Fred Clark on The Proper Channels

 "'Baseball is woven into so many of our lives because it is that sphere where childhood dreams play out and lifetime memories are made, where communities come together in triumph and disappointment.'

"That’s from David Brooks’ latest column, and it seems even more soul-less and inauthentic in context. It’s s sentence that convinces the reader only that its writer has neither childhood dreams, nor lifetime memories involving baseball, and that the game has never been, in any meaningful way, “woven into” his life.

"Fortunately, most of Brooks’ column isn’t about baseball. Unfortunately, the rest of it is even worse — more pretentious, more confused, and less sincere."

Clark goes on to defend the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, drag queens dressed as nuns who stepped up and were counted for AIDS patients whose families, churches, and "caring" professionals (e.g. physicians) left them in the lurch. These "Sisters" began as a troupe performing an all-male rendering of The Sound of Music and received real nuns' habits from "Catholic nuns who got the joke."  David Brooks doesn't seem to get that the SPI stood for community causes which the rest of the community all too often left twisting in the wind; all he cares about is the drag-queen aspect.  He wants to keep these nonconforming men in their place, and "good works" within their proper spheres.

But, too often, there aren't any proper spheres; ergo, the SPI becoming an AIDS advocacy and fundraising group.  Eventually, all this hard work of theirs got them the Community Hero Award from the L.A. Dodgers last month.  This is why Clark admires them.  And this lack of proper spheres takes Clark from the SPI story to the 1992 Sinead O'Connor "Pope-bashing": "Brooks is making the same muffled and muffling defense of injustice that — to our shame — we all nodded along with after Sinead O’Connor tore up that picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live:

"And just seconds after that moment, with astonishing rapidity, we’ll hear the comforting voices of the pre-written consensus, the reasonable-sounding song of the Very Serious People reassuring us that we do not need to trouble ourselves with asking those rabble-rousing prophets and sages and scribes what it was they were trying to get us to look at. We’ll swiftly be told that even if it might have been brave or commendably idealistic for those misguided souls to have interrupted us all like that, there’s no need to disturb ourselves overmuch because if it were anything really important those people would have gone through the proper channels....After all, whatever it was those folks were so upset about, whatever made them so upsetting to us, it’s their fault that it’s still a problem because they didn’t have the decency to go about addressing it in the right way. Shouldn’t we go about things in the right and proper way?"

Sinead O'Connor inserted the phrase "child abuse" into a rendering of Bob Marley's "War," on Saturday Night Live in October, 1992 then pulled the notorious tearing up of the Pope's picture.  

"That was more than 30 years ago, before 'the Boston Globe’s investigation, and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, and the Houston Chronicle’s recent series,' before 'the investigation of the Magdalene laundries and the Ryan Report and the mass-graves at Tuam.' Before the death of Savita Halappanavar and of all the American Savitas and Savitas-to-be now living in a post-Dobbs world.

"It was, in other words, a time when more people might be expected to share the illusion that shapes Brooks’ entire column — the assumption that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops somehow possesses a moral high ground from which to look down upon the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence."

Who built their own sphere of social action.  For those who didn't have the power to do that themselves.  Which is what Sinead O'Connor tried to do for the women and children in the Magdalene laundries.

Where have the proper and improper channels been in our own lives and politics?

Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan