I Want Out of Modern Marketing

Sears credit card accused me of being late on two months payment when I paid off the card. They got payment of the almost the whole balance a day after the due date. That left a small balance – and I thought I had a zero balance. They charged me late fees for both months. I protested. They fixed it and ended up giving me money back.

I tried to close the account, but it was such a hassle I just decided to let it go. But I haven’t shopped at either Sears or Kmart since, and I don’t intend to. It’s the only way I can protest what I see as unjust financial policies that only benefit the company, never the consumer.

Somehow, and I confess I don’t remember how, I ended up in a situation where I had to sign up for a trial copy of Cooks magazine in order to get something I wanted on the web. I was already subscribing to one of the publications, but thought, what the heck, a one copy trial, no big deal. Ever since then I’ve been getting demands for payment for a year’s subscription. Today I got the third notice. Probably going to turn me over to a collection agency next.

I’m tired of companies assuming that I’m a patsy. I’m tired of companies assuming that I will pay bills I haven’t made for products I don’t want. I’m tired of companies making it difficult for me to close accounts, drop out, drop them off my screens – both mental and computer.

I want out of modern marketing!

A questionable hermeneutic

There was a Senior chapel talk the Friday before Thanksgiving break.

It was a fine talk by a fine young woman with a sensitive conscience. She worried that she was not the kind of Christian she believed God and Jesus wanted her to be. She thought about how her life was shaped by faith and how faith guided her choices. I think that’s what she was saying. I was distracted by her hermeneutic – combined with what I had just heard in a debate over the ability of Christian theology to guide thinking about sustainability.

Her hermeneutic was a common one for students at our college. It begins with the assumption that every word in the bible, in its various translations (though more often than not in either the Authorized Version or one of its conservative iterations such as the NIV), is pure word of God, and every word of the bible is “scripture” and “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness.”

In this hermeneutic the Christian scriptures are a rich mine filled with nuggets of wisdom that can and should be drawn up to solve problems, end debate and close minds. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me” is the simplistic version of an evangelical hermeneutic adopted by many of our students, and probably not a few of our faculty.

Given the zeitgeist of fundamental apocalypticism that is not uncommon in many Kansas, Texas, Nebraska churches, that quote mining hermeneutic is sometimes combined with a view of creation that sees creation as coming to a sudden and catastrophic end.

That point of view had been demonstrated in Argumentation class that same Friday. Debating the issue of the sufficiency of Christian faith for developing a sustainable view of human interaction with creation, the negative argued that God was going to do away with the earth sooner or later and therefore there was no need to develop a theological affirmation of sustainability. Even sadder: the Affirmative, having opportunity to refute, didn’t even confront the bad theology.

We offer no challenge to this impoverishing hermeneutic. We don’t challenge our students to see the Christian scripture in historical context, to see scripture through a historical critical hermeneutic, to view it through a Christo-centric hermeneutic, or any sophisticated hermeneutic.

Our contemporary Lutheran understanding of Scripture gets almost no hearing anywhere on the campus. I certainly wouldn’t advocate that we attempt to proselytize for a Lutheran understanding of the Christian scriptures. I would advocate that we need to present that resource to students more directly, more fully and unapologetically. FCA and other evangelical groups who use a quote mining hermeneutic operate without any alternative understanding of the scriptures of Christendom. One of the reasons that kids use the interpretive tools offer by evangelical churches is that they aren’t offered anything else, anything more critical and in some sense more aware of the intellectual difficulties of being religious in our post-modern world.

Our spiritual challenges are partly non-academic. Developing as a faithful and thoughtful advocate of any religious position, (or of agnosticism or even atheism) is in some sense a personal journey and not an academic one. But it is also an academic journey.

The tools that have been developed for the critical study of the Judeo-Christian scriptures are not new. These are ideas and concepts that have been developed since the 1850’s, and are well known in the seminaries, even the most conservative evangelical seminaries. They are disparaged there while they are encouraged in the seminaries of the Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican and ELCA Lutheran churches.

I first encountered these tools in New Testament studies as a sophomore at Augustana College. They were enlightening and empowering. They enabled me to take a clearer look at the Bible. They gave me a terrific boost in an attempt to understand the world science was describing – even the world literature was describing – and the ancient texts that I felt were normative for my life. I don’t think the tools of contemporary scholarship would do anything less for our students. Somehow we need to make those tools more available to the student body if we are going to do something more than just create a warm fuzzy sense of spiritual development. I like warm fuzzy spiritually fulfilling objectives, but I don’t think that warm fuzzies alone are worthy of us as an institution of higher education.

The Scam That Almost Caught Me

I have almost been a victim of an incredibly expensive scam.

It began last week when I put the Fusion on Cars.com. Since that posting I’ve had three brokers call offering to sell the car for a fee – each of them guaranteeing success in the sale. After the second broker call I received an email that began the scam.

The first email, from a Kelvin Klaser or slimmy07@gmail.com, asked, “Is the posting still valid.” He asked about condition, and gave several indications that he hadn’t actually looked at the ad. While this should have been an immediate red flag, I didn’t want to be rude and reply “Why don’t you look at the cars.com ad.” I did direct him to the video walk around. He noted that he was out of town and would complete the deal online. He also told me that he would have the car picked up and shipped overseas.

The next email he offered to purchase the Fusion at the asking price and to pay via Pay pal, to pay the fees for receiving a payment via Pay pal. Only he didn’t call it just that. He seemed to know how to use Pay pal that marked him as an advanced user. I took a day off from the deal and began to think about what I had to do to complete the sale. I had a list of what had to be done on Monday in order to complete the sale.

In other words I was sure that this was going to be a quick sale that would enable us to get rid of the Fusion and not lose money on the deal. On Monday I read an email saying that I should invoice him via Pay pal and he would get the payment to me. I created the invoices on Monday – Pay pal will not let you invoice for more than $10,000, so I had to create three invoices – two for the car and one for the cost of the receiving the cash.

Things were going fast, and I didn’t feel right about the whole deal. I had the good sense to post my ill feelings to facebook, and had the good friends who warned me about what was going on. Deb Levy came thru with a description of the exact scam that I was now involved in.

So I went to the bank and reported. I went to Pay pal and cancelled the invoices. Then I opened my email. I had four emails. Two from Kelvin and two purporting to be from Pay pal. According to the emails, Kelvin had deposited over $18,000 into my Pay pal account, but it was being held pending my sending $1500 via Western Union to his shipping agent in the UK.

I responded by telling Kelvin that the deal was off. If there was to be a deal it would have to be by cashier’s check and that I would not be sending any money anywhere.

I was able to do that with confidence because his scam had followed the list Deb showed me nearly verbatim.

Then I called Pay pal – something Marjie B. Anderson advised. They assured me that there was no money deposited and on hold for me. I reported Kelvin to Pay pal (spoof@paypal.com) and to Google (all the email addresses were gmail addresses).

The key was “send me $1,500 and I’ll send you $18,000 and pick up your car.” Because I would not get burned that way (I’ve never been tempted to send money to a Nigerian princess/Suffering Pastor/Millionaire to be Oil Magnate). I also don’t have $1500 to send to anyone right at the moment. That’s why I’m trying to sell the Fusion! But I followed along to the crucial moment of the scam, even though my gut told me there was something wrong.

Why?

Part of the answer is because I’d never encountered this kind of scam before. I’ve been scammed face to face many times by people who got money out of my pocket and into theirs with all sorts of sob stories. This scam was different.

The steps in the scam are:

1. The scammer makes contact asking about the validity of the posting – no mention of the product. You will fill that blank in for the scammer.
2. The scammer cannot meet you face to face because he’s out of town.
3. The scammer promises to pick up the item through a third party.
4. The scammer needs to complete the transaction quickly. Pay pal seems to be a way to get things done quickly and gives the seller a sense that they will be safe.
5. The scammer promises to pay more than the asking price.
6. Finally – and this is where the scammer pulls the string – the money includes a payment to that third party who will pick up the item to be shipped overseas. You have to pay the shipper and then you can get your payment.

Now that I know the steps I’ll be a little better prepared for the next phishing email.

But I also got caught in this because I wanted the sale to be real. It was my desire that made me almost fall victim to the scam. The Buddha was right about desire.

Thanks Deb Levy and Marjie Benbow Anderson for excellent advice and to all the rest of my facebook friends for reassurance that my gut instinct was right.

What I Have Against Mormons

I am not going to vote for Mitt Romney, but I’m not going to vote for him because of his policies, not because of his religion. The U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits offering a religious test for office. In fact, prior to Kennedy Presidents were supposed to just be nominally religious. Reagan professed some sort of Christianity, but never doing the basic thing that Christians do – attend worship. Still, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t care what sort of faith, if any the President has.

I am not anti-Mormon. On a personal level I’ve known a number of Mormons, and they’ve all been good people. Intellectually, the Smith narrative, while it has essential problems with credibility, is a compelling narrative. The image of the colony’s members, the bee hive, an image of a busy and constructive vision of the American work ethic.

What I have against Mormonism is not the theology. I don’t know Mormon theology, but what I have heard makes it seem to me to be a kind of American works righteousness theology. It seems like a Calvinism with costumes and Indians. It’s a bit odd, but so is the Lutheran doctrine of the real presence.

What I have against Mormonism is the implicit notion that no other religion is either right or adequate for an ordinary human’s needs. I think that the impulse comes from Joseph Smith’s anxieties in the burnt over district. As I recall from my American Church history courses, Smith looked at the competing revivalist impulses and felt that they couldn’t all be right, and he wanted to be right.

This conviction that their way of being faithful is The Right way to be faithful leads to sending largely untrained young men out for two year cycle tours in which they attempt to convert people regardless of their current spiritual connections or life vulnerabilities. This conviction that they are right and we are wrong leads Mormons to baptize the dead, so that they have a chance to decide to be Mormons in the next life.

My experience with Mormon proselytizing goes back many years. I was pastor of a small congregation outside Charleston, SC. One of the girlfriends of one of the teenagers came to our congregation and in the first year I was pastor, actually joined the congregation. She broke with the boyfriend, but remained active in the life of the church. She was bright, thoughtful, well read, wanting to discuss ideas, and strangely vulnerable. Her senior year in high school she came to me for counseling. She was, she said, pregnant and wanted an abortion. We talked about alternatives. She thought that her parents would respond punitively if she told them of her pregnancy or carried the baby to term. Would I drive her to Columbia for an abortion?

I agreed, and on a Saturday morning I drove her to Columbia, SC. I waited and took her home. She said very little on the way home. She said that she was convinced that this was the right thing, but I felt that there was still a need for support. But I was in my third year in the parish and I didn’t know how to support her, much less how to bring some sort of reconciliation between herself and her parents.

She disappeared from the congregation’s life for a while. When next I saw her she told me that she had decided to convert to Mormonism. She’d been visited by missionaries. They read the Book of Mormon with her. They asked her to pray over it; was it the true word of god, was it right? The prayer convinced her, she said, in a somewhat faltering voice that seemed to me to be filled with doubts, vulnerabilities, and regret. Yet she was convinced that she should be a Mormon, had told the missionaries that she would convert, was scheduled for baptism and planning to go to BYU in the fall.

While I said to her, “If you feel that’s best, then I’ll support you,” I was seething on the inside. I thought very quickly of my one ex-Mormon member. She was afraid that the missionaries might find her. What she thought they’d do, I have no idea, but she was genuinely fearful of the consequences of leaving the Mormon faith.

What this boils down to is that it seems to me that Mormonism lacks the epistemological modesty that is useful for civility in contemporary civilization. They’d like to be considered just another Christian denomination, but don’t actually consider the rest of us as equals. We are the gentiles to their true religion. I find that annoying.

It's No Sport

I’m a fan of MSNBC, mostly.

I don’t care for Chris Matthews. He seems to be happy only when he can point to Democrats not doing what he believes will be a winning strategy. I used to be a fan of Chuck Todd. The commercial the station is running right now has set me off Todd. “Politics is a sport,” he proclaims. It’s a sentiment that I think Matthews would echo.

But he recognizes, or whoever wrote the copy recognizes, that this is a bad metaphor. Therefore he immediately issues a disclaimer (a cognitive disclaimer) “but it’s a sport that could mean live or death . . . “ Something like that. In other words, it isn’t a sport at all, at least not sport as we allow sport in this country.

Politics is often treated as a sport by the chattering classes. They think it gives them a measure of objectivity – I’m not advocating for either side on this, but just reporting on who’s ahead. That is not objective reporting, neither is it fair and balanced. It’s easy reporting, leading to empty speculation about what campaign x or y must do to gain advantage.

Sometimes this is called the “horserace.” Reporting on the horserace is simply a matter of reading the polls and then watching for anything that might move the polling – such as a candidate who says “The private sector is fine . . .” Which, in the context of 27 months of continuous growth is a relatively accurate statement. Or wait for a candidate to say “I’m not worried about the poor, there’s a safety net . . .” Which, given the overall vision of the party isn’t a gaffe, but a vision of how we treat the poor. But those statements can move the needle on the polling meter, so there’s reason to play up the statements, out of context, as a way of gauging the horserace.

What this does is make for a cynical electorate (among those who are paying attention) or a disengaged electorate (those who’ve tried to pay attention, but don’t care for political box scores). What this does not do is give us the information (boring) that we need to make a basic decision.

Which economic plan will actually do what it claims to do?

Why should we, or should we not, extend some methods of becoming citizens to those who’ve come without documents?

Is there are way to increase revenue, or is the idea of taxing the most wealthy a fools dream, because the wealthy will just avoid paying the taxes?

And while we’re on it – what happened to Greece’s money, to Spain’s money, to Ireland’s money? These countries didn’t go bankrupt by paying benefits – otherwise they would have been bankrupt long ago. So what actually happened? Rachel Maddow had a story about this several months ago. Was she right that the same greedy bastards who crashed the U.S. economy also crashed Greece’s economy? Where did that money go? Who got rich while Greece got poor? Do we Americans have any culpability for this?

Those are the kinds of stories I want to hear about. They aren’t sport. They require a whole lot more legwork and reporting skills than covering the current political standoff as if it were a horserace or a baseball game or a boxing match.

Find a new metaphor, Chuck Todd! This one isn’t at all helpful.

Verisimilitude & TV Ads

Perhaps I’m watching too much TV, but I’m really annoyed by the lack of verisimilitude in current advertisements.

The worst, at the moment, is the Kayak ad featuring a husband who’s had his pupils dilated in order to see more and not miss anything as he shops for travel bargains. He also sees hair on his wife’s lip and crows’ feet round her eyes.

Ok, everybody knows that dilating your pupils does not give you greater visual acuity, right. It makes your vision worse, not better. It’s why you can’t drive home from the optometrist right after getting your pupils dilated.

So why do the advertisers do this? They want to be funny, but instead they’re just lame and unbelievable. I don’t get it.

The Corporate Internet

I’m watching CBS this morning, a discussion on Facebook going public.

In essence, Facebook looks to make money by becoming like television. We’re going to be the sheep led to the shearing by Quiznos, Walmart, Ford, GM, and the like. You like, they get your data.

Of course there are lots of those annoying little ads in the right hand column.

Yep your internet experience will not be brought to you by America’s corporations. And will they now begin to dictate how the site looks and how we’re supposed to use it? Will they manipulate with half truths, untruths and just general bull. You bet. I’m afraid it is as inevitable as the arrival of advertising on radio.

When radio first appeared and radically changed the way Americans got news and entertainment, there was resistance to putting advertisement on radio. It would cheapen the experience, potential advertisers thought, and therefore cheapen their business. That deference didn’t last long.

I never expected the Internet to behave like early radio and find advertisers hesitant about putting their brand on my favorite web sites. But the discussion of how companies are using and are planning on using Facebook was pretty scary.

So here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to click on any commercial enterprises. I won’t like Quiznos. I won’t like Walmart. I won’t like even Gibson guitars (which I do like).

Bullying and Memory

When asked about his bullying of a closeted gay student, Mitt Romney “doesn’t remember” the incident, but he’s sure he never thought about the guy being a homosexual. When quizzed over his “divide and conquer” comments, Governor Walker doesn’t remember the details of the conversation, but is sure the context makes it innocent. Uh-huh. Sure. I’m a normal late middle aged adult and I do have parts of my life that I have totally forgotten. That’s why I have a wife with the memory of an elephant. But the stuff I’ve forgotten is stuff that made very small impact on my psyche. Meeting people once and once only. A side trip out of Salina to someplace. Don’t you remember that, she asks. And I don’t. But I do not forget, cannot forget those moments in my life that were truly regrettable. The time when I was in seventh grade when my racist upbringing led me to so fear the first black kid at Budlong that I pulled a knife on him to make him go away. I got a talking to. He got thrown out of school. Later, he confronted me on the street and I was fearful and wanting to run away. He was forgiving. I can’t forget those moments from my twelve year old life. When I was sixteen I behaved obnoxiously in the hallway at Lane Tech High School. I cussed at another student (it was supposed to be a joke). I was loud. I was caught by my homeroom teacher. Sent to the vice-principal’s office I sat that afternoon until after dismissal. Every hour Mr. Mazarakous called me into his office and quizzed me. Did I cuss? No sir, not me. Go back and sit outside. Day two. Did you curse? No sir, not me. Sit outside. Day three. Did you curse? Finally, with some tears in my heart I confessed. I had said “Fuck You” very loudly. I got five days detention after school, scraping old varnish off desktops and sanding off the scribbled in graffiti. Same high school. Jimmy was in swim class. It was an all boys high school and we swam in the nude. Jimmy was embarrassed by his nakedness. He was a little effeminate and all the boys teased him and called him queer. No we didn’t think of him as a homosexual. We didn’t think of him as gay. We thought of him as queer, faggot. He overcame the teasing, went on to become clergy and married. I met him many years later. I did not apologize for me behavior, but I certainly didn’t forget. You don’t forget. If Mitt Romney has really forgotten these incidents of bullying he may be suffering from some sort of dementia. He’s old enough that he might be. Otherwise, he’s lying. Or he was such a bully that his bullying was so common, so daily, that it wasn’t even worthy of remembering. I’m not willing to “give him the benefit of the doubt.” I don’t think that our memory of these sorts of incidents is as fleeting as Romney would have us believe. I agree that they didn’t think about it as homosexuality, but I’d bet a dollar to a donut that Romney and his cohort called the boy a queer, a faggot, a fairy. Just because it isn't pleasant doesn't mean you've forgotten. Just because you got caught telling the truth doesn't mean that you can spin and bully us all into believing you. This isn't the 1960's anymore.

Judging Clemens

Did Clemens lie about high and steroids? Did he lie about it? I certainly can’t tell from watching the video and listening to the reports on this morning’s CBS reports. I can tell that there is an assumption of guilt on the part of Charlie Rose and his guests. They have followed the story better than I have, so they might be right. What I don’t get is the apparent need on the part of news programs, despite having been caught in embarrassing judgments previously, the judgments continue. It’s casual editorializing, not like Fox where the editorial content is rarely based on fact. There are clear facts here, but long before a jury pronounces the news reporters and talking heads are already announcing why perpetrator is guilty. I think it is partly a result of the 24 hour news cycle. There’s always a push to pronounce judgment, and judgment is more interesting than dispassion. At the same time we’ve been lied to so often by government and business that we automatically assume we’re being lied to now. And we’ve come to distrust the courts. All of us saw the police just wailin’ away on Rodney King twenty years ago. None of the people were held accountable for that beat down. So why not just go ahead and make our own minds up about the s-o-by’s who have been offending us, breaking the law, whatever? Why not. Everybody else does, except the people we feel are supposed to do it. I don’t think that this is what journalists are actually thinking, but what they’re actually doing. The rest of us, we’re eager to join in the judgments.

On not having a Bible Crisis

I've never had a crisis of “biblical faith.” Let me put that in some context – but not all the context that this goes into. I've been reading a number of blog posts from ex-evangelicals. They describe how at some point in their lives, having been pushed into “it's all or nothing,” decided it was nothing. No god, no God, no divinities, merely earth, sky and mortals. No bible. Certainly no bible. I understand that mentality, sort of, because I was confronted by it many times while I served the church in South Carolina. I had one Navy wife very upset with me because I didn't espouse some sort of biblicism. I had a secretary in Georgetown, SC, who had once been an Episcopalian and when I knew her was a born again wave your hands in the air and speak in tongues and swallow the holy spirit feathers and all. She prayed for me, in my presence, that I might have my eyes opened to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of the bible. I have never had a crisis in which I felt I had to renounce the bible, mostly, I think, because I never understood the bible as a book whose every word was “true.” It started when I was just a kid. I remember an incident during my teen years. One of the girls my sister's age turned down a request that she teach Sunday School because she couldn't teach all that mythology and those old stories that weren't true – I remember her lumping Noah in those old stories she couldn't teach children. I think I was thirteen, and I think I had a feeling that my sister's friend was wrong. I don't think that, even then, I had a sense that these were “infallible” words, magic words I had to somehow “obey.” I do think that even then I had a sense that they were the stories we told that gave us a sense of who we are and where we're going and what we're supposed to be about and that we won't be alone on the journey. I remember my first New Testament class, at dear old Augie. I was liberated by the study of the synoptic problem. I was fascinated by the study of textual variations and how we knew which was closer to the original text. I was deeply encouraged by the search for the historical Jesus and the unwillingness to accept the Jesus of mid-twentieth century piety as identical with Jesus the Jew in Palestine in the first century. The whole modernist controversy, beginning with the 1850's rethinking of the gospel texts, thru the theologies of the Niebuhrs, Tillich, Nygren, and the like did not undermine my faith but increased my wonder. Historical criticism, form criticism, source criticism, those techniques of scholarship didn't undermine my faith because my faith was not and is not based upon a biblicism that I don't believe, have never believed, can't find reason to believe now. I got to thinking about this tonight while sitting at the bells concert. What a great time I had there! But as I tried to keep my digestion under control, I let my mind wander. I thought about the atheist movement; and as I mentioned above, the movement of ex-evangelicals; I listened to Pia Jesu, the only Andrew Lloyd Weber piece I think will survive. I was deeply moved. I had been moved by Fred Beuchner's Lion Country, by his description of a glorious moment when Jesus, looking like John Barrymore, Jr. came striding in from hell. (We read that story as part of the Messiah Theatre festival.) I am deeply moved by the story of Noah as well. Particularly by the verse: “And God remembered Noah.” I mean, it's ridiculous. If you take the story literally Noah and his family are all the human beings that are left. How could god forget? I get the same feeling from the story of the two thieves hung with Jesus. One turns to Jesus and says “Remember me.” In all your poor oppressed lonely nakedness, remember me, Jesus. I find that moving, just as I find Pia Jesu moving. Just as I find Beuchner moving. To me, that's the point. Not laws and rules and magic words, but a sense that we're not walking thru this world alone; a sense we are surrounded by both a great cloud of witnesses and a power we cannot understand, but that understands us.