People lined up overnight to hear the President speak at the Orange County Fair Grounds. Are they going to call it Obamapalooza?
“This almost looks like tickets are going on sale for U2,” said Orange County Fair CEO Steve Beazley. “A seated president has never made an appearance here. … It’s a pretty historic event.”
“Rock concert atmosphere on Obama ticket line“, OC Register
From The Wall Street Journal:
[A] comprehensive new study released by Baylor University … shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
From 1994 to 2002, I worked for a intelligence and law enforcement software and consulting firm. And I learned a few things, especially post 9/11.
For my current job, I fly, on average, very other week. And the TSA screening process never fails to surprise me with its sheer waste of my time, patience and tax money. I don’t know who to blame: the low-skilled lackeys that operate the screening gauntlet, the mid-level “security experts” who manage the operation, or the policy-level political hacks who want to maintain this illusion of security.
I found a kindred spirit in Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
From The Wilson Quarterly:
In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described “the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,” noting that “many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.” Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work using surveys from 2000 and 2004 found that things haven’t changed much in the past half-century.
Most Mormons know little about these dark corners of their history, usually because they are told that they should not give credence to anything that is not “faith promoting”, which is too bad. In the last year, I have done my own reading on the history of the LDS sect and on Joseph Smith in particular.
The Washington Post has a recent review of two books on Mormon history. The first, Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts, recounts the migration of Mormons to Utah in the mid-1850’s under Brigham Young’s leadership:
To save money and thereby maximize the number of Mormons able to make the trek, Young decided to forgo horse- and oxen-drawn wagons in favor of human-powered push carts. The handcarts cost a 10th of what wagons and draft animals did, and they promised to fill Utah with Mormons before too many gentiles arrived.
The journey of the handcart travelers from Iowa to Utah became a defining myth of Mormon history, the equivalent … of the voyage of the Mayflower in American colonial history. Subsequent generations of Mormons took pride in their descent from handcart pioneers; as with the Mayflower, more than a few of the claims of lineage were spurious.
[T]he mythmaking has a sinister aspect, crossing the line into historical cover-up. The handcart companies — as these traveling groups were called — suffered from hunger, disease, exposure and death; their mortality rate dramatically exceeded the average for overland companies, despite the fact that the Mormons traveled but half the distance covered by the much more numerous immigrants to California and Oregon. Most of the 3,000 handcart travelers treated the journey as a heavenly ordained test of their faith; Roberts, making compelling use of their diaries and other records, considers it a criminal fiasco imposed on the innocent migrants by the arrogant, unbending leaders of their church.
Throughout Devil’s Gate, Roberts shows great sympathy for the travelers but none for those who set them in motion.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a totally different story (Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, Ronald W. Walker):
No such positive interpretation is possible regarding another, almost contemporary episode in early Mormon history. During the summer of 1857, an emigrant wagon train from Arkansas crossed Utah heading for California. The train had nearly cleared Mormon territory, reaching Mountain Meadows in the southeastern part of the settled region of Utah, when it was attacked by a band of Paiute Indians. Several members of the train were killed, and the survivors circled their wagons to defend themselves. After a few days of siege, a party of Mormons appeared and offered to escort the Arkansans past the Paiutes to safety. The Arkansans accepted the offer and filed out. A short distance from the wagons, the Mormons fell on the emigrants and massacred 120 adults and teenagers of both sexes, sparing only the young children.
For decades the leaders of the Mormon community concealed what happened at Mountain Meadows.
I recommend the following books if you want to understand the LDS sect:
David Samuels’ “Invisible Man: How Ralph Ellison explains Barack Obama” in The New Republic is a fascinating exploration of Barack Obama as portrayed in Dreams of my Father:
Obama’s decision to identify with the lineage of his black Kenyan father to the exclusion of his white U.S.-born mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and her parents allows him a measure of release from the cruel racial logic that binds Ellison’s narrator—he comes from outside American society, and therefore he is not entirely bound by the overdetermined racial logic that unites the children of slaves and masters. Yet, while Obama’s rejection of his “white blood” may seem familiar from the writings of African American authors like Malcolm X, it is actually much stranger; Obama’s partial “whiteness” is not the product of an ancient rape by an anonymous slave-master but is instead the color of the mother who raised him. Obama’s embrace of authenticity separates him from Ellison’s profoundly modernist consciousness, and prevents him from seeing the serial absurdities of his own story. Where Invisible Man bubbles with fiery, absurdist humor, the narrator of Dreams rarely cracks a smile. One can only imagine what Ellison would have done with Obama’s straight-faced account of his futile career as a community organizer in Chicago, or with the incredibly juicy character of Dr. Jeremiah Wright—a religious con man who spread racist and anti-Semitic poison while having an alleged sexual affair with a white church secretary and milking his congregation for millions of dollars and a house in a gated community whose residents are overwhelmingly rich and white.
In reading this Atlantic article, I couldn’t help think of the emergent church:
More damning is the conclusion produced by a careful reading of this often fine-grained semi-sociological analysis: a good deal of the progressives’ attitudes, preferences, and sense of identity are ingrained in an unlovely disdain for those outside their charmed circle… [M]uch of their self-satisfaction derives from consumption—and much [it] is motivated by a desire to differentiate themselves from the benighted. Sushi, for instance, is ‘everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the “uneducated.” ’ And whatever its goals, the ACLU is beloved by White People, … because it protects them ‘from having to look at things they don’t like. At the top of this list is anything that has to do with Christianity’—an aversion … rooted not in religious enmity but in taste (Christianity is ‘a little trashy’), formed largely by class and education.
I was asked why I wasn’t keen in actively supporting California’s Prop 8, the “Marriage Protection” proposition, and this is what I wrote:
I don’t know that I’m so much against Prop 8 as I am not for it.
I’m against the government invading our religious and personal lives. I think there are duties that belong to the Church, and duties that belong to the Civil Magistrate. (I think the revisions made to Westminster Confession of Faith 23.3 that appear in the PCA’s standards are wise.)
To be brief, I think Christians allowed (and even mandated) the government to become involved in areas only the church has jurisdiction, and this is most evident in education, marriage, and the family. Where we have tried to instill our values and concerns in society using “the power of the sword” it has only been turned back on us. (Read Neil Postman’s Building a Bridge to the 18th Century for the example of protestants creating the public school system.)
My understanding is that not until the mid-1800s were marriage licenses issued by the state; until then marriages were a church and private matter. My layman’s reading of history is that marriages increasingly became licensed to prohibit inter-racial marriages and to criminalize polygamy (especialy among Mormons). The real invasion by the government in regulating marriages was in income taxes and government social programs.
We continue to tie ourselves tighter to the government as we want more tax deductions for marriage, for children, and so on. We have dined with the devil, and we’re surprised the meal has been poisoned.
Anytime you need help understanding what a leftist, a “progressive”, an academic, a postmodern, or an emergent (but I really repeat myself) is really talking about, please refer to the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense. It will help you break through the code to understand what they’re talking about.
Assertion
1. Essential technique, replacing the need for argument and evidence.
2. To be greeted with acceptance, rather than argument.
This Atlantic article made me feel better about my long-held suspicion on the housing market:
Too little attention has been paid to the most fundamental cause, the same one that was at the root of the many booms and busts that Sakolski chronicled years ago: the contagious optimism, seemingly impervious to facts, that often takes hold when prices are rising. Bubbles are primarily social phenomena; until we understand and address the psychology that fuels them, they’re going to keep forming. And unless we apply that understanding to the bubble we’re trying to recover from, we risk calamity.
