The Long View

April may be the cruellest month, not only for mixing memory and desire, but also for allergic rhinitis. For some people, a foreign substance (pollen) stimulates the body’s production of a reactive chemical, histamine. The allergic reaction can be mild (swelling of mucous membranes, production of mucous), or, in the case of some allergies, quite violent, including anaphylaxis (which can lead to death). You can treat the reaction with another chemical (an antihistamine), or you can induce the body’s tolerance for the external substance starting with small, then increasing doses.

This April seems also to have provoked thought allergies from idea pollen.

Recently the University of Connecticut announced a new “branding” or “visual identity program,” designed to make the university (aka “UConn”) and its sports teams more readily recognizable. Reactions were varied from a yawning “whatever” to nostalgia for the recent trademark to critiques of the corporatization of collegiate sports and of universities.

One respectful feminist critique came from Carolyn Luby, a student at UConn, who took the occasion of the announcement of a new “wordmark” and a new Husky logo (designed gratis, to no one’s surprise, by Nike)  to critique the rhetorical framing of a UConn Husky, perceived permissiveness of student athletes’ behavior, and corporatization in higher education and at UConn, in the form of an open letter to the university’s president, Susan Herbst: http://thefeministwire.com/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-uconn-president-susan-herbst/

Allergic reactions to Luby’s letter ranged from the mental congestion of Rush Limbaugh http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/04/26/this_is_how_it_starts_one_uconn_student_says_new_husky_logo_promotes_rape to the anaphylaxis of anonymous comments (including threats of sexual assault) on a Web site http://www.barstoolsports.com/boston/super-page/free-ball-dont-lie-shirt-to-anybody-who-can-explain-what-this-uconn-feminst-is-talking-about/

One does not need to agree with Luby’s premises or conclusions to appreciate that she presents a thoughtful and respectful critique. And she is following in a recent body of critique of the corporate turn in higher education, like that of retired UConn faculty member Gaye Tuchman, who offered an analysis of the aspirations of an unnamed but thinly disguised New England public university in her book Wannabe U. An online petition has been created to offer Luby support.

Academics are not immune to discursive histamine, particularly in online discourse, the subject of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s commentary “#shameonyou” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But as Salman Rushdie has suggested in a recent op-ed essay in the New York Times, “Whither Moral Courage?,” “We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage,” the courage to dissent from “commonsense” views and received opinion (what Twain famously called, in a posthumously published essay, “Corn-pone Opinions”).

Americans have a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and a resistance to analysis and critique; we are more interested in practice (physical bravery) than praxis (theoretically informed reflective action). Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is the founding allegory of the American bullying of the intellectual, and Emily Dickinson’s characterization of her mother (“She does not care for thought”) could be said of many Americans individually and of our public life generally. We’ve  had sporadic decades of public intellectuals, but they are exceptions in the annals of American exceptionalism (our exalted  corn-pone opinion of ourselves).

When the temple of our civil religion (politics) is as schismatic as today, we understandably seek to rally around other fictional creeds of unity. Americans have long had an ambivalent relationship with social critique — we turned it into a literary form with the jeremiad but we invariably reject as nagging scolds those who use it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with gender and feminism.

As pseudonymous “Female Science Professor” writing in the Chronicle (“Fear of Feminism”) observes, when she critiqued a visual representation of scientists, a male colleague with whom she was collaborating was shocked to discover that she was “like that,” i.e. a feminist, and thereafter distanced himself from her on their collaborative project. Was he allergic to feminism?

Writing in the New York Times, Amanda Filipacchi (“Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists”) observes that:

gradually, over time, [Wikipedia] editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.

She notes that, “The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of ‘American Novelists’ is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible,” and remarks: “Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for ‘American Men Novelists.’” The American novelist who is not one?

Critical social analysts like Luby, Female Science Professor, or Filipacchi question corn-pone opinions and the behavior that follows from corn-pone opinions. Is there a cure for Americans’ allergy to thought?

Pope Benedict’s Xmas message has certainly put the X back in Xmas for me, an x-Catholic and an x-priest.

In his 2012 annual Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia  (whose corruption prompted the pope’s butler to leak secret documents to the press, landing him in jail for his trouble–for which the pope granted him a Christmas pardon), Pope Benedict took on academic gender theory and took aim at the Western political movements in support of the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Its salutation gives you an appreciation for the pre-Copernican Great-Chain-of-Being mindset in which the pope resides:

Dear Cardinals,

Brother Bishops and Priests,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Well, at least you know where you stand there. This is, after all, a vestigial medieval royal court.

Benedict begins with a classic bait-and switch gambit:

The great joy with which families from all over the world congregated in Milan indicates that, despite all impressions to the contrary, the family is still strong and vibrant today. But there is no denying the crisis that threatens it to its foundations – especially in the western world.

Uh, oh. Clouds on the horizon. Is that hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen I hear? This foundational threat involves an inability to commit — which I would’ve thought is the lament of heterosexual women about their heterosexual men, but I’m wrong. It’s gender theory and its queer political movement, same-sex marriage.

Citing his new ideological pal, Gilles Bernheim, the chief rabbi of France, the pope continues his assertion of dualism by insisting on rigidly fixed (and divinely ordained) gender roles. Dismissing three-quarters of a century of feminist and gender discussion, he even bitch-slaps Simone de Beauvoir:

. . . the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.

This classic rhetorical ploy, of course, is called petitio principii (“begging the question”): whenever you see the word “obvious,” you are about to be conned. It goes without saying that it is also a cartoonish oversimplification of gender theory, which renders this document was one of the more intellectually dishonest pieces that I’ve read. Then the pope continues with what he sees are the implications of the assertion that gender and sexuality are, to some degree, socially constructed realities:

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.

This is a clever rhetorical move: associating dogmatic Catholicism with the environmental movement. In other words, if you are against the industrial violation of nature, how can you permit the social violation of Nature? But it also prepares his audience for his underlying syllogism: If industrial manipulations of nature are threatening environmental existence with an eco-apocalypse, then social engineering of Nature (gender theory or legalized same-sex marriage) threatens human existence.

Here is the sentimental nub of the argument:

Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain.

Ah, the Child Card! The pope evokes a sinister image of child slavery, the purchase of children as commodities. This from a man who aided and abetted child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, speaking to an audience of the Church officials who covered up their crimes. As we used to say in the seminary: Girls in white dresses shouldn’t throw mud.

The pope closes this theme by asserting:

When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

Let me unpack this: The understanding of gender and sexuality as socially constructed realities denies God. Denying God destroys human dignity. Defending God by rejecting modern notions of gender and sexuality defends the human.

This lovely holiday message follows on the heels of the pope’s 2013 World Day of Peace message, which was released the week before. The pope cites several threats to justice and peace, beginning with an assertion with which few can disagree: “Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.” However, among the “attacks and crimes against life” are those who acknowledge the historically contingent reality of marriage:

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

In other words, proponents of same-sex marriage are equivalent to proponents of abortion, and therefore both are the moral equivalent of murder. Here, too, is our rhetorical pal, Begging the Question:

These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation. Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.

The claims to assert self-evident truths, not religious doctrine, to which any reasonable person (regardless of faith) can assent. Anyone who dissents is irrational.

So let me summarize the main points of the pope’s two recent discourses: Gender theory and its political application in the same-sex marriage movement are existential threats to all humanity. And what do you do with a threat to your existence?

This discourse leverages centuries of argument and rhetoric in which homosexuality is imagined as a global threat, a plague, a incitement of God’s apocalyptic wrath. As I have argued in the essay “Apocalyptus interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End,” this rhetoric goes back to the medieval theologian Peter Damian (11th century) as well as to one of the more popular medieval texts, the collection of saints lives compiled by Jacobus Voragine, Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), in which we find the charming assertion that on the eve of the first Christmas, all the sodomites committed suicide in order that the world would be pure to receive the Christ Child. The 12th-century theologian Peter the Cantor equated sodomy and murder.

A beloved friend of mine, who remains a Catholic priest (and of whom I have no doubt that he is often the channel for healing for many people), laughed off these papal statements as inconsequential, the last gasps of a dying Vatican Curia. Secular friends are inclined to do the same.

But I remind you: In many places in the US and in many places throughout the world, the pope’s words have real consequences on real people, real lives, and real bodies. In the US, the organized and well funded efforts by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the efforts by bishops in individual dioceses, and the preaching by Catholic pastors will influence political decisions about marriage equality. In Uganda, the so-called Kill the Gays Bill, which would providing two penalties (life imprisonment and execution), has been working its way through that country’s parliament.

For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. The words of the marriage vow remind me of Tony and Bob in Chicago. They remind me of Ron and Art (and their three adopted children, including my goddaughter Anna) in Storrs, Connecticut. How these couples pose an existential threat to humanity, much less to peace and justice, is beyond me. I will defend their humanity, however, against the assaults of religious extremists, by any means necessary.

From Mavis Gallant’s diaries while living hand-to-mouth in Spain in 1952:

Chose cinema over potatoes. I found myself watching the women’s clothes, drinking in their texture, appreciating every bite the actors put in their mouths. When one of the characters (because of some imbecility of plot) wore old clothes and pretended to be be poor, I was furious and felt cheated, having chosen this over a meal. Now I really understand why the Italian poor detest De Sica and neorealist films, and why shopgirls like heiresses and read very line in gossip columns. I mean, I understand it, and not just intellectually.

(The New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2012, p. 50)

Several years ago, I suppose we first knew that something was wrong when Mom’s phone conversations became unusually short before she quickly handed the phone over to Dad. A short telephone conversation with Lucy seemed unimaginable. Legendary as talkative, garrulous, voluble, loquacious, Mom had a tea named after her, according to a friend of mine: Constant Comment. But the growing shadows of dementia made it difficult for her to follow conversations, and in her last weeks she went gentle into that good night. The last time I saw her a couple of weeks ago, she was asleep most of the time, but would wake up to say “I love you” or “You’re all so good to me,” and then fall asleep again. Now, the rest is silence.

I want to share with you three stories about Lucy. The first is a story that she told me. The other two are events that I witnessed.

Growing up in a family of ten children with an alcoholic father in a frequently chaotic household, my mother hungered for something that would transcend this instability. She once told me that, as children attending a Catholic school, she and her brothers and sisters could not afford the snacks in the school’s snack store, so the nuns of the school, who baked communion wafers to sell to parishes, fed them the “factory seconds,” the broken or irregular wafers as snacks. I think this story illuminates Mom’s relationship to the Church: During the week, unconsecrated communion wafers fed her body; on Sunday, consecrated wafers fed her soul. The Eucharist for her was real food.

The second story happened to Mom and me in the summer of 1963 when she took me swimming at Chevy Chase Lake swimming pool. Dad had just finished his associate degree at Montgomery Junior College and was starting at the University of Maryland. In 1963 Washington, DC, and its environs in the Southern state of Maryland were restive with racial tension. Later that summer would mark the March on Washington, the occasion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but its vision was not the tenor of the suburbs of Montgomery County that long hot summer. So on a summer weekend, Mom took me swimming to Chevy Chase Lake swimming pool, parking a couple of blocks away on Connecticut Avenue. But when we got to the front gate, we found the staff sitting at a card table in front of the gate. When my mother told them “One adult and one child,” they replied that the pool was now a membership club, but that membership only cost five dollars. A membership club, only five dollars in 1963 before the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act meant only one thing. Lucy knew what that meant. She said to them, “I know why you’re doing this, you’re doing this to keep colored people out of this pool; I think that’s disgraceful and I won’t have anything to do with it.” And she grabbed me by the arm and stormed back to the car. Now she could have said to herself, “You know, it’s an imperfect and unfair world, and there’s not much that I can do about it, and it’s just five dollars.” Or she could have simply told them, “No, thank you,” and left. But there was a reason she reamed them out new orifices that day. Lucy was never willing to be, in that memorable phrase of Thomas Merton, a “guilty bystander.” She understood in her bones that injustice to one, is injustice to all.  And she also knew that Christian morality was not confined to a narrow range of human behavior, to a narrowly personal domain, that the demands of her faith were as compelling on a hot Saturday afternoon as on a Sunday morning. Mom was on the bus before the nuns on the bus.

Where did this sense of social justice come from? She and her family had known anti-Catholicism in the city of her birth, Atlanta, Georgia. She and her family had not been permitted to rent homes in certain DC neighborhoods that had been redlined with the letter “N”—Negro. She also knew her mother’s story: My grandmother and her siblings were orphaned and each farmed out to different relatives, my grandmother to relatives who faithfully reminded her that she was there because of their charity. From her mother my mother understood that, while public assistance can be problematic, private charity is often mean, stingy, and unreliable.

My final story occurred later that year after John Kennedy’s assassination. She insisted that we pay our respects, not by watching TV but by going downtown to watch the funeral cortege. So she and I stood on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street in the bitter cold of that day as the Kennedy’s funeral procession made its slow way to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, then she and I walked up to the cathedral where we stood in the cold beside the limousines of dignitaries and cabinet secretaries parked bumper to bumper. One of the chauffers took mercy on this woman and her son shivering in the cold and let us sit in the back seat, listening to the funeral on the radio. The chauffeur, an African-American man from Atlanta, Mom’s birthplace, and mom discussed racial politics in America. Only Lucy would engage a cabinet secretary’s chauffer in a conversation about the most pressing social and political issue of the day. It seems also providential now that the limousine was that of Anthony Celebrezze, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, given Mom’s lifelong concerns with all three, including her career with the Food and Drug Administration, her advocacy of health care reform, her finally getting to go to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in the early 1980s. Lucy was not content to be a distant observer of history; she wanted to be there where and when history happened. So she and Dad and I were in the gallery of the Senate in 1960 when the Medicare law first came up for a vote, the junior senator from Massachusetts sitting directly below us, and Vice President Richard Nixon, president of the Senate, sitting directly across from us. And on the day that Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, Lucy insisted in going over to the house of Democratic kingmaker, Clark Clifford, where a farewell for Lyndon Johnson was being held so she could tell President Johnson that she thought he was a great man for what he had done in the eventual passage of Medicare and the war on poverty. Only Lucy.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about Mom’s special relationship to music, music of all kinds from Broadway show tunes to sacred choral music. She and Dad for many years sang here at St. Patrick’s in the choir. In the 1940s and 50s she was denied that opportunity because the Church prohibited women from singing in liturgical choirs, which outraged her. So joining the choir here was the fulfillment of a dream. One of this choir’s favorite anthems was Virgil Thomson’s arrangement of the Isaac Watts metrical setting of the 23rd psalm, which begins:

My Shepherd will supply my need:

Jehovah is His Name;

In pastures fresh He makes me feed,

Beside the living stream.

And the anthem ends:

There would I find a settled rest,

While others go and come;

No more a stranger, nor a guest,

But like a child at home.

And Lucy, who never knew a stranger and always welcomed the guest, is now a child at home.

According to a posting on Being Liberal’s Tumblr site:

(W) I am posting the summary of the messages that I have received from Facebook after being banned from posting ANY content ANYWHERE on Facebook. The Being Liberal page in last week had received several “warnings” for alleged violations of Copyright and propagating hate speech. There is no reasonable way of appealing from those decisions. We accept the fact that FB is a private space that is not covered by First Amendment and that Facebook can do whatevere they want. I refuse to believe that there is an organized corporate driven Facebook “attack” on liberal pages. However I believe that there is right now an “army” of paid trolls working for the conservative black PR macjine that is reporting our content… and at the enbd Facebook algorithms are responding to that by downgrading our standing and stats. This is the game of numbers ONLY the increase support from Liberal community can offset the negative numbers created by reporting of our page.

See: http://beingliberal.tumblr.com/post/33207327524/banned-by-facebook

Appearing in the news on the same day (oh bless the gods of synchronicity!) . . .

“Romney campaign gave bonuses to top staff ”

and

Conservative punditista Peggy Noonan announces “Romney Needs a New CEO.”

Clearly in the Republicon world, pay-for-performance is for the suckers below the executive suite.

One of the advantages of being an old whore who’s been working these mean streets for decades is that you’ve seen it all before; you take names and you remember faces (some fondly, some not). So in the current presidential campaign, permit this old whore a walk down memory lane to 1992.

[Cue flashback music.]

Following the successful completion of the first Persian Gulf War (driving the invading Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait), Republicon President George H. W. Bush briefly enjoyed astronomical approval ratings . . . until recession struck. Late in 1991, the New York Times (5 Nov. 1991)reported:

In more than a dozen interviews, occupants of the executive suite, like other Americans, said they were dismayed by what they see as partisanship and just plain perverseness in Congress. . . . Old fashioned tonics like easier money and fiscal stimulus are not out of favor. . . . But for the most part they emphasized other means when asked their prescriptions for the nation’s ills.

James Zimmerman, the COO of Federated Department Stores (now Macy’s Inc.), said that:

It’s critical that consumers have hope. Washington should send a strong message to consumers that the Administration and Congress will do whatever is necessary. . . The fixation on the budget deficit is wrong.

Ad exec Jerry Della Femina said:

The problem is confidence–confidence in our leaders. George Bush is not leading the cheering squad. Since Truman, the U.S. economy has only done well when we’ve had a cheerleader in the White House.

But one man had the courage to come to President George H. W. Bush’s defense, writing in the New York Times (15 Oct. 1992) as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks:

The key to these debates, however, is television ability, pure and simple. President Bush needs to cut through the noise so that his strong message will connect with the public. To do this, he must marshal his passion, his energy, his conviction, his confidence. And he must do so in such a way that it forces Governor Clinton off his formulated answers, allowing the public to take a true measure of the man.

This brave conservative pundit came to President Bush’s defense in his handling of the economy, calling out the Democrats’ negativity and alarmism and applauding Bush’s optimistic (or, as he might say, “realistic”) vision:

The starting point must be the economy. Granted, this is a tough economy, but the President should not be defensive about his optimistic message, which is absolutely correct. I am weary, as he should be, of his opponents sneeringly characterizing him as “out of touch” because he dares to portray the American economy as the strongest in the world. It is.

This bold conservative stood up for President Bush against the Democratic doomsayers who thought that Americans were not better off than they’d been 4 years before:

Inflation has been whipped, inventories are lean, interest rates have been wrestled to 20-year lows. Housing starts, retail and car sales have been posting gains. Although politically tempting, Mr. Bush must not, as Mr. Clinton has, pander to the electorate’s current masochistic desire for tales of economic pain, misery and woe. The President’s upbeat reckoning is, in fact, an honest one.

President Bush’s defender? Rush Limbaugh.

My, how times have changed.

A recent Facebook meme presents you with a picture of white elementary school children making the Pledge of Allegiance and invites you to “LIKE if you did this every morning and think that they still should!” So far it has nearly half a million “Likes” and over 30,000 “Shares.”

But consider:

The generation (the so-called “Greatest Generation”) that adopted the pledge in 1942 (during World War II) and added “under God” in 1954 (at the beginning of the Cold War) also brought you massive resistance to racial integration, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and decades of toxic industrial environmental damage.

The generation (the so-called Baby Boomers) that was required to say the pledge daily brought you the student free speech movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, the sexual revolution, recreational drugs, the Iraq War, Internet porn, Enron, the Great Recession, and disco.

In other words, empty-headed nationalistic sentimentality is no substitute for the hard work of living up to the documents that begin “When in the course of human events . . . ” and “We the people . . .”

By now infamous, Republicon Congressman Todd Akin’s medical discourse on rape and pregnancy–

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

has been shown to be refried pseudo-science (his “doctors” must be witch doctors) that has been regurgitated cud-like by anti-abortion forces for a couple of decades, as The Atlantic observes in “A Canard That Will Not Die: ‘Legitimate Rape’ Doesn’t Cause Pregnancy.”

What is less well known is that the canard has an even older pedigree.

As Thomas Laqueur documents in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, authors from Classical antiquity (Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Soranus) and the Middle Ages (Pseudo-Aristotle, Avicenna) postulated a connection between sexual pleasure and conception. As Laqueur notes:

Pregnancy from rape provides the limiting case for a woman’s conceiving without pleasure or desire. Samuel Farr, in the first legal-medicine text to be written in English (1785), argued that “without an excitation of lust, or enjoyment in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place.” Whatever a woman might claim to have felt or whatever resistance she might have put up, conception in itself betrayed desire or at least a sufficient measure of acquiescence for her to enjoy the venereal act. This is a very old argument. Soranus had said in second-century Rome that “if some women who were forced to have intercourse have conceived . . . the emotion of sexual appetite existed in them too, but was obscured by mental resolve,” and no one before the second half of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century questioned the physiological basis of this judgment. The 1756 edition of Burns’s Justice of the Peace, the standard guide for English magistrates, cites authorities back to the Institutesof Justinian to the effect that “a woman can not conceive unless she doth consent.” (Laqueur, p. 161-162)

Laqueur also notes that, “Without orgasm, another widely circulated text announced, ‘the fair sex [would] neither desire nuptial embraces, nor have pleasure in them, nor conceive by them’” (p. 3). The text in question here was the infamous Aristotle’s Masterpiece or the Secrets of Generation Displayed (published in London in 1684 in the instance cited here, but frequently published in multiple versions and editions), that served as Colonial British America’s and the Early Republic’s first sex manual, which Johns Hopkins medical historian Mary Fissell has been researching in recent years, like her article in the William & Mary Quarterly “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (3rd ser., vol. 60, no. 1) or her chapter “Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture,” a chapter included in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., Right Living: An Angl0-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003).

This vile episode once again demonstrates the Right’s infinite capacity to worship the past without knowing it or learning its lessons.

We were once a great nation, but we have strayed from our founding principles and now stand at the edge of the abyss. We face certain ruin unless we return to our founding principles.

If that rhetorical formula sounds familiar to Americans, it should. It’s called the “jeremiad” (after the biblical prophet Jeremiah), and it was invented by Congregationalist ministers in the middle of the seventeenth century.

They were bemoaning what they saw as a loss of fervor among the second generation of Massachusetts settlers (after the Plymouth Plantation’s founding in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony after 1628), who found that they quite liked the entrepreneurial opportunities there and devoted more of their energies to business than to sanctification.

And ever since, the jeremiad’s rhetorical formula has been used by succeeding generations of preachers and politicians. Raise the alarm! The Republic is in peril!

But as I tell my students in American literature courses, when you hear that formula, check your wallet and your copy of the Constitution, because somebody is about to pick your pocket and to restrict your rights.

Although the jeremiad now seems almost ubiquitous and sempiternal, never going out of season (in part because there is no longer an election “season” but one continuous state of political contest), at election time it is more insistent. Although the jeremiad can be used by all sides of the political spectrum, it is particularly amenable to conservative discourse (since it calls for a “return” to a prior, pre-declension state).

So keep a sharp eye out for those incoming jeremiads! There may be one aimed directly at you.

Dr. Andrew Murphy, professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, offers his gloss on recent political applications of the jeremiad.

My first foray into gay activism occurred in 1976 while I was at the University of Illinois, and a group of us from the Gay Student Alliance met with the management of the local Sambo’s Restaurant, the only place open after the bars closed. After spending several hours twirling, twinkies, drag queens and our retinues decamped (so to speak) to Sambo’s for coffee and dessert. For several months, however, we’d become aware of reports of hostile and abusive treatment of the after-hours crowd by some other patrons and by some restaurant employees.

Twenty years later, several dozen activists and I under the aegis of Queer Nation flooded the Old Country Buffet outside Williamsburg, Virginia, during the after-church Sunday lunch hour to protest the company’s recently announced position that they would not extend employment discrimination protection to queer employees. Trained in advance for the action, we were instructed to be scrupulously polite to the staff, each of us asking for a single table (packing the place), and ordering only coffee, staying for several hours. And we were also instructed to tip the wait staff very generously to make up for their lost revenue.

What is it about fast-food and social equality in America? Earlier in the twentieth century it was African Americans struggling for a place at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. Today it’s advocates of same-sex marriage against Dan Cathy, president and COO of the Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A, a family-owned business founded by his father.

The outcry following his weighing in on the same-sex marriage debate, “we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage. And I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude that thinks we have the audacity to redefine what marriage is all about,” was intensified with the disclosure of massive donations (nearly $2 million in 2010 alone) to anti-gay causes by a Chick-fil-A foundation.

The right-wing victimolatry machine went into high gear; nothing is quite so delicious as the pusillanimous whining of the right about the abridgment of their rights, in this case an assault on the First Amendment protection of free speech. Get a constitutional grip, girlfriends. The First Amendment protects us from the government’s infringing on free expression, but it doesn’t grant immunity from the consequences when we express ourselves.

What’s particularly striking is that calls for a boycott and the announcement by some municipal officials that they would not welcome Chick-fil-A stores into their cities elicited a sympathy for the company, sometimes even from people friendly to gay equality.

So it’s unfair to call out a business owner who is using corporate profits to fund the structural abridgment of people’s equality?

Perhaps some of this fecklessness even from our friends signifies their ambivalence about our status in society and our claims to structural discrimination. Perhaps it’s also that the nation that invented convenience food also invented convenience social justice. People don’t like asking inconvenient questions about their favorite chicken shack.

It’s hard to figure out, until you realize that, in exchange for the American founders’ refusal of an established church, we have created three forms of civic worship: The worship of worship; the worship of guns; and the worship of business. Worship, guns, and business are granted immunity from ethical critique and allowed a remarkable degree of freedom. Freedom of worship, freedom of guns, freedom of business are the foundations of the republic.

My friends and colleagues outside the US have been appalled by the recent gun carnage in Colorado and puzzled why there is not a more vocal debate about controlling certain kinds of weapons. What they don’t understand is that the US, while it tries to maintain a separation of church and state, is dominated by the Cult of the Idolatrous Worship of Guns, whose priests are the National Rifle Association.

So here for strangers is a brief Catechism of Gunolatry.

First Commandment: I am the Lord thy Gun; thou shalt have no Other before me.

Second Commandment: Thou shalt not take Gun’s rights to court in vain, for it is settled law.*

*This commandment does not apply to abortion rights, which may be brought to any available court on any imaginable pretext.

Third Commandment: Thou shalt keep holy the Day of Carnage; thou shalt not profane the Day of Carnage by “politicizing” it; thou shalt only utter inoffensive platitudes on the Day of Carnage; and thou shalt only dare to bring the Day of Carnage into political debate until the last victim has been buried, the last victim has been released from hospital, or the criminal has been sentenced, whichever comes last (by which time My People will be distracted the prophecies of the House of Kardashian).

Thus saith the Lord thy Gun. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Romney criticizes people who expect “free stuff,” but I guess that doesn’t include the salary he got in his last years at Bain Capital when he really wasn’t at Bain Capital before he retroactively resigned from Bain Capital.

A recent visit to New Haven revealed that my favorite discount book outlet, Labyrinth Books, which had a very fine store on the north side of Yale, has closed that shop. Labyrinth describes itself as “an acclaimed independent bookstore for engaged readers” and observes that “Labyrinth serves Princeton University in all its course-book needs, taking a hands-on approach to assuring that students get their books and currently featuring a pilot program that provides students enrolled at Princeton with a 30% discount on their coursebooks.” Princeton provides a market that Yale does not, one supposes.

Evidently, Yale (and nearby University of New Haven, Quinnipiac University, and Southern Connecticut State University) cannot sustain a quality bookstore, which provided course textbooks as well as discounted trade and scholarly press books. For example, I know of no book store in the US where I could find as readily discounted books from Cambridge University Press (and, if you know CUP, you know that the discount is most welcome).

Yale is “served” (if that’s the word) by Barnes & Noble, but B&N’s selection has declined has declined over the years. Shelves in the front of the store that used to be well stocked with Yale University Press books now serve as displays for single copies of featured books by that distinguished scholarly publisher.

There is still Book Trader Cafe at the corner of York and Chapel, a fine little used book store (with good coffee, baked goods, and soup/sandwich).

In a fine analysis, “Unpopular Mandate,” in the 25 June 2012 issue of the New Yorker, Ezra Klein notes research indicating that we don’t “make up our minds” so much on the basis of evidence and logic as on our tribal affiliation (and its shifting principles and alliances). Documenting the Republicon origins of the health insurance mandate (the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s, Senate Republicons in the 1990s, Republicon governor Romney in the last decade):

What is notable about the conservative response to the individual mandate is not only the speed with which a legal argument that was considered [by all sides of the political spectrum] fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012; it’s the implication that the Republicans spent two decades pushing legislation that was in clear violation of the nation’s founding document.

Revival time: Republicons discovered that for two decades they had been straying from The True Way until Elmer Gantry (in the form of the Koch-sucking Tea Baggers) came along. However, as Klein also points out (to no one’s surprise now because most of us feel this way, again across the political spectrum):

But the courts are not as distant from the political process as some like to think. The first judge to rule against the individual mandate was Judge Henry Hudson, of Virginia’s Eastern District Court. Hudson was heavily invested in a Republican consulting firm called Campaign Solutions, Inc. the company had worked with the Presidential campaigns of John McCain and George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and Ken Cuccinelli–the Virginia state attorney general who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act.

Of course Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife is a well-paid opponent of ACA. As several pundits suggested before the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding ACA, Chief Justice Roberts needed some demonstration that the Court could act in disinterested good faith, rather than its majority serving as a board of activist judges bent on on advancing the Republicon agenda.

Writing in the 22 March 2012 issue of the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch critiques America’s education-industrial complex, what Pasi Sahlberg calls “the Global Education Reform Movement” or GERM, whose central doctrine is teaching to the test, while she takes particular aim at the Wendy Kopp pyramid scheme, Teach for America (TFA).

Like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program is part of what Pasi Sahlberg calls “the Global Education Reform Movement,” or GERM. GERM demands teaching to the test. GERM assumes that students must be constantly tested, and that the results of these tests are the most important measures and outcomes of education. The scores can be used not only to grade the quality of every school, but to punish or reward students, teachers, principals, and schools. Those at the top of the education system, the elected officials and leaders who make the rules, create the budgets, and allocate resources, are never accountable for the consequences of their decisions. GERM assumes that people who work in schools need carrots and sticks to persuade (or compel) them to do their best.

Ravitch’s exemplar of schools and education professionals that work (and in which teachers and administrators work together) is Finland:

In Finland, the subject of the first part of this article, teachers work collaboratively with other members of the school staff; they are not “held accountable” by standardized test scores because there are none. Teachers devise their own tests, to inform them about their students’ progress and needs. They do their best because it is their professional responsibility. Like other professionals, as Pasi Sahlberg shows in his book Finnish Lessons, Finnish teachers are driven by a sense of intrinsic motivation, not by the hope of a bonus or the fear of being fired. Intrinsic motivation is also what they seek to instill in their students. In the absence of standardized testing by which to compare their students and their schools, teachers must develop, appeal to, and rely on their students’ interest in learning.

Of course there is less economic inequality in Finland and fewer social disparities. For all the TFA hype (not borne out by research data, as Ravitch points out), poverty is the main impediment to education in the US.

The Duke University economist Helen F. Ladd recently delivered a major address titled “Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence,” in which she demonstrated that poverty drags down academic performance, not only in the US, but in other nations as well.2 To argue, as so many of the corporate reformers blithely do, that poverty is used as “an excuse” for bad teachers is either naive or ignorant. Or it may be a way of avoiding the politically difficult subjects of poverty and income inequality, both of which are rising and threaten the well-being of our society.

The corporate reformers believe that entrepreneurship will unleash a new era of innovation and creativity, but it seems mostly to have unleashed canny entrepreneurs who seek higher test scores by any means possible (such as excluding students with disabilities or students learning English as a second language) or who seek maximum profit.

Some “reformers” (including the politocracy and punditocracy) would like nothing better than to raze public education and start from scratch. Well, we have a laboratory where that experiment has been taking place: New Orleans, in which Hurricane Katrina wiped out the school system and the teachers’ unions.

As for New Orleans, it is the poster child of the corporate reformers because the public school system and the teachers’ union were wiped out by Hurricane Katrina. Now about 70 percent of the students in the district attend charter schools, staffed by TFA and other young teachers. Reformers have portrayed New Orleans as an educational miracle, and the media have faithfully parroted this characterization as proof that nonunion charter schools are successful. But few paid attention when the state of Louisiana recently released grades for every school in the state and 79 percent of the charter schools formed by the state received a grade of D or F.

“How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools” is available on line.

Keep in mind that Texas sets the textbook agenda for much of the US:

Romney can tick off the failings of the president like any other Republican but he precedes each one with a friendly word or tip of the hat. It drives conservatives crazy, not only but also in Texas, where the preferred oratorical style is closer in tone to the Book of Revelations. In a verbal scuffle over cutting health care costs a few years back, Texas state legislator Debbie Riddle went for the jugular of entitlement in the preferred style: ‘Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell. . . .

The extra money [George W.] Bush had approved as governor slipped away under his successor, Rick Perry. Class sizes crept back up. Special programs were dropped. Even former First Lady Barbara Bush was appalled by the train wreck, lamenting in the Houston Chronicle a year ago that pay for teachers in Texas ranked thirty-third in the nation, and the stte was thirty-sixth in high school graduation rates, forty-seventh in literacy, and forty-ninth in the verbal section of the of the national Scholastic Aptitude Test.

–Thomas Powers, review of As Texas Goes . . .: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda, by Gail Collins, in New York Review of Books, 12 July 2012.

When I was growing up the National Geographic magazine had the reputation for a stodgy exoticism (“native girls in all your favorite poses” as we quipped in our high school knowingness). In fact, you didn’t subscribe to the magazine: you became a member of the National Geographic Society (and received the magazine). Later critiques suggested that its articles and splendid photography tended to gloss over the seamy sides of some cultures and to offer a colonizing eye, an up-market Life magazine.

Unfortunately, its TV avatar has abandoned the judiciousness of the print journal and descended into the debased vulgarity and sensationalism of what passes for kulchur today.

As I write NatGeoTV is showing a program on what “will” happen when alien invaders attack the Nation’s Capital. We are given the impression that planning for this inevitability is already underway, numerous “experts” are interviewed, and simulations presented.

This apocalyptic scenario is joined by a new feature on NatGeo: “Doomsday Preppers.” Why we need an expose of those who lead the paranoid delusional lifestyle is beyond me. Perhaps a single one-hour documentary might have sufficed, but, if the trailers for the series are any indication, the subjects of this series take great delight in having their 15 minutes of infamy, and mug appropriately for the camera.

If you’ve had your fill of end-times chaos, NatGeo will feed the American addiction for crime: Alaska State Troopers, Border Wars (the other kind of aliens are featured here), American Weed (it’s not about lawn care), and Locked Up Abroad are also available.

The National Geographic Society proclaims that it has been “inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888,” but if its TV lineup is a reflection of the planet, I don’t care anymore. The doomsday preppers can have it all to themselves.

The 1920 US Census marked a historic milestone in American social history: For the first time a majority of Americans lived in urban metropolitan areas rather than in rural or small-town regions. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in the interim the migration to cities and suburbs has continued undiminished.

So why are we still allowing a demographic anomaly — people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire — to kidnap and hold for ransom our political process? Most Americans are not employed in corn manufacturing or dairy production, so why do we allow those who are to set the economic agenda in presidential elections? Iowa and New Hampshire also are not representative of America’s complex racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, so why are we allowing their interests to create the grounds for our national debate?

Instead, as Frank Bruni pointed out recently in the New York Times (“Iowa’s Harvest”), the Iowas caucus serves as a distillery of extreme right wing activism, and the pandering politicians who love them:

AS the hour of actual caucusing drew closer, Ron Paul’s campaign trumpeted his endorsement by a pastor who, as it happens, has spoken of executing homosexuals. Rick Perry pledged to devote predator drones and thousands of troops to the protection of the Mexican border, making the mission to keep every last illegal immigrant from crossing sound as urgent as rooting out terrorists in Pakistan.

And Rick Santorum, bringing his “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour to this eastern Iowa town on Thursday, promised never to be cowed by all those craven secularists who believe that a stable, healthy household needn’t be headed by a God-fearing mom and dad.

None of these three men is likely to win the Republican nomination. But before they exit stage right — stage far right, that is — they and a few of their similarly quixotic, similarly strident competitors will do no small measure of damage to the Republican Party and no great favors to the country as a whole. What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa: it befouls Republicans’ image nationally, becomes a millstone around the eventual nominee’s neck and legitimizes debate about some matters that shouldn’t be debatable.

The run-up to the Iowa caucuses, like the rest of the primary season thus far, has underscored just how much general nuttiness and moral extremism the party has come to accommodate, with Iowa serving as a theater of the conservative absurd. The state’s unrepresentative caucuses — in which a mere 100,000 or so of the most fervent voters, almost all of them white, are expected to participate — coax a Bible-thumping, border-militarizing harshness from candidates that’s a tonal turnoff to the swing voters who will probably decide the general election.

As Bruni observes, Americans generally and Democrats specifically would benefit from a reasonable, intelligent, and sane Republican party able to provide a healthy dialectic in our current moment. It’s too bad that our agrarian romanticism and small-town nostalgia, now almost a century out of touch with reality, continue to set the agenda for the national political campaign.

‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

The 2012 Republicon presidential primary campaign debuts Republicons’ new family values: Marrying the mistress with whom you were unfaithful to your previous wife.

Pictured here, serial adulterer Newt and his latest wife Callista Gingrich. (Is that necklace from Tiffany’s?)

Twenty years ago I drew the ire of the governor of Virginia.

I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. The Great Wilder, testing his presidential prospects, was traveling around the country making “policy” appearances using travel resources of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I wrote to the governor from my home address telling him that I had voted for him and that I looked to him for fiscal leadership when the state treasury was strapped, but that his travel for personal political purposes did not strike me as leading by example. A few weeks later I received the usual and accustomed letter thanking me for sharing my views.

But then several months later at a college picnic, the college’s president, a man of integrity and courage, chatting with me said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, your letter to the governor caused a bit of a stir in Richmond.” He went on to explain that the secretary of education for the commonwealth, James W. Dyke, Jr., called him to ask, What are you going to do about this employee?

My college’s president asked the secretary of education if I had written on college stationery (I hadn’t) and asked if I had written anything threatening (I hadn’t). So the president said, It sounds to me as though Mr. Long is exercising his constitutional right to free speech, and there is nothing that I am going to do about him.

I learned an important lesson: that speech, though free, may have a cost, as well as about the difference between one executive’s courage and integrity on the one hand, and another’s thin-skinned vindictiveness on the other hand.

I’m reminded of this event in my own life two decades ago (but under very similar circumstances as today) by the story of Emma Sullivan. Ms Sullivan, a high school student in Kansas, infamously tweeted on her Twitter account after a field trip to the state capital of Kansas. It is phrased in the usual vulgarly snarky idioms of adolescents and young adults: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (I don’t know what she actually said to him or if she said anything to him at all; this tweet may just be the usual trash talk to impress friends.)

Brownback’s official court minions, ever vigilant, monitor Twitter, and finding this tweet, contacted Ms. Sullivan’s Shawnee Mission East High School Principal Karl Krawitz, who called her into his office to reprimand her. According to Ms. Sullivan in the Huffington Post, the principal ”laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment . . . He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.” She also told NBC Action News that she was asked to write the governor a formal apology. Subsequent reports indicate that she has been the object of bullying by fellow students.

The Kansas governor’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, is charged with the daily monitoring of any negative comments about Brownback on social-media websites. Having rid the high schools of science, this is where Kansans spend their education time and energy.

I imagine that Ms. Sullivan has learned an important lesson about adults: We are often feckless, and will devour our young to save our skins.

My hope is that “brownback” will become a common noun as “santorum” has done: brownback, (noun): the liquified fecal discharge of the gutless , usually when scared (see colostomy, colostomy bag).

The Vatican claims that this ad is “damaging not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church but also to the feelings of believers.” I can think of some things that the Vatican and its minions have done that have already done this damage. The Vatican is threatening suit to prevent the image’s circulation.

Circulate.

The Spielberg Generation–by which I do not mean Steven Spielberg’s own Baby Boomer Generation (he was born in 1946), but the generation that grew up on Spielberg films and whose fractured families are often represented in Spielberg films–is now suffering separation anxiety as still another “Daddy” has abandoned them.

Generation Kewl’s surrogate father, Steve Jobs, is leaving home. . . again. The media frenzy about Jobs’s departure from Apple is equaled by the blog, tweet, and Facebook chatter about Daddy Kewl, and about what Gen Kewl feels about Dad’s leaving: There will never be anything kewl for us again.

Who’s going to keep giving us kewl stuff?

What I don’t hear is any solicitude for Mr. Jobs, who has been for some time , and is apparently more precipitously now, dying. Dying. Dying from cancer. Death. Death is not kewl (unless it’s in one of the scores of movies available on iTunes). Cancer is not kewl. Instead, it’s about how I feel about Daddy Kewl’s abandoning me.

I’m old enough to remember the first divorce, when Daddy Kewl was thrown out of the house and shacked up with NeXT. Then there was the reconciliation.

I’m also old enough to remember the poignantly failed Apple computer project, The Lisa, which according to the official version was the acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but was also the name of Jobs’s daughter from a relationship and a daughter whose paternity he initially denied. Daddy Kewl’s been leaving for a long time.

When his time comes, may flights of angels speed Steve Jobs to his rest. In the meantime, I hope he has the opportunity to reflect on the rich, complex life he has lived and the ways that he has given joy. And sorrow.