slacktivist

Change the rules

So what we seem to have here is a no-win situation, a conflict between fundamental rights.

Millions of people in America live in manufactured housing. Most of those people own their homes, but not the land underneath those homes. Those millions of people are thus in an extremely vulnerable situation. Landowners might evict these homeowners at any time, or they could raise the rent on the land so that the homeowners could not afford to stay there. When that happens, relocating a manufactured home may be prohibitively expensive or flat-out impossible, resulting in these people losing not just the land beneath their homes, but their homes as well.

It seems that somebody's rights will need to be restricted. Either the landowners' rights to do what they want with their own land will be severely constrained, or else the homeowners' rights not to be exploited and abused and kicked while they're down* will be tossed aside. Neither choice is acceptable, and the usual approach of splitting the difference isn't particularly attractive for either side.

So the dilemma is real and serious and perplexing. It seems almost like the Kobayashi Maru, the academy test from Star Trek designed to measure officers' character when faced with a no-win situation. There was only one way to beat such a test, Capt. Kirk decided: cheat. When faced with a no-win situation, you have to change the rules of the game.

As long as one party owns the home and another party owns the land underneath it, conflicts of fundamental human and property rights will be unavoidable. So, then, change the rules of the game. The solution to a situation in which the land and the home are owned by different people is to create a situation in which the land and the home are not owned by different people. The solution is to create a situation in which those millions of Americans living in trailer parks become the owners of those trailer parks.

This is already starting to happen, at least in a small way. Here's a press release announcing the involvement of one New Jersey-based nonprofit in such an effort in Delaware. READS will be working with the Delaware Manufactured-Home Owners Association to help the First State's 38,000 manufactured-home owners become the owners of the land underneath their homes. This is happening as part of the nationwide effort coordinated by New Hampshire-based ROCUSA. ROC stands for "resident owned communities," which is what we're talking about here.

Here, again, is how ROCUSA summarizes its mission:

ROC USA is a social enterprise that offers training, networking, and financing to help homeowners gain security through community ownership.

ROC USA solves the financial and technical challenges faced by homeowners when they seek to acquire their manufactured home communities. Today there are roughly 3.5 million US homeowners in an estimated 50,000 manufactured home communities.

Through ROC USA and its national network of Certified Technical Assistance Providers, homeowners can join together with their neighbors to acquire the manufactured home community in which they live, and be secure and thrive in resident-owned communities.

Here's my immodest proposal: Let's turn all of those 50,000 manufactured home communities into resident-owned communities.

To get there from here might require some changes in state and local laws, tax codes and zoning regulations, so state legislators are going to need to get in touch with people like the folks at ROCUSA to find out what kind of changes would help to ease and expedite this transition, what kind of incentives might be offered and what hurdles (such as access to credit for the homeowners) might need to be cleared.

The only problem with the goal of this transition would be that it would mean the end of the trailer-park owner industry. That's not really much of a problem, though, since everybody in that industry is already looking for a way out. (That is, after all, the basis for this whole dilemma in the first place.)

Some of these communities might adopt a land-trust model, many others might simply become more traditional neighborhoods, where individual lots are individually owned. There's nothing socialist about this idea -- it's not like we'd be creating kibbutzes or something. We're talking about real homeownership -- red-blooded American capitalism.

There's also nothing inherently partisan about this goal. It seems to me that both Democrats and Republicans would have ideological reasons for supporting such a transition. Apart from the question of local or regional vested interests -- particular developers with their particular corrupt legislators -- I don't see much reason for any political opposition.

Obviously, therefore, I'm missing something. So here's where I need your help: Why shouldn't the transition to resident-ownership be a goal in every state or province with land-lease manufactured-home communities? What political, ideological, economic, etc., reasons might there be to oppose such a goal?

Unnecessary clarifying addenda: I didn't anticipate that the idea of manufactured-home owners purchasing the land under their homes might be interpreted as the moral/legal equivalent of Hugo Chavez nationalizing them. I don't really need anyone to point out the potential objections to government confiscation of landowners property because I object to that myself already, thanks. If I didn't, the dilemma discussed above wouldn't be much of a dilemma.

What I'm looking for is what rational, real-world objections anyone might have to what ROCUSA et. al. are actually doing: Helping homeowners purchase the land under their homes at a fair price. I'm beginning to suspect that there aren't actually any rational objections to such a goal, only irrational ones that involve seeing socialist bogeymen where none exist.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* Where, you may be asking, is this right not to be exploited and abused guaranteed? It's not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Nor is it recognizably honored by custom. That will lead some people to argue that talk of such a "right" makes no sense. Perhaps they're right about that. Maybe even this most fundamental right is meaningless unless it is explicitly enumerated in the law. And maybe Moses and the prophets were fools. Maybe there is no God or gods, or at least no God or gods that give a rat's ass about the poor, the powerless, the orphans or widows. Maybe there's no such thing as karma. Or ghosts. Maybe Dives isn't in torment. Maybe all talk of justice is just a mask for envy or the will-to-power. But then again maybe not.

Canada too

It seems that manufactured-home owners in Canada may be just as ill-served by their laws and governments as their U.S. counterparts. Here's an article from British Columbia's Ladysmith Chronicle, "Seaside residents lose arbitration":

Residents of Saltair’s Seaside Trailer Park will have to uproot by next May.

Following a June 4 arbitration hearing in Victoria, Seaside residents received notice that the arbitrator ruled in favor of the new landowners. ...

In April, the landowners gave Seaside their one-year eviction notice and a cashier’s check for approximately $3,000, following section 42(1) in the Mobile Home Park Tenancy Act.

... [Landless homeowner Alice] Walter, along with resident Norm Street, have homes in Seaside that they pay mortgages on. ... If they can’t sell their homes or find places to move them, then they will both end up paying a mortgage on places they cannot live in, places that may be demolished by the new landowners after the eviction next May.

A local government official, Brian Duncan, acknowledged that "On a human level, it's tragic," but said that the new landowners were within their rights.

Those rights were, I suppose, purchased along with the land. If you have the means, you can buy all kinds of rights that other people can't afford. If you don't have the means, you probably won't be able to secure quite as many rights. It all seems terribly feudal.

This precarious situation, again, is something facing tens of millions of manufactured-home owners throughout North America. They own their homes, but not the land under them. When landlords decide to sell or redevelop the land, these folks face eviction with no legal protections other than the sort of things provided by "section 42(1) in the Mobile Home Park Tenancy Act" -- a grace period before they have to be off the land and an inadequate stipend for moving expenses.

That Canadian statute is poorly named, because there's really little that's "mobile" about these homes. That's the problem here -- families have all their equity tied up in homes that cannot be moved and that cannot stay where they are.

That's an impossible situation for those families, arising from the prior impossible situation -- that of people owning their homes but not the land beneath them. That situation is bound to create irreconcilable conflicts between the rights and needs of homeowners and landowners. The only way to solve such conflicts is to prevent them from occurring in the first place -- about which, more tomorrow.

After the flood

Yep, we're back. Sea Isle City, N.J., was lovely.

The weather was just about perfect the whole time we were there. Except for one day. That one day -- Sunday, the 27th -- was a doozy. Severe thunderstorms, hail the size of dimes and about two inches of rain in a single afternoon. That rain fell at high tide, so the water had no where to go, flooding streets higher than the wheels of parked cars.

But despite that little hitch, we still managed to get hitched. The Slacktivixen even says that, as it turns out, getting carried to the altar across knee-deep water was kind of romantic.

And but so anyway, welcome back.

P.S.: I don't post comments via Blackberry, and I would never say anything bad about pie.

Q&A

Q: ...

A: Sunday, at sunset, on the beach.

Q: ...

A: True, but it's not like we were going to fly to the West Coast just to have a prettier sunset for the ceremony.

Q: ...

A: I'm sure that is lovely, but we're not really morning people and I don't think it would be wise to try to talk to the Slacktivixen about loving, honoring or cherishing before, say, 10 a.m.

Q: ...

A: If by "honeymoon" you mean a week in a small beach house with paper-thin walls and the entire extended family, then, Yes.

Q: ...

A: I'll be two hours from my computer, in a house full of people with kind of a hectic schedule, so I don't think I'll be able to until I get back.

Q: ...

A: Well, technically I guess it is a "hiatus," since I most likely won't be posting anything here until around August 4 or so and ...

Q: ...

A: Well, yes, that will mean skipping one Friday. But like I said, I'll be back August 4, so I don't really like to call it a "hiatus" since that's the word bloggers always seem to use when they're going through one of those "I'm not sure if I want to keep doing this" mid-blog crises. That's not what's going on here, I'm just taking a little vacation, heading down the shore, getting married, that kind of thing.

Q: ...

A: I don't have any of the equipment to do that -- no wireless laptop, no digital camera -- but nevermind that, I think liveblogging your own wedding would be horribly tacky.

Q: ...

A: Oh, thank you. And yes, I really am. Very much so.

Q: ...

A: Right. The fourth. Week from Monday. See you then.

L.B.: The hidden display

Left Behind, pp. 456-458

I should start by acknowledging something remarkable about this passage: Jerry Jenkins succeeds in conveying some of what he's trying to get across. Nicolae Carpathia is genuinely creepy here, just as Jenkins intended. There are touches that actually work. Nicolae's calm, polite cold-bloodedness is effectively disturbing.

This isn't the first time we've encountered something creepy in these pages. Nearly every scene with Rayford, for example, is deeply disturbing. But this is the first time that Jenkins succeeds in being intentionally creepy -- still not creepy enough, perhaps, but to some extent legitimately creepy. Yes, the scene borrows heavily from things we've all seen before, and yes it goes on a bit too long, but on some basic level, this bit here works:

"Everyone be seated, please," Carpathia said, calm again. "Jonathan, on your knees."

Painfully, the old man crouched, using Hattie's chair for support. He did not face Carpathia or look at him. The gun was still in his ear. Hattie sat pale and frozen.

"My dear," Carpathia said, leaning toward her over Stonagal's head, "you will want to slide your chair back about three feet so as not to soil your outfit."

Part of the reason that little bit works a little bit is because it's understated. As we've seen time and again, Jenkins is capable of understatement, but he can never seem to leave it at that. Every time readers encounter something that seems subtle or nuanced, we're quickly reminded that Jenkins uses such light touches only as a one-two combination, a quick jab always followed by a big, sweeping, off-balance roundhouse.

Stonagal began to whimper. "Nicolae, why are you doing this? I am your friend! I am no threat!"

"Begging does not become you, Jonathan. Please be quiet. Hattie," he continued, looking directly into her eyes now, "stand and move your chair back and be seated. Hair, skin, skull tissue and brain matter will mostly be absorbed by Mr. Todd-Cothran and the others next to him. I do not want anything to get on you."

That seems less creepy and more just kind of gross.

Plus I think Nicolae is right about Jonathan Stonagal -- begging doesn't suit him. He shouldn't be the begging type, and "I'm no threat" is exactly the opposite of what he should be saying here. He's Jonathan Stonagal, after all, he owns banks and governments all over the world. He's the head of an international shadow-government conspiracy. It seems likely he's had a gun pointed at him before.

We've all seen this scene on television or at the movies enough times to be familiar with its conventions (which is a nicer word than "cliches"). The eerily calm master manipulator never flinches at the sight of the gun. He simply explains to the person with the gun why shooting him would run counter to their own best interest. He mentions intimate details about their friends and family members in a vaguely menacing way; he explains the consequences he has ensured will occur should anything unforeseen happen to him. He hints at secrets that would never be revealed if he were to die, and at secrets that he would no longer be able to conceal. He doesn't raise his voice and he doesn't beg. And he absolutely never whimpers or pleads for mercy on the basis of friendship.

We're supposed to accept here that Stonagal is surprised by Nicolae's sudden betrayal. That seems unlikely. First of all, Stoney didn't get to be where he is today as a global puppet-master by trusting anyone. He might have to rely on his associates and his deputies, but that's not the same as trusting them. He would anticipate the possibility of betrayal by any or all of them, and he'd have plans in place for that contingency. That seems doubly true in the case of his protege. He knows that Nicolae is capable of murderous betrayal because he, personally, taught him how to do it. So it seems unlikely that Stonagal could be caught off-guard like this.

Stoney is also well-acquainted with all of the dirt in Nicolae's past. He knows where the bodies are buried. Rather than whimpering and begging, he ought to be reminding his protege of that and advising him of the consequences of pulling the trigger -- such as perhaps the nonstop global broadcast, through his many-tentacled media empire, of every incriminating or embarrassing or career-ending detail of Nicolae's past. ("Remember that unfortunate situation in the Ukraine? I told you not to worry, that I'd take care of it? Well, she's still alive. Oh yes. She's almost 12 now, and the specialists think she may even be able to walk again some day. And that videotape? I'm afraid I may have exaggerated slightly when I told you that every copy had been destroyed. Although should anything unforeseen happen to me that tape would be the least of your problems ...")

Stonagal is supposed to be the great Machiavellian manipulator. What we needed to see here was Nicolae out-manipulating him, beating him at his own game. There ought to be a final chess match between these two evil megalomaniacs, ending with Nicolae's crowning "checkmate," but instead he just knocks the board over, scattering the pieces. That doesn't fit with the picture Jenkins is trying to paint of Nicolae as a calm, methodical mastermind carrying out a carefully devised plan.

This chapter's preoccupation with seating arrangements also undermines that image. Everyone comes into the room and Nicolae has them all take their seats just as he's arranged for them to do, orchestrating their every movement according to his master plan. Now at last, the pieces are all in place and his grand scheme can go into ... Wait. Sorry. Jonathan, you and I need to switch places. Right, good. Thanks.

OK, now at last the pieces are all in ... Hold on. Todd-Cothran, would you mind switching seats with Hattie? Just skooch over a little there ...

This game of musical chairs might have worked if Nicolae was supposed to be a capricious sadist -- a psychopath who took pleasure in toying with his victims before killing them. But that's not what the authors are shooting for here. Nicolae is supposed to be anything but capricious. He has a meticulous Master Plan. It's hard to worry about his nefarious Master Plan, though, when he can't even put together a proper seating chart.

Carpathia was in no hurry. "I am going to kill Mr. Stonagal with a painless hollow-point round to the brain which he will neither hear nor feel. The rest of us will experience some ringing in our ears. This will be instructive for you all. You will understand cognitively that I am in charge, that I fear no man, and that no one can oppose me."

... Until I run out of bullets.

Again, it's difficult to be impressed by what was billed as a supernatural display of power when the only actual power on display turns out to be that of Man With Gun in Room Full of Unarmed People.

Buck considered a suicidal dive across the table for the gun, but he knew that others might die for his effort.

So Buck continues to just sit there, doing nothing. In a few pages there's a dramatic scene in which he sits there, saying nothing. And then a few pages later he springs into action and ... runs away.

"When Mr. Stonagal is dead, I will tell you what you will remember. And lest anyone feel I have not been fair, let me not neglect to add that more than gore will wind up on Mr. Todd-Cothran's suit. A high-velocity bullet at this range will also kill him, which, as you know, Mr. Williams, is something I promised you I would deal with in due time.

Todd-Cothran opened his eyes at that news, and Buck found himself shouting, "No!" as Carpathia pulled the trigger. The blast rattled the windows and even the door. Stonagal's head crashed into the toppling Todd-Cothran and both were plainly dead before their entwined bodies reached the floor.

Those high-velocity bullets, it turns out, are way deadlier than your typical low-velocity bullet.

Nicolae puts the gun into Stonagal's hand, staging the scene, roughly, to look like a kind of suicide with collateral damage. He's not wearing gloves, so his prints are on the gun and the powder residue is on his hand, but he's not really worried about that. He can always mind-mojo the CSI squad if he needs to, and he's got a room full of eyewitnesses to support his version of the story:

"What we have just witnessed here," he said kindly, as if speaking to children, "was a horrible, tragic end to two otherwise extravagantly productive lives. These men were two I respected and admired more than any others in the world. What compelled Mr. Stonagal to rush the guard, disarm him, take his own life and that of his British colleague, I do not know and may never fully understand."

And of course this works. Over the next several pages, all of the non-born-again eyewitnesses in the room will dutifully repeat this version of the story, believing that this is what they really saw happen. Here, at last, we see that Nicolae really does have some supernatural Antichrist powers beyond the kind of trigger-pulling powers available to every mere mortal.

The display of supernatural powers by the Antichrist ought to be chilling, but here in the final chapter of Left Behind it falls flat. This is partly due to bland, unimaginative writing (as we'll see when we look, in our next installment, at the following pages), but mainly it's due to his grand display of Antichrist powers just plain not making any sense.

Nicolae demonstrates his supernatural powers by concealing them. I can't figure out how this constitutes a "show of strength."

Everyone in the room is thoroughly convinced that they saw nothing other than the suicide Nicolae just described. That scenario scarcely holds up -- Stonagal could barely kneel unassisted, how could he have overpowered the guard? And why would he have run back to his seat? -- but set that aside. Apart from Buck, no one in the room will remember what they really just saw. Apart from Buck's Tribulation Force friends, no one outside the room will ever hear any other account of what occurred there. How is that account supposed to make the whole world "understand cognitively" that Nicolae is in charge, that he fears no man, that no one can oppose him?

Bruce Barnes said that, according to prophecy, "The Antichrist will solidify his power with a show of strength." If Nicolae is really the Antichrist, he told Buck, then "He has to show some potency. What might he do to entrench himself so solidly that no one can oppose him?"

What might he do? Well, he might just convince the entire world that he had been a hapless bystander at a suicide. Power solidified. Prophecy fulfilled.

Ladder to Lake Charles

What's the use in half a story, half of a dream?

"The Ladder," Prince
"Lady," Regina Spektor
"Lady Goodbye," Daniel Amos
"The Lady Is a Tramp," Gerry Mulligan Quartet
"Lady Luck," Vigilantes of Love
"Lady Madonna," The Beatles
"Lady with the Spinning Head," U2
"Laid," James
"Laid a Highway," Tift Merritt
"Lake Charles," Lucinda Williams

On the line

American Public Radio's Media's "Marketplace" yesterday featured a report on the unglamorous but eminently sensible technological apparatus known as the clothesline.

You can read a transcript of the report at this link -- "Clotheslines: Energy saver or eyesore?" -- but you really owe it to yourself to click on the "listen to this story" link to hear for yourself the voice of the appalling Ceil Bell, a board member of a Timonium, Md., "homeowners' association" that prohibits clotheslines.

"Clothes drying is just unsightly," Bell says. "You get people hanging towels over the railings, you get clotheslines in the backyard. We just don't like the look of it. It looks like a lower-class neighborhood."

Apparently Bell thinks people in "lower-class neighborhoods" are, as a rule, smarter and more sensible than the prodigal idiots the Timonium homeowners' association hopes to attract.

These homeowners' associations fascinate me. Marketplace's Joel Rose reports that there are about 300,000 of these in the U.S., about half of which prohibit clothes lines. How does this prohibition work, exactly? How is it enforced? And by what authority do these Mayberry Mussolinis claim the right to tell others that they're only allowed to dry their clothes through the operation of energy-intensive, fossil-fuel burning machines (adding chemicals to make them smell almost, but not quite, like they had really been dried the sensible way, out in the sun)?

The Wikipedia entry on homeowners' associations answers some of those questions, but not the larger question of why on earth anyone would voluntarily submit to live in such prefab neighborhoods where, it seems, all that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. One could argue that this intrusive corporate governance of private life is un-American. But then I suppose one could also argue that the voluntary surrender of personal freedom in the hopes of attaining higher "property values" is quintessentially American.

Rose's report balances the odious attitude of Ceil Bell with two sets of Good Guys. First there's Gary Sutterlin, the U.S. representative for Hills Hoist -- the simple but ingenius folding rotary clothesline that is, Rose says, ubiquitous in Australia. Sutterlin says the use of a clothesline "will save the average consumer 6 to 10 percent of your utility costs." That's reason enough to use a clothesline without even getting into all of the environmental benefits or the lovely additional perk of ticking off the Ceil Bells of your neighborhood.

Then there's Alex Lee, director of Project Laundry List, a nonprofit dedicated to "making air-drying laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy." Their "Right to Dry Campaign" advocates the passage of Right to Dry legislation in states and municipalities to win Americans the right to, you know, access to the sun. (Wasn't denying that right the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel?)

And while you're clicking around that Laundry List site, be sure to check out their online store.

(Jeez, I've only been a homeowner for one week and already I'm resorting to laundry blogging.)

FICO, FICO un day

The Associated Press apparently frowns on bloggers linking to AP news articles and quoting the first paragraph in its entirety. I'm about to do just that. It's unavoidable in this instance, since my whole point in linking to this AP story by Christopher S. Rugaber is to note that it's inaccurate, insulting and full of misplaced condescension, beginning with the very first paragraph:

Americans can save billions of dollars annually on credit card and other interest payments by raising their credit scores, but many consumers still don't know enough about the complex numerical values that represent their credit risk.

Rugaber is certainly correct that Americans need to know how credit scores work. The ability to manage these "complex numerical values" is a vital and necessary skill for anyone with money in the bank, or a mortgage, or a car loan, or car insurance, or health insurance, or a job. Not knowing exactly how credit scores work will cost the average American hundreds of dollars a year in fees and interest, sometimes invisibly.

Pop Quiz: Following are two possible explanations for why most Americans are in the dark about the meaning and manipulation of credit scores. Which do you think is more important?

A. We Americans are lazy and ignorant people who can barely manage to feed ourselves unless tut-tutted and prodded by parental figures like Christopher S. Rugaber for our own good.

B. The calculation of credit scores is a protected trade secret, proprietary information closely held by the triumvirate of Transunion, Equifax and Experian, and therefore, legally, by definition, such information is unknown and unknowable by anyone not working for those unelected entities, including you, me and every personal finance reporter in the business including Christopher S. Rugaber.

Rugaber's article presumes A as the only possible explanation for why most Americans are unfamiliar with how credit scores work. Explanation B -- that this information is legally, officially and emphatically kept hidden from consumers -- never enters his article or, apparently, his mind.

The article passes along some of the hints, guesses and inferences that we the public have been able to figure probably help to improve credit scores -- don't max out credit cards, "avoid opening multiple new accounts quickly, and pay off debt rather than moving it around," don't miss monthly payments, etc. But these are all just guesses. How exactly all those things affect our credit scores isn't something we're allowed to know.

Lenders and debt merchants are in the same boat as the rest of us. They don't have access to the extra-constitutional triumvirate's top-secret proprietary information either. But credit-card banks and mortgage brokers and insurance companies and auto lenders have more time, resources and incentive than consumers do for probing the mysteries of these all-important formulae. They've pieced together enough of the puzzle that they've gotten quite skilled at manipulating this statistical game to their advantage.

Rugaber notes, for example, that "credit card issuers ... have recently cut limits on many cards as financial institutions seek to reduce their credit risks." Limiting risk is one explanation for this step. An additional explanation is that this step alters borrowers' "utilization rate," and the cabalistic scholars of credit scoring at these institutions have determined that higher utilization rates make for lower credit scores, thus providing a quantitative fig-leaf for aggressive increases in fees and interest rates.

Here's how the scam works. You've got a $10,000 limit on a credit card and you're carrying $2,500 due to a recent dental procedure. The lender, in the name of reducing risk, abruptly reduces the limit on your card to $4,000, announcing this change on page seven of the nano-type in a booklet mailed with your next monthly bill. Now instead of a 25-percent utilization rate, you've got a 63-percent utilization rate (they round up, when convenient), lowering your credit score.

That lower credit score means you no longer "qualify" for your previous rate of 9.9 percent and will now be paying 19.1 percent. Oh, and there's a one-time fee of $35 dollars, conveniently added to your existing balance, for exceeding 50 percent of your available limit.

Unfortunately for you, these changes in your balance and rate became effective at 9 a.m. on the 15th of the month. Your electronic payment, dutifully set for the previous minimum payment, is credited to your account at 1 p.m. on the 15th. That minimum payment was based on the earlier interest rate, so it's no longer adequate to cover your newer, higher minimum payment. A $35 late fee is therefore added to your balance and this delinquency is reported to the triumvirate, contributing to the further reduction of your credit scores. Second verse, same as the first.

For a heartbreaking, in-depth look at the end result of this process, see Gretchen Morgenson's article, "Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper into Debt," in Sunday's New York Times. The headline writer there was drunk with the same condescension that ruins Rugaber's AP article, but Morgenson's piece itself provides a much more rounded and accurate picture.

Rugaber is certainly right that consumers need to be better informed about this. But his article seems to assume that it might be possible for consumers to compete with the debt merchants on a level playing field. As though the average person has the same kind of time, resources and expertise as those institutions do. As though the game wasn't rigged. As though we must simply, passively accept the unchecked, unregulated and unrestrained influence of the unelected triumvirate to dominate our economy and our lives.

Americans don't need yet another lecture from yet another personal finance reporter. Americans need torches and pitchforks.

L.B.: Pistol-packing pacifist

Left Behind, pg. 456

We left off here:

Carpathia raised the .38, cocked it, and stuck the barrel into Stonagal's right ear. The older man at first jerked away, but Carpathia said, "Move again and you are dead."

We've discussed how disappointing it is that the Antichrist's first on-screen kill should involve something as mundane as a handgun. I was hoping for something creepier, something a bit more supernatural or cinematic.

A second disappointment here involves the death of my dim and implausible hope that Nicolae Carpathia might turn out to be an interesting tragic villain. Up until those two sentences above that was still, at least theoretically, a possibility. After all, Nicolae came preaching a message of "love, peace, understanding and brotherhood." If he had genuinely believed in such ideals, but had tried to impose and enforce them by imperial fiat, we'd have been looking at the stuff of tragedy. This scene confirms that's not going to happen here. Nicolae Carpathia, it turns out, is just going to be one of those mustache-twirling villains inexplicably dedicated to villainy for villainy's sake.

What's harder to figure out is whether this villainy makes Nicolae a hypocrite in the authors' eyes when he's preaching his message of love, peace, understanding and brotherhood. Nicolae Carpathia, remember, is also a "thoroughgoing pacifist," a man described as "a peacemaker ... leading a movement toward disarmament."

Now we find this alleged pacifist wielding a gun and threatening lethal violence. In any other book, I'd know what to make of that. "Aha," I would think, "so he's not really a pacifist after all." Seeing the character's actions contradict his words, I would conclude that his words must have been false. Actions speak louder, etc.

Here in Left Behind, however, things are a bit more complicated. In these pages, words are almost always more important than deeds. And in these pages I'm not certain that being a "pacifist" precludes killing people with a handgun.

Let's deal with the latter point first. We've noted earlier (see "Cursed are the Peacemakers") how Nicolae's pacifism and his dedication to peacemaking marked him as morally suspect from the authors' point of view. This idea is simply a given for Tim LaHaye and his premillennial dispensationalist colleagues, and they treat it as such, presenting this audacious bit of up-is-downism with a disarming matter-of-factness. The Antichrist is diabolically evil, they say, and so of course he's a man of peace, what else might one expect?

As Alice discovered in Wonderland, this kind of confident, reassured madness can be difficult to engage. We don't have any way of knowing what the rules are when we talk to such people. The accustomed meaning of words and logic don't seem to apply. It doesn't help when LaHaye et. al. explain that they're just repeating what they read in the Bible because no amount of Bible-reading will take you through the looking glass to this alien world where goodness is proof of evil.

So let me try to retrace their steps as they travel from Point A to Point Crazy.

It starts with this idea of the Antichrist. We looked earlier (see "Speakerphone") at the way PMDs put together their Antichrist Check Lists by collecting every generic warning against evil in the Bible and reinterpreting these as a unified warning against a single, future personification of evil: The Antichrist. This vast collection of biblical passages warning against evil includes several passages warning readers not to be deceived by false promises of peace.

So far, so good. According to the convoluted allegorical scheme of the PMDs "literal" reading, then, it makes sense for them to apply those warnings about false promises of peace to this future Antichrist. But that's as far as the internal logic of this scheme takes you. If PMD were consistent with itself, it would teach that the Antichrist will be a sham-peacemaker, someone who pretends to be concerned with peacemaking, but really isn't.

That's more or less the picture one gets from the early 20th-century prophecy gurus -- people like C.I. Scofield, the man who first popularized Darby's psychedelic invention through his "Reference Bible." To Scofield and his contemporaries, the Antichrist would be an evil man who, at first, pretended to be a good man. Part of that false facade of goodness would be the Antichrist's claim to be a proponent of peace. Their assumption, in other words, was that genuinely advocating peace was a Good Thing. They believed that by pretending to be good, pretending to be a man of peace, the Antichrist would lull the world into a false sense of security and then, abruptly, reveal his true self: the rider on the white horse, armed and crowned, riding out "as a conqueror bent on conquest." They saw "man of peace" and "conqueror bent on conquest" as two different, incompatible things.

Scofield's contemporary heirs, however, seem to think that "peace" and "conquest" are just two words for the same thing.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the most popular "Bible prophecy scholars" -- from Hal Lindsay to Tim LaHaye -- moved away from the idea that the Antichrist would be making false promises of peace and began to suggest that this ultimate personification of evil would be an actual peacemaker. This happened, in part, due to their reinterpretation of PMD through the lens of America's so-called "culture wars." LaHaye came to PMD carrying with him all the baggage and presuppositions of his John Birch Society, McCarthyist Cold-War paranoia. Lindsay came to it in full-blown panic over Vietnam and the '60s. Neither of them was capable of imagining such a thing as a false peacemaker because they did not believe there was such a thing as a genuine peacemaker.

To LaHaye and Lindsay, all peacemakers were, by definition, false. All proponents of peace, from their point of view, were duplicitous fools -- not peacemakers, but peace-niks. At best they might merely be cowardly, dovish dupes, but at worst they are subversive fifth-column agents of the enemy.* The PMD teaching that the Antichrist himself will one day rise from the ranks of such peaceniks simply confirms what they already believed to be true: that anyone advocating peace should be presumed guilty.

So the biblical warnings not to be deceived by false promises of peace have evolved into the belief that any promise of peace -- or any effort to achieve peace, or any policy that includes peace as its ultimate stated goal -- is itself false and, in fact, Satanic.

This belief has real-world repercussions. Many of those biblical warnings specifically mention deceivers making false promise of peace with Israel. Thus whenever LaHaye & Co. hear anyone speak of a plan for peace in the Middle East, they assume that this person is helping to pave the way for the Antichrist's imminent reign -- or that he may even be the Antichrist himself. All such plans -- from Oslo to the current "Roadmap" -- are therefore denounced as evil and vigorously opposed in the name of "supporting Israel." Supporting Israel comes to mean ensuring that it never achieves peace with its neighbors. Up-is-downism as foreign policy.

So let's get back to the scene we're reading now. Since LaHaye views peace only as a mask for conquest, it may be that we're not meant to see anything contradictory at all in what we're witnessing. Nicolae Carpathia is a pacifist. Nicolae Carpathia sticks a loaded gun in Jonathan Stonagal's ear and pulls the trigger. For LaHaye, that action doesn't reveal Nicolae's true nature as a lethally violent non-pacifist, but rather it reveals what he believes is the lethally violent, tyrannical true nature of pacifism itself. (Poor LaHaye must be terrified in Amish country.)

Really, though, it's hard to know what to make of this apparent contradiction between Nicolae's claims and his actions because the universe of Left Behind doesn't recognize such contradictions as a possibility. In this book, words trump actions. The authors have stated that Nicolae is a pacifist and, according to the rules of this book, that makes him a pacifist even when he's firing a gun into someone's ear.

Bad Writing reinforces this. LB offers innumerable instances in which what we are told about a character seems to contradict the behavior we witness from that same character. We're told, for instance, that Buck Williams is a "star reporter," much admired by his readers and his peers for his unrivaled journalistic skills. But what we actually see of Buck is a lazy, incurious, ethically compromised hack who never files a story. Likewise we're told, repeatedly, that Rayford Steele is a good person, while the evidence we have been shown all seems to contradict this.**

But the Bad Writing here is, I think, part of the effect and not the cause of this inverted hierarchy of words and deeds. The problem isn't a failure of execution -- it's not that Jenkins is trying, but failing, to have the characters demonstrate the things he claims about them. The problem, rather, is a seeming disregard for any such correspondence between words and actions. He doesn't have to care whether or not they correspond, because it's only the words that matter. In a sense, then, Jenkins' notion of characterization matches his and LaHaye's notion of salvation, repentance and conversion -- they're all just a matter of saying the magic words.

And but so anyway, here we are:

Carpathia raised the .38, cocked it, and stuck the barrel into Stonagal's right ear. The older man at first jerked away, but Carpathia said, "Move again and you are dead."

Does this mean that Nicolae Carpathia is no longer a pacifist? I have no idea.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* We looked at this anti-peacemaker attitude in that earlier LPU&B post. There I wrote of people like LaHaye that: "They've gotten so caught up in guarding against wolves in sheep's clothing that anything in sheep's clothing is viewed as the enemy. So all sheep must be shot on sight." That probably understates the problem. LaHaye doesn't believe there's really any such thing as sheep, just a wooly fifth column of wolves.

** We're also told repeatedly that Rayford Steele really, truly loved his wife Irene, even though neither readers nor Irene ever saw much in his behavior that would demonstrate this to be true. I'm willing to give L&J a partial pass on that one since this particular mistake is hardly unique to LB. The idea that love is something one says or feels (passionately and sincerely), rather than something one does, is a widespread confusion shared by many people who have never even heard of this book.

Kalhoun, Ky.

Don't know exactly what it means
It's just a sacred kind of thing ...

"Kalhoun," Daniel Amos
"Kamp Krusty medley," Krusty, Gene Merlino
"Kamphopo," Esau Mwamwaya
"Kare Kare," Crowded House
"Karma Police," Radiohead
"Kathy's Song," Simon & Garfunkel
"Keep Me in Your Heart," Warren Zevon
"Keep Me Runnin'," Randy Stonehill
"Keep Out the Chill," Vigilantes of Love
"Kentucky Avenue," Tom Waits

It knots you

Reporter Jonathan Starkey finds a fresh angle for the high gas prices story: "Even Amish fret about high fuel costs."

It may be hard to imagine that the Amish, known best for their horse-drawn buggies, are as susceptible to the sting of rising oil prices as people who rely on gas for everyday transportation.

But for those who milk cows, build cabinets or saw timber for a living, the pinch is real. Pressure from fuel prices even reaches into Amish homes, where they use gas to power washing machines and freezers.

Amish people are banned from driving cars and trucks because leaders worry that faster transportation could "pull the community apart," but the prohibition does not extend to fuel-powered motors and engines like those used to run power tools and washing machines, said Donald B. Kraybill, an Amish scholar at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa.

"I don't know that there ever was a categorical taboo on the engine," Kraybill said. "They used steam engines in the late 19th century."

So despite their old-fashioned separatist image, the Amish are squeezed by high fuel prices just like everybody else.

... "We used to get it for half the price," [Harvey] Yoder said of the gas. "It knots you."

I hadn't heard that expression before, but it's wonderfully apt. The doubling of fuel prices really does "knot you."

Donald B. Kraybill, quoted above, heads the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown and has become the go-to guy for reporters writing about the Amish. Most of his many books deal with the Amish, the Hutterites and the other Old Order Anabaptists.

But I'm most grateful to Kraybill for his one book that wasn't about all that: The Upside-Down Kingdom. That book is a wonderful, humbling, challenging, leper-hugging, pacifist brick through a window. It's gently subversive and perhaps even subversively gentle. It knots you:

Our normal tendency is to scramble up ladders as fast as possible. The disciple of Jesus works to serve the powerless at the bottom. This may be in the form of personal ministry or through changing the structure of the ladder itself. The Christian is more concerned about the plight of those at the bottom than about advancing his own position on the ladder.

That sort of thing. The main problem with the book is that for all of his talk about how "the Christian" behaves, Kraybill doesn't offer many real-world examples of actual Christians actually behaving this way. But then I don't really think that's his fault.

Incidentally, I've been to Elizabethtown College once or twice, many years ago. My old roommate's band played there and we learned that E-town is where students from Messiah College, 30 miles away, sneak off to dance. (I hope no administrators from Messiah are reading this.) I suppose that prohibition against dancing offers another option, an alternative, upright vision to compete with Kraybill's upside-down one. But if you're not allowed to dance, then you're probably not allowed to join that revolution.

Lemon-aid

This is pretty cool.

The Limestone Presbyterian Church in Pike Creek, Del., just got a new roof. And now they're putting 180 solar panels on it. According to the church:

On sunny days when we are not using much electricity, our church's electrical meter will go backwards. In the evenings or when it is raining, the meter will move forward when electricity is being used in the building. The 180 solar panels will produce, in an environmentally friendly manner, about two thirds of the electricity that Limestone uses annually.

Bravo. By going solar, the church is drastically cutting its reliance on fossil fuels and its greenhouse emissions. This is a Good Thing. It's also, we're coming to realize, probably a Necessary Thing -- something that more churches, libraries, businesses, schools and private homes are going to need to do if we hope to substantially address both our growing energy crisis and the effects of climate change.

So why isn't this being more widely done? Well, it turns out that this good and necessary thing is not an inexpensive thing. Limestone Presbyterian's solar project is costing about $250,000. That money is an investment, since the church will recoup much of that cost in the years to come through energy savings, but those future savings don't change the fact that they've had to come up with $251,790 up front, which is a lot of money for a medium-sized congregation -- or for any library, business, school or homeowner.

Fortunately for Limestone Pres., the state of Delaware has a program that helps to encourage this sort of renewable energy by leveraging investments like this solar conversion. The Delaware Green Energy Program "provides cash incentives for the installation of Renewable Energy Systems." In Limestone's case, that involves an "energy alternatives" rebate of $125,895 -- half the cost of the project. Between that and a loan from their denomination, the congregation was able to afford this solar conversion.

I believe in the strict separation of church and state and here we have a church, a sectarian entity, receiving almost $126,000 in taxpayer funds. And I approve. More than that, I applaud. How can I explain this seeming contradiction?

The bottom line here is that the state isn't supporting the church. This isn't an establishment in which the state is funding religion. The state, rather, is funding solar energy. And solar energy is not sectarian.

The state of Delaware has decided, I think rightly, that providing this kind of funding to support renewable energy is good policy. It doesn't cease to be good policy just because this particular roof belongs to a church. The standard for this distinction is called the Lemon Test, which takes its name from the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman. Wikipedia provides a nice summary of the three-part Lemon Test:

1. The government's action must have a secular legislative purpose;
2. The government's action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion;
3. The government's action must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion.

The application of that test can be complicated, and in recent decades Lemon has been strengthened and weakened by numerous cases involving Santeria, peyote and, of course, school prayers. But the basic wisdom of this three-pronged test, I believe, still holds. The solar-energy rebate for Limestone Presbyterian Church, it seems to me, easily passes all three parts of this test. The rebate serves a secular/non-sectarian purpose; it does not have the primary effect of advancing or inhibiting religion; and it does not result in an excessive entanglement of church and state.

I hope to have a chance soon to take a closer look at Barack Obama's proposals regarding state support for faith-based initiatives. When I do so, it will likely be through the lens of the Lemon Test. I don't want to comment on his plans before having a chance to examine them more closely, but for now I'll just say that I think it shouldn't be too difficult to design such a program that could pass the first two parts of the Lemon Test. Whether or not such a program might pass the third part, it seems to me, is a trickier matter.