COWBOY UP!

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 12, 2003



I saw a great bumper sticker the other day on the back of a pick-up truck in the parking lot at the Bedford Stop & Shop. It said, simply, "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." If I were still living in West Texas, I probably wouldn't have given this bumper sticker a second thought. But this is Massachusetts -- a Blue State -- we're generally a lot more easy-going about horse-theft in these parts. "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." It's a plain, straightforward expression of something my old High School football coach would have called "reckless abandon" -- play like there's no tomorrow, fight as though you've got nothing left to lose, take no prisoners, leave it all out on the field, don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up. It's a terrific attitude for rodeo bullriders, late-inning relief pitchers (especially those who have to pitch regularly in Fenway Park), and various other types of semi-religious fanatics whose lot in life is to be painfully bounced around by forces beyond their control, thrown to the ground, perhaps even dragged through the dirt, yet whose only option (other than simply giving up entirely) is to get right back up in the saddle and do it all over again.

This is my favorite time of year to live in New England. Autumn, and especially these pleasant few days of Indian Summer, are what living New England is really all about. The changing colors, the falling leaves, the crisp autumnal air, all leading up to that quintessential New England holiday, Thanksgiving (not to mention the Harvard/Yale game)... isn't this the real reason why people put up with the brutally cold winters, the soggy, bug-infested springs, and the hot, humid summers? And then, just when you thought it couldn't get any better, we are treated to October baseball in Fenway Park. It doesn't happen that often you know. Better enjoy it while you can.

This is not, by the way, a sermon about the Red Sox. I know there are a lot of folks here in New England, and all over the country really, who are excited about the Sox, and also the Chicago Cubs, and who are hoping to see these two star-crossed teams meet in the World Series...an event which some prognosticators have suggested may well indicate the impending end of the world. Personally I have my doubts about the eschatological implications of such an encounter, but I am finding it a congenial distraction from other things that have been weighing on my mind these past few weeks. Things like the California Recall election and the Texas gerrymander, or the arrest of the Islamic military chaplain James "Youssef" Yee and two other Arabic interpreters at Guantanamo Bay; the scandal concerning the "leak" of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative, and the subsequent politics surrounding calls for an independent investigation of that disclosure; and of course the on-going situation in Iraq (where almost every day, it seems, another American soldier is killed), as well as both the emerging public realization that the Bush Administration seriously and probably deliberately misrepresented its intelligence about Saddam's possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction and his alleged links to Al Queda in order to drum up popular support for the war, and the President's new request for an additional $87 billion appropriation to help rebuild that country, now that he's spent the $75 billion budget override Congress voted last spring which enabled him to attack it in the first place. In the face of all that, a little innocent speculation about "the Curse of the Bambino" is kind of a welcome relief.

Preaching, like any form of ministry, is essentially a relationship between a pastor and their people. And like any relationship, it grows and develops over time. For the past two years, as our nation has attempted to find its way in the world in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th, I've been engaged in an on-going dialog concerning issues of peace and justice with the members of the Unitarian Church on Nantucket, just as I'm sure you were engaged in a similar dialog with your interim minister, Diane Miller, during her two year tenure here. But now Diane's in Colorado, and we're here together, and I'm feeling a little at a loss regarding how to pick up this dialog in the middle of the conversation.

At first I thought that I might just go back through some of my old sermons from the past two years and "lift out" a few choice paragraphs, both so that you could hear the tenor of my thought, and also appreciate just how prescient I've been in anticipating and articulating the issues that are now apparently on everyone's mind. And who knows, I may still do something like that at some other time or in some other forum (maybe as a BLOG); but there was just so much of it, that it was hard to distill it down into a form that I could use here this morning.

And then I thought that maybe I'd just plunge right in headfirst. That's kind of my style anyway. But you know, talking about peace in a time of war, talking about justice in the midst of a highly-charged, highly-partisan political campaign, isn't always the easiest thing to do. These are NOT simple black and white, good and evil, "us vs. them" issues, despite the constant temptation to make them appear that way. Still, one has to start somewhere. Real Cowboys never put their toe in the water first unless their foot is already in their mouth. So Cowboy Up; let me just jump in and share with you some of my thoughts about some of the things you've been reading and hearing and seeing in the news these past few weeks.

The recall election in California represents in my mind a rather intriguing case study of direct democracy gone wild. I'm kind of excited about the fact that there was such an incredible voter turnout (something in the neighborhood of 70%, I've heard); I kinda wish that there had been this kind of electoral "do over" law in Florida three years ago; and I sorta feel sorry for Arnold..."beware of what you wish for, you just may get it." I take some comfort in the fact that, despite the allegations of his occasionally groping women on the sets of his movies during the past thirty years (boorish and offensive behavior for which he has appropriately apologized), that the governor-elect of California is on the record as being both pro-choice and pro gay-rights (which is almost unheard of in the Republican party these days), and also that he has promised not to make any additional movies while in office.

The Texas gerrymander, on the other hand, represents in my mind the worst kind of cynical, opportunistic, back-room, partisan political hardball I can think of, and is a powerful argument for the elimination of Congressional districts altogether, and the adoption of a modern system of proportional representation within each state for determining the membership of the House of Representatives. Tom DeLay ought to be ashamed of himself. But if he were capable of shame, he wouldn't be Tom DeLay.

The arrest of Army Captain James "Youssef" Yee, a 1990 graduate of West Point who served with distinction in the first Gulf War, then converted to Islam and later re-enlisted in the Army as an Islamic Chaplain, is troubling for me in a different way. Yee was finally charged this past week, a month after his arrest, with "improperly handling classified information" -- although it is not exactly clear yet what this information was, or if he actually disclosed it to anyone else, or whether his motives were merely humanitarian, or somehow more sinister. And to me it doesn't really matter.

Camp X-ray, as our private and secretive little concentration camp at Gitmo is more properly known, is an outrage and an embarrassment to the ideals of justice and due process which our nation ought to stand for in the world. As a chaplain, it was Captain Yee's duty to provide "aid and comfort" to the individuals we have designated as our enemies, some of whom we have incarcerated off-shore, out of public view, without benefit of trial or even the filing of formal charges, for nearly two years. I have no way of knowing this, of course, but I doubt very seriously, judging from the public record of his exemplary military career, that Captain Yee is a traitor, at least in any conventional sense of the word. But he may well have planned to become a whistleblower, and that, in the minds of some, is tantamount to treason.

The disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert operative of the CIA was, in fact, a federal crime, although the President now tells us that we may never know who actually leaked this information to the press. But Attorney General Ashcroft will investigate, and present his findings if he finds anything. As a Senator, Ashcroft was one of the leading advocates for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate all kinds of allegations of wrong-doing in the Clinton White House (things like the firing of a few travel agents, and the status of some misplaced FBI files left lying around after the first Bush administration), but times have changed, so despite the outraged cries of the Democrats for an independent investigation, the Attorney General is going to keep this one in-house.

And who can blame him? I mean, it's not as if anyone has been accused of having sex. Things are different after 9/11. We all know, for example, that Karl Rove was behind this leak, even if we don't have any real evidence to prove it. But we don't really need evidence anymore; the CIA knows where he lives, so they ought to just take him out -- burst into his home in the middle of the night, put a bag on his head, hog-tie him in front of his wife and children, then frog-march him down to Gitmo, or some other undisclosed location, where we can hold him without benefit of trial, or an attorney, or even formal charges, until we decide we've had enough of him. Or if that proves too difficult, just order up a "bunker-buster" airstrike, or perhaps use one of those Predator drones. That's how we do things in America these days. And anyone who complains about it is unpatriotic.

America's first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, once told a visitor to the White House: "If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I sure wish that our current President had taken those words to heart, before he started talking about yellow uranium from Niger, and the imminent threat which Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction posed to the security of the American people. But perhaps he really isn't worried about trying to fool ALL of the people. Perhaps he really only cares about those few people he CAN fool all of the time, select demographics such as evangelical, "born-again" Christians living in the South and Mountain West, who comprised approximately 21% of the electorate in the last Presidential election, and were the key constituency in providing the Republicans with their electoral majority in the so-called "Red" States.

The Republican party knows that if they can just increase their hold on this key constituency, perhaps using their $200 million campaign war chest (money contributed mostly by those who benefited most from the President's tax cuts) in order to improve the turnout of "Christian" voters while suppressing that of other constituencies living in those same states (such as African Americans, who tend to vote in the opposite direction), they don't need to worry about what we think here in Massachusetts, or in New York, or even California or Illinois. So forget all this rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and fair elections in which everyone who can vote does vote, and every vote is counted. It's all just pure power politics: "Ride 'em like you stole 'em." Play like there's no tomorrow. Fight as though you've got nothing left to lose. Take no prisoners. Leave it all out on the field. Don't hold anything back. Cowboy Up.

American electoral politics have always been kind of "rough and tumble," since back in the days when a politician's "stump" speech might literally have been delivered while standing on a tree stump in the middle of an open field, rather than loaded with carefully-scripted sound bites and performed in front of cameras. Back in those days, mud-slinging was something that politicians had to worry about physically, which was the reason most Presidential candidates never left their front porches. There is a price that we pay, as a society, when we play political hardball all the time; "Cowboy Up" is a terrific philosophy of life for a rodeo bullrider, or a relief pitcher, or even a horse thief -- it's a TERRIBLE philosophy for someone who would be a diplomat, or a statesman, a "uniter rather than a divider."

And this is why I cringe when I look at the electoral map from the last Presidential election, and recognize how closely it resembles the election of 1860....only this time, irony of ironies, it is the Republican party that controls the solid south. I cringe when I think of the price that we all pay, as a society, in order to maintain this thin Republican majority in the electoral college; nobody likes paying taxes, and I doubt whether many of us have too many objections to killing real terrorists either, but when you add those things together and present them as a solution to every single problem confronting America, the "fuzzy math" gives you a budget deficit approaching half a trillion dollars, not to mention the elimination of important government programs, or a shifting of the costs of those federal programs to state and local governments.

I cringe when I think of the loss of civility in our political discourse, and of the political payoffs to the religious right I see coming down the line on issues like abortion and gay rights, prayer in public schools, school vouchers, creation science in textbooks, and all sorts of other things that the 21% of the American electorate who believe strongly in these things would like to impose on the rest of us.

And I cringe when I hear the President, in a stump speech in New Hampshire just this past week, tell the cameras that he invaded Iraq because he "was not about to leave the security of the American People in the hands of a madman." Because, you know, I couldn't agree with him more.

And that is the most frightening feeling of all....