September 19, 2008 by djackson.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. - Revelation 6.8

I’m not going to say who I’m voting for, mostly because I still don’t know myself. But I do wish to make two observations about the upcoming election.

1. John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin is not reason enough to vote Republican.

2. The liberal establishment’s treatment of Sarah Palin just might be.

Just a couple of pop-culture observations. First: standing in line at the local HEB the other day I noticed a couple of magazines in the impulse rack. Both were slick-paper jobs, pitched to the popular market, something on the level of “People” or “Good Housekeeping.” One featured a photo of Barak Obama, his strikingly handsome wife and his two beautiful daughters. The headline said something about his family being his strength. The other showed Ms. Palin and hinted darkly at new “revelations,” with bullet-points about dark secrets suddenly unearthed. Second: reading the Sunday comics I came across the strip “Luanne” by Greg Evans. Two teenagers are shopping and one asks the other if she ever thinks about her future. The friend, who is African American, replies in the affirmative, noting that so many possibilities lie open to her. “Barak and Hillary proved that,” she observes. Well, at the moment one possibility lies open to Sarah that does not lie open to Ms. Clinton.

And then of course there’s the SNL skit. A recent article in the New York Times quotes head writer and cast member Mike Meyer’s observation that “the trick with all of these people is to try to come out as fair and evenhanded as possible.” He goes on to give it as his opinion that having a Hillary Clinton impersonator as part of the sketch “made it safer to mention things about Sarah Palin without making it seem like an attack piece.” As far as I can tell (I haven’t seen the whole thing, only snippets), the bit consisted of the faux-Clinton scoring points off ditzy statements from the pseudo-Palin. Calling that balanced is like saying a rape is fair because the sexes are equally represented. Mr. Meyers himself described Governor Palin’s professed enjoyment of the skit as “weird,” so plainly he realized it was a one-sided hack job. Not to mention the interesting choice of having their Palin impersonator duke it out with a Hillary stand-in when Hillary isn’t one of the options . . . by Barack Obama’s own choice.

Now, all of this gives me two reasons for voting Republican that I would not otherwise have.

First of all, the left has shown its hole card and that card turns out to be the fifth ace. What I mean is this: both sides in this election bark about their support for the middle class, about how in touch they are with Joe Sixpack, Walmart shoppers, and Soccer Moms (or Hockey Moms, with or without lipstick - or was that a pig?). But the Democratic reaction to Sarah Palin reveals the reality beneath (way, way beneath) the rhetoric. As columnist William Kristol observed, John McCain “didn’t just pick a politician who could appeal to Wal-Mart Moms. He picked a Wal-Mart Mom.” And the liberals immediately tore into her like a shark on a seal pod. She’s from a small town! (As opposed to simply stopping at one and drinking coffee with the locals before moving on.) She hunts! (As opposed to just strapping on a khaki vest and Elmer Fudd hat to blast a few rounds over the heads of the press corps.) She goes to church regularly and takes her faith seriously! (As opposed to tacking “God bless America” onto the end of a speech.) We’ve never heard of her! (As opposed to a candidate who simultaneously claims to be an outsider and to be a known quantity.)

Now, I’m not saying that any of those things means that Governor Palin would make a good VP or, potentially, president. What I’m saying is this: I don’t live in a major city. I know lots of people who hunt, though the passtime never really appealed to me. My church and my faith are central rather than peripheral to my daily life. Nobody’s ever heard of me. If you want to know what the left thinks of people like you and me, look at how they actually treat one when it becomes possible that such a person might enter a place of power. The left loves the middle class the way kings love subjects or scientists love lab rats- raw material, not as equals. Sarah Palin is the tumbril at the gate of the Bastille of liberal elitism, and les aristos are not best pleased.

Second, there’s this: in an election where neither candidate really offers much of a significant choice, I’m left with a final criterion for voting: what will hack off the media establishment the worst? For a while Barak Obama was running right up there. For two days he kept the news networks frothing and panting like dogs whose master holds up a treat, waiting to hear whom he would pick as his running mate. And then he went over their heads and texted his pick straight to his constituency! It was a thing of beauty, telling the Cerebrus of print, television and blogosphere that he didn’t need them, that they could all go chase their collective tail. But then McCain goes and picks someone the journalistic establishment never heard of. To quote William Kristol again,

They’re offended that McCain picked Palin without, so to speak, consulting them. The establishment media take pride in their role as gatekeeper to our political process and social discourse.

So the gatekeeper media’s reaction has been: Who is Sarah Palin to suddenly show up on the national stage? We didn’t vet her. And we don’t approve of her.

So it begins to look as if electing Sarah Palin vice president would make the media angrier by far than electing Barack Obama. She’s not so much a dark horse as, in the eyes of the latte left, the pale horse of death itself, an apocalyptic messenger sent to tell them that they don’t rule the world. And with Ron Paul out of contention, that could just be reason enough.

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September 3, 2008 by djackson.

I met Jesus a while back. He thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt.

Turns out the Son of God is crazy as a bedbug and hasn’t been taking his medication. I’m not being blasphemous; I’m being biblical.

For a while now I have been spending some of my Sunday nights worshiping at a downtown ministry that caters primarily to the homeless. “The Station” was established by Tony Celelli, now President of the South Texas School of Christian Studies, back when he served on staff at the Second Baptist Church of Corpus Christi. These days my pastor Grover Pinson and Ryan Pflughaupt, one of our seminary students, run the place. I can’t say for sure what has led me there beyond the proximate cause of some very convicting presentations by our chapel speakers last semester.

Anyway, back to Jesus. One night a few months ago my younger son and I stood behind the counter serving soup when a tall, skeletal man swaggered up with a smile on his face and informed me, with a conspiratorial wink, that he was, in fact, our 26th President. I think he was also the target of a CIA conspiracy and just possibly one of the archangels. I didn’t quite take it all in because to tell the truth his rap rattled me and his smell so overpowered one of my senses that the other four had to stand down.

I found Ryan and in sotto vocce passed along the information. His face fell as he said, “Oh, that’s Uncle Riley. He must be off his pills.”

But it was Jesus.

Our Lord warned us that he would show up in the person of the physically challenged and the mentally damaged, the poor and the pungent, hungry and the crazy. Serious Christians through the centuries have taken Christ seriously at this point. C. S. Lewis tells the story of a European pastor who once saw Hitler in person. This man had suffered much at the hands of the Nazi dictator but when Lewis asked, “What did he look like?” the minister responded, “Like all men. That is, like Christ.”

Walter Miller, Jr., in his science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, describes an encounter between a scholar and a priest. The intellectual argues for the unredeemable corruption of humanity and illustrates his position by pointing out a peasant in the filthy street below his balcony.

Look at him! No, but it’s too dark now. You can’t see the syphilis outbreak on his neck, the way the bridge of his nose is being eaten away. But he was undoubtedly a moron to begin with. Illiterate, superstitious, murderous. He diseases his children. For a few coins he would kill them. He will sell them anyway, when thy are old enough to be useful. Look at him and tell me if you see the progeny of a once-mighty civilization? What do you see?

“The image of Christ,” the priest replies.

It bothers me when Christ insists on meeting me with a mental computer so infested with spyware that programming means nothing. I often feel that all I have to give is words, thoughts, intellect, so I find myself helpless before these particular demons. I turn to my Master and ask peevishly, “Why was I powerless?”

A dear friend challenged me on this point recently. She is Good Christian, but a swearing, drinking Good Christian. She reminds me of what Captain Peleg tells Ishmael about Ahab: “a good man – not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man – something like me.” My friend, poking gentle fun at the spotless cuirass of my evangelical piety, invoked the story of the Rich Young Ruler. “Wonder what Jesus would ask of you? Of me?” she mused. “You and I are contemplative enough to have little trouble giving away our (limited) material possessions, but wonder if we would part with our intelligence?”

I wouldn’t. In fact, I remembered a specific instance when I didn’t. I once participated in a “Walk to Emmaus.” If you’re not familiar, this is a weekend retreat ministry founded by the Methodists. Apparently participants are not supposed to talk about the program – sorta like telling people in advance how the magician really got the rabbit out of the hat. Well, I’ll avoid plot-spoilers. The point is (as I only realized later) that the whole thing is structured to minimize, and even completely efface, differences in intellect and education. So they put me in an environment where none of my reading and writing came into play. We had to make mobiles out of wire hangers and old magazines and perform dumb little youth camp skits. These were things that a high school drop out could do just as well as a doctoral candidate – AND I HATED IT! I went away sad that weekend because I had “many trophies.” Jesus might have been there, I don’t know – and I didn’t care. I just wanted out.

When Henri Nouwen left a career of teaching at Ivy League universities and became a chaplain at L’Arche, a community of profoundly mentally retarded men and women. He suddenly discovered that his vast intellect counted for nothing when a resident advised him not to offer another resident meat at dinner because “he’s a Presbyterian.”

Uncle Riley cum Teddy Roosevelt cum Jesus had little use for my knowledge of Greek roots or theories of atonement. He would end up being arrested for his own protection and sent to a hospital where they would fatten his synapses on pills until his personality pulled itself together. All I had was eye contact, a handshake, and a bowl of soup.

But somehow in that moment I heard Jesus speak through the words of one of his Old Testament prototypes. When Joseph’s brothers appear before him in Egypt he decides to mess with their repressed Freudian guilt. He tells them that ten out of eleven does not comprise a quorum. As Reuben later retails the conversation to their father Jacob, “The man solemnly warned us, ‘You shall not see my face unless your brother is with you.’”

The Uncle Riley’s of this world thankfully do not constitute the majority. Each one needs a staggering amount of care so we require a high ratio of the stable to the unstable. But these damaged goods do stand for the beloved sons and daughters, the children of God’s dotage by the spouse without spot or wrinkle. Next Sunday as the band strikes up the opening chords, look around you for Teddy Roosevelt. Unless our brother is with us, we will not see Christ’s face.

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