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Saturday, September 30, 2006
Daniel Larison's thoughts on Wal-Mart's ability to bring down the price of prescription drugs by squeezing suppliers brings to mind what may be the only Gerald Ford quote worth remembering: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything you have."
There's a passage in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War" juxtaposing Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's upbeat public speeches about the progress of the Vietnam War with the grim news he was privately delivering to the president at the time. I thought of that when I read this from Bob Woodward's front-page story in the Sunday WaPo: On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."
A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.
On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation. I wonder when it will sink in with most of us that we cannot trust this government to tell the truth about the war, much less to wage it? Do not fail to note this passage in the Woodward story, involving Gen. Abizaid, who is running the show in Iraq: This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."
So it turns out that the Speaker of the House knew months ago about that pervy Rep. Mark Foley coming on to an underage Congressional page, and apparently did nothing about it. I don't understand either why Rep. Rodney Alexander, the Louisiana Republican for whom the 16-year-old boy worked, didn't raise hell until this Foley freak had his hash settled. Well, yes, I understand it all too well; it's how big organizations work, and besides, to have made a big deal of this might have helped the Democrats, and we can't have that; better to be quiet about it for the greater good of the Cause -- it's expedient, after all). I think Rahm Emanuel is probably right: Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, questioned yesterday why Alexander had gone to the House Republicans' chief political operative, rather than to other party leaders. "That's to protect a member, not to protect a child," Emanuel said. And this from the WaPo story: Rich Galen, a Republican political strategist, worried that voters might lump Foley's name with former representatives Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), all of whom were forced to resign or were indicted amid various scandals this year.
"This sense of entitlement that members of Congress can do anything to anyone or for anyone has got to end," Galen said. I am sick to death of these people.
From "The Gulag Archipelago": If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committeing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: "Know thyself."
Contronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good. Solzhenitsyn goes on to mention the case of some Soviet officials who used holy icons for target practice. We prefer to think people so given over to evil can't exist, he says. The problem, the author continues, is how literature depicts classic evildoers: they are conscious at some level of their evil. In reality, though, the real evildoer has to be convinced that he's doing good, "or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with the natural law." Otherwise, the conscience will restrain the evildoer before his evil gets too out of hand. Shakespeare's evildoers, he cites as an example, stopped after a few corpses because they lacked ideology. Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory wihich helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquererors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Ideology, Solzhenitsyn writes, made the 20th century the century of mass murder on a previously inconceivable scale. He speaks of a rumor that during one period immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the secret police in Petrograd supposedly fed those condemned to death to the animals in the city zoos. Solzhenitsyn says he can't prove it was true, but how else would they have kept zoo animals alive during those famine years? "Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn't it expedient?"That is the precise line that the Shakesperean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
...Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.
Would somebody please point me to a source where I can get a straight answer on two issues related to this "torture"/"habeas corpus" bill we've been arguing about? Here's what I want to know: 1. What interrogation techniques will be allowed under this bill? Will waterboarding be allowed? (I've been going on and on about how it will be permitted in some instances, but to be honest, I'm now confused, and doubting that that's the case.) How much latitude does the president have to define which techniques are okay to use? I ask because it's fine to say that it bans "torture," but not if President Bush gets to define the meaning of torture. 2. Who loses his habeas corpus rights under this bill? If, as I believe SCOTUS declared, enemy combatants have statutory (as distinct from constitutional) rights to challenge their detention, will they still have them if this bill is signed into law? Will it be possible that someone will be thrown in jail indefinitely, with no opportunity to have his case reviewed, or to challenge evidence against him? The NYTimes editorial board says: "All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial." Is that true?
Friday, September 29, 2006
And now for something completely different: a wonderful essay by Eric Miller, who's quoted in the new chapter in the "Crunchy Cons" paperback (out next month), writing about the metaphysics of honeybees, and what the fate of the bees has to teach us about our own.
I got this advice to Ross Douthat too late for him to take advantage of it on his recent trip to Paris, but now that we're getting into the autumn, and all discerning and enlightened people's thoughts turn to cassoulet, I've got to tell you something. If you're in Paris, you will have one of the best meals of your life if you stop into a small, family-run restaurant in the St-Germain district, called La Table du Perigord. My crunchy-con Parisian pal Fred Gion, knowing of my devotion to cassoulet, took me there last December when I passed through Paris on business. It was one of the best meals of my life, and it didn't cost a fortune either. Good times, good times.
A Catholic friend who gave me a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" some months back writes today to chide me for not yet having read it: It is, you see, the single-most important treatise on the evil of torture - thanks to its stark description of the twisted mentality of it's administrators. It is written in the superior and passionate prose of a Christian intellectual who lived to tell.
(You can almost hear him spit on the ground as he recounts his gruesome story.)
For anyone interested in apologetics the book is indispensable. When one realizes the depravity that overtakes, possesses and eventually destroys the inner man, the reasons are self-evident as to why we should never allow such tactics to be used in the name of "justification" for the greater good.
The book is a fascinating study on human depravity and the corrupting influence of sadistic power given to little men.
I love our military guys as much as anyone, but the portrait of evil presented in that breathtaking book convinced me that we must never tempt anyone in our military with a likewise fate. To do so is to do them a grave disservice.
Put simply, human nature cannot be trusted to handle the power of evil. I know what I'll be reading soon.
Just got this from a friend with whom I can't recall ever having had a substantial disagreement, and who is a former military intelligence officer who was once married to a military interrogator: I have to say that I think your torture post is a little off. The problem folks seem to have in debating this issue is that there are actually two conflated issues involved. One, is torture permissible as an end; and, two, is torture permissible as a means to an end. Aside from the criminally insane, I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that torture as an end in and of itself is permissible, legally or morally – who in his right mind would argue otherwise?
The second issue, torture as a means to an end, is more difficult, and it’s what I think was actually debated by the administration and McCain et al. If the end sought is to prevent the loss of innocent life, then I have absolutely no problem with torture as a means to achieve that end. If we have a reasonable belief (and I stress reasonable) that some wack-job has information about an attack that is imminent, then I’m all in favor of using whatever methods necessary to extract that information – and I frankly think to do otherwise is to commit the much greater sin. But if the information isn’t perishable or of lesser intelligence value, then torture would not be appropriate (and probably wouldn’t be necessary in the first place, there are other better methods to gain information).
The NY Times and Andrew Sullivan have set up the first issue as a straw man. Implicit in their railing against torture is the belief that the administration and our interrogators are advocating the use of torture as an end (this is, I’m sure, deeply satisfying to those who feel that the Bush administration is evil personified). That is pure nonsense. The adult debate has been over what techniques (means) are permissible to acquire intelligence information (defined ends) under various circumstances. In this argument, the only people guilty of torture are Sullivan and the Times, guilty of torturing logic. I've got a bunch of page proofs to read right now, so I'm not going to be blogging for a while. Y'all discuss -- and please, don't get into name-calling. Let's talk about the actual issue, and not trash each other's motives.
I was out all morning, and see that there has been a lot of activity in the comboxes on my previous entry. I can't even look at it -- I have way, way too much to do here in the office this afternoon. I do want to say a couple more things on the topic, though. 1. I am familiar with the question, "But what if you believed the suspect had information that could stop another 9/11. Wouldn't it be morally right to torture then?" I suppose it's possible to come up with a particular situation in which it would be morally justifiable to resort to torture. I can think of plenty of situations far, far less weighty than "another 9/11" in which I would personally get medieval on someone to get information (e.g., a captured kidnapper of my child). If I were in such a situation, I would do what I thought I had to to save my kid, and throw myself on the mercy of the court, or take my punishment. I would think it dangerous for the law to sanction torture, by whatever euphemism we choose to call it. Anyway, if we operate on the principle that the good of the whole depends on seriously violating the moral law in specific instances, where do we draw the line? I keep going back to the Church scandal because as we know, so very, very much wrongdoing was overlooked, and that turning-a-blind-eye justified by those in a position to do something about it, on the principle that "the good of the Church" demanded it. I personally know of a case in which a priest used information obtained in the confessional to blackmail a married penitent into having a sexual affair with them. It only came to light when she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and told her husband everything. When they went with their lawyer and her psychologist to see the bishop, he told them that if she made this public, he would see to it that she was ruined. "I have the welfare of the people of God to think about," he told her. And I think that bishop, who retired with honor not so long ago, honestly believed what he said: that her suffering, and the injustice done to her, was nothing compared to the putative harm that would come to the Church if she told what had been done to her. Let me put this another way: I don't have grave reservations about the path this country is taking with regard to torture and the rights of terror suspects because I care so much about them. I believe and feel as I do precisely because in my heart, I don't give a damn about them, and would just as soon see them thrown to the sharks. I bet quite a few of my fellow Americans feel the same way. We can't let ourselves go there. 2. Today is my son Matthew's seventh birthday. I watched him bound into the school building this morning like a little puppy, carefree and full of life and joy. I was thinking driving away that if he has to go to war someday as a soldier of his country, I will grieve that my boy will have to maim and kill for the sake of his country's survival, but I will accept it and pray for his soul to be as unstained as possible, and his mind unshaken, by him doing his duty. But if I knew that a son of mine was standing over another man and waterboard him, or otherwise torture him, I would come close to losing my mind. Not a pleasant thing to ponder on the tollway.
I have not blogged about the torture bill till now, in part because I found its constitutent elements to be somewhat confusing, and I didn't quite know what to say. This morning, I see that it has now passed the Senate, and is headed to the president's desk to be signed into law. I realized this morning that something snapped in me last evening on my drive home, listening to the president on the radio defending this thing, saying (once again) that we -- meaning the government -- can't say that it's doing everything it can to keep the American people safe unless it has "the proper tools" to do the job. "The proper tools." I am sick of this euphemism, as if torture and all the rest of it were just part of a handyman's fix-it box. These words allow us to conceal from ourselves just what it is we do, and what is done in our name. I have serious concerns about what this legislation does to our Constitution. This New York Times editorial lists them as succinctly and as powerfully as I've seen anywhere. Given that the government will now have the power to hold and waterboard and otherwise torture indefinitely men who might be innocent, the idea that these men will have no right of habeas corpus is deeply worrying. But if you say something like that, you get accused of being soft on terrorism. Take, for example, what House Speaker Denny Hastert said last night when House Democrats voted against warrantless wiretaps: "For the second time in just two days, House Democrats have voted to protect the rights of terrorists." It's perfectly fair to criticize the Democrats for their position on this issue. What bothers me a very great deal is the corrupt and corrupting language the Right uses to criticize them. Oppose this bill, and you are for the terrorists. One is reminded of Orwell's observation: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement." Proper tools. Protect the rights of terrorists. You see? Or do you see
? This, via Andrew Sullivan, is what is now permitted. This is a waterboarding device, or as our Christian president would say, "a proper tool." How can Christians in good conscience support this? We allow ourselves to accept this kind of thing because we allow its proponents to obscure the difference between harsh interrogation -- I don't think anybody with a lick of sense expects terror suspects to be treated as gently as a guest on "Larry King Live" -- and torture. Others have written far more eloquently and intelligently than I can ever hope to about the legal and moral ramifications of all this. What weighs on my mind this morning is what accustoming ourselves to this sort of regime is doing to our individual and collective consciences. Here's what I mean. I hate terrorists, and I believe I have enough hatred for them in my heart to bless a policy that would throw them in a pit and, in Orwell's phrase, see to it that they have a jackboot on their faces forever. In fact, my hatred of these Islamist monsters is so raw, and so close to the surface -- it surfaced again this past 9/11 -- that I really can't allow myself to dwell on it for too long. And yet, being aware of what terrible things I am capable of doing, or having done, to these creatures -- I should say, these human beings -- makes me all the more afraid of what our government is up to. Of what the rest of us have effectively signed off on. I know how much evil I'm willing to see done to other men to appease my own fear and loathing of them. I know what's in my heart. It will always be in my heart -- and in yours too -- until the day I die. But it should not be sanctioned in the law. I don't think I can do nearly as well writing about the immorality of this as Mark Shea (see this, for a great example) and Andrew Sullivan -- now there's a pair you rarely see on the same side of any issue -- have done, so I don't dare try. But I think Mark really speaks prophetically here: Much has been said of the Rule of Integrity ["To do evil in order to accomplish good is really to do evil."] here, because it is the single most fiercely opposed Rule on the Right at present. It is called all sorts of names. But it remains true: you cannot do evil that good will come of it. If you try it, you will encounter the same Judgment as Judas Iscariot, who found that all the evil was his, and all the good that came of it was God's.
But in addition, there is also the Eschatological Rule ["The victory is assured; my job is to run out the clock in style."], which not a few frightened post-9/11 people seem to have completely forgotten. It is this: "What shall it profit you to win the war and lose your soul?" That, in the end, is what the torture debated comes down to.
The Rule of Realism [" "Remember that Satan is eager to corrupt my efforts to build up the Kingdom, and he's smart enough to figure out a way to do it." -- which is another way of enunciating the principle of Original Sin] is the principal defense we have against the pride that cocoons all fallen men from reality as they reflect on their goodness and compare themselves with the badness of their foes.
And the Petrine Rule ["Nobody ever built up the Church by tearing down the pope."] is about the handiest touchstone for day to day sanity. Recently, I ran across somebody on another board who was baffled over my puzzling inconsistency. He had some kind things to say about my theological scribbles (for which I thank him) and then shook his head, "That's why it breaks my heart to see those "torture" posts. If he's wrong about that, than what happens to his "credibility" on other matters?". It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that my remarks on torture are just as rooted in the Church's teaching as my remarks on everything else. Al
l I'm doing is repeating the teaching of the Church, accessible in any Catechism, as well is in conciliar and papal teaching, that torture is intrinsically immoral, gravely sinful, and so forth.
There are only two ways out of this. One of them is to just say the Church is wrong and torture is *not* gravely sinful, etc. This is usually achieved by saying that the Church is hopelessly unrealistic in not recognizing that "24" is exactly like real life, where "ticking bomb" scenarios are a daily fact of life. Another strategy is to say that human beings who are guilty, or suspected, or foreign, or named "Maher Arar" don't have basic human rights and so we can see to it they are tortured if we think it will keep us safe. All of these have the disadvantage, for the putative Catholic, of ascribing fundamental error to the Church's moral teaching by saying that something the Church declares intrinsically immoral is not really intrinsically immoral.
The other strategy is to endlessly quibble about what techniques constitutes "torture". The problem here is that, in my case, I have resolutely refused to play that game. My argument has been, whatever trained interrogators (which I am not) have hitherto deemed "torture" is not in sudden need of redefinition since 9/11. Attempts to redefine torture are simply attempts to call what is intrinsically immoral by a new euphemism so as to get away with it. As my longtime readers know, I have worn myself out and even wrecked my own Catholic faith by endlessly railing against the Catholic bishops for their own aiding and abetting of the great moral evil, of the kind that corrupted the entire church, of child sex abuse by some of the clergy. I don't believe, and never have believed, that the great majority of these bishops are any more or any less evil than me, than you, than anybody else. What they did is allow themselves to believe in their own goodness, and in the rightness of their mission, and in doing things that no Christian or even decent human being should do because they accepted, consciously or not, that The Good of The Church demanded it. And even to this day, I believe, they have not faced the full truth of what they sanctioned. Nor, in my view, has the broader church. We prefer to speak in euphemism. It's human nature. It's Original Sin. The point of bringing that up is not to start another argument about the Church and sex abuse. It is rather to say that I'm coming to understand this torture business in the same way. That a lot of good men and women who have the right intentions are signing off on things that we have no business signing off on, because We Mean Well, and anyway, there We Have Enemies, so let's keep the focus on them, and not on our own hearts and our own motives, and our own culpability before God. That's the road to Hell.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
A French philosopher is now living under police protection after having published a column in a mainstream newspaper protesting against Islamic bully-boy tactics. Here's my translation of a snippet of the Nouvel Observateur story linked in this item: In his column, titled "Facing Islamist intimidation, what must the free world do?", Robert Redeker affirmed notably that "hatred and violence live in the book by which any Moslem is educated, the Koran."
"Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites delegitimize violence," writes Robert Redeker, professor with the college of Pierre-Paul-Riquet at Saint-Orens de Gammeville, "Islam is a religion which, even in its holiest text, and some of its customary rites, exalts violence and hatred."
Concerning Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, the author affirms: "Exaltation of violence: chief of pitiless war, plunderer, mass-murderer of Jews and polygamous, that's the Mohammed revealed through the Koran." Is Redeker right? Is he wrong? We should be able to discuss it without fear that we'll have our throats cut in our own streets.
I'm trying to find a down side to Wal-Mart's plan to offer cheap prescription drugs, making them affordable to people who don't have health insurance, but I can't. This sounds like a great deal, and the company is to be commended for it. What am I missing, if anything?
It's getting worse by the day. + Moqtada al-Sadr, who needs killing, is losing control over segments of his Mahdi Army, who have become freelance death squads accountable to no one. + US military commanders are openly discussing the weakness, corruption and incompetence of the Iraqi government. + The highly-touted $75 million US project to build the Baghdad Police Academy has gone to hell. The building is such a mess that they might even have to tear parts of it down and start over. Poop and piss was raining down on some students from the ceiling. Who's to blame? A US company that got a $1 billion contract for Iraq reconstruction projects, and our friend the US Army Corps of Engineers, who look to have put as much oversight into this project as they did in building the levees that kept New Orleans safe from Katrina. Excerpt: "This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster." Gosh. I know! Let's talk about whether or not George Allen ever said "neener-neener" to lesbians when he was in college. The WaPo's David Ignatius agrees that Iraq is a mess, but takes the Democrats to task for ducking the debate over what to do about it, instead satisfying themselves by taking pleasure over Bush's misery: Here's a reality check for the Democrats: There is not a single government in the Middle East, with the possible exceptions of Iran and Syria, that favors a rapid U.S. pullout from Iraq. Why? The consensus in the region is that a retreat now would have disastrous consequences for America and its allies. Yet withdrawal is the Iraq strategy you hear from most congressional Democrats, whether they call it "strategic redeployment" or something else.
I wish Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter) were asking this question: How do we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state? Many critics of the war would argue that the worst has already happened -- Iraq has unraveled. Unfortunately, as bad as things are, they could get considerably worse. Following a rapid American pullout, Iraq could descend into a full-blown civil war, with Sunni-Shiite violence spreading throughout the region. In this chaos, oil supplies could be threatened, sending prices well above $100 a barrel. Turkey, Iran and Jordan would intervene to protect their interests. James Fallows titled his collection of prescient essays warning about the Iraq war "Blind Into Baghdad." We shouldn't compound the error by being "blind out of Baghdad," too. Jake Weisberg says that neither party will talk about the war, not only because each sees political advantage in avoiding the topic, but also because nobody has a clear idea what to do about it. Weisberg surveys the options for What To Do About Iraq, and says "neener-neener" to all of them.
At the University of Texas in Austin, there's only university housing for 20 percent of students. The rental housing market is insane there. Some students are dealing with the problem by living in co-op housing. It's not simply a matter of seeking more affordable housing. It's for community: “It’s not just that people are arriving on big, anonymous campuses, but the homes these kids are coming out of are more isolated,” Mr. Jones said. “One of the problems in American society today is that people don’t eat together anymore. It’s the whole bowling alone thing, and co-ops are one of the few places where people can really come together.” I graduated from college in 1989, so when I started this story, I thought, "Yeah, these co-ops are probably patchouli-reeking hippy havens, especially down in Austin." Newp. Times have changed: For anyone with a certain idea about the free-ranging spirit of American college life, the taste for bureaucracy and logistics among co-op members can seem staggering. “One of the things that amazed me when I came here,” said Alan Robinson, the general coordinator of College Houses, “was that so many students wanted to impose rules on themselves.”
In addition to a labor czar, each house has various managers and officers, committee and subcommittee delegates, as well as a representative who serves on the board of either College Houses or the Inter-Cooperative Council, the other umbrella organization through which the co-ops here function. In most houses, regular meetings are held to discuss paint colors, parking, guest policy, labor infractions and ways to market co-op life.
[snip]
Members can also decide whether the ornery or impertinent among them should be submitted for review. The choice of one condiment brand or another can prompt impassioned debate. Recently, at Pearl Street, there was much discussion over how to handle students who might use drugs. A few weeks ago one member called the police to report the smell of marijuana in a nearby room.
Such an act would have seemed unimaginable 30 years ago on the premises of Pearl Street, easily the most storied building on campus. Originally constructed as a women’s dormitory in 1961, the house, called Mayfair House then, was home to Farrah Fawcett in her undergraduate years. Later it was reinvented as a co-op known as the Ark, where in the late 60’s and the 70’s beer replaced soda in the vending machines. By the 80’s drug habits were so pervasive in the Ark that it was shut down in 1988 because of “anarchy and building destruction,” as the brochure for College Houses puts it.
French House, the co-op where Mr. Stovall lives, is in many ways emblematic of a new ethos in student communal living, one in which social hedonism, commitment to a vegetarian diet and a monolithic political view no longer hold as the predominant conventions. French House is also known as the carnivore’s house; meat is served every evening. Ten of its 20 residents attend the Hill Country Bible Church nearby every Sunday. Dating within the house is discouraged. “The stereotype is that we are hippies and drug addicts,” said Patrick King, an art student and one of Mr. Stovall’s housemates. “We are neither hippies nor drug addicts.” This is really great stuff. I hope that by the time Matthew is old enough for college, there'll be a crunchy con co-op at UT. Though he probably won't want anything to do with it. He's not a very crunchy kid. I was over at the doubleplus uncrunchy Virginia Postrel's place not long ago, and told her that my kid keeps going on and on about modernism, and modernist design, and how he wants to go to IKEA to look at the cool design, and how Jackson Pollock is his favorite artist and Frank Gehry is his f
avorite architect, and so forth. She good-naturedly cackled at my comeuppance. Who wouldn't?
One reason I love podcasting is that it gives me an opportunity to hear talk shows that I miss during the day. This morning, I heard most of an interesting exchange from the Diane Rehm show (download the podcast here, among a guy from the Family Research Council, a scholar from the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, and the head of the National Council of Churches. The topic? Religious voters this election season. It was a good discussion, though I didn't have time to hear the entire thing. One thing that annoyed me about the Rev. Bob Edgar, the NCC head, was his framing of the discussion. I know why he does it, but still, the spin is pretty irritating. He describes conservative Christians as the "far right," as if they were some sort of Christofascists. They can't simply be "conservatives" or "on the right;" no, it's the "far right," as if they were some fringe nut group on the margins of American religious life instead of well within the mainstream. In point of fact, the liberal churches that Rev. Edgar leads are less a part of the mainstream than the Evangelical conservatives (as the phrase goes, the mainline has been sidelined). Not, of course, that this has anything much to do with the rightness or wrongness of their positions on the issues. Still, the language is intended to manipulate, and obscure understanding rather than increase it. But have you noticed that the media won't even use the word "liberal," even when it applies? There are "conservative Democrats" but "moderate Republicans," for example. There are "moderate Muslims" but not "liberal Muslims." And so forth. More on the substance of the Diane Rehm show conversation later, after I've taken Matthew to school...
Did Saddam make Iraq what it is, or did Iraq make Saddam what he is. This may shed some light Excerpt: The [senior U.S. military] official said political parties who were plundering ministries were squandering chances to make progress that could reduce sectarian violence.
“I can tell you in every single ministry how they are using that ministry to fill the coffers of the political parties,” the official said. “They are doing that because that is exactly what Saddam Hussein did.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
There's good news on the German opera front -- a meeting of German Muslims and non-Muslim leaders came to agreement that whatever one thinks of that controversial opera, the show must go on. See, there is hope for agreement and conciliation, right? Right? Well, maybe, but don't be too quick to judge based on this conference and its happy ending. Buried at the bottom of the NYT story is this nugget: Mr. Schäuble, who oversees antiterrorism policy, warned Muslim leaders that they must abide by the German Constitution and the principles of a democratic society if they wanted to be included in the conference. Ah. In order to be admitted to the table, Muslims had to concede at the outset what the kind of Muslims members of liberal democratic societies worry about refuse to concede. So how representative can it possibly be? This reminds me of something an Arab Muslim told me at a Mideast conference in Dubai last year: "Islamists never get invited to these conferences. But you can't really understand what's going on in the Muslim world unless you talk to the Islamists" -- who are much more popular than we in the West prefer to think.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Now here's an interesting situation. Remember the big controversy not long ago over the pro-life pharmacists who didn't want to sell the so-called morning-after pill because it's potentially abortifacient? Remember how they said it would violate their conscience to sell the pill, and how a lot of people got up in arms over it? At the time, I thought they should have the right to refrain; this is a matter of life and death to them. Refusing to sell contraception? No. But this is perhaps the only medication in any pharmacy that when used as directed could cause the death of another human being, in their eyes. To grant them the right to abstain on conscience grounds was a reasonable accomodation, or so it seemed to me. Well, it seems that at least two Muslim shopkeepers in Brooklyn are refusing on religious grounds to sell alcohol. Excerpt: “The people who think about the money sell beer,” Mr. Saleh said. “The people who think about their religion more don’t do it.” In addition, he said, students from Middle School 51 across the street used to try to buy beer, and he preferred not to run the risk of getting into trouble for selling to minors.
Kassem Salem, the manager of the Salem Deli, offered similar reasons for filling his beer cooler with Perrier. “Beer’s a big seller,” he said, “but first of all you have to think of your religion.” I have to admit that I admire these guys for making a stand that costs them money, for the sake of honoring their religion. Though I would be deeply annoyed if I lived in their neighborhood and wanted to buy a six-pack. Do you see any kind of parallel in principle between these men refusing for reasons of conscience to sell beer, and the Christian pro-life pharmacists? What about the Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis who refuse to transport arriving airport passengers suspected of carrying alcohol? If they refuse a fare, the airport makes the cabbies go to the back of the line. That seems just to me. Declining to sell somebody alcohol is one thing, but refusing to give a ride to someone who has a bottle of Scotch from the duty-free? No. The reader who sent me the link takes a dim view of all of this, saying "Sharia law is slowly becoming a part of our daily lives as we acquiese to these demands."
A German state opera company has cancelled a performance of a Mozart opera out of fear that Muslims will react violently to a scene in which the severed head of Mohammed is onstage. Funny, the scene also features the severed heads of Christ, the Buddha and Poseidon, but nobody much worries about Christians, Buddhists or worshipers of Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters burning down the opera house or blowing up tenors and sopranos. OK, before we go where you know I'm going to go, let's stipulate one thing. This, from the NYT account of the controversy: The disputed scene is not part of Mozart’s opera, but was added by the director, Hans Neuenfels. In it, the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool.
“Idomeneo,” first performed in 1781, tells a mythical story of Poseidon, or Neptune, the god of the sea, who toys with men’s lives and demands spiteful sacrifice. This jackass Neuenfels was being deliberately provocative, and to what end? So many contemporary artists think nothing of defecating on the most deeply held religious beliefs of a very great number of people. In fact, it's seen as a mark of legitimacy in their circles. There is a nasty, spiteful part of me that takes pleasure in the squirming of these artists under such circumstances. I went to see Terrence McNally's blasphemous but ersatz and boring gay Jesus play "Corpus Christi" in NYC a few years ago, on assignment for the Weekly Standard, and saw hundreds of Christian protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the theater. McNally and his supporters thought they were being so brave. One wonders what they'd do if they had to worry about Christians being as demonstrative about blasphemy as they do about Muslims. A vicious little part of me likes to see them squirm. I have to confess this. But that sentiment is very wrong, and I reject it. As angry as we may get at the blasphemies of artists, we absolutely must object to this capitulation on the part of the Germans in the face of Islamofascism (yeah, I used the word: what is fascism as a tactic -- as distinct from a political philosophy -- if not using the threat of violence to suppress speech you don't like?). The right to free speech doesn't mean that speech will always be exercised wisely, or tastefully, and there are forms of speech -- child pornography, say -- that must not be exercised at all. The right to blaspheme, though, must be protected, for our own good. Hundreds of years ago, European Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and vice versa. The right to be able to speak your mind on religious and political questions was not won easily or quickly. If Europe keeps capitulating to Muslim sensibilities instead of standing up for Western free-speech principles, where will it end? In dhimmitude. What's next for Europe? Cancelling Western civilization itself?
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
John Derbyshire reviews a new book that examines the horrible practice of Europeans kidnapped and forced into African slavery by Muslim pirates. He concludes: This whole terrible episode in European history has been forgotten. Is there any chance we might persuade the Muslim nations of North Africa to erect modest monuments to the million or so European Christians who suffered and died as slaves of their ancestors? My guess would be: no chance at all.
In a welcome essay, Lee Harris notes that columnist Madeleine Bunting of The Guardian cited "papal stupidity" for provoking Muslims into acts of violence. Harris notes: "Papal stupidity" is strong language. But a few paragraphs before this harsh phrase, Madeleine Bunting has prepared us for it by arguing that "even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches...that reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honor of Mohammed." A Pope who did not know that "reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable" must, therefore, be guilty of egregious stupidity. Harris then proposes this thought experiment: Suppose that the eminent English biologist Richard Dawkins delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg in which he attacked supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design theory as "ignorant boobs" -- words that he has already applied in them in a written article. Now, let us imagine that Christian fundamentalists all over the United States, outraged by this inflammatory language, went on a violent rampage. Suppose that they lynched an elderly professor of biology, and attacked biology departments at several universities. Suppose that teachers of high school biology went about in fear of their lives, while many simply quit their jobs.
What kind of article would Madeleine Bunting write about such a hypothetical incident? Do you think she would violently condemn Richard Dawkins, writing something along the lines of:
"Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Creationists teaches...that reverence for the Biblical account of man's creation is non-negotiable. What unites all Christian fundamentalists is a passionate devotion and commitment to the inerrancy of the Holy Bible." I think we all know the answer to that question. Would you see any article like that in any American newspaper? Unthinkable. It should be unthinkable. And yet...
Iraq is in a civil war now that could embroil the entire Middle East in a general war. Afghanistan is going to hell. Iran is marching undeterred towards nuclear weaponry. The US Army is stuck in a quagmire that we can't fight successfully, and we can't withdraw from. Nobody in Washington seems to have the faintest clue what to do about any of this. Let's not even bring up the ongoing bankrupting of the country via deficit spending. But the US Senate race in Virginia will be decided on whether or not the frat-boy Republican incumbent used the n-word in college. What a country.
Some United Methodist leaders are demanding a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and are delivering their protest to the Methodist family in residence at the White House. There is a lot less to this than meets the eye. The G.W. Bush family's home church is Highland Park Methodist here in Dallas. I don't know enough to say that it qualifies as a conservative church, but I will say that many, many mainline Protestants here in Dallas are quite conservative. I grew up United Methodist in Louisiana, and if there's a single person in my family's church who voted for Al Gore or John Kerry, I'd be surprised. The leadership of the UMC is so far out of touch with a lot of Dallas (and Southern) Methodists that they (the leadership) hardly ever gets thought of. And that is certainly true of the president's Methodism.
This morning Matthew had a stupid six-year-old blow-up over his stupid glass of stupid apple juice. It was -- what's the word? -- stupid. Irritated the fire out of his mother and me. I told him he couldn't play on his trampoline after school today because of his outburst. So, I was driving him to school later, and as we always do, I was helping him say his morning prayers. At one point, he said, "Dear God, help me to understand that when mom and dad punish me, it's for my own good." I was really startled by the maturity of that petition, and after he finished praying, I asked him about it. He said, "Well, it's like in the Bible, when God said, I mean, God said through Solomon, in Proverbs, that a wise son takes correction well." I thought I was going to drive the car off the road. Did our Matthew say that? The same Matthew who cannot stand to admit error? Who barely ever showed evidence prior to this school year of taking his parents seriously when we talked about the Bible and moral instruction? Matthew's curriculum requires parents to read a designated chapter from the Bible to the kids every evening -- we just finished Proverbs -- and I was shocked that this stuff is taking. After I dropped him off, I called Julie to tell her. She said, "You know, don't you, that the chapter of the Bible that you read to him at night they read again in class the next day, and talk about it and pray?" I didn't realize that. I gotta say, I'm so grateful for this school (which we learned about when a fan of "Crunchy Cons" who sits on the board e-mailed to say that if we ever decided homeschooling wasn't for us, that we might take a look at this place -- which on second thought, I don't feel at liberty to name, out of privacy considerations -- where a lot of the moral, spiritual and educational values we esteem are institutionalized). What I'm learning from Matthew's experience there is the importance of "it takes a village to raise a child." That is, given Matthew's strong-willed temperament, Julie and I struggled to give him instruction, moral and otherwise; he just didn't want to hear a lot of it. But the disciplined environment of this school is working beautifully for him. He loves the school, and because the same things we teach him at home are taught to him at school, and because the other parents who send their kids there are completely on board with the spiritual and educational mission of the school, all this stuff is getting deeply into Matthew's bones. It's an incredible thing to see. This school is a good example of the kind of "little platoon," to use Burke's phrase, or perhaps even a secular monastery, as I like to think of it: a social grouping where like-minded people come together to support an institution where the light of faith and reason can be protected from the outside world, and children can learn in an atmosphere of serenity and order, moral and otherwise. What a gift this school has been to our family, and what a special gift Matthew's teacher is to this child who had been struggling in his homeschool setting, but who is thriving now, on every level.
"The Theocons" author Damon Linker now has a blog. He's got a couple of interesting posts up now. He puts up quotes from two opposing reviews: From The Washington Monthly: "[The Theocons is] exaggerated and alarmist . . . tendentious . . . . frequently cartoonish. . . . Again and again Linker lapses into the worst rhetorical excesses of the theocons he is trying to discredit."From The New York Times Book Review: "[Linker's] tone is admirably restrained, dispassionate and scholarly when it could easily have been rank and recriminatory. . . . In telling his tale, Linker scores some good points against his former bedfellows, without abandoning his dispassionate tone."My copy of the book only arrived last week, so I'm just getting started. So far, I'd say the tone is a lot more like what's described in the NYT review than the Washington Monthly review. But again, I'm only just getting started. In another post, Linker swats Prof. Robbie George of Princeton for a post on the First Things blog, characterized by Linker as laying ...out the case for why serious Catholics, or indeed any "citizen of faith who opposes the taking of innocent human life," must always, in all cases, vote for the Republican Party. For believers to do otherwise -- for them to "use their votes and influence to help bring the Democratic party into power" -- would be "unreasonable."
There's the theocon project in a nutshell. I think this is factually correct, but doesn't do justice to George's position. George really does believe that there is no moral issue more important than protecting innocent human life, both in the womb and, God help us, in the test tube. Given that the Democratic Party cannot be counted on ever to oppose the extermination of unborn life, or its exploitation in the laboratory, George's is an understandable and even honorable position (N.B., there's an exchange of letters in the current New York Review of Books between two pro-choice liberal professors, one of whom, Michael Sandel of Harvard, argues that if the Catholic teaching about the moral personhood of the unborn child is true, then protecting that unborn life is more important than the woman's right to choose). What I struggle with politically is that I think George is almost right. I too place a very high value on protecting innocent life, and given the cultural drift of the country into what Macintyre calls "emotivism" (a variation of moral relativism, defined in "After Virtue" as "the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character") and scientism as we make our way into the biotech century, it is vital to support political leaders who will put a check on our utopianism. That said, what are you supposed to do when Republicans are governing as catastrophically as they are today? I am sick and tired of this war, and the lies and deception that the administration used to get us into it, and the refusal of the GOP Congress to hold them to account. I sincerely fear for the country, on national security as well as fiscal grounds, if the GOP stays in power. I don't like the Democrats at all, but I can't see ratifying Republican rule under current conditions. I have always justified voting Republican in national elections, despite various misgivings, on the life issue. However lacking the Republican candidates, at least we pro-lifers have a shot at winning every now and again with the GOP in power, whereas all would be lost with the Dems running the show. But seriously, how much incompetence should the country be prepared to withstand
for the sake of voting for a putatively pro-life party? Breaking the army? What?
Well, look, if you haven't read Joan Didion's essay on Dick Cheney, do so at your earliest convenience. It's a perfectly modulated collection of facts, quotes and analysis that at the end, makes you wonder what the hell is happening to this country. Take this characteristic passage, which illuminates so very much about Cheney's stewardship of the nation. Emphases are mine: If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate. This was dishonest, a repeated misrepresentation, in the interests of claiming power, so bald and so systematic that the only instinctive response (Did too!) was that of the schoolyard. By June 2004, before the debate with Edwards, Cheney had in fact begun edging away from the Prague story, not exactly disclaiming it but characterizing it as still unproven, as in, on a Cincinnati TV station, "That's true. We do not have proof that there was such a connection." It would be two years later, March 2006, before he found it prudent to issue a less equivocal, although still shifty, version. "We had one report early on from another intelligence service that suggested that the lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia," he told Tony Snow on Fox News. "And that reporting waxed and waned where the degree of confidence in it, and so forth, has been pretty well knocked down at this stage, that that meeting ever took place. So we've never made the case, or argued the case, that somehow [Saddam Hussein] was directly involved in 9/11. That evidence has never been forthcoming." The Didion piece is so strong in part because of her tone. She's typically cool, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. She demonstrates that Cheney has a dangerously exalted view of the executive branch power, and that he has a demonstrable history of not taking responsibility for his own mistakes. Which explains so much about this administration. But you know, the part that outraged me didn't even have much to do with Cheney. Check this out: In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company," according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."
This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun. When David Kennedy spoke at Stanford about the vacuum in political accountability that could result from waging a war while a majority of Americans went on "wi
th their own affairs unbloodied and undistracted," he was talking only about the absence of a draft. He was not talking about the ultimate step, the temptation to wage the war itself to further private ends, or "business opportunities," or other priorities. Nor was he talking about the intermediate step, which was to replace the manpower no longer available by draft by contracting out "logistical" support to the private sector, in other words by privatizing the waging of the war. This step, now so well known as to be a plot point on Law and Order (civilian contract employees in Iraq fall out among themselves; a death ensues; Sam Waterston sorts it out), had already been taken. There are now, split among more than 150 private firms, thousands of such contracts outstanding. Halliburton alone had by July 2004 contracts worth $11,431,000,000. Got that? Allbaugh left government service to cash in on his connections to profit from a war THAT HADN'T EVEN BEGUN YET! This is beneath contempt. Just beneath contempt. When the backlash to what this bunch has done to this country, to its military, to its honor, and least of all the conservative movement, begins, it is going to be terrible indeed.
Monday, September 25, 2006
Sorry for the light blogging today. I'm way, way behind on a million things. I'll be online in the early evening, opining like a drunken sailor. Or something.
With Iraq going to hell, Joe Klein takes a look at the Virginia Senate race and asks, "Who cares if George Allen's mother is Jewish?" Hear, hear. Apparently, from what I read over the weekend, Allen handled the Jewish issue when it arose worse than I had thought. But still, good grief, is this really worth all the fuss, considering? Charles Krauthammer has a good column today talking about the issue in terms relatively lighthearted and poignant. Here's the relatively lighthearted bit, focused on what the columnist calls Krauthammer's Law: Everyone you know is Jewish. He explains: For all its tongue-in-cheek irony, Krauthammer's Law works because when I say "everyone," I don't mean everyone you know personally. Depending on the history and ethnicity of your neighborhood and social circles, there may be no one you know who is Jewish. But if "everyone" means anyone that you've heard of in public life, the law works for two reasons. Ever since the Jews were allowed out of the ghetto and into European society at the dawning of the Enlightenment, they have peopled the arts and sciences, politics, and history in astonishing disproportion to their numbers.
There are 13 million Jews in the world, one-fifth of 1 percent of the world's population. Yet 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, a staggering hundredfold surplus of renown and genius. This is similarly true for a myriad of other "everyones" -- the household names in music, literature, mathematics, physics, finance, industry, design, comedy, film and, as the doors opened, even politics. For the poignant part, read to see what George Allen's tormented mother told him after she revealed his Jewish heritage. I have never understood anti-Semitism -- not because I'm especially enlightened or virtuous, but only because, at the risk of sounding weirdly patronizing, I've never understood why anybody (OK, anybody who's not a Palestinian) has a problem with the Jews. If the Jewish people had never existed, it is impossible to imagine how impoverished the world's art, literature, science and culture would be. Hell, we'd probably all be living in Branson, from sea to shining sea.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
That was Donald Rumsfeld's response -- you could look it up -- back in 2003, when reports emerged from newly-liberated Baghdad that looters were sacking the city's art museum. Now, as Frank Rich notes in his Times column today (behind the firewall, so I won't link), it's plain that the indifference the US showed to that looting was a sign of things to come. In recent days, the Iraqi Christian who ran the museum fled the country for his life; the new man in charge is a dentist by trade, and a fundamentalist Shiite close to Moqtada al-Sadr. Who wants to be the country's antiquities from its pre-Islamic past -- those that remain, that is -- will be safe in the tender hands of this guy? As Rich points out, the US has spent all this blood and treasure to empower Islamic fundamentalists. But hey, stuff happens. I heard a Diane Rehm show interview via podcast yesterday with Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief early in the war. He said his reporting showed that when the Americans allowed the looting of Baghdad, that was when the effort to secure the country and put it on solid footing was lost. Had the Americans refused to let that go on, they would have shown the Iraqis -- all of them, not just the looters -- that order would be maintained. They didn't, and so lost an immense amount of respect. And here we are today. How bad is it in Iraq? David Brooks writes an astonishing column -- "astonishing" for reasons I'll get to in a minute -- in today's Times (and yes, it's behind the firewall, so I won't link), reporting on new independent survey research done among Iraqis. Here's the gist: What’s true of children is true of adults, and in Iraq we now have a case study in human insecurity. The people of Iraq have endured decades of dictatorship, war, insurgency and civil strife, and the psychological costs have been ruinous. Iraq is the most xenophobic, sexist and reactionary society on earth.
Researchers from the invaluable World Values Survey have interviewed over 2,300 adults from all over Iraq. The results have just been published by Ronald Inglehart, Mansoor Moaddel and Mark Tessler in the journal Perspectives on Politics.
Inglehart, Moaddel and Tessler describe a people who, buffeted by violence, have withdrawn into mere survival mode. They are suspicious of outsiders and intolerant toward weak groups, and they cling fiercely to what is familiar and traditional. This didn't start with the US invasion -- Saddam's dictatorship destroyed much of Iraqi civil society -- so it's hard to know how much of this to blame on the US, and how much on Saddam. The invasion and the way we handled its aftermath certainly didn't help things. To read the Brooks column is to see how utterly far gone Iraq today is. I have no idea how on earth we can salvage a decent outcome now. People are absolutely terrified, and as Brooks said, they are reacting like human beings do in such a situation of anarchic violence. There are two things I found astonishing in the Brooks column. One, Brooks said the US was surprised to learn how religious Iraqi society had become under Saddam; the Iraqi exiles who had Bush's ear hadn't prepared him for that. Oh? Throughout the modern Arab world, the religious sphere has long been the only place where dissent from authoritarian governments was allowed. Of course the Iraqis would have become more religious. So would we have done under similar circumstances. And the men who planned to overthrow the regime and remake Iraqi society didn't understand this? Or they didn't realize that Iraqi religion was not the same as suburban American Evangelicalism? The mind boggles. Second ... well, here's Brooks: The larger lesson, as we think about future efforts to reform the Middle East and combat extremism, is that the Chinese model probably
works best. That is, it’s best to champion economic reform before political reform.
We know from a wealth of historical experience that when people see their standard of living rise, they reject the reactionary survival mentality and they become more open to others and to change. If people already see their lives improving materially, they will be more likely to keep their cool as their political institutions are reinvented.
In the age of terror, statesmanship means knowing how to create a sense of security so you can lead people on a voyage of reform. Most of all, it means that if you’re going to do nation-building, you have to understand the values of the people you’re going to build a nation with. You just want to bang your head on your desk. How many times do we Americans have to learn this lesson? Rich says that we are no different in Iraq than the naive Americans portrayed in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," who just happily assumed that the rest of the world is just like us. We overthrew a country and had no idea what we were getting into. There were conservative voices who said wait, stop, you can't do this, it'll be a disaster, their culture is not our culture. But not enough people listened (once again, I plead guilty to this). For whatever motive -- and there were several -- we preferred to believe that those who were pessimistic about imposing universalist Western values on an ancient, tribal and fiercely religious Middle Eastern country were cynics, even, as Laura Bush said, racists. And now look at where our idealism has got us. Oh, and by the way? A new top-secret authoritative intelligence assessment by the US Government finds that the Iraq War -- for all the dead and maimed, and all the hundreds of billions poured down a rathole -- has made America less safe from terrorism. Stuff happens.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
In a combox below, a reader quotes from Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings": "...without love of words or things … degraded and filthy … dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong." And the reader adds: "This is J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of the brutal speech of the Orcs of Mordor, slaves of Sauron, puppets of his will, vandals defiling the beautiful and noble monuments of Gondor (The Lord of the Rings, one-volume edition, p. 1108 )." A discussion that touched on the utter degradation of rap music lyrics brought this quote to the reader's mind. I couldn't possibly agree more. The cure? Bach. Billie Holliday. Ella Fitzgerald. Willie Nelson. Mozart. Diana Krall. Al Green. Faure. Marvin Gaye. Frank Sinatra. Mel Torme. Louis Armstrong. And on and on ... no end of musical beauty in this world. But do we even want beauty anymore?
Here's a fantastic essay by Mick Hume, editor of the online British magazine Spiked and an atheist, about why the Benedict controversy matters to us all. Excerpt: I am not a Catholic, a Christian, or of any other religious persuasion. For its part, spiked advocates a godless, human-centred morality. We do not care too much what the Pope says about anything. However, the globalised agonising over the Pope’s words does reflect a broader problem of our time.
The heated row has focused on the Pope’s use of a quotation from a medieval text, in which a Byzantine Emperor besieged by an Islamic army described the legacy of Mohammad as ‘evil and inhuman’. No doubt there are interesting theological issues raised here. And the bigger point that the Pope’s speech was making, about the relationship between religion and reason (arguably more of an attack on atheists like me than on Muslims), could keep unemployed philosophers busy for hours.
But the furore is not about any rarefied points of theology or philosophy. It is a reflection of the wider political culture in which we all live today.
This bizarre ruckus over the words of a medieval monarch has turned into a revealing picture of the modern world. A world in which nobody, not even the leader of a major faith, is allowed to express a strong opinion without risking condemnation and demands for an apology. A world dominated by a victim mentality, in which groups with hyper-sensitive ‘outrage antennae’ are always on the lookout for the chance to claim that they have been offended, insulted or oppressed by the words of others. And a world where striking moral poses takes precedence over serious debate, so that a minor issue of a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper or a paragraph in an obscure Papal address can be blown up into a phoney image war staged for the benefit of the global media.
[snip]
Those of faith should be free to criticise other faiths as they see fit – just as those of us who have no religion must be free to criticise or ridicule them all. If the Pope had meant to condemn Islam, it might not have been diplomatically wise, but it would be perfectly legitimate – or even obligatory – for the leader of a worldwide Christian church. However distasteful others might find it, it should also be accepted that Muslims or Christians can express the belief that homosexuality is a sin (violence is, of course, another matter entirely).
Indeed it is far better for all of us if these things can be stated and debated out in the open. It is when people’s beliefs are suppressed that they can find other outlets. Thus, the you-can’t-say-that culture has not countered the growth of the fundamentalist fringe in our societies. On the contrary, it has given fringe groups legitimacy. With the Pope under fire for being a Catholic, for example, where is there left for true believers to go? To join Mel Gibson and the cranks?
I was thinking about the lively thread below in which I called a geeky seminarian "Star Wars"-themed video "pathetic," and was joined by some, but a majority of posters thought the thing was good harmless fun. (N.B., I didn't think it was harmful, exactly, just insufferably dorky, and immature for men studying to be priests). Anyway, it occurred to me today that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love Roberto Benigni, and those who would stick hatpins in their ears and eyes if they were stuck on a desert island with him. I am definitely a hatpin guy, which might explain my intense negative reaction to the seminarian video. How about you? Where do you come down on Benigni? Actually I love humor, but I strongly prefer ironic, verbal humor. The broad, in-your-face physical slapstick of a Benigni sours me in a trice. He reminds me of a dog, all spastic and eager to please. Maybe there's a reason I prefer cats...
This will only matter to a tiny slice of the CC readership, but I'm thrilled to be able to report news from Baylor: Francis Beckwith has been granted tenure on appeal! Great news, just great news. (For background on the Beckwith affair, start here.)
I spent the lunch hour today with a friend whose husband is a fairly new teacher at a suburban public high school near Dallas. I asked her how "John," as I'll call him, was doing in the new school. The report was really depressing. She said he's coming home from school every day completely stressed out. John says he's not teaching, he's babysitting. The school serves a relatively impoverished population, mostly minority (about half the kids in school are Hispanic, with about a quarter African-American, the rest white and Asian). John says the lack of discipline and respect for authority among the kids is staggering. He says parents by and large don't care to involve themselves in their kids' education. "John said, 'What am I supposed to do with a kid who won't do his homework, and whose mother won't call me back when I try to get her in for a conference, or even just to talk on the phone?' said my friend. He has to spend at least half his classtime on discipline, which makes him feel guilty for not giving the proper attention to the good kids who really do want to learn. The thing that really gets John down, said my friend, is what he calls "the ghetto mentality." I asked her to define that. She said, "This mentality that says, 'I'm a victim of society,' and that I can get self-respect by refusing to do anything I'm supposed to do." She said her husband has come to despise rap music as being a key factor in socializing the kids to these profane, violent, anti-authority and anti-social attitudes. He also despairs over how sexualized the girls in his school are, even down to the 7th and 8th grade. "They're like Bratz dolls," my friend said. I told her that in the media, we often think that if we just threw more money at the schools, they'd be better. "Well," she said, "all I can tell you is that at John's school, they have a lot of new equipment, a lot of digital things, real state-of-the-art stuff. But what good does it do when the kids come to the classroom determined to disrupt everything, and come out of families who don't care about instilling respect for education and for authority?" "Does John have support from his principal?" I asked. "Yes, and that's one good thing," she said. "The administration is excellent. But again, what can you do when the parents don't care?" And get this, she told me that there is an explicit understanding at this school that you do not fail anybody, no matter how poorly their work. Why? My friend says nobody has yet told John, but the understanding seems to be that the school could risk losing state funding if the truth were known about how badly so many of these kids were doing. "At least he's not like my friend [N.]," she said, "who's teaching English at [huge Dallas public school], and has to figure out what to do with a whole bunch of kids in her classes who cannot read or write a single word -- and she's got no support from her principal, who just wants to process these kids through." I told my friend that both liberals and conservatives used and abused the education issue for their own ends. Conservatives are forever cracking on bad teachers and incompetent administrators, and the bureaucracies that protect them. Liberals are always cracking on the supposed lack of money in the classroom. What you will never see is a politician blaming the parents for not holding up their end of the bargain. There are no votes to be had in saying, "Look, people, at what you're doing to your children." Don't read me as saying that all public schools are bad (I am the product of public schooling, all the way through a state university), but I do mean that the things we ask public schools to do are unreasonable. A teacher friend told me not long ago that the family situations so many of her students come out of are so broken and messed-up that she considers it a triumph if they just get to school in the morning. And she teaches at a good public school. She said she struggles to
get basic concepts across to her students in large part because they have nobody at home to reinforce what they learn at school, that school is important, that learning matters, that self-discipline is key -- nothing. And the TV is on all the time. And yet, when American kids fail to learn, we blame the teachers. Look, I know there are plenty of bad teachers and lousy administrators and corrupt educrats, and I know that American education is besotted with pedagogical craziness. But you could not pay me enough to be a teacher today and put up with the kind of thing John is dealing with. It would discourage me to no end (and I didn't even tell you about the insults he has to put up with, from kids). I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would have more faith in the public schools if I had more faith in the public.
The invaluable Diogenes at the Catholic World News blog, in assessing the US Catholic Bishops' corporate response to Pope Benedict coming under attack by Islamic nutters and their craven allies in the secular media, reminds us once again of the uselessness of what the stout-hearted and clear-sighted Bishop Bruskewitz once deemed "this hapless bench of bishops." You get the idea from their response that the bishops are ashamed of the Holy Father.
In a thread below, we've gotten to talking about how it's not enough to shield your kids from the bad stuff in the culture, you also have to expose them to, and culture them in, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. A regular poster who goes by the name Lutheran Reader made this comment: One thing I like to think about is how, in this time when unimaginable rivers of garbage and filth flow freely, we also have a time in which people like me with below-average incomes _can_ borrow or even buy reproductions of great music and art, etc. I'm sure it's better to see a Samuel Palmer etching in a museum than in a book if you have the choice, but at least you can savor the reproduction. What a good and necessary point to make. I'm a cultural pessimist, so it's all too easy to give in to the gloom afoot. But as LR points out, we have options today for combatting the Kultursmog that previous generations didn't. My dear friend Fr. Joe Wilson of Queens is quick to lament the haplessness and cluelessness of the contemporary American Catholic church, of which he is a faithful priest, but he is also quick to point out how a vast library of Church teaching, Christian thought and philosophy is available at a reasonable cost, via Amazon.com and other online retailers. A parishioner suffering through the AmChurch Kultursmog at a desultory parish could have sent to his doorstep in a matter of days volumes that even scholars only a short time ago would have suffered almost anything to hold in their hands. Similarly, sitting here at my home computer, I could click onto iTunes and in a matter of minutes, download and burn onto a CD a vast array of the best music ever written in the West. That's amazing. That's really, really amazing. And we increasingly have the freedom to homeschool, and form voluntary associations that make it possible to preserve, as best we can, the "permanent things" for ourselves and our children. And the Internet makes it possible for us to "meet" each other, and network, and stay in touch. Yes, the times are bad in many ways, but we are far from bereft of resources. Thanks, LR, for reminding us.
TMatt picks up on reports that the three Catholics executed in Indonesia were denied the Sacraments before being shot -- in violation of Indonesian law (which appears to be in the process of being redefined to "whatever Muslims say it is"). This is not being covered in the US media, as far as TMatt can see. Which prompts his tart point: However, try to imagine the MSM coverage — outraged coverage that would be completely valid, by the way — if a Western government denied Muslim prisoners an essential element of their faith in the hours before their executions.
We often feel that we wait in vain for moderate Muslims to speak against the haters without equivocation. Well, Salim Mansur does, and God bless him for it.
Julie Lyons' piece is amazing not only because it appeared on the website of an alt-weekly, but because it breaks a taboo that needs breaking. The public discussion about homosexuality has become so stilted and false. On one side, you have people -- usually Christians -- who speak with complete certainty about the lives of homosexuals, their "choice" to be gay, and how healing awaits them if they'd only come to Jesus. On the other, you gays and their allies who will not tolerate any divergence from the party line that everything is always and everywhere perfect in gay lives, and that any questioning is a sign of the foulest bigotry, to be denounced and vilified without quarter. Left in the vast middle, I believe, are people like Julie Lyons -- whether or not they personally struggle with same-sex attraction. Speaking for myself, I have and have had gay friends who are saner and better adjusted than most straights I know; it is only an ideologue who could look at these men and women and see utter brokenness and despair. It's just not there. But I have also had gay friends who are sex-addicted messes in a way that the straights I know just ... aren't. And broadly speaking, there is something about gay male culture, with its deification of desire, that I find deeply disordered. You can't read books like Randy Shilts' "And The Band Played On," which in part chronicled the refusal of San Francisco's gay male community to close the bathhouses despite the raging AIDS epidemic, without having profound questions of the spirit behind much of this stuff. And yet, even though I do believe in the traditional Christian/Biblical teaching on homosexuality, when I hear some Christians pronouncing so authoritatively about the matter, and what is to be done, I cringe, and wonder, "Do you even know any gay people?" Given the fiercely clashing ideologies, to read someone like Julie Lyons come forward and talk about the complicated realities of struggling with not only same-sex attraction, but sexuality in general -- well, it's liberating. (So has been the work of my friend David Morrison, a chaste orthodox Catholic and former gay activist who does not respect the political correctness of the right or the left in his writing about same-sex attraction.) And to be perfectly frank, though I believe she got to a good point (by the grace of God and her own openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit), if she had become a lesbian, I still would have been grateful for her testimony in this piece. What she does here is talk about a real life, about the refusal to accept easy answers and false solutions for her brokenness. I suspect there are very few heterosexuals who haven't struggled to master their own sexual brokenness, especially in a culture that instructs you to accept it and indulge it as "who you are" -- as if our true and complete identity was determined by our sexual desires. I believe that there is a "right ordering" of our sexual desires, and that all of us are required to struggle to achieve it, all the days of our life. It is never easy, certainly not in a culture like ours, for reasons already stated. But the difficulty of the struggle doesn't relieve us from the obligation to embrace it, and to show mercy to our fellow strugglers, but not at the sacrifice of living in truth. Of course we argue over what it means to "live in truth" about sex and sexuality, but look, can't we stand down a bit and try to see what the other side is saying, and just ... listen, with an open mind, putting aside the compulsion to demonize, instead seeking to understand, even if we are unlikely to agree? I see the whole public conversation about homosexuality as being like the one we have on the Iraq war: on vast segments of the Right, to express any doubts about this administration, its case for war, its conduct of the war, etc., is to show yourself to be the worst kind of
traitor to the Glorious Cause. And on the Left, to express any doubts about the dogma that Bush is Chimpy McHitler, and undertook this war from the basest of motives, etc., is to be the worst kind of traitor to the Glorious Cause. I'm awfully tired of Glorious Causes, especially when they render the difficult and complicated truths of lived human experience into politically and emotionally useful abstractions. Anyway, I first learned about the Lyons essay on FrontBurner, the snarky, must-read blog of D, the Dallas city magazine. There was some expected commentary about how Lyons must be a self-hating closet case, and so forth, but I really liked what the magazine's publisher, Wick Allison, a conservative who is very comfortable with and friendly to gays (you'd have to be to go to his parish) had to say in response: All I've read so far on FB, pardon me for saying so, is a bunch of secular media people unable to fathom the depth and complexity of a woman's Christian faith. Perhaps it is impossible to grasp unless one has faced the demons she speaks of, not just about one's sexuality, but about alcoholism or drug addiction or personal corruption or the scores of other ills that afflict the human soul. As she notes, opinions about the "causes" of homosexuality are a dime a dozen. She's talking about something more important than that. I admire her honesty in making such a heartfelt witness--which, like most witness, is made to an uncomprehending world. Amen and amen.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Julie Lyons is the editor of the Dallas Observer, the local alt-weekly. She is also an Evangelical Christian. I had no idea. She writes this column for the Observer's blog Unfair Park (a local pun) called "Bible Girl." Last week, in a negative review of gay activist pastor Mel White's latest book, she wrote the following jaw-dropping words -- jaw-dropping, because they come from someone who works in the alternative press: But in my profession and in my sphere—the alternative press—gay marriage is pretty much a non-issue. Anyone who opposes it—in other words, someone who holds an alternative view–is considered a bigot, a hater and a homophobe. Yeah, I know: irony and all that. But we in the alternative press are pretty good at failing to detect the uniformity of our nonconformity. And in the face of that, I’m just gonna have to risk all of those nasty labels and carve out my own middle ground.
I believe my parents’ generation was wrong to advance the idea that men and women are interchangeable parts. I reject the Daddy-optional family plan—the degrading and diminution of men, of women, of sex–so prevalent today.
I don’t believe it was a biological accident that, in marriage to a member of the opposite gender, we’re forced to embrace the Other. It isn’t easy for most of us; it’s incredibly uncomfortable at times. But it causes us to wrench ourselves away just a little bit from the stinking self-absorption of this age.
God designed it that way, and it’s a good thing for our kids—a life-affirming thing. It affirms the value of their lives, above and beyond our own.
Now do you get this? Marriage is sacred to me. Leave it alone.
There is one last point that constitutes my middle ground. In the alternative press I work and have worked with many outstanding gay and lesbian colleagues. This is my passionate belief as well: They have a right to live and work and prosper in this country.
I will not be found guilty of treating their convictions with contempt.
I ask the same for mine. Wow. That's exactly how I feel, and the situation in the mainstream press is just about as uniform as in the alt-press on this issue. But wait, this week Julie -- who is married with kids -- comes back with a stunner of a Bible Girl column, in which she discusses her own struggles with same-sex attraction, and how her faith helped her deal with it. Love her or hate her for it, it's fearless stuff. And considering how conformist media circles are, even as they congratulate themselves on their freethinking ways, admirably courageous.
A Jewish reader -- I point that out only to indicate that this conservative sensibility I keep talking about is by no means limited to Christians -- who is the father of a small child writes: I share your sentiments 100 %; I suspect Noah probably shook his head and muttered “screw ‘em” as he sailed off. The desire to escape from all this lunacy is strong in our household as well, but, as you say, you can’t escape it. And it’s not like the popular ethos is passive, it will hunt you down if you do try to escape (unless you become a complete hermit out in the middle of nowhere, which, I confess, I would seriously consider if I was still single). The thing that gets me the maddest is every time I read of some person or group who tries to carve out a little island of moral normalcy for themselves. Does the popular culture leave them be? Of course not, it becomes a call to trot out the ACLU and all the so-called do-gooders to stamp out the poor misguided fools who dare question the values of the secular elites. You can’t escape even if you want to. Bastards. As Neil Postman has written, in the age of electronic media, childhood ceases to exist in the traditional sense (as a time of relative innocence) because there's no way to control the information environment. Small towns used to be a refuge from the craziness, but now the same conformity that used to make them bulwarks against moral innovation now serve to accelerate it, thanks to the electronic media. It's not true, as many conservatives suppose, that the news and entertainment media tell you what to think. No, they drive the culture by setting the boundaries for our conversation. This is one reason why conservative talk radio took off like a shot: the things that tens of millions of conservatives care about, and their opinions about them, have long been effectively shut out of the mainstream media, except when they've been demonized. The situation is a lot better today, but those of us old enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh first hit it big will recall what an absolute blast of free speech and fresh air he was in the stifling media landscape. Anyway, when the moral and cultural agenda is set by cable TV and the Internet piped into houses everywhere, there is no escape from it, unless you find some way to withdraw. Unless you find some community wherever you live where people refuse and resist the popular culture, and raise their kids to do the same -- and that's a lot harder to do, it seems to me, in a small town. That's been my experience as someone who was raised in a small town, and who has lived in big cities all his adult life. In Matthew's Christian school, the kids are not allowed to talk about pop culture. That's a blanket rule. The school doesn't require that they stay away from it outside of school, but it does set that rule to help support parents who are trying to raise their children counterculturally. I tell you, it's a godsend. Matthew is a big Harry Potter fan, but he can't talk about that at school. While I might personally draw the line more liberally, I'm grateful to the school for its blanket policy. From what we can tell, other parents there feel pretty much like we do about protecting their kids from the pervasive and predatory popular culture, and that makes Julie and me feel more confident about the environment in which we're raising him. The so-called "real world" will demand Matthew's attention soon enough. What we hope to do is to shield him as much as possible from the sex, the violence, the crudity and the hard-sell of that world as his conscience is being formed, and he's developing defenses against the lies of the world. I want him to learn how to breathe clean air before he has to breathe the Kultursmog.
A friend faxed me this morning the four letters published in the current issue of First Things that were critical of Gilbert Meilaender's review of "Crunchy Cons." There's no link to those letters yet, but I want to thank letter-writers Mignon Sass, Paige Hochschild, Marc Rogers and Rachel Stone for their generous comments about the book. I'll reproduce Ms. Hochschild's letter here (because it looks like the shortest of the lot, and therefore the quickest to type in on this busy morning) to give you an idea of what the letters say. Gilbert Meilaender's main criticism of Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" is that the author is a snob, or at least a mere aesthete. Let Dreher have his Birkenstocks, his organic homegrown vegetables, and his meat purchased from the farm down the road: Burger King, baseball, and New Balance sneakers are the hallmark of the real heartland conservative. But while Meilaneder, while reluctantly praising the book, engages in a disingenous misrepresentation fo tis real content. It's not about "sorrel soup" vs. the Whopper.
Dreher points the reader to E.F. Schumacher's central reflection that the economics of the West, as much as in the East of old, is "built on philosophically materialist assumptions." Any debate among conservatives about economics must begin by acknowledging that man is not a purely economic being.
This seems to be the assumption within the political discourse of libertarian Republicanism. To a Christian, pro-life, "organic-food," homeschooling mother, whose family is happily but barely able to get by, Dreher is one of several voices (including Russell Kirk, Christopher Lasch, and Wendell Berry) that critique Republican conservatism from within a more authentically conservative tradition. Thsi publication deserves to give a book like Dreher's a fairer consideration. The agrarian argument may be irritating, but it speaks to the heart of a new conservative generation.
Paige Hochschild
Emmitsburg, Maryland Well, okay, indulge me here -- a couple of grafs from Marc Rogers's letter: Dreher is trying to get conservatives and Christians to focus not just on sexual morality and immorality but also on virtue more broadly and deeply understood. To focus not just on the sin of lust but also on the sins of greed, envy, and pride, which are equally deadly to the soul. In this he is surely being faithful to the word of God, which contains more teaching on the blessing, use, and abuse of material possessions than anything else. Dreher is also being faithful to Our Lord, who by choosing to be born in the way he was among the people he was, who by the people he chose as his friends and the people he chose as his enemies, who by the people he lifted up (the widow with the two mites) and the people he confronted (the rich young ruler, the moneychangers in the Temple), showed that our relationship with wealth and the world is determinative in our relationship with him.
The choices we make about money and liefstyle are not, as Meilaneder would have it, just a matter of likes and dislikes. In a biblical worldview everything -- agriculture, food, city planning, politics -- falls under the lordship of Christ.
In Genoa, the city is dying for want of children. The only people having kids there these days are immigrants. Young people have resolutely chosen to have either no children, or only one child. Some claim that it's too expensive to raise kids, but that's a crock, given what generations of their (our) ancestors endured in terms of material privation, yet still had families. Here is a quote from the Times story that has the force of a prophecy: In the Fiumara Mall, the rare mother pushing a stroller is generally speaking a foreign language. “In Italy, they don’t have children,” said Flor Ribera, a 42-year-old house cleaner from Ecuador, who plans to enroll her two children in middle school next year. “They have dogs and cats.”
Caught an interview on "Fresh Air" last night with Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey who resigned after it was revealed that he put his gay lover on the state payroll (as Homeland Security adviser, even though he had no relevant experience). McGreevey and his wife are divorcing, of course, and he's now trying to sell a tell-all book about his life in the closet. I have to say that listening to that creep last night on the radio was quite an experience. The nauseating part was not so much his sex life -- though the part about how he had his first tryst with his lover while his wife Dina was in the hospital recovering after having just given birth to their child was pretty revolting -- but how he couched his public confessions -- his "honesty" -- as somehow noble, something that should be affirmed. Understand, I would be just as appalled if he were straight. The fact is he was a sleazy politician who cheated on his wife, put his lover on the payroll, and by his own admission engaged in dangerous anonymous sexual encounters that could have exposed his wife to HIV. The guy is a dirtbag by any stretch. But now he's selling a book and trying to repair his reputation by blaming, in large part, the Closet (in other words, It's Society's Fault). This must be a continuation of the p.r. strategy McGreevey followed at the time, trying to make himself into a gay-rights hero to deflect the plain truth about his corruption. If he had any decency or self-respect, he would disappear from public life and live the rest of his days trying to rebuild his reputation and make restitution to those he betrayed. But our celebrity class -- be they drunks, adulterers, drug addicts, what have you -- don't do that anymore. They admit their mistakes and somehow think that their "honesty" should grant them the public's absolution. But ours is a confessional culture, and this is the ritual through which all fallen celebrities -- and maybe all people, I dunno -- make it right. By taking "responsibility" for your sins and failings, but paying no price for them (politicians do this all the time; when's the last time you heard a pol claim responsibility for something bad that happened on his watch, but then do no penance? That's all we require, though: words that show that you mean well.) McGreevey ought to be deeply ashamed of his actions. But what is shame anymore, except a mere public relations problem? Maybe I'm a troglodyte about this stuff, but if I had abused my wife and the public's trust in that appalling fashion, I would be too ashamed to do anything but go away and try my best to make amends.
Today is Friday, the official Islamic "Day of Rage" called for by televangelist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to protest Pope Benedict's intimation that maybe Islam has a leeetle bit of trouble dealing with reason -- a suggestion that as we have seen since, is totally and completely and doubleplus without any grounds whatsoever. Ahem. Anyway, contemplating the Day of Rage, and praying that no Christians get martyred nor churches burned down (Nigerian Muslims appear to have gotten a headstart on the festivities, torching an Anglican cathedral because a Christian woman reportedly insulted Mohammed), I am reminded of what my mother told me one Mother's Day. I, a smart-aleck kid, asked her when was Children's Day. She said, "Every day is Children's Day." Ahem.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
I'm sorry, but this is pathetic. Is this what seminarians spend their time doing, making goobery "Star Wars" home movies? Is this how you prepare to be a spiritual father? Maturity? Hello, anybody home?
In a small e-mail group I'm involved in, we started talking last night about the new Sony kids movie "Open Season." One of our number is a film critic, and got an advance preview. She said the thing was so filled with juvenile crassness (farts, snot, poop, the whole megillah) -- all meant for kids -- that it didn't so much outrage her as leave her overwhelmingly sad. Tainted, even. She told us that she thought for the first time in a while that she wishes she could just pick up and move somewhere else to get away from the pervasive crappiness of our popular culture. But she knows there's really no escaping it. Boy, is that ever a familiar feeling. I find it hard to work up much outrage over this or that aspect of pop culture anymore. It's just a constant low-grade depression, like a hangover headache you can't ever get rid of. It's like the whole culture lives under fluorescent light. Like there's a pervasive Kultursmog everywhere (the term originated with R. Emmett Tyrrell, as far as I can tell). This is what we're raising our kids in. My kid Matthew likes to read the comics. Right next to the comics runs the daily "Dear Abby" column. Julie and I have to cut it out and throw it away most days before we can let our 6-year-old read the freakin' comics. Sure enough, one day earlier this week there was a headline that went something like, "Hubby wants public sex, but wife unsure." Right next to the comics page. Kultursmog.In New Hampshire, a high school cancels a dance because the kids won't stop dry-humping each other on the dance floor. Don't expect the parents to back the administrator, though. According to the report: "But some students and parents don't see it that way. They say that like the jitterbug and disco before it, grinding is just a sign of the times." Only a moral idiot sees no difference between the jitterbug and dry-humping. Parents as corruptors of their children and the community's morals. What can you do but shrug? That's Kultursmog. An entertainment writer friend predicts that within a year or two, this will be everywhere, and the only places administrators will be able to stop this is in Christian schools. I'm so glad for my son's Christian school. "But we can't withdraw, we have to engage the culture!" an Evangelical friend said to me today. Yeah, sometimes. But I tell you, I'm glad that Noah didn't decide to stick around and engage the culture when the rain got heavy, and instead climbed aboard his ark and pulled up the gangplank.
For the first time ever, Forbes' magazine's list of the 400 Richest People in America is an all-billionaire club. And it's interesting to note that, as ABC just reported, self-made billionaires like Sergey Brin of Google dwarf in riches families like the Rockefellers, who inherited it. That's some progress, yes? Yes? Anybody? One does wonder how long America will put up with this concentration of wealth at the top. James Kurth, writing in The American Conservative, says there's no end in sight. For one thing, we're in a postindustrial economy, which makes it more difficult to organize workers.: Second, there has also been a change in the economic self-identification of the general population. The way people define themselves is different in a consumer society, with a total focus upon individual self-gratification, than it is in a producer society, with an emphasis on the social consequences and connections of one’s work. It is obviously much more difficult to politically organize masses of people if they all think of themselves as individual consumers or as expressive individualists, each freely choosing his own unique (even if vapid and banal) lifestyle, than to organize masses of people who think of themselves as members of working classes or local communities, who share in common most of the important conditions of their lives.
Third, and a variation on the consumer mentality, there has been a change in the non-working or leisure activities—the preoccupations and not just the occupations—of much of the population. For many Americans today, especially those in what was once the working class, there is indeed a kind of mass activity, but it is not mass political or social activism. Rather, it involves spectator entertainment, especially sports. For them, there is no participation in anything involving real interaction with other human beings, be it political parties, labor unions, community associations, fraternal societies, or, if they have become adults, even in participatory team sports themselves. It is the poorer classes, in contrast to the richer ones, that spend most of their free time with spectator entertainment. As more and more people become poor or poorer and lose any reasonable hope of improving their economic status, either by their own economic efforts or by anything like political activism, it is not surprising that they would seek to fill their bleak hours and vent their sullen frustrations with escapist (and violent) entertainment. What would have been seen as juvenile and abnormal preoccupations in the society of half a century or more ago have become normal ones in the society of our own time.
The same three shifts that have essentially demolished the social-movement constraint on growing inequality in America have also gone far toward doing so in other Western countries as well and even in Japan. All of these have now followed America far along the path of becoming information economies, consumer societies, and spectator cultures. Bread and circuses.
What a weird story this latest George Allen flap is. First he gets his back rared up when a reporter asks him if he has Jewish heritage in his background (which I agree is a weird question; why on earth is it relevant?), then, after his campaign implied that raising the issue of his Jewish heritage was an attempt to smear him in a Southern state, Allen, a Christian, turned around and embraced his Jewish roots. All of which raises an obvious question: Who the freak cares?It is a sign of progress, though, that this issue seems like such a non-issue. You could probably stuff all the people in the state of Virginia who wouldn't vote for George Allen because he had Jewish ancestry into three Volkswagens. These days, the most conservative Christians -- Evangelicals -- are also the most philosemitic. I suppose this flap might give us insight into Allen's character if it turns out that he knew about his heritage and tried to downplay it; when John Kerry and Wesley Clark found out they had Jewish blood in their background, they embraced it, and paid no political price for it. If Allen is uncomfortable with his own ethnic Jewishness, I'd say that says more about him than about any political reality he has to deal with. The more interesting question to me is: which religions are still far enough on the outside that it's an issue for voters, in general. Islam is obviously one, given the world situation now. Hinduism and Buddhism? Iffy. What about Mormonism? Mitt Romney's a Mormon. Wouldn't affect my decision to vote for him -- I'd rather vote for a Mormon who agreed with me on key policy issues than an orthodox Christian of any sort who didn't -- but I think his Mormonism will be a significant issue in his presidential campaign. America being America, and supercontroversial religions like Islam or Scientology excepted, the only surefire political liability a major candidate would have to face related to religion is ... not having one.
The three Christian men have been shot by a firing squad. I don't think it would be right to describe them as martyrs in the strict sense. They were not tried for being Christians, but for allegedly leading Christians committing acts of violence against Muslims. They said they were innocent; maybe they were, maybe they weren't. But we won't know because this trial was a crock, as independent human rights watchers have long said. But I think in a broader sense, this is why they are are martyrs to the march of jihad. If not from pressure from the militant Muslim majority in Indonesia, these men likely would have received a fair trial. And Muslims would have received equal treatment for their role in the violence. But as ABC News reports, "Only a handful of Muslims were convicted in the violence, all for 15 years in prison or less." One of these days, probably long after everyone reading this is dead, this war will be over, and someone will compile a version of the "Black Book of Communism" for the jihad wars. The names of these three men -- Fabianus Tibo, Marianus Riwu and Dominggus Silva -- will be in it. Meanwhile, you should be reading Bat Ye'or.
You've got to have Times $elect to read the column, but David Brooks has some sobering thoughts on this past week. He says, for one, that the international system is plainly broken, that while the Americans screw up, the Europeans live in their escapist fantasy land, and the Russians and Chinese indulge in greed, the nastiest people in the world are driving events. Given my interests, I was most struck by this point of Brooks's: The third lesson [of the week] is that a huge gap is emerging between the way ordinary Americans see the ARab world and the way members of the political, media and intellectual elites see it.
Elite debate is restrained by a series of enlightened attitudes that amount to a code of political correctness: be tolerant of cultural differences, seek to understand the responses of people who feel oppressed, don't judge groups, never criticized somebody else's religion. Brooks correctly notes that masses of ordinary people reject that head-in-the-sand mentality. "These millions of Americans believe the pope has nothing to apologize for," he writes. What these Americans see is fanatical violence, a rampant culture of victimology and grievance, a tendency by many Arabs to blame anyone other than themselves for the problems they create. These Americans don't believe they should lower their standards of tolerable behavior merely for the sake of multicultural politeness, and they are growing ever more disgusted with commentators and leaders who are totally divorced from the reality they see on TV every night. I suspect this is a guess on Brooks's part more than anything based on data, but I'd bet my wallet that he's right -- and I certainly hope he's right. If the American people are waiting on the news media to tell them what's really going on in the Muslim world, and to help them interpret events, they will remain ignorant. If people really are growing angry and mistrustful of the media and the politicians on this point, I can only congratulate them on their powers of observation and rationality. Seriously, there's not much more than depresses me about my profession than the p.c. rules we follow on reporting and commenting on Islamic matters. Without a doubt the emotional reaction I feel is driven in part by the personal trauma of 9/11, and seeing where Islamic extremism ends up. In the spring of 2003, I paid a visit to an Islamic bookstore a couple of doors down from the Al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, which was an al-Qaeda recruiting center in the 1990s. This was a year and a half after 9/11, and still I found books urging Muslims -- literally -- to hate Jews and Christians. One in particular advised Muslims to limit contact with Jews and Christians "because you might come to love them." I feel a sense of personal urgency about all this when I see things like the Toronto cell of homegrown terrorists. How much of this Saudi junk is being taught at local mosques around the country, radicalizing young people? I honestly don't know. I don't think anybody does, really. But what makes me so angry, as I keep saying, is the willful incuriosity of my profession on this point. The thing too is that among the people hurt by this p.c. approach are the Muslims whose mosques don't welcome Salafism, and who in fact are considered apostates and suchlike by the Salafis. They're brought under suspicion by many in the public too, because the media doesn't try to investigate what's happening, and draw distinctions. I was talking last week to someone here who said he thought that all mosques were teaching this garbage. I told him he didn't know that, and neither did I. We just don't know a lot. And how else are we going to find out if the media don't get in there and find out and tell us? I'll spare you the sermon. You know where I'm going with this. Just believe me when I tell you that Davi
d Brooks is right, and that the media elite cannot be trusted to be honest and thorough in this matter. And we in the media are going to have a lot to answer for one of these days.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Benedict had even more clarifications of his Islam statement today. He really needs to stop doing this. He's said what he's said, and at this point, it's not going to help, only make him look weak. The Muslims who haven't yet been satisfied by his multiple semi-apologies are never going to be satisfied. Lawrence Auster thinks the Pope has pretty much blown it now. Excerpt: [T]he pope's statement is filled with so many respectful noises toward Islam, including his expression of "my profound respect for the great religions, and in particular for the Moslems, who 'adore the one God,' and with whom we are engaged in 'defending and promoting together, for all men, social justice, moral values, peace and freedom' (Nostra Aetate, 3)," that I'm ready to throw up. Surely Benedict knows that Islam does not believe in "social justice" (what, is the pope a commie?), peace, and freedom for all men. Islam believes in Islam for all men, it believes in submission to Allah and the Prophet for all men, it believes in sharia law for all men, and it believes in either death or the degraded state of dhimmitude for all men who refuse to convert to Islam.
The pope, who is supposed to know so much about Islam, doesn't know this? Auster goes on to say that Benedict is trapped by Vatican II's "ecumenist embrace of Islam," and thus "cannot meaningfully criticize Islam" while remaining a faithful observer of the council's teachings. Is this true? Does the council's teachings impede Catholic understanding of Islam, or aid it? Somebody who knows more about the Second Vatican Council than I do, please share your thoughts.
Here's a link to Tom Edsall's important New Republic essay adapted from his new book about Red America. Unfortunately, you can't read the Edsall piece unless you subscribe to TNR. But here's my take on it. Edsall begins by talking about how Karl Rove grew up in a broken, miserable family, and from that ...understood the longing of many Americans for a traditional nuclear family and a sense of social order. He grasped the values crisis brought on by the sociocultural revolution of the '60s and '70s because he himself had lived its worst consequences. And--like previous Republican strategists, including Kevin Phillips, Pat Buchanan, Charlie Black, and Lee Atwater--he realized that these sentiments, however crass they sounded to the ears of liberals, held appeal to many voters and could therefore be harnessed to his party's advantage. Stop right there: "crass"? The fact that the "longing of many Americans for a traditional nuclear family and a sense of social order" sounds crass to liberal ears tells us a very great deal about why so many voters reject liberalism. But see, the stoutly liberal Edsall understands this, which is why he goes on to say that the philosophical edifice upon which the modern conservative political movement is built on is still quite strong, and that "Whatever happens this November, no one should be fooled: The Democrats are still in deep trouble." Edsall links basic GOP themes -- small government, religious enthusiasm, affirmative action, cultural populism -- to George Wallace, as if the ideas themselves were tainted because a racist demagogue made political hay from them. Edsall goes on to say -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that believe it or not, Republicans have managed to make people think that all this cultural breakdown comes from the institutionalization of liberalism, and people actually vote according to that vision. Reading the piece as a social conservative, it's almost amusing to see Edsall struggling to understand how on earth anyone could believe that liberals, with the best of intentions, misunderstand human nature, and have therefore fomented laws, policies and cultural developments that many of us crass simpletons who prefer stable family life and social order deplore. (You know, of course, that I think conservatives ignore how the GOP's free-market-uber-alles individualism harms traditional values and society, but let's leave that aside for now.) Here's a killer graf from Edsall: Many Democrats--and writers such as Thomas Frank--have called for the party to reconnect with the white, working-class, male voters it has lost over the decades. The problem with this call to populism is that the party's most influential wing is not populist; it is elitist--affluent, well educated, urban, indifferent (or hostile) to organized religion, and, on the controversial social issues of abortion and gay marriage, well to the left of the general public. The values of this elite tend to prevail in party debates and in the crafting of Democratic platforms. Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union--and himself an Ivy League graduate--recently said that the perception of Democrats as "Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, Chardonnay-sipping, Northeast, Harvard- and Yale-educated liberals" isn't a perception at all, but rather "the reality. That is who people see as leading the Democratic Party. There's no authenticity; they don't look like them. People are not voting against their interests; they're looking for someone to represent their interests." That's what Andrew Sullivan would call an "Yglesias Award Nominee": someone not afraid of speaking a difficult truth to his own side. It gets better: Once characterized mainly by the economic split of the Great Depression--a split that played to the Democrats' advan
tage for the better part of a generation--the parties now divide differently. Put simply, the Democratic Party has become the political arm of the subdominant, while the GOP is home to the dominant groups in American life. In other words, Democrats and liberals are out of touch with most people in this country. Could it be that Edsall had to coat that bitter nougat in the sweet chocolaty coating of condescension to get that message down liberal gullets? But there's an unpleasant truth for the right to accept too: In other words, in the culture and the workplace, the left's core constituencies have largely won. As a result, for a decade or more, their goal has mostly been to consolidate gains rather than to break significant new ground. Conservatives, on the other hand, are losing the culture wars, and they know it. This has only made them fight harder--and, ironically, it has strengthened the political party to which they belong. I think Edsall's really onto something here. We don't vote Republican because we think we can turn this cultural slide around; we vote Republican to slow the rate of descent. We are losing the culture wars, and voting Republican is a feeble defensive action. And besides, the alternative is so much worse. The incomptence of the Bush Administration and the GOP Congress has soured some conservatives (like me), but it hasn't made liberals of us. And won't. So when Edsall concludes that even if the Republicans lose this fall, the Democrats are in such disarray that their victory will only be temporary, I believe him. But in the end, what good will GOP victories stretched out until the end of time do for social conservatism? Why is it that despite the GOP's dominance of US politics, conservatives continue to lose the culture war? Claes Ryn says that's because American conservatives have been too concerned with politics, and not concerned enough with culture.
Ramesh Ponnuru, quoting Michael Barone: Political judgments are affected by temperament. Optimists tend to be confident that their side is winning and alert to signs that things are moving their way. Pessimists tend to be gloomily certain that their own side is messing things up and that the other side is running circles around them. Pessimists often produce great political reporting. Robert Novak, an embattled conservative, is always ready to report stories that show conservatives hopelessly divided, outmaneuvered, on the verge of defeat. The Washington Post's Thomas Edsall, a gloomy Irish liberal, chronicled the rise of the Religious Right and conservative Republicans' gains in the ethnic working class. We optimists have it a little harder. We're inclined to see the smallest glimmer of hope as a harbinger of victory. We tend to overlook issues or character traits that produce serious problems for our candidates. We are slow to discern trends in the wrong direction. We can try to discipline ourselves by rigorously analyzing data, but sometimes such discipline is not enough.
Daniel Larison has some good new stuff over at his blog, including a takedown of Christopher Hitchens, a curmudgeon whose polemics I often admire, but who apparently despises Christianity as much as he despises Islamism. I was most struck by Larison's commentary on a remark Mark Helprin made at a recent Claremont symposium. Helprin, an Iraq War opponent, said that whenever someone asks him what the US ought to do to improve matters there, he feels as like a surgeon being asked to operate on a dead patient. Here's Larison: I sometimes marvel at the counterblasts from war supporters when those of us who predicted disaster in 2002 point to the huge flaws in existing strategy: “So what do you think we should do?”
When I offer my “solution”: “Get out as quickly as possible,” the usual rejoinder is, “But obviously we can’t do that! That wouldn’t be fair to the Iraqis!” Of course, nobody gave a damn about being “fair” to the Iraqis when they urged on a war of aggression, er, liberation on their country allegedly for the sake of our national security. Show me a war supporter who cares so deeply about the fate Iraqis, and I’ll show you someone who has run out of rational arguments in favour of staying in Iraq.
The New York Times weighs in again with another ignorant and objectionable editorial about the Benedict controversy. Excerpts, with my comments in [bold brackets]: The pope and the Vatican can also do more. For the past two years, Benedict has been a no-show at interfaith gatherings in Assisi, begun 20 years ago by his predecessor, John Paul II. Last year, he issued an edict revoking the autonomy of Assisi’s Franciscan monks, a move that was seen as a reaction against the monks’ interfaith activism. On the occasion of this year’s gathering, he issued a statement about religion and peace that was read by an envoy, but his absence spoke louder than his words.
[I know the Times's idea of religious dialogue is a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk singing "Kum-Ba-Yah" in four-part harmony, but grown-ups should ask themselves why Benedict chose to stay away from the event. Benedict was sick and tired of the local Franciscans letting it turn into a polytheistic carnival. When African voodoo priests sacrifice chickens to their pagan gods near the tomb of St. Clare, it was time to put a stop to this nonsense. Benedict is not against dialogue with other religions, but he demands that reasonable limits be set. If a Pope has to accept chicken-slaughter by voodoo priests at a Christian holy site to appease the gods of East 43rd Street, then to hell with the gods of East 43rd Street.]
The pope also recently reassigned the Vatican’s former head of interreligious dialogue, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, an expert on Arab affairs, to a diplomatic post in Egypt. According to a report in The Times by Ian Fisher, the move was interpreted by some church experts as reflecting Benedict’s skepticism of dialogue with Muslims. As his unfortunate comments show, the pope needs high-level experts on Islam to help guide him.
[Oh? John Paul's tireless reaching-out to the Islamic world did nothing, as far as I can tell, to make life easier for the persecuted Christian populations under Islamic rule. If the only thing Abp Fitzgerald was good for was appeasement under the pretense of dialogue, then why not take another approach -- a more realistic one this time?]
In offering his regrets, the pope said that in its totality, his speech was intended as “an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.” In living up to that, he and other top Vatican officials will have to accept that genuine communication cannot occur on their terms only.
[Now this really does beat all. In recent years, Muslims have been setting the terms of this so-called dialogue by threatening murder and causing mayhem when somebody from the West offends their delicate sensibilities. We in the West -- well, our media at least -- snivel and scrape and bow to the wildest fanaticism. And now the Times has the gall to blame Benedict for trying to impose his conditions for dialogue on the Islamic world?! Oh, vomit.]
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, minces no words: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” If Carey is right, then what? I fear Carey is right. I think he might be. Please somebody convince me that he is wrong.
The Indonesian government is preparing to execute three Christian farmers tomorrow for their supposed role in Muslim-Christian fighting that resulted in the deaths of scores of Muslims. There has been much concern voiced internationally over the fairness of the trial, which appears to have been a kangaroo-court situation rigged by the government to appease the Islamic majority. It's interesting to note that the protesters don't claim that the three Christian men are innocent, only that they did not receive a fair trial, and that they were the only ones charged when Muslims had a key role in the strife as well. The bloody Muslim persecution of Christians in Indonesia is nota new story, but it's not one you hear much about in the West, not from our media. This from a National Review piece I wrote four years ago, about the indifference of the West to the intense persecution of Christians in the Muslim world: An Indonesian man with a lined, anxious face hands me a photograph from a magazine report on events in his homeland. I am looking at a photograph of the burned and decapitated corpse of a Christian man who was murdered in a Christmas Eve pogrom in his village. His killers were members of Laskar Jihad, a heavily armed Islamist terror group. "They cut off his genitals too," the Indonesian man explains. "He died at his church."
My informant, a Christian human-rights activist who refused to be identified, in order to protect his family, has photographs of Christian villages burned to the ground by Laskar Jihad. Numerous sources say the group has killed as many as 10,000 Indonesian Christians, forcibly converted thousands more, and demolished hundreds of churches. Activists say the Jakarta regime has only sporadically shown an interest in protecting the nation's Christian minority, and some accuse elements of the government and military of sympathy with the jihadists.
"I was in Indonesia when 9/11 happened, and I followed the statements of Muslim political leaders," says my informant. "They were encouraging Muslims to help Osama bin Laden. I was crying in my heart for New York, but I'm telling you, 9/11 happened once in New York, but it's happening every day to Christian villages in Indonesia."
[snip]
You try going over there and facing these Christians, like I did recently in Indonesia, and answering them when they ask, 'You're supposed to be our brother Christians, why aren't you doing anything? Why are you letting them kill us?'" says [Ann]Buwalda[ director of the DC-based human rights group Jubilee Campaign USA]. "You can see how angry and upset they are, and they're right to be. They say they just hope September 11 wakes us up to what they have to live with every day." Three Christian farmers are going to be murdered by the government of Indonesia tomorrow to pacify Islamists. If you can, take time out of your preparation for Friday's planned "Day of Rage" across the Muslim world, set to protest the Pope's mentioning of a Byzantine emperor's judgment of Islam's peacefulness, to give these poor souls, and all those persecuted by Islamic rule, a thought.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
A military officer of my acquaintance complained that when he served on the frontlines in Iraq, he and his men never saw their designated CPA contact, who never left the Green Zone. This officer said that the Bush Administration sent in well-connected Young Republicans to run the show in Iraq, not men and women with useful experience. Now, the Washington Post is writing about how bad that patronage and cronyism was. Honest to God, you read this stuff -- and it's in "Fiasco" too -- and you want to put your fist through the wall, especially if you voted for Bush. I look forward to the recriminations in November. Jon Rauch, writing in the Atlantic Monthly (sub. req.), observes that: History judges good presidents by what they do, bad ones by how long they take to undo. Although history hasn’t yet caught up with President George W. Bush, midterm elections are about to—and those are often a referendum on presidential performance. Now is therefore as good a time as any to jump to a conclusion: the question history will ask is whether Bush’s presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon’s or only as bad as Jimmy Carter’s. UPDATE: A reader writes to say: "This isn't news. In 2004, the Post reported that the CPA went to the Heritage Foundation looking for staffers, and got a bunch of conservative twentysomethings with no relevant experience." Good grief. We overthrew a country, and were so unprepared for the "what next" stage that we hired a bunch of kids. To run the country. Innocents abroad. There's a black satire in this, if the right filmmaker would take it on. UPDATE.2: A reader in the comboxes posts: "I was a CPA advisor in 2004, and stayed for a few months after the handover with the State Department...and I can tell you flatly that Chandrasekaran’s piece is crap." Go down and read his entire entry.
Anne Applebaum of the WaPo says it's time for the West to quit apologizing over slights to radical Islam and unite behind the defense of free speech: By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.
All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should... Applebaum is right. We in the West -- at least in the Western media -- practice a peculiar form of patronizing condescension: we hold our own side to a very high standard that we almost never expect of Muslims. When Islamic mobs firebomb embassies and churches, our first reaction is too often, "Oh dear, what did we do to offend them?" rather than to condemn them without restraint or apology. It's not Applebaum, but here's a good diagnosis of what ails the West, or at least in America, our elites: "[The West] has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self- acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive." Guess who said that?
Last night I finished my galley copy of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross's forthcoming (Feb. 2007) book "My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir". I think it's safe to say that when this book comes out, there's going to be a great deal of media attention paid to it. DGR was raised in a liberal Jewish family in Oregon, converted to Islam in college, and spent a year working for a radical Islamic "charity" and being transformed from a progressive, liberal Muslim into a Wahhabi. He finally broke free of the cultish hardliners, and eventually left Islam. He's got an incredible story to tell about how intelligent and otherwise normal idealists get sucked into radical Islam. His is a vitally important book. Yesterday I wrote to DGR to ask him his thoughts about the Benedict controversy. The pope's deeper point, questioning Islam's relationship to reason, was cast in a certain light by DGR's experiences with the Wahhabis (also called Salafis), who operated on the basis of force. There was no room in that circle for debate: you were told what to believe, and you accepted it. It was eerily fascinating to watch DGR slowly give up his capacity for independent thought, and come to discover that there was a lot stronger case in the Koran and the hadith for the Salafi interpretation than most of us would care to consider. With that in mind, I asked DGR to offer some thoughts. This is his response: When I practiced Islam and went through my own process of radicalization, I found the case made by radicals (as opposed to the case made by progressive Muslims) to be more logical and sound. The logical force of the radicals' interpretation of the Islamic faith cannot be denied; anybody who brushes off Islamic radicals' interpretation of jihad as clearly and simply distorting Islam is either dissembling or else speaking from sincere ignorance.
I don't think, though, that the radicals are inevitably right, and thus haven't yet given up the hope that Islam can save itself. One of my major long-term projects is an assessment of moderate Islam's chances of success. One of the Muslim moderates with whom I've been dialoguing for that project tells me that the Salafi interpretation seems insurmountable at first, but as a Muslim gains greater mastery of Arabic and is able to interpret Islamic history on his own, less radical alternative interpretations may seem more compelling. At this point, it's too early for me to assess whether this statement is accurate.
But the fact that I don't think the radicals are inevitably right makes the current controversy over Pope Benedict's remarks all the more distressing. It seems that whenever a prominent Westerner voices strong criticism of Islam, two things happen: Muslims threaten violence in response and often actually resort to it, and in return the Western media and leading intellectuals condemn the initial statements rather than the violence. Recall Jerry Falwell's statement back in 2002 that Muhammad was "a violent man"; the ironic -- and tragic -- response was rioting in Solapur, India that killed at least ten people, as well as a fatwa condemning Falwell to death. Yet by and large the media wasn't interested in the Muslim overreaction; it was intent on condemning Falwell.
The violent response to Pope Benedict's remarks is indicative of the pathologies within contemporary Islam. Angry Muslims set fire to seven churches in the West Bank and Gaza. An Italian nun in Somalia who worked in a children's hospital was brutally assassinated. There have been calls to assassinate the pope. And Islamic leaders such as Yusuf Qaradawi have called for a "day of rage."
But it seems the media would rather condemn the pope and th
us place criticism of Islam off limits rather than focus on the pathologies in contemporary Islam. This Western response serves to undermine Muslim moderates and strengthen radicals. It undermines moderates because one of the strongest big-picture arguments the moderates have is that Muslims need to act like adults, that they can't go off burning churches and killing people at the slightest provocation. Yet the signal we're sending is that we're willing to look the other way and create a ridiculous double-standard: that we're unwilling to hold Muslims accountable for unacceptable behavior and unacceptable actions. The extremists are helped not only by the missed opportunity to examine the crisis in contemporary Islam, but also because it increasingly appears to them that if they want to use threats of violence to stifle speech, they will be helped in their cause by hordes of guilt-ridden Westerners who will side with them. We live in cowardly times, and it's sad to see that so many Westerners pick the wrong side in what is a stark choice between free speech and intimidation.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Fascinating material from a 1997 interview then-Cardinal Ratzinger had with the journalist Peter Seewald. Read the whole passage here (scroll down). This is key,and the emphases are mine: An important point, however, is [...] that the interplay of society, politics, and religion has a completely difference structure in Islam as a whole. Today's discussion in the West about the possibility of Islamic theological faculties, or about the idea of Islam as a legal entity, presupposes that all religions have basically the same structure, that they all fit into a democratic system with its regulations and the possibilities provided by these regulations. In itself, however, this necessarily contradicts the essence of Islam, which simply does not have the separation of the political and religious sphere which Christianity has had from the beginning. The Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such partial freedoms as our constitution gives, but it can't be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, it would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.
Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society. When one represents the situation in those terms, as often happens today, Islam is defined according to the Christian model and is not seen as it really is in itself. In this sense, the question of dialogue with Islam is naturally much more complicated than, for example, an internal dialogue among Christians. If Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, is right, then we have a serious problem on our hands trying to assimilate Islam into states and cultures derived from Christianity. Islam cannot be swallowed by Western-style pluralist democracy. It can't happen without the Muslims becoming untrue to their faith. What do you think, is he right? And if he's wrong, why is he wrong? I wish G.W. Bush & Co. had talked to Cardinal Ratzinger before running off to unleash the spirit of Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. Ahem.
Did you see her commentary on the CBS Evening News tonight? You can. Here's part of what she had to say: As a faithful Muslim, I do not believe the pope should have apologized. I've read what’s been described as his inflammatory speech. Actually, he called for dialogue with the Muslim world. To ignore that larger context and to focus on a mere few words of the speech is like reducing the Koran, Islam's holy book, to its most bloodthirsty passages. We Muslims hate it when people do that. The hypocrisy of doing this to the pope stinks to high heaven.
...We Muslims should remember that God told the Prophet Muhammad to "read." My advice to fellow Muslims: Read the pope's speech — in its entirety — and you'll see that his message of reason, reconciliation, and conversation would make him a better Muslim than most of us. Find out more about Irshad here. Brave woman, she is.
Reader Russ draws our attention to Jacob T. Levy's sensible commentary from The New Republic's Open University blog. Excerpt: I confess to often having some sympathy for non-ecumenicists and those who draw distinctions [between religions and religious traditions]. I don't expect Catholics to take their theology any less seriously than Mormons take theirs; and one theology excludes the other. It seems to me that if religion is meaningful it's serious business; if one is committed to divine truths then one is committed to the falsehood of rival claims. By my human standards "No man comes unto the father but through Me" is a terrible way to run a universe; but if there is a God I have no reason to think that His rules will conform to my contingent, twenty-first-century Western liberal human standards. And so I don't expect religious believers to softpedal the exclusionary implications of their beliefs. I don't think Unitarian Universalism is somehow a better religion than Catholicism or Mormonism or Orthodox Judaism just because its god seems to be so nice and inclusive; indeed, my sympathies for the aesthetic and moral-psychological experience of religious belief tends to run the other way. This is a bit like the stance of many American lapsed Catholcic or many Israeli secular Jews, I incline to say, "I don't believe in God, but the God in whom I don't believe is a serious one!" But I don't quite mean that. Rather, I want to say that if there is a point to religion and theology, then that point is undermined by the reluctance to draw distinctions and take them seriously. I have no idea why this should be controversial, but it certainly is. I believe Christianity to be true, which means not so much that I believe other religions to be outright false, but that I judge their truthfulness based on how much they align with the Christian claim. Judaism is, therefore, more true from a Christian point of view than Zoroastrianism. I would be chagrined to hear, for example, a Muslim say that my Christian faith is no more true or false than his Islamic faith. We can't both be right. Either there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, or not. All serious religious believers understand that religious claims are truth claims about how the world is, not how an individual believer feels about the world. If we are asking the Islamic world to agree to our piffly Western view that all religions are pretty much the same, and ought to behave like it, then we ask too much of them. The answer is not to privatize religious belief, but to recognize that while all religions can't be true, individual believers, by virtue of their dignity as human beings, have the right to believe as they wish -- and have the right to be wrong.
Robert Miller, a Catholic professor writing on the First Things blog, thinks Benedict screwed up by using the Emperor's startling quote: Still, Benedict went about this noble business in a very imprudent way. The statement he quoted—that everything new Mohammed brought was “evil and inhuman”—is simply untrue and so obviously hurtful that it will prevent anything else the pope might say from getting a hearing. Given the predictable reactions in the Muslim world, it is patently counterproductive to try to make the legitimate point that Muslims have sometimes used violence to spread their faith by quoting, even without endorsing, the untrue and much more sweeping statement that everything peculiar to Islam is “evil and inhuman.” If Benedict wishes to call Muslims to account for wrongful acts, current and historical, committed by Muslims against Christians, well and good, but he ought not do so by grossly overstating the case in an obviously provocative way that he himself does not believe and then apologize in stages for having done so.
In one of the comboxes below, Ken Myers -- whose latest edition of Audition, the free Mars Hill Audio podcast, is out and ready for download (I listened to it over the weekend, and it's great) -- asks a great question: To what extent are American journalists afraid of reporting on differences between Islam and Christianity? They regularly report on differences between Republicans and Democrats, or between New Yorkers and Southerners, even (sometimes) between men and women. But are journalists (unlike most Christians and Muslims) committed to the assumption that all religions are essentially the same?
I've known journalists willing to compare Buddhism with Catholicism (most of these were ex-Catholics with bad memories of the sisters), but I've yet to see a journalist raise questions about the different understandings of who God is and who man is (a pretty basic question) that divide those who believe that God assumed a human nature (which he still has) and those who believe that such an assertion is blasphemy. I defer to the Masters on this question, but here's what I'd say, based on having worked at a variety of news organizations for nearly two decades. Most journalists, as we know from survey data, are secular. To the extent that they think about religion at all, the view is that all religions are the same, except for conservative strands of Christianity, which are malevolent. Rather than take religion seriously, they project their own biases onto all religious people. Consequently, what the liberal atheist Sam Harris denounces as "head-in-the-sand liberalism" with regard to the reality of what Islam teaches is a pretty good way to think of how American journalists see Islam. Mind you, I'm generalizing, but I'd say that the approach journalists take to reporting on Islam is palliative; that is, it seeks to soothe the public's concerns about Islam by presenting it merely as a misunderstood faith. Episcopalians in hijabs and kufis. Of course it's laudable to want to teach the public more about any faith as a way of dispelling prejudice, but when you take that approach, you run the risk of hiding aspects of that faith that the public would find offensive or unsavory. Worse, you yourself become incurious about things that about which you should be curious. And you do both the integrity of journalism and your readers a disservice by refusing to pay attention, and to ask the tough questions. I remember two years ago, reading the Chicago Tribune's lengthy and astonishing series of reports on the secretive, radical Muslim Brotherhood and how it established itself in North America. It was an amazing and exemplary piece of journalism, and I thought it really would change things. How could the US media keep its head in the sand after that piece? How, for that matter, could the US media, having seen what the homegrown cells of British Muslims did in the London subways, and what the Canadian Muslims in Toronto were allegedly trying to do, be so incurious about what's being taught to teens at American mosques? The truth is, we don't want to know, because to know is to have responsibility for that knowledge, and what we do with it. We are all going to pay a terrible price for this willful, politically correct ignorance. You watch.
Here's a riveting op-ed from the LA Times by Sam Harris, the atheist liberal whose book "Letter to a Christian Nation" will be published this week. Excerpt: But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.
A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.
This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Harris goes on to say that the Christian right speaks with the greatest moral clarity about the Middle East wars -- and this worries him greatly, because he's afraid that ordinary people will come to back the Christian right as the only sensible reaction to violent Islam. Meanwhile, his own side lives in a fantasy world that Islamic radicalism is a legitimate response to Western malevolence and the lack of educational and economic opportunity: I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals. The question very few want to ask, because we're afraid of the answer: is the problem Islamic radicalism ... or Islam? If the answer is "Islam," you then have to ask, "So, what do we do about it?" At which point the discussion gets really dark and disturbing, and many of us (me too!) recoil. Which only puts off confronting the question, which won't go away simply because it's too unsettling to ask.
The Muslim reaction to Benedict's speech has been the main story, given its extreme bellicosity. If Benedict had outright called Islam evil, it still wouldn't have merited the insane response we've seen. I do believe, though, that Benedict was needlessly unclear in his initial remarks about the emperor. If it's true that the Emperor's views are not his own, given the hysterical sensitivity of the world's Muslims, he ought to have either chosen a different example or taken pains to be more clear in his speech. Let me underscore: nothing justifies the Islamic response. But really, it's not as easy to figure out why Benedict said what he said the way he said it. Here's an English translation of his original speech. And here's the key part. This is long, but I need to get it all out here: The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the "universitas scientiarum," even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: It had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: This, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.
It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.
In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point -- itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself -- which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason," I found interesting and which can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.
Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the so
ul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...."
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?
I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 'logos.'"
This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word -- a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. What an extremely important point for Benedict to have made! And what a shame that by choosing to introduce it with a provocative quote from the Emperor, that the Pope assured the profundity and delicacy of his main point would be obscured. This is a tragedy. I say that as a writer and an editor who every day works with writers to clarify their writing to avoid misunderstanding. Just last Friday I was going back and forth with a brilliant contributor to hone his essay so a general audience of newspaper readers could fully grasp his point. Had Benedict let someone else read his speech, they probably would have seen at once that quoting the Emperor's words would be needlessly inflammatory. I almost hate to say this, because I don't think the Pope has anything to apologize for, and I think that it's outrageous that anybody in the West should think he should go groveling to the fanatics braying for his blood. But Benedict himself has said that the Emperor's views were not his own. Had he simply cut that one line, there would almost certainly have been no protest. The Pope's remarks concerning faith and reason, insofar as they touch on Islam, are actually quite radical in the sense that they address the root of the conflict between Islam and the West. It is, at its core, a theological conflict. Christianity has made many, many mistakes in its history, but it is informed by the spirit of Greek philosophy, and sees rationality as an aspect of the divine. The universe is made to be known, both by the mind and the spirit. Islam, says the pope, has no corresponding sense of the role of rationality. If we are to have a fruitful dialogue with Islam, it must be on the basis of rationality. We non-Muslims have nothing to say to them if the only thing they can br
ing conceptually to the dialogue is a conviction that we must accept their faith as true, or else. Absent a rational ground for discussion, we're just wasting our time and theirs. I have long said that we Americans are foolishly eager to think that Muslims are merely Episcopalians in hijabs. Benedict invites us to consider the West vs. Islam conflict as rooted in rival conceptions of God, and in turn the nature of truth itself. To put a finer point on it, here's the inimitable Spengler: But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:
The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism. That's Spengler, quoting Rosenzweig. This stuff sounds abstruse, I know, but it's really important. If there is no deeper sense of law and purpose governing the universe, a purpose that is knowable in part through reason, and instead reality is governed only the capricious will of a divine despot -- well, then rational dialogue is barely possible. It all comes down to will to power. If -- if -- that is the situation that we face, then we'd better get that straight in our minds now.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
George F. Will knows. Excerpt from Will's review of a new liberal tome by Thomas Edsall: Edsall notes that one-third of American children -- and almost 70 percent of African American children -- are born to unmarried mothers. Then, in an astonishing passage about this phenomenon, which is the cause of most social pathologies, from crime to schools that cannot teach, he explains how Americans differ concerning what he calls "freedom from the need to maintain the marital or procreative bond."
"To social conservatives," he writes, "these developments have signaled an irretrievable and tragic loss. Their reaction has fueled, on the right, a powerful traditionalist movement and a groundswell of support for the Republican Party. To modernists, these developments constitute, at worst, the unfortunate costs of progress, and, at best -- and this is very much the view on the political left as well as of Democratic Party loyalists -- they constitute a triumph over unconscionable obstacles to the liberation and self-realization of much of the human race."
Looking for the real reason for the rise of "Red America"? Read that paragraph again.
The Aussies have read Muslim leaders there the riot act. Excerpt: The Howard Government's multicultural spokesman, Andrew Robb, yesterday told an audience of 100 imams who address Australia's mosques that these were tough times requiring great personal resolve.
Mr Robb also called on them to shun a victim mentality that branded any criticism as discrimination.
"We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith," Mr Robb said at the Sydney conference.
"And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem.
"You can't wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others.
"Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia."
Mr Robb said unless Muslims took responsibility for their destiny and tackled the causes of terrorism, Australia would become divided. (Hat tip: The Corner).
Michelle Malkin has a photograph of an elderly missionary nun, murdered in Somalia after an ROP cleric there said, "Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim." At my parish today, there was lots of fear for Benedict's life. I spoke to a number of people about the matter, and to the very last man, they all expressed a belief that the time for pretending to believe that Islam is a religion of peace is over. This is, obviously, a highly select group of people, but it was surprising to see the frustration they have with Islam. They were talking about the church firebombings in Gaza and the West Bank. We talked about what the Copts suffer under Islam. I mentioned that Pope Shenouda had distanced himself from Pope Benedict's comments, but that we should realize that the Copts could be massacred by the Muslims at the drop of a hat. One older gentleman who has personal experience with Copts confirmed this, and said the situation for the Copts is horrible. I dunno, something about the reaction to Benedict's speech seems to have pushed Christians -- Catholics and others -- I've been in touch with this weekend over the line. One young man this morning said to me, "The thing that makes me so angry is that the Muslims use liberal language to counter anyone who objects to what they do, or even questions it. And the liberals go along with it." That's a profound point, actually, one explored by Bret Stephens in the Journal, who wonders why in the world liberals are afraid to stand up to radical Islam, which threatens them and their values most of all. Quoting Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the secular apostate from Islam and dissenter, Stephens says there are several things at work here: 1) an instinct for pacifism; 2) appeasement; 3) an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" feeling among some on the left, who identify with radical Islam's hatred of America; and 4) a deep conviction that to criticize Islam is racist. To that I would add from my experience working in the media that there is a knee-jerk emotional need on the left to identify with the underdog -- or rather, the perceived underdog, because if liberals were true to their protect-the-underdog viewpoint, they'd be siding with Christians and others living and suffering intense persecution under Islam. But they don't, because -- and I think here is a prejudice that many on the left are loath to confront -- they have a sense that to criticize Islam is in some sense to give aid and comfort to the Christian right. The Islamists know this, and use it to their advantage. I've seen this myself. When the head of the Islamic Society of North America came to the Dallas Morning News to appeal to the editorial board, he deployed language masterfully, portraying a natural alliance between his organization and the media to stand up to the bigoted Religious Right, who only want to demonize Muslims, in his view. It was a brilliant strategy. And it works. The US media, I believe, as well as American liberalism on the whole, think Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are a graver threat to humanity than Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi and his ilk, who bray about bigotry but who endorse suicide bombing and all manner of savagery. So what's a dead nun to the American left? What's a firebombed church, or two, or ten? Nothing. It's only Christians, after all, who probably deserve what they get. This is why I'm completely convinced that if, God forbid, Pope Benedict should come to physical harm at the hands of Muslims, we'll see the left blame him for his own fate. This, despite the fact that there are no Muslim countries on earth that any Western liberal could stand to live in for a day, owing to the disrespect for human rights, especially women's rights. If any good is to come out of this mess that began with Pope Benedict's speech, it will be that fewer and f
ewer ordinary people will be gulled by political correctness, and will start to understand exactly what we're all up against. And when I say "we," I include in that number truly moderate Muslims, who are ashamed of the reaction of their co-religionists, and who realize that the cowardice of the West in confronting the militant intolerance and fanaticism running rampant through worldwide Islam at this moment is as much a threat to freethinking Muslims as it is to Christians, Jews, secularists and everybody else who refuses to submit. In any case, Benedict's speech will go down as a defining moment in this conflict. A Catholic priest friend remarked to me this afternoon, "This is a real teaching moment -- if they don't blow us up first."
Former GOP Congressman turned cable host Joe Scarborough has some blunt advice for woebegone Congressional confreres facing a tough re-election bid. Excerpt: I can't help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church's Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit.
How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader.
How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?
Easy. Blame George W. Bush. He goes on to say: If I were a GOP candidate this year, I would not call the president an idiot (he isn't). But I would spend the next 50 days of the campaign telling conservatives and liberals alike that even though I voted for this war once and this president twice, time has proved that Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were wrong to think that the nation could win Iraq on the cheap. I would also look them in the eye and say that our president was wrong to believe that the United States could fight a war, cut taxes and increase federal spending, all at once. I would castigate my president for claiming to support homeland security while allowing our borders to remain wide open. Sounds like a winning message to me. And it has the advantage of being ... true. Of course, the voters might well say, "How convenient that you waited until now to figure out how crummy the leadership of the country has been for so long." But then they turn and look at the lack of much of an alternative on the Democratic side, and that just might be enough to win Republicans a desultory vote. Or two. Enough to hold on to the House, anyway -- though count me among the conservatives who believe it'd be better for the GOP to lose the House and get busy reforming itself to be ready for 2008.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
What's a monopsony? It's a situation in which a firm has the power to dictate price to its suppliers. Like Wal-Mart, which is so big and powerful that those who want to sell their products in its stores have to meet its demands. Barry C. Lynn's essay in Harper's shows how Wal-Mart's power undermines the free market. Excerpt:
The idea that Wal-Mart's power actually subverts the functioning of the free market will seem shocking to some. After all, the firm rose to dominance in the same way that many thousands of other companies before it did—through smart innovation, a unique culture, and a focus on serving the customer. Even a decade ago, Americans could fairly conclude that, in most respects, Wal-Mart's rise had been good for the nation. But the issue before us is not how Wal-Mart grew to scale but how Wal-Mart uses its power today and will use it tomorrow. The problem is that Wal-Mart, like other monopsonists, does not participate in the market so much as use its power to micromanage the market, carefully coordinating the actions of thousands of firms from a position above the market.
One of the basic premises of the free-market system is that actors are free to buy from or sell to a variety of other actors. In the case of Wal-Mart, no one can deny that every single firm that supplies the retailer is, technically, free not to do so. But is this true in the real world? After all, once a firm comes to depend on selling through Wal-Mart's system, just how conceivable is the idea of walking away? Producers own and maintain machines, employ skilled workers, lease land and buildings. Even with careful planning, most would find the sudden surrender of 20 percent or more of their revenue to be extremely disruptive, if not suicidal.
Another basic premise of the free-market system is that the price of a commodity or good carries vital information from actor to actor within an economy—say, that cherries are scarce, or vinyl floor tiles abundant, or the latest iPod includes a new technology. Again, no one can deny that, technically, every firm that supplies Wal-Mart is free to ask whatever price it wants. But again, we must ask whether this holds true in the real world. Every producer knows that Wal-Mart is, as one of its executives told the New York Times, a “no-nonsense negotiator,” which means the firm sets take-it-or-leave-it prices, which as we know from the previous paragraph are far harder to leave than to take. Every so often Wal-Mart will accept a higher price, but then the retailer's managers may opt to punish the offending supplier, perhaps by ratcheting up competition with its own in-house brands. Price, within the consumer economy, increasingly carries but one bit of information—that Wal-Mart is powerful enough to bend everyone else to its will.
Elsewhere, Prof. Bainbridge says that right-wing defenders of Wal-Mart overlook the fact that the retailing behemoth is a huge beneficiary of corporate welfare. How pro-market is that? UPDATE: I fixed the Bainbridge link. Also, Bainbridge here lays out a conservative case against Wal-Mart.
Iraqi jihadists vow to "destroy their cross in the heart of Rome ... and that their Vatican will be hit and wept over by the Pope." Church bombed in Gaza. It's an Orthodox parish. Two churches firebombed on the West Bank. One Anglican. One Orthodox. Neither Catholic. Muslim demonstrators burn pope in effigy in Pakistan. Etc. Signs of the times. Signs of things to come.
Over at Get Religion, Terry Mattingly has some very pointed words about the Times' editorial. Excerpt: And thus it came to pass: The content of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech stopped being the story — including the fact that the speech was an attack on secularism in the West — and the reaction of many Muslim leaders became the story.
That could only lead to one conclusion, in the mandated Unitarian-Universalism of the New York Times editorial-page suite, the holy of holies for the blue-zip code faith. All religious roads have to lead to the top of the same mountain (even if saying that is, itself, an affront to Islam as well as to traditional Christianity). Otherwise, we would have to do basic, balanced, factual journalistic coverage of people on both sides of historic, complicated, emotional, intellectual religious issues. We would have to be journalists. TMatt indicates that the Times won't be satisfied until Benedict kisses the Koran. Literally or figuratively. The "soft apology" already offered by the Pope won't be enough.
Pope Benedict has apologized to offended Muslims.It's unclear whether this was a real apology, or one of these "sorry if you were offended" halfhearted apologies. Either one is a surrender to the forces of hatred, violence, obscurantism and fanaticism in the Muslim world. I'm sure the New York Times will be thrilled. The Pope was defeated. So was reason. UPDATE: More than a few commenters below don't read the papal apology the way I do. They consider it to be a non-apology apology. I hope they're right. I guess it will depend on how the apology/non-apology is received. UPDATE.2: Well, if the fanatical loons of the Muslim Brotherhood don't think it was a real apology, things are looking up! UPDATE.3: OK, I was wrong. It seems clear that Benedict didn't apologize.
Michelle Malkin has a long, excellent post urging the West to stand behind Pope Benedict ... and ends it with an absolutely chilling fact: a novel on the Turkish bestseller list now foretells the assassination of Benedict in Istanbul. Where he's planning to visit in November.
Via Amy comes these words from Magdi Allam, an Italian Muslim, writing in the Italian paper Corriere della Sera: It is desolating and preoccupying to see Muslims who have given life to a unified international front to attack the Pope and demand public apologies. From Bin Laden to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Pakistan to Turkey, from Al Jazeera to Al Arabiya, there has risen anew the widespread and universal alliance that first emerged on the occasion of the events surrounding the cartoons about Mohammed. It testifies, in an unequivocal manner, that the root of the evil is a blind ideology of imperious hatred among Muslims, one that violates the faith and darkens the mind. Why is it that Muslims, especially the so-called moderates, never stand up with similar and as much enthusiasm against the true and perpetual profaners of Islam, the Islamic terrorists who massacre Muslims themselves in the name of the same God, the Islamic extremists who legitimize the destruction of Israel and inculcate faith in the so-called Islamic “martyrdom”, while in the meantime they feel themselves dutybound to promote a sort of Islamic “holy war” against the head of the Catholic Church who legitimately expresses his evaluations concerning Islam, with respect but with just as much clarity about the diversity that naturally exists between the two religions.
[snip]
To deny the historical reality [that Islam was spread by the sword -- RD] is simply foolish, and it can generate nothing but foolishness. I recall that one of the most notable contemporary Islamologists, the Egyptian Mohammad Said El Eshmawi, said to me in the mid-nineties that he simply did not sympathize with the military conquest carried out by the Arab tribes in the Christian lands of the Mediterranean, and that he would have preferred to have had Islam spread peacefully as came about in Southeast Asia. And now the Pope is being punished and threatened for having said what every honest and rational Muslim should accept: the historical reality.
The lesson to draw is that the West and Christianity ought to stop considering themselves to be the cause of everything that followed, whether good or bad, within Islam and in the rest of the world. The ideology of hatred is an ancestral reality that exists in the heart of Islam from its very beginnings, because of the refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of the physiological religious communities, and given the subjectivity of the relationship between the believer and God, and the absence of a single spiritual reference point that incarnates the absoluteness of the dogmas of faith.
[snip]
This is the tragic reality of the ideology of hatred that is succeeding in solidifying the consensus among all those Muslims whose minds are clouded by being anti-American, anti-West, and by prejudiced hostility to the right of Israel to exist. The pretexts that can set off their fury change, from the Israeli occupation to the American war, from the Mohammed cartoons to the declarations of the Pope. But the problem is entirely internal to an Islam transformed by the extremists from a faith in God into an ideology bent on imposing a theocratic and totalitarian power upon all those who are not in their image and likeness. And it frightens me to note that even the so-called moderate Muslims have renounced the prudence of reason, and have aligned themselves with the “holy war” of which they will be the principal victims. Read the whole essay here. And pray for Magdi Allam, who will probably be in danger of death for having had the courage to defend the Pope here.
Andrew Sullivan and I rarely agree on Catholic matters, but he's spot-on here Well, I think he's wrong about Benedict suppressing reason within the Catholic Church, but still, Andrew draws our attention to an important point Benedict appears to have been making. Excerpt: The obvious inference from the pope is that the Koran does indeed sanction violence, i.e. "holy war," in the cause of its own religion; and that the [Koranic] passages about peace can be explained in part by the fact that they belong to the early days of Islam, when Muhammed had no other practical option. Subsequently, Muhammed endorsed and practised war. One thing you can say about Jesus: he didn't kill anyone, however bloodthirsty his subsequent followers might have been. Today, in many Muslim countries, apostasy remains subject to the death penalty. That in itself is the use of murderous violence to impose faith. Christianity has, of course, been just as bad in the past. But it has reformed itself. Moreover, the nature of the Muslim revelation, according to Benedict, is that it was God's word channeled unmediated through the Prophet. The Christian tradition of logos or reason does not therefore have the same salience in Islam, according to the Pope. A Muslim reformation, Benedict seems to say, is very unlikely because of the intrinsic irrationality of Islam.
I will pass on the ironies of this Pope commending reason in faith. He has done a great deal to stifle reason within the Church by policing and suppressing free debate. But his fundamental point about Islam and logos cannot be dismissed as a glitch or merely bad manners. I'm not a scholar of Islam and so I am not prepared to say whether his appraisal of the role of reason and violence in Islam is accurate. But it's pretty clear that he's saying something substantive about the core meaning of Islam. And the violent reaction of some Muslims to his address doesn't exactly prove him wrong, does it? Is Islam inherently irrational and violent? That's an extremely important question, and an extremely important discussion to have, because the answer to that question, one way or another, determines the strategy for the long struggle ahead. But we have not had it in the West because the politically correct guardians of public debate -- especially the news media -- consider it to be intolerable on its face. Certainly many Muslim leaders do, and are not shy about making their illiberal, intolerant and anti-rational views known. I can tell you because I've faced this personally, in my line of work: raising questions in print about the behavior of certain Muslims or the nature of Islam brings a swift and angry response from Muslim leaders, who treat the questions themselves as evidence of bigotry and irrationality, and therefore try to suppress discussion and debate by painting those who raise these concerns as haters who must be silenced for the safety of the community. Just whose interests do the New York Times and those who follow the Times' line on appeasing Islamic irrationality think they're serving? Not the interests of the truth. Not the interests of liberty.
The other night a conservative friend asked me why I subscribe to the New York Times. I told him that I know it's a liberal paper, but it's also a very, very good paper, and I can read through and deal with the bias. This morning's editorial page, though, made me as mad as I think I have ever been at the Times. Here's why: its editorial calling on Pope Benedict to make a "deep and persuasive" apology to Muslims. Here's the thing in its entirety, with my comments in boldface and brackets. --- THE POPE'S WORDS There is more than enough religious anger in the world. So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.” In the most provocative part of a speech this week on “faith and reason,” the pontiff recounted a conversation between an “erudite” Byzantine Christian emperor and a “learned” Muslim Persian circa 1391. The pope quoted the emperor saying, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” [Context, please? By declining to put the Pope's quote in the fuller context of the speech, and to explain why he quoted this emperor, the Times gives the impression that the Pope was being merely provocative.]Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam. For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism. [What, not the least concern over the disturbing fact that Muslim mobs around the world have taken to the streets in full-throated protest against the mere words of the Pope in a long, scholarly lecture spent mostly castigating the West? If Muslims overreact to the least little thing that offends their sense of religious dignity, that's fine with the Times, because it's the fault of anyone in the West who dares to criticize them? If Christians reacted in the same way to the constant insults and degradations of our religion in this culture, the Times would go nuclear, and shriek about the dark night of theofascism threatening to descend upon us, silencing free speech &c. But when actual theofascism shows itself among Muslims, then the Times seems to think it's the fault of those who have the nerve to exercise their right to free speech. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I was at a Pew Forum religion conference earlier this summer, at which an Ivy League professor considered to be one of the world's leading authorities on Islam and Islamic history declined to talk with us journalists about certain relatively minor aspects of early Muslim history on the record. Why wouldn't he? Because he was afraid that to do so might get him killed. That is astonishing, isn't it? That a leading scholar did not feel free in the United States of America to discuss this or that aspect of Islamic history, for fear that Muslim fanatics would hunt him down on his campus and take his life for blaspheming the Prophet. This is not an uncommon situation; ask Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists. But the Times takes out against the Pope for one remark in a long speech about how violence can never be used for religious goals, only reason? Astonishing. And outrageous.]The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue. But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims. In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as
a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.” [Oh, so it's impermissible to have a negative opinion about relations between nations without being accused of fomenting "discord"? The Pope happens to be right about the Turkish situation; Turkey -- where they put people on trial for mentioning that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenian Christian population a hundred years ago -- is an Islamic society, with its own traditions, traditions that run deeply counter to Europe's. The Pope might have been wrong in what he said -- I don't think he was at all, but let's grant that he might have been -- but expressing a political and cultural judgment about the suitability of a large Muslim nation joining the European Union is perfectly legitimate. If Turkish Muslim leaders were to say the same thing from their point of view, would the Times take them to task for fomenting discord? Of course they wouldn't, nor should they. The Times, though, has absorbed the liberal/dhimmi mentality, which is geared toward appeasing Muslim hotheads at all costs. Reprehensible.]A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue. [What the heck does that mean? That because the head of the Catholic Church worries about his flock losing Catholic identity, he's intolerant, and unsuited for interfaith dialogue? Does a religious leader have to abandon the core convictions of his faith as a prerequisite for talking with people of other religions? Would the Times have the nerve to make a similar demand of Muslim clerics? Of Jewish ones? Of course not, because that kind of demand is absurd and insulting. I get tired of people who yell "bigotry" every time there is the least criticism of Catholicism or Christianity, but I'm telling you, this Times editorial really does come across as having special standards that apply to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, and not to leaders of other religions.]The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal. [This sniveling capitulation of the New York Times in the face of Islamic fanaticism and intolerance is tragic and dangerous, not so much because it represents a great newspaper's cowardice in the face of religious fascists' attempt to silence any criticism of their religion, but moreso because the Times' disgraceful response represents the point of view of quite a significant number of people in the West, who believe they are being progressive and moral by abasing themselves before the illiberal demands of Muslim leaders. One doesn't have to believe the Pope was right to use the quote he did to stand up for his right to say it, and to recognize that the real threat to liberty and human rights in all this are those Muslims who are hysterically braying for the Pope to apologize. If the West is going to adopt the attitude of the New York Times in these matters, the danger and the tragedy will belong to us, and be of our own making.]
Friday, September 15, 2006
What do I have in common with Pope Benedict? Unfortunately for me, not as much as I wish we did. But there is this: We have both been compared to Nazis by Islamic leaders who believed we had insulted their faith. Three years ago, the head of the Islamic Society of North America shook his finger at me and told me that my words reminded him of Nazism (I had calmly asked him why, if he was being honest in describing his organization as dedicated to peace and tolerance, it had on its board some Muslims who had been publicly associated with extremism.) Here's the column I subsequently wrote about it for the Dallas Morning News, here collected on another website. Today a Turkish Islamic leader compared Benedict to Hitler for his remarks in that Regensburg speech. The condemnation is coming in from all over the Islamic world. I've been watching footage of street protests in Gaza, in Cairo, in India and elsewhere -- all because of the Pope's words. I certainly wouldn't expect Muslims to take kindly to Benedict's words, but this hysterical reaction is stupid. If Christians or Jews lost their heads and took to the streets every time some Muslim, secularist or whoever criticized them, there's be no time for anything else. Andrew Stuttaford, writing in the Corner, quotes approvingly from this column by the religious affairs editor of England's leftist daily The Guardian, who finds himself surprised to be in sympathy with the pontiff: Benedict's offence, of course, was recklessly to quote this 600 year-old expression of the point of view of a medieval Middle Eastern potentate. He didn't endorse it, didn't say that it was his own view, attributed it in context. And is now told that he has "aroused the anger of the whole Islamic world". Most of which, probably, had never heard of Manuel II Paleologue before this morning. Perhaps the pope should be careful of bringing such subversive ancient texts to light.
On the other hand, if you cannot, as part of a lengthy and profound academic lecture, cite a 600 year-old text for fear of stirring the aggravation of noisy politicians half way around the world, what CAN you do? We might as well all retreat into obscurantism. And keep our mouths shut, for otherwise, who knows who we might offend. And if, as a result of the outrage, some Catholics get killed or their churches burned down by offended scholars and textual exegesists it might be thought that Manuel's original point had rather been made. Yesterday I thought Benedict would have been wiser not to have said what he said. Today I'm glad he said it, because the fanatically intolerant Muslim response may finally wake people up to the kind of challenge those of us in the West -- Christian, Jewish, secularist, moderate Muslim and otherwise -- who believe in freedom of speech and freedom of thought really do face. I especially found this, from an Al-Jazeera report, rich: In Qatar, prominent Muslim scholar shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi rejected the Pope's comments and said Islam was a religion of peace and reason. Qaradawi, you will note, has called for killing homosexuals, wife-beating, suicide-bombing to murder Israelis, punishing rape victims if they dressed "immodestly," and other charming things. Yet according to one prominent British Musli
m leader: When most Muslims look to Mr Qaradawi, they see a shining example of moderation: in its Islamic meaning. To us, being a moderate Muslim means to practise the religion faithfully, according to its letter and its spirit. Think about that.
Here's Russell Arben Fox's meaty, complex take on Damon Linker's "The Theocons." Well worth a read -- and I'm sorry I've got so much going on this morning that I can't devote more time to parsing Prof. Fox's analysis. The gist of it is that he thinks Linker, who is a personal friend, has some genuinely good insights into where the theocons went wrong, but misses a great deal too. The key contribution, says Fox, is in showing that the project that Father Neuhaus and Co. are engaged in fundamentally differs from the kind of religiosity that men like Wm Jennings Bryan, MLK and other public divines in American history brought to the public square. In other words, the "theocon" project, such that it is, represents a break with the traditions of American public religion, not merely a contemporary iteration of it. But, says Fox, this kind of analysis is not what most people reading the book are going to get out of it. If the reader happens to be a secular liberal or libertarian, then the fine distinctions which Damon's analysis reveals between different forms of public religiosity are not going to matter; if it has to do with making (supposedly) private things like religion more "public," then they're against it. And if the reader is a theocon or at least a social or political conservative wanting to protect their side in the culture war and keep their bases of political power intact, the subtlety of Damon's argument will similarly be lost; all they'll see is another hysterical attack on the (quite reasonable) idea that politicians ought to employ religious ideas, particularly those which are manifestly popular with their constituents, in making policy. And frankly this result doesn't surprise me--because Damon himself, in my view, doesn't actually do nearly enough with the particular elements of theoconservatism which he analyzes. Instead, the book (which, to be fair, he intended to be read polemically anyway) invites unsubtle, either-or reactions. Damon has become a lot more secular over the years I've known him, and I think that as he worked through the enormous amount of material before him in order to craft his indictment of the theocons, he much too often employed, either explicitly or implicitly, straightforwardly (and rather easy) secular dismissals and arguments.
Muslims burn an image of Pope Benedict in effigy to protest his intimation that Islam has a problem with violence.The more of this kind of thing I see, the happier I am that Benedict said what he said. Better to know precisely what we're dealing with here than to deny the problem with honeyed words, as the previous administration was wont to do. UPDATE: Amy reports the following: Mario Mauro, vice-president of the European Parliament, said in a statement today, "Let us defend the Pope without ifs or buts, let us defend reason," in answer to the reactions from the Muslim world to Pope Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg on Tuesday.
"The monstrous attempt on the part of many Islamic leaders, even the so-called moderates, to distort the Pope's reaching out to all religions (through the lecture),in order to hit out at Christians and the West shows us the gravity of the danger we are facing," Mauro continues.
He underscores how "the islamo-nazi ideology that permeates the thought of fundamentalists represents the most dramatic distortion of the use of reason." The statement continues: "They use God as a pretext to pursue a plan for power, and this is what the Pope has denounced, thereby defending freedom for all, especially for those Muslims who look to religion as an experience of the sense of life, and not as a shortcut to political power.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Honestly, the thin-skinnedness of many Muslims is getting awfully tiresome. How on earth are we ever supposed to be able to have a dialogue if the non-Muslim side has to walk on eggshells to avoid offending the wounded sensibilities of Muslim leaders, who seem very eager to take the gross offense at anything critical (that said, a Catholic theologian friend who loved the Pope's speech said that Benedict probably should have chosen a less stark quote to make his point, and my friend is probably right). Still, in my dealings with Muslim leaders in Dallas who have been offended by my critical writing, they rarely if ever have dealt with the substance of what I've written; they've gone apoplectic over the fact that I wrote anything critical at all. As if the only reason anyone could have anything critical to say about Islam is out of malicious or bigoted motive. I'll soon be having a formal meeting with my superiors here at the paper and representatives of area Muslims who were outraged by my recent essay on the meaning of the life and teaching of the Islamist fanatic Sayyid Qutb, whose work was presented to teenagers at a large local mosque. My piece explained what Qutb thought and why he thought it, and that we in the West are never going to win the battle of ideas with the forces of extremism until and unless we take Qutb serious and answer his challenges. This essay was described by the Muslim leader who requested the meeting as an example of "hateful paranoia." I'm seriously looking forward to engaging my critics in this meeting, but I'm under no illusion that the point of this kind of complaining is to argue the merits of my criticism, or Pope Benedict's, or anybody else's. It's to attempt to silence critical discussion entirely. This is why CAIR, et alia, scream "Islamophobia!" constantly -- to intimidate those who have legitimate questions and comments from expressing them, under pain of being denounced as a hater. Ian Buruma has recently written to say that leaders of various minority groups are harming democracy and the free and fruitful exchange of ideas by trying to set the terms of the debate. One cannot expect all Muslims to be pleased by Benedict's speech, but good grief, it's way past time to get over the adolescent idea that criticism of one's ideas or behavior is always and everywhere evidence of "hate." As I say to intemperate gay-rights advocates all the time, "You hate me! You hate me!" is only a valid argument, or an argument at all, in the minds of 13-year-old schoolgirls.
Ross has been reading Damon Linker's much-anticipated "The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege," and while he's not out with his own thoughts yet, recommends this Washington Monthly review by Commonweal's Philip Baumann as "definitive." According to Baumann, who writes for the liberal Catholic ("theolib"?) journal Commonweal, and who can't be accused of being ideologically biased in favor of Father Richard John Neuhaus, the principle target of "Theocons," the Linker book is pretty awful, lacking in insightful analysis, candor and even fairness. Linker recognizes that Neuhaus is a formidable and important figure, at least. Says Baumann: For Neuhaus is that rare religious thinker who “likes contact,” as football coaches say. He’d rather hit than play nice. Delighting in attention, he relishes intellectual combat, and his willingness to say what others only think endears him to his admirers. He can also be an elegant and compelling writer, combining the cadences of a preacher with the clever ripostes of a practiced debater. He knows how to flatter, and he knows how to get under someone’s skin. His skill at combining the loftiest of moral appeals with the bluntest political rhetoric and tactics makes him an emblematic—and effective—figure in our era of highly partisan politics. The problem, according to Baumann, is that Neuhaus pretty much makes theolibs and secularists lose their heads, and rush to type out "blunderbuss" books shrieking about theocracy, rather than provide a serious and substantive response to the serious and substantive challenge posed by Neuhaus's thought. And the liberal/secularist freakout, Baumann shrewdly notes, only makes the position of religious conservatives that much stronger, because most Americans think religion is a normal part of life, and withdraw from those who see a crypto-Richelieu in a man like Neuhaus, who, whatever his faults, is really nothing more -- and nothing less -- than, in Baumann's words, "a very serious churchman and sophisticated political actor." Ross identifies a key passage from the review that sums up Baumann's core complaint against the book: Suffice it to say that while some on the religious right are anti-democratic, the arguments Neuhaus and company make about the religious origins of our ideas about human dignity and the intrinsic value of each life are hardly a recipe for theocratic tyranny. Liberal religious thinkers embrace similar premises yet come to very different political conclusions. As Galston and Edsall note, while Americans want a firm separation of church and state, they don’t want a purely secular public square, and there is no moral or constitutional reason why they should accept one. Yet Linker thinks the explicit disavowal of religious-based moral claims should be a prerequisite for entering into the political debate. He’s wrong, both philosophically and historically. As Ross rightly comments, "This doesn't mean that religious conservatives are right about everything or even anything. It just means that their arguments are as legitimate as any other set of arguments in the public square, and that our debates about public policy shouldn't get sidetracked by pointless and ahistorical ad hominems about the supposed existential threat America faces from "theocons" and "Christianists." Unfortunately, it isn't.
Uh-oh, Mario Loyola over at The Corner is demonstrating dangerous crunchy-con tendencies: Is economic progress necessarily preferable to cultural conservation? In the countryside of France, the last century has been dominated by a struggle between the impulse of modernity and a desire to preserve a way of life that many people find absolutely perfect in stasis, balanced and harmonious, its preservation worth sacrificing for. For many of them, going from 5 weeks of vacation a year to 2 weeks, trading their local (expensive) tomatoes for Wal-Mart's cheap and nearly tasteless ones, means trading the best life has to offer in exchange for increased productivity growth. I agree that Wal-Mart is much better for society and for our economy — especially for low-income people — than its detractors care to admit. But the larger philosophical point seems to me ultimately a normative dilemma, and I just don't know how best to resolve it. As France grows slowly to accept the failure of its social and economic model, it may be resigning itself to the end of la France des villages. That makes them very sad, and me too.
Do you want to know why so many Christians fear that the gay rights movement is a direct threat to their religious liberty? You might have read Maggie Gallagher's startling report in which she quotes legal scholars on both sides of the issue saying that the conflict between full rights for gays (esp. re: same-sex marriage) and religious liberty for Christians who believe homosexuality is sinful is irreconcilable, and is headed for a court showdown. But you probably haven't read Melanie Phillips' very important column from London's Daily Mail about how Christianity is being suppressed, even criminalized, by gay campaigners in England, an establishment that has taken their side, and secularized public that appears to hate Christianity more than it loves liberty. Here's an excerpt: How long will it be before Christianity becomes illegal in Britain? This is no longer the utterly absurd and offensive question that on first blush it would appear to be.
An evangelical Christian campaigner, Stephen Green, was arrested and charged last weekend with using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour.
So what was this behaviour? Merely trying peacefully to hand out leaflets at a gay rally in Cardiff. So what was printed on those leaflets that was so threatening, abusive or insulting that it attracted the full force of the law?
Why, none other than the majestic words of the 1611 King James Bible. The problem was that they were those bits of the Bible which forbid homosexuality. The leaflets also urged homosexuals to ‘turn from your sins and you will be saved’. But to the secular priests of the human rights culture, the only sin is to say that homosexuality is a sin.
Admittedly, Mr Green is not everyone’s cup of tea; other Christians regard him as extreme. But our society is now so upside-down that, by doing nothing more than upholding a fundamental tenet of Christianity, he was treated like a criminal. And yet at the same time, the police are still studiously refusing to act against Islamic zealots abusing British freedom to preach hatred and incitement against the West.
The Bible is the moral code that underpins our civilisation. Yet the logic of the police action against Mr Green surely leads ultimately to the inescapable conclusion that the Bible itself is ‘hate speech’ and must be banned.
This bizarre state of affairs has arisen thanks to our human rights culture which automatically champions minorities against the majority. As a result, no one can say anything disobliging about a minority without being accused of prejudice or discrimination.
The problem for Christianity is that it holds that homosexuality is wrong. This, however, it is no longer allowed to say because it treats a minority practice as sinful. So it can no longer uphold a central tenet of its own faith without being accused of prejudice.
This dilemma is currently tearing apart the Church of England itself. But it is also turning our whole notion of justice on its head. Phillips goes on to say that: Christianity is fast becoming the creed that dare not speak its name. It is being written out of the national script by ideologues seeking to hasten its disappearance. ... What started as a commendable desire to ban hatred of the gay minority has morphed into a hatred of the Christian majority. She concludes that the same process which is destroying the liberties of Christians in England will destroy the liberties that all English people enjoy, which derive from Christianity. Now, we are, I think, safe from this sort of thing here in America, in large part because we have the First Amendment. But the First Amendment requires interpretation, and there is no guarantee at
all that religious institutions who hold to the traditional Biblical teaching about homosexuality will be able to retain their full religious liberty in that regard if the courts decide that homosexuality is to be seen in the eyes of the law as the equivalent of race. Read the Gallagher piece for a fuller sense of the implications of this. It is extremely clear that we will see open, wide and active persecution of what practicing Christians remain in Europe, and that we will see it in our lifetime. It will all be done in the name of human rights, and all "right-thinking" people will applaud. When many Christians in this country see this happening, it confirms their worst fears about what gay-rights campaigners in America seek for them: a future in which the faith and those who practice it are suppressed by the law and hounded into submission. This will sound hysterical to many readers, I know, but it is impossible to deny what is happening to Christians in Europe. A serious question: Why shouldn't American Christians (and for that matter, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and others who hew to the traditional teaching of the Abrahamic religions on homosexuality) fear the same future for themselves here?
Time's cover story on the "Prosperity Gospel" is not available online, except to subscribers, but I was able to read it last night in -- strange as it may sound -- the actual magazine. I was pleased to see so many Evangelical pastors and theologians sternly condemning it as un-Biblical. Indeed, it's quite simply shocking to see how the prosperity preachers twist the clear teaching of Scripture about the relationship of wealth to holiness to advocate a theology that cannot be reconciled with Scripture or tradition. It occurred to me that while the most modish heresy afflicting the Christian left in this country is the belief that homosexual practices are affirmed by Christian Scripture and tradition, the most modish heresy on the Christian right is the prosperity gospel. Both of them represent an abdication of Biblical faith and an accomodation to the world. As I wrote in "Crunchy Cons," the Dems are too often the Party of Lust, and the Repubs are too often the Party of Greed. Both are deadly sins. Both are deadly to true Christianity, too.
If you're a close reader of these comboxes, you will have noticed that we're making more of an effort to be vigilant about deleting personal attacks. It's our policy to be as accomodating as we can be to all points of view, and I would not want anybody to think that dissent from my point of view, or strong criticism, is unwelcome here. It is welcome. Let's be clear about that. But what is not welcome are nasty personal attacks on me or combox commentators. I try to take a narrow view of what constitutes a "personal attack," because there are people who believe that disagreeing strongly with them is a personal attack. I don't share that view at all. But as you regulars know, there is a small but strident minority of folks who can't seem to add their two cents to any thread without being personally spiteful. This kind of commentary is unwelcome on its face, but more importantly in my view it makes the comboxes unwelcome to decent people on all sides of an issue who would like to discuss issues rather than insult their opponents. Let's all -- and I'm talking to myself too -- commit ourselves to behaving civilly with each other, even when we disagree (and especially when we disagree). I'm unable, because of time constraints, to monitor all the combox threads, and truth to tell I rarely go back into a thread after a day. If you see someone engaged in ad hominem attacks, let me know, and we'll try to deal with it. It is possible to have a robust discussion and debate without behaving badly, and I don't want the great majority of readers and posters here who want to engage in that kind of exchange on this site to be driven off by the very small number of people who don't know how to conduct themselves.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
I'm not sure if you need a subscription to read it, but I'm hoping not. I'm talking about Richard Florida's piece in The Atlantic noting the huge demographic shift over the last 30 years, in which the most educated people have concentrated themselves in certain big cities (e.g., Boston and Austin, not Cleveland and Milwaukee). You have to see the two maps published with the piece to appreciate what he's talking about. The first shows that the college-educated were fairly widely dispersed throughout the country in 1970; by 2000, though, certain urban areas had drained much of the rest of the country pale. That is, as these urban areas (called "means metros" by Florida) grew richer in brainpower, much of the rest of the country grew poorer. Writes Florida: What’s behind this phenomenon? Some of the reasons for it are essentially aesthetic—many of the means metros are beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in. But there is another reason, rooted in economics: increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value.
The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth—in fact, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas declared the multiplier effects that stem from talent clustering to be the primary determinant of growth. That’s all the more true in a postindustrial economy dependent on creativity, intellectual property, and high-tech innovation.
Places that bring together diverse talent accelerate the local rate of economic evolution. When large numbers of entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, designers, and other smart, creative people are constantly bumping into one another inside and outside of work, business ideas are more quickly formed, sharpened, executed, and—if successful—expanded. The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes. That makes intuitive sense, though Joel Kotkin makes a good case that Florida's "creative class" hypothesis is pretty thin, and that rather than spending money developing hipster arts districts, cities that want to attract the solid middle class that they need to thrive would do better to invest more in bread-and-butter stuff like a good police force, reliable infrastructure, decent schools and the kinds of things that meet the needs of families, not the young and unattached. Still, the demographic numbers (and real-estate prices) have an important story to tell about the growing desirability of urban areas to those with high incomes -- which is to say, those driving the economy. Florida says it's easy to imagine that these urban areas will be priced out of the reach of the middle class as the upper classes bid up real estate prices. Figuring out how to manage this geographic sorting-out between the intellectual elite (who become an economic elite in a meritocratic information economy) and everyone else will be a big challenge this century. Meanwhile, a colleague today told me of a gated community in a prosperous local suburb that contains within it another gated community, so the people who live in the $700,000 houses can be protected from the people who live in the $300,000 houses on the outer rim. This is going to be an interesting century.
Finally, a transcript of Pope Benedict's so-called "Islam-bashing" speech! How very different the speech was from what you'd expect if you'd read an MSM account of the thing. There was the untoppably atrocious, biased and inaccurate headline atop the Agence France Presse account. The New York Times version of the story, for example, correctly notes that the pope's remarks about Islam were only a tiny part of the long address, which concerned itself with the divorce in the West of faith and reason. But a large amount of the Times' account deals with those Islam-related remarks, and what they might mean. The profound -- and profoundly important -- message Benedict had about the limits of reason got second billing. The press writes about what it understands, and as some among us tirelessly and fruitfully point out, the press doesn't get religion. I recall that when John Paul would issue an encyclical, the press would tend to evaluate it on what it had to say about sex and women's rights. As if the concerns of a secular liberal journalist were the universal concerns of the wider world, and the religious community to whom the message was primarily intended. The Islam part of Benedict's speech, however, was especially important, because in it, he indicates that the differences between Islamic and Christian concepts of God make dialogue difficult. Not impossible, but difficult, because the way we understand God's nature has everything to do with how we interpret reality and our own duty to Him. This is an important point, one often overlooked -- and indeed downplayed by Benedict's predecessor. Benedict is trying to take Islam's theological claims seriously, not gloss over them for the sake of false ecumenism. I think Benedict chose this example to telegraph that it will be more difficult than many in the West suppose to separate Islam from violence: I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) of part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.
It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the "three Laws": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran.
In the seventh conversation ("diálesis" -- controversy) edited by professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that sura 2:256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.
Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading
the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...."
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.
The conservative writer and humorist Christopher Buckley has a very funny piece out about why it's time for his party, the Republicans, to get their blocks knocked off this November, for their own good. He's part of a group of conservatives with essays in the Washington Monthly explaining why they hope the GOP loses big this November. I especially like this part from Buckley's essay: The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it. There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.
Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]
George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons — bright people, all — are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”
What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back? One place comes to mind: the back benches. If you want to know where to find the Schadenfreude on Election Night, come sit by me. Or maybe by Richard Viguerie, also in the Washington Monthly symposium, saying: If Big Government Republicans behave so irresponsibly and betray the people who elected them, while we blindly, slavishly continue backing them, we establish that there is no price to pay for violating conservative principles. If we give in, we are forgetting the lesson that mothers teach their daughters: Why buy a cow when the milk is free? Oooh, snap!
The question of the difference between aggressive interrogation and torture is not a cut-and-dried one. Mark Bowden, writing in The Atlantic three years ago, explored the murky world of interrogation and torture, and makes a strong case for using at least some very harsh interrogation techniques in at least some cases. What angers me about the way the Bush administration has handled the question is that it has dissembled greatly as a way to avoid having to confront the issue. Whenever I hear Bush say that "we don't torture," I think about how the Bush Justice Dept came up with a legal ruling that redefined torture to give our interrogators a massive semantic loophole. I think an argument could be made that US interrogators ought to be allowed to do harsher interrogations. I'm not saying that the argument would be persuasive or moral, but it would at least be an argument. What the administration is doing is trying to avoid having to defend what many Americans would find indefensible. Take, for example, this short video clip of a recent Oval Office interview Matt Lauer conducted with the president. It is remarkable, really remarkable, to watch the president try to bully his way past Lauer's reasonable questions about the torture policy. The entirety of Bush's defense is: 1) we don't torture;
2) I can't talk details about what we do, because that would tip off the enemy;
3) I'm doing everything I can to protect your family, so what's your problem with that, huh? Huh?This is transparently manipulative. It's telling people to put their conscience at ease, they have nothing to worry about, that asking questions is dangerous and possibly disloyal, and besides, why do they have a problem with the president doing anything he wants to do to protect their children? This is not an argument. This is a strategy to avoid an argument, or even a discussion. This is trust me. But you can't trust Bush on this, unless you happen to be on the pro-torture side, in part because when the Congress explicitly outlawed torture in interrogation, Bush, in signing the bill into law, issued a signing statement reserving the right to himself to do whatever he damn well pleases with enemy prisoners. Maybe I've got my priorities backward, but what galls me most about this is not even that we've tortured, and reserve the right to ourselves to torture. No, what galls me the most is that Bush is so self-righteous about it, and is manipulating the legitimate fears that people have of terror attacks to disarm their moral sense, even as he poses as a guardian of morality. America already has a big problem with "ends justifies the means" morality. This is making it worse.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Last night, the president said: We look to the day when moms and dads throughout the Middle East see a future of hope and opportunity for their children.
And when that good day comes, the clouds of war will part, the appeal of radicalism will decline, and we will leave our children with a better and safer world. According to the New York Times, a 9/11 message on a jihadi blog: I'm against America even if it turns this life into a paradise
I'm against America even if a mufti issues a fatwa in its favor from within the glorious Kaaba If only the Arab Muslim world were more interested in building opportunity than in pursuing its self-destructive obsession with honor...
Rosie O'Donnell says that "radical Christianity" is just as dangerous as "radical Islam." The amusing thing is she no doubt really believes that. I hope she'll test her thesis. I hope she'll go with her lesbian partner to the center of Bob Jones University, and make out on the quad for a couple of minutes, to see what happens. Next, they should fly to Tehran and go stand outside a mosque and try the same thing. This is what they do to gay people in Iran, genius.
My Dallas Morning News colleague Josh Benton, who covers education for our paper, has a good column out about how colleges make a pretense of meritocracy, but cut all kinds of slack for rich kids with mediocre minds: Is any of this really surprising? I mean, isn't it a given that connections matter, that a kid whose last name is Bush, Bass or Kennedy is going to have an edge?
I suppose. But America's elite colleges make such a fuss about their high-minded meritocracy that it's disgusting to see them dance like eager courtiers.
The American model is supposed to promote social mobility, not an inherited aristocracy. College admissions is a zero-sum game. For every C-student rich kid who gets into Harvard, there's a far more qualified middle-class kid who gets stuck with his safety school.
And those spots in the freshman class are more sought after than ever. When I applied to Yale in 1993, the university admitted 19 percent of all applicants. Today, it's closer to 9 percent.
Elite schools, including Yale and Harvard, have made efforts in the last few years to increase the number of low-income students they attract – mostly by offering more generous financial aid packages.
But as long as they keep holding the door open for the middling children of aristocrats, they'll be blocking the path for everyone else. I am foursquare against affirmative action in college admissions as being irredeemably unjust. But I'm also against affirmative action for the rich, dumb and connected.
Watching it last night, I thought, you know, I believe Bush is a good man. I really do. I know a lot of you will say, "If he's such a good man, how do you explain [fill in the blank]." Fine. I get that. I've gone sour on this presidency too. But I think Bush is not a villain, but instead a tragic figure. He means well. Which is not an exoneration, but still, I wanted to get that said. I wanted to say that because the tragedy of this presidency was on full display in the speech last night. The rhetoric was lovely, it really was, but it has little or nothing to do with the actual world we live in, or the challenges we face. That's putting it a bit broadly, but not much, I think. I listened to him talk last night about how the Iraqis are bravely standing up for Freedom, and only the villainous insurgents who hate Freedom are preventing them from having Freedom and its blessings ... and I thought, good Lord, he really does believe this b.s., doesn't he? How is it that with Ayatollah Sistani, our Man in Mesopotamia, having withdrawn from politics in despair (see Spengler's take on the meaning of that event), and with Anbar province having been lost to Al-Qaeda in Iraq and its fellow travelers, and with the military flat-out lying -- Flat. Out. Lying. -- to create happy news on its summertime operation to pacify Baghdad -- with all of that, how can Bush gas on about the glories of Freedom in Iraq? It boggles the mind. It reminds me of Minister Helpmann, of the Ministry of Information, I recall, in the fantastic Terry Gilliam film masterpiece "Brazil," who begins the film with a TV interview about a terrorist campaign against the government: INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?
HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.
INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.
HELPMANN: Beginner's luck. The President went on last night about this grand project of bringing democracy to the Middle East that we're all going to have to commit ourselves to for a generation or more. And I thought, "You will not have my sons for building your Wilsonian dream palace." (Well, actually I thought something unprintable here, but I meant "You will not have my sons for building your Wilsonian dream palace.") It is the same message he's been giving since the start of this war -- most unnervingly, in his second inaugural address -- and he's gotten to the point where he seems to think if he says it often enough, it'll be true. The reason I find him tragic is twofold. For one, I honestly do believe he's a good man, but he has led his nation -- with the help of Congress, yes, but also because we were all too willing to be led -- into a quagmire based on his own exalted but false view of human nature. He thinks people are better than they are. That is his mistake, but the tragedy doesn't just belong to him. Not now. Not anymore. And see, I think he's right about the war on Islamism being the most important ideological battle of the 21st century, and the challenge of our generation. Which only makes the ditch he's got us stuck in, and is manifestly incapable of leading us out of, all the worse. Listening to Bush last night, I began to think that this really might be well on its way to Vietnam. The distance between the president's rhetoric and reality leaves a gap that can easily be filled with anger
and cynicism. I would really rather not be angry and cynical about my country's leadership, especially given the fact that I voted for this president, twice. But we are where we are. I'm afraid that the president's complication had a little complication.
Monday, September 11, 2006
OK, one more thing about 9/11. In this column, John Podhoretz writes today about how he wasn't rattled by fear after 9/11, but that his form of resisting the evil unleashed on that day was to rededicate himself to loving fiercely in its face. In the immediate wake of 9/11, he writes: Getting married was an urgent, all-consuming need.
I took Ayala aback with the ferocity of my determination. At every turn I brought up what it would mean to be married. I was so determined that I proposed to her at 9 in the morning sitting in the living room of my Brooklyn Heights apartment, through whose window we had seen the black gash of the sky above Ground Zero every night since 9/11. She accepted - and then informed me we had to come up with a more romantic engagement story to tell her family and friends.
I'm telling the story now for the first time because I think it is romantic. I fell in love more deeply with Ayala and had to marry her because I had witnessed the worst and needed the best. Something deep and elemental within me needed to supersede the evil of 9/11 with the purest affirmation of existence - unconditional hope for the future and new life in the form of children whose presence on this earth would be the most crushing blow a middle-aged man like me could deliver to the cult of death that sought to tear out America's heart. Bravo. Bravo!
Finally on this 9/11, a word, maybe, of hope. I wrote this for Touchstone about something we saw at a Christmas concert near Ground Zero on a snowy night in 2002. It speaks in some way to something my friend Bill Holston, a lawyer here in Dallas, sent me today: C.S. Lewis preached at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford on October 22, 1939. Less than two months earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland. Britain was about to face the horrible Nazi onslaught. This is what Lewis told the assembled students:
It may seem odd for us to carry on classes, to go about our academic routine in the midst of a great war. What is the use of beginning when there is so little chance of finishing? How can we study Latin, geography, algebra in a time like this? Aren't we just fiddling while Rome burns?
This impending war has taught us some important things. Life is short. The world is fragile. All of us are vulnerable, but we are here because this is our calling. Our lives are rooted not only in time, but also in eternity, and the life of learning, humbly offered to God, is its own reward. It is one of the appointed approaches to the divine reality and the divine beauty, which we shall hereafter enjoy in heaven and which we are called to display even now amidst the brokenness all around us. Stagger onward rejoicing!
Whenever I think of the redemption that God can bring, and did bring, out of 9/11, I think of Frank Silecchia. I heard about his deed before I ever knew his name. A few days after the attacks, I was walking up Montague Street in Brooklyn, and took a cell phone call. It was my uncle, a Lutheran chaplain with the FBI. He was down on the pile, ministering to the firefighters and rescue personnel. He said the most amazing thing had happened. An ironworker had discovered in one corner of the site three large cross-shaped metal beams that had fallen perfectly: they looked like the three crosses on Golgotha. You've got to get down here and see this, he said. There's twisted and tangled metal everywhere, but those beams are the only straight lines you can see. I couldn't talk my way onto the site, but my uncle managed to convince the ironworker who had discovered the beams to come outside the perimeter to meet me and talk to me. His name was Frank Silecchia. He was one of the biggest men I've ever met. A huge bear of a man. Enormous. Strong. But gentle. A gentle giant. He was covered with filth, and reeked of acrid smoke. We sat down, and he told me that indeed, he'd been the one to discover the crosses. In the time since, he'd been leading rescue workers overcome with emotion there to kneel and pray. He said that one man, a police sergeant I think it was, had lost his son in the collapse. Frank had been trying to talk to him about it, and the man turned on Frank in anger. Big Frankie led the poor father down to the foot of the cross, where they knelt and prayed. And then the grieving father hugged Big Frankie, and was better. Again and again that happened. My uncle had seen it. Frankie wasn't making any of it up. Frankie spoke slowly, with conviction. He was a working man, had been all his life. He told me he had been raised Catholic, but somewhere lost his way. He got married, had a kid, but got into drugs and wild living. Lost his wife and child. At some point, he was lost in a pit, and someone reached out to him, invited him to church. It was a Pentecostal church. Jesus was there, and Big Frankie got born again. He cleaned up his life. He began to make amends for the wrongs he had done. And one day, God put him in just the right place. The crosses he found became a pilgrimage site. Here's something he told me, recalled in a Crisis magazine piece I did in November 2001: "Despite all of the evil poured onto these buildings, God is here, and He will not be defeated."Here's a story about Frank, with a photograph of that good and great man. Big Frankie, where are you now?
Many Americans believe that terrorism and war are caused by poverty and political oppression, and that if we just make people more free and more prosperous, we'll have less terrorism and war. Niall Ferguson understands otherwise. In this long piece analyzing why the 20th century's wars happened when and where they did, and what that tells us about 21st century war, he writes: It might have been expected that such prosperity would eliminate the causes of war. But much of the worst violence of the twentieth century involved the relatively wealthy countries at the opposite ends of Eurasia. The chief lesson of the twentieth century is that countries can provide their citizens with wealth, longevity, literacy, and even democracy but still descend into lethal conflict.
James Lileks has a moving video montage of news footage from 9/11. It starts with images of his daughter, then a toddler, playing unawares in the living room as he's filming the initial news reports of the attacks. What a startling image that is. The event that will determine so much of that child's life -- that is, the world she will live in -- was taking place in real time, and there she is, completely innocent of it. My oldest son Matthew is a little older than Lileks' daughter. As far as we know, he didn't understand what was going on, though he did grasp that it had something to do with firefighters. He had been going through a firefighter stage, typical for a little boy. That summer, we'd paid several visits to Ladder 118, in Brooklyn Heights, where the firefighters let Matthew crawl into their truck and play around. That's what they did for all the kids in the neighborhood. Here's what happened to Ladder 118 on 9/11. Weeks later, when they finally dug their ladder truck out and brought it home to the neighborhood, a contingent of volunteers from the Jehovah's Witness community came out and cleaned up the battered rig, out of love and devotion. It was a beautiful thing. Anyway, Matthew had been going around that summer from time to time in a plastic red fireman's helmet, because he loved firefighters. When we went on the night of 9/12 to a memorial at our Brooklyn parish for the dead, he wore his helmet. I got called out on newspaper business during the mass, and when I got home later that night Julie told me that Mike, a kind older man from the church, had taken her, Matthew and another friend to a neighborhood cafe for dinner, so she wouldn't have to go home alone. When they walked into the cafe, the place was full of firefighters from Jersey and elsewhere who had come in to join the mission on the pile. Seeing a two year old boy being carried in with a firefighter's helmet made an impression on the crowd. A big, burly firefighter stood up, came over to Matthew, and said, "Hey little fella, I want to shake your hand." Matthew tried to give him his sippy cup. The firefighter just smiled. Then Matthew took off his helmet and gave it to the firefighter. Today, Matthew has no memories of anything that happened on or after 9/11. I can't make my mind up if that's a blessing or not. Probably is. But I wish he had some memory of those good men of Ladder 118, who were his friends. Everybody's friends. And everybody's heroes.
Jeremy Lott joins the growing chorus of caring persons who refuse to marry Angelina Jolie until gay marriage is legal. Hear, hear. While I am already married, there is something I can do to support Brad's bravely keeping his child illegitimate (to say nothing of his options open, and his legal affairs less complicated) for the sake of proving a point. I have informed my wife that I will not mow the grass until marriage is legal for everybody. It was the least I could do.
Andrew Sullivan has a must-see YouTube video posted to his site: the Buckingham Palace band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in tribute on 9/11/01. Watch it. Then watch it again.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
I suspect I'll post less on 9/11 than I otherwise might have. I had to turn off ABC's excellent "Path to 9/11" miniseries tonight, because I was so filled with anger and emotion just watching it that I didn't know what to do. I still have a pounding tension headache from it. I spent pretty much the entire year after 9/11 living with this anger. I had to start wearing a mouth guard as I slept at night, because I ground my teeth so much. I remember the smell of burning human flesh hanging over our neighborhood in Brooklyn for that first week. On 9/12, I went into a Catholic parish in Bay Ridge, and found it filled at noon with people praying. It had a dome, and smoke from the pile had gathered there, like incense hovering over the faithful. I remember what the sunlight looked like passing through it. It smelled like burning wire, with a faint note of sweetness. That was the human flesh. I went to several firefighter funerals that fall. One in particular comes to mind now. We lost eight firemen from our neighborhood station. After one of the funerals, which I observed from the sidewalk (the church was too full to get in), I saw the dead man's wife and small children come out. The boy was wearing his father's hat. After everyone gave them condolences, they finally made their way down the Brooklyn street, until nobody could see them anymore. I followed them from a distance, and watched them load up into the minivan and drive away, into the rest of their lives. I wonder where those kids are now? I'm also thinking tonight about John Rigo. Nice guy -- we met him when we were in Rome in early 2001 for the consistory. He and his wife Betsy were in our little inexpensive hotel, the Due Torre. They were taking their young nephew Jackson on a tour of Europe. We met them for breakfast a couple of times, and really enjoyed their company. John was killed instantly in his WTC office when Mohammed Atta flew his plane into the north tower. It occurred to me today that within a space of one year, we had 9/11, and the breaking open of the Catholic priest sex scandal, first in Boston then elsewhere. I got so overcome with anger about all of those things that a military chaplain friend suggested to me that I should see a counselor or something, because it sounded to him like I had PTSD. He told me he'd been worried about that ever since I'd told him on 9/11 that I'd seen the south tower fall. So I went to see a Catholic psychotherapist in NYC, hoping that someone who understood something about Christian spirituality would be better able to help me deal with all the rage I still had at the hijackers, which had gotten all mixed up with fury at abuser priests and the bishops who enabled them. That was going okay, until the third meeting, when he attacked me for having written a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that John Paul had "let us down" by not disciplining the US church more firmly regarding the sex scandal. The therapist literally began yelling at me. He called me a "new Luther." He kept yelling, saying that I was going to lose my soul and destroy my marriage if I kept writing these things about the Church. He told me that the demons had hold of me. He told me that only the saints have the right to question a Pope's judgment, but being saints, they never would do so. He went on like this for an hour. I was so shell-shocked at the end of it that I just paid my money and shuffled out. A day or two later, I wrote him and accused him of malpractice, and told him if he didn't apologize and refund my money I was going to turn him in to the state licensing board. I got my money back. I wish I had turned him in all the same. God knows how many other people he browbeat like that. That fall, I was in another American city for Thanksgiving, far away from NYC. I was at a big Thanksgiving dinner. All I could think about was what had happened only a couple of months earlier. Everybody at the party chattered happily about everything else but 9/11. I found
myself sitting quietly, fighting anger. I was overwhelmed by emotion over the 9/11 loss, and being thankful for my country and for the firefighters and all the rest, but I was also nearly overwhelmed with anger over the fact that no one else at that party seemed to be paying any mind at all to the solemnity of the occasion. And then I got mad at myself for being mad at them. Why should they have been as morose as I was? It didn't happen to their city. They didn't see it take place with their own eyes. It was a TV event for them. I had no right to hold anything against them. What was wrong with me? Anger. You make bad decisions out of anger. I was gung-ho for the Iraq War out of anger, out of wanting a sense of vengeance. But I do think that being angry, still, about what was done to my city and my country and people I know on that day keeps me paying attention to things that a lot of people don't think to pay attention to, or don't want to pay attention to, and it keeps me passionate about them. So is anger constructive? Yes, it can be. But it can also mislead and destroy. I hate with the purest hate over 9/11 stuff. I'm not proud of it -- quite the contrary -- but it's difficult to control. Once in Dallas, I was in an editorial board meeting -- I'd been here only a few months, which is to say not quite two years after 9/11 -- and some expatriate American author was talking to us. We were looking for something to ask him about, so I asked him what it was like living in Panama on 9/11, watching what was happening back in the US. He said that there's a large Arab community in his city, and they were celebrating the events in New York and Washington, and really, can you blame them? I started shaking with rage -- literally shaking -- and had to get up to leave the room. I think I might have gone across the table to get the guy if I had stayed. I've never been so angry, at anything or anyone. If I know what's good for me, I'll keep the TV off tomorrow. But I never know what's good for me about this stuff. For some reason, I have to watch everything about 9/11 that's ever on. I have to look at every picture. I think all the time about what it was like to be in those towers when they started to fall. Sometimes, even now, I fall asleep thinking about everything that happened on that day. I can't decide if that's a matter of keeping faith, or a matter of being trapped. P.S. to those who posted in the comboxes on an earlier thread. I deleted that one, because one of the usual handful of idiots who comes around here with her deranged spitefulness provoked me into acknowledging her existence. I don't want that stain on this blog, so I deleted it. Remember that Beliefnet won't let me ban any of these people. They just have to be endured. I'm sure they will trash this combox with their musings, but I won't be responding. Sorry if I deleted your post -- feel free to repost on this thread if you like.
Last night I was rooting around for some bedtime reading, and pulled off the shelf a copy of Will Durant's history of the Reformation, which I'd bought at a used book store years ago for a couple of dollars. I read the first chapter, which set the stage for the Reformation. There's nothing quite like history to both reassure and panic simultaneously. It was reassuring to once again be faced with the facts that the Church was once upon a time in much worse condition than it is today ... and survived. It is panic-inducing -- well, not quite that, but worrying all the same -- to see how human flaws can so easily thwart our ability to haul our collective oxen out of the ditch. The Roman Church was enormously corrupt in the day -- nobody disputes that. Its corruption had a lot to do with the fact that during the Dark Ages, it had essentially saved Europe by acting as the de facto government. With worldly power and riches came the inevitable. What's so hard to accept, at least for me, is how even popes who could see what was happening, and who wanted to reform things to keep the Church -- and Christendom as a unified concept -- from throwing itself off a cliff were largely powerless to do so. Too many people at all levels of Church bureaucracy were too dependent on the status quo to accept the kind of change that was needed to restore the Church to sanity and responsibility, much less holiness. Here's Durant: The popes -- Boniface IX in 1392, Martin V in 1420, Sixtus IV in 1478 -- repeatedly condemned these misconceptions and abuses, but they were to pressed for revenue to practice effective control. ...The Church tried repeatedly, and often sincerely, to cleanse her ranks and her courts, and to adopt a financial ethic superior to the lay morality of hthe times. The monasteries tried again and again to restore their austere rules, but the constitution of man rewrote all constitutions. The councils tried to reform the Church, and were defeated by the popes; the popes tried, and were defeated b y the cardinals and the bureaucracy of the Curia. LeoX himself, in 1516, omourned the utter inefficacy of these endeavors. The collapse and re-formation of Christendom developed a kind of inevitability. There were spectacular, Church-sponsored cultural achievements during the period building to the crisis point, but none of this glorious business addressed the root causes of the crisis -- and in fact, may be thought of as an expression of it, in the sense that the luxury and worldliness represented by the Church's sponsorship of this art and architecture symbolized the Church's giving itself over the the spirit of the age. (Thought experiment: Would we give back the artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance in exchange for the Reformation never happening?) What interests me about this is not ecclesiastical matters, but what it says about our secular/political/cultural situation in contemporary America. At the risk of sounding Marxist, our prosperity depends on an efficient economic system that inevitably alienates people from their communities and even their families (in the sense that our highly mobile economy makes it increasingly likely that people will have to move away from their communities to hold employment). The individualist ethic that rules our society, like the individualist-consumerist economy, has produced great riches, and wrought achievements that no one can deny. And yet, one senses a decay in civic consciousness, a softening in our character, an inability to imagine sacrificing our present situation for the sake of preserving the commons for the future. Look at what Bush tried to do with Social Security reform. His might not have been the ideal plan, but at least he tried. It's not his fault that the political class and the public -- that's me and thee -- did not want to imagine giving up this scheme that plainly cannot last in its current form. Similarly, the GOP's abhorrent record on spending reflects, I
think, the public will: we the people really want to see our taxes cut and spending increase for the things we like. Could it be that the stasis we observe in both political parties is a reflection of both of them being so dependent on the status quo that they can't imagine thinking beyond it? Is it possible that the mess that both the GOP and the Democrats are in are not the cause of our problems, but a manifestation of it? Think about it: No politician could get elected today on a platform of raising taxes and/or cutting public spending for the sake of the long-term common good. I suspect no politician could get elected today on a natalist platform, even though the birth dearth crisis is going to be very serious indeed; people don't want to be told that the consumerist-individualist mentality they've accepted as reflecting metaphysical truth is unsustainable. Besides which, our 24/7 media culture swiftly and brutally punishes any politician who commits the heresy of questioning his or her tribe's dogma. That there will be a reckoning for the way we've chosen to live. I wonder what our breaking point will be? I wonder who the Luther will be, and what his Theses will say?
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Unbelievable: FORT EUSTIS -- Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.
In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said "he would fire the next person" who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Hey fellow conservatives, remember how much we sneered at liberals and Democrats for standing by Clinton no matter what during the Lewinsky scandal, because there was apparently nothing those doormats wouldn't accept from their man? IJS. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
That was the famous last line Johnny Rotten uttered before walking off stage at the Sex Pistols' final gig. Weirdly enough, it came to mind this morning as I was reading this story in the Times this morning. Here's the basic deal: WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The Central Intelligence Agency last fall repudiated the claim that there were prewar ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a report issued Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The disclosure undercuts continuing assertions by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee, in a second report, also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the prelude to the war in Iraq.
The findings are part of a continuing inquiry by the committee into prewar intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond its earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also of the administration.
Several Republicans strongly dissented on the report with conclusions about the Iraqi National Congress, saying they overstated the role that the exile group had played in the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. But the committee overwhelmingly approved the other report, with only one Republican senator voting against it.
The reports did not address the politically divisive question of whether the Bush administration had exaggerated or misused intelligence as part of its effort to win support for the war. But one report did contradict the administration’s assertions, made before the war and since, that ties between Mr. Zarqawi and Mr. Hussein’s government provided evidence of a close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Mr. Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.
The C.I.A. report also contradicted claims made in February 2003 by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who mentioned Mr. Zarqawi no fewer than 20 times during a speech to the United Nations Security Council that made the administration’s case for going to war. In that speech, Mr. Powell said that Iraq “today harbors a deadly terrorist network’’ headed by Mr. Zarqawi, and dismissed as “not credible’’ assertions by the Iraqi government that it had no knowledge of Mr. Zarqawi’s whereabouts.
The panel concluded that Mr. Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat rather than a potential ally, and that the Iraqi intelligence service “actively attempted to locate and capture al-Zarqawi without success.’’ Got that? The CIA admitted last fall that Saddam had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, or with Zarqawi. But three weeks ago, the president was still saying that he did. Honest to God, how can you believe anything he says about Iraq? I well remember watching Colin Powell's UN testimony, and being convinced to the marrow that we had to go to war with Iraq for our own safety. It was crap. Utter crap. According to the Senate report, the US relied wholly on information provided by a single source, Ahmad Chalabi and his crew, which we now believe were penetrated by Iranian intelligence. But see, the administration wants us to forget about that. Here's White House spokesman Tony Snow's spin on the report: “The important thing to do
is to figure out what you’re doing tomorrow, and the day after, and the month after, and the year after to make sure that this war on terror is won,” Mr. Snow said. Ah, but that's the rub, isn't it? We can't rely on this administration to figure out what to do because they cannot be trusted. I was talking to a cab driver this morning who said to me he's really concerned about the war on terror, "but I don't know what to believe because the government has lied so much to us." Speaking of which, Mark Shea can't help noticing something: The Prez, yesterday:
"I want to be absolutely clear with our people, and the world: The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorized it - and I will not authorize it."
We do, however, use "methods" to get information. What methods, Mr. President?
"I cannot describe the specific methods used - I think you understand why - if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary."
Translation: "We can't reveal methods because it's a security issue, not because our "methods" are torture or anything. Because I just said we don't torture and only a fool could believe a politician might lie."
But, Mr. President, members of your own Administration said that we employed waterboarding:
"Senior officials have said Mr. Mohammed was 'waterboarded,' a technique in which his head was pushed under water and he was made to believe that he might drown." Americans are not the kind of people who torture. Therefore, it's not torture. Got that? Let's focus on the future now, shall we? Onward and upward, to infinity and beyond!
Friday, September 08, 2006
You might remember my blogging not long ago about a sad and strange case in Dallas involving an elderly eccentric who was taken financial advantage of by a pair of alleged grifter types, who played to her kooky, Norma Desmond-y fantasies in order to talk her out of her house. Well, they had an estate sale at her house today -- and hundreds showed up. The Christian Science Monitor writes about the Brooke Astor case in NYC, and how elder abuse is happening more and more -- with family members the culprit. The Monitor reports that this is happening so much partly because people are living longer. I suspect that as the Baby Boomers age, stories like this will explode -- in part because they'll be happening more often, and in part because the Boomers set the media and cultural agenda, period. Humans being human, we've always had elder abuse among us, but surely when cultural norms exalted the elderly, this sort of thing was more rare. Don't you think? When I was growing up, everyone looked up to the elderly, and treated them with great respect. That sort of thing got into my bones -- I know, I know, a Southern thing again -- such that I was constantly frustrated for the three years I lived in south Florida. So many of the elderly down there were rude and undignified. They didn't behave like old people I was used to. They didn't invite respect. To be perfectly honest, many of those I encountered behaved like self-centered teenagers. By the end of my three years there, I felt weirdly hostile to the elderly. Which went away after I moved out of south Florida. I wonder if the mobility we enjoy in contemporary America has had the effect of straining the communal bonds and traditions that taught us to automatically respect the elderly, and fit them into the web of community life. As the Boomers age, with their children living far away, they will be more isolated, and more vulnerable. The radical individualism that characterizes American society -- something that the Boomers have championed -- will come back to hurt them in their elderly years. It's also the case that the Boomers inaugurated the modern Cult of Youth -- and I fear they are going to suffer from this in the future. Peter Augustine Lawler had a good essay about how the coming healthcare crisis as the Boomers age will force us to reassess how we've come to live and to think of society and our place in it. Those traditions of esteeming the elderly came from somewhere, after all: But there is also something deeply inadequate about viewing old age in terms of individual “ownership” of one’s own destiny. The aging society, after all, will confront us with the realities of human neediness. Freedom from “want and fear,” to the extent such freedom is humanly attainable, will require the old accepting the inevitability of their growing dependence on others, and it will require others who willingly accept the burden of caring for their elders, even at the expense of their own independence. The ownership society only makes sense if it prepares us to be care-givers and care-receivers, and if it does not encourage us to see ourselves as unencumbered individuals.
Ross Douthat is about a decade younger than I, but his experience is similar to my own. Read this important post of his. In it, he describes how liberating it was, having been raised in an extremely p.c. environment, to discover subversive conservative truths as he got older and wiser: [I]t was a huge intellectual thrill to find out all the things about the world that my somewhat politically-correct education wouldn't tell me. That welfare programs weren't working, say, and not just because Ronald Reagan wouldn't fund them. That there really were Communist spies in the 1940s and '50s. That decolonization hadn't been the magical process of Third World self-actualization that my eighties-era social studies textbooks suggested. I can still remember doing research for a project on population growth for my AP Biology class, around 1997 or so, and being astonished to discover that all the dire predictions of looming disaster that I'd heard throughout my childhood were just recyclings of Paul Ehrlich's dated alarmism - and that the greater threat might be something else entirely. This is true of any intellectual conversion, Ross says. While I did not have the p.c. childhood that Ross did, I spent my first two years in college consumed by liberal thought and polemics. I joined the Progressive Student Network straightaway, and handed out anti-contra literature on campus. I quit hanging out with them on the morning that Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on the Achille Lauro. Arriving at the literature table to work that morning, I was really upset over what had been done to Klinghoffer. One of my co-progressives responded that you always hear about Jewish deaths, but never about Palestinian deaths. Another said that if Klinghoffer was rich enough to take a cruise, perhaps he deserved to die. That was the end of me and the progressives, but I remained stalwartly liberal, in my way. It was only when a friend in Washington bought me a subscription to The American Spectator, which was very, very good in the 1980s, that my facade began to crack. Not only did the conservatives make more sense, they had a sense of humor and humanity about them that our side just ... didn't. True, I was not temperamentally inclined to hang with the Young Republicans on our campus, but more and more, I was beginning to agree with them, though it would take a few years before I was able to admit to myself that I was, in fact, a conservative. That I didn't believe the liberal dogma anymore -- that there was a difference between the real world and the world I believed in as a liberal. Truth to tell, I believe the break came consciously with me when I graduated and suddenly became a taxpayer and moved off-campus, and suddenly had to be concerned about crime. I wasn't mugged by reality, exactly, but I was roughed up by it. Anyway, in that light, Ross articulates here something that's been bothering me for a while, but that I hadn't really grasped until he said it: So it's been depressing, in the Bush years, to watch various conservatives take on the role that liberals played in my childhood and adolescence, by swaddling themselves in delusions about how the world actually is - whether it's the weird and persistent Bush-worship, the constant "good news from Iraq" drumbeat, the desperate "we found the WMDs" meme, or basically every word that comes out of Donald Rumsfeld's mouth. The thing is, unlike my intellectual conversion to conservatism, my having gone sour on the contemporary conservative scene (and the GOP in power) does not involve any serious threat to my fundamental principles -- well, most of them, anyway; it's true that I've become more sympathetic with paleo
cons and traditionalists since 9/11. It's about losing faith in the ability of my tribe's leaders to deal with changing conditions non-ideologically. It's about coming to see that many of us in the conservative camp have become more concerned about holding on to power than in being true to what we profess -- and admitting it when our principles or dogmas don't account for what we're observing in the real world. And changing course. Instead, we've become in many instances ossified in our thinking and quick to demonize critics, both inside and outside the conservative movement, as heretics. I hasten to say that I'm not tempted by liberalism. I fundamentally disagree with liberalism in most respects, and it's kind of amazing to be 20 years away from my freshman year in college, and still listening to the same stuff from many liberals that I used to hear two decades ago (except back then, I was saying them too). I'm not sure where conservatism is going, but I hope that after this election season -- whether or not the GOP takes a drubbing -- there will be some serious introspection on the Right. We cannot count on the Left being in disarray forever. We're deep in John Major territory now, and there's no Tony Blair on the scene. Yet. I'll leave you with this melancholy thought from Andrew Ferguson, writing in the 10th anniversary issue of The Weekly Standard. You should read his entire short essay. Here's an excerpt: Under the circumstances, it's not much of a surprise that the threshold Buckley tried to maintain has collapsed. I suppose any philosophical tendency, as it acquires power and popularity, will simplify itself, define itself downward. That's democratic politics for you. But something more corrosive is also at work. Marshall McLuhan was righter than anyone ever would have guessed. The medium really is the message. Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped--if I were a Marxist I might even say determined--by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone's been asking what I think about . . . You won't want to miss my appearance tonight on . . . Be sure to click here for my latest . . . ) that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the "author" on the cover. What a tumble! From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman--all in little more than a generation's time. Whatever this is, it isn't progress.
Hold in your mind the thought of that heroic and holy Ugandan Anglican bishop. Now read this. It's about an Anglican priest from England who moved to India and converted to Hinduism, and began serving as a Hindu priest there. He's just had his permission to serve as an Anglican priest in his English diocese renewed for three years. The diocese said they had no idea he'd become a Hindu, even though he wrote a book about it. No word in the story about whether or not they're going to withdraw his permission, or defrock him (as he ought to have done); the priest thinks there should be no objection to his serving as an Anglican priest in good standing when back in England. If this cat's bishop defrocks him, I'll be absolutely shocked. But delighted.
I'm sitting here at my desk in downtown Dallas, almost five years and half a country away from 9/11, but I can still remember exactly how it sounded when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. I was standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, just about to run off and into Manhattan, and had just told a colleague that the towers wouldn't fall. Suddenly, the south tower fell. It fell with a faraway roar that sounded exactly like what it was: a Niagara of dust and glass. Peggy Noonan today writes about the sounds of 9/11 "beyond the metallic roar." It's a moving column. Excerpt: I think too about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes--the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.
Something terrible had happened. Life was reduced to its essentials. Time was short. People said what counted, what mattered. It has been noted that there is no record of anyone calling to say, "I never liked you," or, "You hurt my feelings." No one negotiated past grievances or said, "Vote for Smith." Amazingly --or not--there is no record of anyone damning the terrorists or saying "I hate them."
No one said anything unneeded, extraneous or small. Crisis is a great editor. When you read the transcripts that have been released over the years it's all so clear. Noonan has a line -- "People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess" -- that prompted Frederica Mathewes-Green to e-mail the following observation: This line reminds me of something Anglican Bp William Rukirande of Uganda told me. He wore a cross that had belonged to Janani Luwum, who had been killed by Idi Amin; he had lived through that terrible history. He said that before the persecution began, church members were ordinary -- fallible, backbiting, greedy, unforgiving, all that. But when the martyrdoms began, the grace of the Holy Spirit began to flow, and everyone became brave and loving, ready to be martyrs. It was grace given in context.
I remember an American bishop asking abt that time what the US church could do to support the Ugandan church, what could we send them, and he said "clergy shirts". Which seemed an odd or even frivolous request. He said they were necessary so that "when our people are being taken to death, they can look and see that their clergy are among them".
Thursday, September 07, 2006
The new issue of Touchstone came in, and draws our attention to a report from family scholars Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe that paints a bleak picture for the future of the family in the US. According to the Touchstone summary: Adults now live many more years without children in the home, report Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe in "Life Without Children," the 2006 "State of Our Unions" report. Peple are marrying later and waiting longer after marriage to have children, and an increasing number of women (now one in five) are not having children at all. As a result, fewer than one-third of American households contain children, compared with about half in 1960. Many people fear having children, the authors say, partly because their marriages are unreliable, and partly because popular culture increasingly portrays parents critically and parenthood as burdensome and depressing, especially in comparison with life without children. Among the effects, they predict, will be decreased political support for parents -- who already make up less than 40 percent of the electorate -- and more cultural hostility. [Emphasis mine.]
"It is hard enough to read children in a society that is organized to support that essential social task," the authors write. "Consider how much more difficult it becomes when a society is indifferent at best, and hostile, at worst, to those who are caring for the next generation." This can only mean one thing: Up with natalism! Reihan for President!
I'm sorry for the light blogging today -- we're crashing on deadline here at the paper, and I'm working late, and I have a sick kid at home, and I'm not at the Toronto Film Festival watching the Borat movie, and, and... But look, I have to say something. I'm awfully sorry that the Crocodile Hunter dude died. But come on, why are we shocked? The guy made his living going around poking a stick at jaguar goolies, just to see if he could get a rise out of them! I've had it with the people who talk about how meaningful it was that Steve Irwin introduced us to the wonderful world of animals. Please! People watched Steve Irwin because he ran around pissing off toothsome and venomous creatures while barking Aussie "shrimp on the barbie" minstrelsy. He was hugely entertaining, no doubt about it, and crazy-brave. But people watched him for the same reason they watch any daredevil: to see what happens when and if his luck runs out. And so it did. If they ever show the "Death of the Crocodile Hunter" video on global pay-per-view, his family will be set for generations.
Victor "Friend of this Blog" Morton is a lucky man. Not only is he at the Toronto Film Festival today, but he is almost certainly going to run into the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen masquerading as his ingenious character Borat, the Kazakh TV personality. For the uninitiated, Borat is a Kazakh TV journalist who is cheerfully, shockingly crude and anti-Semitic, but who affects such wide-eyed naivete that the marks for Cohen's satire inevitably want to please him. Cohen is in Toronto as Borat promoting his forthcoming film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan", which a New York friend who has seen an early screening, assures me is one of the funniest movies ever made. I'm a huge Borat fan, so I can't wait. Today's NYT has a piece on one controversial aspect of the movie, and in turn of the Borat shtick: it's anti-anti-Semitism. Cohen, who is Jewish, plays Borat as an avuncular Jew-hater, and thus tackles anti-Semitism by making ironic fun of it. Take this clip from HBO for example. Here's Borat at a honky-tonk, singing what he convinces the audience is a Kazakh country song, titled "Throw the Jew Down the Well." The audience really gets into it. It's insanely funny. Is Cohen drawing out and exposing the anti-Semitism of these country people? Perhaps. But the real genius of Borat is how he exposes people's slavish desire to conform. I think he could have stood there pretending to be an equally clueless and eager-beaver Israeli Jew, and convinced the crowd to sing along to "Throw the Muslims Down the Well," or something similar. Maybe it's an American thing, I dunno, but if you watch enough Borat on HBO, you see over and over that the people he interviews are so eager to please, so desperate to make the nice but offensive foreigner feel comfortable, that they make fools of themselves. Case in point: in one of the earlier episodes (which air on "Da Ali G. Show"), Borat visits high-society Charleston, ostensibly to show his Kazakh TV audience about Southern traditions. He goes to a fancy dinner party among all the well-bred Charlestonians, and starts talking crudely about sex. And then he farts at the table. It's hilarious to watch the well-off Charlestonians squirming at all this, trying very hard not to embarrass their guest (a polite Southerner is brought up to consider it his or her duty to prevent a guest from feeling uncomfortable). They ought to have thrown him out, but they didn't, they just took it, and played along unaware that they were being had. (I couldn't find a clip, but if somebody does, let me know and I'll post it). This is how Cohen works in all his characters. Here is a screamingly funny clip in which Cohen, disguised as "Bruno," a gay Austrian TV fashion reporter, exposes the utter idiocy of New York fashionistas. It leaves you with the sense not that these are bad people (though they might be), but that they are so desperately eager to please, to conform to the expectations of their interviewer, that they'll say anything. I do think it's telling that Cohen, as a Jew, has the cultural confidence to make humor out of anti-Semitism. I don't think any other people do that, certainly not so well. Can you imagine a Christian comedian having such nerve? A Muslim comedian? (For that matter, can you imagine Christian or Muslim comedians? Funny ones, I mean.)
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
College journalist Danny Kampf's so liberal his column is called The Bleeding Heart. But he makes sense here. Check out this bit: Liberals, such as me, have a tendency to go easier on Muslims who say ridiculous or intolerant things than we do on Christians of comparable stupidity. Just think of how you - and yes, I'm assuming that if you're reading this you are, like most GW students, liberal - would react to a bigoted comment by Pat Robertson versus a similarly bigoted comment by Ayatollah al-Sistani (of which there is no shortage).
[snip]
Recently, the BBC reported on the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America. For the most part it went fine, with many reasonable things said. But some of the opinions expressed were just categorically absurd. Had they come from the mouth of a Christian fundamentalist like Robertson in a comparable situation, I would be among the first to condemn them as the height of illogic. It thus strikes me as bigoted to spare Muslims from a similar liberal scrutiny.
Among the most irksome quotes from the event involved one that denied the reality of “Islamic fascism,” one that suggested Muslims were portrayed in too “negative” a light and another that asserted a “Muslim woman holding a candle praying for peace” is as (or should be as) newsworthy as “a Muslim driving a truck bomb into a building.”
Is that how low we’ve set the bar for Muslims? That every non-barbaric act committed under the banner of Islam should be reported on, no matter how trite or banal (one woman with a candle), in order to counter a perceived PR problem?
[snip]
The bad rap Muslims get in the media isn't some massive institutionalized bias against them. I have no doubt that such things as Islamiphobia and other, more subtle, forms of anti-Muslim discrimination exist, but to harp on this as the elephant and not the gnat in the room is disingenuous at best. He goes on to mention how remarkable it was that the recent conference of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim organization on the continent, just had the objectively Islamofascist ex-president of Iran as its keynote speaker. Which is certainly their right, but it sends an unmistakable signal to the broader community. Here's the columnist: Indeed, the irony of the situation – that of Muslims complaining about their negative portrayal in the media for acts of terrorism while simultaneously hosting the former president of a terrorist-supporting nation – could hardly be more obvious to the rest of us. Yet liberal non-Muslims and Muslims across the political spectrum alike seem incapable of grasping this point.
It’s time we liberals become as tough on Muslims as we are on Christians. It’s only fair. And it starts with admitting that Islamic fascism does exist and that it’s as much a problem for the Muslim community as it is a product of it. Good for Danny Kampf for daring to speak truth. I wish those of us who work in the professional media had half the insight and courage as this guy.
Charles Bowden, writing in Mother Jones, speaks some truths about immigration that are bound to upset just about everybody. You've got to read the whole piece. Here's an excerpt: There are no honest players in this game. People cut the cards to fit their ideology. More Mexicans come north than either government admits. They do take jobs. (They say Mexicans take jobs Americans refuse to do. This is probably true in some instances. But in the mid–1960s slaughterhouse workers earned twice the current wage for their toil. Now such jobs are held by Mexicans.) They do commit crimes. And if the arrival of millions of poor people in the United States does not drive down wages, then surely there is a Nobel Prize to be earned in studying this remarkable exception to the law of supply and demand.
They are no longer migratory workers. And it is not seasonal labor. The people walking north all around me are not going home again. This is an exodus from a failed economy and a barbarous government and their journey is biblical.
And all the solutions in political play are idiocy. Worker permits? Demand at this moment is certainly the 12 million illegals in the United States today, and it climbs each year by maybe a million more. Open the border? Mexicans would be trampled to death by Asians storming up the open route and, also, by other Latin Americans, those folks the Border Patrol calls OTMs, Other Than Mexicans. Build a wall? The border consists of 1,951 miles of desert, mountains, and scrub, a zone legally traversed by 350 million people a year–the busiest border in the world. Employer sanctions to make illegals unemployable? Fine, then Mexicans go home and Mexico erupts and we have a destroyed nation on our southern border and even greater illegal migration. In 1910, the Mexican Revolution ripped apart a nation of 15 million souls. One out of 15 died. But 892,000 fled to the United States. Now there are 108 million Mexicans. Do the math.
There are piles of studies on these matters, studies that prove illegal migration benefits the United States, studies that prove it does not benefit the United States, studies that show it enhances the GDP or has little or no contribution to the GDP. There are plans to manage this migration and plans to stop it dead in its tracks. There are proposed solutions. And, of course, there are claims that we don't really need a solution, because mass migration is natural for a nation of immigrants and as American as apple pie.
But in the end, you don't get to pick solutions. You simply have choices, and by these choices you will discover who you really are. You can turn your back on poor people, or you can open your arms and welcome them into an increasingly crowded country and exhausted landscape.
Good thing blogs are just daily diaries, on which bloggers are entitled to put their ever-changing deliberations. I say this because I'm all Waffle House on this Santorum race -- and in fact his candidacy distills the dilemma that socially conservative voters like me face with the GOP this fall. You can hardly ask for a senator who represents social and religious conservatives more faithfully than Rick Santorum. I believe he is an honorable man, and his loss would be keenly felt by our tribe. I also believe Casey is a costume Catholic when it comes to how he'd vote. He was deeply unimpressive on "Meet the Press" the other day, where Santorum was feisty. I'm chagrined, though, that Santorum is left to defend the Iraq War policy, and the GOP's spending record. But Michael Smerconish, a self-described "suburban moderate" who has not been so hot on Santorum, saw the same debate I did, and says there's no question but that Santorum is the right choice for Pennsylvania. Excerpt: [T]he exchange displayed why Rick Santorum IS worthy of re-election in this contest.
That's because political viewpoints are only part of the Senate job requirement. Personal qualities are at least of equal importance, and what I find Santorum lacking on policy matters, he more than makes up for on the personal ledger.
Rick Santorum is unique. He's a man of rare substance and conviction.
In our poll-driven political climate, dominated by blow-dried politicians with their fingers to the wind, he stands for things. And even where he stands for things with which I disagree, I come away admiring his unwillingness to placate dissenters by telling us words that we want to hear. What you see with Santorum, is what you get. He speaks from the head and heart.
Here's an example of what I am talking about. Tim Russert confronted Santorum with his near unanimous support of the Administration, an Administration that the world knows is in political free-fall. Santorum, having already indicated several areas of disagreement with the President, nevertheless did not back off and went so far as to say that he thought the President was doing a "terrific" job.
Look, I continue to like George W. Bush, the man, far more than most. I think the president's heart is in the right place even when his head isn't. But "terrific" is not a word I would use to describe his effort, particularly if I were running for the U.S. Senate. But Rick Santorum gave what was for him an honest answer to a difficult question. He didn't look at the president's approval rating. He didn't duck. He offered no sound byte. And I find his honesty refreshing amid all the BS and spin that comes out of D.C.
Bob Casey, on the other hand, came across as an appeaser without assurance - a tentative generalist who is schooled on national issues only according to someone's talking points. That was evident from the opening bell. The Smerconish column made me wonder: how would I feel if I woke up on Nov. 8 to find that Rick Santorum was no longer going to be in the Senate. Answer: lousy. Santorum can change his position on Iraq without abandoning his core convictions. I'm not sure what Casey's core convictions are, and judging by the MTP performance, he's not likely to be one to stand up to the Democratic Party leaders on culture of life issues. For all my frustration over Iraq and the GOP stewardship of the Senate, Santorum is the one U.S. senator social conservatives cannot afford to lose.
Even Republican analysts are saying that the GOP could easily lose the House this fall. Daniel Larison responds to the idea that the GOP could pull out a win this fall because Iraq was an albatross around Bush's neck in 2004, and he still won: The Iraq war wasn’t as much of an albatross in 2004, as poorly as things were going, because the war was still relatively new and we had yet to reach the many, many turning points of 2005 and 2006 that failed to result in any turning. Two years later, the war has become very old and very aggravating to more and more people. At the start of November 2004, 1,125 “coalition” personnel had died in Iraq; in two months’ time, there will have been over twice as many ”coalition” casualties, almost all of them American. Maybe that shouldn’t make a difference, but apparently it does.
The public has wearied of the conflict significantly and has changed its mind about the necessity of the war–you did not see half the country saying that Iraq had no connection to the larger “war on terror” in 2004, but you do now. You did not have mass waves of sectarian killings making the problems of Iraq even more insoluble two years ago, but you do now. Two years ago Republicans could still defend the administration’s past incompetence because they believed the administration had a plan for making Iraq policy work; fewer and fewer of them believe any such thing now. Even if they do not oppose administration policies, they are deeply demoralised and dispirited, and the administration’s appalling immigration position has only made things worse.
Via Mark Shea comes the latest Bruce Bartlett column, which says the Reagan Coalition is breaking up. Bartlett endorses this conclusion from Ryan Sager's forthcoming book Sager argues that George W. Bush has effectively destroyed this extremely successful political partnership by siding with the traditionalists and ignoring the libertarians. He threw a few tax cuts at the latter, like bones to a dog, but at the same time endorsed a vast expansion of government spending that will soon lead inevitably to tax increases.
Bush's courting of the evangelicals has increased friction between them and the libertarians, who now have become deeply alienated from the Republican Party, Sager argues. They may not be ready to become Democrats, but neither can the libertarians be considered a reliable part of the Republican coalition any longer, as they were in the Reagan era. Bruce says that libertarians are probably going to sit at home this November, at least in sufficient numbers to cause GOP losses. Maybe so. Not sure if you have to have an Atlantic Monthly subscription to see this or not, but Ryan Sager's Atlantic Monthly piece on the topic is well worth a read. He says that the big split underway between GOP voters in the South and the West has to do with -- surprise! -- religion. Now, I certainly understand (and share) libertarians' anger at Bush and the GOP Congress over their crazy-irresponsible spending. And from a libertarian point of view, I would be angry over the homeland-security/civil-liberties track of this administration. But I'm really not sure why they're all bent out of shape over Team Bush's supposed sellout to the religious right. It's the traddies who ought to be more upset. Think about it: the GOP controls the House, the Senate and the presidency, and the Federal Marriage Amendment -- highly valued by the religious and social right -- has gone nowhere. Embryonic stem-cell research is alive and kicking; the president has made only the most modest of steps to restrain it. Terri Schiavo? OK, but really, how big a deal was that in the end? Abortion is still quite legal. The administration's support of the religious conservative agenda has been in the main primarily rhetorical, a question of style. In the end, tax cuts and Iraq are what this administration has been about defending. I think the traditionalists have as much if not more beef with Republican governance. Irresponsible spending and incompetence (Iraq, Katrina) are no more or no less offensive to either libertarians or traditionalists. Those reasons, I think, are the main reasons so many conservatives are put out with the GOP this election season. It's tempting, though, for both sides to assume the administration has sold out to those within the GOP coalition that it's tired of messing with.
Remember Secretary Rumsfeld chastising the news media the other day for reporting unhelpful things from Iraq, and helping the enemy war effort? Well, according to the Washington Post, the US military in Baghdad is taking bids on a $20 million contract ...that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.
The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide "public relations products" that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal. Hey, I have an idea! Why not spend that $20 million to buy more body armor for our troops? How about spending $20 million on buying a clue about a winning strategy? Nah, let's blow it on spin. (And by the way, as Harry Shearer asks on his radio show this week, isn't this what Karen Hughes is supposed to be doing?)
The Texas State Fair has topped itself in creating the ne plus ultra of cardiac-arrest cuisine. This year, fairgoers will be treated to something that surely qualifies as manna from Homer Simpson Heaven. Are you ready for this? Fried Coke.No, really. It's Coca-Cola flavored beignets doused in Coca-Cola syrup, and topped with whipped cream. Served in a cup. Meanwhile, one in four Texans are obese, statistics show. That's the bad news. The good news is that we're only the 10th fattest state in the Union. The worse news is that we haven't gotten any thinner, it's just that other states have gotten even fatter.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Caleb Stegall passes on this New Atlantis essay about the spiritual lessons inherent in manual labor. Specifically, author Matthew Crawford thinks that our cultural and technological sophistication is causing us to forget practical lessons -- put simply, how to build and fix stuff with our hands -- much to our detriment. Caleb identifies the following paragraph as a succinct and penetrating critique of the crunchy-con sensibility [emphases mine]: The Arts and Crafts movement thus fit easily with the new therapeutic ethic of self-regeneration. Depleted from his workweek in the corporate world, the office worker repaired to his basement workshop to putter about and tinker, refreshing himself for the following week. As T. J. Jackson Lears writes in his history of the Progressive era, No Place of Grace, “toward the end of the nineteenth century, many beneficiaries of modern culture began to feel they were its secret victims.” Various forms of antimodernism gained wide currency in the middle and upper classes, including the ethic of craftsmanship. Some Arts and Crafts enthusiasts conceived their task to be evangelizing good taste as embodied in the works of craft, as against machine-age vulgarity. Cultivating an appreciation for objets d’art was thus a form of protest against modernity, with a view to providing a livelihood to dissident craftsmen. But it dovetailed with, and gave a higher urgency to, the nascent culture of luxury consumption. As Lears tells the story, the great irony is that antimodernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the machine paved the way for certain unattractive features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after “authenticity,” precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind of compensation for, and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized, bureaucratic work. Discuss.
I'm preparing a special cover story for my DMN commentary section this Sunday. I'm interviewing a number of Texans -- some famous, most not -- talking about where they were on 9/11, and how the events of that day most changed them. I'm hearing a common refrain: as awful as that day was, people have a nostalgia for the unity, the solidarity, that we all felt on that day and in the immediate aftermath. So many people are saying, "It felt so good to stand together then, and to want to help your neighbors, and to overlook the things that divide us. I wish we had been able to keep that." Well, it was inevitable that that feeling was going to dissipate, and it is to be regretted that our leaders didn't capitalize on the opportunity to parlay that common feeling into useful sacrifices, and a renewed sense of civil commitment. I was thinking about this social solidarity thing earlier today when, on Kathy Shaidle's blog, I ran across a link to this insight: We still seem to think we can fight Islamic fanaticism with a mixture of indifference and devil-may-care big talk. We are not willing to give up any of our creature comforts and the mental padding they offer, despite all of our chesty declarations of “we are Westerners together.” We seem to think we are still fighting the Soviet Union’s lumbering one-upmanship, when in fact we are fighting an ancient evil that cares nothing for competing with us. It wants to wipe us out entirely. (If Western culture is crushed under the heel of Islam, in essence is converted, then it will be wiped out.) Not that many of us don’t recognize this, but we are still in essence holding off the full realization because of the fact that currently our enemy is physically weaker than us. Iran’s pursuit of nukes aside, the Muslim world is in no position to take over anything by force of arms.
But on the other hand, they might not have to. A house that has been tunnelled through by termites can collapse at the next breath of light breeze. A culture with no solid basis on which to make a stand, because it has allowed itself to be eaten away by bad ideologies, because it has decided that many of the values that its ancestors held were “too hard” or “too unfair” to deal with, can be brought down much more easily. We may end up giving ourselves away because it’s easier than fighting, until we end up in a situation like this: telling ourselves “okay, wearing a burka outdoors will at least protect me from skin cancer, and I can wear my bikini in my own fenced backyard next to my pool, the public beaches are too crowded anyway,” until the next decree against women sunbathing in their own backyards comes out. The usual “when they came to take away so and so, I didn’t say anything, because I wasn’t so and so” scenario.
..."People want, and need, solidity. If we can’t find it in our own culture, we’ll look for it in another. This 'solidity,' by the way, is not a material solidity, but a psychic, even spiritual one. The problem is, our increasingly gooey culture can’t give us the ability to discern true solidity from tinsel fakes. In other words, good luck fighting off Muslim fanatics by going to the beach." Interesting. As I've mentioned before here, when I was in the Netherlands a few years ago reporting on the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a friend of mine mentioned that Dutch authorities had been closing public swimming pools because teenage Moroccan thugs were coming around cursing and threatening Dutch kaffirs swimming there. Rather than arrest the Muslim boys making the threats, they shut down the pools to avoid confrontation. And from what I could tell, nobody thought that was such a bad idea. Anyway, a friend of mine believes that the triumph of the West over militant Islam is inevitable. I'm afraid I can't see it. I mean, I hope and pray that it wi
ll, but what happens when Iran gets the bomb? Or other Islamist nations? I have no fear that the United States will ever be under Islamist government. But they don't have to conquer us to destroy us, or at least to render us a shadow of our former selves. I keep saying that the thing I learned in my bones, traumatically, on 9/11 was how quickly everything you think you know about the world can be shattered. Think about what would happen to our economy, to our legal system, and so forth if a suitcase nuke were to go off 10 minutes from now in Washington, DC, obliterating the national government. Think about what a nuclear-armed Iran with missiles that could reach the continental US, and a leadership prepared to turn its entire population into a holocaust, for the sake of destroying the major cities of the Great Satan, could pull off.
David Warren has no use for the two Fox News journalists who converted to Islam at gunpoint rather than accept martyrdom. Warren wrote that very many Christians over the centuries have gone willingly to their deaths rather than renounce Christ. Even if the two journos aren't Christians, what they did is still disgraceful, says Warren: You don't necessarily have to be a Christian, to be Western. Two years ago, an heroic Italian captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, asked to make whimpering statements as part of the video of his execution in Iraq, ripped at his hood and instead declared, "This is how an Italian dies!" to his contemptible captors. He must have upset them: for they shot him instead of sawing off his head. In making his stand for human dignity, he also turned one of their propaganda videos, into one of ours. When I first read the Warren column, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to agree with him, but wondered what I would do if I had been captured by Islamic terrorists and told to convert or die. I would hope and pray that I would have the courage to die for Christ. But I wonder if my fear, and my fear over what would happen to my wife and children if I were to die, would get the best of me? There's a reason we Christians pray "lead us not into temptation." I felt that I ought to be merciful toward the Fox guys, because I don't know how I would behave in that situation. Warren considers this point, and has a great comeback in his latest column: I cannot know how I will behave in such a situation, until I am in it. But if I capitulated, from fear of pain and death, I would be deeply ashamed of what I had done. And this shame would haunt me for the rest of my life. I would not be appearing all smiles on TV, I would not be accepting the accolades of my colleagues, and I would surely have the decency to contradict anyone who dared call me "brave" for saving my own skin.
And if I had, in that moment of cowardice, denied Christ, I'd be praying for forgiveness as Judas should have prayed. Unless, like his, my soul had been broken by the gravity of my act.
This is no mere ethics quiz: I invite my reader to ask himself what he would do in the situation those Fox journalists found themselves in. Not what I would do -- I am just the messenger -- but what you would do. And before you give any quick or clever answer, recall that our whole civilization stands or falls on what you decide. Do you, do we, have the courage to hold our spiritual fortress? Or will we, in the time of trouble, give everything away? This is exactly right, it seems to me. If I had capitulated, the shame of it would haunt me for the rest of my life. And it should. What those two men did was understandable on a human level, but they ought to be ashamed of themselves. UPDATE: A colleague sends this quote from Thucydides: "Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory."
The current issue of Texas Monthly has a fascinating story -- not available online to non-subscribers -- about the nasty rift at the posh St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Austin (where tuition runs between $10,000 and $15,000 a year). The cause? The Annie Proulx short story "Brokeback Mountain" being assigned to a senior English class. It all started when two St. Andrew's moms started talking about the story at a softball game: Kate [McNair's] friend had a copy of the story and directed Kate to the paragraph in which the two men's love first gets physical. Kate read the phrase "Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect [ahem]," and then saw mentions of "all fours" and "a little spit." She needed no more. Like Horne's her reaction was visceral. She could taste her anger. "We assumed that this was a Christian school," says McNair now, "and that these kinds of materials would not be handed to our children. We're not a bunch of homophobes. We just don't want our kids reading smut." It turns out that Ms. Horne, the teacher who assigned "Brokeback," had also assigned Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things," which includes an explicit scene in which a pederast forces a small boy to masturbate him. That assignment outraged another family whose daughter was in the class. The dispute grew extremely bitter. Kate McNair, whose family pulled a $3 million pledge to the school in protest, said: "[W]e came to find out this was not a Christian school. It's Episcopal. And shame on me for not knowing what the Espicopal Church has gone through the past few years. If they took the word 'Christian' out of their mission statement, that would be different. But they won't." But Lucy Nazro, who runs the school and who defends teaching "Brokeback" there, told the author what it means to be an Episcopal school: "We're a school where emphasis is on reason and open inquiry, on inclusiveness, not exclusiveness. An Episcopal school is basically modeled on love." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In the end, it appears that the outraged contingent wasn't very large, and that the majority of the students and their parents rallied to the school's defense. Anyway, I have written appreciatively of "Brokeback Mountain," saying that it's a much more ambiguous story than many of its critics have said (I think it's primarily about the destructive and obsessional power of Eros). But I don't think it's suitable for students at a Christian high school, or one that advertises itself as Christian. Of all the works of literature available to teach young people, why would the teacher choose "Brokeback Mountain" and Arundhati Roy's novel? There's an agenda there, surely.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Now Eastern European countries are following their Western European confreres into barrenness. From the NYT today: After a long decline, birthrates in European countries have reached a historic low, as potential parents increasingly opt for few or no children. European women, better educated and integrated into the labor market than ever before, say there is no time for motherhood and that children are too expensive anyway.
The result is a continent of lopsided societies where the number of elderly increasingly exceeds the number of young — a demographic pattern that is straining pension plans and depleting the work force in many countries.
The European Union’s executive arm, alarmed by the trend, estimates that, if birthrates remain this low, the bloc will have a shortfall of 20 million workers by 2030.
Immigration from non-European countries, already a highly contentious issue in much of the European Union, would not fill the gap even if Europe’s relatively homogenous countries were willing to embrace millions of foreign newcomers, experts say. As the story points out, the birthrates are so low that there is no historical precedent for them. Why is it happening? From the story: New, vibrant market economies provide young people with tantalizing alternatives. Lukas and Lenka Dolansky, both journalists, would like a sibling for their 3-month-old son, Krystof, but they are not sure that would be practical. “We want to go abroad, study, have a career,” Mr. Dolansky said. “Our parents didn’t have those opportunities.” And so, discrete individuals (and couples) pursuing self-interest results, over time, in the death of the collective. Isn't this a version (an inversion?) of the tragedy of the commons? Shouldn't we all be turning to the pro-natalist duo of Ross & Reihan for guidance?
According to the Telegraph, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shia leader upon which we have placed all our hopes for a stable Iraq, is now saying that he cannot prevent his followers from waging civil war. He's waning, while Moqtada al-Sadr is waxing. If this report is accurate, then there is no denying that the civil war has begun. Sistani was the last obstacle to it.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
While waiting to leave for church this morning, I caught a good portion of the "Meet the Press" debate between Pennsylvania senate candidates Rick Santorum and his challenger, Democrat Bob Casey (the son of the sainted pro-life Democratic governor Bob Casey). I've not been paying a lot of attention to this race, though it is one of the most important this fall. On social issues, Santorum is a real favorite of mine, though I've been dismayed by how closely he's hewed to the president's line on just about everything. I had hoped that Bob Casey, as a pro-life Democrat, would offer a real alternative to Pennsylvania voters. Based on what I saw this morning, he doesn't -- not by a mile. Casey hammered Santorum for fiscal irresponsibility, which the GOP Congress is certainly guilty of. But when Russert tried to get Casey to say what programs he would cut to get the deficit down, Casey had absolutely nothing to say, aside from fiddling with the estate tax, and, get this, growing our way out of the problem. Russert pointed out that the estate tax change would produce only a tiny fraction of the funds needed, and asked him incredulously if he was really suggesting that it was possible to grow our way out of the deficit, given that the Baby Boomers are now starting to retire, and are going to become a massive drain on the public purse. Casey said, well, sure. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe he had no better answer than that. Of course Santorum wasn't much better on the issue. I told Julie later that by 2015, Medicare and Social Security will be consuming almost three-quarters of the federal budget -- and neither party can bring itself to level with the American people about what's coming. And from a purely political standpoint, that's probably sensible, in that we are so used to the something-for-nothing mentality that any politician, Republican or Democrat, who told the truth would probably be whacked at the polls. Then the Plan B issue came up. Santorum said flat-out that the pill is sometimes abortifacient, which is certainly true if you believe that life begins at conception; the pill can work by preventing the fertilized egg (that is, a human being) from implanting on the uterine wall. Santorum said he was against Plan B for that reason. Casey, who insists he's pro-life, said he was in favor of Plan B because "the science is clear" that it's contraception. That's a shameful dodge. The science is clear about how Plan B works; whether or not that counts as abortion is a moral question -- and a question that the Catholic Church answers very clearly. Casey is trying to lay claim to his father's pro-life mantle, and he's not worthy of it. Not only is he for a potentially bortifacient pill to be distributed over the counter, but he dissembles about what he perfectly well knows the pill is. Anyway, it was depressing. I like Santorum, despite my differences with him, and hope he wins. I had hoped that Casey, though, would begin to open the door for more socially conservative religious voters in the Democratic Party. But he was pretty unimpressive this morning. Anybody else see the debate? What do you think? UPDATE: Just read the morning newspaper account of the entire debate, which as I said, I missed. Santorum defended Rumsfeld, and called the Iraq War one of "necessity." Oh drear. And Casey apparently had little else to offer. Well, let me amend my position to this: whoever wins this race, it will be depressing news.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
NYT story today reports that small towns in the West are ground zero for teenage binge drinking. Big cities have relatively small levels of same. Doesn't surprise me a bit. I grew up in a small town in the deep South. Drinking to excess was the teenage thing to do. I ended up at a public boarding school for my last two years of high school, and was stunned to find that classmates who had previously been in schools in big cities faced little of the peer pressure that we small-town kids did to binge drink. It became clear to me that the big-city schools were so big that you could find your own peer group; if you didn't want to be with the drinkers, that was fine, there was a group for you to hang with, and there was so much to do in town that you didn't drink from boredom. People have this idea that small towns are the place to go to escape modern life. They're wrong. Sometimes, the smallness of a town, by creating intense peer pressure, makes the situation for kids much worse.
Very interesting post over at Catholic World News' Off the Record site, on the $16 million settlement the Archdiocese of Milwaukee has reached with plaintiffs in a couple of clerical sex abuse cases. It still, even now, boggles the mind to think that the then-Archbishop of Milwaukee sent to Orange, Calif., a priest who had pled guilty to child molestation out to California to work. The priest, Siegfried Widera, went on to molest many more boys, before committing suicide while fleeing from justice. A friend who read the CWN blog notes the following passage: In other words, the Milwaukee Archdiocese's conduct targeted a known group of California residents -- boys, specifically, Roman Catholic boys -- as a means of getting Widera out of the Milwaukee Archdiocese. Such targeting is, we believe, sufficiently individualized to satisfy due process because the Milwaukee Archdiocese could reasonably anticipate being hauled into court in California. ...and said that this sounds exactly the kind of "predicate act" required to prove a RICO claim. You know, organized crime. Any lawyers among the CC blog readers? If so, what do you think? I am still poleaxed by the idea that a bishop would be so loyal to his clerical class that he would send a confessed child-molesting priest back into ministry. What if that was your kid the priest molested? What would you do? I know what I would be sorely tempted to do -- not that it would be right, but if any pervert laid a hand on my boys, I think I would lose my mind. Really and truly. I have absolutely no reservoir of sympathy for the bishops. None whatsover. Why the Catholic laity hasn't turned on the episcopate for their rotten handling of this crime against Catholic children and their families is to me a mystery beyond my ability to comprehend.
Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles is in very hot water over the way he's handled sexually abusive priests. It's not surprising, perhaps, that his archdiocesan newspaper, The Tidings, has published a three-part series adapted from Crisis magazine and written by Francis X. Maier, that describe sex abuse lawsuits against Catholic dioceses as a "shakedown." You can read all three parts, in order, here, here and here. There's some interesting stuff in those pieces, comparing the legal situation of the Catholic Church and Catholic schools regarding sexual abuse lawsuits, versus the status the public schools enjoy, even though the problem is arguably worse in public schools. A fair point. The author goes on to allege that lawyers for sex-abuse victims are "looting" the Catholic Church's resources. It's pretty clear that he sees victims and their attorneys as the villains here, even as he clearly admits that sex abuse was a serious problem. You might wonder why the man identified by the Tidings like this -- "Francis X. Maier, the father of four, writes from Colorado" -- doesn't even consider that the bishops who refused to deal with pederast priests, and instead shuffled them around to rape and molest more and more Catholic children, might well be the primary ones responsible for Catholic dioceses losing their shirts in these lawsuits. Oughtn't Catholic people hold the bishops at least somewhat culpable for their loss of property in paying these claims? Even a little bit? Fran Maier is the wrong guy to expect that kind of sentiment from. What the Tidings doesn't tell you is that this Colorado father of four is the chancellor for the Archdiocese of Denver. This doesn't invalidate anything he says -- argumentum ad hominem is a logical fallacy -- but it does put his comments about the villainous plaintiffs' lawyers in a certain light. Even more does it put Cardinal Mahony's paper in a certain light for having hidden this rather key fact about the essayist: that he's the right-hand man for an archbishop. I can't tell from the Crisis magazine website whether or not it used the same tagline for Maier, instead of identifying him as a senior Church employee. But any publication that would conceal the fact that the writer of an essay portraying people who sue the Catholic Church over sexually abusive priests happens to be the salaried right-hand man of an archbishop is being deceptive, and owes its readers an explanation. UPDATE: Got a nice note from Brian Saint-Paul, editor of Crisis, which I reprint here with his permission: I just saw your blog post on Fran Maier's Crisis piece. For the record, the Tidings bio was the same one we carried in the magazine.
Fran has been writing for us for 4-5 years now, and when he began, he asked that his bio not mention his role at the archdiocese of Denver (for fear that people would assume his opinions reflected the official position of the bishop). Since that time, we've simply cut-and-pasted his original bio onto each new piece. I must admit, it never occurred to me to change the bio for this piece -- it was not an intentional exclusion.
You make a good point, though. Something for me to think about for the next go-round.
Friday's Wall Street Journal op-ed page featured a lengthy essay by Gary Becker, the 1992 Nobel laureate in economics, entitled "Missing Children." It's not (yet) available for free online, but I'll post a link if and when it becomes available. Anyway, he argues that the plummeting birth rates in Europe (including especially Russia) and much of Asia mean that if those nations don't start making lots of babies quickly, they had better be prepared to accept vast numbers of immigrants or face economic collapse. Becker writes: What is concerning people about low birth rates that is overlooked by the many neo-Malthusians who continue to rail against growing population? One consequence of low birth rates and extensions of life expectancy at older ages is that fewer people are at working ages compared to the number of retirees. As a result, financing of retirement income and medical expenditures becomes more of a challenge with an aging population since most countries finance retirement income and medical spending on the elderly by social security taxes on the working population. In other words, we are now living in an upside-down pyramid situation, in which an increasing number of pensioners are being supported by a dwindling number of young workers. Social security plans work on the theory that the base of the pyramid will outpace the growth of retirees at the top; but population decline has had exactly the opposite effect. This is obviously unsustainable. Interestingly, Becker says with fewer and fewer young people, the instances of technological innovation will also decline, as innovation is heavily associated with inventors and scientists who are aged 50 and younger. Becker says he's not optimistic that any of the schemes underway in Europe and elsewhere to encourage having babies will work. "Since 1970," he writes. "no country has had a large increse in its total fertility rate after this rate had fallen much below the replacement level." The only solution, then, will be large-scale immigration, which presents its own massive set of problems. But by the time that choice is squarely in front of us, there will likely be no other choice. It strikes me that this whole topic makes people extremely squeamish for a variety of reasons. When I published some time ago a Phillip Longman essay about it in the section I edit at the Dallas Morning News, I got several critical comments from co-workers about how Nazi the whole thing sounded, re: having babies for the national good. Others don't like to talk about it because they don't want to feel judged for having chosen to have one, two or no children. (Similarly, discussions about the cost to the integrity and strength of family life exacted by mothers in the workplace are so fraught with emotion that it becomes virtually impossible to have a discussion that sticks to the facts.) Nevertheless, facts don't scurry away like frightened rabbits just because we are discomfited by them. As unpleasant as it may be to look at the actuarial tables and reason from them, it must be done. Those who think that a future with far fewer people on the planet will be better for us all had better not plan to be old one day. Or expect to live as prosperously or as comfortably as they do today. And they'd better be prepared to face the wrath of the younger generation, who will be taxed into penury to pay for retiree benefits, absent some other solution.
Friday, September 01, 2006
According to a grim new Pentagon report to Congress, Iraq is sliding closer to civil war. Things are not getting better in Iraq under this administration's leadership, and in fact are getting steadily worse. And the American people know it, too: according to the lead story in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the Republicans are losing their advantage over Democrats on national security. This is not exactly brand-new news -- polls have been consistenly showing this since early summer -- but the long Journal piece gathers a lot of information together to show why the Republicans are in such trouble now on Iraq. It's pretty clear that the Administration, and in turn the Congressional Republicans, are increasingly less credible on Iraq. I don't know who Rumsfeld's going to blame for this gloomy report put out by his own agency, but see, this is why his blame-the-media attack is so hollow: the facts don't support it. Nor does that old black magic of smearing all critics as appeasers work anymore. We've heard it all before, and the trust the American people have put in the Administration's leadership on the war has not paid off. Bush is in a desperate situation. It is not in the interest of any patriotic American that this president, or this country's mission, fail in Iraq. But you don't continue following a bad policy, in defiance of the facts, because you think by force of will, or by wishing and hoping, that you can make things turn out alright. Optimism and stubborness are not working strategies. When we get speeches like Rumsfeld's and Bush's, going on and on about "freedom," as if that meant anything in the anarchic charnel house that is today's Iraq, you just want to say, "Won't get fooled again." It's not that I don't want to believe them. It's that I find it impossible to.
In the thread below about childlessness by choice, a reader who says she and her husband don't feel called to have children says it really bothers her when people ask them when they are going to start a family. It's a personal matter, she says, and none of their business. And she's right. Julie is going to have our third child in a few weeks, and a couple of people have asked me over the course of her pregnancy if we "plan to stop" after this one. Honestly, where do people get the nerve? Friends of mine with four or more kids say they draw negative comments from strangers all the time when they're out in public -- things like, "Don't you know where babies come from?" etc., to show that the stranger disapproves of their large family. (A friend of mine, a Catholic who is a very proper New England gentleman, finally got tired of that sort of thing when he and his family would go out. He snapped, retorting, "F-- you, we love children." Which I thought was the perfec thing to say.) Anyway, I think it's fine to discuss family size as a concept, but it's a very bad idea -- as well as atrocious manners -- to bring this up in particular cases. Nobody can know what goes into any particular couple's decision on family size. I am aware of several cases in which childlessness, or a relatively small family size, is not a choice, and is in fact a cause of real pain. MYOB is a good rule.
Did you hear that Pinocchio, Heidi, D'Artagnan and other European fictional characters have been converted to Islam in a new set of Turkish editions? No, really. Well, hey, is this not a good pilot program to prepare the children of Europe for their Eurabian future?
A Latino protest march to support illegal aliens is being sponsored by Miller Beer. The Chicago Tribune reports: [T]his march is no Cinco de Mayo parade. The politically charged event will promote a controversial plan to end deportations and offer legal status for all 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants. That creates potential pitfalls for any businesses lending support, experts say.
At the same time business sponsorships have forced activists to confront whispers that they are commercializing their movement when they accept much-needed donations.
"We would love to have 20 corporate logos. It doesn't mean we are selling the movement out," said Jorge Mujica, a member of the March 10 Committee. "The principles and demands remain the same. They are helping out this movement and we are happy with that." Un-freaking-believable. Is there anything corporate America won't embrace or support in order to move more merch? (Answer: No.) Law-and-order conservatives who buy Miller Beer products should cease and desist. (Via Malkin.)
My friend John Podhoretz mentions my harsh verdict on the Rumsfeld speech the other day in his Friday column, as an example of conservative bad faith. John writes: The key emotion engendered by Rumsfeld's speech and presumably by Bush's speeches in the days and weeks to come is rage. Rage that he would be so aggressive. Rage that he would presume to lecture anyone on what American troops might need from the media and what responsibilities the media might have in wartime. Rage that he is even opening his mouth at all. Well, yes, something close to rage is like it, certainly with Rumsfeld. The anger has nothing to do with what John claims. It has instead everything to do with being fed up with demagoguery and willful blindness. After all the huge mistakes we've made in Iraq, to have the SecDef give not a sober speech taking measure of the situation and providing serious leadership through the crisis, but to deliver a tawdry political broadside portraying his critics as cowardly appeasers (does that include George F. Will? Bill Buckley? Gen. Newbold?) and the media as an anti-American fifth column is exactly what I called it the other day: disgraceful. John again: Or is it, at least in some cases, fear? Fear that, once again, Bush is going to convince enough Americans that the cause is just to prevent a bloodbath of GOP politicians in November? Fear that he is going to rally the Republican base, remind it that there is something noble going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and that much of America's political and media elite is dismissive of it? Please. It's fear that this administration is taking this country off a cliff in Iraq, despite the best intentions, and its leading strategists are making things worse by preferring to go out and give demagogic speeches instead of facing up to reality and figuring out where to go from here. Again, who outside of the Chomsky crowd actually wants America to lose in Iraq? Does any serious person not want Iraq to be strong and stable, and not a vassal of Iran or Lebanon-on-the-Euphrates? If people -- not only the elite, but a majority of American voters -- are dismissive of the prospects of this, it has a lot to do with bungled US leadership at the top. John again: Make no mistake: The fear is real. Otherwise, why wouldn't Bush's political opponents be welcoming their chance to help the president and Rumsfeld walk themselves to the political slaughterhouse? This is fantasyland stuff. Speaking for myself, I don't much care whether this pair goes to the "political slaughterhouse" or not. I very much care what happens to American soldiers in Iraq, what happens to America's national security as Iraq disintegrates into civil war, and what America might do to rescue itself and its allies. It is understandable that ideological minds on the left and the right see the current crisis as primarily through the lens of domestic politics, but when you get to the point where you see a leader's critics as merely enemies with the lowest, most partisan motivations, your judgment gets corrupted by ideology. Now, Greg Djerjian has an important post up at his Belgravia Dispatch. He judges Rumsfeld's speech as a failure even on political grounds: [T]his is not devilishly effective Lee Atwater style fare, delivered with calculated punch and resulting in tangible electoral advantage. Rather, it smells like damaged goods, smacks of desperation, and is nakedly divisive fare despite disingenuously masquerading as a call for unity.
Indeed, as the failure of the Bush Administration's war strategy becomes more and more evident to all but the most hardened denialists, as their desperation and incompetence becomes m
ore evident to the American public, as their Middle East policy increasingly lies in tatters, and as they continue to erroneously attempt to conjoin things like the London terror plot with Iraq, without admitting the need for urgent re-appraisal of our overall strategy in the war on terror (they are incapable and/or too exhausted to make significant course corrections)--the rhetoric is beginning to border on dangerously reckless, and I trust the American people to reject this growing demagogy, and vote the Democrats in in November (at least in the House). I take no particular joy in this, as I think the Democrats have distinguished themselves by what I've called their ferocious lameness too often, but I cannot support a party that continues to allow a man this discredited a platform to propagate such gross dissembling, not to mention continues to allow him to prosecute a war where he has failed so dismally to achieve our nation's most basic strategic objectives.
A reader wrote yesterday to say that he and his wife have a 7-month-old daughter, and are considering homeschooling her when the time comes. What should they start doing now? First, I should say to newcomers to this blog that we no longer homeschool our son Matthew. For reasons not worth going into here, homeschooling didn't work for him. He's in a classical Christian school this year, and he's really thriving on the discipline in the classroom -- we'd had so much trouble getting him to focus on his work at home. It was disappointing to us to have to give up on homeschooling with Matthew, but Julie and I have always tried to keep squarely in front of us that we must do what's best for our individual children, and not impose our own ideological convictions about education on them. With luck, Lucas, our No. 2 son, will thrive in homeschooling. But if not, we'll deal with that when the time comes. The point I want to make about this is that not all kids are cut out for homeschooling, so you should prepare yourself for that possibility. As for the rest, I asked Julie for her advice to this reader, because she began thinking about and researching homeschooling from the time Matthew was as tiny as this reader's daughter. She thinks it was a mistake to be so intense about it so early. Here's her advice: I'd tell him to avoid the mistake we made and don't think about it for 2 years. OK, maybe think about it a little, but don't worry about it. The things a little person needs are the same whether you plan to homeschool or not: lots and lots of reading aloud, talking to them constantly about anything and everything, lots of outings to interesting places, and all the little mommy things that teach them so much like identifying the numbers on the signs in the grocery store. I had to laugh when I saw the recommendations Matthew's super-intense school sent out for kindergarteners the summer before school started because it was all that kind of stuff. Basically getting your kid addicted to the library and asking a thousand questions that you actually answer well is the best homeschooling you can do before the age of at least 4.
I really do think that establishing a strong attachment relationship with Mom and Dad is the very best thing you can do for a little one; for us it has been clear every moment that we are building on the trust and confidence established from the very beginning. Matthew and I had a blast discovering things together when he was small, and the times when we get to recapture that sense of adventure together are the absolute best, both just as Mom and as someone trying to supplement his education.
Plus, I think it's important to wait and see what kind of kid you have.
I would have saved all of us a lot of frustration if I'd done that instead of deciding the way things were going to be when Matthew was really little. Over time you'll get insight into their character that will help you see whether HSing will work for you and your kid and, if so, what sort of curriculum is best. If you really want to read something I'd take a look at Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer's books, which I found inspiring (and depressing because they made me more aware of the massive holes in my own education). She outlines a kindergarten curriculum that involves about 15 minutes of actual study per day.
There's a book called "Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready" that a lot of HSers swear by for birth to age 5. I found it too basic, but it's worth taking a look at, even if you just go to a HS store and flip through it for 10 minutes. That's probably enough to get the concept.
A priest friend tipped me off to some eye-opening stuff published in The Wanderer concerning Judge Anne Burke, the Chicago Democrat and jurist who headed up the US Catholic bishops' National Review Board, which was created to examine the roots of the sex-abuse scandal. Judge Burke turned out to be a tough cookie. The writer who interviewed her, Tom Roeser, does a lot of throat-clearing in the two installments of his lengthy account that I was able to find online (start here, then read this one), and finally this most important one, though you have to scroll down for it). Still, it's worth your time to read them, because of the following: + When Burke and her fellow board members got serious about their work -- commissioning a formal study by John Jay College, and hiring an experienced criminal investigator -- many bishops balked. Said Burke, "Gee, after all those eloquent sermons on TV about how they were going to change the system, it turned out they didn't want to after all.. Surprise, surprise." And later, meeting with all the bishops at the lavish Washington headquarters of the USCCB: "There were very few bishops who wanted us to continue. Very few. I can count them on one hand. Some great, sanctimonious names who had told the media they wanted to press forward, didn't want it when we gathered in the Great Hall." + As an example of how the bishops twisted the truth to evade accountability, she recalls the story of an unnamed bishop who allegedly told her he'd cleaned out the stables in his diocese, but who later made front-page news by having a convicted sex-abuse priest living with him in his rectory. When Burke accused the bishop of lying to her, he said he didn't lie, because the priest had not been convicted. Burke reminded the bishop that the priest in question had pled guilty to the crime. The bishop insisted, bizarrely, to the judge that that isn't the same thing as being convicted. + She calls on the USCCB to be disbanded. “All it is is a trade association. And not a very good one at that.” + Burke and her NRB colleague Bob Bennett discreetly flew to Rome to meet with then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now, of course, Pope Benedict), to make sure he understood what the situation was in the American church. They also met with Francis Cardinal Arinze. Writes Roeser: In his lightly German-flavored accent with superb English diction, [Cdl. Ratzinger] said: “I have been very eager to see you and to listen to your report and have many questions to ask you.” They bent his ear for two and one half hours.
As Burke and Bennett strode out into the hot Roman sun, Bennett said: “I think we’re getting somewhere.”
“To say that we were highly impressed is an understatement,” Burke told me. “He had a number of pungent observations.” Burke didn't betray the future pope's confidence with the reporter, but Roeser writes that Ratzinger was "direct in his questioning, far from naïve in assessing the situation in the United States, not so theological or philosophically speculative as to render it an academic exercise but asking pertinent questions concerning bishops, their preparation for the task, how involved they were in the exercise, what they sought to achieve by the process and how they would reform in the future." + When USCCB head Bishop Wilton Gregory heard that she and Bennett had been to Rome to brief the top cardinals, Bishop Gregory allegedly phoned her at once: “You are entitled to know,” said the bishop in his grave way, “that even bishops who go to Rome for such meetings are required to clear them with this office.”
“I am sure,” said Justice Burke. “But then as you know, we are not bishops.” +
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