Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Escaping the Bully Pulpit (Essay by Bob Racine)

David, like most other kings of old, acted on the assumption that his authority was absolute, that God’s appointment of him to the throne of Israel entitled him to the absolutely free exercise of his own discretion.  He probably assumed even further that since God was ordaining his every move, he was incapable of making a wrong move.  If he felt an impulse, that impulse must be of God.  Entitlement by virtue of inclination!  If I want it, it must be something good for me or God would not have put me on the throne and let me want it.  Bathsheba is a godsend; I must have her.  If I declare war on another nation, it must be a heathen entity, just because I have the idea.  For an absolute monarch judgment is an absolute prerogative. 
                                     
Judgment!   Not many of us I daresay are envious of those who make the laws of society or those who must preside over the enforcement or the interpretation of that law’s fine points.  And yet, if we are completely honest, moral and ethical judgment does have a place in the exercise of all our minds.
                                     
It is with a chastised spirit that I must admit that that kind of judgment had a very central place in much of my early adult life as a theological graduate.  I confused God’s judgment with my own.  It took me many years to understand that just because I could work up a big head of righteous steam over an issue did not mean that I could assume that my fervor and fume were inspired of God.  In retrospect I have nothing but the most bleeding heart sympathy for those poor parishioners who had to weather my storms issuing forth from what was in fact my bully pulpit.  Not that all my sermons were in bad taste or irrelevant; I just got carried away at times being dogmatic – and enjoyed doing it.
                                     
But of course the urge toward absolutes has not gone away, any more than the desire for a drink leaves an alcoholic who goes on the wagon.  I still have fantasies in which I tell off people I dislike.  It is not a wish for them to die, because dead they would be out of their misery.  It is a wish for them to live and be very much in their misery.  The seeds of fascism are right there in my psyche, I daresay in all our psyches.  I am sometimes frightened by their presence.
                                     
People we do not like are not going to go away.  I cannot think of a more appropriate Purgatory than spending the first so many years of eternity locked into a room with people I have wrongly judged!  There is no way out.  You don’t get to have visits from people you like or those you treated fairly.  You do not even get to sleep.  You have nothing to do but make arrangements, come to terms with all these many seemingly detestable individuals.  That would be enough to purge the hell out of anybody.
                                     
Sometimes we might find ourselves calling one of our singular traits by a different name when we espy it in another person.  Let us consider some examples.
                                     
She/he is hateful! ---- I’m passionate and righteously indignant!

She/he is opinionated! ---- I have the strength of my convictions!

She/he is overbearing! ---- I’m persistent and persevering!

She/he is slow! ---- I’m thorough!

She/he is impatient! ---- I believe in forthright action!

She/he is absent-minded! ---- I have a lot on my mind!

She/he is controversial! ---- I’m an innovator!

She/he is withdrawn, distant and snobbish! ---- I value my privacy!

She/he is a pain in the butt! ---- I’m a force to contend with!

She/he is wishy-washy! ---- I’m open-minded!

She/he is a conformist! ---- I’m a team player!

They’re dirty rebels! ---- We’re revolutionaries!

They’re brainwashed! ---- We’re enlightened!

                                     
We could go on and on, with many more examples.
                                     
God’s judgment, unlike our own, does not require a spectacle of litigation or some exhibitionist event, no “Hear ye, Hear ye, this court is now in session.”  God’s judgment is the working out of the moral law.  It occurs ever so subtly sometimes.  We are not punished for our sins; we are punished by our sins.  From within!  David was punished from within.  The death of his baby was not his punishment for having Uriah killed and stealing his wife Bathsheba.  He and the recorders of that history only construed it to be so.  He was punished from within, following his confrontation with the prophet Nathan, who unearthed his secret.  Henceforth, he had to look in the mirror and see a different kind of man, a fallible man, prone to the same evils as anyone else.  He had to give up the idea that his royal discretion was one and the same with the mind of God.  His self-image would never be the same.
                                     
Our righteous judgments constitute what I believe is the most dangerous thing about us human beings – our most lethal weapon.  A mindset that attempts to close the gap between human judgment and divine judgment is an extremely dangerous one, as events in the news are currently demonstrating.  Under the guise of nationalism or religious fervor millions have been slaughtered, lives uprooted, terrorist activity has been unloosed in our streets, and the bully pulpits of politicians and radical clerics have incited otherwise decent people to hotheaded bigotry and sometimes violence. 
                                     
In the previous years of my life when Presidential campaigning was conducted, I seem to remember that mud was slung between candidates but that it was generally a soft oozy, mutually respectful mud.  I remember Jimmy Carter, after some candid and cutting debates with Gerald Ford, expressing appreciation to Ford immediately after winning the White House, praising Ford’s spunk and courage.  And though Richard Nixon lives in infamy because of contemptible things he did after getting into office, I recall how upon the occasion of his first term victory he was full of praise for his losing opponent Hubert Humphrey, calling him a great fighter who had had to contend against terrible odds after the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  “I admire a fighter”!  And one could tell that he meant it.
                                     
In the current contest the mud has not been all that soft and oozy; it has often been hardboiled and rocklike in texture.  Some of the judgmental remarks that have passed between the candidates have not been of a gaming nature, but warlike and downright nasty.  It is one thing to find fault; it is quite another to demonize.  I wonder how mutually respecting the two people nominated will be this time, when the bloodletting ceases upon the election of one or the other.  The Presidency, as the founding fathers conceived of it, is not a bully pulpit; it is a tough rigorous job, one that should give pause to anyone who first sets foot in the West Wing.  But I have been given to wonder of late whether this bitter, seemingly unprecedented behavior will have set a new precedent for our nation’s future.  Have the waters been so badly polluted that the art of open-minded compromise, the greatest of all anti-pollutants, will get lost?   I pray my fears will prove unwarranted.      


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

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