Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Notes from my Knapsack 9-17-20

Jeff Gill

 

Leadership and lying

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It's difficult to get a clear read on this, but I strongly suspect that, when I was a kid, if someone said "all Presidents lie" there would be a great deal of pushback.

 

Kennedy was recently buried under an eternal flame at Arlington, and LBJ had just started asking McNamara what his options were in Vietnam, and Nixon was a semi-disgraced former vice-president. Ike was retired in Gettysburg, and Harry to Independence, but Johnson went to him for the signing of the legislation that created Medicare.

 

I learned when our family stopped with Grandma Gill at the Hoover birthplace in Iowa that, to my surprise, she appreciated him to the point of tears; I'd only heard him mocked as a failure, but she remembered his relief work in the Mississippi Valley and overseas, and honored the man. FDR was on the dime, and in our hearts as the one who taught us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.

 

Things changed quickly into the 1970s, and now "Vietnam and Watergate" is a phrase synonymous with loss of faith in leadership and government. Institutional trust came apart in many ways after Nixon left office and Saigon fell. It's of no small personal interest to people like myself that organized religious bodies, Scouting registration, and many other non-profit fellowship groups saw a peak in the early to mid-Seventies that has only declined in numbers and involvement since that date.

 

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" dissects this in detail, and hints at the reality that it wasn't just the Watergate tapes or the Pentagon Papers that triggered our national withdrawal from trust and commitment, but trends that go back farther, which ask us to dig deeper. I've spent most of my professional life delving into those questions, and wish I had better answers, or at least ones which fit into five hundred words, but I do not.

 

Yet I doubt I'd get much debate if I said today "all Presidents lie." Ford pardoned Nixon and said a number of things about why and how he came to that decision which I trust he privately regretted; Carter said to America "I will not lie to you" and then found in the Iran hostage crisis and as Desert One played out that it was easier said than done. Reagan and Iran-Contra set loose a tangled web of non-truths and evasions which only deepened skepticism on all sides, tripping up Bush I and setting the table for Bush II, with Clinton in between arguably not gaining a reputation for honest speech, whatever you thought he meant by "is."

 

As to Obama and Trump, in our era of hyper-polarization, you don't need me to poke the rough beast slouching through our politics today. Look back farther, and now historical studies tell us about presidential lies and misrepresentations from slave-owning scribes of equality to apostles of normalcy with mistresses in the White House hallways. Wherever you come down politically, we all think presidents lie, and what's more, there's nothing to be done about it.

 

Which is, in my opinion, our deeper dilemma. What would a truly transparent presidency look like? Can executive authority be wielded with absolute honesty? Should we ask for full disclosure of everything, always, from the Oval Office? And if not, why not, and when? We know what Colonel Jessup thinks about the subject, but what's our answer? I don't think we've had this conversation, and it's overdue.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he really has no opinion worth sharing about the hat you're not wearing or how those pants really fit you, but your baby is indeed beautiful. Tell him how you handle the truth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-12-20

Faith Works 9-12-20

Jeff Gill

 

Foreign countries right nearby

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"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

L.P. Hartley's line in "The Go-Between" has been reused in many forms since he wrote that in 1953.

 

Today, February 2020 feels like a foreign country.

 

So much has changed, and is still changing, that we all have to take into account, faith communities included. Schools and shopping are perhaps more common experiences of dislocation, but church life is right behind them.

 

I had intended to write about that this week, but another distant yet nearby circumstance has nudged its way into my present thoughts. Brad Lepper wrote a column about a subject he and I have been researching, discussing (even debating at times!), and publishing on for decades now. We have done presentations together at Denison University and at Sunwatch Village in Dayton, separately in various historical museums and archaeological societies all over Ohio and occasionally beyond. We've met bus tours and camera crews, all the while still adding to our store of data and length of a timeline whose length is itself nearly bookish in print.

 

The Newark Holy Stones are a mystery even to how many there are, since the various pieces and parts are a matter of some dispute even among those who still argue for their authenticity. The one clear point agreed to by all is that there are two primary artifacts, found in the ground with Hebrew letters carved into stone, both found in 1860 if months and miles apart, but both in Licking County.

 

Some supporters of Hebrew language users in a prehistoric period of central Ohio are willing to cast aside the first found, the so-called "Keystone" which was the only Holy Stone actually found in Newark (and outside of the city limits at that time). The contemporary nature of the typeface style characters inscribed on a sort of over-sized plumb-bob has led quite a few to agree that it is relatively modern in manufacture, but the later "Decalogue" stone, found in the fall of 1860 at the bottom of a stone mound that once towered over Somerset Road east of Buckeye Lake, is the one most often cited as proof of Israelite involvement in the construction of the Newark Earthworks.

 

With the profile of Moses on one side, and the Ten Commandments carved in a snaking path weaving around all sides of the round-topped stone object, the "Decalogue" object has a certain mystical appeal. For reasons of typography and paleography and patterns of error, it's as clear that the second Holy Stone has a modern origin as the Keystone. They are bound by qualities of discovery and manufacture that make them one, so that a flaw in either discredits both.

 

But as Brad pointed out last week, some sincere questioners have asked "if these are hoaxes, why would someone put so much effort into them?" The two-piece stone box for the latter Holy Stone, and other carved objects likely found with them, all indicate a serious amount of work. "Why?" is a fair question.

 

This is where a minister and an archaeologist have a common interest, in asking questions about "why" human beings do something, but not on our own commonly accepted terms. "Why" today is not always the "why" of a previous century or era. The question of the human quest for "why" has certain common features through time, but you miss the deeper issues if you assume people have always thought pretty much the way you would.

 

One aspect of the adventure Brad and I have taken on, along with occasionally scrambling through multifloral rose vines on hilltops, or sifting archives from Harvard to that foreign land of Michigan, is to try to put ourselves into the distant country of 1859. It's the Licking County of 1859, so many names and locations are the same, but the thinking is just similar enough to trip you up.

 

And the painful realization we came to was that the essential humanity of all racial and ethnic communities was denied, even here where slavery held no sway. Whether Caucasian or African or Native American Indian, there were and are those who would affirm we are one in origin, in rights, in hopes; and there still are, though less than there were, those who see sharp divides between peoples, and a lower origin, fewer rights, no hopes.

 

To erase that divide, if you thought you could do it with a fabricated artifact, would be worth a great deal of effort. They were wrong to do it, but we have come to understand better the "why" that drove them on the verge of civil warfare to do so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in Licking County; he owes Brad more writing than this short column. Tell him how the past looks to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.