One of my biggest felt losses in this pandemic is that of the church as my timekeeper.  It is true with each week as services, when possible, have shifted times and locations to suit the prevailing dictat.  But far more importantly any sense of the church calendar has simply disappeared.  Do you recall a memorable Easter?  I certainly don’t – we celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ by watching a service on TV.  There was no parade of palm branches the week before, no Hallelujah Chorus with the choir and congregation.

The liturgical calendar is more than simply a way of organizing the various high points of church doctrine.  It is more even than a way of remembering the story that the church exists around.  The liturgical calendar is a means of organizing our lives around the story of Christ and all that that story implies.  I have spent a life time trying to do that and I miss it in very deep levels.

And a week from today begins the season of Advent when we anticipate the celebration of the birth of Christ – when we anticipate the Incarnation of God.  As John put it, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

As in all things we are to imitate Christ.  And so one of the best ways to celebrate the Incarnation of God is to, in whatever way possible, incarnate some piece of God in ourselves and show it to the world around us.  We are to reveal God’s glory.  That is one of the reasons people are so much more pleasant at Christmas time.  Will we notice this year?  How do we evidence the Incarnation when we do not interact with others?

Well, we do interact with others – the members of our household.  But incarnating Christ, showing God to them, is not merely a matter of cutting down on the road rage or dropping by with a box of cookies.  These are the people that know us most intimately and that would see through such artifices immediately.  Incarnating Christ to the members of our household involves real, serious and deep change in our very character and nature – it means letting God deep into our lives to root around and clean out the serious nastiness.  It is a tall order.

As we anticipate the Advent season beginning next Sunday let’s anticipate finding new and deeper ways to incarnate the Living God.

I sit here in LA looking at a probable total lockdown by the time the weekend is over and something hits me.  The standards the bureaucrats are using, the tiers, the “positivity” counts  (Lord I hate stupid language manipulations) – all of it – is part of the burgeoning covidacracy.  Now here is the thing – those standards and metrics were established last spring when hospitalization and fatality rates were much higher than they are now.  We’ve learned a lot – unless you are a covidacrat.  If you are a covidacrat you have 1) a process that must be followed and 2) a process that cannot be changed short of an act of Congress timed perfectly with an act of God.

God save us from the administrative state.

I recently ran across a fund raising ad for City of Hope – the excellent cancer treatment hospital.  The ad was based around the sentence, “There is no profit in curing the body if in the process we destroy the soul.”  Now I am sure that is an old meme for City of Hope because cancer treatment can be soul crushing, but I saw that sentence with new eyes in light of covid.  We live in an age when a Thanksgiving dinner can become an act of revolution.  Those sorts of things are happening because there is much more to the pandemic that just the disease.

If you read widely you will see stories about masks being worthless and about masks being everything.  You will see stories that say lockdowns will save mankind and stories that say they accomplish nothing.  You will see stories that describe this pandemic as “horrific” and others that look at historical context and “meh.”  Sometimes these stark differences are based in fundamentaly different worldviews, but sometimes it is something much simpler.

One of the wisest things my father ever said to me was “You get what you measure.”  By that he meant that there are many ways to measure accomplishment, and your path will generally follow the metric that you choose.  Much of the disparity we are seeing in covid opinion is based on the metrics people are choosing to measure success or the lack thereof.  If your metric is purely positive tests you are going to get one thing.  If you metric is hospitalization you will get another.  And so forth.

Now, we will finally get to the title of this post.  A leader is responsible for the overall health and performance of an organization.  That means a leader has to consider all the possible metrics.  It is a nebulous thing, for the metrics are often in competition for resources and then there are intangibles.  A bureaucrat, on the other hand, has expertise in a given area and a well defined set of metrics and they pursue those metrics to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Let me give you an example.  California enacted the $15/hr minimum wage.  When that happened a lot of less experienced employees got a huge raise.  So large in fact that most places could not afford raises for their long-time, well-experienced employees.  Suddenly $18/hr, which used to be recognition of years of service and a job well done now looks like no big deal, but there is no money left in the organization to make that $18 into $22.  And so the $18/hr people begin to resent working there and their work suffers.  Delivery and quality begin to fall.  But the head of the organization is focused on a few important metrics – profitability and productivity – numbers on a balance sheet.  Those numbers will suffer in this situation albeit indirectly.  A bureaucrat will start trying to tweak the numbers in all sorts of erratic and unhelpful ways.  A leader will walk the floor, come to understand the resentment – an intangible – and makes moves to correct that intangible and watch the metrics fall back into line.

The problem with our covid response is we have become a nation of bureaucrats and there is no genuine leadership.  Our politicians are simply no longer leaders – they are popularity seekers that rely on the bureaucrats they ostensibly control to actually do things while they focus on getting elected again.  Well covid is simply too broad a societal issue for a single bureaucracy, or even team of bureaucracies to deal with.  Then there are the intangibles which the politicians should be uniquely positioned to understand, but fail to in the avalanche of “data” the bureaucrats send their way.

And so we end up destroying souls while we deal with disease.

My cousin died Monday from cancer.  It is a long and complicated story.  She has spent her time with that horrific disease demanding that everybody ignore the disease and soldier on.  She died alone because she did not wish to burden anyone with her problems.  She worked, more than anything else, to maintain her dignity and independence in the face of certain death.  Those were her metrics, not tumors or blood counts.  Damn I am proud of her.

I am weary of covid metrics that ignore the dignity, independence and freedom of the American people.  I am fed up with life in a bureaucracy and without leadership.

Matthew McConnaughey joined me on Tuesday for an encore interview about “Greenlights,” his best-selling book.  Our first swing at an interview is below the audio and transcript of yesterday’s. Great fun, and we can all use that.  And a future governor of Texas?

Audio:

11-18hhs-mcconaughey

Transcript:

HH: Welcome back, America. It’s Hugh Hewitt. So pleased to welcome back for an encore interview the author of Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey. In fact, he’s now Matthew Gone and Come Back Againaughey. I am so glad that you agreed to this, Matthew. The first one botched up so badly on the audio, we were able to transcribe it and show it, but it didn’t really make the mark I wanted it to make. But Greenlights at the top of the New York Times bestselling list is doing pretty well without it.

MM: Yeah, well, electrickery, no one can explain it. Audio, visual, if we can get them both going, we’re lucky sometimes. But no, my pleasure to come back on and chat with you again. And what do we got? Yeah, the book’s doing well, and been having a great time on the tour and the road talking, listening to people how it translated, how they related to it. And the reception’s been excellent.

HH: Well, it’s grabbing a lot of people. You know, in the radio business, I know my demo, which is 35-64, smart, hard-working, employed. Your demo’s basically everybody. In fact, this is my second chance to embarrass my daughter. I wrongly said her favorite movie was Dazed And Confused when it’s 10 Days, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.

MM: How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days.

HH: (laughing) You know, you’ve got every person out there in America from 18 to 70. And I don’t know how you do that. What do you put that down to?

MM: Wow, you know, I didn’t have a specific demographic that I was sort of chasing. I just sort of, you know, and I said this to you, I believe, in our first longer conversation. Here’s something I noticed in the writing of the book. The more subjective and more personal I got, the more I would look at it and go, you know what, I think it just became more relatable to more people. So on this tour, I’m hearing people from all ages, sexes, everything else, about how they’re personally relating to stories in the book. And they’re all relating to different things, a scenario, a story that I’ve been in where they go that didn’t exactly happen to me like that, but something similar happened, and here’s how I handled it, or oh, how you handled it, I’m going to try that next time, or oh, I see where you failed, McConaughey, and you explain why. And you know what, understanding why I failed in the same way has helped me, or someone goes I really loved the poems, or someone says I loved the prayers, or someone says I loved the bumper stickers. So it’s, thankfully, relating and translating to quite a few, to all demographics right now.

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