Got Those Ol’ Lutheran Blues

I was raised in the Lutheran Church. For the longest time I was never told what being a Lutheran meant, except that it was better than being a Catholic. And what was the Catholic Church? When I was a little kid this question would prompt a lot of head-shaking and eye-rolling from the adults around me. Without much more to go on, I made a note to myself:

Catholics bad, Lutherans good.

Later, in my mid-teens, I met and fell for a Catholic girl. Since I was infatuated and thus she was incapable of error I had to make an adjustment to my thinking, and it came out like this:

Catholics great (also smell wonderful), Lutherans irrelevant.

That love affair fell through, and shortly thereafter so did my enthusiasm for attending daily mass and spending my Saturday afternoons trying to tot up my peccadilloes before going to confession. I had already decided that the number of “Hail Marys” I was being given as penances was excessive. Especially since at that point in life most of my sins were those of thought, and pathetically venial to boot. So it was back to Martin L. and the Lutheran fold for me.

Lutherans okay, Catholics tedious.

In college I read the book Here I Stand!, which was a best-seller at the time. It was a biography of Luther, and I remember that it painted him in heroic colors, and gave relatively little space to examining his “attitude” toward the Jews. Fast forward to my friendship thirty years later with Rich Kaplan, who referred to Luther one day, quite casually, as a “vicious antisemite.”

[A bit of background here. It was not uncommon for Rich to freely use phrases in general conversation like vicious antisemite, rabid antisemite, and antisemitic fuckstick. It was never clear to me which was the worst category.]

But later on I did some reading and found that Mr. Luther was indeed highly prejudiced against the Jews. In fact, he wrote a 65,000 word treatise entitled On the Jews and Their Lies.

Lutherans okay, Luther not so hot.

So how do we deal with the legacies of people who do very good and very bad things? Disqualify their positive achievements? Baby with the bath water and all that? I don’t have an answer. My own error-filled approach is to do it on a case by case basis. But I have no problem with those who topple the statues and erase the names. It may be the better way after all.

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Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, in his individual statement appended to the 1974 report by the Senate committee on Watergate, warned that “law alone will not suffice to prevent future Watergates.” Ervin wrote that “the only sure antidote” is to elect leaders who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them. Their election is not in the hands of prosecutors or lawmakers but of voters.

New York Times, August 24, 2023

So, friends, when the 2024 elections roll around, let’s all look hard for men and women “who understand the principles of our government and display the intellectual and moral integrity to uphold them.”

That shouldn’t be too hard. Anyone with those qualities will stand out from the generally unsavory herd.

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I admit that I didn’t watch the “debate “ this week. By now we all know pretty much what’s going to come out of those particular mouths, so it was unlikely that any surprises were in store for viewers.

Plus my personal physician , Dr. Perpetua Longstocking, told me that my psyche was too vulnerable at the moment to watch big fat liars for more than ten consecutive minutes. So I stayed away. All of the accounts I’ve read so far make me feel that I missed only an acute bout of nausea.

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I saw a genuine Cluckster at the grocery store last evening. Strange-looking fellow, strangely clothed, strangely bearded. But with a bright, clean, red MAGA cap on. This on the day that Mr. MAGA’s mug shot was released. Maybe it was his only cap. Maybe he likes being played the sucker. Maybe anyone who gives the world the finger, no matter how phony that person might be, is his hero. Maybe he doesn’t give a **** what I think. Maybe all of the above.

Perhaps one fine morning he’ll wake up and say to himself – could I really have been that dumb all this time? That unconscious? That unaware? That big a chump? Maybe none of the above.

It would be nice if I thought, as a traditional liberal, that we human beings are all walking on the road toward perfection and are perfectly capable of seeing the truth if it is presented to us … but these guys in the red hats … I don’t know about them. What I do know is that they had the country to play with for four years and I really disliked the results, the tone, the ugliness. They are today’s equivalent of the fascisti, and no good can come of letting them back in.

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Robin and are watching an excellent series on Netflix entitled Amend. It deals with the origin and application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.

The story is told imaginatively and has captivated us more than anything we’ve watched recently. As a refresher to those who may not carry the entire Constitution in their heads, here is the first section:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The third section will be discussed much in the months to come, I am pretty certain.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

This amendment is a biggie. Huge. What’s obvious to me in viewing the series is that it is responsible for the America that I thought was always there, from the very beginning. Nossir, not the case at all. We’re still working on it.

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