Author: albrooke

A Hard and Heavy Thing

Posted on by albrooke

26542105Matthew I. Hefti’s A Hard and Heavy Thing is the best novel I have read in 2016.

AHAHT is the story of three friends, two men and a woman, who struggle in situations dangerous, terrifying and mundane.  It is written with a gritty wide-eyed realism, but conveys deep compassion for the flawed characters.

No spoilers here, but the narrator (Levi) self-consciously looks back on his history with Nick and Eris, and the choices which led two of them to enlist in the Army.  The story lurches back and forth between third-person narrative and Levi’s direct discourse to the reader, who fills in for Nick.

The back-and-forth is purposely a little clumsy, which works beautifully to further the author’s artistic aims.

Highly recommended.

Changing the Past?

Posted on by albrooke

Three quotations on changing the past:

26542105[He] thought, even if it was not true that he was a hero, perhaps it was true that he was not a criminal or a failure.  The possibility existed for him that the past was mutable — that he might have a new truth, a new narrative that was truer than his own tortured memory.  For the first time, he realized how subjective it all was and how the past was not as inviolable as he had come to believe.

Matthew Hefti, A Hard and Heavy Thing 207 (2016).

Now for you and me it may not be that hard to reach our dreams,
But that magic feeling never seems to last.
And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

Jackson Browne, ”Fountain of Sorrow,” Late for the Sky (1974).

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
   All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” l. 1-10, Four Quartets (1943).

The Man in the High Castle

Posted on by albrooke

This is not entirely true, of course, but a provocative thought, nonetheless:

“We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.”

61BMpmDw23LPhilip K.Dick, The Man in the High Castle 260.

Indeed the truth is that too often, knowing perfectly well what is moral, we find that we do not choose to do it. See Romans 7:18b-19 ESV (“For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.“)*

PKD’s quotation does remind us, however, that our choices are obscured by our inability to perfectly perceive reality — we have very imperfect knowledge about many of the choices we have to make — and yet we still must make them.

Paul goes on to explain the only escape from this dilemma:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Romans 7:21b-25a ESV.  Only Jesus delivers.

And so we should pray for guidance from the one whose perfect knowledge and perfect love are necessary for correct decisions in life and in less momentous choices like elections.

RIP GOP?

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot164Alan Jacobs writes this recent post:

“My friend Ross Douthat disagrees, mostly, with Avik Roy’s contention that the Republican Party is dead, but by contrast I suspect that Roy is too optimistic. He thinks that some kind of renewed GOP will eventually rise from the ashes, but I doubt that. I don’t think that the rise of Trump marked the end of the Republican Party as we know it, but rather that the party’s incoherent and brainlessly reflexive responses to Trump, whether positive or negative, were the equivalent of the last few electrochemical twitches of a corpse. The current donor base will pay for one or two more decades of artificial respiration, but no more, and I suspect that as early as 2024 the GOP will be completely irrelevant to American politics, at least at the national level.

At that point we’ll still have a two-party system, but the two parties will be the Neoliberal and the Socialist — basically, the two main wings of the current Democratic Party. And I’m not sure that, when that happens, we’ll be any worse off than we are now.

Alan Jacobs, “Two parties,” Snakes and Ladders (July 25, 2016) [link].  (That last line may be fairly discouraging to many, but I think AJ means it to be encouraging — it is not going to be much worse.)

Jacobs is referring to an article in Vox about Republican strategist Avik Roy’s dismal predictions regarding the GOP:

“The work of conservative intellectuals today, [Roy] argues, is to devise a new conservatism — a political vision that adheres to limited government principles but genuinely appeals to a more diverse America.

“I think it’s incredibly important to take stock,” he says, “and build a new conservative movement that is genuinely about individual liberty.”

Zack Beauchamp, “A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die,” Vox (July 25, 2016) [link].

I think believers can pray that an American political party will rise from the ashes that is committed to social justice as well as limited government.  I wonder what it will be called?  Compassionate Realism?

“Dummy” candidates

Posted on by albrooke

(or Why I can’t leave the Republican Party, yet)

It makes sense that political parties choose their own candidates — until it doesn’t.

ScreenShot142In American politics, parties usually choose their candidates by primary voting and then each party’s  winner competes in the general election.  Everyone can vote in the general election, but usually only party members can vote in the primary.* This is plausible, in that fairness suggests that each party should have a chance at self-definition.**

Nevertheless, historically, there have been many times in which belonging to the minority party was tantamount to self-disenfranchisement.  If you belonged to Party A, you could certainly vote in the general election, but the winner might be a foregone conclusion if Party A accounted for only a small percentage of the electorate.  In such circumstances, the pragmatic strategy would be to join  Party B so as to have a say in the primary election (where there might be two relatively strong candidates) rather than wait for an essentially meaningless general election.

In order to avoid this situation, there are times when primaries are open, such as when Party B puts up no candidate at all.  In that situation, everyone can vote in the primary.***

Unless.

Unless someone runs a write-in campaign and thus gets on the ballot for the general election.

That is actually occurring in Duval County in 2016, in two very important races — for State Attorney and for Public Defender.   The incumbent State Attorney and incumbent Public Defender have highly publicized problems, mostly self-caused. These problems brought strong, well-qualified Republican opponents into each race.

However, in order to “protect” the incumbents, sham write-in candidates (“dummy candidates”) have entered the races to close the Republican primaries.

So I’ll keep my “R” until after the local primaries — these races are too important (and the choices are too clear) to stand on the sideline.  My Trump-exit will have to wait.

*Open primaries, as are held in some circumstances, allow voting without regard to party affiliation.

**Most people would agree that it would be “unfair” for the Tea Party supporters at a University to all join the College Democrats and take over the College Democrats’ platform so as to undermine the “real” Democratic agenda.  (It might not seem so unfair for the Tea Party group to try this with the College Republicans.)

***In Florida, we actually have a Constitutional provision to assure this. Florida Constitution, Article VI, Sec. 5(b) [link] (“If all candidates for an office have the same party affiliation and the winner will have no opposition in the general election, all qualified electors, regardless of party affiliation, may vote in the primary elections for that office.“)

****I know some lifelong Democrats who are going to change temporarily, too.  It is actually pretty easy, but needs to be done soon.

Two “whys” . . .

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot164Two interesting short reads, each a welcome break from the relentlessly depressing political news:

Richard Gilbert, “Why I Hate My Dog,” Longreads (July 2016) [link] is a well-written analysis of the (animal and human) psychology of one man and his rescue dog.

At 22 pounds, she’s too heavy for a lapdog. She’s ambivalent about cuddling anyway. We’re seldom inclined to offer much physical affection, given her peculiar odor, an intermittent acidic stink, especially pungent when she’s hot from running.

Jon Stokes, “Why I ‘Need’ an AR-15,” Medium (June 14) [link] explains something of the point of the style of gun used in more than a few domestic shootings.  As Stokes concedes, it may not change any minds, but if you want to understand the thought process behind the ownership of such weapons by normal people, this is a good start:

[T]his article is for the genuinely curious — those who assume that 5 million of their fellow Americans are not inhuman or insane, and who want to understand what set of rationales, no matter how flawed and confused they may ultimately turn out to be, could make an otherwise normal person walk out of a gun store with an “assault weapon.”

Not funny, but . . .

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot164I am well aware that the problem itself is not funny, but Michael Brendan Dougherty is managing to make our apparent 2016 Election choices pretty amusing by saying things like:

You know that Donald Trump is an unstable imbecile. But this knowledge doesn’t oblige you to discover new qualities in the bottomlessly cynical, power-mad grifter Hillary Clinton.

Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The existential despair of Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump,” The Week (June 9, 2016) [link].  Dougherty:

You might also feel some pressure to suck it up and vote for “the lesser of two evils.” Well, I have a simple message for you: Don’t.

Don’t let anyone steal that disgust from your heart. It is a precious thing. You should treasure your disgust as a sign of your decency, particularly because hardly anyone else will. Don’t let anyone tell you that the nearly uncontrollable urge to retch at the thought of this election is disproportionate, or somehow uncivil. When you contemplate the fate of your country in 2016, you have the right to be depressed, or even despairing.

Read the whole article and and laugh a little and then remember that “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.” Psalm 2:4.

No reason to despair.

No political options

Posted on by albrooke

ScreenShot164Another thought piece on why believers may simply have to sit out the 2016 presidential election, this one by Alan Noble:

There are no good political options for evangelical Christians in 2016, but we have a critical opportunity to stand by the convictions we have proclaimed and to do so in a way that offers other Americans an alternative political imagination, one committed to principled pluralism, to the flourishing of local communities, and to the common good.

Alan Noble, “Evangelicals like me can’t vote for Trump ∼ or Clinton.  Here’s what we can do instead,” Vox (June 7, 2016) [link].

We better be praying, people.