Alan Jacobs, on The Attentive Reader.So it turns out that if we want to think seriously about how we read and the conditions under which we read, we require at the very least three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates:
There were particular books that donned the shelves and coffee tables in pretty much every Christian home in the 70s and 80s. There was, of course, Joni — the autobiography of Joni Erikson, the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, and a book called My Utmost for His Highest. Parenthetically, I went on Twitter recently asking what I should title my latest book and my very favorite suggestion was, My Lowest for His Highest…but anyway… Another book that was on every Christian coffee table when I was growing up was titled “How Should We Then Live” which was a brilliant title since basically it felt like that was the main question being answered in church. Being Christian was — more than anything — a lifestyle — one that demanded great discipline and restraint. The good thing was that it was pretty easy to know how you should then live because you could rely on the preacher to let you know the law — what to do and not do so that you would be righteous and God would bless you — what to do and not do so that you would be a sheep at Jesus’ right hand and not a goat at his left — and if you started doing the wrong things, there was a group of old straight white men, called the elders who would discipline you. So things were pretty clear…. Anyhow, given that we were taught to read the Bible literally — I find it fascinating that the list I was provided for what Christians should do — never seemed to include feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and welcoming the stranger.
Bolz-Weber can be a fabulous preacher, but this sermon saddens me. It simply takes the sheep/goats binarism and reverses it. Ah, those poor benighted old white fundies, they just didn’t get it. They read the wrong books — you can tell just from the titles that they’re wrong — and they read them in the wrong way and they drew the wrong lessons from the Bible. (Did they, by the way? They utterly failed to feed the hungry and care for the sick and welcome the stranger? You sure about that? Because that’s a pretty damning charge to make if you’re not sure. And I know a great many benighted old white fundies who have done more of all those things than almost anyone else I know, including, especially, me.) Anyway, the whole message is simply We thank you, Lord, that we are not like those stupid old fundamentalists. We thank you, Lord, that while they just didn’t get it we totally get it. The aroma of self-congratulation fills the room.
If as a pastor you’re teaching people to compare themselves favorably to others, including their mothers and fathers in the faith, I don’t think you’re doing them any favors.
And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.
This seems right to me. Millions and millions of Americans do not just accept but applaud the killing of people like Michael Brown, that is, people who could be dangerous. Those same people don’t exactly applaud the killing of a man peacefully shopping at Wal-Mart or a child playing with a toy gun on the street — but they accept such acts with no real qualms.
Why do those Americans accept such behavior by police? Because it almost certainly won’t happen to anyone of their color or social class. Because it would be hard to reduce the massive amount of firearms our police carry; it would be hard to dissuade police from their shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policies; it would be hard to change our laws to hold police more accountable for their acts; it would be hard to become better informed about what crime rates actually are and what dangers police actually face, or don’t face. Because their lives would be complicated by caring, and who needs more complications in life? It’s a shame that John Crawford and Tamir Rice are dead. But not enough of a shame for anybody to try to change anything. Black lives just aren’t worth that much.
These advice columns are becoming a genre unto themselves. The stock villain: crazy right-wing uncle, the jokes about stuffing. But I recognize them by what they unwittingly emulate: guides for religious evangelism. The gentle, righteous self-regard, the slightly orthogonal response guides, the implied urgency to cure your loved ones of their ignorance. Your raging uncle will know the truth, and the truth will set him free.That’s a problem. Our politics are taking on a religious shape. Increasingly we allow politics to form our moral identity and self-conception. We surround ourselves with an invisible community of the “elect” who share our convictions, and convince ourselves that even our closest and beloved relatives are not only wrong, but enemies of goodness itself. And so one of the best, least religious holidays in the calendar becomes a chance to deliver your uncle up as a sinner in the hands of an angry niece.
Here’s the simple fact that no one wants to talk about. Spotify says it pays out seventy per cent of its revenues to rights holders. Well, that’s very nice, that’s lovely. But if I’m making a shoe, and it costs me a hundred dollars to make it, and the retailer is selling that shoe for ten dollars, then I don’t care if he gives me seventy per cent, I don’t care if he gives me one hundred per cent—I’m going out of business. Dead is dead.
But ritual dazzles more than it convinces. Beyond the converted, the less committed observer will see the facts piling up and conclude that one can be fully aware of racism’s persistence and yet still feel that the part racism played in Brown’s death is too abstract to qualify as a Selma-style — or even Trayvon-style — teaching moment. We need here Selma, Sanford — we want to make all of America put down their beers and feel this turning point. Again, of course Brown didn’t deserve to die — at all. But we have an urgent and challenging task here. And if so — and, God, it’s very much so — aren’t other deaths that have grieved us more useful in teaching a vast nation of people, with various levels of understanding and concern, that we have a serious problem here?What happened to Diallo, Martin, Crawford, and also Oscar Grant is a clearer demonstration of what faces us than what happened in Ferguson. People don’t like being told to ignore facts; even fewer find ambiguity a spark for indignation. Crawford’s killers weren’t indicted either. We must wonder why this is considered a less urgent — and instructive — catastrophe than what happened in Ferguson. I mourn Brown as we all do, but I worry that we have chosen the wrong tragedy to wake this country up.
My murder-mystery plot was extremely elaborate, with lots of strange clues involving balsa wood, and that was going to be fun, I thought. But then there was the dead body. The dead-body part was the thing I just didn’t go for. You have to start with it. If you don’t have the dead body, you do not have the murder mystery.
The idea that Michael Brown’s death is being emphasized too much by the black community, which should instead be concerning itself with “black on black crime” is oddly dissonant with the specific details of this case. The death of a person at the hands of a police officer, a person who is vested with the state’s power to do violence, should obviously be treated with an even greater seriousness than their death at the hands of another citizen. It also would seem strange to invoke the ancient spectre of black criminality given that, even if we take the questionable police account of events as completely credible, the worst crime for which Brown was stopped was shoplifting a handful of cheap cigars. Why this should be treated as something more than an instance of ordinary American juvenile mischief is unclear. That each of these well-worn narratives are being wheeled out in this this case only seems strange if we fail to recognize the argument’s core: we can’t complain about being treated like niggers when we’re acting like niggers.…
I wish I were ending this comment with answers or at least encouragement, but I have none to offer. I just have a list of things that I know. I know that I have never called the police, and if in future I do, it will be because I have reached the furthest of last resorts. I know that I am taking steps to learn how to arm myself for the protection of my loved ones and my community. I know that I will always vote “not guilty” if I am on a jury prosecuting a non-violent drug offense. I know that I will always oppose any expansion of the state’s power to harm and jail its citizens. I know that I will be going to community meetings and protests and vigils and organizing sessions and memorial services for the rest of my life. I know that one day I will tell my child, if I am blessed enough to have one, that the world is afraid of them, and that the police are not to be trusted. I know that one day, that child will tell her own child the same thing. And yet, I know that I still have enough hope to want to bring children into this world, broken as it is. That is something.
[Perhaps the British government could] take advantage of the Palace of Westminster’s imminent overhaul to evacuate it and move Parliament around, like the Cup Final while Wembley was being rebuilt. Peripatetic parliaments or king’s councils are not unprecedented. We had them in the early Middle Ages. Other countries still do. That way MPs could re-engage directly with the parts of Britain that feel distanced from Westminster today.Meeting one year in Manchester, the next in Glasgow (not Edinburgh, given the local competition), another in Swansea, then in Newcastle or even Hull (UK City of Culture in 2017), they would see the shuttered-up shops, the desolation caused by deindustrialisation, as well as the many positive and promising aspects of provincial life. And national journalists would follow them, and report. I’m sure they could find enough big rooms to meet and debate in – even some that might remind them of their old home, such as Manchester Town Hall (a much better building than the Palace of Westminster). Getting away from London for a while could do Britain’s crumbling democracy a power of good. What’s to lose?
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You have no computers – or none that I have seen. So many libraries today have become sheds for computers, with books being edged out, put away. You have none of that. Let books who are exiled by computers seek refuge here in your little reading room. You are there to receive them, to comfort them in a world that is turning against the book.You are so generous. You were a free library back in the seventeenth century, and you still are. In keeping alive this tradition you are reminding us of what libraries are all about. You are about knowledge and the open and generous sharing of knowledge. You are about the good that comes from the written word in an age when there are so many lies around.
You are the senior library in Scotland. You are loved by those who know you, but you are happy to take on new friends. You are a little beacon. You really are.
— Alexander McCall Smith on the Innerpeffray Library
