Lost Between the Notes: My Top Album Reviews, Part 3

In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”

Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.

I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.

But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.

“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:

I’ll take the quiet life

A handshake with carbon monoxide

With no alarms and no surprises

No alarms and no surprises

Silent

And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)

In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.

I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.

This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.

Everything in its right place.

This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:

Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.

That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.

The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.

Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.

The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:

Red wine and sleeping pills

Help me get back to your arms

Cheap sex and sad films

Help me get where I belong

She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.

Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.

Dispatches From Panic Central

We have evidently entered full-on panic mode here in the Northeast. I went to a grocery store called Acme yesterday to get breakfast sausage, coffee and a couple other items, and seeing the lines, the nearly full parking lot and hordes of customers scooping up groceries like they had a bomb shelter out back and the Russians were bearing down on us circa 1955, was something to behold. The line to check out extended down a frozen food aisle, blocked the doors to the freezer and ran all the way to the back of the store along the meat section.

Available information changes frequently, but currently here in Pennsylvania, there have been 41 reported cases of the coronavirus and three so far where I live in Philadelphia. Schools were just shut down for a two-week period. President Donald Trump, who recently suggested that he wasn’t concerned about the virus and that he thought it would just go away in a month’s time with the advent of warmer weather — worse and even more tone deaf, he also claimed it was a “Democratic hoax” — has now changed his tune and said the virus is a “horrible infection.” He just declared a national emergency.

According to a report from NBC News, Trump didn’t necessarily wise up and start to take the threat seriously on his own volition, of course. He’s too clueless for that. Aides suggested that he take a more proactive approach in light of his unfortunate and, frankly, nonchalant attitude about the crisis. After a series of characteristically fact-starved statements that had to be rolled back and clarified by staff members who are more qualified to run this nation than he is, Trump was compelled to take a more “presidential” tone:

The stumbles, people close to the White House acknowledged, detracted from the intended effect of the address: portraying Trump as a commander in chief steering the country through a crisis.

On Thursday, Trump’s Twitter account took on a much more serious tone, retweeting warnings from public health officials about how people could protect themselves, as both the White House and his campaign weighed allowing staffers to work from home. But as with many previous Trump tone shifts, his attempt at a more traditional presidential approach was inconsistent and impermanent.

Of course it was “inconsistent and impermanent.” That’s not who he is. He isn’t a president “steering the country through a crisis.” He’s a president who is ill-fit to lead, who blames and insults others and deflects criticism away from himself, and then when the facts don’t comport to whatever message he wants to convey, he lies or simply makes up information off the top of his head.

In any case, the facts are these:

  • There are currently more than 1,600 cases of the virus reported in the United States, with 41 deaths.
  • Symptoms include cough, fever and difficulty breathing.
  • The new coronavirus is airborne. It cannot live in food but can exist for a few days on the surface of fruits and vegetables at the grocery store.
  • Health experts are mainly recommending that people wash their hands regularly, use hand sanitizer and refrain from touching their faces. Surgical masks are not full-proof but can drastically reduce the likelihood of catching the virus for those who come in contact with an infected person. Here is a full list of recommendations from the CDC.
  • In a recent announcement, Trump has said the government will partner with the private sector to increase the number of tests that are made available to the public.
  • In another Johnny-come-lately maneuver, Trump has set aside an estimated $50 billion to help coronavirus victims.

So, with all of this going on at the moment, it’s a little bit of a disconcerting time for healthy people, much less for someone like me who has a weakened immune system, but I don’t really buy into the panic of the moment, or the panic of any moment, for that matter, unless I am in acute danger. Common sense compelled me to wear a mask for my trip into the packed grocery store. As far as I could tell, I was the only customer in the whole place who was wearing a mask, such that I actually looked like the paranoid germaphobe figure at whom I would normally scoff. I felt kind of silly and self-conscious, but if anyone in the place needed a mask and was vulnerable to new infections, it’s certainly someone like me. I had a successful double lung transplant in early 2017 and an unsuccessful bone marrow transplant 10 months later and will be taking immunesuppressant drugs the rest of my life to prevent the new lungs from being rejected by my immune system, so caution in my case is the name of the game to try to stay healthy.

That said, this pandemic is probably going to get worse before it gets better, and as some nations take some rather draconian measures to try to stem the spread of the virus, it will be incumbent on us here in the United States to adopt an even-keeled approach, to not give into paranoia and the-sky-is-falling thinking or to ignore the threat. The virus is a threat, even to healthy people, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly, nor should we go overboard and start hording toilet paper and surgical masks like we’re about to enter a real-life version of “Outbreak.”

I don’t necessarily have a punchy conclusion for this post, so here is Muse’s “Panic Station”:

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 2

If we both stand with absent eyes / And think about the oceans, watch ’em dry / We can see far to the other side / It’s you and I forever, we don’t have to hide — Hum, “Little Dipper”

***

My friend and I were on the phone one Sunday night in 1995 watching MTV’s “120 Minutes” when we saw a guy behind a guitar who looked a little like myself eyeglasses, messy and slightly wavy hair, an unkempt button up shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. He was softly playing a clean electric guitar, singing the words, “She thinks she missed the train to Mars. She’s out back counting stars.” He repeated the line, but on the second time through, a thunderous crunch rained down on the word “stars,” and the distortion sustained for several seconds before fading out as ocean waves peel back from the coast. A few more bars of clean guitar before lift-off. And then, a riotous introductory drum beat cascading into a guitar riff so divine that it managed to take the listener on a journey from the depths to the heights of harmony and sound, all in the span of 4 seconds. My eyes widened. My pulse quickened. My heart, like the music, soared. My voice rose in pitch, and in a rare moment of sheer delight, I let out a Beavis-worthy screech of “Yes!”

Such was my introduction to Hum, a band that did not have a lot of commercial success and only made four albums, one of which, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” is pretty much the only one that is remembered, and it’s barely remembered at that. But the band, along with The Smashing Pumpkins, came to represent in my mind the best of what alternative rock and roll could be thoughtful, poetic and lyrically challenging and musically majestic. I loved the music of “Stars,” the dynamic range and the confluence of Matt Talbott’s mellow voice with the circling distortion and drums, but it was the imagery of the song that really captured my imagination as a teenager:

I thought she’d be there holding daisies, she always waits for me
She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars
I found her out back sitting naked looking up and looking dead
A crumpled yellow piece of paper, with seven nines and tens

That paints a picture in my mind of a girl sitting in the backyard under the stars scribbling something, perhaps an indecipherable something, on a yellow legal pad. I don’t know, and still don’t know, what it meant to me then or what it means to me now, but I do know that it’s a stark and enduring image. Lyrics such as these, spacey, full of mystery and breathed to life somewhere in the cosmos, punctuate the entirety of “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” and much of Hum’s library, including the 1998 follow-up “Downward Is Heavenward.”

Sam Blum, with the AV Club, called Hum’s music “an adventure in exploring musical opposites:”

It could be thunderous and unrelenting, but restrained, measured, and mopey at the same time. The music could be melancholic and boisterous, but still downtrodden and catchy. Combining all of these disparate moods made the band purveyors of something bold and even genius. 

“You’d Prefer an Astronaut is only nine songs long. Normally, I would balk at a full album that is only nine tracks, but these songs cover a lot of ground musically and lyrically, running the gamut from emo-like, quiet and subdued on tracks like “The Very Old Man” and “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” to scorchers like “The Pod” and “I’d Like Your Hair Long.”

The first song on the album, “Little Dipper,” sets the tone for a kind of space odyssey on which Hum is about to take listeners. Underneath the heavily distorted main guitar, a second guitar drones and undulates with a pulsing, hypnotic quality that lays the bedrock for Talbott’s matching drone on vocals until the end, when his voice fades with the line, “We won’t let them take you; we won’t let you die” before terminating in a swell of distortion and leading seamlessly into the wild, cosmic ride of “The Pod.”

The album’s fourth track, “Suicide Machine,” is a rich panoply of sound, of clean guitars and later, near the end of the song, heavy distortion, and bracing lyrics that tell a sad tale of loss and regret:

Sleep comes to no one else like we have falling through the ground,
Fulfilling promises of endless summer nights, I’m losing ground, you’re losing sound
Somewhere through a thousand blues a dragonfly descends with just a whisper,
“I’m lonelier than God”
And all my wishes spin the fishes in the air and every one
A different shade of you

And to the left where up is down now stands a zebra
Made of shapes of me, and silver and the sun
So bring no guilt with you up above the flat line
Let’s just hit the sky exploding into one

The eighth track, “I Hate It Too,” offers some of the clearest lyrics on the record. “I need you to give me meaning. I need you to share the view.” The song begins with Talbott’s voice and clean guitar before exploding into a wave of feedback and crashing down into heavy distortion.

The ninth track, “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” is, without question, musically, the prettiest song on the album and one of the sweetest sentiments you are likely to hear from an alternative band or any other band:

A love song to everyone I know. Arms wide open. Here we go.

The song, like the whole album, is grounded in human emotion and poetic sentiment, but musically, it soars with feedback and harmonies that seem to pierce the night sky and was an appropriate way to end an album that was meant to transport listeners, and probably Talbott himself, to another dimension; for music alone has the power to take us places that few art forms can.

I hope this has conveyed the breadth of my appreciation and love of this album and why, of the hundreds of albums that I could have chosen for this list, it is No. 2 in my all time top albums list. “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” captured my imagination and my young teenage heart with its poetry, with its other-worldliness and with its rich musical landscapes. I hope you also come to enjoy it as much as I do. Give it a spin.

Here we go.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 1

Before you run away from me / Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round / The beat goes round and round — Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”

***

I’m taking a little break today from more serious topics to start a series in which I review my top 10 influential albums of all time. I selected these albums based on emotional impact on me personally and quality of songs from top to bottom and not necessarily commercial success. I also limited the list to one album per artist. I don’t normally get too biographical here, but I thought this series would be a good exercise — number one, to give a renewed, close listen these albums again and perhaps, pick out elements that I might have missed before either lyrically or musically, and number two, to openly reckon with my own musical past about what these songs and albums have meant to me over the years or what they still mean to me. As such, some of these entries will feel more like traditional reviews of classic albums, while others will have a more personal bent. At the very least, I hope it makes for some interesting reading. And away we go …

Top 10 albums with five honorable mentions:

  1. Counting Crows: “August and Everything After”
  2. Hum, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”
  3. Radiohead: “Kid A”
  4. R.E.M.: “Automatic for the People”
  5. Smashing Pumpkins: “Siamese Dream”
  6. +Live+: “Throwing Copper”
  7. Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
  8. Our Lady Peace: “Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch”
  9. The Beatles: “Magical Mystery Tour”
  10. Pearl Jam: “Vs.”

And the best of the rest:

  • Tool: “Lateralus”
  • Alanis Morisette: “Jagged Little Pill”
  • Hootie and the Blowfish: “Cracked Rearview”
  • The Cranberries: “No Need To Argue”
  • Bush, “Sixteen Stone”

“August and Everything After

It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Counting Crows’ breakout debut album had on my life as a teenager. If, as a younger boy in middle school or junior high, The Beatles introduced me to rock and roll music and unlocked in me an emotional side unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, Counting Crows broke me open and helped me lay bare feelings that I either didn’t know I had or didn’t know how to access. I don’t remember ever crying while listening to a song before “August and Everything After” came along, but even today, when I get a fresh listen to songs like “Anna Begins,” “Sullivan Street” or “Raining In Baltimore,” the emotional weight of the lyrics, combined with the music and the vocals of lead singer Adam Duritz, not just singing the lyrics, but feeling and embodying the lyrics and sounding almost desperate at times in his delivery, often makes me tear up all over again.

Casual music fans will certainly know the high-water tracks “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” Indeed, it was on the strength of “Round Here,” a quintessential Counting Crows song with a poetic and vulnerable style of songwriting, and particular the band’s performance of it on “The Late Show with David Letterman” that really jump-started their popularity when fans realized that the band, and Adam’s singing style, reached an emotional depth that only a select number of bands actually achieve.

At the time, I was coming off an interest in 1980s and early 90s country music, oldies rock and roll, Billy Joel and other videos I saw on VH1. I discovered “August and Everything After” at a crucial and impressionable time in my life, and needless to say, the album struck a chord with me because before that point, I had never come across a band or songwriter that touched me to the same depths that Duritz’s songwriting touched me. His songs seemed to get at the core of who I was and what I was struggling with in the mid-1990s, and as I grew up with the band into adulthood and matured with the band, the lyrics remained poignant as I looked back and remembered the well-worn feelings of isolation or longing or despair that troubled me as a youth, and often still trouble me.

Drawn to the emotion of Counting Crows’ music, the band, along with others like R.E.M., The Beatles and Pearl Jam, inspired me to write my own poetry or music, but more than that, the imagery of Duritz’s lyrics, even today, is perhaps responsible for my preference, some 25 years later, for the color gray or for bleak and cloudy winter days.

Tyler Clark, with Consequence of Sound, described Duritz’s various gloomy images on “August” as melancholy snow globes:

In the scenes Counting Crows conjure, the season is a perpetual state of almost-winter, the weather overcast, the time of day always slightly later than it responsibly should be. Within these melancholy snow globes, Duritz grapples with woes both private and interpersonal, lit here and there by a bedroom lamp, a neon beer sign, the dome light of a car speeding all by itself down a long, dark road. 

“August” was the second or third CD I ever owned, and I also had the cassette version for playing in the car and in the Walkman. My obsession with this band and with this album ran deep. I don’t entirely remember the content, but I once gave a school presentation on the symbolic nature of the song, “Rain King.” I remember taking the album along on at least one or two summer trips with my family and either “forcing” my parents to play it over the car speakers — they were actually kind enough to play it for me and endure my new foray into alternative rock and roll music — or listening to the album through my headphones and not so quietly singing along.

And as a lasting testament to the inspiration I drew from Counting Crows, I had taken a Sharpie and wrote the line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything,” on the back of my backpack in the same font style as the album cover above. The line came from a song that wasn’t on the album and was subsequently recorded and released in January of last year, but some of the lyrical fragments were visible on the album cover, and they spoke to me, namely, the line I wrote on the backpack, “I stumbled into Washington Square,” “I’m sorry” and “You look into her eyes, and it’s more than your (heart will allow) …” I couldn’t read the rest of the line in parenthesis, but these spoke to me about regret, longing and not knowing which direction to take or whether to take any direction at all. The actual line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything” meant a lot to me personally because I was a shy or reserved child and struggled, not only to meet friends, but to meet girls, and the lyric suggested a kind of pessimistic hopefulness that things might be different once school started and new opportunities to meet people would abound, in contrast to the often lonely summer months when meeting new people was less likely. Duritz was born on Aug. 1, so for him the meaning of the line may have been more literal, but for me, it was the symbolic hope of a new start, a new start that, admittedly, I didn’t quite believe in.

But I nonetheless hoped.

I’ll go through a few of the songs that had the most impact on me as a teenager. The emotional depth and weight of these selected songs, along with my opinion that the album, as a cohesive piece of art, is strong from top to bottom, is the reason why it gets No. 1 billing on this list.

Round Here

Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices the
Contrast of white on white.
And in between the moon and you the angels
Get a better view of the crumbling
Difference between wrong and right

The first track of the album, “Round Here,” opens with about 20 seconds of feedback leading into the main guitar riff that sets the tone for a song that seems to be about a person who is grappling with newfound freedom and doesn’t know which direction life is going to take, as was certainly the case for me as a teenager and into my early- to- mid-20s. That person may be living on their own and away from authority figures for the first time, and thus is able to do whatever they want (“We’re never sent to bed early and nobody stays up late”) or newly separated from a partner or both. In either case, the introductory lyrics suggest a narrator who doesn’t know how to find their place in the world.

It’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what this song means to me in concrete terms. Like many of these songs, there isn’t a particular person or memory that comes to mind when I listen to “Round Here” today, but it’s more like a feeling, the feeling of teenage angst, the feeling of being locked inside a set of rules under someone else’s roof, the longing for liberation and the bittersweet release of finally feeling free under a vacant sky, yet weighed down by loneliness, indecision and aimlessness or depression. When I’m in the car by myself and there is no one to hear or see me, and thus no self-consciousness, I can sometimes tap into raw emotion, put myself inside the lyrics of this song, wandering through the fog and trying to find my way in life, singing these lines near the end of the song:

Round here she’s always on my mind
Round here, hey man, I got lots of time
Round here we’re never sent to bed early and nobody makes us wait

then, as the swirling feelings of sadness, malcontent and anger mix and build, I sometimes find myself virtually screaming this climax:

Round here we stay up very, very, very late (!)

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling …

Adam has said this song is about insomnia, but I have always personalized this track, and particularly the lyrics, “I stay at home with my disease,” to reflect the breathing problems that I dealt with most of my adult life before I received a double lung transplant in February 2017. Over time, chronic breathing problems (“I stay at home with my disease”) breaks your will and in your worst moments, makes you want to stop participating in life (“There’s a dead man trying to get out”). Couple that with social problems — having trouble making new friends or meeting people and the depression that comes with it — and sometimes, you just want to stay inside and be left alone with your “disease,” and you come to prefer the dream world (“Asleep in perfect blue buildings/Beside the green apple sea”), what life could be when you close your eyes, to what life actually is.

Anna Begins

Other than the emotions associated with losing a love or feeling the loss of a love that only existed in the imagination or dreamworld, I, again, don’t have a specific memory or idea associated with “Anna Begins,” but it’s one of four or five songs on this record, along with “Round Here,” “Sullivan Street,” “Time and Time Again” and “Raining in Baltimore” that routinely summon strong feelings in me with each new listen. One thing I have always appreciated about Counting Crows is their ability to take the listener on an emotional journey in their songs, and this song has a buildup into the final chorus that sometimes brings tears and sometimes just makes me sing at the top of my lungs with Adam, feeling the pain of loss and longing and regret alongside the character in the song.

In “Anna Begins,” it seems that Anna and the speaker are exchanging doubts about whether the relationship will work or whether they’re even “ready for this sort of thing.” At first, “when kindness falls like rain,” Anna changes her mind. Later in the song, Anna changes his mind, and he reflects on how he loves even the little things about her (“Every time she sneezes I think it’s love, and oh lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing”),” but despite this, he holds onto his doubts. Near the end of the song, when he finally decides he is ready for a relationship with her, it’s too late, and she’s gone:

Her kindness bangs a gong
It’s moving me along and Anna begins to fade away
It’s chasing me away
She disappears and
Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing

Time and Time Again

I wanted so badly
Somebody other than me
Staring back at me
But you were gone

This is a wasteland of a song — lonely and barren — that comforted me in some of the moments that I have felt most alone. Like so many times traveling in the car by myself on the open road either going back and forth to Boston or South Carolina, listening to this song, I could imagine myself “traveling on a freeway beneath this graveyard western sky” heading deep into the desert outside California with nothing but the sky and the setting sun as a backdrop. This reminds me of another Counting Crows song called “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where the speaker in the song personifies the sky as a girlfriend or partner that keeps him company in the absence of others:

I call the wind Maria because I do not know her face
I call the endless sky Amelia
Because she stays with me from place to place
I call the sun my love Emmanuelle
Because she cradled me in her embrace

Sullivan Street

This one speaks to me of regret in love and loss and the eventuality of knowing that a relationship, sooner or later, is going to end (“Pretty soon now, I won’t come around”) and the ensuing loneliness and despair that will follow. When the first D chord hits whenever I fire up this song, it’s like my heart begins preparing for the emotions that are about to come flooding forth in the next four minutes. In the first verse, he is thinking about driving her home and already describing the relationship or memories of the relationship as “shadows,” and in the second verse, the couple has already broken up, and she is pretending not to know him. He is pretending not to care. By the third verse, he’s describing himself as “just another rider (or lover) burned to the ground.” While I can certainly relate to the experience of driving a girl home all the while doubting that the relationship is going to last, the song’s overall aesthetic — Adam’s voice, combined with the music and lyrics — brings up deep emotions almost every time I listen.

Raining In Baltimore

This is a simple and sad song about missing someone who is far away, and the solo instrument and Adam’s pained voice add to the effect. As I understand it, the speaker is in Baltimore and his love is 3,500 miles away across the country, and he is probably not going to see her again (“What would you change if you could?”).

Nonetheless, he is feeling utterly alone without her. He needs a phone call. A raincoat. A big love. A plane ride. A sunburn. He can’t get any answers or any change; except for the rain and missing her, everything else is the same.

A Murder of One

During Counting Crows’ This Desert Life tour, I got to see Counting Crows in Toledo, Ohio. I lived in South Carolina at the time, and being obsessed with the band as I was and since Toledo was one of the closest places they were coming to where I lived that summer, I took a road trip by myself. The concert was at the Toledo Park Zoo ampitheater. During that particular tour, Adam usually screamed “Step right up!” at the beginning of “A Murder of One,” which was a cue for people in the audience to jump up and down while the rest of the introduction was played before the opening verse. Already having had my fill of beer and under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have budged, but on this night, I, along with couple thousand strangers, started bouncing together in sync, as if there was no longer any real world in which to return, as if we, alone — myself, my fellow Counting Crows fans and the band — experienced life as a singular entity under that dark globe of moonlight and stars. It was one of my more memorable concert experiences.

Jim Farber has said that “August and Everything After” painted a

fully credible portrait of a young man struggling to accept himself, to find some way to be comfortable in his own skin.

And perhaps that explains, more than anything, why I took to the album and the band so much. In 1993 when the album was released, I was in transition, not just musically, but emotionally and as a person. I wasn’t very attuned to my own emotions. I didn’t have great self-esteem, and I had trouble meeting people, especially girls. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I was unsure of where I was headed. I didn’t know how I felt about life or that it was even OK to have feelings or to express them as a boy. Even if I sometimes felt alone in life, I somehow felt less alone when I hit play on the album with the knowledge that someone else, somewhere, had experienced similar feelings. In “August” and in Duritz’ lyrics, I found that it was acceptable to have and express deep emotional feelings. Like I suppose many others have in my situation, as impressionable teenagers just beginning to dabble in a new world, a newly discovered amalgamation of poetry and song, I found a kind of kindred spirit in Duritz and the work of Counting Crows, and I found a voice, even if it was someone else’s, in music and meaning that would inspire me to create my own for decades to come.

In August and everything after, I was after everything.

Repairing Our Democracy and a Return to ‘Republican Virtue’

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. — James Madison, “Federalist No. 51”

***

As those who have followed the debate about health care will remember, Supreme Court Justice John Roberts sided with four liberal judges in issuing a majority opinion that the individual mandate behind Obamacare, the key component of a bill that compelled uninsured people to become insured, was constitutional if it was viewed as a congressional tax. This critical moment punctuated decades of failure with regard to health care legislation and positioned Roberts as one of the more moderate, fair-minded judges on the bench in an age when partisanship and compromise were becoming a lost art form in politics. In essence, amid political rancor, when his fellow conservatives were fighting tooth and nail to obstruct Obama and his programs at every turn indeed, the Democrats rammed through Obamacare without a single Republican vote Roberts saved the legislation. Although the law was far from perfect, those with a forward-thinking vision realized that health care reform was desperately needed because of runaway costs and the fact that profit-minded, not patient-minded, insurance and pharmaceutical companies had acted with near impunity for half a century.

Life on the Fringe

Now that Senate Republicans have shirked their responsibility and voted to acquit President Donald Trump, despite most of them being in agreement that he committed impeachable offenses, to hold the man accountable and drive home the fact that no one is above the law, now that we have seen three years of the president of the United States attacking the press, attacking free speech, denigrating women and almost every ethnic group in the nation, suggesting that we shoot migrants and laughing about it, courting the support of white supremacists and further ginning up racial tensions across the country, not to mention the sustained threats to the constitutional rights of all Americans, perhaps now it is our democracy that needs saving. While I certainly don’t agree with Roberts on a lot of issues, repairing what has been damaged by Trump and the GOP will take people like him, conservatives and liberals, stepping up and doing the right thing for the betterment of the nation. We have had scant little of that kind of bipartisan action the last 10-plus years.

One could argue that while the political divisiveness has always been a prominent feature of government in America, it really picked up steam in the mid- to late-2000s with the advent of the Tea Party and the populist, know-nothing movement that began to take over the Republican Party and slowly move it away from the center under people like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., to the fringe under newly christened stars of the GOP, an “every man” blue collar worker nicknamed Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin. Almost in lockstep, as the Republican Party turned away from the center, the far left did the same thing.

One really had a feeling that after Palin and presidential candidate John McCain lost the election and with the lofty “hope and change” message of unity and solidarity that Obama brought to his pre-election and presidential speeches, the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, it seemed that the nation may have turned a corner. But what actually happened is that Obama, either because of his liberal values, the color of his skin or some combination of those two, precipitated a kind of conservative backlash, made even more heated and insidious by the 24/7 Republican news cycle that piped in commentary that catered, and still caters, to the lowest common denominator of white, blue-collar fear. (The late John McCain, by the way, whiffed on picking Palin to run with him, but he was another example of a Republican leader with courage and integrity who could have worked to turn the nation more toward the center had he won the election. Before he died, of course, McCain also did not escape Trump’s ire, and Trump could not resist insulting the veteran even in death.)

In any case, the idea that we, as a nation, had turned a corner was an illusion, and when Donald Trump entered the national discourse prior to the 2016 election, the stage was already set. Existing quietly under the surface of all the progressive fervor during the Obama years lurked the prejudiced, anti-immigrant, anti-gay demons of our past. The populist right from the mid-2000s never went away, and in 2016, they found a new hero in Trump, despite having virtually nothing in common with the billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star.

The Republican Party has fallen even further into the mire. As if failing to impeach a guilty president wasn’t enough, the current GOP and their president have attacked the country’s constitutional principles and core values at nearly every turn, from tripping over themselves to nominate Trump’s now-multiple picks after illegally refusing to provide so much as a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court selection, to kowtowing to the president and letting him lie and make outlandish claims without censure, rebuke or recourse, and attempting to roll back protections in the First Amendment and using it as a tool to loosen regulations and increase discrimination.

Ironically enough, shortly before the Senate impeachment trial was about to commence and thus, shortly before Republicans in Congress were about to embarrass themselves again and take another turn away from justice, it was Roberts who offered some instructive words in what has been, by all accounts, a deeply troubling presidential term.

‘Debate and compromise’

In his annual report about the work of the federal courts, Roberts told a “sadly ironic” story about how John Jay, one of the co-authors of “The Federalist Papers,” along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, was attacked by an angry mob in New York and because of his injuries, was apparently unable to continue contributing to the series of essays, which were written as a vigorous defense of the Constitution and the democratic principles of our republic.

Roberts wrote:

… We have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.

As Adam J. White, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about what Roberts had to say, the United States needed to display “self-restraint, goodwill, and moderation” in order to get back to a place of republican virtue,” which, according to the late Irving Kristol, means:

… curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility. We think of public-spiritedness as a form of self-expression, an exercise in self-righteousness. The Founders thought of it as a form of self-control, an exercise in self-government.

And this also includes

probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsch, one of Trump’s nominees, added to these ideas when he said that we should

… talk to one another respectfully; debate and compromise; and strive to live together tolerantly. … (The) essential goodness of the American people is a profound reservoir of strength … cannot be taken for granted (and) … need(s) constant tending. … (We have) the duty of having to listen to and tolerate other points of view … (and) democracy depends on our willingness, each one of us, to hear and respect even those with whom we disagree.

These values have been all but lost in the current political climate, and by quoting conservative sources, I am, as a progressive, attempting to demonstrate that compromise, civility, the sharing of good ideas, no matter where they come from, and, yes, even, virtue, should transcend party allegiance if we are to return to a place where integrity in politics matters.

A Better Way

Integrity in politics matters to Mitt Romney, another Republican who gives me hope that politics in America isn’t a lost cause. Romney, who stood alone among the GOP in his public admission that Trump was guilty, made a stunning speech today outlining why the evidence compelled him to vote to remove the president from office, noting Trump committed “an appalling abuse of the public’s trust.”

If Romney’s actions were just an anomaly and integrity doesn’t actually matter anymore, if decorum and virtue don’t matter anymore, if American politics is just destined to become a vast, wild-west frontier of insults, flame wars and misinformation, then, by all means, we can continue on a path of intellectual dishonesty, tribalism and identity politics, where the national discourse gets more fragmented and where winning an argument for your team is more important than moving the nation forward in an ethical way that benefits everyone.

But if virtue in politics and government does still matter, as I hope it does, then it seems that both our elected officials and the electorate need to walk it back and ask: If this approach isn’t working and it’s not what can we do differently and how can we be better, individually and collectively? How can we compromise and work together to change the spirit of the conversation and make it more positive? Conservatives are not the enemy, and liberals are not the enemy. Partisanship and a failure to compromise. Cynicism and apathy. Cowardice. Dishonesty. Hypocrisy. And intolerance. These are the real enemies that haunt our republic.

[Cover image: “Checks and Balances” by DeviantArt user RednBlackSalamander.]

In Denial: Free Speech and Holocaust Conspiracy Theories

People are sick of the myths and alibis. — Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”

***

A book that I am currently reading, “120 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature” by Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald and Dawn B. Sova, divides the works into four categories: books that were banned for political reasons, religious reasons, sexual reasons and social reasons. The book contains about 20 titles that I have already read and several that I would like to read in the future, including “All Quiet on the Western Front,” about World War I; “Andersonville,” about the Confederate-manned, Yankee prison camp in the Civil War and “The Satanic Verses,” by Salmon Rushdie, which resulted in a fatwa being issued on Rushdie’s life for supposed blasphemy against the Muslim faith.

While I may write additional blog articles on subsequent chapters in the book on censorship, I wanted to add a few thoughts about what undoubtedly is one of the controversial of controversial works in the whole collection — “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry” by Arthur R. Butz. Many books in the collection were flagged by various religious groups or school districts for either coarse language, racial stereotypes, political views or other controversial content. Butz’s work is a piece of revisionist history — to call it “revisionist” is being both generous and polite — claiming that the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany and other parts of Eastern Europe was a “propaganda hoax.” Butz, who has a background in control sciences and electrical engineering — not history — is currently a professor at Northwest University, which has protected his right to espouse his personal views while condemning those same views.

It is to the credit of the authors of “120 Banned Books” that they don’t make value or moral judgments about the works they are describing. They simply provide a summary of the narrative arc of the novel or thesis of the nonfiction work, whichever is appropriate, and then outline in some detail the censorship histories of each work. The authors’ handling of Butz’s work is no different.

According to “120 Banned Books,” Butz’s contentions about a conspiracy theory related to the Holocaust are far and wide, and the book attacks nearly every major detail we know about the Holocaust — information, in other words, that makes the Holocaust one of the more egregious offenses against humanity in the history of, well, humanity.

Butz argues that the judges who worked during the war crime trials after World War II had already made up their minds about the presumed guilt of the defendants, which implies that the trials were unjust. Butz questions world Jewish population figures at the time of the planned extermination and the sources by which those numbers were devised. He writes:

… in the demographic argument for a five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Community and Jewish and thus, essentially useless.

Butz contends that about 750,000 people were resettled from Germany to other areas, while many others died because of disease and starvation, not an attempted wholesale extermination. He said it was likely that a “fair number” died during the resettlements, while others relocated to others areas, like the United States and parts of Europe or the Middle East.

Typhus, Butz said,

plagued the German concentration camps since early in the war. A typhus epidemic at the Belsen camp, for example, is cited as the major cause of death, resulting from a “total loss of control” at the end of the war, not a “deliberate policy.”

noting that disease caught the Germans off guard, and they were unprepared to handle such catastrophic loss of life, which is presumably one reason, according to Butz, that so many piles of unburied bodies were scattered across the Germans landscape and the historical record.

Butz discredits the number of Jews the Germans supposedly killed, citing “inconsistencies and implausibilities” in estimates ranging anywhere from 750,000 to 7 million. He alleges that the area did not have enough crematoria to handle such a large influx of bodies.

As the authors of “120 Banned Books” point out, Col. Rudolf Hoss, who ran Auschwitz, confessed that 2.5 million people were murdered at that concentration camp alone. This was a revised figure. He previously claimed the number was 3.5 million. Needless to say, when killing human beings becomes almost as routine as your morning coffee or brushing your teeth, when women and children are treated like dogs, spat upon, called names, murdered and then are unceremoniously tossed into mass graves like their lives meant less than nothing on a daily basis, it’s easy to see how Hoss and other Nazi officials could have gotten confused as to whether the number of people killed at Auschwitz was 2.5 or 3.5 million in lieu of record keeping. In the calculus of human lives in the Nazis’ depraved sense of morals, what’s difference does a million lives here or there make? A million multiplied by zero is still zero.

But Butz goes farther. He claims that the infamous gas chambers were actually used to disinfect clothing in order to kill lice, which carry the typhus bacteria. This might be one of the more shocking and absurd claims. Here is Butz:

… all ‘survivor literature’, sincere or inventive … report the same basic procedure involved in entering a German camp: disrobe, shave hair, shower, dress in new clothes or in old clothes after disinfection.

Far from exculpating the Nazis for their role in the gas chambers, Hoss has testified that this was a lie concocted by the SS to fool the victims into willingly walking into their own death traps so, presumably, the guards would not have to go to the trouble of forcing them into the buildings. That said, I don’t know why this ruse was even necessary. Surely, the victims could see the writing on the wall. They saw the haggard appearances of their Jewish brethren. They saw the rampant sickness and hunger. They heard the screams. They were forced to march all over the German and Eastern European landscape, sometimes with no shoes or in extreme weather conditions, at the whim of the Nazis. The SS had no problems forcing the Jews to do other tasks, and many had to dig their own graves. So, marching or forcing them into the chambers should have been just as routine as the other mindless, inhumane things they did to the Jews.

Finally, Butz traces the figure that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi to various sources in articles from The New York Times and to the World Jewish Congress, which he said gave an estimation that there were 5,721,800 “missing” Jews to the International Military Tribunal. He claims the Americans and British embellished the numbers of Jews that were killed as a “propaganda basis for their war,” presumably as a way to gin up support to attack Germany and oust the Nazis.

***

I want to be careful to say that I am not presenting a comprehensive picture of Butz’s views as he lays them out in “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.” Perhaps at some point in the future, I will read Butz’s full thoughts on the Holocaust, if it’s even worth my time — I’m not sure that it is — but in this blog entry, I think I have fully represented Butz’s view as summarized in the book on censorship, and lest someone claims that I have taken his views out of context, I think it’s fair to say these were clearly were Butz’s views, and the views of other Holocaust deniers, at the time he wrote the book, and as I understand it, these are still his views, namely that the Nazis had no state-mandated policy to exterminate the Jews, thus no “final solution;” that the gas chambers were not killing centers; that the Germans did not kill 6 million Jews; that the Jews who did die fell victim to starvation and disease; and that the trials of 24 top officials of the Third Reich after World War II were carried out unfairly on the presumption of guilt and their testimony was largely invalid.

Given enough time and space, I could dispute all of these views, but many people have done this before, and Butz’s arguments have been roundly criticized and debunked since the book’s publication in 1975. On the question of whether the Nazis received a fair trial and whether their confessions were given under duress, and can thus be discarded, I offer the following passage from the BBC:

This, however, ignores the fact that some of the more detailed confessions were written after the perpetrators had been sentenced to death. It also ignores the fact that many of the perpetrators described – sometimes in great detail – what happened, but insisted that they either had nothing to do with it or were forced by their superiors to participate.

Thus this argument fails to take into account the statements of Nazis such as the Commandant of Birkenau concentration camp, Rudolf Höss, who described the mass murders that took place in his camp in a document written after he had been sentenced to death. It also fails to account for Adolf Eichmann who, in the memoir he wrote during his trial, spoke of the gassing of the Jews.

It also fails to take into account, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does in detail in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” the large number of everyday Germans — local police officers, civic leaders and church officials who either openly supported the wholesale persecution and murder of Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — who were fully on board with the Nazi regime’s plan and even took part in some of the killings themselves, either directly or indirectly. Although Goldhagen’s book was published 20 years after “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” one could conclude, without even considering the reams of first-person testimony we now have about how utterly devoted much of the German collective was or how devoted they eventually became to antisemitism and the extermination project, that it would be impossible to fabricate such large numbers of photos of mass graves, physical evidence attesting to the “final solution” and Nazi propaganda material and meeting minutes that document the Third Reich’s intentions to eliminate the “Jewish problem,” not just to resettle them elsewhere.

More than that, it would be impossible to imagine a scenario in which the Nazis could have carried out their heinous acts in a vacuum without widespread support from the populace. The sheer scale is unprecedented and had to have involved much of the entire country. If that is hard to fathom, that an entire country could be caught up in an antisemitic and murderous fervor, one only need consider the embedded hate against the Jews that began centuries before with the death of Christ and continued into the early 20th century. The Germans and other antisemites branded the Jews as Christ-killers, even though the Romans ultimately killed Jesus, at least as the story goes in the Bible, and in Hitler’s time, they were largely blamed for the economic recession that struck the poor and working class people of Germany. Antisemitism was deeply embedded, not just in Hitler’s Third Reich government, but in the entire nation. It was a powerful, destructive force. The idea that the final solution was a manufactured genocide in order to start the war is belied by the evidence, both cultural and actual.

Nonetheless, as offensive as Butz and the Holocaust deniers claims are, not only to Jews, but to lovers of humanity who think all life is valuable regardless of sex, gender, race or religion, the entire point of a book like “120 Banned Books” is to suggest that we must protective people’s right to be offensive, and we must protect people’s right to, if they choose, counter the offensive material with either mockery or facts. The prohibition of thought does not move society forward; in fact, it acts as a regressive force, and as we know, the repression of thought has led to and fed some of the most dictatorial regimes in history.

Butz continues to be employed at Northwestern because in the college and in this nation, and others that value free thought and expression, supports his right to speak his mind, whether we think he’s wrong or not. I will end with a statement from Northwest University’s former president Henry S. Bienen, who served in that role for 14 years before retiring in August 2009:

Northwestern University Associate Professor Arthur Butz recently issued a statement commending Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s assertion that the Holocaust never happened. Butz is a Holocaust denier who has made similar assertions previously. His latest statement, like his earlier writings and pronouncements, is a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people. While I hope everyone understands that Butz’s opinions are his own and in no way represent the views of the University or me personally, his reprehensible opinions on this issue are an embarrassment to Northwestern.

There is no question that the Holocaust is a well-documented historical fact. … Butz is a tenured associate professor in electrical engineering. Like all faculty members, he is entitled to express his personal views, including on his personal web pages, as long as he does not represent such opinions as the views of the University. Butz has made clear that his opinions are his own and at no time has he discussed those views in class or made them part of his class curriculum. Therefore, we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust – however odious it may be – without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect.

[Cover image credit: “Holocaust Memorial” by DeviantArt user Good Mythical Miles.]

I was inspired by what the artist behind the artwork above had to say about the tragedy of the Holocaust and thought it was apropos to share part of it here:

I drew this, it’s supposed to be in reference to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the concentration camps and their fight to retain their identity. There’s a lot of tiny things in it inspired by details in the class lectures and the books we read, but the biggest one is that the numbers are supposed to be projected onto the sculptures from a distance, so the viewer blocks the numbers from reaching the figures and instead sees them on their own person, and becoming part of the piece themselves.

Reclaiming the Dream

Being a product of white America in the South, lacking historical perspective and maybe even some early prejudice, I’m ashamed to say that I did not grow up with a lot of admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. Each February when Black History Month rolled around, and usually at no other time throughout the year, I heard about King’s dream for a more equitable society, one in which, even in the Deep South, black children and white children could play together in harmony and mutual admiration and respect. I heard about his call for equality at the ballot box, in the workplace and in retail stores and restaurants throughout the nation. I heard the high rhetoric and remember actually saying, probably simply parroting the opinion of an adult, that, sure, King dreamed big, but what did he actually do to make the nation better?

The ridiculous arrogance and ignorance of that question became apparent to me when, a little later in life, I began to learn about MLK in college and on my own time thereafter. Consequently, I studied Civil War history, and to whatever extent it is related, Civil Rights Era history at Clemson University in northwestern, South Carolina. Clemson can’t escape its checkered past. It has for one of its founders a racist firebrand by the name of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, along with a hall named in his honor.

The college is home to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Government and Public Policy, which is named for one of the staunchest pro-segregation, anti-civil rights politicians of the 20th century and a true enemy of progress. And for some good, old-fashioned, southern-fried symbolism, as it was pointed out to me by a professor of mine when I was a student there, the sidewalk design near the library that proceeds to run above the Strom Thurmond center, which is underground, is in the shape of the Confederate battle flag’s stars and bars.

And so, as a student, I was aware of the debate surrounding how educators and students, past and present, reconcile what many consider to be the age of the New South — not abandoning the past, but learning from it and fostering a more progressive, inclusive track record on race and culture — in short, how to honor the past but move forward from it into a new era.

After college, I began working at a newspaper about an hour north of Clemson in a quaint town called Clayton, Ga. Here was an interesting mix of wealthy, white Republicans and Democrats, a smattering of black folks, including the chief of police at the time, and a not insignificant Hispanic population. In spite of that eclectic mix of people, the county was mostly populated by local white, low- to middle-class residents, who valued school, church and community. Essentially, this was an even more conservative place than Clemson, but it was here, ironically, that I went even deeper into my research on the Civil War and the push for equality.

I also fully abandoned conservatism because, as I saw throughout American history, it was conservatism that fostered an atmosphere of secession in the 19th century — my home state being the first to leave the union and the last to rejoin after the Confederacy lost the war — it was conservatism that largely led to the failure of Reconstruction, the Black Codes and Jim Crow after the Civil War, and it was conservatism in the early- to mid-20th century which spoke out so vehemently, and sometimes punctuated by violence, against equal rights and equal protection under the law for women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups. I don’t think conservatism alone is a problem, but I think conservatism created the atmosphere, and is still creating the atmosphere, by which some of the most pernicious ideologies in American history could flourish, much to the detriment of our national character and collective conscience.

I had read W.E.B. Dubois’ lyrical work, “The Souls of Black Folk” while at Clemson, but it was here in Clayton that I picked up Dubois’ much longer and detailed book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” which outlined, in painful detail, the part that black people played, as the subtitle suggests, “in the attempt to reconstruct Democracy in America.” I read books and information on people like white abolitionist John Brown, who, terrorist though he was, fought alongside his black brothers for their freedom, which he saw as a right consecrated from on high. I read about white abolitionist newspaperman, William Lloyd Garrison, who wrote vigorously and tirelessly, often at risk to his personal safety, on the importance of racial equality and ending the “peculiar institution.” I read about the lives of slaves and about slave religion and how, just as many slaves found comfort in the story of the Pharaoh’s enslavement of Israel and their subsequent freedom and the story of Jesus, plantation owners and supporters of slavery used the same scripture as justification to keep their property in shackles, since the Bible both condones slavery and offers no rebuke to chattel slavery. I read books on the sometimes tense, but working relationship, between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. in the run-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and LBJ’s “Great Society” programs that were designed to address issues in education, urban development and housing, transportation, employment and other areas.

And finally, with all of this as context, I come to MLK himself. So, what did he do, to answer my own question from 25 years ago, that specifically warrants honoring him year after year, to rewatch or reread his speeches, to shed new tears over the high-minded, courageous path that few people on earth ever walk?

First, this adoration for the man is not in the least an obligatory gesture, and I would say that if we are only thinking of MLK one day out of the year, or at most, for one month — the shortest month at that — we are doing the man, his legacy and what he stood for a grave disservice. Indeed, given the current environment of prejudice in the highest office in the land and the sustained bigoted remarks that began when Trump was a candidate and has continued to this day, the institutional racism that pervades the justice system and the overarching hostile position our nation has taken against legal and illegal immigrants the last few years, the need to remember what King stood for, how he remained above the fray and elevated a nation and what he accomplished in life and death, the need to recommit ourselves individually and as a nation to reclaiming his dream is as important now as it’s ever been.

The following is a short list of reasons why we honor King today and throughout the year.

Nonviolent resistance

King brought the idea of nonviolent protests to the forefront of America’s conscience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandi. Whereas some justifiably angry black and white activists thought the best way to enact change was through a strong-arm approach, King and his nonviolent protesters appealed to and pricked America’s collective conscience with what he called “soul force.”

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

Cynthia Tucker, a black columnist working at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the same time as when I got my start at the newspaper, has argued that Black History Month is a relic and we should not just remember the accomplishments of black leaders during one month out of the year, and she argues, echoing King, that the history of black folks in America is inextricably linked to American history writ large.

In short, black history is our history.

First president of the SLCC

It feels kind of silly pointing out the more obvious parts of King’s life and legacy, but as the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King was instrumental in helping to start the political action organization after the Montgomery bus boycott of the mid-1950s to begin a series of other nonviolent protests across the South to facilitate and support desegregation of public spaces and numerous freedom movements across the nation.

Before the March on Washington, the organization perhaps saw its biggest win come in Birmingham with its goal of desegregating the downtown area. This series of nonviolent sit-ins of businesses that previously denied access and service to black residents was met with a disturbing level of violence by local police under the leadership of Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who, through his virulent opposition to equality and commitment to segregation, came out looking like a true villain, attempting to squash protests with violence and intimidation. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King writes to local clergy about why that was a time for action in Birmingham:

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. … Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The march

The full name of the famous event, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, drew somewhere between 200,000-300,000 people and apparently went off without a hitch and without violence or skirmishes. It was organized by King, James Farmer Jr., with the Congress of Racial Equality, Roy Wilkins, with the NAACP, John Lewis, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others as a push toward desegregation nationwide and more equality in the workplace and in culture. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was brilliant for the way in which it positioned America’s highest ideals in, not just religious terms, to which many Americans, then and now, understand and relate, but in foundational terms. It explained that the nation has yet to fully grasp the full measure of Thomas Jefferson’s famous line from the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream today. … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountain side, let. freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

King then ended his speech with some of the most stirring lines ever uttered in American history that thundered back through time and continue to reverberate to the present.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaeeous slopes of California.

But not only that. Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountain side. Let
freedom ring …

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,”Free at last, free at last, great God almighty, we are free at last!

In October 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in racial justice and nonviolent resistance, and the next year, he helped organize perhaps the second most significant march of the civil rights era, the march to Selma en route to Birmingham to protest inequality and advocate for voter rights. This is the march in which John Lewis, and many other nonviolent protesters, got hosed and beaten by members of the Alabama state police. The incident became a powerful symbol for nonviolent resistance and led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Fifty years later on March 7, 2015, Barack Obama, the first black president in United States history, delivered a speech to commemorate the famous march. I was watching the moment on CNN that day, and I can tell you, seeing Obama’s presidential motorcade rumble over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was named for a former grand wizard of the KKK, was one of the most powerful and enduring images of racial progress I have ever seen, and it’s something I won’t soon forget.

The legacy

As we know, King was killed April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., as he was in the process of planning an occupation of Washington, D.C., called the Poor People’s Campaign. On April 3, probably seeing the writing on the wall and seemingly foreseeing his own untimely end, based on the hate that had been generated against him from the conservative right in the South and elsewhere, he delivered his final, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech, an extremely powerful affirmation of this nation’s First Amendment rights.

… Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

And then, like a lightbulb going off in his mind, he turned inward and one could see tears welling up in his eyes as he could see the end peering him in the face.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

And in that moment, he looked completely spent, as if all of his emotional fervor and rhetorical power had all been used up in preparation for the next day’s events. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has gone down as the most important of his career, but the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech was the most vulnerable moment of King’s public career in my view.

King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in civil rights, and MLK Day was established in parts of the nation in 1986. Not until 2000 did all 50 states celebrate the holiday.

So, what of his legacy? Despite the almost obsessive efforts of J. Edgar Hoover to discredit King, expose his supposed marital infidelities and paint him as a communist, King was central in putting pressure on LBJ and other leaders in Washington to get the ball rolling on the Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on sex, gender or race illegal. Shortly after King’s death, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. It’s hard to underestimate the impact of these programs on American politics and culture. While they weren’t perfect and while racism and discrimination were far from resolved in King’s lifetime — they are still far from resolved now — these were obviously landmark achievements that may not have been possible without King’s persistence, intelligence, courage and unshakable faith in humanity. Working in tandem with his dedication to nonviolence, King was also against the disastrous war in Vietnam.

I have said all of that to say this: I might not have known much about MLK and Civil Rights starting out in high school and the early part of college, but the more I learned, the more convinced I became in adult life that wherever we go as a nation, we must go together as different people unified in mutual respect and understanding and be committed to the idea, even if previous generations were not, that all men, all human beings, are created equal — full stop — without qualifiers and without exception.

We must be committed to the idea, the idea for which King gave his life, that there is no white America or black America. There is only one America. And while in this era of blatant bigotry and hostility to immigrants spearheaded by Trump and his largely white, unlettered supporters, we can’t give in to apathy. We must believe that we will overcome ideologies that attempt to divide us and that we will overcome racial prejudice and injustice and create for ourselves a better tomorrow. Perhaps King’s greatest legacy to us, then, was that he offered more than a dream. He opened a door so that we could begin the long march toward its ultimate realization.

[Cover image: “I Have a Dream” by DeviantArt user Rachel Laughman.]

The Bully’s Lament

Christian Apologist Anthony DeStefano: Atheists to blame for world’s ills

I don’t want to give Anthony DeStefano a dime. Indeed, I only learned who DeStefano was five minutes ago when I saw one of his op-ed columns, with the laborious headline, “Today’s atheists are bullies — and they are doing their best to intimidate the rest of us into silence,” posted on social media. But if I can find a way to access his book, Inside the Atheist Mind: Unmasking the Religion of Those Who Say There is No God,” from which the column is adapted, without paying for it, probably through the library, maybe I will read it and respond here. For now, though, let’s see what DeStefano thinks of me, and presumably, all atheists:

Atheists today are the most arrogant, ignorant and dangerous people on earth.

We’ve all seen how these pompous prigs get offended by the slightest bit of religious imagery in public and mortified if even a whisper of  “Merry Christmas” escapes the lips of some well-meaning but naïve department store clerk during the “holiday season.”

He then cited three examples in which prominent atheist or freethinker organizations, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, exercised their right to free speech and protested potential violations of the separation of church and state. This, of course, is what free and empowered people do in a democracy, but to folks like DeStefano, behavior such as this is arrogant, ignorant, dangerous and pompous. Arrogance and pomposity are pretty close to the same thing, but I guess he was running low on adjectives. In any case, he has more childish insults for us.

Yes, these atheists are loud, nasty, unapologetic and in-your-face.

But while their arrogance is annoying, it’s nothing compared to their ignorance. Atheists believe that the vast majority of human beings from all periods of time and all places on the Earth have been wrong about the thing most important to them. They basically dismiss this vast majority as being either moronic or profoundly naïve. What they don’t seem to know – or won’t admit – is that the greatest contributions to civilization have been made, not by atheists, but by believers.

Here is a real bit of arrogance: Claiming to know what atheists think about believers or presupposing that just because DeStefano has had a certain experience with some nonbelievers, then that must apply to most or all atheists.

I don’t think DeStefano has had many, or any, personal experiences with atheists, outside of what he’s read in books or on websites, and thus, it becomes easy to generalize and demonize a whole group of people when one doesn’t have to be bothered to view them as thoughtful, intelligent and moral human beings.

Both nonbelievers and believers through history have been wrong about a great many things about how the world works. The difference is that intellectually honest people, regardless of whether they are believers or not, must be willing to change their minds if new information comes in that goes against their previously held notions. And people who are serious about searching for truth must search after it no matter where it leads.

For centuries, science has been ever-narrowing the gap in which god and the entirety of the spiritual world resides, and increasingly, we have had fewer and fewer reasons to turn to religion for explanations about the world because the natural explanations are much more rewarding and much more elegant than anything dreamed up in holy books.

It is true, of course, that most major scientific discoveries down through the ages have been made by religious people or at least people who claimed to believe in some kind of deity, but that is only because society and culture has been dominated by religion for millennia. These discoveries were not made because of religion. In some cases, like Darwin’s earth-shattering theory of evolution, they were made in spite of religion.

DeStefano’s claim that the “greatest contributions to civilization” were made by believers is easily refuted. Some contributors to science, culture and art were believers; many were not. To make a blanket statement like that is dishonest. But in many Christian apologetic circles, politically-minded ones even more so, intellectual dishonesty is a virtue.

Yes, the new atheists have an ignorance of history bordering on madness.

Uh huh. Next.

But are they really dangerous, too?

You bet they are. The truth is, the atheist position is incapable of supporting any coherent system of morality other than ruthless social Darwinism. That’s why it has caused more deaths, murders and bloodshed than any other belief system in the history of the world.

Do I really need to elucidate the abject immorality of Christianity again? A couple paragraphs from this post will do to squash any notion that believers, and their god, have any kind of monopoly on morality or ethics:

In real life, people are free — they have freewill — to decline a gift if the giver has, perhaps, overstepped her bounds and maybe was too generous. With Christianity, we must accept the “gift” of eternal life, even though we weren’t consulted about it first, we must fear the one we are commanded to love or face the fire, and good riddance all the while. If we happen to think the four evils of Christianity, vicarious redemption, scapegoating, human sacrifice and compulsory love, are inferior doctrines of previous barbaric epochs and want nothing to do with them, well, we can be damned for that too and shooed off to hell like the carnal garbage that we are.

Oh, and by the way, since God is omniscient, he knew who would be “saved,” and conversely, he knew the face and lives of each and every person who was going to burn forever — he knew them intimately — yet he chose to put this experiment called earth into motion anyway with the full knowledge that millions would not only suffer ghastly fates in their physical lives but would be tortured forever and ever in everlasting fire, many of whom because of a mere accident of birth. He knew them all intimately, this “good” creation he made, and would watch them fall down to perdition seemingly with indifference.

Atheism has caused more bloodshed than any system in the world. Really? If we’re doing a death total, the God character in the Bible puts Hitler to shame in the sheer number of people that died on his watch. Thankfully, there’s a website for that. Dwindling in Unbelief puts the number of human people God killed, either directly or otherwise, at about 25 million. And this doesn’t begin to account for the vast numbers of believers and nonbelievers alike who were murdered after the events of the Bible for heresy or witchcraft or, you know, for fun, at the hands of believers.

It is true that history has seen its fair share of psychopathic dictators who were not believers, but they reeked havoc on humanity, not because of their atheism, but because they were simply evil people. Atheism doesn’t necessarily make a person good, nor does religion make a person bad. Often, the converse is true, but assuming each is true and then generalizing about each to win an argument is, again, dishonest, and I would wager, decidedly anti-Christian.

The idea that DeStefano would, with a straight face, attempt to suggest a “frightening connection between atheism and death” is laughable. He trots out people like Pol Pot and Stalin to make his case and then tries to argue that Hitler, modern history’s top villain, was, himself, an atheist hellbent on ending “the disease of Christianity,” a quote DeStefano uses with arrogant assertiveness that was probably never even uttered by Hitler. It’s a disputed passage. Hitler’s thoughts about the Jews, and the entire Nazi philosophy related to Jews, was built on the idea that Jews killed Jesus, first and foremost, and that is the bedrock belief of nearly all of the hatred, bigotry, subjugation and violence by Germans and other antisemites against the Jews. Again and again, Hitler referenced “providence” and “God’s will” to assert for himself and for his listeners that he was, indeed, walking a divine path.

Here are a few, of many, examples:

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (Mein Kampf, p. 65)

And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God. (Mein Kampf, p. 174)

As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace. (Sept. 1, 1939)

I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence. (July 5, 1944)

DeStefano goes on to say:

Atheists don’t believe in God, so they don’t believe in any transcendent, objective moral law. Nor do they believe that human beings are made in the image of God, and so they don’t believe humans possess infinite value and dignity. When you put these two beliefs together, you have a deadly recipe that makes killing “problematic” human beings quite easy and defensible.

To suggest that nonbelievers don’t think humans have value and dignity and that killing is somehow defensible in any context is, not just wrong, but embarrassingly short sighted and mean-spirited. And we are supposed to believe that people like DeStefano have the moral high ground?

DeStefano concludes as he began, by calling atheists a well-trod schoolyard name: bullies. To review, in the length of a short op-ed column, DeStefano has called nonbelievers — many of them well-meaning, moral, truthseekers — arrogant, ignorant, dangerous, pompous prigs, loud, nasty, unapologetic, in-your-face, annoying, amoral, ignorance bordering on madness and dangerous (again).

Who is the real bully here?

[Image credit: “Constantine’s Vision” by DeviantArt user Julian-Faylona.]

Walls a-plenty

Trump wants to build a wall in Colorado but not Kansas:

“We’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico, and we’re building a wall in Colorado. We’re building a beautiful wall, a big one that really works, that you can’t get over, you can’t get under. And we’re building a wall in Texas. And we’re not building a wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the walls that we just mentioned.”

Got it.

I’m sure people in Colorado will appreciate the new wall keeping out all those unwanted New Mexico residents.

Some journalists, apparently trying to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy he doesn’t really deserve at this point, have said he probably misspoke. How exactly does one misspeak about a state that is 430 miles away from the United States-Mexico border?

Time to end invocations

If Pennsylvania residents or viewers across the nation watching the recent spectacle that unfolded in Harrisburg were unclear about where freshman Rep. Stephanie Borowicz, R-Clinton County, stands on Jesus — and by implication, where she stands on the First Amendment — the answer reverberated throughout the chamber more than a dozen times.

Apparently meant to serve as a kind of holy buffer and a not-so-subtle plea for forgiveness for what was to come later, Borowicz delivered a two-minute prayer that invoked the name of Jesus no less than 13 times and included a bevy of overtly Christian-based words and phrases one might hear at an old-time religion tent revival.

Near the end of the prayer, Borowicz went into full evangelical preacher mode, saying that “every tongue will confess, Jesus, that you are lord,” which drew an “Objection!” from someone in the room. House Speaker Mike Turzai, who looked uncomfortable and, as far as I can tell, barely closed his eyes the whole time, then tapped Borowicz on the shoulder to wrap it up, which she promptly did, no doubt realizing she had gotten carried away.

The big news of the day wasn’t supposed to be the invocation. In a nation where the separation of church and state is routinely blurred, prayers of this type wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows. But the prayer was particularly problematic because the state’s first female Muslim representative, Movita Johnson-Harrell, of Philadelphia, was set to be sworn in immediately after the opening.

It was an important milestone for more diversity in politics that was overshadowed, probably by design, by Borowicz’s overwrought and potentially illegal appeal to heaven — the Christian heaven, that is — that may have violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

This was a public meeting in a public building in a nation that has established religious freedom as one of its founding principles, not just freedom for some believers, but freedom for all believers and all nonbelievers.

While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that open meetings can include sectarian invocations, meaning that they can invoke the specific god of the speaker, they must be reverential and “invite lawmakers to reflect upon shared ideals and common ends” and cannot “denigrate nonbelievers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion,” according to the court’s 5-4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Borowicz careened well over that line.

But beyond the prayer to Jesus, the constitutional issues it raises and the impertinence toward adherents of Islam and to her fellow representative in the House, Borowicz’s breathless support Israel, both as a political entity and a theological mecca that all three Abrahamic religions claim as their own, was both unnecessary and beside the point.

If the goal here was to be incendiary and incite strong negative emotions, the opening succeeded. If the goal was to bring people together in a respectful manner, as invocations should, it failed. I dare say Borowicz was mainly there to preach, honor her religion at the detriment of all others and offer a thinly veiled rebuke of Johnson-Harrell’s swearing-in, no doubt one of the many reasons she asked Jesus for forgiveness.

Notwithstanding the House’s recent flirtation with constitutional impropriety, the chamber has already been taken to court for its policy of only allowing believers to deliver the invocation before meetings. Last year, U.S. Middle District Judge Christopher Conner found that the chamber must give nontheists an opportunity to deliver the opening message. The judge also ruled that the House’s requirement that lawmakers stand during the prayer was unconstitutional.

In short, sectarian prayers are permissible in Pennsylvania, but lawmakers can’t be compelled to participate in them.

I have covered public meetings in which residents have petitioned city and county boards to allow representatives from secular organizations to deliver the invocation as a way to try to get the board to be more inclusive. Believers and nonbelievers alike have quibbled over the sticky issue for years. Trying to appease everyone doesn’t admit to any easy answers.

I realize it might be a radical idea, but the simple solution is to end invocations altogether, start meetings with a polite greeting and quickly move to the public’s business. Invocations, oftentimes abused more for grandstanding than to be reverential or to espouse “shared ideals and common ends” among diverse people, can produce the opposite effect for which they are intended.

People of all faiths, or no faith at all, have freedom to live as they see fit outside of open meetings. Using public forums to offend the religious sensibilities of others does a disservice to Christianity and to democracy.

[Cover image credit: “Prayer” by fbuk.]