Look at Glenn Beck (I never said this would be easy.) I’m not sure what he was attempting with his rally at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, but it seems he has ambitions beyond being on Fox News forever. I try to put myself in his shoes. Here’s a guy who used to be a disc jockey and now he’s got a tee vee show, a radio show and his own “university” (however much damage his institution does to our understanding of that word). I’m sure there are people out there telling him he’s a prophet, naming children after him and so forth. It would be hard for me not to get a bit messianic if I was subject to all that and I think my grasp on reality is more tenacious than Mr. Beck’s.

Look across America. The current wave of Islamophobia has given an escape valve to the huge pressure of racism that has run beneath the surface of our continent since Mr. Columbus first made landfall. In Tennessee, western New York, Washington state and Connecticut racists are attacking (respectively) a mosque, a Sufi mosque (Sufis are like the Quakers of Islam, as mild and gentle a people as you’ll find anywhere), a Sikh (who is not a Muslim: what next – attacks on Buddhists?) and a hookah bar (one featuring belly dancers, no less – not exactly Sharia law, dude).

Now look at Vermont. Like Alaska, we had a contested result in our primary last Tuesday. Three Democratic candidates for governor were within two percentage points of each other when the counting was done. The second-place finisher, Doug Racine, called for a recount, as is his right.

Meanwhile, Mr. Racine has joined the first-place finisher, Peter Shumlin and third-place finisher Deb Markowitz in joint press conferences and campaign appearances to express the unity of their positions and to ask voters to support whichever of them ultimately becomes the party’s candidate.

Back in 2002, when then-governor Howard Dean declined to run for re-election, Mr. Racine was lieutenant governor and candidate presumptive. Mr. Shumlin (then and now) Senate majority leader, had hoped to run in 2002, but stepped aside for the good of the party. He ran for Lite Gov instead. Both he and Mr. Racine lost to the current incumbents Gov. Jim Douglas and Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, both Republicans.

Perhaps Mr. Racine should have returned Mr. Shumlin’s 2002 favor and stood aside for the good of the party. For whatever reasons, he chose not to, as was his right. Now the three former rivals campaign together. Two Democratic candidates that finished fourth and fifth last week also pledge their support to the eventual nominee. (Disclosure: I supported Mr. Racine in the primary.)

As for Mr. Dubie, now the Republican candidate for governor, I’ve met him and like him. I believe him to be a sincere man who wants what he thinks is best for Vermont. I disagree with almost all his positions, but that’s politics. (I’ve poked fun at Mr. Dubie, as recently as last week’s post. That’s politics, too.)

I do not like Mr. Dubie’s mentor, Gov. Douglas. I think he has brought an insidiously insincere style of Republican politics to Vermont. I think the people around Mr. Dubie want him to take up Mr. Douglas’s ways. I think they think it’s Mr. Dubie’s best chance of becoming governor.

The general election is still 61 days away. I’m encouraged by the civility and focus on issues and positions we’ve seen so far in Vermont’s 2010 election cycle. I wish the contrast with the rest of the country were not so great. I wish national journalists would pay more attention to the way we conduct ourselves.

There’s a Vermont bumper sticker that reads: “A small state can lead the nation.” Indeed, we must.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s been four months, a new president is in office and life is returning to normal. Most Poles think it’s time to move the cross away from the palace, others think it should be left where it is. It’s getting controversial. Poland’s constitution separates church and state; those who want to move the cross away from the palace say such a display is inappropriate for a modern secular state. Those who want to keep the cross say Poland is an overwhelmingly Catholic country and the cross represents their interests.

Although I may have an opinion on the issue, it’s not for me to decide. It’s for the Poles to decide.

In the US, our constitution guarantees freedom of religion. A Muslim group, the Cordoba Initiative, wants to build a community center in New York City, two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Some people say this should not be allowed, because the men who attacked the World Trade Center (among other places) were Muslim. This view is clearly anti-constitutional and unAmerican. The people who shout this crap on cable tee vee are either stupid (yes, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, I’m looking at you) or disingenuous (that would be you, Newt).

Some others (the Anti-Defamation League, Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan and five-and-a-half term Governor Howard Dean) say there’s no doubt the Cordoba Initiative has the right to build its community center (called Park51), but that it shouldn’t – because of the sensitivity of the location.

Huh? I’m thinking you people will have to go sit with Ms. Palin over in the area reserved for stupid (although not nearly as far in as her seat). By all reports, the area around the WTC site is littered with bars and strip clubs. If the site of the 9-11 attacks is hallowed ground, then are those establishments sacrilege? No one’s calling for their removal. (Come to think of it, the 9-11 hijackers reportedly spent their pre-attack weeks hanging out at strip clubs – not community centers – so maybe I’m onto something here….)

A new Pew poll shows one in five Americans think Barack Obama is a Muslim, which means I know more about Polish politics than many of my fellow citizens (and – gulp – voters) know about their own country. (“You people in the stupid section! Move over! Make room! Lots of room!”)

In the disingenuous section, Newt Gingrich said allowing Park51 to be built is “like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust museum” and that Park51 should be built when churches and synagogues are allowed in Saudi Arabia.

(“Holy Cow! I just realized! That cross in Warsaw! It’s four meters high! Four meters equals 13 feet! Thirteen! Is it the work of Satan?” Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?)

Listen, Newt, if you wanna bring some country down to the level of Saudi Arabia, emigrate. Stop messing with my country. And your Nazi comment is crass beyond belief. If you want to know why you will never hold an elective office again, take a peek in the mirror the next time you brush your teeth.

Park51 is a proposed community center, like a YMCA or a JCC. It’s a place for kids’ art classes and pick-up basketball, book readings and potluck dinners. Community centers, as the name implies, build community, whether urban ones like Park51 or rural ones like Grange halls and 4-H clubs. They give kids a constructive place to spend idle hours and seniors a place to come and not feel so lonely.

Community centers are anti-terrorist. They should be places to bind us together, not tear us apart. We should thank God – five times a day – there are people who still want to build them.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who says the Supremes are immune to sound bites? If Chief Justice Roberts believes what he wrote, can we fairly extrapolate that he thinks, “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation is to stop discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation”?

Does he believe? Can we extrapolate? Probably not. Mr. Roberts famously told his the US Senate during his confirmation hearings that a judge’s role is to “call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” Once ensconced in his lifetime appointment, the record of his court has been to pitch, bat and push as hard as it can toward the right end of the spectrum. In Lebetter v. Goodyear, Mr. Roberts and company eliminated workers’ ability to sue for race or gender discrimination. In Exxon v. Baker, the court slashed away 90 percent of the damages Exxon had to pay victims for the Valdez spill and in the infamous Citizens United case, allowed corporations to spend freely on elections, giving First Amendment rights to businesses.

All this matters because federal Judge Vaughn Walker ruled yesterday that California’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. In his ruling, Judge Walker wrote that the ban “places the forces of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians,” reinforces the idea that “gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals” and “gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.” There is no doubt this case will wind up before Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

Judge Walker’s line of reasoning appeals to the equal protection clause of the Constitution, the same clause Justice Roberts appealed to when he wrote that one stops discriminating by stopping discriminating.

In courtroom, the opponents of same-sex marriage argued that one man and one woman make the best parents. That’s clearly incorrect. One merely needs eyes to see good gay and lesbian parents or bad heterosexual parents. OK, maybe you don’t know any gay and lesbian parents, but don’t try to tell me you don’t know some bad heterosexual parents.

Neither hetero- nor homosexuality automatically confers sanctity or evil on couple. Everyone is about the same when it comes to parenthood –or anything else. Thus, the equal protection clause.

Just for fun, let’s momentarily consider that “who makes the best parents?” argument. Is the raising of children the sole reason for matrimony? If people cannot or choose not to have children – or if two septuagenarians fall in love – should they be denied the opportunity to marry? Of course not. An argument to the contrary is ridiculous on the face of it. Just as the argument that men should not marry men or women marry women.

Sadly, the record of the Roberts court seems to shaping as “decide what outcome pleases right-wing ideologues and then try to find a legal argument to support that outcome.

The bottom line could be corporations are people, but gays and lesbians are not.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.

There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.

In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.

Times have changed – somewhat. There’s no phone in this cabin and no cell phone signal. There’s no Wi-Fi and while there’s a tee vee, it doesn’t work. There’s a teenaged girl, deep in the throes of Facebook withdrawal, sure that her social life will have forever left her behind if she can’t check in at least once a day.

So we find a little Wi-Fi now and then. I admit, I log on, too, if for no other reason than to delete unwanted messages, so I won’t have to plow through five or six hundred at once when I get back to town. I try not to get sucked into the news, but it’s hard.

Tuesday evening, the radio in the cabin was tuned to a little station on the New Hampshire line that plays “all the normal songs” (according to the teenaged girl). The CBS Radio News came on at six o’clock. Here was the line up: The leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Afghan war generally, a potential new oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, an update on the BP oil spew, the new CEO at BP, Congressman Charlie Rangel decides he might want to cut a deal on ethics charges after all and the imminent debut of the Arizona immigration law.

I stepped back outside to tend the grill. The sun was starting to decline toward the Green Mountains in the west, the pond lapped softly against the dock. Since it was mid-week, there were few jet skis or speedboats on the water. The older folk in their pontoon boats, canopies rigged, cruised like the Pharaoh’s barges on the Nile.

In it’s odd way, “Nixonland” is a comforting book. It’s thesis is that the seeds of the divisive politics that so wrack our country today were sown back in the ‘60s with Nixon’s invention of the “Southern strategy” and self-pity of the so-called “silent majority.” (If they would only lapse back into silence.)

Somehow, we got through. Let’s hope we always do.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s not me saying that, it was Barack Obama, last month. Good advice, but as is often the case when you’re president, it landed him in hot water, so two weeks ago he went out of his way to praise the city and encourage people to visit and spend sums of money smaller than the college fund.

“Let me set the record straight – I love Vegas, always have,” he said. “Love Vegas. Enjoy myself every time I’ve got an opportunity to visit.”

There are a few verbal “tells” there. Just as George W. Bush mangled his words when he spoke about things he didn’t seem to care about – poor people, education – but never slipped when canceling international treaties or threatening small nations, so Mr. Obama says “let me be clear” or “set the record straight” when he’s about to be insincere. He also tends to drop the first person singular noun and begin his truncated sentence with the verb when he’s BS’ing.

It’s an occupational hazard and an irony that the leader of the world’s only superpower can’t express too many opinions in public, lest he have to grovel before some hypersensitive constituency. Our sense of “victim entitlement” has really hit overdrive when the president has to go out of his way to praise Vegas as a wholesome place to go lose your money.

Politicians are a bunch of phonies, we all know that, but we hesitate to acknowledge the part we play in making them so.

“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.” – Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 1992.

Ms. Rodham, er.. Mrs. Clinton got herself in hot water with that one, even had to share her cookie recipes. Although she had to phony up to make amends, I always thought the initial comment was a shot at all the phony political wives who never dared to have a career, lest it cause the least distraction from the alpha male in the relationship.

Similarly, Barbara Bush during the 1984 election campaign said of Geraldine Ferraro, “I can’t say it, but it rhymes with ‘witch.’” She too, had to backpedal and resort to such inanities as writing her cocker spaniel’s “autobiography” to soften her tough ol’ broad image.

So, it’s a curse, I suppose, this phoniness. (We won’t mention the Edwardses.) Once in a while, a politician comes along and cuts against the phony grain, making a name for him or herself as a straight shooter in the process. John McCain was that guy, until he ran for president and doused himself in Eau de Phonee.

Which is not to say public figures should abandon all phoniness. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi brags about his plastic surgery, appoints his mistresses to run ministries and all but dares the courts to indict him on criminal charges. That’s going a bit too far the other way.

A nice happy medium – Pierre and Margaret Trudeau, say. He was thrown out of the officers’ corps during World War II for lack of discipline, he married a woman 30 years his junior and she partied at Studio 54 (sans culottes) just before a Canadian national election. He lost that election, but staged a comeback a year later.

Alas, the US is not Canada and never will be. If the phony phad merely provided phodder for parlor games, it would be one thing, but the virus attacks every system in the body politic. It leads politicians to tell us they’re working on our behalf while they’re selling us out to the banks and oil, coal and insurance companies. It leads individual senators to cut of unemployment payments and send federal workers on furlough. It causes political parties to dangle the future of the nation over a cliff, because what they really care about is power, not governance.

In the end, phoniness may be the death of our democracy.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Our legislators all have other jobs – they’re farmers and business people, professors and attorneys. There’s a law on the books that says a person cannot be fired from his or her day job because she or he is attending to legislative duties. Wealthy professionals are over-represented in the Vermont legislature, but show me a legislature where they’re not. All in all, I think we do pretty well.

Still, I sense an unvoiced inferiority complex when it comes to our legislature. We have New York just to the west and Massachusetts to the south and while we all thank good fortune every day that we are not those states, there’s a certain junior varsity air to the whole undertaking.

So what? The point of a legislature is not offices and staffers or worse, to provide a space for lobbyists to hang out all the year through. The point is to make good government and then go home. That’s what the Vermont legislature does in 16 weeks (more or less) each year.

Yesterday, the Vermont Senate, on a vote of 26-4, became to first legislative body in America to close a nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, which is owned by the Entergy Corporation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

The plant, first opened in 1972, is scheduled to close in 2012. Entergy Louisiana, which bought Vermont Yankee in 2002, wanted the legislature to extend its permission to operate another 20 years.

The Louisiana folks have – to be honest – run the place into the ground. A cooling tower collapse, a transformer fire, a crane dropping high-level radioactive waste, missing fuel rods – it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

The latest fiasco has been leaks of tritium and cobalt-60 that Entergy cannot neither find nor plug for the last seven weeks. We do know the leak is from an underground pipe – a pipe Entergy Louisiana officials swore under oath did not exist.

Yesterday Curtis Hebert, new guy in Vermont (the old guy got sent on vacation after the leak) held a (sorta) press conference before the Senate met. He read a statement and refused to take questions. The statement said lawyers hired by Entergy to conduct an “independent internal investigation” found Entergy officials didn’t lie to regulators about the supposedly nonexistent leaky pipe. (Translation: “We’re not dishonest, we’re incompetent. Can we please keep running a nuke in your state?”)

The snow flew all through the day, heavy flakes that accumulated like wet cement. Town meeting, our annual exercise in direct democracy, is next Tuesday and we always seem to get a blizzard within a week of town meeting.

Inside the statehouse, a holiday atmosphere reigned. Some two hundred supporters of closing Vermont Yankee crowded the halls. Entergy Louisiana had trucked in 50 plant workers the day before, but none we present for the actual debate. Off looking for the leaks, I suppose. A public gallery runs the perimeter of the Senate chamber. Citizens sit so close, they can reach out and tap legislators on the shoulder.

Extra police officers were in the halls to help with crowd control, but environmental organizers kept everyone headed where they needed go. I saw one police officer cooing to a year-old baby who had a “Retire Vermont Yankee as Planned” sticker on her snugli. A delegation of Russian citizens on a cultural exchange passed through the crowd with their interpreter. Their eyes were wide in amazement. Doesn’t look like this back home, does it folks?

The final vote – 26 to 4 – is in keeping with conversations I’ve had with fellow Vermonters in the last few years. Most people know the time for nuclear power is past and look forward to a renewable energy future. A few people disagree, are dug in and put out that they constitute such a small minority. It’s OK, they’ll get over it. We’ll welcome them back. It’s Vermont, after all. We’ll be living together for the rest of our lives.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

It’s strange her husband told reporters he didn’t know she had a gun – until he remembered he’d accompanied her to a shooting range several times in recent weeks.

It’s strange the Bishops were questioned in a 1993 case in which a bomb was planted in one of their Harvard professor’s houses. (No one was ever charged with a crime in connection with the incident.)

It’s very strange that Ms. Bishop’s brother died of a shotgun blast 1986, a blast delivered by Ms. Bishop. The official story (until this week, that is) was the shooting was an accident. This was Ms. Bishop’s story, corroborated by her mother. Ms. Bishop supposedly was trying to unload the weapon, with which she was unfamiliar, when it went off – once into a wall, once into a ceiling and once into her brother. He died of the wound.

It’s strange that she then ran down the street with the shotgun, pointing it at drivers, apparently trying to hijack their cars. She was arrested and taken to the police station in her hometown of Braintree, Massachusetts for booking.

While that process was underway, Police Chief John Polio called the station and ordered Ms. Bishop released. Apparently, Ms. Bishop’s mother was a member of the town’s police personnel committee and called Mr. Polio for assistance.

Releasing someone who is at least a “person of interest” in a fatal shooting did not sit well with officers on the force, but the chief’s the chief, so Ms. Bishop was released to her mother’s custody. Apparently, Chief Polio told officers Ms. Bishop was “too emotional” to be interviewed and she would be questioned when she’d calmed down.

I used to be a police reporter and I have to say, I’ve never heard of police granting anyone a “cool down” period before questioning. (“Sarge, let’s let this fellow have a few hours to gather his thoughts. We want a nice, level playing field when we ask him questions. Wouldn’t want him to making contradictory statements or anything.”)

Ms. Bishop was given 11 days (!) to cool and eventually, her brother’s death was ruled an accident and everyone forgot about it – perhaps even during the 1993 Harvard bomb investigation – until Ms. Bishop (allegedly!) shot six people, killing three.

The case of Amy Bishop is strange indeed. What’s not strange is that kid-glove treatment is given to educated, politically connected white people. Can you imagine an African-American male wanted for questioning in a shotgun death being released to his mom for a “cool down” period?

In another Boston suburb last summer, educated, wealthy, politically connected African-American Henry Louis Gates was arrested after being found inside his own home. He was, by all accounts, agitated when he was accosted by the police officer. He was not given a “cool down” period. His mother was not called. He was taken away in handcuffs and charged, although the charges were later dropped.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department decided no federal charges will be brought against the five New York City police officers who fired 50 bullets into a car carrying Sean Bell, killing Mr. Bell on what was to have been his wedding day in 2006. Two men in the car with Mr. Bell were injured. None of the men in the car were armed.

No state charges were brought against the officers. They may be subject to internal department sanctions, but that possibility is currently unclear.

The only “cool down” period Mr. Bell received was in the morgue.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

At one house, the father answered and said his family was eating dinner, which was usually a reason to send me away. Instead, he invited me to the table and asked if we could have a conversation about the environment with his wife and sons. It was one of those experiences that made the job worth while.

Better still, the elder son – Tony – came and canvassed for me the following summer. He was 17 years old, tall with a big jaw and glasses. He was a bit dorky and it was clear he had not yet accommodated himself to his new size. He was like a colt learning to run. Tony was not the best canvasser in the office that summer, but I took particular pleasure watching his progress. Although I was 27 (it seemed old at the time), I took an avuncular interest in him. It was like watching a coming-of-age movie.

Through the years, I’ve told Tony’s story at gatherings where canvassers and ex-canvassers meet. “Did you hear about the time, I canvassed this house and came away with a canvasser?” I was always proud of that.

On the evening of Martin Luther King Day in DC, I was attending an event and ran into Tony’s parents, Sam and Karabelle. I introduced myself and launched into my story about Tony. As I did, I watched emotions flicker over their faces, like a breeze across the surface of a pond. Wrapping up, I said, “He was such a great kid. What’s he up to now?”

Sam swallowed and said, “Tony died… in an automobile accident…. In 1995.” I expressed my shock and condolence and then they proceeded to tell me about the rest of Tony’s life.

A computer prodigy, he programmed his first machine at age 10. By 14, he volunteered for CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, getting their software sorted at the height of the civil war and oppression in that country. By 17, he was working for me and soon after departed for MIT, where he pushed forward the boundary of software design.

His parents say Tony’s interest lay in open-source software. If you’re not familiar with the term, open-source software is developed and shared without regard to copyrights and royalties. Because it is held in the public domain, anyone can access it (and improve on it) for free. It’s a technological return to the concept of the village common, where all share and all benefit. Tony’s parents said he firmly believed in the power of technology to better the lives of people everywhere, not to line the pockets of a handful of entrepreneurs. As Steve Jobs launches another product designed to get consumers to shell out hundreds of dollars to Apple for a “content delivery device,” I realize again how much we lose when people like Tony die before their time.

Tony graduated from MIT, moved to California and met his fatal accident. He lives on through the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, awarded annually. It’s a fitting tribute. Please pass news about the prize along to the technically proficient. I’d be honored if I indirectly helped a worthy candidate find the prize.

The pain on Karabelle and Sam’s faces was clear as we spoke. Fifteen years after Tony’s death, it was clear my words brought it rushing back to the surface. At the same time, there was immense love and pride. I could see how much it meant to them to have a face come from the crowd and have a stranger recall Tony with affection. We would all be fortunate to be so remembered.

I searched for something appropriate to say. A phrase by the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz came to mind, so I spoke it: “The quality of a life is not measured by its length.”

© Mark Floegel, 2010

From the stereo in the coffee shop, I heard Professor Longhair whistling “Big Chief” and was reminded that Carnival season has begun. Carnival, which some people think is limited to Mardi Gras, is one of the oldest human rituals. Historian Karen Armstrong traces its history back to the Babylonian creation story.

In that story, the gods overcame the Earth’s initial chaos and established order. In the Babylonian springtime as the Earth was renewed after winter, the gods (and the king) had to annually reassert their power, so the king was symbolically dethroned, chaos (in the form of unfettered celebration) reigned and in the end the king (and gods) were re-throned and order was restored.

Quaint, isn’t it? Little of this remains in our society today. Christian syncretists took over the holiday and changed its meaning two millennia ago. (“Carnival” is derived from the Latin carne vale or “farewell to meat,” a reference to meatless fasting imposed during Lent.)

That the meaning of a given ritual should change over time is inevitable. There’s no point mourning about that, but it’s disappointing that what was once Carnival has devolved – at least in the US – into an occasion for public inebriation, the display of certain body parts (you know which ones I mean) and the distribution of cheap plastic beads.

On another hand, consider what unfolds in Haiti, a nation with a long history of celebrating Carnival. There are no celebrations this year. Instead, the Babylonian creation story is enacted before our eyes or perhaps it’s the Haitian re-creation story. Chaos reigns. Looting, rape, murder, fights over the few scraps of food available. What goes down on Bourbon Street are pale vestiges of the real thing occurring now in Port-au-Prince. It’s horrible to see and more horrible to know no god or king will arrive in four weeks to restore order. (Here’s a 60 Minutes piece on what doctors there struggle with.)

Pat Robertson, in his widely broadcast ignorance, ascribed the torture of the Haitian people to a pact made with the devil two hundred years ago. Just as no god will descend from the sky to make things right in Haiti, so it is that no supernatural demon caused the misery there now. Which is not to say that the Haitians are not victims of the agents of evil.

Throughout its history of European occupation Haiti’s natives were first wiped out, then replaced with African slaves. They threw off their shackles 200 years ago (which Mr. Robertson thinks was the devil’s work), but life has not been easy there since. Haiti has long been the “away” in the phrase “throw away.” It’s where we take our waste, where we exploit the poor there for their labor and natural resources. The western hemisphere has used and discarded Haiti a dozen times.

Gods and kings are in Haiti’s past. If they are to recreate their world, they will need our help. If we choose to help Haiti, we choose to help ourselves, because their world is our world.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Many groups are sending aid to Haiti. Two of the most effective are Partners in Health, which has been serving the medical needs of poor Haitians for 25 years. Another is Doctors Without Borders. The Greenpeace vessel Esperanza is now shuttling supplies into rural areas for DWB, as we did in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and in Samoa in 2009. Money donated to these groups goes right where it’s needed most.

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

Two stories in Wednesday’s Washington Post: The first was about Father Tim Jones, an Anglican priest at the parish of St. Lawrence in York, England. From the pulpit last Sunday, Fr. Tim said shoplifting is not a sin, if the act was caused by need instead of greed. He encouraged his parishioners – should they need to shoplift – to do it from big chain stores and not a locally–owned mom-and-pop store and to not take more than they absolutely need to get by.

The sermon generated plenty of attention, much of critical. Archdeacon Richard Seed promptly rejected Fr. Tim’s point of view on the Anglican Church’s website and has called Fr. Tim in on the carpet.

Fr. Tim says the frenzy misses the main point of the sermon. “The point I’m making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one,” he said

“What I’m against is the way society has become ever more comfortable with the people at the very bottom, and blinded to their needs,” Fr. Tim said. Among the classes of justified shoplifters, he said, are people who are legally entitled to government welfare benefits but have the benefits delayed for bureaucratic reasons.

Twelve years ago, another Anglican priest in the UK, John Papworth, told the BBC that shoplifting from corporations is not immoral, because corporations are not people and therefore cannot be sinned against. Mr. Papworth was expelled from the Church of England for his remarks. We’ll see how Fr. Tim fares.

In the case of each priest, many tongue-tsking critics take pains to note that shoplifting raise prices for all of us, in that corporations pass their losses along to the consumer. As it was 12 years ago, it’s worth noting that corporations pass along the cost of obscene executive salaries and bonuses or the price of corporate misfeasance and malfeasance. We hear more grumbling about these costs today than we did in the go-go 90s, but no change looms on the horizon. The Post also reported Wednesday that employees who promised to give back their bonuses at taxpayer-rescued AIG, in fact did not.

On this side of the pond, a Roman Catholic priest at St. Michael parish in Garden City, South Carolina won $100,000 for his parish building fund in a poker tournament. The priest, Fr. Andrew Trapp, missed the million-dollar first prize in the tournament, but came out ahead for his parish nonetheless. The AP story about Fr. Andrew noted that he also entered the tourney to “strike a public relations blow for priests.”

Fr. Andrew, at 28 the youngest priest in the statewide diocese of Charleston, received permission from both his pastor and his bishop before entering the tournament. He wore his roman collar throughout and was filmed saying mass for the final episode of the televised tournament. Even with Fr. Andrew’s 100 large, the building fund is still $1 million short of it’s $5 million goal.

Fr. Andrew compared the tournament to being on a game show. Instead of answering trivia questions, he played cards. He said his talent for card playing is a gift from God that he uses for good purposes. Fr. Andrew says gambling – in moderation – is not a vice. Apparently, the numbers 100,000 and 1,000,000 fall within Fr. Andrew’s (and his superiors’) definition of moderation.

But it’s Christmas Eve, when we celebrate the birth of a child – in a barn, to an unwed mother. I wonder about that barn. Did Joseph and Mary have permission to be there or were they squatting? The crèches we see this time of year look very staid and pious, but I think the real thing was dirty and drafty and sweaty and bloody. Joseph – according to Hebrew law – should have been nowhere near the place, since Mary, having just given birth, was considered unclean.

Joseph, however, had already stepped outside the law, by refusing to turn his fiancée, pregnant by someone else, over to the authorities for stoning. Within days of the birth, the whole family would be running off to exile in Egypt.

Their child, Jesus, was no great heeder of statutes, unsurprising, given his patrimony. He was called out because his followers were caught working on the Sabbath and he himself got arrested for causing a ruckus in the temple in Jerusalem.

Christmas week and two priests are in the news – one praised for gambling for a new church, one punished for his ah… innovative method for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

God bless us, every one.

© Mark Floegel, 2009

P.S. – By the way, Wednesday’s Post also reported that the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, approves of the Simpsons. And if you’re still in the Hanukkah spirit, there’s now a professional dreidel league.