SKJ Today

Does The Tea Party Qualify As A Political Movement?

February 27, 2010 // No Comments »

Bill Maher tackes this question in recent episode of Real Time.

Posted in Culture, Politics, Video

Are Americans Politically Skitzophrenic?

February 9, 2010 // 1 Comment »

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg doesn’t think politicians are to blame for America’s woes. He lays the blame squarely at our doorsteps. The problem is the American public.

On any number of issues from the stimulus plan to how to handle deficits to health care spending, Americans are of a divided, and often contradictory mind, argues Wesiberg:

One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending…The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time.

Posted in Culture, Politics

My Kind Of Conservative

February 4, 2010 // 2 Comments »

If the Republicans ran the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Joe Scarborough we’d have a great debate in this country, and we’d all be better for it.

Posted in Culture, Politics, Religion, Video

Stewart in The New Spin Zone, part 1

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Posted in Culture, Politics, Video

Why We Need To Be Care-Full…

January 11, 2010 // No Comments »

I recently came across this passage in an essay by Colin McGinn. It explains the enslavement of human beings in the film The Matrix from the perspective of their robotic masters:

The Matrix naturally adopts the perspective of the humans: they are the victims, the slaves — cruelly exploited by the machines. But there is another perspective, that of the machines themselves. So let’s look at it from the point of view of the machines. As Morpheus explains to Neo, there was a catastrophic war between the humans and the machines, after the humans had produced AI, a sentient robot that spawned a race of its own. It isn’t known now who started the war, but it did follow a long period of machine exploitation by humans. What is known is that it was the humans who “scorched the sky”, blocking out the sun’s rays, in an attempt at machine genocide—since the machines needed solar power to survive. In response and retaliation the machines subdued the humans and made them into sources of energy—batteries, in effect. Each human now floats in his or her own personal vat, a warm and womblike environment, while the machines feed in essential nutrients, in exchange for the energy they need. But this is no wretched slave camp, a grotesque gulag of torment and suffering; it is idyllic, in its way. The humans are given exactly the life they had before. Things are no different for them, subjectively speaking. Indeed, at an earlier stage the Matrix offered them a vastly improved life, but the humans rejected this in favor of a familiar life of moderate woe—the kind of life they had always had, and to which they seemed addicted. But if it had been left up to the machines, the Matrix would have been a virtual paradise for humans—and all for a little bit of battery power.

Why do human beings reject an edenic paradise “…in favor of a familiar life of moderate woe—the kind of life they had always had, and to which they seemed addicted…”? This is the subject of the opening chapter of Robert Harrison’s Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.

Harrison finds in Odysseus an ideal case study of the human condition. Why can’t he rest content with the Goddess Kalypso on her island paradise? Why is he restless? Because he cannot be carefree:

What Odysseus longs for on Kalypso’s island—what keeps him ina state of exile there—is a life of care. More precisely, he longs for the world in which human care finds its fulfillment; in his case, that is the world of family, homeland, and genealogy. Care, which is bound to worldliness, does not know what to do with itself in a worldless garden in the middle of the ocean. It is the alienated core of care in his human heart that sends Odysseus to the shore every morning and keeps him out of place in the unreal environment of Kalypso’s island. “If you only knew in your own heart how many hardships / you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country, / you would stay here with me and be lord of this household and be an immortal” (5.206–9). But Kalypso is a goddess—a “shining goddess” at that—and she scarcely can understand the extent to which Odysseus, insofar as he is human, is held fast by care, despite or perhaps even because of the burdens that care imposes on him.

Human beings reject Edenic paradise because of our longing for the active life, which Harrison defines with the help of Hannah Arendt, who sees at its core three things: labor, work, and action.

Labor is the endless and inglorious toil by which we secure our biological survival, symbolized by the sweat of Adam’s brow as he renders the earth fruitful, contending against blight, drought, and disaster. But biological survival alone does not make us human. What distinguishes us in our humanity is the fact that we inhabit relatively permanent worlds that precede our birth and outlast our death, binding the generations together in a historical continuum. These worlds, with their transgenerational things, houses, cities, institutions, and artworks, are brought into being by work. While labor secures our survival, work builds the worlds that make us historical. The historical world, in turn, serves as the stage for human action, the deeds and speech through which human beings realize their potential for freedom and affirm their dignity in the radiance of the public sphere. Without action, human work is meaningless and labor is fruitless. Action is the self-affirmation of the human before the witness of the gods and the judgment of one’s fellow humans.

Posted in Culture, Literature

The Decade Of The Tea Party?

January 5, 2010 // 1 Comment »

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting…The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Brooks is no fan of the Tea Party movement, but he clearly sees its potential to shape the coming decade’s politics. Put it in the “ignore at your own risk” file.

Posted in Culture, Politics

Theology, Daily Show Style

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This is off color and hilarious, vintage Stewart…

Posted in Culture, Religion, theology, Video

What Do We Talk About?

October 1, 2009 // 1 Comment »

Robert Harrison, host of Standford’s Entitled Opinions, recently remarked that contemporary sociological research shows that the overwhelming amount of human conversation across race, gender, culture and class can be classified as “gossip”. Most of the time most people talk about other people they know and their affairs. A minority of conversation fits into a second category, namely politics. The third, and by far the smallest category that most human conversation fits into, is talk about ideas. Apparently we spend the least amount of time talking about the most important things: the good, the true and the beautiful. Yikes!

Posted in Culture

Bill Maher Preaching About The Significance Of Saying You’re Sorry

September 23, 2009 // 1 Comment »

Bill Maher, the raunchy, unlikely, offensive, prophet and advocate of the humble apology. Who figured?

Posted in Culture, Politics, Video

Why It’s Better To Be Boring Than Bored

August 19, 2009 // No Comments »

There is no such thing as an uninteresting subject in the world. There are just uninterested people. This is the thrust of Chesteron’s criticism of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling’s cosmopolitanism in the end results in bored people who will never see the beauty of the world the way the boring do. “The globe trotter lives in a smaller world than than the peasant.” The bore is in Chesteron’s mind a god, unlike the bored. Because the gods never “tire of iteration of things…to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.”

That every thing is poetic is for Chesterton a matter of fact. The idea that some things are poetic is a fictive literary device. There’s nothing more ordinary than “Smith”. And yet the children playing in the village know the mystical and magical power of the smith. They hear the pounding of his hammer amidst the flames that lick it all around as slams down again and again on his anvil. They see him literally bend metal. Metal bends to his will. It yields to him. It’s ironic that the name “Smith” has become a synonym for uninteresting and completely conventional. You can call the village smith many things, but he is no parvenu. “From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor.”

Things bore us because we can’t see them for what they are. A mailbox can seem boring because we forget that it’s not a “mailbox”, it’s a sanctuary for human words. A lover waiting to read her beloved’s sentiments is enraptured when she sees the red lever upright, indicating that the long expected missive has come. If we think that Mr. Smith or his mailbox is boring it’s not because we’re unrefined, it’s because we’re over refined. Everything around us is poetical. “It is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic.” This insight wasn’t lost on some of the greatest literary minds in the modern West. It’s the point of Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service and The Red Wheelbarrow, two very different poems written by two men who were not mutual admirers of one another in the least. It’s also central to Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s an insight that also might help explain why the Harvard Classics edition of 1910 includes numerous versions of the Odyssey while the Iliad remains conspicuously absent.

Rudyard Kipling wondered how someone could love England who knew only England. Chesterton wonders just the opposite. You can only love a place when you know it deeply. Kipling didn’t belong to England because he thought of it as a place. But when someone is rooted in England, or in any place, it ceases to become a place. The place vanishes because we’re rooted in it, like a tree, and we live like a tree “with the whole strength of the universe.” The telescope makes the world smaller, only the microscope makes it larger. Cosmopolitans, bored, are always seeking adventure. They love the thrill of traveling, experiencing Arabia as “a whirl of sand” or China as a “flash of rice fields.” But Arabia and China are not just the sum total of the sites the cosmopolitan sees. “They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures.” If we wish to know them we must not do so as tourists, seeking the cure to our boredom, “it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets.” When you conquer a place you lose it. The person standing in her kitchen garden, “with fairyland opening at the gate” is the one with large ideas. Her mind creates distance, the 747 and the internet destroy it. The globetrotter seeking a cure to boredom lives in a smaller world than the peasant. Globetrotters motivated by boredom find themselves bouncing from place to place but they lack the patience that would make their destinations anything other than places.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. The point of this proverb was lost on Chesterton in the days of his youth. But as he grew older, it’s profundity became more apparent. “The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead…the moss is silent because the moss is alive.” The moss is alive, and it might seem boring, but it’s incapable of boredom.

Posted in Culture, Spirituality