Only God Can Save Us Now

Three Articles about America and Four Thoughts About Jesus

[I’m so sorry I can’t read my piece this morning, my voice is giving out. Praying it comes back for the weekend.]

Happy Friday after the Fourth. I hope you all have a happy day planned, with no unpleasant work. I came across three articles of interest yesterday, as I was going between the grill and the vat of hot oil—at least once a year it’s worth frying all those frozen store-bought fries instead of baking them in the oven. Enjoy, in the spirit of Americana, these articles and my thoughts on the other side of them:

one

My friend Julia picked up my thought yesterday and wrote about the grinding poverty many people, especially women, endure up here where we live:

A few years ago I read the book Upstate Girls by Brenda Ann Kenneally, the visual social history of a loose network of working-class women in Troy, New York, a crumbling post-industrial city not unlike the one where Anne and I live. Kenneally embedded with her subjects and their children, friends, and partners and documented their lives in a sprawling, disturbing, beautifully produced work of photojournalism. The girls are impoverished single mothers, cobbling together a living from a patchwork of low-skill, low-pay jobs supplemented by an array of social services. The fathers of their kids are absent or in prison. The women’s romantic lives are akin to what the educated classes self-consciously cultivate as polyamory, only distinctly lacking in the freedom and joy that such practices are supposed to confer.

Some, who are supposed to know, she writes, blame high fructose corn syrup and Call of Duty for these ills. Everyone knows something “systemic” is to blame. Various communities tried limiting the reach of the police:

It’s interesting to note that just a few years ago progressives, at least as represented by the focus group in Ithaca, believed that centralized policy decisions made by government entities could alleviate poverty and distress. In contrast, progressives now tend to believe in decentralized forms of collective action and mutual aid to address social ills; in fact, the Ithaca Common Council voted in 2021 to replace the city’s police department with a reimagined social services agency, a plan that was eventually walked back.

You should totally read the whole thing.

two

In contrast to the thoughtful, considered, and I might say, deeply well-read and knowledgable writing above, Christianity Today was having a hard time with America being so full of sin:

Each act of injustice within our society is like a knife slashing through the fabric of the flag, like a spray of blood that stains those white stripes of freedom. And each remembrance, each protest against injustice is an act of veneration of those same stars and stripes. If the flag flies as a symbol of our nation, then it represents both beauty and brokenness. As we celebrate our nation’s independence, we need traditions, stories, and a theological imagination that allows us to hold both the beauty and the brokenness with hope for who we are yet becoming. For Christians, despair and hope, bondage and freedom, brokenness and beauty are familiar tensions. The gospel records of Jesus’ resurrection invite us to pay attention to the wounded places as well as the possibility of healing. When Jesus appears to his disciples after his crucifixion and resurrection, he draws their attention not only to his embodied self, but specifically to his wounded places: “Look at my hands and my feet!” (Luke 24:39).

Casting about for what this “work of repair” might look like, the writer remembers that in Japan they repair broken pots with gold:

Kintsugi emerged out of Japanese tea ceremonies that were interrupted by earthquakes. When the ground ruptured, the exquisite pottery often fell to the floor and shattered. Artisans took the shattered pieces and glued them back together with gold. They didn’t deny the fragmented nature of their artistic practice. Instead, they pieced together the broken places with beauty.

This, the writer explains, is how Christians should work on America:

We need practices of repair within American culture to bring beauty out of our collective brokenness. Christians have an opportunity to lead in this work, as we follow the leadership of our wounded healer.

I was only there for the ratio.

three

And finally, I read this long thing about how everyone—everyone—knew about President Biden’s cognitive decline, but nobody would admit it:

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

Uniformly, these people were of a similar social strata. They lived and socialized in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. They did not wish to come forward with their stories. They did not want to blow a whistle. They wished that they could whistle past what they knew and emerge in November victorious and relieved, having helped avoid another four years of Trump. What would happen after that? They couldn’t think that far ahead. Their worries were more immediate.

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”

four

And so we are caught in this strange netherworld of collapsing systemic dysfunction, the icon of which is the spectacle of Mr. Biden wandering around, I think it was yesterday, while the people who are most, as I said in Take One, supposed to know, but, in fact, as we can see, do not know—do not have a clue—how to solve not only social ills, but the very basic trouble of putting forward a Presidential candidate who is able, in some small measure, to carry out the duties of his office.