Angelina and the Amish

I think I might have watched too many movies.

Last night, after a wonderful weekend hosting our Belgian friends Sergio and Roselie, we were home alone and ready for some mindless entertainment. So we dialed up the Angelina Jolie movie Salt. I’d seen a review somewhere that gave it three and a half stars. After watching the movie I’ve decided that must have been on a ten-star scale.

Is it good if you laugh out loud at a movie that you are supposed to take seriously? At one point in the film Angelina escapes by rolling off a highway overpass onto a passing truck many feet below. In real life, if someone did that, they would break a few ribs and bounce off the truck onto the pavement where they’d be run over by a car. Angelina not only survived her fall without injury, she then jumped onto another semi and then leapt onto a smaller truck. She almost overshot the smaller truck, but was able to hang on by her fingertips. Man, does she have strong fingers!

That last stunt made me think of the last stunt I ever tried. This was about five or six years ago on the ropes course of the Young Life camp at TimberWolf Lake. At the end of the ropes course you jump out and try to grab a trapeze in mid-air and then are safely lowered to the ground. I jumped out, grabbed the trapeze and couldn’t hold it. It makes no difference if you hold on or not, they lower you to the ground either way, but after my attempt I was unable to lift my right arm over my head for the next month. That was nothing compared to the left arm. It took three months to lift that arm, plus a couple of visits to an orthopedic surgeon, an MRI and six weeks of physical therapy. That injury was fresh in my mind because on Saturday my son Jesse and I took Sergio and Roselie up to TimberWolf Lake and we walked under the ropes course. I stood on the ground gaping up at how high that trapeze is and wondered what in the world I had been thinking. What was I doing over a hundred feet high in the air on wires and platforms to start with? Sometimes my own stupidity overwhelms me.

By the way, we also engaged in one of my favorite sports on Saturday. We went Amish hunting. Sergio and Roselie were curious about Amish people, so we drove around North Central Michigan and found some farms and an Amish bakery where they were able to talk with a young Amish woman. I envy Amish people. They don't jump off platforms and grab trapezes or watch inane movies.

But let’s get back to the ridiculous movie and stupid me who watched it. It wasn’t even the ludicrous action sequences I found so objectionable. It was the plot. I guessed it. All of it. I knew from the beginning her “friend” in the CIA was going to turn out to be the bad guy. Don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. I’ve seen too many movies (The Fugitive comes to mind) where the wrongly-accused hero’s friend turns out to be the real villain. I knew Angelina was a highly-trained killing machine with a troubled and somewhat forgotten past (The Bourne Identity? The Manchurian Candidate?). I knew she would have to keep indiscriminately killing innocent people to prove her innocence in the end. I saw all of it coming. It was Die Hard, Rambo, The Terminator and all the others rolled into one.

For some reason this morning I’m stuck on the contrast between that movie and the Amish people we saw on Saturday. Sergio and Roselie were interested in the Amish because of movies like Witness and other media portrayals. What they found was much different than what they imagined. They found reality. None of it was glamorous or particularly exciting – just people living off the land, living lives made complicated by their quest for simplicity. Reality, where middle-aged men get hurt trying to act like kids on ropes courses and where Amish people work from sunrise to sunset six days a week and barely get by, presents challenges far more complex than anything the people who created Salt ever imagined. No one’s going to make a movie about the glasses-wearing Amish girl at Yoder’s Bakery in Stanwood, Michigan. Hopefully the world will ignore her. But in a sense – a sense suggested by CS Lewis in his sermon for the ages called The Weight of Glory – she has a beauty that outshines Angelina’s. Lewis said, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” Keep that in mind today.

I'm Dreaming of the World Series!

Usually, when I want to do a blog entry, I think about the title of my blog and go to what I’m reading or writing or watching or speaking about. But I have a problem this week. I’m reading two books and am not close to being finished with either of them. I have been writing some things, but none of them will appear for a few weeks. I don’t have any speaking engagements until the third week of October. And as for watching, I’m only watching one thing these days: Detroit Tigers baseball.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s good for me to spend as much time as I do watching sports. Gretchen usually does a crossword puzzle every morning and she’ll ask me “six letters, Merchant of Venice heiress” and I will look at her blankly. But if she asks “three letters, Giant legend” I always say “Ott” as in Mel Ott, the New York Giants Hall of Famer from the 1930’s. If only I’d spent all the time I spend watching baseball reading Shakespeare ….

But I really don’t care that I don’t know who Portia is. Last night we watched a couple of innings of the Tigers playing (and losing for the first time in two weeks) in Oakland and saw the A’s centerfielder Coco Crisp. Somewhere high on the list of reasons I love baseball are the names. Coco Crisp! Is naming your son after a breakfast cereal a guarantee of success? We started coming up with players on the All-Food team: Bobby Wine, Chet Lemon, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Darryl Strawberry, Zack Wheat, Billy Beane, Sam Rice … the list goes on and on. For those who like your food closer to nature there’s Steve Trout, Rob Deer and Bob Moose. There was a ball player once named Granny Hamner, which sort of makes me think of literature because George Elliot was a woman and Evelyn Waugh was a man. And there is a player named Shin-Soo Choo for the Indians. Shin-Soo Choo! His name is a tongue twister. Forget selling sea shells by the sea shore. Just say Shin-Soo Choo ten times fast. The sport keeps giving and giving. The other day I saw a pitcher whose last name was “Balfour.” Isn’t that perfect? Reminds me of the old pitcher Dave Heaverlo. “Heave her low, Heaverlo.” And I haven’t even mentioned the sublimely name Matt Batts, Johnny Bench, Rollie Fingers, Gates Brown, Duke Sims or Boots Day. Which makes me wonder how a guy with a name like Mitt Romney slipped away from his appointed destiny in baseball? There’s still hope. Maybe he could buy a team. After all, George W. Bush once owned a baseball team. He traded Sammy Sosa for Fred Manrique. Yeah, that Fred Manrique.

Don’t I have better things to do? Yes, I can read the newly arrived Sports Illustrated, which may have guaranteed the doom of the Tigers by putting Justin Verlander on this week’s cover. Surely, you must be aware of the dreaded Sports Illustrated jinx. Michael Jordan was on the cover of Sports Illustrated about three thousand times and you saw what happened to him. He was the greatest basketball player ever and got old and retired. I hope something terrible like that doesn’t happen to Verlander.

Yes, I should be more tuned in to what’s happening in Libya, but the Gaddafi wine my daughter and her boyfriend found in DC last week says it all: “nutty flavors and a curiously disappearing finish.” Yes, I should be more tuned in to other things in our culture, but a friend’s post on Facebook that said “every time you watch an episode of Jersey Shore a book dies,” has convinced me to stay away from that. Yes, I should care more that our governmental system allows a permanently-tanned guy from Cincinnati the power to frustrate the President at every turn, but all that makes think of is that Sparky Anderson came to us from Cincinnati, and he always looked tan, too, and now the Tigers are kicking butt again like they used to when Sparky was the manager.

Anyway, who wants to listen to John Boehner when you can watch Jose Valverde totter around the mound like a drunken elephant trying to walk on ice? Who cares that Sarkozy and Cameron showed up in Libya yesterday to pat each other on the back when guys like the oft-despised Ryan Raburn and ever-suffering Alex Avila hit pinch-hit home runs to tie a game in the ninth inning and then the disabled list-prone Carlos Guillen gets a hit in the tenth inning to win it? Who cares about evil empires developing weapons of mass destruction when we have Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez, two of the most potent WMD’s ever unleashed on the American League?

Our boys are going to be in the playoffs for the first time in five years. They will win their division for the first time since 1987. I’m dreaming that they will win the World Series for the first time in 27 years. Don’t try to guilt me into caring that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. The Tigers are on top and I could care less.

Ten Years After

The part we all agree upon is the tragedy. The senselessness of the attacks. The heroism of the firefighters and policeman who ran forward into the carnage and died as a result. The selflessness of soldiers who answered their country’s call and have given their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The widow who wondered how long after 9/11 she should keep her husband’s toothbrush by the sink. The scar left on our national psyche. The determination not to let the bad guys win. The reality that we now submit to full body scans after we remove our shoes, belts and jackets, empty our pockets, present our computers and Ziplock bags of toiletries just to get on an airplane. The way the images of the towers of the World Trade Center falling are seared into our brains. The beauty of the crystal clear blue sky that day. The stories of courage of the passengers of United flight 93 who took a vote and decided to overpower their hijackers. The way phrases like “Let’s Roll” or “Ground Zero” now have sacred meaning. There were three thousand or so victims that day, and tens of thousands of ways that day has affected us.

What we don’t agree upon is what it all meant. In the days immediately following the terrorist attacks, I wondered “Why do they hate us so much?” I heard the President say it was because they were enemies of freedom, but I later heard Osama Bin Laden credited as saying “If we wanted to attack freedom, we would have attacked Sweden.”

What we also don’t agree upon is how to respond. To his credit, George Bush never said “Go shopping” to the American people immediately after 9/11. He did encourage us to get on with life as normal, but he never stated that in terms as crass as “Go shopping.” I felt Bush’s statements and activities in the days immediately following the attacks were very good.

To his discredit, George Bush started “The War on Terror,” which has cost more American lives than were lost on 9/11 and over a trillion dollars. Anyone but me notice the irony that our fractured Congress has a special deficit reduction committee working to figure out how to reduce our national debt by $1.2 trillion? That is approximately what we spent in the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither Bush nor Obama presented a plan to the Congress or the American people of how to pay for the war(s) we have been fighting. Want to save $1.2 trillion? Don’t invade the Middle East.

I mentioned words that have become part of national lexicon above, and you can add “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantanamo Bay” to that list. The problem with choosing to fight back is that you wind up taking on the characteristics of your enemy. We didn’t learn a blessed thing from our involvement in Vietnam. Don’t you remember My Lai? Every “Cowboy Justice” Western that’s ever been made has illustrated this truth, where, by the end of the movie, it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. I lament our national addiction to “Cowboy Justice.”

For me, this is more than a matter of citizenship. It’s a religious issue. Last Monday I had a blog entry posted on “Think Christian” that speculated on what it would have been like for us to choose compassion instead of vengeance as a response to 9/11. There has been an ongoing debate on that site over my post since. I recognize not all Christians agree with me, but I believe the heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ is compassion. I believe when Jesus said “love your enemies” he didn’t mean go kill them. I believe when he told Peter that people who “live by the sword die by sword” he was telling the truth. As much as my heart breaks over the losses of 9/11, I still have no idea what that has to do with our decision to invade Iraq. I see more of a connection between 9/11 and our involvement in Afghanistan, but I wonder ten years later what in the world we are still doing there.

We had a poignant time of silence while a bell was struck ten times at church this morning. Then we sang America the Beautiful and later we sang My Country ‘tis of Thee. I had mixed feelings about the songs. To the extent we sang them to honor the memory and suffering of all those directly affected by the terrorist attacks a decade ago, I sang along with gusto. To the extent that we sang them to endorse “The War on Terror,” I felt conflicted. Such is often my lot in life. Maybe I just think about things too much. I’m going to stop thinking about this now and go watch both the Detroit Lions and Detroit Tigers this afternoon. That luxury, a luxury people in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly don’t have, may well be part of the problem. I don’t know. I’m not going to think about it anymore.

Where Were You?

There are millions of words and images everywhere this weekend as we mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, and I hesitate to add more to them but will, in order to ask a question.

Where were you when it happened? My story is unusual because I was on an airplane, flying from Detroit to Indianapolis. The plane did a 180 degree turn and the pilot came on the intercom and told us we were returning to Detroit because of an “air traffic control event” and that all planes were being ordered to the ground. I couldn’t imagine what that could possibly mean and wondered if he was lying to us because there was something seriously wrong with our plane. Before long someone used a cell phone (which, of course, they weren’t supposed to be doing on a plane) and told us that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon. I remember someone on the plane angrily saying, “What’s that got to do with Indianapolis.” I wonder if that person remembers saying that. I bet they’d like a “do-over” of that moment. Getting a rental car amid the chaos of the Detroit airport was surreal, and then I still had to drive to Indianapolis. There were bizarre scenes along the way – there were lines at gas stations of people who figured World War III was starting and some gas stations tripled and quadrupled their prices. I also remember pulling off the highway in Anderson, Indiana and passing the “Hoosier Girls” strip club that had a sign out front that said “Pray for America.” I’d never really thought much about the relationship of strip clubs and prayer before that moment. I finally got to Indianapolis eight or nine hours later than I was supposed to, and only then did I see the video of the towers in New York falling and start to really absorb the devastation that had happened. Where were you?

Whither Labor?

Labor Day feels like the inverse of Memorial Day – both holidays mark the change in season more than commemorate anything specific. It’s not like folks stay at home on Labor Day contemplating the legacies of Samuel Gompers or George Meany. People around here head to the lake for one last long weekend because summer is ending and if Labor Day means anything, it means we all get a day off to rest from our labors.

Organized labor as a force is fading fast in our culture. Pay attention to the media and ask how many positive references you hear to labor unions. Unions get the blame for coddled, unproductive workers, high costs and low profits.

On top of that, the new Beloit College Mindset list just came out, the list created annually to capture the worldview of freshman entering college. (The list mostly succeeds in showing the rest of us how old we are.) Number four on this year’s list is: “The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major-league sports.”

That’s not how it used to be.

Sometime around 1970 my father told my brother and me that there was going to be a strike at the Fisher Body II plant by our house. He worked a few miles away at Fisher Body I. We hopped the fence that separated our sub-division from Fisher II and, sure enough, at the appointed hour a hoard of people came streaming out of the factory. A few of them hoisted placards and started picketing. A piece of paper blew across the road to where we were and my brother picked it up. We now had a copy of the lyrics of the union’s marching hymn Solidarity Forever. We joyfully sang along with those on the picket line: When the union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, there can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun, yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, for the union makes us strong….

But it wasn’t all marching and singing. There was definitely violence in the air. I remember someone came barreling into the plant entrance and tried to drive a car through the picket line. The way was blocked and there was a lot of shouting and cussing and rocking and pounding of the car. A stalemate ensued until some plant security officers came out and rescued whoever was trying to get in.

If my memory is correct, the strike at Fisher II was never settled. Not that it mattered in the long run – Fisher Body is long gone, and if the Federal Government hadn’t intervened a few years ago there’s a good possibility that General Motors itself might have gone under. The struggles of Flint, Michigan, where the drama of the strike at Fisher II played out, have been well documented by Michael Moore.

I’ve sometimes ridiculed Michael Moore because he actually grew up in the suburbs while I grew up in the city. Truth be told, though, his father was a blue collar, hourly employee at AC Spark Plug on Flint’s east side. My father was a white collar, salaried GM employee and we lived on the southwest side of town. My father spent his career in “labor relations,” which meant he was locked in a slow dance with the United Auto Workers for about 30 years. The UAW was anathema to him. In my father’s retirement he’s seen benefit after benefit stripped away as GM has struggled financially. Things like pension payments, life insurance policies and health care provisions have all been cut or reduced. In addition, the GM stock he accumulated over the years is now worthless. Ironically, the blue collar UAW retirees have had more of their benefits preserved because of the strength of collective bargaining. Somebody should have started a union for the white collar retirees!

I think about the assumptions labor and management made about the world a generation ago. They assumed they should be in conflict with each other. They assumed unreliable, ugly, gas-guzzling automobiles would always be in demand. They assumed it was okay to spend your life doing mind-numbing work that required few skills and little education. They assumed people worked only for money and didn’t need things like inspiration, hope or beauty in their work lives. They assumed General Motors, the largest corporation in the world in those days, was invulnerable. Neither side thought much about what mutual goals they had. Instead, they fought and fought to beat each other and get a bigger piece of the pie than they had before.

The future, for any company or corporate entity, and for any labor organization, is in cooperation instead of conflict, in inclusiveness instead of exclusiveness. Who can afford the kind of acrimony and combativeness I witnessed as a youth at Fisher II? Go back to the Beloit College list. Only in professional sports, where millionaires bicker with billionaires, can people afford strikes and lock outs. In the real world, happy are the employers who have learned the lessons of the labor movement and come to value the unique contributions every employee brings, who share ownership, who build cultures where everyone is an insider. The future belongs to them.

It Happened Again

For the second time this week, a post of mine is up on ThinkChristian.net

In the meantime, I've been occupied working on a book for Young Life on the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the Castaway Club camp in Minnesota. I've been doing research and interviews, digging through the camp archives and finding things like a list of the camp staff in July of 1978 which had both my wife and college roommate (but not me) on it. The Castaway book won't be done anytime soon, but I wanted you to know I'm not just sitting around writing for other blogs at the expense of my own this week.