A Disappointed Traveler

 I saw the ugly side of the American traveler yesterday in Rome. A man, with wife and child in tow (literally, they were several steps behind him), loudly made fun of the names on the backs of soccer jerseys on display at a typical tourist knick-knack store. "What the hell is a Vini, Jr.?" he proclaimed, laughing. His son, innocent and credulous and not yet aware of or acculturated to his father's jingoistic chauvinism, told him Vini, Jr. was a famous soccer player. The display embarrassed me, challenging my belief that Americans abroad do not need to wholly abandon their Americanness to be gracious guests.

Despite the challenge of this singular and proud Know Nothing display, I still believe Americans can find a proper balance between being themselves and respecting local norms when they travel abroad. Smiling a bit too much signifies Americanness will, in most contexts, signify Americanness in a culturally inoffensive manner ( and the truth is most Americans will be noticeably American even if they are trying hard to blend in). Loudly making fun of your host country's most popular sport is simply offensive and causes one to wonder why such a person would travel outside of the U.S. in the first place. For most people, one reason to travel is to experience the differences between places firsthand. Foreign countries are not immersive zoos whose inhabitants are on display for the traveler's amusement and should never be treated as such. 

Perhaps this is what people in other countries find so annoying about the "American" traveler - this sense of gazing at a place and its people as if the viewer, the American, is looking at a display and hasn't really left America at all. Such travelers, to paraphrase Neil Finn, take America with them wherever they go. And this is offensive because it treats the subjects of the gaze as objects of amusement rather than as fully forme persons with moral and cultural agency. Thus, the middle-aged man can proclaim, without embarrassment, "What the hell is a Vini, Jr.?" on a crowded Roman street in August, 2024. I cannot stop being an American (nor do I want to), but I do prefer to leave America when I physically leave America.

Something New Under the Sun

My son Luke said something recently that caused me to reconsider the aphorism, "youth is lost on the young," not because he confirmed its accuracy but rather because he demonstrated its foolishness.  We were at home and a song came on a Pandora station he created (Today's Hits or something like it) that struck him as being similar to music played on the stations to which I listen.  In response he said, "That sounds like an oldie, you know, like the play on 88.9."  What is interesting, since I chose not to be dispirited, is the fact that 88.9 is not an oldies station.  I'm not sure how to describe the station since they play a variety of music, most of which is contemporary, from the more avant-garde or alternative (perhaps pretentious) edges of genres as diverse as hip hop, rock, and EDM.  The point here is that the station is not an oldies station.

I suppose none of the foregoing is interesting in itself; nevertheless, it reflects a social and psychological orientation that is.  Luke considers the music to which I listen to be old not because the music itself is old but rather because I am old.  This orientation has interesting implications for parenting, especially for those in my generation.  A generational marker (however imperfect and imprecise) between Gen X and preceding generations is the degree to which my generational cohorts continue to do the activities they did when they were young.  I do not regard this as or mean it in a puerile sense; rather, we simply continue to be interested in playing sports, playing video games, and participating in activities that would have, say 30 or 40 years ago, been associated with youth and young adulthood.  

The problem that this poses for parents and children today is that they often are involved in and enjoy similar things.  Why is this a problem?  The reason is simple:  the process of growing into adulthood requires children to differentiate themselves from their parents.  For a child, differentiating oneself from one's parents is difficult if one's parents do similar things, like similar things, and act similarly to their children.  Hence, Luke gravitates toward different music than I do and associates my music with his psychological or mental conception of age which, to my chagrin or not, he rightly attaches to me.

This has at least two implications.  First, no parent can be "cool" in the eyes of their children because the relationship between parents and children, aside from when children are very young, is, no matter how loving, antagonistic.  Children, despite their dependency, have a social and psychological need to separate themselves from their parents.  If children are not allowed to do so naturally vis-a-vis the normal variances between generations, they will discover and even invent ways to differentiate themselves.  Those of my generation might aptly call such a phenomenon the Alex P. Keaton syndrome.  

Second, parents ought to recognize the need their children have to be different and let it flourish.  The foundation parents lay for their children will, in most cases, shape their children's character in profound and irrevocable ways (by affinity or opposition) however particularized children wish to express their differences from their parents.  How a child dresses, what music they like, what social interests they have, etc. will not change whether they have internalized such learned and habituated qualities as respect, curiosity, kindness, strength of conviction, responsibility, etc.  

Luke considers me to be old.  While somewhat dispiriting as a psychological category in which to find oneself placed, there is danger in trying to convince him otherwise.  So I will set limits and listen to my "oldies" station and behave as best as I am able.  Most importantly, I will strive, however imperfectly, to accept that as he grows he is Luke and not the culmination of my wishes.  I will even refrain from telling him that there is nothing new under the sun when he goes through the things we have all gone through (like discovering pop music) because when we all go through those things they are new to us and the last thing anyone needs is a pedantic and dismissive parent telling us they are not.  That would truly make me old and would demonstrate conclusively that youth would in fact be wasted on the old.

The Difficulty of the I Am

It is a week late, but we are headed to my mother's house for a St. Patrick's Day dinner.  Such is the way of things with families.  Regardless, the dinner has gotten me thinking:  what does it mean to be Irish?  I do not know, but with a name like "Patrick Callahan" I occupy a nether region.  When asked, I say, and this is plain fact, that I am an American.  "But your name," say my interlocutors, "you must be Irish?"  To which I reply, "By the badge of patrimony only,"

If I am honest, though, there is something more, a deep inchoate feeling that justifies my rage at injustice, that inspires me to read and reread and reread "Easter, 1916," that causes me to find inordinate pleasure, almost lusty, in the bastard language of the colonized:  procreant, broad, and unfinished.  Perhaps it is the ghost of ancestral spirits sluicing through time on the tendrils of ancient peat fires for me to inhale in my own post-colonial bastardized now, a constant reminder that the I am is always ephemeral and complicated, comprised of vanishing and recurring scents, spirit eddies on unpredictable winds...

So what does it man to be Irish?  Surely I do not know; nevertheless, I follow lonely impulses of delight, revel in the banter that 3,500 miles away they call "the craic," and I listen to rebel songs with a fury that feels my own.

Nihilism, American Style - Part I

Nihilism is a major problem facing the United States and other liberal democracies with advanced economies.  The lure of nihilism arises out of a sense of grievance besetting large segments of the population.  The experience in Wisconsin and the law known as Act 10, which stripped public employees of many collective bargaining rights and protections, is an example.  Many residents of Wisconsin supported Act 10 based on the viewpoint that since private sector employees had fewer protections and poorer benefits than public sector employees, it was appropriate to reduce public sector employees’ protections and benefits to a level similar to the average private sector employee.  Many of the persons who supported Act 10 who would have benefitted from collective bargaining in terms of better wages, benefits, and job security, did not use Act 10 to make the case that they deserved more.  From an economic perspective, it would have made more sense for private sector employees to express outrage at they way their employers had eroded their wages, benefits, and protections over the years instead of expressing outrage at the wages, benefits, and protections that public sector employees received.  The position that many residents of Wisconsin took in supporting Act 10 was a nihilistic one in the sense that it had no positive effect on their situation.  In essence, many Act 10 supporters were saying, “if my employer screws me, employees paid by my taxes should get screwed too.”  The private sector employees’ grievances about their wages, benefits, and job security gave rise to an impulse to harm or destroy others.  This nihilistic move or ethos should worry those who support functioning liberal democracies because this sort of nihilistic impulse and the policies that may arise out of it will chip away at the protections of individual freedom that we associate with legitimate, contemporary representative democracies.

The reasons we should be concerned about the growing nihilist impulse and ethos are myriad.  Chief among them are the distinct but related problems of categorizing population groups into normatively ordered hierarchies, the diminished respect for or outright abolition of the rule of law, the growing perception that civil society is an anarchic competition between population groups to obtain and exercise power and dominance, and the perception that society is in a lapsarian, collapsing state.  To this may be added the irrational sense of general fear that is becoming increasingly more pervasive.  This constellation of attitudes, impulses, and beliefs and the political policies and ideologies they spawn are troubling because they lead to government policies that favor arbitrary exercise of state authority, reduce or eliminate the idea and practical enforcement of equal protection under the law, create a hierarchy of rights based on group identity within the state, and condone or at a minimum are hospitable to ethnonationalism.  

The assumption, amply justified by every page of history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly or brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so.  Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” (10).

As Americans, we often think Shklar’s assumption simply does not apply to us, either as a people or at least to those of us who share our political persuasion.  Recent history, however, is filled with examples of Americans who behaved lawlessly and brutally despite having no history of criminal or cruel behavior.  The incidents that occurred after American forces took control of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are one example.  A U.S. Army report found many instances of American soldiers abusing their authority and brutalizing Iraqi prisoners:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after he was slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, and using military dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Seymour Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.”  Hersh further discussed photographs taken by guards and broadcast on 60 Minutes that show “leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses” including a photograph in which “Private [Lyndie] England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates.”  Lest we think that this was an extraordinary instance, Hersh writes, “the 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine--a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide” as evidenced by witness testimony in the numerous hearings related to the abuse.  Further demonstration that American government agents will act unlawfully and brutally when left unchecked is supported by the fact that higher ranking officials in Military Intelligence and the C.I.A. instructed the G.I.s at Abu Ghraib in at least some of the torture techniques, including how to humiliate prisoners.

We needn’t look beyond the territorial limits of the United States to find government agents acting unlawfully and brutally.  On October 24, 2004 a Milwaukee man named Frank Jude briefly made national headlines when it was learned that he was beaten at the hands of off-duty Milwaukee police officers while attending a party in one of their homes.  In addition to Jude’s face being pummeled almost beyond recognition, “Jude's pants were also cut off his body. He says he was kicked repeatedly in the groin, his fingers were yanked back and a pen was jammed in both of his ears,” as reported by ABC News.  Through the course of investigations, hearings, and trials, it appears that the motivation for beating Jude is that he and one of his companions at the party were African American.  Most of the involved officers were convicted in federal court of unlawfully violating Jude’s civil rights under color of state law.  The City of Milwaukee paid a $2 million settlement to Jude as a result of the incident.  

More recent examples of unlawful and brutal behavior by government agents abound.  On October 20, 2014, a Chicago police officer shot Laquan McDonald 16 times when he was not threatening police.  The incident was recorded on a police car dashcam.  Seven officers have been charged with attempting to cover up the investigation into the incident, which included lying about the dashcam video.  On April 3, 2015, a Philadelphia man, Tyree Carroll, was beaten and repeatedly tasered by as many as 26 Philadelphia police officers long after he had been subdued and was clearly not resisting arrest.  In 2012 the Orleans Parish Prison signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice stemming from a class action lawsuit over prison conditions in which included, among other allegations of abuse and neglect, prisoners “in need of mental health treatment or protection from suicide” being “held practically naked in overcrowded cells that reeked of human waste.”  Abusive practices are not restricted to the criminal justice system either.  Nine public officials and employees have been charged with misconduct, neglect, or similar crimes related to falsifying, misleading, or failing to report dangerous lead levels in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water and evidence of lead poisoning in the community related to the water quality.  The abuse in this case may not have been violent; nevertheless, the consequences to the health of Flint residents is no less severe.  

Government agents are not uniformly bad actors or inherently unethical.  This, however, does not vitiate Shklar’s point that some government agents will behave lawlessly and brutally if they are left unchecked.  Hence, it is critical that we stand up to nihilistic impulses that seek to impair or destroy the political and legal structures that ensure government agents behave lawfully and hold them legally accountable when they don’t.  Nihilistic impulses may arise from a feeling of grievance with the government, but such impulses cannot be allowed to turn a government of laws into one of men.  Put less idealistically, we cannot allow nihilistic impulses to turn government into a mere tool of those who hold power.  

Donald Trump offers a unique opportunity to examine the effects of nihilism in American politics because of the brashness with which he has embraced it and the confidence his rise to and assumption of power has given segments of the electorate prone to or explicitly supportive of nihilistic policies and positions, all of which are furthered by the widespread and intense media coverage President Trump and his supporters receive.  One theme President Trump repeated during his campaign was his characterization of majority minority urban neighborhoods as lawless, chaotic zones out of control and almost beyond repair.  His favored term for these neighborhoods is the “inner city.”  President Trump’s characterization of specific geographic areas as lawless potentially enables him to treat residents of these areas as outside the law.  If this occurs, it would be a literal ghettoization of minority majority neighborhoods in a way that differs only in degree from the ghettos the German General Government created in the occupied territories during World War II.  If a specific place is carved out from the rest of the polity and is seen as no longer functioning within existing laws, then it is a short step to argue the place need not be subject to existing law when being governed or “brought under control.”

Minority majority communities have been subject to such supra legal government action before.  The disparate sentences for powder and rock cocaine is an example.  Despite evidence that rock cocaine is no more addictive than powder cocaine and that whites and blacks use cocaine at roughly similar rates on a population level, the public bought into a hysteria over “crack” cocaine, portraying minority neighborhoods in which crack was sold as lawless, which led to significantly harsher sentences for delivery and possession of crack compared to powder cocaine.  In addition to the differences in sentencing, police and prosecutorial agencies pursued radically different enforcement strategies to combat crack cocaine distribution and use compared to powder cocaine distribution and use.  The strategy applied to crack cocaine, and hence majority minority neighborhoods, was paramilitary:  aggressive, coercive, and often violent.  The strategy applied to powder cocaine, and hence majority white neighborhoods cannot even be described as a strategy because there was none.  Powder cocaine was simply treated as one illicit drug among others used in majority white neighborhoods and communities - neither a scourge to be eliminated nor evidence of lawlessness to be quellled.

Another instance of supra legal government action being applied to majority minority neighborhoods and communities was the redlining and discriminatory housing policies and practices that arose in the wake of the post-World War II G.I. bill.  Huge amounts of wealth were created in America under this income redistribution welfare program that enabled veterans to obtain home loans for which they otherwise would not have qualified.  Unfortunately, the benefits of this welfare program were not distributed fairly.  Lenders, builders, realtors, buyers, sellers, and city governments engaged in a pattern and practice of excluding minorities from the program and shunting those who managed to participate into majority minority neighborhoods, creating the segregated communities which President Trump considers to be lawless, chaotic zones.  In effect, the discriminatory housing policies and practices of the postwar years created the geographic zones President Trump seemingly wants to ghettoize in a formal manner.  It is especially galling since the economic disadvantages that have beset and accrued in majority minority neighborhoods and communities can in significant part be traced to the intentional exclusion of these neighborhoods and communities from the wealth and income redistribution of the G.I. bill.  

The rhetoric of President Trump regarding the “inner city” should give us pause because it characterizes whole communities in a way that delegitimates entire populations, thereby removing their entitlement to be treated in accordance with the ordinary application of existing laws.  In lawless zones, supra legal measures are allowed because such zones are characterized as being in a state of emergency.  Hence, extraordinary, i.e., supra legal, measures are necessary to rescue or stabilize the zones.  This typically takes the form of increased military-style policing.  

The view that majority minority neighborhoods are dangerous, lawless, chaotic, or out of control is nihilistic.  The view implies that something is wrong with the communities themselves, that politics and socioeconomics do not explain the real problems besetting many majority minority neighborhoods.  If the communities themselves are somehow inherently deficient, the argument then implies that the members of the communities are not capable of self-governance.  It follows that individuals who are not entitled to the same individual rights, freedoms, and protections as individuals who are capable of self-governance.  The effect is to treat such communities and their members as wards of the state.  The nihilistic impulse is to deny full citizenship based on ethno-geography and then use the force and authority of the state to control the ethno-geographic communities deemed outside of the law.  The common racist trope exemplifying this nihilistic point of view is the animal/zoo which regards supra legal action as necessary because individuals who are minorities are not considered fully human and thus are both dangerous and incapable of behaving lawfully without physically (read “brutally”) controlled.  Society itself becomes a struggle between ethno-national groups to control and exert the authority of the state rather than a political contest among legal equals against the backdrop of equal protection and the rule of law.

Fell Rabbit, Christmas Eve Morning

The cursed rodent has found me.  For those who may not remember, I encountered the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog not long ago while mountain biking on the Hoyt Park trails.  When I escaped the white beast, I thought I was rid of it forever.  But this Christmas Eve morning, that oxymoronic time of anticipation and procrastination-fueled preparations, he returned.  I opened the door to head out and pick up some Kouign Amann from Amaranth Bakery (which, as an aside, are the finest breakfast pastries that I have tasted) when I spied the creature's tracks at my door, mocking me, as it were.

An auspicious beginning to Christmas Eve day.

I donned my battle gear for the bakery run:  Sorels, London Fog wool overcoat, and rabbit fur-lined gloves.  I am not above mocking, fell beast!  Projecting confidence, despite my wariness, I strode through the wet snow toward my car, alert for the attack I know must be coming.



"Hasenpfeffer," I thought to myself.  "Bring it on rabbit, I'll make you into stew," I muttered, like whistling in the dark.

My driveway, where it nears the road, slopes steeply.  Surely the foul creature would launch his attack while I was on that portion, strategically the least defensible portion on my walk, a fraught narrow stretch not unlike Gallipoli or Thermopylae.  "If only I can make it to the car," I thought, "I'll be able to arm myself with an ice scraper and jumper cables," an urban gladiator in this spectacle of the absurd.

Alas, the creature is a clever strategist, learned in history and cunning of tactics.  I would never reach the car before the onslaught.  In my heart of hearts I knew this was so.

What happened next was too fast to process.  Perhaps you have seen The Revenant?  In an instant it was all incisors and fur and blood curdling screams.  Instinctively I raised my hands to my face just in time, the razor sharp incisors finding purchase in my left forearm, crushing through soft tissue to bone, tearing sinew and fascia and muscle.

In a state of shock, I felt no pain and threw the beast off me.  It attacked again with lightning speed, not giving me a moment to recover my senses, gnawing deadly, teeth dangerously close to my face as I struggled to hold it back, both hands grasping its now bloody fur, streaked with the ferruginous liquid leaking from the gashes in my forearm.

I tried to find a weakness but the furry fiend's defenses were impenetrable.  I grabbed a hind foot, visions of lucky talismans filling my mind, but it merely dug its other foot deep in my exposed wrist, causing me to yowl in pain and frustration.  Again it flew at my face, gnashing its teeth.  Again I parried the attack.  The super fecund vermin once more found purchase in my left forearm.  I started to black out.  I could not take much more of this.

It was then that I saw it - my salvation, the nub of a baseball bat, the one I told the boy never to leave in the yard, sticking out of the snow bank, just barely, which I grabbed, life surging again, almost gleefully.  I yanked the Easton free and stood, raising myself to my full height, confident, hurling the beast once more from my gaping, ragged forearm, cocking my elbow, a little Joe Morgan twitch, stepping into the snarling rodent which was now enraged and flying at me to finish me off.  It may not have been a textbook swing, nowhere near level, a tomahawk really, but in the throes of mortal danger, in the sights of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, function  trumps form and I sent the beast up, up, and away, over the bungalow across the street, over the great oak one street away, its terrible scream Dopplering away into nothing, perhaps as far as Washington Park.

I stood dripping sweat and blood, panting, my wool overcoat in tatters, my hat on the ground, but, I thought, I am alive!  The rabbit that stalked me in Hoyt Park, that found my home, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog would not defeat me.  This would not be my hot gates, the band would not play Waltzing Matilda.  I gathered myself and, despite searing pain and a barely functional left arm walked to the car and got the Kouign Amann rolls I promised would be on the table for breakfast Christmas Eve morning.  And though I struck the rabbit with Giancarlo Stanton-like ferocity, I sense, no I know, that he is not dead.  Who knows where he will turn up next.  Perhaps it is time to find the Holy Grenade of Antioch.

Merry Christmas

Christmas as Hope, Gifts as Ethics

The way we celebrate Christmas, especially common notions as to why we give gifts on Christmas, has long struck me as problematic.  Christianity is ultimately an Easter faith.  Mark and John do not mention Christ's birth or origins.  Paul focuses exclusively on the experience of the risen Christ.  The only reason the birth of Christ appears in the Christian Bible at all is rhetorical:  to link Jesus of Nazareth to Messiah references in the Torah.  In essence, biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus reflect the Jewish nature of the earliest iterations of the Christ faith.  As a theological matter, the birth of Jesus seems practically irrelevant to Christianity as an Easter faith.

As a matter of religion, Christmas is, for me, fraught.  Principally, the birth of Jesus as the future Christ is the instantiation of hope in the world,  I take that hope to mean hope for justice in the world, the possibility that God's law will be realized or actualized.  The possibility Jesus' birth brings is not salvific in the sense of offering hope for another world, i.e., heaven, but rather is salvific in the sense of bringing the possibility of God's law, i.e., justice, to this world.  The fact that Jesus was not born as the Christ but rather as an ordinary and wholly human infant exemplifies the material or existential nature of his possibility.

As a practical matter, Christ's birthday was utterly ordinary, notwithstanding the rhetorical needs of Matthew and Luke.  This to me is the meaning of Christmas - the instantiation of hope in an ordinary person.  The redemptive or salvific possibility of Christ exists in a person who bears no special markings, a person who is wholly ordinary.  The birth of Jesus, if it is to be celebrated, should be celebrated for the extraordinary fact that the possibility of God's law, the salvific capacity for justice, is fully human and is to be realized in the world.

The idea that Jesus is a gift from God to the world [and that this is the reason for gift-giving on Christmas] turns the radical nature of Christ's meaning on its head.  Jesus was not a gift.  Christ represents an ethical choice.  We should celebrate Christmas as an acknowledgement that the condition for justice is being human and that the possibility of justice exists in all of us.  Christmas is truly a material holiday, but only in the sense that it demonstrates the wholly existential nature of God's law, that justice is human rather than heavenly.

The transformation of Jesus to the Christ was volitional.  The possibility of Christ is embodied in ethical choice.  Gift-giving is laudable but does not, for the most part, have much to do with the birth of Jesus.  Insofar as the birth of Jesus has meaning, it has meaning because it was an ordinary birth of an ordinary child whose future would be extraordinary not because of his birth-status but rather because of how he chose to act.  Jesus was not Zeus or Krishna appearing on earth with divine power and attributes.  Jesus was a man who offered an ethical choice, which was also a divine choice:  to live justly.  Christmas should be a celebration of justice, of ethical choice, not largesse.

Of course, the problem with interpretation is that it sometimes runs counter to reality.  In the case of Christmas, that means gift-giving.  Neither I nor anyone else can do anything to change our practice of giving gifts on Christmas.  That being said, the practice, insofar as it is traced to the Bible, can be made to accord with the significance of the single instance of gift-giving on the birth of Christ - that of the three Eastern wise men or kings:

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.

NKJV, Matthew, 2:2-12.

The function of the gifts in the passage quoted above seems not to be a celebratory matter exclusively but rather a political one:  here are secular authorities pledging themselves to God's son rather than to Herod (and by extension, Rome).  Tribute, which is what the gifts of kings is, goes to god, not to the secular authorities, not to the empire.  Hence, the notion of gifts for Christmas should be a political act, a tribute to God over the secular authorities, rather than an act of mere generosity or thankfulness.  

This squares with the radical message of Christ, which calls for uncompromising and unaccommodating fealty to God regardless of the secular authority's demands.  In truth, a plain reading of Christ's message puts the believer squarely at odds with the secular authority.  In fact, Christ's message could be read as a critique of all authority qua authority, which ultimately turns into a self-propagating edifice at odds with God.  All authority qua authority becomes an idol, a golden calf if you will.  The hierarchy or bureaucracy or ecclesiastical polity becomes so focused on meta-analysis of the rules governing it and justifying its existence that it effectively turns away from God.  The problem is not 'law' per se, but rather the claim to monopolize both the interpretation and administration of God's law.

The eastern kings or wise men and their tribute to a babe in a 'manger' further the Christ message that God's law is not formal or ethnocentric.  The gifts are not offered to be generous.  They gifts are offered because tributes to God are appropriate.  In this way, the tribute, the Christmas gift is a radical tribute to and tacit acknowledgement of the ethical priority of the other.  "Thou shalt have no other gods before me;" hence, kings or wise men give gifts to Jesus. The commandment is the starkest form of prioritizing the other.  Above all and first, God.  In Jesus' formulation, "The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength."  Mark 12:29-30.  The gifts of kings pay tribute to the absolute and utter primacy of God and our obligation to that otherness.  this radical alterity is the model for our gift-giving.  The gift is not an act of generosity or charity, though it may be that too, instead it is an acknowledgement of the ethical standing of the other as prior to the self.  The gift is a tribute to the material aspect of the first commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, to acknowledge the other's absolute and inalienable status as a fully ethical being to whom tribute, and hence moral agency, are due.  The fact that Matthew specifically locates the secular authorities to the "east" demonstrates that the ethical priority of the other is not parochial but instead extends to every person.  This is extraordinary and worth emulating.

I still maintain that the way we celebrate Christmas is problematic.  Jesus was not a gift but rather the instantiation of hope in the world.  The message of the risen Christ only makes sense if Jesus was wholly human, one whose divine status centers on volition, an ethical choice, rather than a magical birth.  Nevertheless, we give gifts on Christmas and that is not going away.  Although I am not particularly religious, I will remember the model of the eastern kings or wise men when I give gifts this year:  my gifts partially fulfill my obligation to understand and treat those receiving them as ethically prior to myself, to treat them as I would treat myself.  In this way, whether we are religious or not, we fulfill that most basic and radical ethical command when we give gifts at Christmas.

Whither Milwaukee French Immersion School?

I have the good fortune to be able to pick up my son when his school lets out for the last couple of months.  Parents wait for their children in the auditorium.  I usually arrive a bit early and have time to observe the process.  It is uplifting to see the younger kids' eyes light up when they spy their mom or dad (or grandparent).  I am not certain that there can be more clear and unmitigated joy than that precise moment.  Witnessing it privileges me.

As lovely as the excitement of kids meeting their parents is, I write this post for another reason.  Chiefly, I worry about this place that has become a sort of family for my son.  My son attends Milwaukee French Immersion School, which is part of Milwaukee Public Schools.  The staff and students are a mix of races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc.  Sitting in the auditorium and watching this group of kids smile and goof and pout is heartening.  I am, however, painfully aware that this group of students and staff is all too unusual in American society where segregation, intentional or not, is the norm.

I am worried because the instances of integration in American society, when they do occur, tend to occur in urban areas.  Even in a hypersegregated city like Milwaukee, a place like French Immersion School can and does exist.  There are few, if any, other places in the State of Wisconsin where a place like French Immersion School would even be a possibility let alone an actual school.  Unfortunately, the things that make Milwaukee French Immersion School possible and other opportunities for integrated experiences in urban centers are under assault from state and federal legislators.  What is truly disturbing about the assault on urban self-government is the historical antecedent.  A similar assault occurred in Austria in the 1930's, pitting the left-leaning urban center of Vienna against the right-leaning central government.  As historian Timothy Snyder notes,

The central government (controlled by conservative Christian parties) lined its artillery pieces up on the hills above Vienna and set about quite literally shelling socialism:  firing down upon the Karl-Marx-Hof and all those other nice working class Hofs, with their kindergartens, their daycare centers, swimming pools, shops and so on--municipal planning in action and despised for just that reason.

 Judt, T. with Snyder, T.  Thinking the Twentieth Century. Penguin, 2012, p. 30.

It is difficult not to note how this parallels the struggle going on the U.S. between urban centers and the rest of the country.  The City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin are good examples.  Milwaukee has enacted municipal regulations designed to benefit residents such as mandatory paid sick leave for employees of employers located in the city limits.  The measures are favored by a majority of residents and liberal politicians.  The regulations are opposed by businesses and conservative politicians, almost none of whom represent the city.  Rather than allow the city the privilege of self-governance, the conservative controlled state legislature passes state laws prohibiting municipalities like Milwaukee from enacting local laws to which conservative state legislators are opposed, such as mandatory paid sick leave.  Similarly, conservative legislators have attempted to wrest local control from local school boards such as Milwaukee Public Schools to push school districts to adopt policies conservatives favor but residents do not.

I am not entirely certain from where this animus towards local control proceeds other than the fear that the policies will prove successful and thereby undermine the conservative legislative project to privatize and deregulate virtually every aspect of civic life.  Regardless, the worrisome consequence is the stark derogation of urban residents' self-determination such legislative action represents.  The exercise of state legislative authority to trump local regulation and governance is blatantly paternalistic and infantilizes municipal residents whose political will is treated without deference or respect.  Although the legislature is not lining artillery around the perimeter of the city, politically their actions gut our kindergartens and shops and effectively shell municipal planning in action.  It is as if they despise urban communities simply for having a different vision of how to achieve the good.

What this hostility toward urban places means for Milwaukee French Immersion School is not yet certain.  Nevertheless, the historical antecedents for rural antipathy toward urban centers is disturbing.  Historically, rural populations are driven by resentment of that which makes urban centers desirable and a misguided fear that urban centers are more powerful than they in fact are (as exemplified by the results in the recent Presidential election).  Rather than allow urban centers to flourish, examples such as Vienna of the 1930's demonstrates that persons and politicians from outside the city will do what they can to cripple urban centers.  The Milwaukee Public School District has made many strides and weathered a significant assault from conservative legislators to take over the district.  Nevertheless, the question remains, for how long can it continue to do so?  Five years hence what will another father see when he sits in the auditorium and waits to pick up his child?  I fear he will see something different and less extraordinary than the sight I see because some conservative from the countryside saw the same thing and couldn't abide it.