{"id":1862,"date":"2008-02-05T19:22:32","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T19:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2008\/02\/05\/leftovers-again\/"},"modified":"2008-02-05T19:22:32","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T19:22:32","slug":"leftovers-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2008\/02\/05\/leftovers-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Leftovers again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Apologies for not tying all this together.<\/p>\n

The paper I work for is in Delaware and I\u2019ve spent the past week in Super-Tuesday-prep mode. So even though I live in Pennsylvania, and we\u2019re not part of today\u2019s festivities, I\u2019ve had the nagging feeling all day that I<\/i> should be voting.<\/p>\n

\u201cSoylent Green is poor people<\/a>!\u201d TBogg 10, Megan McArdle 0. McArdle argues that \u201cthe poor don\u2019t need more food,\u201d because, like, she once saw a poor person who was fat and they were eating, like, potato chips. Or something.<\/p>\n

Expect more of this sort of thing if the economy gets worse. Increased insecurity leads to increased anxiety which leads more people to, like McArdle, close their eyes, shove their fingers in their ears, and chant, \u201cThe poor deserve<\/i> their poverty, so that can\u2019t happen to me. The poor deserve<\/i> their \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Joseph Gross on Richard Mellon Scaife in Vanity Fair,<\/i> \u201cA Vast Right-Wing Hypocrisy<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a baroque epic of appalling behavior. (Sure, the super-rich sometimes make bad choices \u2014 but do they eat potato chips?<\/i>) Scaife is quite candid about his disdain for the moralizers he\u2019s funded over the years, and that he regards them as simply tools to be used in the political defense of concentrated wealth.<\/p>\n

What I found most interesting was Scaife\u2019s account of his lunch with Bill Clinton. The former president \u2014 the object of decades of Scaife-funded vitriolic nonsense-gates \u2014 seems to have sized up what might be accomplished during such an encounter and then, instead of revisiting the misery of their long enmity, decided to treat the old buzzard the same as any other visitor who happened to have scads of extra money lying around:<\/p>\n

Scaife left the meeting with an autographed copy of Bill Clinton\u2019s My Life<\/i> and a head full of thoughts about the \u201cscourge of AIDS\u201d in Africa, which the two had discussed in detail \u2014 though Scaife emphasizes, twice, that Clinton \u201cdid most of the talking.\u201d Back in Pittsburgh, Scaife decided to send a $100,000 personal check to the Clinton Global Initiative. That got him thinking about AIDS locally, he says, and so when he found a direct-mail solicitation for Persad<\/a>, Pittsburgh\u2019s AIDS service center, in his mailbox, he wrote that group a check, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cPeople like what other people like<\/a>.\u201d Every DJ already knew that. I made the mistake, back in college, of playing \u201cLove Shack\u201d before it was a hit. That cleared the dance floor and raised a chorus of derisive hoots. Six weeks later, the same crowd\/flock<\/a> was requesting<\/i> the same song.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\u201cMartin Marty<\/a> on evangelicals:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything anybody can say about Evangelicalism is true\u201d is my take-off from Emmett Grogan\u2019s \u201cAnything anybody can say about America is true.\u201d He and his truism issued from the \u201960s, a period when I would not have known about or spoken of the Protean character of modern American evangelicalism. Back then, schooled by the likes of the late Carl F. Henry, we thought Evangelicalism cohered around a distinctive theology born of 19th century Princeton-born thought and 20th century Billy Graham evangelistic style. It was \u201csoft\u201d and \u201copen\u201d post-fundamentalism at its core.<\/p>\n

These years, with one-fourth of America identifying or being identified as evangelical, leaders within, critics without, and editorialists within and without are trying to find coherence. Of course, there are some continuities, such as: 1) a high view of biblical authority, but by no means always or any longer the old doctrine of inerrancy; 2) a high Christology but one with bewildering variations; 3) a commitment to evangelizing, making converts, and growing, but in competitive and sometimes mutually contradictory forms; 4) a dream of community, but now challenged by individualist, go-it-alone spiritualities and mega- and post- and emergent- and traditional styles; 5) an involvement with public life, but by no means reducible to the politically \u201cChristian right.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I stumbled across that while failing to find a convenient distillation online of Marty et. al.\u2019s exhaustive and insightful study, The Fundamentalism Project<\/a>, which is my guess as to the source of what Raka described in comments earlier as \u201can extremist for cause A will have more ideological and behavioral resemblance to an extremist for any given cause X than they would to a moderate for cause A.\u201d That, in a nutshell, was what the project\u2019s research concluded.<\/p>\n

Anyway, as Marty says, modern American evangelicalism is Protean. It is also frequently Procrustean, but rarely Promethean. Discuss.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mentioned before the separation between advertising and editorial at newspapers. Among other things, that means when your ad department puts together the announcement of primary election ads, nobody in editorial sees them until after they hit the page. So it wasn\u2019t until the presses rolled that we noticed a Very Bad typo \u2014 Monday\u2019s ad said that the polls today would close at 1 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. Not good. Really, really not good. We\u2019ve got the proper time prominently displayed on every page of today\u2019s paper, but still. Really, really<\/i> not good.<\/p>\n

Benighted<\/a>,<\/i> i.e.,<\/i> Praline\u2019s book. (Not this<\/a> Praline, this one<\/a> \u2014 tricky business, plugging someone\u2019s book while still respecting their use of a screen name.) No, I haven\u2019t read it yet, but the raves in comments here have pushed it to the top o\u2019 the stack.<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t find Praline listed yet at \u201cLiterature Map<\/a>,\u201d but it\u2019s still a fascinating Web thingie. Type in an author\u2019s name and it displays a map-like array of other authors. \u201cThe closer two writers are,\u201d it says, \u201cthe more likely someone will like both of them.\u201d Every example I\u2019ve searched has made me think both \u201cAh, yes, that makes sense\u201d and also \u201cWTF?\u201d (such as the Stephen King\/Agatha Christie\/Kurt Vonnegut cluster \u2014 ??? \u2014 that showed up when I looked up Neil Gaiman).<\/p>\n

Eight days until the first pitchers and catchers report to spring training. Ten days until Johan Santana reports to Port St. Lucie. I\u2019m heading south myself \u2014 gotta get to work early tonight because the polls in Delaware close at 8 p.m. Once again, that\u2019s 8<\/b> p.m.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apologies for not tying all this together. The paper I work for is in Delaware and I\u2019ve spent the past week in Super-Tuesday-prep mode. So even though I live in Pennsylvania, and we\u2019re not part of today\u2019s festivities, I\u2019ve had the nagging feeling all day that I should be voting. \u201cSoylent Green is poor people!\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLeftovers again<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Apologies for not tying all this together. The paper I work for is in Delaware and I've spent the past week in Super-Tuesday-prep mode. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. 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