Reading notes

Jeanne writes about cleaning up messed-up ol’ time religion, that it’s time for angry music, and Iris DeMent’s new album:

Last week I linked to a couple of uplifting songs that were getting me through the post-election blues. I’ve killed those files to make room for some new ones. I’m not in the mood for uplifting any more. When they won, I was sad. When they set to work rewarding torture (to a tepid response), and showing their true colors, I started getting angry.

I need some angry music. Bring back “Masters of War.” It’s still dangerous.

I think this is what’s going on with me, too, which is why Apocalyptica’s acoustic freight train is speaking to me right now, as I wrote last night. Jeanne continues —

The last person I would normally think of when I need to hear an angry voice is Iris DeMent. Her voice is so simple, gentle, honest, and kind. It seems to come from long before I was born, a sweet, innocent time that probably never existed, except in a few corners of the universe … A voice you’d hear in the kitchen from a woman putting up beans. …

Yes, Steph has been a big Iris fan for years, probably for this reason. Oops, make that a Gillian Welch fan. Both Iris and Gillian qualify as “unpretentious” and “hopespun,” at least in my mind, and I had therefore mistakenly conflated them.

But even sweet country girls get pissed some times, and two of her [earlier] songs fit just right this week. The first — “God May Forgive You (But I Won’t)” — is by Harlan Howard … what I love about this one is that Iris DeMent doesn’t have the big, tough voice of Loretta Lynn. She sounds to me like a gentle, hesitant soul who really has tried to forgive and finally learned not to. …

And I find the title, spoken to a man who thinks he can do whatever he wants as long as he claims Jesus’ blessing on him, to be very useful these days.

Good Lord, this touches on what I’ve been struggling with in this weblog space for years now. How the hell am I going to forgive politicians and voters who claim Jesus but campaign instead for war, hate, oppression, and discrimination, who can’t or won’t discern between decent and obscene but rather confuse the two, who have turned the Beatitudes upside down, who have (metaphorically) set up gangs and crack houses in my church community?

I keep thinking I have to forgive when it feels like I can’t. But I see I’m not bringing to bear wisdom borne of surviving abusive relationships; I don’t quite know where the line is between being codependent and being a survivor. There are times and degrees to which blunt-force forgiveness is not appropriate. I think forgiveness has gradations I have yet to learn.

Jeanne links to MP3s of Iris’ God May Forgive You (But I Won’t) and Wasteland of the Free. Wow, those are some powerful lyrics … Ah, here they are: GMFY(bIW) and WotF.)

Thanks, Jeanne.

I’ve been soaking in Christian teaching and experience for 40+ years now, and from that I fancy I somewhat understand what Religious Right folk are hoping for by voting Republican. Many, probably most, really, truly mean well. But what’s become clear to many of us but not yet to all is that in so doing these voters are being punked: the Republican Powers That Be will never provide more than a few crumbs toward what they’re hoping for.

Meanwhile these voters are seen as having cast their lot with people like Jerry Falwell who says of terrorists, “let’s blow them all away in the name of the Lord” (CNN transcript). Given that Jesus stands firm against blowing anybody away, rather commanding us to love even our enemies instead, Falwell’s statement qualifies in my mind as bearing false witness against the aforementioned Lord himself. That can’t be good.

So I continue to think what we have here is primarily an education issue. What we have here is just a few too many people voting against their economic and moral interests — and against their Lord, for that matter — because of incomplete and erroneous knowledge. That’s fixable.

Frank proceeds brilliantly along these lines:

There’s only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media’s conventional wisdom [“moral values”], it is fiction. Everything about the election results — and about American culture itself — confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry’s defeat notwithstanding, it’s blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. …

It’s in the G.O.P.’s interest to pander to this far-right constituency — votes are votes — but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, “The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment.” That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn’t.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” by common consent the year’s most prescient political book. “Values,” Mr. Frank writes, “always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won.” Under this perennial “trick,” as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry “to clean up its act” — until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. …

According to [CW], the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical “Bush votes come to life” apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by “moral absolutes,” support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the “working poor.” Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn’t even met.

I love that last line.

If Frank R. is right, then I think much of the collective despondency of the last week is unnecessary. We’re not facing an entrenched us against a diabolical them; we only think so because of propagandistic nonsense put out by people with a vested monetary interest in preserving the status quo. In reality it’s all us, and most of us already agree on more issues than we usually realize.

I’ve learned I can always be sure that anyone engaging in demonization of others is not speaking in behalf of any God I know or would care to worship.

BTW, I define “demonization of others” as something like saying we should “blow terrorists away in the name of the Lord.” Or like writing a book called Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, an actual title of an actual book by an actual propagandistic opportunist.

In contrast, for example, saying “cutting taxes in the face of a catastrophic $multi-trillion national deficit is fiscally irresponsible” is not demonization, it’s providing a real-world example of fiscally irresponsible.

[via Markos]

I find this absolutely fascinating, an astonishing example of thinking outside the box. Might be true, might be wishful thinking, but whatever it is, it’s classy.

When Senator John Kerry (D-MA) talked about how his policy would be different in Iraq, he kept saying, in effect, ‘It’s the how, stupid.’ He said repeatedly he would fight a “smarter” war.

Flash forward to today. Following the election, there was a problem apparent. The exit polling didn’t match the ballot count, and many reasons for that began to become apparent.

John Kerry was faced with three options. One, fight on publicly rather than conceding and put the nation into a media frenzied limbo. Two, concede and go on with his life, turning his back on his promise to his supporters to ensure that “every vote will be counted.”

Most people are assuming that John Kerry opted for the second of these while John Edwards, his running mate, opted for the first, and since Kerry was the big dog, he won out. But people who think this are thinking in Bush terms, all or nothing, either you are for the war or against it, that either Senator Kerry was for recounting the votes or he was against it.

The reality is, John Kerry has chosen a third, much smarter course — just as he said he would all along. …

Read on.

True or not, I find this believable because it’s what I expect of John and John, the bright and fundamentally decent choices in this election.

[via Baldwiny]

What a great idea:

Some of us [in the U.S.] — hopefully most of us — are trying to understand and appreciate the effect our recent election will have on you, the citizens of the rest of the world. As our so-called leaders redouble their efforts to screw you over, please remember that some of us — hopefully most of us — are truly, truly sorry.

Photos galore. And FAQ.

Thanks everybody.

Gary Hart, former senator from Colorado, writes about faith in politics. First he mentions his own background —

I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, an evangelical denomination founded a century ago as an offshoot of American Methodism, which, the church founders believed, had become too liberal. I graduated from Bethany Nazarene College, where I met and married my wife, who was also brought up in the church. I then graduated from the Yale Divinity School as preparation for a life of teaching religion and philosophy. …

Then he explicitly mentions what has been slammed home to me, too, over the last dozen years —

A neglected thread of church doctrine was the social gospel of John and Charles Wesley, the great reformers of late 18th-century Methodism. The Wesley brothers preached salvation through grace but also preached the duty of Christians, based solidly on Jesus’ teachings, to minister to those less fortunate. My political philosophy springs directly from Jesus’ teachings and is the reason I became active in the Democratic Party. …

Excellent advice follows —

Having claimed moral authority to achieve political victory, religious conservatives should be very careful, in their administration of the public trust, to live up to the standards they have claimed for themselves. They should also be called upon to address the teachings of Jesus and the prophets concerning care for the poor, the barriers that wealth presents to entering heaven, the blessings on the peacemakers, and the belief that no person should be left behind.

And then a dream, a wholistic vision, of working together to heal our land —

If we are to insert “faith” into the public dialogue more directly and assertively, let’s not be selective. Let’s go all the way. Let’s not just define “faith” in terms of the law and judgment; let’s define it also in terms of love, caring, forgiveness. Compassionate conservatives can believe social ills should be addressed by charity and the private sector; liberals can believe that the government has a role to play in correcting social injustice. But both can agree that human need, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy and sickness must be addressed. Liberals are not against religion. They are against hypocrisy, exclusion and judgmentalism. They resist the notion that one side or the other possesses “the truth” to the exclusion of others. …

To engage a vision like this (so that we not perish), can we get the hell past [our] raging denunciation of each other? I peruse the political book section of my local Borders and see all the titles roaring about how liberals are destroying America. Nonsense. We all of us bring strengths to the table — unless we’re too busy demonizing everyone else to share ours.

As Eugene paraphrases Paul —

Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful …

Indeed. Embracing and putting to use all the gifts we’ve been given would be healthier, smarter, and more effective — and more appropriately thankful — than what too many of us are doing now, which is drawing and quartering ourselves.

Thanks, Gary.

I’m still struggling to understand how those who call themselves “persons of faith” can endorse the behaviors of deception and death put forth more and more forcibly by the present administration. Rabbi Lerner speaks precisely to my struggle —

The frantic attempts to preserve family by denying gays the right to get married, the talk about being conservatives while meanwhile supporting Bush policies that accelerate the destruction of the environment and do nothing to encourage respect for God’s creation or an ethos of awe and wonder to replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the intense focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life without a concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell research/HIV-AIDS), gun control and healthcare reform., the claim to care about others and then deny them a living wage and an ecologically sustainable environment — all this is rightly perceived by liberals as a level of inconsistency that makes them dismiss as hypocrites the voters who have been moving to the Right. …

and imagines an alternative that speaks to all of us —

Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back on the suffering of the poor, that the bible’s injunction to love one’s neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that the New Testament’s command to “turn the other cheek” should give us a predisposition against responding to violence with violence.

Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that comes from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy and homeland security. …

It is this spiritual lesson — that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and on the well-being of the earth — a lesson rooted deeply in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, that could be the center of a revived Democratic Party.

Yes, yes, yes. Thanks, Michael.

[via Jim]