The Best and Worst of America

Nobody likes the restrictions and inconveniences that have come about as the result of the coronavirus, but most Americans consider them necessary to save lives and are willing to go along for as long as needed. Some Americans are flouting the rules, however, and it’s getting increasingly ugly.

Every day seems to bring another story about people resisting any restrictions with violence. They range from the park ranger in Austin, Texas, who was shoved into a pond while asking park-goers to stay six feet from another to the security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan who was shot and killed after refusing entry to a customer who refused to wear a face mask. The mayor of the fine city of Stillwater, Oklahoma, felt compelled rescind an order requiring face masks before entering stores and restaurants and some other businesses because owners have been threatened with violence if they enforce the policy.

In some cases, the violence has been committed by overzealous police officers. There are also concerns that police too often have a different standard for black and white violators of the social distancing rules, which will inevitably lead to further violence.

For the most part the coronavirus has brought out the best of the American people. Most citizens are willingly complying with public health orders, helping out their family and friends, contributing generously to charities that help the newly unemployed, and treating the grocery store clerks with politeness and a newfound respect. The worst of America has also been on displaying, with hoarders and price gougers and protestors bringing semiautomatic rifles and their implied threat of violence to rallies, but for now that’s a distinct minority. A certain selfishness and a penchant for violence are also an unfortunate part of the American culture, and here’s hoping we can keep it in check as the frustrations continue to mount.

— Bud Norman

The Bad, the Bad, and the Ugly

The two most disliked and distrusted people in American public life have somehow wound up as the presumptive presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties, and this bizarre turn of events is being brought to you live and in color by what’s left of the Fourth Estate, one of the many public institutions that are even more widely disliked and distrusted. Presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump took shrewd advantage of this awful situation on Tuesday, luring his enrapt media scribes into an anti-press conference trap that thrilled his die-hard supporters.

By now all the “reality show” analogies have become hackneyed, and we’ve resorted to calling it a post-reality or surreality show, but there really was something undeniably recognizable about that irksome television genre on display through the whole affair. It was the part of the campaign when the “Real Housewives” of wherever tell their rivals what they really think and their fans cheer and their anti-fans jeer, or where the big mogul tells some faded B-lister that “you’re fired” on “Celebrity Apprentice,” and we must admit that the desultory end of the American experiment does make for riveting YouTube watching. Trump seems to have got the better of it, judging from the reviews on the comments sections of almost everywhere on the internet, but that’s not saying much.

Trump started out by dropping the name of basketball star LeBron James and bragging about his huge and better-than-Eisenhower-and-Reagan victories in the Republican race before waxing indignant over some press stories that had questioned whether his much-bragged-about fund-raising for veterans had actually been true, and he had some honest-to-God veterans on hand to swear in the most angry way that they’d already got their cut, and he had an unusually detailed list of donations that he claimed had been made, and at least for the moment no in the press seem to have any response. Those chastened media might come up with something yet, given the shaped-shifting nature of Trump’s detailed lists, but no matter what they’ve got it will be doubted, and Trump’s point that he has at least raised more for veterans than the presumptive Democratic nominee will still be true, and his complaint that the hated media won’t much note that fact will also be valid, so we can see why his supporters see it as another huge win by the hero who always wins hugely.

The press corps, meanwhile, was just awful. One reporter asked why Trump objected to “scrutiny,” he told her she was a “real beauty,” and seized the opportunity to note that he was being scrutinized for raising money for veterans. He further described the entirety of “the political press” as the “most dishonest people,” went on a bizarre rant about how he was accurately quoted about an ill-advised joke about the crowd size at one of his events, in keeping with his strange defensiveness about anything involving size, and described a particular reporter from the American Broadcasting Company as a “sleaze,” and no one could supply a quote-worthy riposte to any of it. At one point he asked about that gorilla that was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo, and any sympathy for the media was surely lost.

Even Trump’s most cautious fans were thrilled by it, but even with the public’s widespread disregard for the ill-defined “media” we suspect his skeptics were not impressed. As much as we loathe the presumptive Democratic nominee, and those media that have enabled her awful career, we can’t help noticing that the draft-dodging presumptive Republican nominee’s enthusiasm for veteran causes is conveniently newfound, nor forget that he regards those veterans who endured wartime captivity as a bunch of losers who got caught, no matter what heroic sacrifices they made, and all that hooey about how he hoped to keep his generosity a secret because one of his many awesome qualities he doesn’t like to brag is conspicuously ridiculous.

So far as we can tell these “reality shows” always feature such awful people, and are brought to you on-tape and in-color by at least equally awful people, and we’re dreading the season finale.

— Bud Norman

Those Crazy Christians

Christians still comprise a significant percentage of the American population, at least according to the polls we see from time to time, but so many people seem to have no familiarity with them. We notice this from time to time in our social encounters with people who assume we share their agnostic or atheistic or otherwise enlightened notions of the universe and proceed to speak of Christians as some sort of remote and primitive tribe, and in widely disseminated news outlets that attribute that all sorts of strange opinions to Christians that we’ve never heard one utter, and in even a symposium at last week’s Catholic-Evagenlical Leadership Summit at Georgetown University featuring a best-selling author and the President of the United States.

Harvard professor Robert Putnam, best known for the book “Bowling Alone,” got the ball rolling with an interview with The Washington Post, in which he said “The obvious fact is that over the last 30 years, most organized religion has focused on issues regarding sexual morality, such as abortion, gay marriage, all of those. I’m not saying if that’s good or bad, but that’s what they’ve been using all their resources for. That is the most obvious point in the world. It’s been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.” When Putnam repeated the claim at the Georgetown, President Barack Obama chimed in that “Despite great caring and concern, when it comes to what you’re really going to the mat for, the defining issue, when you’re talking in your congregations, what’s the thing that is really going to capture the essence of who we are as Christians, or as Catholics, what have you, that (fighting poverty) is oftentimes viewed as ‘nice to have’ relative to an issue like abortion.”

This might seem “the most obvious point in the world” to a Harvard professor or a President of the United States, but it will surely come as a surprise to anyone who actually lives among the Christians of America. Even the editors at The Washington Post know a couple of Christians from the Religion News Service who had the numbers at hand to refute such nonsense. They note that in 2009 America’s churches donated more than $13 billion to overseas relief and development, which is more than the secular charities could muster, and even looks pretty good compared to the $29 billion the federal government spent, largely with the taxes paid by Christians. In 2012 the evangelical group World Vision spent about $2.8 billion caring for the poor, which would put them 12th among the world’s nations. The Catholics, whom we also consider Christians, our president’s clumsy locutions notwithstanding, spend about $97 billion on health care networks, many billions more on colleges and schools, and another $4.6 billion to various national charities.

Even the most diligent research will fail to account for all good works done to alleviate domestic by done by America’s churches. Our own small congregation at the rough edges of a working class neighborhood chips in for a local orphanage and offers whatever help it can to anyone who walks in, our parents’ congregation in the Philadelphia suburbs runs a food distribution center with its time and money, and every Christian we share church chat with tells of a similar endeavor. Diligent research shouldn’t even be required to notice this phenomenon, as a daily drive through almost any city or town in America will take one past the various shelters and soup kitchens and hospitals and assorted charities created and run and supported by Christians, and in to contact with someone who has benefited from these efforts, and perhaps even one of those Christians who made who put a buck in the collection plate and did some volunteer work to make it possible. Those professors and presidents who dare to take the daring anthropological plunge in to the most remote portions of Christian America might even find that the natives aren’t quite so sexually obsessed as they’ve imagined.

At our small congregation on the rough edges of a working-class neighborhood that stuff rarely comes up, and in a lifetime of worshipping with this very conservative church we can’t recall many times when it ever did. We listen to the talk radio and read the web sites and newspapers and magazines that conservative Christians follow, and notice that the social issues aren’t such a hot topic there as they seem to be in the more ostentatiously secular media. The combined budgets of the best-funded organizations devoted to the social issues are supposedly American Christianity’s main concern spend in the mere millions, and are vastly outspent by Planned Parenthood alone, and of course the occasional protests heard on those conservative Christian media are vastly out-shouted by the more ostentatiously secular media. To complain that American Christianity is obsessed with the social issues to the extent that it ignores other pressing problems is not only divorced from reality, it seems rather unsporting.

Nor do we concede that those social issues are unrelated to those other pressing problems, or that American Christianity’s last resistance is unjustified. Issues of sexual morality have much to poverty and the general social well-being. A society of people raised by baby mamas and baby daddies will be poorer and more generally unpleasant than one raised by husbands and wives, no amount of federal spending will change that time-honored fact, those crazy Christians out there in the hinterlands and the socio-economic elites of our time seem to be the only ones who understand this, and those crazy Christians out there in the hinterlands and the only ones who will come right out and say it, so we hope they don’t go away or agree to shut up.

Much of American Christianity has already agreed to shut up, and its focus on the social issues has been devoted to accommodating the latest trends, and its churches seem to be losing congregants to whatever’s on television at those hours of a Sunday morning. Many continue to insist on traditional notions of sexual morality, even as they divvy up the church funds to the orphanage or the food distribution center or whatever its charity might be, and at this point they’re just hoping that they’ll be able to be live by these beliefs after the latest trends take root. Those churches are struggling, too, but we expect they’ll persist, as they have the past two tough millennia, and we believe the world will be better for it.

Yet apparently it looks different to a Harvard professor and a President of the United States. Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” was about the decline of bowling leagues and increase of individual bowling and the decline of fraternal orders and social organizations generally, and was well reviewed by both liberal commentators who decried the retreat into private live and conservatives who found proof of a government’s encroachment on the free association of individuals into effective groups, and we’d have expected him to notice that the churches are among the last effective non-governmental groups. We’d also have expected more from any President of the United States, especially one who has proclaimed his Christianity almost as much as he has criticized the faith.

— Bud Norman