American Lament

At the moment I heard that 20 kindergarten kids in Connecticut had been slaughtered along with six school staff members on Friday morning I was writing an essay on prayer. I was reviewing a new book called Thanks, Help, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by California cool, irreverent, faithful, Christian writer Anne Lamott. 

While generally liking the book, I was arguing cleverly and convincingly that she should have included two other kinds of prayers as well: prayers of confession (“I’m Sorry”) and prayers of lament (“This Sucks.”) 

I thought my case was especially effective in support of “I’m Sorry” prayers. We know that most faith traditions (as well as therapists) encourage some kind of spiritual practice where we honestly admit our failings or weakness or sin or other messups, and ask for forgiveness. And surely Lamott, who is so refreshingly open about her own human failings and that she belongs to a 12 step group, should understand the need to do a fearless and honest moral inventory and then make amends to those we have harmed. 

But I was having a harder time explaining prayers of lament. My delightfully foul-mouthed clergy pal and Biblical scholar Rev. Dr. Therese Descamp had taught me at a retreat about prayers of lament; she encouraged us to use these key prayerful words: “This Sucks!” Contra Lamott, “Help” may not be our first prayer in the face of pain or sorrow. First we have to yell. I Hate This! There Must Be No God! I Don’t Want To Go On Living! This Sucks!

I reminded folks that in cultures from Ireland to Iran it is especially the older women who lead laments, choruses of mourning and hair pulling. I quoted the prophet Jeremiah wrote: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; send for the skilled women to come; let them quickly raise a dirge over us, so that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids flow with water.” (Jeremiah 9:17-18) 

But I felt I wasn’t really making my point. Wouldn’t my editor say that lament is just another form of “Help”? You have cancer or lose your job or want a drink – you say “Help!” – right? Surely we want God to help us out of this mess. 

Then I remembered the bestselling relationship book Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Author John Gray says women often want solely to vent and bitch about a problem; they want no kind offer of help or possible solution. You, Men! Just listen up, men, forget the helpful suggestions. Listen to the women lament. Marriages might be saved. 

Then I saw those pictures of screaming children being led from the school by police and teachers, the faces of parents outside the school before they knew if their kids were coming home that day. Later I watched President Obama crying as he spoke of the tragedy. 

I saw lament. I felt it myself. 

Lament is when we feel both sorrow and anger at the same time, tears shed and fists raised simultaneously, angry grief, miserable bitterness.

The more I learned, the more I felt both anger and sadness. Each 6 or 7 year old was shot multiple times at point blank. The murderer killed first his mother with the guns she owned and had taught him to use, before driving to the school in her car. One teacher died trying to shield her first grade students with her own body. One so-called Christian leader said if God hadn’t been banished from classrooms this wouldn’t have happened. Another said if teachers had been allowed to have guns all would have been well.

Most of that last paragraph’s lament is sadness.

But those last two are anger.

I’ve come to believe that the gun culture in American is a pervasive addiction. Those citizens who own 300 million guns (out of 315 million citizens) are not so much morally pathetic as desperately sick. Their illness is caused by ignorance, fear, rigidness, cowboy complexes, uncried tears and unnamed shame. Like all addicts they are not responsible for being ill, but they are certainly responsible for getting better and taking responsibility for how their illness harms and kills others. And we should no longer enable the dope peddler National Rifle Association as they feed and profit from this societal addiction.

That’s my anger and my sorrow, my tears and my fists. My lament.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Abraham Lincoln in Jerusalem

A new famous quote by Abe:  “Next year in Jerusalem!”

In a bittersweet scene near the end of the new Stephen Spielberg movie, Lincoln, Abe and Molly Lincoln (he calls his wife Mary “Molly”) take a quiet carriage ride away from the White House.  Sitting close and affectionate, he says to her, “When this term is over, before we go back to Illinois, let’s travel.  I want to see Jerusalem and the Holy Land.” 

It’s Good Friday afternoon, April 14, 1865, and they have a date that night at the Ford’s Theater.  They never made it to Jerusalem.

“God created war so Americans could learn geography,” Mark Twain quipped.  Maybe God created Stephen Spielberg so Americans could learn history, of which we are as ignorant as geography.  His movies have taught us a lot we didn’t know about the slave rebellion aboard the Amistad, and about WWII, from Schindler to D-Day (Saving Private Ryan).  Now it’s Lincoln.

Everywhere you look in American TV, papers, magazines, people are talking about Lincoln the man and the movie.  Screenwriter Tony Kushner did the media rounds, as did historian Doris Kerns Goodwin, whose bestseller Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln inspired the movie. President Obama read that book also, and got the idea to emulate Lincoln by putting some rivals on his cabinet also, like Hillary Rodham Clinton.  He even has a favorable plug on the book cover; “A remarkable study in leadership,” he says.

Obama is sometimes compared to Lincoln, in circumstance and in leadership style. Skinny lawyers from Illinois.  Introverts.  Not afraid to work with rivals.  Willing to compromise.  Elected President without much previous legislative experience.  Memorable orators.  Trying to unite a divided nation in the midst of war.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  There are no red states, no blue states, only the United States of America.

A good movie, like a good art museum (see last week’s column), succeeds when it gets people talking and thinking in new ways.  I don’t actually go to a lot of movies for that very reason; they don’t make me think anything new.  But all the talk from friends and in the media about Lincoln – I felt I almost HAD to go, it was my citizen duty.  I’m glad I did.

It covers only two weeks in his life and one huge legislative victory, the passing of the 13^th Amendment outlawing slavery – that’s the whole movie.  No log cabin or railsplitting or Gettysburg or even the Ford Theater.  One reviewer said, “ “Lincoln”—I can’t believe I’m writing these words—is a legislative thriller. It’s an exciting, suspenseful movie about cajolery, persuasion, ideology. It’s a great movie about…counting votes.” 

But what stuck with me was that last dream Lincoln had to go to Jerusalem.  It is apparently a documented comment he made on that Friday.   Mary Lincoln later told a minister that he said it to her in the box at the Ford’s Theater.  He had never traveled outside the US.  He was not much of a Christian, more a theist, but he knew his Bible, often quoted the Old Testament.  It makes for a great cinematic meme – the gaunt savior martyred on Good Friday hoping to visit Calvary, maybe the empty tomb. (The movie does end with a sappy sort of angels in the clouds vision, unnecessary.)

But did you know that Lincoln actually was an advocate for the Jews?  And benefited from their support?  This thought provoking movie and the line about Jerusalem got me curious.  Thank you Google, where “Abraham Lincoln Jerusalem” gave me these tidbits:

 - He wrote his friend and fellow Illinois State legislator Abraham Jonas complaining about another legislator whom he called a “stupid, classic anti-Semite.”

 - He befriended a NY Jewish publisher of a German language newspaper who helped Lincoln get most of the liberal German immigrant vote in 1860.

- He was the first President to appoint a Jew to a European post, as US Consul in Zurich. 

- He revoked Ulysses S. Grant’s order that all Jewish peddlers be forbidden from selling to Union troops after some of the peddlers were found to be selling to the Confederates also.  Lincoln wrote, “To condemn a class (of people) is to condemn the good with the bad.  I do not like to hear an entire class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

(This info from web zine Our Jerusalem.)

And my favorite Abraham Lincoln Jerusalem tidbit – there is a street in Jerusalem named Abrakham Lincoln Rd.  It’s in a nice neighborhood near the King David Hotel.

And the Jerusalem YMCA.

Maybe he and Molly could have stayed there.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

What is Art?: Nureyev’s Sequins

I spent a lovely afternoon last week at San Francisco’s De Young Museum of Fine Arts.

De Young Museum of Fine ArtsA 125 year old institution (old for California), its current modern building opened in 2005 and is the 4^th most visited museum in the US. It is a treasure.

I especially wanted to see a visiting exhibit of Impressionist art collected by the late William Paley, a CBS founder, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, another favorite museum of mine.  It was a rich display of Matisse and Picasso and Cezanne and Gauguin.  Especially delightful were large photographs of some of the paintings hung in the Paley’s Fifth Avenue apartment.  One can always dream. 

(Once I was looking at some lovely French art at the Morgan Library in NYC and heard some people speaking French and I tried to say, in my bad French, that I felt badly that so much fine French painting is now in New York.  They laughed and said, Oh no, we have taken lots of art from other countries as well; art is international!  Pas de pays!)

The other blockbuster exhibit currently at the De Young is called “Rudolf Nureyev: a Life in Dance.”  There were lots more people going to that exhibit, especially older women, and mothers and daughters in holiday dress.  While the Paley collection was presented is a pretty standard mundane fashion, the Nureyev one was multimedia, fabric festooning in front of huge videos of his performances, interviews with dancers, and room after room of sequined costumes, little jackets for various nobility roles he played, and even more sequined tutus worn by Margot Fonteyn.

I fully intended to boycott this exhibit.  “Costumes and fashion are not art!”  I have told anyone who would listen, about the previous De Young exhibits of Chanel designer dresses and Yves St. Laurent suits.  I am less obnoxious, but still dubious, about the quilt exhibits and the tapestries, all part of an extensive “textile art” collection.   But there is something about sequined tutus and silk dresses for anorexic models that offends me in a fine arts museum.  I am an obnoxious snob on this subject.

So how do I know the shunned Nureyev exhibit had videos and fabric and tutus?  Because I could see them even as I just walked by, on my way to the very fine collection of Hudson River School landscapes.  I could see the movement and the color.  Which just drew me in.  Oh what the hell, I’m waiting til rush hour is over on the Bay Bridge, let’s check it out.  Make fun of the obsessions of the rich and skinny.

Rudolf NureyevI was brought to a standstill by a short black and white video of the young Nureyev doing his ballet warm ups. Not even a rehearsal for a particular performance, just a rough dance studio  with stuff lying around.  Silent, no sound.  It looped over and over. He leapt and did the little wiggle thing with his pointed feet and twirled.  His hands were like flowers.  The few other people in the studio weren’t even watching him, just working on their own steps.  But here in SF there were lots of us, all seized in the dark silence. 

And I said to myself, “That’s art. That belongs here.”

Because of what it evoked in me.  I felt the same wonder as looking at the Matisse.  I had the same deep appreciation for skill and spirit and beauty and questioning as Picasso evokes.  The world and I felt a little better and slower to kill each other because of that dance.  I don’t know – I got my heavy art feeling.

When I went back to my daughter’s apartment that night I said I was having second thoughts about my aversion to costumes in art museums.  I admitted that theater sets could be art, like Maurice Sendak’s sets for The Nutcracker and Magic Flute.  So why not costumes for the same production?  Is there a distinction between paint and fabric?  Is it easier to accept old fabric (tapestries) than new (Dior?)  And from there we talked about art and money, how much Paley paid for Picasssos in 1933, was art just what the rich collect, or is it quilts made in Appalachia?  With her recent history degree she could add in concepts like “vernacularization.” 

Basically we sat on her sofa and asked, what is art anyway? 

* Liz MillerAnd I said, “You know, maybe that’s the role of art museums, not to decide what is and isn’t art, but simply to get this kind of conversation going.  If sequins get folks in the door, maybe they’ll see the Gauguins also.  And then go see the cool Eskimo art and the charred remains of a black church from the south hung in a piece called “Anti-Mass.”

And maybe all those ballet moms and daughters will go home and have a similar conversation.” (Still a little snobby about the ballet moms.)

I tried to tell her about the silent spinning body in the studio.  But I finally said, “You just have to go see it.”

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

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* See: Liz Miller

The Sandy Scourge

Georges and Gertrude Ngoka visited us here in Northern California last spring from the Republic of the Congo as part of a US tour, and made many friends. We belong to the same church, Disciples of Christ. Earlier this month, when they heard of Hurricane Sandy, they sent a letter to their American friends:

At a moment when the attention of not only the people of America, but also the world, is on your presidential election, a natural disaster or Hurricane Sandy, hits your country as well. The amount of damage done makes us talk of a cyclone rather than a storm. The situation that you are facing does not leave us indifferent, for we are One in Jesus Christ (Unity in diversity).

We pray not only for the lives touched directly and indirectly by this scourge, but also for other living beings and things – the wildlife and plants along the east coast of your country. As soon as I grasped the immensity of the damage, I asked all our pastors to organize prayer vigils in their respective congregations. The day that we have designated for everyone to come together for prayer is this Thursday, November 1. Here in Brazzaville, the women of the church will organize an all-night vigil from Wednesday to Thursday uniquely for this situation.

Finally, our deepest sympathy to Global Ministries, churches around the country and the American people for the loss of lives and for those in mourning.

Rev. Georges Ngoka
General Secretary and Legal Representative
Church of the Disciples of Christ in Congo, Brazzaville

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American exceptionalism was a big topic in the election. We’re better, smarter. Maybe, even God likes us better. No apologies.

Which often makes us paternalistic and patronizing to the rest of the world. Since we are obviously so much better off and more fortunate than anyone else, it is our duty or obligation to bestow some small bounty on poor “foreign” nations not so blessed. We church people give little donations to “overseas” missions. Our government give an equally tiny share of our vast military-bloated budget to foreign aid and relief.

So it is humbling and moving to be the receiver, not the bestower, of concern and blessing. Us, in need of prayer and concern from those poor folks in Africa?

(Like the first time I met a missionary from another country TO America; that was a shock.)

Well, duh. We are seriously in need of prayer and concern and a lot more from any and all who might send it our way. I was touched by Georges’ concern.

Two things especially. His naming that the “scourge” of Sandy would hurt and kill not only human lives, but “other living beings and things – the wildlife and plants of the east coast of your country.” And that women of his church held an all night prayer vigil for us and our troubles. Would I do that for them?

Hurricane Sandy whipped up not only waves and beachfronts but also stormy arguments and affirmation that climate change is real. It seemed like these drenched and marooned and homeless New Yorkers were climate change converts. I’ve lived in New York – those folks are strong minded and stronger willed. They also think the world revolves around them. So if they didn’t believe in climate change before, they do now. Look what happened to us!! This must be climate change. Now fix it! Right now!

As hopeful as are the election results, so do many Americans see this as a possible and crucial moment when we could have a real national conversation about climate change and actually rise to the challenge. Obama can now be bolder; he even mentioned climate change in his victory speech election night.

Many leaders and organizations are calling on him for fast bold leadership on this issue. The New Yorker Magazine editorial “Magical Thinking” congratulated Obama on his victory and went immediately to a challenge that he help the nation move beyond the kind of “magical thinking” personified in the Republican anti-science, backward looking denial of so much that is real and pressing. Editor David Remnick wrote, 

The German insurer Munich Re estimates that the cost of weather-related calamities in North America over the past three decades amounts to thirty-four billion dollars a year. Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, has said that Sandy will cost his state alone thirty-three billion. Harder to measure is the human toll around the world – the lives and communities disrupted and destroyed.

“If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it,” Obama said, when he clinched the Democratic nomination in 2008, future generations will look back and say, “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Those generations assuredly will not.

Although Obama, unlike his predecessor, recognized the dimensions of the problem, he never pursued measures remotely equal to it. To his credit, his Administration has directed ninety billion dollars to investments in clean energy, and has secured several billion for energy-conservation upgrades; he got Detroit to agree to better gas-mileage standards, and finally introduced CO₂ emissions standards for commercial trucks and buses. For the most part, though, the accumulating crisis of climate change has been treated as a third-tier issue.

Last week, in his acceptance speech, Obama mentioned climate change once again. Which is good, but, at this late date, he gets no points for mentioning. The real test of his determination will be a willingness to establish a sustained sense of urgency. There will always be real and consuming issues to draw his and the political class’s attention: a martial scandal at the C.I.A, a fiscal battle, an immigration bill, an international crisis. But, all the while, a greater menace grows ever more formidable...

This election hinted at the defeat of a certain kind of magical thinking. It was defeat for the ideas that deficits can be reduced with across-the-board tax breaks. It was a defeat for Rovian analysts who defy statistics and infer from the “enthusiasm” of rallies that their man will win in a landslide. It was a defeat for the fantasy that the President was born in Kenya and has a secret socialist agenda.

But Obama must now defeat an especially virulent form of magical thinking, entrenched on Capitol Hill and elsewhere: that a difficulty delayed is a difficulty allayed. Part of American exceptionalism is that, historically, this country has been the exceptional polluter and is therefore exceptionally responsible for leading the effort to heal the planet...

There’s that exceptionalism again. Not just in how great we are, but how polluting and how responsible we are. From 3000 miles away here in California, it is easier for me to say that Sandy seems to have blown in some good news as well as death and destruction. Maybe we can now as a nation accept not just that science but also the effect and the responsibility.

And accept that we really are all in this together. I am more hopeful about that, thanks to Obama, and in a strange way to Sandy. Both of these powerful forces got my new friends Georges and Gertrude to think of us, to remind us about our wildlife and plants suffering as much as we are, and to stay up all night to pray for us.

That’s a start.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Election Maps: 50 Shades of Purple

Oh, there is so much to say about our US Election.

Relief. That’s the word I’ve heard the most this week.

Shock and awe, on both sides really.  Romney was reportedly shocked by the results.  He had already ordered $25,000 fireworks for his victory celebration. 

He and the Republicans thought all that voter suppression work would succeed; robocalls with incorrect information about polling hours and locations, jail threat billboards about the myth of voter fraud.  He is said to be surprised at how many people Obama got out to vote, as if some magic by Obama rather than his own failure swung the election. Oops, voter supression backfired; minority voters said attempts to keep them from voting actually encouraged them more strongly to go vote.

Speaking of backfire, all that Super PAC money that was supposed to buy the election.  Sorry, Karl Rove ($300 million), Sheldon Adelson ($60 million), National Rifle Association ($34 million) – all your millions bought you not one victory, not one of the candidates you backed, federal and state, won.

Binders of women!  Record numbers of women were elected, now 20 women US Senators, many more women Representatives and in state offices. Women voted 54% Obama, 44% Romney. (52% of men voted for Romney.)

Catholic voters also confounded the vain efforts by Republicans and bishops to fearmonger them with false predictions of lost religious freedom; they voted just like the whole population, 52-48% for Obama. 

White people, well, that’s another story.  “The Bad News About White People: Romney Won White Vote Almost Everywhere,” read the headline in the Nation. Nationwide 59% of whites voted Republican. Even in my beloved progressive (everyone thinks, but really?) California, 52% of white people voted for Romney.  Thank God we are close to being a white minority state. Nationwide more Blacks and Asian-Americans and Hispanics voted for Obama this time than in 2008.  See above; voter suppression backfires. Also – McCain at least seemed to have a heart, not so obvious with Romney. 

My favorite post election indulgence; maps!  I had a sixth grade textbook, Maps Mean Adventure! Election night was an adventuresome trek through the jungles of waiting, slashing through state results, especially hazardous for East Coasters, waiting out lots of bad news before the West Coast results came in. 

But geography is taught differently these days; my recent college grad history major daughter Norah (Univ. of St. Andrews 2010) took a class on the politics of map making and added a new favorite phrase to our family lexicon: “It’s all a construct!” Maps are created with political assumptions and maps perpetuate political assumptions.

Consider the standard red state blue, state map of the US: Obama won the majority of votes in the blue states, Romney in the red.

Boy, are we a divided country. Whackos on each coast, real heartland Amuricans in all those vast red states.

Then look at it this way:

See - a lot more of us, that would be well over the majority, are true blue. This is a cartogram, a map in which the sizes of the states are rescaled according to their population, drawn not by acreage but by number of inhabitants. Rhode Island, for example, with 1.1 million people, would appear twice the size of Wyoming, with half as many people, but 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.

As Charles Blow put it in a great piece in the New York Times with lots of other interesting data: “Romney also won eight of the 10 states with the lowest population density: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah. Obama won New Mexico and Nevada. (Hello.  Hello.  Hello.  Is there an echo in here?)"

You see, it really all is a construct, how you make the map.  Try this one:

This one is by vote percentages within states. Its creator says he made this more nuanced map because “talking about red states versus blue states in a monolithic way is reductive and annoying.” After posting it on Facebook, a friend commented:

"Yes, we are a nation of purple.  Fifty Shades of Purple!"
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PS: Don’t get me going on how we elected the first out lesbian Senator, the first out gay person of color Representative, the first Hindu Representative, who will take the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, the new Representative who is an emergency room physician Mexican American son of illegal immigrants – look out for some interesting discussions of health care and immigration!  Need I say all these successful candidates are Democrats?

Yes, relief.

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter