Following Up: Clerics Who are Still Losing It

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D.C. riots, District of Columbia, Episcopalians, Followin g Up, George Floyd, Gregory T. Monahan, Lafayette Park, Lafayette Square, Marian Budde, political violence, protests, religion, St. John's Church, Trump, U.S. Park Police, violence, Washington Post

As ticked off as I was yesterday over the truly deranged reactions of the District of Columbia’s Episcopalian leaders to the torching of their own church and to President Trump’s decision to express support for the need to protect the entire nation from arsonists, I’m ever angrier today – and justifiably so.

For Episcopal Rev Bishop Marian Budde and her colleagues, along with many prominent clerics from other religions, not only apparently lack the instinct for self-preservation that’s a hallmark of minimal sanity. They’re intellectually dishonest and unethical as well – unless you think it’s perfectly OK for them or anyone else to jump to the most convenient conclusions possible about those you disagree with politically.

To start off, although the Episcopalians’ responses to the church fire were especially unhinged, they weren’t unique among the nation’s so called faith leaders. It’s easy to find statements from these clerics blasting Mr. Trump’s actions. Just Google the relevant words. But good luck trying to find these figures criticizing the St. John’s attack. (BTW, if you come across any, please let me know. No one would like to be proven wrong on this score more than I.) At least some clerics have done a better job denouncing the violence that erupted nationwide over the last week. (See here and here for examples.)

As for the St. John’s Church positions of many religious leaders, on top of singling out the so-called Trump photo op for their slings and arrows, they have uncritically swallowed the (widespread) claim that federal police used unjustifiable and excessive force when they cleared out supposedly peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square to make way for the President. (See, here for the Episcopalians, and e.g., here and here.)  

Here’s the problem: It’s clear that not all the protesters were peaceful the day of the Trump walk. In fact, not all of them were peaceful half an hour before the Trump walk. At least that’s the claim of United States Park Police (USPP) acting Chief Gregory T. Monahan. Yesterday, Monahan – whose agency was one among several involved in the clearing operation – released a statement contending:

“On Monday, June 1, the USPP worked with the United States Secret Service to have temporary fencing installed inside Lafayette Park.  At approximately 6:33 pm, violent protestors on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids. The protestors also climbed onto a historic building at the north end of Lafayette Park that was destroyed by arson days prior. Intelligence had revealed calls for violence against the police, and officers found caches of glass bottles, baseball bats and metal poles hidden along the street.”

P.S. Monahan is hardly your supposedly typical brutish cop. Before his appointment by President Trump, he was accused by the Fraternal Order of Police of being soft on defendants – including defendants who allegedly assaulted officers of the USPP San Francisco field office he then heads.

But maybe it’s likely that Monahan has undergone a Jekyll-Hyde-like transformation? Nothing’s impossible. But it’s certainly noteworthy that the Washington Post, whose news coverage of the clearing operation explicitly tarred it as “a show of aggression,” in literally its next breath proceeded to describe the victims as “ a crowd of largely peaceful protesters. Talk about weasel words. By the way – I’m pretty sure the bad guys (and gals?) weren’t wearing signs announcing, “We’re the crazies!”

The religious leaders who treated this episode as a latter-day Boston Massacre didn’t see Monahan’s statement – which came a day after theirs. But isn’t that the point? Is there any evidence that the clerics tried to confirm their suspicions – and apparently prejudices – before getting on their high horses? Again, let me know if you find some. In its absence, it’s clear they were determined to shoot first and ask questions later.

A book with which I trust all these clerics are familiar quotes someone who I trust they all revere as advising, “He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone….” Time for these religious leaders to resume paying attention. Unless they view themselves as exceptions? 

Death and Senselessness

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death, ethics, evil, God, Holocaust, Las Vegas shooting, religion, Stephen Paddock, Sylvia Hall

No doubt there’s nothing cosmic, or even important (except to me), about it, but I can’t help but be struck by the fact that within the last two weeks, and especially the last two days, I’ve needed to reckon with questions of God, evil, and death (on an individual and mass scale) – all closely related of course.

One of the mass-scale deaths obviously is last night’s Las Vegas shooting, about which so little is known for sure that any analysis is wildly premature – and frankly irresponsible. Not that that’s stopped the hateful partisans on all sides.

To be sure, there are details that seem significant, but they add up to nothing coherent yet. For example, shooter Stephen Paddock clearly planned this atrocity in great detail, but no reliable information has emerged yet about any political or other cause-related agenda he might have had. Similarly, no evidence of affiliation with any non-state actors has been found. For those reasons, it looks like the term “terrorism” doesn’t apply.

So are we dealing with a case of derangement? Nothing known yet warrants that conclusion, either – including the statements from his brother. And as has become so depressingly typical, he was taken utterly by surprise by this act of mass murder.

Moreover, I’ve balked at viewing these kinds of mass shootings as reasons to tighten greatly gun control laws, for reasons explained here and here. Today I’m not inclined to revisit this issue, but it does seem worth noting that audio of the violence seems to reveal that an automatic weapon of some kind was used, and that its capacities added greatly to the fatalities. So is it too much to hope that Las Vegas will lead to some meaningful improvements in gun control that fully respect legitimate gun-ownership rights?

But of all the reactions I’ve heard and read till now, the most moving for me came from a Twitter contact, producer Sylvia Hall of Fox Business News: “Worlds changed for families of 50 people without warning or reason.” For me, nothing has better described the shock – and the maddening senselessness – from the standpoint of the victims and their loved ones.

I strongly suspect her words affected me so deeply because just yesterday I learned that a good friend had passed away over the weekend. He had experienced some major health problems in recent years, but his death was jolting, and seems senseless, for at least two reasons. He seemed to be recovering from his syndrome. And before falling ill he was young for his age physically and in some ways in personality (in the best sense).

And I’ll be grieving actively for longer than usual, I’m convinced, both because it’s the first such loss I’ve experienced of a peer, and more important, because I have no doubt we could have been even better and closer friends. We’d been separated by geography for most of the time we’d known each other, but practically from the first it was clear we were on nearly all of the same wave-lengths. So I’m mourning a genuinely good soul and a relationship that ended long, and senselessly, before their time – along with a marriage that inspired and delighted everyone who knew him and his now devastated wife (also a good friend).

The other mass-scale death I unexpectedly encountered recently is the Holocaust – in the form of a lengthy conversation I (unexpectedly) had with a Christian clergyman during a train ride from New York City back to DC. He was Middle Eastern in origin, and therefore well acquainted with violence of all kinds, especially by dint of work with refugees, as well as very compassionate and learned both in theology (including of my own Judaism) and history.

Normally, I don’t broach metaphysical subjects right away with strangers, even if their business is metaphysics. But the ride would be a few hours long, I was curious about him and his beliefs, he seemed curious about me and mine, and it was only a matter of time before the subject of arguably the ultimate example of senseless (by any standards I at least regard as remotely ethical) mass violence came up.

My position is full of uncertainty. My late father, as mentioned here, witnessed the Holocaust’s effects first-hand, as part of a team of Yiddish translators sent to Dachau shortly after that death camp’s liberation. He told me that he was never able fully to square a belief in God with witnessing that sight. I have great sympathy for that view, though my faith remains more intact.

My interlocutor was much more certain – of the opposite. His position seemed an attempt to imbue this slaughter of innocents with sense. As I understood it, he argued that during the run-up, God became so dissatisfied with His creation, and apparently so despairing that faith was wanting, that He “absented” Himself from His role in and influence over human affairs.

I didn’t for a moment take him as claiming that the Holocaust’s victims in any sense deserved their fate, but my questions tumbled out anyway. Did the victims themselves displease God? What sins, on anyone’s part, could possibly justify such retribution? Why was the loss of faith (apparently the decisive sin) so important? Isn’t God’s top priority to foster loving hearts and behavior? Shouldn’t “results” like this count for more than theological allegiances? What of proportionality? Why so utterly indiscriminate? And since there’s so much evidence of a continued shortage of faith ever since, didn’t this divine decision fail to achieve its objective? Unless He’s still absent?

I can’t do the answers justice in this space. They were coherent and sophisticated and reasoned. They were also deeply humane. Yet I found them completely incapable of making sense of this abomination – a term I use in both the secular and Biblical sense – let alone strengthening the case for faith.

Still, a critical mass of my faith has continued through a sad weekend and a tragic day. I hope the reasons aren’t becoming increasingly senseless.

Im-Politic: Rating the Journalists at the Front-runners’ Republican Debate

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bankruptcy, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Chris Wallace, debate, Donald Trump, Fox News, Im-Politic, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, journalism, Marco Rubio, Megyn Kelly, Mike Huckabee, religion, Republicans, Scott Walker, Silicon Valley

Since Donald Trump still almost certainly won’t be the Republicans’ presidential nominee this year, my reactions to the first GOP presidential debates need to deal with the 16 other candidates, too. But since Trump is still The Story of Campaign 2016 so far, I need to start off by correcting a mistake in yesterday’s post on his performance. I was slightly inaccurate in my description of his response in the front-runners’ debate to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly’s charge that he’s often insulted women.

Then I’ll segue into an examination of how well or poorly she and her colleagues organized and conducted the session – because the press’ performance clearly will have powerful effects on the presidential race itself.

I wrote yesterday that, rather than trashing Kelly personally, Trump should have focused on framing her question as typifying the superficial “gotcha” mentality that’s dominated mainstream journalism for so long and thus helped degrade American politics. (And of course, Trump should have made this observation “in sorrow, not in anger.”)

But Trump actually did try to Go Serious. As the transcript shows, after his Rosie O’Donnell crack, he insisted that “I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.” The trouble is, immediately afterwards, and especially the following day, he was back in Tabloid Land.

Nonetheless, overall, Kelly and her Fox colleagues did a pretty good – and “fair and balanced” – job at the front-runners event. The initial questions for all the candidates zeroed in on conspicuous weak spots in their records – from neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s unfamiliarity with foreign policy, to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s dynasty and “W” problems, to New Jersey’s economic woes under Governor Chris Christie, to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s extreme pro-life abortion stance, to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s challenge in broadening his appeal beyond Christian conservative ranks.

My main criticism on this score is that the subjects of these questions were somewhat too conspicuous. That is, each candidate had obviously heard all of them before, and had had plenty of time to rehearse answers. Moreover, some really obvious follow-ups were neglected throughout the debate. For example, why didn’t any of the panelists point out to Bush that the impressive numbers racked up by his state’s economy during his tenure stemmed largely from a housing bubble that burst disastrously just as he was leaving office?

In addition, Fox’s Chris Wallace once again demonstrated how pitifully little political reporters know about business and finance. As Wallace saw it, a handful of bankruptcies declared by Trump’s businesses over the last 25 years cast doubt on the candidate’s qualifications “to run the nation’s business.” Wallace obviously doesn’t know that failure is such a common aspect of doing business that, as one analyst has noted (and in connection with this Wallace question) it’s “a background term to every contract.  It’s an embedded option.  Lenders price for it.”

Perhaps more important, Wallace is obviously clueless about the essential role bankruptcy plays in producing success. A good businessman or woman uses it the way any intelligent person uses the mistakes that all of us make – as a learning opportunity. Indeed, the most celebrated part of U.S. economy (rightly or wrongly), Silicon Valley, has begun to celebrate failure as an essential ingredient of eventual success.

Finally, I was troubled by the Fox journalists’ decision to pose this viewer question: “I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.”

I know that subjects like this are of intense interest to many Republican voters in particulara. But you don’t have to oppose injecting religion into political and public policy matters to recognize that this query was bound to unleash a torrent of the most vapid homilies imaginable, notably Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s declaration that “I believe God has blessed our country. This country has been extraordinarily blessed. And we have honored that blessing. And that’s why God has continued to bless us” and Ohio Governor John Kasich’s “I do believe in miracles.”

The only saving grace (no pun intended!) in this segment of the debate was Walker’s statement that “I know that God doesn’t call me to do a specific thing, God hasn’t given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day. What God calls us to do is follow his will.”

Here’s hoping that the rest of the 2016 field shows similar restraint in declaring themselves or their agenda or their party to be the Almighty’s anointed messengers – with all the ugly insinuations about their opponents that logically follow, whether they’re intended or not.

Next on RealityChek: a discussion of those Republican candidates not named Donald Trump, including the participants in the undercard.