Culture Watch
Pity is a distraction,
I’m too mean to die.
—Vassar Miller
Late at night, I was nearly asleep on the couch; the phone rang. Jay Leach, the Baptist minister from Houston. Did I remember him? In my grogginess, there was no mistaking his tone: At 74, Vassar Miller’s seemingly endless life had been eclipsed by a final silence.
Poet, self-taught theologian, disability advocate, and feisty woman—Vassar Miller’s life was a confluence of desire, hope, and dire suffering. Few writers have been so unfailingly honest and determined to chink from the bounds of American letters a place for themselves. Paradoxically, save the admiration of a dozen of our most respected poets, she went to her grave in virtual anonymity.
A poet who wrote predominantly in traditional forms, she was among a handful of post-war formalists who wrote on religious themes. When you consider this was during the height of the Beats and the Confessional poets, choosing to write in form was not an idle undertaking. To paraphrase poet and critic Hayden Carruth, to write a poem is an act of love; ergo, Miller wrote the poems that had to be written. Those who cherish finely crafted poetry about spiritual issues, the struggle to find one’s self amidst a mostly godless world, read Vassar Miller. Not just for her countenance, but for her unflinching attempts to name the experience of an invisible woman, as in "Meditation after an Interview":
I speak myself, and my name
is only smoke
and less than smoke.
Like so many big events of the digital age, the February shutdown of all those major e-commerce Web sites (Yahoo, E*TRADE, eBay, etc.) didn’t make much of a dent in my real life.
Yes, we have a computer and Internet access. But the computer is not in our house; it’s in an outbuilding we turned into an office. It’s only 20 feet from our back door, but those 20 feet, and a childproof lock on the door, are enough to separate our family’s real life from the virtual one. We unlock the door for specific work- or study-related purposes and lock it again when the job is done. The only exception is e-mail for far-flung family and friends.
As it happened, the day of the great Web meltdown was very cold, and I was out late with a night class. So I didn’t even walk those 20 feet to check the e-mail, much less fire up Yahoo in search of the latest TV and movie news. (Hey, for me that’s work-related!) When I finally did hear the news, the significance (dare I say justice?) of the event was plain.
Left historian Michael Kazin told The Village Voice that the e-commerce guerrillas are the direct descendants of Abbie Hoffman, and he was right. There has not been a more perfect symbolic, made-for-media political act since Hoffman and company dumped baskets of dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
As an activist in the girls’ movement and father of two girls, I’ve always known that far too many advertising images were bad for girls. In a brilliant and logical argument, author Jean Kilbourne makes the connection between the premises of advertising and the scourge of addiction. Denial is the most intractable symptom of addiction, and Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising is among the most potent interventions available for our addiction to advertising, consumerism, and the immoral ways in which our commercial culture so often undermines our integrity.
For years, Kilbourne has taken her powerful, funny, and life-changing presentations to college campuses, businesses, and the federal government. Now she has combined this huge mine of information, insight, and critique into one outstanding book.
As Kilbourne shows, we are what’s for sale. Media outlets aren’t selling products to us so much as they are selling us to the products’ manufacturers. It works—what industry would spend $200 billion annually on something that doesn’t work? All we have to do is read the pages of advertising’s trade journals, where we see media ads proclaiming "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free," or "We deliver Gen-X," or "One magazine delivers an audience spending $38 billion annually on American Express cards." It’s easy to see the underlying attitude that suggests that we use people as products and objects. This is the same mindset as pornography, and we are harmed in the same way by it.
In a country where Jesus’ words "the truth will set you free" are the mandate of a national commission, where forgiveness and reconciliation are not some vague religious ideals but national policy, it’s difficult to look into the lives of ordinary people and not find faith at work.
David Goodman, who traveled to South Africa in the dark days of apartheid in 1984 and then lived with his family for a year in the newly democratic republic in 1996-97, examines the dramatic changes in South Africa in Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa. He doesn’t set out to write about religion, but the church has left such indelible marks upon the South African landscape that he can’t help but touch on deep questions of faith.
The church played a key role in both the construction and the dismantling of apartheid, with Christians on opposing sides during the struggle. Now, in the process of national healing, Christians stand on either side of forgiveness, as victims asked to forgive their oppressors and as oppressors asked to repent of the crimes.
While the emphasis on truth telling and repentance, and forgiveness and reconciliation, highlights the positive influence of the church in South Africa, the church’s role in perpetuating injustice is central to the story of Wilhelm Voerwoort III. The grandson of H.F. Voerwoort, the architect of apartheid, Wilhelm made headlines when he forsook his family’s legacy of white separatism and joined the African National Congress. This conversion came at the end of a long journey for Voerwoort, who at one time wanted to become a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. He realized that apartheid was a brutal and unjust system while studying abroad in the 1980s. When he returned home, he realized his church had supported this injustice and kept silent about the atrocities committed by whites against blacks. He left the church and, consequently, alienated himself from his family.
Last year’s anti-World Trade Organization uprising was a reminder that there are detractors from the Pax Capitalista that currently placates some Americans with e-money and numbs others with the not-so-cheap thrills of day-trading. With unfettered consumption and development largely unchallenged, Seattle was one of those rare signs that this economic boom is leaving in its wake newly impoverished people and a devastated environment that has never been in worse shape.
All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, by long-time Native American activist Winona LaDuke, is another disturbing signpost. This book implicates the current boomtown mentality flowing through America and cautions us to learn new ways to live in harmony with the environment and with our neighbors.
LaDuke examines the often heroic struggles of indigenous communities in North America and Hawaii to regain control of their traditional lands and resist the onslaught of "development"—which is rarely aimed at improving life for America’s Native peoples, but very often comes at the expense of their land and resources.
There are close to 200 environmental groups based in Native communities, most of them, as LaDuke says, "underfunded at best and more often, not funded at all." In these small groups, which lack the cash of their mainstream counterparts in the environmental movement (who, as this book points out, have rarely proved to be Native people’s allies), LaDuke found Native environmentalists who "sing centuries-old songs to renew life, to give thanks for the strawberries, to call home fish, and to thank Mother Earth for her blessings."
Many Americans are treading into the 21st century riddled with spiritual trepidation. Women’s uncertainty is often shaped by gender issues wrought with difficult choices about where to stand in relation to their religious communities: Be silent? Be radical? Be a reformer? Be a dissenter? Mary Farrell Bednarowski argues that women’s ambivalence ought not be seen as negative, but as an emerging religious virtue.
Critics may counter that Bednarowski is putting a positive spin on a deplorable situation created by patriarchal systems of religious thinking resistant to change. By her own account, Bednarowski says many women speak of their traditions as an exercise in "inhaling contradictions" and relate to their communities as both insiders and outsiders. Caught in a web of tension, women describe their traditions as simultaneously life-giving and death-dealing, liberating and imprisoning.
If none of this sounds very virtuous, Bednarowski says that’s because ambivalence in any religious context is seldom seen through that lens. In popular usage, she says, "ambivalence connotes the lukewarm attitude, the wishy-washiness, the holding back from full commitment that religious communities preach against." But she contends that women’s ambivalence might be "cultivated" as a creative choice and, at the very least, looked upon as honorable. Creative ambivalence requires critical distance from one’s religious community, yet an appreciation for its deepest insights, Bednarowski says. Such communities often exclude women from positions of public authority and embrace religious symbols, rituals, and theology steeped in patriarchy. But ambivalence, she says, can summon forth women’s creativity and imagination, leading to new visions and perspectives drawn from tradition, experience, and the culture at large.
Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing is a wonk-world of pure imagination. It’s compelling, intelligent, fast-paced, and seductive.
NBC’s new Wednesday night poli-drama has the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) up in arms in response to episode two, when fictional president Josiah Bartlet (played with ego-centered magnanimity by Martin Sheen) wants to bomb Syria off the map for downing an unarmed U.S. Air Force jet. Says ADC president Hala Maksoud, "By creating a fictional story that blames a real nation and people for such a heinous crime, NBC has slandered an entire nation in the most unfair manner possible."
This episode, titled "A Proportional Response," shows the impact of Just War theory in limiting the military response of the powerful. The president is finally talked down by his chief of staff (played brilliantly by John Spencer), who reminds Bartlet that a more reasoned response "is what our fathers taught us." While it is a far cry from active nonviolence (activist-celeb Sheen’s preferred mode), it is nonetheless a sharp new architecture in the exurbs of network TV.
Sorkin, the creator of another talk-box hit, Sports Night, is known for his frenetic literary dialogue, quick quips, and tight emotional maneuvering. Perhaps his swill of choice, Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink, gives him the edge.
Emmy-winning director Thomas Schlamme sparks the small screen with a rich visual field. The Oval Office (thanks to visual consultant Jon Hutman) looks like the real thing. When Air Force One isn’t really Air Force One (and it often is), it’s a very good Virgin Atlantic 747 imitation. The deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) totes Elizabeth Drew’s current Beltway bible The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why under his arm.
As I drive to work each morning, a man who makes his home on the streets waves a palm branch in blessing over every car that passes under the bridge. I know that his hair is matted and his jacket is torn, but what really bothers me is that I can’t see his shoes. Normally, this wouldn’t have been my first concern, but in the recently released CD Justice and Love, Bryan Sirchio asks: "How does the love of God abide in you if you have this world’s goods and yet refuse to help someone in need?" I have more shoes than I need. Justice and Love urges me to wonder why I don’t give them to this man.
This is Sirchio’s seventh solo recording of his 10-year musical ministry and adds to a body of work that invites children, teens, and adults to participate in the joys and challenges of discipleship. An ordained minister who gave up the pulpit to put on the guitar, Sirchio preaches two sides of the gospel: seizing and nestling into a personal relationship with God while living the faith of personal responsibility to promote peace, end hunger, and eliminate poverty. To his fans, he writes, "I try to nurture a balance between songs which help us look inward and nurture the Spirit’s presence in our personal lives, and songs which call us beyond ourselves to reach out to this broken world with Christ-centered compassion and justice."
Sirchio reminds us that Jesus directed his followers to "follow me" 87 times. This call is not merely to acknowledge his existence or to believe, but to "follow me." This commitment does not include recreating Christ in our own ideological image but aligning life choices with the radical changes Jesus required of all his disciples. To Sirchio, following means acting upon a God-inspired voice that comes nagging in prayer, as in "There Really is a God," or while driving "Westbound on Interstate 80," where you might just hear God urging you to give your new sneakers to the man at the side of the road.