Jersey Girl

            When Governor Chris Christie ordered that flags on state office buildings be flown at half-mast this past Saturday, there was grumbling in and out of the Garden State. “Whitney Houston doesn’t deserve this,” said one group of indignant Tweeters. “We only drop the flag half-way down the pole when members of the military, or official leaders, or first responders pass to the other side.” Another group’s tweets were even more concise, “We don’t honor drug addicts.”

            The governor held firm. While acknowledging that Whitney might not have been a perfect role model, she was still a “daughter of New Jersey” and her cultural impact on the state was huge. “I am disturbed by people who believe that because of her … history of substance abuse that somehow she forfeited the good things she did in her life,” said the governor during a press briefing. “I just reject that on a human level.”  On Saturday, the day of Houston’s private funeral in Newark, the state’s flags were flown at half-mast.

            The fact that the Republican governor of an urban state stood up against Houston’s detractors is a very good sign. For forty years Republicans (and some Democrats) have relentlessly vilified a certain class of drug users even as they cut social services for the poor. Crack, in particular, was used to justify a dramatic restructuring of government spending. Rather than provide urban neighborhoods with garbage service and good schools, politicians just needed to say, “crack,” and the money flowed into profitable prison contracts. But allegations of crack didn’t just funnel money into upstate prisons, it also legitimated private economic development on a very grand scale. State money would not go to the undeserving, the homeless, the families in public housing, because those people all did drugs. Rather, state money would go to the building of convention centers and airports and parking garages, where a different class of drug users could indulge in reckless high finance and no one would say, “shame on you.”

            Houston’s funeral was in Newark, the city of her birth. During her lifetime, its manufacturing base disappeared, social services dried up and a massive airport lured coach and business class travelers out of New York. Going to London? Fly out of Newark! “It’s so much easier to get out of Newark,” said my Northern New Jersey mother-in-law in the eighties. “Just don’t get lost on your way to the airport,” she cautioned. “You might never get out of some of those neighborhoods.”

            “That’s the plan,” I told her. She thought I was talking about dangerous drug dealers who would hold her dear son and his difficult young wife for ransom. I didn’t correct her. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Margaret Thatcher was in 10 Downing Street. “Governments will no longer protect the people,” they said with great confidence. “Governments will provide resources for Big Business.”

“But wait,” said the people, “aren’t you guys running democracies, English-speaking democracies for that matter? Isn’t the point of all this freedom-rhetoric that government protects the people?”

The Neoliberal Monarchs had a ready-answer. “Big Business doesn’t use drugs, it doesn’t waste its resources. Only Big Business can provide a healthy future. The people, unfortunately, have a drug habit and do not deserve our protection. If they suffer from our new economic development policies, they have only themselves to blame.” My mother-in-law completely agreed.

Forty years later, there are miserable conditions in the inner cities and swanky convention centers near international airports. There is also a high degree of heartlessness in the land. “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times,” said NBC’s Brian Williams to Governor Perry during a presidential debate and the conservative audience erupted in glee. “Should we let a thirty-year old without health insurance just die?” asked another moderator at the CNN/Tea Party Debate in September. Before Ron Paul could answer, a member of the audience yelled, “Yes!” Again the crowd cheered. The beneficiaries of neoliberal policies don’t have any qualms about exposing its cruel side.

An argument could be made that Christie can afford to defend Houston because he is not running for the highest office in the land. One could also say that neoliberal leaders usually get the white middle-class to do the dirty work of hate while they remain looking noble at the top. But as the crowds get more brazen in their heartlessness, some leaders are starting to look nervous. It’s hard to look noble when your constituency is made up of thugs.

Meanwhile, in Newark, one of America’s most promising leaders has devised an economic program to end homelessness. Mayor Cory Booker’s ten-year plan puts the creation of permanent housing at the top of the city’s agenda. Not airports, not highways, not convention centers, but neighborhoods where people actually want to live. Rather than wasting money on emergency shelters, Booker wants to create an environment in which a young girl who sings in the Baptist choir can walk down the sidewalk without ducking bullets, can step into a grocery store with fresh New Jersey vegetables, and can easily love herself because her community was loved.

As far as I can tell, people take drugs to feel the love the world denies them. By targeting certain communities as undeserving of public love, neoliberal economic policies cultivated the conditions for drug use. By creating a class of people to hate (drug users), these same policies created a nation of haters who cheer at executions and want the uninsured to die young. It’s not a pretty picture.

So kudos to Governor Christie! May all the flags fly at half-mast until we stop wasting lives, wasting neighborhoods, wasting topsoil for airports and convention centers. May the national banners flutter at that mid-way point until we are moved more by the sound of an extraordinary woman’s voice, by the beauty of gospel culture, than by the mob’s manipulated urge to hate.

A Valentine Without Chocolate

Years ago, when I worked at a battered women’s shelter, Valentine’s Day was observed with a good deal of skepticism. Coming shortly after Superbowl Sunday – a day when shelters around the country brought in extra workers to handle the brutal aftermath of fan disappointment – Valentine’s Day seemed made for the batterer. The women, who had come to the shelter out of desperation, who had shared their stories with other football refugees, who were beginning to see that another life was possible, were at just that point in their recovery where they had healed enough to forget the pain of two weeks ago. And then came this revelry in romance, the ubiquitous rose and red satin and chocolates everywhere. Even with a restraining order, it was hard to resist the seduction of Valentine’s Day.

But Valentine’s Day or not, brutal relationships have their own form of seduction. The master says to the slave, “I own you,” and the slave finds a strange comfort in being owned. Aristotle pointed out years ago that there are some men, by nature, “who are capable of becoming the property of another.” European conquerors used his natural slave argument to enslave native peoples across the planet, but that’s not how I read this passage. The natural slave is someone who prefers to have someone else make his decisions; who, when given the choice of freedom, would rather be ruled. Unlike institutionalized slavery, which is what we would call the American practice of enslaving Africans and their descendants, natural slavery is an inside job. The habit of being ruled creates a disposition for servitude.

Where there is a natural slave there is also a natural master, a person who gets his needs met by ruling another person. Put them together and the natural master and the natural slave have a symbiotic relationship. The slave does as the master directs, thus avoiding the difficulty of having to think through things on his own. The master gets to rule without acknowledging that he can’t meet his own needs; he has the slave to do that for him. Aristotle scorned both the master and the slave for taking up roles that limited their capacity to grow. Each member of a political community, he wrote over two thousand years ago, must take turns ruling and being ruled. A democracy cannot work, he told us, when peopled by masters and slaves.

            It’s not just abusive relationships that seduce us away from life in a political community. Our relationship to the earth is marked with all the indignities of the master/slave relationship. We are a race of masters who believe we know what is best for the animals, plants, and soil. We cut off her mountains and ejaculate chemicals into natural gas reserves. Like all masters, we dismiss our needs and focus on our magnificent will. We will have her. We will bend her to our desires, which, after all is why she is there in the first place.

            Historically, slaves have had an easier time making the shift to political life than their tyrannical masters. Once slaves start to organize, they start ruling themselves. They make decisions, they consider other options, they come up with strategies, and, voilà! – they no longer act as slaves. Having spent much of their life being ruled, however, they don’t give up on that part of the equation. They just ask that when they are ruled, they be ruled well.

Masters, on the other hand, have difficulty organizing because they are accustomed to getting their way. Their knees are stiff and not accustomed to bend. They don’t know how to compromise. Tyranny has also distracted them from their terrible feelings of insecurity; masters keep slaves around in order to mask their terrifying dependency. For all these reasons, masters have a hard time seeing the benefits of living in a political community. They are too scared to risk being ruled.

            As if the earth itself was conspiring to ease us out of the master/slave relationship, the world’s chocolate supply is at great risk. Brazil, which during the eighties was supposed to be the world’s greatest producer of chocolate, lost its dominant market share almost overnight because of disease.  In West Africa, where most of the world’s chocolate is currently produced, thirty to forty percent of the harvest is lost to disease. Add climate change and poor farming practices to the mix and suddenly the endless supply of chocolate seems less secure.

            But maybe a chocolate scarcity will free us from the seductions of the master/slave relationship. “I’ll never do it again,” is less convincing without chocolate. “I can give you whatever you want,” is less palatable without the magic of the cocoa bean. Without the crutch of chocolate, the master/slave dichotomy may give way to a political community where people, the remaining cocoa plants, and the mastectomied mountains all take turns ruling and being ruled.

Muy Emocionante

            A nice way to begin a critical inquiry into the present moment is to set up a timeline. All it takes is a piece of paper and marker and voilà, the investigator is ready to go. Important dates are duly noted and major events arranged in chronological order. As more information gathers on the timeline, trends start to emerge. Some of those trends can be reassuring, others not so much. But the researcher presses on, determined to better understand what some theorists call “the direction of the present.”

            In her book on the transition to democracy in post-Pinochet Chile, anthropologist Julia Paley describes the effectiveness of timelines as a political tool. The residents of one of Santiago’s poorer neighborhood gathered to plot major events in Chile’s political history. September 11, 1973 was a big date; the day President Allende was overthrown by the military and General Pinochet came to power. But there were other dates: When squatters first settled in the abandoned field of a hacienda, when the government promised to set up a clinic and a school, when a park was approved by the neighborhood council, when the national government abandoned public services in favor of structural adjustment programs. As the timeline became more detailed, the residents began to see how, over time, they had come to expect less and less of their government. They also saw how many times the government had reneged on promises. The timeline became an important tool to mobilize the neighborhood.

            But not all visual aids inspire political action. There is a type of graph, one that plots exponential growth, that can take most of the oxygen out of the room. A first cousin to the timeline, environmentalists call this type of graph, “hockey stick,” referring to the shape of the line itself. Map global population from 1800 to 2012 and you’ll get a hockey stick lying on its side. From 1800 to 1950, the line runs pretty flat. Then in the mid-1950s, the number of people on earth rushes skyward, from 2 billion to over 7 billion in fifty years. If you map the number of species going extinct over time, you’ll get another hockey stick to the noggin.

            Which is exactly what these graphs do; they bang us over the head with a direction of the present that seems way too fast and way too big to deal with. With human population rising at a tremendous rate and biodiversity disappearing almost as fast, it’s hard to find the energy to do anything. “I guess we’re f___’ed,” is how one audience member described it, after a lecture at Marlboro’s Graduate Center a few years back. He had just been hockey struck.

            Besides global population and species extinction, another hockey stick is incarceration rates for African-American men without high school degrees. In the 18-34-age category, we see a big spike in the incarceration rate beginning in the 1980’s. At that time, less than ten percent of that population was behind bars. Now it hovers around 40 percent.

            But here’s an interesting twist: show an audience the population and extinction graphs and they’ll just want to go home and cry. Show an audience the incarceration rates and chances are good some will want to mobilize around prison reform. In other words, some graphs provoke, and some just numb.

            Interestingly enough, timelines have the advantage of generating more political energy because they require more work to read. Members of the Santiago neighborhood looked hard at the information plotted along their x-axis and then hypothesized about possible trends. The timeline provided the stuff of political narratives, suggesting plot lines where bravery wins briefly against corruption and considers future opportunities for resistance. Graphs, on the other hand, control the story. “Look where that line is going!” we say to ourselves, as if we were not involved.

            I’m thinking about this because on Wednesday evening I’ll be speaking at Landmark College about species extinction and population growth and I don’t want to take the oxygen out of the room. The hockey sticks are there, floating above my timeline like celestial visitors, playing the role of Fate and Fortune. In this new 21^st century, the direction of the present is haunted by their undeniable facts. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have choices in how we go forward.

            For instance, population growth may not be as horrible as some Vermonters dread. The second time we walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, it was a holy year. The saint’s day fell on a Sunday, making the indulgences we received for our blisters worth far more in papal heaven. With greater value came bigger crowds, particularly for the last hundred kilometers of the journey. The refugios were full and used toilet paper littered the fields just outside the villages. “Look at all the people!” I said to a schoolteacher from Madrid, thinking she would share my distress. “Sí,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “Es muy emocionante.”

            For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, my Madrileña guide was teaching me that life is more exciting when there are more people to share it with. Where I saw toilet paper, she saw the pulsating energy of pilgrims.

Almost 8 billion of us are on pilgrimage now, filling up all available beds, in prison and out, scattering our waste across the planet’s fields. Our collective timeline reminds us of promises that were broken and plans we still cherish. What ever happened to that park by the river? Why does so much public money go towards prisons instead of playgrounds? How did we inherit these choices? With more people participating, the timeline is rich with details, the trends more obvious. Oh right, we tell ourselves, that’s what we wanted back then.

This is our story, made step by step, even with blisters, even with fewer species by our side.

The Hokey-Pokey Hen

Congress is considering whether to pass a bill that will expand the size of commercial hen housing. H.R. 3798, which amends the Egg Products Inspection Act, would do away with those wire cages, where eight chickens are crammed into a container, unable to scratch their heads or turn around. If Congress passes this bill, layers would have bars on which to roost and boxes in which to nest. The cramped cages in factory farms would be thing of the past. The hens of American will finally work under conditions that allow them to move around.

Animal rights organizations are lobbying for the passage of H.R. 3798 and so are egg producers. When California voters passed Proposition 2 in 2008, egg producers across the land saw the writing on the wall. Prop 2 demanded that layers be able “to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely.” Rather than try to comply with an assortment of state regulations, producers want a national standard, one that will make it easier to do business.

With egg producers joining with the Humane Society in support of the bill, what is getting in the way of its passage?

As reported on NPR, the president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is worried that Congress is concerning itself with the emotional life of chickens. “It isn’t a very large leap from egg production to chicken production to beef production," said Bill Donald. If Congress starts demanding mobility for chickens, what’s to say they won’t start demanding mobility for pigs and cows? With all those layers standing up, stretching their claw-tipped toes and turning all around, one could imagine that other farm animals might agree that the hokey-pokey really is what it’s all about. As far as the cattlemen are concerned, we’re on the verge of another great ethical step for mankind (a rights foot forward, if you follow the cardinal rule of hokey-pokey).

At the inception of this country, only white, land-owning males could go where they wanted to go, and do what they wanted to do. That small sphere of mobility was gradually expanded to include the landless, descendants of African slaves, and females. Each time the ethical sphere expanded, new political life infused a segment of the population that had lain fallow. In grammatical terms, objects became subjects; no longer the property of others, these new subjects could move of their own accord.

From this perspective, one can see why meat producers of America are feeling the heat. If the next ethical expansion includes chickens, the entire meat industry will come under scrutiny, or so they fear. With voters concerned about the happiness of their entrees, feedlots would have to be replaced with pastureland. Egg producers believe they can pass on the costs of improvements at about a penny an egg. Meat producers, however, aren’t so reassured. They fear they will have to raise the price of hamburger beyond the purchasing power of a McDonald’s customer.

I suppose the meat producers could take some strange consolation from the fact that ethical expansion has not saved all classes of people from life in cages. The numbers of African-American males packed in some county jails is not unlike the density of California chickens prior to Prop 2. When I visited a jail in North Philadelphia a few summers ago, there were forty men to a cage. The cages and the bunk beds were stacked two high, the temperature hovered around 100 degrees, and upon our entrance the inmates set up a deafening howl. When the men finally quieted down we asked permission to enter their cages. One man told me he had been in this holding cell for nine months, waiting to be arraigned. He had high blood pressure but the warden wouldn’t give him a low-salt diet. “They’re going to kill me before they charge me,” he said. The ethical expansions of the past hundred years had not saved him from the cruelties of the cage.

But mentioning this sordid fact to meat producers won’t necessarily help their case. Once chickens receive protections from Congress, other caged creatures will make similar claims. Indeed, one could imagine a powerful coalition forming between prisoners and farm animals. Let us stand, let us lie down, let us stretch our limbs! We want the same protections, California, that you just gave to hens! (Here in Vermont, where ex-offenders still have the vote, a portion of the voting population might have some useful things to say to policy makers about life in cages.)

My sense is that where goes the chicken, so goes the nation. Once the commercial hen can dance the hokey-pokey, then the game of cruel confinement will be over. The newly emancipated layer will be the standard of freedom, a thorn in the side of architects of cramped spaces. And it’s not just feedlots that will lose their legitimacy: commercial airlines, prisons, and the “man camps” of the North Dakota oil fields may all need to be rethought. After all, we can’t live in a country where hens are happier than people… can we?

Nuclear Politics

            It’s tempting to see Judge J. Garvan Murtha’s recent decision on the re-licensing of Vermont Yankee as just another example of corporate power undermining democratic processes. In that interpretation, the powerful giant, Entergy, used its might to silence the will of the Vermont state legislature. The Judge was just a pawn, some might say, to economic interests. There are no institutions strong enough, goes this line of reasoning, to resist the will of Corporations!

            Another way to read this decision is through the shared powers of federalism. The commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate all things that pass between states. By that interpretation, Murtha was merely following the established law of the land. If a business is engaged in interstate commerce, which is the case with Vermont Yankee, the federal government is in charge.

            Still, the fact that the federal government regulates interstate commerce doesn’t mean that states aren’t part of the mix. Let Congress regulate the navigable waterways and the interstate highways, but the states have always held the nobler responsibility of protecting the public welfare. Under this bifurcated system, the states do the real job of politics: building schools, providing a police force, supporting rural and urban communities. Safety, according to the rules of federalism, is a state issue. No wonder the state of Vermont stressed public safety when it denied Entergy an operating license.

            But here’s where Murtha’s ruling is particularly instructive. When it comes to nuclear power, states are precluded from deciding what is unsafe. Nuclear technology is so complex, so dangerous, and so capital-intensive that it requires a centralized, technocratic organization to oversee its operation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established to deal with nuclear safety concerns and its determinations trump any democratic legislature. Murtha could not find for the State of Vermont because radioactive safety concerns had been pre-empted by federal law. The State of Vermont can protect its citizens from sex offenders but, under the Atomic Energy Act, it cannot protect them from radioactive particles.

What all this means is that technology itself plays a big role in determining whether or not our politics are democratic. As Langdon Winner points out in a 1989 essay, “the intractable properties of certain kinds of technology are strongly, perhaps unavoidably, linked to particular institutionalized patterns of power and authority.” Nuclear reactors create a particular type of political structure, one that is highly centralized and run by elite technocrats, as a matter of necessity. Friedrich Engel, it should be pointed out, made a similar argument for authoritarianism and modern industry. If we want an industrialized economy, said the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, we need a disciplined hierarchy to make it work.

But not all technology necessitates a centralized technocratic political system. Winner points to solar panels as examples of a technology strongly linked with a decentralized, democratic political structure. While solar panels may require technical knowledge to produce, they are innocuous enough to be regulated by civilian legislatures. The difference between nuclear and solar, then, is not just a difference in the type of energy being produced but in the type of political structure we can expect each technology to produce. Nuclear reactors produce centralized and authoritarian systems; solar panels produce decentralized and democratic systems.

Right now, the complex technology known as the Internet is fighting with Congress to maintain its decentralized and democratic pattern of power and authority. When Congress tried to claim more regulatory authority through PIPA and SOPA, Wikipedia shut down for a day and Senator Patrick Leahy was swamped with calls of protest. The techocrats in this instance, the producers of Internet content and html codes, operate in a pattern where power is shared. No way will they exchange that decentralized structure for something controlled by Congress!

            Congress will only prevail if they are able to convince a majority of Americans that the Internet is as dangerous as nuclear power. Should there be a War on Piracy as part of the War on Terrorism, or a massive campaign against corrupt foreign powers trying to steal our data, then the American public might surrender its democratic authority to something akin to the NRC. But that seems very unlikely. The nature of the technology of the Internet links it to a democratic system. Indeed most users assume they know more about its proper use than the white-haired, would-be regulators in Washington.

            But here’s the rub: the democratic, de-centered Internet runs partially on energy created by authoritarian, centralized nuclear reactors. It’s as if we have another bifurcated system, only this time the parallel tracks aren’t the federal government and the states but two different types of technology/political systems, one democratic and the other authoritarian. The more dangerous the technology, the more willing we are to cede authority to a technocratic concentration of power. The same tendency, it should be noted, happens during times of war. Authoritarian structures develop when the situation is too dangerous for mere civilians to understand.

            What all this means is that politics often follows technology. When the technology is decentered and democratic, the political structure allows for many decision-makers. When the technology is centralized and controlled by technocratic elites, the political structure allows only a select few to decide. We’ll want to think about this as we go forward. As Judge Murtha’s decision makes clear, the type of technology, not the political climate, determines who is in charge.

           

           

Presidential Prayers

            Fifty-six years ago, the Herald Tribune ran a headline that got E. B. White’s attention: PRESIDENT SAYS PRAYER IS PART OF DEMOCRACY. Although he was not a religious man, this New Yorker columnist could well understand why Presidents might need divine assistance from time to time. “But I don’t think a President should advertise prayer,” he wrote. “That is a different thing. Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home.” Writing from his “private sick bed,” White worried about this tendency of the American President to “pray electronically.”

            When Eisenhower delivered his Presidential prayer during his 1953 Inaugural Address, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Sharing the podium with two bishops (one Protestant, one Catholic) and a rabbi, the General-turned-President surprised the reporters waiting in the press box, who had copies of his prepared address. "I have a little prayer of my own,” Eisenhower said, “and I want you all to bow your heads." He had composed it that morning in his hotel suite, in the hour between church and the day’s events. "Give us, we pray," the Chief Executive intoned, "the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our works and actions to be governed thereby and by the laws of this land."  The concourse was silent, the sun shone brightly, and then the President spoke his address. Later, during the parade, he was lassoed by a California cowboy. A reporter from the Washington Post noted that the President was in a “gay mood.”

            Three years into his term, Eisenhower might have thought about that festive day with some nostalgia. There were no California cowboys playing with their ropes and the concourse was rarely reverent. Having pushed for civil rights for African Americans as a matter of national security, Eisenhower now had a white electorate unwilling to be governed by the laws of the land. A governor from Arkansas would refuse to enforce the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and eventually Eisenhower would bring in the troops. No wonder he was advertising prayer. Maybe cultivating piety would bring stubborn white Americans to a higher ground.

            But as far as White was concerned, the President’s promotion of religiosity created its own invidious social divisions. Sure, Eisenhower might have received many positive responses to his inaugural prayer, but what about “the persons who felt fidgety or disquieted about the matter,” wondered White. Those people “were not likely to write in about it, lest they appear irreverent, irreligious, unfaithful, or even un-American.” A piece in Harpers, penned by Adlai Stevenson, had also gotten E. B. White’s attention. Stevenson quoted Justice Louis Brandeis: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” It was a slippery slope from Eisenhower’s little prayer, thought White, to accusations of being a communist.

            White’s concerns about well-meaning but misplaced religiosity appear to have come true. In 2001, George W. Bush’s inaugural prayer was neither little nor non-denominational. The only religion represented on the podium was Protestant and the only divine power had the initials J.C. Kirbyjon Caldwell prayed in "the name that's above all other names, Jesus the Christ." Rev. Franklin Graham asked the American people to "acknowledge You alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit." The positive responses Bush received would have come from a particular type of American voter. Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Mormons, Muslims, pagans, agnostics and humanists might worry that their criticisms would make them seem irreverent or irreligious or unfaithful or un-American.

            From the vantage point of current American politicking, Eisenhower’s little prayer seems downright secular and White’s criticisms those of a hypochondriac. The General was only asking for divine assistance for our ethical judgments and strength to follow the law. Surely, we can go back to that level of religious discourse, can’t we?

            And yet White’s concern wasn’t with prayer, per se, but with “praying electronically,” a political reality that most of us have come to expect. Praying electronically is what leaders do when they want to silence their critics and reinforce their proximity to the divine. Even that little prayer put the well-meaning President in the position of speaking for Americans to God. “I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude,” wrote White, “knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards for human behavior.”

            For my own part, prayer has gotten me through times of agony and uncertainty and has helped me discern the difference between right and wrong. But just because I reach out for spiritual assistance doesn’t mean I would bring a cadre of spiritual advisors with me to start a new semester. Nor would I begin a new class by speaking to God on behalf of my students. Indeed, the thought of it makes me quite fidgety. My job is to provoke thinking, to provide evidence for claims and to consider alternate arguments. To do my job well, I need an energized group, eager to take on challenges and to question my assumptions.

            Too often, religion is used to pacify the electorate. Presidents invoke it at their inaugurations as a way of quieting down the concourse. In Eisenhower’s time, the method was subtle and, to my mind, innocuous. Nowadays, the technique is extreme and the content designed to exclude. But as the concourse fills up and the demand for jobs gets louder, praying electronically may not be quite so effective. The people already have, as Rumi says, “a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” What they need from their leader is more attention to matters of state.

           

           

The Rooster and the Sun

            Mitt Romney was in fine form at the Republican Debate on Saturday night, maintaining his dignity while the second-tier candidates squabbled over who was the most conservative of the bunch. Paul, Santorum, and Gingrich strutted and puffed up their hackles, causing no end of consternation for one another. Romney kept a cool gaze on a distant competitor; he had no reason to rile himself up. Finally, he put an end to the petty primary politicking. “The president is trying to take responsibility for the economy,” he said, in response to a recent report about jobs growth.  “It’s like the rooster taking responsibility for the sunrise – he didn’t do it.”

            On Sunday, I checked in with Franklin to see how much credit he takes for the sun rising in the east. He was over behind the compost bin, watching his flock. Since we took out the drakes, the three remaining ducks cling to his shadow. Bright, Montaigne, and Pong circled the Speckled Sussex rooster like adoring fans eager for an autograph. Franklin did not look flattered. The ducks were cramping his style, making it hard for him to do his roosterly duty with a nearby Rhode Island Red. He had little time to talk about planetary matters.

“I have too many responsibilities to take on another,” he said, almost tripping over Montaigne, who was undulating her long neck in front of him like an inchworm on the crawl. “Romney must be talking about roosters who don’t have to work for a living. Me? I’m always having to find the girls new places to scratch and to make sure those silly pullets don’t go wandering off into the forest. And then there are hawks to watch out for…” As Franklin described his endless tasks, he kept a sharp eye on a covey of Buff Orpingtons who had wandered behind the goat shed, out of sight. Franklin rose up on his tiptoes and let out a call, “Hey! I told you girls to stay close by! You all come back here!” He took off down the hill, the three ducks waddling frantically after him, “No, no, don’t leave us, don’t leave us behind.” Franklin clearly was too busy to think about the sun.

“What about you, Beaumont?” I asked the No. 2 rooster who had little to do with his time. “Do you take responsibility for the sunrise, Beaumont?”

The Dorking Dandy cocked his head and considered the matter. “First, roosters start crowing well before sunrise. Second, our brains are too small to invent that sort of causal explanation. The idea that my actions affect the sun in its path is not something a chicken would ever think of. You’ve got to be a human for that big an idea.”

“A certain kind of human,” I pointed out, “one with presidential ambitions.”

“I’ve noticed,” said Beaumont, giving me a long look, “that when people talk about chickens, they are actually saying more about themselves than about poultry.”

“Good point,” I said, feeling a tickle of heat rise in my cheeks and quickly looking away. “So what do you think Romney’s comment says about Romney?” I asked, when I had regained my composure.

“That would take a human brain to figure out,” he said, rushing off to take advantage of Franklin’s momentary absence from the flock.

According to the Internet, roosters crow in order to establish their territory. When there are several roosters in the neighborhood, each one tries to be the first to establish his dominion in the new day. In these parts, Franklin is the first to sound off. The Chanticleer of Holland Hill, he breaks the silence of the night at about 2:15 a.m.. In the winter, the sun doesn’t come up for another five hours. By the time the rosy fingers of dawn slide over Monadnock’s crest, Franklin and the other chickens are busy looking for food. By then, the rooster hierarchy has been well established so the sunrise is a quiet affair.

The presidential debates are also a matter of establishing hierarchy. Mitt Romney, the front-runner out of Iowa, arrived in New Hampshire with the first crow of the new day. The other roosters are scrambling to out squawk him. If one of them gets more votes, he will be the first rooster of the South Carolina day. Eventually, like Franklin, one of those men will become the established top bird and primary season will get much quieter.

But, because they are people, not chickens, the claims in the crowing will not settle down. The First Rooster will say he can make jobs appear and the deficit go away. High on his tip toes, his neck extended, blind to everything but the sounds coming out of his throat, he’ll convince himself that his power alone, his righteousness, his moral conviction, will make the sun rise over America.

But because we are people, not chickens, we are less likely to obey. The human roosters may work themselves up with fantasies of power, but the flock is less willing to believe them. Fewer women in this country are undulating in front of the Great Protector; they’re more interested in finding meaningful employment. And young people can’t see much future if they don’t take risks in the forest. The roosters may keep crowing, but the flock has started to disperse.

Perhaps if these presidential roosters just did what they were supposed to do – run around and make sure the flock has food to eat and that they are kept out of harm’s way – we might stick around. As it is, they promise too much and deliver too little. Just the sort of mistake a human animal would make.