I missed reading some news yesterday because I taught school last night. Today I see that the blogs are full of righteous wingnuttery over Joseph Lowery’s benediction at Tuesday’s inauguration. Here’s a fairly mild little rant from Lewisville, Texas:
That’s not a prayer, that’s a travesty. If a white man had made similarly racial comments, there would have been hell to pay. Racism is truly stronger from black to white, than from white to black. They really need to get over the fact that their skin is black, and join the rest of the human race.
And in case anybody expected that the hate Obama campaign would go away or die for lack of participants, a look at this thread will be sobering.
I loved the Lowery prayer, and I particularly loved its weaving together of material from the history of the civil rights movement. Its peroration was a blues riff, embedded in the history of white privilege to be sure, but also embedded in the humor and toughness of the blues singer’s minstrelsy. It was a human prayer, and its closing call and response, “That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen” (a quotation from Micah), was exactly appropriate, I thought.
Here’s the apparent source of Rev. Dr. Lowery’s blues riff. Katie Sherrod has some background for the song, for which she depends partly on Louie Crew, in a reference I’ve not been able to track down. But here’s the song, “Black, Brown and White,” as recorded by Bill Broonzy in the nineteen fifties.
No spiel promised: A caller from the democratic congressional hoo-ha, just now, promised “no spiel,” then cozied up with a couple of comments designed to make me feel part of the in-group, I guess, and wound up by suggesting that I contribute $209 to the cause of keeping the congress Democratic. Myomy! I’d have been more inclined not to hang up if the leaders of my party, Pelosi, Reed, Feinstein, etc., would rein in their egos and get to work.
Rick Warren: Beating a horse that perhaps ought to be dead, I intend to listen very carefully to Rick Warren’s prayer on inauguration day. I don’t like Warren, don’t like religion hucksters generally–from Joyce Meyer to Deepak Chopra. And I think my guy could have chosen any number of better people to deliver the invocation before he, himself, delivers the most important speech of his career thusfar. Nor do I think the choice is clarified by the claim that we have to listen to folks with whom we disagree. But what the hell–this is America, God love us:
in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
No child left: Two interesting pieces in today’s Washington Post (here and here) tell an ironic tale about education in the land of the free. The Shrub of legacy-seeking touts his putative achievements in the realm of education reform whilst a political pressure group lobbies a DC area school system for lower grading standards, complaining that “students [are] at a disadvantage when they seek college admission or scholarships.” I’m remembering a Czech graduate student who worked for me back in the last century. She told me one day that she was grateful to have come to the United States for graduate school because education in her country consisted of “dictionary learning” only; whereas she found herself surrounded by intellectual stimulation and creativity at our large, public, provincial, American university. That’s what we stand to lose by the pursuit of education as measurement and measuring up, what Jill Ker Conway found at Harvard in the ’50s and details in her book, True North (1994). My guy got a very good education that also included Harvard. His education secretary-in-waiting notwithstanding, I very much hope he doesn’t sign on to the Nicklebee ideology.
All we like sheep: As part of my holiday reading binge, which is by no means done yet, I read last week a wonderful little book entitled Three Bags Full (2005), characterized by author Leonie Swann as “A Sheep Detective Story.” It reminded me that The Good Shepherd remains a powerful a myth of leadership, and rightly so. A classical evocation of the myth (designed to do honor to a secular prince and not to God as is sometimes thought) occurs in Bach’s hunt cantata, #208. Everyone knows the tune, but it isn’t every day one gets to hear it performed by authentic sheep. Read through the comment thread attached to this lovely performance of “Schafe können sicher weiden.”
