Here is your open thread for March 8, 2020.
Today I’m wishing a happy 57th birthday to my big brother. He’s a very good big brother, and so at just the right age he took his little brother to see the Ramones, live, in the smallest possible venue — the Chestnut Street Cabaret, back in the day — so that his little brother might learn that the world can be a loud and wonderful place.
On this day 758 years ago — more than 250 years before any hint of the Protestant Reformation — the people of Strasbourg overthrew the army of the reigning bishop, Walter of Geroldseck, who’d been taking that whole “prince of the church” business way too literally.
Although one side of the Battle of Hausbergen was led by a warrior-bishop and his church army, it was a secular, political struggle fought over what form of secular, political governance the city of Strasbourg would have. But that political struggle had theological consequences and implications. Walter was of the theological opinion that bishops ought to have armies and literal thrones granting them unchecked temporal authority. The people of Strasbourg disagreed, arguing that they ought to be ruled by a secular Council. Rather than composing a list of theses and nailing them to a church door, they presented their argument in the form of battle axes and crossbow bolts, and thereby won their side of the debate.
My point here is that questions of church and state are always both theological and political. The difference between what happened in Strasbourg in 1262 and what happened in Wittenburg in 1517 isn’t as easily distinguished as we like to pretend. One reason that I’m so concerned about the First Amendment and whether the Supreme Court is getting it right (as in, say, Hialeah) or getting it wrong (as in, say, Hobby Lobby) is because I’m not very good with a crossbow.
On March 8, 1775, Thomas Paine’s Pennsylvania Magazine published the essay “African Slavery in America,” calling for immediate emancipation and the abolition of slavery. We’re sometimes told that articles and arguments like that were “ahead of their time,” but the obvious moral and political truths stated in that essay were not written by a time-traveler and they were not presented for an audience incapable of knowing any better. They knew better. In 1775, everybody already knew better. (By 1775, after all, people like Benjamin Lay and John Woolman were already long dead — none of this was new or unknown at the time.)
Like the Battle of Hausbergen, it’s tempting to regard the publication of “African Slavery in America” as a secular, political document, but that’s misleading as it ignores the massive theological consequences of its publication (and the even more massive theological consequences of its rejection by most of its audience).
The New York Stock Exchange was founded on March 8, 1817. If you invested $100 in the NYSE on the day it opened, you’d be long dead by now.
The Castle Gate coal mine near Salt Lake City blew up on March 8, 1924, killing 172 workers. That makes it only the 10th worst mining disaster in America.
On March 8, 1957, the legislature of the state of Georgia and its governor, Marvin Griffin, called on Congress to nullify the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Their “memorial” plea to erase the Reconstruction Amendments and to roll back the new birth of freedom of the Second Founding failed, so the Georgia legislators went back to work on a longer-term plan — the decades-long effort to pack federal courts with enough far-right, anti-Reconstruction judges to gradually chip away at the 14th and 15th amendments until they were almost meaningless, restoring the antebellum glory of white supremacist herrenvolk “democracy” in America.
This is what white evangelicals are referring to when they say they only supported Donald Trump because of “judges.”
Critic Neil Postman would have been 79 years old today. Postman lived and worked in New York City up until his death in 2003, so like everyone who lives there, he was well-acquainted from the 1980s on with the mobbed-up wanna-be real-estate loser widely known and mocked as the most ridiculous jerk Manhattan had ever seen. Mercifully, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death didn’t live to see his direst warnings confirmed when that walking joke got sworn-in as president.
Slugger Dick Allen turns 78 today. So he was 15 years old when Georgia presented that 1957 Memorial to Congress. Six years later he was blasting the cover off the ball to lead the Phillies’ AAA squad in total bases in Little Rock, Arkansas, where fans rewarded him with non-stop racial epithets and booing. Those slurs and harassment continued after he made the big league club, and didn’t stop him from hitting 29 home runs and batting .318 and becoming the first Phillie to win Rookie of the Year honors. Some say Allen would’ve had a hall-of-fame career if not for the relentless racism he faced as a player. Some of us think he did have a hall-of-fame career despite all that.
Today is the birthday of sort-of rock stars Mickey Dolenz (75) and Gary Numan (62). Rebounding machine and bad-novel-protagonist-namesake Buck Williams turns 60. Emmy-winning working actor Camryn Manheim turns 59.
Today is the 44th birthday of Freddie Prinze Jr. and the 43rd birthday of James Van Der Beek. Someday this generation’s teen heartthrobs will reach their mid-40s and the kids now putting their pictures up in their lockers will feel as old as you do now, reading this.
Finally, today is the feast day of St. Philemon the Actor — an Egyptian actor, dancer, and musician who converted to Christianity just in time to be martyred during the persecutions of Diocletian. As with most of those early martyr-saints, we don’t know much about Philemon beyond the time and the means of his death. (He was bound in chains and hurled into the sea.) That’s always frustrating, but it’s especially so in this case because I’d love to know more about what kind of roles Philemon was playing in late second-century Alexandria.
Talk amongst yourselves.
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