Patzcuaro: Not a Food Fright; an Adventure.

In the city center of Patzcuaro, Mexico, women in the evening sell chicken that they fry in free-standing pans. The pieces of chicken for sale, partly pre-cooked, sit on the edge of the frying pan, and potatoes cook in the center of the pan.

I asked a woman how much the meal cost. She told me that the chicken came with potatoes and five tortillas, and it cost 55 pesos. I said that was fine.

The vendor was a handsome elderly woman with her white hair pulled back in a pony tail. She wore a full white apron over her beige knit shirt and black skirt.

She asked me if I wanted breast meat or leg meat. When she asked, she put her ungloved finger directly on the piece that she was talking about. To my American eye, this looked wrong. But I was not in America; this was Mexico. I chose the breast. And after all, I thought, the chicken was going into the middle of the pan before I ate it.

The concave frying pan sits on a brazier that sits on a skeleton of thin, black, metal bars. The brazier has an open vent next to the fuel. While the chicken cooked, the vendor constantly and vigorously fanned the fuel with a woven fan.

Like the chicken and the potatoes, the tortillas went into the middle of the pan. She counted out five of them and, in two batches - four and one - she hand dipped them in a red sauce. As she pulled the tortillas from the sauce, her fingers were red with it. They remained so as she finished cooking the meal.

When the chicken was fully cooked, she pulled it off the pan with her fingers.

I hope I do not sound condescending. American government sometimes is hyperactive, and maybe our food regulations reflect that. I have heard that Peking duck is not served in Chinatown in Los Angeles. Apparently, its method of preparation does not meet local health standards. That is a shame. I have eaten and enjoyed that dish in China, and I never was sick from it.

A nice finish to this piece would be a rave report of the deliciousness of the meal.

Well, the potatoes and the tortillas were very good. Parts of the chicken were somewhat dry. But it was late, and maybe the meat had waited too long on the edge of the pan before I chose it. But the flavor was fine.

Everywhere I have traveled, I have tried to eat the street food. Eating like a local adds to the adventure of travel. And often, people who make their homes where I travel seem to like my effort to eat as they do.

Making the Best of Bad Spanish

The poverty of my Spanish is matched by my boldness in using it here in the state of Michoacan, Mexico.

But it works, kind of.

In fact, it works like the game Jeopardy. Remember, Jeopardy is the game where the contestants try to guess a phrase from a few letters on a board.

So, here in Michoacan, I ask a question, in Spanish, like "Where can I find the bus to Santa Clara del Cobre?" Then my courteous would-be explainer answers in Spanish. But he answers too fast and with too many strange words for me to understand. But usually, I can spear a few words. So, just like a contestant on Jeopardy, I try to assemble those parts into a coherent answer.

So I asked a man in a minibus who was ferrying passengers that very question: where was there a bus to Santa Clara del Cobre? From his soup of words, I heard "take" and "Santa Clara del Cobre". He gestured me into the van. "Ah," I thought, "what luck. It must be on his way." I asked how much it cost, and he answered six pesos. That was more luck: the guidebook said it cost seven pesos to travel from Patzcuaro to Santa Clara del Cobre. Which seems cheap for a half-hour journey. (One peso is nine cents.)

We traveled for about five minutes. Then he pulled over and gestured behind the minibus. There, there was another minibus with the words on the windshield, "Santa Clara del Cobre." So he charged me, to get to the right bus, almost as much as I expected to pay to make the whole journey. The fink.

A young man stood outside the Santa Clara del Cobre bus. I told him where I was going, and he handed me a perforated ticket and gestured me onto the minibus. I climbed in and waited to depart, sitting on a bench along one side of the minibus, examining the other passengers.

Eventually, I looked toward the front of the minibus. The driver was looking at me. It seemed as if he had been doing that for a while. He pointed at the young man who had handed me the perforated ticket, who was in the minibus and also looking at me. I handed the young man the minibus fare. He thanked me and stepped out of the minibus, and we were on our way.

I thought it was odd that the minibus driver should just look at me to get my attention, instead of saying something. I do not speak Spanish well, but I am not deaf.

After a time, I asked the driver if Santa Clara del Cobre was near. From his facial expression, he looked like he was mentally wrestling with how to answer, and then he gestured forward ahead of the bus. I took this to mean that we were close.

He might have simply said "Si", and I would have understood. But apparently he believed that Americans speak no Spanish. And he was unwilling or unable to alter his understanding of the linguistic universe based on the demonstration of my poor Spanish.

We arrived at Santa Clara del Cobre. The driver stopped the minibus next to the copper bust of the founding patron of the copper industry of this locale: Bishop Quiroga. Then, the driver pronounce his only word to me: "Ticket!" I handed him the perforated ticket, which he tore and returned my half.

So here I am in Santa Clara del Cobre, practicing my Spanish, depending upon the patience and good will of the local populace to tolerate its simplicity.

And loving it.

Principles of Power and Reality Among Nations

Maybe these 20 principles of foreign policy are "liberal"; maybe they’re "conservative". I think they’re obvious. Sometimes America follows them; sometimes it doesn’t.

Assets in foreign affairs.

1. Goodwill among nations sometimes makes it possible to avoid bloodshed. Ill will makes bloodshed more likely.

2. The loyalty of its own people is a nation’s powerful asset in foreign affairs.

3. The vigor of its own people is a nation’s powerful asset in foreign affairs.

4. Knowledge is power.

Friends and enemies in foreign affairs

5. Favor the people over the powerful.

6. Cruel regimes dread a democracy that acts as good at it knows how to.

7. The desperate and the fearful and the angry are drawn to war; the comfortable and the calm aren’t. Therefore, we benefit from comfortable, calm adversaries.

8. "A wise enemy is better than a foolish friend." – Azerbaijan proverb

Negotiation in foreign affairs.

9.  "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate." – John F Kennedy

10. With the shrewd, be shrewd. With the gentle, be gentle.

War in foreign affairs.

11. A nation that goes to war should have a plan to finish it.

12. A nation that goes to war should have a plan to pay for it.

13. A nation shouldn’t go to war if the stakes don’t warrant decimation of its best.

14. War calls for sacrifice by the whole nation, not just by those who fight and by their families.

Virtue and its opposite in foreign affairs.

15. If you fight for the right, you might not always win, but you’ll always be right.

16. It’s better to practice morality than to preach it.

17. A strong and upright nation gives hope to the world.

18. Don’t be too virtuous.

Reality in foreign affairs.

19. Total security demands complete power. No nation has complete power

20. Nothing is certain.
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Does God Have an Immigration Policy?

"Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?" – Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

We have a disconnect between how we judge others, and how we hope God will judge us.

1. The never-ending debate.

I have friendly debates with friends about illegal immigrants. From my point of view, people have assumptions about illegal immigration, and these assumptions don’t hold up. For example, people assume that there are a limited number of jobs, so that every job taken by an illegal immigrant is a job lost to a citizen.

This assumption doesn’t hold up when it’s studied by economists. Economists find that illegal immigrants create as many jobs as they take. Money doesn't go to illegal immigrants and stop. They spend it. That spending creates jobs. So illegal immigrants don’t just eat the pie; they make more pies. They make pies as fast as they eat them.              .

So I don't think that the facts are on the side of my debate partners. But sooner or later in my friendly debates, the argument becomes a moral argument. Sooner or later, my friends resort to this argument: people shouldn’t come to the country and break the law. And by coming to the country, illegal immigrants are breaking the law.

It’s a fine argument. After all, people should obey the law. Who can endorse law-breaking?

Who wants to be on the side of law-breakers?

2. God and grace.

Well, Jesus.

Yeah, him.

The guy who said:

But go and learn what this means: "I desire compassion, and not sacrifice," for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. [Matthew 9:13; NASB.]

To know God and to know yourself is to know that "[B]y grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." (Ephesians 2:7-9; NASB).

We need grace when we stand before God so that our own too-scrupulous words don’t return to judge us when we crave mercy. I would not want to be judged by the parable of the slave who’s debt was forgiven by his king, who then threw into prison a debtor who could not pay a debt to him. (Matthew 18:23-35.)

"On Earth as it is in Heaven" means that we must strive to be like Christ.

3. On Earth as it is in Heaven?

That doesn’t mean that we lock up the Penal Code instead of locking up law-breakers. It does mean we pray for the grace to know that we need grace. It does mean we pray for the grace to know when we should confer grace, and when we should withhold it. It does mean we think hard about these things.

When I was a relatively new Christian, I worked at a law firm and had a secretary who undermined me in every way she could. Yet I knew that Christians had to forgive, so I tried and tried to forgive her and to return good for evil. All I ever got back was evil. I finally decided that if it was alright with God for me to hold that job, it was alright with God for me to try to get that secretary fired. Which I did. That is, I tried. In fact, she wasn’t fired until the day I quit the firm.

The point is that I know that it’s hard to model God’s grace; sometimes, it’s impossible. For me, that’s true.

But it’s more possible than a lot of people think.

At the very least, we should not necessarily demand strict obedience to laws, when no harm actually is being done. We should understand that judging others in legalistic strictness is not the righteous, unanswerable argument that it seems to be.

4. Obama, immigration, and grace.

The Obama administration is coming under predictable attack for extending grace to good kids – kids who came to the country illegally as children, who have stayed out of trouble, who want to go to college or join the military. The Obama administration has decided not to bring deportation proceedings against these good kids. Instead, the Obama administration wants to use more resources to eject illegal immigrants who commit crimes and harm our country.

I think that’s a sensible policy. I’m proud of the president for it.

I prefer the president’s plan to the attitude of my friends.

5. My hypocrisy.

But I’m a hypocrite. I pretend to be gracious, but I’m not, because I judge my friends. I act like they are hypocrites, who rely upon grace but are not gracious. Well, they are human, so that’s probably true. But it’s true of me, too, every day.

Maybe they just calibrate grace differently than I do.

But that’s the debate: it’s not law-breaking versus not-law-breaking. It’s lawbreakers learning by grace how much law-breaking we should tolerate, especially when that lawbreaking does no harm.

And it’s knowing that we're not born citizens of Heaven. We don’t earn citizenship. If we enter Heaven, we enter by grace, and by grace alone.

____________________________________

The Obama Administration policy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19immig.html?scp=2&sq=illegal%20immigrants&st=cse

A paper on the net effects of illegal immigration:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/reports/2010/09_immigration_greenstone_looney/09_immigration.pdf

God in the Classroom: A Manifesto

Sshhh! Let’s conspire.

People complain that the Supreme Court banned God from the classroom in the 1963 case Murray v. Curlett. But there’s a way to get him back.

It’s real simple. It’s real subversive.

See, God dwells in the hearts of those who love and fear him.

See where I’m going with this?

So it’s simple. In our homes, in our churches, teach our children to love and fear God. Then send our children to school. When our children enter school, God goes in with them, carried in their hearts.

It’s so simple!

The problem is that people sometimes talk like we need teachers to lead Christian prayers and read the Bible in classrooms, in front of students who are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and agnostic. That, apparently, will install God in the hearts of the students, so the students can carry God back to their homes and churches.

But these people, in their complaints, have it all backward. It’s supposed to work the other way around.

True, my plan has at least two problems. The first problem is that it takes effort by parents and pastors. Because to really, really work, this plan demands that children learn to be little Christs. To really, really work, our Christian children must go into schools and act in a way that the non-Christians see a difference in them that they want for themselves.

And that calls for discipleship. That calls for study, prayer, and meditation – by the parents, by the pastors first, then by the children.

That’s because Christlikeness does not arise in the lazy Christianity that glories in being saved but makes no effort to deepen a relationship with the saver. That relationship – like any good relationship – demands time. And it demands time from the parent and the pastor before they can reproduce it in the children.

And here’s the second problem: the success of this plan is not guaranteed by the efforts that parents and pastors make. This Christian Normandy Invasion of the classroom is no more guaranteed to succeed by our efforts than that other Normandy Invasion. There’s something else that this plan requires, and it’s something that we have no control over.

That’s grace.

Study, prayer, and meditation don’t automatically lead to Christlikeness. Online, you can listen to sermons from the Westboro Baptist Church (they who celebrate the deaths of our soldiers). They know their Bible. They know it well. They just have a flawed understanding of it. It defies my understanding of the in-dwelling Christ to say that Christ dwells in them.

The South went to war against the Union to preserve the institution that permitted them to eat their bread by the sweat of other men’s faces – Black men’s faces. They were a praying, preaching, Bible-reading people.

The overwhelming majority of Germans were Christians. But they followed Hitler into World War II and the Holocaust.

So study, prayer, and meditation lead to spiritual wastelands without the grace of God. And nobody can make God give grace.

But nobody can stop us from praying for grace.

So pray for grace, for yourselves and for your children. Then study, meditate, and continue to pray, and teach your children to do likewise.

Then nothing but God himself can keep God out of our schools.

Homage to My Facebook Friends

Sometimes, Facebook is like a hammer blow to my hand that I can’t live without. I’ll explain.

If Abraham Lincoln lived today, I think he would be on Facebook.

Lincoln lived before public-opinion polls. He had to gather his information about what people were thinking in old-fashioned ways.

He read newspapers.

And he talked to people.

He lived in a time when a man or a woman of no fame could walk into the White House and demand an audience with the President – and get it. He lived in a time when the President walked the streets. In fact, people felt so comfortable with Lincoln that they would ask him for money. One day, he had to tell a man that he couldn’t give him money, because he had given away all the money that he had started out with.

So Lincoln as president lived among the people, and he knew about them firsthand.

I’m not exalted (and isolated) like the president of the United States. But we live in an atomized age. That is, I don’t think that people today join groups where they mix with people very different than themselves. People today are more socially self-contained. Our lives follow the rut of work, family, TV, and, increasingly, the internet. And friends tend to be like-minded. And the programming and websites that we choose tend to confirm our beliefs, instead of challenge them.

That’s not completely true of me. I sometimes go to a conservative church, and I suppose that most people there are politically conservative. (Can I generalize and say that conservatives make the best preachers? Maybe. But my exposure is limited.) And I have my newfound friends at the Masters swim meets – a diverse group.

But by and large I don’t have the wide access to people of different opinions that Lincoln and his generation had. That’s why I value Facebook.

On Facebook, I interact with people who have opinions that are stunningly different from mine. In fact, they have ideas about the world and reality that make it hard to believe that we live in the same neighborhood, city, state, or country. It’s almost like we come from parallel universes – theirs where Barack Obama is a secret Muslim; mine where he lives to make their lives better.

But it’s important for me to know their opinions. That’s true for a lot of reasons.

First, I grew up with many of these people. So they’re a permanent part of my life story, just like, in some way, I’m a permanent part of their life story. So to know what they’ve become and what they believe is to better know parts of the story of my own life.

Second, in this world, we share a common fate. If the country capsizes, it won’t be just Democrats or just Republicans who fall into the water. This is important because we live in perilous times. I don’t take for granted our continued prosperity, nor our continued freedom. I agree with those who sense a fragility in these things unrecognized by most people.

So I want to know my shipmates. I want to know who I depend upon to keep us afloat. I want to know who I’ll be treading water with if we capsize. To know who they are and what they think gives me a sense that I can see where the country is headed. This might be illusory. But it feels real.

Third, what my friends believe challenges my own beliefs. Reading the words of my Facebook friends makes me honestly ask: why do I believe the New York Times and not Fox News? I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t have friends who gather their information and opinions from sources alien to me. It makes me put myself through a cognitive safety-check. That’s a good thing.

Fourth, there’s simple curiosity. Honestly, sometimes I read what my friends write, and it feels like I’m watching a small plane dive into a water tower. (They probably feel the same way about some of what I write.) But we humans have curiosity – even if sometimes it’s morbid curiosity. And sometimes it’s just interesting to know what other people think.

Fifth, politics makes me angry. I get frustrated by it. But knowing people who hold opinions that I hate reminds me that these opinions are held by people of good will. Of course, I believe that we all are innately evil – and I don’t except myself from that religious article of faith. But if the term "good" can be applied to the unrighteous hominids that we are, then I’m reassured that people who hold opinions very different from mine are "good" people. That keeps me from becoming a hater. That also is a good thing.

I’m grateful for the toleration of others. So far as I know, none of my Christian Facebook friends "un-friended" me after I wrote a blog called "When Christians are Assholes" and posted a link to it on Facebook. I’m sure that that wasn’t welcome on the Facebook news feeds of some of my friends.

This toleration gives scope to my opinions that otherwise I wouldn’t have.

By keeping me as a friend, my conservative friends show that they value some mix of the things I value about the diversity of Facebook opinions.

My Facebook friends might never make me believe that Obama is a secret Muslim. I might never make them believe that Obama lives to make their lives better. But their opinion is valuable to me exactly because it’s their opinion. I hope they value my opinion.

Ten Things that Liberals Believe - National Politics

In a few minutes, I wrote ten things that liberals believe. These relate to national politics (compared to international politics). It’s not an exhaustive list. It might not even be the top-ten things. But I think that these ideas are at the core of domestic political choices that liberals make.

1. Sick people shouldn’t die because they are poor.

2. In times of shared sacrifice, even the rich should share in the sacrifice.

3. Government of the people, by the people, for the people should be like the people. If people should be compassionate, government should be compassionate.

4. People should be compassionate.

5. Corporations are not people. Giving corporations First Amendment rights to spend unlimited money on political contests risks to drown out the actual people.

6. Big businesses, big banks have great power because they have great resources. They use their great power and their great resources for their own benefit, not for their nation’s benefit. They do things that harm the nation. It takes a strong government (of the people, by the people, for the people) to stand up to big businesses and big banks.

7. When we say that government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, we mean all the people.

8. In our time on Earth, humankind has built powerful technology. It makes our lives easier and better. But it also has the power to wreck our air and water and soil. We must use and control our technology to make sure that we pass on to our children and our grandchildren a cleaner Earth.

9. A nation is judged by how it treats its most powerless members.

10. Human rights are worth sacrificing for.