It is Saturday Night, after all. Time for an All-American Post.

Stephen Colbert on Capitol Hill. Not over on the Capital mall, where he should be, preparing for his March to Keep Fear Alive. He was testifying before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security of the House Judiciary Committee. They wanted to hear his views about how hard it is to bend over in the field all day picking beans.

Colbert arrived before the committee in his complete right wing nutcase persona. I can’t remember whether witnesses before congressional committees are asked to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Probably not. If they did, it would present a real challenge to a comic who has foresworn “truth” in favor of “truthiness.”

If Colbert was feeling a little daunted by his appearance before one of the more august committees of the House, he didn’t show it. He complained that stooping over all day was hard, but worse, was completely unnecessary. There is no reason, he said, why beans have to be grown at ground level, where they are so hard to pick. They should be grown at waist level. And he thought that a nation that could put a man on the moon ought to be able to do that.

That particular idea might strike you as far-fetched, but he did have a more practical solution. All this painful labor is made necessary by the demand for vegetables. The “obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables — and if you look at the recent obesity statistics you’ll see that many Americans have already started.”

Needless to say, Congressmen are not accustomed to being treated like this. At home in the district, sure, but not behind the committee table. It is therefore understandable that a member might think that tut-tutting Mr. Colbert would be in order. Not a good idea. This is Comedy Central we’re looking at.

Representative Lamar Smith, R-TX did go so far as to ask, “Does one day in the field make you an expert witness?”

“I believe that one day of me studying anything makes me an expert,” Mr. Colbert replied.

Tea Party Exegesis

I was disappointed to learn in the New York Times that Jimmy Carter, certainly our best ex-president, thinks that the story of Onan is about masturbation. I don't care all that much about Onan. It has been many years since I lived anywhere masturbation was thought to be a hot topic for Christian ethics, let alone for biblical exegesis. But I actually do care about the story of Tamar. She is one of my favorite women in the world and Onan plays a bit part in the story of Tamar, so I guess I'm going to have to get into it after all. For anyone who wonders why I might be such a fan of Tamar, I have put my reasons in this telling of her story. She is, in any case, a good deal more interesting than Christine O'Donnell.

Oh yes. Christine O'Donnell is the Tea Party candidate for the office of U. S. Senator from Delaware. Maureen Dowd, a regular New York Times columnist, reported in her column this morning that Ms. O'Donnell once said, "The Bible says that lust in our heart is committing adultery, so you can't masturbate without lust." Well, OK, there's some biblical work to be done there, but that's Christine O'Donnell and I don't think I've got that kind of time. But Jimmy Carter told Maureen Dowd, she says, that the Old Testament story of Onan "warns against wasting thy seed on the ground."

It doesn't, actually, and Jimmy Carter has taught a Sunday School class in Plains, Georgia for many years and he ought to know that. If you care about exegesis at all, the first question you need to ask of a story is, "What is it about?" If you are going to draw any lessons from it, you need at least to know what it is about. The story of Tamar is about being obedient to God's laws. And what law is involved here? Levirate marriage.

We will have to pause momentarily to consider levirate marriage. That may have been the part of the story that stopped Robert Redford from seriously considering my proposal that Tamar was the kind of story he should make a movie of. Something stopped him, at any rate. The best I got back was a snotty letter from one of his henchpersons. Levirate marriage shows how important it was for Israelites to have male descendants in every clan line. And how do we do that? If a son does not have a male heir (and Tamar's husband, Er, did not have one), his next younger brother is to impregnate her and the resulting son would be considered "the son of Er" for clan purposes.

Onan was the next younger brother and producing an heir for Er was his job. He didn't want to do that job. We don't know why. Maybe he hated Er. Maybe he didn't like having his father, Judah, send him to Tamar as a favor to Er. In any case, Onan did whatever he did for the purpose of seeing to it that he did not produce an heir for his brother, E, as God had commanded. God was not happy and killed Onan for that.

It was Judah's job, as head of the clan, to move the responsibility down to the next son. He didn't. The reasons are a little complicated. He may have reasoned that he had already lost two sons to Tamar and was not willing to risk a third. Also the third son was not yet old enough. In any case, Judah failed God by refusing to send the third son in the same way that Onan failed in refusing to impregnate Tamar. And it is entirely possible that God's vengeance would have fallen next on Judah.

Actually, following that line of speculation, Tamar might have saved Judah's life by seducing him, getting herself pregnant, and producing heirs, finally, for her dead husband, Er. Two heirs,in fact, since she gave birth to twins, Perez and Zerah. And that's how Tamar winds up in Matthew's account of the genealogy of the Messiah. She was the one who was faithful to God, although it took the seduction of her father-in-law to get the job done.

Jimmy. Christine. That's what the story is about. Whatever lessons we might learn from it probably ought to feature "being obedient to God" as the first Powerpoint slide. Of course, I wouldn't argue that levirate marriage is required in the 21st Century. Ms. O'Donnell might. Mr. Carter might. But I don't. I do argue that "obedience to God" is still a crucial concept and anyone who thinks of himself or herself as a follower of this God might want to give some thought to just what "obedience" might mean right now. At least it's worth asking.

The Eight Answers

Nothing heavy tonight. I like to celebrate the Saturday evening posts with something easy and fun. This little skit on how to sound smart and stay dumb is my idea of fun.

Sometime in the first week of my American government class at PSU, I will play a clip from the movie, Born Yesterday. I’m thinking of the 1993 version, not the 1950 one. This one has Don Johnson as Paul Verall, the Washington insider, Melanie Griffith as Billie Dawn, the political novice, and John Goodman as Harry Brock, Billie’s boyfriend/keeper/boss.

Billie seems likely to make a lot of trouble for Harry in Washington, where he has come to buy some Senators, so he hires Paul Verall to “smarten her up” a little. Paul starts very conventionally by telling her to get a copy of the Washington Post and circle any words she doesn’t know. It turns out that there are quite a few she doesn't know. That’s not good enough for getting smart quickly in Washington, so he comes up with another plan.

At this point in the presentation, I mention to my class that the expression, “the liberal arts” was once one of a set of two. I ask them to think of these two as options. They are two ways one might go about the process of learning about American government. The other phrase was “the servile arts.” So we have “the arts fit for free men” and “the arts fit for servants.” I promise them that I will teach the course in the liberal arts mode, but I admit that there is nothing to prevent them from taking the course in the servile arts mode.

Then I play the clip. It takes two minutes and 57 seconds. Paul tells Billie that everyone in Washington talks about the same thing at parties and that the only time anyone is willing to say he doesn’t know something is when he is being indicted. So the deal is that he will stand across from her and (unobtrusively) hold up from one to eight fingers. That way she will know which of the eight "answers" to parrot. This practice is called psittacism, by the way, a word I never utter in class. The closest English verb is "to parrot."

Here are the eight answers. You will notice that they are answers in the sense of “things you can say when people ask you something.” Beyond that, they aren’t much.

Answer 1. Here’s what I’d like to know. Who elected the Washington Post president?

Answer 2. We can’t be the policeman of the world, but until we get another cop on the block, we have to support our friends.

Answer 3. Being a superpower has a price.

Answer 4. It’s still a dangerous world out there.

Note: At the party, Billie starts with 2 and adds 3, pauses, and adds 4. It’s beautiful

Answer 5. That’s about as likely as a Democrat being elected president.

Note: This after the previous 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Answer 6. It makes you wonder if a parliamentary system isn’t better.

Answer 7. I don’t think Abe Lincoln himself would know what to do about that.

Note: There is a pathetic little exchange after this one. Paul says, “You say that one when you don’t know what to say. Billie responds, “Good. I’ll just say that one.”

Answer 8. If only the U. N. would take out the Vernor amendment to Resolution 165, we’d have the power to do what needs to be done.

What will happen in November?

It will get colder. More Pacific Northwest football games will be played in mud. Many leaves will fall. And some Democrats. But not as many as people think.

In my Page (the non-Post entries on my blog), I warned that I like reading polls. If you think polls are about as reliable as Rorschach blots, you can move right along. The next post is going to be about self-respect and may be more a rant than a sober analysis. If you think there is useful information in polls, come along and look at the New York Times/CBS Poll of September 10--14.

Sometimes I get all systematic about analyzing polls, but that's not the way I'm feeling today. I'll just breeze through and give you some of the results and play with them a little. You can download the entire poll by using the hyperlink in yesterday's New York Times.

Since the previous poll in August, the number of people disapproving the way Obama is handling his job as president has gone up and the number approving has gone down. "Approve" is now under 50% at 45%, although the number disapproving is also under 50%. The number of respondents who answered "don't know" or who had no answer at all (the category is labeled DK/NA) is lower than it has ever been since they started asking this question. The "I'm not sure" position is getting squeezed out. It now stands at 8%.

This question is a good question. I don't have any negative criticism of it at all. Still, I would love to know what the respondent’s think Obama's "job" is. Is it "making things better?" Is it "caring deeply and personally that people are still hurting?" Is it "making sure that however things are, the blame for those bad things can be assigned to someone else?"

About a third of the respondents think "things in this country" have "gotten pretty seriously off track." The alternative, by the way, is "are generally going in the right direction." Following my post on euphemisms and dysphemisms, I would think that the phrasing "pretty seriously off track" would be attractive today--just the phrasing--while "going in the right direction" would not be. The good thing about these polls is that they ask the same questions in the same way every time, so it is safe to compare them. The percentage of people who think things are going in the right direction has not been above 40% since September of last year.

Things are worse for the Congress, of course. Only 21% of the respondents believe Congress is "handling its job," although there is, again, the question of what the job of the Congress really is. There is no question that passing healthcare legislation has taken most of their time, attracted most of the ink, and probably fewer photons than would be required to give a good account to TV watchers. Given that use of their time, it is worth noting that 49% of the respondents disapprove ("somewhat" or "strongly") of the healthcare law, while only 37% approve (also combining "somewhat" and "strongly") The 49% who disapproved, were asked if the law should be repealed. Nearly all(about 80%) of the 49% said it should be repealed.

What does that mean? The next poll question asked if the respondents would be more or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supported the reforms--this would include incumbents, who have a recorded vote and challengers, who do not. Some said they would be more likely to support such a candidate (28%), some would be less likely (28%) and some said it would make no difference at all (41%). Is it just really cool to live in a democracy or what?

Still, odd as it may seem with all the anti-incumbent rhetoric, it is better to be a Democrat than a Republican. "Approve of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their job (38%)" matches up pretty well with "Approve of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their job (20%). The disapprovals are (Dems) 58% and (Reps) 68%. The opinion of the Democratic party in general is not favorable (45% favorable to 48% unfavorable. But Democrats run, mostly, against Republicans and the opinion of the Republican party is even worse (34% favorable to 56% unfavorable).

If you push beyond favoring the Democrats in general, you find it is echoed in most policy areas. Who has better ideas for solving the nation's problems? Democrats (40% to 33%). Who is more likely to make the right decisions on immigration? Democrats (40% to 38%). Create new jobs? Democrats (44% to 38%). Help the middle class? Democrats (55% to 33%). Help small businesses? Democrats (49% to 41%). The single issue the Republicans win is that they are more likely to reduce the federal budget deficit (42% to 34%). This, with the Bush-era deficits, is amazing, but there it is. The Republicans are getting credit for protesting Democratic deficits and they are not being blamed for their own deficits. It's odd, but then it's politics.

Still, odd as it may seem, when you ask the anti-incumbent question directly, only 34% believe their own congressional representative, the incumbent, deserves to be re-elected. The percentage who feel that "a new person" should be elected is up to a historic high at 55%. The "new person" question in 1994, when the Republicans took over both houses of Congress, was only 53%. And where is Newt Gingrich today? On the other hand, a lot of voters are going to say that they favor "a new person" in general, but that they don't know enough about the particular new person in their own district, to vote for him or her. So questions that put "this particular person" up against "any new person" aren't very helpful in any one district.

There is so much more, but I've had my fun for today. And only another month and a half until election day. Woohoo!

Being "Sensitive"

I've heard a lot of people say, lately, that if the Muslims in New York were as "sensitive" as they should be, they wouldn't build a "mosque" that close to Ground Zero. Not long ago, a white bureaucrat was fired, briefly, for saying that a certain Washington D. C. budget was "niggardly." Some of the people who protested were engaging in what is called "folk etymology." That means, in this case, that you can tell where that word comes from just by looking at it. Others knew what it meant, but thought that someone that willing to risk offending blacks, shouldn't have a job in the District. He was restored to his job by the black leadership, who said, eventually, "Look, we know what the word means. We aren't offended and he's right."

It seems to me that it wasn't that long ago, you had to do something wrong to get attacked that way. Or you had to do something that actually offended a constituency with the clout to make you pay for offending them. Now, you don't have to actually offend anyone. If you said or did something that could have offended someone, it is the prerogative of anyone to complain that you are "insensitive." Puh-leese!

The quest for victimhood is a good deal more aggressive these days. You can, if you put your mind to it, learn to be offended by most political events or by the absence of those events. I've been reading Renegade recently, a very good account of the Obama campaign of 2008. He said at one point that Sen. McCain's attempts to make a very ugly economy look good were no more effective than putting lipstick on a pig. Funny. Trite, but funny. The Republican operatives spent days trying to persuade people that "lipstick" was a reference to Sarah Palin and that women everywhere should be offended. No one thought it was worth pursuing the idea that this attempt required McCain to be the pig.

I've been hearing more and more that the men and women of our armed forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else "to protect our freedoms." What freedoms are we talking about? It used to be enough to say that they were where they were "to protect American interests." And it was understood that "American interests" included the interests of American corporations. Access to cheap copper and cheap oil and cheap bananas, for instance, are of very great interest to the businesses who would otherwise have to pay more for them and charge more for them. It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether the interests of these corporations are so important to the government of the United States that they should be supported by every American who pays taxes.

Who will say that it is too much to identify the function of the armed forces in general as being in the business of "protecting our freedoms?" Is the clarification that moves this function from "protecting our freedoms" to "protecting American interests" going to offend anyone? Is it insensitive to risk offending the families of men and women who are now in danger from America's enemies? Does it really matter that we have inflated "American interests" to "our freedoms?"

This is territory already well trodden by "Support Our Troops." The political strategist who first figured out that we could skip over where the troops were and what they were doing and go straight to whether we should "support" them, was a public relations genius. I have never seen a bumper sticker that raises the question of whether some uses of military force should be supported but that others should be opposed. Or, more exactly, the ones I have seen are too long to chant effectively. Who will say that we, as the people of a democratic government, must skip over the uses to which our armies are put? Who will say that "Support Our Militarism" is a bumper sticker worth having a conversation about? Is it insensitive to wonder aloud whether killing as many suspected foes a year as we kill might strengthen the movements we are trying to weaken.

And while we're at it, who is going to say that it took great courage for the terrorists of 9/11 to fly their planes into buildings and get themselves killed (along with a lot of other people)? I've never heard it said. And I, myself, have said only in American government courses where the point is that here is something everyone knows is true and no one is allowed to say. I say it bears on American civil liberties, and it does, but it bears on the language of politics, too. Shall we keep the meaning of "courage," or shall we apply it to acts that are done by the good guys only. When these acts are done by the bad guys--the same acts--they are not "courage," but...oh...what? Vindictiveness?

It seems to me that the bad guys are going to survive our lack of appreciation. I am not so sure we are. I wonder if we will survive the degradation of the language we use to negotiate our public attitudes. Look up "courage" in a good dictionary. Try to find a caveat that this applies only to us and not to our enemies.

These are instances in which we have muddled our political discourse because so few people have the courage to insist on clarity where "sensitivity" is felt to be a higher value. So we "support" our troops because we don't want to oppose them and don't have the wit to insist on a better question. We celebrate our military's function in "protecting our freedoms" because we are reluctant to say that so many of our own people have died protecting only "our interests." We allow a word as important as "courage" to be blurred beyond certain recognition or divided so that it's meaning depends on who it was who was courageous. And we do this because we don't want to run the risk of being called "insensitive."

Perfectly sensible people refuse to say these things because the costs will be swift and personal and the benefits will be slow and societal. But we will do them or suffer the consequences of their not being done.

Well, Sh**t, I Dropped the Noodles on the Floor

One of the things that always puzzled me when I was a kid was that there were words that were “not to be said.” In my family, there was a familiar series of reasons why we were not to use certain words, but beyond that, I knew that the phenomenon was general even if the reasons varied from one family to another.

It seemed more reasonable to me that things were “bad,” rather than words. Body parts or body functions that had to do with sexual practices or excretory functions, for example, could be “bad.” I was OK with that. What confused me was that anus, for instance, was a good word, while asshole was a bad word. It was the words, apparently, not the things. How odd.

I’ve thought about this from time to time since then and as I now see it, we imagine a word scale that goes from -1 through 0 (neutral) to +1. These vary, as I pointed out in my post “Conservative and Proud,” from one setting to another. Asshole could be a -1 word in one setting and a +1 word in another. I get that. But what about that zero? What is that?

This brings us to the question of euphemisms and dysphemisms and that brings me to George Carlin. Shit is a word Carlin loves to say. As I let my mind wander back over the years of Carlin I enjoyed with my kids, I remember uses of shit as a noun (pot, mostly), a verb, an adjective, and an adverb. How he missed conjunctions and prepositions, I can’t imagine.

Here’s Carlin on saying and hearing the word “shit.”

Shit's a nice word. It's a friendly, happy, y'know, kind of word. Handy word. Middle class has never really been into ****, y'know, as a word.No, not really comfortable.Not completely into it. Y'know, not really relaxed with it. You'll hear it around the kitchen if someone drops a casserole, y'know, "Oh, ****! Oh! Oh, look at the noodles! Oh, ****! Don't say that, Johnny, just hear it. Oh, ****!" Sometimes they say 'shoot'. They can't kid me, man. 'Shoot' is 'shit' with two 'o's.

I’m guessing that all those quadruple asterisks are to stand for shit, although that is puzzling since shit is the first word of the paragraph. There is so much to play with in that paragraph. Maybe if I just say what they are, it will help me focus on the use I had in mind when I called it up. The middle class has not been comfortable with the word. Hear it, Johnny, but don’t say it. But the one I had in mind was, “shoot is just shit with two o’s.”

Is that right? Is shit, shoot with two o’s? Is shoot, shit with an i-? Is one of those forms real and the other a fraud? Which one? This brings us to the need for the 0 in the center of the scale. So I drop the casserole on the floor and I am angry and upset. Am I looking for a neutral denotation or a neutral affect equidistant between shit and shoot? Nope. Not.

How about if I say “Gajurgis!!”? You never know for sure, but I intend that as a nonce word—like the one time pad in the spy novels—that means nothing at all. On the other hand, that j- in the middle could be said with a lot of gusto. And you could kick off the whole word with a very robust g-. You could even hang onto the sibilant at the end if you didn’t feel purged yet. As a “word” you could say when you were really upset, it is harmless.

Which accounts, I think, for what such words are used so seldom. The boundaries of “good speech” and the sensibilities of “good people” are so clear that we may feel that we have not really expressed our anger if we have not violated at least one of them. Several violations would be better. “Shit!” as a response to dropping the casserole is really very good. It evokes excrement where you really don’t want it, i.e., in the kitchen, and it is really not something “nice people” say, which further expresses just how angry you are. Breaking out of the prison of “what you ought to say” helps you express your true feelings. “Gajurgis!” probably does not.

What Does God Want From Shy Christians?

“What particular use do you suppose God has in mind for shy Christians?[1] There ought to be something. I don’t think “shy” is a disease. I don’t think it’s a character disorder. Some people are just shy and if they are Christians, they are shy Christians.

Let’s begin by looking at what shy is going to mean in this piece. It doesn’t refer to people who have a psychotic hatred of or a neurotic aversion to people. Those are diseases and I’m not talking about diseases. It isn’t the stirring of a sense of self-consciousness and the mild anxiety that sometimes goes with it in stressful situations. Those are things that could happen to anyone, given the right situation; they aren’t the property of shy people particularly.

I’m inclined to say that I, myself, am shy. I hesitate to say so because the fact is that most people say they are shy, when they are asked. And also because I made a living being professionally gregarious at and around the legislature in Salem for many years. And also because I have chosen a career that involves standing before groups of people and trying to teach them about politics. And also because I have a daughter who described herself as shy when she was a cheerleader—a cheerleader!—in high school and I could not find a way to take her account of herself seriously. I am taking it seriously now.

I am going to follow my original inclination, however, and say that I am shy. I want to spend a little time saying what I mean by that and then a little more time trying to answer the question with which I began this post. It will take just a little extra time because I want to build the general case for gifts (see 1 Corinthians 12 for Paul’s take) and then apply it to temperament and character. Or, more exactly, to kinds of temperament and character.

So here’s what I mean by shy. I go into an unstructured situation not knowing what to do. I think what it must feel like to gregarious people—that’s what I’m calling “the other kind of people.” It must feel like an opportunity to meet new people or to exchange casual conversation with friends and acquaintances. It must feel like a party that goes on and on. I’m guessing. When I’m at a party, I try to find someone who really wants to talk about something—“talk about something” describes the kind of conversation, not any topic in particular—and go off into a quiet corner with that person and play with the idea until it’s time to go home. I tell myself I do that because I'm shy.

I also think gregarious people make different kinds of mistakes than shy people. Gregarious people are inclined to take more, in a conversation, than was offered and the people from whom that more was taken sometimes feel bad about it. Shy people are inclined to take less, in a conversation, than was offered and the people who saw their offer rejected sometimes feel bad about it. You noted the parallelism there, I trust. For every way of doing it right, there is a way of doing it wrong. For every temperament, there are jobs that belong particularly to people whose temperaments make them good at it. It's their job.

I like “largetalk;” smalltalk just doesn’t do it for me. (I am using both largetalk and smalltalk against the advice of my spellchecker, but when it objected to spellchecker, I stopped taking it seriously.) Besides, I’m no good at smalltalk. And the effort of it wears me out. I’m really tired afterwards and, usually, discouraged as well because I’ve done the job so badly. And I remember that it has been a long time since I remembered to take a deep breath. And I think there are a lot of people like me. I don’t know if that way of characterizing the experience I’m calling “being shy” has any resonance with you. I hope so, because it’s the best I can do right now.

Now I want to take a small theological detour. I’m going to play off of Paul’s chapter on “gifts,” where he says that everyone is given a gift that could be used for the building up of the group. I’m going to say that everyone is a kind of person. Every kind of person is better at something—shy people might have acute empathy with others, for instance—than another kind of person. Every Christian has the obligation and the opportunity, to be of service as the kind of person he actually is. Doing what you can do, acting in a sustainable positive fashion, is all one person can expect of another. It is sometimes argued that God expects more, but I have not yet been persuaded.

That’s how the system works. Everyone is diligent about doing what he can do. Everyone is appreciative of the people who do other kinds of good things. Both those contribute to the vitality and effectiveness of the group.

There are some exceptions I would grant. I am thinking of four in particular. The first is that every now and then, something needs to be done and you are the person who is there. The fact that the job to be done is “not your kind of thing” doesn’t really matter in this case. If it’s you or nobody, it’s you. The second is that this understanding does relieve you of the need to do the things that would be done better by others, but it identifies as crucially important that you do the things that belong to people like you. The third is that there are some things that now cause you great anxiety which, if you would learn to do them better, could be a normal and sustainable part of your repertory. And, finally, it is worth remembering that we are talking about shy today, but no one is just shy. People are shy and competent and insensitive and knowledgeable and naive and “having a bad day.”

That’s the theological dilemma and a four practical little buffers. Now that we come, finally, to the question of what God wants from shy Christians, we find it is already answered. There is always the possibility that this is my answer, not God’s, but let’s stop for a moment and remember whose blog this is.

The answer is that, under ordinary circumstances, God wants shy Christians to do carefully and well the work their shyness prepares them to do. No one is obligated, by virtue of being a follower of Jesus Christ, to be gregarious. At my church, they are careful to ask the congregation to “stand if you are able,” but we are not asked to "sing if you are able,” or to “make smalltalk if you are able.” (I have made smalltalk one word against the advice of my spellchecker.) We say that the coffee time after the worship service is “fellowship” and we call it “a good thing” because, after all, who is against “fellowship?” I don’t know. Who is against cocktail party conversation? The coffee time is stressful because it is about either meeting new people or talking intently to your friends so you won’t have to meet the new people. The new people really do need to be not only met, but welcomed. I hope very much that someone does that because if it needs to be done and no one is doing it, I am back on the hook again and for me, the costs are high.

I believe that every person has a gift to give, but in this post, I am arguing that every kind of person has a gift. If they give it, they should be supported by those of their friends who know what is going on. If they fail to give it, they should be criticized (helpfully) by those of their friends who know what is going on. But they will not be expected to do the things that will cost them a good deal when those things could be done by people who would consider them a golden opportunity.

The point I am about to make, the last point, is a very small-scale view of God’s providence. I know that Providence—that’s Providence with a capital P—is about larger things. I remember a remark that “Providence” is the word Christians use for history. But we do say that God provides, the Latin is providere, because God foresees; the Latin is pro = “before” + videre = “to see.” It is God’s ability to see what is needed that sustains God’s ability to provide what is needed.

Nothing in the Christian doctrine of Providence implies that I, myself, will see what is coming or what is needed in any systematic way. But the implication of this notion of providence is that there is a “fitting together” of the faithfulness of different kinds of disciples that makes the outcome of their service more than the simple sum of the work they have done.


[1] Shy doesn’t suggest everything I have in mind, but I think it is the best word overall. I have been surprised by how differently this question develops for me when I say introverted or reserved or private instead of shy. My mind simply takes different paths when I think of this dilemma using those other words. I have stayed with shy because it is a more colloquial word; essentially, a wider door. A door more people can get through and move on into the rest of the post.

Remember the Titans

Remember the Titans is a very good movie. It meets my first criterion by being about something that matters to me. It isn’t football this time, although football does matter to me. It is about overcoming alienation and learning to belong together.

There are some very nice bonuses as well. The first is that it is true (mostly). The second is that the DVD has a commentary track by the two coaches, Herman Boone and Bill Yoast, who are the subjects of the movie. The third is that there are very good performances by the main characters. Boone is played by Denzel Washington; Yoast by Will Patten. Gerry is played by Ryan Hurst, Julius by Wood Harris. They are terrific.

How the Titans Came Together

I want to tell two stories. The first is the story the movie tells about the racial integration of T. C. Williams High School in Virginia. Neither the black players nor the white players wanted the school to be racially integrated, but it happened anyway and in their first year together, they won the state championship. The second is about my own quest to understand what the hell is going on in the two crucial scenes of this movie. I worked on that a long time so I really deserved to have something good happen, but the truth is, I got some very timely help and I want to tell about that as well.

What is “the event” in this movie? It isn’t the climax, in which The T. C. Williams Titans win the state championship on the final play of the game. “The event” is long before that. It is before the season starts. There is a sequence of three events that take place at training camp. They are bands 9 and 11 if you happen to have the DVD.[1] The first is an open confrontation between two defensive stars, Julius Campbell (black) and Gerry Bertier (white). The second, several nights later, is two repetitions of a running play to the right side of the offensive line. The first is bad. The second is good. That second play is “the event.” The state championship is an anticlimax.

We need to start with the first confrontation between Julius and Gerry. It takes place at all because Coach Boone seen the dislike of the white players for the black players and vice versa and assigns them to be roommates and to get to know each other. Some do, but Gerry and Julius do not. Coach Boone raises the pain level. Until you do confront each other, the whole team will be practicing three times a day. In mid-summer Pennsylvania heat and humidity.

That is what leads Gerry, ultimately, to engage Julius. Here is how that actually goes. Then I want to tell you how it would have to go for people like me to understand it.

Gerry: Honestly, I think you’re nothing. Nothing but a waste of God-given talent. You don’t listen to nobody, man—not even Doc or Boone. Shiver push [if you don’t know what that means, see section two: I didn’t either] on the line every time, man, and you blow right past‘em. Push ‘em. Pull ‘em. Do somethin’. You can’t run over everybody in this league, and every time you do, you leave one of your teammates hangin’ out to dry—me in particular.

Julius Why should I give a hoot about you, huh? Or anyone else out there.

Julius:You want to talk about waste, you’re the captain, right?

Gerry: Right.

Julius: You got a job?

Gerry: I’ve got a job.

Julius:You been doing your job?

Gerry: I’ve been doing my job.

Julius: Then why don’t you tell your white buddies toblock for Rev. (starting quarterback, black) better, ‘cause they have not blocked for him worth a plugged nickel and you know it. Nobody plays, yourself included. I’m supposed to wear myself out for the team? What team? No. No. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to look out for myself and I’m going to get mine.

That’s the confrontation. Julius wants to talk about racist football. Gerry wants to talk about stupid football. You can’t have both of those conversations at the same time, so let’s take Gerry’s first. Gerry’s criticism of Julius’s football goes like this:

Gerry: Shiver push on the line every time, man, and you blow right past ‘em. Push ‘em. Pull ‘em. Do somethin’. You can’t run over everybody in this league, and every time you do, you leave one of your teammates hangin’ out to dry—me in particular.

This is straight up football criticism. Let’s imagine Julius says this:

Julius: Yeah, you think you’re so hot. I have to try to get through the line because I know there’s no help at linebacker. That’s what you’re supposed to do and you’re not doing it.

But that’s not what Julius says because football isn’t what he wants to talk about. He wants to talk about racism and he takes an angle on Gerry that flummoxes him completely. Julius defines “fighting racism” as part of the captain’s job. Take a look at that dialogue again. Having established that Gerry is the captain and that he thinks he is doing his job—which, by the way Gerry defines completely in football terms—Julius says, essentially, “If you’re the captain, then you are implicated in the racism of your white friends on offense. Your complete failure to deal with that leaves me no choice but to freelance from my position on the line.”

So we see that the football issues and the racial issues are related, even when, as in this confrontation, they whiz past each other with not so much as a glance. We see no effect at all on anyone in that scene.

Bad Play, Good Play

There was an effect, though, and we see it in the two plays in the middle of the night practice. It is easy to call the two plays “doing it wrong” and “doing it right.” If we do that, we can ask the two useful questions: a) what is the difference between the plays, and b) why?

At this point, I introduce, tardily, Ray Budds. Ray is an old friend of Gerry’s. He is the right offensive end, so he plays opposite Julius. He is deeply racist, and having been humiliated in front of the whole team by Coach Boone has not improved his attitude. He has to play at a certain level in camp or he won’t be on the team, but he doesn’t have to play very well and he certainly doesn’t have to do the kind of blocking that will allow the black quarterback, Rev Harris, to run plays successfully.

In the bad play, Rev pitches to running back Petey Jones. Here is where it gets hard to see what is going on. We know that Julius does not defend against this play the way he should, but we don’t see that. What we see is Ray not blocking for Petey—it is the merest charade of a block—but Petey makes a sizeable gain, nevertheless. Petey shouldn’t gain much, because Ray doesn’t block much, but Petey has to gain a lot so we will be ready to see the change in Julius’s game. I’m not being critical. You simply can’t show everything at once.

That’s the bad play. Before the next play, the good play, Gerry gets as close to face to face with Ray as their faceguards will allow and he chews Ray out in language that can be heard all over the field. Ray’s humiliation by Gerry is, in fact as prominent has his humiliation by Coach Boone at the beginning of camp. Here’s what it sounds like.

Gerry: What was that, Ray? Whatever it is, it ain’t blockin’.

Ray: Give me a break, Gerry. (“as an old and white friend,” I think, from the tone)

Gerry: You want a break? I’ll give you a break. If we get to Rev just one time, I’ll hit you so hard by the time you come to, boy, hey, you’re going to need a new haircut! Let’s play ball, fellas.

Before we look at the good play, let’s look at what is going on here. Remember that Julius challenged Gerry to “tell his white buddies to block for Rev better.” So the naïve viewer, that’s me in this case, expects to see “the white buddies,” that’s Ray in this case, blocking for Rev. My expectation that we are going to see some white players protect Rev is sharpened by Gerry’s language to Ray, “If we get to Rev just one time…” Of course they don’t get to Rev even one time because Rev is pitching the ball to Petey. So I still don’t see what I am looking for.

Here’s what I do see. They run the same play again. Ray ties Julius up in a block. Julius fights the block off and initiates a mammoth collision with the ball carrier in the backfield. Note: When I first wrote this, I had no idea what “shiver push” meant, but I could tell that whatever Gerry was telling Julius to do in Band 9 is what Julius actually does do in Band 11. Whatever “shiver push” is—you’re looking at it.

So the easy part is saying what is different between the bad play and the good play. Julius slips the block—a much better block than on the bad play, by the way—and stops the ball carrier. Now we come to why it is different. It isn’t different because Ray finally blocks better, although he does. It isn’t different because no one gets to Rev although they had been getting to him before. It is different because Julius has seen his question, “What team?” answered. He has seen “What don’t you tell your white buddies…?” performed. As a result, he has forsaken, “I’m going to get mine…” and has embraced “shiver push on the line.”

However confusing the development, the outcome could not be clearer. Julius had said to Gerry, “If you are serious about being captain—and that will require you to take responsibility for the racist laxity of your old friends—I will get serious about playing my position.” That’s the deal. In ripping up Ray, Gerry met his end of the implicit bargain. In stuffing Petey, Julius met his end. The state championship was, at that point, a foregone conclusion.

How I Figured It Out

First, I worked over these two bands, 9 and 11, year after year. I am sure that helped. Somehow. I followed the direction the words took me. They went nowhere, but I followed them anyway because that's what I know how to do. When I began to follow the visuals rather than the words, I got some help. The words, for instance, do not lead you to the understanding that Julius is waiting for Gerry to step up as captain before he, himself, will step up as a football player.

The words don’t, but the pictures do. If you look back up at Gerry’s rant at Ray, you will see a section in green. It is during that part of Gerry’s speech that the camera pulls away from Gerry and Ray entirely and focuses on Julius’s face. Julius is listening intently; he is focused on the confrontation. The guy who runs the camera is trying to tell us something. He is trying to tell us that this confrontation is not about Gerry and Ray. It is about Julius. There it is on the screen for anybody to see, but I’m a word guy, not a picture guy, and I didn’t see it.

However, it turns out that I have a couple of cards up my sleeve. I have a friend in Florida who is married to a football coach. Last week, my thrashing around about Remember the Titans reached my friend, Bonnie Klein, who was an English major and whose sense of how narratives are constructed is considerably better than mine. She took my lament about “shiver push” to her husband Bill, the football coach, who told her what it meant and why it actually made football sense as it was used in the movie.

Following Bill’s ideas about “shiver push” and Bonnie’s ideas about how the plot is shaped, I wound up where I am today. I’m a happy camper. I can put away Remember the Titans, which I have been carrying in my files all these years as a cold case. I know why they do what they do and I understand why they couldn’t do more. And there is always the chance that I will come to the next such dilemma just a little smarter.








[1] The speech which Coach Boone gives on the Gettysburg battlefield was, in fact, given by a park tour guide. Whoever that guide is, he’s not getting paid enough. My appreciation also to the people who gave that speech to Denzel Washington in the movie. It’s on band 10.

"Every Saturday evening, I bring out the mag."

I’ve written some fairly serious essays this week. I thought I would post one of them tonight, but then I remembered that it is Saturday evening and it seemed to me that a Saturday Evening Post ought to be more on the lighthearted side. So I’m doing this one instead.

It intrigues me, for instance, that a “post” is something you put on a “log.” I referred in my first post to the crunching up that gave us, instead of web + log, just “blog.” Words are not always fussy about where you separate them. Take the process, for instance, that gave us “an uncle” from the older “a nuncle.” It isn’t so bad, though, really. If you remember that a “log” was once a chunk of wood thrown overboard to help in the navigation of a ship and that the information it provided was “posted,” so to speak, on a “log board” or “log slate,” then putting a log on a post is the most natural thing in the world.

Natural. Not necessarily simple. There are three nouns, “post,” and every one of them has a separate existence as a verb. There is posting like mailing a letter and like being stationed somewhere and like putting a sign up—-you could put it on a post, I suppose.

The folks who put together blogspot.com and who made it so easy to use (thank you, thank you) offer the user a chance to put up some permanent remarks, called “pages,” along with the occasional remarks, called “posts.” I’ve been capitalizing them as Pages and Posts to try to get used to the idea, but I think I’m over that now.
You get 10 pages; ten essays that just sit there. They don’t get pushed down into a historical sequence like posts. I can still find, for instance, the first post I wrote last May but I have to leaf through June, July, August, and September to find it. The pages just sit there at my site.

When I noticed that, it occurred to me that I would be writing about ten subjects—or somewhere in the neighborhood of ten. Shortly after that, I thought that if I had the wit to do it, I could turn each of the pages into an introduction to one of the themes. You get to say what the theme is in the box at the bottom called “label.” So each page would represent a label, like “politics” or “love and marriage.”

All I really had to do was work out what 10 things I was going to devise labels for and then write the ten essays—I mean pages. I’ve done that now. I expect I’ll keep fussing with them. I know, for instance that the page now called Christian Apprenticeship 2.0 is not what I want and that it will be replaced by a page called Christian Praxis…which also might not be what I want, but I like it better at the moment.

So I have a very broad category I call Living My Life. I thought if an idea didn’t go anywhere else, it would at least go there. And that is what I am labeling this one. There are three related to Christian thinking and acting: Christian Theology, Biblical Studies, and Christian Praxis. There are two political ones: Politics and Political Psychology. Then there are just things I like to write about, like Getting Old and Love and Marriage. Finally, there are Words, long a fascination of mine, and Books and Movies. That’s ten. Or, as a very wry friend put it, “One per commandment.”

I’m really happy to be blogging. I’m really happy you are helping me. And have a wonderful Saturday evening.

Conservative and Proud

I’m a language conservative. Everyone who knows me knows that and I might as well acknowledge it up front. I’m not an ideologue, though. I don’t believe, as many of my fellow conservatives do, that there was once a golden era when language was carefully spoken and eloquently written.

On the other hand, I reject the position of the language liberals entirely. The bumper sticker caricature of their position is “Language Changes (so what?).” The actual argument is that “so long as we can still understand each other” is a good criteria.

Let’s start there. A good criteria? You did understand what I meant, didn’t you? Some standard should be adopted (just one) to validate language use and the intelligibility of speech is that standard. But since you know me, you might have just stopped at the expression “a good criteria.”

Criteria is one a class of words used in English and the members of this class are proving troublesome. Many Greek nouns have plurals that are more different from the singular form than English plurals are. The singular criterion and its plural criteria make up one example. Here are some others that will be familiar. Datum/data is a distinction nearly lost, even in academia. Professors have said “the data shows” for decades; now we are beginning to hear it from academic deans and provosts. The people who have a faint sense that something is wrong—or who are adroitly sidestepping the whole conflict—sometimes say “data points.” A data point is a datum. I still say “the data show” but it puts extra pressure on me, as someone who is interested in being understood, and when I get tired of the pressure, I will cave in. Is it “realistic?” Is it “cowardly?” Is it a betrayal of my “class?” Does it contribute to the decline of civilization?

So how do you feel about stigmata? “Being too “white” if you are black and being too “middle class” if you are poor are both stigmata. Who still says “stigmata?” I still see it written sometimes, but I haven’t heard it in years. I do hear “stigmas.” And, say the liberals, what’s the harm? My answer: probably none. I, myself, have always said "gymnasiums," where my father insisted on "gymnasia."

I used to be careful to say that newspapers were one medium of communication and TV another medium. I now use media as a singular form. I fought it for years because it is wrong and I am a conservative.* But usage has moved on. The texts I assign now use media in ways that alternate back and forth between singular and conservative and sometimes provide new uses that move beyond the distinction entirely.

*This was a footnote in the Word document. A liberal and a conservative are dining together. The waitress says, stopping by the table, “Are you OK?” The liberal says, as everyone now does, “I’m good.” (Theologically, this would be a controversial claim, but this is only dinner.) The conservative says, “I’m well,” and immediately wishes he had said nothing. Good and well are ordinarily the alternatives. The distinction has been set clearly in the jibe “doing well by doing good.” But good and well don’t work in the restaurant. It’s not an insoluble problem. I say, “I’m fine, thanks.” But there is a frictional cost to the language in shifting away from good/well and besides, sometimes the waitress will provoke the dilemma by asking, “Are you good?” My mind is flooded with Bible verses I dare not use.

My father’s introduction to the social sciences came at a time when folkways (cultureal habits)were routinely distinguished from mores (important cultural norms). We’ve shifted away from Greek, you’ll notice: folkways is Germanic; mores, Latin. Obviously, folkways is plural and the singular is folkway. Mores is also plural, but no one knows the singular. I have never heard it spoken in my entire life as a listener, except, of course, by me. Not that it matters, the singular form is mos.

So there’s a collection of instances. I reject the liberal position, which is “living languages change, so change is good.” I reject the liberal criterion, which I have caricatured as “it doesn’t really matter so long as communication is still possible.” I reject the idea that there is one and only one criterion. Those would be the three planks in my platform if I had a platform. So where does that leave me?

Well, I’m a reasonable sort of person, my conservatism notwithstanding. I think there should be several criteria, not just one. I think language conservatives perform a service, even the most militant among us—Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, is an example—provide a service to society. I think language conservatism which, in this paragraph only, I am willing to define as “identifying and rewarding correct speech,” serves as a counterweight to other trends which really ought not to rule us by themselves.

Those three make up my program for language conservatives. Let’s take the last one first. What other language forces are "checked and balanced" (I teach American government) by conservatism? How about “Ooooh, you talk like a white girl,” which was a criticism slapped on a very young Michelle Obama? How about being required to “make an ask” at a business meeting? What about having to say, in order to be understood, that a good running back is one who can “run vertically?” (I agree, that would be a really really good running back.) My point here is that if there were no notion of “correct speech” the racists, the barbarians, and the antigravitarians would rule absolutely and everyone would be forced to comply. The thing about egregious behavior is that it gets you thrown out of the group.

My second point is that the service language conservatives perform can be likened to the traffic lights on freeway on-ramps. They are an inconvenience—there is no point in denying it—because they make you stop when you are in a hurry. Their function is to allow “new traffic” onto the freeway at a rate that allows it to merge with the “old traffic” already on the freeway without causing accidents or traffic jams. The liberals are right when they say that language changes, but that does not establish that any rate of change is as good as any other. My position is that slow steady change in language is good. It allows new traffic and it helps prevent accidents and traffic jams.

Let me give you an example. Advocate was once a transitive verb, like identify. When someone says “I identify…” you expect him—there’s another knot, “him”—to say what he identifies. Now we “advocate for…” You don’t have to advocate anything in particular; you just have to “advocate for” certain people, or, commonly, “advocate on behalf of” certain people. We can’t use the word both ways. It will represent the people whose views we are supporting or it will represent the idea we are supporting. It will not do both jobs at once and alternating them like a committee of running backs, is worse. “Advocating for” functions like “Mistakes were made.”

That brings us to point one. My first point was that there should be other criteria than simply “is communication still possible?” What criteria? Here are some candidates. Speech can be beautiful; why not aspire to that? Speech can be pellucidly clear; why not aspire to that? “People who use language skillfully and with respect” can be an identifiable group so that people can aspire to belong to it. That’s a good thing. Careful users don’t have to be “grammar nazis.” A lot of companies pay good salaries to people who can use language well. I don’t mean just attorneys, whose lack of precision could cost a company millions of dollars. I am thinking also of a catalogue I used to get which contained delightful and whimsical descriptions of the clothes in the catalogue—at roughly triple the price you would pay for them elsewhere without the description. I never bought any of the clothes, but I relished the descriptions for many years and appreciated the companies who hired the writers.

That’s my pitch as a language conservative. It is not our job just to say No to new uses. It is our job to protect the integrity of the language as a whole by providing for the gradual assimilation of new uses, even bad ones, so there are fewer accidents and traffic jams. It is our job to continue to value language for its beauty and its clarity, as well as its short-term effectiveness. It is our job to make good usage a value on its own, so that other values, racism for instance, will not will not be able to slash and burn without opposition.

Conservative and proud.