real boy

Your eyes paint the picture they see. They cook and feast at once.

-- Don Cupitt, Life, Life

Seventy-six Fahrenheit, and the weighted air does not move. I can’t breathe. I stand quite still and sweat, as they say, like a pig, though I think pigs must sweat with more elegance than I. Sus domestica is an intelligent and dignified animal, and might resent the comparison.

Some of my people say that I’m a man of God, that I carry the Spirit with me. But the spirit grunts and moans in this slow-cooked flesh, longing for a cold shower and a change of clothes.

These bottom-of-a-fishbowl days, trials of endurance that cannot be blamed on a thermometer, are among the city’s climatic pranks, its special contributions to meteorology. We carry on our affairs in a tidal estuary – nothing is ever washed out to sea; everything churns and sours. What goes around comes around. Karma. Until the autumn breezes come to save us, we live in our own effluence.

My colleague thinks I have a fashion sense. She flatters my “muted greys and browns” with an esthetic interpretation.

I never thought of myself as relevant to fashion. I place myself in the category of things strange-looking but presentable with some effort. Who was it said, please God, make me normal? Perhaps I am learning, at long last, to look normal. That’s what I hope for as I choose the day’s clothes, or as I buy those modest vestments from catalogues and discount stores. My younger presentations were often misguided, peculiar. Passing for ordinary, if that’s what I’m doing, would be progress. Has Pinocchio finally become a real boy?

I’ve learned that I must respect the physicalities. In a day’s campaign I might walk a few miles, climb twenty or so flights of steps, adjust to the climatic terrors of a half dozen subway cars, and stand on as many steamy platforms waiting for those cars to open. I’m a walrus and, if I begin the day in a suit and tie, then by noon I’ll look like what the cat dragged in. And smell that way.

So I’m a bit informal. I’m big on linens and breathable fabrics, stuff that won’t be ruined by a little moisture. As the Fall comes on, some may think I’m dressed too cold but, like Dave Letterman in his frigid studio, I’d rather not be dripping on the script.

In recent years I’ve discovered an intuition for colors. So on a given day, among the prosaic alternatives of trousers (pleated or tropical), turtlenecks, polos, blazers, tropical shirts (monochrome or fine-print), I choose an ensemble. I learn from the day’s predicted high temperature which wardrobe I should deploy – winter, summer or transitional. And then the work of decision begins, among the exchangeable alternatives of a template.

There are two ways to organize by color. The first is by gradation, and the second is by contrast. When I wear my lime green tropical shirt, should I show above the top button my tee-shirt of paler green (or hunter)? Or should I show the goldenrod, or light brown? Under my black shirt, a tee of black, or grey, or cardinal red? I ponder on these matters. It isn’t just any old shirt, any old tee, and any old pair of pants. There has to be a plan, a concept, if you will.

When my colleague thought I had achieved a semblance of fashion, I thought I might have finally passed for prep. Which I never quite achieved when I was a prep.

These colors matter. I’ve known people – they seem always to be vegetarians – who wear nothing but brown. Vegetables are more colorful than the people who eat them. I’ve also known people who wear nothing but black. Some others are addicted to pink. Enough said.

Colors matter. But they do not exist. They are among the qualities that Descartes called “secondary.” Monet has proven how such things change in the light. Though L. L. Bean assures me that this shirt hanging in my closet is of cardinal red, Nature did not sign it so. It’s just a fabric, treated so that light of certain frequencies does not reflect from it. I find it quite exciting, but my kitty, brilliant as he is, doesn’t know the difference.

And rainbows don’t exist. Our crippled eyes filter out all else, and what’s left of the sun’s refracted radiation appears to us in an arc of all possible colors – by which we mean the colors it is possible for us to see. In God’s eye there a million more colors, and she casts them in vain – unless there shall be wiser, more perceptive creatures than ourselves to follow us, and receive the blessing that has been so long on offer.

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pastel bedclothes

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it.

-- Genesis 3:17 (NRSV)

Somebody did something terrible. I can’t tell what it was exactly, and I can’t name the one who did it. But the evidence is all around. The reek. The smoke. The suspicion.

Once upon a time, the world awaited. Light came in my window, inviting me to put my feet on the floor. Meaning no harm, I could do none, to others or to myself.

At least, it must have been that way once. The picture is not, as Descartes demanded, clear and distinct. There are fragments. A white frame house with green shutters all round. Trees reaching out for each other over a quiet street. A window’s outline projected on the floor of a church basement. A guy with lady’s hair, dressed in pastel bedclothes, walks on a hill with sheep. Jesus loves me, this I know.

It’s not clear and distinct, but it never entirely fades. Not entirely.

The more honor you give to The Suspicions, the more they multiply. They always have Prudence on their side. If you’ve already feared This, you should really fear That. Be very afraid. Don’t just do what seems right, are you looking for trouble? Bah, humbug.

The people who fund my ministry don’t trust me. Nothing personal, they don’t know me and the feeling is mutual, it’s just business. We clinicians are all in a ministry – nurses, social workers, doctors and me. We’re here to wipe away the tears. But the agencies that pay for the services think we’re trying to rip them off. Because somewhere, sometime, somebody once ripped them off. It wasn’t me, but I must play in the wreckage of the primal trust.

Trying to do good, we must pay for the sins of others. So we fill out forms about each client, about what we did and what we plan to do and why and what got done and not, and about what we say to each other we should do, and about meetings where we can’t say old information, can’t say new information, but must without saying any information make a plan of care in which we all “collaborate.” This is what, from the high regulatory desks of Planet PencilPush, seems good use of our time. It costs time which is money, limiting the number of tears we can wipe away. Think of it as a lesson in Original Sin. We don’t have to commit that Sin right now: it Originates before we get there. The level ground on which we walk is already tilted, the compass points are all wrong and the right angles are something less than ninety degrees. It’s a fallen world in which we must take our straightest shot. Two and two are five. So forgive me if I have walked past a door of grief, knowing I haven’t time both to wipe away the tear and to document it.

Forgiveness, as Tony Kushner said, is hard, it's where love and justice meet.* My colleague thinks I don’t understand what it’s like to be black and female. And of course I don’t, never will. Nor does she understand what it’s like to be a white male trying to understand a black female. Never will. All we can do is listen, looking toward the place on the horizon where parallel lines meet. Take it in, play it back. Compare our incomparable experiences. “That part of your story – which I have not experienced – is it at all like this part of my story – that I have experienced?” Midterm without end. Describe several similarities and differences between two stories. Be specific in your answer. A very imperfect procedure; but what else can we do? We come from different locations. The world is fallen. It’s this or scorn.

Forgive my ignorance and procrastination, I find that I am writing this on the day after Yom Kippur. We all need a day of atonement, a day to get it done and move on. Forgive ourselves and others for all the things done and undone by which we fall short of what we know should be. Not because forgiveness makes sense – we have, after all, only five loaves and two fishes – but because it clears the way to life.

Forgiveness is not a process or a syllogism. Though you look for it in the lesson plan, it’s not there. It’s a thing you just do. Or not. Don’t get ready for it. Just do it.

Last time I went back to that street, the house with green shutters was still there, and the trees still reached for each other over the street. The guy in pastel bedclothes, some say, is still walking those hills. Or might sit next to you, next time you fly home to Emmaus.

*Perestroika

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urgent silence

All of us . . . believe some modes of existence are superior to others. But only the liberal, committed to a vision of harmonious communal pluralism, is unsettled by this truth.

-- Sam Tanenhouse, “Peace and War,” New York Times Book Review (August 29, 2010)

Though you cannot hear the underlying agreement in our inflamed discourse about poverty and violence, we all agree – liberal and conservative, black and white, separatist and integrationist – that there are a lot of young urban men who would be better off if they felt that reading, studying and getting good grades were a path to success. That’s because reading, studying and getting good grades really are a path to success. The bitch goddess basketball, on the other hand, disappoints most of her devotees and corrupts the rest.

We argue with malice and fury about who’s to blame and what the fix is. But everybody knows that learning to read is more liberating than basketball. Basketball has its place and can, like music or poetry or worship, save lives. But reading saves more lives, and our access to literacy is a crucial part of what we white folks mean when we talk about our white liberal privilege. Literacy is better than illiteracy; and those who would be free must become literate. Everybody knows this. Or rather, those who do not know it will never be free.

The liberation theologians say that we white liberals are privileged people – that we have, without entirely earning it, what oppressed people want. Now listen. Don’t just react defensively. Listen to their critique. We have what those less fortunate want. That is to say, the oppressed want what we have. They want, in some respects, to become like us. Why then do we despise ourselves? Why are we so desperate to go slumming, as if we could transform ourselves into people who themselves want to change their identity? What sort of solidarity is it that causes us to hate in ourselves that to which the oppressed aspire? Could it be that our feigned love for the culture of oppression is a way of fixing the oppressed in their place, in hope that they won’t enter our neighborhoods, compete for our jobs, or infiltrate our voluntary associations? The Delta troubadour who sings with a clanging guitar of whiskey, wandering and women, is not about to buy a Volvo and apply for that new position in the English Department. Or run for president. There are good reasons to listen to a Leadbelly record, but let’s not fool ourselves that we’re doing anything radical as we listen. Leadbelly is, for us, safe.

You see, there’s no innocent way forward, no systematically pure creed or discourse. No language policeman or process observer can do anything but seek the last word in an argument that never ends. But we have to step out of the circle. We have to go forward. We have to leave the argument behind.

I and Thou, my brother, my sister. Ich und du. That’s what it comes down to. There’s mystery in it. Frankly, I don’t understand how we get along at all. But we have to keep doing it. We have to keep getting along, and more than that, we have to proceed toward justice. And since the terrain of history obscures the way and we lack the requisite Mecca-finder, we adopt together and for now some provisional marker of justice, good enough orientation perhaps until we can get there and revise our purposes. And we must remember, when we get there, that the marker is not, never was, God Herself.

We do this, as we do every other important thing, with insufficient knowledge. My dearest friends, my children and my spouse are a mystery to me; so how could I ever claim, my brother, my sister, that I understand you? Or demand that you understand me? Across the gap a spark of agape must fly. This flame is not ours to command, and yet we must be ready for it. Ideologies of blame and rejected responsibility violate the requisite stillness. W. H. Auden said that “the essential aspect of prayer is not what we say but what we hear.”* Faith is the urgent silence in which we wait for love’s prompting.

Urgent silence is the skill of a chaplain. We do not hurl good news onto the porch like a paperboy, but wait for good news to be born in a parlor of grief. Our comfort for those who mourn is a comfort of their own, revealed and blessed. Standing in for the Shepherd, we walk with them through a dark valley toward the sunlit turning.

Those who feel they have a license to fix, to save and rescue, should not apply for this job. To give the mourners their freedom, we must honor their pain and protect it from meddlers. We give the mourners their freedom not because we lack a theology but because our theology demands their freedom. Chaplaincy is a theology of immanence. Blessed are those who mourn. They have the blessing. We can be midwives at its birth, but not its parents.

Liberal faith says truth has more than one voice. No scripture or bishop is beyond question. Not that there is nothing sacred, but that the sacred recedes as we institutionalize it. Christianity’s worst day, said my liberationist professor, was the day on which the Roman Empire adopted it. If God became flesh in Yeshua, then truth is in the body, its weakness and passion, sufferings and accidents.

And liberalism is not value-free. Wake up, comrades, the coffee’s getting stale. Some “modes of existence” are better than others, and some are downright wicked. Literacy is more liberating than basketball. We believe it, and it’s true. It’s a fact.

*quoted in Context (Vol. 42, No. 9, Part B)

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snake oil

. . . a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

-- Isaiah 53:3 (KJV)

I have my share of joys and contentments, augmented by mirth and when necessary by the healing power of sarcasm. But I have become acquainted with grief. Not my own: I have my griefs, but am not acquainted with them. I walk among the sorrows of others. It’s my job. I am a servant of those who suffer, and I am most helpful when I dare to walk a few steps in their path of suffering.

Some pains can be relieved by pills and patches, therapies and disciplines. Sometimes the price of that relief is too great to bear. Some pains simply cannot be relieved. And some should not be.

Grief is prefigured in every love. Great grief, like great love, changes us forever – there is no going back from it. Grief persists because we fear that if we lose it we will lose the love. Grief’s resolution is not termination but transformation.

“A long time I have lived with you,” wrote Nancy Woods, “And now we must be going separately to be together.” As grief resolves, the relationship changes. I remember that my life lies before me each morning and there is something yet to do, a chance that would not be mine if I had not loved and lost. In the joy of creation we sing the sad song of what is still with us if we keep singing. That’s why we love sad songs, and sing them with such happy tears.

This is what my people mean when in grief, or in the presence of grief, they say, “Everything happens for a reason.” They say it because they cannot see the reason, and are angry with God. Why? Why did You do this, why did You let this happen to him, to me? It doesn’t make sense.

It never will “make sense.” The question why will never get its answer. But when we come back to life, singing the sad song of love and loss, we’ll stop asking. When we feel the love and pain as a condition of life, we’ll lose our anger. The “reason” for which it “happened” is nothing more than this – that we are here today doing this, laughing and weeping as we go.

It’s a hell of a way to learn. But it’s the only way we learn the important things.

When I came to this city nine years ago, Grand Central Station was full of billboards. “Have you seen my husband? my son? my sister? my brother? my girlfriend?” Photos, names and phone numbers to call if you sighted them. There was hope that those still “missing” would return. In almost three thousand cases, they did not.

How easily the grief of mass murder turns political! Now some of our finest politicians (may my sarcasm heal them) have decided to mine it for votes. The falsely labeled “Ground Zero Mosque” will be invisible from Ground Zero, but shameless and power-seeking celebrities claim that it will dominate the landscape, apparently terrorizing the 1776-foot Freedom Tower soon to be built there. Such claims are, purely and simply, lies. Officials of any agency or party who fail to denounce them, and to denounce the liars, are complicit in xenophobia. No deals or compromises should be made with those who depend on lies, and who exploit the grief of wounded Americans, to gain wealth and power. No respect should be paid. Harry Reid, you disappoint me.

To my grieving fellow citizens I say, beware! What begins in a lie ends in death. If you could expel all Muslims from Lower Manhattan, from Manhattan itself, from New York City, from the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, from the United States of America – if you did all this, your loved ones would still be dead. That’s the awful truth. Life can only begin in truth.

I take deep concern for the security of my city and my country. My daughter and I go into the subways of New York thirty times a week. The office I report to is almost as close to Ground Zero on the south as Park 51 is on the north. If acts of war are committed again, I am on the front lines. But this I know – the surest way to turn mosques into terror factories is to begin expelling the Muslims.

Life is a dangerous place. Though I seem to be in good health, this could be my last post. No cult of vengeance can spare us, or those we love, from mortality. That’s why living requires courage. We get up each morning to this day’s work, knowing that there are no guarantees of success or survival, no assurance even that we have chosen the right direction, no certainty that we will not mourn tomorrow for the deeds we did today.

Congratulations, said Yeshua, to those who mourn, for they are to be comforted. But this is hard work. Comfort only comes as love and loss are incorporated into new life. Anger is natural, but it is not the cure. It is not comfort. Leaders who divert grieving people from this work with a snake-oil called rage are – well, the Reverend Daffy Duck would say, “You’re dethpicable.”

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de trop

What about the all-consuming pleasure of reading something, really reading something, with no distractions? And the creative complexity of writing, making language flow from sentence to sentence, listening only to your inner voice?

-- Perri Klass, “Texting, Surfing, Studying”*

What about it?

I was taught writing by people who thought that writing was important. Some of them were writers themselves. They read and corrected my weekly theme on the assumption that how I said it mattered, almost more important than what I meant to say, because if I wrote with integrity, with reverence for language, I could not write lies.

One may write, and write, and be a scoundrel; and the world is full of scoundrels who think they write well. But their villainy is oft revealed in their crimes against language.

It took me twenty years to hear the famous music of the mother tongue. I pushed packages of meaning on a puzzle-board, assembled denotations in a plausible order, resolved equations by the prudent rules of syntax, hoping, hoping to project on the screen between writer and reader a style. It was like playing the piano with a wooden hand.

The ones who create language do not pursue syntax. Their observance is instrumental, and their transgressions birth the rules. The bard is the hardest of the Elizabethans to read because he doesn’t give a damn about diagrammable sentences. You have to hear him, because only in utterance do his leaps come down where they should.

When the ears of my ears were opened, I was reading middle-English alliterative poetry. A duckling bonds with the first creature he sees out of the shell, and I shall always think of the Pearl-Poet as my mother. I read ”Many birds bitterly on the bare twigs/Piteously piping for pain of the cold,” and for the first time I didn’t have to figure out the figures of speech. I was there. I heard the birds. I saw the twigs. I felt the cold. I was with Gawain, behind his eyes.

Hearing for the first time the percussion, feeling the sternum vibrate in sympathy, I could now distinguish other sections of the orchestra. Looking over the bard’s shoulder, I saw the staff and read the notes. I knew what he was up to. The earth moved with the beat of his lines, the alternation of stress and release that marks out our mighty mother tongue.

I now had privileges in the operating theatre where sentences are saved or lost. These scalpel verses, conjured in a scheme of consonant noises, exposed the sinews and the viscera of language. I could see the heart beat, the fibres twitch. Now I know the cadence of a sentence before its content. It doesn’t make me happy. It makes me fussy.

Look at my headline quotation. It’s good. But it’s not as good as it could be. There’s something de trop about it. Adjectives. Two of them. A curse on adjectives.

Do we have to tell you that reading is “all-consuming”? Or that writing is “creative”? If we do, you‘re not the kind of person for whom these lines are written. Banish those migrants, and read again. Is it not clearer? “But it doesn’t say what I mean,” the author might protest. No, I reply, it says something better. It says what you ought to have meant, what you would discover you meant if you pushed yourself harder.

This is my kind of étude. Such are my scales and arpeggios. These are some of the rules.

If you get the sound right, it might make sense.

If you can omit a word without making nonsense, do so.

If you can omit a syllable without making nonsense, do so.

Sometimes nonsense in the short run makes best sense in the long run.

Too much explanation makes confusion.

Don’t ask permission, the reader always says no, better to apologize later, but you won’t have to.

When you wonder if you ought to say something, say it.

These are not always good rules of conduct. But they are good rules of writing. They’re good if you’re writing rather than texting. If you’re not playing the piano with a wooden hand.

*New York Times (October 13, 2009)

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care less

I could care less about Shirley Sherrod.

-- Andrew Breitbart, blogger*

I should have taken time to listen and to learn.

-- Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture

We’re forced in this business to make quick judgments.

-- Benjamin Jealous, President, NAACP*

No Mr. Jealous, no Mr. Vilsack, you were not forced to throw a good woman under the bus. You were not forced to do the bidding of a self-confessed liar. You were not forced to ignore decency and fairness. You were not forced to betray the code of liberal (okay, call them “progressive” if you want) values. You were not forced to endorse the power of falsifiers and fabricators. These were your own decisions. These were your choices. We hold you responsible. We’re allowed to do that. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.

I’m glad you apologized and are trying to clean up the mess you made. But what will you do next time?

Both of you presumably went to college. You got what we used to call a “liberal education.” My liberal religion is not value-free; it proclaims as a principle the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Scholarship – the pursuit of knowledge – came of age in the Enlightenment, and free speech is its modus vivendi because, as Jefferson said (with a little help from the committee), “all men are created equal.” That is to say, you don’t get to win the argument because you’re a king. You don’t get to win the argument because you’re a bishop. You don’t get to win the argument because you thump the Bible. You don’t get to win the argument because you’re holding a gun. You don’t get to win the argument because you shout the loudest. You don’t get to win the argument because you use the most insulting language. You don’t get to ignore the facts, or lie about them, without public judgment and private penalty.

The table of discourse has standards. It denies a chair to those who will not live by facts, logic and evidence. Its clear space is a temple passionately committed to reason – that is to say, sacred to the whole power of human perception, and dedicated to the proposition that together we can rise above our lusts, greeds and fears to share the world.

So the rules of discourse are not the rules of a party game, like conventions of bidding in bridge. They are not the ceremonial of a narrow class, like rituals of a debutante cotillion. The rules of discourse are moral laws, rules of what some have called the Divine Domain. They are an instantiation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. They are a necessary means of the Golden Rule. They are the nearest thing human beings have created to justice. Without rules of discourse, revolutions are just chapters in the endless cycle of revenge.

When prominent officials who know better, prompted by a suspect source, rush to judgment and fall over each other to do the bidding of the wicked, it is a Day of Discouragement and also of Revelation, exposing the cowardice of liberal culture, its forgetfulness of principle, laziness before the work of decency, shamefastness for virtues rather than for sins. Justice begins in meticulous search for truth. That’s why tyrants and ruffians fear and persecute the honest, and that’s why liberal officials of public or private agencies are supposed to defend the innocent from those assaults.

“Integrity” is an old-fashioned word meaning wholeness. Those who have it know that compartmentalization ultimately fails, whether at the pearly gates or at the door of conscience. There is, or used to be, a price to be paid for bad character. Mr. Breitbart has told us that he is a person of bad character, a person without regard for truth, a person willing to destroy the innocent in pursuit of his plans – the kind of person from whom you would shield your family if he lived next door. No statement from such a source should prompt any action of government, or appear in any venue of journalism.

The Attorney General wants us to talk about race, and Ms. Sherrod’s story is of a kind that, if it were more widely known, could help to heal our racial wounds. She has overcome profound grief and injury, and taught herself to address the suffering of those made to suffer unfairly, no matter what their social location. She is the living refutation of Breitbart’s lie. When our leaders threw her to the wolves, they were engaging in a kind of behavior that enables witch-hunts, red scares, blacklists and pogroms.

Kipling the colonialist said that “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, . . . You’ll be a man, my son!” We’ve learned during the death of empires that both women and men participate in Menschheit, so I could say to my daughters that I hope you’ll be a Mensch, my child. And in times of moral peril when the mediocre lose their courage, we need Menschen to lead us, people who will stand for truth in a storm of entitled idiocy, naming the lie and the liar for what they are and denying them influence. It’s what we expect of our leaders.

Mr. Jealous, Mr. Vilsack, I hope that in your future careers you’ll redeem yourselves from this week’s betrayal of America’s values. But as for now, if you were in my employ, I would fire you both.

*Both quotes from “On the Media,” National Public Radio, July 25, 2010

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this hour

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

-- William Wordsworth, “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty”

Who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

-- John Milton, Areopagitica

I have. Over and over again I have known truth put to the worse, when there is too much freedom, where there are no rules. And who am I to declare the rules? Nobody in particular. But I know that where there are no rules, lies prevail. The biggest fist then rules, and might makes right.

“Your right to swing your arm stops at my nose.” I heard this motto spoken at a small-town meeting on residential zoning. A developer had bought two of the town’s modest frame houses and torn them down to build mcmansions in their place. These intruders bullied the neighborhood, and towered over it. A woman broke into tears as she told how she no longer had sunlight in her kitchen window.

The town discovered that it had no rules against this kind of thing. Many were afraid it was a sign of things to come, that it was the end of “our town as we know it;” or that, as a realtor might say, the “special character” of the place was about to be demolished. So they wanted to make what the developer had done illegal.

The speaker, who so zealously guarded the prerogatives of his nose, was the developer. How dare you pass laws, he said, that limit my property rights? You can swing your arms, of course, provided that the arc never crosses my path – or any potential path that I might choose. Pass all the ordinances you want, as long as they have no impact on me.

But it wasn’t the developer who should have spoken these words. The words properly belonged to the woman who no longer had sunlight in her kitchen. Her nose had been smashed by his fist. She had done nothing, and the swinging of his arm had materially curtailed enjoyment of her property.

The developer was misrepresenting himself. What he said was true – none of us has a right to smack another in the face – but his utterance of it was false. When the smacker masquerades as smackee, the resulting speech acts are duplicitous. We have a right to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. When aggressors claim to be victims, they deserve no place in the discussion circle.

Those who deny the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, for instance, contradict the facts in order to continue the persecution of Jews. Because a few seconds of research demolishes their position, they create phony institutions of research, and publish ragtag “journals” in which the persecutors can quote each other, thus generating footnotes – those ensigns of scholarship that fool an ill-informed reader into thinking the author owns a place in the intellectual tradition.

Some Christians in America claim that Christians are persecuted in America – proving only that they do not know what the meaning of the word “persecution” is: disagreement is not the same thing as persecution. Christians have at times and places been persecuted for their faith (more often than not by other Christians), but not these Christians here and now. Conservative Christians have the right to offer their views, but not to be protected from exposure in delusion or dishonesty.

When I went to school in the still segregated south, family members and their friends told me (the Yankee kid) that the “Niggruhs” had their own schools, just as good, no, “even better than ours,” and they would show me some time. But they never did show me, because there weren’t any such places. The kids who a year or two later sat down at a Greensboro lunch counter had stopped talking; this matter wasn’t going to be resolved at a discussion circle. Discussion in that time and place had become too corrupt for that. We’re lucky that the ones who stopped talking weren’t carrying guns.

Some who sought power recently have said that the new health care laws include “death panels,” by which government bureaucrats will decide who lives and who dies. There are in fact bureaucrats who get to decide who of us will be treated and who will not: they work for health insurance companies. The death panel hoax was a scheme to smear government with sins of private enterprise. It worked, because those with higher ethical standards were too polite. I am a worker in palliative care. This lie is about me. I take it personally. No one will tell it in my presence without being called on it.

We didn’t call the liars out. We didn’t confront them with their professional and personal corruption. They should have been red-carded and sent off the field, but we tried to debate with them. They do not deserve debate. They deserve – depending on your philosophy of child-rearing – either a long time-out or a public spanking.

If Milton were alive today, he would know that truth can be put to the worse when the rules of discourse are violated and no one calls the fouls. Free speech isn’t utterly free. You don’t get to win by shouting louder. You don’t get to prove your lies by repeating them. You don’t get to quote movies as if they were history. You don’t get to ignore the facts. You don’t get to dispute the facts except on the basis of other facts. Above all, you don’t get to call yourself the lamb when you are the lion.

Radical theologians and philosophers have said in recent times that the rules of discourse are elitist. I do not think they are right; but if they are right, then justice requires that elites should rule the world. We don’t always have to listen to everybody. Though all are born with a place in the circle, some have disqualified themselves.

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