The Secret Origin of Captain America

An extra thought (after my earlier Captain America post) in honor of the Captain America movie: John Seavey’s wonderful speculation that Steve Rogers, in being a “premature anti-fascist” must have been a red diaper baby.

Ever notice how sometimes, there’s a weird synchronicity at work in the things you read? I just got done reading a book about the Hollywood blacklist, and I’m now reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (not bad, but I’d still rather read a biography than a roman à clef). Both of them focused a lot on the social unrest of the 1930s, as the world headed for war, and on a society that was far less united in its opposition to Hitler and fascism than we like to mythologize. (America has a disturbing tendency to mythologize its own past, and then unfavorably compare it to the realities of the present.)

Reading the two books together have sparked an idea in my head for a comic book. And since I’m probably never going to get a chance to write it, I’ll share the idea here.

It’s the biography of Steve Rogers.

When you think about it, we really don’t know much about Steve Rogers before he became Captain America. We know he walked into a recruiting office eager to do something — anything — to help fight the Nazis. We also know that his parents were dead by then (one of the reasons he was accepted as a volunteer was that he had no family.) But beyond that, it feels almost like he wasn’t a real person until the day they gave him the Super-Soldier Serum.

But I think he must have been a very interesting person indeed. Because Steve Rogers has always been socially progressive–his attitude towards Sam Wilson might seem patronizing to modern audiences, but for someone born in 1917, Steve Rogers is pretty damned enlightened. He seems to have been working-class; there’s no real mention of an inheritance anywhere in his background, and he’s had to take jobs to make ends meet on several occasions. And he’s very strongly anti-Fascist; it’s telling that he signed up to fight against Hitler a year before the United States’ entry into the war…and was passionate enough about it that he wouldn’t take 4F for an answer.

All those things add up to a very interesting, potentially shocking, probably fascinating backstory that’s never been touched on. Namely, that Steve Rogers probably grew up in a Communist household. He might not have been a card-carrying Communist himself, but his parents almost certainly were. Because being a Communist had a different meaning during the Great Depression than it did twenty years onwards, in a Cold War America. During the 1930s, when unemployment was high and a privileged few were almost completely insulated from the Depression’s effects, lots of people joined the Communists because they believed in things like unionization, racial equality, and fighting back against the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe. (Lots of prominent leftists went to help in Spain against Franco before Hitler rose to power. It was the cause celebré of its day.) The later political connotations didn’t come about until after World War II…which is part of why so many people wound up getting nailed by accusations of associating with Communists when the witch-hunts started.

Both of Steve’s parents were Irish immigrants; I see Steve Rogers’ dad as a union organizer, perhaps a dockworker or a teamster. His mother might have been a seamstress, also a highly politically charged profession (when Steve Rogers would have been born, the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was still a pretty recent memory.) The two of them probably believed solidly in the rights of the working man and woman, joined the Communist Party because many of their friends and fellow activists were members, and probably didn’t know nearly as much about Stalin as they thought they did. They might have led a fairly bohemian social life, rubbing shoulders with upper-class leftists like Hemingway or Dorothy Parker who liked to get involved with the lives of the people they were fighting for.

And by the time Steve was twenty, they were both dead. Certainly, that’s something that shouldn’t be treated lightly in any story about his life; union organizing in the ’20s and ’30s was a dangerous business. Activists could get beaten, jailed, or even discreetly murdered by hired thugs kept on the payroll. Maybe Steve’s dad died in a riot at the docks caused by paid agitators? Maybe his mother worked herself to exhaustion, eventually dying of pneumonia from trying to support the family single-handedly because Steve was too frail to get a job like his father had?

Steve’s poor physical health speaks volumes, too. It suggests malnutrition, childhood illnesses, the sort of thing that happened a lot in families too poor to afford good food and real doctors. Maybe Steve had a brother or a sister once, someone he never talks about because it’s too painful. Maybe he narrowly avoided the same fate.

The more I think about this, the more I think it would make a great story, a vibrant chronicle of pre-WWII America as seen through the eyes of a young man who would someday become its emblem. (Although he probably wouldn’t have stayed that way if he’d been around in the 50s. The HUAC would have had a field day with him. Maybe it was a good thing he stayed frozen in ice for a decade or so…) I’d love to write it. Tom Brevoort, if you’re reading this, call me!

Updates

• Steven Attewell at Lawyers, Guns, and Money elaborates, directly calling shenanigans on Mark Millar’s misreading of Steve Rogers
• More from Attewell
• And Brian Cronin offers Ed Brubaker’s response to Mark Millar
• Infamous Brad observes that this explains why Steve Rogers and Tony Stark do not get along.
• Lance Mannion says something similar looking at Age of Ultron
• “Moviebob” Chipman admires movie Cap standing up for what's right
• Delicious fanfic on this subject from Idiopathic about Steve Rodgers, PR disaster and reflections on the theme from Tumblr

(And while we are here, I also have a moving little reflection from theumbrellaseller about why Stark and Banner are Science Bros.)

Captain America

So being a geek, I've enjoyed the embarrassment of riches in superhero movies this summer. Thor was good fun and Asgard looked great. Green Lantern was kind of hokey and soulless, but impressed the heck out of my nephew. X-Men: First Class was, despite a few false notes, terrific.

But the one I was excited about opens tomorrow.

A few years back, in the pages of Marvel comics, Captain America took an assassin's bullet and died. (Don't fret; being a comic book superhero, he eventually got better.) A friend who isn't geeky—but knows that I am—asked if I could shed a little light on what it signified, but I couldn't think of anything to say. Cap has never been a character I've cared much about. Save for his memorable guest appearance in Daredevil's “Born Again” storyline, as written by the unstoppable Frank Miller, I've not felt much interest in him.

The one idea I do have about Captain America didn't do me much good in that situation, but the nifty trailer for the movie sold me completely, because it demonstrated that the filmmakers obviously have been thinking the same thing.

Captain America has a terrific arch-nemesis. Possibly the best.

Those are strong words, because the quality of your opposite number is a big deal in the superhero business. Many comics fans would say that I'm wrong about Captain America having the best foe, since the Joker obviously takes the prize. Surely Joker is an all-time great: he's the common sentiment Clowns Are Scary, made into supervillain form. Plus he plays well opposite Batman, which is important. Thanks to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight film, you don't have to be a comics geek to know about this symbiotic relationship between superhero and archnemesis; when Joker says to Batman “you complete me” it's scary and funny, but most of all it's uncannily true, and you can see how it cuts both ways. Batman ain't Batman without the Joker to fight, and vice versa.

While we're on the subject, Batman also benefits from a deep bench of second string enemies, including supervillainous versions of a Sexy Catburglar, Earth First!, not just one but two Insane Psychologists, and many more, all contributing to Batman's general superheroic coolness. Similarly, Superman has a big rogues gallery helping to make him super, and his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor, is great fun because he's basically Supervillain Thomas Edison.

A good enough villain can elevate a mediocre superhero into the big leagues. Nobody cared about Daredevil until Frank Miller gave him Kingpin, The Capo of All The Mafia In The World, as his nemesis, then topped that with Elektra: Your Psycho Ex Girlfriend Has Become The Deadliest Ninja In The World. (Miller is both a terrific writer and a sexist creep; Elektra remains an excellent character, nonetheless.) Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is made much more interesting by having as his nemesis Victor von Doom, whose story is “I have lived out every damned trope in the entire Gothic literary tradition, we were best friends in college, and I have conquered an entire Eastern European country as the first step in my plan to kill you.” Superhero fans reading this may want to argue that Galactus, who is sort of Supervillain Jehovah, is Reed's greatest foe, but I think we have to reserve him as nemesis for the Silver Surfer ....

Point being, to be a superhero, you should have a cool supervillain to foil.

So who is this arch-nemesis for Captain America, who beats out the Joker, Lex Luthor, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and all the rest?

Comics fans are probably rolling their eyes reading this, because Captain America's nemesis is generally accepted to be a guy called the Red Skull, who is your basic evil megalomanic with endless cannon fodder minions and one plan after another to conquer the world. You can see him in the trailer, if you know to look. The Skull is pretty cool, but he's not in the very top tier. But I submit that Red Skull is just a stand-in for Captain America's real nemesis: Adolf Hitler.

And I don't know about you, but Lex Luthor, Darth Vader, and the kid who took my lunch money in 5^th Grade can all get in line; in my fantasy life, there's nobody I'd rather punch in the face.

The people who made this film obviously know that. So count me in.

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Update: The Secret Origin of Captain America, with links to reflections on his politics and the films.

Politics

Timothy Burke, in the middle of struggling with why we should even talk about politics at all, says a bunch of things I think:

I think individuals, institutions, communities don’t always or even often just defend their particular self-interest. I don’t think they often accurately understand or clearly express their interests, any more than I believe human psychology or agency is well-described by the sketch version known as homo economicus. I think political agency, whether expressed narrowly in the drafting of policy or broadly in the mobilization of resources and constituencies, frequently leads to unanticipated or surprising consequences, some unexpectedly good for almost everyone and others terrifyingly destructive even to the agents who initiated a particular course of action. I think it’s intellectually possible and morally desirable to understand people unlike yourself, even people whose aspirations and worldview are genuinely antagonistic to your own. I think totalizing ideologies and totalizing social philosophies are intrinsically ill-suited to explain the human past or set a course for the human future. I think language isn’t just a framing device or an instrumental apparatus for the production of consciousness and subjectivity. I think every imagined alternative to liberalism and modernity ends up reinstating both of them under the table as well as using both of them to generate complaints about their shortcomings.

Yeah, pretty much.

Yes, Minister

Yes, Minister is one of the funniest, cleverest television shows ever made. It’s also a work of political propaganda. The original is linkrotted, so here is the original pulled from archives

Yes (Prime) Minister – The Most Cunning Political Propaganda Ever Conceived

by Dan Haggard

The BBC series Yes Minister and its sequel Yes Prime Minister are two of the most renown and acclaimed television series ever made. They are timeless classics that can be watched and re-watched over and over again. Anyone who has seen them will express their admiration for the shows without hesitation. However, what many people don’t realize is that the shows were written by an advisor to Margaret Thatcher – Sir Anthony Jay – and were perhaps one of the most cleverly disguised vehicles of right wing propaganda ever conceived.

For those who don’t know of it, the series follows the exploits of a British MP James Hacker and his management of the ministry for administrative affairs, and then subsequently, the Prime Ministership. He is thwarted and manipulated at every turn by the chief public servant assigned to his department, Sir Humphrey Appleby. We learn fairly quickly that it’s the public service, not the democratically elected government, that really runs the country; and that their chief aim is to protect their own power, comforts and privilege. Hacker tries to get the upper hand, and occasionally succeeds, but rarely in the sense of actually doing any public good.

If you have friends on the left side of politics, one of the most amusing things you can do is either ask them about, or introduce them to Yes (Prime) Minister. If they are astute you’ll at least provoke an entertaining rant about its evils. But if they are not, you’ll get to watch them recount their favourite scenes and episodes; laughing all the while, praising the show for its incredible wit, acumen and insight into human nature. You’ll then get to watch their discomfort when you tell them that it was written by an advisor to Margaret Thatcher and that she was its biggest fan. And when you reveal that it is a propaganda piece for the right, a confused and pale pallor will stretch across their face that will be somewhat akin to the expression of a jock being told he had just had sex with a gay man.

If you want to be really mean, and perhaps even threaten your friendship, you can accuse your socially conscious brethren that their enjoyment of the show demonstrates that they secretly do agree with the essential psychological truths that underlie the economic theories of the right. While on the outside they profess to believe in the altruistic core of the human spirit, on the inside they delight in the satire of the essentially selfish and petty human animal.

Okay, maybe you shouldn’t do that – it’s too mean! But you should definitely educate them as to the true intent of the show. Sir Anthony Jay, along with the Thatcherites, believed in a political theory called public choice. This theory originated in the works of Kenneth Arrow, Duncan Black, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Anthony Downs, William Niskanen, Mancur Olson, and William Riker. They attempted to apply the principle of rational choice theory to the realm of political theory.

Rational choice theory is the view that individual were autonomous units that act purely in their own selfish interest. There were no altruistic saints that sacrificed their own comfort for the comfort of others, rather everyone aggressively sought to position themselves at the expense of others. The best you could hope to do was to achieve a maximal equilibrium which allows each individual their greatest share. Out of this view came the ideal of freeing individuals by means of the free market which in turn led to the heady 80s where individual greed ruled the world (and in more recent times as well).

Applied to the political realm, rational choice theory became public choice theory. Led by James Buchanan, they challenged the idea that public servants and politicians act in the public good. Rather, they really only pursue their own interests and seek to consolidate their power at the expense of the people they were expected to help. The solution was to radically curb the power of government, thereby enabling the freedom of the masses.

To espouse the ideals behind public choice theory, Sir Anthony Jay began writing Yes Minister. Once you understand the philosophy behind it, it becomes impossible to view the show in any other way. The public servants, as exemplified by Sir Humphrey Appleby all work to thwart the government where it tries to break down the barriers preventing social progress. But even though the politicians express a desire to help the people, they ultimately end up only serving their own interests as well. The only real difference between Humphrey and Hacker is that Humphrey is at one with his selfish nature, where Hacker cannot admit it to himself. This lack of self-awareness allows Humphrey to easily manipulate him. Most of Hacker’s noble plans are shelved because Humphrey either shows or engineers it such that to pursue the noble policy would damage Hacker’s own self interest.

The show played directly to the cynicism that the public has for their elected representatives and the political process as a whole. It was so well written, and so genuinely funny that only recently has it been outed as the propaganda piece that it really is, with Adam Curtis making the criticism in his documentary – The Trap. One might of course wonder if its status as right wing political schill in any way lessens the quality of the show. I won’t cast judgement. No matter what your political beliefs, its very hard to deny the immediate appeal of the show and its brilliance. But you can’t ignore the role it was intended to play. You have to keep in mind that it was intended to manipulate your beliefs and your ideals. The one thing you must do is watch it with a very careful and critical eye.

I first learned this through the amazing Adam Curtis’ long video-essay The Trap mentioned at the end of the article. I have reservations about Curtis but it is still well worth your time.

Federal deficit

Conservatives consistently talk about reducing government spending. Lately we've been hearing a lot of talk from them about the evils of deficit spending. Fundamentally I agree; we cannot rely on running a deficit year after year without screwing up the economy.

(Actually, economists I respect argue that if the economy is growing, modest deficits are safe and even healthy; I won't quibble. And I vigorously believe in the Keynesian argument that temporary large deficits are desirable in deep demand-failure recessions like we're in right now. But my point is that you cannot run big deficits year after year indefinitely.)

But in understanding what's going on with this conservative rhetoric, one must look at both the past and the future.

The past: Throughout Bush's administration Republicans held the House. Four out of eight years they held the Senate as well, and the other four years the Senate was exactly split between the parties. Republicans were steering the bus. They turned the balanced budget from the end of the Clinton administration into rising deficits. And no, we did not hear conservatives talking about how the deficit was bad.

Now that we have a Democrat in the White House, conservatives are talking a lot about deficits. This pattern arouses my skepticism.

The future: I was inspired to write this post because a conservative was telling me that conservative commentators promise to hold Republicans' feet to the fire about the deficit ... which they want to see addressed only through spending cuts, not by raising taxes.

This tells us that the deficit itself is not the priority. If it were, tax increases would be worth discussing. Combine this with conservatives' silence about the deficit during the Bush administration and I conclude that conservatives are insincere with their concern about the deficit. The point is cutting spending, the deficit is just rhetorical support for that project.

Well okay, conservatives are unmistakably consistent in talking about cutting spending. But most conservatives and practically all Republican politicians are evasive about what spending they would cut. Saying they want to eliminate “waste” and the Department of Education isn't enough. What will it take?

Federal spending consists of four roughly-equal major chunks:

1. Military
2. Social Security
3. Medicare/Medicaid (and miscellaneous other health insurance stuff)
4. Everything else (embassies and the FBI and maintaining the interstate highway system and NASA and farm subsidies and federal prisons and keeping the lights on in Washington DC and the immigration and naturalization service and the CIA and on and on ....)

The deficit is currently about 30% of total expenditures. So you have to cut two of those in half, and then some, or eliminate one of those entirely and sweat something else down significantly. If you're sincere and serious about cutting spending then you have to say which of those it's gonna be.

But conservative commentators and Republican politicians don't do that, because most Americans are in favour of Items 1, 2, and 3, and if you cut significantly into Item 4 you can count on hitting something they care about there, too.

So: What's it going to be? What are you going to cut? Until you answer that, I say shenanigans.

I'm sincere and serious, so here's my plan:

1. Fix the weak-demand recession with as much deficit-funded stimulus spending as Paul Krugman says we need. This is a temporary measure, so it should focusing as much as possible on one-time infrastructure investments.
2. Cut the military in half.
3. Raise taxes on income over ^$100k to fill the gap.
4. Switch our broken health insurance system to Medicare For Everyone so we start working on long-term cost controls. (No, this doesn't have to cost more money; most rich countries with universal government health insurance spend no more per capita than we already do.)

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Update:

A clever video about how projects Republicans propose cutting have trivial costs:

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Update

Since people get confused about what these numbers are, checking Wikipedia I see that the Federal budget for 2011 was ^$3700 billion. That breaks down to ^$835B for Medicare/Medicaid, ^$725B for Social Security, ^$700B for the military (or about $1000B or even more, it depends on how you count), and ^$1340B (or ^$1000B) for Everything Else, including $225B in interest on the outstanding debt. Note that this is on ^$2300B in revenue, leaving a deficit of ^$1400B. (Note also that Social Security payroll taxes brought in ^$820B, so that program is almost ^$100B in surplus, which is set aside to pay for rising expenditures in benefits for retiring Boomers.)

Note also that the ^$1400B deficit sounds pretty scary until you realize that total GDP for 2011 was ^$15,000B. No, we cannot tax all of that out of the economy — that would leave nothing for people to buy shoes and pay for groceries — but it means that the country isn't “broke”. We can pay for everything in the Federal budget now if we really want to.

Deficit hawkery is a lie.

The Jerusalem of our imagination

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

David Shulman at the New York Review of Books blog offers hope that the Arab Spring is inspiring Arab Palestinians.

A Mediterranean variant of Gandhian-style mass protest has by now taken root among Palestinian communities in several parts of the West Bank: Ma’asara, Nabi Saleh, Dir Kadis, Na’alin, and Bil’in, to mention only a few. There is by now a clear awareness among many that non-violent resistance is far more likely to be effective against the Israeli occupation than violence; and these days the humane principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are frequently and clearly articulated in Arabic by grass-roots Palestinian leaders.

An eloquent statement of the philosophy and method was delivered on June 5 by Bassem al-Tamimi, one of the leaders of the Nabi Saleh protests, at his trial at an Israeli military court for organizing demonstrations. Al-Tamimi’s text will, I am sure, someday be taught in schools, maybe even in Israel; it is remarkably reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous statement to a now forgotten British judge in Ahmedabad in 1922, when the judge sentenced him to jail for six years.

Non-violent resistance is also the official policy of the Palestinian government in Ramallah.

He isn’t fooling about the statement from Bassem al-Tamimi. It’s good stuff.

I organized these peaceful demonstrations in order to defend our land and our people. I do not know if my actions violate your Occupation laws. As far as I am concerned, these laws do not apply to me and are devoid of meaning. Having been enacted by Occupation authorities, I reject them and cannot recognize their validity.

Despite claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East you are trying me under military laws which lack any legitimacy; laws that are enacted by authorities that I have not elected and do not represent me. I am accused of organizing peaceful civil demonstrations that have no military aspects and are legal under international law.
[⋯] Regardless of how just or unjust this ruling will be, and despite all your racist and inhumane practices and Occupation, we will continue to believe in peace, justice and human values. We will still raise our children to love; love the land and the people without discrimination of race, religion or ethnicity; embodying thus the message of the Messenger of Peace, Jesus Christ, who urged us to “love our enemy.”

The example of the Arab Spring presents a great opportunity to break the tragic deadlock in Israel and Palestine. May we, for once, miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity.

Independence Day

I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.

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Today is Independence Day in the United States.

Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite, with my soft spot for lefty activism) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.

I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence. The nation was born not when people used force of arms to secure the nation, either for the first time or the last time. Rather the nation was born when the idea of the nation was first named clearly.

It's easy to forget what a rhetorical achievement the Declaration really is. The world of 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.

Here's David Hume working to name a moral theory for equality, taking pains to say that there's nothing special about a king.

Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.

Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights, taking pains to say that this makes sense if you think about it carefully.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Now here's Thomas Jefferson summing it up in the Declaration, asserting that these things are obvious givens.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

There you go. There's the fundamental principles of human rights, democracy, state legitimacy, and revolutionary action, rolled up in two hundred and three words.

I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But—forgive me getting feminist for a moment—those two uses of the word “Men” really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one; he was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. Check out his rough draft of the Declaration in which this is the longest complaint against the King of England.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

So I believe that Jefferson understood the radical implications of the idea that all people are equal, but didn't think to fit it into the language.

I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing — it's really good stuff.

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Bonus posts:

• Me on Hollywood movie stars and liberal patriotism—plus those movie stars reading the Declaration
• Brad DeLong and Don Herzog on Jefferson, rights, and Nature's God

• Hilzoy on Abstract Words, Too Noble To Neglect
• Fredrick Douglass on What is the 4^th of July to a Slave?; you can hear a podcast of it read aloud ... or the marvelous Baratunde Thurston reading both Douglass and Jefferson

Midrash

Yes.

The only way to cultivate organic symbols is midrash. As a discourse, midrash is completely different from scientific discourse. [...] Scientific analysis strives to reveal the conceptual world of the creators of symbols; midrash tends to ignore the conceptual world of these symbol-creators. Scientific analysis sees the symbol as a means to reach the past; midrash sees it as a way to reach the future. Scientific discourse aspires to be objective; midrashic discourse is intentionally subjective. Midrashic discourse takes symbols out of context; scientific discourse strives to place symbols in their contexts.
....
Children do not like to be spoken to in the analytic mode of discourse. They are eager for midrash of organic symbols. At a very young age, they discover that the world is round, but their inner world stays pre-Copernican, and angels climb the ladders of their world and slide down slides into their sandboxes.

Identity politics

Lady Gaga: “Essentialized conceptions of gender, sexuality, and other identity categories compel a celebration of diversity. Also, at Haus of Gaga we're bored with Matthew Barney videos and have started watching a lot of Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell instead.”

Weird Al: “Your Ladyship, if anyone is a demonstration that gender, sexuality, and other identity categories are performative, it's you. Also, don't go all highbrow, you're ripping off Madonna's act more than anybody else's, and I started doing that before you were born.”

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Advantage: Weird Al, channeling Judith Butler.

On the behalf of all Generation X cultural theory nerds, I'd like to offer our apologies to the Millennials. We tried really hard to sort this identity stuff out in the ’80s and ’90s, but it's harder than it looks. And I'm afraid it's not getting any easier; now we have the transgender liberation movement trying to make both arguments at the same time ...

Lifestyle advertising

I stumbled across this clever little trifle today. It's a takeoff on Ice Cube's “It Was A Good Day,” depicting a good day as a young tech startup employee in San Francisco. I recommend you watch it. It's cute.

It filled me with disgust.

The romanticized vision it offers of this character's life ... or, I should say pointedly, lifestyle ... is part of the waters I swim in. I meet folks all the time who want to believe in this romantic image, want to live it, want to think they are living it now.

I myself am living something like it. And I believe in the embodied life, the urban life of simple pleasures and bonhomie and all that. I believe in it fervently, like I believe in democracy and feminism and good design. I believe that making The Good Life happen is a technological, personal, social, political, even spiritual victory in a struggle with a world that too often conspires against it. No small thing.

I know I'm overthinking this, but I felt that the video makes that profound little victory somehow small, just the sum of its pleasures. Less than the sum of its pleasures, with the implication that small pleasures are not only important, but the only thing. And the video is actually — in a weird recursive loop of self-reference — a San Francisco startup advertising their product. It's lifestyle advertising, selling both the product as a marker of the lifestyle, and the lifestyle itself as an object of desire. And the video represents the victory of the transformation of the rakish San Francisco of my youth — the transformation that began with the first dot-com wave in ’99 — away from countercultural and toward being merely hip. And the video deracinates the Ice Cube song “It Was A Good Day” that has more than a bit of political context.

I'm not too serious to enjoy trifling celebrations of The Good Life. I actually think the product advertised is quite a good one, made by a good company. I don't wish for some kind of unchanging San Francisco, trapped in amber. I'm in favour of playful, artful remixing of culture. I'm not radically opposed to any of these things I'm complaining about.

But still. It's smug. It irked me.

Sorry. I'm being a cranky middle-aged man today. Haters gotta hate. I guess I'm a hater.

X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is elaborately plotted, smart, and melodramatic. It's full of in-jokes, sexy ladies in absurd costumes, and symbolic subtext. It plays clever games with the continuity established in the other X-films, and opens up opportunities for endless sequelæ. It ends with sock-o action and anguish.

In short, it's even truer to the spirit of the Claremont X-Men comics I grew up on than Bryan Singer's two X-films.

There's a lot to like. McAvoy and Fassbender are terrific as Xavier and Erik, both individually and playing off of one another; it's a tall order to play characters who are going to age into Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, and they deliver the goods. As villain Sebastian Shaw, Kevin Bacon is even better; he's as terrifyingly convincing a psychopath as Hopkins' Lecter. There are a number of other good performances as well, including some pleasant surprise appearances by great character actors like Michael Ironside, and Nicholas Hoult as an anxious young Hank McCoy. The production design is marvelous, with great little winks toward the world of early James Bond movies. The movie delivers good superheroics — incredibly it even sells Banshee's power of flying by yelling really loud, which seems goofy even in the comics — with nifty special effects and the characters using their distinctive powers intelligently. The movie is smart and fun and a lot of the characterization is rich.

That said, it has a few serious flaws. There are patches in the middle where it bogs down with Too Many Mutants; my non-comic-book-fan companion fell out of the movie at that point, and never quite found her way back in. Surrounded by good performances, January Jones' Emma Frost stands out as, well, looking great in '60s hair. The uncanny blankness of her Betty Draper in Mad Men is apparently the only note she can hit; the computer-generated diamond version of her is a better actor. The evocation of '60s sexism, which could have been witty, is undercut by the sexism of the movie itself. Among other things, having established that movie Mystique walks around blue and nude, and having included Emma Frost as a character, you'd think there was more than enough womens' skin showing, but no we have see every female character in her lingerie at some point while the men get all the good lines. There's racism to go with the sexism; all of our central characters are White ... though there is one Black guy in the movie. Just guess how things work out for him. I try not to let that sort of thing get under my skin too much, but it is especially disturbing given the Civil Rights Era subtext of X-Men in general and the choice of the early '60s as the setting for this story.

Still, First Class is a much, much better superhero movie than I was expecting, and suggests that the series will recover from the hugely disappointing X-Men: Last Stand. Joe Bob says check it out.

Magick, reason, and science

This, in a nutshell, is how I reconcile magickal practice and the understanding of reality we get from the natural sciences.

I take Uncle Al's maxim “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” to mean that magick is to one's personal, subjective experience of one's life as science is to the physical universe. Your life is the material you're working with in magick.

Obviously your subjective experience is profoundly conditioned by your encounter with the material cosmos. What you see is shaped by what's in your head, yes. But what you're looking at, outside your head, also has a big effect. (At least, it does if you're sane.)

Science organizes the application of reason to the physical universe through the use of meticulous experimentation and observation within controlled conditions, confirming its models of the world through reproducible results. These rigorous standards produce High Quality Truth. Let me say that again. Science produces High Quality Truth. If you are wise, you will not fuck with it.

Magick organizes the application of reason to your life through the use of meticulous experimentation and observation ... but in your life you cannot have controlled conditions, and you cannot get neatly reproducible results. In studying your life, it is impossible to use the full rigorous standards of science. But you can still apply reason and experiment to get very useful results.

Science produces models of how the physical universe works. Models are regarded as strong to the degree that they predict what the universe does, using the simplest explanation of the widest range of phenomena. Again, this marvelously rigorous standard gives us extremely reliable models. These models tell us that at the scale we live in the cosmos has crisp, mechanical rules for causality in which the operations of the mind do not directly affect what the cosmos does.

Yeah, yeah, quantum mechanics, I know. QM does not apply at human scales. Do not kid yourself with some What The Bleep bullshit about how QM proves that the universe is just craaaazy. It does not. That is fucking with the High Quality Truth of science, and I warned you about that. The world of people and teacups and cheeseburgers that we live in is Newton's clockwork automaton. But don't worry, it has plenty of room for magick.

Magick produces models of how your life works. Consider two types of models that can describe the effects that you get: Consciousness and Spookiness. In the Consciousness model, you understand a magickal operation as having altered the processes of your mind, resulting in changes in behavior and perception that produce the effects that you get. In the Spookiness model, you understand a magickal operation as having connected to spooky patterns in the cosmos (gods! angels! demons! egregores!) which use spooky means to reshape the cosmos, bringing the effect to you.

Both models provide explanations of the results you get from magickal practice. Early in your magickal practice the Consciousness model seems tidy and straightforward — “after the ritual for A New Job, I started talking to people about A New Job more, started preparing for it, started looking for it, so it's no surprise that I was able to bring myself A New Job when I bumped into it in the form of Jane at that cocktail party” — while the Spooky model seems elaborate and tortured and, frankly, a little goofy. This is comfortingly consistent with Newton's clockwork universe that we know about from science; you can see all the material, causal connections at work. But as your magical practice progresses, the Consciousness explanations you can come up with for the magickal effects you get become increasingly elaborate and tortured ... while the Spooky explanations become increasingly tidy and straightforward.

Models should be regarded as strong to the degree that they predict what your life does, using the simplest explanation of the widest range of phenomena.

Both explanations will always continue to apply. You will never get magickal results that outright conflict with a Consciousness model consistent with the scientific understanding of the material world. But your life is inherently a great big irreproducible result, with plenty of room for the improbable. Looking at your life, performing magickal experiments, seeking the simplest explanation, things can get very, very Spooky.

SlutWalk

I just succumbed to the temptation to respond to someone who said this:

I do not want anyone to assume this is anything to do with trying to excuse the actions of the perpetrator.

What I want to talk about though is that I think we should be able to acknowledge that people should try to not put themselves in bad positions. Lets be realistic. The world is not a perfect place, in fact very far from it. Should we be working to make it a better place? Absolutely. But in the mean time we also have to live in the world as it is.
....
What I am saying is that the “slut walk” is absolutely right to be trying to change the culture, but I think it got started for the wrong reasons. I think the police were absolutely right to suggest that people make decisions to improve their own safety in the imperfect terrible world that we have to live in.

Damn. Duty calls. I responded with this:

There's a meaningful distinction between blaming victims and talking about what behavior is wise in an imperfect world. Surely there is stuff that would be wrong to say to someone who had just been victimized that is entirely appropriate to say during a safety training.

Let's look at the incident that sparked the SlutWalk movement. It was a safety training, but it wasn't even an appropriate comment in that venue.

Constable Michael Sanguinetti made the stunning remark during a meeting about safety at Toronto's York University.

While a more senior officer was talking, Mr. Sanguinetti interrupted and reportedly said: ‘You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this, however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.’

So what's wrong with this picture?

There's the important context that we live in a culture where there is a lot of victim-blaming going around. So one should step carefully to avoid reïnforcing that pattern. Constable Sanguinetti didn't make any effort at that; in fact, he alluded to having been warned about it and dismissed that warning.

If you look at his comment, he implies that dressing differently is reliable protection against being victimized. He's not talking about improving your odds; he's implying that it's a way to be safe. Which we all know isn't true. You may protest that I'm reading the comment too closely, and that the constable meant to say only that dressing provocatively increases the risk of being raped. If we grant him that meaning — which in his position as an expert offering his expertise he should have made more clearly — then he's still wrong because there is no reliable evidence that how a woman is dressed significantly affects her risk of being raped. (Look it up.) So even if we set aside the cultural politics, this was a very irresponsible statement.

And he didn't say “dressed provocatively,” did he? He said “dressing like sluts.” Sluts. Not a neutral term, a derogatory term for women who are “too willing” to have sex. Using the term “slut” at all is using a slur; using it linked to the threat of sexual violence is even worse.

So no, the police were not absolutely right.

Lasagna sauce

I used to go for cocktails at a restaurant bar near my old apartment, where they sold “soup shots,” which were exactly what they sounded like: soup served in shot glasses. It sounds like a goofy restaurant gimmick. It was a goofy restaurant gimmick. But they were also really good. Eventually, I figured something out about them which explained to me something about the old TV series Moonlighting.

I was a teenager when Moonlighting was first shown, and found it exhilarating. I saw a few episodes recently and it doesn't look as good now — we forget how clusmy TV was before our current Golden Age — but at the time it was one of the gutsiest, craftiest, most inventive things ever broadcast. The show was ostensibly about a detective agency, but the episode's mystery was almost incidental to the the point of the show, which was much more about banter between the characters and the show's generally surreal tone. Usually the mystery only took center stage in bookends at the beginning and end of each episode: a prologue at the beginning which often excluded the show's recurring characters in favour of the guest stars who inhabited the mystery, then an encounter when the main characters solved the mystery at the end. Often the prologue had an intense thriller / noir tone quite different from the rest of the show's comedic voice. I'd think that the mystery, while it was onstage, was wonderfully gripping and intense, and wish for a different show which delivered more of that.

But I eventually realized that the tone of the mystery sequence was actually unsustainable: so intense that it would be laughable if you tried to maintain it for an hour of TV. It only worked because it came in such a small dose.

Like the soup shots.

I figured out the soup shots because I do the same thing when I make lasagna. If you use your normal spaghetti sauce recipe to make the tomato sauce for lasagna, it doesn't work right. You have to overspice the sauce, or else it will get drowned out by the other lasagna ingredients. Like the thriller portion of Moonlighting.

It seems to me that this is a design pattern useful for a lot of things.

Affluence

Via Rick “Nixonland” Perlstein, I learn of a disconcerting article about the demographics of affluence in Ad Age, seen through the creepy lens of appetite for luxury goods.

Before the downturn, luxury marketers embraced the concept of “mass affluence.” Buoyed by fatter stock portfolios and exploding equity in real estate — and encouraged by easy credit — a larger portion of the population, mainly in the Aspiring tier, considered itself wealthy enough to buy luxury goods. But in 2011, these consumers no longer “feel rich,” and they are not particularly likely to graduate into affluence later on (and thus are not a particularly promising future market for luxury brands to seed). In 2011, those in the Aspiring tier firmly self-identify as middle class.

This article points to something that I suspect is going on in our current process of increasing income inequality. Lefties like me talk a lot about the stagnant wages and weakening security of the lower 80% or so, and the stratospheric wealth of the upper 1%, but I see a great deal of weirdness in the in-between of technocratic professionals where I live.

I'm sure that this is partly a symptom of living in left-ish San Francisco, but among folks like me I'm seeing an awareness that the unforgiving American economy is treating us relatively well combined with several kinds of anxiety. First, there's class anxiety that we directly experience in our working lives how we are the courtiers hard at work running the country for the benefit of wealthy oligarchs. Second, there's political anxiety that the majority of the American people rightly should see us as complicit in running the system that screws them. Third, there's the economic anxiety that our economic class lives on a slippery and shrinking ice floe, and it's easy to fall off of it; you see this particularly in the sense of barely contained panic parents have about their children's education.

There's also a weird frustration with what my relatively good income will and won't buy. I think I'm not alone in this. I'm conscious that not worrying about money day-to-day is a profound luxury, and I enjoy a number of small luxuries as well — more restaurant meals than are really responsible, a few nice pairs of shoes, some spiffy consumer electronics. But I cannot afford a fancy car or take elaborate vacations or enjoy many of the other trappings of “wealth.” I don't have as much money saved as I'd like. And I don't feel confident that my economic fortunes are secure in the long run.

I do indulge in one very big luxury, which is not living in the great American suburban wasteland. This not only makes my housing breathtakingly expensive, it also nickels-and-dimes me with every carrot and bar of soap. Suburban living is actually more resource-intensive than urban living, but we've made it cheaper through a whole range of public policies. It is decidedly weird that a smaller living space, relying on public transit, and encountering hungry, miserable people asking for spare change every day is an expensive luxury.

That last point is exceptionally frustrating. Being acutely aware of the systems of social injustice that I participate in, even benefit from, I make an effort to contribute to charities and such. But another one of the things which I want but just cannot buy with my relative wealth is social justice.

Manhattan Projects

In a couple of recent conversations, I've heard folks invoke the Manhattan Project as a demonstration that given a vigorous enough government commitment, scientists can be directed to secretly invent the seemingly impossible. Unfortunately, that's just not true.

I think a lot of people imagine that one sunny day in 1942 the US government came to the scientific community and said, “we need a city-busting bomb, and we'll give you resources to do it,” and the scientists quietly whipped up the Bomb to order. But that is the reverse of the way it happened.

Physicists had been designing atom bombs on blackboards as a “thought experiment” since the 1930s. Seeing the theoretical possibility of the Bomb wasn't hard to figure out. It was the scientists who came to the government, aware of the potential to make the Bomb and horrified by the prospect that the Germans might develop it leaving the Allies at their mercy. It wasn't the conceptual difficulty of the Bomb which necessitated the mammoth effort of the Manhattan Project. Yes, having a large team of scientists did help do it more quickly, and resulted in the team delivering two different successful Bomb designs. But it was the materials problem of separating the uranium isotopes that required the magnitude of the Manhattan Project. Scientific discovery and technological invention do scale with investment, but only to a degree.

And as a secret effort, the Manhattan Project may be unique. Obviously we still have secret military research in the US, and totalitarian nations can conduct big secret projects, but it's difficult to imagine keeping something as big as the Manhattan Project under wraps again. Scientists tend to be garrulous and iconoclastic; only the uniquely galvanizing threat of Hitler with the Bomb could have kept so many of them both engaged and careful to keep the secret.

Judeo-Christian

A few months back, I snarked to a friend:

few things say culturally conservative American Protestant hegemony with an “I’m not an antisemite” fig leaf like using the word “Judeo-Christian”

But I just learned from an article in Tablet magazine that it has complicated, interesting origins.

When and how did America start to think of itself as a Judeo-Christian country, rather than what it historically has been, a Protestant one? That is the question Kevin M. Schultz asks in Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (Oxford), and he gives a very concrete answer. The change came about in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks primarily to the concerted effort of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a lobbying and educational group founded in 1927.

[⋯]

The NCCJ had its origins as a reaction to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, with its anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic hatreds, and took new urgency from the rise of Nazism in 1930s Europe. Its most popular programs were the so-called Tolerance Trios, in which a priest, minister, and rabbi would tour the country conducting public discussions.

This was a vigorous propaganda effort.

the marching band formed into a Star of David and played a rousing version of “Ein Keloheinu,” before reforming as a cross and playing “Onward Christian Soldiers”

The past is another country.

Expanding on the theme later

I know that many people use the expression “Judeo-Christian” in naïve good faith. But it always raises my hackles, and I think it’s safe to say that many if not most American Jews feel the same. The people who turn to it most often are chauvinists for a certain conception of Christianity, who want to claim that their Christianity is fundamental to western civilization … but they want to hide the chauvinism so they add the “Judeo-” in order to sound inclusive and not-antisemitic. “Protestant But I Promise I Am Not An Anti-Semite Why Would You Think That No I Swear I Am Not No Way Not Me I Have Jewish Friends And I Love Israel Because Israel Is Necessary For Jesus To Come Back And Convince All The Jews To Convert To Christianity.”

Though the people most enthusiastic about talking about “Judeo-Christian values” are making that move, more people resort to saying “Judeo-Christian” in a more innocent way, talking about an understanding of western culture entangled with Christianity while trying to avoid the implication of antisemitism or Christian-ist politics. A wholesome error, but still a serious error. Christian culture, emphasizing how Christianity regards the Hebrew Bible as sacred as a way to counter antisemitism fails to understand how different Christian and Jewish sensibilities are. It is difficult for folks either coming from Christian religious practice or coming from the vaguely-Protestant baseline of US culture to register how deep these differences in outlook and texture are.

If one is thinking at a big enough scale, yes one can read Christianity and Judaism as having a lot in common when constrasted with dharmic religious currents (like the various strains of Buddhism and “Hinduism” ) or animistic religious currents or so forth. But at that level, the useful term of art for what Judaism and Christianity have in common is “Abrahamic”, because Islam along with Baha’i and Druze and other traditions belong in any box big enough to hold both Judaism and Christianity. “Abrahamic religion” is thus a term of limited, specific utility rather than simply a more polite substitute for “Judeo-Christian religion” because the work people use “Judeo-Christian” to do should not be done.

One difference is Judaism emphatically refusing final truths, while Christianity (generally) pursues them. A degree of dissent which would produce a denominational schism in Christianity is, in Judaism, a component of daily practice!

Folks unfamiliar with Judaism often ask about principles in common, including the rules for sex much-quoted by Christian conservatives. Contemporary Judaism inherits mitzvoth (blessings / commandments) from the Torah which do indeed include tight constraints on sex among other things. But one can no more understand Judaism simply by reading the Torah than one can understand Christianity simply by reading the New Testament. But Jewish practice wraps the mitzvoth in a very thick interpretive layer. So while there are a lot of mitzvoth which call for a penalty of death, the Talmudic tradition sets up conditions for actually following through on that penalty which are effectively impossible to meet. And in particular, Judaism and Jewish culture simply do not think about sex in the same way that Christianity and Christian culture do; sex itself is not a corrupting imposition on the human condition in the way that Christianity often understands it.

The use of “Judeo-Christian” by Evangelical Christians today is a reversal of the origins described in the article I linked above; early on they opposed the expression.

Evangelicals, meanwhile, resisted the encroaching pluralism. In 1947, and again in 1954, working with political allies, the National Association of Evangelicals introduced the Christian amendment into Congress: ‘This nation devoutly recognises the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of all nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.’ Out of step with the burgeoning postwar pluralism, the Christian amendment was not passed.

This misrepresentation of history and ideas is destructive.

Ultimately, no attempt to treat two disparate cultures as one is productive or useful — but were we to do so, there’s very little reason (aside from supersessionism and anti-Judaism) to try and conflate Christianity and Judaism. When we talk about a Judeo-Christian civilization, we demean and endanger both Judaism and Christianity, and we do neither of them any favors by continuing to reference such an idea.

More history:

The modern use of the term is another step in the grand evolution of Christian erasure of Jews; a faux inclusion while speaking over and erasing Jews, all the while muddling, obscuring, and hiding Jews and our very different beliefs from the narrative. Most people using this term have an agenda and that agenda serves the needs of the Christian majority — Jews and our beliefs be damned.

On the transparency of what the loudest voices using the term mean.

So if you insist on using the term “Judeo-Christian” to identify your values as superior to others, then I will require you to show your work.

And so I set limits on the question.

The value must be uniquely Judeo-Christian, it cannot be common to any other value system, secular or non-secular. The value, whatever it is, must be common to both Jewish and Christian belief systems, i.e. it must be Judeo-Christian.

Be specific. Show your work. Don’t make vague hand-waving pronouncements.

And out of a thousand answers, from Christians, from Jews, Muslims, atheists, agonistics, from Rabbis, from Preachers and Shit Shakers and Holy Rollers, I got … nothing.

On unwholesome implications and more:

To respect and value Judaism means to do so on its own terms, and not only if it conforms to Christian ideas about what religion should be. Ignoring these differences (and to pretend that Jews and Christians believe the same things) risks subsuming Judaism into Christianity. It risks viewing Judaism as an archaic precursor to Christianity rather than a continuing unique and vibrant tradition.

[⋯]

Indeed, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” erases Judaism by implying that Christian values are Jewish values. Erasing Judaism by subsuming it into Christianity is called supersessionism, a tactic of Christian polemicists for centuries, and one that is currently in use by the Christian religious right.

So please, just do not use the expression.

… as American democracy once again grasps for root metaphors with which to confront our country’s diversity and its place in the world, the term’s recuperation should rightfully alarm us: It has always divided Americans far more than it has united them

A few favorite Twitter threads

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg:

“Judeo-Christian” isn’t a thing. It

1. positions Jews and Christians against Muslims, is Islamophobic
2. elides Christian oppression and murder of Jews over more than 1000 years
3. ignores Jewish civilization worldwide, and facts of key Jewish developments in the Middle East and North Africa

And yes, Jesus was a (brown-skinned, Middle Eastern) Jew, but his followers were not. Jews changed their liturgy to be clear about that differentiation pretty early. And guess what? Judaism has continued to evolve since the Second Temple was destroyed! The Mishnah (check Wikipedia on terms you don’t know) was (depending on your theology) either given at Sinai or developed organically in the Land of Israel sometime when we were under Greek/Selucid/Roman occupation. The Talmud (Bavli natch) was composed and redacted in what’s now Iraq. Lots of scholarship on whether and extent of e.g. Zoroastrian influences. The Geonim were living under the Abbasid Caliphate. The Rif lived in Algeria, Tunisia, and possibly Morocco. Maimonides fled Spain and wound up living in Morocco and Egypt, wrote in both Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The Shulchan Aruch (which, along w/Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah, are the bedrock of post-Talmudic Jewish law) was composed in Sfat, Land of Israel, under Ottoman Empire. Its author, Joseph Karo, was born in Spain and expelled in 1492 when the Catholic monarchs kicked out all the Jews. And yes, then there was an Ashkenazi gloss—the Rema was from what’s now Poland. And Rashi was from France. And Rebbeinu Gershom lived in France and Germany. Etc. But to say that even half of the major moments that shaped Jewish thinking happened under Christian rule is way off.

When we were under Christian rule, it generally wasn’t so great for us. Go learn some history if you think otherwise. And while life in Muslim countries wasn’t always great either, it was often much better than under Christians; we had a protected status as People of the Book. #NotAllChristians, obviously. I have a ton of amazing Christian friends (actually tho), have spent years reading Christian spiritual wisdom, have great admiration for and have learned from Christian progressive movements today and in history; some of y’all do a great job following Jesus.

But it’s important for interfaith dialogue, coexistence, basic respect and historical accuracy to not conflate Judaism and Christianity. Two different faiths, traditions, theologies, histories. The origin and relationship to text is overlapping in some cases, yes, but …

There’s no Judeo-Christian tradition. And that’s ok.

For those asking about “Abrahamic faiths” re: Judaism / Christianity / Islam, sure, but when do you really need this? And what’s implied about Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, etc etc? Not saying it’s never applicable but better to check yourself first.

For everyone who wants to argue with me about the second tweet in this thread and thus totally miss the larger point I’m making:

Within not very long after Jesus’ death, Christianity and Judaism had gone off on different paths — including with Jews taking pains to differentiate themselves from followers of Jesus. I am referring to the separate paths of the last 1900 or more years ….

Also philosophically, legally, ritually, in so many ways, Judaism and Islam have much more in common than Judaism and Christianity. Yes, some Jewish sacred texts are also Christian sacred texts, yes Jesus was a Jew. Just … be nuanced. Learn comparative religion. Don’t conflate.

Today I learned that the phrase “Judeo-Christian first appeared in 1821 to talk about Jewish converts to Christianity and then for the second time in 1829 to talk about churches that would observe some Jewish traditions in order to convert Jews. Toxic to us? Yeahhhh.

See also: Christian Zionism.

Jews, the Christian Zionist endgame is Armageddon / bringing the end times, during which they believe we will not be saved. We’re a tool to help them get there. Even if you like their “support for Israel” (I don’t, it’s pro-Occupation), you are cannon fodder to them.

What fascinates me is the ultra-Orthodox Jews who ally with them, which I think can be read as both groups using each other. Christian Zionists thinking the Jews will help hasten the Rapture and they’ll get zapped, that’s fine. Jews thinking, like, obviously the Rapture won’t happen, but this is great for helping Israel make the Occupation permanent (and, depending on their theology, maybe will hasten the Messiah-who-is-not-Jesus coming and they don’t really care where non-Jews fall in that equation.)

Anyway. Christian Zionists often appropriate our stuff and make Big Jewish Noise but they are not our friends, do not wish us well. (NB Christian Zionism is a movement, a thing, I don’t mean just “Christians who happen to believe the State of Israel should exist in whatever way”)

They wish us ill, they wish queers and trans folks and probably most people of color ill (never mind Jews who are also queer and/or Black etc etc), they, unlike the guy they claim to follow, do not bring love and compassion to the world. They are dangerous and they are running this country.

For those of you talking about how some Jews will be “saved,” aka convert to Christianity, won’t get killed — my friends, you misunderstand if you think that’s better. It’s roughly same difference viz valuing Jews and our humanity, autonomy, faith. We only matter if we convert. We have a whole martyrology literature around “sanctifying God’s name,” aka preferring death to forced conversion.

The Yom Kippur liturgy includes language specifying explicitly that we’ll let those who pretended to convert under duress to pray with us — because it wasn't obvious that the answer was yes. In fact, the Kol Nidre prayer may be a formula to annul those conversions. “Saved” isn’t better.

We didn’t survive the Inquisition and the Crusades and all those expulsions and pogroms and the Holocaust just to give up at this so-called end. Not gonna happen. End of the world can come and go and there’ll still be a couple of Jews somewhere in some corner studying Torah.

I'll say this again, more slowly, here: #NotAllChrisitians are trying to manipulate Jews to bring the end times and don’t care if they’re obliterated (whether death or conversion) in the process. I’m talking about a very. specific. movement. here. Christian Zionist Evangelicals. This eschatological theology we've been discussing depends on supersessionism, which is inherently antisemitic. But also this particular branch of toxic Christian Zionist Evangelicals is also not the only place where supersessionism / replacement theology shows up.

So if you are Christian and reading this thread it would be a good and helpful form of allyship to Jews to interrogate the places where it might show up in your own community's thinking, and to do some grappling with that. Even if you're not actively trying to bring the Rapture.

PS

Some versions of this Evangelical end-times involves a massive war, battle of Armageddon-type stuff. Some would welcome the outbreak of war in Israel/Palestine in anticipation of it bringing all of this to a head.

And of course care and concern for Palestinians is totally absent from these scenarios.

(I have a few words of my own on an example of ultra-Orthodox Jews and anti-Zionism.)

Jessica Price:

There’s no such thing as “Judeo-Christian ethics.”

Judaism and Christianity’s ethical systems don’t have any more in common with each other than Christianity and Islam’s ethical systems, so all this phrase is is a roundabout way to shit on Islam.

Plus, “Judeo-Christian ethics” almost always gets trotted out in a vague, Golden Rule sort of way. Which is basically just shitting on every other major world religion, since they all have “treat other people with compassion” teachings.

But wait! I hear you saying. Christianity has its roots in Judaism, so surely we can speak of some sort of ethical tradition common to both, but not to other religions, that’s more robust than “just treat people with compassion.”

… can we, though?

Okay, well, in order to define what’s unique about a purported “Judeo-Christian ethics,” we first have to define what was — I’m not going to say unique, but — different about Judaism’s ethical system from other major religions around the Mediterranean at the time.

So, okay, what were Judaism’s innovations as a religion. If you’ve taken a high school world religions unit, like, ever, you’ve probably heard the term “ethical monotheism.” One of the defining features of mainline Judaism around the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age was the idea that its deity was the only deity (or at least, the only one worthy of worship), and that what that deity wanted wasn’t just allegiance and sacrifices, but ethical behavior. I’m not saying that idea was absolutely unique in the world at the time or anything, but it was kind of a big deal in the world of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean milieu.

And the other one was the primacy of law. One of the most enduring negative stereotypes about Judaism is that it’s “legalistic.” That’s a weird flattening of everything it is, but absolutely the idea of law holds a central place of honor. It’s a huge deal. Law was the province of kings — and in most of the ancient Near East, commoners didn’t have a right to know what the laws governing them were. Law was basically whatever the king said (or wrote) it was. So the idea that everyone gets to know what the law is, and everyone is responsible for upholding / teaching / enforcing it was a huge deal. When Moses starts his final speech to the Israelites about moving on without him, he doesn’t start with a bunch of religious stuff. He starts with: ok, you're going to build yourself a legal system, and you're going to make sure it applies equally to everyone.

So, okay, what are the defining features of Jewish ethics, as they existed when Christianity split off (so that they can accurately be said to be part of the same ethical tradition)?

^#1 divine desire = ethical behavior

💕💖💗🥰 LAW LAW LAW ❤️💕❣️😍

So, if Jewish Ethical Characteristic ^#1 is that the primary divine desire is for ethical behavior, not pure allegiance to the deity, Christianity skipped off into the sunset shouting “byeeeeeee!” almost immediately on that one.

Like, Christianity is pretty clear that Thing ^#1 is allegiance to Jesus, and then the result of that is supposed to be the desire to do good works.

For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.

Jesus said to him “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

And it’s only doubled down on that over time. At least in Catholicism, you still have the idea of faith and works existing more or less equally and in tandem, but Protestantism goes all sola fide and ends up developing “works righteousness” as a term of contempt.

So if the first and foremost thing the Eternal wants in Judaism is ethical behavior, in Christianity, it’s for you to be saved, and then you’re supposed to want to do good works to be more like Jesus. These are two completely different bases for an ethical system.

And then we’ve got the primacy of law.

There are a million and one debates about how antinomian Christianity is, and I’m not going to rehash them. I don’t think there’s a single right answer. I do think, however, that this is pretty clear that law isn’t a primary focus.

So no, I don’t see a single unbroken line of descent from Jewish ethics to Christian ones. Christianity incorporated Jewish texts, certainly. But the bases of the systems diverged immediately. And I’m hard-pressed to find a single major principle in Jewish ethics that’s shared by Christianity but not Islam, or even, in broad strokes, but every major world religion. “Judeo-Christian ethics” aren’t a thing.

Rabbi Mike:

Tonight, let's chat about the oversimplification of “Jews and Christians have more in common," and that “one just thinks the messiah has come, and one hasn’t.” None of this is true, and it’s time we all learned!

A lot of this goes back to the old ideas of Judea-Christian values, which, don’t exist. For more on that, read this.

But what’s most important, is that no Jews and Christians don’t share the same values, not even about the scripture we “share”. We don’t have the same book. The Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible are in different languages, from different manuscripts.

So what does this mean? Quite simply, the values inside Biblical Judaism were (and are) interpreted through a Jewish lens by the rabbis, the books of law and interpretation, and finally into law codes and responsa that now form Modern Judaism. Parallel to this were the values that Christians interpreted from Biblical Judaism focusing on their theological ideas, such as, for instance, the typological predictions of Jesus, and seeing the laws and stories of the “Old Testament” through the lens of a “new” one. In other words, there never were any Jewish-Christian values, nor can there ever be, because as soon as the Jesus movement began in the 1^st century CE, the followers of Jesus began to rework and reinterpret Jewish values into their own.

Now, one might ask, “what about the moral statutes in Judaism and Christianity that we can bond together?” These are perfect examples. Let us take one of the more simple and well known commandments of the Torah, “You shall not murder.” This commandment, which occurs in the “decalogue” in Exodus 20 and in its similar retelling in Deuteronomy 5 is a wonderful place to start. For one, most Jews and Christians alike have mistranslated the Hebrew to be “You shall not kill,” which is incorrect as “killing” is a prescribed punishment for countless sins in the Torah and elsewhere. But more to our discussion, most laypeople would argue that both the Jewish and Christian “value” is to not murder. However, those doing so make a critical error in theology, particularly that of the reason for morality, the reason to not murder. In Christian theology, sinning has a specific punishment (Hell), and in some cases a specific remedy (forgiveness), but in Judaism there is no such system: Jews do not believe in a God who would use “hell” as an incentive to make them moral. Jews are moral because that is the proper way to live. Unlike “fear,” this is a fine incentive … Further, we deny hell altogether as barbaric and contrary to the nature of God.

Therefore, while Jews and Christians follow the law to “not murder,” it is for different reasons, and thus different values are placed behind the following of that law. This is the same for all “laws” and “values” found in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament (and beyond). Jews and Christians may want the same things at times, but for different reasons. As I said in my podcast, if Jews and Christians agree on something, it’s not from our past, it's a fluke, that somehow our separate interpretations matched for once.

And as for the messiah, I’ve written this before but our ideas of the messiah don’t match, so we can’t just say “you think they’ve come, and we don’t.” “Messiah” (from Hebrew) is a Jewish concept that, today has come to mean God’s agent who brings an end to war, famine, disease, discrimination, and suffering. Since these ills still afflict our society, Jews cannot accept any historical figure (including Jesus) as the Messiah.

That “Christ” (Greek for Messiah) is supposed to forgive sins or bring salvation is a Christian, not Jewish, idea — and it is one that redefines the Messiah’s agenda away from what Jews intended when they originated this concept.

Additionally, Christians are unaware that all books in today’s Hebrew scriptures were complete in themselves before anyone even had projected the kind of “Christ” figure that Christianity later came to propose. Jews never imagine their Bible standing on its own, serving any additional purpose Christians view the Jewish Bible’s purpose solely as lead-up to the Gospel accounts

Finally, A common denominator of Jewish biblical books is uncompromising denunciation of idolatry. A lesser known kind of idolatry — “Bibliolatry” — worship of the Bible as God (or in lieu of God). Even if the Bible did identify any individual as a Messiah, modern Jews need feel no compulsion to accept that person. No more so in the case of Jesus than in that of Cyrus of Persia. The Biblical identification was wrong, thus destabilizing the missionary’s tactics.

Just Say Xtian:

Let’s talk about the non-existence of “Judeo-Christian” values, using the PRRI 2019 American Values survey. It’s convenient, because the whole purpose of the survey is literally to ask people what their values are!

A caveat before we begin — not that long ago I was dragging someone for drawing conclusions from tiny sample sizes. In this survey we have data from 1,678 Christians and 35 Jews. That’s a tiny sample of Jews. Take all of this with a statistical grain of salt.

I’ve included real numbers along with percentages to try to drive that point home. That said — the differences are significant enough that we can still compare the results to get a general picture of how the populations differ. Let’s begin with [drumroll please] ...

• Is it necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values? Christians are nearly perfectly split on this question, 50/50. Jews come down hard on “no” with 80% generally disagreeing and roughly 60% completely disagreeing.
• Christians are again split 50/50 on whether discrimination against white people is as bad as discrimination against other minorities. Jews think it’s not a thing - 75% disagree, and a plurality (42%) completely disagree.
• Christians are generally opposed to removing Confederate leaders’ names from public buildings and statues (70%). Jews are split on the issue, but lean towards removing them (54%/42%).
• 40% of Christians would like to prevent refugees from entering the US. Only about 20% of Jews would do so, and about 50% are strongly opposed to doing so, compared to 20% of Christians.
• 40% of Christians are generally opposed to legal gay marriage, compared to only 10% of Jews. 60% of Jews strongly favor legal gay marriage, compared to only 25% of Christians.
• Christians are split 50/50 on legal abortion. 90% of Jews think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 42% of Jews think abortion should be legal in all cases, compared to 17% of Christians.
• This is my favorite one. Christians and Jews roughly agree on whether America is or has ever been a Christian nation. But — among those who think it was Christian once but isn’t now 80% of Christians think that’s a bad thing, and 72% of Jews think it’s a good thing.

Let us wrap up with a funny little story:

My student was abashed that he hadn’t put the obvious two-and-two together. To be clear, it wasn’t that he had thought “Jewish” was a subsect of Christianity — he knew Judaism was its own religion — it just genuinely never occurred to him to link “Judeo-” and “Jewish” (it seems obvious, I know, but I can absolutely imagine it being one of those things you just never put together until it’s stated and then it slaps you in the face). There were, he had thought, Jews and Christians, and then among Christians there were Catholic Christians and Orthodox Christian and Assyrian Christians and Judeo Christians.

Limbaugh as Schrödinger’s Asshole

I originally blogged a link to this article here back when. It is paywall’d but old, so in early 2025 I feel justified in transcribing the whole thing here for convenience, since it is so useful.

In a way, it is now old news. The Discourse is now awash in far right propagandists speaking in bad faith by saying foul things, then dissmissing criticism by claiming that they are just “joking”. On the personal scale, one may recognize this as a classic emotional abuse pattern. Rush Limbaugh was a master at it, a model for countless far right trolls who came after. There is ultimately no truth of what these folks “really” mean when they say things; it’s rhetorical strategies all the way down.

As a rule I don’t share things from Conor Friedersdorf. He is often the kind of “center-left” mainstream political commentator who degrades our ability to understand the political challenges we face. But this examination of a particular example of how Limbaugh worked this playbook is instructive and clarifying.

Rush Limbaugh’s Strategically Ambiguous Monologues

Conor Friedersdorf 3 May 2011

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Was the talk radio host being earnest or sarcastic when he praised the president for killing bin Laden? Neither answer is correct.

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Osama bin Laden’s death caused a bunch of curiosity seekers to tune into Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. Would the man who said he wanted President Obama to fail congratulate him on this success? The talk radio host was in a tough spot. He’s long insisted that Obama is opposed to the U.S. asserting itself as an arbiter of justice. But there the president was: weighing America’s options, ordering a unilateral military operation, and glorying in the death of Civilizational Enemy No. 1.

For Limbaugh, this was potentially devastating. President Obama is a flawed leader, no matter his recent success. His critics are right to keep saying so. But the particular criticisms Limbaugh regularly voices? “Obama doesn’t believe we have the moral authority to do anything other than mouth a bunch of words,” he said just weeks ago. “He doesn’t look at America as the solution. We’re the problem.” That narrative was shown by dramatic real world events to be utter nonsense.

And he knows it. But to admit as much?

His problem was that he couldn’t come out Monday morning swinging. Sure, some of his listeners would stick by him. But the Limbaugh audience is largely made up of nationalistic War on Terror hawks who wanted bin Laden’s head on a pike as much as anyone. Opening with a direct attack on Obama after an event that brought out the jingoism in NPR listeners wasn’t going to play.

Longtime Limbaugh watchers won’t be surprised by his ingenious if cowardly solution. This is a man who often makes self-contradictory remarks that would evoke cognitive dissonance if uttered by a less talented broadcaster. (A recent example is his brazen about face on the war in Libya.) Over the years, he’s gotten around this problem by putting ever more weight on his intellectual crutch of choice: deliberately ambiguous monologues that cannot be pinned down.

Did a segment have its intended effect? Then Limbaugh was totally serious. Is it generating more heat than anticipated? Oh, he was only joking. Isn’t it just like humorless liberals to have missed that? His audience always buys these weak explanations because they’re told that they’re sophisticated enough to understand the nuance of his radio program, something his critics in “the drive-by media” lack the attention span and intelligence to grasp. The fact that he is often misunderstood by his least sophisticated critics only helps him get away with this clever feint.

That brings us to the way that he started his Monday program (transcript below):

We need to open the program today by congratulating President Obama. President Obama has done something extremely effective, and when he does, this needs to be pointed out. President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East. He did not scrub the mission to get Bin Laden. In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb like they always do. They wanted to go in there and drop missiles and launch bombs, a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that. Not a single intelligence advisor, not a single national security advisor, not a single military advisor came up with the idea of using SEAL Team 6 or any of the Special Forces.

Our military wanted to go in there and just scorch the earth, leaving no evidence of anything after the mission. But President Obama single-handedly understood what was at stake here. He alone understood the need to get DNA to prove the death. Obama alone understood the aftermath, alone understood that there would be doubting Thomases if the place was just obliterated and no evidence was to be found. According to news reports, not one member of the military, not General Petraeus, nobody in the intel community, nobody had the slightest idea of going in there and using Special Forces. It was President Obama, single-handedly and alone, who came up with the strategy that brought about the effective assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

On Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Twitter, and elsewhere, folks were debating whether Limbaugh was being earnest or sarcastic in that segment. It’s easy to understand their confusion: The “Osama is caught” monologue isn’t a coherent example of either approach. Various aspects of it don’t work as sarcasm. After all, President Obama did reject a military plan to reduce the compound to rubble, and actually deserves credit for ordering an attack that would leave proof of bin Laden’s death. Plus there’s all that stuff about how he continued George W. Bush-era policies, and being proud of the troops (more on that in a moment) — just what you’d expect an earnest Limbaugh to say.

On the other hand, it’s obviously silly to say that nobody else in the U.S. government saw the merits of using a raid rather than bombs. The hyperbole used to describes Obama’s role wasn’t delivered with an obviously sarcastic tone, but it made no sense as an earnest statement.

Especially considering the man voicing it.

Where should observers come down? Early on, media outlets reported on the monologue as if it was totally earnest. A debate on Twitter ensued, where even savvy media observer Glenn Greenwald wrote, “Rush Limbaugh’s Obama praise today is unquestionably sincere, not sarcastic — not even a close call.” But the talk radio host couldn’t let himself be quoted in mainstream media articles earnestly praising Obama as singularly deserving of credit. Imagine what some of the hard core anti-Obama callers were saying after that first ambiguous half-hour!

So he comes back in hour three, springs the traps he set, and laughingly mocks the media sources that quoted him as if he was speaking in earnest. It’s exactly the outcome he wanted. Limbaugh, put in an intellectually precarious spot, always does his utmost to change the subject into a meta-conversation wherein he critiques the media. It’s the only way a man unable to defend so many of his utterances can survive. If it’s Rush vs. the MSM, the audience will always take his side.

In order to fully grasp his mastery of the strategically ambiguous monologue, let’s go back to the line I flagged before: “Last night I was as proud as I have been of the U.S. military in I don’t know how long.” Earnest praise for the troops? Sure seems like it on first listen. Mocking allusion to Michelle Obama’s controversial “proud of my country for the first time” remark? Also plausible! Especially in context. Certainly some of his listeners heard it that way and chuckled. But also totally deniable if necessary! The important thing to realize is that there is no right answer, other than whatever happens to be more convenient for Limbaugh at a particular moment in time.

It is unimportant to him that there even be a true meaning. He is a bullshit artist in the strictest sense of the term:

There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail … It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

This failure to articulate and defend a single coherent position is the tactic of an intellectual coward, one who has abandoned any pretense of adding to the discourse, and satisfies himself by being an especially adept manipulator. In a man as smart as Limbaugh, it is a perilous course, for it can only end in self-loathing. But credit where it’s due: he is damned good at the game he plays.