The Joyful/Happy Dichotomy and Symantic Theology

In our Wednesday night Bible class, we are looking at a video series based on the Dallas Willard book The Divine Conspiracy. In the series, Willard is "interviewed" about his concepts by author and preacher John Ortberg. At one point in the conversation, Ortberg asks Willard about a statement in his book in which Willard describes looking at a beautiful beach in South Africa, realizing that God sees every beautiful thing in his creation at once, and suddenly feeling very happy for God. Ortberg points out that we don't often think about God as "happy," maybe joyful, but not happy. Willard replies by saying "what else would you expect joy to look like?" He goes on to suggest that perhaps joy and happiness aren't the same thing (a common modern Christian teaching) but that God is certainly happy with what he has made, even if there are parts of it (humans) that don't behave as he would like them to.

Of course, this opened the door for me to rant about how much I hate the teaching that "joy and happiness are not the same thing." We ran out of time and I didn't get to explain it (which I intend to do here), so I opened a can of worms that we didn't get to explore. I only got to explain that I can't stand this oft repeated Christian phraseology because it doesn't mean anything. These two words are in fact synonymous and our separation of "joy" and "happiness" into separate concepts is a semantic trick. Here's why I think so.

In popular Christianity, we have developed and taught the idea that joy and happiness are separate things. We base this on the [well grounded] assumption that "happiness" is an emotion and thus contingent upon circumstance. This is true, as far as I can tell. The issue, then, is what we do with the concept of joy. What is our working definition of this concept? The answer to the question "what is joy?" is always much more nebulous. It's apparently something more permanent, based on our relationship with God, and much deeper than fickle emotions. Thus, we can have "joy" even when we are not "happy." I am not at all satisfied with this definition. It's meaningless. And so, in my opinion, is a realistic distinction between these words. So where does such a distinction come from?

Our problem with equating "joy" with "happiness," and our subsequent desire to invent a distinction between the terms comes from our cognitive dissonance regarding versus like James 1:2. Here, James writes to the Jewish Christians scattered throughout the empire and tells them, "consider is pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know the testing of your faith develops perseverance." Paul writes some similar things in his letters. We look at versus like this one, where we are being told to be joyful about trials, mistreatment, and suffering, and such commandments don't make sense to us. How could God expect us to be "happy" about suffering? So, rather than acknowledge that God asks us to do things which are hard, we invent this dichotomy. He tells us, not to be "happy," but to have "joy," and these are different things--even if we can't quite really describe how they're different.

In fact, this dichotomous understanding of these two concepts does not extend into any other context. That is to say, in none of our conversations, save for this topic alone, do we use these two words as if they are different things. When we refer to a joyous occasion, we are always talking about a happy occasion. We mean a wedding, not a funeral. When we think of "making a joyful noise," no one thinks about Barber's Adagio for Strings. Even scripture does not bear out this separation of concepts. John compares his feelings about the beginning of Jesus's ministry to a friend who is "full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice" (John 3.29). When the pregnant Mary enters Elizabeth's house, an unborn John "leaps for joy" (Luke 1.44). The Book of Acts describes Samaria as being full of "great joy" (8.8) at the healing of paralytics and cripples. All of these examples describe happiness. Such examples go on and on. So, even within the New Testament, happiness and joy are usually synonymous.

In fact, if we think about the people who we think of as being "filled with joy," we think of the people who always have a smile or encouraging word--in other words, people who appear to be happy, even when bad things are going on in their lives. So, happiness may not be joy, necessarily, but happiness is indeed the mark of joy.

The explanation for James's teaching, to me, is that indeed Christians can be happy, even in the midst of tribulation. Certainly, this seems unnatural and maybe even unfair. But remember that everything about Christianity asks us to behave differently than how the world would expect us to. But how can such a thing be possible? Emotions are natural reactions, and cannot therefore be inherently wrong. How can we be commanded to be "happy" about terrible things?

I think the answer, perhaps, lies in the person of Paul, a person who often talks about joy in hardship. In the Second Letter to the Corinthian church, Paul says to the church:

I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged: in all our troubles, my joy knows no bounds. For when we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn--conflicts on the outside, fears within. But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him. He told us about your longing for me, your deep sorrow, your ardent concern for me, so that my joy was greater than ever. (2 Cor 7.4-7)

When Paul tells them that "in all our troubles, my joy knows no bounds," I do not think he intends to say that he is happy about his troubles, But I do think he intends to say that even during these troubles he remains happy. He is indeed referring to his emotional state. He goes on to explain how such a thing can be possible. Certainly, nothing about being harassed, being involved in conflicts, and being afraid makes one "happy." But, when the church at Corinth heard about this problems, their love for him spurred them into action. First they loved Titus. Then they sent Titus with ovations of love for Paul. Paul learned that they hurt for him, longed for him, loved him. And their expressions of love made his "joy greater than ever." I do believe that when Paul refers to "joy" here, he is expressing a feeling of happiness--the emotional stuff that's supposed to be separate and different than "joy." See, the trials themselves did not make Paul happy, but in the midst of these trials, Paul found something to be happy about.

The reason we as Christian should be able to find happiness even during struggles is that we are to see the world in fundamentally different ways than does the world. So we can indeed be "happy" when James tells us to be joyful of our trials. Because these trials means that God is planning to use us for something. And that's pretty cool--something to be actually emotionally moved by. Something to be happy about. And the love that our brothers and sisters show for us in our struggles is something to be happy about. Certainly, responding to trials with happiness is unnatural. Such responses take training. And I don't think this training comes from giving ourselves permission to be unhappy even while giving ourselves credit for being joyful. Instead, such training comes through intentionally looking at our trials and searching for what God is doing through them.

Inasmuch as we often use the word "joy" to mean something more like "peace" when we espouse the teaching I'm critiquing here, I am comfortable in saying that there may indeed be a slight difference in these concepts of "happiness" and "joy." When I say that I hate this teaching and that I think it's nonsense, I am admittedly being a bit hyperbolical. But it is true, and vitally important to understand, that if these are different things, than one is necessarily the fruit of the other. Those who possess joy will be happy, and they will often show happiness when the world would not expect them to, when they would in fact have permission to be unhappy. So, if joy and happiness are different, they nevertheless belong together.

Because I'm (sort of) a Rhetorician Who Was Once a Music Major

Several weeks ago, this digital poster made the rounds especially among my artsy, hipster friends. Of course, graduate school ruined me so that I can't look at anything without performing a miniature Toulmin analysis, so I quickly analyzed this poster, questioned it's assumptions, and filed it away in my brain to deal with it later. Well, it's later. I won't do a line by line Toulmin analysis here, because it wouldn't be particularly interesting, but I will address the implicit argument of this digital poster and the assumptions on which such an argument relies.

The argument itself is relatively straight forward. The poster first shows lyrics from the song "The Way You Look Tonight" which, if the adjacent photo denotes authorship, it mistakenly attributes to Frank Sinatra (the song was written by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields and originally performed by Fred Astaire for the 1936 film Swing Time. Sinatra recorded a version in 1964, by which time the song was considered a standard.) Underneath these lyrics, the poster lists the much less interesting, highly reductive (dare I say, stupid) lyrics of Justin Bieber's "Baby." Underneath these lyrics, in the popular style of the (de)motivational poster, is the line, "Music, w..what HAPPENED!?"

The argument here is easy to discern. Music (judged by lyrics) was at one time rich, complex, and good. Now, it's simplistic, stupid, and bad.

This claim presents as its grounds the lyrics of these two songs. Of course, this is a digital poster, so it has little time for a nuanced portrayal of the music of these two eras (either the 30s or the 60s depending on if the poster intends the actual song, or the Sinatra remake, and the early 21st century). A complete historical picture of these two eras obviously cannot fit onto a digital poster. The claim of this poster, then, relies on the assumption that each of these songs is representative of its era. The quality of each era can, therefore, be judged based on the quality of each of these songs.

This assumption is relatively easy to attack. After all, it relies on the related assumption that ridiculous lyrics, like those of the Bieber song, did not appear in songs of the earlier era. Such a claim disregards lyrics like these from the Johnny Mercer song "I'm an Old Cowhand" (also remade by Sinatra):

I know all the songs that the cowboys know
'bout the big corral where the dogies go
'cause I learned them all on the rad-ee-o
Hey, yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay
Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay

Furthermore, this assumption suggests that our current era does not include lyrics of more sophistication that the Bieber song, thus discounting lyrics like those of Anna Nalick:

Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, girl
So cradle your head in your hands

In other words, in order to support the claim of this poster, the author relies on a biased sample, a logical fallacy in which the arguer makes generalizations which cannot be supported by the evidence provided because they are purposefully biased.

Furthermore, claims like the one made by this digital poster tend to discount one very important aspect of history--that is, history will ultimately remember the things that were the best of the era. Every church in the Baroque era large enough to hire one had a church composer and organist. But they didn't all become Johann Sebastian Bach. Indeed, an extraordinary majority of them, though they may have been popular at the time, have been forgotten by history. We remember Bach because he was the best of the era. The same has been true of the music of the 1930s and will be true of current music as well. It is, therefore, inappropriate to compare the relatively banal lyrics of one particular Justin Bieber song to the songs that have survived because they held some quality that made them classic, and use this comparison as evidence of some kind of devolution of music.

Claims like the one made in this poster ultimately belong to the narrative of the "golden age." Such narratives are often presented for rhetorical reasons by folks who wish to show that their own generation had it right and that "kids these days" have it all wrong, or by people who wish to show that they are aware that things used be be better and that their awareness of this fact makes them more sophisticated than others of their own generation. In other words, there is an element of pop-culture elitism inherent in these arguments. To the careful observer, however, these arguments do not show the sophistication of the arguer, but rather, the arguers historical ignorance, or at the very least, the arguers abuse of rhetorical strategy.

Parenting 2.0

In case you haven't seen it, the video above was posted on February 8th by an angry father in an attempt to discipline his daughter for posting a nasty "letter" to her parents on Facebook on and his video has quickly gone viral. A dozen or so of my friends have shared it on facebook, it's been blogged half to death, and it even appeared on my MSN home page for much of the day. It features a father reading the ranting letter of his daughter's (which she thought she had blocked from her family and church), then shooting the laptop computer the family owns for her to use.

As the video has gone viral, many have congratulated this father for punishing an ungrateful child, while others have been vocally angry about his public punishment. I choose, here, to theorize about the situation, and what it means to parent in the digital age (and in digital format).

Though most (well, all) of my friends who have shared this video were congratulatory toward this father and his innovative punishment, I was initially worried. The very public nature of this punishment worried me (*though, to disclaim, I'll say: keep reading.). I have serious concerns about the highly public nature of this father's punishment.

When young people post videos about each other, we classify it as cyber-bullying. We know that one of the aspects of cyber-bullying that makes it so dangerous is its highly public nature. Information placed on the internet can spread very quickly, and the written/recorded nature of this information gives it an appearance of permanence. And though, realistically, what is said about or to another person on the internet may be quickly lost in the fast-paced, instantaneous flow of information on the web, for an adolescent, it feels as though everyone has seen it and it will never go away.

For these reasons, I have grave concerns over the appropriateness of this father disciplining his daughter in such a public way. As adolescents, we all said things and behaved in ways that we would later realize were immature. In fact, the things that she says in her letter are exactly the things many of us were in trouble for saying when we were adolescents. And, looking back, we are embarrassed by our own behavior. In this case, this daughter's embarrassing mistakes were made incredibly public. Millions of people she does not know are calling her ungrateful, citing her as an example of what's wrong with "kids these days" and congratulating her father for disciplining her.

Of course, embarrassment can be a powerful disciplinary tool. My dad used to tell us a story about how his father punished him when he was caught shoplifting by shaving his head. He hated it, and his girlfriend, who loved his longish flowing hair, broke up with him over it. Of course, we have all seen the pictures of kids whose parents make them hold signs proclaiming themselves as shoplifters. My favorite is of a kid who "wants to go to prison to be with daddy."

In fact, in a response to people questioning why he would punish his daughter so publicly, the father said that he was raised this way:

If I did something embarrassing to my parents in public (such as a grocery store) I got my tail tore up right there in front of God and everyone, right there in the store.

The difference, though, is that these describe very local forms of embarrassment. Most of the people who saw my dad's hair cut knew him. In this case, this daughter's punishment is on display to millions. For millions she has become an example of a typical, ungrateful teenager. The folks sharing links to this video, arguing about it in comments sections and on blogs (like this one. . .) do not know this girl--they do not know her other weaknesses or her strengths. Instead, she is a dehumanized and disembodied "example" of what's wrong with this generation.

Of course, to disclaim this entire conversation, she is reportedly good-natured about the whole situation. Her father was surprised that the video went viral (he expected only her facebook friends to see it) and, when it did, he had to talk with her about the attention it had received and what they should expect now. According to her father, they have read many of the responses to the video, laughing at the predictions that she would "commit suicide, commit a gun-related crime, become a drug addict, drop out of school, get pregnant on purpose, and become a stripper because she’s too emotionally damaged now to be a productive member of society." Her surprisingly good attitude probably says less about the validity or invalidity of this form of punishment than it does about the relationship between this man and his daughter.

So, a case like this one ought to cause us to begin to theorize what it means to parent in the digital age. Since digital environments have become as important in our lives as physical environments, the policing of rules of etiquette, social norms, and appropriate behavior is also important. This means that parenting will happen in, or at least regarding, these environments. So how do we do this? There has been a great deal of conversation about what we must teach our children about the internet, but little thought about what and whether we teach them on the internet. Where are the lines of appropriate behavior when it comes to parenting and interacting with our children in digital spaces? Is the digital world a place that offers us new innovative ways to parent, or just another dimension in which to screw them up?

A Cop Reviews a Cop Play

It rained all night in Oklahoma City the night after Thanksgiving. This was bad news to me because my partner and I had agreed to do a ride-along for Ben Hall and Mike Waugh, two local actors performing in Carpenter Square's production of "A Steady Rain," a play about two Chicago cops. We regretfully warned Ben and Mike that rain usually slows us down. I had hoped we would spend the shift beating the bushes, talking to the prostitutes and pimps who frequent our sector, and looking into the dilapidated low-rent housing of the inner city (in neighborhoods remarkably similar to south Chicago). Along the way, I thought we would have plenty of time to tell Mike and Ben about the both the triumphs and the frustrations of big city police work. So I was disappointed that the rain threatened to derail that.

We did manage to show the guys a few things. Mike (who rode with me) got to talk to a couple of meth addicts and, through talking about then hearing reference to a notable ghetto figure called "Mama K," he got a picture of the interesting close-knit networking of the city's underbelly. He also watched a creative arrest. Perhaps most importantly, since the play takes place in a summer when it rained non-stop in Chicago, the guys got to think about what unrelenting rain might be like to guys who spend entire nights in a car.

I don't know how much the ride-alongs helped Ben and Mike. But I hope they were able to take away some lessons about how cops live, think, and act in a world defined by grey. I've always thought that the hallmark of inner-city police work is the often fuzzy lines between the good guys and bad guys, legal and illegal, aggressive and abusive. The officer's primary struggle comes in negotiating this grey. And whether one ends up as a good cop or a bad one depends in large part on where he ends up when he's passed through a grey deeper than the rainiest Chicago twilight.

It is capturing this grey that Keith Huff did so well in crafting this very rich script. Both characters, Joey and Denny, are both quite good and also very bad. As Linda McDonald, the director and my former teacher, mentor, and friend, explained to me after I saw the show last Friday, "both characters are likable in their own way. But one of them loses his soul and the other finds it."

Indeed, as a city cop myself (a good one, I hope), I saw myself in both these characters. I appreciated Joey's (Ben Hall) heart. He is a cop who wants to do it right, despite a crippling addiction. And when Denny (Mike Waugh) railed against the seemingly illogical unfairness of the police department, I found it hard to keep from shouting out loud, "damn right!" even when I knew that he had brought his situation on himself. These character were both good cops, and bad cops--they were also both incredibly human characters whose stories were tragic and heartfelt. Of course, as anyone would when watching a play about their profession, I thought the script got some things wrong. But it rose well above the typical cop-movie stereotypes that Huff intentionally subverts.

Mike and Ben handled these characters with remarkable aplomb. Ben's narrative delivery is often lyrical and always empathetic. Mike (who I had seen in The Goat: or Who is Sylvia) was superb playing Denny, a character who can be hateful, but who the audience must ultimately love. They work well together as well, a difficult task when one considers that they must play characters who have been "best friends since kindergarten."

I am a former professional actor, failed playwright, and professional police officer and, thus, likely the most difficult audience this play could have had. And I was very impressed. I empathized and commiserated with these characters, and I have spent the last three days since thinking about the script. And that's what I like in a play.

"A Steady Rain" runs at CST through February 4th. Go see it.

What Toothbrushes Taught Me About Ways of Seeing

Since our boys were brand new, we have organized things by color in order to keep straight what belongs to which kid. The phrase "Blue is for Beckett," has been a mantra in our house for the last two and a half years. When they were newborns, we would dress Beckett in blue so that others knew which kid was which. Though we have pretty much dropped color coding their clothing (Beckett, as it turns out, likes much brighter colors), we still use this to organize items that they should not share.

Beckett's milk cup is still blue because Aodan needs lactose free milk, so the coloring helps us keep the two types of milk separate. We also keep their toothbrushes separated by color. Blue is for Beckett. But we recently learned that even this simple system is not fool-proof. Even something as seemingly straight forward as color scheme is, as it turns out, subject to interpretation.

I learned this when we were both in the bathroom at the same time while I was brushing the boys' teeth. Charissa said something like, "oh, you switched their tooth brushes. I guess it doesn't matter." Of course, I hadn't. I was using the blue toothbrush to brush Beckett's teeth, so I replied, "blue is for Beckett." I then learned that she thought the other toothbrush was the blue one. We had been using opposite toothbrushes the entire time we've had this set. She is not, by the way, color blind. Nor am I. But we saw these two toothbrushes very differently, obviously.

Every geeky kid with an existential streak will remember the moment when he began to wonder whether or not people really do see colors the same way. What if what I see as blue, you see as red? We would never know that what we saw was different because we would both always call what we were seeing blue. This is the kind of question that is interesting from a theoretical perspective but that really doesn't matter much. As long as we consistently call that color blue, it doesn't really matter what it looks like to us, we can still communicate about the color consistently. But what was happening here was something different.

When I asked Charissa what she saw when she looked at these toothbrushes, she said that the one on the left was a green toothbrush with blue trim, and the one on the right was a blue toothbrush with purple trim. This is because the bases and the very tops of these toothbrushes are green and blue, respectively.

But I see these completely differently. I see the long necks on these toothbrushes and the fats parts on the handles, so I see them as blue (on the left) and purple (on the right). So, though we both see the same colors, we define which color is predominant, and thus definitive, in different ways.

This hints at a fundamental difference in the way my wife and I see things. What I see as trim, or background noise, she sees as defining characteristics. From my perspective, it seems like she sees a negative image of the same world I see. What's unimportant to me, is definitive to her.

Of course, to what extent our way of seeing toothbrushes is analogous to our ways of seeing the rest of the world is not settled. But the lesson here is still an interesting one. My wife and I, despite sharing our lives together, and despite the fact that we agree on most things and have an extraordinary number of things in common, see the world through different eyes, and may perceive it completely differently.

And ultimately, we name things according to how we see them. We see things according to how we define their characteristics. So, which characteristics we see as important--as definitive--has everything to do with how we name the world.

This Thanksgiving, Are We Celebrating Cooperation or Genocide

Anyone at least my age remembers participating in Thanksgiving Day pageants in elementary school. In these pageants, some of us would dress like pilgrims, some like Indians (always an inaccurate term, now a distasteful one too), and some would even dress as turkeys. We would sing songs and perform little skits which all designed reinforce the American mythos of a cooperative relationship between Native Americans and early settlers of the "New World." Though the holiday (which was made an official by Abraham Lincoln, undoubtedly for political purposes) had been intended to celebrate the cooperation between the Plymouth Colony and the Wapanoag tribe, the holiday was often connected to Christopher Columbus who we were always taught had "discovered" the New World. In fact, in Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the same day the U.S. celebrated Columbus Day.

Of course, this myth has come under fire in the past couple decades as well meaning folks have asked whether or not we ought to be celebrating the fact that an imperialist European force crossed an ocean and subdued a continent full of people. For this reason, I was surprised to see my sons come home from day care the other day with construction paper headdresses rather like the ones I remember making for our Thanksgiving pageants. Of course, I also noticed that the headdresses were altered from those that I remember, as if they were hiding what they were. Instead of cutouts of feathers, the headdresses were adorned with cutouts of hand prints in yellow, green, and blue. They combined feathers with our old technique of drawing turkeys.

These, along with the general spirit of the season got me thinking. How should well meaning people view Thanksgiving? How should we view our early history as a nation? Were we heroes in search of religious freedom, or wicked imperialists bent to grabbing as much land as we could, at the expense of those who already lived here? Is either of these views accurate or fair?

Certainly, the myths of my childhood are inadequate. It will not do for me to celebrate Columbus (since we have connected these events in our perception of cultural history) for discovering a "New World." How can this be when millions of people already lived here. To do so requires that we take a decidedly Euro-centric view of history. Only Europeans matter, and only their exploits are worthy of history.

But might the other extreme be lacking as well? Should I refuse to celebrate the crimes against humanity perpetrated by those Imperialist Europeans from whom I descended and who are ultimately responsible for my being here? I would argue that this view also involves assumptions that are both Euro-centric and inaccurate.

This view, in most of its forms, seems to assume a benevolent population of Native Americans who were bewildered by a European understanding of land ownership and who were ultimately overcome by superior force. This view positions European settlers as pirates (Vonnegut used this term explicitly) but it also seems to position Native Americans as romantically naive, almost childish people who lived off the land, to which they believed they belonged.

This view is every bit as racist as the first. It ignores the richly complex sociopolitical milieu of the Native American tribes living on the east coast in the seventeenth century. It ignores the complex relationship and the history of the relationship between early settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Wapanoags, the tribe if the "first" Thanksgiving.

A well nuanced explanation of the history of early settlers and their relationship to those people already living in the Massachusetts Bay area can be found in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower. His book provides wonderful historical insight as to how the events we talk about at Thanksgiving actually occurred, who the people involved were, and what their relationship was like. Through this book, we gain a better sense of what we ought to regret, and what we ought to celebrate.

The first generations of settlers at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were far from being conquistadors looking for cities of gold. Instead, they were half-inept sailors sick and weary from a long voyage. They might have resembled illegal immigrants who have just crossed the Arizona desert more than a well armed force of confident Europeans. For their part, the Native Americans living in New England were certainly not romantic nomads quietly living off the land. Instead, they were farmers in permanent settlements. They lived on close proximity to other tribes and were thus politically savvy, engaging in land disputes and forging treaties, much like those is crowded Europe.

When colonists first arrived on Massachusetts Bay, they were hardly conquerors ready to subdue a bunch of disorganized natives. In fact, it seems likely that, had the Wapanoags wanted to, they could have pushed the settlers back into the sea. When fighting did begin to break out, it was localized. The first (and most important) major conflict came with King Philip's war, decades after the settling of Plymouth. Philbrick describes the ultimate cause of the war in this way:

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century. . .the attitudes of of many of the Indians and English had begun to change [from that of a spirit of cooperation and cohabitation]. . .Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This first war was much more evenly matched that one might assume. By this point, Native Americans had been able to acquire the same weapons as the settlers, and King Philip (the English name adopted by Metacomet, sachem of the Pokanokets) was well educated and often dressed in expensive clothing he bought in Boston. On the other side, one of the chief agitators (perhaps accidentally) of the war was a Harvard educated Native American Christian named John Sassamon.

The point is, The breakdown of diplomacy between early settlers and Native Americans was hardly a one sided affair, and it is hardly accurate to think of early settlers as marauding invaders sacking the villages of unsuspecting natives. Instead, two groups who had one lived in cooperation had begun to want to push the other out. So, with a more nuanced view of how things really were, how are we to think about and celebrate Thanksgiving?

Without a doubt, the policies of the young United States toward Native Americans was deplorable. The evils of the White Man's Burden, western expansion, and so on should not be minimized, and certainly should not be celebrated. And it may be impossible to separate entirely these travesties from our early history as settlers. But the spirit of cooperation between Native Americans and settlers which allowed Plymouth to survive can and should be remembered and celebrated. As Philbrick points out:

For a nation that that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

Without a doubt, much of the history that follows these first years is tragic and shameful. As greed and hatred are common to all mankind, tragedy and shame mar all of human history, not just that of this country. But this first generation of settlers shared with us the dream of a cooperative utopia, and though they were sick and poor, that dream was very nearly realized because two groups who did not know each other, could not speak the same language, and had no reason to trust one another nevertheless shared with one another. Thanksgiving, then, may and should still be celebrated as a picture of what could have been--a picture of what still may be.

Brecht, Alienation, Reality TV

I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.

When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.

European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.

Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to
communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote

The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.

The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.

So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?

I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.

Actor and Audience:
In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.

Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.

Space:
The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.

In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.

Un-Alienation
This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.

The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.

In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.

The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."

The Hands-in-Pocket Revolution

Last night, Charissa and I sent our boys off to their grandparents' for the weekend, so we spent a night on the town. We went downtown for chocolates and coffee then decided to take a stroll to see the OKC National Memorial because Charissa had never seen it at night. On the way, we were surprised to see a large group of people in a downtown park, which is usually home to a number of homeless. But this looked like a rally. Complete with a News 9 van. So seeing some Bricktown police officers I know, we went and asked what was going on.

Turns out, the Occupy Wall Street movement had come to Oklahoma City. So, in front of me were a group of well meaning revolutionaries wanting to voice their concern that the wealth of this country was in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.

This is a obviously not a new complaint, and it's a concern that I should be careful to note here that I share. I think it's appropriate to ask whether or not a democracy where so much power is held by so few can be a democracy at all. When small groups of people hold the money, and therefore the power to make their voices heard, the rest must either agree with them or be silenced. This is obviously a huge problem in a democracy, and one that I think is a political reality in our country. I think it's fair to ask if our democracy isn't something more like an oligarchy.

I also sympathize with the complaint that wealth is not spread more equitably. So few have so much, while so many have so little. This is and always has been a reality in our world. But the problem seems somehow more insidious in a country in which hard work is supposed to be the key to success, where our own national mythos holds that if one simply works as hard as one can, one can and will rise. Of course, for many, this is simply untrue. For the uneducated, the poor, the handicapped, and many others is positions of disadvantage, it is awfully hard in this country to rise much above one's stature no matter how hard one works. After all, if you go from being a fry cook to a shift leader, you haven't really gone so far after all. This is a sad and awful reality. One that compromises our democratic ideals. One that, perhaps, calls for revolution.

But what I saw in the park last night was not a revolution. It was not revolutionary. It was not even in touch with the real problem. The fact is, the whole "I am the 99%" line is a sham. I did not see the poor, the stricken, the underprivileged, the oppressed. I saw no minorities (though I did see one African American woman on the News 9 story), and in an interesting irony, I saw not one homeless person in a park where homeless people sleep every night. What I did see were a lot of upper-middle-class white people, many college students (one even carrying a sign with an OU logo printed on it), wearing interesting and expensive body art and piercings, taking pictures of each other with smart phones, and all-in-all having a jolly time.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with upper-middle-class white people noticing and speaking out about social inequities (I am, after all, all of these things). But as I listened to their speeches and watched their interviews, I became more and more aware that the people I was listening to didn't have a clue, and in fact had no compulsion to enact anything like the kind of social revolution that would change this country.

I found that I wanted to get up and speak myself (I didn't). I wanted to ask for a show of hands in answer to these questions: How many of you know what is at 800 W. California? What about 1335 W. Sheridan? How may of you have ever been to SW 8th and Rockwood? SW 15th and Westwood? NE 28th and Kelley?

These addresses describe the City Rescue Mission and the Jesus House. SW 8th and Rockwood is an intersection less than a mile from the opulence of the new Devon Building. The street at this intersection and for a few blocks on either side of it is in such disrepair that it is not even paved. Meanwhile the city that says it doesn't have money in the budget to fix the street is re-doing the Myriad Gardens--the front yard of the Devon building. These other intersections are the locations of large public housing projects in the inner city.

Then I wanted to ask them how many of them had been to Bricktown? To a Thunder game? To an OU-Texas party?

What I saw last night was not a collection of people dedicated to bringing about change. Instead, I saw a collection of college students who wanted to take part in something and leftovers from the 60's wanting to relive their own college years. Occupy OKC may as well have been a flash mob.

For those of us in the upper middle class, real change must begin with our admission that we are not victims in some class struggle between millionaires and thousandaires. We are suspects. We are people who demand to be heard but who blithely ignore the problems of people much less fortunate than ourselves--people who really are oppressed and poverty stricken. We complain that our student loan rates are unfair considering our sorry job prospects while we ignore the man working six days a week sweeping the street up after our protests. We don't even know that when we're sleeping in after a Saturday full of college football games and fun nights in the Paseo, he'll be getting up at 4:00 and walking to Labor Ready so he can be in line before all the good jobs are gone. We don't know about. We don't care about him. Yet we demand that something be done about him.

So, my complaint in this blog is against pretend revolutionaries. My exhortation, though, is for real ones--would be revolutionaries who don't know what to do. It's as simple as this:

Do Something!

Realize that standing in a park under the Sandridge building hoping Tom Ward will throw some money down does nothing to change the status quo. Get out of the park and into the community. I've often half-joked that I want a revolution led by Jesus Christ and Kurt Vonnegut. That's because these men both realized that change happens by getting among people and helping, eating with them, hearing their problems, being a voice for them. And doing these things (as Paulo Freire has suggested) not as patronizing liberators but as neighbors.

Sure, both these men took to the streets as protesters (Jesus was after all killed for the things he said), but they both understood that this in not where the real work is done. The real work is done by being kind to people. By living among them.

You want to see wealth redistributed? Start with your own. Feed and clothe people, even if it costs you your smart phone. Care for the sick, even if it costs you a semester or two of college. Go into foreign countries or even poor neighborhoods in your own country, even if you're uncomfortable. Use the privilege of your education to understand and voice the concerns of people who need an advocate. Put down your sign and pick up your shovel.

Love, the Self, and the Divine

My friend and fellow writer and teacher Jessa Sexton once very flatteringly quoted me in a book. At some point, I told her that "you cannot love others until you learn to love yourself," or something like that. What I think I meant was that you cannot value others until you are able to value yourself, something that makes sense. As soon as Jessa told me that she wanted to quote me, I was embarrassed by this quote. Obviously, Jessa is my friend and I allowed her to quote me (I was pleased to have ever said anything that anyone found inspirational, especially someone as intelligent as my friend), but not without a little shame--mostly because the quote feels a bit cliched to me. But as I look at the quote now, I realize something else that I dislike about it. It assumes, I think, a kind of emotional state in which my ability to love others is dependent on my ability to feel good about myself. It's a matter of self esteem, a concept I've since come to see as dubious, fleeting, and perhaps even irrelevant.

At 32 years old, having been married now for ten years to a fantastic wife with whom I have had two sons, my thinking about love and what it is have changed dramatically. Love is, and this is every bit as cliched as my quote in Jessa's book, much more active than my original quote assumed. It is not a feeling one has, though feeling is certainly a part of it. Love is a stuff one does. It is service and sacrifice. It is treating others as if they have been made in God's image, an understanding of the value of individuals.

With that in mind, I'd like to revise my thinking in my old quote. In fact, I'd like to reverse it: I could not love myself until I learned to love others.

You see, despite my seemingly arrogant bravado, I am a very self-conscious person. I often doubt my intelligence, question my talent, and fail to see my own worth. Often, it seems to me that there's just not much to love about myself. But, rather in opposition to my old quote, it is when I love others that I begin to understand my place and consequently my own worth as a child of God.

My faith has taught me that God is, above any other aspect of his complex personality, defined by love. It is therefore no surprise that his most important commandment to the people he has declared to be created in his image is to love. My capacity to love, as God has loved, is one of the most important ways in which I am created in the image of God.

Therefore, it is when I love others--through service, through kindness, through grace, through sharing a meal or a kind word--that I most able to see God in me. And when I realize that God lives within me, that I am in essence a container for the divine, I am able to see and accept my own value. When I see others through God's eyes, I see myself through them as well.

Thus, in my love for others, I develop a purpose and a sense of self--and a love for what I am and what I am called to do.

Who's Kelly Dodson? One year after the Bed Intruder

July 28th was the one year anniversary of the original airing of the WFF-Huntsville story that made Antoine Dodson a household name. The story itself became a viral notable. Then the story became a commercial success for Dodson when the Gregory Brothers auto-tuned the interview, creating the Bed Intruder Song. The song propelled both Dodson and the Gregory Brothers (who had been auto-tuning news clips for some time already) into Web 2.0 fame.

In the year since, I've shared both versions of the video on Facebook, talked about the Gregory Brothers remix in PhD level rhetoric and composition courses, shown the video to four sections of English Composition, read articles, papers, and blog posts about what the phenomenon means with regard to old notions of authorship/copyright/creativity and so on.

As interesting as the phenomenon has been as a student of rhetoric, there is one element of the story that has always troubled me--that is, the exploitative element of the story itself.

When the original story first became a meme, I was troubled by what I saw as an act of exploitation by WFF in its piece. I worried that what made the story so compelling, the reason it was being passed around the internet so much, and indeed the reason WFF edited the interviews in the way they did was that Antoine Dodson is so laughable. The troubling thing is that what makes Dodson so laughable is that he seems to fit into so many stereotypes. We instantly peg him as a ghetto-dwelling, Ebonics-speaking homosexual--proof that the inner city really is inhabited by the something-less-than-humans that middle class suburbanites think it is.

Of course, the part of me that was troubled by the fact that a news station would take advantage of these aspects of Dodson's persona was soon silenced by Dodson himself. It was quickly apparent that he was soaking up the attention, and loving it. And as soon as the Gregory Brothers song began selling on iTunes, he began to make money off the story as well. So, if the story was exploitative, it was at least co-exploitative. Dodson gained from it as much as WFF did.

But what gets lost in a discussion of whether or not Dodson was exploited is what is lost in the original story as well. That is: the victim, Kelly Dodson.

When the story first aired, I noticed the discrepancy in the amount of time the 2 minute, 3 second story devoted to Antoine Dodson (three clips for a total of 31 seconds) versus the time given to Kelly Dodson, his sister (two clips for a total of 7 seconds). So, the brother of the victim gets three times the air time as the victim herself. At the time, I took this as evidence that WFF was exploiting Antoine Dodson's compelling ghetto character at the expense of Kelly. I'm ashamed to say that it was not until much later that I considered whether or not this was a disservice to Kelly more than it was to Antoine. We know that Kelly must have had more than 7 seconds worth of stuff to say, because the story itself contains a clip of her talking and pointing, but this is dubbed over with the voice of the reporter. So, what of Kelly's story is edited out to make room for Antoine's ridiculous, self-aggrandizing rant?

I have little doubt that the story was edited the way it was to feature Antoine because Antoine was, frankly,more fun to watch--because he was so laughable. But the fact is, this was supposed to be a story about an attempted rape. A man violated the sanctity of Kelly Dodson's bedroom, in an attempt to violate her body as well. Such a crime is not and should not have ever been a joke.

The fact that it has become one is certainly an interesting academic phenomenon. But it also ought to trouble us. A news station may very well have robbed a woman of her story in order to amuse its viewers with the antics of her brother. And we lapped it up and laughed it up. Should we be okay with this?