The Private Intellectual

The Private Intellectual
Ecclesiastes-Based Real Estate Advice

Friday, May 25, 2012

Decoration Day

I wrote an essay on Memorial Day for the Christian Century blog:

As a child in Wisconsin, I looked forward to Memorial Day for the family reunions. At full sail, with 20-odd aunts and uncles and all their kids, this became a considerable event, complete with dirt-bike riding, beer-fueled volleyball and lots of laughter.

Eventually I came to understand that Memorial Day is related to military service. My grandfather was a tail-gunner during World War II; he was shot down over the Aleutian Islands and again over German-occupied Europe. He was taken prisoner the second time and escaped the camp, crossing Allied lines a month before V-E Day.

These stories, which I knew only in their outlines, thrilled my boyish sense of adventure and swelled my sense of family pride (though my grandfather once got in trouble for giving my brother his service revolver, unloaded, to play with in lieu of a toy gun). Only later did I come to understand the more difficult meaning of Memorial Day.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 5:02 PM

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

No Satisfaction

I was of course not going to miss Mick Jagger's appearance on Saturday Night Live, and though one is always going to hope for a cameo by the full band, it didn't disappoint. All the same, the music did suggest a melancholy truth of Mick's, and the band's career.

In his memoir Keith Richards described, and presumably exacerbated, a decades-long rift between him and Jagger, and he did so while studiously avoiding any high roads. It was not a pleasant thing to behold, in the midst of an otherwise splendid tale, and I am accustomed to embracing virtually everything Keith does. Bill Wyman (not the bassist), writing in Slate, penned a clever, even moving response in Jagger's voice:

The second important thing is Keith's talent. We took it for granted, in a way, as he says. We felt it was our duty to get together and write a song, one good song each day we worked. He is kind to say I could take what he gave me and run with it. But he is the one who gave me the actual song to write the lyrics to. He wrote a dozen Top 10 hits in five years, and, after the band added Mick Taylor and essentially grew up, he wrote most of Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed. Again: What were you doing at 25? It's interesting to me how no previous song we'd recorded would have a respectable place on those albums; and any song on them would have seem out of place even on Aftermath or Between the Buttons. Keith's lurch forward was amazing. As a pure rock (not folk or pop) songwriter, I think he is not just without peer. I think he is unrivaled in depth and growth, from "As Tears Go By" to "Satisfaction" to "Jumping Jack Flash" to, I don't know, "Gimme Shelter. " "Monkey Man." "Street Fighting Man." The primal feel of the chording. The musicality of the intros and breaks. The innovation of the recording—cruder, no doubt, but I will argue far more emotionally powerful than the Beatles'. The winding, intermixed guitars he almost desperately loved. Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone? It is hard to use a word like integrity about a band as compromised, as self-bloodied, as we were. But for some years, unlike any other group, the Beatles included, we declared war on that silly, hypocritical, repressive, and arbitrary society in which we lived. The only ammunition we had were Keith's songs. The lyrics, I confess now, may have been in their defiance just épater la bourgeoisie and in their poesy derivatively Zimmerman-esque. Even when they weren't, no one would have paid attention if the chords weren't arresting, irrefutable. The songs spoke primarily through their music, not their words. Keith's doting fans nattering on about the ultimate avatar of rock 'n' roll authenticity irritate me, it's true; but he may to this day be underappreciated.

What I noticed about Mick's performance was not just the obvious: it was all Stones material, all from the sixties and seventies excepting his throwaway original blues song. More significantly, the songs he picked were either from that early period ("The Last Time," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "She's a Rainbow," "Ruby Tuesday") or a standard-tuning rocker from later on ("It's Only Rock n' Roll"). These are fine songs, and Mick can flick them out of the park without breaking a sweat when he's in front of a tight outfit like Arcade Fire or Foo Fighters. What was missing, what would always be missing, is the big open-tuned chords of that high period: "Jumping Jack Flash," "Gimme Shelter," "Street Fighting Man," "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," "Rocks Off," "Tumbling Dice." The mystery of these songs is all in the guitars, and more specifically in their tuning. They use tunings that Keith Richards mastered and that few, if any, standard-tuning guitar gods will touch. It's easy enough to imagine The Kinks or even The Beatles recording "The Last Time," but there is only one band that could have done "Jumping Jack Flash," and in fact there still is. No one can cover these songs without basically ripping their heart out by transposing them to standard chords.

And so the core of Mick's canon is, in effect, useless to him as a solo performer. The dilemma is even worse for Keith. His voice has a croaky charm, but after he blows through his own lead-vocal chestnuts and the early Stones R&B covers, usually with the help of a stronger vocalist, he can't go near the great stuff either. They are both so diminished when apart, both hugely talented but laboring in the shadow of a collaboration that long since soured. It's more painful and obvious even than Lennon and McCartney; they had been working separately for so long, and their instrumental talents were so dispensable, that a division of musical effects was pretty straightforward after the Beatles fell apart.

Reading Keith's book made me long for the Salman Rushdie of an earlier period, the kind of novelist who could do this story some justice. Two former schoolmates meet at a train station, become famous within months, and end up locked in an artistic and temperamental death-embrace that crosses decades and continents. Each man must be painfully aware--must have been for decades now--as he gears up to grace the world with a live performance, that the bulk of his output is either too routine to bother with, or too enmeshed with the other to attempt. It's hard to imagine that one more mega-tour, even preceded by another album, wouldn't be redundant as far as the music is concerned. Sure, there are some more deep cuts to be pulled out and some albums whose reputation could use a second or third of fourth look, but really: what matters is to hear those chords again, and that voice, together as they can't help but be.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:40 AM

Monday, May 21, 2012

Historical Slurs

My column for The Daily dealt with our abuse of the terms "medieval" and "puritan" as shorthand for stupidity, cruelty, and general uptightness:

We may admire Renaissance men, ancient wisdom or classical beauty, but the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of what we call modernity were home to nothing good in the eyes of most writers, liberal or conservative. It’s a rare point of rhetorical consensus across the political spectrum. “Puritan” has become a similar epithet. We may envy settler virtues, Yankee reserve or the genius of the Founding Fathers, but “puritanical” is only used, by both left and right, to scorn the moral views of an opponent.

The use of these bywords is an example of bipartisanship gone badly wrong. This curious historical smack talk is partly about religion. Since we think of both medieval people and Puritans as being defined by religion, it seems logical to see the religious anxieties of our own time reflected in them. But these words also illustrate how very foreign our own past has become to us, with consequences that go beyond scoring points in contemporary debates over contraception or foreign policy.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 10:06 AM

Monday, May 07, 2012

Toward a 'Slow Sex' Movement

My latest column for The Daily is online:

The connection between how we eat and how we love is evident in different religious traditions, but our politics has made it unnecessarily obscure. Concern about nutritious food for children, local systems of agriculture and consumption and “sustainable” methods is considered “liberal.” When Michelle Obama settled on obesity, a seemingly-apolitical area for a first lady to do some high-minded advocacy, Rush Limbaugh said she was trying to “tell everyone to eat twigs and berries and gravel,” promoting a right-wing backlash. By the same token, any hand-wringing about the prevalence of pornography, the culture of hooking up and the impact that both may have for the viability of long-term domestic relationships, is interpreted by lifestyle libertarians as prudish or patriarchal.

In terms of political tribalism, this distinction between concern for food and concern for sex is useful. American politics has always had a heavy cultural element, and a quick and easy way to galvanize your own side is to scorn the personal habits of people on the other — to mock their cars, their food, their domestic arrangements. Inasmuch as anxieties about food or sex are really stand-ins for our views about environmental laws or gender politics, they’re likely to be voiced by one electoral coalition more than another. But does it really make sense to pay attention to the integrity of our food while ignoring that of our intimate relationships, or vice versa?

Read the whole thing.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:10 PM

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Power, Hidden and Revealed

My review of the fourth volume in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson is online at the Washington Monthly:

There is, to put it simply, no one who writes modern American biography like Robert Caro (the closest analogue I know is the late T. Harry Williams, whose definitive biography of Huey Long is the only book I’ve read that bears comparing with Caro’s finest work). His books are researched with a detail that goes beyond meticulous. He recounts opening letters so long unread that they crumbled in his hands. He tracked down the forgotten people displaced by Robert Moses’ highway projects, slept out for days in Johnson’s Hill Country to get a feel for its isolation, found new, explosive details of the 1948 election forty years after it took place. They are sweeping social panoramas and chamber dramas, driven by decades-long historical developments and by individual character. They are operatic, tending toward brisk recitative passages of plot punctuated by grand arias of theme, written in a slightly anachronistic high style but tempered with a fiercely democratic moral grounding. Part muckraker, part bard, Caro has been guided by the intuition he felt in his study of Robert Moses, that Moses “could be a vessel for something even more significant: an examination of the essential nature—the most fundamental realities—of political power.”

Read the whole thing. I said a lot about Caro and Johnson, but I could have said a lot more. This book is magnificent.

Labels: lbj, robert caro

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 7:15 AM

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Redistribution of Wealth: It Happens

My latest article for the Christian Century is online:

“Redistribute My Work Ethic,” a bumper sticker recently exhorted those of us driving north on Chicago’s Tri-State Tollway. The slogan probably owes its existence to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign run-in with “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher (now Joe the congressional candidate), to whom Obama explained that all Americans benefit when we “spread the wealth around.” Obama’s off-the-cuff phrase—never to my knowledge repeated in an official campaign or administration statement—has spawned a whole rhetorical frame within which to attack the president’s policies. “Redistribute My Work Ethic” captures this conviction: government programs redistribute wealth from the hard-working rich to the lazy poor.

According to a Gallup poll, Americans are closely divided on whether government should redistribute wealth by way of “heavy taxes on the rich,” with Democrats much more favorable toward the proposition than Republicans and independents. This difference comes into play whenever Democratic politicians propose rolling back the upper-bracket tax cuts initiated by George W. Bush in order to pay for something, such as the payroll tax holiday, health insurance subsidies for the poor and middle class or food stamps. This division in popular opinion may be why the president rejects the “redistribution” label when promoting his policies.

But what poll respondents and disgruntled motorists don’t seem to appreciate is that redistributing wealth is what all public budgets do.

Read the whole thing, which may not end up where you expect it to.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:18 PM

A Time to Love, a Time to Hate
Elmhurst Diarist

On Sunday night I went to see Dan Savage speak about the It Gets Better Project at Elmhurst College's Hammerschmidt Chapel. The last time I saw him in person was 2003, if memory serves, in front of a crowd of perhaps one hundred at one of the downtown Borders locations. I went with my roommate, whose essay Dan was editing for The Stranger, and he took a break from promoting his new book Skipping Toward Gomorrah to refer his audience to the now-famous New Republic cover story "The Liberal Case for War" (against Iraq).

It was a good talk, funny and engaging, and it made a striking contrast with his Sunday appearance. The chapel was packed with well over a thousand people from all over the region and at least as far away as Champaign County. The heart of his talk was something much graver than his old book's subtitle ("The seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in America"), though not, in fairness, graver than the matter of invading Iraq. It was about how he came to start, with his husband Terry, the viral-video campaign to reach out to hurting, bullied, and suicidal LGBT kids with the message that their adult lives will be worth living. The column in which he publicly launched the project, in response to the suicide and subsequent post-mortem cyberbullying of a child in Indiana who was perceived to be gay, still makes for very moving reading. By his own account, Savage expected maybe 100 videos to be added to the one he made with Terry, enough to cover the demographic and geographic waterfront of LGBT life. The response was much faster and broader than he anticipated, and now the Youtube channel hosts well over 50,000 videos from all around the world.

On the subject of bullying, despair, and hope, Savage speaks very beautifully. His rage at the bullies and the cultures that enable them is obviously genuine, and even when he slips into demagoguery--as he does often and seemingly without thought--he does so with something that seems very much like innocence. I believe him when he reports that the It Gets Better Project has touched an even saved many lives. Who, really, would doubt it? Adolescence is hard enough, socially and in every other way, without the stigma of sexual or gender non-conformity. The brilliance of the IGBP is demonstrated by its obviousness in retrospect. The technology to do this has been around for a long time (though it has, in fairness, accelerated in the last very few years). The need is hard to miss. Yet no one thought to do it until Dan and Terry, and as a consequence the full-time sex-advice writer and part-time gonzo journalist became a cultural figure of considerable stature.

But the event, which was suffused with good feelings at first, took what struck me as some dark turns as it went on. There was a digressive tirade on the Pope that badly mischaracterized--in what has become an authorized account--his words in January about the family and the threats to it. Every public utterance by the Pope is recorded and put online, so anyone with a modicum of curiosity can read both the statement at issue and the prior statement it refers to. Now that's not to say that Benedict doesn't deserve criticism for the role of anti-gay-marriage advocacy in his papacy, but the fact that he never mentions same-sex marriage in the statement, and indeed is primarily referring to the economic developments that assault family life, might be noted. Instead, Savage spiraled into a harangue about papal words and intentions that were largely of his own imagining. And the crowd, which congratulated itself (incessantly and irritatingly) on its own broad-mindedness, jeered right along. There was an additional harangue about the Bible and slavery, which was totally uninformed and tediously moralistic. And when, during the dreadful Q and A, a few foolhardly conservative Christians decided to ask Savage some questions that challenged both his views and his conduct, he did not respond as befits someone standing on a podium at the head of a rapturously sympathetic crowd. To his credit, he did thank the last evangelical questioner for engaging with him in what he knew would be a hostile environment. "This was the lion's den for you," be acknowledged, and I appreciated that at least. It's not a necessary acknowledgement, however, when a speaker maintains an atmosphere of respect rather than of self-celebration.

In fairness, this is a lot to ask. Savage is right, in a sense, to point out that there's something of a double standard at work when people take him to task for his santorum campaign or for his stern words about conservative Christianity: that some people are allowed to say anything at all about gay people, even the most appalling slander, while gay people themselves are expected to respond with restraint and decorum. And Savage himself is just a human like anyone else--in his case, a somewhat thin-skinned and defensive human who seeks only total victory and annihilation rather than assent and conversion when he engages with an opponent. But I don't think that people with liberal convictions (that is, a commitment to fairness of process that people like Stanley Fish think is stupid and weak) should be satisfied with this sort of display. It's fair enough to criticize the Pope for things he actually says; making things up--and reading into one's made-up words the secret motives of the man's heart--is really unnecessary and, to use an old-fashioned and pious word, uncharitable. And I can't think of a single good thing to say about Tony Perkins, but to say that he revels in the suicide of gay teens is, at the very least, unsupported by actual evidence and at worst the sort of slander that no one would credit when aimed at oneself or one's allies.

The principle of charity that I am invoking here is not just a matter of manners and tactics. The Pope might be wrong about gay marriage, but he (and his predecessor) were right about the Iraq War when Dan Savage (and I) were very badly wrong. It is a little surprising how quickly Savage has embraced this unearned sense of sanctimony, given that he discovered life-saving activism all of nineteen months ago. A little humility is in order, for him like everyone else. The Bible says plenty of things that we don't easily understand and that we quite rightly reject today (leaving aside the rhetorical trick whereby a law commanding the stoning of non-virgin brides is used to abrogate a law commanding the stoning of people engaged in same-sex intercourse, which also no one wishes to enforce). But what will our society look like to the future if humanity manages to endure another 2,000 years? What will people think of meat-eating or wage labor or our utterly extravagant levels of resource consumption? No one stands at the pinnacle of history (well, there was one guy, but he got crucified). No one fully escapes the sins they so readily diagnose in others. We are obligated to temper justice with mercy not just because mercy is a virtue, but because we all end up needing it some day.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 2:06 AM

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Why the Church Matters

I got a little ticked off that everyone from Andrew Sullivan's headline writers ("Forget the Church. Follow Jesus") to Christian Piatt to post-everything evangelicals are so down on the "institutional church," so I wrote a column about it:

So why do churches still matter? For one thing, a church, or any religious community, is a sort of first responder to social problems. Churches have stepped in where housing policy has failed, providing badly needed beds for homeless people in the Chicago suburbs. Church professionals are front-line mental health care providers, usually intervening in family crises more quickly (and cheaply) than a therapist can. Churches are the major cultural institution for a lot of Americans, the only place we sing or play instruments or absorb something like a public lecture. They provide space for all kinds of hermit-crab community groups, from Alcoholics Anonymous to after-school tutoring. And they offer access to social capital to people whose schools and extended families aren’t as helpful as they could be. Churches are, for many people, the only place where they mingle on equal terms with those of different generations, economic classes or political ideologies (though we don’t mingle too much across racial lines, unfortunately).

Quite remarkably, these things tend to be true whether a church is “liberal” or “conservative,” whether it exists under a priestly hierarchy or an egalitarian lay leadership, whether its prominent figures wear us out with their position-taking or avoid the political arena altogether. This is not to say, as politicians like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have recently suggested, that churches can step in to replace the social safety net. But in their own small, often invisible ways, local churches do something that I am tempted to call radical in our segmented, individualistic society: They ask us to bear with one another.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Benjamin Dueholm | 9:36 PM