About My Best Photograph Of 2009
Taken at the May 26 protest against the California Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Proposition 8’s prohibition of marriage equality, held at Salmon Street Springs. The full photo set contains a total of twenty-four photos, including several others featuring this particular subject, but it was this one which The Progressive paid to use in their July 2009 issue.
Oddly, or perhaps not, marriage equality also was the subject of the coverage of which I am most proud from back in my Portland Communique days. Uninterested in marriage myself, but able to legally obtain one if I wanted to, the subject for some reason sparks some of my best work in any medium.
More generally, my best photographs — although I’m still judgmental enough to cringe any time I succumb to using “best” and “photograph” when discussing myself — tend to be those that capture moments, not objects, and certainly not (although there are apparent exceptions) subjects aware that they are being photographed.
Out of all my photography over the course of last year — of television panel events, high school plays, teabagging, comic book conventions, zoo animals, and even bicycle races — ultimately the visual happenstance of this shot comes first in capturing a moment not just from the event, nor just from that singular day, but from the necessary motion of history.
The Strange And Dangerous Offspring
The Family (Powells)
by Jeff Sharlet
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for such utopian dreams? Lately some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America — from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy — that means a culture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow as he conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love. These are the days of the sword, literally — wealthy members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to battle standards, a fad inspired by a Christian best seller called Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of Man’s Soul. As jargon, then, maximalism isn’t bad, but I think fundamentalism still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
I offer these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of American fundamentalism, an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the defining tension of a creed that is both fearful and proud even as it proclaims itself joyous and humble. It is a martyr’s faith in the hands of the powerful, its cross planted in the blood-soaked soil of manifest destiny. It is the strange and dangerous offspring of two intensely fertile sets of stories, “America” and “Christianity”.
End of excerpt.
A Powerful Correlation
The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
Yet inconsistencies abound even among the one third of Americans who say that they consider the Bible the literal word of God — not merely “inspired by God” but, from the serpent in the Garden of Eden to Jesus’ resurrection from the grave, an explicit blueprint handed down by the deity, with Part I going directly to Moses and Part II through Jesus to the twelve apostles. Even more Americans — four in ten — believe that God made man in his present form, in one distinct act of creation, during the past 10,000 years. There is something mysterious about the finding that Americans are more likely to believe in the creation account set forth in Genesis than they are to credit the literal truth of the whole Bible. Apparently many people accept the story that God created Adam out of dust and Eve out of Adam’s rib but balk at subsequent whims of the Supreme Being, say, sending a flood to destroy everyone on earth but one family or making a ninety-year-old woman pregnant by her hundred-year-old husband Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people, and then asking Abraham to kill his only son. A similar inconsistency is apparent in polls showing that nearly two thirds of Americans believe in heaven but fewer than half believe in hell. It seems that the American tendency to choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu is not limited to Catholics.
Regardless of how fundamentalists fine-tune their beliefs, there is unquestionably a powerful correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education. Approximately 45 percent of those who have no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible, while only 29 percent with some college — and just 19 percent of college graduates — share that old-time faith. Secularism, skepticism, and acceptance of mainstream science all rise with education; two thirds of college graduates, but only about one third of high school graduates, believe that living beings have evolved over time — with or without the guiding hand of a creator.
End of excerpt.
The Worst Pseudoscientific Ideas
The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
Forgotten in their original form but not gone, the worst pseudoscientific ideas emanating from the late nineteenth century are constantly being marketed under new brand names in the United States. Social Darwinism has never died: it manifested itself as a bulwark of eugenics until the Second World War; in the tedious midcentury “objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand; and, most recently, in the form of market economy worship that presents itself not as political opinion but as a summa of objective facts. All of the theories included in the general category of social Darwinism may be summed up in the immortal line uttered by the hero of Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943): “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is — ‘Hands off!’” Rand was an atheist, but Americans have managed to translate her social Darwinism into the language of faith: according to a recent poll, a majority mistakenly believe that “God helps those that help themselves” is a line from the Bible.
It is useful to recall that intellectualism was not always synonymous with liberalism, especially economic liberalism, in the American mind. The irreconcilable conflict between evolutionism and biblical literalism would probably have been sufficient to engender a permanent fundamentalist antagonism towards all intellectuals and scientists who disputed any part of the creation story in Genesis. But the fact that so many prominent intellectuals once used Darwinian evolution as an argument against all social reform provided yet another reason for populist fundamentalists to dismiss not only the theory of evolution but the rich intellectuals who seemed to be its most ardent proponents. [William Jennings] Bryan would no doubt have been astonished had anyone told him 1896, when he made his “Cross of Gold” speech, that by the end of the twentieth century, many Americans who shared his religious beliefs would ally themselves with the political party favoring the interests of the rich — and that the Social Gospel, enjoining Christians to help their fellow man, would be replaced by the conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves (and that the Bible tells us so).
End of excerpt.
Granting Religion Immunity
The Age of American Unreason (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone’s faith — an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions. Both the Constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society enjoin us to respect our fellow citizens’ right to believe whatever they want — as long as their belief, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But many Americans have misinterpreted this sensible laissez-faire principle to mean that respect must be accorded the beliefs themselves. This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. Millions of Americans are perfectly free, under the Constitution, to believe that the Lord of Hosts is coming one day to murder millions of others who do not consider him the Messiah, but the rest of the public ought to exercise its freedom to identify such beliefs as dangerous fallacies that really do pick pockets and break legs.
End of excerpt.
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