I sometimes confuse apocrypha with apocalypse, apocalyptical with apocryphal.  Sure, they look and sound the same, but I think something in me feels like they mean the same, too.  The Apocrypha and the Apocalypse both seem out of the New Testament mainstream and seem vaguely threatening to that mainstream.  The Apocrypha, it might be said, is a bunch of books that could be God’s Word that is often printed with God’s Word.  Who was behind this, and what was he trying to do to my concept of God’s Word?  It's as insidious as the beasts with their lying wonders.

In my Evangelical mind, the New Testament seems sandwiched in time between true-sounding stuff that might be false, and false-sounding stuff that must somehow be true.

Hanukkah, of course, is a minor Jewish holiday instituted (probably) in the apocryphal Book of 1 Maccabees.  Actually, the Catholics and Orthodox include 1 Maccabees in their canon, but the Jews and Protestants don’t.  The Jews, of course, don’t have much use for sola scriptura, so everyone’s on board with Hanukkah one way or another but us Protestants.

I didn’t celebrate Christmas for years, either, not finding any evidence for that holiday in Scripture.  (Under this reasoning, Hanukkah has a greater claim to legitimacy than Christmas since Hanukkah at least makes it into the New Testament: we catch Jesus celebrating it in the Gospel of John.)  Now I celebrate both holidays.  While this inclusive approach may or may not be commendable, it’s been fun.

1 Maccabees feels like the Bible to me.  Its central character reminds me of Nehemiah, a defiant leader who bucks the odds with a lot of success. As soon as his dad dies and leaves the Jewish resistance movement in his hands, Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee rallies many of his fellow Israelis in their guerrilla warfare campaign against one of Alexander the Great’s political descendents, his vast army, and the Jewish “renegades” who have gone over to the dark side.

1 Maccabees also reminds me of the Book of Esther.   Both books have the Jews’ apocalyptic struggle against annihilation by their conquerors as their themes, and neither book makes any direct reference to God.

The story of Hanukkah also reminds me of my two children.  Judah, who had a difficult time going along with what everyone else was doing, could be Warren's patron saint.   Once when Warren was three, Victoria was getting him ready for Sunday school.  He raised a lament, apropos of nothing: “But I don’t want to obey my teachers!”

Two years later, Warren was skating counter-clockwise while the other three hundred children on the ice rink were skating clockwise.  Victoria stopped him and told him that he needed to skate “like everybody else.”

Warren stared incredulously.  “Why do I need to do that?”

(Victoria treasured up these sayings in her heart, wondering what role he might play in the latter days.)

For me, Bethany comes into the Hanukkah story once the Jews recapture Jerusalem.  The Jews clean up, rebuild, and rededicate the temple.  Bethany is very dedicated to God and finds a lot of meaning in worship.  The Bible’s comparison of our bodies with the temple of God resonates strongly with her.

Bethany especially likes the story about the miracle of lights.  When she was little, she’d watch the candles as we’d read in the storybook about how the one-day supply of oil lasted the eight days it takes to celebrate Hanukkah.

The only problem is, the miracle of lights never makes it into 1 Maccabees.  Its writer, always reticent about more than inferring divine intervention, leaves the miracle of lights story to be told in the Talmud.  My Protestant mind scoffs: the miracle of lights is too apocryphal for the Apocrypha!  But the story sounds like the God of the Bible, and watching Bethany relate to it over the years, I’ve become a believer, too.  It’s hard to arrive at the whole truth according only to Protestant lights.

I’ve included two photographs.  The first is of Bethany at age four, intent on the menorah she had made out of clay.  The second is of Warren, taken tonight, lighting the shamash out of order with a blowtorch.

Happy Hanukkah.  Here’s to truth and light.

Somehow I end up with Fords, and somehow they all let me down.  Fords follow cars I like (and even name): my Ford Pinto wagon followed my VW Squareback (tan; hence, “the Pig”), my Ford Mustang followed my Toyota Corona (dubbed “the Sewing Machine,” due to its engine, by my father), and my current Mercury Sable wagon followed my Subaru Impreza (“the Zipmobile”).  With the exception of the Subaru, the three foreign cars were dreams I scraped up money for and bought near the end of their lives.  The Subaru was the only new car I’ve ever bought, but I totaled it on an icy overpass a few years back.

After the death of each dream car, my parents graciously step in with a bailout plan, and one of the plan’s conditions is always a Ford.

This cycle has gone on uninterrupted since my sister and I bought the Pig back in 1977.

My Fords die relatively young, and my Sable, after about 65,000 miles, has been in the shop for about a month.  The repair guy’s shop has a great reputation, and he has always treated me well.  He hasn’t figured out what’s wrong with the Sable’s electrical system.  He recognizes, though, that his customer isn’t hot to get his car back, so my car hasn’t gotten much attention from him over the past few days.

I’m at the point in my car cycle where I’d scrape together some cash and buy another small, foreign, dream car.  But this time I have no cash, and I no longer want a car.

Cars don’t allure me anymore.  I like the idea of being green, but it’s more than that.  Even electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars don’t move me, perhaps because I’ve been reading about these cars for decades and have felt like the auto industry and Congress misled me about their willingness to make it happen.  But the allure is gone mainly because cars are such bothers.

My life, already pedestrian in my students’ view, is becoming more pedestrian in the more pedestrian sense of the word.  I ride my bike or walk to school and to the public library.  Our neighborhood’s one-month-old grocery store is a seven-minute walk from our house.  Last month, I quit the gym I’ve been a member of for the past ten years in favor of one that will open in two weeks around the corner from the grocery store.

Victoria’s Sienna would make us a one-car family, and I wouldn’t mind if I never drove a car again.  We live just off the W&OD bike trail; maybe I’ll scrape up enough money over the next couple of years for a good used road bike to replace my current, yard-sale clunker.  Thanks, folks, but no more automobile bailouts.

Four Anglican Communion bloggers have lit my Advent candles.  Simon Kershaw at Thinking Anglicans (I dislike the name's implication) homilizes the life of Nicholas Ferrar in preparation for Holy Communion to be celebrated at his grave in Little Gidding:

Nicholas Ferrar and his family, living a quiet and godly life at Little Gidding, did not forget the poor and needy. They welcomed into their household a number of poor widows, they provided alms and education for many, and Ferrar, utilizing his training in medicine, ran a dispensary for the neighbourhood.

Fr. Scott, who pointed me to that post, picks up on its Four Quartets overtones at Fr. Scott & Co. Ask Some New Questions.  Indeed, Fr. Scott chose to link not to the post but to theThinking Anglicans site itself, where the hopeful, big-themed Nicholas Ferrar post is surrounded by posts filled with links to dire-sounding news reports concerning the recent American Episcopal Church rift.

Like Four Quartets, Beth’s words often feel like music to me, and here she is at Cassandra Pages, sweating out and enjoying a new challenge in preparation for the Advent Lessons and Carols program at her cathedral today:

We've just learned an exciting new piece, a setting of the poem "Earthquake" by Thomas Merton, composed for the choir by the director and organist, Patrick Wedd. It's unlike anything I've ever sung, with twenty bells rung in chords by choir members and free-form chanting of the text in some places, where each of us starts and ends a phrase individually before the choir comes together again on a following phrase.

Finally, Paula of Paula’s House of Toast posted “Advent,” a new poem with four stanzas accompanied by four striking photographs, all of which reminds me also of Four Quartets.  Here’s the first stanza:

There is no lack of lack. 
The wind, restless and laden, sinks, 
erases what might lead us back to where
the leaves unbleach, unmould
to ancient, ever-virgin green
or so we think.
There is no way but what's beneath the feet.

By the way, you can catch Beth’s choir’s performance today at Radio Ville-Marie (click “Nous ecouter en direct” in the upper-right portion of the window).  When?  4 P.M., of course (EST).

Each year my high priestess, not without blood, phones to recite the story of my birth.  We danced at the Chamberlin against a night of few stars, she says, colonnade women and poplin men in brick-soled bucks on bluegrass. Heat lightning tugged at tankers in a dark offing.

We were at a point; you’ve seen the Chamberlin from a skipjack, rising and falling against sky and Hampton Roads, respectively; well, we rose and fell in the barest swell, I’m sure, the Navy Band’s brass and dress whites narrowly ruffled in black water. It was hot, a solstice hot, not unrelenting but apogeic; I think a June night is an anomaly and a celebration, brief as it is, and a summer night young enough to admit that summer hasn’t come, and 1957, too, the boom year of baby boom babies, the height of something you were born to fall from, and the top of a clock; I wanted you born by midnight.  I didn’t want you born on the thirteenth.

To the side, in a green dress, your grandmother, just five years older than you are today, her hair a black and silver you never knew, talked with her friends. (I have never thought of her with either friends or dark hair, I think to myself, but later I realize that I had thought last year when Mom had called how I had never thought of her that way; this year, though – I think for the first time – I think: nor have I ever thought of her in a cotton dress.)

Between numbers, after months of expansion, the contractions, the clock hands climbing and not falling, the heat a haze and not unrelenting, a presence and a midwife, really, and your father, excusing himself from his fellows, took me by an elbow, if you can picture that.  His long, black Studebaker bent around Newport News Point to 50th Street and the hospital, ablaze above the James River and its own silent ships.  The doctor and I worked to have you born today; your father, outside, rocked on his heels.  11:43.  There you were, and she hangs up again.

I look out my window, appeased.  I cradle the phone.  I can see the same moon that floated below those ruffled colonnades.  But I reflect that the hospital is now a parking lot, and my June nights have become like asphalt, too, expanded and contracted by a hundred solstices, buckled like lips turned upwards for their mother’s kiss.

November and poetry.  I named my only stuffed animal November; I don't know why.  I became aware of him when his eyes were scratched out and his rabbit ears were torn from their metal wires.  I remember accepting on some level that I had done this before I was I, before I remembered anything, and I remember feeling that I would never love November as much as when I didn’t know I loved him and didn’t know anything the way I did then, feeling the way I felt then and trying to see myself scratching out his eyes in love.

The memory of writing poetry is as dark as when I left school tonight just past six, gusty and cold as January night.  I walked past the bike rack I had given up a month ago, and I got in my Sable wagon.  Something electrical happened to it yesterday.  The radio and clock don’t work, half the dash lights are out, and the heat and defroster are frozen on, full blast.  I was warm by the time I stopped at the strip mall to pick up the pizza and subs.  I won’t need to get any of it fixed for a while, though I miss the radio.  I must have hit the knob six times during the five-minute drive home.

November we write poetry, mostly in muck we shape later.  We aim to make a mess, I say.  Don’t worry about spelling, poetic forms, rules of any kind.  Some days it’s work, but some days you’re unconscious.  I remember a college day playing ball in Blow Gym, and shot after shot falls; I steal the ball and race for a lay-up, three guys behind me, but I stop and do this jumper at the end, the three guys flying by me and hitting the wall.  I don’t remember it going in, but I remember knowing it goes in and being happy for the knowing and not seeing, for the forgetting that makes memory.  One guy, a real gym rat, pats me, says, “It’s a good thing you pulled up ‘cuz we were coming down on you.” That day made the other days all right.

Moving from desk to desk this week, I pushed through a hundred and twenty writer sketchbooks.  I promised not to read them but only to count the pages and finger the dog-ears.  Show me shop floors strewn with shavings and sawdust.  Brown leaves blown back through black afternoons.

Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
-- Rolf to Liesl in The Sound of Music

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Merton wondered whether he and Fundamentalist Christians served the same God.  I wonder similarly if YourBO is MyBO.  Unless you’re frank, I may not learn how MyBO offends you.

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”  What do you make of that?

If you break open Obama’s memoir and take a gob of pages in each hand, bearing down somewhat with your thumbs on each open page as you might to read it, the book applauds. My daughter thought so, too.  Now, mine’s a used paperback; my mother read it at home this past summer in Tidewater where pages can get a little soggy.  Anyway, it’s the loudest book I’ve ever held.  And I think Isaiah’s prophecy that “all the trees of the field will clap their hands” has come to pass in my day, in MyBO.

This week, even the hazard of a cabinet appointment marginalized MyBO.

I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.  “I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.”

Christians argue most over Genesis and Revelation.  We are half-blind in different eyes, each the other's spitting image.  We see trees as men, walking.  But MyBO sees the past and future rooted in each clattering leaf.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests.  I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power – that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.  It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky.  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce.  They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another – the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

That’s from pages 436 and 437 of Dreams from My Father.  Obama was in Kenya then, crying over his father’s grave.  There was no plaque on it, nothing in writing.  When he returned years later with a wife and a Harvard law degree, he found a plaque.

The GOP wrote Bill Ayers all over Obama’s book.  Turns out it was just their copy.  So they offered Pilate $10,000 to revise it, but they panicked when they read the blank proofs.  TheirBO came out last week as OurGOP and sold millions of copies.  What I have written I have written.

Thomas Merton and the baobab tree.  Neither MyBO nor I can cite sources.

We are dogs, rooting in crotches.  The past is present in a scent, the future’s brazen innocence.  MyBO is me; YourBO is you.

And Liesl’s dreamy echo: “To write on.”  There’s something indiscriminate about an empty page.

Yesterday was pouring rain.  We came, maybe five minutes apart, walking past the Obama yard sign and the For Lease sign into a suburban professional park suite smelling of fresh paint, thin and white.

By the time the fifth one of us had filed in, we pretty much looked like Ashburn: three women, two men, a black, four whites, a teacher, a government contractor, my Jewish buddy who lives behind me, and two ex-lawyers.  Five.  Different ages, too, from maybe twenty-five to sixty.  The lobby didn’t feel giddy or self-congratulating, as I had feared, though it felt like a roomful of stories untold by people who liked to tell them.

The campaign guy, a quiet kid with thinning blond hair, probably in his early thirties, mentioned the rain and suggested that we canvass by phone, and one of us, a young black woman, acquiesced.  The rest of us said no, we weren’t there for no phone.

The campaign guy looked at us and scratched the back of his neck.  “Yeah.  Okay,” he said, walking to another room with a sheaf of paper.

None of us told our stories, but I knew that some of them would come out canvassing from under umbrellas.  Debbie and I decided to go as a pair until we got comfortable enough going solo so we could cover more ground.

That’s what the [community organization] leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried with them some central explanation of themselves.  Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them.  Sacred stories.  (Dreams from My Father 190)

My father ran for office once – an unsuccessful run for the Newport News City Counsel.  I remember looking at the yellowed copy of the Daily Press that had come out sometime during the year of my birth.  My father, the headline read, “Throws His Hat in Ring.”  It gave me some clues about what the Old Man did when he left home in his white Lincoln convertible every day: a top hat, maybe a circus, his smiling face in the morning paper.

My parents and I used to canvass for Democrats in a white and increasingly Republican end of town.  The blacks lived down in East End, across the tracks from the shipyard, the municipal buildings, and what little else was left of Newport News’s downtown by the time I was a kid.

I remember at about ten years of age folding and unfolding a simple card a friend of my father’s had prepared.  Unfolded: “Vote Alan Diamonstein.”  Folded: “Vote Alan in.”  We handed our cards out to unfailingly polite neighbors who seldom voted for our candidates.  Sometimes our candidates would win, anyway, aided by the bloc vote from East End.

I haven’t canvassed since, until yesterday.

Our last house together had a front porch, so we each had two hands free.  Debbie, a cheery, slightly heavy woman who had been airing out the Obama cards she had dropped in the rain, introduced us to him.

The man, gray bearded and brusque, seemed a lot older than thirty-three, the age the campaign manifest had assigned to him from the registrar’s office.  “Obama.  Obama,” he assured us.  He had voted for Bush the last election but wanted his vote back.

“I’ve voted for a Republican in every presidential election since 1980, until now,” I confided to him.

Debbie looked up at me.  As we walked down the driveway, she said, “You’re good at this.”

“Thanks!” I said.  “You’re good, too.  We’re real, you know that?”

My father, a raconteur, has told me a certain story only twice.  At a vestry meeting at our midtown Episcopal church during the Fifties, he had made a short, impassioned plea in favor of permitting black people to worship there.

“Jenkins raises his voice and says, ‘You’re a nigger lover,’” my father told me.   Jenkins was a generation older than my father. “It was awful.

“A week later, Jenkins pulls me aside. ‘I’m sorry, Warren,’ he says.  ‘I shouldn’t have called you that.’”  My father’s eyes get a little wet like they do at the end of some stories.

Only recently have I understood that the denouement was the most important part of that story, that it didn’t tie up a loose end so much as it reflected a reversal of fortune.  It has been hard for me to understand Jenkins’s generation.

Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me.  “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say.  Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.”  Or “The Kalenjins – well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”

Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways.  “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say.  “We’re all part of one tribe.  The black tribe.  The human tribe.  Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”

And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans were all crazy anyway.  You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”

And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry.  He also had such ideas about people.”

Meaning he, too was naïve; he, too, liked to argue with history.  Look what happened to him  . . . (Dreams from My Father 348)

Debbie and I were on opposite sides of another suburban street with expensive homes.   The rain had stopped, but I still carried my umbrella, now at my side.  My canvassing manifest indicated that my next house was home to a young, first-time voter, but her mother, a black woman peering through an eight-inch opening in the doorway, told me that her daughter was away at college.

I introduced myself as an Obama volunteer who lived just behind the high school.   (“Don’t let them think you’re from Maryland or something,” the campaign guy had told us.  “I mean, I’m from Illinois, and we get a lot of volunteers from Maryland.  But if you’re from around here . . .” He finished his thought with a shrug.)

“Have you decided whom you’ll be supporting for president – Barack Obama or John McCain?” I asked her.

“Who do you think I’m supporting?” she asked.  The doorway stayed eight inches wide.

I thought about my canvassing of white neighborhoods in Newport News with my parents forty years ago, and about the support we always assumed would come from an area of town I learned to be afraid to visit.

I won’t take the bait, I thought.  I wanted her to feel empowered, to feel the irony I was savoring at that moment.  A white man trying to get a black woman to vote for a black man for president.  Here in Virginia, where I grew up.

“Well, I don’t know!” I said.  “Are you for Obama or McCain?”  I smiled, probably somewhat coyly.

She didn’t answer.  She turned her head and pursed her lips.  The opening held steady at eight inches.  I glanced down looking for a chain lock, but there wasn’t one.

Finally, I said, “I assume you’re for Obama.  Are you planning to vote?”  And I went through the rest of my spiel.

She was ambivalent about volunteering for the campaign, but she confirmed the phone number the campaign had gotten from the registrar’s office.  I told her that she might get a phone call from my campaign guy asking her if she was ready to help out somehow, maybe with canvassing or phone calls, at least with some paperwork.

She accepted my offer of two absentee ballot forms.

She closed the door, and the rain picked up. I checked off a box or two on the manifest.  I don’t think she’ll volunteer.

WHEREAS, we have fought the Culture Wars for almost three decades, and

WHEREAS, the Culture Wars being typical of an unraveling phase of a generational cycle, the said phase and cycle described by leading generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997), an unraveling phase (a phase also called a “turning”) in which, according to Strauss and Howe, “people have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral reform, and lifestyle experimentation. Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, during an unraveling (a.k.a., a third turning), such as the one that most of us have spent the majority of our lives in, “as moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means. Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred. Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, the unraveling itself shows signs of unraveling, beginning with the spiritual maturation of significant segments the politically influential Evangelical Movement, a growth which has seen these segments champion causes, such as poverty and health care, that are more closely identified with the Democratic Party, which growth is a signal that the Culture Wars are ending, and

WHEREAS, the unraveling appears to be unraveling faster at the presidential level, since the divisive, sixteen-year era of Boomer presidencies is drawing to a close and since no generation since Abraham Lincoln has returned to the White House after leaving it (Generations 459 - 60), Boomers being an insufferable “prophet” generation (of which I hereby admit to being a member) at the front lines of both sides of the Culture Wars, one president on either side of that war and elected in large part to advance the cause of his side in that war; drawing to a close, I say, since, at least arguably, none of the four national, major-party candidates in this election are Boomers, each ticket containing oneSilent Generation member (McCain and Biden) and one Gen-Xer (Obama and Palin), “arguably” since one might argue with Strauss and Howe’s formulation of the Gen-X Generation as beginning in 1961 instead of 1964, as is more traditional, though Strauss and Howe’s formulation seems to be particularly apt for Obama, born in 1961 and showing little inclination to re-fight the Culture Wars, himself a poster child for Gen-X cool, pragmatism, and rough upbringing, and

WHEREAS, the said unraveling may be unraveling faster since this presidential election may be the first in American history in which all four major-party candidates are from what generational theorists call recessive generations, the civically dynamic Hero Generation (e.g., the G.I. Generation) and the spiritually dynamic Prophet Generation (e.g., the Boomers again) being the most influential and the Adaptive Generation (a.k.a., the Artist Generation and e.g., the Silent generation) and the Nomad Generation (e.g., Gen Xers) sandwiched between those dominant generations to help correct their excesses, the Adaptive Generation as ameliorators (think how McCain, long an inclusive politician, has adapted himself (as people in Adaptive Generations will do to the younger Prophet generation’s ways) to the divisive Boomer Culture Wars during this campaign as, in his view, I guess, a necessary and justified means to a good end) and the Nomad Generation as pragmatists (Obama stating frequently, for instance, that his foreign policy would be free of ideology), and

WHEREAS, parenthetically, this anti-Boomer, recessive correction was confirmed again to me as late as this morning in a video email from David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager who, parenthetically, seems to have adopted Obama’s clipped cadence and facial mannerisms when speaking, and who, in announcing that the Obama campaign had added over 632,000 donors in September, pointed out that “the two groups who have given us the most contributions are retirees and students,” who, of course, are Silents and Millennials – not Boomers – all (and by “all,” I mean the stuff in this paragraph and in the non-parenthetical paragraph above it) of which may point to a major corrective ahead of, and a national and unconscious preparation of sorts for,

WHEREAS, a fourth turning, a crisis turning (think turning like the hands of a clock, the fourth turning being sort of a sweep of the hour hand from 9 P.M. to midnight when we ourselves turn, if perhaps not into pumpkins, then at least into something we’re not at all familiar with except from history) much like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II era fourth turnings before it, that will threaten our national existence is coming, a military, ecological, economic, social, and/or terroristic crisis that most of us have feared in one form or another during this long unraveling (as people do during all unravelings, often calling themselves prophets in so doing), especially towards its end, a turning which I used to feel we could not survive because of our collective moral and civic depravity compared with the civic spirit evinced by that generation that came together to suffer the Great Depression and fight World War II, say, not knowing what it would feel like to live in a fourth turning when, say, 100,000 young people chanted in Boston Commons in 1933, “I promise as a good American to do my part.  I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times,” (Fourth Turning 292), or even so much as having the capacity of comprehending the possibility of such an event, until perhaps recently, and

WHEREAS, a fourth turning, I say, in which “Public order strengthens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result” (Howe), and not understanding that the100,000 people who turned out to see Obama yesterday afternoon and the 75,000 who came to see him last night, both crowds ironically gathering in the Show Me State, a nickname perfectly suited for the cynical third turning we are turning from, the unraveling long unraveling, were drawn by a new sense of something like civic pride, the first stirrings, I say, of our unconscious preparation for a national crisis, and gathered certainly not to see a unraveling-era Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears but gathered instead as a kind of collective repudiation of our generational cycle’s version of the divisive unraveling-era “politics as usual,” and

WHEREAS, the Boomers are too much the creatures of the divisive, self-centered, cynical third turning to lead a nation, or to even yet prepare a nation (the fourth turning itself not being scheduled to come until sometime between 2010 and 2025 according to Strauss and Howe in 1991 (Generations 381 – 83)) – though the Boomers as they age may yet have an important role – for a fourth turning, Strauss and Howe knowing enough about Boomers to warn us in 1991 that, should the crisis come during our decade, “the national cycle suggests that the risk of cataclysm would be very high.  During the 2000—2009 decade, Boomers would be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and institutional power.  From a lifecycle perspective, they will be exactly where the Transcendentalists [the Civil War cycle’s Prophet generation] were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper’s Ferry.  [The Civil War Fourth Turning was not an unqualified success in Strauss and Howe’s books, unlike the World War II Fourth Turning.]  Boomers can best serve civilization by restraining themselves (or letting themselves be restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual energy would find expression not in midlife leadership, but in elder stewardship” (Generations 382), and

WHEREAS, the presidential candidate himself being the message of both the Republican and Democratic parties for the first time in my life anyway, John McCain (before trying to adapt to the Boomers’ divisive brand of politics this election cycle, one cycle too late as I believe we’ll discover next month, but as a member of an Adaptive generation) pointing to an impressive list of attempts at forging legislation with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, and Barack Obama pointing to his lifelong pursuit of bringing people together, first as a community activist in Chicago before and after law school and more recently as the head of his well-run presidential campaign, a campaign that he continually refers to, with some justification, as a movement for postpartisan politics, and

WHEREAS, the candidates themselves being the messages, both major-party presidential candidates seem almost reluctant to champion specific policy positions, in stark contrast with the unraveling-era primacy of plans and policies over leadership in presidential politics, which unraveling-era primacy of plans was championed even during this election cycle by most of the presidential nominees’ primary opponents who of course all failed, not understanding the times we’re living in, each nominee now advancing plans only because that’s what you do in the general election phase of a presidential campaign, but neither having much heart for it, McCain having little interest in matters having to do with the economy (or expertise, by his own admission, famously), health care, or education, anyway, and Obama, for his part, spending the first ten months of his campaign downplaying any particular solution to almost anything, his Democratic rivals, in contrast, loving to highlight the differences among their competing health care plans, for instance, but Obama emphasizing instead the persuasion it would take to get any of it passed, telling Iowans a year ago, “We need to build a movement for change. [Universal health care] is not going to happen just because you elect a Democrat," and

WHEREAS, the wisdom of both men’s reluctance to champion specific plans is now becoming more evident from the dynamic nature of what we call the Financial Crisis, in the midst of which “last week's unthinkable idea quickly becomes this week's imperative” as columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. pointed out last week, the said Financial Crisis being, perhaps, a harbinger, perhaps one of many, 9-11 perhaps being another, of the said fourth turning and the national-existence-threatening crisis to come (and there's the rapid depletion of centuries-old polar ice packs, food shortages, and all kinds of stuff),

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that, with the election of Barack Obama, a Gen-Xer – McCain’s Silent-Generation, inclusive style of leadership having an equal claim to high office during the unraveling of the unraveling but McCain having forfeited that claim by campaigning like a third-turning Boomer, as an Adaptive generation member might be tempted to do (can you imagine what the campaign would have been like if McCain had campaigned like innovative, inclusive, Silent-generation McCain of old?) – we Boomers accept that we will never step into the White House as presidents again (taking perhaps some comfort that the un-Boomer-like Obama is by several reckonings a Boomer), that we Boomers will be the first Prophet generation not to serve in the White House during a national-existence-threatening crisis, Lincoln and Roosevelt belonging to the Transcendentalist and Missionary Generations, respectively (Prophet generations both), as a fitting judgment against our selfish, sanctimonious generation, that we accept further that the Culture Wars are over even though they don’t feel over to many of us, that the fourth turning crisis, when it comes, will resolve our Culture Wars for us if the nation survives at all, that we not insist on our divisive, unraveling agendas or bemoan unduly the end of the positive particularities that attend an unraveling generation (the ascendancy of the individual and of the arts, for starters) nor insist on controlling events but rather confessing plainly, with Lincoln, that events have controlled us, and that we assist Obama, who may be quite unpopular and act quite slowly on occasion in stark contrast (as least with respect to slowness) to Boomer presidents, and other future leaders, rather than impede them, in instinctively preparing us for a national crisis, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the organizing (not in the institutional or paperwork sense of organizing, but in the community activist sense) and consensus-building that Obama has accomplished thus far and that could not have been accomplished by even him as late as four years ago, the generational cycle not in support of such things back then, that (as I say) Obama’s organizational and consensus-building skills will help us prepare for a national crisis but will inevitably fall short of the organization and consensus we will need for the crisis itself, the crisis itself pushing us to the full organization and relative consensus that has attended every fourth turning in our nation’s history, and

BE IT FURTHER AND HIGHLY RESOLVED that the dead from every crisis generation, including the Millennial Generation (our cycle’s hero generation, now in their twenties, teens, and childhood), war or no war, shall not have died or die in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In a comment to “A Slow President,” maggie writes:

I would love to know what Lincoln biographies are you're favorites. I haven't read anything on Lincoln in a LONG time, but would love to read something fresh on him.

Maggie, I’ve been waiting a long, long time for someone to ask me that.  Some of this might not be "fresh," since I've included one book almost as old as I am.  Well, let’s get started! 

A good reintroduction to Lincoln might be Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, which came out in 1977.  I’ve read it twice, mainly because it’s such a good story.  Oates’s Lincoln is a bit romanticized, kind of an updated Sandburg version.  If you can find the unabridged, recorded version, you’re in for a treat.

The least romanticized Lincoln may be David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, which was published in 1995.  It’s a fine biography with lots of good detail.  Lincoln plays the part of a political operator, which he was, but one gets the feeling that the Lincoln here is a bit the product of late-twentieth-century America.  Too much the callous C.E.O.

My favorite Lincoln biography is Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, which was published in 1999.   Quoting from my own customer review on Amazon: “But unlike most biographies, Redeemer President centers on the maturation of its subject's thinking. Guelzo shows how some of Lincoln's most famous ideas, such as his reliance on ‘the proposition that all men are created equal,’ were part of Whig orthodoxy. To trace Lincoln's development takes nothing away from his genius, of course.”  The book examines the maturation of Lincoln’s religious thinking, too.

The most recent Lincoln blockbuster, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is a lot of fun.  It gives a brief biography of Lincoln and his three chief rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination up to that year’s party convention.  Then it follows the men through Lincoln’s presidency.  William Seward, the odds-on favorite for the party’s nomination in 1860, becomes Lincoln’s closest friend in his cabinet after Lincoln earns his respect.  Salmon P. Chaise is made out to be a vain opportunist that Lincoln must expend lots of energy managing during his first term.  The book focuses, as you might imagine, mostly on Lincoln’s cabinet. Published in 2005, Team of Rivals is really a great biography.

My favorite Lincoln books are not biographies at all, but works of political philosophy by Harry V. Jaffa.  The first isCrisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, published in 1959.  Jaffa first makes Douglas’s case for “Popular Sovereignty,” the doctrine that allowed each territory to vote on whether it would be a free or slave state when it entered the union.  The second half of the book makes Lincoln’s case for natural rights, which Lincoln found embedded in the Declaration of Independence and which, when combined with the Constitution, required the eventual extermination of slavery.  The book focuses not only on the debates’ arguments but also on speeches and other historical events that flesh out those arguments.  If you read it, read its appendix first, which gives a great overview of the five years leading up to the debates, beginning with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Jaffa’s sequel, published in 2000, is A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War.  I set out here my Amazon customer review of the book:

A New Birth of Freedom is a book about Lincoln's political philosophy, which Lincoln himself said (in so many words) emanated completely from the Declaration of Independence. The book is the sequel to Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, written over 40 years earlier. In Crisis, Jaffa takes up Douglas' arguments in the famous 1858 debates for the first half of the book and then Lincoln's in the second half. In New Birth, Jaffa backs up from the 1850's to take in a sweep of history and thought from Classic Greece to the present.

If the material in New Birth is far more wide-ranging than in Crisis, the theme in New Birth is much more precise. The south lost the war, but the philosophy behind the justifications advanced by southern leaders such as Calhoun, Taney and Stephens is winning the battle of the minds.

Crisis of the House Divided is like being in philosophy class, but New Birthis like being over at the professor's house later for drinks. Jaffa seems to lazily go over mountains of quotes, philosophers, and arguments, and he returns again and again to make the same points. But it's never tedious. One finds Jaffa's repetitions well worded and essential in understanding how far we've fallen philosophically. And eventually, toward the end, one gets a sense of the book's structure.

Here's the book's thesis. Most of us admire Lincoln, but most of us wouldn't agree with his political philosophy. Lincoln really did believe that our nation was dedicated to a proposition -- a proposition that also brought forth natural rights. Mr. Jaffa demonstrates how 19th Century historicism has won out over the Founders' concept of natural rights. Just as Nietzsche bitterly accounts for how Jewish thought won out after the Israelites were defeated, A New Birth of Freedom laments the ascendancy of the Confederacy's historical approach in today's political thinking.

Jaffa traces natural rights from Greek and Jewish thought through Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln. Basically, Jaffa teaches that natural rights begin with the doctrine of the "state of nature." In this state, a person has the right to life and liberty, and to property in order to defend his right to life and liberty. People form government in order to better protect these inalienable rights. In so doing, they yield the exercise of some of their rights, but not the rights themselves, which are inalienable. The people reserve the right of revolution, which is strongly asserted in the Declaration of Independence. Legitimate government can only exist through the consent of the governed, by a unanimous compact or contract. The measures of such a government by the majority's will are deemed the will of the whole, so long as the minority's rights are not violated by the measures.

All of this presupposes that all men are created equal. Jefferson found this self-evident, famously pointing out that we don't find some people born with spurs on their shins and others born with saddles on their backs. Natural rights recognizes a distinction between God and mankind, on the one hand, and a distinction between mankind and beasts, on the other. The historical school finds all of this an accident of history. Picking up with Jaffa:

"The historical school, which by the 1850s had largely displaced the natural rights school of the Founding, had also given rise to the romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century. It too repudiated natural right, because it repudiated 'rationalism,' insisting as it did that 'the heart had its reasons which reason did not know.' Accordingly, Lincoln's Socratic reasoning was rejected, because the very idea of justification by reasoning had come to be rejected. History, not reason, decided that some should be masters and others should be slaves. This movement of Western thought, from the natural rights school to the historical school, culminated in the Nazi and the Communist regimes of the twentieth century."

This was one of Jaffa's few specific references to how the relativism of the historical school has affected modern history. I hope that, in his next book, Mr. Jaffa will give many more examples of how our retreat from the Founders' conception of natural rights – and the clear distinction among God, people, and beasts underling that conception – has cost us.

Speaking of Amazon, to which I've linked each book title discussed, you pretty much have to ignore the aggregate stars the customer reviews give a Lincoln book.  Confederate sympathizers bash most modern books on Lincoln because these books don’t generally share their views of him, and by so doing they artificially lower these books’ star totals.

I seem incapable of writing short posts these days.  I hope you’re not sorry you asked, maggie.  And thanks for asking.

If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.

         -- Barack Obama during his acceptance speech in Denver last month

It seems like Barack Obama benefited politically last night by debating John McCain to something like a draw on foreign policy, which is supposed to be the latter’s turf.  And, arguably, Obama began to raise America’s comfort level with the unknown, much as Reagan and Clinton did in 1980 and 1992, respectively.

But if this was the debate Obama promised last month in Denver, he didn’t try very hard.  Instead, it was McCain who repeatedly suggested that “Senator Obama doesn’t understand,” setting himself up for an effective closing argument: “ . . .and I honestly don't believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in a number of areas . . .”

Maybe it’s the trial lawyer in me.  I wish Obama were more of an advocate.  Obama easily could have gone for the jugular as he suggested he would when he accepted his party’s nomination in Denver.  He should have not been satisfied with a draw.

I’ve been sort of breaking character by delving into political issues on this site some this year.  Presidential political strategy fascinates me, but it’s more than that.  Last night’s debate got to the crux of why I talk some politics here now: McCain’s approach to foreign policy really scares me.

Anyway, here’s my closing argument last night, were I Barack Obama.  The language I use is not what I would employ to express myself (I’d never be elected to any office if I did that), but I think many Americans would accept it.  Admittedly, time constraints would not have permitted Obama to say this all at once.  And if my approach seems tough, remember that McCain had just called Obama unfit for the job based on a lack of knowledge, experience, and judgment.

I’ve made two points here that Sen. McCain, even if he believed them, would be unable to follow through on as president.  The first is the essential relationship between our economy and our military strength.  In the history of the world, no nation has sustained military superiority in the face of chronic economic problems.  Therefore, our longstanding economic issues – and even this current economic crisis that average American citizens feel far more keenly than the deregulation crowd whose policies have betrayed us – these bread-and-butter issues that Sen. McCain has professed an insufficient knowledge of – will help determine whether America will continue to be strong throughout the twenty-first century.  America must get moving again.  My economic proposals, including a health care plan that takes the burden of costs off of families and small businesses, a tax cut that benefits working Americans and not the rich, and an energy policy that leads to energy independence once and for all in ten years – these proposals will make us stronger at home, and economic strength at home is a necessary condition to a strong foreign policy.

The second point that Senator McCain cannot deliver on is the American President’s position as Leader of the Free World.  That job description should be just as apt today as it was during the Cold War.  The people in many nations, including North Korea, Iran, Burma, and even China and Russia, are not free.  Their people suffer, and their governments’ actions in some cases threaten the Free World.

The phrase “Leader of the Free Word” means little if no one wants to follow.  The broad alliance President Bush tried to put together to invade Iraq never materialized, and he became the “Leader of the Coalition of the Willing,” itself an overblown title.  Part of Senator McCain’s unwillingness to meet with the President of Spain, which not surprisingly caused a bit of an international stir last week, stems from his anger over Spain’s decision to leave President Bush’s small coalition as the Iraq War dragged on and on.  We don’t need an enemies-list mentality to infect our foreign policy.  We have enough enemies.  We need to get our reputation in the world back where it was before the policies of President Bush and Senator McCain began tarnishing it six years ago.  Sometimes you stand alone, but not for two entire presidential terms on issues as diverse as Iraq, global warming, and economic strength.

We can be the leader again – a leader with followers.   Our allies who stand under the specter of a strong China and a resurgent Russia want this, and they don’t share Senator McCain’s assessment that I’m naïve.  If, as Senator McCain believes, proximity to Russia gives people greater foreign policy perspective, then the cries of our allies in Germany, France, and England for American leadership are something we can no longer afford to ignore.  I’ve been there.  I’ve seen American flags waived in Europe again.  I’ve the seen the ache of some of our most important and historic allies for America to retake its rightful place as Leader of the Free World.

We won’t be strong by retreating.  Senator McCain in three instances tonight advocated positions no longer held by his party’s own president who has seen fit to follow my judgment and leadership in correcting at least some of his foreign policy.  The first instance is Pakistan, where I have suggested that we not ignore any evidence of bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s whereabouts but that we attack them, unilaterally if necessary.  I got a lot of heat for that position, but four months later President Bush did just as I suggested: he attacked Al Qaeda positions inside Pakistan with moderate success.  The second instance is Iran, where I have advocated direct engagement at lower diplomatic levels and not at the presidential level unless and until progress is made.  Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand this distinction, and he ridicules what once was an unquestioned tenet of our foreign policy under presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy.  Now we learn that President Bush has again adjusted his foreign policy to follow my lead.  He has dispatched officials who are negotiating directly with Iran.  Events and his own party’s president have left Senator McCain behind again. 

The last instance that I will bring up tonight is Iraq.  Despite the Iraqi president’s and even now President Bush’s embrace of timetables – timetables that look very close to the 19-month withdrawal timetable that I have advocated for months – Senator McCain continues to support an unlimited presence in Iraq.  Although he apparently slipped this summer and admitted that my timetable was reasonable enough, he has gone back to his hundred-year-presence position that even President Bush has moved away from.  Once again, Senator McCain has been left behind.

Time does not permit me to more than mention Russia, which Senator McCain wishes to alienate by drumming them out of the Group of Eight Industrialized Economies – a sanction even the provocative Bush administration rejects.  Suffice it to say that, on many issues, Senator McCain has been left behind.

We can’t go back with him.  We need change, but not the kind of backsliding Senator McCain proposes tonight.  We don’t need more bluster, more empty words in the face of danger.  And we don’t need to retreat to the worst foreign policy positions advanced over the past eight years by the current administration.  We don’t need to find more enemies; we don’t need to go out of our way to make enemies out of allies, as Senator McCain seems willing to do with even Spain.  We don’t have the luxury to be vindictive.  In fact, it’s not even in our national personality.  America needs a president who shares its strong and fair temperament and judgment.  During my presidency, I look forward to working with Americans of every political stripe to make America stronger, to restore our leadership position in the world, and to see America not only respected but admired once again by our allies.

Obama will win.  He will be an unpopular president during most of his term.  Republicans will gain seats in Congress during his administration. But Obama will help to reconnect our civic life with our constitutional values.  If he lives, he will be reelected.

Or he could lose this year.  Or win and be popular.  It just helps me to understand Obama by projecting him against a blank future.

Obama will be unpopular because he is chiefly concerned with reconnecting us with our national ideals.  This concern will cause him to take a very long time to make some important decisions, and many will view his protracted decision-making as evidence of a weak presidency.  His vacillation will be more pronounced in time of crisis, because he considers decisions politically (like all presidents), patriotically (like many presidents), and constitutionally (like few presidents).  By “patriotically,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our nation in the long run.  By “constitutionally,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our Constitution and our relationship to it in the long run.

In other words, Obama will be unpopular because he will be slow.  But Obama might just be as slow as the best of them: Abraham Lincoln.

We’re familiar with most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama, of course.  Both men are Illinois lawyers who never run anything, really, before becoming president.  (I refer to Lincoln in the present tense for ease of comparison.)  Both men grow up distant from their fathers, one emotionally and the other physically.  Both men are seen as theorists and orators whose talents arguably would be more suited for the legislature, but both men are drawn to the presidency not by ambition alone but by a desire to address fundamental discrepancies between what our nation was meant to be and what it is.  Before his presidential campaign really begins, each man becomes nationally known initially only for a single, electrifying speech he gives in the Northeast to party faithful.  The campaigns of both men emphasize their candidates’ humble origins and deemphasize their candidates’ careers in law.  Both men win their party’s nominations as dark horses against highly favored candidates from New York, favorites who many party leaders fear would be too divisive in a general election.  Both men benefit from running after in a year favoring their party’s general prospects.

Some of these parallels are almost as meaningless as the ones I read as a child between Lincoln and John Kennedy (e.g., each had a secretary who shared the other’s last name).  For me, though, the most important parallels between Lincoln and Obama have to do with what makes them both slow executives: a driving desire to connect policy and public with constitutional ideals and principles.

Obama takes a long time to respond concerning important matters.  When he finally responds, he responds conceptually, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  He is slow to distance himself from Reverend Wright.  When he finally reacts to the public’s distaste for the clips of Wright’s sermons, though, it is in the form of a critically acclaimed speech that addresses race in America in fresh, constructive ways.  Then he is slow to respond to accusations that he is unpatriotic.  He finally reacts with a speech just before Independence Day this year that advocates a broader, less divisive concept of patriotism.  It is not a stirring speech, though, and it is not as well received as his earlier address on race.

Lincoln’s final speech is to a fired-up crowd that comes to the White House to celebrate the successful end of the Civil War.  Lincoln uses the occasion to offer an olive branch to the South and to outline a generous philosophy for admitting the succeeding states back into the Union.  Disappointed, the crowd starts to thin out before the speech ends.

Whether or not Lincoln’s and Obama’s more-important speeches are successful, they are usually theoretical in nature, connecting current events with broader themes.  Both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches generally make for terrible sound bites, since neither Lincoln nor Obama relies on cute turns of phrase.  Their rhetoric has a lawyerlike force that requires a longer attention span.  Fortunately, both men know how to keep their audience’s attention.  Both men are good writers, and one could use the best of both men’s writings as texts for teaching both rhetoric and prose.

But most of the force in both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches comes not from their literary and rhetorical skills but from the way they connect current events to constitutional values our government fails to live up to.  Indeed, both men know constitutional law well: