The Jefferson Bible

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Modern conservatives who can’t bear to think that the Declaration of Independence was written by a Bible-defacer have spread the rumor that Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible as an ethical guide to civilize American Indians. The so-called ‘Jefferson Bible’ was really a tool to introduce the teachings of Jesus to the Indians,” declared Rev. D. James Kennedy. Actually, Jefferson’s editing of the Bible flowed directly from a well-thought out, long-stewing view that Christianity had been fundamentally corrupted -by the Apostle Paul, the early church, the great Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and by nearly the entire clerical class for more than a millennium. Secularists love to point to the Jefferson Bible as evidence of his heathen nature; but that misses the point, too. Jefferson was driven to edit the Bible the way a parent whose child was kidnapped is driven to find the culprit. Jefferson loved Jesus and was attempting to rescue him.

Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

I’ve been enjoying HBO’s John Adams, and then the other day Steven Waldman, the founder of Belief.net, was on Fresh Air, promoting his book Founding Faith. Waldman emphasizes that religion was a part of revolutionary culture, but that the writers of the declaration of independence and the constitution were scrupulous about keeping Christianity out of their government.

Waldman’s main point is that Adams and Jefferson and the rest had 150 years of experience with religious intolerance, especially against Catholics and Jews, and that they did not want the national government to repeat these mistakes. Interestingly, Waldman says, like much of the Constitution, this was a compromise; the states were free to support religion. This wasn’t corrected until the 14th amendment.

Posted in: Language, Online Places, Writing

Anger / Race / Hate

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Anger and hate are only the same thing to people who have not yet moved beyond the childhood notion of hate, which is: Hate = Anything I Am Pissed About Right Now. No. Hate is much stronger and less fleeting than that.

I am angry, that much is certainly clear. The things I’m angry about or the people I’m angry at? I don’t hate them. I’m just frustrated and annoyed. I deal with my frustration by blogging, by trying to make people understand why I’m angry, by trying to fix things so they don’t make me angry, anymore. But that’s hard to do when people insist on telling me I feel a way I don’t.

Things You Need To Understand #8 – Anger Does Not Equal Hate, March 17, 2008 by the angry black woman

I have to say that i admired Senator Obama when he refused to take the bait and ‘denounce’ his preacher for so-called hate speech. I admired him a little less when he claimed to reject his preachers ‘rigidity’ which the Senator said refused to recognize the possibility of change in the White community.

I think it was one of those straight-off-the-shelf bits of analysis rather than an honest assessment. I think the Senator didn’t want to talk about anger. If you do a search using the terms ‘Obama” and “hate’ you can get a feel for why Senator Obama wanted to avoid this subject.

Again and again you see writers (mainstream and otherwise) refusing to think about anger by claiming to see hatred. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech on 9-11, for example, represented legitimate anger. Even if we grant the important role of the white community in the Civil Rights movement, the powers-that-be are often blissfully unconcerned with the violence that afflicts the Black community.

The atrocities go back hundreds of years: slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, busing, crack, the ongoing litany of atrocity and injustice that never seems to cause more than brief flashes of concern. Yet one admittedly horrible, dramatic act of terrorism and suddenly the ‘world changed forever.’ Who could blame the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for his anger?

Posted in: Language, Writing

OMG Johnny Can’t Read

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The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature.

This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting “the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life,” particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing’s condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of “a fragmenting culture” in which “young men and women … have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers.”

Amy Goldwasse, Salon, March 14, 2008

There has been a real run lately on these sorts of stories. One conservative blogger is even recommending that old chestnut, Why Johnny Can’t Read, as a corrective to what he (or she, but it has to be a he) calls “the entire leftist establishment that has so dominated our culture for decades.” These studies come out regularly, but I think it was Dorris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech that started this round.

Goldwasse takes a swipe at Lessing, of course, although I get the feeling that she did not read the speech. If she did, then she would know that Lessing’s point was that the powerful always turn technology against the powerless. Why should the Internet be any different? Lessing worries that we have turned some terrible corner, that the powerful have in recent years won a victory that may be impossible to reverse. It’s also fascinating that Lessing herself seems so foreign to writers like Goldwasse.

What I most disagreeable about Goldwasse’s defense of the young is its political naivitee. If you can’t see class, race, and even gender, perhaps because you have fallen in love with a stylish, ironic detachment, it’s hard to see that the Internet might be empowering to some but not all youth. It seems pretty obvious, for example, that the online voices are more affluent than the off line voices and that as usual the affluent voices are getting the most attention.

It is equally obvious that some Johnnys and Janes are getting more help in their reading and writing and computer skills than others. Why wouldn’t the Internet reflect that too? If you take class into consideration, then in effect Goldwasse is defending the privileged. I think she’s right, too, in that the online kids are probably not in much danger of becoming the village idiots of world culture. Even their misbehaviors come from their material advantages. The poor are in a very different boat.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing

The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

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Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically – as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government – the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors – we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security – remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” – didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Naomi Wolf, The Guardian, Tuesday April 24 2007

When I was a young man– 25 or 30 years ago– we tossed around the word ‘fascist’ like it was candy. It was our favorite epithet, as useful for a grumpy friend or an unfriendly store clerk as for Reagan and his ilk. So whenever I hear the term outside of very specific historical contexts, a red flag goes up.

So I was a little suspicious when I heard about Naomi Wolf’ new book, The End of America, and the series of talks she has been giving on what she calls the closing of open societies. How do you go from a democracy, however flawed, like Germany, to fascism?

I am not certain I am persuaded by the above interview, but some of her questions are chillingly perceptive. We think we know what fascism looks like she says, only because we think of the jack-boots and violent armies of WWII. It began quite differently, of course, in a society Wolf shows we would feel was very familiar. If you check off her list of 10 steps it’s a little too close for comfort.

Wolf’s ideas suggest that electing a democratic president, as well as a more strongly democratic Congress, has a very literal meaning this time. I haven’t had the time to read the book but there’s a great series of videos where she sets out her basic argument. This seems to me exactly the right context for the next election. Somehow, I don’t think that cranky old Republican grandfather is going to help.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, War, Writing