Pastrix & Accidental Saints

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (Jericho Books, 2013)

Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015)

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Nadia Bolz-Weber seems like an unlikely star among Lutheran pastors. By her own account, she's a cynic with anger issues and a foul mouth, who devoted her early adult life to drugs, booze, and tattoos. She's now in great demand as a speaker and preacher, and the author of two very popular memoirs. She's also the founding pastor of a Lutheran mission church called House for All Sinners and Saints, in Denver, Colorado.

Pastrix starts with a precocious twelve-year-old Nadia in Sunday School, discovering that she knew more about the Bible than her teacher; in the Church of Christ, this was not a woman's place, and she soon smart-mouthed herself right out of the denomination. She was left with an image of God as punitive, angry, and judgmental, consumed with drawing lines between saints and sinners. "It did not seem to me, even back then, that God's grace or the radical love of Jesus was what united people in the Church of Christ; it was their ability to be good. Or at least their ability to appear good. And not everyone can pull that off."

When Nadia walked away from striving to appear good, she opened Pandora's box: cursing, listening to punk rock, smoking pot, drinking, dropping out of college, living in a commune, and hanging out with Wiccan lesbians. At the end of 1991, however, she was pulled aside from the path of alcoholic destruction: "It was as if God abruptly, even rudely, interrupted my life." God preferred that she not be dead by thirty, because he (so to speak) had another plan for her life, in which she would recognize grace, and feel compelled to talk about it.

Four years into sobriety, she met the man who would become her husband, who was studying in a Lutheran seminary. That sounds like more of God's handiwork, because the Lutheran church offered her a completely different picture of how God sees the world, and what we're supposed to do about it.

The most obvious difference was the liturgy, a structure of themes and variations shared through centuries of tradition and practice. From week to week, some prayers are the same, and others change with the seasons, from Advent through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter. Following those same seasons, scripture readings span a three year cycle, a lectionary, observed in common by Catholics, Anglicans, and several Protestant denominations. This discipline is somehow just as liberating as it constraining. We don't have to figure out how to pray from scratch, or get stuck in the favorite Bible verses of our local preacher.

The other benefit of liturgy is that it requires community. It might be possible to be spiritual all by yourself, but you can't be religious. Bolz-Weber says, in Accidental Saints, "Spiritual feels individual and escapist. But to be religious (despite all the negative associations with that word) is to be human in the midst of other humans who are as equally messed up and obnoxious and forgiven as ourselves." That's what makes them qualified to share our joys, hear our confessions, and offer us God's forgiveness.

My favorite story in Accidental Saints is about the time Bolz-Weber agreed to give a talk to a national gathering of Lutheran youth. This was outside her comfort zone, since her regular congregants are nearly all adults, and she was nervous about how uncool she'd doubtless appear. On the plane, she sat next to a girl with pink bangs, in whose surly shyness she recognized her own teenage self. Suddenly, even in the unreal environment of the Superdome, it was simple: "I told them that this is a God who has always used imperfect people, that this is a God who walked among us and who ate with all the wrong people and kissed lepers...I told them that this God has never made sense."

But she made sense that night to a multitude of teenagers, and she does to me, too.

 

Email, Any Good Books, May 1 2022

Orwell's Roses

Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)

I'm always drawn to books that serve as portals to the Infinite Library, and this one is a classic. Delightful in its own right, it would also serve well as a companion to a book club or an adult education class reading George Orwell. Orwell's Roses is lightly biographical, but far more than that; Rebecca Solnit is the contemporary writer who can actually match and follow Orwell's range of interests, small and large, botanical and political.

I read Orwell in high school, like most people perhaps, and some of the essays still linger in mind: "Such, such were the joys," an essay about the misery of his school days, being crammed with facts for the entrance exams to Eton; "Shooting an Elephant," about serving in Burma as a colonial policeman; and "Politics and the English Language," surely still a guide to the wiles of propaganda. But now I'd want to read Homage to Catalonia alongside other people's war stories, and side by side with Animal Farm, to find out how Trotsky figures in both.

Orwell planted the roses of the title in 1936. Later the same year, he went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side against Franco, an experience that deeply informed him as a thinker and a writer. Ten years later, he wrote about the roses and their outsized return on investment: "One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence."

Solnit was actually looking for those trees when she stopped, on her way from London to Cambridge, in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Wallington, to which Orwell and his wife moved in 1936. The trees are gone, but two of the roses still bear flowers. Solnit felt a 'joyous exaltation' to stand in their presence and realize that "this man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses." As she will discover, and demonstrate, Orwell lets nature and beauty into his writing, even at its grimmest.

In the 1940's, many of his essays were published in Tribune, a socialist weekly. Then as now, the political Left had a puritanical, ascetic streak, which Orwell resisted head on: "...is it politically reprehensible...to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so." At the heart of such idiosyncratic, personal pleasures lies a fundamental sense of liberty. There must always be things, however small and transient, that no one can take away from us; many of the best of them were not given to us by people in the first place.

At the same time, Solnit is looking into the largest possible distances and spans of time. What trees are still standing that your grandparents might have planted? No, go back to the Sequoias of Solnit's native California, standing for thousands of years. No, go back to the Carboniferous period, three hundred million years ago, when the sunlight was captured that would become the coal and oil deposits we've been burning for the past three hundred years.

And, much as Orwell reported on the northern coal mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, Solnit goes to Colombia to look into the industrial growing of roses for the North American market. How did you think those millions of dozens of roses got to all the local florists for Mothers' Day? It's a far cry from picking up a few plants at Woolworth's.

Still, at least as far back as 1910, 'Bread and Roses' have been paired as necessities of life worth fighting for. "Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right." Orwell may not have known the slogan, but he was evidently in full sympathy with what it stands for. In one of his greatest essays, "Why I Write," he says this: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information." What a worthy ambition!

 

 

Any Good Books, April 2022, by email

 

One Summer: America, 1927

One Summer: America, 1927

Bill Bryson (2013, Doubleday)

     Any moment can be a historic moment, of course, and the world is always changing; but it's pretty hard to beat Bill Bryson's choice of 1927 as the year that changed everything. It would also be pretty hard to beat Bryson's gift for drawing characters and spinning narratives out of the American scene of the time. Giants walked the earth - Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Al Capone, and, probably first of all, Charles A. Lindbergh.

     At 7:52 on May 20, Lindbergh took off from a muddy runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, barely clearing the telephone wires in his path. 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds later, he touched down at Le Bourget, outside of Paris, France. "In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris." He had flown by dead reckoning through the night, in a cloth-skinned plane with no way of looking out the front. It was a truly brilliant feat of aviation. The degree of fame that came with the feat was unprecedented, too. The boyish twenty-five-year old from a modest Minnesota background was suddenly unable to do anything or go anywhere without an adoring crowd turning up.

     One reason that was true was that radio had established a foothold in the United States, thanks in large part to a man named David Sarnoff, who saw the possibilities of the medium and helped to found the National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff also grasped that hearing advertisements was a price audiences did not particularly mind paying; NBC sold ten million dollars worth of advertising in its second year on the air, and continued to dominate the business through the Depression, as newspapers failed on every side.

     The automotive industry was also hitting its stride, which would change the American landscape profoundly. Henry Ford gets a chapter, full of glorious eccentricity and questionable business sense. By 1927, Chrysler and General Motors were stealing a march on Ford, but he had already made his mark by bringing cars within the reach of ordinary working people, permitting them to move out of cities.

     The Twenties were a violent time, more than we now remember. Prohibition, of course, made criminals of citizens, and heroes of criminals. Anarchists planted bombs, sometimes blowing themselves up in the process. Nicolo Sacco and Bart Vanzetti were executed in 1927 for a robbery that took place in 1920, or perhaps for being immigrants with dangerously radical friends; historians haven't quite made up their minds. The Ku Klux Klan enforced not just segregation, but subjugation. "The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere."

     Those biases were found in more respectable circles as well, in the form of a eugenics movement that bore the imprimatur of scientists from the leading universities. In the spring of 1927, by a vote of 8-1, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a woman to be sterilized on the grounds of being feeble-minded. Scientific theories about the superiority of northern Europeans over Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans were as spurious as they were self-interested, but they influenced housing segregation in the U.S., and encouraged the Nazis in some of their most deranged practices.

      For all that, the mood of this book is cheerful, and occasionally joyful. Babe Ruth's mighty bat brought delight to thousands; the golden age of the movies was just getting started; and Charles Lindbergh may have had a miserable time being thrust into the limelight, but his achievement made America feel like anything was possible.

 

 

Any Good Books, 1 March 2022

 

Empire of Pain

 Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Patrick Radden Keefe (2021, Doubleday)

    Isaac and Sophie Sackler, hard-working eastern European immigrants to Brooklyn, achieved a version of the American dream: they had three sons who grew up to be doctors. Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond would also leave lasting marks on the pharmaceutical industry, and, through their extravagant philanthropy, on museums and educational institutions across the world. There is, however, a movement afoot to take their names off of some of those edifices, because their name has finally been associated with the dangerous drugs they sold, to the detriment of millions.

  The eldest Sackler brother, Arthur, had a truly remarkable degree of entrepreneurial energy. Even in high school, he edited publications and hustled for advertising sales, delivered flowers, and had a paper route; when his plate was full, he enlisted his brothers to step into his old jobs. One of his most profitable sidelines, by the time he got to medical school, was copywriting for a drug company. In 1942, he joined the William Douglas McAdams agency, which specialized in pharmaceutical advertising; within five years, he bought the founder out, and was running the show. His clients were among the first to send out dozens, then hundreds, of sales reps, bringing free lunches and official-looking medical literature into doctors' offices, in the interest of persuading them to prescribe a particular drug by brand name.

   Always in search of synergy, Arthur also started a weekly newspaper called the Medical Tribune. "The whole purpose was to reach physicians and to influence them ('educate' them, Arthur would insist), so the Medical Tribune was subsidized by pharma ads and distributed for free." In his capacity as advertising guru for companies like Pfizer (Terramycin) and Hoffman-La Roche (Librium and Valium), he was his own best customer. He was also a secret partner in an ostensibly competitive ad agency, run by a friend who had once worked for him; it was a simpler way to handle competing products without a visible conflict of interest. And he bought a small drug company, Purdue Frederick, naming his brothers as equal partners.

    He needed Mortimer and Raymond to run that business as his own interest strayed into collecting Asian art, becoming a large force in the market; he had a special arrangement with the Metropolitan Museum to store as well as to display parts of his collection, and he gave them a wing to put an Egyptian temple in. Meanwhile, Purdue plodded along selling Betadine antiseptic and Senakot laxative. It was considered a minor part of Arthur's estate when he died in 1987, and his heirs were happy to sell their share to the younger brothers.

    By then Mortimer's daughter Kathe and Raymond's son Richard had found places in the company, and were moving it into the pain relief business. An English subsidiary had invented a way to coat tablets so that morphine could be dispensed by mouth, because the coating released the drug over time. Purdue released MS Contin in the United States, and it did very well, but it still had the scary reputation of morphine, considered a last resort drug. Richard Sackler pushed the R&D department for a new formulation that could both renew the patent exclusivity of the Contin coating, and gain acceptance for the wider world of pain sufferers. OxyContin was the time-release form of oxycodone, a chemical cousin of morphine and heroin, and it met those criteria very well. Though stronger than morphine, it was perceived as an ordinary painkiller, familiar from Percocet and Percodan pills. OxyContin came in much larger doses, however, marketed to last twelve hours.

   Real life was not so tidy. In many patients, the pills wore off in eight or ten hours; and the protective coating could be readily defeated by cutting or crushing the pills, leading to an immediate rush. In either case, withdrawal symptoms were miserable, and constantly on the verge of returning. An epidemic was born, as the Sacklers could very well have seen from their own sales figures, had they been willing to. As with Arthur Sackler and Valium, they tended to blame addicts for some character flaw, rather than considering the drugs themselves addictive. They probably didn't see themselves as addicted to the billions in profits, either.

   Patrick Radden Keefe has done a beautiful job of telling this harrowing story. He's got citations for every detail and anecdote, and they're stitched together very naturally. A friend I mentioned it to said the book sounded depressing, and I couldn't quite explain why it isn't. Maddening, maybe, and horrifying, but the misery of the victims is not the focus of the story. No, this book is about the shamelessness of the Sacklers: "They could produce a rehearsed simulacrum of human empathy, but they seemed incapable of comprehending their own role in the story, and impervious to any genuine moral epiphany." Lord have mercy.

 

 

Any Good Books, February 2022 by emair 2/1/22

 

Behind the Magic Curtain

Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham's Civil Rights Days

T. K. Thorne (NewSouth Books, 2021)

There was no chance I wouldn't want to read Behind the Magic Curtain: Birmingham's history has always held a fascination for me, particularly the story of the years when I lived there but was too young to follow the world-changing events. In addition to familiar mayors, bishops, and department store owners, the book is full of people I knew growing up there, including friends of my parents or the parents of my friends.

I'm sorry I can't report better of it as a reading experience. It's clearly the product of extensive research, but the notes and quotes don't necessarily add up to a satisfying narrative, any more than a stack of boards make a house. There may actually be too many characters, some of whom are brought in for a single anecdote, then forgotten. Given that, a better final editorial pass would have been a big improvement, as would a more sedulous indexing job. (How do you quote Bear Bryant in the text, and omit him in the index?)

There is a central character, however, and I didn't know about him before. Tom Lankford was the police beat reporter for the Birmingham News, reporting to Vincent Townsend, Sr., the general manager and assistant to the publisher. Townsend assigned Lankford, just a couple of years out of journalism school, to shadow Eugene "Bull" Connor and the Birmingham Police Department. This put him in a position to exchange favors with City Hall staff and police officers at all levels, and T. K. Thorne is not loath to admit that some of what he did fell outside the bounds of journalistic ethics. His first loyalty was to Townsend, but information flowed in nonstandard ways; he used hidden microphones and taping systems to find out about both the Ku Klux Klan and the civil rights leaders, often to the benefit of the police or Bull Connor. Lankford was on the spot when the Freedom Riders arrived at Birmingham's Trailways bus station, avoiding a Klan beating only because one of their number (who was an FBI spy, to boot) recognized him as "Bull's boy."

The whole story features strange bedfellows, and people who could have been allies but weren't. On the Black side, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth had lawsuits and protests going before Martin Luther King ever came to town, only to have King getting the lion's share of attention in 1963. Thorne reprints the Birmingham Ministers' Letters of January and April of 1963, to which King's Letter from the Birmingham Jail was a response; she assumes the reader knows or can look up King's letter. In the climate of violence caused by White supremacists, the pastors, bishops, and one rabbi were offering utterly insufficient solutions for their Black neighbors: "When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets." Even this was enough to stir up protests from their white parishioners, and they were utterly wounded when King said he needed much more, much sooner.

The other development in the spring of 1963 was an electoral impasse. The preceding November, voters had narrowly endorsed a change of governance from a system with three commissioners – Bull Connor was one of these – to a mayor and city council system. The mayoral election of March fifth resulted in a runoff between Bull Connor and Albert Boutwell; on April second, Connor lost, and refused to accept the results. The next day, Black students from Miles College began a program of sit-ins and boycotts directly challenging segregation. It was to be a long and raucous summer of marches, to the consternation of White moderates. David Vann, a lawyer who would later be mayor, said, "This is the most cruel and vicious thing that has ever happened in Birmingham." Well, no, sir, there were beatings, bullets, and bombs you could put up against it, if you really wanted to talk about cruelty.

The inconvenient timing of the protests was part of the point, not least because the Black leadership reckoned correctly that Bull Connor would not respond with moderation. Police dogs and fire hoses wielded on national television against schoolchildren would have more impact in Washington, D.C., than all the lawsuits and committee meetings of the preceding years. The September bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which notoriously killed four young girls, would make more of a difference to the consciences of White Birmingham. There was still a very long way to go.

Other books that I liked better:

https://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Diane%20McWhorter

https://anygoodbooks-mixedreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Hank%20Klibanoff

 

Any Good Books, January 2022

published by email 1/1/22