"Aiding a Surrender to Terror"?

What the %#& did Romney say? The gloves are waaay off now.

Romney, the former favorite GOP robot since Gort ("Klaatu barada nikto!) just announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference that if he stayed in the race it would "forestall the launch of a national campaign and be making it easier for Sen. Clinton or Obama to win. Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Can't get much more inflammatory than that. Perfect for his audience of paranoid conservatives fretting over fear of liberal fumigation. They will be hearing panels and speeches apparently designed to ratchet up that fear. "What Do Liberals Have Planned for Your Money?" featuring, among others, Grover Norquist, who famously instructed his partisans, “You look for an issue that unites your side . . . divides the other side and allows you to reach in . . . and take their hearts out," and denounced bipartisanship as "date rape." Will he be calling Barack a "date raper?"

The crowd's hearts will race as they cringe over other frights: How the Liberals Are Criminalizing Free Enterprise. Threats to Our National Sovereignty. Why Judges Are STILL the Problem and What to Do About It.

While all this fear is being spread and accompanying vitriol spewed, I reflect on its ubiquity.

Demonization in American politics is hardly new. While in the earliest contested presidential elections it was considered unseemly for the candidates themselves to sling the mud, or even directly campaign, their surrogates were unrestrained. John Adams’ supporters published attacks that make Romney's accusation today and GHWBush’s Willie Horton spectacle seem positively gentlemanly. Of their opponent Jefferson, they said, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Lest anyone think that the contemporary Christian right originated challenges to candidates’ proper Christian credentials, as they did with Romney, the Adams gang also called Jefferson an infidel who “writes aghast the truths of God's words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

The Andrew Jackson campaign was even dirtier. He was accused of murder, gambling, slave trading and treason. Adams’ son’s gang continued the traditions of his father’s. They said Jackson’s mother was a prostitute and that his father was a mulatto, and his wife first an adulteress and then a bigamist. Jackson’s troops hit back that Adams was the gambler, plus a pimp for the Russian czar, and thoroughly corrupt.

Against that, suggesting that Hillary and Barack would "surrender to terror" is almost tame. But let's see what's to come. "Date raper?"

Strange campaign robo-calls

Cook County, in Illinois, the state with the largest number of local governmental units in the nation -- the more to do patronage and ghost hiring by -- has a Water Reclamation District. I got a robo-call today from a candidate seeking to serve on its board.

Her credentials? She is staunchly pro-choice. That's cool, but what the hell does abortion have to do with sewage disposal and clean-up?

Sick jokes to the contrary, Nothing! In Illinois, no post is the post of desire, but just a step to the next.

Earlier, Mayor Daley sent a robo-call endorsing a tax assessement appeals board candidate. I yelled at the robot to no avail. Shut up, Daley! You are all going to wind up in Club Fed! Thanks, Rich, you let me know whom I should vote against.

I voted for Barack today -- 4 good reasons

It's been a hard year for this political junkie. I have been torn up over the primary trying to decide for whom to vote.

You see, I know Barack from my days in Springfield lobbying for poor people and the problem is that when you know someone up-close, you know their warts, faults, flubs and snubs.

Throughout my struggle to find my candidate, I kept saying to myself, if I knew Hillary (or Richardson or Biden an eon ago when they were still relevant), I'm sure I would have seen their warts as well.

So, I decided, screw the warts (which I shall not enumerate here). Everyone has warts.

Here are my turning points / bottom lines -- my reasons for voting for Barack today that coalesced just yesterday.

1. McCain and Independents. Independents will be critical voters in the general. McCain will get too many of their votes over Hillary and that is not a good thing.

2. Our relationship with the world. A number of months ago, someone, maybe it was David Brooks, said that the day Barack is elected, his name and face alone will alter and improve US relations in the world that Bush has done so much to tear asunder. I think Hillary would be an improvement, but not nearly as powerful and evocative a change of America's imagery of swagger and imperial power. Plus, I think Barack's desire (even if not actual capacity -- yet) to be a healer and "uniter" is desperately needed.

3. Rush and the other Screedmeisters. For me, the worst part of the Clinton years was the nightmare of rage the Clintons (innocently, in my view) provoked. I can't bear another four years of their screeching. While I know they will be hard on Barack, they will not be reduced to psycho attacks that I can only compare to the wild boys turned-cannibals in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. As Liz Taylor's Catherine Holly said, “They had devoured parts of him....or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs.” Rush's ditto-heads want no less as they seek to butcher Hillary.

Nothing unified the right in its quest for power during the Clinton years more than hating Bill and Hillary. Hate creates passion. Hate energizes. Hate creates focus. Hatred solidified and grew the right wing movement that had been delicately juggling Libertarians and Christian fundamentalists. Hatred brought them all together. As Stanley Fish and Jason Horowitz have pointed out, the Hillary haters are still living in their world of inexplicable psycho hatred.

I just don't want us to have to suffer that again -- even though it's not the Clintons' fault.

4. The Kumbaya Factor. It thrills me to think that finally a black man can elected President. It's about damn time. If it happens, I will be proud of my country and may once and for all stop seeing napalmed babies when the flag waves. (Update: I have since learne this is wrong, wrong, wrong to feel, as the kerfuffle over Michelle's comments have proven. So I should amend by saying, I would be over MORE proud of my country. . . Is that what you want?)

Down by the Riverside.

1/30/08, Afternoon.

I am in a huge convention center in Atlanta with 10,000 black Baptists singing “Down by the Riverside. . . I ain’t gonna study war no more; I ain’t gonna study war no more. . .”

We’re killing time waiting for Hillary to show-up. All the presidential candidates were invited. None of the GOP’s white guys in suits agreed to attend – just like their front runners’ failure to show-up for the Congressional Black Caucus debate last year. I guess the GOP thinks they have the Baptists sewn up -- or they have already written-off the hope of getting any black votes.

Barack was here a little while ago, but he came via a videocast -- about five minutes of nothing. He looked incredibly exhausted and stuttered and stumbled a lot. The video connection followed suit and cut in and out. The crowd was disappointed. Getting up and cheering the dispirited video just wasn’t going to happen.

The convention leader is oblique about Hillary coming – whether in person or via another lame video, but I see some stone-faced white guys along the wall with their tell-tale earpieces with the squiggly wires whom anyone who has been to a presidential campaign event knows to be Secret Service. Hillary will be here in person.

The crowd does not seem impatient at all. The music is rollicking, everyone is standing, clapping, dancing around, calling out, and having a great down-home gospel-singing time. Now they’re doing Amazing Grace, led by four incredible young men with voices from heaven.

Everyone around me in this older middle-aged and just plain old crowd is decked out in Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes -- the women in astonishing glittery hats with feathers, fur and brilliant colors made more vivid by the extravagant arrays of sequins and rhinestones; the men wearing suits with long jackets reminiscent of the Zoot Suits in the forties, many in colors, others in sharp pinstripes. I’m seeing quite a number of fur coats, too.

And shoes! The women have matching fancy high heels and purses. The men compete with alligator shoes in colors not found in nature. When the offering is announced, the preacher at the helm encourages the men to put at least as much as their shoes cost in the bucket, and the women at least as much as their hats.

Hillary arrives. Now she is the only other white woman in the room other than me, The Termite. And one of about six white people in all – the others being those Secret Service guys and some lost-looking hippie who has wandered in. She gives a long, powerful and meaty speech, most of which is not the stump routine, but specific to the audience, honoring the historic significance of this convention and talking about her own Methodist faith.

The audience doesn’t quite know what to do with this. They applaud and many rise from their seats but I can tell that many wanted to go nuts over Barack instead. Half jump up for Hillary; half stay seated and clap politely. Pollsters take note.

Historic Baptist Convenings

Reflections of this (impressed) Secular Humorist.

I have not often had the experience of being present as history was being made. This week I am.

This is the 2nd “historic” meeting of the four main black Baptist conventions (sort of like sub-denominations) where our criminal justice ministry project and the manual I have been writing with them are being announced.

Earlier today we had the Casey-sponsored luncheon announcing the soon-to-be-published manual for congregations to use in working with people caught up in the criminal justice system -- from arrest through reentry, the perps, their family members and victims of crime.

My preacher friends from the Progressive National Baptist Convention with whom I have been working said my presentation was something of a hit as evidenced by people asking if I could serve on their committees. (One of the preachers has claimed me as a member of her church, though I think I have decided on the label “secular humorist.”)

The four black Baptist groups have been splintered for years – mostly over issues of power, control and, since 1961, civil rights tactics. Unifying only now (though not abandoning their four separate identities), they will be better able to address common issues and common dreams.

The black Baptists’ joint meeting is back-to-back with another historic event. Tonight, white Baptists will join this group and together they will proclaim A New Baptist Covenant. This has been the dream of the Covenant’s architect, Jimmy Carter, who broke with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, after years of trying and failing to get them to take a less unyielding and strident view of matters both theological and political following its sharp turn to the right starting in the late seventies.

Baptists who have suffered the breaches, divides, expulsions, splinters, schisms, humiliations and sorrows as they lost in the conservative seizure of power of the Southern Baptist Convention and Baptists who were never part of the Southern convention will be coming together to pledge a first-ever unity, inclusiveness and commitment to finding common ground. The Convention many of them left, the 17 million-strong Southern Baptist was invited, too, but it declined – even as some of those 17 million will come as individuals.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

1/30, evening.

I see white people. . .
White people are coming, coming in droves into the enormous hall where Jimmy Carter will be kicking off the Covenant meeting. I haven’t been seeing white people for awhile and it seems kind of strange. The first thing I notice are their clothes. My god, I see a sweatshirt! And jeans! The contrast between them and the spiffed-up blacks is more than a little startling.

They are mixing pretty well, though. The room is filling with black Baptists, white Baptists; Baptists from the North and Baptists from the South. It took over 150 years for this to happen.

Now I am just plain embarrassed to be white. White warm-up music is playing on the stage. There’s a guy singing who is a cross between Pat Boone and the busted-for-purchased-gay-sex Ted Haggard wearing a red shirt and khakis – so painfully unhip, it hurts. The music, I am learning, is called “praise and worship.” It has all the soul of kindergarten sing-songs. Ding-Dong School.

The white people sing along, many not even needing to refer to the verses on the giant video screens. The blacks look slightly appalled.

Now there’s a guy who looks like Newt Gingrich but even MORE white bread than Newt, if you can believe that’s possible. He is playing the guitar and forcing us to endure more treacly, syrupy kitsch. Ouch, it’s hurting my teeth! Now he is leading the other musicians and singing audience members with strange herky-jerky up and down fists. What the heck kind of conducting is that?

Oh thank God, and praise Jesus, here comes a gospel choir. They are bringing the house down. Their voices rise and shake the building. People are out of their seats, swaying, halleluiahing and calling-out. I am wondering what the Up With People types are thinking about this and if the now much happier-seeming white people in the audience are thinking that their performers might try to be a tad less dead.

The president of one of the black Baptist conventions takes the stage to deliver a sermon. A woman in the audience falls into a rapturous and very loud round of halleluiahs. With the patience of Job, he calmly waits for her to quiet down (or perhaps she was silenced or removed by others) and begins talking about how strange it is for him, as a black Baptist, to be preaching on an assigned topic and for an assigned number of minutes. Blacks in the audience laugh heartily – knowing exactly what he means. He reluctantly agrees to do both and builds into a rousing sermon – within his allotted time.

Jimmy Carter takes the podium and is speaking of the journey that led to this Covenant meeting and his hopes for finding mutual honor and respect across denominational and ideological lines. It’s not getting people out of their seats, but the tone, fairly humble, is good.

As he winds-ups, I’m slipping out now before the white music starts up again and ruins my uplift.

Al Gore and the pale blue dot.

1/31, noon.

It’s Baptist Al Gore time and he has come with his high-tech PowerPoint show about global warming, the film version of which, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award. The audience for this luncheon (which cost $35 – the rest of the Covenant events have been free) is almost all white. 2,500 of them.

It’s a bit crowded (and the food is ghastly).

It’s dawning on me how many national office holders are Baptists – Gore, Bill Clinton, Carter, Bush . . . Gore is engaging, self-deprecating and quite funny. People are whispering that they wish he had behaved like this instead of being such a stiff in the 2000 election.

In one of his slides, the animation bounces down a map of Greenland. Gore is bouncing it, bouncing it again, and then a few more times as he quips that he really liked the bouncy thing on Apple’s Key Note software and was dismayed to learn that its most recent release didn’t have it. But, he tells us, there are advantages to being on the Apple board – they reinstalled the bounce for him.

The room is loving the show – all 90 minutes of it – with the exception of two well-scrubbed teenagers at my table who are decidedly not clapping along and two girls sitting on their hands at the table behind us; the annoying nasty, catty chattering of the neighbor girls’ is incessant and I want to throttle them.

As the lights came up and none of these dissenters join the crowd giving Gore an ovation nearly as long as his presentation, I ask why them they weren’t excited about what they’d just seen. Then I notice that the two at my table have press credentials and I take back my question and say, oh, I get it, the press isn’t supposed to clap. But the girl says, no, it’s because it’s Gore. We hate him. These people wouldn’t stand and applaud Bush, she says, so why should we applaud Gore. (So much for Carter’s hope for bridging gulfs and creating harmony.)

I ask, well what about the presentation itself? What did you think of that? The girl says, we don’t care about that stuff. It’s not our issue. She and the young boy with her scurry away. Yes, these kids are reporters, reporters for the Southern Baptist Convention’s newspaper. But their heads are in a lock-box – one Gore never contemplated.

Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!”

1/31, afternoon.
“What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!” ---Thomas Jefferson.

I am happily ensconced in a heady seminar on religious liberty. The Baptists pretty much created and own the concept, despite the Southern Baptists’ sharp move to all but denounce or rewrite its meaning it in recent years. It’s wonderful to see so many people fiercely embracing the First Amendment and taking a stand against government entangling itself in matters of faith and giving money to church groups.

This is making me re-think my work with the White House Office of God. Jefferson would smite me if he knew – and call me a rogue!

Outfits! Sequinned everything.

1/31, afternoon.

What’s for sale: Outfits! Sequinned everything.

There is no convention without vendors. I decide to visit some of the exhibits and tables. The black Baptists have theirs in a large hall on the lowest floor of this huge complex; the whites have theirs lining the main hallways leading to the meeting rooms. Hmmm.

Both feature preacher-wear and choir outfits, with the white folk’s outfits a lot more subdued. The black wares also include clothes and shoes for the flock, too. Dresses, men’s and women’s suits, hats and shoes. Oh. My. God. Gladys Knight and the Pips would go wild shopping here.

I have never seen such an array of glitz in my life since I used to go to drag queen shoes in Oregon for respite from Pendleton shirts and down vests that my law school classmates wore.

Both sell books, too. Lots of books.

Sneaking a drink with an ex-Southern Baptist boy.

2/1, evening.
Sneaking a drink with an ex-Southern Baptist boy.

I have just come from another terrific religious liberty seminar and another on the criminal justice system and have some time to kill before the evening event. I have headed to the bar at the Smith and Wollinsky joint across from the convention center.

A sweet-faced young man wearing a fedora takes the bar stool next to me. I see what appears to be a convention badge peaking out from under his coat and ask him if he is attending the convention and about the drink in his hand (Baptists, by and large, do not drink).

This leads to a long a delightful conversation about Michael leaving the Southern Baptists and how now, though he is enrolled in a seminary (it is a nondenominational progressive one --Vanderbilt), he has come to think of religion as mythology – to the consternation of his parents, who are also having to deal with the fact that his sister has just come out.

Baptists believe they gayness is a choice made as a consequence of being reared without sufficient religious instruction, so the parents are more than a little distressed. Is this their fault?

Michael is refreshingly curious about the world and ideas and wants to teach theology one day – not preach. He tells me of the pain and incredible fear instilled in those growing up in Southern Baptist churches. Both he and many of his friends experience this.

A college friend borrowed a friend’s class notes for a marketing class and nine months later, he says, the friend was still sleepless and terrified he had sinned. He went to the teacher and confessed and she was flummoxed; there is nothing wrong with sharing notes. He is describing scores of other such cases with many, including him, experiencing random, free-floating terror – attached to no particular thing. Just constant fear.

He explains that the fear stems from the substantial caveat to the Baptist doctrine of “once saved, always saved.” Apparently, the slightest thing can work to unsave the person and send them hurtling to hell. Even Michael lives with that fear, but he is getting over it.

Bill Clinton: Seeing through a glass darkly.

2/1, evening.

Now Michael and I are in the airplane hanger of a hall and await the closing speech to be delivered by Bill Clinton. The endurance contest begins with more embarrassingly bad white music playing as people fill the room.

Thankfully, this pain is alleviated by a powerful black preacher’s sermon on “setting the captives free” followed by the awesome Spellman men’s choir. They rouse with song after song. I am thinking they have been given instructions to be prepared to do something between one and thirty songs because Clinton is so notoriously late.

But here he is, after only six songs. I wonder, will it be bad Bill beating up Barack? Inappropriate-for-the-setting Bill giving a stump speech extolling his wife’s credentials for the presidency? Stem-winding Bill? Statesmanlike Bill? Brilliant Bill delivering a wonky fact-filled address?

He is none of those Bills. Subdued. Almost soft. He talks of the history of the break with the Southern Baptists and distinguishes the historical Baptist faith from that which its convention now demands.

Reminiscent of Lincoln in his Second Inaugural when he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Clinton now says, “we all believe we are fulfilling God's will in our lives. The point that I want to make is, so do they. They read the obligations of the Scripture in a different way.”

He focuses on the meaning of 1 Corinthians 13 – but not verse 13 about love that he reminds us is always read at weddings, but 12, which speaks of seeing through a glass darkly. “For now I see through a glass darkly; but then face to face, now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.” It’s after that passage that we find “And now abideth faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love."

Clinton says we have to love because we may be wrong about everyone and everything because we see through a glass darkly. And that is his response to how these Baptists should relate to those who have exiled and reviled them for their liberalism and modernism – or traditionalism, if you take a historical view.

Like Dr. King, Clinton exhorts the crowd with the admonition that “we must approach those with which we disagree with an outstretched hand and not a clenched fist. . . no matter what condemnation is leveled at this movement - you must respond with the spirit of love.”

He is none of the Bills I had guessed he would be.

Jimmy Carter gets up again and speaks of his hope that this is a beginning, but we can tell nne knows how to make this stick. The week’s events have come to a close and my new friend.

Michael and I are going to have a drink and talk about this momentous occasion. He doesn’t like the white music any more than I and is eager to leave.

“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

2/2, After midnight, back at the hotel.
“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

I run into some white Baptists at the hotel and we talk about the week’s events. I ask about the white music and I suggest there is most excellent white music out there. Beethoven, Bach, Handel – heck, all those guys wrote astonishing sacred music. Lots more recently, even Elvis did a hack of a job with church music. They explain “praise and worship” is intended to be simple so people can understand it and sing along. (Michael had said he thought it came about when churches became capitalist and sought to sell their music to the masses of believers.) These Baptists seem to think that the classics are too difficult to comprehend and perform (every city’s mass do-it-yourself-Messiah apparently notwithstanding) and folks like Elvis are too . . . I don’t know what. And gospel? I didn’t bring it up.

Closing thought on diverse Baptists coming together and bringing together everyone in this country: It’s the music, stupid.