Review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Today my family and some friends made an event out of watching the first Captain America movie (well, the most recent reboot. Please forget this one. And this one. And this one.) and then going to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I won’t spoil the new one, but I can confidently say it was better than the first and worth your time. First, let’s revel in the fact that Chris Evans is one of the best miscastings of all times. His turn as Steve Rogers (Captain America) has not only made him very successful, but it’s had some surprise bonuses. For one thing, it’s redeemed his performance as The Human Torch in those painful Fantastic Four movies. I thought he was some Hollywood douchebag in those. Watching his Steve Rogers, I realize he was channeling something very real about Johnny Storm’s character: He was a douchebag. I would not have been surprised if the first actor to be cast as two different superheroes had been a woman. There tend to be a smaller pool of Hollywood “it” girls, while Hollywood treats its myriad wooden action-hero-types as interchangeable. The female characters in comic books almost always have the same body types, specifically ones no human woman possesses, so I expected Hollywood to find the closest woman to that vision and toss her all the female roles. When I first heard they were casting The Human Torch as Captain America, I thought they were making that mistake, which seemed to be more progressive than I’d expected but still an error. It turns out that this new role allowed Chis Evans to show he has some range. While Evans’ Human Torch was all feigned swagger on top of a layer of insecure human on top of a core of genuine but uninteresting heroism, Evans’ Captain America in anything but. He’s always throwing himself on grenades, tossing himself between gunman and their targets, leaping before he looks in order to save the day. His layer of uninteresting hero is on the surface. He clearly gets that part of the comic book’s character. The reason Chris Evans is miscast is that Steve Rodgers is a fundamentally boring character in the comic books, and I’m sure they could have found someone with an even more square jaw and crazy muscles to play the part in that boring way. (If anything, Evans is too buff for Steve Rogers, who wasn’t the most roided-out of all the characters in the Marvel Universe.) Instead, they picked an actor who can pull off a joke, something that was never particularly important in the Captain America comics. The Captain wasn’t the source of comic relief in the Avengers comics, either, but Evans can go toe-to-toe with actors with excellent comic timing in that franchise of films. In the original Captain America, he keeps up with Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones (the highlights of that film by far), and that’s quite an accomplishment. In this one, his banter with Anthony Mackie (Falcon) and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) shows more wit than the comics’ Steve Rodgers ever had. But Evans’ ability to pull off a joke isn’t even the best thing about his mis-casting. It’s the fact that he was cast as much to play the before-Captain-America Steve Rogers as the after version. He maintains the courageous weakling that the first film chose to focus on so heavily, and that carries over into this movie even as his central conflict shifts to that of a man questioning his loyalties and assumptions about his place in the world. Essentially, Chris Evans (and a good script) give Steve Rogers more layers than the comic book’s Captain America ever had.

The Winter Soldier does a good job of not going overboard with the characters’ angst or the allegory. It uses Steve Rogers’ return to the waking world after seventy years trapped in the ice as a nice parallel for the soldiers returning home from modern wars, though Anthony Mackie’s turn as Sam Wilson, a soldier returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, makes that metaphor a lot more believable and less forced. The movie resists the urge to dwell on this too much, especially since it could have confused the situation if they’d tried to contrast this struggle of Rogers’ and Wilson’s with the character of The Winter Soldier. I won’t give away too much about him, but it’snot a spoiler to say that The Winter Soldier is not an appropriate allegorical equivalent of a soldier struggling to come home from war or one tempted by the potentially lucrative benefits of becoming a mercenary, since it’s made explicitly clear that he is not really returning from a war and that he’s not a willful mercenary cashing in on his super-warrior skills. The Winter Soldier is something else, and if this movie took itself too seriously it might have inadvertently made some more bitter critiques of returning American soldiers than this light Hollywood fare would ever dare touch. If there is any sharp allegory, it’s not connected to the returning soldier plot-line, but to the danger of the surveillance state.  Even that is subtle enough that no one at the NSA is worrying this movie will inspire a great public outcry. It was nice to see characters who held nuanced positions on the subject though, rather than good guys who uniformly support Freedom and bad guys who support Tyranny. Even the movie’s ultimate head villain is revealed to be someone who does not cackle or think of himself as evil, just a pragmatist who thinks he’s doing what it takes to make the world better. Comic book villains too often lack believable motives, and it was particularly satisfying that a number of the movies heroes occupied spaces between Captain America’s and the chief villains, and could articulate those positions in persuasively.

Of course, mostly The Winter Soldier was about cars crashing and bullets ricocheting harmlessly but dramatically off of surfaces very close to the heroes’ faces. There was also a lot of acrobatic fighting, well-choreographed and better edited than the first. (While watching that one, my nine-year old son noticed that there was a hard cut between a shot of Captain America swinging on a chain and a shot of him running without any hint that he’d landed at some point in between. Noah theorized that it was a deleted scene in an extended edition, which is both nerd-dorable and more generous than calling it a mistake.) The body count in The Winter Soldier is both disturbingly high and unrealistically low considering the number of bullets flying and cars crashing into one another. An argument could be made about Hollywood’s desperate need to up the stakes always resulting in conflicts that threaten complete world-wide disaster, but, if that’s a problem (it is), comic book movies are not the place to start rectifying it. In the source material, the entire world is imperiled multiple times each month. At least in this movie, no major downtown areas are destroyed just to show that the bad guys are, in fact, dangerous.

One last note from a comic book geek: It’s not a major spoiler to reveal that one of the villains in this movie is Batroc The Leaper, a character sometimes credited with being the lamest villain in the entire Marvel Universe.  This movie did a great job of making him barely menacing and appropriately minor, a little shout-out to us old comic book fans that didn’t spoil the movie for people who are new to Captain America’s nemeses. I imagine that someone bet one of the screenwriters, Edward Brubaker, Stephen McFeely, or Christopher Marcus, that no one could ever get Batroc into a major motion picture, and that one of those gentlemen is now the proud owner of a crisp new five dollar bill. Well earned, sir!

Bertrand Russell's "Ten Commandments"

I just discovered this, and I love it. This is Bertrand Russell's "Ten Commandments." 1: Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2: Do not think it worthwhile to produce belief by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3: Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4: When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5: Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6: Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7: Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8: Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9: Be scrupulously truthful, even when truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

I wonder what Russell would think of The Sum of Our Gods. On the one hand, it revels in uncertainty and shows very little respect for authority. On the other hand, while it strives to tell the truth, it's the truth of fictional characters. Would Russell consider fiction to be "scrupulously truthful" or merely convenient?

Grumpy Cat Pumpkin

For Halloween, I carved a pumpkin for my wife, Paige, that looked like her favorite animal in the world, Grumpy Cat. The other pumpkins quickly rotted away, but Grumpy Cat Pumpkin lingered, so I started taking pictures of his slow and bitter decline. Want to know what's grumpier than Grumpy Cat? Click your way through these:

I love you, Paige!

To All My New Conservative Friends on Facebook

Dearest New Friends, When I was invited to join your protest against the Affordable Care Act, I clicked on the “Decline” button. Facebook, mistaking your brave online protest for a party, asked me to fill in a textbox explaining why I wouldn’t be attending. Due to a lack of willpower, I filled in that box. As soon as I hit “Post,” I instantly regretted the decision, but now I see that it was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. By engaging with all of you, my new friends, I have realized the error of my ways and have completely come over to your side. I think everyone should have a chance to learn all about your brilliant rhetorical techniques so that they can also see how well you defend your (well, I guess now it’s our) position on US domestic policy.

Kathryn Mullins, I apologize for not being convinced by your initial foray. Unfortunately, unlike those who would come to your aid later in the thread, you tried to use numbers and facts. In between, you threw in lots of multiple exclamation points. These really should have convinced me that I was wrong all by themselves. I’m embarrassed to say that your use of caps-lock didn’t convince me, either. Luckily, you ended by shouting, “YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID!!” and that really got me thinking about how correct you must be, despite the historical and factual inaccuracies in your post.

John Graham, it’s a good thing you hopped in to help Kathryn out. By letting me know that my opinion is a “b.o. talking point,” you showed me that there was no need for you to even address the facts of the case, and that really made me reconsider. You only used caps-lock a little bit, though. Maybe that’s why I still needed some persuading.

Jason Freeman Jones, you really upped everyone’s game by jumping in to repeat the same sentence four times. Sure, the sentence was factually wrong, but because you wrote it four times and then followed it up with, “Get it?” that basically obviated the need for truth of any kind. You could learn a thing or two about the use of exclamation points from Kathryn, though.

James LeBeau, thanks for pointing out that there’s really no point in anyone having any kind of insurance of any kind since it might end up being money wasted on a need that never materializes. I can’t believe I was one of those dupes who thought risk could be managed by insurance. What a fool I’ve been! I also appreciate your point about how we made it 137 years without any taxes in this country. Sure, that’s not even remotely true, but who cares! Truth is as dumb as insurance! Calling me a moron helped me understand that. Thanks, James!

Link*, you really need some help from these folks. You tried to post articles, establish facts, and demand specificity. You didn’t even bother to call me a “lib-tard” or tell me I was “drunk on FOOL-AID!!” Good thing Kathryn was there to help you out.

Luckily, a bunch of you showed up to make the discussion far more persuasive. John Graham, thanks for bringing up the New World Order conspiracy theory. Christina McDermott, thanks for criticizing liberals by sharing the lyrics from a song from 1993 that made fun of George H. W. Bush. I’m still not sure how that related, but you shared it as though it did, so it must have. Hai Vuong, thank you for kicking things up a notch with your creative idea to file a lawsuit on whitehouse.gov about the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. (I don’t think that’s quite how the court system works, but…)

Mark W. Mumma, I’m sorry I pushed back on your statement that you “prefer the government stay the hell out of our lives.” You were right to be offended when I pointed out that the government is made up of public servants like firefighters and police officers. Of course one can hate the government but like public servants. There is no disconnect there at all. I see that now. I suppose you’re correct that I was using liberal “all-or-nothing reasoning.” Now I see that “We prefer the government stay the hell out of our lives,” is a nuanced view, as is your claim that “There's two kinds of people in this country.” Now that you all have brought me over to your way of thinking, I will strive for this kind of complexity.

Things seemed to be cooling off, and there was a real danger that I wouldn’t be persuaded when Christina was just calling me an idiot. Luckily, Derek Lozoski showed up and posted, “Benjamin G = Fucktard!” I think the power of the statement comes from its brevity. Suddenly, I was really wavering again. Thanks, Derek! And then when Mark quipped that Derek had just insulted fucktards everywhere, I realized that they must be right!

But now that I’d seen the light, what kind of conservative or libertarian should I become? Surely all these people couldn’t be completely in lock-step with only a few of us libtards on the outside, right?

Just then Joe Fisher showed up to inform us all that “i want my plan, not a niger scam artist plan.”

Rick Morgan called Joe on both his racism and spelling ability, but I’m guessing that Rick isn’t the kind of conservative/libertarian the others want me to be, because he wasn’t participating in convincing me that I was a fucktard, and none of the conservatives liked his comment while they were falling all over each other to like the unified theory of liberalism. Heck, even Joe Fischer got a “Like.” And Christina McDermott came to Joe’s defense, explaining that Joe wasn’t a racist because black people use the n-word.

At this point, I made what I now see was clearly a big mistake. I pointed out that I’d gone all that time without personally insulting any of you. Thank you all for really piling on at that point to teach me that name-calling is the best way to persuade people. Sure, “Dumb-ass” wasn’t that strong. “Silly Boy,” and “Drama queen,” didn’t really push me over the edge. The way many of you used words like “liberal” and “socialist” as insults was actually a bit more persuasive, and made me rethink my political leanings. Insults like “doggie” and “sheep” were a bit weird but appreciated. However, it was when you told me that I was both impotent and receiving oral sex from the President that I really was forced to conclude that you folks are on to something.  Suddenly the fact that you mix up communism and fascism, or confuse the progressive Republicans of Lincoln with the modern Republican Party, seems perfectly acceptable! Who needs facts when we have multiple exclamation points AND CAPS LOCK?!!!

And why should America need civil public discourse when we have such brave and persuasive defenders of liberty?

Again, thank you all for telling me who I suck and who sucks me. This has logically convinced me that the Affordable Care Act is a bad idea.

Now you have someone you all consider to be an illiterate communist fucktard firmly on your side.

We’re all winners!!!

DOESN’T IT FEEL GREAT?!!!

*Upon request, I removed Link's last name. I'd only included him to give him credit for being civil, but I understand why he doesn't want to be associated with the conversation. If the other people who said horrible, obscene things would like to have their last names removed, they can send a request to notachance@snowballschancein.hell

Should a Former Christian Send His Son to Church?

My mom sent me a message today that poses an interesting question for agnostic parents, especially an agnostic like me who was once a Christian: Should I be sending my son to church? After listening to the podcast of an interview I did for Artist First Radio, she wrote of my answers, “What I noticed was the need for community… Noah needs that for his opportunity to develop a faith journey. You may continue to question and think and intellectualize until the cows come home, but a community is where faith develops.”

My first response is a bit defensive. Either due to the answers I gave or to my mom’s wishful thinking, she presumes I want my faith to develop. I’m not sure what that would mean for me, but I don’t think my particular lack of faith is something she wants me to foster, so I presume she wants me to develop in some other direction. As someone who lost his faith while deeply involved in a truly excellent church, my experience doesn't support the notion that communities naturally lead to faith, nor do I want to go through the painful process of extricating myself from a loving community ever again.

The point that really piques my curiosity is the one about my son, Noah. Mom says he needs an opportunity for his faith to develop. That’s a very challenging idea for me, as an agnostic. The central tenant of my religion (or, more accurately, my position on religion), is that I don’t know and do not believe I am capable of knowing about the existence and nature of the supernatural. So do I owe it to Noah to give him the same experience I had, considering the conclusions I’ve come to?

If I were an atheist, this would be much simpler. If someone told an atheist to take his son to church so that his son’s faith could develop, the atheist could respectfully reply that, while some church time might be valuable for the cross-cultural experience, since the basic principle of all houses of worship hinges on the belief that there is a God, and since the atheist believes this to be untrue, sending his son to a church would be tantamount to intentionally exposing his child to a lie in order that the son might develop a deepening belief in a myth. In that case, it’s clear that the atheist wouldn’t be asked in the first place, and if he were, we would all understand why he would decline.

It’s not as straight forward for an agnostic. I can’t refuse to take Noah to a church on the grounds that he will be exposed to lies. As an agnostic, I don’t know that the teachings he would hear in a church are true or untrue. Instead, I have to evaluate whether or not it’s worthwhile to expose him to something I myself am unsure of. In that case, the question becomes a bit more nuanced; now it’s a question of the authority of the church, my authority as a parent, and the danger of the persuasiveness of certainty.

As a high school English teacher, every year I have to carefully explain to students why it’s preferable to avoid first person pronouns in their formal writing. When I was a kid, teachers would just say, “It’s wrong. Don’t do it.” They presented this as though the rule were as hard and fast as the most basic rules of spelling and simple grammar. Unfortunately for them, students could pick up high quality formal writing in respected sources and find personal pronouns all over the place. Did this mean the writers were bad? Did it mean the teachers were wrong? Neither. It meant the true edict should have been explained more fully. There’s nothing inherently wrong with personal pronouns in formal writing. If the purpose of a piece is to persuade the reader, for example, and the writer makes a determination that the most effective technique to persuade a particular audience involves some evidence from the writer’s own experience, personal pronouns in personal narratives are actually a good choice. The reason writers should learn to avoid them is that, far too often, beginners use personal pronouns to qualify what they’re writing about. Instead of, “Moby Dick is a novel about obsession,” they write “I think Moby Dick is a novel about obsession,” or “In my personal opinion, Mody Dick is a novel about obsession.” The use of the personal pronouns, in these cases, diminishes the authority of the writer and of her ideas. She’s far better served to express her opinions as though they are facts. We, the readers, will know these are her opinions because her name is on the paper. These qualifiers are either a sign of a lack of confidence in her ideas or of a kind of false humility that can have the unintended consequence of turning the reader against the writer. “Writing,” I tell my students, “is an act of courage. You are bravely sharing your ideas. So be brave! Be bold! If you have the guts to put it on the page and then put it in front of someone’s eyeballs, follow through and write with conviction.” I tell them this because I know that statements made with a tone of certainty are for more persuasive.

That very certainty is the hallmark of the kind of faith one finds presented at churches, and it’s also precisely what drove me away from my faith. I was lucky enough to have a pastor who was very open about his own doubts, but he still had a lot more faith than I did, and I couldn’t reconcile my own limited, human comprehension of the divine with that kind of certainty. The pastor has to be at least certain enough to do her job. I do not believe that level of certainty is advisable since I don’t think that kind of knowledge of the divine is possible (at least for me).

Consequently, if I send my son to church, I’m saying, “Dad isn’t sure what’s true. These people are remarkably, sometimes even dangerously sure of what they believe. Go decide for yourself.” Since I know certainty is persuasive, I’m knowingly bringing a knife to a gun fight and asking my son to make a prediction about the outcome. “Who do you think is right?” I’m asking. “The guy who isn’t sure or the institution which claims to be?” In this context, it’s not fair to say I’m simply letting him make up his own mind, something that I sincerely want for him. Instead, I’m pretending that I want him to make up his own mind while putting a finger on the scales, and for the other side!

This brings me to the next question: If I know that attending a church is likely to persuade a 9-year-old to become a Christian, is that something I should do? This question is actually harder than it might appear, since I had a host of positive experiences in church. Besides the friends I made, I learned songs I’m glad I know, I worked for folks who were down on their luck on mission trips, I learned to focus my mind during open worship (a time of deep prayer similar to meditation but focused outward on God), and a bunch of other things. I became a much better reader through church, first improving my fluency by reading above my parents’ fingers as they helped me learn to sing along to the lyrics of hymns, then learning to read critically as I studied the Bible on my own and in Sunday school classes. I learned that I love to come up with arguments and debate philosophical ideas while trying to prove the existence of God and debating free-will vs. predestination. I even had some distinctly un-churchy experiences thanks to church. My first kiss was at a church camp (horribly embarrassing, but I got it out of the way), my first real make out session was at a church lock-in, and my first serious girlfriend was someone I met through Youth Group.

These valuable experiences of community might outweigh some of the potential dangers of church attendance, though those are worth considering, too. Since I would be taking him to a church sight-unseen, I might be exposing him to some of the elements of American Christianity I find most repugnant. He could hear anti-feminist, gender essentialist rhetoric from the pulpit. He could hear anti-gay propaganda. He could hear closed-minded attitudes towards other religions. He would almost certainly eventually hear regressive attitudes about sexuality. He might hear some of that anti-science rhetoric (or the even more unethical, deceptive Intelligent Design variant). Hell, he could hear some of that Gospel-of-Wealth bullshit that even flies in the face of Jesus’ own teachings about wealth and responsibility to the poor. Those would all be things I’d feel compelled to confront, further confusing him.

But even if I managed to find a progressive church that I didn’t need to argue against on social grounds, I still don’t think the value of community outweighs the danger of a community whose beliefs are antithetical to my own. Here’s why: Imagine I lived in a similarly small town, but in some far off country, and there were no Christian churches. Would my mom be encouraging me to take Noah to the local mosque or Sikh or Buddhist or Shinto temple? I doubt it. I think, at its core, the notion that some-community-is-better-than-no-community is rooted in the assumption that the-default-community-will-be-my-community. Only, Christianity isn’t my community anymore. As an agnostic, I’m not a Christian who is searching, not someone who is part of the un-Church movement, not a post-modern Christian. I’m someone who fundamentally believes that there may or may not be a God (or gods), but that if higher intelligences exist outside our ability to perceive them with our senses or accurately describe them with our imperfect, human language, then, by definition, they also exist beyond our comprehension. Furthermore, I believe that religions which simultaneously preach submission to an all-powerful deity (an expression of humility) but also dictate a command to have some degree of certainty in their particular conception of that deity (an act of hubris) have an irreconcilable consistency problem.

Ultimately, while I respect and admire a lot of things about Christianity (the architecture, the music, the care for one another and for those outside the community itself, the elevation of literacy and education, many of the dictates about how people should treat one another) and admire and respect a lot of individual Christians (my mom foremost among them), it’s simply not my religion. Consequently, I don’t feel compelled to deposit my son into someone else’s community so that he can develop his faith in someone else’s god.

If my wife (a Christian) wants to take him to church, that would be fine, but that's completely up to her. If my parents want to take him to church, I'd be fine with that, too. It just shouldn't be me.

But, every year at Christmas time, I do wish he knew more of the songs.

GOP Response: More Hypocritical Government Bashing

I'm not quite sure which kind of hypocrisy irks me more, right-wing media outlets complaining about "The Media" or right-wing government employees complaining about "The Government." Tonight, in the GOP response to the President's State of the Union Address, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers went on what can fairly be described as an anti-government tear. "...Republican vision… One that empowers you, not the government…"

"trusts people to make their own decisions, not a government that decides for you."

"...To grow the working middle class, not the government..."

"...more spending, government bailouts, and red tape…"

"...health care choices should be yours, not the government’s."

Sensing a theme? By the end, I think she was literally choking on her own hatred of the government - the precise institution that she works for!

But it's worse than that. She started off with a mini-biography about how she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, working at the McDonald's drive-thru to put herself through college. Buried in that bio, she mentioned that her father was a school bus driver. Now, it is possible, though unlikely, that her dad worked for a private school. I tried to confirm either way and couldn't find out that detail in any of her bios online. But since most school bus drivers drive for the public schools, and since most private schools don't employ their own bus drivers (at least in rural areas where I work and where McMorris Rodgers grew up), this means her father was, more than likely, a government employee. So while she was working at McDs to put herself through school, the food she was eating around the kitchen table and the roof over her head were paid for, in part, by the hard work that her father did for the evil government she kept deriding.

And this gets at the heart of why I am so frequently irritated when I hear people griping about "the government." Do you know who gets kids to schools safely and brings them home safely to their families each day? The government. And who teaches them and cares for them while they are at school? The government. And the police and firefighters who keep those families safe? The government.

Now, when pressed, I expect most conservatives would say, "Well, that's not the part of the government I have a problem with."

Oh, so you like local services but dislike the evil "Federal Government"?

"Yeah, that's what I really mean."

Yeah, except that most of the employees of the federal government work for the military, and conservatives seem to like them.

"Well, sure, that's not the part of the federal government I have a problem with."

Veteran's Affairs?

"No, not them either."

The treasury that prints your money?

"No."

The courts?

"Well, there are those activist judges I dislike and the activist judges I like (because when they agree with me they aren't activist judges anymore), but no, that's not the part of the government I mean."

Then what? Homeland Security? Agriculture? Interior? Transportation? Commerce? Labor? Energy? Housing and Urban Development? NASA?

"No, not those."

Um, The Tennessee Valley Authority?

"I don't like the IRS!"

So you like all the parts except for the part that collects the taxes that make them all possible?

"No. I don't like all the parts. I don't like the EPA!"

Yeah. Clean water is a bitch. Mercury and lead are tasty; no argument there.

See, here's where I think the average conservative voter and their political leaders part ways. They can both hum along to the same "the government" dog whistle, but it means two different things to each. To the voter, it means "I like most of the parts of the government, but I vote for the team that doesn't want it to work because I don't like the team that makes it work." Is that an oversimplification? Yes. But we need these people. This conservative impulse is actually good, because, in a measured degree, it could save us all from government overreach which is a real thing that could happen if the only people in power were the ones who believe in government solutions. They would wield the tools they have (government solutions) for everything, and that would be bad. We need conservative voters.

What we do not need are right-wing politicians who mean something very different when they say "the government." Because if you do a close reading of McMorris Rodgers' speech, she's not talking about the NSA (clear government overreach) or drone strikes. She's talking about taking away limits. This is another code for "regulations," another word the Republicans have tried to make into swear word. And I worry that it's working and that people don't give that a second thought. Because while stupid regulations are bad, Republicans don't propose smart regulations. They oppose all regulation on principle; the rules that keep your water clean, that prevent your car from being a ticking time bomb, that try (and often fail) from keeping the banking industry from throwing away your life savings. Why?

Because what Republican politicians really want, in spite of the fact that conservative voters actually like a lot of government programs, is to cash in on all those potential markets. Schools? Privatize them all. Police? More money to be made in private security forces. The military? Blackwater mercenaries. EPA? Let Exxon Mobile do whatever it wants. What bad things could possibly come from that?

Now, of course this irks me because I'm a public sector employee who firmly believes that all children in the world's richest nation deserve a free, high quality public education. But this goes beyond self interest. I overhear my students in the halls parroting this anti-government propaganda and I can't say anything because that wouldn't be appropriate. I oversee my former students grousing about the government on Facebook and twitter, and it depresses me. 

Despite Republican's claims to be the "party of personal responsibility," this constant anti-government drum beat has diminished a whole generation's sense that they need to take personal responsibility for their government. It becomes "the government," this nebulous entity that can only wreak havoc on their young lives. What they don't see is that, unlike the corporation they work for, the government is an entity they own and control. It's certainly not perfect and it's not the solution for everything, but it is an entity that belongs to all of us. The government is an extension of We the People. Anti-government rhetoric from people who carry around little copies of the Constitution seems like the most bitter form of irony to me. Read the first three words! The government is us. And if we don't like it, we shouldn't complain about some institution out there. We should fix it. Because it's ours. The people who hate the government hate something we have created (or failed to create due to our apathy), and that should be an insult to all of us. 

The insult is even more severe when those people work for that government or are asking for our permission to go to work for it.

So tell me the government should change in this way or that way. I can appreciate that. Tell me you want to reign in this specific part or alter this other specific part. But don't sneer every time you mention the government until you're literally choking at the end of your speech. Because that government belongs to us.

Geeking Out.

Poverty Beats His Children

After coming across this great article which blows up some of the insidious lies that cripple our debate about our country's social safety-net, I remembered a piece I wrote back in June for my previous blog, and I thought it would be worth republishing here.  

Poverty Beats His Children

The other day, a friend of mine voiced the opinion on Facebook that America is the ultimate land of opportunity, and that people who are in poverty are at fault for blaming others for their plight. It was, he argued, a question of perspective. If people are poor, he argued, they should take more responsibility for their circumstances.

My friend isn’t a greedy or hurtful person. Though we haven’t seen each other in almost two decades, based on the pictures of his beautiful, happy family, he strikes me as somebody who has his priorities in order. But this statement got under my skin and has been itching. I’ve been scratching at this for a little over a week now, and I’m not quite sure how to express why this irritates me so much.

Should I begin on purely factual grounds? He states, without evidence, that the United States is one of the foremost countries which provides its people with the ability to raise themselves out of poverty.  “Unlike nearly any other country, you can start in poverty and move into the middle or upper income bracket within a few short years...definitely into a generation.” What he’s describing is something economists call "social mobility." It’s measurable. And he’s simply wrong.  At best, we rank 4^th. When other factors are included, like unemployment, inflation, and respondents’ satisfaction to standard-of-living and employment opportunities, the U.S. comes in 18th. Of the 195 countries our government recognizes, that means we’re not even in the top 5%. That hardly sounds like “unlike nearly any other country” to me.

Or should I challenge his notion that income inequality is irrelevant? He claims that we don’t have “haves” and “have nots”, but “has” and “has more.”  This sounds like merely bit of optimistic semantics. It’s all in one’s perspective, he claims. But that’s wrong, too. The distance between the “have nots” and the “has mores” produces real world consequences. According to economists, it impedes growth in a number of ways. It doesn’t take a lot of economics training to imagine why this would be. People who are far down the economic ladder can’t demand higher salaries. Beggars don’t haggle. When they have lower salaries, they can’t buy as many goods. The ultra-wealthy still live very well, thank you, but they store their money in accounts rather than investing in businesses which sell goods to people on the bottom of the income spectrum because that’s a better investment. If you reduce the buying power of the poor, you reduce the selling opportunities for the rich. This leads to less sales, less employment, less of what economists call “churning”: money growing because it’s changing hands in exchange for real goods and services. Widening income inequality makes some people much richer, and creates the illusion of economic growth when the total GDP is divided to become the Per Capita GDP, but in truth the standard of living of the vast majority of people decreases.

But this kind of sunny optimism is worse than just bad economics. In my friend’s defense of his position, he cites Christian scripture, pointing out that people have an obligation to use the talents they’ve been given to achieve success. He cites the parable in Matthew about the bags of gold entrusted to servants, Matthew 25:14-30. This is what an English teacher would call “bad reading.” The passage is clearly not about money, it’s about faith. The master says, quite clearly, “You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” If the parable were about money, one would have to imagine that the “things” Jesus is teaching his disciples to take care of are quantities of money. This from a man who told people that they should take all they have and give it to the poor? This from a man who told people to give Caesar his coins back? This from a man who told people that wealth would make it more difficult to get into heaven? This from a man who told people not to store up their treasures on earth? This from a man who, at least according to scripture, was aware that his death was imminent and yet spent more time talking about concern for the poor than any other single topic during the limited time of his ministry? It’s certainly a convenient interpretation to use when one is trying to justify an investment strategy, but it cannot be justified by the text as a whole.

That’s not what bothers me, either, though. I’m not a Christian. If Christians want to pick apart their scripture to justify widening income inequality and callous disregard for the plight of the poor, that’s their business. They can write a new translation which actually includes the phrase “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,” stick it into the Sermon on the Mount, and shove those words into Jesus’ mouth, and if that’s what they all decide they believe, who am I to argue? I could point out that it’s a very different interpretation of scripture than other Christians have had before, tantamount to a different religion, something earlier Christians would have called a heresy, but they could quite correctly retort that Christianity has changed a lot over the years. Some have learned to read around the misogyny. Most have learned to stop using scripture as a justification for racism and slavery. A growing number are even learning to get around the bigotry towards homosexuals that’s clearly in the text. So if they want to decide that all the commands to care for the poor, to suffer with those who suffer, and to recognize worldy wealth as a threat to their salvation are just cultural relics of a time gone by and scold the poor for having bad attitudes, it is absolutely within their 1^st amendment rights to do so, and they can take that up with their god when they get to the end of the road. That’s no longer my business.

Except…

Except I have to live with these people. And not just this particularly venal and callous kind of Christian, but with a greedy and self-defeating kind of American. This kind of attitude has real-world policy implications which harm my country, my community, my family.

No, that’s not it, either. I can abide people I disagree with, even when their beliefs harm me and mine. I can live with people who deny evolution even though their beliefs hurt our country’s international reputation and our scientific competitiveness. I can live with people who have regressive beliefs about immigration even though their selective notions of law enforcement will split up families, hurt our own economy, and ultimately fail to do anything but align them with racists. I can live with people who deny the reality of global climate change even though their intransigence will have dramatic and disastrous effects on the economic, political, and even physical health of their fellow citizens. I can live with people I find to be wrong. Why? Because I am sure I’m wrong about some things, too, and I’m sure the ways I’m wrong will injure others. Of course, I don’t know how I’m wrong. As Wittgenstien pointed out, “If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” If I’m wrong about something, I can’t know it at the time. But I can assume I am wrong because I know I’ve been wrong before, and because I know that being wrong about some things has always appeared to be an essential characteristic of every other human being with whom I’ve come into contact, including those people who are far smarter and far wiser than I am. I try to surround myself with the kind of people who can tell me how I am wrong, and I’ll bet this post may motivate a few of them.  I may not know what god to believe in, but I do believe in people, complete with all their absurdity and outright folly. Sartre said “Hell is other people,” but I think other people are the point of existence. Without them, including all their multifaceted wrong-ness, life would be meaningless. An un-observed tree falling in a forest may or may not make a sound, but a man in a crowd who doesn’t care about any of the people around him makes no difference.

And that, ultimately, is why my friend’s point bothers me so much. It’s the callous disregard for others that I cannot abide. I cannot claim to be an expert on poverty from personal experience. As the Everclear song says, I’ve “never had the joy of a welfare Christmas.” I wish I could explain poverty as eloquently as Sherman Alexie does early in his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. (If you haven't read it, do so forthwith.) I just don't have the skill.  But, in my experience, that kind of personal history doesn’t always give people a whole lot of insight into the nature of poverty anyway. I know too many people who raised themselves out of poverty, sometimes terrible, tragic poverty, and their response has been to look back over their shoulders with contempt and say, “I did it. Why can’t they?” I’m starting to recognize that I understand poverty better than some people who experienced it more acutely because, though I might be exactly as middle class as my parents (American social mobility, right?), like them, I’ve chosen to work for people who haven’t escaped poverty. That’s taught me about more than the path out. It’s taught me about the people who are stuck inside.

I came across a great illustration of this today. There's a powerful if unsurprising relationship between effects of dyslexia and the wealth of the dyslexic. Dyslexic children born to wealthy families are identified earlier and are able to get more interventions. As one would expect, they are far more likely to overcome their disability. Now, we could say to a dyslexic, as my friend does, “If you're working has[sic] hard as you can and not getting anywhere....change what you're working at. You need a new perspective or a new path.” But, in this case, we’d be saying, “If you are working hard to learn to read and it’s difficult, you really should have started working hard with a specialist when you were much younger, and in order to do that, you should have been born richer. Choose that path.”

I think my friend doesn’t understand poverty (and again, he is in the company of my middle class friends who climbed out of it themselves). Poverty is an abusive father who beats his children. He stands in the foyer of his house, punching them and kicking them, and they cower in the corner, curled up into tight little balls, trying to protect themselves. Every day his blows rain down on them, but while he beats them, he tells them to get out of his house. Behind him, the door is open. For some, it’s open wide. They are gifted with intelligence, athletic ability, good looks, resilience, perhaps an indomitable will. For others, the door is open just a tiny crack, smaller even than their little bodies. Maybe they are not exceptionally smart or brave or beautiful. Maybe they are afraid to leave the house that at least protects them from the weather. For whatever reason, some of these children remain cowering in the corner, while others make a break for it, scrambling for the door. Some of these escaping children run and don’t look back. “I made it out. Why can’t they? It’s their fault.” Others stay inside all their lives. But here’s the greatest atrocity: We are standing out on the sidewalk, and we can always see into the door, at least a little. We can see Poverty beating down the poor. And, to my amazement, many of us say, “It is their fault. Why don’t they take responsibility for their circumstances? Look at the way their choices keep them inside the house of Poverty?” But we stay out on the sidewalk. I want to ask my friend and anyone else talking about taking personal responsibility for poverty: "Who is supposed to take responsibility for where you stand while the poor suffer? Isn’t that up to you?"

All American Corporations Go to Heaven

Have you ever had the experience of telling a story to a friend and, only during the act of telling it, you fully realized what it meant or why it was relevant to the topic at hand? When I started writing The Sum of Our Gods, I was at the tail end of the process of losing my own Christian faith, and I was self-aware enough to realize that the story was part of that process. I didn’t fully realize what the story was really about until I revised it. Now, in the light of a news story that is just starting to get the attention it deserves, and after my book is in print and getting into people’s hands, I finally see just how relevant it is. In case you missed it, a private company called Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., has successfully worked its way through the lower courts and will have their case heard by the Supreme Court. Their contention is that, since the Citizens United case established that corporations have at least some of the rights of individual human beings, those rights should extend to allow companies to invoke their religious beliefs in order to get a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act so that the owners don’t have to foot the bill for medical insurance that might be used by some of their employees who want to buy birth control. I’m not making this up. That’s really what they want.

And this case has just been accepted by the Supreme Court. The highest court in the land! This is not some tiny court with a wacky judge who hands out an absurd punishment that makes the local news, or even a state court that gives out a very large settlement in a civil suit which serves as anecdotal evidence for people who argue for tort reform (despite the fact that fear of civil suits and large settlements stands in for weak government regulation and makes almost every product we buy safer for consumers). No, this is the Supreme-fucking-Court! Either way, their ruling will have the force of law for the entire nation and will make precedent that will last until Congress acts (try not to laugh) or a future court overturns it. This is the real deal.

And yet, I’m not hearing any significant public outcry about this case. We live in a country where people complain if greeters at Target say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” (or vice versa), but this isn’t earning the same outrage? That’s madness! And now I see that it’s exactly the kind of absurdity I was trying to point out in my novel.

Luckily, I didn’t know about this case when I wrote the book. The novel is, by and large, light-hearted and fun. Had I known, it may have curdled into an angry diatribe. Why? Because this should piss just about everyone off if they would just stop and think about it for two seconds.

Now, you’re going to hear a lot about women’s rights to make their own decisions about their healthcare choices, and that’s a legitimate argument. You’ll also hear some talk about a slippery slope. Personally, I don’t go in for those as a rule. A slippery slope is a logical fallacy. A decision to move to position X does not necessarily mean a slide to position Y and then Z. People will point out that a company could use this same rationale to try to justify other forms of workplace discrimination. What if the owners of a company are opposed to same-sex relationships on religious grounds? Could they invoke the company’s religion to fire those employees? What if the company’s religion dictates that the planet should be preserved from ecological destruction? Could they fire employees who have gas-guzzling cars? Certainly we could imagine a thousand ways that this kind of proposition could be abused, but we don’t have to worry about positions Y and Z, because X is far enough, and I’m not just talking about the affront to the autonomy of female employees. The very foundation of this argument should have us (all of us, people of faith and those who live with them) howling with rage.

If a company has the rights of an individual, and those rights extend to a religious preference, then we are making a statement as a country that we believe companies can participate in religion as individuals. What does that entail? Does a company get baptized? Does it pray? Does it worship a deity? If so, does the deity recognize it as a single adherent? Ultimately, does the company have a soul that can be sanctified? Will Walmart go to heaven?

If this seems absurd to you, consider how much we allow beliefs like these to have sway over our society. This instance involves a relatively discrete set of circumstances; companies refusing to participate in the ACA. But we don’t have to go down the slippery slope into some dark dystopia to contemplate all the other absurdities that religious belief brings into our lives, whether we hold those beliefs or not. In a few short days I will have a tree inside my house. Why will I be bringing this bit of the outdoors inside? Because the people of one religion danced around a maypole in cold German winters to ask their gods for fertility, and the people of another religion decided to make that symbol their tradition, and my family took it on generations ago, and now it’s mine. It’s fun and beautiful and provides a meaningful connection to my childhood memories, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t acknowledge that it’s also fundamentally silly. So if that bit of ridiculousness can infiltrate so many of our homes every year, why should we think that the idea of companies recognized by the government as single spiritual entities will not become an equally acceptable part of our national dogma?

So here is where we find ourselves: Either a preponderance of Christians find this notion of corporate person-hood compatible with their beliefs about the relationship between God and human beings, or they don’t. I just don’t think there’s a lot of gray area in between. If they do, that has significant theological implications that should be acknowledged. God may sanctify your company. Or He may not. Do all the employees of a Christian company go to heaven? Did Jesus die on the cross to save Citibank and GE? If a company goes bankrupt, was it always predestined to go bankrupt? Should Christian companies obey Jesus’ edict to take all they have and give it to the poor? Perhaps Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., should address that question. My guess is that they would say that they are planning on divesting of every penny as soon as they figure out a way to make sure none of the poor will use that money for abortions.

Or companies are not individuals with religious rights, in which case we live in a country where Christians dominate our political landscape and, when faced with a proposition that would fundamentally undermine their concept of the soul and its relationship to the divine, they yawn. Or worse, they are willing to tolerate that insult to their faith if it gets them a win on a social issue or needles the President’s healthcare plan.

I went pretty easy on Christianity in my novel. Though I’m not a Christian any more, I love a lot of Christians, and I still hold a great deal of respect for them. I knew, going in, that many of these people would be pained even by my gentle ribbing of their faith. I know some of them pray for my soul. I sincerely appreciate their concern, and I’m sorry that my lack of faith hurts them. So I didn’t beat up on their religion.

But now I want to make something very clear to anyone who wants me to ever take their religion seriously: Figure this out first. Does your religion say that Walmart or Bank of America is on equal footing with real, live human beings in the eyes of your god? If so, (and you’ll have to pardon my language, but as a writer I’m bound to use the correct words) fuck that noise. If Saint Peter wants to write my name in his ledger underneath Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., I think I’ll find some other after-life abode, thank you very much. On the other hand, if your particular deity of choice doesn’t treat corporations as if they were people, did you stand idly by while the courts allowed that to be the legal interpretation of the country? Why? Because you couldn’t be bothered? Because preventing women from buying birth control was that important to you? Or did you just feel there was nothing you could do? Your god couldn’t or wouldn’t put a stop to it?

If this goes through, it will only shore up my fervent agnosticism which dictates that the universe is either run by no one in particular or by powers I cannot comprehend.  If Christians want to convince me that the universe is orderly and overseen by a deity who loves all individuals, they’d better decide if those individuals include Walmart.

Happy Wednesday!

(Shhhh. I'm just going to quietly post this here on a Friday night, then share it on Wednesday. Don't tell anybody.)  

In case you don't get the joke or just want your Wednesday to be that much better:

Hump Day!