Apologies and Confessions

The Best and The Worst

2012-01-06T22:52:00.005-06:00

Not long after seeing the trailer for Atlas Shrugged, I came across the trailer for quite a different kind of film: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Malick is the world’s greatest living filmmaker, and this project has been with him for years. … [ T ]his is my plea: Do not go to see Atlas Shrugged. Do not encourage those people. Go instead to The Tree of Life, which—whether it should prove a triumph or a failure—will be the work of a remarkable artist who really does have something to tell us about both nature and grace (two things about which Rand knew absolutely nothing). So make the wise cinematic choice here, for the good of your own soul, but also for the sake of a rapidly foundering civilization.

—“The Trouble with Ayn Rand,” David Bentley Hart, First Things, May 2011

Mr. Hart is a wise and witty man. His essay on Ayn Rand is smart, fair, and precise. I recommend it. The technologically savvy will find it on the First Things web site.

I am not a wise man. If I were merely a smart man, I would have followed Mr. Hart’s advice. Unfortunately, I am a fool. I did not heed Mr. Hart’s admonition. Now I am left with a fool’s bragging right to have seen the best and the worst film of 2011. The best is the best film in 70 years. The worst is Atlas Shrugged.

The Worst First

On September 14, 2009, in the post “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” I first took note of Ayn Rand’s poisonous philosophy in our public discourse. “The Threat,” on October 23, 2010, addresses the malady explicitly. Those who consult the archives of this blog may be tempted to accuse me of bias in reviewing Atlas Shrugged. This would be a mistake. A distinction must be made between bias – an unreasonable prejudice against something – and an informed judgment.

Ayn Rand was not a good writer. Her philosophy is acceptable only to those who know nothing of the discipline. That she has been ignored in academia has nothing to do with some kind of liberal bias, as her disciples might claim. She is ignored in philosophy departments because of her ignorance of the field, and her work contributes nothing to the great conversation of Western thought. Literature departments are more inclusive than her supporters will acknowledge. Even there, however, there must be limits. There is more delightful invention in the horror of H. P. Lovecraft than in the malicious fantasies of Ayn Rand.

There are only two remarkable things about The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. First, that Ayn Rand stayed at the typewriter so long. Second, that she found a publisher.

Ms. Rand’s disciples are quick to cite the extraordinary sales of her two most famous works as proof of their value. There is another explanation. From Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon to L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health to Ms. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the United States has a long history of bad writing that wins a cult following.

Beyond the cult, it is strange that Ms. Rand has garnered the approval of Christians. This includes the Roman Catholic Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan and the Lutheran Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson. Despite the evidence of history, Ayn Rand argued that Capitalism is incompatible with Christianity. Her denunciation of Christianity, to the point of blasphemy, is undeniable. Her egoist morality is irreconcilable with even a passing acquaintance with the words of Our Lord. Nevertheless, otherwise thoughtful Christians find something appealing about Atlas Shrugged.

Curiosity got the better of me. I watched the film.

In his essay, Mr. Hart noted that the awfulness of the film The Fountainhead owed much to its faithfulness to Ms. Rand’s novel. The same is true of the film Atlas Shrugged. The dialogue is stilted. The characters are caricatures. The relationships between characters are unbelievable.

For example: Lillian Rearden, the wife of industrialist and inventor Henry Rearden, is so very repulsive that the sensible viewer must wonder why he has not divorced her – or just murdered her outright. Murder would not be objectionable because she is not a real character, a real person. She is just a foil to expose the admirable qualities of Henry Rearden. Even as a mere foil, however, she is intolerable.

The character Henry Rearden needs all the help he can get.

He arrives home late. His despicable wife is there enjoying cocktails with an assortment of Ayn Rand’s villains, moochers. The moochers are so very much moochers as to be implausible. The ensuing dialogue is cutting. Henry is ridiculed for this work ethic. He gives his wife an anniversary present. It is a bracelet made from Mr. Rearden’ s latest invention, Rearden Metal, steel lighter and stronger than anything that has been made before. Lillian and others ridicule the gift. It is not a conventional diamond bracelet. It is ugly. It is a symbol of Henry Rearden’s egoism.

This is where things get interesting. The bracelet is probably intended as a symbol of Henry Rearden’s egoism. Egoism is a virtue in the world of Ayn Rand. However, the bracelet is also ugly. It is not clear that the ugliness is intended. It is nevertheless. The one interesting thing about this film is the unintentional exposure of what is ugly and shallow in the thought of Ayn Rand.

The film’s production values are first rate. The acting succeeds despite the bad dialogue. However, the interior settings are garish and dark. Characters drink what appears to be red wine from glasses appropriate for whisky. When main characters are enjoying an evening meal, there is no dialogue. We see them eating, drinking, and conversing as the film score plays over it all. We have no idea what is enjoyable in the conversation. In the materialistic, egoist world of Ayn Rand life is dark, expensive, and dull.

Most importantly, in this depiction of the rebellion of the “people of the mind” against the Masses, there are no Masses. Hank Rearden looks out on what appears to be a fully automated factory floor. Machines lay railway. No workers are seen. Ms. Rand’s distain for ordinary people, people who are not exceptional by her lights, means that ordinary people simply do not exist. Steel is made, railroads are laid, but there is no sweat. There is no labor. There are only the geniuses at the top.

Atlas Shrugged Part I is a faithful depiction of the vile novel, acceptable only to true believers. In its faithfulness, however, it reveals all the flaws of the original. This film failed miserably at the box office. Nevertheless, Part II is reputably in production, unintentionally showing, once again, that Capitalism is not working in our country.

The Best

Seventy years ago, in 1941, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was released. It had detractors then and there are critics now. For most serious viewers, however, it is the greatest American film ever made.

Mr. Welles achieved acclaim by showing us that cinema is not theater filmed. The camera is the most important actor in the film. What the camera reveals and how the camera reveals is more important than the actor’s words, however well delivered.

We have had over a century of cinema. In that time, we have had many great directors, but few geniuses. The great, Mr. Kurosawa, Mr. Ford, Mr. Coppola, Mr. Scorsese, Mr. Bergman, and Mr. Kubrick – this list is too short and too parochial – have given us hours of cinematic achievement and added to the development of the art. Mr. Welles, with Citizen Kane, gathered up all that came before him and showed the way for the future of cinema.

Citizen Kane was a work of genius. Unfortunately, Mr. Welles could not repeat his first success. As good as successive films were – The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil to name just two – he could never achieve again what he accomplished with his first film. Not that we lesser mortals have anything to complain about. Mr. Welles’ contribution to the art of film is not diminished by later failures except in the conception of the small-minded.

There will be objections to my distinction between the great and the genius. Some might name as genius what I call great. I will not protest too much. Perhaps we can simply agree that the cinematic genius is the one who understands what the camera can do that cannot be done on the stage. I hold Mr. Welles, with Citizen Kane, to be preeminent in that regard. Mr. Terrence Malick is more than his successor.

It is a wonderful age we live in when a pauper, like myself, upon reading Mr. Hart’s essay, can then find on DVD the complete work of a director. I watched, in succession, the achievement of Mr. Malick from the 1973 Badlands to the 2005 The New World before viewing his magnum opus.

It was my second or third viewing of Badlands. It is as fresh and brilliant as it was almost forty years ago. Days of Heaven (1978) is wonderfully beautiful. The Thin Red Line (1998) is the best war movie I have ever seen, surpassing even Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. The New World was disparaged on release. It is perhaps the weakest of Mr. Malick’s work to date. Nevertheless, its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. In the four films that Mr. Malick directed before The Tree of Life there was never a failure to show what has not been seen before.

A fine film cannot be all camera work. Alfred Hitchcock, in comparison to Mr. Malick, is a directors’ director. His camera many times exceeded the story. The Birds, for example, contains amazing technological innovations, but the story is a stale melodrama performed by second-rate actors. It is hard to watch this film today without rooting for the birds – “Quick! Peck them! Don’t let them say another line of that terrible script!”

Mr. Malick is a cinema aficionado’s director. His work has always been to show us something of the human condition. The verisimilitude of his weakest film, The New World, is astounding. With just four films he has established himself as the philosopher-poet of the camera. He has peers, but no rivals. The Tree of Life is the consummation of all that he has done to date.

I have watched The Tree of Life three times. I cannot tell you what “it is all about” with certainty. I cannot tell you what it is trying to teach us. I am not sure it is trying to teach us any one thing. I can only attempt an explanation. Any explanation falls far short of viewing the film itself. It must be viewed. It must be experienced. This is true of any great work of art. No one understands War and Peace from Cliff’s Notes. The Mona Lisa is not captured by describing it as lady with a slight smile.

The Tree of Life begins with a quote from Job. “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” This is God speaking to Job. Job has been complaining of God’s way with men. Here God begins to examine Job. Who is he to question the Lord who gives the gift of life?

This is God’s only appearance in The Tree of Life. It is a mute quotation given in a white on black screen. Nevertheless, one senses God is there, just off screen.

This is a theodicy, an attempt to justify the ways of God with men. It is, therefore, much like the first great theodicy, Job. I would humbly suggest that this is what the theologically ignorant media have not understood. It is the key to understanding all that follows in the film.

What follows is nothing less than the violence of creation, the evolving of the earth, complete with dinosaurs, the death of a son, the struggles of a family in Texas, and finally the end of the earth in fire. If this seems a paltry statement of plot, it is. Visions do not have plots. Mr. Malick is the William Blake of cinema.

Most of all there is life. Most of all there are living human beings coping with life in all its splendor and loss. At one point comes the voiceover: “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” This is the line I believe we are to take away from this film.

Perhaps I am reading too much into Mr. Malick’s film. It is a brave, audacious film, however, so perhaps I am justified in girding up my loins and declaring what I believe he is showing us. He is showing us that with all we know about the beginning of the universe and its end, despite the dinosaurs and regardless of the cataclysmic end of the earth, there is a God. He is a God of life and love. It would be going too far to claim The Tree of Life is Christian. I do not think that is what Mr. Malick was attempting. It is, nevertheless, unabashedly theistic.

This much is certain. No one before Mr. Malick has attempted to give us what The Tree of Life has given us. He is to cinema what James Joyce is to literature. Even as Ulysses is not to the liking of everyone who reads serious literature, The Tree of Life is not going to be appreciated by everyone who enjoys fine cinema. Frankly, I have attempted Ulysses more than once and have not enjoyed the experience. I can therefore understand the negative reaction to The Tree of Life. Nevertheless, I understand that Ulysses is a great literary achievement. I know that The Tree of Life is also a great achievement.

I suspect that it is the greatest film of our time. Perhaps it is even the greatest film of all time. At the very least, it is the best film of 2011.

Senator Ron Johnson and The American Jobs Act

2011-09-13T13:19:00.000-05:00

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson recently replied to President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress. In email sent to Wisconsin voters, Senator Johnson called The American Jobs Act “the definition of insanity” because, to the Senator’s way of thinking, it merely repeats American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

Actually, Mr. Johnson could not bring himself to use the proper titles of either the ARRA or the President’s proposed legislation. The latter is simply the “latest government stimulus program.” Neither could Mr. Johnson address any of the specifics of the proposed legislation.

Mr. Johnson did begin with ad hominem.

“As I sat listening carefully to our President, it was painfully clear that his remarks were merely a campaign speech. His proposals were designed to assist in his reelection campaign, rather than a serious attempt to forge alliances, address our massive debt, strengthen our economy and create jobs.”

It has been difficult for Republicans to deal with a president who is arguably the best communicator to occupy the Oval Office since President Ronald Reagan. It is particularly grating as this president follows eight years of Mr. George W. Bush, who was the master of malapropisms. President Obama, however, repeatedly spoke to the concerns of both Republicans and opponents in his own party. He appealed for their support in terms of their own goals. Mr. Johnson’s claim that Mr. Obama’s address was only a campaign speech is inaccurate and unfair.

Certainly Mr. Obama’s speech cheered his supporters and annoyed his opponents. It is undeniable that Mr. Obama is running for a second term and the speech did not hurt that effort. That there was a political aspect to the speech is unsurprising to any mature observer of our government. Characterizing the detailed proposal the President set before the joint session of Congress as merely a campaign speech, however, only reveals the weakness of Mr. Johnson’s position.

That weakness is manifest as Mr. Johnson sputters on in his email.

“Even worse, the overall substance of his proposals were nothing more than a rehashing and repackaging of the same big government, ideological agenda that our President has already tried – driven our debt up another $4 Trillion - and have failed miserably. These ideas would simply double down on that failure.”

Mr. Johnson needs a grammarian. Verbs are supposed to agree with the subject of a sentence. “Substance” is singular and requires the singular “was” not “were.” He should have chosen “rehashing” or “repackaging.” Using both is redundant. The accusation that the President’s “ideological agenda” drove up the debt “another $4 Trillion” calls for another sentence and should not have been smashed into this one. (Trillion should not be capitalized.)

Mr. Johnson ignores the niceties of grammar and the specifics of the President’s speech because all he has is Tea Party boilerplate. Mr. Johnson rants about “big government” but says nothing about the President’s expressed goal of jolting the private sector back to life. He ignores the President’s proposals to help small business. He makes no mention of the President’s tax cuts for middle class consumers. He is oblivious of the need to help the long-term unemployed.

In sum, Mr. Johnson’s complaint does not touch upon anything the President actually said, but merely repeats the talking points of the House radical Republicans. By ignoring the proposed American Jobs Recovery Act, he fails to prove that it is merely a repackaging of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The most significant falsehood of Mr. Johnson’s missive is his assertion that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was a failure.

“Since his inauguration, during admittedly tough economic conditions, President Obama has taken America 180 degrees in the wrong direction. His failed $800 billion stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the explosion of his Administration's other job killing regulations have combined to put a stranglehold on our economy.”

Mr. Johnson’s only concession to the President is that he took office “during admittedly tough economic conditions.” This is a gross understatement. The President took office after decades of deregulation of the financial market initiated by Republican President Ronald Reagan and fostered by Randian Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Republican policies resulted in the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis, the 2001 Internet Stock Bubble and finally, beginning in 2007, greatest financial meltdown since the Depression.

Mr. Johnson conveniently ignores the details so that he can continue to rail against government regulations. He specifies no regulations that kill jobs. It is he, not the President, who fails to learn from history.

(Note: Inside Job (2010), the Academy Award-winning documentary film about the late-2000s financial crisis directed by Charles H. Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon is one-sided, and, I believe, unfair to President Obama. Its subject is complicated. Nevertheless, it is a good introduction to all the facts that Republicans would have us ignore.)

The Republicans have blocked the full implementation of the Dodd-Frank bill, so it is impossible to attribute anything good or ill to it. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – which Mr. Johnson calls “Obamacare”—will not be fully implemented until 2014. That leaves only the so-called “failed $800 billion stimulus,” ARRA, as a possible “stranglehold on our economy.”

Did the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 fail to increase employment? Mr. Johnson and his fellow Republicans have repeatedly said that it did. The economy is still in recession. Unemployment is still high. The ARRA did fail to meet with the administration’s projections. All of this, together with the fact that many citizens cannot distinguish GDP from GPS, makes the Republicans’ simple declarative statement, “The stimulus failed,” persuasive.

Repeat a falsehood long enough and you will convince the masses. This is particularly true with a subject as complicated as the economy.

On September 27, 2010, the independent FactCheck.org posted, “The economic stimulus package is a favorite target of Republican candidates and groups, but more than a few ads falsely claim it did not create or save any jobs. … The truth is that the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise.” (FactCheck.org, “Did the Stimulus Created Jobs?”)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch PolitiFact.com examined Republican Eric Cantor’s May 26^th, 2011, statement, “They (Democrats) passed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill which failed to get people back to work.” The Virginia publication rated Mr. Cantor’s statement false after consulting experts from both the right and the left.

Both of these publications based their conclusions in part on the 2010 report of the Congressional Budget Office, which stated: “… CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the second quarter of calendar year 2010:

They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,
Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,
Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and
Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise …” ( http://www.cbo.gov )

If Senator Ron Johnson had been doing his job, he would have known about the CBO report.

What animates Mr. Johnson, however, is not concern for the unemployed or the challenges of a global economy in recession. Mr. Johnson, as I pointed out in October of 2009, is an advocate of the Atheistic Capitalism of Ayn Rand. He is a true believer in an ideology that holds that government involvement in the economy, in any way, at any time, is wrong. From health care, to stimulus, to regulation, the government can only kill jobs.

Mr. Johnson writes, “President Obama simply and sadly does not understand the basic economic truth that expansion and job creation must come from the private sector, not government.”

One hopes that President Obama understands that in difficult economic times, remedies must be sought from both the private and public sectors. Progressives hope he understands that the history of this country is in part the history of a mixed economy, with the government playing a positive role in protecting the country from the excesses of capitalism. Mr. Johnson and his ilk hanker for a pure capitalism that has never existed and is every bit as false as Marxist-Leninist millennialism.

It is the insupportable small government advocacy of Mr. Johnson and his Republican colleagues that will take us in the wrong direction, as the August unemployment figures indicate.

“On September 2nd the government reported no net jobs were created in August. To be precise, private firms created 17,000 jobs while governments trimmed payrolls by the same amount. Adjusting for striking mobile-phone company workers, underlying private job growth was actually more like 60,000, consistent with an economy still growing; but barely.” (The Economist, “A Choice of Medicines,” September 10, 2011.)

The Economist does not say so, but I suspect the “governments” that trimmed their payrolls are the state governments run by Republican governors, like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Among the jobs trimmed are those of school teachers. President Obama’s American Jobs Act calls for the hiring of teachers to train students to be competitive in an increasingly global job market. This is just one small detail that shows that President Obama is the one working for America’s future, not Mr. Johnson and his small-government colleagues.

President Obama’s American Jobs Act is not all that progressives wanted. It is more than they expected. It is not a magic bullet. It will not immediately reverse the global recession. Mr. Johnson may choose to ignore it. The Congress should pass it and press on to strengthen both the private and public sectors of the economy.

Is the Opposition Loyal? Part Two

2011-09-07T23:40:00.002-05:00

Tonight we will not hear the President of the United States address a joint session of Congress regarding the dire economic condition of the nation. It was Mr. Obama’s intention to begin this new session of Congress by addressing the issues about which the whole country is concerned. As is well known, Speaker John Boehner has informed the President that the United States House of Representatives will be otherwise engaged.

“ ‘As the majority leader announced more than a month ago, the House will not be in session until Wednesday, Sept. 7, with votes at 6:30 that evening,’ the speaker wrote. ‘ With the significant amount of time, typically more than three hours, that is required to allow for a security sweep of the House chamber before receiving a president, it is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening, when we can ensure there will be no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.’ ” (“Obama Moves Jobs Speech After Skirmish With Boehner,” The New York Times, August 31, 2011)

Mr. Boehner’s unprecedented refusal to grant the President’s request has been reported, reviewed, and, from the very beginning, denounced as just another petty political squabble. Blame has been cast on both the Speaker and the President.

“ ‘If the objective of the White House and Speaker Boehner was to demonstrate to the American people that they have gotten the message from the markets and from voters that our economic straits are so dire that it is time to set petty politics aside, they have failed before they started,’ said David Rothkopf, a former Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration. ‘This childish gamesmanship regarding timing reconfirms to the world that Washington is a sandbox full of petulant children who don’t play well together.' He called Wednesday’s antics 'late-summer silliness.’ ” (The New York Times, same article as above)

Despite the fact that Mr. Boehner is the first member of Congress to deny a president permission to speak to a joint session of Congress, it is the President who has received the most criticism. He is accused of playing politics.

“The real story, of course, was that the White House had high-handedly announced its preferred time for the speech, which just happened to conflict with a long-planned GOP presidential candidates’ debate at the Reagan library.” (The Weekly Standard, “The Scrapbook: Dissing Boehner,” September 12, 2011)

Even before Mr. Boehner took his stand against the President’s supposedly political proposal, talk radio condemned the idea. How could the President dare to upstage a Republican Party candidate debate? It is only reasonable to conclude that Mr. Boehner’s motive to deny the President’s proposal is to thwart Mr. Obama’s alleged political gambit and please the likes of Mr. Limbaugh. His stated reason is lame. The House has no business this evening that cannot be postponed.

Other aspects to this story have been reported, mostly from anonymous sources. Most of what has been reported is irrelevant. It remains that Mr. Boehner has done what has never been done before. In this, he has shown that, despite the fact that the Republican Party likes to wrap itself in the Constitution and boast its fidelity to the intentions of the Founding Fathers, it knows and cares little for either.

Let us grant the Republican contention that Mr. Obama scheduled his address to Congress to upstage Republican candidate debate. I do not know that this is so. It is, however, the best reason the Republicans have to deny the President’s request. So let it stand.

The activities of any political party should not interfere with the work of the elected government. A single debate, this early, is of negligible importance, particularly when compared to an official address by the sitting president.

The Republicans are far from selecting a candidate for the coming election. They have held one straw poll, in which Mrs. Bachman was selected. The Iowa straw poll historically has had little positive effect on selecting the eventual Republican candidate and even less on the results of the national election. Mrs. Bachmann’s victory was quickly eclipsed by Texas Governor Rick Perry’s mere announcement of his candidacy.

Even with Mr. Perry’s announcement, there is dissatisfaction among Republicans with the candidates vying for the ticket. Despite the fact time is growing short, there are calls for Representative Paul Ryan, Governor Chris Christie and even Mrs. Sarah Palin to enter the race.

The Republican contention that tonight’s debate should take precedence over a president's speech to Congress is nothing less than hubris.

The Constitution established three branches of government, the legislative, executive, and judicial. There is no mention of political parties. Political parties have no official standing in the work of government. In fact, the Founding Fathers disliked the idea of political parties and hoped that the nation could do without them.

The Republicans should know this if they knew the Constitution and its history as they claim. James Madison penned Federalist 10 as a warning against political parties, which he called “factions.” The Founding Fathers hope of politics without political parties did not survive their lifetime, and even Mr. Madison became a member of a political party. Nevertheless, the Founding Fathers would be appalled to see this day when a single party’s candidate debate interferes with the work of the elected government.

Perhaps some would question the wisdom of Mr. Obama using his office to upstage a single debate of the opposing party’s candidate debate. Let them. There is no reason that any sitting president should take into consideration the internal work of the opposing party in the rightful execution of his duties. More importantly, there is no reason the opposing party should expect such consideration.

The Constitution established three branches of government. Mr. Boehner won a majority of the votes of the 8^th congressional district of Ohio to become a member of the lower chamber of the legislative branch. The majority of that lower chamber elected Mr. Boehner Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Boehner thus represents both the 8^th congressional district and one half of the bicameral legislature.

The President of the United States is elected by the whole nation, albeit indirectly through the Electoral College. Mr. Obama won the office of President of the United States by a clear majority of the popular vote and the Electoral College – without the assistance of a decision of the Supreme Court. He represents not a district, or even a state. He is President of the whole country and for the whole country.

To be sure, the president is not a dictator. There are constitutional limits to his authority. The Constitution provides checks and balances so that no single branch of government has power beyond what is necessary to exercise its duties to the country.

However, the Republicans have taken the legislature beyond anything the Founding Fathers imagined. Republican senators, by the mere threat of filibuster, have turn back presidential appointments. The single disqualifying mark of an appointee is that the appointment came from Mr. Obama.

“Speaking with National Journal magazine about Republican Party priorities for the 2008-2010 Congress, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that ‘the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.’ ” (Wikipedia, Mitch McConnell)

Senator McConnell has expressed clearly that the single priority of the Republican Party is not the welfare of the country, but the augmentation of the power of the Republican Party. In keeping with this priority, the Republican Party perpetrated the unnecessary debt-ceiling crisis. In keeping with this priority, Mr. Boehner denied the President of the United States a joint session of Congress. In these and several other instances the Republican Party has demonstrated that it has no respect for the constitutionally established office of the executive as long as Mr. Obama occupies it – the vote of the people be damned.

This is not the governance the Founding Fathers envisioned. This is the factionalism that James Madison abhorred.

In September 2009, the President addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there that Representative Joe Wilson set the true precedent for Mr. Boehner’s action this month. Mr. Wilson broke with tradition and shouted at the President. On September 11, 2009, I asked the question, “Is the Opposition Loyal?” on this blog (see archive). This question stands.

[Works consulted for this essay: The Debate on the Constitution, Part One, Library of America, 1993; James Madison, Writings, Library of America, 1999; Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, Richard Beeman, Random House, 2009; The Oxford Companion to United States History, edited by Paul S. Boyer, Oxford University Press, 2001.]

They Are Back ...

2011-09-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

For a while we did not hear from them. They did not call. They did not write. It is hard to say why. Perhaps they were embarrassed. Perhaps they felt threatened. It would be too much to think they were repentant. One thing is certain. It was nothing we had done. We went on with our lives the best we could after the 2007-2009 financial meltdown.

This year they returned. We strictly observe the rule that coincidence is not causation. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that their return coincides with the ascendency of the radical faction of the Republican party, particularly in the House of Representatives.

“This is Rachel with credit card services, calling in regard to your current credit card account. There is no need to worry. Your account seems to be in order. But you need to respond immediately to get the new reduced credit card rates…”

Rachel has a sister.

“This is Lisa. We have contacted you before. This is your last chance…”

Rachel and Lisa have another sister, who does not give her name.

“…In order to take advantage of this offer you must have $3,000 in credit card debt and at least one credit card in good standing.”

The above is an accurate representation from memory and not verbatim. One offer goes so far as to illogically reference “the current Federal stimulus package.”

One thing is certain about these three – they are all lying b…witches. The three weird sisters by subtle word choice would have us believe they represent the credit card that is in our pocket. Parse their sentences and it is evident they have no idea what credit card we have. Lisa has offered my last chance two, even three times in one week.

I have not returned their calls, so I cannot be completely certain of the extent of their scam. It would appear however, that their “regard” for my “current credit card account” is to switch it to another credit card. Since their offers begin with mendacity, it is highly doubtful that the switch will be to my advantage.

The wicked advances of the three weird sisters are small beer compared with the predatory lending practices of certain mortgage brokers that brought about the recent housing bubble. Nevertheless, our humble household has experienced the need for government oversight of the consumer financial market, maybe five times a week – sometimes twice in one day – by the three weird sisters.

Of course many, if not most, people are protected from the spells of the three weird sisters by good sense. Most people are not the prey of these anonymous overtures. The poor, the financially desperate, and those who are easily frightened are their intended victims.

Here come the radical Republicans. Mr. Eric Cantor has announced that the agenda for the next session of the House is to repeal so-called job-killing government regulations. Already the Republicans have significantly stalled the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and their efforts will continue. They have the backing of the completely unrepentant banking industry.

Let us concede that government regulations do kill jobs. Let us also recognize that the jobs of the three weird sisters deserve to be burned at the stake. And we have not even touched on the indefensible usury of payday lenders who charge as much as 524% APR.

Mr. Cantor and his colleagues need to be held accountable for siding with companies whose only purpose is to prey upon the poor and financially uninformed.

Failure among the Faithful

2011-08-03T18:07:00.002-05:00

I'm just not cool with the government insisting that an excessively large and growing share of the output of the motivated and responsible achievers ought to be diverted to the unmotivated and irresponsible. -- A Christian’s posting to Facebook.

It does not matter who wrote the above. The sentiment is common, particularly and sadly among politically conservative Christians.

The argument is that any tax on corporations and persons of wealth to fund programs to help the poor, sick, and elderly is immoral. When the government uses its power of taxation for any other than military appropriations, it is an act of theft. The rich are rich because they are “motivated and responsible achievers.” The poor are poor because they are “unmotivated and irresponsible.”

This argument is straight out of Ayn Rand’s essay “Collectivized Ethics” from the book, The Virtue of Selfishness. “Only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help others,” Rand pontificates, “society – as an organized political system – has no rights in the matter at all.”

Rand offers no supporting evidence for her assertion. There is not any. The progress of Western civilization itself is the refutation of Rand’s thesis. More on that another time.

I have no reason to believe that the Christian who made the above post to Facebook has read Rand. However, as I posted on 23 October 2010, Randism has poisoned our political discourse (See “The Threat").

Take for example the untenable distinction of the rich as the “motivated and responsible achievers” from the poor who are “unmotivated and irresponsible.” There is no empirical evidence for this. In fact, it runs the other way. Most rich individuals in the United States acquired their wealth the old-fashioned way – they picked rich parents. The poor, conversely, are to be faulted for not choosing parents of ample means.

It is, however, of little concern that our Christian has imbibed a bit of Randism or does not know the social science that refutes his simplistic distinction between rich and poor.

What is disturbing is that the Faith has little or nothing to do with the political thought of too many conservative Christians. Instead of the compassion of Christ, we have the cruelty of Randism. Instead of concern for the weakest in our country, there is a perverse concern for the supposed imperiled rights of the most powerful.

I do not doubt that most conservative Christians believe this is a fallen world, corrupted by the sin of our first parents. Nevertheless, they also seem to think that, miraculously, justice has been preserved in the distribution of wealth in this country. They seem to think our Lord was issuing a command when He said, “The poor will always be with you.”

A Short Sermon

2011-07-25T14:39:00.002-05:00

And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and all my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” – Luke 12:16-21

Begin with the first sentence. Begin with what is verbed in the first sentence. It is “the land” which is the first actor in this parable. It is “the land” that brings forth fruit. The rich man merely receives what “the land” brings forth.

The rich man does not consider that the land was there before him. The rich man considers only himself, talks only to himself, plans only for himself, and lives only for himself. Note the monotonous possessive pronoun – my crops, my barns, all my grain, all my goods and finally my soul.

The rich man thinks himself a completely autonomous, self-made individual, owing nothing to the land, family, community, or even God. He is supreme monarch of all he surveys. He is captain of his own soul.

If it were not for the first sentence, if we looked at things only through the rich man’s eyes, we would undoubtedly admire his efforts. We would commend his plans for his future. We live in a country that heedlessly praises the self-made individual. We live in a fallen world with the Old Adam hanging around our necks.

With the first sentence our Lord pulls us back. Our Lord would have us see our life and all our possessions as they are in God’s eyes. The Lord gives the land and seed to the sower, the first rains and the latter rains. The Lord gives us life and places us in families and communities. The Lord calls upon us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The rich man loves only himself, plans only for himself, and hoards what he has been blessed with for only himself.

This is a parable of our Lord. It is not a political treatise. The parable is not in the least way a promotion of Socialism or a condemnation of Capitalism. It would be wrong to think the parable condemns private property.

The Gospel is more radical than any political or economic philosophy. The Gospel does not call for revolution or seek to upend the way men attempt to organize life in this fallen world. The Gospel cuts to the hearts of men and gives them eyes of faith by which they are to view their lives and all they possess.

The rich man is condemned not because he is rich, or because he is prosperous, or even because he makes plans for the future. The rich man is condemned because he is ungrateful for the land, ungrateful for the fruit it produces, ungrateful for the community he lives in, and most of all, ungrateful for the life given to him. All these are from the Lord.

The rich man’s ingratitude is born of nothing less than idolatry. He is the only thing that matters to him. He worships himself.

Now one must be careful not to abuse this parable and make it into a political tract of some kind. On the other hand, one must not ignore the application of this parable to Christians living in these times. It would be negligent, in particular, to ignore the explicitly anti-Christian political philosophy to which this parable applies.

Ayn Rand would have hated this parable. The individualism that she espoused is the individualism of the rich man in this parable. Rand’s individual lives only for himself. The poison of Rand’s individualism has infected our public life through her latter-day disciples, Paul Ryan, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, and a number of other radical Republicans.

One does not have to probe the pronouncements of the radical Republicans to see that in much of what is said there is a lack of gratitude for the work of the laborer, an idolatrous affection for the rich, and a disregard for the neighbor who is in need. Supporting all of this is the myth of the self-made individual.

We do not live in a Christian country. We live in a country that has always tolerated Christianity. We live in a country that allows the preaching of the Gospel. For this, thanks be to God. It is incumbent upon preachers to preach that radical Gospel in all its truth and purity. Such preaching should invoke gratitude for all the Lord’s blessings on this land. It should also renounce idolatry in all its forms – including Randian individualism.

One can only pray that politically conservative pastors are strengthened to be faithful to their calling.

Things Have Changed

2011-07-15T21:36:00.000-05:00

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. -- President Dwight David Eisenhower

This Gun Smokes

2011-04-17T15:03:00.003-05:00

I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentry Lords and the common people vassals, are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be? …

I am willing to allow the Colony great merrit for having produced a Washington but they have been shamefully duped by a Dunmore.

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Equally Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.—Abigal Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776

Mrs. Adams was an amazing lady. In the above citation, taken from her prescient “Remember the Ladies” epistle to husband and future United States president, John Adams, she hits at the contradiction of the ideals of the Founding Fathers and their practice.

She is a bit chagrinned that Lord Dunmore has caught them out.

In 1775 Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, declared martial law and promised freedom for slaves who would desert their patriot masters and join the British in stopping the revolution. His proclamation was somewhat successful, and at the end of the war, the British evacuated some 20,000 freedmen from their former colonies.

Mrs. Adams in the midst of all this blames the Virginian slaveholding patriots. They talk liberty, and “deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.” This is not right. More importantly, for Mrs. Adams, this is not Christian.

The founding of the United States of America was a wonderful, multifaceted event that bequeathed both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was the promise of liberty for all. The curse was the denial of liberty – the continuation of slavery, particularly in the southern states like Virginia, the home of slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Even James Madison, who played a major role in the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and later in the appending of the Bill of Rights, owned over 100 slaves to do the work on his Montpelier plantation.

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of beginning the Civil War. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called upon the country to “recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals…” The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s further addressed the “faults and crimes” which issued from the curse of slavery. With the election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, America’s first African-American president, one would like to think that this country had finally consigned the curse to history.

The birther movement, however, squelches such optimism.

The birthers claim that Mr. Obama is not legally president of the United States of America because – they contend – he was not born in America. Mr. Obama’s birth in Hawaii was never questioned before his election. He fought a vigorous campaign first against his Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton and then against the formidable Senator John McCain. Both opponents were capable of raising the question of his origin and did not. It was only after the election that the movement gained a following.

The blogosphere was the medium and the message resonated with everyone who believed that a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama, and a skin of a different hue from their own, could not possibly be the legitimate president of their country. This was despite the facts that both elected and bureaucratic officials of Hawaii vouched for his birth in their state, and contemporary news accounts in the local papers witnessed to the birth. Even the publication of a copy birth certificate suitable for the issuing of a United States passport did not satisfy them.

Still the birthers claim fraud. Recently the state of Arizona has taken up the lost cause by requiring presidential candidates to supply documentation proving birth in the United States. The law does not stand a snowball’s chance on a summer day in that sunny state of surviving a court challenge. It will contribute to the state’s growing reputation as the most xenophobic state in the nation.

The connection between birtherism and racism I must admit has been tenuous. No birther has appeared on Fox News in a white robe with a peaked white hat – the only confirmation that would satisfy some on the right.

Still, in the light of the supplied documentation and government testimony little else explains the irrationality of the birther. I suggested as much in an exchange on Facebook and was taken to task. It was awkward, because while many indications of racism are present in birtherism, it is never explicit.

Then this came up on my Google news page, without a search. It is an Associated Press report, not the New York Times or some other biasedly liberal source.

An Orange County Republican Party official is under fire after sending an email with an altered photo depicting President Barack Obama as an ape.

The email, sent Friday afternoon by party central committee member Marilyn Davenport, depicts a family portrait-style image of apes with Obama's face superimposed on one of them. The photo is accompanied by text that reads, "Now you know why no birth certificate."

Now in all fairness this needs to be added:

Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, has called on Davenport to resign and said the party's ethics panel will hold a hearing into the incident if she does not do so. The panel will make findings, and a majority vote of the entire 73-member committee can oust her.

"It's just highly inappropriate, it's a despicable message, it drips with racism and I think she should step down from the committee," Baugh said. "It undermines everything we are doing to reach out to ethnic communities."

Kudos to Mr. Baugh. The Republicans of Orange County are not at fault here. This connection of birtherism to racism should not be blown out of proportion. Not all Orange County Republicans are racist. Let us go further and say not all birthers are racist. All that being granted, the irrational birther movement owes much to racism. That much is established by the Orange County Republican Party official’s email.

This is Palm Sunday. Christian churches begin the most holy week of the church year by stripping the liturgy of the lesser Gloria and responses. The Lenten liturgical austerity bespeaks a heightened emphasis on repentance.

This is the 150^th anniversary year of the beginning of the Civil War. When the war ended, the life of President Abraham Lincoln ended on Good Friday, April 15, 1865.

Now, we have our first African American president. Love him or hate him, he is the President and Christians are admonished by the Apostolic Scriptures to pray for those who rule over them.

The confluence of things suggests a time for conservative Christians to examine their hearts. It is a time to denounce what is false and rejoice in what is true, but most of all, to know the difference.
_______________
Monday April 18, 2011

When I wrote this the Arizona legislature had passed a bill requiring Mr. Obama and all other candidates to provide proof of their birth as United States citizens. I should have waited before making the broad judgement above.

This just in from AP:

[Governor] Brewer said in her veto letter that she was troubled that the bill empowered Arizona's secretary of state to judge the qualifications of all candidates when they file to run for office.

"I do not support designating one person as the gatekeeper to the ballot for a candidate, which could lead to arbitrary or politically motivated decisions," said Brewer, who was secretary of state until she became governor in 2009.

"In addition, I never imagined being presented with a bill that could require candidates for president of the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth to submit their 'early baptismal circumcision certificates' among other records to the Arizona secretary of state," she said. "This is a bridge too far."

The certificates are among the documents a candidate could submit in place of a birth certificate.

So, two cheers for Arizona. Their governor has pulled the state back from the brink. On the other hand, the reported details of the bill raise serious questions about their lawmakers. Nevertheless, two hearty cheers for Arizona.

Liberal Discipline

2011-03-20T17:01:00.003-05:00

Children’s Crusade

There was a bit of overtime this week. As an office temp with no benefits, I milk every assignment for as much cash as possible. When the contract is fulfilled at this assignment, there is no telling when, if ever, I will get another assignment. Working four hours on Saturday morning is easy money.

When I got off the bus on Downer Avenue, it was cool but sunny and pleasant. I looked forward to enjoying the rest of the weekend.

Then I saw the picketers. They had small white cardboard signs attacking Governor Scott Walker. They were walking in a circle in front of Sendik’s grocery store chanting, “We like teachers. Not Scott Walker,” and “Shame on Walker. Shame on Sendik’s.” The picketers all appeared to be college students from the nearby University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM), although I received reports later that there may have been one woman beyond college years in the group.

Comedy of Errors

Readers who are not citizens of our fair city need a little background.

Sendik’s is the name on three different grocery store chains in Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the beginning, an Italian family named Balistreri founded Sendik’s. How the stores came to be called Sendik’s is too complicated to recount here. (It involves the purchase of a stove by the Italian patriarch with a thick accent.)

Over time, the Balistreri cousins reportedly had … ahh, differences. Now there is one chain of nine stores that advertises itself as Balistreri owned and operated for over 80 years.

Another branch of the family owns the store on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee and stores in the suburbs of Bayside and Elmbrook.

Then there is the scandal of Balistreri cousins selling the Oakland Avenue store in Shoreword to the Nehrings. The Nehrings shamelessly advertise their store as A Milwaukee Tradition for more than a Century. (Yeah, right. And my name is Michelangelo.)

Let us return to our story. Anti-Scott Walker activists selected the nine-store Balistreri-owned Sendik’s for boycotting and protest action because the owners reputedly supported Mr. Walker in the November election. A Facebook page is dedicated to the cause and lists the stores to be boycotted.

The college students picketing the store on Downer were at the wrong store. They picketed from noon to one o’clock. Two protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct. Reportedly, after one hour of heavy lifting on Downer, the protesters proceeded to protest at the Nehring’s store on Oakland Avenue. This store also was not part of the chain singled out by the activists running the Facebook boycott page.

There is one thing that both the Nehring’s Sendik’s store on Oakland Avenue and the Downer Avenue store have in common beyond the fact that they are not the target of the Facebook activists. They are both within walking distance of UWM.

The blogosphere and talk radio would have you think union thugs are harassing local businesses. There were no union thugs on Downer Avenue. These were naïve, ill-informed, foolish college students getting a little drama into their lives. It is quite likely that these students came from suburbs to study in the big city. They may not have had cars to travel to the Balistreri stores, but “Hey, there are two Sendik’s in the neighborhood. Let’s do a show!”

Bad Aim

This whole comedy of errors calls for an adult conversation about the anti-Scott Walker boycotts. Boycotting is the wrong tactic. Boycotting benefits no one but Mr. Walker. Boycotting aims at the wrong target and hurts the very workers that Mr. Walker’s fiscal policies hurt.

Those who funded Mr. Walker’s gubernatorial campaign and those who voted for Mr. Walker are not the enemy. There is nothing illegal or immoral about contributing to Mr. Walker’s campaign. There is nothing illegal or immoral about voting for Mr. Walker. Those who supported Mr. Walker need to be persuaded, not punished.

Mr. Walker has made a career of misleading Wisconsin voters. As Milwaukee County Executive he pitted suburban voters against city voters. As governor, he has pitted union workers against non-union workers for the benefit of his corporate sponsors. Stripping the public sector unions of their 51-year-old bargaining rights was not a plank in his gubernatorial campaign for the simple reason that if it were he would not have been elected. Even the pro-Walker Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS) admits this.

If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. At least some of the anti-Walker party seems to think they only have a hammer. That hammer is a boycott. The hourly workers at Sendik’s or M & I Bank or Johnsonville Brats are not nails, however.

Boycotting reputed supporters of Mr. Walker is the wrong tool. Boycotting is effective when its aim is to change behavior. Those who funded Governor Walker’s campaign cannot take back their funding. Those who voted for Mr. Walker cannot take back their vote. Now that these supporters have fulfilled their purpose in the last election there is no reason that the ideologue Mr. Walker will listen to them. He has loftier goals.

But Isn’t Liberal Discipline an Oxymoron?

“Between Feb. 14 and March 12 more than a million people protested in and outside the Capitol,” Steven Walters writes in the MJS. “No one was injured; 16 citations were issued for minor violations.”

I suspect Mr. Walters’ figures are cumulative. Over the period he cites, I suspect some people are counted twice. I know of one MPS teacher who was there for four days. Nevertheless, there were tens of thousands of citizens outraged by the policies of Mr. Walker.

Rueters reported that on Saturday, March 12, the number of protesters was anywhere from 85,000 to 100,000 according to Madison police estimates. The news service observed that this “would top the size of protests in Madison during the Vietnam War.”

On the other hand, the pro-Walker MJS has buried any mention of the size of the March 12 crowd and then has never put a number on it. On Sunday, March 13, it tepidly reported, “The crowd that gathered in Madison was the biggest yet during four weeks of protests.” This understatement is on page 18, bottom right hand corner. The very bottom.

There have been attempts by Governor Walker’s administration and its allies at Fox and on talk radio to portray these citizens as dirty rioters imported to the state by greedy unions, causing cost overruns in police service and millions of dollars in damage to the Capitol.

The protestors were in fact clean, upstanding Wisconsin citizens exercising their rights to peacefully assemble and petition their government. Well, except for that guy on the tractor pulling the manure spreader. It seems that Mr. Tod Pulvermacher “has been convicted of drunken driving four times and has no valid driver’s license” (MJS, 3-16-11). Exceptions must be granted in such a large crowd.

Honest citizens, both conservative and liberal, should be nothing but proud of the uprising of citizens in Madison. Did we mention no one got hurt? Should we not be proud that the police, from the chief down to the patrol officers, professionally kept the peace? Should we not remember that protests in the sixties, over issues every bit as important, shared nothing of the character of this lawful assembly of citizens in Madison?

The fight must go on. The policies of Mr. Walker are dangerous for Wisconsin and the country. The loyal opposition, however, must exercise discipline.

Boycotting hits the wrong targets. Pouring glue into the locks of businesses is vandalism that every citizen should decry. These actions merely feed right-wing talk radio and Fox News. The wrong target is being hit.

On the other hand, the recalling of the senators who support Mr. Walker is on target. The recall of Mr. Walker himself in January 2012 is necessary.

These recalls require persuading citizens who voted for Mr. Walker that he misled them, that his senate supporters are culpable, and that neither the Governor nor his Senate supporters are working in the best interests of Wisconsin. This is hard because it requires patience, maturity, and the work of marshaling the facts. It is easy because the facts are against Mr. Walker and the good citizens of our Wisconsin do not share to his radical Libertarian ideology.

These recalls require disciplined liberals.

Walker's War on Workers

2011-03-13T23:16:00.005-05:00

We've seen local union after local union rush to their school boards, their city councils, their technical school boards and rush through contracts in the past two weeks that had no contributions to the pension and no contribution to health care. – Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

Governor Scott Walker won a battle against public sector unions last week when the Republican-controlled legislature passed a portion of his so-called Budget Repair Bill. The new law strips public sector unions of bargaining rights granted by this state fifty years ago. The Governor contends that powerful unions prevent the state and its municipalities from assessing workers for pensions and health care costs.

From the beginning of this fight, Governor Walker has maintained that public sector workers covered by collective bargaining agreements pay little or nothing for pensions and health care. This assertion has been picked up by the local and national media and reported as fact.

When the fight went on over the so-called Budget Repair Bill, the Governor made the above statement. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel franchise of PolitiFact, a reputed investigative fact-checking enterprise, examined his statement and reported:

Two governmental bodies -- Madison and MATC -- tapped on the accelerator to get deals approved before state lawmakers could slam on the breaks. But two others, Janesville schools and Sheboygan County, are making their workers wait until the contracts are brought up for a vote at regularly scheduled board meetings. That doesn’t reflect the ram-it-through image Walker pointed to. We rate his statement Barely True.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed Mr. Walker for governor. Now MJS continues to support him in both its news and editorial pages. Even their fact-checkers need to be fact-checked, because the Governor’s assertion about employee contributions to pensions and health care is complete economic hogwash.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services (http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8EDJYS?OpenDocument).

The above is from David Cay Johnston. His excellent article deserves your attention and I encourage you to follow the above link.

Mr. Johnston shows that every employer has employee costs that go beyond the cash on the paycheck. Pensions, health care, sick pay, vacations, and employer contributions to Social Security all figure into the compensation earned by a worker for services rendered. Workers earn this compensation.

Every employer must count the full position costs of a worker, whether his employees are union members or not. No employer, public sector or private, gives his workers something for nothing. Even employers who do not compensate their workers with pensions, health care, and other benefits have to contribute to Social Security. The only exception would be if their employees are undocumented and off the books.

Governor Walker has premised his attack on public sector unions on economic nonsense. Undoubtedly, fair-minded citizens of Wisconsin were appalled to hear that state workers were not contributing to their health care and pensions. They should be even more upset to learn that the Governor has completely misled them.

Governor Walker likes to compare his battle with public sector unions to President Reagan’s conflict with the unionized air traffic controllers. There are significant differences.

President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers when, contrary to law and union contract, they went on strike. To the best of my knowledge, all public sector union members are forbidden by law from striking, unlike their private sector counterparts.

Governor Walker has attacked public sector unions that conceded to his economic demands. They were not striking. They were not threatening to strike.

President Reagan enforced the law. Governor Walker changed the law. President Reagan fought a battle forced on him. Governor Walker has picked a fight. It will not be his first.

After this battle won against public sector unions, there is the battle with the private sector unions. Even before the proposal of the so-called Budget Repair Bill, Republicans in the state legislature were talking about making Wisconsin a so-called Right-To-Work state, thereby ending closed union shops.

Governor Walker has won a battle with his so-called Budget Repair Bill. After this came the budget that cuts local funding and grants tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy. Terminations of local municipal workers are sure to come. Terminated public sector employees do not buy many goods and services. As unemployment surges, wages are depressed. Every worker in Wisconsin, union and non-union, is beginning to realize that there is now a war on workers.

This is a war the Governor cannot be allowed to win.

Scott Walker, Meet Harry Lime

2011-02-27T22:34:00.003-06:00

“Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love -- they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.” -- Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in The Third Man.

Harry Lime is the charming entrepreneur in the Carol Reed classic, The Third Man. Graham Greene wrote most of the script, but the above quotation, one of the most famous in the history of film, reportedly came from the third genius of the film, Orson Welles.

Harry Lime is an entrepreneur because in post-World War II Vienna he bought low – actually stole - penicillin, and sold high, diluting the penicillin to maximize profits. Harry Lime is charming because even after his nefarious enterprise results in the death and suffering of hundreds, his friend Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) and lover Anna Schmitt (Alida Valli) cannot bring themselves to betray good old Harry.

The Third Man is a truly great film. I have seen it a half dozen times and have always found something new to appreciate and wonder about.

The quotation above is part of the Ferris wheel scene where Holly Martins confronts Harry about his crime and Harry explains his philosophy. He is a complete egoist. As they reach the pinnacle of the Ferris wheel ride he beguiles Holly with the idea that one should always regard his self-interest above all the “little dots” below.

Selfishness as a virtue, disregard for the masses, disparagement of democracy, and appreciation of the advance of creativity regardless of bloodshed, these are all attributes of an Ayn Rand hero. Fortunately, here they are the attributes of a Greene/Reed villain.

The analogy is this: Randians cannot disassociate their hero John Galt from the villain Harry Lime any more than Marxists can disassociate Marx from Stalin. The moral bankruptcy of Randism and Marxism is equivalent.

Capitalism is not inherently evil. Neither is it unqualifiedly good. Like any human invention, it is susceptible to corruption. The ideology of Randism threatens to corrupt capitalism in our republic.

I doubt that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has read Ayn Rand because I doubt that this college dropout has read much of anything. His singular talent is to get himself elected to office. As Milwaukee County Executive, he solved none of the county's problems. He dedicated himself to reducing government and taxes without regard for the consequences.

I do not know that he is a Randian. He has drunk the Kool-Aid. His ideological purity has brought on moral corruption.

Governor Walker was pranked. A caller pretending to be radical capitalist David Koch recorded a conversation with the governor. It was damning at several points, most of all in revealing the Governor’s regard for the citizens protesting his latest power grab before the state senate.

Murphy [pretending to be Koch]: Right, right. We’ll back you any way we can. But what we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.

Walker: You know, well, the only problem with that — because we thought about that. The problem with — my only gut reaction to that would be, right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them. The public is not really fond of this. …My only fear would be if there’s a ruckus caused is that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems.

The protests in Madison have been amazingly peaceful. Even when pro-Walker demonstrators showed, there were no incidents of violence. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have flooded the capitol and there have been no arrests. The capitol police have been wonderfully professional and the demonstrators have been respectful.

Little did the police suspect, however, that the Governor himself had been thinking about sending “troublemakers” into this situation. He did not send them, which is to his credit. The reason he did not, however, deprives him of all credit.

He did not send troublemakers into the crowd because it would be immoral, illegal, and very likely, dangerous in a crowd that at one point swelled to 70,000. He did not consider that such an action might cause bodily harm or even death. His only concern was that such an action might backfire and cause the public to turn against him.

Eagle Scout Scott Walker is a radical who believes in himself as the strong individual who is without all doubt on the right side of history. He dismisses, without the least consideration, the concerns of the tens of thousands of little dots who surrounded the capital. He is concerned about their safety and well-being only to the extent that they threaten him and the success of his ideology.

Mr. Walker has graduated from being a bungling county executive to being a truly dangerous governor.

Scott Walker, meet Harry Lime.

Caveat Emptor

2010-11-07T23:38:00.000-06:00

Because I am an unabashed Liberal – capital letter and all – some might be surprised to learn that I am a charter subscriber to The Weekly Standard, the formerly neo-conservative political journal.

In its first numbers The Weekly Standard was an interesting center-right counter balance to center-left The New Republic. The reputed father of neo-conservatism is the late Irving Kristol, the actual father of William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard. It was Kristol the Elder who defined a neo-conservative as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." The Standard's executive editor, Fred Barnes, was formerly an editor for The New Republic. Charles Krauthammer remains a contributing editor of The New Republic, while also holding that title for The Weekly Standard, though by my recollection it has been years since anything by Mr. Krauthammer has appeared in The New Republic.

I have read The New Republic since high school. Much later, I came to admire the work of Mr. Barnes and Mr. Krauthammer. It was from reading them in The New Republic that I came to be a subscriber to The Weekly Standard. I cannot boast to be a charter subscriber to The New Republic, for the simple reason that it is ninety-six years old today.

For years, The Weekly Standard was a reasonable conservative response to what one read in The New Republic. There have been several editorial changes and several journalistic scandals at The New Republic over the years. There have been times that I found myself preferring The Weekly Standard over The New Republic. If memory serves, in the early numbers The Weekly Standard even ventured to criticize the anti-government philosophy of Ronald Reagan.

That all changed with the election of Barack Obama. Since Mr. Obama's election The Weekly Standard has turned sharply to the right, unwilling to criticize any extremism from the Tea Party movement, blindly endorsing the nonsense that comes from Sarah Palin, and giving a wink to the radical capitalism of Ayn Rand.

The Weekly Standard is neo-conservative no longer. Perhaps there no longer is any neo-conservatism. From the little I know, it does not seem possible that the urbane Kristol the Elder would find anything amusing in the vitriol that currently spews on the pages of Kristol the Younger's magazine. It seems questionable that the liberals who had been mugged by reality would endorse the radical unregulated capitalism of Randism.

These, however, are larger issues that require research.

However, the proposition that free-market capitalism cannot be left completely free, that some government oversight is needed for the protection of consumers, can be defended easily, and from nothing less than the pages of the formerly neo-conservative Weekly Standard.

For the last few months, many times opposite an article that staunchly defends free-market capitalism, The Weekly Standard has run a full-page color advertisement for "The Holy Bible In Its Original Order." This new edition of the Bible is unique for two reasons: the order of the books and the "new translation."

The first claim is the most important.

This advertisement claims this Bible to be "the only complete Bible ever published … that accurately follows the original canonical or manuscript order as recognized by most scholars." Furthermore, it is claimed, "With this restoration to the 1^st century 'manuscript' order, a purposeful design, symmetry and story flow order of the Bible become more readily apparent."

How is it that after two millennia of the Christian faith this is the first and only Bible of its kind?

"It is a little known historical fact that the original manuscript order of both the Old and New Testament books was altered by early church fathers," the publisher claims.

The history of what has come to be the Christian Bible is complicated. This history runs from the second century B.C. until the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Council of Trent – at the very least. The "little known historical fact" promoted by this advertisement is pure rubbish. No "early church fathers" altered the order of any "1^st century 'manuscript' order" because there never was a first-century manuscript order.

Consider first the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament. The late Jaroslav Pelikan, theologian and former professor of History at Yale University, wrote, "The Holy Scripture for Jesus and the early Christians was the Hebrew Bible of the Jewish community, but no list of books it included exists" (The Melody of Theology, p. 28). Pelikan goes on to explain that from all the books competing to be part of what came to be the Old Testament for Christians, there have come to be "…three canons, one each for Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy" (p. 31).

If this appears complicated, it is. Any standard Bible encyclopedia will introduce the interested reader to the subject. What can be said for certain, however, is that there was no single first-century canon of the Old Testament.

The Bible publisher's claim as it pertains to the New Testament is even more glaringly false. Every first-year seminary student knows that there was no first-century manuscript order or canon because the New Testament was written in the first century. The first canon, or list of New Testament books, extant is the second-century Marcion canon. The problem with this is that Marcion was a heretic and his canon, although interesting from an historical perspective, is deficient for current orthodox Christians.

We could go on to discuss the heresy of Montanism, and the significance of Eusebius' categorization of books as either homologoumena or antilogomena, but the point has been made.

The first-century manuscript order Bible being peddled here is completely the invention of a twenty-first-century Bible publisher. The publisher's claims for this Bible are false and indefensible. The publisher claims the authority of "most scholars," but conveniently names no scholar.

No court of law will prosecute this publisher, but every penny that this publisher takes for the $119.50 Deluxe Lambskin edition, or the $99.50 Black Faux Calfskin edition, or the $99.50 Paper Edition with carrying case, is an act of theft. No court is going to adjudicate rival claims of ecclesial history. No court will defend the pious but ignorant consumers of this rubbish. Caveat emptor.

What we have here is the Bernie Madoff of Bible publishers.

Perhaps under a liberal free market society that allows the free flow of information, such creatures need to be tolerated. Perhaps we should allow Grandmother Schultz to be defrauded of a hundred bucks, or left to hope her pastor can defend her.

What about her retirement fund, or mortgage, or life insurance, or health insurance? There comes a point when the free market needs some regulation to protect it from its own excesses. There comes a point when the government needs to protect citizens from the fraudulent claims of the unscrupulous entrepreneur.

President Barack Obama is not a socialist. He is, when he is at his best, a Liberal. Like the Liberal Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, he has tried to protect capitalism from its own excesses.

The editors of The Weekly Standard have failed to recognize this. They have also failed to scrutinize the advertisements they accept for publication.

The Threat

2010-10-23T23:37:00.009-05:00

The election of President Barack Obama aroused a truly un-American, anti-democratic, virulently un-Christian ideology in our country.

This ideology promotes vice as virtue, and evil as good. This ideology has long been in plain sight but, until recently, was never taken seriously. Powerful persons in the government have subscribed to this ideology. They have done real damage to our country and have not been held accountable. Elected officials have adopted this philosophy and have made plans accordingly for the future of the nation.

If this ideology succeeds in seducing the republic, it will not only radically change our government, it will subvert the Judeo-Christian ethos that guides our public discourse. This ideology, awakened by the election of Mr. Obama, threatens this country in much the same way as Nazism threatened the Weimar Republic.

Forget Mr. Obama portrayed with Hitler's mustache.

This threat is not from the Left.

It is from the Right.

The ideology is Randism – the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Ms. Rand preferred to call her philosophy Objectivism and opposed naming it after herself. We refuse to put lipstick on this pig. It is Randism – an ugly, vile ideology that nourishes everything that is ungodly in the fallen human soul. There is nothing "objective" about it.

When Rand declared selfishness a virtue there was no mitigating irony. Rand was Nietzsche without the humor. The freedoms she promoted are for the few, the elite, the producers, the creators. She held nothing but contempt for the masses – they were the looters, the parasites. The capitalism she promoted would result in cruel plutocracy where money is god. Your stock portfolio would be the measure of your moral worth. If you had a stock portfolio.

Rand's capitalism is capitalism with a demon's face.

Alan Greenspan, the Ronald Reagan-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, was an unabashed acolyte of Ayn Rand. Her ardent capitalism was his. His faith in the false god of self-correcting financial markets brought on the financial meltdown of 2008.

This was Randism at its best.

Unfortunately, it is not the last of this ungodly ideology.

Paul Ryan, Wisconsin representative to the U.S. House, is a Randian who reportedly gives copies of Atlas Shrugged to all staff members. He is one of the young guns promoted by the formerly neo-conservative Weekly Standard for his obtuse Roadmap for America. According to his Web page, Representative Ryan is a Roman Catholic.

Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican candidate for the Senate, is a Lutheran who espouses the views of Rand, according to the Weekly Standard. Johnson is running against maverick Democratic Senator Russ Feingold.

The list of Randians could go on. Rand Paul, Glenn Beck, Libertarians, Lutheran college professors, and more are all going Galt on the Obama administration.

A few concluding observations.

First, to Paul Ryan's priest and Ron Johnson's pastor – wake up. You have parishioners whose souls are in danger.

No one can be a Christian and subscribe to the vile teachings of Ayn Rand. Do not take my word for it. She abused William Buckley for his Catholic faith. Rand hated any form of "altruism," which was her code word for any form of faith, Christian most of all. She was ardently opposed to Christianity and there is nothing in the Gospels that squares with Randism.

Secondly, Randism is not conservatism. It is a perversion of conservatism. William Buckley would have nothing to do with Rand. Barry Goldwater shunned her. Whittaker Chambers eviscerated Atlas Shrugged in Buckley's National Review. The recent promotion of Randism in The Weekly Standard and National Review presents us with nothing less than the corruption of conservatism.

Lastly, the United States of America is not the Weimar Republic. We have a wonderful Bill of Rights appended to the Constitution. We have a longstanding tradition of making full use of the right to free speech. We know how to argue like no other republic on the face of the earth.

So God Bless America.

And God keep America.

We have much to fear from plutocracy, oligarchy, and the fallen nature of man. It is the latter that feeds all the rest. Randism preaches selfishness. The old fallen nature says Amen.

Lord help us.

Big Government

2010-01-18T18:59:00.003-06:00

Elizabeth Henderson has a concise prescription for what ails the nation's health care system: Limit the federal government's role. "I want government out of my life. I can make my own decisions," Henderson, of Union Grove, said Saturday, as she and others gathered at a "tea party" to protest the health care legislation pending in Congress and other issues. –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sunday, January 17, 2010

Ms. Henderson probably rode or drove a car, or perhaps even an SUV to her "tea party." She traveled over paved streets from which the snow had been plowed. It was the government that regulated the company that made her vehicle so that it is safe to drive. It was the government that paved and plowed the roads that she drove on.

Yet, she wants the government out of her life.

Perhaps you would object that the subject is not the government, but the huge health care reform legislation that Ms. Henderson is speaking about. Look at Ms. Henderson's statement again. She did not say that she did not want health care reform. She said, "I want the government out of my life."

The boogeyman that the anti-health care reform, anti-tax, tea party crowd continually raises up for excoriation is "big government." At this point, let us dismiss Ms. Henderson. She might be more of a victim of the "tea party" movement than a proponent. Let us focus on the meaning of "big government."

The unquestioned evil of "big government" needs to be questioned.

In this big 21^st-century world, just what is so evil about a "big government?"

Can a small government protect its commerce on the high seas from third-world pirates? Can you expect a small government to detect a solitary Nigerian terrorist plotting to board and bomb an international air flight?

The answer is obvious. We want the largest, most powerful government we can have to protect us from foreign threats.

Health care is not a foreign threat. It is a domestic issue. Perhaps we do not need "big government" interfering in domestic issues.

Even here, however, questions must be raised.

Was it "big government" that caused the 2009 financial meltdown? Did big government cause the savings and loan failures, the malfeasance of Enron, or invent no-down-payment mortgages and credit default swaps? Would Bernie Madoff have been caught in his nefarious schemes by a smaller government? Could a bigger government have prevented him from going as far as he did?

We need a big government because this is the largest, most powerful nation in a world with complex international political and economic relations. We need a big government to protect us from nefarious domestic and foreign powers that would rob us of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We need a big government to uphold the Constitution, which is the greatest man-made guarantor of individual liberty the world has ever known.

This country has progressed far beyond the Jeffersonian agrarian republic envisioned by some of the founding fathers, due, paradoxically, to the wisdom of those same founding fathers. A succeeding generation built upon their legacy in a bloody civil war that enlarged the place of the federal government and brought the promise of liberty to a large portion of the populace that the founding fathers had ignored. That promise of liberty came to be more of a reality though the turmoil of reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Is big government really a threat? A big government, grounded in the rule of law, protects us from plutocracy, the rule of the very rich. A big government, elected by the people, protects us from oligarchy, the rule of a small number of interests groups.

A big government, which observes the rule of law, cannot protect us from demagoguery. We are protected from demagoguery only when free citizens denounce simplistic, manipulative, paranoid assertions – like the idea that big government is always and only evil.

Invictus

2009-12-20T23:20:00.013-06:00

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. -- "Invictus"

The kindest interpretation of these lines is that they invoke, like Rudyard Kipling's "If," the virtues of the British "stiff upper lip" attitude towards adversity. Unfortunately, as inspiring as these lines appear, they are pure balderdash.

We are not the masters of our fate. Fate masters us. We live, we die. We are not the captains of our souls. Check and I will bet you have a navel – an irrefutable physical sign that you are joined to the human race with all its foibles.

Do not misunderstand. I am not opposed to a certain kind of individualism. It is commendable for each to do the best he can with what he is and what he has been given to benefit himself and others.

Still there is that navel.

We are born into a family, in a country, at a certain place and certain time. Countless permutations of benefits and deficits are imposed on an individual before he has uttered his first word. More are to follow as he makes his decisions among choices that he has not chosen. In the end, one looks back and realizes there are right decisions that reap ill rewards and wrong decisions with consequences that cannot be escaped.

No, the writer of "Invictus" for all his bravery had it wrong. Ecclesiastes is closer to the mark.

I returned, and saw under the sun,
That the race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Neither yet bread to the wise,
Nor yet riches to men of understanding,
Nor yet favour to men of skill;
But time and chance happenth to them all.

"Invictus" encourages selfish individualistic fantasies. The Preacher, Ecclesiastes looks at life as it is and invites gratitude and charity in the midst of the unanticipated challenges of life.

An Unplanned Trip to the Emergency Room

2009-11-15T23:38:00.004-06:00

To say that it was a headache would be an understatement. It was a headache from hell. It was a headache that made self-decapitation seem a reasonable alternative.

It was Wednesday, Veterans Day. It was a day off from work for me. The headache came shortly after my wife left for work. It came on suddenly, with full force, closing my left eye. I could not lie down. I could not do anything but pace around the flat howling.

It was difficult, but eventually I called my wife for help. She called neighbors.

One of our neighbors is a retired nurse. She did not take a very long look before she decided that I had to go to the emergency room.

It was fortunate for me that neither she nor her husband is concerned about how litigious this country is rumored to have become. They took me to emergency in their car when they discovered I had no health insurance to cover an ambulance ride. Such generosity is rare and foolish and wonderful. I thank God for my neighbors.

At the emergency room I was asked numerous questions as I writhed in pain. The hospital staff and I each attempted to do our separate parts with aplomb. I cannot complain about my treatment because I was out of my mind.

Blood was taken for tests. A CT scan was run. Nothing came from these or the doctor's examination. The pain was subsiding somewhat, but I was still sick. The doctor prescribed a spinal tap. He was frank about the pain. He was uncomfortably explicit about what the procedure entailed. It sounded terrifyingly medieval.

My head was in pain. I was asked to make a decision. It took time. I have no health insurance. I am spending money and I have no idea how much I am spending. I suspect it is money I do not have. I am sure it is money that was not in the budget. Who budgets for the emergency room?

There was a good chance the spinal tap would show nothing. If the spinal tap revealed anything, it would be something deadly.

I decided for the spinal tap.

The procedure was every bit as uncomfortable as promised. I will take three colonoscopies over one spinal tap any day.

The results: nothing. From the blood tests, the CT scan, the examination, and the spinal tap, nothing to indicate the cause of my sudden extreme headache.

I was sent home with prescriptions for three pain medicines to deal with the headache that might come as a side effect of the spinal tap. I doubt you have to read that last sentence twice to catch the irony. The headache I came to the emergency room with still lingered, less severe, for the next four days. I lost two days of work at a job for which there is no "paid time off."

Now there is nothing very special about my experience. There are people who suffer migraines and cluster headaches frequently. I have never been diagnosed as having either. This little episode, however, does illustrate several facts that undercut the Republican and conservative critique of universal health care.

Health care does not fit in the marketplace.

In my pain I was not offered different emergency rooms with different features. There was no choice of different CT scans with greater or lesser resolutions, or a spinal tap at the base of the spine or the base of the neck. Frankly, those sorts of choices were completely irrelevant. I wanted the pain to stop.

Neither did the services suggested come with a price up front. It was simply take the blood test, the CT scan, and the spinal tap, or leave it. The bill comes later. The doctor gave no indication that he even knew what a spinal tap costs.

Marketplace ideology does not work beneficial health care. A visit to the emergency room is not a trip to the grocery store and conservative critics of universal health care are, at best, fools for not recognizing this.

I was not going to write about this until I read conservative Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran today.

Among the many falsehoods the Mr. McIlheran packed into his column was that "of course, the government now ensures the poor and the old get care. It even pays for the not-really-poor via programs like BadgerCare."

This is one of the many assertions conservatives make without support of facts – that the needy are being taken care of, even the not so needy. No need to fix what is not broken.

Well, the call came on Friday the 13^th. The hospital wanted to confirm that I have no insurance and screen me concerning my financial situation to see if I qualify for assistance. I do not qualify for any assistance. I will be getting a bill in four figures from the hospital. And a bill from the radiologist and another from the doctor. I am not poor, and Mr. McIlheran is purposely vague about what he terms "the not-really-poor," but there is no Badger Care for me.

This brings to mind another myth about our current system of health care that conservatives like to assert. It is said that hospitals must provide emergency care, even to the uninsured. In addition, it is said that when the uninsured do not pay, that loss of income is simply averaged over the bills of insured paying patients. The uninsured get a free ride.

I am sure that hospitals lose income treating the poor and uninsured. I am sure that they have found some way to recover that loss from the people who do pay.

The poor and uninsured are billed, however. They are expected to pay. After several billing notices, their accounts are handed over to collection agencies. The collection agencies use all available means to recover the cost. There is no free ride for the poor and uninsured in our current system.

I have never been to an emergency room as a patient before and I hope never to make another visit. If this country had the universal health care that is popular in so many other developed countries, preventative care might have discovered and addressed whatever brought on this headache so that there would have been no emergency room visit.

As it is, I have a debt in four figures and an inconclusive diagnosis.

Cherry-Picking in Health Care

2009-10-07T23:18:00.003-05:00

Last month I wrote that there are two important facts that are ignored in our current health care debate.

Everyone gets sick.

Everyone dies.

These facts are not always ignored. For-profit health insurance companies do not ignore these facts. These facts affect their bottom line. Their response to these facts is to cherry-pick among their applicants. They pick those who are the healthiest and youngest.

The cherry-picking begins with the application for insurance.

I have before me an application. It has three and a half pages of intimidating, broadly worded health questions that must be answered before insurance is granted.

The intimidation works this way. The prospective client must answer all the questions with full honesty, or eligibility will be denied. On the other hand, the prospective client, out of reasonable self-interest, will not want to overstate any health issue or problem, or eligibility will be denied.

In addition, if the prospective client neglects to reveal any condition because it is deemed trivial, or for some reason irrelevant, or the prospective client simply forgets, then the company reserves the right to rescind coverage even after granting the policy.

In three and a half pages, the prospective client must reveal the intimate details of his visits to the doctor with the knowledge that everything stated and unstated will be used against him in the event the for-profit insurance company decides that a claim for coverage should be denied. It is nothing less than three and a half pages of self-incrimination on the applicant's permanent record.

Forget what you have heard about "Washington" getting between you and your doctor. The intrusion of the for-profit insurance company is now much worse. The for-profit insurance company now intrudes, accepts premiums, and then reserves the right to use its intrusive, intimidating health history questionnaire to deny coverage.

The first use of the questionnaire, however, is to cherry-pick. Only the young and healthy will qualify.

In my previous post, I recounted the efforts of a worker to purchase a lower premium high-deductible health savings account policy. The worker is healthy, has a healthy life-style that includes a good diet and regular exercise. The worker has made full use of the preventative exams offered by the worker's current health care plan to stay healthy.

The exams, which should be part of any responsible person's health care, revealed two non-life-threatening conditions.

One condition was revealed by advanced medical technology. A few decades ago, I doubt that it would have been a matter of concern at all. The worker is grateful that the condition is being monitored, but has been told by medical professionals that there is no reason for concern. Simple prudence requires a modest amount of monitoring. (Readers will note that I am protecting the privacy of my source by not going into further details.)

The second condition is even more benign. Through the medical history questionnaire, the health care insurance company learned that the worker has a "History of Joint Pains."

Yes, the worker is closing in on sixty years of life. There have been "Joint Pains." There have been no tests, only the most cursory of examinations, and no prescription medicines. There may be a need for more serious care ten or twenty years from now – or not. Now the worker has some discomfort because the worker is closer to sixty than fifty – the pains are just part of getting older.

"History of Joint Pains" is how this company cherry-picks the young and healthy and excludes the rest. The "History of Joint Pains" preceded the worker's current health care plan, and did not resulted in one dime of claims under that plan. The "History of Joint Pains," however, does preclude the worker from getting a cheaper plan.

This worker is healthy. This worker is being denied cheaper health care under the current free market health care system. The practice of cherry-picking is denying healthy workers affordable health care insurance because our so-called free market system grants freedom only to the for-profit health care insurance companies for the benefit of their stockholders.

It is high time to admit it. The United States of America does not have a "health care system." The United States of America has a market where for-profit companies feed upon the facts that everyone gets sick, everyone dies.

Our worker is fortunate. Our worker for now has high-deductible coverage. The premiums have repeatedly gone up, but for now, the worker will manage to cover them.

This will not last. Moreover, there are others less fortunate than our worker.

Forget the public option. Anything less than single payer universal coverage is less than what is needed. Anything less is a shame in the greatest country this world has known.

The Failure of the Free Market Health Care System

2009-10-04T22:59:00.006-05:00

Our national health care debate has included numerous anecdotal accounts of the failures of government-run health care policies. From the blogosphere to the mainstream media – and unfortunately today that includes the Fox network – people have come forward to recount how their relative in Canada, Great Britain, Germany and even Norway suffered illness and eventually died.

The fault is, of course, "socialized health care." Never mind that all of the countries named above have widely different systems of providing health insurance to their citizens. Disregard that not all of these countries practice "socialized health care."

Most of all ignore the fact that under any system, sick people will die and bereaved relatives will be offended and will find fault. Sometimes the faultfinding is justified. Many times grief clouds judgment.

What follows is an account where no one is sick, no one dies. It is anecdotal. Nevertheless, it is a true representation of what happens under the free market capitalist system of health care in the United States of America

A worker for a small concern purchases a high-deductible plan that is combined with a health saving account (HSA). It is the dream plan of the Republican Party. Contributions to the HSA are tax-deductible. Funds from the HSA can be used for the high deductible and health care costs not covered by the health care plan.

It is nice that health care savings are tax-deductible. The worker, however, works for a small firm and has an income that is congruent with working for a small firm. Contributions to the HSA necessarily come after paying for daily living expenses. Then there are the health care costs that drain the HSA even while the worker is trying to build this account with tax-deductible contributions.

This system requires constant vigilance.

Happily, the worker is healthy. The worker has healthy habits. The worker exercises regularly. The worker has a healthy diet. The worker is no athlete, and is not young. The worker is responsible and takes full advantage of the yearly physical examinations and screening tests covered by the high-deductible plan.

The worker pays the premiums of the high-deductible plan for two years, during which time the premiums increase no less than three times.

This is where the tale gets interesting.

After the first examination, a condition is revealed which in and of itself is not life-threatening, but could be serious. There are no symptoms of illness. There is only the possibility of illness.

The premiums for the high-deductible health plan go up again. The worker applies for a lower premium plan from another company. The worker's income has never gone up to meet the increase of the premiums.

The healthy worker is denied coverage by the alternate company because of the non-life-threatening condition revealed in the earlier examination. The worker is stuck with paying a higher premium.

The Republican Party has advocated that the free market system offers workers the freedom to make choices congruent with their income. Citizens can choose their health care providers. They can choose their doctors. They can control costs.

The Republican Party needs to return to planet earth.

The only freedom the present system provides is the freedom of heath care insurers to deny coverage and increase profits.

Anyone who is otherwise healthy will have a "pre-existing" condition simply because they have some existence.

The present system of health care provides no freedom for those who have employer-based insurance. It tethers them to their employer. The present system of health care provides no freedom to those who do not have employer-based insurance. They are at the mercy of companies who can deny coverage for the least reason. The present system provides no freedom for the 45 million who are uninsured. They ignore their symptoms until they need the emergency room. Or they die.

The citizens of the United States are at the mercy of so-called health care insurance providers whose motive is profit and not health care.

Read this essay again. It is not the tale of a sick person needing health care. It is the tale of a healthy person trying to pay for health care in this so-called free market and finding no freedom at all.

This is not my story. I have no health care insurance. I have too many pre-existing conditions. I will probably die before there is a civilized health care system in this greatest country the world has known.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

2009-09-14T00:11:00.004-05:00

Is health care reform advocated by the Democratic majority of Congress and the President of the United States a threat to the nature of democracy in America?

Leave aside that there is no one health care proposal from congressional Democrats. These are the cats that President Obama is trying to herd. It is not going well. Between the Blue Dogs and the progressives, it is hard to understand how anyone would reasonably think that President Obama and the congressional majority are initiating any one plan, much less a nefarious plan to undermine our constitutional freedoms.

Nevertheless, there are those pictures of President Obama with Hitler's mustache.

And there is an editorial by associate professor of history at Concordia University Wisconsin, Jim Burkee.

For Dr. Burkee the important and ignored question is, "…what happens to democratic society when non-producers can vote themselves benefits at the expense of the producing class?" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 9, 2009)

Is it possible, a class struggle in our republic? Yes, according to Dr. Burkee, but the struggle is not between the working class and capitalists. It is between the producers and the non-producers. It is between those who are dependent on government and those who are independent.

Keep this distinction in mind as we give Dr. Burkee the floor to make his case with history.

Our nation's founding generation was profoundly aware of the relationship between economic independence and democratic participation. In classical Athens, Aristotle had argued that political participation required property ownership, since those who did not own property "have no share in the state." Likewise, our founders largely restricted voting rights to those who owned property, believing that a voter's independence of judgment and desire for liberal self-government was found only in those not economically dependent on others.

This is an odd reading of American history for a professor of history.

The founding generation did not have any consensus on the question of property ownership as a qualification for suffrage. This qualification was indeed popular with some of the founding fathers. It certainly was not supported among the Revolutionary War veterans who did not own property. They felt that their participation in the war to establish this nation earned them the right to participate in its governance.

The Constitution never had property ownership as a qualification for suffrage because there was a diversity of opinion on this question.

Indeed our republic has thrived, not on the restriction of suffrage, but on the broadening of the right to vote, first to freed slaves, then to women, and eventually to eighteen-year-olds.

History professor Burkee should review the history of the amendments to the constitution.

The founding fathers bequeathed to us an amazing founding document in the Constitution that we should be grateful for as long as this country endures. It is a work of genius. However, it is not a divine proclamation.

The founding fathers were mortals with all the flaws of mortals.

Among the landowning founding fathers were men who were dependent on the work of slaves. They were hardly the liberal, independent, enlightened property owners depicted by Dr. Burkee. They were not the high-minded producers that he exalts. Their slaves produced, they profited.

This country has profited from what the founding fathers did right. It also suffered a bloody civil war from what they did wrong.

This brings us to the simplistic distinction Dr. Burkee makes between producers and non-producers.

Dr. Burkee is not too clear on whom he considers the producers to be. He has a list of non-producers. The non-producers, remember, as the non-landowners who "have no share in the state," will undermine democracy in America.

The non-producers are recipients of Social Security checks, recipients of payroll checks from the Federal government, recipients of payroll checks from the State government, recipients of payroll checks from local governments. These, by Dr. Burkee's reckoning, are dependent voters. He has figures for each category for which he cites no source.

It is startling to see how many citizens of our country are dependent non-producers, until one queries just whom Dr. Burkee is fingering as the agents of the downfall of democracy in America.

Begin with Social Security recipients. These are workers, people who have labored throughout their lives to give us the goods and services we enjoy and now are retired. Can these people be justly termed "non-producers"?

Many like to take shots at Federal government employees, as Dr. Burkee does. This broad category includes, naming just one group, the men and women of the armed forces who defend us and the free world. Moreover, among the local government employees are the law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our property and persons.

The retiree, the soldier, the police officer – these are among the agents of big government that Dr. Burkee views as the non-producer threats to our democratic way of life.

On the other hand, there are the producers, like the entrepreneur who is constantly spamming you with the promised benefits of colon cleansers. He is to be valued above the retiree, the soldier, the police officer. He is a producer in a free market economy.

Dr. Burkee admits to one resource for his opinion, "political philosopher Isabel Paterson."

Isabel Paterson had no credentials in political science or philosophy. She had only a couple of years of formal education and no high school degree. Her biography is not in the Britannica. She is not referenced in Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She was an amazing autodidact, to be sure, making her living as a novelist and critic.

Isabel Paterson is regarded as a "political philosopher" only among radical libertarians. She was an influence and once friend of the atheist Ayn Rand.

This is the point at which we should worry about democracy in America. President Obama with a Hitler mustache is the product of those who look upon our time as a struggle between a producer elite and the non-producing masses.

We have little to fear from the Democrats, President Obama, and the reform to health care. We should be wary, however, from the fear-mongers who paint mustaches on the President and make facile distinctions between so-called producers and non-producers.

Is the Opposition Loyal?

2009-09-11T00:12:00.004-05:00

South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson has apologized. President Barack Obama has accepted his apology. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that despite the violation of House rules, she is satisfied not to press the matter further since the President has accepted the apology.

It would be nice if the matter ended here. But it has not and it will not.

Mr. Wilson's Democratic challenger received hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions instantly over the Internet in response to his outburst. The Democratic party is going to make use of this unfortunate incident in its future fundraising.

Mr. Wilson shouted, "You lie," when President Obama stated that the proposed health care reform would not provide coverage to illegal aliens. All authoritative reports have stated that President Obama was right. The proposed reforms explicitly exclude illegal aliens.

Republicans and organizations advocating stronger measures against illegal aliens contend that the proposed heath care reforms, while excluding illegal aliens, contain no measure sufficient for the enforcement of this exclusion. Whatever the merits of their position, it is an issue beyond what President Obama was addressing. He was not lying.

Nevertheless, while Mr. Wilson has become a symbol of Republican intransigence for Democratic fundraisers, he has also become a hero to those who are advocating stronger measures against illegal aliens.

"It is a real shame that the rest of Congress was not on their feet pointing out the president's lie about illegal aliens in his healthcare plans," said William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration, a political action committee. (Los Angeles Times)

Without going into all the other permutations of this event, and without detracting from Mr. Wilson's apology or in any way questioning his sincerity, it is important to focus on just what happened and why his action was an offence.

President Obama was acting in his official capacity in addressing a joint session of Congress. There are rules that govern the conduct of the members of Congress in these events. Mr. Wilson and his party have recognized that he violated these rules.

This was not a town hall meeting. This was an official address to the elected members of Congress. It was not a time for debate.

Neither should the customs and rules of this event be confused with the customs and rules of a meeting of Parliament in Great Britain where the Prime Minister is regularly shouted down by the opposition.

We are Americans. We have different rules and customs by which we show respect for the elected head of the executive branch of our republic.

The Republican minority appropriately registered their displeasure with President Obama's speech by remaining seated at the several points when the party of the majority stood and applauded. That is their right. They also have the right to criticize the President after the speech on the floor of their respective bodies and in the press.

What we have here is an instance when the opposition ceased to be the loyal opposition. Mr. Wilson's outburst was not merely an act of opposition, but an act of disrespect for the office of the Presidency. It was such an act, in and of itself, even if – as I suspect – Mr. Wilson did not intend it to be. It was an act of disrespect for the office of the Presidency because it violated the rules and customs for a joint meeting of the Congress.

It is in the observance of these rules and customs that respect for the office of the Presidency is expressed.

William Kristol of the Weekly Standard has advocated that the Republican Party act as the loyal opposition to the agenda of the President and the majority in Congress. This is certainly acceptable and even beneficial for the republic.

The nature of disrupted town hall meetings of August and this incident with Mr. Wilson raise serious questions, however, about the loyalty of the minority's opposition. Unfortunately for Mr. Wilson, his outburst is within a larger context that he may or may not be party to.

To give just one example.

When continued unreasonable questions are raised about the constitutional eligibility of Mr. Obama to be President, and no one in the opposition denounces this absurdity, the question needs to be asked: Does the opposition recognize the decision of the electorate and the legitimacy of this Presidency? Or is this opposition so self-righteously dedicated to its position that it will not let respect for the office or the electorate stand in its way?

It is way past time for the conservative minority to demonstrate the loyalty of its opposition.

Two Ignored Health Care Facts

2009-09-08T00:13:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow, President Barack Obama will address a joint session of Congress about the need for health care reform.

In my short life, I have never witnessed a president throw himself so vigorously into the work of his administration. It would be unfair to say that Mr. Eisenhower golfed through his presidency, Mr. Reagan slept, and Mr. George W. Bush spent much of his time trying to untie his tongue. Nothing near these caricatures will be made of Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama is faulted for trying to do too much. He has not come near violating the Constitution –an accusation that has been made against a couple of our previous presidents. He is faulted for calling upon the legislative branch of this government to do the work of the people and address the problem of health care. He has vigorously taken his case to the people. Agree or disagree with him – and on many subjects I do disagree with him – Mr. Obama is earning his salary.

Yet, there are two facts central to the health care issue that I predict he will not address. He cannot state the case for reform as vigorously as he should because the nation is in a state of denial about these two central facts.

Health care costs are unacceptably rising for those who have health insurance. There are approximately 45 million who do not have health insurance. Even among those who do have health insurance approximately 25 million are underinsured. These and other figures can be disputed and argued about endlessly.

The two central facts remain.

Everyone gets sick. Everyone dies.

We are dealing with mortality.

President Obama is not the foremost agent feeding our national state of denial on this issue. The fear-mongers on the right ranting about socialism, euthanasia, and a host of other horrors have done the most to keep us from considering the consequences of our undeniable mortality.

Talk to a Republican about health care and he will offer you a tax break.

Hence we have Health Savings Accounts coupled with high deductible insurance plans. This is a great idea on April 15. Unfortunately it does little to deliver necessary heath care.

Taxes do not kill people. Wave the voodoo magic supply-side economic tax wand and remove all the taxes. People will still get sick. They will still die.

We would all like to have the life of Paul Newman. Mr. Newman led a vigorous and productive life for many decades. He was beautiful and gracious. And then he died. His death was relatively quick.

Unfortunately this is not true for most. Some get sick early in life and need care for many years. For others, illness is something that needs little medical attention. Still others need hardly any medical attention for many years, and then there may be years of debilitating illness.

The only bright spot in dealing with our mortality is that we do not all get sick, we do not all die in the same way. The fact that we do not all get sick and die in the same way is, over the years and in the population as a whole, a benefit. It means that financial resources can be pooled. Services can be distributed to those in need from the resources of those who have less need. The morality of this pooling and distribution is that everyone will have some sort of need eventually. Because everyone gets sick, everyone dies.

Our undeniable mortality is exactly why a free market capitalistic economic system fails in the area of health care. To recognize this fact is not to embark on the slippery slope to socialism. Capitalism was not revealed to us by God, and it is, like every human invention, imperfect. There is a time and place to pool our finite resources to deal with life's uncertainties.

Those who say that the United States has the best health care system in the world are living in denial. They are ignoring the rising premiums, the millions of uninsured, the millions of underinsured and the millions who will be losing their insurance in the years to come as our population gets older. They are also ignoring the many other industrially advanced nations that, regardless of their other weaknesses, are in fact doing a better job than the United States in this area.

Capitalism does a fine job of delivering goods and services for our temporal existence. We have the freedom to choose many goods and services we want, ignore what we do not want, save and work for what we desire. In many areas of life where our desires go beyond our means, we can still live and find some degree of happiness.

Health care deals with where we lose our freedom to choose. Illness comes unbidden.

Shopping for a car or a house is a fine activity in the marketplace. Shopping for a cure is an act of desperation.

The failure of free market economics on health care is obvious with for-profit health insurance companies.

The rightful task of any for-profit company is to deliver a profit to its shareholders. For-profit health insurance companies are by definition involved with a conflict of interest. They cannot deliver service to very many ill premium-paying customers without cutting into their shareholders' profits. Yet their premium-paying customers are paying them for exactly that reason –to provide care when illness eventually comes. The several different ways for-profit companies unfairly deny claims will always happen because these companies need to serve their shareholders.

There are many other ways the current health care system fails the citizens of the United States. One does not have to be an economist, a medical authority, a pharmaceutical company executive to see were the problem is.

We need to start with the facts – everyone gets sick, everyone dies.

Doctor's Charges

2009-04-07T22:04:00.004-05:00

We were expecting a bill from our doctor. What we received on 1 April 2009 was much worse. It was a letter.

Dear Valued Patient, it began. The adjective was the first false note. Just what made me a "valued" patient? What kind of letter uses the salutation to pay a compliment? How much is this going to cost me?

As you know I love practicing medicine and enjoy being your physician, the letter continued.

Actually, I did not know either of these things.

A little over a decade ago, we chose Dr. Arthur King to be our physician because he was within walking distance of our home. This became particularly important in recent years when we gave up having a car.

I have not seen him in over a year. As I am without health insurance, there is little point. The lab work for a decent physical is more than I can afford.

We procured a high-deductible policy for my wife recently. It was for a diagnostic examination for a condition that could prove serious – but thankfully so far has not been – that we expected a bill.

Therefore, we cannot claim the close relationship that our doctor seemed to think we had. His office staff has been cordial and understanding. He has been professional and never prescribed snake oil. Nevertheless, the last sentence of his overly flattering first paragraph sent a chill.

Unfortunately, the current system does not allow me to provide your care in the way I know you deserve.

Then came the pitch. He was going embark on a new method of medical practice "that enables the patient-physician relationship to be a true partnership." The services under this "new" system were described in bulleted short phrases.

Opposite "Higher quality care experience" was "Total care coordination with specialists and other providers," "Test result consultation," "Post-specialist visit explanations," and "Assistance with insurance filings."

The verbiage was pretty, but the first three points simply describe standard operating procedure when a general practitioner makes a referral to a specialist. The last is how a doctor gets his money.

Opposite "Incredible access at your convenience" was the truly incredible claim of "24/7 access to me via cell phone, email, or office phone." Notice that this is not access to "service," but to Dr. King himself. The FAQ sheet, which accompanied this letter, was equally unambiguous on this point, offering "Direct access to your physician any time of the day or night."

Only God is accessible 24/7. Mere mortals do not have this power. Leaving aside the fact that even doctors must eat, sleep, and take days off, there is the conflict of dealing with a patient in the examining room when the cell phone goes off. "More about your colonoscopy later, Fred, I have to take this call."

There was one new item that followed "Incredible access" – "House calls as needed" (italics in original). There was no statement about who would determine the need or how need would be determined, making this an empty though enticing promise.

All the puffery and empty promises of this letter came down to this. Dr. King claims to have 4,000 patients. Under the new ModernMed practice he can have no more than 500. Of those 500 patients, the first 300 to sign up will be offered the introductory monthly rate of $75 a month. The unfortunate remaining 200 patients will be charged the normal rate of $125 a month. Given the terms offered, everyone will be paying $125 or more a month in the years to come just to be a patient of Dr. King.

That is right, friends, this retainer fee does not cover office visits or tests or anything else. It is a simple retainer fee, promoted with pompous and incredible claims. There is nothing offered under this new system that is not either standard operating procedure of a good general practitioner or available elsewhere for less or nothing.

The advantage is all with the doctor. He dumps 3500 patients. He dumps some who have come to him regularly for any number of reasons. He dumps some who come only under the compulsion of dire illness. He keeps only those who can pay for the privilege to call him their doctor. He receives over a half million dollars annually under the introductory rate, three-quarters of a million in the next year, and undoubtedly, a million and more in the years to come, in addition to any fees charged for the actual practice of medicine.

At $125 a month, his patients will pay an annual $1500 in addition to their health insurance premiums, deductibles, and office visit co-pays. They will receive for this sum nothing beyond what is expected of the general practice of medicine.

What is being promoted here is "a new revolutionary model of medical practice." What we have is medical extortion.

Rule of Law

2009-01-06T21:26:00.007-06:00

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein goes against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in saying Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made a legitimate appointment to the US Senate. – Fox News, Web Headline.

It is a new year with a new president and a new Congress. With the new comes the strange. Strange for me is agreeing with a radically liberal senator from – of all places – California.

You know the story. Indicted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has made his selection for the senatorial seat vacated by president-elect Barack Obama. Governor Blagojevich's chances of beating the rap of trying to sell this Senate seat are nil. In addition, he has a potty mouth which has made him the butt of late night humor.

Nevertheless, the fact is that as Mr. Blagojevich is the governor, indicted, but innocent until proven guilty, state law empowers him to make this appointment to the Senate. In addition, there have been no allegations against his appointee.

So where is the rule of law in denying Roland Burris a seat in the Senate?

The appointment was tainted? By what? A foul-mouthed governor? Sad to say, but many of our elected officials suffer from a lack of vocabulary in their private speech. This does not rise to a point of law, in my humble opinion.

Unless there is some evidence that Mr. Burris himself was involved in the federal accusations against Governor Blagojevich, the Senate of the United States of America, the greatest deliberative body in the world, is guilty of an unconstitutional hissy fit.

As a white guy living in Wisconsin, I have no dog in this fight. There is this concern. After eight years of the administration under Mr. Bush playing fast and loose with the Constitution, this first act under a new regime does not bode well.

Senator Feinstein is right – I still cannot believe I am writing this – Mr. Burris should be seated.

Post-modern Luther

2009-01-03T20:58:00.004-06:00

On this day in 1521, Pope Leo X issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, excommunicating Martin Luther. On May 26 of that same year, the Edict of Worms declared Luther an outlaw, putting his very life in danger. Neither the excommunication, nor the edict, however, would prevent Luther from writing, preaching, teaching, marrying, and fathering children, until he died in ripe old age on 18 February 1546.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Modern Age began with this man on this date with this papal act of excommunication. This is not to say that Martin Luther was a great man. He was, but the beginning of a new epoch takes more than a great man. It also requires a confluence of economic, political, and cultural circumstances. The story of the Sixteenth-Century Reformation includes everything from improvements in mass communications to shady banking practices.

At the center of it all is Martin Luther, a brilliant, irascible, complex man, who, because of circumstances, did not suffer burning at the stake as his Czech predecessor Jan Hus did in 1415.

It is a sign of the poverty of our post-modern era that the popular understanding of Luther – where there is any recognition at all – goes no further than the 2003 movie Luther staring Joseph Fiennes. This movie attempts to capture the drama of Luther's life without being encumbered with the facts of history. Scenes depict not only events that never happened – which might be defended on the grounds of "dramatic license"—but events that are out of character for Luther.

In one of the most impressive scenes, Luther himself buries a suicide on consecrated grounds. This never happened. It bears little relevance for what Luther taught and wrote. It does give Fiennes a fine opportunity to overact, something he does throughout this movie.

In another scene, Luther preaches to a congregation, not from the pulpit, but walking in the midst of the congregation like a modern American Evangelical, dressed in a fine chasuble. For centuries before this movie, Luther was always depicted preaching in the traditional way, from a pulpit, and in modest dress.

This movie is fiction, not fact, promoting an idea of Luther, and bears no resemblance to what he was. Fiennes, coming off a film where he fictionalized Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Love), hardly even musses his hair to take on Luther. He rants, he raves, he throws himself around the room, but for all the energy he expends he does not have the gravitas of a Luther.

This is the popular presentation of Luther in our day. Because it was a mainstream picture, with legitimate actors, even some of the most conservative
Lutheran churches embraced Luther. It was obvious that the stars got in their eyes.

On this day in 1521, the Modern Age began. It would be nice if we understood something of it.

Panther Pride

2008-08-25T16:54:00.010-05:00

It is almost funny.
The gold and black sign reads,

Panther Pride
In Our Neighborhood
Respect All

The lawn is weedy. The shrubs are untrimmed. One day there was the remains of a Bud Lite twelve-pack at the porch steps. Today there is a four-foot-high pile of broken furniture at the curb.

If UWM president Carlos Santiago has any Panther pride, it is preserved by avoiding the two blocks immediately south of campus on Farwell Avenue.

Maryland Avenue is even worse.

Of course, there is no direct evidence that students are responsible for the discarded beer and liquor bottles, broken furniture, and vandalized street signs. (Yes, all this has been observed on a single walk within two blocks of UWM.)

It is possible that the residences of the owner-occupied properties are vandalizing the properties of the absentee landlords because they think it makes their places look better. It is possible that roving bands of malicious alcoholic homeless men are attacking the East Side in a jealous rage against the fate that has scorned their desire to be scholars and gentlemen with diplomas from our city’s august university.

It is not probable.

It is probable that the bottles, furniture, and sundry debris that routinely adorn the neighborhood are the product of irresponsible transient students and negligent absentee landlords. (Note: there are numerous conscientious absentee landlords. Mine, for example, is an exceedingly considerate gentleman with a fine discriminating taste in selecting tenants.)

There has been some improvement in UWM neighborhood relations. The efforts of former alderman Michael D’Amato have borne fruit. Students and neighborhood liaison officials patrol the East Side. There has been a decrease of large groups of rowdy students returning from closing the North Avenue bars. The university now has the COAST program, Community Outreach and Assistance for Student Tenants. COAST publishes a newsletter that contains articles about student tenant rights and responsibilities. COAST leaders have made visits to all residents to address concerns. Numerous other efforts have been made, to be sure.

Nevertheless, UWM is still far from being a good neighbor. Chapters 17 and 18 governing student behavior still do not address off-campus civil infractions. The rubbish of prideful Panthers has never abated. Just this morning, on my relatively quiet block, tickets were issued for a noisy party. Four o’clock this morning. And the fall semester has not started.

More needs to be done.

The community outreach efforts should be augmented by having off-campus misbehavior addressed by University discipline. Fair due process will insure that students’ rights are preserved.

University growth should not proceed unchecked. The parking on the East Side is not limitless. Therefore, the number of commuter students should be limited. Limited university growth is also in the best interest of students. It is easy for the university to accept tuition. It is difficult to provide the right classes at the right time over four years for an unlimited number of students. Easy enrollment is one factor leading to the five-year bachelor degree.

Future university housing should be selected with regard to larger community concerns. The propensity of students to toss their trash just anywhere certainly does not bode well for housing along Milwaukee’s developing riverfront. Housing that is in a developed urban area can be monitored and regulated for all concerned. The location at 1755 N. Farwell would mean that more than one Milwaukee alderman would be concerned with regulating university matters.

Milwaukee’s East Side is a wonderful place to live and UWM is a great asset to all of Milwaukee. Nevertheless, preserving and improving urban life requires vigilance and the cultivation of civility. We need to work for the day when all Milwaukee can have a bit of Panther pride.

Same-Sex Marriage Redux

2008-08-16T21:38:00.006-05:00

The Cream City Foundation wants you to know that gay families are no different from heterosexual families. Moreover, they are probably living next door.

Thus, Lisa Kaiser reports in the Wednesday, August 13, issue of Shepherd Express, “Same-sex couples are registered in 98 of 100 southeastern Wisconsin Zip codes” Her source is Denise Cawley, a media consultant for the Cream City Foundation.

According to Susan Bence, reporter for WUWM, Ms. Cawley “helped the advocacy group come up with its billboard campaign.” On Thursday, August 14, Ms. Bence on NPR Morning Edition reported, “Cawley says in the last census gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender families registered in every Zip code across the nation.”

Also on Thursday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a laudatory article by Georgia Pabst about the Cream City Foundation campaign to battle “stereotypes.” Ms. Pabst did not include any “Zip code” statistics.

The Zip code statistic broadcast by WUWM is significantly different from the one published in Shepherd Express. Ms. Bence reported that there are LGBT “families” “in every Zip code across the nation.” Ms. Kaiser reports only on same-sex couples – thereby relieving us of trying to figure out what a “bisexual family” is – and finds them “in 98 of 100 southeastern Wisconsin Zip codes.” Neither Ms. Bence nor Ms. Kaiser explains with whom these “families” are “registered” or why. Ms. Bence makes a passing reference to “the last census.”

In email correspondence both Ms. Bence and Ms. Kaiser confirmed that their source was media consultant Denise Cawley. Subsequently, Ms. Cawley owned up to only the 98 of 100 statement. The basis is not the 2000 U.S. Census, as implied by WUWM’s Susan Bence, but that census interpreted by UCLA’s Williams Institute. The Williams Institute is also a gay advocacy organization.

Both Zip code statistics are false and appear to be the invention of Ms. Cawley and the Cream City Foundation.

Neither the U. S. Census nor the Williams Institute reports their findings by Zip code.

The reason Zip codes are not used in demographic reports is most likely that the United States Postal Service does not assign Zip codes by geographical area. Zip codes are assigned to facilitate mail volume.

For example, the city of Milwaukee alone has 43 Zip codes. Ten of these are “unique.” Unique Zip codes are given to corporations and other entities that receive a high volume of mail. There are no families of any kind receiving mail at these Zip codes.

The only way one can have 98 of 100 Zip codes in southeastern Wisconsin with gay families is to cherry-pick the 100. Such cherry-picking, however, would invalidate the gay neighbor claim of the Cream City Foundation.

What has been done here is not mere advocacy, but propaganda. False information, disguised as quantifiably verifiable fact, is being used to argue that same-sex families are the same as heterosexual families.

It may seem a small matter. However, if the Cream City Foundation is false in this small matter, how can they be trusted concerning the larger question?

WUWM, Shepherd Express, and even the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are all complicit in promoting Cream City’s propaganda. True, MJS did not report the Zip code statistic, but neither did it expose the falsehood of what is obviously part of Cream City’s press release. All three “news” organizations merely passed on what was fed to them – without the least concern for veracity.

In 2006, a clear majority of Wisconsin voters passed a constitutional amendment supporting marriage as the union between a man and a woman. At the time, the proponents of gay marriage denounced the vote as bigoted and based on ignorance. The Cream City Foundation has launched a campaign to combat this “ignorance” with falsehood. And they have willing confederates in a significant portion of the Milwaukee media.

Rich in Grace

2008-01-18T00:59:00.004-06:00

(My dear wife has published her first book of poetry. Yes, that does mean that she has another book ready for publication. What follows here, however, is something of the story of her first book. It can be ordered at http://www.alpb.org/ the Web page of the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau.)

It was just a line with an internal rhyme, but since she rose from bed, she could not shake it from her head. “Eve took the bait – she did not wait to weigh the consequences.”

So, Kathryn Ann Hill took her muse for a walk to nearby University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, thinking that a change of scene and a little time might give her respite – or a few more lines.

That was in November 2003. Kathryn had been writing poetry regularly for the past year. Occasionally her verse was published in small journals like Gottesdienst: A Quarterly Journal of the Evangelical-Lutheran Liturgy, for which she is copyeditor, and The Bride of Christ. She was encouraged by appreciative responses from readers.

On this foggy Sunday afternoon in November, Kathryn headed for a table in the library lounge and wrote down the line that kept looping through her brain.

“As I left the library I saw a flyer for an upcoming lecture. It reproduced a medieval woodcut. There was an image of Eve grasping a couple pieces of fruit. A wickedly grinning serpent faced her. A figure resembling Jesus looked on from a tree in the background. Here was a picture that illustrated the line that had been haunting me. I knew I had to attend the lecture this flyer announced. It was a lecture on Biblia Pauperum.”

The lecture was sponsored by the rare books department of UWM library. “Before the lecture was over, I was hooked,” Kathryn recounted.

“Biblia Pauperum translates ‘Bible of the Poor.’ It is a book of triptychs portraying stories from the Old and New Testaments. It was intended to teach the Christian faith to the poor who could not read. It was produced by an order of begging friars.”

Kathryn had some familiarity with medieval literature from her undergraduate studies at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Her interest in Christian texts was nurtured by her father, a Lutheran pastor, and her husband Michael, who also became a Lutheran pastor.

During the cold, dark months that followed the lecture, Kathryn adopted a regimen of study and meditation. “Max Yela, the Special Collections Librarian at UWM, was helpful. His staff made photocopies of pages from a facsimile edition of Biblia Pauperum by Avril Henry, a book that is now out of print. Each weekend I would study the scholarly notes and the pictures from the Henry edition as well as the Bible texts that matched the triptychs. Then, walking to and from my job as secretary at Luther Memorial Chapel in Shorewood each weekday, I would meditate on the Bible lessons and ponder lines of poetry. Usually by the end of the week I had a finished poem.”

“Volumes from my husband’s library, especially the literal translations of Genesis by Richard Alter, and The Five Books of Moses by Everett Fox, aided my studies of the Bible narratives. Michael was my severest critic, but he helped me to be faithful to the Bible texts.”

“The images of Biblia Pauperum were fascinating because they showed again and again how Christ is prefigured in the Old Testament. Martin Luther called the Old Testament Scriptures ‘the cradle of Christ.’ This book by Roman Catholic friars literally shows Christ at the center of Holy Scripture. In the central panel of each triptych is a scene from the life of Christ. Usually the panels on either side depict an Old Testament story which points to a promise that Christ would fulfill.”

After a year of studying, meditating, and writing on the images of Biblia Pauperum, Kathryn had a collection of 38 poems. The poems combined with 38 pictures from the medieval book became Rich in Grace: The Bible of the Poor for 21st-Century Christians. This month Rich in Grace was published by the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau.

A pre-publication review was enthusiastic. Dr. Francis C. Rossow, Professor Emeritus, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, wrote: “Repeatedly in her poems Kathryn Hill takes the jewels mined by the medieval authors and gives them the kind of setting that enhances their worth and splendor…. Her poems are not only an orthodox and devout witness to the Gospel – they are an artistic witness to that Gospel.”

This is Kathryn’s first published book of poetry. A second book is waiting in the wings. “I found a book of wood engravings by Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais on the parables of Jesus. To accompany these beautiful pictures I have written 44 poems interpreting the parables. Michael’s library again provided invaluable help, with studies on the parables by C. H. Dodd and Jeremias Joachim.” This collection of verse has not been published yet.

“I am encouraged by the publication of Rich in Grace. The ALPB worked hard to produce an attractive book of picture and verse.”

This first book begins with a catchy first line: “Eve took the bait – she did not wait to weigh the consequences.”

Getting Personal

2006-11-17T12:03:00.003-06:00

[When I began this blog I set out several goals. First, it would not be simply personal and subjective. Second, I would attempt to address concerns beyond the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) and Lutheranism in general while maintaining a Lutheran voice. Third, I would update the blog weekly, giving readers a reason to return. There were other goals, but it seems pointless to mention them because this article begins on a personal note, will probably be of little interest to anyone outside the LCMS (if even there), and is late. I will reform. The goals remain. For now, dear readers, you have the following.]

The Reverend John Fenton has been a good friend of mine for almost two decades. When I hit some deeply dark times Pastor Fenton helped my family and me. Despite our differences in age (he is the younger) and many differences in outlook (he actually admires Richard Nixon), he was generous with his help and effective. The differences between us cannot be over-emphasized. With many others, I learned a great deal from Fr. Fenton about the liturgy. However, even on this we had our differences. Nevertheless, the differences did not matter when I was down for the count. He was there for me and for my family. I will breathe my last breath in his debt.

So it was with great sadness that I received the news that the Reverend John Fenton has renounced the Confessions of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church, resigned from the roster of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, and would be joining the communion of the Eastern Orthodox. We will no longer share the same faith.

John’s progress to the East has been evident for some time. He has been honest with us. He has published and circulated his sermons via the Internet. He has written extensively concerning the liturgy and its importance for the confession of the Faith. He has engaged his friends and those who are a whole lot less than friends in his struggle with what it means to be a faithful Christian.

I know several of his friends who have warned him and rebuked him when he went beyond what the Evangelical-Lutheran Confessions teach. I have also been concerned and have communicated with him on this matter. I must confess I did not do this as frequently as I should have or as thoroughly. To my shame, I must admit that I did not come to my friend’s aid as he had done for me. I have my excuses, which may prevail before men. God will not be impressed. May the Lord forgive me.

John has made his decision. He is in error. I do not doubt that he made his decision after great spiritual turmoil. He has participated in the Missouri Synod to the fullest, never shy on sharing his views with his district supervisors and even serving on a committee for the new hymnal. There were several instances of great trial for him in the Synod. Only the Lord can distinguish when he suffered as the consequence of his own sin from when he suffered because of the sin of others.

In the end, however, based on his own statements, it must be concluded that John’s renunciation of the faith confessed in the Confessions of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church comes from his own weakness of faith. He seeks a visible Church that does not exist. Neither Scripture nor the Confessions support his ecclesiology. Many, including myself, can sympathize with much of his criticism of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. Unlike St. Paul, however, his great learning has led him to a solution that is indeed mad.

I have every reason to hold that the Lord will be merciful to my friend John, even as He forgives as great a sinner as me. Still, I am saddened, personally, that he has made this choice, and grieved for what this portends for the liturgical and pastoral practice for which he was a strong advocate.

Consequences

John Fenton was not a politician in the politically driven Missouri Synod. That was both his great strength and great weakness. It was a strength because in the Synod of bureaucrats and politicians there is a pronounced need for theologians. It was a weakness because in this political environment of the Synod he could brook little compromise. As the publication of the new hymnal demonstrates, compromise is the order of the day in the Synod.

So it comes as no surprise that we have a vitriolic and uncharitable denunciation of John’s resignation from a Synod bureaucrat.

The Reverend Paul T. McCain has published his “An Act of Treason, Dishonesty, and Sin” in the blogosphere. It is an all too typical Missouri Synod screed. McCain demonstrates that he does not have the slightest understanding of Fr. Fenton’s complaint against the Missouri Synod.

“Fenton’s renunciation of his ordination vows, and confirmation vows, is nothing less than an act of treason against our Lord Jesus Christ and His Gospel, purely taught and preached,” McCain writes.

Please note, John has not become a Buddhist. As for the Gospel purely taught and preached, that is what John fails to find in the Missouri Synod and (wrongly) seeks among the Orthodox. What we have here is an example of a Pharisee who fails to understand he has a plank in his own eye even as he seeks to scrape the splinter out of the eye of his opponent.

“Smells and bells, chalices and chausables, chanting and prancing, rubrics and genuflections all have their proper place,” McCain continues. Note “smells and bells” is derogatory and “prancing” never has a proper place in the reverent conduct of the Liturgy. By his dismissive word choice McCain demonstrates that he has little understanding of the importance of sound liturgics for the benefit of God’s people. It is what can be expected from someone who has spent the vast majority of his Synod career behind a bureaucrat’s desk rather than before a parish altar.

“Beautiful liturgy is no replacement for beautiful doctrine.” To which we respond, “show us beautiful doctrine and we will show you beautiful liturgy.” Liturgy and doctrine are not the same, but what McCain is oblivious of is that liturgy and doctrine cannot be divorced.

Many years ago, Fr. Fenton and I visited an historic Missouri Synod church together. The long sermon was centered on the importance of the divine inspiration of Scripture. When it came time for the Sacrament, the pastor seemingly had decided that the service was going too long. He rushed through the Verba, contrary to the expressed teaching of the Confessions. (In 1998 Fr. Fenton published an article pointing out that the Formula of Concord, Article VII, line 79, is a rubric. The Formula there states that the Words of Institution “should be spoken or sung distinctly and clearly.”)

It was hard not to conclude from this pastor’s conduct that Missouri Synod Lutherans were not saved by grace through faith in our risen Lord and Savior, but because they were smarter than others about the right doctrine of Scripture. His lack of reverence at the altar did not reflect well upon the doctrine of the real presence. Examples like this can be multiplied and are a source of offence to anyone who, like John Fenton, think that doctrine should be reflected in practice.

McCain does not have to bother himself about “beautiful doctrine.” He accuses Fr. Fenton of dishonesty and fiscal malfeasance. And, again, typical in the Missouri Synod, he has an anonymous source as the basis of a personal attack.

This is too much. Paul McCain’s dishonesty is a matter of public record, no anonymous source needed. He is the editor of the most dishonest edition of the Book of Concord ever published in the English language. He was forced to stop publication of the first edition because of his duplicitous editorial tampering and issue a fifteen-page booklet of corrections. The unfortunate thing is that the booklet only proves that the handsome volume is completely unreliable for any serious study. I would also argue that the provided corrections are incomplete. And, of course, there is fiscal impropriety in accepting money for a deficient product.

Conclusion

John Fenton has decided that Lutheran doctrine is deficient. He is wrong in this. However, he is on moral high ground to follow his conscience rather than continue in the LCMS. He certainly deserves more respect than those who remain in the Synod and explicitly teach that Lutheranism is deficient and needs to be supplemented by American Protestantism’s Church Growth theology. Paul McCain is no advocate of Church Growth, but he happily promotes the new LCMS hymnal that owes much to this theology.

John Fenton bears full responsibility for his decision. He has failed to understand that the Church is hidden. Nevertheless, there are those in the Synod who use the “hiddenness” of the Church to hide from their responsibility to confess the Faith and suffer under the cross.

Temptations must come, but it is a matter for repentance when temptations are surrendered to, causing one of the Lord’s little ones to fall.

Lord have mercy on us all.

Weariness of the Flesh

2006-11-17T11:52:00.002-06:00

The second edition of Ancient Facts and Fictions Concerning Churches and Tithes, by Roundell, Earl of Selborne (author of A Defence of the Church of England Against Disestablishment), with a supplement containing remarks of a recent history of tithes, was published in London by Macmillan and Company in 1892. I know this because I own a copy. The one-hundred-and fourteen-year-old copy that I own has never been read. Not by anyone. Ever. In one hundred and fourteen years.

I know this book has never been read because the pages have not been cut apart. Consult an antiquarian book collector for the facts, but I believe the practice was to print at least eight pages on one large sheet, fold the sheet and bind it with other sheets so printed and folded. The reader would take his penknife and cut them apart as his reading progressed.

No one has made any progress through my copy of the Earl of Selborne’s Ancient Facts and Fictions etc. in one hundred and fourteen years. My copy is the old maid of my library, an ancient virginal icon of the words of Ecclesiastes, “Of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

I own over a thousand books and do not understand the Preacher to be an anti-intellectual. Rather, the Preacher and the Earl together give a prudent admonition, the former explicitly and the latter inadvertently. The love of hardbound knowledge can go too far. There are books that one simply does not need. There have been many times when I have been tempted to buy a book and have conquered temptation by remembering Ancient Facts and Fictions Concerning Churches and Tithes. Even so, I have not thought of the Earl of Selborne’s volume as often as my long-suffering wife would like, but more often than she knows.

Which brings us to Worship, Gottesdienst, Cultus Dei, What the Lutheran Confessions Say about Worship, edited by James L. Brauer (Concordia Publishing House, 2005), a book I will not be buying.

Professor Brauer informs us in the preface that “this collection of quotations from The Book of Concord seeks to present significant portions of the confessors’ documents under a few central topics” (p. 6). Nine chapters follow the introduction. Each chapter contains questions. After each question are a series of quotations from the confessions, which the editor deems answer the questions he has posed. Following each quotation are notations quoting the German and Latin text from the 12th edition of Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirke. “The English text used is that of the Kolb/Wengert edition of The Book of Concord, except when the Tappert edition is used to reflect the Latin of the quarto edition of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, which one finds in the Triglotta and Die Bekenntnisschriften”(p. 7).

In other words, when it comes to the quoted text, what we have here is a pretty kettle of fish. Any one who wishes to check the original context of a quotation will have to have at the very least a copy of Kolb/Wengert and Tappert. Of course, serious students of the confessions will have both of these editions. Serious students, however, will have their own questions about doctrine and practice that are best answered by simply reading the confessions and using the indexes.

Worship, Gottesdienst, Cultus Dei, What the Lutheran Confessions Say about Worship is the fool’s gold of reference books.

The first volume of the American Edition of Luther’s Works was published in 1955. The general introduction to that volume and each subsequent volume carried this statement: “Although the edition as planned will include fifty-five volumes, Luther’s writings are not being translated in their entirety. Nor should they be. As he was first to insist, much of what he wrote and said was not that important.”

Not only are some of the works under Luther’s name unimportant, but as specific introductions to the America Edition make clear, not all of the works are entirely Luther’s. The problem of editorial redaction is addressed frequently in the American Edition. Even in a work as important as the Lectures on Genesis there are indications of Melanchthonian interpolations. And let’s not even get started on the Table Talks.

The Reverend Joel Baseley did not get the memo. He has self-published Festival Sermons of Martin Luther (Mark V Publications). He admits the dubious origin of the books he is translating, and that significant passages come from Bugenhagen and Melanchthon and not from Luther at all. Then audaciously he proceeds with a foreword from another book found in the Weimar Aufgabe (that is to say, not from the books he is translating), wherein Luther states that what follows “is published completely under our supervision and direction.”

If the reader skips Baseley’s notes on the text he will never realize that this statement simply is not true by Baseley’s own admission. He will not know that the foreword from Luther does not belong to the book that Baseley has translated. On the other hand, no one who reads Baseley’s notes can help but be offended by such a duplicitous cut-and-paste job.

As for the quality of Baseley’s translation of Luther-Bugenhagen-Melanchthon sermon notes, this much is certain – the good reverend is a poor writer of English. His prose is purple. This he demonstrates beyond any doubt in his Christ Beyond Reason: Luther’s Treatment of Faith and Reason in the Festival Portions of the Church Postils (Mark V Pulications).

Yes, this means that the self-published sermon translations have a self-published companion volume. There we read, “Yet in an age of seemingly limitless discoveries and technological miracles, we are at the brink, perhaps, the dusk of the Enlightenment.” The use of “brink” with “dusk” here is just one example of over-writing. It should also be noted that the Enlightenment lasted through the 18th century. There is more out of date in this monograph than the prose style.

Christ Beyond Reason is full of examples that Baseley does not understand Luther’s late medieval use of the word “reason,” with its Scholastic, non-Enlightenment background. In addition, Baseley does not employ any other source, primary or secondary, for this commentary other than the sermons he has translated. This circle is too tight; the basis for this work to attribute anything to Luther is far too slight. More importantly, while Luther personifies “reason” as a trope, Baseley does so as a shortcut to thinking. The result is that what in Luther is a vivid statement becomes in Baseley an indefensible generalization.

So, we have here three books you need not weary the flesh reading.

Peace, Peace

2006-11-01T15:02:00.002-06:00

[This article was written for Gottesdienst, A Quarterly Journal of the Evangelical-Lutheran Liturgy. It will not be published there, so it is published here.]

Undoubtedly, most readers of this journal would regard me as a liturgical liberal. I do not believe that The Lutheran Hymnal (TLH), published in 1941, is above criticism. I do not hold that Lutheran Worship (LW) is unusable by confessional Lutherans. There is a fine Methodist hymnal in TLH, and LW has made liturgical chant possible even in the humblest of congregations.

My contrarian leanings go even further. I do not believe that simply because the three-year lectionary has its origin in reforms in the Roman Catholic Church it is therefore inferior to the so-called historic one-year lectionary. Such criticism employs the fallacy of guilt by association. There are many reasons to criticize the three-year lectionary. The most obvious one is that the readings from the Gospel According to St. Mark cannot sustain the second year. Nevertheless, the three-year lectionary in itself is not an impediment to evangelical preaching, as some would imply.

The edifying use of either TLH or LW depends on the confessional stance of the pastor. Give TLH to a pastor who uncritically leans towards American Protestantism and you can be sure that hymns by Wesley and Cowper are going to be used. In the hands of a confessional pastor it will be obvious that there are at least as many hymns by Luther in LW as in its predecessor. The Lutheran Hymnal has been praised beyond its virtues and Lutheran Worship denigrated despite its strengths.

A confessional pastor who is concerned with the edifying use of what has been given him can positively use either hymnal. He knows that the heart of Sunday worship is the liturgy of the Mass and acts accordingly.

The liturgy of the Mass is divided into two parts, the ordinary and the propers. The ordinary is there every Lord’s Day. It is the framework, let us say, into which the propers are placed. Since they are repeated every Sunday, even children can learn by heart the Kyrie, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Creed, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. When to stand, sit, say “amen” or even make the sign of the cross are not secrets in a congregation where the ordinary is properly used.

The propers change from week to week, and include the Introit, Collect, Readings, and hymns. Regardless of the lectionary, one hopes to discern a common theme for each Sunday in these propers. No lectionary has descended from heaven and even Luther had complaints regarding the Epistle lesson of the historic lectionary (AE 53:23). Nevertheless, the Gospel reading governs the day and the hymns should be chosen accordingly.

The ordinary provides continuity, while the propers change from Sunday to Sunday. There is little need for a pastor to be liturgically creative and therefore little chance of confusing the congregation. Like a good shepherd, he leads the people to the still waters of the ordinary and the green grass of the propers.

The design of LW offers one advantage with respect to the Mass’s rhythm of continuity and change. Many congregations for the first time found the propers as they chanted the Introit from LW. The forepart of the hymnal was no longer relinquished to the pastor. In many instances where TLH was used, the pastor would simply speak the Introit before the congregation chanted the Gloria Patri. With LW, the congregation that chanted the Introit could now see where the pastor was getting the Collect and Readings for the day.

Lutheran Worship unfortunately produced one innovation in the liturgy that was not beneficial. It was the two-letter word “or.” For example, in the ordinary one could sing the “Gloria in Excelsis” “or” the tedious “This Is the Feast.” This innovation, more than any thing else, is what is liturgically detrimental about LW. By providing a number of alternatives within the Mass LW effectively banished the ordinary.

Soon pastors and congregations hankered for the fleshpots of innovation. Lutheran Worship fed the craving. Divine Service I could be used one Sunday and Divine Service II the next. For those congregations that desired to get closer to their Lutheran roots, there was Divine Service III, which allegedly “follows the tradition of Luther’s German Mass (1526)” (LW p. 197).

The banishment of the ordinary created a dependence on the worship bulletins. Even salutations could no longer be said or chanted from memory, but had to be printed. I visited one old congregation that no longer knew when to say “amen” at the end of the Collect. There the ordinary changed every Sunday, which is to say, there was no ordinary.

These innovations were practiced many times not by Church Growth enthusiast but by conservative pastors. Many pastors who are undoubtedly confessional in their preaching and teaching are far beyond liberal in their liturgics. One could even argue that among confessionals, liturgics has become a big tent that includes just about anything Church Growth enthusiasts desire.

After nearly eight years of committee meetings, polls, field testing, and retesting, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has a new hymnal. Lutheran Service Book (LSB) is a handsomely bound hymnal with easy-to-read cream color pages. Decisions have been made, reconsidered, and revised. Old hymns have been restored, new hymns have been published. It is doubtful that the LCMS has ever had a hymnal that received as much pre-publication scrutiny as LSB.

The error of LW, however, has not only been repeated in LSB, but augmented. The use of “or” remains. In addition, there are not just four Divine Services, as in LW, but five. Congregations need not use any of these services. Another LSB resource called Lutheran Service Builder gives the busy pastor even more reason to spend time at his computer, mixing and matching parts of the service and generally being liturgically creative.

Again a service “based upon” Luther’s German Mass is included. Again, it bears only a slight resemblance to what Luther wrote. The German Mass, for example, did not begin with Confession and Absolution, as Divine Service Setting Five does in LSB. It did include instructions for chanting the Epistle Reading and the Gospel, something the producers of neither LW nor LSB were bold enough to suggest. It must be admitted that Luther was not given to any kind of repristination of the liturgy. His liturgical writings are not popular among many of our contemporary high churchmen. However, his German Mass is not as informal as either LW or LSB suggests.

Not only does LSB encourage the continued banishment of the ordinary, but unlike either TLH or LW, it does not contain the propers.

It was stated at one workshop for LSB that the decision was made to produce propers for each Sunday in each year of the three-year lectionary, as well as provide the propers for the one-year lectionary. There is much to commend about this decision, particularly if the one-year lectionary is used. It is impossible to select one Introit, for example, that fits with the Readings of both the three-year and one-year lectionaries, as LW demonstrated.

The one serious drawback is that the propers alone now take up nearly 400 pages, space no hymnal can afford. Rather than have something for everyone, it would have been preferable to make the difficult and courageous decision to return to the one-year lectionary, and thereby keep the propers before the people.

As this article has indicated, the first concern of a pastor with a new hymnal is the liturgy of the Mass. The first concern of the laity is the hymns. Of course any new hymnal will receive criticism concerning the selection of hymns. A selection must be made and it is impossible not to displease someone. Nevertheless, LSB tries to please everyone and is the poorer for it.

The first thing one notices about the new hymns of LSB is that thirty-two of them, 5 percent of the whole hymn section, are penned by the chairman of the hymn committee. Only time will tell if the Reverend Stephen P. Starke is the greatest hymn writer of our age. However, his “Lift Up Your Heads, You Everlasting Doors” (LSB 339) does not sit very well opposite the venerable “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates” (LSB 340). One fears that this is just one more example that in the gated community of the LCMS, the phrase “conflict of interest” is meaningless.

Pastor Starke’s work is popular in some circles and one can almost hear the howls of indignation at the above paragraph. The cacophony will be matched by any objection rightly raised regarding Jaroslav Vajda’s “Now the Silence.”

“Now the Silence” was published in the Lutheran Book of Worship, excluded from its successor, Lutheran Worship and strangely reintroduced in LSB’s predecessor, Hymnal Supplement 98. Objections to this hymn were raised in these pages by our honorable editor-in-chief (Gottesdienst, Michaelmas 1999, “A Winsome Hymnal”).

Mr. Vadja has been an unflinching critic of some venerable Lutheran hymns. There is no poetry in them, he has claimed. They are merely “sung doctrine.”

Judging from “Now the Silence,” Mr. Vadja learned his poetics from the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Williams’ dictum was “No ideas but in things.” “Things” abound in Williams’s poetry. It is, however, difficult to say anything definite about nouns without verbs. For that reason, what makes an interesting, suggestive, and perhaps even arresting poem does not necessarily make a good hymn.

There is a paucity of verbs in “Now the Silence.” It says nothing definite. It proclaims nothing. It teaches nothing. The editors of LSB themselves inadvertently supply the evidence that “Now the Silence” fails as a hymn. It is the only song in LSB with a footnote to explain what it means. The classic “sung doctrine” hymns of Lutheran orthodoxy need no footnotes.

The depth of shameless pandering is achieved by LSB’s inclusion of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Mr. Johnson, who declared himself an agnostic in 1891, wrote this song in 1900 for a ceremony celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It soon became very popular throughout the South as the Negro National Anthem, an appellation Johnson himself approved and by which it is known to this day.

Mr Johnson was a diplomat, civil rights champion, novelist, poet, and lyricist for Broadway. It in no way denigrates Mr. Johnson or his work to state that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” does not belong in a Christian hymnal. It is not a hymn. It was not written for worship. It does not proclaim Christ.

Let us pass over in stubborn silence the shallow, and boring contemporary “praise songs” that have been included in LSB by simply noting that there is something for everyone in this hymnal. It is meant to be a hymnal for the whole, liturgically diverse Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. After all the years of reviewing, testing, and polling, the LCMS now has a hymnal that allows everything and denies nothing. Every congregation is free to do what is right in its own eyes – and then change it next week.

Of course, confessional pastors can use LSB even as they used LW. They can use Divine Service, Setting Three, which is based on TLH page 15, and ignore the rest. They can pick the sound hymns and ignore the “praise songs.” There is a Lutheran hymnal in LSB. Unfortunately, there is also a hymnal in it that is a whole lot less than Lutheran. Lutheran Service Book is a picture of what the LCMS is, not what it should be

The shepherd of Psalm 23 goes in front of his sheep and leads them. That shepherd knows what his sheep need. The LCMS follows the sheep. The sheep are allowed to go in all different directions. It does not take much prescience to see that this bodes ill for both the sheep and the shepherds.

With the publication of Lutheran Service Book it is evident that the worship wars are over in the LCMS. Confessional Lutheranism lost.