Archbishop Desmond Tutu is my hero. Really, truly, properly. I just think he’s one of the best men to ever have lived. I got to meet him once, when he was the Archbishop of Cape Town, as my Nan and Aunt worshipped there and knew him a little. It’ll probably be one of my favourite memories till I die.
Anyway, it turns out that he has been in Chicago, where he was giving a talk called, “The Dawn of a New Moral Awakening,” at a breakfast given at Chicago Center for Cultural Connections.
“The other day, we were traveling and went through one or another of the airports,” Tutu told the diverse audience that included several other Christian bishops, rabbis, imams, Sikhs, and Buddhists, among others. “And the [television] screens showed some illustrations or cartoons of Barack Obama wearing Arab clothes, Muslim garb. I didn’t see all of it because we were passing through, but there was something about it … he was holding a gun and ‘terrorist’ was something that was put down there.”
“I felt incredibly sad for this country,” Tutu said, his sparkly eyes flashing with emotion behind wire-rimmed spectacles. “I thought, how obscene. How repulsive. And also, how dangerous! You know what’s happened already? There are people in this country and in many other countries who are saying, ‘Islam is a religion that propagates violence. Islam is a religion that propagates terrorism.’ It’s an offensive, repulsive, obscene [mischaracterization] and dangerous. And they say this because one of his names is ‘Hussein’? They forget that the other name means ‘blessing.’”
It’s a familiar message but one that bears repeating, if the “Barack Hussein Obama is a covert Muslim terrorist” e-mails that keep arriving in my mailbox — a week before the election — are any indication.
“Imagine what would happen if all Christians said, ‘Jews, you killed our Lord!’” Tutu said. “There was a time when Christians said, ‘Jews are guilty of deicide,’ of murdering God. That was obscene. That was repulsive and that was dangerous, because from that came the justification for the persecution of Jews, ending with the Holocaust. It’s dangerous. Dangerous!”
Reducing any person or people to a stereotype is dangerous, the archbishop insisted, especially if it’s done with the claim of a divine imprimatur.
“I don’t know about you, but I am so glad I’m not God,” Tutu said, drawing one of many bursts of laughter from the rapt audience. “I really am glad I’m not God. But I’m also so glad that God is God. He is an incredible God!”
Instead, Tutu said, “God says, ‘Help me. Help me. Help me make this world the kind of world I intended for it to be. Help me. Help me so I can make this world more compassionate. Help me. Help me to make this a world that is more caring. Help me, help me, please help me, to make this world a world where there will be no poverty; where my children won’t spend as much as they do on weapons of destruction, and would spend a small fraction of what they do on killing to make sure my children everywhere have enough to drink and have food to eat. Help me. Please help me. Please help me. I have no one except you.’”
These people need to be stopped from being allowed to claim that they are speaking for Christianity as a whole, right about now.
I am horrified that this is actually a serious advert, though not surprised. I am sick of the way that this kind of thing makes a lot of militant athesists assume that this is what I think and believe just because I’m a Christian. I’m sick of the way the Christians who believe and promote this kind of thing get to tell me I’m going to hell because I don’t think like they do. And I am absolutely disgusted by things like Focus on the Family’s Letter from 2012 which not only misinterprets Obama’s policies and views and the amount any president can get done in one term, but which seeks to make people vote based on fear, and which condems young evangelicals for voting for Obama.
It is way past time for those young evangelicals to reclaim their faith from these people, and to say, “No, I think you’re getting it wrong.” It doesn’t have to be a condemnation of the beliefs – though it certainly should be of some of the methods of spreading them – but an explanation of why we believe what we believe, and why it’s ok for us to believe it. Kudos to Jim Wallis and Co. at God’s Politics and Sojourners who try and drag Christian social concerns into a non-partisan-specific but politcally active field. We need to stop the fundamentalist religious right from dictating the discourse about the Christian faith. They don’t speak for all of us, and they shouldn’t be allowed to.
I got annoyed by Sarah Palin’s speech last night. That’s probably fairly noticeable. It was a well written, well delivered piece of work, and it was bitchy and partisan as hell.
It’s one thing to disagree with your opponent, it’s quite another to dismiss their career path with a sneer. ”Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organiser”, except that you have actual responsibilities.”
Bada-bing-bang-boom. Community Organisers *so* lack a sense of responsibility. That’s why they took the job, rather than getting straight onto the political ladder by becoming mayor of a small town.
But then we get this little gem.
“I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion – I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country. Americans expect us to go to Washington for the right reasons, and not just to mingle with the right people. Politics isn’t just a game of clashing parties and competing interests. The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.”
Basically, “I’m not a member of the Washington elite, and therefore I’m more likely to change things than him, except, could you please forget that thing where I literally just said I have more experience than him because I got into politics as a mayor whilst he was faffing around doing jack shit in the South Side of Chicago.”
And that’s before we get into the ‘My family are off limits for political games, because they didn’t chose this, but I get to parade them around like there’s no tomorrow,’ crap.
I now have a footnote in my thesis citing Matt Yglesias and George W. Bush’s speech to this year’s Republican Convention. The footnote lurks in a chapter on the Philippics right now, although it will move, in the final showdown, towards the conclusion as I chat happily and not at all ominously about the problems of the existence of multiple understandings of political concepts in the Late Republic. Basically my line of argument, at the moment goes something like Cicero says so-and-so is a good citizen because the things that so-and-so has done benefit Rome, which begs the question of who gets to decide what actually benefits the Republic. Answer, pretty much no-one, they all just fight about it, which is all pretty much fine until someone rocks up with an army to back up their side. That someone in this case being Mark Antony, whilst Cicero, having attempted to push Antony out of Rome as a non-citizen ended up with his head and hands cut off and nailed up in public.
So this is me on Cicero on good citizenship: ”Nonetheless, this remains Cicero’s own understanding of the good citizen, not a universal one, and his tendency to define other understandings of political concepts, as wrong and dangerous for the Rome, rather than accept the possibility of their validity in a different understanding of the nature of the res publica precludes the opportunity for negotiation and compromise that might have enabled Rome to avoid civil war.”
I wrote that on Tuesday. Yesterday I was doing my usual trawl of the internet, being thoroughly entertained by the noise and comment coming out of the US election and especially the Republican Convention. It’s much more fun to watch when it’s not your political system that’s the circus.
This is a line from George W. Bush’s speech on Tuesday night: ”Fellow citizens: If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.”
This is Matt Yglesias on that line: “The analogy between American liberals and Vietnamese Communists is extremely offensive. As is the analogy between criticizing McCain’s policy ideas and subjecting him to physical torture and imprisonment. As is the imputation of bad faith — that right and left can’t just disagree about what’s best for the country, but rather in Bush’s view the left is self-consciously pushing a bad-for-America agenda.”
What Bush is doing – and what his government and the Republican hierarchy (hello Karl Rove, especially) – has been doing is to make the left, personified in the Democratic Party into dangerous un-American criminals who have no place in American public life. It’s more than a little terrifying – especially if they win the debate. Of course if they don’t, they probably won’t end up with their heads on sticks. I’m not saying that that’s a shame, but I wouldn’t mind people being able to at least throw eggs.
