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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13113246089956410882015-11-10T21:13:41.327-05:00Irritable ReachingNegative capability, my ass.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-5167075468471451582015-11-10T21:13:00.000-05:002015-11-10T21:13:41.352-05:00He Ain't HeavyThe Friday before Halloween, Dawn sent Willy to school in his Marvel pajamas and a sign that said "I'm Super Willy, the Superhero." That's as good as it got. Neil Patrick Harris's family we ain't. Still, it had a certain Willy style and sass. It worked.

When a child dies, we often grieve not just for the loss of life itself but for the loss of potential, for all the things that child won't be or experience -- the prom, a wedding, their own children. Dawn remarked to me the other day that with Willy we're also grieving for everything he couldn't do or be in the first place.

For all that we tried to give him, we couldn't give him the chance to make the winning goal in soccer, or get an A on his science project, or experience his first crush (though he was a bit of a flirt). His needs were such that we called it a win if we could just keep him fed, diapered, and properly medicated.

We did try to give him a personality. Since we had no way of knowing what or how much was going on inside that smooth brain of his, we ascribed things to him. We blamed him for things he couldn't possibly do, like eat all the Oreos or leave the toilet seat up. It was slightly less probable than blaming those things on the dog, but funnier.

We accused him of timing seizures to get out of doing things or just to make more work for us. "Anything for attention" I'd say, pretending to be exasperated. We accused him of being petulant in age-appropriate ways: "Tweens, amiright?" Another of my favorite jokes (and timing was key here) was "I know, right? It's like there's something wrong with his brain or something."

We accused him of being grumpy with people he didn't like and of having an eye for the ladies. I used to seat him at the table to grade papers or play games. We narrated his life in the way that we wished he might be actually experiencing it, even though we knew that was probably not the case.

In light of this, it seems all the more appropriate that many of us imagine him, in whatever version of the beyond we're able to conjure, running and jumping and playing Nintendo because those were things he couldn't do in life. It's standard fare at funerals, and the images offer solace and comfort.

I don't want to make light of that. Those things are true in the best sense, in the way that they need to be true. If you thought or said or believe those things, thank you. It's touching and beautiful. I mean that.

But -- and I tread lightly here -- it doesn't quite work for me, and not because I have a less robustly kinesthetic view of what happens when we die. To me, that running and jumping and Nintendo-playing kid isn't Willy. I don't say that to be churlish or contrary or pedantic. It's a beautiful thought, but it's not the Willy I know.

Maybe it's because I came late to the party and never had cause to lament what his life might have been. I get that. I don't want to take anything away from someone else and how they need to process.

Nobody is glad that Willy had lissencephaly. It was not a gift. Neither Dawn nor I cop to a deity doling out special needs kids to parents who apparently don't have enough shit to deal with.

We never wanted Willy to be defined by his diagnosis. But he did have lissencephaly, and it was part of who he was for us. He was one of the "Liss Kids," an elite cadre.

The Willy I knew couldn't walk on his own, or even crawl or scooch down the hallway, so he had to be carried. Of course his parents scooped him up and carried him thousands of times before I ever had the chance, but that's what I remember: carrying him.

Willy had the reach that he had precisely because he had lissencephaly. Dawn and Todd made the connections they did because they were thrown violently into that world. A large chunk of the hundreds of people that paid their last respects to Willy we only new because of his disorder.

Willy's superpower wasn't something he had in spite of his lissencephaly; it was his lissencephaly. That doesn't make it good or right or something for which we should be grateful. But it made him who he was and it made us who we are.

He needed us. Completely. He showed us, collectively, what we were capable of in the face of such abject need.

And he showed us it was okay to need. That's a superpower.

Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-54353853615786669962015-09-09T10:20:00.000-04:002015-09-09T10:20:17.405-04:00Workin' for a Livin'It's just before 2am on a summer night and we shamble toward the entrance like a zombie horde. We mumble greetings to each other as we wait for the manager on duty to unlock the door and let us in. I've been unloading trucks at a major retailer, adding to what I like to call my "summer employment portfolio."

It's a world in which we're keenly aware of time. We're keenly aware of the fact that it's two in the morning, and most of us can tell you exactly how much sleep we got last night, a subject that lurks in much of our small talk.

We're also keenly aware of how many hours we've worked that week, because overtime is against company policy, even for crew leaders. This gets tricky on Saturday, which happens to be not only the end of the pay period but one of our busiest days.

It means that many of the strongest workers, who naturally end up working more hours, can't stay for the whole shift on Saturday because they're up against the 40-hour limit. Others "save hours" so they can help out. Either way, the attention to time is pervasive.

And we're aware of the time on each shift. We're usually scheduled for six hours, and if we're going to work more than that we have to take a half-hour unpaid lunch (another strictly followed policy), which leads to a kind of shorthand: "Can you take a lunch today?" means you're being asked to stay over, whereas "Let's break for lunch" over the PA means they expect the whole crew to stay over.

But you don't have to take a lunch, and if you don't, they can't make you stay. Otherwise, the manager on duty is in violation of policy -- which means, in the logic of corporate America, that you're the one in trouble. I'm not positive, but I suspect that you can't be forced to work past your scheduled time according to union regulations anyway.

The third possibility, "Let's go to break," indicates the whole crew is going on a fifteen-minute paid break, which means they're expecting the truck to be put away before the six hours are up and no one will have to take a lunch. Here, too, I think the union says you don't have to go home early, but nearly everyone does. There's an ebb and flow to how long the shifts run, and most people just roll with it.

It's not all like this. My other job, as a soft drink merchandiser, is a lot more fun. I actually like it. I'm relatively autonomous; I clock in and out on a phone they provide, and each night I have a route of four or five stores where I'll stock the shelves with whatever we've got in backstock. I also build displays and process orders.

No, I didn't build this, but it's awesome.

Being in and out of the same stores, I've gotten to know some of the managers and employees, as well as the other merchandisers. It's like a secret underground society of grunts on the front lines of American consumerism.

Even among vendors of competing products there's an easy camaraderie. We talk a little smack, but at this level there's far more commiseration than competition.

There's something I like about this world. It keeps me in shape, for one thing, but it's also pleasantly concrete: I'm not mindlessly pushing widgets through a chute, but I'm not trapped inside my head, either.

That's the Good Job. At the Bad Job, once the 2am shifts get going, I stop taking lunches so that I don't get held past the six hours. Sleep is too precious. The Good Job goes until nine or ten at night, sometimes later. I get home, grab a bite to eat, visit with Dawn for a bit, then take a nap.

At 1:15 I get up, go to the Bad Job, put in my six hours, take a nap, and get ready to head to the Good Job. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm sleeping six or even seven hours in a given 24-hour period, but never all at once. I'm keenly aware of the time.

I don't make it more than a couple of weeks at this pace. I can't take the lack of sleep. It's like all I think about is when I'll sleep next and how much I might get. I'm not doing either job as well as I want to. I swear I can feel cognition slipping away. One day I call in sick and never go back.

There is no shame in falling before a greater enemy.

I needed to quit anyway, because it was time to start course prep. Compared to the horror stories we hear about adjunct faculty (the preferred nomenclature is "fixed-term"), I'm doing pretty well: I'm full time. I have benefits. I have a two-year contract. I get to teach some interesting classes. I've never felt treated like a second-class citizen.

There are some distinct advantages, too. I don't have to attend faculty meetings. Granted, this is because I don't get a vote, but let's accentuate the positive. I don't have to advise students or sit on committees. Any publishing I might do looks good, especially since I teach writing, but it doesn't need to meet the criteria for tenure.

I say all of that to put these next observations in perspective, and to make it as clear as I can: I'm not disgruntled. I like the university where I teach and I love the colleagues and students I get to work with. I feel, in general, pretty lucky.

But my base salary is still less than what I made 15 years ago as a music minister with a bachelor's degree. Anything I publish might look good, but with a 4/4 load (four classes each semester), I don't have time to write anything. I still haven't submitted a proposal for turning my dissertation into a book (there's a publisher mildly interested) and I owe a colleague a book review for a journal he edits. I'm spending time I should be grading papers revising this blog post (which I can't really put on my CV).

Again -- I want to make this very, very, clear -- I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm not on government assistance, partially because I teach extra courses (here and elsewhere) and I get summer jobs. I feel so good about being able to get them, in fact, about being able to make ends meet, that I forget to be scandalized by the fact that I need them in the first place.

It might just be some kind of neoliberal Stockholm Syndrome, but I like to work. I like, well, being useful. I like doing things. I like the feeling of having done a good job. In some ways, I feel like it speaks to my work ethic. I'm freakishly cheerful about work, and I'm reliable. I get things done.

I'm the quintessential cog in the machine, working to support a lifestyle of consumer distractions from work. My hard work is rewarded with goods and services that I pay for by working, things that someone provides me as part of their work, for which they reward themselves with goods and services paid for with the money they get from working.

The work I do in retail involves making sure people have access to the products they use to console themselves for (or distract themselves from) the daily grind of productivity, and the work I do as an educator involves helping students get the degree they need to join that daily grind.

Part of me feels like I should be affronted or outraged, but I'm not. Neither do I feel things are as they should be and that I deserve what I've got (good or bad). It just is. I applaud efforts at reform but I'm not holding my breath for a glorious revolution.

Truth is, I'm happy. I do my work and enjoy my downtime. My wife and I are consumers, like everyone else, but we're not big accumulators. We're not interested in surrounding ourselves with things -- apartment living makes this impractical anyway -- so much as we want to collect experiences, like trying a new pub or tubing down the river or just curling up to watch Netflix.

Maybe that's just respite from a world gone slightly mad but it's our respite, and being together makes it worth it. What should the world be like? At this point, I've given up trying to answer that question. I'm not that smart. All I know is that I've got a workday ahead of me, which I'll enjoy for the most part, but not nearly as much as coming home at the end of it.

Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-80823405922353392892015-06-27T13:40:00.000-04:002015-06-27T13:40:02.483-04:00We Are the ChampionsThe recent Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage across the nation is brilliant in many ways, and not just because I agree with the outcome. In fact, some of more brilliant bits I'm a little more reluctant to agree with. Let me explain.

The argument is liberal, of course, but more in the classical sense. It focuses, as it should perhaps, on individual rights. There were rights being sought, and they have been granted by the Supreme Court. Allowing Kennedy, a Republican appointee, to write the majority opinion was a savvy and sophisticated move.

But that opinion -- and this is part of the brilliance -- is a conservative one, or at least a libertarian one. It's what Kennedy could accede to, and it allowed him to come down on what many of us feel is the right side of history without coming off as a chump.

Many of my liberal friends, in the elation of victory, are posting snarky memes about not getting a gay marriage if you don't want one, or unpopulated lists of ways in which this decision will affect heterosexual marriages. It's funny stuff.

It also misses the point. However poor of a job the right has done in making their arguments, the concern for the sanctity of marriage is not about individual marriages but about about competing visions for society. To be clear, my own vision for society (to the extent I claim one) includes marriage rights for my LBGTQ friends and neighbors.

For many conservatives, however, this is a dangerous compromise that undermines the integrity of the social order. We disagree about that. But they are grieving not because they are vicious bigots who didn't get their way (though some may be) but because their fears for the fate of society have been partially realized. I might be making an academically fine distinction here, but I feel it's worth making.

The problem with the underlying logic of the decision (and the celebratory memes in its wake), however necessary that logic might have been, is that it is too fundamentally similar to arguments that those who don't want guns should simply not buy them, or that those who find minimum-wage jobs exploitative shouldn't get them. It is, in other words, libertarian logic.

By acceding to this logic, we leave ourselves with little ideological purchase against the right's economic agenda. We leave ourselves with no defense against neoliberalism. We reveal ourselves to be as weak as what passes for the left in this country seems to be: if the right accepts the neoliberal ideology without questioning its effects, the left seeks to ameliorate its effects without questioning the ideology.

I will celebrate the Supreme Court's decision, and I am celebrating it. My theoretical misgivings need not matter to the millions who are finally able to have something I have been able to take for granted. I'm just not going to cheerlead for the logic behind it.

Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-7444246197596191842015-03-15T13:16:00.000-04:002015-03-15T14:07:06.092-04:00Mean Time Before FailureI went to my first demolition derby when my oldest daughter was queen of the county fair. She had to attend certain events, which meant I got in for free. The demolition derby is like the deep-fried Twinkie of live entertainment: I can't say it's good, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable.

Two things struck me. One was the sheer noise, from the PA announcer to the sound of crunching metal to the roar of the cars themselves, most of which just had straight pipes poked through the hood into the exhaust manifold. Mufflers are for sissies.

The other thing that struck me was how much some of these cars could take before they stopped running. They were getting smashed into by other drivers deliberately trying to take them out, and yet for all the damage they often managed to remain functional longer than I expected.

Teams of backyard mechanics patched the cars back together between heats. You could see the sparks from the cutting and welding torches they used in their automotive meatball surgery. Parts were replaced -- or bypassed -- to get the cars ready for the next onslaught. One of the winning cars could only go in reverse by the time the tournament was over, but it won regardless.

Most of us experience our cars as more fragile than that. The difference between "functional" and "street legal" is salient here, as is the fact that most of us don't have crews patching us back together after every trip. We're not smashing our cars into each other on purpose, for the most part, but our damage threshold is (practically speaking) much lower.

As a power-commuter (I make a four-hour round trip twice a week for my main teaching gig), I am constantly aware of the things that might go wrong and render me unable to get to work or back -- or worse, stranded somewhere in between. In the past year I've been pretty lucky, but that's after replacing one car and spending $5,000 fixing another.

The simple fact is that things break. Hard drives and other products are given something called an MTBF rating, which stands for Mean Time Before Failure (or Mean Time Between Failures, depending on the kind of system). Failure is a given; the only variable is how long before it happens.

This is true of everything. Relationships die. Families disintegrate. Civilizations crumble. Climates destabilize. Stars go supernova. I used to joke with my more theologically-minded friends that my eschatology -- my vision of the end times -- is "everybody dies."

The body-as-machine metaphor is problematic for a number of reasons, but the body is nevertheless a complex system that will eventually experience the catastrophic failure we call death. "On a long enough timeline," says the narrator of Fight Club, "the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

I think about this sometimes when I'm feeding Willy or giving him his pills. He's got a brain disorder; there is something profoundly wrong with one of the most vital of bodily organs. This has led to the failure or at least the compromise of other systems -- and yet he is still very much alive. Dawn was told he might not make it past two years old, and we just celebrated his eleventh birthday.

Willy's situation is, at least statistically, more fragile than most of the rest of ours. The next seizure could be the one from which he doesn't recover. The next feeding could be the one that his body stops assimilating in the slow spiral of degeneration. The next virus that gets passed around could be the one that ends in a lethal bout of pneumonia, to which he is susceptible.

But it's a difference of degree rather than kind. We're all fragile in this sense. I could die tomorrow of an accident or an aneurysm, and Willy would outlive me. Or I could have any number of things go wrong and live on in defiance of the odds, as Willy has. Bodies are weird and unpredictable.

St. Benedict adjured his monks to meditate upon their own death. That sounds morbid, but it's probably good perspective. Everybody dies. Of course we have preferences about the timing, but beyond the statistical advantages of staying healthy and minimizing risks, we don't really get much say.

In my own nod to the Buddhist recognition of impermanence, I tend to expect that things will break, that plans will go wrong, that my attempts to budget will get wrecked. That everyone dies. This isn't pessimism. I'm not negative or morose. In those moments I have to confess that, deep down, I'm probably a nihilist, I always make sure to qualify it: "but I'm the happy kind."

This doesn't make me a pessimist any more than my expectation that good things will happen makes me an optimist. Of course good things will happen. They have. They do. Ditto bad things. I like it better when the former outweigh the latter but again, apart from statistical advantages I have no control over that.

If the universe doesn't owe me anything, then I can't be disappointed when I don't get it and I can't afford to be triumphalistic when I do. The good things that happen are either the consequence of things I hope I'm smart enough to repeat or they're random happenstance. Bad things are either the consequence of things I hope I'm smart enough to avoid or they, too, are just happenstance.

I'd like to beat the odds, but I might not. Not everyone can or the odds would be different to begin with. I'm okay with that.

Everybody dies.
Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-49331238453310096162014-12-20T12:31:00.000-05:002014-12-26T05:41:40.445-05:00Share the Land
One of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it –  or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I sometimes joke that I'm not smart enough to run a country and I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise. It speaks to my discomfort with dogmatic certainty as well as to my vaguely anarchistic inclinations. In fact, I'm suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, though I don't really have a viable alternative for either. I'm not smart enough to -- never mind, I already gave the punch line.

In college I was a libertarian. I wasn't exactly a Republican as such -- that would have been too passé, I guess -- but definitely on the right, and the religious right to boot. I was an evangelical Christian attending Bible college in the wake of a Reaganite hangover we still haven't slept off. I listened to Rush Limbaugh and read articles from the Cato Institute.

I ate lunch regularly with a group of guys and we playfully called ourselves the Dead Horse Society because we covered a lot of the same material in our conversations. We fancied ourselves "radically conservative": conservative, but edgy. We joked that we were "intolerant by choice," lest some muddle-headed liberal have pity on us by thinking we couldn't help it. When Clinton was elected, we symbolically drank grape Kool-Aid. This was also a joke, of course, but I can still say we literally drank the Kool-Aid.

There's a certain frat boy quality to this strand of right-wing populism. Limbaugh -- and I know he's not exactly  a libertarian, but there's some overlap -- is a blowhard but he's also an inveterate jokester. Some of it's a passive-aggressive schema in which the frat boy conservative can say outlandish things and then claim it was just a joke and we all need to lighten up.

Some of it, though, is a genuine sense that everyone really does need to lighten up. The answer, for the libertarian, is simple: limit government to the protection of borders and property rights (make it small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, the saying goes), let the market do its thing, and everyone will be free, happy doing what they want to do -- because under libertarian governance, they can! Party on, Wayne.

There's also the attraction of a kind of ideological purity that can cut through the partisan bric-a-brac and clear out the cobwebs of complicated political thinking. Even better, it has the benefit of being really hard to falsify. No one's really going to try it, not even the Republicans, and to whatever extent it is tried libertarians can claim anything good as evidence that it works and anything bad as evidence that we didn't take it far enough.

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I drifted away from this thinking and largely grew bored with politics, but my sympathies grew more and more liberal [while I often use that word in its broader sense in which the entire American political system is liberal or neoliberal, here I just mean "opposite of conservative"]. The problem is that I never really liked being a joiner, and as much as I was (and am) sympathetic to the issues, I don't care for liberalism as a discourse community.

For one, liberals seem to have a tendency to be preachy and sanctimonious. Conservatives like to think they have a more realistic grasp of the world and how it works, and can be dismissive and condescending about it. Liberals, for their part, seem to think they're better people, and they're no less condescending or dismissive.

I see the same things among liberals that turned me off from conservatism: the us-vs.-them mentality, the straw man fallacies and ad hominem attacks, the ideological entrenchment, the in-group posturing. Politics and religion seem particular fertile breeding grounds for these weaknesses in human thought, which is probably why we're not supposed to bring them up at dinner.

This is not to say that there's no discernible difference between the major parties or that favoring one over the other is always reducible to mere in-group bias. While liberals and conservatives might resort to the same rhetorical shortcuts and Republicans and Democrats might be scrambling over one another to kiss corporate America's ass, there are significant differences in their respective agendas, and those differences matter. I sometimes joke that I can vote Democrat and be disappointed when they don't live up to the promises they made or I can vote Republican and be disappointed when they do.

So I bristle at the temptation on one hand to narrate those differences in stark, apocalyptic terms and the temptation on the other hand to cynically dismiss them in "a pox on both their houses" fire-them-all-and-start-over fit of hand-waving. The system is weird and dysfunctional and it doesn't seem to attract the kind of people we'd really like to see running the country, but, like family, it's what we've got to work with.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

By the time I got interested in politics again, it was Christian anarchism, which really is a thing. I've written about the theological side of that journey here, and about anarchism here, so I don't want to belabor those. The short version is that I ended up an anarchist by virtue of a pacifist ethics, and I glommed onto that ethics via a particular understanding of Jesus, an understanding that is predicated on a belief in the Resurrection that I no longer have.

Now, to be completely fair, there are ways of being an anarchist that don't involve being a pacifist, but I wasn't interest in those. And there are ways of being a pacifist without believing in the Resurrection, but I wasn't interested in those, either. For that matter, there are ways of being Christian don't involve being pacifist or necessarily believing literally in resurrection, but -- you guessed it -- I'm not really interested.

Like libertarianism, anarchism can useful for pushing away from the usual partisan divide and for its ideological clarity. It's somewhat common to think that the right and left meet at their extremes in these two political viewpoints but the economic divide between the two is too significant for that to hold. Anarchists share the libertarian disdain for the state but add to it an equal or even greater suspicion of capitalism.

In fact, the things that libertarians need the state for -- protecting borders and maintaining property rights -- are anathema to most anarchists, and many anarchists I know would give a passing nod to the usefulness of the state (especially if the capitalist milieu is not going anywhere soon) for providing a safety net and putting the Keynesian brakes on the market, which makes libertarians break out in a rash.

One way of describing the difference between liberals and conservatives, then, is that the latter embrace the neoliberal ideology without questioning its effects while the former seek to mitigate the effects without questioning the ideology. Push far enough to the right, and you get the libertarian goal of an unfettered market. Push far enough to the left and you're getting rid of capitalism entirely.

This push to the left doesn't have to be anarchism, as such, but after the "death of Marxism" it comes up more than, say, a push for state socialism. Regardless, this is not the extremes coming back around to meet again so much two radically different socioeconomic visions sharing certain superficial political contours.

To put it more colorfully, in my Christian anarchist days I'd be much more likely to compromise my pacifist ideals and punch a libertarian in the face than anyone else on the political spectrum. I'm just keeping it real here. I used to joke that libertarians were white guys who didn't have the money to be Republicans or the balls to be anarchists.

Bad Ted.

So what's the problem? The problem is that I'm really, really bad at believing in things. I have a history of finding something interesting to believe in, thinking it to be The Thing that I might be able to really dig into, and then believing it so hard that I break it, like Lenny mauling the puppy to death in Of Mice and Men. I don't mean to; it just happens.

Anymore I just don't bother. I really am a bit of a nihilist, epistemologically speaking. I'm the happy kind, though: more Nietzsche's "passive" than "active" nihilist, with some absurdism thrown in for good measure, which probably helps to explain my fondness for Hitchhiker's.

It's not that I don't think meaning exists or can exist; it's just that none of it is inherent. We create it. We make shit up. We have to, of course, and we also try to hide that fact from ourselves, but we do it.

So I find anarchism interesting but I don't really believe in it, not enough to risk anything. But I can't say I believe in liberalism, either. I'm good at questioning and critiquing things but I don't have a comprehensive constructive vision. Voltaire ostensibly said "I may not believe in what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." I'm more like "I may not agree with what you have to say, but at least I won't kill you for it." That's as far as I'm willing to commit.

I can't say I believe in America, though I'm willing to admit that for an educated middle-class white guy like me, it's a pretty nice place to live. I'm not sure I believe in democracy or freedom, but they seem like nice ideas when we're not killing people and claiming them as the reason.

So, to recap: I'm skeptical of everything, but my sensibilities are liberal. This is fitting since I live in Ann Arbor, and it probably just makes me an example of Richard Rorty's "liberal ironist," and thus probably not as interesting as I thought I was. I can live with that.

In fact, the epistemological nihilism I'm willing to confess to should, by all rights, default to a kind of pragmatism, and Rorty himself is a good example of that. The problem with pragmatism, though, is that everyone thinks they're being pragmatic, and it's hard to get good data that's not ideologically pre-spun. I'm back to not being smart enough to run a country. Or maybe I'm just chronically prone to overthinking it.

At least I'm fun at parties.
Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-21276681503268994432014-11-14T17:38:00.000-05:002014-11-15T13:07:58.877-05:00That SmellThere's some significant internet buzz about semi-nude photos of Kim Kardashian, particularly one of her backside. I'd call it much ado about nothing, but judging by the photo it's much ado about quite a lot. The photo shoot's title, "Kim Kardashian Breaks the Internet," appears to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The buzz is, for the most part, not flattering to Ms. Kardashian, ranging from denunciations to parodies to "Why is this okay when _____ isn't?" pretensions of moral outrage to catty comments about Photoshopping (which may well be true). Kanye West is not spared, either: one meme has a picture -- almost a mug shot -- of West with the caption "Here's that picture of Kim Kardashian's ass everyone's been talking about."

Stay classy, Internet.

In one sense this comes with the territory. Kardashian, like Paris Hilton before her, is the quintessential person famous for being famous.

Life in the spotlight brings all kinds of attention, and while I suppose the old adage that there's no such thing as bad press rings true, not all of that attention is savory. Live by the photo-op, die by the photo-op, as Rush Limbaugh (himself no stranger to the pitfalls of celebrity status) used to say of Bill Clinton.

Some gawk, some mock, some take the opportunity to (perhaps a bit too) loudly proclaim their lack of interest and/or familiarity with all things Kardashian. The Kardashians and their ilk allow us the opportunity to perform our identity.

It's not exactly schadenfreude -- there's no real misfortune involved for us to take pleasure in -- but we do get to congratulate ourselves for not being that kind of person. They offer us what Robert Scholes calls cultural reinforcement: the opportunity to be confirmed in our ideological positions and reassured as to our membership in a collective cultural body.

The Kardashians, et al. wash up onto our cultural shores as the flotsam and jetsam of our own self-absorption, the detritus of our vanities, the lingering purple haze of our collective narcissism. They might be the family members we'd just as soon not have show up at the family reunion, but they're still us.

We look, and then we make a big show of looking away. We're like the kid who's too cool for fart jokes but is nevertheless fascinated by the smell of his own flatulence.

Every driver thinks they're making autonomous decisions and yet traffic constellates into mathematically predictable patterns. The most popular station in most metropolitan areas is the country station, but nobody likes country. Advertising must work on someone, because it certainly doesn't work on us. And Kim Kardashian is famous.

Because none of us cares.Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-4179019090570544392014-11-09T10:04:00.000-05:002014-11-09T10:14:17.769-05:00Tell Me Something Good[A talk presented at the 3rd annual English Studies Conference at Central Michigan Univerity. The theme was "Authority, Autonomy, Anarchy," and I was asked to give the keynote. The talk includes bits of my dissertation as well as things I've written on this blog.]

At the end of the first chapter of Ursula K. Leguine's The Dispossessed, the protagonist, Shevak, travels from the inhabitable moon on which a group of breakaway anarchists had formed a collective to the home world to conduct academic research. His arrival is quite controversial due to the animosity between the two groups, and at the end of the first chapter he tells his hosts, "You have him. You have your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?"

I would begin my talk this afternoon the same way except that I am no more an anarchist than Barack Obama is a socialist. The truth is, I don't have the guts for revolution, I don't have a flair for the theater of protest, and I don't have the fortitude for social experiments in anarchist polity. I have an academic interest in anarchism, and a philosophical sympathy for anarchism, but on a practical level I'm just another boring white middle class liberal.

I'm reluctant to call myself an anarchist partially because I don't want to be one of those people who co-opts a sexy sounding word because it supposedly has some kind of cachet. Partially, too, because it is a deeply misunderstood designation, owing not a little to all those people who like to co-opt sexy sounding words because they supposedly have some kind of cachet.

I'm not saying that people whose political thinking doesn't go much beyond Dead Kennedys T-shirts and a predilection for shouting and breaking things aren't anarchists, but they might be making things confusing for anarchists who construct their politics a little differently. I don't want to be that guy.

I say all of this not to distance myself from "those people" – many of whom I have a deep respect for – but to allay your fears that I'm going to indulge in anarchist proselytizing or peddle anarchist propaganda. "That's good," you might be thinking, "because isn't anarchism a state of lawlessness and chaos in which everyone does what they want and the strong prey on the weak in a kind of Mad Max dystopia?"

The answer is no: you're thinking of Congress.

"Anarchy" does carry those connotations, however, and some make a distinction between "anarchy" in that sense and "anarchism," which describes the political philosophy, whereas the purists want to wrest the word from those connotations entirely. Suffice it to say that while it would not be impossible to find people of a mind that lawlessness and chaos are underrated and should be given a chance, that really doesn't describe anarchism either in the historical sense or in terms of present-day anarchist discourse.

Anarchism as we know it begins in the nineteenth century, though anarchists often claim a more august pedigree. Kropotkin saw an evolutionary case for anarchism, arguing that "mutual aid," and not just competition for limited resources, shaped our evolutionary journey. Anarcho-primitivists similarly see hunter-gatherer societies as proto-anarchist, going so far as to call into question civilization itself. Christian anarchists – yes, that's a thing – see the original Jesus communities as an analog to anarchist collectives and tend to read the Old Testament through something of an anarcho-primitivist lens.

Anarchism as such, though, is usually traced to Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx who shared of a lot of Marx's concerns and was part of the First International. He and Marx agreed that private ownership of the means of production led to oppression and that collective ownership would eliminate class stratification and thus poverty, but he disagreed with Marx's assumption that such ownership would have to pass through the state apparatus on the way to a classless society. I'm glossing a lot here, but Bakunin didn't buy the idea that the state would wither away on its own and thought it was probably going to need some motivation in that direction.

19th century anarchism was concerned with class, but didn't see class as the only dangerous hierarchy; it saw the state in the same way, especially since the presence of the state would almost certainly result in a defacto governing class. Bakunin wasn't alone, either: Kropotkin, and Proudhon in Europe and Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker in the US had similar ideas, and women like Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, and Emma Goldman would add early critiques of patriarchy to the mix.

The basic is idea was that we were evolutionarily predisposed to egalitarianism, that this was in some real sense our destiny, and that a combination of education, worker discontent, and the inexorable forces of history would soon usher in a new age of true freedom and equality. What we might call "classical anarchism" is very much a product of the Enlightenment and 19th century humanism. They weren't necessarily alone in their ideals; they were just very particular as to the telos or goal of those ideals as well as the means to get there.

History is not exactly kind to anarchism. The new age does not arrive as such. The Revolution never comes. The liberation of human subject is never fully realized. There are pockets of anarchist resistance and experiments in anarchist polity as well as an anarchist thread – what we might call a black thread after the anarchist black flag – that runs through leftist movements in general, from the Paris Commune to the American labor movement to the Spanish civil war to student movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

Anarchists were involved in the ultimately unsuccessful uprising in Paris in May of 1968, which is in some ways The Day the Music Died and the time when philosophy started to get really interesting. By this I mean the sense in which the events of 1968 marked a crisis in the left as we knew it and gave rise to shifts in Continental thought that we've come to know as postmodernism or poststructuralism. This is important because of where anarchist theory has been heading for the last fifteen years or so.

Since the 1999 "The Battle in Seattle," anarchism has garnered attention from both the media and the academy. The WTO protests were part of what is sometimes called the "anti-globalization" movement. "Postanarchism" is the name attached to the attempt to theorize the relationship between this movement and emerging forms of anarchism that seem to characterize it.

This term does not mean to be done with anarchism, or that anarchism's moment has definitively passed, but instead denotes the introduction of poststructuralist and postmodern critiques into to anarchist theory. It is often contrasted to the "classical" anarchism of Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and others.

Whether this is a truly a break from these thinkers or a continuation of their thought is a topic of debate among postanarchist thinkers, as is the usefulness or accuracy of the term "postanarchism," but is enough for our purposes to note that postanarchism is critical of the humanism and essentialism of modernist anarchist discourse.

Postanarchism is also is markedly different in how it conceptualizes the state and its place in political theory. Todd May borrows language from Michel de Certeau, and calls this a difference between "strategic" and "tactical" thinking. In strategic thinking, May explains,

The variety of oppressions and injustices that pervade a society and the possibility of justice are located in a single problematic; if that problematic is properly analyzed and the right conclusions for intervention are drawn, then justice, inasmuch as it can be had, will be had….[This reduction] lies at the core of strategic political thinking. All problems can be reduced to the basic one; justice is a matter of solving the basic problem.
Whether that basic problem is seen to be ownership of the means of production as with Marxism or the state as with classical anarchism, postanarchism questions the strategic calculus by which a single site becomes the focus of resistance.

Tactical thinking, by way of contrast, assumes power to be multiple and fluid, requiring more creative responses. Saul Newman points out that contemporary radical politics is working more and more outside the state rather than strictly against it. Postanarchism sees the state as a problem, but not the problem; it rejects the logic that would make any single point of resistance primary or central.

One reason for this shift, besides the influence of poststructuralist thought, is the changing role of the state in contemporary politics. Both postanarchism and the anti-globalization movement have come about as a response to neoliberalism, in which the state is no longer the primary political actor.

Wendy Brown argues that the designation "neoliberal" describes a repudiation of certain aspects of Keynesian economics in favor of a more radically free market – the Chicago School of economics run amok. But she points out that this is not merely economic. It has an ideological and political component as well: "Neo-liberal rationality, while foregrounding the market, is not only or even primarily focused on the economy; rather it involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action, even as the market itself remains a distinctive player," she writes.

Responses to neoliberalism are mixed. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe neoliberalism as a global empire and call for an equally global multitude to rise up in resistance. Slavoj Žižek issues a new Marxist – even Leninist – call for socialist revolution. The response on the streets has been, as Graeber argues, largely anarchist.

Postanarchism tends to emphasize the ethical component of anarchist theory. It is not necessarily pacifist – at least not on the personal level – but it is to some extent predicated on an ethics of nonviolence. Newman argues that violence is "an authoritarian, sovereign relationship, something that violates the autonomy of the other" and that nonviolence should be the ethical horizon of an anarchist politics.

In "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology," Graeber points out that violence forecloses on dialog: if I hit you over the head hard enough, he explains, I don't need to bother getting to know you or even having a conversation with you. I can get what I want from you without securing your consent. The postanarchist attempt to make this nonviolence comprehensive leads to a critique not only of neoliberalism or the state but also of other forms of radical resistance, including some elements of classical anarchism. To abolish the state outright, for instance, would be to foist upon millions of people an anarchism (or anarchy) that they did not choose and for which they are not prepared.

Richard Day' speaks to this in Gramsci is Dead. After pointing out that "there is no single enemy against which the newest social movements are fighting," Day identifies neoliberalism with hegemony, which he defines as "a process through which various factions struggle over meaning, identity and political power." Neoliberalism, he claims, is seeking and achieving hegemony on an unprecedented scale. The significant question for Day is: how can we fight it? His answer is worth quoting at length:

The obvious answer is to try to establish a counter-hegemony, to shift the historical balance back, as much as possible, in favor of the oppressed. This might mean a defense of the welfare state in the global North, or a continuation of the battle to enjoy its benefits for the first time in the global South. Or it might mean attempting to establish a different kind of global hegemony, one that works from 'below' rather than from 'above.' [Here I think he has Hardt and Negri in mind.] To argue in this way, however, is to remain within the logic of neoliberalism; it is to accept what I call the hegemony of hegemony. By this I mean to refer to the assumption that effective social change can only be achieved simultaneously and en masse, across an entire national or supranational space. Marxist revolutionaries have followed the logic of hegemony in seeking state power, hoping to reverse the relationship between the dominated and the dominators. Liberal and postmarxist reformism display the same logic, although in a different mode—rather than seeking to take state power, they seek to influence its operation through processes of pluralistic co-operation and conflict. What is most interesting about contemporary radical activism is that some groups are breaking out of this trap by operating non-hegemonically rather than counter-hegemonically. They seek radical change, but not through taking or influencing state power, and in so doing they challenge the logic of hegemony at its very core.
It is not difficult to see here the similarity between Day's "hegemony of hegemony" and May's "strategic" thinking. Simon Critchley describes this non-hegemonic impulse as "neo-anarchism," and in terms that are similar to those of postanarchism. He offers a three-fold typology of political response. One he calls "military neo-liberalism," which roughly corresponds to Day's hegemonic, "neo-Leninism," which is counter-hegemonic. [Here he is probably referring to Zizek.] The third response is neo-anarchism, which takes up what he calls an "interstitial distance within and against the state," which is non-hegemonic. What makes it neo-anarchism, Critchley argues, is that it "does not hope to achieve the classical anarchist dream of society without the state." It is an anarchism that functions more as critique than blueprint.

It's this idea of anarchism as critique that I'm most interested in. Another reason I don't really embrace the moniker is that I don't think an anarchist society is practical. I don't mean to say that "anarchist society" is an oxymoron -- one of the horrible clichés people almost instantly reach for – but that a) there's no way we're ever going to get enough people behind the idea to make significant progress toward it; and b) it seems like the sort of thing that would be all too easy to fuck up if we did. In this I find myself siding with Jacques Ellul, who likewise distinguishes himself:

The true anarchist thinks that an anarchist society—with no state, no organization, no hierarchy, and no authorities—is possible, livable, and practicable. But I do not. In other words, I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realizing of such a society is impossible.
I'd quibble with Ellul that anarchism is really about no organization or no authorities, but the opportunity here is to recognize that anarchism and other forms of resistance to Empire are nevertheless parasitic upon Empire as the thing they need to kick against – which is the point of the Matrix trilogy if one can get past the first film. There is no pristine or primordial anarchist site that has been obfuscated by Empire; there is only the negative space that is always already defined by Empire. True anarchists may not agree with this, but I think they can nevertheless help us to see it.

What this suggests is that if anarchism isn't practical, in conventional terms, it is a least practicable, in small communities and small ways. In fleeting and furtive moments. In the refusal to wield power or the decision to use power outside of approved channels to help those with no access to power. Accepting the mantle of leadership can be a way to occupy the place of power, which might be seen as necessary, in order to give power away. It's a little like having an anarchist mayor in Reykjavik; it sounds oxymoronic, but it's not, necessarily.

Another illustration that comes to mind is an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In the story, an unfamiliar ship docks at the space station in need of repairs. The ship's lone operator, of a previously unknown species called a Tosk, manages to strike up a friendship with the station's chief engineer, O'Brien, but also gets in trouble for snooping around the weapons stores (for which he refuses to offer an explanation) and lands in the brig.

Eventually another unknown alien vessel comes looking for the Tosk. They are not the same species, and it turns out they are hunting the Tosk, not in a law enforcement or bounty hunter kind of way, but in an English-gentlemen-out-with-the-hounds kind of way: the Tosk is their prey. The Tosk are bred, in fact, to be exciting quarry and honored for their cunning in evasion. The captive Tosk is bound by social custom to be the hunted, and in getting caught alive (facilitated, of course, by his being held in the brig) he faces humiliation. The station is prepared to hand him over to his pursuers.

O'Brien is scandalized by this; he realizes that the Tosk was interested in the weapons as a possible hedge against his pursuers, and finds the idea of hunting a sentient race repugnant -- but the Prime Directive (which, in some ways, represents the logical outworking of liberal "tolerance") prevents him from interfering with the social customs of these other races. The Tosk could ask for asylum but he refuses; it would only be further indignity and a violation of his code. He would rather die with honor than evade his fate, even though the means for that evasion are available.

O'Brien takes things into his own hands and launches a plan to help the Tosk escape. The plan succeeds, and the Tosk is freed, in not in O'Brien's sense of what freedom would be, but to continue the hunt without further loss of honor. O'Brien, however, must be reprimanded for violating orders – for violating the Prime Directive, in fact. He is called into the station captains's office for a dressing-down. As he accepts his reprimand, he pauses to admit puzzlement over one aspect of the plan: at a crucial point at which he was certain it would fail, the force field system he thought would stop them was curiously slow to engage. The captain, Sisko, says suggestively, "I guess that one got past us," and the two exchange a knowing look.

The Tosk's escape is a violation of the law but not of the social code by which the Tosk lives. He cannot accept asylum but he can accept O'Brien's offer of outlaw justice. He is restored not to freedom as we might think of it but to the life for which he is bred and to which he seeks to return. Sisko is required by the law to reprimand O'Brien and does, but in the process it becomes clear that he not only secretly approved of O'Brien's actions but also played a role in making sure those actions were successful. He was occupying the place of power, and maintaining the pretense of power, but he was also giving it away.

Of course, there are ideologies and social constraints that are upheld, to a certain extent precisely through this violation of the law (Žižek would have a field day with this), and in no sense are O'Brien or Sisko enacting an anarchist society or articulating an anarchist theory. But they are working in the negative space of empire to offer aid to the oppressed on the terms of the oppressed. It is a fleeting anarchical moment. It critiques the present order at precisely the point where that order cannot account for the complexities of the sociopolitical situation at hand. And that's the problem with massive – in this case galactic – social structures: they aren't supple enough to deal with life as it is actually lived.

This is related to anarchism's critique of fixed hierarchies. Anarchism is not opposed to leadership or structure or even authority. What it's critical of is any authority that isn't contextually situated. Most of us reject hierarchies based on race or gender, even though we still live in a society in which white men disproportionately hold power, and we're largely blind to hierarchies of class even though the white men in question are also ridiculously wealthy, probably because we're suckers for the myth of equal opportunity.

Anarchism is critical of any authority that cannot justify itself. Just as we find unconscionable the idea that one race should rule over another, or that one gender should be head of the other, and give lip service to the idea that one class should be lord over another, anarchism would also question the idea that one might govern on the basis of being able to get elected, or manage on the basis of being able to impress the hiring committee.

There's a sense in which we get this kind of critique from The Office. Michael Scott is hilariously inept, and yet the system keeps him in place. He almost magically manages to keep his job, and there's an extent to which the employees go along with it because they've learned to manage him. There's an element of sticking with the devil you know, but there's also an element of a very tactical response to a dysfunctional power dynamic – the practice of everyday office life.

Anarchism is predicated not on the individualistic and often juvenile pronouncement that you are not the boss of me, but on the ethical conviction that I am not the boss of you, and I certainly shouldn't expect to be in charge of something or be listened to simply because status, station, or privilege. Rather, I should expected to be listened when and if I have something worthwhile to contribute and I should expect to be followed on the basis of being able to take others somewhere they want or need to go.

This even has application in the classroom. David Sedaris tells a hilarious story about a gig teaching a writing workshop. As he tells the story, he was hilariously inept, and his challenge was to get through each class session without the students discovering he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. Eventually, when asked who he thinks he is to tell the students how to write their stories, he has an epiphany: "I'm the only person in the room," he tells them "who gets paid to be here." He loses all credibility, however, when they ask just how much he was getting paid.

It's a funny story and Sedaris is a great humorist. But he knows, and we know, that getting paid to be in the room is not a legitimate source of authority. At least we should know this. We can't deny that our authority in the classroom comes from the system itself – that would be naïve. But it is equally naïve to think that it is enough. Our de jure structural authority becomes a legitimate de facto authority when we demonstrate that we are competent, that we have something useful to offer, that we are credible.

If it seems obvious that anarchism would critique authority, it seems less obvious that it would critique autonomy as well. Postanarchism is a response to the linguistic turn, the idea that we don't have access to mental states but only to language. We only know what the words do. If our worlds are linguistically constructed and mediated, then the question of autonomy becomes problematic. Theorist Todd May takes this farther in The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism:

Poststructuralism dissolves the subject/structure dichotomy by substituting for both a concept that might be called "practices." What is of interest to the poststructuralist is neither the constituting interiority of the subject nor the constituting exteriority of structures, but instead the interlocking network of contingent practices [like language] that produces both "subjects" and "structures." Whether these practices are founded upon a metaphysics of forces, as is the case with Deleuze and the Lyotard of the 1970s, or rejects metaphysical grounding, as do Foucault and more recent Lyoyardian writings, they remain a multiple, diverse, and contingent network of events, effects, and influences that defies such dichotomies as above/below and inside/outside. Subjects and structures are sedimentations of practices whose source cannot be discovered in a privilege ontological domain but that must be sought, rather, among the specific practices in which they arise.
May goes on to connect this specifically to anarchism, suggesting that what was going on in poststructuralism was continuing the anarchist critique in the wake of he calls the failure of Marxism.

My point is that an anarchist critique cannot stop at a simple binary in which authority is oppressive and the human subject must be emancipated as an autonomous agent, but must question the individualism that undergirds our assumptions about autonomy. This, in a roundabout way, is also a critique of the liberal theories – meaning "liberal" in its broadest political sense – on which Western democracy and capitalism are based. If we are not, as it turns out, independent rational actors (and here even cognitive science suggests that we are not), then the very premise of Western society is called into question – it doesn't get much more anarchist than that.

It also keeps us from falling prey to simple libertarianism, which is predicated on the same faulty social ontology. One of the reasons I think contemporary anarchism, or postanarchism, is somewhat less strident in its anti-state rhetoric is that such rhetoric plays too easily into libertarian sentiments. Getting rid of the state is not the answer, especially if that means leaving us at the mercy of the vagaries of the free market.

Capitalism is demonstrably not a viable meritocracy, and without regulation it offers no hedge against an owner class amassing wealth at the expense of a worker class making as little as the market will support and paying as much for goods as the market will support. It is a kind of divine command ethics in which the market is God. Today's left, such as it is, wants to ameliorate the effects of neoliberalism without being willing to interrogate its ideological framework, whereas the right wholly accepts the ideology without interrogating its effects.

Instead of authority and autonomy, then, perhaps we can think in terms of agency – at least it begins with 'A', right? [The conference title was "Authority, Autonomy, Anarchy."] If there is no central locus of power that we can either abolish or take hold of, but rather a web of intersecting lines of power in which we're always already caught up, and there is no static, essential human subject to be liberated but rather the product and intersection of practices, then perhaps we can see the task of anarchist critique as one of interrogating those lines of power and opening up new avenues for agency, new lines of flight, new forms of life. Not life forms – let's not get that sci-fi just yet – but new ways of living and having agency.

So where does this leave us? First of all, as you might have noticed, we kind of already know this. We are already shifting away from teaching the canon or standard written English as fixed forms demanding our adherence and homage. That is to say, we teach them, but as responses to specific contexts. The conventions of academic writing are just that – conventions. I tell my students there are no rules of grammar; there are conventions, based on the way we've actually used the language, that vary from situation to situation and to which we might want to pay attention if we want to be taken seriously. We've already made the linguistic turn that anarchist discourse has just caught up to in the past fifteen years.

Second, in literature and cultural studies (and there's a journal called Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies) we might look to anarchist theory as tool for exploration. Making the structures of power visible is the condition of possibility of interrogating those structures. We might look to anarchist theory as something of an umbrella term for the various investigations of power with which we are already familiar. Or we might not need to – the anarchists aren't going to come after you if you don't.

Third, we might let the anarchist critique question our own assumptions about and pretensions to authority. It might encourage us to recuse ourselves of presuming to be in charge of others, and to substantiate our claims to authority in those situations where we are in charge. We have authority precisely to the extent that we have credibility – ethos, if you will.

In the classroom it means that our authority comes not from the fact that we get paid to be in the room, or that we have an advanced degree, or that we were able to pass our certification, but from our ability to help students learn the things they need to learn, to help them cultivate the practices that will allow them to contribute to their worlds. As authors, it means that our authority comes not from an ability to put words on a page or get them published, but from our capacity to say something worthwhile – to, in the words of Stevie Wonder (made famous by Chaka Khan):

"Tell me something good."

Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-38694581377834272842014-09-25T12:13:00.000-04:002014-09-25T13:49:37.824-04:00Crazy Train"You're not here to make a choice," the Oracle tells Neo in The Matrix Reloaded, "You're here to understand a choice you've already made."

I have, as far as I can tell, two great passions: music and writing. Added to these are what I take to be two lesser but nevertheless significant interests: teaching and theology (which includes an interest in atheism -- that's not as paradoxical as it seems).

These have long existed in a kind of tension. I don't have time to devote to all of them, vocationally or avocationally, and they can be complementary but they are not always compatible.

When I went to college I wanted to be a minister -- this would combine theology, writing, and teaching. But music called too loudly, and I didn't fit the ministerial profile, so I ended up a music major.

Music for me has almost always been church music. Whether it's the acoustic pop stylings of contemporary worship or the jangly piano of gospel hymns or a Mass written for my master's thesis, my musical language is that of the church.

Being a church musician does, to some extent, combine the theological and the musical. There's even a teaching element involved, and a writing element, insofar as I wrote some of my own songs.

Still, there's a tension. For one, I'm not very good at believing in things. When I graduated from Bible college, I put off going into ministry and worked in the pizza business instead. I still went to church and helped out with the music, but I wasn't ready to be vocationally Christian.

In fact, I harbored atheistic fantasies of an intellectual life without the theological furniture. I read Isaac Asimov. I lurked in atheist chatrooms on CompuServe (this was the 90s), fascinated by the world they narrated. I was envious of characters in books and movies and their utter unconcern, for the most part, with things religious.

I was still a Christian, still pretty much a believer, but I ventured out. I flirted with atheism the way you might flirt with the kind of person your parents don't want you to date.

The music called me, though, and when I got an offer to join the staff of a church full-time, I stuffed that atheist impulse and assumed God was trying to get my attention. But I was still restless, and it's possible that a choice had already been made that I wasn't fully aware of.

The other tension was that while there was a writing element to what I was doing, it wasn't really the writing life of which I was somewhat enamored. I had plenty of time to study and a budget for books, which was nice, but not much of an outlet. I signed up for a graduate degree, partially because I was bored.

Relief from this tension came in the form of another job offer. I had been in chatrooms again, this time not with atheists but with preterists -- people who believed that the prophecies of the Bible had already been fulfilled in what turns out to have been more whimper than bang.

The basic premise of preterism is that the parts of the Bible we usually take to be about the Second Coming, or Heaven and Hell, and so forth, were really ways of narrating more temporal events like the destruction of cities or major battles, and had more to do with a new covenant between God and humanity than with hellfire and brimstone.

The details aren't really important. What's important is that this theology assuaged my skepticism insofar as it re-contextualized some of the difficult bits. There was, in a sense (and this is horribly unfair to earnest preterists), less to believe. Moreover, I understood this theology really, really well and could explain it to others, which is what I ended up doing on the message board.

This attracted the attention of the group that hosted the board, and they offered me a job writing for a magazine they were starting up. Here was a theology I thought I could latch onto and a shot at the writing life.

This failed spectacularly on two levels. First, the magazine flopped and the organization folded, beset by massive internal problems. Second, the more time I spent with this theology the more it auto-deconstructed. Again, the details aren't important; the end result is that it collapsed for me along with the organization and led me again to atheism.

Granted, it could have led me other ways, like back to my evangelical roots or into a more robust postliberal faith. I had a thing for Episcopalians -- it could have led there. But it didn't. I think I went where I wanted to.

On Christmas Eve 2001, I wrote in my journal "Tomorrow may be my first Christmas as an unbeliever." I"m wondering now if that choice hadn't been made well before that.

My ticket out of this conundrum came in the form of yet another job offer, this time teaching music at a Christian college. I'd kept my atheism to myself, and could narrate my path as one of repenting of my suspect theological digression and coming back to the mainstream fold.

I didn't believe in God, but the turn of events still seemed providential. I needed the money, and I could play the part, and maybe I wasn't so much lying or playacting as I was trying to inhabit my true calling. At least that's what I told myself.

In the process I was introduced to another theological turn, this time a postliberal theology with an Anabaptist flavor rooted in a pacifist ethics. I would come to understand (and write a dissertation about) this theology as a kind of Christian anarchism.

Again, the details are unimportant; this was something I thought maybe I could believe. I still had trouble believing in God, but perhaps I could nonetheless live a life of faith, and this might mean that I really did believe after all. It's crazy, but it just might work.

It was a stark contrast from the evangelical world of contemporary worship music, and while these worlds aren't necessarily in conflict, they don't sit together easily. The megachurch paradigm is not one in which Christian anarchist principles obtain.

Another tension is that after I finished my master's in music, I soon discovered I didn't really want to continue with it. I did a year of doctoral work in composition but needed a change.

The American studies department looked attractive to me, and I pitched the idea of studying contemporary praise and worship music from the perspective of cultural studies.

They liked it, and I got into the program. Then I took a course on American radical thought and fell in love -- here was a connection to the theology I was so interested in -- so I changed my topic and left music behind as a field of study.

This was a little awkward since I was teaching music, but I eventually left the Christian college and began teaching writing at a state university. Music did not go quietly into that goodnight, however, and I got another offer to lead worship part-time at a fairly large church, and I took it. It seemed like the right thing to do, and in many ways it was a great experience.

In retrospect, it was a horrible place to be -- not the church, as such, but in the tension. I was intellectually an atheist, theologically a Christian anarchist, vocationally a secular academic, and quasi-vocationally an evangelical worship leader. It was, to say the least, a little crazy-making. I could be any two of those, maybe -- but not all four.

This quadrilateral tension tended to collapse into one between music and writing, with belief rather loosely tied up with music and unbelief with writing, simply because of the way they sat with me. They didn't exactly line up, because of the added theological tension between my anarchist interests and the evangelical world, but it mostly came down to music and the ecclesiastical world as an evangelical versus writing and the academic world as an atheist.

I was on both paths, and I had probably already made the choice but it was hard to give up the music. I loved it, even if there was an element of guilty pleasure to it. It's like flipping through the channels and stopping on a Three's Company rerun: it's fun, but you don't want to get caught.

I was good at it. I knew how to get the sound. I knew how to work the crowd. I liked the attention. I liked the idea that I could, for 20 minutes on a Sunday morning, make people feel good. I could help them have the "God moment" they were looking for, which they attributed to the Holy Spirit and I chalked up to the affective power of music.

It was ultimately dishonest, though I submit it wasn't as cynical as it sounds. I was not just fleecing the flock for a paycheck and a few minutes of glory; I was contributing to the life of the church in a positive way, and I wanted that to be earnest. It's just that I kind of suck at earnestness.

Irony is my spiritual gift.

Things came to a head when it came time to hire someone full-time to do what I had been doing part-time. They loved me there, and I had a shot at the full-time gig. But I couldn't do that and teach full-time as well, so I faced a choice that I knew I had already made.

I quit the big church and helped out for awhile at my home church, but when I moved to Ann Arbor, I left the evangelical world and music with it. I still hammer out pop covers on my guitar at home, and I'd entertain the idea of picking up a (non-church) gig if the opportunity presented itself, but I'm pretty much a hobbyist at this point and happy about it.

I'm an atheist, but I still love theology -- atheism is, after all, unavoidably theological. I don't wear it on my sleeve; it's less a point of identity for me than an artifact of a lazy, almost passive unbelief. I just can't be bothered. It's actually more nihilistic, but that word scares people. "Atheist" is bad enough.

I've toyed with "skeptic" or "unbeliever," since a lot of atheists I know still believe in more gods than I do (they just don't recognize them as gods), and epistemologically I suppose I'm technically agnostic, but "atheist" seems more accessible and more honest. It's a choice that's taken me twenty years to understand, and I don't want to get cute with the semantics.

And I teach. Mostly writing, but when I get the chance I teach a little cultural studies or literature. I write when I can, which is not often enough, but that's okay. I'm trying to get my dissertation published, and I have some ideas for followup projects. Or I might indulge myself and try to get published with some more personal writing or creative nonfiction.

Probably I've already made that choice -- I just have to understand it.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-64082689943564875482014-09-04T12:50:00.000-04:002014-09-04T14:33:10.084-04:00Lucky Man

"No, wait ... I'll tell you something," said Zaphod. "I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it's easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It's like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and think -- why did I want to do something? How did I work out how to do it? -- I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's just after 6am when I pull into the gas station about a mile from our apartment complex. It's a two-hour drive to where I'll be teaching for the day and it will take a tank of gas to get there and back. I don't mind the drive; seasoned road warriors know there's a serenity to the open highway, and I have podcasts to pass the time when that serenity eludes me.

It's the kids' first day back at school, and I've left Dawn with most of the morning routine, except for Willy's morning pills and whatever we were able to do the night before. It's still hectic, and I'm on the road before the real chaos starts.

We spent Labor Day getting everything ready -- school supplies, clothes, lunches. We made lists and charts and schedules. We drilled the kids on their routines and responsibilities until we couldn't stand any more eye-rolling. Everything went off without a hitch, except Dawn got to work and realized she didn't pack a lunch for herself. Such is a mom's life.

Dawn and her ex moved to the same apartment complex after they separated, which means there are three of us around for parental support (and supervision). They've remained friends and he pops over now and then for a beer or dinner or to pick up some leftovers we've saved back for his lunch on the night shift. I joke that it's a very postmodern arrangement, and I've thought about pitching the premise to Fox as a sitcom. We just need a couple of catchphrases and some canned laughter.

Because of the move, however, the kids are too far from school to walk and outside of the district to be bused -- except for Willy, who gets bused regardless. That translates into three kids needing to get to three schools at three different times via two different means of transportation around three different work/sleep schedules. I'll spare the details, but the logistics are such that even with the three of us on task we still have to enlist the help of one of our neighbors. It takes a damn village.

The truth is, though, that things are going remarkably well. Amazingly well. Almost uncannily well, as if orchestrated by cosmic forces. Things have fallen into place with refreshing regularity and we're grateful, even if we're a little fuzzy on where such gratitude should be directed. This is common, of course -- what couple doesn't feel their love to be fated in some way?

I'll take well-worn clichés for fifty, Alex.

On the one hand, it does feel like that, even in a more general sense: we've both lived lives that have pretty much just worked out, beyond our ability to orchestrate them. I have applied to and attended exactly four schools in my academic career -- I figured I'd go somewhere and I did. I can only think of one time where I was granted an interview but didn't get the job, and it's hard to shake the feeling that in most cases just the right job showed up at just the right time.

This feeling is not uncommon. Daniel Quinn called his memoir Providence, and it narrates what is for him the uncanny process by which he arrived at his life's work. Kelsey Grammar, in his memoir, describes his own sense that the universe was somehow making his path straight.

I recently heard an interview with David Sedaris in which he confesses his belief that the right thing will come along if we are but patient and hard-working, and it worked for him: he kept plugging along writing articles until one day a publisher called him to see if he had a book they could publish. "I've been waiting for your call my whole life," he said. "I have one in my drawer."

The Tao te Ching adjures us to wait until the muddy waters clear and the right action presents itself. The Taoist concept of wu-wei describes a kind of flow, rolling with life's changes in the way that a good surfer neither fights the waves nor succumbs to them.

It's not hard for me to see each life as having its own genius, one that we are to lean into and go where it takes us without regret or triumphalism.

On the other hand, neither of us really believes this. We'll say it was "meant to be" but we do so with the irony of those for whom "meant to be" isn't really a thing. It's too hard to reconcile with a world in which there are brain disorders, tsunamis, and only one season of Firefly. Providence, if that's what we're going to call it, might narrate our experience but I shy away from it as a way of making sense of the universe.

Maybe it's all a matter of perspective, and I simply have a better attitude than some people. It could be that I just stumbled independently upon the power of positive thinking. Metaphysical musings aside, it's become almost axiomatic that positive people tend to experience the world more positively, and negative people more negatively, with some fuzziness as to which way the causality arrows are pointing.

But what about all those people in situations where positive thinking isn't going to help them? There are millions of people in the world in situations that are simply and abjectly cruel if part of a cosmic plan, and putting a positive spin on that isn't going to do them any good. If I take any part of my own experience, make it normative, and extrapolate from it a path to success and happiness, I'm a tube of hair gel and a good dentist away from being Joel Osteen.

No thanks.

More likely, it's a matter of confirmation bias and selective memory. We humans have a predilection for pattern recognition, even when the patterns aren't really there. Add to that some dumb luck and some underacknowledged (or even subconscious) machinations on our part, and it's no wonder our lives seem charmed.

In the end, "meant to be" is an affirmation, a way of calling something good. It's a way of saying we believe -- not in fate or cosmic forces, but in us, in our own future.

I get home around nine and Dawn has saved some salmon for dinner. "How was the drive?" she asks.

"Uneventful," I say. "Just like I like it. How was your day?"

"Let me tell you," she says, her smile weary but content, "the morning was crazy..."Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-29922934472224235692014-08-14T09:46:00.001-04:002014-08-14T10:50:12.687-04:00Hey JoeI love the beginning of the fall semester. I love the feeling of a fresh start. I love the excitement on campus. I love the lingering rays of summer sunlight as autumn approaches. As much as I enjoy the time away, by the end of the summer I'm ready to be back in the classroom, and to meet a new crop of students.

I started teaching in my early 30s but looked far younger, so I made a habit at the beginning of the semester of dressing up a bit. Not a tie or a jacket but khakis and a button-up shirt -- just something to establish a slightly more professorial air.

By the end of the semester I'd be in jeans, and that button-up shirt would be unbuttoned over a colored T-shirt (hey, at least I coordinated the colors)<sips coffee="">. These days I don't really bother with the pretense; I'm likely to show up on the first day wearing a hoodie. </sips>

This business of classroom fashion came up one day in the faculty lounge. I don't know how we got on the topic of sartorial choices but in response to my dress habits one of my colleagues patiently explained to me that she didn't have the same luxury: as a woman of color, she felt she had to dress very professionally every single day in the hope of garnering a modicum of the respect that I, as a white man, had upon entering the room.

This was my first object lesson in white privilege, which refers not only to the fact that I can pretty much wear whatever I want and not reap (or at least not notice) the consequences, but also to the fact that I never even had to think about it. It matters little if my colleague's perception is 100% accurate; even if it turned out that she could afford to be more casual without losing the respect of her class, the salient point here is that somewhere or another -- either through experience or the passing down of wisdom from the previous generation -- she learned to account for such things.

White privilege was brought to my attention recently with the death of John Crawford, who was shot by police at an Ohio Wal-Mart for brandishing an air rifle he picked up off the shelf. One of my friends asked "does this happen to white people, like, ever?" The story might not exactly fit the "unarmed black man shot by white cops" trope, but that sort of thing happens often enough to be a trope in the first place. More stories keep coming in as I've been working on this essay, most notably the situation in Ferguson, Missouri.

Here again, what interests me is not so much the event itself, which may or may not turn out to be a tidy example of racially inflected brutality, but the comments from African-American men pointing out that when you grow up black you learn there are certain things you simply don't do -- waving anything remotely resembling a weapon around white people being one of them. (You also learn a certain deference to law enforcement, which you're statistically about three times more likely to have to deal with than your white counterparts.) They weren't blaming the victim; they were bearing witness to a piece of relevant cultural knowledge.

Even The Daily Show is hep to this, offering a satirical admonition to black men not to attempt open carry. Imagine, for instance, if people of color staged an armed rally such as the one held by Tea Partiers at the Alamo. Or if the NAACP endorsed open carry. African American boys grow up with constellation of things they're taught to do and not do in order to navigate a racially charged world to which I can remain oblivious if I choose to.

My Facebook friend Brian Smith, who brought my attention to the Crawford piece as well as the sketch, commented, "We have to teach our sons this happens and how to improve the odds it doesn't happen to them."

I don't have to think about teaching my sons anything of the sort.

We need to be careful with this, however. Just as Slavoj Žižek can point to subjective violence (I hit you with a stick) versus structural violence (I benefit from a world in which you're more likely to get hit with sticks than I am through no fault of your own), I'd like to suggest a similar distinction between subjective and structural racism ("subjective" here simply meaning "pertaining to subjects").

To be subjectively racist is to actively and consciously bear ill will toward people of another race. Structural racism is that which is chronicled masterfully by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: it describes the way in which the cultural deck is stacked against people of color. The interesting thing is that once this obtains, once the structures are established and self-sustaining, no living white person needs to be subjectively racist in order for the system to nevertheless skew that way.

We might fill out this spectrum be adding latent racism, where I display behaviors or attitudes inflected by a racial prejudice I'm not aware of, and passive racism, which describes my unexamined complicity in structural racism. There's a lot of racism that happens, then, in a kind of middle register or passive voice.

With this taxonomy in mind, I'd like to take a look at Mo Brooks's comment that Democrats are waging a "war on whites" and what appears to be a growing interest in open carry. I think these are connected.

Brooks's comment is, of course, certifiably nutty. Even Laura Ingraham seems to have thought he was over the top. But it speaks to what I think is a perceived loss of white hegemony. The Democrats are not waging a "war on whites" -- that's stupid. But white people, particularly white males, are being unseated as the holders of uninterrogated cultural power, and this is uncomfortable for them. Brooks comes awfully damn close to admitting that straight up.

Political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff describes how we got here in a blog post exploring the right's reaction to the Affordable Care Act. For Wolff, the this reaction has gone well beyond the normal partisan bickering. It's not just that the right doesn't like the bill; they've been downright hysterical in their opposition to it. As Wolff explains,

There is now a sizeable fraction of the American public, and a considerable number of Representatives and Senators, who say that they consider Obamacare an assault on everything they hold dear, a fatal blow to the American Way, a Socialist plot to destroy life as we know it, an evil so great that it is worth bringing the government to a halt and threatening the world financial system to defund it or even slow marginally the pace at which its provisions go into effect. What on earth is going on? The answer, I think, is actually rather simple, although unpacking it will take me more time than I usually devote to a blog post. To put the answer in just four words, the real, underlying reason for the hysteria engendered by the ACA is:

Because Obama is Black.
Wolff is not particularly careful in the way he couches this, but I will be: this does not necessarily mean that anyone opposed to the ACA is subjectively racist. It does not mean than any particular conservative legislator is racist as such (though of course some are). It has more to do with shifts in the cultural zeitgeist, and structural and latent racism. Let me quote Wolff at length:

During the slavery period, only well-to-do Whites owned slaves. An adult male slave in 1850 cost as much in the slave markets as a year's wages for a free white northern worker. There were millions of poor Whites, especially in the South, whose principal claim to self-esteem was the simple knowledge that they were not Black, not slaves. With the end of legal slavery, things changed dramatically. The same men and women whose presence, even physical closeness, posed no threat to Whites now became anathema. To sit in the same train carriage with a Black man, to use the same facilities as a Black woman, to walk on the same sidewalk as a Black child very quickly came to be experienced by Whites as a threat to their safety, security, very being. Black labor, needed by plantation owners to raise and bring in the cash crops, was beaten into submission by Black Codes and the renting out of convict gangs and the threats of lynch mobs.

Thus a new relationship emerged between free and bound, between White and Black, a relationship encapsulated in Jim Crow laws. Whereas previously, White women expected to be served in every way by Black women, now these same women, or their daughters, found it intolerable to be served in department stores by Black clerks, so that for a long time Black women could not find even low-paying service jobs that might bring them into direct contact with Whites. Residential segregation, which of course was impossible under slavery, when slaves had to live close to where they were required to serve Whites, produced a sorting out of the two populations and the creation of all-Black ghettoes. The segregation was officially enforced and written into Federal and State law by means of covenants restricting the sale of properties. During all of this time, it remained the case that poor Whites, exploited and oppressed by White capitalists, could tell themselves that they were free, White and twenty-one, that they were, at the very least, not black.

The Civil Rights Movement, launched by African-Americans half a century ago, threatened, and eventually began to break down even these legal, customary, residential, and employment barriers. It was at this time that the old familiar political rhetoric about "working men and women" also began to change. The new rhetoric spoke of "middle-class Americans," which, although no one acknowledged it, was a thinly veiled code for "not Black." As economic pressures mounted on those in the lower half of the income pyramid, Whites wrapped themselves in the oft-reiterated reassurance that at least they did not live in the Inner City [which is to say, Black neighborhoods], that they were "Middle Class." All of the political discourse came to be about the needs, the concerns, the prospects of the Middle Class, which to millions of Americans, whether they could even articulate it, meant "not Black."

All of this crumbled, frighteningly, calamitously, disastrously, when a Black man was elected president. "Free, white, and twenty-one" ceased to be the boast of the working-class White man. Statistics do not matter, trends do not matter, probabilities do not matter, income distribution differentials do not matter. If a Black man with a Black wife and two Black children is President of the United States, then a fundamental metaphysical break has occurred in the spiritual foundation on which White America has built its self-congratulatory self-image for three centuries and more.

Hysterical Whites tried every form of denial. Obama's election was theft. Obama is not an American. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a socialist. Obama's election was a one-time proof that we are not racist, to be followed immediately by restoration of the status quo ante bellum. When Obama was reelected, vast numbers of Americans went into terminal denial. They seized upon the ACA simply because it was, as everyone knew, Obama's signature domestic accomplishment. To repeal it, to defund it, to make it as though it had never existed, would be in some measure to deny that he had ever been President. The actual details of the ACA matter not at all. Neither do the actual felt medical needs of those driven insane by the very fact of Obama's tenure in the White House. None of that has anything at all to do with the real cause of the hysteria. Why are millions of Americans driven beyond hysteria by the ACA?

Because Obama is Black.
Blogger Doug Muder has explored this more recently. In "Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party," Muder painstakingly chronicles a history in which, as he sees it, the Confederacy eventually won insofar as Reconstruction, culminating in the Atlanta Compromise and the advent of Jim Crow, allowed them to restore significant parts of the social order they were trying to protect.

That seems a bit of a gloss to me, but Muder's point is that on some level, the South got what they wanted: a way of maintaining paternalistic control over black Americans because to the Confederate mind, they weren't ready for freedom.

But that hold has been slipping for over half a century, as Wolff points out, and one of the flash points is the election of the first African-American president. The fervor and furor over gun rights during Obama's tenure is, at least in part, a shoring up of white hegemony in ways both symbolic and actual. As Muder explains it,

Confederates need guns...Gun ownership is sometimes viewed as a part of Southern culture, but more than that, it plays a irreplaceable role in the Confederate worldview. Tea Partiers will tell you that the Second Amendment is our protection against "tyranny." But in practice tyranny simply means a change in the established social order, even if that change happens — maybe especially if it happens — through the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. If the established social order cannot be defended by votes and laws, then it will be defended by intimidation and violence.
Again, my caveat: this does not make every (or any) white person with a gun a racist. It doesn't make you a racist if you apply for a carry permit (though I do think it would be interesting to see a demographic breakdown of permit applications). In fact, no one need be subjectively racist for most of this analysis to obtain, at least in theory.

I don't need to call anyone a racist; we live in a culture so fundamentally shaped by racism that no one has to be.
Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-66336768011443502522014-07-25T09:30:00.000-04:002014-07-25T09:30:59.319-04:00Live and Let DieIt's Saturday, and I have to work, so I ask if there's anything I can pick up. Since I'm stocking shelves at grocery stores, it's easy for me to grab something on my way out.

"We need drinks for the pool party tomorrow," Dawn says.

"Okay," I say, "what should we get? Do you like piña coladas?"

It's an innocent question at first, but I immediately know where I want to go with it.

"Oh, sure," she says.

"And getting caught in the rain?" I deadpan.

"Absolutely," Dawn replies, without missing a beat. "But I'm not much into yoga."

I'm not into yoga, either, but I've been practicing something recently I call "bolus judo." "Bolus" refers to the way we feed Will, using an open syringe as a funnel and letting gravity do the work. Another option is to use a pump, but that option has been precluded by Dawn's discovery that she can't substitute her laptop charger for the pump's power supply.

The bolus feed is precarious, as I explained in an earlier post, because it involves an open syringe of formula in range of limbs akimbo. What I've discovered is that I can put the side of the bed down and swing my own leg up to block Will's arms. I'm not really pinning him -- my leg is draped over him with my foot on the far side of the bed -- but it does keep his arms out of the way.

Will's summer school is with the county school district rather than the city proper, so it's a different facility. It's also a much more robust facility for special needs, with a dedicated full-time nurse, a pool, great equipment, and a high teacher-to-student ratio.

These are the people who fixed his wheelchair, and his teacher regularly texts pictures of his activities and progress. This is not to slight the teachers and aides at the city school, who were fantastic; they just didn't have the same resources. We're looking at keeping him with the county school for the next school year and beyond.

The hitch is that the county school won't recognize the Do Not Resuscitate order, or DNR, on file for Will. Not without a court order. The director is sympathetic; there's currently a family pursuing such an order, and the school has helped them find an appropriate lawyer and has generally been cooperative and supportive. It's less a rancorous clash of wills than it is a collective attempt to jump through the proper hoops.

The decision to put a DNR in place is fraught and complicated. It means leveraging our ability to prolong life against the quality of that life as well as the life of the rest of the family. It's an alarmingly real-life variant of Lifeboat, involving not just real people but your own children. Put the most starkly, it requires sussing out the conditions under which you are willing to let your child die.

There's no clear line for this. There's a point at which prolonging life is inhumane, but that point is by no means obvious, and sorting that out is different for every family and every situation. There's no appealing to what is "natural" (a long-deconstructed notion anyway); in completely "natural" terms Will wouldn't have made it nearly this far -- but then, neither would many of the rest of us. "We're already keeping him alive by feeding him through a tube," Dawn points out.

To go through the arduous process of coming to such a decision -- consulting with doctors and family, wrestling with the ethics involved, starting into the abyss of mortality -- and then have that questioned a priori by a board policy can be demoralizing. For the board, it's a matter of liability; for us, it's a matter of parental rights.

Dawn and Todd didn't come to the decision to establish a DNR for Will lightly, and it is intended to represent their wishes in those cases when they can't be present to make those wishes known. Almost the only time Will is not with one of us is when he's at school, meaning that the one place a DNR is most likely to be relevant is one where it's not going to be honored.

It's the same ticklish, ironic structure as being on hospice. This seems to pop up everywhere. I'm reminded of Zaphod's reaction in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the first time they use the Infinite Improbability Drive, whereupon they miraculously (or, rather, improbably) pick up Arthur and Ford seconds after the latter are ejected from a Vogon airlock: "Is this sort of thing going to happen every time we use the Infinite Improbability Drive?"

"I'm afraid so," comes the reply.

My understanding is that while the DNR is legally valid, it's not legally binding. It effectively establishes parental or guardian wishes but does not obligate anyone to follow those wishes. That, apparently, takes a court order, and the University of Michigan's Advocacy Clinic has agreed to represent us. They're trying to work out co-plaintiff status with the other family, otherwise we'll have our own case. Either way, we hope that it sets precedent for other families. Surely the board doesn't want to get sued every year.

It's especially frustrating because Will's previous school was receptive to the DNR without any legal wrangling. Again, that structure: the better facility for special needs is the one fussier about a legal detail common among special needs families, especially involving terminal conditions like Will's. Does this sort of thing happen a lot?

I'm afraid so.

The piña coladas were a bust, so I tried my hand at making a Bloody Mary. The end result? I won't be trading in the coffee and papers for bartending anytime soon.

But I'm going for gold in bolus judo.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-66455888155635320812014-07-08T10:06:00.000-04:002014-07-08T10:06:02.118-04:00Stuck in the Middle with YouI pull into the Meijer parking lot at 2:30 and punch in on my Blackberry (yes, those still exist). For my Coke job, I'm on the road, going from store to store stocking shelves. The Blackberry is how we clock in and out and how get our route and keep track of what we've done at which location -- how many cases we pulled, whether or not anything is out of stock, etc. It's also our only contact with the office, by email (usually) or phone. I haven't been to the home office in months.

The first thing I do is check the coolers in the checkout aisles. These we stock with 20 oz. single bottles of our main products, and they're the first thing the higher-ups would check if they visited the store. Stocking the coolers is a little like having your towel with you in Hitchhiker's Guide:

A towel...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can

have.... For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost."
Basically, if the coolers are stocked, the supervisor will assume you've got everything under control and simply haven't gotten to the other bits yet, whereas if the coolers are a shambles this will cast something of a pall over the visit.

I say this as if such a visit has actually happened, which it hasn't. I also haven't seen any of my supervisors since training. But the effect is real; if I go into a store and the coolers are in good shape, I immediately assume the stop is going to go well in general, even if that happens to not be true. Someone told me that sales from the coolers alone pays everyone's salary but the truck drivers, but this strikes me as a tall tale. Unless that includes vending machines; that might actually be plausible.

Today the coolers look fair but they need some attention, and I am just completing my perusal of them when the day guy catches up to me. A typical route is four or five stops with the same Meijer outlet as the first and last stop. That means that sometimes I run into the day merchandiser when our stops overlap.

He tells me that the bad news is they've cleaned us out of two liters and the coolers need to be hit, as I've already seen, but the good news is he's got the backstock all organized and ready to go. We talk shop and a little gossip and he heads out.

I head to the backstock area -- and it is nicely organized -- and load up an L-cart with 20 oz. singles, which we just call "cooler pop." I'm in the middle of stocking the coolers when my phone rings (my regular phone, not my Blackberry). It's not a number I recognize, so I just answer "Ted Troxell," in case it's a student (I'm teaching an online class) or something official. Usually it's a telemarketer.

This time it's not a telemarketer or a student. It's Will's teacher.

"Hi, this is ____ from Will's school." I'm immediately on edge: I've never gotten a call from the school before, but he's in summer school now and this is a different facility. She immediately puts me at ease.

"Everything's fine," she says, but she wanted to let me know that their resident MacGyver had fixed Will's wheelchair by using one of the ankle straps, which we don't use, to repair the lap belt, which was broken. She wanted to make sure that was okay, which had me wondering in what kind of scenario that wouldn't be okay.

Will's been on hospice care, which has been a great boon. An aide comes out to give him a bath twice a week and a nurse and social worker come out every other week. Most of his care is coordinated through this one service and they do a great job. He's managed to avoid any major hospital stays and is, in general, healthier than he's been in a long time.

There are some downsides. He has to show signs of regression in order to keep qualifying. If he makes too much improvement, he'll get kicked out of the system and we'll be navigating things on our own. It's the medical analog to the welfare recipient who gets a job and then no longer qualifies even though they still need the help.

Lately he's been having trouble with seizures and chorea (erratic involuntary movements) and even as we're trying to address those issues we're also secretly glad that this might be enough to secure his place in hospice a couple more months. It's an odd world to live in, where you simultaneously want your child to be healthy and to regress enough to qualify for hospice, precisely because it's hospice care that's doing the most to keep him healthy. It's not just a catch-22; it's Derrida's pharmakon inverted.

Another artifact of being on hospice is that we only get about two weeks of Will's medication at a time, so it feels like we're constantly running low. The idea is that a patient in hospice is dying, and not just in the Sylvia Plath/Eastern philosophy sense in which we're all dying. Ergo, they don't need a stockpile of drugs.

(It reminds me of a scene in Brighton Beach Memoirs. Eugene's mother sends him to the store for a quarter pound of butter. He complains that she sent him just that morning for a quarter pound, so why didn't she just have him get half a pound then? "And suppose the house burns down in the afternoon," she says. "Why do I need an extra quarter pound of butter?")

It also means that the insurance company won't cover both hospice and repairs to Will's wheelchair (it also won't cover prescribed modifications to the chair, like a headrest that would keep Will's head from flopping, or additional equipment like something to sit in besides the broken wheelchair). Dying people don't need to be secure in their wheelchairs, apparently. They're dying anyway, right? It makes a certain kind of sense, in a systemic corporate logic kind of way, but not on a human scale.

"Are you kidding?" I tell Will's teacher. "Of course! Thanks so much." We exchange pleasantries and hang up. It's just a wheelchair strap, but somehow I feel lighter, like for awhile I might be able to believe in humanity. It's the little things, I guess. I text Dawn to let her know, and then I have to get back to work.

These coolers aren't going to stock themselves.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-78947119796438578512014-06-03T10:36:00.000-04:002014-06-03T13:44:01.074-04:00A Day in the Life"Will you feed Will?" she asks me.

"Of course," I say. "I was planning on it."

"Do you think we could crack the window open? I want to hear the rain."

"Sure," I smile. "I'll close it when I come to bed." I open the window and adjust the blinds so the air can flow.

"I can hear the crickets."

"Actually, they're probably peepers."

"What?"

"Spring peepers. Frogs."

"Oh."

My pedantic side is showing; who cares if they're crickets or frogs? I roll my eyes at myself in the dark.

I'm home a little early from my Coke job. My schedule is 2:30-11 but some nights are slower. I worry that I won't have enough hours to pay child support, but I also get paid mileage for going from store to store and that should compensate. Plus last week I worked a warehouse shift, which pays a lot more and I worked five hours of overtime.

It's time for Will's last feeding. Will is ten years old and has lissencephaly, a disorder in which the surface of the brain is smooth, lacking the ridges and crevices (technically gyri and sulci) which ordinarily characterize the brain's topology.

The result is, among other things, cognitive impairment and chronic seizures, requiring a cocktail of drugs which would kill most of us just to keep things somewhat regulated. The prescriptions all say x amount x times a day "for seizure control" but I'm learning quickly that "seizure control" is wishful thinking at best. It seems more like a dark joke that's not very funny.

Actually there's a cognate of gallows humor that's part of the discourse of special needs families. "Willy's talking back again," I'll say to Dawn, who'll reply something like, "Probably we're not spanking him enough." Or the time I told Dawn that I had to take his driving privileges away because he was burning out the clutch.

[Don't judge me; I just had that clutch replaced.]

I'm new to this. Not just to the procedures and routines, but to the life-world of having a special needs child. I'm sure it's cute to the veterans: the noob's first blog post. Isn't he adorable? I've tried to jump in with both feet; Dawn sometimes seems amazed that I want to jump in at all.

There's a lot of philosphizing and theologizing in these circles. A lot of theodicy. This makes sense; we're face-to-face with some of the most challenging aspects of life. We're tempted to wonder why, and to speculate, but I think we also intuitively know there's no answer. To me it's just life. Nothing more, nothing less.

In my case, I'm choosing this life, but I don't actually see it any differently than if Will were born to me. Ignoring for the moment the extent to which it feels like this life chose me –  a sentiment that is phenomenologically viable but metaphysically suspect – there was no cost/benefit analysis with Will on the minus side when I decided to start a new life with Dawn.

In fact, pardon the salty language but that's a shitty way to look at it anyway. Will was and is simply part of the constellation of things that make up this life, and I feel I belong here. So yes, I'm up at 10 o'clock feeding a child with a terminal brain disorder, and that's not tragic or admirable or even all that remarkable. It's just life. "Was that life?" Nietzsche asks at the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra – "Then once more!"

Will can't properly chew or swallow, so he gets fed through a gastric tube, or g-tube. There's quite a bit of terminology to learn here; Dawn was proud of me recently for using the phrase "rescue meds" in a Facebook post. I'm still trying to sort out the taxonomy of seizures. Anyway, his pills get crushed and suspended in liquid and delivered through the tube via a large syringe.

In another attempt at "seizure control," Will's on a ketogenic diet –  think Atkins –  and can't have the liquid drugs because most of them have sugar in them. This means crushing the pills in a mortar and pestle, pouring the powder into the syringe, putting the plunger in the syringe without the powder shooting out the other end (a rookie mistake, and yes, one that I've made), and then pulling water into the syringe to create the suspension.

This is then injected into the g-tube and followed by three more syringes full of water. This happens three times a day, each instance followed by two feedings an hour apart. In the morning, for instance, he gets his meds at 6, then feedings at 7 and 8. At night it varies, and on this particular night he needs one more feeding before we're done for the day.

His food, such as it is, is some sort of keto-friendly protein shake. Sometimes we just call it formula. It's supposed to be vanilla, but it ends up smelling like cake batter with a hint of Parmesan cheese. Like cake batter made with sourdough starter or something. Sickly sweet, with a hint of sour, and not in a good way.

I turn on Will's light and he's awake and alarmingly alert. I say "alarmingly" because a) he's supposed to be sleeping and has had some trouble with the whole day/night thing lately and b) because when he's alert (which is, on the whole, a good thing), feeding him becomes a matter of dodging fidgety limbs that seem precisely calibrated to knock your hand and splash his food everywhere.

It's like he waits for it. To feed him, we attach a plungerless syringe to the line and use it as a funnel for the food. He doesn't have much motor control, but his hands instinctively grasp, and he could conceivably grab the line and yank out his g-tube, which introduces a host of problems.

More likely, however, you'll have his arms contained with one of your arms, feeling clever with your other hand holding the syringe out of reach, and a knee will come out of nowhere in some kind of ninja move and douse you with formula.

Did I mention the sickly-sweet/sour smell?

I mean, theoretically, of course. It's not like this has actually happened to me or anything.

Ahem.

Tonight I'm onto him. I watch the arms and the legs and the feeding goes on without a hitch. I change his diaper, and give him a pad and a second diaper because he likes to gunnysack on us, saving it all up for a massive flood in the morning. We do a lot of laundry.

I situate him on his side, with his stuffed bear and a pillow between his knees and a blanket. "It's sleepy time," I say, hoping he'll take the hint and get some sleep. In the morning we'll start again with pills and the morning feedings, along with getting him ready for school. I'll have some papers to grade, and around 1:30 I'll get my route from Coke.

I check Facebook, and think about a snack but it's late and I'm not hungry. I brush my teeth, close the bedroom window and blinds, and get in bed.

"Did Willy get a blanket?"

"Of course," I say, and kiss her forehead. I'm not even sure she's really awake.

In about five minutes, I'm not either.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-35941895390206947702014-03-28T11:08:00.001-04:002014-03-28T11:10:52.889-04:00Black Coffee
Despite the sheer frequency with which I am "drinking coffee and grading papers" on Facebook, I'm not as much of a coffee snob as one might think. I do drink it black, as God intended (when asked how he liked his coffee, my grandfather would say "in a cup"), and I have a predilection for the darker roasts: I like my coffee to taste like it's been smoking Chesterfields waiting for me to get up.

But I'm not that much of a connoisseur; I grind my own but I'll buy Meijer brand beans, and sometimes I'll just pop a K-cup into the Keurig because, you know,convenience and stuff. So, sure: it's Sumatran, but it's a freaking K-cup. That's like feeling good about yourself for drinking champagne instead of beer and then popping open a bottle of André.

This didn't stop me from offering to review a new roast/blend by my Facebook friend and fellow blogger Brian Gumm. I forget how it happened. I think he was razzing me about the Keurig and whatnot and the smack talk ended up with him sending me some free beans to try with the promise that I'd do a writeup.

Apparently I need a sign that says "Will write for coffee."

Because I totally will. I'm just saying.

Anyway, Brian sent me two: one is sort of a black and tan concept blending light roasted Costa Rican beans with darker roasted Brazilian which he calls "Americano Blend," the other just a roast of some Tanzanian Peaberry. I try the Americano Blend first. Once ground, the blend is actually lighter than I expected -- almost blond -- and the aroma is rich with just a hint of spice.

[More disclaimers: I'm just using the filter option on my Keurig, whereas a true aficionado would probably do a French press or a pour-over, and I'm using a blade grinder when everyone knows you're supposed to use a burr grinder. What a Philistine.]

The resulting brew is true to the sight and smell of the grind. The first few sips are light, even a little watery for my taste. As it cools a bit, however, richer flavor notes come out. There's the brightness and spice one normally associates with Latin American blends, along with the smoothness of a good Colombian, with just a smidge of earthiness I didn't expect.

Overall, it's lighter than I usually like, though I would enjoy this as an after-dinner coffee, with or without dessert (something fruity -- I'd want something with more bite to go with chocolate or custard-type desserts). Those who prefer lighter roasts would probably find this one delightful.

Next is the Tanzanian. First, it seems to be aptly named. I mean, I don't know Tanzania from a hole in the ground, but I know what peas look like, and the coffee beans really are pea-sized and round. The grind is rich and earthy with some hints of dark chocolate.

So is the brew. Unlike the Americano Blend, this is my, er, cup of tea. It's not terribly smoky, but it is robust with some bite to it. Some brightness comes through, like an unexpected sheen on a otherwise matte finish. This is a roast that I would drink for breakfast, or to wash down several chocolate eclairs. Because chocolate eclairs.

Overall, this was some good coffee. The beans are fair trade and organic, which I like, and the roasts have a lot going for them. Brian is thinking about a Tanzanian/Sumatran blend. I'd love a chance to review that one.

[Sips Tanzanian]

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Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-67181220424526886192014-03-21T12:54:00.000-04:002014-03-21T12:54:49.811-04:00Drive My Car (A Reluctant Lenten Reflection)In a gesture toward what I like to call "involuntary poverty," I gave up my car for Lent -- or rather, my car gave me up. There's a joke being played on the atheist forced to observe in this way, even if there's no one there to play it.

Lent, as a season of fasting prior to Easter, has been part of liturgical life longer than Christmas has, and for some reason, even though I'm not a terribly devout observer of Lent (or terribly devout in general), I like that it exists.

Eugene Peterson, in Reversed Thunder, writes that one of the good things about church is that it goes on without us. Whether we pray or not, people are praying. Whether we're even there or not, people are gathered. Somehow this is comforting. I feel that way about Lent.

I'm not sure why this is. My friend Daniel, a Catholic convert, told me, "I think it is interesting to see the attraction Lent has for my non-religious, atheist, agnostic and even Jewish hipster friends. Of all the things within Christianity that is culturally accessible I wouldn't have chosen Lent to be it."

I wouldn't have chosen to give up my car, either, and I do hope I get it back before Easter. About a month ago (before Lent began, actually) it broke down on the way out of Ann Arbor -- I hadn't even made it out of the city -- and has been stranded there ever since awaiting an engine replacement.

I'm learning to appreciate, however, the way this forces me into a discipline I did not choose. I'm walking more places, obviously, and to be honest I'm enjoying the exercise: except for some rudimentary (and sporadic) calisthenics, I don't work out. A 20-minute walk can do wonders for the otherwise sedentary, and I've enjoyed quite a few 20-minute walks.

It also throws me upon the mercy and generosity of others. The illusion of independence is shattered and I am forced to both ask for help from others and allow them to help me without the pretense that I'm going to be able to meaningfully pay them back. There's a certain paradoxical charity in allowing others to be charitable without trying to reciprocate (cue Derridean reflections on the gift).

I see this more generally as well. I'm staying during the week with a younger couple, and I try to be the model houseguest. I'm quiet. I'm neat. I also have an almost obsessive-compulsive need to be helpful: I do the dishes, or fold the load of laundry I find in the dryer when I do mine.

I sometimes notice, however, that these efforts also have the potential to subtly rob my friends of their opportunity to offer me hospitality. I'm not saying I shouldn't do them, but it introduces an element of payback. It hints at a calculus. Sometimes I duck out of the house on foot before I can be offered a ride; there's just a whiff of passive-aggressiveness about it.

There's a lesson to be learned here, and a balance to be sought. Maybe I'll find it. Maybe, on the other side of my reluctant Lent, I'll have grown in some sort of discipline of receiving charity.

Or mabye I'll just have killer thighs. Either way.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-21563719384863469872014-03-09T09:40:00.000-04:002014-03-09T09:40:11.202-04:00Modern LoveThings change, sometimes rather quickly. Heraclitus and the Buddhists seem to agree that change is the only constant. That sounds about right. No less a college of poets than REO Speedwagon adjures us to roll with the changes. You got to.

I'm getting a divorce, and I've fallen in love with one of my best friends, Dawn (and by "fallen in love with" I mean "plan to marry" -- we're not messing around) and these are related in all of the ways one might imagine them to be.

This means an odd combination of things that are wonderful and free and healthy and things that are difficult and fraught and complicated. That's not what this post is about, but it's necessary information to make sense of the following.

I'm living in Ann Arbor on the weekends and teaching in Mt. Pleasant during the week. It's not ideal, of course, but it's the situation we're in and we're trying to make the best of it. Oddly enough, then, the weekends find us wondering where we might go to church.

This is odd not so much because we're doing things of which the church might not approve -- all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, right? -- but more because I'm a theologically interested atheist and she's a theologically curious agnostic. In fact, wrestling with faith has been a point of connection for us over the course of our friendship, and one of the many things over which we've bonded.

So why bother? It's a fair question. The answer might be that we're both too conditioned. It's possible. But we also both have a thing for being part of a tradition, even if it's as dissenters or heretics. It's still a way of being part of something larger than ourselves, something that precedes us and will go on after us.

It's a way of giving nod to a sense of mystery that doesn't really disappear in a cloud of atheist skepticism or agnostic ambivalence. It's not radical discipleship or robust orthodoxy, but at least we're talking about getting our asses to church.

Neither of us, however, has any kind of taste for church-shopping, and evangelical churches are out. No more "Protestant guitars." Dawn converted to Catholicism 20 years ago, and has yet to fully recover from her Assemblies of God upbringing (German District, she is fond of reminding me -- I didn't even know that was a thing). She's lapsed, somewhat, but the Mass still holds an attraction for her.

It does for me, too. I went through a Catholic phase back in the day and wrote a Mass for my master's thesis. I love Thomas Merton and Kathleen Norris (who isn't exactly Catholic, but is a Benedictine oblate, so there's that). I have a shelf full of Catholic books -- a prayer book, the Rule of Benedict, a bunch of contemplative stuff.

So we went to Mass last week. It was quite beautiful. It's been awhile for me -- I consider myself "pre-lapsed" -- and I keep forgetting that the response is "and with your spirit," not "and also with you," though I still prefer the latter. It was nice to sing hymns and damned if I didn't bust out a tenor part even though the hymns weren't printed in 4-part. Whatever.

The problem is, we'll both be divorced and thus Dawn will be barred from Communion, as am I because I'm not confirmed. I could go through RCIA but then the divorce thing would come up and maybe the atheism thing and I'm not sure which would be the bigger deal. And I can only imagine how much of a pain in the ass I'd be in one of those classes. I went to a Catholic grade school. Nuns hate me.

There's also the matter of our considerable disagreements with Catholic dogma -- women's ordination, LGBTQ inclusion, birth control, abortion, the nature of authority, the existence and/or nature of God -- you know, stuff like that.

The Episcopal church might be a better fit in those areas, and we've kicked that around, too. But again: Dawn's Catholic. She feels like a tradition already chose her, even if she also feels somewhat betrayed by it.

Plus, I was up until recently actively involved in an evangelical church that fared little better on those items, and there's a grand history of folks identifying as Catholic and having profound disagreements with the Church. There's being Catholic, and then there's being Catholic. One of the weirdly attractive things about the historical Christian traditions is that they give you something pretty solid to kick against.

So we're going back to Mass. We'll see what happens. I'll be the atheist singing tenor, holding hands with the agnostic receiving Communion.

(Today's title courtesy of David Bowie.)Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-18218184321367577272013-12-12T18:01:00.000-05:002013-12-14T06:59:22.341-05:00White Christmas
There's a great scene in Ken Burns's Jazz where the narrator reads a horrifically racist quote from Nick LaRocca of the Original Dixieland Jass Band and then the scene cuts to Wynton Marsalis, who just says "Well..." before a deliciously long pause. The timing is perfect, and Marsalis launches into some meaningful reflections on race in America. The "Well..." offers just a bit of humorous punctuation to ease the tension. I think of that scene sometimes.

Aisha Harris recently published a piece in Slate arguing that it's time Santa got a makeover.

Harris writes poignantly about the social dissonance of growing up African-American in a world where cultural icons like Santa are white, about the way in which a white Santa reinforces the normativity of whiteness. She suggests that we replace Santa, not with a black Santa, but with a penguin. I think, but can't prove, that she's being tongue-in-cheek here, indulging in a bit of mild Swiftian satire.

This got picked up by Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, who panned the idea in her segment The Kelly File. To be fair, Kelly and her panel praise Harris for the depth of the writing, and the way she brings the reader into her experience, but ultimately they can't abide Harris's modest proposal. Suggesting we replace Santa with a penguin is where Harris "goes off the rails," Kelly asserts, but the interesting and almost tragicomic bit is where Kelly insists -- more than once -- that "Santa just is white." Then she adds that he's white just like Jesus is white, which she says is a "verifiable fact."

Well...

Santa is white because white people have claimed domination of America since, I don't know, 1492 or thereabouts. The American Christmas holiday comes to us primarily from England (white) and Germany (also white), while Santa himself comes to us by way of the Dutch Sinterklass, who is white because Dutch people are -- you guessed it -- white. The Santa we know is white by dint of historical contingency. It's not that Santa "just is" white, as Kelly claims, but that Santa just happens to be white because the legend as we know it was made up by white people.

Santa may have ended up white, then, regardless of the source material. I had assumed that Saint Nicholas of Myra, on whose life the Santa Claus legend is loosely based, would not have exactly been white as we understand it because he was from what is now Turkey, but an astute reader (see below) suggests that given the demographics of that time and place, this ain't necessarily so, and corroborates this rejoinder with iconography. I'd still call it historical contingency, but the point is a good one.

Jesus, however, was from northern Israel, and his non-whiteness is a little more secure. It's not that Jesus is black, of course (except "ontologically black," a la James Cone, but that's different), but lets's just say he'd be a lot more likely than me to get profiled by the TSA. People who look like Jesus probably looked do not, in today's politically climate, enjoy the privilege of being considered white.

The fuss over Christmas also serves as a screen for religious and cultural skirmishes more generally. Festivus poles have gone up in several places, and in Oklahoma even Satanists and Hindus are seeking civic recognition as a quid pro quo for a monument of the Ten Commandments. This, predictably, has Christians -- or at least a certain kind of Christian -- in a tizzy over the loss of what they want to believe is a Christian America. Christian America is a cherished myth, right up there with a six-day creation and Obama's socialism.

Of particular interest is this chestnut from right-wing radio host Bryan Fischer. According to Fischer, "religion" for the Founding Fathers meant Christianity exclusively, ergo First Amendment protections apply only to Christians. It's an interesting invocation of authorial intent. Fischer supports this claim by pointing out that 99.8 percent of the population of the colonies were Christian. The the other .2 percent were Jewish (this, apparently, not being enough to warrant protection).

He's right that the overwhelming majority were Christian of some denominational stripe or another, but there were also, however scant, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and various kinds of occultists, some of whom maintained nominal membership in Christian churches to avoid persecution. And he's completely ignoring the religio-cultural sensibilities of the Africans enslaved and the indigenous peoples displaced by all those nice Christians.

Moreover, by the same logic, 100% of the Founding Fathers were white and male, and they only extended suffrage to white males, so we should probably limit First Amendment protections to white males as well (I am assuming Fischer would find this objectionable; I could be wrong). The point is that we have, throughout history, corrected for the shortsightedness of the Founders and extended rights and privileges to people groups not on their political radar.

This raises the question of the extent to which the U.S. can be considered Christian, and what that might mean. Let me suggest three ways in which we might consider a nation Christian. One is culturally, referring to the extent to which the dominant culture is at least nominally Christian in a way that has some bearing on national life. Another is legally, meaning the extent to which Christianity is established or sanctioned as part of the legal code. A third is what I'm going to call qualitatively, by which I mean the extent to which a nation can be said to be following Jesus.

This last one is tricky: to what extent can a nation be said to follow Jesus? Jesus doesn't make this easy insofar as he doesn't seem to have been all that interested in forging a nation. A people, sure, but a transterritorial, diasporic people, not a nation with sovereignty to protect. It's an admittedly Anabaptist sensibility, but I'm skeptical that a Christian nation, as such, can even exist.

But that's not fair. I should at least be sporting and offer some kind of criteria, so here goes: I'd take claims of Christian nationhood seriously, in this qualitative sense, if a nation can be said to love its enemies, care for the poor, and welcome the stranger. The first one is easy. The U.S. has never loved its enemies. This would simply have been impractical, and thus perhaps it is an unfair criterion, regardless of how clear Jesus might have been about the issue.

Let's back off the pacifism, then, and go with something more practical: submission to the governing authorities a la Romans 13. Interpretations vary here, too, of course, but for the sake of argument let's agree that this does not mean slavish obedience. It does seem to rule out armed insurrection, however, so even if we don't hold the Founders to Anabaptist standards of pacifism, the birth of the nation involved playing fast and loose with biblical standards.

There is a way around this: the leaders of the resistance were, in many cases, junior magistrates of a sort, beholden to the will of the people. If the people were being oppressed, then those junior magistrates had a duty of obedience to the higher political will to foment revolution. Neat as it is, this has several problems, not the least of which that it reflects a political sensibility that would not have been intelligible to Paul -- thus, by Fischer's logic, we can't count it because Paul couldn't have meant that.

Another counterargument is that desperate times call for desperate measures. The British certainly weren't following Jesus or Paul, so the logic goes, and the colonists were just making do in a situation far afield of Christian discipleship all around. The British were simply bad people, and God was clearly on the side of the Good Guys. Perhaps we could call the Lakota or the Cherokee as character witnesses.

We could hope that the U.S. fares better in aiding the poor, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Ask the sharecroppers, or the coal miners, or the railroad workers about our care for the poor -- including the working poor. Even a cursory look through labor history betrays our grim track record in this regard.

Welcoming the stranger, though -- here we shine, right? Ellis Island? The great melting pot? The land of opportunity? "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free." Sadly, history betrays us yet again. The U.S. has been, in general, fairly welcoming of the same -- white Europeans, but especially the Anglo-Saxon variety -- but less so of those who are different. This includes the more obvious, such as the persecution of Asian immigrants on the West Coast and the "nativist" reactions against Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, but also counterintuitive oddities like the racist treatment of the Irish (and their equally racist journey to mainstream inclusion).

Our legislative commitment to helping the poor varies, as does immigration policy. The nation in general, however, has not been a friendly place to the poor or the stranger. To the extent that, legislatively, we are getting worse on these issues, drifting away from the teachings of Christ, those efforts are being spearheaded by people who claim to be Christian. If the U.S. is not the Christian nation it once was, blame the Christians. But to the extent that we're willing to accept my qualitative criteria -- and I realize we could debate them -- the U.S. is not and has never been a Christian nation.

Whether or not the U.S. is legally Christian should be more straightforward: establishment was explicitly rejected. Jefferson made his own intentions clear in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, a letter which includes the famous reference to "a wall of separation between church and state." This language did not make it into the Constitution -- but neither did God. The point is that Jefferson, who gave us the language of "endowed by their Creator," invoking "Nature and Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence, was clearly anti-establishment, a sentiment shared by enough of his confreres that it did make it into the Constitution.

It is primarily culturally that the U.S. can be said to be Christian, and here people like Fischer have a point. We observe Christian holidays. We take oaths on Bibles. We have a National Cathedral. The American civic religion is parasitic on Christianity. We could argue that they're not the same thing (the qualitative argument) or point out that this is de facto and not de jure (the establishment argument), but it's there. What's more, a case can be made that this bleeds into the legal: these can't completely be separated.

Here historical contingency raises its deconstructive head again. Of course colonists were predominantly Christian: they were from Europe, home to the rise (and fall) of Christendom. Only among the intelligensia was atheism even on the cognitive map. For many of the Founders (and certainly their constituents) it was literally unthinkable. Other religions were considered "heathen" and "uncivilized."

Fischer wants to sacralize their ethnocentrism as a hermeneutical principle. That the Founders would couch their political musings in a (broadly) shared metaphysics is unremarkable. It does not follow that they were thereby inscribing that metaphysics into the social code.

What defenders of "Christian America" don't seem to realize is that irrespective of their personal pieties, which varied considerably, the Founding Fathers collectively created the most secular nation imaginable at the time, the most secular nation ever to exist up to that point. They did this despite the broadly Christian milieu in which they were operating, and they did it quite deliberately.

Nevertheless, if Fischer and his ilk are correct that America is at least culturally Christian in the way I'm describing, they're also right that our cultural Christian identity is waning, especially as the courts sort out the implications of recognizing this heritage while at the same time upholding disestablishment.

This is not, however, just about separation of church and state. As Richard Beck argues,

What is being "lost" in our nation isn't Christianity but white hegemony. The white majority of America is declining. America is becoming more diverse and pluralistic. And retailers, well attuned to the demographic shifts in their customer base--it is their lifeblood after all--shift to reflect the times. "Happy Holidays" is what you say when a religiously and ethnically diverse population is standing in your checkout line. It's simply good business sense.

The "Christian" culture that informs the American social imagination is largely WASP culture -- if a bit softer on the 'P' these days. The lament over Christmas is, consciously or not, a lament over the loss of cultural dominance.

And that's why Jesus is white.
Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-78770997006045289722013-12-02T06:08:00.000-05:002013-12-02T11:19:45.792-05:00Santa Claus Is Coming to TownIt is fashionable, this time of year, to bitch and moan that Christmas is not what it used to be, or what it is supposed to be, or has become in one way or another sullied and denigrated.

The jeremiads range from complaints that Christmas is too commercial and consumer-oriented to hand-wringing over the excision of explicitly Christian content from our public celebrations of the season.

Some even take exception to the use of "X-mas," complaining that Christ has been "X-ed out" of Christmas -- apparently unaware that the use of the Greek chi, or X, has been a shorthand for Christ in the Christian tradition since long before Macy's had a Santa Claus. One way or another, however, we are barraged with diatribes berating us for forgetting the "reason for the season."

The real reason for the season, however, is that it's so damn dark. The Christian holiday is piggybacked onto a melange of pagan celebrations, most of them having something to do with the winter solstice. Just on the

other side of this longest night the sun slowly begins to reclaim its authority over the sky and our pagan ancestors found cause to celebrate.

For some this becomes just more evidence of the "war on Christmas," and there are always those encouraging us to forgo trees, or the use of "yuletide," or Santa, because these accoutrements are tainted by their pagan lineage.

The irony here is that the birth narratives themselves suggest construction out of the raw material of pagan mythologies. That and some bad translating: in a key prophecy in Isaiah, the Greek Septuagint uses the word for "virgin" to translate a Hebrew word meaning "young woman." This is not linguistically untenable in a world where a young woman could reasonably be assumed to be virginal, but the original context probably refers to the prophet's wife, who -- without prying too much into the prophetic personal life -- was probably not a virgin.

Jesus doesn't even get born until later in the tradition. For Paul, Jesus seems to have been "declared the Son of God by the power of his resurrection" (Rom 1:4). The writer of Hebrews evinces a similar perspective. Mark's Gospel has Jesus declared the Son of God at his baptism, 'Son of God' being a royal or messianic designation.

Only Luke and Matthew give us (somewhat conflicting) birth stories. John is bullish on pre-existence and incarnation but is silent about the actual birth. John's take on "only begotten" seems far more cosmic, and much less literal, than parthogenesis.

A cruder version of divine conception lay at the heart of Rome's etiology; mythical founders Remus and Romulus were the semidivine twin sons of a woman raped by Mars. The god Mithra was born in a cave at the winter solstice, attended by shepherds (which might explain a few things) but he was actually birthed from a rock, which seems a bit mundane (pun intended). As a mythological trope, virgin birth was not unheard of, and ancient kings -- who were often also gods -- were often assigned some kind of miraculous birth appropriate to figures of great importance.

The details are contested, of course; some take all such references to be mere copycats. The early church fathers, for whom such "signs and wonders" were exceptional but not, strictly speaking, impossible, regarded the similarities as Satanic counterfeits. The more modern C.S. Lewis cleverly argued that in Jesus, God made these mythological elements come literally true so that Christians could have bragging rights. My virgin-born savior can beat up your virgin-born savior.

The common Biblical trope for special nativities is to have a child born to a barren woman, like Hannah or Rachel, or to a woman beyond childbearing years, like Sarah -- but Luke used that one with John the Baptist, so he had to dig deeper into the collective unconscious to get Jesus into the world in something beyond the usual way.

Suffice it to say that there's a strong hint of syncretism here, and those who would excise all things pagan from our midwinter celebrations might find themselves going all Thomas Jefferson on the Biblical text itself. There is no pristine, unadulterated Christmas. If anyone should be grousing about having their holiday hijacked, it's the pagans.

The consumerism angle has some teeth to it. I am not a fan of capitalism. Contrary to the famous speech by Michael Douglas's character in Wall Street, greed is not good. It does not "work." It might be harnessed for brief moments of corporate glory but it is a lousy long-term strategy and it will destroy us. The invisible hand is giving us the finger right about now. The market is not a benevolent god.

As strongly as I feel about this, as much as I believe that if a sustainable future exists, it is a post-capitalist future, this is not a problem with Christmas. Granted, there are ways in which the Christmas buying season might put a finer point on things, laying our contradictions bare (and nobody gets trampled in a Wal-Mart on, say, St. Patrick's Day), but the problems of capitalism are not limited to Christmas, nor is the commercialization of Christmas terribly new. Christmas, like truth, was never what it used to be.

So, if we filter out those elements that are not specific to Christmas, and the grumblings of those who think the entire world should validate their belief system, what are we left with?

In the midst of the darkest time of year, we string lights and decorate with shiny things. We pay attention to children. We give each other gifts. We think about the poor and the less fortunate, and while it would be better to do this all year, at least we do it. We throw more parties, and visit more relatives. We wish each other well on a regular basis.

We invoke something called "Christmas spirit" as an excuse to momentarily shed our cynicism and look beyond our selfishness. We sing songs, and show a higher tolerance for jazz than at any other time of the year. We make cookies and drink eggnog. We make snow angels and write Christmas cards. We go to church and light candles and even the most skeptical of us are tempted to strain for a glimpse of the numinous.

Christmas makes it fashionable to talk about things like peace and love without getting strange looks. Christmas gives us the gumption to share our feelings with that person we've been admiring all year, or the fortitude to extend grace to that pain-in-the-ass down the hall.

Christmas, for all of its saccharine sentimentality, for all of its sappy sitcom send-ups of A Christmas Carol, for all of its tendency to degenerate into an ideological battleground, encourages good things in us. Does it "work"? I don't know about that.

But it beats the hell out of greed.Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-30554481975609772872013-11-24T08:28:00.000-05:002013-11-24T11:11:54.188-05:0099 ProblemsDoritos is running a "Crash the Superbowl" ad contest soliciting fan-made commercials. One entry is from Rebel Pilgrim Films, a faith-based company out of Cincinnati founded by part-time Vineyard pastor Joe Boyd.

"Rebel Pilgrim" is the way Boyd likes to think of Jesus, and the group's goal is to "tell stories that spark hope and action" according to their Facebook page, and create films that are "soft, thoughtful, and anything but evangelical," as described in a local newscast.

In their contest entry, titled "Silence is Golden," the big game is under auditory siege by the lone woman present, who is loudly and vacuously chatting on her cellphone while her hapless boyfriend gestures in resignation. She cattily asks one of the guys (the video's description identifies him as Ben) to "turn this down" because it is interrupting her phone call, which of course is interrupting the game.

The boyfriend, Chris, tosses our beleaguered protagonist a football, which miraculously turns into nacho cheesy tortilla goodness. Somehow Ben has been bestowed with the magical power of nachification.

This gives him an idea. As the Annoying Girlfriend (neither she nor their African American compatriot have names) chatters on -- "Shut up. No, you shut up. Shut. Up!" in the sing-song cadence and glottal-stop t's of a Valley Girl -- Ben touches her cellphone and it, too, becomes snack food. Ben has the Midas touch of game-day munchies.

"You freak!" says the Annoying Girlfriend, and turns to her emasculated beau for help: "Chris! Do something!" Chris try to shrink into the couch as the ever-resourceful Ben shooshes Annoying Girlfriend by putting his nacho cheesy finger to her lips, and -- cut shot to the Doritos logo and sound clip.

When we return to the scene, Annoying Girlfriend, is, predictably, nachified, the consumer culture equivalent of Lot's wife -- and thus silent. Ben is apologetic: "Sorry, dude," he says to Chris, who nonchalantly plucks off part of her chip-shaped earring, proclaiming "it's cool" as he munches away.

The blatant dudebro-ism of the commercial is low-hanging fruit. The sports-loving guys just wanna have fun, and the hectoring, chattering woman -- a well-worn TV trope -- is getting in the way. She doesn't get it. She is a threat to the patriarchal order, and a threat to masculinity itself. She is an object of both desire and fear, a bitchy vagina dentata with amazing cleavage.

Chris appears to be henpecked (there are cruder ways to put this) and the men are, of themselves, helpless to do anything. Thus they are graced with miraculous help, which comes in the form not just of silencing the Annoying Girlfriend, silencing the Other, but making her the perfect object of consumption. Literally. The objectification is complete: she's not just making them sandwiches, she is the sandwich. The patriarchal order is restored.

What is shocking is not that this exists -- sports advertising is not generally characterized by a progressive view of gender issues -- but that what appear to be otherwise well-meaning, intelligent folk could make this and apparently have no idea how egregiously sexist it is. No doubt they offer it all in good fun, ha ha, high fives all around, nothing to see here.

But the video is fraught with sexist stereotypes and tainted with a misogynistic ideology, however unintentional it might be. Evangelicalism's patriarchy is showing yet again. Rebel Pilgrim, for whatever else they might offer of artistic or intellectual merit, are in this case like the frat boys who don't understand that their blackface Halloween costumes are racist.

So, no: this is neither soft nor thoughtful. It's crass, disturbing, and stupid. Surely Jesus, that Rebel Pilgrim, deserves better.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-14941401289605348402013-11-21T10:08:00.000-05:002013-12-14T07:10:39.069-05:00She's GoneMy tenth grade girlfriend is the only one who ever broke up with me. I was devastated, or at least as devastated as a kid can be at that age of invincibility. I tried various ploys to hang on but she was done. We remained friends and eventually spent part of our senior year flirting a bit but never actually got back together.

In the meantime, I had probably dozens of love interests, some of whom were more or less official girlfriends and all of whom I summarily dumped once I got bored, which was anywhere from two weeks to two months.

This is actually part of a larger pattern. My mental health profile includes a "tendency toward narcissism" -- that's what it says in my file. I meet just enough of the criteria in the DSM for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) but I'm too self-aware (which sounds like the sort of thing a narcissist would say, but bear with me) to actually be diagnosed with it.

People with full-blown NPD aren't able to see the game they're so masterfully playing. Ultimately, it makes them even better at it. I tend to play the game more consciously, though I haven't always been aware of its contours or consequences. The fact that I can be made aware of them, and am thus amenable to treatment, is I why have a "tendency toward" narcissism but not NPD. I have issues, but I'm not a psychopath.

At any rate, part of the narcissistic profile is that we have a pathologically amplified fear of loss, which we stave off by giving people bit parts in our narcissistic dramas rather than becoming truly vulnerable. And we pre-emptively write people out of that script before they get the chance to leave us. We're the classic "You can't fire me -- I quit!" types.

Thus, thanks to a combination of narcissistic manipulation and dumb luck, I've never faced significant loss. The scant few people close enough to hurt me have neither died nor denied me. That could change tomorrow -- or in the next five minutes -- but that's where I'm at right now.

As such, then, I've only seen the grief process secondhand, though I'm enough of an armchair psychologist to be fascinated by it. Someone once introduced me to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages, which I remember as DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

The stages don't necessarily manifest in order nor are they as discretely periodic as the list makes it seem. People seem to go through mini-versions of the whole cycle within the larger arc. There's a fractal quality to it, and of course it's the structure that I would train on, me being me and all.

I bring this up because I've been pondering the extent to which my wrestling with belief and unbelief over the past dozen or so years might be characterized by some variation on the grief process. I have been mourning my loss of faith, or the loss of a particular kind of faith, all this time. I hedge here a bit because I don't want to presume that atheism is some sort of norm or baseline, and yet I can't completely avoid that, since this is my story.

To wit, I've had scads of denial. This isn't a loss of faith, I'd tell myself; it's a transition to a different kind of faith. I'm not an atheist but rather an apophatic mystic. This is not so much a crisis of belief as a journey through the Dark Night of the Soul. And so on. Sometimes the denial was more stark: I didn't believe but carried on nonetheless, like Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno.

I've certainly been angry: raging against the church, against Christian hypocrisy in its manifold forms, against God. This gets an assist from denial because of course God has to be around so I can be pissed off at him. I've been frustrated -- no, "angry" really is the right word -- at the way my life has trudged along in the outward forms of faith while inside I've harbored more than just nagging doubts. I've shaken my head, and my fist, at the irony of being so good at church work and so bad at belief.

Bargaining is the big one. I am, apparently, a first-rate bargainer. If I don't believe in God, but still follow Jesus, I can haz faith? It seems very close, and I do think there's something to it. I've latched onto Jesus's parable of two brothers, one of whom agrees to go work in the field and never shows up, and the other who putatively refuses but goes anyway. I kept trying to narrate myself as the latter.

Surely it's better for people who have trouble signing the statement of faith to continue to do the work of the Lord than it is for millions of Christians to give intellectual assent to essential doctrines but reject what St. Benedict called a "conversion of manners." Hell, even the book of James is on board with this. No wonder Luther hated it.

Still, as true as that might be it's ultimately bargaining. James brooked no such dualism, and neither did Benedict. This is not a choice between lazy belief and paradoxically pious unbelief but a call to integrated faith: belief fleshed out -- incarnated, if you will -- in a life of robust discipleship.

Trying to get by with the latter divorced from the former is, it seems, a fool's gambit. I don't think I can make it work. I wanted it to work because I wanted it to mean that belief really was there after all, just masked or hidden in some way [see: Denial].

Depression and I go way back. I'm not sure it's a stage so much as background noise, a terminate-but-stay-resident program. Nevertheless, even the most inscrutable depression has triggers, and the vicissitudes of faith have certainly been triggers for me. I'm much healthier and happier at a secular university than I was at a Christian college.

More to the point, I have responded -- and have been responding -- to a loss of faith, a loss of God, with depression. I've shut down, closed up, retreated within myself. Some of it almost seems tied to bargaining: if I can just dig deep enough, go far enough inside, maybe there's something there I can call faith, something just enough to justify a life that might justify hanging on to the trappings of belief. It's a little like the country song: "If I could cry a little harder / And get a little less sleep at night / If I had two dozen roses would you change your mind?"

And some of it is just plain old grey, flat depression. I'm tired. Soul-tired. Bone-tired. Existentially tired. I am, if you'll pardon the salty language, all out of fucks to give. I don't hate religion. I'm not smarter than faith. I'm not better than those who are deeply invested in their religious traditions in a way that I can never be. But I'm tired of trying to figure out how to have a dog in the hunt. It's wearying. I'm done.

"Truth be told," Douglas Coupland has one of his characters say in Miss Wyoming,

the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

I'm reaching that point in the depression cycle where I look up and see the sun as if it had gone missing for weeks, and realize that I actually feel sort of okay today. That person, the one who feels okay, doesn't believe in God. That doesn't need to mean anything to anyone else, but it's huge for me. I can't tell you what your "clear and quiet mind" is supposed to look like. Mine, apparently, is an atheist. I regret nothing.

I don't want to trivialize grief by comparing the loss of a loved one to a loss of faith or the loss of a tenth grade girlfriend. But just as I reached out to try to hold onto that girlfriend when she broke things off, often in hilariously dysfunctional ways, I've tried to hold on to faith. It's time to let go.
Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-29211273091112404262013-11-14T12:37:00.000-05:002014-02-03T08:35:45.651-05:00Always a WomanWhile I can't consider myself a superfan, I like Joss Whedon. Firefly is one of my favorite shows. I thought what he did with The Avengers -- hitting a broad audience rather than just a Whedon fanbase, for instance, or handling an ensemble cast without letting Robert Downey, Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson eclipse the less experienced (or at least less famous) cast members -- was brilliant, or at least very, very smart. I love the way he's an atheist but still insists on creating wonderfully enchanted worldscapes for his characters to inhabit.

I also like the name he's made for himself as a champion of women's rights. He was once asked why he wrote such "strong female characters," to which he retorted, "Because you're still asking me that question." That is, in the memetic hyperbole of our times, the best response ever.

It's because of this track record that Whedon was recently invited to speak at an Equality Now dinner, where he delivered a clever and moving screed about the word "feminist." To be sure, his critique is trenchant. He doesn't like the sound of the word, particularly the ending, but he also doesn't like the meaning of "ist." "You can't be born an '-ist,'" he says, and then comes to an interesting conclusion:

So "feminist" includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state. That we don't emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that's imposed on us. That we are indoctrinated with it, that it's an agenda.
Again, there's some power here. Whedon invokes the word "racist," which denotes something that most people would like to believe they are past whereas "feminist" invites the subject to identify or not, or perhaps even challenges the subject to be worthy of the appellation. The word functions differently, and this makes it possible for otherwise sympathetic people to distance themselves not just from the word "feminist," but also from a meaning that Whedon rightly argues should be unremarkable.

The strength in Whedon's position lies in his lament that "feminist" functions in a way so as to suggest that believing in and/or advocating for equality is not normative when it should be. He riffs on "racist" for a bit, remarking that there's no strong equivalent for gender -- "sexist" doesn't do the trick for him, nor does "misogynist," so he tentatively suggests "genderist" but doesn't think it will stick. He's right about that.

"Racist" suggests something that almost no one wants to be, something that is ostensibly behind us in a way that gender inequality is not, as evidenced by our ambivalence about the word "feminist." We could turn the tables here, however: perhaps the rhetorical effectiveness of the word "racist" makes it too easy to think of it as something we're not in a world that is still structured by systemic racism.

What Whedon circles but never quite lands on, I don't think, is that whereas "feminist" would seem to be what one is when one is not a sexist or a misogynist (or, as Whedon would have it, a genderist), there's no concomitant word for "not a racist." Someone who is not a racist is simply a normal, decent human being.

Some otherwise normal, decent human beings who don't seem to be sexist (etc.) nevertheless feel compelled to point out that this does not make them feminists, even though "feminist," for Whedon, means not being sexist or patriarchal or genderist. "There's no fuzzy middle ground" between feminism and misogyny, he argues: "Either you believe women are people or you don't."

I like the way he throws down the gauntlet here -- in the video, this comment gets considerable applause -- but I'm a bit troubled by the way that Whedon can so cavalierly hate on the word "feminist." I get it. It's clever. It makes a point. But ultimately people are not going to latch onto "genderist" (and I'm not convinced that "sexist" is as facile as Whedon thinks, though there are other reasons to critique it), nor are we finished with the word "feminist." To be fair, I don't think that's exactly what he's calling for anyway.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't identify as a feminist, but this is not because I have problems with the word or anything it connotes. Rather, I feel that others are in a better position to determine if anything I'm doing qualifies as feminist, or to what extent that matters. What I do or do not call myself, however, does not change the fact that "feminist" describes a mode of discourse and a body of literature that are very, very important. It's a word that does real work. [Update: I'm a feminist. I'll still leave it to others to decide if I'm a good one or not.]

What Whedon fails to grasp is that "believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people" actually isn't our natural state because there is no "natural state." There's no default setting. Whedon's humanism is showing here. And that's just it -- I don't think he has a problem with "humanist" or "atheist" because I'm pretty sure he identifies as both of those.

It's interesting, then, that he's willing to presume the tenets of feminism to be normative in ways that maybe he's not willing to say of humanism or atheism (he even lists the latter specifically as something we must be taught), but his lament about "feminist" ignores the ways in which we might need something constructive like feminism to counter our formation in gendered discourse, our training in gendered ways of seeing the world, our indoctrination into gendered ways of understanding what it means to be human.

Whedon's address at the "Make Equality Reality" event is funny and insightful -- delightful, even -- but Whedon makes the tragic mistake of beginning with "feminist" (both the word and its meaning) as a problem instead of a good idea.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-58484721114025490962013-11-05T17:57:00.001-05:002013-11-07T10:09:15.606-05:00Here I Go AgainIn the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, there's something called the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. When our heroes (such as they are) finally get there in the second book (called, conveniently, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe), it turns out that the end in question is not the spatial end of the universe -- some remote edge of the known plane of existence -- but its chronological end. The "end of the world as we know it" is part of the evening's entertainment.

This works, however impossibly, because the restaurant is suspended in some kind of temporal bubble, and time turbines shift it back over the brink after each meal to reset. Night after night (if that is meaningful in this context) the end plays itself out and then the process starts over again.

I feel like that sometimes.

The end, in my case, is not that of the world but of faith. My faith. I've been there before, and I'll be there again. I think I'm there now. I live on what appears to be a knife-edge between being a postsecular atheist interested in theology and a poststructuralist Christian struggling with belief. I haven't ruled out the possibility that they're the same thing. "Christian atheism" exists, but even that sounds tenuous and weird.

By now it's an old story: I reach the end of my tether, release the tension by letting go of the last shreds of belief, and then realize I can't sustain that and get reeled back over the brink, if just barely. It can be exhausting.

It's not that I'm ever a metaphysical theist on one hand or a gross materialist on the other. In a certain sense, I've been an atheist since at least 2001 and a Christian that entire time. What changes is the extent to which I'm willing to make a case for myself as a disciple of Jesus over against a nominal Christian who can't escape the sociocultural matrix of church life.

The Christianity I've been interested in is the "radical discipleship," rooted in pacifism, which informs neo-anabaptism and Christian anarchism. If one really wants to follow Jesus, one must wrestle with just how demanding this Jesus character is. He can be, and often is, construed as something much tamer -- but that sort of Christianity is not compelling to me.

Within this variant of Christian theology, it's a bit of a truism that there is "no peace without eschatology." In other words, Christian pacifism takes the long view, and the vindication of the martyrs is in some way operative in most constructions. I explain it better, or at least at greater length, here.

But I have no eschatology. Not a real one. There may be an end of the universe, to be sure, but I don't believe in any kind of divine wrap-up. There's not, in my reckoning, any final balancing of scales. Everybody dies.

My friend John Nugent calls this "a story without a future." I see what he did there. That doesn't mean that pacifism as such is unavailable to me, but it does mean I have a hard time constructing it as a specifically Christian pacifism.

The call of Christ can't be reduced to pacifism, however. Actually, in some ways pacifism is easy for me, insofar as I don't often get the opportunity to not  be a pacifist. I'm too old to be a viable candidate for military service or even law enforcement, and I'm not interested in either of those things.

I have no vendetta to pursue, no deaths to avenge, no enemies to dispatch. I'm a horrible fighter and have no interest in guns. Pacifism, however useful it might be as a point of critique, isn't likely to demand much of me. It's easy to like.

I'm not prepared, however, to sell my goods and give the proceeds to the poor, or to be a part of a community where goods are held in common. Extreme? No more so than loving one's enemies. If I'm going to take a hard stand on one, I'm not sure by what coherent exegetical principle I get to go soft on the other. Of course there are ways out of this, too, and that's fine -- but again, it's not as interesting to me.

And that's just it: the kind of Christianity that I find intellectually interesting and theologically defensible is also one I'm not really willing to sign up for. I'll champion the bits I like, but I'm not up for the whole package. I had already reduced things with my rejection of metaphysics, such that the socioethical dimension was all I had left. Turns out I can't go for all of that, either. Oops. I fail at Jesus.

And there's more than that, all far more autobiographical mush than intellectual rigor. Some of it has less to do with what radical discipleship looks like than it does with where evangelicalism is in the 21st century. I'm not convinced that my particular tradition, the Church of Christ, needed to become as evangelical as it has, but it has. It's an interesting milieu in which to be a closet atheist.

Can I be honest? I don't care if Paul wasn't the poster boy for LGTBQ inclusion. I just don't care. There are people doing good work connecting the theological dots to work through this, and I've tried my hand at it, but the truth is my position isn't falsifiable; I'm not willing to accept conditions under which I would have to conclude that sexually active LGBTQ persons cannot be disciples of Jesus.

I don't care about the brilliant answer you have the sums things up neatly as if none of us have ever thought about that before. Sorry. I don't. I don't care what the government does, which is easy for me to say since my marriage already has the luxury of state recognition, even state sponsorship. I don't care what your church does. I care a little bit about what my church does, but we're still struggling with patriarchy, and I'm tired of that battle, too.

Truth is, I'm really not interested in getting into my gay friends' business, at least not about being gay or expressing that with a partner. I don't see how I get a say in the matter. Full stop.

I know how to play the hermeneutical language-game, of course, but I don't have a doctrine of revelation to maintain. Frankly, the political musings of a Pharisee-turned-apocalyptic prophet don't seem like a great place to go for guidance about same-sex marriage and related issues in our day, even if he was otherwise remarkably insightful. It's really no more significant than the way Russell Brand can say interesting things politically and still be a raging sexist.

None of these are great reasons possessed of trenchant analysis for choosing some path over another. It's just where my head's been at lately. Who knows where I'll be later.

Probably ordering waffles at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.Ted Troxellhttps://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-28259324626869533402013-10-28T07:30:00.000-04:002014-04-01T14:56:46.589-04:00Happiness Is a Warm GunI've been trying to understand America's gun culture, and the rhetoric pathologically focused on surrounding guns and the use of guns in American discourse. I'm not sure I've come up with any real answers: to a large extent I just don't get it. Simply put, there's a lot of really shrill, quasi-hysterical discourse about guns going on -- and of course you thought I was talking about the other side (whatever that might be for you).

I don't claim to know who should own guns, who shouldn't own guns, or what kind of guns they should or shouldn't own. My liberal friends will point to numerous countries that have stricter gun laws and a lower rate of violent crime. My conservative friends will point to Chicago, which has strict gun laws and a high incidence of violent crime, and/or to some mythical town in Florida (or was it Texas -- isn't it always Texas?) in which everyone is armed and thus afraid to do anything to anyone else. Mutual Assured Destruction on the local scale.

Not to put off the liberals, but I'm concerned that calls for greater restriction fail to take into account differences in culture as well as the sheer number of guns already in circulation in the United States. It's possible that countries in which a correlation between strict gun laws and low gun violence obtains are different enough to make apples to apples comparisons problematic. Gun restrictions that failed to yield a decrease in gun violence would only serve as ammunition [see what I did there?] for the gun lobby. I'm not sure they need encouragement.

And not put off my conservative friends, but let me say this: I have no particular reverence for the Second Amendment or even the Constitution itself, though I recognize these as the law of the land and pay heed to their capitalization as proper nouns. If there are reasons to affirm sensible gun ownership, there are better ones than religiously repeating the musings of disaffected 17th-century colonists high on the aftermath of armed insurrection.

[Oh, the anarchy!]

But relax, conservatives. I have no agenda for regulating gun ownership and no means to enforce one if I did. To be clear: I don't want your guns. I don't want to take away your guns. I'm not lobbying the government to take away your guns. I don't give a crap about your guns. In fact, I'm starting to think all this gun-talk is some kind of overcompensation. It seems more than a little fetishistic to me.

Despite my caveat above, I'm fairly comfortable suggesting that sensible gun laws fall somewhere between a mandatory arming of the citizenry (which I've heard suggested) and their unilateral disarmament (which seems to be unrealistically feared). The rest is just details. But both sides really do seem focused on the guns themselves in a bizarre way.

This is perhaps not surprising given the attention guns get in popular media. Guns in television and film seem uniquely, even uncannily, useful tools -- for persuasion, for opening locks, for shooting bits of rope or chain that are holding up heavy things, for dispatching bad guys (often with single shots) and other unrealistic things. We see people grappling fatefully for guns that have fallen to the ground, and we wince when the protagonist's gun gets knocked away. The Gun looms large in the American imagination.

It seems almost banal to point that the gun is also curiously impersonal compared to hand-to-hand combat or swordplay. It is effective at a distance. I don't have to be close to you or touch you for the gun to work. I can attack without being (quite as) vulnerable or open. Moreover, guns do seem to be uniquely lethal, with more potential for collateral damage -- all of which is to say that the fixation on guns, characteristic of both sides, does seem explicable in some ways, if not entirely justified.

Surely there's also, at the risk of being crude, some kind of phallic dynamic here as well: the barrel, the explosive discharge, the desire for penetration (without which the gun is not effective). The sheer, well, potency of the gun and what it is expected to do. I'm collapsing a lot here, but I'm wondering if there isn't a good bit of the rest of the culture war between left and right in America that gets projected onto the gun debate.

There's a danger to the rhetoric I'm using by referring to both sides in third person, a danger of appearing to be above the fray, of discursively situating myself on some higher moral, ethical, or political ground. I make no such claim. I am not in possession of some third perspective, and the deconstructive move of identifying both sides as fixated on guns qua guns is a mild one at best.

The truth is I don't know how to get my bearings in the conversation. I don't know how to run a country and I'm skeptical of the entire enterprise. I have no investment in gun culture, and find it perplexing. I don't see the problem with sensible gun ownership, and I don't see how restricting certain kinds of guns is an egregious abrogation of rights, whether it turns out to be all that helpful or not.

What I really find interesting, however, as well as a bit troubling, is the subtext of what I sometimes hear from my gun-totin' conservative friends, which is this: they seem to be anticipating some decisive moment when they'll need their guns. It's like a kind of eschatological fantasy that ties into the rest of their politics. Obama is some uniquely dictatorial martinet hell-bent on bringing about an apocalyptic scenario in which the Good Guys will be the ones with gun racks on their pickups and country music on their radios. The Confederate flags, I'm guessing, will be optional.

I'm not just poking fun; they're serious about this. And if it's not Obama, it will be Hillary. Until it's not, and then it will be the next Democrat. Lather, rinse, repeat. And I'm not even talking about those who think the Trilateral Commission or the Illuminati or some other (Catholic? Jewish? Intellectual elite?) cabal is masterminding the whole thing. Otherwise normal, straightforward-thinking conservatives talk like some grand opportunity for armed heroism is just around the corner.

You don't buy a gun unless you think there's a chance you'll need to use it and you don't defend the Second Amendment as a sacred text unless you think there's going to come a time when a "well-regulated militia" (or a bunch of good ole' boys with guns and pickups, which I don't think is the same thing) will be just the answer to the country's problems -- and gosh, wouldn't it be kind of neat if that day came? In other words, on some level they seem to want this to happen. That's the sense I get.

It's a similar logic to the action movie or disaster movie (and these obviously overlap). In the quasi-apocalyptic scenario of a disaster or an invasion by an unprecedented malevolent force, the bric-a-bric of democratic bureaucracy falls away and the strong take center stage. The efficacy of violence is the order of the day, and those who wield it most effectively are seen as leaders. The angst of our postmodern condition gets swept away in the purpose-driven teleology of the battlefield.

The liberal fixation on doing something about the guns is the mirror side of this totemic construction, but its source is the anxiety over the loss of agency endemic to late capitalism. We yearn for something to interrupt the ennui of what Robert Scholes calls "the bureaucratized, commodified world that is our present environment." We pine for a moral landscape in which the lines are more clearly drawn and the course of action is difficult but easily defined.

We believe, intuitively, that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-49577631589247376582013-10-09T08:29:00.000-04:002013-10-09T13:44:24.250-04:00Baby I'm Amazed
I worked with a leader who praised people by saying "Thanks for all you do." On one hand, this is better than never being thanked or acknowledged or appreciated, but on the other hand it seems dishearteningly impersonal, like a form letter or an automated response. And even those are often more specific.

"Thanks for all you do" is generic. It is general. It covers all the bases. It doesn't require much thought or any attention to the specifics of a person's contribution. "All that stuff you did that I can't be bothered to remember? Yeah, thanks for that."

I have a similar but more pointed reaction to a video that's making the social media rounds and even got

used to introduce a women's Bible study at my church. In it, an attractive young man address an empty auditorium and says things like "You are beautiful. You are smart. You are funny. You are unique." And so forth. It is intended to be encouraging and on that level it is well-meaning and even touching.

It seems to be especially touching to evangelical women (and evangelical men with daughters, judging by my Facebook feed). Perhaps this is due to the vague theological content, but that content comes toward the end of the three-minute video, and there's nothing about the title of the video or anything in the opening frames that suggests that this is a cultural artifact of evangelicalism as such, which leads me to believe that the theology is not the draw or even all that significant.

What seems to be the video's affective impact is that women -- particularly young women, whom the video assures are worth more than "the percentage at the top of your math test" (because, you know, math is hard) -- are being praised in rather generic terms by a blandly attractive white man. To me, it could only be more clichéd if he were Ryan Gosling and the script began, "Hey girl..."

There would still be plenty to critique if the actor were someone else. Still, one wonders if the video would have made quite the same splash if the message came from a man of color. Or a woman of color. Or a woman with tattoos and spiked blue hair. Or Ellen Degeneres. Maybe that wouldn't have made any difference in the video's reception, and maybe it's insidiously uncharitable of me to speculate. But I have my doubts.

I realize the position this puts me in. The sentiments in the video seem pleasant and it has clearly had its intended impact. I'm in no position to tell evangelical women or anyone else how they're supposed to feel about it. Casting aspersions on this video, given the way in which it seems to be cherished at the moment, is tantamount to drowning kittens in a washbucket.

Moreover, setting aside speculations of my own attractiveness, I'm a white man myself. If I don't think "I can feel good about myself because some blandly attractive white guy said nice things in second person to an empty auditorium" is really the message we want to be sending, neither is "I'm going to resist the affective power of this video because some middle-aged white guy critiqued it on his blog." I'm acutely aware of that.

Nevertheless, I think we need to resist the affective power of this video. I think we need to resist because it sends the wrong message. We need to resist it because it reinforces dangerous assumptions about gender that are operative in evangelical culture. We need to resist because it is rooted in objectification and patriarchy and it is not, once we get down to ideological business, all that encouraging.

Like "Thanks for all you do," the message of the video is generic. It is abstract. The title of the video is "Who You Are: A Message to All Women." This is perhaps a niggling semantic detail but it seems a bold move to presume to know who all women are and that one might address them as such: "all women" are enough the same -- cosi fan tutti -- that one message suffices.

This message, one that all women need to hear, is that they are beautiful, funny and smart. That they are hearing this from someone who can't possibly know them, can't possibly be addressing them in any legitimately personal way, is immaterial. You are beautiful. You are funny. You are smart. Thanks for all you do.

But curiously, the women aren't really doing anything. They are simply "unique." They are "precious." The video suggests that every woman is "a diamond, a rose, a pearl, the most stunning of all God's creation." Women, apparently, are pretty things. They look nice. They have worth, and this is comparable to the worth of beautiful objects.

The corresponding "Message to All Men" is interesting in this regard. The men, by contrast, are "brave," "strong," and "capable." They have "ability" and "potential." They have "talents to share with the world." Rather than being compared to objects, they are identified by their contributions: "You are a writer, an athlete, an inventor, an artist, a musician, a technician." Thanks for all you do, and at least you're doing something.

Men, in other words, have agency. They do things. They get things done. Women look nice. They have value. Men are agents; women are objects. This is not to pick out a random artifact of the video's script: the men's video fairly oozes agency. The men have jokes to tell, and kind words to share. Their joy will change people. They have a power inside of them, waiting to "burst forth and change the world." Watch both videos and pay attention to the ratio of passive to active verbs.

In the women's video, the actor is addressing an empty auditorium from the stage, from a place of privilege and power, in which we are constructed as the passive (female?) audience. In the men's video he is in an empty school hallway. He is on our level, addressing his bros. He gets a little animated, almost yelling, in a pep-talk kind of way. Because his bros can take it.

These differences are telling.

"A Message to All Women" is not encouraging. It's disheartening. It's disempowering. It's disgusting, actually, to think that what women need -- all of them, it would seem -- is some man to speak from a place of power and privilege and tell them that they're worth something. Mostly as objects. As pretty things that can be possessed (at one point, women are told that they are worth more than the men who want to have them; there is no corresponding line in the men's video).

This is not, of course, the intended message of these videos. They're meant to be uplifting and inspiring. They're meant to celebrate "who we are." But what gets revealed, especially when the videos are taken in tandem, is the sexist and patriarchal forces to which evangelical culture is held in thrall. This is not something to be celebrated; it is something to be resisted.

Thanks for all you do.

Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-1311324608995641088.post-545851053086955022013-09-29T07:51:00.000-04:002013-11-10T06:38:24.842-05:00Jesus Is Just Alright"I have overcome a fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing," Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk, "in order to attend Mass simply and solely to escape the Protestant guitars."

I've shared this quote before; it's one of my favorites, probably because I've played those Protestant guitars. In fact, I own two of them. They're very nice. Dillard means, of course, not my Seagull or my Ovation as such, but contemporary evangelical "praise and worship" music.

Some people make a distinction here, wherein "praise songs" are upbeat and catchy and "worship songs" are more contemplative and introspective. It reminds me of the scene in The Blues Brothers where the waitress at Bob's Country Bunker tells the band, "We have both kinds of music -- country and western!" I've never found this distinction that helpful, but the emotional journey from "praise" to "worship" -- from exuberance to reflection -- is the affective arc of many an evangelical worship service.

I've been in this world for nearly a quarter of a century. Ever since I was a music major at a conservative Christian college I've been involved in the evangelical worship scene. I got a master's degree in composition and taught music at a another Christian college for four years. My first dissertation idea, before I was seduced by a course on American radical thought, was Protestant Guitars: Evangelical Worship and the Performance of Religious Identity (see what I did there?), a project I might still take up.

When it comes to the guitar-driven contemporary pop sound of today's evangelical worship music, I'm, well, really good at it. At least I think so. I'm no Matt Redman, perhaps, but I know how this music works. I know how to get it done. I know how to get the band to sound tight and the singers to sing in harmony. I know how to sell it. I know how to connect to an audience a congregation. I love doing it.

I also hate it. I hate the saccharine sentimentality. I hate the theological vacuity. I hate the mind-numbing musical repetitiveness. I hate the way that people will assume they've experienced a theophany simply because they liked the music. I used to tell my students that church music was a little like prostitution -- you're there for someone else's pleasure.

But my misgivings are more substantial than that. Contemporary praise and worship music is actually somewhat elitist, on two levels. Let me explain. For one, this music can be hard to sing. Tomlin doesn't quite seem to have realized that he's a tenor and thus sings higher than your average churchgoer. Darlene Zschech sometimes seems oblivious to the fact the her 3-octave range is something of an outlier.

[This didn't stop "How Great Is Our God," which keeps reaching for E's, or "Shout to the Lord," which spans an octave and a fourth if you don't take the key change, from becoming immensely popular -- but I maintain that they're hard to sing well. What they have going for them is that they both have catchy choruses that feature a I-vi-IV-V progression that characterizes 50s doo-wop, The Police's "Every Breath You Take," and most of Taylor Swift's oeuvre.]

The band and singers -- "worship team" in evangelical parlance -- have learned and practiced these songs for hours, most likely. I once estimated that the musicians play and sing a given song something like twelve times for every one time the congregation is expected to sing it, which means that we're getting a lot more practice. It also means we're constantly bombarding ill-equipped parishioners with new material because we're bored.

On another level, this is music that is inaccessible to smaller churches that lack the resources and talent pool to pull it off well. And yet they feel compelled to try, because that's what all the cool churches are doing. That's what's "bringing the young people" or "reaching the unchurched" (a code word for "middle-class white people who might go to church if it were cool enough," but I digress). Churches with no business going "contemporary" are nevertheless giving it the old college try and the results are horrific. It's like bad karaoke, only you can't drown it with another couple of beers.

And this speaks to another misgiving: the whole enterprise is market-driven, shaped by the evangelical media industrial complex. Songs become part of a church's repertoire not because of what they might have to offer the liturgical life of the congregation but because they get radio airplay. To be "successful" in church music today you basically have to be a Chris Tomlin cover band. Or if you're really edgy, a David Crowder knock-off. And the newer stuff just sounds like Coldplay to me. I know, I know -- I forgot to add "get off my lawn."

This means that we're getting, musically and theologically, a least-common-denominator pop evangelicalism. Musical kitsch, in many cases. You can't tell anything significant about a given church's collective personality or theological commitments because they're singing the same damn four-chord hyperslop as everyone else.

I'm not stumping for something more "traditional," whatever that might mean. I'm a veteran of the 80s "worship wars." I fought for drums and guitar and wondered why the devil should have all the good music. I think I still have PTSD. A good bit of what we cherish as traditional is simply the 19th century version of sentimental schlock. I'm not going to name any names, but I'd gladly host the funeral for a goodly number of our golden oldies.

Mainly, I'm concerned that we're not having robust conversations about how our practices form and shape us, and how they might do so in defiance of, rather than in acquiescence to, how our desires are shaped by market forces. As a result, we end up with a fairly predictable repertoire that is often executed poorly in a musical style that is predicated on an attractional model of church -- even in churches with a stated theology that eschews that model.

I don't want this to be about "traditional" versus "contemporary" because I think that's the wrong conversation. Actually, I'm not even sure what the conversation is supposed to look like for every church. What concerns me is a kind of musical isomorphism toward songs that tell Jesus how cool he is over the chord progression from "Don't Stop Believin'." Something doesn't seem right here.

I don't know what the answer is, or that there is one. I'm dying to see what "postcontemporary" might be. I'd love to see churches finding their musical (and theological) voices independently of the abomination that is Christian radio. I'd like to see us all recover what Thomas Cranmer sorted out a long time ago: that what we're doing is really common prayer. This, to me, is a promising avenue, because the problem isn't really that we've got such bad music -- it's that we're settling for such shitty prayers.Ted Troxellhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com