12 Questions for Candidates

Our political candidates and their parties are not talking about what drives their agendas in ways that I can easily understand. Even candidates for whom I will probably vote are not articulating clearly the convictions that underlie their plans for our nation and what values will guide them as they try to turn their plans into political reality.

Maybe it’s me.

So, for my sake, here are 12 mostly “domestic issue” questions for candidates to which I’d like straight answers. I have tried to state them as fairly as I can–they are not intended to be “gotcha” questions. Candidates’ answers will no doubt raise many follow-up questions. But all of these questions should be answerable in no more than a few words.

1. As an elected representative, do you represent all the people living in the area that has elected you, or only those who voted for you?

2. Do you believe our planet’s climate is changing? If so, do you believe human activity is contributing to that change?

3. Is the availability of health care properly determined by market/economic forces alone? If not, do you think government has a role in assuring health care’s availability to our citizens?

4. When your religious/spiritual convictions are not the same as the constitutional and legal rights of all Americans, do you submit your personal convictions to the general public interest?

5. Should GLBT Americans be accorded the same rights as other Americans?

6. Should considerations of environmental impact help determine the kinds of jobs we create?

7. Is there ever a good reason to raise taxes?

8. Would you consider compromising any of your convictions about deficit spending and the national debt in order to fashion a bi-partisan plan to deal with those issues?

9. Are you concerned about the widely-reported “gap” between the richest and the poorest Americans, and the “shrinking middle class” between them?

10. Is there a role for public and/or private sector unions in America today?

11. Do corporate power and money in elections threaten our democracy?

12. If your opponents and/or their party win this election, will the American republic survive the next 2-4 years?

Could these be more clearly stated? Do you have questions of your own? How could we put them before candidates and get them to respond?

For artists and other creators and would-be creators

The June 2012 issue of The Sun magazine contains a fascinating interview with artist Ran Ortner. He is best known (I guess) for his enormous paintings of the sea. The interview is called, "Water, Water Everywhere: Ran Ortner's Love Affair with the Sea," and the interviewer is Ariane Conrad. In it Ortner offers fascinating insight not only into what makes him tick as a person, but also into how he understands art and creativity. What he says touched many places in my life, and I invite you to find it and read it and comment on it here.
You can see part of the interview at www.thesunmagazine.org. You have to get a print copy for the whole interview. I know Mac's Paperbacks in Coventry carries it in the Cleveland area, but it may well be available in other bookstores. It's a periodical I always look forward to getting and reading.

Wandering and Maybe Lost in a CO2 Haze

How many times will I receive the “second and final important call” regarding my credit card account before they stop calling me?

My lawn is browning out and it’s only June 1. What’s up? A mild winter here followed by a dry, warm, even hot, spring...and northeast Ohio’s experience is consistent with worldwide data.

“Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide reached an all-time high last year, further reducing the chances that the world can avoid a dangerous rise in global average temperature by 2020...Global emissions of carbon dioxide, or CO2, from fossil fuel combustion hit a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes in 2011...an increase of 2 Gt, or 3.2 percent, from 2010...” (Plain Dealer, May 26, 2012)

Lee Vierding, who “studies environmental change and teaches at the University of Idaho,” writes that very high levels of atmospheric CO2 some 40 or 50 million years ago were cut in half by the rise of Mt. Everest. Took 25 million years to get the job done. If you want to know how that works, read his article in the May 30, 2012 Christian Century.

Will we know when we’ve received that last and final important call about climate change? What if we’ve received it already, and have decided not to respond? Will our salvation have to come from a mountain (again)?

Dis-a-(p)point-ment

“Disappointment” is a soft word we sometimes use to describe hard experience.

When we are angry at or frustrated with someone or something, but anxious about expressing our real feelings, “disappointment” may be all we can safely say–or all we will allow ourselves to say–to others and to ourselves.

Our culture urges us to express our feelings honestly and publicly, and honesty in expression of feelings is often appropriate and even redemptive. But the unbridled spilling of every emotion creates barriers that may be harder to overcome than if we had started by expressing disappointment and encouraged the conversation to go on from there.

Diplomats, labor negotiators, and politicians use “disappointing” to describe failed attempts to resolve differences and heal divisions. No matter how heated the words that crossed the table between them and their adversary, or what was said when they gathered with their own team to review the situation, “disappointing” takes care of it in public without revealing too much. When they stand in front of cameras to report on their last session together, “disappointing” conveys their feelings while leaving a door open to the next round.

A “point” is a place; to “appoint” is to direct attention or work toward that place; to “disappoint” is not to get to that place. There are many ways for things to go wrong that result in disappointment: the “point” is not understood or agreed upon; the way to get to it is unclear, either by design or error; one or the other of the parties has no real desire to get to that place despite statements to the contrary; one or both of the parties involved does not clearly understand their own goals.

When things fall apart–do not go as one or the other or both expected–there may well be anger or frustration. The more important the issue and the more emotionally-involved the participants, the stronger the anger and the greater the frustration. But when the stakes are too high to give up trying, the more important it is that “disappointing” be used to describe how it felt to miss the point.

We cannot be disappointed unless we are working toward something, either within ourselves or with others. People with no hope for the future don’t know disappointment, or when they do it is after they realize it is too late for them to do anything to change the outcome. I recently watched some ants carrying little bits of green leaves across a wilderness of last season’s mulch and fallen pine needles. They were working very hard, probably on their way to a particular place. But I doubt they were conscious of where they were going in the way we would be, or that other ants knew they were carrying their cargos to them. I doubt that ants know disappointment, though they may experience something like anger or frustration, even without naming them. Disappointment depends upon awareness of time, and from what I know we humans are the only animals who quantify time.

One of the dangers of telling someone you are disappointed in them is that it can be manipulative to do so. To express disappointment can be an oblique way of laying the blame on them without owning up to your part in it; after all, your expectations of them were absolutely pure and clear, and they should have known that and tried harder to please you! Parents can misuse “disappointment” in this way, and often do.

Our most painful disappointments can be with ourselves. When I cannot do something I think I should be able to do, I easily flame out in anger and frustration. I get mad both because of what I could not do and because of how I reacted to not being able to do it, and either give up trying or let my anger sabotage my trying. But instead of beating up on myself for my perceived failures of personal behavior or habit, I’d do better to acknowledge my disappointment with myself in this situation, figure out what I need to do differently (even asking for help!), and give it another go.

Perhaps a judicious willingness to call ourselves disappointed with ourselves and in our relations with others would more frequently set us a path toward resolving what angers or frustrates us. It is better than pummeling ourselves or others in anger or giving in entirely to frustration. It is always worth trying.

Walt Whitman: "Dirge for Two Veterans"

Whitman's "Dirge for Two Veterans" has been set to music by (at least) Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Kurt Weill. That in itself attests to the evocative power of its rhythm and its imagery. No end of analysis is available regarding it, but listening to the musical settings on YouTube might be all you need to do to "get it." I believe Whitman based it upon the actual experience of seeing father and son buried side by side; they seem to me to represent the one-generation-to-another nature of human war-making. Makes me wonder what might happen if successive generations we able to make peace. In any case, it's all here: the music, the march, the moon, the "mother's large transparent face" ever watching--all through the prism of Whitman's experience of our Civil War.

Dirge for Two Veterans

The last sunbeam

Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,

On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,

Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,

Up from the east the silvery round moon,

Beautiful over the housetops, ghastly, phantom moon,

Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,

And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,

All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,

As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,

And the small drums steady whirring,

And every blow of the great convulsive drums,

Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,

(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,

Two veterans son and father dropt together,

And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,

And the drums strike more convulsive,

And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,

And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-bouying,

The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,

(’Tis some mother’s large transparent face,

In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!

O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!

O my soldiers twain!  O my veterans passing to burial!

What I have, I also give you.

The moon gives you light,

And the bugles and drums give you music,

And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,

My heart gives you love.

Walt Whitman

Our Collective Binge

“We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge, and the earth couldn’t support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn’t do much. We didn’t turn our lives around the prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.”

Bill McKibben, quoted in The Sun, May 2012, p. 48

The Letters Hold Their Course

I was sorting through materials I’ve collected over the years when I came across a mimeographed copy of author and critic Edmund Wilson’s On First Reading Genesis. It had first appeared in the May 15, 1954, issue of The New Yorker. I knew exactly how it had come into my possession, and I immediately sat down to read it, as if for my first time.

During my first semester in seminary, Dr. James Muilenburg distributed On First Reading Genesis to his “Introduction to the Old Testament” class. Dr. Muilenburg, a master teacher, often gave us “extra” readings to supplement our textbooks. Perhaps because of his own experience as an English teacher, he wanted us to appreciate the full power of the original language of scripture.

Wilson’s essay is a wonder of insight, wonder of the kind that only first-time readers of anything worth reading can know. Himself a writer, Wilson delves into how the Hebrew language works, and specifically into how the Hebrew verb tenses reveal a very different understanding of time that we have. I am no longer sure if Wilson has everything “right” about Hebrew, and probably our understandings of it are different now than they were 60 years ago, but many lights of recognition came on in my head as I re-read On First Reading Genesis.

After describing the Hebrew language’s bold written consonants attended by dots and dashes (“pointings”) to represent vowel sounds, Wilson writes:

“Our first look at the text of the Bible, when we have mastered the alphabet, is likely to give us the feeling that this system is extremely impractical. It required what must seem to the beginner an annoying and easily avoidable effort to coordinate with the heavy consonants the elusive little dashes and dots that hover about them like midgets ...

“Even the printing of these signs is difficult, impossible for a linotype machine (!), since they appear in innumerable combinations. The result is that, even in learned books, the consonants are, if possible, written without the ‘pointings,’ and what you get is a kind of shorthand. You must already know the words extremely well in order to be able to recognize them.

“Yet some further acquaintance induces respect, and a perception that this method is appropriate, an inalienable element of the Jewish tradition. The characters themselves are impressive -- not fluent like the Roman or Greek, but retaining still, as these have not, the look of having once been cut in stone. To write out Hebrew vocabulary, with black ink and stub pen, affords a satisfaction that may give one a faint idea of the pleasures of Chinese calligraphy, as well as a feeling of vicarious authority as one traces the portentous syllables. ...

“These twenty-two signs ... from which, in their Phoenician form, all our European alphabets have been taken, have, austere in their vowelless terseness, been steadily proceeding from right to left, over a period of two thousand years, among peoples that read from left to right; and in the Bible they take on an aspect exalted and somewhat mysterious: the square letters holding their course, with no capitals for proper names and no punctuation save the firm double diamond that marks the end of a verse, compact in form as in meaning, stamped on the page, like a woodcut, solid verse linked to solid verse with the ever recurrent ‘and’ the sound of which is modulated by changes of vowel, while above and below them a dance of accents shows the pattern of metrical structure and the rise and fall of the chanting, and, above and below, inside and out, the vowel pointings hang like motes, as if they were molecules the consonant breathed.

“Difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and completely indifferent to this, they have withstood the drive toward assimilation, to their Spanish and Germanic neighbors, of the Jews of the Middle Ages; and in the dialect of German that is Yiddish, in newspapers spread in the subway, they still march in the direction opposite to that of all the other subway newspapers, English or Spanish or Italian, Hungarian or Russian or Greek, with only a light sprinkling of pointings to indicate Germanic vowels. And we have seen them reassemble in Israel, reconstituting their proper language -- not embarrassed in the least by the fear that the newspaper reader of our century, even knowing Hebrew perfectly, may have difficulty in distinguishing, in the British reports, a vowelless Bevan from a vowelless Bevin. (to what is that a reference?) They march on through modern events as if they were invulnerable, eternal.

“But in the meantime, the Bible confronts us, in the dignity and beauty of its close-packed page.”

I think James Muilenburg intended his students to take those paragraphs to heart. They stand in the center of the essay, making clear why this ancient language still matters, still makes a difference, still comforts and confronts men and women in all cultures and times.