June 11, 2009
In a new Intel commercial, an unseen person enters a company cafeteria (remember those?). The employees have that startled, hungry look that Americans apparently get when a celebrity enters the room or a midtown elevator. They pull out paper and pens, holding them out for autographs or maybe just the touch of his hand.
The object of all this attention is a non-descript man who would not be noticed in any room except, perhaps his own living room. The man is, in fact, a real person and an employee of Intel. He is the inventor of the USB port (look on the left side of your laptops). It's a funny parody of American star lust. But it is more.
Because that nondescript man is also, obviously, from the Indian subcontinent. Or, his parents or grandparents were.
For a brief moment, during a commercial sponsoring a Sunday morning public affairs show, America hovered above the diversity obsession to embrace individual achievement.
I came back to earth while grazing the June 5th issue of the Michigan Catholic. Who reads MC? Probably older Catholics like me. And new converts, like me.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops sponsors something called the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church. The executive director is Jesuit Fr. Allan Figuerosa Deck. Fr. Deck is also a founding member of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. In the issue of MC, Fr. Deck was praising Pres. Obama's choice for US ambassador to the Vatican. Several choices had been rejected by the Holy See, in part because the candidates were pro-choice. The candidate is Miguel Diaz, a professor of theology (hispanic theology?) at St. John's University in Collegeville, MN. Prof. Diaz arrived in America as a child when -- the article doesn't elaborate -- his parents left Havana. Prof. Diaz is 45 years old, so it is a good guess his parents weren't fleeing the American mob.
The article describes Prof. Diaz as "pro-life," but also, "smart, willing to listen to others..." Pro life AND smart. Fr. Deck makes great claims for the "bilingual and biculutural," and by inference, Prof. Diaz (and, of course, Fr. Deck himself.) "The advantage is that our circumstances have allowed us to have feet in two worlds."
The current president of the Academy of Hispanic Theologians, Prof. Carmen Nanko-Fernandez, praises Pres. Obama's choice of Prof. Diaz as "recognition of the presence of Latino Catholics, which has been marginalized."
Marginalized.
Indeed.
At my election ceremony in April at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Detroit, Bishop Flores (a suffragan bishop chosen to minister to Michigan's growing spanish-speaking population) alternated between English to Spanish as he spoke to the catechumens. One half of the Cathedral was filled with Latinos. It was, by the way, an impressive talk by an impressive priest and bishop. A natural preacher.
Opposite the Diaz article was another piece: OBAMA NOMINATES NY LATINA TO SUPREME COURT. Judge Sonia Sotomayor's own words are absent from the article. But, it is clear from them that she shares the world view of Prof. Nanko-Fernandez and Fr. Deck. That is, cultural exceptionalism.
And also Prof. Diaz? Who knows? What is known is that he was a signatory supporter of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' nomination as Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services. Although, a Catholic, Secretary Sebelius is a vocal supporter of reproductive rights. Operation Rescue's site displays several pictures of her at a campaign function in May of 2008 with Dr. George Tiller -- the recently murdered abortion provider. A WSJ article (not an editorial) reported that he had performed abortions on girls as young as nine years old and abortions as late as near birth.
If my own personal observations of America's legal establishment are any indication, you don't get where Judge Sotomayor is today by being vigorously pro-life. Chief Justice Roberts is a beneficiary of Pres. Reagan's two terms in office, as well as Pres. Bush's eight years in the White House. But the establishment itself -- from the ABA on down to the infinite variety of law student associations focusing on ethnic triumphalism as much as the law itself -- brook NO criticism of Roe v. Wade or reproductive rights as they have expanded over the decades. The Federalist Society as it actually functions in real law schools is not much better. Given the quietude of students, I have no idea what it means to be a Catholic law student in today's vigorously policed classrooms.
Not so long ago, it was popular to talk about "two Americas." One rich. One poor. In between extremes are tens of millions of middle class, working class, and working poor of equally diverse backgrounds. Many, especially the working class and working poor, straddle America with "feet in two worlds." Particularly if, like soon-to-be Justice Sotomayor, they have some glancing acquaintance with poverty and struggle. I can only speak from personal experience. Merely "anecdotal" as the educated like to say. But individual struggle does not always meet the academic standard of "cultural advantage." If only the English and American underclasses, as described by Murray and Dalrymple, could watch TMZ and Sabado Gigante with equal fluency.
Not diverse enough in their suffering, a growing number of working class and working poor are invisible in their long descent. Sparse attention -- with the exception of Charles Murray and Theodore Dalrymple -- means the inhabitants of this culturally disadvantaged class are strange and unknowable like the creature in Edward Gorey's "The Sinking Spell." Little education and health care; more fatherless; poorer; abandoned to addiction and disease. Like so many others in corrupt and dysfunctional and value-free America. At the Dixieland flea market north of Pontiac, they mingle with blacks and hispanics in an underclass denied even its "diversity."
Academic America, and some precincts of the Church, seem to subscribe to his cultural exceptionalism that makes the pitiless distinction between historic and individual hardship. Diversity has the cynical appearance of upward mobility by other means.
In the complacent world of ideological triage, one wonders whether God's Divine Mercy has not been reduced to the unimaginative zero-sum game of fiscal politics. What is meant by hispanic theology? (Fill in your culturally advantaged group here.) Is it suprising that the rhetoric of social justice equals high-church leftism to outsiders without bilingual and bicultural advantage?
Reading Dalrymple or Murray; wandering through Dixieland mall; or watching COPS or the ten o'clock news; I feel my own sinking spell over Invisible America.
"It is not merely sitting there,/But falling slowly through the air... It settled further in the night/And gave the maid an awful fright... The weeks went by, it made its way/A little lower every day... One wonders just what can be meant/By this implacable descent... It now declines in fretful curves/Among the pickles and preserves... It's gone beneath the cellar floor/We shall not see it any more."
-- The Sinking Spell by Edward Gorey
Sam Macomb
Comments