Farewell, President -- Sightings

Tomorrow we welcome in a new President, Barack Obama, and bid farewell to another -- George W. Bush. I'm not a fan of the exiting President. I'm one of those who thinks he ranks at the bottom of the list, though where is hard to determine. Some Presidents simply didn't live long enough to make a mark (William Henry Harrison). James Buchanan was one of the most experienced Presidents ever, but he sat and did nothing as the nation moved toward dissolution. Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover, both did poorly. Where in that anti-pantheon will Bush fit, history will have to determine.

But at the same time, it is possible to say that we might not have been the best of people either.
We are a people given to a sense of exceptionalism, a sense that we are inherently good, and it's difficult for us to look inside and see anything else.

On the day before Inauguration Day, Martin Marty takes a look at this issue -- not so much about Bush, but about us. What kind of people do we wish to be? I think its a question worth pondering.

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Sightings 1/19/09


Farewell, President

-- Martin E. Marty

Tomorrow, they tell us, is an epochal day in America and on the world-scene, so we'll choose to be reflective about some of its meanings. The dictionary says that sighting is "the act of catching sight of something, especially something unusual or searched." The original charter of Sightings was to "search" for sights of religion in public life and public issues in religion, back when it was rarer to "catch" sight of such. A canvass of press and media coverage during the weeks up to and including the weekend just past suggests we do not have to "search" or "catch sight of." Rather, so massive is the coverage that we have to squint and blink to protect the searching eye. To the point of it all:

The text for our meditation is something the late columnist Mike Royko wrote when he bade good-bye to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. My Royko books are in storage and what he said was not lifted up by Google and other search engines, but it was etched in my mind, and I hope that my reproduction is faithful. It went something like this: "Farewell, President Johnson. You weren't the best president a people ever had, but we were not the best people a president ever had."

This season people are still debating whether President Bush, who, I think, is being mentioned in this column for the first time on his last day in office, is "the worst president a people ever had," and I don't think we are "the worst people a president ever had." But Inauguration Day is a good time to reflect on "what kind of people we have been" and "what kind of people might we wish to be and might become."

Presidents of both parties from Eisenhower to Clinton have cited Alexis de Tocqueville, the great commentator on American life: "America is great because America is good." Two problems: Tocqueville never wrote that – look it up! And "good" is too hard to define, is too much in the eye of the beholders, and is far too crisp and clean for any nation to advertise, since the record of each is mixed, and more mixed each year.

What kind of people do we want to be with a new president who has such lofty ideas about what he wants to be? A sermon: We might do better if we aspire to be good rather than claim to be good; if we become a self-claimed godly people who serve God more than we boast about our goodness; if we spend less time fighting over who prays when and where and how, and let the intrinsic value of praying speak for itself.

What kind of people do we want to be? It would be good to see us as a people weary of "culture wars" in which God gets used, and ready for armistice and truces so we can fight the political battles that must be fought in pursuit of justice; a self-claimed godly people that stops legitimating torture of humans; a less litigious people who concerns itself with building trust; a people that will turn down the shouting on talk-radio, cable television, and the internet, so that we can hear each other.

What kind of people do we want to be? A people not paralyzed by fear and insecurity in the face of fearful threats; a people more dedicated than before to the education of all and health care for all; a people concerned with the environment given – many of us say – by a generous Creator; a people concerned for the rights of others. In four or eight years we hope to bid our now-new president farewell upon his retirement: "Farewell. Your and our record is mixed, but there is good in it. And you and we and the people we affect can live with that."

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

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"By wanting to talk about what normally falls under the category of religion in terms of play it may seem like I want to solve this problem by taking none of this aspect of life seriously. This is just because there is such a close association between play and frivolity in contemporary discourse. But if play is non-instrumental activity framed to evoke ambiguity, then it is not at all necessarily unserious." Approaching play as "a sophisticated form of metacommunication," a "non-instrumental activity framed to evoke ambiguity," Divinity School PhD candidate Jeffrey Israel finds wide-ranging ramifications for society. In "The Capability of Play," January's Religion and Culture Web Forum essay, Israel makes forays into animal behavior, religious identity, and Lenny Bruce, building a case for play as an essential component of human existence which should be recognized as a basic right.
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/index.shtml

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Goodbye Bush, and take bhusseinobama with you.

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