Tired Tired Nixon Moon Landing Tired

What a long day!

I don't have much in me for blogging tonight. The fragments left in my brain are the same old borderline hopeless things about impeachment and epistemic polarization as I've been writing about for a while now.

Tomorrow I drive (and drive and drive and drive) all the way up to my family in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. I hope my car makes it. I hope I make it. Today wasn't so great on the "consuming sufficient calories" score.

In my caffeine-fueled morning, I briefly entertained a whole (smallish) book on online performance and lying. I . . . simply can't bring to mind much of a coherent assessment of that thought process right now, lol.

I leave you, then, with the weirdness of deepfakes. As you may know, Nixon's speechwriter William Safire had prepared a statement for the President to read in the event that the Apollo moon landing had ended in disaster. Some bright folks at MIT have deepfaked a video of "President Nixon" reading that statement:

Funky.

Epistemic Crises on the Run

I ignored an inner voice of conscience today. Prepping to run around the lake today (about four miles, which has been my plateau/limit for a while), I was trying to choose between things to listen to. I could continue the "Christmas Present" playlist I've been using for running workouts. Or I could hear the latest episode of On the Media, which promised a dire report on the "epistemic crisis" we face.

My inner voice groaned at the thought of the media show. Don't you know pretty much everything they'll say already? Do you really need this hit to your sense of hope and well-being? Can't we just enjoy some more Christmas music?

I chose the show, ignoring my inner voice.

And yeah, it's depressing. The episode's title says it all: "The Disagreement is the Point." The first segment, featuring Vox writer David Roberts hits a lot of the points I've been making about the impeachment hearings. It seems obvious to me and to many within the "legacy media" (neat term, better than "mainstream media," perhaps) that Trump has done exactly what he's been accused of. Heck, he and his staff have admitted it, reveled in it.

Every witness, even those that were expected to be amiable to the President, supported the same story: Trump, via Giuliani, was pursuing his on shadow diplomacy and intelligence-gathering with and in Ukraine, efforts that had as their goal not national interests but Trump's personal need to embarrass his political enemies. He delayed military aid approved by Congress to Ukraine with the understanding that this would pressure Ukraine into opening investigations into the Bidens and into (again, multiply debunked conspiracy theories about) Democratic servers. He only ended the delay and (in a call with Sondland) cried "no quid pro quo" when it became clear that the gig was up.

I find it necessary to reiterate this narrative, even if only for myself, because it seems like the facts involved just aren't apparent to everyone.

The GOP response has been largely one of obfuscation, throwing up disinformational chaff in the form of multiple (and multiply debunked) conspiracy theories about how Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 election meddling. Or that Joe Biden, not Trump, is the person who really deserves investigation (amazing how this became a pressing issue only as Biden emerges as a front-runner in the Democratic presidential primaries).

The problem here, Roberts stresses in the On the Media interview, isn't that Republicans make different conclusions based on the facts. It's that they operate from a completely different basis, a Trumpian basis, for what kinds of information should be valued. The show quotes Rep. Devin Nunes crowing that the impeachment hearings are a failure for Democrats because their ratings aren't very high. In any sane world, Roberts notes, the question of how entertaining an investigation like this would be ridiculous. Are these facts true? Did the President and the President's operatives do these things, and why?

But whether an allegation is true seems to have taken a back seat to the question of whether an allegation is damaging to my team. It's a "tribal epistemology," says Roberts. We decide ahead of time which side we're on and then represent or evaluate facts on that basis.

The Republicans don't have facts on their side here (as even many conservative writers not supporting impeachment concede). The best they can do, then, is make the process of fact-finding seem boring, overly complex, or purely partisan. They want people who aren't especially engaged with the facts of this case to dismiss the entire thing as Democratic pique. They want people to get angry at and tired of the process, the very question of whether Trump did something wrong.

And it looks like they might be succeeding.

Senator John Kennedy (Louisiana, alas), this morning asserted that "no one can know" for sure who was behind the 2016 election interference. It's the "you can't prove it's not [Ukraine]" defense beloved of people arguing for indefensible positions.

My question, aside from how to sustain some kind of hope amidst this epistemic divide, is whether I reach out to my representatives, of whom Kennedy is one. Is it worthwhile to call and leave a message? Is there any chance whatsoever that they'd listen?

Would I be "entertaining" enough to be heard?

Hopelessness in Lote Bravo

Sometimes, while hacking away at the endless and ever-renewing pile of papers to grade, I run into a student analysis that makes me re-think a play I thought I knew. I'm going to ramble through some thoughts here.

The play in question is The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis. Set in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the play tells the story of a mother, Juanda, searching desperately for her lost daughter, the 15-year old Raquel, whom she calls "el toro bravo," the brave bull. Actually, as the play starts, the audience sees Raquel dying in the deserts outside of CD, her body beaten, her hands bound. She's met there not by her mother but by La Santa Muerte, the Holy Lady of Death in Mexican Catholic culture, patron diety of sinners and desperate people. Raquel asks for release; Santa Muerte offers only presence and some comfort, telling Raquel the story of Juanda searching for her.

The play unfolds from there in nested flashbacks. We see Juanda, a malquiladora (American-owned factory) worker, appealing in vain to Pedro and Roberto, corrupt police detectives, to help find Raquel. She spills her frustration and desperation to Camille, a co-worker at the malquiladora. Camille insists that Juanda pray to La Santa Muerte, giving her an icon of Lady Death. Scandalized at first--Juanda insists she is a good Catholic--she nevertheless takes the figure.

At home, as her young sons sleep, Juanda prays to La Santa Muerte, who enters in a supernatural flash. She scorns Juanda's ignorance (the proper prayer to her involves offerings of tequila), demanding payment in exchange for Juanda's request for knowledge. Juanda promises anything. La Santa Muerte presses her:

La Santa Muerte: Are you a virgin?
Juanda: I have four children.
La Santa Muerte: Were you married before you let a man fuck you?
Juanda: I don't like you accusations or your language. It's disgusting.
La Santa Muerte: You can't even answer me honestly.
Juanda: I was...I've prayed for forgiveness. I've confessed.
La Santa Muerte: Confessed what?
Juanda: Eduardo and I did the honorable thing. We married before I was showing . . . Raquel was born in wedlock
La Santa Muerte: You're a very good Catholic woman.
Juanda: I try . . .
La Santa Muerte: I've never liked her. Your holy virgin. I've never understood why anyone prays to her. A virgin knows nothing about the sins a woman must endure for survival. Get her out of my sight.

Raquel, La Santa Muerte informs her, has prayed to the Lady Death since she was five. It's Raquel's prayers, not Juanda's that lead her here. La Santa Muerte demands the Mary statue Juanda has. She gives it. La Santa Muerte takes her into Raquel's past. We (along with Juanda) see Raquel meet a young wannabe tough, El Reloj ("the clock"), who promises her a job at the bar where he works. Both he and Raquel, Santa Muerte says before departing, pray to her.

From there, the play consists of scenes where Juanda purchases--and then steals--ever more expensive alcohol--and finally her own blood--for her ritual entreaties. Each time, La Santa Muerte shows here a bit more of Raquel's past--her growing relationship with El Reloj, her work selling her body for money, their plans to escape Ciudad Juarez, El Reloj's fear of his gang's boss. Ultimately, after an unsuccessful duel (a bullfight) with Reloj's boss (the Man in the Black Hat), Raquel is beaten. Reloj, struggling to get her away, is stopped by Pedro, the police officer who we learn is both his own father and in the service of the gangs. to spare the rest of his family from reprisal, Pedro says, El Reloj must end Raquel's life, and Pedro must end his. This happens. Pedro and Roberto then dump the bodies in the desert.

Thus we rejoin La Santa Muerte comforting the dead Raquel as Juanda enters. Cradling her daughter, she narrates a tale of her and her sons' escape over the Rio Grande into the USA.

The student's paper suggested that the action pattern for the script is pillaging the light, stealing away hope and replacing it with hard, dark, pragmatic survival. At first I objected. Action patterns in plays generally do not describe merely the starting conditions of the script; they must account for the arc of the play. The play starts in hopelessness, I said, with light already pillaged. What's left for the play to do? The student, however, argued effectively that the play takes us through that loss of hope, the replacement of idealized fantasies (the Virgin Mary) with crimes of survival and, finally, with blood. The play ends just as it began, in the desert, with a woman crooning a tale to a corpse.

It is a grim play, a play where a religion that preaches hope gets supplanted by a religion of gritty reality. "I was a naive child once," the Man in the Black Hat says as he begins to duel Raquel, "filled with dreams of escape." Juanda's ending vision, which I originally read as prophecy, now seems like a kindhearted dream, a final comfort to a daughter who died for nothing.

The real antagonist, Bettis suggests, is the world itself, a NAFTA-created world of exploitative factory work and violence-ridden gang life, all for the benefit of invisible Americans. (The factory Juanda and Camille work in makes USA flags. At one point Camille catches her finger in the sewing machine and without missing a beat wraps her bloody finger in a flag so that she can keep working.)

In an interview, Bettis says she wanted to write a play that would make white Americans, upon watching it, start rooting for Mexicans to cross the border illegally--do anything to escape that world. In this, I think, she succeeds.

But I'm caught by the odd sort of hopeless hope represented by La Santa Muerte, the one everyone in the play--antagonist and protagonist alike--prays to.

At one point, a desperate Juanda steals a bottle of añejo to summon La Santa Muerte.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Shit. This añejo, this bottle…So many mouths that have tasted this have called my name. Desperation. Loneliness. And yet a lingering taste of hope. Subtle. If you didn’t know what hope tasted like you’d miss it completely.

JUANDA: La Santa Muerte…Forgive me. I…I’ve never stolen anything in my life.

LA SANTA MUERTE: That guilt just eats away at your insides, doesn’t it. You should know by now that I don’t forgive. I listen.

JUANDA: What good does that do…

LA SANTA MUERTE: Whose sin is worse. The one who sins to pay or the one who pays to sin?

JUANDA: I don’t…I don’t know anymore.

LA SANTA MUERTE: Good.

"If you didn't know what hope tasted like you'd miss it completely." 

I'll have to think more on this.

 

Times Were Tough and Mr. Rogers

Today was "Times Were Tough" day in my senior capstone class.

I assign three brief readings. The first is "Everything Is Awful and I'm Not OK: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up." (PDF Downloadable form here.) It's a one-page list of check-in questions, simple stuff like "Are you hydrated?" or "Have you moved your body to music in the past day?" These questions are paired with straightforward suggestions. "Drink a glass of water." "Find a living thing to cuddle." "Pause right now and get something small completed."

I share these with the caveat that the author isn't suggesting any of these cures depression or magically makes life better. But, I tell students, my sister the mental health counselor (the wisest person I know) could point them to people who would attest that they are alive today because they paused five minutes to drink a glass of water.

Putting a firewall between emotion and action is a big part of the second reading, a chapter from Kelly Williams Brown's Adulting: How to Become an Adult in 468 Easy(ish) Steps. The chapter is "Times Were Tough." Like a lot of Brown's book, the chapter combines practical how-to's (how to write a decent condolence note, how to share bad news) with some meta-level advice. A lot of it is a gentle lesson that the kind of things we experience as crises when we're in our late teens/early twenties turn out to be mere annoyances as we get older. The more we see and survive, the more perspective we have to separate emergencies from irritations.

One list she includes are physical health signs that qualify as medical emergencies, like a high fever, paralysis, or a seizure. I took the opportunity to add mental health emergencies. We spoke about the injustice of our cultures (and sometimes families) viewing mental health issues as somehow lesser than physical health issues.

There are differences, of course. My partner is fond of quipping that a symptom of having a broken leg is not denying that you have a broken leg. Many mental health dysfunctions, however, have as part of their awfulness minimizing or normalizing them. It's fine. It's not that big a deal. 

It doesn't help that, as my partner says, people tend to treat mental health as a matter of willpower rather than as an illness. No one tells diabetics to "just get over it" or "get right with the Lord" or "try smiling more." No, you give them insulin and other interventions.

The last reading, a new one for this class, is from Frank Ostaseksi's The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully. Ostaseksi founded a Zen Hospice in California. His book, a combination of anecdotes and wisdom teachings, can at first seem a bit like the worst kind of cliched self-help pablum. But then, just as you're thinking that, he hits you with a story of someone forgiving a mortal enemy on their deathbed. Or he tells about his story of surviving abuse at the hands of a trusted priest. Or he simply makes an observation that captures what you've always suspected.

The chapter I assigned was "Taming the Inner Critic." There Ostaseksi discusses how often the inner voice that hectors us is an unhelpful holdover from some previous (often childhood) experience. We can get awfully defensive of this critic, romanticizing it as the voice that keeps us on the straight and narrow. That defense, Ostaseski suggests, is often misguided. The inner voice more often than not isn't interested in wise discernment but in judgment, the quick and easy  castigation of all effort. It's a useful chapter for young artists (and middle-aged professors).

I end with Mr. Rogers. One of my favorite bits of musical theatre is this clip from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, where Daniel Striped Tiger and Lady Aberlin share a duet (a beautifully constructed one, I might add). Daniel worries that he's a mistake. Aberlin assures him he's not.

Notice how Aberlin's insistance doesn't diminish or banish Daniel's fears. They sing them together. But it helps.

I didn't show that in class (I know not everyone reveres Rogers as I do), but I did share the statement that Rogers ended every show with. First he sings:

It's such a good feeling
To know you're alive
It's such a happy feeling
You're growing inside
And when you wake up ready to say,
"I'll think I'll make a snappy new day."
It's such a good feeling
A very good feeling
A feeling you know 
That I'll be back
When the day is new
And I'll have more ideas for you
And you'll have things you'll want to talk about
I will, too.

Then he says:

You always make each day such a special day for me. You know how? By just your being you. There's no one else in the whole world like you, and people can like you just the way you are.

I tell my class that, locking eyes with each of them in turn. Some of them cry.

We never get over needing to hear that, I tell them. The people around you never get over needing to hear it, either. Only say it when you can mean it. But find ways to mean it and say it to the people in your life. 

It's a good Friday.

Private PS: Lord who loves us just the way we are, Lord who follows us into the darkest places of illness, be with EW and his family.

Watching Protests

As much as I appreciate a lot of what American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher writes, sometimes the worldview differences between us just leave me befuddled.

Take his latest post, for example, "Watch the Intellectuals." He discusses a protest last night at UC Berkeley. The UC Berkeley College Republicans had invited Ann Coulter to give a talk called "Adios, America!" (presumably about immigration?). Hundreds of protesters (from a group called Resist Fascism, not representing UC Berkeley officially) showed up, met by UC Berkely police in full riot gear. The protesters attempted a human chain to prevent people going into the event. The police escorted attendees and Coulter. "Six or seven" protesters were arrested. The event happened.

Dreher is apoplectic. "Seriously," he asks, "what if a mob of white people at a major American university banded together to prevent people of color and their allies from going into a hall to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak?" He continues:

What is it going to take to fight this? It’s so exasperating how little people in this country care about the fact that left-wing mobs are taking our liberties from us, and our political leaders — including Donald Trump — are doing nothing about it. Barely even talking about it. I honestly don’t get it. We should not be living in a country where people who want to go hear a speaker have to be protected by police simply to get into the hall. You know what this looks like?

He then compares the protests in Berkeley to the Little Rock Nine, where pro-segregationists blockaded Little Rock Schools to prevent black children from entering an historically all-white school.

That comparison seems . . . stretched.

Dreher links the Berkeley event to a favored bugaboo of his: the liberal intellectual class's prejudice against conservatives:

If you think this is going to stay in Berkeley, you’re mistaken. This mob action might not spread to places outside of the coasts, but here’s what’s going to happen: those young people who join the mobs, they are going to graduate and move into the institutions of American life. They are going to carry their militant illiberalism, including their contempt for free speech and open discourse, into those institutions, and are going to do their damnedest to institutionalize them. One thing I have learned from the past few months spent studying Soviet-bloc communism: watch the intellectual class. It is a very big mistake to think that what they say and do only matters in the shadow of the ivory tower. They are the ones who produce the ideas that are eventually spread through society. If you don’t care about this stuff when it happens now, on campuses, you had better prepare yourself to be made to care later, when graduates of these campuses are setting corporate policy, or serving as gatekeepers to the institutions you want your “deplorable” kids to get into. This is not a joke.

Oy. Sometimes from members of my church or from people who know I'm a professor, I hear something like this, often framed sympathetically: things must be really tough for you right now in Universities with all that political correctness and intolerance. "Not really," I say, shrugging. We're much more stressed about precarious funding structures in this state that make student aid more difficult, teaching resources more expensive, and academic endeavors more generally difficult. I'm concerned about the fact that historical state funding for a state university is dwindling, and that the avenues open to institutions to compensate for that funding loss are unpleasant at best and unethical at worst.

The picture that people, especially conservatives, beyond the university have about what's happening at colleges and universities often surprises me. The image of a liberal-totalitarian enclave laser-focused on policing the thoughts of students just doesn't match the reality most of us who work at universities face. My life at school simply isn't taken up with politics most of the time. The mundane routines of catching up with grading, admin work, class planning, and (in my case) production work takes up the vast majority of my attention. Most of my students are too tired/busy/stressed with class and production work to worry much about who's politically correct or not.

Truth: I'd not heard of these protests outside of Dreher's reporting. I'm rather more focused on the impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States. So is everyone else. There's not much out there on the Berkeley event even on Fox. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed don't mention it.

Dreher sees this as evidence that the media is left-leaning. Maybe? Or maybe it's that there's a whole lot of national-crisis-level stuff happening in DC right now, and the goings-on at a single university may not merit that much attention. Would things be different were Ta-Nehisi Coates were protested? I don't know. I kind of doubt it, though.

Look, I have no interest in defending every action by every university where something like this happens. Inevitably, you're going to find instances where something like a left-wing political correctness leads people to jerkish behavior. (You can also find instances where right-wing political correctness does this.) (Also: what makes the protesters and not the College Republicans "the intellectuals" whose tendencies Dreher warns against? How does a private protest group get to stand in for Bekeley as a whole?) There are 5,000 colleges and universities in the US. For any news about a single university, you have to divide by 5,000. At one university out of 5,000 yesterday, Ann Coulter faced protesters before getting to speak and be heard just as planned.

Forgive me if I fail to see the dire threat here.

That said, and for the record, I don't condone activist tactics that block people from hearing folk they want to listen to. A human chain to prevent people from attending Coulter's event is indeed illiberal. It also seems like a recipe for backlash. I wouldn't like it if someone were to propose blocking me from, say, going to a public library to watch drag queens read a story in public.

There is a big difference, though, between segregationists protesting the Little Rock Nine--or even hypothetical racists protesting Ta-Nehisi Coates--and a coalition of activists protesting Coulter. In the former cases, you have people objecting to people. It didn't matter who the Little Rock Nine were, only that they weren't white. Coulter, by contrast, garners protests not for who she is but for the arguments and rhetorics she makes her living off of spreading. She traffics in provocation fueled by xenophobic nationalism (which, it must be said, often accompanies and bolsters race-based bigotry). This kind of event is exactly the kind of thing that helps her brand (which is another reason, frankly, why super-protests against her have a "feed the troll" kind of counterproductivity).

People shouldn't be blocked from seeing here. But neither should her views go unchallenged.

I wonder, though, if Dreher would be mollified had the protesters simply, well, protested? If they'd shown up in the hundreds with signs and slogans--but allowed attendees in--would that still pose the intellectual threat Dreher detects? Coulter's right to expression does not trump protesters' right to expression, after all. She gets to spew her vile rhetoric to adoring crowds. But other people get to counter that rhetoric through protest. The right to free speech isn't the right to immunity from criticism or response.

Or is the mere existence of disagreement with Coulter evidence of political correctness?

Game Overs

I should be used to it now.

Every day of this impeachment inquiry, it seems like the witness utters something that to my eyes seems utterly damning to the President. I mean Well, that's the game. Time for Republicans to float Trump's resignation-level damning information comes out.

Vox agrees. "Gordon Sondland's Opening Testimony is the Ballgame," writes Zach Beauchamp. Was there quid pro quo? said Sondland, The answer is yes. I read that in Sondland's opening statement this morning and thought, surely, this is the tipping point. (I mean, even Ken Starr on Fox was wavering at one point.) Surely this is it.

But no.

Fox News quoted GOP Representative Mark Meadows that, in his view, today's testimony was "Game over" for the Democrats' impeachment hopes. Asked whether Trump ever explicitly told Sondland to withhold Ukraine funding in exchange for political favors (investigating Burisma), Sondland said no. That, Fox News suggests, was the real bombshell. No explicit request equals no wrongdoing. Game over, libs. (Not that these kind of quid pro quos ever operate explicitly, but whatevs.)

The real surprise is how surprised I am, even now. All political news is a shibboleth now. Your take on it, your conclusion about whose game is over, signals your membership in team red or team blue. Nuance isn't critical thinking or taking your time; it's disloyalty.

This shibboleth factor feels to me stronger within the right-wing media world. There's quite a bit of nuance and wiggle room, for instance, in NPR's overview today. Yeah, Sondland said there was quid pro quo, but yeah, Sondland also said he came to that conclusion gradually. It took him a while, he said, for him to get that "Burisma" was essentially code for "Biden." NPR also acknowledges some credibility problems with Sondland, problems for which he was dinged by both Republicans and Democrats. He's changed or updated his testimony three times now. He "doesn't keep notes," so his memory is iffy.

This performance contrasts with that of career diplomats, professionals at protocol and record-keeping. The diplomats were much more immediately keen to detect irregularities in Trump/Guliani's backdoor Ukraine politics. Sondland is out of his element, a hotelier and rich guy appointed to his position by Trump thanks to his million-dollar donation to Trump. In a way, Sondland's muddy testimony is proof of what you get when you kick out the experts and bring in laypeople.

I guess he's what Trump's supporters mean when they insist that he's "draining the swamp." To me, it seems more like a hospital firing all its experienced, credentialed doctors, PAs, and nurses in favor of country club socialites who've consulted Web MD--and then being shocked, shocked! when patients start dying in droves.

But I'm just screaming into the echo chamber. Politico reported this morning that, so far as its contacts among House Republicans can see, not a single GOP member will vote for impeachment, no matter what. There's just no incentive for them to do so when Trump has a stranglehold on their constituents' support.

That's sad, really. Rod Dreher said he voted for John Bel Edwards because, though Edwards is a Democrat, he's a pro-life one. It doesn't feel like betrayal to vote for him. There's no one like that among the Democratic presidential candidates. And Trump has effectively negated everyone to his own left within the Republican party.

For Republicans, Trump is the only game in town. No wonder, then, that they're loath to declare that game over.

Unswayable

Public impeachment hearings continue this week. I caught just a bit of them this morning while on some errands, specifically the end of Rep. Jim Jordan's diatribe about this being a coup to undermine the will of the people. Real Americans, Rep. Jordan assured everyone, know that this is a sham; they see President Trump did no wrong.

The polls I see indicate that 70% of USAmericans believe that what Trump did is improper. A smaller number, however, report supporting impeachment and removal from office.

I'm more interested/disturbed, however, by a poll out from NPR/Marist. Asked whether they could imagine anything from the impeachment inquiry that would change their view on whether or not Trump should be impeached, 65% said no. Nothing would sway them.

I just wrote last week that, although I'm not especially moveable on this issue (I think he's guilty as sin of an impeachable offense), I could imagine something that might sway me. But then, maybe I just have a good imagination.

There's also the fact that, for many people, poll questions like this aren't so much about reporting one's nuanced beliefs as they are about registering sides. People know, generally, how survey results can be mobilized in favor of one or another narrative. Were I dead-set against impeachment, I'd likely say that nothing could sway me. Whether something actually could is another issue.

Were evidence to emerge, for instance, that Trump had perjured himself regarding the Russia investigation, it may become more difficult to resist impeachment--though not removal.

At least, I'd like to think so. The glass-half-empty takeaway from the NPR/Marist poll would be that people are intractably polarized on this essential issue. They live within entirely different epistemological and ideological universes where it's obvious--how can you not see this??--that they are right and the other side is wrong.

Such polarization has roots within the separate media ecosystems of the right and the left. Consider, for instance, the top headline right now on Fox News: "Morrison, Volker undercut claims of 'quid pro quo,' 'bribery,' and 'cover-up' on pivotal day of testimony." Contrast that with one of the top stories on CNN: "How Republicans' star impeachment witness turned on them."

I tend to think that the weight of evidence is stacking up against Trump here. But I can see how, if Fox and such were the only trusted sources I consulted, I'd probably double down on my resistance to impeachment. The Fox story is spiced with slights against Democrats (ex: Democrats are using "bribery" as a charge only because it's "poll-tested"), full of choice quotes from Republicans, and quite selective (judging from the fuller accounts from other news sources) in presenting what Morrison and Volker said. Integral to the Fox News journalistic ethos is not merely reportage (Here's what happened) but perspective (Here's how the other side is acting in bad faith). Well-poisoning is part of the narrative strategy.

Of course, they'd likely say the same about the main stream media (i.e., everyone beyond the Foxsphere).

Perhaps they're right, at least in part. It's not like I'm inclined to read Fox News generously. But I'd like to think that part of my reading involves looking for elements that trouble my own preconceptions. (How would I know? How would I judge this for myself?) I'm not sure that's part of the Fox's assumptions for their readers.

Inertia is a powerful drug, ideological inertia even more so.

Hard times ahead.

Unpleasant News about Former Students

Unpleasant discussions of sexual assault ahead.

News greeted me this morning that a former student of mine (FS for "former student"), now a tenured professor elsewhere, is facing allegations of sexual assault by a former student. I have been navigating a parade of reactions: shock, dismay, soul-searching, pessimism.

Shock: this isn't someone I'd have expected this kind of thing from. I mean, that's a sorry-sounding thing to say. Is there a "type" for men who sexually assault women? Whatever type I had in my brain, and however wrongheaded it was, FS was not that type. FS has a family, a wife and two kids. Had, maybe. He's gone dark on social media.

Dismay: the person making the allegation wrote a lengthy account of the relationship she and FS had. It's sad and sordid. Reading it, I started to see just how FS's charisma could translate into that kind of ego-boosting hero-mentor that some professors (especially but not exclusively male professors) become. I'm a fairly popular professor myself. It feels good to feel looked-up-to. I was also the kind of student who loved being noticed by professors I looked up to. Those good feelings can be a dangerous combination.

As the writer narrates it, a close mentor-mentee relationship developed into a social-media/texting affair, during which FS shared a number of explicit and TMI messages. This culminated in a visit, drinking, and an unwanted advance (forcing hands down pants and up shirt) by FS despite the student's protests. The relationship continued (this is not an unusual feature of abusive relationships). FS cooled and then decided to break things off. The student, an undergrad at the time their relationship started, was thoroughly confused, hurt, and from her account traumatized by the whole thing. She apparently reported the assault to FS's institution, but since she'd not filed a police report at the time, the institution said it could do nothing. A public post is understandable after traditional legal routes are exhausted.

Of course we're hearing only her side of this story, but the narrative she posted contained copious snapshots of social media interactions that--well, I don't see any way FS comes out of this innocent. Nor should he if her report is as credible as it seems. People who commit assault must face consequences. Ditto faculty who abuse student-teacher relationships.

Soul-searching: I've often had grave doubts about the ethics of teaching in a PhD program in my field. Statistics for graduates securing a tenure-track position aren't great. We tell prospective applicants that this isn't a path to set yourself on thinking a position just like your own professor-mentors is waiting for you. On another level, though, grad students manifest extremely high levels of stress. Washouts and attrition from mental-health-related issues (and this is separate from folk who simply decide this path isn't their thing) are common.

FS has long been one of the most successful alums we've had in my time here (I was not on his committee, so the credit I can take for that is limited). He was my go-to example of how things sometimes really can work out. And now?

So far as I am aware, no hint of inappropriate behavior between FS and a student ever appeared during his time with us. But was there something more we should have impressed on him, some well-duh-but-let's-stress-it lesson: Of course, you should never become intimate with someone whose grade or career you can control, someone who's placed their trust in you that you have their best interests rather than your libido at heart. Boundaries.

On another level, I think to my shame how lucky I and some of my colleagues (particularly those of earlier generations) are. Teach for any great length of time, and it's inevitable to have some students who are closer to you than most others. That closeness, most of the time, is innocent and mutually rewarding. But it's also risky. Appropriate kinds of closeness can all too easily slip into relationships that cross lines that ought not be crossed.

The realty of power differentials means that the more-powerful person can miss or misread (or ignore or rationalize away) cues from the less-powerful person that they aren't on the same page, consent-wise. I don't even refer primarily to sexual boundaries. There is a wide vista of inappropriate behavior potentials in teacher-student relationships quite apart from sexual violations, from favoritism to overwork to codependency. I can spot some times in my own history where, if things or the people involved (including me) had been even a little different, some problems might have developed.

That said, I have never gotten drunk and forced myself on someone.

I hope the survivor here gets the healing she needs.

Pessimism: I must also say that this experience adds to some others I've not written about, experiences where other male grad students have behaved in ways that make them dishonorary members of the sexist/misogynist/chauvinist club. The #ThemToo club.

"Remember," advised Twisty on the departed-but-not-forgotten I Blame the Patriarchy blog, "men hate you." Here I take her not as mind-reading every individual cis-male on the planet, divining somehow that they personally bear animosity toward non-cis-men. I take her as meaning that, in a culture like this defined by a long history of women being objectified, minimized, silenced, and marginalized in favor of men, it's hard for men not to have some degree of contempt for women written into their social software.

Like most systemic oppressions, male supremacy comes as the default firmware of modern-day USAmerica. Being socialized in this time and place means absorbing on mostly unconscious levels that men (white, well-off men in particular) occupy the top of whatever pyramid matters: wealth, power, attention, the benefit of the doubt. It takes constant patches and updates to compensate for that firmware, and in bad moments the mind can all too easily default back to the factory settings. I am not immune. No one raised and socialized as male in this culture is (needless to say, this firmware also has effects on women and non-binary/non-conforming folk).

There are times when I wonder whether having men in institutions like mine (as faculty, as students, as staff) is worth the disproportionate risk that they will mistreat women in some way. Of course women can and do abuse people, too. But men are statistically more likely to do so, and to do so to women. Wouldn't things be better without us? Thanos snap! But of course that's wrong-headed, self-pitying fantasy.

This isn't really about me except insofar as I'm saddened by it.

What a shame.

Wild Ideas and Staged Readings

So, a wild thought occurred to me as I was reading The National Review's take on Will Arbery's just-closed play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, about which I've written before. I've been wanting someone to talk to about this play for a while, but almost no one in my immediate world is familiar enough with the script or with the issues involved. And everyone in my world is pretty busy with their own things that they'd love to talk to me about if only I were more familiar with them.

But, among the many ideas the play pitches into the air for characters to bat back and forth is conservative Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. Arbery apparently sent Dreher a draft of the script. Dreher notes, however, that Arbery has not responded to Dreher's emailed questions. Likely, Dreher surmises, Arbery is reticent (as he is in national news interviews) about sharing his own stance. As a playwright, he presents an honest selection of characters who represent a cross-section of conservative Catholic thought in 2017. For Arbery to register whether he supports one or more of the characters would be to upset the balanced, complicated picture his dramaturgy produces. (This seems similar to Lucas Hnath's keeping mum about his beliefs in reference to his excellent play The Christians.)

But Rod Dreher lives here. I live here. It is in my power to create a staged reading/discussion event and invite Dreher to participate.

This is a wild thought because, although I find Dreher's writing often compelling, the two of us stand on opposite sides of a worldview gap. We may concur about President Trump's many shortcomings, but on issues like abortion and sexuality, we would be opponents.

It's a strange kind of opposition in this strange time.

One of Dreher's posts today celebrates Democrat John Bel Edwards's gubernatorial win over Republican Eddie Rispone yesterday, a victory widely seen as a rebuke of Trump. I celebrate along with him.

Trump had campaigned strongly in Louisiana and elsewhere for Rispone, even coming personally to Louisiana on three occasions for pro-Rispone rallies. Such rallies, predictably, turned in to pro-Trump rallies. Dreher points out that Rispone had no discernible platform beyond "Trump likes me; I like Trump." If anything, Edwards's victory signals that pro-Trump rhetoric alone isn't enough to swing a state like Louisiana.*

Edwards, by contrast, has held on to his position as one of the very few Deep South Democratic governors largely thanks to his stalwart pro-life credentials. He signed into law incredibly restrictive anti-abortion legislation during his last term.

I am, as I have mentioned, heartily against most abortion restrictions. I approach reproductive matters from an entirely different place, holding entirely different warrants, than Dreher does.

I support Edwards despite rather than because of his anti-choice stances. There are a number of reasons; his expansion of medicare, his stabilizing the state's finances, his openness with his electorate (he hosts a call-in radio show weekly), his support for teachers, his general alignment with Democratic rather than Trumpist values. In my ideal world, I'd have someone like Edwards but who also works to protect the right not to be forced into continued pregnancy or childbirth, who doesn't treat pregnancy as a functional punishment inflicted on people (disproportionately on women) who have sex. I'll take Edwards, though, because his anti-choice stance makes him a viable candidate. It's the kind of pragmatic calculation Deep South progressives regularly have to make when voting (and the kind of calculation conservatives in other parts of the country have to make about their candidates).

There are other big worldview differences between Dreher and me. Unlike Dreher, I simply fail to see any dire cultural threat from the spectacle of a few drag queens in 30 or so cities reading books to children in public libraries. I'm baffled at the shibboleth status that Drag Queen Story Hour has acquired among a particular bandwidth of cultural conservative. I don't know, but I imagine there's a number of ways that my faith expression (liberal gay United Methodist) would be obnoxious from his Orthodox perspective.

Nevertheless, I'm intrigued at the thought of having a good, long conversation with him about this play. He'd be an ideal conversation partner here. (In the unlikely event you're reading this Mr. Dreher, please do contact me!)

And beyond the wouldn't-this-be-cool factor, a productive conversation with Dreher might restore a bit of faith in the possibility of a pluralist civic ethos. Two people who disagree strongly and are unlikely to convert each other have a deep conversation about faith and politics. What a spectacle. Someone should write a play about it.

We'll see.

*Dreher cites another possible factor in Edwards's victory, one I find depressing yet difficult to discount: LSU won last weekend against its long-time arch-rival Alabama (a rare feat). Spirits in Louisiana--pride and contentment about Louisiana--were high this last week. Had LSU lost, a note of dissatisfaction may have tipped things more in Rispone's favor...

My Little Sermon at the Louisiana UMC Next Gathering

The centrist-progressive Methodist meeting today went fine. I think God used me despite myself; my message went well.

Here's a written-out version of it. My actual delivery (which is somewhere on video) diverged in several ways. Someday I'll perhaps turn what's below into more of a transcript. But for now, here's an idea of what I wrote:

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"Latter-Day Joy"

I just can't start a church meeting without some kind of song. Can we sing something?

[We sang "We are one in the spirit." I reflected how that song combines elements of hope--"We are one in the Spirit"--with bits of uncertainty--"And we pray that our unity may one day be restored." Add to that the fact the song is in a minor key, and its stirring strength becomes more like somber yearning...]

I had another song in mind, but, since we lack hymnals, I'll just read the words:

Joyful, Joyful we adore thee

God of mercy Lord of love

Hearts unfold like flowers before the

Opening to the sun above

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness

Drive the dark of doubt away

Giver of immortal gladness

Fill us with the light of day.

Confession: I’m terrible at joy.

I’m in a place where the clouds of sin and sadness cover me with the dark of doubt.

When I read about our global church, I’m hard pressed to feel joy. I feel tired, scared, and depressed. I see deep polarization, sides mostly set and convinced and weary of sniping at each other. I’m afraid of what 2020 will bring.

It feels like the end. It feels like the apocalypse is nigh—at least for the Methodist Church as we’ve known it. It may be that we are the Latter-Day Methodists.

This feeling gets reinforced by, well, looking at the news. Massive problems, rising global temperatures and sea levels, rising inequality, rising levels of animosity between left and right. I’m afraid of what 2020 will bring. We may be latter-day Americans, latter-day humans. 

The apocalypse may be nigh.

I’m blessed that in this reality God made me not an end-times preacher but a professor of theatre history. You’re like, "John, what’s theatre history?" So glad you asked. The short answer might be, well, it’s theatre but viewed through a historical lens. A lot of the time, though, it’s history viewed through a theatrical lens. Where are we in the human historical drama? The rising action? The Climax? The eleven o’clock showstopping number?

The gift of history is the gift of perspective. When I teach theatre history, I remind students that the terms we use to day for the past—renaissance, medieval, ancient—weren’t used by people in the times. People in the middle ages didn’t think of themselves as living in the middle ages. They thought of themselves as living in the present. Or, more likely, they thought of themselves as living in the end times. The apocalypse was nigh.

That’s a lesson of theatre history: there’s not just one drama. There are many. 

There have always been apocalypses. Ask the indigenous people of the Americas or Australia. (I point out to my students that Western movies from the fifties and sixties with cowboys versus Indians—those are post-apocalyptic stories, except somehow the victims of apocalypse, the survivors, get framed as the villains)

There are personal apocalypses. Last month, a friend of mine from graduate school lost her son, a boy I’d known for almost twenty years since she came to school with me. He was her only child. She was a single mother. He was in many ways her whole world.

It is the reality of mortal existence: some world is always ending.

The Bible is full of apocalypses great and small. The world floods. Hagar gets cast out Abraham’s house into the wilderness. Job loses all his children. Israel splits and goes into exile. Jonah gets swallowed by a big fish. Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt with their toddler. The rebuilt temple is burned.

Our biblical drama, the story of people of faith, isn’t the tale of people spared the end times; it’s the story of God accompanying us through those end times. God meets Hagar in the desert. God walks with the believers in the firey furnace. God guides Israel in exile. God gives the fish Jonah indigestion.

My father loves the song "Once to Every Man and Nation," especially the last verse:

Though the cause of evil flourish

Yet the good alone is strong

Though her portion be the scaffold

And upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future

And behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch upon God’s own

God is in the shadow. This, too, is reflected in scripture. “If I go up to heaven, you are there,” the Psalmist sings, “If I go to sheol—to the grave—you are there. . . In God there is no darkness at all, the night and the day are both alike.”

We echo that divine persistence in that line we’re apt to leave out of the Apostles’ Creed about how Christ "descended into hell." Christ searches out and finds us and meets us in the darkest, deepest midnights of the soul, the worst parts of our dramas.

I love how Methodists talk about God as being on the move. Consider our signature grace: prevenient grace—the grace that goes before us. We usually talk about prevenient grace in the past tense, how God was active and working with us before we knew God. But what if that grace persists? What if God is still going before us? God is already there in the dark of doubt today, God is already there in the dim unknown of 2020.

I have come to think that God is less impressed by the end of all things than I am. 

I cry out to God from the dark abyss, "Lord, the nation may be collapsing." And the Comforter comes to me in that dark place and says, “Yeah, maybe. But I'll be here no matter what."

I cry out to God, "Lord, my church may be ending! My church is splitting!" And God the Holy Spirit comes in that darkness, enfolds me in love, and whispers gently, “Who’s church is that, again?”

Age to age, the Triune God was living and powerful before the United Methodist Church existed. Age to age, the Triune God will be living and powerful long after there is no longer a thing we recognize as the United Methodist Church.

There is comfort in this but also challenge. So many of the verses in scripture about God finding us in sheol, in the grave, in the darkest places of our lives, the bellies of the fish that swallowed us—so many of these aren’t comfort stories but exasperation stories. How shall I escape you? No matter where I go, there you already are. God is the Hound of Heaven, pursuing us, refusing us the pleasure of an apocalyptic pout.

Lord Jesus spoils the romance of ecclesiastical grief, calls us out of the grave, bids us pick up our mats and walk.

That’s God’s harshest lesson about apocalypse: Our job in the apocalypse is the same as our job anywhere. At the end of all things, the questions Lord Jesus asks of us are precisely the same as the questions he puts to us every day: are you feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, meeting those in prison, welcoming the stranger, loving your enemy? The Latter-Day Methodist ought to be identical to the Everyday Methodist.

Thus we experience the comfort and the challenge of Christ, the prevenient grace that refuses to leave us all alone and refuses to just leave us alone.

And, lest we forget, apocalypse means revelation—Behold, I am doing a new thing. Can you not perceive it? What is God revealing to us in this crisis? What ought we be revealing about God to the world? To our siblings in Christ? How ought we be the apocalyptic Methodists about whom the world says, "See how they love one another!"

God of the Omega as well as the Alpha, God beyond our dramas, God with us through the apocalypse, guide us. Make us reminders to each other, reminders to all in need, that your grace and love never leave us alone.

May Your joyful music lift us sunward in the triumph song of life.