Month: March 2014

This week, Lorne Manly reported (NYT) on the case of Antwain Steward, a Virginia man being tried for a double homicide. The twist? He raps under the name Twan Gotti, and the above video of his song, “Ride Out,” was used as evidence against him:

“But nobody saw when I [expletive] smoked him,” Mr. Steward sang on the video. “Roped him, sharpened up the shank, then I poked him, 357 Smith & Wesson beam scoped him.”

Mr. Steward denies any role in the killings, but the authorities took the lyrics to be a boast that he was responsible and, based largely on the song,charged him last July with the crimes.

Manly notes that “the lyrics don’t neatly correspond to the crime: No knife was involved, the song mentions only one murder, and shell casings found at the scene were of different calibers from the gun cited in the song.” Simon Waxman responds:

I imagine prosecutors have more to go on than rap lyrics alone, but it’s easy to see how, in these cases, rap is the new hoodie—a symbol of black male aggression.

Rap is frequently viewed as threatening; listening to it is taken as a form of misbehavior to be corrected. Witness the case of Michael Dunn, the Florida man who murdered seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis and shot at Davis’s friends after they refused to turn down the “rap crap” they were blasting in their car. Dunn believed the teens were a danger to him. Would he have felt the same way had they been listening to the Beach Boys?

Pointing to a double-standard, he goes on to pose a question – “what are we to make of murder ballads, those mainstays of folk and country music,” such as “Down in the Willow Garden,” performed by the very non-threatening Everly Brothers, among others? Nathan S. at Refined Hype addressed Steward’s case last year:

I feel the need to pause here and make it clear that it’s unclear just how much police considered [Steward’s] lyrics when considered him a suspect for Horton and Dean’s murders. The media essentially makes it sound like the cops conducted their investigation on Rap Genius, stopped when they found lyrics that seemed to describe the murders, and then arrested the corresponding rapper.

In reality, I’m willing to bet the truth is far more complicated and that “Ride Out” was only one piece of evidence among many, and almost definitely the most important piece.

Nevertheless, he thinks that “using rap lyrics as evidence in court feels shaky at best, and a violation of the 1st Amendment at worst.”

It doesn’t work unless you take his religious beliefs seriously. That’s one of the lessons gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell’s absorbing retrospective on the 1993 raid and subsequent siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, TX, that resulted in the death of the sect’s leader, David Koresh, along with 82 other men, women, and children, and four ATF agents:

[A]s the conflict-studies scholar Jayne Docherty argues, the F.B.I.’s approach was doomed from the outset. In “Learning Lessons from Waco”—one of the very best of the Mount Carmel retrospectives—Docherty points out that the techniques that work on bank robbers don’t work on committed believers. There was no pragmatism hidden below a layer of posturing, lies, and grandiosity. Docherty uses Max Weber’s typology to describe the Davidians. They were “value-rational”—that is to say, their rationality was organized around values, not goals. A value-rational person would accept his fourteen-year-old daughter’s polygamous marriage, if he was convinced that it was in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Because the F.B.I. could not take the faith of the Branch Davidians seriously, it had no meaningful way to communicate with them.

Gladwell goes on to describe an approach – informed by Koresh’s understanding of Biblical prophecies – that could have ended the standoff peacefully:

Not long after the Waco siege began, James Tabor, the Biblical scholar, heard David Koresh on CNN talking about the Seven Seals. Tabor is an expert on Biblical apocalypticism and recognized the Branch Davidians for what they were—a community immersed in the world of the Old Testament prophets.

He contacted a fellow religious scholar, Phillip Arnold, and together they went to the F.B.I. “It became clear to me that neither the officials in charge nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited,” Tabor writes, in an essay about his role in the Mount Carmel conflict. “I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.” …

Koresh needed another way to make sense of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, so that a violent end was not preordained. Tabor and Arnold made a tape—a long, technical discussion of an alternative reading of Revelation—aired it on the radio, and sent it to Koresh. Koresh listened and was persuaded. He had been called a liar, a child molester, a con man, and a phony messiah. He had been invited to treat his children like bargaining chips and his followers like hostages. But now someone was taking his beliefs seriously. “I am presently being permitted to document in structured form the decoded messages of the seven seals,” he wrote back. “Upon the completion of this task, I will be freed of my waiting period. . . . As soon as I can see that people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold have a copy, I will come out and then you can do your thing with this beast.”

Inside Mount Carmel, [former Branch Davidian Clive] Doyle writes, there was rejoicing. Soon they would all come out together, and the ordeal would be over. The F.B.I., however, remained skeptical. “Then what’s next?” one of the agents in charge allegedly said. “He’s going to write his memoirs?”

Daniel Silliman understands the episode as revealing an aspect of secularization:

One of the current explanations about secularization, held by Steve Bruce, among others, is that secularization does not mean that religious belief disappears. What happens with secularization, rather, is that the social power of religious belief declines. What happens with secularization is that increasing numbers of people don’t take religious beliefs seriously. They don’t understand religious motivations, and assume them to be false. They fail to understand and fail to make themselves understood.

Dominic Preziosi, however, found Gladwell’s essay lacking, especially his assertion that the lesson of Waco “is that Americans aren’t very good at respecting the freedom of others to be so obnoxiously different”:

Granted, dishing up delightfully unexpected if semi-plausible interpretations of phenomena he deems insufficiently understood is Gladwell’s stock in trade, and he’s likely not responsible for how the story is titled and packaged. And fortunately, the piece doesn’t focus on lurid, cult-y details or rehash events in a way that invites readers simply to blame Janet Reno or demonize David Koresh. What’s frustrating is that it uses an extreme case to sidle up to a big question—what is a proper response to unshakeable and “different” belief?—while implicitly posing other questions about the limits and extensibility of religious expression, without actually engaging the issue explicitly.

Gladwell treats the Davidians and their beliefs with careful respect, even if it means citing sociologist Max Weber’s typology of such a group as “value-rational” (not organized around short-term goals, say, like bank robbers), and he keeps the fact of so many pointless deaths in the foreground. But it’s ultimately an unsatisfying exploration: The catchy hook and provocative marshalling of quotes and conceits have that familiar intuitive appeal but amount to little more than another Malcolm Gladwell special; molehills are made precociously out of slightly larger molehills. That the mistakes of the FBI twenty-one years ago offer a promising starting point for a discussion on responses to “obnoxiously different” expressions of belief is fine. What would have been better is if such a discussion actually followed in a meaningful way.

For more, check out this podcast Gladwell did about the essay.

(Image: A 1993 FBI photo of the Branch Davidian complex, known as Mount Carmel, in flames, via Wikimedia Commons)

David P. Goldman praises Jody Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age, for revealing it, noting that “the inner life of secular Americans remains dense with spiritual experience”:

America’s consensus culture, Bottum argues, is the unmistakable descendant of the old Protestant Mainline, in particular the “Social Gospel” promulgated by Walter Rauschenbusch before the First World War and adopted by the liberal majority in the Mainline denominations during the 1920s. Although this assertion seems unremarkable at first glance, the method that Bottum brings to bear is entirely original. A deeply religious thinker, he understands spiritual life from the inside. He is less concerned with the outward forms and specific dogmas of religion than with its inner experience, and this approach leads him down paths often inaccessible to secular inquiry.

Michael Brendan Dougherty explains the connection:

Over a century ago Rauschenbusch wrote, “If a man has drawn any religious feeling from Christ, his participation in the systematized oppression of civilization will, at least at times, seem an intolerable burden and guilt.” Bottum deftly notes that in theological terms this signals “a nearly complete transfer of Christian fear and Christian assurance into a sensibility of the need for reform, a mysticism of the social order — the anxiety about salvation resolved by ecstatic transport into the feeling of social solidarity.”

Can we not hear in the progressive’s soul-searching examination of his own “privilege,” as well as his unconscious participation in structural injustice, an echo of Rauschenbusch’s words?

Whereas Catholics make an examination of conscience before confession, and confess their personal sins before promising to amend their life, today’s progressives examine their place in the social structure of oppression, and then vow to reform society. That is what it means to have a “social gospel without the gospel” — to be motivated by religious impulses, but believe it is entirely secular.

In an interview on the book’s Amazon page, Bottum describes the work’s origins:

In some ways, An Anxious Age really began when I was sent out to report on the protestors at Occupy Wall Street—and couldn’t finish the assignment. I could feel a spiritual anxiety about modern civilization radiating from nearly all of them, but I could find no easy way to explain it.

Now, two years later, this book is my answer: Not just those protestors, but nearly everyone today is driven by supernatural concerns, however much or little they realize it. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives—together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation of individuals desperate to stand on the side of morality—anxious to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. The trouble, of course, is that we’ve lost any shared cultural notion of what exactly that goodness might entail.