Pondering the toppling
of mountain ranges
and the excoriation
of plateaus
so as to feed
the alchemy
of manganese
cobalt
nickel
and lithium
seasoned in our feed
with the avarice
of algorithms
tailored to our insatiable need
to deliver unabridged
another minute’s update
on our status.
Stumbling toward an abyss
haunted by the murmurs
of an earlier debacle
unassuaged
by assurances
that the ropes and rails
will hold
(haven’t they always?)
so we should hold
we are told
our suspicions
and trust
that our fathers’ deliberations
will deliver us
a landing
on a ledge of thin air.
Before this rock
shatters
into shards of
hornblende and silicon,
before this stream
evaporates
or salinates,
you and I will be
mere whispers
of past consciousness,
scatterd traces
of carbon and calcium.
As day breaks
amid the frosted veins
of blood and gold
tracing the leaves
of past due books
with stories still left untold
even below the fold
scattering
before the whims
of a recalcitrant wind
born of an autumn’s retrenchment.
At streamside the archivist sighs
Sifting pebbles and tracing the fault lines
Aware of and oblivious to
The cacophony upstream
Knowing the course of the underlying story
Depends less on the turbulence
Than the tectonics of shifting plates
And the vicissitudes of arctic ice.
When Jesus stood up in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, and read from the Isaiah scroll, his aim was not to sooth the consciences of the first century Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloombergs, or Jim Waltons. He rose to preach good news to the poor, recovery to the afflicted, liberation to those held captive, and freedom to those oppressed.
He did not relent or equivocate on any of this during his three years of ministry leading up to his crucifixion. The message he kept pressing home in his encounters and through his parables was consistent: love God, and love your neighbor, unconditionally. That has become an increasingly fragile and unheeded call in this hyper polarized,
Civil discourse, attentive dialogue, and open minds—let alone open hearts—are endangered species in our social and political arenas. Our agora has been vacated for cells and closets where we nurse grievances, cultivate conspiracy theories and manufacture zero sum propositions—less for you is more for me.
All manner of explanations have been offered: social media algorithms bent toward antagonism, diffusion of shared norms in an increasingly multicultural and multiethnic society, shift of news media from reporting toward more commentary and analysis, an enduring gun culture and fixation on violence, and an erosion of reasoning and deep reading skills. Subsuming all of these is the profound economic inequality that has pervaded American society over the past three decades, and the confusion, resentment and depression it has engendered.
During the post World War II economic expansion, from 1948 to the early 1970s, when GDP more than doubled, the top marginal personal income tax rate stood at 90 percent in the 1950s and then shrinking to 70 percent in the 1970s. The gap between what executives made and workers made was fairly narrow: in 1965 the pay ratio was 20 to 1. But over the past three decades that gap has ballooned. The CEO to worker income ratio stands now at 300 to 1. Even the pandemic hasn’t dented it much. Coca Cola’s CEOmakes 1600 times as much as the typical Coca Cola worker. Further fueling the inequality crisis is the tax code that is weighted more toward wage income than earnings derived from capital. Shell companies, trusts, real estate and investment loopholes are all ways that the wealthy avoid paying taxes. If your income is almost entirely from investments—stocks, bonds, real estate—as it is for most of the top CEOS, then your major tax liability is the capital gains tax which tops out at 20 percent, but because of the loopholes the actual tax paid by those owning 1 percent of the nation’s wealth runs from 1 to 4 percent.
The rich just keep getting richer, while lower and middle income households watch their prospects for financial security diminish under a regressive tax code and salaries and wages that barely keep pace with inflation. The supply-side shift in economic policy by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, touted to float all boats, mostly floated those of the wealthy.
The disproportionate gains of the wealthiest Americans were also clear in the 2017 tax cut legislation engineered by the GOP. Personal rates were cut for all income levels by 2 to 4 percent, but sunsetted for 2025. Some reductions were made permanent though: reduction of the corporate rate to a flat 21 percent, and doubling the amount shielded from estate taxes. Along with adding $2.289 trillion to the nation’s debt, the bill fell well short of generating GDP growth to offset the tax revenue loss. Corporate investment in the economy—translating to more hires, and higher wages—never materialized. Businesses instead plowed the tax savings into stock buybacks, executive bonuses, and debt pay down.
Four years on, even with the Democrats in the driver seat, the chances for significantly reducing income inequality are fading. The “soft” infrastructure bill has shrunk from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion, and along the way has dropped Medicare dental and vision coverage, permission for the Federal government to negotiate drug pricing, and free community college. The planned wealth tax on unrealized capital gains is also gone, limiting the revenue source to surtaxes on income exceeding $10 million (affecting 16,000 tax payers), a minimum 15 percent tax on large corporations, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, and a 50 percent minimum tax on corporate foreign profits, which analysts are skeptical will be enough to cover the cost. With all this whittling over the months amid rising inflation, it is still uncertain whether Democratic moderates (basically Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) will back the bill without being assured it will pay for itself.
Even pared down the Build Back Better bill would be a game changer for the working class. Universal free pre-K, extended child tax credit, expanded Medicaid, and construction of 1 million affordable homes. But will it be enough, assuming it passes, to wean blue collar and rural voters from their infatuation with Trump and the identity politics smokescreen thrown up by the GOP, and convince them to embrace this New Deal, one that truly has the capacity to tilt the prospects for a better life to their advantage?
In this era of profound institutional distrust, who is willing to make that leap of faith? Neither the one percenters nor those striving to make ends meet appear eager for an overhaul of the engine driving our economy and driving our expectations for a fulfilling life. One fears losing ground in a scheme weighted against their welfare; the other fears losing the opportunity to gain more ground on a field tilting to greater inequality. Who faces the greatest risk? Who has the most to lose?
In the Gospel of Matthew we learn of the rich man, who claiming to have followed all the rules, asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus challenges him to choose between two kingdoms, two ways of living: self serving or self sacrificing. “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
What of the existential and quintessential question, what is art? Setting aside, for the moment at least, the facile option of “like pornography you know it when you see it,” I believe there are traits or markers that can be separated out from purely subjective notions and responses.
The difficulty is that art, almost by definition, is on the part of the artist quite personal and subjective. It is that person’s response (discounting the works produced by cats and elephants and similar endeavors) to his or her experience of something or someone, in their environment or outside it. It may be as spare as painting a black canvas or recording stillness in a pitch black room; or as extravagant as the installation of 3100 blue umbrellas in a valley in Japan. as Christo did the late 1980s. It is both expression and reception; exhibition and private prospecting. An audience can be empowering, gratifying, and essential to continued creation, but not always. Any number of poets, Emily Dickinson being the exemplar, have expressed themselves without a public or publication.
But if art is understood as an interaction or encounter between artist and viewer or listener or toucher, then an audience’s role in determining whether a creative work is art, and its power as art, is critical.
Must art be intentional? The pachyderm exercise notwithstanding, is a red maple leaf on a stone fence art? Or a pattern of aspen leaves on still water? Or the iridescent hues of a gas stain on wet pavement? On a garden path bordered by nepata, northern sea oats and coreopsis, we remark about the artful arrangement. And we may also do so crossing an alpine meadow or noticing reflections among lakeshore rocks. Is the difference in intention or outcome? If you believe in a Creator or universal force, then the meadow and lakeshore groupings in your view are just as intentional and uplifting as the perennials lining a garden path.
An audience, and for that matter an artist, may be critical to assessing something to be art, but outside our perception, or experience, or assessment, is it art? Or from a different angle, is art, as a principle, law, state, or force, reliant on our perception, participation and analysis? The paintbrush and columbine in that alpine meadow are in an arrangement by opportunity and environmental suitability, not so much design (except in the larger sense of creative processes being part of a universal design or intent). Temperature, humidity, viscosity, and electromagnetic attraction all play a part in determining the design of a snowflake, but outside our perception is this geometric rendering art? And if it is, then does art exist independent of our reception or perception? And going further, can there be art without an artist?
The ripples of the Great Recession have redistributed lives and dreams on unfamiliar shores, and forced the castaways to forge new social networks as a matter of survival. Makeshift shelter encampments, abandoned apartment buildings, shanty towns, and homeless shelters are destinations for many set adrift by the financial crisis. Some, though, land in more promising terrain, such as an RV campground outside Boise, Idaho.
Of the 224 sites in this campground, nearly half are occupied fulltime by single adults and families. Some are here because they like the lifestyle–the intimacy of mobile row houses if you will–and others because it is the next best choice after foreclosure or eviction. Greg, a middle-age guy with a three-legged pit bull, has been here for three years and expects be here for at least three more. He is the campground’s unofficial handyman, helping new arrivals set up their units and helping neighbors with the myriad issues of a second-hand trailer or motorhome. He just recently bartered for a porcelain toilet that he installed in his own unit. Now he just needs to find a water heater and a refrigerator.
This campground is more like a mobile home park, in that the units are here for the long term, even those kept here for weekend use by local residents. With just a dozen feet separating the units, connections and relationships develop more quickly than in a traditional mobile home park, not to mention the typical subdivision. Adversity may bring people together, particularly in alien settings; but shared circumstances and concerns seem to be more powerful in forging social networks. The people in this RV park carry on their lives in pretty much the same size lots and with the same limits and privileges. The trailers and motor homes may vary in size and amenities, but they all share the common characteristic of being homes on wheels.
America is a country wedded to change. We renew or replace, or refashion or reinvent our assumptions and aesthetics continually. Our culture is transitory, and in this RV park, and others like it, people can land for a day , a week, a month, or years to repair their lives, companion with others, and entertain the hope of something better down the road.
While 2010 was the year of the mall flash mob, 2012 seems to be the year of the mall shooter. Both are planned but also impulsive acts intended to startle and amaze. Only with radically different motives and outcomes. One is about joy and the other terror; one delivers hallelujahs, the other a hail of pain and grief. One is an exercise in disdain and defiance; the other a symphony of harmony and concord. This impulse to interrupt, or disrupt, custom and convention seems to be firmly embedded in our cultural genome. How do we encourage the one tendency that is about affirmation and communion, and discourage and disarm the other which is about rejection and division?
The question presses more urgently with yesterday’s news of the carnage in Connecticut where a gunman ended the lives of 20 children under age ten and seven adults, before taking his own life, a scenario that mirrors so many other mass attacks, including last Tuesday’s shooting spree in a Portland, Oregon mall. This slaughter of the innocents compounds and confirms the slaughter of our innocence. Bewildered by the incongruence of gunfire in a suburban mall, or school, or temple, everyone joins the chorus asking, Why? A question not easily answered, and one which may be unanswerable for any one of these senseless acts.
In 2007 Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life. Cho had been diagnosed as suffering from anxiety disorder, and accused of stalking fellow VT students. And yet was able to purchase two semi automatic pistols. In his rambling 1800 word manifesto he mailed to media outlets between his two assaults at Virginia Tech, Cho claimed to have been forced into a corner and crucified, leaving him only one option.
Less than a year later, another torrent of bullets at another college campus, by another unbalanced student taking a number of lives including his own. In this case Northern Illinois University in DeKalb where Stephen Kazmierczak killed five students and faculty before turning his gun on himself. When he entered the lecture hall where an oceanography course was in session, Kazmierczak was wearing a black T shirt emblazoned with the word Terrorist superimposed on the image of an assault rifle, and brandishing three semiautomatic pistols, a knife, and a 12 gauge Remington Sportsman shotgun concealed in a guitar case. A 2006 graduate of NIU, Kazmierczak was described by NIU police as a “fairly normal” and “unstressed person,” at least during his time as an undergraduate student. A month before the shootings, Kazmiereczak enrolled as a graduate student in the University of Illinois at Urban Champaign’s school of social work. And in the weeks that followed he stopped taking the medication for his depression. Mystified by his actions, his girlfriend told reporters that “he was anything but a monster” and said she found him to be “probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”
Just four days before the killing of the innocents in Connecticut, Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, released his demons in the Clackamas Town Center mall in Happy Valley, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, through the barrel of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. A hospice nurse, and a small business owner died, another woman was seriously injured. Not surprisingly, everyone was shocked that such a normal person could commit such senseless acts. A friend described him as “a very loved individual,” one who appeared to have “great intentions and a heart of gold.”
Using a semiautomatic handgun, Wade Michael Page this past August killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, before being wounded by police and taking his own life. A former U.S. Army psychological operations specialist, Page was involved in the white supremacist movement and was active in several Neo-Nazi bands. Though no one mentioned him having a heart of gold, a neighbor of Page’s in Cudahy, Wisconsin, said he was “stunned” by the news, and though noting Page was upset over a recent breakup with his girlfriend, he did not seem angry, said the neighbor.
Then there was last July when James Eagan Holmes entered an Aurora, Colorado theater and allegedly killed 12 people and injured 58 others during a premiere of the Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. The guns used in the shooting included a 12 gauge Remington Express tactical shotgun, a Smith and Wesson M&P15 semiautomatic pistol, and a Glock22 semiautomatic pistol. The 24-year old former graduate student in the University of Colorado’s neuroscience program surrendered to the police behind the cinema, reportedly claiming to be “the Joker.” His attorneys have stated he is suffering from mental illness.
We as a society seem to be suffering from some form of mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, or at least a denial that we are seriously disordered. Seven mass shootings in five years across the country is not the rare exception of a sound society, nor simply the expected cost of a society reshuffling its economy and socio-political order. Something is seriously amiss, and it is getting worse, not better.
In the aftermath of the gunfire, the gurneys and the memorials, we keep asking why, not so much as a question as an exclamation. With a tragedy this horrifying and far-reaching, who can answer such a plea other than God? And what would or could God say that would suffice?
When a tsunami snuffs out over 200,000 lives around the Pacific basin, the epic scope of the loss implores us to question how God could allow such destruction to occur. But we don’t question the causes or motives of the event as those are quite clear, the subduction of tectonic plates, or the collision of warm and cold fronts. The question we pose to God is not why or how it happened, but why God let it happen.
We ask that too when the social compact is torn or shattered by acts of violence, but too often leave it at that, knowing this query into theodicy is unanswerable.
Answers are available though, if we reword the question, turning it away from God and focusing it on ourselves, our families, our communities, and our institutions. We may not know what mix of reason and delusion drove these disturbed individuals to pull the trigger, reload, and keep on pulling. But we can discover and define the conditions that set them on this course.
Are we needing better monitoring of persons with mental health disorders? Probably. Could our efforts at treating mental health disorders benefit from more research and funding? Definitely. Should we be doing more to address racism and hate crimes? Very much so. Would better security provisions at schools and public venues help? Probably. Could our regulations on selling and licensing firearms be strengthened? Ideally, yes.
But something more fundamental needs addressing: how we understand, or fail to understand, ourselves as interdependent and mutually responsible members of civil society. We have so much work to do in this regard.
Alienation and polarization are infecting nearly every level of our political discourse, and undermining our civic and familial relationships. Cooperation and compromise are disregarded by our governors and legislators in favor of brinkmanship and self-righteousness, ostensibly in defense of a greater good, but in actuality the good is less about principle than principality. What began 400 years ago on the shores of Virginia and Massachusetts as a covenant community has become an association of independent contractors, beholden not to a common wealth but to their own self interests.
In a culture forged out of the violent assertion of human rights and liberty, the qualities of courage, self-reliance and sacrifice have mutated through the dissolution of various social compacts to the point that what we herald and express are corruptions of these principles. Antipathy, egocentrism, intolerance, and narcissism are really what are playing out in our boardrooms, our dorm rooms, our playrooms and our bedrooms.
On almost every level of our social intercourse, good will has been supplanted by self will, both by accident and design. And the cost incurred is fists and bullets flying not only on Chicago street corners or in Colorado movie theaters, but along expressways with outraged drivers, at checkout counters, health clinics, church services, and far too often our living rooms and bedrooms.
Before Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed himself in the Chiefs training facility parking lot, he shot and killed his girlfriend at their Kansas City home. Before Adam Lanza entered the Sandy Hook elementary school, it appears he shot and killed his mother at her Newtown home. Before we can solve the shortcomings in security processes and firearms control, we need to address the shortcomings in how we understand and support healthy relationship. Equal attention must also be given to our reverence and appetite for violence, institutionally and interpersonally. For every Wounded Knee and Thibodaux, there are a thousand counterparts on our playgrounds, in our classrooms, in our meeting rooms, on campaign platforms, in food courts and video arcades, around our kitchen tables and inside our bedrooms. H. Rap Brown famously declared during the 60’s race riots and police actions “that violence is as American as cherry pie.” But that doesn’t mean we have no recourse to continue eating that pie. We can choose an alternative.
Dr. Drew Pinsky, the well known addiction specialist who operates the Pasadena Recovery Center, gave his diagnosis to CNN yesterday: “Someone going purposefully and killing small children. This is the world we live in. This has got to change. Our culture is sick.”
We are sick, and have been sick for a quite a while. Before this week, before Oak Creek, before Columbine, we suffered, and never really acknowledged the psychological, spiritual, and moral deformation afflicting our relationships at every level—familial, collegial, social, professional, political. And as every 12 stepper knows, the first movement towards rehabilitation and recovery is recognition that we have a problem and need help.
Yes, we need to light candles, assemble memorials, and ask the unanswerable. But we need to summon the courage to tackle the questions that can be answered, and truly commit to our healing, as a society and people of God. Starting today.
In the second week of Lent
fhe sky descends with an integration of hydrogen and oxygen
falling and flowing between extended strings of carbon
materialized in conifers and leafless ribs
of birch, and beech, and maple
awakening to the prospects
of another season overflowing
with the bounty
and the blessing
of the integration of hydrogen and oxygen.
Word with Image 