Jesus with a Rocket-Laser Arm

Tim Tebow was selected in the first round of the NFL draft last night by the Broncos (pause for White Bronco jokes...). He was undeniably a great college player, but there is quite a bit of skepticism about how his skills will transfer to the NFL. In other words, he was drafted shockingly high.

Drafting a player significantly higher than his talent justifies makes sense from an economic perspective if the popular player generates fan excitement, and given that the Broncos have to stationary passing quarterbacks, in football terms Tebow might allow them to run popular Wildcat sets.

But the more interesting explanations for the pick have to do with Tebow's awe-inspiring Good Works. Tebow was selected above players with "character" issues because of his impeccable behavior.

But the question must be asked, what, exactly, has Tebow done that allows us to conclude he is a morally superior college football player? His charity works are certainly impressive, and by all accounts he participates in such activities for decidedly non-cynical reasons. I do not intend this post as a condemnation of Tim Tebow.

Jason Cole's Yahoo piece begins:

NFL teams seemed to take a strong hint just a day after Ben Roethlisberger was suspended without committing a crime. If there was a theme to the first round of the NFL draft Thursday night, it was that character was put on equal if not higher footing than talent.

Because of the controversy surrounding Ben Roethlisberger, NFL teams have placed a premium on good citizenship. The exemplar of this movement was the choice of Tim Tebow.

Tim Tebow is a good man because he uses his celebrity to aid charities. Ben Roethlisberger has a foundation that supports police dogs, and he gave generously to tsunami victims. Studying the public appearance schedule on his webpage reveals constant appearances at events that raise money for various charities.

Obviously one can donate to charities in a very earnest manner and still be so flawed that the NFL changes its drafting policy based on your behavior.

So, why the confidence that Tebow is the anti-Roethlisberger? What has he done to convince people of his purity?

I would guess, and I have no statistics to support this claim, that it has much to do with his public expressions of faith. There is still a presumption in our society that "religious" means "moral," despite endless examples to the contrary. Nevertheless, Tebow's squeaky clean image rests largely on the notion that he is incredibly religious.

The NBA's version of Tebow is Dwight Howard. So dedicated to Christianity is Howard that befor he was even drafted, Sports Illustrated wrote, "When Dwight Jr. looks at the NBA logo, he imagines a cross superimposed over the slaloming outline of Jerry West."

Howard certainly hasn't run afoul of the law, but this very devout man has hardly been the embodiment of proper morality. The mother of that child now appears on Basketball Wives. She is legally barred from discussing Howard and the show cannot even mention his name.

But the greatest irony brings us back to Mr. Roethlisberger. Both Tebow and Roethlisberger donate to charity, but Big Ben surely does that to improve his public image. It's a smoke screen hiding the deeply immoral truth about his character. We know Tebow is a good person because of his faith...

“I’ve told the Christian players that a Super Bowl ring won’t be worth what a testimony to Jesus in public will be this week,” longtime Steelers chaplain Jay Wilson said. “These players are excited to speak about their faith in Him if they get a chance.”

Several marquee players from both sides -- Shawn Alexander and Matt Hasselback from Seattle and Pittsburgh’s Antwaan Randle El and Ben Roethlisberger, with the famous PFJ (Play for Jesus) tape on his shoes -- should have ample chances to talk about their faith.

Link

Once again, this post is not meant to argue that Tebow will make the same poor choices that other high-profile Christian athletes have made. Rather, the intent is to question that reflexive assumption that "religious" means "moral." I sincerely hope that despite his obnoxious professions of faith, Tebow manages his career well. The more success he has, the more he will be able to give to those in need. Even if they have to listen to an incoherent sermon, a great many people will benefit.

But why do we think Tebow is different than, say, Dez Bryant, who has a weak-character reputation because he ran afoul of the NCAA's absurd rules?

If asked most sports fans would place Dwight Howard's character above Bryant's. Yet Howard has an illegitimate child with an exotic dancer and Dez Bryant merely violated an NCAA by-law by not being forthcoming about a conversation he had with Deion Sanders.

Perhaps Bryant could have avoided his trouble with a few well-placed Bible quotes on his equipment.

Human Scum, to put it mildly...

This story has been making the rounds, and there's something uniquely unsettling about the situation.

Essentially, a judge, ruled that Itawamba School District violated Constance McMillen's First Amendment rights by prohibiting her from attending the school's prom in a tuxedo with a female date. The judge did, however, deny the ACLU's request for an injunction that would force the district hold the prom. He rejected the injuction because a group of parents promised to hold a private, wholly inclusive prom.

This turned out to be a very ugly lie. The private, "inclusive" prom was a ruse intended to distract a group of "undesirables" while the parents held another party for the "acceptable" students. Only seven students attended the prom on the date announced by the school's attorney. As if the utter vileness of the parents and other students wasn't evident in their homophobic bigotry, there's this:

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. "They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."

The parents' deception was inhumanely cruel, no doubt, but what makes it so shocking is its personal nature. A great portion of right-wing, resentment-based politics (anti-welfare, anti-immigration...etc.) occurs at a distance. The gay marriage issue, for example, is framed as a conceptual disagreement about the institution. They say, "I just think marriage should be between a man and a woman," and do everything they can to ignore the real human suffering it causes.

And, in fact, these malicious positions are difficult to sustain when confronted with their very personal results. That's why this was so sickening.

The Mississippi case exposes parents willing to lie to ostracize certain elements of their community. And not their peers, not other adults they work with or professionally compete with, but high school kids. They focused all of their rancor on one young woman, and decided to take out a few others while they had the chance.

Targeting an individual in such a malicious manner reveals a complete vacuum of basic decency that is difficult to fathom. It's roughly the difference between the person sitting in Wyoming in 1965 arguing with his friends about the merits of segregation while being blissfully unaware of the policies actual impact, and the people in Alabama burning churches and forming lynch mobs. While both groups are advocatng similarly disgusting public policy, the ability to act very personally on such shallow bigotry defines another level of horrific human.

Perhaps these Mississippi parents should be applauded for their lack of hypocrisy. They don't simply advocate disgusting behavior at distance while happily allowing others to fight in the trenches, so to speak (see War, Iraq). No, they are the full, living embodiment of their despicable ideology.

Like the insanity surround Terry Schaivo's death, these fleeting moments when the true foundation of fundamentalism is exposed, help us understand what we're really dealing with. The opposition to gay rights in this country is not about "traditionalism" or some similarly detached concept, it is about honest-to-goodness hatred and bigotry.

Kitsch v. Kitsch

I consider myself a legitimate fan of The Onion, but their critics, located at the A.V. Club, are infuriating. They fetishize on the obscure, ranking their tastes by imagined uniqueness, not quality. The more unknown the artist, the more worthy of praise.

So, I was pleased to read one such critic, Erik Adams, putting this opinion of mine into cold, hard reality with his own words:

My Garden State experience has just as much to do with age—my first extended period of time in my hometown since leaving for college was coming to an end, and I could’t believe that a movie could capture the way my familiar corner of Michigan suburbia suddenly felt so alien. When the film became a hit, however, it came to my attention that it managed this because—like the ability to enjoy the easy, breezy indie-pop of the film’s soundtrack—that feeling is universal.

I would never dream of defending the obnoxious Zack Braff. He is the living embodiment of kitsch, as perfectly defined by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

For Braff, it's not dressing-up like MC Hammer that is, itself, funny. Rather, how funny it is that I, Zack Braff, have decided to dress like MC Hammer? It's self-referential meta-humor, never to be enjoyed as funny, but to be appreciated as the sort of thing we should think is funny.

And this leads nicely into the problem with the Onion review. Braff's movie was meaningful and important until its message was recognized as nearly universally experienced. And this, too, is an expression of kitsch. It's meta-appreciation that soured Mr. Adams on the movie, not the production itself.

This is an incredibly odd, and in many ways very sad, approach to art, but it seems even more pathetic coming from someone who has chosen aesthetic appreciation as their profession. I'm not sure how many people on planet Earth enjoy the compositions of J.S. Bach. Having an answer to that question wouldn't affect my enjoyment of his music in any way, and what's more, how awful if it did. I can't imagine watching a movie, and before writing my opinions, investigate how it was received to insure that I haven't, gasp, agreed with others.

Popular art has always relied on image cultivation. The music is to be enjoyed, certainly, but it's far more important that one feel good about enjoying the music. This is why all counter-cultural music since the 60's has been so amusingly transparent: "You want to be seen as an individual, your taste in art is a great way to express that individuality, so please, come join all of us..."

But there is a certain poetic justice in Braff suffering at the hands of a fellow kitsch fanatic. It's as though the two do battle entirely in the ether, detached from any actual creation, making sure that they have properly gauged how people should feel about what they're doing.

Visions of Flightsuits...

I am genuinely afraid that Obama may have used the State of the Union to declare "Mission Accomplished" with respect to the economy. In a meeting with the Republican Caucus today, his explanation of why the controversial spending freeze kicks in a year from now (instead of immediately) betrays a premature conviction that the economy has escaped imminent danger:

Now, the reason that I'm not proposing the discretionary freeze take into effect this year, retro -- we prepared a budget for 2010, it's now going forward -- is, again, I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best.

And what they will say is that if you either increased taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a destimulative effect and potentially you'd see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off.

That's why I've proposed to do it for the next fiscal year.

The spending freeze is either stupid or cynical, but thinking that everything will be perfect in a year is an astonishingly large gamble. FDR experienced the same premature celebration when after four years of successful recovery he decided to bend to political pressure and balance the budget in 1936. I think we know how that turned out.

For reasons political and for the lives of all the people who would be affected by a reinvigorated recession, I hope that Obama doesn't find himself blaming the spending freeze on a rogue Navy crew.

Amazing Development!

In a stunning revelation it appears that making women watch an ultrasound of an abortion makes them less likely to opt for the procedure.

The author of the linked piece sees this as a positive way to reduce abortions, which he rightly points out is a goal shared across the political spectrum, "...even the most ardent pro-choice advocates, including President Obama, insist that nobody is for abortion and that everyone wants to reduce the number of abortions."

He seems to be slightly confused, however, by what that means. The idea is not to intimidate and terrify women into having a child they would otherwise abort. The pro-choice movement (and I recognize I'm speaking broadly here) wants abortions to lower because the socio-economic conditions that often lead to unwanted pregnancies have been dealt with. The 90's saw numbers of abortions decrease as access to legal abortions increased. And the statistics reflect the economic nature of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, "The abortion rate among women living below the federal poverty level...is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level...This is partly because the rate of unintended pregnancies among poor women (below 100% of poverty) is nearly four times that of women above 200% of poverty..."

But I do enjoy the rhapsodic surprise of the author when he notes, "Upon seeing what happens during an abortion, many women might choose to have their baby rather than go through with the abortion." Yes, and Upon seeing a video of what happens during brain surgery, many people might choose to simply die of cancer rather than allow a doctor to slice into their grey matter. It works infinitely: upon seeing a camera shot of a doctor inserting some sort of device into their rectum, men might be less likely to show up for their scheduled colonoscopy.

But again we arrive at the fundamental strangeness of the pro-life position. That same group so anxious to curtail abortions could give less of a rip about hungry children, children without access to health care or homeless children. But if one of those kids should reach an age at which they can procreate, then by God you've got their interest...until they have the child and right back to blaming them for their lot in life.