Like, Socialism

by Hendrik Hertzberg November 3, 2008

Text Size:

Small Text

Medium Text

Large Text

Print E-Mail Feeds

Keywords

2008 Election;

Obama, Barack (Sen.);

McCain, John (Sen.);

Socialism, Socialists;

Economy;

Politics;

Palin, Sarah (Gov.)

Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist.

“This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.)

As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies.

The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.”

On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .
MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist. ♦

I am thinking of writing a novel from this.

Sketches

for

And Here We Have Them

1.

Fountain Park is on the southwest corner of the intersection of Neponset street and Venice Avenue. The fountain in the middle, the one we named it for, has a pixie dancing or standing on one foot spitting a continuous stream skyward, filling a small, ever-overflowing cup. The pool the cup overflows into has lights that change colors. We spent most nights sitting on the benches that lined the fountain's perimeter, the lights casting tones of pink and blue and green across our faces. Sometimes we smashed the lights with golf clubs or our fists and it was dark. There are trees strategically placed through the park so that cops can see from one side to the other without stepping from their squad cars. In the winter, Christmas lights tangled with the branches and moss. For some of us, they were the only thing that set the holidays apart from the rest of the year. During the years we spent at Fountain Park, we never saw anyone put the lights up or take them down. They appeared with the first winter storms and were gone shortly after the New Year.

Futureman and Handsome Jack were brothers and the park's keepers. Their Aryan faces and statuesque physiques gave the group an authority. Their parents had abandoned them when Futureman was 17 and Handsome Jack was 16. They had been homeless for two years; that was how they started hanging out at the park— bathing in the fountain and sleeping in the shadowed corners. They were there from the beginning.

If you spent any amount of time there, they gave you a nickname. Sprinkles was a fag, self proclaimed and proud of it. We were cool with it. Mad Dog Palmer didn't drink—never had—but when people were drunk around him he broke everything in sight. Sandman could fall asleep anywhere. Many nights we left him curled up and trembling on the park bench asleep. When Sandman's parents had asked him where he slept when he didn't come home he told them, "HJ and Futureman's house."

Juice Box was half black but his biological father had died of a cocaine overdose when he was 4 and he was raised by his mother's new husband, a white catholic man who broke his Megadeath tapes and wouldn't let him watch horror movies. There were always Juicy-Juices in their refrigerator. Mercitron was Juice Box's best friend. He worked at the humane society but didn't talk about that much. He was named after the machine Dr. Kevorkian used. For Christmas one year, Juice Box made Mercitron a shirt that said: My Best Friend is Half-Nigger, and insisted he wear it. So Mercitron made Juice Box a shirt that said: Half as Black and Just as Stupit (sic). Stink Finger had dreadlocked Juice Box's hair one time and his hands had smelled like dirt for a month afterwards. They had given names, but those given were not representative of who they were, or so we all felt.

The closest I got to a nickname was Mundy because I was normal by their standards. My parents were still together and by all accounts they seemed to care about me. I was friends with people outside of our group, too, football players and surfers and girls. I was seen as gregarious and that hurt. There were a bunch of others that came and went but the ones that mattered were always around for the good stuff.

It was summer and I had just turned 15, just lost my virginity to a twenty-year old cashier from the grocery store in a lifeguard stand. I was full of anger that had no roots—just dull, blunt convictions, unstructured ideals. The world was undressing before me, spreading its legs and begging me to take advantage of it.

2.

I was working at the coffee shop across the street from The Park, Grinders—a little kitschy place owned by a coke-head from Colorado named Kristine. I was closing up solo one night and heard what sounded like people wrestling on the roof. I was and am still not one to pursue possibly threatening situations, so I just minded my own business and locked the door, ready to get home. I saw someone standing in the middle of the intersection—a shadow under the sepia street-lamp— holding a tennis racquet like a bat, screaming at the roof to “fucking shoot it already!” I looked to the roof just in time to see who I would come to know as Handsome Jack and Mad Dog holding their arms straight forward, stiff, as Mad Dog cocked the water-balloon launcher back. In an instant the launcher snapped, the ball made a sort of sick thud and the kid in the intersection staggered three steps back and crumpled, like his bones had been pulled out, in the middle of the road.

The ball rolled a few feet away from me. I picked it up and went to see if the kid was alright. It was Sprinkles. Before I could get to him, the kids from the roof had already scrambled from the building, laughing violently, and were trying to pick him up. He woke up, confused and wobbly, stood up and said, “I’m going home.”

3.

I got off work one night and they were all standing around holding golf clubs with a bag full of tennis balls. Mercitron had taken the balls from the humane society. Most animals that entered through the door of the humane society were euthanized. Kittens and puppies, some that had not opened their eyes yet, dissolved from the inside out by a blue liquid. He had worked there for years and watched the balls pile up, apparently donated by local country clubs. The balls, used once, were unworthy of the no-doubt stellar level of play the senile World War vets were capable of. The tennis players surely felt like good Samaritans in their white tennis skirts and polo shirts. Unfortunately, Mercitron said, the dogs would kill each other if you threw a ball into the pack.
The boys were hitting the balls into traffic. None of them had ever golfed, but they were doing a pretty good job. Lined up in the middle of the intersection, they would wait for the light down the block to turn green and all hit in unison. The sound of tires screeching meant a direct hit and sent the group diving behind the benches, falling over each other, laughing.
A little later on, after we had gotten bored and put the tennis balls away, one of the local cops came by on a tip that kids had been hitting golf balls at cars.
"You boys wouldn't know anything about that would you?" he asked.
"They were tennis balls," Juice Box said. "And no, I have no idea what you're talking about."
After the cop drove off we dumped the remaining balls into the middle of the intersection and watched cars run them over, sending them flying all over the streets. The gutters were littered with barely-used tennis balls for weeks.

4.

It must have been the end of winter when I bought the second water-balloon launcher because the Christmas lights had been taken down. The first one broke while we were trying to shoot a bowling ball at an abandoned car. So I bought a new one. We shot oranges and rocks and the stale, left over muffins that Kristine's let me take home with me. Handsome Jack found a dead bird and shot it at an ambulance as it streaked by. Futureman got the idea that he wanted to feel what it was like to get shot with it. So we bought water balloons. Actually, Mad Dog stole them. They seemed safe enough. We filled a balloon up half way (accuracy and the object's size were inversely related) and Futureman walked down the street about fifty yards. I wasn't very good at shooting the damn thing so I sat on the bench and watched. Handsome Jack and Stink Finger held the handles out while Juice Box aimed and shot it. The balloon was red. I couldn't tell you the color of the building across the street, but oh! that ruby balloon, sailing through the air, tumbling over itself, distorted by the momentum, moving just slow enough for Futureman to realize that he did not want anything to do with it. He tried to jump out of the way but it caught him in the thigh with enough force to send his legs out from underneath him, his entire body horizontal. He landed on his side and was laughing and crying when we got to him. His thigh had a bruise that looked like the aurora borealis, all purple and green.

5.

Futureman, Sprinkles and I were sitting on the bench running out of things to talk about. Futureman stood up without saying anything and left. We figured he was going to find Handsome Jack and make him buy some food. However, twenty-minutes later he showed back up and sat down. He didn't say anything, just sat back down, no explanation. I didn't really care until he pulled something out of his pocket and started tapping it on the bottom of the bench, tap tap tap. I asked him about a girl he had talked into sleeping with him earlier that week. Sprinkles laughed and said it never happened. Futureman took the small object that he had been taunting us with, tap tap tap, which turned out to be a hunting knife, and stabbed Sprinkles in the thigh. Sprinkles didn't scream or yell—he hardly moved—and then blood started to soak through his pants. He asked Futureman to borrow his knife. Futureman obliged, knowing Sprinkles wouldn't try to stab him back. Sprinkles cut the bottom of his pants off and tied it around his thigh. Then he got up and said "I'm going home."

6.

The fireworks stand usually only showed up for business the week before the 4th of July but that year it just stayed there. Most of the group was over 18 and could sign the safety waiver themselves. The few of us who were not had to have our parents come down and sign it with us. I don't remember exactly what the waiver said, something about using them exclusively for warning and emergency flares or for herding cows. After he got to know us and realized that we were using them as weapons, he started giving us tips. We came in, one at a time usually, not wanting give away our supply list to the others, and he would tell us what the guy before us bought, making us think we had an edge on the crew, not realizing that he was selling us all the same stuff.
"You’re going to have to do better than that," he would say. "I forget his name, the big blonde kid. He got a fuck-load of Saturn Missiles and Roman Candles. Be careful, you boys are in for it." So the arms race escalated and that made life good for everyone: he stayed in business and we set the block surrounding the park on fire.

Once, we were sitting on the benches, pretending to exist somewhere outside the world that surrounded us, talking about 80's action movies probably, or existentialism, or the nature of specific superheroes sexual encounters—I honestly don’t remember. Handsome jack was smoking a cigarette and pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket. He broke the stem in half and stuck it in his mouth alongside the cigarette. The fuse sparked and snaked towards his lips, sending us all diving from the bench. He didn't even flinch as the rocket shot from his lips and burst inches from his lap.

Incidents like this were commonplace and hell always broke loose afterwards. Cars got burned. Our fingers turned gunpowder grey. We bought novelty butane lighters that looked like guns and spent the majority of our time making small cannons to shoot bottle rockets out of, decorating them with slogans like "death from above" and "show no mercy." The conflicts were not exclusive to the park. They happened in our homes, at school and, once, in the grocery store. We did this for two years and during that time we rarely slept well or took a shit in peace, knowing damn well that someone was bound to slip a firecracker under our pillow or a handful of bottle rockets or Black Cats under the bathroom door.
We were talking politics. Handsome Jack was lighting a cigarette with an entire book of matches.
"People are too dumb to be free," he said.
"You think?" I asked. "Wait, what do you mean?"
"People are too dumb to be free. What do you mean, 'what do I mean?'" He threw the matches down onto the brick where a group of weeds were crawling through the cracks, setting them on fire. The rest of the group had been playing dice on the next bench over and stopped to watch the sprouts burn.
"I guess you're right." I said.
"I'm always right." He exhaled the drag he had taken, pulled a bottle rocket out of his pocket and threw it into the burning weeds. The whole group scattered, running to their cars for cover and ammunition.
That night the cops showed up again. When they did, we were spilt on both sides of the road, shooting roman candles at each other—a sort of irresponsibly beautiful Civil War reenactment. I don't remember exactly who was there. I know Juice Box and Sandman were there. Handsome Jack and Futureman, for sure. Some other hangers-on’s were around, as well. So the cops make us stand up against the cars and ask us a bunch of questions like: "do you have any 'street names', or, 'are you affiliated with any gangs?'." Juice Box just started listing shit off: " I go by: T-Bone, Juice Box, Bone Henge, Terrence of LeBonia, T-Bot, RoBot, Race Trader, Half Breed. Do you want me to keep going?" Somewhere in the interrogation Sandman convinced the cops that we were rival gangs. I think he called the two gangs "The Locusts" and "Heaven's Devils," or something cliché like that. Eventually they gave up and wrote us warnings. Come to think of it, we never really got tickets for anything. Juice Box got one, kind of.
7.

Juice Box would tell us that he was half-black but that his dad was a nigger. His dad had beaten his mom, abused him and died of a cocaine overdose before Juice Box was old enough to really know him. It didn't seem to affect him. In fact, the only times it was brought up was in joke form. And it was effective.

One night a homeless man walked up to the group. Juice Box was playing guitar and Handsome Jack was singing, making up shit as he went along, and we were all dying. The man was drunk and filthy. He asked for money and, when no one gave him any, he called us niggers. He said, "this whole fucking town" was "nothing but niggers." Still singing, Juice Box laid him out with the guitar, catching him above the eye with it. The man dropped. Just slumped down and stayed there. We ran to our cars and left. It was the first time I had ever been really scared. It was serious and we knew it. None of us went to the park for a couple of weeks at least. We never saw him before that night and we never saw him again.
8.

So, about Juice Box's ticket. There was a parade down Venice Avenue one night that went right by the park. The streets were flooded with white hair and beach chairs. The smell, a mix of aging flesh and artificial florals, was overwhelming. Juice Box was standing on the sidewalk kicking around a hacky-sack and a cop on a bike came by and told him to get out of the way. Juice Box just stood there, staring. Again, the cop told him to move. Nothing.
"If you don't get out of the way I am gong to write you a ticket," the cop said.
"For what?" Juice Box asked, balancing the hacky-sack on his knee.
"Blocking pedestrian traffic."
"Really? You can do that.?"
"I will be back in a minute and if you haven't moved I'll be forced to write you a ticket."
"For blocking pedestrian traffic? Wait…..you're on a bike. You're not a pedestrian." The cop smiled and pulled out his pad. Juice Box walked up to and then behind him, looking over his shoulder as he wrote the ticket.
"What's your name, son?"
"Juice Box Lebonia," he whispered in the cops ear.
"Can I see some ID?"
"You now I am not going to pay this, right?" he said, handing the cop his license.
"What you do with it is your business." he said, handing him the thin pink and yellow copy of the carbon paper.
"I guess that's true." He took the paper from the man's hand and tore it in half, then in half again, dropping the pieces at the officer's feet. He threw the hacky-sack in the air and continued juggling.
9.

But sometimes the cops were not all bad. One time Sandman locked his keys in his car and we convinced him that the cops were required to help you get into your car. He called bullshit, but eventually he flagged down a cop who was patrolling the area. It was a woman cop and she seemed quite taken with Sandman's flowing blonde hair and bronzed skin. She told him that one of the other officers on duty was a wiz at B and E, so she called in a request. Minutes later there were four cop cars surrounding Sandman's car, all with their lights on. The officers stood around giving Sandman tips on how to get in, offering little tools that they had in their patrol cars. Sandman thought it was hilarious. We were all sitting on the benches, across the street in the park.
"Hey Juice Box!" Sandman yelled. The cops all turned their attention in the direction where Sandman was yelling. "You're half black. You should have been in and out of this motherfucker already!"
"You're right, man. But I would have just thrown a brick through it."
10.

Another time, early winter, I remember, we were playing hackysack in the middle of the intersection in front of the park. The season's first cold front was passing through and the town was silent, save the wind. A cop showed up, lights showering the block in blue and red as the autumn ended above us, the temperature dropping as the wind screamed through the empty streets. He got out of the car and walked towards the group who pretended he was not there.
"Pass me the rock," he said.
We let it fall at our feet, as confused, dumb silence buried us. He stepped into the circle, picked up the hacky-sack and began juggling it deftly with his boots. Everyone stared blankly as the small uniformed man kicked the sack to Mercitron who twitched out of his trance and volleyed it back.
"You got skills, copper," Juice Box said.
"Word," he responded. A few minutes later another squad car passed us and he pretended to be reprimanding us, pointing his finger and shouting.


At times, looking back, it seems High School never happened. I wasn't a part of it. I was at the Park and that's all I remember when I think of those years. I graduated High School in 2002, a semester early, hoping to move to California. The night before I left, I stopped by the Park to see everyone and say goodbye. Most were in attendance: Juice Box, Handsome Jack and Futureman, Mercitron, Stinkfinger and Mad Dog. Sprinkles had moved by then, with his mom, I think, to Key West. It made sense, really. We had all recently taken a group field trip to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding a uniform that the group could wear, something identifying, obvious, something flamboyant. We had settled on black-vinyl (women's) vests and spray painted "Park Posse" on the backs in safety orange. We were all wearing the vests and Juice Box was trying to get hit by a car on his bicycle. He ended up running into a station wagon that had come to a stop at the intersection, sending him sailing over the handlebars into a Pete Rose-slide across the hood. The woman driving panicked and sped off, the mulatto daredevil still laid across the front, trying to jump off the hurtling grocery-getter. I walked over to him, lying on the side of the road laughing. I kicked him lightly in the back and extended my hand to help him up. He slapped it and smiled. I looked back at everyone sitting on the bench, smiling our way, burning under the sodium arc lamp.

The End Of An Era

by George Packer

Step back a moment from the robocalls and the Biden gaffes and the Valentino jacket to take in the history being made as we watch. I don’t mean the likelihood of a black American President, though that’s mind-bending enough. I’m referring to the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America.

The conservative movement was driven by the single unifying idea that government is the problem, not the solution. It attained and kept power through the highly successful political strategy of dividing the country into the hard-working, America-loving, God-fearing majority and the minority of élitist liberals who wanted to tell the majority what to do. What’s happened to that idea and that strategy over the past few weeks?

When Obama told an Ohio plumber on camera that his tax plan would take some money from the rich and give some back to the middle- and working-class, the McCain-Palin campaign got very excited—they finally had the key to turning the race around. Since then, the Republicans have been talking about Joe, socialism, and spreading the wealth around at every turn. Did Obama begin to sink in the polls, as pundits predicted? Was Dick Morris finally going to get something about this election right? No, Obama rose—and even on taxes he’s preferred over McCain. Like Democrats running against Herbert Hoover well into the 1970s, the Republican campaign still thinks it’s 1980. But it turns out that in 2008 voters can actually imagine worse things than tax rates on upper incomes returning to their Clinton-era level.

What about Republican strategy, which still wakes Democrats up in the middle of the night—the devastating invocation of Bill Ayers, terrorists, real Americans, small-town values, Hollywood, and (on the fringes of the McCain-Palin campaign and Fox News) the spectre of a Muslim President destroying the country from within? Even right-wing commentators have been begging the campaign to drop this line of attack—not because they disapprove, but because it isn’t working. If anything, it’s dragging McCain’s numbers down and driving moderate Republicans and Independents toward Obama. A Republican congresswoman from Minnesota deployed the strategy at its most unvarnished on national television, and the Party has had to desert her. Who can blame Michele Bachmann for being dumbfounded? It was always O.K. when it was successful.

As for Palin, the incarnation of red-meat, know-nothing Christian nationalism, she turns out to be McCain’s single biggest mistake. The Republican Party’s immediate post-election future will be a bloody struggle over Palinism. It’s already started at National Review online, where the growing hysteria of the posts signals that the roof is falling in on conservatism. Everything that worked for forty years has suddenly not just stopped working, it has become self-defeating. Republican candidates, strategists, and pundits are like witchdoctors who keep repeating the old incantations over and over, their voices rising in furious shock, to no effect. That’s the sound of an era ending.

Posted by George Packer

In

• Interesting Times
• | Campaign 2008

"Salvation" by Langston Hughes

This piece is from Hughes memoir "The Big Sea"



"Salvation"

By Langston Huges

I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen. But not really saved. It happened like this. There was a big revival at my Auntie Reed's church. Every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying, and shouting, and some very hardened sinners had been brought to Christ, and the membership of the church had grown by leaps and bounds. Then just before the revival ended, they held a special meeting for children, "to bring the young lambs to the fold." My aunt spoke of it for days ahead. That night I was escorted to the front row and placed on the mourners' bench with all the other young sinners, who had not yet been brought to Jesus.

My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. I believed her. I had heard a great many old people say the same thing and it seemed to me they ought to know. So I sat there calmly in the hot, crowded church, waiting for Jesus to come to me.

The preacher preached a wonderful rhythmical sermon, all moans and shouts and lonely cries and dire pictures of hell, and then he sang a song about the ninety and nine safe in the fold, but one little lamb was left out in the cold. Then he said: "Won't you come? Won't you come to Jesus? Young lambs, won't you come?" And he held out his arms to all us young sinners there on the mourners' bench. And the little girls cried. And some of them jumped up and went to Jesus right away. But most of us just sat there.

A great many old people came and knelt around us and prayed, old women with jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work-gnarled hands. And the church sang a song about the lower lights are burning, some poor sinners to be saved. And the whole building rocked with prayer and song.

Still I kept waiting to see Jesus.

Finally all the young people had gone to the altar and were saved, but one boy and me. He was a rounder's son named Westley. Westley and I were surrounded by sisters and deacons praying. It was very hot in the church, and getting late now. Finally Westley said to me in a whisper: "God damn! I'm tired o' sitting here. Let's get up and be saved." So he got up and was saved.

Then I was left all alone on the mourners' bench. My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices. And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting - but he didn't come. I wanted to see him, but nothing happened to me. Nothing! I wanted something to happen to me, but nothing happened.

I heard the songs and the minister saying: "Why don't you come? My dear child, why don't you come to Jesus? Jesus is waiting for you. He wants you. Why don't you come? Sister Reed, what is this child's name?"

"Langston," my aunt sobbed.

"Langston, why don't you come? Why don't you come and be saved? Oh, Lamb of God! Why don't you come?"

Now it was really getting late. I began to be ashamed of myself, holding everything up so long. I began to wonder what God thought about Westley, who certainly hadn't seen Jesus either, but who was now sitting proudly on the platform, swinging his knickerbockered legs and grinning down at me, surrounded by deacons and old women on their knees praying. God had not struck Westley dead for taking his name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that maybe to save further trouble, I'd better lie, too, and say that Jesus had come, and get up and be saved.

So I got up.

Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air. My aunt threw her arms around me. The minister took me by the hand and led me to the platform.

When things quieted down, in a hushed silence, punctuated by a few ecstatic "Amens," all the new young lambs were blessed in the name of God. Then joyous singing filled the room.

That night, for the first time in my life but one for I was a big boy twelve years old - I cried. I cried, in bed alone, and couldn't stop. I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me. She woke up and told my uncle I was crying because the Holy Ghost had come into my life, and because I had seen Jesus. But I was really crying because I couldn't bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody in the church, that I hadn't seen Jesus, and that now I didn't believe there was a Jesus anymore, since he didn't come to help me.

Sometimes we show our true colors.

America the beautiful, in all its glory.

More politics.

I am sure that many of you caught the final debate last night. I am also sure that, hopefully, you were as blown away by Obama's eloquence and equally by McCain's lack thereof. It is interesting seeing McCain's anger overshadow his deceitful tact and manipulation of language. Here is a wonderful peice by James Woods on the politics of language.

Verbage

The Republican war on words.

by James Woods Oct, 13th

Related Links

“After America,” by Ian Buruma

“On the Bus,” by Ryan Lizza

“The Conciliator,” by Larissa MacFarquhar

Keywords

Republicans;

Words;

Republican Party;

Language;

Obama, Barack (Sen.);

Wordsmiths;

2008 Election

In recent elections, the Republican hate word has been “liberal,” or “Massachusetts,” or “Gore.” In this election, it has increasingly been “words.” Barack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has “authored” two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: “I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an élitist who worked with words.” The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama “just a person of words,” adding, “Words are everything to him.” The once bipartisan campaign adviser Dick Morris and his wife and co-writer, Eileen McGann, argue that the McCain camp, in true Rovian fashion, is “using the Democrat’s articulateness against him” (along with his education, his popularity, his intelligence, his wife—pretty much everything but his height, though it may come to that). John McCain’s threatened cancellation of the first Presidential debate was the ultimate defiance, by action, of words; sure enough, afterward conservatives manfully disdained Barack Obama’s “book knowledge.” To have seen the mountains of Waziristan with one’s own eyes—that is everything.

Doesn’t this reflect a deep suspicion of language itself? It’s as if Republican practitioners saw words the way Captain Ahab saw “all visible objects”—as “pasteboard masks,” concealing acts and deeds and things—and, like Ahab, were bent on striking through those masks. The Melvillean atmosphere may not be accidental, since, beyond the familiar American anti-intellectualism—to work with words is not to work at all—there’s a residual Puritanism. The letter killeth, as St. Paul has it, but the spirit giveth life. (In that first debate, McCain twice charged his opponent with the misdeed of “parsing words.”) In this vision, there is something Pharisaical about words. They confuse, they corrupt; they get in the way of Jesus.

But we all need words, and both campaigns wrestle every day over them. Words are up for grabs: just follow the lipstick traces. For days, the McCain camp accused Obama of likening Governor Palin to a pig, because he likened a retooled political message to a pig with lipstick. Eventually, McCain (who had previously described Senator Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan as a pig with lipstick) was forced to fudge. No, he conceded, Senator Obama had not called Governor Palin a pig, “but I know he chooses his words carefully, and it was the wrong thing to say.” This was instructive, not least because it sounded like implicit praise: maybe I don’t choose my words very carefully, but he does, so he should have chosen them more carefully.

Meanwhile, the campaign that claims to loathe “just words” has proved expert at their manipulation, from reversals of policy to the outright lies of some of its attack ads (“comprehensive sex education”) and the subtle racial innuendo of a phrase like “how disrespectful” (used to accuse Obama of making uppity attacks on Palin). Karl Rove—along with predecessors like Lee Atwater and protégés like Steve Schmidt—long ago showed the Republicans that language is slippery, fluid, a river into which you can dump anything at all as long as your opponent is the one downstream. And, to be fair, those who affect to despise words have been more skillful than their opponents not just at amoral manipulation but at the creation of what Orwell called “a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech.” Pit bulls and lipstick stuck for good reason.

• from the issue
• cartoon bank
• e-mail this

Or take McCain’s slogan “The Original Maverick,” now attached to many of the campaign’s ads. It cynically stipulates that politics is just merchandise, by sounding as close to a logo or a brand name as possible. But it also understands that consumers trust brands that sound like “quality.” Thus “Original,” which has the reassuring solidity of something like “Serving Americans of discernment since 1851,” or, indeed, “Levi’s 501: Original Jeans.” In such formulations, “Original” means eccentric, strange, unusual, and also first, best, belatedly copied by others. Better still, the phrase sounds like the tagline from a movie poster; not for nothing has McCain taken to announcing that “change is coming soon, to a district near you.”

If Obama is the letter (words, fancy diplomas, “authored” books), then the latest representative of the spirit is Sarah Palin. Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was “writing the difficulty”—that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that “Americans are cravin’ that straight talk,” but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor—not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: “I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.” And words do matter, after all: it matters that our Vice-Presidential candidate says, as she did to Gwen Ifill, that “nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all-end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.”

Hearing her being interviewed by Sean Hannity, on Fox News, almost made one wish for a Republican victory in November, so that her bizarre locutions might be available a bit longer to delve into. At times, even Hannity looked taken aback; his eyes, slightly too close to each other, like the headlamps on an Army jeep, went blank, as if registering the abyss we are teetering above. Or perhaps he just couldn’t follow. The most revealing moment happened earlier, when she was asked about Obama’s attack on McCain’s claim that the fundamentals of the economy are sound. “Well,” Palin said, “it was an unfair attack on the verbage that Senator McCain chose to use, because the fundamentals, as he was having to explain afterwards, he means our workforce, he means the ingenuity of the American people. And of course that is strong, and that is the foundation of our economy. So that was an unfair attack there, again, based on verbage that John McCain used.” This is certainly doing rather than mere talking, and what is being done is the coinage of “verbage.” It would be hard to find a better example of the Republican disdain for words than that remarkable term, so close to garbage, so far from language. ♦

Sam Harris discusses the disater that is Sarah Palin

Harris is the author of two amazing books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, both which extrapolate the true evil that is religous influence on politics, morality and science, among other things. I highly recommend them to anyone concerned with the future of humanity, or who enjoys destroying the feeble-minded arguments of Christians, Jews, Muslims and republicans.

This Newsweek piece is sure to turn some heads:

When Atheists Attack

A noted provocateur rips Sarah Palin—and defends elitism.

Sam Harris

NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.

Consider the Lobster

The news of David Foster Wallace's suicide struck a nerve. Wallace was the most talented, perhaps the only talented writer to come out of the last 15 years. His fiction, humor-filled essays and non-fiction are exhausting, humbling, achingly funny and written so precisely that it forces me to reevaluate my minimal talents as a writer. I recently decided to take on the Everest size leviathan that is Infinite Jest. So far, it is amazing. My friend Brian called him a "sentence artist" and that is certainly the case.

Here is a piece he did recently for the New Yorkertitled "Good People". It is written with such intimacy.

Good People

by David Foster Wallace

They were up on a picnic table at that park by the lake, by the edge of the lake, with part of a downed tree in the shallows half hidden by the bank. Lane A. Dean, Jr., and his girlfriend, both in bluejeans and button-up shirts. They sat up on the table’s top portion and had their shoes on the bench part that people sat on to picnic or fellowship together in carefree times. They’d gone to different high schools but the same junior college, where they had met in campus ministries. It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. There were bees, and the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark. There had been more storms that week, with some downed trees and the sound of chainsaws all up and down his parents’ street. Their postures on the picnic table were both the same forward kind with their shoulders rounded and elbows on their knees. In this position the girl rocked slightly and once put her face in her hands, but she was not crying. Lane was very still and immobile and looking past the bank at the downed tree in the shallows and its ball of exposed roots going all directions and the tree’s cloud of branches all half in the water. The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright. Looking at the torn-up hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over. It was still early yet and all the shadows wheeling right and shortening. The girl wore a thin old checked cotton shirt with pearl-colored snaps with the long sleeves down and always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love. Lane Dean had liked the smell of her right away. His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways. The shallows lapped from different directions at the tree as if almost teething on it. Sometimes when alone and thinking or struggling to turn a matter over to Jesus Christ in prayer, he would find himself putting his fist in his palm and turning it slightly as if still playing and pounding his glove to stay sharp and alert in center. He did not do this now; it would be cruel and indecent to do this now. The older individual stood beside his picnic table—he was at it but not sitting—and looked also out of place in a suit coat or jacket and the kind of men’s hat Lane’s grandfather wore in photos as a young insurance man. He appeared to be looking across the lake. If he moved, Lane didn’t see it. He looked more like a picture than a man. There were not any ducks in view.

One thing Lane Dean did was reassure her again that he’d go with her and be there with her. It was one of the few safe or decent things he could really say. The second time he said it again now she shook her head and laughed in an unhappy way that was more just air out her nose. Her real laugh was different. Where he’d be was the waiting room, she said. That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought every time he went and said it—it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden at all. The worse he felt, the stiller he sat. The whole thing felt balanced on a knife or wire; if he moved to put his arm up or touch her the whole thing could tip over. He hated himself for sitting so frozen. He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing past something explosive. A big stupid-looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon. The whole last black week had been this way and it was wrong. He knew it was wrong, knew something was required of him that was not this terrible frozen care and caution, but he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He pretended it had no name. He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings. He also worked dock and routing at UPS, on top of school, but had traded to get the day off after they’d decided together. Two days before, he had awakened very early and tried to pray but could not. He was freezing more and more solid, he felt like, but he had not thought of his father or the blank frozenness of his father, even in church, which had once filled him with such pity. This was the truth. Lane Dean, Jr., felt sun on one arm as he pictured in his mind an image of himself on a train, waving mechanically to something that got smaller and smaller as the train pulled away. His father and his mother’s father had the same birthday, a Cancer. Sheri’s hair was colored an almost corn blond, very clean, the skin through her central part pink in the sunlight. They’d sat here long enough that only their right side was shaded now. He could look at her head, but not at her. Different parts of him felt unconnected to each other. She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right; he was hanging in there. She was a year older, twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way that age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew what it is she wanted, which was nursing and not an easy program at Peoria Junior College, and plus she worked hostessing at the Embers and had bought her own car. She was serious in a way Lane liked. She had a cousin that died when she was thirteen, fourteen, that she’d loved and been close with. She only talked about it that once. He liked her smell and her downy arms and the way she exclaimed when something made her laugh. He had liked just being with her and talking to her. She was serious in her faith and values in a way that Lane had liked and now, sitting here with her on the table, found himself afraid of. This was an awful thing. He was starting to believe that he might not be serious in his faith. He might be somewhat of a hypocrite, like the Assyrians in Isaiah, which would be a far graver sin than the appointment—he had decided he believed this. He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good. He rarely before now had thought of damnation and Hell—that part of it didn’t speak to his spirit—and in worship services he more just tuned himself out and tolerated Hell when it came up, the same way you tolerate the job you’ve got to have to save up for what it is you want. Her tennis shoes had little things doodled on them from sitting in her class lectures. She stayed looking down like that. Little notes or reading assignments in Bic in her neat round hand on the rubber elements around the sneaker’s rim. Lane A. Dean, looking now at her inclined head’s side’s barrettes in the shape of blue ladybugs. The appointment was for afternoon, but when the doorbell had rung so early and his mother’d called to him up the stairs, he had known, and a terrible kind of blankness had commenced falling through him.

He told her that he did not know what to do. That he knew if he was the salesman of it and forced it upon her that was awful and wrong. But he was trying to understand—they’d prayed on it and talked it through from every different angle. Lane said how sorry she knew he was, and that if he was wrong in believing they’d truly decided together when they decided to make the appointment she should please tell him, because he thought he knew how she must have felt as it got closer and closer and how she must be so scared, but that what he couldn’t tell was if it was more than that. He was totally still except for moving his mouth, it felt like. She did not reply. That if they needed to pray on it more and talk it through, then he was here, he was ready, he said. The appointment could get moved back; if she just said the word they could call and push it back to take more time to be sure in the decision. It was still so early in it—they both knew that, he said. This was true, that he felt this way, and yet he also knew he was also trying to say things that would get her to open up and say enough back that he could see her and read her heart and know what to say to get her to go through with it. He knew this without admitting to himself that this was what he wanted, for it would make him a hypocrite and liar. He knew, in some locked-up little part of him, why it was that he’d gone to no one to open up and seek their life counsel, not Pastor Steve or the prayer partners at campus ministries, not his UPS friends or the spiritual counselling available through his parents’ old church. But he did not know why Sheri herself had not gone to Pastor Steve—he could not read her heart. She was blank and hidden. He so fervently wished it never happened. He felt like he knew now why it was a true sin and not just a leftover rule from past society. He felt like he had been brought low by it and humbled and now did believe that the rules were there for a reason. That the rules were concerned with him personally, as an individual. He promised God he had learned his lesson. But what if that, too, was a hollow promise, from a hypocrite who repented only after, who promised submission but really only wanted a reprieve? He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself. He kept thinking also of 1 Timothy and the hypocrite therein who disputeth over words. He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted. This was the truth. All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include it—the word—for had he once said it, avowed that he did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were praying and deciding on together. Sometimes they had prayed together over the phone, in a kind of half code in case anybody accidentally picked up the extension. She continued to sit as if thinking, in the pose of thinking, like that one statue. They were right up next to each other on the table. He was looking over past her at the tree in the water. But he could not say he did: it was not true.

But neither did he ever open up and tell her straight out he did not love her. This might be his lie by omission. This might be the frozen resistance—were he to look right at her and tell her he didn’t, she would keep the appointment and go. He knew this. Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values, could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have. He didn’t know why; he just could not do it, or even pray to do it. She believed he was good, serious in his values. Part of him seemed willing to more or less just about lie to someone with that kind of faith and trust, and what did that make him? How could such a type of individual even pray? What it really felt like was a taste of the reality of what might be meant by Hell. Lane Dean had never believed in Hell as a lake of fire or a loving God consigning folks to a burning lake of fire—he knew in his heart this was not true. What he believed in was a living God of compassion and love and the possibility of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through whom this love was enacted in human time. But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.

When he moved his head, a part of the lake further out flashed with sun—the water up close wasn’t black now, and you could see into the shallows and see that all the water was moving but gently, this way and that—and in this same way he besought to return to himself as Sheri moved her leg and started to turn beside him. He could see the man in the suit and gray hat standing motionless now at the lake’s rim, holding something under one arm and looking across at the opposite side where a row of little forms on camp chairs sat in a way that meant they had lines in the water for crappie—which mostly only your blacks from the East Side ever did—and the little white shape at the row’s end a Styrofoam creel. In his moment or time at the lake now just to come, Lane Dean first felt he could take this all in whole: everything seemed distinctly lit, for the circle of the pin oak’s shade had rotated off all the way, and they sat now in sun with their shadow a two-headed thing in the grass before them. He was looking or gazing again at where the downed tree’s branches seemed to all bend so sharply just under the shallows’ surface when he was given to know that through all this frozen silence he’d despised he had, in truth, been praying, or some little part of his heart he could not hear had, for he was answered now with a type of vision, what he would later call within his own mind a vision or moment of grace. He was not a hypocrite, just broken and split off like all men. Later on, he believed that what happened was he’d had a moment of almost seeing them both as Jesus saw them—as blind but groping, wanting to please God despite their inborn fallen nature. For in that same given moment he saw, quick as light, into Sheri’s heart, and was made to know what would occur here as she finished turning to him and the man in the hat watched the fishing and the downed elm shed cells into the water. This down-to-earth girl that smelled good and wanted to be a nurse would take and hold one of his hands in both of hers to unfreeze him and make him look at her, and she would say that she cannot do it. That she is sorry she did not know this sooner, that she hadn’t meant to lie—she agreed because she’d wanted to believe that she could, but she cannot. That she will carry this and have it; she has to. With her gaze clear and steady. That all night last night she prayed and searched inside herself and decided this is what love commands of her. That Lane should please please sweetie let her finish. That listen—this is her own decision and obliges him to nothing. That she knows he does not love her, not that way, has known it all this time, and that it’s all right. That it is as it is and it’s all right. She will carry this, and have it, and love it and make no claim on Lane except his good wishes and respecting what she has to do. That she releases him, all claim, and hopes he finishes up at P.J.C. and does so good in his life and has all joy and good things. Her voice will be clear and steady, and she will be lying, for Lane has been given to read her heart. To see through her. One of the opposite side’s blacks raises his arm in what may be greeting, or waving off a bee. There is a mower cutting grass someplace off behind them. It will be a terrible, last-ditch gamble born out of the desperation in Sheri Fisher’s soul, the knowledge that she can neither do this thing today nor carry a child alone and shame her family. Her values blocked the way either way, Lane could see, and she has no other options or choice—this lie is not a sin. Galatians 4:16, Have I then become your enemy? She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all the long week’s thinking and division had even so much as occurred—why is he so sure he doesn’t love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? What would even Jesus do? For it was just now he felt her two small strong soft hands on his, to turn him. What if he was just afraid, if the truth was no more than this, and if what to pray for was not even love but simple courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?♦

Breezy weekend, all points East.

This weekend I will be breaking in my 6'10 Mayo Mid-Life Crisis. Hard body in the shorey all hurricane season.

The youngest Goggans shows us up!

My sister has been a busy little bee in Florida. It seems every time I talk to her she has something fantastic up her sleeve. She is going to shows, meeting curators from famous art galleries, starting school newspapers, getting involved in debates and political campaigns or just chilling hard with my pops at the homefront. Here is the youngest of the Goggans squad with the two other legs of the aptly coined "tri-pod" chilling with Joe Biden in SRQ. She is a mover and a shaker. She has her eyes set on the five boroughs Jack and I call home and I know she will get here on her own accord. And when she does, damn NYC, watch out!

Updates.

Our time has gladly come to an end at this bug infested bundle of toothpicks that our landlord "Mr. Schwartz" calls a home. We are moving! Juicy Terror got a pad in the dirty 'Wick, while Jack, Pete, my man Corey Uhl, Lemon Rimbaud and I found a ground floor, luxury apt. on Bedford and Myrtle, just a short walk from our pad here. We sign the lease and get the keys on Friday and you can certainly bet we will be there very shortly after that.

School starts next tuesday for all of us. I am certain that all of us are happy to see it as all of us have been feeling less and less like the productive youngsters we came here to be.

Unfortunately (I guess), I will be missing the first week of school. I am heading to the Dominican Republic to work on a film with Jeremy Dean and the New York Surf Film Festival. We shoot two days in NYC and then are in DR from Wednesday till Saturday. Hopefully I will be able to break in two of my fresh Larry Mayo hand-shaped sleds.


On another note, Juicy and I just destroyed some of these delectable morsels:

Welcome to the Family!

eSeveral variables have led to me being unable to update this blog. One of them is a new addition to the Goggans clan. World, meet Lemon Rimbaud Goggans. Lemon, meet the world.

Vote The Environment

Patagonia sent my friend Scott Robinson and I to Camden, New Jersey to spread some consciousness at Jack Johnson's show. Patagonia is running a campaing called "Vote The Environment". We are registering voters and encouraging them to research the candidates voting records on environmental issues.

Jack came out and chatted with us for a bit. He was rocking a T. Moe Sprout shirt and seemed as down to earth as his agents might hope.

Camera is broken

sorry for the lack of updates. My camera got stepped on by thine own foot.