The Color of Heroism

Growing up white in an all-white suburb, I didn't have a close friend who was a person of color until I went away to college. In fact, the only person of color I had any contact with prior to college was a woman who came to help my mother with the house cleaning once a week. She treated me as if I were her own child and I loved her in return but, in my family, she was always a domestic servant.

During my childhood (say, between the ages of 5 and 12), the people of color who had a real impact upon me (beyond Carrie, the cleaning woman) were professional athletes. These individuals were heroes to me and their grace, skill, and beauty left an indelible impression. How anyone could consider them to be inferior on account of their race? Professional sports played an important role in my moral education.

In chronological order, my earliest sports heroes were as follows:

First, was the "Great One," the Pittsburgh Pirate right fielder with the golden arm, Roberto Clemente. Clemente's death in 1972 while engaged in a charitable mission to Nicaragua elevated him in my mind (and in the minds of many) to the level of a secular saint.

Second, the poet and wit of the boxing ring and one of the most impressive athletes of the 20th century, Muhammad Ali. His conversion to the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his principled refusal to fight in the Viet Nam war also affected me deeply

Third was Cleveland Brown's running back Leroy Kelly. I began to follow Kelly in the years prior to the rise of the Pittsburgh Steelers to dominance in professional football. Even after the "immaculate reception" of Franco Harris and the victorious run of the Noll years, my loyalty was to the Steelers as a team. I never acquired the same level of admiration for any particular Steeler that I reserved for Cleveland's number 44.

Finally, when I began to "discover" basketball, I also came to admire Johnny Brisker of the ill-fated ABA team, the Pittsburgh Condors. Brisker's later disappearance in Uganda is shrouded in mystery, but seems to have been consistent with the personal intensity and even volatility he exhibited on the court.

I am sensitive to the argument that professional sports is one of the few avenues of economic success available to people of color in the United States--some have called this the "new plantation." I think that, unfortunately, there is an inescapable degree of truth to this argument. But, speaking from personal experience, I can also attest that it was exposure to the careers of these four athletes in particular that made it difficult for me accept racist assertions of black inferiority. All four of these men were clearly superior in many respects to the whites against whom they competed and with whom they played.

Racism is a peculiarly American disease and, for me at least, the ability to witness such individuals in action proved to be part of the antidote.

The War Economy

Just the facts.

Obamney

Obama is a fraud and Romney an idiot. The Presidential campaign season is upon us!

An Editorial Worth Reading

The Aurora Massacre: Once again, evasions rather than explanations

Anxious Days For The Gun Lobby

The aftermath of any mass shooting such as the one that occurred in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, always creates anxiety in the gun lobby. But, fortunately for them, these tragedies occur with such regularity that they have become quite practiced at taking the "high moral ground" and deflecting any criticism of their cherished ideals. You see, at bottom, it really is all about principle. The occasional slaughter of innocents is simply the price one has to pay in order to be true to one's higher vision.

As a result, whenever these events (quite naturally) raise questions in the minds of American citizens about the meaning of the Second Amendment or the wisdom of making assault rifles readily available to American consumers, the position (pose) of weaponry apologists is quite consistent: "Have you no decency? This is not the time to engage in political debate; this is a time to mourn the tragedy..." We sometimes forget that weapons manufacturers, like all corporations (since the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case), are people too. In fact, they are sensitive, poetic types, filled with love and overflowing with compassion for their fellow human beings.

The effectiveness of this strategy is obvious to anyone paying attention: shamed into silence, inquirers and critics alike await a more "appropriate" moment in which to raise their questions and concerns.

But, conveniently for the lobby, that moment is deferred into a future when the public's attentions have been re-focused on whatever the media circus has portrayed as the "next big thing," and the prevailing political discourse carries on with its usual irrelevancies. In this way, a serious national conversation about this most urgent of topics and the delusions of the American electorate (about being in possession not only of a democracy but the greatest democracy the world has ever seen) are efficiently and effectively managed.

Deflect. Defer. Delude. These are the "three D's" of American political discourse in the opening decades of the 21st century. The Ghaffar Khan Society responds to these "three D's" with its own "three R's": Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

The prevailing degree of what we may term "political manipulation through discourse management" reminds us of our Shaykh, Leo Tolstoy, and his novel Resurrection.

There is an episode in that novel that treats of the political radicalization of an individual by the name of Kryltzoff. Prior to his radicalization, Kryltzoff was arrested and jailed for having made a monetary contribution to a political cause concerning which he, personally, was indifferent. While incarcerated, he becomes acquainted with his fellow inmates, including "a Pole, Lozinsky" and a seventeen year old boy, Rozovsky, a Jew. These two were taken off one morning for their trial and when they returned to their cells later in the day they revealed that they had been condemned to death. Tolstoy wrote:

No one had expected it. Their case was so unimportant; they only tried to get away from the convoy, and had not even wounded any one. And then it was so unnatural to execute such a child as Rozovsky. And we in prison all came to the conclusion that it was only done to frighten them, and would not be confirmed. At first we were excited, and then we comforted ourselves, and life went on as before [emphasis added].

This passage speaks so clearly to the present state of American politics: discourse management deceives only those who desire to be deceived. Tolstoy's insight here echoes perfectly Etienne de la Boetie's argument in The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. The American electorate's inability to question the status quo is self-inflicted. We are not a free people because the price of liberty is eternal vigilance (a maxim attributed to Thomas Jefferson) and, long ago, we grew tired of keeping watch.

And, yes, if you have not read Resurrection, it is important that you learn that both Lozinsky and Rozovsky were subsequently executed by hanging.

Kryltzoff, astonishingly, took note and thus came about his political radicalization.

Would that the American electorate could break the cycle of excitement, self-comforting, and status quo.

It is a fond hope, but a hope cherished by the GKS nonetheless.

Then Let Us Go Forth, Together, Armed Only With Our Conscience And Our Higher Vision

"I pledge allegiance to the dream of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic, and to the principles for which it stands: Cosmopolitan, Pluralistic, with Liberty and Justice for All."

In the wake of yet another horrific mass murder, emblematic of our cruciform culture of violence--with its unholy trinity of salvation religion, consumer capitalism, and unbridled militarism--let us pause to consider that lost America of the road less traveled: the America that Whitman sang, that Emerson exhorted us to midwife, that Thoreau constructed in microcosm with his own hands on the shores of Walden Pond. An America that is cosmopolitan and pluralistic: not just for the rich and the white. Not for the violent. Not for the politicians who are willing tools of the rich, the white, and the violent. Not for the preachers of hatred and their religions of "What about me?" salvation ("Get saved!"). In other words, not for those who are presently ascendant in our national culture and political life.

We need new heroes in this country: real heroes--not soldiers who invade foreign nations to do the dirty work of craven oilmen, not Hollywood fantasies like "the Dark Knight." We've had enough of those "heroes." We've seen what trouble they can bring.

We need heroes of reason and deliberation, of curiosity, of generosity and heart. Heroes who understand that the limit to their own freedom is the freedom of others--and who dedicate their lives to discovering the proper balance: this is Liberty. Heroes who understand that Liberty must always be predicated upon Justice, and that Justice is not "what happens when I get my way" (a corollary of "What about me?" salvation religion) but when the Golden Rule triumphs among us. All of us: without regard to race, ethnicity, creed, gender, sexuality or (and, nowadays, perhaps especially) that forgotten element--the unmentionable--socio-economic status.

Poverty is not an accident from which we avert our eyes: it is an injustice. It is the enemy of individual liberty. The poor are not free to pursue their own flourishing. They are, as a practical matter, enslaved. Lyndon Johnson--for all of his faults (and he had many)--got this right when he declared "war" on poverty.

There is room for warfare in our lives: not wars of violence against fellow human beings--"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12).

And low places as well. Indeed, we must wrestle against the dark forces of the self. Salvation religion is popular across this broad land because it promises relief not through effort, not through struggle, but through belief. And anyone can believe anything they like--as it should be. But everyone must be persuaded that not all beliefs are equally true or wholesome. Belief in the "unbelievable" (as the theologian Paul Tillich characterized much of latter-day Christianity) is but a form of selfishness: for it is self-serving self-delusion to think that any salvation worthy of the name can be achieved without effort, without struggle.

Christians must re-dedicate themselves to struggle with the self--not armed struggle against the various external "infidels" that populate many a pious Christian imagination (those "demonic" socialists, secularists, abortionists, sexual minorities, Muslims). Christians must re-dedicate themselves to struggle with the Christian self: that is, to struggle with their whole notion of religion. For, as Rene Girard pointed out long ago, salvation religion that is based upon a substitutionary sacrifice is a religion of scape-goating. And when scape-goating becomes an accepted pillar of one's world view, holocausts result. This is the worm in the apple of the dogma of substitutionary atonement: a dogma that Christians would do well to abandon, once and for all.

Scape-goating is a form of pyschopathology: it is a crude drama of human helplessness and the dark fears that attend such helplessness. Fear must be met with courage, not with sacramental violence against the weak.

Islamophobia is a form of scape-goating; it is, therefore, a form of psychopathology--the psychopathology endemic to and emblematic of the cruciform culture of violence that pervades the United States.

This disease does not infect the Invisible Whitmanian Republic...The Invisible Whitmanian Republic is truly--and tragically--the American road less traveled...

So take the pledge today. Meet your darkest fears with courage. Examine your beliefs and your lives. Examine your religion. And then let us go forth, together, armed only with our conscience and our higher vision.

Once Again, We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us...

Call it “terrorism”