All posts by Chuck Fager

Thoughts on the Quaker “Testimony of Equality”

arly Friends lacked a Testimony on Equality with the outside world because, to speak plainly, they (the Friends) were quite sure that those outside were NOT their equals.

A striking example of this is found deep in the famous 1660 Letter to King Charles II, from Fox and a dozen or so other leading Quakers — the one which announced what we now call the “Peace Testimony.”

In a part of the letter which does not get quoted on meeting house wall posters, Fox & Co. explain to the king, “for your soul’s good,” why he should avoid persecuting the Quakers. It was not merely because they were peaceable folk, innocent of plotting his overthrow; but more important, because to do so would mean he was fooling with “the babes of Christ, which he [Christ] hath in his hand, which he [Christ] cares for as the apple of his eye; neither seek to destroy the heritage of God . . . .”

And here we have early Quaker theology in a nutshell: Friends were God’s chosen people, “the apple of his eye.” In the Bible, the counterpart is referred to as a “royal seed.” Maybe the Friends were not destined to rule the world outwardly, sitting on actual thrones; but surely they were commissioned to show it the true way to what the Lord had in mind, and they needed to be able to do the Lord’s work unhampered.

So were Quakers “equal” to other humans, even the king? Not hardly; none of this lot came anywhere near their level as “the heritage of God.”

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Gina Haspel Marks The Return of “Zero Dark Thirty” — Still Zero; Even Darker

For despite Jessica Chastain’s fine acting, this mute moment framed and underscored her character’s essential emptiness. Maya has already told another female agent, who asked lightly about her plans to party after the mission,  that she has no history, no family, no friends or personal life — in the film not even a last name, no emotional range, and evidently no professional ambition beyond the decade-long, monomaniac drive to wreak lethal revenge on the architect of September 11.

In the end, while OBL may be dead, her life too, it appears, has been all-but consumed in the process. There is evidently a real CIA agent behind her character; and both embody a shameful, emptying time in our history.

Many Americans can no doubt still identify with Maya’s payback obsession. And under director Kathryn Bigelow’s sure hand, the film’s driving pace and vivid visuals make this process easier while the story unreels. Yet for me the film’s emotional frame came to feel increasingly dated, even obsolete. And I believe I’m not alone in that sense.

After all, it’s 2013, and while Osama Bin Laden is dead (and General Motors is alive), by now more and more of us are beginning to realize that even so, America has lost the two reflexive wars our panicked leaders unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers attacks. And besides these major strategic defeats; beyond the trillions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands killed, and millions made refugees — in the process we also threw away many of our rights at home, and values essential to our moral standing in the world. Was this really the only way to deal with the horror of the September attacks?

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Dog Days: George & The Cottonmouth

This outhouse looked like the ones I used to see in magazine cartoons sometimes, built like a big phone booth of wide wooden boards, with a slanted roof and three small holes at the top to let the smell out. Inside was a flat bench seat with a hole in it.

The boards were sunburned a dark grey and sanded by the Kansas wind until the looping wood grain stood out in wavy ridges that looked like a giant’s faded fingerprints. I stepped in, pulled the door closed, and sat carefully down on the bench — yes, with a bare bottom.

Of course, my grandparents had a bathroom inside, now. But the outhouse had been used by them and most of their children, summer and winter, for a long time before. To my parents, of course, this was just an old leftover, something to ignore. But I had never been this close to one before. The bench felt warm and ridged, but worn smooth, and much more comfortable than the prickly couch in the front room. Resting there, it felt like I was traveling back in time.

I looked around and listened. The air was dim except for slivers of light coming through cracks between the boards. The outhouse smell was not as strong as it must have been once. Beside me on the bench a thick old Montgomery Ward catalog leaned against the wall. The curling pages were yellow and brown, and about half were gone, used long ago for toilet paper.

It was warm and stuffy in the outhouse, but the sense of mystery deepened as I sat there, as if I was listening to it, hearing something I couldn’t quite make out.

I sat there until a big horse fly started buzzed loudly around my head. The buzzing mademe think of wasps, and I wondered whether there were wasps nests under the bench. Wasps, you know, can sting and sting, and I suddenly thought there was probably nothing they’d like better than a fresh bare bottom.

That thought brought me abruptly back to the present. So I tore a crinkly page, finished and pulled up my pants, and watched the horsefly warily. When it lit for a moment on a dim rafter above me, I jumped and ran, banging the door behind me as I hurried past the edge of the field toward the barn.

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