Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: Matthew

The Gospel according to Matthew; or, the church's book.  The word "church" does not occur in Mark, Luke, or John, but it occurs twice in Matthew, most famously when Jesus says to his most prominent disciple, "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail upon it" (16:18).  A translation cannot really capture it, but we have here a rare instance of verbal playfulness in the New Testament, which was written in a language (Greek) where the word for Peter (Petros) is very close to the word for rock (petra): "You are Petros, and on this petra I will build. . . ." 

The Catholic Church of course regards this passage as the commissioning of Peter as the first pope, the founder of the Christian Church.  One can't help observing, therefore, that the narration of the incident continues with Jesus teaching the disciples that he "must suffer many things, and be killed, and on the third day be raised."  The recently commissioned Peter doesn't care for it, and begins to remonstrate with Jesus, thereby eliciting a strong rebuke: "Get behind me, Satan!  You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men" (16:23).  To us outsiders, it appears to have taken about twenty seconds for the first pope to supply proof of his fallibility.

One difference between Matthew and Mark, its chief source, will be evident to anyone who grew up with one of those Bibles that print Jesus's words in red.  There is comparatively little red print, either by volume or percentage, in Mark.  But most of the red print in Matthew can also be found in Luke.  The probable reason for this is that Matthew and Luke, in addition to following Mark, had in common a second source, often denoted Q by scholars, which must have been a collection of sayings and parables of Jesus.  Matthew arranges this Q material into five separate discourses.  Of the five, the most loved and quoted is the first, the Sermon on the Mount.  It may well be that the five discourses are intended to parallel the Five Books of Moses, and that Jesus's first discourse is delivered from a "mount" in order to suggest the proclamation of a new law, the old having been delivered to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of those texts that  will sound familiar even to those who've never read it, for the same reason that a silly lady is supposed to have liked Hamlet "because it has so many famous sayings."  It is in this discourse that Jesus says "Blessed are the meek" and "Blessed are the peacemakers"; where he tells his disciples to pray what is now universally known as "the Lord's prayer"; where he instructs those who have been hit on the right cheek not to respond in like manner but to turn to their foe also the left; where he lays out what everyone now recognizes as "the golden rule"; &c. 

Despite its status, or maybe in part because of it, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount has its detractors.  Committed Christian moralists, perhaps guarding against the charge of hypocrisy, have edged toward admitting a certain impracticality--no one seems to think, for example, that Jesus would require us to turn the other cheek toward al-Qaeda.  The celebration of meekness has contributed to the complaint that the whole religion will be attractive mainly to small souls too afraid to fight back--that the ethic of meekness, in other words, was invented to make a virtue of a fatal flaw.  This criticism is associated most closely with the philosopher Nietzsche's repudiation of Christian ethics, and it seems to me that, in our time, it may be extended to the observation that a chastity rule will have the effect of attracting psychological cripples who have no interest in forming open, "normal" sexual relationships. And, as long as I've blundered into the topic of human sexuality, the Sermon on the Mount also includes the following problematic pronouncement:

You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery."  But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. (5:27-29)

Yikes!  You might think that morality is largely a matter of beating back your inclinations in order to make your behavior conform to basic ethical precepts, but Jesus flatly rejects the distinction between impulse and action.   Moreover, the recommended remedy for having the inclination is--what to say? Let us only point out that anyone who followed through on it in an advanced country would soon find himself in the psychiatric unit of a hospital.  We are back, it seems, at the question of practicality, without even having taken up the question of the golden rule, and whether Jesus's "positive" version of it is really to be preferred to, "Don't do to another what you wouldn't want done to you." 

These questions, whatever their merits, are of no concern to the author of Mark.  If the end of the world is at hand, you really do not need instructions on how to live in it.  You don't need to found a church, either. The Gospel according to Matthew concludes with what is known as "the great commission"; Jesus, having been raised from the dead, appears to his disciples and says:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age (28:18-20)

Unlike in Mark, "the close of the age" is not imminent.  The "church's book" was written later.  The idea of the time of Jesus being the end time has to blunted, because time has passed and the end hasn't come.   So the time of Jesus is instead a time for revelation and instruction.  He taught his disciples and now they must teach others, making new disciples.  There is time for human activity.

To come to a true understanding of the gospel narratives, it's necessary to drop the notion that they promulgate one true theology. 

Sunk in Elmore Leonard

I found the obituaries and tributes that followed upon the recent death of Elmore Leonard, especially this one by Joan Acocella and this one by Anthony Lane, so interesting that I picked up at the library a paperback 52 Pickup.  I've now read Mr Majestyk and Stick, too.  Next up: LaBrava.  I read them in the order that I find them checked-in at the library.  If Leonard is a bad habit, like drinking booze, I'm in trouble, having dived into the bottle and pulled the cap down over my head.

But Leonard isn't a bad habit.  Put aside the garish, mass-market covers and the arguably lowbrow genre, "crime fiction."  Consider intead all the glittering moments unconnected to the shady dealings of the characters.  After all, you may find something of interest in Moby-Dick even if whaling tales aren't your normal fare.  Who is better than Leonard on the subject of the homes of the American rich?

Stick turned into the drive, 100 Bali Way, followed the blacktop through a patch of jungle and came in view of the house, white with a whiter roof; it reminded Stick of a mausoleum, neat and simple.  Barry said, "Around back."  They came to a turnaround area of cobblestones, four garage doors, a covered walk leading to the house and Stick couldn't believe the seze and sprawl of the place.  Like an assortment of low modules stuck together, open sides and walls of glass set at angles, the grounds dropping away from the house in gradual tiers, with wide steps that might front a museum leading down to the terraced patio and on to the swimming pool.  A sweep of manicured lawn extended to a boat dock and a southwest view of Biscayne Bay, downtown Miami standing in rows of highrises beyond. . . .

[Snip]

It seemed more like a museum than a place where people lived: all marble and glass or wide open, full of hanging plants and flower arrangements, potted palm trees.  Looking across some of the rooms or down a hall it was hard to tell what was outside and what was in. 

The living room was like an art gallery: two steps down to a gray marble floor and a sectional piece in the middle, pure white, where about a dozen people could sit among the pillows and look at the paintings and pieces of sculpture that didn't make any sense at all.  The room was pale gray and pink and white except for a black marble cocktail table.  There were white flowers on it--no ashtrays--and several copies of a magazine, fanned out, called Saavy.

Part of what I love about this is that it only pretends to be a just-the-facts description.  The details register and sum to a judgment.  Museum, mausoleum.  Speaking of Moby-Dick, the whiteness of the place is like that of the whale.  The fanned magazines were never meant to be read.  The art objects don't make any sense but an ashtray would.   The plot to this novel was kick-started when Stick, the protagonist, got dragged to the similarly gaudy residence of a criminal and, wandering around, was accosted by the tough-talking owner.  Who are ya?  An appraiser?  See anything ya like?  Stick lets his eyes drift around the place, then fixes them back on the owner and says, after a brief pause, "No, I guess I don't." 

Joyce's Dubliners: "Clay" and "A Painful Case"

In "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts," men find no cheer in marriage.  The next two stories in Dubliners are "Clay" and "A Painful Case."  The main characters in these stories aren't married but the color of their lives is gray, too.

Maria, in "Clay," works at a Protestant home for fallen women.  Her physical description is that of a witch--"a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin."  She's prim, like the interior decoration that repels Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud."  The people in these stories by Joyce tend to be small and what some people call "fussy."

In the story, she has the evening off and is travelling to a party at a home where she formerly worked, caring for children who are now grown.  She has some very minor adventures--or misadventures--along the way: maybe it is not too much to regard "Clay" as a very, very small mock odyssey.  What one notices, in the rather drab narration of Maria's preparations and travel, is her heightened response to suggestions of sexuality or matrimony. While dressing, she studies her body in a mirror, and judges it, despite the years, "a nice tidy little body."  She stops along the way to buy cake for the party and blushes when the girl at the counter asks whether it's wedding cake she wants.  Back on the tram with the cake, she makes small talk with a man who has had a few drinks.  Her reaction to this ordinary encounter is such that she forgets the cake on the tram.  At the party, she plays a blindfold game that had earlier been alluded to back at her work: when someone predicted she'd pick the ring, a symbol of marriage, she had laughed nervously and denied she wanted a man.  In the event, she picks a saucer on which some mischievous girls have put something soft and wet--clay, a symbol of mortality.  The girls are scolded and Maria takes another turn.  This time she chooses a prayer book. 

As the story comes to a close, Maria is asked to sing a song, "one of the old songs" called "I Dreamt that I Dwelt."  Blushing, she sings the first verse, in which the speaker celebrates a mutually fulfilling love affair, and, having finished this verse, by mistake sings it again in "a tiny quavering voice."  Her mistake is overlooked by the host, who has had too much to drink, and the story ends.

"A Painful Case" features a man who is single by choice.  He has orderly habits, works in a bank, has liberal political views but dislikes the people whose cause has his intellectual support.  He doesn't like anyone, actually.  He has a brief dalliance with a married woman but breaks it off when it becomes evident that she is emotionally starved and wants from him more than a dalliance.   Her neediness repels him and his life falls back into the same pattern.  After some years pass, he is one evening eating dinner in a restaurant and sees in his newspaper a story headlined "A Painful Case" concerning a woman's suicide.  It's the woman with whom he had had the small affair.  His food congeals as he reads the threadbare account of the "accident" at the train tracks.  His default reaction is to feel disgusted with her again, and confirmed in his decision to leave her.  But as he ponders his thoughts turn and he feels that he is "outcast from life's feast."  That striking phrase recurs in his sad nearly swooning revery, and the reader understands to whom the newspaper headline, and title of this great story, applies.  

Wish I'd written that

Amy Davidson, describing President Obama's demeanor while announcing Wednesday's deal in which the Republicans in the House gave up, at least for now, on their strategy of legislative terrorism:  "He had the air of someone who'd had too many evenings ruined because he had to drive home a drunk colleague he didn't even like."

David Frum: not bad for a Republican, but still a Republican

My last post praising David Frum quoted a long passage from his Daily Beast article entitled "Will the Republican Moderates Please Stand Up?"  In the interest of balance, I should point out that the paragraph following immediately upon the ones I quoted approvingly is a lot of hooey.  Here it is:

The Republican party is a party of people who have invested deeply in America and who have the most to lose if the American experiment fails.  Republicans are the party of married parents, of business and property owners, of the settled and established.  Republicans are the party of people who weren't born yesterday, the party of people who've earned their gray hairs the hard way.  They're the party of the great middle of the country, of people who don't adopt fads, of people who can afford to worry more about tomorrow because they worry less about today.  Will such a party really force a default on national obligations?

Everything Frum says here that's specific applies to me but--God forbid!--I am no Republican.  His formulations raise such questions as: If Republicans are indeed "the party of the great middle of the country," then why has a generation passed since its presidential nominee carried Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Minnesota?  Does "middle of the country" mean "middle of the old Confederacy"?

Which leads me to another complaint.  Frum indicates that Republicans, being "settled," by which I think he means "rich," have more leisure than liberals to worry about the future.  But today was once the future.  What did Republicans do in the past that has had a positive impact today?  As Hendrik Hertzberg point out, you have to go back to Lincoln and the period of the Civil War, when Republicans championed "a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive end of slavery"--all made possible because the backwards part of the country had seceded and therefore couldn't block all this forward-looking legislation. 

In more recent history, however, Republicans and conservatives have opposed virtually everything that has advanced our country.  The Social Security Act, against.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964, against.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965, against.  Medicare and Medicaid, against.  In our own time, gay rights: against.  There's never been a proposal to reform national health care that they supported; indeed, the principles underlying what they call, derisively, "Obamacare" were forged in conservative think-tanks back when the party was railing against "Hillarycare."  While the federal government has been partially shut down, a new climate change study rang the alarm perhaps louder than any of its predecessors.  On this question, we all know the position of the party of sober, gray-flecked wise men who are sufficiently "established" to worry about tomorrow.  Climate change is a hoax.  Drill, baby, drill!

Frum's notion of this Tea Party gang representing a deplorable departure from the recent, golden past of the Republican party is a bit much.  In 1980, Reagan began his general election campaign for the presidency by delivering a states rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where some civil rights workers had been murdered by the Klan in 1964.  All these "responsible Republicans" whom Frum is calling upon now to make their voices heard were not making their voices heard then, either.  You kiss the collective ass of these troglodytes for thirty years, they get the idea you're on their side, and it's not all that convincing to hear Mr Frum's "No, that is not what we meant, that is not what we meant at all."

 

Netflix: "42"

Not very good.  I don't know how you convey in a movie the daily grind of Jackie Robinson's summer of 1947, when he broke baseball's color line and helped the Brooklyn Dodgers win the pennant in the National League.  This movie's attempt involves the depiction of a series of "incidents" that alternately toy with melodrama or get into bed with it.  And Jackie Robinson, with his wife and Branck Rickey tutoring him, prevails! 

When Robinson once or twice is shown popping out, you understand the movie-makers sensed danger.  There was a lot to sense, and they needed a better remedy. 

Interviewees reply to questions

Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature earlier this week, was once asked in an interview whether a certain autobiographical work was drawn from diaries she kept at the time.  She replied, "I have never kept diaries.  I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people." 

Which reminded me of the possibly apocryphal occasion on which Richard Pryor, fresh from a brush with the law and mortality brought on by his drug use, was being interviewed on network TV by the imitable Barbara Walters.  All earnest, she leaned in and, in a tone of portentous cross-examination, a serious journalist doing her job, asked, "What does taking cocaine make you feel like?"  He is supposed to have replied, "It's make you feel like having some more cocaine."

I say "possibly apocryphal" because, bopping around hither and thither on the Internet, I can't confirm that this moment ever happened.  Pryor did apparently say, "The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is that vampires are allergic to bullshit." 

More from David Frum

Being a lefty, I can confess to a case of the man-loves, and lately I've been feeling it for David Frum.  I called attention recently to his "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Political Parties," and now he's followed it up with a piece that, if you discount the nostalgia for a Republican party that hasn't existed in his voting lifetime, qualifies as both acute analysis and a clarion call.  My favorite section:

There has been a pool of Republicans who have doubted the party's radical turn.  Until now, however, these Republicans have been quiet and passive.  They came out to vote in 2010, but they did not join the Tea Party rallies.  They supported Mitt Romney in the primaries because he looked like a potential president, but they did not object when Romney fastened his campaign to the deadweight anchor of the Ryan plan.  They look to Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell to fend off the crazies in the caucus, but they did not understand that those leaders' strategy for "fending off" the crazies consisted of abject appeasement of the crazies. 

Some of these more responsible Republicans are waking up at last.  More must do so, many more, before the party can again become a positive force in American politics. 

It's not enough to condemn the crazies in the company of friends.  Responsible Republicans have to act.  They have to organize and mobilize.  This latest debt crisis exemplifies the problem: to threaten default on the obligations of the United States is simply not an acceptable tool of politics.  Instead of making excuses--or rummaging through the record books looking for incidents that can be misrepresented as proof that "everybody does it"--responsible Republicans need to challenge their own party. . . .  Blame the leaders for their faint-heartedness, if you like.  But remember, faint-hearted politicians are the norm.  In the past, faint-hearted politicians behaved in mostly sensible ways because they were afraid to act recklessly.  Today they are afraid NOT to act recklessly, and the failure of their non-reckless constituents to make themselves heard is a big part of the story of that new fear.

Whew!  Just by following Eric the Blue you have now heard more good sense coming from a Republican than you would have gotten from watching C-SPAN during your waking hours for the past 25 years. If only he wasn't being, if anything, too charitable in his assessment.  If you're paying attention, you would have long ago stopped hoping for anything good from such manifest sub-mediocrities as "Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell."  Also, it's  not that there's a jillion people like Frum and that the Republican party would be fine if only they'd all speak up.  Shit, Fox News is a profitable business.  What else do you need to know?  That Rush Limbaugh is rich?  The reason it's become dangerous for Republican politicians not to be reckless is that the country is full of ignorant, reckless people who have found a home in the Republican party.  It's why the rest of us, trying to laugh instead of be horrified, tell each other jokes. Did you hear about the guy who was going to go out on Halloween as a Republican?  Turns out he couldn't get his head up his ass. 

Frum speaks

In a recent quixotic attempt to sound open-minded and reasonable, I allowed that there are some Republicans in our land who appear to be in possession of the higher rational faculties.  I mentioned, as one example, David Frum, and rued that he had fallen silent since his father's recent death.  But now I see he is speaking out loud and clear and making me pleased for having praised him--see "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Political Parties."  For those of you who prefer not to click, here are the bullet points:

• Maximalist goals
• Apocalyptic visions
• Irrational animus
• Collapse of leadership
• Self-reinforcing media
• Politics as war; and
• Despair

In short, Republicans are overwrought and narcissistic.  So much for what used to be called "the conservative termperament."  I wish, however,  I could be as confident as Frum that the R's are about to suffer humiliation. 

It seems to me that wackos have an inherent advantage in games of chicken.  President Nixon is said to have believed in "the madman theory of the presidency," which holds that acting crazy is a shrewd tactic, for it can make your foe cower and cave before your perceived recklessness.  But how much better if it's not an act?  From the logic behind the strategy it follows that it's best actually to be reckless and irresponsible.  And that describes what right-wing commentator Charles Krauthammer has called Boehner's "suicide caucus." 

Yes, they're nuts.  That's why it might work out for them.  I detect signs that some of them are dimly aware of their advantage.  "We're not going to be disrespected," Indiana wingnut Marlin Stutzman told a reporter.  "We have to get something out of this.  And I don't know what that even is." 

Poor people who follow their dubious impulses and, landing in a fix, start yammering about being "disrespected" and "having to get something out of this" do not normally get a lot of sympathy from people like Rep Stutzman.  Nevertheless, he seems to understand that being crazy has its prerogatives.  Just because you're unhinged doesn't mean you can't have a super-sized sense of entitlement.

A pox on one of the houses

What's the connection between "Obamacare," passed by both House and Senate and signed into law by the president in 2010, and a continuing resolution to fund the government in 2013?  We should call things by their actual names, and in this case blackmail and extortion apply.  You have to laugh at the Republican talking points because, really, what are the other options?  "Democrats refuse to negotiate!"  About what?  The Republican position is that the Democrats, having in recent history won more elections, must drop their agenda and agree to cancel their achievements, because if they don't the Republicans will use a routine budget resolution to blow things up, shut down the government. 

And it is Democrats, you see, who are being unreasonable.  They won't play this game.

Well, of course they won't play.  Good grief.  I guess I'm naive but to me it is remarkable how stupid you can be and still get elected to the US House.