- correction - speculative rant on political rhetoric -


a couple of days ago i posted a link to the Political Compass . My brother David said me a sagacious and corrective email:

>2 things
>
> 1. your political compass test is not well written, many of the questions
> demonstrated a bias toward the "right wing".
> 2. i ended up one click right and exactly on the horizontal axis.
>
> I guess that means I am more balanced than you, and therefore from now on I
> should be considered the political moderate of the family.
>
> Thus all ideas differing from mine will be considered extreme

I deferred to him and wrote back:

> you're right. I didn't realize the negative affect of them framing the test
> that way -- though I certainly recognized it as I moved through (Five
> straight disagrees in a row) -- but after I took it i clicked on the link to
> find literature that reflected my position. apparently NO ONE has written
> from a liberal left perspective -- Of course the right wing literature was
> blossoming on this site.
>
> But what ends up happening -- if the test is skewed right -- is that
> leftists (eg. me) look like extremists -- and righties (eg. you) look
> centrist.
>
> BUT i'm happy to give you the political moderate slot in the family.

and now i've been thinking about the whole experience and wondering if its endemic about something larger that's happened / happening in the american political rhetoric sphere.

I think that one thing that conservatives have beat liberals at hands down in the last fifteen years (with the psuedo-exception of Bill Clinton and sorta Bill Maher -- though he's only SORTA a liberal) is POPULARIZING their discourse. From Rush Limbaugh on the radio to FOX news on TV to Focus on the Family in the religious sphere. These folks know how to articulate their message to everyday people. This is a huge shift in american popular discourse. Liberals, after all, used to be voice of the masses. And actually the TERM liberal, I think has become a polarizing one.

My take (and obviously pundits have already talked about this) is that the new "godterm" in our society is "moderate" or "centrist" but there's a subtle skewing of the MEANING of this term given the massive takeover of the government and the media ownership (not the reporters or editors -- because i agree -- they're liberals) by the right (of both political parties....). "Liberal" becomes a devil term to centrists, "conservative", on the other hand, I think, is only a devil term to the liberals.

I think that David would argue (am i right, D.R.?) that my last sentence is evidence that there's been an actual shift of the center, but my argument is that there's been a CONNOTATIVE shift to the right, that reflects how people respond to TERMS -- but that that isn't reflective of how people WOULD actually vote for social policy -- BUT the evil intercourse between the political parties (both of them) and the media industry has reduced our political DISCOURSE to a bunch of SIGNS divorced from the actual meanings that people are living...

Am I trying to taunt some of you into starting up your own blogs? Sure. Anything to share our lives together! :-)

PEACE (i mean it, even in diversity of opinion) ~
andrew

poking the president

Sometime last week Jaelyn showed me a dollar bill. “Daddy? Did you know that this is George Washington?”

I did and I told her so. I asked if she knew that G. W. was our first president?

She nodded enthusiastically.

ME: and who’s our president, now, Jae?

She shrugs.

ME: His name is George, too.

That small prompt is all she needs.

JAE: George Bush!

ME: Right!

Her face suddenly becomes completely solemn.

JAE: He’s killing everyone!

(For those of you who haven’t been around recently – Lynn and I have become pacifists; for those of you who have, we haven’t always been.)

Well, I nodded solemnly, war kills people and he did choose war. And then (as it always does in a four year old world) conversation changed direction.

Well yesterday, Lynn drove the kids past a house festooned in balloons and flags and streamers and signs.

What’s happening there mommy? Jaelyn wanted to know. Someone is coming back from the war, she answered, the war that George Bush made him go and fight.

(I know, I know, political dogma, but we all do it…)

JAE: I’m going to kill him!

(for the record, we’re pacifists, not radicals, so this response seemed a bit unmerited.)

LYNN: Oh, no, Jae, we don’t kill other people. That’s only more violence and that doesn’t solve problems.

ADDISON: (from the carseat) Go home!

LYNN: What?

ADDISON: GO HOME!

LYNN: You want to go home?

ADDISON: (and now I’m going to move to a more literal transcription) o-ome-et-tick!-pokey!

LYNN: What honey?

Eventually she decoded: I want to go home to get a stick and I’ll POKE him.

We took the family to see a children’s theater rendition of The Emporer’s New Clothes at the local civic theater a couple of weeks ago, and Hahn, the evil prime minister character was POKING the villagers with his cane – the image has stuck with our kids. POKING is now the most heinous punishment they can imagine. A much more serious fate than even being decapitated (I threaten them with chopped off heads at least twice a day – no! they shriek and laugh and run out of the room. I’m thinking of writing a book – Growing Good Children Through Capital Punishment).

It’s finally a quiet day – the last of our dear friends made their way through last week – Ted, Harry, Joe & Roxanne & Bei and family…now we need a day of quiet. Well psuedo quiet. Toby & Mark are upstairs drywalling the bathroom, Gary’s coming later today to help tear off the roof on the porch…but at least its sunny! Lynn surprised me with Panera Coffee this morning. I have an amazing wife…

Happy Birthday Dave L.! (Sorry I forgot to say so on the phone!)

Hope y’all have a Sabbath day!

Peace~

hearing the call

so i've been thinking about vocation -- and jotting ideas into a file to maybe make it into a blog someday -- but probably not because it got too long -- and I already impose enough with my rambling ideas -- and as a result of me thinking about vocation --

i asked Harry to clarify what he meant when, in church last sunday he offhandedly corrected himself,

"when i decided to become a pastor. well...what am i saying...i didn't decide to become a minister..."

and then off he went in another direction.

so he said -- no, he was called by God.

AND it turns out -- had an experience where he *heard* God.

Now I know that some of you readers have had such experiences -- but I have not. I like the Frederich Buechner sense of hearing God THROUGH your own story -- the countours of your life -- in retrospect revealing a shape of God's revelation to you....

But that's as good as it gets for me, folks. I'm interested in how others have experienced this notion of God's "CALL" --

Harry described it as a pure clear thought. Like no other mental clarity that he's experienced. I'd definitely take that.

I've had the argument with my dad & david -- that moderns (and I am one -- like it or not) cannot hear the voice of God because the selective attention that we've trained our brains for is only attending to the bits of reality that conform to the scientific vision....

Sort of a cultural-lenses argument. but i'm willing to surrender these lenses -- if i could find a way to do so that would make me think that possibly i could hear something genuine and authentic (eg. i'm leery of being trained to speak in tongues or be slain in the spirit...as I'm afraid that such experiences may just be physiological experiences...on the other hand C.S. Lewis' retelling of the Cupid / Psyche myth -- in Til We Have Faces ...and or...the way the stable door functions in The Last Battle ... may suggest that i need to let go of my stranglehold on rationality to surf the experience before I can even get to the magic?)

I WANT magic. I WANT the divine -- and I want it in a more immediate package than I've encountered thus far.

You know the first scene in Slacker where Richard Linklater's character talks about how all the decisions in our lives end up being other roads in other realities that we never get to know about. I thought of writing a quest story about a guy who is me who just gives up on rationality in hopes of finding God. I guess he'd leave his job and town and everything. Wouldn't he?

peace~
andrew

- Writers Bloc -

Hey writers or creative types out there. I've been wrestling with a creative problem for too long. I'm going to ask for input here & then let it gestate for a few days -- i'll work on a different project in the meantime.

I'm revising the most recent screenplay _The Legacy of Troy Ludwick_ is our working title....I need a GESTURE or an ACTION that signifies that someone is a nurtuing person.

My character is a man -- about my age. So the question is -- can you help me? Do you know a nurturing person? If you were walking downtown with them (or in any public place) -- what gesture might cue onlookers that they're a nurturer? Or what action might you infer that someone were a nurturer from?

Stories of nurturers, all. That's what I'm looking for.

peace~

whats simmering on the backburner

if you haven't heard for awhile -- here's what we're up to --

hey! glad you're here.

things for the rudds seem to be on a predictable arc, generally:

1. we love our kids who are getting bigger and cuter and smarter all the time.

2. we both continue to teach at Malone -- and, for the most part, find that work fulfilling.

3. i "go up" for tenure this year -- so am devoting much of my summertime to preparation for that rite of passage.

4. we've been travelling to Michigan and South to Coshocton regularly this summer.



5. to our status-chagrin, but travelling pleasure, we're now driving a mini-van (please feel free to ridicule...)

6. we've settled into a church (Akron Christian Reformed) which we really like.

7. we continue to feel ambivalence about how suburban our life is -- and wonder whether this is the lifestyle we intend to sustain and nourish.

8. we continue to read voraciously -- both fiercely recommending Peace Like A River -- as our first book to clearly meet our old favorite recommend -- Atticus

9. we still love time spent with friends and family -- but mourn the fact that so many of the people that fall into those categories live far or work too hard (or we do) to spend the time and depth that we'd like to be able to. (i kept trying to NOT end that sentence with a preposition -- and it just kept getting longer and longer. i just gave up eventually.)

10. we're having our leaky bathroom re-done before the kitchen ceiling falls in on us.

in the perhaps-less-predictable category:

1. the film _independent study_ still languishes in post-production-purgatory. i still have hope that a cut of it could be forthcoming within the calendar year....

2. lynn derives some of her greatest personal fulfillment from her ongoing work with the urban Timken Academy -- she finds it to be a rich environment of professional and educational risk and reward.

hmm. on balance, we seem to be more predictable than not.

but we feel provoked by life. and that's good. if you read our last family update -- we sound as if we're about to fall into the depths of the doldrums. i think the summer has been healing...

in any case -- we'd always love to hear from you!

peace~

alt.story

Have you seen any short films? Very many short films? I've been increasingly interested in short forms.

I wrote a ten minute play last year that was produced here at my little midwestern college -- and I've written several more this summer. (early drafts yet.) i'm pretty excited about flash fiction... i think the music video more aptly gets at the experience of contemporary existence than most other extant forms (eg. maybe the music video is the new great american novel). i'm watching the short films on triggerstreet and a couple of other places, and i wrote a treatment for a short film about a mucisian who is obsessed with writing the perfect short (one minute) song. The perfect one minute song (in my film) would be composed & performed in one minute.

The great difficulty as I see it -- is that these forms aren't / can't find an audience due to the deathgrip of the media industries...

part of me knows that i want it both ways. my imagination about artists finding audiences is shaped by my understanding of MASS culture. An artist hasn't foundan audience, part of me says, until they've "made it big." On the other hand -- the global monopolies & economies of scale that the BIG SIX are perpetuating -- are much of what gives rise to this notion of fame = success.

Sometime I should blog about celebrity being a format by which this hegemony is perpetrated -- but for now i'm interested not in critique but in redemption!

I -- as a consumer -- as a human being -- as a fellow artist -- as someone who is moved by art -- want a way to access these forms of indymedia.

specifically, now, i'm refering to short films (though many of my thoughts translate well to the other forms).

I can watch short films at work (with some justification since i teach about these subjects) -- but not too many or too often -- and DSL service is expensive & if only DSL-ers should get to watch indymedia (/short films) than doesn't indymedia become an even more elitist, self-referential enterprise?

So that's why i'm excited about the idea of microcinema. and i'm excited enough about it to do something about it. to try to start a microcinema here in middle eastern OHIO. but of course this is a back burner. and my front burners are fairly demanding right now. if you're a local reader (and most of you aren't) i'd love to hear how interested you'd be in volunteering to keep a microcinema organization up and running -- how regularly you'd support it (by coming)...what you think the major barriers would be...

heck I'd be interested in hearing that from non-local-ites...too...

part of me suspects that i should have as many blogs as i have "back burners" but that'd be more fragmented -- and my goal in this blog is -- i think to be more unified. so that means that many of you aren't so into indymedia rants...but others of you aren't so into news about the kids...this is like having a debate inside of your head -- in public.

peace~

mundane crisis - upcoming visitors - political compass - theological speculation

just before I left the office at noon yesterday -- Jerry Fliger (from BGSU days) called to say that he and Deb were in Akron and may drop in after lunch. We do love drop-inners, but all the same i sped home to redd up a bit (note the VERY eastern-Ohio-vernacular use of "redd up"? a bit of impressive code switching, eh?).

As I walked in the doors, I found Lynn on her hands and knees. Mark and Toby began our bathroom remodelling yesterday and just to get things started on an adventurous foot -- accidentally flooded the kitchen (through the ceiling) by knocking open a pipe.

It was a rains-it-pours moment.

we're looking forward to lots more friends this week. Teddy for dinner tonight (Cedarville Ted), the Schandersons (of Shy Quiet People) for lunch tomorrow & Bei (from BGSU) for dinner on Thursday. Lynn may off to BG on Friday to watch Scott (old student) play in the all state football game...

Took the Political Compass Test today. Great stuff, if you're interested to know how you rank. I've been speculating that I've been getting lefter and lefter, but who knew! I outlefted Ghandi and Nelson Mandella -- and I even said that I believed in spanking! (not often and never in anger - in case we haven't conversed about this...)

Harry said some great things on Sunday-- he spoke of the difficulty of giving *and* receiving. A very nice interpretation of matthew 18. I'll see if I can get a copy up and link to it later. the idea is that abject dependency is the only way to receive the Kingdom of God. So I was thinking -- how is it possible to enter that space of abject dependency given the careful wealthy way I live. I have some answers brewing, but I don't like to think about 'em.

peace~

welcome to the backburner

Friends and Family! Welcome to my blog. It's not organized very conveniently. Tho' this is going to be the site where I plan to keep track of the mundane bits of life that matter -- I also intersperse these mundanities with (*VERY LONG*) musings and meditations. Feel free to fast forward past...(as if you wouldn't on your own...)

The idea that I keep this space as my "back burner" is supposed to allow me to keep a bunch of ideas simmering for a long time -- as they develop in my mind -- and now, hopefully, in community, and (theoretically) allow me to stay focused on my "real life" -- the "front burners" as it were.

Certainly that whole metaphor and the ascendant values are worth consideration on a different day!

Glad you're here! Let me know (or not)!

Peace~

ohio wedding

- wedding description - epistemological coup - janson's dissertation - more ohio dissing

Well, the wedding is over. Everything was beautiful. Laura and Erik’s SMILES gave me such joy that I started crying with inspiration / worship / happiness as I prayed with them after the lighting of the Unity Candle. Their joy in each other was a beautiful mirror of the love God has for us.

BERlin was great – and when I re-read my last blog – I realized that I sounded much more anti-Ohio than I am or wanted to seem. I love Ohioans. Possibly I have more dear-friend-Ohioans than (could this be true, Michiganders?) any other state. Ohio has been good to me. I feel grateful for what I have gained here.

Berlin was great – despite its hardcore disneyfication of the amish (for you far-awayers – Holmes County, Ohio is one of the top three spots for Amish-tourism in the world)– because somehow, between all the stylization, the pace and the peace of the surrounding countryside and the centuries of tradition just FEEL like they pool around you slowing things down a bit.

Laura’s dad, Paul graciously had us stay in a hotel with the kids where Jaelyn swam a good twenty feet (all at once!) under water. I have a keen sense that such news (look at my honor roll student! bumper sticker news) should be edited out of the blog in general, but twenty feet! Gosh!

I preached on First John 4. I liked the stuff I came up with -- can't comment on how it was received. My core reading of I john 4 -- knowledge of the Divine comes only through embodied love of those around us -- i think is a radical epistemological coup, but i tried to steer clear of such terminology...

Lynn and I are sitting in our living room waiting for Janson and Heather to arrive. Jans, most of you know, is our still-in-school-since-we-graduated-college-together-11-years-ago-seminarian-friend who is dissertating on the book of NUMBERS – and its literary value. Isn’t that great?! The most demonized book by Christians – who – see – no – point – in – the – last – in – the – last – half – of – the – Pentateuch…and Janson suggests that the key to understanding the whole of scripture is right there in Numbers 1 – 10. We always feel so deepened and motivated by listening to the ideas he's wrestling with. We’re meeting Heather for the first time, just after she’s finished meeting his sister and he’s meeting her sister for the first time (what a weekend!). Then they’re driving back to Chicagoland tomorrow after church.

Hmmm. I’m not really blogging about any of the ideas / issues that are on my figurative "back burner", so if, on the off chance that you’re reading for issue-centered narrative, forgive this purely event centered blog.

Oh wait – before I go - one more Ohio-diss. On the way to Berlin we drove through Justus. Now when you say Justus, Ohio – it sounds a lot like Justice – but, I always rant as I drive through (how downright intolerant and non-Buberian of me, this is), Just – US is a much more apt way of describing the outlook of the smalltown folk of the world. Sure we’ll put a sign up announcing the name of our town – and while we’re announcing the name, perhaps we could try to chase away foreigners – we’ll name our town Just Us.

And if that weren’t enough the high school in town: Fairless High School. Just to be fair – if it were named Fairness high school, I’d have a joke, too, but please, I can’t let that connection go unrecognized – a town called Just Us and a high school named Fairless? It’s like these people are the home of the villain in a comic book devoted to a superhero whose greatest attribute is her commitment to Justice – this little town is the yang to her yin.
BTW ~ the two people I know who TEACH at Fairless ~ Rachel & Ben are anything but fairless. They’re wonderful teachers. So (!) devoted.

By this time Jans and Heather arrived, we talked for hours, slept for a few and it’s a beautiful Sunday morning. The kids will wake any minute and we’ll start to get ready for church...so for now...

peace~