Building a Better Scotsman

Here's one of my least favorite evergreen internet donnybrooks:

Person A: So-and-so isn't a real Christian [or insert identity here]. Real Christians care about the poor/don't commit adultery/aren't racist [or insert other "good" qualities here].

Person B: I've got bad news for you: lots of real Christians are greedy/adulterous/racist etc.. Stop trying to bowdlerize the reputation of Christianity by pretending the bad parts don't exist!

The reason I hate this is that both "sides" are not just attempting to do wholly salutary things, but they often know the salutary point the other side is trying to make and just pretend not to.

Person B is certainly right in trying to check against an illicit cleansing of Christianity's moral reputation. There are lots of people who are and are recognized as Christians who do bad things, and one can't wave that history away by playing games with definitions.

But Person A is also right in that the public meaning and understanding of Christianity is a perpetually contested concept, and it is a good thing when people try to align that concept with other good qualities. It is good when people who are Christian understand that identity to encompass good things. It is a constant push-pull struggle, and Person A is fighting the good fight in trying to push "Christianity" in a positive direction.

So yes, it would be bad if we just collectively glaze over the bad attributes of various identity/ideologies in a misplaced desire to define ourselves into innocence. But it would also be bad if we sabotaged efforts to present alternative and more salubrious accounts of these identities by acting as if they're forms of cheating.

In theory, a bit of nuance lets these positions coexist. One important lodestone I'd turn to here is Richard Rorty's maxim that "there is nothing deep down inside us what we have put there ourselves." The inherent nature of Christianity (or again, fill in your favored blank) is not homophobia, nor is it LGBT-inclusion. There's nothing deep down inside the concept save what we put there ourselves. If we put in homophobia, then its homophobic. If we take out homophobia and replace it with LGBT inclusion, then its LGBT inclusive. It is not definitionally wrong when people put in homophobia, nor is it cheating when people try to take out homophobia.

In the field, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask what the speaker is reacting to. If someone is criticizing Donald Trump by saying he's "a bad Christian", I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "actually, Christians can be bad." If someone is criticizing Donald Trump for imposing Christian nationalism upon the population, I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "what he's doing isn't really 'Christian' at all." 

Likewise, I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to deny the real strands of homophobia in Christianity by simply saying "that's not real Christianity". That is, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, "cheap grace"; it takes work to excise those strands, it's not something that can be accomplished by proclamation alone. But I also don't have much patience for people who pooh-pooh the notion of doing that work at all because they insist homophobia is inherent to Christianity and anyone who tries to dislodge that attribute is lying -- and importantly, standing up and presenting a different vision of Christianity is an important form of doing the work. Indeed, there aren't many other ways.

Parental Sabbaticals

Today was Jill's first Mother's Day as a mom.

Tuesday, Jill returns to work after the end of her parental leave.

The end of her leave, and the beginning of a return to "normal" where we will both be working parents, underscores just how special these last four months have been. That we've both been off of work and have been able to just concentrate on being parents, on loving and cuddling and playing with our baby, has been a gift beyond measure.

It's also accentuated how important parental leave is. We've been very lucky in terms of support: we're financially stable, had both sets of parents come for extended visits, had night doulas for much of the first month, have a baby who basically started sleeping through the night immediately, and yet it still feels like this whole deal would have been absolutely possible if even one (let alone both) of us were working. Even now, with four months of experience under our belt, the prospect of "daddy daycare" feels terrifying to me (and that's accounting for the fact that Jill works from home!).*

I do not understand how anyone who's ever been a parent doesn't support universal parental leave. Jill and I have joked about how "surprising" it is that not having to work and just being able to concentrate on helping your baby grow is so much more pleasant than toiling in the salt mines, but really, it is an experience that everyone deserves to have. Oregon, to its immense credit, does mandate (and fund) twelve weeks of paid parental leave -- this is a brilliant policy that should be nationwide.

In fact, I'm way beyond that -- I think we should have periodic parental sabbaticals. Not a sabbatical from parenting (that's what sleepaway camp is for, and I'm embarrassed that I didn't figure that out until well into adulthood). I just think that every six or so years, one should be able to take parental leave again just to ... parent. Obviously, the parenting demands of a baby are different from those of a six- or twelve- or eighteen-year-old. But no matter what age your child is, I cannot help but imagine that both parent and child would benefit if the former could set aside four months where all they have to do is be a mom or dad. Four months to dive into a parent-child art class. Four months to really concentrate on math tutoring. Four months to dedicate to college visits. I get why this incredible experience of parental leave is centered around the time when your baby is a baby. But really, why should it be so limited?

We live in a (for now anyway) incredibly rich society. This an investment we could make, and which could make so many lives so much better. A lot of people talk a big game about encouraging families to have children -- by which 98% of the time they mean "taking away choices from women so that they no longer have any option but to have children" -- but this is something that actually would be a great catalyst for thriving families.

So consider this my big Squad/Green New Deal-style pitch: universal paid parental sabbaticals, for any parent with children under the age of 19. Build families back better.

* My leave formally ends at the end of the semester, but I don't teach over the summer, so even though I will be "working" (e.g., writing papers), I'll be taking over primary childcare duties during the day.

The Debunkers

Once, when I was in middle school, a friend and I saw a picture of a border guard from some eastern European country inside a Scholastic Magazine and decided it was a fake.

We had a grand time picking out details in the photo that "proved" it wasn't real. The guard's uniform had English on it, not Cyrillic. The rifle he was carrying was wrong (how we know what rifle he was supposed to be carrying, I don't know). There were other "problems" as well that I can't remember now. But I do remember feeling very proud of ourselves for figuring out that the magazine ran a fake photo; when the reality is that the photo was almost certainly real. We were vastly overreading minor "discrepancies" that probably weren't ultimately discrepancies at all.

The New York Times has a really interesting (and long) profile on a TikTok star who announced she had cancer, and then faced an organized community committed to "proving" that she was lying about it for influence, clout, or clicks.

The story doesn't hide the ball for long: unless her oncologist is in on the grift, the woman really has cancer. Nonetheless, it was fascinating to see how many people got so committed, for so long, into being sure she was faking it.

In particular, I noticed the deployment of a sort of Potemkin expertise. The debunkers seized on little details and discrepancies which they persistently viewed as the critical cracks in an otherwise elaborate facade. The tenor was an interesting mix of obviousness ("anyone could spot this is a fake, look at the rubes falling for such a clear con") and sophistication ("look how meticulous my investigation is; the story falls apart when an expert looks at it"). The latter component I think does more work than the former: it concocts an aura of authority that both reassures other readers that the claims are backed up by evidence, and also makes them feel good about being critical consumers not taken in by ruses and cons (when the irony, of course, is that they've talked themselves into not believing the truth).

When I read this story, it reminded me of a similar army of "debunkers" who pore over any claim of atrocity or calamity in Israel/Palestine to "prove" that a claim forwarded by seemingly credible sources (doctors, international media outlets, and so on) is actually a hoax or a lie. For example, this account is dedicated to minute analysis of videos or pictures that purport to show, say, famine in Gaza or bombed out civilian infrastructure, picking out bits and pieces that "prove" it's being staged. There's a whole ecosystem of people on this beat (and not just on the "pro-Israel" side), and their tenor and behavior is very reminiscent of the fanatical debunkers described in the NYT article above. They project expertise via hyper-fixation on detail, and present themselves as simply trying to uncover the truth. But they're obviously not dispassionate; the tiny nits and picks they make to "debunk" adverse narratives are never paired with a similar fine-toothed comb aimed at stories more to their taste. It's not even real skepticism, let alone critical analysis. Yet they have an eager audience from those eager to believe they're seeing through a ruse, who revel in the twin joys of faux-sophistication and confirmation bias.

Now, to be sure, the TikTok case is in many ways simpler: it doesn't have any clear political valence, and it is a single incident capable of being definitively declared true or false. Across the many, many reported incidents of catastrophe and calamity in Israel and Palestine, things tend to be muddier, with more obvious incentives to slant (or invent) claims for political purposes, and there will be inevitably a distribution of results following initial claims. Some will be borne out, some will turn out to be overstated, not what are initially claimed to be, or even outright falsified. There is value in actual critical assessment and reassessment of what people say is happening inside a war zone -- not the least because even among perfectly good faith actors the chaos of a war zone doesn't lend itself to the conjunction of perfect accuracy and immediate reporting.

Nonetheless, I can't help but think part (though not all) of the deception relies on a persistent assumption that every social calamity is complete and totalizing, such that if there's anything interrupting the grimness then it just cannot be cancer/fascism/famine whatever.

And that's not true. There are times one is living with cancer and yet isn't an emaciated patient confined to her bed. That can be part of cancer, one of the scariest parts of cancer, but a picture that doesn't fit that template doesn't prove the cancer is made up. There are times one is living in a fascist state but does not see jackbooted thugs grabbing people off the streets. That is one of the scariest parts of fascism, but a day one just goes to the market as normal and doesn't see any secret police at all doesn't necessarily falsify the fascism. Cancer isn't always like that, fascism isn't always like that. And famine, too, doesn't always look like "The Vulture and the Little Girl"; a picture of a market with some food in it does not necessarily mean there isn't a famine.

That's why those little bits and pieces aren't the smoking guns they purport to be. Reality isn't as clean as we think it is. People with cancer still go to parks. People under fascism still enjoy nights out on the town. Places afflicting by famine still typically have some food somewhere. Buildings that have been bombed still have unexpected pieces that remain standing.

Each of those faux-"discrepancies" becomes grist for the debunking mill. But it's not real critical analysis; it's just food to keep believing what one already wants to believe.

Requiem for a POB

One of the great traumas of my youth, as my mother tells it anyway, was when a favorite brand of gummy bear oatmeal was discontinued. It was one of my favorite breakfast treats, and learning that it was gone -- and gone forever -- was devastating to my tiny brain. I was heartbroken; sufficiently so that this calamity is still spoken of in the Schraub household thirty-plus years later. It did eventually come back when I was teenager, but by then the magic was gone.

Fast forward to the present, and one of David's favorite contemporary treats is Dole's pineapple orange banana juice (or "POB", rhyming with "lobe"). I had this off-and-on as a kid as well, but my true love affair with it didn't begin until I was an adult. It is a beautiful mixture of the holy trinity of smoothie fruits, and having it in my fridge is tantamount to being able to get a delicious smoothie whenever I want. Since David loves smoothies, this is a major selling point.

Unfortunately, POB has become increasingly hard to find.* And today I deigned to ask someone at the grocery store if they had it, and he said it had been discontinued. I don't know if he just means only that store no longer carries it, or it's no longer produced anywhere, but given my trouble finding it at any of the myriad grocery stores near my house, I fear the latter.

Upon getting this news, I remarked to my wife that this was even worse than the gummi bear oatmeal fiasco, because I'm an adult now and "there's less time". She replied "doesn't that mean it's better?" And I just want to explicitly trace out both of our logics here:

• My idea was that less time is "worse", because there's less time for someone to reproduce the product and return it to the grocery shelves.
• Her idea was that less time is "better", because I'm closer to death and so will have to suffer for less time.

Grim.

Anyway, I am heartbroken. Bring back POB!

* I have no idea if this is anything Trump and/or tariff related -- I'm actually inclined to doubt that it is -- but I'm happy to blame him for it anyway. If other voters can crankily decide every bad thing in their life is the fault of the incumbent party, why can't I?

Like Wildfire

The first I heard of wildfires in Israel, it was in the context of an allegation that the fires were the result of Israeli settlers committing arson while attacking Palestinian farmers.

As best I can tell, that allegation traces back to a stray Haaretz tweet that reads "As wildfire rages in Israel, security source tells Haaretz settlers set Palestinian agricultural land on fire in the West Bank." There doesn't seem to be any further corroboration, and the link in the post doesn't go to any article or news item elaborating (as best I can tell, it was either taken down or never existed in the first place).

Meanwhile, the right-wing coalition running the show in Israel was also quick to blame the fires on arson -- specifically, that caused by Palestinian militants. This, too, seems thinly supported and already has the hallmarks of a smear campaign. Netanyahu, for instance, claimed that 18 individuals had already been arrested for suspected arson; the true figure is three. And one of those three is a sixty-three-year old man with no criminal record who was found with the smoking-gun evidence of a tobacco pipe and some cotton to clean it.

Finally, there are the experts, who posit that the wildfires raging across an arid region of the eastern mediterranean that just had its driest winter on record are probably attributable to ... the climate crisis. Fancy that.

In recent years, right-wing politicians have frequently blamed Palestinians for arson in the wake of wildfire outbreaks, but no one has ever been indicted for nationalist-motivated arson leading to large-scale fires. Most major fires investigated were ultimately attributed to negligence.

The Carmel disaster in 2010 was sparked by a discarded hookah coal. Two of the major fires that scorched parts of the Jerusalem hills in 2016 were caused by a flare gun and welding work. Other large fires were found to have been started by farmers burning waste or hikers making coffee.

The phenomenon of blaming minorities for starting wildfires is not unique to Israel: in Turkey, Erdoğan blamed the Kurds; in Europe, migrants were accused of arson; and in California, claims emerged that LGBTQ individuals in the fire services were responsible for the failure to contain the fires.

It does all hang together, doesn't it. 

Fine Art is Ridiculously Cheap/Expensive

Over the past year or so, I've developed a new passion and hobby in collecting art. I deeply resent this, since it flies in the face of one my cardinal life rules I've abided by for as long as I can remember: do not develop expensive tastes. And fine art is an expensive hobby.

Or is it? Well, yes, in many ways. But in other ways, it's ludicrously cheap. Let me explain.

First of all, I'm not talking about the headline-making auction prices of masterworks that involve more money than some countries' GDP. Robert Rauschenberg's "Buffalo II" silkscreen painting, for instance, auctioned for $88.1 million dollars in 2019. That is expensive under any definition. It's also functionally irrelevant to my life.

Go down to the other end of the spectrum. If I want to buy a decent-sized painting from an "emerging" artist -- a term that generally encompasses artists who have gallery representation but are at an early career stage, aren't in any museums or public collections, and haven't otherwise made any major "mark" in the art world -- it generally will cost in the low four-figures. That is expensive. It is a price I have paid for things, but it immediately becomes one of if not the most expensive thing in my house that I can physically lift with my own hands. At that price, there's not a lot of room for dabbling or experimenting or dilettantism. If I buy it, it better be something that I want on my wall for at least a decade.

And again, that's entry-level. What happens if you want to move up in the world?

Well, here's where the "ludicrously cheap" comes into play. Because you can absolutely get a Robert Rauschenberg print -- not a reproduction, a genuine, vetted, real-deal limited editioned Rauschenberg -- in that same price range. Earlier this year, Christie's auctioned a numbered Rauschenberg lithograph (edition of 31) from 1969 titled "Gulf" for $2,142. That is not cheap. But that is a price a normal human could imagine paying for something. My wife and I are financially doing reasonably well, but we are by no means 1-percenters. We couldn't toss out two grand on a lark. But could we do it periodically, for something we really loved? Yes, absolutely.

And Rauschenberg is an indisputable A-tier artist. What happens if you go the next step down?

This is a woodcut by Werner Drewes, titled "Goddess of the Night":

It was executed in 1961 as an edition of 10; one of those editions is in the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. Drewes himself is no small figure: he is credited with bringing the Bauhaus movement to America, and he coined the phrase "It Can't Happen Here" as the title of a 1934 portfolio of works critiquing the rise of fascist repression in his native Germany (Sinclair Lewis would use it a year later for the title of his famous book).

"Goddess of the Night" recently auctioned for $924. Two other Drewes woodcuts sold together as a lot at that same auction for $826.

There's just something about that particular price range that I can't wrap my head around. It is simultaneously so expensive, and so accessible. It's so expensive in the sense that it is a figure that I would need to think about, and I'm far more financially secure than the vast majority of Americans. It's so cheap in the sense that it's a figure I can feasibly pay, which feels absurd to me when we're talking about historically significant artists whose works are in major museums.

The Anti-Anti-Racism Conspiracy in Oregon

This is an infuriating story on many levels:

The principal at The Madeleine School, a private Catholic school in Northeast Portland, summoned Portland police to the campus in late March when the parents of a Black student demanded to know her plan of action after their fourth grade son reported being called a racist slur on the playground.

Just 72 hours later, the school expelled the boy, effective immediately, saying his parents — Moda Health executive Karis Stoudamire-Phillips and renowned jazz musician Mike Phillips, both prominent Black Portlanders with long histories of volunteering both citywide and in Portland’s tight-knit Catholic school community — had violated the school’s code of conduct for parents.

The students accused of hurling the slur denied it, but the boy's account was corroborated by at least one other witness.

There are a couple of different layers here. One is that the Archbishop of Portland has had a tense relationship with the Catholic school community here, stemming from his effort to enforce conservative gender orthodoxy over the objections of many students, parents, and lay leaders. This appears to be part of a broader intrusion of right-wing culture war shibboleths, which helps make more sense of this part of the story:

According to that child’s father, who did not want to be named to protect his child’s privacy, Principal Tresa Rast told him and his wife that she suspected that their son had made up the entire incident and recommended that the child see a therapist so he could be “deprogrammed” from the anti-racist training he’d received while previously attending public school in Portland.

From what I can tell in the article, the child had been attending the Madeleine school since Kindergarten, so it's unclear when he would have been "programmed" by Portland Public Schools at all.

But of course, searching for logic misses the point. Rast appears to have an understanding where "racism" is something entirely made up -- so made up that Black children need to be "programmed" into believing its existence so they can foist false charges upon innocent White children. It isn't hard to draw a line here to the MAGA demand to suppress any and all American history tellings that accurately recount our nation's racial past (and present) -- the entire theory is that all such stories simply are lies concocted to assert control. It is a classic conspiracy theory (which is why Rast could jump to the absurdist notion that the child needed "deprogramming" -- an outrageous claim even if the child had been a regular PPS attendee).

And we also shouldn't lose sight of the fundamental cruelty this politics inevitably inflicts. Here is how the school handled the expulsion of the child:

“It has become clear that the relationship of trust and confidence that is necessary for a collaborative partnership between parent and school officials for the good of your child no longer exists,” Rummell wrote. “Our partnership is hereby immediately terminated as of the end of the day, April 3. This decision is final and from our perspective this matter is now concluded.”

Their son was allowed to return to campus one more time, Stoudamire-Phillips said, to say goodbye to his teachers.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the classroom,” she said. “Teachers from all over the school were coming in to say bye to him. He knows that he is loved by that community. He just doesn’t understand why these two leaders keep making decisions that have hurt him.”

"He doesn't understand why these two leaders keep making decisions that have hurt him" Juxtapose that against the brusqueness of his dismissal, of the ripping of this child from a community he had been enmeshed in and valued. It's heart-wrenching. And it emerges from people who prioritize of national kulturkampf demands over the interests and humanity of the children in their care. This, above else, is what characterizes the current MAGA orientation towards so many children -- they pour out hatred and disdain and scorn, because hurting the kids matters less to them than cleaving to their own fantastical tales of resistance to "wokeness".

Thrilling Over Dead Children

In a generally interesting column about Israel's war aims in Gaza, Raviv Drucker writes:

Today, the lust for revenge, an easy willingness to make use of the madman theory and the widespread view that "they're all terrorists" have led to many actions that cannot be explained or justified. It is immoral, inhumane and taints us all.

This jumped out at me, because of a response to my "Tenth Plague" post I had read a few hours earlier. The response took great delight in trying to come up with myriad thought experiments justifying the killing of children: Would you kill baby Hitler? Would you kill members of the Hitler Youth? Would you kill a neo-Nazi kid who would have voted for Trump? (The last was presented as some sort of gotcha, as if it presented some more difficult quandary than the others).

These meditations, of course, are fun little games one plays in order to rationalize killing children -- a still grimmer (if that's possible) example of refusing to lay down one's toys. They are misappropriations of the famous quip about knowing what one is and just haggling over the price -- the idea being that we're all actually okay with killing children, some are just more clear-eyed about it than others.

The uselessness of the "baby Hitler" hypothetical is obviously that we cannot know in advance who will turn out to be Hitler. The purported way around that is pure racist fatalism -- we do know that these children will grow up to be Hitler, because that is what they do. It is not irony at all that this is exactly the rationale of those who cheered the murder of the Bibas children -- claiming that they will grow up to massacre Palestinians because that is what they do. It's the same sickness, in a slightly different color palette. Let nobody deceive you into thinking that these people are not one and the same.

And what stands out at me, again, about people such as this is the desire -- the thrill -- that some have in finding a way to justify killing children. It reminds me once again of Bernard Henri-Levy's contention about the rise of the "New Antisemitism", speaking of people who want above all else to "feel once again the desire and, above all, the right to burn all the synagogues they want, to attack boys wearing yarmulkes, to harass large numbers of rabbis, to kill not just one but many Ilan Halimis...." It's not just about attacking kids, it's about feeling right to do it. And so they are never more thrilled than when they can tell themselves a story whereby the killing is righteous, and justified, and necessary, and beautiful.

A key part of the story they tell themselves, I think, is that everyone thinks this way. Everyone revels in killing the children of the enemy, some just put on a show of pretending otherwise. It is cynicism posing a "realism" that's actually cowardice. It continues to be a lie, and lie whose only purpose is to give despicable people moral license to promote despicable things.