Author: AKMA

I noticed yesterday that the Rev. Arnold Conrad of Davenport, Iowa, began a rally for McCain with prayer (good so far). Pastor Conrad, however, urged God to bring about a McCain victory — not because he supports all the evangelically correct causes, but because people of other faiths are praying for Obama, and it would be bad for (the Christian) God’s reputation if they could think their prayers availed.
 
To make matters worse, it sounds as though Pastor Conrad thinks “Hindu” is the name of a deity: “Millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah….” I’ll cut him some slack on Buddha, but it heightens the already-celestial ludicrousness of this intercession when he incorporates “Hindu” into that sequence.
 
Let’s see: two Christians are running for President, and God should favor one over the other because non-Christians favor the second. That makes the prayers of those non-Christians pretty powerful; think what might happen if the non-Christians of the world should get together and pray for world peace. Or, one supposes, cataclysmic war, since then God would have to bring about peace to spite them.
 
But wait — the McCain campaign issued a statement about the incident. They did not say, “Sorry, that was a foolish idea” or “We understand that Hindu is not a god,” but they did say, “Questions about the religious background of the candidates only serve to distract from the real questions….” But clueless Pastor Conrad hadn’t said anything about Obama’s faith (or McCain’s), at least not in the CNN story. The McCain spinmeisters had to use the opportunity to talk about religion as an occasion to imply that Obama himself was non-Christian.
 
Well, it looks as though this will take care of itself in the next few weeks. A couple of days ago, Palin indicated that McCain would end “abuses of power” in Washington, thereby ruling out a role for her in national government; and yesterday, McCain held one of those town hall meetings he so favors, but he left before the question-and-answer period that he himself had promised when he began talking.

The House of Lords, God love them, defeated a proposal to extend to six weeks the state’s power arbitrarily to detain suspects:

The amendment [to eliminate extended detainment] was put forward by Lord Dear, a former West Midlands chief constable, who told peers: “This attempt to appear tough on terrorism is a shabby charade which is unworthy of a democratic.
“This legislation is fatally flawed, is ill thought through and is unnecessary. Perhaps worst of all, it seeks to further erode the fundamental legal and civil rights that have been the pride of this country for centuries.”

John Bull has a lesson to teach Uncle Sam. In the U.S., you can even call that kind of provision “unconstitutional.”

Happy Thanksgiving for our neighbors to the North!

A few days ago, Doc suggested that John McCain had a variety of winning strategies; all involved putting his own admirable qualities forward. He had devoted his life to national service; he had spent five long years as a prisoner of war, and had been maimed in the process; he had a political born-again experience after he was caught shilling for a financier in the Keating Five scandal; he had charted his own course relative to the Republican establishment and (especially) its unscrupulous tacticians. Had McCain leaned into his strengths, calmly and confidently, he’d have had a strong appeal to independent voters, and the Republican base (however dissatisfied) would have had no viable alternative to Obama. If a few hard-line right-wingers stayed home from the polls, McCain would still have stood to pick up far more independent votes. As Doc says, that’s the high road: McCain equals experience, service, track record, non-partisan, honor, respect, a plain dealer, a straight talker. That’s the McCain that the media loved and protected, that was a McCain who ran a high-road campaign against George W Bush (and who could have parlayed that opposition into a winning campaign to remedy what his predecessor screwed up), and that was a McCain who had mustered a reputation for integrity and statesmanship.
 
Instead — for whatever reason, and I’m no campaign wonk so I won’t pretend to see into the planning — McCain began last year to pander to the same right wing of the Republican Party that had slandered and attacked him four years ago, and that questioned his credentials well after his nomination. He ran away from his strongest points by identifying himself strongly with the failed Bush presidency, by selecting a manifestly unqualified candidate for vice president (how can he look Kay Bailey Hutchison in the eye after nominating Palin?), and by staffing his campaign with lobbyists and practitioners of Rovian ethics. Rather than burnishing his own status by treating Obama with respect and honor (“for a young fella,” “for a misguided liberal,” “for someone without military service,” “for someone who wasn’t already wired into foreign policy networks”), he sullied and eventually dismantled his integrity with deceitful attack ads and by exacerbating the latent racism that scars this country’s recuperation from the evils of its past.
 
As David points out, even McCain’s efforts to rein in the rabid ignorance and xenophobia he inflamed smack of the bigotry he’s ostensibly trying to check. McCain ought to listen to more They Might Be Giants:

Can’t shake the devil’s hand
and say you’re only kidding

I guess November 4 is where the party ends.

The past four weekdays were grueling; I spent more time talking and meeting than I have in ages, and a couple of the conversations hit high intensity levels. On the whole, though, it went very well (so far as I can tell). You would never guess, from my experiences, that the Episcopal Church was experiencing convulsions over doctrinal differences; everywhere I went, my resolute emphasis on theological soundness met with appreciative sympathy (or polite reticence, I guess).
 
And now, I don’t have any special events for a few weeks. This week Duke observes Fall Break, so classes don’t meet. My stress level has dropped like the stock market.

I’m between my two stops on this trip. St Louis went very well — I was touched by the diocesan clergy’s attention and enthusiasm for my reading of Mark. And the highlight was sharing in the Daily Office and closing mass with them.
 
Next stop, a full day of conversations and presentations, then home on Saturday. Thankfully, I can look forward to Duke’s Break Week coming up.

Most of the day here was occupied by my talking. You may well shudder at the thought, but on the whole things have gone pretty well. Most everyone has been encouraging and receptive; if some felt dubious and dissatisfied, they were gentle enough not to give me a hard time.
 
I’ll be talking again tomorrow morning, and preaching at the closing Mass (in honor of Robert Grossteste) before I begin making my way homeward, via a visit to the University of the South.

Got up, housework, go to school, write, visit with Sr. Elena, lunchtime talk by (visiting) Bishop Gene Robinson, back to office for course prep, class on John 10 and 11, home, long phone call, dinner, chat with Margaret, pack — where did that day go?

If I were John McCain, I might not try to steer the campaign discourse toward questions of character and temperament. Sticking with “experience” and Palin-appeal seems safer to me.

(Sorry for the gender-specific language; this is one of those words for which a suitably resonant and evocative equivalent hasn’t come to my attention.)
 
I’ve been laboring (some would say, “obsessing”) over the details of my upcoming presentations to the clergy conference. I’d rather not work from a verbatim manuscript; that’s partly because the occasion befits something a shade more relaxed, and partly because I have a hard time not pitching such compositions to a more technical readership. I keep feeling tempted to put in more footnotes and nuances, where the setting calls for more exposition and explanation. And when it comes to conference-presenting ex tempore, I have not been satisfied with my results.
 
So I’m trying to get the presentation onto 5×8 notecards, with a lead-in sentence, reminders of pertinent stuff to say, and a closing sentence. My rationale for preparing so detailed a schema rests on (a) my proclivity to divagate and lose focus, (2) the high valuation I put on transitions and continuity, and (iii) the importance of strong, clear, explicit thesis sentences for an audience to orient itself. This approach also affords me leeway conveniently to build paragraphs out-of-sequence for different topics when I’m getting stuck on one line of thought. Plus, using notecards offers an opportunity to use my pens, which by their design and functioning remind me of the value of my craft.
 
We’ll see how this all works out.

A week or so ago, Chris Lydon sent out an email advertising his interview with Slavoj Žižek; this week, he’s promoting an interview with Anna Deveare Smith. Keep an eye on Radio Open Source — you never know who will turn up on his show.