A Slight Delay

Staying in other people’s houses is always a trip. I can’t always sleep well in strange places, so a lot of the time I’m up at the crack of dawn, tiptoe downstairs trying not to wake anybody up, and spend half the time going through the bookcases trying to find something interesting… nothing but John Grisham. Dammit.

Anyway, then you turn the TV on really low–so low you have to turn on the closed captions just to follow what’s going on–and a couple of hours go by and STILL nobody’s up. So you go to the fridge, ‘cause it’s been two hours you’ve been up, and you’re getting hungry and…

Hmmm… ok. What can I eat that won’t disturb anybody? It can’t be loud, and it can’t require cooking ‘cause you don’t want the smell to alert anyone to the fact that you’re up. So let’s see… You can eat bacon cold, right? So some bacon… beer? Nah, don’t want someone coming down and smelling Pabst Blue Ribbon on your breath. Nobody’s gonna believe you when you say the Wheaties fermented, trust me. Shrimp cocktail! Now we’re talking… a coke… and some peanut butter. You can put some on the stale Saltines, or just eat it right out of the jar.

So you get to work. No sooner do you finish up then somebody comes downstairs. Then they open the fridge and say, “Oh, good, Debbie threw out that shrimp… it’s been there since Christmas.” Or–and this is even worse–they say, “Hope we didn’t keep you waiting long. We’re all morning people here, but we thought you’d like to sleep in!” and you’re trying to be polite and not choke them. And then they make breakfast. The mother of all breakfasts… pancakes, ham, bacon, sausage, grits, oatmeal, cream of wheat, cornflakes, scrambled eggs, waffles… almost like Jesus gave up on loaves and fishes and decided to work at IHOP instead. And they put all this stuff in front of you, and it all looks and smells so good, and you’re already full. Well, there’s always tomorrow morning…

For once, I’ll be early with something.

Thanksgiving, 1973: The little round-headed kid is having as much luck with Thanksgiving dinner as he did trying to kick the football. He’s supposed to be at Grandma’s house by four. In the meantime, he’s got everyone in the neighborhood inviting themselves over for a dinner cooked by a beagle in a Pilgrim costume whose assistant is a little yellow bird that can’t even fly straight.

Over the hastily assembled dinner, Linus says to Peppermint Patty, “This is not unlike another famous Thanksgiving episode. Do you remember the story of John Alden, and Priscilla Mullens, and Captain Miles Standish?”

Peppermint Patty’s irritated reply: “This isn’t like that one at all.” She’s right; we look at the ping-pong table piled with buttered toast, popcorn, jelly beans, pretzels, and ice cream, and can’t help wondering right along with her, “What kind of Thanksgiving dinner is this!?” (more…)

There’s been an awful lot of hand-wringing on the Right over the prospect of the Democrats having a sixty-seat majority in the Senate. Never mind for a minute that the same members of the complaining class didn’t quail nearly as loudly–not at all, come to think of it–when the GOP controlled all three branches of the government. Never mind, while you’re at it, the repeated claims by those selfsame commentators that this will lead to Communism, Fascism, or both simultaneously (I’d advise you to take an aspirin after that last bit; I know my brain hurts trying to figure out how that’s possible). While the Democrats have a majority on paper, history and common sense both indicate that there’s less to worry about than the hysterics on the TV and radio would have you believe.

For starters, the Democratic party is no more a unified, monolithic entity than the GOP is. Yes, Barack Obama ran what’s arguably the most disciplined, and effective, campaign in recent memory, and yes, the Dems who were downticket benefited from his popularity and a rising discontent with the sitting president. However, as we’ve seen with Joe Lieberman (to pick just the most glaringly obvious example), there’s still room for dissent and discontent in the Democratic tent. (more…)

He’s been stripped of a minor committee chairmanship, so Joseph Lieberman got off easy. Too easy, if you ask many on the left; after all, they’ve been crying “treason” since the Senator from Connecticut hit the stump to campaign–hard–for John McCain, and against Barack Obama. They’ve argued, from all corners, that he should at the very least have been stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, if not censured and drummed out of the party. Luckily, in this instance, our legislators have control over this stuff and not the blogosphere.

Over at the Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas said that Lieberman “wasn’t sanctioned. And Senate Democrats trying to make that claim are dishonestly trying to cover up the extent of their betrayal of the American people’s vote for change.”

‘Scuse me? (more…)

One of the many arguments over Prop 8 comes down to theology. Many who oppose same-sex marriage, or even just homosexuality in general, argue that it’s not only against nature, but against God. By now, anyone with a television has seen Fred Phelps and company marching with their “God Hates Fags” signs, or has heard from other, less hysterical, quarters that homosexuality and Christianity are inherently at odds. While I’ll throw in (yet another) disclaimer, this time that I’m not a theologian, I’d have to say that this is one scriptural analysis with which I’d have to disagree.

Let’s start from the assumption–a relatively uncontentious one, I’d hope–that if one is a Christian, the New Testament has a primacy of sorts over the Old Testament. With that as our starting point, then, there are four passages in the New Testament that are widely taken as evidence that homosexuality is anti-Christian. I’ve quoted those passages at length after the jump.

It should be noted that the passages below are all from epistolatory writings. The Pauline epistolatory material, it should be noted, was just that: a pile of letters. A wide spectrum of Biblical scholars (that is to say, we’re not just talking about the Jesus Seminar here) would readily concede that these weren’t written, or intended to be taken, as scripture. Each of them was written to address specific issues faced by some of the many churches the apostle Paul set up during his wanderings in Asia Minor and North Africa; one suspects that if he were writing scripture, or knew that his writings would later be construed as such, they would have had a much different tone. Additionally, some of the later epistolatory material—like Timothy, which is quoted below, and 2 Corinthians, which isn’t—is now widely regarded to have been forged.*

On the other hand, you’ve got the Gospels, and Acts, which I lump in with the Gospels, since they were probably penned by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. The Gospels, which purport to tell what is known of Jesus’ life and ministry, do not mention homosexuality. At all. (more…)

On November 4, voters across the country elected Barack Obama president by a margin that, if not overwhelming, was very nearly so. The crowning irony of that occasion–seen by many (rightly, I think) as a vindication of the long struggle for civil rights in this country–is that many of those same voters chose to disenfranchise one part of the population at precisely the same time they were elevating another.

And it’s not as though you could conceivably argue that they didn’t know what they were doing. Unlike the 2000 election fiasco, where Florida voters who intended to vote for Al Gore may instead have ended up voting for Pat Buchanan, there was no chance that anyone who voted Yes on 8 in California could have missed the measure’s intent. First, there was the wording of the proposed constitutional amendment itself, consisting of two sentence-long Sections:

Section One: This measure shall be known and may be cited as the “California Marriage Protection Act.”
Section Two: Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Then there was the summary of the measure, written by the State Attorney General, which was no less succint:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME–SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
*Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California.
*Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

And, by the way, we’ve been here before. (more…)

For an idea of just what we lost when writer and broadcaster Studs Terkel passed on October 31, leaf through a copy of My American Century (1997), which cherry-picks the best bits from such earlier volumes as The “Good” War, Race, and Hard Times. Better still, pick up the originals, and read those.

Why? Well, Terkel’s talent–whether as a writer, or during his many years in radio–wasn’t so much in what he said, or wrote. His gift wasn’t in making grand pronouncements or connections that ended up saying more about him than his subjects; instead, he was a great listener, always seeming to find the right question, and then having the good sense to get out of the way to see what his subject had to say. And those subjects, from big names like Bob Dylan or Louis Armstrong to others who would otherwise have been lost to history–riveters, sharecroppers, hoboes, office workers, shop girls and others of that ilk–had plenty to say. (more…)

Getting off the bus tonight at the Port Authority in Manhattan, I happened to glance over one of the passengers’ shoulders as I was walking down the aisle. She had her MP3 player out, and the display showed that she was listening to Sam Cooke’s greatest hits. So I’ve spent much of the rest of the night with Sam Cooke’s music–one song in particular, really–echoing in my head.

I caught little snippets before, and during intermission at, Spamalot, listening for early returns; again when I heard the cheers going up from Times Square each time the ticker would show another state for Obama; and again listening to the returns on NPR as I tried to get home in time for McCain’s concession speech, and the President-elect’s speech. (more…)

Just finished listening to John McCain’s concession speech, and was struck by one particular line: “I don’t know what else we could have done to win the election.”

Ink will be spilled by the bucketload over the next several days, if not years, trying to answer that question, but I think that the germ of an answer might have been contained in the rest of McCain’s speech; it was pitch-perfect, conciliatory without condescention, and allowed the GOP candidate a moment of grace that the other 900-odd days of this campaign have too often lacked. After all was said and done, this was what McCain could have done. He could have listened to his best instincts, could have run on the best of his nature, and run more on the love and commitment that he had, and has, for his country. We saw a welcome, and altogether too rare, glimpse of the 2000-model McCain, much to his credit.

I’ve read enough statistics showing that all that negative crap works; it moves votes, and voters, at times when precious little else does. I can’t begin to pretend that this election will fundamentally change that, but I can at least hope that what happened this evening might be a useful first step toward some sense of civility in public life, and a sense that we’re capable of better than what our public figures, our parties and their mouthpieces, have foisted upon us.

More to follow.