The Rain Dilemma

Bottom of the Rain - Buffalo Tom (mp3)

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Here’s my problem with that quote: we don’t mean it.

In Greece, a country that has collectively written a check its body couldn’t cash, people are rioting. They believe their bankruptcy is some secret German plot rather than the consequences of their own fiscally-irresponsible actions. They pissed on themselves for years but were OK with it, because they just kept calling it rain.

In America, The Great Recession might as well be called The Binge Drinking Hangover from Hell, because the entire situation can be summed up the same way: “How was I supposed to know that drinking the entire fifth would make me puke all night and leave me so useless the next day?”

Our wealthiest and most ambitious worked behind the scenes to cut corners and fly towards the sun, and our average Joes and Janes maxed out every penny and every piece of plastic we could find until, for one shining moment, our entire society -- our big family of 307 million -- was spending more than it was taking in.

Seriously. Let that fact swirl around in your mind for a minute. Appreciate the gravity of an entire continent, for the first time in our modern history, spending more than it earns. (We only once dipped below 5 percent before the mid-90s.)

By recession time, more than half of the 25-34 demographic in America had ZERO savings. Most of those, it was surmised, had never even grown up thinking a savings account was necessary.

Savings? Fuck that, the lease is almost up on my Scion!
Savings? Fuck that, they’ve just come out with 3D televsions!
Savings? Fuck that, I haven’t yet seen the world!!

You know what we do to people who tell us we’re being pissed on? We vote them out of office. And we replace them with people who tell us it’s raining.

Locally, we have Howard School (of Academics and Technology and Fluffy Unicorns), a school with a rich history that long ago became the preeminent eyesore of inner-city educational horror. Before desegregation, Howard was the shining star that the black community around Chattanooga held up as proof of African-American potential. The school educated and graduated untold numbers of highly- and moderately-successful and men and women of color and beat plenty of odds and sneers to do it.

Yeah, that was, like, 35 years ago.

Or, if you want to stretch the lie and include the era of Reggie White’s years as proof that Howard was not yet a blight, then we’ll just say 30 years. For the past 30 years, Howard has been a shame and a tragedy. It has failed tens of thousands of teenagers, almost all of them black, almost all of them poor. The crime of it being labeled a “persistently failing school” by the state is that this label is about 25 years overdue.

So here’s what’s funny: the people who are angriest about Howard earning such a label are the people the school has failed now for two generations.

“Now is not the time to pull the rug out from under them,” said Walter Williams, a former local judge and one of the school’s alums from its Golden Era.

Um, has he looked at this rug? It’s a shitty rug. They haven’t replaced that rug since he was a student. It's stained, moth-eaten, frayed, and out of fashion. It's never been shampooed or even vacuumed. You can’t help but wonder why anyone would want that damn rug, or why anyone would object to it being pulled out and burned.

But people don’t rally behind slow neglect and decay. We don't hate the dude who lifts a dollar from the cash register every day for 10 years nearly as much as the guy who steals $100. We only rally when someone pulls a fast one. Americans are like frogs in boiling water who get upset about the jump in the electricity bill.

I think we like being lied to. I think we crave being deceived. I think when we pick up that huge turd and sink our teeth into it, we want to be told it’s Hershey’s Special Dark. When we rub our face in shit, we want to be told it’s deep-cleansing mud. When someone pisses on us, we want to be told it’s just rain.

How else to explain our modern world?

"The Sperminator"

Dirty Denim - The Donnas (mp3)
B is for Brutus - The Hives (mp3)

I would never have voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The Governator” (alt. “Guhvinator,” “Guvinator”) wasn’t a complete disaster during his two terms in California’s highest elected position, but history won’t be kind.

Generally speaking, I’ve come to believe we get the politicians we deserve. We get the politicians who reflect who we are, who we think we are, or who we think we want. We rarely if ever get the politicians we need, people who could actually do something powerful and positive and beneficial. Those people are generally ugly or nerdy, or they have the charm of a roadkill skunk, and we treat politics like “American Idol” or a beauty pageant, expecting entertainment and demanding these people stroke us to earn our votes.

Politics is prostitution. They seduce our minds, and we pay them with our votes and shove them out the door. Politicians rail against the horrors of prostitutes because they’re trying to eliminate the competition.

When the latest news about Arnold emerged this week, it raised eyebrows. I had the rare opportunity on Tuesday to be the one who revealed this information to a handful of people (thanks, Twitter!), and their collective reaction was perfectly 2011. Shock and surprise for all of 30 seconds -- the standard length of a political ad -- and then quick downshift into cynicality and surrender.

No, really? But they’ve been married for so long.
What am I saying? Of course he did.
What did we expect?
He’s no different and never was.

California deserved The Governator. They got the leader they deserve just as Chattanooga deserves Fred Skillern, a man who would apparently joke with a reporter that he wouldn’t invite African-American council members to his house because didn’t think he “could cook barbecue like them n------.”

I digress. Back to Arnold.

It wasn’t 20 minutes into the revelation he had fathered a child a decade ago that the Twitterverse referred to him as “The Sperminator.” Ouch. Humor in Twitterville is like a tsunami, swift and harsh and unflinching.

Meanwhile, my reaction has been quite different. Because I’ve never seen Arnold as a man to idolize or think of as “a good man,” revelation of his infidelity only serves to confirm that which I already assumed: that I didn’t need to waste my time admiring him.

Instead, my reaction is a feeling that we have an opportunity here. If we as a country have an ounce of brain juice left in us, we should take this as an opportunity to reevaluate our foolishness, our obsession with celebrity, our superficial fixation with morality.

It’s a no-brainer that, had this news about “Ahnolt” come out earlier, he would never have been coronated as The Governator. This news was certainly an election killer. It’s killed Spitzer, Hart, Edwards, Sanford... seriously, this list would go on forever. Sex scandal has killed or threatened more politicians than all of Tom Clancy’s novels combined.

But we have an opportunity right now to ask ourselves the most important question possible: Did Arnold’s personal scandal, one unbeknownst to us, affect his ability to do his job?

I believe, confidently, that The Governator would have sucked no less or no more in his elected position had he not knocked up a “household assistant.” Keeping his privates out of his maid would not have given him greater wisdom, and it would not have solved California’s horrifying fiscal issues. Ahnolt stunk as a governor, but it had nothing to do with sexual scandals.

The day may never come, but we eventually need to accept a difficult but essential truth about humanity: Being a great employee or office leader or business owner or elected official has absolutely nothing to do with how you handle your non-work personal relationships.

Of equal or greater importance is this following realization: Being a great and dedicated husband or father or friend has absolutely nothing to do with how well you do a job. In fact, if we know anything in the 21st Century, it’s that placing too high a priority on family can actually hurt one’s professional career.

If we know the second part, that being a good person doesn’t make you a good employee, then why can’t we accept that the opposite is also true? We insist on clinging to this illusion that the only people we can elect with good conscience must be squeaky clean.

Our modern society would not have elected Thomas Jefferson. To anything.

I want that to sink in. It’s pretty friggin’ disturbing.

Please understand. I’m not defending The Sperminator. His scandal conveniently arrives on our doorstep after we were already prepared to stop giving a shit about him, and I can only hope this makes things easier on his family.

The Sperminator will go away. Our delusions that some singular issue of morality determines a person’s leadership skills, on the other hand, will not.

We don’t have to become Italy. We don’t have to become a place where Silvio Berlusconi becomes the standard-bearer of our country.

But what seems clear to me is that, for all our hemming and hawing over the importance of morally-upstanding role models in elected office, America is hardly doing any better than other countries at policing dirty behavior.

Maybe it’s time we took a different approach.

The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Sunshine Lies - Matthew Sweet (mp3)
God's Got It - The Black Crowes (mp3)

A man has a story. The story changes lives. It changes the way entire groups of people deal with situations, with other people, with themselves. It reroutes armies.

But wait.

You begin to realize this story is not entirely true. You begin to realize that the man, the storyteller, knowingly embellished or even fictionalized a portion of this story. And yet, parts of the story remain true, and its telling has unquestionably affected people for good, and its ripple effect of positivity cannot be questioned.

How big must the lies be before they become inexcusable, before the good accomplished is eclipsed by the interwoven acts of deception?

If you think I’m talking about Greg Mortenson and Three Cups of Tea, you’re only partly right. I could also be talking about Joseph Smith, or L. Ron Hubbard, or some could even say I’m talking about Jesus Christ himself.

60 Minutes did its expose, complete with damning info from investigative studpuppy Jon Krakauer. It took a few days of follow-up shock in newspapers and blogs, and then the invevitable backlash to the backlash began. If you read the comments section of the 60 Minutes link, a majority of the 376 (and counting) commenters are incensed that the show dared to investigate such a great hero.

That Mortenson has been the central figure in acts that have positively changed the lives of hundreds of people, possibly thousands, is indisputable. But couldn’t the same be said of Scientology? Or Latter Day Saints? Or Christianity?

Sure, we can all talk about how these religions have caused problems or used deceptive practices or whatever, but it's also indisputable that they have positively changed the lives of thousands if not millions. Does all that positivity that make the Original Sin of foundational lies OK?

As a Christian, obviously, I don’t believe Jesus was a liar. As a non-Mormon and non-Scientologist, I believe Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard very much were. Such is the unavoidable dividing line between believers and skeptics. Faith often requires us to believe true that which is difficult to accept as true.

But with Greg Mortenson... at the very least he tells convenient half-truths, and he (er, his organization) mishandles more money in a month than most of us see in a year, and he gets his ego stroked by reporters, military generals, politicians, and untold thousands of Americans and poor foreigners.

Disclosure: This story hits very close to home.

Two years ago, a nearby school, a school my daughters will soon attend, put most of its focus on fundraising to help Mortenson’s organization build a school for girls in Afghanistan. They raised over $60,000. Mortenson even came to the school and spoke to them. Now there’s serious doubt the school was ever built, and even if it was, there’s doubt it’s being used as a school and not sitting empty or being used for storage.

When these students saw or were told about the 60 Minutes report, you can only imagine how devastated they were. Mortenson's defenders may be right in part -- we don’t know the extent of Mortenson’s deceptions and incompetencies -- but even the true believer must accept that he has overstated his accomplishments and understated his own profiteering. The most common defense: surely there are worse people out there for journalists to investigate.

Do the schools Mortenson actually built that have real girls in them excuse that he or his organization mishandled this school's $60,000, money raised for a specific purpose that was never met? If Bernie Madoff started a world-changing charitable foundation with the millions he bilked from unwitting investors, does that make him less of a thief?

I find myself fairly ripped apart by these questions. I don’t like having to ask them, and I don’t like the answers my heart and head offer back. Instead I think of The Watchmen, and about Serenity, and many great works of more traditional literature that suggest that large-scale lies and cover-ups in the name of the Greater Good are never, ever OK.

Times like these, I wish reality were as easy as fiction. Is our sin here in making a hero out of a human, or is the sin that the human insisted on believing too much of his own hype? Can we ever get far enough past our own miserable flaws to do truly heroic things for very long, or if we keep flying, are we destined to eventually find ourselves a little too close to the sun?

When We All Get to Heaven

Somewhere In the Middle - Casting Crowns (mp3)
Everything'll Be Made Right - Superdrag (mp3)

Hipster youngster pastor Rob Bell has published a controversial new book, Love Wins. In it, he apparently offers the not-particularly-radical notion that Hell is either very small, temporary, or non-existent. If you want to watch his very intriguing "trailer" video for his book, watch here.

(Side note: For another recent version of this argument, see If Grace is True, a book I happened to like a whole lot, thankee.)

I first read Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis about six years ago and enjoyed it, although it felt like it was written in 5-minute spurts, as if he just jotted stuff down every time he sat down on the john. But it had its moments, and I found it to be a worthy side reading project for wayward lib’ral Christians, much like Blue Like Jazz.

I’ve known four pastors and preachers well enough to have had intense and personal conversations with them, and I’m related to two more, one of whom was my grandfather, whose fiery Baptist sermons were counteracted by private journal entries where he expressed one doubt after another about his own faith. I know two more who are about to finish or have recently finished seminary. Of those six men and two women, every last one of them has “The Gospel I Believe” and “The Gospel I Preach,” and with all of them, those two Gospels aren’t the same Gospel. They have a lot in common. Probably 80-percent of them are the same. But all of them have beliefs or doubts or concerns in their personal beliefs that get covered up, glossed over, or ignored when preaching publicly.

And all of their responses, in private, are along these lines: My congregation “can’t handle it,” or “isn’t spiritually open to it,” or “would kick me out on my dainty bum.”

I’m not saying confidently that There Is No Hell. I’m not confident about much when it comes to Christianity. I only know what I hope, and I know this hope has nothing to do with my own selfish desires. It’s not for my own protection or sense of being, but because it seems the most just.

And it’s this: We all get to heaven on airplanes.

The most saintly among us, like Mother Theresa, get private Lear Jets that fly them immediately up. The very faithful and good get first class and are sent off the runway in expedient fashion. The highly flawed are forced to sit on the runway for several years, not allowed to use the bathroom or unbuckle, and forced to sit next to the people you were most judgmental towards in your lifetime. (I mostly put myself in this category, but I might be shooting too high.)

The malicious, the cruel, the rabid disbelievers, and those whose misguided faith led them to do the most harm to others in the name of God, they’re forced to endure several decades of layovers. They don’t get hotel vouchers. They sleep, night after night, on uncomfortable airport chairs. They eat nothing but poorly-cooked fast food that rips the stomach up. The Starbucks is permanently closed due to repairs. The heat doesn't work. They don’t get Wi-Fi, and the cell reception constantly drops out at exactly the wrong times. The bathrooms smell and never get cleaned, and bile randomly spews forth from the toilets. And the only reading or viewing material is a recording of all the horrible things they’ve done in their lives, mixed in with all the good things they could have done had they taken different paths.

The only way their plane finds a pilot is when they have a Bill Murray-esque moment from Groundhog Day. When they finally accept their mistakes and repent for their destructive or wasted lives, they are granted passage and taken up.

Finally, there are those who choose separation. That’s, according to the wise old Milton, precisely what Satan chose. He was the first rebel. And maybe there are just those in our midst who, after death and granted full and total enlightenment, would still choose to remain separate. I cannot imagine a God who would force us to do anything, so I guess they’ll get their wish.

Maybe this makes me a Unitarian, or a Universalist. Maybe this makes me sacrilegious. Maybe this guarantees I’m gonna be stuck in that airport for several painful lifetimes. I’m sure I deserve it.

But one day, somehow, I’ll get there. And so will you. And when we meet, hopefully God will let us listen to some of our favorite music, even if it was a song by Judas Priest.

Well, Which Is It Young Feller?

How to Be Strong - Roseanne Cash (mp3)
ELO Kiddies - Cheap Trick (mp3)

From Raising Arizona:
GALE: Alright you hayseeds it's a stickup! Everybody freeze. Everybody down on the ground.  (Long pause)
HAYSEED: Well, which is it Young Feller? You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? I mean to say, if'n I freeze I can't rightly drop. And if'n I drop, I'm gonna be in motion.

What do we as a country want our children to be?

Are kids better serving as consumers in a free economy or as innocent angels in a pit of vipers? Well? Which is it, people? What the hell do you expect from America's children and teens? They ain't super-powered, y'know.

A recent Washington Post article in the "On Faith" section points out the dilemma decently enough.

In much the same way that adults cram fast food and candy down the throats of children yet expect them to grow up with physiques like Kate Moss and Macauley Culkin, adults shove kids in front of millions of disturbing visual images and auditory sounds but expect them to grow up sweet and innocent. And I'm not talking just parents here. I'm talking parents in specific and culture at large.

The TODAY Show will run an expose on the scandal surrounding Bristol Palin and premarital sex at 7:10, followed by a Hardee's commercial at 7:14 that depicts a woman with her tits practically spilling out of her dress, eating a hamburger like she's fellating it, and then scooping some stray ketchup from her finger and sucking on that like it's sloppy seconds. And then Matt Lauer returns to the screen to discuss the "scandal" of Miss California taking photos in lingerie. And then they'll see a movie trailer where Uhura is straddling Captain Kirk, and he's about to boldly take her where no man has gone before. All before most children have finished their breakfast. Oh yeah, and then Meredith returns with stories about the Craigslist predator and John Edwards' wayward penis.

Can you explain this to me?

If we want to feel like responsible parents, we can't watch a single thing that remotely interests us on television if there's the slightest damn chance our children could walk into the room. We won't let them watch ANY show anymore unless it's been DVR'd ("TiVo'd") first, because we can't risk the kind of shit that will greet them during commercial breaks of "Wipeout."

Meanwhile -- and I mean no offense, my conservative friends -- I've witnessed a fairly strong correlation between how often one agrees with "Family Values" lingo and how often one exposes their children to questionably-appropriate material. The more granola and tree-huggin' the parents I know, the more likely their children are even more sheltered from pop culture than ours. And ours are pretty sheltered, especially compared to most I know. (In point of fact, I'm not terribly confident that sheltering them more or better necessarily guarantees anything substantial in the long run. It just soothes my conscience a little is all, so we err on the side of caution.)

I wonder if that's because conservatives are the ones who espouse both the family values and the free market, the belief that people have the right to make a buck any way they can.

Let's take Carrie Prejean as an example. Her parents instilled in her a belief that gay marriage rips at the stable fabric of society. And I'd bet you a dime to a dollar that they are against increasing taxes and gun control. Yet, those same parents were perfectly OK with their sweet darling getting fake tits and modeling in lingerie as a teenager. I don't mean to rake them over the coals, but I do awe at our collective inconsistencies that don't once seem to give us judgmental pause.

Likewise, why aren't Elliott Spitzer and Sarah Palin seen more frequently as partners in deplorable hypocrisy? Both stood on soap boxes and wooed votes based on a public stance that was clearly neglected -- at least in moments -- in their private lives. But apparently we give Palin more lenience because "Who can control kids these days?" Maybe that's valid. Or... maybe it's all the more dangerous to stand on soap boxes and preach parental values if your kids ain't sweet li'l angels.

As the article suggests, we seem to be much more capable, as a society, of objecting to gay couples and teenage sex than we are of actually trying to address what most reasonable minds should agree is a more serious problem -- the pandemic of illegitimacy, for instance -- head-on.

It's a foolish game to call out the hypocrisy of specific people to make a point, because I'm plenty hypocritical in my own right, as both a parent and as a general adult. But I must call this hypocrisy out. I'm doin' it for the children, dammit!

We want them to do as we say, not as we do. And we want them to be sex symbols only in certain situations. We want to market Britney as a whore and an angel (well, we did back in 1999), and we expect our kids to know wisely and magically differentiate the good Britney from the bad Britney.

Everyone always expects so much out of the younger generations, and almost as much out of other people's children as our own, yet we don't seem to want to do much, collectively as a society, to help them.

I originally wrote "protect them," but I think the challenge is far more nuanced than mere protection. Instead of shielding, shouldn't we instead be aiming to equip them to do what they should, and more importantly to nurture them in an environment that helps them determine what the hell "should" is in the first place?

"How to Be Strong" is from the compilation album Mary Had a Little Amp. I can't find it anywhere for downloading, but the CD is good! The Cheap Trick tune can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.