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Debra Dickerson and Erroll McDonald

the breakfast table
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from: Debra Dickerson

Hell on Earth

Posted Thursday, Sept. 7, 2000, at 11:55 AM ET

Dear Erroll,

Mighty strong words dogging the Mother Church there, homey. God's gonna get you. I do believe that Catholics are among the most disgruntled of all religionists (and I say that as a furiously EX-Southern Baptist). Yet, you still want to be married as a Catholic and have your kids partake of the most basic, most sacred rituals. I wouldn't submit my kid to the full-immersion baptism I endured as a 10-year-old in a moldy church basement on a bet. "Foul spiritual corruption"? Priests who are "red-faced drunks"? Why not just walk away? (Or help that guy outside the Vatican Embassy here hold up those big old signs of his?) My husband and I would not allow the word "God" used in our wedding ceremony and looked hard for someone secular to marry us.

Remember the movie Agnes of God? I was particularly struck by Mother Superior Anne Bancroft (always deliciously human no matter who/what she plays) jacking up the lapsed Catholic-investigator-of-miracles Jane Fonda played and saying something like, "OK, sister. What is it that you're mad at God about? What's your beef?" The clear implication being that most lapsed Catholics still really believe, or want to, but have some particular grudge (feminism, class issues, historic oppression, the sinful opulence of the church's wealth). I think that's you, oh multilingual, Yale-educated sophisticate. You're mad at the God you wish you didn't believe in for the many loser followers of His we have to put up with day in and day out. Honoring the God they believe made the world in six days by insisting on ostentatiously praying to him before football games. Hard spiritual work, that. This school year in Virginia is the first to begin with a mandatory "moment of silence." Nyah, nyah! They want sex ed out of the schools (so important only parents should dispense the knowledge) but prayer in (so important any anonymous teacher should oversee it). I share your annoyance with His minions. He made roses and Jerry Falwell?

My lapse, however, is complete. I do not believe in any kind of god, and I emphatically reject the existence of heaven, hell, and religions that claim both infallibility and exclusivity. Are Catholics aware that they are a minority of believers on this planet? Everyone's wrong but them? The Borgias were popes for goodness' sake. The Abrahamic God may exist. I just refuse to deal with Him. Why do you keep trying if you're so sickened by it? Admit it--you believe. I guess you never said you didn't, did you? Speaking of idiotic followers--did you read about Gloria Steinem getting married? Charlotte Hays, former New York Post gossip columnist who now edits the conservative Independent Women's Forum said, "She was always sort of desperately eager to get married, poor thing. I think she just didn't lasso anybody until now." At 66. A former Playboy bunny who was never without a high-profile, high-living boyfriend. These conservative chicks, excuse me girls, crack me up. MEOW! That's the same way they try to smear Hillary Clinton for being (gasp!) a supportive wife. How dare she have put her enormous talents and potential on hold to follow around a man? And she calls herself a feminist! The miniskirts they're all so proud of must cut off the flow of blood to their brains that would make them understand that it's their silly and willfully perverse version of feminism that's the problem. Women get to choose. That's all feminism is. Marriage or not. Kids or not. Work or not. We don't have to choose a life alone to be feminists. Duh. Didja read the pretty conclusive proof that pre-Colombian Anasazi Indians (precursors of the Hopi, etc.) were cannibals? This debate has been raging for a while (The New Yorker did a big piece on it last year), but they seem to have the goods now. Indians activists are of course denying it. Something tells me the Vatican would find that "deficient." Some would just call it dinner.

Later,
Deb

the breakfast table
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from: Debra Dickerson

Hell on Earth

Posted Thursday, Sept. 7, 2000, at 11:55 AM ET
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Debra Dickerson is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist for Beliefnet.com. Her memoir, An American Story, will be published this month (click here to buy it). Erroll McDonald is an editor at Pantheon Books.
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Reader Comments from The Fray:


Indian gaming may seem like a form of reparations in our tort-minded culture, but this is a false analogy. Indians are permitted to operate casinos because they have sovereignty over their reservations by treaties signed in the preceding centuries. When the federal courts ruled that states could not bar tribes from running casinos, states negotiated agreements with them regulating their operation (restricting alcohol, for example). Indian gaming, fishing rights, and sales tax exemptions are not gifts of guilty white liberals. They are an acknowledgement of legal obligations from another era.

--Andrew W.Cohen

(To reply, click here.)


I believe the best reparations would be putting forth the effort to treat Black Americans and Indians with the respect and equality human beings deserve. What good would money and property do, when white folks can still treat Black Americans and Indians as less than human, therefore less than equal? What would I, a Black American, rather have: 40 acres and a mule, or to be treated and given as much respect and equality is my white brother and sisters? Forget the money and the property, give me my equality and my respect. That is the best reparation any oppressed people can ask for.

--philiagoddess

(To reply, click here.)


The purpose of reparations is justice. The purpose of group reparations (vs. individual) is approximate justice. So it is necessary to decide how approximate we wish our justice to be. I believe that reparations for the dead (eg slaves) paid to their remote descendants is too crude. However, after slavery there was still a long-term injustice towards blacks: Jim Crow. This depressed the wages of Afro-Americans. Some of these victims are still alive. Since they would be mostly retired now, I suggest compensation through the Social Security system. This could be done in many ways, for example by adjusting the probability distribution of wages of blacks to mirror that of whites (on a year-by-year basis, up to some cutoff date), and then using that adjustment to adjust individual wage histories, and so finally increase Social Security payments.

--Bob Cox

(To reply, click here.)


We do owe the black people. The whole country does, because we took their share of work for building this country up, for free, and on top we dragged them through the hell of slavery, and broken families, and constant humiliation. And even now 140 years after the Civil War, the prejudice continues. If we inherited all the good stuff from our predecessors in this country, we also inherited their debts. And the debt to the black people still needs to be paid.

--Amyntas

(To reply, click here.)


Several questions:
1)If we're starting with home-grown folks, should we be planning to collect reparations from black slave owners' descendants?
2) Would you prefer African-Americans have quasi-sovereign nations to live on like Native Americans tribes, and thus be immune (to a large extent) from the state and federal government?
3) Did Bill Clinton oppose the war before or after he signed up for ROTC, and then dropped out once he realized he might get drafted?
4) Was Gore struggling along as a pauper while Bush was living high with his family's money?

--MRB

(To reply, click here.)


Notes from the Fray Editor: Debra Dickerson does a splendid job of explaining The Fray. (In fact, our job--thanks Debra.) This is the post she mentions about the National Review. Views on reparations can be found all over The Fray, and we picked out some of what we hope she will think the more intelligent and thoughtful ones, above. And WillV liked Ms Dickerson's description of the shooting--Tuesday-- so much he thought she should be be hired by Slate to write a cops and crime column.


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