I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on December 25, 2019 with the lectionary texts from the Letter to Titus and the Gospel of Luke.

The service format was drawn from the twelfth order of service (for Christmas Day) from the 1937 Services of Religion prepended to the Hymns of the Spirit. The responsive reading used the alternative, second-person text of the Magnificat from the English Language Liturgical Consultation.

Merry Christmas.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me to preach again, and thank you for welcoming me back.

Plainly put, Christmas sermons tend to write themselves. The stories are well-known and well-loved, and they say something different to us in our different stages of life. And we fill in the details with the singing, the shared companionship and the general warm feeling. My sincere hope for anyone struggling now (and struggling with Christmas in particular) that these moments will bring you rest and refreshment; you’re among friends.

And yet for the familiarity of the Christmas stories — I learned part of today’s lesson in King James English through repeated viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas — it takes years of living to recognize what strange stories they are, and to appreciate the differences between them. Today, we have two lessons from the Gospel of Luke, the most familiar version of Jesus’ origin story. We heard the part about the manger, the shepherds and the actual birth from chapter two, and Mary’s song from chapter one, which we read as the responsive reading. Though considered separately, they are part of a whole. In Mary’s song, she recounts her place in cosmic history. We took her part, and declared to God:

You have mercy on those who fear you from generation to generation. You have shown strength with your arm and scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. You have filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

This is perhaps less familiar than the angel and Bethlehem, but it is very much part of the same story.

Mary speaks of those who fear God; they will receive mercy. Similarly, the shepherds were terrified: God was being revealed for them, as an infant and nearby. Yet it’s awkward to speak of fear and think of the love of God at the same time. Too often, we fear that which can and would hurt us. This is not what we mean by the fear of God. Rather we also fear what we cannot understand, and we fear disruption to our customary and ordinary life, even it means something good might be coming.

Divine living is not customary or ordinary, and we can scarcely understand how it might come about. That itself is frightening, but also gives us cause for hope. God’s ways are not our ways. In Mary’s time and ours, the proud get their way, the mighty get their way, the rich get their way and it’s hard living for the rest. When Jesus said “the poor will be with you always” we was not mandating poverty, but recognizing what had always been, casting a light on it, dignifying the suffering rather than ignoring it. Divine living is living with a God who knows us and sees us, and desires our good. And God acts by confusing our expectations. Thus a baby, not a warrior or Caesar. Thus Bethlehem, not Rome. Thus a word and not a sword.

And so too, the confusing, unexpected love that God shows us. It can make us afraid because we may not want to love so deeply. God would not hurt us, but love often does. It breaks our hearts, but also gives us life. We can be afraid of being loved so deeply. Consciousness of God’s love pulls out out ourselves, and away from anything low and self-serving. It can lead us to a life of serving one another, as Deacon Eliserena spoke of on Sunday. Is this how God scattered the proud, and cast down the mighty? And it is how God lifts up the lowly?

Or as the author of the letter to Titus puts it, “when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy…” We do not earn this love and cannot earn it; it’s God’s unreserved gift. Accept it. Let it take you to a moment of tenderness, answered by gentle tears. Let it take you, like the shepherds, to the manger.

And then, on returning, what? Where then do the Christmas stories take us? At the very least, this tender goodness and loving kindness should lead us to reflect on how we regard one other in families, among friend or at work, as a nation and in the world. Have been too hard on one another? And in doing, have you been too hard on yourself? For the gift and goal of Christmas is that nearness to God which draws out our likeness to God. Day by day, we can (by God’s grace) strengthen and express those same divine qualities, and above all, a heartfelt love for the world and the people in it. By it, we fulfill the angel’s song of peace and goodwill.

God bless each and all of you this Christmas morning.

If you are looking for a Christmas Day service in Washington, D.C., I’ll be preaching and leading worship at Universalist National Memorial Church,  at the corner of 16th and S Streets, N. W. at 11 am.  (Map)

Update! Four well-loved carols!

We will meet in the parlor — easier to heat and cheerier for a small congregation — with refreshment to follow.  (There will, of course, also be a Christmas Eve service at 8 pm.)  Hope to see you there.

We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.

– James Dobbins, former special envoy to Afghanistan

This week’s featured post is “The Evangelical Deal with the Devil“.

If you were wondering what I was up to last week, I talked at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Billerica, MA about the humanistic holiday that has built up around Christian Christmas.

This week everybody was talking about impeachment strategy

The House approved two articles of impeachment, but adjourned for the holidays without delivering the articles to the Senate. This temporarily freezes the process in a state where the public agrees with Democrats on the next step.

Majority Leader McConnell has expressed his preference for a minimal trial in the Senate: no witnesses, just introduce the record from the House, have closing arguments, and go straight to debate on the vote. Presumably, the vote would happen quickly, and Trump would be acquitted.

Democrats (and most of the American people) understand that Trump has prevented key witnesses from testifying, but would have a harder time blocking them if the Senate subpoenaed them. For example, the best witness to Trump’s role in blocking military aid to Ukraine is clearly Mick Mulvaney, who was simultaneously White House chief of staff and head of the Office of Management and Budget. The best witness to the policy discussion within the White House is then-National Security Advisor John Bolton. If there are any doubts about how things happened, why not ask them?

I think it’s safe to assume that Trump (and McConnell) don’t want Mulvaney or Bolton to be asked, because they’ll have to either perjure himself or reinforce the evidence of Trump’s guilt. If (on the other hand) they were happily waiting to exonerate Trump, Republicans would have every reason to want them to testify.

Delaying the process at this point may have little effect in the long run, but it does make clear to the American people who wants to get to the bottom of things and who doesn’t.

It’s possible that four Republican senators can be persuaded to vote with the Democrats to have an actual trial. It’s still a long shot that four out of the 53 Republican senators would decide to take their responsibilities seriously rather than obey Trump, but it’s possible.

The abuse-of-power article passed 237-190-1, and obstruction-of-Congress 236-191-1. No Republicans voted to impeach. Two Democrats (Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey — who has announced that he’s switching parties — and Collin Peterson of Minnesota) voted against the Abuse article and a third (Jared Golden of Maine) against Obstruction.

Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard voted Present on both counts, explaining it on her campaign website like this:

I come before you to make a stand for the center, to appeal to all of you to bridge our differences and stand up for the American people. My vote today is a vote for much needed reconciliation and hope that together we can heal our country.

Personally, I don’t see how letting Trump get away with attempting to cheat in the 2020 election is “standing up for the American people.” When the question is whether the president is above the law, and when he acknowledges no wrongdoing and apologizes for nothing, I don’t see a way to bridge that difference. Either you grant him permission to commit more crimes or you don’t.

Gabbard’s vote gave weight to a speculation Hillary Clinton made in October, that the Russians had “their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”

Speaking of the Russians, Vladimir Putin takes Trump’s side in the impeachment debate, and Trump thinks it boosts his case to point to Putin’s support.

A number of conservative voices have unexpectedly come out in favor of removing Trump: Christianity Today, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, American Conservative’s Daniel Larison.

Michele Goldberg identified an ailment I can identify with: democracy grief.

The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression.

When I examine those feelings in myself, it’s not about democracy per se. It’s more related to something I have believed in, perhaps naively, all my life: the power of truth. The most dispiriting thing about watching the impeachment hearings has been to realize just how little it matters that Trump actually did the things he’s accused of. Republicans have enough votes to acquit, and they don’t care.

and trade

Months after Trump started taking credit for a Phase One trade deal with China, a deal actually exists. The US has cancelled tariffs scheduled to start December 15, and rolled back some other tariffs. The Chinese have pledged to buy more American farm products. The major goals the trade war supposedly was seeking — progress on intellectual property rights, for example, — have been kicked down the road to a future Phase Two agreement.

Trump (of course) is claiming victory, but so are Chinese hardliners.

In essence, a year and a half into the trade war, China seems to have hit on a winning strategy: Stay tough and let the Trump administration negotiate with itself.

“The nationalists, the people urging President Xi Jinping to dig in his heels and not concede much, have carried the day,” said George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Center. “I don’t see this as a win for market liberals.”

Frequent Trump critic (and Nobel Prize winner) Paul Krugman proclaims Trump the loser of this trade war.

On one side, our allies have learned not to trust us. … On the other side, our rivals have learned not to fear us. Like the North Koreans, who flattered Trump but kept on building nukes, the Chinese have taken Trump’s measure. They now know that he talks loudly but carries a small stick, and backs down when confronted in ways that might hurt him politically.

but we should all pay more attention to the Afghanistan Papers

It’s a coincidence that I just wrote an article about “The Illusions Underlying our Foreign Policy Discussions“, but the themes of that article couldn’t have been better illustrated than they were by the revelations about the Afghanistan War that the Washington Post started publishing the same day.

The Post articles are based on a “Lessons Learned” project undertaken by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The Post won a three-year legal battle to get the 2000-pages of reports released to the public, and supplemented the material with its own reporting. The Post summarizes its conclusions:

• Year after year, U.S. officials failed to tell the public the truth about the war in Afghanistan.

• U.S. and allied officials admitted the mission had no clear strategy and poorly defined objectives.

• Many years into the war, the United States still did not understand Afghanistan.

• The United States wasted vast sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan and bred corruption in the process.

In particular, I want to call your attention to two aspects of the series: First, the Post article on the lack of strategy.

In the beginning, the rationale for invading Afghanistan was clear: to destroy al-Qaeda, topple the Taliban and prevent a repeat of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Within six months, the United States had largely accomplished what it set out to do. The leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban were dead, captured or in hiding. But then the U.S. government committed a fundamental mistake it would repeat again and again over the next 17 years, according to a cache of government documents obtained by The Washington Post. In hundreds of confidential interviews that constitute a secret history of the war, U.S. and allied officials admitted they veered off in directions that had little to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11. By expanding the original mission, they said they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand. …

Diplomats and military commanders acknowledged they struggled to answer simple questions: Who is the enemy? Whom can we count on as allies? How will we know when we have won?

Second, the unwillingness to tell a complex story of limited successes and larger failures that led to a consistent misleading of the American people across three administrations.

It’s worth considering what that more complex story might have sounded like, and how unlikely it is that the American public as it is could have accepted it.

Imagine if, six months or so into the war, we had declared partial victory for getting Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and sending Osama bin Laden into hiding. Imagine further that we had begun negotiating a settlement (in an honest coordination with Pakistan) that would have given the Taliban a role governing the country in exchange for verifiable assurances that Al Qaeda would not be allowed back in.

Whatever administration negotiated such a deal would have had a hard time defending it. Al Qaeda is an international group that attacked us and the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan group that we could only keep out by continuing to fight a long-term civil war (more intensely than we have been). Pakistan would help us against Al Qaeda, while protecting the Taliban against us. But both groups represent “radical Islam” and neither hold values consistent with ours.

But we could probably have worked out a way to live with one and get rid of the other.

and corporate surveillance

The NYT and the WaPo independently had scoops on the extent of the surveillance we have all put ourselves under by using current technology.

The NYT’s Privacy Project acquired a datafile of 50 billion location pings from 12 million smartphones, and demonstrated some of the things that could be done with such data.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

The data comes from a “data location company” that buys data from apps on your phone that collect location information. Such companies are essentially unregulated.

The companies that collect all this information on your movements justify their business on the basis of three claims: People consent to be tracked, the data is anonymous and the data is secure. None of those claims hold up, based on the file we’ve obtained and our review of company practices.

For example, the companies refuse to attach personally identifying information (like your name) to your data. But if a smartphone regularly makes the trip from your home to your workplace, who else could it possibly belong to? And yes, you did click a box that allowed a Weather app or a restaurant-review app to access your location, but you probably assumed these apps would only access your location when they needed it to answer your questions, not that they would track you wherever you go.

Such a track can be very revealing.

One person, plucked from the data in Los Angeles nearly at random, was found traveling to and from roadside motels multiple times, for visits of only a few hours each time.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post pulled apart the computers in a 2017 Chevy Volt to find out what General Motors knows about its customers.

On a recent drive, a 2017 Chevrolet collected my precise location. It stored my phone’s ID and the people I called. It judged my acceleration and braking style, beaming back reports to its maker General Motors over an always-on Internet connection. … Many [cars] copy over personal data as soon as you plug in a smartphone.

The reporter’s hacking was necessary, because GM doesn’t tell owners what data it’s collecting on them, much less allow them to see it.

When I buy a car, I assume the data I produce is owned by me — or at least is controlled by me. Many automakers do not. They act like how and where we drive, also known as telematics, isn’t personal information.

When you sell your car, the information about you the car has stored goes with the car, unless you figure out how to delete it.

For a broader view, Mason also extracted the data from a Chevrolet infotainment computer that I bought used on eBay for $375. It contained enough data to reconstruct the Upstate New York travels and relationships of a total stranger. We know he or she frequently called someone listed as “Sweetie,” whose photo we also have. We could see the exact Gulf station where they bought gas, the restaurant where they ate (called Taste China) and the unique identifiers for their Samsung Galaxy Note phones.

and you also might be interested in …

An uplifting story from the world of sports: Recently retired NBA star Dwayne Wade (best known as the Miami Heat star who created a multiple-championship team by convincing LeBron James and Chris Bosh to join him) supports his trans child.

I’ve watched my son, from Day 1, become into who she now eventually has come into. For me it’s all about, nothing changes with my love. Nothing changes with my responsibilities. Only thing I got to do now is get smarter and educate myself more. And that’s my job.

I had to look myself in the mirror when my son at the time was 3 years old and me and my wife started having conversations about us noticing that he wasn’t on the boy vibe that [older brother] Zaire was on. I had to look myself in the mirror and say: “What if your son comes home and tells you he’s gay? What are you going to do? How are you going to be? How are you going to act? It ain’t about him. He knows who he is. It’s about you. Who are you?”

I’m doing what every parent has to do. Once you bring kids into this world, you become unselfish. It’s my job to be their role model, to be their voice in my kids’ lives, to let them know you can conquer the world. So go and be your amazing self, and we’re going to sit back and just love you.

The Hallmark Channel backed down on banning the lesbian-wedding-themed ad from the wedding-planning site Zola. Afterwards, GLAAD looked into the One Million Moms organization that pressured Hallmark, and found that it’s more like One Mom.

and let’s close with something cold

It’s a cliche to call music “cool”, but ice drumming on Lake Baikal surely qualifies.

and why it won’t help them win the culture wars

When Christianity Today called for President Trump’s removal from office, as “a matter  … of loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments”, it acknowledged an argument in his favor:

his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy

but it characterized those benefits like this

no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence.

It worried that ultimately, as Christian leaders tie themselves to this “human being who is morally lost and confused”, Christianity itself will be tarnished.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency…. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel.

CT’s editor Mark Galli, who wrote this editorial, is too benevolent to use this term, but the Christian tradition (not the Bible itself) contains a perfect description of the kind of bargain he is describing, in which worldly advantage is obtained in exchange for moral corruption: It is a deal with the Devil.

You might think Trump would deny such an implication, but in his tweeted response, the Artist of the Deal emphasized the transactional nature of his relationship to Evangelicals:

No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage.

In other words: You got a good price for your soul, so why are you complaining?

The moral cost. An inescapable feature of a deal with the Devil is that there is always more to it than you bargained for. And so it is here. A simple votes-for-judges bargain might have made pragmatic (if not moral) sense for conservative Christians, and might even make it defensible (if distasteful) to “brush off … immoral words and behavior” when Trump or his policies are grossly incompatible with Christian ethics. But instead of just ignoring sin and injustice, Evangelical leaders have been drawn into actively promoting and defending it.

When the public became aware of the policy of taking children away from their parents at the border, some prominent Christian leaders stepped up to deflect blame away from Trump:

“It’s impossible to feel anything but compassion for these kids, who must be dealing with a great deal of pain and confusion,” [Family Research Council President Tony] Perkins wrote in a June 15 statement. “But the origin of that pain and confusion isn’t U.S. law or the Trump administration. That burden lies with their parents who knowingly put them in this position.” …

Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and one of Trump’s most influential evangelical supporters, acknowledged the plight of the detained and separated children, but said he backs the president’s policy.

“Anybody with an ounce of compassion has to be disturbed by the scenes we are seeing at the border,” Jeffress said. “The only thing more gut-wrenching than the children separated from their families at the border is seeing children like Kate Steinle separated forever from her family.”

Kate Steinle was 30, not a child, when she died, and Jeffress did not explain how Steinle’s death might have been prevented by taking immigrant children — some as young as four months — away from their parents, or (if it could have been) how a Christian might justify such a moral trade-off. (This kind of reasoning is the exact opposite of the argument abortion opponents make against a rape exception: The child-to-be should not be punished for the sin of the father. “You are valuable no matter who your parents are, no matter the circumstances of your conception.”)

After the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville (in which a neo-Nazi rammed a car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 28), Jerry Falwell Jr. invented reasons to defend Trump’s pandering to the white supremacists in his base, and vouched for his character:

Falwell, president of the Christian-based Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, said Trump likely had more detailed information on protesters when he described “fine people” on both sides.

“One of the reasons I supported him is because he doesn’t say what’s politically correct, he says what is in his heart,” Falwell told ABC’s “This Week” program. “But he does not have a racist bone in his body.”

Think about that: Standing against Nazis is being “politically correct”, while defending them is not racist.

What about sex? You might at least expect Evangelical leaders to denounce Trump’s sexual offenses. After all, we all saw him on the Access Hollywood tape confess to a pattern of sexual assaults, after which two dozen women came forward with corroborating testimony. But Falwell heard only “somebody bragging in a locker room-type environment about something they never did”. Falwell could have stayed silent; he could have withheld judgment — but no, he actively stood up in defense.

When it came out that Trump had cheated on Melania with porn star Stormy Daniels, and then paid for Daniels’ silence just before the 2016 election (a campaign-finance offense for which Michael Cohen is in prison), Perkins thought Trump should “get a mulligan“, as if the entire sleazy mess were just a bad golf shot.

Wayne Grudem, a professor of biblical studies and author of Christian Ethics: An Introduction to Biblical Moral Reasoning, remains unshaken:

I strongly disapprove of adultery and being unfaithful in marriage, but I still support [Trump’s] actions as president. I’m glad he’s president, and I would vote for him again.

Nancy Allen, a Baptist who wrote Electing the People’s President, Donald Trump can read the same Twitter feed that CT characterized as “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused”, but somehow she has invented a New Trump, who (without confession or repentance) has been washed clean.

Donald Trump has changed. I believe that with all my heart. He has changed. He hasn’t had any more affairs. Now he’s not perfect, but there’s no perfect person. We know that there has been a change in his heart, and he respects our beliefs and values. And I believe he has some of the same beliefs and values.

Even Christian theology has been corrupted. Numerous Evangelical leaders have paved for Trump (and presumably him alone) an entirely new path of salvation from the one I learned about in Lutheran confirmation: He can be forgiven even while continuing to claim that everyone who accuses him is lying.

But why? By many accounts, the justification for the deal is a sense of desperation: Conservative Christians are losing the culture wars, and have to fight back harder. Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted:

Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing “nice guys”. They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many Repub leaders are a bunch of wimps!

Perkins echoes this sentiment.

Evangelical Christians, says Perkins, “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”

You may find it bizarre that Obama, who (unlike Trump) was scrupulously polite to his opponents, is seen as “the bully”. As best I can tell, liberal “bullying” consists mostly of recognizing same-sex marriage, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and requiring Christian businesses to offer their employees a full range of healthcare benefits.

But in addition to these actual affronts to Christian dominance, an array of imaginary threats have been concocted: Christianity will be criminalized! There will be widespread violence against Christians! Civil war! Christians are “one generation away” from a Nazi-like oppression!

Where actual offenses are lacking, terrifying ones can be envisioned in the future.

Why it won’t work. Selling out Christianity for Trumpism might even be justifiable for Evangelical leaders, at least temporarily, if Trumpist “street fighting” did what the Falwells and Jeffresses want: turned the country back towards the kinds of values Evangelicals promote — strict gender roles that reject homosexuality and female promiscuity, and postulate male/female as an either/or fixed at birth.

But the deal with the Devil won’t produce this outcome, because it’s based on a false diagnosis. Evangelicals aren’t losing the culture wars because they haven’t been tough enough. They’re losing because they’re wrong.

At its best, morality provides a way to skip bitter experience, because it offers you the same conclusions you would eventually come to yourself after years of pain and failure. How many people look back on failed relationships, estranged children, lost friendships and think, “If only I’d been honest with everybody from the beginning.”? How often do people confront a tangled web of cover-ups and wish they’d never cut the corner that got it all started? How many grasshoppers reach middle age and envy the ants whose consistent application of higher values have produced thriving careers, loving families, and valued places in supportive communities?

But not all attempts at moral rules work out that way. Some moral rules are arbitrary and bureaucratic. You keep them or you break them, and (unless you’re caught) life goes on with no obvious difference. Other rules are perverse: breaking the rule is the decision you look back on with pride and satisfaction. The regret you live with isn’t “Why did I do that?”, but “Why didn’t I see through that sooner?”

That’s where American culture is with traditional gender roles. We can see this most clearly in the public’s sudden acceptance of same-sex marriage, which went from an absurdity to a majority position in a little over a decade. In most other ways, that decade (roughly the early Oughts to the early Teens) was not a time of tumultuous change in social mores and attitudes. Politically, liberal waves in 2006 and 2008 were followed by a conservative wave in 2010, while approval of same-sex marriage continued to rise.

What changed? As gays and lesbians came out of the closet, more and more straight Americans got to know something about their lives, and came to rely on their own judgments of real people rather than the scare-stories promoted by Evangelical preachers.

Same-sex marriage wasn’t “presaging the fall of Western Civilization itself”, as James Dobson proclaimed in 2004 (and I think as far back as 1998, though I can’t find the link). As real experiences replaced stereotypes, same-sex marriage became the two guys who were renovating the house across the street, or the lesbian couple whose kid belonged to your kid’s playgroup. It was the cousin who could start being herself, or the son or daughter who now felt hopeful about life. Gay and lesbian couples weren’t engaged in some horrifying sham whose purpose was to undermine marriage for the rest of us, they were seeking many of the same happily-ever-afters we all were.

The reason American young people in particular are so accepting of diverse gender identities and sexual orientations is that they have grown up with out-of-the-closet friends. (I love the unconflicted coming-out story the CW Network wrote for its new Batwoman character. In 7th grade, when Johnny told everybody Kate was a lesbian, “I said ‘So what?’ and punched him in the mouth.”) They have seen the reality of the situation, and so will never be convinced that their classmates are minions of Satan.

Occasionally I hear white racists opine that blacks were better off under slavery, but I’ve never heard an African-American make that claim. In the same way, I’ve never heard a gay person say, “I wish we were all still the closet.” The era when homosexuality was a shameful secret, like the era when women could aspire only to “ladylike” futures, was a Dark Age. Nearly everyone cares about somebody whose life would be ruined if we really did “Make America Great Again” by going back to the values of the 1950s.

And for what? What possible benefit to straight white men would be worth rolling back the liberalizing waves of the last sixty years?

If the majority of the American people have anything to say about it, we’ll never find out. Not because some demon has tricked them, because of the authentic morality their life experience has taught them.

So Trump has been impeached, and now we wait to see what his trial will be like. Can Republicans really get away with simultaneously claiming that there isn’t enough direct evidence, and that the American people don’t need to hear witnesses with a clear view of what happened (like Mick Mulvaney)? Can senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner get re-elected while supporting a sham trial that acquits Trump without hearing any witnesses? We’ll soon find out.

The new NAFTA got through Congress, and the tensions in the trade war with China seem to have diminished. What does that say about the future of trade?

Meanwhile, the Afghanistan Papers came out, painting a picture of cluelessness and lying that stretches through three administrations of both parties. And the NYT and the WaPo had separate scoops about the constant corporate surveillance Americans live with, as both our smartphones and our cars have become spies against us.

This week’s featured post will start with the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal, and from there talk about the entire deal-with-the-Devil that Evangelicals have made — and why it’s not going to help them win the culture wars. That post should be out around 11 EST. Expect the weekly summary around 1.

Imagine you are living in a time with the long reign of a narcissistic dictator, a rise that meant multiple generations living with tyranny, oppression, fear.  Imagine for many years your people have been terrorized and even killed by those in power.

Imagine that for many years you have not been able to gather or practice the religion and customs of your birth – all those things that mean the most to you have been outlawed.

And then imagine, hope against hope, that a small band of rebels, without enough resources or enough people – without any real reason to think they could be successful – manage to overthrow those in power, and liberate everyone into a new and possible freedom.

This is the story of Hanukkah. 

The story of the Jewish people after the rebellion of the “small band” known as the Maccabees.

Finally, they who had lived on the edge of despair for so long would be able to return to their temple, which was for them a place of security and memory and hope.

They were celebrating, purifying, remembering and re-claiming – the Assyrian army had been defeated, they were free. 

In the historical record, this is the “miracle” of Hanukkah. 

Just this.  And it is enough. 

A small community of people who refuse to cooperate with their own oppression, refuse to accept the world as it was, even after generations of it being that way – and a small group continuing to act until liberation finally becomes reality. This is an amazing miracle. 

The rabbinical record, however, keeps going – past this part of the story.

The rabbinical record reminds us that for many years before the uprising – when the Jews were hiding in caves, and fending off arrest – they had missed their great festival of Sukkot, which must be celebrated in the temple, and so now that they had returned, they could begin the ritual as their promises with God required.

As they began, however, they realized that the Assyrians had destroyed all but one night’s worth of oil for the lamp.

They needed 8 days’ worth – anything less would not allow a true re-dedication or commitment to begin again as a religious community and as a people.

After all they had been through, it mattered that they do it right, and completely – it mattered that they not let the light go out.

And as the story goes – rather than the lamp staying lit for one day, the oil lasted for the whole 8 days.

These 8 days are why Hanukkah is celebrated for 8 nights, with each night lighting a new candle on the menorah.

In the rabbinical telling, this was the miracle – that the oil that lasted far beyond what it should have – that’s how you end up with latkes and other oil-heavy foods as a part of the Hanukkah celebration! 

Both of these moments – the uprising of the Maccabees, and the oil that lasted – are miraculous, amazing, and inspiring –  and yet they aren’t what has always struck me as the most miraculous truth at the heart of this story.

For me, the miracle is in something less showy, more routine. 

The miracle, for me, is the choice that the Jewish people made to light the lamp in the first place.  

The choice that made the 8 nights of light possible. 

They made the choice to light the lamp, even though it was hopeless.

They made the choice even though they probably didn’t think it would make a difference.

Something in them persuaded them to expect that something else could be at work. 

Something beyond their own effort, their own vision.

In making that choice they chose to believe, as Arandhati Roy writes, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” 

This choice was the miracle. Expecting the miracle was the miracle. 

Because by their expectations, they made the miracle possible. 

This is the power of expectations.

Since researcher Robert Rosenthal began studying expectations and their impact in the 1950s, it’s been repeatedly shown that what we expect shapes not only our own experiences, but also others’ experiences, and then all of these accumulate so that all of these small, yet often meaningful ways, our expectations can impact – as in change –  Reality.  

For example.  “One study described golfers who were told they had a ‘lucky’ ball. They made more putts than when using an ‘ordinary’ ball.” 

Another: “Highly-trained weight lifters out-do their personal bests when they believe they’ve taken a performance booster.”

And repeatedly, “studies have shown that a teacher’s expectations can raise or lower a student’s IQ score.” 

Not just their grades.  Their IQ.

This was one of the earliest discoveries from Rosenthal – how a teacher’s unconscious bias – specifically racial bias – impacts how well a child learns – because, for example,

when a teacher expects more from a child, they will wait longer for the child to answer, and take a longer time explaining a subject they may seem not to understand. 

These are barely-noticeable, usually sub-conscious shifts resulting from our expectations – with a huge collective impact.

This is what we might call the placebo effect – this long-disparaged idea where we can be fooled by “fake” medicines that trick us into believing we are being healed –  but here it’s being played out socially, collectively. 

Except- what we are learning is that far from “fake,” the placebo effect is actually a manifestation of a very real, very complex scientific truth – it’s just that rather than the medicine, or more generally – the change- coming from a pill, it comes from within us – from our brains. 

This is the basic premise of science writer Erik Vance’s fascinating 2016 book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. 

Our brains, Vance describes, are wired for the future – they are constantly assessing what’s going to happen next.  Almost entirely subconsciously. 

This is connected to the “time warp” Sean spoke about last week – because the way that our brains predict the future is by drawing on what they know from the past. 

All the time, our brains are taking experiences from the past – and by the past, that might mean two seconds ago or two years ago – and using it to predict the future, and therefore guide our choices in the present. 

And then – as I feel like I’ve been saying in every sermon lately: our brains don’t like to be wrong.  

Our brains don’t want those expectations they are making to be wrong. 

So sometimes, amazingly, instead of shifting our expectations, our brains shift reality. 

Let me offer an example:

Returning to golf.   If we know from the past, about an experience that felt like we were playing with a “lucky ball” because we played better than we ever played before – when we play with a ball we are told is lucky – our brains expect the outcome to be the same. 

And so our body and mind automatically make small, unconscious choices that can ultimately all add up to playing a better game. 

We are more focused.  Less anxious. More confident, clear.

All because our brains want the expected future to line up with the actual future. 

What’s wild is that it doesn’t always matter if you know that it may not actually be a lucky ball.  Acting as if it is – like, the “theatre” around having a lucky ball – this is the thing that hooks your sub-conscious to engage the things that will produce the original expectation. 

One of my favorite stories from Vance’s reporting is the story of an experimental Parkinson’s treatment – not a pill, surgery.  Participants in the study come in for brain surgery – but then some get the surgery, and some don’t.  And the doctors make the same marks on your skull so you can’t tell. 

Well, one patient – after he had his “surgery”, it changed his life.  “He went from having trouble walking and talking to — heli-skiing. He did a half-marathon. He climbed the backside of Half Dome.”

And everyone was thrilled – they thought they cured Parkinson’s. But then two years later, when it was time to un-blind the study, his doctors were shocked. Because he was one who didn’t actually get the surgery.

Again, it’s important to say this – it wasn’t that it was all fake.  The experience itself activated real physiological differences in the brain, in the body – that literally created this patient’s expected future. 

Of course, expectations do not entirely determine reality – as Chris Berdik describes in his book Mind Over Mind –  there are limits to what the placebo effect can do. 

When my son broke his arm last month, we couldn’t simply “expect” him to be healed, and make it so.  Expectations can’t fix poverty, racism, or the climate crisis.  I wish.  

Vance describes it like this: placebos can’t stop the disease, but they can often limit, even erase, the impact of the disease. 

Expectations shift things in small, often imperceptible ways.  As our expectations shift, small, imperceptible things shift in us, in our bodies, in our actions; and from these shifts, small, imperceptible things shift in others, and in the world around us.  And all of these small effects can end up making a big difference. 

There’s another story from the Talmud – a story of the Jewish people hundreds of years earlier, when they were slaves in Egypt – until a man named Moses led them to their freedom.

This story, is the moment when he’s try to do just that.  They’ve left Egypt, Moses is leading them to the Promised Land – until he finds himself at the edge of the Red Sea.

His people were all around him, hungry for liberation.  All Moses and his people had to do was go forward. Freedom was waiting.

Except for the sea. This big, deep, wide sea.

Moses looked to God, unsure what to do. But nothing happened.  The ocean remained wild, unfriendly, hopeless. 

Until, from the back of the crowd, a man named Nachshon pushed his way forward, and started walking into the sea.   

A regular guy who’d never heard a voice from a burning bush. In that moment, he decided what he could do – was keep walking.    

Moses stared at him. Others started to point and yell. What are you doing? You’ll drown!

But Nachshon just kept walking. He waded through the rising tide, the water hit his calves.

He kept walking. Water hit his waist.

He kept walking. The water came up to his chest, and then his shoulders. He kept walking, the water all around him. Until finally, it was at his nostrils, about to fill his lungs.

And it was at that moment, the Red Sea parted, and the Israelites could continue their journey to freedom, moving safely through the walls of water, safely through the sea.

His expectation of the miracle made the miracle possible. 

In the story of Hanukkah, when the Jewish people decided to expect something other than what all reason might’ve told them was possible, this is a story they would have remembered.

This is the memory – the collective memory that their brains would’ve used to shape a story about the future.

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt – Hebrew scriptures say again and again –

so that when the question of whether or not they should step out to resist the oppressive regime; or whether they should light the lamp even though there was not enough oil – though the present reality said it was hopeless, their brains were sure something else was possible: freedom, and liberation.  

They expected a miracle – and made the miracle possible. 

Over the past few years, there have been many moments where I’ve seen people wonder if there’s anything they can do would make a real difference.  So many places today make the Hanukkah story feel not all that distant. In our world – and in our personal lives.

Which is why the Hanukkah story should feel like such good news for us in our lives today.  Because what Hanukkah reminds us – is that we can unlock the power of expectations – We can draw on our past in all the ways we have changed and healed and walked into the sea and it parted.  We can draw on a collective courage – which is one of our core values at Foothills.  

For as many times as I have seen people struggle to know how and when to act, just as often I have been bolstered by someone stepping out like Nachshon.  Making the way by just walking forward. 

This is a collective courage, a collective memory, that can fuel a collective expectation, and a collective liberation.

We don’t know what the future will bring – in our own lives, or in the world.

We don’t know if our actions will be enough.

But the only ways they could be, is 

if we act as if they are

If we take the step forward to light that first candle 

If we act in expectation of the miracle –  making the miracle possible. 

Opening Words

Readings

Now that I’m in my 30s, I often reflect on who I’ve become and where my life is going. I’m lucky to be privileged enough to have the time and means to visit this beautiful property a few times a year to clear my head, do some writing and commune with nature.

I wish to show my appreciation for everything I have and all the things I’ve learned so far. But how? And to whom or what do I give thanks?

As I hike across the prairie, away from the stone chapel, I consider the upcoming holiday designated to giving thanks. I think of my family — my brother, our spouses, our children, and my mother — soon to be gathered around a table full of delectable foods.

Our Catholic upbringing ingrained in us since childhood that dinner is off-limits until we hold hands, bow our heads and my mother recites “Bless us, O, Lord, and these, Thy gifts,” or my brother offers a freestyle list of how we have all been blessed by God. I hold their hands, but instead of bowing my head and closing my eyes, I simply wait. I appreciate that they are thankful, and I’m thankful for the same things they are. But sitting at the table, eyes open, mouth closed, I appear ungrateful to them.

And then Christmas arrives soon after. Some people go out of their way to remind us that “Christ is the reason for the season,” and insist the proper way to greet people is with a “Merry Christmas” instead of the more inclusive “Happy Holidays.” Their insistence that all gratitude and celebration must be devoted to a Christian God excludes not only people of other faiths, but atheists like me; it inflicts a guilt of sorts on those who just want to enjoy the snow, the trees, the twinkle lights. They dismiss our perspective by telling us it’s not enough to wish each other a happy holiday season ― thanks are always owed to God.

But my experience after leaving Catholicism proves otherwise.

Even when God is gone, gratefulness remains.

The Talmud teaches that Adam created in Late September noticed during the first three months of his life how the days slowly became shorter and shorter – He said: Woe to me, because of my sin the world is getting darker … and will return to a world of darkness and confusion. This must be my death sentence.  Instead of accepting this imminent fate, Adam overcame his depression and took upon himself to fast, pray and repent. After eight days, Adam noticed that the days indeed had begun to lengthen. Realizing that this is ‘minhago shel olam’ [the way of the world or nature], he made a celebration for eight days giving thanksgiving to the Almighty.  The next year, he made these days holidays.

The Rabbis explain that Adam had good intentions when making these holidays; however his offspring turned them into holidays of … nature worship. The Talmud tells us that this is the origin of Saturna and Kalenda 
which we explained eventually became Christmas and New Years.

Sermon

Benediction

• A present from family? (From Berlin, CT? I have no family there.) 
• A marked-up copy of my novel with a book offer? (I'm pretty much sure that's not how it's done.) 
• A package bomb? (By FedEx? Highly unlikely). 
• A sweepstakes prize? ("Here's a grocery sack with our logo!")
• An inheritance from a long-lost relative? ("Here's a grocery sack with a logo!)

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear December 23.

The question presented by the set of facts enumerated in this report may be as simple as that posed by the President and his chief of staff’s brazenness: is the remedy of impeachment warranted for a president who would use the power of his office to coerce foreign interference in a U.S. election, or is that now a mere perk of the office that Americans must simply “get over”?

– Adam Schiff,
preface to The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report

This week’s featured posts are “Articles of Impeachment: Broad or Narrow?” and “The Illusions Underlying our Foreign Policy Discussions“.

This week everybody was talking about articles of impeachment

The Schiff quote above is the key question in this impeachment, and I would follow it with two other questions:

• If soliciting or coercing foreign interference is just what presidents do now, how will we ever again have a fair election?
• If Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme was wrong but not impeachable, as some Republicans suggest, what is the proper response that will keep Trump (and future presidents) from continuing to commit such offenses?

Two major reports came out this week: The House Intelligence Committee summarized the findings of its hearings regarding Trump’s Ukraine scheme, and the House Judiciary Committee reported on “Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment“.

The Judiciary Committee heard from four legal scholars Wednesday, three called by the Democrats and one by the Republicans.

The Republican witness, Jonathan Turley (who you may have seen over the years on CNN), was also a witness during the Clinton impeachment hearings, where he said the exact opposite of what he’s saying now. In 1998, he saw the danger of letting things go:

If you decide that certain acts do not rise to impeachable offenses, you will expand the space for executive conduct.

In 2014, when Obama was president, Turley listed five “myths” about impeachment, one of which was:

An impeachable offense must involve a violation of criminal law.

Now, though,

I’m concerned about lowering impeachment standard to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger.

and he argues that the evidence against Trump doesn’t exactly fit the statutory elements for criminal bribery. (The other three witnesses said that it did.) So the need for a violation of criminal law isn’t a myth when a Republican is president.

Further hearings are happening as I write this, and I’m not trying to keep up.

Digby sums up the current anti-impeachment argument:

So basically the GOP position is that you can’t have an impeachment without examining all the relevant evidence and since Trump has denied all requests for that relevant evidence there can be no impeachment.

Fox News raises a point that I think they read entirely backwards.

While Democrats may use impeachment as an anti-Trump talking point on the campaign trail, candidates — including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Michael Bennet, D-Col. — could end up spending valuable days of the primary season torn between their campaigns and a Senate trial should Trump actually be impeached.

An impeachment trial at that stage of the game would put the senators at a disadvantage, while candidates such as South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would be free to continue their efforts.

I think senators who are currently not polling in the top tier, like Booker or Klobuchar, could get far more traction out of a compelling pro-impeachment speech on the Senate floor than they could from a campaign event in Sioux City or Manchester. Conversely, who’s going to pay attention to Buttigieg or Bloomberg when there’s an impeachment trial on CNN?

BTW, I’m getting really tired of hearing pundits make the point that Democratic presidential candidates don’t talk much about impeachment in their campaign speeches. Why would they? One way or  the other, it should be all over before anyone votes in a primary. These candidates should be discussing their plans for 2021 and beyond, and leaving impeachment to Congress.

and the NATO summit

Trump came home early after a video of other NATO leaders laughing about him went viral. Biden capitalized with an ad about how the world is laughing at Trump, concluding with “We need a leader the world respects”.

The incident and Trump’s reaction gave me an idea that I hope catches on. Like a lot of people, I’ve been saying for a while that we need to be out on the streets holding pro-impeachment demonstrations. There should be a continuous impeachment vigil outside the White House.

But here’s the idea: It shouldn’t be an angry, chanting and sign-waving kind of demonstration. It should be comedy marathon. Every night, one or more of the country’s top comedians should be standing on a soap box outside the White House telling Trump jokes. Any time Trump opens a window in the White House, he should be able to hear people laughing.

and Confederate symbols

Nikki Haley told interviewer Glenn Beck that the Confederate flag represented “service, sacrifice, and heritage” until the Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof hijacked it for white supremacy. Former RNC Chair Michael Steele recalled “The black people who were terrorized & lynched in its name” and concluded that “Roof didn’t hijack the meaning of that flag, he inherited it.”

The Washington Post points out that

Confederate symbols have not always been a part of American or Southern life. Many of them disappeared after the Civil War. When they reappeared, it was not because of a newfound appreciation of Southern history. … These symbols were not widely used after the Civil War but were reintroduced in the middle of the 20th century by white Southerners to fight against civil rights for African Americans.

Wake Forest and Garner, North Carolina have cancelled their annual Christmas parades, for fear that the participation of pro-Confederate groups would lead to protests and counter-protests. Of course, each side blames the other for ruining a popular children’s event with politics. I sympathize with town officials, who were in a tough place legally: Banning particular points of view from a public parade is very tricky legally, as is banning protests of those views.

The University of North Carolina solved its “Silent Sam” problem, but not in a way that made anybody happy. Silent Sam is a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood at an entrance to the UNC campus for over a century until students tore it down last year.

The University settled a lawsuit filed by Sons of Confederate Veterans (who made a controversial claim to own the statue, based on the theory that removing the statue violated the conditions under which United Daughters of the Confederacy donated it to the University). The settlement agrees that SCV now owns Sam, and UNC is contributing $2.5 million to a fund to transport the statue and build it a new home.

The University’s legal position was complicated by a 2015 North Carolina law that prohibits removal of historical monuments from public property. The law was passed after the Charleston Church massacre led to calls to remove Confederate monuments.

UNC’s anti-racist groups are glad that Sam will not be coming back to intimidate black students as they enter campus, but are outraged that the University is contributing to a neo-Confederate group.

[Assistant professor William] Sturkey said he came to UNC in 2013 because he felt it was the best place in the country to study the history of the South. In recent years, he said, he has repeatedly asked the university to endow a professorship in the Department of History for a specialist in the history of slavery, in part to research the university’s own connections to slavery.

Each time, he said, he has been told UNC couldn’t afford to fund such an endowment, which Sturkey said would cost about half the amount that has been pledged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans through the Silent Sam settlement.

and you also might be interested in …

If you’re worried that the House can’t legislate because it’s so obsessed with impeachment, consider this: Friday it passed a law to restore the parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court voided in 2013.

In the Shelby case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that Congress remained free to try to impose federal oversight on states where voting rights were at risk, but must do so based on contemporary data. The measure passed on Friday was an attempt to do just that.

Specifically, it would update the parameters used to determine which states and territories need to seek approval for electoral procedures, requiring public notice for voting changes and expanding access for Native American and Alaska Native voters.

Two points are worth noting:

• Protecting voting rights used to be a bipartisan issue, but no longer is. The previous extension of the Act, in 2006, passed the House 390-33 and the Senate 98-0. This time the VRA passed the House 228-187, with only one Republican voting for it.
• Like hundreds of other bills passed by what Trump calls “the do-nothing Democrats”, the VRA is expected to die in the Senate without being brought to a vote. So the point isn’t that Republicans have a different vision of how to protect voting rights, which McConnell & Company could write into a Senate version of the bill and send back to the House. Instead, Republicans in Congress are happy with the efforts of many red states to make it as hard as possible to vote, and want the federal government to leave them alone.

Waitman Wade Beorn explains why avoiding war crimes is a good idea. (Hard to believe that point needs defending, but under the current administration it does.) Using both his own combat experiences and examples from his training, he argues that “Abiding by the law of war has both ethical and pragmatic value.” He quotes his first squadron commander: “the laws of warfare are designed not only to protect civilians, but also to minimize the risk of moral injury to troops.”

“Moral injury” is an abstract way of saying that you don’t have to wake up at night seeing the faces of the family you massacred because you shot first and thought later.

Katie Hill, the California congresswoman who was pushed out of public life by a revenge-porn scandal, wrote a very moving account of how close she came to suicide, and why she didn’t do it.

This makes me wonder: Men who go through scandals seem to benefit from an unofficial statute of limitations. (Louis CK is on his comeback tour. Woody Allen is still making movies. Eliot Spitzer had a post-scandal media career and even ran for office again.) Could the same thing possibly work for victims of sex scandals?

I mean, after some interval, could Ms. Hill run for office again? Would the media respond to her revenge-porn pictures as old news? I hesitate to urge someone to display more courage than I would probably have, but someone someday should try this, just to raise the issue.

An important article in YES! magazine about a former white supremacist who works to help others deradicalize. She focuses not on the philosophical points of ideology, but on the emotional needs that white supremacy satisfies.

In every case she’s ever encountered, Martinez said, she’s been able to identify some type of unhealed trauma. Sometimes it’s extreme, as in the case of a young woman interviewed for this story who was repeatedly raped as a child by her grandfather—and then, once in the movement, raped again by a White nationalist boyfriend … Sometimes the trauma is less extreme, but there are always fundamental and unmet needs, Martinez says: the need to love and be loved, to speak and be heard, and to be a part of something greater than yourself. Deradicalization involves identifying the trauma, and finding new resources, behaviors and networks outside extremist groups to meet those needs.

Too often, we think of people doing things because they believe things. Often it’s the reverse: They believe things that justify doing the things they feel compelled to do. If you are filled with fear, you find a paranoid worldview that justifies that fear. If you’re filled with anger, you adopt a worldview that justifies that anger. Such people don’t need to hear facts that debunk their beliefs; they need to learn healthier ways to deal with fear and anger.

The NYT reports that hundreds of Hong Kong protesters have fled to Taiwan, where their visas are renewable month-to-month. Meanwhile, the demonstrations continue: Hundreds of thousands of protesters were on the streets yesterday.

North Korea is back to testing rockets, in preparation for a “Christmas gift” for the US, which analysts suspect could be a satellite launch. Trump tweeted this response:

Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way. He signed a strong Denuclearization Agreement with me in Singapore. He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States

(Oval Office soundtrack: “Don’t Give Up on Us, Baby“.) I’ve been a skeptic about the Trump/Kim relationship from the beginning. It has always seemed like one of those movie-star romances that the PR departments liked to dream up back in Hollywood’s big-studio era.

The United Kingdom has an election Thursday. Boris Johnson hopes to get a majority behind his Brexit plan. Ben Judah writes in the Washington Post: “Russia has already won Britain’s election“.

There are (at least) two distinct kinds of bigotry. The most egregious is outright hate: Kill them all, send them back where they came from, and so on. Trump is insulated against being accused of this kind of anti-Semitism by his some-of-my-best-sons-in-law-are-Jewish defense.

The second kind of bigotry may not be overtly hostile, but it pushes the stereotypes that dehumanize the victimized group. That’s what Trump was doing when he spoke to the Israeli American Council Saturday.

A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me — you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax.

In other words, Jews are rich, ruthless businessmen who only care about money. Goebbels couldn’t have said it better.

The Bloomberg campaign will be a test of what money can do in presidential politics. A typical candidate raises enough money to compete in the early small states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada — hoping that strong showings there will bring in more contributions that allow the campaign to continue nationwide.

Bloomberg is spending near-limitless amounts of his own money, so the early-state strategy doesn’t apply.

Jim Brown makes a strong case for raising pensions for NFL players who played before the million-dollar-contract era. It would cost a very tiny percentage of the revenue the league generates today.

The minister of a Methodist church in California posts a lengthy annotation of the church’s nativity scene, which shows the Holy Family separated in cages, as they might well have been if New Testament Egypt had been like America today.

In the Claremont United Methodist Church nativity scene this Christmas, the Holy Family takes the place of the thousands of nameless families separated at our borders. Inside the church, you will see this same family reunited, the Holy Family together, in a nativity that joins the angels in singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace and good will to all.”

I’m reminded of a stage production of The Odyssey I saw a few years ago: When Odysseus washes up on the island of the Phaeacians, he gets gets detained with all the illegal immigrants who have been streaming in since the fall of Troy.

and let’s close with a job well done

At Boise State, home of the famous blue football field, they’ve trained a dog to retrieve the tee after kickoffs.

So many of our debates about defense and foreign policy take place in a fantasy world.

Nations. Every time you look at a globe, you’re participating in an illusion: that the Earth’s land mass partitions neatly into nations. On the globe, ungovernable places like Afghanistan and Syria look every bit as solid and well-defined as Belgium or Japan.

In spite of ourselves, we fall for that illusion again and again. When American troops occupy a place like Iraq, we immediately start talking about “installing” a government, as if Iraq were a light socket that just needed a new bulb after we removed the old one. After all, there are lines on our globes, and little stars that denote their capitals. You just put somebody in charge, they send one of their people to the UN, and there you go: a nation.

In reality, the world is full of wild places where the word “government” doesn’t quite apply. Some of them, like Kashmir, are contested regions on the edges of larger entities. Some, like in Afghanistan, start right outside the capital and extend over the bulk of the alleged country. In places like Mexico, neighborhoods of major cities are controlled by crime families that the official government can’t overcome.

Some wild places are ruled by insurgencies that aspire to become governments themselves. Some are a field of play where rival warlords compete for dominance. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on: There are troops that claim to represent a government, insurgencies fighting against them, warlords picking a side one day at a time, criminal gangs just trying to do business, mercenaries paid by some interested party, official foreign troops allied with the government, or even covert foreign troops who wear no insignia and officially aren’t there at all.

Code that on a map.

War and peace. Another illusion is that war and peace are a binary pair of opposites. You’re at war, or you have peace. Peace is the natural order, but occasionally it is punctuated by relatively brief episodes of war, like the Civil War or World War II. Society has its normal rules for peacetime, but occasionally a switch gets flipped and the rules of war apply, giving more freedom to governments and armies, but less to citizens and foreign civilians caught in the wrong place.

Because peace is the natural state, within a few years any war is supposed to come to a conclusion: victory, defeat, or a negotiated settlement. Citizens submit to the restrictions of war on the implicit assumption that those restrictions are temporary. When events don’t play out that way — if say, the war goes on and on with no apparent end in sight — citizens get antsy and support for the war wanes.

Similarly to its localization in time, war is also supposed to be localized in space. There is a comparatively small and well-defined war zone where the shooting happens; everywhere else, life is normal but for a few restrictions necessary to support the war effort. Inside the war zone, people neatly divide into combatants and non-combatants. Combatants are soldiers of the afore-mentioned nations, which have agreed to rules that (up to a point) protect non-combatants.

The way a nation wins a war is through the quantity and quality of its combatants. Either you throw more troops at your enemy than it can handle (as Iran did against Iraq in the 1980s), or you equip your troops with expensive weapons that give them a decisive advantage (as the US has done wherever it fights).

Conventional war. One of the strangest bits of terminology we use is “conventional war”, which is supposed to distinguish a conflict from nuclear war on the one hand and “unconventional” war on the other.

The classic conventional war is World War II in Europe: There are two sides that each control well-defined territory. The line between those territories is the “front”, and each side tries to push the front one way or the other, using armies equipped with guns and tanks, and supported by air and naval power. Away from the front there might be spies, saboteurs, and assassins; covert partisan groups (like the French Resistance); or even enemy troops who have infiltrated past the front lines somehow (like our airborne troops on D-Day). But these behind-the-lines struggles are a sideshow compared to the big tank battles at the front.

What’s weird about calling this model “conventional” is that it rarely happens any more. Granted, it’s not totally gone. The Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors in 1967 was a conventional war. The opening phase of the Iraq War, where the US and its allies attacked and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s organized armies, was conventional.

But the US war in Vietnam wasn’t conventional. The Afghanistan War isn’t conventional. After the initial invasion, the Iraq War wasn’t conventional.

Unconventional war. “Unconventional” war is like what happens behind the lines of a conventional war. It’s all sabotage and partisans and irregular troops, but there is no “line” for this activity to be behind.

By calling this kind of war “unconventional”, we ghettoize it. It’s like the irregular verbs in a foreign language. War is mainly conventional war, and we’ve got that covered. But there are a few exceptional situations that fall through the cracks.

And that’s the problem we’ve had these last 60 years or so: Everything falls through the cracks. If the Viet Cong or the Taliban would just line up some tanks and roll them at us, we’d totally nail those suckers. If Boko Haram would field an air force and dogfight our F-16s, they’d have no chance. If the Colombian drug cartels floated a navy and tried to land narcotics on our Gulf coast in a Normandy-invasion sort of way, they’d find out just how mighty we are.

But they don’t. Everybody who takes on the United States fights an unconventional war against us. And we keep losing.

We lose in a fairly predictable way: We see war as a temporary thing. We imagine applying our matchless power until we’ve captured the enemy flag, and then we’ll declare victory and go back to our normal peacetime lives. So all the enemy has to do is refuse to give us a flag to capture. Melt into the countryside, hide among the civilian population, and come out just often enough to remind everyone that they’re not defeated yet. Eventually these tactics will run out our clock and we’ll start looking for a way to leave.

Obama took a lot of criticism in Iraq for a having a timetable, because you’re not supposed to tell the enemy how long they have to wait. But even without a timetable, we don’t fool anybody. Everyone knows we can’t stay forever.

Dr. McFate

The new rules of war. That’s where Sean McFate starts in his recent book The New Rules of War. How can we be so powerful and yet keep losing wars?

I find it hard to believe that “McFate” is his real name, but it seems to be. He’s on the faculty at Georgetown and the National Defense University. (Dr. McFate is not to be confused with Dr. Fate, the most powerful sorcerer of the DC comic book universe, even though McFate sounds a bit like a comic book character himself: He was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, served as a mercenary in various conflicts he can’t talk about, got a Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics, and published two novels. He’s exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to stumble across the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak, or maybe an infinity stone.)

The central point of McFate’s “new rules” is less that he knows exactly what we need to do and more that we need to start thinking about reality again. The book’s subtitle, “victory in the age of durable disorder” introduces the book’s central idea: that disorder is a chronic condition to be managed, not a disease we should expect to cure and be done with.

Dr. Fate

Durable disorder is something that happens in the twilight region between war and peace. It can be found in the physical places that we call “failed states”, but it also happens in abstract areas where the rules of war and peace have never been nailed down, as in cyberwar between rival countries’ hackers, or information war.

“Conventional war is dead.” is the first of McFate’s new rules. He points out that not even other great powers practice it any more. Look at Putin’s Russia. In the last few years they have

• invaded Crimea with “little green men” — masked soldiers without Russian insignia — that Putin for a long time denied existed or had anything to do with him.
• manipulated the American political process to put his man in the White House and co-opt one of our two major political parties. Similar tactics have just about succeeded in breaking the United Kingdom away from the European Union.
• bombed civilian areas in Syria to produce a wave of refugees that destabilized democratic governments across Europe.

None of that is peaceful, but neither does it fit into the usual categories of war. It is aggressive and sometimes violent, but far from the tanks-pouring-into-Europe scenario that NATO was designed to oppose.

Weapons. McFate disapproves of the urge to invest fabulous amounts of money in ever-more-complex technology. Rule 2 is “Technology will not save us.” There’s a reason for that: Gee-whiz weaponry may succeed in giving us greater dominance of the battlefield, but it doesn’t address the problem that most of our conflicts don’t happen on traditional battlefields.

Tech is useful, he says, but not decisive.

Gizmos can shape our everyday lives, but not victory. War is armed politics, and seeking a technical solution to a political problem is folly. Ultimately, brainpower is superior to firepower.

Instead, he recommends investing more in people, particularly special forces, diplomats, and people who know how to shape narratives. Rule 5 is “The best weapons do not fire bullets.”

Mercenaries. Having been a mercenary, McFate has a more nuanced view of them than you typically see. The stereotypic merc is a killing machine for hire. But in McFate’s account, they are like any other professionals whose skills may be used for good or evil. (Compare, for example, computer programmers, who could be developing algorithms to help Facebook manipulate us more completely, or who could be hacking Cayman Island banks to expose the sources of dark money.) Maybe they will take a gig with the bad guys to keep food on the table, but they’d rather work for people they believe are the good guys.

McFate tells an amazing story that I have no other source for: During the Darfur genocide, he claims, Mia Farrow floated the idea of human rights organizations hiring mercs to secure safe places for refugees to run away to. It was seen as a temporary measure while a parallel PR campaign would try to shame the world community into taking action. The scheme was never put into action, but it could have been.

He foresees a future in which mercenaries play an ever-larger role. Rather than pay a corrupt government for protection (like Rachel Maddow describes Exxon-Mobil doing in Equatorial Guinea) why shouldn’t a corporation just establish its own fiefdom with paid soldiers? When individual people have tens of billions of dollars and strong views, why shouldn’t they take direct action rather than work through the political system? What if, say, the Koch brothers decided to take down Venezuela, or Bill Gates finally had enough of corrupt African governments getting in the way of his foundation’s good projects?

Educating strategists. Strategy, especially grand strategy, is held in low regard these days. It’s supposedly a bunch of ivory tower ideas that have lost touch with the real world.

But the United States’ biggest failures in recent years have been failures of strategy. Bad strategy is how you win all the battles but lose the war. The mess in Iraq arose because we didn’t know what we were trying to accomplish: Replace Saddam with a friendlier tyrant? Control a larger chunk of the world’s oil supply? Create a showpiece democracy for the rest of the Muslim world? We didn’t know, so we couldn’t do it.

McFate locates this problem in how we educate our military leaders: We start out teaching them tactics and expect them to grow into strategic thinkers as they rise up the ranks. It seldom happens. He also has a radical diagnosis: Our officer corps attracts and promotes too many engineers. Engineers make good tacticians, but strategy is a liberal art.

My take. I think that McFate has sold conventional war a little short: It’s not so much that conventional war is obsolete, but that US dominance has largely taken it off the table. The same is true of nuclear war: It’s not that nuclear weapons can’t be used to win a war — they were key to our victory over Japan. But that example defines the situation where nukes are usable: You have them and your enemy doesn’t.

The fact that we haven’t exploded a nuclear bomb (other than as a test) since 1945 doesn’t mean that there was no point in building them. Our nukes took nuclear war off the table for our enemies.

The same thing could be said about the tanks, planes, ships, and missiles of our conventional arsenal. Wars against the United States have been unconventional not because conventional war is obsolete, but because potential adversaries know the US would win such wars.

We want to keep nuclear and conventional war off the table, so we should still invest in weapons that will make those options unattractive to our adversaries. (That probably doesn’t require as much money as we currently spend — maybe ten aircraft carriers is enough — but it does require something.)

I think some of his other rules are questionable, but in some sense that criticism misses the point. He’s raising questions that somebody needs to raise. Our defense debate is often just about a number: How much are we going to raise the budget this year? It needs to be about what we’re trying to do and how we imagine doing it.

Should Democrats throw the kitchen sink at Trump, or keep the impeachment case short and simple?

Thursday, Speaker Pelosi announced that the House would go ahead with drafting articles of impeachment. The main debate at this point is how broad or narrow those articles should be.

Obviously, there will be an article about the Ukraine scheme, and almost certainly an article about Trump’s efforts to obstruct Congress’ investigation of the Ukraine scheme. The most obvious additional article could be built around the obstruction-of-justice evidence in the Mueller Report.

Beyond that, Democrats could throw the kitchen sink at him. NYT columnist David Leonhardt consulted legal experts and came up with eight articles of impeachment:

1. Obstruction of justice. This count would include the obstructions laid out in Part II of the Mueller Report, as well as hiding evidence by improperly classifying the call notes on the Ukraine call.
2. Contempt of Congress. This refers to Trump’s blanket refusal to cooperate with Congressional oversight.
3. Abuse of power. This is where the bulk of the Ukraine scheme fits.
4. Impairing the administration of justice. Attempting to use the power of the executive branch to hound his political opponents.
5. Acceptance of emoluments. “Trump continues to own his hotels, allowing politicians, lobbyists and foreigners to enrich him and curry favor with him by staying there.”
6. Corruption of elections. Michael Cohen is already in jail for campaign finance violations related to the Stormy Daniels payoff. He claimed to have been carrying out Trump’s orders.
7. Abuse of pardons. “He has encouraged people to break the law (or impede investigations) with a promise of future pardons.” The Mueller Report discusses how hints at a pardon may have encouraged Paul Manafort not to cooperate (which is a big reason Mueller never got to the bottom of the Trump/Russia connection). But he also has told border enforcement officials not to worry about breaking the law.
8. Conduct grossly incompatible with the Presidency. “He lies constantly, eroding the credibility of the office. He tries to undermine any independent information that he does not like, which weakens our system of checks and balances. He once went so far as to say that federal law-enforcement agents and prosecutors regularly fabricated evidence — a claim that damages the credibility of every criminal investigation.”

I have no trouble believing that Republicans would have impeached Obama if they could have mustered a charge as strong as any of those eight. Who can forget Rep. Blake Farenthold discussing the possibility of impeaching Obama over the totally phony birth-certificate issue? Or Rep. Kerry Bentivolio telling his constituents that it would be “a dream come true” to impeach Obama, but that unfortunately “you’ve got to have the evidence”. Rep. Mark Gaetz of Florida is still  talking about impeaching Obama, nearly three years after his term ended.

The danger in the broad approach is that the short-and-simple story of the Ukraine extortion scheme — something that is easy to grasp, clearly proven, and obviously wrong — can get lost. It gives credence to Trump’s talking point that Democrats have just been looking for anything they can possibly find to hang an impeachment on. “Conduct grossly incompatible” happens every day, but does it really call for impeachment?

On the other hand, if Trump is impeached just for Ukraine, does that send the message to future presidents that all the other stuff is OK? Does it tell 2020 voters that the other examples of corruption aren’t really serious?

Meanwhile, Lawrence Tribe argues that broad/narrow is a false choice:

The impeachment and removal of this president is necessary because Trump has been revealed as a serial abuser of power, whose pattern of behavior — and “pattern” is the key word, as Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) and House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) emphasized during Wednesday’s hearing — makes clear he will repeat the same sequence again and again.

And Josh Marshall says something similar:

You can’t take any of the Ukraine stuff in isolation. Trump wasn’t a more or less normal President and then suddenly he did something totally bonkers. Both in soliciting foreign assistance in his election campaigns and obstructing the administration of justice, Trump has done all of this before. This is not only critical to establishing a pattern of conduct, which speaks to the question of guilt. It also provides powerful evidence that this is what he does and that he will unquestionably do it again.

This relates to the conclusion I came to in “What is Impeachment For?“, an article I wrote in June 2018 for the purpose of setting my impeachment standards before I knew what conclusions the Mueller investigation would reach. Impeachment shouldn’t be about punishing past wrong-doing; it should be about heading off a continuing threat to the Republic. If Trump’s abuse of power is over and done with, let the voters (and future prosecutors) deal with it. But if it’s ongoing, Congress should take that power away from him as soon as possible.

This argument points to a short list of articles, each of which includes multiple examples that establish a pattern of misbehavior. “Do us a favor, though” is an example of seeking foreign interference in our elections, but it’s also part of a pattern of seeking foreign interference that goes back to “Russia, if you’re listening” in 2016.

Then we run into the question of whether the less egregious articles of impeachment could pass the House, and what it would mean if they didn’t. On the one hand, debating a long list of articles, but passing only two or three, might show the public that Democrats are taking their constitutional responsibilities seriously. (Republicans wrote four articles of impeachment against Clinton, but passed only two.) Democrats representing purple districts could tell their constituents, “I voted for some articles and against others”, and sound like moderates rather than Trump-haters. But is it a good look if the Democrats are split on some counts, or should they try to stay united throughout the process?

Finally there’s this: A subpoena for the Senate impeachment trial would be hard to ignore, so that’s probably the quickest way to get testimony from people like Don McGahn. If there are key witnesses we’re not likely to hear from any other way, it might be worth including a related article of impeachment just to get them on the stand.

Personally, I’d go for three articles: Ukraine, obstruction of Congress’ Ukraine investigation, and obstruction of the Mueller investigation. Wavering Democrats could vote against the Mueller article, if they think they must, to give themselves cover back home.

Impeachment has a way of swallowing up all the other news in the world. (The UK is having an election Thursday. Who knew?) But we really are reaching the only-two-episodes-before-the-series-finale point. The Intelligence Committee submitted its report on the facts of the Ukraine scheme, the Judiciary Committee reported on the constitutional basis of impeachment, and Nancy Pelosi gave the go-ahead to write articles of impeachment.

So this week’s first featured post is “Articles of Impeachment: Broad or Narrow?”. It will cover the discussion about whether Democrats should focus on the simple Ukraine story, or attempt to produce a complete list of all of Trump’s impeachable offenses. It should be out shortly.

The second featured post has nothing to do with impeachment and is mostly a book review. I read Sean McFate’s The New Rules of War, which got me thinking about the fundamental illusions at the heart of most of our defense and foreign-policy discussions. Let’s predict that to appear around 11 EST.

The weekly summary covers impeachment stuff that the first featured article missed, the NATO summit, a series of more-or-less unrelated stories about Confederate symbols, restoring the Voting Rights Act, Hong Kong protests, North Korea’s latest threats, why Katie Hill didn’t kill herself, the UK election, and a bunch of other stuff, concluding with how a dog helps out on Boise State’s kickoff plays. That should be out between noon and one.

If you are looking for a Christmas Day service in Washington, D.C., I’ll be preaching and leading worship at Universalist National Memorial Church,  at the corner of 16th and S Streets, N. W. at 11am.  (Map)

We will probably meet in the parlor — easier to heat and cheerier for a small congregation — with refreshment to follow.  (There will, of course, also be a Christmas Eve service.)  Hope to see you there.

Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.

– Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson

This week’s featured post is “What Does Trump’s Inner Party Believe?”

This week everybody was still talking about impeachment

Last Monday, a federal court ordered former White House Counsel Don McGahn to obey a congressional subpoena. The subpoena in question wasn’t part of the recent Ukraine hearings in the Intelligence Committee, but an earlier follow-up to the Mueller Report, in which McGahn’s testimony could be key in establishing an obstruction of justice charge against Trump.

The judge’s opinion was sweeping, and would seem relevant to Ukraine-related subpoenas as well. If any Trump officials were looking for permission to ignore Trump’s order, this would be it. But it has no direct legal impact on them.

It will also have no immediate effect on McGahn. The Department of Justice is appealing the ruling.

The House Intelligence Committee will discuss its Ukraine report tomorrow. The report goes to the Judiciary Committee, which will compose articles of impeachment.

Trump had a decision to make about the Judiciary hearings that begin on Wednesday: He was offered the chance to have his own lawyers participate, but decided not to. The lack of participation was a major objection Trump supporters made to the Intelligence Committee hearings, but a letter from the White House counsel continues to hold that the impeachment process is unfair.

It is hard for me to imagine Trump agreeing to any process of critical inquiry into his actions. His sense of victimization is axiomatic; if he is being criticized, it is unfair.

While purporting to be outraged by Hunter Biden cashing in on his father’s name, the Republican National Committee spent $100K to make Donald Trump Jr.’s book a bestseller.

Last week I mentioned the Fox & Friends phone interview where Trump repeated his absurd claims about Ukraine and the DNC server. The WaPo fact checker found four “whoppers” within ten sentences:

Ukraine does not have the server, the FBI did not need physical possession to investigate, CrowdStrike was not founded by a Ukrainian, and it is not a Ukrainian company. It is dismaying that despite all of the evidence assembled by his top aides, Trump keeps repeating debunked theories and inaccurate claims that he first raised more than two years ago.

There are some days when we wish we were not limited to just Four Pinocchios.

Trump supporters can’t talk about impeachment without using the term “witch hunt”. Stacy Schiff, author of The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem, knows a thing or two about real witch hunts.

By definition you do not qualify as the victim of a witch hunt if you are the most powerful man on the planet. You do, however, incite a witch hunt when you spew malignant allegations and reckless insinuations, when you broadcast a fictitious narrative, attack those who resist it and charge your critics with a shadowy, sinister plot to destroy you. (Witness intimidation can sound strangely like a witchcraft accusation. Did someone really tweet that everything a middle-aged woman touched during her diplomatic career tended to sour?)

And she calls on Republicans to heed the example of Thomas Brattle, who turned the tide against the Salem trials.

You can walk gutlessly into history behind a deluded man, holding tight to a ridiculous narrative. Or you can follow the lead of Thomas Brattle, in which case someone will be extolling your heroism 327 years from now.

BTW, I didn’t do a full family history, but don’t believe Stacy is related to Rep. Adam Schiff. At the very least, she is not his wife or daughter.

and Thanksgiving

The weather was kind of dicey in New York on Thurday, which made low-flying balloons a hazard.

During his surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, Trump said he had restarted talks with the Taliban that had blown up in September. Neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government seem to know what he’s talking about. But it sounded good, so he said it.

Now there’s a War on Thanksgiving. A single Huffington Post article suggesting that environmentally conscious people might want to shrink the carbon footprint of their holiday meal (mainly by locally sourcing their ingredients, emphasizing more vegetarian dishes, and wasting less food) led to multiple Fox News segments claiming that liberals want to “cancel Thanksgiving”.

By Tuesday night Trump was chiming in, telling his cultists that liberals want to call the holiday something else. I still haven’t figured out what the left-wing name for Thanksgiving is supposed to be, but I’m sure right-wingers will tell me if I watch Fox long enough.

Here’s my liberal view: A holiday that emphasizes gratitude seems like a good idea — though whether or not that holiday needs a religious basis is debatable — and Thanksgiving seems like a good name for it. It’s up to you to decide what you’re thankful for or who you should thank for it, but a national gratitude holiday is a good thing.

While I didn’t notice any liberals calling for Thanksgiving to be cancelled, I did see many articles this year about how we should stop repeating the First Thanksgiving myth. Author David Silverman recounts the myth like this:

The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.

He also mentions the more subtle myth that “history doesn’t begin for Native people until Europeans arrive”. I occasionally still run into this misconception in my own thoughts. A few years ago I was at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, looking at an exhibit that explained the migrations of various Southwestern tribes. I had always pictured the tribes as fixed in their locations until European colonists started jostling them around, so the idea that they had an actual pre-Columbian history — different eras when different tribes held sway over different regions — was new to me. Realizing that I had never had that simple thought before was embarrassing.

and the Democratic presidential race

Governor Steve Bullock of Montana dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. The theory of his candidacy was that an outside-Washington moderate who had been successful in a red state would appeal to Democrats whose top priority was to beat Trump. No one seems to be able to make that model work.

Former congressman and Navy admiral Joe Sestak — another moderate outsider — also dropped out.

I keep seeing people on social media saying “The polls must be wrong; I don’t know anybody who’s for Biden.” 538’s Harry Enten has an answer for that:

Biden’s polling in the low 60s with black voters 45 years and older. He’s got a 50 point lead on the field with them. This is a group that has stuck with him all year. If you don’t get Biden’s appeal, you probably need to talk a lot more with this group.

and unrest in foreign countries

The ongoing demonstrations in Iraq have led to the resignation of the prime minister. “Some 400 people have been killed since protests began in Baghdad and other cities at the start of October.”

I’m not sure why, but the Trump administration is again withholding military aid from a country in distress. This time it’s $100 million for Lebanon. Once again, Russia appears to benefit.

Foreign Policy has an interesting article about the Hong Kong district council elections last week, which were an overwhelming symbolic victory for the pro-democracy protesters. Apparently the Chinese media was so convinced by its own propaganda about a “silent majority” opposed to the protests that they had already written their stories about the electorate’s rebuke to the protesters, leaving space to fill in the numbers when they became available.

What caused such an enormous misjudgment? The biggest single problem is this: The people in charge of manipulating Hong Kong public opinion for the CCP are also the people charged with reporting on their own success.

and you also might be interested in …

A lot of my Facebook friends linked to this article about an outrageous anti-abortion bill in Ohio. Yeah, it’s insane. But I have a rule about these things (which I stole from David Wong at Cracked): Don’t get excited about a bill just because somebody “introduced” it in some legislature. There are just too many state legislators introducing too many crazy bills; you’ll live in perpetual outrage.

This bill was sent to the Criminal Justice committee on November 18. If it comes back out of the committee and still mandates surgical procedures that don’t exist, that might be worth your attention. It probably won’t.

My quick summary of the Trump economy: The economic expansion that started under Obama has been artificially extended by running up debt. This short-term strategy increases the likelihood of serious problems whenever a recession does finally arrive.

Usually we think about the federal deficit, but the Washington Post observes:

In recent weeks, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and major institutional investors such as BlackRock and American Funds all have sounded the alarm about the mounting corporate obligations.

WaPo blames the problem on low interest rates, saying “rates have never been this low for this long”. The large amount of corporate debt might not be a problem if the money were being invested wisely, but the article notes that

the weakest firms have accounted for most of the growth and are increasingly using debt for “financial risk-taking,” such as investor payouts and Wall Street dealmaking, rather than new plants and equipment, according to the IMF.

The structural risk posed by large amounts of debt, as we saw in the real-estate bubble that brought on the Great Recession, is that bankruptcies can cascade: When a borrower can’t repay, the lender may become insolvent too, triggering a chain reaction.

Before Colin Kaepernick, there were the Black 14. In 1969, the 14 black players on the University of Wyoming football team met with their coach to discuss wearing a black armband during an upcoming game with BYU to protest racism. The coach kicked them all off the team. Fifty years later the university brought them back.

Gregory Downs (author of After Appomattox, whose central points are discussed in this article), has an interesting suggestion: Rather than talk about “the Civil War”, maybe we should call it “the Second American Revolution”.

To see the 1870s United States as a Second American Republic operating under a Second Constitution created by a Second American Revolution asks Americans to abandon their dreams of continuity and to develop a new, more vulnerable set of national understandings and also a new sense of the nation’s possibilities. Thinking through the implications of the Second American Revolution might lead us to see the First Founders as less successful and less consequential than celebrators and critics have imagined. As architects of a country that failed, the First American Republic, the First Founders might shimmer as warnings or ideals but not as guides. Americans might have to shed the sense that the Founders possess answers to our current predicaments or blame for our situation.

Whale corpses that wash up on shore turn out to be full of plastic. It’s hard to tell if that’s what killed them or not, and we have no idea how much plastic is in whales that don’t wash up, or in smaller ocean creatures that decay before anybody can examine them.

My annual dose of humility: the NYT’s 100 Notable Books of the Year list. This year I’ve read five, which is more than my usual two: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power, Fall by Neal Stephenson, The Institute by Stephen King, and The Nickel Boys by Colin Whitehead.

The Nickel Boys, I will point out, has one of the great opening lines: “Even in death, the boys were trouble.”

I would have added Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer to the list. I haven’t finished Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, yet, but it also seems like a worthy novel. (If you have a 2019 book to add, leave a comment.)

CBS reports:

Caliburn International, a corporation with billions of dollars in government contracts, has scrapped plans to host a holiday party at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

Some of those contracts involve “holding unaccompanied migrant children in government custody”. Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly is on Caliburn’s board. Somebody apparently decided that the appearance of corruption in this party was a little too obvious.

Cartoonist Damian Alexander relates an interesting point about his upbringing: It was OK for girls to admire male characters in fiction or history, but not for boys to admire female characters. A girl might want to be like Spider-Man, but it was weird if a boy wanted to be like Wonder Woman. Alexander comments: “Not allowing boys to look up to and aspire to be like women leads them to believe women are unworthy of admiration.”

I remember the same thing, and I wonder if American childhood has significantly changed.

and let’s close with a series of unfortunate misunderstandings

When you ask a PhotoShop expert for help, make sure you’re clear about what you really want.

Reading: Ross Gay’s Loitering

Sermon: Lose Your To-Do List

Growing up, I learned a special way to mark time at this time of year. Even better than the “Christmas Countdown app.” I learned to mark time with an Advent Calendar.  

In my family, we had a relatively elaborate Advent Calendar. Homemade by one of our family friends using felt. 

It was big, and green, with all the days of December marked out on the bottom, and a blank space at the top – where each day, we would add a piece of the nativity story, so that by the end of the month, the whole scene was there. 

Each day was actually a pocket, that held the different nativity characters and scenery – plus a paper with a story snippet corresponding to the felt you’d be putting up.  

And also, of course, a treat. 

Sometimes chocolate or candy canes.  Sometimes Barbie clothes. You never knew. 

It was all part of the magic.  I mean, the treats, but also, the repetition, the re-creation of the story, every year.  We knew it so well but we also loved acting like we didn’t. 

Where will Mary and Joseph stay? Where will she have the baby?

And why is there a dog in the nativity? Were there dogs in ancient Jerusalem?

Every year, these same questions.  

There’s something about repetition like this at the same time each year that helps you with the marking of time. 

Sometimes Unitarian Universalists can be overly committed to novelty; but there’s a lot of wisdom in tradition – Sean’s going to explore this more in a few weeks.

How turning to something familiar at the same time, in the same way – clues your brain, your body, your heart in to the passing of time – and in the telling of these ancient stories, locates you in a greater story, too.

It’s what Ross Gay is getting at when he talks about “taking one’s time.”  As in, claiming ourselves in time, to know this day as the day we have, this moment, this hour, this life – as ours.  And to know ourselves as a part of the great arc of all time, past, present, future. 

Advent calendars, and wreaths, and the whole idea of advent – are all ways to mark time –both in the countdown sense, and also to mark ourselves – where we are and when we are – which in turn, connects us more fully to who we are – in time, and in life.  In the greater story of life.

Fitting for the Christmas story of a baby arriving at an inconvenient time and inconvenient place – marking time in advent is much like the marking of time while pregnant.  Pregnancy too has countdown apps these days – but even without an app, pregnancy means being constantly aware of time: the months, and then the weeks, and the days remaining –  the baby growing, yes, but also the things you have left to do in that time so you can be ready – even though the whole time you suspect there’s nothing you can do that would make you ready.

You might think, given this core story of advent, that the text in Christian churches today – which is the first Sunday in Advent – would be the story of Mary’s pregnancy.  But because sexism, it’s another story – also about marking time.  

It’s a text known as the “little apocalypse,” because Jesus tells everyone that SOMETHING IS COMING SO WATCH OUT – KEEP AWAKE he says. 

Except he doesn’t really say what that something is.  He says there will be angels, with trumpets, on clouds.  Or, he says, there won’t be.  Instead, maybe it will come without warning, like a “thief in the night.”  So live all the time READY – BE READY all the time – even though there’s probably no way to really be ready. It kind of reminds me of…. 

“You better watch out, you better not cry, better not pout…”

It’s not just Christian households that mark time differently this season, with a sense that we need to get ready for SOMETHING THAT’S COMING…

The world around us, the stories within us – deep stories, I mean childhood stories – create in us a sense of urgency, and even vigilance, to hurry, to get all the things done, get ready – SOMETHINGS COMING. 

So we shop, and decorate, bake and celebrate, sing and gather with family, rush to holiday concerts and school plays, wrap presents, lose the scissors, shovel the walkway, travel cross-country, buy new scissors, trim the tree, pull together end-of-the-year reports, find the scissors you first lost, hurry to office holiday parties, watch the grandkids, light the menorah, ski (not enough!), drink hot totties and eggnog lattes (too much!), fill up on pecan pie and mashed potatoes, and don’t forget, pass back and forth the holiday cold.

Especially in a year where Thanksgiving is compressed so closely with Christmas…..Instead of marking time with the steady, intentional presence I learned as a kid through my advent calendar

The magical marking of time that links when you are with who you are – many of us instead mark this time of year with a mad dash of activity and consumption and production until we don’t know what day it is, or even our own names…

…. I mean, I’d have to guess at least a few of you received the notice about our worship series “Slow Down” in your email in box this week – and were like: you’re kidding. 

 It’s why, when my partner heard that the title of my sermon for this week was “Lose Your To Do List,” she responded quickly with: “that gives me anxiety.” 

And I’d bet she’s not alone.  

How many of you would call yourself a “list” person? 

I love lists, actually.  Lists are a way that we keep track of all those things that need to get done – but that haven’t gotten done yet – it’s a way to manage the anxiety of all that remains unfinished….Because without a list – you might forget to do the thing by the time it needs to be done; or just as bad, you might obsess about the fact that it’s not done yet, so you keep turning it over and over in your brain with increasing anxiety and adrenaline…

Sound familiar?

This anxious response to our unfinished business is what’s called the Zeigarnik Effect. 

Remember I said a couple weeks ago how the brain likes things to be resolved – similarly, it likes things to be finished. Once we start something, our brains want to keep bringing it up into our short term memory over and over – until it gets done.  Now you officially understand the entire Netflix Marketing Strategy.  (Next Episode…)

This Effect was discovered through a study on food servers in restaurants.  You know how amazingly your server can remember all the details of your order…? But what’s interesting is that after you’ve paid, they forget all about you.  Every table blurs into another. 

Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik picked up on this, and through a series of studies figured out that before the tables were “done,” the servers turned the orders over and over in their short term memories – adrenaline, anxiety – but then as soon as it was done – huge relief – they could forget all about it. And they did. 

This is explains what I was describing can happen in the mad-dash of the holidays – you get to mid- January and you’re like – what happened?! What did we even do on Christmas this year? Who am I?! 

It’s not just the holidays though that we have to figure out how to live with “unfinished business.” All those things – you know need to be done, but aren’t…yet. So much of life is about learning this lesson – or at least, it’s the lesson my kids have been trying to teach me every day for the last 14 years….which IS the whole of their lives.  

My children love to come breaking in to whatever thing I’m trying so hard to finish – dinner, a sermon, a conversation – whatever I’m trying to GET DONE, and provide me, instead, with an alternative. 

They are, as one author put it, a constant invitation to be “willingly distracted by the present.” And occasionally…rarely – by some combination of grace and luck and lots of prior investment in my own spiritual health I sometimes manage to relish their lessons – and somehow sometimes I manage to remember that unfinished business is actually a sign that we’re doing life right….

Afterall, as Reinhold Neibuhr said, “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime.”

And so “taking our time” can also mean letting ourselves take up to do lists that will take longer than our own lives – letting ourselves feel a part of the larger arc that will keep moving, and dreaming, and doing, and being – long after we are gone. 

To live with “unfinished” things means knowing that even at our last breath, we will be growing and changing and striving – that is, still learning, still healing, still becoming – that we will be still living, for our whole lives –  which is the hope, right? Unfinished business is a sign of a life well lived….which is beautiful, except for our brains! 

Because our brains still love all things to be resolved.  So they are at work – all the time to get us to clean up those “loose ends” –  whether we’re talking about unfinished holiday shopping or unread emails or an unresolved relationship – all this unfinished business can occupy a huge amount of mental energy, and creates an inflated sense of urgency – whether we realize it or not – it gives us a sense that we’ll never have enough time. 

Which means, we can never really relax, let alone “loiter.”

Because we need to hurry and get done – whatever it is we’ve left undone.  Especially things we’ve actually started – even if that’s in a hypothetical way, as in, we’ve thought about them a LOT, written them down, maybe transferred them from one list to another…and another…and another….with the guilt growing with every transfer, and the dread of having not done it, needing to do it, wanting to get it done…..

Which is why – it’s true, we may be better off losing our to do list. 

Don’t panic. 

Because think about what happens when you lose your to do list.   First, if you’re like me, you might freak out a little. But then, you take a deep breath, and a get a clean piece of paper, and you start from the top. 

And you ask yourself – what is it that I need to do?

If you want to torture yourself, you try to remember what was on that old list, sure you’re forgetting something. 

Or, instead, and this is my invitation to you, not just in December, but across the whole of our lives….you can open the question up, in a fuller way – so that you access the deeper thought process, the slow thinking part of your brain, your heart, your body – the part of yourself that knows itself “in time,” and that knows in a deeper way what it means to “take your own time.” 

The invitation of this season, and the challenge is to linger here, in this slow space.  To remember that dream that is just yours. A dream that lives in your inhale, and your exhale, that will go on long past your last breath – a project that you will spend the rest of your life not-finishing. 

This is the thing to record on your new list. Record it first, and then again, and again. 

Start here, and then return here.  

Because in this life – that is inevitably filled with unfinished business – it matters what we leave undone.  

This is what the Zigarnik effect teaches us most of all – whatever is left on our to-do list is what is left on our heart.  And so we need to be so careful about the work we pick up, the work we begin, the work we call ours – because it will be what our brain turns towards over, and over, and over.

Which if it’s the right thing – can actually be for the good – after all, any big, complicated achievement, any work worth doing – relies heavily on the obsessive nature of the Zigarnik effect. 

It is the opportunity of this season – to mark time in this slower, more intentional way. To know when we are in a way that connects us to who we are. So that we can know – long after the light returns, and the walks are clear and dry, that we are not perpetually out-of-time but that we are held in time, connected, and whole, and enough.

Like a lot of liberals, I have spent more time than I care to admit thinking about Trump supporters. Who are they? What do they want? What are they thinking? And most of all: How can they possibly support this man?

One reason this task is so difficult is that the Trumpist message is not meant for me. St. Paul was an apostle to the gentiles, but there is no Trumpist apostle to the liberals. No one in the administration is out there translating for me, explaining what parts of the message to take seriously and what parts to ignore. No one is trying to resolve the apparent contradictions, or to make the case that my goals can be achieved by his methods. One symptom of this is White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who appears on Fox News, but doesn’t hold briefings for the press in general. (Trump’s previous press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has joined Fox News outright.)

As a result, the most widely available version of Trump’s message is the one intended for committed supporters, who already live inside the Fox News alternate reality, where climate change is not real and racism was solved in the 1960s. So if, like me, you live in a world where where Russia (and not Ukraine) meddled in our election, where health insurance companies would happily let people die if they could make bigger profits, and tax cuts don’t pay for themselves — well, there is no message for you. Trump’s world has an Us and a Them, and you’re a Them. You’re never going to be invited in.

The Inner Party. It’s easy (and very human) to reflect this attitude back at them: People support Trump because they’re uninformed and gullible. Or because he appeals to their deplorable passions: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, to use Hillary Clinton’s list. Or because they’re rich and selfish; they just want to pay less tax and stop worrying about how much their industries pollute. Or because they just want power.

And if you look, you can confirm that bias: There certainly are Trump supporters who fit all those descriptions. (I’m not denying that point, so don’t argue it with me.) And I am capable of imagining a movement made up entirely of a cynical core surrounded by gullible and manipulated masses. But I have a test that I run when I’m considering such a theory: I picture it from the other side. If I were in that cynical core, how confident would I be that I could make this plan work?

And the answer in this case is: not very. A conspiracy of pure evil-doers is actually fairly hard to hold together, because the vast majority of people don’t like to think of themselves that way. Once you have a core bigger than a cabal, you need some kind of self-justifying story — not just for the gullible masses, but for your own people. There needs to be an explanation of why you are the good guys and why the things you are doing are right, or at least necessary.

To use Orwellian terms, you need an Inner Party message in addition to your Outer Party message. There are, I assume, lots and lots of Trumpists who understand that the Outer Party message is bullshit. I’m sure that a lot of Evangelicals, for example, realize that Trump’s knowledge of Christianity is superficial at best; that he has lived a life of licentiousness, infidelity, and fraud; and that his current administration is full of corruption. They may say “We are all sinners,” as Jerry Falwell Jr. acknowledges, and explain that Christianity is a religion of forgiveness rather than perfection. But they also know that forgiveness requires repentance, a step Trump has never been willing to take.

Republican politicians, likewise, are not generally stupid or gullible people. Lindsey Graham used to see Trump fairly clearly (and used terms like “loser” and “nut job”). They can’t all be intimidated by Trump’s sway over his base voters, either. Ted Cruz surely remembers Trump’s attacks on his father and wife, and having just won re-election in 2018 (along with ten other GOP senators), he doesn’t have to face the voters again until 2024, by which time everyone may have conveniently forgotten that they ever supported Trump. (George W. Bush was once immensely popular among Republicans, but by the 2008 campaign he had become an unperson.)

A lot of people who support Trump are not ignorant, and they are not all motivated by greed or fear. If this is all hanging together, and it seems to be, there has to be an Inner Party message for such people. What could it be?

The Barr speeches. That’s the context that I put around the recent spate of articles examining two Bill Barr speeches. Both of these speeches were given to what I think of as Inner Party audiences.

• In October, he spoke to the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame, an organization “committed to sharing the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition”.
• In November, he delivered a named annual lecture to the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention. The Federalist Society is a conservative legal organization that is responsible for vetting Trump’s nominees for federal judgeships.

In short, these are both audiences friendly to the Trump administration, but are not the MAGA-hat-wearing yahoos that show up at Trump’s public rallies. Both groups see themselves as having intellectual heft as well as moral purpose. Neither would be satisfied with a screed of obvious lies or slogans like “Lock her up!” or “Build the Wall!”

So this is what Barr offered them: To the Catholics, he spoke about the impossibility of maintaining  liberty without Christianity. To the Federalists, he advocated for the Presidency to shake itself free from the “usurpations” of Congress and the Judiciary.

The Notre Dame speech. Barr’s Notre Dame speech lays out the problem like this:

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity. But, if you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.

On the other hand, unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous – licentiousness – the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny – where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles. …

But what was the source of this internal controlling power? In a free republic, those restraints could not be handed down from above by philosopher kings. Instead, social order must flow up from the people themselves – freely obeying the dictates of inwardly-possessed and commonly-shared moral values. And to control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

This cries out for annotation, which I’ll try to keep short so that I can get on with Barr’s argument: If you wanted a poster boy for “the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the public good”, you could hardly do better than to choose Barr’s boss, President Trump. If you allow corporate persons into the discussion, Exxon-Mobil (which knew the danger of climate change decades ago, but spent millions to keep the public confused about it) or one of the pharmaceutical companies that promoted the opioid crisis would be a good choice.

And unless the “transcendent Supreme Being” decides to express Their authority much more directly than They currently do, God’s will is going to be presented to us through “willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize”. For example: the Catholic hierarchy, which for decades — perhaps centuries — had no trouble enabling and covering up the sexual misconduct of its priests.

This far I agree with Barr: If a free society is going to work, the public good needs to be supported by moral values freely chosen, rather than rules enforced solely by government power. However, the countries that seem to be doing the best job of maintaining a free society in today’s world are the least religious ones: the Northern European humanist crescent the flows from Finland to Iceland. In the real world, moral values and religion have (at best) a tenuous relationship.

However, Barr takes this relationship as given and proceeds from there: Traditional Christianity is losing its hold on America, and at the same time a number of social ills have gotten worse: births outside of marriage, divorce,

record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

The causality here is clear to him: All these negative consequences come from an increase in “secularism”. Thomas Edsall offers a counterpoint here: If this were true, you’d expect the worst effects to show up in the most secular parts of society, but this seems not to be the case.

The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.

Similarly, the highest rates of births outside of marriage are in the Bible Belt states.

Barr continues: Ordinarily, we’d expect the pendulum to swing back towards social conservatism. As people saw the calamitous results of social change, that change would be stopped, and then turned around. But this time is different, because America is not just dealing with the ordinary tides of culture. This time the story has an active villain: people like me, as best I can tell.

[T]he force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today … is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.

Speaking of ridicule, here how cartoonist Jen Sorensen responded to Barr’s speech:

It is very popular in conservative circles to talk about being “silenced”, despite the awesome wealth and power conservatives command. But the truth doesn’t stretch quite that far: Conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, are used to being the only voices in the room. In the days of mandatory Christian prayer in public schools, there was no equal time for atheists or Buddhists. Gays could be characterized as “deviants”, and women who made their own decisions about sex as “sluts”. Conservative Christians could say these things in public, and no one would respond. No one would dare stand up and say, “Wait, I’m gay, and there’s nothing deviant about it.” or “What happens in my bedroom is none of your business.” No one would strike back and say that the Christian was “judgmental” or “bigoted”.

Now, someone will. Maybe lots of someones. That’s what the Constitution calls “freedom of speech”, but Christians are not used to hearing it. When their opinion is not the last word in a discussion, it seems like persecution to them, even though it’s the normal situation for everyone else.

Barr uses another religious-right buzzphrase when he talks about “a comprehensive effort to drive [our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system] from the public square”. As best I can tell, this refers to another revocation of a special privilege. Christians used to be able to use public resources to promote their point of view: prayers at public events, nativity scenes on the town green, and so on. In recent decades, Christians have often been treated like everyone else and limited to promoting their views with their own resources. (Barr may say “Judeo-Christian”, but when have Jews ever tried to install a Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea model on the town green?) This is quite a come-down, but it is not persecution.

Secular moral values, Barr claims, are different from Christian ones, not just in content but in kind.

Christianity teaches a micro-morality. We transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation. The new secular religion teaches macro-morality. One’s morality is not gauged by their private conduct, but rather on their commitment to political causes and collective action to address social problems. This system allows us to not worry so much about the strictures on our private lives, while we find salvation on the picket-line. We can signal our finely-tuned moral sensibilities by demonstrating for this cause or that.

This is absurd on both ends: One one side, the anti-abortion movement Barr champions elsewhere in the speech is not a micro-morality; it is an attempt to use the law to constrain the choices of other people. Conservative leaders (Trump, for example) often exhibit horrible personal morality, but they signal their virtue by opposing abortion or gay rights. On the other side of the question, Barr has completely written off a long Catholic social-justice tradition, from Dorothy Day to liberation theology. As Archbishop Hélder Pessoa Câmara once put it, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.”

To sum up: Christianity is at war against an active enemy. Secularists are not just trying to live their own lives as best they can, they are working to tear down the transcendent moral order. If they succeed, the result can only be anarchy or tyranny.

The Federalist Society speech. Barr’s Federalist Society speech inadvertently illustrates a point from his Notre Dame speech: Willful human beings have an infinite capacity to rationalize.

The claimed topic of the speech is “originalism”, the legal doctrine that tries to find the meaning of Constitution in the thinking of the Founders. Since the Founders faced a world far different from ours and could barely have imagined the issues of the 21st century, originalism provides boundless fields for rationalization. Like scripturalism in religion, the resulting propositions don’t have to justified on their own merits, because we did not think of them ourselves, but only found them in the texts written by our prophets.

What Barr finds in the Founders’ collective mind in this speech is a vision of executive power unbound by the other two branches of government.

In the orthodox reading of American history, the structure of American government got remade on two occasions: by Lincoln during the Civil War and by FDR during the Depression and World War II. In each case, executive power expanded, and has kept expanding in recent years, reaching the point where a President can unleash a global nuclear holocaust completely on his own authority. In my view, relating the apocalyptic power of today’s Presidency to Hamilton’s praise of “energy in the executive” is insane.

But that’s not how Barr sees it:

In recent years, both the Legislative and Judicial branches have been responsible for encroaching on the Presidency’s constitutional authority. [original emphasis]

Congress has encroached by refusing to rubber-stamp Trump’s unqualified and often corrupt appointees, and also by attempting to exercise oversight of questionable (and again, often corrupt) administration actions.

I do not deny that Congress has some implied authority to conduct oversight as an incident to its Legislative Power. But the sheer volume of what we see today – the pursuit of scores of parallel “investigations” through an avalanche of subpoenas – is plainly designed to incapacitate the Executive Branch, and indeed is touted as such.

In Barr’s view, this is pure harassment. There is nothing unusual in the Trump administration’s actions that invites these investigations. The most he will grant is this:

While the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook, he was upfront about that beforehand, and the people voted for him.

Of course, the people did not vote for him; the Electoral College did. But leave that aside. Fundamentally, the conflicts with Congress arise because, as in the Notre Dame speech, liberals are villains.

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

It’s weird to pull this back to the Notre Dame speech, where conservatives treat religion as their politics. What is an illegitimate “abstract ideal of perfection” for liberals becomes the “moral values” of a “transcendent Supreme Being” when conservatives do it. And what is the conservative project, if not to push women and gays back into an Eisenhower Era “abstract ideal of perfection”? What Barr says here in polemic terms about liberals is just the plain and simple truth when applied to the politics of the Notre Dame speech: Barr quite literally is on a “holy mission” to “remake man and society”. He literally, not figuratively, sees himself “pursing a deific end”.

And that conclusion about using “any means necessary to gain momentary advantage” without asking “whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct” is a hair-pulling bit of projection. I mean, does Barr think withholding appropriated funds to coerce a foreign government into doing the President a political favor should be a “general rule of conduct”? Should the President routinely declare a state of emergency whenever Congress refuses to appropriate money for his pet projects? Should the Senate routinely refuse to hold hearings on Supreme Court nominees when the President is of a different party?

Conservatives, in Barr’s view, have failed by being too nice.

conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means. And this is as it should be, but there is no getting around the fact that this puts conservatives at a disadvantage when facing progressive holy [fire], especially when doing so under the weight of a hyper-partisan media.

His judicial encroachments on executive power are similar: In his view, the number of court orders stopping Trump from doing what he wants has nothing to do with Trump wanting to do illegal things (like discriminate against Muslims or ignore our asylum laws); it’s just harassment.

Also, he sees no judicial power to arbitrate disputes between Congress and the President, like the current cases about the Wall “emergency” or whether Trump can stop his officials from testifying before impeachment hearings. What this means in practice is that the President has whatever powers he says he has. If, say, the President were simply to instruct the Treasury to start writing checks for all kinds of things Congress had never voted on, it would be a gross usurpation of Congress’ power. But what could Congress do about it on its own? It could pass more laws that the President could ignore, and the usurpations would continue.

He concludes with this:

In this partisan age, we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure. As we look back over the sweep of American history, it has been the American Presidency that has best fulfilled the vision of the Founders. It has brought to our Republic a dynamism and effectiveness that other democracies have lacked. … In so many areas, it is critical to our Nation’s future that we restore and preserve in their full vigor our Founding principles. Not the least of these is the Framers’ vision of a strong, independent Executive, chosen by the country as a whole.

The underlying issue. Ezra Klein brings in this bit of context.

Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, estimates that when Barack Obama took office, 54 percent of the country was white and Christian; by the time he left office, that had fallen to 43 percent. This is largely because young Americans are less white, and less Christian, than older Americans. Almost 70 percent of American seniors are white Christians, compared to only 29 percent of young adults.

In 2018, Americans who claim no religion passed Catholics and evangelicals as the most popular response on the General Social Survey. … [T]he age cohorts here are stark. “If you look at seniors, only about one in 10 seniors today claim no religious affiliation,” Jones told me. “But if you look at Americans under the age of 30, it’s 40 percent.”

That’s at the root of the sense of panic Barr is voicing. This time really is different, because the white Christian majority in America is being lost forever. But Barr portrays this not as a simple changing of the guard, but as the end of a civilization: White Christians must hang onto power, because the alternative is a society without the moral values necessary to maintain a free society.

This, I think, is the essence of the Inner Party message: Trump offers himself as the bulwark against this looming catastrophe. He is the alternative to the too-nice conservatives who have let immigrants keep coming, let liberals secularize the youth, and have been too slow and too tentative about rallying the white Christian vote, stacking the courts with conservative white Christians, and suppressing all other votes. If he cheats in elections, say by getting illegal help from foreign countries, that’s a necessary evil. If he suppresses any attempt to check his power or investigate his corruption, that, too, is a necessary evil. Ultimately, if he loses at the ballot box and has to maintain office by violence, that may be necessary as well, because the alternative is the end of American civilization.

I’ll give Thomas Edsall the last word:

The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life. Relentless pressure to maintain the urgency of that threat is crucial to Trump’s political survival.

And that, I think, is what the Inner Party believes.

I’m running behind today, so posts should come out a little later than usual.

The featured post is another one where I try to grasp what’s going on in the minds of Trump supporters. This time I’m looking at the ones who are well-educated, well-informed, and aspire to moral values, rather than the kinds of people who chant “Send her back!” at Trump’s rallies. I refer to them as the “Inner Party” and look at two Bill Barr speeches to see what the administration’s message to them is. The post is called “What Does Trump’s Inner Party Believe?”, and I’m hoping to get it out by noon EST.

The weekly summary will cover the progress in the impeachment effort, the import of the McGahn court decision, Thanksgiving, the threat of rising corporate debt, and a few other things. It should be out around 1.

I was up on Montserrat today visiting the beautiful monastery nestled in the crazy mountains of Catalunya about an hour outside of Barcelona.

I girded my loins and took the little cable car/funicular thingy, reasoning that five minutes of potential terror would be easier to endure than twenty minutes  white-knuckling on a train sliding around hairpin turns with a death-drop view. I am known to be a bit dramatic when I get terrified, as in I have actually flattened myself on the floor of vans, trains and airplanes (“Ma’am, PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEAT”) when animal fear overcomes me on dangerous or tubulent trips. Don’t ask me about my drive down coastal highway 101 in Oregon – I was the passenger on the floor hugging the front seat.

Montserrat is truly beautiful and has a museum, a basilica, a hotel, a monastery, a cafeteria and some lodgings for those who live there full time. It is best known as the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, or The Black Madonna, the patron saint of Catalonia. Many people had obviously come to the shrine for healing, and I lit a candle and prayed for the many people and animals in my life who need healing and compassion.

While I was there moving in and out of crowds of tourists, I heard an English-speaking woman hollering for her daughter. The girl wasn’t very young and she wasn’t lost — this was just someone being loud. I have noticed that Americans are often the loudest in tourist spaces. They are inevitably talking about how many steps they’ve taken that day, what other sights they’ve “done” ( not seen; done, as in “we did Madrid and then we did the Dali museum in Figueros), how irritated they are by the spotty wi-fi connection, or how much things cost. It is always shocking to me when I am in an international setting to realize how aggressive and competitive Americans are by nature.  We take up so much space and air in the room.

So this woman was hollering and another woman in her party kind of shushed her with an embarrassed laugh, and I heard them murmuring and then the loud lady said in an earnest way, “I’m not religious. I didn’t know!”

This is so interesting to me. I’m going to be thinking about this for awhile. My parents raised me to be considerate in all public environments and to keep my voice down (I was frequently admonished to “turn it down, Vicki,” which I actually regard  just as much an attempt to diminish and feminize a naturally strong little girl as it was to instill appropriate social conditioning and good manners), and it must have been my grandparents who taught us church etiquette – hushed voices, standing and kneeling on command, opening and holding a hymnal or prayerbook even if you can’t read from it. We did not make the sign of the cross or genuflect; we drew the line at such expressions of faith, and we did not receive the Eucharist. But we learned how to be a good guest in someone else’s religious home.

So I got to thinking about howtraditional religious spaces contribute to what we might call “cultural literacy” or, flipping the framework around, how they contribute to patriarchal control and/or white supremacy culture.

I conclude that I am grateful for all the spaces that contribute to a shared human experience of REVERENCE. General reverence transcends nation, race, religion, political party, gender and class.  What I would hope for the shouting women is not that she move through the world fearful and embarrassed that she will do the wrong thing at the wrong volume in a sacred space and insult “the faithful,” but that she will develop a happy attentiveness to her environment (especially while traveling) that leads her to naturally adopt a gentler presence when she is in houses of worship or their environs.

When hundreds of us from many lands and many or no faiths gathered at 1PM this afternoon to hear the famous Escolania de Montserrat Boy’s Choir, the monk leading the service was very clear in his gestures, inviting in his words and inclusive in his language. It was clear to me that he knew that it was not just Catholics who were there, and not even a variety of Christians, but a wide variety of human beings who wanted to hear angelic voices in a glorious setting. To me, that is a religious instinct. It isn’t adherence to a doctrine that makes someone religious, it is a hunger to be in relationship with God (by whatever name) and those who also seek to live deeply from the soul.

If I could, I would draw the loud lady aside and say, “Did you make an effort to get up this mountain and visit this lovely place out of respect, interest and perhaps a longing to be touched by something deeper than the daily news and the quotidian concerns of your life? Then you are religious. You are a legitimate part of this community of pilgrims. If you turn down the volume on the voices in your head telling you how religious you aren’t, you may be able to hear your spirit better.”

Ultimately that is what I devoutly wish for us all.

Those little boys sure could sing.

This is America. This is the country I have served and defended, that all of my brothers have served. And here, right matters.

– Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (11-19-2019)

[Gordon Sondland] was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.

– Fiona Hill (11-21-2019)

This week’s featured post is “An Impeachment Hearing Wrap-Up“.

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment hearings

I’ve pulled my impeachment notes out into the featured post.

In a related matter, the Washington Post appears to have gotten an early look at the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the origins of the Mueller investigation. It finds that one low-level FBI lawyer acted improperly, but that “political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016”.

The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered a email that was used to support renewal of the FISA warrant to surveil the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. But even without that email, the report concludes, the application had sufficient legal and factual basis.

An earlier IG report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation found “no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias.”

The report generally rebuts accusations of a political conspiracy among senior law enforcement officials against the Trump campaign to favor Democrat Hillary Clinton while also knocking the bureau for procedural shortcomings in the FBI, the officials said.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Bill Barr is running a criminal investigation into much of the same material.

but the latest developments are making me paranoid

OK, the latest developments in the dig-up-dirt-on-Biden story are starting to make me paranoid. Unsavory people are suddenly providing evidence that helps the good guys, and telling stories that are tempting to believe. It feels like a trap.

In this morning’s NYT, Vladimir Putin’s favorite Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, is saying that Rudy Giuliani’s now-indicted associates (Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman) made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. (See Rachel Maddow’s recent book Blowout for a long write-up on Firtash.) Firtash was encouraged to hire two Trump-connected lawyers (Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova) who could help with his case in the US. (The US is trying to extradite him on bribery charges. He is currently living in Austria, where he is out on bail from local charges.) Part of the $1.2 million he paid them would finance the effort to find dirt on Biden in Ukraine.

Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, confirmed that account and added that his client had met with Mr. Firtash at Mr. Giuliani’s direction and encouraged the oligarch to help in the hunt for compromising information [about the Bidens] “as part of any potential resolution to his extradition matter.”

… In the [NYT] interview, Mr. Firtash said he had no information about the Bidens and had not financed the search for it. “Without my will and desire,” he said, “I was sucked into this internal U.S. fight.”

The same article claims Giuliani’s people tried to pressure another Ukrainian oligarch with US legal problems (Ihor Kolomoisky). This one is anti-Russian and refused to cooperate. Firtash also denies cooperating with the get-Biden conspiracy, but …

After Ms. Toensing and Mr. diGenova came on board, confidential documents from Mr. Firtash’s case file began to find their way into articles by John Solomon, a conservative reporter whom Mr. Giuliani has acknowledged using to advance his claims about the Bidens. Mr. Solomon is also a client of Ms. Toensing.

Those documents are the ones Giuliani kept waving around on TV.

Lev Parnas has also been implicating Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Maybe Firtash and Parnas are rats jumping off of a sinking ship, but I’m also reminded of the plot of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [spoilers]. That classic John le Carré Cold War novel follows a British intelligence operation to frame an East German official, who had been getting too close to exposing the British spy in East German intelligence. At the same time, though, other Brits scatter bread crumbs that the Communists can follow to blow up the operation. After the operation is blown, the target’s East German critics look like tools of the West, and any future suspicion of him can be written off as part of the British conspiracy against him. The supposed target, of course, is the actual British spy, who has been protected by this convoluted operation that appeared to frame him.

Remember Putin’s KGB training, and apply that Cold War plot as a template: Wouldn’t it be marvelous for Trump if Democrats jumped on this new Firtash/Parnas information, which then turned out to be fabricated? That would feed Trump’s “hoax” and “witch hunt” narrative, and (in the public mind) invalidate much of the true evidence against him.

So I’m following the new developments in an isn’t-that-interesting way. But nobody should trust these people, or go out on a limb based on anything they say. Right now, Democrats are siding with patriots like Lt. Colonel Vindman. I’d hate to see a career criminal like Lev Parnas become the resistance’s new poster boy.

Meanwhile, the Democrats had a debate

My impression of the debate of ten Democratic presidential candidates on Wednesday was that nothing drastically changed. No top-tier candidate had a major gaffe. No lower-tier candidate had a breakout moment.

On a lesser scale, I thought Joe Biden looked old. He often stumbled over his words — not in a disturbing I-don’t-know-where-I-am way, but in an I’m-having-trouble-making-the-right-words-come-out way. For example, at one point he said he had been endorsed by the “only” African-American woman who had been elected to the Senate — apparently forgetting about Kamala Harris, who was standing right there — when he meant the “first” African-American woman, a correction he made immediately when challenged.

Watching Cory Booker, I wondered why he isn’t an top-tier candidate. But I’ve wondered that in previous debates too. His candidacy didn’t see a boost then, so it probably won’t now either.

No one was the focus of attack, which tells me that the candidates aren’t sure who the front-runner is. Biden is still comfortably ahead in national polls, but Pete Buttigieg (who is fourth nationally) has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire. Elizabeth Warren, who briefly moved ahead of Biden nationally in early October, also sometimes looks like the front-runner. All three took a little flack, but the other candidates didn’t gang up in the way I would expect if one of them were considered the person to beat.

I don’t recall anyone directly attacking the other top-tier candidate, Bernie Sanders. That may reflect Nicole Hemmer‘s point that “Pretty much everyone has made up their mind about him.” At the moment, the other candidates aren’t afraid of him winning, but they also see no point in pissing off his supporters.

Having the debate in Georgia moved more attentionto the black vote (hence Biden’s unfortunate claim). I thought Charles Blow‘s post-debate analysis made a lot of sense: In the Deep South particularly, the attitude of the black electorate is changing:

Those voters may be less excited by a national revolution because they are living through a very real revolution on the ground. They are feeling their power in cities and increasingly in statewide races. But in presidential elections, their voices are drowned out on the state level — other than Barack Obama winning North Carolina in 2008, no Democratic presidential candidate has carried my Deep South states since the 1990s.

As such, until that changes, voting in presidential elections can feel mostly symbolic for blacks in the South. The Democratic candidate won’t carry their state. If that person wins the presidency, it will be because of people in faraway places.

But during the primaries, those Southern black voters have a chance to make their voices heard, to reward loyalty and fidelity, to support the candidates they feel they know and to spurn those they feel they don’t.

Big plans mean less and can ring hollow. … Black people in the South are experiencing a surge of real power and the ability to enact real change. Democratic candidates have to talk to them like the people they are: strong and pushing, not weak and begging.

The main criticism of Buttigieg has been his lack of experience. I still believe what I said when John McCain tried to use that issue against Barack Obama in 2008:

The danger of making experience your central issue and claiming that your opponent is “not ready to lead” (but you are) is this: When you finally debate your “unqualified” opponent, the difference needs to be apparent. If the other guy looks equally well prepared, he wins.

Ditto here: The inexperience claim against Buttigieg will work only if he displays the classic flaws of inexperience, by saying or doing things that are hot-headed, naive, or immature in some other way. His lack of a traditional resume makes him vulnerable, but the attacks won’t stick unless he gives them something to stick to.

I believe something similar about the age issue for Biden, Sanders, and Warren. It’s a problem when Sanders has a heart attack or Biden looks confused, but so far Warren hasn’t given the age issue a hook to hang on.

On the other hand (and related to Charles Blow’s point), Buttigieg lacks history with major voting blocks, and that’s why his black support is currently undetectable in polls. I can imagine a Southern black voter saying “You’re here when you need us. Where were you when we needed you?” By contrast, Georgians remember Biden and Warren campaigning for Stacey Abrams in 2018, and Bernie Sanders endorsing her in the primary.

Timothy Egan puts his finger on a point that we’re all a little afraid to talk about. In a column where he envisions Biden beating Trump a year from now, he says:

Most Democrats came to see that it would do nothing for their cause to gain another million progressives on the coasts if they still lost 80,000 people in the old industrial heartland.

American democracy is flawed in some important and predictable ways, and that’s how Trump became president despite Hillary Clinton getting 2.8 million more votes.

It’s wrong that not all votes count the same, but they don’t. And it’s totally understandable that blue-state voters (and I am one now that I’ve moved to Massachusetts) resent the purple-state elitism of candidates like Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar, whose main message is “I can appeal to the right voters.”

But that’s the real state of affairs in America today: There are right voters and wrong voters. Nobody wants to admit that or talk about it. But there it is.

That said, it shouldn’t become an excuse for making a fetish of white working class voters and ignoring people of color. The 2020 general election may well hinge on black turnout in Milwaukee, or the Hispanic vote in Arizona. The only recent Democratic presidential candidate to carry Indiana was Barack Obama, not some lunchpail-carrying white guy.

and Israel had some news

This week saw two significant developments regarding Israel: Thursday, Israel’s attorney general announced that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be indicted.  Monday, the Trump administration reversed previous US policy on the legality of Israeli settlements in the territories gained in the 1967 war.

The charges against Netanyahu reportedly will be bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. In the most serious charge, he traded regulatory favors to a news organization in exchange for favorable coverage. Under Israeli law, any government minister other than the prime minister has to resign when indicted, but the PM only has to resign if convicted.

Netanyahu is still PM, for now. Israel has now failed to form a new government despite holding two elections. In the most recent one, Netanyahu’s Likud Party finished a close second to Blue and White, led by Benny Gantz. But neither party had a majority in the Knesset, or could assemble a majority coalition of other parties. A third election will likely be held in a few months.

Netanyahu’s defensive rhetoric should sound familiar: The cases against him are all a “witch hunt”, and an “attempted coup”.

Secretary of State Pompeo announced a week ago that the United States no longer regards Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan as illegal, reversing a State Department legal opinion from 1978. Vox has a good article on the issue.

The case for claiming the settlements are illegal rests on the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Israel disputes the interpretation that it is an occupying power, claiming that the right of Jews to live in these territories is rooted in the League of Nations’ 1922 Mandate for Palestine.

In any case, it’s hard for me to see how this policy change promotes some ultimate vision of peace in the region, unless that vision involves either pushing Palestinians out of the territories entirely, or herding them into economically non-viable reservations, as the US did to its unwanted native population. East Jerusalem would be an example of a place where Palestinians are being slowly pushed out, and Gaza an example of them being penned in.

and you also might be interested in …

Hong Kong held district-council elections, the only real bit of democracy in their system. Usually, these elections revolve around mundane issues like traffic and parks and trash, because the administration that runs the city as a whole isn’t elected by the broad electorate.

But in the middle of the citywide crisis caused by pro-democracy demonstrations, the elections took on a symbolic meaning well beyond the legal duties of the offices being filled. And the result was a stunning endorsement of the demonstrators. Turnout was at record levels, and pro-democracy candidates got 80% of the council seats.

Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer is the latest casualty in Trump’s defense of war criminals. Trump intervened in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who had been acquitted of premeditated murder in the stabbing death of a 12-year-old ISIS prisoner, but was “convicted of bringing discredit to the armed services after posing next to a dead ISIS fighter’s body, which is against regulations.” Trump reversed Gallagher’s demotion, but the Navy still intended to hold a disciplinary hearing that could take away Gallagher’s SEAL trident.

This angered Trump, who tweeted about it. Sunday Defense Secretary Esper fired Spencer, claiming that Spencer had gone around him in attempting to negotiate directly with the White House.

Spencer released a letter acknowledging his firing, and shooting back.

The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. Good order and discipline is what has enabled our victory against foreign tyranny time and again. … Unfortunately, it has become apparent that in this respect, I no longer share the same understanding with the Commander in Chief who appointed me.

Trump’s betrayal of America’s Kurdish allies and attempt to play games with military support for Ukraine is rocking US alliances around the world. The Washington Post discusses the impact on South Korea, where Trump wants to quintuple the contributions the Koreans make towards the cost of maintaining US troops there.

The Post offers the orthodox foreign-policy argument that “a forward defense position in Asia pays for itself, in security”. I could imagine a reasonable debate about that point, not just in Asia but in all countries where American troops or American commitments are supposedly helping keep the peace: When are we heading off problems that would otherwise cause us bigger trouble later, and when are we getting drawn into conflicts we could safely ignore?

But that conversation should involve some alternate theory of American security, a Trump Doctrine that has much more detail than “America First”, and is much broader than a case-by-case debate about whether NATO or South Korea or Israel is taking advantage of us.

Sadly, though, no one in the Trump administration (least of all Trump himself) thinks on a grand-strategy level, or is capable of leading the kind of national discussion we need if we’re going to make a fundamental change in our foreign policy.

Fracking wastewater spills in North Dakota have resulted in rivers with high levels of radioactive contamination and heavy metals.

The NFL scheduled a behind-closed doors workout for blacklisted quarterback Colin Kaepernick, ostensibly so that scouts from various teams could see if his skills have diminished during his involuntary three-year exile from the league. The Nation’s David Zirin reports:

Roger Goodell and the NFL tried to bend Kaepernick to their will this week. They scheduled him for a tryout with only three days’ notice. They insisted he come to Atlanta and work with a coach not of his choosing at the Falcons’ headquarters. They told him that it would be on a Saturday, when coaches and top scouts are busy either preparing for Sunday games or analyzing college contests. They did not tell him who the receivers he would work with would be. They wanted him to sign a “non-standard injury waiver” that would have prevented Kaepernick from suing the league for collusion in the future. Most egregiously, they insisted that the workout not be open to the press. Roger Goodell wanted all the positive public relations for “ending the collusion” against Kaepernick and none of the transparency.

Kaepernick wasn’t having it.

He showed up in Atlanta and refused to work out at the Falcons facility under the watchful eye of an NFL chosen coach. He instead went to a high school an hour away with his own receivers. He kept it open to the press, several of whom live-streamed the workout over social media, preventing the NFL from spinning the event as if he no longer had the goods.

… Now that the spectacle in Atlanta is over, we are actually back where we started. Everyone knows that Kaepernick has the ability to play. Everyone knows that he is only being kept out for political and PR reasons. The question will be whether there is one team that is willing to put their team’s success over their political prejudices. This is where we have been for three years, and this is where we remain.

The NFL has found a place for numerous wife-beaters, child abusers, sexual assaulters, and felons of other varieties. But what Kaepernick did — respectfully kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against people of color — is apparently unforgivable.

It’s the kind of story that happens all the time, but doesn’t usually make the New York Times: a local hardware store is closing. This one is on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan and is owned and operated by Russian immigrant Naum Feygin. Like many such stores it’s a victim of online competition and high rents.

We tell ourselves this shift in the economy is all about efficiency, but the reporter claims not.

[Mr. Feygin’s hardware store] is cheaper and faster than ordering from Amazon and offers expert advice that reduces the risk of buying the wrong thing. It is all too easy on Amazon, for example, to buy halogen bulbs that don’t fit your lamp base; Mr. Feygin has spared me many such headaches. And the store’s small size [600 square feet] is a virtue: Unlike at Home Depot, you can be in and out in 10 minutes.

… Competition from Amazon and a rent increase might seem like distinct phenomena, but they are two sides of the same coin. Both reflect the transformative consolidation and centralization of the American economy since the 1990s, which have made the economy less open to individual entrepreneurship. Amazon represents the increasing monopolization of retail; the high rents are a symptom of the enormous concentration of wealth in a handful of coastal cities like New York, San Francisco and Washington.

Both phenomena contribute to the same regrettable outcome: In today’s economy, returns on investment have shifted away from the individuals like Mr. Feygin who take personal risks. Instead, wealth is being routed to large middlemen, national monopolies, property owners and shareholders.

Feygin once hoped his son would take over the business, but his son is more in tune with the era: He works for a hedge fund

and let’s close with something that sounds like a tall tale

The Greek historian Herodotus was famous for believing outrageous stories told to him on his travels. (My favorite explains the Persian king’s massive tribute from India with a story about ants the size of dogs who dig up golden anthills. Apparently that was easier for his audience to swallow than the sheer size of India.) Marco Polo was similarly gullible at times, though some of his most outrageous stories about the Far East turned out to be true. (He claimed that some cities in China were too large for the surrounding forests to provide enough wood for fuel, so the Chinese had learned to “burn rocks”. He was talking about coal.)

So anyway, this story sounds like a traveler’s tall tale, but  it seems to be true: In the Nepalese Himalayas lives a species of honeybees that are more than an inch long. They build nests five feet across under cliffs and on rock faces. A nest can contain well over 100 pounds of honey. And here’s the best part: Because the bees feast on poisonous plants, the honey is hallucinogenic.

That makes it worth taking outrageous risks to acquire, as the Gurung “honey hunter” tribe has done since time out of mind.

Unless Democrats are able to break through the Trump blockade on key witnesses, the Ukraine part of the impeachment hearings ended this week. The Intelligence Committee is preparing its report for the Judiciary Committee, which is responsible for writing articles of impeachment.

Judiciary will almost certainly offer an impeachment resolution with an article on Ukraine. Whether that resolution will be narrowly focused or include additional articles like obstruction of justice (based on Part II of the Mueller Report) or obstruction of Congress (based on the administration’s withholding of evidence and refusal to let officials testify) is still up in the air.

As many people have noted, this investigation has reversed the usual detective story: We knew whodunnit from the beginning. As soon as the White House released the call notes from President Trump’s July 25th phone conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky, it was obvious that Trump had used the threat of withholding American military aid to pressure Zelensky to announce investigations of “Crowdstrike” (the wacky conspiracy theory that Ukraine and the Democrats framed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf) and “Biden’s son” .

The testimony we’ve heard the last two weeks has mainly done three things:

• Educated the public on how important US military aid and the public appearance of US support was to Ukraine, which is fighting a war with Russia. Trump really did have Zelensky over a barrel.
• Detailed just how wide and deep the effort to pressure Ukraine was, and how extremely it differed from the US policy towards Ukraine supported by a large bipartisan majority in Congress. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani had no official government position, but for months ran a “shadow foreign policy” directly at odds with official US policy. (Fiona Hill put it like this: “[Gordon Sondland] was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.”) Official policy wholeheartedly supported Ukraine in its war with Russia; the shadow policy threatened that support in order to create pressure on Ukraine to help Trump’s re-election campaign.
• Shot down the wide range of unlikely claims by which Trump defenders urged us to ignore what we could see with our own eyes in the call notes. Trump may have spoken in a Mafia-don manner that only hinted at what he wanted, but the Ukrainians and the US personnel involved in the process understood the corrupt bargain Trump was offering. Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s testimony was the most explicit: “Members of this Committee have frequently framed these complicated issues in the form of a simple question: Was there a quid pro quo? As I testified previously, with regard to the requested White House call and White House meeting, the answer is yes. … Everyone was in the loop. It was no secret.”

The fourth key point is what the hearings have not done: challenged the basic narrative of Trump shaking down Zelensky. Republicans weren’t allowed to turn the hearings into a circus by calling witnesses against the Bidens or Crowdstrike, but none of the witnesses they were denied had anything to offer relevant to the shakedown narrative. Similarly, Republican questioning of the witnesses offered distractions from the narrative and denigrated either the witnesses themselves or their knowledge, but offered no exculpatory facts.

It’s really kind of amazing just how crazy the “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory is.

Most conspiracy theories are built on some real coincidence that the theory baselessly casts in a sinister light, but the most basic element of the Crowdstrike theory is just false: Crowdstrike is a California company that has no Ukrainian connection at all. The “suspicious” founder (Dmitri Alperovitch) is an American citizen who was born in Russia, not Ukraine, and has lived in the US since he was a teen-ager. The other founders are George Kurtz (born in New Jersey) and Gregg Marston (whose biography I haven’t been able to google up, but who is never mentioned as an immigrant in articles about the company’s founding).

In his recent Fox & Friends phone call, Trump referred to Crowdstrike as “a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian.” Wikipedia lists Crowdstrike’s major non-founder investors: Google, Telstra, March Capital Partners, Rackspace, Accel Partners, and Warburg Pincus. So Trump’s claim appears to be a pure invention. When challenged by F&F co-host Steve Doocy whether he was “sure” that the mythical DNC email server was in Ukraine, Trump said only “That’s what the word is.”

The weakness of the hearings has been the lack of star witnesses that the public already knows. Unlike the Clinton and Nixon impeachment hearings, Trump has successfully blocked his top officials from testifying. Republicans involved in the hearings have repeatedly denigrated witness testimony as “hearsay”, while supporting Trump in blocking the testimony of witnesses who had more direct contact with the President.

The public deserves to hear from administration officials like acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, just to name a few. But they have defied subpoenas under Trump’s instructions.

TPM floats an interesting theory about why Democrats are not pushing the courts to enforce these subpoenas. Everyone agrees that if the cases go to the Supreme Court, they might not be resolved until the Court’s term ends in June, when the 2020 conventions will be looming. But an impeachment trial in the Senate might offer a quicker path to the desired testimony.

Under the Senate’s impeachment rules, the House managers will be able to issue subpoenas whose validity will be adjudicated directly by Chief Justice Roberts, who will preside over the trial. Roberts is the swing vote on the Supreme Court anyway, so going straight to a Senate trial will force him to decide in January rather than June.

There are two major objections to this plan, but both seem answerable. First, by majority vote, the Senate could overrule Roberts’ decisions to issue subpoenas. But that would be a very public vote to suppress evidence, and only a few Republican senators would need to defect to uphold Roberts’ decision. Second, Democrats will have no chance to interview the witnesses before they testify. That may produce some false starts and dead ends, but it will also increase the drama of the televised hearings: No one knows what these witnesses will say.

Yesterday, Adam Schiff was asked about this theory by NBC’s Chuck Todd:

I do think that when it comes to documents and witnesses, that if it comes to a trial, and again we’re getting far down the road here, that the Chief Justice will have to make a decision on requests for witnesses and documents.

Gordon Sondland corroborated David Holmes’ account of a phone call Sondland had with Trump while Sondland and Holmes were in a restaurant in Kyiv, but Trump told Fox & Friends “I guarantee you that never took place.” Holmes and Sondland were under oath. Maybe Trump should go under oath before he contradicts them.

Another tantalizing Sondland revelation: Zelensky “had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.”

This blows up the already far-fetched idea that Trump had a legitimate concern for corruption in Ukraine. (Holmes reports Sondland agreeing with the statement that Trump “doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine“. I know no example anywhere of Trump opposing corruption, unless it involved his political opponents.) Trump wanted Ukrainian investigations as a touchstone for lock-him-up chants against Biden, and was not counting on them finding any actual malfeasance.

According to 538’s polling analysis, support for impeachment has been slowly eroding during the hearings. A small plurality 46%-45% currently supports impeachment. Polls that specify removing the president from office are a virtual tie.

At least the hearings changed one person’s mind: Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist of the NYT, who now thinks Trump should be removed from office even though “This isn’t what I thought two months ago, when the impeachment inquiry began.”

What persuaded him isn’t what Trump did to Ukraine, but to politics in the United States.

we’ve been living in a country undergoing its own dismal process of Ukrainianization: of treating fictions as facts; and propaganda as journalism; and political opponents as criminals; and political offices as business ventures; and personal relatives as diplomatic representatives; and legal fixers as shadow cabinet members; and extortion as foreign policy; and toadyism as patriotism; and fellow citizens as “human scum”; and mortal enemies as long-lost friends — and then acting as if all this is perfectly normal. This is more than a high crime. It’s a clear and present danger to our security, institutions, and moral hygiene.

If people aren’t changing their minds about Trump during these hearings, I hope they are changing their minds about Republicans in general. Because it’s been really clear that the Republicans in the room are acting in bad faith. All the patriotism in the room is coming from the witnesses, because the Republicans, one and all, have chosen Trump over America. Again and again, they make ridiculous arguments that they can’t possibly believe themselves.

While complaining about the lack of witnesses who spoke to Trump directly, not one of them has asked Trump to let more witnesses testify. Thursday, Fiona Hill called them out for repeating talking points that originate in the Russian security services, and have been refuted by all American intelligence agencies.

Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetuated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. … Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.

They didn’t care. Devin Nunes in particular just kept repeating those same Russian talking points. So did Trump himself: “Don’t forget. Ukraine hated me. They were after me in the election.” (That was part of a long interview that included “at least 18 false statements“.) And here’s Senator Kennedy of Louisiana yesterday on Fox News Sunday:

CHRIS WALLACE: Senator Kennedy, who do you believe was responsible for hacking the DNC & Clinton campaign? Russia or Ukraine?

KENNEDY: I don’t know. Nor do you.

W: The entire intel community says it was Russia.

K: Right. But it could be Ukraine. Fiona Hill is entitled to her opinion

The goal of the Republican leadership is to make impeachment a party-line vote, with no Republicans crossing over. But I wonder if that might not rebound against them in 2020. That willingness to ignore all the evidence will underline that there are no “reasonable” Republicans. Whatever the candidate in your district might sound like, when push comes to shove, all Republicans are Trump.

Unless new witnesses become available, the House Intelligence Committee’s hearings on the Trump/Ukraine extortion plot wrapped up this week. The featured post will pull together where things stand. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will include a few impeachment-related tidbits that aren’t directly related to the hearings, like reports that Devin Nunes was in Europe seeking dirt on Biden, and leaks about the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the origins of the Mueller investigation. But mainly it will be about the rest of the world: Israel, Hong Kong, the Democratic president debate, Colin Kaepernick, and a few other things. It should be out by noon EST.

• Edit one short story for a short story contest.
• Edit a couple poems (minor edit)
• Edit Whose Hearts are Mountains, which seriously needs a developmental editor because I don't know if I'm going in the right direction
• Rethink this whole writing thing (which I do once a week).

How do you solve a problem like the Bible? How do you come to terms with its mix of exquisite insight and downright nastiness?

Some people focus on Jesus. As in, “Paul was mean, but Jesus, he was all about the love.”

You know what? Jesus said some should-y stuff, too.

Here’s the parable of the sower, from Mark, the oldest and least embroidered of the gospels:

Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred. And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. (Mark 4:3-9, KJV)

Not too bad, right? Simple agricultural metaphor, no shaming yet (unless you’re listening closely and hear the words “good ground” or the dig about having ears to hear).

But here’s how Jesus unpacks the parable for his disciples:

The sower soweth the word. And these are they by the way side, where the word is sown; but when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately, and taketh away the word that was sown in their hearts. And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who, when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness; And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time: afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake, immediately they are offended. And these are they which are sown among thorns; such as hear the word, And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful. And these are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred. (Mark 4:14-20, KJV)

Can you imagine how a kid with undiagnosed ADHD, inattentive type, hears these words? I was a daydreamer, easily distracted, who struggled to stay motivated. I heard the word, and Satan must have snatched it away, because it was gone. Clearly, I was not good ground.

It’s a subtle kind of nasty, this parable and the meaning Jesus gives it.

What if we removed all the moralizing, and recognized the fact that different seeds sprout under different conditions?

Sure, grass seed will grow (almost) wherever and however you scatter it. When we built the shop on our property, digging for water and electricity left long lines of bare ground. I bought a big bag of grass seed from Lowe’s that seemed like the right kind for the conditions, scattered it, and walked away.

But other seeds? You read about how to get them to germinate, and it says things like, “Put them in the freezer for a month” or “Scuff them up with a bit of sand paper.”

Some seeds won’t sprout unless a wildfire races over them, burning off their hard outer coat and clearing out competitors.

It’s not that they’re bad seed, or that the ground is bad. They’re just . . . different. They have different needs.

My mind germinates seeds very slowly. I hear things, but they don’t immediately sprout into action. I tuck them into the soil, and wait. Some of them sprout, eventually.

Almost a year ago, my college roommate Dawn came to visit. We talked all afternoon, and one of the things we talked about was yoga and our aging bodies. She does a lot of yoga, while my practice is more, um, aspirational. We both have had problems with the meniscus in our knees.

Describing her recovery from meniscus surgery and return to yoga, she talked about modifying poses and listening to her body for what felt good.

See there? That’s the seed that has been sitting in my body. Waiting for conditions to be right.

After my surgery, my surgeon sent me home with a list of exercises for rehabbing my knee. I had a small baby (Thomas was still breastfeeding), a new home, and ADHD. Can you guess how well that went?

If I had time, I didn’t remember. If I remembered, I didn’t have time, or couldn’t find the list of exercises.

It’s always been the same way with yoga. What was the “right” sequence of poses? I tried yoga videos, cards, CDs—none of it worked.

Until I began to practice self-compassion and shame-resistance.

Only then did the seed Dawn offered begin to sprout.

It began with the simple fact that I wake up in the morning, and my body hurts. Not just my knee. Back, neck, hands, wrists, ankles—it all hurts.

Eventually, I noticed that it helped to stretch and wiggle while I was still in bed. I started describing this, laughing, as my way of doing yoga.

My trauma therapist begins each of our sessions with breath and movement. Everything we do is a suggestion, not a prescription. An offering, a possibility. There are always options, and the invitation to listen for what my body needs.

And there it was. Permission for yoga to be intuitive. The seed coat split and the first pair of leaves unfolded.

It took a year, and that’s OK. It takes as long as it takes. No judgment. No bad soil, good soil. No good seed, bad seed. Just soil and seed, doing their thing, in their own time.

The post The parable of the sower, revised appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

I rode the Eurostar from London to Paris, which I have never done before.  I dragged my suitcases from the Airbnb flat in Kensington to the Gloucester Road Tube station, got on the Piccadily line and thought vicous things about the cows who were sitting right near the door when they could have moved over three seats to the empty ones and let me sit with my big suitcases.

I use “cow” as an insult for all humans who lumber along in life without any awareness of those around them. I am hyper-aware of those around me and apologize profusely when I am selfish or inconsiderate when I should have realized that a simple action could have provided some relief to someone else. It’s not a sacrifice to scoot down a few seats. I hadn’t had any tea or coffee or food and I was cranky. Still, I judge. I most definitely do.  A bit of attentiveness costs nothing.

I got to St. Pancras and stood in line for security and passport control and I found my seat and stowed my luggage and got all settled on the train (window seat) and sat happily contemplating the next leg of my journey. I had a tremendously delicious latte at a stall called Source at St. Pancras, where I also asked for “some bread and cheese” and was sent on my way with an enormous container full of huge slabs of delicious cheddar and something soft and runny and a third kind of slightly tangy frommage and some toasts. A feast! I brought it to my hosts in Paris and we will be eating it all week.

As I sat in comfortable tranquility and watched the landscape whiz by I remembered traveling as a very young woman and becoming aware that my interior monologue was relentlessly frightened and self-critical. These were my first adventures in solitude and I became attuned to myself for the first time in a way that I suppose some adults never actually do. Solitude eventually emerged as my lifestyle, perhaps vocation? — and my internal monologue at this age is mostly concerned with things on the ministerial to-do list, thoughts about life, death and God, a bit of worrying and thinking about friends and loved ones (still a category of more insecurity than most others in my life), dog details and housekeeping. I am not rattled by insecure or self-critical thoughts although I have very little skill in dismantling them, whereas I have developed a fairly high level of skill in interrogating and untangling insecure and other-critical thoughts; particularly in catching myself catastrophizing or projecting.

I am grateful for that. Now, perhaps, I can learn some effective ways to disarm the monster who lives in my head who takes up arms against myself. That monster is so deeply hidden, I only hear rumblings when she is active. She tends not to speak in complete sentences, she just shrieks and throws things and is as irrational as my parents were when they were in their fits of rage or addiction.

But today on the train there was no monster and no anxiety or fear. I am an experienced enough traveler to think a few steps ahead and get where I am going — and by the way, I am not going to Venice as I had planned, because I trust my instincts by now — and I like myself as a traveling companion.

I recognize now that the extreme anxiety I experienced when traveling in my youth actually caused me to dissociate, as happened on the beach in Antigua when I was 18 years old and on a senior trip with three of my girlfriends. The three of them went horseback riding one afternoon and I decided to go to the beach by myself. When I settled myself in the sand, I experienced a jolting sensation of the world rocking and went blind for a few seconds, after which I saw shooting stars everywhere and felt that I no longer existed. It was one of the earliest memories I have of literally losing my mind and it scared me badly. I decided to patiently wait where I was until my senses returned, so there I sat on a beautiful tropical beach, a young, pretty teenager trying to stay sane.

I was probably dehydrated and God knows if we had been eating enough food. We were drinking like fishes, far away from home and on our own. I remember the trip very fondly in general but I have not forgotten the tilting earth and my momentary blindness. Stress, anxiety, a fragile psyche, I was a kid whose father had recently died and who was living alone at home with an actively alcoholic living parent and a kid brother, sitting thousands of miles away under a too-hot sun with only three peers to rely on if my brain didn’t start functioning right again. We got through it. I am still close friends with two of those three peers and I feel protected by their good cheer, their confidence in and love for me now as I did then.

This morning: navigate the Tube. Use the Oyster Card. Find the platform. Get the coffee, bread and cheese. Load the luggage. Take the journey.  Disembark, find the toilet. Learn the toilet cost .70 Euros. Locate the bank machine, obtain the euros. Return to the toilet with the help of a friendly nun. Protect the bags, the passport, the phone from pickpockets. Call an Uber.  Find the Uber, who is parked a block away. Find the apartment code. Load the self and the luggage into the tiny lift. Be received in warm, welcoming arms of friends. Eat dinner, have some wine, load the laundry. Plan tomorrow.

Write. Remember. Thank God for the sound mind and body, for the accumulation of experiences, of years, of journeys.

This past Sunday when the kids and I arrived at church, a woman held open the big front doors for us and handed me a green flyer. “Do you know about the parents’ class and potluck today? There’s childcare.”

I knew but had forgotten, and had nothing to contribute. I told myself we couldn’t go.

The kids went upstairs to their classes, and I settled into the sanctuary, singing and swaying, savoring silence and the presence of other souls and bodies. In that warm space, I wondered—did I really believe the event’s organizers would bar the door if I didn’t bring something to the potluck? Of course not.

What made me assume I couldn’t attend? Shame.

Lunch was abundant (many thanks to those who did remember to bring something), and the informal, small-group class about coping with stress was excellent.

The workshop leader, a member of the congregation and a WWU professor, said that a crucial question is, “Do I have control over this situation?” If the answer is yes, I have control, then the next step is problem-solving.  If the answer is no, then the next step is emotional adjustment. Either way, stress decreases.

But that’s not the end. Most of us have habitual, knee-jerk answers to the control question.

Some of us almost always say, “Yes, of course, I have control.” When we persistently answer yes, even when we have no control, we set ourselves up for failure. This is a perfectionist’s shame: I am able to do it all, and do it all well, and I failed.

Others of us almost always say, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.” This is the shame carried by those of us who have learned helplessness.

To free ourselves from habits of perfectionism and helplessness, we have to question these initial responses.

You have control? Are you sure?

You can’t do it? Are you sure?

My friend Liz often challenges me to interrogate the story I’m telling myself.

You’re lazy? Hmm. Tell me what you did yesterday. Doesn’t sound lazy to me.

You can’t get things done? Well, you had two goals for November that you met in the first week of the month.

My habitual answer to the control question is “No, I can’t.”  Particularly as a parent. No, I can’t, the baby is napping then. No, I can’t, I don’t have childcare.

Helplessness shrinks our lives—and that bracing question, “Why can’t you do it?”—helps us break out of the prisons we create for ourselves.  “Why can’t I do it?” is the first step in problem-solving—identifying the problem. Once we can do that, we’re almost free.

How do you answer the question, “Do I have control in this situation?” Do you overestimate your power, or underestimate it?

How might your life change if you began asking yourself, “Really? Are you sure?”

The post Interrogate your stories appeared first on Rev. Heather Lou.

You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people.

– Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent (11-13-2019)

This week’s featured post is “Why Can’t I Watch This?“, where I meditate on my inability to make myself watch more than short snatches of the impeachment hearings. (A humorous aside: Ever since I titled that article, I’ve been humming Weird Al’s Hammer parody “I Can’t Watch This“.)

This week everybody was talking about the impeachment hearings

This week’s hearing schedule:

Tuesday morning: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman of the NSC and Jennifer Williams, an aide to VP Pence.

Tuesday afternoon: former Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Timothy Morrison of the NSC.

Wednesday morning: Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland

Wednesday afternoon: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper and Undersecretary of State David Hale

Thursday: Fiona Hill of the NSC

This week we heard from three witnesses: Bill Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch. All of them had testified previously behind closed doors, and their opening statements became public then, so the main import of the public hearing was to see them in person, where we could judge their manner and see how they handled questioning.

In general, all three impressed me with the precision of their statements. Questioners from both sides often tried to lead them into stating an unsupported opinion, and they repeatedly refused to. Typical is the way Yovanovitch talked about Trump’s Twitter attack on her during the hearing.

ADAM SCHIFF: Ambassador, you’re shown the courage to come forward today and testify, notwithstanding the fact you urged by the White House or State Department not to, notwithstanding the fact that, as you testified earlier, the president implicitly threatened you in that call record. And now the president in real time is attacking you. What effect do you think that has on other witnesses’ willingness to come forward and expose wrongdoing?

MARIE YOVANOVITCH: Well, it’s very intimidating.

SCHIFF: It’s a designed to intimidate, is it not?

YOVANOVITCH: I mean, I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do. But I think the effect is to be intimidating.

There was also a closed-door session for State Department aide David Holmes. Holmes told an amazing story about being in a Kyiv restaurant with Gordon Sondland and two other people, when Sondland decides to call Trump. Trump talked at such volume that Sondland held the phone away from his ear, allowing Holmes (and maybe random other people) to hear both sides of the conversation. (As someone who once had a security clearance, I’m appalled by this whole situation.) Trump asked whether Zelensky was going to do the investigations, and Sondland assured him that Zelensky would do “anything you ask him to”.

Afterwards, Sondland explained that Trump “doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine”, but only cares about “big stuff” like investigating Biden.

One common refrain among Republicans in the hearings is that nothing really happened: Zelensky didn’t announce any investigations, and Ukraine got its military aid eventually anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Eric Swalwell took this point apart. First he got Ambassador Yovanovitch’s agreement that the Ukrainians only got the money after the whistleblower complaint became public, and then he summed up:

So you don’t really get points when you get your hand caught in the cookie jar, and someone says, “Hey, he’s got his hand in the cookie jar”, and then you take your hand out — which is essentially what my Republican colleagues and the President are trying to take credit for.

Republicans repeatedly tried to derail the hearings onto a discussion of the whistleblower. The fake outrage at the anonymity of the whistleblower was answered conclusively by Kellyanne’s husband over a month ago.

Someone calls 911 because they hear shots down the street at the bank. The cops show up at the bank, and, sure enough, it’s been robbed, and there are numerous witnesses there who saw the crime. The suspects confess. Normally, at this point, no one cares about who called 911.

And then Friday there was fake outrage about Rep. Schiff going by the rules that everybody already knew.

Both Nunes and Stefanik knew what the impeachment resolution said about the rules of the hearing. The entire committee knows what they are. I heard them complain about this particular rule—that the ranking member would only be able to yield time to counsel during these 45-minute periods, ahead of the usual five-minute rounds for each member that would come immediately afterward—when the resolution was released, and I watched them debate it in the Rules Committee. Wednesday’s hearing had already proceeded under precisely the same rules, with Nunes obediently sharing his time with his committee counsel, Steve Castor, and no one else. But, hey, they produced their content: Cult leader Adam Schiff shuts up a Republican woman. Coming soon to five hours of prime-time Fox News coverage.

Fareed Zakaria was the CNN interviewer to whom President Zelensky was supposed to announce the Biden investigation. Zakaria tells how this all looked from his side.

Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman explains why he thinks the Supreme Court will rule that Trump’s accountant has to turn over his tax returns. His argument relies on John Roberts staying true to the principle of judicial restraint. I think it’s a stretch to see any principles in Roberts. (His handling of the Citizens United case was the exact opposite of restraint.) So we’ll see.

and Roger Stone

Guilty on all seven counts: five counts of lying to Congress, one of witness tampering and one of obstructing a congressional committee proceeding. Stone joins Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos as Trump associates convicted of crimes.

His sentencing hearing is set for February 6, so he may actually spend a few months in prison before Trump pardons him (and Manafort and maybe Flynn) the day after the 2020 election.

Trump is already setting up his justification: Everybody does it.

So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?

Did they? I’m not in a position to vouch for the 100% honesty of all those people, but anybody who wants to claim their equivalency with Stone’s lies ought to be a little more specific.

One thing that came out during Stone’s trial was that Trump’s written answers to Robert Mueller’s questions were misleading. They only reason they weren’t perjury was that Trump phrased them in terms of what he remembered rather than what happened. (The gist of Trump’s testimony is that he remembers virtually nothing. If I were VP Pence and I believed these statements, I’d invoke the 25th Amendment, because the President clearly has dementia.)

I have no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1.2016 and November 8, 2016. I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with him, nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign

Trump’s deputy campaign manager Rick Gates testified that he was in an SUV with Trump while Trump talked to Stone on the phone. After the conversation ended, Trump said that more information was coming from WikiLeaks.

but we should also pay attention to stuff happening overseas

The response to the protests in Hong Kong appears to be escalating. Police stormed a university campus this morning, and last week police shot an unarmed demonstrator. A good overall article on the protests (which have been going on for months now) is “The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven By Hope” in the Atlantic.

Interesting Engineering claims that Chilean protesters brought down a police drone by focusing lasers on it. People are trading theories about how that might have happened.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited the White House Wednesday. He returned the letter Trump sent him in October, the barely literate one where Trump urged him “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool.” He showed an anti-Kurdish propaganda video to five Republican senators critical of his Syrian invasion. Turkish government media portrayed the event as Erdogan’s triumph over Trump.

In additional to killing many of our former Kurdish allies, Turkey has recently bought an air defense system from Russia. The new system is not compatible with NATO’s air defenses. How this got him the White House visit that Ukraine’s president can’t get is something of a mystery.

Remember Trump’s boast that Saudi Arabia would “pay cash” for the new US troops posted there? Turns out that his “100%” claim is not strictly true, but you had already guessed that, right?

But letting the details slide a little, we can all see the Trumpian vision: The US military becomes a mercenary force. You want our protection, you pay us.

South Korea is the latest country to get the Trump shakedown. It currently pays about $1 billion annually to defray the cost of maintaining US troops there. Trump is proposing raising that to $5 billion.

Meanwhile, there has been exactly zero progress towards denuclearizing North Korea.

and Stephen Miller

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog has published excerpts of emails that White House advisor Stephen Miller wrote to editors of the right-wing website Breitbart in 2015 and 2016, when he was working for then-Senator Jeff Sessions. In these emails, Miller was pushing Breitbart to pick up stories and talking points from openly white-supremacist sites like VDARE and American Renaissance.

Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 previously private emails Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 4, 2015, to June 27, 2016. Miller does not converse along a wide range of topics in the emails. His focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration.

There’s a lot more at the link, but I’ll just add my interpretation of what was going on: There’s a pipeline that flows from neo-Nazi and KKKer sites to the far right end of the widely-read news sources (like Breitbart), then to Fox News, and finally to the mainstream news outlets. In this way, ideas that start in the white supremacist fever swamps (like the “Great Replacement” theory) make their way into mainstream conversation. Miller’s job was to help that pipeline flow.

Now that he’s in the White House, Miller can do two additional things: (1) influence Trump to transmit white supremacist ideas through his Twitter feed, which mainstream outlets believe they have to cover; and (2) implement white-supremacist policies directly, by simultaneously abusing immigrants who come here without documents and shutting down just about every avenue for legal non-white immigration. [This link to the USA Today seems to have vanished.]

His administration has granted fewer visas, approved fewer refugees, ordered the removal of hundreds of thousands of legal residents whose home countries have been hit by war and natural disasters and pushed Congress to pass laws to dramatically cut the entire legal immigration system.

Many Democrats have called for Miller to resign. But Cas Mudde argues that a Miller resignation won’t really change anything, because Miller represents a white-supremacist majority within the Republican Party.

This is why calling for Stephen Miller’s resignation wouldn’t change much. Neither Miller nor Bannon “made” Trump the white-supremacist-in-chief. And Trump is not the only problem either, as Joe Biden seems to believe. He won the Republican primaries, and presidential elections, not despite white supremacy but because of it. In short, it is time for Democrats to face and name the ugly truth: the Grand Old Party is a party steeped in white supremacy.

The White House is attacking the messenger, calling SPLC “an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization” that is “beneath discussion”. But the leaked emails are what they are, and Miller has not denied writing them.

and the Democrats

I keep hearing people make sweeping pronouncements about the Democrats in the presidential race: Biden is doomed; Warren is too liberal to beat Trump; we need new candidates. And so on. Well, I think a lot of things can happen that we haven’t foreseen yet, so I’m keeping my powder dry prediction-wise. I continue to believe that at this stage in the campaign, the important thing is to pick somebody you like and think would be a good president. After we get down to three or four candidates who have real support from people who like them and think they would be good presidents, then we can worry about which one we want to see challenge Trump.

Support for my you-never-know position comes from the recent Buttigieg surge in Iowa. Did you see that coming? I didn’t. I mean, I love listening to Mayor Pete and admire the crispness of a lot of his answers. But has anything about him really changed in the last two months? On September 15, the RCP polling average had him running fifth in Iowa at 7.5%. Now he’s first with 21%, followed by Warren (19%), Biden (16.5%), and Sanders (16%).

Nationally, Biden (26%) is still the front-runner (after a brief blip in early October when Warren was ahead), followed by Warren (20.8%), Sanders (17.8%), and then Buttigieg (8%).

I’ve previously compared this race to the Republican 2012 contest, where a series of boomlets briefly pushed Romney out of the lead, only to see him go ahead again in a week or two. Again and again, Republicans would get excited about Candidate X, and then look at X more skeptically once X became the frontrunner. (Michele Bachmann? Herman Cain? Rick Perry? Newt Gingrich? Maybe Romney isn’t so bad.)

I’m not predicting that Biden definitely weathers all the past and future storms until he gets the nomination, as Romney did. But it’s foolish to discount that possibility, or to write other candidates off because they haven’t caught fire yet. A lot can still happen, and it’s easy to imagine that we know a lot more than we do.

One reason waves crest is that other candidates start attacking any new threat. Amy Klobuchar (who is probably competing for a lot of the same Iowa voters Buttigieg targets) pointed out the role sexism plays in the rise (or failure to rise) of inexperienced candidates:

Of the women on the stage — I’m focusing here on my fellow women senators, Sen. (Kamala) Harris, Sen. (Elizabeth) Warren and myself — do I think that we would be standing on that stage if we had the experience that he had? No, I don’t. Maybe we’re held to a different standard

That’s probably true, though it deserves two caveats: First, it’s not exactly an argument against Buttigieg; more precisely, it says that we might be overlooking good female candidates who have similar experience levels. Second, being gay has given Buttigieg his own hurdles to jump.

Atlantic has a good article about sexism in the coverage of Elizabeth Warren. Both rival candidates and the media are repeating a theme of Warren as an “angry” candidate. Anger is one of those emotions that men are allowed (see Brett Kavanaugh) but women are not.

New candidates: Mike Bloomberg is definitely in. And now former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is too.

Next debate: day after tomorrow. Ten candidates will be on stage: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Gabbard, Harris, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, and Yang.

and you also might be interested in …

Matt Bevin finally conceded the Kentucky governor’s race, after spending a week talking about voting irregularities that he never provided any evidence for. It was the typical Trumpian thing: If I lost, somebody must have cheated.

I feel vindicated in my assessment last week, that the Kentucky legislature’s Republican majority wasn’t willing to steal the election for Bevin.

Saturday, Democrats also won another close governor’s race in a red state: Louisiana re-elected John Bel Edwards. Edwards’ message was a mixture of liberal and conservative issues: He favors expanding healthcare access and paying teachers more, but is against abortion and gun control.

Criminals have to stick together. Trump intervened in three war crimes cases Friday, pardoning one convicted war criminal, another accused and awaiting trial, and restoring the rank of a third.

Retired General Marty Dempsey tweeted in May (when the possible pardons were first floated)

Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US servicemembers accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously. Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility. Risk to us.

In October, Trump took a different view:

We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!

If I wore an American uniform, it would bother me that my commander-in-chief thought of me as a “killing machine”.

Dahlia Lithwick interviews Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island about the partisan nature of John Roberts’ Supreme Court.

Take a look at the situation right now. United States Supreme Court justices are selected based on a Federalist Society operative, on his recommendations, while the Federalist Society is taking large amounts of dark money from big donor interests. So there’s dark money behind the selection of justices. Then when the selection is made, the confirmation battles for those nominees are fought with dark money. The Judicial Crisis Network took two $17 million–plus contributions, one to push Garland out and Gorsuch in, and one to push Kavanaugh through and onto the court.

There’s every likelihood that the donor in those two $17 million contributions was the same donor, which, if that were true, means that somebody paid $35 million–plus to influence the composition of the United States Supreme Court. And we have no idea who that person is and what their interests are before the court.

… Most Americans have no idea that under Chief Justice Roberts, there are 73 of these 5–4 partisan decisions in which there was a big Republican donor interest implicated. And in 73 out of 73, the big Republican donor interest won.

And why can’t we trace all that dark money? Well, because of Supreme Court decisions that equate money with speech.

Understanding that any legislature will have a few crazies, I try not to get excited about every ridiculous bill that gets introduced somewhere. (Most will vanish in committee and aren’t worth your outrage.) But Ohio’s “Student Religious Liberties Act” (full text) has passed the House and now moves to the Senate, so it’s worth paying attention to.

The bill states that no school authority (there’s a long list of them, starting with the local board of education)

shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student’s work.

So six-day creation, Noah’s flood, light speeding up so that distant stars can be visible despite the universe only being 10,000 years old — if that’s what your religion says, you can express it on a test and still get an A. Heck, nothing in the bill restricts its scope to specific classes, so if your religion says 2 + 2 = 5, that’s an OK answer too.

The bill passed 61-31, with Republicans voting for it 59-0 and Democrats against it 2-31. Maybe the two parties really aren’t the same.

Planned Parenthood was awarded a $2.2 million settlement in their lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress, which filmed PP workers secretly and produced a video claiming that PP was illegally selling fetal tissue from abortions.

Some parts of the economy are doing better than others. Farmers are suffering from Trump’s trade war, and that problem has spread to farm-equipment makers like Deere and Caterpillar, which are cutting production and laying off workers.

Yesterday’s NYT examined how the Trump tax cut played out for one big corporation: Federal Express. Its tax bill went from $1.5 billion in 2017 to zero in 2018. And did the company pay workers better, increase capital investment, or let that money trickle down in any other way? Not really.

As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. … This year, the company cut back employee bonuses and has offered buyouts in an effort to reduce labor costs in the face of slowing global growth.

What did happen to the money? It went to stockholders.

FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.

The closing is going to be a fun-fact chart from Our World in Data, but here’s an important thing to know from the same source. A lot of times we hear about which countries have the highest carbon emissions. By that measure, China is the worst offender, followed by the US and India. A related question is which countries have the highest per capita carbon emissions, and that list is topped by oil-rich nations that need a lot of air conditioning, like Qatar and Kuwait.

But OWiD has thought this out a little deeper. If a car gets manufactured in, say, Mexico, but is sold to somebody in the US, who is really responsible for that carbon? America, not Mexico. If you track carbon emissions to the ultimate consumer, then the map looks like this:

Again, the hot oil-producers — Saudi Arabia and smaller surrounding countries — are most responsible, but they are closely followed by the US, Canada, and Australia. China is much less of a factor and India barely figures at all.

and let’s close with something that’s been getting better for a long time

We could all stand to contemplate some good news this week. The Our World in Data website tracks the price of artificial light in the UK since 1300, when you probably would have lighted your book or gameboard or after-sundown project with a candle made from animal fat. A few centuries ago, whether or not an activity was “worth the candle” was a real consideration.

I’ve been waiting for Congress to start the process of impeaching Trump. So why is it so hard to watch?

Fundamentally, the whole point of the Weekly Sift is that I dive deeply into the news so that people with busier lives don’t have to. So I read things like the Mueller Report or Supreme Court’s marriage-equality decisions or the transcripts of presidential debates. I check out neo-Nazi websites to see what they’re up to. I review polls, and examine enough of them to warn everybody not to get too excited about some surprising result that no other pollster can replicate. I keep track of books about the death patterns of democracies or the structure of the American news media.

And then once a week I report back. That schedule is a small revolt against the 24-hour news cycle. If an active shooter is still at large somewhere, you should probably get your updates somewhere else. But an awful lot of the news makes more sense if you take it in week-long chunks rather than five-minute blips. And it often turns out that something seems terribly important for an hour or two, but is not really worth your time at all.

So the impeachment hearings should be right up my alley. I’ve been keeping track of the story ever since the whistleblower report came out, so I know the characters, the basic outline of events, the range of arguments available to both sides, and a bunch of the legal and procedural nuances. The length of the hearings (ten hours Wednesday and eight Friday) makes it unreasonable for most of my readers to watch, so I should watch it for them.

More than that, it’s history. In the two-centuries-and-counting history of the United States, this is only the fourth serious attempt to impeach a president. And rather than some tawdry sex story like the last impeachment, this one is about war and intrigue and world leaders trying to bully each other. It’s about the rule of law, the separation of powers, and whether or not we’ll have a fair election in 2020 (or ever again). This impeachment matters in a way that the Clinton impeachment never really did.

So why can’t I watch this?

I try. I tune in for opening statements and maybe a little of the questioning by counsel. Maybe later in the day I try again and watch five or ten minutes. And then maybe again once more. But I’m making myself do it. I want to turn it off.

To be more specific, I can’t watch these Republicans. This is a problem I have never had before. I disagreed with President Reagan and his followers, but I could watch them. I was pretty sure George W. Bush’s people were lying to me a lot of the time, but I mostly understood where they were coming from, and why they thought they were the good guys. Some of them, I’m pretty sure, were trying to do the best they could with a bad situation (though some weren’t). There was something human in there, something I could empathize with.

I’m not seeing that now.

It seems perfectly clear at this point that Trump did what he is accused of: He withheld aid that Congress had appropriated for Ukraine, for the purpose of pressuring President Zelensky to launch a pretty clearly bogus investigation into Joe Biden, which would do nothing at all to help either Ukraine or the United States, but would work to Trump’s personal political benefit. Withholding the aid would have sabotaged Ukraine in its war against Russia, and even hinting at withholding the aid has harmed Ukraine’s negotiating position with Russia. So Trump has done public harm in an attempt to get private benefit.

It almost worked. Zelensky was within days of announcing the investigations in a CNN interview, but the whistleblower report and Congress’ resulting curiosity about what was going on caused Trump to release the aid, after which Zelensky cancelled the interview.

That’s bad enough, but it looks like there’s even shadier stuff going on in the background. With the President’s blessing, Rudy Giuliani has been running some scam of his own in Ukraine, one we don’t even begin to understand yet. But even without that, we’re looking at a corrupt style of governing, the kind that’s typical in kleptocratic regimes. If all this is OK, then the president should be able to skim personal favors off of all of our foreign aid.

Sad as all that is for America, so far it’s just the story of a simple mistake: The Electoral College elevated a scam artist to the presidency (against the will of the voters, I should point out) and he’s scamming us. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, but by itself it doesn’t implicate our society or our system of government. In fact, the Founders anticipated stuff like this would happen from time to time. (That’s the nation-sized version of “Momma told me there would be days like this.”) That’s why they built impeachment into the Constitution.

But then the Republicans involved in the current impeachment hearings start to talk, and it’s crystal clear that they have no interest at all in finding out whether Trump has committed crimes, or how bad they are. They just want to make sure that he gets away with them.

That’s what I can’t stand listening to.

I’m old enough to remember the Nixon impeachment, and it wasn’t like this. The iconic Watergate question “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was asked by a Republican, Senator Howard Baker. He wanted to know. By and large, Republicans in Congress wanted to believe the best about Nixon and tried to frame the evidence against him in the best possible light. But they were not accomplices. If the President was guilty, they wanted to know.

These Republicans don’t want to know.

Once you acknowledge the facts of the case, there’s still a debate to be had about how bad this is, and whether it justifies removal from office. There is room to acknowledge that the president did something wrong, something that should never be repeated, without supporting removal. This is the position nearly all Democrats came to in the Clinton impeachment. (The liberal group Move On originated in an online petition saying: “Congress must Immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.”) No one argued then that presidents have an absolute right to blow jobs from interns, or that DNA testing is not really a science, or that presidential ejaculations are covered by executive privilege. No one did a Lindsey Graham and just refused to pay attention. (“I’ve written the whole process off. I think this is a bunch of BS.”)

There is a thoughtful way to receive bad news about the leader of your party, and to consider what should be done about it. These Republicans are not doing that.

Instead, they’re ginning up fake controversies to keep their base outraged. They’re asking to call witnesses like Hunter Biden, who has no knowledge of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme, and no connection to it at all other than as an intended victim. (The point here is purely to claim some kind of our-scandal/your-scandal equivalence. It’s as if Democrats called Newt Gingrich as a witness in the Clinton impeachment, so that he could be questioned about his own infidelities.) They threaten to violate the laws protecting whistleblowers, and paint Democrats as Stalinists for not allowing them to do so.

In lockstep, these Republicans accept and promote the circular logic of the Trump defense: Testimony from people who didn’t deal with the President directly can’t be taken seriously, but anyone who did deal with the President directly can’t testify. Whether to remove the President for his crimes should be left to the voters, but the voters should not be allowed to learn what those crimes are. Any witnesses who testify against the President (or simply testify to facts the President finds inconvenient) must be opposed to him politically, and so their testimony can be written off as biased.

These Republicans charge that the impeachment process is a sham, but it is they who are making it a sham. By showing no interest in the facts of the case, they are sending a blunt message to the American people: “Nothing the President did matters. We have power and we’re keeping it.”

That’s what I find so hard to watch. I had thought I had prepared myself for this. I had thought I had lost all my illusions about the state of American democracy. But to see so immediately just how far one of America’s two great political parties has fallen, to bear witness to this degradation for hours at a time … it’s sad beyond my ability to process.

So this week, I have failed to adequately sift the news for you. I’ll try again next week, but I don’t know what I can promise.

I have to confess failure this week: I should have watched the impeachment hearings for you, and I couldn’t make myself do it. My full confession is in this week’s featured post “Why Can’t I Watch This?”. It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary has a lot to cover. The impeachment hearings, of course, but also the Roger Stone conviction. The regime’s response to the Hong Kong protesters escalated. We got more explicit information about Stephen Miller’s role in promoting white supremacy. Pete Buttigieg grabbed the lead in the Iowa polls, while new candidates entered the race. Kentucky’s defeated governor Matt Bevin finally conceded, and Democrats held on to the governorship in another red state, Louisiana. Turkish President Erdogan came to the White House to make Trump’s Syria surrender official. There’s more, and then we close with a fascinating graph about the drastic decline in the cost of artificial lighting since 1300.

That should be out, say, around noon EST.

I preached from this sermon manuscript at Universalist National Memorial Church, on November 17, 2019 with the lectionary texts from the Second Letter to the Thessalonians and the Gospel of Luke.

I would like to thank Pastor Gatton for asking me into the pulpit again, and thank you for welcoming me back. And I’d like to start, not with the sermon directly, but with an illustration I really wanted to work into the sermon, but doesn’t really fit.

Back in 1982 Ridley Scott’s neo-Film Noir movie Blade Runner introduced viewers to a dystopian future Los Angeles, where nearly perfect copies of human beings — essentially slave labor on other planets ― would only live (or last) three years, by design. They were forbidden from coming to earth, but some do, with hopes of extending their lives. The blade runners, one is the lead played by Harrison Ford, are the agents sent to find and destroy them. The title suggest our identification with the blade runners, with humanity and order, but is that how it works out? Watch and see.

That disturbing future took place in the far future of November 2019. That future is now, and so I wanted to work it into the sermon, in part to reflect on today, and also because science fiction provides such an easy and accessible window into theological discourse.

If you want to talk about human nature, what better contrast is there than to introduce a non-human character with human characteristics, whether living or an automaton. If you want a metaphor for a spiritual journey, you can depict it as a journey through space, into the literal heavens, where you will find nothing familiar except yourself. If you want an idea of what God is, or properly what God is not, have the characters meet a force which is greater than humanity — perhaps unseen — and whose good or evil works force crises and decisions.

Blade Runner adds another twist. There are several, slightly variant versions of the film, edited to suggest the different answers to the mystery underlying the story. (In fact, my brother worked on one of them.) So it’s not clear which version is canonical, or authoritative. All of them, perhaps? We approach biblical interpretation the same way, so this is another way to look at the film theologically.

But I’ve not seen Blade Runner in two or three years, certainly not contrasting the variations, and haven’t seen the recent sequel. Apart from the coincidence of dates, I couldn’t work it into the sermon. And (ironically, you’ll see) it was a heavy week at work, so I didn’t have time to run down all the leads: I’ll leave Blade Runner aside. I hope to come back to it, and other films, some day.

Instead, I started by going back to that article that Pastor Gatton referred to last week — the one from the New York Times (“5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please”) by Cal Newport — since he preached from the prior passage from Luke. (I have his book on hold at the library; there’s quite the wait.) The editorial’s main illustration was an experiment by a small German tech firm to have a distraction-free five hour work day instead of a longer day peppered with Twitter, email and urgent texts.

Imagining a world where we work less is also something frequently posited by futurists and in science fiction. It prompted me to lift out the ideas about work in the lesson from Second Thessalonians.

It’s funny that work itself isn’t more of a theological topic. For most of us, it takes up most of our waking hours, working either outside the house, in it, or both. Work for pay gives us access to the necessities and pleasures of life, even as it keeps us from them. A good work life will make you happy, a bad work life will make you unhappy and not having work or not being sure of what work would be good can be the worst of all. Work, like sleep, growth, family and food, is one of those foundational realities of human existence.

And yet, any number of commentators would have us believe that the future of work is optional or minimal, and with a science fiction-like zeal that the robots will take care of us, and so we need to look past work for both fulfillment and the distribution of goods. I’m not convinced, but not because I think people should be forced to work, but that it’s not so easily brushed away.

To be sure, work doesn’t mean the same thing as it did in St. Paul’s time.

Technological advances in the last nineteen centuries have moved us past the power of human and animal power and faster than sailboats. Electric light makes us a little like God for the day and the night are alike to us — but that means we can or must work longer than ever before, not to mention faster communication than even the last generation knew. The ideas of retirement and vacation are revolutionary. And we are less stuck — I can’t say not stuck — in the work paths our parents and grandparents set before us. Indeed, we may not work (and live) in the same place they were born or where we were born. And tomorrow we might be working halfway around the world, or speaking with someone who is. For most of us, and by us I mean the whole human family, work doesn’t mean farming or finding the next meal. It’s different, less physically demanding, but easier or better? I’ll leave that for you to decide. But work is different now than in the first century.

The first and second letters from St. Paul to the Thessalonians — that is, what’s now the the city of Salonica, in northern Greece — are essentially practical advice to that young church, and he was helping them in their own time. The churches were very young at this point, as old (more or less) as social media is to us, and the “rules” were still being developed. We take from the context that some of the people in the church in Salonica didn’t think they should work, or that they needed to work. Were some of the people taking the message of a liberating gospel so literally that they didn’t feel that they needed to work. Or perhaps took the injection to “give away all you have” so literally that they became dependent on the good-will of others. Or perhaps they believed that God would provide in all things, and too that to mean the supernatural supply of natural needs. Well, eventually. It’s not clear, but there’s indirect evidence of conflict.

So his warning, “if they don’t work, they don’t eat” should be read not as a kind of punishment but set a standard of how they members of the community should regard one another. Egalitarianism is implied for one thing. And that bit about “not being busybodies” might be translated idiomatically as an injunction to work, but not work each others’ nerves.

But this is a short passage, and to read it without inquiring and generous minds would miss the point. What about those who really cannot work? The sick or injuried or debilitated? The very old, and the very young? Are they left hungry? Of course not. This goes against good sense, and cuts against the kind of care that drew people to the gospel in the first place. So the lesson for us is that work is important, it resources our needs, it can build mutual understanding, but it’s not the ultimate good. Work has its place.

Five days a week I work as the operations director of a small international health nonprofit, working up budget, payroll, contracts and the like. It’s typical office work, with the typical mix of rewards and challenges.

It’s no secret that I used to be the minister of this church, but after that pastorate ended I didn’t want to leave town. The quality of life is good here, particularly for gay couples, and there were few if any churches that might appeal elsewhere. Those that did would pay very poorly in isolated communities, and would offer my husband few good opportunities. So I traded ministry for administration. I bring my theological training into my work: active listening, a kind word, and a willingness to get the bottom of a story have all been a part of my nonprofit life.

But I do miss church work, sometimes, and I do feel that God is keeping me in the ministry. One of the reasons I like preaching here, in fact is that it helps me work out my ministerial vocation when that will never again be my main source of income. St. Paul was himself famously and literally a tent maker, from which we get the term “tent-making ministries” when you refer to a minister who has a day job to cover most of the expenses.

Work has a value apart from earnings. It’s not an original thought to say that you get a lot of our sense of self from my work. We build collegial relationships with sometimes turn into friendships. Our work structures our daily lives. The problem is when our work let’s become our daily lives. When we have no other sources of validation or encouragement apart from work. Which also means that work has a power over us in more than providing earnings. And then subsumes that you somehow enjoy your job, or have one. I recall being unemployed and hating it. It was like I was always waiting for my life to restart.

I know that one from personal experience. I’ve had four multi-month long spells of unemployment and I remember how corrosive the experience was. I was lonely. I started missing the presence of co-workers who annoyed me. I worried about money. I doubted my worth. In one case, I’m pretty sure I took a job just to make the grind of not-having go away. That’s also why I don’t believe the stories of the “end of work” and that robots will do everything, and that we will have to prepare for a time past work. You need something to make life seem meaningful, and we have millennia finding that kind of value in our work.

But what if your job stinks, and you don’t have very good options? Sometimes you need to take or keep a job because there’s no time or energy to change. Or the one you have took a long time to get, and you don’t want to go through that again. Or it provides medical insurance you or a family member needs. Or if you can get through three more years you can retire without imperiling your retirement years. Or a hundred other variations.

Then take my advice: find your vocation, even if it’s not your day job. This is opposite of that cloying work advice, “Do what you love” which sounds like the kind of advice given by people with lots of options and cash to fall back on. Instead, find out what God is leading you towards, and be prepared to follow that off the clock.

That brings us to our lesson from Luke. The passage in Luke is different than the Thessalonian letter, both in that it’s not meant to be practical, and not meant to be clear. In it, Jesus is speaking of a final time, but doesn’t say when it will be, or clearly how to anticipate it. A time when nothing will be the same. It’s heavy and apocalyptic, and can unsettle you deeply if you’re not aware.

Time, of course, means nothing to God, but it does to us. So this future time, when even the Temple, falls in meant for us. The most we know, and this is so banal that I resist even mentioning it — the most we can know is that it’s terribly important. And that we should be ready.

But a cautious, moderate kind of readiness, I think. We cannot become extreme by denying what we can have now. We cannot become extreme by predicting exactitudes we cannot know. I feel a bit of sympathy towards those people who prepare not only for disasters but prepare for a full collapse of society.

They act as though it is inevitable that everything will collapse around us. Food supplies, safe water, public safety, the rule of law and the electrical grid. All things which human beings have built and must maintain. It makes me deeply sad that it makes more sense to some to run to the boondocks and try to reproduce society rather than to make it part of your life’s work to preserve all these things from collapse in the first place.

When we find our calling, and pursue it where or not it’s our job, we orient ourselves to that Day that Jesus speaks of. We live for the future. The past is done. Nobody can add anything to it, or take anything from it. We can, and should, be grateful for those who worked and struggled, usually unnamed and unrecognized, for us to be where we are.

In the meantime, what can we do until we find our calling. Reflect your faith in daily life.

To jump from Sunday prayer to Monday work then means taking on new habits that we may not directly benefit from. For instance, we might try and create virtuous circles in the workplace. No winking at little cheats or pilferage. We show our workplace — our coworkers and vendors, if not our bosses and clients — our honest, kind and careful intentions.

Be thankful and show thankfulness for the special contributions others bring to their work, including taking on work that’s unpleasant to do or has low status.

And outside of the workplace, we find alternatives to the Washington question. You know the one at social occasions? where we categorize each other by what we do.

In short, work to live, and find a better way of living. But do not live to work.

Find places were we have friends and not just coworkers or contacts, and interests that makes life interesting and rewarding that is not dependent on having any particular job. I will include church in that number.

Don’t treat your religion as a niche interest just because others project theirs badly. Your religion can be deep without being intrusive. The good ones are out there; you just may not know their religious motivations. May your behavior at work, at home and wherever you are the first way you express your faith.

Let your life’s work be a blessing for you and for others.

A thing that I most despise in modern American culture is the total separation of madness and “sanity,” with so-called sanity as the norm and the goal of all mental health modalities. Sanity, like gender, is a construct. What passes for “sanity” in my context seems like half-life to me. That is not to romanticize states of mental distress that cause suffering  – but there’s much more territory to be accepted and explored.

This may be why I continue to defend non-violent religious enthusiasms even while I deplore their ridiculous and harmful theologies: I appreciate a bit of madness! Last night as I walked through Leicester Square I heard an evangelical idiot with a megaphone blathering on and on about Jesus and salvation and I felt the oppression of words, words, words, thank you very much Martin Luther, thank you John Calvin, for this obnoxious verbosity. I would rather the man put down his megaphone and dance his Christian message for us, act out the threat of Hell, become Jesus on the cross dying for our sins — I’d respect him more. It would be more impressive an expression of faith than his loud lecturing and exorting.

(I’m working it out — writing without inner editor and critic that is so tightly uniformed and On The Job in my usual work and especially my sermons.  Don’t expect these sabbatical posts to be terribly linear, consistent or coherent)

More opera tonight! “Orphee” by Philip Glass. “The Mask of Orpheus” the other night was, in the words of one patron I overheard in the lobby, “TOTALLY mental” and it went on for four hours of avante garde bizarrity that I loved and found irritating for the usual reasons of sexism and cliched design. Make it new! Make it new!

Here now at the Wellcome Collection Library, a wonderful resource of medical history that is one of my favorite cultural centers in London. I’ve joined the library and am happily nestled among the stacks of loads of books on the plague. Just now taking notes on Death, Reburial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity by Jon Davies and Ritual Texts For The Afterlife : Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston.

There is so much water imagery in the Orpheus art I’m seeing, I want to know what is in the original Greek material. I always thought Orpheus was a poet, musician, lyre-playing guy. I associate his story with the earth, and perhaps the element of air (Apollo, stringed instrument, etc). Whence all this water?

Off to find some dinner and then to the theatre. I need to figure out how to upload photos to this little Chromebook.

Cheers.

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