In Another Country

I hadn’t planned to write about Korea while I was here, but things got interesting, and I haven’t seen anything about this on the sites I frequent. Korea means a lot to me for both personal and political reasons that are too intertwined to disentangle briefly here. I admire its passage from dictatorship to democracy, a story of which most Americans know nothing. A lot of Americans I talk to have trouble grasping that South Korea was also ruled by dictators for over thirty years, and some flatly refuse to believe it. “Where’d you get that propaganda?” one asked me irritably.

Even before I got here a week ago, I knew that a Free Trade Agreement was being negotiated between South Korea and the US, and that beef imports had been a major obstacle. After a scare in 2003, Korea had refused to allow beef from animals more than 20 months old, because it’s at greater risk for Mad Cow Disease. But then, abruptly, new President Lee Myeong Bak (derisively known as 2MB, or 2 Megabytes) caved in and gave Bush what he wanted.

Lee had won in a landslide over previous President Roh, and he was hailed in US media as much friendlier to America than his predecessor, which translates as more open to neoliberal programs and multinational corporations. Roh had if anything been too US-friendly, but Bush never liked him, probably in part because of Roh’s background as a human rights lawyer. Much of Korea’s public capital has already been sold off since the 1997 financial crisis, but as always the corporations want more, and President Lee is eager to let them have it.

Protests against US beef imports began with an online petition calling for Lee’s impeachment, signed by a million netizens on May 4. Candlelight vigils started by high school students have been going on nightly. Such vigils have been used often in the past few years, over grievances ranging from US soldiers who ran over two schoolgirls in 2002 to the government’s handling of a Korean hostage killed by Islamists in Iraq in 2004. This time the vigils have persisted for weeks, developing a carnival atmosphere as popular singers like Lee Seung Hwan have come to perform and express their support. Lee told the crowds, “In fact I’m very selfish. I’m here because I’m worried about my family, my friends, and my neighbors. I think you’re all selfish here. But if everybody shares this selfishness, it will do good for everybody, don’t you think?” (Damn, I've lost the clip with Lee in it; the singer in the clip below is Yoon Do Yeon, who explained that he'd been silent too long and thanked the young people for goading him into action.)

But the vigils have also become an irritant, and police have begun to push the protesters, who’ve pushed back. Yesterday the conservative English-language Korea Herald ran a stern editorial, accusing the protestors of breaking the law, inconveniencing the country, and picking on the police. A Korean friend told me that President Roh restrained the police in their dealings with protesters, but Lee will let them crack down. This is worrisome. Not only old Korean hardliners but US commercial interests and government have long wanted the Korean government to ‘do something’ about what they call anti-Americanism. (As usual, this translates as any criticism of American policies and conduct.) The editors accused the protesters of starting fights with the police, and ordered Koreans to shut up and stay home.

Last night about 50,000 protesters gathered in front of Seoul City Hall (the BBC says 20,000), then proceeded to the Blue House, the President’s mansion. Police arrested about 70 (update: 228). There are already plenty of cell-phone videos online from last night. Everyone has a cell phone, so everything is caught on video by the crowd and uploaded to the Web. The police are frustrated, which in the long run will be dangerous. But for now, they’re under surveillance as they never have been before. One newspaper said that the police are still in the 20^th century, while the protesters are in the 21^st.

At about 12:45 a.m. the police turned water cannons on the crowd, injuring about 65. (Welcome back to the 20^th century.) This morning there are photos on OhMyNews showing police beating a demonstrator, but they were taken in daylight. My Korean isn't up to sorting out exactly when they were taken.

My own guess is that Mad Cow Disease, while a valid concern, is partly a symbolic tag for much larger ones. As in many countries, small farmers have suffered in Korea, leading to loss of farms and large numbers of suicides. Increased beef imports will only worsen their condition. The 1997 crisis gave the International Monetary Fund entrée to Korea; unemployment remains high, and inequality between rich and poor have grown steadily. The dictatorship was toppled in 1987 by a broad coalition ranging from the usual college students, labor unions and churches to middle-class citizens; the latter bowed out of activism when they won their immediate goal, no doubt believing that no more needed to be done. Now, with the economy still staggering, they may be returning to the struggle.

These events are part of the same global struggle that put Chavez, Morales, and Da Silva into office in Latin America. I imagine anti-“globalization” activists are already watching Korea, but what’s going on here deserves wider attention and support.

(Thanks to Soo for translations and help finding the video.)

In Another Country

I hadn’t planned to write about Korea while I was here, but things got interesting, and I haven’t seen anything about this on the sites I frequent. Korea means a lot to me for both personal and political reasons that are too intertwined to disentangle briefly here. I admire its passage from dictatorship to democracy, a story of which most Americans know nothing. A lot of Americans I talk to have trouble grasping that South Korea was also ruled by dictators for over thirty years, and some flatly refuse to believe it. “Where’d you get that propaganda?” one asked me irritably.

Even before I got here a week ago, I knew that a Free Trade Agreement was being negotiated between South Korea and the US, and that beef imports had been a major obstacle. After a scare in 2003, Korea had refused to allow beef from animals more than 20 months old, because it’s at greater risk for Mad Cow Disease. But then, abruptly, new President Lee Myeong Bak (derisively known as 2MB, or 2 Megabytes) caved in and gave Bush what he wanted.

Lee had won in a landslide over previous President Roh, and he was hailed in US media as much friendlier to America than his predecessor, which translates as more open to neoliberal programs and multinational corporations. Roh had if anything been too US-friendly, but Bush never liked him, probably in part because of Roh’s background as a human rights lawyer. Much of Korea’s public capital has already been sold off since the 1997 financial crisis, but as always the corporations want more, and President Lee is eager to let them have it.

Protests against US beef imports began with an online petition calling for Lee’s impeachment, signed by a million netizens on May 4. Candlelight vigils started by high school students have been going on nightly. Such vigils have been used often in the past few years, over grievances ranging from US soldiers who ran over two schoolgirls in 2002 to the government’s handling of a Korean hostage killed by Islamists in Iraq in 2004. This time the vigils have persisted for weeks, developing a carnival atmosphere as popular singers like Lee Seung Hwan have come to perform and express their support. Lee told the crowds, “In fact I’m very selfish. I’m here because I’m worried about my family, my friends, and my neighbors. I think you’re all selfish here. But if everybody shares this selfishness, it will do good for everybody, don’t you think?” (Damn, I've lost the clip with Lee in it; the singer in the clip below is Yoon Do Yeon, who explained that he'd been silent too long and thanked the young people for goading him into action.)

But the vigils have also become an irritant, and police have begun to push the protesters, who’ve pushed back. Yesterday the conservative English-language Korea Herald ran a stern editorial, accusing the protestors of breaking the law, inconveniencing the country, and picking on the police. A Korean friend told me that President Roh restrained the police in their dealings with protesters, but Lee will let them crack down. This is worrisome. Not only old Korean hardliners but US commercial interests and government have long wanted the Korean government to ‘do something’ about what they call anti-Americanism. (As usual, this translates as any criticism of American policies and conduct.) The editors accused the protesters of starting fights with the police, and ordered Koreans to shut up and stay home.

Last night about 50,000 protesters gathered in front of Seoul City Hall (the BBC says 20,000), then proceeded to the Blue House, the President’s mansion. Police arrested about 70 (update: 228). There are already plenty of cell-phone videos online from last night. Everyone has a cell phone, so everything is caught on video by the crowd and uploaded to the Web. The police are frustrated, which in the long run will be dangerous. But for now, they’re under surveillance as they never have been before. One newspaper said that the police are still in the 20^th century, while the protesters are in the 21^st.

At about 12:45 a.m. the police turned water cannons on the crowd, injuring about 65. (Welcome back to the 20^th century.) This morning there are photos on OhMyNews showing police beating a demonstrator, but they were taken in daylight. My Korean isn't up to sorting out exactly when they were taken.

My own guess is that Mad Cow Disease, while a valid concern, is partly a symbolic tag for much larger ones. As in many countries, small farmers have suffered in Korea, leading to loss of farms and large numbers of suicides. Increased beef imports will only worsen their condition. The 1997 crisis gave the International Monetary Fund entrée to Korea; unemployment remains high, and inequality between rich and poor have grown steadily. The dictatorship was toppled in 1987 by a broad coalition ranging from the usual college students, labor unions and churches to middle-class citizens; the latter bowed out of activism when they won their immediate goal, no doubt believing that no more needed to be done. Now, with the economy still staggering, they may be returning to the struggle.

These events are part of the same global struggle that put Chavez, Morales, and Da Silva into office in Latin America. I imagine anti-“globalization” activists are already watching Korea, but what’s going on here deserves wider attention and support.

(Thanks to Soo for translations and help finding the video.)

Meet Me In Miami

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about politics and especially the US presidential campaign lately, but my mind apparently refuses to generate words about other topics. And then I found this link to this speech by Barack Obama, addressing Cuban exiles in Miami, eulogizing “our” common experiences:

These bonds are built on a foundation of shared history in our hemisphere. Colonized by empires, we share stories of liberation. Confronted by our own imperfections, we are joined in a desire to build a more perfect union. Rich in resources, we have yet to vanquish poverty.

Of course Obama won’t acknowledge that the US itself is the “empire” most relevant to the rest of the Americas, but to speak of a “shared history” in this context is insultingly dishonest. Masters and slaves, occupiers and the occupied, invaders and the conquered also have a shared history, but it should never be pretended that they are equals. And, especially in the Cuban exile community of Miami, that “shared history” includes a history of support and safe harbor for terrorists.

What all of us strive for is freedom as FDR described it. Political freedom. Religious freedom. But also freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At our best, the United States has been a force for these four freedoms in the Americas. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that at times we’ve failed to engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner. …

I suppose it’s unrealistic to think that Obama would acknowledge, before such an audience, that the US has consistently, actively fought democracy in the Americas. It would be interesting to hear some specific examples of times that “the United States has been a force for these four freedoms” there. Given the actual history, from the Spanish-American war to the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, from Somoza and Pinochet and the Argentine generals to the latest overthrow of Aristide in Haiti, from the Bay of Pigs to the terror-bombing of Cuban airliners by Cuban exiles now living comfortably in Miami, to say “we’ve failed to engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner” is to riot in understatement. It’s reminiscent of Obama’s former advisor Samantha Power’s claim that when Indonesia invaded East Timor, the US looked the other way. (In reality, the US actively supported and protected the invasion for a quarter of a century, in a fine example of the “bipartisan” foreign policy Obama wants to emulate.)

After eight years of the failed policies of the past, we need new leadership for the future. After decades pressing for top-down reform, we need an agenda that advances democracy, security, and opportunity from the bottom up. So my policy towards the Americas will be guided by the simple principle that what’s good for the people of the Americas is good for the United States. That means measuring success not just through agreements among governments, but also through the hopes of the child in the favelas of Rio, the security for the policeman in Mexico City, and the answered cries of political prisoners heard from jails in Havana. …

So which is it: “eight years” or “decades” of failed policies? As far as the Americas go, Bush has done nothing notably new. But this is an election campaign, after all, so Obama must give first priority to targeting the Republicans, even if Democrats have never done any differently. And don’t forget that “top-down reform” here is a euphemism for military coups, torture, dictatorships, starvation, repression.

I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That’s the way to bring about real change in Cuba – through strong, smart and principled diplomacy….

Why, sure, the embargo has helped Cuban political prisoners immensely! And we know how committed the US has always been to freeing political prisoners, especially in Latin America where their jailers were trained in torture at the School of the Americas, and often supervised by American personnel to make sure the electrodes were properly attached. That’s why every Latin American dictatorship was placed under embargo by the US. … Sarcasm aside, and forgetting for the moment Obama’s own votes for the Patriot Act, which has given the US many political prisoners of its own (we should embargo ourselves), and given the vast numbers of political prisoners in US clients like Israel (embargo, anyone?) whose violations of political freedom don’t seem to bother Obama, the embargo of Cuba has weakened Castro very little, if at all. Even if I granted the US the right to dispose of governments at will, the embargo should count as a “failed policy” on its own terms. (This article, from a few years back, is still relevant.)

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected leader. But we also know that he does not govern democratically. He talks of the people, but his actions just serve his own power. Yet the Bush Administration's blustery condemnations and clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez have only strengthened his hand.

This is a flat lie. Chavez is no angel, but he does govern democratically. His actions, including a great deal of social services spending, have served the people of Venezuela and in doing so have enhanced his power and status. But when he lost a vote, as he did in the recent referendum, he accepted it instead of dissolving the legislature as a dictator would do. When “the Bush Administration’s … clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez” went as far as support for a coup, the mass of Venezuelans revolted to bring him back. Either Obama has swallowed US propaganda whole, or he’s lying (as I think), but in either case he’s offering no change here. All in all, an appalling performance.

P.S. Avedon Carol at The Sideshow links to this post at Cab Drollery which calls for a "sane foreign policy" toward Cuba, and says we'll only get it if The Democrat wins.

Cab Drollery also thinks that the US is entitled to "remove Fidel", only (boo-hoo!) the embargo didn't succeed in doing so. She quotes some yammering goober who claims that the embargo only made Castro stronger, and provided him with "a convenient antagonist to help whip up nationalist fervor on the island" -- as though Castro were manufacturing a threat, in the same way that the US government has used him -- and mentions the poverty of most Cubans as if the embargo had nothing to do with that, as if it weren't one of the aims of the embargo.

The very fact that Obama wants the US to lead shows that he's not interested in anything but "top-down reform." Cubans and other Latin Americans don't need the US to give them their freedoms. What they need us to do is get our collective national foot off their necks.

P.P.S. This great comment on Obama apologists by saurabh at A Tiny Revolution (unfortunately I can't link to the individual comment, so I'll just quote it):

This is what I don't get about Obama supporters. If the guy never says all he wants to say, how do you KNOW what he actually wants to say? It's voting for a simulacra. Maybe what Obama REALLY wants to say is: "Greetings! I am Lord Xypto, from the planet Korg in the Ztrog Nebula! I have come to enslave humanity and harvest your rich supply of biliary fluids to nurse our spawn with. Starting tomorrow, you will all be chained to a funnel in a vomitorium. Muahahaha!!" But he can't say that, 'cause there will be people who won't be ready yet.

Meet Me In Miami

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about politics and especially the US presidential campaign lately, but my mind apparently refuses to generate words about other topics. And then I found this link to this speech by Barack Obama, addressing Cuban exiles in Miami, eulogizing “our” common experiences:

These bonds are built on a foundation of shared history in our hemisphere. Colonized by empires, we share stories of liberation. Confronted by our own imperfections, we are joined in a desire to build a more perfect union. Rich in resources, we have yet to vanquish poverty.

Of course Obama won’t acknowledge that the US itself is the “empire” most relevant to the rest of the Americas, but to speak of a “shared history” in this context is insultingly dishonest. Masters and slaves, occupiers and the occupied, invaders and the conquered also have a shared history, but it should never be pretended that they are equals. And, especially in the Cuban exile community of Miami, that “shared history” includes a history of support and safe harbor for terrorists.

What all of us strive for is freedom as FDR described it. Political freedom. Religious freedom. But also freedom from want, and freedom from fear. At our best, the United States has been a force for these four freedoms in the Americas. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that at times we’ve failed to engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner. …

I suppose it’s unrealistic to think that Obama would acknowledge, before such an audience, that the US has consistently, actively fought democracy in the Americas. It would be interesting to hear some specific examples of times that “the United States has been a force for these four freedoms” there. Given the actual history, from the Spanish-American war to the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, from Somoza and Pinochet and the Argentine generals to the latest overthrow of Aristide in Haiti, from the Bay of Pigs to the terror-bombing of Cuban airliners by Cuban exiles now living comfortably in Miami, to say “we’ve failed to engage the people of the region with the respect owed to a partner” is to riot in understatement. It’s reminiscent of Obama’s former advisor Samantha Power’s claim that when Indonesia invaded East Timor, the US looked the other way. (In reality, the US actively supported and protected the invasion for a quarter of a century, in a fine example of the “bipartisan” foreign policy Obama wants to emulate.)

After eight years of the failed policies of the past, we need new leadership for the future. After decades pressing for top-down reform, we need an agenda that advances democracy, security, and opportunity from the bottom up. So my policy towards the Americas will be guided by the simple principle that what’s good for the people of the Americas is good for the United States. That means measuring success not just through agreements among governments, but also through the hopes of the child in the favelas of Rio, the security for the policeman in Mexico City, and the answered cries of political prisoners heard from jails in Havana. …

So which is it: “eight years” or “decades” of failed policies? As far as the Americas go, Bush has done nothing notably new. But this is an election campaign, after all, so Obama must give first priority to targeting the Republicans, even if Democrats have never done any differently. And don’t forget that “top-down reform” here is a euphemism for military coups, torture, dictatorships, starvation, repression.

I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That’s the way to bring about real change in Cuba – through strong, smart and principled diplomacy….

Why, sure, the embargo has helped Cuban political prisoners immensely! And we know how committed the US has always been to freeing political prisoners, especially in Latin America where their jailers were trained in torture at the School of the Americas, and often supervised by American personnel to make sure the electrodes were properly attached. That’s why every Latin American dictatorship was placed under embargo by the US. … Sarcasm aside, and forgetting for the moment Obama’s own votes for the Patriot Act, which has given the US many political prisoners of its own (we should embargo ourselves), and given the vast numbers of political prisoners in US clients like Israel (embargo, anyone?) whose violations of political freedom don’t seem to bother Obama, the embargo of Cuba has weakened Castro very little, if at all. Even if I granted the US the right to dispose of governments at will, the embargo should count as a “failed policy” on its own terms. (This article, from a few years back, is still relevant.)

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is a democratically elected leader. But we also know that he does not govern democratically. He talks of the people, but his actions just serve his own power. Yet the Bush Administration's blustery condemnations and clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez have only strengthened his hand.

This is a flat lie. Chavez is no angel, but he does govern democratically. His actions, including a great deal of social services spending, have served the people of Venezuela and in doing so have enhanced his power and status. But when he lost a vote, as he did in the recent referendum, he accepted it instead of dissolving the legislature as a dictator would do. When “the Bush Administration’s … clumsy attempts to undermine Chavez” went as far as support for a coup, the mass of Venezuelans revolted to bring him back. Either Obama has swallowed US propaganda whole, or he’s lying (as I think), but in either case he’s offering no change here. All in all, an appalling performance.

P.S. Avedon Carol at The Sideshow links to this post at Cab Drollery which calls for a "sane foreign policy" toward Cuba, and says we'll only get it if The Democrat wins.

Cab Drollery also thinks that the US is entitled to "remove Fidel", only (boo-hoo!) the embargo didn't succeed in doing so. She quotes some yammering goober who claims that the embargo only made Castro stronger, and provided him with "a convenient antagonist to help whip up nationalist fervor on the island" -- as though Castro were manufacturing a threat, in the same way that the US government has used him -- and mentions the poverty of most Cubans as if the embargo had nothing to do with that, as if it weren't one of the aims of the embargo.

The very fact that Obama wants the US to lead shows that he's not interested in anything but "top-down reform." Cubans and other Latin Americans don't need the US to give them their freedoms. What they need us to do is get our collective national foot off their necks.

P.P.S. This great comment on Obama apologists by saurabh at A Tiny Revolution (unfortunately I can't link to the individual comment, so I'll just quote it):

This is what I don't get about Obama supporters. If the guy never says all he wants to say, how do you KNOW what he actually wants to say? It's voting for a simulacra. Maybe what Obama REALLY wants to say is: "Greetings! I am Lord Xypto, from the planet Korg in the Ztrog Nebula! I have come to enslave humanity and harvest your rich supply of biliary fluids to nurse our spawn with. Starting tomorrow, you will all be chained to a funnel in a vomitorium. Muahahaha!!" But he can't say that, 'cause there will be people who won't be ready yet.

CAN A DOCTOR GET AWAY WITH DENYING FERTILITY TREATMENT TO AN UNMARRIED WOMAN?

In 1999, doctors in California refused to provide fertility treatment for Lupita Benitez, a lesbian who sought to have a child. The doctors think they should not have to follow the law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. Benitez is represented by Lambda Legal, and staff attorney Jenny Pizer argued her case before the California Supreme Court this week. The newspaper report of the oral argument indicates that the court is likely to rule in Benitez's favor.

But even if Benitez wins, her case will go back to the trial court for a determination of WHY the doctors refused her treatment. The doctors say it was because she was UNMARRIED, and if they can show that was indeed the reason, they will still win! You see in 1999, it was unlawful for a California business to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. But it was NOT a violation of state law at the time to discriminate on the basis of marital status!

Marriage is the wrong dividing line between who is entitled to fertility treatment and who isn't. California has since amended its laws to make discrimination on the basis of marital status unlawful. Benitez's case proves that such laws are necessary!

You Gotta Tell Us You Love Us So We Won't Be Alone

I'm drawing a complete blank on what to write about today, so I'm going to post this review that I wrote for Gay Community News, but which never got published. There has been a flood of gay Christian material published since 1988, but whether it's put out by a small house, like the book below, or by a major publisher like Beacon or Harper, it almost always takes the same crypto-fundamentalist approach: if you interpret the Bible the right way, it will say what you want it to say. Disdain for non-Christian gays, or for gays who don't share Christian-Right values, is also common. So, twenty years old though it may be, this piece is still timely.

Things They Never Told You in Sunday School: a Primer for the Christian Homosexual
by David Day
P.O. Box 50421, Austin TX, 78763: Liberty Press Inc., 1987
170 pp.
$7.95 pp.

When I think about gay and lesbian Christians I'm sometimes reminded of Mark 6:34, where Jesus pities the crowds who come to hear him, because they are like sheep without a shepherd. I don't believe that human beings ought to be sheep: sheep always seem to end up getting fleeced. (I prefer to be a goat: omnivorous, cantankerous, horny...but I digress.) But I can't help noticing that gay and lesbian Christians seem always to be milling anxiously around, looking for someone to tell them that they have a right to exist. And now as in Jesus' day, there's always someone who's more than happy to take up his crook and lead the flock off for clipping.

David Day is Pastor (from the Old French pastor, meaning shepherd) of Metropolitan Community Church of Austin, Texas. He has written a book called Things They Never Told You in Sunday School: a Primer for the Christian Homosexual. It's a good title, but misleading, for the book contains exactly the kind of things they taught you in Sunday school -- sloppy or outdated scholarship, semi-inspiring platitudes, (barely) unconscious bigotry -- turned to gay/lesbian Christian ends.

Day begins by warning against proof-texting, "the use of a single scripture that seems to pertain to a certain topic as proof of God's opinion concerning that topic" (31). People who proof-text ignore "the cultural setting of the original scripture . . . the original meaning of the language . . . [and] the overall messages that surround it and appear throughout the Bible" (31f.). This, of course, is what you are likely to be told at the beginning of any Bible class. As Day admits, "Even the most rigid Bible-pounding conservative preacher uses this approach to some extent" (35).

Day then proceeds to violate the principle he has just endorsed. He accepts the consensus of modern Biblical scholarship that the Torah was written in several stages long after Moses, and that the framework of Leviticus, in which Yahweh dictates his laws to Moses from the tabernacle, is a legend intended by its authors to lend divine authority to their prescriptions for Israelite life and worship. The Levitical laws, which include a prohibition of sexual acts between men, were written by "the priests of Israel . . . to guard their traditions against heathen intrusion", notably "the sexual practices of the Canaanites . . . [which] were deeply interwoven with idol worship. Their gods were sexual and were worshiped in sexual rites" (72). (This sounds like my kind of religion, but Day, like the Levitical priests, disapproves.) Day also believes that Leviticus emerged partly as an expression of what he imagines as the ancient Israelites' shock, while in exile in Babylon, at discovering "large-scale homosexual prostitution" there. "The male-male sexual activity that the Hebrews would have seen prominently displayed in Babylon would have been in the form of prostitution -- cult prostitution honoring a Babylonian God" (75).

Why this should have bothered the Hebrews is not clear, since Day thinks that male-male sexual activity had long been common among them (65). On Day's own assumptions, they would also have seen male-female ritual copulation "prominently displayed" in Babylon; why didn't this make them reject heterosexual activity as well? According to Day, ritual copulation had been practiced in the Jerusalem temple for around 300 years before the exile, so seeing the practice should have made the exiles more homesick than disgusted. And what is so intolerably nasty about ritual copulation anyhow? It was, Day says (like most gay apologists for Christianity), a common practice in heathen religions, as if this explained everything. But Israelite religion practiced rites which were practiced by the followers of other gods, such as animal sacrifice and circumcision; why not ritual copulation, especially in a culture which regarded itself as the bride of its God?

It's true that one way a group may define itself is by projecting evil onto other groups. Ancient Romans, for instance, prided themselves on not practicing ritual cannibalism or incestuous orgies, as the sect known as Christians did. Medieval Christians defined themselves by contrast with lustful Musselmans, or avaricious Jews who murdered Christian babies to use their blood for Passover matzohs. Modern Christians may define themselves against hypocritical Pharisees, bigoted fundamentalists, or amoral secular humanists.

These examples are meant to remind my readers that we need not, must not take seriously all of the charges a group levels against outsiders. Recently, a Biblical scholar named Robert Oden Jr. has shown that we don't know that ritual prostitution was common in ancient Middle Eastern paganism. See his The Bible Without Theology, (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. Oddly, thanks to stories in I Kings and the complaints of some of the prophets, we are fairly sure that it was practiced in Israel -- if, that is, the Hebrew word qadesh actually does mean "sacred prostitute."

However, there isn't any reference to "cult prostitution" in Leviticus, certainly not in chapter 18. The prohibition of males lying with males in verse 22 does not occur in the context of prohibitions of ritual activities: it is surrounded by prohibitions of certain kinds of sexual activity, including incest (very broadly construed, vv. 6-18), sex with a menstruating woman (v. 19), adultery (v. 20), and bestiality (v. 23). The sole exception is verse 21, which forbids dedicating (sacrificing?) one's children to Molech "by fire". So the explaining away of Leviticus 18:22 as a condemnation of ritual copulation involves lifting the verse out of context and explaining it in terms of a practice discussed only in a different part of the Bible.

Then Day turns to the New Testament. Against Leviticus, he cites the story of Simon Peter's vision from Acts (10:9ff.) in which Yahweh declares all foods acceptable to eat, thus repealing the dietary restrictions found in the Law of Moses. Does Day recognize that this story too is a legend, invented to legitimate the early Christians' abolition of parts of the Mosaic Law? He does not: he takes it at face value. For Day, the clean/unclean distinctions in Torah are "outdated concepts" which reflect "the ancient Jewish understanding of the ideal creation" (81); while the early Christians' rejection of Torah does not reflect the early Christians' concept of the ideal creation, but God's.

Day applies the same double standard to ancient Judaism's sexual norms: they are the result of "biological ignorance" and "ungodly sexism" (68), while the teachings of the apostle Paul contain "the word of God brought to us. . . . [O]ut of them eternal truths can be discerned" (102). And what makes David Day so sure that he knows an eternal truth when he sees one? How is he less bound by history and culture than Paul and the Levitical priests?

Day's discussion of New Testament passages relating to male homosexuality takes the same tack. "The same-sex activity would have encountered during his missionary visits [to Corinth] would have been associated with idolatry, pederasty, or prostitution, or sometimes all of the above. . . . Here, also, sex was glorified and nude statues of Apollo in various poses of virility 'fired his male worshippers to physical displays of devotion with the god's beautiful boys.' The society in Corinth was one in which sexual activity was routinely a part of worship. . . . In a city whose very name was synonymous with prostitution it is reasonable to think that Paul might address the issue of male cult prostitution" (108-9). The reference here to "physical displays of devotion with the god's beautiful boys" comes from something called The Apostle by John Pollock, published by a fundamentalist house in Wheaton, Illinois; not the most scholarly source. It sounds more like the prurient fantasy of a homophobe than an accurate account of Corinthian worship, though I must say that it sounds a lot more inspiring than most Christian services. Remember too that it's not certain, or even likely, that ritual copulation was actually practiced on this scale.

In Romans 1:18-22, the infamous passage denouncing men who burn with lust for other men, "Paul was talking about those who were involved in idolatry and thereby had the ownership of their lives given over to their passions" (125). This is bigotry. There is no reason why people who worshipped gods other than Yahweh should have been ruled by their passions any more than Jews or Christians were, and we have plenty of evidence of loving relationships, heterosexual and homosexual, from the Greco-Roman world. We also know of pagan writers who were disturbed by the exploitativeness of some male-male relationships -- and so does David Day, since he has read Robin Scroggs' The New Testament and Homosexuality, which quotes such writers.

If, as Day believes, Paul was so concerned about the ethical failings of male homosexual relations in the Hellenistic world, why didn't he do as he did with heterosexual relations -- encourage mutuality and love between the partners -- instead of condemning them outright? Since Day acknowledges that "It would be senseless to argue that Paul would not have considered same-sex activities between males unnnatural. ... Affection between men or male coupling was not the issue" (126), I don't understand why he bothers trying to defend Paul in the first place.

Day also cannot resist indulging in a little standard Christian theological Jew-baiting: "The Pharisees of Jesus' time believed that they were justified in looking down their noses at persons around them because they didn't abide by the rigid laws with which the Pharisees defined their own righteousness. ... God was not as impressed as they thought" (141). "Jesus came along," says Day, "and condensed all of the moral teachings of the ages into three little words, 'Love one another'" (141). Forget for the moment that the Pharisaic rabbis of Jesus' time had done the very same, or that like Jesus they found the command "Love your neighbor as yourself" in (of all places!) Leviticus. (Chapter 19, verse 18.) Forget that Jesus promised eternal torment to everyone who did not observe every jot and tittle of the Mosaic Law (Matthew 5.19, 7.21), as interpreted by the Pharisees (Matthew 23.3). I just wonder if God is as impressed as Day thinks by this unintentionally hilarious passage: "Those who criticize and hate homosexuals are contrary to nature themselves. God has made it clear that it should go against our spiritual nature to judge others. Bigotry is an unnatural act!" (98). Just who is being judgmental here? Or bigoted?

Reading Things They Never Told You in Sunday School did make me feel a bit sorry for gay and lesbian Christians. The more they strike at the Church the more hopelessly they stick in its dishonesty and hypocrisy. They will never be able to free themselves until they let go of their belief that if they can just interpret the Bible correctly, it will endorse homosexuality. It ill becomes them to denounce other Christians for selective Biblical interpretation as long as they are doing it themselves; though ironically enough, it is precisely this picking and choosing from the Bible that they have in common with other Christians.

There's a strong and unappetizing streak of self-pity among gay Christians. Their feelings are hurt, I guess, because no one else seems to agree that they're as wonderful as they think they are. They consider themselves superior to Christians who won't buy their particular distortion of the Bible, whom they regard as hypocrites, and of course they consider themselves superior to non-religious gays, whom they routinely characterize as loveless, promiscuous sluts. In a way, I suppose, it is unfair: other Christians get away with twisting scripture for their own purposes, so why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't gay Christians be allowed to claim moral leadership of the gay movement despite their self-righteousness and hypocrisy? The success of the Religious Right has set a very bad example for gay Christians, I'm afraid: what with religious nuts like Falwell and Robertson being taken seriously as political figures in this country, it's no wonder that gay Christians are babbling about spiritual renewal and thinking of themselves as the vanguard of homosexuality for the 1990s. The trouble with Things They Never Told You in Sunday School is not that it's unrepresentative of gay and lesbian Christianity; unfortunately, it's all too typical.

You Gotta Tell Us You Love Us So We Won't Be Alone

I'm drawing a complete blank on what to write about today, so I'm going to post this review that I wrote for Gay Community News, but which never got published. There has been a flood of gay Christian material published since 1988, but whether it's put out by a small house, like the book below, or by a major publisher like Beacon or Harper, it almost always takes the same crypto-fundamentalist approach: if you interpret the Bible the right way, it will say what you want it to say. Disdain for non-Christian gays, or for gays who don't share Christian-Right values, is also common. So, twenty years old though it may be, this piece is still timely.

Things They Never Told You in Sunday School: a Primer for the Christian Homosexual
by David Day
P.O. Box 50421, Austin TX, 78763: Liberty Press Inc., 1987
170 pp.
$7.95 pp.

When I think about gay and lesbian Christians I'm sometimes reminded of Mark 6:34, where Jesus pities the crowds who come to hear him, because they are like sheep without a shepherd. I don't believe that human beings ought to be sheep: sheep always seem to end up getting fleeced. (I prefer to be a goat: omnivorous, cantankerous, horny...but I digress.) But I can't help noticing that gay and lesbian Christians seem always to be milling anxiously around, looking for someone to tell them that they have a right to exist. And now as in Jesus' day, there's always someone who's more than happy to take up his crook and lead the flock off for clipping.

David Day is Pastor (from the Old French pastor, meaning shepherd) of Metropolitan Community Church of Austin, Texas. He has written a book called Things They Never Told You in Sunday School: a Primer for the Christian Homosexual. It's a good title, but misleading, for the book contains exactly the kind of things they taught you in Sunday school -- sloppy or outdated scholarship, semi-inspiring platitudes, (barely) unconscious bigotry -- turned to gay/lesbian Christian ends.

Day begins by warning against proof-texting, "the use of a single scripture that seems to pertain to a certain topic as proof of God's opinion concerning that topic" (31). People who proof-text ignore "the cultural setting of the original scripture . . . the original meaning of the language . . . [and] the overall messages that surround it and appear throughout the Bible" (31f.). This, of course, is what you are likely to be told at the beginning of any Bible class. As Day admits, "Even the most rigid Bible-pounding conservative preacher uses this approach to some extent" (35).

Day then proceeds to violate the principle he has just endorsed. He accepts the consensus of modern Biblical scholarship that the Torah was written in several stages long after Moses, and that the framework of Leviticus, in which Yahweh dictates his laws to Moses from the tabernacle, is a legend intended by its authors to lend divine authority to their prescriptions for Israelite life and worship. The Levitical laws, which include a prohibition of sexual acts between men, were written by "the priests of Israel . . . to guard their traditions against heathen intrusion", notably "the sexual practices of the Canaanites . . . [which] were deeply interwoven with idol worship. Their gods were sexual and were worshiped in sexual rites" (72). (This sounds like my kind of religion, but Day, like the Levitical priests, disapproves.) Day also believes that Leviticus emerged partly as an expression of what he imagines as the ancient Israelites' shock, while in exile in Babylon, at discovering "large-scale homosexual prostitution" there. "The male-male sexual activity that the Hebrews would have seen prominently displayed in Babylon would have been in the form of prostitution -- cult prostitution honoring a Babylonian God" (75).

Why this should have bothered the Hebrews is not clear, since Day thinks that male-male sexual activity had long been common among them (65). On Day's own assumptions, they would also have seen male-female ritual copulation "prominently displayed" in Babylon; why didn't this make them reject heterosexual activity as well? According to Day, ritual copulation had been practiced in the Jerusalem temple for around 300 years before the exile, so seeing the practice should have made the exiles more homesick than disgusted. And what is so intolerably nasty about ritual copulation anyhow? It was, Day says (like most gay apologists for Christianity), a common practice in heathen religions, as if this explained everything. But Israelite religion practiced rites which were practiced by the followers of other gods, such as animal sacrifice and circumcision; why not ritual copulation, especially in a culture which regarded itself as the bride of its God?

It's true that one way a group may define itself is by projecting evil onto other groups. Ancient Romans, for instance, prided themselves on not practicing ritual cannibalism or incestuous orgies, as the sect known as Christians did. Medieval Christians defined themselves by contrast with lustful Musselmans, or avaricious Jews who murdered Christian babies to use their blood for Passover matzohs. Modern Christians may define themselves against hypocritical Pharisees, bigoted fundamentalists, or amoral secular humanists.

These examples are meant to remind my readers that we need not, must not take seriously all of the charges a group levels against outsiders. Recently, a Biblical scholar named Robert Oden Jr. has shown that we don't know that ritual prostitution was common in ancient Middle Eastern paganism. See his The Bible Without Theology, (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. Oddly, thanks to stories in I Kings and the complaints of some of the prophets, we are fairly sure that it was practiced in Israel -- if, that is, the Hebrew word qadesh actually does mean "sacred prostitute."

However, there isn't any reference to "cult prostitution" in Leviticus, certainly not in chapter 18. The prohibition of males lying with males in verse 22 does not occur in the context of prohibitions of ritual activities: it is surrounded by prohibitions of certain kinds of sexual activity, including incest (very broadly construed, vv. 6-18), sex with a menstruating woman (v. 19), adultery (v. 20), and bestiality (v. 23). The sole exception is verse 21, which forbids dedicating (sacrificing?) one's children to Molech "by fire". So the explaining away of Leviticus 18:22 as a condemnation of ritual copulation involves lifting the verse out of context and explaining it in terms of a practice discussed only in a different part of the Bible.

Then Day turns to the New Testament. Against Leviticus, he cites the story of Simon Peter's vision from Acts (10:9ff.) in which Yahweh declares all foods acceptable to eat, thus repealing the dietary restrictions found in the Law of Moses. Does Day recognize that this story too is a legend, invented to legitimate the early Christians' abolition of parts of the Mosaic Law? He does not: he takes it at face value. For Day, the clean/unclean distinctions in Torah are "outdated concepts" which reflect "the ancient Jewish understanding of the ideal creation" (81); while the early Christians' rejection of Torah does not reflect the early Christians' concept of the ideal creation, but God's.

Day applies the same double standard to ancient Judaism's sexual norms: they are the result of "biological ignorance" and "ungodly sexism" (68), while the teachings of the apostle Paul contain "the word of God brought to us. . . . [O]ut of them eternal truths can be discerned" (102). And what makes David Day so sure that he knows an eternal truth when he sees one? How is he less bound by history and culture than Paul and the Levitical priests?

Day's discussion of New Testament passages relating to male homosexuality takes the same tack. "The same-sex activity would have encountered during his missionary visits [to Corinth] would have been associated with idolatry, pederasty, or prostitution, or sometimes all of the above. . . . Here, also, sex was glorified and nude statues of Apollo in various poses of virility 'fired his male worshippers to physical displays of devotion with the god's beautiful boys.' The society in Corinth was one in which sexual activity was routinely a part of worship. . . . In a city whose very name was synonymous with prostitution it is reasonable to think that Paul might address the issue of male cult prostitution" (108-9). The reference here to "physical displays of devotion with the god's beautiful boys" comes from something called The Apostle by John Pollock, published by a fundamentalist house in Wheaton, Illinois; not the most scholarly source. It sounds more like the prurient fantasy of a homophobe than an accurate account of Corinthian worship, though I must say that it sounds a lot more inspiring than most Christian services. Remember too that it's not certain, or even likely, that ritual copulation was actually practiced on this scale.

In Romans 1:18-22, the infamous passage denouncing men who burn with lust for other men, "Paul was talking about those who were involved in idolatry and thereby had the ownership of their lives given over to their passions" (125). This is bigotry. There is no reason why people who worshipped gods other than Yahweh should have been ruled by their passions any more than Jews or Christians were, and we have plenty of evidence of loving relationships, heterosexual and homosexual, from the Greco-Roman world. We also know of pagan writers who were disturbed by the exploitativeness of some male-male relationships -- and so does David Day, since he has read Robin Scroggs' The New Testament and Homosexuality, which quotes such writers.

If, as Day believes, Paul was so concerned about the ethical failings of male homosexual relations in the Hellenistic world, why didn't he do as he did with heterosexual relations -- encourage mutuality and love between the partners -- instead of condemning them outright? Since Day acknowledges that "It would be senseless to argue that Paul would not have considered same-sex activities between males unnnatural. ... Affection between men or male coupling was not the issue" (126), I don't understand why he bothers trying to defend Paul in the first place.

Day also cannot resist indulging in a little standard Christian theological Jew-baiting: "The Pharisees of Jesus' time believed that they were justified in looking down their noses at persons around them because they didn't abide by the rigid laws with which the Pharisees defined their own righteousness. ... God was not as impressed as they thought" (141). "Jesus came along," says Day, "and condensed all of the moral teachings of the ages into three little words, 'Love one another'" (141). Forget for the moment that the Pharisaic rabbis of Jesus' time had done the very same, or that like Jesus they found the command "Love your neighbor as yourself" in (of all places!) Leviticus. (Chapter 19, verse 18.) Forget that Jesus promised eternal torment to everyone who did not observe every jot and tittle of the Mosaic Law (Matthew 5.19, 7.21), as interpreted by the Pharisees (Matthew 23.3). I just wonder if God is as impressed as Day thinks by this unintentionally hilarious passage: "Those who criticize and hate homosexuals are contrary to nature themselves. God has made it clear that it should go against our spiritual nature to judge others. Bigotry is an unnatural act!" (98). Just who is being judgmental here? Or bigoted?

Reading Things They Never Told You in Sunday School did make me feel a bit sorry for gay and lesbian Christians. The more they strike at the Church the more hopelessly they stick in its dishonesty and hypocrisy. They will never be able to free themselves until they let go of their belief that if they can just interpret the Bible correctly, it will endorse homosexuality. It ill becomes them to denounce other Christians for selective Biblical interpretation as long as they are doing it themselves; though ironically enough, it is precisely this picking and choosing from the Bible that they have in common with other Christians.

There's a strong and unappetizing streak of self-pity among gay Christians. Their feelings are hurt, I guess, because no one else seems to agree that they're as wonderful as they think they are. They consider themselves superior to Christians who won't buy their particular distortion of the Bible, whom they regard as hypocrites, and of course they consider themselves superior to non-religious gays, whom they routinely characterize as loveless, promiscuous sluts. In a way, I suppose, it is unfair: other Christians get away with twisting scripture for their own purposes, so why shouldn't they? And why shouldn't gay Christians be allowed to claim moral leadership of the gay movement despite their self-righteousness and hypocrisy? The success of the Religious Right has set a very bad example for gay Christians, I'm afraid: what with religious nuts like Falwell and Robertson being taken seriously as political figures in this country, it's no wonder that gay Christians are babbling about spiritual renewal and thinking of themselves as the vanguard of homosexuality for the 1990s. The trouble with Things They Never Told You in Sunday School is not that it's unrepresentative of gay and lesbian Christianity; unfortunately, it's all too typical.

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.” “The debate about pacifism”? Where is that going on?

Katha Pollitt began her attack on the book in The Nation by declaring, “By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Damn, girl! Before I can judge her reading, I’ll have to read the book, but Pollitt’s wrath is mild compared to the New Republic reviewer, one Anne Applebaum (“a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post” -- not the greatest recommendation nowadays). Applebaum seems to be even more angry at the book’s form, which she uses as a springboard to rant at length on some of her (presumably) personal hobbyhorses, Wikipedia and “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “ ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.” Baker is on record as liking Wikipedia, so he’s fair game I guess.

In a display of typical mainstream media balance, Applebaum allows:

It is true that there are many excellent, well-educated bloggers, whose contributions to public debates are invaluable, and who have served to prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder. At the same time, there are also many bloggers who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the "mainstream media, " or the "conventional histories," simply because they are self-appointed "critics," whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts. The result of their efforts is that quality -- accuracy, truthfulness, learnedness -- is disappearing beneath the sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information.

You know, Applebaum has picked a bad time to trumpet “the establishment institutions” of journalism. During the leadup to the Iraq War, the Washington Post and the New York Times functioned as propaganda arms for the Bush administration. This is not just the gripe of a disaffected anti-expert blogger: the Post and the Times have both admitted as much. And this was nothing new; the corporate media have been coasting on the Post’s Watergate coverage and the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers for decades now, to cover up their generally craven collaboration with the state. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership which left most American cities with only one major newspaper, conditions have probably worsened since the 1970s, when those last gasps of rebellion took place. But most of the mainstream media’s war coverage, before and since, has consisted precisely of a “sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information”, most of it generated by “experts”: government officials speaking on and off the record, political scientists in the pay of mostly right-leaning think tanks, high-ranking military, and the like. It really is the most sensible course, when faced with mainstream media coverage of important political issues, to treat them with extreme skepticism.

Just for the hell of it, Applebaum lumps Baker in with Dan Brown, author of the dread Da Vinci Code, which I’ll certainly agree is one of the dumbest books I’ve ever read, though I don’t think that’s really Applebaum’s objection to it. What she means by expertise is really authority, the people who somehow know what’s best for us and whom we should obey without question. But why? It’s false to call Brown “anti-expert” – he appeals to an expertise based on conventionally serious scholarship that comes to unorthodox conclusions; his main character is an Ivy League academic, and one of the (inadvertently) funniest moments in that leaden book was when Sir Leigh Teabing impressed protagonist Robert Langdon with his ability to write the entire Hebrew alphabet from memory. (An intellectual feat which any Israeli schoolchild can probably match – it ain’t rocket science.) What enraged so many Roman Catholics about the book was its disrespect for Church authority, which is augmented by but not built on expertise: its scholars and theologians are servants answerable to the church, and with the resurgence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Wojtyla and Ratzinger it’s hardly a radical observation that their expertise is limited by the “establishment institution.”

Brown’s alternative Christian history is bogus, but so is much of the standard version. Outside of Catholicism, credentialed Christian academics who wander too far from mainstream positions can expect to be attacked, viciously and largely inaccurately, by their more conservative and conformist colleagues. One thing that struck me while I was studying early Christianity in the 1980s was how much sheer nonsense a mainstream Bible scholar could publish without real consequences. (Of course, picking each other’s work apart in journal articles is the fun part of being an academic.) Outside of academia, who even cares that a right-wing evangelical like D. James Kennedy publishes outrageous howlers in his apologetics? What counts is that he accepts the authority of orthodoxy. No one complains when a layperson like Anne Rice attacks the expertise of perfessors who don’t think the gospels are historically accurate, because she does so in the context of her return to the Roman Catholic fold, submitting to its authority. (It’s worth remembering that Jesus and the early Christians challenged the religious experts of their day without expertise, relying instead on the charismatic authority of the Spirit. And they were derided for it, dismissed as unlettered and rebellious – which they were. Ironically, the authority of the Church is founded on its founders’ rejection of authority.)

The democratic movements of the 1950s and later, which as Noam Chomsky says terrified rulers in the US and around the world, also refused to defer to duly constituted authority, and rightly so. The Civil Rights movement, for example, defied experts who cautioned against too-rapid change (that is, any substantive change at all) and urged African-Americans to be patient; after all, such people said in the mainstream media, it wasn’t certain that “the Negro” was ready for equal rights. (Male) experts also delineated Woman’s proper place, tut-tutted the crazy notion that homosexuals weren’t sick, and so on. Similar problems turned up during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when straight doctors, mostly ill-informed and often downright bigoted, were challenged by people with AIDS who developed their own expertise. (This example shows another side of the problem, as many AIDS activists were co-opted by the establishment.)

I, of course, belong to the 60s generation that attacked not expertise so much as authority, though some of us did confuse the two, because we’d seen expertise abused so much. Women and gay men challenged the authority of the medical and psychiatric professions to declare us sick and then hold out the offer of “cure.” When women did so, however, they set out to construct their own expertise: Our Bodies, Ourselves didn’t throw out medicine, only pointed out its masculist bias and argued that it should serve women rather than control them. There were psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who questioned the sickness consensus about homosexuality, but they didn’t control the discourse; gay men and lesbians decided that we would decide whose expertise to use.

Experts aren’t always wrong; they aren’t always right either. So how to decide which expert to believe? Applebaum wants laypeople to wait quietly while the professionals duke it out, perhaps assisted by a few exceptional but deferential critics who “prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder.” Professionals generally don’t take well to criticism by outsiders, no matter how well the latter have done their homework; after all, they don’t even take well to criticism by other insiders. They’re much happier if they’re in charge, which is humanly understandable but not acceptable. (See Nina Eliasoph’s Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998] for an exploration of this problem.)

I can relate somewhat to Applebaum’s distaste for people, not just bloggers, “who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the ‘mainstream media,’ or the ‘conventional histories,’ simply because they are self-appointed ‘critics,’ whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts.” But those people’s skepticism is justified, and again, laypeople who accept authoritative lies and obfuscation are no better, though authorities seldom criticize them. It may be that relatively few people are willing to make the effort necessary for an informed critique; what if anything can be done about that, I don’t know. But I’m sure the answer is not more deference to expertise and authority. We’ve already seen the results of that.

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.” “The debate about pacifism”? Where is that going on?

Katha Pollitt began her attack on the book in The Nation by declaring, “By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Damn, girl! Before I can judge her reading, I’ll have to read the book, but Pollitt’s wrath is mild compared to the New Republic reviewer, one Anne Applebaum (“a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post” -- not the greatest recommendation nowadays). Applebaum seems to be even more angry at the book’s form, which she uses as a springboard to rant at length on some of her (presumably) personal hobbyhorses, Wikipedia and “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “ ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.” Baker is on record as liking Wikipedia, so he’s fair game I guess.

In a display of typical mainstream media balance, Applebaum allows:

It is true that there are many excellent, well-educated bloggers, whose contributions to public debates are invaluable, and who have served to prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder. At the same time, there are also many bloggers who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the "mainstream media, " or the "conventional histories," simply because they are self-appointed "critics," whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts. The result of their efforts is that quality -- accuracy, truthfulness, learnedness -- is disappearing beneath the sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information.

You know, Applebaum has picked a bad time to trumpet “the establishment institutions” of journalism. During the leadup to the Iraq War, the Washington Post and the New York Times functioned as propaganda arms for the Bush administration. This is not just the gripe of a disaffected anti-expert blogger: the Post and the Times have both admitted as much. And this was nothing new; the corporate media have been coasting on the Post’s Watergate coverage and the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers for decades now, to cover up their generally craven collaboration with the state. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership which left most American cities with only one major newspaper, conditions have probably worsened since the 1970s, when those last gasps of rebellion took place. But most of the mainstream media’s war coverage, before and since, has consisted precisely of a “sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information”, most of it generated by “experts”: government officials speaking on and off the record, political scientists in the pay of mostly right-leaning think tanks, high-ranking military, and the like. It really is the most sensible course, when faced with mainstream media coverage of important political issues, to treat them with extreme skepticism.

Just for the hell of it, Applebaum lumps Baker in with Dan Brown, author of the dread Da Vinci Code, which I’ll certainly agree is one of the dumbest books I’ve ever read, though I don’t think that’s really Applebaum’s objection to it. What she means by expertise is really authority, the people who somehow know what’s best for us and whom we should obey without question. But why? It’s false to call Brown “anti-expert” – he appeals to an expertise based on conventionally serious scholarship that comes to unorthodox conclusions; his main character is an Ivy League academic, and one of the (inadvertently) funniest moments in that leaden book was when Sir Leigh Teabing impressed protagonist Robert Langdon with his ability to write the entire Hebrew alphabet from memory. (An intellectual feat which any Israeli schoolchild can probably match – it ain’t rocket science.) What enraged so many Roman Catholics about the book was its disrespect for Church authority, which is augmented by but not built on expertise: its scholars and theologians are servants answerable to the church, and with the resurgence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Wojtyla and Ratzinger it’s hardly a radical observation that their expertise is limited by the “establishment institution.”

Brown’s alternative Christian history is bogus, but so is much of the standard version. Outside of Catholicism, credentialed Christian academics who wander too far from mainstream positions can expect to be attacked, viciously and largely inaccurately, by their more conservative and conformist colleagues. One thing that struck me while I was studying early Christianity in the 1980s was how much sheer nonsense a mainstream Bible scholar could publish without real consequences. (Of course, picking each other’s work apart in journal articles is the fun part of being an academic.) Outside of academia, who even cares that a right-wing evangelical like D. James Kennedy publishes outrageous howlers in his apologetics? What counts is that he accepts the authority of orthodoxy. No one complains when a layperson like Anne Rice attacks the expertise of perfessors who don’t think the gospels are historically accurate, because she does so in the context of her return to the Roman Catholic fold, submitting to its authority. (It’s worth remembering that Jesus and the early Christians challenged the religious experts of their day without expertise, relying instead on the charismatic authority of the Spirit. And they were derided for it, dismissed as unlettered and rebellious – which they were. Ironically, the authority of the Church is founded on its founders’ rejection of authority.)

The democratic movements of the 1950s and later, which as Noam Chomsky says terrified rulers in the US and around the world, also refused to defer to duly constituted authority, and rightly so. The Civil Rights movement, for example, defied experts who cautioned against too-rapid change (that is, any substantive change at all) and urged African-Americans to be patient; after all, such people said in the mainstream media, it wasn’t certain that “the Negro” was ready for equal rights. (Male) experts also delineated Woman’s proper place, tut-tutted the crazy notion that homosexuals weren’t sick, and so on. Similar problems turned up during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when straight doctors, mostly ill-informed and often downright bigoted, were challenged by people with AIDS who developed their own expertise. (This example shows another side of the problem, as many AIDS activists were co-opted by the establishment.)

I, of course, belong to the 60s generation that attacked not expertise so much as authority, though some of us did confuse the two, because we’d seen expertise abused so much. Women and gay men challenged the authority of the medical and psychiatric professions to declare us sick and then hold out the offer of “cure.” When women did so, however, they set out to construct their own expertise: Our Bodies, Ourselves didn’t throw out medicine, only pointed out its masculist bias and argued that it should serve women rather than control them. There were psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who questioned the sickness consensus about homosexuality, but they didn’t control the discourse; gay men and lesbians decided that we would decide whose expertise to use.

Experts aren’t always wrong; they aren’t always right either. So how to decide which expert to believe? Applebaum wants laypeople to wait quietly while the professionals duke it out, perhaps assisted by a few exceptional but deferential critics who “prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder.” Professionals generally don’t take well to criticism by outsiders, no matter how well the latter have done their homework; after all, they don’t even take well to criticism by other insiders. They’re much happier if they’re in charge, which is humanly understandable but not acceptable. (See Nina Eliasoph’s Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998] for an exploration of this problem.)

I can relate somewhat to Applebaum’s distaste for people, not just bloggers, “who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the ‘mainstream media,’ or the ‘conventional histories,’ simply because they are self-appointed ‘critics,’ whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts.” But those people’s skepticism is justified, and again, laypeople who accept authoritative lies and obfuscation are no better, though authorities seldom criticize them. It may be that relatively few people are willing to make the effort necessary for an informed critique; what if anything can be done about that, I don’t know. But I’m sure the answer is not more deference to expertise and authority. We’ve already seen the results of that.