Politics is dodgeball by other means.

The point is to bean, and not get beaned.

Taking a stand can get you beaned.

Not taking a stand can get you beaned.

Flip flopping can get you beaned.

Too much coffee can get you beaned.

Not enough can get you beaned.

Too much money can get you beaned.

Not enough money can get you beaned.

What gets you beaned in the national press isn't necessarily what gets you beaned in the privacy of the voting booth.

The voters bean by the million.

But hey, it's just dodgeball. Relax. Play the game. You have a 50-50 chance to win. Unless of course you've been seriously beaned.

The only thing about politics that's different from dodgeball is that dodgeball was over in an hour. We have another week of cheap shots to go.

Write in: Lutheran Surrealist.

THE GROWING THREAT OF VIGILANTE JUSTICE & LAX HYGIENE

Thanks to Henry David Thoreau the idea of Civil Disobedience has grown into mega-proportions.

I suppose my first introduction to this was Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book! It was virtually a manual on how to perform outlaw behaviors and not get caught. You learned how to steal, monkey wrench, and many other illegal or quasi-legal behaviors. Hoffman ilustrated how to make a pipe bomb. How much influence has such a nexus had? Is it just the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weathermen, the Unabomber, the Yippies, Earth First!, the ELF, and others? It seems to me there is a growing sense on the left (and now on the right) that law is something that moves too slow and with too little dramatic emphasis.

We believe that a good government is one that protects the life, health, liberty, and property of ALL its citizens.

However, the sanctity of property has for a long time been nixed by the left. They cite Proudhon's title Property is Theft, but never went on to read his final book, Theorie de la Propriete, in which Proudhon argues that private property is the only hedge the citizen has against the overwhelming power of the state or her more powerful neighbors.

Is it because property is not countenanced that a leftist feels the right to run a rusty nail through the fresh paint of an SUV?

Life, Health, Liberty and PROPERTY are the essentials of LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Lutheran Surrealism is a LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC organization. We are NOT MARXISTS or ANARCHISTS.

We denounce those animal rights activists who believe they have the right to blow up animal researchers or their laboratories. We denounce anyone who attempts to shoot at police officers. We denounce ANY FORM OF VIGILANTE justice, including the destruction of abortion clinics or their personnel, or even the slightest defacement of another's property or person. We believe that livestock are the property of their owners and that they can do with them as they see fit under the guidelines of the law.

We are for: Getting home in time for dinner (this shows respect for others), we are for getting to bed on time (this shows respect for the one body we have been given), we are for eating responsibly (we do not believe in drinking alcohol or coffee), we are against bad language (it shows disrespect for our neighbors). We believe that sexual expression should be reserved for a context of lifelong commitment of love. We believe that we should cut our fingernails once or twice a week and take a shower at least once a day and change our clothes and eat wholesome food that has caused minimal pain to what we are eating.

In short, Lutheran surrealism is so Lutheran that it is surreal. We even worry about the bone marrow in the green jello. If we were voted into office we would make appropriations so that Lutheran surrealist scientists could find a vegetable replacement for this mischievous ingredient.

ATTACHMENT PARENTING

Whether you're short and wide or tall and thin doesn't matter.

What matters is if you love your parents.

That's the basic thesis of Dr. Williams Sears, author of books on ATTACHMENT PARENTING.

I had been reading Kate Coleman's book The Secret Wars of Judi Bari: A Car Bomb, the Fight for the Redwoods, and the End of Earth First! (SF: Encounter Books, 2005) with my 20 excellent honors course students. The honors course kids couldn't understand Bari.

Bari was a promiscuous tree-hugger who mainlined anything she could get from methedrine to crack. She got blown up by a pipe bomb when her Subaru hit a pothole on her way to an action. The pipe bomb had been stashed under the driver's seat. A motion trigger on the bomb set it off.

The bomb only partially exploded sending springs from the seat cushion into Bari's body. It took her ten years to die from the injuries. If the bomb had exploded as it was meant to she would have died instantly.

What was she doing transporting a pipe bomb in the first place? Had a disaffected lover put it there? Did a lumber company have it placed there, as her surviving faction contends? Was it her own bomb? The book doesn't provide closure. But there is nevertheless something to be learned.

I explained to the students that the left is filled with people who hate their families. Bari had fist fights with her sister into late adolescence and almost never spoke to her parents once she left the house. This is common with leftists. They aren't attached. And they are therefore spiritually and emotionally dead. They are zombies of a kind.

We talked about the Unabomber, and Charles Manson, and all these odd loners of the left like Bakunin who never had a normal family growing up and weren't able to do what most normal people do: have kids, and then grow up with them holding their hands and tucking them in. Most of us find more than enough meaning feeding a baby, and tickling a toddler, and reading a goodnight story to a beloved daughter. Leftists like Judi Bari don't attach, and they search for meaning in cataclysmic events such as the murder of a symbolic figure. For one reason or another they end up finding trees or animals to be good companions. They are the only companions who will have them, perhaps?

On the far right you have similar loners. They bomb abortion clinics or shoot abortion doctors. Invariably they are people who have a hard time with normal family life.

When we think of the people who shoot presidents they are almost invariably loners. Czolgosch who shot McKinley was such, as was the dude who shot James Garfield. John Hinckley probably wasn't first on anybody's must-invite list.

Who are these strange people floating about searching for meaning with a bomb in their hand?

Well, first and foremost, they are people who hate their families. They didn't get attached, and are therefore dangerous. Vietnam vets who "go postal." They are often loners. Even rogue elephants in the forests and savannahs who go around attacking people are usually elephants that aren't attached to the rest of the tribe.

Is there a way to take these nutty people and awful elephants and teach them how to attach?

The country is filled with them, and the prisons are overcrowded. Perhaps there is some simple way to calm these people down. With tranquilizer guns you can drop a rogue elephant and bring it in to give it tickle therapy. All these angry Babars in time might learn to attach. Perhaps in prisons there can be more sing-a-longs, and more nice games like patty cakes and pin the tail on the donkey, and ice cream and cake. Give the Babars more peanuts, and soothing music, and a girlfriend, and I think they will begin to be less disruptive out on the savannah.

In the Middle East the most dangerous psychos are also unattached. The terrorist profile is that they hate women, and almost never have a normal family life. It's a global phenomenon.

Could all of it be solved by simply getting little kids to love their families in the first place?

Family matters.

SKIP THERAPY!

In my late teen and early adult years I used to get violently depressed and be almost unable to function.

Then I realized I had to get out of that.

I started to read the work of P.G. Wodehouse, especially anything with Jeeves in the title. This mysteriously kept me afloat for months at a time.

I also realized that major physical exercise would shake the blues out of me.

Skipping always seem like fun.

So now whenever I am getting blue I skip around the block reading P.G. Wodehouse.

It works like a charm.

Some day I'll write a book called Skip Therapy.

But for now, I pass on this simple treatment method for free to anyone out there who is suffering like I used to before I developed these antidotes.

Get yourself a stack of P.G. Wodehouse books. I particularly recommend The Code of the Woosters and Thank You, Jeeves. And then skip around a lot, reading them.

It's guaranteed.

I'm reading Auden and Christianity, by Arthur Kirsch (Yale UP 2005). First of all the book is limpid: clear and so easy to read that it is pure delight. Secondly, it is nice to have the opening sentences in which Kirsch (an agnostic) writes that theological terminology is worse than four-letter words to most scholars who shun it like the plague. He goes on to write, "Such prudery has only intensified in recent decades, especially among academics and intellectuals who assume that one cannot be a religious and a thinking person at the same time. Auden stands as an eloquent example of the joining of the two, a modern instance of a person in whom thought and faith not only coexisted, but nourished each other. His faith expanded the horizons of his mind as well as his heart, and his formidable intelligence, in turn, probed the nature and limits of his Christian belief, animating his continuous quest not only to believe still but also to believe again" (xi).

I'm so used to having to read antithetically that I could barely believe the above paragraph was written and published in the twenty-first century by an American academic.

Kirsch is an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia. What he wants to do is similar to what I tried to do in my book Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern Illinois UP 2002). I wanted to trace the lineaments of faith in Corso's oeuvre. I didn't have any examples before me of how to do this and just did it, but I wish I had seen Kirsch's book first.

The exploration of the metaphysical model behind a poet's work is often difficult in that few of us have the necessary theological awareness to do it. Kirsch thanks a Congregationalist minister in his acknowledgements. When I wrote Corso I was living in Finland and having weekly conversations with a Lutheran pastor by the name of Matti Kristola but was otherwise out on a limb reading as much as I could of contemporary Catholicism and trying to read as much Aquinas as possible.

But there are few people in academia who can serve as mentors for those who would like to explore the rich Christian cultural heritage. Most in scholarship want to smash the icons of the Christian faith and raise anew the flags of Nero and Tiberius and use the classroom as a place where desire and madness rule the Coliseum.

The very fact that this scholar has given a thumbs up to a serious consideration of Auden's Christianity gives me reason to feel joyous.

Many are concerned about animal rights, still others are concerned about animal wrongs.

I'm not concerned so much with animals, but with humans. In my animal rights class one young woman said she would be willing to feed her own baby to a mountain lion in sorrow that she has taken the animal's territory. She doesn't have a baby, fortunately!

The rumor that mountain lions are all over this area has now taken on the dimension of an urban myth. Except we inhabit a rural area where one can drive for thirty minutes without seeing a dwelling of any kind. A student yesterday in class claimed he had seen a mountain lion from his dorm window. I called my mom and was talking to her about the mountain lion situation. She lives by a major golf course in North Carolina in a town called Foxfire Village, near the town of Pinehurst. She said that down there, too, everyone is talking about having seen a mountain lion.

What is this about?

It's almost like the alien abductions of 20 years ago. A mild form of hysteria.

Mountain lions, won't you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight.

So last night I was talking to my neighbor who was walking his St. Bernard. John is the head of the DEC -- department of environmental conservation. He said he works in the woods all the time and none of his crew believe that there are any mountain lions in this area. But he used to work in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Up there, way up north, there have been some DNA samples of mountain lion fur found in trees. But no one up there ever sees a mountain lion.

Have you seen a mountain lion?

When I wrote my first book Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Texas Tech UP 2001), I was still a postmodernist. I honestly felt that if everyone could just laugh at everything the world would be better. Somehow when I got to the end of it, I was no longer so sure. Writing of Charles Willeford's amazing novel The Burnt Orange Heresy I realized that comedy was not sufficient to deal with murder, or even willful bad judgement on the part of a careerist art critic who was pushing an artist purely in order to further his own career. An art critic MUST be the guardian of his/her discipline or else he is nothing but a tyrant. I hadn't yet then read Bachofen. He provided me later on with a certain vocabulary I was missing at the time and still haven't mastered enough to use it fluently. Lutheranism provided me with yet a further vocabulary that I needed to discuss right and wrong from an absolute perspective (impossible to do from within postmodernist terms).

Speaking of the art critic, I write, "He is a killer, an art critic, a lover, and a Puerto Rican immigrant, but finally he has no firm grasp of reality or of any other criteria by which he might guide his life" (143).

Willeford wrote, "I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and a normal condition for Americans living in the second half of the century" (cited on p. 143).

I went on to ask in the book, "What is this madness, and why is it madness if we can describe it clearly and relish it in postmodern films and books? Is it the impossibility of making judgments without clear criteria? Willeford describes the postmodern condition, but he does not begin to pose any solutions or even to imply that there can be solutions. To this extent, he is an absurdist. He accepts the conditions of madness, although he is not overjoyed by it... One suspects, from his letters to his old army pal, that he is somewhat enraged by it, as, one suspects, are most of his readers" (143-144).

I go on to talk about how Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, in fact posits a God. He does it in the final pages that almost no one ever cites. In fact, in graduate school I was told to stop reading before the last section. But it's far and away the most crucial part, because he says that beauty and the sublime give us something akin to a RELIGIOUS feeling (335) -- "Consequently, Kant writes, 'we must assume a moral world cause (an author of the world) in order to set before ourselves a final purpose consistently with the moral law, and in so far as the latter is necessary... we must admit that there is a God" (cited in my book on p. 146, and in Kant's Critique on p. 301).

I then realized that in some way Lyotard's unpresentable was God. That the sublime was God. This is the one thing that the art critic Debierue cannot accept because it means he has all his life worshipped before a false idol, that of art. Is it possible that Lyotard had allowed in against the crude materialism of Marxism, the sublime of religious faith? Abraham before his Father? Christ on the cross?

Lyotard's last book on Augustine, unfinished at his death, made next to no sense to me. Did he intend to affirm Augustine? Lyotard admits in Peregrinations that his first inclination before scholarship was to be a Dominican priest.

About a week after I had reached this pinnacle, my daughter was born, and we had to have her baptized in the local church. My wife insisted. I went unwillingly having not been in a church for decades. I went in, and the familiar hymns arose. I cannot explain what happened then. I kept bursting into tears. God exists! God exists! God exists! It was then, and remains, inexplicable.

After such a long attempt to live in the bitterness of laughter and meaninglessness I had accepted faith. And here I stand, as Luther said. I can do no other. So help me God.

from WHY THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IS NOT PACIFIST, by Reinhold Niebuhr


Niebuhr was a major Christian apologist for American intervention in World War II. He argued, and strenuously, that we had a moral duty to fight the Nazis. Even at that time there were many who thought the problem would resolve itself.

"If we are told that tyranny would destroy itself, if only we would not challenge it, the obvious answer is that tyranny continues to grow if it is not resisted. If it is to be resisted, the risk of overt conflict must be taken. The thesis that German tyranny must not be challenged by other nations because Germany will throw off this yoke in due time, merely means that an unjustified moral preference is given to civil war over international war, for internal resistance runs the risk of conflict as much as external resistance. Furthermore, no consideration is given to the fact that a tyrannical state may grow too powerful to be successfully resisted by purely internal pressure, and that the injustices which it does to other than its own nationals may rightfully lay the problem of the tyranny upon other nations.

It is not unfair to assert that most pacifists who seek to present their religious absolutism as a political alternative to the claims and counter-claims, the pressures and counterpressures of the political order, invariably betray themselves into this preference for tyranny. Tyranny is not war. It is peace, but it is a peace which has nothing to do with the peace of the Kingdom of God. It is a peace which results from one will establishing a complete dominion over other wills and reducing them to acquiescence" (110).

The peace of North Korea, of Iran, of the Taliban (which we so impolitely disturbed), even the peace of criminal bands operating within the US such as the MAFIA are in fact happy to remain in peace. But as Niebuhr says, they have nothing to do with the peace of the Kingdom of God. Niebuhr's arguments remain pertinent in our own struggle with tyrants around the globe. The Taliban shot little girls who persisted in reading. Those little girls had broken the peace! Kim Il-Jong "disappears" anyone who in any way goes against his directives and disturbs his peace.

We are all sinners, and alive in a realm of sin. But we know better and worse. To the extent that we know these things, we have the responsibility to argue for the better.

I saw a documentary about Kim Il-Jung the other evening on TV. First off, in North Korea, there aren't enough sandwiches to go around, but he's fat. Secondly, there is no gasoline for the automobiles, but there are traffic police who continue to direct traffic 24-7 as if there were. Obviously, no one in North Korea dares to say a single word against Kim Il-Jong. We already have our hands tied with the war on Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the remnants of the Baathist party in Iraq who would still seek to have a peace of their own kind in their own countries.

And we have so many who believe that peace of any kind is a heavenly peace.

Personally I feel that we should leave North Korea as a perfect illustration of communist principles in action. A kind of living museum, complete with Kim Il-Jong's flare pants and sunglasses. An Elvis of the left.

But the country is now no longer just a joke. People are starving to death while Kim has his own personal chef in attendance upon him day and night. And the nuclear aspect means that he might visit his mischief on surrounding countries. Seoul is just across the border.

Niebuhr wrote prayers in addition to essays. Prayer cannot reach the heart of communists because they have decided that only material reality exists, and only prosperity matters. They have no understanding of the realm of spirit, and are closed to the laws that are written eternally on our hearts. But sometimes prayer can change a man even when he is unaware of it.

"Almighty God, our heavenly Father, guide, we beseech you, the nations of the world into the ways of justice and truth and establish among them the peace which is the fruit of righteousness" (73-74).

May the light from Heaven fall into the heart of Kim Il-Jong so that he converts to Lutheran Surrealism, and disbands his tyranny, his nuclear program, and gets a different hair-do and pants.

Amen.

Glad that I am not Kierkegaard, but he's the closest thing there is to Lutheran surrealism before the letter.

How is it, he asks, that modern philosophy began with doubt.

I doubt, therefore I am (Descartes).

Kierkegaard asks, "what kind of I was it?" (Philosophical fragments, 242).

And he intimates he'd end with this sentence:

"Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world."

"He realized that in doubt there had to be an act of will, for otherwise doubting would become identical with being uncertain." (Philosophical fragments, 259).

The whole exercise is thrown into doubt because it is written under a pseudonym, Johannes Climacus.

"But it is not a human being, insofar as he knows man, or anything else that he knows. Therefore, let us call this unknown the god. It is only a name we give to it. It hardly occurs to the understanding to want to demonstrate that this unknown (the god) exists. If, namely, the god does not exist, then of course it is impossible to demonstrate it. But if he does exist, then it is foolishness to want to demonstrate it, since I, in the very moment the demonstration commences, would presuppose it not as doubtful -- which a presupposition cannot be, inasmuch as it is a presupposition -- but as decided, because otherwise I would not begin, easily perceiving that the whole thing would be impossible if he did not exist..."

Philosophical fragments, 39

Reading Kierkegaard I often have the impression of reading a lucid lunatic, a man who has gone entirely out of his mind, and yet is more sane than ever. His later denunciations of the church are gnostic to an extreme: that only the individual can know, or even exist. He denies the body of Christ (followers as believers), as he denies his own body, and the bodies of others, or even the necessity of procreation! There is an implicit assumption in fact that the human race OUGHT TO PERISH through lack of procreation which is pretty much what the gnostics felt.

Marriage, the wedding band, and all that, he rolls down the aisle as so much worldliness in a world of temporary temptations, and he decides instead to chuck it all in favor of the afterlife. Rarely does he even mention food except with an almost insane laughter. In a diary note he asks him if a man has his mouth stuffed so full of food that he can't swallow, does feeding him consist of taking food out of his mouth?

Earnestness and jest are inseparable in Kierkegaard, as they are for us. They amount to the same thing. Anyone who is too serious is laughable. Anything that one can laugh at must be serious. They form a circle, rather than a line, where at the edges of time all things meet in God.

Man is the ANIMAL that waffles. -- Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard says somewhere in his journals that if someone thinks about eroticism without the notion of permanent love they are actually thinking about bestiality. The notion that people can change categories and become animals is not unfamiliar in contemporary parlance. Animal House, for instance, pays credence to this notion.

We can say that someone is foxy.

We can say that someone is a bear.

We can say that someone is squirrely.

We can say that someone is a whale.

We can say that someone is a dog.

We can say that someone is a puppy.



And we can go down one category further:

We can say that someone is a vegetable.

We can say that someone is a couch potato.

The two kingdoms model can lead to a serenity and practicality regarding what can be done in this fallen world. Reinhold Niebuhr's famous serenity prayer speaks directly to this two kingdoms idea. It was apparently written during the height of the cold war when everyone was worrying about getting nuked. Getting nuked is not something anyone can do much about. It's not under our control. We can decide just the same whether to plant tulips or daisies, or plant a pear tree in spite of the fact that the world could be obliterated at any moment...

The Serenity Prayer
by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Complete, Unabridged, Original Version.

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

Separation of art and state.
Separation of church and state.
Separation of family and state.
Separation of politics and art.

Lyotard's idea of language games, and the differend between them.

Bossy boilers try to link the different language games.

Radicals of various types trying to claim politics (their politics) as the only criterion of value.

Hegel-Marx, Lyotard said, were the problem. Increasingly he moved toward Kant and the notion of a separation between the different faculties.

He almost became a Lutheran in the process.

One finds this tradition so much more powerfully in the Lutheran tradition.

Art was a concern for artists. Theologians need not apply. Albrecht Durer, Luther's friend, was free to make whatever art he wished. Luther said that art, like math, or science, was separate.

It didn't have to illustrate Lutheran concepts.

Any more than a man who fixed wagons for a living had to illustrate Lutheran concepts. Or a shoemaker had to make Lutheran shoes.

Radicals always try to unite different language games. Bossy boilers, they override differends and say, it's just going to be like this (insert political blueprint).

Postmodernism as I first understood it, was really liberalism. And at the end of his life Lyotard argued that the liberal democracy was the only game in town.

To reopen and clarify this tradition (often Christian!) from Locke through Madison to Reinhold Niebuhr, has been part of our investigation. Lyotard had been the first to open up this route. And then simultaneously we discovered St. Augustine. Lyotard's last book on Augustine -- I've read it -- it wasn't finished when it was published -- was completely incomprehensible to me. Two kingdoms is at the heart of Augustine's work, and at the heart of Lutheran surrealism, but is not once mentioned in Lyotard's book.

I'd love to smuggle this idea into contemporary theoretical discourse, but the route is blocked. Anything Christian can't get past the bouncer. And now even Lyotard can't get past the bouncer. I think even the notion of Lyotard -- the one French postmodernist with an inkling of good sense, is now completely severed from the hydra-headed radical politburo.

Calvinists on the other side also seek to link art and state.

Thus it seems there is no party to join. And this is the reason that Lutheran Surrealism must stand alone -- for now.