Autos de fe

"Clergy Parking Only."

So said the sign marking the space occupied by the 2010 BMW 650i convertible, which retails for around $84,000. While it's theoretically possible that the issue is just that I'm laboring in the wrong stratum of Christendom, prior experience suggests that this vehicle, photographed this morning at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Orange County, where I'd gone to visit a St. John's member after her surgery, belongs to someone who has been called to the vocation associated with the Hippocratic Oath instead of the Nicene Creed.

Saddleback is one of the few hospitals left in our region that provide parking for pastors. One day a couple of months ago, there was a Jaguar in our rank. I visited my patient and then set a stakeout from atop a grassy knoll overlooking the parking lot.

After maybe five minutes, a man came along and walked up to the car. (You may well be wondering how long I would've been willing to wait.) Relying on gifts of discernment that have been carefully honed through years of spiritual discipline, I identified him as a physician. It had something to do with the white coat and stethoscope.

I pounced. Like a Jaguar. Like the Spanish Inquisition.

"Excuse me," I said, "but are you a member of the clergy?"

He saw my collar and knew he was busted. I don't think I'd ever gotten the better of a doctor before. "Sorry," he said. "I had an emergency."

"Me, too," I said. "I won't park in your space if you don't park in mine."

I will cop to a technical violation of Luke 14:8 (the bit about expecting to occupy places of honor). Mea nissan maxima culpa.

Charles Dickens, Liberation Theologian

I suspect we'll be coming back to this perhaps epochal article again and again. Thomas B. Edsall argues that the United States is going through a period unlike any that its citizens, except for the very old, have experienced before. If economic growth remains anemic, tax revenues will as well, and deficits will continue to balloon. At the federal and especially state and local levels in an "age of austerity" and of rediscovered fiscal probity, Edsall argues, competition for scarce government largess will increase. Those with special influence and leverage (such as unions and large corporations) will have an even greater advantage than usual over constituencies, such as illegal immigrants and the poor, who can be easily scapegoated for gobbling up precious taxpayer resources (no matter how small a piece of the budget pie may actually have been set at the table for them).

We can hope that the mighty engine of U.S. productivity and growth (the last best hope of the material world, at least) will reignite and put the lie, as they say, to the doom-and-gloomers. Whether it does or not, it's important for everyone, from the humblest voter to the most exalted legislator, judge, pundit, and policy maker, to remember what the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ proclaimed and the liberation theologians reaffirmed beginning in the 1960s: That God has a special place in his heart for the poor.

So I gave thanks when this passage from Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop came up on my iPod this morning as I drove between pastoral appointments. Those who were amazed a half-century ago to find such powerful faith burning in the darkest slums of Santiago said it no more powerfully. Nor has anyone ever written more beautifully about the roots of true patriotism:

[I]f ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the truer metal and bear the stamp of Heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as part of himself: as trophies of his birth and power; his associations with them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's attachment to the tenements he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a solemn place.

Oh! if those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember this -- if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found -- if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares and great houses, and strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk -- many low roofs would point more truly to the sky, than the loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt, and crime, and horrible disease, to mock them by its contrast. In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years. It is no light matter -- no outcry from the working vulgar -- no mere question of the people's health and comforts that may be whistled down on Wednesday nights. In love of home, the love of country has its rise; and who are the truer patriots or the better in time of need -- those who venerate the land, owning its wood, and stream, and earth, and all that they produce? or those who love their country, boasting not a foot of ground in all its wide domain!

I'm listening to the novel. You can read it on-line here thanks to the University of Virginia.

Andy And Jerry

Tough talk from New York's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Cuomo, possible during a campaign only because his opponent, Carl Paladino, is unelectable. I'm wondering if California's Jerry Brown has the same gumption:

Andrew M. Cuomo will mount a presidential-style permanent political campaign to counter the well-financed labor unions he believes have bullied previous governors and lawmakers into making bad decisions. He will seek to transform the state’s weak business lobby into a more formidable ally, believing that corporate leaders in New York have virtually surrendered the field to big labor.

And even as he girds for war, Mr. Cuomo, the state attorney general and an expert practitioner of political hardball, also plans to lavish attention on individual legislators, who he says are sick of being demonized and eager for accomplishment after years of gridlock and enmity.

"Taliban Catholicism"

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Illegal Immigration Down, Anxiety Up

Thomas B. Edsall argues that in the politics of the coming "age of austerity," the poor will prove to be convenient scapegoats as budgets are cut at all levels of government. Immigration is a harbinger of the trend:

The rise of illegal immigration as an issue this cycle doesn’t correspond to material facts. The number of aliens pouring across the border is not increasing. On the contrary, the recession and improved enforcement have drastically reduced it. What is increasing is anxiety about resource competition. And that’s exactly why immigrants cause so much agitation: They are perceived by many voters as one giant, undeserving resource suck. In June, Gallup asked, “Which comes closer to your point of view, illegal immigrants in the long run become productive citizens and pay their fair share of taxes, or illegal immigrants cost taxpayers too much by using government services like public education and medical services?” Among all voters, 62 percent perceived immigrants as a resource drain. Among Republicans, the number concurring with that dim assessment rose to 78 percent. You’ll often hear Republican immigration proposals—rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship, for instance—dismissed as political suicide. I would argue that it shows the GOP’s astute understanding of the new zeitgeist.

Picking And Grinning

Picking his mandolin, Levon Helm's smile is the soul of music. I hope it may give some pleasure or comfort to visitors to my office at St. John's. It's a birthday gift from my musical buddy Gary Baker, who took the picture during a recent performance in Washington state by Helm and his Midnight Ramble show band.

Poor Coxswain

The GOP is expected to fare poorly in New York, and the party chairman's expected to get the blame.

Halloweek Begins

Kathy and I just discovered a street in Yorba Linda where the grownups dig Halloween even more than the kids. Don't tell anyone (it reduces the sheer intensity of the scariness) but the ghoul at left is Frank Amato, a doctor and volunteer docent at the Nixon library. I think he was meaning to flash a Nixonian V-for-victory sign, but he couldn't because he was holding a Snickers bar in one hand and a fake cocktail in the other.

Frank and his wife live on a cul-de-sac where the residents were dressed as witches, Na'vi, outlaw bikers, and giant pumpkins, dispensing candy by the fistful. One driveway had an inflatable Christmas merry-go-round next to a caped, hooded skeleton hauling a jack o'lantern in a chariot.

It's two months early for Christmas, sure. But a week early for Halloween. On our street a block or two away, we've had fewer trick-or-treaters every year. We weren't sure if it was a national decline owing to heightened parental anxiety (apparently not), evidence of concerns among evangelical Christians about pagan chochanals on All Hallows Eve, or maybe just our reputation as a dark, scary old people's block.

Now we think it's because of the annual spook night at our community center, which Kathy and I had never attended before. Although uncostumed, we participated on our afternoon walk. They had game booths, a pumpkin patch, and a petting zoo, where two lovely princesses were vying for sovereignty over a rabbit. At at dusk, parents led a costumed kids parade halfway around the lake to denude Dr. Amato's block of sugary combustibles. They'll be so full of Reese's and Butterfingers that they might not bother coming to our house on the real Halloween. That's okay. Leaves more for us!

Why We Need The Last Comma In A Series

Its proponents include Andrew Sullivan (who gets the hat tip), Strunk and White, and Jeff Weintraub. Remove the comma after "White," and you see the problem; sheer chaos (semicolon comes in hand, too).

Forever Blue?

Californians just aren't tea drinkers. A new poll suggests that the governor's mansion is well out of reach for Republican Meg Whitman, while the GOP's Carly Fiorina remains eight points behind in her bid for the Senate. The LA Times:

Most of the nation has seen pronounced enthusiasm by Republican voters as the midterm elections approach. In California, however, Democrats have gained strength and GOP motivation has ebbed slightly in the last month, the poll showed. The current standings represent a reassertion of a more typical profile for the state after an election year convulsed by a foundering economy, widespread discontent about the future and record-breaking spending by Whitman, who has dropped more than $141 million of her own money into her campaign.

The Times analysis says that Gloria Allred sank Whitman by holding press conferences featuring a woman who had lied about her immigration status to get a housekeeping job with Whitman and her husband. Nobody cares much for Allred and her tactics (excepting, of course, Mr. Allred and their pets), but if such an obvious setup was enough to upset a candidate's standing with a whole bloc of voters, then she was standing near quicksand already.

The fact is that Republicans have broken their picks with California's Latinos. Some blame former Gov. Pete Wilson. I remember (this was in my Nixon library days) taking a walk with him from his office to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and listening as he complained about the bad rap he said he'd received for supporting an anti-illegal immigrant measure, Prop. 187, when it and he were on the ballot together in 1994. It's true he won reelection. But the GOP has been in especially bad odor with Latino voters ever since.

I'd guess that Wilson, and others in his brain trust who have been advising Whitman, played a part in her shrewd if dangerous decision during the primary campaign to resist veering to the right on immigration by endorsing the Arizona law. Her more overt outreach to Latinos came next. That her housekeeper has evidently cleaned her clock so thoroughly means that if it wants to win, the GOP has a lot more hard work to do with voters who think, rightly or wrongly, they're being scapegoated.