Tuck’s Clucks: Moscow Edition

Today we are going to talk about Tucker Carlson.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, you know that Tucker Carlson is no longer with Fox News. Fox News finally decided that it was more trouble than it was worth to keep him around, so they cut him back in 2023.

But Tucker Carlson is a huge brand with a huge following. Though his following is probably smaller nowadays, there are still lots of people running around out there who want to hear what Tucker Carlson has to say, so you had to figure that he would not be going away anytime soon.

So what has Tucker Carlson been up to lately? He’s been gallivanting all around Russia (Moscow, more precisely). He recently did a supposed interview with Vladimir Putin that basically amounted to two hours (and change) of him fawning all over Putin and being nothing more than mud clinging to Putin’s galoshes. At one point Putin stated, contrary to all history concerning World War II, that Poland was responsible for starting it by not giving up some territory that Hitler had requested, and thereby forcing him to take it by force. Carlson just went with it.

Putin was unimpressed. The whole thing was a good deal for Putin because it allowed him the opportunity to get up on state TV and say something to the effect of “This is the best the West can do? I was expecting and hoping for more of a challenge, and I am certain that I would have been up to it.” But we all know the truth: Putin would never in a million years have done an interview with anyone who was not a fawning fanboy like Tucker Carlson. The real journalists who would have asked the hardball questions that Putin was supposedly craving would never have gotten within a million miles of Putin.

But allowing Putin the opportunity to wipe his ass with him for two hours was not the only thing Tucker Carlson did in Russia. He also went around shooting videos for his social media feed that showed him experiencing various and sundry aspects of everyday Russian life. In one such video he paid a visit to an Aldi grocery store and waxed rhapsodically about the revolutionary (to him) technology that allows one to insert a coin and obtain a shopping cart, then get your coin back when you return the cart. “…So it’s free, but there’s an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment. OK!”, exclaimed Carlson as he got his cart.

Heads up, people: This technology has been around for decades – not just in Russia, but also all over Europe and even here in the US.

Carlson then went on to express amazement at the prices in comparison to US grocery prices and use that as a springboard to lambast inflation here in the US, a routine talking point among conservatives the world over during Biden’s presidency. In Carlson’s words: “If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth, and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want. …At that point, maybe it matters less what you say, whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives in their country. …And that’s what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store – the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live. It will radicalise you against our leaders. That’s how I feel anyway – radicalised. We’re not making any of this up, by the way at all.”

Heads up, people: He is making it up. All of it. Carlson’s musings fail to take into account that grocery prices are a much higher percentage of people’s income in Russia than here in the US, and also that inflation in Russia is worse than it is here in the US.

But the piece de resistance (Why use big fancy French words? Because I can) is this 3 minute clip in which Tucker Carlson takes us on a tour of a Moscow subway station. He gushes effusively about the glories of this subway station, which was built during the reign of Stalin: “So we went into it to take a look, and what we found shocked us. …There’s no graffiti, there’s no filth, no foul smells. There are no bums or drug addicts or rapists or people waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. No, it’s perfectly clean and orderly.” He then goes on to ask a question: “How do you explain that? We’re not even going to guess. That’s not our job. We’re only going to ask the question. And if your response is to shout at us slogans dumber than the slogans that we used to call “Soviet” and mock, that’s not really an answer. How does Russia, a country we’re told is a gas station with nuclear weapons, have a subway station that normal people use to get to work and home every single day, that’s nicer than anything in our country? We’re not gonna speculate. We’re just gonna raise the question and wait for someone in charge to give us an answer. What is the answer?”

This is a common rhetorical trick. The question is the answer, people. By asking the question in the way that he does, Tucker Carlson is giving you his answer. And his answer is this: We could have this subway station too. We could have this whole way of living too, where subway stations are nice and clean and people pass through them every day without having to deal with graffiti, filth, foul smells, bums, drug addicts or rapists waiting to push you onto the train tracks and kill you. We could have all of this if we had a leader like Putin, someone who deports immigrants and puts homeless people in camps and persecutes religious and racial minorities and LGBT people and murders his political opponents (this whole thing dropped right at the same time that Russian dissident Alexi Navalny died in prison) and imprisons anyone who dares to speak out in any way against any of this. It would be worth it to live under a regime that is this fucking cruel to marginalized people, to dissidents, and to people who commit minor crimes, if we could have this subway station or something like it. To have a pure society, stripped of difference, dissidence, distinction, or anything like it.

This is an American, saying to fellow Americans: Russian authoritarianism is much better than anything we have here at home. We envy Russian authoritarianism. You would have never imagined, back in the height of the Cold War, the Reagan era, or even as recently as 2012 when Romney was running for president, that we would ever in a million years come to this. Yet here we are. Eight years of Donald Trump as a major player in our politics, and the consequent envy of authoritarian regimes that our conservative wing has caught during that time, has brought us to the place where Tucker Carlson can say these things to his followers and nobody even bats an eyelash.

Cleanliness, in this context, is code for purity. And with purity comes the demand for purification, achieved by the cruelty that a leader in the mold of Putin would bring. Cruelty directed abundantly and relentlessly against anyone who in any way fails to conform to the norms prescribed by the dominant culture: Black people. LGBT people. Poor people. Immigrants. Indigenous people. The disabled. In short, anyone who is not a wealthy cis-hetero white Christian male or fully submitted to the order of things that places wealthy cis-hetero white Christian males on top of everything.

Christian nationalism wants a pure, white, Christian America, and they will stop at nothing to get it. In the past, Christians and conservatives talked a very good game about working within our democratic system to get out the vote and persuade people to elect their people to leadership. But after eight years of Donald Trump, the gloves are off and we see the whole thing for what it really is: a bald-faced power grab to destroy our democracy and replace it with their vision of a pure, white, Christian America and the unmitigated evil that must and will be perpetrated against all who do not fit that vision. We have seen this with evangelical heavyweights like Rod Dreher and Eric Metaxas fawning all over Victor Orban in recent years. Though Tucker Carlson is not an evangelical (to my knowledge, at least), this is perfectly of a piece with that.

So give thanks for the darkest, filthiest, smelliest, skankiest, sketchiest, most graffiti-covered, rat-infested subway station in your city. Because it is a sign that we live in a society where difference, dissidence, and the existence of marginalized identities is tolerated, to a certain extent at least. It is a sign that we live in a gloriously chaotic and impure society where so many wildly different types of people and points of view are included and represented (to a certain extent, at least) in our social body. It is a sign that we live in a free and democratic society – a society that knows that such things as the Moscow subway station can be had and emphatically rejects the price that must be paid for them. For the time being, at least.

Little Fires Everywhere, Preparing Us All To Accept Fascism Everywhere

Everyone’s Entitled to Joe’s Opinion is not a political blog, and I have no intention of making it such. But there are occasions when the necessity to talk about politics is inescapable. These occasions are coming with increasing frequency in our present historical/cultural moment.

We are currently in the heart of the spring break travel season, so today I thought we would take a little road trip. Our first destination: Murfreesboro, TN, which has been in the news lately. Some of you may have seen or heard about this story.

For those of you who, like me, are from Atlanta: You would get on I-75 and go north for a couple of hours, maybe stop at Buc-ee’s in Calhoun and get some beef jerky for the ride, to Chattanooga. There you would get on I-24 and go west (northwest, more precisely) for another hour and some change, and that would put you in Murfreesboro.

Those of you who are of a certain age may recall hearing or learning about the anti-sodomy laws that were prevalent in many places here in the US. You may imagine these as a quaint relic of a bygone era, a dark, forlorn chapter in our nation’s history that we have, thankfully, long since moved past.

Murfreesboro just passed an anti-sodomy law. In 2023.

It was ostensibly an ordinance against public indecency. The ordinance did not explicitly reference homosexuality, but instead it pointed to a section of that city’s code that defines homosexuality as indecent behavior.

Murfreesboro is no stranger to such stories and the attending controversy. Back in 2010, a local Muslim community wanted to build a mosque. A group of local landowners sued the city to stop them. The stated reasons for this were missed deadlines, notices not properly given, and other such bureaucratic red tape, but in time the real reasons came out: In the eyes of the plaintiffs, Islam is not a religion, and is thus not deserving of the First Amendment protections which apply to religious groups.

This is of a piece with the Islamophobia that was rampant here in the US post-9/11, and also with the white backlash against our nation’s first black president. One of the most frequently recurring conspiracy theories concerning Obama in right-wing spaces is that he is a secret Muslim. A Tea Party candidate, Lou Ann Zelenik, made political hay by weighing in on the Murfreesboro mosque controversy, arguing that “Islam does not claim to be a religion, but a social and political system that intends to dominate every facet of our lives and seeks to dominate it’s host culture by any means including force and violence.”

The fundamental questions here are these: Who gets to be deemed religious? And consequently, who gets to be protected under our nation’s constitution? Who is seen as deserving of rights and protection under the law, and who is not? What should a religion be? If it does not fit the prescribed mold, should it get the rights and protections that our nation’s laws afford to religious groups?

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed in Murfreesboro. The mosque was eventually built, and the anti-sodomy law repealed.

But do not think for a moment that our work here is done, people. Murfreesboro is not some podunk town of 300 people and only one stoplight located out in the middle of nowhere, five hours away from the nearest city of any size. Murfreesboro is a city of over 100,000 people, home to a large state university with a Division 1 football program. It has a sizeable Muslim community and a sizeable LGBT community who were negatively impacted by the stories mentioned above. It is situated on the outskirts of Nashville, within easy driving distance of the Nashville suburbs and less than an hour’s drive from downtown Nashville. It is on a major interstate and is easily accessible to Chattanooga, Atlanta, and other major cities in the southeast US.

And still these things are happening here. The Overton window is shifting, as people much much smarter than yours truly who study this shit for a living would say. Meaning: What was considered unthinkable a decade or two ago is now acceptable, and what is now considered unthinkable will be less so in another decade or two. They tried to shut down the mosque in Murfreesboro and failed. This time. They tried to criminalize LGBT identity in Murfreesboro and failed. This time. But they will try again sometime, if not in Murfreesboro then surely somewhere else. They tried and failed this time, so that some other time they can succeed. And the more they put these stories out there into the world, the more we will get used to this shit and the less we will be able or willing to resist it.

It’s little fires everywhere, preparing the ground – and our hearts – to accept fascism everywhere. Our nation’s far right wants a pure, white, Christian America, and they will stop at nothing to get it. And if democracy gets in the way, then fuck democracy. This is straight out of the playbook of Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban. It is straight out of the playbook of the Nazis.

Speaking of Nazis, this leads us to our next destination. We will hop back on I-24 and then get on I-840, Nashville’s new outer loop that they just finished a few years back, and go about 20 miles west. We will get on I-65 and go north a couple exits, and that will put us in Franklin, TN.

Franklin just had a mayoral race. They fielded a candidate named Gabrielle Hanson. Hanson is a real estate developer who figured prominently in local politics for many years. Hanson is a conspiracy theorist who became a darling of the far right by spreading misinformation around last year’s Covenant School shooting in Nashville and denouncing a Juneteenth event at the Nashville airport last year.

Hanson is an interesting character with a checkered past, which all came out during the course of her mayoral run. Back in the 1990s, Hanson was arrested for promoting prostitution in Texas. In 2008, her husband showed up at a Pride event in Chicago wearing nothing but an American flag Speedo and sandals to promote his candidacy in a congressional race. You can’t make this shit up, people.

At a candidates’ forum during the race, Hanson showed up to the support of Nazi sympathizers. Two members of an organization called the “Tennessee Active Club” escorted Hanson into the venue, while others stood outside. One individual in the group identified himself as an “actual, literal Nazi”. Another showed up at a drag show in Cookeville, TN, and gave a Nazi salute. At no point did Hanson disavow this white supremacist support.

Hanson lost. She got just 3,300 votes, or 20 percent of the votes cast. On the one hand, what an ass-kicking. The Neo-Nazi candidate got stomped like a narc at a drug rally. As well she should have.

And yet, consider that. Twenty percent. Three thousand people. Not three percent. Not an ever-so-small handful of miscreants running around out there. Three thousand people. Twenty percent.

Franklin is not some podunk town way out in the middle of nowhere. It is a suburb of Nashville, and an exceedingly bougey one at that. The streets of Franklin are lined with Whole Foods stores and high-end boutiques and restaurants and subdivisions filled with McMansions. Many of Nashville’s wealthiest and most prominent country musicians have homes in Franklin.

And three thousand – 20 percent – of these people looked at the Nazi-backed candidate on their city’s mayoral ballot and said “I’m with her”.

Let that sink in, people.

As I said before, it’s little fires everywhere, preparing the ground – and our hearts – to accept fascism everywhere. Just like Jesse Jackson ran for president and lost back in the 1980’s so that Obama could run and win in 2008, Hanson ran and got stomped like a narc at a drug rally so that someone else, perhaps someone even more unhinged than her, could run – if not in Franklin then somewhere else – and get a larger percent of the vote, and perhaps win outright.

After Hanson appeared at the candidates’ forum to the support of the Tennessee Active Club, she later shared that group’s posts to her social media feed. These posts claimed that her opponent was connected to Antifa, and stated that “there is no political solution”.

If there is no political solution, then what kind of solutions should we be looking for? Violent solutions? Genocidal solutions? Anti-democratic solutions?

Christian nationalism sees America as a country club. Who gets to join the club? If you’re the right kind of white person, then you’re in. If you’re black, you can work in the kitchen. If you’re black and you align yourself with the Tim Scotts and Candace Owenses of the world, maybe you can have a guest pass. If you’re Asian, you’re the model minority so you’re in. But your membership is completely conditional and can be revoked without notice at any time, for any reason. This does not apply if you are from parts of Asia that we would call “shithole countries”. If you’re Jewish, you’re in but again, your membership is conditional and can be revoked without notice at any time, for any reason. If you’re Latino or Latina, forget it. We’re calling ICE and deporting your drugged-up, thugged-up ass back to Mexico, and we don’t fucking care if you’re not from Mexico.

American conservatism and American evangelicalism want a pure, white, Christian nation, and will stop at nothing to get it. And if democracy gets in the way, then fuck democracy. That is what is at stake in our present historical/cultural moment.

Now Playing at Life in Mordor: Dracula and Today’s Christian Nationalism

Because I am all about shameless self-promotion, here is a post that I wrote at Life in Mordor, the blog of Mike F where I was a regular guest contributor. That blog has long since gone dormant, but I still like to throw them a bone every so often just to let them know that I’m still out there.

In this post I look at how much of the Christian nationalism of the far right that drives our present historical/cultural moment is connected to the Gothic horror literature that emerged from 1890’s Great Britain, and especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I look at the conspiracies that drive that story, and how they connect to the conspiracy theories that drive today’s far right, and how the social/cultural anxieties of 1890’s Great Britain that inform the character and story of Dracula also inform the culture wars waged by today’s American conservatives.

Read: Dracula Is A Mirror to Today’s Christian Nationalism

“Purity” Is A Dirty Word

Today we are going to talk about purity.

American evangelicalism is rife with sermons about sexual purity. I remember one such sermon from way back when I was still a young hot-blooded evangelical, entitled “Purity Is Not A Dirty Word”.

In reality, “purity” is a dirty word.

But we are not going to talk about sexual purity today. When you say the word “purity”, evangelical purity culture is the first thing that comes to mind for many people. Purity culture originated in fundamentalist Christian circles and then blew up in mainstream evangelicalism during the 90s and 00s. Purity culture takes the demand to not have sex before marriage (which has been a key discipline in Christian spirituality for a very long time) and goes way beyond that with its own additional demands, which include such things as: Do not kiss, hold hands, or engage in any other physical contact/intimacy before marriage. Do not date anyone unless you seriously see them as a potential future spouse. There is at least some space for dating in the world of purity culture but the ideal method of romantic connection between the two sexes is a courtship process with heavy parental involvement/supervision.

Purity culture is its own thing. We have discussed it before around here, and we will do so again when I feel the time is right. Better yet, read Virgin Nation by Sara Moslener. This book says everything I could ever have wanted to say about purity culture, and it even discusses things that I have never mentioned around here, such as the (very real) connections between purity culture and a white supremacist vision for America.

But enough about sexual purity. Instead, we are going to zoom out and address the notion of purity itself as seen through a much wider lens.

Conservative Christians talk a lot about purity. In this world, to be pure is to be morally upright, and to be impure is to be the opposite of morally upright – corrupt, governed by sin, or whatever you choose to call it – and therefore unacceptable in the sight of God. This imagery is all over the place in the Bible, and so it makes sense that they would talk like this.

“Purity” is a metaphor. When we talk about sin as impurity, we are not saying that there is some actual, literal thing that is actually, literally contaminating us and making us impure. It is a metaphorical sense of pollution or contamination.

And it is a very dangerous metaphor. The danger is built into the metaphor.

You see, when something is impure, it must be purified. Meaning: Whatever stain/blemish/etc. is contaminating the thing – must be removed.

Why is this dangerous? Because the language of purity is all over the place in contexts where the demand for purification involves the worst kind of horrors and atrocities carried out against other human beings – very often in the name of religion, and specifically in the name of Christianity. These include such things as: Ethnic cleansing in the name of a “pure” people. Xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies in the name of a “pure” nation with firm borders that keep the national body pure and contaminants out. Efforts toward criminalizing LGBT identity because it is an “impure” expression of gender. Nationalisms around the world that target and oppress certain people and groups in their midst because they render “the people” impure.

The metaphor of purity takes us to those awful places whether we want it to or not. All through history, Christians have used the language of purity to marginalize and exclude. From the Crusades, all the way down to the Nashville Statement of 2017. And it continues to this very day. Millions of Christians, steeped in the language of purity, have long been primed for the logics of populism and nationalism that are driving the present historical/cultural moment.

But the language of purity isn’t just a large-scale thing that affects societies at the macro level. It affects real people, individual people whom Christians find impure. It lives in the bodies of sexually active teens who are marginalized by their faith communities, in the LGBT community, in black and brown people who do not have a place in majority-white Christian spaces – and many more.

This all comes down to a desire to purify. And purification can only be achieved those individuals and/or groups who “pollute” the Christian body, the national body, the white race, etc. Whether this removal is literal and final (as in Hitler’s euphemistically called “final solution”) or “merely” metaphorical – the underlying logic is the same. It is built into the language of purity and its inherent demand for purification. The realization of what is required by this demand for purification is built in as well.

It’s the “principle of the path”, which my church’s pastor routinely mentions. In short, every path has a destination. If you don’t like the destination, then find a different path. The language and metaphor of purity is a path, and the demand for purification with all its horrific consequences is the destination.

If this is not what you really believe or want, then find another metaphor. If you do, your theology will change. But if you cannot articulate your theology without the language of purity – if your theology demands the language of purity – then the demand for purification, and all of the horrific consequences that follow, is built in.

And that’s why “purity” is a dirty word.

Plagiarism: The Newest Weapon in the Conservative Culture Wars

Today I direct your attention to a story that dropped over the course of the New Year.

Claudine Gay is Harvard’s first black president.

Well, she was.

Gay resigned under pressure on January 2 amid allegations of plagiarism. These allegations were brought, not by her academic peers, but by her political foes. Conservative troll Christopher Rufo spearheaded the campaign against Gay. He cheered her departure on social media by posting “SCALPED”, referencing a violent practice adopted by white colonizers in their campaign of extermination against Native Americans on the American frontier. Other prominent conservatives in the campaign against Gay included representative and Harvard alumna Elise Stepnik, and billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor Bill Ackman.

The plagiarism allegations are dubious. It is common practice in highly specialized academic fields for scholars to reuse portions of language in order to describe similar concepts, and that is what Gay was doing. But the larger question here is this: Would Gay have faced such intense scrutiny if she were white? Would Gay’s detractors have come out with anything remotely resembling the same level of urgency if she were a white man? The answer is an emphatic no. This is clear from Rufo’s follow-up posts on social media after Gay’s ouster: ”Tomorrow we get back to the fight”, he said in one post, then going on to reference a “playbook” against institutions deemed too liberal for his sensibilities. In another post he said, “We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America”. In another, he announced a new “plagiarism hunting fund” and swore to “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as the highest principle in academic life.”

On the surface, this is a story about plagiarism and academic misconduct. But we live in a racialized society and so race is never far from the surface. The reality is that this story is about white male supremacy weaponizing plagiarism and academic misconduct in order to target high-ranking black leaders in academia.

This is all part of the playbook that white male supremacy has long employed, in one form or another, in order to attain and retain power. At the start of another contentious election year, it is clear that not only are the forces of white male supremacy still committed to this playbook, but they have refined it to new levels of effectiveness. The white grievance stoked by Donald Trump and his supporters is still very much a thing, and it has come roaring back as the next presidential election looms ever closer.

He Doesn’t Get Us: It’s Just More Of The Same From Conservative Christianity

Today we are going to look back on the biggest PR/marketing event of 2023. Earlier this year, an ad campaign dropped on national TV. These ads, which you may recall seeing, depict Jesus in a manner consistent with the sensibilities of our present historical/cultural moment by showing him as a marginalized black/brown individual who endured much of what marginalized people and communities endure in our world today.

The explosive rise of the religiously unaffiliated, or “Nones” as they are sometimes called, has been one of the biggest social/cultural stories over the past decade. American evangelicalism’s wholehearted embrace of Donald Trump, a political leader whose life, message, and values are the exact opposite of anything even remotely connected to Jesus Christ, has dumped several truckloads of nitroglycerine on that fire. These ads, which depict Jesus in an inclusive light that fits with the social/cultural sensibilities of our present day and feature the tagline “He Gets Us”, are an attempt to counter that challenge.

But if you scratch below the surface, you will find that this is really just another in a long line of attempts by conservative Christianity, and specifically conservative evangelicalism, to rebrand its message in a way that will gain traction with younger people and combat what they perceive as the growing secularization of our society. And the Jesus presented here is probably not as inclusive or sympathetic toward the plight of the marginalized as we would hope to believe.

The “He Gets Us” campaign was sponsored by a nonprofit. This organization is required to file certain things with the IRS in order to retain its tax-exempt status, and these filings become public record. By looking at these filings, we can discern that this organization received funding from sponsors who also sponsored anti-LGBT hate groups, anti-evolution projects, and an organization that broadcasts Christian content into Islamic countries with the goal of converting them to Christianity. Chrissy Stroop lays all of this out in an article at Religion Dispatches entitled “Behind The Inclusive-Sounding Ads of This $100 Million PR-Blitz-For-Jesus It’s The Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy“.

The “He Gets Us” campaign is a slick marketing production which attempts to present a version of Jesus that is relatable to all who share the social and racial justice sensibilities of our present historical/cultural moment. But the reality is that, in all likelihood, the Jesus presented in these ads does not get us.

Queer Democracy: Christian Nationalism as Bodily Dysphoria

Today I direct your attention to Queer Democracy: Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic by Daniel Miller. This book draws upon the image of society as a body in order to make sense of what is happening in our present historical/cultural moment.

Those of you who have studied American history are no doubt familiar with the concept of the “body politic”, as expressed by Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and other political thinkers of that era. But the notion of “body politic” goes back much further than that, even if Locke and Jefferson were the first to utilize that particular turn of phrase. In Western thought it traces back to the Stoics of ancient Greece, and similar notions exist in cultures all around the world. When Paul, who wrote over half of what Christians call the New Testament, images the Church as the “Body of Christ”, he is not pulling something out of thin air but instead drawing upon something that was very much in the air back in his day and with which his readers would have been intimately familiar.

So why is this image of society-as-body so prevalent? Because it is useful. Every body has a shape. All the parts of the body fit together to form a certain shape, and each part has a certain function. All the parts performing their proper functions and working together with each other result in a healthy and functioning body. What is true at the individual level is also true at the social level: The social body has a shape, and each member of society, by performing his/her proper function in conjunction with all others, ensures a healthy, functioning, and properly shaped social body.

But here’s the thing: Bodies are not egalitarian things. They are hierarchical, with certain parts like the brain and the central nervous system having executive functions and the other parts existing to carry out those executive functions. Some parts may be critically important to a healthy and functioning body and others less so, but all are subordinate to the executive functioning of the brain and central nervous system.

As it is in individual bodies, so it is in the social body: Certain people and classes of people have executive functioning within the social body and the privilege, power, and status that goes with it, and all the other parts are subordinate. This is how the Stoics understood the social body, and this is how Paul understood the Body of Christ.

Now a case can be made that Paul’s expression of the Body of Christ is a countercultural and egalitarian thing, that Christ is the head and all other members are subordinate to Christ and equal to each other and thus the hierarchies of the outside world have no place in the Body of Christ. Support for this reading of Paul can be drawn from Galatians where Paul states that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

But this is only one way to interpret Paul. A compelling case can also be made that Paul does not overturn the hierarchies of the world but instead affirms them and imports them into the alternative community that is the Church, with Christ as the head over all. Support for this reading of Paul can be drawn from his assertions of his authority as an apostle, his expressions of the proper place and function for women in Christian community and from his admonitions to submit to the authorities (Romans 13) and be content with one’s place in society (1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and other such places). This is the view that the Church has held for much of its history, at least all the way up to the Protestant Reformation. It survives to this day in contemporary evangelicalism’s complementarian formulations of gender roles. After the Protestant Reformation this hierarchical view of the social body was expanded outward into the secular world and we see it in Locke’s and Jefferson’s formulations of the “body politic”.

So what does this hierarchical understanding of the social body do? It justifies dysphoric response to parts of the social body that are believed to be out of shape and operating contrary to their proper function. Dysphoria is a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction, the exact opposite of euphoria. When any part of the human body is out of place and not functioning properly, this typically creates a profound feeling of distress that can only be resolved by putting the offending part back into its proper place. What is true of individual bodies is also true of the social body: If any part of that body is out of place and not functioning properly, this creates the feeling that any response that puts the offending part back in its proper place is justified. We see this in contemporary movements such as MAGA Nation and the Stop The Steal rallies that followed the 2020 presidential election. The participants in such movements can give reasons if pressed, but these are often contradictory and poorly articulated and ultimately just a proxy for the real reason: a visceral, gut-level feeling that something is very wrong with the shape of the social body and it needs to be put back into its proper shape by any means necessary. This pattern has recurred throughout American history, through the Reagan-era 80’s and evangelical responses to the civil rights movements of the 60’s, and the Southern Redemption movement of the late 1800’s that undid the gains of Reconstruction and gave rise to Jim Crow, the KKK, and the lynching era.

If our hierarchical understanding of individual bodies and the social body is problematic, as indicated above, then is there an alternative? To answer this, Miller turns to queer accounts of embodiment and develops an understanding of the social body as queer. Meaning, not that the social body is same-sex-attracted, but that there is no normative shape for the human body. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes; there are a few basic features that all human bodies have in common and on top of that there is incredible variety across cultures and historical eras. Beauty standards are arbitrary things that are typically used by any group that is in power to exclude and/or marginalize all who are not part of the dominant group.

Moreover, the human body is fluid. Individual bodies are all fluid things that evolve and change over time. We are always modifying/changing the shape of our bodies through such things as dress, eyeglasses, hearing aids, diet and/or exercise, cosmetic surgery, and a whole host of other such things that we don’t even think about. Sometimes bodily changes are forced upon us: sicknesses, accidents, sports injuries, or just the natural course of growth and aging.

What is true of individual bodies is also true of the social body. When we recognize the social body as queer, we recognize that there is no prescribed proper shape for the social body except for perhaps a few basic features that all societies have in common, and that is OK. When we recognize the social body as fluid, we recognize that the shape of society is always changing. Marginalized groups of whom we were unaware are coming to the fore and demanding a place in our social body, and our social body is expanding – changing its shape – to include them. Our social body today does not look like it did a century ago, and in another century it will look different from today.

When we understand society as a body we begin to make sense of much of what is happening in our present historical/cultural moment. And when we begin to understand that social body as queer and fluid, it opens the way to modifying the shape of that body in ways that lead to the health and flourishing of all.

The Doctrine of Discovery Created Christopher Columbus

Today I direct your attention to a conversation with author and activist Mark Charles. This interview centers around the Doctrine of Discovery, a Church doctrine which came out in the 1400’s which gave white European nations the full authorization and blessing to claim for themselves any land they found that was not already settled by white Christian people. This arose at a time in history when Christianity was altering the religious landscape of Europe at the same time that Europe was experiencing a growing aspiration for wealth and power. This doctrine led to a process of emigration from Europe which resulted in oppressive colonization and genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples all around the world. It is by virtue of this doctrine that Christopher Columbus, who was lost at sea, was able to land on a continent already inhabited by millions of people, and claim to have “discovered” it. The consequences of this doctrine were devastating and they persist even to this day.

Read: Doctrine of Discovery: A conversation with Mark Charles

A Crazy Week in Politics

It has been a crazy week in politics.

Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert got her bitch ass thrown out of a theater in Denver (I had to say that. It felt good) that was putting on a performance of the musical Beetlejuice. Boebert insisted via her campaign manager that she was not doing anything more than singing along enthusiastically (which may be disruptive in and of itself. I don’t know how Boebert sings and I don’t want to), but eyewitness accounts and security footage indicate otherwise. There was yelling and screaming, vaping, recording with her phone, and even some hanky-panky with her date. As she and her date were being removed by security, she said such things as “Do you know who I am?” and “I will be contacting the mayor”. Boebert later issued an apology, stating that her behavior “fell short of my values”, but in reality such behavior is perfectly on brand for Boebert (she made waves by heckling Biden during his 2022 State of the Union speech) and plays very well with her base.

It is not my place to attempt to take down Boebert, though I do confess to feeling no small amount of schadenfreude at watching all this go down. Hopefully all this will play out; there seem to be indications that voters back home in Colorado may have had enough of Boebert.

In other news, long-time California senator Dianne Feinstein died yesterday at age 90.

Feinstein was elected to the US Senate in 1992. Her three decades in office made her the longest-serving female US senator in history. Feinstein was active up to the very end; she participated in a vote Thursday morning.

There had been concerns about Feinstein’s health over the past year. She had to take a lengthy leave of absence in the early part of this year, and there was much speculation over what would happen if she had to step down. This has led to an ongoing conversation around the fitness of aging lawmakers to remain in office.

Prior to serving in the Senate, Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco for many years. She became mayor in 1978 when then-mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. She was the first female mayor of San Francisco. Prior to that, she served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where she was its first female chair.

While in the Senate, Feinstein became the first female chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the first woman to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She also served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and was the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee from 2017 to 2021. Feinstein led efforts on gun control which resulted in a 1994 federal ban on assault weapons, which has since lapsed. She also was influential in a 2014 report that exposed much of the CIA’s practices of torture and interrogation in the wake of 9/11.

Feinstein was a progressive, but was willing to work across the aisle with Republicans, much to the consternation of her fellow progressives. She was praised for her distinguished career by progressives and conservatives alike, including Dick Durbin, Kevin McCarthy, and Chuck Schumer.

Whatever your political commitments may be, you cannot argue that Feinstein has served with class and distinction in a way that will be sorely missed, especially in the present political climate.

“Fast Car” And Crushing Systemic Poverty

Today we are going to talk about “Fast Car”.

Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, which has resurfaced this summer thanks to country singer Luke Combs, is one of the defining anthems of the black experience in America during the 80s. Those of you who are of a certain age remember where you were when Chapman performed it on the big stage at Wembley Arena in London at the Nelson Mandela tribute concert in June 1988. The concert was done to honor Mandela, who at the time was about to turn 70 and had been in jail for years for his part in the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid state. The lineup consisted of numerous big-time artists including Stevie Wonder, Harry Belafonte, Whitney Houston, and many more. Chapman’s performance on that stage was a defining moment in rock and roll history.

But it almost didn’t happen. Stevie Wonder was set to go on at that time, but was having issues with the programming on some of his keyboards that could not quickly be resolved. This created a hole in the lineup that Chapman was able to fill; the only setup she required was herself, a guitar, and a couple of mics. The rest, as we know, was history; Chapman’s performance electrified audiences all around the world and pushed the song all the way to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. But had it not been for a little technical difficulty with Stevie Wonder’s keyboards on a summer day in 1988, there would probably have been no “Fast Car” for Luke Combs to cover in the summer of 2023. And there might have been no Tracy Chapman. Success is never guaranteed to anyone, no matter how talented, and in order for a musical artist to break through on the world stage, all the stars have to align. And in Chapman’s case, there were numerous other stars that had to align as well. We will look at some of these later on.

The song is a plaintive folk ballad, a story of dreams of escape from soul-crushing poverty, told in the voice of a working-class woman who pleads with her lover to get in the car and just drive. Anywhere. The dream of class ascension – the hope of getting a better job and moving out to the suburbs. But – first things first – out of the shelter. That shelter was as far away from the idyllic middle-class suburban existence for which Chapman yearns as it is possible to get.

The story told in this song is heartbreaking – because it is relatable. Black poverty grew immensely – by 50 percent – during the 80s, as the prosperity promised by the Reagan era did not trickle down to everyone. Far too many black Americans, even to this day, can relate to the tale of woe and despair related in the verses: A father drinking himself to death to numb the pain of ghetto life. A mother who left him because she “wanted more from life than he could give”. The narrator forced to quit school and go to work to support him.

But then we come to the chorus, and everything changes. The tempo picks up, the drums and band kick in, and the narrative compresses from an overview of the narrator’s life all the way down to a single moment in that fast car – the possibility of getting out, getting on the road and just driving, never coming back, and becoming something completely different. We feel the exhilaration of the high speeds, the wind blowing on their faces through the rolled-down windows, their miserable ghetto life far behind and nothing but open road ahead, the bright lights of the city spread out before them. All rushing inexorably toward the song’s emotional and melodic climax: “I had a feeling that I belonged / And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone”. And here we learn that the place the narrator is longing to reach is not a place on a map, but a place in her heart.

Self-esteem. It is everything to anyone seeking to make their way in this world. And for black people living in a white supremacist America, where whiteness is cherished and blackness despised, it can be exceedingly difficult to come by. That is why the phrase “Black is beautiful” was transformative back in the 60s. A people who up until then despised their identity to the point where they would consider “black” or “African” or any variant thereof to be an insult and use harsh chemicals to straighten their hair and/or lighten their skin to more closely resemble white people, now began to delight in all the beautiful and messy complexity of their black identity. The phrase “Black lives matter” does the same work in our day. And in the 80s, that work was done by the phrase “I am somebody”, the battle cry of Jesse Jackson’s two presidential runs. I would be willing to bet that the line “I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone” is a reference to this.

Jackson was no fringe candidate either. He carried some states in the 1984 Democratic primary, and in 1988 he carried even more, including Michigan, which put him briefly in the lead. He would eventually finish second to Michael Dukakis and ahead of then-senator Al Gore. But Jackson’s candidacy was transformative; whereas before no one would even remotely consider the possibility that a black person could be president, afterward that possibility was no longer a thing that could be ruled out. Jackson put cracks in the highest glass ceiling of all, the one that Obama would one day break through. He ran so that Obama could win.

To see another way that Chapman’s life and career could have gone, we look to Elizabeth Cotten. Cotten was one of the preeminent figures in black folk music, but it took her a long time to break through. She was a gifted musician and started playing guitar very early in life, but by age 9 she was forced to quit school and go to work to help her family make ends meet. She went to work as a maid, offering her services to well-to-do white families in the area. At age 11 she wrote a song called “Freight Train”. This would become her most famous song – but not until much later. At age 15 she married and had a daughter. She quit playing music and continued working as a maid for four decades, until fate intervened. A seasonal job at a department store led to a connection with a client who was a folk music writer and producer. She went to work for her and her family for 10 years. During that time she started back playing guitar. She was in her 60s by then. The family recorded her songs and helped her make an album. Eventually she had the opportunity to go to England and perform “Freight Train”. This led to many groups playing it, including The Beatles. Cotten recorded and toured for years thereafter, and with the money she made she was eventually able to buy a house in Syracuse, NY, and move her family there. In 1984 she won a Grammy for best traditional/ethnic folk album. In 1987, a year before Chapman’s breakthrough performance, she died at age 95. She was still doing shows up until only a few months before her death.

Cotten’s story was a classic blues story: a life derailed by poverty. A black person swept up by the tides of life, forced to wait for a lucky break late in life in order to finally pursue her dreams. How many black people out there have immense talent – in any field – blocked and shelved by the hurdles of life in white supremacist America?

Cotten’s story could have been that of Tracy Chapman. Early on, Chapman’s story tracked very closely to that of Cotten: She grew up in Cleveland with a father who left at a very young age. Like Cotten, her musical talent showed through at a very young age. She was given a ukulele at age 3, and at age 8 she was writing music. Her family was poor and times were tough. The public schools that she had access to in Cleveland were worthless due to racial tension, frequent strikes by underpaid teachers, and many other factors.

But here Chapman’s story diverges from that of Cotten. As noted above, all the stars had to align for Chapman to break through. And they did, due to cultural forces unique to the 80s that were working in her favor. She got accepted into a program called A Better Chance (ABC), which helped smart black kids get into elite private schools. Over 16,000 kids benefited from this program. It was built upon the driving principles of affirmative action: If black people are just given access, they can thrive. Ensuring that they get the access that they have historically been denied makes our organizations and communities better, and makes us as a nation better. Chapman got into Wooster School in Danbury, CT. From there she got into Tufts University in Boston. This exposed her to Boston’s coffee shop scene. There she connected with the son of a record executive and got a record deal. Who knows what would have become of her if she had stayed in Cleveland?

The journey of inclusion in previously all-white professional and educational spaces was not without unique challenges for black people, challenges that Chapman was forced to navigate while at Wooster and Tufts. It was (and remains to this day) fraught with microaggressions, stereotyping, and even overt racism. To meet these challenges, black people sought to center their own unique identity as black people. This led to the rise of Afrocentrism, which led to a deeper connection with the people of Africa and the issues they faced, and a growing conviction that Africa’s problems were ours as well. This led to a growing anger at the injustice of the South African apartheid state and the decades-long imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, and ultimately to the tribute concert of June 1988, which led to millions of people all around the world discovering Tracy Chapman.

No one up to that point was saying the things in music that Chapman was saying. “Fast Car” is not a political song – not overtly, at least. But one can’t help listening to it and coming away with the conviction that the situation related in that song is wrong and unjust and that we as a society need to do better. And having that message come to us via the voice of a woman who could very easily have been the woman in the song adds yet another layer of poignancy and immediacy to it.

The ABC program that Chapman was able to get into was her “fast car” – it enabled her to escape the crushing poverty all around her in her growing-up years, to chase her dreams, and to be someone. The rise of Afrocentrism, fueled by black people who thanks to affirmative action found themselves in previously all-white cultural spaces where they had long been denied access, led to anger at the injustice of South African apartheid and a focus on Mandela as the poster child for the struggle against apartheid, which ultimately set the stage for Chapman to perform to the entire world on that summer day in 1988. And because of that performance, there was a “Fast Car” for Luke Combs to cover in summer 2023.

For your viewing pleasure, here is Tracy Chapman’s performance of “Fast Car” at Wembley in 1988:

And here is Elizabeth Cotten performing “Freight Train”: