I really miss Wendy Wasserstein

...meanwhile back at one of the other revolutions...

I didn't know I was missing her but I just read The Heidi Chronicles. She died too soon to finish telling a version of the American post-war cohort story that I found sad, recognizable and compelling. I ache to see how it all turns out and I shall never quite know.

It is not a lie to characterize a cohort by putting in their mouths the words they only wish they had said.

Its a drama. Nearly everything is in caricature in this play. But it is like seeing an Al Hirschfeld drawing. All the uninformative average features and filler have been left out so effectively that the stylish blobs and swept lines of the remaining picture, which no computer could match to the person, are instantly mapped to the subject by us humans. Wasserstein seems on the surface to have only a little pity for herself and even less for the somewhat iconic characters that play through her life in flashbacks.

The sadness is not in the wistful recounting of uncommitted lives that miss their potential to connect. Such stuff could fuel the drama's of any age. The sadness is the way the self-anointed generation who rang doorbells for Eugene McCarthy and who flooded the streets to shout down the establishment folly of the Viet Nam war gradually became the establishment, turning their own slogans into babble and losing their souls. There is no one line in the play where such things are said and yet that was very much the impression that had settled into my mind before the last scenes. Critics knocked this Pulitzer winning play for its contrived ending. I don't see how it could be honestly called that since this is an impressionistically autobiographical play and that last scene is, at the plot level, an exact quote from Wasserstein's life.

I'd like to imagine that everyone of a certain age and inclined to browse about in the left lobe of the blogosphere has read this play. Not really a baby boomer, not New Yorker enough, not Jewish enough or feminist enough to have picked it up yet? Such labels are almost characters in this play but it is not about any of those identities. Nor should one treat it as foreign for its reliance on period rock music or names from the news of each decade: every generation grows up. Do get the play and enjoy looking in on a generation, as it would have expressed itself.

Blogging the revolution I didn't have time for

It dawns on me now and then that I live in a miraculous age. And also, I am fortunate to live in a corner of the planet where the locals are sane enough to pick some of the best politicians.

[Has the executioner been drinking? Perhaps he should take it up?]

And it occurs to me as well that the miracles come not a minute too soon and the strength of democratic principles and participation in my local politics are particularly a blessing because they will have to pull more than their share of weight to salvage the rest of our so-called democracy.

Now, you may be wondering where my lucky neighborhood is so you can come bask in its beneficence. Well, yeah, I live in Massachusetts but it has become equally important that I live in YOUR neighborhood: the net roots are the delivery of the best promises of the "global village".

My Massachusetts and netroots neighborhood came together physically last night at an all-too-brief "Open House". My state legistlative representative has been giving and getting straight dope on all sorts of issues via this series of public lecture+Q&A sessions for a decade now. BTW, Kaufman has better ideas about overhauling health care than American politics can even begin to discuss. I just got blown away by some remarks he made to a knot of folks before proceedings got under way on that topic but I digress.

This month, he got Eli Pariser to speak to us on how MoveOn got started, the nature and purposes of its current form and where it might be headed. Eli is just a kid fer crysake!
The evening was all Eli's. I will put down more of my impressions in my next post, but wanted to justify the title of this post.

In my involvement with Operation Democracy and MoveOn, I get to see who sticks with it and who gets burnt out as we try moving the heavy wheels through the grass roots. And in watching this I kind of concluded that part of the new magic of MoveOn was that it found a way to get "action" from people even when they only had five minutes to devote to politics of change. Eli had worked for "dot org", i.e. non-profit, groups doing organizing before we were all on the web [he must have skipped school!]. Although he was as surprised as anyone by the amazing "hundreds of thousands of signatures in a week" response to his first web site devoted to a multi-national response top 9/11, he grasped that the response betokened a previously untapped way to spread political knowledge and focus political will among disaffected liberals and others marginalized by machine politics...and he dived in.

He did not say so in exactly so many words but he did, to summarize one of many things he talked about, that lots of little actions can be harnessed to the same effect as the big players, small money from many people instead of fat checks written by people-to-whom-you-must-then-listen was a way to get a significant political voice. And he did say that he knew they had on board many who only had time to click through on a sign-an-email campaign.

Why are liberals so damn busy? Who told you guys you could have a life?

Perfection

Dreams are imperfect. But on waking, we often recall the sensation of perfection.

never mind authority, speak truth to greensmile

Seriously folks,
What would you say to stop the war? We will stand in vigils on Monday and I want some kick-ass slogans for the signs.
Bush, Cheney and friends gladly interpret silence as "yeah, go ahead, stay the course".

Taylor takes the prize

Belief is slippery and insubstantial as smoke. Like smoke, only its residual diseases mark the passage of its memes through us.

This sounds presumptuous but look around you: I doubt that most people have done the amount and intensity of study and soul searching regarding the belief systems they espouse to give a passable defense or explanation that bears any resemblance to rationality. That is why I would expect to enjoy hanging out with a few old Jesuits who teach science or philosophy at Boston College but fear for my safety if locked in a room with some of William Donahue's pet parishioners.

Not that one can't say they believe a thing they don't really know well or understand. That is the power of "what would the neighbors say", not the power of god. So any time I run into someone claiming they do X because they "believe" Y, I just don't turn over that rock. A don't ask, don't tell policy regarding other people's jumble of hope and received imaginings avoids disturbing us both. It is rare outside of the liberal blogosphere for people to just come out and say "[insert deity name] hasn't shown her face in MY world. So sorry to disappoint, but I gotta move on". That breaks the don't ask, don't tell protocol and when you force the issue that way, all the folks who won't even look inside and ask themselves, get their fur up. Once you break the charmed silence of the don't ask, don't tell, or what I also think of as "tolerance through willed ignorance" you can either go into respectful dialog or, if even one party has insecurity about their grip on faith or even one party flunks the reciprocity test ["you live in my world as much as I live in your world"], an asymmetry built on what sounds like absolutist beliefs springs up. Then don't ask, don't tell breaks down to some veiled form of inquisition: "do ask, do condemn".

Discussion of whether a person "believes" in some deity, let alone the one you happen to envision or perceive is fruitless friction if not conducted between minds enlarged by a friendship more confirmed and trusted than one's own ideas about god. [ and yes, as you may detect, in my experience (call it a "belief" if you need to throw rocks in my direction), chevruta, study groups and other communal states of mind with or without aid of much ritual are the equivalent of "religious experience" but with the great benefit of being explainable.]

What you have read so far is just a paste-in of a comment I left at Majikthise. A few of us discussed there the folly of conventions and popular notions about if and where one dares to be an atheist in America. Some of us were born tired of arguing about the acceptability of atheism in public life. Others seem certain it will be important to them even after they die.

Given the purpose of the Templeton prize and Northwestern Professor Charles's Taylor's various herculean efforts to make the relationship between politics and religion "hand in hand" rather than "hand to hand", its probably about time he won the Templeton.

The premise of his work repulses me somewhat. Much of his career is involved in a passionate campaign to restore what he conceives of as the lost primacy of our spiritual nature and the way our institutions used to tend to that aspect of our characters. If he weren't quite so convinced that religion is the only way for humans to express and harness that spirituality, I bet I'd be buying his books. In the NYTimes coverage of the prize, you would get the impression that his life's work is to prove the divide defined in C.P. Snow 's "Two Cultures" thesis is not only real but that the evil half is not the humanities.

Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions.

“The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said in remarks prepared for delivery at the announcement of the prize at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York this morning. This is damaging because it “affects the culture of the media and educated public opinion in general.”

But as of now, I don't really know what opinion of Taylor's work I would hold if I had read much of it. This doubt has come to unshackle me from my initial certainty by the accident of having heard Taylor interviewed on NPR as I left work today. The NPR web intro is not heartwarming either:

He disputes the rationalist approach that regards morality and spirituality as anachronisms, as well as those who use moral certitude or religion to justify righteous violence.

The transcripts have not yet gone up on NPR.org. If I listen to the linked audio at the NPR page, this post will never get out. When I get that transcript, I will see if I only hear what I hope to hear. I only recall three of the many questions posed. I paraphrase the answers and Robert Siegal's questions:

1. Did he think America gave sufficient consideration to religion it its national dialogs? Yes but only if superficial treatments are what count.
2. What did he think of the outing of the "highest ranking atheist in office in the US"? He doubted highly that this congressman was alone. There is a huge amount of hypocrisy covering up most people's actual beliefs with far more shallow professions of belief and of disbelief than well earned positions on these matters.
3. Is Intolerance not some inescapable curse of having religions? Not at all. The people most thoroughly studied up on their religion are among the most tolerant of other religions.

Maybe its just the "tone" of his answers I like. So I guess I won't mind speaking with Professor Taylor, I just won't read any of his books.

People smart and honest and diligent enough to have earned their opinions have by that sole achievement earned my ear. It is so quiet here sometimes but Taylor is a man I can at least listen to. After all, he gets a million pounds sterling for saying some of the same stuff I said.

---

UPDATE: The transcript went on line [for a fee] this morning...I think I heard it about right:

1

SIEGEL: Do you think that political discourse in the United States actually suffers from a deficit of talk about God or religion?
Prof. TAYLOR: Well, I think it suffers from a deficit of maybe serious talk about God and religion. I mean, religious belonging and God and the Bible are used as kind of clubs to beat other people over their head with. If you have religion without an absolute, you know, touch of self-criticism, then you have some kind of, I think, distorted religion.

2

SIEGEL: On the other hand, I noted this week that a group that advocates - and I’m not sure how they used the word, whether it’s secularism or atheism - determined by survey that it had found the highest ranking nonbeliever in the U.S. government - or the highest ranking, self-confessed nonbeliever. And he’s a veteran California Democratic congressman, Fortney Stark, Pete Stark, who admitted that he does not believe in a higher power. The fact that one could find no higher than that…
Prof. TAYLOR: Yeah.
SIEGEL: …in American politics suggests that indeed our politics don’t suffer form the lack of religious belief.
Prof. TAYLOR: Well, maybe it proves the - and maybe it proves that there’s a high degree of hypocrisy about all this because there are demands made by religious-believing voters on people that they can’t possibly get elected unless they declare themselves. And I think that probably what you have here is a very high hypocrisy level… (Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: You suspect there are more than a few agnostics and atheists in the closet in American life.
Prof. TAYLOR: I would lay some serious money on that proposition. But we’ll never know, because they won’t want to shoot themselves in the foot by admitting it.

3

SIEGEL: Can there, do you think, actually be a level of diversity of religious - and for that matter - nonreligious ideological beliefs within society in which people are devoted to what they believe in, sufficiently so to act on that belief, and sufficiently so to actually regard in utterly different concept of humanity’s place on earth or the order or the universe with a truly generous Democratic spirit? Or ultimately, if people are wedded to very powerful beliefs, are they ultimately going to be intolerant of ideas that are completely and philosophically at odds with their own?
Prof. TAYLOR: Yes, that’s - in my experience, intolerance and depths of religious commitment just don’t correlate at all. I mean, and even perhaps the opposite. I’ve known lots of people who are kind of - let’s say - lax agnostics, where they aren’t very invested into it but they just take for granted that religion is passe and so on. And they are, in some ways, incredibly intolerant. Certainly, they have no understanding for what they’re denying. And then there are people that are very, very profound believers, but are interested in the fact that people are atheist, that there’s some kind of very deep position here which has driven people to that.

A little fuel to throw on your smoldering paranoia...

I know for a fact that I have blogged a few things that would not sit well with my employer. But as it is my right to say all that I have and more, I excuse my pseudonymous presence as protection both for me and that employer.

Reputation has a funny reputation...it is supposed to be what others know about you yet what they don't know is what preserves your reputation.

That is why some minds actually think "don't ask, don't tell" is a perfectly workable policy.

But just so you would think a bit: I also know for a fact that I have spilled enough data in enough places that any enterprising snoop with access to even half of my traffic could figure out my identity. The creative interpretation of Patriot act privacy limitations just revealed by the FBI are only the latest. FISA is meaningless law from the ignored branch of government. ATT and who knows how many other backbone carriers have caved to NSA and friends ...you, my Internet friends, are as naked as a jay bird. And so am I. In fact, I have signed acknowledgements, as many of you may have, that a condition of my employment is the inspection of all communications I may engage in from work. I have heard not a peep about my politics or habits and I just have to wonder: do they only keep quiet because to do otherwise with such a piddling protester as myself would tip their hand and reveal exactly how far they have gone down the police state road? Just thinking out loud here.

Yo, Bush! I'll see your reputation and I'll raise you a lie.

Why would I learn a new language?

So I could hear and understand when I have been thanked or given a compliment. I seem able to hear distrust and hatred no matter what language it is expressed in.