Capers With Carroll

The poppies are telling me the Capers winter hiatus has extended unbecomingly into the spring. That leads to a problem of surface tension. How does one return to blogging after a twelve-week absence without unleashing all the stored up thoughts? This, in turn, becomes self-perpetuating. When one does not know where to start, one rarely gets started.

I did not mean to leave-off posting. Life happens. Weeds infiltrate. Laundry accumulates. I spend my days teaching junior high: six performances a day in the center ring. Stare them back to their seats, find new ways to entertain them, keep records of everything, hope they don’t call one’s bluff, grade the papers, and pray they’ll somehow pick up what they need for the state tests. Whistle while you work. Collapse in front of the computer screen when the kids go home. There may be energy for Facebook, but not for much else.

This year’s distraction is that a third of the teachers at my school got lay-off notices, me included. I expect that most of us will be hired back by August, but it is one more example of amateur-hour at the highest levels of California government. There are other current events I want to write about, most noticeably the issue of immigration reform. I attended a Tea Party on Tax Day, but I am a party of one, searching among strange bed-fellows for someone to whom I can feel comfortable granting my vote.

I attended the four-day Mount Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference over Palm Sunday weekend. I had attended twice before, and was accompanied this time by my daughter Rebecca. We took a ten-hour class in writing narrative non-fiction from Lynn Vincent. I appreciated Lynn’s work during the ten years she wrote for World magazine, and her recent books have included NY Times bestseller The Same Kind of Different as Me, and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. She taught an excellent class, and it has seeded much of my thinking over the last month. Some of those thoughts may turn up here on Capers over the next few weeks.

I also renewed friendships from previous conferences and made new ones. Among the former was Randy Ingermanson, who taught the workshop I participated in two years ago. Among the latter was Dale Cramer. Referring only to the “L word,” Randy pointed Dale out as an author who writes in the same Literary Fiction category where my stories seem to fall. I came home from the conference with a tall stack of books to add to the stack I’m picking up at the Perspectives course I’m taking Sunday nights. Is it just a coincidence that I stopped blog-posting right when the Perspectives course began? I tend to read several books simultaneously and finish a bunch at the same time. The next few weeks may see a slew of Capers book reviews.

I also hope to get back to a series I was running two years ago, on the history of my novel. I posted fourteen episodes and then got interrupted. Fortunately, in the interim, I have made significant progress on the novel itself, and I came home from Mount Hermon with some encouraging feedback from a couple of well-respected agents. If I’m not teaching in the fall, I will be busy finishing the current novel and starting the next two. Capers will also stand to benefit. I wouldn’t expect to see a three month winter hiatus next year.

This week, as chūnyùn (春运), the largest annual migration on earth (likely 210 million passengers in 40 days), gets underway, it’s time for the Capers with Carroll Annual Chinese New Years Post. Chinese custom says that the third visit makes one a friend, so this third installment of Spring Festival greetings raises our blog-tradition to a new level.

I hope all of my friends in China (and some in Korea and parts of Southeast Asia) enjoy wonderful holidays with their families, and prosperous and healthy new years.

Everything points to an auspicious year for love. For the first time since 1934 (Year of the Dog) and 1953 (Year of the Snake), the lunar calendar teams up with the Gregorian calendar to usher in the Year of the Tiger on the same day as the Western world’s Valentine’s Day. (China celebrates its own version of Valentines Day, qīxījié [七夕节], on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month: August 16th for 2010.) Let’s face it, as Valentine images, dogs and snakes can’t compete with tigers. Go get ‘em tigers!

A lot has changed in a year. Last year, the chūnyùn migration bogged down in the kind of freak snow storm that had the Chinese government working hard to avoid any thoughts that it might have lost what the ancient Chinese referred to as the “Mandate of Heaven.” As I write this, it’s the Atlantic coast of the United States that is bogged down in a storm that mandate-damaged President Obama himself referred to as “Snowmageddon.” We are different cultures, to say the least.

Again this year, my Xīn Nián Kuài Lè posts for 2008 and 2009 begin drawing heavy traffic about six weeks ago. I suspect people are googling the Romanized pinyin spelling and hoping to find the Chinese characters. If so, in the spirit of the season, we here at Capers are pleased to provide this service. To each and every one: a full measure of New Year’s happiness.

What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy
by Malcolm D. Magee
Baylor University Press, 2008
ISBN 1602580707

The tragedy is that Woodrow Wilson was right. Wilson stood alone as the last best hope of staving off World War II. Of course, that just adds to the enormity of his failure.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was reading Malcolm D. Magee’s What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-based Foreign Policy. (Full disclosure: since my previous post, I have become Facebook friends with Magee.)

Forty pages into the book, I called it a “Woodrow Wilson biography,” but the book is much more focused than the usual biography. Magee gives us only enough biography to explain the mental processes that carried Wilson to his critical moment at Versailles, and there failed him.

The title uses “foreign policy” narrowly, but “faith” broadly. Magee makes no mention of Wilson’s dealings with Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, or the Bolshevik Revolution (using the take-over of Veracruz Mexico as a sample of Wilson's interventionist policies), nor his reaction to the Balfour Declaration or Armenian genocide. I found myself turning to other sources to fill the gaps. This study’s concept of faith, however, goes beyond Wilson’s understanding of Biblical Christianity. The objects of Wilson’s faith included democracy, the power of his own mind, and a paternalistic sense that as both God’s Man for the Moment and a White American, Wilson could know better what would benefit other countries than the citizens could know for themselves.

From his father, Wilson inherited both a tradition of Presbyterian thought and a mantel of Presbyterian leadership. Young Wilson’s faith was heavy on Christian duty and the idea that in each generation, God picked a Moses or a David to lead society into greater conformity to God’s will. Early in life, Wilson developed a deep metaphysical appreciation for the power of Words in the hand of God’s Chosen Servant.

Wilson also grew up comfortable with a wide range of antinomies. Antinomies are those apparent contradictions within Christian doctrine: Jesus is 100% God at the same time he is 100% man, or salvation is by Free Will at the same time it is predestined. Antinomies require the faith that God can resolve these paradoxes at a higher level than man can presently see, and Wilson saw no reason why antinomies couldn’t exist in every area of life. For example, even with the great weight he placed on Words in the hand of God’s Servant, he saw no reason why subsequent generations could not reinterpret the meaning of such words, whether found in the Bible, the Constitution, a treaty to end a war, or a charter for his League of Nations. Wilson also saw no conflict between what our age would delineate as Creation and Evolution.

Magee makes only quick mention of the fact that 21st century labels like fundamentalism (or liberal and conservative) only confuse the issue when applied to late 19th century debates, or to Wilson’s early 20th century eschatology. I would have dwelt more on the sea-change in Christian thought brought on by the two World Wars: American leaders from Washington to Wilson believed mankind was getting better, that with advances in Christian institutions and education the world could be sanctified enough to make it ready for Christ’s second coming. Unfortunately, the carnage of civil war within European Christendom changed this. Post-war Christianity could no longer hope that man might bring in an age of righteousness on behalf of Christ. Only Christ’s physical return could solve mankind’s problems. True, this swerve came after Wilson left the stage, but somehow, readers need to understand how the stage itself has shifted.


One of Wilson’s characteristics was an inability (or powerful unwillingness) to change his mind, either in the face of new facts, or of potent opposition. He was, after all, God’s Chosen Vessel. I find this interesting because so often we hear politicians criticized for their “flip-flops.” Wilson could have benefited greatly from some carefully nuanced redirection. Politics is the art of the achievable. In 1999 and 2007, I was first drawn to George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee over the issue of immigration reform (having already narrowed my field over abortion). In each case, I felt these men hoped to rearrange policy in a direction of mercy rather than retribution. However, after the 9/11 attacks, I recognized that Bush could not do this, and in the face of vocal opposition, Huckabee needed to retreat. Wilson, as described by Magee, could not bring himself to any such reevaluation. There were indications that the Senate might have approved Wilson’s treaty with the addition of only minor “reservations,” but Wilson refused to pursue the feelers.

Another Wilson pattern was to trust the reports of personal friends over those of State Department professionals, even when his friends did not speak the language or have any previous experience in the country. Eventually, the only friend he trusted was Edith, his second wife, and she only told him what she thought he wanted to hear.

The presentation is relentless. Seventy pages into the book, I found myself rooting for Wilson, hoping that he could do at least one thing right. Ninety pages into the book I began to wonder if I was being set up for an argument against Dominionism.

Perhaps I am primed to such a suspicion. A couple of years ago, an atheist I am close to challenged me with questions about this doctrine as if it was something to which I probably adhered. I had never heard of it. In poking around, I’ve come to the conclusion that Dominionism is the derogatory term used by opponents who largely caricature its teachings or exaggerate its influence. I found Magee’s page at the website of Michigan State University’s Department of Religious Studies, and indeed, Magee lists a “growing anti-intellectualism in much of modern American religion” as the impetus for leaving his earlier profession and pursuing the study of history, and mentions as his current project “a study of Christian Reconstruction’s influence on politics.” Christian Reconstruction is the term preferred by adherents of what the other side calls Dominionism.

By whatever name, this movement grows out of the writings R. J. Rushdoony and David Barton, and has been promulgated by media ministers such as D. James Kennedy. (Full disclosure: In the 1980’s I was given a book by Rushdoony, but couldn’t get into it. I soured on Kennedy when I wrote for his pamphlet on Thomas Jefferson, only to find lots of interesting tidbits, but no footnotes or bibliography. I finished at least one book by Barton. Though it was slanted in favor of the U.S. being a Christian nation, it was no worse than—and a health balance to—the state textbooks I had been given to teach from. The 8th grade text gave five pages to the Plymouth Puritans without ever mentioning that they had come to America looking for religious freedom. The 7th grade world history gave 124 words to Jesus, presented as a progressive Jewish rabbi; a full page to Paul, seen as the founder of Christianity; and four pages to Muhammad. Since the 80’s, my impression is that textbooks have improved greatly.)


In the end, though, Magee makes no attempt to tie Wilson’s failure to any current political debate. This is good, because it wouldn’t have worked. Rushdoony wasn’t born until the end of Wilson’s first term, and Rushdoony would likely not have claimed Wilson as the best example of what Rushdoony hoped to reconstruct. On the other hand, the ACLU—organized at the end of Wilson’s second term—might well claim to be in the tradition of Wilson’s Progressivism. The Fundamentalist Movement, which didn’t appear until Wilson was on his deathbed, would have been put off by Wilson’s relaxed attitude to reinterpreting both the Bible and the Constitution, and by his willingness to entertain the possibility of his own person fulfilling the promise of Christ’s Second Coming (Magee, 87-88).

The fact is, no one accomplishes admittance to the rarified heights of the presidency without some kind of faith, whether that be theistic, secular, or merely pragmatic. It would be fanciful to posit that someone might formulate a foreign policy divorced from any faith. Magee makes something of the same argument in a short epilogue. (Actually, the whole book is short: a body of 114 pages, four pages of epilogue, and 70 pages of appendices, notes, sources, and an index: I suspect this study served as a PhD thesis.)

It is always disappointing to realize how ordinary our giants are up close. We want our Great Men to be flawless, and we despise them for falling short of that mark. None will either be or bring the Second Coming. It is hard to imagine a different president leading us into World War I. Teddy Roosevelt? William Howard Taft? William Jennings Bryan?

I opened this book with some questions I hoped it might answer. I enjoyed the read, but finish up with only a longer list of questions. That, I think, may be the best measure of a good read.