Boston and the End of the War on Terror

cross-posted from Dagblog

Five weeks after a terrorist attack on Boston, President Obama has declared that the War on Terror, "like all wars, must end."  If I had told you a year ago that he would make such a speech a month and a half after a high-profile terrorist attack on a major American city, neither you nor I would have believed me. But the lessons of Boston drive home the wisdom of the President's decision. It showed us that a terrorist attack is meant to be lived through and that Americans are ready to live through one. And it showed us an excellent civilian response to a terrorist attack paired with a decidedly mixed paramilitary response.

The key lesson of the Boston bombings is clear: the best way to prepare for a possible terrorist attack is to build six or eight world-class hospitals in your city. Start in the 19th century if you can.

I'm phrasing that as a joke, but much of Boston's resiliency and quick response was built on the city's superb medical infrastructure. Every victim who was alive when a first responder reached them got to a hospital. Every victim who got to a hospital lived. That is simply remarkable. The city's medical personnel held the death count to the absolute minimum. That does not diminish the senselessness of those three deaths, or the grievous wounds that many survivors suffered. But the city's doctors and nurses prevented a fourth or fifth or sixth senseless death, and I am grateful to them for that.

Some of Boston's success at coping with the attack comes from specific post-September-11 training. Boston's emergency responders had drilled for this scenario, and all of the hospital trauma centers had some doctors who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and had experience treating the kinds of severely traumatic injuries that they saw on April 15. You can only give the police and EMTs special training after you've built organizations strong enough to carry out the training. First responders did a superb and intelligent job in triaging the wounded, spreading them out between the six nearby trauma centers. But that could only happen because the first responders had the luxury of six top-tier trauma centers within a three-mile radius. There aren't many spots on the planet with that luxury; the attack happened at the heart of a medical epicenter.

And you can't build a Tier One trauma center in any hospital. You need an institution and a staff that can support it. Boston could only dedicate such impressive resources to crisis medicine and emergency response because of the profound depth in the city's overall medical resources. Boston was ready to tend its wounded on that terrible day because Boston works on tending the wounded every day.

Boston's response to the Marathon bombings, its ability to absorb the body blow and respond effectively, was built on its peacetime strengths. It was a victory of the open society. On the other hand, the paramilitary response to the bombing suspects once they were identified, the manhunt and the city-wide lockdown, showed that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns. Getting tougher, giving the police heavier weapons or more military training, is not going to help; we're already at the point where those things are beginning to offset their own benefits.

I certainly can't fault the various police forces engaged in the manhunt for their caution; the bombers had already murdered a police officer, and they'd thrown IEDs at others. They had no choice but to assume that Dzokhar Tsarnaev had a gun and at least one more bomb. But the daylong lockdown, which paralyzed a major urban area and temporarily stopped its economy dead, was at least partly counterproductive. The lockdown itself helped hide Tsarnaev. He was found almost immediately after the lockdown ended, by one of the neighbors who'd been locked down. The militarized search took all the civilian eyes off the street. As soon as those eyes were back, the fugitive was easy to find.

After every attack, there are calls to get "tougher." But there's no tougher to get at this point without undermining ourselves. We're already at the point where the "toughness" is starting to hurt as much as it helps. Sending more cops with more body armor wasn't going to speed up that search. If they'd called in the National Guard, the bomber would probably still be hiding in that boat now.

And that's basically where we are as a country with the larger situation. Bringing more muscle than we've already brought to the War on Terror isn't going to get us better results. In fact, we've hit the point where more muscle and more security restrictions are going to bring us slightly worse results, while continuing to drain our resources.

There have also been calls to "toughen" immigration, because the bombers were immigrants, and there will be a new minor rule change designed to hassle foreign students between terms. That is not going to meaningfully cut back on terrorism, though it will play into the terrorists' argument that we're a country hostile to foreigners.

Of course, the people screaming about tougher immigration rules are ignoring the immigrants who played important positive roles during the Boston events. The terrorists were actually located because the hostage they took in a car-jacking, a Chinese national, was able to escape them and was quick-thinking enough to help the police track the terrorists with his cell phone. I don't see how keeping that guy out of the country would have made things better.

Nor can any reasonable person believe that those world-class hospitals that saved so many victims' lives on the day of the bombing are run by exclusively American-born doctors and medical staff. A world-class research hospital, by its nature, attracts talent from across the world. Some of the people saving lives in those six trauma units were immigrants. I'm pretty glad those people were here.

We're not going to be make our country safer by keeping foreign medical students out of the country. We can only make ourselves a little less safe by doing that, becoming a country with less young medical talent. We're not going to make ourselves safer by making it even more of a hassle to fly; we can only weaken ourselves a little by discouraging foreign talent and foreign business from coming. Closing our society down doesn't make it safer from terrorist attacks. It only weakens our power to weather those attacks.

Terrorism will never go away. It only takes a few disgruntled people willing to murder strangers. And we will always need to invest some resources in stopping terrorism and repairing the damage. But the question is how we allocate those investments. Some anti-terrorism spending goes toward things that have no other use in themselves, such as the x-ray machines in the airport, and that function as a drag on the overall economy, such as making airline travel more difficult and complicated. Frankly, most obvious military and security measures fall into these categories. On the other hand, spending money on things like hospitals improve the country's effective security while improving the general economy. Build excellent hospitals, with some extra money for things like trauma response, and you make the city better while also making it less likely that people in that city are killed by terrorists. Investments that protect us against terrorism and its effects while also strengthening our open society are apure gain. Spending on fortifying the country always involves some dead loss; spending on strengthening the public commons makes us safer while benefiting us in other ways. There will always have to be some straight-up security measures that will function as sheer cost; those costs are hedges against risk. But those measures can never diminish risk to zero, and at a certain point they start to cost far more than they save. On the other hand, money spent on building our country, rather than walling it in, is a secure investment in every sense.

In Praise of the Writing Binge

When I got my first job, I also got a book of advice for new professors. It gave me some sensible-sounding advice about writing. Avoid binge writing, it said. Write at regularly scheduled hours and keep each session brief. Too many graduate students are used to writing in crazy binges, the authors said, rather than developing steady writing habits. Faculty had to learn to write all the time, and also had to learn to STOP writing even if things were going well. And I tried to take that advice seriously. I have always believed in good writing habits and deplored the way graduate school undermines those habits. I drank the no-binge Kool-Aid with a smile, in an appropriately moderate serving. But that advice is fundamentally wrong. If I had kept following it, my career would now be a smoking ruin.

Writing binges are things of wondrous beauty. I can't do without them, and all the work of which I'm most proud was done in flagrant violation of the no-binge rule. Part of that is simply who I am as a writer. I will never be a 45-minute-a-day writer, just as I will never be an early-morning writer no matter how much I would like to be. (I am a nocturnal writer, and that's that. Every attempt to become a virtuous early-bird writer ends up wasting a morning and leaving me too sleepy to write later when I'm feeling productive.) But more importantly, some things cannot be written at all without some form of binge. You cannot build them out of six hundred brief sessions, any more than you can train for a marathon by running two miles a day. Some pieces of writing demand the writer's full attention in a way that cannot be kept up forever. They require weeks or months of intense focus to complete, after which the writer goes through a rest period, working at a more relaxed pace and paying more attention to tasks that have been put off during the most strenuous writing.

Now, the book that advised me to write in brief, regular sessions could itself have been written in a number of brief, regular sessions. Its structure was simple, its prose was not complicated, and neither really were its ideas. Likewise, those books that tell you how to write your novel in one hour a day could have been written in one hour a day. But you can't actually write a good novel in one hour a day any more than you can drive from Boston to Los Angeles in one hour a day. Doing it that way is not efficient. Neither can you write a book of complicated or original scholarship in nothing but short sessions without losing the thread. To sustain a complicated argument over hundreds of pages requires sustained focus.

Obviously, you cannot write anything so complicated in a single sitting. This part of the no-binge rule makes sense. Procrastinating until the deadline arrives (or passes) and pulling an all-nighter is obviously counter-productive. So is banging out three 25-page term papers over a week and a half, as the semester system requires many graduate students to do. That is not a writer sustaining focus. You need to give a project your attention for the full time it needs. Otherwise, it's like trying to drive from Boston to Los Angeles in a single go without stopping.

I spent six weeks in the middle of this spring semester on a writing binge. It wasn't a frantic graduate-school-style binge, and it couldn't have been. I can't drop everything else and hole up in my study for days. I continued teaching and grading and going to meetings. I continued my multi-state weekly commute to see my spouse, and continued paying attention to my spouse. I continued cooking the meals. But I arranged things during those six weeks to clear all the time that I could for writing. I set aside that time in large blocks. And I made getting my writing done during those six weeks my priority. There were no deadlines but the ones I set for myself, and the recognition that I could only keep my window of time open for so long. The results were excellent; I completed a few projects that had been almost-but-not-quite finished for seemingly forever, and then finished a monster article that I had been wrestling with for over a year. Working on that article in short, manageable stints had inched along like a glacier, taking a step back for every two steps forward, and every time I was forced to set it aside and deal with something else I would lose the thread. (Of course, spreading out the work on the articles over such a long period ensured that work on it would be interrupted repeatedly, that I would have to work on something else or have a week with almost no writing time.) In fact, the fragmentation of the writing process was damaging it, fragmenting its structure as the months went by. But a sustained six-week march made it into a unified whole for the first time, and got it out the door.

In the six weeks since that binge, I haven't been nearly as productive. I've had to pay the committee-work bills I'd deferred during the binge, and a bunch of new ones that have come due. One reason that I set my private deadline when I did was that I knew that the end of the semester would bring demands that would leave little time for sustained writing. Oh, I've written a lot over the last six weeks: memos, e-mails, reports, an application form, a questionnaire for a survey, even a form rejection letter. All of those writing tasks fit easily into routine, manageable sessions. And for the last six weeks, my scholarly writing has mostly happened in sessions of an hour or so at a time, which means not much gets done. But I'm less frustrated than I would be if I had hoped, unrealistically, to set aside the same amount of time or produce the same number of pages every week. Instead, I experience this crush of busy-work as simply a fallow period between one season of strenuous writing and the next. I have another week or two of grading and bureaucratic reporting, and then summer will have come in and it will be time to write hard again. When that new season starts, I have to be ready.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Why It's Hard to Smear Jason Collins (and Not as Easy to Smear Keynes)

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's been a tough week for elite gay-baiting. First Howie Kurtz, hack journalist extraordinaire, lost his job at the Daily Beast because he badly botched an attempt to smear NBA center Jason Collins. Part of what Kurtz botched was the facts, claiming that Collins had concealed the fact that he had once been engaged to a woman when Collins had "concealed" that fact by explicitly stating it in his Sports Illustrated coming-out article. ("When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged," is pretty straightforward.) Kurtz, to his credit, has made a full apology.

Then, Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson (also a columnist for the Daily Beast) was also forced to apologize after publicly gay-baiting landmark economist John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson decided to tell an audience that Keynes wasn't interested in long-term policy effects (itself a gross distortion of Keynes's position) because Keynes was a homosexual in a childless marriage. Yes, really. That's the standard of logic and evidence to which Ferguson holds himself.

It's heartening that both of these outrageous pieces of queer-baiting blew up in the queer-baiters' faces. Both Kurtz and Ferguson were using well-established, traditionally effective gambits for smearing homosexuals, moves that Kurtz and Ferguson clearly expected to work because those moves have always worked before. (In fact, many other people, including Ferguson himself, have used Keynes's sexuality as a slur that supposedly discredits his economic thinking; Ferguson thought he'd get away with it because he'd gotten away with it other times.)

Let's look at Kurtz's attack in detail. His claim was that Jason Collins (of whom I myself will only say Stanford Pride) had been dishonest about the fact that he'd been engaged to a woman and deceived that woman. It's a classic anti-gay smear: gays are called dishonest because they've been in the closet, as if the source of dishonesty was not the institution of the closet itself, and the sometimes brutal social penalties for open gayness, but something intrinsic about gayness itself. Force a bunch of people to lie about their sexuality, denounce them as liars if they actually start telling the truth, and then claim that the people you've stigmatized deserve to be stigmatized because they're all naturally dishonest. The only logic here is a social logic, through which nearly any charge will stick to the despised group.

As part of this attack, Kurtz offered Collins's former fiancee as the wronged victim, whose plight the news coverage had unfairly overlooked. The basic motto here is "Won't anyone think about the poor straight girls?" Now, I would never recommend misleading a romantic partner. But it's also the case that closeted gay men have long had various kinds of relationships with women and that many gay men who've deceived their female partners have also deceived themselves on some level. (That John Maynard Keynes was gay does not mean that he did not love his wife.) But the gay-baiter's move is to play up the wrong done to the straight person in order to smear the character of the gay person, and by extension the character of gayness itself. This is how prejudice works, especially in people who don't consider themselves prejudiced: sympathy flows swiftly and easily to people in the favored categories, but is quickly withdrawn from people in stigmatized categories. You become quicker to accept negative ideas about a stigmatized person, and slower to let go of them. Here, the idea is that everyone sheds a few sentimental tears for the poor straight white girl and then turns their resentment upon the duplicitous, untrustworthy gay who did her wrong.

It didn't work, which is progress. But one reason that it didn't work is that Howard Kurtz picked on the wrong guy. Too many people are still quick to believe bad things about homosexuals. But lots of influential and powerful people are actually reluctant to believe bad things about Jason Collins personally, because they know and like him. They are quick and ready to sympathize with Collins as an individual, sexual orientation notwithstanding, because he's already part of their social network. He was inside the charmed circle before he came out of the closet, and he's staying in that circle.

The failure of Kurtz's attack validates the wisdom of letting Collins be the standard-bearer. Collins is clearly a Jackie Robinson figure, not in terms of sheer athletic talent (Collins is merely a superb world-class athlete, one of the top few thousand physical specimens on the planet; Robinson was in a level above that.) but in that, like Robinson, Collins has the social bona fides to blunt attacks on his character. Robinson had gone to USC, been a contender for the Heisman, and held a commission in World War Two. Collins is a Stanford grad. But Collins is even more of a Jackie Robinson type than Robinson, or any other black man in the 1940s, could have possibly been. Collins is socially wired in a way Robinson never was.

Collins is a college friend of Chelsea Clinton. Bill Clinton knows him personally. His college roommate was Joe Kennedy III. And those are just the highlights. Collins is enormously wealthy in social capital, meaning connections and beneficial relationships. He is black. He is gay. And he is firmly a member of the upper class. You can't just roll up on Jason Collins with some bullshit smear and make it stick. He has his people.

On the other hand, Keynes has been a punching bag among certain circles for a long time. Ferguson had to expect his queer-Keynes slur to keep working the way it always had because people were ready to have a gay man slurred but also because they were ready to have John Maynard Keynes slurred. The right wing has made a serious commitment to the idea that Keynes is disreputable. The commitment to making Keynes ridiculous was so strong that you didn't have to bother to have the charges against him make even minimal sense. (The idea that gays have no interest in posterity suggests that there would be no gay sculptors, painters, or writers. Perhaps you've heard of some.) That Ferguson was forced to apologize (this time) suggests that bigotry against gays is weakening somewhat, so that if you want to smear them you have to make it good. But it may also suggest that at this point in our ongoing depression, kneejerk rejection of economic stimulus is starting to wear thin. Maybe at this point, with austerity leading only to economic contraction, you're no longer allowed to backhand Keynes unless you make it good. One can only hope.

Things We Did Not Learn About the Marathon Bombings

Let's recap the things that did not happen on the sorry day that the Boston Marathon was bombed:

Five unexploded bombs were not discovered nearby. No unexploded bombs were discovered nearby.

The government did not shut down cell-phone service as a precaution to prevent more detonations. The cell phone system around Copley Square simply became massively overloaded, so that calls could not get through (but texts, which take much less bandwidth, could).

The police did not arrest anyone or identify any suspects.

Twelve victims did not die.

Neither of the bombs exploded inside the Copley Fairmont Hotel.

The 8-year-old girl in the photo that went around the internet was not killed; the 8-year-old victim was a boy.

And, much as I would like it to be true, the story about marathoners running across the finish line and continuing running to the hospital to donate blood cannot be true. The police closed down the finish-line area (i.e., the crime scene), and directed runners elsewhere. I'm sure some runners did donate blood, but the inspiring version of this story, where they finish the race and don't even break stride, is not true.

All of the above things that did not happen were widely reported and widely repeated, especially on the 24-hour news. If you watched the news for the first 24 hours, you were likely to "learn" at least some of these things that are not true. On the other hand, you would not learn much of anything accurate during the first 24 hours, because no one actually knew anything. The crime scene had not been properly searched yet. There had not been time for investigators to study photos and videos to look for the bomber.

So what did you gain if you watched cable news for the first 24 hours after the terrorist attack? Less than nothing. You "learned" more false information than you were given real information. What 24-hour coverage covers is the 24 hours before anyone knows anything. And watching the news during those 24 hours actually leaves you more ignorant than if you simply waited for the next day's paper.

Forty-eight hours later,  long after there was any such excuse, CNN and AP were trumpeting that a suspect had been arrested, and was on his way to arraignment at Boston's federal courthouse. A few hours later, they had to retract that story. They didn't just report that an arrest was imminent. They reported that the non-existent arrest had already happened.

Cable news obviously does a terrible job supplying information about the real world. But supplying viewers with information is not cable news's real job. The 24-hour news channels, no matter their partisan leanings, exist to insulate viewers from the emotional experience of not knowing. 24-hour news is for people who, like small children or Politico columnists, simply cannot wait.

What cable news offers is not information but protection from feelings of uncertainty. The emphasis is not on discovering the truth, but banishing the discomfort of being uncertain what the truth is. It will fill 24 hours with confidently reported gossip, speculation, and rumor in order to distract a viewer from any truths that remain unknown, and most of all from the truth that the viewer does not know. It is an emotional substitute for knowledge. That any actual information occasionally mixes into the news flow is just an accident of necessity.

The anxiety that cable news addresses, the discomfort with uncertainty, is the opposite of curiosity. Curiosity embraces uncertainty as a necessary first step to more knowledge. Curiosity is driven by the joy of discovery but also by the pleasure of groping toward that discovery, the pleasure of not knowing yet. (When the curious eventually answer a question, they become curious about a new question.) But cable news teaches that not knowing yet is intolerable. Having unanswered questions is intolerable. Not being sure of one's position is unbearable. So it promotes pseudo-knowledge, a set of cliches and talking points and reflexive attitudes that substitute for actually knowing something. That pseudo-knowledge does not help you understand the questions better. It labels questions officially answered, so you can stop thinking about them.

And conspiracy theories, which began to proliferate as soon as the bombings entered public awareness, are simply a more elaborate effort to close off the experience of the real world, to block out any sense of uncertainty and any possibility of surprise. Conspiracy theorists, whether American right-wingers or Egyptian Islamists, began denouncing the bombings as a fraud designed to frame people who share their ideologies because the conspiracy theorists think that the bombings likely were carried out by someone who shares their ideologies. (If a right-winger says that right-wingers are about to be framed, it's because on some level he thinks that right wingers did this. Likewise the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman who claimed that it's all a conspiracy to defame Muslims actually thinks the bombers are Muslims.) But more importantly, conspiracy theorists are trying to fend off, well in advance, any piece of evidence that might interfere with their theories. The point of a conspiracy theory is to make the facts fit the theory, not the theory fit the facts, so you'd better get a head start on inconvenient pieces of reality. The point is never to change your mind. An old joke says that "a paranoid is never surprised." That's the point of paranoia: to ward off the discomfort of discovering and learning, the intolerable intellectual adventure of not knowing something, the tormenting possibility of change and growth. Some people will go to any lengths not to learn anything new. For those who need an easier path, there is always CNN.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Marathon Day

Boston is my home, my beloved city, although I have not lived there for many years. And Patriot's Day, the Monday of the Boston Marathon, is the proudest day in a proud city's year. We open our city to all, and hold one of the world's greatest sporting events, the oldest annual marathon on the globe. We hold that race in public streets and fill the sidewalks to cheer. It is Boston's day to celebrate the many things that make it Boston.

Tonight the news is asking who did this and what they want. Of course, there are no answers to those questions yet. 24-hour news only fills the anxious time before anyone knows anything real, and makes those hours more anxious. But what the bombers want, what any bombers want, is not important. What matters is what they want to take away from us. Why they attacked does not matter, because their beliefs cannot justify this deed. What they attacked does matter, because that is what we have to keep them from taking away.

The Marathon is a celebration of athletic excellence and discipline, of course. And it has become a symbol of human willpower overcoming adversity. No one can watch the Hoyts run their race without understanding that this is about the will to face challenges and overcome them. But the Marathon was deliberately symbolic from the first. The race began in 1897, the year after the first modern Olympic Games revived the marathon as a sporting event. The Greek Revival spirit of the event resonated with Boston's vision of itself as the Athens of America, our country's university city, heir to classical learning and values. More importantly, the legacy of the ancient Greeks was bound up, as it was for the Founding Fathers, with democracy itself; celebrating an intellectual link to the ancient Athenians (in the most grueling physical way possible) inevitably means celebrating a tradition of democracy. It's not for nothing that Boston runs the Marathon on Patriot's Day, which celebrates the anniversary of Lexington and Concord. In some way that never gets spoken outright, the Marathon is a celebration of American democracy in the city that birthed the Revolution.

But the Marathon is also a game of peace, founded in the wake of the Olympic movement for many of the same reasons. It is a reenactment of the Greeks' peaceful competitions. The Boston Marathon has lived up to that Olympic ideal, drawing athletes from around the globe. Inevitably, the running of the Marathon is a celebration of the openness, the public freedom, that make a great city great (and in truth make it a city in the first place). It requires a city open to visitors from around the world. It requires a city where half a million people can gather and cheer in the streets. Holding the marathon at all celebrates the essence of urban civilization: a civic space shared by multitudes of strangers, living together in peace.

This is what the bombers want to destroy: democratic values. A dedication to shared history. Resolution in the face of adversity. Peace. International cooperation. Public space and public institutions free for all. A city of open streets and open minds.

Terrorism wants to convince us that we cannot afford these things. It works to tell us that such things are luxuries for the naive. But these are exactly the things that we must not give up, because we cannot do without them. Because these are the things terrorists fear most of all.

Boston is a city and not a fortress. The last attempt to turn it into a fort, shortly after Lexington and Concord, was an abject failure. Terrorists hate cities, hate places where people can walk the streets, can meet and talk in peace, because terrorists fear civilization itself.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Seeing the Headlights

Six years ago today, in the early morning hours of April 5, I hit a patch of highway ice while driving to the airport in an unexpected snowstorm and spun out sideways. My car was totaled, with all of the damage to the driver's side door. I survived unscathed. I did not get whiplash. I did not miss my plane.

My car turned around 180 degrees so that I was looking back at an 18-wheel truck coming toward me out of the snow while I was sliding sideways into its lane. There was nothing I could do in that long moment but watch the headlights coming toward me. Either I would slide in front of those headlights, and that would be the end, or I would slide just slowly enough to miss the truck.

In the end, I was almost slow enough. The metal step on the truck's cab gouged into my driver's-side door, buckling it inward and sending me caroming in another direction until I finally spun to a stop in the middle of the highway. Snow was falling through the foot-wide gap that the crumpling door had left between my window and the car roof. The difference between life and death had been two or three feet. I was alive.

After the wreck had been towed away and the cops had taken their report, they dropped me off at the airport with my bags, and then some time later I was standing in the California sunshine at an academic conference. Later that afternoon, California time, I took part in my scheduled seminar. Our death always follows close behind us, just over our shoulders. For a brief moment I was forcibly turned around so I could see its headlights, and see them pass, and then it was back behind me again, hidden from direct view.

Because hindsight creates the illusion of order, it looks to me as if the seeds of the last six years were already around me on that day. The seminar I took part in, and the response to the paper I had written for it, formed a turning point that began the last six years of my career. That paper became my most-cited article, and part of my book. When I went off to the same conference this year, the book was freshly out in paperback and the colleague who was covering my graduate class decided to assign my students that article. I had allowed myself to stall professionally; the jump-start came on the day I lived through the accident.

And that weekend in California I also happened to see, for the second time in my life, a person whom I later married but who was then only an interesting but skeptical stranger. That weekend was nowhere close to a beginning for us, but was a chance for me to make the all-important second impression, persuading her that I was at least not a full-time jackass. (The second impression is pretty important if you're me.) I suspect that it was on the last day of that conference that she decided I was socially tolerable. I suspect this because she has repeatedly informed me that it is so. And the last remnant of that early-morning trauma, a lurking anxiety about driving in the snow, began to dissolve later as our commuter marriage gave me strong reason to travel winter highways again.

The six years since I saw those headlights have been full: a book, a career, a house, a marriage. Six years of things I would have left undone. Six better and fuller years than the six that came before it, surely. I don't think my accident was providential, or that the last six years have been specifically part of any plan. Two or three feet further to my left and there would have been no planning left to do. But seeing the headlights puts some things in sharp focus. What you want, and what matters to you, become very clear. A couple hours after I had almost been killed, what I wanted most in the world was to go to my Shakespeare conference. (On the other hand, I absolutely did not want to go home to my apartment and spend the weekend there without structure. That idea would have been terrifying.) That may be a sorry truth about me, but it is the truth, and apparently pointless to deny.  For better or worse, that is who I am.

I don't believe that things happen to me, personally, for a reason. God's plan is not focused on my career. But seeing the headlights can put you in touch with what you want from your life. And if you glimpse the Angel and it passes you by, you should take that as a reminder. It's worth it to live.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Justice Roberts's Gay Marriage (and Mine)

The Supreme Court spent Holy Week (or, as Jesus would call it, Passover) debating gay marriage, which Chief Justice John Roberts clearly opposes. Religious opponents of gay marriage like to argue that the purpose of marriage is to beget children, so that only heterosexual marriages are "real," because only biological fertility makes a marriage "real." By this standard John Roberts's own marriage is not real, and neither is mine. I do not believe that, and neither should he.

John Roberts did not marry until 41, to a woman his own age, and they adopted their children. Justice and Mrs. Roberts are, as that link suggests, believing Catholics. That their marriage did not result in biological children does not make them less Catholic or less married. Roberts married an intellectual and professional peer rather than, say, a twenty-five year old. If he had married a twentysomething admirer, that hypothetical marriage would likely have led to biological children. Would such a marriage, to less closely-matched spouse, have been more authentic? More sacred? I do not believe so. I do not think Justice Roberts believes so, either.

Like Roberts, I did not marry until my early forties: a year and a half ago last Monday. Like Roberts, I married a person who was my equal or better intellectually, professionally, and emotionally. For me as for Roberts, that meant someone relatively close to my own age. And, like Roberts and his wife, my spouse and I share a faith life that is part of our marriage; as it happens, we and they belong to the same church. External circumstances make beginning a family out of the question for the near future; it would be irresponsible of me to father a child when I spend most of every week hundreds of miles away (just the thought of my wife entering labor while I am that far away from her opens a swampy pit inside my stomach). I am not less married because we do not have children. And I would not be more married if I had chosen a spouse with whom I could wait ten years to begin a biological family because she was half my age: God forbid.

I could not be more married than I am. My relationship with my spouse has become a fundamental element of my identity, whether I wake up beside her or two state lines away. Marriage is not just dating with tax benefits; it has the potential to transform and reorient your life, to change the way you move through the world. My marriage is part of who I am. And my spouse, to borrow John Donne's words, is the compass "who makes my circle just, and makes me end where I begun." I believe and hope that Justice Roberts's marriage gives him the same sense of purpose and the same consolations.

I do not believe that marriage is a means to an end, or simply a prerequisite to something else. Nor do I think anyone truly married can believe that. The purpose of marriage is to be married: to enter a lifelong relationship with your spouse. It is, as John Milton argued long ago, a remedy for the loneliness of the human soul: "against all the sorrows and casualties of this life to have an intimate and speaking help, a ready and reviving associate in marriage." Sex can be arranged by other means; childbirth can be arranged by other means, but, as Milton says, only marriage can satisfy the soul's thirst to join "to itself in conjugal fellowship a fit conversing soul ... many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown it." The intellectual and spiritual companionship of marriage, not the potential for begetting children, is essential and irreplaceable.

Justice Roberts' spiritual and emotional bond with his wife, the essence of his marriage, is exactly what he would deny his fellow citizens because they have taken another man for a husband or another woman for a wife. The commitment to intense lifelong partnership comes to those who will not or cannot have children of their own body. That is as true for gay husbands and gay wives as it is for straight husbands and straight wives, as true as it is for John Roberts and his wife, as true as it is for my spouse and for me. Except for the privilege society offers to one class of citizen instead of another, John Roberts' marriage is a gay marriage, a source of profound spiritual and emotional nourishment that transcends the biological. The comforts and fulfillment of Justice Roberts's marriage, which I hope continue for many more years, are no less valid because he and his wife have not conceived children. But neither are the consolations of his fellow citizens' marriages any less real or valid because they, like Roberts and his wife, may not physically procreate. If John Roberts believes, as I trust he does, that marriage is a genuinely spiritual institution, then he should respect and honor the emotional and spiritual bonds of marriage. If mere biology invalidates such a bond, then John Roberts can no more be married to his true partner than two men or two women can be. Their marriages are as real as his, or mine. And to dishonor the sacred reality of those marriages dishonors his own.

cross-posted from Dagblog