Call Me Ishmael

Sweet Heaven When I Die, Reviews

2011-09-29T22:23:00.001-04:00

The reviews so far of my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die:

“The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.”

--Michael Washburn, The Washington Post

“For Sharlet, the story of American religion is not a polarized one of fundamentalists vs. secularists. It’s a vast landscape, and each essay in his remarkable new collection of literary journalism explores a different crag or cranny of it…. There’s no better guide to this ‘country in between.’”

--Brook Wilensky-Lanford, The Boston Globe

“Superb… Compelling… Stunning… A fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer.”

--Steve Yarbrough, The Oregonian

“A Must-Read…. Brilliant portraits of the religious fringe… fleshed out in lush three-dimensional detail—a lifetime in a dozen pages, a biography distilled to its purest elements…. Sharlet impresses with his ability to mine the common humanity that lingers in even the most radically minded thinkers.”

--The Daily Beast

“Sharp and intimate.”

--Rolling Stone

“All I had to do was open to the first lines of ‘Sweet Fuck All, Colorado’: ‘When I was eighteen I fell hard for the state of Colorado as embodied by a woman with long honey blond hair and speckled green eyes, who drank wine from a coffee mug and whiskey from the bottle.’

--The Paris Review, Staff Pick

“A beautifully written bricolage of reported narrative, character study, and memoir tracing his travels among the faithful in the United States.”

--Jeremy Keehn, Harper’s.org

"The characters in Sweet Heaven When I Die are rough, unfulfilled, often doomed. But that’s what makes this collection so strong, so human. We always suspect that by the end, they will be betrayed by their beliefs, will be disillusioned or destroyed. But failure doesn’t make belief meaningless. It may be the only thing that gives faith meaning at all."

--Kansas City Star

“A fascinating tour through some of the darker, or simply more baffling, corners of American faith and spirituality. Sharlet proves himself a worthy guide both because he's a keen observer and because he approaches his subjects with a sense of openness.”

--Bookforum

"[A] collection of beautifully written narratives... Sharlet's previous works have incisively critiqued fundamentalism and American power; Sweet Heaven is equally thoughtful, but tender, acknowledging that between the extremes of snake handlers and nihilists, most of us wander through life groping for meaning, with consolation that in the act of finding, we too, may be found."

--Durham, NC Independent

"Brilliant portraits of faith, despair and the fictions that keep people going... [Sharlet's] often-elegiac prose rumbles with the fierce rhythms of the blues…. By bringing back the stories of people they’ve met on their own wanderings across battle lines, Bottoms [author of Swalling the Past] and Sharlet bear witness to something greater than their personal dilemmas. Call it faith, call it fiction, call it both. But to read these books — both works of passionate, troubled empathy — is to feel less alone. "

--Margot Harrison, Seven Days

“A collection of powerful, moody, hopeful, sad, unsettling and even uplifting essays into the deepest realms of truth, belief, hope, and the blues.”

--Lebanon, NH Valley News

“[Sharlet] uses his gift for clear, resonant prose to slowly unravel each subject…. Rich and intriguing reading.”

--Booklist

“In the end, [Sharlet] says, it's in not knowing the ultimate answers, in leaving ourselves open to the possibility of change, that we can continue to draw hope…. Call it narrative journalism or creative nonfiction, Jeff Sharlet's collection of feature-length pieces demonstrates his mastery of the form.”

--Ron Hogan, Shelf Awareness

“In every wonderfully told, intimate, (auto-)biographical detail, we learn something of more wide-ranging significance. Perhaps we learn a bit about how to die and how to live. At the very least, we learn a lot about the religious field in America…. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth, much like Cornel West after him, drew from Christianity’s concept of love a model of “protest against the course of the world,” a way of being ethical in a world mired in injustice. Sharlet searches for such pockets of love-as-protest that persist in unlikely places in America—from personal relationships in the heartland to radical politics in New York City. It is rewarding to join him on this search.’
--John D. Boy, The Immanent Frame / Social Science Research Council

“A fascinating collection of essays… outstanding, at both reportorial and literary levels…. Strongly recommended.”

--Scholars & Rogues

“While reading and re-reading Jeff Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die, a couple of songs replayed over and over in my head. His lovely and haunting collections of essays made my thinking musical. Perhaps it is the beauty of his language, the lyrical quality of his descriptions, that direct me to hymns and pop songs… Perhaps, it is because his reflections on religion, trauma, belief, unbelief, practice and loss feel like poetry.”

--Kelly Baker, Religion in American History

“[Sharlet’s] quest is personal, and Sweet Heaven is richer for it: infused with both his searching and his skepticism, the collection is documentary journalism with a hint of poetry. Recommended.“

--New City Lit

“Sweet Heaven When I Die tells tales of religious weirdness, which is also to say the wildness, the wilderness, the untamable regions. If we don’t make space for the weird in religion, we simply don’t get religion in all its complexity, its messiness, and its wild parts…. Sharlet’s rare gift has been to make friends with the weird and almost, but not quite, make peace with it…. A great, incisive writer.”

--S. Brent Plate, Religion Dispatches

“Marvelous vignettes of this bizarre country of ours and its double-bizarre inhabitants. I loved The Family and C Street but I think this is his best so far.”

--Bookavore, Word Bookstore staff pick

"Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat Moon and John McPhee, in Sweet Heaven Sharlet's travels reveal people in place and time. The stories are at once humorous and sad, while the characters from all corners lead lives both fulfilling and desperate."

--The Observer (Shepherdstown, W. Va)

“Part reporter, part prophet, Jeff Sharlet is an American visionary in the lineage that runs from Twain to Robinson Jeffers to Sam Shepard and Joan Didion. In Sweet Heaven When I Die, he scours the desert margins of our culture, politics, and religion, training his eye on outlaws, anarchists, fanatics, and saints. In this way, he reveals the unexpected shape of our nation’s center, which is to say, our heart.”

--Peter Trachtenberg, author of The Book of Calamities

Fall Book Tour

2011-08-31T01:35:00.002-04:00

Following are some of the events I’ll be doing this fall in support of my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and around other topics. Bookstores interested in hosting an event should contact my publicist, Whitney Peeling, at whitney.peeling@gmail.com. Universities, colleges, and other organizations should contact my speaking agent, Annette Luba-Lucas at lectures@andersonliterary.com. You can also write me directly at jeff.sharlet@gmail.com.

September 13 / Middlebury, VT Town Hall Theater, sponsored by the Vermont Book Shop

September 15 / University of North Alabama

September 21 / Norwich, VT Norwich Bookstore

September 23 / New York, NY New York University Bookstore. This is an event for Heather Hendershot and her new book, What’s Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. I’m the respondent. She’ll speak a bit, then we’ll have a conversation.

September 26 / Asheville, NC Malaprops Bookstore

September 27 / Chapel Hill, NC Flyleaf Books

September 28 / Durham, NC Duke University Center for Documentary Studies

October 9 / New York, NY Union Theological Seminary. The American Christian Right and the global equality struggle.

October 12 / New York, NY Details TBA

October 18 / Concord, NH Gibson’s Bookstore

October 21 / Shepherdstown, West Virginia Shepherd University

October 22 / Washington, D.C. “Religious Politics & Secular Values: A CFI Institute”

October 23 / Washington, D.C. Busboys & Poets

October 27 / Burlington, VT University of Vermont

October 30 / Pasadena, CA All Saints Church Rector’s Forum

November 3 / Hanover, NH I’ll be hosting the Dartmouth English Department’s second creative writing event of the fall with guest writer Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck. Sanborn Library, 4 pm, free and open to the public.

November 7 / Lewiston, ME Bates College

November 8 / Amherst, MA Hampshire College

November 9 / Cleveland, OH Case Western University

November 10 / Iowa City, IA Prairie Lights Books, 6:30

November 16 / Cambridge, MA Porter Square Books

February 28 / Knoxville, TN University of Tennessee

Sweet Heaven When I Die, First Reviews

2011-08-22T21:07:00.001-04:00

My new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between is out. It's getting good reviews.

The Boston Globe calls it a "remarkable new collection of literary journalism... intimate in tone and expansive in scope," and adds that "taken together, these essays begin to give shape to a multifaceted America that is so much more than east and west, left and right, religious and secular. And there’s no better guide to this '"country in between.'"

The Oregonian says: "Superb... compelling... stunning... From what people in the publishing business tell me, collections of essays are not easy to sell these days. I hope Sharlet proves conventional wisdom wrong. This is a fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer."

The Daily declares, "In a crowded field, 'Sweet Heaven' stands with the few books that aren't afraid to look at the realities of American religion."

And then there's Michael Washburn, writing in The Washington Post.

Jeff Sharlet delivers a fine dose of thoughtful skepticism in “Sweet Heaven When I Die,” his collection of 13 trenchant essays on how we gain, lose, maintain and blindly accept faith. The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.

Best known for "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," the author offers a disquieting meditation on hope while discussing parental loss, artistic desire and the haunting music of Dock Boggs in a chapter called “Born, Again.” We cling to hope, Sharlet writes, “when the odds, no matter how good, are still that: odds, chance, a gamble in which the rules may change at any time. . . . We hope when we understand that circumstances are beyond our control, when will is not equal to effect, when we are not the subjects of a story but its objects. Hope isn’t optimistic; it’s the face of despair.” In this lamentation, he underscores how life itself puts faith in question.

In another essay, Sharlet combines autobiography and reportage to bring to life a group of Westerners in self-imposed exile who worship Christ in mountain churches and then congregate in local dives. He visits an old, distant friend and finds comfortable ground because when they “talk about God . . . both knew that’s a conversation without many conclusions.”

Sharlet also visits the opposite side of the spectrum in his reporting on BattleCry, the “furious youth crusade” of fundamentalism. In his account, BattleCry is the type of fundamentalist organization that embarrasses temperate Christians and enrages nonbelievers. Yet with its “warrior” mentality and its loathing of “queers and communists, feminists and Muslims,” the organization offers a vision of faith unencumbered by ambiguity. Sharlet quotes BatleCry’s leader, Ron Luce, as saying, “The world is a forty-five-year-old pervert posing as another tween online.’ ” BattleCry offers a sanctuary for like-minded believers.Speaking with a young entertainer at a BattleCry event, he realizes that her calm stems from the fact that she has “found faith that promised not answers but an end to questions.”

This is the prevailing division of the world that “Sweet Heaven” presents: between those who use faith as a tool for answering life’s difficult riddles and those whose faith is less an instrument than a blindfold. Sharlet contends that this latter faith exists without belief because it operates without understanding.

“Sweet Heaven” goes beyond “fringe fundamentalisms” and believers’ personal struggles. Sharlet also delivers commanding portraits of philosopher Cornel West, Yiddish novelist Chava Rosenfarb and radical environmental and labor activist Brad Will that dramatize faith made heroic through intellectual, artistic and political perseverance. But these more traditional pieces lack the intimacy of other essays in the collection.

In a chapter called “The Rapture,” exploring New Age extravagances, Sharlet reveals his pragmatic skepticism. He anchors the essay to New York-based healer Sondra Shaye, a self-described “fairie” who adopts the persona ofJesus as part of her therapy for her clients, all of whom pay good money to have her bless real estate deals and tackle their health problems and anxieties. Her payoff is handsome: She claims she earns more as a healer then she did in her previous job as a corporate litigator. Sharlet presents her story as a lesson in 21st-century faith. “Money is the means by which Sondra and other New Age healers show themselves to be a religious movement that’s within the economy of belief,” he writes.

As Sharlet chronicles the economies of belief — private, public or fraudulent — he remains more agnostic than atheist, more charitable than cynical. And though he obviously finds blind faith corrosive, he tempers his criticism by declining to impose his own beliefs. Sondra the healer seems to get something right when she tells Sharlet “doubt is your revelation.”

The Shack

2011-07-03T19:53:00.002-04:00

Notes for a review I never got around to finishing:

Recently an acquaintance of my wife’s, a woman she’d met a few times through work, presented her with a gift for our two-month-old daughter: a tiny, hand-knit, beige sweater, a wrap-around tunic that ties at the side with a button in the shape of a ladybug. “Isn’t it wonderful?” my wife asked. She likes wrap sweaters, herself, and she thought the ladybug was adorable. I’m sure it is. But I could only feign agreement. My stomach was lurching with the adrenalized vertigo peculiar to new parents, torqued between deep fear and cold aggression in the face of a perceived threat to one’s child. There was no threat in the sweater, of course. Rather, just the dangers of free association, between its ladybug button and the toy ladybug left behind as calling cards by the child-killer who sets in motion the plot of The Shack, an evangelical bestseller self-published in 2008 by an Oregon motel clerk named William P. Young. I read The Shack with the intention of reviewing it several months ago, but until that moment with the ladybug, I couldn’t account for why this awkward allegorical novel has won the hearts and minds of Christian America like no other fiction since the 1995 debut of the apocalyptic Left Behind series, which went on to sell some 50 million copies worldwide.

The Shack is as unlike that violently fundamentalist fever dream as possible: almost action-free, clogged with philosophical allusion, soundtracked by a series of chapter epigraphs drawn from Bruce Cockburn songs, and dedicated to a transgendered God who takes the form of a jolly, fat black woman in an apron, seemingly borrowed from a bottle of Aunt Jemima maple syrup, and calls herself Poppa to remind you that even though she’s a a mountain of maternal love she’s also your father. The Father, in fact—The Shack is ultimately committed to the same muscular faith that ripples through Left Behind. It’s not the theological destination that differs, it’s the path. Left Behind, perhaps the definitive evangelical text of the 1990s, attacked secularism and liberalism head on, its story of a small band of evangelicals doing battle with a United Nations bent on eradicationg religion an outright declaration of culture war, at the least. The Shack isn’t like that. The Shack loves everybody, even liberals. They’ll learn, if they’ll just relax for a minute and pull up a seat for pancakes with Poppa. The Shack is fundamentalism a la Alice’s Restaurant.

This Is How I Wish People Would Read My Next Book (Plus, Some Other Reading)

2011-06-20T14:43:00.003-04:00

I just got my first review for my forthcoming book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and it's kind of a drag. It's Kirkus, and to begin with it has two errors in a very short review, one minor, one major. There's a reference to a "preacher husband" in the lead essay, "Sweet Fuck All, Colorado," who simply does not exist. I don't know what the reviewer is talking about, beyond the fact that my friend John, husband of my friend Molly, is an Episcopalian active in his local church.

The other error is more egregious: "Sharlet admits that many of these essays were born from research for other books."

First, there's tone -- "admits"? Then, there are the facts: I admit no such thing, anywhere in the book, because it's simply not true. One short essay was "born" from research for The Family. I do note, in the acknowledgments, that I wrote the assembled pieces mostly as a kind of escape from fundamentalism.

It gets weirder -- the reviewer says I have "plenty of reason for confusion," since my parents were divorced and one was Christian, the other Jewish. That's a line of backhanded sympathy I recall from the fundamentalist ideologue Marvin Olasky's dismissal of The Family in his magazine, World (before he evidently realized he was wrong and published a series of investigative pieces on the Family). He said I was critical of fundamentalism because my religiously intermarried parents had divorced, leaving me a "loveless universe."

But my biggest gripe is the reviewer's main complaint -- his (or her) dismayed discovery that a collection of essays is, in fact, a collection of essays. "Disjointed!" the reviewer cries. "Disconnected!" Well, yes and no. It's true, as the reviewer points out, that the essays are on different subjects, not bound by content. I think they're bound by thematic concerns, but that's for critics to decide -- critics willing to engage a collection of literary journalism that doesn't come conventionally packaged. The decision to present this book as 13 stories, without introduction or explanation, was a deliberate one. In compiling the book, I looked at a great many similar collections. Nearly all included either self-deprecatory introductions in which the author apologized for foisting lowly journalistic pieces on the poor reader or a friend of the author declared the author a genius. There are exceptions -- the last lines of Didion's introduction to her Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Ellen Willis' introduction to her Beginning to See the Light, which nearly brought me to tears -- but most introductions amount to a disingenuous distancing from the ordinary goals of any collection of stories.

Writers of short fiction do not begin their books with introductions explaining that this one was published in The Paris Review, that one in The New Yorker, and that they are all casuals, really, and probably not worth reading, but still, they were written, so anyway, here. Nor are short fiction collections measured by the continuity of subject matter -- one doesn't complain that characters don't recur, that questions are not plainly restated. Instead, we look for themes, for common concerns, for currents, or alternating currents, of dread or desire or some other emotion, or impulse, or idea.

I discarded my introduction because I think literary journalism should be read the same way. There is precious little "news" in this book or in most other collections. I don't read Willis because I want to know about concerts she attended 40 years ago, or because her brother's spiritual condition is of pressing national concern. I read her for the same reason I read short fiction. This is not to say her essays, or mine, are like short fiction; they're second cousins, at best. But just as a painting, a photograph, a song, and a short story all attempt to express something more and less than the news, so, too, does a piece of literary journalism. There's a tension, there, of course -- when Willis' pieces were first published in Rolling Stone, people did read them because they wanted to know about the concert last month, and when Rolling Stone readers encountered the essay titled, in Sweet Heaven, "She Said Yes," they likely read it not for its portrait of a young woman torn between the certainty of fundamentalism and the certainty of her desires but because they were worried about fundamentalist influence on national politics. That same tension may apply to fiction -- consider the timeliness of an Updike story on terrorism, or the timeliness of any story at all by some pretty young thing said to be the next big thing in some assemblage of 20 under 40, 15 before 25, 3 to watch out for, or one for the money. It's best resolved not through invocations of "universalism" -- no such thing -- or anxiety about what endures -- Moby-Dick didn't, until it did -- but through engagement with the story on its own terms, followed by disengagement if the verdict so determines.

Doing so will also relieve literary journalists and other writers of creative nonfiction of the pedantic urge to organize collections according to type. No more neatly divided “personals,” “travels,” and “considerations.” Some of my favorite books are organized this way, and my first instinct was to organize Sweet Heaven like so as well. My editor, Alane Mason, talked me out of it. No disclaimers. Here is a story. It may be worth reading. It will not be made moreso by the reassurance that it is tucked away in a book as tidily organized as a tool box or a sewing kit or a child’s divided toy chest – this compartment for stuffed animals, that one for “things that go,” as my daughter’s word book describes them, and that one for puzzles.

Well, maybe that would have been good – a book divided up into the categories of Stuffed Animals, Things That go, and Puzzles. The late anarchist journalist Brad Will, the subject of “Quebrado,” comes under Stuffed Animals; “Clouds, When Determined by Context,” about the sci-fi imaginations of 1950s fundamentalists, is a Thing That Goes; and the inner workings of the media monopoly Clear Channel documented in “Rock Like Fuck” are a Puzzle.

* * *

My irritation dissipated, I’m ready to move on to cheerier subjects, the recent publications of friends. But having learned from Kirkus that one must be clearly organized, I’m sticking with my new scheme.

Stuffed Animals

Here we have my former student, fellow Buddha killer, and pal Meera Subramanian's first full-length feature in Virginia Quarterly Review, "India's Vanishing Vultures." The title does not do justice to the lyricism or the horror of Meera's essay, but I think this sentence does:

Overhead, hundreds of birds kettled in slow circles in the sky—mostly Eurasian griffons, bulky steppe eagles, and Egyptian vultures the size of large gulls—all riding the warm whorl of desert thermals to the top of the gyre without a single flap of their wide wings and then peeling off like a slowly cascading waterfall.

Things That Go

Here I'm filing the great JoAnn Wypijewski's short essay on Anthony Weiner for The Nation, although Weiner is now simply gone. To my mind, it's the only thing worth reading about Weiner and why so many of us seemed to care.

Of all the restrooms in all the schools and bars and gas stations across this great land, rare is the stall inside of which someone has not paused to draw a penis. Erect, with tight scrotum on one end and a cartoon squirt at the other, it is characterized by a vigorous arcing line and a paucity of detail; no hairs or veins or rippled skin, no great variation in size or proportion, a Unipenis, really, the signal hieroglyph of our age. When we have blown or glutted or pummeled ourselves into extinction, alien archaeologists will find this symbol on crumbling viaducts and leeching scrap heaps, in the ruins of our cities and the overgrown remnants of our public libraries, and they will conclude, “Here was their god.”

Read more.

The same issue of The Nation features Kiera Feldman's controversial feature debut, "The Romance of Birthright Israel," in which the thing that goes is the love bus of conservative Zionism, carrying Kiera and her fellow campers on a journey through Israel the goal of which seems to be the reproduction of the state, literally:

Birthright co-founder Bronfman, the billionaire heir to the Canadian Seagram’s liquor empire, began directing his philanthropic dollars to teen Israel trips in the late 1980s. “To me, in order to be a complete Jew, one must have an emotional and physical attachment to Israel,” Bronfman says. But he was bothered that the kids on those early trips weren’t bonding with their Israeli peers. Bronfman’s answer: developing the mifgash—the encounter—between Jewish Israeli teens and their diaspora counterparts. This made the tour bus less of “an isolated bubble,” according to Elan Ezrachi, the Israeli educator who developed the mifgash on Bronfman’s dime. Birthright adapted the mifgash by way of IDF soldiers. These encounters between American youth and youthful Israeli soldiers “move very fast to what we call ‘hormonal mifgashim,’” Ezrachi told me. “Things happen.”

Puzzles

Nathan Schneider attends an evangelical advance screening of Terrance Malick's Tree of Life, at which he is advised by a former chief of staff for South Carolina firebreather Senator Jim DeMint to "mobilize" around the movie. "Mobilize and Contemplate" is his lovely attempt to do so, a hybrid of narrative and criticism that was turned down by a big magazine for not clearly being either. Killing the Buddha to the rescue.

And, finally, the approaching July publication of my fellow Rolling Stone writer Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology, which grows from her 2007 National Magazine Award finalist feature. I first met Janet when she was researching that feature, her first foray, I think, into writing about religion, and we had a series of odd conversations about religion, science, space ships, aliens, and advertising. My contribution to the final result is a blurb I wrote for the jacket:

"Inside Scientology goes beyond the celebrities and the scandals -- though they're here in all their absurdity and horror -- to find in Scientology a more profound story about "technology" as an article of faith and faith as a vessel for science, or, at least, science fiction. With precision and empathy, Janet Reitman has in this definitive investigation laid bare the genesis and possibly the endgame of America's strangest religion."

McGinnis vs. Malcolm

2011-05-21T19:48:00.000-04:00

I've long been fascinated by Janet Malcolm's 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer, about the lawsuit filed by convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against journalist Joe McGinnis over McGinnis' representation of MacDonald in his 1983 book Fatal Vision. "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on," Malcolm famously begins, "knows what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." McGinnis, as one might guess, does not come off well in what follows, though the most powerful passages of the book, like that opening salvo, don't deal with him in particular. Still, he apparently felt compelled to publish an epilogue addressing her charges in the 1989 edition of Fatal Vision. Now, prompted by some sharp words in a NYT review of Malcolm's newest book, he's posted it online. I find Malcolm's diagnosis of journalism persuasive, but admirers of her work -- especially those of us who include her on our syllabi -- will nonetheless want to read McGinnis' response, the better to "teach the controversy," as advocates of creationism like to say.

On the Present Tense

2011-05-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

From a review by Joseph Salvatore of Dogfight, a Love Story, by Matthew Burgess.

“This disorientation may arise from the story’s being told in the present tense, which heightens immediacy and suspense. But in such fiction, a flash-forward to a character’s paunchy future can be distracting. Suddenly the reader is taken out of the main action and begins looking for clues: Who survives and who doesn’t? What becomes of Alfredo and Isabel’s baby? The use of the present tense can also, paradoxically, flatten out rather than heighten events, so that highs and lows register the same intensity; a dogfight feels no different from, say, someone setting a dinner table.”

Sweet Heaven When I Die, Dust Jacket

2011-04-28T15:33:00.000-04:00

Above are the galleys of my forthcoming book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, to be published by W.W. Norton this August. Also, some of the 6 1/2 feet of snow that fell this past winter in my new home of New Hampshire, and a barn from which a bear stole a garbage bag last week. A raccoon may live in there, too.

Norton has just finalized the dust jacket copy for Sweet Heaven. That is, the flap, the pitch, the shpiel, the what's-it-about come-on that will for most bookstore browsers determine whether they write down the title to remind themselves to buy it online -- sad but true -- or drop it with a thud. Or maybe like a pat -- it's a modestly-sized book, 264 pages, 5.5 inches X 8.25, a little shorter than a piece of paper is wide. Small, but big in ambition, or so declares Norton:

No one explores the borderlands of belief and doubt quite like Jeff Sharlet -- ingenious, farsighted, able to enter the worlds of others, even the flakiest and the most fanatical, with uncommon sympathy. Taking his title and inspiration from the despair and desire of legendary banjo player Dock Boggs, Sharlet sets out across a landscape of strange religion, from the American mythology -- and geology -- of “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado” to the midnight congregation of urban anarchists celebrating a victory over police in “What They Wanted.”

Sharlet discovers a country of prophets, promoters, revolutionaries, and other restless souls to guide him along the way. There are old friends—a whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking, Bible-reading radical born again as a Republican D.A., campaigning on horseback with a gun in her holster—and would-be saviors, a fundamentalist Christian “frontline soldier” who takes Sharlet into a grave at a Hell House in Texas, a “ritual master in the High Council of Gor” who attempts to rid him of evil spirits with a big knife and an “emotional cord cutting” above a yoga studio in Brooklyn. Sharlet finds heroes—a rebel journalist who videotaped his own murder, a Yiddish writer who left behind the greatest Holocaust novel nobody’s ever read, a philosopher who shows Sharlet the “deep democracy” within the “death shudders” of jazz and the blues—and antiheroes, not villains but everyday people confronting the truth of suffering and trying to cut the best deals they can on the side.

In the tradition of Joan Didion’s classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem, these portraits and journeys become movements in the same complex piece of music, one that vibrates with all the madness and beauty, the melancholy and aspirations for transcendence, of American life.

Are you melancholy? Do you vibrate? Do your underarms smell of aspiration? Then you should probably buy the book right now.

Sean and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp, "Organizing the Bookcase"

2011-02-25T15:21:00.001-03:00

Some years ago I read an article about interior design and bookshelves. It included some photographs of Bret Easton Ellis' bookshelves. Or, rather, his shelf: one long shelf running like a snake around the circumference of his fabulous loft. I was inspired. I'm not neat or organized enough to be a bibliophile, but I do like books as objects almost as much as I like them as texts. Those affections are sometimes in tension. Case in point was my decision to do Ellis one better by organizing my books by color. The problem, of course, was that if I wanted to find my copy of, say, Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet, I had to remember not only that its spine is red but that my copy is a bit faded, the red fading to the color of old salmon, so that I'd shelved the book closer to orange than to violet. Then, too, there is the dominance of Penguin orange; and the problem of books such as Borges' Collected Fictions, the bottom half of which is a dusty twilight blue and the top half of which is a milk chocolate brown. I could picture the spine, but not its location. So my experiment failed. Fortunately, Sean and Lisa Blonder Ohlenkamp have not:

Books I Re-Read, Often

2011-02-08T15:06:00.000-03:00

For some extra material at the back of the paperback edition of my 2010 book C Street, my publisher, Little, Brown, asked me for a list of six or eight nonfiction books that shape my writing, with a few sentences for each. I like it when my publisher asks me to make lists. Here's mine, with some usual suspects and some titles that surprised even me when I sat down to really think about the books that shadow me when I'm writing. Some of these are favorites, some are books that just stick around. I recommend every one of them.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941). This is an attempt to document the "cruel radiance of what is," as Agee put it, that all others should be measured against. And all others fail -- as did Agee, and, to a lesser extent, photographer Evans. And still I re-read this great, failed experiment over and over through the years, with caution and awe.

Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground, by Charles Bowden (2002). I used to assign this to my students, but it infuriated 2/3 of every semester’s class. It’s hard going, dense, circular, occasionally overwrought, and absolutely brilliant. Makes the phrase “dark lyricism” meaningful. Sort of like James Agee’s best work: study it, but beware of trying it at home.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion (1968). When I first read this, at age 18, I wanted to wear giant Joan Didion sunglasses and have migraines. Then I figured out that all I wanted from Didion were her sentences. Now that I’m older and I have my own, imperfect sentences, what I admire is Didion’s power of perception, the nearly flawless double vision that allowed her to see a society in crisis and at the same time to see herself, watching it crumble.

The Robber Barons, by Matthew Josephson (1934). An early 20th century example of muckraking as scripture. Like many of his contemporaries, Josephson wanted to write about the bastards who’d ripped off a nation; but unlike less imaginative writers, he fell in love with his subjects, and the result is this Dante-eque tour of the history of American greed by a writer who knows that Hell is more interesting than Heaven.

The Dybbuk, or Between Two World, by S. Ansky (1914). This Yiddish play, which I first read in an English version by the great translator Joachim Neugroschel and later saw in an adaptation by one of my favorite playwrights, Tony Kushner, is not, technically, nonfiction. But Ansky approached it as if it was, scouring the folklore of Eastern European Jews for decades to create this uncanny distillation of a world of belief. The story, of a possession, is simple and yet irreducibly complex; I find myself thinking about it often when writing about religion. Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes is equally essential to me.

The Maine Woods, by Henry David Thoreau (1864). I’m no great fan of Thoreau’s self-enamored prose, but this book’s account of his ascent up Mt. Ktaadn and his discovery, close to its peak, that the world is vastly more complex and beautifully dangerous than his imagination could conceive—“Contact! Contact!” he nearly screams in terror—is, to me, the beginning of American literary journalism.

The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm (1990). Maybe this book should have marked the end of American literary journalism. Its brief story—of a dispute between the murderer of its title and the journalist who tried to tell his story—is a vehicle for Malcolm’s condemnation of the genre she practices as something akin to ritual sacrifice. I read it, assign it, and think about it every time I start a new story.

Lipstick Traces, by Greil Marcus (1990). I’ve never read this book straight through, and I don’t care about its ostensible subject, the Sex Pistols, but I always keep it close at hand. It’s a masterwork of pattern and digression, an almost too-hip monstrosity of hybrid prose that I nonetheless find bracingly hopeful: a commonplace book of strange dignity, “the ability,” writes my favorite theological thinker, “to contradict what is.”

Borders, Henrietta, New York, 2009

2011-01-17T14:13:00.000-03:00

Borders is dying. I'd like to add one more tack to its cardboard coffin. The worst Borders I've encountered -- and since I often travel to small cities without many bookstores, I've been to a lot -- was in Henrietta, NY, an upscale suburb outside of Rochester. To the best of my knowledge, there are no more independent new bookstores in the Rochester area. Borders has taken over a metro area of 1 million people and slowly deprived it of books. The Henrietta store was a case in point. I went in to pick up a copy of The Paris Review. No copies. Sold out? No, said the clerk, they didn't carry that "magazine." Curious, I went back to the lit journal section. What did they carry? Alaska Quarterly Review. Antioch Review. Bellevue Review. Callaloo. Denver Quarterly. Detect a pattern? That's right -- they'd ordered literary journals by picking randomly, A, B, C. I don't think they got further than F.

I asked to speak to a manager. She met me between the fancy chocolate counter and the comic book rack. I asked if she might consider ordering The Paris Review. No, she said, smiling, they had a good selection of "story magazines" already. Look, I said, I'm not really a fan of The Paris Review myself, but it's part of the landscape. Skipping it in a lit journal section would be like skipping Faulkner in the fiction section. Love him or hate him, you gotta have him. She smiled and said nothing. "Faulkner?" I said again, testing.

"Would you like to look that author up?" she asked.

Don't bother, I said. I bought the latest Astonishing X-Men and left.

Borders didn't like books, and book buyers didn't like Borders. I'd say good riddance, but the sad fact is that with its death a lot of people will lose even the chance to buy X-Men and Twilight. What's left?

Suffolk County Tourist Board, "Icon Survey," 2011

2011-01-05T14:31:00.001-03:00

Awesomer than a swimming pool.

My new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, to be published in August, features a very short passage on death metal rockers Cradle of Filth. So I was excited to see them break out of the death metal ghetto this morning and break into international "news" via Gawker.com, which reports that lead singer Dani Filth was the surprise winner -- ahead of Brian Eno! -- of a poll by the tourist board of Suffolk County, England, to determine the county's greatest icon. Second place went not to Eno but to a swimming pool. The tourist board was not amused; they've apparently called for a recount.

But as pleasant as it always is to hear news of everyday people rejecting the drive to sanitize and homogenize culture, Dani Filth may not be the best representation of rebellion. I wrote about Cradle of Filth in the context of a story about Clear Channel, the giant media monopoly. I'd gone to Denver to meet Jesse Morreale an independent concert promoter being driven out of business by Clear Channel, but since he was entangled with a lawsuit over the matter, he couldn't give me any particulars.

Nor would the minor rock stars who came through town while I was there. Morreale took me to shows by arena rockers, alt-country crooners, and bands so bland that they could not be classified. The best was that of Cradle of Filth, a death-metal band from England with a cult following. The show featured a trapeze, lots of sparks, and a stilt walker dressed as a giant lobster; the band, dressed in leather bondage gear, sounded awesomely like a car running out of oil crashing into a lawnmower grinding up gravel. But afterward, on the tour bus, the lead singer assured me that he would "never" say anything against Clear Channel; he hoped his loyalty would be rewarded with a radio hit.

Oh, well. Maybe that swimming pool deserves another look.

Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities, 2008

2011-01-03T08:46:00.000-03:00

An inquiry from my friend Melvin Bukiet, about a contact for the writer Peter Trachtenberg, prompted me to dig up my review of Peter's The Book of Calamities, one of my favorite books of recent years. I reviewed it for Search, a now-defunct magazine without an online archive. Much, much worse than that is the fact that Peter's publisher, Little, Brown, never brought The Book of Calamities out in paperback, despite reviews nearly all as admiring as mine, a number of awards, and sales that, if modest, were within the range of what publishers used to expect of "serious" books. Nothing I can do about publishing's determination to strangle itself, but here's the review. Buy the book in hardcover.

Peter Trachtenberg

The ordinary history of Christianity – not the wars fought in its name or the popes and martyrs and televangelists who bob along near the crest of its waves, but the faith as it is found and lost by everyday people – is rife with instances of what might be called “scripture shock.” Abigail Hutchinson, a subject of Jonathan Edwards’ “experimental religion” during the Great Awakening of the 18^th century, described such an experience for Edwards’ notebooks. Determined to work out the matter of her salvation, she plowed through the Bible as quickly as she could, racing from disobedience to flood to murder to the shame of a naked father, a banished mother, lovers speared like roaches, cities slaughtered, locusts, boils. Too much scripture, too fast. Abigail Hutchinson collapsed; she died not long after.

It’s usually not so bad. In Fort Riley in Kansas, I met three young Iraq veterans who described episodes of scripture shock of their own; but they considered it a successful treatment for an illness they called belief. For one man, a medic raised a fundamentalist Christian, it was a particularly bloody passage of the Book of Numbers that he studied before entering the Army that overloaded him. He became an atheist. His two friends, one a lapsed Catholic, the other a North Carolinian who’d joined to fight holy war against Islam, reported similar epiphanies of disbelief in response to close and rapid reading of scripture in a war zone.

Death and disbelief are only two of the possible outcomes. A third, by far the most common, is unquestioning belief. Scripture can drown doubt. All suffering begins to look the same; some simply call it sin, and declare themselves its enemies, a response every bit as reasonable, if reductionist, as the madness of Pip, the stow-away on Melville’s Pequod who loses his mind after falling overboard and treading water in a vast, blank sea for hours before rescue.

Peter Trachtenberg’s terrifying and wondrous Book of Calamities, if consumed too quickly, might induce similar responses. (Disclosure: Peter Manseau, the editor of Search, and I published an early draft of a section of the first chapter in a book called Killing the Buddha.) There are more painful chronicles – anthologies of lynching, compilations of genocidal documents, black books of the Holocaust – but few that hurt on so many registers, from the mundane to the inconceivable, the personal to the political, the absurd to the outrageous to the stupid to the sad. A partial inventory: a friend with cancer; the author as junky; the Book of Job; the dead of 9/11; a martyr and a lion; Rwanda; the Holocaust; twins befriended by Trachtenberg who are afflicted by a disease that flays them alive, over and over, for 27 years; Vietnam vets trapped in their own stories; victims of AIDS in Calcutta, trapped in Mother Theresa’s; another friend of the author, his head stuck in a plastic bag.

And yet, The Book of Calamities never wallows. Trachtenberg is as humble as he is nimble, and both qualities are prerequisites for his inquiry—or rather, set of inquiries, since the book is framed as “Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meanings.” It might as easily have been subtitled “Five Hypotheses,” since in each chapter Trachtenberg not only addresses a different facet of suffering but also a variation on religion’s or philosophy’s or law’s responses, drawing on Gilgamesh, Boethius, Buddha, Simone Weil, and many others, always respectfully, never conclusively. “This book is an investigation of the ways people find meaning in suffering,” he writes, “or try not to be driven mad by the possibility that it means nothing.” He allows that possibility: “Suffering may not inherently mean anything, but I believe that giving it meaning is the only way people can escape being ultimately destroyed by it.” The rest of the book might be summed up in three words: Or maybe not.

This is The Book of Calamities’ remarkable achievement: to the shock of suffering, Trachtenberg responds with a masterful collage of personal narrative, journalism, biblical criticism, and layman’s philosophy that gently and subtly guides the reader past both unbelief and certainty. That’s not as easy as it sounds, for they’re represented in The Book of Calamities by, among others, Buddha and Mother Theresa, respectively, and Trachtenberg gives them their due. He wants us to understand them and appreciate them as best we can, but when their traditions, their hypotheses, turn away from or euphemize or gloss any suffering at all – Thich Nhat Hahn fails to connect with a group of broken Vietnam vets at a Buddhist retreat, Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity, swept away by the beauty of suffering, fail to provide painkillers –Trachtenberg collects that data, too, and weighs it.

“Before suffering people can form a coherent picture of their suffering,” he writes, “they must first ask questions about it, or maybe of it. In doing so, they are performing the work of science and philosophy, interrogating their reality in order to derive a thesis about it.” But those who suffer are at a disadvantage, he continues. “They pose their questions in the silence of a hospital room or the murmuring heat of a refugee camp, in a house where someone has died; his clothes still hang in the closet, bearing a trace of his smell.” So Trachtenberg, a man who despite years of drug addiction, overdoses, and a suicide attempt does not believe he has suffered much on the scale of things, joins them in their questioning, adding to their urgency his privileged calm.

The first question is the simplest: “Why me?” In Trachtenberg’s hands, though, it becomes: Why not me? Why her? The her is his friend Linda, dead of cancer. Long before that that, though, she was “a beautiful young woman with translucent olive skin and the eyes of a Sienese Madonna.” A saint and a genius, according to Trachtenberg’s memory, her virtues disguised by her day job as a functionary at an arts nonprofit with Trachtenberg. “Like practically everybody else in our office, she wrote poems, but hers weren’t about her genitals or her feelings. They were about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and they were sestinas.” Trachtenberg, meanwhile, is a disaster, a spoiled middle class kid who thinks suffering is a synonym for thrills and who finds both in a syringe. He buys drugs, gets mugged, buys more drugs, squirts blood in other people’s homes, buys more drugs, tries to kill himself with 50 fiornal and a razor blade, and fails, partly because Linda saves him.

In his memory, she miraculously intuits his condition and spirits him off to a hospital. Then, later, she becomes ill, first with an sickness that bloats her grotesquely, then with an even worse one that wastes her to the bone. There is an inverted logic to this, an answer to the chapter’s question. Why her? Because she took his suffering onto herself. Because only the good die young. Because fate loves irony. Because God tests those who can bear it. Phrased so glibly, such explanations are horrifying. And yet, they’re rooted in the rational impulse, the search for causality that has long prompted interpreters of the Book of Job, an account of which Trachtenberg splices with Linda’s story, to look for justice within Job’s suffering. “Order,” Trachtenberg writes, “is the nest we make for our minds.”

But it may not be reality. The last time he sees Linda before her death they reminisce about the early years of his friendship, including her almost-magical rescue of him. “Linda stopped me. ‘That’s not what happened,’ she said.” There had been no miracles. Trachtenberg had called her and told her what he’d done, a detail he’d erased. And they hadn’t been close, then, either. In fact, she’d always wondered, “Why me?” There is no answer: “I couldn’t say why I’d chosen her. I couldn’t say why she’d been chosen.”

Randomness is not the end, however. Order may be a fiction, but in Trachtenberg’s telling it’s a necessary story. The centerpiece of the book is a long chapter on Rwanda’s attempts to reckon with murder on a scale that makes the Nazis look like a few bad apples. There were no death camps in Rwanda, only people. Some of them were killed; most of them were killers. But the question of who was a victim isn’t so simple. The Tutsis, no doubt; but what of the genocidaires, herded by cowardice and chance into horrible crimes? Trachtenberg juxtaposes his interviews with Rwandans with the story of Andrea Yates, who in 2001 drowned her five children in a bathtub, believing she was saving them, and of Oedipus, who truly knew not what he did. The thread between them is fate, one of the Book of Calamities’ hypotheses about suffering. “If I was created so, born to this fate,” Trachtenberg quotes Oedipus, “Who could deny the savagery of God?” Fate is not, in this reading, destiny, but a thicker, more complicated term for circumstance.

“This isn’t to say that fate eliminates guilt,” writes Trachtenberg. “But it makes possible a more nuanced vision of human responsibility, allowing one to see it as an intricate bitmap of freedom and unfreedom in which there are many shades of doubt and pity.” Which is to say, fate reveals a spectrum; Trachtenberg’s quasi-scientific method of inquiry has brought him around to a theory of relativity. Against it, he weighs justice. “What all justice does,” he writes, “however cruelly or inequitably, is to impose order on the pandemonium of acts.”

From order to chaos to fate to order: Trachtenberg’s story seems circular, but in fact it winds inward. The most moving story in the book uses Buddhism, martyrdom, and the trauma of Vietnam to reflect on the story of Kelly and Kate Daley, twins born with recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, an extremely rare skin disease the effects of which are like “being burned every day of one’s life.” The affliction of the twins is unimaginable; Trachtenberg doesn’t really ask us to try. Instead, he wants us to understand their courage, as manifested most clearly in their wit – they’re bright, funny, honest women, people with whom any reader would want to be friends. The point of the story isn’t inspiration, however; the twins die horrible deaths at age 27. It’s witness. Another word for that is martyr; and yet another, Trachtenberg suggests, is bodhisattva, an “awakened being,” according to Buddhism, who sacrifices the reward of nirvana in order to stay with the rest of us as witness to our suffering. In one sense, that’s what the Daley twins desperately need: a witness. They wanted to be seen, both their suffering and their humanity recognized. In another sense, they were witnesses: they stayed in this world, living longer and fuller lives than almost anyone else with their disease. They did not die for the truth, they lived for it. And the truth was that of suffering. This is neither belief nor unbelief, it’s simply fact, the antidote to the inevitable shock of calamity.

Trachtenberg never makes suffering beautiful, but his prose is often lovely, as when he writes of the view from a suicide’s room, “the vast shining loneliness of the Hudson and the immense sky filled with light.” When he thinks we can bear it, the book is even funny. No gags, just an appreciation for the humor that attends suffering, as when Kelly Daley – forbidden from eating even toast, lest it scrape away her throat’s membrane – tells him she lusts for foie gras. “ ‘I’m a wistful hedonist. If I was healed, I’m afraid I’d be totally into the pleasures of the flesh.’ ”

The same may be true of Trachtenberg. He writes most vividly not of horror but of the delight he takes in the people he comes to care for, the twins, Linda, a painter in the final chapter. He sees not just their suffering, but also their brilliance, and it’s that reflected light that makes this darkest of studies itself a kind of witness, a profound book of heart stopping stories and even more powerful questions. This is a rare and invaluable kind of writing, almost scriptural in its scope and its openness to pain. I say “almost,” because The Book of Calamities is both less and more than the scripture from which it borrows much of its form. Trachtenberg offers no answers and doesn’t seem certain there are any. And yet that’s a blessing, a recognition that there is a limit to witness – which means that there may be a limit to suffering, too.

New Year New Music.

2011-01-01T14:37:00.000-03:00

New music for the new year. Bought three albums today: The ArchAndroid, by Janelle Monae; Sweet Warrior, by Richard Thompson; and Far, by Regina Spektor. Reactions tk.

David Shields, Reality Hunger 2010, pt. 2

2010-12-17T17:58:00.000-03:00

A continuation of my responses to David Shields' assemblage of numbered quotations on nonfiction as a question, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

#73 Shields or an unidentified source writes in rebellion against the niche marketing of Hollywood movies, comparing his preference to a dinner party at which he and his guests together will serve tacos, cordon bleu, and "perhaps some Japanese food as well. I want to mix it all together, because I think that's what life is like."

My response: Shields and those he approves of spend so much time doing things because they think "that's what life is like." Don't they know? Is their only access to life through their reproduction of it as an idealized pastiche of pop cosmopolitanism? Are they conflating life and commercial media?

#74 Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, writing in Wired, plays the part of a 19th century railroad booster on behalf of the internet, declaring it "the opposite of broadcast... with as many senders as receivers." Well, that's just not true, but it's hard to hold Gibson responsible for such misinformation without knowing when he wrote it. Which we don't, because Shields, angry about being forced to source anything, fails to include dates in his begrudging citations. Maybe "because that's what life is like" -- if life, for you, is comprised of nothing but wit and irony. Gibson, whose fiction is more than that, offers even less in his attack on citation: "The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art." So once again these brave pioneers of genre crossing insist on the preserving the gated sanctuary of "art," into which the genres they raid are never to be allowed entry, lest art's purity be sullied. Which is to say: Lurking beyond all this pop art piracy is the same old regime of fauxhemian capitalism the would-be pirates say they're decrying. "Reality can't be copyrighted," concludes Gibson; it's worth noting, though, that his novels are. I suppose that's the kind of quibble Gibson might dismiss as pedantry akin to citation; I think it's just reality, no more, no less.

#78 The old regime resurrects another one of its dearest ideas, dressed up in the drag of techgnosis: "It's important for the writer to be cognizant of the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and more visceral narrative forms," argues an unidentified writer who may or may not be Shields.* "You can work in these forms or use them or write about them or through them, but I don't think it's a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum. Culture, like science, moves forward. Art evolves."

Only if you're a social darwinist. Implicit in this statement is the idea that art is a form of progress, that it "moves forward" -- that art is, by definition, a social good. But there's no suggestion in Reality Hunger that Shields or those he subsumes into his manifesto believe that all art is a social good. Indeed, most use "art" as a term to indicate that which they believe "evolves," that which serves the greater good of social darwinism. I suspect Shields would strongly reject this notion, as I've rephrased it. Hence, I'd argue, the veil of "art" drawn between genres even as these writers declare their own transgressions.

* Eager to evolve, I turned to a "more technologically sophisticated" form of citation, Google. This remark from Reality Hunger is widely cited, and usually sourced to Shields, himself.

David Shields, Reality Hunger, 2010; Milton Rogovin, Portraits in Steel, 1993

2010-12-16T04:02:00.000-03:00

I've been slowly reading David Shields' recent book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto for awhile now. I'm not sure if I recommend it -- I keep reading out of annoyance as much as pleasure. I've decided to try blogging it, a reasonable response, I think, to a book that is comprised of 618 numbered quotations related to the question of fiction vs. nonfiction. Or maybe simply fiction/nonfiction. I'm sympathetic to the not-very-new idea that it's difficult to draw a sharp line between genres, and I'm grateful for many of Shields' selections, but I'm bored by the book's cleverness (the quotations are only identified in an index he says his publisher forced him to include) and dismayed by the tired old conventional wisdom of "art" masquerading as genre-bending transgression.

But I can't stop reading. So I'm going to start taking notes on the the entries I find most provocative, starting with #45*:

"After Freud, after Einstein, the novel retreated from narrative, poetry retreated from rhyme, and art retreated from the representational into the abstract." In the margin I wrote, "glib & false." What bothers me in this statement, representative of a tone throughout the book, is the definite article: "the novel."

Such grandiose statements remind me of the singularity with which some fundamentalists speak of gay people: "the gay man," as Pastor Ted Haggard used to say, before his regular male escort outed him as one. For Ted, the definite article elevated his enemy; for champions of the novel, the definite article elevates their sense of themselves as at the center of the only conversation about fiction worth having. The novel doesn't exist; only novels, many of which remained firmly committed to narrative.

#47** galls me for a similar reason.

"I listened to a tour guide at the National Gal'ery ask his group what made Rothko great. [Various possibilities follow.] The tour guide said 'Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.' This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I've ever encountered."

To which I responded in the margin: Each entry sillier than the last. Their problem is the distraction of "great."

But thinking on it now, I realize I'm disqualified from judging this commentary, since I don't believe there can be a "useful definition of artistic greatness." Such a definition isn't very useful, since it can only be definitive in the cliquish imagination of those who accept it. "Imagination" is perhaps too generous a word for those who cannot conceive of art beyond the world in which Rothko looms large. Poor Rothko; held captive by little minds for which size really matters.

#62*** concerns Brian Fawcett's Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, which, in my youth, was a book for young men who wanted young women to know that the A&P -- that'd be Art and Politics, capitalized -- left them no time for anything less than maximum sexual and romantic intensity. Nonetheless, Fawcett can't be blamed for this remark about his book, in which the top two thirds the pages are filled with fiction about media consumption and the bottom third features an essay on the Cambodian genocide:

"The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett's point: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge."

Why stop there? How about: "TV, lacking greatness, represents as thorough a destruction of humanity as Auschwitz." Or: "Pop stars who aren't quite trashy enough for me to celebrate ironically represent as complete an assault on our ears as the machetes of the Rwandan genocidaires."

See, that's the great thing about insisting on no distinctions between fiction and nonfiction: you're free to draw on both in the service of literal idiocy at once.

#65****, on the preferred genre label of these bold pioneers, the "lyric essay":

"In fiction, lyricism can look like an evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it's apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real, that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know."

I believe this is from an advertisement for a penis pump called The Real.

#72***** More on the lyric essay.

"What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation?"

The short answer, of course, is easy: kitsch. But I'm also reminded of a comparison my friend JoAnn Wypijewski once drew between the photographs of Milton Rogovin and Sebastio Selgado, both of whom set out to document the lives of workers. Selgado's work looks like fashion photography: it is lush, beautiful, lyric -- "a lovely sideshow to The Real, that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know."

Pretty, no? Get that bit in the center, where the nameless worker looks almost like he's on a cross?

Rogovin, who recently turned 100, has been taking pictures in his adopted hometown of Buffalo, New York, since 1942. My favorite book of his is Portraits in Steel, images of steelworkers whom he has come to know over decades. Each is photographed at home and at work, and many are interviewed, as well. The steelworkers collaborate in their portraiture, especially at home, where many pose with favorite items. Yes, they "pose," but there is nothing artificial about the process. Each pose, for that matter, might be considered a form of reportage, on the part of the worker, and of observation, on the part of Rogovin, more truthful than the capture of brutal elegance on display in Selgado. Here is a sample that gives only a limited sense, since most of these images are stripped of their companions and their identifying details. Even so:

* Shields thinks citations are a distraction from Art. I don't, but I've tried to give his book a fair shake by commenting on his commentaries without immediately identifying their source, as his wish. In the index required by his publisher, he provides some scant bibliographical data, with the caveat that he "forgot" some it "along the way." Shields suggests you cut all of it out of the book. He presents this notion as a rebellion against the ownership of art (why, then, attach his name to the book at all?), but it strikes me more as an evasion of the specificity he seems to believe would reduce his Art to the lowly status of information. Here, then, is as much information as he could bring himself to provide: #45 is taken from Lorraine Adams, "Almost Famous: The Rise of the 'Nobody' Memoir,"Washington Monthly. Shields doesn't include such trivia as dates, for what hath Time to do with Art?

**The source of #47, on Rothko, is unidentified.

***Likewise #62. Just as well. The asshole who thought it witty to equate big media with actual murder is probably left unnamed.

****I was wrong. The source for #65 is Ben Marcus, "The Genre Artist," The Believer.

*****The source for #72 is lyric essayist John D'Agata, though Shields doesn't distinguish whether this quote is from D'Agata's anthology, The New Essay, or from Shields' conversations with him, also mentioned as a source. I happen to be reading D'Agata's About a Mountain right now, too, which has raised some related questions I'll have to blog tomorrow or the next day, after I've moved on to the passages from Reality Hunger about which I have sweeter things to say.

The Falls Church (Anglican), 2010

2010-12-16T02:33:00.000-03:00

About a month ago I posted a strange bit of spam I received that seemed connected to my work on the Family and a very conservative, and very influential, church to which it has ties, The Falls Church (Anglican). Falls Church isn't what most people think of when they think fundamentalism -- it's old, it's upper crust, and its membership includes some genuine elites -- Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard, Tucker Carlson, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, former CIA director Porter Goss, Rep. Robert Aderholt (a Republican Family man from Alabama), and others. Here's a 2004 portrait by liberal evangelical writer Ayelish McGarvey, "Evangelical Elitists," written before Falls Church broke away from the Episcopal Church USA, which it viewed as too tolerant of homosexuality.

No real news. Just the arrival, this evening, of a pungent little defense of Falls Church, a response to my small critique.

"You typical demonizing Jew."

This is, I believe, what the Falls Church Anglican schismatics call "traditionalism."

Style Sheet, 2010

2010-12-11T17:17:00.001-03:00

After four books, I've a good sense of what I like and don't like about publishing. What I like is writing the book. What I don't like is publication. The best part of the latter process, I've come to think, is the style sheet. This is a document prepared by the copy editor to let the author know how the publisher spells or presents terms about which there might be some debate. It reads like a grocery list from the author's subconscious, the particularity of the author's interests stripped of sentence and story, laid bare without meaning. It's organized alphabetically. Here are my favorite letter lists from the style sheet I just received for my next book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, coming from W.W. Norton in August 2011:

Afrobeat

Aijalon

alef (Yiddish)

al-Qaeda

American Top 40

anti-utopian

Acquire the Fire

Arapaho

facefirst

fake-whisper

federal

feng shui-ers

filth-punk

Garden (for MSG)

gelt

Geimende aud dem Weg

Gibeon

giml

Golden Arches

Goth

Gott

goyish, goyishe

Ground Zero

halfsies (n.)

Hanukkah

Harold and Maude

head shots

hell house (n.)

hell-house (adj. before n.)

Herr

hip-hop

hip-huggers

holy-spirit (adj. before n.)

homeschool (v.)

Judenrat

jujitsu

kairos

KISS (band)

kumbaya

Walmart (no hyphen since 08)

Western (for movies, books, and “attitudes,” etc.)

Western Edge

West Texas

wolfangel (1 word)

woodstove

Zapatista

Marilynne Robinson, "The dark side of justice," 2004

2010-11-28T23:54:00.000-03:00

Tonight I discovered an old notebook from a class I sat in on with Marilynne Robinson, author of one of my very favorite novels, Housekeeping, and one that I like a great deal, Gilead. Robinson teaches in the Iowa MFA program, but this was something different: a Bible study, conducted in the basement of a church. Peter Manseau, with whom I wrote Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, and I were in Iowa City to read from the book at Prairie Lights. Our friend Laurel Snyder told us about Robinson's class. She knew it was in a church, but not which church. So off into the night we went, and into a blizzard as well. We peered into several basements before we found it, in session, and interrupted nonetheless. Or rather, stood like frozen cattle in the doorway, staring at the great woman. She snapped at a heavily bearded poet to fetch us chairs and Bibles, and then we were in. Following are the notes I took in a miniature composition book I happened to have in my pocket.

"Can we imagine that He is happy?"

The story of Christ in the wilderness -- "How do we know this story? Did Jesus tell it himself? Regardless, it is strange, an embrace of natural laws, limitations."

A riff on the old English of "gospel," God spell, an accounting of Christ's speech patterns, the way he introduces statements with Amen, translated as verily. Literature, she notes, proceeds by pushing toward definition. (Really?) "The Messiah is a definition of how God will act in history." But Jesus, she proposes, presents a counterintuitive definition, since he is not an action hero.

"The revolution that goes on continuously," she says -- Christ in the world, I believe she means -- "is a refining of definitions."

"The whole Bible is trying to say, 'I take this very seriously.'" She speaks of God as an abused wife. She asks, "What would we do without feeling like we're on the dark side of justice?" Because justice has a problem: "As soon as the language of justice emerges, it becomes incredibly metaphorical."

Anything that threatens us, she says, we've created. Beneath which I write: "not so."

Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010

2010-11-24T13:18:00.000-03:00

Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010

Chalmers Johnson, an academic cold warrior who became one of the most persuasive analysts of the ongoing costs of that conflict, has died. There's a respectable but too-brief obit in the New York Times, but Johnson hasn't gotten the Arts & Letters Daily treatment, a compilation of obituaries and commentaries for influential scholars and artists. Maybe that's still to come. Johnson certainly influential, both as a cold warrior, and then, after its official end, as a critic of the American empire into the service of which he put much of his scholarly career. Starting with Blowback, in 2000, and continuing with The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis, he moved from academe into public discussion; his books joined those of Hardt and Negri, Naomi Klein, and, of course, Noam Chomsky on the shelves of popular anti-imperialism. But he wasn't a radical; his critique of empire was that of a pragmatist, as Chomsky points out in a recent interview with the Jewish online magazine Tablet:

Take, say, the blowback theories. I like Chalmers Johnson, he’s a very good guy, but he argues that the U.S. policy of installing the shah didn’t work, because look at the blowback. Didn’t work? It worked perfectly for 25 years! That’s a long time in international affairs. Nobody plans for 50 years from now.

That's a fair point. But the real value of Blowback, the book, and the school of thought that grew out of it was the honest simplicity and eloquence of its accounting, its measurements of the costs. In 2000, I published a very short interview with Johnson for The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Verbatim" column. Here it is.

You know what they say about the road to hell and good intentions. Borrowing a Central Intelligence Agency phrase for the unplanned consequences of American actions-such as the 1988 terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which was probably retaliation for the 1986 U.S. aerial raid on Libya -- Chalmers Johnson, an emeritus historian at the University of California at San Diego, argues that in the aftermath of the cold war, the United States is facing an epidemic of "blowback" at every level, from individual acts of terrorism to the estrangement of nations.

Q. You argue that the cold war's legacies won't end anytime soon. Why not? Hasn't everybody had enough?

A. The American empire hasn't. The concrete origins of this book came as the result of a visit to Okinawa in 1996, after the rape incident of September,1995. I've spent my life working on Japan, thought I knew a lot about it. But Okinawa was a revelation. I was frankly just shocked by the sight of the then-42 American bases. And I was equally shocked that after a 12-year-old girl was raped by two marines and a sailor, the U.S. sought basically to spin the issue. To call it a unique tragedy. To claim that such things are not a common occurrence. To cover up the enormous costs of these bases on the Okinawan people. That then led me to ask, even if you could make a case for the deployment of American forces during the cold war, why are they still there 10 years after the cold war? Which led me to the conclusion, well the cold war hasn't ended in East Asia.

Q. Why not?

A. Whereas the Soviet Union created its own satellites, which then turned slowly into an empire in Eastern Europe, the U.S. did identically the same thing, and for identical reasons, often with even greater brutality, in East Asia. Whereas we may be able to make a strong case for our policies in Europe, in East Asia we have been in pursuit of empire. There the idea of the cold war was a sort of mask for an imperial project.

Q. Who needs an empire?

A. Mostly the military. For its bases, its budgets, its influence on foreign policy, which is bloated beyond reason. For instance, I believe that China is not a military threat, and that we ought to be much more accommodating in a military and political sense, to reassure them that we mean them no harm. By the same token, we ought to take them much more seriously as an economic challenge. If you want to be accommodating to China economically, who pays for it? It turns out it's not white men on Wall Street who pay for it. It's black steelworkers, in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama. The continuing hollowing out of our manufacturing is another kind of blowback.

Q. And then there's the violent kind.

A. Look at the cycle of terrorism. Osama bin Laden was a protege of ours in Afghanistan. He then objected to the stationing of American troops at Dhahran and Riyadh during the Persian Gulf war. They're still there. Saudi Arabia, the world's most important source of our petroleum, is beginning to look like Iran under the shah: a place where we don't really know what we're doing, where we're running on vested interests and established practices rather than thinking through whether we ought to be getting out of there, putting our relations on a much more commercial and less military basis.

Q. And if we don't?

A. One of the things that alarms me most of all is that we seem to be losing options to the point that we have only the military option. Our diplomacy is weak. We are no longer leading by example, and we're not even concerned about it. Moreover, this is occurring in the context of a discourse that forever tells us we are wonderful, we are perfect, we are the model of the world, that history came to an end because there are no longer any alternatives to the American way of life. These are signs of a mistaken and flawed polity that is asking for -- well, what happened to the Soviet Union.

Danica Novgorodoff, Killing the Buddha Tin Anniversary Poster, 2010

2010-11-12T14:17:00.000-03:00

I'm naturally very excited about the upcoming Tenth "Tin" Anniversary Party for Killing the Buddha, the online magazine Peter Manseau, Jeremy Brothers and I started in 2000 (and edited by a long list of wonderful writers since, with Nathan Schneider, Meera Subramanian, and Quince Mountain shouldering the bulk of the work now). The party will feature performances by some of my longtime favorites, such as comedian Eugene Mirman and poet Eileen Myles, and some artists I'm just learning about now, like musicians Gangstagrass and Gabriel Kahane (here's a NYT profile). Plus, Quince, a graduate of auctioneering school, is going to auction of some KtB crap to make money for liquor and communion wafers. But the real surprise, for me, is this fabulous poster by Danica Novgorodoff, an artist I didn't even know had come into the KtB circle. Novgordoff is the author of one my favorite books of 2008, Slow Storm, an intensely beautiful graphic novel in water color. It's a thrill to have her contribute her talents to this party. Now it's up to you New Yorkers out there to contribute yourselves to the party, too. (And don't forget it's a fundraiser.)

Some Very Weird Spam

2010-11-11T22:07:00.000-03:00

On the night I receive news of a new Family offensive against my work comes this peculiar spam, "commented" onto every blog post. It's a bunch of Microsoft Word 2007 links embedded in a piece of text in favor of Falls Church, a schismatic rightwing Episcopal church closely linked to the Family (and the anti-gay African Anglican dioceses that have welcomed any American church unable to abide the presence of a gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in their worldwide communion). Coincidence, I guess, but creepy all the same. Here it is, purged of the links that might be viral.

NEVERTHELESS, THE CIVIL LAW is and must be neutral about who has a more noble or rewarding faith. The breakaway parishes ought to win every facet of the lawsuit not becausetheir beliefs or their politics are better, but because both law and equity, along with common sense, are on their side. Not only does Virginia state law (the Division Statute) explicitly apply to just such a ituation as now exists, but the historyespecially of The Falls Church argues against the claims of the Virginia Diocese with which the have disassociated. First, The Falls Church was founded, formed, and developed long before the diocese, or the national Episcopal Church, even existed.

Rev. Flip Benham, Stalker & Ladies' Man

2010-11-09T17:51:00.000-03:00

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/09/national/main7038067.shtmlRev. Flip Benham, head of Operation Save America, has been given two years probation by a North Carolina court for distributing Wild West-style "Wanted" posters featuring the home addresses of abortion providers. The court considered this stalking.

What a relief! I spent some time with Flip and a few of his associates four years ago and left wondering whether I should call the F.B.I. Never had I met a Christian fundamentalist leader who seemed to be so clearly flirting with the idea of terrorism. At one point, when I asked Flip about the Army of God -- the underground movement dedicated to killing abortion providers -- he winked. Of course, I didn't call the F.B.I. -- that's not the journalist's job, and Flip hadn't said or done anything genuinely incriminating. Here's what he did say, as I recorded it in my book The Family*:

There was the Reverend Flip Benham, head of Operation Save America, also known as Operation Rescue. He was the man who baptized Norma McCorvey—Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade—into fundamentalism. For the rally, he was wearing vintage white-and-brown wingtips, symbols, he explained, of his commitment to pre-1947 America—1947 being the year when the Supreme Court ruled according to Jefferson’s “wall of separation” for the first time, in a case concerning government funds for parochial schools....

While we were talking, Reverend Flip had begun to preach. He told the crowd about a recent victory he’d scored near Charlotte, North Carolina, where he’d led seven hundred prayer warriors to a school board meeting to protest the formation of a Gay- Straight Alliance club in a local high school. “The preachers preached, the singers sang, the pray-ers prayed, and the theology of the church became biography in the streets!” Flip said. The school board shut down the club—a deliberate bid, it had declared, to bring the issue before the courts and get gay- straight clubs outlawed everywhere. Flip said this was what Jesus wanted. He even did an impression: “Cry to me,” he said in his best bass God voice; the prayers of the righteous will be answered....

Across the table sat Pastor Rusty and Reverend Flip. Flip threw his tie over his shoulder and leaned back in his chair. The waitress, a handsome middle-aged woman named Anna, looked crushed when she learned that the whole group, out of respect for the nondrinkers among them, would be sticking to iced tea. Several of the men asked her where her accent was from. She said she was Polish-Russian, but when she came around to Flip, he said, “Hola, Señorita,” and asked her where she was from. Anna rolled her eyes. We ordered, most of us the buffet. Anna came back to refill our iced tea. She tried to tally the orders, which the pastors kept changing.

“You ordered the buffet?” she asked Flip.

Flip took a toothpick from his mouth, fixed her with a stare. He
owned the room. “I think I already had a buffet,” he said, pronounc-
ing the word as Buffy. “Now I’d like to try an Anna.”

Nobody missed a beat. The party went on.

*Flip is not a part of the fundamentalist organization called the Family.

Sweet Heaven Travel Itinerary

2010-11-06T18:33:00.001-03:00

I've finally finished -- really finished -- my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die.

The subtitle is Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between. For no reason other than it makes me happy to think about, here's an itinerary of my travels in that country for this book:

The 11th judicial district, Colorado
Knoxville, Tennessee
Princeton, New Jersey
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Scotia, New York
The old East Village, NYC
Kenilworth, Illinois
A Wisconsin death trip
Montreal
East Berlin
Cleveland, Ohio
Tyler, Texas
St. Mark's-on-the-Bowery
America's Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo
The Khyber Pass, Philadelphia
Cradle of Filth tour bus
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Goshen, New Hampshire

Corrections: The Oklahoman

2010-10-30T11:58:00.000-03:00

C Street reader Kelley Duncan writes:

The conservative Daily Oklahoman (and owned by the arch-conservative Gaylord family) is mistakenly referred to as the "Tulsa Oklahoman" in your recent book "C Street". The Tulsa World is a largely centrist to occasionally liberal daily.

Keep up the good work. No good Okie -- and I try to be -- should be unaware of the shady (and just plain weird) behavior of our politicians.

Thanks, Kelley. I'll correct this in the paperback. The error occurs on p. 120. Defenders of the Family and C Street are fond of accusing me of massive and grave errors. This post is my response: Send me a correction, and I'll make it. Writers always make errors. What's important is the effort you make to avoid doing so -- I paid fact checkers a nice chunk of my advance to go over every page of the book, with instructions to think of themselves as interrogators and of every sentence as guilty until proven innocent -- and that you then make the correction when you find an error, as you always will, if you're honest.

The Dragons, Rock Like Fuck

2010-10-24T22:39:00.000-03:00

The other day, a cab to the airport, driver says, "Too many people have, what you call -- opinions. That's how life works. If you can afford it, you can put your opinions out there."

I guess I can afford it. Tonight's my last night to work on the manuscript of my next book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, to be published next August. It's a collection of essays, some previously published, some not, all of them re-written to comprise, together, some kind of organic whole. Organic like Frankenstein, that is, with a lot of pieces stitched together -- anarchists, Yiddishists, evil twins, Willa Cather, blimps, sunflower disguises, miners, magicians, and a band called the Dragons, with an album called Rock Like Fuck. The original title of the book was Sweet Fuck All, Colorado, after a bar I stopped in on the way to South Park, and it also features a sweet, waif-like New Age healer who believes she's part fairie and likes to punctuate her spiritual statements with the word "fuckin'" because she believes it provides grounding. Not sure what it provides me -- an out, maybe, from all these years of seriousness about fundamentalism and democracy. Thank fucking God, I'm free at last.

Jay Kirk, Kingdom Under Glass, 2010

2010-10-19T15:30:00.000-03:00

Here's an effective opening sentence for a book: "He felt heartsick when he saw the gorilla start its death tumble." And then a very functional second sentence: "It was coming right for him."

They're from Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals, my pal Jay Kirk's first book, to be published by Holt in November. I met Jay when we were both fellows at the MacDowell Colony, a sort of artists' retreat where writers and painters and such are given cabins in the woods and three meals a day. Evening entertainment is usually comprised of ping pong and presentations. Jay and I paired ours, since I'd been given a magnificent "cabin" -- heated flagstone floors, a loft, more space than I could fill with all the documents I needed to write The Family. I read an excerpt about Jonathan Edwards, which wasn't as boring as you might think -- there was sex, Satan, and blood. Jay read an excerpt from Kingdom, then very much in-progress. It might have sounded less promising even than Edwards: its subject is a 19th century taxidermist named Carl Akeley. But Akeley didn't just stuff animals, he hunted them -- he once strangled a leopard with his bare hands -- all in the service of "knowledge," or maybe it was art, or maybe it was just for the thrills of the Gilded Age and a rising empire that sought to freeze the world behind glass. You can see the results and decide for yourself -- Akeley created the New York Natural History Museum's Hall of African Mammals. But don't just go and gawk -- read Jay's book, as I'm starting to do today, for an important piece of the story of how Americans first came to see wilderness as "nature."

Also, authors: covet this cover:

You Should Talk United States

2010-10-19T02:47:00.000-03:00

Up late unpacking old boxes, I find an old notebook, circa 1998, I titled "American Deadpan." Notes toward a novel I wrote three chapters of and left behind like old chewing gum once I got all the flavor out of the story. That's how writing fiction is for me: greedy, delicious, and, ultimately, unsatisfying. So I never returned to the novel (which was going to be about Yiddish, communism, porn, and the Unabomber) but now I'll return to the notes, which include, among other sundries, a list of expressions I overheard in conversation or borrowed from other books with the intention of re-using. (That's also known as stealing.) Here are my favorites. I didn't record their sources.

*You should talk United States.

*He's like a girl who gives from under her dress for a ride in a car.

*You wouldn't be his wife without he's a fine man.

*Take your troubles to God.

*I am become an Irish.

*I got misery in my legs.

*He's a Sunday thinker.

*He was a good actor, but he always picked the wrong character.

*It's been an enjoyment to listen to you.

New Yorker, C Street, and Happily Ever After in Uganda

2010-09-06T17:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I posted 5 predictions of what the New Yorker's Peter Boyer would include in his article on C Street (the movement, not my book). All I'll say about the piece is that I'm 5 for 5. The rest is between Boyer and his God. Or maybe his fact checker.

But one point needs to be addressed: Boyer's extremely misleading and dangerous statement on Uganda. Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a conservative Christian psychologist at Grove City College who has emerged as perhaps the unlikeliest champion of LGBT rights in the world, handles it well in his post, "The New Yorker Almost Reports on Uganda." If you care about these issues, Throckmorton's blog is a must-read.

New Yorker, C Street

2010-09-05T20:46:00.000-04:00

Last week I received a message from a New Yorker fact checker, telling me it was urgent she speak to me asap -- the magazine would be going to press with a feature on "the Fellowship and C Street" at the end of the day. I wondered what she was checking, since the author, Peter J. Boyer, had never spoken to me. And, in fact, she wasn't really checking anything. All she wanted to know was whether the title of my new book, C Street, and its pub date, both listed on Amazon, were correct. They are.

Meanwhile, I learned a lot. Turns out Doug Coe, the longtime leader of the Family, gave Boyer, an amiably centrist writer, complete access. That's not surprising; since last fall, evangelical superflack A. Larry Ross, one of the PR geniuses behind Rick Warren, has been advising the Family on how to handle fallout from the C Street scandals and their connections to Uganda's murderous Anti-Homosexuality Bill. As conservative World magazine reported, Coe's first instinct was to say nothing, while another faction wanted to go on a media offensive. Here it is.

I'm certainly not saying that Boyer is party to that. He's a reporter grabbing a big interview. I'm a little worried he may have inadvertently grabbed more than that, though. When I asked the fact checker if anybody there had drawn material from my as-yet-unpublished book, she assured me they hadn't. Then, in passing, she mentioned that they had two memos important to the Uganda story which I give a lot of space to. That puzzled me, since the memos are dated 1986, and after I obtained them, in 2003, the Billy Graham Center Archives, which houses the papers, put a 25-year restriction on them. Not even the author of the memos would be allowed to obtain them. But the fact checker told me that Boyer had done his own archival research and had made an exception on its restriction policy. Now that would be surprising -- a serious breach of scholarly protocol, favoring one researcher over another.

Fortunately, that's not the case. The fact checker wrote a while later to offer what she called a correction: Boyer had not visited the archives, and the memos had been supplied to him by the author himself.

Well, good for the Billy Graham Center Archives, and good for Boyer, too, I suppose, for getting them. They're not bombshells, but they're interesting. The signs, though, point to the kind of story a smart publicist like A. Larry Ross would want: Not a puff piece, but not investigative, either. A puff piece would be too much for anyone to swallow. All this needs to do to satisfy the Family is to paint it as a little quirky but basically benign -- and establishmentarian to the core.

Here are my predictions of what it'll contain:

1. A lot of Democrats friendly to the Family, saying nice things about it. How much these Democrats know is another matter.

2. Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay, who's praised the Family before, gently scolding it for its penchant for secrecy (he might say privacy) and touting its influence even as he declares it harmless.

3. A couple of the Family's more liberal members, like Bob Hunter, talking about their own good works -- Bob really has done some amazing things -- and saying the Family errs mainly in being too open to everyone.

4. Doug Coe talking about how everyone's welcome to love Jesus. If it's a real slam dunk for the Family, Boyer won't point out that there's not an evangelical, Pentecostal, or fundamentalist in the world who wouldn't say the same. That's not tolerance. Coe is a charming man, a far, far cry from the angry pulpit pounders most people think of when you say the word fundamentalism. Coe's fundamentalism is both more universalist, and, for that reason, more theologically vulnerable to exploitation for the sake of power.

Maybe I'll be surprised. Maybe Boyer will bring some theological depth to his conversations with Coe. If Boyer hasn't done archival research, as the fact checker says, it can't really be investigative, since nobody Coe isn't friendly with knows him well enough to offer a critical perspective. Since I labored long and hard in archives, I sound like I'm defending my turf, and I suppose I am. But I'm also hoping that this piece won't be a whitewash. I can't imagine Boyer, a veteran New Yorker writer, would let himself get rolled.

Glenn Beck, "Amazing Grace," 2010

2010-08-31T02:19:00.001-04:00

Two a.m. and I've been packing for a big move for hours. An unpleasant chore, so I gave it an unpleasant soundtrack -- the three-and-a-half hour video of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor Rally," on C-Span. I've been reporting on the American right for close to a decade now, so I've mostly gotten past the snark with which lefties respond to this sort of thing. I'm more fascinated by the craft of mass movement manipulation. For the first couple of hours, I was thinking that Beck was genius. Because the rally really wasn't explicitly political, not even Palin, and there were Native Americans and black preachers and MLK, and even if it didn't make sense -- if Beck was stealing history -- he seemed to be getting away with it. That is, he was successfully passing off the radical witness of MLK as prelude to the almost all white crowd on hand. That great white crowd would leave feeling itself redeemed from and inoculated against charges of racism. The use of veterans, too, was masterful -- never about the war, always about the soldiers. Beck can say anything he wants now -- he's proven, to his followers, that he is above politics.

"So what?" says the liberal. His followers are, after all, his followers, right? Not exactly. He needs not only to keep them but to keep them moving. Beck isn't Rush; Rush appeals to the cranky, while Beck speaks to discontent. Rush satisfies his fans' cynicism; Beck offers them hope. Or, rather, promises them that it's up ahead, and there's danger behind -- keep moving, nation.

So I'm watching out of the corner of my eye while I pack, admiring the craft of manipulation, when Beck starts winding it down with the story of John Newton, the slave trader turned clergyman who wrote "Amazing Grace." Beck, predictably, mangles the story, as he has every other moment of history he's stroked during the rally. But what catches me off guard is Beck's description of the song as the best ever written for the bagpipes. Cue bagpipes.

Now, I like bagpipes, too, but "Amazing Grace" wasn't written for bagpipes -- a military instrument. It's not a militant song, but Beck, tipping his hand at the end, makes it a battle hymn. A few more songs follow, but that's the big finale -- Beck has closed his rally like Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Remember, the boulder rolled away from the tomb, and the marching music rising, Christ rising too, to go kick some ass? That was Gibson's real theological sleight of hand, the replacement of the lamb with the action hero, muscular Christianity on steroids. Beck has followed his lead, turning the plaintive beauty of "Amazing Grace" into a war song. I know, firemen and policemen killed on the job sometimes get "Amazing Grace" with bagpipes. But somehow this is different. Those are funerals; this is a movement rising, getting read to kick some ass. It's the only moment in this really kind of dull rally that galls me -- the only real crack in Beck's facade of democratic pluralism.

"No Solution," Wendy Doniger, 1999

2010-08-30T01:37:00.000-04:00

More old notes from basement cleaning and packing, these from interviews with the great scholar of myth Wendy Doniger, whom I profiled for The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999, I think. Her short book on method, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, is one of my favorite books about writing. Even though it's not about writing.

In one of our conversations, she cited Levi-Strauss's idea that "myths tackle problems that have no solution." I said that in the context of her work, that made me think of a novelist knowingly wading into a doomed attempt to resolve a plot. "That's an interesting way of putting it," Doniger answered.

That explains to me why I drive my publishers crazy. Because I hate to produce conclusions. I tell all these stories and I have ideas about them, and I say, "Look at this, did you notice that, I know another story that sheds some light on it." Then I want to go home. And my publisher says, "What's the answer? What's the solution?" And I usually have to make something up for the book. But my heart isn't in it because I usually think there is no solution. It's just an interesting way of talking about the problem. I'm a mythologist.

I also salvaged an index card on which I'd written a comment from another conversation with Doniger: "There are so few interesting questions, and so many interesting answers."

"We are the moment the of deconstruction," January, 2001

2010-08-28T21:10:00.001-04:00

Packing for a move, which means throwing out old papers. Among the notebooks to be disposed of is the tiny pocket one in which I wrote these words by a forgotten speaker, someone I interviewed about something in the late 1990s or early 2000s. I have no idea who it was. Nobody I'd planned to encounter -- that's why I wrote in a tiny notebook instead of my preferred steno pad.

Cocaine was rediscovered by the individual in the 1980s. Then, by a whole bunch of individuals in the 1990s. Cocaine was especially good for people with no sense of belonging. A lot of people don't have anything to belong to. They're not religious, they're not in a labor union. I'm drawn to labor unions, but I was not a worker. Well, that's not true. I was. I was a worker in the cocaine business.

I've been an addict, I've been a dealer. But that didn't reflect who I thought I was. So I went to law school, and at law school, I sit down with all these people at lunch time, but they're not my people. The only place I see myself reflected is in the people I graduated from college with.

My disdain isn't sociological. I'm actually jealous of the fratboy law students. And of my boyfriend. [A minor dealer, in the business through family connections.] He belongs. And he feels belonging with me. But I don't belong. Do you? [Laughing:] We are truly postmodern. We are the deconstructionist moment. We're the day after generation.

Sometimes I look at some insane piece of furniture, a $30,000 coffee table, and I calculate, How many families can't eat because of it? Because of the wealth compressed into this table?

I asked, "Do you look at $180,000 of coke" -- a shipment the dealer had helped process -- "and think the same thing?"

[Thinking. Laughs.] You know, I was taught to be introspective. You know, hippie stuff, "I spoke to the river; did the river speak back to me?" And the answer is, I don't know. I see the problem. I understand the problem with what I'm doing. I can say with certainty that I'm not happy. I mean, I sell drugs; I facilitate the sale of drugs. I'm a saleswoman. It's not the drugs. It's the sales. I persuade, right? That's what you do, right? That's what journalists do? What's the difference? I'm a propagandist. You're a propagandist. That's what we do.

Now that I'm done typing this in, I remember who I was talking with, and when. It was the late fall of 2000. I wanted to write a story about her, a dealer with plans for a union. But the coke had other plans. The last time we discussed the story she grew paranoid; she talked about guns. It was the eve of W.'s first inauguration. One of customer came over, giddy. He was a rising star conservative writer. He called her a Marxist, and giggled when she counted his money. She called him a fascist, and cackled with delight when he bragged about the young Bushies he'd soon be fucking -- confirmation of her low opinion. She considered herself -- she was -- a deeply moral person. She no longer touches coke, in any capacity, but back then she was a diligent law student by day and a drug dealer by night. Not the glam kind, the gritty kind, not slumming but paying the bills. It wasn't cute; as I recall, she told me she'd established her authority as a woman in a business of men by putting out a cigarette on the arm of an asshole who didn't pay her on time. She was always a tough girl. Still is; but sober, and past the moment of deconstruction.

Glenn Beck and American History

2010-08-28T16:26:00.000-04:00

In light of Glenn Beck's invocation of phony American history on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial today, I think it's worth reviving my 2006 Harper's magazine story on the Christian Right's make over of the past, "Through a Glass Darkly: How the Christian Right is Re-imagining American History."

Joe Connelly, Bringing Out the Dead, 1998; King Motherfucker Rat, 1999

2010-08-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

For years I've been wondering where I'd put some notes I'd made on a conversation with homeless guy by the office I was then working. Tonight I found them, written in the end pages of Bringing Out the Dead, Joe Connelly's amazing 1998 autobiographical novel of a New York City paramedic who's losing his mind. I was reading it one night in 1999, when I left the offices of The Chronicle of Higher Education late. I covered the new research in the humanities; hardly the cops beat. It was good work, a license to travel around the country asking dumb questions of brilliant scholars, but it felt a little removed from the world, and the setting didn't help -- an antiseptic office plaza that looked, in real life, like an architect's rendering. A really boring architect's rendering. At night it was deserted, which is why a few homeless guys napped on the benches. I don't remember how I struck up an acquaintance with this guy, Joe, but I did; and on this night, March 29, I ended up scribbling down his words in the back of Bringing Out the Dead.

"The knife or the gun, they don't know nobody," my notes began. Joe was talking about an argument he'd had with a friend that had come close to violence before Joe walked away. "Let that shit rest in the past," he continued,

bury that motherfucker, call that shit dead and gone. Cause he is the sweetest, goodest kinda man when he sober, but get him a drink -- I can handle mine, I can drink a beer, I can even drink liquor -- he don't know all to stop. Then he let the 'nigger' out."

Joe was black; his friend was white.

"Nigger" this, "Nigger" that. The racist type of shit -- holy shit, look at that rat!

A big rat was sniffing around a bench a few yards off.

You gotta see it cause he BIG. He on patrol. Yeah, now look at him. In the alley -- ok, I sleep in the alley, but we don't got rats there, it's only when I come over by the clean buildings here. You tell em, that's dangerous, here in the clean buildings. That motherfucker. Somebody eat their lunch out here and he be on patrol. Then somebody set their sandwich down and that motherfucker rat take the sandwich and the hand, too. Cause I seen movies about them -- No! Don't throw nothing at him. Leave him be, cause you get him mad a dozen -- maybe 14 -- come out. I seen movies, they live in colonies, the peoples do. And they got a king motherfucker rat, he big as a dog, like this he stand up. I seen him. I hit him with a pole, like this, and king motherfucker rat stood right back up.

C Street

2010-08-25T16:19:00.002-04:00

I'll be talking about my new book C Street, with NPR's Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" today, so now is as good a time as ever to blog the jacket copy.

Democracy, desire, and the street address for fundamentalism in America

Jeff Sharlet is the only writer to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Christian Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington DC address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially it’s home to fundamentalist efforts to transform the fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants’ past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today’s world, revealing that the past efforts of religious fundamentalists in America pale in comparison to their long-term ambitions.

When Obama entered the White House, headlines declared the age of culture war over—just like they did after the Democratic victories of 2006 and, ten years before, Bill Clinton’s re-election. It’s an American tradition, declaring conflict a thing of the past. In C Street, Sharlet tells the story of why these conflicts endure and why they matter now—from the sensationalism of Washington sex scandals to fundamentalism’s long shadow in Africa, where American culture warriors determined to eradicate homosexuality have set genocide on simmer.

We’ve reached a point where piety and corruption are not at odds but one and the same. Reporting with exclusive sources and explosive documents from C Street, the American-backed war on gays in Uganda, and the battle for the soul of America’s armed forces—waged by a 15,000-strong movement of officers intent on “reclaiming territory for Christ in the military”—Sharlet reveals not the last gasp of old-time religion but the new front lines of fundamentalism.

The Uganda chapter is excerpted in the September Harper's; and an excerpt of the excerpt is now online.

R.I.P. Tony Judt

2010-08-07T13:45:00.000-04:00

Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, died today of Lou Gehrig's disease, at age 62. Before Postwar, I'd skipped Judt's essays in The New York Review of Books, thinking him a typical centrist liberal wonk. My mistake. I picked up Postwar while I was working on a chapter of my book The Family, about the role of American fundamentalists in the rehabilitation of Nazis. My interest, then, was limited to a small piece of Judt's book; really, I was simply hoping to find a generalist's account of the Adenauer government. But what I found was a vigorously argued, well-paced, deeply engaged history that picked me up and carried well beyond Germany. I'm usually not a fan of doorstop continental histories, but Judt's book is, in one sense, less than that, and thus more. Judt eschewed the omniscient authority of the all-powerful historian for the greater passion -- and, to me, persuasiveness -- of the essayist. It's a valuable book. And since then, I've read Judt's NYRB essays, including his moving memoir, dictated in his dying days, which begins here.

Lt. General Mike Gould, 2010; J.C. Hallman, In Utopia, 2010

2010-08-04T00:50:00.001-04:00

What do you call an amplification -- not a correction -- issued in advance of the original statement? A preemptive post-publication addendum? Whatever it is, here's one. In my forthcoming book, C Street, I expanded on 2009 Harper's article of mine on Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. military, in which I briefly mentioned U.S. Air Force Academy superintendent Mike Gould:

Gould granted himself the nickname “Coach” after a brief stint in that capacity early in his career. Coach Gould enjoys public speaking, and he’s famous for his 3- F mantra: Faith, Family, Fitness. At the Pentagon, a former senior ofﬁcer who served under Gould told me, the general was so impressed by a special presentation Pastor Rick Warren gave to senior ofﬁcers that he e-mailed his 104 subordinates, advising them to read and live by Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life.

“People thought it was weird,” recalls the former ofﬁcer, a defense contractor, who requested anonymity for fear of losing government business. “But no one wants to show their ass to the general.”

The "heroes" of the chapter are the activists of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a nonprofit watchdog dedicated to defending first amendment freedom of (and from) religion for military personnel of all faiths and no faith. Tonight, MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein forwards an email he received from an Air Force Academy professor that shows Gould has turned a corner.

Today, I heard the most astonishing words from an Air Force Academy Superintendent that I have ever heard in my entire 16 years as an Academy professor. Quoting from a well-known 1997 United States Air Force report, Lt Gen Mike Gould, Superintendent of the US Air Force Academy, actually said in a Commander’s Call addressed to the entire permanent population of the base that “military officers shouldn’t push their religious views on subordinates”. My jaw dropped in astonishment. This man clearly “gets it”. My elation was tempered only by the sad fact that it took multiple Superintendents and several years of painful turmoil for us to finally get a top guy in here who clearly sensed that the environment was right to say something so blatantly obvious and true to every single person here at the Air Force Academy.

Credit, he continues, belongs to Mikey Weinstein and MRFF.

I sadden only when I realize that two years from now, this Air Force Academy Superintendent will retire, we will have a different USAF Chief of Staff, and the process of training yet another chain of command must begin anew. Who knows what we will get. That means, Mikey, that you and the MRFF must be vigilant. You must be vigilant, and you must have staying power. The forces you so appropriately and aggressively oppose here at the Air Force Academy, and indeed all over the Department of Defense, think in terms of eternity, so four years between Academy Superintendents is nothing to them. Please, Mikey and MRFF, be there for an eternity too.

Meantime, I have to give Gould some credit for being better than anyone expected or even hoped.

***

Unrelated, and, really, a lot more interesting, is the arrival in my mail today of J.C. Hallman's newest book, In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise, the official pub date of which is today. (Or, yesterday, when I started this post.) It deserves more attention and will get it, but for now I'll go with the jacket blurb I contributed:

Hallman brilliantly explores the idea of utopia and its applications in the real world, from hippie communes to shooting ranges to a massive floating city. We could hardly ask for a better guide: Hallman is an erudite but humble writer, with the skepticism, wit, and compassion necessary for those close encounters with the distant possibility of a perfected world.

Here's an excerpt from Hallman's last book, The Devil is a Gentleman, we published on Killing the Buddha.

A Short History of Journalism and the Modern Fact (An Imaginary Book)

2010-07-18T10:28:00.001-04:00

I was just fuming a bit over an article from the July 3, 2010 Economist, "The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit." Because I've been reporting in this subject for the last nine months, I saw immediately the major factual errors in the piece, which I'll write about elsewhere. But the piece got me to wondering about fact checking. Evidently, The Economist either doesn't do any or does it terribly at times. What other publications don't fact check? I learned fact checking in the early 1990s, as an intern at The Nation. At the time, The Nation's rival, The New Republic, didn't fact check. (Or so we were told; I didn't check that fact.) I know they do now because they fact checked me, vigorously and well, when I wrote for them. When did magazines begin fact checking? Here's my proposal for a book that has probably already been written (again, I didn't check): A Short History of Journalism and the Modern Fact. If it hasn't been written, and you're interested in the subject, please write it and send me a copy.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post this morning, I've learned a few things. Apparently, very few British publications fact check. And The Economist is famous within magazine publishing for not fact checking. Worst of all, I'm told by a reliable source (you'll have to trust me!), are their statistics. On another front, I got the answer to a question that's bothered me ever since Ann Coulter misrepresented me in her book Godless: How do hacks like that get away with it? I don't mean, How do they persuade people? Rather, how do they avoid getting sued until they're in sack clothes? Why do their publishers stand by such crap? The answer, apparently, is publishers usually don't -- you can put a lot of garbage in a book, but if you do, the publisher says you're on your own. For people like Coulter, that's probably fine, since A) she's fabulously wealthy; B) lawsuits generate sales for people like her; C) people don't usually sue. I didn't sue Ann Coulter, and it's never crossed my mind to sue any of the online hacks who've said I use the blood Christian babies and kittens to bake my matzoh.

So it's up to the author. I paid a team of fact checkers to check my book before it went to legal review, instructing them to think of themselves as prosecutors and every sentence as guilty until proven innocent. Then the book, notes and all, went through legal review. That doesn't catch facts, but it does prevent any characterizations you can't back up. The lawyer's concern, of course, is defending the publisher, not me. Then again, I'm an afterthought to any lawsuit that's in earnest, since I have no real assets. "You sue the publisher for money," the lawyer told me. "You sue the author for fun." All the more reason to do everything she says.

The Wire season 1, episode 6, Major Rawls

2010-07-17T11:31:00.001-04:00

I get the irony of responding to this screed on "slow reading" in the Guardian on a blog, especially given that the article is itself the sort of thing the author doesn't think we should read much of at all. So I'm going to double down and blog, briefly, in advocacy for "slow watching" -- repeated viewings and pauses for contemplation. Not just for movies -- that's respectable -- but for TV. I'm in the midst of watching season one of The Wire for the second time, and I'm writing this during a pause in episode 6.

I was struck by a scene in which an external shot of police headquarters cuts away to show the careerist commander, Rawls, putting on his jacket to head home for the night. He glances down at a stack of three red folders on his desk, case files the season's hero, Detective McNulty, has left on his desk. Picks one up, shuffles it over, glances at another. Then he looks up and shouts "Jay!" -- his toady sergeant. That's it. The entire scene is about 25 seconds.

Two scenes later, we learn that what seemed opaque was actually exposition. Jay tells McNulty that Rawls wants arrests on the cases, a move they all know will improve their stats and hurt the larger case against Avon Barksdale's drug empire. But if it was just exposition, why make it so quiet, and why separate from the answer it's meant to provide?

So I watched again, and again. Most of the scene is dedicated to Rawls putting on his jacket and adjusting the lapels. He's a vain man, almost completely disinterested in police work. He's an apparatchik. He wants the system to work, which is to say that he wants to get a paycheck and to rise through the ranks and, perhaps, solve a few crimes. All this is summed up in the way the actor who plays Rawls, John Doman, puts on his dark grey jacket. He lets out an irritated sigh, gets his arms through the sleeves, and shrugs the coat up with his shoulders, still holding the puffed cheek expression of his sigh. Then he adjusts the lapels three times. He was too lazy to put the jacket on properly, but he wants it to look good. All along he's staring at the stack of case folders, his eyes presumably scanning the cover sheet. Again, too lazy to really engage with the folders -- three cleared cases, left to linger on his desk all afternoon -- but vain enough to want their rewards, and intelligent enough to recognize them easily. He knows what good detective work is, just as he knows how to wear his jacket. He just doesn't want to do the work to have either. He drops his hands, staring at the folders. We notice that his belt is around his belly button -- that although he's a man maybe in his late 50s, reasonably fit, aggressive enough in his demeanor that he passes for vital, he wears his clothes like an old man. We notice, too, his ID badge. For all his blustering authority, he's just a cog. So here's the cog, old before his time, vain, wanting something, too exhausted from his vanity to get it, seeing a shortcut on the desk before him -- and then he shouts "Jay," ordering his underling to make it happen.

But why this scene here, several minutes removed from the result of Rawls' decision? It's framed by two longer, more traditional scenes. Preceding it, we see Carve and Herc, the two greenest and most brutal detectives on McNulty's special detail, grab a young punk named Bodie who's been giving them trouble. They think he's skipped out on juvie, again, and begin to beat him for it. But he shows them a piece of paper that show's he's been given a pass by the court. They're incredulous. The thing is, so is Bodie. Not even triumphant. The juvenile system, he says, is a joke. Then he asks them for a ride to his grandmother's. "Get in the back, fucknuts," says Carve.

The scene following Rawl's jacket features D, a mid-level man in the drug operation -- something like Major Rawls -- waiting for a girl who's one of his runners to come out of a grocery. He takes her bag, looks in, pulls out some eggs. "Little early in the month for this, isn't it?" he asks, and begins dropping the eggs one by one on the sidewalk. He thinks she's been stealing. But D isn't a monster. In fact, he's too soft for the drug trade. He's killed one, maybe two people, almost cracked when presented with a (fake) picture of the kids of one his victims, and earlier in this episode was freaked out by news of the murder of one of the drug ring's enemies, by torture. "Let it go," he advises a younger guy, who can't; and D can't, either, so he passes it on to the girl.

Back to Rawls. Taken as a series, the three scenes are a study in authority. Nothing profound, just the observation that we pass suffering along. Not out of sadism but because the way you "let it go" is by getting it out of your system. Carve and Herc, constantly frustrated by the higher ups and by their own inability to either understand or really do anything about the crime they see, pass it on in a beating for Bodie, which Bodie escapes by pointing to the enemy above. D needs to purge himself of the poison of the murder he's been party to. And Rawls? That 25 second scene is the radicalism of The Wire. His poison is the system he's a part of. Not its corruption, but the system itself. Rawls, unlike drunken, idealistic McNulty, understands that his job is not to solve crimes, it's to "clear" them. Clear them off his desk, that is. Nobody expects anymore. Nobody wants anymore. And when McNulty gives them more, anyway, he disrupts the system. He thinks he's smarter than Carve and Herc, but he's not. Lazy, vain, amoral Rawls is the only one who gets what's going on.

Giacomo Leopardi; Fishers of Men; Brilliant, arrived

2010-07-14T05:36:00.005-04:00

A short post, since my deadline for my book has gone well into post-death, zombie time. Yesterday, though, brought encouragement in the mail. On lousy days I like to think of the review books that show up from publishers as "presents"; but they're usually the kind of presents you'd get from a semi-hostile distant relation. How else to describe the multiple copies of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest I've received? According to the flap copy (which, to be fair, should rarely be trusted), it's a journey from crippling depression to self-acceptance by way of magic mushrooms and "shamanic ceremonies" in South America. Christ. I think I knew this kid back in college. You probably did, too. It's a good thing we have the Indians and their rituals to help us accept ourselves.

(My apologies to Adam Elenbaas if your book is not what your publisher has packaged it as. I know what that's about. But some of the blurbs from your friends really aren't helping -- that one about how tripping made you "God-realized" and capable of seeing the Christ we all need, or something like that? Or the one celebrating the "gradual absorption of ayahuasca shamanism into North American culture"? Really? Because absorption turned out so well for North American Indians?)

But yesterday, it really did seem like I received presents in the mail. Probably from a shaman, since the two books that arrived were both desired? One is Jane Brox's new Brilliant, about which I made a note here before; the other is Canti, a thick, bilingual edition of the poems of Giacomo Leopardi translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi. I learned about Leopardi, said to be one the first modern European poets, while I was reporting a profile on the cultural critic Cornel West:

“That’s the American way,” says West when I raise the question of the blue note and its dismissal, the common conviction that looking forward means forgetting the past. “ ‘No problem we cannot solve,’” he says, paraphrasing conventional wisdom. Well, that’s a lie. I don’t know why Americans tell that lie all the time.” He laughs, shaking in his chair, mimicking a voice that sounds like a suburban golfer in pants a size too small. “‘No problem we can’t get beyond.’ That’s a lie! But—it generates a strenuous mood.”

This, to West, is a good thing, the naiveté that makes ambition possible. “Engagement! I like that. Now, Brother Leopardi on the other hand”—Giacomo Leopardi, a 19th century Italian poet-philosopher revered in Italy but little read in the U.S—“he starts with what he calls, ‘The mind’s sweet shipwreck.’ Ain’t that a beautiful phrase?”

Leopardi should be the poet of our times, West tells me—late empire, mid-recession. “You hear about people rereading Steinbeck now,” he says, referring to a recent surge in sales of Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s Great Depression chronicle. “They got to go deeper than that!” Steinbeck lets us off too easy. West prescribes Brother Leopardi for “deep-sea diving of the soul,” a process’s not just personal but essential to understanding “the paradox of human freedom”: that we must summon the strength to resist and endure oppression even as we acknowledge that we are ultimately weak in the face of death and despair. “We are organisms of desire,” West defines the human condition, “whose first day of birth makes us old enough to die.”

West gets down on his hands and knees, crawling along the bottom shelf until he locates a green volume. “This is the Leopardi, brother.” He flips through the pages. “Oh, man! See this one? ‘I refuse even hope.’” He repeats the line, his body suddenly slack, staring at me as if to ask, “Do you follow?” I do, or, at least, I’ll try. West begins to read, rocking forwards and backwards at his hips like a metronome. “‘Everything is hidden,’” he reads, “‘Except our pain.’” He looks up. “Deep blues, man.” He returns to the green book in his hand. “We come, a forsaken race, / Crying into the world, and the gods / Keep their own counsel…’” I bend close, following the rhythm of his handwritten annotations down the margins: “blues,” “jazz,” “blues,” “blues,” “jazz.” ...

“Now, this, this is the greatest one,” West says, petting a page of Leopardi’s poems and looking at me with giant poem eyes as if to communicate the gravity of the words in his hand, the necessity of their immediate recitation. He resumes rocking and reading:

That man has a truly noble nature
Who, without flinching, still can face
Our common plight, tell the truth
With an honest tongue,
Admit the evil lot we’ve been given
And the abject, impotent condition we’re in;
Who shows himself great and full of grace
Under pressure.…

West closes his book and stands still. His head shakes back and forth with admiration. That’s too polite a word for the emotion flooding over him: it’s relief, gratitude.

After that interview I walked across the street from West's Princeton office and looked for a copy of Leopardi at Labyrinth Books, an amazing bookstore (with one of the best remainder tables I know of) that was my best bet for finding such a volume. No luck. I suppose I could have ordered one from Amazon, but books like this -- books that you bump into by accident -- are best waited for.

Cover Me

2010-07-08T03:42:00.000-04:00

I've a collection of essays coming out next year from Norton called Sweet Heaven When I Die. Subtitle to be determined. It's a collection of previously published pieces and some new work, but it's not a grab bag. Rather, it's organized around some themes that guide some of my favorite work outside the subject of fundamentalism. There's the last Yiddish writer, a forlorn banjo player, an anarchist martyr, a blues philosopher, a bewitched preacher, and the long unpublished piece that I'd originally planned to title the book after, "Sweet Fuck All, Colorado." I'm keeping the "sweet" but saving the "fuck" for inside the covers. The book, sadly, is not as naughty as that sentence. Fortunately, it's not as corny, either.

Other titles I considered and rejected: "Old Enough to Die," "Still Waiting to be Born," "The Point of Despair," and, most bluntly, "This Is Not a Redemption Story." But nor is it as grim as that list would suggest. The pieces I've included are almost all in one sense or another blues stories, which means they're attempts to squeeze from brutality something that's near-tragic, near-comic, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison. I don't know if I've succeeded, but I've "done all I can do" -- which is another title I considered, a line from an old Dock Boggs song. As is Sweet Heaven When I Die.

The question then becomes: What should the cover be? It's a serious question. I'm asking for your help. A suggestion of an image or a concept. If Norton uses it, I'll send you a free copy.*

Here are my past book covers and some other covers I covet:

This is the cover for Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, which Peter Manseau and Published in 2004. It's my favorite of my book covers, and a favorite in general. It shows up in books about design, too. But, for obvious reasons, it didn't work so great in bookstores. Free Press put the title on the paperback, which really crowded it.

I wasn't crazy about this cover, but other people liked it. I thought it was a bit of a cliche, since other books have used the fake Bible approach. (Though none have the pun. "The Family Bible." Get it? Nobody else did, either.)

This is the cover for a sort of sequel to The Family forthcoming this fall from Little, Brown. Evidently, the designer wanted to evoke the heavy brown of The Family. I like the title treatment. With this one I need to wait to see it in the flesh, so to speak. But for Sweet Heaven When I Die, I definitely want something lighter. And without Christian elements.

I love this cover for my friend Peter Manseau's travelogue, Rag and Bone:

But if that cover is beautiful, the paperback, sadly, is a case study in how to go wrong:

Awful! What's with the turquoise? Is that meant to be sky? This looks like a couch in a Russian dentist's office. (It's a great book, though, in cloth or paper.)

I think this one's so great this is the third time I've posted it:

This one's beautiful, all the more so when one considers that the painting is probably an archival image, but the car detail at the bottom really cheapens it, as if the publisher got worried that people wouldn't connect "Fordlandia" with Henry Ford. I'm a fan of covers that are beautiful but don't try to explain too much.

I've been reading The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle and I think the cover is as well matched to the book as the title. It's a photograph of the author, cropped just below the eyes so he becomes a sad sack every man, wrapping his hands. The gloves desired by Anasi, a past boxing prime writer with a chip on his shoulder, are the golden ones you win in amateur boxing's biggest match, so the font is gold, too. I'd have made it a little shinier. But they handled placement just write. This is a book about a man with questions about manliness (he routinely gets thumped by his female sparring partner, a better and stronger boxer), so there are The Gloves, down between his thighs.

* At least two of this blog's three readers know that I'm not very fast about mailing things, which is putting a crimp in my new mail order free bookstore. But with this, I promise you'll get your copy in timely fashion, since I'll just put the winner on the comp list for the publisher.

The Corrections

2010-07-08T03:11:00.000-04:00

I've just been having an unpleasant email exchange with a flack for Congressman Zach Wamp, a Republican running to become Tennessee's next governor. I gave a research assistant a long list of politicians linked to C Street who I'd like to talk to. I'd tried most of them before, with little luck, so I wasn't expecting much. It was mostly a courtesy to the congressmen, an opportunity for them to put their spin on their C Street affiliations. So far, I believe, only a press rep for Wamp, Laura Condeluci, has even bothered to answer my researcher's very polite note. Her response, in total: "Is this a joke?"

I thought that was rude, so I wrote back with great earnestness:

No, Ms. Condeluci, but your response must be. Because it'd be hard to imagine a staffer for a U.S. congressmen [sic] expressing such open contempt for the free press. I understand that Rep. Wamp is most comfortable taking canned questions from papers stripped of their investigative capabilities by media consolidation, but I thought it would be fair to give Rep. Wamp a chance to respond to some real questions. I know he's had some nasty things to say about me, but, in the spirit of reconciliation, I'm willing to forgive him! We can have a real lovefest. Wamp talks about reconciliation, too, and works with the Fellowship Foundation, which has practiced it with some of the world's worst murderers, by any standard, left or right.

Does Rep. Wamp's Christian faith and small-d democratic convictions not extend to journalists, even those he despises?

Of course it doesn't. Condeluci wrote:

Your previous work has included complete falsehoods and absolute misrepresentations of the Congressman’s record. I work daily with the press and have a high regard for professional journalists; however, I don’t consider you one of them.

I'm interested in the concept of "absolute misrepresentation." To be honest, the worst thing I think said about Wamp was his name, on the Bill Maher Show. "Wamp." It has a nice heavy thud to it, which Maher picked up on, interrupting me and repeating "Wamp?" for laughs. In The Family, I speculated that he may have been part of the prayer group Senator Sam Brownback told me he was in during the mid-90s. Brownback wouldn't say and Wamp's people never returned my calls. Did I guess wrong?

I told Condeluci that I'd be glad to make a correction if she'd care to provide me with some errors. I don't I'll ever hear from her again.

But I wasn't kidding. And, lucky for me, fate comes along to give me an opportunity to prove it. Just tonight I stumbled on an error in The Family. On p. 281, I described a German Family associate named Rudolf Decker, active with their work in Africa, as a Bundestag member during the 1980s. In fact, although Decker often traveled with Bundestag members, as best I can tell he never held office. He moved with ease among some of the world's most powerful and unsavory people -- he counted among his friends Zaire's Mobutu and Sudan's al-Bashir -- but he did so as a private citizen, Chance the Gardener without the charm.

My apologies to Mr. Decker.

Mars and Dieter

2010-06-29T12:37:00.000-04:00

Going through old notes, looking for some details for an essay I'm working on, I came across this fragment from years ago, a description of a conversation I wrote after an awkward, mildly drunk evening.

“Mars has this thing where he wants to hear what kind of music I like. Like it’s a way of connecting with me, he wants to hear what I’m listening to, so I’m like, ‘Mars, check this song out.’”

Mike paused and raised his eyebrows, looking at me from the side with his chin tilted down and a confidential smile. We were sitting in a bar with two women, one an old friend of his named Juliette, the other pretty and dark-haired haired with a tiny nose and compressed lips that didn’t utter a word. She was somewhere between date and girlfriend for Mike. She held her arms folded across her chest, her eyes glued to Mike’s crisp profile. She wanted some of his attention. She wasn’t going to get it. Mike wanted to talk to me.

I didn’t know him well. In fact, I’d only spoken with him a few times in the past, even though we’d gone to a small college together and had known the same people. When I ran into him on the street one day, I almost walked right past him. He’d gained weight since college, had let his hair grow out from dyed blue to its natural dark color. He still looked good, but harried, as if despite the extra pounds he was insufficiently padded from the world. But his eyes were sharp, and he recongnized me even though I too had grown softer and blander in appearance. “Hey man,” he said. I stopped, stared, smiled.“You never called me about that coffee.” I gave him a blank look. “You said we’d go out for coffee,” he snapped. His face looked like it’d been mix-and matched from two different people: his mouth grinned, his dark eyes glared.

“You mean last January?” I asked. It was a warm September night.

Mike nodded. “You stood me up, man.” He kept smiling. I considered backing away from him slowly. Instead, I agreed to go out for a beer. A month later he called. “This is John Chavez,” he said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Mike,” he replied, amused and offended that I hadn’t recognized his voice.

We met later that night. The two women joined us, and over beers, Mike began telling us about his childhood and his two fathers, one adoptive, one step: Mars and Dieter. None of us really knew one another, so we were glad to let Mike talk. He talked us from his early childhood to college, where he lingered, our one point of common ground.

“So Mars is lying on my bed one time when he visits me at school”--Mike spreads his hand apart like he’s describing a fish to suggest Mars, who he says is a short, stocky, bushy-haired man--nothing like himself, he points out. “And he says, ‘Mike, I want to tell you something I just learned. Something very important.’ This guy, keep in mind, is forty-nine or fifty. So I say, ‘Sure, Mars, lay it on me.’

“‘It’s something really important,’ he says. ‘You might already know it, but I just learned it, and I want to share it with you because it’s important that you know it in case you don’t.’

Mike grins at us, embodying Mars and mocking his father’s clumsy communication at the same time. “I’m thinking this is probably something really good, like how to avoid those red marks the elastic band of your underwear leaves around your waist. I’m thinking he’s going to tell me something like, ‘Baby powder, Mike, baby powder.’ But then this is what he says: ‘I’ve learned,’ he goes, ‘that most women cannot come through the—the thrust-thrust.’”

Mike pushed his pelvis forward and pulled both arms back, mimicking his father mimicking sex. “I say to Mars, ‘You mean, penetration?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Right. Penetration. What they need,’ he says, ‘is stimulation of their digit.’”

Mike pauses. “Their ‘digit,’” he says to us. He holds up a finger and crooks it, gesturing to me, Juliette, and his date in turn. “I say, ‘You mean clitoral stimulation, Dad?’ ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Exactly. You may have already known this, but I just learned it, and I think it’s really important.’

“All I can think is, ‘No wonder my mother divorced you, you bastard.’ I mean I’m like, I’ve known this since the eighth grade, and here’s Mars at age fifty telling me he just learned that women need their digit stimulated. Their digit. And he’s looking out the window, staring away. I can tell he’s really putting himself out for this, he’s crossing the line to tell me something he thinks is really important. And all I can think is, ‘No wonder my mother divorced you, you bastard.’” Mike laughed and took a swig of beer. “What an idiot!” he said with a half-full mouth.

Juliette and I laughed; Mike’s date didn’t. “You gotta meet Mars,” Mike told her. Juliette cupped a hand to her mouth. “Tell ‘Bitch Magnet,’” she whispered.

Mike waved her away. “They don’t wanna hear it.” he said, then turned to me. “You want to hear ‘Bitch Magnet?’”

“What’s ‘Bitch Magnet?’” I asked.

Mike pressed his lips together, smiled, clapped a hand on my shoulder and launched himself into another story. “So another time my mother and my stepfather, Dieter, come to visit me at school. Whereas Mars is an idiot, Dieter’s this tall, blue-eyed, totally Aryan, very educated and stern man. Dieter’s looking around my wall, and at this time I’m in AMC, the alternative music collective. There’s this band coming, called ‘Bitchmagnet.’”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “I remember that. I didn’t think you were into that kind of music then.”

“Did I know you then?”

“No,” I replied, “but I knew who you were. You had blue hair.”

Mike glanced at Juliette, who’d been his friend throughout college. “Blue-black,” she corrected me. It was true; Mike's blue hadn't been the electric blue of a punk but rather a moody sapphire color just shades lighter than Mike's college-years uniform of tight black pants and black jacket.

“Sure,” I said. Then, thinking that we’d been bonded by the foolishness of his fathers, I decided to reveal a secret. “I remember. We used to call you ‘Depeche Mike.’” Mike smiled brightly, as if I'd said something kind. Maybe he'd heard it before. No offense taken.

“I’ll finish the story,” he said. “So anyway, Bitchmagnet was coming. They’ve got this flyer that’s all black and just says, ‘Bitchmagnet.’ It’s hanging on my wall. Dieter comes into my room, checks it out, you know, looks at the flyer and says, ‘What’s that supposed to be, some kind of award?’”

Mike pauses to let us laugh. When we stop, he says, “But that’s humiliating, don’t you think? Your stepfather saying, ‘Is that some kind of award?’”

“What did you say?”

Mike shrugged. “Nothing. I just sat there and took it.” This time he grinned with teeth, a neat row of bright whites. “It’d make a great comic strip, don’t you think? ‘Mars and Dieter.’”

“Sure” I agreed. “Do you draw?”

“No,” Mike replied. “That’s the problem.”

He took another drink. The bartender flicked the bright overheads on and off. Last call. “So,” Mike said, smiling. I waited for another story, or a moral drawn from those he’d already told me. I was watching his lips, ready for him to speak, but I should have paid attention to his eyes, which were clouding over into yet another glare. “So,” he said again, “Who the fuck called me ‘Depeche Mike?’”

My New Experimental Bookstore

2010-06-28T00:41:00.001-04:00

I learned the value of used books in college. I wasn't one of those students who sells his course books back at the end of every semester. I kept them all. Instead, I made my money off the rich kids who couldn't be bothered to sell back their books or carry them home. At the end of each school year, I'd go dumpster diving for books tossed in the great dorm cleaning, and every year I'd come up with a couple of boxfuls, many of the books clearly never even opened. That's how I got the copy of Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments I still have today. I bought Michael Herr's Dispatches, which was too bad, since I came up with a couple of copies every year. Same deal with Beloved. I'd take what I wanted and cart the rest to Amherst's used bookstores, where between us a few friends and I would split around $150. I usually took my portion in trade.

Since 1996, I've been receiving free review books from publishers hoping I'd write about their latest offerings. Oftentimes I did. Sometimes, it was better for everyone if I didn't. And then there were the great books I let down, like Nick Cave's startlingly good novel of last year, Bunny Munro. Thanks, FSG, for the free book. I told anyone who'd listen that it was better than Murder Ballads.

I don't get a lot of books, and usually not the ones I think I want, but there's always enough to require some recycling. You're strictly forbidden to sell review copies, but the only people I know who don't are the same people who used to throw their books out at the end of the semester or the kind hearts in Brooklyn who put them on the curb. I eventually became one of those, in part because it's hard to get a price for books in Brooklyn that justifies the time spent lugging them to the store, and in part because I was so thankful for everyone else who was doing the same. That's how I got my copies of Don DeLillo's Underworld, Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and some beautiful annotated editions of Thoreau's near-complete works. But before I got to Brooklyn, I think I made well over a thousand dollars off of unwanted review copies. I took most of it in trade. A lot of that trade ended up on the curb in Brooklyn. I gave about $500 worth of books, cover price, to the Monroe County public library system in Western New York after I left Brooklyn in the hope that they'd cut me some slack on my fines, but no such luck. Pretty soon I'm going to return the library's Sam Cooke box set that migrated with me to Massachusetts.

Now I live in North Cambridge, where nobody puts books on the curb and used bookstores are disappearing faster than record stores. So I have a new plan I want to try, a virtual curb.

I'm going to put some books up for trade. Not for sale, but for trade. If you want one, email me -- jeff dot sharlet at gmail dot com -- and make me an offer. I'm starting with pristine copies, but I don't need that in return. I'll mail you a $25 book for a $1 paperback if it's something that sounds interesting. And I'm defining "interestesting" very broadly. If you have a book I've been wanting, great; but if you have something I've never heard of that'd be interesting enough to pick up from a box left on the curb, maybe that's better.

This is, of course, a ridiculous, time-wasting project. It's always cheaper to buy from Amazon. But I'm hoping this will be more interesting. We'll see. This blog is half-secret -- very few people know about it and fewer bother to read it -- so the sample is a little smaller than all the used book traders of Brooklyn. But I'm hoping to find something wonderful.

Here's how I think it should work: I list a few titles. You want one, you email me with whatever you have. No obligation either way. If I see something I want, we exchange addresses and mail each other the books, book rate, in padded envelopes, at our own expenses. It's on the honor system. You tell me you're mailing me a book, I'll mail you a book and hope for a delivery.

I have three good titles to start with. Two of them I received double copies of. One of them I arranged for coverage of and another I recommended widely, so I feel like I'm doing the author no dishonor. The third I bought new, and it remains good-as.

Since I want you to trade for these books, none of the links below will take you to a bookseller.

1. Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places, by Bill Streever (Little, Brown, 2009). Cloth. This is really a lovely book, so beautifully written that I overcame my aversion to science writing. Good for hot days.

2. The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright (Little, Brown, 2009). Cloth. My friend Nathan Schneider, an editor of Killing the Buddha, and I met Wright at a conference on journalism about religion, and Nathan ended up interviewing him. I took home a freebie from the conference, and then wound up with another copy in the mail. I'm skeptical of Wright's basic premise, that religion, over time, evolves into a force for good -- what's "good"? -- but I think there's a lot of interesting arguments along the way, so I'm holding on to one copy. You can have the other one.

3. Luna Park, by Kevin Baker and Danijel Zezelj (Vertigo, 2009). Cloth. A beautifully-draw graphic novel about Russian gangsters in Coney Island by the author of the acclaimed plain-old-text novel Dreamland. I'm an admirer of Baker's essays for Harper's, I love graphic novels, and I was completely absorbed as I read it -- but then it seemed to evaporate as soon as I turned the last page. So why keep it on the shelf when somebody else might linger with it longer? Extra points for a graphic novel offered in trade.

That's it to start. Write me at jeff dot sharlet at gmail dot com with something good. A free book -- no trade necessary -- to whoever comes up with a good name for this experimental bookstore.

Journalists & Stenographers

2010-06-26T15:44:00.000-04:00

Since, sadly, I'm not a graduate of what Jeremy Scahill calls the "Joe Klein/David Brooks/Peggy Noonan School for Caviar Correspondents," I've only met Brooks, the special subject of Scahill's contempt for his recent NYT column declaring that the duty of journalists is to keep the secrets of their fellow members of the ruling class. (The dereliction of this duty that provoked Brooks to re-swear his allegiance to the Beltway was Michael Hastings' exposure of General McChrystal in Rolling Stone.) My brief meeting with Brooks was at a junket in Key West sponsored by a conservative think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Since EPPC had gathered its flock (besides Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Elisabeth Bumiller, and reporters and editors from all the other usual suspects) with money from the Pew Trust, and I was also on the Pew teat at the time through the NYU Center for Religion and Media, I got an invite to "observe." That meant a chair against the wall, in which I was to sit quietly. All the better to marvel at caviar correspondents new, old, and converted -- the last of these being Christopher Hitchens, who proposed loyalty oaths for American Muslims, a position that allowed Brooks to play his favorite position: Liberal. Not that he is liberal. His specialty is in moving the spectrum so far rightward that he looks broadminded by comparison.

But "Hitch," as those who claim to know Hitchens call him (I don't) was, apparently, determined to test Brooks' liberalism. My memory is shaky here, because while I wasn't allowed to talk with the VIPs during session was I encouraged to drink, heavily, with them afterwards, but as I recall Brooks' wife was there and some journalist for some wonk magazine -- I don't remember who -- wove over to Brooks, holding forth on "respectability," or "the vital center" or some such -- to warn him that Hitchens was over by the rail of the dock with Brooks' wife, seemingly determined to seduce her or tumble into the water.

What is the point of this story beyond gossip about the mandarins? Nothing other than that it's a fine example of what Brooks says journalists shouldn't do: Tell tales about people more important than them. To be honest, I tried not to at the time; I thought this short report for my Pew-funded project was very respectful. I did say host EPPC and its leader, Michael Cromartie had created an amiable forum -- Brooks' wife, as far I know, went back to the Brooks' room, and Hitchens went back to his bottle.

But Cromartie didn't think so. Maybe that's because he plays a significant part in the archives of the Family, a group which had decided I was no good after I'd first published on them in Harper's. At the time, Cromartie told me I'd gotten it right -- that their theology was sort of a vapid, perverted Buddhism. But later he popped up in a "review" -- the sort that invites the subjects of a book to talk back -- by yet another attendee of that Key West junket, Jay Tolson. Cromartie said nasty things about my book, but that's not breaking the rules, since I'm not important in Washington. (Or anywhere, really, except maybe my apartment when my daughter wants to go to the park.) But I knew we were on the outs long before that -- I never got invited back to Key West, and he wouldn't return my phone calls. That's saying something for a man who makes his living trying to influence journalists. I'm not even worth influencing. Thank God.

But David Brooks is. "So much of what is wrong with journalism today can be gleaned from a simple RSS subscription to David Brooks's columns," writes Scahill, author of the investigative bestseller Blackwater.

In his world, those who have access to the powerful guard their darkest secrets--not their affairs or infidelities or alcohol problems [those, too, actually; journos love trading naughty tales they'll never print lest they lose access to the sources of their copy], but the kinds of views McChrystal and his aides expressed in Hastings' article, the kind of conduct they condone and order in US wars. In a responsible society, one with a vibrant and independent press, the job of journalists should be to hold those in power accountable. Part of the job of journalists is to do precisely what Hastings did--catch powerful figures in their true element, not simply portray their crafted public personas and loyally transcribe their prepared public statements. "McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched," Brooks writes. "And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter."
To Brooks, Hastings's conduct was a part of the decay of the private, sacred relationship between the press and the powerful.

Becky Garrison, Jesus Died For This?, 2010

2010-06-25T10:49:00.001-04:00

My friend Becky Garrison and I have been emailing about the various coalitions that have been forming or not forming around the question of evangelicalism and homophobia. Becky is a Christian satirist -- that is, a Christian who writes satire, not one who satirizes Christianity, though come to think of it she does that, too. But like most satirists she mocks because she loves, and because she loves her faith she's angry about the way it's so often abused. We have sort of an ongoing mild debate about what to do about it. Becky's keen on alliances, but I'm wary. Whenever one group or another tries to recruit me and my books for their cause I get uneasy. This morning I came up with an absurdly mixed metaphor of cliches to explain why:

To be honest I find the whole project of "common ground" to be a distraction. My first interest is the story. Second comes politics. Politically, I think there's a lot too much bridge building going on. Sometimes you need to tear shit down. Or, to put it another way, writers shouldn't be in the business of building big tents. We get on the stage and tell a story and leave it to others to decide whether they want to listen. And then those folks, if they're all standing around together, might want to build a big tent for themselves -- at which point, the writer had better skedaddle or risk getting stuck telling the same story over and over again, ever more polished, like an 80s one-hit wonder trapped in the matinee slot of a second rate Vegas casino forever.

So I tell my stories about C Street or the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda or some other problem of fundamentalism. People want to build coalitions with that information, great. People want to bust up coalitions with it, maybe even better. The myth of common ground is the lie of empire. It's also the bane of literature, since common ground can only be achieved by shaving off sharp edges and losing specificity.

Becky, fortunately, keeps the sharp edges; that's what satire is good for. Here's one of her sharpest, the fabulous cover of her new book, coming out next month:

The Family: Panama and the Pasadena Prophecy

2010-06-24T19:17:00.002-04:00

Another modest document from the Family archives, Collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois. These are a few passages from an early 1980s address to a private Prayer Breakfast meeting. They're of significance mainly for the names involved. The speaker was Aquilino Edgardo Boyd de la Gard, heir to one of Panama's oligarchic ruling families and ambassador to the U.S. from 1982 to 1985, representing the military dictatorship of Manuel Noriega, another friend of the Family represented in their archives. He appreciated the contacts the Family brought him with "the Pentagon, the State Department, business and industry"--and the fact that the meetings were confidential. "By and large, the little groups meet on a private basis, completely off the record."

As a result of this association and because of the problems facing the Central American nations, I thought perhaps these friends could be helpful and have invited three of them, General Vessey, Mr. Ellingwood and Mr. Coe, to meet to discuss some Ideas which I believe will interest you. General Vessey has been involved for many years with the leadership/breakfast groups, and now serves as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Herb Ellingwood was a close friend of the President when he was the Governor of California, and now serves in the administration here in Washington.

Mr. Coe, of course, is Doug Coe, the longtime leader of the organization who in his very rare public utterances -- about once every ten years -- disavows any political intentions. General Vessey is John W. Vessey, Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from during the same period Boyd was ambassador to the U.S. Herb Ellingwood was an aide to Family man Attorney General Ed Meese in the Justice Department, who put Ellingwood in charge of the Office of Liaison after congressional opponents blocked his appointment to the Office of Legal Policy--which is saying something, in the Meese Justice Department.

Here's what I wrote about Vessey in The Family:

In 1983, Doug Coe and General John W. Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the civilian ambassadors of the Central American nations that the Prayer Breakfast would be used to arrange “private sessions” for their generals with “responsible leaders” in the United States; the invitations would be sent from Republican senators Richard Lugar and Mark Hatfield, and Dixiecrat John Stennis, the Mississippi segregationist after whom an aircraft carrier is now named. The Family went on to build friendships between the Reagan administration and the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, found liable in 2002 by a Florida jury for the torture of thousands, and the Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, who before his assassination was linked to both the CIA and death squads. El Salvador became one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the Cold War; U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $4 million per year to $79 million. In Africa, the Family greased the switch of U.S. patronage from one client state, Ethiopia, to another that they felt was more promising: Somalia. “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe explains, “build new power where we can’t.”

That was no joke in Somalia:

A document titled “Siad Barre’s Somalia and the USA,” prepared for the Family and marked “Very Confidential,” is one of the rare Family documents to move beyond what Elgin Groseclose called “the facade of brotherhood.” It is undated but appears to have been written near the beginning of the relationship. Siad, it begins, is the only head of state to have expelled the Soviets, and the only regional leader to offer “full military, air, and naval bases.” He pledges, too, to provide for a pro-American successor, and to purge his government of all offi cials linked to Somalia’s former patron, excepting himself, presumably. Then he notes that he has already supplied the Pentagon with a list of armaments he needed to fight the Cubans. Received.

In 1983, Somalia’s minister of defense went to Washington at Coe’s invitation to meet with the new chairman of the joint chiefs, General John J. Vessey. The United States nearly doubled military aid to the regime, pouring guns into a country that before the decade was out would achieve a moment of unity it has not seen since, when nearly everyone—politicians, warlords, children—united in opposition to Siad. He fl ed in 1991, taking refuge in Kenya with arap Moi. One of his last acts as Somalia’s key man was to scorch as much of his enemy’s land as he could, a biblical punishment for a nation that had resisted God’s appointed authority.

Now here's Herb Ellingwood, from the footnote for the Coe-Vessey collaboration referred to above:

Minutes of a luncheon held at the Cedars, the Family’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters, October 19, 1983, collection 459, BGCA; no box number. The luncheon was organized by Aquilino E. Boyd, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s ambassador to the United States. Also in attendance was an inner- circle member of the Family named Herb Ellingwood, a longtime Reagan aide who had been responsible for “psychological warfare” against student protestors in California. In 1970, Ellingwood was one of the small circle of men who laid hands on Reagan and heard a voice, allegedly God’s, promising Reagan the White House. (Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life [Regan Books, 2004], pp. 135–36.) When Reagan ascended to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he took Ellingwood with him as a deputy counsel. Ellingwood’s advice? “Economic salvation and spiritual salvation go side by side.”

But not, apparently, electoral success: Ellingwood left Reagan and Meese in 1986 to join the presidential campaign of Christian Right leader Pat Robertson. Robertson had a strong showing in the early primaries, but the Republican establishment could not abide a man who'd put morality before money--even a morality that said God wants the poor to be poor and the rich to be rich--and so they closed ranks around a choice nobody was happy about, George H.W. Bush.

Here are some notes I made about better times for Ellingwood, the so-called "Pasadena Prophecy" referred to above, which foretold Reagan's ascendance:

A Sunday. Harald Bredesen, Herb Ellingwood, Pat Boone, wife, George Otis, and the Reagans gathered in the governor’s mansion a month before election for second term. The group form a prayer circle. “Otis, a pastor with High Adventure Ministries in Van Nuys,” recalls awkward seconds that go on a long while. Praying “the things that you’d expect… thanking the Lord for the Reagans…” when the Holy Spirit entered the room and his arm and the hand with which he held Reagan’s began to shake, “tensing,” “pulsing.” He tried to still his arm, but it continued shaking, like a current was zapping through muscle and bone, “a bolt of electricity.” Then, a voice: It was Otis’ own, but the words, tone, the great calm, were not. The voice was not even meant for him, but for the man on his right, Reagan. “My son,” the voice called him. The voice spoke in a diction Otis had learned from the King James Bible. It told Reagan that he was governor of a great land, “indeed, the size of many nations.” But it promised more: “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Brilliant, Jane Brox, 2010

2010-06-23T20:30:00.000-04:00

Here's a summer book I'm very excited about: Brilliant, a history of artificial light, by one of the best nature writers I know, Jane Brox. I met Jane a few years ago during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I had to commute down to NYC once a week to teach a literary nonfiction seminar at NYU. One night I drove back to Peterborough in the mid-evening, not noticing until I was pretty far north how dark it was. One doesn't notice the permanent glow of artificial light until it's gone. The effect is all the more powerful in the country, on a winding road between a cliff and a long black lake, where you'd assumed there was no artificial light, anyway. There was. But this night, it was gone, and so the tree branches in the road weren't just the fallen soldiers of a windstorm but sudden, lurching creatures that sprang into the headlights and into the underbelly of the car on a road with no room to swerve. By the time I got to MacDowell, I understood the power was gone, and that big trees had fallen. But from the big house at the heart of the colony I saw a dim glow. Not some warm, welcoming, Thomas Kinkade nostalgia smear, but a flickering light. Inside the main hall I found the artists and writers, meeting by candlelight and oil lantern. And there was Jane, working on her new book, a history of artificial lighting.

That was three or four years ago. I've been waiting for this book eagerly ever since. I'll have more to say when I lay my hands on it.

The Deadliest Catch, 2010

2010-06-23T15:52:00.001-04:00

"He will die. He did die." That, apparently, has been the paradox for fans of The Deadliest Catch, a reality show about fishermen. This commentary by Brian Moylan on Defamer, about the death of the ship's captain, is fascinating. It's fan stuff, but it's also a critique of what's at stake in documentary art in the age of reality television.

The Family: Organization

2010-06-22T15:28:00.000-04:00

The latest in my series of documents related to my book The Family. This one isn't especially significant except for what it reveals about the historical precision of the movement's organization, in contrast to its claim to have never been more than a casual association of friends. What follows is from the "Summary Report of the Working Session" of an October 27-29, 1967 meeting of what was then called International Christian Leadership in Stockholm, Sweden. It can be found in Box 474 of Collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archives.

Douglas Coe described the strength of ICL in number of followers and geographical extension today in terms of Groups and correspondents. The latter part of the description, he reported, was based on a review of Dr. Vereide’s correspondence during the past eight years. All names were classified by country in a book that was at the disposal of the meeting. Groups of correspondents, he said, existed in 68 countries out of 133 and in 15 dependencies out of 111.

Mr. Coe stressed the fact that some national teams set as springboards for extension of the movement in other countries. Thus, in Latin America, the influence of ICL has spread from Costa Rica to Honduras and Panama, and from Brazil to Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela. Similarly ICL is expanding from Puerto Rico to the Dutch Indies, Haiti and Santo Domingo; from Korea…and from Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast to the rest of Africa.

The groups work under the leadership of the Congressional group, Senator Frank Carlson being responsible for internal and Representative Albert H. Quie for external affairs. The leadership of the student organization and labor unions are invited to attend seminars on the occasion of the Presidential Prayer breakfast.

Our movement is not simply duplicative of other prayer group movements, for it is concerned in promoting a “leadership led by God.”

The Two Hands of the Gospel

2010-06-21T10:13:00.009-04:00

Part of the Family's defense of its influence in Washington is that its only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast, is resolutely ecumenical. Ecumenical, that is, in that the Family welcomes all to worship its idea of Jesus. A while back I posted this account of the 2005 National Prayer Breakfast from an enthusiastic attendee, who transcribed a card she received as part of her welcome folder: "Jesus Transcends All." Below is a testimony from another satisfied customer, Pastor Joe Fuiten of the Cedar Park Assembly of God mega-church, crown jewel of a network of eight powerful and politically active congregations in Washington state, sermonizing on the 2003 event. I attended that one, myself, and I remember Condoleeza Rice's prayer talk, a comparison of the United States, facing Iraq on the eve of war to the narrator of the old black spiritual, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," facing racism. That's right -- Rice played America as the underdog victim. But Fuiten celebrates another, equally cynical instance of text abuse:

I was greatly touched this past week as I spent Monday through Friday in Washington DC. Being there gave me opportunity to think about our country and what God is doing. At another time, when the message is not being recorded, I would like to tell you all about it. There are a couple of messages that I think will come out of the trip. One is about America in God’s plan of history and why Washington DC, our capitol, reflects it so clearly. Being able to spend some time in the Capitol allowed me to see America through God’s eyes. As a result, I am more convinced than ever that we are living in the last days. History is coming to its peak and we are part of that peak.

This morning I want to reflect on the culture of America as demonstrated by its key leaders, many of whom I have had the chance to be with this last week. (Don Argue and Philippe Vallerand as well as Jerry and Germaine Korum were together a good part of the week in these meetings).

In private meetings we met with Senators Murray, Clinton, Santorum, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. We also met with Representatives Insley, Dicks, and Dunn. We had breakfast at the home of Admiral Vern Clark, Chief of Naval Operations, and were thirty minutes from meeting with John Ashcroft when he had to cancel and announce the Orange warning alert.

Our meeting with Majority Leader Bill Frist and Senator Santorum was my most providential meeting. Bill Frist called together a group of African government leaders and American Evangelical leaders to discuss the problem of AIDS in Africa. There were about 25 present. Before I left for Washington, I had no idea there would be such a meeting but the Lord had been putting something on my heart. I had asked AG Missionary and African AIDS nurse Suzanne Hurst to write a letter appreciating President Bush’s $15 billion dollar AIDS proposal that he announced in his State of the Union address. I particularly wanted her to describe why that money should flow through church organizations in Africa. She sent me the draft Sunday night and I entered the names of each Washington State legislator that I hoped to see with the intention of giving them each a copy the letter. I printed up one extra letter that was simply addressed “Dear Senator” without any name on it. Through the influence of Don Argue, I was invited to the meeting. By God’s grace, I had prepared in advance for a meeting that I didn’t know existed. I was able to verbally deliver the message personally to Bill Frist and then to give him the letter along with my card. The message was exactly the topic of the meeting and I was able to deliver it to the man most able to do something about it. I’ll say more about this miracle at another time.

The National Prayer Breakfast was an incredible experience. Any meeting that begins with a prayer by General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in full military dress, has the prospect for being a good meeting. He prayed, “Help us to be at peace with ourselves and with those around us.”

The CIA director, George Tenet, read the Scripture. I want to read for you the Scriptures that he read. Even if he wasn’t head of the CIA, George Tenet looks powerful. When I think of the CIA in its current context, my mind is drawn to that hellfire missile fired from the Predator drone in Yemen that took out that senior Al-Queda leader. In a very strong voice, he gets up and reads the following:

Ephesians 6:10-17 “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Having read that Scripture, Tenet then turned to Luke 6:35-38 “But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. 37 "Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. 38 Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

In those two Scriptures you have the two hands of the Gospel. One speaks of power, the other of forgiveness and loving our enemies. The Scripture is always powerful, no matter who reads it. But when a man who commands a virtual secret army reads it, it makes an impression.

Pastor Joe Fuiten

The Family: Reader Mail

2010-06-20T20:30:00.001-04:00

Received May 31:

You have set me thinking about the relationship between religion and empire. Both my wife and I are Episcopal Clergy and after 30 years in Los Angeles we have moved to Canada. I have begun to recognize how my American theology, one which celebrates the revolution, civil war, civil rights... is part and parcel with my understanding of salvation history. It has no traction in a culture that is post empire. Am I capable of faith sans empire? You got me thinking.

I graduated from Hampshire in '72. My dentist at the time had an office across the street from the Congregational Church A-Frame where Edward's church once stood. The good doctor did not believe in Novocaine, I have always wondered if Edward's spirit was lingering around the neighborhood. A sinner in the hands of an angry dentist..

Actually, the dentist was a sweet man who never charged me.

Chas Belknap

Sima's Undergarments for Women

2010-06-19T17:53:00.003-04:00

My friend Ilana Stanger-Ross's 2008 novel Sima's Undergarments for Women is out in paperback. I think I would have written something about it here were it not for the fact that I read it around the time my daughter, Roxy, was born. But here's what I wrote to Ilana:

It's stunning! I expected I'd like it, but I had no idea that it would consume me. I read it all with Roxy in one arm and the book in the other, much of it out loud to her. I'd rock her to sleep and then grab the book. If there's any justice in the world -- and there isn't -- it'll win prizes. Beneath the veneer of "charming," as Kirkus puts it, I found a book of surprising pain, reminiscent of Delmore Schwartz' regrets in "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and Malamud's restraint in The Assistant. I'm deeply impressed at the courage of creation evident in the character of Sima [the aging, disappointed-in-life owner of a lingerie shop], who never grows cute, never a bubbe or a yenta or any recognizable Jewish literary figure; rather a real woman, and a Jewish one. And I think your decision not to really reveal Timna [her gorgeous young Israeli assistant] to us is brilliant; a lesser novel would have done so. I think the closest I got to Timna was the scene in which she tells Sima that it'd be unfair to envy her; but even then, I stay with Sima, her embarrassment, her resentment. Her resentments are profound.

I was impressed, too, by the honesty with which you depicted work. In fact, I can't think of many novels that pay such close, true attention to work, its costs and its rewards and the large but not total role it can play in a life. That's subtly evident in Lev [Sima's retired husband], too, who seems to have been emptied out not just by life with Sima but by an ordinary career as a teacher; he did his work and now he's tired. There's a line near the end that knocked the wind out of me, Sima speaking to Lev: "It's been too late for so long that I don't think time matters anymore."

Of course, there are many such lines. I mention Malamud because he's such a brilliant storyteller without ever showing off. Schwartz, of course, is pyrotechnic; most younger writers are. This novel never calls attention to you, Ilana, which makes it all the more splendid when a line causes the reader to pause, to consider the fragment of things-as-they-are described just so.

I think, too, that it's an important Jewish book, maybe a pivotal one. In part because you describe a world I haven't really seen in books -- the frummy but not frum majority of Brooklyn Jews -- and in part because the book feels so effortlessly Jewish. So plainly and simply and completely Jewish. (The stuff about Israel is very funny. And that's a sentence that's unusual these days.) No shtetl, no bubbe, no identity angst, no folktales, just a couple of Jews in a basement full of bras.

Annotations

2010-06-16T07:13:00.003-04:00

Reverend Johanan Ojok Kibuota shows me his well-marked Bible. Kampala, 2010.

David Durenberger and the Family, 1993

2010-05-24T00:20:00.008-04:00

Before there was John Ensign, there was David Durenberger. In 1990, the Senate unanimously denounced their Republican colleague from Minnesota for financial schemes sufficiently shady to merit a two year Justice Department investigation. He was also disbarred. At the time this article was written, he was in the thick of a paternity suit over a child that resulted, said the mother, from rape. That wasn't his last affair. One burst into public view when his secretary attacked him with her purse in an airport. He blamed much of his troubles on his wife. His chief regret, he told the St. Pioneer-Press, was that he got caught. But he kept on going until 1994--buoyed by faith and the Family.

It's all "ancient history" now, as my Family friends say of just about any past unpleasantness, but tonight I happened to stumble on a 1993 article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press in which Family leader Doug Coe, seeking to rehabilitate his brother's reputation, is unusually candid. Following are some excerpts.

THE SENATOR WHO SAYS HE IS SORRY//BESET BY SCANDAL, U.S. SENATOR DAVE DURENBERGER TURNS TO GOD - AND THE VOTERS - FOR FORGIVENESS.

--Bruce Orwall, Feb. 28, 1993

U.S. senators have a favorite biblical metaphor to describe the plight of their long-suffering colleague from Minnesota, Dave Durenberger.

``This is our version of Job,'' they say, as one Republican did last month when introducing Durenberger to a stranger.

The allusion seems apt - Job being history's most vivid symbol of steadfast faith. Despite being burdened with a lifetime of trial and despair, he never turned away from God.

Yet each time the comparison is made, Durenberger demurs. He chooses a different Biblical figure to symbolize his struggle.
``Not Job,'' he says. ``Joseph.''

In the Old Testament, Joseph was betrayed by those who were supposed to love him. But using his power as a visionary interpreter of dreams, he returned in triumph to lead his nation, forgiving those who had deserted him.

The ``new'' Dave Durenberger has risen again this winter.

The new Dave surfaces each time the Minnesota Republican finds himself neck-deep in controversy, which is often. This is how Durenberger fends off controversy: by unleashing a torrent of spiritual revelation, oozing New Male sensitivity and sincerity to assure voters that the old Dave - self-centered, egotistical, out of control - is dead and buried.

In his place, Durenberger says, is a man driven by self-improvement. He attends several prayer groups a week. He has a spiritual adviser and a new and improved relationship with God. He's not just a better senator; he's a better person.

Durenberger has turned to this explanation frequently over the years. In early 1986: ``I think in terms of just a `small p' person, I am so much better a person than I was a year ago.'' In 1988: ``My life continues to improve all the time. I couldn't say that four years ago.'' In 1990: ``I am looking forward to making amends the only way I know how: by being the most effective senator I can be, every day I serve in the U.S. Senate.''

Finally, in 1993: ``I spent a lot of time thinking about `The Senator.' Right now, I put a really high value on being `The Senator,' but I put a higher value on being me - whoever that is. And that's coming a long way for me. A long, long way.''

Who has helped him on this journey? Our man Coe, and some of his friends -- ranging from Mother Theresa to Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister to Saddam Hussein currently serving 15 years for his role in the executions of 42 Iraqi businessmen.

Dave Durenberger and his inner circle are heavily invested in the power of faith. They say that a deepened spiritual conviction has carried Durenberger through his darkest days to make him a better, more effective public servant.

``It's his faith,'' says Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming and one of Durenberger's closest Senate friends. ``That's the anchor he has plunged into the sandy earth here. ... He found out where to turn when he didn't know where to turn.''
At the heart of Durenberger's spiritual journey is Doug Coe, operator of the International Foundation, a vaguely defined spiritual center in Arlington, Va.

Coe, 64, is not a minister. He won't say where he gets money for the foundation, which is not affiliated with any religion. He floated from job to job during the 1950s before devoting himself to the spiritual development of public officials through the foundation, which runs prayer groups for politicians and oversees a number of charity projects.

Coe calls the foundation a ``family of friends''' from around the world that gathers to explore the spirit and soul. A key member of that family is Dave Durenberger.

``They're sort of compatriots in a cause,'' says Holderness, the friend from Dorsey & Whitney. ``They're ministering to leaders around the world. I think Doug has been a good counselor and listener and in some ways a minister to Dave.''

The International Foundation also owns The Cedars, a retreat house in Arlington where Durenberger has lived on and off during turbulent personal times.

Described by some as a ``commune,'' The Cedars is nothing of the sort. It features a mansion with a swimming pool and tennis courts on a sprawling campus, where friends from around the world stay when visiting Washington. No one lives there full time; Durenberger was an exception.

``When he and Penny were having difficulties, he needed a place to stay,'' Coe says. ``He was very depressed and he needed some company.''

Together, Coe and Durenberger have traveled the world trying to forge spiritual bonds with world leaders. They have prayed in Jordan with King Hussein, dined at midnight with Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, and explored the power of Jesus Christ with Rajiv Ghandi in India.

It was during that visit to India several years ago that Durenberger met Mother Teresa, and was awed by her personal commitment to the poor. To explain her dedication, Mother Teresa took Durenberger's right hand in hers, counted his fingers and recited: ``I take my hand every night and I say: He-Did-This-For-Me.'' Then she grabbed Durenberger's left hand and counted: ``Then I say to myself: I-Did-What-For-Him.''

``Dave didn't wash his hand for two days,'' Coe says.

The two men have spent long hours together at The Cedars, on what they both describe as an earnest quest to change

Durenberger for the better. The Dave Durenberger that Doug Coe knows does not blame others for his downfall: ``He's saying, `Look, there's something must be wrong with me that I get myself into this sort of stuff.'''

The article continues with Durenberger's childhood as the son of a legendary Minnesota football coach. No special trauma, but Coe works what Durenberger has given him.

Coe, the spiritual adviser, explains the fallout of Durenberger's self-esteem problem with a long discourse on the importance of children being touched and loved. He likens Durenberger's upbringing to that of inner-city children from fractured homes who witness a world of violence and drugs.

``These little children are very emotionally scarred,'' Coe says. ``Now, you say that David didn't come from that. But I don't see any difference in my experience. ... He didn't ever learn about intimacy.''

The resulting scars left Durenberger unable to confront his problems directly, Coe says. And in the depths of a midlife crisis, Durenberger's actions often made him look like a hypocrite. Even as he told the public he was improving his life, he was having an affair and signing off on questionable business deals.

``He would tell you that he was not practicing, in a personal way, his Catholicism or his faith,'' Coe says. ``He would have a technical belief that (his actions were) wrong, just like Prince Charles has a technical belief that he appears and takes communion and does all the things right - but he has a regular bevy of women and so on. He was, I would think, very much like that, just like most of the ballplayers and the Redskins. That's kind of that Kennedy thing.''

Durenberger often avoids confronting people or problems directly - behavior that creates the impression he is dodging accountability. But Coe says it is a form of emotional denial, a trait that has allowed Durenberger to dodge deep pain.

``One of the reasons, in my view, that he's having trouble is that he doesn't want to be hurt anymore,'' Coe says, ``That's not excusing. That's just to say that that's what he has to battle within himself.''

But that was then. According to Coe and Durenberger himself, the new Dave Durenberger of 1993 has won his battle against low self-confidence. His strong spirituality now allows him to experience life in a way he has never known.

``This spiritual experience is giving him, for the first time, the capacity to be intimate,'' Coe says. ``He feels this is the first time he's ever had it, and he's very excited about it. He feels like he's getting a new lease on life in his relationship with God and people.''

...

Doug Coe has faith that his friend and spiritual confidant, Dave Durenberger, will be the Charles Colson of the 1990s.

Colson was the callous White House special counsel under Richard Nixon, best remembered for maintaining Nixon's ``enemies list.'' After serving a prison term for his role in the Watergate coverup, Colson accepted Jesus Christ and now runs a widely acclaimed prison ministry. Coe thinks that Durenberger, like Colson, will overcome the bad influences that have controlled him, and emerge a finer person.

``Everybody wrote every day about what a rat (Colson) was,'' Coe says. ``He was a rat, and he did all those things and a lot more things people don't know about. The thing is, some people are defeated by their errors. Other people grow.

``We're in a process where David is learning and growing. I don't think there's much more that can hurt him.''

A Family Adventure

2010-05-18T20:50:00.005-04:00

Following is an account of the 2005 National Prayer Breakfast preserved in a screen save by Chris Rodda of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I'm reproducing it in near entirety, without commentary -- it's a fascinating document on its own. I will bold some passages, though, and some names, that give a sense of the author's experience of this ostensibly "ecumenical" event

NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST
WASHINGTON DC
February 1-4, 2005

We never even knew to put this on our wish list of things to do in our life of adventure…till Ike and Trisha Thomas asked us to go to the 53rd National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC. The experience is beyond what we could hope or think or ask. Thank you Lord and thank you Ike and Trisha....

Sister picked us up at 8:50 on Tuesday for our American Airlines 11:24 flight to Baltimore where our chauffeur awaited, sign in hand… “Ike Thomas”…that would be us. Baggage collected, we stepped into a gorgeous DC day and into a realllly long black stretch limo. Trisha had gotten their number from a friend and decided to upgrade at the last minute. Now that girl knows how to travel! Tom didn’t want me photograph the limo…might be too big-shotty, but I did get a couple of interior pics. We traveled the hour and fifteen minute trip through snow covered landscapes and time as Ike told us stories of his brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Bill and Karyn Frist; how they met; of the Frist's family's medical heritage; Bill's double major in medicine and political science; Bill's establishment of a heart transplant unit at Vanderbilt University; Bill's performing volunteer medical services in third world countries each summer; and Bill's venture into politics where he won his first Tennessee Senate race against a strong incumbent. We would be having dinner with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and his wife Karyn later that night.

We arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel around 4:00, freshened up and met downstairs to pick up our Prayer Breakfast packets. Wow…the first thing we noticed inside our folders was the “Jesus Transcends All” card. “Jesus Christ transcends all religions! Judaism – Islam – Buddhism – Hinduism…He is greater than all these – including Christianity. Religions are the inventions of men. They may begin with a great leader in mind – Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha… But human traditions soon reduces the original to a mere set of ethical standards and a dead letter of the law which no one can follow. The original sin was not murder, adultery or any other action we call sin. The original sin was, and still is, the human choice to be one’s own god – to control one’s own life – to be in charge – to be religious. Rising out of this choice evolved religion: mankind’s attempt to please God. Jesus transcends religion because he is the incarnation of all that is true, good, loving, gently, tender, thoughtful, caring, courteous and selfless. Jesus does not want you to become a Christian. He wants you to become a new creation! There is a great difference between the two.” Dr. Richard C. Halverson.

Wow…so this is how they approach the multi-faiths attending the Prayer Breakfast. There would be Muslims, Hindu, Jews, Christians…people from entirely different backgrounds and beliefs. Some come for the experience and adventure of meeting people from around the world, praying the Holy Spirit will touch lives. Others come for the honor of being included in this event where heads of states and those of political and spiritual position will be attending…even knowing Jesus’ name will be lifted up, they come. Wow.

Looking further in our packet… “The Strategy of Jesus”, “Remarks of President Ronald Reagan” and the Vision, Message, Purpose and Power of Agreement of “The National Prayer Breakfast Seminar”. This pamphlet includes eight New Testament scriptures and one Old Testament. We admired the subtle boldness and wondered if the foreign packets were the same as ours.

Time to depart for dinner at 6:00. We caught a cab to the restaurant and were given a table upstairs overlooking the park. We hadn’t eaten since our Friday’s carry-on box lunches on the plane and were ready for a quality meal. Shortly after our arrival, two secret service men arrived and remained stationed at the top of the stairs facing our table. Then Trisha’s sister, Karyn Frist, and her husband Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, arrived. As we dined and conversed, Bill was staying in touch with the Senate via his Blackberry wireless. “Sorry…just shutting down the Senate for the day.” What interesting folks. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal and conversation. They had just been to a wrestling match….wrestling match? Both Tom and I pictured WWF or perhaps Suma. But they had just come from one of their son’s wrestling matches. In the midst of political life, the Frists take time for family. Balance…one of the things we continue to pursue. Bill was kind enough to autograph a business card for our good friend Joe Mullens who is a big fan. Joe will just die. Following dessert we took a group picture and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we’d meet up with Ike and Trisha at 10:00 A.M.

...

Our tour of the Capitol began and ended in the Senate Majority Leader's (Frist) suite. When we first arrived, Speaker of the House Dennis Hasertt and Congressional Majority Leader Tom DeLay and several others came through the office for a meeting in the Frist conference room. Brook Whitfield, Senator Frist’s assistant, gave us a VIP tour...

Returning to the Senator’s office to retrieve our purses and Tom’s hat, we took pictures in Senator Frist's private office which Karyn had decorated beautifully. A treasure of art and furniture is available in the federal warehouses for use in the offices; Karyn had done a spectacular job of selecting pieces and arranging a perfect office environment for Bill and his guests. Personal things made it his…a Covelle, a Granbury artist, sculpture of Travis …family photos in the book shelf… one of Ike and Trisha with Karyn and Bill and of course pictures of their three sons…and in the another book shelf, the books Bill had written. The man is amazing. In the course of conversation at the dinner Tuesday night, it was evident the Senator had no clue as to who Sharon Stone and other Hollywood personas are...because there is little time for T.V. and movies when time is so filled with other things. We salute you, Bill…that says a lot about the man...

Ike and Trisha went back to the hotel to rest-up for their exciting evening (attending the State of the Union address) while Tom and I took advantage of our time to visit the Lincoln Memorial. I love that man. And the Vietnam Memorial, which brought me to tears. I thought of the fun I was having while they paid with their lives serving our country.

A quarter to four we took a taxi to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office where we met up with Ike. (Trisha went to the Ladies venue that included her sister, Karyn, as one of the speakers…we wanted to do both, but they were scheduled at the same time.) Her office had extended invitations to the Texas guests of the Prayer Breakfast. We found Kay to be diminutive and delightful. As some asked politically based questions, I asked how much the cleaning bill was on the suit she wore in the christening picture above her fireplace. She laughed and related she had tried three times to break the bottle whose contents burst into activity with every swing and upon the successful contact, filled the air and the Senator’s hair and suit with its bounty. The papers the next day said she had christened herself. Cal Thomas, America’s leading political columnist also spoke. Both told of their belief in Christ and their participation in spiritual things in DC….the Senators have a weekly prayer breakfast and Cal has prayer lunches and invites both Christians and heathens of the media. We had our picture made with the Senator in front of the United States and Texas flags by a professional photographer. The pictures are being mailed.

Back to the Hilton where small dinners were being held. We joined about a hundred and fifty new friends from Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas in the Jefferson East Room. Eighty percent of the room were Texans. Great Racer Denny Pearce gave us a great big welcome hug. He emceed the dinner and also hosted Texas Suite. We sat by new friends on our left Debbie and George Lee, a banker from Houston, and on our right Mark and Debbie Littlestar from Boerne, friends of our good friends Mike and Tracy Kinchin of Fredricksburg. Next to them were new friends Tom and Linda Wilson of Ft. Worth. They’ve been with Young Life for thirty years. Across from us sat Boone and Peggy Powell. I knew Peggy from Bible Study at Anne Miller’s some fifteen years ago. Then Kurt, the youth minister from our Dallas church, Northwest Bible, came in. What a small world we live in.

There was a table of guests from Argentina, one spoke….and the keynote speaker was Jock, a handsome young dynamic man from Australia, whose father had attended the National Prayer Breakfast years ago and returned a new Christian. Since that time the son and speaker became a Christian and has traveled throughout the world encouraging other countries to take up the torch of Prayer Breakfasts in their countries. Jock's home in Australia is always full of guests he’s met on his journeys.

After a delicious dinner of chicken on rice and a yummy ice cream cake dessert, the Texans retired to the Texas Suite on the seventh floor to watch the State of the Union Address. We kept watching for Ike’s big smile and shiny head. Later we learned he and Trisha had sat about 10 seats behind the First Lady. We were all so proud of our President.

Thursday morning we dressed for the National Prayer Breakfast. No purse, no cameras… long lines to go through security. We arrived at 6:45 for a 7:30 breakfast. Even-numbered tickets sat in the International Ballroom, the largest in DC, and odd numbers sat in the overflow ballroom downstairs and watched via multi-media.
We were table number two-sixty-eight…Ike and Trisha, number one-thirty-nine. The tables were set beautifully with perfectly ripened fruits, granola, bagels and sweet rolls, and beverages. I had two large strawberries. We sat by new (and really cool) friends Richard and Susan Davis who have a church in Zurich Switzerland. He sold his Harley just before they moved there seven years ago. It would be fun to rent a motorcycle in Europe and visit them. They are central to so many day trips into the Alps and other countries.

The Prayer Breakfast began with black singer Wintley Phipps (amazing). The pre-breakfast prayer was given by Emanuel Cleaver, House of Representatives, Missouri; opening remarks by Jo Ann Emerson, House of Representatives, Missouri; the opening prayer was given by Tom Osborne, House of Representatives, Nebraska; opening remarks – Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota; Senator Dianne Feinstein gave a reading from Jewish spiritual literature; Wintley Phipps sang again; Army Sergeant Douglas Norman read from the Bible; Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, a Christian, prayed for our national leaders; Tony Hall, Ambassador, United States Mission to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agencies gave the main message. He was awesome. Tom told me while Tony was serving in the House of Representatives he had gone on a hunger strike until legislation was passed to help starving children in Ethopia who were literally dying by the thousands daily. He didn't eat for thirty days; then our President, George W. Bush spoke to our hearts. His message is included in another section of this book; Wintley Phipps then sang the most amazing Amazing Grace. Wintley pointed out it was written by the Captain of a slave ship and many think the melody is an African chant. He began the song with a chant of sorts in his deep rich baritone…sang the hymn as a Negro Spiritual….it was awesome. Lincoln Davis, House of Representatives, Tennessee closed in prayer. Most Impressive...Each prayer lifted Jesus name and was given in His name. No "side-steps" were made in deference to our guests from other nations and faiths. To You be the glory, Lord.

I whispered in Tom’s ear I was going to make a quick trip to the Ladies Room before we were served, to which is response was, “We’ve eaten.” I later learned those in the downstairs ballroom viewing by screens were served a full breakfast to my two strawberries. Ike and Trisha said they should have warned us. We met them up near the stage and as we exited I got to speak to Chuck Colson, telling him we still use his taped talk comparing the Watergate 12 to the disciples. We had seen him at the Interstate Batteries Convention in Orlando. What an incredible ministry he has.

The Texas Suite was next on our personal agenda. We met fascinating folks from Houston, Louise, daughter Vicki and her aunt Carolyn, who kept us entertained for the next hour and a half. Ike and Trisha joined us briefly, then took off for a meeting with retiring Attorney General John Ashcroft, who spoke to an intimate group of about thirty. Between meals various small groups of spiritual leaders met in the mini-meeting rooms.

Lunch was back in the International Ballroom. It was by far our best meal of the trip…main course – salmon…my favorite. Amazing that a wait staff of two hundred served three thousand a hot meal so efficiently. Rick Warren, who wrote Purpose Driven Live and Purpose Driven Church, spoke followed by the keynote speaker, the President of Honduras, Ricardo Maduro Joest of the National Party – a Christian.

We anticipated a late night so we all took long naps after lunch, and met up for dinner back in the International Ballroom. Tom and I met the most interesting lady, Pauletta from DC, who teaches defense in the Department of Defense and who travels to many foreign nations in upheaval. I asked if she was a Black Belt, to which she answered, “Surrounding yourself with men with guns is the best protection.” To my left was new friend Lynda Keese who lives in DC …and next to her was her new friend Carol from Oklahoma. We had steak, mashed potatoes and green beans and the best dessert – my favorite – chocolate mousse cake. Ike and Trisha were at the table next to us and when they rose at 7:30, so did we. A seven-time dove winner was performing and we missed the speaker, now Chaplain of the Senate, Barry Black, but we had a dessert date at the Frists.

Ike and Trisha’s friends Warren and Lenore Carter, who provided our four invitations this year, picked us up at the front door. We drove past the National Cathedral, where Ronald Reagan’s funeral had been held, and arrived at the Frist’s right on time – 8:00....

Bill gathered us all in the dessert room to welcome us and thank us for coming to a no-agenda gathering of Christians (most of whom were spiritual leaders) from various parts of the United States. After his talk, Franklin Graham led us in prayer for the future of Bill and Karyn…and for each guest present and for their ministries. Tom and I made note to add Bill and Karyn to our daily prayer list right behind the President. It would be so awesome if the office of the President continued to be filled with God fearing committed Christians who consult our Father for direction and wisdom and who will run the country on Christian principles. At dinner on Tuesday night we had repeated the words of one of Bill’s fans who had said… “You go for it!”

Among the guests were Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son); Luis Palau (Evangelistic Association); Chuck Colson (Prison Fellowship Ministry); David Barton (Wall-Builders); Rick Warren (Purpose Driven Life); Lloyd John Ogilvie (Author and past Chaplain of the Senate); Ted Haggard (President of the National Association) and Richard Land (President of The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention). All of these men would be among the list of twenty-five most influential evangelicals in the February seventh issue of Time Magazine currently on stands…five of them are on the cover. May the Lord continue to empower them for reaching the world for Christ through their various ministries.   We also met other pastors we just fell in love with…especially the black ministers. Their hearts and love for Christ literally beamed on their faces. What an open book and joy filled soul they each had.

One of our favorites was Wellington Boone, a pastor from Norcross, Georgia. He has written a book published by Doubleday called “Your Wife Ain’t Your Mama” and promised to send us a copy. His new book on shelves soon is titled “Woman – The King Maker”.

We missed David Barton…Ike saw him leaving before we got into the other room to even know he was there. What a shame as he lives just down the road from us in Aledo, and we’ve used his video transcripts on America’s Godly Heritage in our Bible Study at the UpTop. Now there’s a man everyone needs to listen to. Our government has gotten our heritage so mixed up, and he reminds us of the documents, actions and beliefs of our founders and fore-fathers.

I visited with Franklin Graham. “Franklin, I had the honor of hearing your Daddy at the Lobo Stadium in Longview, Texas, circa 1958, and they were coming forward by the hundreds even back then.” He responded with enthusiasm… “You’re from Longview? I went to Le Tourneau Tech for two years and still fly back in and get some Bodacious BBQ to go.” I told him I had lived in the Le Tourneau barracks when my daddy was going to school there. And how was his Daddy? He had missed his first Prayer Breakfast this year. He said he was doing OK. I thanked him for all he does in the name of Christ.

We talked to Chuck Colson. Tom asked Chuck for advice on how to begin a ministry in the Granbury jail as our new Christian sheriff, Gene Mayo is wide open for Jesus. Chuck referred us to the Prison Fellowship office in Dallas for assistance.

Our visit with Rick Warren was one of our favorites. Rick is an "old rocker", and he is a hoot. Turns out he plays the guitar and when we told him about Granbury Live, Rick said he would come to Granbury if he could play onstage. Tom told him, "Consider it done, you'll be perfect with Mo and Bro, the Blue Suede Brothers."

We finished our evening with a few pictures with new friends and a thank you to our hosts for an incredible evening in their beautiful home Karyn had decorated perfectly. To the hotel and in bed by midnight.

Friday as Ike and Trisha were in route to Cancun to receive a Turf Grass award for Ike and as Karyn was on her way to New York to a red dress fashion show with the First Lady, and as the Senate Majority Leader attended to the business of the day, Tom and I ate breakfast at Union Station and boarded first class Amtrak for our twenty-seven minute trip to Baltimore. Tom carried the luggage on and stepped back off the train to proclaim… “The first face you’ll see is ‘My Kinda Woman’”…a line from Granbury Live’s “God Bless Texas”: “One thing you’ll never hear in Texas… The tires on that truck are too big, That song needs a little more French horn, That Hillary is my kinda woman.” Sure nuff….there sat Hillary with her perhaps secretary and the secret service. We had the option of sitting facing her or going on back to a private table. We chose privacy, were served cranapple juice, diet Pepsi and the New York Times before we disembarked at BWI Baltimore where a too chatty lady cabby took us to the airport for a full flight home.

Sister picked us up, and we stopped for the much missed Mexican food of Abuelo’s and then home to the more than missed Granbury Live Family…where we played “God Bless Texas” and the lines “what you’ll never hear in Texas.”

Thank you Lord for a blessed adventure with Ike and Trisha, and thank you Ike and Trisha for choosing us to share your adventure, making it ours. It was a blast!

                                              Tom and Sandi

Lost, X-Men, Narnia, Agee

2010-02-09T13:58:00.001-03:00

As a child, I knew I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to write X-Men. A few years on, I still wanted to write X-Men, but I also wanted to write The Chronicles of Narnia. I worried about how I'd get the books I loved -- The Great Brain series, Susan Cooper's eerie folk nightmares, The House With the Clock in its Walls -- once I was too old for them. I imagined standing at the counter of the Open Door, the bookstore in which my mother and I spent hours, as a grown-up, with a stack of children's novels: "For my nephew," I'd lie.

What I liked most about many of these stories -- X-Men, The Dark is Rising, The Chronicles -- is that they didn't seem to end. The X-Men, never. The Dark is Rising, not really. The Chronicles, yes; but it was so dull compared to the rest of the story that one could imagine the last book as nothing more than a giant typo.

I drifted away from writing in high school, and went off to college determined to be an actor or a biologist, maybe a forest ranger. (I would have made a great ent.) Instead, I read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and I was back to writing. What was remarkable to me wasn't that the book didn't end; it was that it never really began. Or rather, it began over and over, each start a crescendo and a failure, proof of Agee's contention that language was a lie, forever inadequate to the "cruel, radiant symphony of what is."

I still like X-Men -- at least, when Joss Whedon was writing a series -- and I return now and then to Agee. But I no longer need endless stories to make me feel safe -- children fear endings -- nor Agee's angst-filled failures to make me feel honest. Writing is mediation; a negotiation.

But television? Its adolescent stories keep hope and nihilism alive. That is, most series are conceived with no clear end in sight. That's the hope. And most are built around a repetition of crescendoes -- none moreso than Lost, the series that has lost hope (the end is in sight). Each new season, almost every new episode, implied a new beginning, as the story returned us to the events that had set the story in motion, each time flogging us for failing to understand what had been right before our eyes and promising us that this time it would be different, this time we would proceed with the necessary information, this time the story would have meaning. And, of course, that was a playful deception, too, because the story always had meaning; it just kept changing. Every episode was an illustration of Faulkner's chestnut: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

But maybe, sometimes, it should come to an end -- so that it can avoid ending. So argues Graham Hilliard on KillingTheBuddha.com.

There’s a moment in the third season of Lost, ABC’s soon-to-conclude serial drama of time travel and philosophy, that might have made a perfect ending to the series. Jack, the surgeon-cum-tribal chieftain whose impetuousness drives much of the show’s conflict, has delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, “The Others.” A rescue party of his friends has arrived at a gated camp to find Jack sprinting toward them, eyes ablaze. Before they can react—before they can move toward him or aid his escape—Jack looks over his shoulder, raises his hands, and catches a football. He grins at the captor with whom he’s been playing, and he spikes the ball. Cue credits.

It’s a devastating scene—one of the finest in the show’s history—and a stunning conclusion, had it been allowed to serve as one, to a narrative whose success was built not on revelation but mystery. Though Jack has long been established as the series’ central protagonist, the notion that he has switched sides is just possible. We’ve seen the creeping petulance that has marked his behavior since midway through the first season, and we’ve begun to question our own loyalties. Jack has been alone with the Others for days, furthermore, and their motives and practices are unknown to us. That Jack may have turned is both shocking and quietly plausible. In its mastery of timing, characterization, and narrative momentum—the very ingredients that made the show successful in the first place—the moment is a tour de force. It’s an exclamation point. A bang of an ending rather than a whimper.

Read the whole essay at this blog's big sister site, KillingTheBuddha.com

Hometown Paper

2010-01-25T17:47:00.002-03:00

There's nothing quite so rewarding to a small town brain like mine as making it into the hometown rag, which in my case is the Schenectady Daily Gazette, my first employer. (I was a paperboy.) Features writer Sara Foss contacted me and asked some of the most challenging and engaging questions I've encountered in years of doing media. Here's the story, which ran on page 1 of the January 24, 2010 edition.

Jeff Sharlet credits a trio of Republican sex scandals with the success of his 2008 book "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power."

"The book didn't quite catch when it came out," recalled Sharlet, 37, a 1990 graduate of Scotia-Glenville High School, during a phone interview.

Then South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Nevada Sen. John Ensign and former Mississippi Rep. Chip Pickering each admitted to extramarital affairs.

All three had connections to the Family, a little-known but politically powerful network of fundamentalist Christians, and Sharlet soon found himself talking about the Family on TV -- on the network news, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "The Rachel Maddow Show," "Real Time with Bill Maher" and "Hardball." His book, an exhaustively researched look at the secretive group's influence on policy and world events, landed on the New York Times best-seller list, where it spent 14 weeks in the top 10 and has remained ever since.

Sharlet serves as a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and Rolling Stone and also writes about music for the Oxford American and politics and religion for The Nation, Mother Jones and Salon. Since 2003, he has served as an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media, where he edits The Revealer, a daily online review of religion in the news and news about religion.

Many of the publications Sharlet writes for have liberal views; his Web site proudly proclaims that right-wing pundit Ann Coulter has called him one of the "stupidest" journalists in America, while left-leaning writers and thinkers such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Thomas Franks have sung the praises of "The Family."

Diverse background

Sharlet has a pretty prominent platform for his work these days.

But when Phyllis Kulmatiski, the mother of one of Sharlet's boyhood friends and a! retired Scotia-Glenville studio art teacher, sees Sharlet on television, she's reminded of how he used to talk about the issues of the day when he was in high school.
"We see him on TV and say, 'Oh, God, he looks like his father,' " she said. "And then we remember him doing that around the dinner table."

Sharlet's interest in religion developed during childhood.

The son of a secular Jew and a "Christian eclectic," he was neither bar mitzvahed nor raised in a single church. But his mother would often take him to different churches and congregations. They visited a Dutch Reformed church, he said, because they liked the bell ringers, and they attended midnight Mass as well as a Hindu ashram.

"My mother was not a seeker in the hippie way of looking for a true path," Sharlet said. "She was interested in the crazy quilt of it all."

In a 2004 interview in Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, Sharlet talked about his unusual background.

"I grew up in what seemed like a mostly Catholic ! town in upstate New York," he said. "My father is Jewish, and my mother, with whom I lived, had been raised in a very unusual Pentecostal home. Her mother, a very poor Tennessean without a whole lot of education, had at an early age discovered a box of discarded books -- Dostoyevsky and Balzac and Tolstoy and books of Eastern religion. That was in rural Tennessee in the 1930s. So she raised my mother to be interested in everything, and my mother did the same for me. Going to other people's churches and temples, gathering stories -- in my family, that was just how you did religion. I didn't even know that it was religion, in fact, which probably helped me become the kind of religion writer I have. I gravitate to stories about what people believe and don't believe and how that affects their lives, because that seems the most natural way to engage the world around me."

When Sharlet was 16, his mother, Nancy Goodlin Sharlet, died from cancer.

Shortly before ! she died, she invited people of different faiths -- Buddhism, Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism -- to pray with her at the house. These people spoke of salvation -- of preparing for the next world, for life after death. But his mother, Sharlet said, wanted to pray for deliverance.

"She would say, 'I want to be delivered from my death.' ... That always stayed with me. That whole idea of deliverance versus salvation -- it's the most interesting dilemma you could have."

Academic childhood

People who knew Sharlet when he was growing up remember him as a bright, inquisitive boy who came from an academic family. His father, Robert Sharlet of Niskayuna, is a retired Union College professor of political science who specialized in Russian and post-Soviet law and politics. Sharlet's mother was a writer and editor who worked for SUNY Press. After she died, Sharlet spent the summer going through her papers, "discovering her as a writer," he said.

"Jeff was always a reader of books," said Kulmatiski, who has known Sharlet since he was in kindergarten. "He was very verbal."
Sharlet and her son, Andy, would play "Bridge to Terabithia" in the yard, a game based on the famous children's book by Katherine Paterson.

"In high school, Jeff started writing more," she said. "He was also interested in political issues and social justice." Sharlet and his friends "were great arguers," Kulmatiski said. "They were like lawyers. They were always challenging each other. They were very liberal and full of themselves. They were kind of pain-in-the-neck kids. They weren't the kids who were kissing up to teachers. They were outspoken."

Sharlet said he wasn't a particularly distinguished student in high school. He described himself as a screw-up, a straight-A student whose grades fell off when his mother got sick; he and his friends, he said, "were smart-alecky jerks."

After high school, Sharlet attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where he studied literary journalism.

"Like many people, I discovered writing by going off to college and having a really great writing teacher," he said.

Taking up the pen

He began his career at an alternative weekly newspaper in San Diego and then moved on to the National Yiddish Book Center, where he founded Pakn Treger, an award-winning magazine of Jewish history and literature. He didn't speak Yiddish or even Hebrew, but it didn't matter: the National Yiddish Book Center wanted to create a magazine that would "deal with the Jewish world, that was not about this faction or that faction."

Sharlet had a large budget and was able to do things like travel to Spain with Jewish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. But the job gradually became more restrictive, and when the National Yiddish Book Center decided it no longer wanted Sharlet to write about sex, politics or religion, he took a job with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In 2000, Sharlet and his friend Peter Manseau founded an online religion magazine called Killing the Buddha, which describes itself as "a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the 'spirituality' section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse, it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be. Killing the Buddha is it."

The magazine was successful, and Sharlet and Manseau received a contract to write a book about religious subcultures. The two spent a year traveling throughout America, visiting unusual churches and religious gatherings and exploring some of the country's stranger religious subcultures: a Pentecostal ! exorcism in North Carolina, a military pagan coven in Kansas, ! a storm- chaser who looks for the divine in tornadoes. The book, titled "Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible," came out in 2004.
"I was interested in the margins," Sharlet said. "I was interested in unusual things."

Mixing god, government

Sharlet's next book, "The Family," was a much different project, one that took him to the halls of Congress, to megachurches in Colorado and deep into the Family's archives at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois. And although Sharlet is now a leading expert on the Family, he learned about the group almost by accident.

In 2002, a woman he had dated in college contacted him. She said she was worried about her brother --she thought he had joined a cult. Sharlet met the brother -- called Zeke in "The Family," although that's not his real name -- for dinner and learned that he'd had a born-again experience while staying at Ivanwald, a home for young Christian men in Arlington, Va. T! he young men at Ivanwald, Zeke told Sharlet, worked at The Cedars, a spiritual retreat for politicians. Sharlet asked Zeke how one went about joining Ivanwald.

"You don't," Zeke told him, in a conversation recounted in "The Family." "You're recommended."

Zeke recommended Sharlet to Ivanwald, and he lived there for a month, praying, working and studying the Bible with other young men. Initially, he thought the experience might merit a chapter in "Killing the Buddha."

"I thought it would be a monastic group of frat boys," he recalled. (In "The Family," he writes, "I thought Ivanwald would simply be one more bead on my agnostic rosary.") Instead, Sharlet discovered a topic that deserved its own book: the Family.
Founded in 1935, the Family's members include high-ranking government officials in both the U.S. and abroad, business leaders and military officers; the group's goal, Sharlet writes, is to minister to the powerful, with the objective of creating "god-led" governments centered around the person of Christ.

During his stay at Ivanwald, Sharlet visited a Washington townhouse run by a Family affiliate called the C Street Foundation; eight congressmen live there. He also visited The Cedars, where Ed Meese, who served as attorney general for former President Ronald Reagan, presides over a regular prayer breakfast.

powerful actors

In "The Family," Sharlet explains that these connections give the Family surprising power.

"In the process of introducing powerful men to Jesus, the Family has managed to effect a number of behind-the-scenes acts of diplomacy," Sharlet writes. "In 1978, it helped the Carter administration organize a worldwide call to prayer with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, Family leaders persuaded their South African client, the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to stand down from the possibility of civil war with Nelson Mandela. But such benign acts appear to be the exception to the rule. During the 1960s, the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, arranging prayer networks in the U.S. Congress for the likes of General Costa e Silva, dictator of Brazil, General Suharto, dictator of Indonesia, and General Park Chung Hee, dictator of South Korea."

Sharlet wrote an article about Ivanwald and the Family for Harper's in 2003; with his editor's encouragement, he spent the next five years turning the piece into a book.

"The Family" is a mix of first-person accounts, narrative history and essays with numerous footnotes.

"People had to push me into writing about it," Sharlet said. "It wasn't what I wanted to do, but it was a story that landed on my lap. I thought it might be an important book."

Objective approach

Sharlet said religion is a fascinating topic to write about.

When people ask why he writes about religion, he said he ofte! n gives them what he calls his "glib answer -- because it's there." Mo st of the people who write about religion, he said, have a religious agenda. He said he isn't interested in exploring the question of whether religion is good or bad or whether God exists but understanding character and motive.

"I'm interested in what people who believe in God or don't believe in God do about it," he said.

Friend Manseau said Sharlet spends time getting to know his subjects, which is why he's such a good religion reporter.
"He's able to understand the beliefs of others and empathize with them without sharing their beliefs," he said. And he's bold: "The key to his success is that he presents himself to [his subjects] with no agenda," he said. "He doesn't have a list of gotcha questions. He's there to learn about the people he's writing about. That's attractive to his subjects --here's this smart guy who wants to learn about them."

Manseau, who met and worked with Sharlet at Pakn Treger, said Sharlet taught him a lot about writing.

"I started off wanting to be a fiction writer," he said. "Jeff taught me the necessity of being out in the world, of going out into the world and meeting people. He taught me that a reported story doesn't have to be a boring story."

Future projects

Sharlet now lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife, Julie Rabig, and nine-month-old daughter.

He has several other projects in the pipeline.

One is a book he plans to write with his father about his father and uncle's experiences during the Cold War. While his father, Robert Sharlet, became a leading authority on the Soviet Union -- Sharlet described him as a "Cold Warrior" -- his uncle, also named Jeff Sharlet, served as a translator during the Vietnam War and became a leader of the GI resistance movement; the 2005 documentary "Sir! No Sir!" about the anti-war activities of American GIs during the Vietnam War is dedicated to him. (Sharlet died in 1969, of exposure to Agent Purple, a precursor to the dangerous herbicide Agent Orange.)

Sharlet also plans a follow-up to "The Family" that will look at... the scope of Christian fundamentalism in other areas of American life, such as the military.

A third book, "The Hammer Song," will explore the history of the folk song "If I Had a Hammer."

Sharlet said he's now in regular communication with some members of the Family, which he said has a "small liberal wing" that believes the group should be less secretive. He recently arranged for Bob Hunter, a Family associate who built the group's relationship with the country of Uganda, to appear on "The Rachel Maddow Show" to talk about a Ugandan bill that calls for life imprisonment for gays; the legislator who introduced the Ugandan bill is a member of the Family.

Sharlet applauds Family members who support greater transparency but said the group and its members do not take responsibility for their actions and the way their ministry impacts the world.

"They're blinded by their good intentions," he said. "I keep getting drawn back to the brutality of the cold, hard facts."

The Family: Reader Mail

2010-01-13T22:23:00.004-03:00

Mr. Sharlet,

I am in the midst of reading "The Family" and finding it a fascinating read. I commend you for the obvious thorough and painstaking research, but also for the very enjoyable style in which it is written.

Having spent several of my younger years as an evangelical preacher I was intrigued by what I knew of the subject matter of the book prior to actually reading any of it. In that I was "grafted in" to fundamentalism so to speak, I was always viewed by colleagues with a certain degree of suspicion. I was continually confronted with the difficulty of trying to keep my left-leaning political points of view separate and distinct from anything related to my personal spirituality. Unfortunately, any and all of the religious institutions to which I was formally or casually associated with would have none of it and was often pressed to justify my political ideology with what was assumed to be the more Godly right winged approach. Ultimately this and several other issues caused a slow but continual erosion of my desire to serve God as a fundamentalist.

That being said, I was amazed, while reading your book to happen upon a reference to an old acquaintence of mine, Mrs. Marian Aymar Johnson.* In the early seventies I was newly "born again" and with two years of bible school under my belt I returned to my hometown of East Islip, Long Island and began street preaching. It wasn't terribly long before I had amassed a following of well over one hundred converts, mostly teens and young adults.

I soon became the darling of the established ministers in the area. They saw me as someone who had a way with young people and could reach them with the gospel message in a way they couldn't. It was at just such a place, Sayville Community Church, that I met Marian Johnson for the first time. Being somewhat itinerant and in obvious need of financial support I soon found myself on the receiving end of her generosity. In addition to straight cash gifts, she bought me a watch and gave me a car. Though not a new car, it was a late model in fine condition and I drove it for several years.

After I moved on to take an associate pastorate position in New York City I lost contact with Mrs. Johnson and had not so much as heard her name until reading it in your book a few nights ago.

Chappy Valente

* From The Family:

During the war years, [Family founder] Abram had acquired a new patron, a youngish widow named Marian Aymar Johnson, heiress to the fortunes of both her late stockbroker husband and of her old, Hudson River family.
A lovely if empty-headed beauty raised between Newport, London, and Manhattan, she was a second cousin to FDR, but her isolationist politics were far to his right. Before the war, she’d been fond of Buchmanite ["Moral Re-Armament, fascist-friendly until the outbreak of the war] house parties, hosting one herself at her Long Island estate—an event of sufficient gossip value to rate an article in Time. Tall and blue- eyed with a broad, open smile, after her husband died she resolved to develop greater gravitas. She gave up the life of a social butterfly for what she called Abram’s “total Christianity.” Her goal was the establishment of “spiritual beach heads” from which to evangelize leaders. Only by accepting the same Christ, the “Supreme Leader” she had come to serve, could they save America from communism.18 With her help, Abram bought a four-story mansion on Embassy Row in Washington at 2324 Massachusetts Avenue. He hoped it would be a headquarters for politicians and diplomats of all denominations, a place for businessmen visiting Washington (by this point, Abram’s inner circle
included the president of the National Association of Manufacturers) to share their concerns with brothers- in-Christ in spiritual, not material, terms. A “Christian Embassy.”19

18. Harriet French, “To Make Christians Leaders, and Leaders Christians,” in unidentified newspaper, box 411, folder 4, collection 459, BGCA.

19. An undated brochure produced by the Fellowship shows on its front page just such a conversation between two men walking down the stone steps of the mansion. The man on the right, dressed in light gray and a dark tie, seems to be trying to persuade his companion, an older fellow with gray hair and black brows and an impatient air. The persuader, we learn in the
caption, is Commissioner Sigurd Anderson of the Federal Trade Commission; the skeptic, Howard Blanchard of Union Pacific Railroad—two men with more than Christ in common. “The Bible,” declares the brochure, “contains inexhaustible resources for the businessman fighting the economic battle in a two-fisted business world,” like a vein of coal or a pool of oil “deposited” by God, awaiting refinement into a spiritual offensive against “materialism.”

Some additional documents referencing Marian Aymar Johnson:

1. In the 1948 August-September edition of the National Committee for Christian Leadership's internal newsletter. Aymar Johnson writes of “Our Supreme Leader and Living Contemporary.... If we link up with this Power we project it. Results will be had just as fast as we are willing to invest and hurl our lives and resources back of our convictions. World economies will follow…. infect the rest of the world… We must have a clear, committed, self-sacrificing minority in every strategic situation." This same issue features an essay arguing that the "The totalitarianism of God is the only answer."

2. An August 2, 1949 letter from a German industrialist associated with the Family (then known as International Christian Leadership -- ICL) to Aymar Johnson begged for her help in preventing the Allied dismantling of a German factory linked to Germany's war machine. Aymar Johnson was evidently moved to help, as indicated by an August 31, 1949 letter to Aymar Johnson from Donald Stone, a Marshall Plan administrator who, through his connection to ICL, had concluded that American foreign aid should promote evangelical Christianity. But Stone drew the line when it came to the particular factory Aymar Johnson had attempted to preserve for their German Christian friends, noting that its dismantling had been agreed upon as "a result of international action and formal international agreements," related to "the effort of the Nazis to dominate the world and to perpetuate heinous crimes." (Folder 21, Box 474, Collection 459, BGCA)

3. Aymar Johnson's efforts on behalf of Nazi sympathizers were not limited to economic concerns. In an October 10, 1951 letter to German ICL leader Gustav Adolf Gedat -- a minister who'd been an early Hitler supporter but who'd turned against the Nazis by war's end -- Aymar Johnson notes that along with the men traveling on ICL's behalf there would be a Mrs. Perle, evidently available for romantic consideration: "Auntie and I do not feel that she would be the right type for Prince Hohenlohe... be sure to include my delightful cousin, Colonel Hoffman, who is her right hand there."

4. A December 27, 1967 letter from Family leader Doug Coe to Aymar Johnson and another associate illustrates the Family's longstanding relationship with the oil industry: "perhaps the most tremendous thing that has happened this year is indicated in a copy of the letter from the Executive VP of Continental Oil. They are leaving Ken White on staff but making available to the nation as a public service his time to work with us in the work." (Folder 4, Box 204, Collection 459, BGCA)

What I Learned

2010-01-11T05:26:00.002-03:00

My publisher asked me to fill out a questionnaire to help their publicists promote my next book. This was the only question I had fun answering:

Q. PLEASE DISCUSS SEVERAL ARTISTS (NON-WRITERS) WHO YOU FEEL HAVE INFLUENCED YOUR OWN WORK, AND HOW THEY HAVE DONE SO.

A.

From photographer Walker Evans I learned about framing.

From punk poet Patti Smith I learned the importance of being earnest.

From Marvin Gaye I learned that anger can be beautiful.

From composer Tarik O’Regan I learned the shape of grace.

From photographer Roy Decarava I learned the elegance of contrast.

From jazz singer Patty Waters I learned the power of phrasing.

From basketball player Allen Iverson I learned how to weave.

From photographer Dorothea Lange I learned the angles.

From photographer Sally Mann I learned about the roots.

From singer Paul Robeson I learned the depths.

From comic book artist Alex Maleev I learned that texture can be tragic.

From photographer William Eggleston I learned that color bleeds.

From Tina Turner I learned what's shaking.

From TV creator Joss Whedon I learned that art is pulp.

From actress Emily Watson I learned that innocence is death.

From photographer Helen Levitt I learned that everything is code.

From country duo the Louvin Brothers I learned that Satan is real.

From Bruce Springsteen I learned that everything that dies someday comes back.

Bob Hunter, Uganda, and Rachel Maddow

2010-01-06T01:17:00.004-03:00

Bob Hunter, the Family/Fellowship associate who built the group's relationship with Uganda, appeared on MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show" tonight. I helped arrange it. That may surprise some readers of my book, The Family, but it shouldn't: transparency is the foundation of the democratic process the Family has so long sidestepped. Bob, who by his own admission is part of the group's small, relatively liberal faction, believes the time has come for greater transparency. I think he's about 75 years late -- the group should have been transparent from the beginning, in 1935 -- but better late than never.

Unfortunately, tonight was only a step in the right direction. Bob said he wanted to go public to set the record straight on the Family's relationship with Uganda. Instead, he opened by attacking me on trivial matter, arguing that my dislike for the cover my publisher chose for my book somehow invalidates everything in it. He continued by misrepresenting my views. In fact, I haven't acknowledged that the Family isn't political; just the opposite. Bob and I argued about it for awhile.

In the interest of transparency, I should add that I called him up after the show. He said he'd planned to talk about Senator Jim Inhofe, the fiercely anti-gay politician who is listed in Family documents as the "U.S. leader" responsible for working with Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni. Bob said he wants to see Inhofe take a bolder stand against this awful bill. But he got sidetracked.

So here's hoping we can all stay on message. I'll do my best when I get a chance to review clips from the show.

The Family, College Style; and Some Hope for Tiger Woods

2010-01-01T20:18:00.004-03:00

Since I published The Family, I've received hundreds of emails from readers, including a number who report personal experience with the Family/Fellowship. Here's a fairly straightforward one from a Christian who took a look at the Family's theology and kept on going.

Mr. Sharlet:

I read The Family in 2008 with great interest and listened to all your interviews on Fresh Air. I was part of an Intervarsity Fellowship at Emory University from 1987-1991. After graduation one of my friends lived in a mens house in the Arlington area. I enrolled in graduate school in Philly and stopped there a couple of times to spend the night. I even went to an evening worship service I think at the home of the Senate chaplain, Halverson,* I think was his name. He gave a short message which I thought was theologically light. The "let go, and let God" message.

In the fall of 1992 one guy from the Fellowship enrolled in my graduate program at Eastern College. This guy started bible studies and recruiting folks to go down to DC on ocassion. It all had the feel of a fraternity and less of a BIble study. Several guys went, but I always had this feeling of doubt. I asked a couple of professors and faculty about the group including a older woman who had lived in women's house around the time Chuck Colson was released from prison. She told me she was a yellow dog Democrat and she refused to serve breakfast to man who had so violated the Constitution.

They told me it's a strange thing and not to get to mixed up in it. Their theology is very nebulous. I had a classmate from Kenya who knew some fellowship members and he said it's a club for very wealthy Christian people. There a very few Democrats and they are very anti-church, but they project an aura of elite evangelicals. Definitely not for me.

I was told in the early 90s they lead Bible studies on the PGA tour and provide spiritual counsel perhaps through Payne Stewart. I would not be surprised if they reach out to Tiger Woods.**

Keep up the good work.

[Name withheld at request]

*Richard Halverson was indeed chaplain of the U.S. Senate, a beloved figure who blended bonhomie and hard right sophistication in the person of a pastor for the Presbyterian Church of the USA, the more liberal of the two major Presbyterian denominations in the U.S. Halverson believed in a complete transformation of U.S. government, but he took the soft sell approach. “A revolution can be anarchy," he wrote a rival within the Fellowship who favored a more public style, "or it can be tyranny. It can be noisy and rambunctious and spectacular like a Fourth of July fire-works celebration, or it can be quiet and penetrating and thorough like salt, like benevolent subversion." (Emphasis mine; Halverson to Clif Robinson, May 22, 1963, folder 2, box 232, collection 459, Billy Graham Center Archives.)

**Here's an ironic little excerpt from a conversation I had recently with Bob Hunter, the Fellowship associate who's been in the news lately for his involvement with Uganda. Bob and I both recorded our conversation, and Bob was kind enough to share with me the transcript he had professionally prepared. In this excerpt, Bob is referring to a personal crisis that led him to his faith and his long work with the Fellowship:

Bob Hunter: I went through a crisis, and I felt like I -- you know, I felt like I got blessed out of the crisis, kept my family together. And then, you know, maybe a Tiger Woods type of moment. I don’t think I have to give you all the details, but --

Jeff Sharlet:
Now, there’s a story. Tell me that Tiger Woods is over at the Cedars right now. We’d get front page in a hoot.

Bob Hunter:
I wouldn’t be surprised by that, actually. They do tend to do that.

The Family and Lebanon, 2009, unverified

2009-12-29T22:40:00.006-03:00

Here's a fascinating comment posted below. The poster was anonymous -- apparently inadvertently. If he reads this, I hope he'll contact me. What he describes, however, sounds like it could be believable -- while Tom Coburn is a relatively high profile associate, Mike Doyle is less well-known and Tim Coe, one of Doug Coe's sons, is generally known only to Family members.

I started searching for information concerning Doug Coe and his Fellowship Foundation about a year ago. I also obtained your book "the Family". I must say that all the allegations that I came across in my research, including those adduced in the book "the Family" fit like a glove.

I happened to be in the thick of things when Douglas Coe dispatched a delegation to travel to Israel, Lebanon and Jordan in April 2009. The mission to Lebanon was, among other things, to provide support to the so called "charitable youths learning centers" in Jordan and Lebanon. The visit was not official and did not take place under the auspices of the US government.

I find it amazing that Senator Tom Coburn along with Rep. Mike Doyle, Tim Coe and other distinguished Americans, appear unannounced in a remote Sunni village in Northern Lebanon to tour a small youths training center called DCL established on the behest and under the guidance of Douglas Coe. The overt purpose of the youths center is to provide English language training to the youths of the little village. The covert purpose is to introduce the principle of Jesus to the youths and thus expand the circle of influence of "the Family". However, the underlying purpose has been uncovered due to a chain of local events in the village. The two local lieutenants of Doug Coe denied insisted that their purpose is merely charitable. The statuesque in the village is a divided community and a brewing problem with unpredictable consequences.

My question is this: How could elected officials be involved in such counterproductive activities on the world stage? I was present in the little village when the US delegation arrived without prior notice in an unofficial visit to a remote village in north Lebanon. I have a number of photos taken with members of the delegation. Later on I was sick to my stomach when the two local Lebanese "lieutenants" of Douglas Coe falsely stated before the US delegation that the center caters mainly to sunni orphans. It became apparent to me later on that the false statement was made in a pitch to raise funds from wealthy "men of Jesus" dispatched to observe the wonderful work of the foundation all over the world to prepare a new generation able to govern the world in accordance with the principles of Jesus. There were a number of US wealthy visitors to this small village in North Lebanon. The sad thing is that only the two local Lebanese front persons have been prospering! They managed to establish a meager center and recruit a few trainees. US wealthy "men of Jesus" donate hefty amounts for land acquisition and building a center in this Sunni remote Lebanese village. What does Douglas Coe want with this tiny village is truly mind boggling.

We would like to see a more productive relationship with the US people. We would like the US people to reach out to us and help our communities and children to be more productive participants within the international community. We don't want people to come and take advantage of our deprived communities.

The Family and Uganda's "Anti-Homosexuality Bill," part 2.

2009-12-22T22:04:00.003-03:00

Not long ago, I spoke about the Family's connection to Uganda's proposed gay death penalty bill with Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air." To my surprise, the Family man who'd established the Family's relationship with Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni demanded the right to respond. I supported him; if the Family wants to go public, I'm all for it.

I went down to Hunter's house, across the street from the Cedars, and spent an afternoon talking with him. Hunter's part of a small liberal faction within the Family. More importantly, he's part of a faction that would like to move toward greater transparency. Most important, he's opposed to the gay death penalty bill, and was willing to break with the Family custom of secrecy to make that known. Below is a link to the entire transcript of "Fresh Air"'s interview with Hunter. But first, I want to highlight what I think are some important points:

1. Hunter acknowledges the Family's secrecy: "We are little too secretive. There are some things have to be secret, you know.

2. He thinks the secrecy should end and reports that there was recently a meeting about doing so (the verdict, for now, is that the secrecy will continue; but Hunter is clearly going in a different direction):

"GROSS: Why now? What was that meeting the reaction to?

Mr. HUNTER: Well, it was part reaction to Sharlet's book and this history, you know, troubles and the inability for anyone to be able to respond because they just don't have a mechanism for responding. And so the media looks for a Web site, I would too. And there is nothing there and so the media goes, well, it must be a secret organization even though Jeff Sharlet found 273 footnotes in his book. So, it isn't totally secret. And so, it's - I think the secrecy will end.

3. Hunter says I acknowledge that nobody in the Family is involved in the bill. In fact, in the short article I wrote about my conversation with Hunter -- which I cleared with Hunter before publishing -- I noted that the three Ugandans most discussed in relation to the bill, MP David Bahati, Ethics Minister Nsaba Buturo, and President Musveni, are all linked to the Family.

4. I did acknowledge that none of the Americans involved with the Family seems to support the bill. But it's just as important to acknowledge that men such as Senator James Inhofe, Senator Chuck Grassley, Rep. Joe Pitts, and Senator Tom Coburn condemned the bill only after a concerted campaign of public and private pressure. None of these men presented any kind of profile in courage. But I'll give Hunter credit: He's gone public in a much more effective way than his better-known brothers in Christ.

Here's the whole transcript.

The Family and Uganda's "Anti-Homosexuality Bill"

2009-12-21T18:16:00.003-03:00

I spoke to Andrew Harmon of The Advocate, America's oldest LGBT magazine, about the Family and Uganda. Writes Andrew:

With mounting international pressure on Uganda to table the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, even key members of the Family — the secretive evangelical group with extensive links to Capitol Hill that has dominated headlines in recent weeks — has spoken out against the draconian legislation authored by one of its own Ugandan members.

Whether the plea falls on deaf ears is unclear. But passage of the bill could mean death sentences for gays and lesbians in one of Africa’s most homophobic countries — as well as severe restrictions for nongovernmental organizations working to combat HIV/AIDS in the region.

A near-nightly subject of cable news programs led by MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, the Family has cultivated relationships over decades with Ugandan political leaders, ostensibly in order to export its brand of fundamentalism to the developing nation. David Bahati, a Ugandan politician and the author of the bill, is a Family member who organizes the Ugandan equivalent of the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast — the latter being an annual event that’s become a staple of Beltway politics and has been attended by every sitting U.S. president since 1953.

With the bill currently before a Ugandan parliament committee, Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, talks to Advocate.com about why some Family members have spoken out and why President Obama should finally stare down the Christian right by skipping the yearly prayer event that President Dwight D. Eisenhower hoped would never become a tradition for sitting presidents.

You can read the rest of the interview at Advocate.com.

The Family and Taiwan

2009-12-20T12:22:00.006-03:00

Since I've decided to make this blog a sort of record of "outtakes and bonus materials" to The Family (at least for the time being), I'm keeping my eye out not just for documents from my archives but for news from the world that illuminates the function of the Family. In that regard, I'm recommending this post on the Taipei Prayer Breakfast, by the brilliant religion blogger Richard Bartholomew:

...as with “prayer breakfasts” in other countries, the event was useful to all concerned; the political leader gets a boost, while the church leaders get a national pulpit:

The sermon in Taiwanese was delivered by Rev. Hsiao Shiang-hsiu, who reminded the audience through his sermon that God wanted Taiwan to become a country that loved justice, mercy, and peace. He also lauded President Ma’s moral integrity and urged him to continue leading the country in the way of righteousness.

It should come as no surprise that the Republic of China has a strong relationship with the Family, which has always provided a veneer of piety for U.S. allies on the front lines of any struggle -- in this case with China. A 1942 Fellowship pamphlet titled "Finding the Better Way" explained that God worked not democratically but through powerful individuals, noting, "In China, a single indiviual in a post of authority, Chiang Kai-Shek, has done more to Christianize that heathen country than thousands of equally sincere but obscure fellow worshippers." (This pamphlet can be found in the periodicals section of collection 459 at the Billy Graham Center Archives.) The Fellowship worked to build relationships with Taiwanese politicians over the year, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the effort started paying off. In 1965, the Fellowship's German leader, Gus Gedat -- a prominent writer and public speaker who at the beginning of the Nazi regime had tried to "find a synthesis between the new party and Christianity" -- toured Taiwan on a goodwill tour. It evidently worked. A Fellowship briefing (the term "Family didn't come into usage until the 1970s) for members of congress associated with the movement, by then-Rep. Al Quie (R.-Mn.), dated December 12, 1966, notes that Taiwan -- along with Indonesia and Seoul, two other Cold War allies -- has instituted regular Fellowship prayer meetings for Taiwanese politicians. (folder 2, box 362, collection 459, BGCA)

On October 5, 1967, Fellowship leader Senator Frank Carlson (R.-Ks) writes to Taiwanese contacts that Vice Admiral William E. Gentner, Jr., Commander of the U.S. Taiwan Defense Command, has sent a "report" informing the Fellowship that "you [the Chinese] are perhaps ready for a Presidential Prayer Breakfast with your great leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek." Carlson asks that all accommodations be made for the Fellowship's "field associate" for Asia, who will be coming to Taiwan to meet with national leaders. "This service will be deeply appreciated." (Folder 16, Box 365, Collection 459, BGCA).

On October 21, 1968, Fellowship leader Doug Coe requests from Chiang Kai-Shek (along with Ferdinand Marcos, Heilee Selassie, and Napolean Alcerro, an accessory to the Honduran dictatorship) a special congratulatory letter for the new Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, who'll be presiding over Brazil's new Fellowship Prayer Breakfast despite the fact that he's Catholic. Coe makes these requests through "key men." In France, for instance, the key man responsible for organizing support for the dictator is Jean Fernand-Laurent, who had distinguished himself before the war by pressing for anti-Semitic Vichy-style reforms before the Vichy government had even taken over. In Taiwan the key man is businessman John K.C. Liu, president of the United Orient Corporation, a member of the "international planning team." Liu doesn't come through -- Chiang Kai-Shek wants to send a proper letter instead of a cable, and it won't make it in time. (I believe this document is located in folder 1, box 183, collection 459, BGCA.)

A tape recorded message to Fellowship members dated January 4, 1971, by Doug Coe and Fellowship field associate Clif Robinson, tells of meetings with the leadership of South Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Reports Robinson: "We went to meet American Ambassador Walter McConaughy, a model of the way a diplomat of responsible trust can also become a part of this message. A unifying force, a catalyst for God. ... then to the head of the head of the state bank of China, comparable to Federal Reeserve, a man who was so completely open to the concept... with John Liu taking responsibility in a personal way... Secretary General of what we would call the Security Council. Full session middle of the day, the generalissimo and all the others were there. Felt awkward walking up that red carpeted stairway, ushered into next room, Secretary-General gave his gavel over to another man to come out and spend time with us. Said 'I think what we’re doing in this room is far more important than what we’re doing in this other room.'"

Robinson, who believed that the Fellowship should fight a sort of spiritual guerrilla warfare in S.E. Asia, got more excited as he spoke of meetings with Cambodians and Vietnamese. "As men go, and BECOME a part of this LIVING outreach of the unknown, of this living God that we know, God that we know but he’s part and parcel of the great God beyond him, not two gods, not three gods, not 1000, One! We know a little bit, we have seen a little bit of him and what we've seen we want to throw our lives away on behalf of... And so as we do this we don’t do it in the POWER of men. We don’t, don't do it because we have a program that WORKS. We don’t do it because ....Who can we send? Who can we have to go to Manila? Who can we have to go to Saigon? Who can we have to go to Jakarta? We’ve only got this man and this man and this man who knows the score. Isn’t that sort of ridiculous. I believe that somehow GOD has got his men who knows the way. ... This is where we come in... WE must pray into being THIS LIVING MESSAGE. The Word become flesh. Maybe the man doesn’t have to go from the United States to Manila. Maybe he needs to go from China [Taiwan] to Manila. Or from Manila to China. Maybe there’s already somebody right there... just waiting for this RELEASE of spiritual ENERGY that in some mysterious way has been committed to OUR keeping. We can unlock it if we will..." (tape 109, collection 459, BGCA)

The March 1971 briefing for Fellowship-linked members of congress, sent by Senator B. Everett Jordan, a North Carolina segregationist Democrat notes advances in the overseas Prayer Breakfast circuit, with the U.S. military producing 1,400 prayer breakfasts, simultaneous with the main event in Washington and "including all units in South East Asia" -- treated to tapes messages from President Nixon and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, on the "moral and spiritual values which undergird our way of life." These same sentiments, reports Jordan, found foruns in Fellowship prayer breakfasts in South Korea, the Philippines (again, Marcos), and Taiwan, where Vice-President and Premier Dr. CK Yen had begun working with Liu on an event to simultaneously pray for Nixon and Yen. (Folder 2, box 363, collection 459, BGCA)

In late 1980, Doug Coe wrote Liu, then in the National Assembly of the Republic of China, that he would be dispatching Senator Sam Nunn (D.-Ga.) to meet with him. (folder 2, box 411, collection 459, BGCA).

And so the relationship continued. The most recent dispatch from behind-the-scenes came in 2000, when Sara Fritz, an Asian correspondent, reported for the St. Petersburg Times on the Taiwanese connection. I'm pasting in her article, dated April 10, 2000, below in its entirety, a fine example of reporters doing what reporters are supposed to do:

Not even prayer breakfast immune from power game

When voters in Taiwan recently elected a leader of the opposition party as their president, they also may have dealt a blow to a traditional Washington ritual: the annual National Prayer Breakfast.

What, you may ask, do the Taiwanese have to do with the National Prayer Breakfast? The answer is money. In past years, Taiwan's long- ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party has been a major financial backer of the prayer breakfast and many other such events in the United States.

The party contributes to the prayer breakfast as part of an unpublicized, but highly effective effort to maintain Taiwan's influence with Washington politicians. The KMT's strategy was developed after then-President Richard M. Nixon broke off formal diplomatic relations with the tiny island nation in the early 1970s.

In addition to funding the annual prayer breakfast, which is usually attended by the president and hundreds of members of Congress, the Kuomintang also has funded numerous travel junkets for politicians in Taipei and celebrity-political events, such as the annual Danny Thompson Memorial Golf Tournament in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the annual festival of the Very Special Arts organization founded by Jean Kennedy Smith.

For their donations, Taiwanese officials get to participate in these functions, where they can rub elbows with influential U.S. officials who are not easily accessible to a country that does not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States.

After the annual prayer breakfast earlier this year, for example, Hsu Shui-teh, president of the Examination Yuan in Taipei, boasted to reporters that the event allowed him to have a private chat with President Clinton.

These strategic acts of charity by the Taiwanese have been so successful, in fact, that rival Chinese leaders in Beijing have in recent years tried to use a similar strategy to develop friendships with influential people in Washington. Their copy-cat strategy is surprising when you consider that Beijing enjoys full diplomatic relations with the United States.

Most of the people who attend the prayer breakfast apparently don't know about the Taiwanese connection, which I first learned about several years ago while interviewing KMT leaders on an assignment in Taipei.

I was told the Taiwanese ruling party's contribution in 1997 was $10,000. At that time, prayer breakfast organizers refused to confirm it, saying only that prayer breakfast financial records are not available to the public.

When I began to inquire about these matters again recently, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as a volunteer press spokesman for this year's prayer breakfast in February. He said he did not know how the prayer breakfast was funded, but he doubted it had received Taiwanese support.

"I can't imagine a foreign political party making a contribution to the National Prayer Breakfast," he said. He promised to check into the matter and get back to me. I never heard from him again.

Nevertheless, Taiwanese support for the prayer breakfast and other charitable activities could come to a screeching halt when President- elect Chen Shui-bian takes office May 20. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) does not have the vast financial resources of the KMT, which is said to control bank accounts containing billions of dollars.

"We are not as rich as the KMT; KMT is the richest party in the world," conceded I-Chung Lai, director of the DPP's office in Washington.

Lai said that while DPP leaders recognize that the KMT's generosity to institutions and causes in the United States has been good for promoting Taiwan's interests, some things may have to be curtailed. He said his party would review all such contributions as part of the transition of power from KMT to DPP.

"We have to reassess how effective and appropriate they are," Lai said.

Of course, winning has been good for the DPP treasury. Many Taiwanese business executives who once supported the KMT have begun making contributions to the DPP, according to Lai. Contributing to the winner is a political tradition in every country - East and West.

My purpose in writing about this matter is not to lament the potentially precarious funding of next year's National Prayer Breakfast, or any of the other causes that receive Taiwanese support. In fact, I assume that if the Taiwanese withdraw their money, other groups will fill the void.

I am interested in the funding of the National Prayer Breakfast primarily because I think it reveals the double-edged nature of virtually everything that happens in the nation's capital. Nothing that goes on here - not even something as worthy and other-worldly as a prayer breakfast - is completely divorced from the influence game.

"Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement," LA Times, 1974

2009-12-19T15:50:00.003-03:00

Defenders of conventional wisdom occasionally respond to The Family by asking, "If this group has so many powerful friends, how come we pundits have never heard of it before?" Perhaps because you weren't paying attention. I'd love to say that I'm the first person to break this story, but I'm not. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times ran a long front page story by Lisa Getter linking the Family to Central American death squads, outing Family associates such as Rep. Bart Stupak, Senator Jim DeMint, and Senator Sam Brownback, and revealing the group's secrecy policy. Not long after that, AP journalist Lara Jakes Jordan reported on the Family's C Street House. Reach back further into the press morgue -- easy enough to do now with Proquest -- and we find coverage of the Family and its secretive ways in Time, the Washington Post, and even Playboy, which in the early 1970s published an exhaustive investigative report focusing on the group's policy of making off-the-books loans to congressmen.

And then, every now and then, there was a positive story, such as this January 1974 column for the L.A. Times Syndicate by Nick Thimmesch. What's remarkable about this piece is that's positive not despite the Family's lack of transparency but because of it.

Below are some excerpts, followed by a few other documents for context. Emphases are mine. The original draft of this article is available in folder 8, box 102, collection 275 -- the papers of Watergate felon and Christian Right leader Charles W. "Chuck" Colson -- in the Billy Graham Center Archives.

Politicians and the Underground Prayer Movement

by Nick Thimmesch

Washington – This city is often cynical, and it can be vicious and merciless, too. But there is an “underground” movement here, spurred by Watergate, which might surprise some of our jaded folks when it shows results in the future. It is the growing inclination among troubled souls here to find serenity and strength through belief in God.

Now this kind of statement can cause even more cynicism, and loud guffawing as well. I know. Particularly when the story broke that Charles W. Colson, the White House’s one-time tough guy and wheeler-dealer, said that “I have found in my own life the relationship with Christ.” Colson might have found God, but it will be a long time before many here will believe it.

It is more believable to learn that two other Watergate figures, Egil (Bud) Krogh, indicted for the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and James McCord, convicted in the Watergate burglary, have both gone through profound spiritual experiences.

Anyway, Colson, Krogh and McCord now regularly counsel and pray with other so-called “big” men in this town who have also gone through trials of the spirit. These are usually highly successful political, government and executive figures who woke up one day in middle age to discover their lives were empty and that, in reality, they had earned little or no respect from their associates, their wives and families.

They meet in each other’s homes, they meet at prayer breakfasts, they converse on the phone. They are a brotherhood in belief; are slow to accept quick “believers”; are secretive and guarded in discussing their experiences or activities. Unlike most public figures here, they genuinely avoid publicity. In fact, they shun it.

It appears Colson’s story broke by accident. Long troubled over the way his life had gone, and the way he had become involved in high-powered dealings here, Colson sounded out a friend who was deep into the prayer movement [According to Colson's memoir, Born Again, it was actually Family man and CEO of defense contractor Raytheon who sounded Colson out.] Soon, Colson was invited into the home of a prominent congressman and met others there, including Sen. Harold Hughes of Iowa, the anti-war liberal, whose story was made public many years ago…

… The men who go through spiritual ordeals often meet at prayer breakfasts, and wish there wouldn’t be so much publicity about the National Prayer Breakfast, which features the President of the United States, foreign dignitaries and other celebrities. It looks like affected holiness under “the big tent.”

“I don’t spend more than five hours’ times in preparing for it,” says Doug Coe of the Fellowship Foundation of Washington, who quietly helps groups form their own prayer breakfast groups.

“It is only one-tenth of one per cent of the iceberg and doesn’t give a true picture of what is going on.”…

Colson, to whom I devote much of a chapter in The Family, went on to serve less than a year for his Watergate felony, at which point he was paroled into the Family's care, which wrote the warden that he was needed for religious work. Senator Harold Hughes was waiting for him. It was a friendship that startled many, since on most issues Hughes was liberal. He was also a sentimental man, mostly oblivious to the details of allegations against his Family friends -- the Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos was another subject of Hughes' spiritual and political patronage -- and a deeply religious one for whom divine law, as he understood it, trumped the law of the land. Another column by Thimmesch, "Why Hughes Shocked Liberals" (by breaking with Democrats and many Republicans to reject a sense of the Senate motion against more Watergate pardons), includes this nugget, which can be found in folder 7, box 102, collection 275 of the Billy Graham Center Archives:

Hughes voted “nay” because he feels that the Senate has no business even implying to any President that he doesn’t have, “in his own wisdom and conscience, the final decision-making process rightfully guaranteed to him by the Constitution, and actually going back in history coming from divine inspiration, or granting mercy to those he may deem proper to receive that mercy.” Amen.

The Family, Joe Pitts, and Abortion

2009-12-09T00:11:00.003-03:00

This fall, anti-abortion activists cheered for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment -- or, the Pitts-Stupak Amendment, as Rep. Joe Pitts' office called it. The amendment nearly derailed health reform and threatened to roll back abortion rights. In Salon, on NPR's "Fresh Air," MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," and in other venues I reported on the Family's relationship to the amendment. Representative Bart Stupak has been enjoying subsidized rent at the Family's C Street House since at least 2002. Rep. Pitts' relationship goes back much further, to the late 1970s. Pitts didn't respond, but Stupak has been vocal in denying any connection between the Family, which he characterizes as apolitical, and anti-abortion activism.

The following letter, from Family organizer Fred Heyn to Pitts -- then a state legislator and national anti-abortion activist -- and an associate, Glenn Cunningham, is just one of the many documents contained within the Family's archives that prove Rep. Stupak wrong. It can be found in folder 8, box 386, collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archive. It represents the early days of Pitts' anti-abortion activism through the Family.

September 2, 1980

Dear Joe and Glen,

The dinner at the Cedars [The Family's $4 million Arlington mansion] recently with you and your invited guests was a great pleasure. We appreciate the way in which you are working together and, although as a fellowship we do not officially become involved in issues, we're grateful when men like yourselves take the leadership on a national issue as important as the one on which you're working. We pray for you and God's leadership in the days ahead as you work on it.

Also, Doug Coe, Stu and I have visited and we are agreed to help with this work as much as we're able.

Thanks again for being here and for including us...

Yours Sincerely,
Fred Heyn

Jeff Sharlet, The Family, 2008

2009-07-10T20:18:00.000-04:00

"Just when we thought the Christian right was crumbling, Jeff Sharlet delivers a rude shock: One of its most powerful and cult-like core groups, the Family, has been thriving. Sharlet's book is one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read -- just don't read it alone at night!"
--Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, and Dancing in the Streets

From the bookjacket:

They are the Family—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen, congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao, the Family's leader declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

Order yours now.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE FAMILY:

"Of all the important studies of the American right, The Family is undoubtedly the most eloquent. It is also quite possibly the most terrifying. This story of a secretive and unmerciful church of 'key men' goes way beyond Jesus Christ, CEO—it's Jesus Christ, lobbyist; Jesus Christ, strikebreaker; and maybe even Jesus Christ, fuehrer."
--Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?

"Forget what you think you know about the Christian Right; Jeff Sharlet has uncovered a frightening strain of hidden fundamentalism that forces us to revise our understanding of religion and politics in modern America. A brilliant marriage of investigative journalism and history, an unsettling story of how this small but powerful group shaped the faith of the nation in the 20th century and drives the politics of empire in the 21st. Anyone interested in circles of power will love this book."
--Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

"Jeff Sharlet has an incredibly rare double talent: the instincts of an investigative reporter coupled with the soul of a historian. He has managed to infiltrate the most influential and secretive fundamentalist network in America, and ground his reporting in the most astute and original explanation of fundamentalism I've ever read."
--Hanna Rosin, former religion reporter for the Washington Post and author of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save the Nation

"A gripping, utterly original narrative about an influential evangelical elite that few Americans even know exists. Jeff Sharlet's fine reporting unveils a group whose history stretches from the corporate foes of the New Deal to the congressional lawmakers who gather each year at the National Prayer Breakfast. The Christian Right will never look the same again."
--Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan

"The organization of influence these men constitute may remind readers of a Rotary Club—but it is a Rotary Club equipped with nuclear weapons. When the Family's members say 'Let us pray,' they are not just making a suggestion."
--Michael Lesy, author of Wisconsin Death Trip

“Un-American theocrats can only fool patriotic American democrats when there aren’t critics like Jeff Sharlet around -- careful scholars and soulful writers who understand both the majesty of faith and the evil of its abuses. A remarkable accomplishment in the annals of writing about religion.”
--Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

"Jeff Sharlet is one of the very best writers covering the politics of religion. Brilliantly reported and filled with wonderful anecdotes, The Family tells the story of an influential group that you haven't previously heard of, and need to know about."
--Ken Silverstein, Washington editor of Harper's and author of The Radioactive Boy Scout

“I was once an insider’s insider within fundamentalism. Unequivocally: Sharlet knows what he’s talking about. He writes: ‘Our refusal to recognize the theocratic strand running throughout American history is as self-deceiving as fundamentalism’s insistence that the United States was created a Christian nation.’ Those who want to be un-deceived (and wildly entertained) must read this disturbing tour de force.”
--Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy For God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back

“The Family offers the reader an astounding entrée to a fascinating Christian network unknown to most Americans. Jeff Sharlet has managed to peel back the curtain and reveal an elusive organization that wields an unsettling amount influence over our country’s lawmakers as well as business and political leaders worldwide. The Family is a must-read for any American who wants to know who is actually pulling the strings at the highest levels of power.”
--Heidi Ewing, co-director of Jesus Camp

“Jeff Sharlet provides a fascinating account of how part of American Christianity has gone off on a dangerous tangent. It should worry everyone -- maybe especially those of us who understand the Gospels to be a call to help the powerless, not prop up the powerful. In the last few years evangelicals have begun to reconsider their automatic support for the status quo; The Family will help accelerate that important renewal.”
--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben Reader

"The author of that Harper's piece is the fearless and fantastically talented Jeff Sharlet, who just came out with a book about [the Family]. I can't recommend the piece or the book strongly enough."
--Noam Scheiber, The New Republic