Concerning Faith and Morality

A forthright statement by Bishop Nunzio Galatino, the Secretary-General of the Conference of Italian Bishops, resonates well with the statement by Pope Francis "Who am I to judge?" Reformist Pope Francis stunned the world in the early days of his papacy and now another major proponent of reform has broken ranks with the traditionalist hierarchy in the Roman Catholic Church.

“My wish for the Italian Church is that it is able to listen without any taboo to the arguments in favor of married priests, the Eucharist for the divorced, and homosexuality," is the money quote in an article by Yasmine Hafiz on the Huffington Post dated May 15, 2014.

Obtuse and harmful pronunciamentos from the Vatican have plagued the alleged sacrosanctity of this religious institution for the better part of two millennia. Statements ex cathedra by the supreme pontiff - asserted by the ordained hierarchy to be beyond temporal dispute, become less credible when couched in pedestrian beliefs du jour. Rigorous scholarship and solid science exist in often fractious contrast to such quasi-divine impertinence and there have been some really rotten, really bloody episodes when ideology has attempted to trump serious inquiry au contraire in the long history of this religious denomination.

I wrote and Huffington Post published my comment on this article. Here is what I wrote:

It took the better part of 75 years in my time on planet earth to accept that the pablum thrust on me as a trusting youth was toxic, ignorant, and life-threatening. Check out works by Wayne Meeks, John Boswell, Phillips Jenkins, and Resla Aslan. Look at solid research, not fairy tales. Embrace the humanity we hold in common.

Mind you, there is a not so subtle hint in what I wrote that intimates that I too am a revisionist thinker in these heady matters. Pope Francis is a couple of years older than me and I don't see myself as anything remotely resembling personal status as a peer of His Holiness. There are other religious traditions quite as doughty as the Roman Catholics elsewhere on the globe and in the history of the human race writ large. Some significant tutelage is to be found in the work of Joseph Campbell and I venture to say that terms like ethos, logos and pathos have a more universal significance than the narrow and judgemental habits to which the apologists of Western Christianity lay claim.

I have no objection to the concept of the leap of faith examined by Thomas Aquinas and more recently by Karl Jung. Reason alone is inadequate.  Faith satisfies a fundamental yearning among humankind, it seems to me, but the "whys and wherefores" are essentially inchoate IMHO. Suffice it to say that anthropomorphizing a deity or deities is suspiciously culturally specific ab origine. Commandments come and go in reality, one notices, and assertions of supremacy for religious reasons are a fool's errand.

Huzzzah for the anti-establishment Italian bishop and more such accolades for Pope Francis in his agnostic comments. There will be an Extraordinary Synod for the Family in October and we shall see how mutually exclusive views on hot-button topics may be reconciled.

A year has gone by since my last substantive post here at The View from Sequin Heights, and a lot has happened. CM Lilligren is no more, having been trounced by scads of new voters who preferred CM Abdi Warsame. There are seven new city council members, including a Hmong American in Ward 5, a Somali American in Ward 6, and a Latina American in Ward 9. Also new faces  in the mayor's office and Wards 3, 10, 11, and 13. CM Cam Gordon in Ward 2 continues as the sole Green Party member of the council.

I surmise that the troika of CMs Johnson and Goodman, and Mayor Hodges will continue to rule the roost, since the Council has kept on Rybak's City Attorney, City Coordinator, and a feckless incumbent in whatever passes for civil rights/human rights oversight. The rush to build ever more upper-income condo high- and mid-rises in and within easy reach of downtown will also continue even though it is increasingly obvious that this is a saturated market reminiscent of the scene along the riverfront in the 1980s when the City had to rescue failing enterprises in a unduly optimistic festive marketplace meme.

It will take another four years to see a further evolution in the composition of the City Council and I suspect that my friend and former colleague Kris Brogan will end the longstanding reign of the Rainvillle clan in Ward 1 and the consortium of North Minneapolis political families that have dominated the city council for many decades.

No more Barb Johnson as City Council President should that be the case and CM Glidden, now Council Vice President replacing former CM Lilligren, may bring greater attention to both south Minneapolis and more generally the rapidly changing demographics in the inner-city wards that are a first ring around the central business district  (CBD).

There are some serious loose ends hanging fire. One has to do with the growing population of baby boomers who are aging out of active employment. Another has to do with the home-based white-collar workforce that may well prefer to live in surroundings that Minneapolis has no way to offer - suburban and exurban landscapes, rather than urban cement, noise, air pollution, low-performing schools, crime, clutter, and oppressive taxation. A third phenomenon has to do with official fixation on sports palaces. The way that Minneapolis rammed through a billion-dollar gift to the Vikings owner demeans due process and rests on income projections proven nationally to be a financial turkeys over time and across the United States. Blue-collar employment is also at considerable risk because there seems to be little official interest in sustainable alternative energy production and/or industrial use.

Instead, we haggle over showpiece light rail and/or streetcars, see our infrastructure being given a low priority, and notice flight to the suburbs far more likely than the attempt to return to post-WWII population density meant to reinvent that particular wheel at 500K and higher. Where will 200K additional residents live? Where will they find suitable employment? How will a half-million people find ways to travel that won't involve freeway "parking lot" traffic jams or stiff parking fees in the CBD and its immediate surrounds? What families of four will find it routinely splendid to drop $400-500 for seats at the football stadium every time our losing Vikings fail once again to break their now familiar and unimpressive win/loss record in the NFL?

Item: The rise of a fascist oligarchy nationally has ominous local implications as well. Our police have effectively been militarized. State-sponsored invasions of our privacy have become routine with no credible oversight. We can be "vanished" in the best Argentinian, Chilean,Central American, Russian, and/or Chinese traditions.

Item: Attacking the messenger rather than admitting wrong-doing has become standard issue even in the face of the Congress of the United States. Our national financial structures have been "taken to the cleaners" by large-scale malfeasance in major corporate enterprises and surprise! no one goes to jail for the theft of billions of dollars. No one is held accountable for trillions of tax avoidance dollars parked beyond the usual reach of our Treasury.

Item: More ominously still is the appearance of organized armed and seditious groups on American soil. Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower used national military resources to restore constitutional order in domestic situations threatening the stability of the country writ large. Not so in 2014, despite posse comitatus already a dead letter. Wanton abuse of personal firearms kills thousands of Americans - ten times the lives lost on September 11, 2001. Mass slaughter of children has become no more than an awkward footnote, soon passing from informed views in official circles.

Item: Then there's the matter of global warming. Nature's vote means far more than obfuscatory attempts by the lackeys of the fossil fuels crowd. The entire State of California is now in drought, water reservoirs are emptying out, wildfires are rampant, and the once bountious agricultural central valley is sharply endangered with major national implications. Whatever the cause, that's hard news. Similarly, fracking in hundreds of locations in Oklahoma and Ohio are destabilizing a land mass overdue for a colossal shift along a fault line that runs through the entire lower Mississippi watershed. Ah, yes. And the overuse of the major western aquifers is leading inexorably to the desertification of the great plains and a hefty chunk of the southwestern states east of the Sierras. Meanwhile, both east and west coasts of the country are being pummeled by the great oceans rising in response to accelerated melting of the planet's ice caps and glaciers. Not to mention torrential downpours, devastating superstorms,  polar vortex weather systems, and volcanic eruptions here and there.

These sweeping statements certainly trump whatever concerns I might otherwise still have about the antics of our local governments in Minnesota and Minneapolis. I look in vain for the ounce of prevention and dread the cost of the pound of cure that lies ahead.

A bit of personal history - and derring-do!

The View from Sequin Heights. May 5, 2013

A bit of personal history and derring-do!

On Friday, May 3, 2013 William J Cronon gave the annual Ralph Hall Brown Day Lecture to a packed auditorium in the Carlson School of Management. The event was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Department of Geography, Environment & Society. Among many credentials, Dr. Cronon is a past president of the American Historical Society, a former recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, and is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wi.

His topic, astonishingly, was “The Portage: Time, Memory and Storytelling in the Making of an American Place”. The ‘Portage’ he explored with us was none other than the portage and subsequent significance of the near-juncture of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers at what is now Portage, Wi. 

Having spent several years growing up in Portage, this was almost embarrassingly familiar. I did take occasion to interrupt the proceedings right at the conclusion of Professor Cronon’s talk to tell the assembly anonymously that I was essentially an avatar – germane to the topic in many ways consonant with the good professor’s affection for the significance of personal anecdotes and other informal approaches to that German ideal “Die Gelegenheit wie es eigentlich war”. 

I was able to inform the speaker and the hall that I was turning 75 years old this summer and had given guided tours of the Indian Agency House when I was 7 years old. I indicated that my relatives had been in custodial control of the House and its environs for the past seventy-odd years, were still in that role, and that I hoped to visit them in Wisconsin this very summer. I gave a few anecdotes from my own early years in Portage, thus confirming by my own testimony the value of first-hand accounts over the often dry and uncertain narratives written by historians and others at one or more removes from the time and place of interest. 

Dr. Cronon had new information for me as well. Frederick Jackson Turner and John Muir grew up just a few miles downstream from the Agency House and their influence later in life was profound in the evolving life of our nation and that of the Native Americans. The lessons they drew from their early years remain with us as well as recollection of a third individual who worked for years to reforest what had been cleared for cultivation in this same vicinity. Young Lieutenant Jefferson Davis – hailing originally from Mississippi - was stationed at Fort Winnebago in the early 1830s, also nearby, and went on to become a member of Lincoln’s cabinet and still later, the President of the Confederate States of America. 

Given the recent fascination with numbers and number theory, it was briefly instructive to learn that the ancient portage trail was/is 2600 paces long. A bit over a mile in all. I described how I would ride my bike down the levee on the Wisconsin end of this wonder en route to the county fair in the first ward. I indicated that the city fathers had had to build the levee to keep the first ward from flooding every spring. Ah, yes, quoth the good professor, Irish immigrants had settled on that low ground. 

I had been invited to attend this event as an alumnus of the U of MN Geography Department. My summa degree dates from 1993 and the intervening years have seen much community activity on my part and almost no contact with the faculty of that earlier time. Attrition has understandably sharply reduced their ranks and I only recognized a couple of faces – Will Craig, with whom I worked briefly in the later 1990s on the emerging utility of GIS technology in neighborhood settings, and John Adams, long emeritus, a former chair of the Geography Department, and a teacher from whom I learned much about the geography of the Twin Cities as such was then understood. 

I left before the body was gearing up to adjourn to a nearly reception because, alumnus cum “avatar”  notwithstanding, I have been pointedly distant from the department ever since I was advised at the beginning of my graduate career also in 1993 that I ought rather go live with “those people” in San Francisco and give no thought to following up on my summa thesis “Are Gay Studies on the Map”.

This unfortunate ignorance uttered by a former editor of the Annals of American Geography, known for his ruthless practices as an editor of student writing, when coupled with the non-response from a number of seasoned faculty who really should have known better, convinced me that whatever my various attainments within this realm have been or may yet be, I would never lend my good name to such intellectual garbage as was clearly ascendant at that time in that otherwise highly prestigious department in the heady international world of such scholarship.

Events continue to create their own headlines and histories in these matters and I regret that my sharp recollections of the first three decades of my own life are unavailable to the good offices of such later generations of scholars as have recently emerged around much of the globe. Actually, the next four decades in my life – moving now toward the appellation”octogenarian” in the fifth such subsequent decade – have quite their own story to tell. Should I move to write a formal memoir, the early years that I touched on at the Brown Day lecture episode will have their place in such a narrative.  

Just not under the auspices of the Geography Department that would have relegated me to the presumed fleshpots of the West Coast. 

I’m just not that forgiving.

Fred Markus

Starting a 2013 exploration

Tony Scallon writes to Minneapolis Issues to urge that the polished rhetoric of Abdi Warsame’s speech to the Ward 6 DFL convention ought to quiet concerns about Mr. Warsame’s notion of the good in politics. This despite the well-documented outrage being expressed by seasoned veterans of the DFL’s caucus and convention processes. And given the laundry list of recollections intimated by Dave Garland, there is ample reason to doubt the integrity of the DFL party’s internal motivations as against the expressed letter and intent of that party’s origins and current fundamental documents.

Well it’s a messy business, all right, but how about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

As Andrea Schaerf has appropriately suggested, the swamping of precinct caucuses only goes so far – too much gasoline, as it were, and not enough fire prevention or firefighting assets in place. The issue, as she suggests, is that these organized marches of one part of the “vox populi” only obtains if there is sufficient combustible material beyond the often docile ranks of the disaffected participant/victors in this presumably structured partisan environment.

Item: it’s well known that R.T. et al were dismissive of legitimate East African concerns, whatever the public rhetoric ladled out, save only for an investment in Hussein Samatar’s nascent development corporation. A “causus belli”, IMHO with reference to the less-established but rapidly growing interest in the mechanics of nomination, endorsement, and potential election in what is an essentially one-party city with seriously flawed policy practices in that party and in the behavior of a whole string of elected incumbents up to and including our state-level governing bodies.

Item: Conversely, the track record of our incumbent City Council Member, sitting Vice-President of that body CM Robert Lilligren, is frankly formidable. His vita is readily available from his campaign website. I know from Mr. Warsame’s introductory letter announcing his intention to seek the Ward 6 seat on the Minneapolis City Council that he has the perquisite professional background and leadership involvement in his personal portfolio. But not at the level of a thirteen-member governing body who made short shrift of the Green Party incumbents in the early years of the first decade of this century while continuing a well-worn practice of kowtowing to developers and major business interests for whom grassroots initiatives were, and still are, seemingly much more annoying than valid.

Item: On sexual and gender diversity issues, one must look askance at Mr. Warsame’s elision of any potential commitment to the well-established policy profiles lately achieved in Minnesota’s public life and determinedly valid in the City of Minneapolis. Will we see continued commitment in these matters from a conservative Muslim cohort who, like many evangelicals, see moral and religious turpitude as definitive in these matters, whatever the increasingly probative value of research in the academic world that establishes such diversity as part of the normal range of possibility in homo sapiens sapiens.

Would we see vigorous action from either of these major candidates regarding the high-risk lives led by our hundreds of homeless teenagers, whatever their sexual or gender understandings?  As a large municipal destination magnet, we as a society are confronted in these matters by bullying, parental rejection, suicides,  and inimical pressures from sexual predators, the black-market drug culture, gang-related intimidation, and an often hostile police force.

Item: What can be done to address the ever-growing demand curve as baby boomers reach retirement and grasp that their personal preparations are proving to be hopelessly inadequate. This has been a major concern for a very long time in Minneapolis and elsewhere and face it – we won’t all be able to live in market-rate condos and apartments or shell out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for essential medical procedures or supportive living environments. 

Item: We are in a serious financial pickle in the current reality of hugely expensive “trophy projects” – stadiums and convention centers that are reliably predicted to be net loss long-term investments nationwide. Just imagine what a billion dollars would do in the realm of essential municipal services right here in Minneapolis!

Who shall best advocate for a more sensible balance in the assignment of resources here? This is not a parlor game or a popularity contest. Lives are lost, children are marked for life, and families are torn asunder with increasing regularity as the banks continue to hoard assets and corporate leadership awards itself grossly inflated financial benefits, outsources productive activity to places far from the land of ten thousand lakes, and routinely uses offshore tax havens and other rather obvious public subsidies rather than to share in constitutional requirements about the good of the whole.

Item: Secrecy versus transparency has become the norm in our municipal governance lately. This is unacceptable for a host of historical reasons. When coupled with the increasing militarization of our law enforcement establishment sans meaningful oversight, there’s a recipe here for violence here that may make the Plymouth Ave. riots seem minor in comparison. Our place is becoming chock-a-block with nasty weapons meant for waging war and both instructions and examples of a capacity for massive slaughter abound in the news and online.

Our local government can’t fix all these things, but we can educate and inform far more sensibly in our ever-evolving population. We can also learn new values from both our new neighbors and those who were here before the Europeans ever got involved. And we can do this, as has happened in our past, without ruining the place with short-sighted machinations that just fuel all sorts of fires.

Of course there’s more to follow!

Fred Markus