The Revealer

Palin: Reagan Invented San Francisco

The Revealer — 2008-10-03T11:01:21-05:00

Plenty of pundits pounced on Palin's resurrection of failed Civil War general George McClellan in last night's debate (apparently, she meant General David McKiernan, who is alive), but not many noticed her erasure of near four centuries of history when...

Biblical Capitalism

The Revealer — 2008-10-02T17:18:58-05:00

Only months ago, what scant attention the press paid to fundamentalism in American life was dedicated to declaring the Christian Right deceased. Of course, those were the days when Lehman Brothers still looked like a good investment. Now, Christian Right leaders are feeling bullish for the first time in years, ready to bet the farm on Sarah Palin, while the rest of us blink in shock as the clock goes spinning back to the Great Depression. In more ways than one—it was in the 1930s that modern fundamentalism’s strange marriage of laissez-faire economics and heavily-regulated morals was first consummated, in reaction not to abortion or homosexuality, but to economic malaise—“spiritual depression,” as it was called by an early advocate of “biblical capitalism.”

In 1932, James A. Farrell, president of US Steel, tried to persuade then Governor Franklin Roosevelt that economic depression was “caused by disobedience to divine law,” and that the only cure was a mix of spiritual revival and unprecedented powers for corporate leaders. In 1936, Frank Buchman, the founder of the Moral Re-Armament movement—a network of upper crust Christian clubs—announced, “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.” He suggested instead “God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Bruce Barton, a founder of advertising giant BBDO and the author of one of the 20th century’s bestsellers, The Man Nobody Knows (it was Jesus, whom Barton proposed as the greatest CEO in history), won a seat in Congress in 1938 by proposing to a nation battered by unfettered capitalism that it “Repeal a Law a Day.”

The most influential of these businessmen for God was a Norwegian immigrant named Abraham Vereide, founder of an annual ritual of piety and politics that survives to this day, the National Prayer Breakfast. In 1935, Vereide created a “fellowship” of Christian businessmen bound together by the idea that God hates government regulation because it interferes with a believer’s ability to choose right or wrong. He found receptive audiences in private meetings with Henry Ford and the president of Chevrolet, Thomas Watson of IBM and representatives from J.C. Penney. By 1942, he’d moved to the capital, where the National Association of Manufacturers staked him to a meeting of congressmen who would become students of his spiritual politics, among them Virginia senator Absalom Willis Robertson—Pat Robertson’s father. Vereide returned the manufacturers’ favor by telling his new congressional followers that God wanted them to break the spine of organized labor. They did.

Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.

Submersion Journalism

The Revealer — 2008-09-16T20:24:05-05:00

Upcoming events: Submersion Journalism, Ten Minutes of Palinology.

Palinology

The Revealer — 2008-09-16T18:13:11-05:00

Will McCain's Palin pick revive his once-high hopes of winning Latino votes? Will mainstream media be able to comprehend the overlap of the Latino, evangelical, and Pentecostal demographics? The answer to the first question, says B. Adriana Venegas-Chavez, is: Possibly....

Private Conversation

The Revealer — 2008-09-12T02:38:00-05:00

Sharlet: I'm using the thinnest of threads to tie my friend Kio's new blog, Municipal Archive, to The Revealer, a momentary mistaken notion of religion: "On a crowded corner," writes Kio, "there’s a young man with tight shoulders and clipped hair. Tourists surround him but he doesn’t see them, he’s staring out across the street into the far distance of his imagination. His hands are moving in a pattern that repeats, it seems for a moment like genuflection: father, son, holy ghost. But it’s not, the motions are more intricate and subtle than a hastily drawn cross. He flicks two fingers at his chin, and suddenly I see that his finger are talking, it’s sign language, and by the long stare it is clear that his hands are talking to himself. He says the same thing over and over until at last the light changes and his hands drop to his sides, his fingers still moving like pistons, muttering at the sidewalk." Municipal Archive is entirely comprised of such moments, real life scenes from the city of Ben Katchor's imagination, transmitted to experience by way of Vincent McHugh's ghostly inspiration, and transcribed by Kio.

Just When You Thought It Was Over

The Revealer — 2008-09-10T18:22:52-05:00

"As the Bush era comes to a fitful close, and the American presidential elections approach, the Christian evangelical movement that brought the Republicans to power in 2000 is, to all outward appearances, losing its political influence. The strange spectacle of...

Holy Ghost Hustle

The Revealer — 2008-09-10T13:39:19-05:00

There is no news, scholarly, or artistic value in this link. Just a glorious example of fundamentalist funk, Holy Ghost hustle, and evangelical locomotion.

Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

The Revealer — 2008-09-10T11:30:06-05:00

A review of and excerpt from the best Jewish novel of the year, by Revealer contributing editor Peter Manseau

Peter Manseau, a longtime Revealer contributor and occasional Revealer editor, has just published his first novel, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, immediately shortlisted for the $10,000 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. The novel follows Peter's first book, Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, an experiment in religion journalism Peter and I wrote together, and a memoir, Vows: The Story of A Priest, a Nun, and Their Son. As the title of that book might suggest, Peter's not Jewish; but Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is.

This is no minstrel show. Peter is steeped in Yiddish literature, and what he's brought forth in Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is a not just a literary thriller the fine line between murder and memoir but also a Jewish novel that was waiting to be written, that needed to be written. And so it has been, officially by Peter but more likely, I suspect, by a host of dybbuks clamoring within his Catholic soul. Together they've created what Melvin Jules Bukiet, no easy critic, calls the best Jewish novel of the year; and, more importantly, the most insightful fiction about the death of a language since Cynthia Ozick's masterpiece, "Envy, Or, Yiddish in America."

“For no one who who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it," Susan Sontag famously observed in "Notes on Camp. "He can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.”

Which is to say, Peter's no anti-Semite, but he's no philo-Semite, either. Which is good, since philo-Semitism, as John Hagee has amply demonstrated, is just another way of dehumanizing Jews. The revulsion that goes hand in hand with deep sympathy in Songs for the Butcher's Daughter is not toward Jews, but in response to the desperation of Yiddish in America, the envy Ozick diagnosed and the sad self-deception Peter and I both witnessed working at the National Yiddish Book Center (where Peter was, briefly, the Last Yiddish Typesetter in America). Novelist Michael Chabon captured that delusion in his essay "Say It In Yiddish," about the phrasebook by Uriel and Miriam Weinreich of that name that the Yiddish Book Center gave out as a membership premium. "What were they thinking, the Weinreichs?" wrote Chabon

Was the original 1958 Dover edition simply the reprint of some earlier, less heartbreakingly implausible book? At what time in the history of the world was there a place of the kind that the Weinreichs imply, a place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish, but also the airline clerks, travel agents, ferry captains, and casino employees? A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie, get a finger wave from a Yiddish-speaking hairstylist, a shoeshine from a Yiddish-speaking shineboy, and then have your dental bridge repaired by a Yiddish-speaking dentist? If, as seems likelier, the book first saw light in 1958, a full ten years after the founding of the country that turned its back once and for all on the Yiddish language, condemning it to watch the last of its native speakers die one by one in a headlong race for extinction with the twentieth century itself, then the tragic dimension of the joke looms larger, and makes the Weinreichs' intention even harder to divine. It seems an entirely futile effort on the part of its authors, a gesture of embittered hope, of valedictory daydreaming, of a utopian impulse turned cruel and ironic.

Chabon wrote that a decade ago. The cruel irony of those words now is that the novel that grew out of them, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is whimsical rather than brave, brilliantly written but entirely futile, a piece of valedictory daydreaming that retreats from the fire in which Yiddish burned -- a reassuring subway novel for Jews comforted by the false remembrance of a mameloshn -- a mother tongue -- they've lost forever. Chabon's novel is camp; superb camp, certainly, but artificial.

Peter, the outsider as insider, the son of a Catholic priest and a nun -- an abomination in his own tradition! -- a Gentile who has written of passing as a Jew, of lying to little old Jewish ladies to make them better when he came to take their Yiddish books away (he was the book collector for the Yiddish Book Center), a novelist who writes in English, speaks Yiddish, and, he once explained, dreams in Catholic whether he wants to or not, has produced the real thing. Or, rather, produced is not the word: he has manufactured it. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter flows so fast you may read it in a sitting or two, but it's not an organic creation. It's assembled. The narrator of the novel is a writer much like Peter, who intersperses his translation of a Yiddish memoir with "Translator's Notes" that tell us more about his own love affair with a young, secular Jew who is busy reinventing herself as an Orthodox woman. The bulk of the novel is the memoir, and that Peter has drawn from the dust of the Yiddish Book Center's warehouse, borrowing parts and pieces from the Sweatshop Poets and Di Khaliastre, the Gang, Yiddish experimentalists in Warsaw between the wars, and the Big Three -- Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz -- and the author of the first play banned on Broadway, Sholem Asch, and the darker, even more forgotten writers, Lamed Shapiro and Yankev Glatshteyn and the writer who went by "Der Nister," the hidden one. Peter, once a Yiddish book collector, has become a Yiddish book thief, snatching stories from limbo and resurrecting them as Songs for the Butcher's Daughter.

I could go on singing its praises, but better you should sing your own. Following is an excerpt from the best goyish Yiddish novel in history.

--Jeff Sharlet

Go Ask Sarah

The Revealer — 2008-09-10T11:10:37-05:00

ABC reports that two of the books Palin's church allies in Wasilla may have singled out for censorship are Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous, and Pastor, I Am Gay, by a Wasilla area pastor named Howard Bess who describes himself...

We Can't All Be Queen

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T19:16:45-05:00

Evangelical Palin's fans are comparing the governor to the biblical Queen Esther, whom her pastor said Palin took as her role model when she was elected. The Nation's Jon Weiner outlines some of the pitfalls of that parallel here. And,...

McCain Isn't a Made Man Yet

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T18:53:02-05:00

The Family Research Council -- Washington's one-stop lobby shop for all things fundamentalist -- is warning McCain that picking Palin won't be enough to win evangelical loyalty unless he unpicks his media pals. Writes FRC leader Tony Perkins in an...

Books Too Good for this Tawdry World

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T11:28:34-05:00

Every now and then, The Revealer receives some books for review that none of us are ever going to read. Well, actually we're never going to read most of the books we get for review, but I'm talking about those books that seem worthy, and admirable, and absolutely tedious. Not academically; morally...

The Audacity of Compromise

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T08:53:23-05:00

The press played Obama's convention speech as MLK's dream fulfilled. A careful reading reveals the dream deferred. Obama's theological journey from liberation to liberalism, and what got left on the wayside...

Coming Attractions

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T08:15:01-05:00

We've got head hunters, big dams, holy Wal-Mart, and all kinds of Jesus, available to YOU, this fall, absolutely free but for subway fare to the greatest show on earth, "Culture, Religion, and the Politics of Change" division. We're talking about the fall schedule of the NYU Center for Religion and Media, publisher of The Revealer, of course...

So That's What She Meant

The Revealer — 2008-09-09T01:11:00-05:00

Dan Kennedy's Media Nation blog points us to two helpful Palin perspectives, including a Pentecostal scholar of Pentecostalism who says -- contrary to Steve Waldman's point, below, and my own read of Palin's word -- that it's fair to interpret...