The Trumpet of the Lord

Church, Culture, and White Male Anger

      When I began pursuing a master's degree in theology, I was in my forties, disillusioned, and too old to sit passively while one professor or another inflicted his monologue on me.  It could be pretty hard to take when a distinguished theologian, whose lily hands had never repossessed furniture at some deadbeat's apartment, would start pontificating about class oppression and the evils of capitalism.  For nearly twenty years, I had run a trucking business.  I met a payroll of about 300 thousand dollars annually and kept eight or nine other guys working.  It was the kind of living for which writers settle when they aren't good enough, or lucky enough, to beat the odds on success in their craft. 

      Managing truck drivers would have been enough to give me a jaundiced view of life, but to add insult to penury, I had been married for nine years to an alcoholic.  Gender bias and male privilege were themes about which I had already heard a great deal from my wife while she was drunk.  I wasn't much interested in more of that from my instructors.  I had taken a bath financially on the divorce, but somehow I continued to make a living. 

      During one Saturday morning lecture, a visiting professor was going on about the racist/sexist hegemony--white male power, all that.  It was getting on my nerves.   I tried to imagine how the moral imperatives he found in American social stratification applied to my business.  Hell, the guys I employed were the scum of the earth--my literary friends, or musicians, an attorney who worked for me intermittently until he passed the bar exam. 

      There were a host of others who would work for a matter of weeks, or days, and then move on.  Once in a while one of them would start an action at the Human Rights Commission or the Department of Labor & Industries.  They would accuse me of being a racist, or, judging from their workman's compensation claims, some equivalent of a camp tyrant working the inmates, literally, to death.  Most of the claims charges went to chiropractors for treating backaches.  Occasionally there were bumps and bruises from the equipment.  The claims were legitimate enough.  What the state charged me for workman's compensation insurance wasn't--$1.85 per hour and rising.  What private sector company could charge $15 per day for a man's accident and disability insurance?  This was in the early 1980s.  In fact, none of the oppressed workers died or was disabled.  They borrowed money from me and didn't repay it.  The turnover was such that I couldn't always deduct it from their checks.  I told one of them I wasn't going to mail his W-2 until he paid me back.  He knew whom to call to get the Feds on my case within three days.

      My mind had been wandering.  The professor droned in his orbit, but I heard him call Allen Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, a racist tract.  I raised my hand and waited for him to deflate for a moment and condescend to notice.  Finally he nodded wearily in my direction.  I asked, with evident antagonism, "I'd like to know what you think might be worth saving in Western civilization?" 

      He shrugged, then conceded superciliously, "We should probably try to preserve the freedoms.  That, anyway." 

      This was a bigger pain in the ass than the price of tuition at this institution.  I had truck drivers with more sense.  One of them regularly gave half his paycheck to hookers, but at least he earned his money.  It was costing me $700 or more to sit and listen to this supercilious fuzzface with his fatuities.  I could get the liberal cant for free elsewhere and told him as much. 

      "Oh," he said, "You want to hang the 'L' word on me.  'Liberal' is getting to be the new equivalent of 'nigger' isn't it?"  There were a few gasps from around the classroom.  He was black, and not willing to let me disregard it.  Maybe he was going to call the Human Rights Commission. 

      "That isn't true," I said, more stridently.  "If anybody has been getting the Amos-and-Andy treatment lately, it's Conservatives--the ridicule Quayle took for his comments on family values, or Reagan about the evil empire!" 

      So why was I paying good money for this?  The passions that still consumed my discretionary time, writing and music, which kept me from making any real money in business, had been demoralizing to the extent that I was looking for a transcendental resolution of my problems.  A theological seminary seemed the place to find something of more significance than getting published.  Except for the satisfaction of paying bills on time, my grimy business enterprises had been uninspiring. 

      I have to admit, even the professors with whom I argued had something to teach me.  This one, who called Bloom a racist, knew how to sell his books.  For his course, I had to read one called, The Coming Race Wars.  A title like that would hook your average working stiff in the suburbs who worries about rioting and mayhem raging out of the cities. 

      There was probably a time when intellectuals of his stripe were on the right side of history.  Veterans of the civil rights era can't understand what the fuss over public education is all about.  They equate the school-choice movement with school segregation in the 60s.  The anger driving welfare reform, to them, seems only mean spirited.  Newspaper columnists indignantly hammer at conservatives on these themes, as if there were no compelling evidence implicating government social programs, meant to remedy the problems of the underclass, with the expansiveness and increasing menace of the antisocial poor.  The rhetoric of intellectuals on the left and gunfire in the streets traps responsible people living in inner-city neighborhoods in a dispiriting double bind. 

      Redistributionist economics and social engineering have been the dominant ideologies among intellectuals for a hundred years now.  In many cases leftist elites have co-opted populist movements.  Using the dialectics of class struggle, Marxists tried to channel the labor movements to their advantage.  Demagogic Democrats have continued to exploit resentment of the rich.  Their New-Deal rhetoric becomes more and more dissonant with every enlargement of government payrolls.  In the church, what began as the Social Gospel movement has evolved into liberation theology and support, both financial and ideological, for anti-capitalist revolutions.  Now when the evidence is coming in that the welfare state and the liberationist left are morally bankrupt, intellectuals seem most unwilling to acknowledge it.

      If there were not still important work going on in the universities, one might be persuaded that intellectuals were lacking in intellect.  I prefer to think that institutions of higher learning are in a state of decline and corruption similar to that of the church on the verge of the Protestant Reformation.  A history of venerable contribution does not guarantee that arrogance and venality will not become endemic. 

      A disgusting example of how the arrogant and venal in the academic community react to ideas uncongenial to their influence and the governmental financial largess on which they thrive is their ballistic response to the research presented in The Bell Curve by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray.  Until his death, Hernstein was head of his department at Harvard, and widely published, but Scientific American would not even concede that his later work is science.  Is it too obvious to mention that people who get grants for research on social issues will be unfavorably disposed to the idea that upward mobility is more related to intelligence than to any of the other factors in a socioeconomic equation that has been studied ad nauseam for thirty years?  Is it coincidental that Murray and Hernstein--may his reward be great in heaven--are so ferociously attacked? 

      If academic heavyweights speak with the pedantic condescension of clergy in the pre-Reformation church, they seem to expect taxpayers to be more gullible than the folks who send money to televangelists.  They want us to keep funding them, even while they browbeat us.  At least Jim and Tammy used to shed a tear now and then.  Schweigert, as well, in acknowledgement of his sins.  Together with the welfare aristocracy, the priests of the academy are mainstays of our great statist economy, and among them are some of the most moralistic big mouths anywhere, insisting they need more money to study and repair what their ideas and our tax money have wrenched out of alignment. 

      This modus operandus in academe is in imitation of the business interests lobbying for government subsidy, contracts, and regulatory inhibition of their competitors.  In the trucking business, everything I hauled, the territories I serviced, the customers for whom I contracted work, and what I could charge, were all subject to Utilities-and-Transportation-Commission regulations negotiated by the biggest companies in the state.  For the public good, of course.  Catch twenty two, in their representation of the public interest, was that to be in motor transportation at all, in any manner, one had to prove that his services were necessary above and beyond what was already being provided by the major companies.  I ran on the black market for years before I could get a couple of permits. 

      One wonders who financed the lobbyists and environmental groups clamoring for more government regulation of nuclear energy.  Oil companies?  It seems worth looking into, but right now I'm too busy trying to keep from losing my mind. 

      Before I started voting Republican, the divorce I went through must have been sent from hell to prove there was something worse than the Utilities and Transportation Commission.  I mentioned that my former wife was an alcoholic, and that while she was drunk I heard most of the feminist cant about which angry white males are prone to jest bitterly.  The marriage counselors tended to share her conviction that she drank because I dominated her.  They soaked me at the rate of $75 per hour for several years, until I filed for divorce.  Because she was a legal secretary--as long as she could sober up and get to work in the morning--her lawyer friends would harass me without cost to her.  To respond, I paid my attorney, formerly my employee, $120 per hour.  The soap-opera ended after more than three years of visits to artfully furnished offices downtown.  You really don't want to hear about it. 

      So, I had my reasons to enroll in seminary looking for indications of God's survival.  His vital signs were fairly strong; apparently, he wasn't dead as rumored.  I found reason enough to perpetuate my argument with the venerable intellects who are manufacturing a progressive culture for our time.  It used to be if your minister had been through a course of study at a respectable institution of the sort I attended, he would come out with some conception of God's activity in human history.  He would preach sermons which conveyed solidarity with the ideals of Western civilization.  It was not yet considered immoderate to be loyal to the tenets of American democratic governance: human rights and freedom under law based on moral reasoning and guaranteed by the constitution.  Of course, this-worldly concerns might get spiritualized away, if your man was under pressure to compete in the marketplace for conversions and church growth.  Fire insurance under threat of hell consistently sells memberships when you are in a hurry, even if the church becomes an other-worldly equivalent of Connecticut Mutual. 

      Domestication of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the God called a Man of War, who plagued an Egyptian Pharaoh into submission, parted the Red Sea, and inscribed his laws in stone on Sinai, who gave Moses authority to both liberate the Israelites and condemn idolatry, and gave his successor Joshua blessings of conquest by the sword--is a process of spiritualization which begins with the Creation epic and renders, for our time, the trivial sentimentality found in religious bookstores.  God raised up Israel, from which came Jesus the Messiah, who, though he was a Jew, intended to supererogate all the soaring visions of major Hebrew prophets and bring salvation history to a climax, through which this world and its troubles would be transcended for the bliss of heaven.  A clergyman might throw in a cursory treatment of St. Augustine--the city of God and the city of man have no commerce with one another, and this world be damned. 

      There was a sense that this heavenward trajectory needed some adjustment; Yes, Christians had a responsibility to vote.  Somehow heaven and earth were connected.  One could be so otherworldly, he was of no worldly good.  Of course, if you were Catholic, the church had a rich enculturation of worldly interests, which to your Protestant friends was a dubious record of clerical imperialism, and to Fundamentalists might seem a conjuration of the Whore of Babylon.  If you were Jewish, your rabbi was having none of it.  Oi!  Spiritualization!  Messiah, when he comes, will change the world, not throw it away. 

      But, no matter what their clergymen were saying, Americans--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish--had in their bones the conviction that God had a hand in the origin and destiny of this nation, begun by pilgrims, which had been for so long a refuge for Jews and religious dissenters of all faiths.  It seemed that God had bared his strong right arm and was in American history up to his elbows. 

      Since the Vietnam era you don't hear much from respectable sources along these lines.  Clergymen, lately, prefer neither to confirm nor deny the notion, formerly taken for granted, that God had an opinion relating to the outcome of the Second World War or the demise of Communism.  They prefer to make moralistic pronouncements on Western failings.  In the seminaries anything Western is suspect.  Cultural imperialism in the Third World is disparaged by missiologists.  In Ivy League universities, all of them founded by churches for the education of clergymen, now, even among the divines, an ethos prevails in which the Bible is irrelevant and God inadmissible in the discussion of any serious issue.  Politicians still say God bless America, but with sufficient ambiguity that they can retreat any direction.

      Thirty years ago, the generation that grew up pledging allegiance to the flag and singing, "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty," took to the streets with bullhorns.  Sophomoric indignation and Marxist rhetoric equated patriotic faith with jingoism.  Any association of God and country, to this way of thinking, was contemptible and should be castigated with fascism.  The chanting and anti-intellectualism began to drown out any argumentation by people who still held the populist convictions.  Never mind the old folks had honorably waged war on fascism, while turning back a Japanese invasion.  Never mind they had good reasons for being in Vietnam and maintaining the nuclear deterrent that contained the Soviet and Chinese communists who were arming and training the Viet Cong.  We know a lot of things, now, that were then debatable.  Anyway, debate was not of the essence.  To argue in favor of a legacy for which the whole world had collectively given thanks in 1945 was enough to start a riot in 1967. 

      Inflammatory, still in the nineties, is any statement that suggests Western nations, the United States in particular, represent any kind of ideal of human progress or moral vanguard.  To suggest that the historical and cultural influences which produced Western civilization were and are sustained by the Judaeo-Christian tradition will get you into an argument about separation of church and state, before any concessions are made that, possibly, religion played a role in the evolution of human rights and freedom, but, even if it played a role, it is a dubious one in consideration of the bloodletting and sectarian strife so pervasive in post-Reformation Europe and now raging in Bosnia and continually threatening to erupt in the Middle East. 

      Even Christians and Jews are reluctant to invest much anymore in defense of notions one would assume to be crucial to the traditions of which they are a part.  It would seem that being a Christian or a Jew involves the belief that certain moral and epistemological premises integral to Western civilization are true, not just in a philosophical sense, but because the progenitors of these faiths were chosen by God and blessed with a substantive revelation, this in spite of their sins and through which they incurred both privilege and obligation.  More than half the population of the world presumes to believe some version of the faith of Abraham.  If any of it is more than dogma, it follows, no matter how ethnocentric and, thus, objectionable it may seem, that Western dominance has something to do with a moral and epistemic superiority of its culture. 

      If what God revealed in his relations with the ancestors of Western societies includes sound epistemology and moral truth, the power this has delivered into the hands of their descendants is consistent with the axiomatic logic of the information age.  Francis Bacon was perhaps the first to recognize, explicitly, that knowledge is power.  Deconstructed, the canon of Western literature isn't worth the paper on which it is printed, but if there is objective truth in it, our re-imaging of metaphysics may prove decisively that the rise of the West was not imperialism, but a liberation of millions of human beings created in the image of God, and that the prescription for the disease now rampant is not government micromanagement, but freedom within a cultural consensus that recognizes the true nature of human nature. 

      The groups most favorably disposed to believe this are much maligned these days.  That Europeans, Brits, Americans, and the ethno-religious groupings of Jews who manage to cohere across national boundaries, are running things because of Judeo-Christian assertions that are essentially correct, is not a proposition to be debated; it is an idea to be gaped at, called racist, sexist, or fascist.  Martin Marty gets government funding to study it along with fundamentalisms of terrorist inclination.  Any sympathy with it invites cynicism.  Despite cynicism of many sorts over the years, I now recognize, with few reservations anymore, that I belong with those who have been taking the heat.  I haven't always understood all of the implications this might have.

      Jesus apparently said, "My kingdom is not of this world."  I've struggled with this saying for quite a while.  It had something to do with my reasoning when I graduated from high school in 1967 and went to college instead of Vietnam, pushing my military obligation into the future.  As for a lot of boomers, Vietnam, for me, was a test for which I hadn't been studying.  At the University of Oregon, I signed up for ROTC, but marching around the drill field with upperclassmen yelling in my face seemed pointless, and I dropped out.  Though I didn't trust the war protestors, I bought enough of the arguments being sold in the streets to stay in school and to continue to avoid the draft, unlike some of my friends who had more conscience.  And yes, I used that statement of Jesus to convince myself the war was not my fight.  I was making some headway with the demons I was battling, but at the same time I evaded dealing with the historical forces shaking the foundations of everything I took for granted.  Friends of mine were traumatized, maimed, or killed in Vietnam.  Eventually I drew a high number in the first draft lottery.  At a high school reunion in 1977, most of the veterans wouldn't speak to me.  Now I understand.  They were entirely justified in their conviction that the rest of us had betrayed them. 

      In the controversy surrounding that war it was often said that aggression, if not resolutely countered, would one day bring the fighting to our own soil.  Evasion and failure of resolve, as was predicted by veterans of World War II, led to holocausts in South Vietnam and Cambodia.  The spinelessness of my generation, in a different sense than was feared, has led to atrocities on American soil.  J. Edgar Hoover, in spite of evasions of his own, was nonetheless correct in maintaining that we faced the twin enemies of communism and crime.  Those of us who wouldn't face the enemy in Vietnam now face a confrontation in our streets which increases in menace and in magnitude every year.  Most of us are still trying to evade it. 


     My own ignorance may not seem as contemptible as that of anti-war agitators among the radically chic who knew precisely what they were doing, but I remember, with shame, arguing the moral equivalence of American capitalism and Soviet communism with my mother.  She didn't have to read Solzhenitsyn to know what was right.  And she knew then, as anybody who cares to investigate knows, now, that the communists were the primary instigators of the student anti-war movement.  My father told me, with inscrutable equanimity, that I might feel differently someday about my obligation to my country and about what might be worth fighting for.  He had enlisted during World War II, even though he had an deferment as a railroad employee. 

      It has been said that politics is civil war carried on by other means.   A culture war is not an image I want to perpetuate, but there is much to lose if the assault on Western ideals persists for another generation.  Since the tenured radicals who are educating the young show little indication of recognizing the folly of their earlier exploits, those of us who do recognize it have to object.  It may give us a clearer conscience in old age.

      Some of this should be easy.  If God acts in human history, it's obvious that he must have a stake in Western democratic governance as opposed to other prominent ideologies of the twentieth century.  Those of the Nazis and the communists have disqualified themselves as morally viable options.  Nazis were bent on extermination of the Jews; six million died in the camps.  And communists were responsible for the deaths of more Christians and Jews than all of the world's previous persecutions.  Many of the thirty million Russians purged by a succession of Soviet ideologues, were martyred for their faith.  In China it has been the same.  One need not be an historian to know the rough outlines of the bloodiest epoch the world has ever seen.  This since the purported death of God.  Germans were for a generation very conscious of the direct line that could be drawn between Nietzsche and Hitler.  For Russians, Dostoevsky brought out similar implications in The Brothers Karamazov.  "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." 

      Among postmodernists, Dostoevsky’s perspective is no longer compelling.  God is a concept modifiable in authentication of whatever liberation one wishes to promote.  People of orthodox faith are considered dupes or reactionaries, and all of them are assumed to have been cut from the same cloth.  Feminists sustain equal contempt for the Pope in his opposition to abortion and contraception as for Mullahs who sanction clitorectomies of Muslim girls, or Hindus who burn women on their deceased husband's funeral pyres.  The "moral dilemma" of women's immolations poses the question with which Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind begins.  Astonishing as it may seem, people will still contend that the British had no right to interfere and prohibit such atrocities in colonial India, cultures being "morally relative". 

      In the Christian West, human rights and due process are normative.  Moral censure from the West challenged the Chinese communists who perpetrated the Tiananmen Square massacre.  This might be evidence of moral progress.  Why did the inalienable human rights of the American constitution seem self-evident to its framers, when they have not been normative for most of bloody history?

      Any course in the history of Western civilization used to begin with the Hebrew Bible.  American patriots were schooled in a tradition going back to the prophets of the sixth century before the Christian era.  Other high moral traditions entered into it, but the Judeo-Christian consensus absorbed and homogenized them all.  I can hear Noam Chomsky getting ready to object.  The Bible, he will say, is rife with holocausts perpetrated in the name of God.  But that is the equivalent of historical revisionism at the Smithsonian Institution in which the fuselage of the Enola Gay is put on display with pronouncements condemning the American wartime decision to deploy nuclear weapons.  This was justly silenced by the objections of men still living who might otherwise have died on Japanese beaches and their wives who remembered well the exigencies of war.  The warfare of race and clan in the Ancient Near East has given way to progress arguably because the Hebrew Bible was morally superior to the idolatry practiced by some of the tribes obliterated in the wars it records.


      Environmentalists continue to attack passages in Genesis relating to human dominion over nature, and they extol the ecological consciousness of aboriginal Americans whose ways were supplanted by invasions of Europeans.  Contrasting folk ways with modern science is not a very good way to accentuate the merits of native American tribal lore.  The epistemology of science is the culmination of centuries of cross cultural developments in astronomy, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and logical analysis, brought together under the auspices of people who read the Bible.  Isaac Newton wrote more on the Bible than he did on physics.  The book of Genesis was as fundamental to his understanding of the universe as the word-processing program in my computer is to the manuscript it prints of this contrarian essay.  For Leibniz mathematics and physics were corollaries; he was, first of all, a theologian.  Michael Faraday was for all practical purposes an Evangelical.  The work these Christians did was exceptional and has stood under centuries of rigorous experimentation and analysis.  Mathematicians still marvel at Newton's proofs.

      Creation and cult in the Bible are based on law, which is God's word, the ordering generative force in the universe and a moral framework for human society.  Because man is made in the image of God, it is assumed in biblical literature that he can comprehend the word of God spoken at creation and revealed in the moral law delivered to Moses.  These two basic premises are the core of Western science and ethics, in government and jurisprudence.  There have been other conceptions of legal ethics.  The code of Hammurabi, like the law promulgated by the Hebrew prophets, is explicitly intended to defend the defenseless.  The good in paganism is not antithetical to the Bible; the good in other human cultures is affirmed.  If we are going to control the hazardous aspects of the power our sound epistemology has unleashed in the world, it will be because we come back to an idea found in Genesis--the charge given to Adam and Eve to tend the garden, have dominion, and subdue the earth and its creatures.  Pagan conceptions of the world as an orgy of the senses and irrational impulses won't do.  Nor will Gnostic aspirations to transcend life in the flesh and escape the natural world.

      In view of all that came before Jesus said "My kingdom is not of this world," and all that has followed in the Christian West, it might be a good idea to defer judgment on this statement long enough to consider what he could have meant besides the sentiment contained in the old gospel song: 

This world is not my home, I'm just a'passin' through

My treasure's all laid up, somewhere beyond the blue

The angels beckon me from heaven's open door

And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

Its modern equivalent is even more problematic in view of the nobility of the creation hymn of Genesis. 

Cast your eyes upon Jesus

Look full in his wonderful face

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim

In the light of his glory and grace

      To sing the foregoing lyrics without qualification requires neutralization or abandonment of Isaiah's eschatology and much of the Pentateuch.  There are more compelling visions.  Those of the prophet Isaiah are recognized as canonical by both Jews and Christians.  Do the faithful wish to ignore such noble texts as: 

It shall come to pass in the latter days

That the mountain of the Lord's house

will be established

As the highest of the mountains

And shall be raised above the hills

And all nations shall flow to it

And many peoples shall come and say,

"Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord

To the house of the God of Jacob

That he may teach us his ways

That we may walk in his paths"

For out of Zion shall go forth the law

And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem

He shall judge between the nations

And decide for many peoples

They shall beat their swords into plowshares

And their spears into pruning hooks

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation

Neither shall they learn war anymore

      I'd prefer to take the popular songs with a grain of salt and preserve the implications of Isaiah's imagery. 

      There is an important connection between the Protestant Reformation, prosecuted by people who contended for the authority of the written word, and the constitutional governments that followed.  Martin Luther wasn't a political activist, but his idea that ordinary people could interpret the scriptures may have been the main impetus toward the liberation of Western societies from authoritarian governments and aristocratic churches.  In this vein, we might speculate that what Jesus meant by "not of this world" was that the methods through which his kingdom would be established were not the methods usually employed, some alternative to power mongering and politics as usual. 

      Three hundred years from the time of Jesus, Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.  He claimed to have seen a vision.  What he saw, whether in a vision, or in his imperial imagination, was a means through which he might unite the regions he ruled.  There were, by this time, so many Christians in the empire that maintaining authority required an acknowledgement by Constantine that, to a remarkable degree, Christ had gotten the upper hand on Caesar.  The blood of martyrs had proved his subjects were more loyal to the kingdom of God than to Rome.  If Jesus had meant that his kingdom is in heaven and literally "not of this world" there appears to have been a whopping malapropism in subsequent history.

      Maybe this is the time to go back to the beginning.  Three world faiths trace their origins to father Abraham.  That is a patriarchy that has directly influenced more than half the people now living on the planet, and indirectly most of the others.  Abraham Lincoln, his namesake, is perhaps the greatest American.  Isaac Newton, namesake of Abraham's son, is the greatest figure of Western science.  That makes Abraham's wife, Sarah, who bore Isaac in her old age, so the story goes, a matriarch of heronic dimensions despite the singularly uncongenial item noted in herstory that she called Abraham Lord. 

      Abraham was promised that he would be the father of so vast a multitude that his descendants would outnumber the stars of the heavens or the sand of the seashore.  He was to be the father of nations, and kings would come from his lineage.  The heirs of these dynasties would be powerful and possess the gates of their enemies.  And through Abraham's seed all nations of the earth would be blessed. 

     In the traditional interpretation, Abraham's two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, are regarded to be the progenitors of peoples still with us today, Isaac the father of Israel in all its clans, Ishmael the father of the Arabs who threaten to drive modern Israel into the sea.  Abraham's seed is commonly taken to be Jesus, the messiah of early Jewish Christians, Christ to the Greeks.  Whether this patriarchy of Semites from antiquity have been a blessing to all nations, according to the promise, is the great bone of contention these days. 

      Where I live, we have a rabbi by the of name of Daniel Lapin who writes provocative editorials for the Wall Street Journal.  When I heard him speak, one Friday evening in January, it was without amplification, because Orthodox Jews eschew technological devices on the Sabbath.  But his robust voice thundered out into an auditorium filled with people who had voted Republican in the recent revolt of angry white males.  Interestingly enough, many females were in attendance.  It looked as though as many women had come with their men in tow as there were women who were following obediently at their husbands' sides.  Rabbi Lapin brought all in attendance to their feet for a lengthy ovation following his speech.  The gist of his argument was that what unites moral relativists of every stripe having an agenda for cultural revolution is an opposition to the idea that God delivered to Abraham and his offspring a normative cultural legacy.  Ideologues of the left, sexual liberationists, racial separatists, environmental extremists, and postmodernists, do seem to pose an enigma for the latter days of the twentieth century: whether the dialectic which has fallen out of the upheavals of the past thirty years between the old populist consensus of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, as opposed to the liberationist movement, is anything more than a power struggle between world views in conflict. 

      Both sides claim the moral high ground.  Peaceniks, environmentalists, gay rights advocates, and multiculturalists are allied in opposition to a common enemy whom they consider to be authoritarian, violent, and oppressive.  Groups for whom personal autonomy and self-created standards are the only norms oppose an old guard of traditionalists, or absolutists, depending on your point of view.  The Bible is the mainstay of many in the old guard.  Our local rabbi isn't a conspiracy theorist.  He probably wouldn't credit the movements he has identified as opposed to the God of his ancestors with enough understanding of what they are doing to conspire.  They co-operate in alliances which resemble Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition joining forces with big labor and educational elites.  The consequent stand-off comes down to the same thing.  Is God taking sides on this one?  Is it a false dichotomy perpetuated by rigid minds? 

     Christians might look for help on these questions in their own Bibles.  In the drama of the gospels, Jesus seems to evoke the wrath of both sides of a similar dichotomy.  Pharisees, in his day, were the conservative party.  They stood for careful observance of the law and the prophets.  Sadducees were the modernists, willing to make significant accommodations in their Hellenized cultural environment.  They were pragmatic in their concessions to the Romans.  Jesus minced no words, calling both parties hypocrites and vipers.  He said that they both closed the kingdom of heaven and that neither of them would enter it themselves.  In an explicitly anti-authoritarian manner, he vilified the leaders of both factions and pointed out examples of genuine devotion: a poor widow who contributed her last penny to the alms box, a Roman Centurion who humiliated himself asking Jesus to heal his servant, a tax collector who made restitution to people he had defrauded.  Jesus himself kept company with orthodox and radicals alike, with fishermen and an unwashed rabble. 

      In this it is all too easy to find the antithesis of what used to be called the Moral Majority.  Part of the trouble is that the tradition of which Jesus evolved into a theocratic subculture with puritanical conventions within a dominant Greco-Roman hegemony long established and unlimited in the exercise of its power.  To take Jesus's criticisms of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and apply them to the opposing sides of our modern antithesis is too simplistic.  The old cultural establishment in our context is Judeo-Christian, but the channels of influence within it have been co-opted by bureaucrats, the media, lobbyists, and entrenched political alliances that manipulate institutions and cultural images in a fluid balance of power. 

      The counter culture seems to have gotten the upper hand in institutions, whether governmental or the foundations, and, conspicuously, in the educational establishment.  On the basis of New-Deal ideology, wealth is being redistributed from productive businesses and individuals to a growing underclass and to armies of civil servants.  Much of this transfer is sold to middle-class voters on the basis of a persistent ideal of American style Christian compassion.  Christians, having found the mandate in their Bibles, set the pattern.  The Social Gospel perpetuated it.  Lately it has been put in service of liberation theology and the welfare state. 

      In the dominant images shaped by the left, the poor are a subsidized class, well represented, yet prone to violence.  When religious faith and morals are increasingly fragmented and libertinn, it is entirely possible that Jesus would come off sounding like Newt Gingrich.  He might find his moral exemplars among the bourgeoisie.  He might have a radio talk show:  "And now, live from New York, with talent on loan from God... ." 

      In an era of expansive social services and a welfare subsidized drug economy, it is difficult to find the virtuous poor.  In Jesus's day a man who couldn't pay his debts was sold into slavery.  A woman reared her children responsibly because they were her only hope for the future.  When the virtuous poor are found mostly in the movies, a middle class taxpayer, who fights freeway traffic all day, yet still finds time to play ball with the kids, starts to look quite admirable.  If the guy gets his family to church on Sunday and contributes to charity in addition to the money he sees going to social services, he might qualify as a saint, especially if his charitable contributions are in lieu of buying a boat to go fishing once in a while.  About the only constant literary type to be found in all this is the fisherman who left his net, in this case, hanging on a nail in the garage. 

      It doesn't follow that God has joined the Republican party.  But we're getting warm.  As long as democracy holds, Christians are responsible to do more than vote; they have an obligation to inform themselves well enough to vote on a more intelligent basis than reference to the groups with which they identify or interests in which they are vested.  They might have to think about the unintended consequences of a certain kind of compassion.  Mainly, they have an obligation to participate in a process that does more good in the world than they could do as individuals.  And they might put in a good word for the Strategic Defense Initiative, while they're at it.  When we have the technology to shoot down international terrorists' missiles, building the systems to do it gains a certain moral urgency.  With freedom and capacity comes an obligation not binding on occupied Jews in the first century.  All the peace marches churches have blessed over the past thirty years haven't done as much to prevent war as the United States Marine Corps.  This parsimonious insight we owe to Rush Limbaugh. 

      Rush does all right.  You have to admit, it is remarkable for a guy who is only a high school graduate to end up addressing an incoming class of elected representatives in Washington.  When he starts talking about God, he isn't profound, but his instincts are urging him in the right direction.  He is like a lot of evangelicals who do the right thing in spite of half-baked ideas about theology and an aversion to the oven. 

      Serious discussion of theology has to move from milk to solid food, as the Bible says.  It need not be abstract in the manner of much that is written.  Actually, to build one's house on the rock in this regard is the antithesis of abstraction.  The doctrine of the Incarnation, which is at the core of Christian orthodoxy, is God's embrace of human form in its full vitality of flesh and spirit.  When God became man, redemption of the world and its noblest human achievements began.  The good to be found in all cultures was affirmed.  Everything the God/man said and did amplified what God had already demonstrated through his interaction with Israel.  Jesus, of course, was a Jew and the meaning of his life is inextricably enmeshed in Israel's history. 

      There have been movements which would prefer to ignore or forget this fact.  Gnostics of the early Christian era exhausted most of the logical options available to this way of thinking.  Disregard the fact that Jesus's spirituality is grounded in history, human flesh, and culture, and you have a religion that will relegate the finest accomplishments of humanity to second class citizenship.  Gnostics renounced both the glory of classical Greece and the artistry and moral refinement of the Hebrew Bible.  They fled the world of their own time for a mystical realm of pure spirit.  Thus, it became a thing of no consequence whether they mortified the body through self-flagellation or indulged in orgiastic sexual licentiousness.  The flesh was of no importance.  Fortunately, their scriptures ended up in a cave--Nag Hamadi.  The church councils repudiated gnostic theology and set down the rigorous Trinitarian creeds that still unite Christians, even in a lamentable diversity.

      Incarnational theology is at the core of Western civilization.  On the basis of the doctrine in which God folds transcendence into immanence by becoming human, Christians have been able to salvage the heritage of Greek philosophy and the splendors of pagan arts.  Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches still evidence the rich enculturation which resulted from Christian inclusiveness.  There was, of course, dissent.  The iconoclastic controversy hinged on prohibitions of images in Mosaic law.  But the incarnation has an inherent inclusiveness.  The good and the beautiful have prevailed; difficult accommodations were made, perhaps erring on the side of tolerance.  And there have been extremisms which resulted in lapses from orthodoxy.  Hermits renounced human society for the desert.  Art became anathema for some.  Calvin permitted only congregational singing of psalms unembellished by instrumental accompaniment or harmony in the bare bones churches of Geneva.  English Puritans smashed stained glass windows.  World haters persist in trying to purge themselves of all human passion through abnegating responsibility for life in the world.  Sectarian ideas have kept many American Christians out of public life and the full exercise of their citizenship. 

      Sometimes ulterior motives seem to have been involved.  Revivalists eschewed worldly engagement to avoid scrutiny of their books and their apres-revival entertainments.  The civil rights movement was largely a mobilization of churches, but many Christians resisted out of sectarian polity conveniently coincident with segregationist impulses.  To his credit, Jerry Falwell has admitted he was wrong in the sixties.  Interestingly, we now have organizations like People for the American Way who would, if possible, drive all religiously grounded morality out of the public square, in effect sending people of faith back to sectarian ideas they have abandoned. 

      There is no theological reason the church should be a minor player on the world's stage.  Taking the Bible seriously, there is hope that one day, under the authority of Christ, the church will be a nation of priests vindicated by the resurrection and destined for the glory to be revealed when Jesus comes with fire in his eyes.  But the end is not yet.  In the meantime there is the quality control problem.  The Church in the United States has been, in a sense, an experiment in the deregulation of religion.  Since the Reformation, state involvement in religion has been on the decline, which is to everyone's best interest.  Whenever church and state have joined forces, the church has been exploited, and power mongering is not a vice to which religious leaders are immune.  Politics may indeed be civil war by other means, but a political coalition will not turn back the legions of the Beast.  Kultur Kampf is a relic that didn't prove effective even when backed by the battering ram of Nazism.  The methods employed by ambassadors of the Spirit must be of a different order.  Christians will function best as citizens by being in the world, but not of the world.  God's contributions in favor of the Republican party may not be automatically renewable year by year. 

      But legions of Christians, many of whom were thrown to the lions, crucified, or burned as human torches to light up Nero's entertainments, were able to transform the Roman Empire.  This was in part because Christians were responsive to human need after the fashion demonstrated by their master  Before the welfare state existed, they organized charity on a large scale.  Now, when welfare reform is overdue, they are going to have to refurbish the original tenets of their social gospel.  The spiritual resources to accomplish miracles come out of suffering, and God has proven them to be inexhaustible. 

      But gaining spiritual strength through exercise among the poor in spirit does not always assuage the bitterness remaining for a church which is the object of scorn among elites.  The preponderance of argument against biblical norms comes from people who are anything but poor in spirit.  Arrogance and privilege are more characteristic of groups that would reduce Christendom to the marginalized status it sustained as a grudgingly tolerated minority in the Roman Empire.  Judaism and Christianity, for a while a sect within Judaism, were licit religions but always targetable for persecution when there was need for a scapegoat.  American white males are disinclined to accept scapegoat status. Now leftists yell, "Bring back the lions" at their rallies.

      Let's talk this over.  The reputed white male anger is perhaps misunderstood.  What seems to be voter indignation looking for redress may be misidentified as manageable pique, when it is verging on blind rage.  Why is it that I can be calmly driving in traffic listening to a Haydn sonata on the radio, and the trivial belligerence of another driver makes the veins bulge on my neck and adrenaline begin to flow?  I see you back there, you son-of-a-bitch, puffing your cigarette and grinning at me.  Why do I set the hand brake at the next red light and unbuckle my seat belt as though I am going to get out and kill you? 

      This is a matter of some concern.  Anger is part of the human constitution, and men have it written in the first paragraph of their constitutions as a basic premise.  If we apply theology, it might be said that men are made in the image of a God capable of vengeful fury.  Aggression and insult will be resisted.  Or obliterated.  Push me often enough, or insult me, and I will react.  If I am stronger than you and not restrained by the old injunction to "turn the other cheek," I might kick in your doors before you can call the police, a social worker, the National Organization for Women, the Peace and Justice Coalition, or the NAACP.  The one who said "turn the other cheek" knew disdainful rage, and he will forgive me, eventually.  Maybe it isn't because I'm frustrated that I become aggressive.  Maybe it is because my mornings at the gym are giving me extra vitality.  I've been feeling pretty good.  Maybe it is strength that makes me volatile.  Let's just talk here for a minute, before we do something we'll both regret. 

      My volatility may stem from the fact that I am a responsible person who habitually does what is required of me before I do what I want to do.  I get up and exercise, then go to work every day instead of turning on the television set to watch the inane chatter of spokes-models posing as newspersons, or some glitzy gossip show.  I listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio because I can do it while I am commuting between jobs and because he is a hell of lot more informative than the TV spokes-models.  While I am away from home, I have to worry about some deadbeat using a crowbar on my back door, because social workers think their compassionate ministrations are more effective on creeps than punishment, and the law doesn't require keeping them in jail for the full term of their previous sentence. 

      I have to work several months every year to pay taxes that aid my attackers--social workers and the effete elites and politicians who are buying votes with my money.  And it is already too late to reduce government spending; in many places half the registered voters are public employees with large, well organized unions and professional lobbyists, not to mention the motor-voter act which requires states to make voter registration readily accessible in welfare offices. 

      Then there are the business liberals--attorneys who thrive on medical malpractice compensation and product liability damages, who resist with big money any efforts in congress to limit the multimillion dollar punitive judgments and several-liability for which everybody pays.  Health care reform is hopeless, and medical costs have little chance of coming into line as Medicare neutralizes all market forces. 

      Maybe I wouldn't have to drive in traffic, maybe public transit would be feasible, if the oil companies and the automotive industry weren't keeping their thumbscrews on the political process--keeping highway funding in the billions, regulating transportation to death, bankrolling the anti-nuclear lobby.  Nuclear energy is so violent--so male.  What we need is passive energy. 

      The country is full of do-gooders, most of them blaming white males.  What about this compassion?  Is it really a good idea to keep robbing the rich to give it to the welfare moms?  I watched incredulously the other night as a woman on television, who had spent eight years on welfare, lectured me about how "we have to develop a conscience in this country."  After investing about ten trillion dollars in a war on poverty, we seem to be losing bigger all the time.  Throwing money at poverty is like pouring gasoline on a fire.  Ask why the fire gets bigger, and they tell you we're not pouring it on fast enough.  Used to be, when charity was Christian, before you ate dinner, down at the mission, they made you chop wood.  The able-bodied were expected to help support the organization that took them in.  And any Sunday school teacher knew better than to give money to teenage girls for getting pregnant.  Now the government sets them up with apartments and enough food stamps so they can spend their cash on drugs.  This is compassion?  Ever seen mothers' day at the crack house?  They come in taxi cabs.  On the day welfare checks arrive, they're lined up at the curb! 

      There was a time I thought compassion was what being a Christian was all about.  Twenty fifth chapter of Matthew.  Feed the hungry.  Clothe the naked.  Care for the sick.  It didn't take too many years for me to realize the only way I was going to help anybody was to be productive enough myself to have something to give.  The master said give, expecting nothing in return, but he also made it clear that the servant was worthless who buried his money in the ground instead of making a profit.  "To him who has, more shall be given.  To him who has not, even the little he thinks he has will be taken away."  Not very compassionate, Jesus!  On some occasions you don't sound very Christian.  You were certainly right in saying this wasn't going to be easy. 

      One doesn't want to believe God intended life to be drudgery.  Else why create a world with such potential.  I would have gone nuts a long time ago if I didn't think there was more to life than paying my bills and trying to help when somebody with problems wants to talk.  Writing is my revenge.  I like people, and I'll listen to what they have to say.  Now I'm having my say.  You can shut me out of your face anytime. 

      But if you are an engineer, or a doctor, a good salesman, or whatever, you no doubt make more money than I do.  If you have found something that gives you satisfaction, don't let some do-gooder make you feel guilty through that nonsense about ninety percent of the world's resources being consumed by ten percent of the population.  Those were numbers dreamed up by somebody for a Sierra Club poster.  David Brower admits it.  We are not in a zero sum game.  Human resourcefulness, not physical resources, creates wealth.  This is the first premise of the information age which is proving itself more decisively every year.  Solomon said, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might."  Right, Sol.  There is another way to establish the same thing, and, by now, you know how my argument from incarnational theology will go:  God valued the world and its human inhabitants enough to join us, so the world is worth every nickel of your investment in it.  Don't let anybody tell you the purpose of life is only to be revealed in the great by and by.  Furthermore, Jesus said, if you can't handle this, nobody is going to put you in charge of whatever is other side of Jordan.

      This week my university alumni publication arrived with forebodings concerning financial limitations being imposed on education and research.  Under recent tax limitation initiatives and proposed cuts in federal funding, the president worries there will be problems retaining and motivating distinguished professors.  He will retire soon, so the problem is for him somewhat academic.  The magazine featured reflections on his accomplishments during his sixteen year tenure and projections for the future.  Of course, he reiterated, mainly, the need for more money.  Over the years, he has stressed quality in education over accessibility, thus, his campaigns for salary increases and the necessity of a high powered faculty.  Only reluctantly, under the advisement of sympathetic, if more realistic, legislators, has he expanded the accessibility of education through branch campuses in suburban locales.

      Interestingly, the president is profiled as a man whom, early in life, was "ticketed for the ministry."  His father and his grandfather were both clergymen.  Seemingly, everybody else in his family was either a minister or married to one.  The influences, apparently somewhat negative, of these ministers and aunts who were married to them, he says, were an important reason that he chose philosophy as a major in college and eventually education as a career instead of theology.  In what he describes as "sort of a classic story" he began in college to challenge "the presuppositions and essentially the theology of the church."  "By the time I was a junior," he relates, "I knew for a certainty that I was not going into the ministry."  Then he adds, "On the other hand, some say that being a professor is a kind of secular priesthood.  Maybe."  Shouldn't he have used inclusive language?  How about secular priestesses?  More on that in a moment. 

      The domains of education and religion have long been overlapping in American society.  If there is any such thing as values free education, it is hard to imagine.  Since the courtroom debates of the twenties, Clarence Darrow's rebuttal of William Jennings Bryan has prevailed, but controversy over the teaching of evolution in the schools has relented only during a few periods of relative calm.  Stereotypes associated with religious fundamentalists persist, and those who oppose the establishment of evolution as the explanation of human origins seem unavoidably reminiscent of characters from Inherit the Wind.  The stereotypes of the Scopes trial, if not necessarily the science, have been increasingly detrimental to orthodox faith and to religiously grounded moral discourse in public life.  We seem to find ourselves, these days, on a rather bleak landscape where moral considerations are not cultivated.  In education, of course, a certain professional detachment has not disallowed authoritative pronouncements, especially with regard to academic and artistic freedom, sexual politics, the welfare state, and democratic capitalism.  We seem to have inherited, not the wind, but a great many windbags, often morally indifferent but moralistic in the extreme.

      When Herbert Marcuse was promulgating Marxism from an appointment at the University of California and calling for a revolution to overthrow capitalist exploiters, citizens and business people argued that it was an abuse of academic tenure for Marcuse to use his bully pulpit to aid their moral and ideological adversaries.  Conservatives now argue that educational unions and the social-services bureaucracy do the same kind of thing through partisan political organizing at taxpayers’ expense.  And, conservatives want to cut the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, thus eliminating what they consider to be propaganda paid for by their tax dollars in favor of creeds they find objectionable or immoral. 

      The argument takes many forms, but at the core of it is the conviction that governmental financial largess supports the establishment of moral and quasi-religious ideology.  It is one thing for social service employees to promote redistributionist economics, but they impose moral judgments on the people who pay their salaries.  They frequently make careers of this controversy.  Government funding which perpetuates welfare and other social services, right or wrong, should not subsidize the ideology by which the services are justified, any more than the state should subsidize the churches and synagogues of those who find welfare entitlements or payments to Planned Parenthood morally objectionable.  And the desecration of religious symbols is a religious statement of sorts.  No Roman Catholic should have to pay taxes to subsidize the irreligion of Andres Serrano's urine bathed crucifixes or the moral code implicit in Robert Mapplethorp's bullwhip proctology masquerading as art.  The creation of sadomasochistic or homo erotic art is a form of protected speech?  The state, by funding morally outrageous and sacrilegious art is encroaching on religion, quite the contrary of the contention by organizations like People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union, that it is the other way around. 

      Now concerning the esteemed priests of the academy--and the priestesses.  It's not gender inclusive editorial policy that requires my reference to secular priestesses as well as priests among the faculty of the venerable institution continually asking me to contribute to its endowment in addition to what I pay in sales and property taxes to support education.  In the recent issue of the alumni publication in which salary increases are defended to prevent a great exodus of tenured faculty--the brain drain--an article appears profiling a university sociologist, presumably one of the prodigious intellectuals to be retained and motivated by the increases.  In addition to her academic publications she is now featured in Glamour magazine.  The title of the article profiling her career is entitled Sex, Truths, and Videotape; the column she writes for Glamour magazine is called Sex and Health. 

      The noteworthy sociologist maintains that the core of her work is research and teaching.  This caught my eye, and I was interested in her views, because not long ago my church featured her on a lectureship series.  Since reading the article, I will stop contributing to the fund that sponsors the lectures.  I may have to find another denomination of the church, which doesn't provide a forum for such personages.  It is going to be harder, unfortunately, to disenfranchise such intrusions of dubious moral authority by professionals established in government institutions.  This is a regrettable example of the encroachment of government into areas of life that were formerly considered private, or voluntary, and the realm of religiously grounded morality.  Or any morality! 

      The profile of our diminutive sociologist begins as she strides into a session of her seminar on Sex, Gender, and the Family.  One of the nurses in the class, who is working on an advanced degree, has recently examined a Muslim woman who had undergone what is termed "genital circumcision."  The author of this morally neutral, culturally sensitive piece calls the procedure "controversial."  Though considered "genital mutilation in many Western cultures," she confidently reports "it is a common coming-of-age and religious ritual elsewhere."  Subjecting a twelve-year-old girl to clitorectomy with a razor blade and a lifetime of sexual dysfunction may be hard for Westerners to accept as the equivalent of Bar Mitzvah or Christian Confirmation, but those schooled in the Judeo-Christian tradition are not so advanced in their thinking as university journalists and sociologists.  The journalist informs us with alacrity that the sociologist "has been a liberal and a feminist since childhood."  Can we take this as indicative of the depth of study and reflection required to become a liberal and a feminist?  The budding teacher "organized a sex education group in her basement when she was ten years old."  "With parental approval," we are assured.  Somebody is going to have to call Rush Limbaugh on this one. 

      The latest opus of the highly regarded sociologist, Glamour columnist, and contributor to the New York Times is a book entitled, Peer Marriage.  It apparently grew out of a collaboration with another professor, written up and entitled American Couples.  They interviewed six hundred married or cohabiting couples and sent out surveys to twelve thousand others.  "The 'couples' research unearthed many same sex couples with egalitarian relationships but [alas] very few heterosexual couples" on suitably egalitarian footing.  Ah!  Homosexuals are dividing household chores more equitably than married heterosexuals.  What we are to make of the child-rearing division of labor among homosexuals, which she finds commendable, is anybody's guess.  Career and decision making dynamics were, no doubt, easier to evaluate. 

      Making the interpersonal dynamics of gay liaisons normative for married heterosexuals is a stretch.  Twenty years of academic work have enabled our secular priestess and progressive social critic to accomplish it.  Her non-judgmental analysis of such things might be better suited to Glamour magazine, but it is doubtful that even that audience would pay her enough to keep publishing.  It does seem that her conclusions belong in the company of her other titles from the Glamour column: What it Means when Your Boyfriend Won't Make Eye Contact During Lovemaking; and How to Deal with a Mediocre Lover.  Turning out such commentary will not maintain your income on par with an architect husband anymore, but she has been doing well at my beloved alma mater on a suitably motivating salary.  Perhaps she receives grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her research.  Now if religious conservatives will stop mingling church and state, and refrain from trying to impose their religiously grounded morality on others... .  And if they will just butt out of a political process which looks as if it is headed toward cuts in funding for public education... .

      With the clowns acting up in Washington D.C., we better hope God acts in human history.  The really frightening conclusion is that Americans are getting what they deserve from their representatives.  Washington is a circus, but that seems to be what people want.  They turn off their television sets if the news isn't as titillating as the parade of inanities Phil Donahue drags out every day.  This week the big Washington flap is over Dick Armey's "mispronunciation of Barney Frank's name.  Barney "Fag" is a little too distant from Barney Frank to believe Armey's remark wasn't the result of some habitual joke among Washington conservatives.  Frank was not too long ago in the middle of another highly publicized scandal, when it was uncovered that one of his ass-hole buddies was running a gay prostitution ring out of the lower level of Frank's pad.  Frank threatened to bring down others, maybe even the former Speaker of the House, if anything was made of his "indiscretion."  So why is Armey apologizing?  And how is it that Barney the swinger comes off, replying generously, like an indulgent elder statesman?  Is it any wonder people are listening to Rush Limbaugh instead of Peter Jennings?  This kind of stuff is not to be taken seriously.  Ridicule is the appropriate treatment. 

      You can't even watch a football game anymore without being subjected to a half-time show so tasteless it makes a production of Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera sound like Schubert.  Patty LaBelle's screaming at this years Super Bowl was louder and brassier than fifteen marching bands.  Her main attraction, and probably the reason she got the gig, was that her cleavage bulged so amply out of her red dress that a fan in the 67th row could get excited.  When the spotlight swung over on Tony Bennett, his wimpy baritone was obliterated by an eruption like Vesuvius behind him--fireworks, confetti, and streamers.  The field was covered with--besides a lot of trash--swarms of nubile women and boys in harem pants and pasties, presumably to give equal opportunity for spectator gratification among football fans of all sexual preferences.  Maybe some of Barney Frank's friends were in the stands. 

      If Americans will travel hundreds of miles and spend their money for this, we may be farther along the road last taken by the Romans than is thought.  It is harder to be sympathetic with the complaints that taxpayers are over-burdened.  Arguments for the National Endowment for the Arts start to sound convincing.  Popular taste having led to this, it may be worth putting up with Robert Mapplethorpe--now perhaps the world's most prominent proctologist.  If we keep money in the pipeline to the arts mafia, at least we'll occasionally hear a symphony in the bargain, and keep a few opera companies out of the red.  At least the singers in those ghastly productions at the Met can sing. 

      The controversy over the arts is not peripheral.  It goes right to the heart of our culture.  Even in church the battle rages over music and worship idioms.  There are church productions to rival the super bowl half-time show going on in mega-church auditoriums all over the country.  "When in Rome," so the argument goes, "do as the Romans do."  Sometimes called the church-growth movement, a trend in religious circles, instead of trying to raise the level of the culture, is playing to the gallery.  It is enough to make you think Calvin was on to something with his prohibitions of all but non-instrumental unison singing. 

      It is a question of standards.  Attracting a crowd isn't difficult when your budget rivals that of some Los Vegas gambling casinos.  But, just as it would be a gross misrepresentation of God to throw in chorus lines and prostitution--that big draw among Greek and Roman cults--it is wrong to ignore artistic standards when employing the arts to the glory of God.  Aboriginal Africans, when converted to Christianity, include much that is characteristic of their ritual and music in worship of the Judeo-Christian God, but they know intuitively that there are some of their rites that become questionable.  If we can't keep the casino out of the church, is it any wonder Washington runs like Harrah's Club?  Most of the Puritans who began the American experiment were suspicious of any humanistic indulgence.  One need not feel like and emotional cripple for criticizing what is becoming a pagan orgy. 

      So what is the difference between Patty LaBelle's screaming and one of the sopranos in those gaudy Met productions?  Are there any absolute artistic reasons to prefer one over the other?  Maybe Paul's response to a question in the book of Romans applies.  "What is the advantage of being a Jew?"  His surprising reply: "Much in every way."  Though God can forgive nearly everything, he condones nothing which ignores or despises excellence.  It is no accident that Jews, in addition to exalted moral standards, have given the world many of its artists and intellectuals.  Look at any demanding field of human endeavor and you will find achieving Jews.  Jews care intensely about excellence, and they work as if life depends on it.  Maybe it does. 

      But the "relativists" are going to start yelling about standards of excellence.  Whose standards?  What makes Bach better than debauchery?  Beethoven better than the Beetles?  In any field, the standards become apparent with experience.  I remember a conversation I had with a gemologist, once, when I was looking for a gift for my wife.  Instead of going to a jewelry store in a mall, I looked in the telephone directory and found a dealer who sold investment grade stones.  He not only sold me a beautiful sapphire, he explained the application of standards in his business.

      "Gem grading is easy," he said, "if you have enough stones to make comparisons."  I looked at the cache of sapphires he had poured out like gravel on his felt-cushioned table.  Even my untrained eyes could pick out the beautifully colored, transparent stones that would be of the greatest value.  The criteria become distinguishable to anyone familiar with sapphires.  Color, brilliance, transparency, and cut, are four I can remember without difficulty. 

      I picked a stone I liked, and he told me what it was worth.  Since we were dealing with sapphires and not emeralds, I could afford it.  He took me across the hall to jeweler who set it for me and sold me a gold chain to hang it on. 

      Admittedly the standards in music are harder to identify and demonstrate.  For people who know the most about music of all genres, it gets easier.  Sure there are different styles, but this is not as important as is now maintained.  Count Basie said there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music.  Most of the music we're hearing lately is bad music.  There are sentimental attachments to some music.  I might feel nostalgic for my callow college days listening to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the same way I might have an attachment to a gemstone that was my grandmothers, though it is not valuable by rigorous standards. 

      In music, the standards have been discovered by musicians, only in part created by them.  In music theory one learns rules which seem arbitrary and pedantic until one has written many exercises in composition and found that following the rules of voice leading, for example, brings out qualities equivalent to color, brilliance, transparency, like cut in gemstones.  The rules were ascertained during centuries of chanting in monasteries and throughout the development of the Western tradition from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner (gulp!), R. Strauss, etc.

      The glory of tradition is that one artist builds on the foundation many others have laid.  Eastern and Western traditions have developed worthwhile music.  Interesting though, in music, as in many other fields, the East has avidly taken up Western standards and without hesitation allowed lesser traditions to take their places in museums and folk arts festivals.  Any culture rich enough to experience the wealth of human creativity values Mozart and Beethoven.  Only a decadent culture could ask orchestra musicians trained in the Western tradition to scratch and screech and raise a clamor like a bunch of children in kindergarten. 

      Rigor and basic principles in a tradition that cherishes what has been learned in the past is the methodology of progress.  In science, Isaac Newton said he could see farther than his predecessors because he stood on the shoulders of giants.  In government, the nobility of the American constitution was crafted from materials as old as Plato's Republic and the books of Moses.  In court, only an idiot thinks he can represent his case without attorneys well versed in precedent going back hundreds of years.

      Liberationists of the latter half of the twentieth century have undermined the ethical standards of large segments of the population by encouraging abandonment of basic virtues established since Methuselah.  Martin Luther King considered self-expression an insidious doctrine.  Among black people, or any other, he argued that the self-expression doctrine is inimical to human progress.  What if King had lived to see what liberationism and self-esteem have wrought?  Whoever named Martin Luther King after a dead white European male had a greater respect for the moral progress evident in Western culture than the Afrocentrists who have been trying to carry on since 1968. 

      Of course, Brother King had some indiscretions of his own to conceal while preaching from the various pulpits he filled.  Given what he accomplished, it is hard to condemn him for the escapades J. Edgar Hoover discovered.  But the debilitated state of the black family today requires giving equal recognition to the many black preachers who were calling for responsible sexuality and marital fidelity long before King and who have continued their struggle into the present evil age. 

      The sexual liberations of the past thirty years have decimated the poor.  Welfare mothers have money to feed and clothe their offspring better than their grandparents were fed or clothed, but community traditions have broken down and old mores are eroded.  In their place are the brutal creeds of Hollywood rappers and the role models of drug dealers driving German luxury cars.  Schools are staffed by people who are still proud of the liberations which have turned underclass neighborhoods into war zones. 

      Carnality has consequences.  If sexual liberation has been an agony of broken marriages and disturbed children for the privileged, it has been anomie and insurrection for the poor.  White males can't shoot anybody for this one.  How do we forgive ourselves for buying entertainments that have traded culture for claptrap?  We made Jack Valenti rich.  We mauled the girls and fell asleep on top of them.  And gi'me another can of Colt 45.  Others, less able to recover and forget, after the hangover, continued the drama from our irresponsible cues. 

      We dumped the work ethic for self-expression and got what we deserved: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Keasy, the Rolling Stones, and church-growth music.  If we weren't drinking and drugging, we were, many of us, reading Hal Lindsey and analyzing intricacies of the timetables of the last train to Armageddon.  Either way it was mostly an excuse not to dig in and produce.  Prodigal sons.  Foolish servants who buried our money in the ground. 

      Now, in our forties many of us are still trying to decide what to be when we grow up.  Women support us.  Our children patronize us.  Might as well wander down to the tavern for a few more games of pool.  My father stopped hanging out in taverns while working three jobs to keep me in new levis and sporting equipment, and he can still beat me at pool.  My much vaunted freedom and self-expression has ended in this: sitting here looking at my lack of discipline in print. 

      I had a fire in my belly once to write.  But, you know, I had to ski bum around for a while.  When I ended up broke, I'd go home to live with Mom and Dad.  Maybe take a few more courses; I might want to finish my college degree sometime.  Singing in a community choir, I thought, "Hey, I'm not too bad; I can sing."  I found people charging thirty bucks an hour for coaching who would tell me I was the next Caruso.  I could get into those purple productions at the Met.  But in the seventies thirty bucks for a voice lesson, or anything else, was thirty bucks.  Got to get this cash flow problem worked out, once and for all.  Maybe Amway?  People are making big money, but, damn, this is hard.  Selling is work!  Many people with more discipline than I had must have been able to do it--those enthusiasts in double knit suits--because Jay Van Andel is bankrolling the Heritage Foundation these days.  Amway wasn't the problem; I was. 

      The crass materials!  I didn't want a Cadillac.  But I did need enough money for my singing lessons--or was it the writer's-school correspondence course I signed up for and never finished.  Dad paid the bill when they demanded payment.  They were such a nuisance--sleaze operation that they were, but they did have a contract.  Was this the time I actually did go to work at McDonalds?  McDonalds should have known better when they offered me a shot at Hamburger University.  Don't laugh, it was an opportunity to make a living.  Rex, the boss, who explained it to me wasn't much older than I was, and he was buying a house.  I thought flipping hamburgers was beneath me.  One of the managers told racist jokes, the money grubbing low life!  I was an artist.  And a professional student.  I guess I didn't act motivated enough.  One day I reported to my station at the fishwich fryer and found out I had reached my final hour at McDonalds.  I had managed to get myself fired.  It wasn't the first time.

      This was twenty five years ago.  Freedom can be little more than bouncing around like a foosball on Friday night.  I haven't yet fully recovered.  Starting with so much confidence, I've ended up with so little.  My parents have forgiven me.  And God.  How do I forgive myself?  My ex-wife drank because she was addicted to alcohol--so they told me at AA--but after she got away from me she was able to sober up.  During the last five years of our marriage she hadn't been dry more than a few days.  When the divorce was final, she began to benefit from the treatment centers she had sloshed in and out of for years.  She married an attorney who made in excess of $100000 a year, and she has been clean for years.  She has three kids and a membership in the most lavish health club in Bellevue.  Her mother always blamed me for the drinking, and she might have been right.  It wasn't that I dominated or abused her, she just couldn't bear to keep on after me day after day in whatever direction I might be headed.  She wanted to have a baby.  She came to despise literary types and musicians. 

      But the attorney she married didn't have to do his real work after driving a truck for six hours in traffic.  Even after I hired others to do the driving, I had to push myself through book-keeping, payrolls, schedules, and tax forms, before I could read or write.  During the early years of the relationship, my ex typed my manuscripts, and my work never looked so good.  When she realized the absurd odds against making any money in this business, she stopped typing and started drinking.  And bitching.  Who could blame her?

      I was an artist, wasn't I?  Artists express themselves.  Don't they?  Not if they have the sense God gave any jackass who wants to eat.  Writers study the markets and write what sells.  Self-expression is for people without responsibilities--people with money or without conscience.  Like singers who let women support them while they traverse the North American continent and half of Europe.  If their auditioning tours are successful, then they spend eight out of ten months living out of a suitcase someplace without the woman who helped them make it.  Sleeping with bimbos, or other singers.  Or opportunistic homosexuals who hire singers on the basis of their performance of another service also done with the mouth.  You wonder why my wife came to despise musicians?  Obsessive tawdry sex thrives in the paranoid subculture of maniacal ambition.  When singers will do anything for a role, the directors can do their casting in the bedroom.  Used to be sopranos were susceptible, the victims of lascivious conductors.  Now stud baritones and dramatic tenors are going to bed on the way to the stage.  And the garish spectacle of opera is a reflection of the world its producers inhabit in complete disregard of composers intentions.  Again, about the National Endowment for the Arts... . 

      Artists don't express themselves.  They look at the world with a craving for the truth.  In an era when Pontius Pilate’s query, "What is truth?" is axiomatic for people who dispense the National Endowment or manage foundations, artists find themselves in more or less the predicament of the man Pilate derisively interrogated and then crucified.  Art should be a responsibility which makes life bearable.  A response.  An obligation to beauty, truth, and morality.

      I might have been an artist if I had done my duty as a citizen.  Vietnam was still in my blood.  I couldn't handle the truth.  I seldom voted.  My wife told me about myself while she was drunk.  Her first husband had been in the Air Force in Germany.  Even there he got some idea of what was going on in Vietnam and what had gone on, not very long ago, in Europe.  I was in Sun Valley, or Jackson Wyoming maybe, when the war wound down.  During Nixon's great disgrace, which was not Watergate.  Watergate only proved he was a politician.  Caving in to war protesters proved he was without conviction; he was not a Churchill, but a Chamberlain.

      My wife was desperate to divert my attention from her pathetic drinking, and she could use everything that was wrong with me to obfuscate.  She found material because it was there, things she could use to distract me and abet her denial.  The marriage counselors were looking for abuse and male domination, but I simply failed to inspire any admiration.  My ambition, never steady enough, was unfocused, not realistic.  I couldn't see that desire matters less than demand and duty.  If you do what is required of you, your duty, you might see truth well enough to be able to demonstrate it in art.

      In 1967, while I had no idea what I would study in college, if I had been reading somebody with more sense than Ken Keasy, I might have known what the farm boys knew who were going to Vietnam out of honor and moral obligation.  Then the old patriotic ideals could be found on the editorial page of any newspaper.  Salt-of-the-earth people, veterans, their wives, knew what needed to be done.  The politicians began listening to the clamor on the left.  Washington had begun to find its candidates and staffers among Ivy League elites, not recognizing that authority gained through academic proficiency is not equivalent to leadership earned under fire. 

      The privileged among us, of the generation of booming babies, expressed ourselves as careerist Washington attorneys.  Those of us who should have gone to work in sawmills and wrecking yards kicked up our boots on bar room tables and coffee houses.  Women preferred to go on welfare rather than to stick it out with us.  Affairs of state fell into the hands of men and women who were, as the Bible says, heroes at mixing strong drink.  Men who wouldn't work, or were unemployable, and deadbeat dads, came under the censure of men who had never gotten their hands dirty, men who, in a real sense, had never worked a day in their lives. 

      How can the poor be anything but irresponsible?  The culture we have allowed to evolve irresponsible.  Given what the privileged are reading it is hard to expect the poorly educated and deprived to be disciplined.  One of the finest literary stylists of our time, read by an audience who should be fit, if few, but which is unfit and expansive, came to lecture at our university.  A professor and friend of mine was elected to ferry him around to faculty lectures, luncheons, and cocktail soirees.  The great man had famously written, "It's common knowledge that if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."  And other such Freudian crap.  In other words, if you are responsible about sex, you probably can't write.  I suppose it was to be expected, knowing his work, that all he could talk about was sex.  In the car between functions he blabbered how horny he was.  At the parties he was on the make.  Did his thinking with his balls. 

      At a faculty bash in Laurelhurst, he asked my professor friend if it would be alright with him if he just lay down on the floor and moaned.  My friend told me he could have helped the poor bastard make his connection.  He knew a few women who might be agreeable and could have bird-dogged the great author stylist of repute onto candidates disposed to that in which he was so fervently interested, but playing Leporello to the great man's Don Giovanni wasn't his inclination. 

      The heavy-weight author made his own connection.  It looked as if he had her pretty well along in the process in the smoke-filled and liquor lubricated environment of fancy faculty gatherings.  He was groping her and not holding down anything or inhibiting its adjoining whatever.  He excused himself momentarily to go upstairs and relieve himself of some of the liquor in his system, but, while there he encountered a proposition of another sort.  A homosexual who had correctly discerned his condition, but had not noticed the selection he had made which indicated a conflicting sexual preference, offered himself in unmistakable terms. 

      This was before it was considered homophobic to take offense at such advances.  Famous author was very upset.  He may have even taken a swing in the direction from which the proposition had come.  Others upstairs heard an uproar and a lot of un-literate language, and they rallied to break up the confrontation.  Famous author came storming down the stairs to the consternation of faculty and guests.  It took considerable consoling and restraint, while he was putting on his coat, to keep all that was not held down from damaging nearly everything adjoining.  The formerly willing prospect apparently realized she would have to be crazy to go to his hotel with him.  He was still breathing heavily and enormously indignant.

      With artists such as this award-winning stylist of great distinction setting the tone of high culture, it isn't surprising that literary hacks like me have had trouble finding our true voices.  When the Ivy League boys are reading his books, it isn't surprising, either, that young studs in lower class neighborhoods feel no inhibitions about sex or about fathering children they have no intention of supporting.  The privileged trade on these ideas, and trade them in when they are weary of them, but the final mileage on their ideas bears resemblance to the inner city fate of their traded-in Cadillacs which are driven into the ground, recklessly, by men who have never bought insurance on anything.  If the privileged have little sense, can we expect better from the poor?

      White males are angry, but it isn't the feminists and culture trashers who are making it roughest for us.  It's the rot on the inside.  Defensive posturing and self-justification are despicable when you have something to hide.  The radicals merely take advantage of our self-pity.  Gender and skin color have nothing to do with the disease.  Right now, a rich, phenomenally desirable black man sits precariously near the brink of hell.  Male idol, O. J. Simpson has proved to all of us who admired him that vulgar success can be worse than failure.  I've been hearing about O. J. since I was in high school, when he won the Heismann trophy.  His millions haven't wore well.  They just enabled him to wear women like trophies. 

      When you marry a woman, you find out it takes more than manly grace and style to make a husband.  O. J. went out and hooked up with another stunner, a lingerie model.  Maybe several others.  The one he married complained.  He had to rough her up at home.  Keep smiling for the camera; they're paying for that up-from-nothing smile.  You have to keep the taxes paid on your mansion, keep the Bentley tuned up.  "I want to tell you; I am one hundred percent innocent."  I'm a nice guy.  Just like a white male, I always land on my feet.  This is no contest; I'll write a book to pay the celebrity attorneys.  It's going to be all right.  I didn't do it.

      Somebody did.  Slashed the two people found in the bloody mess--the stunner wife sprawled on the steps, the waiter on the sidewalk.  Somebody left the trail of blood into O.J.'s car and bedroom.  Maybe it was a frame-up like so many black people seem to believe.  Maybe it was a couple of white males who murdered without motive or gain.  Like the con artist witnesses say. 

      There is a monster tearing at my insides who says feed me or I will rip you open.  Give me more women, more money, more super bowls, and more celluloid violence.  If you can't imagine it vividly enough, give me real grunge and gore.  You haven't the manhood to suppress the mayhem in the streets.  I'm going to splatter it across your face. 

      Where is your will man?  You couldn't face the war.  Your wife wanted you to support her dreams, but you crumbled under the weight.  Walked out.  You're nothing but a sham.  With all the time in the world, you watch somebody else win big on rented movies. 

     You wonder why men want to shoot somebody?  Why guys in army fatigues stalk phantoms in the woods?  Some of us are nuts because we didn't go to Vietnam, others because we did.  Some of us have evaded every obligation.  Others, who tried to pick up the slack, couldn't hold on as the rope slid burning through our fingers.  Some of us, at least, held on to our self-respect.  But, if we're honest when we're defenseless in the middle of the night, we know that the reasons for our failures are mainly in ourselves, in our evasions, and failures to stand up to the foul ridicule we heap on one another. 

      I don't know about you, buddy boy, but I am willing to acknowledge what it must have felt like for God to become a man, to live with the guilt we have accumulated through generations of our abuse of our freedom.  When Jesus looked into the eyes of his executioners, clouded but keen, he saw malignant magnificence.  When they spread his arms to crucify him, he tasted sweat draining down from exertions driven by the contempt of dominant Roman males for the God of the Jews.  The weight of the mall came down, driving steel through his wrists, and he felt the impact of a world hitting the absolute floor of existence.  In his delirium, when they hung him up on the blood stained beam to be taunted, he could see the howling mob of fools, proud of blindness and rage.

      No, I'm not going to start anything.  I'm starting to calm down.  You'd better get back in your car.  I probably would have reacted the same way you did.  Maybe I cut you off back there.  Yeah, yeah.  Sorry.  But wait a minute.  I should have recognized you.  Didn't we drop out of the same college? 

      With material like this to work with, it's a wonder things go on.  Feminists need not vilify white males for our dominance.  So few of us are dominant!  Most of us don't have the will to rise out of our desultory employments.  Those of us who do, can't control the appetites that our success has given us the means to satisfy.  We end up paunchy and bleary eyed from the smoke of cigarettes.  Any woman who has the discipline to keep herself in shape can lead us around by the nose.  By the time we start abusing them, they have become habituated to us as their domesticated beasts of burden.  They would rather take a beating once in a while than get a job. 

      Enough!  Calm down now.  Get back in the car.  Standing in the street isn't going to help.  It's starting to rain.

      Listening to the news you'd think we were in the middle of a revolution.  I suppose having Republicans in control of both houses of Congress is a shock to the system, but isn't this the way representative government is supposed to function?  The voters wanted a change.  Call it revolt if you want, or rage.  We have a new Republican majority, not a junta bent on extermination of women and Jews.  The "party of compassion" hasn't been able to make anything or anybody work.  If the Republicans don't do anything more than return control of the economy to the hands of productive citizens instead of the bureaucrats, lobbyists, and the rest of the public employees who are part of the overhead of running a country, they will have accomplished something. 

     Getting producers back in control is what might be called, in mathematical jargon, a necessary, if not sufficient condition.  It may not be sufficient, to make the poor more responsible, to reduce the number of social workers on their case, but it is necessary.  It probably will be better if the poor go looking for jobs at the producers' places of employment than if they continue to apply at government agencies.  Some people will still have a very hard time.  Reducing government will not be sufficient to remedy the problems of the underclass, but it is necessary if the underclass is to stop failing at such an alarmingly increasing rate.

      So where is God in this hand basket going to hell?  Will it be improved because there is a change of administration?  Are winners in the struggle, which is being described as social Darwinism, going to be better leaders than social engineers who have been redistributing the winners' wealth, the civil servants who have been redistributing a lot of the wealth into the hands of people in public employees' unions.

      I'm cynical and must admit that, for several years now, I have been working as a medical technician, still self-employed, but Medicare pays my wages.  It got to be too much trouble to deal with the Utilities and Transportation Commission.  My present wife is an urban planner.  I know about public employees’ unions because I read her union rag when it comes in the mail--their screaming about privatization, and so forth.

      About my wife.  I know, you thought I was on my own now and deserved to be watching television by myself at night, but my second marriage is working out.  I've learned a few things.  What I gave my former spouse, even during the years she was swallowing up everything with the wine she guzzled, made it easier for me to be generous with a responsible woman when I found the opportunity.  I don't make light of this; the years of failure were a sunk cost.  I have little sense of meaning for posterity because my children were abortions.  But I do have hope.

      Since I have begun with Abraham, and since I am a Christian, I might be expected to look for resolution of human history in John's Apocalypse.  Jesus's eschatology has some resemblance to that of the Revelation to John.  Jews are looking for a world redeemer of a somewhat different order who will modify the downward spiral of civilization, according to their prophets visions.  Either way there is hope not to be found in naturalism--Darwinian, or that elaborated by the writers of science fiction.  But we need not call down fire from heaven.  Though it would be difficult to find more powerful literary images than those in John's Apocalypse, not even all Christians find them compelling.  Martin Luther didn't think they were worthy of inclusion in the canon. 

      There are sufficient grounds in the incarnation and the resurrection for belief in God's ultimate redemption of the world.  The narratives of Jesus life and death agree in relating the physical resurrection of his body after it came down from the cross.  Many believers in the gospel of eternal life seem not to grasp the single most tangible effect entailed by the resurrection.  This is the possibility in which every person alive might dare to hope, during rare moments, or at the beginning of a perfect day when the sun warms the earth and shrill cries of birds pierce the mist.  In a flush of pulsating exertion, balanced between heaven and a radiant earth, fingers on ruddy granite and muscles full of blood from the climb, one might hope that the body and this world could persist in strength and vitality day after day--that one might revel forever in living.  Sometimes just the smell of the earth suggests it could endure.  Or it brings back the day of that promised realization--the fulfilling, ongoing, summit-thundering lightning.  Many landscapes prefigure this renewal, the morning of eternity, the day, and another morning, another day, and another... .  On Resurrection morning brilliance penetrated the darkness, and brittle clay on the floor of the cave cracked as Jesus began to breathe again.  All creation slid back into place.  It shifted, like the bones in that grave.  Suddenly there was something toward which even death might orient itself and wait.

      Creation started groaning again right away, but Jesus sent his spirit into a few formerly cringing men.  Instead of backing deeper into the regressions they had started down, they came out like heroic tenors and Verdi baritones to stride across the world stage.  Singing, ecstatic, their lungs filled with music.  New roots grew under the ancient ash tree, and the tendrils sunk deep, penetrated the foundation of the world. 

      I wish I would never hear again, in the church, the world abandoning lamentation.  Even venerable sages seem full of cynicism.  Can their mighty faiths not stand up to the world-hater God's Word has stunned.  Human history is moving, even now, toward its climax.  The incarnation and resurrection affirm human life and the world.  Mystics and enthusiasts of the spiritual life continue to renounce them.  They ignore the God of covenants, the God of the exodus and conquests, the God of judgments, the God seen by visionaries, proclaimed by prophets.  They forget the hymn of creation and the moral laws.  Seemingly longing for death and release, they see only another Tower of Babel in the marvels of twentieth century science and the ethical resiliency of constitutional governments.  They don't find in the recurring resurrections of the Judeo-Christian West the promise of epistemic and moral premises embedded in culture, the prospect of its coming to fulfillment in the presence of the God who revealed the law. 

      It is not insignificant that the horrors of our time are acknowledged evils, plain to all but the most obsessive autocrat, primitive chieftain, or postmodernist scholar.  The vanquished whom Caesar conquered thought his power proved some measure of nobility.  That was before Christendom.  In our era, Stalin had to kill Russians at a rate approaching that at which they realized he was, not a man, but a monster.  The West and its capitalist multinationals may be corruptible, but economic freedom has liberated millions of people.  Individualism is inconceivable in absence of the Bible.  Now oppression is intolerable to those using their minds, working their way to self-respect.  Muslim cab drivers who hardly speak English find the road to prosperity in America because they embrace the opportunity that comes with a sense of self, while street-wise, youthful cynics can't stay out of jail.  Civility may seem a relic of the past in South Central Los Angeles, but Koreans build community there. 

      In New York stoic buildings still proclaim truth, virtue, and faith in inscriptions a century old.  Truth, virtue, and faith are embedded in the foundations now.  Tear down the edifices and Western virtues will grow back from the bedrock underground.  A tone deaf generation may prefer rock music to the symphony of science orbiting the planet, but history is moving, with or without them, toward a destination where a city is destined by God to be built.  In that vocation there will be engaging work for men and women in whose minds God finds comprehension of his standards, in whose hands willing assent. 

      The resurrection is affirmation of flesh, blood and bone.  It is hope for the noblest elements of human cultures, for the most beautiful of the arts.  The Passions of J. S. Bach were only the beginning of what will be sung in the spirit of the worshipful Christ returning glory to the Father.  Mozart's choral masses and the gospel according to Mendelssohn's St. Paul are but the early strains of an overture to this great work.  The revival of the Grecian heritage was just one of the marvels of the resurrection.  Holocausts, plagues, and the darkness of imperial and clerical regressions have not been able to bury Christendom.

      From our vantage point, the Renaissance is often viewed as emancipation from the church.  The developments which led up to it, which, arguably, brought it about, can be attributed to a group of theologians, most noted among whom is William of Occam.  Occam criticized realist metaphysics, much debased since Aquinas, and set the world on a course toward the modern schizophrenia of things verses thought.  Before Erasmus began restoration of the viability of ancient manuscripts, both classical and biblical, before Luther and the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, Occam partitioned human thought from transcendent judgments.  The philosophical principle, known as Occam's razor, eliminated universals as speculative appendages to the world of concrete things.  If human reason is incapable of metaphysical judgments, it follows that theology and church polity must be based on some other authority than conclusions attained through metaphysical speculation.  Scripture became the new criterion, not theology of the sort by which the creeds had been elaborated in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.  Things being things, and universals superfluous, science and art become the bread and butter of civilization--a feast of human values, if you go along with the accepted interpretation.  Centuries of religious wars between Christians claiming authoritative understandings of the Bible and the pervasiveness in subsequent generations of a great schism between sense and soul invite another interpretation. 

      In Europe, the Enlightenment which followed the Reformation was a revolt against the church.  Enlightened their liberated thought may have been, but the French revolution was not an unmitigated boon to humanity, least of all to the French.  In England, there was less bloodletting in the transition from the divine right of kings to limited government.  But in the New World, the church was not considered an agent of oppression.  American soil was settled by pilgrims fleeing established churches to gain the freedom to worship God as they saw fit.  The Plymouth Bay Colony was another resurrection of sorts. 

      The Covenant Theology upon which it was based emphasized continuity with the promises to Abraham and Moses.  The land was a new Canaan.  The culture which began to evolve, which was intended to be exemplary, a veritable city on a hill, was theocentric to its core.  Separation of church and state eventually became the guarantee of religious freedom, not a prohibition of religiously grounded morality.  At this incipient stage of the miracle of the United States of America, were these early settlers of the New World wrong in their conviction that God was being faithful to the covenant he had made with Abraham?  If you have followed me this far, it must be plain I think they were essentially correct.

      Isaac Newton's epitaph--All was Darkness; but God said, "Let Newton be," and All was Light--was an appropriate preface to the new age of science and technology.  The West, indeed, had light, with bread and to spare.  If the culture became materialistic, that was understandable, though possibly the result of a subtle philosophical error going back to Occam.  But it wasn't the industrial revolution that made the West great, and the United States in particular, dominant.  The moral equivalent of nuclear energy was released in the human spirit through the revolutions that made freedom and human rights axiomatic in Western Europe and America.  Economic freedom began to power the engines of technological progress.  And the epistemology of science, though not infallible, was based on experimentation and reason in a world postulated to be the lawfully functioning creation of a lawful God.  Incarnate in his works and in his Word, he was the Logos of the Greeks, the Messiah of the Jews.  The progenitors of modern science assumed that the world would prove orderly, and thus, controllable.  This was an unspoken premise. 

      Primary, however, were the moral revolutions and religious freedom.  Many historians have pointed to the connection between the First Great Awakening of religious fervor and the American Revolution.  The revivals of George Whitefield are noted in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.  Wesleyan revivals swept the South.  In Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards abetted the "exercises" of the Spirit at Northampton.  Millenarian fervor, cohesive values, and independence of judgment gave colonial Americans the will and solidarity to organize their resistance and expel the British. 

      The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century was instrumental in the abolitionist movement and precursor to the Civil War.  Revivalists like the "soul-shaken" lawyer, Charles Finney, spearheaded the abolitionist movement.  Abraham Lincoln could not have sustained the collective will to preserve the union and free the slaves in absence of the speeches he gave resounding biblical images and moral imperatives which had been awakened in citizens' hearts and minds through evangelical religious meetings.  And whatever else Lincoln learned, reading by candlelight in a Kentucky log cabin, he absorbed a great deal that had come down through history from the man whose name he had inherited, the man upon whom God's irrevocable blessing had been bestowed three thousand years ago in Near Eastern antiquity. 

     Lincoln is a good example of the kind of man God can use in construction of the New Jerusalem.  Lincoln may not have been an avid Christian or much of a church-goer, but he embodied the ideals of the kingdom of God which Jesus must have had in mind when he said, "Salt is good," or "You are the salt of the earth."  It is of ultimate importance, now when American culture is losing its saltiness that we persist in trying to identify salt-of-the-earth people who are fit for that kingdom which is of heaven, if not necessarily in heaven.  On nearer landscapes than that of Lincoln, charismatic personages can be found raising the steel upon which the skyline of our time will be newly constructed.  Not many of these people are as visible as Lincoln is in retrospect.  Many of them have worked for years in obscurity on things too abstruse for attention spans schooled in the mass media.  Others serve humbly in important, though unspectacular callings.  Abe Lincoln was merely a great man; his mother may have been a saint. 

     Racial issues, ever at the turning point in American politics, continue to provide trials for the testing of spiritual metal.  Some of the saints in this fire have been shown to have feet of clay.  Adam Clayton Powell was living pretty high in the Caribbean on his fame.  Jesse Jackson may yet qualify as a worthy successor to Martin Luther King.  He seems to be prone to saintly flashes of revelation.  Visionary, indeed, was his experience on a dark street one night, when he realized something has gone wrong in the movement.  Having heard footsteps, he says, it was quite a shock to feel relief when he turned to find that his follower was white.  He has also been heard to speechify in a vein that concedes there were no government programs to help emancipated slaves build the sense of community that has lately broken down.  For the present, his dichotomous thinking disqualifies him from canonization; he can't resist identification of all conservatives with stereotypes cut out of a dismal era in the South.

      Sometimes a good man is hard to find.  A villain comes to mind, who might qualify as antichrist in the eyes of observers on both the left and the right.  Even without the Watergate disgrace, Richard Nixon seems now the quintessential example of a politician running amok.  He backed out of Vietnam too slowly for left wingers, too fast for the right.  His expansion of government programs and social services rivaled that of Lyndon Johnson. 

     But we were looking for exemplary character.  To find good prospects right now, one might consider Thomas Sowell, Water Williams, Alan Keyes, or any number of black conservatives.  Conservatives, in general, seem to be on the glory road.  Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole could join St. George Will marching to a familiar refrain on Harry James trumpet.  No doubt there are still authoritarian conservatives.  The Klan Watch organizations have been blowing the whistle on white supremists and Nazi clones among the militias of Montana and Idaho. 

      But the lunatic fringe of the conservative movement pales to insignificance in view of the pervasive, entrenched cadre of leftists in institutions and the bureaucracy who are trashing Western civilization.  The outrages of political correctness in the academic world are only the protrusions of a few of the many icebergs bobbing in a sea of publicly funded ideology.  Smug self-righteousness is likely to turn vicious when the tide of financial largess goes out.  Some media heavyweights began to get the message with the Republican tidal wave of 1994.  It's hard for most of them to fathom, but people listening to talk radio and surfing computer networks are swimming while the media liberals sink. 

      Does this seem to be drifting toward an overly simplistic antithesis?  Is it too much like Jesse Jackson's neat stereotypes of conservatives as the same mentality folk as those back in the sixties who stood in school doorways to keep black children out.  After fifty years of government New Dealing, of liberal intervention in the economy, in education, in social issues, in medical care, the monumental dysfunctionalism of a family of co-dependent agencies, lobbyists representing big business, big labor, the educational bureaucracy, social services planners, Medicare socialists, politicians, and lawyers is so out of proportion to its accomplishments that it would be maudlin, if it were not that through the ideology on which it is based we have mortgaged our future for several generations yet unborn.  Add to this debacle a cultural revolution which heaps contempt upon the on the virtues on which economic well-being and rigorous technology depend--our only prayer if we are ever to grow out of our exorbitant debt--and you have a predicament that raises apocalyptic images. 

      For years so much anti-technology bilge has flowed, like cheap wine, that boomers have forgotten that the climax of the sixties was not Woodstock, that indigestible outrage, or the dubious triumph of the anti-war movement, but the space program which began its awesome trajectory in the fifties, investing in minds and machines, with aspirations toward the sublime, and which culminated in the Apollo lunar landing.  The brilliance of this achievement outshines anything boasted by the educated ignoramuses then rampaging past the engineering buildings at Berkeley or blowing their minds at Woodstock.  The orgy of activism which spread across the country was an anti-intellectual epidemic that obscured the only inspiring government program of all those well intended if misconceived in that audacious era.  The War on Poverty has turned out to be war, a plague on the poor.  Environmental cleanup a monumental swindle.  Affirmative action has proved good intentions are worse than anything the Ku Klux Klan could have devised to flunk the best and the brightest black students out of prestigious universities.  legions of black engineering students have flunked out of M.I.T. and Harvard, pushed just beyond the level at which they could compete, when they would have thrived at Oregon State or the NYU.  It is all becoming clear now in the contaminated hearts and minds of those of us who have had such a hell of a time finding our way to responsible citizenship since the tear gas lifted. 

     Is it a false dichotomy to oppose Western civilization to the cult of postmodernists who can't countenance even the historical verifications upon which civilizations are based?  The respected option nowadays is that of eschewing simplistic reductions of controversy to clear choices.  The complexity of modern industrial states blah, blah, blah... .  John Kenneth Galbraith can just shut up.  He has been wrong about everything, why should we continue to listen?

      Fuzzy logic is for dealing with uncertainty, non-aristotelian thinking as a useful surrogate for probability when statistics is beyond most of us anyway.  But the evidence is anything but ambiguous.  As Newt Gingrich would say, "The counter culture has failed."

      Many of the rebellions of our time, as our tradition defending rabbi maintains, are arrayed against an alliance of conservatives, many of whom still recognize the authority of the Judeo-Christian Bible.  That the Bible is the soul of Western culture is not very contestable.  The question is whether its unambiguous criteria in ethics and epistemology are anything more than the contrivance of antiquated networks of priests and their scripture writing poet laureates.  If there is a God in Israel, of uncompromising righteousness, a man of war, there is no recourse in the complexity of non-dichotomous thinking.  This is another evasion and will not suffice.  Either God works his will in human history, or he is a myth of human imagination.  On the evidence of Western culture against the alternatives, and in view of the kinds of thinking opposed to the very idea of normative standards, one might find compelling plausibility in the notion that the Bible is a revelation, that it is God's word in very coherent form, a form that is different from that of the incarnate Word with whom Christians identify, but clear in its intent and backed by ultimate Being.  A straight answer on this one will affect everything else one ever does. 

     Probably, most people don't face the question in such an either/or manner.  For generations it was one that was answered in the ethos of the age in which one lived.  The old consensus supported ideals and people such as Lincoln, the sort for which we have been looking, whom may not have been explicitly Christian or Jewish, yet whom have risen to estimable accomplishments and character in the formerly prevalent Western mode.  One of our contemporaries, Pope John Paul II, is explicitly Christian and identifiable as a leader who resists the spirit of the present age.  He, along with Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan saw clearly the moral obligation in Eastern Europe and steadfastly pursued their course in spite of well organized, scornful opposition.  Solidarity in Poland found superhuman resources in the church and its pope.  Reagan and Thatcher lent their moral support, while deploying Cruise and Pershing Missiles through NATO in Germany, again against great hue and cry, in a defense buildup during the Reagan era that was critical.  Former Soviet generals, veterans of the Cold War, have now acknowledged that the resolution and technological ingenuity demonstrated during those years brought about the collapse of the Soviet military economy.  The balance of terror ended in a growing Soviet awareness of Western superiority. 

     On this theme is found a continuation of the American space epic.  The Strategic Defense Initiative, even in its incipient stages, was the final demoralizing challenge to Soviet resolution in the latter years of the cold war.  The technological imagination of the capitalistic West, in combination with the moral fortitude it had sustained, was too great an adversary for a system that had usurped all initiative from a subjugated people.  How could they keep the pace?  Gorbachev's reforms were an opening, which became a gaping cleavage in the iron curtain, and capitalism, science, and moral resolve, though faltering, triumphed.  Malcolm Forbes Jr. in New York, Edward Teller at Livermore Laboratories, and the Pope of Rome, an optimistic triumvirate of the late twentieth century, trounced the legacy of Marx, Stalin, and Herbert Marcuse. 

      But where was the contemporary Beethoven to compose an Eroica for Ronald Reagan?  Even while the West made good on its word, the culture continued to degenerate.  Instead of celebration, aesthetes composed music for academic orchestras in acoustically tiled studios.  Banal popular talents were getting rich selling raunchy, blood stained lyrics, unfit for human ears, to twelve-year-olds.  Serious art failed to evoke any sense of the historical moment, never having recovered from a century of nihilism.  The major orchestras were living on the capital of past geniuses.  Bernstein's bash for the Panther Party in the late sixties marked some nadir of celebrity art gone nuts.

      The culture war shows no signs of abating.  There are, however, a few indications that the populace is coming out from cover to take back institutions long controlled by cynical manipulators of the political process, many of whom have resisted over the years every impulse of conservatives toward necessary reforms.  The ideologies of the left which have decimated the twentieth century are related by their common arrogations of power to the state.  "Everything under the state, and nothing outside the state," as Mussolini is supposed to have said.  In opposition have been Western states where voluntary organizations still flourish, and governments are still answerable to the consent of the governed.  Based on ideals of human freedom under law, limited government--the old liberalism--depends on moral responsibility. 

      In 1893 Pope Leo XIII in an encyclical called Rerum Novarum--The Spirit of Revolutionary Change--predicted that socialism would fail as irremediably as it has.  Pope John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus--The Hundredth Year--after Leo's abnegation from the then utopian creed, has identified capitalism as the economic system most adaptable to human freedom and creativity.  He does not endorse the amoral strain of capitalism know by the term libertarianism, but he does explore the fallacious promises of government redistribution of wealth and the welfare state.  No matter what one's opinion of papal argumentation in the social sphere, a clear choice has emerged between political parties in America, and it is a choice involving moral deliberation: One can help the Republicans cut back government micromanagement in every sphere of life, or one can dig in and resist it with the Democrats.  Even if we could afford to go on spending billions on social programs and regulation of the economy, it would seem that there is a clear divergence between parties which is, in substance, about freedom. 

      The Republicans contend for the moral responsibility of the individual under law, and, for many of them, under God.  The Democrats have opted for a philosophy of suspended moral judgment under regulation by elites and their surrogates in the bureaucracy.  It is no accident that elites in the educational establishment and the social-services bureaucracy are unanimous in their denunciation of moral absolutes.  As the backbone of the Democratic constituency, they thrive on governmental expansion into areas of life formerly considered private, voluntary, or the realm of religiously grounded morality, or any morality!  Their opposition to any moral consensus beyond their own politically correct canons will degenerate into anarchy in absence of power elite who can demand compliance. 

     If there is any doubt about whom the postmodernist intelligentsia have nominated to be that power elite, it is not among the angry white males who turned Republican with a vengeance in November of 1994.  God may well have joined the GOP, and he will renew his contribution as long as the new majority continues efforts to dismantle dehumanizing social programs, propagandistic education, arts, and media, and put control of culture back in the hands of citizens and voluntary organizations.  Why should taxpayers subsidize ideology which is inimical to morals and ultimately to their constitutional freedoms?  The inventors of postmodernism--Heidegger, Paul DeMann, and others--were Nazis. 

      Marxists used to be full of confidence about being on the right side of history.  For people of faith, that expression turns out to be appropriate in opposition to the revolution Marx claimed was inevitable, and in opposition to the postmodernist revolution that has succeeded it.  From the vantage point of biblical patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, history is the bearer of either a blessing or a curse.  Affirmation of the law of God and working toward conformity to its ideals is choosing the blessing.  The society that affirms these ideals is on the right side of history.  In the Bible, the curse was brought down on the abominations in Israel and Judah in the form of Assyrian and Babylonian invasions.  In the twentieth century Hitler's imperialism and atrocities evoked the curse of massive retaliation motivated by the world's moral indignation.  During the Cold War collective memory among veterans of earlier conflicts made it impossible for moralistic proponents of disarmament and detente to eviscerate Western defense appropriations.  The historical imperatives, as conservatives steadfastly maintained, were opposed to communism, not in its favor. 

      The final days of this century of utopian intentions and horrific consequences give every indication of being the expose of the millennium.  Powerful populist energies, mobilized by a resurgence of hope, are exercising their citizenship and clamoring for accountability in their representatives.  They are demanding fiscal responsibility.  When they find out they can eliminate support for careerist academics who despise them, there will be civil war, or anyway more uncivilized uproar. 

     God is on the side of people salted with fire.  Time will see the binding of the Beast with a great chain and the Whore of Babylon restrained.  Together they will be thrown into the lake of fire that burns with fire and brimstone forever.  Merchants of culture who have grown fat in commerce with the Beast and his strumpet wench, will watch with terror the smoke of their immolation.  From ships at sea, they will groan at their end.  The redeemed will hear the wailing and see the pillar of smoke, but in the light of Messiah's countenance they will rejoice.  In the resplendence of his Word they will find peace and be glad. 

      Amen, Lord.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.