By Dwight Swanson

The election is history. People seem to be struggling to move on in life. There is so little to talk about now!

The Editor has not yet offered his post-election analysis. That reflection will come, eventually. But not yet. Because life goes on. Here is what life is like here lately…

Today provided the sort of variety that makes life interesting (not including starting the day off by dropping my wife off at the hospital to have her hand x-rayed). The morning consisted of succeeding appointments to discuss: environmental ethics from the perspective of African creation stories; the problem of interpretation of the holy war motif in the book of Joshua—the command to ‘smite’ all the people of Canaan; barrenness in a society which views infertility as a curse; and how a church can offer a sense of community in a transient society (and why national and city governments, with all their money, cannot).

For an after lunch treat, a seminar on imitation in Greco-Roman literature.

That was just today.

Over the past week there have been other demands for attention. A visit to a church member serving life in prison for murder; putting on a comedy sketch for the church party, celebrating 119 years of life in Manchester; an afternoon with one of my oldest and dearest friends, catching up on the last couple years since we saw each other; listening to a genome scientist explain what his mapping of bits of DNA has discovered; learning from a Nigerian about persecution of fellow Christians in the north of his country, and how church leaders work with Muslim leaders to bring an end to it; following discussion by local church leaders on plans for change in the church structures to ‘empower’ the local churches in working together.

All of this is besides the regular teaching subjects. One cannot complain of a dull routine.

And, there has been little time to worry about Obama.

By Dwight Swanson

The atmosphere of America regarding this election seems to be apocalyptic. Each side of the political divide appear to view the defeat of their candidate as the likely end of the world. On behalf of TROTW (The Rest of the World) the Editor suggests this is not likely to be the case. Life will go on.

Since the term ‘apocalyptic’, and the worldview based on it, is derived from the Bible, this article will consider the contrasting world-views of the candidates from a biblical-theological perspective.

• Desire for change.

Firstly, a word about Barack Obama’s slogan, which has caught the mood of a large part of the nation, particularly those who have not been involved in elections before. ‘Change we can believe it.’ It is one thing to promise change; it is another to deliver. The Editor is not among those in the US or around the world who believe Obama will be the saviour of humankind. He is a politician who will live within the strictures of his time and place in history. Some perspective can be gained from similar, though less hysterical, expectations of the New Labour campaign of 1997.

Tony Blair caught the same sort of mood on his first election. There was great relief to see the end of the Tory era, and ‘change’ was the promise New Labour made. There was much good will in the first years to allow real change to take place. But, it did not come. The mood shifted sharply against Blair when he got the country involved in Iraq, which then drew attention to the lack of real change in other areas. He had promised much, and delivered only minor change—except in terms of war. And now even the prosperity of his decade is being re-evaluated in light of the financial crash of the past months.

Slogans are difficult to translate into policies. Should he win on Tuesday, Obama will face the task of putting detail to what he means by change.

• ‘Country First’

Turning to the Republican slogan we enter a different worldview. ‘Country First’ can only be seen as a negative statement—the Democrats do not put their country first; they are not ‘real Americans’. It is a remarkable platform to run on: true Americans all vote Republican; all others are…what? Un-American? Non-American? Aliens? Traitors? (more)

By Dwight Swanson

Two stories in this week’s news sparked insight into a subject the Editor has been working on in his Day Job as a teacher of Old Testament, which then sparked thoughts on a subject which has appeared in the Gazelle. The common thread is: the stories nations tell about themselves.

Neither story was ‘new’ news. The first comes from the extreme west of China. Over the course of the past centuryfrozen mummies have been discovered in the far east, along the border with Mongolia, which tell a story that contradicts the Chinese national narrative. The Chinese story is that this part of the world has always been Chinese. However, these mummies are Caucasoid, and come from a time-period that both precedes the Chinese, and continues into the period the Chinese claim as theirs.

The second story comes from Turkey. This relates the context of the murder of writer Hrant Dink. Dink, an Armenian Turk, had written about the expulsion of Armenians from Turkey in 1915, accompanied by the deaths of thousands.

The official Turkish narrative is that no such thing ever happened. The Armenian story is that hundreds of thousands died. Dink was murdered because he broke the rules by telling the story.

What is interesting about these stories is the dissonance between the official narrative and uncomfortable facts ‘on the ground’. In the case of China, the facts are not likely to change the story—the Tarim basin of Xinjiang, and the nine million Uighur people are in a cold and remote part of the world that no one else cares about. The Armenian massacres took place in the midst of the First World War when the attention of the world was bogged down in the trenches of Europe. The subject never made front page news then, and finally became submerged under the weight of the horrific genocide of Jews in the Second World War, and the ‘lesser’ ethnic cleansings of the 1990s. (more)