Midweek Musings - July 31, 2024
A "therefore," Escobar's hippos, the business of conspiracy, parental anxiety, & Olympic triathlons
Just a few days ago, I found myself at an event listening to a number of journalists reflecting on American culture, evangelicalism, and politics. It was a wonderful evening, marked by good conversation and even occasional disagreement. We need more of that.
But the highlight of the evening came when the moderator, a longtime journalist, author, and magazine editor who I’ve admired and appreciated for decades, drew all of our attention to a single verse in Psalm 73:10 and to one word in particular: therefore.
One of the eleven attributed to Asaph in the Psalter, this one begins with outlining the ways of the wicked among the people of God, drawing attention to how it seems they are prospering and flourishing.
Our cultural moment is one populated by what Amanda Ripley has termed “conflict entrepreneurs.” These voices inhabit both ends of the political spectrum and have tapped into something really powerful. When rage and expressive individualism are the currency of the day, truth, civility, and wisdom can easily be dispensed with. I remember years ago reflecting on some of this with a colleague who rightly noted that these kinds of voices function like arms dealers. If the conflict stops, they go out of business. So their self-interest—fomenting, feeding, and sustaining the combat—clouds out any other calculus. And if you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of demand these days for the weapons they’re selling.
That’s precisely what the Psalmist seems to be getting at there in Psalm 73:10. I especially like how Robert Alter’s translation captures the language in verses 9-10:
“They mock and speak with malice, from on high they speak out oppression. They put their mouth up to the heavens, and their tongue goes over the earth. Thus the people turn back to them, and they lap up their words.”
For his part, the Psalmist recognizes and renounces the temptation to “talk like them” (15). Even more, it’s his journey into the presence of the living God (17) where he’s confronted with the ultimate doom that awaits those who traffic in that kind of malice.
The next time you read or see something that is clearly intended to evoke your outrage, maybe just pause and consider the source. Is this someone who makes a living trafficking in outrage, attacks, and insults? Popularity, clicks, downloads, and sales are a poor measure of truth.
There really are things out there that are outrageous. You can tell a lot about a person or community by what sparks their outrage and what does not.
As for me, I’m on the lookout for examples of faithful men and women who are finishing the race with integrity and consistency of character, even as broken and redeemed creatures.
Picking Up Weird Vibrations
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a fascinating story by Eli Maslow telling the story of alternative healing theories and businesses emerging out of the new far right wing of American politics. In particular, Saslow tells the story of Michael Cheseboro, an Army veteran turned Wyoming rancher. The story covers the rise of a lot of far Right media startups that have proliferated, but also some of the unusual business that have cropped up with eyebrow raising claims. If you’ve never heard of the “medbed” movement, neither had I. Read the whole article for yourself, but this section stood out to me:
“Michael’s daughter climbed into the Tesla medbed, a cylindrical hyperbaric chamber that sold for $90,000, and that Baxter said combined light frequency, sound frequency and intermittent electrical stimulation into “the future of health.” Michael went into the room next door and lay down in a frequency medbed, where he could punch in different codes to receive vibrations and stimulation allegedly tailored to specific medical issues.
He picked up the menu of options and looked at the alphabetized first page, which had more than 50 choices beginning with the letter A: “Acid Reflux,” “Acne,” “Alzheimer’s,” “Alcoholism,” “Aneurysm,” “Anthrax,” “Anxiety Relief,” “Arthritis,” “Asperger’s,” “Autism.”
“Wow, it can really correct all this?” Michael asked.
“Over time, it’s possible,” Andrea said. “As long as you believe, and your mind and body are in alignment with the right frequencies.””
There’s a lot going on here. But what fascinates me is the simultaneous emergence of a form of spiritualism divorced from established religious beliefs or structures, embedded within political movements. In fact, it seems some of the most simplistic narratives regarding secularization fundamentally fail to account for the surging growth of this kind of worldview, a trend that seems to proliferate on both ends of the political spectrum. Perhaps we’re all living in the “burned over district” now, watching alternative spiritualities spout up throughout the free market. Indeed, the digital revolution seems to have been an essential catalyst in all of it.
The Parents Are Not Alright
Jonathan Haidt’s work is always worth noting and his most recent book seems to be driving real policy changes in school districts around the country. The data is in on the ways in which mobile phones are negatively impacting student wellbeing, mental health, and learning.
But in a recent After Babel column, Lenore Shenazy points out another dynamic that’s often missed:
“A 2022 Harvard study found that 18% of teens were suffering from anxiety…and 20% of mothers and 15% of fathers were, too. There are usually a lot of causes for any social problem, but here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned: that by being connected to our kids by phones, we, too, are becoming a more Anxious Generation.
“One time when I went to pick up Sean from wrestling, I wanted to figure out which door he’d be coming out of at the high school,” my friend Nancy McDermott told me when I asked whether the phone had changed her as a mom. “We had Find My iPhone and he popped up like two blocks away, and I went, ’Oh My God—what is he doing there?’ I sort of went to this place in my brain like, ‘He’s being held in a basement!’ And then, of course, what had happened was he had turned off his phone when he was running and it showed the last place he’d been. And I knew he wasn’t being held in a basement, but in my head, it was, ‘What if he is?’”
I’m not a social scientist, but I do spend a lot of my time around students and parents. And Shenazy is precisely right. I still remember, years ago, when I was the dean of Boyce College and a staffer alerted me that a mother of an incoming freshman had called the office. “My son really has a hard time waking up early and I’m worried about his morning classes,” she explained. “Could someone from your staff call him in the mornings to wake him up.” Needless to say, we did not begin concierge wakeup calls to the dorms. And, as far as I know, the young man figured out how to get to class on time. But what was really going on was a mother who, I am sure, loved her son and was battling some of her own anxieties about his launch into college away from home.
Narco Hippopotamus
You’ve heard of the Cocaine Bear, but what about “narcotraficantes” hippopotamus? Turns out that Columbia is seeing a surge of hippos, estimated at 169, that originated from a small group that was once owned by infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar and was set loose after his killing in 1993. Over at Smithsonian Magazine, Joshua Hammer tells the fascinating story of how a small group of hippos, likely three females and one male, were set loose in the jungles of Columbia and the challenge that’s developed ever since.
The most recent government estimate from 2023 suggests there are 169 hippos roaming through the country and raising some real problems. So what is a conservationist to do?
This bizarre problem is compelling Colombian conservationists to search for unusual solutions, which is one reason I found myself with Mira on the Magdalena, staking out unsuspecting hippos. Mira is a member of a newly formed, first-of-its-kind animal control program, which seeks not to capture or “cull” the hippos but to sterilize them in the wild. But the procedure, an invasive surgical castration, is medically complicated, expensive and sometimes dangerous for hippos as well as for the people performing it. After successfully piloting the program last year, the team sterilized seven hippos in three months—a considerable achievement, but short of the estimated 40 castrations a year they believe will be necessary to control the population. “There have been sterilizations in zoos, but no information was available about doing this in the wild,” Mira told me. “We basically had to learn it as we went along.””
To say that “invasive surgical castration” of a wild hippopotamus is dangerous seems to be the understatement of the week. And then discovering that there’s no field guide on how to conduct such a delicate procedure in the wild…. well, that’s a job worth highlighting at your next career day.
Like a Bridge Over Bacterial Waters
Dean Martin may have sung about the “lovely river Seine,” but the famed river seems to be causing some trouble this week for the Olympic organizers in Paris and plans for the triathlon. As reported over at Bleacher Report, plans for the event to begin earlier this week had to be pushed back to today due to a surge of e.coli and other bacteria from recent rainfalls.
“Per the AP, $1.5 billion was spent prior to the Summer Games in an effort to make the Seine River safe for swimming, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo even attempted to showcase the improvement by swimming in it two weeks ago.”
I’ll resist the urge to offer up a joke on this one. And kudos to Mayor Hidalgo to doing her part to try to signal confidence in the sanitary conditions of a river that Parisians have been warned against swimming in for a century. Earlier today, both the men’s and women’s events went off without a hitch. I trust the winners, Cassandre Beaugrand and Alex Yes, get a lifetime dose of antibiotics to go with their gold medals.
What I’m Reading
Kevin Hart, Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood (Paul Dry Books)