A seat at the circus

Good news: The overall winner of WORLD’s 2018 Hope Awards for Effective Compassion is the Aquila Rehab Center in Hanoi, Vietnam! Aquila received 35 percent of the votes and will gain $10,000, which will go a long way in Vietnam.

The bigger story is that God’s irony triumphs once more. Fifty years ago the Tet Offensive was a turning point in the tragic war waged by atheistic North Vietnam and the Viet Cong against South Vietnam and U.S. forces. Now, a Christian ministry is helping to change the lives of addicts with results so powerful that even a Communist government sits up and respects what’s done in Jesus’ name.

Bad news: Harvest Prude’s first big assignment as WORLD’s new Washington reporter was to cover the Sept. 4-7 hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for a Supreme Court seat. On the first day she tweeted, “Marvin Olasky told us the great fun in being a journalist is ‘having a front row seat at the circus.’ Those words have never seemed more true than today.”

A circus it was: Ambitious senators grandstanded for television viewers. Prospective Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Kamala Harris (California) issued fundraising appeals. Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) told Kavanaugh two months ago, “You don’t belong in this building as a justice. … I will be a ‘no’ vote,” but in September he said he needed “more time to review documents in a deliberative and thoughtful manner.”

It wasn’t an amateur circus, though. Peggy Nienaber of Faith & Action, a group that prays for officials, stood in line to get a seat at the hearing. She explained on WORLD’s podcast, The World and Everything in It, that left-wing activists went down the line and handed $50 to each person who signed up to scream and shout in the hearing room and then be arrested.

That’s exactly what happened in the hearing. One by one, on cue, the professional protesters stood and screamed. If they were slow to play their part, they received text messages: “Now. Yell now! Yell louder. Yell more.” Capitol Hill police then escorted out the protesters, took them to the police station, charged them for the disruption, and released them—about a four-hour deal for $50, which is not quite a $15-an-hour minimum wage, but life isn’t perfect.

Protesters frequently disrupted the Kavanaugh hearing Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Protesters frequently disrupted the Kavanaugh hearing Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Protesters frequently disrupted the Kavanaugh hearing Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Protesters frequently disrupted the Kavanaugh hearing Jacquelyn Martin/AP

What was a perfect nutcase storm broke out after lawyer Zina Bash, sitting behind Kavanaugh, rested her right hand on her left arm. One left-wing viewer of the televised hearings said she was giving a white nationalist gang sign, and dozens of others jumped on. Ironically, Bash is Mexican on her mother’s side and Jewish on her father’s—her grandparents were Holocaust survivors—and she’s had nothing to do with hate groups, but that didn’t stop the haters. Maybe humor worked best: One response tweet read, “Tomorrow she will be signaling Powerball numbers.”

With Aretha Franklin laid to rest on the last day of August, the funeral highlight of the first half of September was John McCain’s—and as is often the case in modern America, mourning for the dead gave way to attacks on the living. Meghan McCain, the late senator and war hero’s daughter, said, “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness—the real thing, not cheap rhetoric.” She took a shot at President Donald Trump: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

Use of the past tense like that—“America was always great”—reminds me of Merle Haggard’s 1981 song, “Are the good times really over for good?” Maybe not. September brought more good economic news. The gross domestic product, which grew 1.5 percent in 2016 and 2.3 percent in 2017, is on track for 3 percent growth this year. Worker satisfaction, income, and spending are all up.

But we do not live by bread alone, and many cultural indicators signal trouble. Child abuse and spouse abuse continue to soar, and a new term entered the national vocabulary: The former live-in girlfriend of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said he was guilty of “narcissist abuse,” the emotional suffering a self-centered person inflicts on his partner.

We also do not thrive in uniformity: September opened with more than 100 Facebook employees calling their company “a political monoculture intolerant of different views.” Tired of Facebook’s leftward tilt, they joined an online group, FB’ers for Political Diversity. At WORLD, we’re tracking corporate attacks on political and religious diversity—if you’ve been subjected to one, let us know.

But back to Peggy Nienaber of Faith & Action at the Kavanaugh hearing. She says some protesters asked her what she was doing in the hearing room. Her answer was, “I pray. … I silently pray and don’t look to get arrested.” The protesters, confused, walked away. But praying may be the best thing we can do during our current age of confusion.