Musing #46 “Trump-mania”

September 28, 2015

Just finished a book by Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus.  (Yes, that ‘deer’ is spelt correctly, though the ‘Jesus’ perhaps should have been spelt “Jeez-zuz.”)  It is a collection of reflections by a fellow who left Wincester, Virginia, the heart of Appalachia, as a young man, learned to write and survive in the outside world, and then returned home, and describes what he had left behind.  And what he came back to.  Appalachia.  I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, the outskirts of Appalachia, of parents who also grew up on the outskirts of Appalachia, in northwestern Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh, so I recognized what Bageant wrote.  It is somewhat a part of me too, though I do not share the extreme depths of its despair.  I ministered in Cincinnati for a decade and then came to Cambridge, where eight years after my arrival I suddenly realized in a blinding flash, “Oh, this is Appalachia... which explains what I’m seeing here, and what they are feeling.”  

But more importantly today, as I read and finished Bageant’s book, I said to myself, “Now that begins to make sense of the phenomenon of Trump-mania in this presidential campaign, and as well of my estranged son in Lexington Park, Maryland.  Appalachianism.  Though not restricted to the boundaries of Appalachia, that mindset flourishes in other parts of our country as well...in the “Big Sky” country of our northwest, in the rural hinterlands afar from eastern urbia, in the south, and in Texas.

I had been somewhat confounded and scared by the outlandish and hard-scrapple appeal of Donald Trump.  His appeal might be stalled at the moment, but that’s not yet clear.  What is becoming clear though is that he has no need of policy statements, or of realism in his speeches about what he will and will not do, what he can and cannot accomplish.  His appeal is completely non-rational, with no content whatsoever, and purely to the gut,.  He does not think or formulate, he simply blurts some whatever, and then attacks, viciously and indiscriminately, with a ‘take no prisoners’ standard.  And I puzzle, “Why is that so popular?”  The answer “Appalachia” comes back to me.

Appalachianism is not new to me, but every time I recognize it anew, it surprises me.  I was surprised when my wife strenuously objected to our five-year-old-Ted’s pronunciation of his friend’s name, “Day-ah-nee,” with three syllables (we were then living on the river bluff overlooking the Ohio River across from Kentucky, and our neighbors were mainly expatriate Kentuckians).   The next time it surprised me was when I realized that where I was ministering, in Cambridge, while nowhere near the center of Appalachia, was very Appalachian.  And I was surprised later when I became aware that the parish where I was interim rector in Chillicothe Ohio was likewise quite Appalachian.  And I was somewhat surprised when I realized that the Trump phenomenon is simply another form of Appalachianism.  

Bageant does a good job of laying out what Appalacianism is about.  When the Scots and Irish and Scots-Irish immigrated here they brought imbedded in them a mindset born and fostered of their centuries-long oppression under the Brits.... peoples utterly crushed under a cruel and unrelenting heel, who had learned to make the best of the small bits of life left to them.  The resulting mindset is complex, but as I review it, four principles drop out for me.

The first is simply anger.  Anger at being so helplessly oppressed, denied, limited.  Anger at being oppressed for so long a time.  Eventually such anger becomes a way of life, then a foundation.  Deep, abiding, unfocussed anger.  It becomes a way of living, of knowing you are alive and who you are.  And it colors everything you see, and think and do.  I remember being at first confused by the sense of betrayal and abandonment I experienced in the community of Cambridge; yes, industries came and went, but that’s never been odd in this capitalist economy.  But in Cambridge it translated into “Screwed again,” and a feeling of hopelessness, disempowerment and deep resentment.  Appalachia.

And along with that anger came a deep distrust of authority: of the oppressing authority, but even farther, of all authority.  Authority does not help; instead it hurts, injures, defeats.  Some of the immigrants who came into this country from Ireland and Scotland paid their shipboard passage by selling themselves into indentured slavery.   And when they got here some of those ran from their enslavement... up into the hills and hollers of western Virginia, and West Virginia and Tennessee.  And for an escaped slave anyone with a badge was an enemy who might carry them back into slavery.  Even today if you wander into one of those hollers, you’ll likely be met with a shotgun in your face.  An authority of any ilk is unwelcome and unwanted... an enemy.  And that feeling bleeds out...  ANY authority, with or without a badge, even just an unknown, is an enemy, is to be avoided, is to be stripped of his power if possible.  That is the first hallmark of Appalachia; a quietly seething, underlying, abiding anger, and a distrust of all outsiders.

Probably the second most important hallmark of Appalachia is religious fervor and fundamentalism.  Those Irish arrived as devout Catholics, and the Scots and Scots-Irish as committed Calvinists, or maybe as members of the even  more severe and fundamentalist, dour Wee Kirk.  Their faith ran deep, and still does.  I expect that when you are oppressed, as the Hebrews were, and the early Christians after them, and then the Scots and the Irish, you turn to God as your last and strongest hope.  Today many, perhaps most, of them have wandered into evangelicalism and pentecostalism, forms of Christian faith with a strong emotional component... a faith that burns and convicts.  And their form of the faith becomes the only true form of faith.

And a third hallmark is a kind of fatalism.  The cause of their oppression is no longer the Brits; that has shifted and what the oppression is now about has become unclear, but it still feels like oppression.  The “American dream” assures us that by hard work, persistent effort, honest living, you can get ahead.  You can improve your condition.  Your children will have it better than you.  But that dream has not worked for these folk.  They are stuck in poverty and near poverty and a lower estate.  The ‘bootstrap’ stuff works for others, but not for them.  And they don’t know why.  But they know they must resort to being content living in ‘mobile homes’ and ‘double-wides.’  That’s as good as it gets.  And the Calvinist theology at the base of their fervent faith tells them it must be  their own fault, ’cause Gawd always rewards the good.  There’s something wrong with them such that God keeps them at the bottom of the ladder, never gives them a leg up.  They’re stuck, and it has something undefined to do with who they are, who they’ve come from and who they’ll always be.  They don’t succeed, and God is somehow implicated in their failure.  So there’s naught to be done about it.

A corollary comes along with that fatalism, a “know-nothing” mindset.  Education helps others advance themselves, but it’s never helped us.  So the mindset becomes an anti-intellectualism, which subsides into acting out of emotion rather than of out of thought or plan.  An impulsiveness.  And a shunning of planning ahead.  That mindset is reinforced by their fundamentalist faith which assures them that their knowledge of God’s word is the only way to salvation, nothing else will help.  You need know nothing but the Bible.  That is sufficient alone.

One more piece has been added to this complex, one which comes not from their pre-immigration heritage, but from their post-immigration way of life... guns.  I am a city boy, and while my father always had guns in the house (shot-guns, rifles, revolvers and one automatic pistol which lived under his pillow as he slept), I have refused them.  (I keep one .22 caliber revolver for killing the verminous, destructive racoons I trap.)  I have always been appalled at our country’s love of guns, all kinds of guns.  For me it comprises a lethal craziness.  Bageant’s reflections did open my eyes on this issue.  He understands the “meat-hunter’s” attachment to his rifles and shotguns.  They were a primary means of putting food on the table for his family.  My grandfather, who lived almost completely “off the land,”could shoot a running rabbit cleanly through the head with a .22 rifle.  That’s profound skill.  I can respect that.  And I can respect their strong attachment to their meat-hunting guns.  They were not only skillfully handled tools, they were often the primary means for impoverished hill-and-holler folk to eke out a living. (I am nonetheless appalled at the gun manufacturers’ lackey, the NRA’s efforts to sell handguns, which in today’s world are not meat-hunting tools, but designed solely for the killing of human beings.  That is immoral and unconscionable.) 

The last point Bageant makes is that the Appalachians are by default Republican.  And I reluctantly suppose that is correct.  American liberalism has not helped them.  Intellectualism has not helped them.  Their gut (not their minds) tells them that the least possible amount of government (read “authority”) is the best, and none at all would be even better.  And their “know-nothing,” unfocussed, background anger impels them toward the T-Party and Trump-mania.  So, like it or not, the Republican party has them as a pretty reliable voting block.

And Trump-mania?  Well it certainly appeals to the unfocussed anger.  And it certainly is a ‘know-nothing” populism; his policies are misdirected bullying and bluster reinforced with indiscriminate attacks, and irrationally lack any coherent content...but the opening words sound good if you’re angry enough.  And he makes a quite fine pretense of being competent.  What else need be said?

Jack Bowers

Invoking the God

Musing #75 “Thoughts about Invoking the God”

February 17, 2016

The Republican presidential candidates utter idiocies about the God.  I am impelled to grimace in pain and chuckle in derision, simultaneously.  Pandering.  I know not in the least what they silently believe about the God; nor do I care.  I do not choose my ballot on the basis of how the nominee verbalizes about the God.  That’s all silliness.  Mere pandering.  It is quite obvious that they haven’t the faintest notion about the God.  They’re merely parroting what they’ve heard about the beliefs of the people whose vote they’re prostituting for.  Mere parrot-pandering.  In the name of the God.  Silliness.

It has become obvious to me (the guy who proclaims the God ultimately unknowable) that the several gods we evangelize are products of our own fantasies and needs.  The Judæans worshiped a YHWH, the God whom James’ letter later proclaimed absolutely unchangeable, but whom the tanach has constantly in flux.  Their writers tipped their hands at the very beginning of the collection with not one, but two creation stories.  In the first the God is magnificently transcendent, noble, simply uttering words which words themselves effect the creation; and in the second, a bumbling post-creation Gardener who breathes life into a handful of mud he’d molded, and then strolls, like any other patriarch through his oasis, searching for someone to chat with.  And from there the God morphs constantly, sequentially.  For the first patriarchs: a sex-obsessed family totem.  For the ragtag slave band: a warrior and emancipator.  For the newly forged people: a  law-giver and harsh social organizer.  Then a reluctant benefactor.  A petulant national god (though perhaps only for a minority).  A raving and raging bi-polar.  And finally the God creeps off silently into the gathering dusk.  Jesus and Paul tell out the God differently: a hovering heavenly Papa with impossibly high expectations who loves so much he manipulates his own son killed in satisfaction of his defeated expectations (does that sound twisted?)  Muhammad’s God has multiple personalities, some dangerously vengeful and exclusive, some peaceable and inclusive.  And the oldest of us all, the Buddhists, waste little thought about the God; they’re more interested in living.  “There’s only one God,” we mutter.  How can the God be so different, so variable?

The Judæans needed a God who met different needs at different points in their two millennia religi-national history.  The Rome-oppressed Christians needed a God who would sympathize with their paltriness and muddle them through.  The Muslims needed a God who would get their oppressors off their back, or failing that, kick the shit out of them.  The Buddhists had little need of the God except as an ultimate.

It becomes apparent to me that the God each of us chooses to worship has nothing to do with whatever is ultimate and so could rightly be called “the God,” and has everything to do with the brute facts on the ground in our neighborhood.  But emphatically not the brute facts out there in the physical world beyond our perceptions; only with our peculiar perceptions of those brute facts... perceptions shaped (or perhaps ‘warped’?) by the culture into which we happen to have been borne, by the family history that shaped us, by neighborhood and city and nation that fostered us, and by our own individual, idiosyncratic, formative life-experiences and histories which sculpt our idiosyncratic perceptions of the incoming stimuli into our peculiar understandings of our peculiar-to-me world, which in turn tells us what we want, and what we absolutely need from the world in which we find ourselves, and from the God who we perceived made this peculiar world in which we/I live.  The God is shaped and formed by what we/I think we/I want and need of the God, not by any objective, out-there reality.  That almost imperceptibly has become obvious to me.  I choose to worship the God I worship because that God is the one given me, the one I’ve learned to love, the one I judge to be most likely to give me the things I want, and especially the things I think I need, in order to survive, and to remain me (whatever ‘me’ is.)

Each of us worships some very idiosyncratic God collaboratively sculpted, and then worshiped individually within our worshiping community.  So for the Republican candidates to invoke some God in the hope that will gather to them more votes is, to me, an act of stupidity, of ignorance, of egocentricity, an act designed to be a smokescreen to hoodwink me, the dumb voter, an act intended to subvert my vote to his intentions.  

But on the other hand, these are the ravings of a tiny, tiny, inconsequential member of the electorate.  So who am I to make objections?

Jack Bowers

Revelations

December 6, 2015

This musing is kinda off-center amongst my recent musings.  But it sorta fits with some of my earlier ones, about churchy rather than secular stuff.  But after all, that was my upbringing and profession for most of my life.  So I’ll share this.

I misthought last evening when Nancy said this morning’s discussion topic was John.  I mistakenly thought, this being Advent, of the Revelation of John, for some unconscious, unknown-to-me reason.  That last book in the Christian canon I have always thought was a mistake.  Taken literally by some it trails off into some very weird directions, such as predicting the end of the world on a specific date, and drawing implausible notions, and finding Satan behind every metaphor.  Weird, incomprehensible stuff.  I was taught that the bishops fought long and hard over whether to include it in the canon.  They finally did in 370AD.  Bad mistake.  The book makes no rational sense, which leaves it open to all sorts of unreasonable interpretations....beasts with 666 imprinted on them, and whores of Babylon.  Who can make any sense of it?  Scholars have struggled to find some thread or reasonable meaning in it.

And then one evening something clicked into place for me.  I’d been reading and writing about John Spong’s latest book on the Gospel of John.  That gospel has always been a problem for me.  So radically different from the three synoptics.  Those seem to be three separate narratives about the same Jesus, albeit with idiosyncratic twists to fit the spiritual needs of the local communities to which they were written.  But with the same basic story line, and built mostly with the same little pieces.  Obviously the same story about tha same man, just with minor, local variations.  And then we come to John.  The fourth.  And so different that you could easily, reasonably conclude it was written about a different Jesus.  But the Fathers obviously thought it was about the same Jesus.  They included it.

The Greek of John is different than the Greek of the synoptics.  It translates much simpler and easier than the synoptics.  But in the end that’s a deception.  Misleading.  The story really is not simpler; actually it is considerably more complex.  It has always been the favorite among simple folks because it seems so simple.  But actually John’s language is seductively simple...and loose.  So loose that is open to multitudes of interpretations, and can seduce you into some very simplistic notions which are somewhat antithetic to the synoptics.  I spent several years early in my ministry trying to understand exactly how John’s thinking was different from the thinking behind the synoptics.  I thought for a while that John’s thought patterns were illogical, nonlinear, irrational, and instead very associative, somewhat akin to schizophrenic associative thought patterns.  But I finally was unable to convincingly demonstrate that.  So I backed off, still convinced that John’s use of the language was somehow not what it seemed to be: so loose and simple as to be open to multiple interpretations, but at the same time seeming to have layers upon layers of meaning veiled beneath its simplicity.  Very puzzling.  And on top of that the story line was so radically different from the synoptics, with exceptionally few overlaps, and even in those the stories were shaped differently and used in quite different ways to say quite different things.  

Then John Spong came along suggesting that the Gospel of John was the work of a Jewish mystic.  And (click !!) that made obvious sense of John’s gospel.  Spong goes to considerable length to show that behind each of the stories, and imbedded in each of the characters is Jewish lore, deeply Jewish lore, intensely Jewish lore.  And what we have in the Gospel of John is not a narrative about Jesus at all !!  Instead it is the attempt of a Jewish mystic, who had no knowledge of or contact with the earthly Jesus, nor great knowledge of Jesus’ earthly ministerings, but was trying to tell us about his mystical experiences of the risen Christ.  John’s gospel is not about fact at all.  It’s about his own mystical experiences, and should not be considered in the same context of the synoptics at all !!

From Evelyn Underhill I had learned that mystical experiences are far outside the rational realm.  They are experiences of the indescriptable, unlike anything we might experience in a normal state of awareness.  They occur in an ‘altered state/awareness.’  So when the mystic returns from his mystical state to a normal state of awareness, he remembers the mystical experience, but is very lost how to explain or describe that experience to us and to himself.  Underhill tells us that the mystic typically tells about his experience using the terms and metaphors of his own religion and culture.  I’ve tried to read some of the writings of a few Christian mystics.  The words and images and metaphors they use sound familiar, but they come out (to me) as sticky gibberish.  They make only a squidgen of rational sense.  Sometimes they feel only like an intensive parroting of the tradition.  And yet occasionally they are utterances of powerful, innovative insight. ...As if they have left our normal, conscious world, experienced some different, otherwise unobtainable reality, and then returned to our normal, conscious world with powerful, new insights which they are not really able to put into comprehensible language.

And that makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical Gospel of John. ...That he was a Jewish mystic who had some other-worldly experiences of the risen Christ, and came back from those experiences into our normal world trying to share with his Christian community his new and powerful insights using the only guise available to him, that of a narrative about an earthly Jewish Jesus.  And it comes out radically different that the synoptics’ stories, because John’s, while it appears to be about an earthly Jesus, is really about the risen Christ, and not about the earthly Jesus’ story at all.  But John attempts to share with us insights that the earthly story cannot embody, and so the story comes out loose, and impossibly layered and complex, because it’s about the indescriptable...some unearthly, insightful experiences that a well-versed and knowledgeable Jew had about a Christ somewhere outside this physical realm which he was compelled to share with his Christian community.  That is what John Spong revealed to me.  

And then it came to me the other evening, “Oh, that’s what the Revelation of John is about as well.”  Mind you, the scholars are clear that this John is not the same John who composed the gospel.  The vocabulary, the use of language, the imagery, the ideation, the way he tries to express the insights, all tell us these are two different Johns.  (And that same sort of analysis tells us that the writer of the epistles attributed to John are from an altogether different hand.  Three different Johns who we were allowed to assume were one.)  And this John tells us himself that “the revelation was given” to him.  It happened to him, was not something he sought or figured out or heard.  He is trying to explain for us unearthly things and events.  Oh, a mystical experience of that which is ultimately, perhaps absolutely indescriptable.  And he tries to share with us his insights out of that experience.  So his words are not to be taken literally; in fact, to take them literally is to completely misunderstand them.  We must instead look through his words and try to discern what insight about our world John is trying to share with us.  A tricky and very inexact undertaking.  

Such mysticism is not new to our Scriptures with John’s revelation.  Moses went up on a mountainside and saw a burning bush that was not consumed.  And it spoke to him!!  Ezekiel saw critters with hundreds of eyes that were utterly indescriptable...and wheels spinning within wheels.  I’m convinced that many, if not most of the prophets’ insights arose out of mystical experiences.  Jesus and Paul both were mystics.  So this is not new, strange stuff.  But it is strange to those of us who are not mystics... strange, and fairly incomprehensible... but sometimes (not always) deeply insightful and useful... if (a big “if”) we can step into the non-literal and allow the insight to be revealed to us.  Not easy... fraught with pitfalls.