I Am Not Your Negro

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I took in an early matinee showing of I Am Not Your Negro this morning, filmmaker Raoul Peck's presentation of the thought of James Baldwin. 

Content aside, it's a masterpiece the intensity of which drew me in, as a viewer, in a way which I don't remember experiencing since the much and well-deservedly praised Whiplash. For me, however, the nearest point of cinematic comparison is 2003's American Splendor. Neither film can be neatly categorized, and both, while not entirely new in style, present a model which we can only hope other filmmakers will imitate. American Splendor used actors and the real people they portrayed, along with elements of cartooning, to present something (entirely moving) between a biography and an autobiography of Harvey Pekar. I Am Not Your Negro is only nominally a documentary; in fact, it's an essay in film form.

That it comes off as a unified and incisive essay on race relations in these United States is Raoul Peck's personal triumph, since he edited it together from a number of Baldwin's published works, notes towards a never-completed book, and footage of James Baldwin in debate, lectures, and even an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. That last, in particular, made me wonder how anyone could not fall in love with Baldwin's mind. Completely off the cuff, in rejoinder to a white academic, he improvises a speech marked by symmetry and repetition of key phrases, and which crescendoes to a shattering climax. It's a feat of rhetorical jazz which I've rarely had the privilege to encounter.

James Baldwin wanted to use Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. to tell the story of the Negro in America (and I wish I could figure out a way to mention his brilliant analysis of the role of Sidney Poitier in 1960s American cinema), but his true central thesis emerges most clearly in the film's final moments. To Baldwin, the Negro is a concept constructed by whites who sought to deny the reality that America is not composed of black and white people, but of one people with a literally shared and commingled blood. He posited that the challenge for whites, and implicitly for blacks as well, is to recognize that truth, that we are not other to one another, but rather are one. As Baldwin says, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced."

A word to the historically ignorant

Perhaps you, like I, have heard it asserted that yesterday was the first time ever a Vice-President broke a tie vote in the U.S. Senate to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

To which I can only say, balderdash and folderol! First time ever, my foot!

That is precisely the determinative plot point in Advise and Consent! (The film version, at least. I think the book had somewhat different conclusion.) What are they teaching in high school civics classes these days?

Oh, wait. There are no high school civics classes these days.

Memorials

My essay "Memorials," on the sacraments, is currently featured at The Daily Genevan.

Minor Miracle by Marilyn Nelson

This is the second time this poem appeared in my feed since subscribing to The Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day podcast. As a poem, it's not much, not even as blank verse. But as a testimony we all need to hear, especially in these dark days, it's something else.

Nat Hentoff

You know the day is inevitable. Since it's been three months since he last published his column, I suspected the end was nearer than when he first enlisted one of his son's help in writing that column. Still, my heart sank when I read news of his death on Saturday.

I started my newspaper reading on the funny pages. Eventually, I noticed there was always a cartoon on the editorial page. Herblock introduced me to politics, and the Washington Post columnists continued my education. Back then, Nat Hentoff's "Sweet Land of Liberty" was a regular feature, and from him I learned how to read the Constitution as a strict constructionist. More importantly, I learned from him how to adhere to one's principles.

Although an atheist, Hentoff had a religion: America. He loved our country, and he loved it because of the principles on which it was founded. Amongst those principles is the unalienable right to life, and so he opposed abortion, despite the chagrin of many of his so-called-liberal colleagues.

Nat Hentoff was one of the very few people whose disagreement made me question my own beliefs. Generally, a person states his or her disagreement and one nods politely before moving on with one's life. Especially when it came to the Constitution, I knew I had to have very good reasons to disagree with him: following Hentoff's lead, I realized that my strict constructionist read of the First Amendment required an equally strict constructionist read of the Second Amendment, no matter how skeptical I continue to be regarding the putative virtues of a heavily armed populace.

For those of us for whom worship of these United States poses a serious temptation to violate the First and Second Commandments, Nat Hentoff was a chief apostle and unwavering conscience.

And he produced albums for Charles Mingus. How cool is that?

Today's breakfast

Medium burger on rye, topped with bacon, cheddar cheese, over-easy egg, and country gravy.

This is a cry for help.

Another argument for books

As a people, the citizens of the great state of Colorado are united in their confidence in the superiority of Coloradan beer to that of the not-quite-as-great state of Oregon. Sadly, our unity is sorely tested when the craft beer scene of Denver is pitted against that of the All-America city of Aurora. 

(Just how "All-America" is Aurora? Mayor Steve Hogan, an Eagle Scout, personally answered an e-mail I sent to him through the city's website and then gave my Cub Scout den a tour of City Hall. That's how All-America Aurora is. 

But I digress.)

The breweries of both Aurora and Denver multiply at a dizzying pace, and even a dedicated IPA man such as my humble self is torn between Dry Dock's Hop Abomination, Station 26's Juicy Banger, and Comrade Brewing's Superpower. I have also been known to wax rhapsodic about Copper Kettle's Helles Lager. Living in Aurora and working in Denver, I have, like so many others, had my loyalties sorely tested.

That is, until the Aurora Public Library upped Aurora's beer game.

In 2016, the Library system offered a truly amazing deal. Visit four Aurora breweries, get an Aurora Library pint glass. Visit seven, and get a 64 oz. growler. As you will not be surprised to observe, I ended up with two pint glasses and the growler, which is even more impressive given the number of times I forgot to bring my "passport" when stopping by one of the participating taprooms.

In your face, Denver. And I won't even deign to mention how far in the dust this leaves Portland and its lumberjack-bearded hipsters. The Presbyterian Curmudgeon is too classy for that.

A reasonably merry Christmas album

You've got to give She & Him credit for effort. In their eight years of collaboration, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward have released two Christmas albums, which makes that particular genre a full one-third of their output to date. As with their previous yuletide outing, however, the duo is, at best, adequate on Christmas Party. The arrangements are overly spare, which is odd given that one of the things that made their Volumes 1 & 2 so enchanting were lush soundscapes. Particularly objectionable are Deschanel's vocals on "A Marshmallow World:" she rushes through the lyrics as though trying for a new land speed record, and stomps on the line "What if spring is late?" until it's nothing but a lifeless corpse.

Far more satisfying is Jane Lynch's A Swingin' Little Christmas! featuring (deep breath now) Kate Flannery and Tim Davis with the Tony Guerrero Quintet (to which I was directed by Bullseye's annual holiday special). It's really more of a band than a solo effort, and the better for it. They've got a sense of humor, verve, and class (maybe in that order, maybe not). It may not be the Christmas album for the ages, but it's the best I've heard this year.

Speaking of Christmas albums for the ages, at the top of the heap remains A Charlie Brown Christmas from the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Nonetheless, I wish we could all admit that its children's choir rendition of "Christmastime Is Here" is as creepy as creepy gets.

I need to remember what I cannot comprehend

Books 11-13 of Augustine's Confessions are a meditation on the nature of time and God's work of Creation, and are often left out of modern editions. In the preface to his 1983 translation, E.M. Blaiklock writes,

Book Ten seemed to provide a natural conclusion satisfying to a modern reader. ...The mystical ponderings of the last three books are... quite detachable, and it is even a little difficult to probe the writer's purpose in placing them thus. They seem laboured [sic] in their striving for linkage, and are rather the utterance of the Bishop of Hippo than of the embattled man striving Godwards. We have taken leave to omit them.

Still, Maria Boulding did not omit them in her 1997 translation, and so our congregation's reading group, being fastidious completists, chose her edition of the Confessions from the Vintage Spiritual Classics series. We've been working through those mystical ponderings, and I think I can respectfully disagree with Blaiklock. Throughout the autobiographical Books 1-10, Augustine (prefiguring Proust's Remembrance of Things Past) wrestles with the nature of memory and time before, and as created by, God. A Scripturally-saturated mind such as Augustine's would naturally end up with the days of creation and the text of Genesis 1-2.

Reading between Blaiklock's lines, he seems to be saying that Books 11-13 make rather tough sledding, and with that I can heartily agree. Nonetheless, I recognized myself in this sentence from Book 12.

On reading or hearing the scriptural words some people think of God in the guise of a man, or as some huge being possessed of immense power, who arrived at a sudden new decision to make heaven and earth outside himself, as though located at a distance from him, and made them like two vast solid structures, above and below, within which everything would be contained.

Unintentionally, I create mental images while reading Genesis 1-2, and those images render the events in terms which I can understand. Augustine chastises my hubris by reminding me that what I imagine is almost certainly not exactly what occurred.

I would be the first to argue that the Genesis 1-2 account of Creation is a straightforward historical narrative and is written to be as comprehensible as possible to the average reader or hearer. Nonetheless, I need to remember it records much I simply cannot comprehend, such as the existence of light without prior physical source, or an earth without form and void (once one realizes that a jumbled mass has a form, even if a chaotic one, and is certainly not void), or the relationship of the divine decrees to the simplicity of God's person. As chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith states, the Scriptures are clear, but sometimes they speak clearly of things which are incomprehensible to us poor creatures.

Augustine's mystical ponderings may be labored and overlong, but they form useful instruction in intellectual humility.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is Walter Miller's 1960 retelling of Western history through the lens of the monastic movement, but set in the American West after an apocalyptic nuclear war in the late 20th century. I read it after my Hindu neighbor insisted on loaning me his copy after we got into a discussion of comic books and science fiction during a Diwali party his family was hosting; such is ordinary life for a conservative presbyterian pastor these days.

As the Wikipedia notes, Canticle is widely recognized as a literary masterpiece, even being the stuff of dissertations and such. It's categorized as science fiction (since it spans the 27th to the 38th centuries), but as I note above, it's not really science fiction so much as an attempt to dramatize the role of the Church and persons religious in the development of the West during the first two millennia of Christendom. Much of the plot, such as it is, of Canticle's three sections focuses on the preservation of books and, later, development of the learning contained therein. But if that were all Canticle is, it would be little more than a presaging of Thomas Cahill's lamentably oversimplified How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Instead, Miller shows how the Church laid the foundation for Western civilization by insisting on the doctrine of the imago dei, man made in the image of God. In Canticle's first section, "Fiat Homo," the Church insists that those grotesquely mutated by nuclear fallout nonetheless are fully human and must be treated as such. In its second section, "Fiat Lux," an all-too unpleasantly human abbot boldly declares abominable a secular philosopher's suggestion that the men of their day are some kind of lesser, man-created beings precisely because that would make them something other than a reflection of God himself. While the third section, "Fiat Voluntas Lux," builds to another nuclear war, its centerpiece conflict is a debate between an abbot and a government official over euthanasia for the those in horrible suffering. According to Miller, mankind perennially and perversely denies his own humanity by refusing to value actual human beings and their lives; the Church and her members must bear witness against this dehumanization and insist that learning be founded on a Christian humanism.

As Miller tells the tale, it seems the Church is always on the losing side of the argument, but nonetheless her humanistic values work their way into civilization's warp and woof. I think he's right, and it's a fact worth remembering in these dark days for the citizens of the former American Republic. The Great State of Colorado, in which I consider it a privilege to live, just ratified a measure allowing for "assisted suicide" (one of the currently favored euphemisms for "euthanasia"). Our nation's misbegotten electoral college has permitted election to the office of President a man who aggressively dehumanizes all, individually and collectively, with the temerity to displease him. Humanism itself has fallen upon such hard times that the very notion is associated primarily with aggressive secularity, not the imago dei, and Christians shut down at its very mention. From my vantage point, all signs are that we have lost the argument.

In these dark days, A Canticle for Leibowitz helpfully reminds us that the Church's simple duty is to bear witness to the truth of God's Word, which against all common sense teaches us that man is made in the image of God to such an extent that God himself could become a man. Church history teaches us that we will lose many, many arguments, but because of God's grace and Spirit the Church will continue to bear humanity through the ashes of the destruction mankind repetitively and continually wreaks upon himself.