I think that President Barack Obama’s inaugural speech was less about soaring rhetoric and more about giving the nation a few kicks in the rear, though only in the nicest way.
Yet the kicks were firm for all of that. While government has work to do, we all need to change our attitude and get going both in work and in service.
I was also pleased to note that he mentioned “non-believers” in his list of groups. That doesn’t happen all that often.
Let’s try to live up to it!
Rossini said of Wagner that he had great moments but bad quarter hours. I’m paraphrasing this as a short post-mortem on President George W. Bush. I think that several times during his presidency, George Bush showed the potential for greatness, but only for a moment. The way in which he has handled the transition, for example, at a minimum shows his capacity to be gracious and his willingness to work together with others. I could only wish that he had shown this ability during the rest of his presidency.
There were also moments when he showed an ability to communicate. There were a number of good speeches, though he doesn’t have truly great presentation, he can be quite adequate to the task. But apparently he didn’t see the need to communicate a vision to the country.
Don’t get me wrong on what I am about to say. I am an implacable foe of the war in Iraq. I believe that we will not be happy with what will be left months and years after we withdraw, and I believe we would be unhappy with the result if we stayed another five years lost a few thousand more troops, and then withdrew. That’s because our goals in going to war there were nonsense from a strategic point of view.
But having chosen to go to war, President Bush acted as though there was no need for continued support of the war. There are indications that many in his administration thought the war would be much easier. I have a hard time crediting that level of stupidity. I find it easier to believe that certain people thought the war would sell better presented as an easy thing, and then it would be easier to get additional support by pointing to troops in harm’s way.
In a democracy, one of the strategic resources for a war is public support. In deciding to go to war, political leaders need to calculate that they have enough support from the American people to carry their war to a conclusion. The arrogant decide that if they start a war the public must support it as a patriotic duty. This is nonsense. Patriots should vocally oppose bad wars. It’s our duty to our country and our troops.
But this kind of quick sell of a concept followed by an assumption that, the decision having been made, the people would stick with him, seems to have characterized Bush’s presidency. Even with very bad decisions, a more constant communication would have helped.
In the transition, while President Bush has been much more gracious and has helped facilitate an effective transfer of power, his powers of communication have actually dimmed, in my view. His farewell speech was laughable and seemed even more detached from reality than normal.
I’m reminded of the day I watched the Southern League All-Star game in Jacksonville, FL. I was there because my stepson, John Webb, was one of the pitchers, but he doesn’t come into the story. A batter whose name I don’t remember stepped up to the plate, swung with great power at a pitch, lost hold of the bat, and sent it several rows into the stands. Some fans, who should receive psychiatric care, tried to catch the bat, but it crashed to the ground.
The 43rd president thinks history will judge him much more favorably than he is judged now. In the sense that the distance of time makes failures seem less disastrous, perhaps it will. But I believe he will be remembered as a president who had great challenges and great opportunities, stepped up to the plate, and swung the bat at the ball with vigor. For a moment, those of us who wished him well looked for a home run. But much like that batter at the all-star game, he lost hold, and the bat flew into the stands, threatening the well-being of bystanders.
From Bruce Alderman:
To be honest, I think the ugliest thing about Christianity is the pervasiveness of preachers and apologists who try to scare people into the faith, and who seek to reduce their flocks’ exposure to other viewpoints. …
The entire post is worth reading.
There’s a great deal of good material in the blogosphere if you can just find it. I don’t promise truly “daily” quotes of the day, but when I find them, I like to post them.
On Meet the Press on Sunday Tavis Smiley made a comment that stuck with me. I have to extract this from a longer statement, and you can find the whole thing here. He said:
… I think, though, it’s important to state that Obama’s election is a down payment on King’s dream, it is not the fulfillment of King’s dream, and that’s a crucial, I think, and critical distinction we have to make. A significant down payment to be sure, and King would certainly be celebrating this moment. But the closest thing in King’s lifetime to this Obama moment was the election of the first black mayor of a major American city, Carl Stokes in Cleveland. King went to Cleveland and, if I can paraphrase it this way, talked about this notion of black faces in high places. And while that’s something to celebrate, there is work to be done and we have got to keep the focus on the issues. And where Mr. Obama is concerned, while black America and all of America will certainly celebrate this, because King is, again, not just a black leader, he’s the best of what America is all about. …
Now Mr. Smiley makes a good point. Election of the first African-American president is not the end of the story in terms of equal rights in America. There will be much more to be done. One of the benefits I see in having Barack Obama as president is that the very fact of his being in office will start many discussions and help change perceptions. He is not so much the sign of the end of a process but rather a milestone showing how far we have come and how far we have to go.
But there is a problem with the whole “payment” and “down-payment” type of language with reference to what has gone on. I’m not talking about the validity of any claims for reparations. I’m talking about the way we think about equal rights and freedom for everyone. It’s practically a cliche to say that if one person isn’t free, then nobody is free. But I don’t believe we often think about how true that is.
In doing injustice to one group of our citizens, we also injure ourselves. It is tragic for any group to be oppressed, but what about the insanity of oppressors? One of the things that the bus protest in Montgomery managed to communicate to some remarkably thick headed people was that the African-American community was part of the same economy, and that by oppressing that part of the community the opportunities of everyone were limited.
The south didn’t lose the civil war because they were morally wrong, though they certainly were–they lost because they did not have the economy to handle such a war. One reason was that a slave economy was really not all that efficient.
I would regard slavery as immoral even if it was not also quite insane, but there is a certain disgusting pathos about people who are oppressing someone else while at the same time making their own lives worse than they might be otherwise. Perhaps there is a reason why white-supremacy rallies do not appear to be attended by the best and the brightest!
Now there are certainly some people who can prosper in such an economy, but overall and in the long term such things tend to fail, and to fail in a spectacular manner.
As a Christian I believe we do owe one another allegiance, and that we do have a duty to help free the oppressed, to care for the poor and needy. I think there is a moral duty to do such things not because they are good for me, but because they are good. At the same time, I think God has so ordered the universe that it seems that I can do good for myself by doing good for others, that I will live in a richer and better society if I am willing to sacrifice for others and fight for their rights.
Ultimately, the greatest good that can come from this election is not in the person we elected, or in specific milestones in our progress, but in the changes in the way we think about freedom, and in a determination to pursue freedom and justice for everyone. The down-payment was paid much more when each person made his or her decision about the election, and decided to vote based on the content of the candidate’s character and the good of the country, rather than on the color of that candidate’s skin.
(Note that, as I wrote before [see Yes, Race Influences my Vote], I believe there was a value in electing an African-American president of the United States. I put that under “good of the country.” Were the content of his character not appropriate, however, the value of that symbolism would be inadequate to drive my vote.)
Now some people did vote purely or mostly on the basis of race, at least as indicated by the polls. Some cast their vote out of hatred. But I believe that the majority went out a voted their conscience, and that was the down-payment–not the inauguration of the particular person who was elected.
We have much further to go in terms of equal treatment of all people. One example of the type of insanity I described is the discharge of much needed linguists from the military simply because they are gay or lesbian. In a time when we have a documented need for more linguists, we have released some of them because of a sexual preference. There is an unmeasured and unmeasurable claim that morale will suffer that is allowed to overcome a demonstrable need. That’s insanity, in my view. We need to change it.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” means that qualified people who want to serve their country are not permitted to do so. At the same time the country is denied their services. That’s insanity and it needs to stop.
Our attitudes towards race and toward all other forms of discrimination–all discrimination that is based on irrelevant factors is not only immoral in itself, it is insane. In allowing freedom to be withdrawn from others, we cultivate oppression for ourselves.
In pursuing the laudable goal of keeping lead out of children’s it looks like congress may have been just as thoughtful as usual. More on evangelical outpost.
Bill Mounce, author of the wonderful Basics of Biblical Greek, which I have used in teaching, has a post at Koinonia titled <em>Matthew 7:26-Is a moros a moron</em>, with the very proper answer–NO!
There are two things I’d like to call attention to in this post. The first is an excellent illustration of the false allure of etymology or seeking cognates. This is more for the serious Hebrew student, but while sometimes one must look for ideas for a “hapax legomenon” in cognate language, one should be aware that the cognate provides ideas, not proof of a new meaning. Context provides the final judgement, and if a word occurs once, that means that humility is called for regarding that final judgment.
The second is the sprinkling of “what the Greek says” (or Hebrew) into sermons, especially by those who don’t really know, which is the vast majority of times I’ve heard this used.
Mounce says:
I know it is tempting to show a little Greek knowledge and try to create a helpful word picture, but unless you are absolutely confident that your Greek is absolutely right, I strongly urge you not to display your Greek knowledge.
Which brings me to the general point. I encourage my students to never say, “In the Greek ….” Why would you do that? To impress the audience with your academic acumen? To convince them that you are right when you can’t prove your point with biblical logic? Perhaps I am being a little harsh, but I am sensitive to pastors claiming to be an authority and putting themselves up on a pedestal. That’s not where servants belong.
Just so. I have rarely been privileged to quote two paragraphs from a blog post with which I agree more completely.
PS: You’ll have to read Mounce’s whole post to discover more about morons!
Charles Jones has a post a Power of Suggestion in which he notes the following:
But evolution cant allow things, because its unguided. And it cant make any mistakes, because it makes no decisions. Take note: whenever people try to explain how something happens through evolution, they always resort to the language of design.
Now there are quite a lot of problems with the usage of language that is involved here, one of which is referring to evolution–a process–as an “it[-with-consciousness]” that does or does not do particular things. If we think of evolution as a process, however, without trying to make it into an entity, it’s quite proper to refer to a process “allowing” certain things and excluding others.
While evolution may not be guided, there are things that work and things that don’t. Body forms develop in certain ways, both because those ways work and thus the possessors of the form in question survive, but also because the possible alterations in a form are limited. Perhaps if some different body organizations had survived the Cambrian, we would have a different set of alternatives now.
So evolution can “allow” or “disallow” certain options, provided one is thinking not of the conscious decisions of an acting person, but rather the constraints of a process. Think of a simple filter. Let’s consider a box with a mesh covering the bottom. Gravel and sand is poured into the top, and the filter only allows rocks of a particular size to pass through. It doesn’t make mistakes; what happens simply happens because of the constraints–or lack thereof–in the process.
There are two major ways in which language about evolution gets confused. First, we have a failure to see language in its proper context. The word “allow” has a different sense when used to say, “The mother allowed her son to cross the street alone”, as opposed to saying “the filter allowed the smaller rocks to pass but stopped the larger ones.” The mother may have been mistaken in what she allowed; the filter either works or perhaps some of the wires are broken. But it can’t be mistaken!
The second, however, can be more dangerous. We have evolved language to deal with things in our more immediate environment. For most people, a year is a long time. Long term planners may think in decades. Few think in centuries. But evolution occurs over the course of billions of years. Thus we start with a problem. We have to move to observing the present and inferring things about the past. We see this confusion regularly in discussions of whether evolutionary theory is really science.
But even further, we have to look at natural processes that accomplish results. Now at first, as primitive human beings, we would think of events simply as individual happenings. So language to discuss processes would almost always involve an actor. In fact, when we filled our universe with spirits and gods, they very often fulfilled that need of an actor.
But for a process that simply happens because that’s the way it is, we’re a bit short on words, and we’re often uncomfortable with those that we have invented. Note the insecurity produced by the words “random” or “unguided.”
Yet as a theist who accepts evolutionary theory, I believe that even the unguided processes are not, ultimately, absolutely unguided. They’re just unguided in the sense in which we are used to using the terms. If there is a God who created the laws of the universe, then the processes that are constrained by those laws are ultimately fulfilling his will, even if his will was only that those processes work in that way.
Nonetheless, perhaps we need a language to describe action without conscious intervention. Or, on the other hand, we could just realize that the language of design used in describing unguided or remotely guided processes is metaphorical.
Ultimately, you can see, I don’t believe language makes reality. It just simultaneously makes it possible to discuss something, while also making it a bit confusing. It too evolved with constraints.
Christopher Smith has written a three part series on chauvinistic passages in the Bible. The passages are:
In general I agree with what he writes, though I think the balance of evidence is slightly in favor of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. I tended the other way on that passage before reading Gordon Fee in his The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICOT) pp. 699-708. Despite accepting Fee’s arguments on that passage, however, I cannot agree that Paul was essentially egalitarian. I think he points an arrow in that way, but I don’t think he ever brought it to pass, and other passages cited in the series indicate this as well.
I would add I believe that a Biblical writer and/or church leader may be right for his time and place and yet be wrong for another.
I commend the entire series to you to read, as well as the discussion I’m having with Jeremy Pierce in the comments to this post, in which Jeremy says I’m being unfair, and I’ve said a few less than complimentary things about what he has to say. I find Jeremy extremely worthwhile to read, even when he’s annoying me. Read and judge–or enjoy–or both.
… or as soon afterward as practicable, read this. (HT: Pseudo-Polymath.)
From Only Wonder Understands:
This week, in working on a sermon on transforming discipleship (drawing on some materials by Trevor Hudson) I was reminded that Jesus always values people over efficiency and effectiveness.
One might also remember that what is efficient will depend on what one’s goal is. And yes, I think it’s a good one for Martin Luther King day.
