By Dwight Swanson

1919 - 2008

Early last Monday morning my wife’s mother quietly slipped away from this life. The phone call from the US with the news was not a surprise; as ever, when such a call comes, the loss is felt just as deeply as if it was.

Look at the picture above and you can get a glimpse of the trademark twinkle in her eyes. They would easily crinkle into laughter—tightly shut but streaming with tears, shoulders shaking silently, with occasional whooping intakes for breath. This mode of hilarity is the inheritance of my wife and all my children. In her latter years she had learned the art, or received the gift, of taking things as they came and not worrying about tomorrow.

It had not always been this way; hers had not been an easy life.

She was happily married for twenty-five years when her husband died suddenly. She married within six months and her stable life descended into disorder. Her money was soon spent; the new man moved from job to job, and town to town. My wife-to-be changed schools eight times one year; and learned to dread the sound of her step-father’s steps for many years.

It was not long after I met my future wife (we were very young) that her mother gathered the resources to end the marriage. The two moved into a tiny house. Mom worked hard hours, putting together camping trailers (caravans) by day, repairing sewing machines from home by night. Weekends were devoted to social life, seeking companionship. Ironically, during our dating years we teenagers found ourselves wondering when the Mom would get home…they were lonely years for her.

Just months after we married, Mom married again; nearly twenty-five years until her husband’s death. He grew increasingly crippled with arthritis (product of a rough-and-tumble rodeo cowboy life) and plagued by unbearable headaches. In these years we saw the change take place to the more relaxed person described above. This coincided with her return to the church of her early years, and to the ‘rest of faith’ in the God she had grown away from after the death of my wife’s father. Life was not necessarily easier—six years ago she nearly died when her car was hit broad-side and a head injury dealt a blow to her memory—but she met everything with calm. And ready humour.

Say ‘mother-in-law’, and wry jokes come to mind. I have been privileged to have had a mother-in-law who was not a joke, but ready to laugh. And she is already sorely missed. Today, as she is laid to rest beside her husbands, we give thanks for her life.

By Dwight Swanson

Do you see a black man?

The US presidential election is a riveting spectacle for The Rest of the World (TROTW). As usual, we all look on with impotent vested interest, because we know that, by an unfortunate oversight of the American Founding Fathers, only US citizens are allowed to vote for the person whose policies will have direct influence for good—or, as has too often been the case lately—for ill on TROTW. And we are scared. Because we know that Americans will vote for local reasons, and care little what their choice means outside their own tax demand. And, we will pay the cost, as well. (Sounds something close to ‘taxation without representation’.)

But, of course, the Gazelle Editor is not really part of TROTW; I am, indeed, amongst the Chosen, a US citizen, though I have not lived in the US since the year of Reagan’s first election. I have never voted by absentee ballot, believing that living outside the US meant I did not have an adequate basis to make an informed choice. However, the past two elections, and time spent in the US this Winter, have emboldened me to believe that my distance actually offers perspective that the 24/7 media coverage obliterates for those trying to make an informed decision inside the cauldron.

Most of TROTW has been bowled over by Barak Obama—just like thousands of young people in the US who have previously ignored politics as irrelevant to their lives. His rhetorical power dazzles, of course. But, almost anyone who can string a coherent sentence together is a pleasure after 8 years of Bush's dyslalia* and Hillary Clinton shopping-list prose. Clinton, who had TROTW on her side at the beginning, has lost virtually all sympathy by her tactics against Obama. McCain, on the other hand, hardly registers on any scale, except to be seen as Republican business-as-usual. He might be given the benefit of the doubt—unless the Republicans play the race card to fight Obama.

And, it is clear they already are.

The focus of this attack is indirect, of course, via attention on Rev Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for twenty years. The question is repeatedly asked, ‘How can you trust someone who listened to his sermons for twenty years?’ And, no matter how often Obama replies, they just keep asking. Here is what it looks like from a distance:

There are two things that people who wish to get beyond the media hype need to do. The first is to listen to the whole of Rev Wright’s sermons, and not just the sound-bites that are incessantly repeated. In doing so, they might find some surprising realities. Here is a complete sermon. (And, on this week’s antics: The Door, the inimitable magazine of Christian dissent, gives useful insight)

Wright’s call after 9/11 for self-examination should appeal to right-praying Evangelical Christians. I myself preached a sermon at that time—having been given the lectionary reading from the prophet Jeremiah—asking if this wasn’t a call to America to do some soul-searching to find an answer to that frequently heard question, ‘Why do they hate us?’. and then to respond to the reasons that were not hard to find, rather than by lashing out blindly in violence.

The response of the Christian right was a rather strange and contradictory mix. Those who followed Jerry Falwell chose to see 9/11 as a judgement, too—but a selective judgement, not against good Christian Americans, but rather against gay Americans and supporters of gay marriage (God works in mysterious ways). (As a student of the Old Testament, I have noticed that God’s judgement on nations, as evidenced in the prophets, is not selective. The arrows and swords of the armies of God’s judgement do not discriminate between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’.)

Others simply seemed to accept the President’s explanation that America is hated because of our freedom. Any hint of American culpability as a factor leading to the vengeance of the terrorists became not only un-American, but un-Christian.

There is a combination of at least three unfortunate traits of the Christian right (in this regard) that prevents them from being able to hear sermons like Wright’s: one, a patriotic knee-jerk defensiveness; two, ignorance of what their leaders—and more to the point, their businesses—do outside her own borders; and, three—sadly—the fact that they live at such a distance from black people, or virtually any minority race. And TROTW. Two out of three for ignorance.

The second thing to do to get beyond the media hype is to read Barak Obama’s own response to the more extreme rhetoric of his one-time pastor. The speech he gave the week following the first attack on Jeremiah Wright by the media deserves to be read by every voter, as well as by TROTW.

Clinton asks the question of who we want to be at the end of the presidential telephone at 3 a.m. It is a good question. Does the world want Hillary the Heroine of the Bosnian airport attack? Or, someone who can write such a speech—without the aid of speech-writers—under such pressure.

Will the racists win this election?

*Like dyslexia, but of the tongue.