"If we really understood the threat at hand, we would not be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs."
I am not quite as exercised over the speech as Daniel Larison (see his impressive series of "Gathering Stupidity" posts here, here, here, here, and here), but my frustration with Santorum's tack is, a la Ross Douthat's, more in sorrow than in anger, over the depths to which an otherwise good senator will stoop to avoid responsibility for, or even the fact of, the colossal American failure in Iraq, and Republican responsibility for same. Here's Ross:
But it seems more likely that his "gathering storm" speeches will ensure that he's remembered not as a principled social conservative who lost his swing-state seat in a bad year for Republicans, but as exhibit A (well, okay, more like P or W) in the depressing tendency of conservatives, faced with the Bush Administration's manifest failure in Iraq, to duck that issue by pretending that the way to solve it is to start some variant on World War III, or IV, or whatever numeral the "faster, please" folks think we're on these days.
Anyway, why do I think that one line offers the key to why these Santorum speeches are so off the mark? Because it indicates that he thinks the only thing we're doing wrong is not fighting hard enough. If the past three years have made anything clear, it's that we're not fighting smart enough. We thought we could knock off Saddam with little problem, because we believed that the Iraqi people wanted "freedom," and would reveal themselves to be well-behaved small-d democrats. Here comes Santorum, having learned nothing, saying in his speech that we need to aid and abet the Iranian and Syrian people in overthrowing their government (if you get rid of Assad, loathsome as he is, look for a Sunni fundamentalist takeover -- what will Santorum say then?). That, ultimately, is what's so dispiriting about the Santorum speech: that the entire traumatic experience of Iraq has taught him nothing. That his idea of how to fight America's very real enemies is just to keep doing what we're doing now, only a lot more of it.
Because we are all going to see the US substantially withdraw from Iraq in the next two or three years, and the world will indeed be a much more dangerous place because of it (but we will have to go that route because there will be no choice left), we need to have at the summit of the American political leadership men and women who have good judgment about foreign affairs. That is paramount. I think Santorum is probably the best senator on social issues. But I don't believe we can afford this kind of fantasyland crusade any longer.
That's not because I don't believe we have enemies. To the contrary, it's because I think we have powerful enemies, but unconventional ones that cannot be defeated or contained by force of arms alone. What a tragedy -- really -- that one of the best US senators will have shipwrecked his career on Iraq.
A Texas reader who is a conservative Catholic writes:
I saw your post on Beliefnet about the border fence being a good reason to vote for Republicans. I wondered if you'd had a chance to read this article in which even the Republicans admit that the "fence bill" gives the administration the ability to spend the money on different projects (such as roads and technology) and that probably only 300-400 miles will ever be built (if that).
To me, the money quote was, "In this case, it also reflects political calculations by GOP strategists that voters do not mind the details, and that key players — including the administration, local leaders and the Mexican government — oppose a fence-only approach."
I'm planning to sit this election out, and I'm the sort who used to take my kids with me to vote so they'd learn about civic duty.
But wait, Reader! Don't you want to run out and vote Republican to protect traditional marriage? Oh wait, that's right, the GOP cynically punted on that one too. Phonies.
The reader raises an interesting question, though: is it ever the right thing to do to sit out an election? My DMN colleague Mike Hashimoto wrote a funny but serious column yesterday saying that contrary to the eat-your-spinach, good-government propaganda, the nation is not well-served when ill-informed idiots vote out of some sense of civic duty. On a more serious (and ideological) note, the Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put forth an argument for sitting out the 2004 presidential race. Here's an excerpt:
Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.
MacIntyre says the best way to vote against a system that produces what he considers false choices is not to vote.
Is he right? Is it morally justified to sit out this election, if you believe you are presented with two bad alternatives? I'm not sure, but I'm tempted to say yes. Let's talk this through.
Do you observe Halloween? I know I'm going to get grief for this, but we don't. We're not one of the hardcore anti-Halloween families, but we're just not comfortable with it. It makes me uneasy (I guess that's what Halloween is supposed to do), and the fact that my friend, the Louisiana exorcist, strongly warned against it (and told pretty scary personal stories to explain his point) was enough to put me off of it.
No, we're not anti-"Harry Potter" people, and we don't crusade against Halloween. We just don't participate.
Via Ross Douthat, I came upon yet another reason why I think John Derbyshire is one of the most interesting conservative writers working today: his long self-interview about why he lost his religious faith. An admirable quality of Derb's is his blunt honesty: as far as I can tell, he never shies away from saying what he thinks, even when it gets him into hot water. Good. It makes him unpredictable, and even when you don't agree with him, you at least have the impression that there is a real, thinking, contrarian human being behind those words (and as I used to work at NR, I can tell you that he is a gentleman, and I regret that he only came to the office every couple of weeks for the meeting, ergo I didn't get to spend a lot of time with him).
Anyway, I highly recommend his self-interview, because even though I cannot endorse his conclusions, he writes about them humanely and engagingly. I particularly liked his discussion of the social utility of religion, which is widely understood, but also the limits of same, which is uncomfortable for many of us religious people on the Right to admit or to discuss. Here's Derb:
I have now come to think that it really makes no difference, net-net. You can point to people who were improved by faith, but you can also see people made worse by it. Anyone want to argue that, say, Mohammed Atta was made a better person by his faith? All right, when Americans say “religion” they mean Christianity 99 percent of the time. So: Can Christianity make you a worse person? I’m sure it can. If you’re a person with, for example, a self-righteous conviction of your own moral superiority, well, getting religion is just going to inflame that conviction. Again, I know cases, and I’m sure you do too. The exhortations to humility that you find in all religions seem to be the most difficult teaching for people to take on board. Mostly, I think it makes no difference. Evelyn Waugh would have been no more obnoxious as an atheist.
And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?
In the end, I think I’ve now arrived at this position: An individual might be made better by faith, or worse. Overall, taking society at large, I think it averages out to zero.
But he goes on to say he believes that religion is a natural instinct in humans, that it's just there, like the sexual urge. As with sex, when a society can figure out how to corral the religious instinct into socially constructive forms, religion can be judged good -- and when not, not. I think that's true, though as a believer I would say there's the matter of truth -- but to be fair, he's discussing religion as a social phenomenon.
What this discussion does, though, is to violate the generic American taboo against criticizing religion per se. We are a religious country in the sense that many people have religious impulses, and they are more or less accomodated in the public square. But there's this whole civic religion thing, in which religion is generally understood to be a public good (Kinky Friedman, running now for Texas governor, likes to sign off by gently wisecracking, "May the God of your choice bless you."). It ain't necessarily so. You won't be surprised to find that I'm favorably inclined toward the religious as a general matter, but the older I've gotten, the more I've come to see how religion can serve to fix a bad person in his or
her patterns of behavior. I'm thinking of the people I've encountered, clerics and laymen, who have in various ways justified their wicked behavior by cloaking it in a mantle of religiosity ("Nobody'll screw you like a brother in Christ," a cynical Texas Baptist of my acquaintance remarked, from personal experience). This is kind of what I was getting at not long ago when I talked about how suspicious I get whenever someone starts a sentence with, "God told me...". And it is very interesting, Derb's point, about the inverse relationship between personal religiosity and moral self-discipline regarding the African-American and Chinese communities in America.
Finally, Derb is excellent here (emphasis mine):
Q. Can an irreligious person really be a conservative?
A. Of course he can. The essence of modern conservatism is the belief in limited government power, respect for traditional values, patriotism, and strong national defense. The only one of those that gets snagged on religion is the second. But while traditional Western society has had a religious background, it has usually made room, at all points of the political spectrum, for unbelievers. Plenty of great names in the Western cultural tradition have been irreligious. Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, was a complete atheist; and one has one’s doubts about Shakespeare. In any case, as Bill Buckley has pointed out somewhere, the key word is respect. Respect for traditional values implies respect for religious belief, even if you don’t share it.
The word the Romans used is piety. It implies a sense of respect for that which is greater than ourselves. God (or at least the idea of God, which as Derb observes is so great and universal a part of the human experience that due respect must be paid). Nature. Ancestors. That's what I find so worrying about the modern spirit, which you can find among conservatives as well as liberals, the Godly as well as the godless: impiety, by which I mean the sense that we have the right to remake the world anew, according to our own designs, because we can (or think we can).
So, Iraqi PM Maliki is now ordering US troops to take their hands off Sadr City. Well, he may well be an example of Iraqis standing up and taking control of their own country (um, we're supposed to want that, right?), but if this doesn't settle once and for all how reliable Maliki is as a partner for combatting insurgent and death squad violence, I don't know what will. Makes you wonder about those weekend rumors that a US-backed coup is in the offing. Hey, that'd be one way to unite Iraqis...
If you've never read the "Healing Iraq" blog, get over there ASAP. It's where you can find "Zeyad," a young Iraqi dentist who's been blogging from Baghdad since 2003. He was initially a big supporter of the war, but has become bitterly disillusioned. I listened yesterday to a podcast of his interview last week on "Open Source," and it was pretty devastating -- especially when he said that he wished Saddam was back. I remember Zeyad from the early days, exulting over Saddam's overthrow. And now ... this. He explained that the anarchy and murder has gotten so bad that people are desperate for order. Even a secular liberal like himself. (BTW, he's now living in NYC and studying journalism, though his family all remains back in Baghdad).
On "Open Source," the other guest, British journalist Patrick Cockburn, explained that Zeyad's view is common in Iraq now.
Think about that. The anarchy we unleashed by our invasion and botched handling of the aftermath now appears to many Iraqis to be a worse oppressor than the dictator from whom we liberated them.
And take a look at this: a BBC report on conditions in an Iraqi hospital. Zeyad says on his blog that when he watched this, and saw an Iraqi woman yelling "Bring Saddam back!" out of desperation, he burst into tears. He says American television ought to be airing programs like this -- and explained in his radio interview that it's very hard to get here in America real news from Iraq.
Daniel McCarthy writes that to be a campus conservative used to mean you cared about ideas. Now, for the most part it means you've become a partisan of "mindless Republican boosterism." Ah yes, the Romanian Miners Brigades of the Right. Of course, left-wing campus politics has long been intolerant, but when I was on campus at least, back in the dark ages, it was the Right who (plausibly) made fun of the left for its political correctness.
Chances are that your friendly neighborhood Applebee's is not the kind of place you're likely to run into a crunchy con. But yesterday, I bought the book "Applebee's America" after sitting on a panel at the Texas Book Festival with one of its co-authors, GOP strategist Matthew J. Dowd. What interested me was how much Dowd, who was one of George W. Bush's top strategists in his presidential campaigns, and is now running Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election campaign, said the political and social trends are all moving in ways that sound a lot like crunchy conservatism. That is, he said that people are hungry for a sense of higher purpose in their politics, for community, for connections, for civic engagement. It is disconcerting, but in a good way, to make a few basic points about what's lacking in American politics, and what people of my tribe would like to see happen, and have a high-powered Republican strategist say, "Yes, that's right, that's what we're seeing," etc.
When I finish the Polanyi book, I'm going to read the Dowd one (co-authored with Doub Sosnik and Ron Fournier).
Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay long in Austin at the festival, because I had a lot of work to do back in Dallas, so I left shortly after my talk. But I was there long enough to meet one of my favorite writers, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, and to buy his new book, "Through the Children's Gate," a collection of essays about raising children in New York. If these are anywhere near as good as his collection of essays about life, especially family life, in Paris, it'll be terrific.
Mickey Kaus picks up on what bothers so many people about the rush to embrace embryonic stem-cell research and gay marriage: that we're being rushed into making these enormously important decisions without being consulted (if the courts force them on us) and/or without having a full airing of the moral implications of either. Here's Kaus:
One of the things voters might be scared of is precisely that some sort of Faster principle will be applied to speed up social change, with disastrous unanticipated consequences (the same way, Amy Sullivan claims, voters are scared of letting scientific research proceed willy nilly with cloning, etc. "without ever having a conversation as a society about the moral issues involved." Given that concern, framing the gay marriage debate as "law" and "logic" against prejudice is analogous to framing the stem cell debate as "science" and "progress" against faith-based Luddism. The framing itself is what's most alarming. ...
About Amy Sullivan's claim -- it was made in her must-read USA Today piece about why Democrats are "losing" the culture war. I don't really agree that they are, in the broadest sense -- I mean, really, does the culture look like it's growing more conservative to you? -- but Amy's point is that Dems could be doing a lot better politically if they didn't come off as so unfeeling, or even hostile, toward the concerns that many Americans have about the rapid pace of cultural change. Excerpt:
Despite the uproar over Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction a couple of years ago, most parents don't fret that the accidental sighting of a breast or hearing of a swear word will scar their children. They're more concerned about the unrealistic ideas kids get from popular culture about consumption and body image and violence as a way of handling conflict.
Sadly, too many liberals react to complaints about popular culture as if they're teenagers. They either jut out their chins and growl, "If you don't like it, don't watch it," or they stay silent for fear of looking like prudes. Given the ridicule that Tipper Gore faced for promoting warning labels for explicit music lyrics and the derision that followed Hillary Clinton's effort to keep violent video games away from kids, perhaps it's no surprise that most keep their mouths shut. That silence, however, hands conservatives a victory. As David Callahan points out in his book The Moral Center, "When the right complains about the media's descent into tawdriness, it puts them on the side of most Americans."
Even an issue on which Democrats seem to have the winning position can turn out to be a loser for the party in the long run. Most Americans now believe that research on stem cells should be allowed. But as Noam Scheiber recently pointed out in The New Republic magazine, the polls also suggest that they have serious concerns about the morality of unrestricted scientific research. They don't want to wake up tomorrow and discover that we're cloning humans without ever having a conversation as a society about the moral issues involved. By framing the debate as a choice between theology or science, Democrats essentially argued that anyone who has qualms about scientific progress is a troglodyte. That puts them on the losing side of the moral question, even as they win the specific policy debate.
I like the first commenter on the USA Today site, remarking on Amy's essay:
This is an excellent article. In the last 30 years, the democrats have gone from the party of the working people to the party of deadbeats and wierdos and super-rich liberals who don't have to live with the fallout from their "good ideas". And our culture has gone from one where it was easy to raise a family to one that celebrates hedonism as the only realistic
goal of life.
I want an alternative to the republicans. Nancy Pelosi and the Hollywood entertainment complex isn't it. Try again. You can start be re-reading Ms. Sullivan's article.
Yes! Yes! Yes! We will know the Democratic Party is on its way to becoming a solid majority party again when they start doing what Amy Sullivan tells them to do.
National Review identifies what is to me the best reason for voting Republican this fall, despite everything: the border fence. Excerpt from NR's editorial:
On the issue of immigration, majorities of Republicans in both the Senate and House have sided with their conservative base against not just left-wing civil-rights groups and elite opinion, but also a business lobby accustomed to plenty of cheap labor, Republican-party poobahs, and President Bush. They have withstood withering press criticism and pressure from their deep-pocketed donors. It has been a dispiriting session of Congress, but on this crucial issue, congressional Republicans have acted with courage and commitment. If only on the basis of immigration, they deserve their own amnesty from conservative voters disenchanted by other GOP disappointments and failures.
Barbara Nicolosi picks up a rock, puts it in her sling, and lets fly at "Facing the Giants," the Christian movie that she believes is shlocky and sentimental, and is afraid will become the template for the kind of pandering, third-rate movie Hollywood will make for the Christian audience. A Christian audience that, alas, might well eat it up. You really need to read the whole thing if you're at all interested in religion, art and the relationship between Christ and culture. Here's an excerpt, in which Barb says that:
...the small success of Facing the Giants at the box office [has] all of us Able Christians (as in Cain and Able) in Hollywood scared to death that Facing the Giants will be the prototype of the movies that all the new divisions geared to "creating product for Christians" will be seeking out and producing.
I have taken to calling "Able Christians", those who are committed to giving God beautiful, first fruits kind of work. We talk about excellence alot and "the demands of beauty*"(JPII, Letter to Artists) and professionalism and the rigors of the craft. We talk about being missionaries to Planet Hollywood, and how God is much more interested in the people making movies than in the movies being made. We are always wrestling with making projects true AND commercial, beautiful and mainstream. Not because we want the money of studio success, but because we believe that the Gospel needs to be preached to those who haven't heard it, to those who might never wander into a church.
In contrast to this movement of Christian artists, are the ones who are yearning to replicate the Christian Contemporary Music model in Hollywood with a Christian Contemporary Cinema. The goal of these folks seems to be to create fantasy movies for Christians, made by Christians, and paid for by Christians.
Facing the Giants from any serious perspective is a fantasy film. Its message is very dangerous for Christians, and scandalous for pagans. Adult Evangelical Christians watching Facing the Giants is like sex addicts watching the Spice Channel. (Nope. Not going to take it back.)
We are going to leave alone the fact that the film is badly acted, terribly written, completely lacking in imagery, and directed and shot without any style or evident skill. Let's skip all that and just talkabout the content problem.
The film tells the story of a poverty-stricken, generally disdained, losing football coach who drives a broken down truck and goes home at night to a devastatedly infertile wife. Incited by no particular plot point, the coach reads the Bible one day and then kneels down in a field (Why the hell is it always a field? Is that like in Zecharaiah somewhere?) and gives his life to Jesus. In short order after he utters the Evangelical commitment formula aloud, he wins back the esteem of his fellow townspeople, he turns around his terrible team so that they win the championship, somebody gives him a brand new shiny red truck, AND his infertile wife becomes pregnant!
WOW! Give me some of THAT Jesus-stuff!
Absolute fantasy stuff. The kind of thing that makes Christians puff out their chests proud to be on the winning team! This film fumbles deep, deep in the prosperity Gospel end zone. It is icky to tell people that they should be Christian because of the career and health benefits. We have the problem on the team of that embarrassingly unsuccessful crucified coach of ours.
Happened to be in a Borders today, and saw that "Crunchy Cons" is now out in paperback. Let joy be unconfined. It's got a streamlined new subtitle, and a new chapter, too. And it costs about half as much as the hardback. Such a deal. And what's more, we've got that new beefcake pictorial featuring G.K. Chesterton, E.F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry. Makes a great stocking stuffer. Or something.
David M. Walker, head of the General Accounting Office and a man who doesn't have to run for anything, warns that the US economy is headed for a serious crisis. From the AP account of a recent speech he gave:
From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people. What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it. There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
...Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That's almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America - Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included. A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today. And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
The Republicans under Bush have destroyed any reputation they might have had for fiscal responsibility. The Democrats -- have they done anything to show themselves to deserve the mantle that the GOP cast aside? I think not. But before we blame the politicians entirely, let's ask of ourselves: how many of us would vote for a politician who told us we had to pay more and get less, because the country had been living far beyond its means for far too long?
The only politician I've heard this year talking sense about the budget is GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling, who represents a Dallas district. When he came in for his editorial board meeting at the Dallas Morning News, he said that next to Islamic terrorism, the growing fiscal crisis is the greatest threat to America. When the Republicans get clobbered in a couple of weeks, they're going to need to turn to Hensarling to show them the way out of the quagmire that their spendthrift ways have gotten themselves into.
Continuing with Mark T. Mitchell's introduction to the thought of Michael Polanyi, I read today something that puts the current argument over embryonic stem-cell research in a particular light. I hope I can give an adequate brief account of where Polanyi thought Western science and epistemology went wrong, and set the stage for totalitarianism.
Polanyi was first and foremost a scientist, but as a refugee from the Nazi madness, he became preoccupied with the question of how we know what we know, and what that had to do with the twin totalitarianisms that menaced the world in the 20th century. He was horrified by the Soviet idea that science had to be put in service of society (i.e., the State). Science had to be free. But to Polanyi, that freedom wasn't unlimited. Science that was free to pursue anything the scientists wanted would quickly become monstrously nihilistic. There had to be boundaries set somewhere. Both science and society required shared belief in "transcendent ideals" like truth, justice and charity if they are to be free. To deny transcendentals is to deny any defense against totalitarianism.
Science is a system that must work within itself by purely materialistic and empirical data. Those are the rules; to admit anything else into the world of science renders it ... less than science. It was only after science was freed of having to subject its own inquiries to dogmas laid down by religion that it was able to make such dramatic progress. In other words, a limited rejection of traditional authority freed science up in beneficial ways, as Galileo's successors could testify. However, modernity swung too far the other way, and took the empiricism and skepticism that undergirded science as a rule for interpreting all reality. Anything that wasn't empirically provable was rendered meaningless.
Here's the rub: Polanyi says that modern, post-Enlightenment man has lost faith in transcendentals, but he cannot escape the detritus of Christian culture -- meaning that he will still burn with the Christian passion for righteousness and justice, even though he has discarded the transcendental aspect that makes the ideal concrete. Mitchell quotes Polanyi describing the situation as follows:
In such men the traditional forms for holding moral ideals had been shattered and their moral passions diverted into the only channels which a strictly mechanistic conception of man and society left open to them. We may describe this as a process of moral inversion. The morally inverted person has not merely performed a philosophical substitution of material purposes for moral aims; he is acting with the whole force of his homeless moral passions within a purely materialistic framework of purposes.
We still believe in moral perfection, Polanyi says, but now lack the Christian concept of original sin and the stern warning that perfection can never be established this side of heaven. So we are susceptible to applying the methods of science to achieving perfection, even to the point of traducing boundaries that were previously considered immoral. This is how you get the Holocaust and the Soviet Great Famine as the scientifically engineered "final solutions" to the "problems" that stood in the way of totalitarian societies establishing the rule of (Nazi or communist) heaven on earth.
But how did British and American societies escape this fate? According to Polanyi, through what you might term unconscious hypocrisy. Though they'd accepted modernity's empiricism, they still felt obliged to honor the old morality, at least in spirit. This pull of the past, weak though it was, kept the UK and the US from yielding to the full implications of what modernist epistemology, and its attendant scientism, would allow.
What does this have to do with
ESCR? We are seeing quite a large number of Americans -- the majority, it would seem -- agree that it is permissible to create human life for the purpose of experimenting on it and exterminating it, all for the sake of the Greater Good of Mankind. Why should embryos small than the head of a pin be privileged if experimenting on them could ease suffering? The morality of ESCR is not simply a matter of whether or not you believe a human embryo has moral personhood. No, the ESCR proponents cannot evade that the procedure crosses a bright moral line: to carry it out, what everyone admits is biological human life (a genetically distinct and fully human creature) must be willfully created for the ultimate purpose of its destruction. Recognizing the biological humanity of the embryo requires no religious belief at all: it is what it is. And scientists created these beings, which most Americans believe have no moral value, for the sake of making the world more perfect.
It is a horror. But we turn away from the implications of what we are doing, and shriek -- just as the Progressives did during the eugenics era -- that the only people who could possibly object are religious fanatics who want to stop the march of Science. Satisfied that we aren't like those cretinous fundies, we refuse to ponder the deeper meaning of the power over life and death that we have reserved to ourselves, for the sake of achieving perfection. We don't want to consider what may come of it once the scientists tell us that if we could only grow fetuses in the laboratory for harvesting and experimentation, great cures and suffering may come of it. We would never agree to that, we tell ourselves. But 20 years ago, we would never have imagined that we would permit cloning -- but now we do, for "therapeutic" reasons.
This is the kind of thing that's going on in this country. But see, being enlightened people, we fight our elections over macaca and dirty books.
I mentioned Gandalf in a blog a day or so ago because this week, I began reading "The Fellowship of the Ring" to Matthew. He is, I'm pleased to say, transfixed, but then again, I knew he would be. What little boy isn't? We read for about an hour and a half today, and just finished up the "Strider" chapter. I must admit that I'm taken aback by the pleasure I'm having in reading the Tolkien story to my own son, and watching the thrill of his discovering these characters and this plot for the first time. The book is giving us so much to talk about. I told him tonight that even though it's a work of fiction, there is a lot there that tells us how life works, and what is required of us. We revisited again tonight Gandalf's refusal to take the ring into his custody, and talked about how part of being wise is knowing your own weakness, and having the strength to turn away from temptation. We talked about the people we know who are a lot like Gandalf, and also like the other characters. Matthew can't get enough of this stuff, which thrills me to no end.
I have to say too that it's strange, and maybe even wonderful, how that book plays with your own mind. It makes me want to pray more, and to step back and appreciate the heroic in the everyday. Knowing where Frodo is going, and what he faces, makes me appreciate the small, simple qualities of his character, and those of his fellowship, and how they prepared him to do great things when put to the test.
Have any of you read "The Lord of the Rings" to your children? How did they respond? What did you notice that they particularly appreciated? That they didn't like? Talk about it.
Martin Cothran lucidly explains why a Democratic triumph on Nov. 7 will not mean a victory for liberalism, nor a defeat for conservatism. It will instead be a rejection of Republican rule, which many who had heretofore cast their lot with the GOP will have judged to have been more or less incompetent and unprincipled.
I've had some requests in the past few days for a list of websites and a reading list that would be helpful to readers interested in the ideas in "Crunchy Cons." Please share in the comboxes below which books and sites you like, that are more or less faithful to the neotraditionalist sensibility explored in the book.
New York's Edward Cardinal Egan is in the middle of a nasty tiff with some of his priests. The cardinal has a reputation, fair or not, for being aloof, aristocratic and unpastoral. He had a hard act to follow in John Cardinal O'Connor, who was highly visible and active, and in public, quite personable. He was also a terrible money manager, and it was widely assumed that Rome sent in Egan to fix the woebegone assets of the archdiocese, which would require bringing a lot of pain to some people.
I lived in New York for Egan's beginning, and the early part of his reign. I can tell you from my personal contacts among the priests of the archdiocese, that he was not popular. Even those conservative priests who were ideologically predisposed to support him found themselves quickly alienated. He could be a great preacher -- I heard him preach a series of sermons at the long Good Friday liturgy at St. Patrick's, and they were probably the best homilies I ever heard from a Catholic pulpit (faint praise, possibly, but still, they were excellent, and I wrote him a letter urging him to publish them somewhere). But he really did lack the common touch, which was an acute deficiency as O'Connor's successor.
You really saw this in the aftermath of 9/11. One priest I knew shook his head sadly at Egan's low profile in the days immediately following, saying that O'Connor would have rushed to the pile at once. That wasn't Egan's way. Then, to the shock and dismay of many NY Catholics -- especially considering that many of the firefighters who perished on 9/11 were Catholics from the Irish, Italian and Latino communities -- Egan ran off to Rome to a long-planned synod, which he had been put in charge of. People couldn't believe he would leave his city still reeling, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, to go off and run a meeting of bishops. But he did.
This passage from an October 11, 2001, story in the NY Times really captured the cardinal's pastoral blind spot:
When Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Edward Egan of New York to spend October here, helping him run a monthlong gathering of bishops from around the world, the cardinal could hardly object.
But while the bishops are at the Vatican, rethinking their role in the world, isn't the cardinal perhaps rethinking his own role, and his decision to leave his grief-stricken flock?
No, he said in a recent interview here -- first, because he is returning to New York this week for some days to mark the month that has passed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
His work at the Vatican conference, or synod, is important, too, he said. And Rome in many ways is home to the Chicago-bred cardinal.
''I lived here for almost 23 years and love the town,'' Cardinal Egan said, sinking back into a couch in the lounge of an American seminary and calling for an aide to bring him a ginger ale. ''I was ordained in this town, taught here for 17 years and in this building for 4. I'm an old hand.''
Asked again if it was not hard, nonetheless, to be away from New York at such a moment, he said, ''I would not be at all unhappy to be back in New York now."
Wow, Eminenza, that's the spirit. Not. You can perhaps see the character trait that's gotten him in such a bad spot with so many of his priests.
A year ago I wrote a column called "A Separate Peace," in which I said America's leaders in all areas--government, business, journalism--were in some deep way checking out. They saw bad things coming in the world and for our country, didn't think they could do anything about it, and were instead building a new pool or buying good memories for their kids. Soon after I was invited to address a group of Capitol Hill staffers to talk about the piece. When the meeting was over a woman walked up to me. She spoke of what was going wrong in Washington--the preoccupation with money, a lack of focus on the essentials, and the relentless dynamic of politics: first thing you do when you get power is move to keep power. And after a while you don't have any move but that move.
I said I thought the Republicans would take it on the chin in 2006, and that would force the beginning of wisdom. She surprised me. She was after all a significant staffer giving all her energy to helping advance conservative ideas within the Congress. "Yes," she said, in a quiet, deadly way. As in: I can't wait. As in: We'll get progress only through loss.
That's a year ago, from the Hill.
This is two weeks ago, from a Bush appointee: "I hope they lose the House." And one week ago, from a veteran of two GOP White Houses: "I hope they lose Congress." Republicans this year don't say "we" so much.
What is behind this? A lot of things, but here's a central one: They want to fire Congress because they can't fire President Bush.
I've thought this fall how incredible -- and incredibly stupid -- it was that with the US mired in a foreign war it's losing, to say nothing of the other huge challenges facing America, that voters in Virginia were being asked to decide on the fitness of Republican George Allen to continue to serve in the US Senate based on his use of the word "macaca," and whether or not he said the N-word 20 or 30 years ago.
Now comes Allen with what I guess counts as an "October Surprise": highlighting passages from one of opponent Jim Webb's novels in which child molestation is depicted. This despicable demagoguery from Allen is pure, uncut boob bait. I agree with Ross that Radley Balko has the definitive take on the matter, which is excerpted here:
Let's summarize: While George Allen was discovering his love for the Confederacy in Southern California and at the University of Virginia, Jim Webb was fighting the war in Vietnam, finding himself wholly immersed in a completely foreign culture. Webb was obviously rather profoundly affected by that experience. Because he chose to write about it, in a series of books that have won widespread praise from politicians, from fellow Vietnam vets, and from literary critics.
But war-loving, flag-waving George Allen has decided to hold all of that against Jim Webb. Tonight, Allen took what was clearly a scene-painting, cultural passage from one of those books, grotesquely took it out of context and sexualized it, then slapped it on a press release in an attempt to cheapen Webb's well-received books as cheap porn with hints of pedophelia.
This isn't just a political attack. It's an attack on art. On writing. On expression. Hell, it's an attack on knowledge and learning. It's cheap and tawdry and cynical.
Perhaps if George Allen hadn't himself procured a student deferment from the Vietnam War, he'd be more familiar with the country's culture, and wouldn't bastardize the work of a man who did fight, and who saw to share his experiences with the rest of us -- Allen and his campaign of course announcing and advertising their own willfull stupidity in the process.
I hope Jim Webb beats this clabberhead like a drum.
It began Tuesday afternoon with the visitation at the funeral home across town (Martin and Hightower). That lasted 8 hours. Everyone - from city officials to law enforcement chiefs to the president of our local university, most of the department heads and faculty, dozens of doctors and nurses from the local hospital, folks from many charitable service organizations in the community, a large group of Baptists and Presbyterians (their choirs offered serenades), and of course members of my church - it seemed everyone in town came to visit and pay their respects. I led the rosary.
The procession the next morning from the funeral home to my church was amazing. The sheriff, police, and fire department shut down EVERY sidestreet along the route, the main route through Carrollton (Hwy 27) and also the longest since the funeral home is on the opposite side of town from my church - 15 miles or so. Fire trucks and police cars blocked each street while the officers and deputies and firemen stood at attention as the procession passed.
Upon arrival at the church, I was principal celebrant and a classmate of mine Fr. Tim Gadziala, who was friends with the family, was the homilist. The church was packed, of course, and the music was beautiful. Pallbearers were 6 prominent doctors from the community, along with dozens of other honorary pallbearers representing many community organizations.
The Princess? Her name was Michelle Pollard, aged 36, died of complications from a recent surgery after 14 months of struggle.
She was a teacher, first and foremost, but also into sports, winning some gold medals for Georgia in national equestrian events. She was also a greeter at my parish, and active in many local community service organizations.
But she is best known as "Michelle from Publix". Everyone in town knew her, because she was a bagger there for the last 8 years of her life.
Michelle, if you haven't started to wonder by now, had Down Syndrome. And she changed an entire community.
Fr. Tim preached the most remarkable funeral sermon I've ever heard. He's a Scripture scholar and Canonist, so it was a tad intellectual, but warm and joyous and dead on the money and challenging to everyone present. He spoke of her incessant smile and huge hugs. He spoke of how she was not bound by the "impediment of reason" as we are, so that it was natural for her to love unconditionally, whereas it's difficult for us. He spoke of how she taught everyone she encountered the meaning of love and joy. He also spoke of how she "shamed" many of us - an indirect challenge to doctors and others over the years who perhaps didn't put their whole heart into helping her. He also went on for about a half-hour, but that's OK, that's Fr. Tim, and it was beautiful.
I began the Mass with the story from CS Lewis of the woman (in The Great Divorce) being honored by a procession in heaven by thousands of people, because everyone she met became a member of her family, and I told the people we should be honored that Michelle counted us as her family. (She was adopted by a former nun who teaches Special Ed at the University - Dr. Nancy Pollard is a remarkable woman.) I closed the Mass with the comment that I believe we're sent here to learn how to love, but a rare few of us are sent here to teach. And Michelle used to always say, "I be the teacher." And her life itself was a better sermon than any thousand sermons.
She was buried in her prom dress with a crown, which I pointed out as we prayed the Coronation of Mary in the rosary at the Vigil. Indeed, she has received her crown.
Rest in peace, Princess.
Fr. Pau
l Williams, pastor, OLPH, Carrollton, Georgia.
For the Won't Get Fooled Again file, here comes the desperate GOP, going to the gay-marriage well one more time, trying to gin up social and religious conservatives to turn out on the belief that voting Republican will keep the queers from getting hitched. Here's President Bush on the stump yesterday, commenting on the New Jersey Supreme Court's ruling:
“Yesterday in New Jersey, we had another activist court issue a ruling that raises doubts about the institution of marriage,” Mr. Bush said at a luncheon at the Iowa State Fairgrounds that raised $400,000 for Mr. Lamberti.
The president drew applause when he reiterated his long-held stance that marriage was “a union between a man and a woman,” adding, “I believe it’s a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society and the well-being of families, and it must be defended.”
Oh, [expletive]. I too believe that traditional marriage is a sacred institution that is critical to the health of our society and the well-being of families, and that it must be defended. I believe that neither President Bush nor the Republican Party in Washington intends to do jack-squat about it, aside from trading on the gullibility of social and religious conservatives to believe them when they say they will. The only sure way to have defended marriage was to have pushed through a federal marriage amendment to the US Constitution. But after running on defending marriage in 2004, Bush and the GOP forgot all about it -- except for making a half-hearted feint toward passing the amendment, after it became obvious that the votes weren't there to get it through the Senate.
Bush might not have gotten it through the Senate after all -- but he didn't try. After winning a close re-election, arguably because the gay-marriage ballot initiatives in key states mobilized religious and social conservatives to turn out, Bush forgot about marriage. So now, coming back two weeks before an election the Republicans deserve to lose, it takes some gall to pretend to be a defender of traditional marriage. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.
People may say: "OK, so the Republicans folded on gay marriage when it counted. But is the answer to allow a party that has no problem with gay marriage take power?" To that I say: The Republicans have proven that they cannot be counted on to take a political risk to protect traditional marriage, that to them, it is only a sop to get religious and social conservatives to vote Republican. If we are going to get gay marriage declared by the courts anyway, at least by not falling for the Republican lie, we preserve our self-respect. And next time a Republican makes a promise like this, perhaps he'll have the sense to keep it, or at least make a good-faith effort to do so.
Over at Brussels Journal, they're talking about an interview German author Henryk Broder gave to the mainstream left Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, in which he said that young Europeans should emigrate if they want to have a future, because Europe as we have long known it is dead. Excerpt from the BJ item:
Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”
In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it. The epitaph of a great civilization, one fears.
Elsewhere, France is preparing 50,000 riot police for a Nov. 1 potential reprise of last year's violent Muslim intifada in the suburbs of Paris. Hmm...
Well, look, Clive Davis in the UK and I see eye-to-eye on lots of things, but he's written before to say that I and others on this side of the Atlantic tend to be too alarmist about Europe's future, re: Islamization. Clive, if you're reading this, what do you make of the Broder interview?
A friend passes along an e-mail he received from the company that produces W Ketchup, purportedly the preferred tomato-based condiment of conservatives. W ("America's ketchup") is about to release an organic version. From the e-mail:
Dan Oliver, CEO of W Ketchup, added: “Organic is not for everyone, but we thought it was time to allow crunchy conservatives the chance to enjoy delicious organic ketchup without lining the pockets of liberals.”
First we take ketchup, then it's on to mustard!
(Interestingly, the "W" on the label is not George W. Bush, but Geo. Washington. Wonder if it always was...)
Predictably, Daniel Larison has some wise reflections on Heather Mac Donald's claim that conservatism has no need of religion to advance its claims. As a traditionalist, Larison knows better. So does Russell Kirk, who wrote (and is cited by Larison):
The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.
As Daniel puts it, this division cuts right through the heart of the conservative movement.
Via Dan Larison, this excellent WaPo quote on the GOP from a leading Republican strategist:
"They honestly need a baseball bat against the head," said Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who helped Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) take over Congress in the 1990s. "Because if they don't change the lexicon immediately, as bad as this election is going to be, they're going to lose the presidency in 2008. I've given up on 2006. They've already made so many mistakes, there's no way they can fix it in two weeks. But I'm worried now they're going to lose all the marbles."
Larison comments on the idea that as bad as the GOP is, conservatives might as well suck it up and vote for them and make the best of it:
This sort of language of necessity, of having to do something, drives me up the wall. This is one of those odd moments in modern democracy when citizens actually have some minor influence on their government, and some are willing to endorse a party that does next to nothing for them because they think they “have to” vote for them. In an election, no one “has to” do anything he doesn’t want to do. There are no GOP brands on the flanks of conservatives; they do not own us. Why act as if they did?
Would it not be in the greater long-term interest of conservatives to allow the voters to deliver the baseball bat upside the GOP's head, to clear the party's mind before 2008?
I don't often find much of interest in Bob Herbert's NYT column, which is on most days liberal boilerplate. But in today's effort, reported from South Bend, Indiana, Herbert finds that people are sick of the Republicans. The sagacious Lucy McKee, a part-time supermarket clerk, says "I voted for Bush twice. Now I just want him gone." And a lifelong Republican name Jeri Niazi says: "What's hapening now is frightening to me. The war. The deficit. The cronyism." Etc. She says she didn't sign up for that kind of conservatism -- and she's sick of the corporate influence on Washington under Bush: "They are cleaning up, while people here are having a tough time making ends meet."
But Herbert also finds that people have little or no confidence in the Democrats, which prompts him to ask: "Where do troubled voters turn if the country is in a serious fix and neither party is seen as having an adequate solution?"
That will be the question on November 8, the outcome of which will hardly begin to settle matters. I am more devoted to the Republicans than Larison, simply because I see in them the only realistic possibility for the kinds of things I believe in to be translated into governing policy. Therefore, for the sake of constructive reform, in the short run, I am perversely cheered by the emergence what you might call Ben Grimm Conservatives, the sort who look at the national GOP under this president's leadership and say, with relish, "It's clobberin' time!"
But then there's the sticky issue of how he defines "having it in" for the disabled. He works from the assumption that the disabled are entitled to everything and anything the state can conceivably provide, and then he assumes that any opposition to such generosity is a sign of evil intent, a sort of larceny by conservatism. In short, in Adler's view, the disabled are already entitled to everything and the conservative who disagrees wants to take away what is already theirs. This is a fascinating snippet of the assumptions behind Progressive thought. For it holds that positive rights exist prior to everything else and that conservatives are champions of subtraction from an already existing edifice.
The conservative (and most libertarians) sees things very differently. While there may be a moral obligation for the State to help the disabled have fruitful lives — where and when it can at reasonable cost — the disabled (and other entitlement seekers) do not have have an established a priori right to special cars or jobs not well-suited to the blind, people in wheelchairs etc. But according to the Progressive mind, denying this metaphysical right to cosmic justice is proof positive of "having it in" for the disabled.
This is what is so irritating about many liberal polemics on gay marriage. There's this indignant assumption that if you do not think that there is an inherent right (and all rights are inherent) to same-sex marriage, then you must "have it in for gays." Never mind that as recently as 10 years ago, only a handful of people even conceived that gay marriage might be a right. Suddenly we are supposed to believe that the "right" to same-sex marriage is so obvious and incontrovertible that opposing it can only be proof of bigotry and irrationality. I heard on the radio the other day some woman venting that conservatives "want to take away the civil rights of gay people." It's a telling formulation, revealing a mindset that believes that same-sex couples already possess this right, and that conservatives are trying to take away from them something that's already theirs.
I think it's certainly a legitimate claim that marriage should be extended to same-sex couples, and that's an argument worth having. But framing it as a "right" takes the question to an entirely different level. It's almost Orwellian how the left has deftly manipulated language to make something that has never existed in human history, and was only a fringe concept until just yesterday, into something that has always existed and is endangered by conservatives trying to roll back history.
Cal Thomas reacts to the new census data showing that married couples are at last a minority in America. He blames the media in part for the decline in marriage, by normalizing and mainstreaming what we might euphemistically call "alternative arrangements." But:
This decline into minority status for people like me is also partly the fault of people like me. My generation has been obsessed with making money and acquiring things in place of investing necessary time on marriage and children. The message the kids get is that if marriage is mostly about accumulating wealth and acquiring stuff, they can do that without getting married.
I think selfishness of this sort is certainly a factor, but it's also true that we live in a culture that has come to think of children as accessories to a marriage, and not the primary point of marriage. Can't tell you how many people, upon learning that Julie was pregnant with a girl, have said something along the lines of, "Well, you have your boys too, are you done now?" The commodification of children.
But it should be mentioned too that economics, not just social pressure, play a factor. I was talking recently to Andrea Kirk Assaf, who lives in Rome with her husband and baby daughter. Andrea is a devout Catholic, and we share the same views of family matters. We talked about the collapsed birthrate in Italy, and she said that it really is the case there that housing is so expensive it inhibits the desire to raise bigger families.
In the coming rethinking of what conservatism should be about, we should discuss what government can do to encourage ("incentivize") the forming of larger traditional families -- even if it's just reducing the tax burden on them.
Several of you have noticed, as have I, that sometimes when you come to this blog, the freshest post up is one from days ago -- that is, several days worth of posts don't appear. I've noticed that sometimes, if I hit the "refresh" function a few times, the actual current version of the blog will come up. And sometimes ... not. I've reported the problem to the Bnet web elves. So hang in there -- and make liberal use of the "refresh" button.
David Brooks says today (subscription required) that the conservative era of American politics will come to an end on November 7, no matter what the outcome at the polls, just as surely as the liberal era of American politics ended in 1980. Writes Brooks:
First, conservatives have exhausted their agenda. They have little new left to propose and have lost their edge on issues like fiscal discipline and foreign policy. Second, conservatives are beset by scandals, the kind of institutional decay that afflicts movements at the end of their political lives. Third, the Reagan coalition is splintering, with the factions going off in wildly different directions. ... Fourth, there is no viable orthodox conservative candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Orthodox conservatives like Allen, Frist and Santorum are fading, and only heterodox figures like McCain, Giuliani and Romney are rising.
The thing is, we're not about to return to an era of liberal dominance, says Brooks, because voters rightly intuit that the Dems don't have a coherent agenda at the moment. Rather, we are about to enter an interregnum like the 1970s. "That decade," writes Brooks, "was marked not by a change in political winds so much as by disillusionment and a scrambling of political categories. People who once had been liberals drifted away. Voters became cynical about politics itself. The pendulum swung not only from left to right but from politics to antipolitics. Jimmy Carter promised a break from the normal methods of political life."
Brooks predicts that candidates who will do well in this new era are those like McCain and Obama, "who offer a new way of politics." The West and the Midwest, not the South, will be the politically dominant region. And after the period of turmoil, the party and the movement that can best get on top of the "defining problems" of the new era -- Islamic fundamentalism, entitlement spending, rising China and India, building "cultural capital" (which is, if I may say, the main prerogative of crunchy-con neotraditionalists) -- will be the party and the movement that will dominate the post-turmoil era.
See, this is why I actually look forward to a rout of the Republicans next month. If the GOP hangs on, it will only put off the day when the party will be forced to do hard thinking about its principles and priorities going forward. As painful as a loss would be in the short term, a season of prayer and fasting (so to speak!) in the wilderness could, and should, renew the party and the conservative movement. It might not turn out that way: it certainly doesn't seem to have happened to the Democrats, who, if not for the Iraq fiasco, would likely be heading to another defeat. It doesn't seem to have renewed the Tories in Britain, who are riding high now only because Blair and New Labour have exhausted themselves (and wrecked the party in Iraq). But the conservative movement in America, I think, has the intellectual and cultural resources to carry this off -- and the creative minority that stands to lead the way are Evangelicals and other religious conservatives, if the unify behind an agenda of social and cultural conservatism married to economic populism (which in a conservative context, would not mean government redistribution of the wealth so much as the government using its power to push reforms that would help small business, as opposed to big business, as well as some form of localism and protectionism to buffer the destructive effects of globalism on local communities).
To be sure, true cultural renewal is not going to come from Washington, but from families and "little platoons" doing the slow, patient work of raising countercultural kids and building countercultural institutions. Still, come what may on November 7, the first day of the new political era begins November 8, and I think it could well augur an exciting t
ime of renewal for conservatives, after the recriminations stop.
Exhibit one in why I don't like it when Christians say "God told me..." as a way of qualifying their actions: the cheesy saga of Hollywood producer Matt Crouch. His Ma and Pa are TBN shlock pastors Paul and Jan Crouch, whose massive religious broadcasting empire brings in $190 million tax-free dollars in every year. If you've ever seen their network, they and pastors whose shows they broadcast are always being told things directly from God. Well, son Matt is allowing his rich parents -- whose wealth depends on milking willing Christians for money -- to bankroll his attempts to play Hollywood film mogul. To this point, he has been a failure -- his films are critically panned, and they've lost millions. But hey, Matt lives in a Hollywood Hills mansion (that first appeared to him in a "vision" -- presumably a case of God telling him that he was destined by Providence to live like a Tinseltown macher -- and drives, among several cars, a blue Porsche (his wife drives a $240,000 Bentley).
Again, don't misread me: I firmly believe God does communicate with people, and leads them down certain vocational paths. But when someone says outright, "God told me...," I immediately think of the televangelists.
How do I love IKEA? Let me just tell you. We bought a leather couch from there a while back because we needed something decently made and stylish to sit on, but something cheap enough to withstand life in a small house with two small boys, and all their spills and carrying-on. It's been a good purchase. Every time I've yelled, "That's a couch, not a trampoline! Get off it right now!" I've been grateful for having made the purchase.
Well, about an hour ago, I was sitting here in my study when I heard Julie gasp, and call me. I stepped into the living room, and found her standing there holding the baby in one hand, her other hand covering her mouth in shock. Lucas had taken a pen and scribbled all along the top of the couch. It looked awful.
"How are we going to get that off?" she whispered.
Lucas, who suddenly realized that he was in Big Trouble, said, "How about a washcloth?"
Well, why not? We knew it wouldn't work, but we had nothing to lose.
It worked. A washcloth plus elbow grease took every stroke of that pen out of the leather. Mommy and Daddy's hearts are beating regularly again. Thanks IKEA.
Prof. Frederick Turner has a highly provocative column up on TCS Daily today, in which he posits that the death-squad violence in Iraq is following its own brutal logic, and may portend good. His argument is that the Sunnis are the dead-enders who are preventing a political settlement, and bringing about a state of anarchy through their suicide-bombing attacks. The Shia death squads are the natural response of civil society to rid itself of an intolerable and unappeasable enemy. He writes:
[D]eath squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident. That period was a bit further back in the past for the French, the English, and the Americans. But no nation can be shown to have reached the rule of democratic law without it. The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization. That crime is indeed a crime, and its perpetrators must stand trial for it, whether before God or some human tribunal. But it is possible that true civil self-government can only be established with its aid.
Death squads are distinctly better than suicide bombers. Their members want to survive and have something to lose—they envisage a future in which they can stop killing and get on with family life, while the horrible nightmares gradually fade. ... If civil society finds itself threatened by utter chaos, it may resort to free-enterprise war against its enemy. By definition what it does then cannot be law-abiding or approved by its own government; it is in Hobbes' state of nature; but it can be a kind of savage rationality that might precede law.
But, as Socrates knew, this dark archetypal crime must be hidden. ...
I think he's mistaken if he thinks there is that much rationality going on here -- Shia death squads are now turning on fellow Shias. It's true anarchy, or so it seems to me. But what interests me in Prof. Turner's view that civil society requires, at least at the beginning, the use of terror to establish its rule, it's legitimacy. Today's terrorists are often tomorrow's statesmen, and yesterday's freedom fighters.
This got me to wondering about legitimacy and authority in ecclesiastical matters, and whether it is possible for any large church organization to maintain its authority in an era of mass information and mass democracy -- and what that portends, in time, for civil society. What I mean is this: it is increasingly impossible for religious hierarchs to keep scandal, and their own role in it, under wraps (as we have seen in the Catholic Church, and as we see in my own church). We will never again return to a time in which it will be possible either to keep the kinds of things that severely undermine hierarchical or clerical authority forever concealed, or to deploy religious authority to silence people demanding accountability. Attempts will continue to be made, of course, but the tide toward transparency is unstoppable, and the expectations people have of their religious leaders to behave in an upright and honest fashion will only grow.
Mind you, the laity in this or that church may decide to shrug off evidence of ecclesial corruption, either because they have no effective means of addressing it, or they feel, consciously or not, a need to believe in the integrity of the leadership that's greater than their need for truth-telling and accountability. Both, I think, account largely for the ge
neral lack of widespread outrage among the Catholic laity at the sex-abuse scandal. I say "lack of outrage," but just because people failed to take the the barricades, so to speak, to protest their bishops' behavior, that doesn't mean that it didn't affect their view of the hierarchy and its authority. As Jody Bottum discussed in his much-read First Things essay, the public's opinion of Roman Catholic bishops is low, their moral authority having collapsed. To be sure, I say this not to take a whack at the Catholic Church, but to discuss whether it is possible for any church hierarchy to maintain authority nowadays, when what Turner refers to as the "shadow" side of civil society (including church society) is so vulnerable to the sunlight of the public's gaze.
Many Catholics look with nostalgia on the last era of a powerful Roman Catholic church in American life, in the 1940s and 1950s. When bishops pronounced on this or that public matter, it carried weight, because Catholic people took them seriously. It was during this time, though, that one of the most powerful American prelates lived a not-so-closeted gay life. A friend of mine went to an all-male party at his mansion, and got a tour from His Eminence himself. A cop friend told another damning story of this cardinal's sexual debauchery, that he got firsthand. Yet this prelate, a staunch conservative, ruled with an iron fist, and was widely respected in his day. Was the Church -- was society -- better off with the illusions that gave this hypocritical prelate so much power? The answer is no, but it's not a "no" that should come easily. The bishops have been brought down to size by the exposure of their own corruption, and I can't imagine that any social good was worth continuing to cover for them, as they covered for the abuser priests. Still, let's not pretend that something important hasn't been lost in this reckoning. Jody talks about it in his essay, about how the scandal ruined the bishops as a credible moral voice in a public square that needed them.
None of us can stand too much reality. At some point, we have to agree, half-consciously, to accept the shadow side as the price we pay for those that give us civilization (this too is why the American public is not so eager to hear about torture, and the bad things that those in authority do). But you know, you can't un-learn what you've learned, and it's getting harder and harder not to know things. I guess the point I'm trying to get at is that the information environment, this environment of transparency, is going to bring with it successive losses in public confidence in institutions necessary to civil society. But on the beneficial side, it could well bring the kind of reform that will restore public confidence. Speaking in the ecclesiastical context, if the corruption and mediocrity of so many Catholic bishops having been exposed spurs the Vatican to appoint holier men to lead the Church, it will have been worth it. (Similarly, if the agonizing revelations ongoing in the Orthodox Church in America forces accountability, repentance and restoration, it will have been worth it. ). But I think that no matter how much good comes out of any of this, we have no choice but to accept that there will always be a shadow. To accept the shadow without protest is, I think, to accept the Grand Inquisitor's bargain. But to assemble and deploy the power necessary to eliminate the shadow entirely could occasion great evil. Remember Gandalf refusing to take the One Ring from Frodo, saying that the Ring would seize control of his soul through his capacity to pity; he knew would intend to use the Ring's power only for Good, but that that would be a damning illusion.
A week or so ago, I blogged critically about RNC chair Ken Mehlman over his alleged role in firing a State Dept official who reportedly wouldn't do Jack Abramoff's bidding. A reader has since brought to my attention a new Robert Novak column putting the firing in a different light -- it now appears that the fired State guy was a Democratic hack who was found by State's Inspector General to be behaving in a "most egregious" fashion on behalf of the Democrats in the late 1990s. None of this was in the original story on which I based my post harshly criticizing Mehlman. I retract my earlier comments, and thank reader Simon for bringing this to my attention.
That's the advice Andrew Sullivan dispenses to disgruntled conservatives this fall, unless the Republican on their ballot is truly "stellar." He says the exhausted Tories got clobbered in 1974, retired to the woods to do some hard thinking, and came back with Margaret Thatcher. What saved them was rethinking the meaning of conservatism, and what it should mean in changed circumstances:
My book is an attempt to do just that. It has no policy prescriptions. It's an attempt to ask again what the hell conservatism means from first principles. You may well disagree with it. But the conversation is the point. All of us who think or have thought of ourselves on the right need a break from power to figure out what we want power for. We're lost right now. Terribly, incontrovertibly lost.
People keep asking me on this tour who I think can save conservatism, who I favor for 2008, etc. But that's the wrong question. Conservatives do not need a savior. They need a coherent governing philosophy. That requires some hard soul-searching, some healthy recriminations, and a debate from first principles.
I completely agree, and my book is also an attempt to do that. Obviously I think what's gone wrong with the GOP is quite different from Andrew's take (which is: blame the Christians), but I couldn't agree more that after having been entrusted with power, the Republicans in Washington have botched it. They might win this November, but if they do, I fear it will put off the reckoning and accountability and hard thinking that the conservative movement needs to be doing to ready itself for the long slog ahead.
Let me throw something out there for discussion. I don't know anybody on the Right who is satisfied with the performance of the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress, even if they plan to vote GOP on Nov. 7. It's safe to say, I think, that all of us want to see some serious rethinking of priorities and internal reform of the GOP, no matter what happens on Election Day. What would you like to see happen in the post-election period, in terms of GOP reform? What about in terms of the broader conservative movement -- what should the rest of us be thinking about in light of the shipwreck of GOP government in Washington?
Philosophical materialism, when injected into an industrialized society, manifests itself socially in another form of materialism – namely, consumerism. While all living creatures are necessarily consumers, consumerism as such is something altogether new. Industrialization provides the mass production necessary to sustain a society of individuals dedicated primarily to the acquisition of material goods, while philosophical materialism provides the psychological and spiritual license for this headlong, subhuman pursuit. In such a milieu, fidelity to one’s home or community is eroded by the primary value of acquisition. Thus, we see modern consumers embracing a relentlessly mobile existence, trading ties with extended family and community for the promise of a bigger paycheck or, more generally, an improved “quality of life” which is almost always reducible to material terms (or more broadly hedonistic ones, which is merely an instance of the commodification of pleasure). In short, modern man is characterized in large part by a skepticism that manifests itself in both consumerism and rootlessness. And as the scope of human concerns has narrowed and lowered, the social commitments and priorities necessary for the sustenance of healthy communities have been largely jettisoned. Thus, as human concerns constrict to the single (though infinitely variegated) moment of the consumer, the social and political ties that provide the necessary ballast for a fully human existence are violently rent. When the acquisition of material goods or hedonistic satisfaction becomes the engine of desire, although we may still utter words of fidelity to parent, sibling, or community, those attachments will always find themselves in second place to the more urgent and tangible. Modern rootlessness is, at least in part, a function of skepticism concerning the sacred nature of one’s family or home, which are reduced merely to accretions we must, often with considerable pain, scrape away as we pursue that for which our hearts truly long.
--Mark T. Mitchell, from “Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing," from ISI Press’s Library of Modern Thinkers. More on Polanyi's diagnosis and prescription for our spiritual and social condition later; I'm blogging this from behind the steering wheel of the fambly minivan, parked outside an Irish pub that has a wi-fi hotspot, as I'm on my way to pick up Matthew from school. Our Internet connection at home has gone out again. Argh!
Amy Welborn has one of her long, sprawling, excellent posts up, this one about Jody Bottum's First Things essay on the decline of Catholic culture in America. It defies easy summary, but let it suffice to say that the only problem she finds with the Bottum piece is that much of what he talks about that drove the falling-apart of US Catholic culture in the post-conciliar years doesn't really register with most ordinary Catholics. That is, the kinds of things Bottum dwells on -- e.g., that infamous Call to Action conference -- really did affect people in the pews in time, but not at the level of awareness. Amy goes on to ponder the various factors that in her view led to the dissolution and dissipation of Catholic culture, all of which more or less come down to: a church that looked strong but that was actually based on custom, habit and ritualism did not survive the great mid-century shock, and mostly got absorbed by the culture.
I was thinking Amy's post tonight when a Belgian friend and his wife came by bearing a pot of beef stew for us. I asked G. if he'd seen the film biography of Herge, the creator of Tintin, that I'd passed on to him via his wife, who's a friend and colleague at the paper. He said he hadn't; I urged him to, saying that it's really a portrait of Belgium before and after World War II (G. must be in his mid-fifties or early sixties). I recounted to him the film's tale of Herge, a straitlaced bourgeois Catholic, who eventually lost his faith late in life after a breakdown in the late 1950s, I think it was, and left his wife. As I've blogged before, I know something about what happened to the Church in the Netherlands, where Catholicism (and Christianity in general) is really almost entirely wiped out, and it came down to a very fixed and stable social system built around religious and social tradition suffered two annihilating blows in the 20th century, with the wars. In the 1950s, everyone tried to return to form, and found the forms hollowed out. When the counterculture presented itself with vigor in the 1960s, everything traditional collapsed without a fight.
We didn't suffer either war here in the US, but I do wonder what the experience of the Second World War did to the generation that fought it both abroad and on the home front, and how that shaped their expectations of the Church. There are numbers of smart commentators in Amy's comboxes, so do go read them. The sense you get from the whole is that the experience of modernity, which included the wars, has been so shattering that the old rituals and customs didn't survive (Amy says, and I think she's right, that something as simple as relaxing the ban on meat on Friday was a far bigger deal than it seemed at the time). Here's another important point she makes:
The question that has bugged me for ages is different from that I hear asked by others. Others try to rebuild, to recreate that old sense of Catholic culture - which is admirable, but is it possible? No, what I wonder about is how do we reconstruct Catholic life in the catacombs? By that I don’t mean the extremes of persecution, but as Christians living in a culture that is really inimical to the Gospel, at every point, to the celebration of materialism, consumerism, economic success, personal appearance, to the rank hostility to life and the commoditization of sex. Christianity was born and flourished in the Roman Empire, in conditions hostile to it. There was no “Catholic culture” as we associate it with Christendom on. I’m thinking it is more useful and to the point to imagine myself, as a Christian, living in the time of Domitian, than thinking that the answer is to try to recreated 13th century Italy.
I think all of us Christians are, to use Percy's phrase, pilgrims in the ruins, doing what we can to
cobble together some roof over our heads, and a solid foundation to our house, even as the earth keeps shaking. So much of "Crunchy Cons" is about this attempt to reclaim some of what was lost, and to make tradition live again in some form, rather than shrug and give in to modernity (though you might say that picking and choosing from the past is a quintessentially postmodern project -- to which I say, "OK, but what else is there?"). As most readers of this blog know, I have moved to the Orthodox Church for some intensely personal reasons, but also because, as Amy notes in a brief discussion of this in her blog, there was in my experience so little actual Catholicism on offer in various parishes (I don't want to get into that again in the comboxes here, please). It is important to say, though, that despite the much better job the Orthodox Church has done in holding on to traditions, you can't read Father Schmemann's diaries without becoming acutely aware of how much he worried about Orthodoxy being so hidebound to the past, suffused with empty ritualism and worship of the ethnos. Indeed, I received a very moving and sorrowful letter from an Orthodox man who said that his church was pretty much preserved in amber, and seen by the great majority of parishioners as existing to perpetuate the cult of the tribe and all its glories. He says he has little or nothing living and real to pass on to his children, and it grieves him.
There are no easy answers, and no sure escape from shattering modernity. All you can do, I think, is better your odds of weathering it intact.
Part one of a four-day discussion/debate between Joe Loconte and Amy Sullivan, over the way the Bush Administration has treated religious conservatives. Today, Loconte says despite some obvious disappointments, Bush has delivered pretty well for the theocons. Excerpt:
[Bush] has mostly ignored their fixation on the symbols of civil religion (school prayer, et cetera), realizing intuitively that this is not the stuff of cultural renewal. His cautiousness over the abortion debate and his middle-ground approach on stem-cell research remind critics that conservative Christianity is quite capable of principled political compromise. Finally, his faith-based initiative and his human-rights agenda summon the better angels of the evangelical nature. They ask believers to spend less time as cranky prophets and more time as good Samaritans. And Bush has offered this challenge in a way that respects and welcomes their most deeply held beliefs. I find it hard to imagine, at this political moment, a Democratic White House willing to do the same.
A Christian candidate for the U.S. Congress decided to run on orders from the Almighty. Says Republican Michele Bachmann (a Lutheran and native of Garrison Keillor's hometown):
God then called me to run for the United States Congress, and I thought “What in the world will that be for?” and my husband said “You need to do this,” and I wasn’t so sure, and we took 3 days and we fasted and we prayed and we said, “Lord. Is this what you want? Is this your will?” and after long about the afternoon of day two, he made that calling sure. And its been now 22 months that I’ve been running for United States Congress. Who in their right mind would spend 2 years to run for a job that lasts 2 years? You’d have to be absolutely a fool to do that. You are now looking at a fool for Christ. This is a fool for Christ.
You know, whenever someone says, "God called me to do..." or "God told me to do...," my b.s. detector automatically comes on. It's not that I disbelieve that God calls individuals to do this or that. In my life, I got a very clear and even startling call back to journalism at a time I was considering leaving it, and spent months in prayer and reflection about the path I should take. I honestly believe the hand of the Divine was in that. But I can't imagine declaring so confidently, "God told me to run for Congress" (or write a book, mow the grass, adopt an African orphan, whatever). Isn't that dangerously presumptious? Don't we risk confusing the promptings of God with our own desires? What if God "told" Bachmann's opponent to run for office against her? What's wrong with saying simply, "I believe part of my Christian vocation is to public service as a U.S. Congressman?" Why bring God into it like this?
In his review of Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul," David Brooks praises Sullivan for asking some important questions about the meaning of conservatism, but complains that Sullivan is being reductionistic and (frankly) completely unrealistic when he tries to read religious conservatives out of the movement. Nevertheless, Brooks says the performance of the Bush Administration poses a good question to Sullivan and many others on the Right:
If I am a conservative, and I detest many of the things this conservative administration is doing, then what kind of conservative am I and what kind of conservatives are they?
That's a good departure point for a discussion in the comboxes among we who consider ourselves conservatives, but who have grown alienated from the Bush Administration. I was going to start by talking about my belief in the primacy of what Pope John Paul II called the "culture of life," and how in my view this administration has used those issues primarily as a way to get votes, but that wouldn't be entirely honest. The truth of the matter is that if Iraq had gone off reasonably well, it would have been such an incredible achievement -- establishing workable representative democracy in the heart of the Middle East! -- that the many domestic failures of this administration would just not have mattered as much.
So what is it about Iraq that has me so sick of these conservatives in power? These things:
1) Undertaking the war in the first place, on the assumption that the United States can transform a tribal, religiously intolerant Third World country into a modern democracy by force of arms; everything in the conservative tradition teaches against such radical utopianism;
2) Once having committed to such a radical course of action, not committing the troops and materiel needed to give it a chance, however long, of working;
3) Obstinately refusing to admit error and changing course when doing so might have made a difference;
4) Tolerating and even rewarding incompetence out of political loyalty (which we've seen elsewhere in this administration, obviously).
I guess, then, I'm the kind of conservative who thinks custom and tradition is a better guide to predicting human behavior (and acting to change it) than Enlightenment abstractions. And I'm the kind of conservative who thinks he has the right to expect prudent, competent government from conservatives, which includes a sober and responsible acknowledgement of error and change of course when reality runs over ideology.
Near the top of the list of reasons some Republicans give for why angry conservatives are supposed to hold our noses and vote GOP this fall is that if the Dems get control of the House, they'll try to impeach President Bush. Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. They wouldn't be so foolish, and if they were, voters would punish them harshly in 2008. Another reason is that a Democrat-controlled House would start carrying out investigations into the way the Iraq War was sold and has been conducted. Presumably conservatives are not supposed to want our Commander in Chief annoyed by something as trivial as Congressional oversight.
Actually, if we finally got a Congress that held the Administration accountable for how they've run this ruinous debacle of a war, that might well be worth it. Of course there'd be Democratic grandstanding, but maybe, just maybe, the US would stop digging itself in deeper and deeper in Iraq. There has got to be a reckoning, an accounting, of this Administration's incompetence. If the Republicans won't do it -- and they quite plainly won't -- then we need people who will. That's why I think the only thing that will make me gloomier than waking up on Nov. 8 to read that the Democrats have taken over the House will be to wake up on Nov. 8 to read that the Republicans have kept it.
Ross Douthat explains why this popular (in the media and among the punditocracy) notion that theocons are chiefly to blame for the GOP's travails is claptrap. Excerpt:
Look, there's no question that the religious right has played a role in the Republican Party's unpopularity. The Terri Schiavo affair was a debacle for the GOP, opposition to stem-cell research plays pretty badly at the polls, and - as always - the Robertson-Falwell axis of blowhards can be counted on to make anyone who even half-agrees with them look like a blithering fundie moron. But the two major "theocon" issues that George W. Bush has pushed, opposition to gay marriage and the appointment of "conservative judges," have proven to be huge electoral winners for the GOP, and the only major successes of the Bush second term so far have been the "theocon"-approved appointments of John Roberts and Sam Alito. Whereas his failures - well, look, the deficit isn't where it is because of the theocons wanted huge tax cuts or a new Medicare entitlement; our foreign policy isn't where it is because the theocons wanted to invade Iraq (except insofar as everyone on the right did); all of Bush's second-term political capital wasn't squandered because the theocons wanted to try to partially privatize Social Security. The religious-conservative agenda, insofar as it's been put into practice by Bush, involves increased spending on AIDS in Africa and faith-based initiatives at home, an emphasis on abstinence in federally-funded sex education, and those "conservative judges" and gay marriage ballot initiatives. And all of these projects, love them or hate them, have very little to do with 1) the Iraq War or 2) the perception, fed by everything from the botched Social Security reform to Bush's disinterest in global warming, that the GOP is in the pocket of the rich and big business, which (along with the hangover from Hurricane Katrina) are the biggest albatrosses circling the party these days.
The stem cell issue is a big loser for theocons, unfortunately. It's also an emotional issue, and it's being demagogued horribly by the Democrats. Actually, "demagogued" is probably not the right word, because it implies that the putative demagogue is a cynic. I'm probably wrong, but I don't think that McCaskill or any Dem is really a cynic on this issue, in the sense that a cynic makes cheap emotional appeals (but I do wish that if the Dems are going to put a severely afflicted Michael J. Fox before voters to make a heart-rending pitch for federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, pro-life GOP members ought to play snippets of "The Silent Scream" -- the part where the unborn child fights to escape the abortionist's tools). Anyway, there is an extremely important moral principle at the heart of the ESCR controversy, and it is this: to what extent may we treat human life as instrumental? That is, how far are we willing to go to treat human life as something that the strong may exploit to its own ends? I haven't seen any pro-life Republicans who have been able to respond effectively with this point to the pro-ESCR forces. We are on a dangerous slippery slope, and those in politics who intuit this troubling reality seem powerless to make an effective rhetorical appeal for their (our) side. Scientism and emotionalism look like they're going to win again.
Anyway, if the GOP loses big in a couple of weeks, it will primarily be because of Iraq and related incompetency by the GOP president and GOP Congress. But everybody's going to want to blame the theocons.
UPDATE: The indefatigable Kathy Shaidle comments Michael J. Fox's commercial, and makes the crucial point:
I'm sorry a movie star has a disease, but that doesn't give him the right to sacrifice others in a quest for a cure. What if there was a chance that experimenting on, say, Parkinson's patients might lead to a cure of something else...? (Paging Dr. Mengele...)
Well, the Internet mysteriously restored itself here at home tonight, so yay for that. We'll get back to regular blogging tomorrow (there was a slew of stuff from over the weekend that I wanted to mention for discussion, so maybe some of it at least will go up tomorrow, when Mr. Mom gets a break -- and hey, all props to moms! I did want to mention something tonight that struck me as odd, and probably a sign that I'm slip-sliding into full-blown fuddyhood.
When Matthew was born in 1999, I remember spending a cold Saturday afternoon that fall nesting in the basement living room of our Brooklyn apartment with the newborn baby. The Scorsese film "Goodfellas" came on cable, and I was excited; I hadn't seen it since it had been released a few years earlier, and it was the No. 1 film on my Top Ten list that year (I was a professional film critic at the time). I settled in for a long, enjoyable afternoon getting reacquainted with the film. But about 45 minutes into it, I had to turn the TV off. There was so much graphic violence in the movie that I literally couldn't watch it. I had never been overly affected by that stuff, but somehow sitting in the room with that tiny little baby, and intuiting from that how precious human life is, and how fragile -- well, I literally couldn't continue with "Goodfellas." It wasn't one of these "I'd like to, but I really shouldn't" moments; it was "nope, can't do it, goodbye."
So, flash-forward to last night. The kids were asleep (Baby Nora in my arms) and Julie and I decided to watch Woody Allen's "Match Point," about which we'd heard such good things. It got to the part in which the married protagonist begins his obsessive affair with Scarlett Johansson, and I swear, I could not watch it. It wasn't the somewhat graphic sex; it was the deed being done, this creep cheating so vividly on his kind, sweet wife. I felt defiled just watching it. I said to Julie, "You're not going to believe this, but this is making me really anxious. I hate watching this guy do this." I tried to shake it off, but finally said, "I can't do this anymore."
"Well, let's turn it off then."
"Let's."
I'm still trying to figure out why I reacted so strongly to these scenes. I've seen far worse on film, and been unaffected by it. I confess that part of it must be that Scarlett Johansson has to be the most boring major actress around. Had the cad been boffing someone like Kate Winslet, someone who had a modicum of wit or mystery about her, maybe it would have been easier to watch, instead of seeing a character betray his wife with such a dumb, dull bunny. But deep down, I don't think that's it. I think I just couldn't stand to watch this creep betray his good wife like this. And I'm left wondering if my visceral negative reaction had anything to do with the fact that while I was watching this, I held my sleeping newborn baby daughter in my arms.
UPDATE/NOTICE: If you're seeing this as the latest CC post, keep hitting the "refresh" button on your browser until you get the latest version of the CC blog. There's some software glitch that unpredictably eliminates every post that has gone up after this one.
Internet service went out at my place over the weekend, and the tech nerd is not going to be able to come over to fix it until tomorrow. I've just escaped from Mr. Mom duty to run to a neighborhood Starbucks and get a message to the outside world via wi-fi. If you see light blogging here today and tomorrow, you'll know why.
Man. How did I ever become so *&^$#@ dependent on a broadband connection?! Some crunchy dude I am.
And hey, just so you know, I thank the good Lord for the plug-in drug! If not for endless rounds of "Looney Tunes" (the old ones, not the abysmal new ones) and "The Jetsons" on DVD, plus the PBS Kids line-up to turn my boys' brains to mush and to thus render them immobile while I cook and clean and grocery-shop and basically be Mr. Mom 24/7, I don't know what I would do. There, I've said it. Sic transit gloria crunchy.
I know voter apathy is considered a Big Problem by people in the chattering classes, but do they really consider it to be quite so…foul? It must be frustrating to be an important figure in the “movement” and Republican circles and watch as your supporters take one look at your guys, shrug in indifference and walk away. It must be infuriating that your own supporters would actually expect significant results or some of that “advancing” of conservative principle that the party is supposedly so good at doing, and then have the nerve to repudiate the party when it failed to live up to its end of the bargain! What do they think this is, a representative government? So I suppose you would not view these folks kindly. But surely such a person can do better than to start yelling, “You’re a big, fat stupidhead!”
Or, as Richard Linklater's character in "Slacker" said, "Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy."
Mike Crowley over at The Plank cites a telling anecdote from David Kuo's book. Mike sets it up by saying that it has to do with the White House reaction to a 2002 Esquire article by John DiIulio, who had helped set up the president's compassionate conservative office, but who left early and went public saying that it was essentially smoke and mirrors. Here's what Kuo says happened next:
A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. "Well," he yelled through the stairwell, "is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know."
An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent "compassion meeting." In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda....
The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social services programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, "still in process of being accounted for."
Comments Crowley: "Remember, Bush's entire 2000 campaign was organized around the "compassionate conservative" theme. Yet midway through his first term, Bush had no idea whether he was living up to his label--and his aides wouldn't even tell him the truth was quite the opposite."
When I was a Catholic, I never had much interest in the Tridentine Mass, though I have lots of friends who are devotees of it, and I think it's awful that the Tridentine mass -- sometimes called the "Latin Mass," though I've heard the Novus Ordo celebrated reverently and in Latin, and it is a thing of otherworldly beauty -- is so hard to find in the US. Happily, Pope Benedict appears to be moving to make it universally available, which would be a real mercy to American Catholics. In today's Wall Street Journal, a Catholic couple writes about their travails in trying to arrange for a Tridentine nuptial mass in the Archdiocese of New York. They finally got what they were looking for, thanks to Father George Rutler, pastor of the Church of Our Savior and the most cosmopolitan reactionary (I mean that entirely as a compliment) you could hope to meet.
What this world needs is more cosmopolitan reactionaries. I'm serious!
Well, the Republicans haven't even had their tuchus handed to them yet, and already the recriminations have started. From the NYT front page today:
Tax-cutters are calling evangelicals bullies. Christian conservatives say Republicans in Congress have let them down. Hawks say President Bush is bungling the war in Iraq. And many conservatives blame Representative Mark Foley’s sexual messages to teenage pages.
With polls showing Republican control of Congress in jeopardy, conservative leaders are pointing fingers at one another in an increasingly testy circle of blame for potential Republican losses this fall.
...Whether the election will bear out their pessimism remains to be seen, and the factors that contribute to an electoral defeat are often complex and even contradictory. But the post-mortem recriminations can influence politics and policy for years after the fact. After 1992, Republicans shunned tax increases. After 1994, Democrats avoided gun control and health care reform. And 2004 led some Democrats to start quoting Scripture and rethinking abortion rights, while others opened an intraparty debate about the national security that is not yet resolved.
In the case of the Republican Party this year, the skirmish among conservatives over what is going wrong has begun unusually early and turned unusually personal.
But almost regardless of the outcome on Nov. 7, many conservatives express frustration that the party has lost its ideological focus. And after six years of nearly continuous control over the White House and Congress, conservatives are having a hard time finding anyone but one another to blame.
Well. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the fact that the Republican Congress and the Republican president have spent money and run up the deficit at a level not seen since LBJ's Great Society. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the fact that this administration, with the backing of the GOP Congress, has gotten America mired in another Vietnam. I fail to see what the Evangelicals in particular have to do with the rank cronyism throughout this Administration, which helped bring us such triumphs as the Hurricane Katrina response. I say "in particular" because the Evangelicals, by and large, didn't object to any of these things, all of which are key to the coming Republican collapse. (An exception: as conservative political scientist James Kurth has written in an essay I can't link to, but once blogged about, there is a direct philosophical link between crusading Wilsonianism in US foreign policy and American Protestantism; still, I don't see that the Evangelicals were particularly to blame for the Iraq debacle, any more than Jewish neoconservatives were; the Iraq fiasco has many fathers in the GOP camp).
But see, it'll be easy after the November slaughter to blame the Evangelicals, because the media despises them. In fact, Kurth predicted as much in that American Interest essay. Evangelicals and other Christian conservatives had better be prepared for a time in the wilderness. The people who really count in the GOP -- the financial backers, who are not by and large Christian conservatives -- will have it out for them, and the Democrats will not be intellectually or ideologically positioned to appeal to them.
Anyway, in the Times piece, Dick Armey is quoted saying: “The Republicans are talking about things like gay marriage and so forth, and the Democrats are talking about the things people care about, like how do I pay my bills?” I think that's a false distinction. People do care about keeping traditional marriage. But if the Republicans think they can run only on those sorts of
issues, which have worked in the past, they're wrong.
Me, I strongly care about the gay marriage issue, but it could not be clearer by the record of this last Congress and Mr. Bush that the Republicans don't give a rat's ass about it, except as something to gin up the holy rollers to vote for them. So I'm not prepared to be used by the Rovians again. Also, I care a very great deal about what's going on in Iraq, in part because I have a close family member in the military. I care a lot about the financial precariousness the president and Congress have left us in. These are all serious moral issues. Abortion and "culture of life" issues are the only thing in my mind that the GOP has going for it, but even then I don't know to what extent they really believe in the sanctity of life, and to what extent they're just using it like they use gay marriage.
I can't bring myself to vote Democratic, because I have no faith in the Democrats. But somebody's got to hold the Republicans accountable for their failures. I doubt very much I'm going to vote for them at the national level, because they have not earned my vote.
Though I'm trying to move on past my monster post on leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy, Bnet has posted a link to it on the front page today, and my friend Mark Shea has kindly written a companion piece in response. In it, Mark says some things that I really must respond to, because I don't want to leave the impression that I agree with his interpretation of my words. To wit:
Mark:
For instance, I don't believe that the personal charisma—or lack thereof--of a bishop is sufficient reason to leave the Catholic Church, just as I don't believe the sins of bishops and priests somehow de-legitimate the nature of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church any more than Judas' or Peter's did.
I can't figure out why some folks get the idea that I changed my church because Archbishop Dmitri is a lovely man. When I wrote about him presiding over the feast in his humble cottage like a "grandfatherly Gandalf," I was trying to paint a picture of a wise old man who acted not as a CEO but as the head of a family. The material modesty in which he lives is plain, and it told me something about his character. Likewise, he is quite close to his flock, and relates to them in a way that I'd never seen before. I presume this has more to do with him than with Orthodoxy itself, but I could be wrong. The point is, what I saw in him, and in the congregation, was a family -- and that's what Julie and I were so hungry for. I had reached the limit of where abstract reasoning could take me, and I was completely burned out. What I needed was a family. And God showed me one.
Mark:
Like Rod, I converted to the Catholic Church as an adult. Like Rod, I was grieved and appalled by the sex scandals. Yet despite the despicable acts of Catholic priests and their episcopal defenders that have been uncovered in recent years, I don't buy the proposition that my children are in continual mortal danger from predator-priests and that the only way to protect them is to leave the church. The chances of any individual child's encountering an abusive minister in the Catholic Church are about the same in any Christian communion: which is to say remote. The notion that going to Mass or Sunday school is an act analogous to throwing your child into a pit of ravening wolves or sending him on a forced march through a spiritual desert is much closer to hysteria than to reality. Indeed, we Sheas have found the Church to be a rich fountain of living water--and in the highly troubled and frequently heterodox Archdiocese of Seattle no less!
I'm sorry, but this is very far from what I actually said. I have never believed that going to Sunday mass with my children was risking their abuse, though certainly the close encounter with the priest who had been put quietly into active service in the conservative parish (against diocesan rules, and without telling the bishop) was a breaking point for us. No, leaving the Catholic Church for the sake of my children was primarily about the spiritual protection of my children. You get to a point in which you realize having to tell your kids on the way home from mass that what Father (or Deacon) said in the pulpit is not actually true (that is, not what the Church teaches) is undermining their faith. More importantly, you come to understand, perhaps, that they are not actually being taught much in the parish other than that being a Christian is little more than a matter of going through the rituals and feeling good about yourself. And specific to my own situation, my constant anger over not only the sex-abuse scandal, but other things going on in the Church forced me to confront the fact that I was becoming a poor teacher-catechist for my children, or rather, that my anger and despair and near-complete mistrust of the Church that we actually lived with (as distinct from the
Church that lives in books), was teaching my kids by example that the Christian life is primarily a source of anxiety and anger. For that, some fault lies with me, and I accept that. But I still had Christian children to raise, and after fighting this war inside myself for three years or so, I bailed. Anyway, to say -- as some Catholics have, and as Mark does here -- that I left because I thought Father Freakydeak was going to lie in wait in the confessional for my boys creates a straw man.
Mark:
Likewise, I never thought Rod was realistic to demand, as he did in a op-ed essay a few years ago for the Wall Street Journal, that the pope remove and replace a huge portion of the American episcopacy "with the stroke of a pen," or to declare himself "let down" when the late John Paul II did not comply. If Rod had really listened to the author of Ut Unum Sint, John Paul's encyclical on the role of the papacy in the life of the church, he would have realized he was talking about a pope who had a more "Eastern" conception of his office than any pope in a thousand years: one who took seriously the notion that bishops are not just disposable middle management for the Vatican. In this, Orthodoxy fully concurs, which is why I don't see the sense of demanding an impossibility from the Holy Father and then joining an Orthodox communion that would have condemned the Holy Father for acting "unilaterally" if he had met Dreher's demands.
This is not a bad point, certainly, but the fact is, the Pope does have the power to do those things, and the fact that he couldn't even bring himself to speak about this horrible scandal, except obliquely ("the mystery of iniquity"), was to me, debilitating. If he had simply chastised them severely and publicly, that would have worked wonders, at least to my own morale. John Paul sure got rid of the French bishop Jacques Gaillot early in his papacy for teaching heresy, and it's a good thing the Pope did so, too. But look, if he can can a bishop for teaching error, why can't he can a bishop for allowing children to be raped? You know? [And yes, I don't expect the Orthodox bishops and priests to have clean hands either, but it is my hope that going into life as an Orthodox with a sadly more realistic idea of what I can expect from hierarchs will keep me from setting myself up for a great fall, as happened to me in Catholicism.]
Mark:
Finally, when Rod wonders if his revised view of the papacy—that the pope can never speak infallibly—is just an ex post facto justification for a choice made mostly on emotional grounds, I have to say, "Yeah." Because I don't buy Rod's notion that something about Catholic teaching has suddenly been shown to be false. The fact is, the overwhelming bulk of Rod's testimony regarding his Catholic-to-Orthodox conversion is not about his questions regarding the truth or falsity of Catholic teaching, but about ringing changes on how the sins and "self-satisfied" average-ness of Catholics drove him and his family to distraction and how the various comforts and beauties of Orthodoxy made them feel.
Two points here: 1) I agree that my choice was primarily emotional, and that my intellectual reasons were flimsy (but let me say that I strongly believe there can be strong intellectual grounds for leaving RCism for Orthodoxy, though they did not apply to me in my particular case). I found in the filioque controversy, and later in papal infallibility, reason to doubt seriously what I had once believed as a Catholic. I didn't go into that in my long post because these reasons ultimately weren't determinative. Regarding emotion, I don't apologize for that. We are not Vulcans, but human beings, and living in a constant state of anger, anxiety, distrust and crushing spiritual depression had finally taken its toll on me. And the formulas and syllogisms no longer served to dispel them.
I do get really tired, though, of this canard that I'm some sort of snob who hates the "av
erageness" of Catholics, so had to rush to Orthodoxy. What I despaired of was the sense of alienation that I often had at mass, that we were all here because we had nowhere else to go. I despaired not because I was so good, but precisely because I know how bad I am. I needed people who shared my beliefs to help me find my way to being a better man. I needed spiritual headship and counsel. I needed a reverent, beautiful liturgy to lift me out of the everyday and put me in closer touch with God. Suddenly I find myself being accused of snobbery because I could no longer carry on in a parish where you couldn't tell who actually believed in Catholicism, and it didn't seem to matter to the clergy whether or not anybody believed, or learned, just as long as the process kept moving along.
I perfectly well know that the family I've now become a part of is, like any family, flawed and broken. I don't expect perfection, and I won't be disappointed not to find it. What I have found is a beautiful and holy liturgy, serious spiritual guidance and teaching, and a family. I didn't have that before. I do now. And it makes a big difference. Thanks be to God. If you find that in Catholicism, God has blessed you too.
They cannot build prison walls high enough, or pits deep enough, for people like this. Photographing children in sex bondage? This is Hell. Lock these devils up. Throw away the key. Literally.
TMatt riffs on the sense going around the Religious Right political leadership that a cabal of gay Republicans has helped torpedo issues important to Evangelicals and other religious conservatives who are key to the GOP base. I concede that there is possibly -- possibly -- something to this, because I've interviewed far too many Catholic priests and others who have explained to me how this sort of thing works in the institutional Catholic Church, in part because so few Catholic laymen suspect it. But I think in the case of the GOP's situation, this is far more likely to be a matter of desperate Evangelical leaders looking for a scapegoat, rather than to face the demoralizing and even humiliating possibility that GOP politicos have been playing them for fools. (Kind of like the cheated-on wife blaming her husband's secretary for facilitating his assignations with his mistress, instead of blaming the husband.)Because you know, if the Republicans are using religious conservatives, it's not like the Evangelicals have anywhere else to go. Like many of you, no doubt, I'm fed up with the Republicans for a lot of reasons, but the Democrats are culturally and politically hostile to people like me. Staying home this election day -- or at least voting only in state and local races -- is sounding better and better to me.
TMatt is onto something here:
For a moment, try to think of this as an issue broader than homosexuality. Part of what is going on is that it is probably hard, or at least harder, for camp in the GOP that has an agenda focusing on faith and family to thrive in a city that, statistically, is dominated by single adults and workaholics.
As that old saying goes: What is a neo-conservative? It’s a Democrat with a daughter. Study any poll and you will see that people who are married and have children tend to be more socially conservative (and more active in organized religion) than people who are single or divorced, with few or no children.
Meanwhile, as hard as it is for journalists to admit this, the Republicans are the people who have the most division in their elite ranks on the religious and moral issues. When it comes to abortion, gay rights and other similar issues, the GOP is the yin-yang party, while elite Democrats are marching to the same drummer, while chanting the same social-issues creed.
Amy Sullivan has a smart piece on The New Republic Online dumping on fellow liberals for not knowing what to do with the revelations in David Kuo's "Tempting Faith" -- namely, that the Bush White House and the GOP elite have been playing Evangelicals and other religious conservatives for chumps, while only pretending to share their values. Why, asks Amy, have liberals stayed away from Kuo's book? Her answer:
The problem is that Kuo's book creates cognitive dissonance for liberals. Conspiracy theories about theocracy have haunted liberals for the last few years, and, if you believe that religious conservatives lead Bush around by the nose, evidence to the contrary is impossible to absorb. Everyone on the left "knows" that the faith-based initiative is a slush-fund, a jackpot for religious conservatives. If it turns out instead to be a political sham that produced only 1 percent of the new funds it promised for faith-based organizations, liberals need rethink their theocracy-phobia.
One of the most spiritually wise and practically helpful books on my shelf is "The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983." The late author, a well-known Orthodox priest and theologian (the website kept in his memory is here, was praised by his friend Father Richard John Neuhaus, in this review of the "Journals," as "a great spirit; he lived robustly; he had a confident but not corrosive disdain for the banalities of fashionable thought. He was older and more cosmopolitan than I. He was fun to be with, and one left every meeting with the sense that life could be more, and the resolve to let it be so."
That sense of the fullness of life, and of the Christian life, is everywhere present in his diaries. As someone who has struggled a lot with trying to reconcile my religious and moral ideals with the unavoidable human imperfections in the visible church, I appreciate how Father Schmemann was profoundly a man of the Church, but also one who was acutely aware of its problems, and of the problems of all organized, institutional religion. (Father Schmemann was so overwhelmed by the reality of God that he resisted as reductionist those who tried to capture Him systematically.) I strongly encourage you to read the lengthy review/reflection of Father Neuhaus's, because it contains a wide variety of Fr. Schmemann's quotes, and will give you a good idea of the man and his concerns. I am quite fond of these two diary entries, from 1973, which are related:
March 9, 1973
Tragic news about Father N.'s breakdown. So the symptoms I had noticed three weeks ago were real. I am afraid that the reason is clear: "He buried himself in his activity." And that is just what one should not do. One becomes unable to put things in perspective, to detach oneself, to push away all the fuss and the petty details that encumber our life and can devour our hearts. Actually, the cause is the same arrogance that seeks to convince me that all depends on me all relates to me. Then the "I" is filling all reality, and the downfall begins. The essential error of the modern man is to identify life with activism, with thought, etc., hence an almost complete inability simply to "live," i.e., to feel, to appreciate, to live life as a continuous gift. To walk to the trains station in a light that feels like spring, in the rain, to be able to see, to sense, to be conscious of a morning ray of sun on the wall -- all of these are the reality of life. They are not the conditions for activism or for thought, they are not just an indifferent background, they are the reason one acts and thinks. Only in that reality of life does God reveal Himself, and not in acts and thoughts. That is why Julien Green is right when he says: "all is elsewhere" -- "the only truth lies in the swaying of bare branches in the sky." The same is true of communication. One does not communicate through talks and debates. The deeper and more joyful the communication, the less it depends on words. On the contrary, one is almost afraid of words because they might destroy the communion, cut off the joy.
I felt that most acutely on that New Year's eve, when I sat in Paris, in Adamovich's mansard. I had always heard that he preferred to talk about unimportant little events. True. But not because there was nothign to talk about, but because communicaton was so clearly what was happening so vividly between us. Hence my dislike for "profound" and especially spiritual conversations. Did Christ converse with his twelve followers while walking along the roads of Galilee? Did he resolve their problems and difficulties? Christianity is the continuation of that communication, its reality, its joy and effectiveness. "It is good to be here."
Outside, a beautiful springlike
day! It is almost hot. I spent the whole day at home at my desk. Happiness.
And:
December 17, 1973 Home
I love my home, and to leave home and be away overnight is always like dying -- returning seems so very far away! I am always full of joy when I think about home. All homes, with lit windows behind which people live, give me infinite pleasure. I would love to enter each of them, to feel its uniqueness, the quality of its warmth. Each time I see a man or a woman walking with shopping bags, that is, going home, I think about them: they are going home, to real life, and I feel good, and they become somehow close and dear. I am always intrigued: What do people do when they do not "do" anything, when they just live? That is when their life becomes important, when their fate is determined. Simple bourgeois happiness is often despised by activists of all sorts who quiet often do not realize the depth of life itself; who think that life is an accumulation of activities. God gives us His Life, not ideas, doctrines, rules. At home, when all is done, life itself begins. Christ was homeless not because He despised simple happiness -- He did have a childhood, family, home -- but because He was at home everywhere in the world, which His Father created as the "home" of man. "Peace be with this house." We have our home and God's home, the Church, and the deepest experience of the Church is that of a home. Always the same and, above anything else, life itself -- the Liturgy, evening, morning, a feast -- and not an activity.
As regular readers know, cooking is one of my favorite things to do, because for me, cooking is one of the best ways I know how to express love. Maybe because I myself take such comfort and pleasure in good food, I like to express love through making it myself. I spent this entire morning making a fairly complicated chicken pot pie for Julie, because this particular pie is one of her favorite things to eat, and as tired and uncomfortable as she is now, recovering from surgery, she deserves to have comfort food. I had so much fun making that pie, knowing how much she'd appreciate it, and knowing how good it would taste (he said, immodestly). One of my earliest memories is of how my grandmother's tiny kitchen smelled on Thursdays, when she'd prepare baked chicken, sweet potatoes, blackeyed peas and biscuits for us (she kept my sister and me in her little cottage while our parents worked). Mom and Dad would come to Nana's for lunch with all of us, and there we'd be, filling the kitchen, a family, eating and being with each other. Nothing says "home" and "love" and "providence" to me like a warm kitchen filled with fragrances of meats and pies and good things on the stove. For me, to make a good meal, and to make a welcoming home for my family and our guests, is an act of prayer, of worship, of thanksgiving to God, from whom all blessings flow. Maybe you can see why I like Father Schmemann's writings so much...
This is one reason why it's nice to have a baby in a Baptist hospital in Texas. As I was driving out of the Baylor Hospital parking lot the other day, heading home for a shower while Julie and Baby Nora were still in the hospital, the little old lady cashier in the parking-lot booth reached out to take my ticket and my money. She spotted the hospital band on my left wrist.
"Y'all just had a baby?" she asked.
"Yes ma'am, a little girl."
"Whoo, praise God!" she said. "You get on out of here, baby. Don't be hidin' your light under a bushel. Get on down the road and spread that good news!"
She opened the gate and I drove on home. I love Texas.
Somebody had to say it, and bless their hearts, Jeremy Lott and Patrick Hynes have. They want to know how come religious conservatives get bashed constantly for their faith-inspired political activism, but politically active religious liberals are the darlings of the news media (even as they are only a tiny percentage of the population). I've found when I get involved in conversations with people who have worked themselves up into a Voltairean lather about the imminent rule of Shiite Baptists, all I have to do is bring up the fact that abolitionism and the civil rights movement were socio-political movements that were profoundly and explicitly religious. They don't know what to do with that. The truth is, they don't mind religious involvement in politics at all, just as long as the goals being pursued are ones with which they agree.
That 5,600-word magnum opus I wrote about why I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy has drawn an enormous amount of attention. I wrote it in one sitting and posted it without re-reading it. There are lots of things I would do differently (such as talking about the filioque controversy, and how it affected my way of thinking about the schism), and I hope later in the week to find the time to go over at least some of these things. But to tell you the truth, I'm so busy now trying to manage the household with the new baby (and a two-year-old who is NOT HAPPY about the new domestic situation) that I can't work up the mental wherewithal to dive in.
So I think I'll tell a story instead. Make of this what you will.
A little over two years ago, when I was as low as I've ever been about my faith, at a time when I was still going to mass but had all but ceased praying entirely, I felt spiritually crushed by despair. My prayer, such as it was, was simply this: God, please help.
One night I had a dream. In the dream, Julie and I were walking away from a country house (Weyanoke, in fact, from "Crunchy Cons" -- the house I most love in the world) near my hometown, down a gravel driveway, when we were about to pass through the gates. Something caught my eye. There was a bare thorn bush, and on the thorn bush a white mass. It looked like a mound of cobwebs. I stopped to pull the cobwebs off, and drew back in horror. The webs covered my chotki, which is a knotted prayer rope used by Eastern Christians (both Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic) to pray the Jesus Prayer (here, from a Byzantine Catholic parish website, is a good explanation of the Jesus Prayer and its role in Eastern Christian spirituality). A few years earlier (in real life), an Orthodox friend had given me a chotki that had been knotted by an Orthodox monk he knew. I was a devotee of the Rosary, but thanked my friend for the chotki all the same. I never prayed it, though.
Anyway, in the dream, I observed that a spider had unknotted each of the hundred or so extremely tight knots on my chotki. The entire strand was held together by a single thread. I was so shocked by this that I awoke with a start, as if out of a nightmare. I got out of bed and began searching the house for my chotki. I found it in my desk. It was a Saturday morning, and I had to go into the office to do some work. I wrapped the chotki around my wrist, as my Orthodox friend had taught me to do, and made the decision that I was going to visit that Orthodox cathedral over on Wycliff after I finished my work. I was certain, intuitively, that the unraveled chotki was a symbol of my spiritual life, how it had come undone. It was unusual to me that I would have dreamed of the chotki and not my rosary, which was also a hand-knotted one, and which I'd prayed faithfully for years -- but had long ago put down, foolishly, in discouragement. I hoped that if I went by the Orthodox cathedral and said a prayer, I might learn something.
That afternoon, I found my way to the cathedral. Never having been there, I hoped that it might be open for prayer. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed only a single car there. A young man was about to get into it. I opened the door and called to him, asking him if I could go in to pray. As I got out, he came around the back of his car to greet me. When we extended our hands, we both laughed: we were wearing the exact same chotki on our right wrists, knotted the same way (I have never since seen that). He excused himself to go ask the archbishop to open the church so I could say my prayer.
When he came back, he let me in and excused himself so I could pray alone. I kneeled before the iconostasis seen at the bottom of this page (I didn't know that I should have stood), and told God that I was lost, that I was
broken, that I couldn't trust the Church anymore and I hated this. I told him I didn't know what I was going to do or how to be the spiritual head of my family. That I knew He was there, but I was just about wrecked from the weight of this spiritual depression and anger. I prayed for help.
The heavens didn't open up. An angel didn't appear to me. Nothing happened. I looked around for the young man, and found him standing before an icon of the Virgin and Child, intensely praying. I walked over to him and stood behind him for a good two minutes. He never moved. He looked very ... dense. I prayed silently, God, I used to pray like that. Help me pray that way again.
When he finished, I asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee to thank him for opening the church for me. "Sure," he said, "but why don't you let me teach you how to pray that chotki first."
He took me to a bench in the back of the church and taught me the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner"). He taught me how to clear one's mind before starting the prayer on the chotki, and how to breathe when praying it. I asked him where he'd learned to do that. He said his spiritual father taught it to him, but it was in the Philokalia, the famed collection of writings on prayer and spirituality by Eastern Christian monks and ascetics.
"That's great," I said, thanking him again. I stood up to leave.
"No," he said. "Try it yourself."
So I sat there and prepared myself, and began to pray the chotki as he had instructed. Suddenly I felt filled with fresh air, sunlight, and a sense of being able to breathe again. It was almost narcotic. I had to force myself to stop.
"That's incredible," I told him.
"You see?" he said.
We went to a nearby diner for coffee. It turned out that my new friend was a soldier at Fort Hood, three hours away. He had driven up to Dallas just for Vespers at the cathedral. What's more, he was a Catholic who was taking instruction in Orthodoxy. He had been fighting in Afghanistan, and had lots of dismaying things to say about the U.S. mission in Iraq, the sorts of things that are commonly heard now, but weren't so much back then. He told me how he'd been raised a nominal Catholic, but had discovered Orthodoxy fairly recently, and was looking forward to being received. He also told me a chilling story about an encounter with the occult while based in Europe. A very serious young man, this soldier was.
After I dropped him off back at the cathedral, I drove to a nearby Borders hoping to buy a copy of the Philokalia. They didn't have any on hand, but they did have a book called "The Mountain of Silence," by Kyriacos Markides. Markides is an American sociologist who is also Orthodox, and whose book is basically an extended interview with "Father Maximos," the pseudonym of an Athonite monk (now a bishop), who gives practical teaching about Orthodox conceptions of prayer, sin, repentance, spiritual warfare, and suchlike. It's extremely readable. I bought the book, and devoured it in a day or two.
More importantly, I began to pray my chotki. It was hard at first, but I persevered. Gradually it became easier, and I noticed that I began to recover my spiritual strength. An extraordinary thing happened one day, a mystical occurrence that I don't feel prepared to talk about, but which removed a source of spiritual despair for me. Mind you, all this was happening months before I even thought about attending an Orthodox service. Maybe it's no surprise that I ended up where I did. Recently, though, a Catholic friend brought all of this back to mind when he sent me this link from Spirit Daily. Here's the interesting part. The author is talking about evil spirits, which from Scripture,
my own personal experience and experience with priests who have worked in the field of exorcism, I do very much believe in:
Spirits can attach to us from what we do, what we view, where we work, what we read, whom we acquaint ourselves with, and our family lines. A growing number of priests minister in the way of deliverance from spirits that afflict families. ...They can form a dark prism through which we see in a distorted fashion.
...For the main part, we pick them up through life -- unless we cleanse ourselves on a regular basis through Confession, the Eucharist, fasting, and prayers of deliverance. We can even be harmed by the evil of others. Wrote one woman who works with victims of abuse, those who have suffered such abuse appear to the spiritual eye as if they are wrapped in a cobweb, like a cocoon. This spirit can attract even more abuse (which may be why some suffer baffling recurrences of various evils).
There are dark residues, which can attract other abusers or transgressions. When we cast them away, we feel whole and cleansed. Suddenly, we see more clearly.
"In the spiritual world, the symbol of sexual abuse is a spider," says this woman, who claims to have experienced apparitions of Mary. "A person who has been abused has a cobweb covering them."
We place this for your own judgment. To get rid of such, she notes, requires that we forgive.
While I certainly cannot vouch for this insight -- it might be valid, it might be nonsense, or maybe a bit of both -- I can tell you that it startled me to read it in light of that catalytic dream, given that it was anger and despair over the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church that put me into such a personal crisis of faith that didn't begin to lift until I had that dream. And you don't need a supernatural explanation to account for what an inability to detach myself in some healthy way from that experience, through forgiveness, can do to one's faith and spiritual outlook.
In any case, the Jesus Prayer is a marvelous thing, something I would recommend to Christians of any church background.
The other day I blogged that I didn't see where Europeans had much of a leg to stand on, at least philosophically, when it comes to banning the hijab, the burka and other examples of pious Muslim clothing. I have no special love for the hijab, of course, but a government that can do that can also ban Christians from wearing a cross, Jews from wearing a kippah, and so on. Melanie Phillips, however, writes from Britain that there is much more at stake in this latest controversy. Excerpt:
Such Islamic aggression is gaining ground because of the collapse of British majority values. In remarks in his controversial interviews that have been largely ignored, the head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, observed that Britain’s Christian anchor had been pulled up, leaving the country’s ‘moral compass spinning’. As a result, its values were being threatened by a ‘considerable body of opinion that would like to challenge the nature of this society’.
On this issue, the General was absolutely right. Christianity is being written out of the national script. Local councils have abolished Christmas as offensive. Christian voluntary groups are denied funding on the grounds that they are not committed to ‘diversity’. And despite Ruth Kelly’s recent strictures, the Church of England is dismayed that her Commission for Cohesion and Integration contains — astoundingly — no Christian representative.
Within the Church itself, there are faint stirrings of a challenge to its hitherto supine surrender to cultural collapse. An unpublished paper written by the interfaith adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury says the Church has been sidelined by ‘preferential’ treatment afforded to the Muslim community, including using public funds to fly Muslim scholars to Britain, shelving legislation on forced marriage and encouraging national financial arrangements to comply with Islamic requirements.
The most grotesque example of all, however, is surely the proposal to build the largest mosque in Europe on the site of the Olympic village in east London. The most prominent landmark on the Olympic site, it is intended to symbolise Islamic power in Britain. Worse still, it is being funded by the Tablighi Jamaat, said by French intelligence and the FBI to be the most significant recruiters for Al Qaeda in Europe.
And to cap it all, within a mile of the site, the largest church in Europe — the Kingsway International Christian Centre — has been compulsorily purchased and is about to come down.
What greater symbol can there be of the retreat of Christianity and its replacement by militant Islam? This is why the argument over the place of the veil and the cross in public life is so significant. This is not about prejudice or discrimination. It is about cultural survival.
Khalid al-Maaly calls b.s. on Arab intellectuals who say one thing when speaking to the West, and another when talking to Arabs, and who have a rank double standard when it comes to the rights of human beings oppressed and tortured by Arab governments and movements.
GOP Chairman Ken Mehlman, as a top White House staffer, allegedly saw to it that a State Department official who stood in Jack Abramoff's way lost his job. Mehlman denies it. I do not believe him. A man with a career and a livelihood, ruined because he got in the way of a corrupt lobbyist and a powerful Republican. Makes you proud to be a Republican, doesn't it? I don't recall having voted for this.
I'd like to draw your attention to the new blog of my Beliefnet colleague David Kuo. I don't know David, but I did see the "60 Minutes" segment based on his new book, "Tempting Faith," in which he talks about the debilitating effect on the integrity of Christianity put to the service of Republican politics. I haven't yet read the book, but based on the "60 Minutes" report and what I've read about "Tempting Faith," it doesn't sound like David is any less conservative than he ever was. I suspect he'll be denounced as a "liberal" by the Rumanian Miners Brigade of the GOP (my term for the thoughtless partisans who can be counted on to rush in with shovels swinging to bash anyone who questions the status quo; Ceaucescu used to call in the Rumanian miners to slap around students and other dissidents who objected to his rule). It is possible, I suppose, that David has drifted to the left; like I said, I haven't read the book. But my sense is that he realized that the Biblical teaching "ye cannot serve God and Mammon" suddenly struck him in a particular way, hence this book. We'll see.
Reading about David's book brought to mind a conversation I had not long ago with a politically and religiously conservative friend, a devout Christian. We were talking about the Foley scandal, and he said that that was nothing. When he worked on the Hill, things like that were going on constantly, and it finally occurred to him that it was hard to find members of Congress who aren't seriously morally compromised. This hit him particularly hard when he'd see Republicans behaving that way, because he is a Republican, and he really did believe that our party was supposed to be better than that. Eventually he left politics, sick of having to work in that world.
(Similarly, a priest friend who has extensive experience with the Roman Curia told me that one of the quickest ways to lose your faith is to work in the Vatican. Power corrupts, and absolute power, yadda yadda...)
I confess that all this leaves me puzzled about what to think regarding the responsibilities of people of faith to involve themselves in the political process. I don't think we have the option of quietism, not with millions killed by abortion, with eugenics on the rise, with the present and future wars, and so forth. But the way so many churches have become so heavily politicized is deeply discouraging. It's a serious problem when we allow Caesar to get mixed up unduly with Christ. Is it possible to lay down with dogs without getting fleas?
Almost 40. I know this because I can chart my personal decline into my dotage by the difficulty I've had in dealing with the advent of newborns in my family. When Matthew was born, I was 32, and handled all the crazy late-night vigils helping Julie with the baby without much difficulty. Lucas came when I was 37, and it was rather more difficult to go through the same drill. Well, I'll be 40 in February, and though Nora is the most mellow of all my children (so far), I am a mess trying to manage things (we're still in the hospital; Julie had a C-section, so there's more recovery to be done). When I sleep, it's this weird druggy sleep, like I was slipped an Ambien the size of a Baby Ruth bar, coated in a chocolate-flavored horse tranquilizer, around a nougaty black-tar heroin center. I'll be in that sleepchair in the room, and I'll hear my name being called at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and I might think that I'm dead, and it's the Lord calling me to my resurrection on the Last Day ... but no, it's just Julie asking me to get her some more cranberry juice.
My word of advice to you older fathers: if you plan to have any children after age 40, don't neglect to get rich enough to afford help first. Heh.
It will come as no surprise, I hope, that I'm madly in love with this baby girl. With both my girls, actually. I have been blessed beyond all telling. I was holding sleeping Nora in my arms this afternoon, bobbing around the hospital room with my iPod on, watching the rain out the window, listening to Diana Krall's "Live in Paris" album, and thinking how Julie liked the name "Nora Lucia" in part because it could be the name of a stately Jane Austen-like lady, and I liked it because it could be the name of a jazz chanteuse. And I just dig this kid! Turns out our friends John and Ayala Podhoretz had a baby girl, Shiri, on the same day Nora was born. Congratulations to them.
By the way, Julie's passing the hours watching "Grey's Anatomy" on DVDs jammed into my laptop -- I've never seen the show, but now that plinkle-plink theme song will always and forever be stuck in my head as having to do with my daughter's birth. I finished Will Clarke's new novel, which is set at LSU, on the first night, and am now reading a marvelous manuscript for "Small Is Still Beautiful," an upcoming book by Joseph Pearce, about E.F. Schumacher's relevance to our time. But on a trip home today, I picked up my well-worn copy of the Fifth Gospel, and while Julie sleeps, will read selected passages to Nora, to make sure she is properly formatted with theology and geometry. I'm just sayin'.
I'm going to stop typing now, because I'm half-delirious from lack of sleep, and half from being goopily, embarrassingly in love with my wife and kids. Time to go back to the hospital.
I want to thank all of you Catholics, especially the priests, who have written me privately or publicly expressed your good wishes for me and my family in the path our journey towards Christ has taken us. You haven't approved of what we've done, nor do I expect you to, but you have been extraordinarily gracious and charitable, and indeed Christ-like, with me. And it means a very great deal. I especially want to thank Father Richard John Neuhaus for his words on the matter at hand. Father Neuhaus and I have had disagreements, private and public, since the sex-abuse scandal broke over the American Church, which makes his generous sentiments towards me at this time all the more meaningful to Julie and me.
Don't know what happened, but most of last week's posts have been missing from this blog since Friday. I've been at the hospital with Julie and Nora, so I've been unable to attend to this, and I don't know what's happened. But I just reposted them all, and hope you readers weren't unduly affected.
About 13 years ago, I was sitting on the front stoop of my house on Capitol Hill in Washington, talking with my neighbor about how much I hoped to get married someday, but how it didn't seem to be working out. She worked on the Hill for a pro-life lobby, and said that the other young women in her office were once saying the same thing. An older Italian lady overheard them, and told them that back in the day, she longed for a husband, and began praying a 54-day cycle of rosary novenas to Our Lady, asking for a husband. She met a nice fellow at the beginning, fell madly in love, and on the 54th day, he proposed. They married, had a big family, and were happy as could be.
My neighbor said all the unmarried young women in the office had asked the Italian lady for a copy of the novena -- all of them, that is, except her.
"So what happened?" I asked.
"They all got married," she said.
"I need a copy of that novena."
She got one for me, and I prayed it faithfully. A rosary a day for 54 days straight. I didn't get married right away -- or for a long time. But the most amazing thing -- I could see serious progress in spiritual and emotional maturity in myself. It wasn't that this was any sort of magic incantation. It was the devotion to daily prayer, and trust that God would provide, through the intercession of the Blessed Mother.
How many of those 54-day novena cycles I prayed over the years I couldn't tell you. I moved down to south Florida and continued to pray them. There was a Fatima chapel in my Catholic parish, and I'd stop there every Sunday after mass and offer a prayer to Our Lady of Fatima, asking her intercession for either a wife for me, or for peace in my heart if God didn't have that in mind for me. I was terribly lonely, but I persevered in prayer.
(Fatima, for those who don't know, is a famous Marian pilgrimage site in Portugal. It's a little country village where Mary appeared to three peasant children -- Francisco, Jacinto and Lucia -- and gave them a message of repentance for mankind. She gave them "secrets" that predicted the Bolshevik Revolution, the Satanic persecution of Christians by communism, and World War II, among other things. The three children were terribly persecuted for claiming these visions, but they persevered. They claimed that Mary told them she would make one final appearance, and work a miracle so people would believe. A crowd of 70,000 gathered in the fields outside of Fatima on the appointed day, and they bore witness to an astonishing miracle that even atheists attested to. Today, there is a basilica shrine there. Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage there to thank Our Lady of Fatima for saving him from the assassin's bullet. You can read a lot more about Fatima here.
Anyway.
One day, I got an e-mail from my Baltimore friend Frederica Mathewes-Green. She was headed to Austin, Texas, to speak at a pro-life banquet and to do a signing for her (then) new book, "Facing East." I told her I loved Austin, and would love the opportunity to meet her there, take her to my favorite places to eat, and so forth. I flew from Florida to Austin, and turned up at the Logos Bookstore there in Austin to hear her speak. Before Frederica began, a friend introduced me to this undergraduate journalism student from UT, who wanted to meet a real practicing journalist. I took one look at her and stood stark still. I thought, "This might be her." I had been praying for years that I would know the one I was to marry when I met her. This was the first time I ever had that kind of feeling. Julie shook my hand, and we sat next to each other for Frederica's talk.
I have no idea what Frederica said. All I could think about was this young woman sitting next to me. I invited her to go with Frederica and me and some others to an Orthodox monastery the next day. It was our first date. That day, praying before an icon
of the Virgin, I said, "Blessed Mother, if this Julie is the one, please pray that nothing gets in the way of it happening." The next day, a Sunday, Julie and I met after church, and spent the afternoon together. In the parking lot of Waterloo Records, I kissed her. I was totally gone in love. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. I caught the plane back to Florida that night, delirious.
She felt it too. Three or four days after we met, we were already e-mailing each other, saying that this might be forever (we still have the e-mails). We had to court long-distance, but we pulled it off. Four months after we met, I flew to Austin. We went back to the monastery, and as we prayed on our knees in thanksgiving to God for having brought us together, I pulled a ring out of my pocket and asked her to marry me. She said yes.
We chose to marry in New Orleans. A month or two later, we met each other there and searched for a Catholic parish in which to marry. None we visited seemed right. Dejected, we headed by car out of town, but stopped at one last parish, just in case. It was perfect. We knew as soon as we walked in that this was going to be the place. We booked it for December (we'd decided to marry when she finished college later that year). We were set.
She and her mom in Dallas were in charge of planning the wedding. One night Julie called me at home in Fort Lauderdale, and asked me, "What do you think about going to Portugal for our honeymoon?"
"Portugal?!" I said, stunned. "Why do you say that?" Julie wasn't yet Catholic, and I had told her nothing of Fatima.
"My dad's got a business associate who has a cottage there," she said. "And Dad's boss says he'll buy our plane tickets."
I told her I thought Portugal was a great idea. And I told her that we'd have to make a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to a town in the middle of nowhere there called Fatima. And I told her why. I don't think she knew what to make of that.
When we finished our conversation, I was still reeling from the fact that we were going to Portugal on our honeymoon -- for free! This couldn't be a coincidence. I went online to learn more about the Fatima apparitions. What I learned sent me to my knees in prayer.
The day of the final apparition in Fatima, and the miracle of the sun, was October 13, 1917; the day Julie and I fell in love was October 13, 1996. As if that weren't enough, I learned that on that date in Fatima, Mary identified herself to the children as "Our Lady of the Rosary." The parish that Julie and I had chosen in New Orleans because something about it felt right was ... Our Lady of the Rosary! (I even remember mentioning to Julie at the time we picked that church that it sure was appropriate that we get married in a church named for Mary and the rosary, given all the rosaries I prayed to find her.)
I was sure, absolutely sure, that we were brought together by the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima. When we finally did marry, we made a pilgrimage to Fatima to thank God for blessing us with true love, and Mary for bringing us together.
Today Julie and I celebrate what is, in a way, our 10th anniversary -- the anniversary of the day we fell in love. And God gave us another gift today. This afternoon, at 1:16 p.m. in Dallas, Nora Lucia Dreher came into the world. Her father was sitting at her mother's side in the delivery room, holding the icon of Mary and Baby Jesus that has been with us in the delivery room as all our children have been born, and praying the rosary throughout the blessed event. In fact, Nora Lucia came into this world as her father prayed the fifth glorious mystery -- the Crowning of the Mother of God in Heaven. God gave us today another star for Mary's crown. Mother and child are doing fine, and would appreciate your prayers.
That post I put up about my conversion to Orthodoxy was not only the longest post ever, but it has attracted the most number of comments. I wrote the post in one two-hour stretch, and posted it without re-reading it. So there are some things I want to make clear that might not have been from the long, rambly opus.
1. I am not now nor do I have any intention of being an embittered ex-Catholic. Quite to the contrary, after I got out from under the burden of feeling responsible in some way for the Scandal -- that is, for fighting it -- I was able to reacquaint myself with the great things about Catholicism. I literally pray for the Pope daily, and for the Church, and can now better see the Catholic Church in her totality. My preoccupation with the Scandal, the filth and the extreme injustice the institutional Church visited upon children and families hid that from me. I freely confess, because I deeply believe, that there is great truth, beauty and holiness in the Roman Catholic Church. You won't find a Catholic-basher in me (though I will continue to be critical where warranted, in my role as an opinion journalist; it's just not personal anymore).
2. I don't deny that reason played a minor role in my conversion. It was primarily emotional and psychological -- but I do deny that that minimizes matters. As I've said, a decade ago, I argued with a friend considering Orthodoxy and Catholicism that all that mattered was doctrinal truth. He said he worried about raising Christian kids in the mess that is US Catholic parish life. I dismissed those concerns, and said he should instead concentrate on the doctrinal arguments. Well, real life -- and having kids of my own -- showed me how brittle that position was, and is. Human beings are not machines. We all have to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, between radical objectivity and radical subjectivity. I used to think that being a Christian was merely a matter of finding the most logical arguments, intellectually assenting to them and doing your best to live by them. It is far more complicated than that, and I found through the scandal my intellect humiliated. A dear friend of mine used to be Orthodox, but left in his teenage years because he desperately needed Christ, and the only experience of Orthodoxy he had was in his family's spiritually dead Greek parish. He is now a passionate Evangelical. I used to think he was fooling himself. I still couldn't take the path he chose. But I understand why he chose it, and have no interest in judging him, only helping him to be as faithful to Christ as he can be.
[More later ... I won't be posting till later today, when I hope to have some BIG NEWS for everyone!]
That's the title of a great post by Prof. Russell Arben Fox, over at his populist communitarian blog. "Freedom means shaping your own choices, not merely being able to make choices, however many options there may be out there," says Prof. Fox, agreeing with Caleb Stegall, who thinks that freedom defined narrowly as consumer freedom is false. But he doesn't share Caleb's hostility to Wal-Mart:
In a world where comparative advantage and global trade and urbanization and specialization have done their work, a world where the ability to live a wholly self-sufficient life has been rendered often incompatible with the demands of information-based economies, a world where farms are shrinking and unions are on the run and guilds are almost wholly a thing of the past, something like a Wal-Mart is probably necessary if we are not to condemn a good portion of any given population (such as those outside of metropolitan centers or who lack sufficient incomes, or both) to deprivation. So sure, you can shop at Wal-Mart (in truth, it's not like Kroger operates on manifestly different principles either). But our responsibility at the present moment--besides our obvious and primary one to doing what's best for our families and communities--is to figure out ways to limit the Wal-Marts of the world, discipline them and fit them into a new "order" wherein citizens can find themselves to be more than consumers.
This is huge, not only in terms of military strategy, but because of the challenge it represents to the British government's authority. The head of the British Army is in open rebellion against the government's Iraq policy. Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt says that the Brits have to leave Iraq because they're making the security situation worse. They are no longer wanted there, he says. And there's this astonishing warning about British society:
Sir Richard warned that the consequences will be felt at home, where failure to support Christian values is allowing a predatory Islamist vision to take hold.
He said: "When I see the Islamist threat in this country I hope it doesn’t make undue progress because there is a moral and spiritual vacuum in this country."
"Our society has always been embedded in Christian values; once you have pulled the anchor up there is a danger that our society moves with the prevailing wind."
"There is an element of the moral compass spinning. I think it is up to society to realise that is the situation we are in."
"We can’t wish the Islamist challenge to our society away and I believe that the army both in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably wherever we go next, is fighting the foreign dimension of the challenge to our accepted way of life."
"We need to face up to the Islamist threat, to those who act in the name of Islam and in a perverted way try to impose Islam by force on societies that do not wish it."
"It is said that we live in a post Christian society. I think that is a great shame. The broader Judaic-Christian tradition has underpinned British society. It underpins the British army."
Re your thoughtful words about the Amish shooting, I have to say this: I recently read about sexual abuse among the Amish. I don’t know how common it is, or whether it exists more among some Amish than others. But I was disturbed that victims are told to forgive and forget, and that the abusers stay in the community (if they confess.) Abusers are not removed (if they confess) – they are still there. And victims are told to forget. This is certainly different from the way abusers are treated in “our” world. We are told that the abused can never forget. We are told that abusers must be removed, and labeled so they do not abuse another.
I wondered what David Clohessey would say. Who is right, the Amish or SNAP? It is true that abuse by a priest is extra horrible because he claims to represent God – but abuse by a father (exp in a patriarchal group like the Amish) would seem to me to be equally devastating. Isn’t “forgive and forget” what Catholic victims were told in the past? Do local authorities ignore Amish abuse as a “community problem”, the way Catholic abuse was covered in the past?
I wonder.
That's a good point. If what the reader says is true of the Amish, then they are to my way of thinking seriously wrong. It could well be because they, being so otherworldly, have a deficient understanding of what sexual abuse is. Forgiveness, properly understood, is not the same thing as saying that the person who broke the law shouldn't be accountable for it. It is -- as a Baptist pastor who suffered through seven teenagers being shot to death at a prayer meeting in his church by a suicidal gunmen told me -- refusing to wish evil upon someone who has committed evil. If the Amish are suppressing crime in this way, I cannot conclude other than that it is very wrong. They should forgive the evildoer -- but turn him over to the police all the same.
Here's a website for Evangelicals who support the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney. Who's a Mormon. Would you vote for a Mormon for president? I honestly don't see what the problem is. I'd vote for an atheist if I thought I could trust him or her to most effectively advocate for the things that are most important to me.
Yes, says David Kuo, who used to help run the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Excerpt from the MSNBC story about his new book:
More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.
The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.
[snip] Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.
He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”
“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.
More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.
According to Kuo, “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.”
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson had this to say the other night on "Chris Matthews":
CARLSON: It goes deeper than that though. The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power. Everybody in…
MATTHEWS: How do you know that? How do you know that?
CARLSON: Because I know them. Because I grew up with them. Because I live with them. They live on my street. Because I live in Washington, and I know that everybody in our world has contempt for the evangelicals. And the evangelicals know that, and they're beginning to learn that their own leaders sort of look askance at them and don't share their values.
MATTHEWS: So this gay marriage issue and other issues related to the gay lifestyle are simply tools to get elected?
CARLSON: That's exactly right. It's pandering to the base in the most cynical way, and the base is beginning to figure it out
I apologize for this very long post, but it's time to clear something up: yes, I am now a communicant of the Orthodox Church, and have been (along with my family) for a couple of months.
I did not intend to make this public until the end of this month, to honor a personal and professional obligation that, the violation of which stood to hurt some innocent people. This is why I've taken care since the day I entered Orthodoxy not to claim I am Catholic in writings here, and not to rise to the bait of certain people in the comboxes who have demanded that I declare myself. Though I've wanted to get this out there, and not to deceive readers, I had an obligation to keep this to myself until month's end, for an important reason I can't really discuss. But now I am forced to reveal all early. Why? Because a certain malicious reader, a perfect stranger and petty little Catholic Prufrock named Jonathan Carpenter, who is unhealthily preoccupied with me nearly to the point of cyberstalking, troubled himself to write a letter to a priest at my parish asking about my ecclesial affiliation -- and when he received his answer, undertook to publicize it.
So, here we are. I apologize to readers who feel deceived or betrayed. That was not my intent; my intent was to honor a prior obligation, whose terms were soon to end anyway. I only now have to give you the long explanation two weeks early. What follows will be lengthy, but it will be all I intend to say about this matter. I know that the comboxes will be filled with discussion, much of it spiteful and vitriolic, and that there's nothing I can do about that, except refuse to join it. But here is how I ended up where I am today.
Back in 2001, when I first started writing about the child sex-abuse scandal in the Church, Father Tom Doyle, the heroic priest who ruined his own career by speaking out for victims, warned me, "If you keep going down this path, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine." I thought I understood what he meant, but I didn't. Even if I had, by then, I couldn't have stopped. What brought me in touch with Fr. Doyle was my having stumbled upon a cell of clerical molesters at a Carmelite parish in the Bronx. They had preyed on a teenage immigrant boy who was troubled, and whose father was back in Nicaragua. His mother sent him to the priests for counseling, thinking that maybe being around some men of God would do the boy some good. The priests ended up molesting him. When the boy's father arrived in the States and found out what had happened, he went to the Archdiocese of New York to tell them what happened. They offered to cut him a check if he'd sign a paper agreeing to let the Archdiocese's attorneys handle the matter. This man was merely a worker from a Third World country, newly arrived in New York, but he knew what was happening. He walked out and got himself and his son a lawyer.
And that's how it began for me. At the time, as the father of a young boy, I couldn't shake the thought What if this had happened to my family? Would we be treated this way by the Archdiocese? I began reading the literature about the scandal, most especially Jason Berry's devastating "Lead Us Not Into Temptation," a detailed account of the abuse and cover-up in a notorious situation in my native Louisiana (something I remember reading about from my childhood), that revealed the profound personal, familial and communal damage that Catholic authorities were prepared to see take place to protect themselves from the truth.
A few months later came 9/11, and shortly after that I left the New York Post and went to National Review. I hadn't been at NR but for a couple of weeks when the John Geoghan trial got underway in Boston, and thus what Catholics would come to call simply The Scandal would break. I began writing about it critically, both in the magazine and on NRO, the website. Word got back to me that Bill Bennett credited NR's cover story on the stakes in
this scandal for giving tacit permission for conservative, orthodox Catholics to discuss the matter, and to say in public about the bishops' handling of the matter what they had mostly only been saying in private, but feared to voice because they didn't want to be seen as disloyal. The flood of e-mail correspondence opened. I heard from many, many people who identified themselves as faithful orthodox Catholics, but who wrote of the pain and suffering they had undergone because either they or a close family member had been molested by a priest, and their diocese had covered it up and even attacked them when they sought justice.
There was the monk who learned that there had been a molestation ring in his order, and when his superior suspected that he was going to go to the authorities, had him committed to a mental institution. His brother helped him escape, and was trying to persuade him to go public .... but couldn't; the poor man, who had had a heart attack over the stress of all this, feared angering God for betraying his child-molesting brothers to the authorities. There was the woman who, along with other women, had to clean Vaseline off the altar in her parish in the mornings after the priest there (who is now in jail after a child molestation conviction -- I checked this out) had been doing God knows what the night before. She told me she went to the bishop with this news, and had reason to suspect he was being blackmailed by this priest. The bishop now enjoys a reputation as being one of the more conservative prelates in the American church. The woman couldn't be persuaded to go public, because she still works for the Church, and said she had children to support.
My in-box was filled with stories like these. I began to understand what Tom Doyle's warnings meant. Every day after work I'd head back home, feeling like a spiritual "walking wounded." And then there was the day I talked to Horace Patterson. His son Eric had committed suicide after 15 years of depression. Not long before Eric died by his own hand, he'd confessed that he had been molested by Father Larson, their parish priest, as an altar boy. Horace later discovered that >four other suicides of young men were traceable to Father Larson, who now sits in jail for sex crimes against children. Horace and his wife Janet were to learn later that their Kansas diocese knew that Father Larson had a thing for boys, but did nothing to stop him. On the phone with me in New York, Horace talked about having received the call at home one day that their boy Eric had blown his brains out. He talked of having to go sit on their front porch and wait for Janet to come home so he could tell her what had become of their son. He told me how watching her car pull in at the end of the long driveway, and head home, where this news awaited her, was one of the most excruciating moments of his life. As a relatively new father, this devastated me. Even this morning, as I write this, it's hard to recount the brokenness in that man's voice without getting tears in my eyes.
What if that were me? I'd ask. And I'd look at my own little boy, and carry these things in my heart.
And then there were other blows. The prominent archbishop who told me I needed to quit criticizing the Church, and that if I didn't trust the bishops to handle the matter, he didn't understand why I was still Catholic. There was the prominent priest who yelled at me on the phone one day that if Bishop X. told me there was no scandal in his diocese, that should have been good enough for me to quit my investigation. There was the lawyer for a top American archbishop who had heard I was looking into widespread allegations that he had sexually harrassed seminarians, and who phoned to see if I could be taken off the story (when I'd see this archbishop on TV later in the year proclaiming wounded innocence in the scandal -- "If only we had known this was going on in the
Church," he'd say -- I wanted to hurl). There was the Catholic therapist I saw briefly for help in dealing with my anger over the Scandal and over 9/11, who spent an entire session literally yelling at me about how I was going to go to hell for questioning the Pope's handling of the scandal.
And I have only set down here the smallest bit of what I learned.
All this takes a toll. And yet, I kept going back to my catechism, and to the truth that none of this undermines the truth claims of the Catholic Church. The Eucharist is still the Eucharist, no matter how corrupt the clerics may be. That was a lifeline for me -- that, and the comfort and friendship of dear Catholic friends, especially good and decent priests, who, aside from actual victims and their families, were probably suffering more from this scandal than anybody else.
As my dearest friend, Fr. Joe Wilson, has said many times, the Scandal does not exist in isolation. It is only a part of a many-headed beast. The sex-abuse scandal can't be easily separated from the wider crisis in the American Catholic Church, involving the corruption of the liturgy, of catechesis, and so forth. I've come to understand how important this point is, because if most other things had been more or less solid, I think I could have weathered the storm. But I found it impossible to find solid ground. As most readers know, we moved to Dallas in 2003, and had a difficult time establishing ourselves in a parish. Dallas has had more than its share of problems with abusive clerics, as most people know. What I didn't understand, nor anticipate, was how difficult it would be to find an orthodox parish here. We have lots of faithful Catholic friends here, and I don't think it's unfair to say that most of them are doing what most (but not all) orthodox Catholics in this country do: grit their teeth and white-knuckle it out in their parishes, doing what they can to hang on. Without belaboring our boring saga of hunting for a parish here, we ended up in an orthodox parish in a nearby suburb, which had something rare in Catholic parishes: unity in belief. These were Catholics who really believed it, and did so joyfully. We thought we were home.
And then I discovered entirely by accident -- indeed, in the process of helping bring a friend into the Church -- that a priest at the parish was not supposed to be in ministry. He had been suspended by his diocese in Pennsylvania after formal abuse accusations had been leveled against him. The priest came back to his hometown, Dallas, and got other work -- but was helping out on the weekends in this particular parish. It turned out that the pastor knew all about his past, had concluded that he had been falsely accused, and put him into active ministry in the parish -- without telling the parish, or even his bishop. Now, this priest might well be innocent -- nothing has been proved against him -- but that is not the point. The point is, and was, that he was not supposed to be in active ministry, yet the pastor and those closest to him chose to deceive the bishop and the parish about the matter. The priest in question -- orthodox and personally charismatic -- lied to me in a manipulative way about how he had come to Dallas (he said the liberals in his old diocese had driven him out), and lied to my catechumen friend, who is a liberal, in the same manipulative way (he told her the conservatives had driven him out). This was too much. When I told Julie what Father's true background was, we were both shattered. I mean shattered. Given all that had come before, and given that we finally thought we could let our guard down, that we were among orthodox Catholics now, and we could trust them -- well, something broke in us.
It would be months before we realized how broken. We returned to our old parish, and spent months going through the motions. It's hard for me to express how spiritually depressed we were. The only strong emotion I felt about faith in those days was ... anger and bitterness.
I got into the habit of routinely leaving during the homilies -- in part because sometimes we would hear objective lies (like the time a deacon -- and this is one of the most conservative parishes in Dallas -- thanked God from the pulpit that we Catholics aren't like those nasty fundamentalist Christians, who believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation), but mostly it was simply because I felt so weak and vulnerable in my faith that I just wanted to get through mass and to receive the Eucharist and go home without having to get mad all over again. I was in such a state that the usual AmChurch banalities that orthodox Catholics learn to endure early on had the effect of setting me off. It was a rotten way to live, and I began to despair over what kind of icon of Christ I was for my children.
I also despaired over raising children in the Catholic faith. Julie and I decided not to put our kids in the Sunday School program at the parish when she learned that the parish was allowing women who didn't even go to mass to teach the faith to children, as part of their obligation to do parish service in exchange for reduced tuition at the parish school. This whole Sacrament Factory approach to living the Christian life left me ice-cold. I started to see my own faith and relationship to the Catholic Church as a purely mechanical thing. I'd go to fulfill my Sunday duty, receiving the Eucharist and then getting the heck out of there, wanting as little as possible to do with parish life. One day, in tears, Julie and I confessed to each other that we were afraid we were losing our faith entirely. This is not a place either of us ever imagined being. To know that you have the responsibility to raise children as followers of Christ, to say nothing about having responsibility for your own eternal soul -- well, to be in that position and to be so alienated from the Church you believe has the right to command your fidelity is a terrible thing.
After months, we finally made a decision: we would visit an Orthodox parish. As Catholics, we knew at least that the Sacraments there were valid. Though we couldn't receive communion, we could at least be in the presence of the Eucharistic Christ, and worship liturgically with them, and draw close to God on Sunday morning, however imperfectly. I can hardly express the burden of guilt I felt when I crossed the threshold of St. Seraphim's parish that morning. But you know, it was a wonderful place. The liturgy was breathtakingly beautiful. The preaching orthodox. And the people -- half of them Russian, most of the others converts -- could hardly have been kinder and more welcoming. As a new Episcopalian friend told me a couple of weeks ago after he visited St. Seraphim's, "There is life there."
We kept going back, and finally got invited to dinner at the archbishop's house. I feared it would be a stiff, formal affair. I was astonished to turn up at the address given, to find that it was the shabby little cottage behind the cathedral. We went in, and it was like being at a family reunion. Vladika's house was jammed with parishioners celebrating a feast day with ... a feast. There was Archbishop Dmitri in the middle of it all, looking like a grandfatherly Gandalf. I had never in all my years as a Catholic been around people who felt that way about their bishop. The whole thing was dizzying -- the fellowship, the prayerfulness, the feeling of family. I hadn't realized how starved I was for a church community. Julie, who grew up Evangelical, said this was what she had known all through her youth -- and what she'd left to become Catholic. I remember thinking that night, given what we'd been experiencing in the liturgy, and now at this parish feast, This is what I thought Catholicism would be like when I came in. And I reflected that there's really no reason at all Catholicism can't be like this. It's not like the Orthodox have some exclusive magic. But there you are.
Over time, we got to know the people of the pari
sh. They became our friends. It was a new experience for me to be in a parish where you can be openly small-o orthodox, and the priest and the people support you in that. In "Crunchy Cons," the Orthodox convert (from RCism) Hugh O'Beirne says that Catholics new to the Orthodox Church may find it surprising that they don't have to be on a "war footing" -- meaning the culture wars don't intrude into worship. People are on the same page, and if they're not, they're not out trying to get the Church to change her position on abortion, gay marriage, inclusive language, and all that. As someone who more or less is on the front lines of the culture war every day in my job as a journalist, I found it a new and welcome experience to be able to go to church on Sunday and get built back up for the struggle ahead, instead of to find mass the most debilitating hour of the week.
Julie and I could see what was happening to us: we were falling in love with Orthodoxy. On several occasions, we stopped to check ourselves. But we couldn't bring ourselves to leave this place, where we were back in touch with Christ, and learning to serve Him in community, to return to what we had experienced as a spiritual desert. I know this is not every Catholic's experience, but this was ours. I kept thinking about the older Catholics I know who are faithful, but whose children have been lost to the faith. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but knowing them as I do, I think it's not an unreasonable thing to fear the effect of having no real parish support for orthodox Catholicism on raising Catholic children. As my kids have gotten older, I have been deeply impressed by the importance of community in supporting and reinforcing what parents teach. Most of my Catholic friends with kids are doing the best they can in a bad situation. They are a lot stronger than I am. I had to admit that I needed help. I found the help I needed at St. Seraphim's.
But there was the matter of truth. A decade ago, when my dear friend Terry Mattingly was trying to decide whether or not to go Catholic or Orthodox, I listened impatiently to his fears for raising his children as Christians in an American Catholic parish, without active support from the priest and the community, and possibly even outright attack (at the time, I was preparing for marriage while living in south Florida, and had learned that CCL instructors, who taught couples how to practice NFP in obedience to the Church, couldn't even get a foot in the door in parish marriage instruction). I kept saying to him, confidently, that none of that matters, that what matters is: Is the case for Catholicism true? And here I was a decade later, facing the same dilemma.
I had to admit that I had never seriously considered the case for Orthodoxy. Now I had to do that. And it was difficult poring through the arguments about papal primacy. I'll spare you the details, but I will say that I came to seriously doubt Rome's claims. Reading the accounts of the First Vatican Council, and how they arrived at the dogma of papal infallibility, was a shock to me: I realized that I simply couldn't believe the doctrine. And if that falls, it all falls. Of course I immediately set upon myself, doubting my thinking because doubting my motives. You're just trying to talk yourself into something, I thought. And truth to tell, there was a lot of that, I'm sure.
But what I noticed during all this Sturm und Drang over doctrine was this: we were happy again as a family, and at peace. Julie said one day driving home from liturgy, "Isn't it great to look forward to going to church again?" And it was. I was beginning to pray again, and beginning to climb out of the slough of religious despond. I began to think differently about Truth. As Christians, Truth is a Person, not merely a proposition. Here I was beginning to live a more Christ-like life as a fellow traveler of Orthodoxy, and knowing that if I went back to full-fledged Catholicism, I would be returning to anger and despair. What does
it mean to live in the Christian truth in that situation? How would I feel if I approached the Judgment Seat and said to God, "I lived as a depressed and embittered man, lost my children to the Christian faith, and was a terrible witness to your goodness. But Lord, thanks to you, I never left Catholicism."
It was not an abstract question for me. I wondered: is the point of our life on earth to become like Jesus, or is it to maintain formal affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church? I honestly don't believe God will ask of me, in the day of judgment, "Were you an obedient Catholic? (Or Orthodox, or Presbyterian...)" He will ask me, "Did you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind? Did you love your neighbor as yourself?" I had made in my life till that point the fundamental error of conceiving of the Church as an end in itself, rather than a means to the end of becoming a saint in Christ.
I could see authentic holiness and goodness around me at St. Seraphim's, and was encouraged and motivated by it. I couldn't believe these people were going to hell because they weren't Catholic (and in fact the Catholic Church doesn't claim that they are, but the point I'm making is that Jesus so plainly lives in their lives, and that deeply impressed me). This parish was not full of ethnic pride, nor was it anti-Catholic. In fact, the pastor, Fr. John Anderson, had once been a Catholic, and was full of gratitude for his Catholic formation. That made a difference to me, because if we came to Orthodoxy, I could not in good conscience turn into one of those people who bash whence the came. In fact, the further I moved from Catholicism, the more I was able to love it. I think it's because I felt somehow released from feeling responsible for the Scandal. It's important for me to say, though, that at no time in this journey did anybody at St. Seraphim's speak ill of the Catholic Church (in fact, one new friend there, a Russian, once told me that there are too many sins and scandals in Orthodoxy for the Orthodox rigorists to spend their time carping about Rome). They only bore joyful witness to what they had discovered in Orthodoxy. This made an impression on me.
Julie and I put off converting as long as we could, but we finally had to admit to ourselves that we loved these people, that we loved this faith, and we didn't want to leave it. The only thing keeping me personally away from making the decision for Orthodoxy was love of my Catholic friends, whom I knew I would disappoint. And, to be honest, I didn't want to leave Rome because it is all I've ever known as an adult Christian. Some will doubt this, but for all the pain, I will always love the Catholic Church, and I sometimes get a little emotional thinking about that. And yet, staying there was killing me spiritually. Leaving was like chewing my own leg off to get out of a trap.
I have talked about how the Church itself failed me in all this. Let me confess how I failed myself.
The Amish example of forgiveness and detachment from anger recently made a powerful impression on me, because I can see so clearly how I allowed myself to become snared in it. The pursuit of justice is a wonderful and necessary thing, even a holy act. But I became so tormented over what had happened to those children at the hands of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy that I could see nothing else but pursuing justice. And my own pursuit of justice allowed me to turn wrath into an idol. I didn't know I was doing this at the time. I came to believe that if I didn't stop, or if I let up, that I would in some sense be failing the victims, that I would be helping the perpetrators get away with it. Again and again, I kept thinking What if this had happened to our family? And over time, the anger, and my inability to master it and put it in its place, corroded the bonds that linked me to Catholicism. That is something that could happen to anybody, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or what have you. Be warned.
What's more, I had
become the sort of Catholic who thought preoccupying himself with Church controversies and Church politics was the same thing as preoccupying himself with Christ. Me and my friends would go on for hours and hours about what was wrong with the Church, and everything we had to say was true. But if you keep on like that, it will have its effect. One night, some Catholic friends left after a long and vivid night of conversation, and Julie and I reflected that we had all spent the entire evening talking about the Church -- but never mentioned Jesus. Julie said, "We need less Peter around here, and more Jesus." Her point was that all this talk about the institutional Church was crowding out our devotion to the spiritual realities beneath the visible structure. And she was right. But I didn't learn that until it was too late.
I can look back also and see that my own intellectual pride helped me build a weak foundation for my faith. When I converted to Catholicism in 1992 (I entered the Church formally in 1993), it was a sincere Christian conversion. But I also took on as my own all the cultural and intellectual trappings of the American Catholic right. I remember feeling so grateful for the privilege and gift of being Catholic, but there was a part of me that thought, "Yay! I'm on the A-Team now, the New York Yankees of Christianity. I'm on Father Neuhaus's team!" A short time back, an intellectual friend who is a Protestant told me that he almost became a Catholic, and would have except for the place where he was working at the time was filled with conservative intellectual Catholics who wouldn't shut up about the superiority of Catholicism. Their arrogance finally put him off the Church, and now he says he couldn't imagine converting. I swallowed hard when he told me that, because I can only imagine how I must have come off to people like him in my prideful heyday.
Without quite realizing what was happening, I became a Professional Catholic, and got so caught up in identifying with the various controversies in the American church that I began to substitute that for an authentic spirituality. This is nobody's fault but my own. Part of that involved hero-worshipping Pope John Paul II, and despite having a healthy awareness of the sins and failings of various bishops, exaggerating the virtues of bishops my side deemed "orthodox." Bernard Cardinal Law was just such a bishop. I count it as one of the most shameful acts of my life the moment when I rushed across a courtyard in Jerusalem to kneel and kiss Cardinal Law's ring. I don't count it as a sin to kiss a cardinal's ring; what was wrong was my motivation for doing so: I felt so much pride in showing myself to be an orthodox Catholic paying due homage to an orthodox archbishop in that public way.
Well, I was a fool, and I set myself up for a big fall. A few weeks back, I mentioned to Julie on the way to St. Seraphim's one morning, "I'm now part of a small church that nobody's heard of, with zero cultural influence in America, and in a tiny parish that's materially poor. I think that's just where I need to be."
See, this is why you won't see me ballyhoo my conversion to Orthodoxy as I did with my conversion to Catholicism. Partly it's because I still consider myself to be among the spiritually walking wounded. I need to build myself up in Christ, and in ordinary Christian piety. I believe that God rescued me from a pit partly of my own making by showing me Orthodoxy, and through the witness of the people of St. Seraphim's parish. I have to laugh when well-meaning people say, "Well, Rod's still looking for the perfect church, I wonder what's going to become of him when he figures out that the Orthodox Church is screwed up too." Shoot, the Orthodox Church in America is neck-deep in a financial scandal at its pinnacle! Don't they think I see that? I am perfectly aware that sexual sin and the temptation to cover it up or deny it exists in every human institution. I do not imagine that I have escaped that in Orthodoxy. I am incapab
le of being the kind of gung-ho Orthodox as I was a gung-ho Catholic. I've learned my lesson. What I do have in Orthodoxy, though, is a second chance to get it right. To receive the Sacraments as an aid to theosis, and to learn to love the little platoon around me, building up the community and my own family. Had I started out this way as a Catholic, maybe it wouldn't have come to this. But I did, and here I am, and God is merciful.
I don't want in any way for this to come across as an apology for entering Orthodoxy. I am not ashamed of it, and indeed I am grateful for God having provided for me and my family, lost and drifting as we were. Still, I think my feelings must be like that of an exile who had to leave his native land, and who is grateful for his new country but who will never be able to forget whence he came -- nor does he want to. I grieve having disappointed friends, and no doubt many of you, who have been so kind to me over the years with your prayers and encouragement. I can't expect you Catholics to endorse my move, but I hope at least you will pray for me and my family, and with me for the ultimate unity of Orthodoxy and Catholicism (by the way, I took as my patron saint in Orthodoxy Benedict of Nursia, who as a pre-schism saint is also revered by the Orthodox; I also chose him in part to honor Pope Benedict, whom I cherish). I hope also that my own example will encourage others -- Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant -- to look seriously into their hearts, and detach themselves from both idolizing the Church in the place of Christ -- this is partly what led to the Scandal, and partly what led me to put myself in a position where the Scandal destroyed my Catholicism. And I hope my example helps people to deal swiftly with anger before it masters them.
As far as tradition goes, I have moved with my family to a church that I believe stands a much better chance of maintaining the historic Christian deposit of faith over time. To be more blunt, I have moved to a church that in my judgment within which I and my family and my descendants will be better able to withstand modernity. Basically, though -- and this is as blunt as I can be -- I'm in a church where I can trust the spiritual headship of the clergy, and where most people want to know more about the faith, and how we can conform our lives to it, rather than wanting to run away from it or hide it so nobody has to be offended.
In the end, we all depend on the mercy of God to deliver us from our faults and errors. I have no intention of talking about this conversion further, either on the comboxes or this blog. (Nor, by the way, do I intend to avoid critical comments about any church; I am an opinion journalist.) I owe it to my family, and to my God, to avoid the nasty combox polemics that will inevitably follow this revelation. I can't keep any of you from saying whatever you will -- and no doubt, the Jonathan Carpenters of the world will have their day. I'm a public person, so I have to put up with that. Still, those of you more charitably inclined, please just pray for me and my family, that we always live in truth, and do the right thing, and be found pleasing to God, the Father of us all.
I linked to Jody Bottum's First Things piece earlier today. In it, he mentions what a godawful mess the Diocese of Orange (Calif.) is, and says it's epitomized by the case of Father Rod Stephens:
Father Rod was prominent for years in Orange County: director of the liturgical office that issued the anti-kneeling memos, head of evangelization for the diocese, organizer of the Jubilee 2000 project, the bishop’s expert on architectural renovation, and a man appearing openly at events with his male escort. “What do you want from me?” Bishop Brown plaintively asked when local Catholics objected—and when they asked if he was responsible for Stephens’ behavior as a priest, the tired bishop insisted, “No, I’m not.”
Or, at least, that’s what the angry parishioners say happened at their September 2001 meeting with the bishop. To follow the Rod Stephens story is to suffer a kind of motion-sickness, your sympathies batted back and forth until you have no sympathy left for anyone.
You start outraged at a priest who cohabits so blatantly that he sends out Christmas cards that read, “For Chanukah, Christmas, and the New Year, All the Best: From Our Digs to Yours, Howard and Rod.” But then you learn that it all came out because his own family snitched on him to the conservative Catholic press. Your outrage returns when you find out his family had approached him privately first, and he told them, “The bishop knows about it and so does -Cardinal Mahony, and they approve.” But your teeth start to ache when you discover the relatives went on to hire a private detective to dig up dirt on the priest. And then you see that the dirt included $10,000-a-ticket vacation cruises taken by Fr. Rod and his -companion.
Along the way, you are exposed to moments like the reported explanation, from the bishop’s notoriously foot-in-mouth spokesman, that if the diocese tried to control its actively homosexual clergy, “there would be so few priests left we’d have to turn it over to lay people to run it.” Or the memo from diocesan officials during Fr. Stephens’ tenure that insisted teen-chastity programs are suitable only for “homeschoolers and fundamentalists.” Or the right-wing protesters, complete with banners, who paraded for photographers in front of the bishop’s residence. Or the letter from the vocations director of the diocese, which denounced Mother Angelica’s EWTN television network for “religious intolerance and arrogance” and labeled the Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic college in Ohio, “a pathetic organization of bitter people.”
Here is the version of events related by the gay priest's family members, who say they did not "snitch" on Fr. Rod, but tried to get the bishop to stop his destructive ministry. If the following account is true, Bishop Tod Brown's answer to Michael and Susan Teissere, who are related to Rod Stephens, explains a lot -- in Orange, and beyond:
Then the bishop asked repeatedly "What do you want from me, Michael and Susan?" and we repeatedly said "Your Excellency, Fr. Rod needs to resign from the priesthood because his obstinate open homosexual lifestyle and his preaching and teaching heresies to family members, and we want a letter of apology from you your Excellency to our family members and to the entire diocese for Fr. Rod's scandalous lifestyle and false teachings.
"You are responsible for this situation regarding Fr. Rod."
Bishop Brown said: "No, I am not! I am not responsible for priests after they clock out after 5pm."
Man. Could you imagine Jesus saying that whatever the Apostles do after they clock out at 5 is their business?
Here's Amy Welborn's post on the matter, and more. Amy once again proclaims a tireless truth that all churches forget at their peril: if you try to be anything but intentionally centered around the living Christ, you will die. It might take a couple of generations, but you will die because you have no life in you.
I vote for laugh hysterically. A theologian friend just received this invitation to a conference sponsored by Syracuse University's Department of Religion. Can you imagine anything less relevant to religion as it is actually lived in the world today?
"Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion" Conference 2 in the Postmodernism, Culture, and Religion series. April 26-28, 2007
A constellation of internationally prominent philosophers and theologians gather to ask, What does the "return of religion" mean for women and human sexuality? What new openings for feminism and gender theory are being made by the renewed interest of intellectuals in religion? How can we reimagine God and the divine beyond patriarchy and homophobia? How are feminist and gender theory to respond the worldwide resurgence of religious fundamentalisms?
I'm sure the persecuted women of Afghanistan appreciate that these American loony-left theologians will be debating how best to deploy the wisdom of Carol Gilligan and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in their defense.
Liberals in Britain are being hoist on their own petard in the latest row over Islamic women wearing the veil in public. As a Guardian columnist points out, you can't go around tearing down customs and even laws, all in the name of expanding the right to self-expression, and then turn around and say that taking the veil should somehow be prohibited. How much sense does it make to say that women (or men, for that matter) should be permitted under law to parade in Piccadilly wearing bikinis, but Muslim women shouldn't be permitted to cover up? There's this stinging line from the column: "Many Muslim women have pointed out they would be accused of rampant Islamofascism if they asked women with short skirts or naked midriffs to cover up." True.
The thing to notice here is that if you make individual rights, including the right to virtually unlimited self-expression, the absolute telos of your politics, you will find yourself having to defend some things that make you uncomfortable. I certainly understand Brits and other Europeans being made deeply uncomfortable by the growing Islamification of their societies, even as I think trying to ban the veil is absurd and unjust. If you've ever taken a walk through the red-light district of Amsterdam, and seen the kind of filth on public display there, the idea that any European society would consider outlawing or greatly restricting the right of pious Muslim women to cover themselves is cracked. Secular Europeans think they can stop what's happening by passing legislation against the veil, but of course they're fooling themselves. The veil is only an expressioin of what's in people's hearts, and in their heads. You can't outlaw that so easily.
Daniel Larison has a tremendous post up arguing for those who choose to graft themselves onto a Tradition, against the view of Prof. Guroian and Maggie Gallagher, who (coming from different viewpoints) find the whole idea suspect. Excerpt:
But the central difference between pre-modern and modern man, or even between modern and late modern man, is not exactly simply the relatively greater role of individual choice in the life of the latter, but comes instead in in the relationship between choice and authority. Submitting to authority is as traditional as it gets. At some point, everyone has had to submit to a teaching authority for the first time–that does not make obedience to that authority artificial in any sense. Those who want to privilege choice and make the self and the satisfaction of the self the standard by which they judge what is good and what is not are necessarily hostile to the dictates of authority. Such an authority proposes to give them a standard outside of themselves that they must either accept or reject. A traditionally-minded person embraces the claims of that authority, yields to it, denies his own will and tries instead to will what the authority calls him to will. This is as basic as the redirection of our desires away from ourselves and towards God; it is the abandonment of autonomy and the entrance into koinonia, in which ourselves are no longer ours but Christ’s. Indeed, we are called to put away ourselves, to die to ourselves, and thus become truly human and truly personal for the first time. This is the perfect example that is dimly reflected in every submission to authority: the death of the self, the embrace of authority, the vivification of the person. Those who claim that such submission is impossible, or is always artificial when it is attempted, are sentencing the refugees–or perhaps sentencing all of us–to the living death of selfhood. Not only is it irritating to those of us who are trying to make the best of the measly scraps we have been given, but I believe it is fundamentally untrue.
Sorry for the light posting yesterday. We had to go back to the hospital yesterday for what turned into yet another false alarm regarding the imminent advent of That Myrna Minx, the baby girl who keeps teasing us about her own imminent advent. I'm betting she's going to arrive on Friday, for reasons I'll explain later. Anyway, one is a bit, um, preoccupied around here these days.
Continuing the discussion from the last post, what prompted Maggie Gallagher's e-mails to me was her reading of Jody Bottum's long and rewarding essay from the new issue of First Things, in which he makes the failure in recent times of the famed swallows to return to Capistrano a metaphor for the death, or near-death, of Catholic culture in the United States. Bottum says that Vatican II's reforms cleaned out a lot of "nests" in the American Catholic Church, things that the would-be reformers thought were mere cobwebs, detritus, cultural bric-a-brac, but which were actually crucial carriers of Catholic culture. Here's Bottum:
An entire culture nested in the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners, of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t until the swallows had been chased away that anyone seemed to realize how much the Church itself needed them, darting around the chapels and flitting through the cathedrals. They provided beauty, and eccentricity, and life. What they did, really, was provide Catholicism to the Catholic Church in America, and none of the multimedia Masses and liturgical extravaganzas in the years since—none of the decoy nests and artificial puddles—has managed to call them home. All the mission bells will ring, / The chapel choir will sing, / When the swallows come back to Capistrano.
True story: a few years back, Julie and I were visiting our friends the Mathewes-Greens outside of Baltimore. We attended the beginning of the liturgy at their Orthodox parish, and were knocked flat by the beauty and majesty of the service and the singing. Most of these people in this parish were converts, but they celebrated the tradition they had found with inspiring vigor. An outsider could hardly fail to be impressed by the beauty on display -- and that beauty (the beauty of the chanted psalms and ancient liturgy, the icons, the prostrations) carried within it an entire way of relating to the world. As someone who came to Catholicism out of a low-church Protestant background, I had come to understand by doing how all the aesthetic trappings of Catholicism were not just decoration, but carried within them the Catholic worldview. I came to appreciate sacramentalism not through cognition, at least not primarily, but by experiencing the Catholic tradition in rituals formal and informal. Anyway, we left the Orthodox liturgy after some time to drive up the road a bit to fulfill our Sunday obligation at the local Catholic parish.
It was quite a contrast. The 1970s building suggested Our Lady of Pizza Hut. Inside the rounded interior, a large molded plastic cross hung over the altar, which had been moved forward, like a theater in the round. The walls had been stripped of nearly anything identifiably Catholic, except for some modernist representations of the Stations of the Cross. It looked like some sort of badly-dated bus terminal from "The Jetsons." The white-haired priest processed in, trailed by a couple of altar girls, with the congregation mewling some Seventies-era hymn. You can imagine the rest -- indeed, if you are an American Catholic, you don't have to work hard to imagine it. You've seen it. Perhaps you do see it every Sunday. What finally made us leave during the mass was the priest's homily, in which he preached the exact opposite of the teaching of that day's Gospel, and something which I had enough sense to realize directly undermined Catholic teaching. We'd had it. We picked up Matthe
w, who was a toddler then, genuflected and left. We were both near tears on our way back to the car, and it wasn't so much over the blasted modernist disaster on display architecturally, liturgically, homiletically and aesthetically in that parish we'd just left so much as it was the contrast between Holy Cross Orthodox parish and that one.
Don't misunderstand me: I am not putting forth an argument saying "...and therefore Orthodoxy is better than Catholicism." What I'm trying to get at is that living truth is not just a set of propositions. The propositions are conveyed to us through Tradition, and that includes old rituals, old customs, and so forth. Though few of the people in Holy Cross had grown up with Orthodox tradition, they had been grafted onto its trunk, and were making it their lives. The crucial thing to remember is that there was an intact tradition for them to accept. I have a dear friend, formerly Orthodox and now Evangelical, who says he left the Greek church of his youth because all he could see was dead ritualism on display. I've no doubt that's true, and Tradition can become an idol. Still, a Catholic from 1960 who walked into that Catholic parish we visited would wonder what "bare ruined choirs" catastrophe had happened to render the Church so unrecognizable. One wonders: would a Catholic child raised in that kind of environment have a chance to grow up to be Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy? Would an Orthodox child raised in the Holy Cross environment have a chance to grow up to be Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn?
The answer is fairly obvious to me, but Jody Bottum makes a key point here, when he says that there are new signs of life among younger orthodox Catholics, but he doesn't overpraise them:
For the development of a new Catholicism, this doesn’t look the most-promising start. Rich local cultures may produce great works, but few people in the United States have that kind of cultural wealth anymore. Certainly not many Catholics. The number of Americans who grew up in a profoundly Catholic setting is smaller than it ever has been before—which creates a problem for a new culture. If Catholicism is something elected rather than received, can Catholics achieve what earlier cultures did?
Their children, perhaps, will come from a thick-enough world that they can write the kind of strong Catholic novels, make the kind of strong Catholic art, prior ages knew. But in the meantime, a rebellion against rebellion doesn’t escape the problems of rebellion, and a chosen tradition is never quite the same as an inherited one.
And that was Maggie's point: that there is something of a "wannabe" quality to the neotraditionalism I advocate. Yet again, I go back to the "what else is there?" rejoinder. If I prostrate myself before the Orthodox icons on Sunday morning, and teach my children to do the same, or if I say my beads at the Latin Mass, it is an unusual thing. It is not the culture I inherited. The culture of my immediate inheritance is Our Lady of Pizza Hut. But it is a dead end and a dead thing. It won't last. The Orthodox liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the Tridentine Mass in Catholicism -- and all the trappings and devotionals of those wondrous poems -- have stood the test of time. There is true life in them, and the culture(s) that grew up around them. We can never go back to the ghettoized faith and culture of the past. We can't unlearn, but we can relearn. It might be impossible for Catholics of my generation to write the Great Catholic Novel, but if they've been diligent in raising their kids, and (as Flannery put it), pushed back as hard against the age as it has pushed them, maybe in their children's generation. Or their grandchildren's. The only alternative I can see is to accept our rootless condition as fated.
[N.B., The point is not that we should worship Tradition for its own sake. That ends up in worshipping the Tribe, or worshipping Ritual, etc. Tradition (in reli
gion) is only worthwhile insofar as it helps its adherents become saints. The right-thinking traditionalist must always keep that truth in front of him.]
The Kirk family is very traditional and Catholic. Russell KIrk's immediate ancestors were Swedenborgian spiritualists. Are we to tell the Kirks that they're faking it, that they're not really Catholic because the tradition was broken? Or did the recovery take place in a generation or two? You see?
Who took over $1 million from the Orthodox Church in America? Why can't the Metropolitan account for it? Why give money if the church can't say where it's going? Mark Stokoe wants to know.
Back last night from Mecosta, and too much to get caught up on at the office today to do much blogging. Alas. But I exchanged e-mails with Maggie Gallagher, a critic of "Crunchy Cons," this morning on an issue that came up (unbeknownst to her) over the weekend at the Kirk Center conference. The theologian Vigen Guroian, criticizing the crunchy-cons concept in Mecosta, said that there's something phony about the idea of trying to adopt a tradition that doesn't come down to you organically. Vigen said it's a very modern thing to try on different traditions (e.g., converting from one religion to another), and he's skeptical about the whole "back to tradition" aspect of the neotraditionalism advocated in "Crunchy Cons." If I got his argument correctly, he's simply saying that what I propose is not feasible.
My response was along these lines: Yes, there is something artificial about trying to lay claim to a tradition that one wasn't born into, or that previous generations in one's line have jettisoned -- but what's the alternative? Late modernity has been a catastrophe for nearly all inherited traditions, at least in the West. We are all walking around like survivors of a carpet-bombing, bumbling around in the ruins trying to find a place to take a stand and start the recovery, the rebuilding. I know a number of Episcopalians who have converted to either Orthodoxy or Catholicism. At least one reason they've done so is the conviction that they've got to root themselves in a Christian tradition that can stand the test of time and the lashings of modernity. They are adopting traditions not their own, true, but again, if we don't attempt some sort of Great Re-Learning, what's the alternative?
Here's what Maggie wrote, which I reproduce here with her permission:
I guess what I'm really pointing to is the difference between a chosen identity affirmed by a chosen community and an ascribed identity, affirmed by a community that one does not choose.
The latter feels far firmer and more real to people; it is also far more constraining and inhibits individuation and personalization. People like tradition. But they also really like choice.
We have lots of choices in our society but we don't have the choice to be genuinely traditional, as far as I can see, and nothing in your book suggests otherwise.
Yes, the absence of traditional bases for identity creates a genuine hunger. If you want to try to satisfy that hunger by "attaching" to a tradition, I have no objections. I really don't. I just can't look at that process and see that its will achieve what you claim for it. Its not being traditional, its choosing tradition as the best of all available consumer goods.
You make that choice, other people make other choices. God bless, I hope it works for you.
As to your question "What then"?
Listen, its a fallen world. You do the best you can. I personally think the benefits of the modern condition seriously outweigh its liabilities (and so there we may differ). But don't imagine you are recreating a traditional world. It's not true. You are creating a personal world.
Why is this worth saying? I don't know for sure, but I think if one can pinpoint more accurately one's motivations, needs and desires, one can both avoid nostalgia for an imagined past, and perhaps do a better job of meeting the needs modernity intensifies.
How could this be possible after 9/11? How is it that the president entrusted the federal emergency management agency, of all things, to political cronies who have never managed an emergency? How stupid and dangerous is that? What is the president thinking? Is the president thinking?
Well, now Bush has topped that one. Congress passed a law requiring the president to hire someone with emergency management experience to run FEMA. Bush signed the law, but filed a signing statement saying he intends to ignore it. Unbelievable. And you know what? If history is any guide, the testicle-free GOP Congress won't utter a peep. Man, the Democrats could have a field day making an ad with this story. People know what Brownie stands for.
And you know, 2008 cannot come quickly enough. What are the Republicans going to say for themselves, for having not stood up to crap like this during the Bush years?
Via Dan Larison, this observation from A.C. Kleinheider:
Heartland conservatives, the kind of folks who vote GOP, in contrast to their immediate economic interests, have no idea what their leaders are really like and what they abide culturally.
This is where Foleygate will impact voters in the Heartland and homosexual staffers and politicians in Washington. There is, and always has been, a disconnect between the values of professional conservatives and the people they profess to lead.
Professional conservatives live the life of Washingtonians. They don't go to church as much as the rest of the nation and they don't behave like the rest of America, at least not those they represent. They live a life much like their liberal counterparts.
They make the case for social conservatism in Washington but when they go out into Middle America and rail against the liberal elites, they are railing against themselves.
The problem the Republican Party faces is that now the jig is up. They have been exposed. Just like Foley, they are out.
To the average "values voter" it isn't just that the GOP covered up Foley's ephebophilia that angers them. It is more than that.
Let's make it plain. The Republican Party allowed a homosexual access to children. While heartland conservative, religious conservatives, may or may not support a homosexual's outing or ouster from a job, they do believe that those good Christians they sent up to the hill should have been on the look out for someone like Foley.
Your average Christian believes the leadership should have been watching Foley just as hard as he was watching those young boys.
I don't know that I agree with this harsh conclusion, but I think he's totally right about Republican elites. I think this might be one reason I find it difficult to take gays seriously when they paint all conservatives as being full of hatred for gay people. I socialize with many conservatives who are one way or another elites, and even if they (like me) oppose the demands of the gay rights movement (e.g., gay marriage) for reasons of political or moral principle, we honestly aren't made uncomfortable by being around gay people. It's not even an issue, so gay protests that conservatives are burning with fear and loathing of gays strikes me as way overblown, and an attempt to avoid actually considering our arguments on their own merits.
But to be fair, this comment makes me think about how unrepresentative my relationship with gay folks is of the typical conservative's.
These new instruments of conservation will need to be ingenious; for they must be employed against the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy. It is an error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France. Japan, if converted to democracy, will be many times more dangerous than when governed by a conservative aristocracy, content with the present arrangement of things. Eight years later, Babbitt returned to this theme in "On Being Creative," taking note of Andre Siegfried's dread of the American's "consciousness, still more dangerous, of his 'duties' toward humanity." Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis. "Man never rushes forward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as when he is on the very brink of the abyss."
By the way, read this fascinating letter from Iraq written by an anonymous Marine, and published by Time. This part is worthy of Kubrick:
Most Surreal Moment — Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.
Home of the Russell Kirk Center, whose namesake wrote (in "The Conservative Mind"):
The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character -- with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living if sounded. This is conservatism at its highest; but it cannot be accomplished as a deliberate program of social reform, "political Christianity." As Christopher Dawson observes, "There is a tendency, especially among the English-speaking Protestant peoples, to treat religion as a kind of social tonic in order to extract a further degree of moral effort from the people." If the conservatives' effort comes to no more than this, it will not succeed. Recovery of moral understanding cannot be merely a means to social restoration: it must be its own end, though it will produce social consequences. In the words of T.S. Eliot, "If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin."
Peggy Noonan is surprised by how good the Woodward book is. Excerpt from her column:
Here I add something I have been thinking about the past year. It is about the young guys at the table in the Reagan era. The young, mid-level guys who came to Washington in the Reagan years were always at the table in the meeting with the career State Department guy. And the man from State, timid in all ways except bureaucratic warfare, was always going "Ooh, aah, you can't do that, the Soviet Union is so big, Galbraith told us how strong their economy is, the Sandinistas have the passionate support of the people, there's nothing we can do, stop with your evil empire and your Grenada invasion, it's needlessly aggressive!" Those guys from State--they were almost always wrong. Their caution was timorousness, their prudence a way to evade responsibility. The young Reagan guys at the table grew up to be the heavyweights of the Bush era. They walked into the White House knowing who'd been wrong at the table 20 years before. And so when State and others came in and said, "The intelligence doesn't support it, we see no WMDs," the Bush men knew who not to believe.
History is human.
Sen. John Warner is breaking with the president on Iraq, saying that we're losing, and that if the violence doesn't abate in the next few months, no option should be off the table. That's big. CNN reports that Warner went on to say that he wishes he had paid more attention to history, and the British experience in Iraq, back when we were getting into this thing. Lots of us can say the same thing.
Let’s forget all of the niceties and diplomatic language and cut to the obvious truth: From the White House to Capitol Hill, Republicans look inept. And that assertion is based on what Republicans are saying. Democratic rhetoric is much harsher and, therefore, easier to dismiss as partisan claptrap.
I've had a couple of conversations over the last couple of days with plugged-in Washington Republican strategists, both of whom sounded like they wanted to jump off the edge of a building. The level of disgust with the state of the party in Congress was like nothing I've ever heard from within the ranks of GOP professionals. Mind you, this is anecdotal, so take it for what it's worth. But these are Republican political operatives both involved in campaign work right now, and sound as demoralized as can be.
But a lot can happen between now and Election Day, of course.
There are those, including yourself, who think that the Republicans losing a chamber or two would be good because it might make the Repub’s clean up their free spending and their smugness as the sole party in power. Like how a divorce makes a guy go out and lose weight and buy new clothes because all of a sudden he’s got to work for it again.
My take is that the loss of the House or Senate would not only be good as a cleansing of the Republicans, but would require the Demos to hit the showers also. For years they’ve had the luxury of not having any responsibility whatsoever. So when Bush says let’s limit budget increases for a social program to 5% a year instead of 10%, the demos scream that he’s “cutting” a program and the bodies of the poor and elderly will be lined up in the street. Like Bush or not, he’s not Hitler and the U.S. is not a theocracy. But when there are no consequences to saying such things (it’s not like they’re going to lose a party-line vote any worse), they might as well go all Maxine Waters every time they see a microphone. Demos in power, especially if the chambers are split, would have to move in from the fringe. You can’t propose reinstating the draft if you might actually have to vote for it. Result: less grandstanding, more compromise. Goodbye Howard Dean.
If someone’s said this, good for them, and never mind. I haven’t seen it.
Worst case is gridlock, in which case I refer you a quote I often think of from George Will in the late 90’s on This Week: “The opposite of gridlock is bad legislation.”
Why? Because reality is weird enough. Exhibit one: Dallas Cowboys bad boy and world-class egotist Terrell Owens has written a children's book. No, really, he has. It's called -- wait for it -- "Little T Learns To Share." Future volumes include "Little T Learns What Not to Say" and "Little T Learns How to Say I'm Sorry." The other topics haven't yet been determined, according to the publisher. Hmm. How about "Little T Learns That Pills Are Not Skittles" and "Little T Learns How Not to Make the Other Children Cry"
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