Movie night: LINCOLN

Three quick thoughts about Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN:

* This is Spielberg at his most Frank Capra -- trying to inspire us and teach us and make us love what democracy can be, while acknowledging its tradeoffs and pitfalls (albeit with a Spielbergian sheen). It came out nearly a decade ago, after nearly a full term of Obama's presidency, when perhaps it was a bit easier for many of us to feel those possibilities. Now, though, it can feel like it runs against the spirit of our times. But maybe that's an excellent reason to watch it.

* The movie almost slides into self-parody though, as Daniel Day-Lewis's Lincoln defuses one tense moment after another with a story, a joke or an aphorism. At times it resembles Chauncey Gardner from BEING THERE guiding America through the Civil War. 

* But the soul of the movie belongs, in large part, to Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, a "radical Republican" who believes not just in ending slavery, but in real equality between the races -- and how he must negotiate curbing his instinct to "radicalism" so that he allay the fears of shaky congressmen to pass the 13th Amendment. The debate between ideals and effectiveness in politics is forever with us. TLJ gives the dilemma a human face ... while somehow being very Tommy Lee Jones.

Today's thought of dread

I'm given to apocalyptic thinking, so bear with me. But.

I wonder if the plans we're still trying to make and the arguments we're having aren't entirely irrelevant to reality, that our ticket is already punched -- the flood is coming, and a few of us might be on the ark, but most of us aren't.

I hope not. 

But.

The 'stock villainy' of Trumpist voters

These tweets from Michael Brendan Dougherty bothered me overnight:

A few thoughts:

First, I had some good - even deep - relationships with a few semi-prominent conservatives before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. Those relationships have been wrecked, for the most part. And guess what? As much as I despair for what is happening in this country, for what he has done to it and how he has been enabled by those former friends, I also deeply grieve the loss of those friendships. I'm not certain if they can be put back together, or if they should, but I have lost something.

Dougherty's phrase "stock villainy" keeps coming back to me. The phrase implies seeing people in one dimension instead of the three. Few people are only good or only bad, and seeing them that way reduces them, dishonestly. And yet: Donald Trump is the closest thing to a stock villain I have encountered in public life. I cannot discern a redeeming quality in the man. I despised George W. Bush -- but hey, at least he gave the world PEPFAR, and he struck me as somebody who might've been a decent person had he not been given the power of the presidency. I can't even give that much credit to Trump. I can only see one dimension in him. I can see only bad. Sometimes I think that's a failing on my part. I'm certain that it is a failure on his.

So what does Trump's stock villainy say about the people who put him in power?

As Dougherty suggested, there's a strong impulse on the left to just lump them all in together as undifferentiated bad, to write them all off. I get that. But I don't think it's true.

Humans are flawed. Humans are selfish. Humans make mistakes. Humans are dumb! Humans often see the razzle dazzle and miss the conman stealing their wallets. And humans sometimes have bad priorities alongside their good priorities. Only occasionally are humans outright evil. Even more rarely, I think, are humans outright good.

We see Republicans through the lens of Trump, and thus impute his stock villainy to them. They should see what we see and act accordingly, right? But many of his supporters are more complicated than that. It doesn't mean they're right to support him. It doesn't mean we shouldn't upbraid them for their support of the man. But it does mean maybe we should approach the enterprise with just a touch more humility than we usually bring to our politics.

We who aren't Trump supporters are more complicated than that, after all. I've said this repeatedly over the years: We are tremendous at spotting the speck in our brother's eye while ignoring the log in our own. 

Where am I going with this? I don't know. If you've bailed out, I understand. I think Trump is a stock villain. I don't think his supporters are, or at least not many of them. We've decided that we can no longer try to tell the difference, or live with the differences. That, too, is profoundly human. But we're going to be stuck in this awful spiral of recrimination if we can't step back, just a little bit. I can defend my values and acknowledge the humanity of Trump voters. Indeed, my values demand that I do so.

Ross Douthat is wrong about monuments

Douthat: 

To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.

But just as Jefferson’s memorial wasn’t built to celebrate his slaveholding, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs wasn’t named for Wilson to honor him for being a segregationist. It was named for him because he helped create precisely the institutions that the school exists to staff — our domestic administrative state and our global foreign policy apparatus — and because he was the presidential progenitor of the idealistic, interventionist worldview that has animated that foreign policy community ever since.

Douthat is incorrect. You don't have to want to repudiate the good things a person has done to bring down a monument. Instead, you might want to reconsider how those good things are memorialized --  say, in the case of the recent controversy over the Freedmen's Monument: Nobody is against ending slavery, but they are uncomfortable at best with a monument that celebrates that accomplishment in a way that appears to reaffirm the submission of black people. You can disagree with that characterization, but the controversy is not remotely a renunciation of emancipation.

You also might want to bring a monument down after a reconsideration of the balance between a person's sins and virtues. Statues emphasize the virtues, to the near-exclusion of the sins. So even though Ulysses Grant was a greatly effective general during the Civil War -- not an accomplishment to be repudiated -- he also launched an illegal, bloody war against the Native American tribes that lived on the Plains. His legacy is thus much more complicated than a statue honoring him might indicate. You can honor the accomplishment while taking a dimmer view of the man.

I think our current round of statue-toppling is petering out, though I think a more process-driven statue reconsideration business will go on for awhile yet.  Probably, we'll find ways to recontextualize monuments in a way that honors the accomplishments of so-called "great men" without whitewashing their sins. History is nuanced, complicated. Bronze isn't. We have an opportunity to do something about that. 

Do American Christians need a strongman to protect them?

David Graham on Jeff Sessions, Christianity and Trumpism: 

When Plott asked Sessions, who is now running an underdog campaign to return to his old U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, how Christians could support Trump, he replied with a reference to Egypt and el-Sisi.

“It’s not a democracy—he’s a strongman, tough man, but he promised to protect them. And they believed him, because they didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. Because they knew they’d be vulnerable. They chose to support somebody that would protect them. And that’s basically what the Christians in the United States did. They felt they were under attack, and the strong guy promised to defend them. And he has.”

A few prominent, though isolated, evangelicals have been highly critical of the president. They argue that Trump shows none of the signs of Christian devotion or morality, and that Christians who align themselves with the president are making a crude bargain with a flawed man in an attempt to obtain safe harbor. Michael Gerson, in a 2018 Atlantic cover story, criticized the habit of “evangelicals regarding themselves, hysterically and with self-pity, as an oppressed minority that requires a strongman to rescue it. This is how Trump has invited evangelicals to view themselves. He has treated evangelicalism as an interest group in need of protection and preferences.”

I've seen and heard some variation on "American Christians want a strongman to protect them" theory a few times now, and it raises a couple of thoughts:

* I don't think American Christians are really in danger of losing their liberty -- but they are in "danger" of having groups they have disfavored over time achieve the same levels of liberty they have traditionally held in our society. Southern whites and their allies made similar arguments during the 1960s about Black liberation. To folks who have been on top for so long, equality isn't perceived as a net gain -- more freedom for everybody! -- but as a loss of their own advantages. It's not about liberty. It's about power.

* That said (and here my Mennonite roots are showing) I am constantly confused by the need of conservative American Christians to dominate the society around them when they profess to follow a religion whose central narrative act was one of surrender -- to the authorities, to death -- by the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Jesus didn't seek a strongman to protect him. I'm not sure why his followers think they shouldn't observe and act on his example.

Coronavirus diary: Chess, my brain and my son

Since the pandemic began, my son and I have played a regular -- not quite daily -- game of chess.

I am the furthest thing from a grandmaster. My skills really haven't advanced much since I was in sixth grade and learned the game anew, playing against friends in study hall. T, honestly, has more experience than I do in recent years -- but he's a kid, so he has a bit less patience for how the game develops.

One thing that frustrates me about myself, though, is that I'm not great at doing the thing you need to do in chess, which is plan several moves ahead, to see the game unfold before it unfolds. I win a lot against T, but it's not like I'm great at planning victory. Often, it just seems to happen. But the result is that chess is an area where I'm unable to hide behind the Dunning-Kruger effect -- I can see, with some precision, what my limitations are. And they make me wonder about the makeup of how I think in other endeavors, if I'm similarly limited. Indeed, I've also had a chance to read a lot more during the pandemic, and I while I'm a competent enough writer -- I mean, I get paid to do it, right? -- I can see how my writing and the thinking that underlies it probably misses a dimension accomplished by people I admire and respect. I'm not sure how, or if, I can acquire that dimension. Those limitations bump up against my ambitions and pretentions, and that's very goddamn frustrating.

The solace I take, though, is that the more often T and I play chess, the more I can start to see a move or two ahead. It takes practice. That gives me hope the same is true for my writing and thinking, but who the hell knows?

One thing I do, though, is I try to make the game more than about wins or losses. In the last couple of months, my son has gone from being overtly frustrated when he loses to calm and willingness to learn from a loss. That's a big gain. And when I win, I try to explain to him what it is I did to win -- my strategy, such as it is, so that he can think about ways to create his own counterstrategy. I'm trying to help him learn to think about these things. And I'm trying to get better at my own thinking.

Terry Teachout, Matt Zoller Seitz, and grief

Terry Teachout and Matt Zoller Seitz hail from different spots on the ideological spectrum, I gather, but otherwise they share some striking similarities. Both are accomplished critics: Teachout, among his many accomplishments, writes about theater for the Wall Street Journal, while Seitz is one of the best movie and television critics of his generation.

They have also been recently widowed -- Seitz, unfathomably and horribly, for the second time. And Seitz's father appears to be in the end stages of cancer.

What I appreciate about both men is that they have been willing to share their grief, both through tweets and blog posts. Which seems timely -- there is so much for Americans, and the world, to grieve right now. But we're uncomfortable with grief, uncomfortable with showing it, uncomfortable with seeing it. We want it to fit into a neat process -- the "stages" of grieving -- but in truth, grieving isn't necessarily a linear process. And in a lot of cases, that process never becomes complete. We just learn to live with it.

Here's Teachout in a recent blog post:

And how am I feeling now that I’m back in New York? That’s hard to say. I think I’m starting to find my way out of the bewildering maze of sorrow, for I no longer miss Hilary with the same around-the-clock intensity that came perilously close to sinking me in April. At the same time, though, her memory is never far from my mind, and I’m still as lonely as I ever was. And while I’ve kept myself busy writing about theater webcasts for The Wall Street Journal, I miss going to the theater in something not wholly unlike the way in which I miss my life’s companion.

For my own part, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive the simultaneous losses of my beloved spouse and the art form to which I have devoted more than a decade and a half of my life. But I’m still here, and if Hilary’s death and the closing of America’s theaters didn’t kill me, then I figure I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you are, too.

And here is a recent Twitter thread from Seitz:

This weekend marks the seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I still find that grief visits me suddenly and out of the blue, though I don't live with it as a constant low-level thrum like I used to. The really unexpected thing that's happened, though, is that she's gone -- but my relationship with her isn't. I still find myself wrestling with her life and how it affected mine, the love and the conflicts, in just about every interaction I have with my own child.

Anyway, I'm grateful to Teachout and Seitz for their willingness to grieve publicly. I suspect their acts will help others find comfort. We all grieve, sooner or later. You can't prepare for it, really. But maybe you can take solace in knowing you're not alone.