MindSpinner

At the county high school and in this community, a controversy has unfolded. A sole Muslim student objected to the assorted Christian invocations and benedictions traditionally said at graduation-related ceremonies. The school administration has responded by respecting the law regarding the separation of church and state and removing prayers from programs for honors night, graduation, etc.

They have done the right thing, of course. Separation of church and state preserves freedom of religion because it refrains from imposing religion. The last thing I want is somebody else’s version of religion imposed upon me. During the graduation season, baccalaureate services held in churches can offer graduates who wish to attend a Christian celebration of their achievement, and students can, of course, gather at school to pray - as long as prayer remains private and not institutionalized. (Likely, a group of Christian students will follow the example set by students at another school and stand up to recite the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of the graduation program anyway. In my own unlikely fantasy, students of other faiths follow suit with their own prayers, so that diversity finds its voice and makes its point.)

But now, who should be protesting the school’s Muslim students and the administration’s decision but the KKK. They’ll be outside the school on Tuesday. The students will be kept in classes, well clear of the protestors.

Nothing strikes a deeper horror in me than the sight of those white KKK robes, not even a snake at my bare feet. The KKK represents the worst of what we human beings can become, after all, while a snake is merely an animal with no design beyond survival. What the KKK has to do with defending Christianity, I cannot fathom. Hatred of more than half a world “God so loved” doesn’t square with the gospel message.

In the medieval morality plays, a frequent fixture was the Mouth of Hell, a stage prop constructed to reprepresent a ravening maw the height of a man, out of which devils could leap to snatch the wicked and drag them to damnation. When the KKK protests outside my daughter’s high school on Monday (while I’m stuck elsewhere with responsibilities I cannot hand off), I can only imagine them marching straight out of Hell’s Mouth. That the KKK still functions in parts of this country in this day breaks my heart and makes me hang my head in shame over how far short we still fall from spiritual enlightenment.

And though I am as white as a grub in the garden, it is not my race that needs defending; it is this entire species, all of us together along with our delicate, exquisitely beautiful ark of a planet - that indeed needs defending most of all from our own blindly destructive, short-sighted pursuit of self interest over common good.

Today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about yet one more less than sage appointment within the Bush administration, Porter Goss’s choice of Kyle Foggo for the CIA’s # 3 position: executive director.

Friedman frames the larger issue:

Is there no job in this administration that is too important to be handed over to a political hack?
No. In his excellent book on the Iraq war, “The Assassins’ Gate,” George Packer tells the story of how some of the State Department’s best Iraq experts were barred from going to Iraq immediately after the invasion — when they were needed most — because that didn’t pass Dick Cheney’s or Don Rumsfeld’s ideology tests. And that is the core of the matter: the Bush team believes in loyalty over expertise. When ideology always trumps reality, loyalty always trumps expertise.

Yes, Mr. Bush has seen the error of his ways and has sacked the Goss crew, but we just wasted a year and saw a number of experienced C.I.A. people quit the agency in disgust….

I understand that loyalty is important, but what good is it to have loyal crew members when the ship is sinking? So they can sing your praises on the way down to the ocean floor? I just don’t understand how a president whose whole legacy depends on getting national security and intelligence right would have tolerated anything but the very best in those areas. What in the world was he thinking?

Friedman leaves us to our answers: whatever thinking George Bush does, it is hardly perspicacious, and it serves ends other than our collective good.

I am interested in another journalistic investigation of some scope, however - the flip side of irresponsible appointments, mentioned above. I’ve heard much about Bush’s appointees, remarkable only for their lack of stellar qualifications, but I’ve read less than I want to know about the talent and expertise we are losing, often permanently, from the service of our country because the Bush crew is in charge. There are people we’ve depended on for years in many capacities, and, if they aren’t pushed out, some number of them are leaving in disgust and disillusionment.

I’m hoping Americans will effect a coup at the ballot box this year and again in 2008, but I’m quietly thinking that when we do - and we had better - we’ll be starting over with an infrastructure depleted of some of its best minds, the ones most likely to speak truth to power and count that the greatest loyalty they can offer. There will be rebuilding to do; a great storm has come through, a flood of foolishness; when it recedes it will leave its damage, its debris, its dead.

I remember a haunting dream I had once. I was on a quest of some sort and found myself a guest in a castle tower. High in the tower, in a ballroom, was a party filled with sounds of laughter, dancing and music, the swish of colored silks. The party went on and on. Only once, when the music paused, I heard groans from somewhere beneath. I slipped away from the party and found my way down narrow stone stairs, and at last to a dungeon. There were no prisoners chained to walls there that I can remember; there was no one to speak. But by torchlight the whole place seemed alive somehow, and the stones looked like parts of bodies, crouched atop another. Wordless moans came softly from all around. Up above, the music could drown them out, but not here. I studied the stones and suddenly knew that they were not stones at all, but people made, by means of some horrid magic, to be the stones that built the foundation of the tower. The people above drowned out the sounds of their agony with their laughter and dancing, with music and the swish of silk.

I dreamed that dream some fifteen years ago. I don’t dream memorable dreams often, but some never leave me. This is one of those. It haunts me more now than it has ever done, and it comes to mind again as I read Bob Herbert’s column this morning in the New York Times. He cites an Amnesty International report on U.S.-engineered “disappearances” whereby victims are transported for imprisonment and interrogation in countries where torture is practiced. He concludes,

The Bush administration will never do the right thing when it comes to rendition. Congress needs to step in and thoroughly investigate this program, which is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Congress needs to investigate it, document it and shut it down.

AI’s report details the secretive program and offers the stories of some of the victims, including Salah ‘Ali Qaru:

Salah ‘Ali Qaru became one of probably hundreds of people caught up in the secretive and illegal US programme of “rendition”. The CIA has used private aircraft operators and front companies to preserve the secrecy of their rendition flights, but nearly 1,000 flights have been identified as being directly linked to the CIA.

Salah ‘Ali Qaru was then flown from his secret detention site to Yemen, where he was held for more than nine months without charge, before finally being charged with forging documents and released. He has never been charged with any terrorism-related offence.

His life has been destroyed. He has been traumatized by his ordeal. He has a two-year-old daughter he has never seen. His wife is destitute, living in Indonesia not knowing where he was for most of his detention. He doesn’t know if he’ll have the money or permission to return to his wife and child in Indonesia.

More and more, I am feeling that my privileged American life is the party high in the tower, and that its foundations are being shored up by more human suffering than any of us can truly come to know. But we hear the groans, if we bother to listen.

I just want to stop the music and hear. I want to know who suffers unjustly in the name of my freedom (or America’s access to oil, if that’s what Bush’s shennanigans in the Middle East are really all about), and I want the human rights abuses and ill-advised wars to stop. I want to say to my government, “You cannot do this in my name.”

The Secret Life of Bees has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for a read for almost two years. Last summer, I was lucky enough to be able to work on a project that recouped the month’s salary I lost by changing teaching jobs, and reading time was at a minimum. Now The Mermaid Chair waits beside The Secret Life of Bees on the bookshelf. It wasn’t these best sellers that would draw me first to Sue Monk Kidd. It was Dance of the Dissident Daughter instead.

Dance of the Dissident Daughter relates Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual journey transcending her Southern Baptist roots in a denomination that is an increasingly patriarchal expression of the Christian faith. She struggled beyond a conception of God which was too, too small (”two men and a bird,” as a nun once phrased it to her), serving more to exclude women and many others besides rather than to embrace them. (Let’s just get this out of the way - I find “conservative Christianity,” fundamentalist in its leanings, to be a travesty of what I know of the divine. It is patriarchal puppeteering of the most dangerous sort.) Hers became an explicit quest for the divine feminine.

In my kitchen window, a beautiful white coral sits on the sill. It is real coral, not an imitation. It belonged to my grandmother and was harvested many decades ago. I have seen a living coral reef caressed by currents, home to iridescent fish. But this coral is brittle, partly broken. I piece it delicately together and remember what it must have been. It is skeleton now rather than living organism - calcified. Like my coral, living faiths calcify in the hands of those who would tear them out of context for their own purposes. Humanity has always preferred a set of laws that reduce essential matters of the heart to more manageable matters of verifiable outward compliance, making it easy to say “We’re in” and “You’re out” and “Scripture means what we say it means, so we should run the world.” Meanwhile the simple, eternal, transformative laws that were meant to be written in the heart are out the window, ignored, subjugated to bits of text extracted from context, such that the face of God is distorted and even transmogrified beyond recognition.

People calcify, too. As I turned the pages of Dissident Daughter, I was impressed to see that Sandy Kidd, Sue’s husband, was able to accommodate her journey, stressful though the changes were.

The parallels between Sue Monk Kidd’s story and mine are compelling, and reading Dissident Daughter was, at points, cathartic for me. By that I mean that I’d be reading along, and then there would be a gasp, and tears - even yet, five years after I took leave of the first half of my life. I felt connection to her, even the need of conversation.

My friend E and I almost missed the Kentucky Author Forum when April 6 rolled around. The day had been difficult on the teenager front, and I needed some time to rebound, the teenagers being mine. An hour before the program was to begin some 35 miles away through rush hour traffic, we decided to try to go after all. There was no time to worry about what to wear; there was just time to change out of jeans and hop in the car. We (I) nearly gave it up and turned back several times, knowing we’d never make the 6:00 p.m. start time, but finally I said, “If we’re not supposed to go, they’ll have to turn us away at the door.” Then we were there, and they didn’t turn us away at the door, though we must have been 10 minutes late. The forum host was just beginning his introductory remarks when we were seated.

The conversation between Sue Monk Kidd and interviewer Jean Shinoda Bolen was inspired, and the stage hand intent upon waving “Time’s up” could not begin to get Bolen’s attention when the hour had passed. Audience and speakers could have gone on for another hour easily. Afterward, we found our way to a reception preceding the dinner for which I had irrationally paid beaucoup bucks, and there I had a chance to speak to Sue Monk Kidd for a few minutes. I told her how her book had affected me, shared enough of my story to illuminate why Dissident Daughter had meant so much, and thanked her. She was warm, engaged, gracious, and real. I wanted to hug her.

Our $100 dinner tickets admitted us to an encounter with Louisville society quite beyond my modest station in life. The result was a fleeting glimpse into another world, though not one I especially hanker to join. But the after-dinner remarks were worth the wait, and when we left, we knew we hadn’t missed a thing. Once or twice, before dinner conversation got underway, I glanced toward the front table to see Sue Monk Kidd looking my way, as if in thought. Any heart’s hope is a bold and presumptuous thing. That said, I hope we share another, more substantial conversation someday. I suppose we will, in any case, for reading is, at its best, compelling conversation.

If my great grandfather had not been a generous man and an avid conservationist, one of my family might have built a house right here. Or a campground. Or whatever.

But my great grandfather loved the land of North Georgia (tales abound), and he wanted it restored and preserved as part of this nation’s birthright. During the course of his career, the Forest Service acquired much of the land that is now the Chatahoochee and Cherokee National Forests. Some of the land he gave himself, like Woody Gap (pictured above, photo by Jack Anthony), near the beginning of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. Every time I walk there, every time I look to the valley or climb the closed road to the abandoned fire tower on Black Mountain, I am moved and grateful that this beauty belongs to all of us. I’ve never felt as if my birthright had been given away. There is a part of me - maybe that iota of Cherokee - that doesn’t much believe that land belongs to us so much as that we are stewards of it and that we share it with other creatures - in my case rabbits, the groundhog, birds and the occasional deer trying to maneuver through land now infiltrated by subdivisions.

The Bush Administration wants to sell 300,000 acres of National Forest in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests in North Carolina. That’s more land than my great grandfather managed to acquire on behalf of the Forest Service in his entire energetic and visionary career. The ostensible purpose of the sale, according to Wampum, is to fund rural schools. Bull. If we restored a sensible tax structure and didn’t march off irrationally to fight unwinnable wars, we’d have enough money to fund rural schools. Funding rural schools is simply the most politically apt excuse available, intended to tamp down opposition.

The damage this administration wreaks on this country is every day deeper and more far-reaching. (Land sales and deaths in Iraq are irreversible.) I don’t feel that my birthright was sold because I can’t build a house at scenic Woody Gap someday, not as long as that land is safe for everyone. I’m misty-eyed happy to see people hiking or taking pictures or picnicking there. But I do feel that my birthright - our birthright as a nation - is being sold when our government parcels off and sells tracts of land in the middle of our National Forests to the tune of 300,000 acres in a single state.

The comment period regarding the sale of the land ends tomorrow. You can email SRS_Land_Sales@fs.fed.us. I hope you do.