There are a lot of great birthdays today, but I have to with Jacques Brel, who was born on this day in 1929. He was one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever. He wrote chansons with interesting characters in complex situations. There is nothing especially interesting about his life other than that he died very young from some ill-defined problems with his lungs. So let’s just focus on his songs.

First up is “Le Moribond,” probably his best known song in the United States. A terrible English translation of it was a big hit for Terry Jacks, “Seasons in the Sun.” The original version is full of pathos that was somehow ripped out of the English version. You can read about it in some depth in, It’s Hard to Die in French.

Next up is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (don’t leave me). It is haunting in its quiet desperation.

The flip side of “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is “Mathilde.” In this song he talks about the ecstasy as well as the terror of a returned lover. You know it won’t work out. All your friends and family know it won’t work out. But you just can’t stop, “Mathilde est revenue!”

And just to finish out, here is “Madeleine.” This is just about the delusion of love. The narrator has scheduled meetings (according to him) with Madeleine, but she always stands him up. The song ends with him looking forward to tomorrow where he will take Madeleine to the movies. He plans to tell her that he loves her. He knows she will like that.

Happy birthday Jacques Brel!

Last year, there was a whole media dust up about Pastor Alois Bell who refused an 18% autograt (automatic tip on large parties), writing on the receipt, “I give God 10 percent why do you get 18?” It was an unfortunate incident that the Pastor later apologized for. But there is a larger question here, which Karen Swallow Prior grapples with in her Christianity Today article, Why Are Christians Such Bad Tippers?

On one level, it is a puzzler. In general, Christians are generous; they give more money to charity than non-Christians. But they seem to be lousy tippers. The truth is, we don’t know that Christians are bad tippers. The anecdotal evidence we have suggests only that ostentatiously Christian people are bad tippers. You know, the Matthew 6:5 Christians, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.” Do we know if the more reasonable Christians are bad tippers too?

Another question is whether the ostentatious Christians are generous in charitable giving. Maybe they’re not. But I suspect they are, for the same reason that they make a big show of proclaiming their faith after church at the local Denny’s. Prior thinks this has to do with Gnosticism and the way many Christians separate the holy from the profane. Giving to starving children in Africa is part of the holy, so they are generous. But tipping a server is part of the profane, so they aren’t.

That strikes me as a bit too tidy. I think there a couple of things going on. One is the “Hitler was nice to his dog” effect. The server right in front of you is very real and so complicated and flawed. But the starving African child is an ideal: perfect and pure. And if humans can come up with reasons not to part with money, they will! I think to a large extent, that explains the paradox of Christians giving to Good Causes but not to the good cause of a server making rent.

But this doesn’t explain why these Christians tip worse relative to others. Here I think you have to look at the kind of people who are ostentatious Christians. They are also: conservative Christians. Just in the simplest of terms, these people may not tip for the same reason they won’t go to see Noah: they don’t want to give money to those kind of people. But in this case, it’s even worse because there are all kinds of issues of class and identity. If servers were the right kind of people, they wouldn’t be servers. Servers tend to be younger and female; they really ought to be married. There are all kinds of extra reasons there to hang onto your cash.

In general, people tip based upon how they want to be seen. Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs doesn’t tip because he sees himself as smarter than the bleeding hearts who voluntarily throw away money they don’t have to. I tip well because being a bleeding heart and ostentatiously generation is important to my self image. And I think that everyone fits somewhere in that continuum. But Christians can see themselves as not giving money to servers because they are saving it to give it to more deserving recipients.

Either way, tipping doesn’t actually say anything about you other than whether you are a total jerk to the people who serve you. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, but even servers have bills to pay.”

Dan Mathewson wrote a really interesting article over at Religion Dispatches, Noah, Cosmos Controversies Not About Biblical Literalism. In it, he traces the rise of the conservative Christian movement to the early 20th century. At that time, Christianity had to deal with new scientific discoveries—most especially evolution by natural selection. The liberals decided to make peace with science and see in the Bible certain spiritual truths. The conservatives glommed on to Biblicism. This is the idea that all Christians must believe certain biblical truths, starting with: “the inerrancy of the bible; the virgin birth; the substitutionary atonement; the historicity of the miracles; the second coming.”

So Mathewson sees the outrage over Noah to be simply based on the fact that the film’s director is an atheist. His approach to it was not any different than had he made a film about Snow White. It’s just a story like any other. There is much to what Mathewson said. But I think he is giving a bit too much credit to the Biblicists.

I once had a terrible roommate. He was a violent drunk who brought prostitutes home. But you could not talk about religion with him because even the slightest suggestion that Christianity was not the One True Way would provoke a violent response, whether he was drunk or not. And this was from a guy who never went to church. For him, Christianity was not a religion so much as a cultural signifier. It was what gave his life meaning.

This is what’s going on with the Biblicists. To them, the entire modern world is crashing in on them threatening to destroy the meaning in their lives. But notice in the list above that the first item is “inerrancy of the bible.” This is why people use “fundamentalist” or “literalist” as shorthand for these people. But what they are, above all, are cultural conservatives who are afraid of any information that might disturb their very stable beliefs.

Are there biblical literalists who are not Biblicists? Mathewson certainly implies that there are. But I don’t recall running into such people. This is why I have noted in the past that they are conservatives first and Christians second. A non-Biblicist literalist would not fall into that category. But instead, all we see are a bunch of Christians for whom the religion is primarily a cultural signifier.

In the end, there is no real surprise in the reaction of conservative Christians against the film. People make instant decisions and then rationalize them. I can assure you that I would have a very hard time liking a movie by Dick Cheney. I would focus on everything that was wrong with it. And I would minimize everything that was good. That’s just the way humans are. For Christian conservatives, Noah was just a film made by one of those people who want to destroy God. So of course they hate it.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

You may know about Third Way. It is a supposed centrist party that doesn’t fall into the trap of the supposed extremist Democratic and Republican parties. The problem is that when they talk about policy, it turns out that it is what the Democratic Party establishment already supports. Now this is an indictment of the Democratic Party, because it shows that it is not liberal, at least on economic issues. But the reason that Third Way doesn’t just get behind the Democratic Party is that they aren’t really for centrist policy. Instead, they are professional centrists who get their gravitas by pretending to be the mean between the two extremes. They have never been able to explain how the modern Democratic Party is extreme, except in that the Republicans say it is and that they disagree in some small ways.

Over the weekend, the top two people at Third Way, Jonathan Cowan and Jim Kessler, wrote an OpEd in The New York Times, Capitalize Workers! They argue that low wage workers don’t need no stinkin’ minimum wage increase. What is really behind income inequality is that low wage workers aren’t vested in the stock market. So they propose forcing employers to pay 50¢ per hour into a private investment account for employees. They claim this will result in an annuity worth $790 per month at retirement.

Note first how they frame the debate in a way that appeals to their base: the business interests. Raising the minimum wage would actually move money from corporate profits to worker wages. But forcing employers to add 50¢ to every hour worked would end up getting taken out of the employee wages. So this is a way of just forcing workers to invest some part of their earnings and not requiring anything from employers. Note also: all of the proposals to raise the minimum wage are a lot more than 50¢ so even at its best, this proposal is yet another attempt by economic conservatives to do as little as possible to help low wage workers.

But it’s much worse than this. Dean Baker goes through all the numbers and shows that the annuity would be far less—perhaps only half as much. And it is a huge giveaway to Wall Street. It represents between $25 and $50 billion per year in fees for the investments. And then another $25 to $50 billion for turning the investments into annuities at retirement.

Last December, the same two men were at The Wall Street Journal arguing, Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats. So they are very much aware that Obama and the Democratic establishment push policies that are effectively identical to their own. And they are afraid that populism of the Warren and de Blasio type might break out—because they would be bad for their corporate base. So it is clear where they are coming from.

Sadly, the media generally treat Third Way as though it had something useful to say. But this goes back to a point I’ve argued for a long time. Elite media figures are upper class urbanites. They see their interests represented by third way: economic conservatism and social liberalism. Of course the actual people of the country are the opposite; they are economic liberals and social conservatives. And that’s why the Third Way boys push this investment nonsense: it’s a great way to confuse people into thinking that the government is doing something for the working poor, when it is actually just stealing money from them.

This morning I saw that Jonathan Chait had a new feature in New York Magazine. Normally, that is something to celebrate. He’s an excellent writer with a lot of great insights. But this article was, The Color of His Presidency. It is about race in politics—an issue that Chait hasn’t exactly distinguished himself on recently. And more than anything, it is an example of his own special genre of articles, “See how liberal I am? I’m beating up on liberals!”

It is kind of hard to get to the bottom of the article. It’s something like this. The very basis of the Republican Party is racism. Pretty much everything they do has racist motivations to one extent or another. But talking about this just makes the Republicans claim that all accusations of racism are invalid. So we shouldn’t criticize them for their racism or the criticisms we don’t level against them won’t be effective. Or something. It’s hard to say.

Not surprisingly, the article is being eaten alive by liberals. Ed Kilgore wrote, Conservatives, Race, and “Winners” and “Losers.” His basic argument is that conservatives are determined to be resentful of liberals, so trying to make them less resentful is a ridiculous goal. Jamelle Bouie goes after the whole white-liberal-elite focus of the article, Color Blind. He doesn’t say this explicitly, but his argument is that pretending that these racial issues are nothing more than ideological battles just cedes the battle to the white power elite.

The most vicious attack against Chait comes from Joan Walsh, Jonathan Chait’s Epic Race Fail: How a Story About Racism and Obama Goes Horribly Wrong. She meets him on his own terms and, frankly, tears him apart. She summarizes his argument, “If only MSNBC would stop crying racism, then…” To which she responds:

I agree with everything written by these three writers. And I am so tired of Chait’s efforts to claim the liberal high ground by attacking other liberals. It’s just his own personal way of being a Serious Centrist. But what’s especially horrible is that tomorrow (assuming he’s working), he will post an article in which he defends himself against all his attackers. And if Ta-Nehisi Coates decides to weigh in, it’s going to get bloody, and I’m not going to enjoy watching Chait flailing around impotently.

Update (9 April 2014 8:56 am)

Chait is back with this obligatory defense, Obama, Racism, and the Presumption of Innocence. There’s not much to it except that he attacks everyone I quoted in this article. Poor Jonathan.

Billie Holiday was born on this day in 1915. After all these years, she is one of my very favorite singers. Here musical phrasing was entirely new and it continues to fascinate me. And I’m hardly alone. I love both Frank Sinatra and Madeleine Peyroux. But in a fundamental way, they are just ripoffs of Holiday.

But there is more to Holiday than the music. There is the outrage that her life was made by the government of the United States. After social conditions pushed Holiday into prostitution while still a young teen, she was imprisoned for it. And then, after she became famous as a singer, she was harassed by the police resulting in federal prison for a drug charge. And then, while dying in a hospital, the police searched her apartment and allegedly found drugs. Her hospital room was searched and she was placed under arrest. There was an officer guarding her like she was Dillinger.

It’s hard not to conclude that Holiday was treated like this because she was black. After all, all of her crimes were cultural. She wasn’t harming anyone else’s property or person. Meanwhile, while the government did a great deal to harm her, it did nothing at all to protect her. I can’t see a 14-year-old prostitute as anything but a victim. And as for her use of heroin, that wasn’t what killed her. Her excessive drinking caused her liver and heart disease. If the government had spent one-tenth the effort on helping her that it spent on oppressing her, she might have lived a good deal longer and better.

One could argue that she wouldn’t have been such a great singer if it hadn’t been for her hard life. That’s nonsense. First, it’s just a rationalization. Second, there is really no reason to think that being a child prostitute is any more likely to produce great art than having your heart obligatorily broken in high school. And most of the abuse came long after she had perfected her art. No, it’s just another example of how America does everything it can to destroy outsiders. We claim to value the individual in this country, but it is only true in is much as the individual decides to conform.

Now is the time when we enjoy a Billie Holiday song. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of good video of her online. But this version of “Travelin’ Light” is pretty good:

Happy birthday Billie Holiday!

Now you know where Ukraine is. But maybe you already did. Most readers around here are pretty liberal and are not inclined to think that going to war over the slightest provocation is a good idea. I say this because a The Monkey Cage conducted a new poll that found that only 16% of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, and the further off they are, the more likely they are to think that we ought to “intervene with military force.”

According to the article:

They also indicate (if you look behind the numbers) that more Americans think that Obama is a Muslim (18% as of 2010) than know where Ukraine is. So it is very sad indeed. Just the same, they did find that college graduates were 50% more likely to know where Ukraine was, with 22% being able to find it on a map. But being a college graduate doesn’t make someone smart. I suspect that what is driving the correlation between “location ignorance” with the “go-to-war mentality” is general stupidity. I mean, what are we to make of the people who thought that Ukraine was inside the United States?

H/T: Political Wire