Asymmetry
By now you’ve probably heard of the Rev. Michael Pfleger.
The Chicago Reader profiled him back in 1989. According to the Reader, Pfleger was locking horns with Church leadership when he was still in the seminary. As a recovering Catholic, I can’t help but appreciate this thorn in the side of the episcopacy; I doubly appreciate the Rev. Pfleger for his conviction and authenticity. The man lives what he preaches. Whatever else he is, he’s not a hypocrite. That passion means he doesn’t always tow the party line, and when one of his vocal denunciations launched him into the national spotlight, Church officials moved swiftly to discipline him.
The episode has left me even more embittered about Holy Mother Church. One priest denounces a presidential candidate in a homily, in however poor taste, and is immediately suspended. Contrast this with the still unknown numbers of priests who were quietly reassigned after being accused of sexual abuse. How could anyone NOT be angry? What kind of ruthlessness makes such an attitude, such actions, possible? If only someone had had the presence of mind to videotape an instance of child rape — ! This hypocrisy fuels my anger at the Catholic Church. I want to march up to Cardinal George and say, “Really? It’s so nice to know that you take your pastoral responsibilities seriously and that you have your priorities in order. As long as Mother Church looks good in public, who cares what she does to her children behind closed doors?”
This is why I left. To see a priestly class pay lip service to social justice while wheedling funds from parishioners who barely make ends meet, to see them condone ghastly crimes while denouncing comparatively minor infractions, to see the Vatican and all the lust for power and money and pleasure it represents — it was too much. And commingled with the revulsion was the (of course) the guilt, the sense that my baptism implicated me in a legacy of rapacious greed and heinous crimes. I had to leave, but I will never be out.
But more on that later.
Some Thoughts on Immigration
Jonathan Power has an interesting piece on First Drafts regarding some of the drawbacks of immigration. Some points are a bit narrow and forceful for me, but one or two of his points were long overdue for discussion, such as:
The main trouble is that modern capitalist-inclined governments rather like it: immigration keeps down wages. (I’m not talking about the immigration of professionals—and how governments like to mislead the public by often conflating the two!) It provides an underclass who live on the margins of established society. They may not pay income taxes (although they pay VAT and every other kind of consumer tax), but this is made up for by their willingness to do dirty jobs, night shifts and off the books jobs like cleaners and nannies. Immigration, in short, is a deflationary economic tool and governments love that. Note: He’s principally talking about the UK and South Africa, so for the purposes of this post insert “illegal” before “immigration” and “to the US” afterwards.
This is one of my principal problems with illegal immigration to the States: It creates an underclass ripe for exploitation by unscrupulous and greedy companies. That the government turns a blind eye to low wages, unsafe working conditions, and sometimes outright abuse encourages many corporations (for example, the strawberry farmers Eric Schlosser described in Reefer Nation) to actively seek out illegal labor. Given the choice between hiring an unskilled citizen or legal immigrant who understand their right to recourse for unfair treatment, and an illegal immigrant living in fear of the law and probably desperate to feed a starving family, what’s the profit-conscious company to do? The lack of enforcement against these companies is a shameful abdication of governmental responsibility. If labor laws were strictly enforced, there wouldn’t be as much of a market for illegal labor. Moreover, wages would no longer be weighed down by low bidders rendered desperate by their circumstances. But corporations and legislators alike profit from this near-slavery, so the latter placate their constituencies by brutal token roundups, all the while accepting tributes from the former.
What is the answer? Keeping immigrants out is not easy. But there are ways for the government to favour their own citizens. First, they can commit resources to retraining programmes for their own unemployed or poorly employed citizens.
Okay, this is definitely problematic. Suggesting the government “favour its own citizens,” especially in the US, starts you down a nasty slippery slope. In an ideal US, workers would be hired based on their merits: their skill set, their work ethic, and their willingness to work for a fair — not grossly depressed — wage. Employers, in turn, would be judged by the fairness of their wages and work conditions, and thereby forced to conduct themselves properly or lose all the qualified labor to better firms and/or suffer legal penalties. Of course, this is not the case, but it is the standard to which we ought aspire. Additionally, improving our school system would go a long way towards preventing under- or unemployment.
Second, they can help the major countries of emigration develop their economies at home. When countries that once were big emigration countries developed—as varied as Turkey, Puerto Rico and Ireland—the immigrants voluntarily returned.
It is disingenuous to claim illegal immigrants deserve a better life in the States, because the statement doesn’t take into account the multitudes who remain in the countries of origin. All human beings living in poverty and squalor deserve a crack at a better life, and they deserve to have those opportunities available where they are. Any government truly committed to improving conditions for these people would exert social, political, or economic pressure on “exodus nations” (which tend to be impoverished more by corruption than by a lack of resources) to improve conditions so that their citizens were not forced to leave in order to support themselves and their families. But the arrangement works for too many people, except of course for the workers: The destination country’s government gets cheap labor, corporate contributions, an apparently strong economy, and (maybe) political leverage, and the originating country’s government gets a steady stream of income from its expatriates which bolsters the economy and feeds, clothes, and generally placates the remaining citizens, thereby freeing it (the government) of responsibility for reducing corruption or attacking the causes of poverty.
All that said, I support immigration; I am truly proud to be part of this diverse and dynamic melting pot, in spite of all its faults. However, the system is in dire need of an overhaul and we as a nation are in equally dire need of an honest debate about how to bring policy up to principles, and how to govern in a way that respects human dignity, maintains fairness, and offers as much real opportunity to as many as possible.
Nerds, Fascists, Machines
“I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. Automatons at large in the universe. Every person I meet is also a machine — a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules.” –MIT professor Rodney Brooks, as quoted in American Nerd: The Story of My People.
There — that’s it! That’s the eureka moment, the thought that ties together American Nerd and American Fascists. That’s the problem with Richard Dawkins’ thinking: The notion that we are reducible to machines but at the same time gods unto ourselves. How can that be? If we are mere predictable, manageable, uncreated collections of “biomolecules” then our minds are not godlike — far from it. Our minds are no more godlike than the computer facing me right now. If we are machines, our mind are just programmed to regurgitate output based on input, and there is no divine spark, externally bestowed or internally generated. That we are programmed without a Programmer is just a biochemical accident, something for which we can neither take pride nor give thanks. There is nothing of what would be called sentience. There is no Cartesian being, because we degenerate in this model from thinking animals to functioning machines.
I don’t mean to say we’re created, or programmed, or any of that et cetera. I have plenty of doubts on that score. But this become a glaring inconsistency in the militant atheist scientist credo; it undermines their ironclad conviction that we are the highest evolution and therefore somehow gods. They cannot stake their ideological legitimacy on raw reason, logic, or unmitigated biochemical evolutionary theory and then appropriate the godhood they have rejected from other systems of belief. If there is no God, if there is no supernatural divinity, then we are no more divine than that figment of Christian imagination. To see that ilk’s model through to the end, all divinity must leach out of the world. There may be wondrous accidents, to be sure, spectacular coincidences in nebulae and platypuses and chemosynthetic ocean life, but they remain accidents and coincidences nonetheless. They are events on a scale of probability, and if we stand on that spectrum we are as accidental as nebulae and a good deal less exciting.
Mary’s Song(s)
Well. The Catholic Church never ceases to amaze me. Just when I think I’ve come to the end of my shock and awe, the Vatican issues yet another surprising endorsement. Apparently somebody decided to write a musical about Jesus’ mother, the ever-controversial and long-suffering model woman (a virgin AND a mother — the standard to which all god-fearing women should aspire!). Upon review, the Vatican has endorsed the musical — complete with a score composed by one Stelvio Cipriani, a musician also responsible for the scores of such films as Black Orgasm and Devils in the Convent.
And to think, my Catholic grammar school didn’t allow anyone to perform Madonna songs at the talent shows because they were by, well, the wrong Madonna.
That would be a great name for an animated short.
Erm…a Month, Eh?
I will skip the self-flagellation and get to writing. I will skip the self-flagellation and get to writing. I WILL skip the self-flagellation and get to writing.
This page took longer than the others to load, an indication, perhaps, of the time lapse since my last visit and a chastisement of my desultory updates. Or maybe just an indication of a hiccup in my internet connection. Is cable affected by the weather? I can never remember.
And there has been no shortage of things to write about. I’ve been seeing summer blockbusters (air conditioning included at no extra charge!) and meditating on the state of the world and getting back in touch with old friends.
The next few posts will be backdated, more for my own reference and the general manageability of the archives, but I wanted to come clean. Odds are, though, that you have no idea who I am, have never read this blog before and couldn’t care less. I find this comforting. Pray, stranger, remember Persephone in your digital travels (or travails). She is the shadowy presence that makes us grow.
