Monthly Archives: April 2009

First reflections on the last few days

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I’m back home from the Gospel Coalition‘s 2009 National Conference (henceforth GCNC), Entrusted with the Gospel:  Living the Vision of 2 Timothy, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about that.  On the one hand, I wish it could have been longer.  The presenters were, as one would expect, phenomenal, and I’ll have some things to say about the various messages over the next little while; as well, I had some wonderful conversations over the course of the conference.  In particular, I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting Jared Wilson in person and talking with him a bit, which I thoroughly enjoyed—it’s no surprise to find that he’s as much a man of the gospel and as appealing a person face to face as he is in print, but that’s no less a joy for all that—and of running into (via pure God appointment) Dave Moody, one of my classmates at Regent and also a fellow pastor in the PC(USA), whom I always appreciated but hadn’t seen in years.  Put all together, it was wonderfully refreshing and energizing, and I do wish it could keep going.

On the other hand, I already have more than I could absorb in a month of Sundays, and if itdid keep going, I’d overload my processing capacity before much longer.  It’s very human, confronted with a pleasure (and the pleasures of this conference were sharp and deep), to want to prolong it—but deep pleasures are a heady wine indeed, and not only is it true that the body can only absorb so much, the spirit can only absorb so much, before it falls to staggering.

It’s worth noting, though, that I don’t mean this in quite the way that many probably assume.  At one of the workshops I attended, the presenter spoke of “information overload,” but that’s not really what I’m talking about; I didn’t feel that at all.  Yes, there was a lot of information, and a lot of ideas, and I’m sure that I’ll spend a fair bit of time thinking about them, and probably writing about some of them, and that over time they’ll make their way into sermons; but I never felt like my head was overstuffed.  I told someone Tuesday night that I felt like I’d been stretched in several directions—but it wasn’t my mind that felt stretched, it was my soul.

I think, actually, that the conference served to illustrate a point made by Ligon Duncan, that preaching is not merely information transfer—that while certainly information is transferred, that takes place in order to serve the broader purpose.  The principal point of preaching is that God has chosen to work through it for our transformation; Jesus meets us in his word, and his Holy Spirit operates through it to grow and change us, to the glory and pleasure of God the Father.  What I experienced these last few days wasn’t primarily intellectual and informational, though I certainly learned a great deal, and that in itself will take a lot of time and thought to process; rather, it was holistic, God working on my soul in the fullest-orbed sense of that word as the whole of my life in and before him.  Like I said, I feel . . . stretched, and in some ways I didn’t expect, and am still feeling out.  This is a good thing.  God is good.

Crown and throne

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Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Worship isn’t about our experience, but that doesn’t mean our experience is meaningless; and I will tell you that standing to sing that Tuesday night with 3300 brothers and sisters in Christ, all of us singing at the top of our lungs, gave me chills.  I have a sense of what it means that the Lord is enthroned on the praises of his people, because I could feel it, just a little.

All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail throughout eternity.

The Invitation

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(Isaiah 55:1-5; John 4:7-14, John 6:32-40)

Salvation has come. The Servant of the Lord has come to be God’s covenant with his people and the light of his salvation to all the world, and he has accomplished his purpose; he has submitted to death in order to win his victory over it by his resurrection, and there is no enemy that can overcome him or undo what he has done. He has won his victory, bringing reconciliation for those estranged from God, and now he extends that victory to all who will accept it and follow him. What remains to be done?

What remains is for Israel and the nations to respond; and so from proclamation of God’s great victory and its blessings, the prophet turns to invitation. He doesn’t actually begin there, though; that first “come” is something of a mistranslation. The best translation I can think of—Caroline, would you do the honors?—Thanks, that’s it. Of course, you can’t put Caroline’s whistle on the printed page, but something like “Hey, you!” would also work decently well. Isaiah doesn’t actually start with the invitation, because he has to get people’s attention first, and as we’ve seen, the people of Israel were past masters at missing the point. If there were such a thing as a Ph.D. in being oblivious, if you could get a doctorate in ignoring the obvious, these folks would have earned it with honors. After all this time, they still didn’t pay enough attention or listen carefully enough to God to understand their true situation and what was really missing in their lives, or what God was doing about it; they’re like people walking through a street market so focused on the guy down the way selling fake Rolexes cheap that they miss the person who’s selling what they really, actually need.

And so Isaiah begins by tapping his people on the shoulder and shouting in their collective ear: “Listen to me! Look up, and pay attention! Each and every one of you who thirsts—yes, that means you—come to the waters. You don’t have any money, but that’s all right—come, buy and eat.” It’s an extraordinary appeal. Some of those to whom the prophet called knew their need; more, no doubt, did not—but Isaiah doesn’t trim his message to suit them. That’s a mistake a lot of churches make—as deliberate strategy, not by accident; it’s a very popular way to build a church—of tailoring the message of the church to what people think they need, and what they’ve been trained by the culture to want and to expect. That way, you may give people good ideas, but you won’t give them good news; you might bring a lot of people in, but you’ll send them right back out unchanged. The true gospel message, as Jesus himself noted, winnows its audience, because it’s for those who have ears to hear—which is to say, for those who recognize their true need: their thirst for his living water, and their hunger for the bread of life. Those who aren’t willing to admit their thirst, whether to others or even to themselves, hear the prophet’s call and walk on by. That’s well enough with him; those who are willing to listen will stay, and they are his proper audience.

What he offers them is remarkable. In the first place, you’ll note, he doesn’t say “Come take,” as if all this were simply being given away; that might stir suspicion that they aren’t worth the price, or else that they come with significant strings attached, but that isn’t the case. Indeed, this food and drink must be purchased, for they come at a very real price—it’s just that that price has already been paid by someone else. What remains is for people to complete the purchase by accepting the price paid, and to receive in return everything that’s necessary for life: not even just water to drink—significant as that was by itself in the arid Near East—but also wine and milk, and though this doesn’t come through in our English translations, that word “buy” was in fact a specific word for the purchase of grain or bread, so food is included here as well.

Now, that’s quite an offer—everything you need has already been purchased for you; you just need to pick it up at the checkout!—so why would you turn it down? In particular, why would you reject such an offer in order to go spend real money, which you’ve earned by your own hard work, on something that isn’t real and won’t satisfy? That’s Isaiah’s question, and it doesn’t have a good answer. Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t have any answer; there are reasons why we do that, they just aren’t good ones. A lot of it, I think, is that we want what we want, and we don’t want to believe that what we want isn’t what’s best for us. It takes both trust and humility to accept that what we want really isn’t bread, that it really won’t nourish our lives, and that we need to learn to want what God gives us instead; and both trust and humility come hard for us. But they are, I think, the two keys to the Christian life, to living a life that pleases God; they’re the two first lessons we have to learn.

Thus Isaiah says, “Give ear”—literally, “incline your ear”; we might say, “dig the wax out of your ears and listen”—“and come to me; hear, that your soul may live.” That word “soul” is the Hebrew nefesh—oddly enough, the most basic meaning of it is the neck—and it doesn’t mean “soul” in the sense that we use that word; rather, it denotes the whole person, body and spirit both. The idea here is that what the world gives us is essentially junk food, and hurts us both spiritually and physically, while if we go to God, he becomes our food, and he gives us what we need and what is good for us—physically as well as spiritually. As you can see, Isaiah’s drawing a bright line here: the only way to find real life is in God, which requires listening carefully to his prophet and doing what you hear. Anything else is “not bread,” it’s false food, and ultimately will not satisfy because it cannot give real life.

For those who will listen and come, God promises an eternal covenant, “my faithful love promised to David.” Now, “faithful love” is again the word hesed, which we’ve talked about a number of times, including last week; of particular significance in this case is the fact that hesed is a covenant word. God is saying, in essence, I made a covenant of love with David, I made a commitment to love him and to bless him and his descendants, and if you’ll answer my invitation, I’ll include you in that.

How? Well, here we have the fusion—it’s the first time this is made explicit—of the Servant of the Lord with the Messiah, the Son of David. You see, in verse 4, there’s the reference back to David himself, the declaration, “I have made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander of the peoples”; but how has that happened? The key to understanding this is that in verse 5, the “you” is singular—this verse isn’t addressed to the same people as verses 1-3, it’s addressed to one person. Specifically, it’s addressed to the Messiah, the Son of David—who is, in this context, the Servant of the Lord. It’s to the Servant that God says, “Surely you will summon nations you don’t know, and peoples who don’t know you will run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.” It’s in the Servant, the heir and fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to David, that we are brought into God’s covenant with David, that the covenant relationship God had with him and the promises that go along with that become available to all of us.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that this invitation and this promise are offered to people who were already outwardly members of the people of God. The nations aren’t excluded here, to be sure—the invitation is given to all who are thirsty—but there’s no explicit summons to them, either, and the invitation is framed in terms of what God did in and for David. The point, one which Isaiah’s been making all along, is clear: though Israel has heard the law, and has heard the prophets, and they have all kinds of head knowledge about God, that hasn’t translated for them into any kind of real relationship with God. They consider him their God because they’re Israelites and he’s the God of Israel, and doesn’t everybody in this country worship God?—but many of them haven’t answered his invitation, and maybe haven’t even really heard it before. They haven’t learned that there’s more to their faith than just being a faithful templegoer.

Indeed, there’s far more. The challenge to us of Isaiah’s expansive invitation is—do we still need to hear it? Have we really accepted it, or are we no different than the Israelites? I’m not coming to this as a Baptist who thinks you need an altar call every week so that the saved stay saved; you only need to accept the invitation once, and then get along about living it out. But in this country, it’s very easy to be a Christian, and that means there are a lot of folks who are outwardly Christian for all the wrong reasons, with no inward reality, no real faith in Christ. The church has to shoulder a lot of the blame for that, of course, because there are a lot of churches in this country that don’t give people God’s invitation, that don’t challenge people with the call of the gospel; it’s easier not to, after all, easier just to give people what they already know they want to hear. Even for the church, it’s easier to serve junk food. But underneath and through it all, God’s invitation still goes out: “Come, all of you who hunger and thirst; come to me, that you may live.” And we need to ask ourselves: have we really done that, are we really living in God? Or do we still need to accept it?

The temptation and peril of theologized politics

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The question of the proper interrelationship between religion and politics in this country is a complex one.  There are those who argue that, essentially, there should be no relationship between them—that religion should be kept rigidly separate from politics; but as I wrote last month,

There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.

That doesn’t mean, however, that an uncritical fusion of the two is a good thing, either; as I also noted in that post, that tends to result in religion becoming the handmaiden of politics. When our faith becomes “a tool to advance a political agenda,” and as such is no longer “free to critique and correct that agenda,” what we have is in fact a betrayal of Christian faith; we have the political heresy that I labeled “theologized politics.”

Now, it should be obvious why politicians encourage such a thing and seek to make every use of it they can; the short-term political benefits are undeniable.  This approach essentially seeks to mobilize Christianity, with its adherents and their assets, as a political force to accomplish the political purposes of one party or the other. The goal is to deploy the church (or as much of it as possible, at any rate) as foot soldiers for the party in this or that political struggle. It’s an effective way to rouse people to active political participation, and to win not merely votes but enthusiastic and committed support. The theological side of the equation, however, is problematic, because the political side is primary; this results in a purely instrumental view of Christian faith, one which “make[s] men treat Christianity as a means,” as C. S. Lewis put it. It moves us from valuing social justice (or any other good) because God demands that of us, which is a good thing, to “the stage where [we value] Christianity because it may produce social justice.” This is a serious problem, because

[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.

The problem with theologizing politics is that it can be a good political strategy in the short term, but in the long term it has a toxic effect on both the church and the political process. One negative consequence for the church should be obvious: if Christians come to value their faith primarily for the excellent arguments it offers for their chosen political agenda, they will value it less for everything else—and this is not good for the church. Beyond this, it’s bad for our spiritual health, in that it’s essentially a replacement of true faith with something else. It’s bad for the community life of the church, because that “something else” is something outside the church, and fundamentally distinct from it. It could well also be financially bad for the church: if the primary goal is the advancement of a political agenda, then contributions should primarily go to that agenda, rather than to the local congregation. And finally, it’s bad for the witness of the church, because when the church becomes identified with one party, then those who don’t support that party will view the church as the enemy and respond to it with hostility.

The toxic effect of this approach on our political system in this country may be less apparent, but it’s still very real. The problem is that good politics requires a mix of passion and dispassion. One must care about one’s own positions and believe in one’s own ideas enough to want to articulate them and fight for them; one must be passionate enough about the problems in this country and committed enough to one’s proposed solutions to be willing to put the work in to address those problems and implement those solutions. At the same time, however, one must have the necessary dispassion to be able to step back and evaluate those ideas and solutions when they aren’t working; to be able to disengage from one’s own positions enough to consider what may be learned from someone else’s; and to be able to work with those with whom one disagrees, to come to compromises when necessary, and to make common cause when the time is right. When religion is brought uncritically into the political mix, only as a way of supporting one’s own positions (and not as a means of critiquing them), it is excellent at stirring people to passion, but not so helpful in creating the dispassion necessary to balance that passion. The result is something which has been aptly called “the politics of inflammation.”

At this point, again, someone might argue that the solution is to remove religion from politics; and again, the response needs to be made that the true solution is not to break that connection, but to repair it. What is needed is to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

Photo © 2008 Son of Groucho.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Sarah Palin for the Hoosier unborn

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I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in.  So here’s the next best thing: complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele’s introduction:

Note on building a movement

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Quoth Robert Stacy McCain,

So if you’re a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who’s waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you’re part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you’ve got to become an activist. You’ve got to organize.

Create a movement, and don’t worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.

Wise words.  One thing though, Mr. McCain:  We’re doing it.  We’re doing it one flash at a time.

Update:  David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.

One thumb up, one thumb down

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I’ve been meaning to post on the recent pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama and its aftermath, for a couple reasons.  First, President Obama deserves credit for giving the go-ahead for military action; I believe the appropriate response to pirates, terrorists, and anyone else who would hold innocent lives in pawn for their own benefit is best illustrated by the Israeli raid on Entebbe:  no mercy, no quarter, no hesitation.

But second, that requires one other thing:  no negotiation.  Here, in my opinion, is a major black mark on this administration; to first offer to negotiate and then strike was a deeply problematic move, for reasons that Cornell’s William Jacobson lays out:

There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates. One is the Israeli model of no negotiation. The only thing to be negotiated is the life of the hostage taker. Money, free passage, and other benefits are not on the table. The purpose of this approach is to deter further hostage takers, even if it means the death of the hostage.

The other model is the model of negotiating over almost any benefit, as long as the hostage is freed safely. This is the model Obama initially appeared to follow with the pirates. But if one believes the spin coming out of the White House, then negotiation was a ruse to buy time.

The problem is not in this case, which ended successfully, but in the next hostage taking situation. If one is going to follow a negotiation approach, the trust of the hostage takers in the negotiation process is key. If hostage takers believe negotiation is a ruse, then the hostage is in more danger. Words cannot be just words in a negotiation.

So negotiating as a ruse is the worst of all alternatives. It does not have the deterrent effect of the Israeli approach, or the hostage-safety effect of the negotiation approach.

This point was actually illustrated quite nicely on last Friday’s episode of NUMB3RS, for those who follow that show.  The likely result of this approach by the administration will be what the pirates are already threatening:  escalation.  This tactic worked, this time, but it won’t work again—and as a consequence of its use, the pirates are much more likely to preemptively kill any Americans they take.

The ironic thing about this is that, all in all, the pirates are probably the best allies we have in the Horn of Africa.

Piracy is not a strategic threat to the US, it is a big problem for Europe and Asia but not for us. It wasn’t until Asia and Europe realized we weren’t going to solve this problem for them that they stepped up themselves.

Terrorism in Somalia has long driven Navy operations off that coast. On one side, we have a high visibility piracy problem that does not threaten the interests of the United States directly, at all, and our only current national interest regarding the piracy issue is one man with 4 guys in an orange boat 200 yards off the bow of the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96). There is a national economic interest, but the impact to date has not risen to a level that has created a serious concern among global leaders to the point they are willing to commit serious resources toward solving the problem.

On the other side of the Somalia problem, we have the terror problem no one else in the world is interested in doing anything about. And in the middle is the reality that while both the pirates and terrorists are operating in the same black market space, the pirates and terror groups don’t like each other.

Then there is another problem. What if we support a government strong enough to remove piracy, but too weak to do anything about the terrorism cells? Piracy is what has the international community involved in the problems of Somalia right now, if that goes away, we are left with the bigger threat to our national interests and no one internationally to help.

In other words, the pirates aren’t hurting us that much, but they are hurting the Somali terrorists that are a much bigger threat to us.  I don’t like the idea that we might be better off working with them than fighting them—allying ourselves with thugs has never worked out all that well in the past—but from a Realpolitik point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense.  Really, who else is there?  That being the case, even if we leave that aside (as, morally, I believe we should), it does still suggest that our focus in Somalia should continue to be where it has been:  not on fighting pirates, but on stopping terrorists.

HT (for the last article quoted):  Smitty

Political machines hate reformers

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That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It’s the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it’s the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it’s the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it’s the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama’s child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don’t like reformers. Now, I don’t happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven’t blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it’s possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn’t. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn’t threaten the machine—he’s of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn’t, and doesn’t, and can’t, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour’s excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn’t; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He’s still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski’s part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you’re keeping score, that’s twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron’s bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox’s motto: “I don’t give a —- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine’s biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn’t likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn’t apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state’s senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She’d worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren’t above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn’t had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign’s officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton’s seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who’d supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn’t appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she’s willing to work with Democrats, but she’s as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she’s been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys’ club and the perks and procedures to which they’re accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state’s politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about “speaking truth to power,” they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that’s where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don’t think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we’re seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an “independent free press”; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they’re so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she’s been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say “almost” because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it’s why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she’s spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they’re the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don’t believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn’t up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin’s visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.

Seven stanzas for Easter

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I’m not sure why I didn’t think to post this earlier; John Updike is best known for his prose, but this poem is a jewel.

Seven Stanzas for Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.