Daniel Born
Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta
26 November 2000
I remember clearly the first Christmas program I attended at this church. At
the conclusion, the youth group stood in this very place on the platform behind
the pulpit, and sang along with John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famous carol, "And
So This Is Christmas." With arms linked, they swayed to the music as they
sang.
Okay, I will confess I had not expected to be spiritually and emotionally moved
by a Unitarian Christmas program. Forgive me for this admission of so little
faith. Maybe it was just the sound of John Lennon, that patron saint of the
1960s who also told us to give peace a chance, who moved me. In New York we
usually took our out-of-town guests by the Dakota to look at the scene of his
death. Or perhaps it is that unredeemed spot of schmaltz in my soul that makes
me choke up whenever I hear a children's choir, such as the one that backs John
and Yoko at the concluding fade-out of that carol. At any rate, that particular
song emanating from this pulpit, communicated to me and the rest of the audience
that the bohemian culture of the 1960s was not only respected in this place,
but indeed celebrated. It's not a sensibility you're likely to get in the sanctuary
of the regular Baptists or Methodists.
Last week my daughter Liz and I visited a gallery exhibit of John Lennon's
drawings in the hotel where we were staying in Chicago. One display featured
John and Yoko's famous protest for peace in San Francisco. The famous couple
swore they would stay in bed until the Vietnam War ended. The photograph shows
the famous couple nude and rumpled in their hotel bedroom. They mischievously
grin at the camera. I tried to explain the significance of this event to Liz,
who gave me a guarded but stern look. I felt a little mocked.
Further on in the exhibit, numbered prints of John's clever line drawings were
going for anywhere between $600 and $8000. At the end of the exhibit, a woman
behind a cash register racked up the sales and scrutinized us to see if we were
serious shoppers or mere tourists. The cheapest item was a $40 t-shirt inscribed
with Lennon's name and a cartoon face of his bespectacled owlish countenance.
Welcome to the bourgeois collector's world, I thought. Welcome to the merged
values of the 1960s and the 1980s, the world of the bourgeois bohemians. Or
the more clever acronym Bobo, as coined by David Brooks in his recent book,
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.
Brooks argues that once upon a time the values of the bohemian avant-garde
were solidly opposed to the middle-class values of the bourgeoisie. When those
scotch-swilling country club types told Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate that
the next big thing would be "Plastics," knowing bohemians and graduate
students took this as a cue to scoff at the empty values of America's middle
class. And young Dustin looked appropriately nonplused. But that was in the
1960s, when the battle lines were sharply drawn between the youth who went to
Woodstock barefoot to listen to Carlos Santana, and their square dads and moms
who stayed home to play bridge and mind the mortgage.
Now, says Brooks, the countercultural style of the 1960s has achieved a full
merger with the go-go consumer materialism of the 1980s and 1990s. It's as if
Abbie Hoffman met Gordon Gecko and the two, rather than fighting, hit it off
splendidly. Now we can congratulate ourselves on shaking the establishment by
eating a tofu sandwich, and implicitly agreeing that greed is good, all at the
same time. Our stock portfolios may be bursting, but we're still going easy
on the red meat.
Nowhere is this blending of 1960s rebellion and 1990s corporate consumerism
more rampant than in television advertising. Here we find a host of golden rock
oldies being used to sell merchandise. The Who's famous anthem "Won't Get
Fooled Again" now pops up as a consumer education spot. Jimi Hendrix's
inspired riffs from "Freedom" overlay a series of images that show
a Sports Utility Vehicle the size of an Abrams tank ripping across a desert
landscape.
Brooks is funny and scathing about Bobos He writes:
Aristotle made the ancient distinction between needs—objects we must have to survive, like shelter, food, clothing, and other essentials—and wants, which are those things we desire to make us feel superior to others. The Bobo elite has seized on this distinction to separate itself from past and rival elites. Specifically, the members of the educated class elite feel free to invest huge amounts of capital in things that are categorized as needs, but it is not acceptable to spend on mere wants. For example, it's virtuous to spend $25,000 on your bathroom, but it's vulgar to spend $15,000 on a sound system and a wide-screen TV. . .
You can spend as much as you want on anything that can be classified as a tool, such as a $65,000 Range Rover with plenty of storage space, but it would be vulgar to spend money on things that cannot be seen as tools, such as a $60,000 vintage Corvette. (I once thought of writing a screenplay called Rebel Without a Camry, about the social traumas a history professor suffered when he bought a Porsche.) In fact, the very phrase ‘sport utility vehicle' is testimony to the new way Bobos think about tools. Not long ago sport was the opposite of utility. You either played or you worked. But the information age keyboard jockeys who traffic in concepts and images all day like to dabble in physical labor during their leisure time, so hauling stuff around in their big mega-cruisers with the four-foot wheels turns into a kind of sport.
And when it comes to a room as utilitarian as the kitchen, the sky's the limit. . . . That's why when you walk into a newly renovated upscale home owned by nice, caring people, you will likely find a kitchen so large it puts you in mind of an aircraft hangar with plumbing. The perimeter walls of the old kitchen will have been obliterated, and the new kitchen will have swallowed up several adjacent rooms, just as the old Soviet Union used to do with its neighbors. . . .
As for kitchen equipment, today's Bobo kitchen is like a culinary playground providing its owners with a series of top-of-the-line peak experiences. The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor but is really the stove. (Bobos 85-87)
This may not describe most of us here, but I will admit this kind of kitchen
is one of my prime fantasies. Perhaps we are all Bobos now. To put it another
way, if you have glimpsed the Ikea catalog and lusted in your heart, you qualify.
Which brings us solidly up against the ancient testimony of this morning, from
the Gospel of Mark. I will admit that the thread of my argument, running from
John Lennon to David Brooks to Jesus, may seem a little tenuous at this point,
but bear with me and I will try to make the connections plain.
The gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels to be written, is the most minimalist
and also the most cryptic. Jesus continually delivers sayings that elude easy
interpretation. Luke and Matthew do more explaining; Mark, by contrast, simply
puts the hard sayings down on paper and lets them unsettle our thoughts, like
a rock thrown into a well. Some of these sayings seem downright impossible to
follow, including "Sell what you own, give the money to the poor, and follow
me." Half the time in the gospel of Mark Jesus berates his followers for
their dull wit, like a professor telling his students they don't work hard enough.
This is an irritable Jesus, an impatient man, not a smiling Marlboro Jesus,
or a Dale Carnegie positive thinking guru. The painting above me here doesn't
capture the gnarly contrarian spirit of the man.
One thing is clear, though. Jesus is squarely in the bohemian camp. His credentials
as a card-carrying bohemian are impeccable. He doesn't worry about his physical
needs and seems fond of attitudes of renunciation, although he does develop
a reputation for partying and liking a glass of wine or two. No bourgeois, this
one. He doesn't sell any albums, doesn't charge admission to any concerts, and
he destroys the money-changers' stalls in the temple. He would have joined John
and Yoko in bed to protest the war, but I doubt if he'd hang around afterwards
to quarrel over merchandising and copyright. He ends his career by disrespecting
religious institutions and vandalizing private property inside the lobby of
the synagogue. As many scholars now agree, it was probably these actions that
prompted the popular demand for his execution. This boy from Galilee was bad
to the bone. He was not a joiner, but a dissenter.
As a college student in the 1970s caught in the 60s backwash, I thought this
bohemian Jesus was a pretty cool guy. Jesus was cutting through the problem
of the bourgeoisie long before Marx and Engels came on the scene with their
denunciations of capitalist running dogs. I enjoyed this passage in Mark. I
reveled in a biblical tradition including Jesus and the prophets that more often
than not delivered a high-octane verbal ass-kicking of the rich. Of course,
as a student going to college largely on the largesse of a federal government
that gave me hefty student need-based grants, I was not fully honest about the
ironies of my situation. And when I quarreled with my father about the college's
shameless fund-raising tactics, he would remind me that such fund-raising, distasteful
but necessary, perhaps made my education possible. I felt like Jim Morrison
going up against the Realpolitiks of Henry Kissinger. In retrospect, I think
I had 90 percent of the style, and Dad had about 95 percent of the substance.
So now, as at least an aspiring member of the Bobo class, I find myself mired
in compromise at the age of 44. I want to mix my virtue and my profits in equal
portions. I want to do good without sacrificing my potential to do well. And
it seems to me this is not only my personal pilgrimage, but perhaps that of
the Unitarian Universalists more generally. This structure in which we gather
today is testimony to an earlier generation of citizens who combined their personal
wealth with a desire to serve in their community and their country. Brooks doesn't
say it, but I suspect that among the first Bobos in the American paradise could
be counted a few Unitarians and Universalists—individuals placing a high
premium on personal liberty while at the same time practicing a kind of fiscal
shrewdness that embraced rather than shunned the marketplace. Does the Bobo
birkenstock fit? You bet it does. Franklin and Jefferson, in their Unitarian
propensities for both a kind of libertine personal style but a public sense
of civic virtue, embody exactly such an order.
Today, our own congregation in Marietta demonstrates interesting proclivities
both for the bohemian sensibilities of the 60s—with our love of art and
literature and self-expression—as well as the bourgeois rootedness in the
very industrial base that drives the mid-Ohio Valley economy. Our ability to
merge these two orders is not always complete, and sometimes causes discomfort
when we touch on the sensitive topic of emissions policies. But nevertheless,
most newcomers will not immediately spot the difference in this congregation
between the Shell engineer and the lefty English professor. To illustrate further
our common dipping into the Bobo ethic, at local Halloween parties you'll find
an equal aptitude for these two types to cross-dress. Do not ask me exactly
what this means, for I do not know, but it does seem to connect in some way
with the bohemian need to violate bourgoeis piety and social norms. While we
acknowlege our membership in the middle class, we desperately want to assure
ourselves that we live by other than middle-class norms. So the occasional flamboyance
is testament to individual will and artistic license.
As we head out of the Thanksgiving season this morning, and into the Christmas
one in the coming month, we will listen to the voices of John and Yoko, and
we will also, if we are listening carefully, hear the hard words of Jesus. It
is time we acknowledge we are a bohemian bourgeois people. Whether such a combination
is at heart a transparent compromise, or whether it too can allow for sincere
gestures of faith, I am not sure.
As Unitarian Universalists who are also bourgeois bohemians, Bobos if you will,
we must continue to follow, in the words of our own affirmation, "the free
and disciplined search for truth." Maybe what Jesus told the rich young
man was this: his quest for the truth was less than free, and his virtue not
untainted. Jesus seems less interested in the abstract idea of goodness than
in the bohemian willingness to follow the risky path. "Why do you call
me good?" he asks the young man. "No one is good but God alone."
That is a very forgiving line. It is consoling, too, I suppose. The mysterious rabbi does not really care whether you fantasize or not about that nickel-plated fridge with full beverage service and the ice maker with fourteen different settings. He only cares whether it gets in the way of your freedom. Our search for truth must be disciplined, and it must be free, or it is no search at all. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an early American example of a Bobo in paradise, had this to say about the journey:
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
‘Twill soon be dark;
Up; mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!
XXX