Half Past Noon

How anybody can deny the excellence of this idea is beyond me.

The Sasquatch! lineup was announced today, but this is only important because it is prerequisite to the unannounced awesomeness that seems to happen every year: hail, spontaneous dance parties, and other happenstances of epically Beowulfian proportions.

Not that I’ll necessarily go, but I thought Davey would appreciate the trip down memory lane. Man, that hail hurt.

As a way for doing penance for my scattershot of a post regarding abortion the other day, I thought I would share this excellent post from one of the best blogs on the Internet. You’ll note a much more careful treatment of abortion as it relates to the poor and politicians, and even more interestingly, a discussion of Playboy and the role of sexual shenanigans in all of this.

Unhappy Hipsters have a way of cheering up the chronically unhip.

If this young lady can pull off COOP menus on meager budgets, I suppose any of us can.

I refuse, however, to smuggle a bottle of wine into any of our local bars.

This last weekend Doug Wilson urged us to keep our priorities straight, and I think that this is an excellent point to keep in mind, especially as economic and food security issues speedily crowd the intellects of some of us here on this blog. In particular, Wilson points out that the fight against abortion is not over, and the importance of this fight rightly eclipses many lesser issues.

Cruelty to an animal is one thing, but murder of a helpless child is yet another. These are both offenses of the same species – oppression of and cruelty toward the weak – but also of a different order. Abortion is murder, and all of our exulting about the sturdy yolks of our granola-fed chickens looks pretty silly in comparison.

So yes, we should be thankful for this reminder.

But.

I think it is clear by now that we require a mass shift in mores, a near-universal cultural and spiritual repentance, before abortion will go away. This will of course come through the Gospel. But since the Christian witness is an incarnational thing, it is legitimate to ask about practical ways that we can become Gospel for people who need to experience this change. I have been attracted to issues like economics, and eventually food, because I see in them an additional – and chronically underemphasized – tool for bringing about some of the cultural change that is needed in The West.

I think here specifically of the girls who decide to abort. Some do so because of uncaring callousness; others, many others, do so because of cultural and economic pressure. This is true especially for the poor. If you’re poor, having a baby means dropping out of school, perhaps your only way out of poverty. If you’re not in school, you are likely working long hours at multiple jobs to make ends meet, and you’re going to have to stop that. A baby is a game changer for the rich, but it’s often a total forfeit for the poor.

It’s true that these folks made certain recreational (and procreational) choices, and they should be held accountable for them. But it is the first place of the Christian to remove planks, and this includes broad-brush cultural judgments we pass on our society. Abortion is murder; we would do well to contemplate the many lesser murders in which we participate daily. Since we really do inhabit a culture of death, it is likely that this death has worked its way into the corners of our culture and lives as Christians.

The Conservatives with whom Christians overwhelmingly identify have been busy for decades napalming indigenous peoples and bombing deserts to glass. Our food system reeks of death and trades the dignity of God’s creatures for efficiency and commerce. Our political discourse is inhuman and uncharitable. Countless racas are uttered against our political enemies, our denominational oddballs, and even those who share the pews with us weekly. Lesser murders are all around us, and it’s time that we got to work fixing them.

Moreover, our economics reinforce this problem in many ways. Modern American Corporate Capitalism has done much to harm the family, which in turn has eroded our sexual standards, the economic stability and centrality of families, and the economic safety of women. We must now have two working parents to make ends meet; we must now be mobile and more committed to career than family or family life; we must depend on paychecks, which is to say that our livelihoods often depend on shareholders reviewing balance sheets or a capricious market that may finally force the innovation that makes us obsolete. If the church were doing her job, many of these girls would have economic security, a community to fill the gaps in family security, and a robust morality upon which to base their decisions. If our economics promoted dignity and charity over merit and profit, the dividends for abortion could be huge.

It is worth considering that ministry to the poor – an aggressive ministry, central to the church – could be introduced as an important element of the battle against abortion. Here we find the vulnerable and oppressed, those who share a fellowship with the aborted fetus that the rich often do not properly understand. We have spent our days puzzling endlessly over even lesser problems of theological accuracy, and have delegated the problem of the poor to the economists and politicians. But clearly, voting Reagan in wasn’t enough. The ever-widening wage gap in the US tells us that the economists have blown it entirely for the last century. It is widely believed and almost universally undisputed that Pat Robertson, and much of the rest of Christian media, are out of their gourds, or at least ineffective.

When we come to the poor, politicians and economists cease to matter. We not only find some of the oppressed, but we find that these oppressed are also the oppressors of their unborn children. The opportunity for twofold good is apparent.

This is, of course, all tied to food. Economics is simply the ordering of a household. People consume water and food more than just about anything else, so in a very real sense an economic problem is a food problem. I won’t belabor this point, except to say that all of these issues are intimately related. The same corporations that are patenting our seeds and growing our food are feeding and employing our poor, and fixing our distributive problems will go along way to recreating a societal architecture that helps young vulnerable girls make the right decisions.

Please don’t hear me as saying that the poor just can’t help themselves, and that unless we repent of our economic or “food” sins abortion will not be conquered. Of course not. Abortion is murder. Food is, well, food. But the problems are related, and we should avoid the false dichotomy. My argument is that if we get to work fixing our food system and our economics – or, more simply, if we get to work helping the poor – our currently intractable abortion situation may become tractable. Put another way, only the Gospel will ultimately win this bloody war, but there are many types of soil in the famous parable, and our economics have much to do with how rocky, thorny, or rich and loamy our society is.

When ordering our problems and distributing our cool cups of water accordingly, we must take account of “the least of these.” Current wisdom counts the unborn as the least of the least, and I certainly agree. But next in line are often the poor who we then condemn as murders, abandon to the cities, and leave to be ravaged by the excesses of welfare and the predations of an upside-down food system.

Finally:

I present to you two problems. I say: “Your neighbor is having an abortion, and your other neighbor is abusing his beast and then selling it to you for food.” And I ask you: what do you do about it? The answer to the second neighbor is quite easy: buy your meat elsewhere. So that is what some have begun to do. The answer to the first neighbor is much more difficult. You may go and speak with this neighbor, minister to her, protest before her house with signs, write letters to your legislator; at the end of the day, she may still have that abortion.

One of the reasons I am going on about this food thing is because I can do something about it. It presents a very real way of “fixing culture,” and it is a way that I can deliberately pass on to my children. Not as in “I have guilt to atone for, and laying it on the Altar of Whole Foods seems like a hip way to go.” But I, and a growing number of people, look around and see all sorts of cultural sin. Like the many, I wish to do something about it. As with our fathers, I believe that the battle against abortion in our generation is an important one, but I also believe that there is utility in other pursuits like feasting, publishing magazines, starting schools, and fighting for strong families. These all contribute to culture; I wish, with no moral superiority or conviction that this is “the answer,” to contribute my garden to this project. With it comes gratitude, hard work, health, tradition, freedom of the individual and the necessity of community. My hope, eventually, is to share the real-live fruits of this garden with the poor, and in so doing bring them the Gospel, in order to set them free.

I have fixed the plaid, and also (for the sake of our dear friend and reader B.O’D.) placed one of my old sundial sketches in the header.

Now that I’ve marked the tree, as it were, I’ll probably stop by to sniff it a little more often.

We got a fish yesterday.

This is Ponyo.

We adopted Ponyo into our family because, unlike our landlords, my wife and I are both what you would call “animal people.” Actually, unlike A and D, we’re cat people, but when you’re renting you take what you can get. And we could get a fish. So we did.

I thought I’d be relatively disinterested in a fish – after all, fish are slimy and aren’t very talkative – but it turns out that marriage has fostered within me all sorts of ancient and mysterious impulses and among them is the impulse to raise a child. Of course, a fish is nothing at all like a real live wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-spit-up-on-your-flannel-pajamas child, but again: you take what you can get, and we could get a fish. And so, for better or for worse, we’ve pretty much adopted this little goldfish into our family and with it all of the stereotypical expressions of parenthood.

Take, for example, the picture above. My wife snapped that photo earlier this afternoon, all the while cooing at how cute our fish looks and wanting to capture her from an angle that correctly represented her unique shape and markings. When I went to select a good introductory photo, I was pleased to find that over a dozen pictures had already been taken, each featuring different perspectives, distinct lighting, and appropriate framing. While it was convenient for me that such pictures existed, a dark suspicion looms in my mind that they’re actually going to be compiled into some sort of baby calendar sometime during the next month.

In stark contrast to the above, consider the following picture, which I took not long before I started composing this post:

You’ll note the inferior lighting, blurry caudal fin, and peculiar orientation of our fish. That is because after some amount of reading, I have become convinced that Ponyo is suffering from constipation and as a result is having difficulty regulating her swim bladder. The behavior being exhibited in the picture above is called “nose standing,” and is indicative of internal problems due to trauma, overfeeding, or poor diet. I have subsequently prescribed a day of fasting and then a strict diet of de-shelled frozen peas, which serve as a laxative and should clear out any blockages in the intestinal tract.

Of course, this swim bladder issue has been something of a mania for me all day. I know more about goldfish – their history and status in various Chinese dynasties, the varietals found almost exclusively in Japan, common ailments and courses of treatment – than I ever really wanted to know.

But I guess I’m that dad. The dad that reads obsessively, goes grey after the first month of collecting stool samples and plotting their pH levels, and ultimately overconditions his poor child. And I hadn’t even realized it until, after hours of study and relating various findings to my wife, she looked at me and said:

“When we have our first child, you’re going to go crazy.”

Emmanuel Jal did a TED Talk not too long ago, and every time I run across this guy I like him even more. The talk below is long, but well worth the investment:

This video evokes the usual platitudes for me – get off your bohunkus, stop armchair charity and start actually helping – but there are a few things that were absolutely striking to me.

The first is Jal’s version of these same platitudes, because his English is so plain and his poetry so earnest. “What would I be?” The punch line is powerful. I quote from the song:

I remember the time when I was small
When I couldn’t read or write at all
Now I’m all grown up, I got my education
The sky is the limit and the cup is running over
How I prayed for this day to come
And I pray that the world find wisdom
To give the boy in need some assistance
Instead of putting up resistance, Yeah
Sitting and waiting for the politics to fix this
It ain’t gonna happen
They’re all sitting on they asses
Popping champagne and scrunching up the masses
Coming from a refugee boy-soldier
But I still got my dignity
I gotta say it again
If Emma never rescued me
I’d be a corpse on the African plain

Second is Jal’s dance. It starts around 16:40, when Jal announces “I’m gonna get crazy now.” I can’t get over that dance. It looks like the way I should have spent every Gloria Patri I’ve ever sung, so sincere and vulnerable and beautiful and while it’s unlike any dance I’ve ever seen, I know exactly and precisely what it means. It is the dance of a man made alive by love.

It’s not that I remember this video, nor that I still enjoy it. It’s more that this song came out in 1999, for the Love of Pete, and it’s still in regular rotation on my iPod as if it came out within the last few years.

OH NOES I AM BECOMING MY PARENTS