If you have the time, resources, energy (or general privilege) for self-improvement during the pandemic, you may be looking to get some writing done. You may be looking to get some writing submitted. You may be looking for some new journals to read and reach out to.
Creativity may be an essential way you interact with the world, and you may be frustrated because there’s not a lot of time or energy for that right now. You may be experiencing trauma. You may be exhausted, even though it feels like you’re not doing much.
But you’re probably doing a lot. This is what trauma feels like. It’s real, and it’s important to recognize.
I have a dozen tabs open, a dozen journals I’m going to submit to. At some point. At some point today. Maybe after I finish this post. Maybe after I take a walk. Maybe after I take a few minutes.
Eleven days ago, I wrote about what made the prophets of the Jewish and Christian traditions prophetic. I said that you don’t have to believe they had literal visions of the future to understand their work. They understood what oppression, injustice, and empire to do people, families, communities, and the planet. The horsemen John wrote about from Patmos bear the gifts of broken, unjust systems: plague, famine, poverty, war, ecological disaster, and needless, senseless death.
I said that the prophets have always known this. I also said “The headlines are all the same. They’ve been the same for fifty years, or for a hundred. They’ve been the same since Gutenberg. Since Revelation.”
Eleven days later, I want to rephrase something.
When I said “the headlines are all the same,” I did not mean that we can avoid taking every necessary precaution in some “this too shall pass” way. We must take every precaution we can.
With that said, here’s the rest of what I wrote:
There is pestilence. There is war, and rumors of war. There is sickness, God, is there sickness. There is famine, there is poverty, there is ecological destruction. In John’s vision on Patmos, the world is poisoned by the fallout of a star, called Wormwood, and what’s a star, anyway, but a nuclear reaction? And I don’t want to get too strange, but in Ukrainian, Wormwood is Chernobyl. I don’t think John had an actual, technicolor vision of the 80s, but Ukrainian milk still has a half-life, even now, in 2020. Speaking of now, and of pestilence and disease and these riders and their horses, John did not foresee coronavirus, but he knew plagues would spread and economies would crumble whenever power rests with a selfish, greedy few.
I’m not calling the seer of Patmos some proto-democrat. But he was a prophet, in a long tradition of prophets. Even now, some 3000 years since Moses, we don’t really use the word in its proper context. We think it has to do with fortune telling, a literal seeing of the future, or with esoteric Bible codes and arcane symbols. We forget, or never learned, that the Hebrew and Christian prophets were never primarily like their sibylline counterparts, that Jerusalem and Patmos weren’t Delphi. We forget, or never learned, that prophecy in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is a speaking of present truth to present power.
The book of Revelation gets a lot of attention. It is vivid, scandalous, and scary. It has been used to justify all kinds of hatreds, and as a cipher for thousands of agendas.
Though it is also many other things, the book of Revelation is primarily a sociological allegory about life among oppressed peoples (specifically, Christians) in the Roman Empire in the first century of the common era. It’s apocalyptic, not merely because of its prophetic tropes, but because Roman society was, itself, apocalyptic. I don’t mean that apocalyptic visions dominated the social, artistic, philosophic, or theological mores of the day; I mean that the Roman Empire was an oppressive, idolatrous, all-consuming beast of a socioreligious, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical thing. That the things John of Patmos described 2000 years ago should be easy to recognize in our own headlines now speaks to his prophetic status, even though prophetic need not mean predictive. The Hebrew and Christian prophetic voices were prophetic in part because they understood the externalities systemic injustice produces. (It’s a crime of language that we call these things ‘externalities’; they’re only external if you’re among the parties producing them and able to shield yourself from them).
That Revelation, with its images of death, and war (and rumors of war) and poverty and famine and plague, sounds very much like a modern litany of fears is no accident and need not be the function of oracular gifts or actual visions of a far-flung future. The prophets understood what power does, and they spoke against it. The patterns are predictable. Concentrated power in the hands of a few elites leads to poverty, famine, hunger, pestilence, disease, and environmental disaster. It’s all right there in the ancient writings. You don’t need to believe these writers had literal visions of the future to understand that they foresaw it. Their vision, as it were, is in their recognition of the putrid fruits of voracious greed and inverted totalitarianism. God did not show them a literal vision of the inverted tyranny of late capitalism. God didn’t need to. True prophecy is not (and never has been) about mystical predictions of the future. Prophecy is what happens when men and women bear witness to justice in the face of injustice, and usually against all conventional wisdom. This is the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, of Jesus, of Martin Luther King, of Liberation theology. If the prophets of old speak to us now, it’s because they understood the conditions we will always find ourselves in when we don’t take a stand for the kingdom of justice, peace, and love that would find us in solidarity with the margins and with each other, instead of in competition for things that need not actually be scarce, in service of obscenely wealthy powers who convince us that there’s not enough to go around and control us with that fear.
Prophets are stoned, crucified, and assassinated on the balconies of their motels for a reason, and I think we all know what it is.
John of Patmos (like Jesus) lived under explicit tyranny. The tyranny we live under is what theorists call “inverted,” but it produces all the same things. It must likewise be resisted.
The headlines are all the same. They’ve been the same for fifty years, or for a hundred. They’ve been the same since Gutenberg. Since Revelation.
There is pestilence. There is war, and rumors of war. There is sickness, God, is there sickness. There is famine, there is poverty, there is ecological destruction. In John’s vision on Patmos, the world is poisoned by the fallout of a star, called Wormwood, and what’s a star, anyway, but a nuclear reaction? And I don’t want to get too strange, but in Ukrainian, Wormwood is Chernobyl. I don’t think John had an actual, technicolor vision of the 80s, but Ukrainian milk still has a half-life, even now, in 2020. Speaking of now, and of pestilence and disease and these riders and their horses, John did not foresee coronavirus, but he knew plagues would spread and economies would crumble whenever power rests with a selfish, greedy few.
I’m not calling the seer of Patmos some proto-democrat. But he was a prophet, in a long tradition of prophets. Even now, some 3000 years since Moses, we don’t really use the word in its proper context. We think it has to do with fortune telling, a literal seeing of the future, or with esoteric Bible codes and arcane symbols. We forget, or never learned, that the Hebrew and Christian prophets were never primarily like their sibylline counterparts, that Jerusalem and Patmos weren’t Delphi. We forget, or never learned, that prophecy in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is a speaking of present truth to present power.
The book of Revelation gets a lot of attention. It is vivid, scandalous, and scary. It has been used to justify all kinds of hatreds, and as a cipher for thousands of agendas.
Though it is also many other things, the book of Revelation is primarily a sociological allegory about life among oppressed peoples (specifically, Christians) in the Roman Empire in the first century of the common era. It’s apocalyptic, not merely because of its prophetic tropes, but because Roman society was, itself, apocalyptic. I don’t mean that apocalyptic visions dominated the social, artistic, philosophic, or theological mores of the day; I mean that the Roman Empire was an oppressive, idolatrous, all-consuming beast of a socioreligious, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical thing. That the things John of Patmos described 2000 years ago should be easy to recognize in our own headlines now speaks to his prophetic status, even though prophetic need not mean predictive. The Hebrew and Christian prophetic voices were prophetic in part because they understood the externalities systemic injustice produces. (It’s a crime of language that we call these things ‘externalities’; they’re only external if you’re among the parties producing them and able to shield yourself from them).
That Revelation, with its images of death, and war (and rumors of war) and poverty and famine and plague, sounds very much like a modern litany of fears is no accident and need not be the function of oracular gifts or actual visions of a far-flung future. The prophets understood what power does, and they spoke against it. The patterns are predictable. Concentrated power in the hands of a few elites leads to poverty, famine, hunger, pestilence, disease, and environmental disaster. It’s all right there in the ancient writings. You don’t need to believe these writers had literal visions of the future to understand that they foresaw it. Their vision, as it were, is in their recognition of the putrid fruits of voracious greed and inverted totalitarianism. God did not show them a literal vision of the inverted tyranny of late capitalism. God didn’t need to. True prophecy is not (and never has been) about mystical predictions of the future. Prophecy is what happens when men and women bear witness to justice in the face of injustice, and usually against all conventional wisdom. This is the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, of Jesus, of Martin Luther King, of Liberation theology. If the prophets of old speak to us now, it’s because they understood the conditions we will always find ourselves in when we don’t take a stand for the kingdom of justice, peace, and love that would find us in solidarity with the margins and with each other, instead of in competition for things that need not actually be scarce, in service of obscenely wealthy powers who convince us that there’s not enough to go around and control us with that fear.
Prophets are stoned, crucified, and assassinated on the balconies of their motels for a reason, and I think we all know what it is.
John of Patmos (like Jesus) lived under explicit tyranny. The tyranny we live under is what theorists call “inverted,” but it produces all the same things. It must likewise be resisted.
Chris Matthews “has his own views” on Socialism, and, apparently, they end with an ascendant Left rounding up neo-liberals in Times Square. How he makes the jump from Medicare for All and affordable education to Animal Farm is only a mystery if you think he’s being honest.
Socialism calls for the nationalization of all major industry, for the means of production to be owned and operated by the state.
Bernie Sanders is not calling for that. Bernie Sanders is not calling for the state to be the arbiter of truth. He is calling for the apparatus of state to shift its priorities from corporate welfare, special interests, and profiteering toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Things we might call, domestically, “justice for all.”
Bernie Sanders’ vision isn’t particularly new, even in American politics. It is influenced by the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, yes, but stands also in the tradition of the serially electable Franklin D. Roosevelt.
When I posted this two days ago, I was thinking about spring training. I had no idea the Phanatic was about to get a new look. The tweaks were revealed today. He’s dropped a few pounds, and there are some other small changes, but he remains the greatest postmodern non-sequitur of all time.
This piece was originally published at Hobart in the summer of 2013. Editor Aaron Burch was a huge help. The version below is slightly different from the Hobart version.
As an urban rust-belt minister, activist, and writer, I gravitate toward third spaces and common points of reference as a matter of vocation. I like to be where people are, uncovering the things we have in common and the places. There are hospitals and homeless shelters, community centers, coffee shops and church hall basements, bus stops, bars, and ball fields. The conviction at the core of it has to do with the holiness of pluralism and the tension of seeing through our mirrors darkly while wrestling with all kinds of faith; faith in God or people, faith in the redemptive, restorative, and vindicating nature of, say, the Resurrection, or a winning baseball season.
I’m reading The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera. The first section, “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” is pretty brilliant. Kundera’s thesis is that in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the novel emerged as the fundamental plumb-line of the inner life. Art, with its vagaries, and not Bacon’s empiricism (which left even its mater out in the cold) emerges as the way in which people (at least in West) explore these depths and consider the myriad claims on Truth (or truth) presented by modernity.
There is some oversimplification here, of course. Kundera uses poetic and historic license, but that’s what people do when they write any kind of history. Nonetheless:
“Once elevated by Descartes to ‘master and proprietor of nature,’ man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man’s concrete being, his ‘world of life’) die Lebenswelt, has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.
My annotation:
“This seems to be the fundamental problem of our collective psyche, our collective spirit: our collective inability to communicate, despite possessing countless technical (technological) means.”
Bypass. Surpass. Possess.
That is the business model of the never-ending news cycle, and of the ever-looping social feed, and of the echo-chamber feedback, and of sycophanticism posing as collective wisdom.
Kundera, writing in the context of the Cold War, says:
“Like all of culture, the novel is more and more in the hands of the mass media; as agents of the unification of the planet’s history, the media amplify and channel the reduction process; they distribute throughout the world the same simplifications and stereotypes easily acceptable by the greatest number, but everyone, by all mankind. And it doesn’t much matter that different political interests appear in the various organs of the media. Behind these surface differences reigns a common spirit. You have only to glance at American or European political weeklies, of the left or the right: they all have the same view of life, reflected in the same ordering of the table of contents, under the same headings, in the same journalistic phrasing, the same vocabulary, and the same style, in the same artistic tastes, and in the same ranking of things they deem important or insignificant. This common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged by political diversity, is the spirit of our time. And this spirit seems to me contrary to the the spirit of the novel.”
I was reminded today that as a young man, George Saunders fancied himself a bit of a Randian Objectivist. In maturity, Saunders rejected “the spirit of our time” for the “spirit of the novel.” I have worked on doing the same thing, and while my practical politics are nothing like they once were, I have kept a certain secret fairly well. I went to college to become a political hack, and instead was saved by the kind of education without which I could not begin to understand most of what Kundera is saying. My pursuit of hack politics, and then, thankfully, of real political philosophy, and then of theology, and then of fiction is, if I understand myself correctly, a pursuit of something real.
This piece was originally published at Hobart in the summer of 2013. Editor Aaron Burch was a huge help. The version below is slightly different from the Hobart version.
As an urban rust-belt minister, activist, and writer, I gravitate toward third spaces and common points of reference as a matter of vocation. I like to be where people are, uncovering the things we have in common and the places. There are hospitals and homeless shelters, community centers, coffee shops and church hall basements, bus stops, bars, and ball fields. The conviction at the core of it has to do with the holiness of pluralism and the tension of seeing through our mirrors darkly while wrestling with all kinds of faith; faith in God or people, faith in the redemptive, restorative, and vindicating nature of, say, the Resurrection, or a winning baseball season.
I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and I work and live in the Commonwealth’s third-largest city, Allentown, also a single from Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain. Here, we are mostly Phillies fans. When we won our first World Series in the fall of 1980, I was ten months old. I’d be a father myself before our next world title, and those 27 seasons in between taught me everything I know about the intuitions and instinctive gambits that rippled through the 20th century in art, fashion, literature, sports, and finally religion. All that is to say, everything I know about postmodernism I learned from the Phillies.
Like all communities, baseball fandom has manifest a pluralistic call with uneven fealty. When I was learning how to advocate for justice and studying the history of American religion, Randall Balmer, one of its most important contemporary chroniclers, talked about it this way: baseball was and is for many communities the quintessential immigrant game: the entire point is making it safely home. Italians like my ancestors and like the DiMaggios making it through the medigan neighborhoods, Hispanics making it through white ones. Upward mobility was closed to most poor European immigrants outside of sports, specifically baseball, even as the national pastime was racially segregated from 1889 to 1947. The ultimate game of outcasts, from its barnstorming carnival origins to its identification with prodigious new stock talent, baseball’s segregation remains one of the most flagrant practical violations of a just and noble metanarrative outside of more widely recognized religions. Baseball, from the start, has been a game of contradictions.
Looking back, the contradiction between my hope in a Phils franchise resurrection and the realities on the field was a formative experience in myth and meaning-making. The stars of 1980 were called Wheeze Kids three years later, losing the ’83 World Series to a younger, quicker Baltimore. On pilgrimages to Veterans Stadium until 1989, The Year Mike Schmidt Retired, I held out hope with no real reason. When the games felt out of hand, I’d train my GI Joe binoculars on the press box, looking for Harry Kalas and Ritchie Ashburn, imploring these gods to maybe, somehow, intervene. I held my beliefs about my team in tension with what was clear and plain. To me, like any kid not caught up in vulgar front-running, tomorrow was another game. When fall came without the playoffs, I counted days till spring. Eventually, cheering for this team that never won became a badge of honor in and of itself. It might not mean a thing to you, but it meant an awful lot to me.
As a term, postmodernism came into my vocabulary in 1988. It had not yet moved from art and English and music into theology the way it has in recent years, but it was, of course, still extant in the visual codes of culture. Nowhere was this more so than in the still-70s branding marks of 80s baseball teams. I know this because Topps and Fleer were catechists and prayer cards before I could even read. I’d never seen the funky, curvy Phillies initial (the main piece of their 1970 – 1991 look) as anything resembling a letter “p.” It was at best a topless f, just like its Flyers cousin, until one day in that off-season I read a piece in a team yearbook talking about that sublime form as a “postmodern little P,” and even though I had no clue what that meant, I also knew exactly what it meant. To this day, it’s no small effort for me to actually see that symbol as a letter. I know it is one. I know it’s supposed to be one. But it’s also not one. It’s a solitary icon divorced by style from any alphabetic context and it stands for an ideal that can be summed up in a few phrases and names: 1980, World Series, Veterans Stadium, Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, Tug McGraw. That fact that it’s also a P only matters when you see it rendered as the beginning of “phillies,” as in this piece from 1984:
Or this entry from 1970, which absolutely has to have been a response to the expansion Padres’ swinging friar from a year before:
With the tide of bicenteniallism waning, 1978 would see the birth of the most famous postmodern non sequitur of all time:
Look at him waving just like he knows it. When people forget about how awesome and charmingly messed up the late 70s and 80s were, it’s because they forget the cultural crucibles that conjured things like this. What is he? Who knows? Who cares? How does he intrinsically relate to baseball or to the Phillies? He doesn’t, and it’s delightful! Of course he does now. Of course he was a bigger draw at the Vet than those mediocre teams I followed and believed in all those years. When the action on the field crushed, again, our hopes and confirmed our native fears, the Phanatic cut the tension. He exacted justice for us with his liberating nonsense and his belly bounces. Every jiggle, every move, every elbow dropped on a Met in effigy said “Our team really sucks. What are any of us doing here? And yet here we are, and it’s where we want to be.” Harry Kalas was the voice of God in this redemptive schema. Ashburn was the Holy Ghost, our only living legend from the Greatest Generation. Young kids hopelessly, aimlessly hoping on the Phils had these institutions and little else holding us together from Schmidt’s 500th homer to the 1993 pennant. From the ’94 strike to the advent of Chase Utley. Even though most of baseball’s postmodern design aesthetics came from the American League, it was us, the stalwart fans of the Phillies, the most senior of teams on the Senior Circuit, the losing-est franchise at the highest levels of North American sports, who owned the best rendition of the look from sheer necessity. That strange p was pointless? So was our holding out hope. The Phanatic is absurd? Yeah, and what’s your point? So were lots of those seasons. And we found meaning in this pointlessness, we found celebration in that absurdity, in our leaps of faith.
I was finishing Div School when the Phils began showing new signs of life last decade. On course to renewed relevance, and for a while, at least, ascendance, marketing people brought the consumer branding of my youth back into rotation. The postmodern little p, rendered in maroon on powder blue with names like Rollins, Howard, Utley alongside Schmidt and Tug. We bought the now-new-retro, our old beloved symbols, on hats and shirts and hoodies and wore them to the ballpark to say three things at once: we believed in the glory of glorious times; felt, almost personally, the loss of that time and those heroes; and believed again that good times were returning. Like Harry used to sing, we had the highest of hopes. And with good reason.
Kruk, Daulton, and Dykstra were the go-to guys when the Phillies got their first wave of throwback branding in 1991. Those new-then kits and wordmarks reached back to the 50s, to Ashburn’s era. That was over 20 years ago now, and even though we won it all in 2008 in the neo-classic look, it’s time to rethink throwback to the fullest. That ’93 team who beat the Braves the last time pennants really mattered? They all started their Phils careers in the funky p and in the Absurd Era. After the branding change, they grew their beards and mullets, an “America’s Most Wanted” foil to the Braves, “America’s Team.” Coincidence? Modernism says yes. Postmodernism says that’s all up to us. When your team is so bad for so long, fandom and irony blur at the edges. What made the rouge look awesome, what made John Kruk’s gut so great and the Phanatic so effective were the outsized, outlandish enthusiasms they mustered through the worst sports luck of all time. We laughed with them in the face of the meaningless futility of fandom, and that was meaningful.
Thank you, Phanatic and postmodern P, thank you Kruk and Dutch and Nails, thank you, 10,000 blessed losses, for teaching me that there’s finally nothing futile about what Nick Hornby calls “the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.” For teaching me to make myth and meaning for myself, so that I might also find it elsewhere.
Chris Cocca 