Saints and Scoundrels

Biden's Plagiarism: Forgiven

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:41:25 +0000

Barack Obama has forgiven Joe Biden's erstwhile plagiarism. In so doing, Obama is following a long precedent in both Jewish and Christian ethics. Obama did the right thing.

Ancient Jews relied on a passage from the book of Exodus (34:6-7) to conclude that man's capacity to sin can never exceed God's capacity to forgive. Everything could be forgiven, provided that the sinner contritely confessed and resolved to avoid that mistake in the future.

In the Ashkenazi folk ceremony of tashlikh on Yom Kippur, Jews go to water, preferably a river or a sea full of fish, and shake their clothes as if to cast off every trace of sin, while reciting appropriate verses, such as Micah 7:18-20, which contains the words "and you shall cast [tashlikh] into the depths of the sea all their sins." This one example (among others, such as the scapegoat) supports the idea that the slate could be wiped clean: a sinner could start all over again. Certainly, the Roman Catholic theology of confession also involves centrally the belief that the slate can be wiped clean: After proper atonement, a Catholic's sins are washed away.

Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic, which is to say that Biden comes from a faith community enthusiastically committed to the idea that sins really can be forgiven. Calvinists present a counterexample here; unlike most Jews and Catholics, Calvinists do not believe that all sins can be washed away. Calvinists (and various other Protestant communions) also reject the Catholic distinction between "mortal" (very serious) and "venial" (less serious) sins. Although subsequent Catholic theologians have disagreed with him, it is worth noting that Thomas Aquinas, a lynchpin of the Catholic moral tradition, concluded that only a mortal sin (such as murder or adultery) deserves the name of "sin" (Summa Theologica I-II, q. 88, a. 1).

Were we to take Biden to task for his plagiarism, we would be tarring with the same brush countless other offenders - think of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Doris Kearns Goodwin. (In this piece, I have plagiarized my own book, A History of Sin.) Americans have forgiven King and Kearns, and Americans can forgive Biden as well.

Of course, the exhortation to forgive can extend to other (all?) misdeeds. Think of John Edwards's recent affair or, much more significantly, George W. Bush's alleged lies about weapons of mass destruction. When you ponder all the lives lost in the Iraqi conflict, Biden's having lifted a few words or phrases from someone else's work may seem trifling. That's not to say that Biden never sinned, only that some sins are more drastic than others. In the end, the difference might be moot: To forgive is divine.

Our Swimmers, Our Sex Objects

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:21:07 +0000

It's difficult to pinpoint precisely when it became socially acceptable to ogle nearly-naked college men. The American photographer Bruce Weber gained influence and work offers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, doing shoot after shoot of men with no visible body fat. In the 1990s, a radically refigured Abercrombie & Fitch caught the ball and ran it down the field of voyeurism. And then yesterday, NBC published a photographic peek-a-boo game entitled "Ab Fab." One of our nation's most powerful cultural forces has waved the starting flag over a new playfulness.

http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/photos/galleryid=156776.html

The "game," such as it is, invites readers (who are actually viewers on the network's Web site) to guess the owner of the abs we see. First, a close-up of a swimmer's upper torso sans face appears, then the same shot with the young man's face and pelvic region. The news, such as it is, is that swimmers often possess strikingly statuesque bodies. Any gay man in the Western hemisphere who has perused Match.com or its equivalent already knew how effective it was to claim having "a swimmer's build." Who knows how many gay men in the Western hemisphere emailed the URL for the racy NBC piece to their friends yesterday. We can be reasonably sure, though, that almost everyone had already heard that swimmers look good naked (or in a Speedo).

Once upon a time, the New York Times trembled before using "Ms." for the first time. Some fifteen years later, the New York Times decided to begin publishing same-sex wedding announcements. Now NBC has joined the game, thrown caution to the wind, and invited us to see what we could already see anyway. This is social progress.

Should a race to the bottom ensue, we'll see even racier photographic montages just before the 2012 Games. The American network will flash a close-up of a male swimmer's crotch or backside and invite us to identify the elite athlete. As for the parents of said athletes, silence or feigning ignorance of the whole thing might be the easiest way out of embarrassment over hearing your progeny publicly praised as "hot."

Women swimmers are safe for now. Maybe NBC thinks women are too easy a target or maybe flat-chested women will fail to titillate the public. Even more likely, NBC may fear appearing cliché by serving up a distaff equivalent.

Of course, child pornography is illegal in the United States. The men who appear in the NBC meat market are all eighteen or over, but the American superstar Michael Phelps, who naturally shows up in the NBC lineup, was only 15 when he made his first Olympic team. He has grown up since 2000, and so have we.

Twenty years ago, television coverage of the 1988 Olympic Games struck some viewers as odd. We never really got to see a male swimmer's suit: Men were only filmed from the waist up. Rumor had it that the television network had vowed to protect the modesty of male swimmers. NBC does not seem to fear for the modesty of American male swimmers. As creepy as it might be for parents to think of ogling photographers showing up to the college swim meets of their sons for ab shots, it's remarkably bold of NBC to grant us permission to view male swimmers as sex objects. Call it an occupational hazard of making the Olympic swimming team.

Good News for Narcissists!

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:46:30 +0000

Dara Torres, a 41-one-year old Adonis, has raised the stakes for middle-aged Americans who feared they were too old to look or perform like recent college graduates. The good news for narcissists -that they can keep on turning heads and racking up athletic victories into their 40s-is also the bad news. No longer can anyone use as an excuse, "Well, at my age, no one can expect me to elicit catcalls." From now on, 50-something and 60-something spouses and lovers can say to their 40-something cohorts, "Well if she can do it, why can't you?"

Life was sadder but easier in the 1990s, when we still believed that biology was destiny and that gravity bested any challenger. Aging happened, and that was that. Yes, of course we knew that Americans went in for such things as "having some work done" and "visiting Los Angeles for a tune-up." Cosmetic surgery was but one weapon in the bailiwick of concerned narcissists; Dara Torres has given us another. What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve. If you really, really wanted to remain a knock-out, you would (surgery or no)! If you don't look good in your 40s, it must be because you just don't want it enough.

Again, our cultural responses to middle-age in the workplace, at the gym, and on reality TV shows long reflected a feeble resignation to entropy: People age, slow down, and sag. But Dara Torres has proven in a remarkable way that we needn't throw in the towel. How many other 40-something erstwhile athletes will now shudder with a frisson of having wasted away their 30s unnecessarily? You needn't have believed that your best days were behind you, athletically or cosmetically. In late June 2008, the New York Times Magazine featured a train-stopping photo of Ms. Torres's abs, which seemed indistinguishable from ancient Greek statues of teenage male athletes. Torres has pushed back the darkness of old age and muscled in a robust new space for the sunshine of extended sexiness. Who really cares what exactly she won at the recent Olympic Trials in Omaha? She had already won the battle before she dived in the pool.

Where are you now, Shirley Babashoff (the American swimmer who led the 1976 Olympic team in Montreal)? And what about you, Paulina Porzikova and Christy Brinkley and even Mary Tyler Moore? Perhaps you bowed out much too soon and gave up too easily? Ditto for leading men of yesteryear, whose partners will likely foist on them the same cultural expectations they must now shoulder. Once one person broke the four-minute mile, lots of people started doing it.

Never in recent cultural memory has the outlook for us narcissists looked brighter. We're not getting older, we're just having birthday parties. Youth is no longer wasted on the young - we've seen to that. Thanks, Dara, for leading the way. Whether you win multiple gold medals in Beijing or not, you've already won the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow: looking hot. Because of you, what's old is new again.

The Way Obama Speaks

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:56:55 +0000

The preachy tone of Obama will not appeal to many Roman Catholic voters in Pennsylvania or elsewhere. The media has made much of "the black vote" in the run-up to the 2008 election, but little has been said about "the Catholic vote." Roman Catholics comprise a much, much larger slice of the electorate than African-Americans, which can make it even more difficult to generalize about "the Catholic vote" than it is to generalize about "the black vote." Still, though, we try endlessly.

Obama narrowly won the state of Connecticut, which is particularly rich in Catholic voters. But Hillary has won the Catholic strongholds of Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and California. Pennsylvania is likely to go her way as well. While Mrs. Clinton is not a Catholic, she avoids the preachy tone Obama has often used.

Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants differ in many ways. Until gay marriage became a burning social issue in the late 1990s, Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants rarely banded together. When it seemed that Hawaii might legalize gay marriage, though, Conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants agreed to join forces to fight not only gay marriage but abortion as well. That political alliance overcame more than a century of distrust and distance between American Catholics and Protestants.

One of many differences between these two cultures is preaching style. Obama follows the example of many black preachers and civil rights leaders in the way he speaks; this style will strike many Catholics as foreign. It's not so much that Catholics don't like it (although they don't much care for it) as it is that they just aren't used to it. The tone will strike many Catholics as self-righteous, accusing, holier-than-thou. At the same time, the emotional tone of many Protestant preachers will appeal to many, for the way it spoons out emotion and conviction. Catholics, generally speaking, are accustomed to a solemn monotone which communicates a different kind of certainty - it's almost as if (mostly white) Catholic priests say "I have God on my side, and so I don't need to try to persuade you."

How very interesting that when Obama gave his much-discussed speech in Philadelphia, a denunciation of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he abandoned the evangelizing tone and spoke like an ordinary guy from New Jersey. Obama clearly knows what he is doing, and he will drop the preachy tone when it suits him. The potential problem here is that Obama's inconsistent tone may feed into cultural confusion, as he sometimes sounds like Martin Luther King, Jr. and, at other times, like many a white politician.

To the extent that voters choose to back someone they feel comfortable with, Obama would do well to approach Catholic voters in Pennsylvania in the vocal tone he used to great effect in the Philadelphia speech prompted by Rev. Wright. In order to distance himself from Wright, Obama spoke in a tone that contrasted with, rather than mirrored, his own pastor's. Catholic voters in Pennsylvania -perhaps as many as one out of every three who turn out on the 22nd- are noticing the way Obama speaks to them.

A Pope in a Synagogue?

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:53:05 +0000

The Vatican recently announced that Pope Benedict XVI will squeeze into his bulging New York schedule a visit to a prominent synagogue on Park Avenue. What do Jews want from him? Why will the visit take place? A pope would seem to be as out of place in a synagogue as Jews are in Catholic heaven.

It turns out that Benedict's entrance to the sacred space on Park Avenue will mark only the third papal visit to a synagogue in modern history. It was John Paul II (d. 2005) who made the other visits (John XXIII, "the good pope," as he is called by Italians, was driven to the synagogue of Rome in the early 1960s but never actually entered it). Praised by some Jewish leaders for his repeated efforts to repair Jewish-Catholic relations and for various apologies to the international Jewish community (most notably in 2000), John Paul II can be said to have paved the way to Benedict's synagogue visit next week.

The Jews in the Park Avenue synagogue will surely not pester the pontiff with questions about why the papal states forced Jews to live in ghettos for centuries, why the Vatican declared Edith Stein a saint against the wishes of the international Jewish community, or the possible canonization of Pope Pius XII ("Hitler's Pope," as the English journalist John Cornwell has perhaps unfairly called him). The Jews on Park Avenue may be thinking about the sad history of Catholic anti-Semitism, but they will not speak about it in plain terms. Instead, the New Yorkers in that synagogue will reflect on the curious atonement of their would-be Catholic friends.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) transformed contemporary Catholicism. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the current pope and his well-informed flock are still sorting through the considerable changes wrought by that historic "aggiornomento" (updating). The council document Nostra Aetate (In Our Time, 1965) strictly forbids violence toward or hatred of Jews. No Catholic may call a Jew "Christ-killer." That document was published / released a year after Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 1964). Nostra Aetate deepens the ecumenical message of Lumen Gentium, perhaps the most frequently cited document of Vatican II. According to Lumen Gentium:

those who have not yet received the Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways. There is, first that people to which the covenants and promises were made, and from which Christ was born according to the flesh (cf. Romans 9:4-5): in view of the divine choice, they are a people most dear from the sake of the fathers, for the gifts of God are without repentance (cf. Romans 11:29-29).

Referring not explicitly to Jews, Lumen Gentium states:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience -- those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I believe it is possible to read Lumen Gentium in such a way as to conclude that the Vatican was opening itself to the possibility that Jews could get to heaven too -- not by converting to Catholicism, as they Church had long insisted, but simply by being good Jews.

Opening up Catholic heaven to pious Jews should strike even hardened cynics as a remarkably generous gesture, one that indicates the extent to which the Catholic Church is willing to reach in order to atone for the past. Anyone who wonders why on earth Jews would care to be admitted to a place in which they patently do not believe (that is, Catholic heaven) will have a hard time understanding why the synagogue on Park Avenue waits with some enthusiasm to welcome Benedict to their holy space.

Hillary Schadenfreude

John E. Portmann, Ph.D. — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:08:27 +0000

Why are so many Americans enjoying the struggle of Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency? She may be down, but she is not out. Even if she pulls through, still it remains that plenty of bystanders enjoyed the prospect of her defeat.

The German word Schadenfreude made its way into the English language despite the efforts of a nineteenth-century English bishop to bar the gates to it. This prelate thought that if Britons were to have a word for pleasure in the misery of another person, suddenly good souls all over England -and indeed the English-speaking world- would start feeling gleeful when bad things happened to other people. What is remarkable about his efforts is that he used the word in the course of instructing English speakers never to learn it and, moreover, that he assumed only Germans had ever felt this pleasure. Not bloody likely.

Schadenfreude must be a universal emotion, occurring to nearly everyone on a fairly regular basis. Although some moral thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, have vilified the emotion and suggested that only evil people feel it, other philosophers, such as Kant, have insisted that it is only natural to feel good when bad people get their just desserts. The big trouble remains deciding on what other people deserve. Our understanding of what, say, black people or gay people or Jewish people deserve has evolved over time.

We hardly need a poll to confirm that many Americans believe Hillary Clinton does not deserve to be president. It seems some people also believe she needs to be taken down a peg or two as well. Is it justice that demands she suffer public defeat, even humiliation? Or is it envy? Could it be that a woman with the best education money can buy and a well of ambition deeper than the lake of George Bush's blunders has intimidated some Americans? When bad things happen to Barack, we bite our tongue; when bad things happen to Hillary, we smile.

It seems hard to pinpoint precisely what she has done wrong, precisely why some of us (even Maureen Dowd?) want to see her brought low. The other day NPR broadcast a lengthy interview with individual Pennsylvanians on the issue of the upcoming primary. One man stated openly that he simply could not forgive Hillary for having stood by her husband during the Monica Lewinsky brouhaha. How can we justify such a position? And how many American women have stood beside philandering husbands? Who will blame Coretta Scott King for her patience? Who will kick Martin Luther King, Jr. out of the pantheon of American role models because of his "weakness for the ladies"? And who can blame Hillary Clinton for what was likely a very difficult decision (one which was, of course, none of our business)?

Schadenfreude provides a window on contemporary culture as useful as any Gallup poll. It is one thing to celebrate the suffering of a hypocrite such as Eliot Spitzer, but quite another to celebrate the uphill battle of Hillary Clinton. The Schadenfreude she has kicked up on American television and radio reflects very badly on us. The glee points up our sense of inferiority. Should she eventually be forced out of the race, some Americans will feel not just satisfaction but outright joy. The smiles of those who would uncork champagne bottles over her tumble should prompt all Americans to ponder whether a woman even had a chance. It hardly seems fair to blame Hillary for our own character flaws.