Imagination is a danger

Here is your open thread for March 11, 2020.

Jazz singer Bobby McFerrin turns 70 today. Here’s the song we all know — his unlikely No. 1 pop hit and Grammy winner from 1988. George H.W. Bush used this, unironically, as his campaign song that year and McFerrin, unironically, told everybody not to vote for him. Another very cool thing about McFerrin is that he didn’t waste any time trying to recreate the commercial success of this song, even though he probably could have made a lot of money doing that.

The US Bureau of Indian Affairs was created on March 11, 1824. The best guide to the history of the BIA is probably the jokes. There are thousands of them, dating back to at least March 12, 1824. I’d like to see someone collect and compile all those jokes as part of a three volume textbook of Native American history (the other volumes would be Columbus jokes and Custer jokes).

The Flagstaff War sounds like an Eddie Izzard joke, but it was a real thing that began March 11, 1845.

The massive Sendai Earthquake struck nine years ago today off the coast of Japan, sending the tidal wave that took out the Fukushima nuclear reactor.

Pirates star Dock Ellis, who died in 2008, was born 75 years ago today. Ellis pitched for 11 years, putting together a 138-119 record despite his reliance on performance-reducing drugs. Here’s Todd Snider’s “America’s Favorite Pastime,” about the legendary no-hitter Ellis threw in 1970.

Today would have been Douglas Adams’ 68th birthday. He wrote dozens of jokes that I’ve been laughing at, and thinking about, for more than 30 years.

Former ABC News access reporter Sam Donaldson turns 86 years old today. Jerry Zucker — the latter Z in the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team that gave us Airplane! and Police Squad! — turns 70 today. Jerry Zucker also directed the less-funny Ghost. Nina Hagen turns 65 today. Nina Hartley turns 61.

John Barrowman — who is not actually Tom Cruise’s taller and better-looking brother — turns 53 today. Lisa Loeb turns 52. Terrence Howard turns 51. Johnny Knoxville is somehow still alive and ambulatory on his 49th birthday.

Finally, today is Walter Brueggemann’s 88th birthday. Brueggemann is a respected scholar who has spent decades immersed in the words and meaning of the Hebrew prophets. He takes those words seriously. It seems like he actually believes them, which seems dangerous.

Brueggemann’s books thus occupy an odd place in the white evangelical world I was raised in. They’re impossible to dismiss with the usual caricaturing attacks about a “high view of scripture,” but the conclusions he reaches — or, rather, the conclusions he shows the prophets to have reached — are threateningly unsettling, thus earning his books a place on the unofficial Index Librorum Prohibitorum of white evangelicalism. I recommend those books wholeheartedly.

Here’s a taste of what is probably his most famous book, The Prophetic Imagination, explaining what he means by that:

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Don’t panic. Talk amongst yourselves.