An incredible story about the moral confusion and emotional anxiety over the vast population of frozen human embryos -- about half a million -- piling up in fertility clinics across America. Excerpt:
But the impact of the embryo is also taking place on a more subtle and personal level. The glut’s very existence illuminates how the newest reproductive technologies are complicating questions about life; issues that many people thought they had resolved are being revived and reconsidered, in a different emotional context. As with ultrasound technology—which permits parents to visualize a fetus in utero—ivf allows many patients to form an emotional attachment to a form of human life that is very early, it’s true, but still life, and still human. People bond with photos of three-day-old, eight-cell embryos. They ardently wish for them to grow into children. The experience can be transforming: “I was like, ‘I created these things, I feel a sense of responsibility for them,’” is how one ivf patient put it. Describing herself as staunchly pro-choice, this patient found that she could not rest until she located a person—actually, two people—willing to bring her excess embryos to term. The presence of embryos for whom (for which?) they feel a certain undefined moral responsibility presents tens of thousands of Americans with a dilemma for which nothing — nothing — has prepared them.
God knows the churches have done little or nothing to prepare people to think through these issues. You read this story, with its quotes from parents involved here, and you can see their consciences struggling toward truth and moral clarity. But our society has taught them to think in terms of consumerism and utilitarianism, so they find themselves paralyzed over what they've done, and where to go from here. These are just clumps of tissue, right? Except their heart tells them otherwise. And nobody seems willing and able to help them.
Someone once said that the American way is to decide first what you want to do, then marshal the arguments to support it. Witness this in the life of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a pro-life Republican ... except when it doesn't suit his personal needs. Notice the clear, firm reasoning here:
It should be pointed out, however, that even anti-abortion conservatives are not united in their ideas about the embryo and whether it has rights, or best interests, or even the potential for life. Once a person contemplates an embryo—really looks at it, under a microscope or in a photograph—his or her opinion is often changed, and not in any consistent or predictable direction. This is true for pro-choice and pro-life alike. While researching a book on assisted reproduction and its impact, I interviewed California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a reliably anti-abortion Republican member of the House. Rohrabacher was one of some 50 Republicans who defied the president by voting in favor of federal funding for stem cell research using surplus ivf embryos. For Rohrabacher it was not abstract: He and his wife, Rhonda, went through IVF treatment and have triplets as a result.
Going through that process, Rohrabacher told me, fundamentally changed his thinking about life and its origins. “For a long time I’ve been pro-life, and I still consider myself to be pro-life,” he reflected, sitting on the front porch of his Huntington Beach bungalow, which, inside, had been taken over by the demands of triplet care. “I have done a lot of soul-searching but also a lot of rethinking about reality, and what’s going on here, and I have come to the conclusion that I’m…first, I’m still pro-life. But I always said that life begins at conception. But…I was always predicating that on the idea that life begins at conception when conception begins in a woman’s body.”
Now, Rohrabacher realizes, conception can
take place outside the human body. That, for him, is a meaningful difference. The crux of the matter: Is the embryo in the womb, or is it in a lab? “I don’t think that the potential for human life exists in a human embryo until it’s implanted in a human body. So you are not destroying a human life by basically not using a fertilized egg. These are not potential human lives until they are implanted in a body. Left alone, they will not become a human being. When they are implanted in a female body, they have a chance to become a human being, so I still would be opposed to abortion.”
At least Rome is thinking, and talking, with its customary clarity about this stuff. Where are the parish priests? Where are the pro-life clergy of other churches? Ordinary people really do need help understanding this. The Mother Jones story I linked to made it dramatically clear that ordinary people are desperate for real direction on this matter.
Here's a sobering story about how Catholicism is contracting in Latin America, even as Pentecostalism is expanding. This is not a new story. Nor is it a new story about how mainline Protestantism is collapsing in the US, while Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are booming. Catholic blogger Mark Shea captures what's most challenging about the Latin American Catholic story. Excerpt:
[I]f the Church is to respond adequately to the people she serves, we have to know what people are seeking and why. Those who snort at the hordes who are leaving the Church in Latin America and say, "Good riddance! Who needs a bunch of Pentecostals!" are, not to put to fine a point on it, betraying the Church's mission of evangelization and seeking to make the Church a sort of Liturgical Club. This Congregationalist mentality is just another form of Protestantism in the long run.
The people described in this article are seeking something and their desire is not simply contemptible and dismissable. Is it partly disordered. Of course. So are your desires. So are everybody's. So the Church must either prudently begin to assess what the need is (warts and all) and respond to it. But for the Church to, as some members of Fortress Combox Utopia Catholica suggest, just sneer and continue to hemhorrage is not an option that her missionary mandate allows her to take.
Mark's observation is something for all Christians to take to heart. A couple of years ago, I think, I was making mild fun of Joel Osteen for his shallow, folksy, feelgood presentations, when a Catholic friend pointed out that Joel Osteen didn't become so popular by failing to meet the needs of people. Rather than satisfy myself with pointing out what was wrong with Joel Osteen, my friend said, it would be more profitable to find out why people are drawn to what he has to offer, and why they aren't drawn in similar numbers to what more traditional forms of the Christian faith have to offer.
He had a point. It is tempting for many of us to turn up our nose at popular religion, because so much of it is awful (you wouldn't believe the televised religious junk on our cable system in Dallas). And we must constantly keep in mind that truth is not decided by popularity. Still, my own spiritual struggles, and my own spiritual brokenness, have made me less rigid than I used to be, and more aware of what it means to be poor in spirit, and even at times a beggar. I think back to the proud man I was one winter's day in 1998, on a pilgrimage to Fatima, tromping through the gaudy Portuguese tourist town from the bus station, appalled by all the Marian kitsch in the shop windows. It was enough to make you want to have a moneychangers-in-the-temple fit. And yet, to go out onto the plaza in front of the basilica, and to see the poor walking on their knees on the cold, wet asphalt in prayer -- the same poor that would go home with their trunks filled with the glow-in-the-dark statues of Mary, and suchlike -- is to be faced with a spiritual and human reality that one might not be prepared for. I know I wasn't.
People need God, and as messed up as we all are, we will go get Him where He can be found. Or more to the point, where we, in our frailty, can find Him and His mercy.
UPDATE:For a picture of the kind of conditions that most Christians (and Muslims, and everyone else) on the planet will be living in this century, check out this piece. How does the Church universal do effective ministry in these vast slum cities? The challenges seem unimaginable -- and if nothing else, make the concerns of us First World Christians over matters like homosexuality, the role of women in the clergy, the Latin mass
and so forth seem really ... small. Not unimportant, mind you, because they are important. Just small by way of comparison.
In First Things, I have been critically appreciative of the urgings of Samuel Huntington ("Who Are We?") and others who contend that at stake is whether the United States will remain a sovereign nation in legal and cultural continuity with its history. Such arguments may be overblown, but they cannot be dismissed as nativist or lacking in moral seriousness. Anyone who thinks a devotion to nation and peoplehood is incompatible with Catholic social doctrine should spend some time with John Paul II’s last published book, "Memory and Identity."
Again, I don’t know what specific policies should be adopted. The choice should certainly not be between enforcement-only, on the one hand, and virtual amnesty that encourages yet more illegal immigration, on the other. But the hotting up of the immigration debate is turning my long-standing hunch into a deepening conviction that no immigration reform will be possible until Americans believe that the lawlessness of the past decade and more has been brought under a reasonable approximation of legal control.
As I've said before, I have a belief that the anxiety many Americans feel over the immigration question has far less to do with the supposed racism and xenophobia that many on the left would like to think fully explains opposition to the proposed immigration reforms, and much more to do with a general anxiety that the economic and cultural fates of everyone is slipping out of our control. There really is something very wrong with a country that cannot control who comes in and out of it -- and in the case of the Mexican immigration issue, a country that will not control who comes in and out of it. As Father Neuhaus indicates, people are not wrong to insist that we first get control of basic law and order, then we'll talk about comprehensive reform.
In the Orthodox Church, yesterday was the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul. To celebrate, I was invited to a parish dinner at the rectory of Archbishop Dmitri here in Dallas. Though the cathedral is quite lovely, the archbishop -- "Vladika" they call him (from a Russian word meaning "Master," used here as a term of affection) -- lives humbly in a small cottage out back. His house was full of parishioners last evening, everyone bringing food and drink for the feast. Unsurprisingly, there was lots of Russian fare, and several bottles of frozen vodka. Vladika himself is a gourmet cook, and had prepared a flan, a flan de queso, a dried apricot torte, and some sort of complicated raspberry meringue cake. One sidebar filled up with deviled eggs, cheeses, anchovies, sausages and other antipasti, and the more hearty dishes lined a side table in the dining room. There were old people there, and kids, and you could hear at least three languages being spoken as people laughed and chattered on the feast day in the crowded little cottage behind the cathedral.
Finally, Vladika called everyone to attention for the blessing. Everyone turned toward the icon at the head of the dining room, crossed themselves, and prayed the Our Father. Then it was prayed a second time, in Russian. Then a third time, in Spanish. Vladika blessed the food, and the feast began in earnest.
Vladimir, the iconographer, leaned over and whispered in my ear, "This is the Church." Yes, I thought, it sure is.
Wow, wow, wow. The large and vibrant Truro Church in Fairfax, Virginia is now an Anglican cathedral. Its rector, Father Mynns, is as of today a bishop serving under the Primate of ... Nigeria. Virginia, you will recall, led the Confederacy, and the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia was an Episcopalian fellow named Robert E. Lee. You might have heard of him.
Annie Lamott confesses to helping kill a friend of hers. This will strike some of you as warm and humane. It strikes me as absolutely monstrous -- especially monstrous because it is presented as so soothing, so decent, so loving.
The most revealing section of Lamott's essay is this: "Mel was sort of surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide. I believed that life was a kind of Earth school, so even though assisted suicide meant you were getting out early, before the term ended, you were going to be leaving anyway, so who said it wasn't OK to take an incomplete in the course?"
In the economy of just a few words, Lamott effectively turns the Christian understanding of life and death on its head.
No wonder Mel was "sort of surprised" that Lamott, identifying herself as a Christian, would agree to participate in an assisted suicide with such enthusiasm. Christianity teaches a distinctive understanding of human life. At the onset, the Bible reveals that we are not the lords of our own lives in the first place. Life is a gift, and human life is a special gift given to the only creatures who are made in God's own image. We are, in effect, the only sentient beings able to ponder the meaning of our own lives and the reality of our own death. The Christian understanding of humanity insists that we are not autonomous creatures that have the right to determine when we shall live and when we shall die. To the contrary, our lives are in the disposition of the Creator, and human life is understood to posses inherent dignity from its natural beginning until its natural end. Any affirmation of assisted suicide or any form of euthanasia as a way of "releasing" persons by voluntary or involuntary intervention is a rejection of God's sovereign prerogative and a denial of His providence as gracious, merciful, and righteous.
Furthermore, Christianity does not teach that life is just "a kind of Earth school." To the contrary, Christianity affirms the inherent dignity and meaning of our earthly lives. Life is not a course we are taking, so much as it is a stewardship of a priceless gift. It is profoundly true that Christianity points to eternal life beyond this earthly life as the realm of our ultimate existence as believers, but we are not invited to "take an incomplete" in the course of life as we may choose.
I've been putting off blogging on SCOTUS's Gitmo ruling because I want to have time to think about what it means. So I suppose I'll have a longer, more thoughtful blog tomorrow (and Bubba says: "It'll be longer, but I doubt it'll be more thoughtful." Ba-dum-bum!). My initial impression is to offer a qualified endorsement of the ruling, because I have been troubled by the notion that the President has the right to do whatever he wants to with prisoners taken in the terror war, and they have no rights at all. It would seem to be, then, that this ruling is a victory for the rule of law. But I am also given to worry by Andy McCarthy's pre-ruling musing in The Corner, in which he speculates that if SCOTUS finds that terrorists are covered by the Geneva Conventions (as SCOTUS did), that the Gitmo savages will be found to have the right to Zacarias Moussaoui-type jury trials.
What I want to know is: does the Hamdan ruling leave Congress room to set the rules of engagement, so to speak, between the US Govt and the terrorist combatants? If it does, and therefore it removes sole discretion from POTUS, then I think that's a good thing. And if the Geneva Convention aspect of the decision forbids torture and inhumane treatment of the prisoners, I think that too is a good thing. But if it can be read to grant them rights to criminal trials in US courts, that is catastrophically bad. Please chime in below with your own views. I'm still not sure what to think.
Well, no, actually I am sure on one point. Wesley Clark said today on John Gibson's Fox News Channel show: "We don't need military tribunals. We need to turn these people over to an international court. They are threats to the whole world." Wesley Clark is nuts.
If you were feeling uncharitable towards a certain faction at Baylor University over the David Jeffrey story I blogged about yesterday -- whose accuracy in several respects has been vigorously challenged, I should say -- I invite you to pay a visit to the thread on the subject at Baylorfans.com. Once you see the face of true Baylorfan charity, you might well be shamed into repentance. Or something. Ahem.
Yes, yes, we'll get to the Gitmo ruling in a second, but first I want to try to apply the calculus of moral theology to my deliberation over the news that a mondo pregmo Britney Spears has posed nude for a magazine cover. If somebody would please send me the Latin translation of "hoochie mama," it would aid my endeavor.
Being energy self-sufficient "is neither attainable nor desirable" said one oil industry exec at the US-Arab Economic Forum in Houston. So did a lot of them, in fact. Big Oil says that we need to stay dependent on foreign oil for -- wait for it -- the good of our country.
"When they speak, you should listen to them," observed the Saudi Ambassador, who went on to say that we shouldn't speak of oil as an "addiction," because oil is "a necessity of life."
Presumably, they all said these things with a straight face.
Dan Froomkin of the WaPo has some pretty solid thoughts on the political game the White House is playing on the banking story. My initial impulse was to side with Bush in slamming the New York Times for writing the story exposing the banking surveillance. But when I noticed that the White House was only going after the NYT, and not the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal, both of which also published the story, I started to think that this is probably not about principle, but partisan politics.
Maybe I'm wrong. Still, I simply find it almost impossible to believe this Administration in matters like this.
Go Timbertoes, it's your birfday! Actually, I can't stand those stuck-up Timbertoes. And since Ritalin came out, Goofus hasn't been as much fun as he used to be, has he?
...a documentary starring Oliver O'Grady, a pedophile priest from Los Angeles. He raped a five-year-old girl. And that's only one of his victims. The spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles calls the film an "obvious anti-Church hit piece." I haven't seen the film, so I don't know, but I am unpersuaded by the assertion of the spokesman for Roger Cardinal Mahony, the monstrous prelate who enabled Father O'Grady's ministry for oh so many years.
Roger Mahony ought to be in jail. No, under the jail. See for yourself.
The impressive Illinois Democrat had some good things to say today about why the Democratic Party has to get over its fear of religious folks. Said Obama, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square."
Amen to that. It gets better:
"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God.' Having voluntary student prayer groups using school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats."
Oh man, is common sense breaking out in the Democratic Party, or what? And even more truthfully:
"Nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith: the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps off rhythm to the gospel choir."
Take that, Howard Dean! Readers who read my liveblogging from the Pew conference a few weeks back know that there's real evidence emerging showing that the coming generation of Evangelicals is more open to a Democratic message. Obama's onto something. But will the Democratic base listen?
Daniel Pipes points out some telling information in the recent Pew Forum survey of attitudes in the Muslim world. Did you know that solid majorities of Muslims in Western nations, and overwhelming majorities of Muslims in Muslim countries, do not believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks? How can we seek lasting understanding with people whose sense of reality is so out of whack? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm serious.
Abdullah Zainal Alireza, the Saudi minister of state, came calling today here at the paper. He was in Texas this week speaking at the US-Arab Economic Forum in Houston. Abdullah came across as a highly sophisticated diplomat, and he had some interesting things to say. He said, for example, that the US cannot think of withdrawing from Iraq. For one thing, it would destroy our credibility internationally, because the US went in and destroyed the controlling institutions of Iraqi life, and can't walk away from them. For another, said Abdullah, Iraq would collapse into a massive civil war that would likely draw in Turkey, Iran and neighboring Sunni Arab states.
On Iran, he said that the US cannot allow Iran to get the Bomb. Well, I asked, what if it happens anyway? He repeated, firmly, that it must not be allowed to happen. Period. The end.
We talked for a while about Saudi reform of its education system, and to hear His Excellency talk, you'd think that everything was well in hand, no problems, nothing to worry about. Extremism is well under control (ahem). It's really not right to blame the Saudi government for what every Saudi does, he said, but since 9/11, the Saudis have cooperated greatly with the US, and are cracking down. I pointed out that Americans are suspicious of the Saudis because so often, when we see Islamic extremism at home or abroad, there is often a Saudi connection. He said that's not entirely fair, etc. -- and two of the minister's associates asserted that the Saudis get a bum rap in the US media. They particularly complained about the connection between Islam and terrorism. One of the associates, whose name I didn't get, said that there is no connection between Islam and terrorism, because by definition a terrorist is not a Muslim, so why do we in the media keep acting like there is a connection? Etc.
One of my colleagues asked the minister about internal unrest, particularly related to the contradictions between Saudi Arabia's wealth and push to modernize, versus its very conservative religious culture. Abdullah dismissed this as a myth. I thought, "I bet the Shah of Iran's minister of state would have said the same thing in 1977."
Touchstone's Anthony Esolen comments on the necessity for spiritual fatherhood. Very interesting observation here:
Given Roman Catholic teaching regarding the valid operation of the sacraments, everyone will acknowledge the need for a priest: without him (or without a “him” on call from someplace or other) you can’t have Holy Communion and a few other incidental things that the old folks especially want. So they need a priest around, and if he just sticks to his minimal Sunday duties he’ll be all right. But it's strange; this ignoring of the priest's role in quantum homo, as a father and leader of his flock, tends not to exalt his supernatural calling in quantum imago Christi, but to debase it to the level of a brute superstition. In other words, when we sever the idea of ordained ministry in quantum imago Christi from its foundation in human nature, we revert to the barbaric idea of the minister as magician or ritual functionary. He is a father no more, but the sacerdotal equivalent of a sperm donor.
Not long ago, I thought about how rarely I have ever looked upon the pastor at any parish where I've been worshiping as any sort of spiritual father, or an authority figure in all but the minimal sense. That is, I've only been able to take him seriously as "magician or ritual functionary," because there is very little if anything fatherly about him. Clerics these days -- and I'm not just talking about Catholic priests, so cool your jets, you usual suspects -- too often comport themselves as Best Buddies, or mere Therapists. Maybe it's just me, but I've always thought that there was something really wrong, and ultimately undermining, about being part of a spiritual community that had no spiritual father. Esolen puts his finger on what's so destructive, over the long haul, of the attitude that so many Catholics (like me) have of just gritting their teeth and saying "ex opere operato," and trying to console themselves with the fact that the Eucharist is valid, no matter what the priest is like. That kind of thing gets you through this Sunday, and next Sunday, and the Sunday after that. But what about the next 20 years?
Do any of the rest of you, of whatever church or confession, have the same sense about church leadership?
In 1949, the Orthodox Fr. Alexander Schmemann had some wise words for all of us Christians -- Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and so forth -- caught up in serious church controversies:
When controversies are ignited and flare up in the Church, which happens and has happened often, alas, we inevitably hear appeals from Church circles to cease these controversies in the name of peace and love.
Now, this would be cause for great joy, if only in these appeals there were no unmistakably different overtones: "Your controversy is not important. It is of interest to no one: only ‘specialists’ and ‘scholars’ can understand it, so all this argument leads only to seduction and harm."
And here we must point out to these accusers something very important which they have apparently forgotten. They have forgotten that peace and concord in the Church are inseparable from the Truth.
Jeff Jacoby draws attention to a new novel that imagines what the US would be like under Islamic law. Pretty grim, it would seem. People who were unfazed by that Times story in which the "moderate" Imam Ziad Shakir talked about how he wanted the US to be ruled by shariah, but only by consent of the governed (that is, tyrannized) ought to reflect on what that really could mean.
Here's an especially interesting passage from Jacoby's column:
But ``Prayers for the Assassin" is no screed. If its villains are Muslims, so are its heroes; Ferrigno is quite aware that moderate and liberal Muslims have the most to fear from an Islamofascist victory.
He is also quite aware of Islam's appeal. Many converts to Islam find comfort and reassurance in its moral certainty and firm standards, and Ferrigno underscores the point. ``Don't tell me about the old days, girl, I lived through them," says one character, a top government official. ``Drugs sold on street corners. Guns everywhere. God driven out of the schools and courthouses. Births without marriage, rich and poor, so many bastards you wouldn't believe me. A country without shame. Alcohol sold in supermarkets. Babies killed in the womb, tens of millions of them. . . . We are not perfect, not by any measure, but I would not go back to those days for anything."
I've written elsewhere about a conversation I had with a Muslim woman in Dubai last December, an immigrant to Europe from Egypt who told me she was really upset by the descent of her native country into Islamic extremism. But she said that she and her husband just wanted to raise their kids as normal Muslims in the West, and that that was very hard given the militant secularism and aggressive sleaze in the public square. I share her views. In fact, though the radical Sayyid Qutb's diagnosis of the West is far too harsh, and his remedy -- totalitarian Islam -- absolutely unacceptable, there is a lot more truth in his assessment of where the West went wrong than many people would be willing to admit.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has drawn up a plan to split the Anglican Communion, and to expel the Episcopal Church. Full Canterbury statement here. Ruth Gledhill explains it all on her blog. And TMatt at Get Religion has, as usual, lots of links.
My view? This is good. Painful, but necessary. ECUSA's liberals were going to push and push and push, and we're never going to do anything other than exactly what they wanted to do, but instead were going to cover it with soothing, conciliatory language. And now they have pushed too far.
Here's the story from today's Dallas Morning News on Christ Church Episcopal parish's decision to leave ECUSA. It explores a bit the implications of the move, given that the Bishop of Dallas, unlike in similar previous cases elsewhere in the country, fully supports the parish's decision. (If he didn't, he could order them to vacate their property). Bp. Stanton acknowledges in the story that this is an unprecedented situation for ECUSA.
I'm not quite sure what to make of the news that Rush Limbaugh uses Viagra (and despite his pillhead past, doesn't have enough sense to avoid getting in trouble with the law over it), but I'm sure planning to watch Leno and Letterman tonight to find out what it all means!
Can I just say, though, that a distinguished public servant like Bob Dole taking money for confessing on national television that he has trouble, um, flying his freak flag, was one of the low points in American public life of the decade. I'm serious. Maybe it's just me, but I didn't like thinking about an elderly Republican politician's penile tsuris. I don't want to have to think about anybody's penile tsuris. Just buy your Viagra and shut the @#$% up about it, because I don't want to know.
(And the Hollywood Jesus people are thinking, "Hmm, is there a religious angle on this Rush/Viagra story? is it a tale of sin, redemption and the need to forgive seventy times seven? Is it a pop parable illustrating the miracle of raising the dead? Get Pfizer on the phone and let's see if we can work out a synergy deal.")
Hey gang, here's your one-stop online shop for "Biblically-based 'Superman Returns' materials."
Look, I'm all for examining popular culture from a religious angle, and I look forward to reading the discussions we'll all be having about Christian metaphors in the new Superman film. But I have a pretty good idea that this particular thing is about nothing more than selling a movie by crassly piggybacking it into Sunday worship. What do they want pastors to do, show clips during Sunday services? It's creepy as hell that this Hollywood Jesus site is so blatantly trying to co-opt worship for the sake of selling a movie to Christian audiences. What, do they figure that marketing Christ is not that much different from marketing a Christ figure in a Hollywood movie? Come on, Christians -- resist this crap!
Christ Church Episcopal in Plano, Texas, one of the largest and most dynamic Episcopal parishes in the country, announces that it is leaving the Episcopal Church USA. But here's the thing: the parish says it is grateful for the conservative Episcopal Bishop of Dallas, James Stanton, for fighting the good fight within ECUSA -- and still regards him as its "apostolic leader." A statement on the Christ Church website reads:
Over the next few weeks we will explore the ways that this separation will be best realized. Both the vestry and I will keep you informed and updated as needed, and you can be assured of our prayer and definite actions. We likewise would request your patience and prayers. But rest assured that our church is Anglican now… and will always be within the great historic family of the Anglican Communion.
You should know that our bishop is aware of our decision and is very supportive. As we move forward together I ask for your prayers, support and blessing on the work ahead of us.
Meanwhile, Bishop Stanton alerts his presbyterate:
Brothers and sisters in Christ,
I share three short messages.
1) I am calling a meeting of the clergy of the diocese for July 5. We will meet at Church of the Incarnation at 10 a.m., and we will provide lunch. Please let the office know if you will be there so that we can be prepared. We will continue the meeting for as long as we need to do so. I know this is vacation time. I think this meeting is of sufficient import that all of you will be present.
2) No doubt, you will have seen the statement of the vestry of Christ Church, Plano. I very much respect the clergy and laity at Christ Church. I appreciate the sense of mission that they have, and the impact of the last two General Conventions on the way they carry out that mission. I support them in the careful way they have come to this statement. We will work together for the future, faithful to our Anglican heritage.
3) This diocese has been strongly committed to the Anglican Communion. We will continue to be so. Pray for the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the Primates in this time.
God bless you–
The Rt. Rev. James M. Stanton is Bishop of Dallas
Note "Anglican Communion" -- not ECUSA. It starts now, in Dallas...
Is this counterintuitive in the present moment, or what? Jeremy Lott draws attention to a new book called "In Defense of the Religious Right." Good. Somebody has to do it these days.
This is a breathtaking story of an extraordinarily gifted Christian scholar, David Jeffrey, and what was done to him here in Texas when he tried to make Baylor University into a more intellectually serious college, but one that was still deeply committed to the faith. The story begins with a speech Jeffrey recently delivered in Canada:
Mr. Jeffrey, who had taught or mentored many in the audience during his days at the University of Ottawa, did not disappoint. He expounded on how many students in North American universities are blithely ignorant about the Bible, a complacency he says threatens Christianity and, as a result, Western civilization itself. In one of Mr. Jeffrey's classes before moving to Baylor, only three of 30 students knew about Noah and the flood, and none was really sure what the story meant. They weren't even embarrassed to admit it.
Without some knowledge of the Bible, we can't know the basis of our laws, literature, science, or our fundamental outlook on the world, Mr. Jeffrey told the audience. As knowledge fades, we cease to remember why it was important, and civilization loses its train of thought. After the applause, Mr. Jeffrey was besieged with so many well-wishers that it took him more than an hour to get from the podium to the parking lot.
Few of his fans knew that essentially the same speech, delivered two years earlier, had almost ended his career at Baylor, where he teaches English literature. Colleagues wanted him fired. His family was threatened, their tires slashed, sleep interrupted by anonymous phone calls. At college football games, Mr. Jeffrey and his family had to sit behind a plexiglass shield with armed security staff.
Even now, his troubles are by no means behind him.
To me, the most radical and amazing thing about the Buffett gift is that he's deliberately shutting out his kids from the great majority of his wealth -- not out of spite, but out of concern for their character. Reading Buffett's comments on the way inherited wealth debilitates the character of subsequent generations, you can't help thinking about the Kennedys. But I suspect many of us are acquainted with well-off families whose decline can easily be traced through the generations, almost always having to do with how privilege, one way or another, corrupted the younger generations.
When I was out visiting friends in Silicon Valley a few weeks back, one of my pals told me that this is a constant source of concern for the higher-level executives out there. Given the nature of the industry, many of those execs did not come from wealthy backgrounds, and made their money quickly. I'm told they're worried about what being raised in exceptional privilege will do to their children's character. But I didn't hear that any of them had any substantive strategy for dealing with this. I don't know that I would either, if I had that problem (and believe me, with the way the newspaper industry is going today -- a voluntary buyout program was announced at my paper today -- that's not a problem Your Working Boy is ever likely to have).
I doubt I would have the strength of character to do what Buffett is doing, and cut my kids out of so much of my fortune. Mind you, if he leaves each of them with a piddling billion each, that's still an insane amount of cash, so I don't feel all that sorry for them. Still, I would quite naturally want to give my kids every way possible to protect themselves against catastrophe ... even though as somebody famous once said of the spiritually corrupting power of wealth, "It's easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven."
It's fun, though, to think about how you'd give your money away if you had a fortune to distribute to charity. I'd give a pile to my high school, and a lot to various religious charities not affiliated with any bishop or church bureaucracy. I'd want to give a bunch of it to causes to help abused and abandoned children, and also to organizations fighting for religious freedom. I'd be interested in setting up a foundation to provide financial help for urban and rural projects designed to renew communal life along the principles I wrote about in "Crunchy Cons." And I think it'd be fun to have something I'd call the Newspaper Fund, which would exist to cut checks to people you read about in the newspaper who have suffered some sort of catastrophe, or at least a big setback, and whose lives would be improved for the better by a significan financial gift. You know, the single mother you read about inside the Metro section whose apartment burned down, and now she's got nowhere to live with her three kids. Buy her a new apartment, anonymously. Things like that.
How would you give away your billions, if you were Warren Buffett?
As most of you know, I've been spending a great deal of time in the past few months traveling in Eastern Orthodox circles, and worshiping at St. Seraphim's Cathedral (of the Orthodox Church in America). It has not escaped my attention that the OCA is in the midst of a big financial scandal now involving the Metropolitan and his staff. Some Catholic friends have said, in effect, "See? You can't get away from scandal anywhere." The thing is, I have never denied that, and didn't think that entertaining the prospect of leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy would preserve me from having to deal with scandal. Wherever there is humanity, there will be fallenness. That's a fact of life.
What I find encouraging, ironically, about the Orthodox scandal is that unlike in the US Catholic Church, the Metropolitan and the men who are implicated in the apparent wrongdoing are not going to get away with it. And a big reason they aren't is because of this fantastic website, OCA News, run by the lay-organized Orthodox Christians for Accountability. To a Catholic who has become jaded by the RC Church's response to the much more devastating sexual abuse scandals, to go on this site and to read priests and even bishops criticizing the hierarchy (with sobriety, it should be said) for its lack of accountability and integrity in this matter is an astonishing thing. This really is how it ought to be. The bishops aren't standing in unity and refusing to say boo about this very serious matter out of some misplaced sense of saving face, or twisted sense of piety. Priests aren't keeping mum about it living in fear of their bishops. Laypeople too are speaking out. And it's all bringing results. Slowly but surely, the Metropolitan is being forced to do the right thing. I tell my Orthodox friends in the OCA to please not do what too many Catholics have done and still do, and stay silent and keep their heads down out of a false piety. Speaking out for honesty and good church government is not a sign of weakness, but of strength and confidence and even holiness. Mark Stokoe, who runs the accountability website, is doing what looks to me like a heroic work of charity and fidelity by standing fast and insisting that the leadership of his Church acts like holy men of God, not penny-ante chiselers. It is a remarkable thing to witness as an outsider with my background, and God bless them for what they are doing here.
It really is a wonder how much the Internet has changed things. Though I have been frustrated and even despairing over the power of the Catholic hierarchy to avoid accountability, and the powerlessness of the laity to do much of anything to hold our fellow churchmen to account for their sins and failings, the power of the Internet at least to spread the news of what they've been up to, and to provide a place for Catholics to air our thoughts and disagreements over the scandal and related matters, has been a great thing. The good people at the Catholic project Bishop Accountability have done spectacular work in putting up documents related to the scandal on their site, where anybody who wants to find out what has happened can go and learn. Though the power of the Catholic laity to force good governance on the Church is virtually nil, at least the Internet gives folks like the Bishop Accountability people the opportunity to make sure the Catholic bishops' crimes and misdeeds do not slip down the memory hole. And having that power via the Internet is a very, very good thing, not only for the Catholic Church, but for all churches.
I found myself tonight sitting in a restaurant across from a sweet Fort Worth Episcopalian lady in her mid to late 70s, who asked me what I thought about their new Presiding Bishop. I had a laugh, and told her, knowing by the way she asked the question that she didn't think much at all of the new PB.
"Father told us today that we'd have the whole story by next week, and then we'd be decidin' what to do," she said. "Ah guess we're gonna go with the Africans." She seemed quite pleased by the prospect.
Think about this. It's Fort Worth, Texas, in the year of Our Lord 2006, and a little old white Episcopalian lady can't wait to cut loose from the American heretics and embrace an arrangement under which her primate is the Archbishop of Lagos, or some other African jurisdiction, for the sake of orthodoxy. It boggles the mind if you think about it for a just a few seconds. This is going to be a very interesting century.
An important thing to note about the seven individuals who have been indicted in a terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower and an FBI building in Miami is that no news reports and no reports from the FBI have linked them to any mosque, American-Islamic instiitution or organization. These seven idiots obviously did try to link to al-Qaeda, and said they wanted to create an Islamic army to wage war on the devils here. Islamic radicalism is not absent in this country also, and people who want to do harm to this country are reaching out to the worst and well-established groups -- like Al Qaeda -- to do their dirty work.
But to use this incident to lash out against mosques and American-Islamic institutions is not fair. Yes, this not a fair world we live in. And yes, because the string of terrorist plots continue to come from radical "Islamists" and extremist organizations, the mosques and Islamic institutions in this country unfortunately have to put themselves out there, be as open and honest as possible about what is being preached, and how their funds are being spent. It is frustrating, and feels invasive and unfair to Muslims, but the majority of American Muslims realize that with the world as it is now, this is part of what we can do to eradicate extremists.
All that being said, this incident, these individuals, have no connection (well, so far nothing has been discovered) to any such mosque or institution in this country. So why should this be used to lash out against American Muslims again?
The remarks I made earlier suggesting that we should have more scrutiny of American mosques and Islamic institutions have to do with the FBI director's remarks today in Cleveland, in which he said that homegrown terrorism is on the rise in this country, and it's become a new front in the war on Islamic terrorism. Had the Miami arrests not happened, Mueller's remarks would have still been important. I can certainly understand that Muslims who have done nothing wrong, and who want no part of extremism, feel insulted and invaded by this heightened scrutiny. But in the world we live in, the terrorists are often connected to a mosque.
I, for one, would like to know what's being preached and taught at area mosques. For example, a Shia mosque in a Dallas inner-ring suburb two years ago held what they billed as a "tribute" to the Ayatollah Khomeini. It was attended by several prominent Sunni Muslim leaders from the area. This sort of thing is absolutely shocking to many non-Muslims. In a time when Muslims who embrace violent extremism are waging war on America, how in the world can a mosque in our own city host a tribute to one of the great preachers of radical Islam (and one of the great enemies of this country)? It is completely natural for people to want to know what else is going on at that mosque.
Similarly, when we find out things like the Dallas Central Mosque, the largest mosque in Texas, hosting quiz competitions in which teenagers are expected to memorize the work of the hardcore radical Sayyid Qutb, it makes you wonder what's going on there. Last week, Ziad Shakir made one of his frequent visits to teach at the mosque. He believes that America should live under Islamic law. Should it worry us that this is the kind of man brought in to teach at an important mosque? Should it worry us that the imam of that mosque cites the repulsive Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has counseled murdering homosexuals as the proper way to deal with them, as an efficacious guide to Muslims? Does it matter when a respected Muslim community activist sat across the table from me over lunch last November and, in front of two of my editors, said that he supports killing homosexuals and adulterers, as part of a strategy to protect the family and society ("You call it violence," he said to us. "We call it deterrence.")?
It worries me that this kind of stuff is being taught in
my own community. A high-ranking law enforcement source told a colleague of mine a week or two ago that north Texas is one of the hottest areas in the country for Islamic terrorist-related activity. Given that unfortunate reality, and given the rise in homegrown terrorism as a real phenomenon, why shouldn't there be more intense scrutiny of mosques and Islamic institutions? I'm not asking rhetorically; I really want to know.
The federal indictment describes them as Islamic terrorists, but it's beginning to look like the seven kooks taken into federal custody in Miami were members of a syncretist sect that combined teachings of Islam and Christianity. OK, so they're not Muslims. They were seeking the help of al-Qaeda, whose aims they apparently share, to acquire weapons to murder people in the name of whatever they believe.
That doesn't mean that the CAIR guy earlier today was right. At the time he made his statement, the story was that these guys were radical Muslims. CAIR's position appears to be that anybody who wants to commit terrorism is ipso facto not a Muslim, which is just silly, and a public-relations strategy that makes sensible people roll their eyes. And the points that FBI director Mueller made earlier today stand. We've got to be vigilant against places where people might be hearing, saying and doing things that aid and abet terrorists and their cause.
Don't know how I missed this earlier in the week. The Washington Post published what a cable to Washington from the US Embassy in Baghdad. You can read the whole thing here in PDF format. (Here's a news story with extensive quotes, if you prefer.)It is an incredibly bleak, quite detailed report about the unbelievable strains that the embassy's Iraqi staff are suffering. They are living in a Mad Max society. If life is this bad inside the Green Zone, is there really any hope to avoid civil war?
I am particularly struck by this quote from the cable:
"We have begun shredding documents that show local staff surnames. In March, a few members approached us to ask what provisions we would make for them if we evacuate."
The United States is now fighting battle-hardened Iraqi nationalists who will not give up or give in until America is compelled to withdraw its troops. But, that is only a small part of the problem. As Khalilzad's memo indicates, the society has broken down into tribal units forming vast, fully-armed militias which have stepped up to fill the security vacuum. The militias have wormed their way into every area of Iraqi society and now are active even in the Green Zone, creating a viable threat to the American stronghold.
The Catholic bishop of Santa Rosa, California -- one of Cardinal Mahony's men -- waited three days to report to police an admitted molestation of an altar boy by one of his priests. Enough time for the accused priest to escape to Mexico.
In happier news, we are about three weeks away from the 75th birthday of my bishop, +Charles Grahmann, which will occasion his formally tending his resignation to the Vatican. They don't have to accept it straightaway, but given that the Big Cheeses here at Beliefnet quite accurately named him one of the Ten Worst Bishops in America, it is to be hoped that Rome will move quickly to replace him. Trust me, there will be quite a few orthodox Catholics in Dallas who will be raising a glass to toast the bishop on his 75th birthday. But not for reasons the bishop would like.
Wick Allison, a local publisher and activist Catholic, has a new column out listing why it'll be good riddance to Grahmann. He wants a "forceful, orthodox and demonstrably competent local pastor" to be named as Grahmann's replacement. As the forceful, orthodox and demonstrably competent Catholic layman friend in Dallas who forwarded me the link to Wick's column asked, "Say what? Like who? And just how will doing this end what Wick describes as “the reign of goofballs, thumb-suckers, and brown-nosers”?"
Reader Mike from Long Beach, California sends in this quote from commie folksinger Pete Seeger, which I think is pretty great (I think Seeger is pretty great too as an artist, though his politics are, ahem, lousy):
"I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other."
I've been watching the various press conferences on CNN all morning. One thing stands out: the need for all of us to start paying much closer attention to what's going on with potential Islamic radicals in our own communities. FBI deputy director John Pistole said in Washington this morning that the rising threat from homegrown Islamic terrorists means we all have to be more vigilant. FBI director Mueller took it further in remarks in Ohio today, saying that his field agents understand that fighting Islamic terrorism in American today requires taking a "good, hard look" at their own communities. "We call it 'knowing your domain,'" he said.
Mueller went on to talk about how and where Muslims become radicalized. He talked about prisons. He talked about university campuses. I did not hear him talk about mosques, which, if he didn't do so, was probably a political call, but then again, he hardly needed to make the mention. As Michael Ledeen pointed out yesterday, not all mosques are incubators of extremism, but virtually all extremists were incubated in a mosque (the Miami seven appear at this stage to be exceptions).
Here's what needs to happen: we need to get over this squeamishness we have about looking too closely at Muslim institutions and making judgments about their connections, their funding, who they have coming to speak there, and so forth. This doesn't mean presuming anybody guilty until proven innocent, but it does mean once and for all rejecting the line put forth by many in the Muslim leadership that even questioning their beliefs and behavior is tantamount to bigotry. The Muslim writer Stephen Schwartz has alleged that 80 percent of mosques in this country are under control of Wahhabi clerics. Here's a link to Senate testimony he gave in 2003. Excerpt:
At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.
Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.
The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called "the Wahhabi lobby." ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.
The news media, which has for the most part declined to connect the dots, has a moral obligation to investigate this stuff. People have got to realize that while it is true that there are many, many good and decent Muslims who want nothing to do with terrorism or radi
calism, that the mere assertion of blamelessness by leaders and others in these groups proves nothing. As I've blogged before, I sat through a presentation at the Dallas Morning News editorial board by Sayyid Syeed, the head of ISNA, who spoke of peace and tolerance and understanding beautifully. But when I asked him how he squared that pleasing rhetoric with the demonstrable fact that the ISNA board contained on it men who had preached radicalism and associated publicly with radicals, he denounced me as a Nazi in front of my colleagues.
It is time for the news media and everybody else to wake up and start asking these hard questions, and demanding credible answers. It is time to quit being intimidated by activists playing the bigotry card. Trust, but verify.
Well, I'll be blogging on the Miami terror arrests later, but I just saw an official from CAIR on CNN saying that the Muslim civil liberties group is worried about threats to the country from terrorism BUT are also worried about a potential "backlash" against Muslims from these arrests. Good grief, can't these CAIR people ever just flat-out condemn something without the "but"? Where is this backlash they keep going on about every time one of these things happens? The official, whose name I didn't get, called on the media not to call these terror suspects "Muslims."
Well, look, if that's how they self-identify, why not? Maybe they're bad Muslims. Maybe they're heretical Muslims. But if they call themselves Muslims, and if they really were seeking to do violence in the service of the Islamic faith, however misguided, then they must be understood as Muslims. When Christian anti-abortion fanatics get arrested plotting to bomb abortion clinics, it would be nuts to say that Christianity had nothing to do with their actions. As a Christian, I hate to see the name of my religion dragged through the mud by violent fanatics, but still.
Anyway, CAIR's completely predictable act has grown very long in the tooth. Does anybody not in the media take them seriously when they come out with stuff like this? I can just see a future headline: "AL-QAEDA NUKE DESTROYS MANHATTAN; CAIR FEARS 'BACKLASH'"
On the comments thread below on the entry about the importance of the way buildings and neighborhoods look, frequent CC critic Bubba says the following:
Rod, if you're willing I would love to talk about this particular subject in detail. More than our obvious personality clashes, and more than our disagreements on your polemical claims about mainstream conservatives, this is the central issue about which I have questions and problems.
I have no problem with the idea of recognizing God in even our most mundane actions. I just think that the way we ought to do this is, for instance, being grateful to God for our food, even if it's nothing more than a moon pie and an RC Cola -- it's not making sure that our food is as aesthetically pleasing as possible with the idea that such aesthetic beauty will draw us closer to its Author.
Is it that you think that virtue comes from (or at least more easily comes from) beauty? That we are better equipped to do the morally good if we are surrounded by the aesthetically good?
I'm not sure at all that I buy that. For one thing, the idea looks at humans as things to be manipulated rather than agents that act of our own accord. For another, those elites who have surrounded themselves by that which is aesthetically pleasing have not been historically the vanguard of virtue.
And -- and this is the biggie -- I believe Scripture is clear that virtue comes from the inside-out. A virtuous man needs the Holy Spirit inside him, not aesthetically pleasing food and furniture around him.
I'm trying to finish a writing assignment so I can get home, but I wanted to post this comment so readers can discuss it. Bubba's questions are good ones, and I spend a lot of time in "Crunchy Cons" talking about the role of sacramentalism in forming the CC sensibility. People who think sacramentally -- and that would include well-informed Catholics and Orthodox, whose Christianity is heavily based in sacramental theology, but also some Protestants, and perhaps Orthodox Jews, though I don't know enough to say for sure -- do not see matter as merely matter. They see it as a medium through which holiness manifests itself. The Catholic priest/poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur" speaks of this sensibility. In a sacramental vision, material things are certainly not God, but they are the media through which God can reveal himself to us. They are not symbols, but actual matter and actions made holy. Of course there is a vast difference between the Sacraments and mere sacramentalism. But it's a way of seeing the world, or as I write in the book, "a fundamental stance toward reality."
This worldview encompasses the gratitude of which you speak, but it takes it further, and sees the mysterious presence of the divine in created things. Aesthetics is no substitute for ethics, but ethics without beauty is a poor and rigid thing. Kierkegaard said that true religion combined and transcended the aesthetic and the ethical. I do believe, though, that beauty helps bring us closer to God and therefore holier, because it prepares our soul to receive His Spirit.
I don't have time to write more right now, but perhaps some of you would like to talk about it until I can return to this blog (probably not until tomorrow, at the rate I'm going). A great movie to watch, Bubba, to appreciate what Christians like me mean when we talk about sacramentality is "Babette's Feast," in which a lavish feast conveyed in a concrete way the title character's love for the women she served, as well as opened up the hearts of the pious but stoic villages to the grace that abounded among them, but which they had hardened their hearts to. It's a movie about food, yes, but it's really about sacramentality.
Michael Ledeen makes a tough but necessary point in his NRO column today. He says that not all mosques, obviously, are incubators of jihadism, but all jihadis come from a mosque:
Look at the 9/11 terrorists, look at the killer of Daniel Pearl, and you will find well-off, educated men who became radicalized in a mosque. And I’ll bet you a good-sized farm that if we ever get to the bottom of 9/11 we’ll discover that mosques were central in maintaining contact with and discipline over the terrorists.
So mosques can be very dangerous places when the local imam preaches jihadism, as is done in the thousands of Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi mosques all over the world, including the United States. It is clearly a matter of some urgency to put an end to the sort of indoctrination and recruitment that took place at the Masjid Fatima Islamic Center in New York. But that is easier said than done, because the absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment protects the imams and the incendiary sermons preached at such mosques. Freedom of religion forbids the state from meddling in the religious activities of the mosques, and freedom of speech forbids the state from telling the imams “you can’t say that.”
I have long said that the mainstream in this country assumes that extremism is not taught or tolerated in American mosques ... and doesn't really want to make the effort to find out if that's true or not. This is especially true of American journalists, and it's crazy, given the fact that the war on Islamist terror is by definition a religious war (meaning that it is a war undertaken against people who are attacking us for explicitly religious reasons). Ledeen again:
As I say, it’s a very nasty problem. There are several things we can do right away, however, until some brilliant jurist finds a way through the fog. We can tell the Saudis to stop funding these fanatics. We can relentlessly expose the poison they are spreading (something useful for investigative journalists). We can challenge the doctrines in public fora. We can monitor the mosques, the better to spot the recruits.
But all this requires recognition that we are actually at war. At present, the most likely response from our leaders is to ask the Brits, Germans, and French to negotiate for us with the imams.
As for myself, I don't know what would be the right thing to do with regard to religious liberty if it were to be determined that a particular mosque preached or otherwise tolerated teaching consonant with jihad, as long as no laws were being broken. But first I'd like to know what the extent of the problem is. Problem is, nobody in a position to ask those questions and get trustworthy answers is doing so, or intends to do so.
Parkland Hospital, the public hospital in Dallas, is going to send a bill to the government of Mexico requesting reimbursement for expenses having to do with treating poor illegal immigrants. They know they're not going to get a dime from Mexico, but they're doing this to make a point about one cost of the illegal migration crisis.
How many open-borders advocates depend on public hospitals? How many of them have to sit in overcrowded waiting rooms there with sick children waiting for treatment? Just wondering.
The Brookings study says that increased residential segregation by income can remove a fundamental rung from the nation's ladder for social mobility: moderate-income neighborhoods with decent schools, nearby jobs, low crime and reliable services.
Alice McCray used to live in just that kind of neighborhood, a postwar suburb on the far east side of Indianapolis. She has not moved since 1971. It's the middle-class character of her neighborhood that has moved away and left her three-bedroom ranch house behind. With higher-income residents gone, McCray's neighborhood has tipped poor in the past decade. A third of the incoming population lives below the poverty line. Crime is up, and schools have deteriorated.
"I had nine block captains on our neighborhood watch group, and seven of them have moved, said McCray, 61, who owns a cleaning business. "They said they were not going to put up with this."
For people who do not want to put up with aging, troubled neighborhoods and have the means to do something about it, escape is remarkably easy -- in Indianapolis and across much of the country.
The housing industry in the Midwest and the Northeast routinely floods local markets with new, ever-larger houses. In greater Indianapolis, more than 27,500 houses were constructed between 2000 and 2004, even though the population grew by only 3,000.
In the process, older houses and many older neighborhoods -- such as McCray's -- have become as disposable as used cars.
Such overbuilding is rampant across the Midwest and Northeast, where the number of new houses -- almost always at the edge of metro areas -- swamped the number of new households by more than 30 percent between 1980 and 2000, according to a study co-written by Thomas Bier, executive in residence at the Center for Housing Research and Policy at Cleveland State University.
"As upper-income Americans are drawn to the new houses, neighborhoods become more homogenous," he said. Echoing the Brookings study, he said: "The zoning is such that it prevents anything other than a certain income range from living there. It is our latest method of discrimination."
[snip] Until last month, Jim and Lynn Russell lived with their 1-year-old son, Adam, in a middle-income neighborhood called Irvington on the city's near east side. The area of restored historic houses is 20 minutes by car from downtown, where they both work as bank executives.
But the Russells, who have another baby due in the fall, were worried about mediocre test scores at nearby public schools. They were also concerned about safety. A mass killing -- seven people shot in their home -- took place this month not far from their former house.
"Things like that don't happen in Carmel," said Lynn Russell, 31, who grew up in Indianapolis, as did her husband.
Carmel, where the Russells just bought a house, is not a close-in suburb. About 45 minutes north of downtown at rush hour, it is one of the fastest-growing communities in greater Indianapolis. Schools are among the best in Indiana, and housing is abundant and, by national standards, extremely affordable for professional couples. The Russells bought their four-bedroom house on half an acre for $230,000.
Urban planners complain that exurbs such as Carmel are bleeding cities of the middle class. But Jim Russell said he and his wife have made "the logical choice" by moving to a upper-income neighborhood that is safe, comfortable and better for their growing family.
If you were the Russells, what would you do? My family is like the Russells. We like our neighborhood, and manage to live here because crime is not really a problem (though we're really close to a poor neighborhood), and because we aren't using the
public schools. I find it hard to fault them for the choice they made. Yet the choice the made hurts the common good. But again, it's hard to blame them. Who wants to live with the violent pathologies of so many American poor and low-income people? Here in Dallas, middle-class African-Americans who have the freedom to leave the dysfunctional poor behind have done so, and do so. It's not just a race thing. It's too easy to crack on people like the Russells for choosing to live away from the poor, but when the center has not held, when the poor don't choose to live by values that used to be more commonly shared in this culture, the poor bear some share of the blame for this dangerous dynamic. It is also the case that those who are better off bear some share too, because the kind of cultural permissiveness that they allow and even celebrate wreaks havoc among the poor, who don't have the financial or social resources to withstand the damage caused by permissive ethics.
I am reminded of something my dad told me about growing up in the Depression in the rural South. He said everybody was so needy that you didn't know who was poor and who wasn't. Everybody was. But when hard times receded, those who lived by strong values of hard work, self-discipline and order -- people like my dad, who didn't even have indoor plumbing in his house -- climbed out of poverty and into the middle class. When financial mobility became open to them, the value they placed on education and the bourgeois virtues allowed them to climb out of poverty. Yet the same dynamics that provided opportunities for people like my dad to better themselves and their circumstances have also created a social environment where the kind of social solidarity that used to exist no longer does.
I am reminded of something else: the writer Robert D. Kaplan once wrote about the difference between the poverty he saw in western Africa, and the poverty he saw in the slums of Istanbul. In the former, there was nothing but chaos. In the latter, there was order and dignity in the life of those poor people. Kaplan concluded that the only thing holding the Turkish poor back was opportunity -- that they had internalized the code of conduct and values that they would need to advance economically.
I'm not sure what to think about this neighborhood thing. But I am certain that this phenomenon Brookings describes is bad for America. Your thoughts?
UPDATE: A further point: the way things are shaking out now, there is a strong temptation to think that if you can't afford to live in an upscale neighborhood, that it's your own fault, that you are "bad." That's the risk of taking the logic I mention above too far. In fact, it's entirely possible that the moral cost of living in a well-off neighborhood (e.g., mom and dad have to work crazy hours to afford it, and don't get to spend much time with the kids) makes that the less moral choice. Anyway, what about those good people who don't want to live in a neighborhood of chaos, but who, for whatever reason beyond their control, don't have the income to move to a safer, more stable neighborhood? They are being left behind by the kind of people who would help them stabilize the neighborhood under stress.
This is such a complicated question, with no easy answers.
A great buildilng can give us the same exhilaration we experience in a natural landscape. We expect that of great budilings; but we tend to forget that a townscape of ordinary buildings, embodying the same principles, can also exhilarate us -- exhilarate, and make us feel we belong.
In a townscape of disharmonious buildings, such as is common today, we feel no mystery, no promise. We are not intrigued; there is nothing to explore. When we walk among our buildings, we give our attention to signs and symbols, comfort and utility. The average street, the daily landscape, becomes more and more bleak or foolish or meancing.
When we visit the old towns, when we go into an ancient cathedral, when we see a masterpiece by a 20th-century architect, we notice something most of our buildings lack. As we look at these places we know something is absent from the everyday buildings of our time -- the suburban house, the office building, the mall. And we accept this lack. We may complain about it, but in the end, we don't expect our buidlings to have that spark we see in the buildings of the past. Theorists tell us we should accept the "Ugly and Ordinary" building. We assume there must be an unbridgeable gap between what our age builds and what was once produced with a light touch, as matter of course. But there were once, and there can be again, interesting, even magical, ordinary buildings.
Do you think so? What will it take to turn things around?
This. Is. Insane. This is absolute gibberish. But you know, there is a bright side here for Episcopalians. I hadn't thought of it until I reached by phone this evening a friend of mine who is serving as a delegate. He said that his delegation was finishing dinner, and laughing about the Presiding Bishop's gender dysphoria when it came to Our Lord. He really did sound cheerful. I couldn't imagine why, knowing my friend's convictions in these matters. But he indicated to me that there is freedom in the clarity that they now have. There is freedom in knowing that the ECUSA has no place for orthodox Christians. It means, I would think, that the game-playing and pretending that the orthodox party has anything meaningful in common with people who call Jesus Christ "our Mother" has come to an end.
LGF notes that today in a press conference held at the Riyadh headquarters of the Saudi-sponsored World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), CAIR announced today the launch of a $50 million campaign to fight "Islamophobia" in the United States. LGF recalls that WAMY was linked three years ago to terror-indoctrination camps in Canada -- something to think about in light of the the recent Toronto arrests.
This item sent me to my files, where I pulled out a WAMY pamphlet called "Islamic Camps: Objectives, Program Outlines, Preparatory Steps." Among the goals of these camps, according to the pamphlet, is to let the Muslim kids live "in a purely Islamic environment far from ... rising extremism." OK, so far so good. Then it gives a list of "selected camp chants," including:
We prefer death and refuse to be belittled for the Cause of Allah; O! how sweet a destiny!
We have decided and sworn an oath To live or die as Muslims Holding fast to the errors of the corrupt ones Striving for Muslims to rule Muslims! Muslims! Muslims!
We, with Islam were the best of nations And with it conquered Kisraa [a Persian emperor] and Caesar We have sown Justice in the world So reap & spread amongst the people "Allahu Akbar"
Ask if you still don't know who Muslims! Muslims! Muslims!
...Raise the Qur'aan as the constitution of our time And fill the horizons with: We are Muslims! Muslims! Muslims! Muslims!
Here's a bit from a camp chant called "Youth of the True," which extols Muslim military victories of the past, laments the abandonment of shariah in contemporary times, and urges youth to "unsheath the swords/And don't be concerned here with difficulties":
Hail! Hail! O sacrificing soldiers! To us! To us! So we may defend the flag On this Day of Jihad, are you miserly with your blood?! And has life become dearer to you? And staying behind sweeter? Is staying in this world of torment more pleasing to us?
Death-cult chants are a long way from "A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall" and other traditional summer camp ballads, that's for sure. And CAIR, speaking from the world headquarters of the organization that inculcates jihadi values in Muslim youth, has the nerve to wonder why some people in the West have a negative view of Islam.
Via Pod, check out this joyous homemade video of the Peanuts gang "performing" Outkast's "Hey Ya." This will make you happy, promise. At least for four minutes. Then it's back to blood, sweat, toil and tears.
Today's Wall Street Journal has a personal finance column (not available unless you subscribe) that takes note of the fact that Americans aren't saving anything. The problem is not excess spending on Starbucks lattes and the like. The problem is money we're spending on houses and cars.
Everybody needs a house and a car, or cars, right? Well, yes: but the Journal columnist says that "houses and transportation accounted for 52 percent of all expenditures in 2002-03, up from less than 41 percent in 1950." The jump comes in because we are buying bigger houses and more expensive cars than we need.
"The trend has been to buy the most house you can afford, rather than the amount you need," notes Sophie Beckmann, a financial-planning specialist at A.G. Edwards in St. Louis. "It's the same thing with cars. You see a lot more luxury cars on the road. While you can get by with a $20,000 car, people buy the $40,000 SUV with the leather seats and the TV. There's a lot there that's discretionary."
The columnist, Jonathan Clements, concludes: "Indeed, if you're willing to skip the heated car seats and the third bathroom, you would probably still be living better than your parents did -- and you will free up money that can be saved."
Quite a report here about the ECUSA General Convention refusing to affirm the particular Lordship of Jesus Christ. Here's a veiled example of the reductio ad Hitlerum invoked by a Tarheel divine:
"This type of language was used in 1920s and 1930s to alienate the type of people who were executed. It was called the Holocaust. I understand the intent, but I ask you to allow the discharge to stay," said the Rev. Eugene C. McDowell, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and Canon Theologian for the Diocese of North Carolina.
Are you a Christian who believes Jesus meant it when he said "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6) You must be some kind of Nazi.
A leading National Socialist from Texas weighed in:
Judy Mayo from the Diocese of Fort Worth also opposed discharge. "My friends, this is a church convention, and this is the very essence of our faith. This may be the most important thing we deal with at this entire convention...Surely we can say together that Jesus Christ is Lord. And if we can't, we have no reason to be here."
It really does come right down to that, doesn't it? If you can't say "Jesus Christ is Lord," what's the point of being a Christian? Imagine a Muslim having trouble saying, "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet." It's inconceivable.
But not to Canon McDowell, who is one of those enlightened churchmen who think mean people suck:
"In the Episcopal Church we don't do up and down votes on Jesus Christ as Lord, and to do so is potentially a mean-spirited approach, to ask questions that aren't meant to be questions."
Yes, yes, let's fog it up as much as possible. Truth is so tacky. They can't affirm that Jesus is Lord, but they can affirm the necessity of gay bishops. This church really is falling to pieces once and for all. I don't see that they've left the Anglican Communion any choice but to cut them loose.
I've never been a Dan Rather fan, for the usual reasons, but there's something disgraceful in the way CBS is treating him, blackballing him out the door after having given virtually his entire career to CBS News. The piece in last Saturday's NYT really was close to heartbreaking, to see a man like that robbed of his dignity, and humiliated by the news organization to which he was so devoted. Surely there was a more graceful way for CBS to have handled this. Surely.
That said, I hope Rather doesn't partner up with Mark Cuban for a news program on HDNet. There's something deeply Norma Desmond-y about that.
Couple days ago I posted a blog whaling away on House Majority Leader John Boehner for demagoguery. This is because he characterized the House vote last week as a choice between "al-Qaeda or America." This would have been rank demagoguery had he said it, as Dan Larison reported.
But he didn't say it. The quote belongs to Rep. Charles Norwood, a Georgia Republican. Dan Larison last night sent, along with an apology for his error, the original paragraph from the Journal story, with the correct attribution:
"It’s already uglier than I thought it would be," said Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R., Md.), a Marine veteran of Vietnam. Setting the tone early, Rep. Charles Norwood (R., Ga.) urged voters to throw out the "defeatists" in November at the polls. "It's time to stand up and vote. It is al Qaeda or is it America?"
I apologize to Rep. Boehner and you readers for my mistake, and retract the harsh words I had for the House Majority Leader. I ought to have directed them toward Rep. Norwood.
Here is an amazing snippet of an interview with the next Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA:
Interviewer: So what happens after I die?
SCHORI: What happens after you die?.. uhh– I would ask you that question.. but what’s important about your life; what is it that has made you a unique individual.. what is the passion that has kept you getting up every morning and engaging the world..uh.. there are hints within that about what it is that continues after you die.
This is just pathetic. Crushingly pathetic. It would be high comedy if the implications weren't so tragic. I don't know about you, but if this warmed-over New Age swill was all Christianity had to offer in the face of death, I'd go out and get drunk and get laid.
A furious Episcopalian friend e-mails to say the new PB's answer here begs another question: "So what happens after the Episcopal Church dies?"
Washington Monthly has a piece out (as yet unlinkable) speculating on whether it will matter that three GOP presidential hopefuls -- McCain, Gingrich and Giuliani -- are all adulterers. The piece suggests that McCain will probably skate, because it didn't much matter in 2000, and he's acknowledged regret for his behavior. Newt and Rudy, well, not so much. Gingrich was pretty flagrant and obnoxious -- that story about him going to his cancer-stricken wife and asking for a divorce is pretty rank -- and Rudy's public courting of Judith Nathan while married to Donna Hanover was scandalous even in NYC. I can just imagine how that will play in Peoria. Here's a key passage from the Washington Monthly piece:
But if GOP operatives dangle the infidelity bait, and the press fails to bite, its importance to Christian conservatives won't be so easy to ignore. Since the press awoke to the phenomenon of evangelicals in 2000 and so-called "values voters" in 2004, reporters have become fond of gaming out every possible permutation of evangelicals' political concerns. Evangelicals' attitudes towards the marital problems of McCain, Giuliani and Gingrich might actually deserve such an inquiry. In 2000, for example, James Dobson issued a personal press release specifically to "clarify his lack of support for Senator McCain." "The Senator is being touted by the media as a man of principle, yet he was involved with other women while married to his first wife," Dobson said. He also cautioned that McCain's character was "reminiscent" of Bill Clinton's--possibly the ultimate insult in conservative circles.
These remarks received little attention in 2000, possibly because reporters hadn't yet grasped the extent of Dobson's influence, but Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokesperson for Dobson's Focus on the Family, recently made it clear that the adultery issue hasn't lost any of its toxicity among evangelicals. "If you have a politician, an elected official, and they can't be trusted in their own marriage, how can I trust them with the budget? How can I trust them with national security?" she asked me. Although Earll was reluctant to discuss specific politicians, she noted that a candidate who "had an affair and then moved on and restored that marriage" might find forgiveness with Christian conservatives, but someone "who had an affair and then left his wife" would not.
Hmm. Well, look, I guess I'm not your average Christian conservative, but I'll be candid here and say that all things considered, I don't give a rat's a*s about the messy personal lives of potential candidates. The problems facing this country, domestically and internationally, are so grave that if a presidential candidate offered a plausible case for how he (or she) would deal with them, I wouldn't much care what kind of spouse he or she had been. I haven't always felt that way, but I doubt that we can afford to be so moralistic about these things any longer. The idea of the media spending any serious time in 2008 dwelling on the marital foibles of any candidate makes me nauseous. (And George W. Bush puts the lie to that the Evangelical claim that marital fidelity equals trustworthiness with the budget.)
Jeremy Lott is a conservative and a Christian who has written an interesting book called "In Defense of Hypocrisy." In it, he talks about the social utility of hypocrisy, and how we ought not be so quick to condemn it and try to extirpate it from our public life, including politics. Maybe I'm wrong here, but with a war going on in Iraq, the ongoing struggle with Islamic terrorism in the WMD age, immigration, the rise of China, Iranian and North Korean nuclear challenges, potentially catastrophic public debt, and on and on ... I just can't work up much concern about whether or not Rudy or Newtie are cads. In fact, I think they both are cads in the strict sense of the word. But I was a New Yorker on 9/11 and in the aftermath, and let me te
ll you, that adulterous cad Rudy Giuliani was golden. You wouldn't have wanted anybody else there in that critical moment. I dunno, maybe 9/11 and the Giuliani experience turned me French about this issue. That is, I might not vote for Giuliani in '08, but if that's the choice I make, it won't have anything to do with his caddish private life.
Inspired by the squirrelly Presbyterians who are coming up with new, non-offensive titles for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a friend suggests a contest to rename the Christian Godhead to suit popular American tastes. He proposes:
Class Act, Cuddler, Confidante
Hard to beat, no? Another pal on the same e-mail string follows with:
How about "Old Man, Main Man, and Suge"? Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.
Your suggestions? Come on, if there's a way to trivialize beyond all hope of redemption this PC silliness by the PCUSA, we will find it!
"It's time to stand up and vote. Is it al Qaeda or is it America?"
I would like to tell you it was Homer Simpson, inspiring a mob of Duff-soused poltroons massed outside Springfield City Hall. It would at least be funny. But no. That priceless quote, that ne plus ultra of ersatz demagoguery, was uttered on the floor of the House of Representatives last week by House Majority Leader John Boehner. The mind reels. I can understand the reasoning of those who believe that we must continue to support this war, but even they should be embarrassed by this cheap crap.
Via the Corner comes news that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is suggesting that individual parishes can rename the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit -- the Trinity -- so as not to offend 21st-century Americans. Here are some of the alternative labels:
Mother, Child and Womb Rock, Redeemer, Friend Lover, Beloved, Love Creator, Savior, Sanctifier
Ten years from now, they'll be proposing "Groucho, Chico and Harpo" with a straight face, so as not to marginalize the Slapstick-American community.
I've never been able to figure out why some Jews get all worked up over the intense support many Evangelicals have for Israel, given that quite a few of those Evangelicals believe the establishment of the state of Israel is a precursor to the Second Coming of Christ, which in Christian eschatology involves the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Jews don't believe Jesus was the Messiah, and therefore don't believe he's going to to come back. So why can't they just be grateful for the support of Evangelicals for the state of Israel -- who needs all the friends she can get -- and let the Evangelicals wait in vain for the Second Coming? I was pleased to see that question mentioned by Spengler in another of his typically rich and provocative analyses (he's actually quoting the Jewish writer and US Senate staffer David Brog, who asks the same question in his new book, "Standing With Israel"). This week's topic? Jews and Evangelicals. Spengler, whose writings are philosemitic, lest you worry, thinks Jews are silly to fear Evangelicals. Excerpt:
Christian anti-Semitism, to be sure, is alive and well, but it flourishes among conventional, middle-of-the-road, mainline Protestant denominations, notably the US Presbyterians, who voted in 1994 to pull investments out of any multinational corporation doing business in Israel. American Presbyterian leaders publicly embraced Hezbollah in 2004 and made overtures to the new Hamas government in Palestine. I do not believe that the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and other left-leaning denominations in the United States have any special concern for the sufferings of Palestinian Arabs. Rather, I think they simply hate Jews as they always have. The US never was so hostile to the Jews as when mainline churches held sway. Despite the public humiliation of Switzerland for its treatment of Jews during World War II, it is a matter of record that this small country accepted 21,000 Jewish refugees during the war, or precisely as many as the whole of the United States.
"Established Christianity" is something of an oxymoron, after all; the object of the religion is not to make the adherent comfortable in this world. That is the mission of the New Agers, Gnostics, and sundry purveyors of spiritual self-help. When Christianity becomes a Sunday excursion rather than a daily commitment, the notion of pilgrimage becomes irrelevant, and the Jews and their concern become not an example but an irritation. Moderate Christians are soon-to-be-ex-Christians, which is to say that they are proselyte neo-pagans. Like most pagans, they hate the Jews. The collapse of the mainline denominations and the corresponding growth of the evangelicals is the best thing that has happened to the Jews in a very long time.
Today's Wall Street Journal front page has a disturbing story about what happened to Souleiman Ghali, a truly moderate Muslim who led and effort to modernize a mosque in San Francisco, arguably the most liberal city in the USA. He failed, miserably. The article is available only to subscribers, unfortunately, but the gist of it is that Ghali was hauled into court by a hardline radical imam the mosque fired in 2002. These days, the hothead imam, Safwat Morsy, is running a new mosque and preaching jihad to "swelling crowds" in San Francisco. And Ghali has seen his dream collapse after Morsy prevailed in a civil suit against him and the mosque.
Ghali kept clashing with radical imams at the mosque, and after 9/11, worked hard to bring the mosque into the American mainstream. He clashed with Morsy and supporters during a sermon at Friday prayers, in which the imam was calling for God to punish America for its sins. "Ask God to heal America, not punish it!" Ghali says he shot back. Well, things finally came to a head when Morsy and his backers tried to oust Ghali from leadership of the mosque. The Ghali backers fired Morsy, allegedly for preaching extremist rhetoric. Morsy countered that he was fired because he exposed bad accounting practices. In the civil trial, the judge banned Morsy's radical sermons subsequent to his firing as irrelevant, and the jury said it didn't have enough evidence of the sheik's supposedly radical sermons in the mosque to conclude that he was in fact a hardliner. Besides, he looked like such a nice family man in court. Morsy won.
Now the Ghali mosque is in a bad way, and even his supporters say he tried too autocratically to liberalize the mosque. The peace and interfaith activities Ghali launched are over. Mosque attendance is down. And the fire-and-brimstone mosque Morsy started after he got the boot is now looking for a new building to hold the overflow crowds at his services. Depressing, this. I can't say much for his accounting practices, but otherwise Ghali comes off as a great guy.
...or, "That vaca frita I made this weekend was heaven on earth." Steve Bodio asked me in the weekend cooking thread below to post the recipe for the Cuban fried beef I prepared last night. Happy to oblige. As Julie and I ate it last night, I said to her, "Is there any other dish that provides so much pure pleasure with so little effort?" The answer is, yes, there is: ripe tomatoes with kosher salt and a drizzling of olive oil (which I also had this weekend, thanks to my kind neighbor Laura bringing over tomatoes fresh from her garden). Still, you should make this; it's insanely delicious. I think the only reason Castro still rules Cuba is that a well-made vaca frita is the opiate of the people. I'm still pie-eyed from last night.
What you do is the day before you're planning to eat the vaca frita, take 2 1/2 lbs. of flank steak, and let it simmer in a pot of salted water with a bay leaf or two for 90 minutes. When it's done, take it out and let the meat cool. Then, tear it into strips with your fingers. That done, you'll want to put the meat into a non-reactive bowl, and over that pour the juice of six limes and three lemons (at least), as well as three diced garlic cloves. Mix this together, and put it in the fridge to marinate overnight.
The next day, cut an onion in half and slice the entire thing into thin strips. Then, remove the marinated beef from the bowl, and squeeze out all the marinade. Set the meat aside. In a deep saute pan or black-iron skillet, heat a half-cup of olive oil until fragrant, then put the beef in. Let it sizzle cheerfully for about eight minutes, stirring attentively, then put the onions in. Mix the meat and the onions well, and stir for about 10 to 15 more minutes, until the beef is crispy brown.
Salt and pepper to taste, and squeeze a couple of lime wedges over the top before serving, if you like. The thing to serve with vaca frita is white rice. The thing to drink with it is cold lager. The thing to listen to while eating it is Jesus Alemany.
Steve, you promised a recipe in return. Blog it below. The rest of you too, get in on this. If you have a good recipe to share, let us have it. This is not just a politics, religion and culture blog. We like to eat and drink too!
Father Neuhaus on what the election of Schori as Presiding Bishop means for ECUSA, worldwide Anglicanism and ecumenical dialogue with Rome. None of it is any good, according to Neuhaus, who's right about this. It's fascinating to watch this play out from Dallas, whose Episcopal diocese is home to at least two large, thriving orthodox Anglican parishes, and probably more (I can only think of two, but then again, I don't really know the diocese). The bishop here, Stanton, is quite solid, I'm told. But there are also powerful liberal forces here too, so the battle will be intensely joined. What's fascinating to me as an outsider is that I'm so used to the Episcopal Church being one of the most liberal churches in town in the various places I've lived most of my adult life. That's not at all the case here in Dallas, where orthodox Anglicanism is appealingly vital.
Reader Caleb sends a link to the cover story on Christianity Today's website: a case, based on Michael Kazin's new biography, for why we need a William Jennings Bryan figure in America today. Excerpt:
Kazin makes no effort to disguise the intent of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. "I wrote this book, in part, to gain a measure of respect for Bryan and his people," Kazin writes in the first chapter, "The Romance of Jefferson and Jesus." "[W]e lack politicians, filled with conviction and blessed with charisma, who are willing to lead a charge against secular forces whose power is both mightier and more subtly deployed than a century ago. Perhaps the story of an earnest and eloquent, if not godly, hero can help."
Kazin has chosen an almost impossible task. Today's progressives aren't clamoring for a fervent evangelical known more from Inherit the Wind than for his economic egalitarianism. Conservatives will applaud Bryan's righteous rhetoric, but will cringe at his simplistic populism. Still, in the hands of a capable historian, Bryan reemerges as strangely relevant for today. Secular elites like those who mocked Bryan can't regain power without religious populists. And evangelicals can't branch out from their signature social issues and the Republican Party without additional ranks of principled leaders like Bryan.
The front page of today's NYTimes features a story on two American-born Muslim leaders -- Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaik Shakir -- who, the newspaper says, are fighting hard against Wahhabism and Salafism, and trying instead to lead US Muslims to a more moderate form of Islam. "Great!" I thought. "I've got to blog this later." I think it's as important for media commentators highlight Muslims who are doing the right thing as it is to highlight those who are preaching extremism, or at least giving comfort to extremists.
By the time I got to the end of the story, I was thinking, "If this is moderation, we're in more trouble than I thought." Look:
Islamic studies experts say that what Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir are teaching is traditional orthodox Islam...
[snip]
While leading a mosque in New Haven in 1992, Mr. Shakir wrote a pamphlet that cautioned Muslims not to be co-opted by American politics. He wrote, "Islam presents an absolutist political agenda, or one which doesn't lend itself to compromise, nor to coalition building."
While he did not denounce Muslims who take part in politics, he pointed out the effectiveness of "extrasystemic political action" — like the "armed struggle" that brought about the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A copy of the pamphlet was found in the apartment of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. Mr. Shakir says he was questioned by the F.B.I., but had no link to the man, and that was the end of it.
While studying in Syria a few years later, he visited Hama, a city that had tried to revolt against the Syrian ruler, Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Shakir said he saw mass graves and bulldozed neighborhoods, and talked with widows of those killed. He gave up on the idea of armed struggle, he said, "just seeing the reality of where revolution can end."
Asked now about his past, he said, "To be perfectly honest, I don't regret anything I've done or said."
He added, "I had to go through that stage to become the person that I am, and I'm not willing to negate my past."
He said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, "not by violent means, but by persuasion."
"Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country," he said. "I think it would help people, and if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it's helped a lot of people in my community."
If this country were to be ruled by sharia, the government would have to be overthrown, and the Constitution trashed. Whether it's by violence or peaceful means, I want no part of it, and consider this kind of teaching to be dangerous. If this is "traditional, orthodox Islam," then that begs the question as to whether Islam is ever compatible with liberal democracy. Can we please have that conversation in the media?
Sheikh Yusuf comes off much better in the piece, but it only takes a moment's googling to find out that -- surprise! -- there's more to him than the benign portrait painted by the Times. Here's the Sufi Muslim Stephen Schwartz on Hamza Yusuf, considered by Schwartz to be a radical. So much for the Times and its gullibility. (I know, I know...but hope springs eternal.)
The Episcopal Church just elected a woman as its presiding bishop. Well, it's over for them in their present incarnation. The vast majority of the Anglican Communion -- that is to say, Africa and the rest of the Global South -- is going to disfellowship them. Their slide into irrelevance is apparently irreversible. TMatt notes that the ECUSA General Convention tabled discussion on a proposed resolution that would put the Church on the side of saying that Jesus Christ is the only name by which anyone is saved; the resolution was deemed too controversial to be discussed.
A Christian church that cannot bring itself to affirm the unique necessity of Christ to salvation is ... well, I don't know what it is, but I know what it is not. And so does the Global South, which I suspect has been pushed by ECUSA about as far as it is willing to go.
Over at Amy's, they've been talking about the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia. They've been going on for over 20 years now, and it's either an unprecedented miracle, or the world's longest running sideshow. Me, I have no idea what to think, and that being the case, I choose not to think about them, as I recall from early in my life as a Christian how easy it is to get swept away in the woo-woo "magic" of this kind of thing. I do believe in the Fatima apparitions, which have been approved by the Catholic Church, and I even made a pilgrimage to Fatima once (the town's a tourist-trap dump, I hate to tell you, but the experience of the basilica and the pilgrims is quite moving).
I was baptised a Christian, but wasn't "converted" -- meaning, I didn't start to take it seriously as an adult -- until I was in my mid-twenties. I had gotten myself into quite a spiritual hole with all my partying, and remembered that when I was in LSU in the 1980s, I'd known this girl who was a party hound like the rest of us in journalism school, but who went to Medjugorje one summer with her parents, and came back changed -- very much for the better. I assumed that Mary really was appearing there, and began to pray to Mary, asking her to show me the way out of the pit I'd dug for myself. In a way that I can only describe, even now, 15 years later, as miraculous, she did so. And I turned my life over to Christ in the Catholic Church.
Since then, I've always had a soft spot for Medjugorje, though I've never been there. I've known people whose lives were changed very much for the better by miraculous spiritual healings they had there. And many people can testify to physical healings as well. Well and good. A fascinating, non-sentimental book to read about Medjugorje is Randall Sullivan's "The Miracle Detective" (read the Godspy interview with him here.) Sullivan is a veteran journalist known mostly for his work for Rolling Stone, who went to Medjugorje to see what was happening, and came home a convinced Christian, though one who is not exactly sure what's going on at Medjugorje.
But there's something really troubling about the place. A priest friend of mine who was converted to Catholicism from a position of atheism at Medjugorje, now believes the whole thing is a vast religious illusion. One thing that impresses him about the Medjugorje business: the fact that aside from Vicka, none of the "children" who were given the alleged apparitions have suffered because of them (to the contrary, they've done quite well) does not testify to their authenticity, at least not in my friend's judgment. My friend endorses Father Philip Pavich's disillusioned skepticism about Medjugorje.
What do you think? Like I said, I don't know one way or the other, and have gotten to the point in my spiritual life where I think spending too much time thinking about apparitions and miracles can be a harmful distraction from serious spiritual work. So I try to avoid it. Still, I can't help wondering...
Happy Father's Day! The one thing I've written over the course of my career that makes me proudest is this tribute to my father. Excerpt:
At bedtime, as night falls over Brooklyn and my toddler Matthew has said goodnight to Moon for the umpteenth time, I turn off the bedside lamp and tell him it's time to sleep. Then I turn the light off, he rolls into the crook of my arm, cranes his head so he can whisper in my ear, and says, "Pawpaw."
This is my cue to tell my 20-month-old son stories of his grandfather, my own dad, who lives with my mom ("Mammy" to Matthew) in Starhill, a south Louisiana enclave where the only sounds at night are crickets and bullfrogs, not sirens on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Matthew's grandparents visited a couple of months ago, and he fell hard for them. Especially Pawpaw, who shares the boy's enthusiasm for graders and forklifts and things that go. After they went home to Starhill, Matthew kept asking for them ("Mammy! Pawpaw! See more!") and at bedtime wanted me to tell him real-life stories about Pawpaw.
So that first week after Matthew's grandparents left, we followed Pawpaw's adventures hunting squirrels so his family would have enough to eat during the Depression. We joined him in the rodeo, riding bucking bulls and wrassling steers. We followed Pawpaw into the Coast Guard, and rode out a hurricane in Mobile Bay lashed to the wheel of his 40-foot cutter. Then Pawpaw piloted a dinghy in rough seas, outmaneuvering a shark to complete a mission to change a buoy's light bulb.
Then I told Matthew about the things Pawpaw did when I was little. Once I saw Pawpaw catch an egg-stealing chicken snake by the tail and crack him like a whip, snapping the varmint's head off. I told my boy about the hunts, when Pawpaw took me into the swamp and showed me how to stalk whitetail bucks and other game. I told him about how when the Mississippi River flooded, Pawpaw would set lines in the backwater for catfish but often snared snapping turtles, alligator gars and fat black water snakes instead.
You can imagine how thrilling this is to a little Brooklyn boy. But the other night, when Matthew's deep breathing told me he was asleep, it struck me that I hadn't thought about these things in years. Here I was rediscovering my father's life through telling stories about him to my own son (a startling number of which end with the cooking and eating of a wild animal). As a child, none of this seemed extraordinary to me at all. It's how most men lived in West Feliciana Parish, and indeed some version of this rural saga is how a great number of Americans lived until a moment ago.
Ah reckon because it's Father's Day weekend, the wardens here are letting me do pretty much what I want. And what I want to do is to cook! Every now and then I have to fill out something or other that asks for my "hobbies" or "interests." The only thing I ever write is "cooking," or "food." Some people don't quite get that it is fun for me to stand in front of the hot stove for hours ... as long as there's music, and a glass of wine to keep me company. My friend Nora owns this funky old plantation house down in Louisiana -- if you read "Crunchy Cons," it's Weyanoke I'm talking about -- and though the house had plenty of room, people always congregated in the small kitchen. If Spielberg would buy the dang film rights to "Crunchy Cons," I'd build me a house in which the biggest room was the kitchen. I'd have me a big-ass Viking stove, and invite people over to eat and drink constantly. As it is, though, my little kitchen is big enough for two rambunctious boys, a CD player and an itchy German shepherd (you have no idea), but only just.
I started with one of my favorite dishes, the embarrasingly easy to make pasta alla gricia. You have to fry a quarter-pound of diced pancetta in some olive oil, add a pound of cooked linguine and gobs of grated Parmagiano Reggiano -- which I bought at Jimmy's, a neighborhood Italian grocery and deli, for a third less than they ask for at Whole Paycheck (and I bought a pound of fresh cherries at Jimmy's for $1.99 -- the VERY SAME CHERRIES IN THE VERY SAME BAG retail for $7.99 a pound at Whole Paycheck). Plus salt and pepper. It's amazing how good something so simple can taste. Next, I cooked up a Roman shrimp dish that involves tomatoes, hot peppers and fresh mint from the garden. I've got some flank steak simmering in salted water now; it's going to turn into vaca frita later, a Cuban specialty I learned to love when I lived in south Florida. I have to shred the boiled beef and let it marinate overnight in garlic and fresh-squeezed lime juice before finishing it tomorrow. I've also got a mess of greens to cook, and some rice. We'll be noshing on this stuff through the middle of next week.
I've been sipping on an Argentine rose' this afternoon. I always thought rose' would be too sweet, but was persuaded last summer to give this sort a try. It's pretty much the perfect summer afternoon wine. But I tell you, the cheese not to eat on a summer afternoon, or any afternoon if you ask me, is raw-milk blue cheese. I took a chance on a little wedge of it, and man, it tastes of the barnyard. A really salty barnyard. It tastes like you've been nursing directly from the cow's teat, and not a nice cow, either, but one of those trashy sullen cows that smokes Tareytons and goes on "Jerry Springer" and tells kids to get the hell away from her trailer.
Did I ever tell you about the time I wrote a four-page love letter to Marcella Hazan? No joke. Julie thinks they're going to arrest me someday. If I won the lottery, I'd move the fambly to Italy and learn to cook like an Italian grammaw. Call me Santo Battaglia! You watch: I'm going to insist that we name this baby girl we have coming Marcella Flannery Margaret-Thatcher Santa-Battaglia Dreher.
My wife just got this e-mail from a CD company, confirming her order:
1 DAN ZANES AND FRIENDS: catch that train! $15.00 $15.00
Sub Total $15.00 Shipping $2.25 Grand Total $17.25
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, June 13th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Whole Foods has decided to quit selling live lobsters and soft-shell crabs because "they could not ensure the creatures are treated with respect and compassion."
Well, good grief, what the sensitivo Whole Foodies need to do is to hire Smoove B Love Man to oversee their lobster and crab operation. Or maybe they need to encourage customers to offer lobster a cigarette and the benefit of a priest to hear its confession before throwing it into the pot.
A poor misguided communiss in one of the comboxes below is under the impression that I am posing as a faux-populist when I refer to myself as "Your Working Boy." No, no, no! I am merely paying homage to what is regarded by all superior people as the Fifth Gospel. I speak, of course, of "A Confederacy of Dunces."
We have to face up to Garrison Keillor, says Sam Anderson in Slate. Well, okay, if you insist. Actually, I quite like Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" work -- I grew up in a small town too, and I recognize the people and the situations in his stories -- but I can see why he drives some people crazy. And I don't think I would much like Keillor in person. A year or two ago, I read his political book about why Democrats are superior people. I enjoy a good polemic, but this one was surprisingly rancid coming from the gentle sage of Lake Wobegon. I was startled to read a liberal I admire so much (or it his stage persona I admire?) dropping his mask and being really nasty without the compensating virtue of being insightful. It was a diatribe, basically. To be sure, the book had its moments, but it was far more Upper West Side in tone than it was Lake Wobegon.
Maybe it's just me, but have you noticed on "Prairie Home Companion" the only time his jokes fall routinely flat is when he's making fun of religious conservatives? Seriously, listen to the audience reaction when he starts in on them. People maybe titter at best, but that's about it. I can't believe it's because the Keillor audience has so many religious conservatives in it; I think it's because those particular jokes are so jarringly off-key. His Republican jokes fall flat more often than not, too.
Look, I think Keillor is a genius, and I love his program. I think he is also a very angry man who would consider it a mark of virtue to be uncivil to people of my political and religious convictions.
Charles Krauthammer brilliantly analyzes the awful killing of a Palestinian family on the beach in Gaza. He acknowledges that there is serious doubt as to whether the explosion was an Israeli shell at all. But let's say for the sake of argument that it could have been an errant shell from the Israelis, who were attacking Palestinian rocket positions in Gaza. Here's Krauthammer:
But the obvious question not being asked is this: Who is to blame if Palestinians are setting up rocket launchers to attack Israel -- and placing them 400 yards from a beach crowded with Palestinian families on the Muslim Sabbath?
Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians' classic and cowardly human-shield tactic -- attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists -- and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested -- it's a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it's another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel's preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic "Israeli massacre" picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.
But there is an even larger question not asked. Whether the rocket bases are near civilian beaches or in remote areas, why are the Gazans launching any rockets at Israel in the first place -- about 1,000 in the past year?
Answer: because they don't want peace at all, only the Israelis dead and gone.
I never have been able to figure out how Southern Baptists and other Christians who believe any and all consumption of alcohol to be sinful get around the idea that Jesus Christ's first public miracle was not turning water into Welch's grape juice. Here are some thoughts about drinking and piety by a Southern Baptist who believes that good grief, a glass of wine won't kill you.
Here in north Texas, there are still quite a few "dry" districts, where you can't purchase alcohol. Consequently, there are about as many Baptists-and-drinking jokes as there are dry areas. The most familiar one:
Q: How can you keep your Southern Baptist fishing buddy from drinking all your beer? A: Take two Southern Baptists with you. They won't touch a drop in front of each other.
After years of resisting, the US Catholic bishops have voted to obey the Vatican's directive on the use of English in the mass. Hallelujah for that, though it is telling that it makes news when Catholic bishops obey the Vatican. But Father Z. warns those of us on the traditionalist side not to claim victory yet, because there's a lot we don't yet know. I would never count Bishop Trautperson out!
I should say that I am not fond of the Tridentine Mass, though I strongly believe it should be universally available. I am not fundamentally opposed to the Novus Ordo, but I think the new changes, if they are what I hope they are, will return some of the beauty and poetry to the Catholic liturgy. All you have to do is go to an Anglican (Rite One) liturgy to know how beautiful liturgical prayer in English can be, versus the humdrum Catholic version. Even the Orthodox prayers in English are beautifully and poetically rendered, and I marveled when I worshiped with the Maronite Catholics at how majestic the English translation of their liturgy was. A century from now, I bet that American Catholics will look back at the violence done to the traditional forms of Catholicism with the same sense of amazement and dismay with which we view the stripping of the altars in Reformation England, or the iconoclastic controversy in 8th-century Byzantium.
Anyway, the liturgy news from the USCCB should give the counterrevolutionaries reason to hope. We do win one every now and again -- and God willing, the reign of the progressive liturgists and all their pomps and works is coming to an end.
Yesterday I blogged about David Brooks' column asserting that there's a political realignment underway in which the terms "liberals" and "conservatives" don't mean much anymore, but are giving way to a divide between nationalist populists and progressive globalists. Ross Douthat has a smart comment on my blog. Excerpt:
I think Rod underestimates the power of the elite consensus in American life. Populist nationalism is too, well, popular to be ignored by politicians, but for roughly the last hundred years of American history an overlapping, interlocking series of elite classes has done a truly remarkable job of co-opting and controlling populist sentiment - and I'm skeptical that this will change that much in the new century. National politicians, precisely by virtue of being national figures, come under a tremendous amount of pressure to conform themselves to the elite culture and elite opinion, and they almost always buckle. Though perhaps "buckle" is the wrong word - it's not so much that they throw over their populist principles, as that their education (broadly defined as inculturation into the elite realm) makes it impossible for them to seriously consider populism, save pragmatically, on an issue-by-issue basis. So sometimes it's necessary to throw a bone to the rabble, with steel tariffs or the Dubai ports non-deal or rhetorical (if not real) support for the FMA, but by and large the pillars of elite consensus are upheld.
Ross goes on to acknowledge that "the pillars of consensus change over time," but rarely in a more populist direction. He goes on to note the "genius," possibly sinister, of meritocracy, which "co-opts the smartest people in the working classes (the traditional populist base) and turns them into full partners in the elite consensus."
Great stuff there. I should say upfront that I am by nature suspicious of populism, because I fear the mob. I was recently reading about Huey P. Long, the guvna of my home state, and how he made brilliant use of populism to become a tyrant. The conservative historian John Lukacs warned in a book last year that American conservatism risked devolving into rabble-rousing nationalism. No conservative, it seems to me, can be entirely comfortable with populism.
And yet, the elite consensus ruling American life galls. Take immigration, which is a big issue here in Texas where I live. It is considered distasteful in elite circles -- and by "elite" I'm not talking about economic elites only, but cultural elites, like journalists, academics, lawyers and opinion makers of all kinds -- to entertain the idea of building a wall between the US and Mexico, or to say the words "Lou Dobbs" without making a face as if someone had shoved poo under your nose. The idea is that people who do talk about illegal immigration as a threat are racist clods at worst, economic simpletons at best. They generally don't think about the overwhelmed public hospitals, because they don't have to use them. They don't have to think about what illegal migrant males living in overcrowded housing can do to stable neighborhoods, because absentee landlords aren't moving these migrants into their neighborhoods. They don't have to think about what the cost of educating the children of illegal migrants does to taxpayers in locales where the migrants live, because they (the elites) aren't having to shoulder this cost. And they don't think about what the influx of unskilled migrant labor is doing to the labor market, because their jobs aren't threatened.
You see? The elites get to congratulate themselves on their broad-mindedness and cosmopolitanism because they by and large don't bear the burdens imposed by the policies they favor. And that's just on immigration. I see a similar dynamic at wor
k on affirmative action.
I think Ross is right, and that it will be hard for any genuine populism to coalesce in the current structure of American cultural and political life. For one thing, the culture wars are very much with us, and it's hard to imagine that cultural conservatives and cultural liberals can live together in the same party or political movement built broadly around a common economic view. What we'd be looking for is the rebirth of the Truman Democrats, versus Rockefeller Republicans. Do you see that coming? I don't, not anytime soon.
But there could be a catalyzing event that shatters the consensus, and makes new ways of thinking and organizing possible, even necessary. In the current issue of The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan says that neither party is capable of dealing with the mounting crises upon us, e.g., deficit spending that threaten to bankrupt us, foreign troop commitments that we can't sustain, entitlement commitments to Boomers we can't meet without a disastrous tax increase, a shrinking industrial base that makes America more dependent on foreign countries for necessities, and borders we cannot or will not control. He writes:
In 1932, it took a Depression to bring to power new men and ideas. In 1968, it took a divisive war, urban riots, assassinations, and a cultural revolution to convince America to turn away from the party of their fathers. What is the calamity that is coming this time?
UPDATE: Reihan speaks on the matter at hand here, saying in part, "This doesn't mean that we're about to reach the promised land--or hell--in which the will of the majority is (gasp!) heeded by the political class. It does suggest that we're in for a period of partisan instability, strange and possibly noxious political enthusiasms, and robust experimentation at the state and local level."
Well, well, well, if you think homegrown Islamic terror cells are something that only Canada and Britain are dealing with, think again.
Scott Redd, director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, said in a written statement to the Senate that the emergence of home-grown terrorist groups is posing "real challenges" for U.S. authorities despite law enforcement successes at disrupting potential attacks.
"We are grappling with a whole new set of questions: what forces give rise to this violent ideology in immigrant communities that may appear otherwise to be quite well assimilated? ... What signs should we be looking for to try to draw early warning of potential problems?" the statement said.
Too bad that I can't link to today's David Brooks column. It's right up this blog's alley. Brooks opens thus:
If American politics could start with a clean slate today, the main argument wouldn't be between liberalism and conservatism, words that have become labels without coherent philosophies. The main fight would pit populist nationalism against progressive globalism.
Populist nationalists (PNs) would be "liberal on economics, conservative on values and realist on foreign policy." The gist of their politics, in Brooks' words, is: "We are the ordinary, burden-bearing people of this country. We are the ones who work hard and build communities. It's time for us to come together and recognize that our loyalty to our fellow Americans comes first."
From this follows certain PN policy trends: 1) no more waste of blood and treasure on fantasies of democratizing the Middle East; 2) securing our borders against terrorists and illegal immigrants; 3) standing up to "the big money interests who value their own profits more than their own countrymen;" 4) supporting a government that will "stand up to Internet porn and for decent family values; and 5) the defense of government programs that help ordinary people bear the burdens that threaten to wipe them out (e.g., health-care costs).
Brooks writes that PNs are tired of business and cultural elites who don't understand how unstable life is, and how much people fear that everything could be swept away by one catastrophic illness, a terrorist attack, and so forth. He concludes:
Populist nationalism of this sort would be politicall potent. It would be against the war without seeming naive and dovish. It woudl be against corporate power without seeming socialist. It would tap the passions aroused by immigration and outsourcing and cohere with the populist uprisings taking place in different forms around the world.
On the other side are the progressive globalists (PGs), who "would be market-oirented on economics, liberal on values and multialteral interventionists in foreign affairs." Brooks cites John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and Mark Warner as examples of this orientation. PGs are inspired by economic globalism, "technological dynamis and cultural diversity." They want to build international institutions to share the prosperity. Trade needs to be opened up, not shut down, and new policies must be put into place to manage the flow of people across borders, not close them off. We have to make our economy more flexible, and work together internationally to solve global problems. Writes Brooks:
This modernizing progressivism would also be politically potent. It would thrive among the educated, among aspiring suburbanites, among hawks and among immigrants who look to the future more than the past.
"Politics is becoming less about left versus right and more about open versus closed," Brooks concludes (Jim Pinkerton talks about the same conflict under the labels "universalism vs. nationalism."). It's pretty obvious that crunchy conservatism lands squarely on the populist nationalist side of the divide. It is telling that the only national politician Brooks could come up with to fit the PN mold is James Webb, the Democratic Senate nominee in Virginia and former Navy secretary under Reagan. He also named Lou Dobbs and James Dobson, among other media and cultural figures. This suggests to me that the populist moment hasn't found articulation in the political realm. Yet. But it's coming.
Here's a great piece by Slate writer Emily Yoffe, who got lambasted by readers of her "Dear Prudence" column when she advised a reader to reconsider her decision not to have kids. Look, I know that some people who choose not to have children (versus those who for whatever reason cannot) have good reasons for making that decision, but boy, the people who wrote to Yoffe sure don't offer any. They sound like self-absorbed yuppies from hell. Writes Yoffe:
Many didn't just write about the adult pleasures of their childless (or "childfree") life—travel, restaurants, undamaged upholstery, sex in the living room—but expressed contempt for those deluded enough to want to reproduce. As one woman wrote: "My husband and I are childless by choice and I heartily encourage all younger friends to consider it. It is the most wonderful lifestyle, free of whining and sniveling and mini-vans."
Yoffe wonders what's going on when so many people express such contempt for having children. (One answer: the great German historian Oswald Spengler said that when people in a society have to be persuaded of the value of having children, that society has already crossed the line into irreversible decline). And then she goes on to say what most of us who have kids already know well: yes, you have to give up a lot, but the compensation is priceless.
When Julie and I were on the verge of having our firstborn, I was on the phone with my sister, who had two kids at the time, telling her how I guess we were going to just have to get used to not going to nice restaurants much anymore, and how our night-on-the-town weekends were about to be a thing of the past. That's true, my sister said, but just wait: "You and Julie will spend an entire Friday night on the floor playing with the baby, and you'll wonder how you ever got along without him."
It was true. As with marriage, it's hard to convince people who haven't made that commitment of how much more life means when you have anchored yourself in a commitment to other people. By the time I did get married -- I was nearly 31 -- I was so sick of the unbearable lightness of single life that I had absolutely no doubts standing at the altar. Not so with parenthood, which came upon me about two years later. But I've had the same experience of deep joy as a father, a joy I simply couldn't have imagined on the other side of the wall, so to speak. Like Yoffe, I was struck recently by realizing that we are already a third of the way past the time Matthew, who's closing in on seven, will be with us. Wasn't he always with us? Won't he always be? God I love those kids.
Fatherhood has also been good to me in what it has taught me about my own father -- to cherish him more than I had, and to be more merciful to him as well. I wrote about that once upon a time, and feel more strongly about it today.
Anyway, look, raising children is tough, and not everybody is called to it. Agreed. But jeez, the yuppie hatred of children that Yoffe encountered is a canary in the cultural coal mine, if you ask me.
Just got back from a long lunch with a politically connected retired Republican banker here in Dallas. I'm not sure whether it would be more accurate to call him disgusted or despairing. Probably both. He said, "I have kids your age, and I tell them that my generation screwed them. Y'all are screwed. All the Social Security and Medicare we've saddled you with, and all the debt that this Republican president and this Republican Congress have put on your generation. Y'all are screwed to the wall." He went on to say that he never would have imagined that Republicans could have been given control of Congress and the White House, and governed so horribly when it comes to fiscal policy. "At least the Democrats are honest about how they're going to spend," he said.
He went on. "I think that if we're going to save this country, it's not going to be the politicians that do it. The Demopublicans, they're the same thing. They have no idea what kind of mess this country is in."
If not the politicians, then who? Unfortunately, it was late, and we both had to go. "To be continued," he promised.
Jeremy Beer: ...For me, at least, the commitment to that policy was only strengthened by what has happened more and more in the last few years, which is that the self-identified conservatives who have gained political power and influence have tried to read out of acceptable conservatism various folks whose brand of conservatism they don’t like. That’s only natural, of course. If I were in power I’d probably do the same thing. But it has tended to truncate in the popular mind the range of thought that has been the fruit of conservative reflection in the last fifty and more years. Staying on-message may help win elections, but it’s no way to have a vigorous intellectual life.
So — again, speaking only for myself, though I think this conviction is reflected in the encyclopedia — I hope that conservatives’ aspirations to comity are always vexed. At least then we will still have debate. When the debate among conservatives stops, you can be sure that their movement is dead.
Bruce Frohnen: I would agree on the necessity of allowing the diversity of conservative thought to shine through. I would argue as well, however, that there are important reasons behind the attempt to present all sides — reasons that go to issues of comity. There always has been a great deal of personal unpleasantness in politics. Politics in America involves a combination of deeply held personal beliefs, money, and power, so no doubt there always will be unpleasantness. But debates have gotten particularly nasty in recent years, and people (and their careers, and thus their families) are being quite intentionally hurt. The irony is that it is often those who are least “civil,” or most angry, who are being read out of the movement, and their jobs, because they are objecting to a decisive shift in power within American conservatism over the last few years. I’m not certain, actually, that this is just the fairly old “neocon vs. paleocon” debate, but rather one that comes about from the institutionalization of the Republican party in power — something that may well be coming to an end soon. Debates over the war in Iraq, over government spending, over the current administration’s policies on education and a variety of other programs, have gotten serious. There is much arguing, and much purging going on. Some of this is inevitable as the political party most identified with conservatism seeks to maintain its power. But the fallout extends into academia, think tanks, and even journalism. One of my hopes is that this volume will show that there are more peaceable ways in which we can disagree with one another.
If you have a few minutes, take the time to listen to this commentary by Rawlins Gilliland, a Dallas writer, who offered it earlier this week on KERA, the public radio station in Dallas. It's about the emotional and mythical power of classic American popular songs. Now, you can read the short essay on the link I provided, but words on the page cannot do it justice. You have to hear, between musical passages, Rawlins read in his soft, deep Texas accent, as comforting as a broken-in pair of cowboy boots. It really is one of the loveliest radio essays I've ever heard.
Eric Miller's Books & Culture review of "Crunchy Cons" is available online. I'm pleased to be able to say that I called Eric after I first read this piece, and enjoyed talking to him so much that his comments -- which address a problem with the book he identifies in his review -- have become a key part of the new chapter I wrote for the paperback edition.
As long as I'm querying the room, let me ask you to talk about your dangerous idea. What do I mean by that? The idea comes from The Edge, which made "What is your dangerous idea?" its annual question for 2006. The idea, as The Edge explains, is this:
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutins are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
This question is aimed at scientists and scientific thinkers, but I don't know why the rest of us shouldn't take a crack at it. Here's my dangerous idea:
That liberal democracy cannot be sustained in a secular, materialistic culture.
This is not a new idea, certainly; John Adams, for one, understood from the beginning that "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Surely few Americans would agree that we have become an immoral and irreligious people. But in 1798, when Adams made his famous remark, it was immeasurably easier to find agreement on what it meant to be a "moral and religious" person. There was a much more uniform understanding of that definition.
Today, not so much. As MacIntyre observed, we have reached the point in late modernity (postmodernity?) in which it is well nigh impossible to reach a stable social consensus on questions of morality, because we no longer have a shared moral framework. Increasingly, we Americans are asked to put our faith in procedures. This is thin stuff, and I have my doubts as to how long it can last.
This is largely what the big "The End of Democracy?" controversy in First Things was all about a decade ago. What started it was a series of judicial decisions that arguably usurped the function of politics. The editors put the point of the symposium starkly: "The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."
This idea was so dangerous that several prominent members of the First Things board resigned to protest the mere asking of the question. I hope I'm wrong, but I believe we will have to face that question squarely at some point in my lifetime. Ross Douthat picks up on the intrinsic tension between Christians and the American mainstream on this point:
To oversimplify egregiously but not, I think, inaccurately, the modern Anglo-American political tradition came into being because Christians were willing to accept the Christianity-lite political settlement offered by social-contract liberalism - and they were willing to accept it because its major premise, that man was endowed with natural and inalienable rights by Nature's God, was broadly congruent with Christian tradition. In a Lockean-liberal society, the law might not do everything that some Christians would like it to do - compel belief, for instance - but neither would it directly violate basic Christian principles.
There have been tensions in this compromise over the last two centuries, with Christians pushing for more religion in the liberal order, secularists pushing for less. But for most of American history it worked out pretty well, and Christians were at the forefront of the long-running push to ensure that the premises of natural-rights liberalism (which were also Christian premises) found appropriate expression in the laws of the nation - particularly where r
ace was concerned, but also with regard to the unborn, as increasing scientific knowledge about fetal life led to the nineteenth-century bans on pre-quickening abortions. (Or so Ramesh argues; if you want to get deep into the weeds on the question of abortion, quickening, and the common law, go read this post by Bradford Short.)
However, the Lockean settlement was obviously a long time ago, and most of today's liberals no longer believe in the "endowed-by-their-Creator" theory of human rights. Which is why abortion has become such a flashpoint - because it's the place where modern liberals have instituted a utilitarian approach to killing in place of the older natural-rights-based understanding, and the place where Christians are resisting. This explains, in turn, why pro-lifers make liberal arguments even though the source of their conviction is usually religious: it's not because they're dishonestly concealing their Christianity, but because they still think that rights-based liberalism is the common ground between Christians and secularists, and so they naturally attempt to argue on that ground. And the current pro-life frustration, I think, flows from the fact that pro-choicers have half-abandoned this common ground, but often won't admit it.
I see no reason to think that Christians will not continue to lose ground here, arriving quite possibly at the point where broad numbers of us ask ourselves the same question that the First Things editors asked in 1996. And not just Christians: it could easily be the case that if, for whatever reason, Group X decided that it had been pushed farther than its own deepest convictions would allow it to accept, and it had no common moral ground from which to make demands of the mainstream, we could see it breaking away in some fashion -- or at least preparing itself to do so.
To recap: the dangerous idea that I think about a lot is the proposition that liberal democracy cannot survive a polity where binding moral consensus is difficult or impossible. Which is a way of saying that I am pessimistic about liberal democracy surviving in America.
Now, I don't want the thread below to become a discussion about my dangerous idea. I want readers to submit their own dangerous ideas. We'll give the thread a couple of days to grow, then I'll pull several of them out and set up threads devoted to them.
It's summertime, and some people -- not Your Working Boy, alas -- have more free time for reading. Beach reading, whatever. I was thinking about whether or not there are any books I'm planning to read this summer, and the answer is: whatever crosses my desk that I need to read for my work. I do a lot of reading, but it's almost all to do with keeping up with current events. Which is actually pleasure reading for me, because I don't have a lot of interest in fiction. I'm hoping to read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," but at this point that's for pure pleasure.
How about you? What are you reading, and why? Are there any particular books that are especially good for summer reading? I keep trying to read Dostoevsky, but I can't bring myself even to consider him except in the winter.
Two stories in today's NYTimes tell a troubling tale about where we're headed in American society with the Boomers aging.
First is this piece about how Muslims are struggling to figure out how to care for their elderly and still be faithful to their traditions. In Islamic cultural tradition, adult children and extended families care for their elders. In go-go America, though, the elderly tend to get farmed out to nursing homes and other care arrangments, for a variety of reasons. For one, they sometimes need specialized medical care that can't be provided at home. But I think the more common reason is that the children believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can't afford the expenditure of time necessary to care for the elderly. When both parents are working, the problem is obvious. And what happens if the children live far away from the parents? My own parents are aging, and if we reach the point one day where Julie and I need to take one or both of them in, of course we'll do it -- but it would be traumatic for them to have to leave behind the town where they've lived their entire life, and where everything familiar is, including their friends. You do what you have to do, but still. I can remember going to visit my elderly aunt Hilda in a nursing home when I was a child, and it was horribly depressing. She didn't need to be there, but the relatives who had the means to take her in wouldn't. I could never do that to my folks, if it were in my power not to do it.
The Times story captures in a short passage the collapse of a taboo as traditional societal arrangements give way to the stark realities of modern America:
Razia Remtula, Mr. Walji's sister, said that her brother's project [running a nursing home for Muslims -- RD], while controversial now, might one day ease the burden and guilt for her own children. "I know how hard it is for me to provide this care," she said, "and I don't want my children to struggle with these decisions."
Her son, Sibtain, 27, listening intently from across the room, seemed puzzled by the discomfort surrounding his uncle's venture. "I think, in fact, it might be a better way to live when you are older, to be with your own peer group," he said. "If it was there, near the mosque, why not? I would definitely look into that."
Unsurprised by his nephew's response, Mr. Walji said: "You see? Inevitable."
The second story is about how upstate New York is being swiftly vacated by young adults, threatening the viability of cities, towns, and the entire region:
David Shaffer, president of the Public Policy Institute, which is affiliated with the Business Council of New York State, described the hemorrhaging of young adults as "the worst kind of loss."
"You don't just magically make it up with new births," he said. "These are the people who are starting careers, starting families, buying homes."
Experts quoted in the story say that the young people are leaving because the job situation is so lousy. This begs the question: who will care for the elderly left behind in upstate New York with all the children having migrated? Will they just be warehoused in nursing homes, heaven's waiting room? Is that really how we want to live? Why is it becoming increasingly difficult for upstate New York's children to stay where their families have been for generations? Do people care, or do they just accept it? If they care -- and if they will start to as the Boomers age alone -- will this have a political effect?
[T]here is also something deeply inadequate about viewing
old age in terms of individual “ownership” of one’s own destiny. The aging society, after all, will confront us with the realities of human neediness. Freedom from “want and fear,” to the extent such freedom is humanly attainable, will require the old accepting the inevitability of their growing dependence on others, and it will require others who willingly accept the burden of caring for their elders, even at the expense of their own independence. The ownership society only makes sense if it prepares us to be care-givers and care-receivers, and if it does not encourage us to see ourselves as unencumbered individuals.
...We may well have a [financial] crisis today because aging citizens look too quickly to the government and not to themselves in securing their financial futures. But we have another, surely more intractable crisis, as the individual’s need for care increases in a society where the ties of family and fidelity have often weakened and the supply of voluntary caregivers has diminished. No government program, insurance policy, or personal savings account could possibly replace what Americans have done for one another without compensation.
This potential crisis in long-term care is due in part to the last century’s great advances in medicine. People are living longer and longer, but often at the price of living with severe infirmities—bodily or mental—that render them incapable of taking care of themselves for long periods of old age. At the same time, fewer and fewer people are available to serve as voluntary caregivers: today’s baby boomers had fewer children than their parents; these grown children are more geographically dispersed; and family bonds are increasingly complicated by the high percentage of divorce. And there is no reason to believe that there will be enough professional caregivers to fill these gaps. The cost of decent professional care is increasingly daunting, and fewer and fewer of us will be able to provide it ourselves or pay others to provide it well for those we love.
But this crisis does not arise simply from demographic shifts or shortages of manpower and money. It is, at bottom, a crisis of culture, a crisis about “caring,” a product of our society’s opinions on freedom, dependence, and care. It confronts us with one of the peculiar ironies of our time: The more we understand ourselves as independent of others (i.e., in pursuit of our own self-interest and self-preservation), the more dependent we ultimately become on others (i.e., more in need of the care that all human beings rely upon, especially in their old age). Our spirit of ownership and the realities of our dependence inevitably come into conflict, and this conflict is not easily resolved.
The whole kerfuffle between Dallas Muslim leader Mohamed Elibiary and Your Working Boy occasioned a visit to my files here, to go over a printout of e-mail traffic on a Dallas Muslim listserv dedicated to criticizing The Dallas Morning News. Elibiary wrote on this listserv in December 2004 to comment on the Ayatollah Khomeini celebration at which he spoke here in Dallas, and which I was fiercely criticizing on the DMN blog. To his credit, he told the others that he didn't realize at the time how offensive one of the speakers, Mohammed Asi, really was, and added that Asi's radical views are opposed to those of his own organization, and others in Dallas. That's all Elibiary said about the subject -- at least as far as I can tell, because they kicked me off when they found I had subscribed.
The apparent moderator of the list then was a local convert to Islam who no longer lives here. His comments on the list were illuminating. He proposed to his readers that they launch “a concerted effort to destroy any credibility [Dreher] has to the extent that he become ineffective in his current position.”
He further wrote: “Dreher incites people to hatred and violence against Muslims. We know that in the current social envirnment[sic], any statement made against the community in general places us in danger of violent attacks."
Notice how he phrased that. "Any statement made against the community in general places us in danger of violent attacks." Got that? According to this point of view, to say or write anything critical of Muslims is to incite others to hate Muslims and do violence against them. The attempt here is to shame everyone else into refusing to criticize anyone or anything about the Muslim community. The attempt is to intimidate the media into silence by refusing to allow for the prospect of legitimate criticism.
This man went on:
Dreher needs to be ruined. When people here [sic] the name ‘Rod Dreher’ the image of David Duke should appear in their mind’s eye. So, a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke … because right now he is a champion in DFW. He is the voice of the haters, and that voice is potent and dangerous. Yes, he is no Imam, but he is still a danger. Just the idea of a Dreher is dangerous for the community. My idea is more low-key than anything. It should be designed to stay under the radar for a long time. It is not designed to raise any red flags in TDMN. It is not designed to work overnight, but may take time and require patience.
Another member of the group suggested that “We should compile a dossier and alert major churches, temples and local non-Muslim organizations and ask them to contact major DMN advertisers. It is best if pressure came from the wide community as a hole [sic].”
I was fortunate enough to find out about this plan by signing on to the listserv and downloading the thread before they discovered my presence. Happily, I sent it all to company lawyers, because the way the instigator characterized the putative campaign would have been potentially a cause for a defamation lawsuit against them, as they would have intentionally set out to destroy my reputation. In the end, I think my discovering this and publicizing it killed the malicious thing.
I bring it up here as a lesson. Notice how these folks strategized not to meet my own arguments with presumably better arguments of their own, and to have this debate in the public square. They discussed operating a whispering campaign, and co-opting unsuspecting churches, temples and business owners in a stealth effort to paint me as a David Duke bigot to well-meaning non-Muslims.
I can't say how representative this small group is, or was, of Muslim leadership, but I will say that every time someone lik
e Elibiary trots out the "stirring up hatred and inciting violence" charge as a response to criticism, I think about this shabby little backroom discussion I stumbled onto. I think about how members of that listserv were discussing ruining my reputation and harm my newspaper with a groundless whispering campaign designed not to rebut a critic, but to destroy him professionally and to intimidate a newspaper into silence.
Everybody go read John Derbyshire's essay on NRO. Derb supported the war at first, but no longer does. For the most part, he gives voice to my own view (and my own regret over my earlier support of this intrinsically doomed nation-building enterprise) with much more force and clarity than I could muster. Excerpt:
One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence.
Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be?
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely.
Julie and I discovered today, in a sonogram session, that our third child is going to be a little girl. We were thrilled -- now Matthew and Lucas will have a sister. The sonogram technician told us that you'd be surprised at how many women burst into tears upon hearing the news, and apologize on the spot to their husbands or male partners.
"You are kidding me!" I said, shocked.
"Oh no," the technician replied. "I've had boyfriends go sit right there in that chair when they find out, and put their heads in their hands." Like it's the end of the world.
Julie and I were astonished by this, and appalled. You hear of this kind of thing in China and India, where many people murder female babies in the womb, but I had not really expected that kind of prejudice to linger in our society. The technician indicated that it is a lot more common here than many people might suspect.
At the Corner, Andrew Stuttaford catches up to my comments of last week in which I observed that he has made the discovery that material prosperity is insufficient to sustain a society that lacks moral stability and social cohesion -- a particular concern when the market itself acts to sunder those moral bonds, and to undermine the kind of stability that conservatism ought to be defending. Here's how Andrew leads his item:
The good Rod Dreher claims, I think, to have detected signs of crunchiness in my favorable comments last week on that excellent article in the NYT on “freakoutnomics.” If he did, that’s a misperception. My feet remain unshod by Birkenstock, my stomach is unfed by guano-fertilized arugula, my soul is sated by the OC.
It's not a misperception, given that the book I actually wrote (as opposed to the cartoon version some think I wrote), is at bottom about just the thing you identified in your comments, Andrew.
I haven't read Ann Coulter's book "Godless," and, continuing my unbroken streak of never having read an Ann Coulter book, don't plan to. I have read her columns, though, and I laugh out loud half the time, and wince half the time. I find myself wanting to defend her, in part because I think it's risible to observe outrage over Coulter from liberals who think their counterparts who bear-bait conservatives in precisely the same way are engaged in good clean fun. I sometimes think that the problem liberals have with Coulter is not so much that she trashes them mercilessly, but that she's so much better at it than they are in doing the same to conservatives. Besides, Ann Coulter is a lot easier on the eyes than Al Franken.
That said, I know that "they do it too!" is not a defense. And in the end, even though I agree with her sometimes, what Ann Coulter and people like her across the political spectrum stand for is bad for America. As David Carr asks in his NYT column today: "You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us."
It would be a lot more persuasive to me if journos like David Carr spoke out equally against the bombastic left-wing vitriol that pollutes the public square. (Or, for that matter, if liberals would get equally as angry over the filth, the misogyny and the violence celebrated by many hip-hop artists, who are far more influential in the popular culture than this skinny right-wing WASP from Connecticut can hope to be). Because what Coulter and her fellow cynics of right and left have in common is a commitment to polemics as Total Warfare. They write like Sherman marched to the sea. Or, to switch martial-historic metaphors, they seem prepared to destroy the village in order to save it. (Was it really necessary for Coulter to savage the 9/11 widows by implying that they're enjoying their husbands' deaths for her to make the perfectly valid point that it has become unfortunately taboo to criticize any political activist who has suffered a tragedy?)They have no opponents, only enemies.
What especially gets to me about Ann Coulter is that she identifies herself as a Christian ("a mean one"). National Review dropped her column when she said, in response to 9/11, that "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." I know plenty of conservative Christians, but not a single one who would remotely want to do anything like that. Truth to tell, I don't think Coulter wants that -- this is just shtick with her. She's too smart for it not to be. But she plays into the stereotype that many people hold about Christians, especially conservative ones. I am all in favor of boldly speaking truth to power, but Coulter is very far from fulfilling that prophetic role. To put it mildly.
Let me make this personal. For much of my career, I was a professional film critic. There was nothing more fun than trashing a bad movie; in fact, there's an inverse law of film reviewing that says the better a movie is, the harder it is to write about. I can remember sitting at my computer writing harsh, cutting, clever, extremely snide things about bad movies -- and I even came to think of myself as a sort of virtuoso at that sort of thing, taking great pleasure in coming up with the most quotable nasty lines I could about a bad movie. It's been seven years since I reviewed for a daily paper, and I look back now on that aspect of my work with what you might call ... shame. It's not that some, and maybe most, of these turkeys didn't deserve carving. It's that I took pleasure in my own cruelty. Maybe it was becoming a father, maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was writing a book, or maybe it was all of these things, as well as beginning to mature in my Christian faith, that made me realize how -- how to put this? -- fragile all thi
ngs human are. It didn't make me any less critical, I don't think, but it did make me think about how to criticize. It is insufficient to hate the bad; we must also love the good, and it seems to me that if we are to be critics/pundits of any lasting worth, that love of the good must not only guide our writing, but the love of people should as well. I admit, this is hard for me. Really hard. But as a Christian, I have no choice. Neither does Ann Coulter, if she is what she says she is.
Clever piece up at Slate today by Bryan Curtis, on how soccer has become the favorite sport of American intellectuals. I especially liked this observation:
There's also a frisson of underworld glamour in soccer writing. To chronicle the international game is, in many cases, to mingle with thugs, hooligans, and all sorts of unsavories. "There's a strong, strong element of working-class chic in American fandom," says David Plotz, Slate's resident soccer obsessive. "It's like fake macho for smarty-pantses." One needn't venture to Glasgow or Rome to seek out lunch-pail pals, of course—the intellectual could just as easily find them stateside at a college football game or NASCAR event. Perversely, it seems easier for an American soccer fan to make common cause with Italian mobs, who might happen to be shouting pro-fascist chants, than with someone from Alabama, who might happen to be a Republican.
It will surprise no one, I'm sure, to learn that I don't give a rat's Ronaldinho for soccer, but that's not because of faux-populism. I just don't like sports all that much. I much prefer the drinking, the eating and the carousing that attend sporting events (what is LSU football season for except to drink beer and cook up a big gumbo?). That said, I will once again put on my KNVB jersey, find a Dallas sports bar that will broadcast a match involving the Dutch team, and turn out to root for Heineken, I mean, HOLLAND. Go Orange!
Here's an interesting piece from today's NYTimes op-ed section, examining the contemporary appeal of communal living arrangements. When I think "commune," I think of free love, pot and an insufficient attention to personal hygiene. But that's a stereotype. There are all kinds of communal living arrangements. In "Crunchy Cons," I highlighted one of them: the loosely-organized intentional Catholic living arrangement that Rachel and Paul Balducci are part of in Augusta, Ga., (as were there parents before them). In the Balduccis' case, a bunch of like-minded Catholic families who wanted to grow up in something like a community got together, pooled their resources and bought a bunch of houses in a lower-income part of town. In a similar way, Phil and Leila Lawler up in Massachusetts relocated from Boston to a more rural area in western Massachusetts to live near a monastery, along with seven or eight other Catholic families who share their basic values. Leila once told me that you really need that kind of support if you want to raise your kids to hold onto their values.
Anyway, here's what caught my eye about today's Times story:
The new breed of cooperative living, however, is far from radical. In co-housing, the fastest growing segment, participants design their own subdivision with an emphasis on closely spaced, modest homes and Norman Rockwell-style social interaction encouraged by communal areas and pot-luck dinners. Eco-villages, many with solar-powered homes that are constructed with hay bales, are driven by an environmentally minded ideology. Residents are likely to avoid meat, wear hemp-fiber clothing and resemble the hippies of yore.
"There are plenty of people in the mainstream seeking an alternative to the alienation of suburban living, people who want more connection and community in their lives," Mr. Sirna said, as he prepared a stir-fry for three erstwhile strangers with whom he now shares a home and pooled income. "For them, it's not such a far-fetched idea to want to share resources and cooperate with their neighbors."
[snip]
Some say the time is ripe for a less atomized and wasteful existence. They cite an aging population that is seeking to downsize, the high cost of new housing and a surge in energy prices that will make old-school suburban life untenable.
Albert Bates, a lawyer from Connecticut who hitchhiked to The Farm, a commune in Tennessee, in 1972 and never left, says a flood of visitors seeking to learn about the 200-member community led to the creation of an eco-village training center that each year draws hundreds of people from around the world.
When gas hits $20 a gallon, Mr. Bates said, suburbia will wilt and Americans will flock to tight-knit, energy-efficient communities where they can walk or bike to stores that sell pesticide-free produce. "That time may not come for another 10 years," said Mr. Bates, 59. "But at some point people are going to look for alternatives."
The problem here, as the article in full notes, is that these kinds of utopian communties don't seem to last. I'm wondering, though, if that's because they were too ambitious in their separatist mentality. I, for one, would not be interested in living in a sort of "commune" as the understanding comes down to us from the 1960s, but I'd be quite interested in living in a development or intentional community as the Balduccis and the Lawlers have. In principle, by signing a petition in favor of historical district designation for the neighborhood I now live in -- a designation the city granted us a couple of weeks ago -- I agreed to give up some personal autonomy as a homeowner for the sake of preserving what Julie and I (and a majority of homeowners here) believe is the common good.
As readers of "Crunchy Cons" and this blog know, I believe the future for our sort depends on the
creation of what Alasdair MacIntyre identifies as new ways of living in community to preserve our faith and values. Does anybody have any real-life examples, or at least ideas, for how ordinary people like me and thee might do this without signing up for something more radical than most of us are able or willing to commit to?
I see that Dallas Muslim leader Mohamed Elibiary's warning to me that if I didn't stop writing about Islam in ways he disapproves of, I "could expect" someone to put a banana in the exhaust pipe of my car ("or something") is getting some attention on other sites. To be sure, there are worse things that can happen to one than an Islamist to tamper with one's car in that way; a would-be suburban jihadist might short-sheet my bed, for example. Arf arf! What struck me as worth commenting on about Elibiary's missive is the threat that my continuing to draw unwanted scrutiny to Muslim thought and actions would cause someone from his community to tamper with my car, or worse. I have written far more critical commentary of Catholic bishops, of gay radicals, and others, and despite angry, even profane, letters from dissenting readers, with the exception of the followers of Rev. Al Sharpton, nobody has suggested that my person or my property would be harmed because of my words. Until Mohamed Elibiary.
Some commenters think I'm overreacting. Maybe so, but I wanted to get it on the public record that Elibiary made this kind of remark in case something should happen. In any case, it is instructive to imagine the hullabaloo had I written to Elibiary to tell him that if Muslims keep getting arrested here and there on terrorism charges, he "could expect" angry and frightened non-Muslims to tamper with the cars of Muslims with intent to do them harm. I would never have done such a thing, because I believe that kind of vigilantism to be immoral, illegal and a threat to public order. Even to suggest that acts of vandalism or violence against others because of their words or presumed beliefs would be the fault of those vandalized is appalling. Had I issued that kind of threat against Elibiary, he would have been right to raise a stink, and I have no doubt my office would have been picketed by CAIR and the usual suspects.
It's no big deal, in the end, but I note it also because the Elibiary-goes-bananas incident, minor though it may be, offers an interesting insight as to why whenever there is an Islamic terror bombing or terror-related arrests involving Muslims, many Muslim leaders seem much more interested in speaking out against those who would think forbidden thoughts about Islam than they do in speaking out against those Islamic extremists who are doing so much to bring disgrace upon their religion. It'll be a great day when Mohamed Elibiary is more concerned about fellow Dallas-area Muslims hosting a tribute to the Ayatollah Khomeini conference (at which Elibiary spoke) than he is about a local newspaper columnist who troubles himself to ask what it means that Muslims around here hold conferences like that.
UPDATE: Eric Anondson posted in the comboxes below a link to an extraordinary and very much welcome column by a Canadian Muslim. Here's an excerpt, but you really should read the whole thing. The author, a man named Salim Mansur, deserves everyone's gratitude and support. Even a hundred Muslims with his frankness and courage and willingness to step into the spotlight with his prophetic words, would help immeasurably:
We repeat endlessly that Islam is a religion of peace, yet too many of us display conduct contrary to what we profess.
We keep assuring ourselves and others that Muslims who violate Islam are a minuscule minority, yet we fail to hold this minority accountable in public.
A bowl of milk turns into curd with a single drop of lemon. The minuscule minority we blame is this drop of lemon that has curdled and made a shambles of our Islam, yet too many of us insist against all evidence our belief somehow sets us apart as better from others.
In Islam, we insist, religion and politics are inseparable. As a result, politics dominates our religion -- and our religion has become a cover for tribalism and nati
onalism.
We regularly quote from the Koran, but do not make repentance for our failings as the Koran instructs, by seeking forgiveness of those who we have harmed.
We Muslims are the source of our own misery, and we are not misunderstood by others who see in our conduct a threat to their peace.
Amy has a post up linking to a Religion News Service report about the gender imbalance in today's churches. Amy's right: this isn't new news. Amy's also right: what might be new news to most people is to learn that this is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, Lee Podles wrote a whole book on the topic a few years ago, "The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity," in which he pointed out that this has been a fact of Western Christianity for centuries -- possibly stemming from the medieval cult of the Virgin and chivalry, with its exaggerations of the feminine.
I dunno. While the story Amy linked to is about Protestant churches, with which I have little experience, I do know that I know lots of Catholic men -- I seem to recall that SiliconValleySteve, a frequent commenter on this blog, among them -- who are faithful to the Church, but who feel that the atmosphere in their parishes is anti-masculine. By which they mean, in general, an atmosphere that downplays or even denigrates the virtues associated with manliness: courage, honor, physical bravery, and so forth. I know, I know, women can be and are brave, honorable, yadda yadda; but you know what I'm talking about here: many parishes honor the virtues typically associated with women and nurture. I think when you have a religion that puts too much value on one or the other, you get something very much out of balance (is there a more masculine religion than Islam?). Anyway, this is the kind of thing that I was talking about in my previous post, about why something snapped in me in my former Catholic parish on the Ash Wednesday when the pastor told the congregation he wasn't going to talk about sin and repentance (his actual homily, I forgot to mention, was about how we all need to be better to ourselves). I am sick to death of this wimpy American middle-class approach to religion, in which we are challenged to do little more than feel better about ourselves and be nice to everybody. I don't think most men relate to that at all. We look for challenge, for something to overcome (evil in ourselves, evil in the world), we look for something to defend.
(For my view on the wussification of Catholic men as observed in their reaction to the Scandal, see here; in it, I make use of this quote from Teddy Roosevelt: "I loathe cruelty and injustice. To see a boy or man torture something helpless whether in the shape of a small boy or little girl or dumb animal makes me rage." It's fine to be conventionally virtuous, Roosevelt said, but if these qualities are unsupported by "something more virile, they may tend to evil rather than good."
"The man who merely possesses these traits, and in addition is timid and shirks effort, attracts and deserves a good deal of contempt," wrote Mr. Roosevelt.)
I know that a lot of Catholic guys I've talked to over the years have this sense that the Church either doesn't want to encourage or actually wants to discourage the kinds of things we bring to the Church as men, as part of our nature. The Church, to be blunt, wants emasculates. Or that, generally speaking, is how it has seemed to me -- and why Mel Gibson's Christ in "The Passion" was such an inspiration. That was the first time I really understood how manful it was -- that is, how fulfilling of his nature as a male -- for the Saviour to suffer and die as a willing victim.
When I first started attending liturgy at St. Seraphim's Orthodox cathedral in Dallas, I was astonished by how masculine the atmosphere was (this is something I also observed at the Maronite cathedral in Brooklyn, where church attendance was 50 percent male, 50 percent female -- is there something particular to Eastern Christianity, whether Catholic or Orthodox, at work here
?). It was a serious place, not a place where the standard American therapeutic gospel was going to be preached. In the Orthodox parish, you have a strong sense of spiritual fatherhood there. The feminine is honored too, but you really understand what a patriarchal religion Christianity is when its comes down to you through Orthodox worship. I think Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote in one of her books that she was initially put off by the rigor of Orthodox life -- the fasting, the long liturgies, and so forth -- but that she found men really rallied to it, because it asked something difficult of them. It presented a challenge, and it honored as saints spiritual athletes who had overcome themselves. Anyway, I should say that I find in Orthodoxy a much more balanced approach to faith in terms of the masculine and feminine. It looks heavily masculine to people who have grown up in American culture, I think, but to me, as someone who has long had a particular devotion to the Blessed Mother, I find Orthodoxy more balanced.
Before I open comments on this thread, I would ask readers to keep the discussion focused on the topic of the masculine and the feminine as experienced in various churches, and not to make my own spiritual life the focus of discussion. I don't think readers care to read what the usual suspects have to say about whether or not Rod Dreher is going to stay Catholic or become Orthodox. Boring, boring, boring. Let's talk about masculinity and religion, the good and the bad, okay? I hate to have to point this out, but it gets awfully tiresome to have these threads hijacked.
We're not military experts, but as a political matter securing Baghdad first may be the better strategy. Countries can live with unstable hinterlands if they have to; ask the Colombians. But security in a national capital is crucial for confidence in the government and to prevent the flight of the educated middle class, on whom the future so heavily depends. Baghdad is also a multiethnic city, so its stability would carry a symbolic message for the minority-dominated provinces.
Three years since "mission accomplished," and we still don't control the capital?
Mike Crowley at TNR picks up on an interesting concession on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page today. Here's what the Journal said:
The bomb attack that wounded CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier and killed two of her colleagues and a U.S. soldier last week was a very real indicator of the hazards to both foreigners and Iraqis. While some media outlets seized too readily on bad news in the past, Baghdad is now so dangerous for reporters that the bad news is probably undercovered. The latest Pentagon report to Congress estimates that there are more than 600 attacks a week in Iraq--more than in 2004, which saw the simultaneous Fallujah and Sadr uprisings.
I work inside the mainstream media, and I am all too aware of the liberal bias on this or that issue. But I have come to think that the knee-jerk conservative line about how the Iraq-based media are too afraid or otherwise unwilling to cover the "real story" (that is, the good news) in Iraq is really rancid. In December, at a media conference in Dubai, I watched a panel discussion with reporters, Western and Arabic, who had covered the war from Baghdad bureaus. Every single one of them said that the conditions were so dangerous that when they were making decisions on which stories to cover, they had to reckon on whether the story was worth literally risking the life of their reporters and crew.
The recently departed bureau chief for Fox News, not a network known for its anti-administration tilt, said that he'd been asked by the US military to send a crew up to Mosul, I believe it was, to cover the opening of a school. He didn't do it. He said he couldn't justify the very real possibility that his crew would be killed to get a story like that. Notice he was not saying that the story wasn't important, or that the only stories he wanted to cover were those that were safe and easy. He was saying that if he was going to take responsibility for making widows and orphans back home, he had to be able to justify it because of the importance of the story. That makes perfect sense to me.
Most moving of all was an anchorwoman for Al-Arabiya, the Arabic language news channel that is the trustworthy counterpart to Al-Jazeera. The Arabiya bureau in Baghdad had been bombed, and at the time (this may still be the case), no single news organization had had more personnel killed covering the Iraq War than that station. This woman -- I can't remember her name -- said that she grew up in Lebanon, during the civil war there, and this made her desperate to tell stories about how ordinary people maintain their humanity in wartime. She wanted to get out into the field and tell stories about how ordinary decent Iraqis were coping. But it was far too dangerous.
I think all of us left that room feeling that the fact that these common, everyday stories couldn't be covered because of the extreme danger itself told an important story about the real situation in Iraq.
The Young Muslims of Canada unequivocally condemns acts of terrorism. Islam does not motivate, nor does it legitimize the loss of innocent civilians.
We are concerned about the well being of all Canadians. As such, we are optimistic that the judicial proceedings will be carried out with justice, due process and the presumption of innocence.
Who counts as innocent? Are there guilty civilians? What are they guilty of? According to the book "Milestones" by Sayyid Qutb, an English translation of which is provided by the YMC website, as one of the few texts in their online library, anything that is not Muslim is unholy, and must be overcome by force and by preaching, until the whole world has been subdued by Muslims and forced to accept Sharia. If you read nothing else, check out the chapter on jihad, in which he forthrightly rejects the idea that jihad is merely a defensive thing, and ask yourself if people who extol Sayyid Qutb's message are to be taken as paragons of tolerance and peaceability.
Qutb is a fascinating, utterly compelling figure. Paul Berman wrote about him in the NYT Magazine in 2003. Excerpt:
Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. "In the Shade of the Qur'an" [Qutb's masterwork, of which "Milestones" is something of a distillation. -- RD] is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.
Berman goes on to say that Qutb believed the crisis of modernity was the fault of Christianity, primarily, because in his view it separated the sacred from the secular, church from state. (In this, it must be admitted that Qutb is onto something, but only in the sense that the sense of alienation and dislocation most modern people feels comes from a suppression of our spiritual nature). His remedy for that was simple: the world must come under the rule of fundamentalist Islam. Most Muslims in the world have lost their way, Qutb believed, but the world would be saved by an Islamic remnant that was prepared to fight. Here's Berman again:
Islam's true champions seemed to be few, but numbers meant nothing. The few had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in ''Milestones'' called a vanguard -- a term that he must have borrowed from Lenin, though Qutb had in mind a tiny group animated by the spirit of Muhammad and his Companions from the dawn of Islam. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to undertake the renovation of Islam and of civilization all over the world. The vanguard was going to turn against the false Muslims and ''hypocrites'' and do as Muhammad had done, which was to found a new state, based on the Koran. And from there, the vanguard was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.
Qutb's vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules. Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ''a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.'' Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ''it involves an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of profligacy
in society.'' Shariah specified the punishments here as well. ''The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred lashes, which in cases is fatal.'' False accusations were likewise serious. ''A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste women.'' As for those who threaten the general security of society, their punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.''
But Qutb refused to regard these punishments as barbarous or primitive. Shariah, in his view, meant liberation.
Berman takes Qutb with proper seriousness. He says that yes, Qutb's totalitarian, despotic ideas are creepy, but they offer a compelling answer to serious existential questions, questions that most people -- not just Muslims -- have if they are thoughtful. He concludes his piece:
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.
Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.
What do we have to offer them to counter Qutb? We're just gassing on with multicultural platitudes and ecumenical bromides, and we don't even want to begin to take thinkers like Sayyid Qutb seriously, and prepare a challenge. Seriously, you should spend some time reading "Milestones." It is blood-curdling in its calm, pure vision of a totalitarian Islamist utopia. But you can see the appeal to a lost and drowning soul. And you can see the appeal especially in its militant idealism to the young Muslims of Canada, and the world.
Mike Aquilina says the early Church attracted converts by offering hardship, sacrifice and what you might call adventure. He writes:
Search all the volumes on the ancient liturgies, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a scrap of a Mass we’d call “relevant” today. We know of no special Youth Masses. Yet there was an overwhelming eucharistic faith among the young people of the Church.
Tarcisius was a boy of third-century Rome. His virtue and devotion were so strong that the clergy trusted him to bring the Blessed Sacrament to the sick. Once, while carrying a pyx, he was recognized and set upon by a pagan mob. They flung themselves upon him, trying to pry the pyx from his hands. They wanted more than anything to profane the Sacrament. Tarcisius’ biographer, the fourth-century Pope Damasus, compared them to a pack of rabid dogs. Tarcisius “preferred to give up his life rather than yield up the Body of Christ.”
Even at such an early age, Tarcisius was aware of the stakes. Jesus had died for love of Tarcisius. Tarcisius did not hesitate to die for love of Jesus.
What made the Church attractive in the third century can make it just as attractive in the twenty-first. In the ancient world and in ours, young people want a challenge. They want to love with their whole being. They’re willing to do things the hard way — if people they respect look them in the eye and make the big demands. These are distinguishing marks of youth. You don’t find too many middle-aged men petitioning the Marines for a long stay at Parris Island. It’s young men who beg for that kind of rigor.
No young man or woman really wants to give his life away cheaply. Tarcisius knew better. So do the kids in our parishes.
Hmm. I think about my old parish here in Dallas, where I showed up one Ash Wednesday, two days after having seen a media preview of "The Passion of the Christ," and still broken and filled with sorrow for my sins having done that to the Lamb of God. It's standing room only in the evening mass. The pastor rises to preach, and begins with something close to, "It's Ash Wednesday, and I suppose you would expect me to preach about sin and repentance, sackcloth and ashes. But" -- here he pauses for effect -- "that's not my style."
Looking back, I think that was the moment I decided that I could never take this place seriously again, and that the longer I stayed under this kind of spiritual headship, the more a danger to my faith and my sons' faith there was.
One of the most frustrating things about Blogger having been down for most of the past two days was the inability to comment on the ongoing Ramesh-Derb smackdown at The Corner. I told Jonah Goldberg that those guys make the back-and-forth he and I had over "Crunchy Cons" look like Skipper and Gilligan. One of the most interesting commentaries I could find about the Ramesh-Derb dispute (a spat that started when Derb wrote a scathing review of Ramesh's book "Party of Death", and continued with Ramesh's response) was this bit by the pseudonymous Gassalasca Jape at The New Pantagruel, who says the "bitter-sounding dispute" highlights the "divergent pressures within modern conservatism." Jape continues:
In sum, Derbyshire is a scientific materialist who approaches issues of politics and reason as a tribalist, while Ponnuru is a Christian who approaches politics and reason as a universalist. Derbyshire has no practical belief in God, thinks religion is functionally necessary as crowd control, thinks moral truth is hokum, and relies almost exclusively on accumulated tribal prejudices and protections for social cohesion and order. Ponnuru, on the other hand, is a committed Catholic, thinks the Catholic natural law tradition provides clear moral guidance to everyone reasoning rightly, and relies on a Lockean (which is to say liberal) notion of a procedural pluralism to provide social cohesion and order. Ponnuru argues the pro-life position as a procedural liberal Christian. Derbyshire argues against the invasion of his tribe by such puritan busy-body liberal do-goodism as an unapologetic prejudiced conservative atheist. What fun!
Jape has an interesting way of resolving the dispute. I hope Jape is wrong. But I think he's probably right.
The Motion Picture Association of America now apparently considers the presence of Christianity in a film to be so troubling that parents require advance warning.
Earlier this week on the Dallas Morning News blog, I posted a comment about the Toronto terror arrests, and noted how these homegrown alleged terrorists were nurtured at a local mosque, where a radical Muslim cultivated his own circle of angry young men right under the nose of the mosque administrators, who were aware of what he was doing but did nothing. My post drew a lengthy and angry response from Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim leader here in Dallas, who heads something called the Freedom & Justice Foundation. Today I got around to reading his response, and responding to it. That can be read here -- and let me tell you, I believe that anyone who is concerned about Islamic radicalism in America should read it.
You will not be surprised that Mohamed is one of these Muslim leaders who seems to think that any criticism, or critical questioning, of the beliefs and behavior of American Muslims is ipso facto bigotry, racism, discrimination, what have you. He indicates in his e-mail what I interpret to be a belief that the British are responsible for creating the subway bombers because they treated those bombers in a racist manner. This sure sounds like blaming the victim to me, but anyway, here's what startled me as I got to the bottom of his letter. He writes: "Treat people as inferiors and you can expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe or something."
Was that a threat?
UPDATE: The thought just occurred to me that the message being sent by Elibiary is: "If you keep writing things that call into question this non-existent connection between Islam and violence, don't be surprised if a Muslim tampers with your car."
Anyway, a banana up the exhaust pipe of a car wouldn't cause it to blow up or anything like that. It would cause the engine to die. Which is not what you want to happen on the freeway. As far as "or something," well...
Well, there won't be 72 virgins, or raisins, waiting for that S.O.B. There is justice in the fact that that devil went out of this world in the same way he dispatched hundreds, and maybe thousands, of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. I'm only sorry he didn't see it coming.
It is a miserable irony of this happy event, though, that the kind of world Zarqawi did more than anybody else to create in Iraq, has now made his death far less consequential than it would otherwise have been. That is, Iraq is already convulsed by civil war, and as U.S. officials have been careful to point out today, the death of Zarqawi won't stop that. Don't get me wrong: this is a day for rejoicing, and for praising the U.S. military and those intelligence operatives, including the Jordanians, who helped destroy this sadist. But the value of this victory is, sadly, limited.
The Senate is this week considering a bill that would allow Hawaiians of native ethnic stock to set up their own tribal-style race-based government, which would give them the right to negotiate with the U.S. Government over land, leases and suchlike. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal explains why this is such an important vote:
If the bill becomes law, it would create a racial spoils system that would hand special privileges to up to one-fifth of the state's population--including many with only a trace of Hawaiian blood. It could inspire mainland groups such as Hispanic separatists to seek similar spoils, should they ever gain enough political leverage.
Fund goes on:
The potential dangers of approving the Akaka bill--which has already won House passage in a previous Congress--are immense. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee warns that establishing "a new sovereign nation within the United States based solely on race . . . could turn the United States into the United Nations." Linda Chavez, a former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warns that other groups could use the precedent of a new Native Hawaiian government to lodge their own demands. She notes that a group of Hispanic separatists in Arizona once tried to get legislation passed that would have barred anyone whose ancestors were not living in Arizona at the time of the 1848 Mexican War from living in most areas of the state.
Supporters of the Akaka bill refuse even to disavow the idea of secession from the United States. Last July, Rowena Akana, a trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, told National Public Radio that "if the majority of Hawaiian people want secession, then that's the way we'll go." That same month, NPR asked Sen. Akaka about the possibility of secession, and he said, "That is something I leave for my grandchildren to decide."
I think I know why Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl and Texas Sen. John Cornyn are leading the opposition to this bill (which Fund says has a pretty decent chance of passage): because they know that there's a relatively small but intensely motivated separatist movement among Americans of Mexican heritage in the Southwest. If the Hawaii bill passes, where do we draw the line? On what grounds can we deny Chicanos the right to the same sort of separatist government? On the surface, it seems that they would have greater claim even than native Hawaiians, who can claim that designation even if they have only 1/256 native blood (says Fund).
If this passes, why shouldn't the Cajuns organize into their own ethnically separatist nation, and demand their own formally recognized government? Where does it stop?
Additionally, it would be harder to make a case against the kinds of claims Muslims in Canada, the UK and Europe have been making, saying that they deserve to have special dispensation to rule their own communities according to sharia. What about the Mormon separatists? Warren Jeffs as a tribal chieftain? That's not going to happen, but if the Hawaii bill passes, it's going to be very hard to close that separatist Pandora's box.
Via Kathy Shaidle comes this very sobering account of a blogger's discussion with an elderly German who had lived through the Nazi era. The man's family were aristocrats who were not Nazis, and who in fact thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So they sat back and watched the Nazis take over their country, and lead it to ruin. There's a lesson here, says the blogger:
We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.
The blogger goes on to say that most populations in history have arguably been "peace-loving," but history shows that in so many cases, the good people who did nothing allowed the worst people, "full of passionate intensity" as Yeats said, to come to rule society, with horrific results. The blogger says that the peaceful majority of Muslims are made irrelevant by the violent minority, and that if they don't speak up and fight back, the violent ones will bring rack and ruin down upon all Muslims. In any case, says the blogger, the rest of us ought to pay close attention to the ones who mean to do us harm, because in the end they are the ones who matter.
How true this is. I am certain that most white people in the Jim Crow South were not Klansmen, and were basically decent people. But their silence in the face of Klan terror made their basic decency irrelevant in the eyes of black folks. Can you imagine a white pastor after the Birmingham church bombings going on TV to say that most white people aren't violent, and that black people would be wrong to think ill of them because of the violent racism of a few? The blacks would have every right to say, "If that is true, then prove it by risking something to stand up against the terror! Fight back against it! If you don't, you are asking us victims and targets of terrorism to absolve you when you have done little or nothing to prove that you stand with the victims, not the victimizers." As someone once said, a long face is not a moral disinfectant.
You know, as a Catholic, I can sleep well at night knowing that there are tens of thousands of fellow Christians in this town who think I'm going to hell because of my religious convictions. I get along fine with hardline Christian fundamentalists, because no matter how strongly we disagree, I have never once had to fear that any of them would commit any sort of violence, much less murder, against me or people like
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