Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot: Comedy of Manners, Meet Postmodern Literary Theory

I've just finished Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).  I have to say, it doesn't strike me as quite the equal of Middlesex.  To be specific: it lacks the sweeping scope and mythopoeic quality of its Pulitzer-winning predecessor.  It's more comedy of manners gone wild and standing on its head (a jumble of an image that makes perfect sense to me, even if I'll grant it might be mystifying to many readers).  It does ring some refreshing changes on the traditional trope, using postmodern literary theory as its foil while it simultaneously defends and deconstructs the venerable plot devices of comedies of manners à la Austen.

Valerie Saiving on Hypermasculinity of Modernity: The Challenge of Postmodernity

If I have read Valerie Saiving’s ground-breaking essay on feminist theology “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” I did so years ago and have forgotten it.  Now that I’ve been introduced (or perhaps reintroduced) to her, I intend to read anything I can find by her.

In Susan Henking’s summary of Saiving’s essay to which I have just linked, I’m struck by Saiving’s claim that modernity is a “hypermasculine culture,” and the feminized society that critics of that culture often seek to build in reaction to it runs the risk of accentuating some of the negative effects of hypermasculine culture itself, when it comes to the feminine.  As it reacts to the hypermasculine culture of modernity, critique of this culture risks, Saiving argues, affirming the loss of self that is one of the chief effects of hypermasculine culture on the feminine.

Thought for the Day: Douglas Coupland on the Postmodern Vocation

We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind and came to the desert—to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 8.

Moving Dialogue Forward: Obama and a New Post-Racial (Postmodern) Politics

Reading lately about the persistent refusal of some fellow citizens to entertain the possibility of an African-American president makes me wonder how, when, whether the “problem” of race in American society can be resolved. I’m feeling frankly hopeless as the campaign rolls on and some voters become less coy about their hidden racism. Given the dismal performance of Mr. Bush measured against any scale of values imaginable, I had hoped that churched voters, in particular, would turn away from the party whose “values” this president has been exemplifying—for the sake of the very values they claim to hold so dear.

It doesn’t seem to be happening. Though what happened with Hurricane Katrina decisively exposed the current administration’s total lack of commitment to “pro-life” values,* there’s growing evidence that many Catholics will once again vote Republican in the coming election. That stalwart (and moribund) organization of graying middle-American Catholic businessmen, the Knights of Columbus, just met in Québec, and its Supreme Knight gave a rousing speech that stopped only a whisker short of endorsing Mr. McCain.

The speech of Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight, reiterated the tired old talking points that have many heartland Catholics voting Republican in recent years: talking points about how Catholics must vote on the basis of a handful of “non-negotiable” stances such as resistance to abortion and gay marriage. These talking points have been adroitly manipulated by right-wing political leaders (and by many bishops) in recent years to give Catholic voters the impression that their only morally justifiable option is to vote Republican. Anderson’s speech is already being touted on Christian right websites as a call for a Catholic revolt against Obama (see, e.g., www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/aug/08080703.html).

And the strategy seems to be working. Last week, Zogby International reported that Obama’s previous lead over McCain among Catholic voters has now been reversed. McCain is leading among Catholics by a margin of 50 to 34% (see www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=13455).

Though those interpreting the trending of Catholic voters towards Obama are stressing in particular the influence of McCain’s commitment to “non-negotiable” values—and that influence certainly should not be discounted—I think that another factor needs to be considered, to account for the trending of voters of churches of the radical middle towards McCain. This factor is racism, plain and simple. And it needs to be discussed, though media analysts are doing all they can to sing and dance around the ugly reality that racism persists in American culture, including American churches, and that the response of churches of the radical middle to the sin of historic racism is all too often faint, equivocal, and useless.

Last Sunday’s New York Times ran an outstanding op-ed piece by Charles Blow entitled “Racism and the Race,” in which Blow argues that we see the race between Obama and McCain in a dead heat for one reason and one reason alone: this is race (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09blow.html). As Blow notes, though many voters are ashamed to acknowledge how much race skews their political choices, strong empirical data predict that even among voters who will not admit being swayed by race, the choices voters make in the privacy of the voting booth have everything to do with the skin color of the candidate for whom they are voting.

It’s high time we acknowledge this. And do something about it. And in my humble opinion, though our churches ought to be leading the way in the process of social healing, they are not doing so, for the most part, and will never do so. With notable exceptions (I think, for instance, of the current initiative of the United Church of Christ for a nationwide Sacred Conversation on Race: see www.ucc.org/sacred-conversation), the churches of Main Street USA simply do not want to deal with issues that make their adherents uncomfortable.

Issues like race. Issues like sexuality. Issues like bullying of gay teens in schools. Issues like the shadow side of family life in mainstream America, a shadow side that includes wife abuse, sexual abuse of children, etc. Issues like how we treat illegal immigrants. Issues like what people really mean when they say that they believe in God and follow Jesus.

It is so much easier to talk in glossy platitudes about love and peace and healing than it is to address specific social wounds that call for real love, real peace, and real healing. It is easier to maintain the placid surface of church life (and to maintain uncontested pastoral control in churches) when one assumes that churches are not like newspapers in being called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It is easier to preserve the untroubled peace of church life when we do not probe into the causes of the social ills we claim to deplore—when we do not study, talk together, and learn about (and confront) our own complicity in these ills.

Talking about race makes us uncomfortable. Facing the deep roots of racism in our society (and inside ourselves) is tough work. Churches all too often prescind from such tough work in favor of magical-mystery cures. And in doing so, they all too often make themselves extrinsic to important political conversations in the world today . . . .

If the churches won’t provide a forum for such values-oriented discussions, then where are we to turn for forums? I’ve talked before on this blog—a number of times—about what I like to call “safe spaces.” In my view, the key to preserving our democracy is to create safe spaces for the dialogic interaction of those who absolutely must sit together at table, if we intend to build a truly vibrant participatory democracy.

Our society has far too few such safe spaces for the serious interaction and serious work necessary to hold a democratic society together. The civic ties that bind us are fraying because we do not have places in which those who construe each other as Other can interact—safely, respectfully, with the intent to hear each other’s stories, and, in hearing, to commit ourselves to do something about what we hear, to involve ourselves in the Other’s life.

In previous postings, I’ve proposed that the historically black college/university (HBCU) has the potential to provide such safe spaces for the interaction of those who are Other (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html; and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/soul-work-holy-conferencing-in_05.html). I’ve noted the premier opportunity of HBCUs to bring together, for instance, openly gay persons with members of churched communities that resist including gay brothers and sisters. I’ve also noted the important historic role HBCUs have always played in building a racially inclusive society, by bringing together faculty, students, staff, and leadership teams that cross racial boundaries.

Because of their histories, because of the concern of most of their founders to build bridges between racially alienated communities, because of the concern of most of these founders to address mechanisms of marginalization that create inequity in democratic societies, HBCUs have tremendous potential to make an important contribution to American society today—in a presidential election period in which the need for such cross-racial bridge building is more crucially apparent than ever. HBCUs have a significant opportunity in this postmodern moment, when our nation may well elect its first African-American president, to model the post-racial, post-liberal politics this presidential candidate represents to many voters.

After having given almost two decades of my life to HBCUs, I would be disingenuous if I suggest here that I truly believe HBCUs are, on the whole, creating such safe spaces for respectful interaction of various communities to discuss issues of race (and gender and sexual orientation, along with the mechanisms of marginalization that trouble all minority communities). On 3 June, I posted an excerpt from an essay I wrote on 23 May 2006, at a time when I was working at an HBCU and was asked to summarize my reflections regarding a workshop I had recently attended on the topic of transformative leadership (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html).

In that essay, I note the potential for HBCUs to create safe spaces for soul-searching conversations that would provide an important service to our democratic society. I note as well, however, the following:

Though HBCUs should be premier dialogic safe spaces for soul-searching conversations about race (and gender, and poverty, and sexual orientation), I have found that discussions of race (and the other topics) are often even more hedged about with taboos in the HBCU setting than in majority-culture institutions. We seldom put our cards on the table. We seldom dare to speak from the places in which we live, move, and have our being.

As a result, we are impoverished, and much of the energy inside all of us—which could become synergy to build a new university within the framework of the old—is thwarted and bottled up…..

While HBCUs have strong potential to make important contributions to our culture today through the creation of such safe spaces, I have found that HBCUs are often the last places in the world in which people are willing to talk freely across racial lines about issues of race and marginality. The faculty of many HBCUs live in fear of leaders they perceive as sometimes capricious and cruel, as lacking a strong commitment to academic freedom and to humanistic values.

Though some HBCUs have a longstanding commitment to creating racially inclusive leadership teams (I think, for instance, of Xavier University, where I began my HBCU work, where academic vice-presidents have been variously Caucasian and African-American over the years), others have resisted the creation of leadership teams that model racial inclusivity. Some HBCUs with a tradition of racially inclusive leadership teams have moved to a racially monolithic model that no longer models the core values of the founder. The pressures to move in such a direction can be very strong; they often come, for instance, from alumni who do not understand the need for the institution to model racial inclusivity either as an expression of its historic character, or in order to transmit its core values to a new cultural context. When HBCU presidents lack the fortitude and integrity to resist such pressures, HBCUs sometimes move in a self-ghettoizing direction that thwarts their ability to engage the culture in fruitful conversation.

My hope is that the current presidential campaign will be a moment in which HBCUs will reconsider their opportunity to contribute to a new postmodern model of participatory democracy. It is a cliché to say that Obama represents a new day in American politics.

But as with most clichés, that statement contains a grain of truth. Within some segments of the American voting public, Obama is a symbol of a passion for a new way of doing politics, for a new post-liberal moment in American political life.

Leaders almost always fail to live up to the promise they symbolize, and I have no doubt that this will be the case with Obama, if he is elected. Nonetheless, we would miss some important opportunities in this election period if we did not move beyond personality politics and think carefully about what Obama symbolizes to many, and why he symbolizes this.

People have grown frankly tired of the tendency of liberal leaders to triangulate, to play one marginal group against the other, to calculate how to play the game adroitly enough to stay on top while making vacuous promises to exploited marginalized groups who have no choice except to support the liberal leader, since he or she promises to be marginally less horrible than the neoconservative one (on this, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html).

Reading the Atlantic’s post-mortem on Hilary Clinton’s failed campaign today at the Huffington Post website made me recall yet again why some of us have placed so much hope in the Obama candidacy (www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/hillary-clinton-campaign). People are frankly tired of liberal rhetoric about inclusive values that does not issue in inclusive behavior. I am frankly tired of having men of the ilk of Bill Clinton or John Edwards speak about the need to safeguard the sanctity of marriage in the face of appeals to extend marriage rights to gay citizens. It’s bad enough to hear that rhetoric from Larry Craig, but from Clinton and Edwards?

Many of us are tired, too, of race-baiting—whether it comes from the white or the African-American community. The same issue of the New York Times that contained the Blow op-ed piece decrying racism in the current election also carries an essay by one of my favorite political commentators, Bob Herbert. As does Blow, Herbert deplores the race-baiting that keeps surfacing in our political process www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/opinion/09herbert.html).

He notes, however, that this critique cuts both ways. Herbert recounts a sordid little story of a recent Democratic primary campaign in Memphis in which an African-American candidate, Nikki Tinker, played the race card against her opponent, Steve Cohen. To be specific, she resorted to ugly anti-semitic tactics against Cohen, in the hope of eliciting black discontent with Cohen because of his ethnic-religious background.

And she lost, in a district that is heavily African-American. People are growing weary of racially divisive political tactics, and this weariness is helping to spur the movement that points Mr. Obama to the White House. If Mr. Obama is elected, it will be interesting to see whether both black and white social institutions—including churches and academic institutions—take advantage of their opportunity, in this new moment, to transcend the tired liberal politics of race-baiting (and of other forms of division and exclusion, including demonization and marginalization of gay people), and help build a better, more inclusive, more honest and more compassionate, society in which the values to which liberals pay lip service actually make a difference.

*On this, see my essay “Remembering Katrina” at the blog café of the National Catholic Reporter (http://ncrcafe.org/node/429).

Ecclesiological Options and the Church of Postmodernity

In these days of commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Humanae vitae, I’ve been asking myself what-if questions about where the church finds itself now. To be specific: what if Ratzinger had appropriated the Nazi period and its aftermath quite differently than he has done? What if he had approached that period of dark kairos in a way similar to that of his countrymen Rahner and Metz?

The trajectory of Catholicism at the end of the 20th century was decisively set by two men—John Paul II and Ratzinger—who reacted to the horrors of the 20th century in a quite specific way, one that has determined the course of the church into the 21st century. That there were other options for the church—other ways to appropriate what happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is apparent in the theology of both Rahner and Metz. Had the church chosen to follow the path sketched by the theology of Rahner and Metz, it would be in a very different place now—one, I believe, that would far better situate it to be an effective sacramental sign of salvation in the world than the option chosen by John Paul II and that pope’s chief theological advisor, the current pope, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI.

The contrast between Ratzinger and Metz is especially illuminating. When I read Ratzinger on the Nazi period, I’m constantly struck by the dichotomous (and, ultimately, false) way in which he presents the relationship between the Catholic church and the Nazis. To hear Ratzinger tell the story, the church was the sole locus of sanity in a world that went mad with ethnic hatred and blood lust, with total lack of respect for human life, in the Holocaust period.

That sharp dichotomy between church and world that characterizes the ecclesiology of both John Paul II and Ratzinger is apparent already in Ratzinger’s attempt to come to terms with what his countrymen did in the 1930s and 1940s, and with how the church responded. The church held fast to authentic human values and respect for life; the Nazis crossed the line and quickly went to hell, with eugenic experimentation and extermination of the mentally and physically challenged, of “inferior” races, and so on. In the church, light; in the world, darkness. In the church, Christ; in the world, the devil.

To think this way is to disregard the testimony of history. Sadly, the church was simply not the beacon of light in the mid-20th century that Ratzinger would have us remember it as. Its witness against the atrocities of the Nazis was muted, tragically mixed, and compromised. The response of the church was often, at best, one of indifferent silence, at worst, one of complicity.

Certainly, there were courageous Catholics, including many priests and religious, who actively resisted the Nazis. Some of them paid the price of martyrdom for their courageous witness. We should remember them. And we do—primarily because they stand out so sharply from the mass of their co-religionists at the time, in their willingness to speak out.

On the whole, the church stood by in silence as millions of human beings were slaughtered. At its worst (as with the Austrian bishops), it actively welcomed the Nazis as saviors of the church from the scourges of godless communism. The historic legacy of antisemitism in the church, a legacy whose roots go back to the very beginning of Christianity, bore bitter fruit in the 20th century in the church’s timid, unconvincing response to the Nazis.

Ratzinger does not admit this. In refusing to admit it, he falsifies history, and builds on the basis of that falsification an ecclesiology inadequate to meet the challenges of the postmodern period. His fellow countryman, his fellow Bavarian, Metz, has quite different memories of the Nazi period, and out of those memories, fashions a very different ecclesiology—one that, had the institutional church chosen it in the latter part of the 20th century, would place us in a very different place today.

Growing up in a small Bavarian village during World War II (just as Ratzinger did), Metz recalls the silence of his Catholic village about the presence of a death-camp just outside the village. Metz writes about how the people in his village continued praying, singing, going to liturgy, knowing full well that other human beings were being murdered outside the village all the while. And saying nothing. Just as the church itself, in its institutional mode, said nothing.

For Metz, silence was not an adequate response to what happened in the Holocaust. In contrast to Ratzinger, Metz could not defend the silence of the church or try to cast re-read that silence as some kind of noble, prophetic witness against all odds when a savage state was persecuting the church. Metz reads the silence for what it was: complicity. In refusing to stand up against—in refusing even to admit—what they knew was going on right in their midst, Catholics failed to live the gospel at a time of tremendous need for prophetic Christian witness.

Much of Metz’s ecclesiological work following the Nazi period is a meditation on how and why the church is able to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the oppressed for liberation—when the church can very well make a difference. Metz critiques the church that turns in on itself, pretending it can pray and conserve its faith as it ignores the suffering of the world around it.

Metz’s reading of the critical theorists led him to recognize that there are, at all periods of history, many currents at work in the world to imagine and bring about a more humane future for the world. Out of this insight, Metz developed a theology in which the church must always be in active collaborative dialogue with secular currents that are moving along with the church towards the horizon of hope—as the church itself moves, through its proclamation of the gospel and its attempt to be an adequate sacramental representation of the reign of God in history.

Rahner, too, followed a very different ecclesiological path after the Nazi period than did Ratzinger. Rahner’s attempt to re-read Thomist theology in light of the personalist philosophies of the early 20th century—his theology of transcendental Thomism—reflects on the venerable Catholic maxim that grace builds on nature.

In Rahner’s theology, the entire “natural” world is imbued with grace. Nature and grace are not at war with one another; church and world are not enemies. Salvation is not extrinsic to the world; it is the very core, the deepest history, of the world as the world fulfills its destiny.

The dichotomy between church and world that so decisively shapes the theology of John Paul II and Ratzinger—a dichotomy in which the church alone represents salvation—is not present in Rahner’s thought. In a world in which grace is active everywhere and at all times to draw the world to salvation, the church is, of course, a sacramental sign of salvation: but it is a sign of a salvation that is not the exclusive prerogative of the church or of Christians. It is the sign of a salvation that God is effecting everywhere, for all creation, not only for those calling themselves Christian.

Though Rahner speaks at times of the church of the remnant, he has explicitly repudiated the notion of the smaller, purer church that informs the ecclesiology of Ratzinger. Rahner notes that his church of the remnant is a church engaged in active collaborative dialogue with the world, not a cult of true believers turning its back on the world. Rahner’s ecclesiology also grants something that is hardly ever granted in the ecclesiology of Ratzinger and John Paul II—namely, that the church is sinful, even as it is holy and a sacramental sign of grace.

What a different church we would be living in now, had either Rahner or Metz, or both, had the honor, privilege, and power of Ratzinger under the papacy of John Paul II. Ratzinger and John Paul II closed many doors that both Rahner and Metz would have left open: dialogic doors of welcome to Christians of other communions; to the world religions; to secular movements working for a more humane world; to women and laypersons; to theologians. The ecclesiology of both Rahner and Metz opens to all those groups, since God is never the captive of the church and its clerical elite in the theology of Rahner and Metz.

I cannot help suspecting that it is not merely the staunch intent to stand against the godless relativism of secular modernity that forms the very core of the ecclesiology of both John Paul II and Ratzinger. Both maintained that the true face of 20th-century secular relativism was apparent in Nazi ideology and the ideology of state socialism in the Soviet Union. Both saw the church as the only adequate fortress against that godless ideology and its ravages.

But both ended up with an ecclesiology that also implicitly defends the continuation of a system of clerical power and privilege that is equated with the essence of Christianity—of their clerical power and privilege. In the crisis of sexual abuse of children, we are just beginning to see the price the church has been paying for its idolatrous continuation of this changeable, historically developed polity of church governance.

And as we do so, some of the most important voices in the church to help us meet the challenge of this crisis have been silenced. At a moment in history when we need many voices speaking confidently of the experience of grace within many different social contexts, we have a unitary voice—the voice of the church’s clerical elite—seeking to represent itself as the sole possible voice of the church in the postmodern period. At a moment in which thoughtful dialogue with an increasingly complex secular culture is imperative—in which an educated laity could well lead such dialogue on many fronts—we have a church intent on curbing critical thought, a church intent on imposing simplistic litmus tests of orthodoxy, a church intent on hounding out its best and brightest in the name of preserving orthodoxy,

when what is actually being preserved is clerical power and privilege, at a cost we too few of us have even begun to recognize, in this period in which the church's influence in the public square could be so much more cogent, had the project of Vatican II not been deliberately stopped by the previous pope and his theological advisor and successor, Cardinal Ratzinger . . . .

Disinformation Campaigns and the Generational Shift in Politics

In a posting several days ago (5 June), I addressed the issue of disinformation in American politics. I predicted that in this federal election cycle, we are on the verge of a disinformation campaign the likes of which we have not seen at any previous point in our history. I distinguished disinformation from misinformation: the former is the deliberate dissemination of information those disseminating it know to be false, in the expectation of twisting the consciousness of those receiving disinformation.

In my 5 June posting, I discussed a flurry of carefully tailored comments on progressive blogs immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination. These comments gave every indication of having been planned; they gave every indication of having been released all at once as soon as the announcement of Obama’s nomination win came through.

These comments purported to be statements by Democrats disgusted that Mr. Obama has the nomination. These “Democrats” stated that they intended to vote for McCain in the coming election.

My assessment of this flurry of comments on progressive blogs as part of a disinformation campaign seems to be borne out now that Ms. Clinton has endorsed Mr. Obama. That endorsement makes it very difficult now for those trying to split the Democratic vote to use this particular little nasty trick as effectively as they had hoped to do.

The comments of disaffected Hilary supporters have suddenly ceased on progressive blogs, for the most part. What is clear is that many of those making these comments were not disaffected Hilary supporters at all. They were Republicans masquerading as angry Democrats to create the illusion of a national movement of disaffected Democratic voters.

So on to new tricks: I predict that, in addition to the overtly nasty bash rhetoric we’ll see all over the place now that Obama has been chosen the Democratic candidate, we’re going to see another trick tried again and again. I’ve already noticed it on the blog of my statewide “liberal” weekly newspaper, the Arkansas Times.

This is the sober, dispassionate, disinterested prediction that McCain will win, because states that have been voting Republican for some time now will do so once again in this election.

This prediction is anything but dispassionate and disinterested, though it will be spoon-fed to voters again and again in the coming weeks as bona fide political analysis. The prediction plays a cynical numbers game to gain bogus legitimacy. It depends on projecting voting trends that will mirror precisely those of recent presidential elections.

Such analysis pays no attention at all to the fact that this election has changed the ground rules in significant ways. It has brought out a massive tide of new Democratic voters. Many of these are young voters who have previously felt disempowered.

These are trends of intent concern to those who want to conduct politics as usual. These trends portend changes in the way that we do politics which go beyond the surface—substantive changes. The trends point to shifts in the American political scene that may well—if they are not stopped in their tracks by sheer force—be as decisive for the future of the nation as the shifts of the 1960s were.

We are seeing now the birth of a new politics in this country. What is happening now, especially among young voters, does not break down along traditional liberal-conservative lines. The fault line in how the political process is being viewed runs right through the Democratic party itself, dividing Democratic voters into those wedded to politics as usual, and those seeking a new way to engage the political life of the nation.

This election has unmasked the fatuity and insincerity of many of the “liberal” claims of my generation of Democratic voters. Though we of the baby-boom generation have professed concern to include people of color, women, LGBT people in the political process, we have done next to nothing—next to nothing substantive—to translate our professed concern into action.

We have invited minorities to the table only as token representatives of groups. They have not had a voice at our table—not a real voice. They have been there to echo the opinions of the straight-identifying white males who still control our political, economic, and ecclesial life. We have tolerated these minorities at the table only insofar as they were clones of the white-male power structure dressed up in minority garb—only insofar as they were “nice” minority members who played our game, and did not threaten to change the status quo.

We have, in other words, we boomer liberals, willingly participated in the politics of divide and conquer, of pitting one minority group against another, of the Republican right. We are a vanilla version of the more robust flavors of discrimination offered by the right. We all come from the same manufacturer. The ugly divide-and-conquer tactics centered on race and gender in this election derive as much from right-wing strategy as from liberal complicity in that strategy.

It has been in our own best interest—the best interest of liberal boomers—to natter on about inclusion and representation and places at the table for all, while we belie our rhetoric in our actions. A case in point: liberal political commentators in my state are now (rightly) decrying the ugly misogyny we have seen in this election, primarily targeting Hilary Clinton.

Yet these same white-male commentators seem utterly oblivious to the reality that they themselves edit and write for publications that have only male (and white-male, at that) political commentators: white-male middle-aged middle-class heterosexual political commentators. These are almost the only voices we hear in any “official” political discussions in our local media, whether televised or print media.

Fortunately, not a few voters are getting the disconnect between liberal rhetoric and liberal action among voters of my generation. Many of those getting it are younger voters. And it is not accidental, I think, that these voters are also far more media-savvy than are those of either the traditional right or the old left. In particular, these voters know how to use the power of the internet to circumvent the information-flow stoppage of the “official” media, whether of the left or the right.

As I have noted frequently on this blog, one of the most promising developments the internet poses for our political life (and for the lives of our churches, I would also maintain) is the ability of blogs to give voice—real voice—to voices that have historically been excluded by the mainstream media, both of the left and of the right.

Blogs and other online media sites give everybody a chance to be at the table in a way entirely unanticipated by the control-oriented, status-quo-maintenance politics of both the traditional right and the old left. Those of us whose voices have been shut out or carefully tailored to echo the observations of the power centers of our society can now speak for ourselves—in a new way, in an unanticipated way, in a way that reaches around the world.

This potential for change (and for interconnection, for solidarity, between people of all colors and stripes everywhere in the world) frightens those who want to maintain the status quo. It frightens not merely those conservatives who want, with William F. Buckley, to stand athwart history and shout stop. It also frightens gradualist liberals, those who want to anoint only predictable voices that will speak lullingly of change that doesn’t upset the balance of power in any substantive way—that doesn’t upset the balance of their power in any substantive way.

Does all that I have said above mean I am a messianic Obamabot? Hardly. I know enough history to know that the reign of God is always on the horizon, never here in history. It’s what we have to keep striving after, not what we have already built.

Give people power, and they are likely to abuse it. Give power to the marginalized and oppressed, and they may misuse their new-found power even more spectacularly than those who once lorded it over them. Some of the absolutely most horrific abuses of power I have seen in my lifetime have been manifested by women of color, by women one would have expected to know better and do better.

Granting power alone—shifting the structures of power—is no guarantee that things will move in a more humane direction, once power shifts have occurred. What is always essential in participatory democracy as a check against the tendency of those with unbridled power in their hands to abuse their authority is the big table, at which a place is set for everyone.

Insofar as it is participatory, participatory democracy acts as its own check against the abuse of power by any person or group within the body politic. Building open forums in which accurate information is available to all, and all have a chance to comment on how this information is used by the entire society, by its very nature militates against abuse of power by any individual or group.

The shift we are now seeing in our political process is, in some sense, an inevitable one—insofar as we continue to be a society that values, at least theoretically, free speech and the free and wide transmission of information (and it is entirely possible that we can move in the other direction). The shift is an inevitable one in a postmodern age, in which the ground rules of communication, affiliation, bringing people to the table, have shifted radically due to new technologies.

We liberals of the baby-boom generation have, in key respects, simply been caught off-guard by the development of the internet. While we have remained stuck in the modern moment, using new technologies to extend our buying power, our illusion that we can remain young and powerful up to the very end, our lust for new experiences and new things, many of those in the next generations have begun to realize the power the internet offers postmodern global culture for radically inclusive participatory democracy.

And as we boomers continue playing, the next generation has been hard at work building—building towards postmodernity. This is their moment. We need to give them a chance. (For further information on doing so, see Micah Sifry, “Obama’s Organization and the Future of American Politics,” www.huffingtonpost.com/micah-sifry/obamas-organization-and-t_b_105958.html; and Courtney E. Martin, “Fanning the Flames of Youth Civic Engagement,” www.alternet.org/story/87026/).