o1mnikent

The crisis in Kenya has taken a backseat in the newspapers to the domestic and international headlines this past week, with the rampant Obamania (I’ve been enjoying Andrew Sullivan’s blog) and the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Simon, a friend and fellow seminarian, blogs from Nairobi.

(photo from Simon’s blog)

It’s caucus time, which means that today Americans, as they do every four years, spend an inordinate amount to time scratching their head and wondering just what, exactly, a caucus is. The only place to watch a caucus in action (sounds like a good name for a defunct 80s punk band) is C-SPAN, which offers a respite from the babbling monotony that is cable news.

Not long ago, writers for the Writers Guild of America went on strike, which forced me to watch shows other than The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and the other kind of late-night political satire that keeps the rest of my daily news intake in check. And seriously, it’s lamentable that Fred Thompson gives speeches every day without somebody to make fun of him. So I’m glad Jon Stewart & Co. is back starting this week and next.

In the meantime, I was left to endure the mind-numbing monotony that is cable news. Not just Fox News, either. All of it. Cable news is sound-byte-ization at its worst. Even the shows that attempt any kind of lengthy analysis consult panels of experts who are more interested in selling their books than contributing any kind of meaningful commentary. I found myself learning nothing and becoming more intensely frustrated. The medium of television news would not help me understand an issue any better than print or on public radio.

So I canceled my cable. No more FOX, CNN, or MSNBC. I won’t be hearing from Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, and Lou Dobbs. Tonight, I’ll be watching the Iowa caucuses on C-SPAN. I’ll be gauranteed awkward hosts, poor camera shots, and reporting from cafes and bars all over rural Iowa. That’s the way politics was meant to be.

EDIT: From a piece in Slate yesterday on C-SPAN’s coverage of the campaign:

“Its tone can be so dry that you might feel a need to spread mayonnaise on your TV screen. But it can switch, in a blink, into an all-you-can-eat buffet of high absurdity.”

Shelly and I have welcomed a friend from Guatemala to our home for the past few days. He brought with him a self-produced video that describes our work last summer — work we plan to continue this coming summer.

http://homepage.mac.com/garydeleon/iMovieTheater3.html

The finest RSS reader now allows you to share items.  Mine are here, which - I kid you not - you can subscribe to.  How meta is that?  (Answer: quite)

Phillip Pullman, imprisoned gang members in Guatemala, and Jesus Christ all have something uniquely in common: a shared disdain for the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, here depicted by Rembrandt in the shadows. This character, sadly, embodies what the Pharisees were and what the church has become.

Pullman’s chief critique in The Golden Compass is that the church is sex-crazed and close-minded. The former isn’t exactly incorrect (Boston diocese, etc.) and the latter has been met - ironically - with censorship and boycotts. Perhaps there are better ways to engage culture, and finding a good articulation of common grace might be a way to start.

I heard something on NPR awhile back - like, a year ago - about public libraries.  The story not only expressed astonishment that public libraries still exist, but also pondered the public outcry that would ensue if public libraries were first proposed today.  So you want to use taxpayer dollars to buy thousands of books and then give them to anyone who wants them at no cost?  The same idea wouldn’t work for a publicly-funded Blockbuster, so it’s probably no small miracle that it still works for libraries, especially since books aren’t nearly as popular as movies and video games.

I’ve become an avid user of the public library here in Lynden, and I’m grateful that it is free, public, and open to anyone.  So I was surprised to learn that someone is trying to make money lending renting books.  I read on the Seattle PI’s website this morning that

Paperspine is trying to do for books what Netflix did for DVDs. In fact, Dustin Hubbard — the Microsoft Corp. program manager who co-founded the Issaquah startup on a leave of absence this summer — said he was inspired by the online movie rental company when he came up with the idea.

It happened one night while putting a book into a crowded nightstand. Hubbard, who has spent 10 years at Microsoft, started wondering why he simply couldn’t return the book for another, a la Netflix.

The online book rental service was born. Paperspine launched last week with 150,000 paperback titles and four subscription plans, ranging from $9.95 to $24.95 a month. (Hardbacks are to be introduced later this month.)

Subscribers can check out up to five books at a time. Like Netflix there are no late fees, and members return books in a prepaid envelope. They also can browse by category, say history, romance or science fiction.

Best of luck, Paperspine.  For now, I’ll continue to use the local public library.

Shelly and I played speed scrabble yesterday. I’ve never felt better about losing:

(full disclosure: the lower left M wasn’t there when the game ended, rendering me zero points)

It’s exam week, which means that my youtube intake of Russian violinists not wearing pants increases to greater-than-normal levels. Thanks, internet.

Shelly and I went to Starbucks the other day for coffee, conversation, and a bit of respite from our jobs and exams, respectively. Along with Shelly’s Grande Extra Hot Peppermint Mocha and my decaf drip (you can tell from our coffee which one of us has a more exciting life), the barista handed me a card. I asked her about it, since (a) tilting my neck demands too much exertion and (b) it’s almost Christmas, which among other things, should inspire us all to be a little more incarnational. Why read the card when you can just ask them in a flesh-and-blood, pitched-his-tent-and-dwelt-among-us sort of way?

“You can get a free drink,” she told me.

“How?” said I, since I haven’t come to expect such benevolent gestures from corporate exemplars of hegemony.

“Do a nice thing for someone, and we’ll give you a free drink.”

I decided at that moment against lecturing her on the merits of doing nice things for their own sake, or proselytizing the Golden Rule, which until then I had thought was self-evident.

After I scraped the bottom of my jaw off the counter and returned it from where it had dropped, I perused the card she had given me. Sure enough: “Pass the cheer to a friend, and we’ll pass it on to you,” it said, and suggested possible ways by which this might be accomplished. Hold the elevator door. Carry someone’s packages. Then hand the beneficiary of your good deed the Cheer Pass - this small card - and ask them to pass it along. The card even had a cheer pass ID number that do-gooders can use to record their good deeds online. After the card is used, tear off its bottom half and return it for a free drink. Also, the fine print indicates that the cash value of the card - and presumably the cheer it helps pass - is worth 1/20 of a cent.

My good deed is worth $0.0005.

Our exchange reminded me of an editorial about conspicuous virtue that appeared a few months ago in the Wall Street Journal. Conspicuous virtue defined: “consumers spend money in order to demonstrate their innate goodness.” This is much like Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption, which has become central to our modern understanding of consumerism. Veblen noted in 1899 that

For consumption to be conspicuous, it had to exceed the basic needs. “Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure,” Veblen wrote, “runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame [i.e. reputation], it must be an expenditure of superfluities.” Serving a fine scotch might constitute conspicuous consumption: No one needs it, per se, but it reflects taste, connoisseurship and deepness of pocket.” (quoted from the WSJ)

In other words, we buy jeans because they belong to a particular brand - a story or reality that we wish to be a part of. The jeans themselves are not worth much, but our participation as a character in the story is. We spend $50.00 not for the pair of jeans, but for the entry into the story that Gap or Carhart constructs for us and for the social status acquired by becoming such a character.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that we now give like we buy: to enter into a particular reality and to display our goodness to others. The article suggests that consumers now “spend not to suggest the deepness of their pockets but the deepness of their hearts. We inhabit… an age of conspicuous virtue.” A friend of mine reflected on the Red Campaign last year:

“If I may be so direct as to name it, I’ll call this campaign thinly-disguised exploitation. (Haven’t we done this to Africa before?) Companies have the audacity to latch on to the most significant humanitarian crisis in world history in order to sell a shitty t-shirt. People in Africa are, in fact, dying at alarming rates. And not just people in Africa. HIV/AIDS is wreaking havoc in almost every part of the world we don’t like talking about. Good for us, Apple, Motorola and Converse are keeping an eye on the situation. Just buy a new ipod. Your old 4 gigabyte version wasn’t pulling its weight anyway. And plus, think of all the African children you will save.

“Pardon my irreverent suggestion but I’d be interested to see how the campaign would fly if the people hawking the products were African AIDS victims instead of gorgeous film and music stars. Gap and its cohorts have provided a new definition of Poverty-Pornography. The term used to apply to relief organizations who would guilt and shame people into giving money by showing them a shriveled, malnourished three-year old scouring the city dump. Now the term applies to scantily-clad film celebrities who hawk AIDS-prevention-friendly clothes that can barely cover their breasts.”

We have all forgotten the corollary of giving: that it should cost us something. Giving, like fasting and the other disciplines of abstinence, should hurt a little by depriving us of money, time, and all else that might contribute to our own pleasure and serve our own ends. It’s a small thing to hold an elevator for a free cup of coffee or contribute to sufferers of AIDS in Africa by buying red underwear. But it’s a greater thing to be able to give up our participation in world where we give in order to obtain entry into a fake world constructed Apple, Gap, and Starbucks.

And so, in the interest of spreading cheer for the sake of spreading cheer, I will refrain from suggesting where Starbucks might take their free-drink-card and put it.

Excerpted from a letter in this week’s Lynden Tribune:

“My property taxes almost doubled because the County Assessor’s staff have bought into the pro-casino propaganda. My real estate value has dropped 30 percent or more. If you get lucky and find someone to buy your house, it will be almost impossible for them to get financing. The night sky is lit up by lights and sky beams. There is a constant stream of traffic on the road. And, yet to come, drunk drivers.”

It seems that the writer of this letter hasn’t, you know, played the odds very well. Why are poker tournaments and lotteries considered gambling, but investing in real estate or the stock market is not?* Why do churches in Lynden selectively pray against grambling but not against the woeful decisions made by sub-prime lenders (or the lendees sitting in the pews)? It’s easy to bring anti-casino tirades to church, but we ought to be more concerned about the things that we’re too ashamed to pray about, since gambling addiction, I suspect, is less of a problem in our churches than bad credit and the cultural assumptions that justify our spending habits. It is reprehensible that a community as affluent as ours opposes gambling on the grounds that it encourages greed among the most impoverished. Gambling is certainly not the most pressing moral problem for church-goers in our community.

I suspect that we’re upset at the casino not for its gambling, but because we have become aware that gambling amounts to little more than a redistribution of wealth and power to a minority group on the fringe of our city whom many of us have arbitrarily deemed less-than-deserving of either.

*This sentence was quoted.  Can’t remember the source.