The Bosque Boys

Readers of Christianity Today have chosen their favorite movies of 2008.

#1 The Dark Knight

#10 (tie) Mama Mia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I wrote this last May--but in honor of Lil Wayne and his big haul at the Grammys last night, I am reissuing this lament on the decline of pop culture:

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we'll all stay free!

Praise the Lord and swing into position!
Can't afford to sit around and wishin'
Praise the Lord we're all between perdition
and the deep blue sea!

Yes the sky pilot said it
You've got to give him credit
for a son - of - gun - of - a - gunner was he,
Shouting:
Praise the Lord we're on a mighty mission!
All aboard, we're not a - goin' fishin;
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we'll all stay free!

"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" relates the partly true story of a chaplain ("sky pilot") and his reaction to Pearl Harbor. The song was a huge pop hit for Kay Keyser and his orchestra in late 1942. For a revealing window into our current sensibilities, view this You Tube video (with the actual music as sarcastic background to some classic conservative baiting) and then read the accompanying discussion (from the beginning).

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One other hit song from the era (#1 in 1943):
When The Lights Go On Again All Over The World

Note: In truth, unlike 1943, only a small slice of America is actually at war today (the rest of us are drafting off the heroic sacrifice of a select few stalwart souls). For all those Americans on their third and fourth tours of duty, and all the families waiting at home, our sincere thanks. This song is dedicated to you.

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the boys are home again all over the world
And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above
A kiss won't mean "goodbye" but "Hello to love"

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the ships will sail again all over the world
Then we'll have time for things like wedding rings
and free hearts will sing
When the lights go on again all over the world

One last thought, FYI: The number one song again this week (three weeks running) is “Lollipop” by Lil’ Wayne: “She she lick me Like a lollipop; She she lick me Like a lollipop; She she lick Like a lollipop; She lick Me Like a lollipop….”

Unfortunately there is much much more to “Lollipop.”

Remember the bad old days when we sang silly songs that assumed God was on our side in a just war against evil doers? Thank goodness we have elevated our culture above that brand of provincialism.

Saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman died last month of pancreatic cancer. He was 75. Story here.

Jazz, R&B, Blues. He could play them all and bring them together into one package. Here are a few representative cuts.

Lonely Avenue

Another Kentucky Sunset

Cristo Redento[r]

It's late, in the midnight hour, and I'm listening to jazz. Here's my recent playlist.

Dave Holland.

Idris Muhammad and group.

John Coltrane and group.

Stan Getz & group.

Chet Baker & Paul Desmond

Chick Corea & RTF

Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson, and the late Freddy Hubbard.

A week ago on Friday night my wife and I drove to a nearby town even smaller than our own. The Apache girls' and boys' basketball teams were to play Fletcher. We left early to have time for the chili supper beforehand.

Held in the Fletcher High School cafeteria, 8 local volunteer fire departments made and served chili. At the beginning of the line was a boot on a desk to receive donations for the departments. On the serving line were pots of chili, one from each fire department, with a basket in front of each. The idea was to get a sample from one pot, eat it, then return to the line to sample another pot, for as long as the stomach could hold out. You were then to put money into the basket in front of the pot you judged best.

I love chili. Simple in its basic form--meat, tomatoes, chili powder, perhaps beans--it lends itself to many variations. That night I sampled a batch that I think had cilantro in it, another I think used chorizo, two fairly sweet, and one with near-nuclear quantities of jalepano.

The supper was organized by Joe Dorman (D), our Oklahoma State Representative. His goal is to raise enough money for each Volunteer Fire Department Station in his District to have an electric generator so that one site in each community will have electricity during outages. Such as ice storms.

Later, during one of the games, he announced that each department would receive about $175 at a minimum (I assume from the division of the boot money) and the winning chili brought in around $430.

Communities working together in common purpose. Volunteers supported by voluntary donations. This is genuine conservatism. This is a large part of what makes America great.

Cardinal George Pell in this address speaks of social capital: the networks of men and women, families, and organizations, acting honestly and responsibly in service to the common good.

Amen, Brother Cardinal.

p.s., The Apache girls won and the boys lost.

Millard Fuller, the man who founded Habitat for Humanity and whose name was synonymous with volunteer faith-based efforts to build houses for the poor, died suddenly Tuesday after a brief illness.

Fuller, 74, had suffered from a chest cold in recent weeks, said Holly Chapman, vice president of communications and development of the Fuller Center for Housing in Americus, Ga.

"He just took a turn for the worse last night," she said.

Story here from Christianity Today.

Fuller became a millionaire before he turned 30, then gave up his wealth to joing Koinonia Farm, a Christian communal farm in Georgia. He then created Habitat for Humanity in an effort to house the poor.

One of the things I have admired about Habitat, is that the recipient of the house must also labor, putting in a specified number of hours of "sweat equity." Helping people to help themselves is theologically, biblically, and psychologically, superior to giving people things.

People helping people help themselves; Community created by community, not by government.

John Updike has died of lung cancer. One of the great American novelists whose work should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century.

TIME obituary.

Powerline remembrance.

Updike read and was influence by the great Neo-Orthodox theologian Karl Barth. He even once remarked that Barth's theology "at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it [my life]."

Here is an article from Theology Today that can serve as an introduction to Updike and Barth.

"Updike doesn't preach. He tells realistic stories with symbolic and theological overtones that, in effect, invite us to enter the discussion ourselves. Here we are invited to consider the goodness of our relationship with God. God's partnership with us in the covenant of grace disclosed in Christ does not, as has been said, solve our many problems. Yet, within our bloodsoaked world, it does give us a place to stand. Only goodness lives. But it does live. God is God and may be trusted to fill our lives with radiance and the world with joy. "

Here is another introduction to Updike as a Christian novelist with a Barthian perspective.

The novelist John Updike is a Christian, but not a Christian novelist in the sense that his work forces an explicitly Christian message onto the reader. On the contrary, precisely because Updike is a Christian he believes the novelist should portray the human condition with unsparing honesty, expressing his "basic duty to God" in writing "the most truthful and fullest books" he can.1 One therefore looks in vain for clear, morally uplifting, spiritually stirring messages in Updike's fiction. At the same time, a powerful theological dimension can be seen running through his work: subtle but profound, invisible yet constantly present, giving Updike's uninhibited report of the human condition a specifically Christian perspective.

John Updike, R.I.P.

Infidel Bloggers' Alliance recently reminded me of a jazz standard I had forgotten: Charles Mingus' beautiful elegy in tribute to Lester Young entitled Good Bye Pork Pie Hat.

This tune touches me deeply.

Here is Mingus himself, leading an all-star group at Montreux in 1975. For those of you unfamiliar with him, Mingus is the one on bass.

Lester Young was a saxophonist who came to prominence in the Count Basie Band. Here is a brief bio intro. Here a bit longer one.

Charles Mingus, the brilliant, troubled and troubling, bassist was one of the great jazz composers.

Joni Mitchell was attracted to his work, and here is her performance of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.

I have much to say about my trip to the Federal City. But, first, let me begin with an overview.

January 20, 2009. High Noon. There I was, standing with 1.8 million of my fellow Americans, wedged on the Mall between the Monument and the Memorial, with the Capitol as a backdrop, watching the 56th quadrennial American Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.

My journey had been long and circuitous.

My pilgrimage began the day before in a parking lot on the campus of McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. From there, eighteen of us flew 1200 miles from Austin to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, staying the night in College Park, Maryland, riding the Metro Green Line into the District the following morning, forced by overflow crowds to abandon the subway several stops short of our destination, walking west then north, then west then north again--and again, bellying around closed-off streets, eventually finding a clear artery onto the Mall.

There we stood, finally, on "America's front yard." But that famous pet name for the National Mall falls short of expressing the full power of the place, for the long stretch between Capitol Hill and the Potomac is not just a massive shared lawn--it is consecrated ground. We had arrived at the outer courtyard of the great temples of American democracy, independence, and our conception of justice, sprinkled throughout with shrines and tabernacles to our national accomplishments, sacrifices, heroes, and ideals.

We are suddenly quiet--even in the midst of the din of a million voices. Now we are ready to celebrate the most sacred rite in our political culture: the constitutionally prescribed installment of a popularly elected Chief Magistrate of the United States of America.

For all the rhetoric of bipartisanship, the crowd was primarily Democrats--not surprising and not necessarily unfitting. When Jimmy Carter appeared on the screen, they erupted with excitement and approval. When the Clintons came into focus, the boisterous multitudes screamed with glee. Bush-41 and Barbara: silence. Bush-43: snarling enmity. For the vast majority of these pilgrims, this is not a day to forgive easily or indiscriminately hail presidents in general. They had arrived with a palpable malice toward at least one. Perhaps one day they will feel more charitable toward Forty-Three--but this is not that moment. Again, no real surprise--and no offense taken.

The intermittent chant: O-bam-a. O-bam-a. O-bam-a.

An Aside: there is something unsettling about this brand of personal adulation. If this were a Republican crowd, it would be U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

Rick Warren's invocation is long--but not offensive to the throng. The moment passes without comment.

Joe Biden becomes vice president. His voice is loud and clear, almost startling over the massive public address system.

There is a moment of high art. Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and other musical luminaries play a stringed ditty to sooth the savage beast and prolong the moment of anticipation. Is it live? Or is it Memorex? Memorex, as it turns out.

Then there is Aretha--and her hat, which is somehow perfectly befitting in the great collage.

Then the Oath (including the "stumble"). The new President is nothing if not a gracious man--in the big picture, this is very good news for the nation and carries a whole host of positive ramifications.

We are packed in--tighter and tighter as the climactic moment of transfer draws near. By the time Obama raises his hand we are pressed together snugly, straining to see through the smaller and smaller cracks in the wall of humanity. Every time Dianne Feinstein, master of ceremonies, gives permission for the audience to "sit down," the mob on the Mall roars with laughter and Bronx cheers.

Then the address: it is wonderfully traditional, subtlety stressing continuity over change. Inaugurations, of course, were not intended as victory parties; rather, they provide an institutional moment for renewal and re-dedication to the principles of the Revolution and the hard realities of constitutional governance. The lofty rhetoric of the address is properly replete with echoes of FDR and JFK and a host of other former chief executives and ancient Greeks and Romans. The newly remastered words roll over the crowd, plucking "mystic chords of memory connecting every living heart with every patriot's grave," perfectly tailored for ceremonial re-absorption into the collective American canon.

Early on in the speech, I am aware of a man in front of me. He is about my age. He is above-average height, with a relatively athletic build, and white. He is with his wife. They both carry themselves with a confidence that leads me to guess that they are comfortable professionals. I imagine both of them to be alumni of some prestigious institution of higher learning. By the end of the address, they will both be crying--and happily taking digital photographs of their tear-stained faces. But before that, the man is holding a small American flag above his head. Following a few early Obama oratorical high points, the man smiles down at his wife and observes, with great irony, "look at me; I am now a flag-waving American."

A flag-waving American? Who would have believed it--I think I hear him saying. Prior to this moment, the patriotic pose had been for simpletons--the last refuge of a scoundrel. Clearly, this man was much too sophisticated to "wave the flag." Men and women of great intellect had taught him long ago that the emotional exhortations to nationalism were ill-intentioned broad-axes designed to manipulate ignoramuses in Kansas and other backward parts of Red-State America.

But there this man stands, inches away from me, waving his American flag, and wiping away the tears of joy streaming down his face. God Bless America? Could this really be the land of the free? Could it be possible that the creed is NOT merely a lie manufactured and promulgated by rich white men to obscure the issues of exploitation, racism, sexism, and corporate greed.

My most optimistic hope: this really is a new day.

For all the hackneyed talk of "history in real time," this time and place presents Barack Obama with a truly unique opportunity. His presidency has the potential to usher in a watershed moment in our modern national life. Might this be the dawning of a new era in which the several generations of citizens hyper skeptical of the "mythic" American narrative reconnect with a less antagonistic view of the American past?

It is a heavy burden--much too much to ask any one man to carry in our current milieu of ironic detachment. Nevertheless, I choose to believe this President sees the danger of our collective loss of faith and plans on pursuing a rigorous agenda of renewal.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

Are we on the cusp of a New American Patriotism?

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray...."

My Prayer for US. My prayer for this President:

"With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

May God Bless this President. May God Bless America.

Don't miss reading Martian Mariner's recent post on Heath Ledger's posthumous win for his portrayal of The Joker. In his post, Mariner reflects on the difficulty of making Good interesting in fiction.

Mariner reminded me of Simone Weil's reflections on this problem. From her Notebooks:

Literature and Morality. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore "imaginative literature" is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art--and only genius can do that.

Her longest sustained attention to this problem is found in the essay "Morality and Literature." Here is the opening paragraph:

Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.

This problem attaches to fiction itself intrinsically, she asserts. This is because there are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. In other words, precisely because fiction is separated from truth and its necessity it cannot make good interesting and is able to make evil attractive. (For Weil "fiction" is bigger than literature and includes most of our memory, hopes and dreams, etc. unless we are unflinchingly attached to truth.)

A genius, in his maturity, she thought, can overcome this limit of fiction, because the mature genius is able to write truth. Such genius is rare. In the West she lists

This sense of gravity, which only genius can impart, is found in the drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles, in certain plays of Shakespeare, in Racine's Phedre alone among French tragedies, in several comedies of Moliere, in the Grand Testament of Villon. There, good and evil appear in their truth.

She held writers (I don't think she ever considered movies) to the standard of truth. From her essay "The Responsibility of Writers":

Writers do not have to be professors of morals, but they do have to express the human condition. And nothing concerns human life so essentially, for every man at every moment, as good and evil. When literature becomes indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to to excellence.

Perhaps the power of The Dark Knight comes from its attention to the reality of good and evil, even if the writers and director lacked the genius to make good more interesting than evil.