Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 19

Shabbos Goy

“The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order,” Judge Bunning said. “If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”

When I was younger, I was more strident in my atheism. If I lacked the misogyny and gross prejudice—against Islam in particular—that qualify a person for the “New Atheist” label, then I nevertheless held to their practice of swashbuckling into almost any conversation, dull sword drawn, ready to declare that Holy Books hopelessly self-contradict; all those eternal truths are changeable and historically contingent; the notion of any kind of supreme and omnipotent being refutes itself under the simplest tests of logic; and oh, by the way, the Inquisition etc. were very, very bad. All of these arguments are simultaneously true and facile; faith exempts itself from these little eructations of materialism, which doesn’t make it correct but does make it in a sense immune to correctness as a category. In the last decade, my atheism has both deepened and softened. I suspect that had I encountered the right rabbi at the right time in my early twenties, when my passionate anti-religion burned hottest, then I might have been salvaged by grace. Now I tend to view religion, and at least some of the religious, with sympathy, which puts my soul beyond their reach, although it does sometimes force me to remind people that I know there are no gods and just appreciate the poetry.

This long caveat is to say that I have some sympathy for Kim Davis, though not because she’s in the right in her imagined protest. The idea that an agent of the government can nullify the law and obviate the constitutional rights of citizens due to her own private beliefs is manifestly silly. In the immortal formulation of your Catholic hero and mine, Antonin Scalia, you are entitled to your beliefs but not to your government job. Yes, even government employees, even elected officials, can engage in civil disobedience, but you don’t get to ride the First Amendment freely into your pension, especially not by violating its first clause in the delusional belief that in so doing you’re defending its second. As plenty of folks have pointed out, it was well within her small power to deputize some other row officer to sign off on these Satanic permits; that she refused to do so out of a let-use-say theologically suspect belief in the transitive property of the rendered-unto-Caesar suggests a desire to force the issue to a head. The Supreme Court is ironically responsible for this mess: its sloppy Hobby Lobby decision has convinced every minor divine in America that mere belief in whatever puts diplomatic plates on his prejudices.

But the Supreme Court is responsible, and it seems to me that any reasonably dull person, which is to say most Americans, who occasionally tunes into cable news, could easily draw this same conclusion: that “deeply held faith” abrogates temporal law. Egged on in this incorrect belief by unscrupulous legal counsel, you can just imagine how a person like Kim Davis could come to see herself as a hero and a martyr. Unlike her counsel, I don’t actually imagine that Davis holds any particular animus toward gays in particular, but rather has just a vague, foreboding sense of the inevitable decline of the familiar order of things. I grew up in a dying Appalachian coal town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and I knew plenty of women like Kim Davis. They went to the Church of Abundant Life and believed that Jews were going to hell, although one suggested to my mother that our family might be among the 144,000 to be bodily assumed into Heaven on the Rapture’s eve. They thought homosexuality was an abomination, but they were on perfectly good terms with the chubby homo who feathered and teased out their hair at Bangz. Democrats hadn’t done shit when the mines closed, so they drifted toward George Bush and learned to blame the unions and weren’t entirely wrong in either case. The Kim Davises of the world can’t do shit about the decline of Eastern Kentucky, but by God, this one of them can take a stand against things bein’ different. Correctness as a category does not apply.

Now, your regional sob story and hopelessly convoluted sexual ethics don’t entitle you to discriminate from your elected office, but I have the inescapable feeling that by holding her in contempt and tossing her in the clink, Judge Bunning did precisely the wrong thing. He was correct to observe that a pecuniary penalty would have had no impact; political allies of her lawyers would have made fines immaterial to her. And yes, courts do need a mechanism for enforcing compliance with their orders. But it strikes me that if Bunning could just wave his federal wand and allow others to issue the permits, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do the same without the cell. Despite her protestations to the contrary—that these certificates are somehow invalid without her signature—no one believes that the boys down at the Social Security Office are going to take her word over the order of a federal judge. I’ve seen some commentary on the convoluted authority to issue these permits in Kentucky, but state permitting statutes don’t trump the constitution, and their misapplication doesn’t invalidate gays’ right to marry.

If anything, to have simply swatted away her feckless protest and instructed someone else to marry the couples in question would have been a more fitting, biting, and deserved punishment. Let her whine impotently from behind the permits & licenses desk down at the county office while the janitor signs off under the authority of the US District Court. She will be neither hero nor martyr, and in a few months, she’ll wonder why she ever made such a fuss. Instead, I fear we’ve created another dumb saint in a country that seems to me to be drowning in dumb sanctimony. We must learn to love our enemies enough that the only punishment we desire in their defeat is their irrelevance. That would suffice.

Ronald Raven Signs a Piece of Legislation

Never more than a few wing’s beats

away; the poor pigeons warble that

they’ve lost the parking lot where they grew fat

to the loud and faster Corvidae who bleat

an almost-human language; the raven defeats

the mere flocked and fearful flights of cat-

harassed and bread-fed winged rats

of the city by being them but more: he eats

what they eat; lives where they live; but he

collects in his nests a bright collection, this

strange habit of display, half warning

and half fetish. De-natured doves, we,

really, are the pigeons; how we miss

the lost evening cliffs. But the raven is morning.

Accounting, Again

Upon learning that Bill Clegg has recieved a Man Booker long list nod for a book that hasn’t even been published yet, I thought I’d resurrect this 2010 review of his earlier memoir. -JB

The downfall of Bill Clegg’s Portrait of An Addict As a Young Man is contained in the following sentence from the book: “There is only $9,000 and change in my back account, and the end is in sight.” Only nine grand? We should all have such a commanding height from which to survey our own approaching doom.

Clegg’s memoir—it is resolutely a memoir; it eschews reportage, forgets dates, and deliberately suffuses everything with a haze of uncertainty—is by no means the worst thing ever written about addiction. Simply by grace of its modest ambitions and abject tone it towers, morally and artistically, above the macho posturing of James Frey or the overwrought quirk-porn of Augusten Burroughs. It portrays a sordid episode without prurience, although it is sometimes discreet to a fault, and its occasional shyness about the author’s sexual debauches feels calculated and off-putting. Its prose is sharp and well-handled, if fairly quotidian, and the present-tense narration, which bothered me at first, works, establishing an intimacy and immediacy to events that occurred nearly a decade ago.

And yet as a “Portrait of an Addict” it is a failure, and it should probably have been titledPortrait of a Rich Dude on a Bender. The author begins with $70,000 in his checking account. Seventy thousand bucks! He ends with about a tenth of that, which is still more than most of us can claim. The timeframe is deliberately obscure, but seems to take place over just a few months, with several forays back to an appropriately traumatic childhood and to some undergraduate party days. During his swift decline-and-fall, Clegg does spend a brief moment in a crack-house with a woman whose possibly Caribbean accent he never manages to place, but otherwise his tale of depredation and woe seems to take place principally at chi-chi downtown hotels and airport Marriotts.

If it were a celebrity biography or a gossip-rag bit on Lindsay Lohan, we would feel less pity than gleeful contempt. How bad can you have it when your come-to-Jesus moment involves getting kicked out of the Soho Grand? Clegg is a sufficiently skillful author to make himself into a more sympathetic main character, but his story still never transcends its own most basic premise: a rich, privileged guy on a path of self-destruction.

Of course, addiction is an affliction without regard for race or class or sex. If we were better people, we would feel pity rather than contempt for poor Miss Lohan, and we should feel it likewise for Bill Clegg. Still, though he admirably captures the dullness and monotony of an addict’s substance-seeking, how many times can you hear about the problem posed by $200 ATM withdrawal limits in the course of trying to get a thousand bucks in cash before you throw the book across the room. Oh, boo-hoo! How seriously can you take a crackhead who, when he exhausts the holes on his belt, thinks only that he will have to find a leatherworker when he gets to Rome to punch new ones. A leatherworker in Rome? I suppose it beats shoplifting a grommet-punch from the Home Depot.

Clegg keeps his book self-focused, which is true to the fact and spirit of addiction, and most of the other characters are peripheral, including his own dying mother. Only one emerges in his own right: the boyfriend, Noah, who is invariably described in reviews of the book as “long-suffering.” That is one way to describe him. A more accurate would be to call him a terrible enabler. Whether or not Clegg intended it as such, his depiction of Noah is a teary-eyed dope whose infinite forgiveness only fuels the author’s decline. There is a particularly awful scene where Noah literally lays on a hotel bed holding Clegg’s hand while a cracked-out Clegg gets screwed by a male prostitute. He tells Clegg that it’s okay. He loves him. That’s a lot of things, but it isn’t exactly love.

Eventually Clegg gets shipped out West, gets into rehab, and seems to find sobriety. It occupies only a few pages, and is very oblique. There is an obscure suggestion that he is in a twelve-step program (“days are just days”), but it is tossed off. He reconciles with his father. He moves back to New York, where he immediately moves into a light-filled terrace apartment with views of the Empire State building. He does not work for a year. This is more or less the end of the book, and once again its crippling flaw. The bottom of Clegg’s barrel looks an awful lot like a kind of success. He may have fallen from his social class, but there is always someone with a wallet to make certain he doesn’t have to live like it.

While White

Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions?

–David Brooks

Hey, don’t blame me; you hired me to write

these several columns every week, and I

must write each in a little while. White

space is the beginning; it glares back, a bright

tease and an impossibility: for why

(and how) could I have something new to write

three times a week? Why, just the other night

my ex-wife said we’d always lived a lie:

a topic for a column? While my shrink’s white

too-modern couch exerted just a slight

cool leather pressure on my head and on my

weakening back, he averred I not write

about her quite so often. “It isn’t right

to air a private trauma; take the high

road,” he said. His great hair, while white,

is thicker than mine. Sometimes I want to die.

What harder fate than to be a man of high

moral character condemned to write

for money in America while White?

Her Rude Conquerer

Contra Horace, captive Greece was captive.

The empire smashed you good and made you slaves.

Instructing some patrician’s louche, attractive

son in meter while he misbehaves

and mocks your accent; father drinks and raves

that lazy immigrants won’t take an active

hand in their own assimilation, saves

for his servants a grudging, wholly retroactive

permission to be as you were made to be:

this is the rude conqueror’s capture:

only to be burdened by your surrender, ever

to pretend to regret that you’re no longer free,

amputation cast as hairline fracture,

always and inescapable as never.

Gorgeous as a Jungle Bird

There are no tickets for that altitude

once held by Hellas, when the Goddess stood,

prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,

pure mind and murder at the scything prow–

Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain.

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up

like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

-Robert Lowell, “Beyond the Alps”

 

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a brief piece on the inevitable national expansion of gay marriage, in which I tried to explain to self-described marriage traditionalists that they’d effectuated the inexorable demise of their of civil monopoly by making married people themselves into a special, privileged class:

Legal marriage is larded with all sorts of benefits and privileges, and indeed, it was often the very proponents of marriage as a distinct social good who held the larding needle. Married people are a special class of citizen, and that is the crux of the matter. A society used inheritance incentives and insurance benefits to promote a sacrament; now you want complain that the sacred has been subsumed by the economic, the holy spirit swatted aside by the invisible hand.

Remember, the immediate precursor to Obergefell was Windsor, a case about inheritance. Conservatives like to deride the liberal-ish, technocratic belief that ticky-tacky economic incentives can really drive human behavior, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the huge accretion of exactly such incentives was the driving force and legal foundation of the claim that gays’ inability to marry represented a huge zone of civic exclusion. For all the #lovewins, for all Anthony Kennedy’s charming, if slightly embarrassing, raptures to the blessed dignity of the union of two souls, on a practical level, it was inheritance, tax, adoption, immigration, etc. that undergirded the long-term legal strategy toward marriage equality. With the possible exception (contested, I remind you, mostly by the same people who oppose gay marriage) of redressing severe and historic discrimination, the state shouldn’t confer legal, economic benefits of such scope and magnitude on any one group to the exclusion of another.

I remain ambivalent about marriage as the centerpiece of the struggle for LGBT rights, not in the least because, for all the reasons I mention above, it remains a restrictive and selective civil institution. Why, for example, shouldn’t a single person be able to sponsor the legal immigration of his best friend or an adult caring for an elderly person in her home receive the same tax benefits as a married couple? As of the last census, just 51% of Americans were married, after all. And, as a lot of LGBT activists have long pointed out, issues of discrimination in work and housing, homelessness, mental illness, addiction, etc. persist in the “gay community”—they are no less acute now that some of us are able to marry. None of this is to say that I won’t perhaps avail myself of the option now that it’s available. If I never especially imagined myself standing under a chuppah, I wouldn’t exactly mind, and as for all those benefits, well, the corollary to my old adage that you should never begrudge anyone his successful scam is that you should never turn up your nose at a good discount.

But regardless of my ambivalence—both practical and moral—I find the so-called traditionalist position ever more incoherent the more I encounter its variations.

“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical,” said the Rev. Wilfredo De Jesús, the senior pastor of New Life Covenant Church, an Assemblies of God megachurch that has nearly 20,000 members on multiple campuses, most of them in Chicago.

“We won’t marry two men. That goes against our beliefs,” said Mr. De Jesús, who is known as Pastor Choco. He, like others interviewed, noted that over 2,000 years of Christian history, the church has often been at odds with the culture.

“We’re prepared to go to prison, or whatever occurs, but the church cannot change,” he said.

I put my head in my hands. Honey, you’re a Protestant. As I’ve written elsewhere, I take a much more sympathetic view toward religious particularism than today’s gaggle of loudly ignorant atheists, but while I can accept theological objections to same-sex marriage and to the so-called “practice of homosexuality,” anyone who wishes to propose “2,000 years of Christian history” as one of uninterrupted uniformity of moral vision and theology should go sit in the lonely chair for the next few hours to think about what they’ve done.

Easy enough to pick on American Evangelism, which has never been the most . . . learned of faiths. But even among the much, much smarter, I’m at once troubled and relieved by the weakness of the counterargument. My friend Wesley Hill, for instance, who has written frequently and movingly about his own choice to live as a celibate, gay Christian, has now written a couple of posts recently where, in regretting the decision—not so much gay marriage qua gay marriage as gay marriage as a symptom of a broader drift from what he believes to be a truly Christian sexual ethics—he places a great deal of the blame on his fellow Christians:

I think that for many, many (not all) gay people in America today, the options have not been (1) belong to a healthy, vibrant Christian community in which celibacy is held in high esteem and deep spiritual friendships with members of the same sex and opportunities for loving service and hospitality abound or (2) be in a romantic relationship with a partner of the same sex. That has not been the choice facing many gay and lesbian people. Instead, for many (not all) today, the options have been (1) be ostracized (or worse) in church and effectively live without meaningful same-sex closeness of any kind or (2) be in a romantic relationship with a partner of the same sex.

In short: traditional Christian communities have failed to offer gay people fellowship, spiritual belonging, spiritual friendship, and have therefore put themselves in a position where they are not so much in opposition to the moral choices of LGBT people but utterly and starkly irrelevant to them, except perhaps as a bad memory.

I think this may be true, but I think that Wesley’s (and other’s) notion that while historic Christianity (or Judaism, or any of the major religions for that matter) condemn certain sex acts as wrong, it doesn’t necessarily follow that those people “or their partners are somehow irretrievably perverse and that all their longings and loves are any further removed from God’s design than their heterosexual neighbors’ are,” is frankly anachronistic and does a great disservice to the—I’ll use the silly phrase—practicing homosexuals who laid all, all, the foundation blocks of a modern society, including its Christians, that views people of minority sexual and gender identities as anything other than irretrievably perverse; that the back-reading of the Biblical focus on acts, not identities, ignores the plain fact that, for Paul or for the authors of Leviticus, those identities did not exist; that it was only the persistence of people engaging in those acts who, centuries later, said forcefully and at great personal peril, we do these things because of who we are, and that in so doing established a who for society to accept. Orthodox religion simply did not arrive, a priori¸ at the conviction that gay people were fine as long as they refrained from sex. The long tradition of what we’d probably call homosocial friendship notwithstanding, I defy anyone to claim that any modern Christian acceptance of gay identity, whether or not it also accepts gay sexual acts, was the proximate result of anything other than the social and political activities of men and women who did, in fact, have sex with people of the same sex. These impermissible acts were, in addition to being expressions of love and desire, inherently political and inherently moral; gay sex expanded the moral imagination. Put that in your Pride parade.

I should note that this isn’t meant as a criticism of those gay Christians who do choose to live celibately in their faith, a form of spiritual asceticism that I admire, and I also rather admire the open grappling with the idea that perhaps religion must abandon political opposition and turn inward in order to shine outward:

What I am interested in is Griffiths’ final sentence from this old blog post, which has haunted me ever since I first read it: The church’s calling now, and all the more so now that Griffiths’ hypothetical legalization of same-sex marriage is now the law of the land, is to burnish the practice of marriage until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye.

(Although I admit, my Jewish self can’t help but laugh incredulously at the idea of being called a pagan by a Catholic. LOL.) But in this very abandonment, the Christian case admits its inadmissibility in the present circumstance.

Any way you look at it, the religious case against civil marriage is very weak, ultimately little more than question-begging with an admixture of solipsism. It asks that its own moral prejudices be rewarded, literally, in the form of money and legal status but retreats into semantic obscurantism when confronted with the inequity of such an arrangement in a plural society. In a way, the opponents I most respect are the silly Southern judges now proclaiming that they’ll stop marrying folks altogether. It is the only actually morally consistent opposition position, although they arrive at it wholly by accident. Either civil marriage is secular, or sacramental marriage has no civil form. Choose.

An Entire Novel

“We look at teaching literature as teaching particular concepts and skills. So we maybe aren’t teaching an entire novel, but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that that novel would have gotten across.”

–Kimberly Skillen, the district administrator for secondary curriculum and instruction in Deer Park, N.Y

In the tenth grade, my English teacher Ed

“God’s Gift to Warthogs” Cupp, who hated

teaching, though he loved to teach, awaited

with a hungover sense of flush-inducing dread

the answer to this question: “Having read

the brief excerpt from Melville’s Moby-Dick,

complete the sentence: Call me [blank].” Some prick

whose name I’ve now forgotten coughed and said,

“Crazy!” Now, I give the kid some props:

illiterate though he was, it was a joke

with a certain literary sense:

Melville’s underrated comic chops

do suggest you read a vast, baroque

jest, unless it’s stupidly condensed.

Though I Am Native Here

The patriarchy’s not how many drunk

and virgin girl’s fratbro Don Juan has “kissed.”

An –ism’s not the plural of an –ist.

Of all our costly fallacies, we’ve sunk

the most bad debt into this junk,

a penny-stock conclusion. What we’ve missed?

Five fingers unconfigured aren’t a fist.

A white boy? Surely troubled. Black? A punk,

a hood-rat twisted by his absent dad

and too-loud mom. But no bad man decided

these pathologies, which render each

black victim criminal, white killer mad—

a thing repeated is a thing believed

even by disbelievers, in the observance, and the breach.

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Friar

 

I’ve always had a soft spot for Catholicism, as I do for all things Roman. I love its unrepentant, if cheerfully unacknowledged, paganism; I like that it manages to be both particular and ecumenical, with a vast canonical universe, unlike so much dour Protestantism, which has only the Bible and manages to treat all of the Book’s magnificent poetry like an instruction diagram for the assembly of a confusing piece of Scandinavian furniture. I like its camp and its kitsch. And like a lot of folks these days, I like this Pope. Seems like a decent fellow, although the obsequious puffery of his transcendent moral authority by non-Catholic liberal types every time he says anything to broadly accords with their political preferences strikes me as supremely odd—not that there’s anything wrong with proposing a useful political alliance, but rather because it so frequently and quickly shades into an argument from authority.

Here admitted: I don’t like the phrase “climate change,” not because I dispute the general underlying truth and reality to which it refers, but because the phrase itself is so distressingly market-tested, so anodyne, so wooly and amoral and abstract. It hardly inspires a rush to the barricades, and it reeks of the sort of ineffectual political non-postures that gave us, for example, the huge loser designation “pro-choice”—a place, ironically, where the Pope’s biological credentials seem suddenly less burnishable to a lot of the same people pleased with his stance on ecology. And, apropos this very item, the Pope’s insistence that population growth and population control are ecologically insignificant compared to the “consumerism” of wealthy nations is faintly incredible. Though he rightly criticizes the blind faith in technological fixes, the crackpot conviction that we can invent our way out of the problem via electric cars or whatever, a future as mere facsimile of the present, only, uh, “sustainable,” one hardly needs to be a vulgar Malthusian to understand that the ongoing addition of billions and billions more humans—and the attendant need to get them water and food and shelter and clothing—is a large problem in our larger complex of problems. In other words, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of Francis’s correct criticism of the notion of salvation via technological innovation: he too, in his way, is praying for an electric car. What is lacking is an act of really radical imagination, which would suggest that a harmonious and truly sustainable human society would be not simply different, but unrecognizable—unrecognizable in its conduct, yes, but also and more importantly in its scale.

None of this is really meant to single Francis out for criticism. I really do like the guy, admire much of what he says, and as regards his Franciscan ideas about a human ecology, I sympathize and at least partially agree. Compared to the national leadership of our larger and more influential countries, and certainly compared to the greenwashing corporate sector, the Pope’s statements are worthy of much of the praise that they’ve garnered. But, to use a business metaphor I’m otherwise fond of mocking, the idea that they’ve disrupted anything is incorrect. It’s just regular competition in an existing space.

A Public Assembly Facilities Manager Considers Jurassic World

1. Early on, we see a hotel room. Subsequently, however, as the crisis unfolds, we see multiple incidents of thousands of guests held in the hot sun on an outdoor concourse, even as the park director, dinosaur expert, and others scream about getting inside. Additionally, the dinosaur expert lives in an airstream trailer. Conclusion: Jurassic World has only one hotel room, substantially too few for an island resort that is at least a full day’s journey from the mainland.

2. Despite several employees possessing two-way radios, management primarily communicates with park staff via cell phone, an inherently less stable and reliable platform. Additionally, when radios are used, the signal often breaks up, suggesting a) insufficient repeater range/capacity, and b) poor battery charging discipline.

3. Front-line staff are untrained in emergency preparedness, and are not helpful in either evacuation or shelter-in-place scenarios.

4. Self-piloted, two-person vehicles are described as being able to withstand the terminal ballistic force of a .50 caliber round. This seems to be an incorrect safety standard in an environment in which the principle physical danger to vehicle occupants will be not be high-velocity impact, but rather sustained, high-pressure stress and/or repeated striking. Additionally, it is inadvisable to permit un-trained/non-licensed guests/vehicles to self-operate non-tracked, fully autonomous vehicles. Finally, the same technology that locks grocery cart wheels upon transition over a magnetic strip at the edge of a parking lot might be advisable where conditions otherwise amenable to driving such vehicles beyond their designated zone of operation exist.

5. Executive direction and daily operational control should be separated. While marketing/finance and operational duties may overlap, some separation of responsibilities is advisable, especially in a high-physical-liability environment. Suggest creating two senior positions, reporting to a General Manager.

6. In fact, reporting relationships are generally unclear, leading to significant and persistent confusion among front-line employees and management staff.

7. While it is never wise to carelessly damage or destroy capital assets, the stated cost of park attractions is substantially less than the potential tort exposure in the event of an attraction-guest consumption event. In fact, the stated cost of the park’s most troublesome attraction is only $26 million.

8. Broadly speaking, despite claims that the park has employed “the best structural engineers,” capital building assets are woefully inadequate and easily damaged by the regular and routine operations of the attractions. This suggests either a) these systems are, despite claims to the contrary, under-engineered, or b) despite good engineering, construction does not follow industry best practices. Given that our observations indicate the park ownership acts as its own general contractor/construction service, the latter seems more likely.

9. Technology is a complement to, but never a replacement of, good physical/visual inspection of safety and security components. Everything, everything has a limited useful life!

10. Although it appears to operate in a foreign jurisdiction, there appears to be substantial exposure to significant workers comp risk.

11. The public address systems, where they do exist, are not very loud.

12. I did not observe a responsible waste diversion program with clearly marked receptacles.