Tim Stafford's Blog, page 30

The Death of Four Young Girls

This Sunday marks the fiftieth anniversary of a bomb that blasted through the Sunday school at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls.

It was the capstone of the epic events of the summer of 1963 that began with civil rights protests in Birmingham (chronicled in my novel, Birmingham). Medgar Evers was assassinated. Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech for the March on Washington.

It’s hard to remember that for most Americans, civil rights activists including Martin Luther King were the “troublemakers,” disturbing our peace. That story line was disturbed by images of police dogs and fire hoses waging war on children in Birmingham, stories of a black man shot in the back, and the poetic rhetoric of America and Bible offered by King. All through that summer, pressure was building for “moderates” to stop implicitly backing segregation and discrimination. The innocent death of four young girls in Sunday school proved the final catalyst. “Moderates” realized that they would have to stand for something besides the status quo. Broad public opinion began to swing. White segregationists became the “troublemakers.”

Bombs in Birmingham were nothing new. Because of mining all through the area, many people had access to dynamite and knew how to use it. Bombs were the Ku Klux Klan’s favorite tactic, used more to destroy property and create fear than to actually kill people. Blacks could only live in certain restricted neighborhoods, and when some tried to buy or build in predominately white neighborhoods, those homes were dynamited. Troublemakers –Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in particular–had their homes and churches blown up as a warning. The city became known as “Bombingham.”

One of the curiosities of the Birmingham protests in the late spring of 1963 was that there were no bombings. Considering the very close linkages between the Birmingham police and the Ku Klux Klan, some speculated that the police had ordered the Klan to hold their dynamite.

They mostly did, until the September bombing. Ironically, the congregation worshiping that Sunday morning was not known for its support of civil rights. They were Birmingham’s most affluent black congregation, reckoned “superior” to poorer citizens who marched and protested with Shuttlesworth and King. Such social distinctions within the black community may have been lost on the Klan, who only knew that Sixteenth Street Baptist was often headquarters for protests during the week.

We will probably never know why the Klan broke out into bombing again that September. Today, in this era of global terrorism and mass murders, the death and destruction seem relatively small. In that era, however, when America was relatively innocent of spectacular terror, the bomb brought a powerful reaction. Those who planted it probably meant to prove that the Klan was still fearsome. Instead, the bomb nudged America toward good.

Open Welfare

In comments on my post from Chris Wright’s commentary on Deuteronomy, some of my friends have been at odds over what “welfare” should look like in the modern world. It’s a serious question, the answer to which I don’t know. Studying Deuteronomy has influenced my thinking, however, in the following ways:

1. God’s law has a huge, fundamental concern for the poor and the vulnerable. It’s not just the odd verse here and there. It gets emphasized centrally and repeatedly. The implication seems to be: God’s law exists for the welfare of the community, which finds its focus in the needs of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the slave and the immigrant. They are part of the community and their welfare is a barometer for the community.

2. Welfare for the poor and the vulnerable is not optional. It does not depend on kindness or voluntary charity. It is law–God’s law. As such, the “income” of the poor, whether through gleaning, tithes, release from loans, or whatever, is seen to be their natural right as part of the community.

3. Property rights are consistently secondary to the rights of the poor and vulnerable, as seen for instance in the law of gleaning.

4. The poor and vulnerable are consistently treated with dignity as full members of the community. They do not wait in a separate line. Even when they are badly in debt, even when they have sold themselves as indentured servants, they remain equal in status to their masters. The lenders can go only so far in recovering their loans–for example, they cannot enter homes but must wait outside.

5. Welfare provisions generally assume that the poor and vulnerable remain independent, taking care of themselves. For example, gleaners must harvest from the fields; the harvest is not handed over to them. For example, every seven years they get to start over, with the same basic assets as everybody else (i.e., the land). The baseline assumption is that they can handle responsibility, if they get a chance.

6. Generous attitudes are insisted on. The orientation is not toward “how little can we provide,” but toward a spirit of community concern for each other. And that spirit is inclusive; it involves the immigrant, for example. Though “there will always be poor people in the land” (15:11) “there need be no poor people among you,” (15:4), because God has been so generous in giving the riches of the land (undeservedly). As a community we are to emulate God’s generosity toward us. “Therefore I command you to be open-handed toward those of your people who are poor and needy in your land.” (15:11) “Open-handed” is an interesting choice of word. Its basis is a phrase meaning to let go, or release. Generosity means letting go of our resources, not maintaining control.

As I said, I don’t know how we apply this to welfare law. It’s a complicated matter, and perhaps it’s best not to be dogmatic but to allow for experimentation. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that all such systems of law are imperfect and prone to failure. Given human nature, they will be abused. These biblical laws, as interesting and clever as they appear to be, certainly were. We know that because of what the prophets wrote about Israel’s failings. Laws don’t reverse human nature. But that’s no reason to abandon the attempt to make them as good as possible.

Memory and Callousness

I am reading through Christopher Wright’s commentary on Deuteronomy, and came across this magnificent passage regarding the law on gleaning in Deuteronomy 24:17-22:

To harvest in such a way as to leave no gleanings would be to deprive the alien or the fatherless of justice. … The sense is therefore, “Do not pick the forgotten sheaf, the remaining olives and grapes, they belong to the alien, orphan and widow.” The remainder of the harvest is theirs; they have every right to do the final harvesting themselves. This means that the landless are not to be totally dependent on handouts from the landowners after every scrap of the crop has been harvested by them. Rather, they are to have the opportunity to work for their own benefit in the fields of God’s land. Those who do not, for various reasons, have a share in the ownership of the land are still to be given the chance to share in the blessing of the land as the bounty of the true landowner.

When the principle of the law is expressed thus, it can be seen to be  relevant beyond its immediate context of harvest gleaning–a practice the modern harvesting methods render somewhat unprofitable….. The law asks us, however, not to ban combine harvesters, but to find means of ensuring that the weakest and poorest in the community are enabled to have access to the opportunities they need in order to be able to provide for themselves….

Such community care is itself dependent on corporate awareness of the grace of God. Twice Israel is reminded here of the exodus and its proof of God’s generosity to Israel in its time of utter need (vv. 18, 22). When Israel forgot its history, it forgot its poor. The prophets have to remind them of both. It is not surprising either that in modern Western culture, which has systematically been squeezing the biblical God out of its definition of reality and truth, there is a corresponding resurgence of callousness toward the vulnerable. If the alien, the orphan, and the widow of Deuteronomy have anything in common with the immigrant, the refugee, the homeless, the single parents, the aged, etc. of today, then it is clear that our society is massively guilty of “turning aside justice and rights” from many people in those categories. The portrait of a caring society in these chapters is of a society with a memory at the center of its whole system of moral and social values and norms–the memory of God and God’s power. The phrase “moral vacuum” is being used of the increasingly anarchic callousness of the West. It is a vacuum manufactured by the sucking out of that memory and the denial of any transcendent reality that would undergird our values or challenge our behavior. The gods we worship, though unrecognized as gods, are not the God of exodus. The social gleanings for the poor are accordingly very lean indeed.

New Ways of Warfare

Some things about war never change. The civil war now raging in Syria, the clash between warlords in eastern Congo, the military repression current in Egypt–all these replicate other wars fought before, some in the very same places.

Some things about war do change. When I was a boy, the kamikaze pilots who flew suicide missions for Japan in WWII seemed crazy and bizarre. Today a guy who will strap on an explosive vest and go off to blow himself up in a shopping mall is just one more suicide bomber, hardly worth noting.

There are innovations in war strategy and innovations in war technology, and often the two go together. Trench warfare and the machine gun are forever linked. Tanks and the blitzkrieg.

Today, we deal with the innovation of terror networks–Al Quaeda being the prime example–and its mirror image, the drone. Terror networks depend on invisibility and the fungibility of targets. (A football stadium anywhere, or a skyscraper anywhere, or a train line anywhere…. ) Drones respond by watching. They can fly overhead for days, following a single target or surveilling an entire city. They can wait in hopes that the terror network will make itself visible. And then they can kill with substantial precision. They can blow up a single vehicle; they don’t have to level the whole neighborhood with artillery.

Mark Bowden has a long article about drones in the latest Atlantic. I recommend it if only because drones are here for the long haul, and we need to think about them. I find drones very creepy, but Bowden’s informative article unsettled some of my preconceptions and gave me lots more to consider. Here, briefly, are a few points:

Psychological parallelism. Where we have used drones the most, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, they may have done as much harm as “good” to the anti-terror-network cause. Bowden gets at the unfairness of drones. Those living under them feel exposed and helpless as an unseen, unknown assailant sits in judgment on their lives. Paradoxically this perceived unfairness adds credibility to the cause of blowing up a shopping mall full of civilians. Unfairness is answered by unfairness. There is no justification for the willing, wanton slaughter of civilians, and it would be hard to sustain it but for the perception that it answers aptly to the drones. Thus, some claim, every drone strike is a boost for Al Quaeda recruitment. It makes no rational sense, but it makes emotional sense.

Genius in the datalink. Bowden mentions Iran’s crowing after capturing American or Israeli drones, but he says the actual drone is nothing all that remarkable. Drones aren’t the product of a super-secret billion-dollar research program, they are cobbled together from existing technology. (They even borrow from ESPN, which knows how to track images.) It’s the software, not the hardware.

Killing by drone is not like video gaming. Part of what disturbs us is the bloodlessness of the killing done by drone pilots living thousands of miles from their targets and going home to dinner with the wife and kids. But Bowden convincingly portrays the emotional and moral drama these pilots feel. Unlike fighter pilots who zoom over their targets, drone pilots hover for hours, they see their enemies clearly, they hear the sounds of war. It’s not the war of the grunt soldier, but it’s also not emotionally detached. Drone pilots are much nearer their targets than those dropping bombs from planes or firing artillery shells.

Drones are not much use in conventional warfare. That’s because they are slow and easily targeted. They depend on conditions where there is no opposing side to match or come close to matching their technology. In Pakistan, drones master the terrain. In Syria, not so much. (Of course, this situation could change as technology develops.)

Civilian casualties are problematic in all forms of warfare. It’s a fact that drones aren’t perfectly precise. Civilians die, and that causes a backlash. But Bowden makes the case that the backlash has more to do with the perceived unfairness of drones than with the number of casualties. He says that the US is using drones less and less and with more and more care. As a result, civilian casualties are way down, perhaps to 10% of those killed in raids. He contrasts that with the Bin Laden raid. It went as well as can be imagined. Five people were killed. One was the wife of one of Bin Laden’s protectors. If you count her as a civilian, that’s a 20% civilian kill rate. And it could have been a lot worse, if the Pakistani defense forces had detected the raid.

Consider, Bowden says, the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, where a team of Army rangers went in to arrest two lieutenants of a troublesome warlord. Eighteen Americans died in the ensuing fight, as did somewhere between 500 and 1,000 Somalis–more than from all our drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004.

Police work or warfare? Bowden makes the case that drones should operate in the open–with their raids made public and publicly justified, just as the police would do. In war, you don’t have to explain why you kill your enemies. But the fight with terror networks is as much like police work as warfare. If drone attacks were handled more like police work, they might actually undermine the lawlessness of terrorism, rather than justifying it. If seen as agents of law, rather than as faceless, unaccountable, omnipresent killers, their unfairness would not seem so unfair. You expect the police to have an unfair advantage.

Of course, it’s a struggle to get your local police force to behave transparently. How you get the CIA and the Pentagon to see the advantages of that, I don’t know.

Suffering in Egypt

Egyptian Christians make up about 10% of the population, and their suffering is an underreported result of recent political turmoil. This New York Times report fills in some of the details. In brief, Christians have been targets of Islamist hostility for some time. After the army attacked the pro-Morsi protest camps, killing hundreds, Islamists throughout Egypt reacted by burning churches and attacking Christians. (Christians had, indeed, backed the army in its takeover from Morsi–and they made visible, unprotected targets.) While these attacks went on, the army and the police did nothing to stop them.

Now the army is trumpeting the persecution of Christians as evidence that the Islamists are terrorists. They do not mention that the army made no attempt to stop this terrorism.

The article ends with a brief mention of a single Muslim who stood up to the mobs at the risk of his life. Apart from such heroic individuals,  no one seems willing to defend Egyptian Christians.

Great Art from Horrible Life

I just finished the 900-page Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. It was something of an ordeal, but I’m glad to know the fascinating story behind those fabulous paintings.

As I wrote before, Vincent Van Gogh lived a thoroughly miserable life, quarreling with everyone, and especially those (like family) who tried to help him. He died without a single friend except his long-suffering brother Theo, who unquestionably loved him dearly.

Van Gogh didn’t take up art until his late twenties. Before then, he was a devout Christian, seeking to become a pastor or a missionary. He worked at that as fanatically as he later worked at painting. But he repelled the people he wanted to help. After a series of breakdowns he gave up on religion and traded it for art. Indeed, Naifeh and Smith interpret his ferocious drive at both religion and art as expressions of deep longing for family.

He wasn’t naturally good at art. In conventional terms, he couldn’t draw. He struggled mightily to learn perspective, and the human form utterly defeated him. Characteristically, he struggled at them all the harder. His fervent attempts, over years of trying, showed no signs of success. He strongly resisted his brother’s pleas to concentrate on landscape and to use color. An art dealer, Theo thought some possibility of commercial success might lie there. Instead, Van Gogh worked incessantly at dark ink drawings of human figures.

So how did this miserable man produce–in just a few short years before he died–such wonderful works, filled with light and color? It’s hard to say, really. Genius is difficult to explain. But here are a few related facts.

1. He worked hard. He was manic at whatever he did–fighting with his landlord, drinking absinthe, arguing theories of art, pursuing models–and he painted manically. Perhaps this is a case of needing 10,000 hours of practice. He never mastered the human figure, or perspective, but he never stopped working hard. He found his way to something more valuable.

2. He discovered the Impressionists. They had been the toast of Europe for years, but he was oblivious until he moved to Paris to live with his brother. In two short years he met many of the young neo-Impressionists (Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec) and saw the paintings of Monet, Cezanne and Degas, among others. Their quick, impressionistic work freed him from a struggle that he was doomed to lose. He adopted a variety of brush techniques, and rushed into a wild and unconstrained approach.

3. He discovered a gift for color, unconstrained by reality. What he had long resisted turned out to be one of his greatest strengths.

4. After cutting off his ear, he entered a series of mental crises followed by recoveries, living continuously in asylums or under medical supervision. As a mental patient, he seems to have felt freer from responsibilities to earn a living or represent an artistic career. Nobody expected anything of him, and he didn’t expect much of himself. He was free to simply paint.

One cannot help feeling pity for him, so passionately self-destructive, so utterly at odds with himself.  There is no romanticizing his dismal character, which cut him off from every happiness and most probably kept him from producing great art sooner and, surely, much longer. He suffered, and not because of others. He suffered because of himself. He could not help himself.

It is not a package deal. Suffering does not produce great art, any more than does happiness. Van Gogh’s struggles are a mystery–a medical, psychological, characterological mystery. At least, thanks to Theo, he did not die friendless, in an alley. At least he died leaving something precious behind. If he was cursed, he was also supremely gifted.

Hard-Boiled Sinners

Luther wrote a letter to his friend Spalatin, who had fallen into a great depression over his sin.

“Do not let your sin stick in your mind, but get rid of it. Quit your despondency, which is a far greater sin….It must surely be that heretofore you have been only a trifling sinner, conscious only of paltry and insignificant faults and frailties….Therefore my faithful request and admonition is that you join our company and associate with us, who are real, great, and hard-boiled sinners. You must by no means make Christ to seem paltry and trifling to us, as though He could be our Helper only when we want to be rid from imaginary, nominal, and childish sins. No, no! That would not be good for us. He must rather be a Savior and Redeemer from real, great, grievous, and damnable transgressions and iniquities, yea, from the very greatest and most shocking sins….you want to be a painted sinner and, accordingly, expect to have in Christ a painted Savior. You will have to get used to the belief that Christ is a real Savior and you a real sinner.”

(Thanks to Larry Thomas, who passed on this quotation.)

Modern Proverb

I have a new saying…..

“It takes a village…. to remember a noun.”

If you don’t get this, it’s probably because you aren’t yet old enough.

Setting Priorities

It took me a while to realize that my friends were deeply upset. In our Sunday morning worship we had just prayed for a team heading out on a service trip to Costa Rica. Those dedications are generally a feel-good experience. But my friends were troubled. They felt our priorities should be closer to home. Why are we sending people to Costa Rica when we have plenty of needy people in our own town?

I feel some sympathy for their point of view. We ought to be much more engaged with our local community. It’s not right to skip over local needs while heading to far-off places, which we do sometimes. It can be easier to get involved thousands of miles away than it is locally.

Nevertheless, I don’t think we ought to prioritize local needs. First, all human beings are made in God’s image and he cares for them all. As we are his agents, and members of his worldwide family, we are not restricted by geography. The whole earth is the Lord’s, and ours as well.

Second, prioritization can easily turn to elitism. Because where are the boundaries? Should I prioritize my street, where everybody owns a home? If I live in a wealthy community should I prioritize my town, which has very few poor people? Should I prioritize Americans, who are all wealthy compared to the average African?

Third, Jesus addressed this question rather plainly. A man asked him, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan. The message is unmistakable: “neighbor” is somebody outside your tribe, somebody as far off as can be imagined. The Good Samaritan doesn’t say, “I need to use my resources to help needy Samaritans.” He responds to need as he encounters it. So we, in this globalized, media-driven culture, can’t help encountering wounded people by the side of the road in places far from our home.

Artists and Madmen

I’m reading a biography of Vincent Van Gogh (Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith). About two thirds through its 900 pages (without notes–all 1,000 pages of those are available on a website) I want to give an interim report.

What I’ve learned is that Van Gogh was an almost intolerable human being. He was extraordinarily irascible, fighting with everybody and anybody. Throughout his life, from boyhood to adulthood, he seems to have been miserable, and determined to make everybody around him miserable. If somebody made a kindly suggestion he fiercely took the opposite course, and then blamed others when it ended badly. His family, though composed of imperfect characters, put up with his terrible behavior to heroic dimensions, supporting him financially into his thirties though he refused to take any responsibility, spent their money extravagantly, and complained frequently and bitterly that they made his life miserable through their stinginess. He was the original entitled, quarrelsome artistic temperament.

And for the longest time he had nothing to show for it. It never occurred to anybody, even him, that he had any particular talent. During most of his twenties he was dedicated to God, in a high evangelical way. (Charles Spurgeon was his very favorite preacher, and many Sundays Van Gogh went from church to church, just to listen to sermons.) He tried to be a pastor and a missionary, though with horrible results. (He just couldn’t get along with anybody.)

In his late twenties he turned to art. But he couldn’t draw the human figure. He characteristically insisted on drawing nothing but human figures, and doing it in shades of gray and black. He worked at it furiously for years (he did, at least, have the virtue of hard work) without selling a single painting.

If not for his brother Theo (an art dealer) he would surely have died in a gutter. He seems to have had no capacity for taking care of himself. Theo supported him for years, and was treated to much abuse in the process.

Was Vincent insane? Not, it seems, in conventional terms. He didn’t suffer from psychosis, at least not into his thirties. He was just strange, uncomfortable, rigid, difficult. Definitely a narcisistic personality, with mania.

Now the question: how did this miserable human being, who probably ended his own life, create such extraordinarily beautiful paintings? I’ll let you know next week.