Religion and Politics and Fire

What can I say? Slightly fictionalized for inclusion in nanowrimo:

This morning the janitor invited me over to the woodshop for their morning group for Christian fellowship. A few of the teachers would meet to watch a few minutes of a video recording of an old pastor of theirs who had passed away. The talk seemed to be a discipleship class, with other members around the table, but the camera was fixed on the old man. The others would talk from time to time, but when the old man spoke, you could also see their hands moving pens over the papers in front of them, treasuring his words. And what did he say?

It was interspersed with jokes and badinage from the living souls who gathered there to watch the video, and short stories that had to be told. One comes in a few minutes late with a bagel sandwich, apologizing that he’s eating in front of everyone, but his wife has had too much time on her hands since the kids moved out and keeps packing him too much food, food enough each day to last for three days, so that their fridge is overflowing with his leftovers. Another, the science teacher, tells how a student kept drawing on tables and so he gave him community service to help with the murals the art club has been doing in the middle school classrooms. I’ll trump yours with this story, says another one, and they excel one another in wincing laughter at the political pun introducing it, so already you know the sort of thing you’re in store for, but it turns out you’re not quite right. This student keeps asking him to help out with something, not as extra credit, just because he admires the teacher and wants to help. He doesn’t need help, of course, but not wanting to quash that enthusiasm, either, he took the student up on a couple of little projects, washing out beakers after the lab and sweeping up the hallways, which always seem to get cluttered with more odds and ends than the janitor knows how to keep up with, and as they were walking down the hall the kid said to him, “How come you haven’t grown up?” He didn’t know what he meant at first, but it seemed that kid’s dad had a beard, and since he didn’t, he was wondering if he wasn’t grown up. He didn’t seem to understand that not everyone had a beard, and was awaiting the day he would have his. And then he asked, “Are you sad?” He said something noncommittal, no, I’m all right, something like that, but the student said, “You’re really sad. I can tell.” He didn’t elaborate, but he said when he took him back to his English teacher he praised how perceptive the kid was and how emotionally intelligent, whatever his disabilities might be in other regards. He asked her about it and she said, yep, that’s him all right. Attuned to other people’s feelings in a special way.

The video was on complete forgiveness, the emphasis that this must be learned with humility and discipline to such a perfection that it is only possible with God. The pastor began telling a story of his dear mother-in-law’s remarriage to a nice Christian man, them both being up in years, and how the pastor would learn about forgiveness by watching her, for whenever the husband would get cranky and say offensive things, she you could have sworn was deaf to them all. The teachers joked that here was the secret to a happy marriage: ignoring your spouse! And about the license plate “My wife says I don’t listen--at least I think that’s what she says,” and then the obligatory Trump joke passed back and forth. The guys think they’re so funny, the wife said, and got things back on track. She took prayer requests and spoke the prayer to close the meeting when everyone else was abashed, looking down at shoes and folded hands to avoid meeting her eyes; prayers for peace and reconciliation after the election results, knowing the kids might be upset, to say nothing of their coworkers who had other views about abortion or the relative merits of being a crook versus a bigot, prayers for safe families, safe, travel, and thanksgiving.

And all of them voted for him--they asked me but I put the question off, saying that’s what the kids have been asking and I don’t know how to respond. I think they must have guessed my answer, but I couldn’t help saying how surprised I was by the result, where they expressed relief, comfort, a kind of righteousness or beatitude. The wife’s reason was that he was pro-life, whereas the Democrats would kill babies up to the last minute; his, that he was the lesser of two evils, brash and crude as opposed to manipulative. I had the same reason for my vote the other way, so I could at least agree to that characterization, but my Socratisms failed me. I listened to the advice of the old white man with bald old skin and wretched red flesh on his thin neck, huge glasses blurring his eyes in their shadowed sockets. Such a godly man, she said. They thanked me for coming as I thanked them for inviting me.

I wouldn’t be here after next week, at least not every day. In a couple of hours, during my Spanish class, a kid walked out saying he was switching classes, and some time later was marched down to the intervention room by a furious gym teacher I had seen laughing and praying that morning, not entirely rationally declaring after him, “You’re done!”

It echoed the way Trump talks, and that phrase of his, too: “You’re fired.” In this election the two sides didn’t seem to inhabit the same reality: on the one hand, disaster, on the other, the abyss. From my perspective, each outcome fearful and absurd. If Clinton had won, the status quo and progress are interchangeable, the words cease to have meaning; with Trump, leadership and vanity turn the same trick. As we tried to rise for the pledge, one angry girl kept yelling at me to say if I was a Trump supporter. I could honestly say I was not, after the pledge to the flag, which I never say aloud, but still stand for and respect.

But maybe that’s what’s at the core of the disaster and the circumference of the abyss: the loss of respect, even more than the loss of meaning in words or attention to think about them or the things they represent: reason’s eclipse in the frenzy of feeling. Clinton loses, and the mobs riot; had Trump lost, the militias would deploy.

What is the most optimistic thing to be said? Now what? The revolt against political establishment has penetrated the Republican party and put their man in power, while their establishment still holds the legislature, so the conflict of interparty strife is turned to intraparty wrangling for priorities? The Democrats must confront themselves in turn as a party whose base is not yet diverse enough geographically to overcome electorally the minority white vote that overspreads the states, and whose vision of progress is not self-evidently persuasive to that base writ large, much less to the whites who continue to oppose it, even flocking to its antithesis--a bigot, a bully, a climate-change denying ostrich, and any other excoriation you like, but it only makes it worse that he beat you in spite of all? Some such elite mumbo jumbo?

The media are even more thoroughly discredited, all their predictions and cheerleading for naught. Half of the country still sat out the vote, for various reasons and lack thereof. Half of those who did vote, and more than half, are led by the option they voted against perhaps still more than they voted for any alternative, and have nothing to do about it but become engaged in some way still more time-consuming than voting and trying to digest the news.

The effort of comprehending the reality that is, and arguing over what it means about oneself and one’s country, and watching to see what will happen next, when the consequences of this decision begin to play themselves out, but may have happened anyway, or something worse, if things had gone differently and we had chosen the other reality--all this is overwhelming for that reason, and no wonder then that feeling carried the day, or some intelligence too subtle and terrible for my poor comprehension.

Then, trying to get class started again after that little outburst, we smelled smoke. Trying to keep the students in the room and calm, I went to the woodshop to see the teacher running with the extinguisher to spray the dumpster outside that was burning. The janitor thinks it might have been arson: the gate was open. By chance, another fire started at North Central, but they say that was from the welding torch on the construction site there.