History in the Making
Three things have come up recently that I thought would be worth posting on the blog – not that the intervening months have been empty, but that these opportunities come with a special relationship to the spirit, even the letter, of Inherit the Land.

First, I recently took a bus trip with some high school students and others following part of the Underground Railroad route in southern Michigan. (The story is online at http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090628/News01/906280425/1011/News.) Learning about the local connections that I didn’t know was amazing, but even more amazing was the response of thoughtful, passionate young people. They were especially eager to get friends of other cultures to come with them on the trip – as the story says, reflecting their view: African-American history is American history. At the same time, I got to meet a man whose ancestors made it to Indiana because they were freed by a Quaker plantation owner in North Carolina in 1829. I am in the process of investigating the possibility of finding funding sources and writing a book on that story, a perfect prewar complement to Inherit the Land. If that happens, I know of another story in Eastern North Carolina that would complete the set – it’s about a black family that still lives on the land their former master gave them when they were freed by the war.

Second, I recently signed a contract to write the 60-year history of Logan Center, the agency for developmentally disabled people in South Bend whose story tracks the national evolution of such centers. (My Uncle Ed was involved in creating similar programs in Gastonia in the 1950s.) The book will point out the parallels between this movement an the African-American Civil Rights Movement – an impulse for freedom and dignity coming out of World War II, grassroots organizations, key Supreme Court and legislative decisions, increasing inclusion of a once-neglected group in the mainstream of society, significant advance with much more work to be done. It’s an exciting project with terrific people. I hope to finish early next year.

Finally, I have become the principal writer of a new national quarterly magazine, Racing Toward Diversity, produced in South Bend but widely distributed on Wall Street and elsewhere. This is an amazing opportunity to see what progress has been made, and what remains to be made, in both internal corporate communications and external marketing in the field of inclusion. It’s put me in touch with a fascinating array of people who in their various fields share a passion for a more just and equitable society. Each issue includes general articles and an industry focus (the inaugural focus, Spring 2009, was on Motorports). I wrote stories on Robert Marchman of the New York Stock Exchange, businessman Andre Thornton, racing pioneer Charles Wiggins, Rick Clark Motorsports, the Urban Youth Racing School, the Music City Motor Sports Institute and the Boy Scouts of America, in addition to editing some contributed articles. For the second edition, I’m writing about financial literacy, the SEC, pioneer African-American women in communications and PR, and diversity programs in golf, so far. If you’re interested in seeing the magazine, it’s online at www.southbendtribune.com/RacingTowardDiversity. If you’d like to buy a copy or subscription, visit https://www2.southbendtribune.com/services/order-form.php?c=diversity. (You can type my name in the Promotional Code box at the bottom.)

It’s great to participate in these kinds of projects at this point in our society. Yes, there is much to be done. But many people know it, and history is on our side.

Ashes to Ashes
Something is wrong with Lent.
Some of my friends have given up chocolate, liquor, lobster and instant-messaging for 40 days. I, as usual, have given up watermelon. But something seems simply wrong with this picture. I think the problem with Lent is that we don’t understand Easter.
It seems to me that the prevalent understand of the resurrection of Jesus has become something like “Jesus died and rose from the dead so we could go to heaven when we die and live with God forever.” Nothing could be further from the biblical story.
The doctrine of resurrection from the dead in general, so far from being about “heaven,” is the strongest possible affirmation of the physical world, and the Christian claims about the resurrection of Jesus – that it took place in history, with history continuing – is the strongest possible affirmation of the role of history in that world.
In other words, the doctrine of resurrection is the most legitimate option available when one starts with the biblical doctrine of creation: the Earth is our home, because it’s what we’re made out of.
The Hebrews for most of their history before Jesus chose to believe “dust you are and to dust you shall return” (the text, of course, for Ash Wednesday) rather than to accept the otherworldly religions that empowered some people (priests, Pharaohs) to create a present world that others just have to live in.
During the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Hebrews came to believe that God’s covenant with his people would not allow the oppressor to have the last word. Daniel 12 and 2 Maccabees 7 show their confidence that the faithful People of God would get to live again in this world. The writer of Wisdom’s reflection on this, however much he is attempting to communicate it to a Greek mindset, will not give up on its fundamentally physical and historical meaning.
Neither will the New Testament writers. The descriptions of the resurrection of Jesus go out of their way to deny that something simply “spiritual” has happened here – he is not a ghost, he can eat what they’re eating, he can be touched. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 explains the surprising fact that Daniel 12 was fulfilled first by one person, but he insists that the Hebrews’ hope is still the hope for all of us. Death will be conquered, and as he says in Romans 8, when our bodies are redeemed, the whole Earth will share in that glorious liberty. It will not burn. It was not made for destruction. Our life is here.
The mistake, I think, comes from a misreading of the Ascension story through Greek eyes that assume the ether as our goal. I think the story, in both Paul and Luke, is a claim that Daniel 7 has been fulfilled, i.e., the Son of Man has gone to the Ancient of Days. This was not geographic in Daniel – narratively, it is in the exact position of the stone’s filling the whole Earth in Daniel 2, which clearly refers to the vindication of the People of God – and it is not geographic in the New Testament. Paul, in fact, makes clear that Jesus has not left – rather, he fills all things (Ephesians 2 and 4).
Easter is about a new creation, about a resurrection revealed as light breaks through the darkness (Luke 24) – about as clear an allusion to Genesis 1 as one could find. A new creation that is this world, and this history, liberated from the death brought by sin.
How, then, could the shunning of food, drink and friendly conversation be an appropriate preparation for such a celebration? I do not mean to pass judgment on a particular case here – there may be very good reasons for a person to adopt such practices. (Although I personally don’t believe in the pendulum theory, the best explanation I’ve heard, that the cure for excess is defect. Temperance – the real virtue, not the American perversion called the “temperance movement” – is an avoiding of both errors all the time.) But any practice that stems from a Gnostic spiritual/material division calls for a Christian correction.
Getting Easter right could make Lent really fruitful. We are still in the outworking of the story (as I think we always will be), and the climax – Jesus’ resurrection – must be brought to bear on all the ways our world is broken. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are great opportunities to participate in that – fasting, that is, in the Isaiah 58 sense rather than the Pharisaical not-like-other-men sense. We could make ourselves ready, by considering the tasks at hand, to celebrate the solution and go forth into ordinary time revived.

Why Ask Why?

Now that the most gripping political campaign since I was 14 is finished, I’m hoping to get back here more often. I was reluctant to make my strong opinions a point of division on the blog, and anyway, plenty of other people had that job covered. Now that it’s over, and without attempting to add anything to the celebrations and post-mortems about politics, I’d like to start by saying something about the much-maligned press and its role in the process.

As usual, the “liberal, elite media” was a frequent target, and too often the media responded with hand-wringing and a misguided swing at “balance.” Somebody accurately named this approach “the symmetry of sin,” meaning that if you say something bad about somebody (e.g., he started an elective war that has killed more than 4,000 people so far), you have to find something bad to say about his opponent (e.g., he ate the whole main course with the salad fork) that leaves the reader with a satisfying sense of equivalence. One blogger, confronted with the statistic that 80 percent of journalists vote Democrats, responded with the only correct answer: So what? He was assailed as part of the problem. (This, of course, in a political season when it was counted as “correction” to say “oh, no, he’s a good family man” when someone was accused of being an Arab.)

But on the fundamental issue of whether we look at the world as a static place or a dynamic place, the parties will never have parity within journalism. I don’t think it’s primarily because journalists come from upper-middle-class homes or take more humanities courses in college or tend to be more idealistic than average, although all of that may be true and it’s often cited as the reason for the disparity. I think it’s because the journalist’s job is to ask questions – and not just Who? What? When? and Where? but Why? and How?

Once upon a time in journalism, reporters were little more than stenographers for the system. They accepted the authorities in place – government, religion, public schools, large corporations and institutions – and dutifully transmitted what those authorities said. Printing a press release pretty much satisfied the first four questions. Then came Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Richard Nixon and Watergate, and the last two questions came into play. For the first time, the media was attempting to tell the whole story – to answer all the questions.

It seems to me that the simple act of asking those questions puts the media on one side of the great divide. To ask the question is to presuppose that the answers are not self-evident, which by itself is a challenge to the cherished conservative belief in the fixed reality of the establishment. The answer, at bottom, to “why are things the way they are?” is “because this is the way they are.” In our day, for example, it’s flags should not be burned, gay couples should not marry and rich people should not pay more taxes (beware the liberal notion that top tax rates should revert to their 2000 levels!). Why? Because that’s the way it is. In an earlier day, it was blacks should know their place, interracial couples should not marry and rich people should not pay more taxes.

A conservative may grant that things are not the way they should be, but the answer to that unfortunate circumstance is to restore things to the fixed way they should be – and the conservative knows what that is (pregnant teenagers should get married, for example). The overwhelming share of media types on the left turns out to be balanced by the overwhelming share of fundamentalist types on the right. There are journalists who consider themselves conservative, but I expect it’s because they understand the answers to the questions to line up with conservative views. If it’s because they don’t understand the importance of the questions, they are not journalists worthy of the name.

Living History

A story this weekend in the New York Times reports the disclosure of a stone column with Hebrew writing, dating from shortly before the time of Jesus, that seems to refer to a messiah who would rise from the dead in three days. (The whole story is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/world/middleeast/06stone.html?hp.) The headline, of course, says the discovery “ignites debate.” I would like to think that it could settle a debate. Just as science has shown that natural events can be explained naturally, I hope this pushes us closer to understanding that historical events can be understood historically. The old divide between static “natural” and “supernatural” categories, the common ground of medieval philosophers and modern fundamentalists that has preoccupied us for so long, could then go away and we, like Israel, would be free to work with God in history.

The stone’s message supposedly calls into question the supposed uniqueness of Christianity. (Uniqueness is a dubious quality in my view, anyway, for a religion that is supposed to be for all the nations – especially if the uniqueness requires divorce from its Jewish roots.) In the gospels, Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples that he would die and rise again. If there was an alive tradition of a messiah rising in three days in the late first century B.C.E. and early first century C.E., as the stone suggests, he did not say that because he could see the future (the fundamentalist view), and we are not required to believe that the gospel writers retrojected such sayings into the text (the liberal view). History trumps both wrongheaded approaches.

As usual, the historical approach bears fruit in lots of other areas. Here’s one that the story doesn’t mention. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:4 that Jesus was raised on the third day “in accordance with the scriptures,” a line that made its way into the creeds. The remark is offhand, as if to say “just as we always expected” – the messiah’s rising on the third day is not a surprise or a novelty in the story to Paul. But if one asks “what scriptures?” the candidates are extremely thin. The only explicit one I know of is Hosea 6:2, which in context is about Israel’s return to YHWH: “After two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his presence.” Either Paul is reaching for a proof-text here, without citing it, or Paul knows a developed tradition, perhaps rooted in the Hosea text, that is attested by the stone. The second seems to me much more likely.

Nothing stands or falls on the case of the stone, just as nothing stands or falls in evolution on a particular fossil discovery. Doubtless the discovery will be attacked by the ahistorical fundamentalists (of the right and the left), just as fossil discoveries are attacked by the ascientific fundamentalists. But the world is changing.

Alasdair MacIntyre opens his After Virtue with “A Disquieting Suggestion,” imagining a catastrophe in the natural sciences that leaves us with fragments of the past later gathered up and recast as “science.” “But many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear very surprising to us,” MacIntyre says. He is, of course, describing what he considers the Enlightenment’s devastation of the classical, specifically Aristotelean, tradition. But I would suggest that the exercise works at least as well for the Greek devastation of the Hebrew tradition, the imposition of static categories, otherworldly goals, suspicion (at least) of physicality and, worst of all, the unfreedom of a world where some people get to tell others how they have to live. That world is collapsing under its own incoherence. YHWH our God is the one who brought us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Jesus is alive, risen after three days, in the history that we share.

No Senator No

I am sure Jesse Helms was proud on July 4, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He understood his role in terms of saving the Republic, which included saving the Republican Party in the South. But his understanding of the Republic, while it may have had something in common with Adams’ attacks on freedom in the Alien and Sedition Acts, bears little resemblance with Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” That’s a pity, because a little historical awareness could have brought about a different world.

I have long contended that Sen. Helms was at the Ross will trial in his mother’s womb. The evidence is, of course, circumstantial – the trial was in April, Helms was born in October. Still, his father was one of three police officers in town, and one of the others was a juror at the sensational trial. At any rate, he was certainly born into a world where that verdict had been given, but the result was quickly suppressed. I knew Sen. Helms because I was a reporter in his hometown. I was not a political reporter covering his campaigns, but I met him frequently at events in Monroe. I asked him in detail if he had ever heard of the Ross will trial, and he assured me that he had not. I believed him. Growing up in Monroe decades later, I didn’t hear of it either.

Until I met the Ross family, I thought that a Southerner’s a stand for equal rights required repudiating the past. There is much to repudiate, not least the behavior of Sen. Helms and his sort. His protests that he was not “racist” depend on defining racism in violent lynching terms, and his brand, in the tradition of Walter Bickett and John J. Parker, is far more insidious for its paternalistic “separate but equal” inequality. But there is a past, with people like Maggie and Sallie and Bob and Mittie, that can be recovered and treasured as we tell our story moving forward. What a different world if that had been Jesse Helms’ story.

Sex and the City Room

The handwringing about sexism in the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is predictable, but ultimately wasted. The beauty of individualism (yes, there are beauties and well as uglies) is that different people can be treated differently even when they belong to the same group. It is just too great a leap to believe that any other woman (think Elizabeth Dole, Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi) would get the same kind of coverage as this particular former First Lady with the kinds of baggage she brought and the kinds of rhetoric she piled on. If anything, the media treated her with kid gloves, failing to analyze her failure to get health care 15 years ago, turning her Pat Schroeder-like tears into a turnaround in New Hampshire. What other campaign, male or female, could have survived a public appeal to “hard-working white people,” more brazen than anything George Wallace tried 40 years ago?

The worst thing the media did was the equal-opportunity drive to keep the ratings-boosting horse race alive, pounding on “bittergate” and Obama’s preacher when needed, looping her lie about sniper fire and her hint of assassination when needed. Imagine the coverage of any other candidate who kept the race alive by injecting $5 million of her own money before Feb. 5 and millions more to keep from bowing out. As she went around claiming 18 million votes, who checked to see how many of those from California were still with her four months later, and who subtracted the territorial voters who can’t participate in the general election? A few sources hinted at the polls that shifted strongly in California, and some did late, thorough analysis of the math, but most just tagged “the Obama campaign disputes” when reporting that she said she had more popular votes. Already, only 19 percent of her voters are still saying they will vote for McCain, fewer than the number in Kentucky and West Virginia who voted for her because the other candidate is black.

What we need next time is more than one woman running for president. When one of them wins and the other loses, we will have reached real equality – and the Monday morning quarterbacks won’t be able to blame the loss on sexism.

Paradigm Shifted
David Brooks’ column on Obama in today’s New York Times (6/13/08) illustrates the problem with his kind of either/or thinking. He is trying to pigeonhole the candidate in one of the two possible approaches to education that Brooks sets up, and he suggests that the failure to fit nicely is a sign of vacillation or maybe even deceit.

What Brooks misses is that the failure to fit nicely, so far from the failure of post-partisanship that he wants to claim, is precisely the different way of understanding the world that Obama offers. Rather than the clashing either/or of the past, the model that makes sense of this phenomenon is Hegel’s description of progress – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The opposing views are not, as they have been in American politics for so long, doomed to fight each other to the death or a red-blue standoff. Something new can emerge. And the something new doesn’t have to be a dissatisfying compromise chiseled out so gains and losses are balanced – that isn’t really anything new. The synthesis can be something that neither side alone thought of before, but something that makes real progress possible.

Here’s an example. For a long time, societies thought that capital punishment was a positive good. They understood it in terms of retributive justice, deterrence, etc. Then arose those who thought capital punishment was a positive evil. They understood it in terms of vengeance, state-sanctioned murder, etc. For a long time, the fight was across intractable lines, no matter how many studies demonstrated that it was or was not a deterrent or how many appeals were made to Genesis 4 and Genesis 9. Then Pope John Paul II reframed this issue: The question is about justice, he said, but about justice for this person. No longer did the fights about deterrence matter – not because one or the other side had won, but because a new thing had become central. The society’s right to defend itself goes unhampered, but the responsibility to defend itself in every other way possible before carrying out capital punishment comes clear. This is not a compromise. It is synthetic, a new thing arising out of the old debate.

That kind of change, I think, is what Obama is offering. I also think that’s why Hillary Clinton and John McCain seem so oddly similar in contrast to him. She’s not really a Republican in the policy sense, but they are both exponents of this older way of seeing the world. The failure of Brooks and those like him even to notice the categories tells us much more about them than it does about Obama.

Part of the reason I haven’t posted for a while is that most of my thinking has been about the Democratic primary, and I didn’t want to tip my hand for those of you who don’t already know. But the media frenzy about Senator Obama’s “bitter” remarks demands a response.

I think the underlying question is "Why do people resist hope and change, settling for security and familiarity?" Why do they hold on to what they have so tightly (yes, “cling”) instead of reaching out for something even better? And I think the answer is that their immediate basic needs are so great, so overwhelming, that all of their attention has to be focused there. Leisure is the basis of culture, and the worker who lives from paycheck to paycheck has no time for creativity, for free imagination or for action to alter the circumstances around her that she, on reflection, would recognize as oppressive and unjust. The Republicans did not, as they promised, starve the government. They starved the middle class, kept them so strained economically that they were easy prey for cynical campaigns against flag-burning and gay marriage. Analogous to what, perhaps accurately, they accused the Democrats of doing with the welfare generations, they created a world where people have time, after meeting their subsistence requirements, to do only what they are told.

The status quo that the Republicans, and perhaps the Clintons, represent does not want change. Those who win by dividing and taking 50 percent plus one do not want unity. They want to make a world that other people have to live in. Those people will not challenge that world if they live in uncertainty of where their next meal is coming from, how their kids will get educated or what will happen to them if they suffer a catastrophic illness. Obama challenges that world and wants to lift all Americans to a place where we can participate in fashioning a more equal,more just society. His comments show that he understands why that message is difficult for some to hear. Those who twist his words are the real elitists.

Hip-deep in a presidential election that will last for most of the year, we might do well to stop and consider what we mean by “president.” Like “love” or “change” or “experience,” it’s one of those words that might just be a place-holder for one’s private thoughts, and we may be talking past each other without recognizing it when we don’t mean the same thing. I’d like to start the conversation by suggesting two things that “president” does not mean, at least not in the Constitution, that many people seem to take it to mean in our day.
To begin with, the president is not the “decider.” The current president’s appropriation of that term is just the latest in a long history of presidents’ grasping for more than executive power. But it is simply not present in the Constitution. The Framers understood that there are three powers – the same powers that every person has: to choose, to act on the choice, and to evaluate the choice and the action. Those are what we call the legislative, executive and judicial powers when it comes to government, and the Framers were insistent that no two of them, much less all three, could be invested in one department, much less in one person. That way, they knew, leads to tyranny. Congress alone is the “decider.” Congress chooses what the laws will be. The president has power to execute, not what he wants, but what Congress has told him to execute. This limit is so clear constitutionally that the Supreme Court has ruled the line-item veto unconstitutional (the Decider’s use of “signing statements” raises other questions). The president has the power to veto the laws Congress passes, but if Congress wants something badly enough, it can override the veto. (Early presidents seemed to think the veto should have something to do with constitutionality, not personal preference, but the power is there nonetheless.) So, when we are electing a president, we might do well not to think that we are electing a “decider.” That’s what representatives and senators are for. The role of “decider” has, historically, been more readily invoked and accepted in times of crisis, such as Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR during the Depression, but that doesn’t make it constitutional – and it certainly should not become a permanent feature of the office, even if a misnamed “war on terror” goes on for 100 years.
The president also is not a CEO. This business metaphor, however attractive in a corporate culture, may be even more dangerous than “decider,” because it includes all of those problems and leaves no room for Congress at all. The CEO of a corporation is hired by a board of directors. In the metaphor, that’s the voters. The incoherence of this view becomes clear when one objects that the voters are actually the shareholders. But then who is the board? Congress does not hire the president (although, in principle, they can fire him). The CEO keeps his job by making the kinds of profits that make the shareholders and the board happy. Again, will and force, choice and action, are united in him. The Constitution does not envision that we are electing a CEO.
Then what are we electing? It turns out that, whatever else, we are electing someone to a dual role rare in most nations. We are electing both the head of state – the one who will receive other heads of state or their representatives, negotiate treaties, etc. – and the head of government – the one who is charged with executing the laws passed by the Congress. For whatever reason – perhaps aversion to monarchy, perhaps a differently-conceived view of the federal government and the state governments – the Framers did not divide the roles as they are in systems with a president (or monarch) and a prime minister. In most of those systems, the danger that the prime minister will not want to execute the decisions of the parliament is mitigated by the fact that he is part of the majority party. He puts the decisions into action, and someone else holds the more ceremonial, visible-principle-of-unity role in the society. Our president must do both, even when he (or she) is not of the same party as the deciding Congress.
If we do not consider the dual role, we run the risk of electing someone who has the skills only to be the head of state or only be the head of government. The disparaging of a candidate because he is inspirational and unifying but not a policy wonk, or because she is a policy wonk and not inspirational and unifying (if such were to happen) could be understood in terms of the fitness for the dual role. Michael Dukakis tried to run for head of government only (“This election is about competence, not ideology”) against a vice president who knew how to invoke the national symbols (e.g., pledge of allegiance) and overarching themes (“kinder, gentler”) like a head of state (however he actually governed once he got there). Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy seemed to emphasize the role of head of state, renewing and invigorating the country. Given the limited executive role – which must be restored, and Congress resume its responsibility – I would tend on balance toward the more promising head of state when I had to choose.