Month: March 2018

From the Archives:
Talking with a friend about intrinsic human worth, I was reminded of this piece from April, 2009

Is anyone in the US, or our once estranged mother Britain, so cloistered as to have missed Susan Boyle and her sudden collision with fame?

The matronly woman in her thrift shop dress and unkempt appearance seemed to the audience like a comedy act. The snickers were a manifestation of what may be a universal urge to revert to childhood superiority. Lets make fun of Susie Simple. The judges were bored. And then she sang a song so beautiful and powerfully sad, that the momentarily stunned assembly went berserk in adoration. She is a YouTube sensation.

What captivates her huge and and growing following is the contrast between expectation and result. Her biography amplifies the contrast. She was the youngest of nine children, growing up with a learning disability caused by oxygen deprivation at birth. She was odd looking to her classmates and had a hard time understanding school lessons, and so they made fun of her.

You can hear more than vocal talent as she speaks of her childhood. “The ones who were mean to me are now nice to me,” she said in a television interview. The statement is plain, and the context subtle, but it carries the pain of childhood torment. Childhood torment graduated to eventual adult eccentricity. One reviewer still jeers at this “unkempt cat-lady-person.”

Childhood pain so often transmutes into an adulthood path. The fork in the road offered by the world goes to bitterness or to selflessness. She cared for her ailing mother until death finally separated them. Her mom was 91. She has been singing in her church for years. She lives alone.

Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune remarks on the eerie resemblance between Susan Boyle and another woman she knows. “… unmarried, unemployed, overweight, bushy-browed, wiry-haired, eccentric. If you said frumpy, I would resent it but I would understand.” Schmidt’s sister also has a learning disability and knows what it is like to be an object of derision. The difference? Her sister is not redeemed by any talent that is recognizable to a mass audience. And so she remains unvalued to most.

We all know folks who would fit some sort of variation of that description, folks who carry the pain of rejection from the cradle to the grave. It is easy to talk of judging a book by its cover in retrospect, after some aspect of hidden content is added to the cover. The lesson is unlearned. Human value is still not intrinsic, but rather achieved by attribute or earned by talent.

Susan Boyle is presented to us as a broken down reject, a castaway bit of humanity, who suddenly revealed a reason for us to value her after all. An ugly duckling turned beautiful swan.

Susan Boyle is a fraud. For she was beautiful all the time.

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

I’ve looked into their eyes at protests.

I’ve listened to them dispense filth at campaign rallies.
I’ve watched them leverage megachurch pulpits and political seats and social media platforms.

They’ve been helping me.
They’ve been making it impossible to forget why I feel the way I feel about them and people like them owning weapons.

Sometimes they’re anonymous—unleashing their verbal venom from behind the protective wall of fake Twitter handles and bot accounts.

Sometimes they’re professional browbeaters like Dana Loesch and James Woods and Wayne LaPierre and Ben Shapiro; siccing their massive followers on grieving teenagers and distraught parents and mom’s activist groups.

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

The March For Our Lives march/movement has gotten a very special response from pro-gun RW voices–personal attacks against the leaders of the movement, who also happen to be kids who have endured a traumatic event in the form of the school shooting, and are not just working through the grieving process of having lost people, but doing so with courage, thoughtfulness and purpose in a very public way.

Some of these wretched excuses for public comment, such as these comments put out by an NRA spokesperson:

“To all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment at your march on Saturday, I wish a hero like Blaine Gaskill had been at Marjory Douglas High School last month, because your classmates would still be alive and no one would know your names, because the media would have completely and utterly ignored your story, the way they ignored his,” Noir said.

…treat these young people as if they are opportunists who were just looking for the right occasion–like the murder of their friends–to become “famous”. (The individual, Blaine Gaskill, did not actually stop the shooter at Great Mills High School, it turns out–and the presence of resource officers don’t always act as a deterrent to the murder-minded, because individuals who intend to kill people don’t necessarily seek out “gun-free zones”–they seek out the people they mean to kill, and often have no expectation of their own survival.) It’s fine to wish someone had stopped Nikolas Cruz before he murdered 17 people, but it’s something else to suggest this tragic event simply gave these young activists a “story” or that the media gave them a platform that they have no right to. What happened was tragic, it was their experience, and it is their right to tell their own story, and not have it taken away from them because it doesn’t agree with someone else’s political views.

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From the Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Hours after an armed teacher in a Northern California classroom fired a gun and injured a student, the head of the National Rifle Association proposed placing a second armed teacher in every classroom, to shoot the first armed teacher before he or she can do harm.

“Had there been a second armed teacher in the classroom to shoot the first armed teacher, this regrettable incident would never have occurred,” Wayne LaPierre said.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

An interesting article appeared in the Washington Post. In Being empathetic is good, but it can hurt your health, Jennifer Breheny Wallace reports:

Empathy — the ability to tune into and share another person’s emotion from their perspective — plays a crucial role in bringing people together. It’s the joy you feel at a friend’s wedding or the pain you experience when you see someone suffering.

It’s an essential ingredient for building intimacy in relationships, says Robin Stern, associate director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. “When someone feels seen and heard by you,” she says, “they begin to trust you.”

But this seemly positive emotion can also have a downside, particularly if someone gets so consumed by another’s feelings that they neglect their own feelings and needs. Stern says those who regularly prioritize others’ emotions over their own are more susceptible to experiencing anxiety or low-level depression. [emphasis added]

Another researcher quoted in the article, Jamil Zaki, offers, “Being supportive of those we care about is among our most cherished and important roles, but it’s also one that’s fraught: We want to be there for someone but not lose ourselves.” [emphasis added]

If this sounds like a [partial] plug for rational selfishness, you’d be right in my view. I think what these people have in mind is rational selfishness, although not necessarily consciously. Also not mentioned is the term altruism. But that’s what Wallace has in mind—again, probably not consciously—when she talks about when “someone gets so consumed by another’s feelings that they neglect their own feelings and needs.” Self-neglect is exactly what altruism demands. And rational selfishness is what Zaki has in mind when he urges us “not to lose ourselves.”

Of course, altruism saps one’s self-esteem, as well. In fact, lack of self-esteem is probably a deeper, “root” cause of the anxiety and depression.

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A President taking seriously his duty to protect the nation:

Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From James Wigderson:

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says there is no longer a home for Catholics in the Democratic Party.

“The ‘big tent’ of the Democratic Party now seems a pup tent,” Dolan wrote.

Dolan, a former Archbishop of Milwaukee, points to two issues, school choice and abortion, that are pushing Catholics away from the Democratic Party, if not into the Republican Party that Catholics once distrusted.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Hebrews 11 goes on to detail what these people of faith supposedly faced as earthly voices of the one true God:

Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions. Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

I say supposedly, because there’s no evidence outside of the Bible for these things actually happening. Believing them to be true requires faith. And that’s the essence of faith: believing without evidence. Now intellectuals among the faithful love to argue that their faith is reasonable, but I find their arguments unpersuasive. Is it reasonable to believe a man who was cruelly executed on a Roman cross resurrected himself from the dead three days later? Is it reasonable to believe that this same man was born of a virgin, turned water into wine, walked on water, walked through walls, teleported out of the midst of a crowd, healed blindness with spit and dirt, and fed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread and even fewer fish? Of course not. Believing these things to be true requires faith, a faith that rejects what we know objectively to be true. We know that virgins don’t have babies, water can’t be turned into wine (though my wife wishes this were true), people can’t walk on water or walk through walls, blindness can’t be healed through spit and dirt, and it’s impossible to feed five thousand men, and an unspecified number of women and children with five loaves of Wonder Bread and two perch filet. (Now, Jesus teleporting out of a crowd without being seen; that’s possible. SYFY channel, people. It’s all real.)

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From Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice:

I have long believed that Donald Trump would not fire Robert Mueller despite his on-again, off-again threats to do so because saner heads would warn him that the collateral damage would be great. But most of the saner heads have left the building, including much of his legal team, and the president’s behavior has become so maniacal as he starts a trade war, threatens a hot war, undermines the FBI and reaches out to Fox News for fresh West Wing blood to suck on, that I am no longer so sure. Which begs a very big question: What happens to the special prosecutor’s wide-ranging investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the collusion of the Trump campaign and candidate himself if he gets the ax?

Here are some things to consider:

* By law Trump cannot fire Mueller and it would fall to a Justice Department subaltern, so the question becomes who would pull the trigger?

A new acting attorney general is the best guess since AG Jeff Sessions has recused himself and, it is my belief, would resign if Mueller is summarily dismissed, as most certainly would Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller in the first place and has shown flashes of independence in defending the special prosecutor’s work.

It would fall to the new AG to decide how vigorously — or even whether — to continue the Russia investigation, and whether to appoint a new special counsel. In any event, a Mueller successor would do Trump’s bidding.

* The Republican congressional majority will stay on the right side of Trump and the wrong side of history, so who will push back if Mueller goes?

You can’t turn around in this mess without bumping into Watergate analogies, but 1974 was then and 2018 is now, and while Richard Nixon faced congressional fortitude and a public outcry, today most GOP congressfolk and many senators are abject cowards and Trump doesn’t give a damn about what people beyond his base think.

Technically, congressional oversight (such as it is) related to the scandal would remain. State prosecutions, which are immune to Trump’s near absolute right to pardon perps for federal crimes, would proceed.

* But without the full force of a federal investigation, isn’t it likely that all of Mueller’s work — including those 19 indictments — will come to naught?

Hypothetically, yes. But there two very big wildcards, one of which is the 435 House seats being contested in the 2018 midterm elections. That will have a clarifying effect on some Republicans, who already are in an uphill fight to keep control of the House and would find it difficult to campaign on all of Trump’s accomplishments (sic) when they are constantly on the defensive.

Democratic candidates, with the wind of public opinion at their backs, would have a potent weapon in crying obstruction, corruption and cover-up, further hurting GOP chances to hold onto the lower chamber.

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