If it’s violins she loves, let them play

Last updated on: February 15, 2020 at 11:43 pm By Fred Clark

Here is your open thread for February 16, 2020.

Today is the birthday of the late great James Ingram, who could sing anything with anybody. He won the first of his two Grammys for this one. It’s an odd love song in that it’s sung as advice (mostly good advice, I think) to other men:

“One Hundred Ways” verges on a sappy earnestness, but Ingram sells it — in part by injecting a note of remorse, a hint that this was advice he himself regrets having once dismissed as sappy. Ingram had a knack for that — for making earnest cool. (Admit it: If you’re alone in the car and you come across “Somewhere Out There” on the radio, you’re going to let it play, you might even turn it up, and you might even sing along.)

The first computer bulletin board went live on February 16, 1978. It was quickly followed, no doubt, by the first flame war, the first troll, and the first flounce.

Today is the Day of the Shining Star, a mandatory holiday enthusiastically celebrated (or else) in North Korea to mark the birth of Kim Jong-Il. It’s basically like the Freedom Sunday celebrations at Robert Jeffress’ First “Baptist” Church in Dallas, except in Korean.

It’s the birthday of two-time Academy Award-winner Mahershala Ali.

LeVar Burton turns 63 today. He’d be a beloved figure if he’d only done Roots, or only done TNG, or only done Reading Rainbow. Having done all three is pretty impressive.

William Katt, who played the title roles in Pippin and The Greatest American Hero, turns 69. Years ago, I wrote about my frustration with the shallowness of Pippin, which I described as “a period piece, locked in the ’70s at that moment in time when the ’60s were beginning to morph into the ’80s.” It sets out as the story of a young man’s search for meaning, then winds up being about his decision not to do that. Think of it as “OK, Boomer,” the musical.

The Greatest American Hero, on the other hand, was cheesy fun. Pilot episodes for two reboots of that show have been filmed but neither one ever aired or got picked up as a series. I’d be happy to see a third attempt, although I’d also argue that there already has been at least one successful remake of the series. It was called Chuck.

Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen was born on February 16, 1903. Bergen started on vaudeville, but for much of his career he was a radio ventriloquist, which seems like cheating.

Tracy Lauren Morrow, better known as Ice-T, turns 62 years old today. As I forget which comic noted, his career began with boycotts over “Cop Killer” and evolved into his decades-long run as a cop on that show your mom watches. (John Mulaney’s bit on Ice-T on SVU is fun.) Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, turns 30 today. This means he was born in 1990. Part of my brain still freaks out a little bit at the realization that someone who was born in 1990 is now 30.

Christopher Eccleston turns 56 today. He played the Ninth Doctor, which seems like it ought to make him a member of the House of Lords or something.

Otis Blackwell was born February 16, 1931. He wrote “Fever” and “Great Balls of Fire” and “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Prominent 19th-century quack Phineas Quimby was born on February 16, 1802. It says something about the audience for mesmerism and “mind cure” quackery that it could be successfully peddled by a guy named “Phineas Quimby” without that giving anyone pause.

In Western calendars, today is the feast day of St. Onesimus. This would be a good day, then, to revisit our discussion of why “The book of Philemon does not defend slavery.”

Another saint celebrated in the liturgical calendar today is St. Juliana of Nicomedia. She was an early Christian martyr whose story is interesting in that it could have — in some Sliding Doors alternate history of Christianity — become an important example of the fundamental moral importance of consent. Instead, of course, her story was twisted into purity-culture propaganda and used to teach the idea that it’s better to be tortured than to be unchaste.

Talk amongst yourselves.

North Dakota conservatives seek to deny refuge to those in need

Last updated on: December 11, 2019 at 10:15 pm By Fred Clark

The word “conservative” is doing a lot of unspoken work in this story. It serves, among other things, as both an accusation and a defiant confession.

“North Dakota county may become US’s 1st to bar new refugees”

If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh County — home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of Bismarck — could become the first local government to do so since President Donald Trump issued an executive order making it possible.

… Trump’s executive order this fall came as he had already proposed cutting the number of refugees next year to the lowest level since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980. He declared that refugees should be resettled only in places where the state and local governments — counties — gave consent. Since then, many governors and counties around the country have declared that they would continue taking refugees.

Republican Gov. Doug Burgum said last month that North Dakota would continue accepting refugees where local jurisdictions agreed, and his spokesman said the governor saw it as a local decision. Soon after, Cass and Grand Forks counties, which are home to the state’s largest city, Fargo, and third-largest city, Grand Forks, respectively, declared they would continue taking refugees. Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney said refugees were needed to boost the city’s economy, and that 90% were fully employed within three months of resettling in his city.

But the idea was quickly opposed in more conservative Burleigh County. Among the opponents was Republican state Rep. Rick Becker, of Bismarck, an ultraconservative who took to social media to criticize the program as unrestrained and a possible drain on social service programs, schools and law enforcement.

Burleigh County is likely to bar refugees because Burleigh County is “conservative.” The most outspoken opponent to permitting refuge for those fleeing violence and persecution is a local Republican state representative who is “ultraconservative.”

We are presented with an identity: “conservative” equals “inhospitable to outsiders and those in need.” Rick Becker is opposed to accepting refugees because he is a “conservative.” Rick Becker is “conservative” because he opposes accepting refugees.

AP reporter James MacPherson attempts to employ the word “conservative” as a dispassionate, disinterested descriptor — a label that strives for accuracy, not for evaluation. This is in part because the article is discussing Republicans, and the generally agreed-upon consensus view is that Republicans are the “conservative” party in America. This is, in fact, how the Burleigh County Republicans describe themselves, so MacPherson’s use of “conservative” is also deferential — allowing those he discusses to describe themselves as they see fit.

But despite all of that — despite the fact that this use of “conservative” here is customary, chosen, and embraced by the subjects of the article it describes here — the use of the term here is still likely to be regarded by some as judgmental, pejorative, or “biased.” That’s due to the unavoidable substance of the article, which reports the facts of the matter, namely that in Burleigh County, North Dakota, conservatives seek to deny refuge to those in need.

That’s simply a blandly accurate description of what is happening. That this will strike many readers — including many self-identified “conservatives” — as pejorative or judgmental has nothing to do with MacPherson’s or my predisposition toward these self-declared conservatives. Nor does it have anything to do with MacPherson’s or my evaluation of their behavior.

I will happily add my opinion and evaluation to that simple description: Conservatives in Burleigh County seek to deny refuge to those in need … and in my opinion that is a shitty, sinful, blasphemously evil thing to do.

But it doesn’t matter whether or not I add that, or even whether or not I think that. What matters is that everyone thinks that — including the ultra-conservative Rep. Rick Becker, his fellow anti-refugee Republicans in Burleigh County, and all of their fellow anti-refugee Republicans across America. I don’t have to tell you or them that I think this because it is what everyone recognizes to be the case. Banning refugees is just shitty behavior — an ignorant, selfish, dishonest, indecent violation of the Golden Rule.

This creates an uncomfortable situation for poor Rick Becker. He is defiantly proud of his self-chosen identity as a “conservative.” And he is adamant that being a “conservative” entails denying refuge to people in need. If you were to accuse him of going “soft” on his proposed refugee ban, he would vehemently deny that was the case, insisting that no one takes a harder line against providing refuge to refugees than he does. He will not abide the suggestion that anyone could possibly be to the right of him on this point, or that anyone else might be more conservative than he is when it comes to the conservative belief that refugees should be turned away.

And yet, at the same time, he is inescapably aware that his position is utterly gross and shameful. This is what leads him to defend that position as unwaveringly “conservative” rather than attempting the impossible task of defending it as good or as wise or truthful or beautiful.

Perhaps I’m overstating the matter when I say that even Rick Becker and the rest of the anti-refugee Republicans of Burleigh County agree that banning refugees is shameful, sinful, ugly and evil. Maybe they don’t agree with that at all. Maybe they think it’s good and right and just to ban refugees.

But I don’t buy that, because look what happens even if we follow MacPherson’s example and attempt to be as neutral as possible, stating only the stark facts of the matter and refraining from any evaluation or judgment of those facts. We could say:

1. People who describe and identify themselves as “conservatives” seek to ban refugees in Burleigh County, North Dakota; and

2. These same self-described conservatives insist that banning refugees from Burleigh County is the conservative thing to do.

And that alone will provoke a defensive response. It will be perceived as an attack on conservatives and as a criticism of conservatism. Because whether or not it’s ever stated, it is impossible for conservatives or liberals or anyone else to read those two points without also acknowledging a third point:

3. Banning refugees is a shitty thing to do.

Folks like Rick Becker will try to distance and insulate themselves from that recognition by attributing that third fact to the mere opinion of specific others. Points 1 and 2 are an attack on conservatives, they will say, because most liberals think that banning refugees is a shitty thing to do.

And that’s not wrong. Most liberals do think that. Because most liberals are humans and most humans think that. Most conservatives are also humans, and so most conservatives think that too.

We humans — all of us, liberal, conservative, whatever — tell stories about this very thing. In some of these human stories people offer refuge to others who are fleeing violence, disaster, or destruction. In other of these human stories, people refuse to offer such refuge. We humans can tell either version of that story. But what we cannot and do not ever do is tell a story in which those who refuse to offer refuge are the Good Guys.

It is impossible to tell such a story, or to hear it, or to imagine it. By definition — because that is what “the Good Guys” means.

Rick Becker knows this. That’s why he’s so defensive about proudly defending the indefensible.

Becker is quite aware that the policy he’s proposing looks really bad:

“This isn’t about skin color,” said Becker, a plastic surgeon and former gubernatorial candidate. “In the past, nobody had any say whatsoever. Now we have something that should have been in place decades ago.

“Now, if they want to accept them, they can, and if they don’t want to they shouldn’t.”

So this isn’t about skin color, Becker says, as everyone seems to say when they’re doing something explicitly about skin color. Becker says, rather, this is about states’ rights. The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even etc.

Republican state Rep. Rick Becker, of Bismarck, North Dakota, apparently.

I’m still unclear as to what it would even mean for Burleigh County to withhold its official “consent” for the resettlement of refugees there. Trump’s executive order — dreamed up by his white supremacist senior legislative aide, Stephen Miller — seems illegal or unenforceable or, at best, simply beside the point. When the “conservative” fundamentalist Baptist church I grew up in signed up to resettle a refugee family of “Boat People” back in the early 1980s, we didn’t seek or require the “consent” of Union County, N.J. We were just a group of citizens acting as such. The county government had no role, no jurisdiction, no say, and no involvement in any of that.

In providing refuge for that family, we were also a local church acting as such. Had our local county government imagined they had any legal right to muck about with our doing that, we’d have taken them to court and every lawyer they tried to hire against us would’ve advised them to back off, drop the matter, and apologize to avoid losing a slam-dunk First Amendment case.

I note that Burleigh County, North Dakota, is home to many local churches that belong to traditions with a long history of welcoming refugees as an intrinsic expression and requirement of their faith. There are dozens of Lutheran congregations there that have long supported the work of Church World Service. There are local Catholic parishes that have long contributed to support refugee resettlement through the UCCB and Catholic Charities. There are scads of nondenominational white evangelical congregations that have, up until recently at least, wholeheartedly supported the refugee resettlement work of World Relief. And that’s just the Christians — there are also at least three synagogues in Bismarck, and America’s Jewish congregations have always way outperformed us American Christians when it comes to offering refuge to those in need.

I don’t know, specifically, if any of these many many religious congregations in Burleigh County are directly involved in helping to resettle refugees in their community, but the odds are that at least some of them are or plan to be. Does the Burleigh County government imagine it has the authority to stop them by denying them its “consent”? Does the Republican-controlled Burleigh County government imagine that it has any hope of defending itself against the lawsuit that these congregations are likely to bring?

Yes, I realize Trump has had three years to cram hundreds of Federalist Society ideologues onto the courts, and that those bozos do not recognize religious liberty as a constitutional right, only as a political slogan having to do with letting bakeries refuse to sell baked goods or allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell Monistat because they pretend to believe it’s abortion cream. But even so, there’s no legal basis for a county government barring local congregations from practicing their faith in the way that American congregations have done for more than a century.

The idea of a local government withholding its “consent” for refugee resettlement just seems confused. This is not an activity that has ever required that government’s consent.

But now, according to Trump’s strange executive order, we’re told that government “consent” will be required even for activities in which that government has no role or involvement. Religious groups who seek to continue doing that which religious groups have been doing will first need to seek and secure the government’s permission.

There are many words that might be used to describe that state of affairs, but “conservative” really shouldn’t be one of them.

Smart people saying smart things (3.25.19)

Last updated on: March 25, 2019 at 8:33 pm By Fred Clark

Ian Millhiser, “Obama warned us about the Supreme Court we have right now”

No, Scalia’s transition from Smith to Hobby Lobby cannot be explained by a change in the law. But it can be explained due to a factual distinction between the two cases. Smith was a case about Native Americans who belong to a faith that Scalia did not share. Hobby Lobby, by contrast, was brought by conservative Christians — and Scalia was also a conservative Christian.

Conservatives’ evolution on religious liberty, in other words, is best understood through their lack of judicial empathy. When the members of a Native American faith sought a religious exemption from the law, Scalia recoiled. When a Muslim inmate asked to have his imam present at his execution — or, for that matter, when Trump banned many Muslims from entering the United States altogether — the Court’s right flank does not see the virtue in these claims. Yet when a Christian conservative employer does not want provide their employees with birth control coverage — or when a Christian conservative baker refuses to serve a gay couple — the court’s Republicans are suddenly up in arms.

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure, but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.

Bernadette Devlin, “Our people are being oppressed with the active assistance of our people”

Sarah Posner, “The End of the City on a Hill”

Peter Sprigg, an official with the Family Research Council who spoke in Chișinău, similarly downplayed concerns about Orbán’s autocratic moves. “It seems like the Western media likes to focus on some of these sort of procedural things,” Sprigg told me, instead of how Orbán “talks about defending Western civilization rooted in Christianity. I mean that’s where we see that we have common cause with him.”

In recent years, this common cause has more and more explicitly involved the rejection of liberal democracy. “There are great experiments in postliberal political and economic life occurring right now in real places,” Carlson wrote in 2018, “in Poland’s Law and Justice Party; in the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; and — yes — in the land of the Great Russians led by Vladimir Putin.”

Nesrine Malik, “Until Christchurch I thought it was worth debating with Islamophobes. Not any more”

Politicians and the media know exactly what they are doing. They know that hating Muslims sells, whether it is for votes or for clicks or for profile raising. They know that there is a sweet spot where prejudice against Muslims and anti-immigration sentiment intersect, and that the former is a good way of legitimizing the latter. They know that there is a market for racism, but one that isn’t simply based on skin color – that’s too difficult to justify openly – and so “Muslim” became a good shorthand for the unwelcome other.

Postcards from the class & culture wars (2.5.19)

Last updated on: February 4, 2019 at 6:00 pm By Fred Clark

“The 26 richest people on earth in 2018 had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people.”

“So, it’s not like it’s a gigantic number overall.”

“Companies like Wells Fargo have enjoyed huge profits from the tax cuts and spent billions on buybacks while laying off workers.”

“Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and John Thune look at the existing policy landscape – the enormous deficit Republicans have created, the priorities in desperate need of investment – and believe what’s really needed is another tax break that would exclusively benefit the rich.”

“By expanding their demands beyond their own compensation, teachers’ unions are transforming into some of the most significant advocacy groups striving for socioeconomic equality in America today.”

“The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.”

“Yes, judge. She was also a 13-year-old who under our laws can’t consent to anything.”

“Hagedorn also said that the NAACP, the national civil rights group, was a ‘partisan hack’ and a ‘disgrace to America.'”

“The topic turned, as was necessary, to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s refusal to resign after he tried the ‘sorry for the blackface/coonman nickname’ defense on Friday and then almost moonwalking to a Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ defense on Saturday.”

“Birnbaum doesn’t appreciate the irony, but there is little doubt he played a crucial role in the weaponizing of antisemitism.”

“On multiple occasions, including on or about December 1, 2017, STONE told Person 2 that Person 2 should do a ‘Frank Pentangeli‘ before HPSCI in order to avoid contradicting STONE’s testimony.”

“Trump heard something that wasn’t actual intelligence, and repeated it as truth.”

“The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.”

“These are full-blown, what-can-we-do-to-strangle-and-destroy-the-support-system Republicans.”

“In reality, all that remains in town today is a few clusters of homes, a scrapyard, a community center, a dairy, and the infamous PG&E station that connects to the vast natural gas pipeline system.”

“That’s just how it is off in Indian Country.”

“If a candidate can garner the support of me and my 1,156 Twitter followers, I would think that should be more than enough to take the win!”

Brief interludes with hideous men

Last updated on: October 10, 2018 at 11:35 am By Fred Clark

• On Sunday night, Fathom Events will be staging a special screening at thousands of theaters to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconically cool Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt. Next week, the promotional company will have a two-night special event screening the season premiere of Jodie Whittaker’s run as Doctor Who.

Both of those sound like great fun. They should provide a chance for Fathom Events to make back some of the money it seems to be losing this week by hosting the two-night special screening premiere of Liberty University’s conspiracy theory biopic The Trump Prophecy.

The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood attended one of the 1,200 nationwide showings of the film last night and, despite being right there in Lynchburg, Virginia, found rows of empty seats as well as a smattering of true believers.

Sherwood reminds us that Mark Taylor’s “true story” and his “prophecy” of Donald Trump includes the claim that “Barack Obama will be charged with treason and Trump will authorize the arrest of ‘thousands of corrupt officials, many of whom are part of a massive satanic pedophile ring.'”

That hasn’t happened yet. But Sherwood also notes that Taylor/Liberty have prophesied that God has also ordained Donald Trump to “force the release of cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s that are currently being withheld by the pharmaceutical industry.” So, you know, we’ve got that going for us.

• “He said that because everyone was deaf at the school except those who worked there, no one could hear the screams and cries of the young boys when the abuse took place.”

That’s from this Daily Beast report on “The Sex Abuse of Deaf Orphans in Pope Francis’ Backyard.” This was from a school in Rome. It’s horrible. Just as horrible as the deluge of similar stories from all over the world, including the extensively documented accounts of generations of this kind of abuse here in Pennsylvania.

Everywhere this has happened we have seen religious authorities — “moral” authorities — mustering all of their power and privilege to shelter and safeguard the abusers in order to shelter and safeguard their own reputation as moral authorities. In doing so, they have made themselves magnets for abusers and incubators for programs of institutional abuse.

And everywhere this has happened, those same moral authorities have simultaneously supported equally “moral” political movements to control and subjugate women, to defend the status quo, and to protect money from accountability. The term for this behavior in American religion is “pro-life,” and anyone who refuses to accept this program as a matter of course is condemned as immoral. This Florida bishop explains that we are obliged to bow before our moral “superiors.”

• Speaking of self-proclaimed religious authorities who devote their lives to defending abuse: “Paige Patterson plans to co-teach a mid-October weeklong class on ‘Christian Ethics: The Bible and Moral Issues’ with Richard Land.”

A full week seems a bit too long for these two men to share everything they know about ethics.

Patterson lost his job as a seminary president due to his role in covering up a rape, blaming the crime on the victim, and just generally having a long, bottomless history of belittling and demeaning women. He has also been named in some of the pending sexual abuse cases against his long-time ally, Paul Pressler. Land, for his part, lost his job with the Southern Baptist Convention after he plagiarized a newspaper columnist, attempting to pass the columnist’s extremely vile racist words off as his own.

Any fee or tuition charged for an “ethics” class taught by these two horrible men constitutes theft.

Paige Patterson and Richard Land are simply two more ugly Confederate monuments defouling the landscape. They should have been torn down generations ago.

• Lili Loofbourow writes a clearer version of some of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s post, “Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding.”

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men — not the woman — seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience. In each story, the cruel and bizarre act the woman describes—restraining Christine Blasey Ford and attempting to remove her clothes in her allegation, and in Deborah Ramirez’s, putting his penis in front of her face — seems to have been done in the clumsy and even manic pursuit of male approval. Even Kavanaugh’s now-notorious yearbook page, with its references to the “100 kegs or bust” and the like, seems less like an honest reflection of a fun guy than a representation of a try-hard willing to say or do anything as long as his bros think he’s cool. In other words: The awful things Kavanaugh allegedly did only imperfectly correlate to the familiar frame of sexual desire run amok; they appear to more easily fit into a different category — a toxic homosociality — that involves males wooing other males over the comedy of being cruel to women.

Loofbourow goes on to explain how this band-of-bros camaraderie shields these dudes from remembering anything significant about any of the many, many women to whom they were cruel. The objects of their cruelty do not register. Those women were not ever the most important people in the room when these boys performed their cruelties for their intended audience of one another.

Whether or not Kavanaugh was a virgin throughout his teen years, his own boofing words in his yearbook, his calendars, and his hand-written letters shows him to have been a boy obsessed with pushing the bounds of so-called technical virginity. It did not matter to him who the girl involved might be, or whether she was sober, or whether she gave her consent. The important thing — the all-important thing — was that his bros were there to watch and to take part, and to laugh with him.

The lawyerly loophole of technical virginity is a product of Catholic and evangelical purity culture, which is itself an expression of rape culture. The ferocious anger of Kavanaugh’s self-defense and of many of his Catholic and evangelical defenders only makes sense in the context of this warped notion of “purity,” which sees sex itself — and any woman who willingly engages in it — as dirty. In this view, any couple enthusiastically engaging in non-marital sex is guilty of a grave sin, but Kavanaugh can’t be accused of having done anything wrong because there was no P in V. How dare we accuse him of wrongdoing?

Grateful at the end of a long week

Last updated on: February 16, 2018 at 3:00 pm By Fred Clark

My wife comes home this weekend. She’s been at Pennsylvania Hospital most of the week recovering from surgery which the good doctors and nurses say went just the way it was intended to go. They’re confident that they fixed what needed fixing.

Avoiding the details, her problem fell into the general categories of stuff that’s not supposed to be there and of stuff that’s not where it’s supposed to be. This wasn’t life-threatening, but it was the source of a lot of pain and discomfort. This problem isn’t particularly rare, but it’s usually only found either due to some underlying syndrome or problem, or else it’s a symptom of some new ailment or disease (including some of the really scary ones.) So the long run up to her surgery involved months of screenings and test and consultations with specialists, all confirming that she didn’t have any of those syndromes or diseases.

Depending on how you look at it, then, she’s either incredibly lucky/fortunate/blessed to not have any of those associated problems that doctors expected to find, or else she’s incredibly un-lucky to be the rare, otherwise-healthy person who somehow wound up needing this surgery today. We’re mostly choosing to look at it the first way — especially after learning about what all it was those screenings and consultations were ruling out, and what the poor souls who do have those associated problems must be dealing with.

That whole “depending on how you look at it” choice always seems to be part of the picture when you’re spending time in hospitals. You wouldn’t be there if not for something bad and painful and serious, but you’re also surrounded by others, many of whom are facing something worse and more painful and more serious, and whose road back to normal might be longer and harder than the one ahead of you. You can take that raw experience and spin it into either grievance or gratitude. I can’t say I haven’t felt a bit of the former, but today I’m mostly focused on a lot of the latter.

Ash Wednesday is a strange day to spend in a hospital waiting room. I’ve always appreciated the meaning of that day’s visible reminder of our mortality and fragility. That reminder is true, and good, but in a hospital waiting room it just seemed redundant. Everybody in that room was already thinking about that. We’d all just helped loved ones sign multiple consent forms reminding us of those very same things. I think in a hospital waiting room, every day is Ash Wednesday.

(The day set for her surgery also led to less ponderous thoughts — jokes about how unfair it was to have to fast on Fat Tuesday, or about how she seemed to be taking the whole “giving up something for Lent” business a bit too seriously. And whenever anybody asked me if I was doing anything special for Valentine’s Day I could just say that my wife and I had reservations in center city at a really nice place.)

The Slacktivixen is still pretty sore, but there’s a chance she’ll get to come home tomorrow or Sunday. It will be a while before she’s back to 100-percent, and they’ve forbidden her from going back to work for at least three weeks. She’s the sort of impatient patient who needs to be formally forbidden from trying to do too much too soon — the sort of patient who when told they can’t return to work will start secretly planning ambitious projects around the house. So I’m getting ready for a few weeks of saying things like, “Yes, it looks great and you did an amazing job blacktopping the driveway, but please, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

But the very, very good news is that within a few weeks she will be feeling better than she has in a long time. We’re enormously grateful to the doctors and nurses and the whole crew at Penn, who have been kind and capable and impressive at every step.

Anyway, I’ve spent most of the week in This Is The Only Thing That Matters Right Now mode. I hope to be emerging from that soon.

LBCF, No. 170: ‘Pruneface Stonagal’

Last updated on: January 25, 2018 at 8:03 pm By Fred Clark

Originally posted June 27, 2008.

Read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Thank you for your support. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available.

Left Behind, pp. 452-453

Nicolae Carpathia is working his way around the conference table, inducting his followers one by one into his Team of Evil with his hypnotic incantation and his look-into-my-eyes mind control mojo.

Carpathia went through the ceremony with Steve, who gushed with pride. Nicolae eventually covered everyone in the room except the security guard, Hattie, and Jonathan Stonagal. …

So of the 20 or so people assembled in the room, the authors only bother to show us the induction ceremony for the six characters we already knew by name — Buck, Steve, Hattie, Chaim, Stonagal and Todd-Cothran. This is frustrating. Assembled in this room are the Antichrist’s hand-picked lieutenants, the Grand Council of Evil, the Vice-Regents of Armageddon, the Ten Henchmen of the Apocalypse. Yet we aren’t introduced to a single one of them by name.

Villains

This scene wouldn’t fly in the funny pages. Even the worst hacks in the comics biz know how to properly introduce a Rogues’ Gallery. As a sometime comic writer himself — Jerry Jenkins scribed the syndicated newspaper serial Gil Thorp — he should know better. After dropping the ball on this scene, Jenkins’ dreams must’ve been haunted by the angry ghost of Chester Gould.

What sort of people are assembled around this table? That ought to matter. Is this a collection of explicit villains (“Ambassador of the Great States of East Asia Kim Jong Il,” “Ambassador of the Great States of Africa Reanimated Zombie Mobutu,” “Rupert Murdoch, emperor of Australia”)? Or would that be too obvious? Maybe this council of One World Government vice-regents would be composed of others, like Nicolae, who are wolves in sheep’s clothing — Nobel Peace Prize laureates, environmentalists and champions of the poor. Introducing these various ambassadors, even briefly, should have been a prime opportunity to reinforce one of Left Behind’s central themes, Tim LaHaye’s upside-down belief that those who speak of peace, justice and unity are actually the dupes of Satan.

As it is, readers are left with only the vaguest impression of a conference table ringed by interchangeable, faceless white men in expensive suits. That sounds much more like my idea of an evil syndicate than like LaHaye’s.

Carpathia turns to Hattie and gives her the whole “I welcome you to the team … rights and privileges … consistency and wisdom” spiel.

Buck tried to catch Hattie’s eye and shake his head, but she was zeroed in on her new boss. Was this Buck’s fault? He had introduced her to Carpathia in the first place. Was she still reachable? Would he have access? …

“Access“? If that’s not a Freudian slip then I don’t know what else to make of it.

Everyone stared with beatific smiles as Hattie breathed her heartfelt thanks and sat down again.

Here again it’s impossible to tell whether the creepy, unnatural behavior of everyone at the table is meant to be seen that way. The inappropriate and inhuman response of this mostly anonymous group might be intended in this scene to show that they are in the thrall of Carpathia’s mind control. But then it’s not all that different from the inappropriate and inhuman responses that have characterized everyone in the novel, even in scenes that Nicolae has nothing to do with, so who can say?

Carpathia dramatically turned to Jonathan Stonagal. The latter smiled a knowing smile and stood regally. “Where do I begin, Jonathan, my friend?” Carpathia said. Stonagal dropped his head gratefully and others murmured their agreement that this indeed was the man among men in the room. …

We haven’t much time left to consider the sad case of Jonathan Stonagal, so if we’re going to do so before it’s too late we’d best do it now.

Poor Stoney has just never quite fit in Left Behind. Try as he might, Jenkins was never really able to integrate him into the story. Stonagal’s subplots kept turning into tangents wholly unconnected — and unconnectable — to the book’s main plot and setting.

First there was Buck’s Unnecessary Adventure in London — an uncomfortably inserted interlude in which our hero travels to an England from another world, a place where The Event seems never to have occurred. That whole chapter, a pastiche of stock scenes from spy thrillers, fit in so poorly with the rest of the book that even Jenkins seems to have noticed, hastily undoing every consequence of its events as soon as Buck returned to New York. (The conspirators want Buck dead! Oh, nevermind, now they just want him to attend a meeting.)

All we learned of Stonagal from that episode was that he was somehow connected to a plan to consolidate the world’s money into only three currencies. The plan was public knowledge — it’s not like you could change the currencies of more than a hundred nations without their knowledge or consent — yet Stonagal acted as though it were a secretive, surreptitious scheme. The authors didn’t bother to explain, but presumably the international banker (he owned “several” banks, we’re told) was pursuing some kind of insider-trading angle to profit from the currency scheme.

All of that scheming would seem to have been rendered moot days later when Carpathia, newly installed as All Powerful Global Leader of the OWG, declared by fiat that there would be only one global currency.

But of course it’s still true that Nicolae Carpathia would not have become All Powerful Global Leader if not for the assistance and maneuvering of his shadow-government sponsor Jonathan Stonagal. The details of this maneuvering are, again, pretty sketchy, as is the explanation for why Nicolae — already receiving the full assistance of Satan himself — would even need Stonagal’s help.

And that’s Stoney’s real problem. He’s the Satan figure from a different story, a different mythology. Stumbling unwelcome and unneeded into this story — where the Satan figure is actually Satan — he just can’t compete.

Jonathan Stonagal doesn’t belong here. He is, as his name inelegantly suggests, the stand-in for the Rockefellers and Rothschilds of a very different fantasy world — the conspiratorial nightmare realm of LaRouchies and John Birchers. The Rockefellers — or, rather, a nefarious, fun-house mirror version of them — play a central role in the John Birch Society mythos that Tim LaHaye enthusiastically embraced* before he later moved on to become a premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy” guru.

LaHaye’s years spent as a missionary for the goofy beliefs of the John Birchers helped to prepare him for his second career as a promoter of the even goofier beliefs of PMD prophecy mania. Those two worlds share some common traits. Both believe in global conspiracies with evil, if vague, agendas. Both insist that only true believers possess the secret, gnostic keys for decoding the true meaning of history and current events. But these different conspiracies aren’t really compatible — the John Birchers and the PMD heretics decrypt the signs of the times in very different ways.

Yet despite this incompatibility, LaHaye can’t quite seem to let go of many of his younger self’s JBS notions. The continuing influence of those ideas can be seen throughout LB in the authors’ obsession with the United Nations and in their stubbornly perverse misunderstanding of that institution. And this influence can be seen in Jonathan Stonagal, a character who inhabits the faultline or seam between these two systems that LaHaye is still trying, unsuccessfully, to stitch together. Stonagal — the evil Rockefeller** stock character from the John Bircher rogues gallery — seems purposeless and adrift in Left Behind. He stumbles around the edges of this story, unable to find any legitimate reason for his presence. He seems a sad, vestigial relic.

This vague purposelessness of Stonagal’s also underscores one of the defining traits of LB, and of PMD mythology in general, something we might call conspiratorial naivete. LaHaye believes, fervently, that history is shaped by murky, behind-the-scenes forces striving to create a One World Government. Yet he’s complacently incurious about the actual institutions he suspects are part of that conspiracy, and he can’t be bothered to learn anything about how they actually operate or what their motives might be. Stonagal, we assume, is trying to amass money and unchecked power, but how and why he intends to do this doesn’t seem to interest the authors at all. The vague villainy of these conspiracies is proved by a tidy bit of circular reasoning: We know their deeds are evil because they are the deeds of evil men; we know they are evil men because they commit such evil deeds. Beyond that, the authors don’t know, or care to know, any more about such villains.

The portrayal of Jonathan Stonagal in this, his final scene further illustrates L&J’s conspiratorial naivete. For all of their apparent interest in characters like Stoney, they have no idea what might actually make someone like him tick.

Stonagal is meant to be the grand vizier, the power behind the throne — think of Cardinal Richelieu, or James Baker, or Dick Cheney. Such men, as a rule, don’t care about fame, prestige or recognition. They don’t seek titles, since the unrestrained influence they seek to exert always goes beyond the restrictions of any given title. Titles, after all, imply formal offices — with all the checks and balances, responsibilities and restrictions that come with them. That’s not the prize such characters are after.

The powers behind the throne always avoid the spotlight, the headline and the podium, not because they are modest or humble, but because such attention would interfere with their ability to wield power without concern for public opinion or public good. Puppets appear on the stage. Puppet masters do not.

And here we learn that Jonathan Stonagal is too vain, too needy, to succeed as a puppet master. He wants to be thanked, to be praised, to be loved. A real puppet master, a Richelieu or Cheney, would view Stoney’s behavior here with contempt and disdain:

Carpathia took Stonagal’s hand and began formally, “Mr. Stonagal, you have meant more to me than anyone on earth.” Stonagal looked up and smiled, locking eyes with Carpathia.

“I welcome you to the team,” Carpathia said, “and confer upon you all the rights and privileges that go with your new station.”

Stonagal flinched, clearly not interested in being considered a part of the team, to be welcomed by the very man he had maneuvered into the presidency of Romania and now the secretary-generalship of the United Nations. His smile froze, then disappeared as Carpathia continued, “May you display to me and to those in your charge the consistency and wisdom that have brought you to this position.”

Rather than thanking Carpathia, Stonagal wrenched his hand away and glared at the younger man. Carpathia continued to gaze directly at him and spoke in quieter, warmer tones, “Mr. Stonagal, you may be seated.”

“I will not!” Stonagal said.

“Sir, I have been having a bit of sport at your expense because I knew you would understand.”

Stonagal reddened, clearly chagrined that he had overreacted. “I beg your pardon, Nicolae,” Stonagal said, forcing a smile but obviously insulted at having been pushed into this shocking display.

Real puppet masters don’t allow their feelings to be hurt when they don’t receive proper recognition for their accomplishments. They’d prefer their accomplishments to go unnoticed. And they don’t have feelings.

The only thing about this “shocking display” that’s actually surprising is the accidental revelation that Jonathan Stonagal seems to be immune to Nicolae’s mind-control. No amount of warm-toned, hypnotic flattery or eye-gazing seems to work. The Antichrist is unable to bend Stonagal to his will.

That’s interesting. We were told that Buck Williams alone was shielded from Nicolae’s powers due to his “commitment to Christ” and to the protective prayers of his friends in the Tribulation Force. I doubt that we’re meant to assume that Stoney has also become a born-again RTC, or that Bruce and the Steeles are desperately praying for him too. And even with all that divine counter-magic, Buck still wasn’t able to resist as firmly as Stonagal did — wrenching his hand away and saying “I will not!”

So what accounts for this apparent immunity to Nicolae’s preternatural charisma? I have a theory. Like many of my theories that attempt to explain the unexplainable in LB, this one is unsupported, and probably contradicted, by the book itself, but I think it’s interesting.

For about 30 pages in the previous couple of chapters, Jenkins tried to inject a bit of suspense by raising the possibility that Stonagal, rather than Carpathia, was the real Antichrist. What if that were actually true? Or, rather, what if they both were?

What if, years ago, a young Jonathan Stonagal agreed to a deal with the devil. He agreed to dedicate his life to the service of his infernal master, paving the way to One World Government and one counterfeit world religion. In exchange for this faithful service, he would one day rule the world as Satan’s anointed, warring against Heaven itself as the Antichrist.

Here, after decades of careful but ruthless toil, the final pieces of his grand scheme are at last moving into place. The figurehead he personally selected and groomed has been installed as the man through whom he, Jonathan Stonagal, will rule the world. His triumph, finally, is at hand.

And then, just as he is about to receive his reward, Old Scratch points out the fine print in their contract. These things always have fine print, even if all it says, way down at the bottom in microscopic, blood-red ink, is that you’d be a fool to trust the Devil to keep a bargain. Other deals and other promises have been made, Stonagal learns, too late, but only one will be kept. He did all the work, but the figurehead will reap the reward.

That scenario would have made Stonagal a more interesting, more tragic villain. It would also have added an interesting aspect to Nicolae Carpathia’s character — haunting him with the kernel of doubt that belongs to every triumphant adulterous lover.

But as I said, this theoretical scenario isn’t really supported by the book itself. The authors don’t really know or care to know why Stonagal has worked so hard for so many years to set the stage for Nicolae’s global dominion. His elimination in the pages that follow isn’t presented as the inevitable tragic fate of a diabolically ambitious villain. It is, rather, an awkward and belated attempt to correct a wrong turn in the story, to purge an unnecessary character who wandered in, accidentally, from a different conspiratorial fantasy and never really belonged in this story in the first place.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* For much more on Tim LaHaye’s roots in the John Birch Society, see Michael Standaert’s insightful Skipping Toward Armageddon.

** LaHaye may also be clinging to some 50-year-old worries about the ecumenical movement. The Rockefellers were generous patrons of the once-influential National Council of Churches, helping to fund, among other things, the NCC’s offices at 475 Riverside (a.k.a. the “God Box”). The council was once feared by fundamentalists as a source of corrupting liberal theology. Fundamentalists also criticized its emphasis on interdenominational cooperation as a form of syncretism — a stepping stone to the One World Religion that LaHaye is certain looms in the future of our doomed planet. The Fosdickian bomfoggery (“brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God”) once enthusiastically promoted by John D. Rockefeller is now as dead as J.D. himself, but LaHaye seems to cling to this bugbear from his youth the way other men his age still cling to the hairstyles and fashions of the postwar years.

Churches List Themselves as Unsafe for Children

Last updated on: November 15, 2017 at 7:35 am By Fred Clark

If you are a Christian parent in Alabama looking for a place to send your children to Sunday school, VBS, Awana, youth group, Pioneer Girls, or Christian Service Brigade, do not send them to any of the following churches. All of these have been designated unsafe for minors.

danger

NOTE: This is a voluntary designation from these churches themselves, not from any outside group or agency.

The pastors of these churches chose, on their own, to come forward and to announce publicly that their communities are unwilling and unable to protect children, and that their churches will, in fact, eagerly defend adults who prey on them.

Parents should be advised: If this is what these churches say is true about themselves, you should probably believe them.

Adams Street Church of Christ, Enterprise, Alabama
Christ Church, Odenville, Alabama
Christian Renewal and Development Ministries, Eufaula, Alabama
Church of the Living God, Moulton, Alabama
Covenant Christian, Gadsden, Alabama
Dominion Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Edgewood Church, Anniston, Alabama
Fairfax First Christian Church, Valley, Alabama
Faith Worship Center, Gadsden, Alabama
Fannin Road Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
First Assembly of God, Greenville Alabama
Freedom Church, Gadsden, Alabama
~~Fresh Anointing House of Worship, Montgomery, Alabama~~
Grace Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
Grace Way Fellowship, Evergreen Alabama
~~Heritage Baptist Church, Opelika, Alabama~~
Kimberly Church of God, Kimberly, Alabama
Lakeview Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
Marvyn Parkway Baptist Church, Opelika, Alabama
Open Door Baptist Church, Enterprise, Alabama
~~Pine Air Baptist Church, Grand Bay Alabama~~
Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Anniston, Alabama
Summit Holiness Church, Alabama
Trinity Free Presbyterian, Trinity, Alabama
Victory Baptist Church, Millbrook, Alabama
Victory Christian Fellowship Church, Florence, Alabama
Webster’s Chapel, Gadsden, Alabama
Young’s Chapel, Piedmont, Alabama

NOTE: This post has been updated to recognize that some of these churches did not consent to endorse Roy Moore after allegations he molested underage children. See here for details.