Anglischism

Somewhere I remember reading, or at least just totally making up, that one of the basic tenets of happiness through Buddhism is accepting the world and getting over it.

Roughly translated, that means: “Eh….”

I’ve tried applying this to various parts of life (the Bush years were very helpful in this department) and am using the attitude to deal with the current goings-on in the Anglican Communion. As an Episcopalian, a member of that big religious family that comprises the various denominational children begotten of Henry VIII and a stubborn Pope, I’m in the loop every time someone gets unhappy. That happens a lot.
In brief, it’s 2009, there’s a black president, women are people too, we’ve stopped burning gays as fuel, and some folks are incensed.

Pun intended.

Specifically, the Roman Catholic church is making it easier for dissatisfied Anglicans to make a break for Rome:

Am I worried that this is the end of my denomination? That massive flocks of Anglicans will suddenly start saying their Hail Marys even louder (I’m hoping I’m in good stead – I always use the blue candles around her icon)? That trumpets will sound and my home parish will come a-tumblin’ down?

You mean that out of an Anglican Communion of 77 million people, someone’s not happy? Well, that’s to be expected.

“Eh….”

Really, I’ve come to the realization that it’s impossible to make everyone happy. Even if 999 people were soaked in juicy bliss with rainbows shining out their… that last 1 person would be ticked because everyone else was being so damn content. And that’s why being at Disney World too long pisses me off.

So I’m sorry not everyone’s happy, and I try really hard maximize world jolliness, but when I understand that no matter what I do, no one’s going to be totally happy, I can only muster one word… “Eh…”

It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I just really don’t care all that much. My apathy is my greatest strength. I mean, when MTV can’t find eight people that can peacefully cohabitate on “Real World,” it sets a pretty low standard for harmony in the third largest Christian community on earth. Accepting that there’s no way to ultimately make everybody happy, we have to figure out what to do.

Interestingly, it doesn’t really matter, and I suddenly feel enlightened.

“Ommm….”

See, no matter what we do, we’re going to lose some people. We’ve always lost people. Every time we adopt a new prayer book we lose people. At some point somebody lost people when they dropped doing their whole service in Latin… (Yeah, I’m talking at you, Pope Benedict). We lost people when we let blacks in. Now we’re losing people because we let women play too. If we let more gays be clergy, we’re gonna lose even more people.

But if we aren’t accepting of gays, we’re still gonna lose people – them and a bunch of other folks who’ve figured out it’s 2009, there’s a black president, women are people too….We’re always going to lose some people, and we’re always gonna gain others.

As is, we’ve got some folks who’ve left. But we’ve also got some folks who’ve come into the church because we have a more accepting stance on their innate sexuality – i.e. we don’t spend every Sunday morning damning them.

By my guessing, it’ll come out a wash and there’ll more harm, heartache, and heartburn come from navel-gazing and second-guessing ourselves on how many gay angels can’t dance on the head of a straight pin than from our denomination just deciding to walk the right path and not looking back.

What the hell – when in doubt, try doing the right thing.

And sub-Saharan Africa’s got a problem?

Eh… what else is new.

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The Internet Cocoon

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes an interesting piece on how the internet contributes to the rise of political extremism. That might seem a little counterintuitive; after all, the internet brings everyone closer together, right? Well, right...and wrong. Yes, it does bring people together. Unfortunately, it unites the same kinds of people--it allows conservatives to surround themselves with other conservatives and liberals with other liberals.

They end up strengthening one another's biases. It's a well known fact that if you put two conservatives--or two liberals--in a room together and get them started talking politics, they'll end up in a never-ending cycle of agreement. The first guy says he doesn't like Barack Obama; the second guy, wanting to prove his worth as a conservative, disagrees: he HATES Barack Obama. And so it continues from there.

The internet, then, allows not only for the growth of extremism, but also to the spread of malicious and downright false political rumors. Kolbert cites the "birther" movement as a perfect example. There's plenty of evidence out there definitively proving that Barack Obama was born in the United States and not in Kenya or Switzerland or wherever. But because birthers tend to frequent only hard-core conservative websites, they never see this evidence. Even if they do they dismiss it as a liberal propaganda. These kinds of bizarre political movements couldn't exist without the internet.

But I think Kolbert makes a serious mistake when she argues that this paranoid extremism is a purely right-wing phenomenon. She writes:

Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. If the birthers are more evidently kooky than the global-warming “skeptics” or the death-panellers or the supply-siders or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, they are, in their fundamental disregard for the facts, actually mainstream...The historian Richard Hofstadter’s description of the far right in the era of Barry Goldwater could apply equally well today: “I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Sorry, Miss Kolbert, but Hofstadter's argument was outdated two decades ago. The conservative movement is just a troglodytic reaction to the modern age. We're not all tin-foiled-hatted kooks on the lookout for black helicopters. I would add that political paranoia has plenty of practitioners on the left. A liberal friend of mine once solemnly informed me that Halliburton was building "concentration camps" in the Great Plains to house dissidents. And what is the 9/11 "truther" movement, if not the left-wing equivalent of the birthers?

Stupidity knows no color, creed, or ideology. There are stupid liberals and stupid conservatives. There are stupid libertarians, stupid anarchists, stupid socialists, and stupid centrists. That's how politics works and always will work.

WILL SCHULTZ

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The Tea Party Line

It was supposedly Benjamin Disraeli who called conservatives "the stupid party." So far this year, Republicans have been doing their best to prove him 100% right. For proof, check out the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. Though the 23rd narrowly voted for Obama in 2008, it's still Republican territory. GOP Rep. John McHugh was re-elected with 65% of the vote in 2008.

But that was then and this is now, and now doesn't look so good for the GOP. Doug Hoffman, a former Republican, has broken with the party and is now running as the Conservative Party candidate. He's getting support from the usual conservative suspects: Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth, et cetera, et cetera. Hoffman might just cost Republicans the election a recent poll shows him splitting the conservative vote with Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate, giving Democrat Bill Owens a narrow lead.

This is why talk of a GOP revival in 2010 is, for the moment, highly overrated. The Republicans will never win until they get their ideological house in order. Do they want to move towards the center to win back moderates? Or would they rather move right and re-energize conservatives? It's hardly a recent debate; the conservative and moderate wings of the GOP have been duking it out for decades. But the party's never been in worse shape than it is now. They need to come to some kind of consensus, or else risk being wiped out for the third straight election.

It's decision time for the GOP. Right or center? Moderate or conservative? They don't need to come up with a final answer. But they need an answer. And they need it fast. Only a year to go before the midterm test. Tick-tock...

WILL SCHULTZ

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The "Don't Give Me That Crap" Theory of Jurisprudence

I have a comprehensive theory of recent United States Supreme Court church and state jurisprudence.

You have to be a First Amendment geek to know how ballsy that statement is. Really, it’s pretty confusing – why is one ten commandments display judged kosher while another is condemned as meshugana? I hope I used that right… go easy on the gentile, I’m a shegetz.

Very recently the Supremes--of the John Roberts variety, not the Diana Ross kind--heard a case about a memorial to our WWI dead that stands in the Mojave desert… because when the Death Valley VFW post wants people to ignore a monument, they go all out.

Why does anyone care? It’s in the shape of a cross. There’s been a cross-shaped memorial there since 1934, but it's only now that someone has gotten upset about it. So now there’s a memorial to our WWI dead that stands in the Mojave desert in a plywood box.

What will the Gang of Nine do? I’ve got some ideas about these sorts of cases. I call them the “Don’t Give Me That Crap” view of jurisprudence. Somehow, this theory didn’t fly in the church/state course I took in law school. I think I used to much reality and not enough Latin.

Here’s the way it works – say you’ve got two ten commandment displays at two different courthouses. One of them is erected by conservative Christians intentionally trying to stick a fork in Chief Justice Roberts’ eye because they think that the United States isn’t Christian enough. They try this case in the US Supreme Court building, which has a frieze of Moses and the ten commandments over the entrance.

Go figure.

The second display has been around forever and nobody’s really cared, but now somebody, hungry to be oppressed (I imagine them at home, desperately sanding “In God We Trust” from all their coinage and being deliberately unthankful on Thanksgiving) is intentionally trying to stick a fork in Chief Justice Roberts’ eye because...they think the United States is too Christian.

Why, on the same day, does the Court declare commandments one through ten out of bounds and eleven thru twenty fair play? Well, the Supremes don’t like getting jabbed by some little tattletale troublemaker. Under my theory, the Court has adopted a “Don’t Give Me That Crap” approach: don’t go around looking for a fight and then come crying to the Court because you want a nation of theocracy/Godless heathenism – don’t give me that crap.

What Justice Breyer, the swing vote in these cases, really wants to do when some Bible-thumper-who-can’t-stand-the-existence-of-atheists-and-Episcopalians or zealot-atheist-(or Episcopalian like me)-who-won’t-deal-with-conservative-Christians tries to give him an earful is to come down from the bench and jam the fork up the offending party’s...well, you know. But he can’t, so he just votes against them. And after Breyer is done with the utensil, Scalia wants to take it and stick it in their throat.

Under my theory, if you’ve got a legitimate beef, the Supremes will do you right. The desert war memorial cross case has some interesting issues in play, and I’m curious to see which ones the Court latch onto. Regardless of which way they swing, I’m sure I’ll find a way to spin their decision to say they’re enforcing my theory – I’m a lawyer.

But if you go to the Court just to gripe and moan, they’ll send you packing with a fork up your….

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Screwing Over the Huddled Masses

We’re being immigration visa jerks and that’s gonna hurt us in the long run.

America’s always done well by taking everybody else’s best people and making them ours – Einstein, Von Braun, my mother.

Okay, those were all Germans, but I’m sure there are good people from other countries who also came to the US.

It works out well for the United States – we get brilliant physicists, rockets that take us to the moon, and me. Who can complain about that? We attract smart, hardworking folks to our industries, universities, and culture, and milk them for all their worth.

Seriously, folks, we won WWII with a guy named Eisenhower. Doesn’t sound like a Native American name to me – we used a German to whup the Germans.

But part of this system is us being willing to work with foreigners. That’s pronounced “Furrnurs.”

Better yet, try saying it without any vowels.

If we’re gonna brain drain the rest of the world, we have to be willing to play the immigration game and have a relatively open (one-way) door to the international neighborhood (and bars on the windows). If we close the door too tightly, Prof. Wu will go unravel genetics at Cambridge and Dr. Schneider will go open his company in France.

Instead, we’re being tools.

I know a British woman doing public interest work here in the states, trying to fix things we’ve screwed up for free, and we’re making it an unholy pain in the arse for her to stay more than a few months.

And that’s how we treat our friends! C’mon – we’re allies with the UK. They’ve been our closest friends in the global game of Risk ever since we kicked them out. They’re the only ones who’ve had the pluck/bad judgment to stick with us in Iraq in any force!

Then there’s a German buddy of mine who wanted to come study here. There was a metric tonne of paperwork, and when even a German complains about the paperwork, that’s a lot.

My buddy had to make an in person visit to the consulate in Munich – I dunno, to show folks he didn’t look like a terrorist or something – but the best I’ve heard was about some foreign academics at a local university. They couldn’t apply to renew their visas till, say, two months out from the expiration date. But it’d take the government six months to process the paperwork….

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” and screw em."

JOHN DERRICK

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Thoughts on Obama's Nobel Prize

A few days have passed, and we've all had time to think over the meanings and implications of Barack Obama's new Nobel Peace Prize. Most people are still puzzled. Why him? Why now? Most--but certainly not all--pundits think that the award came much too early. A few think he should turn it down. Others say that, no, he really did deserve it.

My reaction? I thought of Notre Dame football. No, wait, I can explain! Think back a few years, to when Ty Willingham was head coach of the Fighting Irish. Notre Dame's storied program looked on the verge of collapse. Willingham's biggest crime was that he couldn't beat arch-rival USC. Each and every time the two teams played, Notre Dame took an unholy beating. After three years of this, the school kicked out Willingham and brought in Charlie Weis.

Weis also lost to USC. But--here's the thing--he almost won. That's what made the difference: it looked like Notre Dame was at least trying to win. That was enough to land Weis a multi-million dollar contract for a gazillion years.

So it goes with politics. Bush is Willingham and Obama is Weis. Obama hasn't actually done anything, but he seems to be trying. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts rather than achievements. Is that a good or a bad thing? You decide. But be warned--the Weis experiment hasn't worked out so well for the Irish.

OK, one last thing. For an interestingly contrarian take on the Nobel, read David von Drehle's piece in Time. I don't know if I agree, but it's a very thought-provoking argument.

WILL SCHULTZ

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Change for China

With all of the discussion of energy saving this and green that, what are people around the world actually doing to combat global warming? The UN Summit for Climate Change met this past Tuesday, September 22, at the UN headquarters in New York in hopes of drafting a treaty proposal to be signed in December at the UN Climate Conference. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who chaired the summit, stressed that “now is the moment to act in common cause” to create a greener world and to aid developing countries in reducing emissions.

This summit has led President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao to actually agree on something. Although China currently has the highest carbon dioxide emissions in the world, Hu promised that Chinese greenhouse gas emissions would slow within the next ten years. China plans to use renewable resources to generate 15 percent of its energy, and further intends to plant over 300,000 square kilometers of trees. This commitment to cleaner energy comes as a surprise to most of the international community, as China has primarily focused on maintaining its economic growth rather than protecting its environment. Hu did not give any details about how China is going to decrease emissions, causing many countries to doubt China’s sincerity.

The United States is among these disbelievers. Although the United States produces the second-highest amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the world, it is asking for exact figures explaining what China is going to do. But there’s a whiff of hypocrisy here--Obama failed to give any concrete figures of his own. This new policy from China has now “added pressure on the United States and other developed countries to accept deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions”. In response, President Obama has tried to put the pressure back on China by arguing that rapidly developing nations “will need to commit to strong measures at home and agree to stand behind those commitments just as the developed nations must stand behind their own” (guardian.co.uk).

Although some countries may not believe it, much of the world is applauding China’s actions. Al Gore and UN Chief Ki-Moon have both lauded China’s proposal. This is a large yet necessary step towards doing something about global climate change. China is finally moving in the right direction, no longer using its developing status as an excuse. In light of these high expectations, it will be interesting to see what becomes of President Hu’s plans at the convention in Copenhagen this December. Maybe the world is finally moving together in the right direction.

LUCY EMERSON

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