What say you, Detroit?

Last week I had a couple days in the can and I decided to take off for the tropical climes of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ok, sure, it is not tropical but it has a climate just like everywhere else.

So, I know what you are thinking. Why Pittsburgh?

There are a few reasons:

1.) I've never been there.

2.) There was an article in the New Yorker back in the early 1990s that called Paris, St. Petersburg and Pittsburgh the most beautiful cities in the world.

3.) I wanted to brush up on the local dialect--Pittsburghese. (Hoagies, "Red-up", "Yinz", you get the idea.)

In any event, it was something to do. I have a car that gets 40 miles to the gallon on the expressway, a digital slr, and a knack for getting good hotel prices online. Why wouldn't I go to the 'Burgh?

Pittsburgh is a success story like no other American city.

This steel city, built down in the valley and rising above the congress of the three rivers, used to be the poster boy for the American rust belt. Today, however, it is a shining city--a civil engineer's paradise with more than twelve bridges, two inclines, trolleys and a downtown subway.

The city planners of Pittsburgh redeveloped its waterfront to rescue it from the clutches of urban blight that so many American cities have succumbed to. Cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, since losing much of their industrial bases, have regressed into depressing shells of their former selves--with brownfields as far as the eyes can see.

Pittsburgh is different.

The Skyline of Carnegie's city is dotted with all the affectations of diverse urban development. This city is no longer slave to the boom and bust of a single commodity monoculture like Detroit and, my city, Flint. Pittsburgh is now known as a center for finance and medical services to go along with its heavier industries. (And a tremendous university...PITT.)

Pittsburgh is not without its problems, but it should give other rust belt cities like Detroit hope for the future. It has recently been voted the most livable city in America due to its low cost of living as compared to the larger cities of the eastern United States.

I only wish other cities that have been similarly affected by the rise of global economy could pick themselves off the mat like Pittsburgh has. (For another example of urban renewal at the city center, check out Cleveland.)

What say you, Detroit?

Get the Message

I was given the opportunity to speak to a group of junior and senior high school students tonight at church. Before I got to my lesson on having a Godly disposition and building character, I took the liberty of shilling for Eugene Peterson. Peterson is the heretic/hero who paraphrased the Bible, putting it into words that everyone can read. Not only is his paraphrase, called The Message, readable, but it is also written with the alacrity of a truly brilliant ink slinger.

As Christians, we must take full advantage of the doctrinal flexibility that our faith grants us. Since we do not have a serious traditional of literalism like our Muslim friends, or Jews to a lesser extent, our faith and our system of morality can be known by all, young and old. Peterson gets it.

For years many Christian churches have been embroiled in controversy over the veracity of one translation over another; it is utter nonsense. Translations are subjective by their very nature. To say that the King James version is more correct than the New International Version which is more correct than The Message belies and understanding of what the scriptures are. What the scriptures have to say about this life are too important to be exclusionary in any way. More to the point, the Message of Christ is too important to be lost in the minutiae of outdated language and anachronistic figures of speech.

Again, we are lucky. Most Christians do not believe that the Bible represents a verbatim recitation of the words of God. The majority of Christians believe that the Bible represents the inspired writings of the great men of the Faith--authoritative yet not immutable. Interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, then, don't seem to make us queasy.

The Bible wasn't written in a sacred language. That is, when Christians pray they pray in a multiplicity of languages--unlike in Islam where Arabic is the only lingual medium to God. The same can be said for reading the scriptures. Many Muslims consider the translation of the Qu'ran into other languages to be apostasy. In this way, the message of the Prophet is lost to people who cannot read in Arabic. This would seem to contravene the Qu'ran's proscription against religious compulsion--though it is certainly not alone.

The Message represents the best of what the Bible can be. It loses none of its depth, it takes nothing away from the spirit of the original texts, and it is more inclusive that any other single translation. The days of reverence to the scroundrel King James' version of the Bible should be put behind us. But, judge for yourself.

I think this calls for a side-by-side-by side comparison. Let's look at this passage in Galatians, chapter five, through the lens of three different versions of the Bible.

Galatians 5:16-18 (KJV):

This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.


Galatians 5:16-18 (NIV):

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

Galatians 5:16-18 (The Message):

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

What do you think?

Peterson writes with a prose that has a Thomas Paine feel to it that certainly appeals to a wide audience. It was Thomas Paine, the muckraker, who sowed the seeds of revolution in young America with his pen--the one that was "mightier than the sword." In the final analysis, it was Paine's style every bit as much as his words that made him a hero of the revolution.

His cause was important enough to necessitate universal currency, and we should not lose sight of that.

The scriptures are too important, too life-changing, to be anything but inclusionary on a grand scale.

In an article published by Mars Hill several years ago, Peterson was asked about how The Message might change the way we look at the Bible:

"...why do people spend so much time studying the Bible? How much do you need to know? We invest all this time in understanding the text which has a separate life of its own and we think we're being more pious and spiritual when we're doing it. But it's all to be lived. It was given to us so we could live it. But most Christians know far more of the Bible than they're living. They should be studying it less, not more. You just need enough to pay attention to God."

The knees are getting wobbly and the pews are quaking--and I think he is right.

Five for fighting

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks in the history of the United States. In the midst of all of the television specials and commemorations in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, I think it is worth taking an inventory of where we've come as a country in the intervening five years.

There's still no sign of Usama bin Laden.

Does this matter that much? Probably not. In five years Usama has gone from enemy number one to a mere token target. The figurehead of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network has been on the run since the inception of the American war against the Taliban in Afghanistan--and, for this reason, is no longer a real threat.

Even so, we are not too far removed from a statement in which President Bush compared (if not equated) Usama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler. This was surprising to me because I could recall the President saying last year that he was not all too concerned with Bin Laden--since, of course, he was only a symbolic figurehead and nothing more. Zarquawi, Zawahari, Omar, and al-Sadr were the guys doing the dirty work.

You can't have it both ways.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks the country was united in anger against the men who perpetrated the attacks. It was a time in which the United States government and our security forces were given a mandate by the people to fight an unwinnable war on terrorism by nearly any means necessary. Democrats and Republicans lined up behind the President because they were too cowardly to stand for their principles (liberty, privacy, isolationism, etc.) because their principles would not be popular for another year or two.

Ain't democracy grand? There's nothing that can make you forget your principles faster than the fear of unemployment.

Dissent doesn't pay unless your Tom Paine or the editor of The Nation.

"If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists" was the President's way of characterizing dissent in this country after 9/11; and we bought it because we were scared.

Five years after 9/11 little has changed. We've killed tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and lost over 2000 American and Coalition soliders.

And for what?

The Sunni Triangle is as violent now as it ever has been. There has been a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan--Mullah Omar is still at-large, along with Ayman al-Zawahari.

The Iraq war has been a complete and utter disaster of micro-management. Rumsfield and Wolfowitz believed that common Iraqis would celebrate the United States' liberation of Iraq and that, by-and-large, did not happen. In fact, since the United States military did not secure Iraq's borders, Iranian (Shi'a) militants poured over the border to fight the "crusaders" on their turf.

Rumsfield and Wolfowitz believed that Iraq could be rebuilt with revenue from the country's oil reserves--the same reserves that stood unprotected during the invasion and subsequent occupation. Those oil fields were set on fire and the factories bombed by insurgents fighting against the occupation.

Since the United States is, ostensibly, unwilling to fight a war of attrition in the middle east, the only alternative would be a scorched-earth policy that would further destroy the reputation of the United States in the world.

That's not going to happen and the status quo will reign.

Five years later it's official: Q-U-A-G-M-I-R-E

There were very few dissenters to the war in Afghanistan. Many notable "doves" fell in line behind the president to wage war against the regime that gave sanctuary to the hero of Jihadism. Even as we were gearing up for war against Iraq there was very little in the way of dissent in this country, for better or worse.

Like so many people, I believed the President (who himself believed George Tenet), the American CIA and Britain's MI-6. Tenet was wrong and whether or not he was instructed to fabricate a case for war against Iraq--one that included hanging the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, out to dry--is unclear.

What is clear, however, is that this country is in a real pickle in the middle east. This will have devastating consequences for the future of our country and for democracy itself. Any application of American military power in the middle east has the effect of creating new terrorists. It always has, it always will. (This, obviously, doesn't happen in a vacuum--there are certainly more grievances at work than just intervention.)

U.S. support for Israel will always have the effect of making us vulnerable to terrorism. Death and destruction play their roles, too--purposeful death and destruction.

Is war truly full of "accidents"? I am not so sure.

The killing of civilians should not be considered accidental because it is not an accident. Bombing cities from 30,000 feet has forseeable consequences--dead civilians. It's not an accident.

This war will only beget more war.

And, in the absence of a swift and categorically inhumane blitz on the Sunni Triangle and pockets of resistance in Afghanistan, we will have another five years just like the last.

Treadwell Twin Meets Tennyson

In the aftermath of the death of the beloved Australian naturalist, Steve Irwin, I am left with feelings of both sadness and frustration. Irwin, better known as the "Crocodile Hunter", was killed yesterday off the northwest coast of Australia when the dirty dagger of a large stingray pierced his heart.

His death comes little more than a year after the release of Werner Herzog's fabulous documentary of the life of the flaky self-avowed naturalist, Timothy Treadwell--"The Grizzly Man." Both Treadwell and Irwin shared an intense love for animals that transcended appreciation on its way toward obsession.

I write this not to demean these men, but to put their lives in perspective. They were unique men for good reasons. They took risks, calculated risks, most every day. (In Treadwell's case, he lived with Grizzly bears for months at a time.) To the layman these risks seemed extraordinary, but to men like Treadwell and Irwin they were quite routine.

Timothy Treadwell lived in a dream world for the better part of his life. In his world, animals were pure good. The altruistic qualities he saw in humans were borrowed from the animal kingdom--referring quite often to the "people's world" as being separate from his own. In his mind, animals only lashed out when they were confronted and they carried with them a preternatural desire for fellowship with humans--humans that understood their idiosyncracies like Treadwell did.

When Treadwell would gaze into the eyes of a Grizzly, he would see something that the rest of us would not. He saw more than a simple sentient creature. Treadwell saw a creature that was thoughtful and rational--and certainly not simply utilitarian. His inability to grasp nature in all its fatalistic grandeur cost him his life. In the end, Treadwell and his lady friend were eaten by an older bear looking for a pre-hiberation meal.

Irwin was certainly not the eccentric that Treadwell was, nor is it fair to equate the two in terms of their knowledge of ecology. However, I am convinced that Irwin shared with Treadwell that same perverse belief in the conviviality of all animals that is rooted in knowledge and knowledge alone.

Men like Irwin, Treadwell, and Jim Fowler (of "Wild Kingdom" fame) are actually averse to referring to animals as "dangerous." To them, animals are only dangerous in the absence of knowledge. This, for them, is how they transform run-of-the-mill "risks" into "calculated risks." Armed with their knowledge, wild nature becomes knowable and, potentially, livable.

To my way of thinking, there is only one example of perfect knowledge to be found in the animal kingdom, at least in terms of behavior. In 1850, Lord Alfred Tennyson published his epic poem "In Memoriam" in which you will find this little nugget of truth:

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

This is perfect knowledge.

Nature is chaos, violence and pain and when human beings overreach the boundaries of wild nature we must play by its rules.

The golden rule of nature is that the strong survive; but, the strength of knowledge becomes weakness when its antecedent confidence convinces men to encroach upon wild nature.

Nature, truly, is red in tooth and claw.

The End of an Era

In the world of sports, it is very rare for fans to be able to see something that is truly great. Today, at Flushing Meadows in New York, the career of one the greatest tennis players of all-time drew to an emotional close.

No one will remember the name of his final opponent, Benjamin Becker, nor the final score. What fans will remember is the outpouring of emotion on the court in the aftermath of the final match of Andre Agassi's esteemed 21-year career. The finest fans in tennis lavished upon Agassi ten minutes worth of applause leaving the 8-time grand slam champion in tears.

After his victorious opponent wished him well, Agassi somehow managed to overcome his emotions long enough to deliver a farewell address to his fans. It is one that I won't soon forget.

"The scoreboard said I lost today but what the scoreboard doesn't say is what it is I have found," said the emotional superstar after grabbing the mic. "You've given me your shoulders to stand on to reach for my dreams. Dreams I could've never reached without you."

And he was right.

Andre Agassi is probably the most popular tennis player of all-time. When he first burst on to the scene he was all ego, all image. He was one of the most recognizable figures in the world of sports. For those of you who are my age you undoubtedly remember the Canon EOS commercials with Agassi and the tagline: "Image is everything." And for the young Andre, it certainly was.

But, the lasting image of Andre is going to be decidedly different.

It was Agassi's flare for the dramatic that made him the people's champion. It wasn't his crazy hair or his lavaburst Nike shoes that made him popular. To real tennis fans his image meant nothing. Agassi was a true champion who defeated his opponents not with brute strength but with energy to spare.

The energy was still there today, but the man I thought would stay young forever just didn't have the legs to stay with the young buck.

The Andre Agassi I saw close out his career on the first Sunday of September in 2006, the emotional gentleman, is the Agassi that I will remember. He came full circle as a player and as a man right before my eyes. In the past five years he has become a husband and a father of two children. All of the sudden, the game that he loved didn't define him as a person. He was a husband, a father and only then a tennis player.

As a child, Andre was my favorite tennis player and it wasn't even close. As I got older, however, I began to appreciate the humble champion and Andre's greatest rival, Pete Sampras. Everything that I loved and respected about Sampras way back when was evident today at Flushing Meadows.

The retirement of Andre Agassi signifies the end of a truly great era in tennis.

And do I ever feel old...