Evangelicals Support Santorum (and Break Law)

When I read the headline “Evangelical leaders back Santorum,” my first thought was, Can they do that? My second thought was, Of course they can, because religious groups can do whatever they like in the U. S. of A. (except for some religious groups such as, say, Muslims). But should they be able to do that? Isn’t there some sort of First Amendment to the Constitution that implies a separation between church and state, between religious belief and political activity? As it turns out, there is, though it exists in the tax code. Religious organizations which claim tax exempt status (and they all do), fall under the 501(c)(3) requirements for charitable organizations (religious, educational, literary, arts, amateur sports competition, prevention of cruelty to children or animals, and a bunch of other well-meaning groups I’m sure). What the tax code says about supporting (or opposing) political candidates is pretty clear (very clear as far as the typical tax code goes):

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

You would think these “evangelical leaders” – who were acting explicitly as spokesmen (I’d say spokespersons except that they’re all men) for their respective churches – would be in violation of this “absolute prohibition” against campaign activity. But you would be wrong. Why? Because what government agency – the Justice Department? the IRS? – is going to go after such a politically powerful institution as religion? Now if it were, say, an education group (let’s say public school principals) that came out in favor (or opposition) to a particular political candidate, how long do you think its tax exemption would go unchallenged? Are there microseconds? All laws are made to be interpreted, and they’re interpreted and prosecuted by whoever is in power at any point in time. And who (including the Islamic Kenyan Obama administration) in this point in time is going to go after any conservative religious group? This is not a country of law or justice, but a country of interpretation, preference, and the current of cultural wind.

Actinic Keratosis

One of the several old man ailments I suffer is actinic keratosis, a small, scaly deformation of the skin, usually the face, arms, or hands that may develop into skin cancer over time. It is caused by having fair skin; long-term, daily sun exposure; multiple severe sunburns when young; and old age – all conditions I can lay claim to. For the past 20-plus years I’ve gone to my dermatologist, Dr. Tom, at least once a year, sometimes twice, to have him search my skin for lesions and burn off those he finds with liquid nitrogen. There’s no pain, a little discomfort, and Dr. Tom and I have a nice chat, he asking me about what I’m teaching (or now how I’m enjoying my retirement) and me asking him how his kids are doing (he has a son in med school who he hopes will take over his practice in a few years). He’s a scuba diver and an amateur underwater photographer, and we’ve talked about the barrier reef off Belize. It’s become a friendly professional relationship. About a dozen years ago Dr. Tom found something more troublesome on my upper right arm than an actinic keratosis – a basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer. He was able to dig it out in his office – the thing I recall most vividly was the smell of my burning flesh as he cauterized the wound – and there wasn’t any spread of the cancer found in the biopsy. The only real problem with my actinic keratosis is cosmetic. For a week or so after treatment (burning off with liquid nitrogen), my face sports three or four red scars that resemble war wounds, and people who meet me stop cold and stare as if I have leprosy, asking what in the world has happened. I explain the horror easily enough. It’s just a history of being Irish and fair-skinned, playing baseball shirtless through the summer in the sun when I was young, and growing old.

Our Spies In Iran

“I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

(Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist)

“Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for or was sent to Iran by the CIA are simply untrue.”
(U.S. Spokesperson Victoria Nuland on the death sentence for American Amir Mirzaei Hekmati in Iran)

Excuse me for not believing for an instant either of these denials. Not that I don’t think that the Iranian government is corrupt, tyrannical, violent, terrorist, dangerous, and just bad guys all the way around. But can anyone really believe that the United States isn’t thick in Iran with spies and assassins and drones and lord knows what else? It’s what we should be doing. We don’t have spies in Iran? We don’t have assassins – or are at least helping Israel with their assassins? Or course we do. There’s a long history of U.S. denial of spying, going back at least to Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960 (we said at first it was a weather plane), and I’m sure it goes back much further, probably back through the Civil War and even Revolutionary War. Who admits to spying? No one, of course. (Remember last year when the U.S. claimed Iran had planned to kill the Saudi ambassador in a D.C. restaurant? Iran denied it.) But knowing that every country is doing it all the time makes the denials all the more absurd. And our government wonders why we don’t believe anything they say?

Another Surgery

I thought I was offering something of a joke when I suggested to my surgeon that it might be best to just cut off the pinky finger of my right hand, but I was surprised when he responded a bit too casually with, “Well, that’s a possibility, but I think we should try surgery again before amputation.” I suffer from Dupuytren’s Contracture (or disease or syndrome or fracture), a painless affliction, a hardening of the fibrous tissue beneath the skin of the palm that causes the fingers corresponding to the affected tissue to slowly flex or curl eventually into a permanent grip. Four years ago I underwent surgery (called fasciectomy) on my right hand to reverse the curling of the pinky finger, which had made it difficult to put my hand in my pocket or glove and impossible to use in typing. The surgery went fairly well, but I was told going in that it was not unusual for the condition to return. And it has. It’s more of an inconvenience, or at most a frustration, one more incessant reminder of age. I’m going in for another surgery. I don’t hold out much hope that it will alleviate the condition for more than a couple of years. But then that’s a couple of years before the next best option is amputation. And I can’t imagine a more defining marker of aging than when they start lopping off appendages.

A Mouse Up My Leg

Certain memories linger though we’d prefer they didn’t. One such for me is the time a mouse ran up my leg inside my pants. I was living in a student apartment in Wichita. It was a duplex, probably built in the 1920s or 1930s. There was a moldy, dusty basement that I was afraid to go into, and fortunately there was no reason to do so. Mice lived in the basement, apparently in abundance. I would be reading or writing late at night, and regularly a mouse would scuttle along the baseboard across the room from me, usually three or four of them an evening. Sometimes they would pause, look up to see what I was doing, and seeing I wasn’t doing anything that threatened them, go about their business. We had what was essentially an appeasement – they went about their business in quiet, and I went about mine. Then one morning I was in the bathroom, doing my business, my jeans down around my ankles. The heating in the apartment was forced air and for some reason there was an open grate on the floor just in front of the stool in the bathroom, placed just so that my downed pants leg covered much of the grate. Yes, as I sat there I felt something scurry up my leg. I slapped at it when it got somewhere around my knee, stood up, and saw the rodent fall dazed briefly to the floor, then disappear quickly back into the grate and back to the basement. I don’t know if that mouse survived. It probably did. And surely it had a tale to tell of survival in the jungle above the grate and in the dark night of the denim. And I have the memory that in 40 years won’t go away.

The Iowa Caucuses

The Iowa Republican caucuses are a weird political event. Actually, they’re not a political event so much as a media event. They’re little more than a non-binding straw poll of preferences among a minority of registered Republicans. The “votes” mean nothing politically. The caucus attendees, meeting in groups of several to dozens to maybe scores in homes and schools and churches, after hearing last-minute speeches on behalf of the candidates, write down their preferences on blank sheets of paper or raise their hands, the results counted on site, and then the results are phoned in to the Iowa Republican Committee who collate and release them to the media. There are delegates elected at the caucuses to attend county conventions, but they are uncommitted, not bound by any of the preference “votes.” At the county conventions, delegates, also uncommitted, are elected to the state convention where delegates are elected, uncommitted, to the national convention. So among the candidates in the caucuses, there are no winners or losers in terms of delegate count, as there are no pledged delegates to be won or loss. It’s the media’s (self-compelled) job to determine who won and loss, and that is based entirely on the expectation built up over the weeks leading to the caucuses by . . . the media.

So in this year’s caucuses, there could conceivably be four winners: Romney (if he finishes first), Paul (if he finishes at least second), Santorum (if he finishes at least third), and Gingrich (if he finishes fourth). Perry and Bachmann could also be winners if they finish fourth or better, but that would mean at least one of the other four would have to drop down, making them losers. Romney would be a loser if he comes in third or lower, Paul if he comes in third or lower, Santorum if he comes in fourth or lower, and Gingrich if he doesn’t make it to fourth. The defense of the caucuses is that they “winnow the field”: if you can’t mount a grass roots campaign that puts you in the top three or four in Iowa, you can’t make it anywhere, and you would do us all a favor by dropping out now. Which is why there are always three or four winners and two or three losers. It’s the ultimate in media-driven horse-race politics. And it’s no surprise that the importance of the Iowa caucuses emerged in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, as the 24/7 cable news megaphones were born. The caucuses are regularly touted (by the media) as pure grass-roots, knock-on-doors, campaign-over-coffee democracy. But they are nothing of the sort. They are a media created and media sustained (money making) circus. They don’t deserve to be “first in the nation” – they don’t deserve to continue as is at all.

Another (New) Year

New Year is one of our most curious holidays. Of course it’s a cliché that any new year (or new day or week or month or decade or whatever) is an arbitrary marker of time that designates nothing in relation to the continuum of change that happens above and beyond our perception of that which we can’t perceive. We – and our world – are constantly changing on micro and macro levels, mostly unseen. So we’ve invented time to help us mark our life’s changes. Yes, there is some astrological relation to our notion of time (our planet just completed another revolution around the sun). More to an understanding of our change might be the physical, observable markers – the turning of leaves in fall, the falling snow in winter, the greening grass in spring – our first broken bone, our first sexual encounter, marriage, a child’s birth, a grandchild’s birth, a knee replacement, the death of a parent, a move into a nursing home, the death of a spouse. But of course those would be (and are) personal markers. So we’ve constructed these cultural markers of time (days, weeks, months, years) to help us with a larger cultural, shared understanding of the movement from birth to death. And the year is a moderate, comprehensible unit to contemplate within the infinity from here to there within a life. Although whether “New” is the best adjective to describe it might be questionable. Perhaps “Another” would be more appropriate. As in, “Happy Another Year!”