allen brill of the right christians has posted a short, to-the-point evaluation of why we absolutely have to do away with the bush administration at the earliest possible opportunity. it's quite well put, i think.

reason # n to stay middle class: otherwise your kids will be miserable.

ok, that's not actually (entirely) the point of the article i've posted -- it's about a crackdown on cheating in a westport, CT, high school. but the cheating itself is at least partially a product of the sorts of pressures rich kids face: do as well as everyone else; go to a college with a fancy brand name; etc., etc.

HOWEVER, there's something very wrong with this poor-little-rich-kid approach. it doesn't question their affluence. none of the students, parents, teachers or administrators in the article thought that a bit of perspective might be a viable solution. i tend to think that a big part of the problem in communities like westport is their isolation from the struggles that most people face. "community service," mentioned in the article as just one more thing these kids are overburdened with, appears to be only a burden -- something these kids are doing because they have to do it to get into the particular college they have to get into.

it would be nice to see these folks become part of the community of an inner-city school, or a midwestern public school, for a few weeks. obviously, that amount of time probably couldn't teach them to have respect for non-professional work (another subtext of the cheating-in-westport story) or to truly recognize their own ridiculous affluence. but maybe they'd get a small glimpse of what it looks like to achieve because you want to, not because you have to.

II.

i also spent some time on saturday preparing for fred phelps and his followers to assault my church. after escorting and before the memorial, laurel and i spent a couple of hours on the sidewalk outside my house, creating a masterwork of protest art: a banner, 5 1/2 by 9 feet, proclaiming, "people of conscience & people of faith support st. peter's: open, inclusive, affirming." i did the lettering, laurel decorated with rainbows, and we invited alyssa and her mom to contribute handprints. i thought a lot about pauline. later that evening, we decorated posters with bible verses and expressions of support.

my favorite creation said "beloved child of God" in the center and had arrows pointing off in every direction.

yesterday morning we all got up early. when laurel and i arrived at st. peter's at 8.00 am, there were already eight people there, waiting for us. we showed off our banner and signs. i showed off the church. people kept arriving. at 8.30, when congregants had begun arriving and phelps's people hadn't, there were over 30 people outside st. peter's. we had been joined by two gay men with a video camera and cardboard signs trimmed in hot pink feathers.

ken, my professor and advisor, showed up with his wife. friends from SPC showed up. ACRONYM showed up, having written a song for the occasion. people from haverford's production of the laramie project showed up. and parishioners kept thanking them. the gratitude that st. peter's showed was overwhelming. by 9.00, it had become clear that st. peter's, the one church with an organized counterprotest, was the one church these people were skipping. i went into service and was joined by jenny, katie and a few others. katie received her first communion.

after the service, we closed up shop at st. peter's. laurel and i went home and made eggs...and then gobbled them in fifteen seconds, rushing out the door, after eliza called to say the kansans were at st. mark's. we made it to sixteenth and locust in record time, and ended the morning being interviewed by philly weekly.

on the way home, laurel and i talked about how sorry we felt for these people, and how clear it is that they are suffering, really suffering, from their painful obsession. they spend virtually all their time, and an incredible amount of energy, thinking and talking about the ways that people have sex. their demonstrations have very little to do with God and a whole lot more to do with offensive, prurient words and images. for some reason, these people are cut off from the love and forgiveness that (for most of us, i think) constitute the experience of God.

once i asked a priest what hell would be like--i think i was ten or so--and he replied that essence of hell is the inaccessibility of God's love.

pray for the people of westborough baptist church, that they may understand a gospel of love and forgiveness. pray for the people they victimize. pray for those who try to reach out to both.

I.

pauline's memorial was saturday at the willistown meeting -- her own meeting for many years, and the home of dozens of SPC retreats during the course of pauline's ministry at swarthmore.

i ended up riding to the memorial in pauline's own car. diana, who had moved in with her during the last months of her life, told us some wonderful stories -- i think my favorite was the one about pauline's insistence that there be beer in her house for visitors. apparently whenever anyone asked if they could bring anything, yuengling and corona were at the top of the list.

we tried to reconstruct the narrative that always accompanied trips to SPC retreat. pauline seemed to know every landmark on the route, and always offered a steady stream of short anecdotes. there's the eighteenth-century tavern jutting out into the middle of providence road, which used to be a great place for it because it was right at the crossroads, but now it's obstructing traffic and they have to move it, isn't it amazing how time marches on, etc. there's the old pub in newtown square. there's the dupont estate, with its miles of fencing and seemingly hundreds of horses.

the meeting itself is an original building. at the beginning of every retreat pauline gave a tour, taking care to note the retractable center wall, which once divided the men from the women in the meeting, and also taking care to note that the separation was there because the meeting worried that women wouldn't get equal time if they were in with the men.

the memorial itself was very hard. i'm used to having a liturgy to lean on in times of trouble. sitting on hard benches listening to people's attempts to weep quietly for thirty minutes is...well, it's something else entirely. near the end, sara suggested that SPC students sing the taize ubi caritas, which ended every SPC meeting, and that was astounding.

after the handshake that signals the end of meeting, i went outside for a bit. the meeting is surrounded by undeveloped land; i leaned on the fence and looked out at the fields, the forest, the geese and the sunset, and remembered how peaceful i felt during walking meditations through that same landscape. last time i walked there, it was the same sort of day, and the same time of year. this time the view, which is the same two years later, almost let me imagine that when the sun set we would return to the meeting, and pauline would be there with a hug and maybe some vegan lasagna, and we would eat by candlelight and end the day singing.

actual veteran max cleland, on his reaction to operation flight suit:

"I'll tell you the truth. I thought, "Oh my God." A man who deliberately got out of going to Vietnam by hiding out in the National Guard and who did not even complete his National Guard tour of duty, now walks onto an aircraft carrier in a flight suit with helmet under his arm, as if he's Tom Cruise in "Top Gun," and "Mission Accomplished." "

this quote, and many others, from a barn-burner of an interview in salon.com. atrios has it linked, if you want, but it's premium content.

cleland, also a member of the 9/11 commission, calls the administration's compliance level "nixonian."

the article also harks back to saxby chambliss's despicable attack ad that showed pictures of cleland (who by the way lost three limbs in vietnam) next to pics of saddam hussein and osama bin laden, attempting to show that he was "soft on terror." cleland's numbers plummeted, and he lost his seat. it's funny, how many ways the republicans have thought of to screw well-intentioned people. they lied to cleland, and he voted for the october authorization. he says in the interview that he regrets that vote and feels "duped." then they lied about his record on terror, and he lost his seat.

lucky for us, he's now publicly pissed. let's hope he gets a ton of air on this.

thank goodness for fiscal conservatives.

ok, not really, but they did help to block a vote on the World's Worst Energy Bill.

i'm sorry for the farm-state dems, but ethanol subsidies, which might be a very good idea in some cases, are not a good enough idea to allow the passage of this monstrous pile of helpfully institutionalized corporate greed.

in other news, i have now formally submitted three of six grad school apps. oh, my hemorrhaging bank account.

in yet other news, laurel is the proud owner of a shiny new JOB. go laurel!!!

congratulate me: i have just finished ALL the essays required for application to the M.Phil. program at oxford and the Ph.D. programs at harvard, yale, michigan, berkeley, and UC san diego. and only eight days late for my personal deadline! if only the profs would give me some feedback, i might actually feel OK about sending them in...

saddest quote from a very sad story:

"'We have a law in Germany — and it is coercive and without any scope for discretion — saying that whoever enters Germany without the necessary visa has to go back where they came from,' Dirk Nockemann, the Hamburg interior minister, said in an interview, defending the decision to expel the Oppong sisters.

'I think it is the sovereign right of every state to decide this way," he continued. "I am convinced that other states make the same decisions, especially the United States.'"

yep, especially the united states. good thing we're such enviable role models.

heroes of the day: the massachusetts supreme court.

they write, in part,

"The question before us is whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry. We conclude that it may not. The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens. In reaching our conclusion we have given full deference to the arguments made by the Commonwealth. But it has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to same-sex couples."

ok, so i had to come back pre-tomorrow with a shocking announcement: i think thomas friedman may have done something right.

the article, whose headline appealed to me immediately, is titled "wanted: fanatical moderates." now, i'm not actually a moderate -- i just play one at swarthmore -- but i have often felt that, no matter how righteous their cause, left radicals often screw themselves (and/or the people they're trying to help) by being mean to moderates. the best moments of the anti-war movement of the past couple of years involved seeing signs like "suburban homeowners for peace" at rallies. the worst involved knee-jerk conflations of the iraq war and...any left-wing idea that comes to mind.

i don't really know enough about mumia abu-jamal, and i sure as shit don't think it's good strategy to try and stop a war by invoking him. same with che, fidel or the abolition of the state of israel, to name a few topics that got front-and-center attention during anti-war rallies.

it's not that some of these issues don't deserve attention. i'd be entirely willing to believe that mumia was framed by a racist justice system. while i'm no communist, i'm also not a laissez-faire capitalist or a freetrader. the anti-israel people, well, they're obviously confused (where "confused" = "wrong"). israel has a perfect right to exist, given certain major concessions to the folks who were there first.

anyway. the point here, which i think could apply to a wide variety of issues, is that coalitions are good and moderates are necessary to coalitions. friedman is writing about the reaction of the likud to the recent "virtual accord" authored by yossi beilin and yasir abed rabbo; he could just as easily be writing about the reaction of some anti-war radicals to churches, homeowners, and [other viable political symbols] for peace.

man, there's nothin' i like better than a nice, high-minded debate.

too bad i'm drowning in FLSA complaints and grad school applications.

in the meantime, let me just say how *incredibly* amused i was to be labelled a "bolshevik" by Matt in comments. hee hee hee. fine: if you get to call me a bolshevik then i get to call you an ASSHAT. i bet you happened upon the site while googling fred phelps, you weenie.

back tomorrow.

pauline allen died yesterday morning. some swat-people will remember her as advisor to the protestant community, and a person who created the only environment i've ever seen that managed to authentically incorporate people of other (and no) faiths into a christian setting. everybody learned. it was great. protestant community continues, but it was never the same after pauline left to do battle with cancer in spring '02.

pauline always reminded me of my friend page, in that she was a big, strong female spiritual leader with a big, strong contralto voice. (and short hair and dansko clogs and good hugs and a comforting presence.)

pauline's favorite hymn was "seek ye first." we sang it every sunday without fail. she also liked friends hymns like "thank you kindly, friend lucretia" (sung to the tune of the battle hymn of the republic, which i always found slightly ironic), and traditionals like "amazing grace."

anyway.

well, lest anyone think i'm being consistently productive at work, i've just gotta say:

if you're interested in sifting the garbage, check out the comment thread at atrios's post on the roy moore spectacular. several points:

1. hey leftists! (this goes for you, too, nicholas kristoff.) not all christians are asshats.

2. hey conservatives! "acknowledgements of God" might, maybe, a little, occasionally, be considered not to violate the establishment clause. but "acknowledgements of God" and "huge state-funded monuments to specific majority ideologies" are not the same thing. just fyi.

3. hey conservatives (part II)! alan keyes is NOT a constitutional scholar.

thank you, my work here is done.

gee, even more news about depressing faux christians. this article about roy moore really turns my stomach.

moore, you will remember, is the former chief justice of the alabama supreme court. he had installed, at public expense, a two-and-a-half ton monument to the ten commandments in the alabama supreme court building. ordered to remove the monument, he refused and was subsequently suspended from his duties. today, as the article i've linked states, he was formally removed from his position by unanimous vote of a special court -- quite impressive, all things considered.

i think it's astounding that even william pryor--alabama attorney general and a scary theocrat in his own right--will not support moore. i guess i'm...happy?

past the first few paragraphs of the article, though, things get decidedly murky. see:

"Shortly after sunrise Wednesday, several dozen of Chief Justice Moore's supporters bowed their heads and held a prayer circle on the courthouse steps. Young men blew curled rams' horns as a call to arms. Two women wore black veils "to mourn the death of America,'' they said. One burly man named Matt strutted up the courthouse steps dressed in a green army helmet and flak jacket "to wage war for God.'' Whether or not Chief Justice Moore emerges with his job, his popularity seems to be only growing. "

i shouldn't feel so bad. leave it to a reporter to make a statistical inference from a small crowd of seriously misinformed people with nothing better to do on a wednesday morning than dress up and undermine the constitution. i'm sure his popularity is not, in fact, "only growing." but the fact that he had or retains any power, over anyone, is disaster enough. combine it with his supporters' call to arms/death of america/war for God language, and it's nothing but frightening.

i'd make some sort of "american taliban" comment here, but it's really not worth my time.

more on fred phelps and my church.

i go to st. peter's in society hill. on november 23, phelps and his mob of scaries are going to be there bright and early, at 8.30 am, to inform us that we're going to hell because we welcome queer folks into our congregation.

yesterday i wrote to one of our priests to wonder whether the congregation would be upset if some sort of counterprotest was arranged. she replied that a counterprotest was a wonderful idea. i agree: occasionally people do better by ignoring hate protesters, but the phelps people are so loud and threatening that i think there needs to be another crowd there to support the congregation. in any case, if you're reading this, and i haven't contacted you already, and you want to either come to church that morning or stand outside it and support our inclusive spirit, then get in touch.

old news.

here's professor burke's take on the diebold thingy -- posted october 28, so it's a bit outdated at this point, but still worth reading.

i am mostly impressed with burke's analysis, especially his contrast between the coalition for the digital commons (pretty rational, generally positive on coalition building within the college) and why-war. one thing that professor burke doesn't address, and something that i think is particularly important on a college campus, is the manner in which the college does what it does, says what it says. there's a reason that the administration is a convenient "straw man," as burke puts it: they have a lot of influence. they have a lot of money, they are at the head of an operation that can put out a press release, create a publication, speak to an academic audience, provide a lot of credibility. even more importantly, whether students care to admit it or not, most swatties want the approval and audience of their administrators.

i think the administration could have done quite a bit more to signal to the student population that it was on their side. it's as simple as that. when adminsitrators' responses seem grudging or more directed at their corporate opponents than at the students to whom they are ultimately responsible, those students deserve to be angry and to complain. it's no good simply to defend the administration on the grounds that they were complying with the law. fine -- comply. then tell the world your students are right and you're going to take every legal step to help them.

...and if you don't think they're right, well, that's another and larger problem. if that's the case you don't belong at swarthmore.

it's veterans' day -- a good holiday, in my estimation, given the tremendous sacrifices that many veterans have made for this country. i'm just irritated that sentiments like "tremendous sacrifices for one's country" have begun to sound so hackneyed and false. i'd like to thank my grandparents for helping to defeat hitler, but all the available words have been hijacked by the bush administration.

it doesn't do to speak of the mission of world war two in anything less than large, historic terms. grandma weber lived far from home in a crowded house in a rough philly neighborhood, and worked really hard every day in the WAC. meanwhile, grandpa weber was slightly wounded in the european theatre, and the botched surgery that followed left him mostly deaf and partially paralyzed for the rest of his life. grandpa hoover was a medic who was among the first americans on the scene at the liberation of ravensbruck concentration camp. grandma hoover was in minneapolis, supporting her entire family.

here's something i believe: war is bad, always. here's something else: there are necessary wars, or at least wars that accomplish necessary things. they are not to be entered into lightly: to compound the horrors of war with the frivolity of ambition or politicking is incredibly dishonorable. somehow, that is exactly what our country has done. or rather, that is exactly what the forces of wealth and power that control such decisions in our country have done.

president bush, as amply documented elsewhere (read krugman's nyt column today, just for example), apparently has no sense of the appalling suffering he has caused. he has never served in any war. in fact, he purposefully avoided vietnam. nevertheless, for some reason he gets to be the one to talk about "sacrifice" and "honor" today; he feels free to impugn the patriotism of anyone who suggests the ruthless frivolity of his iraq campaign.

...and meanwhile, the iraq wounded, and the families of the dead -- not to mention the iraqi civilians wounded, killed and uprooted by the conflict -- though no less herioc than those who gave their lives or their health in world war two, are left without the solace of exalted humanitarian purpose that was afforded the veterans of previous generations.

i hope that senior members of the bush administration feel personally responsible for each and every casualty in the iraq campaign, and that they acknowledge their misconstructions and dissembling, and that they ask forgiveness of both the people they have specifically harmed and the country as a whole (not to mention God, who is probably pretty pissed about the way God's name has been used during this long PR battle). i hope they do it today -- that would certainly be appropriate.

after all, it would be nice for me to have the words to write something wholehearted for veterans' day.

back after a tiring weekend. i think there need to be more windows in our house, and that they all need better insulation. living in the drafty dark is compounding all of our other issues and making us moody.

we did get a lovely amount of sun on saturday morning, when the house, plus jenny, walked a few miles of the manayunk canal towpath. it's finally fall, in that particular east-coast way that involves bright blue skies and not-overwhelming briskness. i'm starting to learn that here, unlike in north dakota, clear skies after october do not necessarily mean arctic high-pressure systems and sub-zero temperatures. hurray!

on our walk we found an abandoned factory, the inside of which had been mostly destroyed by fire. beautiful architecture, though, and even better acoustics. i love ruins.

after a difficult afternoon (culminating in an unsatisfying nap), we headed to swarthmore for dinner chez rosbeccian (and albert, but we didn't see him) (who have a note on the kitchen wall containing contact info for something like "alyssameliaurel"). i met ross's parents. he is lucky enough to also have a mother named betsy. she is very little like my mother-named-betsy, except that they are both very nice. in any case, the food was fantastic.

sunday was church, crossword, grad school apps, dinner, Big Night. a good day, all told, and with an intriguing sermon about the importance of "giving from the place of your poverty." it is a pleasing idea that giving from the resources of which you're in shortest supply can maybe heal that impoverishment.

on a more disturbing note, my church is to be picketed by fred phelps's people. ugh. the brighter side of that news is that was incredibly impressed with the reaction of our congregation: there is, thank goodness, no sense that we owe these people some sort of deference, or that it might be important to dialogue with them, or that, in fact, our welcome to queer people can be at issue at all. so, friends and neighbors, if you are in the philly area, you should come to church with me on the 23rd. don't forget to wear your COW paraphernalia.

aaand...that's about it. as a bit of an afterthought, here is a story about the supreme court's writ of cert for guantanamo prisoners. let's hope they do the right thing.

someone named Roger Sweeny says in comments,

"I came to this page via a Google search for "Buffalo Commons" and stayed for the rest. A few posts above, you said, "you don't need to be mean, bitter, or contemptuous to be radical." but you sure don't sound like you believe it."

ouch! spot on. i still think I can save myself here, though. first off, the comment about radicals and how they should behave was directed specifically to radicals' behavior toward each other, and toward others who are trying to be their allies. i should have stated that a bit more clearly.

secondly, i guess i was thinking about the way people talk to each other, as opposed to some mythical necessity to respect *ideas* that are insupportable. when i meet conservatives on the street, i'm pretty nice to them unless they, y'know, spit on me or something. i even have conservative friends, to whom i think it's very important to listen. i know how hard it is to have grown up with lots of "that's just wrong" in the background.

anyway (this works like constitutionally protected libel, folks!), i reserve the right to be mean, bitter and contemptuous toward bad ideas and public figures who have done wrong. i don't reserve the right to be nasty to people who are trying to have an honest conversation about issues of import.

so there.

joan kroc: through the eye of the needle.

this is a wealthy person who i'll be pleased to hang out with in heaven. kroc was serious about philanthropy and who gave to lots of worthwhile people and organizations.

...like me, for example. from the wapo article on kroc's $200 million ($200 million!) bequest to npr: "She also gave money to those she never met, often anonymously. When the Red River flooded Grand Forks, N.D., in 1997, Kroc toured the damaged area incognito and wound up writing a $15 million check for relief efforts." people screwed up quite a bit with regard to the distribution of that money, but we were right to call it "angel money."