Helen Keller and "subversive verses"

I was chatting with a couple of folks about how Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land morphed from a song that was critical of certain aspects of American society to one of our great patriotic standards through the omission of a couple of subversive verses. Suddenly Helen Keller came to mind.

Helen Keller was the blind and deaf girl who overcame adversity through the devotion of her teacher, Ann Sullivan. The story is told very movingly in The Miracle Worker. Who can forget that scene at the water pump--the patience of the teacher spelling "water" in her hand over and over, the look of wonder on Helen’s face when she suddenly understood?

What a story! And what a lesson for us all.

But Helen Keller's life didn't end there. As an adult, she became a socialist, disenchanted with much of American life. She toured slums and sweatshops, talked to the poor, and came to an understanding as profound as the one she learned at the water pump. "I had once believed that we were the masters of our fate," she wrote in her memoirs, "that we could mold our lives into any form we pleased. I had overcome blindness and deafness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to my birth and environment. I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone."

Helen Keller's childhood is a success story, a wonderful example of the American Dream, the idea that anyone, even a blind and deaf girl, can make it. It's a story we want to believe. But it's the opposite of the lesson she wanted us to draw from her life, and so the adult Helen Keller has disappeared from our national mythology--the "subversive verses" again forgotten.

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Bad history!

The 13th Carnival of Bad History is up at Rob MacDougall's Old Is the New New, and it's a good one. I'm only halfway through it (papers to grade), but so far my favorite is Will Chen's posting on how the FBI viewed It's a Wonderful Life as commie propaganda. Wow. Oh, and check out Rob's comments for even more.

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And Then It Was Over

So I ran the half marathon. Now what?

For the last twelve weeks I have had a goal, a so called "light at the end of the tunnel". Now I have reached the end, I have seen the light. So what do I do now?

Options:

1. Another half marathon - I saw an awesome looking one in Salt Lake City... or there are dozens more, all over the US and abroad.
2. Sprint Triathlon - shorter than a hard core normal triathlon - usually about a .5-1 mi swim, 3-4 mi run and 12-16 mi bike. This is what I am leaning towards. I even bought a new swimsuit.
or 3. Aids bike ride - from San Francisco to L.A. in a week in June- average of about 100 miles a day. I could do this but to do so you have to raise money...5000 dollars, I think. Hmmm. Not my cup of tea.

I think my June turnaround will be activity based. So...if anyone has any good suggestions of places to go/activities to participate in...Let me know!

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...And I'm Spent!

Its over. We are done. We finished in just over two hours, which was my goal. We didnt quite make it as fast as I wanted, but we were only 2 minutes slower. If we hadn't stopped to pee, we would have been fine. Actually, out of some 900+ people, we were about 300. Not too bad; I think on a bell curve that would be a B.

It was a beautiful day, 65 degrees, not a cloud in the sky... We ran the first few miles pretty easily, then Kaylen joined us around mile 5 and ran with us to about mile 10. Those miles flew by; I don't know if it was becuase Kaylen was there or what, but we seemed to reach mile 10 very quickly. It was more difficult to get from 10 to 11 and even more so from 11 to 12. When we reached the 12 mile marker, we tried to speed up a little, but by that time I could not feel my legs and my feet felt like they had been trapped in my shoes for weeks. Mira was having leg trouble; I was having foot trouble. We limped along until the last little bit where Dad joined us and ran with us to the finish. We sprinted the last 100 yards and made it across the finish line at 2:13.

Not bad for someone who could barely run two miles without having a coronary three months ago.

So - what is next, you ask. That has yet to be determined. Possibly another half (it is a good excuse to travel around and see new places) or maybe a sprint triathlon (3-4 mile run, 12-16 mile bike, roughly a half mile swim).

The world is my oyster!

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Dispensationalists

In the comments to my posting last week on "Defining 'evangelical,'" Ed Darrell wrote:

One of the defining characteristics of people who call themselves "evangelical" to me is that they tend to accept unquestioningly the theological interpretations of John Nelson Darby -- though they don't know him by name, nor do they seem to appreciate that his views are substantially different from traditional Christianity, even traditional American Christianity. I would be quite interested in your view of Darby, the Darby Bible, and its effects on the 21st century evangelical movement in the U.S. Do you cover Darby in the class?

Indeed we do.

As a historian--and this is probably especially true in this class--I’m less interested in “debunking” or criticizing attitudes and actions than I am in asking such questions as Why was this particular view attractive to many Americans at this time? How does it fit into American history? That is, what is its social and cultural context? That's the way I approach these topics.

As America moved from the late 19th to the early 20th century, the times were a-changin’, to coin a phrase. Specifically, I put dispensationalism (and fundamentalism in general) in the context of the rising “culture of modernism.” (The link that Ed provided, above, is a good quick intro to the subject; if you’re interested, click on “dispensationalism” in the second sentence.)

This was in many ways an age of uncertainty, as the old absolute truths crumbled. We often think of Darwin, but he was just part of the scientific assault on old ways of thinking. In physics, Albert Einstein showed that perception depended on where you stood: “truth” was relative. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle went a step further, showing that “truth” is not only relative, it’s essentially unknowable. (This of course is not what Einstein and Heisenberg said, but this is how people understood their work.)

This loss of absolute truths spread to the social sciences. For example, Margaret Mead and other anthropologists argued that we should study other cultures without comparing them to our own--a sort of cultural relativity. There was Freud and his writings on the mind, and Marx on economics.

The arts and literature saw similar changes. We used to know music, but barbershop quartets and Stephen Foster gave way to atonal music, with Arnold Schoenberg and later John Cage and others. We used to know literature; now we had “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” We used to know what a woman descending a staircase looked like, but Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and other cubists said that there were other ways of seeing her.

Scholars began applying the new “higher criticism” to the scriptures, subjecting the Bible to the same sort of critical analysis that one might apply to any literary text. The 1893 Parliament of World Religions treated exotic religions as if they were worth the same respect as Christianity. (There’s that relativism again.)

Add to that the New Woman, jazz, movies.....

In short, old values and ways of seeing the world were fast disappearing. Given all this, it’s easy to imagine a defensive reaction to all this change--people wanting to hold on to the old traditions and in fact fighting for them. And there was a religious aspect to this defensive reaction: the rise of fundamentalism and the spread of dispensationalist thinking.

Fundamentalists were not simply more religious; rather, they held to a different set of religious beliefs. Where mainstream Protestants felt comfortable adapting their theology to the new science and social mores, fundamentalists said that--no matter what scientists theorized, no matter how Picasso painted a woman sitting in an armchair--there were certain religious principles that, by god, would never change. (The inerrancy of the scriptures is the best known of these “fundamental” truths.)

Dispensationalists, who I would characterize as a subset of fundamentalists (who in turn are a subset of evangelicals), read the Bible as a guide to both history past and history to come, ending with the Rapture, Tribulation, Armageddon, etc. Darby and others offered charts, footnotes, cross-references--in a sense, this was not an anti-intellectual exercise. And by adopting a certain flexibility, at least to the extent that they were able to fit modern events into their story, they were able to “prove” that they were right, and that the Bible is right, over and over.

A great book on this is Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.

As to the effect of this on modern evangelicalism: I think historians a century from now will see our age as similar to that described above--a general unsettling, loss of traditional ideas, growing “disorganization” of society--and so perhaps it should be no surprise that dispensationalism, and fundamentalism in general, are having a surge of popularity. Witness the sales of Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth and the more recent Left Behind series. I think we might have a dispensationalist in the White House. In his first inaugural address, President Bush said, “Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?” He said it was from a letter from John Page to Thomas Jefferson after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but the imagery is Biblical--that sentence could have been lifted right off one of those fold-out charts that show the progression to the end times--and that was eight months before September 11, 2001.

As a historian, I say that this is not surprising. As a citizen, I see it as a disturbing trend, and even scary.

When he was running for president in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt exhorted a crowd by saying, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” This was a campaign speech, not a theological argument, and everyone accepted Roosevelt’s statement in that sense. With President Bush, we’re not so sure, and the possibility that he sees the United States as playing out a role in a predestined drama, a battle between good and evil that was scripted at the beginning of time, is a bit unsettling.

Anyway, Ed, that’s a longer answer than I intended to your question.

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Guthrie's subversive verses

Yesterday afternoon, a colleague and I were walking across campus. As we got close to our old building--we moved into a new one last December--he suggested we walk in and see our old digs. There was a sign on the door that said "No Admittance" while the building was undergoing renovations. I mentioned Woody Guthrie's comment about such signs, and he didn't know what I was talking about. So I told him.

Guthrie, the folk singer known for his songs about Okies and others who were down on their luck in the 1930s, grew tired of hearing Kate Smith's ubiquitous version of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," and so he wrote a response: the song we now call "The Land Is Your Land," except he originally ended each verse with "God Blessed America for Me."

Nowadays, the song is one of our great patriotic standards, but it wasn't always so, at least not in the same sense. After three verses about America's grandeur (“from California, to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters," etc.), Guthrie had this:

Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,
A sign was posted, said "Private Property,"
But on the back side, it didn't say nothing.
God blessed America for me.
(Sometimes he sang, "That side was made for you and me.")

And then there's the sixth verse:

One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office, I saw my people.
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering
If God blessed America for me?

My friend said, "Ahh, the subversive verses!" I told him I was going to have to use that. And now I have.

By the way, we didn't go into the building.

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Day 82: The Pressure is On

Countdown until the race is almost over. 2 days left....Yikes!

Today we are going to take one last short run. The weather outside is beautiful; it is about 70 today. We plan to run a few miles just to stay loose and then rest all day tomorrow. Tomorrow night we are having a carb load (pasta) pot-luck where we will stuff ourselves silly in hopes of sustaining energy for the next day, and then....

...we will run. We will run as far and as fast as we can.

The race begins at 7, so will we will be out there at 6, jiggling up and down, stretching, peeing one last time... I don't know what it is (nerves maybe) but right before a race I always have to pee about 45 times. If you wait until 10 mins before the race, there is a line about a mile long. Actually, random fact - we were talking about what serious runners do when they have to pee (or worse!) during a race. Apparently they just go. On themselves. Obviously I AM NOT a serious runner. I don't mind adding 1.4 minutes to my time in order to experience the comfort of peeing in a toilet.

Another thing you often do not hear about is the chafing effect which comes from sweating and then rubbing your legs together for over two hours. This is a serious thing. To avoid it, many people take large handfuls of Vaseline or Boudreaux's Butt Paste and shove it down their pants and between their legs before and during the race. I have yet to witness this, but I cannot wait. Luckily, I do not really sweat, so hopefully I will not be using the Butt Paste.

I am nervous; I am excited; When I complete this, I will have completed my longest run ever AND a half marathon. Next up - sprint triathlon...

WEEK 12 (the last week):

Total Miles Run: 185
Ave per week: 15
Longest Run so Far: 12

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Paszkiewicz gets a fisking

It took Ed Darrell (at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub) a while to get around to it-- but he has posted a thorough and well-deserved fisking of David Paszkiewicz, the NJ teacher who spent more classroom time trying to save souls than actually teaching history.

Good job, Ed!

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Brisbane to Melbourne, Tasmania, and Back Summary

As much as we love cruising, sometimes it's just good to get off the boat, and sometimes it's the only way to really see a country.  Australia is HUGE.  Even after looking at maps and devouring guides we still didn't have a feel for just how big the country is.  It wasn't until we started driving, kilometer after kilometer speeding by, that the true size of the country began to sink in.  In the end we couldn't possibly do everything or cover all of Australia; we just didn't have the time (or money).  So we decided on renting a little campervan and driving the east coast, from Brisbane to Melbourne.  Then we flew to Tasmania, spending a week circumnavigating the island via another rented campervan. Finally we flew from Tasmania to Sydney to hang with friends, then did a mad dash, driving back to Mooloolaba in a two day period.  We stayed with our friend (and previous owner of Billabong) in Yamba (near Mooloolaba) for three weeks (lovin' the land life) before returning to Billabong and our life at sea!

It seems we covered a lot of ground, and saw a lot of sights ... so much that we figured we'd deviate from our normal journal style entry, providing picture journals of our trip instead.

The maps below highlight our travels in black.  Links bring up various photo-journals, divided in hopes of making them manageable in both size and attention span!

Road Trip Summary:


Brisbane to Melbourne:
          2/20/07 - 3/13/07
          3,650 km driven

Tasmania:
          3/14/07 - 3/22/07
          1,145 km driven

Sydney Area (just hanging):
          3/22/07 - 3/28/07

Sydney - Mooloolaba Return Drive:
          3/28/07 - 3/29/07
          1,060 km driven

Total:   5,585 km

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Defining "evangelical"

Tomorrow in my History of American Religion class, we’re going to start talking about the rise of evangelicalism and its impact on nineteenth-century American culture. One of the problems we’ll have to address is exactly what “evangelical” means.

I usually start by reading a column Nicholas Kristof wrote for the New York Times a few years ago (March 4, 2003) called “God, Satan and the Media.” (The only free version of the column I can find online is here.) In the column, Kristof noted that although almost half of Americans claim to be evangelicals, the rest of American society doesn’t seem to understand them. The main point I got from Kristof’s column is that he himself doesn't understand the word “evangelical”--which makes him pretty much like the rest of us.

“Evangelicals are increasingly important in every aspect of American culture,” Kristof wrote. “Among the best-selling books in America are Tim LaHaye's Christian ‘left behind’ series about the apocalypse; about 50 million copies have been sold. One of America’s most prominent television personalities is Benny Hinn, watched in 190 countries, but few of us have heard of him because he is an evangelist.”

Kristof described the popular series of Left Behind books as if the apocalypse is an evangelical thing. He is apparently unaware that not all evangelicals believe in that version of the end times, or that several major denominations (including Methodists and Presbyterians) have actually come out against the “dispensationalist” theology of the books.

He also confused evangelicals with Pentecostals. Later in the article, he mentioned people speaking in tongues in his hometown of Yamhill, Oregon. “In the evangelical tinge to its faith, Yamhill is emblematic of a huge chunk of Middle America,” he wrote. But while Pentecostals, who believe that the gifts of the Holy Spirit include speaking in tongues, might be evangelicals, not all evangelicals are Pentecostals. And despite Kristof’s assertion, not every evangelical follows faith healer Benny Hinn or even knows who he is.

“President Bush has said that he doesn't believe in evolution (he thinks the jury is still out),” Kristof continued, getting at another evangelical belief. But by equating evangelicalism with a belief in creationism, Kristof confused evangelicals with fundamentalists, who insist on a literal reading of the scriptures.

Kristof wrote of “evangelicals’ discomfort with condoms and sex education.” Many evangelicals are supportive of and even active in sex education (and not necessarily the abstinence-only approach).

Kristof’s article confirms that “evangelical” is a slippery word, hard to pin down with any precision.

Historically, the distinguishing aspect of “evangelical” was the conversion experience--what has come to be known, among many, as being “born again.” This was part of a general trend away from Calvinist predestination, which said that eternal salvation is granted only to an exclusive few, “the elect,” and that nothing we do can save us. Evangelicals were those who believed that we do have a role in salvation. (The fancy word for this is “arminianism,” named for Dutch Theologian Jacobus Arminius.) That was pretty much it. Sex education, evolution, speaking in tongues, dispensationalism, and faith healing simply had nothing to do with a definition of “evangelical.”

Of course, everything’s changed now, leading to confusion for everyone, from NYTimes’s columnists to my students (and their professor). D.G. Hart, in That Old-Time Religion in America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century, describes what happened: The current sense of “evangelical” came into common usage around 1950, when conservative Protestant leaders, wanting to embrace the biblical basis of fundamentalism but make it more appealing, co-opted the word to tap into a religious movement that was growing outside of churches--through organizations (like Youth for Christ), publications (such as Christianity Today), and radio and television.

Hart’s “recipe” for evangelicalism: “Combine two cups of inerrancy, one cup of conversion, and a pinch of doctrinal affirmations; form into a patchwork of parachurch agencies, religious celebrities, and churches; season with peppy music professionally performed; and bake every generation.” This is from a later Hart book, Deconstructing Evangelicalism, in which he says that “evangelicalism needs to be relinquished as a religious identity because it does not exist. In fact it is the wax nose of twentieth-century American Protestantism.”

So “evangelical” doesn’t mean what it used to mean (if it means anything any more). Take Jimmy Carter. He’s a good evangelical, in my book (and in his). But does he fit Kristof’s description? Historically, we should ask WWJD?, with the “J” meaning, of course, Jimmy Carter. (Today, it’s more WWWD.)

Kristof is wrong, even with the new definition of "evangelical." Still, his column is a good way to begin our discussion.

Update: See here.

Kristof is not the only one to make this mistake. For example (lots of examples), see the comments for the movie Jesus Camp at Amazon or at IMDB. Not all evangelicals are like that, not by a long shot, but the reviewer comments often say that sort of thing.

Part of the above was originally published in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News.

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