Bishop N. T. Wright went on The Colbert Report last night, and the results weren’t what I would have expected. Stephen Colbert (as some have complained) wasn’t at his funniest, but it seems to me that that’s because he was actually interested in having a serious discussion with Bishop Wright about his book, Surprised by Hope. It’s probably just as well, since it seemed to me the good bishop got a bit testy as it was—I’m not at all sure he would have handled an all-out Stephen Colbert assault. Taken all in all, I think it’s a pretty good discussion, with some of the trademark Colbert humor and a pretty good exposition of Bishop Wright’s understanding of the concept of heaven (which I don’t agree with, though I still appreciated the clip); seeing a little of Colbert’s serious side as a man of faith, as I think we did, was a bonus.
Category Archives: Media
Tim Russert, RIP
This is a shocker. Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” and chief of their Washington bureau, is dead at 58, apparently of a heart attack. According to the New York Post, “the network allowed itself to be scooped by other media outlets as it tried to contact Russert’s wife Maureen and son Luke, who just graduated from Boston College”; it’s good to know someone had their priorities straight. Too bad the rest of the media didn’t.As Newsmax noted, “Washingtonian magazine once dubbed Russert the best journalist in town,” and he probably deserved that label as much as anyone. Raised Catholic and trained in Catholic schools, he consistently stressed the importance of both, in such venues as commencement addresses at the Columbus School of Law (part of the Catholic University of America) and Boston College, and a fundraising dinner for the Catholic schools in the Fall River diocese. Russert, like most Washington media, was well to my left, but from where I sat he always seemed worthy of respect, both professionally and personally, and someone it would have been enjoyable to know. Requiescat in pace, Tim Russert; the decline of TV news just accelerated.(Update: I had to add a link to this excellent reflection on Russert by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.)
Firefly, Tolkien, and narrative theology
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.
National Geographic‘s thirty pieces of silver
Remember the big media story a while back about the Gospel of Judas? Remember the stories about how Judas was really a good guy? It appears now that the text (which is in any case a late Gnostic text, and thus not as significant as some people wanted to make it) was seriously misrepresented—and that National Geographic is in large part to blame. It’s clear they wanted to make use of Judas for their own purposes, and that one of those purposes was to make their thirty pieces of silver off him. They wanted the media splash, they wanted headlines like “Ancient Text Says Jesus Asked Judas to Hand Him to the Romans” (that one courtesy of the Arizona Republic), and they wanted the profits that came with that, courtesy of the high-profile documentary, the DVD sales, and the book sales. And if proper scholarly procedures, and with them proper scholarly standards, went by the wayside as a result—taking a proper scholarly concern for accuracy and truth with them—then so be it.
Prince Caspian
Last night, my wife and I went out to see Prince Caspian—it was our first movie date in years (it’s nice to be able to go to the movies again)—and we loved it. I know there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about the movie vs. the book; Frederica Mathewes-Green was actually so bold as to say the movie tops the book, while other voices have, much more predictably, argued the opposite. Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson and the movie’s co-producer, said in an interview with CT that the movie “portrays probably even more strongly than the book the essential message of Prince Caspian,” even as he concedes that the book itself isn’t all that strong. I wouldn’t go as far as Mathewes-Green, who calls it “a dud”—I think she needs to read Michael Ward’s book Planet Narnia, which I’m looking forward to reading (soon, I hope)—but I do think it’s the weakest of the books; in reading it to my older girls recently, I really felt the force of the anticlimax.In light of that, while I don’t want to wade into the fray over comparing the book and the movie (in part because I don’t want to take the time to write a fully coherent review essay, just the movie-review equivalent of a notes column), I do want to offer observations in praise and support of the movie. Warning: spoilers ahead (I will pull no punches); don’t click “Read More . . .” if you haven’t seen the movie.First observation: I thought the filmmakers took the Pevensies’ dislocation and its effects far more seriously, and thought about its effects a good deal more, than Lewis did. Kudos to them on that. The introduction of the Pevensies, with Susan very much feeling a misfit and Peter getting into a fistfight because he can’t adjust back to being a kid under (often-capricious, unjust) authority after spending however many years as High King, is spot-on, and lays the groundwork for much of what follows. Going from being adults and sovereigns in Narnia back in a moment to being English schoolchildren must have been like throwing the car into reverse at freeway speed; if you understand the Pevensies as actual human beings going through that experience rather than as figures in an allegory, that would be a traumatic moment that must have had noticeable long-term effects. (To put it mildly.) I appreciate the filmmakers noticing.I especially appreciated the way they used it in character development, and especially with Peter and Susan. Peter has been struggling to adjust to not being High King, the general and warrior and statesman who is above all others under the law; for him, getting back to Narnia is, more than anything, about being back in charge, back on top. He’s not willing to defer to anyone, or even to treat anyone as an equal (including Caspian, even though Caspian knows the situation far, far better than he himself does), and he’s not willing to wait for Aslan, since to do so would be to acknowledge that even in Narnia, he is a man under authority. He doesn’t see Aslan when Lucy does because he doesn’t want to—he wants to do it himself; Lucy’s right, he has indeed forgotten who really defeated the White Witch, and he’s done so deliberately, out of pride. This drives him to put his faith in himself and his own judgment rather than in Aslan, with terrible consequences. He must be humbled, and have his faith properly oriented once again, before he can triumph; thus the capstone to his work is his surrender of his sword to Caspian, the final acknowledgement that it’s Caspian who now rules in Narnia. In that, he has learned what he needed to learn, and returns to England a second time actually ready to transition back to living there.Susan, by contrast—and by explicit, conscious (or semi-conscious) reaction against Peter—holds herself aloof from Narnia; she too, as Lucy tells her, doesn’t see Aslan until the end because she doesn’t want to. In her case, however, it’s not because she doesn’t want to submit to him, but rather because she doesn’t want to surrender to him; she’ll enjoy being in Narnia “while it lasts,” but she knows it isn’t going to and she’s guarding her heart against it. In this, I think, the filmmakers are laying the groundwork for her defection from the friends of Narnia which is revealed in The Last Battle—groundwork which is, I think, implicit in the book, but which is shown more clearly in the movie. (I might add, by the way, that I’ve never felt “Oh, wasn’t it fun when we used to pretend” was at all reasonable to have Susan say; her decision to turn her back on Narnia made sense to me, but not that she would actually forget, or come to believe it had never been real.) She refuses to fully yield to the reality of Narnia, choosing to protect herself by holding back from it; as a consequence, where Peter moves through their dislocation and comes out the other side, she pulls back from it. Where Peter has learned all Narnia can teach him, she has merely learned all she can learn.Second observation: I’ve seen complaints that the spiritual meaning of the book is lost in the movie. Now, I’m just a simple country preacher, so maybe I’m just not smart enough, but I’ve never been all that sure what the overarching spiritual meaning of the book is. It’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to reading Planet Narnia, in hopes of seeing more in Caspian than I have to this point. As far as the book’s message about faith goes, though, I think it’s actually strengthened in the movie, because Peter and Susan’s character arcs through the movie play into that. Peter’s journey is especially relevant, because he starts off explicitly putting his faith in himself rather than in Aslan, and it blows up in his face; it’s as he shifts to trusting and serving Aslan rather than himself and his own ego that things start to get better.The climax of the movie, I think, is the summoning of the White Witch. Caspian has the wits, when she actually appears, to resist taking the last step to set her loose, and then the appearance of the Pevensies brings the whole plot crashing down—except that Peter allows himself to be half-seduced by the Witch. She’s cunning enough to offer help, to present herself as an ally who would follow him, and despite the fact that he ought to know better, he’s tempted. He still doesn’t want to let go, he still wants to defeat Miraz’ army himself and take the credit, and he’s actually willing to consider allying himself with the Witch to do it (even if it means lying to himself that he can trust her). Fortunately, Edmund isn’t going to make that mistake twice, and saves the day; and at that point, Peter seems to stop, take a good look at himself and how he’s acting, and realize that he’s been putting his faith in the wrong place. From that point on, he lets Lucy have the key role, and dedicates himself to buying the time for her mission to succeed.Third observation: as Philip noted over at The Thinklings, the filmmakers do a lot more with Edmund, and give him a lot more scope to act, than Lewis did. His decisive action to save his brother (and all Narnia) from the White Witch is the high point, and I think adds another dimension to the Christian message of the story. In the Pevensies’ first visit to Narnia, after all, Peter was the golden boy, while Edmund fell to temptation as the White Witch appealed to his pride; but that very success makes Peter vulnerable this time, to the point that he nearly falls to the same temptation that ensnared his brother, while Edmund is humbler and therefore wiser. This really underscores the story’s argument for faith, I think, making it clear that pride and faith in ourselves is a false path, while humility and faith in the true God is the only real way forward. It’s telling that in the last charge, the battle cry is no longer “For Narnia!”: it’s “For Aslan!” And though it’s Peter who leads the way, and Lucy who makes the way, it’s Edmund who shows the way; and, of course, it’s Aslan who is the way.Fourth observation: I have to differ with Renaissance Guy’s complaint that “the characters just do their own thing and don’t work together much or discuss their problems to determine cooperative solutions, which definitely departs from the story Lewis wrote.” That is indeed a problem when Peter shows up and takes over—and the result is a terrible defeat. As Peter is humbled, that changes; we don’t see the discussion that produces the plan that wipes out the Telmarine cavalry at the Battle of Aslan’s How, but it’s a fairly complicated plan that depends on considerable coordinated effort and mutual trust. The fact that failure to cooperate produces disaster, while working and planning together and trusting one another produces success, is very much in line with the story Lewis wrote; and that arc is a lot more realistic, to boot. After all, trust doesn’t usually come all that easily; it has to be built up, and we have to learn (and re-learn) our need to trust one another.Fifth observation: I think the movie gives us a much better and more believeable Caspian than the book. Having him older, right on the cusp of his majority, is not only better for the plausibility of Dawn Treader (as Gresham notes in the interview), it’s better for this story as well. I’m not sure I buy Doctor Cornelius having taught him so much less about the Narnians, but it’s clear that he’s much more prepared to be king, and this is good for the story. In the book, Caspian is a fairly passive figure, taken all in all, and really too young to be what the time demands that he be; that’s why the summoning of the Pevensies is necessary. They essentially return to re-establish their own reign, serving as a sort of rightful king by proxy, then pass it on to Caspian. In the movie, Caspian is already on his own two feet, raising the Narnians as an army against the usurper; he may be a king in exile, but he is very much a king. The Pevensies are needed for the benefit of their experience (mixed blessing though that is) and of their relationship with Aslan (which in the movie is to say, primarily, Lucy’s relationship); their blessing is valuable to give Caspian and his dynasty full legitimacy in the eyes of the Old Narnians, but it isn’t necessary to make him what he already is. Indeed, Peter’s surrender of his sword at the end probably does more for Peter, enabling him to let go of being High King (after all, his reign ended abruptly; one could say he needed more closure than that), than it does for Caspian.Sixth observation: not a major point, but there are a lot more Telmarines in the movie than in the book, as there ought to be after all that time. The book gives us perhaps the smallest-scale coup I’ve ever heard tell of; in the movie, the sheer size of the task set before Caspian can be clearly seen, as it should be.That’s just a few observations; I may have more to post later, but that’s enough to be going on with now. Taken all in all, though, I have no compunction in saying that, while no doubt the filmmakers could have done better, I think we can and should be happy with the job they’ve done.
Children as buying machines
That’s one of Heather McDougal’s complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:
2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.
This isn’t a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it’s no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don’t read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you’ve never run across any of the Mouse’s cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld’s opening paragraph should give you the idea:
Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?
I wonder what Walt would think.
Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media
Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian
that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:
Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.
Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.
It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal
An unexpected gleam of light
I don’t know anything more about it than this link—the show isn’t my cup of tea—but apparently Desperate Housewives decided to encourage the church to evangelism. Or something. One of the main characters, by the sound of things a woman who’s never given the church a serious thought in her life, decides to go to church; predictably (both for Hollywood and, let’s admit, for real life), the doing is harder than the saying, but despite that, she carries through. It sounds like a serious treatment of Christian faith, taken all in all, and an episode that was unafraid to point out something important: there are questions that we as human beings need answered that we aren’t capable of answering.It also sounds like a salutary reminder to Christians of just how alien the church is to those who stand outside its walls. That’s something that’s always been true, really, but in our culture it’s much more obviously so than it used to be; which isn’t entirely bad, but it means that if we’re going to be serious about evangelism—which we need to be, because there are a lot of folks out there who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ—we’ll have to take that alienness into account, and be willing to answer questions seriously and respectfully. We can’t assume people will understand us and how we talk and how we do things, because all too often, they won’t.Which doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that we need to stop being alien; I think by now we’ve pretty well demonstrated that that sort of approach doesn’t work. The truth is, as Charlie Peacock pointed out, ours is a strange language; but it’s strange for the same reason it’s powerful, because “it’s haunted by an even stranger truth.” We can’t assume people understand it, but we can’t set it aside, either; instead, we need to take the time and effort to teach it, because there are folks out there who need to learn it.HT: grains of truth
Respect: the lubricant of good politics
This happens to be a Web ad for John McCain, but that’s not the important thing about it; the only thing that makes it a McCain ad is that it was Sen. McCain’s campaign that released it. I think that fact speaks well of him, but this exact same ad could be released, unchanged except for the substitution of new images of a different candidate, for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Indeed, I could wish that both their campaigns would do that, as long as they then sought to campaign in accordance with the philosophy articulated in this ad.
The basic point is that we should feel free to argue, even fiercely, over our disagreements, but that we should do so with respect, remembering that our fellow citizens aren’t our enemies, but are our compatriots—we’re all on the same side. We need to learn to argue as friends and allies who are all seeking the good of our common nation, rather than as political opponents seeking to vanquish each other. (For help in doing so, see Timely Tips for Having a Civil Political Conversation.)
Honor, reputation, and sacrifice
I wrote a while back, with reference to John McCain, about the difference between honor and reputation, arguing that Sen. McCain knew the difference even if the New York Times didn’t (and presumably still doesn’t). Now Sen. McCain’s campaign has released a rather extraordinary Web ad which, inter alia, proves that he does indeed know that difference well. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this ad is that it’s all about how he learned that difference—and that it’s unsparing about just how much he had to learn, and how much growing up he had to do, before he went to war. He’s not pulling any punches about the kind of person he was before his stay in the “Hanoi Hilton,” and I respect him even more for that.