The Revolution Was Televised

I've been reading books by writers who lived in autocratic countries and this is from Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape. He describes the first indications of Romanian regime change in December 1989.

The first nationwide sign of trouble was booing at a Nicolai Ceausescu speech broadcast over state radio and television, which technicians tried to cover up with canned applause before "going to black." Ceausescu then issued his "shoot to kill" order to local party bosses by closed circuit TV. His regime's public broadcast were limited to two hours per night, and consisted entirely of propaganda; at his trial, Ceausescu said that he didn't want to tire out the people. A few days later, with perfect ironic symmetry that testifies either to the neutrality of the medium or to history's black sense of humor, Ceausescu's own execution was aired over and over on the screens he once controlled...Television literally woke up the country...It was television unlike anything ever seen in the West, an outpouring of images that startled not just Romanians but the world...The extraordinary thing about what Romanians and the world (via CNN and French Television) were seeing on their screens was not just the sudden news and field reports, but the open invitation to the Romanian people to come and speak freely. Consequently, mobs of people milled in front of the tanks outside Studio Four, clamoring to get in with messages ranging from the profoundly serious to the profoundly silly...When the flow of people slowed, the twenty-four-hour station aired things unseen and unheard-of in Romania: MTV videos stolen from satellites, and Italian and German soft porn. Romanians saw bare breasts on television for the first time in history...The National Salvation Front of Romania--prompted by their rapt audience--instituted a series of reforms that often seemed improvised right in the studios: freedom of speech, opening of the borders, release of all political prisoners, five-day work week, landgrants to peasants, abolition of the death penalty, popular elections in the spring...For a time, Romanian television was the central nervous system of the revolution. Gil Scott-Heron was, it seems, wrong when he said, "The revolution will not be televised." This revolution was entirely televised.

 

 

 

 

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable. 

I just like it

I've enjoyed comic books since I was a child. Hardly a revolutionary or unique statement, you can find any number of blogs and websites devoted to reading and appreciating them. You probably grew up with them too. But I have a special set of memories for the comics of the 60s and 70s, when I was most impressionable. They say the music you loved when you were 14 (David Bowie, in my case) is the music you'll love the rest of your life.

Because I read not just the comics of that period but reprints of earlier comics, strips, pulps, I enjoy the mystery around the Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. The mystery comes from the sense I get reading a panel and trying to work out who is being referred to, who is being depicted, what situation is being faced. It's a little harder (and thus more thrilling) to me because most of his references are from British comics and media, which I'm not always familiar with. When I was a tween, I bought a stack of Punch magazines from the 70s, and tried understanding the references and satires of political figures. It was the progenitor of what Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson wanted to make Spy for 80s and 90s America (and to a large degree succeeded). But what I mostly understood from Punch were the comics.

A compendium like this is wonderful for figuring out who is who, what image is being suggested, how an otherwise dissociative series of events (say, the voyages of Gulliver and the fascism of Big Brother) might lead to one another. It's as if Moore took The Avenger from the pulps, images from New Yorker cartoons, Major Hoople, Egghead, Angio Maggio, Dorothy Gale, Richard Diamond, Percy Dovetonsils, and slammed them all together in William Burroughs' Freeland. (Here too, I loved Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life whose family tree of the Wold Newton universe was an early example I devoured with pleasure.)

All told, I'm sorry to see that the series is ending, but all good things of course. And this essay is a good wrap-up of the wrap-up.

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

258 candles-day 121

When I was younger I saw a movie on the noon TV broadcast in Boston, where I was living, that's stayed with me all these years. It was called The Next Voice You Hear and starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). It wasn't a particularly good movie, just one of those you'd probably call "quiet" and "unassuming." Despite its plot, that one evening God starts speaking on the radio, it didn't have a really big message.

Anyway, this is what I thought of today when someone drew my attention to a video by Rabbi David Aaron, Hearing the Voice of God. The 1950 Next Voice didn't have or couldn't use the language that Aaron has but the message, at least as I remember it, is similar: God doesn't speak to us but speaks through us. This is, I think, as profound a message as anything can be, and needs to be remembered as we slog through the rest of this election.

would Jesus eat with Josh Duggar?

This is not an attempt to investigate or even to come to grips with what Josh Duggar has done. I am not a person who watches reality shows, let alone watches religious reality shows--with the exception of early episodes of Amish Mafia; that shit was dope--and I have no dog in the fight over whether companies should or should not continue to sponsor their show. If they do, it will make absolutely no difference to anyone; if they don't, the show will fade from memory and, again, make absolutely no difference to anyone.

What this is is an attempt to answer a question I came across on the Facebook page of a progressive religious group I belong to. A correspondent wrote that he had been reading 1 Corinthians and quoted from it: "But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sisterc but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people." Then the poster asked for people's thoughts on the passage in relation to the disclosures about Josh Duggar.

There were many thoughtful and considered responses, most of them very long and complex. But it struck me that, in its refutation of most of the synoptic messages of Jesus, Paul was denying one of the very things that made the synoptic Jesus so different: that is, that he would associate with people who were, exactly as Paul describes, "sexually immoral, or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, [or] a drunkard or swindler." The Jesus we read about in the gospels, whether he is the historical Jesus or a composite of many Jesus-figures or the creation of an especially gifted writer, is unique among the religous people we know of at that time and place, not only allowing these sinners to eat and be with him, but in some cases actively seeking them out, and in the case of the woman caught in adultery putting himself at risk to save her.

Now the traditional theological response in favor of keeping this division, thereby accepting and building upon the Paul command, is that the difference is that the people Jesus associated with had repented of their sinful lives and so were "worthy" of being with him. But that certainly isn't the case with, for instance, the woman caught in adultery: she's had no prior association with Jesus we're told of, and while it's possible in the small world of First Century Jerusalem that the woman knew of Jesus' reputation, he wouldn't have known her. And while it's also true she repents of her past at the end of the tale, that is after Jesus places his own reputaiton, and possibly his life, in question by responding as he does.

So it doesn't matter, in this reading, whether Josh Duggar repents his actions. The Jesus of the gospel stories, if he were asked to sit and eat with him, would have done so. Like Jesus, I also believe in the essential dignity of every person, and while I haven't been asked, I could do no less.

the robin hood bandit of walton's mountain

This is one of my favorite Christmas movie moments: the scene in which the audience discovers that Charlie Snead, friend to the impoverished Walton clan, is the Robin Hood bandit the local sheriff seeks. I remember quite distinctly watching The Homecoming on TV in 1971, the first year it was shown and before all the 70s hoopla about The Waltons, and freezing the image of Charlie, singing "She'll be Comin Round the Mountain," driving one of the few cars on the mountain through the snow, and looking behind him into the back seat to admire the number of stolen turkeys resting there. It was, for me, a humbling moment that was difficult to process: stealing and putting oneself at risk only to give the stolen item to someone else, maybe even a stranger. I can't find a video of that moment but I have located a promo that includes Charlie thumping one of his revolution turkeys on the Walton' s table. For me it's a lovely reminder of the moment a concept became important to me.

it's the little, safe things

I have caught myself, despite my better intentions, falling quite in like with a little-known television series that my local public station plays in the 20 minute spot between other series. It's called The Cafe and the premise is that...well, you can just as easily read this Wikipedia post about it. And perhaps understand what it is that attracts me by this short scene:

I enjoy it, but what's more important to me is the small, homely (in the sense of something that is comforting and small as one's experience of home) artistic endeavors I come to appreciate especially during the winter.

These run the gamut from comic strips


to recent music

to music from my childhood

to very, very stupid TV shows.


I think what it is is that they're little things. Small examples of tameness that manuever under my defenses and tickle something that, otherwise, I'm loathe to admit: I like consistency and safety. And wailing harmonicas.

"I know the way out"

I've used this story several times in sermons and essays. It's an amalgam of two stories I really like, the parable of the good Samaritan and this story from The West Wing. It's an accurate reflection of what I see as our responsibility to one another--to be on the lookout for the needs of others--and of my personal responsibility. As I mention in the original sermon this is from, I'm not as good a storyteller as the Luke writer, so I've added detail.

Guy’s walking along the Red Cedar Trail and he’s not looking where he’s going and he falls down along one of those spots where the ground is soft and he slides almost to the river.  He’s pretty banged up, he thinks, maybe a broken arm, maybe his leg is at an angle a healthy leg oughtn’t to be.  He’s laying there a long time.  When he wakes up he notices the slope is almost perfectly sheer and even if he could get up, about halfway up the sand breaks away and he’d be right back down at the river, hurt even worse.

            Dude comes by.  He’s a local teacher.  He’s a good man, responsible, keeps his commitments.  Guy down by the river’s edge, he sees him, waves one pitiable hand at him, shouts, “Hey, brother, can you help me up out of here?”  But the teacher, he’s a jogger and this is his running time.  He’s got his headphones on, doesn’t even hear this guy, he’s not looking down, doesn’t see him waving.  He goes on past.

            Guy’s getting pretty nervous.  It’s going to be dark sooner than later and it’s late in the year.  This could be bad. 

            Another dude goes by, local minister.  He’s a pretty good person, too—everyone in this town is an okay person.  Guy down at the river’s edge waves and says, in a weaker voice, “Hey, pastor, can you help me up out of here?”  But the minister, he’s got tomorrow’s sermon due and he’s taking a walk to clear his head.  His mind’s full of what he’s going to say and how he’s going to say it and he doesn’t hear the guy either.  He just walks on.

            Now the guy’s getting really worried.  It’s about quarter to seven and the cold is already creeping up his spine.  He might live through the night from his wounds, but he’s going to be exposed to hypothermia and if he does have broken limbs he’ll probably go into shock and that can be fatal.  He cries a little.

            One of the local kids comes by.  Guy down at the river recognizes him.  He used to hang out down by the Acoustic where he sold weed to the college kids.  He got picked up by the cops, cleaned out, spent some time in prison, got his act together.  He’s been out a couple months, has a hard time finding a steady job, the story is he’s been turning tricks to live day to day. 

      Guy down by the river practically whispers up, “Help.”

            Kid hears him, looks over the edge down at him, yells, “Can you move?”

            Guy tests himself out.  He can move.  It hurts like hell and he’s going to have some nasty bruises and a scar, but turns out nothing’s broken.  He crawls to his feet and says, “Yeah, I can.”

            Kid slides down the cliff to where the guy is.  Guy’s thinking, “Oh man, this kid’s going to rob me!”  He whimpers, “I said get me some help, now we’re both stuck down here.”

            Kid puts his arm around the guy and holds him so the guy can stand and walk.  Gingerly, painfully, but he can walk.  Kid says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.”

suzi quatro in san remo

I heard this song yesterday on my drive home and was reminded of this poem from a creative writing course I taught four years ago. It was an example of a type of poem I asked the class to write: a memory of a celebrity. The format was one I followed from whatever model we were using (from the 2009 Pushcart Prize collection). I rather liked it and am reminded, in rereading it, of the series of poems in the collection Famous Persons We Have Known by my friend Rick Robbins. 

SUZI QUATRO IN SANREMO

 I can’t get her out of my head.  Like an

            ice pick jabbed over and over

                        into my hippocampus, she’s

burrowed into my consciousness.  Those lips,

            that mullet framing a face already running to fat.

                        Years later latex pants make

sausages of her legs.  She’s

            the girl of my dreams, circa 1974, now

                        in early 1980 singing her biggest hit, her worst song,

duetting on Italian television with a guy whose muttonchops

            are probably more familiar with English

                        than he is.  But

there she is, little girl face, this voice that can

            burnish steel, can melt the paint off a car,

                        siren song of so many coke dreams, hash reveries.

Drummers are the “Q” keys of rock music. 

I would be her drummer, fold her cellulite

in, zip up that latex.

pissing in our faces

the response by a conservative audience to wolf blitzer's question at last night's republican candidate debate to ron paul--"congressman, are you saying society should just let [a hypothetical coma victim who has refused to buy medical insurance] die?": shouts of "yeah!" and "let him die!" and applause--absolutely freezes my soul. to be fair to paul, while he simply did not answer the question and didn't seem to have any clue how to answer it without contradicting his own healthcare plan, he also seemed taken aback by the response.

these are the catcalls of the anonymous crowds that gather where someone teeters on a ledge thinking about ending it all. they have nothing at stake in the matter and are interested only in entertainment, wagering that the wouldbe suicide might be less likely to kill himself if there are people insulting him but if he does, they'll be able to say they were there. that's the response of internet trolls and drunken fratboys, hangerson that want to appear tough and outside social niceties. theoretically, a debate audience ought to be made up of individuals who are really interested in the way society functions. but there is obviously a point that we've reached where the 2 groups, usually seen as separate and at odds, have become a single, nasty, meanspirited mob.

I hasten to point out this is a single, apparently focussed group, one that's presumably representative of the new, more conservative, less social right wing of the republican party. destpite their presence at the debate as representatives, I don't think they necessarily represent most republicans or conservatives. but I cannot imagine a similar reaction to the hypothetical at a meeting of obama supporters, liberals, or even late 60s dixiecrats. it is beyond the pale. such a response by an audience of made up of a group seeking political legitimacy and the presidency pisses in all our faces.

"with hosea from the right..."

for my midterm exam in older testatment prophets, I was given the assignment to come up with how I would introduce a 3-week adult religious education forum on the prophets, focusing on a specific 1 to present at the 1st meeting. I had 2 hours to write it up, which is why it's longer than my usual essays--as I mentioned to a classmate last night, I didn't have time to write fewer than 5 pages. (I had to cut out, in the interests of keeping it fewer than 6 pages, the 2 paragraphs making more explicit the analogy between hosea and pat buchanan; I also cut it out because I think if buchanan were to read this, he might be flattered by the analogy, and I don't want to flatter pat buchanan.)

“CROSSFIRE”, WITH HOSEA

[My context: The forum I’ve been asked to teach is centered on a mid-sized Unitarian Universalist congregation in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. As such, the class will be composed of people who are mostly retired, primarily from teaching or engineering backgrounds, with a smattering of younger adults with small children. Almost all of the participants will be white with a few younger Hispanics. Some identify as Christians. All will have had at least some college and consider themselves literate and informed. All will see the Bible as a form of literature but not all will see it as relevant to their lives or to contemporary society. All will have access to an NRSV or NIV Bible and I’ll furnish other texts they may thumb through. This is my introductory lecture.]

The world is full of frightening things. The earth quakes, tsunamis wash out whole towns and families; tornadoes uproot communities as well as individuals; floods engulf coastal areas and people too poor or too frail to evacuate are devastated; regimes that people have learned to live under for generations shift suddenly, it seems overnight, leaving chaos and fear in charge; volcanoes erupt, spilling lava and blotting out the sun with ash, oil leaks and decimates whole bioregions, blizzards freeze animals and people and entire economies, and when it happens everything we have ever known and trusted and counted on is smashed within moments so we don’t know what is up and down, who we can trust or where to turn for solace.

If we’re bent toward Buddhism, we reflect that being alive is suffering and our suffering is no more or less important than anyone else’s and no more or less is asked of us than is asked of anyone else. If we’re bent toward Hinduism, we recognize that this is simply the last turn of the wheel for us in this life and take comfort in our having lived lives that allow us to return for another go. If we’re bent toward paganism, we accept that this is the result of massive disturbances in the ecosystem, some of which we had a part in, and the result of our suffering may be a lesson for others. If we’re bent toward an Abraham religion—Judaism, Christianity or Islam—we may see the hand of a mysterious God that has decided, for reasons we may never understand, to touch down in this way at this time in this place.

The ancient Jews, from whom the Older Testament of Abraham religions derive, looked to their prophets, their seers, their men and women of God, to explain why such things occurred to them. After all, weren’t they the beloved of the Creator? Didn’t they benefit from the covenant with God which lay out in legal terms what God gave to God’s people and the fidelity God’s people returned? Unitarian Universalism is a result, however we might like to deny or ignore it, of Abraham thinking, for good and for bad, and as a result looking to the prophets and their answers resonates with us as it did for the people of ancient Israel. In this course we’re going to examine how the prophets responded to the physical, social and political upheavals of their times so to keep the people faithful to God at the same time recognizing that real people were being hurt and killed in real ways. Tonight we’ll look at what a prophet was in general and at one prophet, Hosea, in particular.

When we talk about someone today as a “prophet,” we generally mean that she sees the future somehow, not necessarily in specifics but maybe in broad strokes. Brother R.G. Stair of the Overcomer Church in South Carolina thinks of himself as this kind of prophet, or Madame Helena Blavatsky of Theosophy or Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant. Ohio Representative John Boehner was called a political prophet when the midterm elections of last year swept many conservative Republicans into major offices. We call speculators like Jim Cramer economic prophets when their predictions about minor blips and dips on the stock market pan out and charlatans when they don’t. Prophets are people who’ve already seen the movie and know how it’s going to end.

But that isn’t what prophets in the sense that the term is used in the Older Testament means. “Older” and “Newer,” by the way, are the preferred terms in contemporary Biblical scholarship since they’re less suggestive of out-datedness or replacement. Prophets, from what we understand of them, had a complex relationship with their communities. Some, like Samuel, prophesied for individuals for a fee in addition to their more communally based prophecies; some, like Elijah, were marginalized members living on the forbearance of the community, while others were in privileged positions of authority, like the female prophet Huldah or Isaiah; some were members or founders of schools, like Elisha. What they shared in common was an ability, not to foresee the future, but to read the signs of the present.

While some were called “seers” and others called nabi “speaker, messenger,” what they did was to pay close attention to events, reflect on the meaning of those events, and then explain those events for the community. Their role was political—Martin Buber even calls them “theo-politicians”—whose position as messengers of Yahweh allowed them to focus on the bigger picture of political and social events and whose pronouncements were an articulation of the action Yahweh expected Yahweh’s people to take. To a degree, you can think of the ancient prophets Elijah and Samuel and Huldah and Ezekiel as the Rush Limbaughs and John Stewarts and Rachel Maddows and Glen Becks of their time.

In this analogy, the prophet Hosea is the Pat Buchanan of 6th Century BCE. He is convinced of the inevitability of decline and judgment. The people have strayed, he explains: like Hosea they have taken for themselves “a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (:2). After Hosea’s wife Gomer (representing Israel) gives birth to a daughter Yahweh tells him, “Name her Lo-ruhamah, for I will no longer have pity on the house on Israel or forgive them” (:6); when she conceives a son, Yahweh says, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God” (:9).

Hosea, probably a contemporary of Amos, for whom another book we’ll look at is named, was one of the longest-working prophets. The events he commented on took place over three decades; and while it’s true Hosea is not himself the author of the book for whom he’s named, it was probable that the book, redacted or edited and added to over the course of centuries, was the product of his followers and sympathetic later editors. He rails against the ease with which life under King Jeroboam II, then ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, has degenerated, and follows Amos who had prophesied the kingdom’s mistreatment of the poor and indifference to justice. Israel, he says, has forgotten Yahweh: “Hear the word of the Lord, O People of Israel…There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish…” (4:1-3).

For Hosea the awful judgment of Yahweh is unquestioned. It will come, it will be terrible, and it will be just. “[Yahweh] will become like a lion to [Israel], like a leopard I will lurk beside the way. I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs, and will tear open the covering of their heart…” (13:7-8). Swift, punishing retribution is what the people deserve for turning away from Yahweh.

But there is a second, equally strong current in the prophesies of Hosea. Yahweh continues to feel compassion for Yahweh’s people, despite their sinfulness. “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son…I took them up in my arms…I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks…How can I give you up…How can I hand you over, O Israel…My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (11:1-8).

This is a God who would be merciful (hesed) in remembering God’s covenant with God’s people. Even within the boundless and justified rage of Yahweh’s judgment, punishment is not for punishment’s sake. Like the Great Flood of Genesis, it is Yahweh’s way of erasing the corrupt and troubled worship and attention by past administrations so that the people, chastised and humbled, will return to their true god. “For the Israelites shall remain many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar…Afterward the Israelites shall return and seek the Lord their God…they shall come in awe to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days” (3:4-5).

Here we see the primary emphasis of Hosea’s prophetic passion. The people have turned away from their true path and are being punished justly for it. But the punishment is meant to punish Yahweh’s people the way a parent spanks a child, as a method by which the parent reminds the child that there are rules by which the child must live and that acting contrary to those rules has consequences. Don’t be confused that this simple analogy, bloodless and petty as it seems to us, was what Hosea was offering. After all, he would have seen up close the suffering and destruction that political change wrought. He saw the assassination of four kings over the course of his work, and for every king killed we can assume hundreds or thousands more died violently in the upheavals, sieges and campaigns in the wake of political turmoil. We are inured by the bloodless shifts of political parties into thinking that it was always this way. For the people of Hosea’s time, a change in leadership often swept away as many people as the recent Japanese tsunami did, and about as effortlessly, about as mercilessly. The mercy available in such an event, Hosea suggests, is in the response of his people after the destruction.

Two questions, then, for discussion: Is this the message we ought to take away from Hosea’s prophecy, that the response to disaster of any kind is humility and acknowledging there is a greater power? And if this is so, how should we behave toward that greater power?

union maid

I had an interesting argument with a friend this morning at church about the protests going on further out on the rim in madison. she's a former union member who's now a member of management and thinks the protestors are overreaching. I disagree. we went back and forth about this for at least 10 minutes while preparing for a church breakfast for the kids and what made the argument interesting is the realization I had as it was winding down that we had arguing past one another at an opponent who was elsewhere.

essentially, her argument was that unions make unreasonable demands that hinder efficient operation of a business or an institution. she gave a couple examples from her own workplace. my argument was that those were examples of a poor negotiating team on her side and that it isn't a sufficient reason to eliminate collective bargaining. it was awhile before I realized that neither of us had made the argument the other was responding to: I hadn't said that unions were perfect and she hadn't said bargaining should be eliminated. this is a prime example of the effect that media have on determining the terms of debate between people: what we were arguing against was not what each of us said but what each of us had heard said.

watching tv

I'm not much of one to watch television often anymore but tonight I'm watching independent lens on pbs while it shows the documentary chicago 10. this is a lot of fun; this is what tv is meant to do.