Nationally and internationally, old authorities are crumbling. No less of a luminary than the Secretary of the Treasury said a few days ago that capitalism is changing. The rug has been yanked out from under the financial experts and captains of industry. Political alignments are shifting as old orthodoxies die in favor of new realities. Entire industries are fading away never to return, along with their cultural markes and mores.  We are shedding the skin of our latest decades-old national identity, and not sure what our new one is.

And the church has not been left untouched by this upheaval. I’m not sure what’s floating around out there in the ol’ Jungian subconscious, but I’ve had several different, unbidden, and related encounters that I’m mulling and have yet to condense into a coherent signpost to anything. Here are my bits and bobs, presented straight with no commentary.

Michael Spencer, proprietor of InternetMonk.com, in an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

Andrew Sullivan, editor of The Atlantic, wrote a post called “Clinging To The Wreckage” yesterday:

In the last decade, I realize that many of my most cherished institutions have failed – and failed in ways that are not trivial. Perhaps the institution dearest to me, the Catholic church, greeted the emergence of gay people in a way that never truly reflected the compassion of Jesus or the good faith arguments many of us offered as a way forward. This was sad to me, but not life-changing. I know the Holy Spirit takes time, as James Allison reminds us. But then came the sex abuse crisis. Like many others, the truth about the evil in the heart of the church, and the cooptation and enabling of that evil, and the refusal to take real responsibility for the evil, simply left me gasping for air. I realize now that my Catholic identity never recovered, even if my faith endures in a far more modest and difficult way.

And a reader responded:

…I raised three children in the Church and its elementary and secondary schools and none seem to have any interest in its increasingly bland liturgies, meddling in politics, and assertive clericalism.  My own wife, a product of a particularly superstitious strain of Irish Catholicism, the other day pronounced the Church’s dogmas on priestly celibacy and the ordination of female priests “ridiculous”.  I fear that soon I will be sitting in the pew alone, my wife busy elsewhere.  Just another middle-aged parishioner in a rapidly aging congregation, listening to an ancient priest rebuke the moral laxity of certain “young people” who would never be caught dead at one of his homilies.

Rainn Wilson (aka. Dwight Schrute on the sitcom The Office) is Ba’hai, and has started a site called Soul Pancake. Why? From his introductory video:

I’m sick of spirituality being airy-fairy, hippy-dippy, and precious. I want to have a debate about life’s big questions. I want to de-lame-ify talking about God and religion. Soul Pancake is where spiritality and creativity meet. Want to join us?

Me, a couple of nights ago. I had a dream that I was back at Mars Hill Church – a local church in Seattle where I served as worship leader and a kind of arts experimentor/integrator along with a number of others. I was talking with two friends – Brad and Luke – both of who are reasonable people in real life, but who were acting like massive a-holes in our conversation: defending the church’s fundamentalist theology with arrogant dismissiveness. At first I couldn’t respond to them. My throat felt thick and my jaw locked up so that I talked like I had some kind of advanced Parkinsons – that dreamlike helpless state. But I was so indignant, enraged by what I was hearing that with massive effort I forced out a rebuttal. I think I partially woke myself up doing it because I went into a lighter sleep where my tongue was loosened. We verbally battled, and I felt a surge of passionate, insightful, important arguments against their behavior and assumptions come flooding out in a boiling river of indictments.

It was only after I woke up a bit that I realized the dream wasn’t personal to either the church or my friends. They were a stand-in for my life’s worth of Evangelical experience with its thickheadedness, divisiveness, selective factual amnesia, disconnect from the past, arrogant posturing, and all of the rest, delivered by friendly, engaging and compelling people in an infuriating mix of always-hoped-for, but never realized, promise and possibility. I told Janece that the dream was very much about me feeling betrayed in a very painful, personal way.

Thoughts?

“We were told that Nick said the two NFL players took their life jackets off and drifted out to sea,” said Bob Bleakley, whose son Will Bleakley, 25, is also still missing.
~ via FoxNews

Four friends, all athletes, all young and in good condition, all dumped into the same vast frigid water miles from land with only a vest/cushion to lift them up, all with the same odds of survival. Only one comes back. Why?

Doctors say it was not only his physical stamina, but his mental stamina that made the difference. I couldn’t tell from the article, but I would surmise that he determined that his best course lay in giving himself every edge he could by sticking to the boat. A white hull of a 21′ boat is easier to see than a single human in a life vest. He must have determined to stick it out through the pain of his icy muscles and exhaustion of battling the powerful waves, and more importantly, stick it out through the temptation to lose his resolve by giving in to animal fear and wild desperate urges and despair. 46 hours later, the rescuers found him, still clinging to the boat, 35 miles out to sea, alone.

What of his friends? One was certain, floating in the pitch cold black, that he’d seen a light from shore. He stripped himself of his last advantage – his life vest – and struck out swimming for what he thought he’d seen. Even more sobering are the actions of the other two friends who died first. At some point in the first night they must have made a decision that the game was unwinnable, hopeless. Deliberately (and, one would assume, ignoring the pleas of their friends), they removed their jackets, let go, and drifted away. And down.

I don’t know what I would have done their positions and I don’t presume to know why they all made the decisions they did. I do know that I’m pitifully out of shape – physically for sure, and probably mentally. I also know that when circumstances collapse, my instinctive desire is to assert some kind of final control by deciding to preemptively get out – whatever “out” is. In other words, I’m often a lot more like the first two friends who stopped fighting, who drifted into the dark and never got to see the lights of the Coast Guard choppers.

The lessons to be drawn from this tragedy are so obvious as to practically write themselves, so obvious that maybe they’re even clichéd. (Lifetime Movie Of The Week, anyone?) But that doesn’t mean the lessons aren’t worth drawing. Sometimes being cynical just makes you take off your life vest.

The obvious lesson: Sometimes it’s gonna hurt bad, sometimes you’re gonna get pounded until you’re beyond exhausted, sometimes you’re going to be distracted by the temptation to take what you think is an easier way out of the oppressive dark, sometimes you’ll be tempted to simply give up because you think you know better than the friends who are rooting for you, telling you not to stop. But don’t let go of the thing that helped you venture out.

Don’t let go of the boat.

Just when you’re starting to get your head and courage wrapped around the Economic Winter Of Our Discontent and end of Western civilization as we know it, along comes the news that

An asteroid which may be as big as a ten-storey building has passed close by the Earth, astronomers say. The gap was just 72,000 km (44,750 miles); a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon. It is in the same size range as a rock which exploded over Siberia in 1908 with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs.

I took a little time today, just for fun, to imagine what the world response would be if 1000 atomic bombs suddenly went off over New York. Or Beijing. Or Moscow. I’m not sure that there’s really any meaningful contingency plan for what would happen next (besides the almost-certain Cheney/Biden deathmatch over who gets to use the undisclosed location).

Our existence on this planet is absurd. Asteroid near-misses are just another poke in the eye to Benevolent Universe/Creator theories. I told Janece that I guarantee that right about the time a massive asteroid exploded over one of our major cities, you could find some devout (and unlucky) churchgoer feeling grateful for God having helped them find their car keys. And then, blammo! Enter the random big-ass space rock. And that’s just the Churchies. Never mind the New Age folks getting up from their lotus positions, feeling at one with the universe and idly wondering where that big shadow came from all of the sudden.

We meat creatures run around on the surface of this rocky, vegetation-and-water-covered ball creating and feeling, in all sincerity, the most wonderful and intricate and meaningful frameworks for the universe and our place in it – none of which have any bearing on whether a 10-story space rock randomly annihilates Boston. Or the myriad viruses that quietly and patiently mutate, waiting for their chance to tear through millions of human hosts in a destructive pandemic on a mindless quest for their own day in the sun. Or [insert your random natural destruction of choice here].

Life on this ball isn’t kind to our animal existence, which – it can be argued – is our only real experiential takeaway in this life. You can’t really end-run around the meat. It can be ignored, contextualized, rationalized, or embraced – it makes no difference. It’s  the elephant in the room when the talk turns to the spiritual. It’s the faulty telegraph through which we claim to receive Divine missives. At the end of the day, it’s the meat, not the Grand Unified Theory of Spiritual Oneness, that closes up shop on the mental exertions in order to get its teeth brushed and be fed bread and eggs.

And consider lobotomies. When the meat and the soul tangle, it’s the soul that seems to come out on the losing end. If that’s the case, then how much soul is left after the meat gets smashed with a space rock?

Apologies for the philosophy 101 stuff. I’m not adept at it, and it’s been a long day. I’m just feeling like anyone that can’t acknowledge, right at the outset, that reality might be as grubby and literal and exposed as it first appears hasn’t looked through a telescope lately.

So, I got a new job starting a little later this month. It’ll be the first traditional employment I’ve had in 15+ years, but I’m currently burnt out on being a freelancer and want to get back to steady paychecks for a while.

In the course of going through the hiring process, my new company had me take a personality assessment quiz. The assessor – a one man company called Worthington Hurst in Chicago – evaluates a job history document, a job description from the company and a kinda unique 100-question personality quiz consisting of sentence fragments that you have to complete. Here’s my responses, along with the results that the company got back. (By the way, I found out companies are required by law to let you see any and all evaluations like this that. So, if you have something on file with your company, you probably have access to it, if you care enough to see it.)

SURVEY RESPONSES (fragments in bold, my additions in not-bold)

1. I was happiest when people were counting on me for things I love to do.
2. “When behind the wheel” is better than being in front of the wheel.
3. People under me are finding it hard to breathe, me being 250+ lbs and all.
4. Having people lean on me is satisfying.
5. Other people usually do things that are unusual.
6. It is tiring to exercise. Seriously.
7. When I’m put under pressure, I get all Capricorn about it.
8. She is something else.
9. Nothing makes me more furious than injustice for the weak.
10. At night I sleep soundly. Or work. Or… both.
11. Some day I‘ll look back on all this and laugh.
12. What people like most about me is most evident when I show up and play hard.
13. I miss being carefree.
14. It’s fun to daydream about winning the lottery – how much good could you do with that!
15. Brothers and sisters are mirrors – they make you proud, and cringe.
16. When it comes to seeing things, I need glasses.
17. What a man wants most in a woman can be counted on one hand.
18. Walking barefoot in the mud… um, no thanks.
19. When they laughed at me, I did nothing, to my regret.
20. I can’t understand what makes me pass gas.
21. Our family was terrible and beautiful.
22. The main driving force in my life floats around – it’s hard to pin down.
23. As for my legs, the less said, the better.
24. Praise makes me do better next time.
25. Anybody will work hard if they feel they have ownership.
26. I would rather do without small biting insects. Hate ‘em.
27. Nothing worse can happen to a man than to lose his sense of himself.
28. The part of my body hardest to hurt is the visible part.
29. My worst mistake was not telling it like I saw it.
30. If they tell me it’s dangerous, I find out why.
31. What one wants most in a friend is for them to show up.
32. Bosses are an opportunity for creativity.
33. A person who always smiles is not to be trusted. Usually.
34. Most people don’t know that I have a third nipple.
35. Discipline is a loaded word.
36. I get down in the dumps when I cast my past as a series of failures.
37. Giving me the authority is something you can feel comfortable with doing.
38. The future has yet to be written.
39. If the company is nice, invite ‘em over again.
40. I would like most to be photographed while skinny.
41. Having to stop learning is an impossible requirement.
42. If I’m alone I like it for a while. Then I don’t.
43. My only trouble is that I see trouble where it doesn’t exist.
44. The strongest part of me is my stubbornness.
45. If I had my way, people would always feel safe.
46. My father had courage when it counted.
47. Weakness comes from over-estimating your strength.
48. The thing I like about myself is that I can do and learn what it takes.
49. If I would only finish this, I could go to lunch.
50. My mouth needs help.
51. The world – what a crazy beautiful sad place.
52. People think of me as bigger than I experience myself to be.
53. Getting started is… This is one of those incriminating application questions, isn’t it?
54. Guns are just another manifestation of the human desire for control.
55. Every man is a gold mine of possibility.
56. Secretly I pick my nose.
57. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see something different than what I imagine.
58. I would like to be genteelly wealthy.
59. When luck turns against me, I storm and brood. And then I deal with it.
60. I think most conferences are too general to be useful.
61. What a woman wants most in a man is more than you can count on ten hands.
62. To be a leader is to help others find the leader in themselves.
63. The part of my body most easily hurt is the inside.
64. To get along in a group, one must be authentic.
65. The way a person looks is their story about how they see the world.
66. He, he, he.
67. When I let go it generally works out for the best anyway.
68. People over me are just like the people under me – one big human sandwich.
69. Money is something I notice more than I think I should.
70. As for my head, well… It’s bald…?
71. Being older would be inevitable. Wiser – not so much.
72. Nothing is so frustrating as the part in between starting to learn and starting to get it.
73. The best measure of personal success is that you defined it, and you reached it.
74. When work piles up, I turn to the messy geniuses (Einstein, etc.) for inspiration.
75. If people only knew how capable they are, they could relax more.
76. Marriage is designed to take you to the edge and make you decide who you’re gonna be.
77. My mother got lost somewhere. I wish she knew where.
78. Work can be the launching pad for life.
79. When I see hills, I feel at home.
80. If I only hadn’t eaten that last spoonful.
81. I will do anything to make sure it happens.
82. When others disagree, I get interested.
83. I like subordinates who don’t play small.
84. As far as my hearing is concerned, it survived my rock band days.
85. Getting dirty is a necessary evil, but only in yardwork and recreation, and… ‘Nuff said.
86. I prefer the company of those who love life.
87. The weakest part of me is making the initial commitment.
88. Being younger would be way more overrated than it actually is.
89. A “man’s man” is a guy who has thrown up the wrong fences.
90. There are times when I wonder, “where’s my other shoe?”
91. In the morning, I roll over.
92. When I have something to say, it’s taken me some time to get there.
93. I failed at speaking the truth in love.
94. At the end of the day, I look forward to the next morning’s perspective.
95. I like a car that gets me from here to there without interrupting my thoughts.
96. I suffer most from over-analysis.
97. When others do better, I get quietly competitive.
98. My greatest ambition is to express myself and have others do the same.
99. Children can be, and are, more than we can imagine.
100. Finding no one to help me makes me lonely. Teams are better.

THE RESULTING ANALYSIS

Quick-witted and creatively adept, this self-motivated man’s need for control is probably the primary reason he has never held a nine-to-five job (or at least one that he will list on an employment application) more than 17 years after graduating from college. Despite his assertion that he is leaving this work style presently because he is “burnt out,” it seems much more likely that his family’s needs and the downturn in the economy are forcing him to make such a move. Might find enjoyment-even professional fulfillment to a certain extent-from a more regimented work experience, but it will not be easy for him to submit himself to a work life of teamwork and responding on a regular basis to someone else’s dictates. And his potential for making a successful transition could be influenced by factors entirely outside the work place: his wife, also an artist, may end up with more freedom to pursue her own artistic muse.

In sum, this application represents, almost certainly, a nod to pragmatic personal and business concerns, rather than a sought-after career move in a new direction. Relatively sedentary, he is much more agile intellectually than he is physically. Though his pursuits appear rather narrowly focused on the arts, within that milieu he has a fairly eclectic range of interests from which he can draw creative inspiration. Is not used to punching a clock, taking direction, or having others to contend with when he is working. As he finds a level of acceptance with all these new aspects of working in an organization, they will draw energy and focus away from the talents that have brought him to this place. How well he adapts will determine his ultimate success-and, in a real sense, his value to the company.

If he has the technical skills and knowledge necessary for the job (Since, as he says, he is “completely self-taught,” there is no way to check credentials through completed course-work, certifications, etc.), he is judged Solidly Adequate for [name of job title], with the proviso that it would be wise to reach agreement on a probationary period during which he and the company can explore the relationship without committing to a long-term arrangement that might be unworkable-or at least uncomfortable-for either party. While he enjoys the attention his work has brought him, he is not a particularly forthcoming person. Will warm slowly to others and may be a challenge to supervise.

“Relatively sedentary, he is much more agile intellectually than he is physically.” “Solidly Adequate.” What more could a guy want from his personality assessment than that…?

We begin with a video from St. Stephen of Colbert (snatched from the jaws of the Ordinary Gentlemen blog):

In this clip, St. Colbert does an intro about how church attendance swells during severe recessions and then interviews Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit who joined the order and took a vow of poverty after leaving what sounds like a very lucrative position at GE Finance. Here’s a snippet of their exchange at the end:

FM: If you tie yourself to your possessions, your possessions start owning you. I think it’s more about freedom. The vow of poverty that we Jesuits have taken is more about being free, following Christ, being free to serve other people, and also identifying with and having compassion with the poor. So it’s mostly about freedom… It’s more that we keep God at bay. we have these defenses – our status, our possessions, things we hold on to – and when they’re not there anymore, it’s easier for God to break in.

SC: He [God] says “I am He whom thou seekest.”

FM: It’s not that God is any more present, it’s that we’re just more open…

In the comments a few posts ago about winter, Bob and Stephen had this to say:

Bob: Today I am seeing in the mirror’s reflection a man visibly marked with earth and ashes – a man more humbled than yesterday, a man reminded of the winter of his soul, the chaos of what he is when left to his own devices, the breakdown of his character and values through the press of daily living, and… the hope for renewal that Springs forth new every Easter.

Stephen: Every winter is an invitation by Nature (one of the many faces of God) to look directly at oneself without the gloss of external delight available in other seasons to protect the eye from itself. While this may be painful, to look deeply and steadily is to become free from the monkey mind — it is no more complicated than that.

Lent is a type of forced spiritual winter for the layman – a season of willingly administered want, searching, scrounging, exposure to a vast, cold, clear-eyed truth with an aching soul. For a culture like ours, suckled from the moment of our births and hounded to the last of our days by the largely unconscious assumption that we can and should have everything we crave when we crave it and that it’s a fact of life that we will be stroked and prodded in almost every waking minute to crave things we didn’t know about when we woke up that day, the idea of Lent is ridiculous. Why deprive yourself of anything when there is no need? Lent, shallowly understood, is just another easy to stereotype example of self-flagellating religious folk who can’t, and determinedly won’t, have a good time and “enjoy life”.

I think what Fr. Martin, Bob and Stephen all point to is the necessity of the Lent experience, especially in Western life as we know it. Whether it is adopted by choice or forced on us by times of want, deprivation or intentional withdrawal from our craving and automatic pleasures has the paradoxical effect of creating room for delight and discovery in our lives.

By inserting lack and want, it hones our senses and makes our pleasure palate more sensistive and discriminating. By eliminating the frenetic buzz of searching for and consuming what we crave, it creates a keen stillness and strengthens our ability to wait and observe. By compelling us to sit shiva on our self-righteousness and gaze silently and steadily on our weaknesses, failures and small and large cruelties (and our subsequent shame and overcompensations), it opens a cathedral in our shadowed soul that is filled with the ever-present light, compassion and generosity of God.

I read a fascinating post on Slog the other day. They’ve been doing a series on jobs people have taken after losing their old lives to this Great Recession (as some call it). In one post, “Chastity”, a former technical writer (and a great writer in general), is talking about her experience in her new role as a part-time porn production assistant. After overseeing a shoot where five couples copulate in various ways in front of a live studio audience, she writes these fascinating words:

Most surprising to me is that the some of the girls who do this work very regularly seem to have their fuses blown out, sexually. There isn’t much they won’t do, but they never orgasm. Not really, anyway — and they’ll cheerfully announce this fact when the cameras aren’t rolling. Nor do they frequently have sex at home. For those who actively choose sex work, this creeping sexual numbness seems to me the greatest tragedy of this way of making money. The loss of my desire would provoke a fundamental shift in my character — my sexuality is my sixth sense. The sensual and the erotic make up a considerable portion of my interior life: they are private — to put them on display would be to capitalize on my most fragile and vulnerable self. The irony, however, is that for me to work in this business, I have to be a little numb, too.
…
I can’t shake the conviction that pornography is exploitation, however much everyone involved insists it isn’t. As long as it remains the last viable resort for a young woman, I don’t know how it can be anything else, and I don’t know how I can be anything other than complicit in Jenny’s eventual sexual anesthesis.

(Read the entire post.)

When I read this, I was reminded of a quote by Frederich Buechner:

Lust is the craving for salt of a man dying of thirst.

Porn, like all human sexuality, is a complex topic (one I’d love to write on and one that, given my new employer is a Christian-based company, I’m not sure I’m feel free to be bluntly honest about). But what struck me about “Chastity’s” vignette is that how these sensitive physical, emotional and spiritual organs at the edge of our human experience – sex, appetite, the instincts for belonging and approval, security and safety, a framework of meaning – get scraped raw or blunted or even hopelessly damaged by a habitual, unthinking aquiescence to our own cravings.

The Lenten season is an antidote to that slow poison of numbness, just as winter is Nature’s antidote to the exertions of spring and summer. We must contract, let our concealing foliage and fineries fall away to reveal the contours of our internal landscape, so that the warm light of God’s benevolence can begin to tease out the new life of roots and seeds that have long been hidden and dormant.

Apologies to you all for dropping off the face of the planet for almost a month. I get in these moods sometimes, whether from burnout or an overdose of unmerited ennui or just lack of feeling particularly inspirational, and I just drop out. Natalie, as usual, says it well while beating me to the punch:

But. Well, lately all of my posts have been sitting in a draft file. My thoughts, feelings and other musings have been too morose, sad, frustrated, cranky, angry, bitter, funky and junky for daylight. I know, it hasn’t stopped me from sharing before, but I find that even my brilliant insights and reflections on the economy, our government, housing woes and the trials of being a rental rat in a high brow neighborhood are just too depressing to print… Every thing I think of seems to come from someone else who is doing it, or saying it or sharing it better.

So, I’ve been in that same no emails, no returning calls or writing posts kinda space. I’m having to strain a bit to re-crank this engine, but it’s nice to know you took the time to drop by and check in.

My post title has a dual meaning, dontcha know. Obama dragged me back out to the blog by providing a great occasion in tonight’s speech for a post, but more than that, of course, he is a tonic that this nation has needed for a sorely long time. He spoke with authoritative bluntness and without sugar coating our challenges, but also not dwelling on them to the point of overwhelm and pointing the nation to exit out of the burning building. I particularly loved his very pointed challenge for these publicly elected officials to rise to the expectations the public has for them, and I thought it was particularly masterful of him to point out that everyone in the chamber was patriotic as long as their efforts were honest – further depriving the wingnuts of legitimacy in their shrill demonization of the other side.

He said tonight what I’ve told people I appreciate about government before – that, implemented properly, it is a “catalyst” that can spur/inspire private enterprise and citizenry on to great things that would not have otherwise been done. What struck me is how he is also a catalyst. His type of synthesizing approach and genuinely cooperative nature has been greatly needed to spark the engine of government that will, hopefully, in turn spark the engine of our nation’s purposefulness and renewal.

Shared communal responsibility is an important aspect to government and one that Obama wonderfully embodies. We taxpayers and citizens have agreed to be governed at the federal level in part to give ourselves the very options we now need – massive government intervention to stabilize our nation and the world at a time when greed and opportunism have overtaken all the already-weakened safeguards and left us vulnerable in a very personal and scary way. We as a national community have built this safety net for times like these, to help ourselves and our neighbors (no matter where they are in the nation) when nothing else can. The actions Obama is taking are an expression of our nation’s commitment to itself, to the propping up or rescue of our most vulnerable citizens, to the reorienting of ourselves towards important shared priorities and responsibilities in the middle of our search for personal freedom.

I shouldn’t, but I feel sorry for the GOP. Watching Jindal try and follow up Obama’s muscular Chicago Sandburg-ian calls for bold and really transformative action, delivered by a diverse and energetic President on an historic occasion and enthusiastically applauded by both political friends and, at times, enemies, was cringe-worthy. It wasn’t because he was overshadowed by the moment or that he now has to live with an incredibly bad political decision to launch his presidential bid with such poor timing and delivery. It’s because he and his party have nothing to stand on or stand for. They simply have no philosophy that can encompass the urgency of the moment we’re in, the quiet tectonic shift in public thinking that burst to the surface in November, the nimble co-opting of a President that is political lightyears ahead of them. All they can say is No. And No, while not big enough even in everyday life, is even less adequate in these times when we need every Yes, And… we can get.

In our last phone call, my dear brother was talking about times of personal winter when we disengage and withdraw and hunker down and our spiritual/mental/relational ground is fallow and still. He used the word “contraction” to describe it. It suddenly occured to me that it’s not accident that it’s the exact word economists use a winter word to describe our current economy – a massive “contraction”, a shedding of surplus and growth and a season of withering and cooling. And of course, “contraction” is also the word for the violent and painful heaves during childbirth.

Winter’s contractions are costly and painful. The majority of a plant’s “body” dies during the process, leaving mostly only root. The leaves on the trees are choked at their roots until they are squeezed off and fall to decay into the forest floor. The season is severe enough to leave a concentric scar in the flesh of the tree. Animals who are unprepared or not strong enough can die, boughs are torn away by snow, ponds and lakes freeze hard, the ground lies fallow.

But winter is not only hard, it’s also beautiful and produces the conditions necessary for the tumultuous and lovely green of spring. Winter’s onset produces the riotous colors of fall and the minimalist beauty of the landscape stripped bare. Right now in the Northwest, daffodil buds are being shivered awake by the cold ground and will soon start to explode in sunny yellow clumps. The accumulation of new nutrients in the soil from the winter damage have begun to feed root systems now preparing to kick back into life as the sun’s rays get warmer.

In biological systems, the cycle of winter/chaos/breakdown is essential for a stronger, more appropriate system to emerge. The same is true for our national system. We are facing big threats, all of our own making, but implicit in those threats is the opportunity, the seed, for something newer, more robust, more expressive of who we are. Just as winter surprises itself with daffodils, so America has surprised itself with Obama and the renewed national image and spirit he represents. With care and luck and time, we’ll see growth again – not the same thing we had before, but something new, unpredictable, more healthy and appropriate for our world and times.

More from the “Truth Will Set Us All Free” dept: What a sad, sad saga this Ted Haggard thing is. Right on the heels of the Prop 8 debacle, the nation gets an object lesson in the destructive poison of being gay, closeted, and Christian. It’s a familiar story to anyone who’s read anything about the experience of gay Christians, but it never gets any easier to watch:

The convolutions, the intrigue, the lies, the lost money, the ruined reputations and careers and hopes, the breathless media exposes — all of that would have never happened if Ted had been free enough to admit at some point, early on, three simple words: “I am gay.” A tragedy.

Charles hates penguins: “Yes, there is no love in me for penguins. The creatures have a life cycle that is utterly stupid and tedious.” Charles also hates dogs and thinks his daughter, age 7, should know whether or not her childhood is successful so far. Poor sad Charles.

Our new President does more for US-Muslim relations in 20 minutes than his predecessor did in 8 years:

Competence. It’s a bit hard to adjust to so suddenly. Obama chose to give his first, highly sought-after, high visibility televised interview as President to Al Arabiya. The interviewer, Hisham Melehm, who I’ve followed and been impressed by on the Diane Rehm Show as a frequent guest, was impressed, and so was Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: He can be a pretty charming guy. Is that what you think?

MELHEM: He — absolutely, absolutely. But, you know, you realize, you’re sitting from a man who has a deep, keen intellect, a sharp analytical mind, supple intelligence. And the way he weaves things, the way he frames issues, whether he’s talking about terrorism, talking about different cultures, he has a very sophisticated understanding of the world…

BLITZER: You know these issues and the region as well as anyone. You’ve been covering this story for a long time. Will he succeed?

MELHEM: Look, already he is sending the right vibes, the right tone, there is a different approach, there is a different wind coming from Washington, different discourse. In terms of a radical shift, it’s too early to say.

He is waiting for the Israeli elections, as you well know. He is waiting for the Iranian election, as you well know. He is sending the right signals at this stage. And I think he will — is going to force people in the Middle East to listen to him and take him very seriously and to listen to him carefully.

BLITZER: I think you’re absolutely right. And as someone who also has covered this region for a long time, he spoke with authority and knowledge. He clearly knew what he was talking about…

MELHEM: Absolutely.

As Steve Clemons puts it:

Barack Obama’s first moves have been uttlerly brilliant…

His style matters — just like Bush’s swagger did — and it is this act of humility towards the Muslim world which may animate hope in the nations around the world and in the Middle East specifically.

Everyone will have to adjust now. The Saudis will leave the peace deal on the table. The Israelis have to remake themselves — even if Netanyahu succeeds Olmert. Hamas will have to find a way to become differently postured — if not on Israel, then at least on some level of international acceptability with American partners. Arab stakeholders are going to have to snap out of positions shaped more by status quo thinking and inertia that things will never change and get with the Obama program.

What Obama did has provided a new punctuation point in American foreign policy, and it is not “continuous” foreign policy at all. This is a new game and a very impressive new leader.

President Obama – GOP punching bag or black-belt rope-a-dope master? The President has been getting a lot of flack from his left flank for not using his sky-high popularity (60% approval rating in Alabama… Alabama!) and a decisive Dem majority to muscle through his agenda instead of taking the time to make a charm offensive to the party that landed us in this horrible mess. It’s a valid complaint. After all, it’s clear after 6 years of Republican hegemony that they have little to offer but bad faith and bad ideas, and the public wants a 180-degree switch from the last eight years. So, why all the effort by Obama and his staff on a fool’s errand?

Al Giordano, making more sense than most of the hysterical liberals I’ve been reading, thinks Obama is basically continuing the political tactics that had him sail past the mighty Clintons and McCain in the elections – define the playing field by taking an early crucial lead in rhetoric, planning and actions, reach out with very politically visible (and genuine) offers to work together, lay back when the inevitable attacks begin, and then yank the political rug out from underneath at the most visible moment to come back for the win.

For a new president with such enormous public popularity to set up Congressional Republicans to be perceived as slapping his “outstretched hand” was a chess move that suckered them into the tar pit of being seen as the obstructionists in Washington, and at that, they’re now branded as additionally inactive on “the urgency of the economic situation”…

In other words, Obama’s strategy is to set them up for another rout in the 2010 Congressional elections and to hasten, in the meantime, the process by which they wake up and realize their seats are vulnerable. The President doesn’t need their votes on the Stimulus (therefore, this maneuver is not about the Stimulus, but more akin to a football team calling a running play to set up a later passing play). The truth is that so many Congressional Democrats are so undependable that Obama will need some Republican votes later on other legislative priorities, particularly in the Senate in order to get 60 votes for “cloture” to allow bills to be voted up or down: On the Employee’s Free Choice Act, on Immigration Reform (and now he needs one more to offset the anti-immigrant junior Democratic Senator from New York), on children’s health care and much, much more. To get to that point, he has to make individual Republicans feel vulnerable at the ballot box to Democratic challenge. Today’s events are speeding that process up.

In the end, Obama’s “bipartisanship” is one of the most Machiavellian partisan maneuvers we’ve seen in Washington in a long while, and I use that description in its most admirable context. The Republicans fell right into the trap today. Progressives that urge Obama to be more “partisan” should pay close attention to how the GOP is getting pwned before falling into the same trap themselves.

Here’s Obama in his own words on his political style:

Reason #1072 why I like Esquire – Tom Junod:

And so give this to global warming: It’s another test case. Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we’ve done with global warming is what we’ve done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the marketplace: We’ve lived with it. We’ve gotten really good at living with things during the Bush Years, at tolerating the intolerable. And while this may sound like another tip of the hat to the incredible resilience of the American people, it’s not: Resilience, after all, is not what’s required in crisis when the crisis is partly of your own making. Responsibility is. We have heard of the Tech Bubble of the Clinton Years, the Housing Bubble of George W. Bush. Well, the bubble that we’re living in now — still — is the bubble that’s all our own. It’s the Moral Bubble, and it will not be pricked until we take responsibility not just for the forty-third president’s actions but for our inaction — for all the agreements we’ve made without awareness, for all the awareness we’ve come to without vigilance, for all the times we’ve touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.

~ from his article “What The Hell Just Happened?” in the Feb 2009 issue of Esquire, italics mine

So, I was going to write a short response to Bob’s comment about my take on Rick Warren’s invocation at the Inauguration, but as usual it spiraled out of control into an almost 700 word behemoth that began to demand it’s own post. So here it is…

Like the other pastors, Warren was given the daunting task of delivering a religious invocation to a huge, vastly diverse audience on such an auspicious occasion, and he did a respectable job. After getting a little distance from the Inauguration Warren’s prayer wore a little better than it did in the moment of delivery. In fact, the transcript reads even better (read it here). But it still didn’t sit well.

For one thing, the delivery bugged me. Obama, who admittedly is a phenomenal public speaker, delivers his lines without excess drama and verbal frippery. His tone is commanding without needing to verbally wheedle or bully. And both Robinson and Lowery also played it straight, with an authenticity and conviction to their verbal phrasing. This isn’t just a style issue – I believe that style has a direct link to the internal cultural attenuation of the speaker.

With that in mind, the practiced, overly nice, melifluous bedside manner of mainstream Evangelical preachers makes me itch because it reflects the church culture they work in – one where they have to verbally work overtime to hide the rough words and rough edges, never ruffle feathers with parishoners or jeopardize their building projects, never cross the denominational leadership on which their careers depend, hide the culturally unacceptable parts of their belief structure and sell the “God is my BFF (best friend forever) type of faith” (as the commenter put it) that makes it easier to attract new attendees. Evangelical preachers feel caught between God’s watchful eye (no compromise on beliefs), their parishoners (who don’t want the boat to be rocked), the world (with whom they have a combined persecution/inferiority complex), and their career in the public spotlight (which demands they always be relevant and interesting). So, they largely adopt this non-strident, uninvasive, undemanding listenable style that has the simultaneous effect of both inducing a warm fuzzy feeling while insuring that their time on stage is instantly forgettable.

Second, for all of Warren’s talk of “failing to treat our fellow human beings…with the respect they deserve”, he, along with many Evangelicals, continue to equate gays and gay marriage with incest and pedophilia and was a vocal supporter of Prop 8 which threatens to dissolve the marriages of tens of thousands of deliriously happy gay folk using the disingenous and untrue reasoning that it threatened the right of churches and pastors to free speech. I believe him when he says that he has gay friends, and people like Melissa Etheridge have spoken of him warmly. But treating people with respect means sticking to the facts, to the truth, and these kinds of overstatements continue to inflame the discourse with their obvious untruths. And it’s made somehow more infuriating by the can’t-we-all-just-get-along style it’s delivered in (see point 1).

Look, I like Evangelicals. I have friends who are Evangelicals. Their charitable giving, hard work and general hand of friendship (especially in the individual vs. church setting) resists the demonization they get from the culture. But I can say from an experienced perspective that their culture and worldview has serious problems that are driving a wedge deeper and deeper between them and the world at large. They’re not dumb – they can feel this happening and I can sense the general pessimism that they feel about it – but they are locked into a theological worldview that makes the deepening separation and resulting irrelevance inevitable.

So, I stand by my comments on Warren being the weakest of the three, and I think the comment I reference in the post captured (in much less bloviation than mine) the essence of why. As for being civil, I’m not personally attacking Warren or casting aspersions on his character. I’m pointing out from my own experience and as authentically as I can what I feel the flaws are in his culture, the culture that I grew up in. I get passionate about it, I mention it, because I still care. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend any time on it because I wouldn’t care, y’know?

Martin Luther King gave America a new language, a third way through the racial minefield that has led us purposefully to where we find ourselves today – commemorating today in his honor as a national hero, a man we are proud to pin our history on, and tomorrow, installing a brilliant and capable black man – the best candidate we fielded in our general election who won his hard-fought contests solely on merit, message and skill – as our 44th President. King’s third way of inclusion and the refusal of division as a means to power have had, and will have, a profound influence on our new President’s governance, giving him precedent and legitimacy as he reaches out a hand of inclusion without malice to even his most bitter detractors.

King showed us that the correcting injustice doesn’t have to lead us to retaliation or separation, to a battle for supremacy or raising up impassable barriers. He and his leadership consciously broadened a very justified, historically necessary struggle for black equality into a call for universal civil rights – a world not just everyone “gets theirs”, but a truly integrated world where mutual dignity is exchanged.

And it cost him the most it can cost anyone. I saw this video on Andrew Sullivan’s blog today. I was mesmerized looking into King’s eyes. I don’t know what he’s looking at in the video, but his eyes seem to look through his audience as if he’s already seeing their faces recede, swallowed up by the final Night that awaited him just the next evening at the end of Ray’s gun barrel.

I was also struck with his demeanor. It isn’t that of a man who’s grandstanding for effect or whipping up an emotional response. There’s no hint of the awful vise he was caught in on a daily basis, the defections from his movement, the constant criticisms and opposition, the threat of government censure and arrest. There’s just a calmness there – a great stillness – as he speaks with the air of a man simply laying out an indisputable fact about an unimaginable future not too far ahead. I watched it several times today, and it gave me chills each time – being in the presence of a person who was fully and completely given over to the work that was given him to do.

Dr. King, thank you for surrendering to your mission, for your commitment to a future that includes all of us. Your presence will loom large tomorrow, not just for Americans, but for all the world watching as we attempt to add a new chapter to your vision and, as our new President reminded us yesterday, put all our hands on the arc of history to bend it toward justice for all.

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Ta-Nehisi said something funny today:

When I was kid, I always thought it was weird how much white racism, basically, revolved around keeping white women from having sex with black men. I’d be reading some book on black history, where people would be devoting, say, the right of black people to vote. And, inevitably, some white segregationists would say something like “If we let them vote, they’ll be marrying your daughters!!! And they’ll take over the country!!!” And I think, “Whaaa??” Talk about your non-sequitur.

But then I was talking about this with Kenyatta this morning, and it all suddenly made sense. She nodded to Barack Obama and laughingly noted, “They were right.”

And apparently, the Seal version of “Change Is Gonna Come” I embedded was weak-sauce. As Ta-Nehisi puts it – “Sam Cooke does it better than you“. OK, fine. Here’s the real version, then.

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So, to address the issues that Sky and Stephen raised in my last post about the “over-signification” of Obama:

I think you guys are over-analyzing what’s happening right now a bit. The country’s in the mood for a party. We’re celebrating our own front-row seat on history, the fact that we made history together, the fact that there is a smart and decent public servant at our helm once again – hell, the fact that last eight years are OVER! Of course everybody wants to get in on the action – showing up in DC, wearing the Obama t-shirts, tearing up at freedom songs and what have you. Of course it’s all going to be a little obnoxious and boozy and overly schmaltzy, what with all the cheesy shirts and commemorative plates. That’s just human beings being goofy like we get when something big happens. If anyone had advance notice, I’m sure they would have been selling mugs that said “He’s Back!” at the Resurrection.

I think Ezra Klein put it really well today:

The night Obama became president-elect, he was almost pure idea: The celebrations that took hold on America’s streets were not a joyous affirmation of his statements on entitlement reform. They were an explosion of pride at what America had just done, the barriers it had just broken, the boundaries it had just obliterated. For a few weeks, Obama was hardly even a partisan figure, much less a tawdry politician. He was living history.

The past two months have marked his slow transition from idea into president. What Obama meant is increasingly submerged beneath what Obama does. The fact that we elected a black man says little about how we spend the TARP dollars, or mediate the conflict in Gaza, or stimulate the economy. Tomorrow, our politics will be at its highest point in memory. We will have elected an African-American. We will be inaugurating a president with higher approval ratings than any other incoming executive since the advent of polling. But then politics will quiet, for a little while at least, and governance will take over. Obama will stop representing things and start doing things.

Obama’s next task, then, is harder. To recast governance much as he recast politics. Success would look different, to be sure. Good governance is often more technical than inspiring. It need not feel like history. But nor should governance deject Americans, or disgust them, or appear impervious to their input. The power of Obama’s election is that it felt like the country’s accomplishment. That is easier in an election: The country votes. Such a direct connection may not be possible in governance. But if governance can feel again like it works on behalf of the public, like it takes seriously their concerns and works daily to meet their expectations, then that would be something better than hope. That would be change.

This is reflected in the latest NYT/CBS poll, by the way. The public expects great things from Obama, and they don’t expect it for a couple of years. He’s asked us to give him time to do his best, he’s asked us to stay involved, and that’s exactly what the country is doing. Ezra puts it succinctly once again:

It turns out that when you treat Americans like adults, when you explain the limits of the possible and temper the timeframe of your promises, they respond like adults. Obama’s public approval ratings are among the highest for an American president in modern times. But they are not the simple product of the crisis. They are not high because the public childishly expects that Obama can enter office and vanquish our ills. Rather, they’re high because he seems to be trying. Because he’s appears to be honest about what he can do, and will do, and what it will mean. After the last eight years of aggressive incompetence and cynical obfuscation, that’s enough. That’s change.

And about that train thing, it wasn’t just an ostentatious victory prance. The route took him through some seriously depressed areas – areas that got a bit more visibility because of his route – and along the way, many people (tens of thousands at his whistle stops and along the route) who didn’t have the financial means to pick up and attend the inauguration got to see him.

So, until the man sits down at the desk in the Oval Office and starts signing things, I recommend smoothing your furrowed brows, picking up a stiff drink, and cutting a rug. Let’s party!

PS. I almost forgot – they’re also partying in alternate reality of Bush World. Really, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, folks. Buh-bye!

My friend Sky has sent a couple of emails recently with little vignettes from his daughter, Ave (who’s about 6 months older than Amira). The most recent goes like this:

Ave, Isai and I were in the car last night, waiting for Anita to come out of Safeway. It was dark, rainy, and Ave was quite for a long time. And then Ave said:

“Daddy… is God playing us?”

“What do you mean, Lovebird?”

Ave starts moving her hands around in the air and says, “is God ‘playing us’, like in a game when you play?”

“Uh… uh… that’s a very interesting question, Lovebird…”

“He’s moving us like we’re pieces, with His hands… I think that’s how it is.”

Silence.

“Daddy, God can do anything because He has power. But His power is love.”

Sky’s family is Orthodox Christian, and I think they attend church a couple of times during a week. Sky is also a very well-read man and has a knack for intuiting and translating complex spiritual concepts. It’s clear that Ave is developing robust 4-year-old language for God and the way the spiritual world works.

In contrast, we talk almost never in our little family about God, except for mealtime and bedtime prayers where we thank Jesus for food and the days activities respectively. Amira for the first time this year watching “The Little Drummer Boy” Christmas video and looking at our Nativity heard “Jesus” in context with “little baby Jesus”, although that was the extent. She really has no context for the prayers we do together beyond it being a family ritual, and she has no concept of a spiritual world that is different than pretend, different than what you can see with your eyes. She has no real spiritual literacy.

I’m torn about this.

On one hand, I feel pretty spiritually disconnected. It’s been several years since I attended a church, and although I emerged with some dear friends, my experience with it was decidedly mixed. When I first started blogging again this year, I felt gung-ho about being a worship leader of some kind. Now, not so much. Just this past week we’ve had eight people in our immediate circle tell us how badly they were, and are still, being battered and wounded by the church and Christians to the point that they’ve completely withdrawn, and that’s not counting many others over the last few years. The foundations of my belief, such as they are, feel adolescent, flimsy, illogical, scientifically wobbly. I feel like without being immersed in activities with like-minded religious folk to shore up my emotional surety, I can’t feel emphatic about what I believe. The things I would die for don’t include my religion.

On the other hand, I’ve lost none of my hunger and enthusiasm for spiritual talk and learning. It’s as much a part of my makeup as ever. I remain convinced of God, even as I have absolutely no idea what to do with that information. In a conversation with my brother a few nights ago, I didn’t feel at all vibey with the kind of Universal Consciousness religious synthesis he has come to and found myself still arguing in favor of more specific religious practice (the paradoxes of Jesus in particular), even while feeling a complete lack of religious commitment. I believe in the spiritual world, and right now I feel like I know less about it than I ever have.

I think Janece shares a lot of that ambivalence. One of her good friends from when they were in Christian high school together, who’s now come out as gay and got a drubbing from her family and the church, has been in spiritual recovery at a Unitarian church and has been liking it. I think her experience resonates with Janece.

So, lacking strong conviction about what we believe, we’ve ended up not saying much at all to Amira. We continue our practice with her of giving thanks for food and life, because we believe that gratitude is vital. She has some great books about caring for our world and caring for others as a way to express God’s love. And… well, that’s it.

I don’t want Amira growing up in a typical evangelical environment, and other forms of Christianity have their own problems. I feel it’s vital to give her a spiritual structure, but not one she’s going to have to deal with later as a negative like Janece and I have. Janece and I still have some exploring and searching to do to build a solid conviction about what we believe and in the meantime, I don’t want Amira’s spiritual literacy to suffer. I believe in belief, in the power of having spiritual vocabulary and distinctions, to put the sensory world and culture into right perspective.

So, a little help. If you have kids, what did you teach them? Do you feel like your church (if you attend) gives them everything they need, or do you find yourself modifying/qualifying what they learn? If you don’t subscribe to a religion, do you teach them about spirituality, and if so, how? What should Janece and I be reading on this subject that could help guide us?

I’m finally back from vacation in the “unpacked and ready” sense. We brought back an unwelcome visitor courtesy of the cousins – some kind of nasty flu bug that’s been kicking us all in the pants. We don’t get out much, so our contact with the outside world and its endless buffet of tasty viruses has been limited. I feel like one of the aliens from War Of The Worlds – limp, pale, disgusting, slimy, and half dead. I spent last night in a slow-motion haze of lying down on the couch, slipping into a fretful sleep, feeling my lungs fill with toxic waste grade phlegm, stumbling to the bathroom to cough it up as quietly as possible to not wake anyone, laying down on the couch again, rinse, repeat. Tonight looks to be no exception, sadly. I’ve fallen prey to … The Man Cold!!!!

A few obligatory end-of-year musings:

First, thanks to all of you for caring enough to visit and comment this last year. As I’ve said before, in a period of my life where I’ve felt very removed from the rest of life, you’ve been a great source of continued conversation and thought-provoking responses. I appreciate all of you, and I’m committed to continuing my endless sideline commentaries on stuff that smarter people have already commented on…

Second, we saw the Will Smith movie “The Pursuit Of Happyness” tonight. I won’t bore you with a rehash since you’ve probably seen it, but here’s a link to the movie site in case you haven’t. There were a couple of qualities that impressed me about Chris Gardner, the man whose biography inspired the movie. He was absolutely relentless in every step – holding on to his dreams, getting his foot in the door of where he wanted to be, not letting despair or defeat rob him of his energy and determination to try one more time. The other quality was his unwavering commitment to not let the circumstances or how he was feeling get in the way of his human connection with his son – not the poverty, not the homeless shelters and endless lines, not his internship or important study, not the responsibility of being a single dad.

I’ve got a lot of ground I can make up on both those accounts. I’ve never held any goal with that kind of single-minded determination, and it’s much easier than it should be for me to disengage with Amira and those I love simply because I don’t feel like it or am distracted (like today, when I was dragging my feet to play with her because I was irritable from being sick).

Tonight I’m feeling that an important word for me this year is “pursuit”. I don’t want to give up that energy, that sense of being unwilling to stay unhappy and in stasis when I see someplace else I want to be. This last year has been about withdrawal, being fallow, floating. I don’t regret it, but I’m feeling the momentum building under me again to forge ahead, make some new trails in the well-worn ground of my life.

More love, more justice, more growth, more connection. Happy 2009!

Bob, welcome back. To you and Stephen and Maria, I appreciate the questions and the mental pause they gave me to consider beyond just my raw heartbreak, sadness and frustration.

Bob, you asked:

…at what point after the 9/11 attacks was a line crossed by Pres. Bush that constitutes the ‘moral failure’ of which you speak? Is it at the point of lifting the Geneva Convention rules, or is it at some other place?

I’m going to be blunt in saying that I don’t think Bush had the personal moral foundation to even take office, much less make decisions of this gravity. My read on him before the election (including his mocking of Karla Faye Tucker’s execution among other things) and one that’s been vindicated a thousand times over since, is that he is a deeply unintrospective, unwise and unserious man. His moral landscape is a childish cartoon of black and white villans and heroes, and his willful refusal to deepen his own capacity for healthy adult ambiguity and wisdom predetermined, I think, both his vastly (almost criminally) incompetent leadership as well as the stain he inflicted on America in a new embrace of torture as official policy. He was, sitting in the most powerful office in the world with all of its pitfalls and pressures, a guaranteed moral time bomb.

That said, you asked about “the line”. Defining the line that has traditionally constrained America in protecting our security has been the heart of the issue all along – determining the right place to be in the murky clouds of interrogation methods, international agreements, urgency, what is legal, and above all, what is morally right. I’ve blogged about this dilemma for myself before:

The movie [Clear And Present Danger] is just OK, but it made me wonder about something that’s popped up for me a few times about Christianity and people who deal with violence on a regular basis as part of their work — CIA interrogators, special ops military personnel, spies, prison guards, undercover cops, etc. etc. This society we enjoy is preserved in a number of ways by people willing to engage in violence for the sake of protecting us. They provide a certain kind of safeguard for normal and nice people to enjoy their neighborly lives. I wonder how people in those professions manage to retain their connection with their Christianity. Is it possible to follow closely in the footsteps of Christ, be told in church that “if you’ve done it to one of the least of these, you’ve done it to me” and still work over a suspect until they talk or assasinate a target?

I don’t know the answer to that question, and it’s a huge issue to wrestle with on the scale of deciding the fate and security of a whole nation, especially in great uncertainty when the nation was wounded so visibly and deeply, as we were on 9/11. I found some great reading on this while thinking about my response:

First, a good example of what Ta-Nehisi calls “weak-sauce” – a jot and tittle argument by the National Review that the torture, humiliation and deaths were “legal” outside the Geneva Convention, and therefore somehow less abhorrent or justified, because the combatants were not state-sponsored. They completely sidestep any real evaluation of the human/spiritual/moral dimension involved, even though their editor makes a lot of loud-n-proud noise about being a conservative Catholic. (Note: The Review has been stubbornly and steadfastly almost 100% wrong over the last eight years as Bush cheerleaders — still! — so I feel completely comfortable writing them off just on that basis, much less the merits.)

Second, a much more thoughtful and compelling series of posts from the Atlantic’s (what a great magazine!) Ross Douthat, a conservative, trying to grapple with Bush’s legacy on this. The posts in order are here, here, here and here. He basically comes down to admitting that while presidents have had to give the order approving horrific acts, such as Truman ordering the atomic strikes on Japan, the Bush administration lacked similar justification, especially for how broad and aggressive the orders were to implement torture.

So, what do I think the line was, and where it was crossed? From a moral perspective, I think there were a few lines, crossed in several ways.

First, our national trust was breached when Bush made the decision to use 9/11 as a “fear lever” for any and every politicized overreach his administration could dream up – cloaking the GOP in an untouchable cloak of patriotism that silenced/dismissed dissent around foreign invasion, energy policy, and a host of other issues. Our nation was wounded, badly, on 9/11. We were full of rage and near panic. The Bush administration was exactly like those charlatan preachers that prey on the fears of seniors to bilk them of their money. We were afraid, we trusted, we were taken for a ride. That’s immoral behavior.

Second, the official decision to pursue traditional torture techniques like waterboarding was beyond the pale, and speaks, in my mind, to morally diseased motivation. This is especially true, given what we now know: torture just doesn’t work. This has been extensively verified, most notably by real, effective interrogators dealing with actual al Qaeda members in actual, “ticking time bomb” combat conditions. A simple review and enhancing the existing methods and safeguards would have been more than sufficient, but instead Cheney went back to Vietnam-era black ops programs as a starting point for our official policy. Why would you do that unless you had a predisposition to, at some level, wanting to be agressive, punitive, retaliatory – beyond the point of civil, reasonable policy or morality? Bush’s immorality is his unquestioning embrace of this mindset.

Third, the attempts at legal cover, obfuscation and even hubris around this new dark legacy of torture reveals premeditation – a need to justify something morally incorrect by either hiding it or daring the public to enact a consequence. From day one of this new policy, the White House employed its lawyers to cover its tracks in case of possible future attempts of war crimes, and pursued an Orwellian policy of redefinition of torture as something else not so hard to stomach. Piled on that, it harshly punished soldiers like Lynndie England as being “bad apples” for simply carrying out its own policy and attempted to silence and ruin the reputations of honorable soldiers like Captain Ian Fishback for whistleblowing. And as a final insult, Bush refuses to own any of it at practically the same time Cheney clearly states that he advocated waterboarding.

Put all this in context of it happening in a direct relationship with another human being. Obviously, there’s not a direct equivalence for nation states with personal human relationships, but these are human beings leading us and their decisions/motivations mean something morally. When you lose, or don’t have, the capacity as leader to make these decisions with some fear and trembling and some sense of taking responsibility, when you go to more lengths to protect yourself from legal action than you did to prevent someone from dying while being tortured, when you use the power of your office to persecute whistleblowers and proclaim your hubris because the protections it gives you – it is immoral and you are responsible.

I include Rick Warren in this list of let-downs because as a Christian leader in a very influential public position, he had the same duty to speak out as Nathan did to David about his crime against Bathsheba’s husband. I’ve heard numerous times in church from preachers like him that you have more of a duty to do this to leaders that loudly proclaim your same Christian faith, as Bush has often done. That he did not, and equivocated about it by saying “it never came up”, is a moral and spiritual failure. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary stances by our public leaders in all areas, and he, among many others, failed that test of moral leadership.

Stephen, in one sense, I take your response as true for the nation as a whole (especially about the financial crisis). As Ross Douthat says in his thought-provoking post:

But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved – because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do…

But anyone who felt the way I felt after 9/11 has to reckon with the fact that what was done in our name was, in some sense, done for us – not with our knowledge, exactly, but arguably with our blessing. I didn’t get what I wanted from this administration, but I think you could say with some justification that I got what I asked for. And that awareness undergirds – to return to where I began this rambling post – the mix of anger, uncertainty and guilt that I bring to the current debate over what the Bush Administration has done and failed to do, and how its members should be judged.

But, to be clear, I never felt this way. Even immediately after 9/11, I felt scared by the where the collective rage and need for a pound of flesh was going to take us as a nation, especially given our leadership at the time. We, as a nation, wrote Bush a blank check and he bankrupted us. But I, and many others, were outspoken about our concerns all through this even through a lot of push-back from our conservative friends and family, and I feel no need to step back from taking our leadership to task. In this one case, I was right, and those who felt the same were right and are justified in our outrage now.

I would counter that to force responsibility on these leaders when they will not accept it for themselves is engagement. We as a national community, need to find a way to complete the narrative of the last eight years in a way that establishes the rule of law and decency for the future – whether its Nuremburg-lite, a special prosecutor, a deep truth and reconciliation process that gives us all an honest look at ourselves, or even a refusal to let Bush’s version of his tenure become the official historical record. These men did not represent the best of who we are, and more than that, they dragged us lower. This shame is theirs to own, fully and, if possible, legally.

I’m weary and depressed tonight. The physical part of it comes from looking down the long barrel of another all nighter following a full day’s worth of dev. But my main sadness is mental, and spiritual.

The Levin/McCain report just out this last week officially determined that Bush and his administration willfully set out to implement a policy of torture, replete with interrogation tactics (hypothermia, stress positions, humiliation, simulated drowning) borrowed from regimes like the Viet Cong. It’s also been clear for some time that Bush’s office tasked John Yoo and David Addington with creating a legal framework to give them cover on war crimes prosecution. Hell, Cheney brazenly admitted it to ABC News – saying directly and unequivocally “yes, I approved waterboarding and other tactics”.

Astoundingly, the media still refuses to call these methods torture, instead preferring to parrot the phrases “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, phrases coined by the Nazis to rhetorically obfuscate their crimes. The media also seems perfectly fine to hound Obama on non-existent ties to the buffoon of an Illinois governor, while giving Karl Rove space to say, with a straight face, that Obama needs to be more transparent. And Rick Warren, champion of “Biblical principles”, still cannot bring himself to condemn Bush’s moral failure.

Millions are losing their homes from predatory lending. Our hard-earned tax dollars are being flushed away into the coffers of the same crooks and incompetents that got us into this mess.

These aren’t abstractions. These are families and lives shattered by war, injury, financial failure, fear. These are wounds to the soul and psyche that will take a generation to heal.

Bush is off to a mansion in Dallas, Cheney to a massive personal fortune and ranch in Wyoming, Rove to a leadership spot in the GOP and a commentator on Fox, the media baboons to their six-figure incomes, the incompetents to other circles of power and wealth, Rick Warren to his prestigious pastorship.

We have been let down by our leaders, our truth-finders, our men of God. And for what? Who is left to make an answer for all this besides the bloodied victims and an outrage-numbed and distracted public?

I’m thinking on the 73rd Psalm. Its baffled anguish resonates and feels deeply true.

We were in the $.99 store a couple of days ago. Amira was running around being her usual enthusiastic self. (It’s all interjections right now along the lines of “That is the coolest [object] I ever seen before!”) She found a pink butterfly net on a bamboo pole that particularly caught her fancy. We found her gleefully trying to “catch” the butterflies on the wind chimes display before we had to ask her to back down.

I was monitoring her at the end of the toy aisle when a couple of sisters – one a year or two older than Amira and the other probably 9 or 10, both of them blond and kinda WASP-y – came up the aisle, out shopping with their equally tailored Grandma an aisle over. Amira ran up to them to introduce herself. She’s been on an introductions kick lately, asking the checkers at the grocery store and the college kids working the counter at Taco Del Mar and other shoppers their names and sharing her name and latest finds with them. She believes what the TV has told her – everyone is her friend and wants to be helpful and is interested in listening to her about things she finds interesting. We’re not around other little kids much right now, and she’s naturally extra interested in them. So she introduced herself to the sisters and showed them her net.

Nothing. Just a short stare, no response except maybe the slightest shrug, and the heel turn that left Amira staring at their backs. She smiled and re-tried her opening gambit about the cool butterfly net, a little more tentatively this time. Nothing. She looked at me quizzically with her “why don’t they want to talk to me?” face.

I looked at my daughters dark curly hair and eyes, her rumpled clothes mismatched with her purple splashing boots she loves so much, her beautiful wide open, unguarded face and got pissed.

I wanted to smack the little beeyotches for not even being polite enough to acknowledge that she was talking to them, much less showing some human decency by being friendly. Or maybe scare the bejeezus out of them with the “dark bearded and physically menacing stranger growling about giving his goddamn kid the time of day” routine.

‘Course, smacking or scaring someone else’s kids can get you arrested. Besides, it was more than likely just kids being kids – disinterested more than dismissive or cruel. I think the youngest one even ended up interacting a bit with Amira before rejoining Grandma.

But given my childhood experience of being either ignored, intentionally ostracized, or actively persecuted by kids my age, when I see Amira getting rebuffed I can get suddenly blindsided by a potent, involuntary emotional cocktail of cold fury, hot embarrassment and nauseating rejection. It only takes a second or two for my reasonable adult brain to kick in and referee, but in those seconds I feel a lifetime of shame and anger for being forced to be an unwilling outsider and a ferocious imperative to keep Amira’s wide open and lovely soul hidden away from the emotional catastrophe that is human beings.

Which is, of course, madness. To become fully human, innocence must turn to wisdom, plastic TV reality must give way to acceptance of complexity, surety must evolve to tolerance for ambiguity, shallow affinities must ripen with understanding into the deliberate choices of love. Not one of those things can happen without being wounded a little, or a lot. To hide Amira away would be to condemn her to being an emotional cripple.

So, I’m trying to stay out of it. I’m going to have to let her get smacked around a little bit by the beeyotches, and coach her how to smack back, or pity them for being the little less-than-human animals that they are when they do that, or rise above it all and be a queen.

And more than that, who said her childhood is gonna be like mine? The only thing I know how to teach her is how to deal with a pack of wolves. What if she’s the bully? Or ASB president? I’ve got no map for that.

Out of the two of us, I’m not always sure she’s the one that needs child protective services.

Greed. Music. War. Love. And many others. We are swept away by their terrors, transported by their glorious vistas. They are the coin of every culture, they are spoken everywhere from the cave of Lascaux to the farthest reaches of space that we can imagine. They are instinctively relearned every generation born, and compulsively and futilely cataloged as they pass and fade into memory. They permeate our our libraries and video stores, but after earnestly searching the many mirrors we’ve held up to our human experience we know nothing more except that their dialect changes from century to century. They seem so much a part of us that we cannot find their source. Their cycle – from speaking to consequence to recorded history to forgetfulness to speaking – is a circle so complete we cannot find their beginning or end. They are elusive, slipping out of our most ingeniously designed rhetorical and religious frameworks only to reappear fully realized and potent and true in our most mute and primitive centers of intuitive, collective understanding.

They are our most defining human trait, but we seem collectively powerless to act upon them. They act upon us. They ARE us. What would we be without them? What could we be without them?

PS. If you haven’t seen Children of Men (clip 2), go immediately and rent it. I watched it two nights in a row, back to back, astounded.

PPS. In case you’re wondering, this was all brought on by watching this tonight:

With Obama elected, it’s now official: the geeks have ascended. As the stories go, he’s read all the Harry Potter books to his kids, he sports a Pac-Man logo on his MacBook, and he really and truly collects comic books – Spiderman and Conan. He’s not alone in being a powerful geek.

There’s the usual suspects, of course – Jobs and Gates. But our political and cultural crop of geeks is also rich. There’s a great blogger named Ta-Nehisi Coates getting a lot of play at The Atlantic, and he has geek cred for days. According to this post on Salon, Seth Myers at SNL, the low-key genius behind the Sarah Palin rap and other great sketches, super geeked out when he got a sketch of himself as Blue Beetle from Marvel artist Kevin Maguire. We all know about Joss Whedon, the cultural powerhouse behind Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible, and a whole mess of great graphic novels. Rachel Maddow has had a meteoric rise at MSNBC, getting her own highly acclaimed show just a few months ago, she’s smart as a whip with geeky good looks, and she’s also a comic book collector with a down-to-earth introverted geek lifestyle. And must I mention Stephen Colbert, honored with his own Spiderman cover? (Here’s a cool vid of Maddow and Colbert together.)

I find all this comforting, and not just because I grok these guys on a cultural level. It’s because geeks care. They are neither jaded and cynical, and consequently toothless and irrelevant, in that disaffected New York hipster way, nor are they particularly entranced by the power/wealth/fame trifecta that seems to spiritually sicken so many people in the public square. They are comfortable with their place in the world, and are just fine not being the most popular kid in the room. In fact, it’s a point of pride to be contrarian.

Geeks are passionate about the details and care about being right – about winning the argument on the merits. Geeks are creative and imaginative, voraciously consuming all manner of diverse cultural oddities and memes in their quest to create a dazzling fusion. Geeks are irritated by the cultural and political fluff that the mainstream is distracted by, and get impatient with people who have cultural hangups about race or sex. Just go to the San Diego ComicCon to see what I mean about diversity. Geeks are inclusive, and they share. They want everyone to geek out with them.

I’m a geek. I’m married to a geek. And I want my daughter to grow up to be a geek. And now, my President will be a geek and will hopefully spread some geekiness to the rest of the world, who IMHO desperately needs a geek infusion.

PS. Major geek kudos to you if you can complete the post title with the second memorable phrase from Pinky and the Brain.

I was very moved tonight by the pictures coming from the rallies all over the nation today in support of gay marriage and against the harsh, vindictive bans passed in California, Florida and Arizona. It wasn’t just big cities like New York or San Fransisco or L.A. We’re talking Missoula, Peoria, Greensville, Grand Forks – hometowns in conservative areas. (Seattle held its own huge rallies, of course.)

What was moving was the spontenaity of the protests (organized within just this past week completely virally online), the diversity of the marchers (all ages, orientations, races), and the spirit of non-violent, optimisic inclusiveness. Even more was the general reports, even in the reddest of states, of good will and support coming from passing drivers and pedestrians. The public, still buzzing with the civic spirited victory of electing Obama last week, has turned its attention to another long-festering injustice in America – gay rights – with a mind to end it.

As Christians, Janece and I’s own awakening to gay rights came as it has for many others – through our friends and family. We could not, in good conscience, avoid reassessing the religion we’d been brought up in against the reality of the lives of those we loved. We couldn’t take refuge in the now obviously false assertions about homosexuality we grew up with. Tropes like “gays don’t have strong father figures” or “gays lead lives of unrestrained debauchery” or “gays are morally perverted” were revealed for the shoddy ignorance they were as we watched our friends struggle to assert their obvious normalcy to their families and church communities, sometimes despairing to the point of feeling suicidal or losing contact with those they loved all together.

This is about truth and freedom – for gays, for Christians, for society. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Gays come to understand that there is something true and unassailable about their sexuality. To deny that truth is to deny their own personhood, their own self-worth, and to start down a path that inflicts the bitter fallout on their own mental health and their personal relationships. There are too many stories of gays who have cut their own bodies, put themselves and others at risk with dangerous sexual behavior, destroyed their most precious relationships and even committed suicide because they could not come out and embrace the truth.

As Christians, I feel it is ungodly to shun that truth that we all can see with our own God-given understanding and rationality in favor of a lie – a lie that not only diminishes our faith but that has inflicted so much needless suffering and loss on gays and their families. There is no difference between a good gay relationship and a good straight relationship, nor is there a difference between bad relationships in either orientation. It is our duty to adjust our religious and moral understanding to the real world. Why build something as precious as our faith on elaborately convoluted and demonstrably false theological contortions when the truth is as obvious and simple as “gay is normal”?

As a society, the long-standing lies about gays have cost us. There are hundreds of thousands of gay couples who would gladly adopt some of our many needy and willing children if only they had the same protections from the state as Janece and I do. There are countless gay couples who have been uprooted or seen their productive personal and civil lives disrupted by needless and punitive laws. Our military currently suffers from having to remove gay translators and service personnel when they are desperately needed in the theater. As with minority civil rights, we have been needlessly wounding our own national body and soul and we merely need to stop the madness to see a surge in contribution and participation in our local communities.

From a purely practical standpoint, gay marriage is no threat to anyone. The civil recognition of married gay couples does not affect a religious person’s theological understanding. Churches, private religious schools and institutions will not have their exclusionary behavior affected as long as they don’t take public monies or support. Our communities will gain, and the only losers will be those in the public square insisting on discrediting themselves by peddling obvious falsehood.

I salute the marchers today, especially the first-time participants, for their raw enthusiasm for change and their unwillingness to tolerate anyone’s lack of civil freedoms. I salute my gay friends and family for their courage and love and hope for all of us.

No more lies, no more division, no more suffering. The time for truth and freedom is now.

As Janece already pointed out, we have a new family member.

And as of tonight she has a new name – Chaya (pronouced “chai-ah”). According to the baby name site we found it on, “chaya” is a word of Hebrew origin meaning “life”.

I think names are a big deal. In legends about Faerie, the myth goes that you never reveal your true name because it gives every magic denizen power over you, over your core essence. So you always pick a traveling name when wandering through Faerie.

While I don’t believe that names have mystical power over you, i do think that a name can shape you over time like a glacier carving a mountain, that it shifts your perception of yourself and others perception of you as well. I think that’s why people find they like shorter versions of their names (“Bob”) while other feel like the long version (“Robert”) fits them better. Some people discard the name they were born with completely in favor of one that they feel expresses them better or for religious/cultural reasons (“Malcom X”).

Janece kept her last name when we were married (Clement). She said liked her family name and didn’t feel like a Mossbarger (my last name). When Amira was born, we talked a lot about how to handle it – maybe letting her choose her last name, or maybe hyphenating.

The only path that seemed to feel right was to change our last names to one that we could all share. It felt right because we knew Amira was going to add a whole new dimension on our long-time friendship that we’d had since high school. In a way, Janece and I were being born into a new family just as much as her and that the new family needed it’s own identity. And of course, “Moment” had all kinds of connotations and symbolism attached to it that really seemed to express what we are after in our lives, a reminder of our goal as a couple to admire those glittering jewels of seconds and minutes and hours that pour through our hands daily.

I didn’t know how it would feel to be a “Moment”. I’d been a Mossbarger my whole life, and had a whole cultural and personal association with that name that would be lost in some sense when I took on the new identity. (Most women go through this when they marry, of course, so this isn’t anything new – it was just new to me.) I’d been kidded about that name in school, written it on countless letters and checks, been associated with it’s reputation through my family, and it felt strange to let it go.

It was a bit tough for my parents, I gather. It’s culturally normal for women to change their name at a big life event like marriage, but I think my dad especially felt more strongly than he realized about a son’s responsibility to continue carrying on the family name. When I initially told him about our decision, he said “great – whatever you guys want to do”, but in a later conversation he brought it up again, wondering why I would give up that name – his name. He understood the reasons I gave him – primarily that our new last name was built on and carried with it bits of our original names – but I’ve wondered occasionally if it still has sat with him over time like me pulling away. And, maybe in a way it was.

As for me, the change has actually had a measurable effect. I feel proud of our new little family circle, and the history we’re writing every day for this new family name, starting with its offbeat origins. I feel reminded by it every day to connect, to take hold of the important experiences as they come by, to steer off the beaten path and open myself up to the unexpected.

Which brings me back to Chaya. I feel new responsibility pretty strongly, to the point of exaggeration at times, and I often drag my feet at jumping into new responsibilities that will mean a life change. And a dog, especially a large dog, isn’t a trivial commitment. This time, even though the circumstances around getting Chaya required a quick decision, it struck me that this was an opportunity to skip the analyzing and just jump in.

Chaya means “life”. It’s a good name, easy to say, and easy to call out with some force, up close or over a distance which is important for training. But symbolically it feels like a good pick because she’s now a Moment, and being a Moment means recognizing the opportunity every day to welcome and embrace life.

Welcome to our circle, Chaya!

If you made it this far, then it’s comment time! Ever thought about your name? Do you like it, and why? Would you ever change it, and if so, what to?

Thanks Amy and Lisa for the nudge to start posting again. I’ve been avoiding blogging for a few days in one of those malaise moods where I don’t feel particularly insightful, funny, interesting or generally worthy of human company. But, I guess that’s why you pledge to post once a day to knock yourself out of those moods, right? Anyway, I appreciate the assist from the Iowa contingent on getting back on the wagon. Love the covered bridges pics.

Politics is a language that translates the shifts in the assessments and priorities of the electorate into leadership and policy. As the polls show Obama’s substantial lead beginning to harden into something resembling concrete, it seems to be clearer that Americans have made the following judgements:

1) The current incarnation of the Republican party has run its philosophical, moral and leadership course. It’s finished. Americans resoundingly reject McCain’s whole-hearted embrace of the worst kind of unproductive and divisive political tactics that, as Rove and Bush have demonstrated, are useful only as an attempt to acquire and maintain power and are poisonous and completely inadequate when trying to actually govern. They are also overwhelmingly rejecting the selection of the disturbingly vacuous Palin as a cynical and bald-faced attempt to put a pretty face on the GOP’s philosophical bankruptcy and single-minded focus on retaining power.

2) Our national love affair with market-driven, trickle-down economics is over. Circumstances are forcing the government to actually buy a stake in major banks and start talking about massive government investment in things like infrastructure. Real wages have fallen for decades and the gap between rich and poor has grown exponentially, even as we were assured incessantly that the “money will trickle down because giving tax breaks to the wealthy creates jobs”. We are looking for a more equitable way to create some “rising water that floats all boats”, and we like Obama’s approach.

3) Our personal greed has left us with a nasty hangover and a bleaker near-term future. The crisis on Wall Street is only a symptom, amplified a thousand times, of the “me-first”, money-and-comforts-first-at-all-costs philosophy many Americans have embraced as our god-given right and that has now come crashing down on our heads. As we face the prospect of massive countries like China and India trying to follow our unsustainable consumption example and ruining the planet permanently as a result, we’re beginning to wonder if we left “better” behind in our manic search for “more”.

4) We have abandoned “we” and “ours” in favor of “me” and “mine”, and we don’t like the results. Our collective unexamined triumphalism has been exposed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the misadventures in cowboy foreign policy by Bush, a self-absorbed poster child so completely in ignorance of his own, feeble, limited worldview that he still firmly believes history will judge his administration’s vast, horrifically bad succession of blunders as a “success”. We are shocked and dismayed to find ourselves suddenly reviled, marginalized and at odds with the rest of the stable/normal parts of the world community. We like people, and we want them to like us and see us as special, something to aspire to. The loss of that status has been hard on our national psyche.

5) We are tired of bullies, flashy and inauthetic showboaters, and incompetent blowhards without any restraint or common sense. The GOP isn’t getting this. On top of the past four years of a growing coterie of Republicans losing or being removed from politics for their criminality and bad behavior (DeLay, Foley, Abrahamoff, Gonzales, Libby, Allen, etc.), there have just this past week been GOP incumbents (Bachmann and others) in tight races doubling down on the same kind of outlandish claims behavior, and getting into even deeper trouble as a result. Events are forcing us to get serious, and we’re looking for serious leadership – so much so that Democrats are poised to take an unprecedented amount of seats in both the House and Senate.

With all this and more beginning to point to another historic realignment of our American experiment, a question has been arising on all of the political blogs I obsessively follow as well as in books and conversations. What caused this realignment, what will it look like, and what will be its impact on American history?

Here’s some interesting reading to get you started:

1) Janece picked up “Deep Economy” from the library, a book written by an economist positing that we’ve been by the idea of endless economic growth as a primary model of improving our lives to the exclusion of other factors that could contribute to a higher, longer-lasting “happiness index” in our national life.

2) “Blessed Unrest” by Paul Hawken uncovers a deep worldwide, uncoordinated movement for social and environmental change that has massive implications for the shape of our world’s political future. In Obama’s extraordinary grassroots-driven campaign, you can see the fruits of some of this new energy and activity and creativity emerge into the political spotlight of the most powerful nation on earth.

3) These interesting posts from the Booman Tribune talk about the implications of an FDR-style New Deal realignment with a Democratic/progressive government. The last time a party enjoyed the level of power the Dems are now looking at (1965), we got Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid, motor vehicle pollution control, the Freedom Of Information Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and many others.

4) Rational conservatives are trying to grapple with their party’s future. See Ross Douthat, Daniel Larison, Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher for a look at the sane voices trying to lay the groundwork for a new incarnation of the Republican party. (For a humorous look into increasingly ludicrous and inane alternate reality of conservatives who think Bush was a great president, Sarah Palin is the second coming, Obama will have Ayers be his Secretary of Education and Wright will be chaplain of the Senate, and on and on, try the National Review. It’s like watching cavemen on a desert planet circling a dying star waving their clubs and shouting threats.)

5) There are smart progressives looking at things like healthcare, urban growth, urgently needed mass transportation initiatives, destructive food production methods, progressive foreign policy and other things that Obama and the Dems will probably be very favorable toward reconsidering. Bookmark Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein.

How about you? What do you think the country will look like after this political and cultural sea change sets in?

I got my absentee ballot today. It’s the most excited I’ve been to vote in a long time. Judging by the long lines and wait times at polling stations in the early-voting states around the country, I gather I’m not the only one. I need to check out the local candidates a bit more before I vote, but I’m raring to go.

Janece and I had a great conversation tonight about growing up. It’s weird to be still talking about that when you’re in your late 30s, but I guess it’s a process you go through your whole life, so…

We were both picking through some destructive stories about the world that we picked up along the way from our families or church or peers, stories that have persisted and had emotional, even physical, impacts on us.

I think my main story, at least the one that’s been floating to the surface, is that people are unpredictable and unsafe, and that they can’t be trusted. It’s a story that occasionally lines up with reality, of course, but that as a fundamental basis of how I live hasn’t been all that helpful or conducive to a full experience of life.

I guess the point is that growing up means taking responsibility for that childhood story, and any story from your past that arises, by understanding that you have all the power in the world to train yourself to live from a different point of view, one that is more powerful and that opens up more possibilities. That’s a process that can take time because when you’ve literally built your world on these stories – anything from what you chose to eat, where you live, who you married, your plans for your future – it can take a while to untangle all the fallout.

Anyway, I’ll dig more into this in a later post since I should be working and can’t right now.