April 2008 Archives

Note - Most of my blogging now occurs at Culture11.com a new media company. My blog is here.

It is hard to read about Miley Cyrus' recent "issues" - in Vanity Fair, other slightly tart pics - and not fear for the road she is being tempted to walk... a road not unlike the one Britney Spears walked a decade ago.

Like Cyrus, Spears was a young Christian girl with a very upfront values system - sex, she said, would wait until marriage.

Over time, however, she began walking a road that seemed - visually at least - at odds with those values; it was a road that capitalized on and exploited her emerging sexuality.

This album cover:

..ended up presenting her in a video this way:

And over time that became this:

And so on and so forth and...

The shame for this in Cyrus' case and in Spears' case doesn't lie so much with photographers or managers or magazines or any other media. The shame lies with their parents.

What on earth are THEY thinking? They are supposed to be the grownups here. You know, the ones who are supposed to be protecting and guarding their children? And Cyrus' father let her pose like that? Do they become so star struck or money struck that they become blinded to simple things like... oh... the fact that someone is taking semi-nude pictures of them to be printed in a magazine?

I've got daughters. I know what I would do if anyone suggested that they wanted to take "artistic" photos of them draped in nothing but a sheet.

Suffice it to say I'd need to repent for violence.

Whoever would have guessed it? The permanent Republican majority lives.

For a few years now it has been a joke - Rove and Mehlman talking about a Republican movement so strong that the Democrats simply couldn't take it down. But in 2004, after Bush's reelection it wasn't a joke. Republicans were making inroads with Hispanics and African-Americans. Democrats were demoralized and defeated.

But then it all imploded. Iraq imploded. Faith and trust in Bush imploded. Republicans imploded. People started talking about a permanent Democratic majority. No more.

What is happening in the Democratic party right now threatens to destroy it for the foreseeable future. Andrew Sullivan summarizes tonight's data:

what is striking in the exit polls is the polarization on three lines: gender, race and age. It was dead even with men; but a massive advantage for Clinton among women. The racial difference is obvious as well. But what really leaps out is age. Obama lost every cohort over 40; Clinton lost every cohort under 40. Race also affects the generations in turn: 67 percent of whites over 60 voted for Clinton - a massive 24 point advantage.

This death match will march on and on through the remaining primaries. The polarization will grow. And when one of them "wins" the nomination they will have won the right to preside over a party divided against itself- young against old, black against white, rich against poor.

Then they will lose - badly - to John McCain and the Democratic infighting will only continue. It will take a decade - more? - for the party to recover and in the meanwhile that once mocked dream of a permanent Republican majority will have been resurrected. Amazing.

I noticed the great blogalogue between NT Wright and Bart Ehrman.

Ehrman writes:

We live in a world in which a child dies every five seconds of starvation. Every five seconds. Every minute there are twenty-five people who die because they do not have clean water to drink. Every hour 700 people die of malaria. Where is God in all this? We live in a world in which earthquakes in the Himalayas kill 50,000 people and leave 3 million without shelter in the face of oncoming winter. We live in a world where a hurricane destroys New Orleans. Where a tsunami kills 300,000 people in one fell swoop. Where millions of children are born with horrible birth defects. And where is God? To say that he eventually will make right all that is wrong seems to me, now, to be pure wishful thinking.

I was in Uganda last month. While there I saw, if not hell, some of its suburbs. The stories are familiar to us all - dying children, slums beyond description, systemic brokenness that robs hope. So many of those questions popped into my head - How could God allow this sort of thing? What kind of god could allow children to live like this.

It isn't a new question for me or for any of us. It is among the world's oldest questions I suspect. But as I thought about it something clicked. God isn't allowing this suffering. I am. You are. We are.

I will focus on Africa's suffering. Africa finds itself where it does today because of a billion or more decisions that people made... individual decisions. A decision not to invest here. A decision to buy a slave there. A decision to drive an unfair trade deal here. A decision to pay diamond miners pennies. Billions and billions of decisions like this have been made over the centuries. The result? Africa today.

Is that God's fault?

I think not. Because at every moment those decisions were made God was whispering for people to do the right thing, the just thing, the merciful thing. But we chose not to listen.

God has done his job. We haven't done ours.

I used to think the suffering question was a serious head scratcher, a truly troubling thing - the best evidence against God. No more. I think it is largely an excuse to make ourselves comfortable in our complacency by blaming God for the suffering we aren't spending our lives addressing.

...gives the election to John McCain.

I've taken a short break from election madness to try and see it from a different perspective - I've been talking to friends in Pennsylvania and non-political friends from around the country and around my block and cannot help but arrive at a single conclusion - barring some huge gaffe, some great scandal, John McCain will be the 44th President of the United States.

Here is one particularly interesting anecdote:

Two friends have voted Republican in each of the last three elections. They are white, upper income, have two children, and have loved Barack Obama. They saw him as the outside agent of change, the unifier, but more importantly, they saw him as an honest politician above the fray.

I use the past tense for a reason. They are disillusioned and angry and will not vote for him in November. Why? Because their hopes have been dashed and they see him as the worst of all possible things - a man who has wantonly and cynically manipulate hope for his own greedy political ends.

It wasn't one thing but rather an accumulation of all the things - Wright, the bitter comment, the debate, etc.

I asked whether they would vote for Sen. Clinton. They laughed heartily. John McCain is their man now. He is the safe choice. He will keep things between the guard rails for the next four years. After that all bets are off.

Clinton and Obama have destroyed each other, destroyed massive goodwill that millions of Americans had toward the Democratic party, and reminded everyone why they hate politics and politicians. It really doesn't matter who wins later today or by how much - both candidates are alread losers... one just gets out of the race more quickly.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan