Welcome to the first issue of The Public Sphere. We have titled this issue “debut,” as it is our very first issue and not quite volume one. Only members of the core staff have contributed essays and art for this initial issue. Each piece queries something we may have taken for granted about politics, religion, culture, and media. Lauren Espineli”s photo essay considers how her trip to Egypt defied her expectations. Valerie Bailey Fischer examines desires to be a Good Samaritan in a road trip through Israel and Palestine. Jacqueline Hidalgo considers how our quests for transformation must be coupled with practices of everyday life. Marc Lombardo traces the limits that our current remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr. place upon our own efforts to transform the world. Paloma Ramirez wonders how text messaging became an acceptable part of dating practice. Katy Scrogin asks us to think about what we really mean by and want in “friendship” now that we can befriend everyone on MySpace.
Individual authors may disagree with positions taken by other authors in this magazine. We think that such dissonance is central to conversation in the public sphere. We invite you to read our initial queries of public life and then to respond with your own thoughts.

Next Issue:

For our first official issue, The Public Sphere seeks essays and art that query public life. We especially seek pieces that explore the topic of “global responsibility.” What questions arise from the Beijing Olympics? What challenges for global citizenship are posed by the foreign policy platforms of John McCain and Barack Obama? What possibilities and limits for global engagement does the Internet make possible? If you are interested in writing for our next issue, please submit your piece via email in either .rtf or .doc format to thepublicsphere@gmail.com by August 15, 2008. Essays should be no longer than 2000 words. Artistic interpretations should be submitted in .jpg format. Poetry and short fiction are also welcome.

By The Public Sphere | The post Issue № 0 <small> | July 2008</small> appeared first on The Public Sphere.

By Lauren Espineli | The post Photo Essay: “Unexpected Egypt” appeared first on The Public Sphere.

There are many kinds of indignation. There is the violent indignation of a Mets’ fan whose player just struck out and the petulant indignation of a child who isn’t allowed to play with a toy that doesn’t belong to him. There is the passing indignation of being cut off in traffic and the enduring indignation of being passed over for promotion. For this first column, in this first issue, I’m addressing something that is new to me: indignation over the blatant yet socially acceptable abuse of a simple technology.

I am not technophobic. A loyal Apple user since the days of the II e, I love my old Powerbook (though it’s already nearly as obsolete as that II e) and my new video iPod (nearly 15 of its 80 gigs are in use). I keep a drawer in my apartment dedicated to the detritus of today’s essentials ““ digital camera chargers, connector cables, adapters, assorted batteries, and tiny storage devices for gadgets I no longer own. But when it comes to cell phones, I was a willfully late adopter. I am not a phone person, and something about carrying around a device that allows anyone to call you anytime, anywhere, just doesn’t sit right with me. The number of times I have waited in the supermarket checkout line while the girl in front of me chatters on her cell phone might have something to do with it.

Anyway, three years ago, after constant badgering from friends who could never get in touch with me, I finally got a cell phone. It opened up a whole new world; a world in which I had no idea how to function. I would forget to charge it, provoking a persistent plaintive beeping, so I would turn it off and forget to turn it on again. People wondered why I didn’t get voice messages, and they got irritated because the phone was always off. Friends would send text messages. Some of them had pictures attached. I didn’t know how to look at them. All I knew is that they cost extra. I asked my friends not to text me.

Now, with the prevalence of Blackberrys and iPhones, texts, pictures, videos, and emails are all whizzing through the air at thousands of kilobytes per second every second of every day. The current generation of 18-24 year olds has never known communication to be any different. This is not necessarily a bad thing. While I appreciate the inherent usefulness of this all, these new, more text-based, and less personal, methods of communication, have certainly changed the way we relate to one another. Yes, when traveling, for business or when plans change last minute, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to convey information to anyone in the world at the touch of a button. But is a text really appropriate in every situation?

For example, I was out with a friend one night, and while trying to get the bartender’s attention, we started chatting with two guys. Drinks were had, and numbers were exchanged. Now, it is not unusual for a guy, on being told my number, to dial it on the spot. This serves multiple purposes ““ it gets the number into his phone’s memory, it confirms the legitimacy of the number, and it automatically gets his number into my phone. Fine. In this case, the guy, immediately upon getting my number, sent me a text. It read: “Hi paloma its ur bf adam” (sic). Half an hour later he sent another: “I had fun w u. Def hang again soon.” I received that message the following morning because I do not habitually check my phone. In fact, I rarely look at it unless it is actively ringing (and sometimes, not even then). I eventually wrote back: “Hope youre not too hungover. I had fun w you too.” He responded immediately: “Actually feel great.

At this point, I was enjoying the novelty of an active text exchange with a cute guy, though I had no clue how to go about it. It takes me a good five to ten minutes to compose any kind of text message, and each time is just as frustrating and fraught with peril as the last. In the time I have owned a cell phone, my texting skills have improved only in that I now know how to do it, more or less. At any rate, I was at work, so the exchange was quickly put away, and I went on about my life.

That Saturday evening, I received this message from Adam: “Going out tonite?” OK, so, how does one typically respond to this sort of thing? The question is straightforward, but it was not an invitation or any kind of request for my company. That combination of words in this particular situation could best be interpreted as: “If you are going out tonight, maybe we can meet up.” Or a more straightforward translation: “Will you get drunk and have sex with me tonight?” My response: “Busy tonight ““ maybe later this week?

I admit that this is still a new medium for me, and I need to pick up on the rules. When did it become acceptable for guys to communicate this way? I use the word “communicate” here because I can’t honestly say he asked me out. He didn’t. What happened is that he sent me a text that implied an interest in a social interaction of some sort. What the hell is that? By the way, his response to my suggestion that we meet up later in the week was this: “Mos def

Which brings us to a few days later, when I looked at my phone and realized I had another text: “My friend wants to hang w ur friend again so we shld do group cocktails a nite this wk?” This at least is a specific suggestion. But he still hadn’t actually called me. Is this how things work now? Has all our modern technology and instant communication brought us to this? It’s like passing notes in junior high. No wonder kids love it so much. And no wonder it’s caught on with all those twenty- and thirty-somethings out there enjoying their extended adolescence. For the record, this particular guy is in his thirties and, apparently, owns his own business.

Call me old fashioned, but when a guy wants to go out with me, I’d like him to actually ask me out. What’s wrong with dialing a number and making a phone call? If you’re texting me, you already have a phone in your hand with the number plugged in for you. It takes more time to type out a message than it does to hit the little green button to put a call through.

I am not the only one to suffer the abuses of texting in the dating realm. An informal survey of my single friends reveals near universal annoyance with the medium. The typed word, especially when abbreviated, is ambiguous in the best of times. How many emails have been misinterpreted because nuance doesn’t read? And yet, it has become the default form of communication. In a way, it’s easy to see why. Text is ambiguous. There is very little danger in sending a few words into the ether. It’s like a crumb dropped into a pond to see if anything bites. If nothing does, it just dissolves. No risk involved. If something does bite, you can still hover and decide whether or not you’re interested. It’s the very definition of passive aggressive. It’s happening more and more often in every age group among both men and women, and it’s really not okay.

If I receive a text that says, “Hey its Blank ““ now u have my number.” Yes, that’s true, but does that mean I’m supposed to respond? I don’t know how to carry on a conversation with acronyms because I’m no longer eight years old. Don’t make me try to flirt by typing out letters on a numbered keypad. It will never sound good. If you want to talk to me, press the little green button and wait for the ringing sound to stop. It’s really not that hard. If you don’t want to talk, why are you wasting your time with all the typing?

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant: Text Messaging Is No Way to Ask a Girl Out appeared first on The Public Sphere.

An acquaintance of mine claims to have 258 friends. That number could be larger, actually; the figure only represents the number of boon companions who show up on her MySpace page and not those additional pals who might appear in real time but avoid online social networking. Among this tight-knit group are celebrities, a personified representation of the university she attended, people with whom she’s shared neither the same physical space nor an actual conversation, and an assortment of random human beings who actually do spend time with her in the non-virtual world. Admittedly, this gal is more outgoing than I am, and is far more in tune with the latest social trends. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something oddI even want to say “disturbingabout this densely populated area of her life.

It’s not the numbers in themselves that bother me; rather, it’s the fact that all of the inhabitants of this e-community share the same label: “friend. OK, fine, what else should you call them, on a site not devoted to business, school, or any other “work-related organization? After all, this sort of acquaintance wasn’t even conceivable only twenty years ago. Pen pal? Not exactly. Associate? That sounds so Wal-Mart. Webfriend? More accurate, perhaps, but we don’t want to get too techno-geek on everyone. The point is that, whatever we think we’re describing with this new sort of relationship, “friend” seems to be the easiest, least confining identifier to use, end of story; don’t take your semantics so seriously.

But I do take semanticsas well as friendshipvery seriously. After all, without friendsthose anchors who stand by you, stave off loneliness, keep you accountable, save you from your own egoexistence would be exceptionally dull. And so, when you can gain or lose a friend in the microsecond it takes to click a mouse, should we worry about the fact that the rich phenomenon that is friendship might be losing some of its complexity?

Let’s take a look at this new realm of cheery community formation. Whatever your preferred site, the routine is more or less the same. You present as much or little, as far-fetched or honest, a public face as you want. You ask the people you know from “real life” to declare publicly that they’re willing to be associated with you, and then you either wait around for something to happen, or you get assertive, depending on your personality. If you choose the latter option, chances are, you browse other members’ profiles, check out their favorite TV shows and music, their pictures, the comments their friends have posted to their siteand if you like what you see, you have another couple of options open to you.

If you’d like to know more about this person than is contained within a few blurbs on the screen, you send a message to say hi and to try and get a conversation going. If, on the other hand, you don’t feel that such a time-intensive step is necessary, you just up and invite that person to be your friend. In this case, you ask a complete stranger to agree publicly to link himself, and all that goes along with him, to you, and all the accompanying baggage that you carry. Somehow, this action is not thought to be as creepy as mailing a personal letter of devotion to a celebrity.

Even if you find something overly hasty about this process of instant and ill-informed amity, though, and refrain from immediate e-bonding with avatars, there will always be some stranger who pops up out of the blue and requests your friendship. The lack of an introductory message in this instance is perhaps less disturbing than the fact that this type of individual often doesn’t even appear to have looked at your profile. So, for example, when a self-proclaimed redneck (and Proud! Kiss my red white & blue ass, terrorists!) solicits the friendship of a Code Pink organizer who enjoys dancing with her coven in Berkeley, you have to wonder what’s going on. It gets even more puzzling, though, because often, you don’t even have that minimal information to guide you; sometimes, potential pals ask you to join up on their team without even allowing you to view their profiles or pictures. In other words, you are asked to claim these unknowns as friends before you’re granted the privilege of knowing anything about them.

And then, for some old-fashioned curmudgeons, a strange thing often ensues out of what should be a ridiculously easy dilemma: instead of officially declining the friend request KrazEE8s has made, you become so anxious about not hurting this person’s feelings that, in spite of being ignorant even of hisor her?true identity that you just ignore the request, hoping that KrazeEE8s will soon forget about having contacted you.

Odds are, however, that were a stranger to come up to you in a public place and ask you to be her friend, you’d pack up and move away in a slightly creeped-out fashion. When the situation happens online, though, why does such a presumptuous approach suddenly become, if not welcome, at least socially acceptable? I’ll wager that it’s got something to do with the safety of the entire process. In spite of the much-discussed dangers of placing ourselves under public scrutiny, when it comes to the work and investment required of an online networking relationship, the risks just can’t compete with those required in the physical realm.

Consider the very un-anonymous peril that someone in the flesh takes when introducing herself to a stranger. If things go well, she’s passed the first of many hurdles; more work lies ahead in order to convince the object of her interest that she’s worthy of sustained attention, of becoming and remaining a “friend.” If rejected, however, she’s markedvisiblyand there’s really no satisfactory remedy to getting out of the situation; leaving will point up her shame and weakness; hanging around will prove that she’s even more socially inept than she demonstrated in her initial approach. The whole prospect is scary. If you don’t have to see the expression on another person’s face, though, whether you’ve been accepted or rejected, well then, one level of anxiety, at least, has been removed.

And then break-ups, never easy to manage, are so easy in the virtual universe that, technically, they don’t really have to occur. If you’re no longer satisfied with your friend, well, just remove him from your friends’ list; there’s no need to inform him that the relationship is over. Unless he happens to scroll carefully through his 300 friends, in fact, he may not even notice you’re gone. And if you’re overwhelmed with the developments that could ensue even from that action, don’t worry; you can just block your ex-pal from contacting you. Easy, clean, no explanation required.

The problem here is that friendship, at least as we’ve experienced it over the last few millienniain the fleshrequires communication and commitmentnot only to respect a friend enough to tell her if you need to go your separate ways, but to be actively involved in her life, throughout the duration of that relationship. Isn’t there some sort of understanding that the two of you will see each other through good and bad, put up with each others’ complaints and relationship troubles and bouts of depression, will attend a concert one of you really doesn’t want to attend? Doesn’t friendship involve, in addition to good times together and common interests, risk and disappointment and accountability, misunderstandings and post-argument reconciliation and a resulting understanding and valuing of each other that are stronger than they were before?

I’m not claiming that good discussion, personal growth, and, dare I say it, lasting friendships, do not or cannot happen on Facebook. I do, however, wonder how this commitment-free realm of existence affects the manner in which we behave in the “real” world, especially the ways in which it shapes our ability, not only to understand and interact with those closest to us, but with people in generalmaybe even our capacity to understand ourselves. It takes something much more complex than a glowing screen of words to help us appreciate the intricacy and nuance that are part of the human experienceand so, to assist us in becoming mature, thoughtful individuals.

Lists of hobbies and favorite music are simply not enough to know a person, and don’t even begin to allow you to describe yourself to others. Heck, Charles Manson might have loved, loved, loved the Beatles just as much as any of their self-proclaimed biggest fans. I’m guessing, thoughhopingthat his physical presenceincluding the quirks that were only perceivable when you stood next to himwould dissuade most people from pursuing an acquaintance, much less friendship, with him. It seems, though, that on these sites of free information exchange, friends are constituted by the facts you know about them; realizing that they like the same movies you do, and prefer green to red, must mean that, were you to meet in the real world, you’d get on swimmingly.

I’m not advocating turning the clock back to rotary phones and card catalogues. And the phenomenon I describe is hardly the most serious social ill we face. Maybe, though, it could warrant a small mention in the lists of things to keep in mind as we move on in our quest for the best of all possible worlds. Because if this trend starts to influence how we treat our “traditional” palsif we don’t have toor worse, don’t want toconnect with other human beings on any sort of profound level, the implications could be terrifying. It’s bad enough to be lonely, or to feel misunderstood, or to misinterpret what another is saying. Becoming accustomed, though, to treating friends as if they were both disposable and easily replaceable makes me wonder with how much less concern we would begin to treat strangers or enemies. Because if our friends don’t matter that much, then those who don’t share our interests or our opinions begin to matter even less. And in a world where we already take so little account of the poor and the marginalized, stopping in our tracks and asking ourselves what friendship means to us might just keep us from expanding that realm of undesirables who are already so unjustly treated. One would hope, too, that it would even lead us to talk to those we’ve eliminated from our consciousnessbecause even those who look and think differently than we do mightamazing suggestion!have much more to offer us than we ever thought possible. That recognition, though, will require a little more than an exchange of favorite TV shows and flattering pictures.

I’m not asking us all, then, to ditch Facebook and the entertainment we might be able to find there. At the very least, though, demand of the people you meet in this new-fangled community something more than a soundbite or a catch phraseat least before you decide to become friends.

By Katy Scrogin | The post Your 258 Closest Friends appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The promise of transformation lurks around many corners this election season. Even when I turn on my television, I watch a show like Eli Stone and find transformational mythology at play. The main character has a brain aneurism that causes visions, and these visions change him. In the third episode, he proclaims himself to be “the new Eli.” When I was a teenager, I used to wake up every morning and likewise believe I was somehow “the new Jackie.” I would perceive that ideas and experiences of the previous day had transformed me completely. I am obviously not alone in this aspirational imagination. I see myself in the premise of Eli Stone. So must many others since that concept, that a momentary experience can transform a life, make a person new, has appeared in a variety of television shows, movies, songs, novels, you name it.

One small viral video likewise typifies this longing for transformation, the will.i.am music video, Yes We Can. This musical alteration of Barack Obama’s speech, itself a riff on Dolores Huerta‘s classic “Sí se puede,” promises change in the moment that we move to the ballot box and vote for Senator Obama. Parts fascism and Internet youth culture, the video moves us to conflate the solitary moment of a vote cast with instantaneous transformation into the change we seek.

In the language of Western Christianity, the longing for transformation has focused itself upon moments of conversion and apocalypse. These stories are not original or unique to the Christian tradition, but those Christian tales are among the most familiar. The myth of transformation has been encoded into the evangelical Christian term of “born again,” a play on John 3:7. Practitioners have often turned to the model of Saul riding to Tarsus, repeated three times in Acts (9, 22, and 26), though Paul in his own letters does not describe this particular transformation, nor does Paul allude to a name change. In Acts, Saul, a persecutor of the early Jesus movement, finds himself surrounded by heavenly light, and he falls to the ground. A voice then speaks to him, and in that moment he ceases to be Saul. Paul rides on to Damascus a changed man, striving as ardently for the Jesus movement as he had once worked against it.

Many are we who also find ourselves drawn to apocalypse, whose original Greek meaning is “revelation,” and not “the end of the world.” Yet the end of the world is bound up with that earth-shattering moment of understanding that the concept of apocalypse embodies. In critical theory, thinkers like Alain Badiou have become fascinated by “the event,” somehow another term for the apocalypse, the transformational revelatory experience, the event that is, in which things are changed and the world sees itself anew. Scholars of the Book of Revelation, like Adela Yarbro Collins and Jean-Pierre Ruiz have signaled that the liturgical practice of reading Revelation was meant to draw people into a ritual experience of communal revelation. The transformational experience of conversion/revelation/apocalypse tracks from Left Behind in Christian circles to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, and through to Eli Stone in broader culture.

Contemporary sociologists and psychologists who study conversion and scholars who study the mysticism that grows out of apocalyptic thought in Western traditions have long noted the simplified narrative of events contained within our popular retellings of mystical conversion. When we tell our life stories, even to ourselves, we create a narrative arc deeply informed by both the audience of our story and the people with whom we have surrounded ourselves. We tell our own stories, looking back, picking on that moment when we most see the seeds of whom we have become. We focus upon that moment because it makes a better story. Yet, that moment is not the only moment that really mattered. Tat-Siong Benny Liew’s recent querying of Asian American biblical hermeneutics lifts up the relationship between apocalypse and the practice of everyday life, and Liew reminds us that the transformational moment and the continuous exchanges of the everyday are not mutually exclusive. While apocalypse may give a vision of transformation, only the practices of the everyday make transformation possible.

Saul’s moment of transformation cannot have been just one moment. When we change communities and networks of friends and colleagues, we may have a moment we look to that signals a shift. Yet such a change is a long-term practice of socialization into a new community, even if the new community is so closely connected to the one in which we started. The mystical practices that lead one to revelation are likewise long-term. A practitioner can often find one moment that signals conversion and one moment that typifies the revelation that directed her/his life, but the moment is only part of a larger practice of life.

I find important lessons in Liew’s reflection, that transformation can be typified in a moment but only truly experienced in the long haul. Like many others of my generation and social location, I found myself drawn to Senator Obama precisely because of the hope of transformation. But those, like my own brother, who struggled against Senator Obama and in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton often did so because the politics of the transformational moment can feel empty if one does not grasp the politics of daily life needed to carry it forward. I felt Senator Obama had both, but watching the will.i.am video, it is easy for me to see how people like my brother can be wary of the promises of the moment. The empty feeling of that video is part of why I’m so fond of the mocking done in “john.he.is,” not for its mocking of John McCain, but rather of the original “Yes We Can” video.

The moment of the primary season’s end leaves me contemplative. My main hope, however, is for people like my brother and I to share both the transformational moment and the daily practice it demands as we move out of the Bush administration and, yes, I also hope, into another chapter in this nation’s history.

By Jacqueline Hidalgo | The post “Yes We Can” and The Politics of Transformation appeared first on The Public Sphere.

April 4th marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. While we should avail ourselves of this moment to reflect on King’s life and legacy, should we not also reflect upon how we remember that life and legacy? These acts of memory overwhelmingly fall into two categories (with a preponderance of cases under the first): 1) what Cornel West has felicitously called the “Santa Clausification” of King and 2) what I would call King’s Christification. The former involves the purification and distillation of King’s memory down to a single image of vague benevolence. The latter involves the nearly literal retelling of the Christ story with King as the protagonist. Both of these temptations of remembrance entail a gross perversion of what King’s message actually was and, perhaps more importantly, they present King in a way that hinders the use of his example as a basis for activism in our own time.

Reflecting on our collective memorialization of King, Michael Eric Dyson‘s recent book, April 4th, 1968, asks whether the assassination of King made him the figure of public memory. Dyson contends that we would hardly remember Martin at all, let alone remember him to the extent that we do, if not for his assassination. Considering how many public figures outlive their own legacies, it’s hard to argue with this conclusion. For example, imagine how differently we would think of Jesse Jackson today if he were killed during his 1988 presidential run. In light of Obama-mania, it’s amazing how little attention has been paid to what Jackson was able to accomplish twenty years ago. As we know, he didn’t take the nomination. But he was for a time the front-runner, and he did manage to gather 6.9 million votes and win 11 primaries and caucuses. Surely the fact that Jackson is still alive and has lived through a number of public humiliationsin addition to the public’s simply losing their fascination with himhas diminished the possibility of his accomplishments being remembered. So King’s early death (not to mention the circumstances surrounding his death) may simply have provided the basis for both his Santa Clausification as well as his Christification.

West’s comparison between the time-honored mythic functions of Santa Claus and the larger-than-life status that King has attained in the popular imaginary is a very apt metaphor here as well. Every year around the time of his holiday, school children around the country are made to produce countless reports, dioramas, and drawings of King. When the calendar turns to March and Black History Month is over, all of the posters and displays are at once put away only to be brought out again next year as soon as the Christmas decorations are put away. What do the children actually learn about King in the midst of this seasonal celebration? That it was he that made it possible for all people to be equal, so that no matter what color you are you can do and be anything you want! If you really believe in yourself and you work really really hard, maybe you can even grow up to be President someday! How did King accomplish this? By giving his “I Have a Dream Speech.” Before King gave the speech, many people were racist and treated people differently if they didn’t look like them, but when King gave his speech he showed all of those people that they were wrong. In that very moment, King ended racism and we could all live happily ever after. We celebrate his holiday every year so that we can give thanks and remember that King did this for us. Thankfully, King is not around to remind us that the whole thing wasn’t quite that simple.

Now, there certainly are worse stories that we could be telling our kids. And nothing is inherently wrong with story-telling and/or myth-creating practices themselves. Santa Claus, Thanksgiving, The Declaration of Independence, The Emancipation Proclamation, King: all of these things give us a shared sense of identity as citizens of the United States of America, a body of images and deeds to draw from in communicating with one another and understanding our place in the world. We can’t put away childish things if we don’t try them out in the first place. Also as adults, we can ill afford the assumption that we ever come to a point where the “childish” has definitively left us never to return. Even if these particular myths came to be naturalized and/or de-mythologized, as perhaps they should, they would likely be replaced by yet another set of equally vague and oversimplified myths. The value of a story is not to be found in its thoroughness as a description of complex socio-historical processes but rather in what Dr. Stephen T. Colbert has called its “truthiness.” Stories are worthwhile insofar as they help us to see the world around us as subject to perpetual revision on the basis of our participation. In other words, our concern with the King myth should not merely focus upon the perversions to the historical record implied therein, but rather with the much more significant fact that the familiar telling of the story may inhibit our ability to participate in social change.

So what is the social function of Santa Claus? (Spoiler alert: those of you who still don’t want to know certain facts concerning Santa should skip this paragraph). We tell children the Santa Claus myth in order to control behavior with a mechanism whose apparent authority is infinitely more just and benevolent than their actual parent(s). Acceptance of this mechanism is in many cases proportional to the degree to which children accurately perceive the flaws, humanity, and limitations of those actual parent(s). There must be someone else out there who’s got more sense than these fools, children who turn to Claus rightfully think.

Nevertheless, only in very rare cases does this hypothesis (sensible in its own right) survive the onset of puberty. In any event, sooner or later, Santa will be unveiled as little more than a trick that mommy and/or daddy played upon us. This is one of the first steps on the difficult road to adulthood. Above all, it entails the realization that all of the kindness, negligence, and even cruelty that one finds in the world exist not as a result of amorphous metaphysical forces but rather as the consequences of concrete choices made by other people who are just as confused and misguided as oneself. Therefore, the only intellectually defensible reason for perpetuating the Santa Claus myth is the fact that the revelation of Santa Claus’ non-existence is the first of a long line of dearly held beliefs that will subsequently be exposed as fraudulent. The appropriate lesson of Santa Claus is Charles Sanders Peirce’s fundamental pragmatic principle: given that any of our beliefs may very well be wrong, all other things being equal, we should believe whatever doctrine or viewpoint is the easiest to revise, amend, and/or reject.

Understanding the social utility of Santa Claus in this manner helps us to see the similar role that is played by the Santa Clausification of King. Are not children told the King myth precisely for the sake of instilling a similar mechanism of behavior control? While this mechanism likely does inhibit the performance of racist behavior to some degree, this is far from its only effect. According to the consolidation of his legacy as it is is disseminated through the media and the schools, King’s achievementswhich is really to say the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement as a wholeare depicted as having been accomplished: 1) single-handedly, 2) in a single messianic moment, and 3) by an agent who was not himself confused, misguided, and at times, wrong. In other words, in the same instant in which children are taught of King’s supernatural greatness, they are simultaneously taught that great deeds lie outside of the scope of everydayand especially their ownexperience. There could be few lessons more contrary to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, which, lest we forget, received many of its most profound and enduring contributions from ordinary people who endeavored to reinvent the norms and conventions surrounding the most banal and trivial of daily activities: riding on the bus, eating at a restaurant, going to school, walking down the street, etc.

The other somewhat troubling temptation of remembrance with respect to King is his Christification. In fact, those, including the redoubtable Prof. West, who commit King’s Christification are often rightfully dissatisfied with the simplicity and political correctness of the image of King’s Santa Clausification. This Christification usually starts something like this: King was a radical. Contrary to what most of us learn in school, his career and life didn’t simply come to a stop after the “I Have a Dream” speech. As the 1960s went on, he spoke out directly against American imperialism in general and the Vietnam War in particularin the process rendering himself persona non grata to Lyndon Johnson whom he had previously worked with on the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Furthermore, King condemned the decadence and affluence of American society not just for ignoring poverty and hunger in many parts of the United States and around the world but for actually profiting from that suffering. To the power elite of American society, these positions, articulated during the height of the Cold War, sounded like those of a domestic Marxist terrorist using his media platform to brainwash the American people into adopting the views of the Enemy. It was primarily for these actionsfor telling us the truth about ourselves whether we wanted to hear it or notthat King was rewarded with assassination.

Clearly, this is a much more accurate and much more enduringly interesting story concerning King than the one that is offered by Santa Clausification. Yet, the culmination of this particular way of telling the story is, as the name Christification suggests, a meditation upon King’s willingness to commit the ultimate sacrifice. In short: Martin died for our sins. Now, I can see the theological utility of this narrative in that it concretizes and exemplifies the Gospel as an event taking place not outside of, but indeed, within (recent) human history. Indeed, who doesn’t get chills down their spine when listening to King’s remarks of April 3rd, 1968? However, we should also see that this metaphysical victory comes at a naturalistic price. As a figure of revelation who freely gave his mortal life in order to achieve immortality, the prophetic King is different from Santa Claus only by virtue of a different sort of cosmology, one that is far less susceptible to revision. Thrust into the place of Christ, Martin is made into the omega, the last in his line. The Door has been closed. While it may perhaps someday open again, there is no telling when or even if that day will come. Moreover, such an occurrence cannot be provoked or predicted by human effort but only by submission to the divine will. “The Messiah will come one day after he [sic] has come,” writes Walter Benjamin. For the time being, our God has abandoned us mortalsall we have is our all too human selves. Indeed, who among us has one iota of the courage, dignity, and grace that Martin had? Who among us will willingly and deliberately submit to the ultimate sacrifice? The only problem with these questions is that they are not meant to be answered.

This narrative of deification clashes with King’s message of everyone’s universal personal responsibility to undo whatever injustice we see in the world: a thesis which patently implies that you don’t have to be God to do exactly that. Again, nothing is inherently wrong with this particular myth as a way of telling King’s story. The problem is that when we tell ourselves stories about King, whether of the Claus or Christ variety, too often we lack the ability to see what is outside these stories. A myth becomes pernicious only when we hold it too dear.

The true utility of these sorts of stories, as the Santa Claus reference suggests, is often to be found not in what the world looks like when we are enraptured believers therein, but rather in what we learn about ourselves from the process of coming to revise and/or withdraw our beliefs about these stories. When we allow ourselves not to hold King too dearand thereby to come to the realization that he was neither Claus nor Christthen we glimpse something of what Martin wanted to show us in the first place. The evil that exists in the world doesn’t simply go on “out there,” but rather dwells in the habitual actions we each performed unquestioningly in the course of our daily lives. We take the first step toward ameliorating that violence when we take account of, come to terms with, and hold ourselves responsible for our own complicity in the heinous yet largely invisible violence of the status quo. Some of the judgment that is today routinely levied upon President George W. Bush for initiating the Iraq war should also apply to middle class tax-payers (such as myself) who have enabled the war. That such an argument is an oversimplification does not make it any less true.

Change should be neither an object of nostalgia nor one of expectation; the only tense it knows is the present and its only time is now. Since Martin is not the Messiah who will return to save us no matter how many idols or temples we build in his name, we might as well consider the possibility of using that energy for saving ourselves. And that isn’t such a bad story after all.

By Marc Lombardo | The post Christifying Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I first learned about the Jericho Road in my church’s Sunday School. As a kid, I was more aware of the Jericho Road in Israel than the major interstate toll road that ran near my home. Since I couldn’t drive, I could not have cared less about I-76 through Pennsylvania. By contrast, the Jericho Road was the setting of “The Good Samaritan,” one of the most celebrated parables of Jesus. The parable of the Good Samaritan was told over and over to children at the end of the twentieth century first with finger puppets and skits. Twenty-first century children probably use mp3s, videos, and YouTube.

Regardless of the medium, the basics of the story remain the same. Someone asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with the story of some unfortunate guy who was mugged on the Road to Jericho. Two different kinds of church leaders stepped over his body in their rush to services. The hero, however, was a kind outsider, disliked by the church leaders and known as the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan was the only one who stopped to help the wounded man. Because of the Good Samaritan’s righteous actions, the Jericho Road was the Christian “batcave” or “the stand-alone phone booth,” the place from which heroes like Batman and Superman emerge to help the helpless. For us Christian kids, the Jericho Road was a reminder that heroic action involved being kind to strangers, being nice to our annoying siblings, showing love to the person who makes us feel uncomfortable, being ready to help and to love everyone. This existential road to Jericho ran through our real playgrounds and offices, the places we needed to remember to be good neighbors.

This year, while serving as a chaperone for college students on a nearly two-week trip to the Holy Land, our Palestinian tour guide pointed out that our bus was now on the Road to Jericho. I sat up in shock; the Jericho Road had now become real and covered in asphalt. I looked at the road, stunned at how much it looked like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Except, in the middle of the road was a huge concrete wall that seemed to stretch almost ten stories into the sky.

Photo by: Peter Mulligan. The Wall, Palestinian West Bank.

“This is the apartheid wall,” the guide said, with disgust and anger. “Or the segregation wall, or whatever you want to call it; the Israelis used the wall to keep the Palestinians away from their settlements¦This wall snakes throughout Israel, walling up places where Palestinians live. Sometimes the wall winds back around itself, capturing a Palestinian community in a bubble and cutting those residents off from everything, schools, stores, family. The Israelis say that this wall is to protect them from terrorists,” the guide explained.

The guide was careful in his use of the term Israelis. “It is not the Jewish people who are the problem,” repeated the guide many times, “but the Israelis”, The leaders of the nation of Israel, the Israelis, are descendants of Jewish people, the Jewish Diaspora who had lived through Europe and the Americas, and other lands,” he tried to explain diplomatically. “These Jewish people moved to Palestine after World War II and the Holocaust and became Israelis. These Jews had survived a horrible genocide orchestrated by Nazi Germany. But their ancestors had also experienced centuries of persecution and pogroms and mini-genocides. For centuries Jews had hoped to have a nation, situated on the land that geographically was known as Palestine, the location of the Kingdoms of the Hebrew people, the land where the Torah was established, where King David and the others lived. In 1948, the dream of an Israeli nation was fulfilled. The hope was that the creation of the nation of Israel would end the torture and persecution of the Jews. And in many ways, it did. But this fear appears to have fueled a new season of torture and persecution, this time, against the Palestinians.

The guide continued his explanation as the bus backed away and took a route along the wall. “While Israelis were celebrating in 1948, Palestinians were being forced from their homes, forced to live in refugee camps,” the guide said. There are Palestinians who still have the keys to the homes they were forced from in 1948. They are still hoping to return.

The trip consisted mostly of college students, all Christians, except for one American Jewish woman who was more aware of the political situation than the Christians and a few agnostics who were very aware of the political while being neutral about any religious connection to the land. A few of the students and chaperones had been on the trip before, but although they said the situation was bad, they never explained what they had seen on prior trips. Since their last visit, they might have signed occasional petitions and attended rallies in support of Palestinians, and they probably educated people in the best way they knew: with stories about the wall.

Two students I sat near were curious about the political situation, but they were, like most American Christians, much more interested in seeing the land where their favorite Bible stories took place. They wanted to see the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, and the Road to Jericho. They thought they might accidentally see evidence of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but only between visits to Holy Land sights. They had not expected to confront a wall down the middle of one of their most treasured Bible Stories. One student opined against having a mystical/spiritual pilgrimage interrupted by a political reality with political commentary. Not that the plight of the Palestinians was unimportant, another student expressed, it’s just not what she had come to see.

The students also experienced a surprising number of White House personnel visiting the same religious sites they were. The White House personnel said they were preparing for the upcoming presidential visit to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary. It was strange looking at the Sea of Galilee with young men and women in suits and American walking shoes, speaking in hushed whispers, surveying the land, wondering about security for when the president would visit Biblical sites he too probably learned about as a boy in Sunday School.

The White House personnel also reminded the students that their nation was in the last year of an unpopular presidential administration, which had launched a war in the same region where these students were trying to be tourists. The existential Road to Jericho was becoming crowded with lots of people, but not necessarily good Samaritans. These students had waited their entire young lives to travel this land as pilgrims had done for centuries. Some of these students would have said that Jesus lives in their hearts, but they also longed to see with their eyes some physical evidence of Jesus’ glory and majesty. They wanted to join the countless others who could call themselves eyewitnesses, to see with their own eyes these places where Jesus could once have walked, to see that these places were not just legend. But while looking for glory and majesty, they saw evidence of a complicated tale of suffering and grief.

We know something is happening, in relation to the Palestinians,” said one of the women who sat near me on the bus. She admitted that, at home, she avoided watching the news, except for excerpts from Entertainment Tonight. “We know it’s bad,” said the woman’s friend, “but we don’t know what’s going on and we can’t do anything about it.” When the topic about the political situation came up, they would shrug and appear irritated if I pressed them for more thoughts. So, when I saw the real road to Jericho blocked by a huge slab of concrete, designed to keep Palestinians and Israelis from contact with each other, it was as if the batcave had collapsed. A wall designed to separate neighbors blocked the Road to Jericho. If the idea of the good neighbor was invented on the Road to Jericho, it was on this same existential street that it became roadkill.

On tours around the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall, we had another guide, a Palestinian scholar. “We are the Gentiles,” he explained. “And later in Acts,” the Palestinian scholar said, “when it said that Paul went first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, Paul was talking about the Palestinians¦We are the keepers of the tradition,” he said, referring to Christianity. Later on the tour, we met another Palestinian tour guide who claimed members of his family as direct descendants of one of the first families to become Christians after the resurrection. “In the book of Acts, when it says, (Acts 11:18) ‘then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life, “they were talking about us, the Palestinians,” said one of the guides.

The students bonded quickly with the guides, gleefully asking them questions about the Holy Land sites, some questions they had held since their days as children in Sunday School. It was here that the students found the biggest surprise, the Holy Land site they had not expected to find. Among the first non-Jews to contemplate the teachings of Christ were the people who had lived in that region for centuries. And these are the Palestinians. The families of the students’ guides had been showing Christian pilgrims the Holy Land for centuries. And we met them. They were the physical evidence left behind to give witness to the events of 2000 years ago. They were the evidence of Jesus’ glory and majesty. And now, they were subject to systemic discrimination and persecution.

Occasionally, during the tour, our bus was stopped at a checkpoint. At most checkpoints, our Palestinian guide had to leave the bus and go through the checkpoint on foot while the Americans remained on the bus. At one checkpoint, while our USA passports were being reviewed, one of our Palestinian guides was stripped naked and searched. When the guide returned to the bus, the students discovered that the Israeli soldiers had taken our guide’s ornate belt buckle.

The students who were not as interested in the Palestinian political situation still found the lost belt buckle deeply disturbing. These students became sullen and stormy, and I suspect they did not have the language to explain why they felt this way. They kept repeating, “We knew things were bad, but¦” They still could not explain why the Palestinian plight was bad; they could barely explain why they were infuriated when someone who had been so kind to them lost his belt buckle. The facts on the ground seemed so small; it was just a belt buckle. Yet, after the belt buckle incident, students began to see more than just the geography.

For a few hours, we visited a refugee camp. The camp looked awful and was full of dilapidated buildings, some without walls. We visited an educational center where people from the camp talked about their ministry to children, who were being taught to tell their stories through photography. The refugee camp residents treated us well, people came out of their homes, waving and saying hello in Arabic and English. We were fed a good lunch, a simple chicken and rice dish, with salad and juice. After lunch, we walked around the camp. The people allowed us into their homes, which had little-to-no furniture and sometimes, no walls or roofs. I walked through the camp, occasionally meeting residents, who hospitably showed me their homes, ushering me past thresholds without doors, inviting me to peer out of windows without glass at a view of the roofs of the refugee camp and the children playing below on the dirt roads. In the distance was the wall, snaking through the landscape, winding and turning back on itself, and disappearing into the distance.

Two of the students I sat near on the bus seemed to be the happiest during this part of the trip. They gleefully purchased things made by the refugee camp children. They posed for pictures with the children in tattered clothes who spoke rapidly in Arabic and hugged the Americans without any sign of fear.

Near the entrance of the camp, we had seen pictures of young men. The posters were in Arabic. “Who are they, are they running for office,” we asked. “No,” said our Palestinian guides. “They are, activists¦freedom fighters.” The guide seemed to search for words in English to describe these young men. “They are heroes to the people in the camp.” The man paused. “You, in America, call them suicide bombers.

The tour continued. We were surprised at how safe we felt. We became witnesses to the kindness of a people who had been demonized by our national press. The students did not expect this feeling of safety, which did not come from the wall, but from the hospitality of the people. When the students were talking about their feeling of safety, the Palestinian guide pointed to the wall outside of the refugee camp and talked about how the Israeli soldiers atop the wall gunned down the children who came too close. The children had just been playing, the guide said, but the soldiers may have thought they were writing graffiti on the walls, he said.

The wall near the refugee camps was full of graffiti. The most prominent graffiti piece portrayed a figure that looked like the stature of liberty, but instead of a woman’s head, the graffiti had a ghoulish skull. Palestinians were angry with the United States of America, we were told by the refugee camp residents. They were angry because the US government helped fund the Israelis, to pay for weapons and to pay for the wall.

The students snapped pictures of the wall with their cameras and their cellphones, smiling and posing in front of the graffiti. The students said they would post these pictures on Facebook and MySpace and other communication networking software. These pictures would prove that they had come to Israel and Palestine, although they were never sure which geographical title to use for the captions of their snapshots. The pictures were their physical proof that they had gone to the Holy Land; yes pictures of smiling happy Americans beside a terrorizing Statue of Liberty.

* Photo by: Peter Mulligan. The Wall, Palestinian West Bank.

By Valerie Bailey | The post Missing the Good Samaritan on the Present-Day Road to Jericho appeared first on The Public Sphere.

As the 2008 Democratic primary season ends with Barack Obama as the presumptive nominee, I want to reflect back on some of the political themes, realities, and pundit theories that have shaped and invigorated the United States of America over the last year. Some could say citizens of this nation faced three major questions leading to the Democratic nomination. Americans faced the heart of blackness in Senator Obama, a strong and politically shrewd woman in Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the love and hate relationship with her husband, the former United States President Bill Clinton.  Between these two talented senators, Americans also had to face the question of religion in the antics of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Thus, Americans have had to ask themselves serious questions about their attachments to race, religion, and what the Oval Office should stand for in a time of economic and environmental crisis as well as an unpopular war.

Commentators of all stripes have heralded this Democratic Primary as the fulfillment of democracy’s promise. The primary has claimed a new generation of youth, especially white students from the halls of Columbia to the spacious green grounds of the Claremont Colleges, who have grown weary of their hollow privilege, power, and racial divisions. Perhaps more impressive is the sudden maturity and awareness black America is displaying in weighing in on issues important to their community and to the country. The academically inclined would ponder the possibility that the US is finally ready, after 232 years, to be the light of democracy it has claimed it would be since 1776. As much as I would love to join the “Yes We Can” bandwagon, I suggest that commentators, students, and black Americans take a step back and truly assess the political realities flowing from Senators, US Representatives, and even some Republicans regarding Barack Obama. Admittedly, I have seen people of all races, ages, and class groups speak earnestly about what Senator Obama as president could possibly represent. People have voiced such excitement about the senator even when he asks Americans to do the one thing that the sixties and the rise of Republicans has reminded all citizens that America has a hard time doing: change.

The word change reminds me of an important twentieth-century black novelist and essayist James Baldwin in The Evidence of Things Unseen (1985). Laws can be changed and treaties can be signed, but can US citizens really put in the necessary work required to really change? Baldwin concluded that, except for the few, the evidence of change is not visible. Senator Obama’s bid to be the president of the United States has caught Americans in a perfect storm of post-racial aspirations and public sphere inertia. Americans seemed to be unable to speak and act truthfully within one American public without the residue that still exists in the old American divisive republicthe ever-present racial divide between black and white. It appears that the roots of a 262 year old racialized society still run too deep. We must remember that black Americans fought and celebrated along with white citizens in the Revolutionary War and Civil War and, yet, freedom did not ring true for all. Another example is the incredible coalition of black, Jewish, and white Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. When the laws were changed, American citizens slipped back into the comforts of their homes, suburbs, jobs, schools, and clubs and the U.S.A. became two nations again splintered not only by race, but racial class groups as well.

The evidence of the racial past reviving itself is revealed in how the democratic primary competition has ended. More and more, what seemed to have been a cohesive union of black people, white intellectuals, the working poor, college students, and people fed up with the Bush administration slowly revealed the U.S.A.’s inescapable racial divide. Consider for a moment the differences between caucus voting patterns and poll booth voting patterns. In caucuses people voted openly, and Senator Obama generally came out ahead. Perhaps in a caucus room, Senator Obama pulls at the souls of Americans who are publicly forced to reckon with history denied and commonly unspoken in the public arena of presidential politics. In a caucus, people must make a public profession and hope that GOD does not confront them with questions about blackness when they reach the pearly gates of heaven. Imagine going to hell because of one’s treatment of or for looking silently away from the treatment of black people. I am talking about the treatment of people who brought so much comfort as slaves and served as scapegoats in bad times after integration. I am writing of the same people who were crucified by Affirmative Action except for the careers it built for men such as Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele. Perhaps, one would answer GOD by saying they were allowed to sing, dance, and contribute spirituals, blues, rock, soul, jazz, pop music, and hip hop?

What the Democratic primary revealed instead was that there is still a major divide between private and public. Unlike the caucuses, in the primaries, people retreat to the privacy of the voting booth. In that voting booth Americans start to waiver, and differences, such as race, religion, and class, still matter in the U.S.A. The race-baiting tactics of the Clinton campaign revealed a voting booth contrast. President Clinton’s rhetoric in the South Carolina Primary parted the thin cohesive sheen of the Democratic Party when he reminded the country that Obama would win South Carolina mainly because he was black and not on his impressive credentials. Surely, Senator Obama had an upper hand in the state but he still had to win black and white voters who were just getting to know him. Moreover, the problem with the former President’s statement was that he was reminding white voters around the country to be aware of those black people. It has never failed in the U.S.A. that when masses of black people start getting energized about something, other people assume it means something is being taking away from white America. Like clockwork after South Carolina, it seems most white people started pursuing the more familiar and more comfortable racial path regardless of the cost to the country, American youth, and the world. The U.S.A. is starting to resemble the world that Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) and John Hope Franklin’s The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-First Century (1993) warned against in the last decade.

Americans have been given a great opportunity in the nomination of Senator Obama. He has managed something unique, promising, and infrequently remarked upon. He broke the coalition of elder black politicians and pariahs who have fed the flames of race baiting and hatred over the last century. Let me be clear on this point: I understand that many black elders lived through some of the worst aspects of a racist system, like being called a nigger and being treated as second-class citizens with second-class toys and parks because a segment of their own country felt and voiced that they were somehow less than human. When US Representative John Lewis, a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, looked into his heart and saw that the people he represented supported Senator Obama with excitement and record numbers of votes, Rep. Lewis switched his support from Senator Clinton. From city to city and state to state, politicians started listening to their constituents. The promises made by black politicians who were looking for gains under the Clinton regime gave way. Black Americans and Senator Obama broke the black politics of the past and showed that they would stand up to the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons.

Black America gave the U.S.A. an opportunity to move beyond race. However, Senator Clinton’s campaign, after a succession of losses in the South, decided that their best chance was to play the race card. The Clintons, who were the pearls of black Americans’ hearts, asked the pivotal question. Can Americans seriously be considering a black man over the storied house of Clinton? Suddenly, pundits, youth, black and white Americans started to rehash the stories of yesterday. Racial divisions and classism returned. And, of course, one can purchase the new book by Shelby Steele, titled A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (2008), fresh off the press as he continues to profit on the racial divide.

Regardless of what the November elections will teach Americans about themselves, Senator Obama’s triumph as the presumptive nominee is incredible. But, my heart tells me that that the evidence of change is still hidden behind the voting booth. Will the United States finally live up to its founding creed of liberty for all? White Americans hold the answer, but they will only reveal it behind the closed door of the voting booth. In the U.S.A. and around the world, people seem to feel as if something amazing is happening in America. I stand firm on James Baldwin’s sentiment of the evidence of things unseen. There will be no post-racial America and people will continue to say the right thing in public and do the race thing in private. I just hope that white America does something good for itself and not for black Americans. Exorcising the ghosts of the past might improve the US economy, education, and foreign relations. We, the people of the Unites States of America, run our own government and if Senator Obama cannot deliver the changes the country desperately needs after the Bush Administration then we can always change again. Yes we can!

By Edward Robinson, Jr. | The post Evidence of Things Hidden Behind the Voting Booth appeared first on The Public Sphere.