For The Misdirected Love Of Mike

That's President Nixon's birthplace on the City of Yorba Linda lapel pin worn by Mike Duvall, who resigned from the California Assembly today after he was caught speaking on a live microphone about affairs with lobbyists. Mike, whom I've known for nearly 20 years, was a cheerful booster of our city's favorite son who has distributed thousands of the Birthplace pins around the world. Since the Yorba Linda city council member was elected to the Assembly in 2006, whenever I ran into him around town he evinced a boyish exuberance about his work in Sacramento, as though he couldn't quite believe he was there. Now he's not. The facts of the sordid story speak for themselves. His gracious wife Susan will be in my prayers, as indeed will Mike and the voters he let down.

Enough Love To Go Around

The youth of St. John's, fresh from their summer occupations and distractions, gathered tonight for their first weekly meeting of the school year under the loving supervision of our chaplain and youth leader, Patti Peebles, and adult volunteers Daphne Berry, Kathleen Driscoll and Eric Sherman, Dina Kubba, and Paul and Paula Reza. (For fear of scaring them off, I'll preserve the anonymity of the wonderful couple we're hoping to recruit to join them.)

Once a month I have the inestimable blessing of presiding at what we call (well, I call) a Yoot Euch -- a service of Holy Eucharist -- using a paten and chalice Patti and the young people made last year during a visit to Color Me Mine. Tonight we talked about the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite or, not to put too fine a point on it, Palestinian) woman, whose plea on behalf of her daughter Jesus first appears to spurn since she's a Gentile rather than a Jew. When she argues that even the dogs under the master's table usually end up cadging some scraps, Jesus relents, impressed not so much by her faith as her irreducible logic. God obviously cares for all his people, does he not? You don't have to ask the St. John's kids twice.

"Why I Love My Bishop": Sermon for 14 Pentecost

The first time I preached at St. John's, five years ago last weekend, I talked about a Pittsburgh man who had given away most of his fortune and decided it was wrong for him to keep his spare kidney as well -- a cautionary tale, perhaps, for a community being asked to entrust itself to a new pastor (and vice versa). But when our Bishop, J. Jon Bruno, decided that St. John's and I were right for each other, I obeyed cheerfully. A few years earlier, when I felt I'd done nothing right and had nothing left to give, he promised that he knew better. His graciousness was a lifesaver and a life teacher. Often we learn more from such moments than the happier ones. Proclaiming a ministry of civility, community, generosity, moderation, and peace is considerably easier when we have experienced (and promoted) the opposite. My Sunday sermon is here.

Not For Teacher

How did we get to a place where the President can't talk to schoolchildren without provoking a national crisis? In the days leading up to his speech yesterday, I saw a well-dressed suburban mother weeping at the prospect for the TV cameras. Pundits accused him of distracting principals and district officials from their solemn duties on the first day of school. Talk show hosts mined the speech for ideological meta messages and counted the number of times he referred to himself.

It seems axiomatic that certain privileges come with being President. Riding on Air Force One. Throwing out the first pitch. Getting to say things like this to children:

[A]t the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world -- and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That's what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.

How secretly socialist of him. Yes, I know the initial study materials distributed by the White House asked kids to think about what they could do to "help the President" -- which actually doesn't bug me that much, either. I know Congress dogged George H. W. Bush about the cost of his own speech to kids -- which was nothing next to the right's latest Obamaspasm.

What was up? Everyone else has opinion, so here's mine. There were these factors at play:

1) Anxious people. A still-struggling economy, a depressed job market, and parents in an H1N1 A-1 back-to-school tizzy. Congratulations -- we are the richest and most obsessively worried country in human history.

2) Unfamiliar leader. To those who didn't ride the Obama wave, he still may seem aloof and a bit fey. Though I don't always agree with him, I like and admire Obama. But every once in a while, when I see his name or image, I have to pinch myself, only because I didn't know he existed five years ago, he doesn't seem especially familiar yet, but there he is, astride the globe. Over on the fringes with the racists and birthers (and no, I don't equate them), there's a sharp edge that totally creeps me out. Watch this revolting Alan Keyes video and see what I mean about the hard malice of Obama's sternest political foes. Maybe wack job leftists were as scary in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush eras, but I didn't feel as accountable for them as I do some of those who, more often than not, may actually vote as I do.

3) Overreaching administration: Obama can't do much about 1) and 2). But it was his call to go for ontological change in health care. Perhaps he decided that he shouldn't have to trim his sails because of the errors of his predecessors. Perhaps he felt he had a massive mandate. I never did. Perhaps he felt he could sneak his bold reforms through in the generalized enthusiasm about his election and the seemingly undifferentiated consensus that a new approach to national government was needed. But once mass economic panic faded, and with trillions in new spending and future deficits already out the door, the health care effort was bound to get caught in legislative molasses as senators and representatives started hearing from home. We're still a centrist country, as Bill Clinton learned in the 1994 midterms.

If Obama hadn't done 3), would 1) and 2) still have generated the embarrassing spectacle of a popularly elected and well-meaning President having to defend his decision to tell his nation's children to do their homework? When I discussed this with colleagues over breakfast yesterday, a discerning Obama supporter said he suspected the answer was yes. I agree. Obama may end up wishing he hadn't spent so much capital on health care. But the rest of the American people are responsible for managing their corrosive and somewhat narcissistic anxiety. A little British stiff upper lip (if even they still do that) wouldn't be the end of the world. And conservatives? They had better get the lunatic fringe into line, or moderates may decide to go for a long walk.

Sept. 12 note: A reader points out that the creepy Keyes video -- in which the former Presidential candidate called Obama a radical communist and then looked at the camera and said he must be "stopped" -- has been de-YouTubed. Probably best.

Global Songs: "Stop The World And Let Me Off" (1966)

John Doe and the Sadies, performing the Patsy Cline classic in Toronto in 2009.

Spies In The Skies

CIA mapmakers, at your service. This is up to the minute as of 2008. More here.

Egyptian Elan

How cultural authorities in Cairo work to preserve Egypt's rich Jewish heritage without seeming to be too friendly to Jews.

Frankensense

Hat tip to "Huffington Post"

Trippy

From San Francisco to Washington, D.C. in four minutes and 35 seconds

Hat tip to the "Daily Dish"

Imagining An Arab Israel

Just back from a visit to the Middle East along with Desmund Tutu, Jimmy Carter says many Palestinians are taking the long view:

"A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea," Carter wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.

"By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy," he explained. "In this non-violent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela."

Carter noted that in doing so, Palestinian leaders were taking into consideration current demographic trends.

He said non-Jews were already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, "and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority."

Carter says the two-state solution is still preferable. The full text of his Post op-ed is here.

Hat tip to Mike Cheever