The Republican Party is a coalition between Christians and people with libertarian economic views. Political pundits are so used to this that they think it’s natural for these two philosophies to go together. In fact the opposite is true; more libertarian people are less religious. As more Christian voters with socialist economic views join the Republican party, candidates who support libertarian economic policies will no longer win primaries, and suddenly the platforms of the two parties will undergo a radical shift. The Republican Party will become the party of religious socialists, and the Democratic Party will be the party of secular libertarians. The good news is that this will result in the leftist wing being kicked out of the Democratic Party. The bad news is that the Republican Party will probably command more votes than the Democratic Party and we will see the country become more socialist, and at the same time abortion will be outlawed, prayer re-introduced to the public schools, etc.
This is the future and it is inevitable.
Well, there is a point there, obscured though it may be by the scare-word "socialist." It would be helpful to know what the author means by "socialist." I don't know many Christians who'd qualify under a commonsense definition, but if by "socialist" he means people who believe that the government has a duty, broadly speaking, to make sure that the inequalities in society don't become too great, and that there's a social safety net, then yes, Christians are generally "socialist."
I doubt there will be the kind of realignment he predicts, mostly because Christians who vote Republican either have no problem with free-market economics as the GOP's libertarians preach it, or they swallow their concerns because issues like abortion, gay marriage, religious liberty, affirmative action and so forth mean more to them than economics. (Don't ask whether or not the GOP will actually do much of anything about those social issues once they're in power; the social conservatives provide a big chunk of the votes, but the business conservatives tend to get the payoff.) Similarly, the Democrats could be making big gains this fall if they'd go all big-tent on social issues. They won't, because their social issues define them.
The only likely thing that could really realign the parties would be a major economic crisis, I think -- something that made economic policy the driving force in US politics. Absent that, I think we're going to have the status quo for some time, with changes around the margins.
UPDATE: Ross Douthat observes "the fundamental problem with the whole post-McGovern Democratic strategy, which has been to build a coalition of upper-middle-class professionals, the poor and minority groups, and enough working and middle-class voters to push them over the top (see The Emerging Democratic Majority). It could work, and indeed it almost has at times—but it’s being persistently sabotaged by the fact that a large and growing chunk of its smart, wealthy, well-educated base just can’t stand religion, and simply won’t let their political party get right with God, or at least the voters who believe in him. As Sullivan says, “[T]hese Democrats view the party’s interest in talking to religious voters as a sure betrayal of the party’s principles.” And they have enough money, megaphones, and high-speed Internet connections to make sure that America knows it."
When's the last time you read the book of Proverbs? Me, probably not since I was a kid. But at Matthew's school, they have a reading schedule from the Bible at night. Parents reading to their kids. They're first graders, so every night, a chapter of Proverbs.
Can I just tell you that the Proverbs writer needed an editor. This is what Proverbs is like:
The wise man speaks pleasantly about his neighbors, But the fool slanders them without remorse.
OK, fine. But three verses down:
Pleasant words about the neighbors issue forth from the mouth of the wise, But the fool is good for nothing but slander.
And you're thinking, hmm. And then you come across:
The neighbors? If you're smart, your lips will drip honey about them; But if you're a dumb guy, not so much.
On and on like this. Somebody was padding this thing out. I'm a writer, I know that trick. I'm just sayin'.
The avuncular Bob Schieffer just signed off as anchor for the CBS Evening News, handing the reins to Katie Couric. Boy oh boy, what a class act he is. I'm going to miss him. My desktop TV only gets one cable news channel (CNN) and one network broadcast channel (CBS), so I've been stuck with Bob for the duration. It was a total pleasure. Now I've got Katie on my screen for the duration. Not so happy about that.
Pope Benedict has cancelled the Vatican's Christmas pop concert.
“Pope Ratzinger prefers Mozart and Bach to 'pop' music and thus, after 12 years, the traditional Vatican Christmas concert comes to an end,” the daily La Stampa said.
“It is impossible not to notice a change under the new pontiff,” the ANSA news agency said.
“Benedict XVI is a very sober pope and is not inclined toward variety shows. He is more concerned about leading the faith of Catholics to its spiritual essence.”
Here's a wonderful story about a Christian couple who left their home in Oregon and relocated with their kids to New Orleans after Katrina to be there to minister to the broken and broken-hearted. Jim Louviere and his wife Michele were doing well in Oregon at the church they founded. They now live in a battered trailer behind an abandoned strip mall. They are, effectively, missionaries. Excerpt:
Jim Louviere, a dark-haired, deep-voiced man, also works to spread the church's help and its message, sending mobile relief trailers to outlying neighborhoods and setting up tents that might one day grow into bricks-and-mortar churches.
Meanwhile, his wife -- a dynamic woman who talks about how vital it is to "love up" those who suffer -- races through her days helping hurricane survivors cope and training other counselors and student interns to do the same. She says it's tough, if not impossible, to stem the grief.
Not a day goes by when she doesn't talk to clients in pain because they lost a loved one in the storm or the continuing psychological and physical aftermath. Two weeks ago, a fellow church member killed himself. He and his family had lost everything when their St. Bernard Parish home flooded last August; last week, the man's brother-in-law was slain inside his home as he worked to repair the flood damage. Michele Louviere struggles to console the family.
Another newly homeless family recently learned that their losses will multiply if the father isn't fortunate enough to get a liver transplant; he's dying.
"You can't say, 'You're gonna be OK,' " Michele Louviere says, "because they're not. I've never seen the levels of grief I see here.
"Everybody," she says, "is hurting."
I'm proud to be able to say I know them. Michele and I were in the same class in high school. She was so effortlessly kind to everyone. And now she and her family are doing something heroically selfless. It's humbling to think about.
I re-read Rumsfeld's American Legion speech this morning, and it's just horrible, an embarrassment, for all the reasons Fred Kaplan says. I said it was a "disgrace" yesterday, and I mean just that. The very idea that the Secretary of Defense, given the calamitous way he's handled Iraq, has the nerve to parachute in and paint his critics as cowards and appeasers, and the news media an America-hating fifth column, is just beyond the pale.
But enough about him. What about Bush? Here's the White House transcript of his speech to the American Legion. It was a much better speech, but then again, it would have been hard to have done worse. This is what caught my eye:
In the space of a single morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. We realized that years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. Instead, the lack of freedom in the Middle East made the region an incubator for terrorist movements.
So we push for democracy, and bring to power a Shia theocracy in Iraq as a prelude to a civil war. And we bring to power Hamas among the Palestinians. Is it really "the lack of freedom" that has incubated terror there? Why is it that many other nations lived, and do live, without freedom, yet are not tempted by a psychotic religious vision? Why is it that giving "freedom" to people in this society only institutionalizes their pathologies? Maybe the lack of "freedom" is only tangential to the real problem.
The freedom agenda is based upon our deepest ideals and our vital interests. Americans believe that every person, of every religion, on every continent, has the right to determine his or her own destiny. We believe that freedom is a gift from an almighty God, beyond any power on Earth to take away. (Applause.) And we also know, by history and by logic, that promoting democracy is the surest way to build security. Democracies don't attack each other or threaten the peace. Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools -- not weapons of mass destruction. Young people who have a say in their future are less likely to search for meaning in extremism. Citizens who can join a peaceful political party are less likely to join a terrorist organization. Dissidents with the freedom to protest around the clock are less likely to blow themselves up during rush hour. And nations that commit to freedom for their people will not support terrorists -- they will join us in defeating them. (Applause.)
So America has committed its influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. We will take the side of democratic leaders and reformers across the Middle East. We will support the voices of tolerance and moderation in the Muslim world. We stand with the mothers and fathers in every culture who want to see their children grow up in a caring and peaceful world. And by supporting the cause of freedom in a vital region, we'll make our children and our grandchildren more secure.
Lord have mercy, will he not observe that to more than a few people in the Muslim world, freedom does not mean the same thing it does to Americans. Freedom means freedom to live as they believe God has commanded them to live. Democracy means electing people who will implement God's law, as they understand it. This crazy hubris, believing that everybody in the world wants the same thing as Americans, is wrecking us. The president said today:
The freedom agenda is based upon our deepest ideals and our vital interests. Americans believe that every person, of every religion, on every continent, has the right to determine his or her own destiny. We believe that freedom is a gift from an almighty God, beyond any power on Earth to take awa
y.
We don't believe that for one minute. We believe that every person has the right to determine, in a political sense, his own destiny in the same way that feminists believe women should have the choice to work or to stay home: we only believe it insofar as they'll choose our way of doing things. I think it's probably true that we hold liberal democracy to be divinely mandated. The conservative scholar Claes Ryn does a first-rate critique of this belief here. Excerpt:
This mode of thinking is in marked contrast to the old Christian tradition. Christianity has always stressed the imperfect, sinful nature of man and warned against placing too much faith in man made political institutions and measures. Augustine (354–430) is only one of the earliest and least sanguine of many Christian thinkers over the centuries who would have rejected out of hand the idea that mankind is destined for great progress and political perfection, to say nothing about the possibility of salvation through politics. Although Christianity has stressed that rulers must serve the common good and behave in a humane manner, it has been reluctant to endorse any particular form of government as suited to all peoples and all historical circumstances.
The president continues:
The path to that day will be uphill and uneven, but we can be confident of the outcome, because we know that the direction of history leads toward freedom.
There you have it: the Whig theory of history. The whole speech sounds as if it had been delivered three years ago. We are in trouble.
FYI, for your listening pleasure, I'll be giving a commentary on NPR's "All Things Considered" later this afternoon. I recorded it just now, and it will air sometime today, don't know exactly when. I waxed philosophical about what it's like to drive around a Dallas summer without air conditioning in your car. I kept the strangled screaming to a minimum.
UPDATE: Just caught the piece live. They edited it clumsily, so you might not have understood what I was talking about at one point. But NPR tells me they'll have it fixed for the re-feed. After 7:30 eastern, you can hear the commentary here.
We’re hearing a lot about this — Lou Dobbs runs a regular segment on it. I think the real war is on the working class, who are being priced out of jobs by floods of illegal immigrants. Of course, nobody much cares. In a modern meritocracy, all the articulate members of the working class — the kind of people who might organize, agitate, and make trouble — are siphoned off into colleges and law schools at an early age, to become members of the elite, agitating for elite interests. Those left behind can eat cake, or welfare — that seems to be the general attitude, certainly the elite attitude.
The lower-middle and middle classes really do seem to be hurting, though. I mean, I live among such people, and I hear about it. I don’t care how many feelgood pieces Larry Kudlow posts on NRO, telling us how wonderfully well the economy is doing. It may be doing fine by Larry over there on his gated private estate, but I’ve never heard so much grumbling down here on Main Street.
The following is not an original observation, but it’s one worth repeating: Much of the talk we hear from economists and government financial panjandrums nowadays treats the national economy as a thing in itself, to be egged on and expanded and caressed and cherished, without any concern for the actual citizens of this country. Sure, I’d rather live in a rich country than a poor one, and a healthy economy is a jolly good thing; but “expanding” is not necessarily synonymous with “healthy,” not for economies any more than for waistlines. A swelling economy is not ipso facto a good thing. It might lift all boats; or it might just lift a few and swamp the rest. It depends how things are organized. As Oliver Goldsmith noted: "Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." That’s about where we’re at, it seems to me. And no, it’s not a leftist remark; Goldsmith was a Tory.
Front page news here in Dallas yesterday: wages in north Texas are declining. Economists blame it on an influx of low-wage immigrant workers. How legal do you think they are? Yesterday I had a long conversation with a middle-class homeowner who recently left the Dallas area for up north. He said that he lived in a decent middle-class neighborhood north of the city. Ethnically mixed, which was fine by him, because everybody took care of their properties, and got alone fine. About five years ago, there began to be an influx of Latino immigrants. They started running businesses out of their rental houses. Almost overnight, there were cars parked all along the street, even in yards, which were piling up with junk. He assumes they were illegal, but can't prove it, and it wouldn't matter if he could, he said, because nobody in the city was going to do anything about it. Not even code enforcement.
He said he and his wife sold their house at a loss, just to keep from losing more money. They could see where the neighborhood was headed. He's a conservative Republican, but says he's sick of the multiculti left and the open-borders, big-business right. Nobody is speaking up for people like him, he said, and the media is bound and determined to portray them as racist. He said the issue never was having Hispanic neighbors, which is fine by him. The issue was having lawbreakers move in who had no respect for the traditions and practices of the neighborhood. And nobody in Washington or anywhere else giving a damn.
Interestingly, I also had a conversation with a very, VERY liberal activist reader here in Dallas yesterday. She lives in a mixed neighborhood not far from my own. She said she's sick of seeing all the illegals piling into her neighborhood, and of the
idea that if you want to speak critically about it, you are automatically suspected of harboring racist bigotry. This is a woman who has not been shy in letting me know over the past few years that she thinks I'd make a good Tonto for Attila the Hun. But she's had enough.
The good news, I guess, is that somebody has finally set up a Wikipedia page for Your Working Boy. The bad news is that it's factually incorrect. I'm not from Baton Rouge, but St. Francisville. I'm Gumby, dammit!
Over at Eunomia, Daniel Larison has a series of blogs on the subject of pessimism that made cheerfully gloomy me, um, happy. Like this quote:
Instead of blaming pessimism, perhaps we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it. As I noted above, pessimism’s critics have often assumed that it must issue in some sort of depression or resignation. But this assumption says more about the critics than about their targets. Who is it, exactly, that cannot bear a story unless guaranteed a happy ending? Pessimists themselves have often been anything but resigned. Indeed, they have taken it as their task to find a way to live with the conclusions they have arrived at, and to live well, sometimes even joyfully. If this cannot be true for all of us, it is not the pessimists who are to blame, but the problems they grapple with. -- Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld gave a speech to the American Legion yesterday that I found simply disgraceful. I don't think the word is too strong, and here's why.
Here's part of the speech:
We need to face the following questions:
+ With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased? + Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists? + Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches? + And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America -- not the enemy -- is the real source of the world’s trouble?
These are central questions of our time. And we must face them.
Those are central questions, but who, exactly, is posing them? Who in this country, other than the Chomsky-Kos-Sheehan crowd, really believes that America is the real source of the world's trouble? Which serious person in American public life is proposing negotiating a separate peace with terrorists? The SecDef is setting up straw men to portray his critics, and critics of the way he and this administration have fought the Iraq War, as lily-livered Chamberlains. Prior to stating the above passage, he brought up the specter of 1938, and Hitler, just so the audience would get the message that either you're with this administration, or you're on the side of Islamo-Hitlers. Never mind that there are an increasing number of conservatives and others who are quite willing to fight the good fight against the Islamofascist menace, but who think Team Rummy has done so incompetently. It is possible to be a loyal soldier in the war on Islamist terror, and to dissent loyally from the present leadership.
Anyway, Rumsfeld goes on to say:
But this is still -- even in 2006 -- not well recognized or fully understood. It seems that in some quarters there is more of a focus on dividing our country, than acting with unity against the gathering threats.
We find ourselves in a strange time:
When a database search of America’s leading newspapers turns up 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib who were punished for misconduct, than mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror;
When a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our Armed Forces as a “mercenary army”;
When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists and the former CNN Baghdad bureau chief [Note: this was actually former CNN president Eason Jordan] admits he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein’s crimes when he was in power so CNN could stay in Iraq; and
It is a time when Amnesty International disgracefully refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay, which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare, as “the gulag of our times.”
Those who know the truth need to speak out against these kinds of myths, and distortions being told about our troops and about our country.
The struggle we are in is too important -- the consequences too severe -- to have the luxury of returning to the old mentality of “Blame America First.”
This is such clumsy, blame-the-messenger propaganda one can hardly believe that at this late stage in the Iraq War someone of Rumsfeld's intelligence and sophistication s
toops to using it. The news media, by bringing us reports of Bad Things Happening in Iraq, are lying and aiding and abetting the enemy. They hate America, even!
If you think about it, this speech is almost quaint in its ham-fistedness, it's red-meatiness, its complete disconnection from reality. Who is still persuaded by stuff like this? Anybody?
Though the Pew Center poll finds growing dissatisfaction (dillusionment?) of the Religious Right with the GOP, Jeremy Lott and Patrick Hynes say that religious conservatives are not likely to abandon the Republican Party:
The Democratic party elites cheer when regulators force Catholic charities to fund things the church considers immoral. They vote to curtail the freedom of conscience of pro-life pharmacists. They filibuster judicial appointees who do not hold to the interpretation of Ted Kennedy, senator, of the constitution-as-rubber-stamp for liberal causes. Worse, they compare religious rightists to Muslim terrorists ("Christianists") and warn that we have entered a new Dark Age. Garry Wills, the popular historian, called the 2004 election the end of the Enlightenment on American soil, and meant it.
The good folks who make up the religious right may not love the Republican party, but they know a threat when they see one. The modern Democratic party is hostile to their very existence. An embarrassment for the Deanified Democrats in the November mid-term elections would be a victory not for theocracy, but for enlightened self-interest.
This is precisely why I will probably end up holding my nose and voting Republican. I don't like the Republicans much these days. But as a religious conservative, I fear the Democrats.
A few years ago, when Matthew was a baby, the three of us went to Rome. Had a great time. The Italians made a fuss everywhere about Matthew, who was two and a half at the time. It was pretty much a cliche, actually, effusive Italians fussing over the bambino. It was unsettling, though, to see how few Italian babies there were on the street. You could see things like Prada babywear for sale, which sounds insane (and is insane), but hey, if you only have one child, you might well have the money for that sort of indulgence.
Well, Newsweek has a story out saying that this is a big global trend, and that even some Roman restaurants won't let you bring in children:
In Greece, as in much of the world, having kids is no longer a given among a growing swath of the population. "Never before has childlessness been a legitimate option for women and men in so many societies," says Catherine Hakim, who studies the phenomenon at the London School of Economics. In a rapid shift occurring in countries as disparate as Switzerland and Singapore, Canada and South Korea, young people are extending their child-free adulthood by postponing children until they are well into their 30s, or even 40s and beyond. [snip] The trend has spawned a new culture of childlessness. In Britain, there's a growing market for books such as "Child-Free and Loving It," which journalist Nicki Defago says she wrote "to let women deciding against children know that their feelings are perfectly normal."
But their feelings aren't perfectly normal. The overwhelming majority of people are still choosing to have children -- but only one child, or maybe two, lest it interfere with their lifestyle. This is what happens when "choice" becomes an absolute value, a development concomitant with a growing materialism and focus on the Self. As liberal thinker Philip Longman has pointed out so vividly -- like, here in "The Return of Patriarchy" and "The Liberal Baby Bust" -- when modern, progressive people choose not to have kids, or choose to have them at below replacement rates, the world of the future will belong to the religious conservatives -- Sacralists -- who still hold children to be a very great Good.
We can argue over and over about the morality of choosing childlessness, and I suspect we will. But in the long run, you can't wish away the fact that the choice not to have children is for most who make it a decision to sacrifice tomorrow for the sake of enjoying today. Get enough people who make that individual choice and you have the death of a nation. Of nations. For as the great German historian Oswald Spengler observed, when a people has to be persuaded that having children is a good idea, baby, it's over for them. As Mark Steyn observed, "A society that has no children has no future." And:
Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.
I'm not much for fiction, but I really want to read Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children." Reading the Slate review brought to mind Donna Tartt's "The Secret History," which came out like, forever ago (1992, to be precise). I loved that book way back then. Wonder if I'd like it now. Wonder why it hasn't been made into a film?
I think we can all agree that the great unfilmed novel is "A Confederacy of Dunces," though Victor will no doubt have five different dissents, three of them sensible. But you know, I can't believe that the BBC hasn't made miniseries out of Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy" and/or his "Deptford Trilogy." What wonderful books they are.
Anyway, anybody who's had time to read the Messud novel, let us know what you think. Also, how about your nomination for a Book They Should Make Into a Film?
In Frisco, a booming northern suburb of Dallas, a fifth-grade public school art teacher has been suspended from her job. Why? For taking her students on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art. There they were reportedly exposed to statues of naked people. And paintings involving the unclothed, without benefit of fig leaf or loin cloth. Some parents complained, and the oh-so-courageous principal suspended the teacher.
Just so you know, Frisco's not Hickburg. It's one of the most prosperous suburban towns in America. Unbelievable.
Well, that was fun. Not. John Mark Karr is not only a hairless sociopathic perv, but a big fat liar, as many people suspected even before Colorado taxpayers subsidized his first-class flight back home from Bangkok. But you know, I find it hard to imagine what else the Boulder DA's office could have done under the circumstances. Read what the DA said today. They weren't sure about Karr, but they had reason to suspect him, and felt compelled to move in after believing that he was about to molest a Thai girl with whom he'd become obsessed. This case reminds me of investigators who move in on suspected terrorist cells, even when the evidence is not as strong as they'd like, because they fear the cells are going to pull off a crime. Maybe I'm going too easy on the DA, I dunno. But I'm glad John Mark Karr is off the street, and, one hopes, headed to jail in Sonoma County on child porn charges.
Anyway, not a moment too soon the cablers have a new weird-sex-nut to obsess over: freaky-deak polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs, arrested today on charges related to his alleged arrangement of marriages to underage girls. Now, Jeffs crossed the legal and moral line if he's guilty of what he's being accused of, but let's consider polygamy among consenting adults for a second.
Sacralists have no trouble explaining why it's wrong. On what grounds, though, would naturalists show that it's wrong? If marriage is in its essence no more than a social and legal construct that confers certain benefites and obligations on parties to the marriage contract, why deny consenting adults the right to "plural marriage"? Especially if you think gays should have the right to marry? Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU, has said, "We have defended the right for individuals to engage in polygamy. We defend the freedom of choice for mature, consenting individuals."
There is compelling logic here. Seriously. If gay marriage is enshrined into law -- and it would be done so on the basis that 1) same-gender is not a legitimate legal barrier to marriage, and 2) marriage is a merely human construct that in infinitely malleable -- then on what basis do we draw the line at polygamy? As Charles Krauthammer put it in a column:
In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.
This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the "polygamy diversion," arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different because polygamy is a mere "activity" while homosexuality is an intrinsic state that "occupies a deeper level of human consciousness."
But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the general culture "privileges" (as they say in the English departments) heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was "Jules et Jim" (and Jeanne Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love with the same woman
, about an "activity" or about the most intrinsic of human emotions?
To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?
Now that would be a discussion worth having on the cable shows! Similarly, I would like to hear a debate about the limits of religious liberty in this country, and the challenge posed by polygamy.
There's been a kerfuffle in recent days over alleged comments made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he is said to have told a Dutch interviewer that homosexuals would have to change to get right with the church. Actually, if you read the actual text of the Dutch interview (available here in English), that's not really the case. Rowan may think it -- his actual comments leave that interpretation open -- but the earlier reports read his remarks prejudicially.
I thought one of the most interesting things he said, though, was this:
Q: Do you have an explanation as to why Anglicans are prepared to let the Church split now over homosexuality, and not for example when a Bishop denied the Resurrection of Christ?
A: I am intrigued by that. On the one hand it says something about our own age, which is obsessed with sexuality - left and right. But I think there's something else. Christian often find it difficult to describe what distinguishes them. More and more they live like the people around them. Divorce is a sad case in point. For some people homosexuality is the last issue where you can draw a clear line. And then it is for many people a central issue of the authority of Scripture. I don't want to minimize that. Even about divorce there are certain things in the Bible that seem to give a bit of room for manoeuvre. It is harder to say that about homosexuality.
I think he's spot-on there. A friend of mine -- gay, orthodox Catholic, chaste -- does not favor gay marriage, but has observed to me before that the culture of divorce and general heterosexual free-range rutting has surely caused far more damage to society -- especially children -- than anything gays have done. Yet we don't see too many Christians willing to rush to the barricades to defend "traditional marriage" when it's under assault from straights in the name of sexual autonomy. His point is very well taken, not as a premiss from which to argue for gay marriage, but as an observation about hetero hypocrisy.
I mean, look, what the gay-rights movement is asking for flows naturally from the premises of the sexual revolution. If you are a "naturalist" about sex (versus a "sacralist" -- see previous post) and human nature, then you will want to see social and moral strictures relaxed so that individuals can choose to do what they like, within broad boundaries (i.e., no child abuse). If sex has no intrinsic meaning outside of the individual's experience, why not? And if you believe that, by what right do you tell gay couples that they should be treated in the law differently than straight couples?
I would suspect that Hugh Hefner is all for gay marriage. At least he's honest. The dishonest ones are straight people who think society should accomodate without judgment their multiple marriages, their abortions, their rutting, etc., but God forbid the gays should insist on being accomodated.
At the Asia Times Online site, the estimable Spengler has launched a discussion thread about my piece discussing why the Islamist ideologist Sayyid Qutb -- hanged 40 years ago today in Cairo -- is so important to the war we are now in, and will be in probably for the rest of our lives.
According to Shulevitz, Luker doesn't believe that the intense arguments over sex ed in schools are silly. Neither does Shulevitz, who shrewdly observes, "We can’t agree about sex education because we can’t agree about sex, and the way in which we disagree about sex has everything to do with how we’re breaking apart as a nation."
I think Shulevitz is onto something here, with her more precise terminology:
Luker identifies Americans’ competing visions of sexuality as “liberal” and “conservative,” but even she acknowledges that those terms are too flabby to nail down our real differences. More muscular terms, it seems to me, would be “naturalist” and “sacralist.” Naturalists, whom Luker calls sexual liberals, hold that sex is natural and unmysterious, a healthy, pleasurable, quasi-recreational activity. Sacralists, whom Luker calls sexual conservatives, consider sex sacred but dangerous, transformative when contained by marriage but destructive outside it. Sex education, to the naturalist, involves nothing more than helping young people manage the risks of having sex by giving them the facts. It’s information, not values. To the sacralist, conventional sex education is chock-full of values, but all the wrong ones. It’s an indoctrination in secularism, teaching kids to be irresponsible and draining sex of its mystery and power. “Sexuality isn’t peanuts and popcorn, although there are those who made it be that,” says one minister Luker talked to. “Thinking of sex that way, it’s such a diminution of what is actual and real.”
I think "naturalist" and "sacralist" are much better terms to use in discussing attitudes toward sex and sexuality, because they shear the political baggage from our conversation. (Even though it's true that political conservatives tend to be much more sacralist, and liberals much more naturalist, it's not inevitable that one's politics will dictate the way one sees sexuality, especially when it comes to teaching sexual right and wrong to one's children). This jumped out to me because the worldview I hold and advocate in "Crunchy Cons" is sacralist about most everything. And it is a metaphysical view because I truly believe it's the most true to human nature, and indeed to the structure of the universe. As Shulevitz pointed out, both sides find it hard to agree on sex ed because we can't agree on what human beings are.
By the way, Ross Douthat read the same review, and he says that one thing the Luker bottom line definitely suggests is the "intellectual bankruptcy" of the view that the way to make abortion more rare is to do extensive sexual education in the schools. The right may not want to hear that abstinence education isn't all that effective, but I know from experience that the left doesn't want to hear that conventional sex ed isn't that effective.
Remember when Bill Clinton in 1995 nominated Dr. Henry Foster, a Nashville physician, to replace Dr. Joycelyn Elders as US Surgeon General? In her remarks announcing the move, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala said:
This is a
man who brought community members together to create the successful "I Have a Future" program at Meharry School of Medicine. This community-based program takes at- risk youths living in public housing and teaches them to say "no" to sex and pregnancy and "yes" to job skills and self- reliance. And, it works. ... The President wants to repeat this success story on a national scale.
Well, the Washington Times sent me to Nashville to see if "I Have a Future" worked. It did not. In fact, if memory serves, the data showed that the kids who were involved with the program -- which involved full-on sex education, and the distribution of contraception -- had a slightly higher pregnancy rate than the kids who had no involvement with it at all. When I began asking standard questions about how the data showed "I Have a Future" was not only no help to the teenagers, it put them at a slight disadvantage, I was shown the door in Nashville.
Charlotte Allen delivers a blistering attack on the White House for rolling over on the "morning after" abortion pill (and yes, if you believe -- as most pro-lifers do -- that life in a moral sense begins at conception, medication that prevents implantation is an abortion pill). Excerpt:
I hope that this time around, the religious conservatives wake up to the fact that Bush is often not their friend. Again, he has thrown them a few bones—in the name of provisions for monitoring Plan B distribution in order to ensure that the pills do not fall directly (in contrast to indirectly) into the hands of minors. But Bush’s opponents—Planned Parenthood and its many allies—already have their knives sharpened to gut those provisions, as well as the ban on sales to girls age seventeen and under. And there is more nastiness in sight for pro-life pharmacists, physicians, and hospitals. The Washington Post reports this:
The FDA decision does not resolve other controversial issues swirling around the pills, including the refusal of hospitals run by religious organizations to offer them, of some pharmacies to stock them and of some antiabortion pharmacists to dispense them.
Expect the abortion lobby, now that it has gotten most of what it wanted, to focus its efforts on securing the rest: forcing medical professionals of conscience to dispense a known abortifacient even to children or else lose their licenses and their livelihoods. Thank you very much, George W. Bush.
It rained this weekend here in Dallas. Which was momentous for us, not only because we're bone-dry here, but because it broke the 19-day streak of temps over 100 degrees. I hate summer. Hate. It. Winter can't get here fast enough.
The weekend was also refreshing because I finally got the Mars Hill Audio podcast to download to my iPod via iTunes. My financial planner must hate that Ken Myers. Every time I listen to anything from Mars Hill, I want to go out and buy the books discussed there. The podcast is mostly a promotion for the latest version of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, and indeed the current one sounds fascinating, which is standard for Mars Hill. I hope that Myers' plans to distribute the Audio Journal via MP3 download will multiply his audience vastly; this is absolutely first-rate cultural programming, every bit as sophisticated as the very best that public radio has to offer, and as far as I am aware without peer among Christian broadcast media (if "broadcast" is word). Anyway, the podcast is basically just an appetite-whetter, but it does include a standard-length interview with Nigel Cameron, a theologian and bioethicist, that makes the podcast well worth listening to.
Cameron made a number of good points with regard to the stem-cell research controversy, but one that stuck with me is his frustration with how the entire public debate is framed in conventional "pro-life" terms. The way we talk about embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR) is stacked in favor of the scientists, because it assumes that the ethical objections to it are only the result of religious conviction. Therefore you have on one side (the story goes) religious people who want to stop scientific progress versus open-minded scientists who only want to help humanity. No wonder the restrictionists keep losing.
Cameron points out, though, that some very important ethical issues are being conveniently swept out of the way in this simplistic and inaccurate rendering. Funny how most European countries -- where religious conservatism has no political or cultural influence -- restrict ESCR, with Germany and Austria outright banning it. Why do you suppose that is? Answer: Germany and Austria understand intimately what society can do to the weak if human life is seen as something that can be eliminated by science for the perceived good of the strong.
As Cameron asks in the podcast, what limits would the science-without-limits crowd put on research? After all, Dr. Mengele was a research scientist. The question itself exposes the shoddy thinking at the heart of the Faith vs. Reason false dichotomy in the ESCR debate. If people want to argue that those who believe in banning or restricting ESCR are wrong, that's one thing; but to claim that this is a battle between the forces of rational Enlightenment and religious Endarkenment is not only unfair, it's dangerous.
Today HUD Secretary Alfonso Jackson announced that the federal government would spend ALMOST TWO BILLION DOLLARS to -- wait for it -- rebuild housing projects in New Orleans.
That's right, the taxpayers are going to spend NEARLY TWO BILLION DOLLARS to recreate what New Orleans had before, which was such a success story before. And get this statement by HUD's Jackson:
[W]e're first going to stop the flow of money out of these communities. You know something's wrong when local earnings of poor folks end up in pockets of Wal-Mart shareholders in Manhattan. After extensive discussions, Wal-Mart and three other chains have agreed to withdraw from areas near low-income New Orleans neighborhoods and to help nurture local businesses to replace them. Legislation under study at state and federal levels will make sure this sticks.
Holy Andrew Young, the Bush administration has strongarmed Wal-Mart and other chain stores to abandon the poor and make their neighborhoods safer for Andy Young's Least Favorite People to come in and charge higher prices for everyday goods.
What sense does any of this make? I wish I could blame Brownie, but he's long gone. I blame Bush throwing federal dollars down a rathole in a desperate attempt to shore up the GOP this fall.
UPDATE: It was all a ruse! NOT TRUE! HUD's calling it a "cruel joke" -- some impostor showed up at the housing summit in New Orleans and made this announcement. The mayor and the Louisiana governor shook his hand. He pretended to be from HUD, and everybody bought it. The fake organization he set up sent out an official-sounding press release to the news media, which is how we learned about it at the Dallas Morning News. According to CNN's reporting, nobody knows who these scammers are, but they managed to fool a lot of people. Me included. Apologies to all.
Here's news that the Sonoma County District Attorney might well have enough evidence to charge Santa Rose Bishop Daniel Walsh with a crime in connection with the escape to Mexico of a priest wanted for child molestation. Bishop Walsh might have broken state law by waiting three days to alert authorities that he believed his priest, Xavier Ochoa, had molested children -- a three-day lag that gave Ochoa time to flee to Mexico. You can read the whole horrible story of Xavier Ochoa, and indeed of the Santa Rosa Diocese under the lavender-mafioso Bishop Ziemann, on the Bishop Accountability page.
If the evidence indicates Walsh is probably guilty, I pray that the DA will indict. I really do, especially after the series my own newspaper ran about how bishops and churchmen all over have run a rat line to help accused molester priests escape the law. Several good priests have, over the past few years, remarked to me that this scandal won't be seriously addressed in the US until and unless one or more bishops is sent to prison for his role in the scandal. If the DA believes Bishop Walsh is guilty of a crime, then he should have the courage to bring an indictment, and let the chips fall where they may.
In yesterday's Dallas Morning News, I published an essay about why we should all be paying attention to the legacy of Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of Islamic terrorism. (Dr. Billy Abraham, a theologian at SMU, wrote a companion piece about why we should all start to appreciate that the essence of the war on terror is theological -- on both sides.) I got an e-mail from our old friend Mohamed Elibiary, the north Texas Muslim activist who, when last mentioned on this blog, was writing to tell me that if I keep writing things like this I might find my car tampered with -- didn't like my take on Qutb. He writes, in part:
Reading Rod's piece, I finally grasped why Qutb is so feared. It’s always easier to direct our fears at one focal point then face our challenge. ... Many Westerners who've read Qutb's and many others' work, see the potential for a strong spiritual rebirth that's truly ecumenical allowing all faiths practiced in America to enrich us and motivate us to serve God better by serving our fellow man more. At that point, America will have a spiritual product that’s exportable and satisfactory to the spiritual marketplace’s demand. So I'd recommend everyone read Qutb, but read him with an eye to improving America not just to be jealous with malice in our hearts.
I quite agree that we should all read Qutb -- his book "Milestones" can be read in English translation here -- but probably not for the reasons Mohamed thinks. Perhaps "Ambassador Elibiary," as he's now referring to himself, is a more careful reader than I am, but I find it hard to grasp the "potential for a strong spiritual rebirth that's truly ecumenical" in these representative passages from Qutb's manifesto, in which he says quite plainly that true Muslims have no business trying to carry out dialogue with non-Muslims, and that the goal has to be conquering them and imposing Islamic law. That's "ecumenism"?
I understand why it's in Mohamed's interest to obscure this fact, especially given that they were drilling teenagers in the finer points of Qutb's "Milestones" at the Dallas Central Mosque two years ago. But you can't spin Qutb's actual words, which ought to wake people up to the true nature of what the US is facing (and to the internal weaknesses in the West that make that fight difficult). Here's a sample of Qutb's spiritual counsel:
And [the Muslim] is most superior in his law and system of life. When the Believer scans whatever man, ancient or modern, has known, and compares it with his own law and system, he realizes that all this is like the playthings of children or the searchings of blind men in comparison with the perfect system and the complete law of Islam. And when he looks from his height at erring mankind with compassion and sympathy at its helplessness and error, he finds nothing in his heart except a sense of triumph over error and nonsense.
And:
It is not the function of Islam to compromise with the concepts of Jahiliyyah [unbelief] which are current in the world or to coexist in the same land together with a jahili system. ... Islam's stand is very clear. It says that the truth is one and cannot be divided; if it is not the truth, then it must be falsehood. The mixing and co-existence of the truth and falsehood is impossible. Command belongs to God, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; God's Shari'ah will prevail, or else people's desires.
And most especially:
The foremost duty of Islam in this world is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of
man, and to take the leadership into its own hands and enforce the particular way of life which is its permanent feature. ...The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people on the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam...
What does Qutb think about democracy? What does he think about the peaceful advocacy of Islam?
The establishing of the dominion of God on earth, the abolishing of the dominion of man, the taking away of sovereignty from the usurper to revert it to God, and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law (Shari'ah) and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God's creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching; if it had been so, the task of establishing God's religion in the world would have been very easy for the Prophets of God! This is contrary to the evidence from the history of the Prophets and the story of the struggle of the true religion, spread over generations.
In other words: liberal democracy (e.g., the system set up by the U.S. Constitution) will have to be overthrown by violence, not persuasion. This is the kind of man Mohamed Elibiary is apologizing for. And moderate Muslims should beware: if you don't share his extreme belief, Qutb considers you a sellout and (therefore) an enemy.
Georgetown University, a Jesuit school pretending to be a Catholic one, has kicked six Evangelical student groups off campus. I'm hearing that the problem is the Evangelical students didn't want to kowtow to the official Protestant ministers appointed by the university, who are, I'm told, quite liberal. Jody Bottum's got the best take on this, but what it comes down to is that Georgetown isn't giving the Evangelicals the boot because they're not Catholic; it's giving them the boot because they are Christian. As Bottum puts it:
There’s an obvious irony here—employed too often to be surprising—in which people begin by protesting in the name of diversity against centralized authority, and later discover, once they’re in charge, how useful those old forms of authority can be in controlling diversity.
Our combox pal Michael Blowhard makes a great find from the celebrated art critic Robert Hughes (whose book "Barcelona" is one of my favorites), writing here about the damage the Sixties -- his Sixties -- did to him and his wife and child. Read this excerpt -- but the whole piece is an extraordinary tale of life on another planet. The very last paragraph, where he tells what happened to his son, is heart-stoppingly sad. But this take on the Sixties is the philosophical gist of his piece:
It was a time of collective self-importance, which masked — not very effectively — a striking indifference to the way the world actually did and might work. I hardly met a single person in the “underground” context who didn’t, no matter how sexually available or amusing, turn out in the end to be ignorant and rather a bore.
The depths of tedium that can be plumbed by sitting around half stoned, listening to people chatter moonily about reuniting humankind and erasing its aggressive instincts through Love and Dope, are scarcely imaginable to those who have not suffered them.
I went through a stupid infatuation with the Sixties for a couple of years in college. Came to an abrupt halt when I finally met my hero, Abbie Hoffman, whose visit to campus I'd helped arrange. I was his handler. Radicalism was just a shtick for him by that point. He was late for his lecture; I found him in his room on the phone with his bookie back in NYC. He told me he had more riding on the Mets game that night than we were paying him to speak (which was thousand$). After his off-the-cuff talk, telling adventures tales from the hallowed Sixties, we repaired to a bar with members of the Progressive Students Network, the campus leftie group. Abbie proceeded to eat a handful of pills and wash them down with pitcher upon pitcher of beer. Later, he asked me to take him to a place where he could meet a woman for sex -- but he put it so crudely that it shocked me, a good little liberal idealist, that he was such a sexist.
We ended up the night drunk, driving around the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College campus, yelling out the window like idiots. The Jimmy Swaggart Bible Police stopped us, and the guy who was driving had to try to talk him out of having us arrested for trespassing, which we certainly were. Abbie leans out the window and bellows drunkenly to the security guard, "I'll have you know that if you arrest us, I'll have it on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow morning."
The rent-a-cop, to his everlasting credit, drawled, "Mister, I don't care who you are, get back in the car and shut your mouth."
He let us go. We dropped Abbie off back at the place where he was staying, in luxury campus housing for special guests of the university. He ended up smoking dope that night there with some nut from the PSN, and nearly missed his flight the next morning. A few days later, I heard from a friend at Penn, I believe it was, that Abbie Hoffman had just been there speaking, straight from his appearance at LSU, where according to Abbie the students were too afraid to stand up to that fascist Jimmy Swaggart.
Abbie Hoffman overdosed on pills two or three years later. The Wikipedia entry on him says Hoffman "has remained a symbol of the youth rebellion of that decade." Yep.
As far as I'm concerned, Victor Morton nails the meaning of the government's decision to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B -- the "morning after pill" -- to women 18 and over. Victor writes:
Let me see if I've got this straight:
A daily dose of from 0.05 to 0.15 mg of levonorgestrel requires a prescription.
Requiring that a 1.5 mg dose of levonorgestrel must have a prescription is patriarchal tyranny over women's bodies, sexphobic anti-scientism and the precursor to a HANDMAID'S TALE-like theocracy.
Victor's not arguing against contraception per se -- though as a faithful Catholic, I'm sure he opposes it -- but against the hypocrisy and politicization of this decision. He continues:
Prescriptions, and the health warnings that accompany them, are required for a reason. I mean, if you get aspirin or cough syrup and take three times the required dose because your headache is THIS BIG or whatever ... nothing very terrible will happen. But is saying that messing with body chemistry like some female version of Barry Bonds should not be as easy as buying a pack of Marlboros really so awful?
From his years of observing our culture, especially the media, Terry Mattingly has discerned what I call Mattingly's Law, a predictive principle that applies to situations like this, which come up all the time. Mattingly's Law is this: The Sexual Revolution must always win. He expresses it in this way in a long, engaging interview in Homiletics:
That great Catholic theologian, Maureen Dowd — at the height of Zippergate or Fornigate, or whatever — at the time when she was attacking Clinton's attackers, there was one column where she said, "The Republicans are trying to repeal Woodstock." It all comes down to whether you're for or against Woodstock, i.e. are you for or against the sexual revolution. You know what? I think she's absolutely right. If you look at the moral issues that rivet our culture whenever elections come up, it comes down to whether anyone in this culture has a right to say that sex outside of marriage is sin. I didn't say a crime. A sin. Is it even possible to say that in American popular culture, and yet that's a position that goes all the back to the early church, a moral given in a New Testament universe.
Another way to put it is: Anything that stands in the way of total sexual liberty and autonomy must not be allowed to stand. Once you realize that that is one of the fundamental laws of our media culture, and our popular culture in general, you will not be surprised by any of this stuff. You will not be surprised that people who have no problem with the school nurse having to call a parent for permission to give their child a Tylenol consider it a matter of deep and profound principle to protect the "right" of a 15-year-old to be taken across state lines to have surgical abortion.
We're as giddy as a schoolgirl today, because the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, one of our favorite organizations, is out with new poll results on American attitudes toward religion and politics. For Your Working Boy, this is better than a new edition of Tiger Beat!
The big headline out of the survey is that the GOP is no longer considered to be as friendly to religion as it once was, especially among Catholics and white Evangelicals, which are key to the GOP coalition (among Evangelicals, the percentage who think the GOP is friendly to religion has plummeted an astonishing 14 points -- a figure that ought to furrow the Rovian brow). But Democrats are not benefiting from the loss of confidence -- the number of Americans who consider the Dems friendly to religion is only one in four, the same as last year. Still, the downturn in confidence among Catholics and Evangelicals could be enough to make a difference in close-run elections. The advantage, however slight, goes to the Democrats -- and that could be just enough to make a difference in some races.
Another key finding is that the Religious Right is not only significantly larger than the Religious Left (no surprise there), but also dramatically more cohesive. Pew concludes that there simply isn't a "Religious Left" in this country to serve as a counterpart to the "Religious Right." Says Pew:
On the left, a larger share of the public (32%) identifies as "liberal or progressive Christians." But unlike evangelicals, progressive Christians come from different religious traditions and disagree almost as often as they agree on a number of key political and social issues. These differences in the makeup of the religious left and right are an important reason why white evangelicals remain a more politically potent force.
Here's an interesting fact from the survey:
A relatively high proportion of adults under age 30 (14%) say they think of themselves as a member of the religious left, twice the level of any other age group. However, roughly the same percentage of young people (13%) say they think of themselves as a member of the religious right.
Fascinating. Religion is becoming more important to young people than to the older generations -- even liberal young people. This suggests that the Democratic Party 10 years from now will be less rigid and faith-ophobic than it is today. It also tells me that the Democratic Party really needs to be talking to Amy Sullivan. Also interesting was the finding that people who identify themselves as "progressive Christians" tend to be not liberal but moderate on political questions. Conclusion: if the Democrats want to make inroads with the coming generation, they need to reach out more to the faithful (and in a real way, not that fakey-fake, patronizing Howard Dean way), and it needs to be more than just words: the party needs to be more open to moderate-to-conservative positions on social issues. The Dems have a lot of ground to make up. The number of Americans who view the Dems as friendly toward religion might be, in Pew's words, "largely unchanged from last year, but 16 points below the proportion who viewed Democrats as friendly toward religion just three years ago (42%)."
Finally -- and this is going to come as a shock to many liberals and Democrats -- more Americans are dissatisfied with the left for trying to push religion to the margins of public life than they are with Republicans trying to bring religion more to bear on public matters. There is a huge disconnect between the Democratic party leadership and the American public on the question of religion. But the Democrats now have opportunities to reach out to reli
gious Americans, especially younger ones. The question is, will the party leadership and its elites be able to overcome its cultural bias against religion and take advantage of the GOP's sudden weakness on the issue? Don't bet on it.
The suspicion of religion, and even hatred of the religious conservatives (and I would say of the religion in general) goes very, very deep among the activist elite of the Democratic Party (as distinct from the broad spectrum of Democratic voters). Researchers Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio found that the secularist vision is as powerful a motivator for liberal politics as religion is for conservative politics. I wrote a piece for Touchstone a few years ago, on the Bolce & De Maio study. Here's a relevant part (boldface emphasis mine):
A fascinating set of statistics emerged when questioners polled each party’s delegates on their views of various subgroups among the other party’s activists. Both Democrats and Republicans were "significantly more negative toward groups associated with the newer religious and cultural division in the electorate than toward groups associated with older political cleavages based on class, race, ethnicity, party or ideology." That is, Republican delegates felt much warmer toward union leaders, mainline liberals, blacks, Hispanics, and Democrats than toward feminists, environmentalists, and pro-abortion activists. For their part, the Democrats were more favorably disposed to big-business types, the rich, political conservatives and Republicans than toward pro-lifers and conservative Christians. Of the 18 groups covered by the survey, Christian fundamentalists came in as the most despised, with over half the Democratic delegates giving them the absolute minimum score possible. Put another way, Republican delegates thought more highly of those who favor the legalized killing of unborn children than their Democratic counterparts thought of people who believe in a literal interpretation of Scripture.
The Episcopalians at Washington's National Cathedral are so open-minded that their brains have fallen out. That's the only conclusion I can draw from the fact that those squirrelly libs are hosting Mohammed Khatami, the former president of Iran, who will speak there in September on the topic of Muslim, Jewish and Christian understanding. (I hope he helps us "understand" the anti-Semitic art exhibition now on in Iran, sponsored by the government there.) True, Khatami is a moderate relative to the Islamofascist leadership. But in his years as president, he did not exactly preside over a Prague Spring. There is tremendous persecution going on in Iran of religious minorities, dissidents, homosexuals and others the hard-line theocrats view as undesirable. And I doubt very much Khatami is prepared to renounce the Islamist basis for the revolution.
To be clear, I don't oppose dialogue with the likes of Khatami in principle. What I very strongly oppose is a Christian church giving a place of honor to a cleric like Khatami, who oversaw and endorses such brutal, repressive rule. The human rights situation in Iran is dire, and has grown much more so since Khatami was turned out of office by that loon Ahmadinejad. But Khatami didn't get to be president of the Islamic Republic of Iran by opposing the theocracy. During the Cold War, you had liberal Christians sucking up to the Soviets in the name of "dialogue," while dissidents rotted in communist jails. It was a moral disgrace then, and it is a moral disgrace now. I detect the whiff of brimstone and the usefully idiotic liberal spirit of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who insulted the American hostages by going to Tehran to sing Christmas carols for them in collaboration with their captors. According to Mark Bowden, author of "Guests of the Ayatollah," writing in the Atlantic Monthly:
In a brief conversation with Bill Keough, the former head of the American High School in Tehran, who had come to Tehran to retrieve school records and found himself trapped by the takeover, Coffin remarked jokingly that he had often longed for an extended period of quiet in which to read and think and contemplate. Keough smiled grimly. It was the remark of a free man who was not being threatened daily with trial and execution.
That's the advice Forbes.com's Michael Noer gives to men in a controversial web column (published here, along with an unconvincing rebuttal by a female colleague who found his piece "frightening.") Noer cites a number of social-science studies finding that two-career marriages are more likely to be unhappy and troubled than traditional arrangements. Writes Noer:
While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.
Elizabeth Corcoran doesn't try to refute the statistics, but only asserts that she and her husband have raised two kids in a happy marriage of 18 years. Well, okay, but that only means that the Corcorans beat the odds, which are stacked against couples like them.
Noer admits that these findings can be hard on career men to take, because they're naturally drawn to the intellectual excitement of being around career women. From my experience, that's true. But see, I'm lucky: I married an educated, intellectual career girl who wanted to leave the workforce to look after the children when they begin coming along. From my experience -- and I write about this in "Crunchy Cons" -- I can't imagine the stress that would be on my family if Julie had a standard job. And seeing how much it matters to our boys (and yes, to their father) that there's a mom at home with the kids, keeping things in order, cooking, taking them to karate, etc. -- well, I can't imagine how different our lives together, and yes, how relatively impoverished they would be, if Julie were a salaried employee instead of a stay-at-home mom.
In "Crunchy Cons," I quote Julie explaining why she had "no doubts at all" that she would leave the career world to raise kids:
"My mom was home with us till I was fifteen, and then she went back to work because she had to. She was really involved with everything we did in school. Once she went back to work, I saw the massive difference, all the stress she was under trying to work and do the same things for us kids." she said. "As a mother myself, I can look back and see how often my brother and I asked way more of her than we should have. As the child, I experience the stress it placed on us, and was old enough to see the stress it placed on her as a mother, and I didn't want any part of either one."
Julie said that the only thing that separated her, a New York City career girl in her twenties choosing to leave work to be a stay-at-home mom, and all the other women like her, was faith.
"I was lucky that I met the man I was meant to marry early on, and I always had total confidence that our marriage was going to work. I wonder sometimes if a lot of women who work are doing it because they worry that their husbands won't be there for them. This is where faith comes in. I have faith in you because we share the same vision of what life is all about."
What she meant was that she knew that I believed, as she did, that marriage is forever, and that we both shared the same traditionalist convictions about how a family should work. So neither one of us had unrealistic expectations, and both of us thought of the family as an organism, not a contract arrangement. In the end, we choose to live traditionally because we are convinced that that's what's best for our children, which is the main point of marriage: to do right by the kids. Because we do the
best we can within our means to put our kids and their needs first, it becomes relatively easy to make this arrangement work.
I'm really lucky that I ended up with a woman who is interested in many of the same things I am, and who loves to read and talk about books and ideas. So I don't have the trade-off that Noer sees, namely between an intellectually engaging career woman, and a boring homemaker. In fact, we know lots of traditionalist young couples in which the wife stays home to look after the kids, and in every case the woman is the intellectual equal of her husband. That Noer even thinks in terms of this (false) dichotomy betrays a commonly-held bias about modernity: that the more educated and intellectually advanced you are, the less interested you are bound to be in traditional social arrangements, traditional religion, and so forth. It may well be true as a statistical matter, at least in the US, but it isn't a Law of Existence. Quite a few educated men and women have used their smarts to discern that our ancestors really were on to something, and that what we take to be progress is actually regressive in important ways. Besides, as Daniel Larison sensibly asks, putting things into perspective, "Are we talking about creating a marriage and a family, or are we setting up a debating society?"
Unless I'm missing something, today's news about the new technique to harvest embryonic stem cells for research -- a method that doesn't require killing the embryo -- is wonderful. Imagine that -- a way to do ESCR that doesn't exterminate what many of us recognize as human life that possesses moral personhood, and which everyone must concede is at least human, with the potential for moral personhood. Who would object to that?
Well, scientists were quick to say that they're not going to back off the old, embryo-destroying method. It's true, apparently, that this new method isn't proven, so if you don't believe that the embryo has the right to life, it wouldn't make sense to abandon the old method until the new one can be proven out. But I have to say it's dismaying to me to see how hard-edged these researchers seem to be, as if to admit that this might be not only a scientific breakthrough, but also a moral (and therefore political) one, would be to concede too much to the pro-life troglodytes, who stand in the way of Progress, and who therefore must never be accomodated.
Here's Bill McClay with some reflections on the kind of pseudo-Progress represented by the scientists and their aiders and abetters, who in McClay's view are not members of the "party of death," but rather "partisans of life, infinitely extensible.
But what they are in love with, and advocating, is a shortsighted and impoverished vision of life: the dream of complete and unconstrained personal mastery, of the indomitable human will exercised on the inert and malleable stuff of nature by the heroically autonomous and unconditioned individual who is ever the master of his fate and captain of his soul, and whose own existence is, or deserves to be, infinitely extensible.
Such a vision eagerly embraces the Jeffersonian dictum that the earth belongs to the living and rejects the Burkean idea that society is an eternal contract among the living, the dead, and the unborn—a contract that is most powerfully manifested in the primal strength of family bonds and that serves as a profound form of prior restraint upon the individual’s room to maneuver. The constraints and duties that came with that old contract are cast off as the mere dead weight of memory. One can see these two competing views wrestling in this poignant recent article from the London Times and in the acerbic comments following it.
The “progressive” view may seem coolly rational and unsentimental, the very picture of enlightened science. But its instrumental rationality actually operates in service to madness, to the most gaudily romantic and fantastical ideas of human selfhood. It regards the abstraction of the liberated individual, of homo invictus, as the benchmark reality, the only true source of moral standing. By grounding moral judgment in the self’s ability to stand alone and radically independent, it must try to deny history—and even deny time itself, seeking to freeze the present and then utopianize it, preserving the youth and beauty and strength that are one’s own, or that one can acquire for oneself, whatever the cost to the future (or to the past). But that state of independence is all-important. The minute one’s ability to be independent falters and fails … well, then the game is up, and all one’s entitlements are revoked, rendered null and void.
Abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, the cannibalization of embryos—all these things are linked, but they do not reflect a desire to promote death per se. Instead, they reflect a world in which the overwhelming desire of the sovereign individual will to have its way, and to order and manufacture a world it can live in without let or hindrance, is regarde
d as the chief source of value, or at any rate the value that trumps all others. They reflect a view of life that trivializes death, precisely because it fails to understand what life is.
JohnT keeps up his excellent crunchy-Catholic blogging, this time advocating reviving a World War II tradition: the Victory Garden. Instead of getting all Henny-Penny about how the sky is falling -- even if it really does sorta look like it is -- why not reject being paralyzed by despair, and get out in your backyard and plant a winter garden? During the war, Victory Gardens were planted to help Americans feed themselves, and to reduce pressure on the food supply. We don't have that kind of need now, of course, but a broader Mideast war that caused another oil shock could make it a lot more expensive to feed ourselves. Getting into habits of self-sufficiency now is smart. Besides, gardening can be a lot of fun. Unless you have the backyard we do. Our house -- our neighborhood -- was in disrepair for decades, and though it's come back, and continues to come back, we still find shards of broken glass sometimes in the backyard, working their way back to the surface.
Pour yourself a stiff drink and read this assessment from the WaPo by Daniel Byman and Ken Pollack. Here's the lede:
The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war.
The consequences of an all-out civil war in Iraq could be dire. Considering the experiences of recent such conflicts, hundreds of thousands of people may die. Refugees and displaced people could number in the millions. And with Iraqi insurgents, militias and organized crime rings wreaking havoc on Iraq's oil infrastructure, a full-scale civil war could send global oil prices soaring even higher.
However, the greatest threat that the United States would face from civil war in Iraq is from the spillover -- the burdens, the instability, the copycat secession attempts and even the follow-on wars that could emerge in neighboring countries. Welcome to the new "new Middle East" -- a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes.
And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall.
Read the whole thing. This kind of thing is why I got so frustrated with the Centcom general who came in yesterday ballyhooing how the new Baghdad security plan is working. It might well be, and if so, yay for them. But the crisis is vastly larger than whether or not this or that block of Baghdad is relatively safe today. What we should be doing is abandoning this blue-sky rhetoric, and instead preparing the American people for the situation as it is, not as the president wishes it were. After exploring the likely regional catastrophes that would take place in the event of an Iraq civil war, Byman and Pollack say that this is why those who demand an immediate US withdrawal of forces, or the withdrawal of forces in the event of civil war, are wrong. They write:
Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, damen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq's neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but nonetheless, we have to try.
They conclude by saying that figuring out who to blame for the mess Iraq is in can and should come later. Right now, our attention has to be on anticipating the inevitable, and getting ahead of the problem in hopes of managing it. Makes sense to me. Optimism as a strategy has been tried -- and tried, and tried -- and found wanting. Bush-bashing over Iraq is not wrong -- in fact, there ought to be hellacious recriminations for this fiasco -- but it's also not the most important thing at the moment.
"I'm not sure finding Osama bin Laden is really that important."
So said Maj. Gen. Gerald Minetti, director of Coalition Coordination for US Centcom, at MacDill AFB in Florida, in an editorial board meeting here at the newspaper today. Well, useful to get that learnt. He was answering a question about the ongoing search for OBL, and was making the point that Osama is simply not as important to the war as he once was. He's got a decent point, I think: five years since 9/11, al-Qaeda is now more a movement and a philosophy than a cult of one man. Had Osama been killed or captured four or five years ago, it would have been more strategically valuable than if he were captured today.
Still, it's startling to hear a high-ranking US Army official say that. A colleague said to me later that that remark struck her as what the Army says when it flat-out can't find the guy. Didn't President Bush say not too long ago that finding Osama doesn't matter all that much anymore? Are we okay with that?
I asked Maj. Gen. Minetti where, if we are going to remain in Iraq for the duration of the Bush presidency (as the president has promised), we are going to get the troops for that. He responded at length that this new operation to clean up Baghdad just might work, and a lot of our guys might be home by the end of the year. OK, maybe so, I said, but what if it doesn't? Well, he said, there's the Reserves...
Sexual abuse by priests could not continue for decades without the active complicity of not only priests, bishops and cardinals but lay witnesses in schools and rectories where priests work and live.
Repeated abuse continues because good people ignore things they would otherwise report to police. Also, a recurring phenomenon follows priests’ dismissal for sex abuse: Anguished cries of disbelief and loyalty to Fr. Perpetrator and against victims ring out.
She then relates two astonishing incidents she witnessed herself. In one, she was attending a national conference for AIDS/HIV ministers at a Catholic university. At one point, a young man suffering from AIDS stood up at the end of the conference and said he'd never been to a gay bar or gathering where he'd been cruised for sex as much as at that Catholic conference -- by clergy.
“I’ve never been hit on so much in my life,” John said. “This is one place I thought I would not have to experience this sort of behavior.”
Nobody talked about it afterward. The author's other experience came when she overheard three young boys bounding into a priest's office, announcing they were going to spend the weekend with Father.
From inside his office, before the door closed, I heard excited voices loudly asking, “Please. Please. Can we watch the Playboy channel again?”
Laughter stopped. The door closed. Silence. My friend arrived. We left. At dinner, I recounted the occurrence, still hearing the boys’ words. A trusted priest said he could do nothing, telling me to report it to the bishop. I had, anonymously. Fr. Friend said that anonymous reports are automatically destroyed.
The author notes that it's easy to make scapegoats of the bishops for the scandal, but what about the rest of us? Why were we silent? Why are we still?
I wish I could tell you how many times I, as a reporter, have spoken to ordinary priests and laypeople who saw abuse, or who knew personally of it, but who wouldn't go public. There was the monk who knew terrible things that his brother monks had done, but who was convinced that he would be betraying them if he told. There was the woman who once worked in a parish in which she'd have to clean up Vaseline from the altar in the morning after a priest had been doing God knows what there the night before; she told the bishop on him, but the bishop -- who is now a well-known Catholic conservative -- was too compromised to act against this priest, who eventually ended up in jail for child abuse (I checked). She wouldn't go public because she still works for the church, though in another state, and was afraid of how she would support her kids if they fired her. There was the foreign-born young priest-monk who knew of wrongdoing, but wouldn't go public because his order could kick him out of the country.
You get the picture. I have talked to Catholic priests, journalists and laypeople who privately express frustration at the refusal of their own tribe within the Church to admit fault, broadly speaking, in the scandal, because they didn't want to face up to their own complicity. There were the conservative Catholics who chose to overlook despicable negligence by a certain bishop because this bishop was known to be friendly to the Latin mass. There were the liberals that a liberal Catholic friend complained to me about who refused to acknowledge the role that homosexual culture within the priesthood played in perpetuating abuse. There's blame to go around on all sides. The fault is rarely with us, and our own. It'
s always Them: the bishops, the media, the liberals, the conservatives, whatever.
Except that it is. Silence means security. Silence also means complicity. I had been preaching for years about the absolute requirement to speak out when you saw abuse or abuse-related wrongdoing. When I saw it in a parish I attended, and was starting to love, I had no choice to but to live up to my ideals, or be a hypocrite. It was an ugly situation, and it permanently altered my life and that of my family. But silence, and going along to get along, is intolerable.
Steve Sailer says that like it or not, Andrew Young had a point when he said that blacks are better off with Wal-Mart driving mom-and-pop stores in their neighborhoods out of business. Aside from getting lower prices, blacks stand for cultural reasons to do better in terms of employment by having Wal-Mart in their neighborhoods instead of bodegas owned by Arabs, Koreans, et alia. It's a provocative point.
OK, I'm going to rant for a bit. We have a long and lively thread going below in which people are arguing about evangelizing. For Christians, evangelizing is a commandment of Christ's. I'm not the sort of person who is comfortable talking to a perfect stranger about how I became a Christian, not because I'm embarrassed, but because it seems like the sort of thing you oughtn't be so quick to offer. I'm a poor evangelist, I guess, but if the topic comes up naturally, I'm pleased to share my own experience.
As it happens, we live in a religiously pluralistic society where all kinds of people are eager to talk about their faith. It seems to me that the default position for most of us ought to be tolerance. It goes both ways, though: if I tell someone who wishes to convert me that I'm not interested, thanks, I expect that he will respect me enough to stop his pitch. I am not offended by the pitch itself -- and would only be so if the evangelizer became rude or pushy. My eldest son just began classes at a heavily Evangelical school, and if we've prepared him for the possibility that he'll be "witnessed" to. I won't freak out over it, unless he's made to cry or something, and in fact I'll look at it as an opportunity to help him understand more deeply why we aren't Evangelicals, and that that's okay. No big deal. It doesn't trouble me that I might run into people who believe in all sincerity that I'm going to perish in the fires of Hell for not holding the correct theological opinions. I think they're kooks, but so what -- as long as they're not trying to send me to hell.
But there are no small number of left-liberals who expect everyone to be completely accepting of all sorts of political and sexual messages, but who risk spontaneous combustion over the possibility that someone might approach them with a religious message. One of our frequent commenters listed his oppression thus:
Sure, I can tell people I'm not interested. But what if I sit in my cubicle and have to read Bible verses all day long because they are posted on my co-workers cubicle. Or if every email I get at work is encouraging me to accept Jesus. Or if people come up to me on the street because I "look Jewish (or Hindi or Muslim)" and get told I should accept Jesus.
Oh good grief, having to look at a Bible verse posted on a co-worker's cubicle. Clutch the pearls, you're a regular Solzhenitsyn. If somebody's sending you email all day encouraging you to accept Jesus, a) get a spam filter if it's coming from outside the company, or don't open the mail, or b) tell the obnoxious co-worker (or his/her boss) that you don't appreciate it. How often do people approach you on the street and tell you this? What's wrong with telling them, "Mind your own business" and walking on? I mean, come on, all of us are hit up with unsolicited and unwelcome messages all day long, via mass media, advertising, and the simple act of interacting with other human beings. Most people are grown-ups about it, and figure out how to deal with it without assuming that their fragile personal dignity has been shattered by having to confront an unpleasant thought.
Amy Welborn has more words about these hothouse flower types, including:
The point is that we're living in a culture in which simply trying to *live* one's faith and raise one's family consistently with it is being rapidly defined as imposing one's beliefs on others. It's put up with the dominant culture or shut up.
Yep. It's scary to think how many people out there -- perhaps some even reading this blog -- who think that Mary Stachowicz had it coming. If you don't know who Mary Stachowicz is, given what happened to her, I would bet cash money it's because the news media, who ought to have been all over this sho
cking crime, decided at some level that she brought it on herself.
Thomas Sowell's column today says "We are fast approaching the point of no return," and rubs our noses in it. Excerpt:
It is hard to think of a time when a nation -- and a whole civilization -- has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea mean that it is only a matter of time before there are nuclear weapons in the hands of international terrorist organizations. North Korea needs money and Iran has brazenly stated its aim as the destruction of Israel -- and both its actions and its rhetoric suggest aims that extend even beyond a second Holocaust.
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
Sowell says that we fundamentally misunderstand the hatred driving the fanatics of the Middle East, who cannot be appeased or bought off with concessions. Writes Sowell:
What kind of people provide a market for videotaped beheadings of innocent hostages? What kind of people would throw an old man in a wheelchair off a cruise liner into the sea, simply because he was Jewish? What kind of people would fly planes into buildings to vent their hate at the cost of their own lives?
These are the kinds of people we are talking about getting nuclear weapons. And what of ourselves?
Do we understand that the world will never be the same after hate-filled fanatics gain the ability to wipe whole American cities off the face of the earth?
Here's the thing: I think Sowell is right, in the main. I think that these enemies will not stop until they murder huge numbers of us -- and even then they won't stop, but will be stopped when we murder even larger numbers of them. It will be hell on earth.
So why not stop them? Well, for one thing, how? If we attack Iran, we'll be going it alone, and draw ourselves into a hellacious Mideast war with no allies and no sympathy, even though the rest of the world will be breathing a sigh of relief that somebody took out the Islamofascist loons. If we attack North Korea, at least 10 million will die, and Seoul will go up in smoke. Can we afford that, morally or materially?
We might have been able to deal militarily with Iran, if not for the Iraq fiasco. But now we're in a much weaker position, and after the failure of this war of pre-emption, it will be virtually impossible for the US President -- any US President -- to rally the country, much less the world community, behind another.
And yet, if Iran goes nuclear, we are going to lose one or more cities. I'm sure of it.
It's easy for me to chastise Bush for having screwed up so badly in Iraq, but the fact is he's got a hell of a burden on his shoulders in trying to figure out what to do with Iran. I don't think anybody has a good idea on how to handle this situation. Maybe one of you does.
President Bush has approved the Plan B abortion pill for sale to adults without a prescription, and to minors with a prescription. See, this is why so many of us pro-life social conservatives prayed for a Bush victory: so he would hold firm on the tough issues, and do what's right no matter what the polls say. Yeah, that's the ticket.
"Real Food" author Nina Planck and I are guests on the latest podcast from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and his Insta-wife Helen Smith. Download it here. Behold my irritating nasally voice!
E.J. Dionne's column today explores why liberalism became a nasty word, and why, in the minds of many Americans, liberals became synonymous with cultural elitism. E.J. says that the late Richard Hofstadter had a lot of useful insights in explaining this shift in terms of status anxiety and psychological displacement, instead of ideas:
Now, Hofstadter was exciting precisely because he brilliantly revised accepted and sometimes pious views of what the populists and progressives were about. But there was something dismissive about Hofstadter's analysis that blinded liberals to the legitimate grievances of the populists, the progressives and, yes, the right wing.
The late Christopher Lasch, one of Hofstadter's students and an admiring critic, noted that by conducting "political criticism in psychiatric categories," Hofstadter and his intellectual allies excused themselves "from the difficult work of judgment and argumentation."
Lasch added archly: "Instead of arguing with opponents, they simply dismissed them on psychiatric grounds."
Boy oh boy, does our current immigration debate offer a great example of Lasch's criticism in action. People in the north Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch are tired of more and more illegal immigrants moving into the town, and are pushing the city council to adopt local measures that would discourage illegals from living and working there. They had a noisy council meeting last night. This passage from the Dallas Morning News story neatly delineates the sides:
"I want to live, Mr. Mayor, in a city that is resistant to lawbreakers," one resident said. "I want to live in a city that's not a haven for them. I want them to know in advance it will be tough for them to live in our city."
Opponents said the proposed measures would put undue hardships on people who were here working hard to make a living.
"We wouldn't want to do business with a city that is so racist," said Elizabeth Villafranca, whose husband owns Cuquita's Restaurant in Farmers Branch.
I would not bet money on there being no racists in Farmers Branch. But come on, what is wrong with people objecting to their city becoming a haven for people who are in this country illegally? The left -- and many business Republicans -- knee-jerkily dismiss the legitimate concerns and grievances of these residents as racism, which prevents the pro-illegal side from having to engage the principles and ideas at stake here. They can psychologize away the residents' concerns and grievances as something merely irrational or immoral. If you have to prove your liberal bona fides by defending lawbreakers, you are going to turn liberalism into a dirty word.
Over at the Corner, Mario Loyola has a post up titled "Remembering Why We Prayed for a Bush Victory." The reason, according to Mario? Bush's refusal to back down from his Iraq strategy. Here's Mario:
[R]ecall the presidents this country has known (and will know) who were obsessed with their own popularity. Think of the many times Bill Clinton allowed polling data and political advisers to shape military strategy. Imagine how horrifying it would be right now to have a John Kerry or Al Gore as president — no clear statements of policy, military decisions transparently shaped by "how it's going to look", a White House that smells to high heaven of vacillation, weakness, and even corruption. Imagine all of this for a second — and then consider the President's response:
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Look, Presidents care about whether people support their policies. I don't mean to say, I don't care. Of course, I care.... On the other hand, Ken, I don't think you've ever heard me say — and you've now been covering me for quite a while, 12 years — I don't think I've — 12 years? Yes. I don't think you've ever heard me say, gosh, I'd better change positions because the polls say this or that. I've been here long enough to understand you cannot make good decisions if you're trying to chase a poll. And so the second part of your question is, look, I'm going to do what I think is right, and if people don't like me for it, that's just the way it is.
Bush has virtually never in his political career made a decision that he didn't think was the right thing to do and the right way to do it. Conservatives who are piling on the anti-Bush bandwagon should consider that this trait—which makes the Bush family historically great—is a historical rarity to be treasured.
What? Tenacity is one thing, but pig-headed stubborness in defiance of reality is quite another. I prayed for a Bush victory in 2000 because I feared for the Supreme Court's future. I prayed for a Bush victory in 2004 because of the Supreme Court and because I trusted that Bush would be better at handling the war on Islamic terrorism than his opponent. I did not pray because I wanted a Commander-in-Chief who was so prideful (i.e., unwilling to admit error) and cripplingly loyal to his subordinates (e.g., Rumsfeld) that he continues to lead this country down a blind alley in Iraq and the Middle East -- and the Republican Party to an electoral rout.
If the president's Iraq policy were working, however unpopular, then I could see applauding his courage and tenacity in the face of bad polling. But things have been going from bad to worse for some time now. This morning, NPR had an interview with Gen. George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, in which he tried to put a happy face on the mess there. Steve Inskeep, the host, pointed out the rising numbers of terrorist incidents, to which Gen. Casey replied that "violence is not a good measurement" of our success there. (I'm slightly paraphrasing, because I was driving when I heard this and couldn't write it down). It's not? Wow. Next came an interview with a Time magazine reporter in Baghdad, who explained why there's a civil war underway, and US troops are neither tactically nor strategically capable of fighting that sort of conflict. But there was the president yesterday in that press conference, sticking by his story, as if he could by force of will make things aright.
Whatever this is, it's not a virtue, and it's not the reason many of us who prayed for Bush's victory once upon a time did so. But it is the reason why so many of us pray for our troops.
In a journal entry from Nov. 1, 1980, Father Alexander Schmemann, the renowned Orthodox priest, discerned a problem with what he called "Romantic Orthodoxy," which can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
+ nominalism (e.g., non-existing Patriarchates) + blind liturgical conservatism + cult of the past + theological preoccupation almost exclusively with the Fathers + "apocalypticism" + hatred for the contemporary world (not for this world in general) + emotionalism + cult of externals (beard, cassocks, prayer ropes, style)
In other words, wrote Schmemann, it includes all that makes Orthodoxy weak, that makes it into an intenral ghetto (and not an appeal, a fight, life). Romanticism, in life and in culture, is, above all, a dream, the primacy of the heart over discernmentandtruth. It pushes reality away for the sake of an imaginedreality; it is belief in illusions.
Father Schmemann, of course, was talking specifically about the Orthodox church, but there is wisdom there for all of us who hold on to small-o orthodox religion, in whatever tradition. My experience is almost wholly limited to the Catholic Church, but there are some good general principles in this for the small-o orthodox to watch out for. We live in a time of such chaos within the churches that it's easy for the orthodox to substitute slavish adherence to ritual and Henny-Pennyism (i.e., "The sky is falling!") for authentic spirituality. For me -- and this is something I would have added to Fr. Schmemann's list -- a particular temptation has been to get caught up in Church politics, and to allow "churchiness" to occupy much of the attention that ought to have been going to advancing on the path to holiness. There was a time not all that long ago when I imagined that being preoccupied with the advances and retreats of the forces of Catholic orthodoxy was the same thing as being and becoming a good Catholic Christian.
The "cult of the past" is a particular temptation too for us tradition-minded Christians. It's very easy to look around at the loosey-goosey religion promulgated by Father Frootloop and Sister Stretchpants (and their dopplegangers in other churches and traditions) and to idealize the 1950s, when the Church was rock-solid. But that solidity must have been a Potemkin village at some level, or things wouldn't have fallen apart so quickly in the 1960s, which is the decade we love (appropriately, I hasten to add) to demonize. Could it be that in that decade, very large numbers of people were going through the motions, but the living faith itself never touched their hearts?
A few years ago I was in the Netherlands talking with a professor about the collapse of the Church and cultural conservatism in Holland. He said that when the Second World War ended, people returned to the social forms that had existed prior to the war. But those forms had been hollowed out by the trauma of the war. When the first gusts from the counterculture blew through the Netherlands in the early 1960s, it all went down like a house of cards. I wonder, then, if the Dutch churches in the immediate postwar period were caught up in a "cult of externals," mistaking the form of corporate worship and personal piety for actual faith -- and so they didn't see the internal weakness developing.
Tom Hibbs, the Catholic philosopher who heads the Honors College at Baylor, writes that American universities have lost their way by becoming indifferent to the way classical liberal education is supposed to form the character of undergraduates. Instead, we have a situation in which universities are morally indifferent, functionally hedonistic, and merely vocational. Colleges are preparing the next generation to be good consumers, but not to live meaningful lives.
"The American people have got to understand the consequence (sic) of leaving Iraq before the job is done," President Bush said today, explaining that he has no intention of changing course in Iraq.
But what does that mean? What benchmarks will tell us that the "job" is "done"? Presumably a democratic government that can defend itself. But that prospect is receding further and further with every day -- and nothing the president offers looks to reverse the slide. Attitude and platitudes won't cut it.
By the way, Spengler has a humorous advice column. In his latest installment, "Pope Benedict" -- whom Spengler, when he's not writing tongue in cheek, admires very much -- has written him wanting to know why so many American Evangelicals wanted Israel to push on to victory against Hezbollah, when he (the pope) and other Christian leaders were pushing for peace? Read the whole thing here. Spengler explains why American Evangelicals identify so strongly with Israel -- and bless his heart, he doesn't do the ignorant American journalist thing of referring to "Left Behind" -- and concludes thus:
The evangelicals convert themselves to Christianity every day, which is the same as saying that for them Christianity is not a doctrine but a life. The living history of Israel and the story of its redemption did not end with the Resurrection, but continues on the Lebanese border. Evangelical Christianity brings the god who revealed himself in history into the hearts of men, to which Christians respond by making the revelation in history the journey of their own soul.
My advice is: change your name to Dominic.
In other words: Preach, man! Make the faith come alive!
Joshua Trevino has written a provocative essay that will unsettle everyone who reads it. He is forcing us to look at a question that is not in our nature, at least not in the West, to consider. Trevino writes in light of the failures of the wars the West has waged in this decade against Islamic enemies.
In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question.
He says that we in the West simply do not understand how true religion works on the mind of believers. Thus we cannot grasp what drives those who hate us and would destroy us. But here's the rub: Trevino says (and I paraphrase him) that we have become the sort of people who would not stoop to the barbaric level of our enemies, who want total war to wipe the world free of the infidel and his malignity. We have a higher calling, a more moral and humane way of life. But is it the case that the war our enemy wishes to make on us is a fight to the death -- and that we have to become as barbaric as he simply in order to survive?
This is not an easy question to answer, though I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to offer easy answers, on both sides of the question. But it is a question that I fear our country will face in my lifetime. If we become as vicious as the enemy in defending ourselves, what will we have won? One answer: survival of ourselves and our children.
The thing to understand about this war, it seems to me, is that for believing Muslims, the West itself, with its relentless secularism, sexuality and consumerism, is a mortal threat to their existence. I mean that: very many Muslims see our strength as an existential threat. And they have a point that's not easily dismissed, if you believe as countless Muslims do that the point of life is to submit to God and his laws. Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest" is a good short book to read on this, though there is much to be learned about the current conflict as a religious/existentialist battle-to-the-death by reading ATOL's pseudonymous columnist Spengler, especially here, here, here and here, where he writes off the news that Afghanistan was planning a capital trial for Abdul Rahman, a Muslim convert to Christianity:
Where are the moderate Muslims?" sigh the self-appointed Sybils of the Western media. Faith is life. What does it mean to be moderately alive? Find the "moderate Christians" and the "moderate Jews", and you will have the answer. "Moderate Christians" such as Episcopalian priests or Anglican vicars are becoming redundant as their congregations migrate to red-blooded evangelical denominations or give up religion altogether. "Moderate Jews" are mainly secular and tend to intermarry. There really is no such thing as a "moderate" Christian; there simply are Christians, and soon-to-be-ex-Christians. The secular establishment has awoken with sheer panic to this fact at last. In response we have such diatribes such as Kevin Phillips' new book American Theocracy, an amalgam of misunderstandings, myths and calumnies about the so-called religious right.
The tragedy of Abdul Rahman also is the tragedy of Western religion. Islam differs radically from Christianity, in that the Christian god is a lover who demands love in return, whereas the Muslim
god is a sovereign who demands the fulfillment of duty. Christian prayer is communion, an act of love incomprehensible to Muslims; Muslim worship is an act of submission, the repetition of a few lines of text to accompany physical expression of self-subjugation to the sovereign. The People of Christ are pilgrims en route to the next world; the People of Allah are soldiers in this one. Contrary to all the ink spilled and trees murdered to produce the tomes of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, Christianity and Islam call forth different peoples to serve different gods for different reasons.
...Where is the moderation? The Christian either joins the People of God in its pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Heaven, or he does not; the Muslim either is a soldier of the ummah, or he is nothing. Religious conversion is not mere adaptation to another tradition. It is a change of people. If God is "able of these stones to raise children of Abraham" (Matthew 3:9), Christians are the Gentiles made into sons of Abraham by miracle. In Islamic society, the convert to Christianity instantly becomes an alien and an enemy.
...Islam does not know moderation or extremism: it only knows success or failure. ... Islam cannot exist outside of traditional society, which by definition knows no doubt. ..."Moderate Islam" is an empty construct; the Islam of the Afghan courts is the religion with which the West must contend.
By the way, I note here that this issue -- "What if it comes down to Us or Them? What then?" -- is still abstract for us. But it's very, very concrete for the Israelis.
Over on The Immaculate Direction, his excellent blog about raising a family in the sacramental tradition, JohnT, a frequent commenter on the CC blog, shows a photograph of the meal his family of four had today for dinner. They ate their fill. It was about 60 percent organic. It cost $12 for the whole thing, but about $8 for what they managed to consume. It's simply a myth that eating good food -- and food that you can feel good about -- has to cost you a pretty penny. Nina Planck offers some hints for how to shop to eat well without breaking the bank.
Stuart Buck, who is not a food blogger but a law blogger (mostly, and a lively one -- check out his thoroughgoing diss of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's ruling on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program), writes to direct me to this great food blog called Tigers and Strawberries. Barbara, the woman who runs it, is a wonderful writer. Check it out. What food blogs do you like to read?
We'd talked a bit here before about organizing meet-ups in various places for readers of "Crunchy Cons" and those interested in the ideas presented in the book. I just got a nice e-mail from a Dallas reader who wanted to set one up for here in my town. We're working on it, but I thought I'd take the time to remind y'all that if any of you want to set a meet-up on your own where you live, I'll be pleased to publicize it on this here blog. Just let me know.
Armando Valladares, the heroic Cuban Catholic poet and former political prisoner, writes in condemnation of Cuba's Catholic bishops for being apologists and suck-ups to the evil anti-Christian Castro regime.
Ross Douthat identifies what I think is the biggest problem with the crunchy-con sensibility: the difficulty of reconciling its ideals with practical concerns of ordinary people. He starts by talking about how it sounds great to come out in favor of conserving the wilderness against sprawl, but it can't be overlooked that a lot of the people who argue for that sort of thing are monied liberals who already have their foothold (and then some), and whose conservationist policies would make it difficult and even impossible for those on the rise to lay claim to the land. Ross notes that when Julie and I got ready to raise a family, we moved out of our beloved Brooklyn and back down South to be closer to our families -- but also to a place where we could afford to buy a house and put down roots. That's good for us, but Ross is actually from the Northeast, and if he felt he had to move so far away to be able to afford decent housing ... well, how conservative (crunchy or not) would that be, having to abandon your extended family and the place you grew up?
As Ross observes, the broader point here for crunchy conservatism is that there are lots of people who might like to live in a historic old house, eat organic and suchlike, but who are too hard-pressed to put a roof over the heads of their kids in a neighborhood with decent schools, etc., to concern themselves with such things. This is something not easy to resolve, but I think we need to try to figure it out. The answer can't be to yield to unlimited sprawl, or to roll over and die while strip-malls and big-box stores render our landscapes hideous. In my hometown, these issues are roiling the community. The decision was made by the state to put a huge new bridge seven miles south of the town instead of in the town itself. The preservation-minded citizens welcomed this, because they rightly (in my view) understood that the little town is so fragile that the amount of traffic that would come through if the bridge were there would overrun the place. But others, not unreasonably, point out that what commerce the town has left might die because the new bridge easier for people who live in the thriving southern part of the parish to do their shopping across the river instead of in the town. (They're already apparently planning a Super Wal-Mart for the other side of the river, in anticipation of the bridge).
How difficult it is to get this sort of thing right. If you let the preservationists alone run the town, their efforts to keep everything protected would probably ensure the town's slow death. But if you let their opponents run the town, they've pave over everything (thus killing the character that makes the town so attractive) because convenience and cheap consumer goods mean more than anything else. I'm exaggerating a bit re: both sides, but the essential point is there. I don't believe you can call a place "good" if it fails to provide beauty, and the things that nourish the soul, and the soul of the community. These are essential too. But if these necessary things are not thought of as essential, if they are thought of as luxuries only worthy of the wealthy, that's not a good situation either.
To look at it from another angle: last night we had dinner at the home of some new friends. We got to talking about New Orleans, and I'd mentioned that John Barry's book "Rising Tide" observed that the same kind of old-money aristocracy that made New Orleans so interesting, and preserved traditions and architecture so well, ended up killing the city because it would not adapt and let in fresh blood. That is, when the oil industry in the Gulf got rolling, the oil companies tried to headquarter themselves in N.O., but their executives couldn't penetrate society there. Frustrated, they relocated to Houston, which welcomed them. They thrived, Houston boomed, and New Orleans sank into stylish decay. R., one of th
e guests and an amateur historian of Dallas, said that that's the difference between Dallas and Fort Worth. Fort Worth is old money and closed, whereas Dallas is new money and open to anybody who's willing to work hard. Dallas thrives in a way that Fort Worth just doesn't, because it's constantly being renewed by new blood.
He's right, I'm sure. But it's also true that the "churn" in Dallas is astonishingly high, meaning that large numbers of people cycle through here without ever putting down roots. How conservative is that? Also, Fort Worth is more beautiful, generally speaking, than sprawling Dallas. That's something conservatives should care about too, right? The vexing thing is that I don't like old-money snobbery, but it's old-money snobs who keep the beautiful old buildings from being knocked over to make way for a Wal-Mart. I don't like new-money vulgarity, but it's the new-money vulgarians who bring vitality and freshness to a culture and place in danger of going stale.
It was bad enough that Andrew Young sold his credibility to Wal-Mart as a way to convince people that Wal-Mart is a fine, upstanding corporate citizen. But to play to rancid racial stereotypes to make it look like Wal-Mart is on the side of poor black ghetto dwellers against Jews, Asians and Arabs is just unconscionable. I mean, really: this giant corporation is David fighting the good racial fight against the Man, e.g., mom-and-pop store owners who happen to be Jewish, Asian, or Arab? Disgusting. Here's what the civil rights icon said when asked by a black newspaper if he was concerned that Wal-Mart is running neighborhood mom-and-pop shops out of business:
"Well, I think they should; they ran the `mom and pop' stores out of my neighborhood. But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."
Now look, I used to live in Washington DC, and all the convenience store owners I ever saw were Korean. If not for the Korean market in my old neighborhood, there would have been no place close to get milk in the snow. They weren't the friendliest people in the world, but you could plainly see that it had everything to do with the language barrier. The immigrant couple who ran that shop kept it open all the time, and were putting their kids through school by working long hours there. I remember being in the store one day when a hotheaded young black man started racially abusing the Koreans. It was a disgrace, but the Koreans took it stoically.
The Asians and Arabs who run those convenience stores in rough black neighborhoods do so at risk of taking constant abuse, and at great risk of robbery or other violence. Why on earth is it easier for loudmouth black folks like Andrew Young to trash brave immigrant entrepreneurs instead of learning from their example and starting businesses themselves?
It will be interesting to see if Andrew Young's racist bilge gets the same kind of media attention and interest-group outrage as Mel Gibson's. I'll be quite surprised if it does.
Lynette Hoppe, an American who has lived in dirt-poor Albania as a missionary with her husband Nathan and their two kids for the past seven years, is on her deathbed this afternoon, suffering from cancer. The Hoppe family went to Albania to help rebuild Christianity, which had nearly been exterminated by decades of communist dictatorship. Here's a website for people who want to pray for her. And here is the most recent update sent out by her husband, who's keeping vigil:
Lynette has begun to slip away from us. A few weeks ago when we learned that the cancer had begun in her liver we believed that it was at an early stage and that we would still have some time together. Since then, things have progressed very rapidly. 10 days ago a scan showed that cancer had completely taken over her liver and caused her liver to expand to fill most of her abdomen. Since then, she has begun to show signs of liver failure with these becoming acute in the last 48 hours. She is extremely tired, sleeping throughout the night and most of the day. She has begun to lose her motor skills; things like drinking out of a glass have become very difficult. She has spilled her water on herself many times in the last two days. It is becoming difficult for her to think and speak clearly. The doctors say that her time is now very short. Those who are planning to come and visit are accelerating their travel arrangements in hopes of arriving while she can still communicate.
We returned from the girl’s summer camp yesterday. The evening before we left Lynette gathered her strength and mental faculties to spend about one hour speaking to the girls about the end-of-life and preparation to meet our Lord. This was a beautiful time in which the work which God has done in Lynette shown out so clearly. Death is almost never talked about here in Albania and terminally ill people are not told that they are dying so we pray that Lynette's testimony will help these young women to prepare for a Christian end to their lives.
We continue to be so grateful for the companionship of each one of you on this difficult journey. We have been so wonderfully sustained by you in so many ways. I asked your prayers especially for these last days and hours which we have with Lynette. Though we have known it was coming for a long time, the end has come suddenly and there are still many things which we would like to finish. Please pray that she will have at least a few hours of strength and clear thought and that we will use these moments well. Also pray that those who are coming to visit will arrive in time.
Pray for the children and I, and that we will have a sustaining sense of His presence. My eyes are full of tears as I write but I also have a strong sense of joy. The jewel which I have been privileged to hold a short time is slipping away from me, but I know that she will be held in far more worthy arms until we are reunited. I am so blessed in these days by her joy and her faith and her love. She is truly an icon of Christ to me which is sustaining me.
Over at Hugh Hewitt's blog, Dean Barnett looks into the abyss, and says that it's clear now that by the time this war with radical Islam is over, a hell of a lot of people will have had to die, on our side and theirs. He notes that, "When the neo-cons (like me) said that we would be greeted with garlands of roses in Iraq, we meant it. We couldn’t imagine anyone preferring an 8th century theocracy to freedom and liberty."
I don't think it was just neocons. I think was, and is, most Americans. We seem simply incapable of believing that rational people would choose to live other than the way we do. Even to this day if you suggest that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible, or at least vastly more difficult to achieve in the real world than we think, you open yourself up to charges that you must be some kind of bigot (e.g., "Do you think Muslims don't deserve democracy?"). Here's Daniel Larison ripping into this sort of parochialism:
What sort of illiberal (in the sense of uncultivated and narrow), parochial sort of person is literally incapable of entering, figuratively speaking, into the mind of another view of the world, if only superficially, to perceive things differently in order to understand? As usual the people who put the greatest store by their cosmopolitanism and universal values have the most limited horizons, the least knowledge and often have the most profound bigotry towards every other way of life that is not cosmopolitan and in harmony with universal values. People who don’t know where they belong, where they’re from or who they are, because they are equally at home (or rather equally alienated) from every place and define themselves by their values and not their folks and their place, are apparently incapable of understanding people different from themselves. “Flyover country” must be as much a mystery to neocons as it is to the coastal liberals.
Most of human history is filled with people who didn’t prefer “freedom”–the question in many cases never really came up or, when it did, was sternly rejected as a route to license and immorality (well, now that you mention it…) or a prideful rebellion against God (well, you know, they may have had a point there…). Quite a lot of people, including more than a few of all our ancestors, preferred what we today disdainfully call theocracy of one sort or another, but which they saw simply as fulfilling their obligations to God and man. I have no truck with Islam and find its vision of order repugnant, but I can grasp why someone would prefer that to the sort of life offered him by Freedom. In the war between a life of meaning and a life full of empty choices, the former will always prevail among sane people.
I'm telling you, you've got to read Sayyid Qutb. He was a fanatic and a totalitarian and hanged as a revolutionary. But he understood that man cannot live by bread and circuses alone. Here's a passage from Paul Berman's NYT Magazine appraisal of his work:
Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man's inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ''to a level lower than the beasts.'' Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness -- this wretched split between man's truest nature and modern life?
A great many
cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason -- an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.
[snip] In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely -- the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds.
It's hard to imagine a greater distance between two people as the Islamo-Leninist revolutionary Qutb and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. But Mother Teresa observed that when she left the slums of Calcutta to come to the US, she saw a spiritual poverty more dire than anything she witnessed in India. Maybe the saint of Calcutta and the demon of Cairo were both onto something that we Americans can't -- or won't -- see.
Rick Hertzberg, who writes the lead Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker every week, is as predictable a liberal as you can hope to find. He's a good writer but an unsurprising thinker, so I usually check out of his essays halfway, because I know where they're headed. Not so with this week's piece. Take a look at this:
[I]n this August of 2006 a palpable, ’68-like shift in sentiment is in the steamy air. Among foreign-policy élites and the broader public alike, it has become the preponderant conviction that George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq is a catastrophe.
He then goes on to cite several leading lights who did not start out opposing the war, but who now believe it has failed:
“The Administration now has to admit what anyone—including myself—who believed in the importance of getting Iraq right has to admit,” [Tom Friedman] wrote. “Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.” In a Washington Post column a day earlier, the relentlessly centrist David S. Broder, citing his colleague Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” admitted that “the hope for victory is gone” and deplored “the answer from Bush,” which he characterized this way: “Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.”
That same week, a summing-up confidential cable by William Patey, the departing British Ambassador to Iraq, found its way into the newspapers. “The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy,”
You can read the rest if you want. What got to me was the Broder characterization of Bush's position: Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.
That stings. And for the life of me, I can't see that it's wrong. So the question remains: why prolong US agony in Iraq? I've been for some time one of those people who believe that we aren't going to win this thing in Iraq, that the Shia and the Sunni are going to have themselves a hellacious civil war no matter what we do. But I haven't been in favor of a pullout because ... well, why not? Mostly because I've feared the consequences of a pullout, not only for Iraq but for the region, and for the psychological shock to the American system (we'll probably feel something like the Israelis do today, having been fought to a draw by people they thought they'd crush). Better to stay there and hope something decent would turn up, I've thought.
But we wait. And we wait. And more Americans die, and things get worse and worse. We spend billions more, to no apparent lasting good. If I thought my brother was over there now, I'd believe that he was risking his life in a mission that cannot succeed, for reasons of our own making, and for reasons having to do with the Iraqis. By what logic should he remain there in a no-win situation? Just so America can avoid losing face?
Blogs are for thinking out loud, so what I'm telling you is I'm trying real hard to avoid the conclusion that the less bad of two intolerable outcomes is that the US should withdraw from Iraq.
If we do this, we should give US passports to every single Iraqi who helped us, and his or her family members. We should give US passports to every Christian or other religious minority in the country.
However it's resolved, the Iraq War legacy is going to shatter the Republican Party for a long time to come. I take absolutely no pleasure in that, especially because I added my own small voice to the clamor for this war. The only excuse I have is that I trusted the judgment of the Bush Administration: that they knew what they
were talking about on WMDs, and that they would run Iraq well after Saddam was defeated.
My question to readers who still support the US mission in Iraq: by what logic should we stay there, given that from month to month, things are getting significantly worse?
Critics paint Wal-Mart as a national symbol of corporate irresponsibility, claiming it provides inadequate wages and health care coverage for its 1.3 million employees while shipping new jobs overseas.
"The Wal-Mart issue should be at the center of the debate about what kind of country we will be," Kofinis said. "How is it possible that companies can make this much profit and not do the right thing?"
What the Dems are doing is hoping to play off economic anxiety among the shrinking middle class, and point to how giant globalist retailers like Wal-Mart are contributing to middle-class slippage. I think it's a good idea to bring some old-fashioned economic populism to bear in this election, but sitting here deep inside Wal-Mart country, I have serious doubts as to the efficacy of this strategy. Wal-Mart is such a cultural totem in the red states. The best way for the kind of white, working-class people -- the demographic that Democrats used to be able to count on, but whom they've lost to the GOP for nearly a generation, owing to cultural issues -- to spot a latte liberal is when the latte liberal starts bashing Wal-Mart. In my book, I made a case for why conservatives undermine the things they're supposed to care about when they (we) make low price and convenience the only thing we care about when making consumer decisions. The most emotional negative reaction to the book came from people who felt personally and culturally attacked over their shopping decisions. Many people are simply irrational on the subject -- by which I mean not that they don't have rational arguments to make in defense of their Wal-Mart habits, etc., but that they don't want to make them; they only want to denounce what they perceive as "elitism."
That's the cultural reality Democrats are facing. In this consumerist society, Wal-Mart is a cherished institution. If I were Karl Rove, I'd be thrilled that the Democrats were going to launch their economic populist initiative by attacking a chain store that's beloved in small-town America. If the Dems were going down this path, they'd be smarter to come up with a target that doesn't elicit such an emotional response from the kind of people they want to win over.
As anybody with a lick of sense could see coming, Hezbollah's victory in the war with Israel is opening the way for it to become the de facto government of Lebanon. The terrorists are going around the country with $150 million of Iranian walking-around money, buying up everybody's loyalty. If people would think for half a second, they'd realize it was Hezbollah who brought such death and destruction to them. But they won't think at all.
Never fear, though, Condi Rice says that if Hezbollah doesn't lay down its weapons, then, well, gosh, read for yourself. Money quote:
“one would have to assume that there will be others who are willing to call Hezbollah what we are willing to call it, which is a terrorist organization.”
Got that, Sheik Nasrallah? If you don't drop that rocket launcher, the world is going to give you a tongue-lashing like you've never heard.
Fantastic essay by Roger Scruton in today's Wall Street Journal -- alas, it's not available online. In it, the English philosopher says that the problem with Islam is that it has no sense of irony, as shown by the extremely thin skins most Muslims have -- and therefore we should wonder if terrorism is as alien to Islam as people would like to think. Excerpts:
This readiness to take offense is not yet terrorism -- but it is a sign of the deep-down insecurity of the Muslim psyche in the modern world. In the presence of Islam, we all feel, you have to tread carefully, as though humoring a dangerous animal. The Koran must never be questioned; Islam must be described as a religion of peace -- isn't that the meaning of the word? -- and jokes about the prophet are an absolute no-no. If religion comes up in conversation, best to slip quietly away, accompanying your departure with abject apologies for the Crusades. And in Europe, this pussyfooting is now being transcribed into law, with "Islamophobia" already a crime in Belgium and momvements across the continent to censor everything at which a Muslim might take offense, including articles like this one.
Scruton goes on to say that it is wrong to give gratuitous insult to anyone's faith, and that we non-Muslims should extend to Muslims the same toleration and goodwill we'd expect them to give us. But you have to wonder, says Scruton, where Muslims stand on this matter. They are in many cases fanatically intolerant. Writes Scruton: "Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and skepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted."
Hear, hear. Scruton concludes by saying that Christians and Jews are "heirs to a long tradition of secular government" that maintains that human societies should be governed by human laws that should take precedence over religious edicts. Citizens must obey the state, and whatever they do with their spiritual lives is between them and God. Against this tradition -- which Scruton says is enshrined in Christianity by what Kierkegaard and Hegel identified as the Christian faith's "spirit of irony," which is to say the ability to stand outside of yourself and see things from other perspectives -- comes the humorlessness of the Muslim fundamentalists, whose belief that all secular laws are blasphemous the rest of us see as a sign of fanaticism, but which many pious Muslims see as a religious requirement.
Once the Muslim world learns not to take itself so seriously, then we can talk about making peace, says Scruton. To that end, check out these Muslim comedians.
David Broder talks to Republican bigs who are afraid that this fall could be a replay of the 1974 midterms, in which disgust with Watergate led the Dems to a massive Congressional sweep. Well, news like this is not helping: More IEDs have been planted in Iraq than ever before, and the insurgency is stronger than it's ever been -- this according to a classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was reported on in today's New York Times. The question -- "Did Iraq produce Saddam, or did Saddam produce Iraq?" -- is a hard one to answer. But there's no question that preventable US errors, particularly in the White House and the Pentagon, are heavily responsible for this Vietnam-like quagmire.
But what to do about it? The Dems have no answer at all, and the Republicans have an answer that fewer and fewer people believe in.
When's the last time you thought about JonBenet Ramsey? Me, not for years. It was a shock to hear her name again yesterday when that skin-crawlingly creepy John Mark Karr was arrested in -- of course -- Bangkok. Despite his fairly incriminating statements on camera, don't be so sure Karr is guilty. His ex-wife, who divorced him after he was convicted on child porn charges a few years back, says he was with her in Alabama on the night JonBenet was killed. And if he's a wack job, he might be confessing to something he didn't do just for the notoriety. I'm just saying.
I have to confess to feeling a bit ashamed of how quick I was to have thought the worst of Patsy Ramsey over the years. I wouldn't say that I thought she did it, or had something to do with it, but I did think there might be something to that idea. Why? Mostly because I think there's something deeply perverse about the whole child beauty pageant thing, and ... well, I figured that any mom who would subject her child to that sicko scene must be capable of worse. Unfair? Yeah. But that was what I thought.
Patsy Ramsey apparently deepened her Christian faith throughout the ordeal, which I'm sure is the thing that allowed her to get through it. I hope this Karr is the killer, because if so, Mrs. Ramsey, even in death, deserves to be set free of all suspicion. But if this Karr really was in Alabama on the night of JonBenet's death in Colorado ... what then? And then there's the matter of the ransom note, which is just ... weird. I hope that Karr can clear all this up. I guess we'll know for sure if the DNA found under JonBenet's fingers matches his.
The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.
The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.
So what! It happens to be the case that the kinds of terrorists we have to fear are always Muslims, and usually Arabs or South Asians. We're not supposed to notice this, but everybody knows it's true, and by this point, surely we can dispense with the political correctness and deal with reality. Yes? Mark Shea, for one, thinks so, and I'm inclined to agree. Writes Mark:
I frankly have no sympathy left for a community that is far more concerned about being offended than about the fact that it is the locus of the nutjobs who are blowing up planes and trying to kill thousands and even millions of innocent civilians. I could not care less if their sensitivities are offended by profiling. It's about time.
What I (honestly) don't understand is why Muslim air travelers would object to this. It's their lives that will be saved too if this rational system manages to detect a would-be terrorist. If middle-aged Christian males of northern European descent were identified as being guilty or suspected in terror cases, you'd better believe I'd be happy to be given extra attention at the airport. No problem, officer, just get me to where I need to be safely.
If you have some time, sit down and read this amazing series of stories from The Dallas Morning News concerning a faded, Norma Desmond-ish Southern belle and the fate of her decaying mansion. A pair of grifters ingratiated themselves with her, and coerced her into signing the house over to them (watch the video of the dastardly duo and their lawyer "encouraging" the demented old woman on her deathbed into putting her signature on legal papers handing it all over to "the boys"). I swear, this story is straight-up Southern Gothic, worthy of a Hollywood treatment.
But the problem at its heart is not so unusual, alas. It's about how difficult it is to protect elderly parents or other relatives from those who would exploit them. The diva's grown daughter lived halfway across the country, and by the time she moved back to Dallas to try to look after her mother's affairs, the clever duo had already cast a spell over the old lady. And it's also true that given the emotional dynamics of families, there's only so much a child can do. In this sad case, the adult daughter probably could have sued to have her mother declared legally incompetent, and been awarded power of attorney. But that's a risky strategy, because even if the court were to grant it, the child -- even though acting to protect the senile parent -- would likely alienate her parent's affection permanently. In fact, it was precisely the fear of that outcome as my late grandfather was in decline that kept my father, his son, from petitioning the court to have him declared incompetent, so my dad could step in and protect his assets from his second wife, who had stolen tens of thousands from him. My dad couldn't bring himself to humiliate his father by having the old man declared incompetent, and he really couldn't bear the thought of having his own father despise him for as long as the old man had left to live.
Israelis are furious at their government -- rightly so -- for bungling the Hezbollah war and thereby making their nation less secure. Well, see, that's how they do things in Israel. Here in America, we pay lip service to accountability, but give our war bunglers Presidential Medals of Freedom.
Over on The Corner, Andy McCarthy and my friend John Podhoretz have been fighting over democracy, terrorism and Islam. I really do think Andy slam-dunks it in this posting, in which he says those (like President Bush) who insist that the problem in the Arab Muslim world is a lack of democracy are dangerously fooling themselves. They can't wrap their mind around the idea that millions of people would voluntarily choose to live as they believe God commands them. Here's Andy:
What is variously called "radical Islam," "militant Islam," "political Islam," "fundamentalist Islam," "Islamo-fascism," etc., is not a fringe cult. It is a highly developed system the history of which traces back centuries and which counts among its adherents many highly educated, highly intelligent people. It rejects fundamental premises of Western democracy — indeed, it blames Western democracy for the ills of the world.
Now, here's what you don't seem to get: it's not just terrorists who believe this. The terrorists are the ones willing to fight over it, but there are tens of millions who agree with their beliefs and aims even if they are not willing to kill to see them actualized. That is why terrorism is not irreconcilable with democracy, but Islam may well be.
You can keep pretending, if you'd like, that the problem here is "tyranny" and "terrorism" and that things would turn around if only we injected a little freedom into the equation. But that is not going to deal with the "root cause," and it is not going to make Muslims like you better (as we are seeing in Iraq on a daily basis). You insult these millions of Muslims profoundly because the logic of your argument is that no one who was truly free would choose the life they sincerely believe God has commanded. You are stuck in a pre-1979 mindset which refuses to acknowledge that a religion-based revolution is possible, and that the millions of people are freely choosing a belief system that opposes Western democracy.
I'm not going along. I've spent lots of time with our enemies and I respect them. That's why I know they have to be defeated, not courted.
As I've said before, I believe one reason why Evangelical Christians tend to be much more suspicious of and hostile to Islam than Americans in general is because they are intimately familiar with the transformative power of religion ... for good and for evil. Last night I read the first chapter of Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower." That chapter tells the story of Sayyid Qutb, the ideologue of Islamic extremism. The owlish Qutb was a fanatic, it's true, and almost comically prudish. But he was a very serious man, with a serious critique of the West and modernity. We will never come to grips with the kind of enemy we're facing until we come to grips with the power of Sayyid Qutb's ideas. Which is to say that until and unless we realize we're in a religious war, we will not have begun to fight.
The paradox of the present moment in world history: Islamists are using the tools of modernity -- democracy, media, high-tech weaponry -- to advance a ferocious anti-modern agenda. And we thought they'd be satisfied with Britney Spears and Pepsi...
National Review editor Rich Lowry whispers sotto voce that Bush might have led us all into another Vietnam. This is not, of course, a fresh observation. What's new -- and significant -- is who's saying it. Tom Friedman's column today was quite strong (though I hate it when he uses that hokey stump-speech affectation, addressing his readers as "Friends, blah blah blah;" it's as bad as Molly Ivins' cornpone tic "bidnessmen"). Anyway, Friedman is quite strong today:
What should really worry the country is not whether the Democrats are being dragged to the left by antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in. What should worry the country is that the Bush team and the Republican Party, which control all the levers of power and claim to have thought only about this larger struggle, are in total denial about where their strategy has led.
Not only is there no honest self-criticism among Republicans, but — and this is truly contemptible — you have Dick Cheney & Friends focusing their public remarks on why Lamont’s defeat of Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with “Islamic fascists” and are therefore unfit to lead.
Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Cheney: If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you “tough guys” fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?
Friedman concludes:
Please, Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don’t understand it. It is just so phony — such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war.
What is starting to unnerve me is the sense that the wheels are coming off, and nobody knows how to put them back on. This confidence game the Republicans are playing is an insult. No, it's far worse than that: it's dangerous, because they seem to believe that all they have to do is keep banging away on the public's fear that the Democrats would be worse, and all will be well for them. It reminds me of Rep. Mike Pence's moronic quote from earlier this year: "The best thing we have going for us is the Democrats. We may be the party of Big Government, but they are the party of Really Big Government."
Is that what GOP leadership comes down to, in the end? They deserve to lose. They really do. But I don't think the country deserves the Democrats, at least not the Democrats we have now.
More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.
Hmm. Well, okay, we might start by discarding the belief that all people naturally want liberal democracy. The Shia don't want to be free. They want to be free to be Shia, which means, among other things, free to run the country as they see fit, oppressing non-Shia and turning their country into Shiastan, Robin to Iran's Batman. They rolled us. They played us for useful idiots. And now that they got what they wanted, they're sick of us infidels, and want us to go so they can get to clobbering the Sunni. Besides, they're no doubt patriots, and are tired of their country being occupied.
I hate that a single drop of American blood was shed for these people. But what happened, happened. If the president is just now getting around to being puzzled at the ingratitude of the Iraqi Shia, he's way behind on the learning curve.
George Will's column today ends with a brutal punch to the administration's jaw:
Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.
In his piece, Will says that John Kerry had a point when he said that the weapons and techniques of war cannot alone effectively combat terrorism -- that you need good police work too. For this he was mocked by the administration. I seem to recall that in internal editorial board debates here at the Dallas Morning News during the campaign season, I contributed a fair share of dumping on Kerry for being a nebbish about this stuff. And yet, as Will points out, subsequent events put Kerry's view in a much better light, and the Administration's rock-'em, sock-'em view in a deep hole. The war in Iraq has not made us safer, or the Middle East more stable. Reading Tom Ricks' "Fiasco" -- which takes not only the Administration and military brass, but also Congress and the news media to task for falling down on the job re: the Iraq War and its aftermath -- is enough to make a Bush-voting conservative like me want to drink myself under the table. So much of what is indisputable now about the mishandling of the war was knowable then, for those who cared to look.
Anyway, my heretical thought is not, "Maybe I should have voted for Kerry," though that might be true. My heretical thought is that no matter what my reservations were about Bush either time I voted for him, they were overcome by my single-minded focus on the Supreme Court. Like many social conservatives, I decided that I could overlook a lot of monkey business as long as Bush could be counted on to deliver solidly conservative SCOTUS justices. This is why lots of us erupted like Krakatoa when Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Court. I'm thrilled we have Roberts and Alito, and I hope we get one more like them before this administration is history. But looking at the foreign-policy and spending legacy of this administration, and what a complete debacle this administration (and this Congress, quite frankly) has been for the things conservatives really care about, I am for the first time wondering seriously if placing all my eggs in the GOP basket for the sake of SCOTUS is a voting strategy I want to follow in 2008 and beyond.
I don't know the answer, but I'm thinking out loud here. What do you social conservative readers think? To steal a phrase from Henri IV, "Are Roberts and Alito worth this mess?"
Bear with me, this is long, but I saw "World Trade Center" last week, and I want to say something.
A superstitious Catholic legend holds that on a day close to the End, every man, woman and child alive will be allowed to glimpse their own souls as they really are, without illusion, as a warning to repent while there’s still time. It might sound strange, but September 11 was like that for a lot of people. The closer you were to Ground Zero, the more those Twin Towers burned like terrible candles, shedding harsh light on who you really were – and maybe where you might yet be going.
This is something that “World Trade Center” gets absolutely right. As its two heroes, John McLaughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) lie buried alive under the rubble of the collapsed towers, they – and their wives at home – reflect on their lives, and come to understand who and what they really love, and what they wish they had done with their lives. And not only them: Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) walked off his job that day as an accountant, put on his old Marines uniform, and went down to the pile to help (and the real-life Dave Karnes, at 45, re-upped with the military and served two tours in Iraq).
The burning towers illuminated the souls of all the firemen, cops and rescue personnel who ran into them to pull people out – and men like Father Mychal Judge, the Catholic priest who died that day ministering to the fallen. They were all the kind of men who conquered their fear, shock and awe because they had a job to do. And it's not something they decided to do on a lark: the making of those men began long before the time of their testing. September 11 illuminated what was already inside. They didn't become on that morning the kind of men who would give their lives to run into the burning towers; they ran into those towers because long ago, they became the sort of men who would do that sort of thing. That's why they chose to be cops, firefighters, rescue personnel, a priest: the kind of people who run toward danger. All 9/11 did was show who they really were when put to the test.
It happened to me, in my own small way. I was a columnist for the New York Post that morning, and hustled from my waterfront apartment across the Brooklyn Bridge, notebook in hand, to cover the catastrophe. I made it as far as the Manhattan side of the bridge before I ran into a Post colleague. “Don’t go down there,” she said. “Those things are going to fall.”
“Oh come on, they’re not going to fall,” I said, genuinely disbelieving her. “That’s the World Trade Center.”
Moments later, down came the south tower. I staggered backward, and held on to her to keep my knees from buckling. I scrawled these words on my reporter’s notebook, which I still have: “the building isn’t there it’s gone.” A well-dressed woman grabbed the bridge railing and began dry-heaving. A short, stout black woman threw her arms up and her head back, bellowing, “And every knee shall bow and every tongue confess! It ain’t over people!”
And then I knew I had a choice to make.
The cloud of dust rampaged toward the bridge. I knew the cops would be closing it off to incoming foot traffic any moment. If I was going to cover the biggest story of my professional life – if I was going to be an eyewitness to history – I had better run toward the cloud. But then I thought about my wife and child behind me in Brooklyn. They had no way of knowing I was alive (I’d told Julie just before I rushed out the door, “I’m going to get as close as I can”). I had no way of knowing what was coming next. Would the other tower come down too? Would lower Manhattan go up in a fireball from gas explosions? What if there’s anarchy, and I can’t get back across the river to help my family?
What if I miss the story?
What if I leave Julie a widow and Matthew fatherless?
What if I mis
s my opportunity to be part of this?
What if my wife and son end up dead from whatever might come because I wasn’t there to protect them?
Me?
Or them?
I set my jaw, turned my back to the fire, and walked back across the bridge toward home.
For a long time, I felt ashamed. Journalists aren’t supposed to do what I did. I filed a story right away from home – one of the first accounts anywhere of the dramatic scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. But I felt I should have been down there with my colleagues, risking my life for the story. It as easy to say that in retrospect, given that the worst things I’d imagined didn’t come to pass. Still, going on the information I had, I chose my family over my career, knowing that I might regret that choice for the rest of my life.
In the end, I didn’t. I see now that it was hardly a choice at all. Every small decision I’d made leading up to that moment on the bridge made me the kind of man who would choose his family in this instance over his career. Please don't misunderstand: if I had chosen to keep running toward danger, I could have morally justified it, I think. Certainly the professional job I had to do that day was not remotely as important as what the firefighters and others had to do, or even what the straight-up news reporters for the Post had to do. I knew that as a columnist, I had my column already, just writing what I'd seen on the bridge, with all the people escaping on it. And yet, there is always going to be with me a tinge of regret over the road to Ground Zero that I refused to take. But had I taken it, I would have felt guilty today over having chosen to risk my life -- and the future of my wife and child -- with no serious moral obligation to have done so, only so I could write a Big Exciting Story. I had a choice that firefighters and cops -- and other kinds of journalists (e.g., war correspondents) don't.
In the end, though, learning on the bridge that morning what I would give up professionally for my family helped me make the decision to leave NYC and National Review to move to a place and a job and a lifestyle that more fit my family's needs. I'm not saying that my choice was more moral than others; I am saying, though, that all of us, whatever our vocation, will face a Bridge Moment at some point in our lives, when what (and who ... and Who) we really love will be made clear to us. The little choices we've made till that point will have made us the kind of men or women who will have the courage to do the right thing in that moment of testing.
Or not. Which is another way of saying: don't take anything for granted. It all goes into the making of your character, for better and for worse. Oh, and cherish firefighters and cops and soldiers, who every single day put your safety and mine over their family's. Cherish their wives and children too. And see "World Trade Center" to be reminded of what hundreds of men and their families gave that day.
Thanks you guys for e-mailing to see if everything was okay, given that I didn't blog yesterday. All is well. I was just extremely busy, and had to write an Ariel Sharon obituary editorial in case he died suddenly, as it was looking like he might yesterday. And Blogger was down this morning, so I couldn't blog for a while. Then Matthew dropped the wireless mouse, and ruined it. But I'm back. Hang on for a very long posting.
White House spokesman Tony Snow told the world that President Bush read Albert Camus' famous novel "The Stranger" on his current vacation. Maybe I'm oversensitive, but that's a really stupid thing to disclose, from a p.r. point of view. The action in that novel centers around a pointless murder of an Arab committed on a beach by an alienated Frenchman living in colonial Algeria. Just imagine what the Arab propagandists are going to do with this information.
My Melled-out reflections from today's Dallas Morning News about the lessons of fallen humanity and the power of grace I learned from reading Flannery O'Connor and living in a small Southern town.
From this NYT story today about the British terror suspects, a telling quote about one of them, Ibrahim Savant, who was born Oliver but converted to Islam:
“My cousin, who went with Ibrahim to the same class, said that he converted, because one day he went to a priest and asked him some questions that he wanted to be answered,” Hamza Ghafoor, 20, a Walthamstow resident and friend of Mr. Savant. “But the priest couldn’t give him any plausible answers,” Mr. Ghafoor added. “And so some of his friends told him to go to the mosque and ask the imam there. And he liked the way, how the imam answered him the questions. He was 18 years old when he converted.”
Compare this to material from "The Close," a memoir by the Rev. Chloe Breyer, a liberal Episcopal cleric, which I reviewed in Touchstone a few years back. Here's the relevant passage of my review:
Our Chloe decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don’t get it.
“They’re supposed to be experts, right?” says Tyrone. “So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don’t have any answers, then who does?”
Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. “See, this is what I’m telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don’t argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God.”
“Is that right?” asks Tyrone. “Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?” Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn’t have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.
“They want answers, not questions,” Breyer writes. “[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers.”
Smart cookies, those crooks, who intuitively grasp the worthlessness of Breyer’s baptized sophistries to their broken lives. Their critique is utterly lost on this earnest young woman, who does not know, or perhaps simply does not have the courage or conviction to say to these men, that Jesus is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
She reminds me of the faithless pastor in Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, who, when asked by a parishioner terrified of nuclear war for a reason to hope, had none to give him. The anguished parishioner commits suicide. The only consolation any of us might take from the education of Chloe Breyer is that her kind of Christianity is committing slow suicide—except that it is taking who knows how many souls down with it.
The Close natters on for a couple more chapters, but that is where it ended for me—appropriately, because though Breyer misses the point, her experience with the prisoners reveals where liberal Christianity ultimately ends up: not only impotent and ignored, but also in its irrelevance handing people over to false gospels and false gods. The poor, for whom Christ suffered and died, cannot afford the fashionable falsehoods proclaimed by the world’s Chloe Breyers. That’s why the poor want
little or nothing to do with that counterfeit faith.
Purely as a matter of sociology, I can see the appeal of Islam, especially by comparison to the degrading nihilism on offer in the West's public square. The upper and middle classes are shielded to a certain extent from life's hard realities by their wealth, but once their children get bored with the materialism and hedonism that have distracted them from the deeper questions of existence, what is there? What does secularism, or denatured Christianity have to say to them? The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan once wrote admiringly of the Islam he saw in Egypt. Whatever else might be said of the harsh religion, it did keep society ordered, together and continuing through hardship and grinding poverty. You can't deny its power.
This is not a brief for Islam, radical or otherwise. But it is important, I think, for all of us to think about the power of religion to answer those deep questions, and to channel human passions to good, or evil. Religion that makes no demands on you, that doesn't call you outside of yourself, that amounts to the self-worship of answers none of the deep questions, fears and hopes that every human being has. Christ bid those who would follow him to die to themselves, to take up their crosses and get on with it. He didn't add, "...if that works for you."
Andrew Sullivan is catching grief from a Muslim reader for having written a single sentence suggesting that there's something really messed up in the collective Muslim mind now, re: all this terrorism. If it makes Andrew feel any better, this very same sentiment was committed to print by a prominent and very brave Arab Muslim journalist in the wake of the Beslan massacre. Excerpt:
We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.
We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.
You can't help feeling sorry for innocent Muslims who must now live under mistrust and suspicion, and we are all obliged to treat people with fairness, and not to jump to conclusions. But I watched CNN all day, and there were lots of British Muslims on complaining about how unfair all this scrutiny is. This is absurd. We are talking about the willingness to commit mass murder here, and these guys are talking about how much it hurts their feelings that we're even mentioning "Islam" and "terrorism" in the same sentence. Madness.
Here in Texas, there's been a three-way competition for the Bush Presidential Library site between Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Baylor University in Waco, and the (private, Catholic) University of Dallas in suburban Irving. The real competition has been between SMU and Baylor. Most people have assumed that the library would go to SMU, because it's in Dallas, not Waco, and because First Lady Laura Bush is an SMU alumna. SMU's biggest problem, though -- and Baylor's biggest advantage -- has been land. Baylor has lots of it, and SMU doesn't.
SMU has been trying to buy up an old shopping center in town on the edge of campus to give it the land it needs for a presidential library footprint. The SMU campus paper got a major scoop today when it revealed that billionaire Dallas bidnessman Ray Hunt, who sits on the SMU board, donated $35 million to purchase the strip mall for SMU. According to depositions, the family of the elderly lady who owned the thing complained that SMU wouldn't quit harrassing her to sell the property.
If I were a betting man, I'd say that it's all over but the formal announcement. You don't have a rich Texan well-connected to the Bush family outrageously overpaying for a strategically-placed strip mall, without having some sort of guarantee that he didn't throw his money down a rathole. If you read the story, you'll see that SMU really really really didn't want this news to get out. But it's out now.
You may have noticed that the DHS has been broadcasting PSAs urging families to have disaster plans like those that they advocate for home fires, etc.--assigning a place to meet, carrying cell phones, etc. On AM radio they've been playing these pretty much in every commercial break.
Now I've just received a Harris Poll asking lots of information about my business--its size, its location, whether it's in a home office or an office building, how many employees, what city we're in, and which Zip Code, whether we have a contingency plan for a disaster, for an extended power blackout, for utility failures, etc.
All in all, and with this London thing, it just seems kind of like dark skies on the horizon, and distant thunder. Wonder what they know that they're not telling us!
Anybody heard anything? Those of you in journalism or law enforcement?
Is my correspondent in touch with his inner Art Bell? Or is he on to something? Me, I don't know one way or another, which is why I'm asking.
Here's Gerard Baker writing in the Times of London, about yesterday's events:
Events such as yesterday’s near-miss should remind us that September 11, 2001, gave birth to a radical and dangerous new world. It required the US — an imperfect country to be sure, but the only one with the power and the will to defend the basic freedoms we too easily take for granted — with its allies to remake the international system. It provided a terrifying harbinger of much larger atrocities to come, when terrorists and their state supporters get hold of weapons with which they can kill millions, not thousands. This new enemy is not like old enemies. It is fundamentalist and suicidal and apocalyptic. The old system, rooted in a liberal philosophy that relied on patient diplomacy and made a virtue of being slow to respond to attacks, was unequal to this new challenge. The new system required rapid action to open up the Middle East, the festering root of all these threats to modernity.
I will grant you that the Iraq war has been characterised, in conception and execution, by blunder after blunder. And it is certainly possible that, in their failures there, the US and Britain have made the world more unstable, not less. But we should not, in our frustration, confuse the real enemies here. We should not mistake the unlooked-for dangers caused by blunders and arrogance in Washington for the targeted threats posed by nihilism and hatred in much of the Middle East, and in some of our own cities.
Yesterday provided us with yet another glimpse of the awful reality of our long war and associated miseries. We must be very careful not to ascribe their creation to our own errors.
A friend e-mails this charming link to an insane left-wing robot who hates you, but wants to talk. Type in your line, and it gives you a 100 percent guaranteed Grade A Moonbat response. Here's an example:
Me: "Islamic extremists make me nervous. We should keep a close eye on them."
Autorantic Virtual Moonbat: "What do you mean, 'extremists'!!? When the fanatics say 'victory,' they really mean 'profits.' Snarl. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I am not in love with superstition!!? It's clear to me, the Republiklansmen stole the election by outing the voters in Arkansas, like Pope Benedict helped our Liar-in-Chief TO steal equality!!!!"
Try it yourself. What I need here is an Autorantic CC Blog Comboxer. It would go something like:
Me: "I'm not confident that the Pope is on point with his latest remarks about the Middle East."
Autorantic CC Blog Comboxer: "You hate the Catholic Church! Why do you always have to compare, however implicitly, the Pope unfavorably to Orthodox bishops?!?! Who appointed you, Mr. Media Elite?!?! Your 'God' is in your cable box, and it's run by Zionists who pretend to be conservative organic-eating uppity snoots, unlike us good ol' common folk. Cease-fire! Argle-bargle! Foofarah!"
The Lamont win was good for the Republicans, says Thomas Edsall in The New Republic Online (subscriber-only), because it shows that relatively well-off liberals drive the Dems' nominating process:
There is nothing wrong with upscale liberals or downscale renters; a vote is a vote. The problem for the Democrats is (and has been for more than a quarter century) that liberal elites are disproportionately powerful in primaries--where they turn out in much higher numbers--and in the operations of the party itself. In presidential campaigns, these voters have nominated a succession of losers, including George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. The power of this wing of the party is easy to see in battles against Republican Supreme Court nominees, when Democratic opposition concentrates on such issues as abortion and sexual privacy to the virtual exclusion of questions of business versus labor, tort law, and the power of the state to regulate corporate activity.
For the Democrats, the influence of the upscale left has increased the party's vulnerability to charges that it is weak on threats to the nation's security and that its candidates are far from mainstream on social issues.
As lousy as the Republicans are, the Democrats won't be back in the game until they produce some socially conservative populists. "Speaker Pelosi" is not a step in the right direction.
Still, I find it risible that Vice President Cheney is putting forth this line (from a teleconference he held yesterday):
And when we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that’s becoming the dominant view of the Democratic Party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won’t — we can’t be.
So we have to be actively engaged not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on a global basis if we’re going to succeed in prevailing in this long-term conflict.
Via The Corner, here's a key point from a Lorenzo Vidino essay on the risk Western societies run by trying to fight against violent Islamic extremism according to the pieties and platitudes of multiculturalism:
The Muslim Brotherhood's ample funds and organization have contributed to their success in Europe. But their acceptance into mainstream society and their unchallenged rise to power would not have been possible had European elites been more vigilant, valued substance over rhetoric, and understood the motivations of those financing and building these Islamist organizations. Why have Europeans been so naïve? Bassam Tibi, a German professor of Syrian descent and an expert on Islam in Europe, thinks that Europeans—and Germans in particular—fear the accusation of racism. Radicals in sheep's clothing have learned that they can silence almost everybody with the accusation of xenophobia. Any criticism of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations is followed by outcries of racism and anti-Muslim persecution. Journalists who are not frightened by these appellatives are swamped with baseless and unsuccessful but expensive lawsuits.
You know what? We have the Muslim Brotherhood in this country too (this lengthy Chicago Tribune piece on it is the best thing I've read yet). It goes by the name Muslim American Society (MAS). There are reportedly 53 chapters nationwide, with about 10,000 members. According to counterterrorism investigator Daveed Gartenstein-Ross -- whose must-read essay is here -- the top members are required to read foundational works of Muslim Brotherhood theoreticians Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb -- both of whom call on the violent imposition of Islamic rule worldwide. Read for yourself from Qutb's "Milestones" the kind of violent totalitarianism he advocates.
I have on my desk a flyer from a 2004 teen quiz competition here in Dallas, co-sponsored by MAS, in which they drilled Muslim teenagers at a local mosque on the finer points of Qutb's "Milestones," which calls for worldwide Islamic revolution and the suppression and eradication of all non-Muslim things. Kids they were indoctrinating with this garbage, at the big local mosque, the largest in Texas.
What is really going on? Does the public know? Does the public want to? More to the point: why won't the elites, who are in a position to investigate and publicize this kind of information, tell them?
(BTW, I saw "World Trade Center" last night, and intended to spend today blogging extensively on it. Very good movie, that one. It really shakes me up, though, to think about all that being replayed again in another form -- and how little progress we've made since then in understanding the enemy.)
Amy Welborn speaks to what's on the minds of a lot of us, Catholics and otherwise, about the state of our civil and religious leadership amid all this terrorism and rumors of terrorism. She's specifically critical of the Pope's recent pronouncements, not because she disagrees with his calls for peace, but because he seems to be ignoring a rather large elephant in the room: the specific nature of the threat -- that is, radical Islam and its agenda. Amy's son is on a plane from London today, which I'm guessing is the catalyst for her thoughts here. Nothing like your own loved one being thisclose to terrorism to focus one's thoughts and make the abstract concrete:
So, my son flew out of Heathrow today. And yes, according to flight tracking, his flight did, indeed take off, about 3 hours late, but it is in the air, passengers without a single piece of hand luggage on them, fingering their passports in plastic bags, looking anxiously around at their fellow passengers, wondering, "Would you do it? Would you kill me? And all of us?"
This, along with recent arrests and disappearances, and Islamic fundamentalism/radicalism/fascism fomenting violence, repression and war throughout the globe, with the parties responsible being not the desperate unwashed but often the educated and, it seems at first glance, thoroughly at home in the the countries they seek to destroy -- all of this means something. A clash of civilizations? Some say no, others say of course, what else could it be?
And in this, those of us who are Catholic - and even many who are not - look to our leaders for perspective. Not directions, not policy pronouncements, but insight as to a spiritual stance within this state of the world.
...I think it is that in [their] statements, there seems to be a sort of distance from the reality raging around us. There is no direct engagement with the fundamental issues: the commitment to cripple the West and impose the radical, fundamentalist Islamist ideal in its stead. A total contempt for freedom and the intrinsic value of human life. And the determination and will to do this, by any means necessary.
In which "peace" means something different to those instigating the war than those defending themselves, in which there is no desire for co-existence or dialogue.
Why is it so hard for our leaders -- and I include the media in this too -- to level with us about the Islamic question? To talk about it. I think they think if we just don't acknowledge what most people can plainly see, then maybe nobody will notice it. Well, guess what: people notice. And this refusal to talk about what is in front of our notices allows uninformed assumptions and prejudices to run amok. There should be great public pressure on Islamic leaders, mosques and Islamic institutions to root out whatever extremism exists among them. This is wartime. It is past time for Christian leaders to stop ignoring the ongoing persecution of Christians and other religious minorities in Muslim societies. It is wrong to be silent. It would certainly be wrong to accuse or to look upon all Muslims as being part of the problem, but surely more scrutiny is vital.
We know where the threat comes from. Why are we so silent about it? Why are we not putting the questions hard to Islamic leaders about what they allow to go on in their communities, and what they teach their children -- and expecting credible answers? Golda Meir famously said -- and I paraphrase -- that Israel will not commit suicide so that the world will think well of it. Well, I believe that Western elites -- religious, civil, media and academic -- would sooner have us all commit suicide-by-terrorist than abandon the multicultural platitudes that keep us from seeing the wor
ld as it is and doing something sensible about it rather than as they wish the world were.
U.S. MUSLIMS TO REACT TO ALLEGED AIRLINE TERROR PLOT
(WASHINGTON, DC, 8/10/06) - On Thursday, August 10, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will hold a noon news conference in Washington, D.C., to offer the Muslim community's reaction to an alleged plot to blow up passenger planes between Britain and the United States.
British officials say 21 people have been arrested after a months-long investigation. American authorities reacted to the arrests by raising the threat level for air transport to "red."
WHAT: CAIR to React to Alleged UK/US Airline Terror Plot WHEN: Thursday, August 10, Noon WHERE: CAIR's Capitol Hill Headquarters, 453 New Jersey Avenue S.E., Washington, D.C. CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-xxx-xxxx or 202-xxx-xxxx, E-Mail: xxx@cair-net.org
"The American Muslim community supports efforts to ensure the safety and security of the traveling public," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "We once again urge law enforcement authorities and elected officials to caution against stereotyping entire religious or ethnic groups based on the alleged actions of individuals."
CAIR, America's largest Muslim civil liberties group, has 32 offices, chapters and affiliates nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.
Just once I'd like to see CAIR react to one of these things without first (and only) "caution[ing] against stereotyping." You'd think from CAIR's response that the real danger in all of this Islamic terror mess was not the threat that radical Muslims will blow up 10 passenger planes over the Atlantic, but that someone, somewhere, might have an unpleasant thought about Islam.
Lots of conservatives are lamenting the Lieberman loss. What I want to know is, why was it a good thing for our side to advocate the candidacy of Rep. Pat Toomey in his primary effort to unseat the semi-conservative Sen. Arlen Specter -- after all, we conservatives said we wanted a senator who was more conservative than Specter -- but it's not a good thing for liberals to want someone more ideologically reliable from their point of view? I can understand conservatives who counted on Lieberman's hawkishness being disappointed in his loss, but I don't really buy the idea that Democratic primary voters did some crazy thing in choosing a standard-bearer who thinks more like they think.
Yesterday, in the blog about whether or not Iran has something big and atomic planned for August 22, I wondered in this space how much we don't know about Iran's nuclear capabilities. Last night I read a story in the current issue of The New Yorker about the A.Q. Khan network and its shadowy work helping Iran get all nuked up. Check out this quote from the piece:
A senior Bush Administration official who has studied Iran's contacts with Khan and his collaborators acknowledged, "There are just major things that we don't know."
Well, there you have it. As former Sen. Sam Nunn says in the same piece, “You can’t deter people who don’t mind dying, and don’t mind their families dying, and think they will become martyrs.”
(The NYer story, by Steve Coll, isn't available online, but this lengthy Q&A with him about the piece is, if you're interested.)
About that David Warren column that Stanley Kurtz references, it's an extremely important one. What Warren does is highlight the way the American media, by declining (consciously or not) to report on the violent, Jew-hating insanity that ordinary Arabs take in as part of their daily media diet, Americans have a false idea of the situation that the Israelis -- and really, we -- face. Excerpt:
Dr Condoleezza Rice is a "coloured dark skin black lady". Did you know? She is a "black spinster", a "raven who brings only destruction", according to Al Hayat Al Jadida, the official daily of the Palestinian Authority -- still under the direction of the "moderate" Fatah faction, controlled by Mahmoud Abbas. These descriptors are from news stories: you should see the editorials. According to the colour cartoon, Miss Rice is pregnant and has a monkey in her womb. The caption says, "Rice speaks about birth of new Middle East." A cartoon from a demonstrator's placard, also featured prominently in the paper, shows her not pregnant, but instead drinking the blood of Arab babies. In caption she says: "I need more blood."
And you thought Danish cartoonists were edgy.
So much for the "moderate" faction. "We will drink the blood of the Jews," proclaimed the Hamas website, well after its landslide election victory. (They forgot to say, "Zionists".) It was the headline over the farewell message from one of Hamas's suicide bombers:
"My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. ... In the name of Allah, we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you, purify the land of you, pigs that have defiled our country. This operation is revenge against the sons of monkeys and pigs." Et cetera.
Warren says that when he asks journalists in the West why they won't report these things, they reply, one way or another, that to do so would be too "inflammatory." Believe him. I've seen the same thing at work: journalists trying to protect radical Islamists and their fellow travelers from the consequences of their words and beliefs. Protecting these thugs, crazies and Islamofascists -- even when they live in the US -- from the judgment of the people. It's disgraceful, and if you don't think the media are giving you the whole story on Islamic extremism in this country and elsewhere, I congratulate you on your wisdom.
With the exception of his take on the Iraq War, I'm pretty much where self-described "Gloomy Hawk" Stanley Kurtz is. You really need to read his essay, which in my view makes it painfully clear that there's no difference anymore between pessimism and realism when it comes to dealing with the Middle East and the war on Islamic terrorism.
Kurtz's basic point is this:
Our Islamist enemy has proven himself implacable — unwilling to relent in the face of either dovish or hawkish policies. That means we’re facing years — maybe decades — of inconclusive, on/off (mostly on) hot war, unless and until a nuclear terror strike, a major case of nuclear blackmail, or a nuclear clash among Middle Eastern states ushers in a radical new phase.
Translation: these people are so far gone into irrationality that nothing works with them. Whether we're talking about Shia apocalypticism and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's work to prepare the way for the Mahdi and the end of the world, or the chronic dead-end of shame/honor culture, the Arab Muslim world appears stricken with a madness that makes any form of compromise or rational deliberation impossible. It comes down to religion: how do you come to terms with an enemy that is prepared to die rather than live in peace with you?
Kurtz again:
I am hawk because I believe that the danger of nuclear terror and nuclear blackmail remain real, and because I am convinced that negotiations from weakness, grand bargains, and unilateral retreats are powerless to defuse these threats. In short, I am a gloomy hawk because I believe that neither hawks nor doves have any viable near-term solutions to the problem we now face.
I agree with this, because I have no faith at all in appeasing Iran, but the Iraq experience (and Israel's in Lebanon) prove to me that war -- at least war as we're prepared to fight it -- isn't the answer either, and might even make things worse. There are no good choices.
Kurtz:
The depth of the Moslem world’s failure to adjust to modernity, the profundity of its need for scapegoats, the seeming boundlessness of its willingness to accept the death and destruction of its own in exchange for the “honor” of “revenge,” are difficult for Americans to acknowledge. Read “A Middle Way” (by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen) and you will see that the Western public is systematically sheltered from the sort of news that turns people into gloomy hawks.
He goes on to say that we in the West are all rapidly becoming Israelis, in the sense that our ability to militarily deter attacks from these crazies is diminished, and these crazies take every gesture of peace as a sign of weakness. Therefore, we, like Israel, are "locked in an essentially permanent struggle with a foe it is impossible either to placate, or to entirely destroy — a foe who demands our own destruction, and whose problems are so deep they would not be solved even by victory."
I wonder what kind of place we'd be in today if the Bush Administration had not launched this foolish war on Iraq in hopes of democratizing the Iraqis (and if you don't think that the Bushies believed that Iraq would naturally sort itself out, how do you explain the near-complete lack of planning for the occupation?). Truth is, probably only marginally, except for two big things: 1) Iran would have Saddam's Iraq to check it, and 2) we'd have a non-broken Army with which to fight the Iranians, if it came to that.
Whaddaya think about Lieberman's race? Me, I like Lieberman okay, and believe he's a thoroughly decent man. This Lamont sounds like a rich-guy airhead. But I have to admit I can't get all worked up over the prospect that Connecticut Democrats would prefer a Senator who was on the right side of the most important foreign policy issue since the end of the Cold War. If Lamont does win, though, I don't think it's remotely a bellwether for this fall, despite what we'll hear. Primaries always bring out the most partisan voters. Besides, that a majority of Democrats in a blue Northeastern state are willing to throw out their Iraq-War-loving centrist Democratic senator tells me jack squat about what voters in most of America are likely to do. Anyway, polls show Lieberman is likely to win the general election in Connecticut if he runs as an independent.
Besides, if Lieberman does lose his spot on the ballot as a Democrat, I will at least be glad that somebody is holding an American politician accountable for the Iraq War fiasco.
In her book, she writes: "What few will admit -- because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities -- is that whatever decision a woman makes [about whether to work or stay at home with the kids] she will lose something of incalculable value."
This is a controversial statement, Flanagan told me, "not because it is wrong, but because it is true." When it comes to matters of marriage and family, there are no easy and pain-free choices in today's world.
Not because it is wrong, but because it is true. You really can't have it all, you know. Tough for us modern Americans to accept about a lot of things, but it's the truth.
In today's Wall Street Journal (subscribers only edition), the eminent scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis warns the world to pay close attention to August 22. Excerpt:
There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers.
In Islam as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time -- Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined.
[President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the US about nuclear development by Aug. 22," which this year corresponds "to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1).
This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.
...A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or wwe will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."
I'm going to be in a training seminar till late afternoon, so light blogging for most of the day. I did want to say one thing, though.
I'm nearly 40 years old, which makes me part of the generation that was politically acculturated under Ronald Reagan. For as long back as I can remember, I resented the Boomers for their corrosive mistrust of institutions. These people make our country weak, I thought.
Now, though, I identify with them. I have found myself for some time incapable of trusting the Roman Catholic Church institution, because of the child sex abuse scandal. The two things that most undermined my trust: 1) when I said to an archbishop in 2002 that I didn't trust the bishops to take care of the scandal, and he replied that he didn't understand why, if I didn't trust the bishops' competence to handle the scandal, I remained in the Catholic Church; what was so undermining about that was that archbishop's apparent belief that the office of bishop was the substance of the Catholic faith; I thought, "If that's how he sees the faith -- as something defined primarily by blind trust in institutional competence -- then we are in much worse shape than I thought." And 2) when I thought my family had found a good, conservative parish where we could trust the priests, but we later discovered that one of the priests had been formally accused of sex abuse, and the pastor had concealed this from his bishop and most of the parishioners, putting the accused priest to work in violation of church rules.
Given what's happened in Iraq, I find it very, very difficult to trust the president or the political leadership of this country. I'm currently reading "Fiasco," which documents chapter-and-verse the deceit and cowardice from on high that got us into this damn war. I'll be blogging extensively on it when I'm done, but let me strongly encourage all of you to read it, especially if you, like me, supported this war because you believed what Bush, Rumsfeld and others said about it. Especially if you, like me, voted for George W. Bush. Reading that book is for me to feel all the trust that Reagan had built up in my generation collapsing under the weight of the outright arrogance and deceit of government officials. God help the poor Army, which is going to have to relive the post-Vietnam rebuilding all over again.
And let's not even mention the government incompetence regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. In fact, the very moment that turned me off Bush was "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
The point I wish to discuss here is not whether or not it's right or wrong to lose faith in the Church as an institution, or the US Government, or the military. What I'd like to know is if others are feeling the same way, and if so, what does that mean? What do we do about it? After I started digging into the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I concluded at some point that I would be depressed as hell if one of my boys went into the priesthood under this kind of leadership; I would support him in his calling, but I would be against it in my heart, and would fear for him and grieve for his suffering as he submitted himself to such rotten leadership. It occurred to me as well after reading "Cobra II" (and "Fiasco" is by far the more readable of the two books) that I'd feel the same way if my boys were old enough to enlist right now. I would be proud of their nobility, but I couldn't feel good about them serving their country under such leadership as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
I say these things as a conservative who never imagined he'd be in this place. How many others feel the same way? And what do we do about it? Society can't go on without faith in its institutions. What will it take to renew and rebuild
that faith? Are we wrong to have lost it in the first place? (Note well that I'm not talking about having lost faith in the idea of the Church, or the Military, or the Presidency; I'm talking about the institutions as they currently exist, under the present leadership.)
I think I'm turning into the same kind of acid skeptic as an old friend and professor of mine who served in Vietnam, and who came back despising the government. I used to think his skepticism-bordering-on-cynicism was an eccentricity; now I'm thinking it was hard-won wisdom. What do you think?
UPDATE: Out of one meeting, back into another here in a sec. I wanted to clarify that what I'm talking about is not coming to accept that Humans Are Flawed And Life Is Tragic. That's something all grown-ups do, or should do. I'm talking specifically about what happens when you, for good or bad reasons, have come to the conclusion that you cannot trust the leadership of a particular vital institution to do the right thing? I mean this particularly when the stakes are extremely high. It doesn't matter to me all that much that I've given up on expecting good service at my neighborhood drug store. The failure of that institution matters very, very little. It matters to me a lot more that it's hard to trust public schools in Dallas to do the right thing. It matters to me still more whether or not I can trust the news media to give me balanced, accurate and useful information, because I form my opinions based largely on what I learn through the various media. But when you get to the point of not being able to trust the Church or the Commander-in-Chief -- well, that's a very big deal indeed, at least to me as a father of boys. Guiding my reading of "Fiasco" is the thought: what if my sons were older, and were fighting under arms in Iraq now? How would I feel about what I'm reading? What if the stakes involved the lives of my children? Because they involve the lives of a lot of people's children -- and husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, and so forth. What if I came to believe as a soldier or the close relative of one that the military and civilian leadership of this country -- including Congress -- had sent me or my loved one to risk his life on pretenses they knew, or had every reason to know, were false. And had sent them into battle with an abysmal plan, because their own ideological blinders kept them from seeing what they didn't want to see, and listening to informed voices of dissent that tried to make them understand what we were getting into?
I don't see how we can get along as a society without fundamentally trusting key institutions like the Church (and not just the Roman Catholic Church), the Government and the Military. Of course we recognize that they are flawed institutions, and will always be, but there's a such thing as fundamental trust that, on balance, they'll do the right thing on the most important matters. What happens if you lose that?
On TCS Daily, the scholar Frederick Turner has some anthropological thoughts about the decline and fall of civilizations:
As a species whose major and unique specialization is language, we are meaning-seeking beings, and when the buck of meaning has been passed around the various contents of the world about us, it ends up usually in the plate of religion. One hypothesis about demographic collapse that might be worth checking out is that it happens when a nation loses its religion.
The proverbial Martian, visiting this planet, might well ask why almost every group of humans has some kind of elaborate, weird belief system involving spiritual beings, a big story or narrative about the world before they were born and the world after they die, and a code of behavior involving not only practical moral relations and behavior conducive to cooperation, but also utterly impractical injunctions, mystical practices, and duties to the dead and to other beings not present. The Martian might be astonished at the metabolic cost to the organism of making and maintaining such things as cathedrals and pyramids and priesthoods and sacred libraries and holy images and sacerdotal robes, and be scandalized at the ecological and economic costs of ritual sacrifice, taboos, and restrictive financial practices.
The Martian might well recognize our need and thirst for meaning, as a linguistic species, but might well ask why the human race had not adopted a sensible position like secular humanism or existentialism. In such views the meaning of things is rooted in human life or experience itself, where in Keats' words, "Life's self is nourish'd by its proper pith".
Only after a study of the evolutionary history of the species would the Martian come to the shocking realization that the reason such sensible, inexpensive and prudent views did not prevail across the globe was that every society that adopted them had died out from lack of natural increase. He would note that all the cultures of the present day that had taken the intelligent position on meaning were undergoing demographic collapse and would, in geological time, be extinct tomorrow.
There's an important cover story in last week's edition of the Dallas Observer, the alt-weekly here in Big D. It has to do with Ole Anthony, the director of the Trinity Foundation. If you know him at all, it's probably because of the work he and his team did with Prime Time Live in exposing (and ruining) the televangelist Robert Tilton. Or you might have read this deeply flattering profile of the man in the New Yorker. Anthony is the kind of man journalists love to love, because he attacks televangelists, for whom there is no love in media circles (nor, as far as I'm concerned, should there be). What's so fascinating about the Observer piece is the gritty, frightening details about the cult-like operation Anthony has been running, and how so many of us in the MSM have been quick to overlook bad signs because Ole has been on the side of the angels regarding televangelists. Even more disturbing to me as a journalist is evidence that much of the dirt Anthony and Prime Time dug up on the odious Tilton doesn't stand up to scrutiny. From the piece:
Tilton lost a libel suit against Anthony, Trinity and ABC; it's difficult for a public figure to win such a case. Though back on the air, he hasn't managed to rebuild his reputation or ministry to its former heights.
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