In a press conference yesterday, on the day that contents of confidential Fort Worth Catholic diocese files on sexually abusive priests hit the papers, FW Bishop Kevin Vann held a press conference. He profusely apologized for the abuse, which took place under the, ahem, leadership of his late predecessor, Bishop Joseph Delaney. But he repeatedly refused to criticize Delaney's handling of the matter. Vann told the press: "Not being here at the time those decisions were made, I can't say that they should have done this or that."
Oh, [barnyard epithet]. Why on earth is it impossible for Bishop Vann to say, "It was wrong for Bishop Delaney to let priests who molest children stay in ministry"? Is the idea that you have to be so loyal to your predecessor, even though his bad decisions put innocent kids and their families at risk, that you can't even find the stones to say that this was wrong? With these guys, it really is about saving face, no matter what. Nobody blames Bishop Vann for what happened before he got here. But now people are mad at him for refusing to say the bleeding obvious, for whatever reason.
This incident reminds me of something a conservative priest told me about running into a well-known conservative Catholic bishop at a large gathering of bishops. The priest remarked to his ideological confrere, "Well, it's good to see a good bishop at last." The bishop didn't think the compliment was funny, chastising the priest thus: "Every bishop is a good bishop."
Reader Conor sends a link to a must-read Commonweal essay from Andrew Bacevich, the retired colonel and professor of international relations. He's a conservative, but has long been a critic of the Iraq War. In this long, wide-ranging essay, Bacevich warns that the United States is in danger of losing the Republic because of cultural decadence combined with a crusading pridefulness that refuses to acknowledge the limits of our own power to remake the world to suit us. This is the fault of both left and right, in Bacevich's view (which is the same view I put forth in "Crunchy Cons"). Here's a key passage:
During the same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations-notably those in the Islamic world-to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]
The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and self-gratification. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once observed, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.” In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence.
The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing behavior once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative.
Laws, traditions, and social arrangements impeding the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and children raised in single-parent homes-all once viewed as problematic-lost much of their stigma. Pornography-including child pornography-reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. And popular music became, in the words of cultural critic Martha Bayles, a “masturbatory fantasy.”
Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign-policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world-those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights-today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with-and even reinforced-the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of “stuff.”
Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillmen
t (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption-acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets.
By the end of the twentieth century, many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that “to consume was to be free.” The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006-with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with “Islamofascism”-an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?” In the conduct their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative.
Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows “the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,” Cross comments, it also imposes “the duty to spend for the ‘good of the economy.’” Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today, consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic wellbeing. In recent years “Black Friday” has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar-the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation, should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last.
American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution-both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right-massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders, who see our reigning conceptions of freedom as shallow and corrosive.
Bacevich goes on to say that the central question posed by the failure in Iraq is:
Are ongoing efforts to “change the way that they live” securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise?
If we're going to continue to defend "the American way of life," it's going to require massive infusion of money -- which we're borrowing from abroad -- and a commitment to militarizing our society for the sake of reforming the world. Far better for us to focus on reforming ourselves, and our own habits, both cultural and economic. We are, Bacevich says, writing checks on a bank account that's already overdrawn, and living as if the law of gravity (so to speak) had been repealed by force of American will. And we are slowly moving towards tyranny, which will be required if we are to keep up our self-indulgence. Bacevich again:
Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it deadens our awareness of the danger it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning clichés about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe. We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation.
A final thought: from time to time here, I mention lessons I learned at a Dubai media conference last year at this time. I am haunted -- the word isn't too strong -- by what I saw among the Arab Muslims, as they grapp
led with the new media world that was going to wipe out, or at least dramatically alter, their traditional culture. As an American scholar of the Arab world told me at the time, we Americans have to understand that the media revolution our culture underwent took place over 50 or 60 years, and within a culture that was much more able to receive it. The Arabs are getting it jammed up within about 10 years, and they're far less culturally flexible. Some things are going to break. And despite the problems I have with Islam, and my desire to see some pretty basic aspects of Islamic culture (e.g., the way they treat women) change, I can't be enthusiastic about American cultural hegemony. The idea that the Middle East would become an outpost of Hollywood depresses me. Better Hollywood than Peshawar, to be sure, but still, those of us here who lament how corrosive the nihilistic American popular culture is should consider how it must look to Muslim men and women overseas, who quite rightly see us as a threat to the things they hold dearest.
If, as Turkey's senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope on his arrival, Islam is a religion of "vast tolerance" that rejects all violence and terror and "assumes that killing an innocent person is a heavy crime and sin," it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?
If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic" to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of Turkey's tiny Jewish minority.
Islam is a religion of peace, and those who say otherwise had better watch their backs.
Back in 2004, Fr. Gassalascus Jape pondered Turkey's possible entry into the EU in light of the advantages it will supposedly bring to the small number of Christians living in Turkey. Excerpt:
Moll quotes Verhuegen’s smug approval of Turkey’s “improving situation” and notes the testimony of a Greek Christian living in Turkey that: “Turkish membership in the EU will be the best guarantee for the future of this dwindling community.”
In no way do I wish to trivialize or downplay the significant persecution those Greek Christians have faced in a predominantly Muslim country, but somehow the vision of “Saddleback on the Black Sea” seems to demean the centuries old story of those Christians’ particular survival even more. Moll ends with an American missionary in Turkey who comments breezily that “we are relatively free and we are tolerated now.”
If this is the sum and substance of western missionary zeal these days–to be free and tolerated–(and I fear that all to often it is) then Christians have good reason to question the compromises with Liberalism they are wont to make.
Yep. Irreversibly open up the remnants of Christendom to mass migration of a culturally alien people in a time of dramatic population and cultural decline, all for the sake of the hope that Christians living in Turkey won't get beaten up when they go out for a carton of milk. Is this really a worthwhile exchange?
The subject line is a quote from Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth files, released yesterday by a state judge. The files are diocesan records on seven accused child-molesting priests whose cases were part of a 2003 lawsuit against the diocese. Here's the story from today's Dallas Morning News. The "he" in question is Father Philip Magaldi, who told the late Bishop Joseph Delaney that yes, he'd paid high school boys to administer enemas to him. Bishop Delaney left him in ministry, and let him continue as chaplain to Boy Scouts, and gave him chance after chance, despite more and more sex-related complaints piling up against him.
The files also show that Bishop Delaney wrote, in one confrontation with his old pal Magaldi: "There is no way that -- that I can defend myself before God or before the people of the diocese or before the world if ... [a reporter for The Dallas Morning News], for instance, tomorrow morning, published all of this. There would be no defense."
The only reason the DMN (and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) are publishing them today is because we went to court to request that these trial documents be made public. Bishop Delaney was clearly more interested in saving face than saving the Catholic children of his diocese from his predatory priests. The diocese fought to keep these records secret, but failed, thank God (to his credit, the new bishop, Vann, decided not long after he took over from the deceased Delaney to stop fighting to keep the records sealed). People need to know what was done. It can't be undone, but it must not be forgotten. If not for the courts and the newspapers, this would all have gone down the memory hole.
The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a nondenominational megachurch in Longwood, Fla., said he resigned as the coalition's incoming president because its board of directors disagreed with his plan to broaden the organization's agenda. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Hunter, 58, wanted to take on such issues as poverty, global warming and HIV/AIDS.
"My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we're not carrying out the full message of Jesus," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They began to think this might threaten their base or evaporate some of their support, and they said they just couldn't go there."
It's hard to blame the old-guard leadership at CC headquarters for this. They say they had four state chapters break away in protest of Pastor Hunter's statements indicating he wanted to expand the conservative activist group's areas of concern. Notice expand not change -- but the old-line grassroots revolted. Well, if that's how they feel about it, fine; I think what Pastor Hunter represents is terrific, but I'm not a member of the Christian Coalition. But do please note that this reveals once again how fractured Evangelicalism is, and how the coming generation of Evangelicals have different priorities.
If she hadn't passed away earlier, Benedict's capitulation on Turkey's EU bid would have killed her. Well, the Vatican is saying that it's not that big a deal, Benedict's saying that he now encourages Turkey's bid to join the EU, when in the past he had been against it. That means that the Pope is now pretty much on the same page as Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew on that question. Bartholomew wants it because he believes that it will result in more religious freedom for the few remaining Christians in Turkey. The price of this, though, would be opening up the entire European continent to unrestricted immigration from a strongly Islamic nation of 70 million -- and this would risk annihilating European culture. If the Turks were having to consider a massive influx of European Christians, of which there are fewer and fewer each day, into their country, they'd be quite right to be concerned about how their Islamic culture and society would be permanently altered. But everybody knows that virtually no French, Germans, Italians and Spaniards will be migrating to Ankara; the movement will be entirely westward.
In 2004, when he was still a cardinal, Benedict said publicly that historically and culturally, Turkey has always been distinct from Europe. What he might have said too was that in fact the Turks have for centuries been the sworn enemy of Europe. Now, no one should want enmity to continue, but seeking peaceful coexistence in no way requires political union. Why Turkey (and more broadly, Islamic civilization) has been the enemy of Christendom have to do with geopolitics, yes, but also with very different and incompatible cultural values. Benedict is now saying that if Turkey meets EU requirements on free speech and freedom of religion, then its entry into the EU would be fine. But the state changing its laws does not change what's in the hearts of its people. What happened to the Ratzinger who once understood that, and understood that European Christian culture, or what's left of it, would be permanently altered, and maybe even eliminated, by the Islamic flood from Turkey? And for that matter, why on earth does the Orthodox Patriarch believe gaining more legal liberty for the few Orthodox remaining in the former Constantinople is worth Europe's opening the gates to massive legal Muslim immigration -- especially with Western Europe so spiritually and culturally weak, and failing to reproduce itself?
A lovely post from "eCurious" in the Santa combox below:
Sigh. Here it is again, the idea that having Santa (or even St. Nick) constitutes lying to your children.
In the great classic "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Don Quixote lives in a world of his own imagining. But a funny thing happens when he encounters 'normal' people; they find themselves pretending to see and believe in the things he does; they must enter his world in order to communicate with him. In a way, I suppose, they are 'lying' to him by entering into his fairy tales. But if they stay in the mundane world, they can't relate to him at all.
The world of a child is a mysterious and magical place. The blooming of a rose in the garden is an enchanted event beyond all understanding; the weekly arrival of the great noisy garbage truck is anticipated with the fear that it might not happen and the joyous dread that it will. When my oldest daughter, nearly a year old, was brought out of her crib late at night to see the lights on our Christmas tree for the first time, she whispered, "Wow," an as-yet unknown richness in her tiny vocabulary. She said it a lot that first Christmas, as enchantments she'd never dreamed of appeared all around her.
We adults forget the fairy-tale lace that drapes childhood and screens it from so much of the ugliness in the world. It is our privilege at Christmas to attempt to add a little to the embroidery, with our Saint Nicholas and our hidden generosity. We're clumsy at it, no doubt. We're a little like the people in Don Quixote, pretending we see giants and ladies and noble squires instead of the mundane and everyday. But underneath it all, there's a stirring at our hearts, and I think it's then that I understand, a little, what Our Lord means when He says we have to be like little children to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
In a combox thread below, we're talking about whether or not to do the Santa Claus thing with your kids. Some readers are saying that they celebrate St. Nicholas' feast day on December 6. You might be interested to know that in the Netherlands, that's the day that Dutch kids get their Christmas presents. As far as I know, it's a tradition peculiar to Holland and the Flemish part of Belgium. "Sinterklaas" -- whence "Santa Claus," though Sinterklaas looks like a bishop, not a jolly old elf -- arrives by boat from Spain, accompanied by "Zwarte Pieten" -- Black Petes -- who help him deliver presents to Dutch children.
With the children’s frivolity out of the way, the Dutch observe Christmas as more of a religious holiday – or, given how secular Holland has become, at least observe a more sober festival than the American pageant of consumerism.
We learned the Sinterklaas tradition from Dutch friends, and observe it in our household out of affection for them and their culture. Yet the real Christmas tradition my Dutch friends gave to my family came to me in 1991, when I spent the holiday with the Jeurissen family, in a southern town called Valkenswaard.
Miriam Jeurissen and I had become pen pals as high school students in the 1980s, and I’d gotten accustomed to visiting her and her family whenever I could score a cheap flight. I thought it might be fun to fly in from Louisiana to spend Christmas in Europe that year, and her parents, Arthur and Mieke, welcomed me. I didn’t know what to expect, having never experienced Christmas outside America.
It turned out to be a revelation. The close-knit Jeurissens began Christmas Eve with Mama, Papa and the sisters gathering with family friends to cook. I made a gumbo as my contribution. (Ever tried to find okra in North Brabant? Don’t.) Everybody pitched in to help, as you might expect, and there was much joyous eating and drinking around the table.
And then, when it was time for the family to exchange Christmas gifts, a quietly astonishing thing happened. The Jeurissen tradition was to give presents that each person made, not purchased. One sister read poems that she had written for her siblings. Another presented siblings with hand-sewn clothing. And so forth. Everyone received their gift with obvious gratitude and pleasure.
Just before midnight, we all rose, put on our overcoats and walked down to the town square for mass. Then we all meandered home, in the cold, and dropped sleepily to bed. And that was Christmas.
But from an American perspective, this was astonishingly countercultural. Every year, we all talk in our culture about how important it is to get back to the “real” meaning of Christmas – that is, to put consumerism in its proper place -- but somehow we never do. Yet for once, I had seen what it was like to have a Christmas where the gift-giving had nothing to do with credit cards, commercials or mall-induced hypertension. It was entirely about faith and family. It was also, to me, a minor miracle. O little town of Valkenswaard…
I can’t say whether I saw a manifestation of Dutch culture, or just one family’s lovely tradition. But it made an impression on me, one that came out years later, when I had a family of my own, and found myself struggling to keep the true meaning of Christmas in sight, and to pass it on to my children. It takes on special meaning this Christmas, because Mama Mieke died from cancer earlier this year. She was the happy genius of that household, and the epitome of gezelligheid – that untranslatable Dutch word that conveys a sense of the rightness of the world one experiences in the company of good friends.
The Jeurissens, comfortably middle-class citizens of a prosperous country, could have had the Yuletide blowout common in America. But they – typical Dutch – chose the more modest path. And because of that, the
richness and humanity of that plain Christmas has not been forgotten by an American who tries to pass a similar tradition on to his young family, half a world away.
The Jewish historian Bat Ye'or has written about how invisible to the West are the persecuted Christians in the Islamic world. It has long been my view that American journalists are far more worried about offending Muslims than they are about standing up for human beings who are persecuted because they happen to be Christians. I believe that many US journalists hear "Christians" and think "Falwell" -- imposing their own American experiences and biases on Christian believers around the world. American journalists, in general, are far more worried that somebody in Peoria might look askance at a Muslim wearing a headscarf than they are concerned that Christians are being massacred by Muslims in Indonesia.
Anyway, here's a real-life story I just heard from a friend of mine who's an immigration attorney here in Dallas. I publish his e-mail with his permission:
I represented a Pakistani Christian for asylum successfully, beautiful man, very brave. He belonged to the Protestant church that was hand-grenaded in Islamabad. We were interviewed for a story for national TV for Thanksgiving. At the last minute they told us, our segment had been deleted out of concern by the network about ‘content.’ What content? The production co. said concern about Muslim sensibilities. My client spent hours in my office retelling the story only to be told after the fact (months later) that the network was concerned about sensibilities. Unbelievable.
My anger eventually gave way to sadness that the plight of these brave people was not told. He’s even nervous here. Our contract stated his name could not be used and they would obscure his face. People should know these stories.
If it was for a Thanksgiving show, no doubt they were talking to this persecuted Christian about how grateful he is to live in a country where he has religious freedom, as opposed to Muslim Pakistan. But media elites cannot abide that. Too politically correct.
The person who stole my Diana Krall Christmas CD had better return it right this second, before someone gets hurt. She's my special Christmas elf, and all. Have a heart, willya? Willya?
Have to admit, painfully, that I was in a Starbucks last night and heard them playing the Charlie Brown Christmas CD, a perennial favorite, and I thought ... ugh, this again? Heresy! That's one of the great Christmas albums, and I'm tired of it on the first hearing of the season. Something's wrong with me, I just know it.
Father Wilson sent me "A Celtic Christmas Sojourn" a few years ago, and it's got to be my family's favorite Christmas album. I played the disc a couple of nights ago, and it's just wonderful, wonderful stuff. Never get tired of listening to that one, which always puts me in the mood of that haunting final paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead":
Yes, the newspapers are right: snow is general all over Ireland. It is falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, father westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It is falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lies thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swoons slowly as he hear the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Another Christmas disc I never grow tired of: The Roches' "We Three Kings" Not only is this exquisite Christmas music, but these songs have deeply personal meaning to me and my family, as you'll see if you read this old Touchstone essay of mine, which concludes with us hearing the Roche sisters perform an a cappella Christmas concert in a snowy park near Ground Zero, 2002.
Please share with us in the comboxes your favorite Christmas discs.
Tmatt has the goods on a yummy "clarification" the Episcopal Church has put out to counter the blogstorm that erupted over Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's limousine-liberal condescension towards Catholics and Mormons. Once again we see the vindication of Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe: when a public official inadvertently tells the truth.
Matthew and I pray together for part of the way to school. This morning, I nearly swerved off the road when I heard him say, "Thank you, God, for Santa's birthday coming soon." I think he was just messing with me, though, but he still got swiftly corrected. In any case, it brought to mind the question many observant Christian parents deal with: what to tell the kids about Santa Claus?
I have friends on both sides of the issue. Some don't even get started on the Santa Claus thing, because they don't want to distract their children from the true religious nature of the holiday. I respect that, and admire it. We chose to take our chances with the Santa myth. Our thinking was that we'd rather deal with the temptation for our kids to take Santa more seriously than Christ rather than deprive them of the pleasure of believing in Santa. We work diligently to remind them of what Christmas is really about, and to tell them the story of St. Nicholas. Truth to tell, with the three-year-old at least, the Santa stuff is clearly at the forefront of his mind this time of year. And that does worry me a bit. But I came through a dualist (Santa-and-Jesus) Christmas childhood just fine, and I think as long as the parents work to keep the focus primarily on religion in the home, most people will do okay.
How do you handle the Santa question in your home?
Here's my Dallas Morning News column today about Benedict's trip to Turkey. In it, I talk about the suffering of Christian populations under the Islamic yoke, and how important it is for Eastern and Western Christianity to find as much unity as they can manage now as they try to survive both militant secularism and militant Islam.
UPDATE: Here's a graf from the column:
Benedict has a clearer eye about Islam than his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to abase himself before Muslims for the sake of improved relations and received little for his efforts. This pope is different. He is not prepared to pretend that it is of no matter that in Europe Muslims are free to worship as they please and to build mosques at will, while in Turkey and the Muslim world, Christians are generally not permitted to build churches and face state-sanctioned discrimination. It is better, says Benedict, to speak frankly about the world as it is, rather than about the world Western elites wish we lived in.
On the Right-wing Film Geek blog, Victor spies a particularly obnoxious form of seasonal Christophobia:
CHICAGO (AP) — A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film "The Nativity Story" might offend non-Christians. New Line Cinema, which said it was dropped, had planned to play a loop of the new film on televisions at the event. [snip] An executive vice president with New Line Cinema, Christina Kounelias ... said she finds it hard to believe that non-Christians who attended something called Christkindlmarket would be surprised or offended by the presence of posters, brochures and other advertisements of the movie. "One would assume that if (people) were to go to Christkindlmarket, they'd know it is about Christmas," she said.
Victor points out that this is a classic example of free speech -- a benign form of it, one might add -- being chilled. And why? What sort of thin-skinned cretins are so sensitive that they're offended at being reminded of, you know, Christ at a German Christmas market, for crying out loud?! Here's a suggestion to the Christophobic and their spineless enablers in government bureaucracies: if you're offended by the idea of Christ, don't go to the Christkindlmarkt. For those of us, Christian and non-Christian, who actually enjoy the season, leave us alone. Victor adds, accurately:
Christianity = "controversial"; other religions = "celebrate our diversity."
Got a nice e-mail from a Baptist clergyman in a Dallas suburb. I've edited out a couple of details to protect his privacy:
I wanted to tell you briefly about a crunchy con dilemma I encountered this weekend and the cost that was involved.
This weekend when going with our little girls to find a Christmas tree we noticed an older couple selling trees right by our house. We were compelled by the fact that they slept in their camper in the parking lot for a month every year, sold trees that they bought from a friend and local farmer and brought down from Wisconsin every year. We got out of the car, walked the lot, had a great conversation with the couple (in which my wife invited them to dinner) and then faced some serious sticker shock. The trees were more than double the price of trees three miles down the road at Wal-Mart. Seriously, we were looking to spend $100 for a 7 foot tree. It was there we faced the real decision. Do what I know is right or save 50 bucks?
I never intended to be a crunchy con. I didn’t read your book and think, “Man, I would like to be one of those.” But when faced with choosing small and local over large and industrial, I had to do it. And although I would love to have saved the $50, I found myself feeling as though to leave that lot would be a moral deficiency on my part. I could have done it, but not with a clear conscience. As I had a conversation with this older man about the different kinds of pine, then looked over at my wife who was talking to his wife about her travels from Wisconsin, and watched my daughter run through the trees in a parking lot and say, “Dis one daddy” then I had to make the purchase.
It was worth it – and for some strange reason, I feel like a better person for doing it.
Via Reihan, this thought-provoking column by the conservative Ben Stein, based on a conversation he had with Warren Buffett in which the second-richest man in the world told him that the rich were making out like bandits. Excerpt:
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
It has become such a cliche among conservatives, to resort to the "class warfare" bogeyman whenever someone points out that the rich really are getting a lot richer, while the rest of us are treading water. Stein goes through all the standard conservative arguments meant to quash any talk about tax fairness, then arrives at this point:
People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?
Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?
Crazy Ben Stein! Where'd he get that idea? Doesn't he know that the Republican line is to keep their voters from asking these questions by making discussing class conflict taboo? And to suppress discussion of how big business is doing very well with effectively open borders that are changing our culture in some deleterious ways (that are not going to much affect the neighborhoods where the business-owning class live)by praising free markets uncritically, and suggesting that those who object are really closet racists? And until recently, it was to suppress discussion on the unwisdom of expecting the Iraqi people to be able to govern themselves as liberal democrats by accusing those who said that the Iraqis were unready for democracy of being, yes, closet racists (e.g., "How dare you say that Arabs can't handle democracy!")
And so forth.
We on the political and cultural right need to start talking about this sort of thing. Republican unwillingness to address the unfairness that that raving communist Warren Buffett warned Ben Stein about is just going to elect more Democrats.
Here's Rebecca West, in her 1941 classic "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia," reflecting on the poor inhabitants of a Dalmatian island, and in particular a "heartrending figure" of a despairing woman, sitting on a stone wall.
This was cause enough that Rab should be poor; but there was a further cause which made her poorer still. It is not at all inappropriate that the men and women on these Dalmatian islands should have faces which recall the crucified Christ. The Venetian Republic did not always fight the Turks with arms. For a very long time they contented themselves with taking the edge off the invaders' attack by the payment of immense bribes to the officials and military staff of the occupied territories. The money for these was not supplied by Venice. It was drawn from the people of Dalmatia. After the fish had rotted, some remained sound; after the corn had paid its ten per cent, and the wool and the wine and the oil ahd been haggled down in the Venetian market, some of its price returned to the vender. Of this residue the last ducat was extracted to pay the tribute to the Turks. These people of Dalmatia gave the bread out of their mouths to save us of Western Europe from Islam; and it is ironical that so successfully did they protect us that those among us who would be broad-minded, who will in pursuit of that end stretch their minds till they fall apart in idiocy, would blithely tell us that perhaps the Dalmatians need not have gone to that trouble, that an Islamized West could not have been worse than what we are today. Their folly is certified for what it is by the mere sound of the word "Balkan" with its suggestion of a disorder that defies human virtue and intelligence to accomplish its complete correction. I could confirm that certificate by my own memories: I had only to shut my eyes to smell the dust, the lethargy, the rage and hopelessness of a Macedonian town, once a glory to Europe, that had too long been Turkish. The West has done much that is ill, it is vulgar and superficial and economically sadist; but it has not known that death in life which was suffered by the Christian provinces under the Ottoman Empire. From this the people of Rab had saved me: I should say, are saving me. The woman who sat on the stone wall was in want because the gold which should have been handed down to her had bought my safety from the Turks. Impotent and embarrassed, I stood on the high mountain and looked down on the terraced island where my saviours, small and black as ants, ran here and there, attempting to repair their destiny.
Along with that, even young children are having to deal with peer pressure and other societal influences.
Beyond the drugs, sex and rock'n'roll their boomer and Gen X parents navigated, technology and consumerism have accelerated the pace of life, giving kids easy access to influences that may or may not be parent-approved. Sex, violence and foul language that used to be relegated to late-night viewing and R-rated movies are expected fixtures in everyday TV.
And many tweens model what they see, including common plot lines "where the kids are really running the house, not the dysfunctional parents," says Plante, who in addition to being Zach's dad is a psychology professor at Santa Clara University in California's Silicon Valley.
He sees the results of all these factors in his private practice frequently.
Kids look and dress older. They struggle to process the images of sex, violence and adult humor, even when their parents try to shield them. And sometimes, he says, parents end up encouraging the behavior by failing to set limits - in essence, handing over power to their kids.
"You get this kind of perfect storm of variables that would suggest that, yes, kids are becoming teens at an earlier age," Plante says.
Natalie Wickstrom, a 10-year-old in suburban Atlanta, says girls her age sometimes wear clothes that are "a little inappropriate." She describes how one friend tied her shirt to show her stomach and "liked to dance, like in rap videos." Girls in her class also talk about not only liking but "having relationships" with boys.
"There's no rules, no limitations to what they can do," says Natalie, who's also in fifth grade.
Nope, nothing much wrong with this mainstream culture of ours. Nothing we can't handle. Throw your kids into this piranha tank, just to prove that you're no elitist, that you're no better than anybody else.
Right.
The center is not holding, and I detect no general will to resist the decline. For some of us parents, that means we must seek out alternatives, no matter what anybody else says. As I've said before, there comes a time when it's foolish to stand in the yard and tell people it's going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, so they'd better make ready for it. At some point, you've got to get onto the ark ... or drown.
It's not online, but here, from the print edition of today's Dallas Morning News, is my short interview with Army 1st Lt. Daniel Ebarb, to whom I spoke last week, and for whom I'd asked y'all to pray when news came a few weeks back that he'd been shot by a sniper on patrol in Iraq. When I talked to him by phone, he had not the slightest trace of self-pity in his voice. None. Wherever you stand on the war, you have to admire the awesome physical and moral courage of this young man.
Where and how are you spending Thanksgiving weekend?
I will be in Houston for Thanksgiving, at a spinal rehabilitation specialty clinic at the VA Hospital. I was deployed to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader with the 1st Cavalry Division, when I was shot in the neck by a sniper. The resulting wounds from the bullet have caused me to be completely paralyzed from the chest down. My wife and the majority of my family are going to drive to Houston from our home in Louisiana to be with me for Thanksgiving. It won't matter that we're not at home; everyone is just extremely excited to be together as a family for the holiday.
What are you thankful for this year?
This year I am most thankful for being able to spend the holiday with my family. From the moment that I realized that I would survive getting shot, all the way until now, I've been so thankful to be alive and to have the ability to come home. Physical health has taken a back seat to just being alive this year.
The support for my health and my family's welfare has been absolutely overwhelming and very humbling. It's been amazing how an event like this has brought people together from all over the country and world. The support that's been shown for me as a wounded soldier is unbelievable. I'm thankful that I was a part of what our country is doing in Iraq, and hope that all the deployed soldiers get a chance to see the love and support that our country has for them as well.
You married in August, deployed in October, and came home paralyzed weeks later. Explain "thankful" in that context.
I believe in the mission. I actually got to see how our military was able to help hte Iraqis. They weren't able to do it on their own, and we were able to give them a sense of confidence. I'm proud that I was able to contribute to what our country was doing for them.
Via Ross, you must read this long essay by Mark Danner, about the Iraq situation. It is the most lucid and straightforward presentation of how we got into this miss, and how difficult it will be to get out of it, that I've read anywhere. It focuses on how the President and all his men deliberately deceived themselves about what we'd likely face in Iraq, because they were determined to fight the war they wanted to fight, instead of deal with the world as it is. It's a story of blindness, of hubris, and of catastrophe. Danner sets up his piece by recalling being in Anbar province in October 2005, just before the country voted on the constitution. He was in the company of a smart, hardworking young US diplomat, who assured him that the Sunnis were going to vote "yes." Here's Danner:
I took the young diplomat's words as an invaluable bit of inside wisdom from the American who knew this ground better than any other, and I kept them in mind a few hours later as I traveled from polling place to polling place in that city of rubble, listening as the Fallujans told me of their anger at the Americans and the "Iranians" (as they called the leading Shiite politicians) and of their hatred for the constitution that they believed was meant to divide and thus destroy Iraq. I pondered the diplomat's words that evening, when I realized that in a long day of interviews I'd not met a single Iraqi who would admit to voting for the constitution. And I thought of his words again several days later when it was confirmed that in Anbar province—where the most knowledgeable, experienced, indefatigable American had confided to me what he had plainly ardently believed, that on the critical vote on the constitution "a great many people would vote yes"—that in Anbar ninety-seven out of every hundred Iraqis who voted had voted no. With all his contacts and commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on the most basic and critical issue of politics on the ground he had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.
And we go from there, following the motif set by 98-year-old George F. Kennan's line abotu the nature of war, before the Iraq hostilities started: "You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end." Here's Danner again:
Anyone wanting to answer the question of "how we began" in Iraq has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.
A mere summary can't do justice to the power of this review essay. I found myself at several points having to put it down (I printed it out -- it's 28 printed pages) to absorb the skull-cracking, ideologically-driven incompetence of the president and his team. As I was reading it, CNN was reporting on yesterday's horrific events in Baghdad, and on widespread speculation that the country was at a tipping point into all-out civil war, with all those people powerless before death squads and militias who burst into their homes and kidnap them and chop their heads off or drill into their brains, or just kill them with car bombs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer, the whole lot -- stained with infamy, forever. Danner again, on the next act in this gruesome drama:
We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration's "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the pr
oduct of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity. Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope—in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.
Thankful for Nature, that most ruthless of aristocrats in her bell curve of talent and in its trickle-down blessings to even the humblest among us; for the First Amendment and all those who exercise it fearlessly on behalf of the search for truth; for a country whose greatest strength and bulwark against its enemies is its boundless capacity for self-criticism, constructive dissent and moral renewal, and an allied homegrown literary tradition, from Poe and Whitman and Melville and Hawthorne and Twain to H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock and Wendell Berry, second to none; for jazz, pop, blues, country, R&B, folk and rock music, from Stephen Foster, and George Gershwin to Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Nick Lowe, XTC and Eva Cassidy; for The Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, for Greta Garbo in Queen Christina and sweet Janet Gaynor in Sunrise; for those redemptive saints of television Red Skelton, Fred Rogers and Brian Lamb, and such programs as Pennies from Heaven, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Flambards and The Glittering Prizes; for The Times Literary Supplement of London and The Columbia Encyclopedia; for Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour on XM satellite radio, and XM's 1940s and folk channels; for hot sauce and for canned mackerel; for Shetland sheepdogs; for Polar Orange Dry soda; for blazing saunas on The Big Lake They Call Gitche Gumee; for having been born in a great place at a great time I'd not trade for any other; and for several dozen people without whom all of the above would be only a fraction as sweet.
Reader Harvey Lacey, on same:
Yesterday in frustration because of traffic in Dallas I turned on the radio in the truck. I usually travel without the radio interupting. I like being alone with my thoughts.
If you were there you understand. There are moments so special that you need to find the perfect mood to enjoy. Then there are moments so special they create the perfect mood all on their own.
This was one of the latter.
This afternoon we had a wonderful dinner in the middle of a great conversation. I love conversing with Mildred, my ninety two year old galfriend. What makes it better is my wife loves it even more.
Johnny's ninety four now, a little past a little senile plus he'd got that touch of a hostile disposition that seems to come with being hard of hearing. When we cut the german chocolate pecan pie with it's homemade crust plus he turned down even a little piece. After a little prodding he agreed to try an itty bitty piece. He ate it all and then grinned like a kid caught with a hand in the cookie jar.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only old codger affected in a positive way by my wife's excellent cooking.
The Mighty Favog -- who invented that great snotty-tot Aunt Kate poster, as it turns out! -- has a great post up slapping around the earnest believers who think that the way to attract people to Christianity is by making the faith, er, "cool." Any critique of faddish trends in contemporary worship that commences by quoting lines from "King of the Hill" is definitely on the right track:
HANK: Can't you see you're not making Christianity better, you're just making rock 'n' roll worse.
PASTOR K: You people are all alike. You look at us and think we're freaks. Come on, even Jesus had long hair.
Go to the Anglican Web Elves site and scroll down to see their hilarious new ECUSA recruiting poster. Oh me oh my, but that NYT interview is going to haunt Bp. Jefforts Schori for a very long time.
Laymen who don't understand how our media priesthood works often wonder why certain figures -- the same old same olds --keep turning up in stories, quoted as experts. There are four reasons, any of which may be present, alone or in combination, in a given moment:
1. Outright bias. The reporter has an agenda, and calls the expert he knows will give him the quote he wants to spin the story a certain way. If, for example, you want to make Evangelicals come across in a certain way, you will call Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, even though their influence on the broad swath of Evangelicalism has long been waning.
2. Laziness, or Expedience. No reporter can be expert in everything, and all reporters work under strict deadlines. Lots of times they'll do a Google or a Nexis search to see which expert in which given field has been previously cited by reporters. "Norman Ornstein" turns up a lot. He's an American Enterprise Institute scholar who knows a lot about Washington politics. Nothing wrong with his advice, but one reason he's so widely quoted is ... because he's been so widely quoted.
3. Ignorance. This is closely related to No. 2. A reporter who means well, and who has the time to research a story, may be unaware of the nuances of a particular field, might not understand that the favored expert is not really expert. She's going on past reputation as a guide to present expertise. The difference between this and No. 2 is that she really may be trying to do the best job she can, and not cut corners, but her ignorance of the subject area leads her to fall back on the usual suspects, thinking she's gone to the leading expert.
4. Media-friendly sources. Nothing makes a source rise to the "must-call" list of a reporter faster than the source's willingness to take the reporter's call, or to call him back as soon as possible. Again, it's a deadline thing. A lot of the experts you see quoted so often build up their reputation with the media by being helpful and accomodating. It's hard to express to those not in the business how helpful that is to a reporter on deadline. (This is why it's good to remember that if a reporter calls you for a quote, if you intend to speak to the reporter at all, call her back as soon as you can; she's got a story to file, and if you don't get back to her promptly, she'll go to somebody else who will.)
Now, what prompted this little tutorial was a story sent to me just now by a Catholic friend irritated by the syndicated Ask Amy advice column today. A couple wrote to Amy saying that their 24-year-old daughter is in love with a 50-year-old Catholic priest, and this upsets them. They threatened to call the bishop, but she says it's none of their business, and besides, given that she works at the diocesan office, she could get fired. The couple wanted Amy's advice.
Amy says she's not a Catholic, so she called -- you knew this was coming -- Father Richard McBrien of Notre Dame to seek his advice. Every media-savvy orthodox Catholic knows that Father McBrien is the spokesman for a certain kind of liberal American Catholicism that has grown very long in the tooth, and that's dwindling on the vine. But he is a media darling, and turns up constantly in the press. No media-savvy orthodox Catholic -- especially those who are more intimately familiar with the situation on the ground at Notre Dame -- will be the least surprised by Fr. McBrien's advice:
McBrien says, "The daughter is an adult and needs to work this out on her own. However, the parents have every right to offer their advice. But they should do nothing beyond that. We may be dealing here with irresponsible behavior but surely not criminal behavior."
Father McBrien adds, "I am not defending the priest, and I agree that it is probably a dead-end relation
ship. If the priest is her superior, then this relationship is also unethical. This young woman needs to talk with a professional counselor who could help her to work this thing out in her own mind. The parents, however, lack the necessary objectivity, even if their concerns are valid and they are only looking out for her well-being."
Typical. Turns out that this non-Catholic advice columnist actually disagrees with the priest, and gives better counsel than Father McBrien! My Catholic friend writes, correctly, that reporters need to update their Rolodexes and get beyond the Quotable Dick McBrien. Too true! Catholics (and others) can help by being available to reporters when news breaks about an issue having to do with their own communion (you might even call or e-mail your local religion reporter to offer a quote if needed, but don't be pushy), and even by building contacts with reporters at every opportunity. It's true that there is a bias against orthodox religion in the news media, but most reporters are probably not aware of their bias, and shouldn't be seen from the get-go as adversarial. They might honestly not understand the ins and outs of denominational politics. It helps if you can educate them without coming across as hostile or angry. Also, it would help too if you'd e-mail to the reporter or reporters who cover issues relating to religion a list of contacts not likely on their Rolodex, with a short explanation of why that source should be there. Again, good reporters aren't trying to be biased, and if you can do this without coming across as an axe-grinder, they'll be grateful for the chance to expand their source list.
But beware: if the new source refuses the reporter's first phone call, or doesn't call back, that steeply reduces that chance that he'll have a second opportunity. Not out of meanness or bias, but just because reporters work under deadlines, and they've got to be able to get information quickly.
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who was recently on "Jeopardy," made a mild crack about spelling "potato," which mildly cheesed off my friend John J. Miller at The Corner:
Who Is Margaret Spellings? [John J. Miller]
A secretary of education who thinks it's cute to mock the intelligence of a conservative former vice president. (Please answer in the form of a question.)
Posted at 6:12 AM
Conservatives are not allowed to make fun of conservatives without getting a harrumph and a rap on the knuckles? What is this, the Conservintern?
Well, it's going to be a lovely Thanksgiving around here. Both the boys have a stomach virus, which means ... well, I'm not going to be gross, but you know what that means. I'm home from work today taking care of them, having sent Julie and the baby to her mom's house in (probably vain) hope that they haven't yet been exposed, and can dodge this bullet. Boys will be boys, no matter what: they were both up by 7:05, and I'd broken up two fights by 7:15.
It's going to be a long day.
I doubt we'll go over the river and through the southern suburbs to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving, if this keeps up. But dammit, I'm going to cook anyway. I regret that I won't be able to leave the house to get the ingredients to make Charlotte Allen's chipotle sweet potatoes, the recipe for which she entered onto the Thanksgiving recipe thread below. What follows is one of my favorite recipes, for cornbread dressing, adapted from Christopher Kimball's indispensable "Cook's Bible: The Best of American Home Cooking." Before I do, let me invite you to share your favorite Thanksgiving memories, either funny or poignant, in the comboxes below. And also, again, your favorite Thanksgiving recipes.
My favorite Thanksgiving memory is not a firm memory of an event, but a sense of warmth and comfort and what the Dutch call gezelligheid -- an untranslatable word conveying a sense of intense coziness and "all's right with the world" that you experience in the company of family and dear friends. It all has to do with Nana, my dad's mother, who used to host Thanksgiving for our extended family in her little cottage, until she died in 1976, when I was nine years old. I remember what an occasion this was for me. Thanksgiving morning would start with anticipation of the Macy's Thanksgiving parade on TV. I recall standing barefoot in my pajamas on the green naugahyde couch in Mom and Dad's living room, watching the colorful floats going by, thinking it was just the coolest thing. Around noon, we'd drive over to Nana's house. Thinking back on it as an adult, it's astonishing to me that we fit our extended family in that little 1930s wooden cabin, but we did. Nana was a wonderful country cook. The house smelled like turkey, of course, but also black-eyed peas, greens and pumpkin pie. She had a couple of turkey figures made from pine cones sitting on the dining table; I took them as Thanksgiving totems, and associated them with my love for Nana and all she meant to our family. The house was jammed with people, and while I don't recall anything specific, I do remember the feeling of security, of abundance, of being loved -- and how Nana was at the center of it all. We had no other meals like that in our family -- I mean, with all the relatives -- in the year, so this really was the time of year when we all came together as one, for sure. Nana was the keystone of the family, and when she died, nothing was ever the same again. We all kind of drifted away -- nothing hostile, really, just a unity that was lost when she wasn't there anymore, and we never got it back. But that ideal feeling, that gezelligheid, is something I always search for during the holidays. Julie teases me about my sometimes ridiculous need to create a sense of occasion, to entertain, to be hospitable, to cook and open bottles of wine and get people to talking. I think it must all go back to a desire to recreate Nana's Thanksgiving table.
Anyway, here's the dressing you really need to make for Thanksgiving. And put Chris Kimball's cookbook on your Christmas list:
TOASTED CORNBREAD-PECAN STUFFING
6 cups coarsely crumbled cornbread 3/4 cup pecans 1/4 pound bacon, cut into 1/2 in. pieces 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp olive oil 2 cups finely chopped onions 3/4 cup finely chopped celery 1 tbsp fresh
thyme leaves or 1 tsp dried 1 tbsp minced fresh sage or 1 tsp dried Salt and pepper to taste 3 tbsp Bourbon 1 cup chicken stock 1/2 cup minced flat-leaf parsley
1. Heat oven to 350 F. Spread crumbled cornbread onto a baking sheet. Coarsely chop pecans and add to cornbread. Toast in oven for 25-30 minutes or until cornbread is golden, tossing the crumbs once or twice during toasting. Cool and place in a large mixing bowl.
2. Cook bacon over medium-high heat in a saute' pan or skillet. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon to bowl with cornbread and pour off all but 1 tbsp drippings. Add butter and olive oil to skillet and when butter has melted add onion and saute for 5 minutes over medium heat. Add celery and saute' another 3 minutes. Stir in thyme and sage and salt and pepper to taste. Add to cornbread mixture.
3. Turn up heat under saute pan and add Bourbon. Stir vigorously for 2 minutes with a wooden spoon, scraping the bottom onf the pan. Add chicken stock, cook for 1 minute, and add mixture to bowl. Add parsley to bowl and adjust seasonings. Spoon into serving dish. -- This makes about 10 cups of dressing, but trust me, you'd do well to double the recipe. People devour this stuff. It was kind of odd to me that the dressing does not go back in the oven, but it doesn't, it's all cooked and done.
News came late today of the death in Fairfax, Virginia, of Father George Calciu, an Orthodox priest and immigrant from Romania. He served many years in communist prison there for his faith. My friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, whose spiritual child he was, has told me for years about the astonishing goodness of this gentle man, who bore suffering for the sake of Christ that few of us will ever have to. And now he has gone into eternity. Frederica e-mailed this Father George quote in his memory:
"What does the priesthood mean? It means to be an enduring witness to human suffering and to take it upon your own shoulders. To be the one who warms the leper at his own breast, the one who gives life to the miserable through the breath from his own mouth. To be a strong comfort to every unfortunate one, even when you yourself are overwhelmed with weakness. To be a ray of shining light to unhappy hearts when your own eyes long ago ceased to see any light. To carry mountains of others’ sufferings on your shoulders, while your own being screams out with the weight of its own suffering. Your flesh will rebel and say,‘This heroism is absurd, impossible! Where is such a man, where is the priest you describe so that I may put my own suffering on his shoulders?’ Yes,nevertheless, he does exist! From time to time there awakens within us thepriest of Christ who, like the Good Samaritan, will kneel down by the side of theman fallen among thieves and, putting him upon his own donkey, will bring him to the Church of Christ for healing. And he will forget himself and comfort you, O man of suffering."
UPDATE: Father George was in communist prison with Pastor Richard Wurmbrand. Read Father George's testimony, given after he was released by Ceaucescu and sent to the US, in which he talks about the most meaningful Eucharist he ever celebrated. And read Frederica's story about how Father George suffered communist brainwashing techniques, but came through. And here is a photo of Father George, with Frederica and members of her family. Look at the joy on his face. The joy, after all he saw and lived.
I am, however, consistently puzzled by the resistance, whether it's among my friends and neighbors or the Sam Harrises of the world, to any consideration of the notion that religious experience might be like most other widespread human experiences - which is to say, a response to something that's actually out there.
I think 95 percent of it can be easily explained: people don't really want to think that God might exist, because if He does, then He might expect something of them. To get right to the point, it might mean that they can't conduct their sex lives exactly as they wish.
For me, when I got to the point of finally accepting religious faith, I could no longer avoid the fact that all my vaporous philosophizing and high-falutin' doubt was almost completely dishonest, and in fact an elaborate rationalization for the fact that I didn't want to believe God existed, because I didn't want any limits placed on my sexual freedom.
I don't think this is true for some people, but I believe -- though I can't prove it -- that it explains the vehemency of most who want to quash any sense of wonder or speculation about religious experiences. They just don't want to hear it, because it troubles their sleep. If God exists, and we aren't Him, well then...
Here's a painful story about a Polish high school exchange student who spent a hellish few months living with a fundamentalist Christian host family in North Carolina. They sound like a bunch of cultists. Of course this story got a lot of reaction when it appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel, no doubt because it confirms every obnoxious European stereotype about American Christianity.
Nevertheless, the poor kid's story is troubling, in part because of what it reveals about a kind of Christianity. We find out that the boy learned that the only real reason for them inviting him into their family was to prepare him to plant a fundamentalist church in his native Poland upon his return. In other words, the family never saw him as a person in his own right (rite?), but as merely an instrument. He only existed insofar as he could be useful to what this family considered its mission.
This reminded me of something a friend of mine, who was a devout Evangelical in college, told me about her experience. She said that she was often love-bombed by Christian groups who told her how much God loved her and had a wonderful plan for her life ... but when she would join the fellowship, suddenly that stopped, and she was loaded down with work while the group's hardcore enthusiasts ran off to love-bomb other potential recruits. Pretty soon it became clear to her that the mentality behind at least some of these groups was anti-human, in that they were not interested in people except insofar as those people could be recruited and made part of the mission. (Similarly, you can see this mentality at work in the response of some of the Catholic bishops to the scandal: sacrifice justice for individual victims and their families for the sake of the Mission, as they defined it).
I suppose that's a constant temptation for any "missionary" group, whether devoted to a religious mission, a political mission, or what have you. But it's a temptation that religious people should be very careful to avoid.
The Dallas Morning News has been running this week an excellent series about Cactus, Texas, a wretched little town in the Panhandle. The town is about 75 percent illegal immigrant, and the only reason to move there is to work in the large meat processing facility. Crime is rampant -- robbery, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, among other things -- and the rule of law is a nice idea there. If we rounded up and shipped out all the illegals, the town would die in an instant. It is very, very difficult to imagine Americans who would be willing to move to this ugly town in the middle of nowhere to work in a bone-crushingly hard job for the kinds of wages that illegals are willing to accept. It's hard to imagine Americans being willing to put up with the abuse of workers that the illegals have to endure -- check out today's story for details -- because as illegals, they are in no position to complain.
A Baptist pastor in Cactus who works among the migrants says that these people are worked like "animals." I believe it. I am down on industry for the way it breaks the law to get cheap labor, and then exploits these human beings. If the slaughterhouses paid the kinds of wages necessary to entice American workers to do this kind of nasty, backbreaking labor, they'd have to jack up the price of meat. And that's something the American people will not tolerate. Therefore, we are complicit in the lawbreaking and exploitation. As a University of Kansas anthropology professor who studied the situation in slaughterhouses told my newspaper today, "The general public, as long as their food is cheap, as long as it's safe, as long as the workers aren't really that much like them, they can look the other way."
Fascinating report in the Times today on a Faith/Science conference, which ended up like ... well, here's what the story says:
Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.
Reading this report as a believing Christian interested in and open to science, as well as one who winces over the unreasonable hostility that many believers have toward science, I was taken aback by the blind rage these men of science have toward faith -- which ultimately comes off as blind rage toward a humanity too intellectually puny to recognize their sole authority. Given the paramount role science plays in our technologically-driven culture today, this is about as scary to me as hearing men of the Church denounce scientists in the same way back in the day when religion was paramount. These guys are hardcore, militant fundamentalists:
I mean, get this, from Stephen Weinberg, the University of Texas scientist:
“Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
Turn that around: "Anything that we theologians can do to weaken the hold of science should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization."
There were voices of moderation:
“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”
“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”
Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.
“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”
They got flamed by Richard Dawkins, who is as arrogant as the day is long:
“I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”
Another scientist slammed the anti-faith pile-on:
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. [Sam] Harris [the atheist writer] and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and
Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”
The Western world has far more to fear today from evangelical Scientism than it does from religion. Lawrence Krauss, the anti-creationist physicist, spoke wisdom when he said at this conference: “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God. We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”
UPDATE: I was thinking later this morning that I could easily see Dawkins and Weinberg merrily pushing the plunger on the detonator and blowing the Bamiyan Buddhas to kingdom come. Just like the Taliban did.
"Crunchy Cons" readers will remember the Robert Hutchins family from the food chapter. They're the fundamentalist Christian family -- 12 kids! -- raising livestock organically, and home-churching. Great, great people. On the DallasNews.com site, there's a video report about their turkey-raising operation. If you want to see who they are and what they do, check it out by going to the site and clicking on the video column on the right-hand column.
Outgoing Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney is calling on the State Supreme Court to put an amendment to ban gay marriage on the state ballot if the legislature doesn't do so when it reconvenes in January. The legislature has basically killed the idea. Romney said:
"A decision not to vote is a decision to usurp the Constitution, to abandon democracy and substitute a form of what this nation's founders called tyranny, that is, the imposition of the will of those in power, on the people," Romney said earlier. "The issue now before us is not whether same-sex couples should marry. The issue before us today is whether 109 legislators will follow the Constitution."
This is overblown. I share Romney's view on gay marriage, and his anger at the courts for making such a huge decision unilaterally, and forcing it on society. That said, the legislature's decision not to put the question to a vote of the people, while deeply regrettable, is hardly "tyranny," and I don't even see why it usurps the Constitution. If the people want to vote on this amendment, what's stopping them from throwing out the legislators who won't let them? Like I said, I'm basically on Romney's side philosophically, but this strikes me as all about bolstering his image with religious and social conservatives in advance of his 2008 presidential campaign, and not about actually affecting policy in Massachusetts.
After all, the Republican-controlled US Senate refused to put the gay marriage amendment question to a vote of the people also. Are they guilty of "tyranny," of disdaining the Constitution? Or is it only tyranny when state legislators in Democrat-controlled Massachusetts do it?
UPDATE: A reader below says that this is not the same thing as the US Senate situation. The Massachusetts constitution, he says, requires the legislature to vote on the issue. If that's true, then the legislature letting it die really is cowardly. They ought to all declare a position, and defend it. If these legislators don't think the people should vote on an amendment banning gay marriage, then they should make the argument why not, and stand by it. To let it die without voting one way or another is cowardly.
Ross Douthat and Spencer Ackerman are two of my favorite writers, but I couldn't watch this snoozy "diavlog" for more than a couple of minutes. But that's not why I write. I write because they're both young guys with beards. Not goatees (which are properly called Van Dykes, but whatever), but actual beards. Like your faithful servant. The New York Times noted not long ago that beards are the thing for au courant men to wear. Excerpt:
On city streets, too, trends in scruff have reached new levels of unruliness, a backlash, some beard enthusiasts say, against the heightened grooming expectations that were unleashed with the rise of metrosexuality as a cultural trend. Men both straight and gay, it appears, want to feel rough and manly.
Or, ahem, we just hate to shave. Be that as it may, is it not crystal-clear that you can tell a man of vision, taste and wisdom by his acceptance of facial hair? Is not the denial of facial hair, or its limiting to mustaches, evidence of the "contraceptive mentality" applied to matters of masculine grooming and hirsutitude? (Stop that snickering. You should hear Father Joseph Wilson's airtight case for why decaffeinated coffee is immoral; it violates Humanae Vitae by frustrating the natural purpose of the bean. Ingenious!)
Another proof of the superiority of beards: Hitler didn't have one. I mean, really, what else do you need to know?
I was in a video store over the weekend, and what caught my eye was a new copy of "Civilisation", the famous 1969 BBC survey of the Western cultural, artistic and intellectual tradition conducted by Sir Kenneth Clark. I'd heard so much about the series over the years, and how it was considered a real landmark in cultural programming. I took out the first four-hour disc for a look. Unfortunately, I didn't get to finish the whole thing, owing in part to a throw-uppy kid who needed a lot of attention, but I found it uncommonly engaging, in no small part because of the eccentric but charming personality of its host, Sir Kenneth. Here are a few gleanings from the first three episodes of the series:
1. Clark says you can tell the character of an epoch by the way the human face is portrayed. At one point in the program, he admires kings and queens sculpted above the west portal of the 12th century cathedral at Chartres. He suggests that the quality of the faces of those figures depict "a new stage in the ascent of western man? Indeed I believe that the refinement, the look of selfless detachment and the spirituality of these heads is something entirely new in art. Beside them the gods and heroes of ancient Greece look arrogant, soulless and even slightly brutal. I fancy that the faces which look out on us from the past are the surest indicator of an epoch...good faces evoke good artists — and conversely a decline of portraiture means a decline of the face, a theory which can now be illustrated by the photographs in the daily papers. The faces on the west portal of Chartres are among the most sincere and, in a true sense, the most aristocratic that Western Europe has ever produced."
What does the state of portraiture say about our own epoch? What about the hard, cold, shrunken faces of fashion photography? It's frightening to think of it.
2. The influential Abbot Suger of St-Denis, Sir Kenneth says, was the first Western ecclesiastic to teach that man can encounter the Divine through the experience of sensual beauty, a principle that led to the creation of the glorious beauty of Western churches in the High Middle Ages and beyond.
3. Sir Kenneth says that prior to the 12th century, the Virgin was a minor figure in Western art, but during that time, she became a central figure. This happened at the same time the cult of chivalry came into being. He suspects that high reverence for the Virgin came into the West from Byzantium. Interestingly as well, he said the Crucified Christ wasn't a common image in Western art and devotional imagery until the Middle Ages.
4. The difference between "culture" and "civilization" includes permanence. The Vikings, for example, had a quite distinct culture, but because they were nomadic, they never established a civilization. Given how fast our civilization changes, owing partly to technology, it makes one wonder about the permanence of any civilization in the current age.
5. Sir Kenneth begins the programs by visiting Roman ruins, and saying that Roman civilization yielded in large part because of boredom, because it was exhausted. Boredom is something you find as an attribute in many wealthy societies. Sir Kenneth says (remember, he said these things in the late 1960s) that he's acquainted with people who say that whatever else you might say about barbarism, at least it's exciting. Sir Kenneth replies that the overwhelming and inescapable dullness of true barbarism is incomprehensible to modern Westerners.
It is impossible, at least for me, to listen to Sir Kenneth talk about how Rome fell from the exhaustion if its culture, and not to think of contemporary Europe.
6. Sir Kenneth believes you can also determine what a civilization of a particular era really cares about, because it accepts internationalism without protest. He made this remark while contemplating that durin
g the transition from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages, English Christians had foreign-born bishops, and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that. Religion was so important that it didn't much matter to Christians that their bishops came from afar.
By that standard, Sir Kenneth said, it's clear that our age primarily cares for Science. (And, I would add in this post-1960s globalization era, Business.)
Comprehensive -- that's today's euphemism for "as eager as possible to drive this sucker off the cliff with the windows down and horn blaring." Here is is used by Presiding Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, in an Q&A interview with the NYT Magazine:
Your critics see you as an unrepentant liberal who supports the ordination of gay bishops. Are you trying to bolster the religious left?
No. We’re not about being either left or right. We’re about being comprehensive.
Woo! Madame is even more enjoyable here:
How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?L
About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.
Translation: We Episcopalians are too smart and care too much about the planet to have all those kids, unlike those troglodytic Catholics and Mormons.
They may be dying on the vine, but at least they'll go out thinking well of themselves. Since there's apparently no hope of stopping the ongoing suicide of the Episcopal Church, I think I'll probably have to stop worrying about it on behalf of the good and long-suffering Episcopalian friends I have, and learn to enjoy this kind of thing. You really can't make comic characters like Bishop Schori up.
Also in today's NYT Book Review, Books and Culture editor John Wilson writes about how Evangelicals have become the all-purpose bogeymen in our fiction and non-fiction -- even as the authors of such intolerant hysteria show little understanding about who Evangelicals really are -- and particularly how diverse they can be. Excerpt:
Ever since Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority began making headlines in the 1980s, it has served the purposes of certain conservative activists and their ideological foes to exaggerate the influence they wield among evangelical Christians. In fact, it is both a strength and a weakness of evangelicalism that the “movement” lacks a center. Yes, a significant majority of evangelicals voted for George W. Bush. Big deal. At the moment, it appears unlikely that a Republican of any stripe will win the White House in 2008, though the Democrats may yet find a way to squander their advantage. So much for theocracy.
If many commentators give a false impression of evangelical unity, they also underestimate the fluidity of religious identities. My wife and I have four children, all of them raised in an evangelical setting. The two oldest, ages 36 and 28, stopped going to church when they were about 16. We pray that they will return. Our third child — after graduation from Graham’s alma mater, the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois — converted to Catholicism along with her husband, also a Wheaton grad, who was home-schooled in a self-described fundamentalist family in Texas.
If you have raised your offspring to be freethinkers before sending them away to college, you may be horrified to learn that one of them has fallen in with Christians on campus and is lustily singing praise choruses. You may have an evangelical at your table come Thanksgiving. (Your mail carrier may be one of Them already.) Or you may have grown up in a secular Jewish family, not in the least observant, only to find yourself drawn into one of the flourishing Jewish renewal movements when you begin to raise your own children.
Many years ago, when I was teaching English at a large state university, I sat through part of a faculty debate on the problem posed by evangelical groups who were “proselytizing.” These professors, you understand, were fully committed to free speech — they’d swear to it, so help me Mario Savio — but they were concerned about the vulnerability of impressionable young minds to the seductive wiles of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other such evangelical organizations.
...The university was a marketplace of ideas. Wherever I turned, someone was trying to persuade me to do something. A young woman in a fetching tank top wanted me to join the army of the credit-card indebted. (I had already enlisted and re-upped, foolishly, at great eventual cost before I was discharged.) A couple of beefy guys wanted me to drink beer and do whatever else fraternity guys do. But some ideas are more threatening than others. So the evangelicals were a problem.
Today's NYT Book Review carries a longish review of "I, Goldstein," the new memoir by the infamous pornographer, Al Goldstein. Reading these lines:
Goldstein, in addition to being a porn king, made an art of self-loathing. It pervades “I, Goldstein” and was his most driving and destructive force. Despite his aggressively funny writing style, Goldstein doubted he was truly intelligent. A self-described “bed-wetting stutterer from Brooklyn” and a punching bag for neighborhood toughs, he feared he would become a milquetoast like his father, a photojournalist who exhibited courage in World War II, working alongside the likes of Ernie Pyle, but addressed elevator operators as “sir.” (He later toiled in Screw’s mailroom.) Goldstein, forever self-conscious about his weight, compensated by making voraciousness the cornerstone of his identity. He describes, touchingly, how as a teenager he was treated by a diet doctor — with whom it turned out his mother was having an affair, because “my father was so inadequate.” Thus he entered manhood primed to defy all who crossed him, and he fulfilled this wish, metaphorically flushing hypocrites and incompetents from President Nixon to his auto mechanic in a ceremonial toilet bowl.
Above all, Goldstein really wanted to be somebody.
...brought to mind my brief personal acquaintance with the man. It was 10 years ago, when "The People vs. Larry Flynt" was in theaters. I was a film critic for the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, and Al Goldstein was a local resident (he owned a mansion there). We decided to profile him -- our own local outlaw pornographer. I interviewed him by telephone, and met with Goldstein twice in the course of writing the piece. I visited the Manhattan offices of his (now-defunct) magazine Screw, and later met him and his then-wife for dinner at Elaine's, and on a second occasion he invited me and a friend to one of his regular Sunday brunches (he'd rent out the room of a restaurant, and fill the place with his buddies). I had to look at copies of Screw for research, and it was probably the most repulsive, degrading thing I've ever seen. It was utterly despicable, and without the least redeeming merit. Yet I was genuinely startled by how much I pitied Goldstein -- I mean, really pitied him, not in a sneering, condescending way. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was such a black hole of raw emotional need. Nor have I ever met anyone who so plainly despised himself -- or in whom self-loathing manifested itself so strangely. When he talked about his son, Jordan (that he would give his son that kind of name tells us a lot), doing well at Georgetown, he got tears in his eyes. He was, as I recall, estranged from his son at the time, and if memory serves, felt acutely that his boy was ashamed of his old man. And Goldstein thought the boy should be ashamed of him ... and yet he loved that kid ferociously. What a sad, complicated man. And incapable of learning a thing: this 2004 Page Six item finds the elderly Goldstein, despised by his son (who since graduated from Harvard Law), living in a homeless shelter, receiving charity from bums. Still, he tells Page Six: "People ask me would I trade it, if I knew 35 years ago what would happen to me? I wouldn't. It's been a fair trade. I had the best women, the best wine and the best cigars."
There was no question, of course, that he was (and perhaps still is) a malicious pig. But to be around him is to see that the true object of his malice is himself. His entire life's work is an elaborate pageant of self-torment. I went into this assignment with extreme distaste, expecting to confront a two-bit monster, but found ... well, yes, that, but something else too. Al Goldstein's story is not
yet done. Who knows what is in his future? Peace, I hope; underneath all that fat and filth and spite is a human being. A human being deformed by evil and the absence of love, but a human being created for something else (hmm, perhaps not unlike...). I mean, I'm not one of those sentimental people who looks at bad men and imagines a pitiable, cringing creature underneath it all. But in Goldstein's case, I have to admit it was pretty hard for me to conclude otherwise.
Two other things came to mind: 1) Goldstein told me he got started on his path when his uncle took him as a teenager to a prostitute, to initiate him into manhood; 2) when my pal Lebowitz and I went to Goldstein's brunch, we met the proprietor of the Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada, who offered to comp us as Friends of Al if we ever made it out West. When we told our girlfriends about this, they were not amused.
Infanticide, alas, has become a respectable notion, at least among some elite opinion makers. History shows that this is how baby killing begins — by convincing ourselves that there is such a thing as a human life not worth living, and hence, not worth protecting. By calling for a serious debate about infanticide, the [Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists] has badly subverted the foundational moral principle that each and every human being has equal moral value simply and merely because he or she is human.
When referring to the Holocaust, someone says "Never again," they're lying -- probably to themselves, but it's still a lie.
"I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person." -- Milton Friedman, 2002.
I've recently come across your "Crunchy Con Manifesto." It was with great interest that I read your nine tenets, and I shared them with my friends and acquaintances who are as interested in the intersection of politics, culture and faith as I am.
I should let you know here that I consider myself, for the lack of a better political label, a liberal. As a religious person, I have problems with the left's dismissal of religion, but overall I find the current trend of american conservative to be so authoratarian and oppressive of personal freedoms and so materialistic that I figure better the devil you know than the one who scares the dickens out of you.
When I read your manifesto (three days ago), shortly after the elections, all I could think of was a sense of relief- your book was written a year ago, I believe, but it fell into my awareness at a time when my deep personal fear was (and remains) that as Americans we have been so fractured and polarized by the past six (or possibly even ten) years, that we will be unable to reverse course. Bitter infighting and power struggles within the united states scares me deeply, as I think it should scare anyone who calls the US it's home. Whether from patriotism or sheer pragmatism, it seems a truly frightening thing to imagine years of bitterness and mistrust of each other.
These thoughts being on my mind, I read your manifesto feeling a tremendous sense of interest. As you yourself must know, much of what you've written (in the manifesto, I haven't had a chance to read your book, it's on the slate for this Sunday evening) could have been the bullet points in any number of leftist manifestos. In fact, when I posted a link to your article in my on line blog, several of my friends assumed it had been written by a friend of ours (a loud and vocal liberal). And clearly, you are not seeking to switch your identity. You view these things as being in keeping with the conservative ideology or value system that is (from your articles that I've read in the National Review) very serious and important to you.
When I mentioned to my friends that you were writing as a conservative who plans on staying conservative, my friends responses also intrigued me. There was a sense that you are trying to co-opt liberal ideas for your own uses. Or frustration- why not just call yourself liberal?
For myself, I do not have those questions of frustrations. It seems apparent to me in the very manifesto that you are relying on axioms that are conservative, rather than liberal, by nature. Your apeals to tradition and faith are in keeping with conservative values as I understand them. And we all get very deeply married to our titles and the tribe we identify with. There is much about conservative values that appeal to me and that I live out, but I will probaby always have sticking points that are non negotioable that put me in the liberal camp.
Ultimately, it seems to me (and here I am wondering about whether or not you agree), the label is less important than the values and ideas that you espouse.
[snip]
In my circle, the word "conservative" is a perjorative, and the other day a friend and I who were in the middle of a heated discussion called me a "republican"- it was meant to be a cutting insult. My family, who lives in the very conservative area of Western NY between Buffalo and Rochester, are very quick to assert that they are not liberal when they discuss the plight of the
poor or the problems they see in rampant business interests being unregulated. It seems that these words contain such huge psychic darkness to us that it is difficult to get beyond their shadows, at this point, to find common ground.
But the world is not that big, and it seems to be shrinking, rather than expanding. We don't have that many places to escape to. It seems to me that anything that can allow us to work together on some shared issues is valuable. ...It seems to me there is much in your manifesto that could be common, shared ground between liberals and conservatives. How open are you to thsi being used that way? Do you feel that it is important that liberals come to your brand of conservatism (get into the fold, so to speak) before you would work with them on issues of common ground?
I find this kind of thing encouraging. Of course there are areas of common interest on which conservatives and liberals ("conservatives" and "liberals") can and should work together. The trick is un-learning mistrusting and despising each other categorically. Sometimes when I check in on Daily Kos, I am taken aback by how intoxicated people are with hatred of their political opponents. You see the same thing on some right-wing comboxes. Prior to the election, a friend of mine was writing things that were simply deranged with malice toward Democrats. You do wonder where this stuff ends up.
The conservative historian John Lukacs has some worthwhile thoughts in his most recent book "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred." He talks here about how learning to hate without guilt is a political strength:
As early as 1921 in one of his speeches [Hitler] announced: "There is only defiance and hate, hate and again hate!" And: "The lesson of life is to hate and to be hard." This impressed Goebbels whwen he met Hitler in 1926. Hitler kept telling him how he, Hitler, "had learned to hate." "His most beautiful phrase," Goebbels wrote in his diary, "yesterday: 'God has graced our struggle abundantly. God's most beautiful gift beswoted on us the hate of our enemies, whom we in turn hate from the bottom of our hearts.'" That was for him, and for many others, an element of strength.
Of course the concept of "hate" is much abused in our political discourse; when someone accuses a critic of "hate," more often than not it's a lame attempt to shut down an argument the respondent would prefer not to be having. Still, it's worth considering Lukacs's contention in the book that the Left is motivated primarily by fear (of what those awful Rightists plan to do, reflecting "anxiety and fear about the potential mass appeal of populist nationalism in the age of popular sovereignty") and the Right primarily motivated by hate (of Leftists). Lukacs's book is eccentric, and I don't see that his distinction between fear and hatred carries with it a significant difference in the contemporary American political context. What is more important, I think, is his observation here:
"What is relevant here is that those who hate often believe that, apart from or beyond justice, they pssess certain truths about their enemies, important and decisive truths underlying the characters of the latter."
That's the thing we have to all push back against, because our age pushes so hard in the other direction. Our media encourage us to think of our opponents as the Enemy, and (necessarily) the Other. I am often at a loss to read and listen to liberal polemics about conservatives, especially religious conservatives, because they sound like malicious cartoons, and have little to do with actual people. I'm quite sure that liberals would feel the same way hearing many conservatives talk about them. If you read my book, you'll see that I grounded the ideas in the manifesto in conservative thought and history. I'm glad her friends, thoug
h, heard the ideas first without having them framed as conservative. They let down their guard and considered the ideas as ideas. For conservative audiences, framing these ideas as conservative -- that is, showing how they are rooted in traditionalist conservatism -- is perhaps a way of having them drop their guard, and consider their validity as ideas.
Maybe the way to begin to find common ground is to start considering ideas as ideas, instead of trying to pigeonhole them into labels that don't work well anymore. Maybe the way to begin to find common ground is to start considering people as people. If the ideas are bad, or the people are bad, then reject them. But let's think first, not just emote, or react. Why not?
Really interesting discussion going on in the combox thread under "Church and community." Terry Mattingly relates there something interesting:
Back in the mid-80s, Bishop J. Francis Stafford -- now a cardinal in Rome -- was sent to Memphis, Tenn., which was a bit of a shock from a A-list Catholic intellectual from Baltimore.
I was at the Rocky Mountain News at the time and interviewed him many times. Early on, he told me that the biggest POSITIVE shock in coming to Memphis was discovering what Southern Baptist churches -- especially the big ones -- were all about. What he found, he said, was that these churches resembled the large, countercultural, pre-Vatican II Catholic communities that he once knew (and now missed).
They were building schools to defend their faith. They gathered several times a week. The small prayer groups and Bible studies were not sacramental, but the resembled some of the lay piety that once was so strong in Catholicism. The muscular blue-collar man kind of faith and the groups that mothers really trusted.
Where did that go? That was his question. Why were suburban Catholics now so, well, mainline? Where did those communities go? That was the question that haunted him.
I think the key word is assimilation. Bad assimilation. Assimilation at the level of doctrine and practice.
And here's something the poster Cajetan put up:
As Rod says, it takes a community to raise a child. I am not confident that my children will keep the faith if it were just me preaching backed up by my books. They also need to be reinforced by their friends and parish community. We must not get taken in by the contemporary culture but become a subculture of holiness. Everyone by instinct feels that they want to be a part of a tribe.
That's so true, and I can't for the life of me figure out why so many on the Right get the heebie-jeebies whenever anybody talks about the need for community. Liberals didn't invent the concept, you know. It's human nature. The conservative movement has been so besotted by libertarian concepts that anytime anybody hears something like what Cajetan said, they think that Hillary's coming to take away their children and put them in re-education camp. Forget the government! We're supposed to be doing this for ourselves.
Mr. Bone-Through-the-Nose doesn't like George W. Bush:
Pamungkas said the ritual, which involved killing a snake, a black crow and a goat, deployed “Haitian-style voodoo” because “Indonesian black magic does not work on foreigners”. Smearing his face with a mixture of his own blood and that from the slaughtered animals into which broccoli and sugar cane was also cast, Pamungkas offered prayers to “Satan, who will bring disasters on Bush’s visit”. “My curse will make him bloat like broccoli. Bush will feel unease during the visit,” he said. Asked if he was confident the hex would work, Pamungkas said: “I’ve put voodoo curses on white men in Indonesia before, and they all died.”
This is news? Didn't somebody on Daily Kos do this on Election Day?
One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is in one of the Indiana Jones movies, the first I think, when some grand, scimitar-wielding assassin leaps in front of Indy inside a souk, does some whoop-de-do presentation with his sword as a prelude to chopping the American to bits. Indy, unperturbed, laconically pulls out his revolver and blows the dude away.
Nevertheless, I can't honestly say I don't believe this stuff can work. If you want to disbelieve in it with ease, don't hang out with exorcists, or talk with people intimately familiar with the occult. I'll be praying for the president's safety, though I would have done so the minute he got there, given how jihadi-infested Indonesia is. I wish he weren't going, frankly.
Hobbes's best friend deploys crunchy-con arguments in service of a particular Dreher vice: procrastination. Good on 'im. Thanks to reader Jason for sending this in.
The one good thing about the GOP losing the House, I told myself, "is that it'll force those clowns to have a come-to-Jesus moment, and get their acts together."
I'm hearing that one big reason the reform team of Pence and Shadegg lost (and lost badly) is because they weren't seen by their colleagues as effective legislative tacticians. Well, maybe, but honestly, you've gotta be nuts to think that the message of this past election to the Republicans is "Stay the course! Effective legislative tacticians now!"
I had taken some consolation in the fact that the Democrats struggled on ethics and leadership too, with the Murtha near-miss. Until I read John Podhoretz's column. Excerpt:
Yes, it seems like a disaster for the Democrats.
Only it isn't. This behavior is a sign of the Democratic Party's health, not its weakness.
Dems have power on Capitol Hill for the first time in a dozen years after winning around 53 percent of the vote for House seats last Tuesday.
And House Democrats have made several correct judgments about their victory. The first is that Nancy Pelosi was not its architect and requires little or no deference. If anything, they won in spite of her, not because of her.
Daniel Larison, incidentally, makes an intriguing counterintuitive case for why the GOP should be happy that Trent Lott -- you know, Ol' Strom's podna -- is back in leadership.
There's a really good discussion about church and community going on at Mark Shea's blog. It's among Catholics, about the Catholic Church, but the themes emerging there are universal among Christians. Folks are talking about the relative importance of having a real community in one's church. As longtime readers know, this is one of the big reasons we left Catholicism for Orthodoxy -- the sheer loneliness and lack of community. Now, before the usual suspects get their backs up, I'm not claiming that this is unique to Catholicism; I am quite sure you can find it in every communion, and if you read Mark's comboxes, you'll find that there are Catholics who do have a good parish community. I can only talk about it in terms of Catholicism not because I have a chip on my shoulder about Rome, but simply because that's all I've known as an adult Christian.
Anyway, in that light, I really appreciated Sherry Weddell's comments on the thread:
I know a number of serious, well-catechized Catholics who are either doing serious "double-dipping"[meaning going to non-Catholic churches for fellowship, while still doing their Sunday obligation to go to Catholic mass -- RD.] or have left altogether. I wouldn't put Patricia Heaton into that category - but they do exist all over the place. A solid, orthodox, intellectual formation alone is not the sure-fire cure.
It depends upon the person. Some people are tremendously relieved to have left evangelicalism because they feel much more comfortable with the hands-off, introvert-friendly style of most Catholic communities.
Others feel like they have made a terrible mistake and are simply dying for lack of personal and spiritual support. And the Eucharist alone does not touch the need for human community.
I know a number of evangelical converts to Catholicism who have returned to evangelicalism - something that we almost never acknowledge in blogdom. All the ones I've met decided they can't ultimately live without fellowship and/or practical assistance to live the faith in daily life.
I myself nearly left 3 times in the early years - I hung on out of sheer, willed, obedience but the sense of spiritual isolation was excruciating. My vocation has been a huge blessing in this regard - enabling me to meet fantastic, creative, devout Catholic disciples all over the world.
People shouldn't have to choose between the Eucharist and genuine Christian community with fellow disciples; between the great intellectual tradition of the faith and the sort of sustained practical support that ordinary people need to live their faith on a daily basis.
And Mark's follow-up:
Honest folks. We're talking about a real pastoral problem that can't be waved away by insouciantly declaring (as one comboxer did) that somebody who leaves "just wants to have her plastic surgery and flash her store-bought T&A and not worry about her salvation."
And his comment earlier:
Now the stupidest thing Catholics can do (and some of them do it constantly) is to *mock* this reason for leaving the Church. As though the fundamental requirement of the human soul for love, work, and meaning is a sign of weakness and stupidity. I don't know how often I've run across Catholics for whom *any* mention of love in connection with the faith is sneered at as "Kumbaya Catholicism". This peculiar notion that orthodoxy and love are enemies has to be ruthlessly killed, I think.
It is a real pastoral problem for many communions, not just Catholic ones, and it's one that I didn't take seriously for years, until I found myself in great need. I have to admit that I looked down on Evangelical megachurches for a long time, and in so doing have been guilty of the kind of mockery that Mark rightly criticizes. I
've never been to one, but that didn't keep me from looking down my nose at them. It wasn't the theology, it was the sociology: I couldn't imagine the attraction of being part of a congregation that big. That's not church, that's a concert, I thought, and anyway, why would people be attracted to that sort of thing?
I read this book recently called "Applebee's America." I've mentioned it before. It's essentially a marketing book, telling politicians, preachers and businessmen how to reach contemporary Americans. I don't much care for books like that, but I shared a panel at the Texas Book Festival with a Republican consultant who is one of its authors, and I was so interested in what he had to say that I bought a copy. The book's discussion of megachurches is eye-opening, at least it was to me. They say that the successful megachurches intentionally create small clusters within the larger whole. Rick Warren says he doesn't have one church of 20,000 people, but 1,000 churches of 20 people. Broadly speaking, what the megachurches do is respond to this desperate need people in our highly mobile, deracinated society have for community.
The thing is, they understand that community is not something you just declare. Authentic community has to come out of a sense of shared beliefs and values. The "Applebee's" authors say that megachurches avoid a lot of doctrine, because that would drive away potential customers, but I wonder if that's true. Here in Dallas, I hear that some of the megachurches are pretty doctrinally conservative -- it's just they're the sort of places that, as the line goes, "love Jesus, but aren't mad about it." Anyway, it seems to me that there has to be a real purpose to the church community -- a shared sense of mission -- or it's not going to hold you for long. And you can't have a shared sense of mission unless you agree on the goals, and pretty much on how to get there.
The point I took away from the book -- and the authors, incidentally, come out of political backgrounds, and have been researching voter trends -- is that the craving for community, for human connections, is emerging as one of the most powerful motivators in American life. Those leaders -- political, religious and commercial -- who recognize that and who can offer a credible experience of community, of authentic community that serves a sense of higher purpose, will attract followers. Certain branches of Protestantism will have a vastly easier time adapting to that reality than the more dogmatic churches, like Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but the need is still there, and there's no reason why any church can't meet it.
One more thing: a couple of years ago I was visiting my folks, and my mom had a copy of Rick Warren's "The Purpose-Driven Life" lying around. I decided to pick it up to vindicate my prejudices against it; a book that popular, written by a megachurch pastor, had to be pretty awful. To my amazement -- and indeed to my embarrassment at my own snootiness -- the book was really helpful. It was simple, uncomplicated and direct. I thought after a while, "This is meat and potatoes stuff, but if I heard a homily like this at mass on Sunday, I'd think that Bishop Sheen had come back from the dead." Point is, Warren was trying to reach out to people where they were, and to help them apply Biblical teaching to everyday, real-life problems. It wasn't squishy, feel-good stuff, as I recall, and it was very far from anything you'd read in First Things. But it was good stuff, and not syrupy Osteenism, either. It was obvious to me why Rick Warren is a good Christian leader. He's mission-minded, and community-oriented. Shouldn't every pastor be? Shouldn't all of us laypeople be too?
I was googling around tonight for information on the great economist Milton Friedman, who just passed away, and found this passage from an interview he did with Peter Robinson in March of 2000:
Milton Friedman: ...The reason you have a surplus today, in my opinion, the credit for that has to be given overwhelmingly to gridlock.
Peter Robinson: To gridlock?
Milton Friedman: If you had had a Democratic House and Senate, as well as a Democratic president, you would not have a surplus today in my opinion. They would have spent it. Similarly if you had had a Republican president as well as a Republican House and Senate, I doubt that there would have been a surplus today. Because they would either have spent it or had tax reductions.
Peter Robinson: So when President Clinton steps forward to take his bows, you don't applaud at all?
Milton Friedman: Well, I applaud. He provided gridlock.
How about that? Friedman knew perfectly well that the Republican Party couldn't be trusted to be good fiscal stewards if they held Congress and the White House. One suspects that, given the recent election resulting in divided government, the old man died happy. RIP.
Today, brethren and sistren, is the day when the pert Gamay grape deigns to brighten our tenebrous late-autumn melancholy. Beaujolais nouveau, the Mary Lou Retton of the wine world, is in stores today. Let joy be unconfined.
Yea, even the combox grumpus Bubba puts down his Big Chief tablet, lays aside his lute string, and emerges to touch his lips to a glass of good cheer, perhaps to coax an unfamiliar upturning of the corners of his lips in game attempt at -- dare we say it? -- a smile. One hears glad tidings that even the dreaded Witch Queen of Angmar, grinding her molars over having failed yet again to strangle the baby Gamays on the vine, has been seen sniffing at the fall breeze, hoping to suss out a kindly wine merchant proferring a thimbleful of the jammy elixir, for moistening the dusty halls of her heart. One is permitted to hope that even amid this vale of tears, our dear Diane is by now on her third bottle, and has for the sake of her own sanity gone far past the Angelic Doctor's prescription to imbibe only "to the point of cheerfulness," and is now three sheets to the wind. I, for one, pray that on this day of days, she, with the help of spiritual director Georges Duboeuf, has forgotten her self-tormenting obsession to the point where she is actually credible when she claims to be happy.
Sadly, one suspects that the Travis Bickle of the Trinity River is immune to the charms of trashy French wine. The tragically unfulfilled cyber-stylite continues, under assumed names and other IPs (because he keeps getting banned) his grim combox witness to the utter fraudulence of Your Working Boy, the DMN, and all its pomps and works. Perhaps some Good Samaritan will sprinkle a few drops on his eyes, so that his tongue might issue forth to lick them clean, and the simple pleasure of the vine will free him from his slavery to his Precioussss.
A big part of the crunchy con sensibility is taking pleasure in cooking and eating at home. With biggest food-and-family day of the year coming up a week from today, I'd like to start a Thanksgiving recipe thread here. When I get home tonight, I'll post my recipe for the best cornbread dressing ever. But let's start now with a recipe Karen posted in a combox below. I love me some cranberry sauce, but this sounds like a great alternative:
Just for you all, here is my best Thanksgiving recipe, good with pork and all forms of poultry:
Dried Cherry Chutney
2 cups dried cherries about 1.5 cups port or sherry 1/2 tsp. allspice 1/2 tsp cloves 1 tsp. cumin pepper and kosher salt to taste 1 or 2 shallots, finely chopped, and, if you like, one clove garlic olive oil two tablespoons of one of the following: cherry, peach or apricot preserves
Soak cherries in wine for one hour
In a saucepan, heat olive oil and saute shallots until clear. Add cherries and wine, spices, and preserves. Cook until thickened, usually about fifteen minutes.
This is loosely based on a Rachael Ray recipe crossed with one by Tyler Florence.
We got the following prayer request on an Internet prayer chain today:
Friends and Family:
We have a young couple in our church, David and Christina Kristynik. David is in Iraq and due to be sent back to the states in three weeks. He called Christina this morning at 9:30 am (our time) to say goodbye to her and their children (they have a 2 yr old and a ten month old). He and his group will be leaving at 4 pm today (our time) on foot to go into Baghdad...no vehicles or tanks will be taken. Their mission will last 2 or 3 days and the purpose is to go door to door and capture all snipers in the city. The commanders have told the men what a dangerous mission this is and it is very likely that most will not come back to their base. Christina is terrified and called on everyone in our church to pray. She said the men are also fearful. They were all told to call their families before they leave.
I'm asking each of you to pray for these men and women for the next 3 days. If your church has a prayer chain, PLEASE call and ask them to pray.
Well, that's horrifying, isn't it? But before I set out to pray, I decided to check it out at Snopes.com, which verifies things like this. Turns out that the thing is only partly true. Here's what the allegedly imperiled soldier's wife told Snopes:
I am the wife of the mentioned David Kristynik. I sent out a prayer request for my husband's safety and protection during his final patrols before he comes home in a few weeks, due to the escalating violence in the Baghdad area. I want him to come home safe, he's in the home stretch. I am very hurt and disturbed how one simple prayer request can be manipulated and embellished with false and bogus information. The info in the prayer requests that I have seen contain very sensitive, yet false information. He never called with his final goodbye. HIs commander never told them they will all die. This is all bogus. I just can't understand why someone along the line would add this kind of info to anothers request for prayer. Anyway, my husband and the guys he is with is fine. Thank you for those who DID pray for his safety, but please know that the situation is not what it was made out to be.
Going to Snopes.com to see if they've done any work on Internet phenomena like this before you believe it or encourage others to do so is a good habit to get into.
My Bnet colleague David Kuo has a piece in today's NYT saying that chatterers claiming that the Evangelical vote is opening up to Democrats are premature, that there's no conclusive evidence that Evangelicals are moving toward the Dems. Instead, he says, there are signs that Evangelicals are beginning to re-examine their spiritual and political priorities, resulting in them being less intense about politics. Unless I'm mistaken, the Bnet post-election online survey David cites was voluntary, therefore non-scientific, so I don't see that data as indicating anything predictive.
Still, I hope he's right, broadly speaking. The overall message of "Crunchy Cons" -- now out in paperback, just in time for all your Thanksgiving needs (dang, no recipes!) -- is that true conservatives need to look inward and build communities and institutions that will help us to preserve in community our faith and the virtues by which we aspire to live. This doesn't mean withdrawing from politics -- I can't share David's view that Christians should "fast" from political involvement for two years -- but it does mean reprioritizing to focus our energies on family, church and building up things at the local level. Which is not actually all that different from what David proposes, I guess. I think both of us, out of our very different experiences, believe that the preoccupation many Christians have had with secular politics has been at best a distraction from more urgent tasks. Again, we come at it from different angles, but as those who've read my book know, I believe the idea that we conservative Christians are doing our part to push back hard against the spirit of the age by enthusiastically voting Republican, even as we turn ourselves and our children over to the corrupting broader culture, is foolish and dangerous. Most conservative Christians intuit this, I think, but we need to be talking more openly about this in our churches and circles of friends, and figuring out what to do.
"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.
"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.
"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.
As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
"To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale," Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. "Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."
"When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. "It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences."
Eastern Saudi Arabia is heavily Shia, and tired of being oppressed by the Wahhabist Sunnis who run the country. They also inhabit the region where most of Saudi Arabia's oil is. Will they break too, especially if their Shia brethren in next-door Iraq and Iran encourage them? In Syria, will the Alawite minority lose its dictatorial grip on the country, and face a Sunni fundamentalist takeover? To begin to contemplate these things is to stare into the abyss. But here we are. And if people think that however bad it gets over there, it won't affect us over here, they should contemplate what an all-out Middle East war, or series of wars, would mean for a world economy that depends on oil.
There will be time -- oh, will there be time -- to deplore and excoriate the president, the vice-president and the leaders that got us into this mess. History's judgment will be savage. But for now ... what can America do to stop this? It really does seem that forces are in motion that are beyond America's ability to control, or even much to affect. The fact that we have so many troops in country seems to be of no avail. The civil war is underway, and is worsening, despite our presence (and perhaps in part because of our presence). To leave a situation that is likely unwinnable would seal Iraq's and the region's fate, along the lines quoted above. And yet, it seems that the only thing our presence is doing is merely slowing the rate of decline towards all-out war. I can't see a good path either way.
I do know that if my son were serving in the military in Iraq, I would want him out of a situation in which he was risking his life for a lost cause. Our soldiers aren't pieces on a chess board; they're somebody's sons. It sounds sentimental to put it that way, but it's true, and it is infuriating to think of fathers and mothers losing their children to fight a war that we started for no good reason, and that we now cannot win.
The US Catholic Bishops' message to gay Catholics is causing confusion and controversy. This from the LA Times' story today:
Written by Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli of Paterson, N.J., chairman of the bishops' doctrine committee, the document teaches that persons with "a homosexual inclination" must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and it condemns violence, scorn and hatred.
It also underlines the faith's teaching that although homosexual leanings are not necessarily "rejected by God or the church," engaging in homosexual activity is inherently sinful and contrary to the divine plan.
Specifically, the guidelines encourage homosexuals to take a more active role in church activities, but urges them to remain celibate and not tell anyone other than close friends and family about their sexual orientation.
I'm not sure what to make of the advice to remain semi-closeted, but as for the rest of it, I'm not sure what else the bishops could have said and remained faithful to authoritative Catholic teaching. The Catholic Church will never teach that homosexuality is morally good or neutral because to do so would be to overturn Catholic teaching from time immemorial. They have gone as far as they can in being compassionate and welcoming, but Catholic (and traditional Christian) anthropology really does posit mankind itself as disordered, as the result of the fall, and the condition of homosexual desire as intrinsically disordered; i.e., it is itself impossible to harmonize with Christian teaching.
Catholicism teaches -- as virtually all Christian churches did, until virtually yesterday -- that the only rightly ordered expression of sexuality is between men and women, within marriage. This is true for everyone. When I became a Catholic, I was a young unmarried adult. I believed I had to live chastely, until I married. It was really difficult to live this out, especially because I had no way of knowing if I would ever marry. Two friends of mine walking this same path were gay Catholics; all of us were converts, and all of us accepted that the Church was a divine institution, and our role was to conform our own lives around her authoritative teachings because they were true. It was really, really difficult to do in the area of sexuality, especially because we live in a culture that not only defines one's sexual orientation as intrinsic to, even determinative of, one's core identity. To deny yourself the exercise of sexual expression is, to our culture, to deny your identity. But that's what it means to take up your cross.
I was fortunate, though, because I eventually married. The two friends I mentioned are still living chastely, as I would be if I were not married. Of course barring a change of orientation, they couldn't marry, and so they likely never will have the opportunity to lay down the cross that I left at the altar. They are heroic in my eyes. Every day, they die to themselves for the sake of Christ. (I, too, as a married man, have to die to myself to be faithful to my calling, but in a different way, obviously). Still, even though I'm no longer a Catholic, we all three share the same conviction about the proper relation of humankind to truth in matters of faith and morals: it exists objectively, and we are to submit to it; we don't have the right to expect the Church to remake the sacred deposit of the faith to fit our own desires.
What this issue comes down to, ultimately, is not gay vs. straight, but a couple of simple questions: What is truth? What is the nature of moral authority? As James Davison Hunter identified over a decade ago -- and as TMatt discusses here -- those questions are the cause of the culture wars. That's what the culture war is about. Catholicism has
an answer to that question, and has had the same answer since the beginning. It will not change. It cannot change, or it is no longer Catholicism, but a form of liturgical Protestantism. Those who expect it to change labor in vain, and are doomed to disappointment.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. True. That is why we are called to be merciful. But it is one thing to be merciful to a sinner, and it is quite another to deny the sin. The Church must do the former; it cannot do the latter. This is an answer that will send many away bitterly, but to say anything other than what the bishops said does no service to the truth, and therefore no service to the people of God.
It occurred to me this morning, listening to an NPR report on the Catholic bishops' statement about homosexuality, that activists and interested observers on both sides are probably too worked up over this policy statement. Love it or hate it, does anybody believe it will actually change anything at the local level? It's not like the Catholic Church has been silent on its position on homosexuality. I believe that dioceses and parishes will do exactly as they have been doing, for better or for worse. One thing that struck me as someone coming to Catholicism from the outside years ago was how there is much less to the dogmatic and hierarchical nature of Catholicism than it appears. I thought that priests and bishops, at least, took marching orders from the Pope and from the Magisterium. Ideally, yes, but that's not how it works out in practice. For me, it was a real shock to discover, when I was living in the Archdiocese of Miami and preparing for marriage, that you couldn't find a single parish that taught Natural Family Planning. I found a Couple-to-Couple League teaching couple, who told me that they had been formally turned away by parish after parish, with the message that Catholic couples preparing for marriage didn't need to hear what they had to say.
The point being that the Pope's teaching, the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church, and even the official positions adopted by the bishops, can and do get undermined at the diocesan and parish level, by the diocesan bureaucracies.
What do you think? Do you think the bishops' teaching on homosexuality will filter down to the diocese and parish level? That is, will it make a bit of difference?
So columnist John Tierney is leaving the New York Times op-ed page to write for the Science section. He won't be missed. His column was predictable and mostly ho-hum. But at least as a libertarian, he brought some ideological diversity to the Times' op-ed page. He's going to be replaced by Tom Edsall, who is a smart liberal[UPDATE: I believe I got that Edsall tidbit from The New Republic Online yesterday, which no longer has that claim, if it ever did. Let the record show that I don't know to whom the Tierney slot will go.-- R.]. That leaves David Brooks as the only conservative voice on the page -- versus a gaggle of liberals: Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman, and Edsall. Six to one -- and Brooks, the only original thinker of the bunch, is pretty moderate for a right-winger.
Leaving aside the dullness of most of the Times' columnists, it's amazing that they would opt for such ideological uniformity in a time when they're trying to make themselves a national newspaper. The NYT is actually losing readers in NYC, but picking them up nationwide with its national edition. I subscribe to it at home, and you'd be surprised driving through Dallas early in the morning to see all the blue bags on front lawns. It's in the paper's longtime interest to expand that national edition. But this is a country that's a lot more diverse (and conservative) than Manhattan, obviously, and it is in the financial interest of the NYT Company to serve that diversity on its op-ed pages. The Washington Post's op-ed page is far more diverse -- and far more interesting -- than the Times's. If the WaPo could deliver a newspaper to my front lawn every morning, I'd probably choose to subscribe to it instead of the Times.
It's confounding to watch the newspaper industry from the inside. It has been obvious to me for a long, long time that ours is an industry that talks a good game about the need to serve the readers (read: the customers), but which won't lift a finger to do it if it would require us to grow outside our own comfortable prejudices. Journalism executives agonize over "diversity" hiring, which they take to mean exclusively hiring racial minorities. "Diversity" expanded to include conservatives, and (say) Evangelicals, never occurs to them -- or if it does, it's rejected. Newspapers spend a lot of money sending recruiters to black colleges and minority journalism events, but I'd be shocked if any paper committed a single farthing to visiting journalism programs at religiously affiliated colleges looking for writers with potential.
Don't get me wrong -- it's a very good thing that newsrooms are not monochromatic. I wouldn't consider it a good thing if the newsroom all looked like me. But in my opinion, newsrooms ill-serve their readers when they think they've achieved "diversity" even though there's little or no ideological diversity on its staff.
But I'm conflicted about this. Fact is, it would do no good whatsoever to hire conservative, or Evangelical, journalists because they offer ideological diversity if they are not good at basic reporting and writing -- you know, the art and craft of journalism. But American journalism is also an industry that lives by the dogma that diversity -- read: one's race or gender, provided it is not white or male -- adds to the quality of one's work as a journalist. It would do nobody any good if that racist and paternalistic dogma were expanded to include religious and/or political conservatives; it would simply mean expanding a spoils system that corrupts the nature of the journalism business. I don't care if the courts reporter is black, white, socialist, Whig or whatever; I care that he or she is aggressive and trustworthy, and a good writer. Don't you? But I tell you, the diversity dogma -- in its highly selective form -- is unshakable in American newsrooms. I have no data to prove it one way or another, but I believe the idea that readers care about the race or gender of the write
r of a given story, versus the quality of the reporting, writing and analysis, is a liberal shibboleth -- and the kind of thinking that is creating duller newspapers (and more morally self-satisfied journalism executives).
I more or less decided to quit going to journalism classes to talk to students. I don't want to encourage them falsely. I expect to spend my whole career as a journalist, because it's what I love, and it's what I know how to do. But as an avid newspaper reader who sees a lot of newspapers on my travels, it's hard to find much life in American newspapers these days. I recently connected through Cleveland and picked up in the airport my first-ever copy of the Plain Dealer, a newspaper that had a big repuation, at least when I was in journalism school. I was quite literally shocked by how dull the thing was. Completely unremarkable and personality-free. No life in it at all. I thought that if I moved to Cleveland, there's no way I'd subscribe to this newspaper. It was bland and mushy. Mind you, that's one day's newspaper, and maybe the PD was having an off day. But I'd guess not. You read journalism from the past -- H.L. Mencken's, say -- and you lament that a lot of this stuff would never make it into an American newspaper today. Too edgy. Too lively. If Mencken tried to get a job at an American newspaper today, they'd never hire him. Did American newspapers become blander when they got all professionalized? I wonder.
Anyway, I'm rambling, but what I want to say is that I pretty much think the newspaper industry, barring an unexpected burst of creative thinking, is all about managing decline. A lot of that -- maybe most of it -- has to do with technological changes that the entire industry is struggling to adapt to. But we do ourselves no favors on the things we can control -- like the way we approach reporting, writing and analysis. In that, I think we're about like the Episcopal church: losing communicants in part because our bien-pensant dogmas make increasingly little sense to the wider world, yet we stand defiantly and proudly upon them, taking little notice of our customer base and, frankly, boring people silly.
UPDATE:You may be thinking, "So what does he want? He's complaining because the Times is not hiring more conservatives on its op-ed page for the sake of diversity, at the same time he's complaining about newsrooms hiring for diversity? How does that make sense?" Let me try to explain. In the case of the Times op-ed page, the ideological orientation of a columnist directly affects the kind of job he or she does. It would be nonsense to hire a columnist only because or predominantly because that columnist is a conservative. But to fill a job like that, especially on an op-ed page that's almost entirely liberal, it makes sense to seek ideological diversity within an overall search for a smart, lively, inquisitive columnist. In newsrooms though -- that is, not the op-ed page -- hiring for diversity (as defined by this profession, which excludes ideological diversity) is enormously important, far out of balance, at least from what I've seen. In my own case, about a decade ago I applied for a film critic's position at a particular newspaper, was told by the arts editor that he loved my writing, and wanted to hire me. He called back later and sheepishly told me he couldn't bring me in for an interview, because his boss told him they wanted to hire a woman or a minority. It worked out for me in the end -- I ended up with a much better job elsewhere -- but to be told flat-out that the quality of my work didn't matter at all, only the color of my skin and my gender, was infuriating and discouraging. While this was going on, I phoned the arts editor's boss and offered to buy my own plane ticket to come to that city and sit for a job interview; the boss said he would meet me for a cup of coffee if I wanted, but that I shouldn't consider it an interview. The only reason for this was because I am a white male. A few months
went by, and the newspaper called me back, said their national search for a woman or minority candidate was over, and they'd like to bring me in for an interview. Happily, I had that very day accepted a job at the New York Post, and could tell them I wasn't interested. But the sting remained. The idea that no matter how hard I worked to write well, I couldn't overcome this bias against me because of the color of my skin and my gender was debilitating. You hear stories like this a lot in this business. It was wrong to do it to women and minorities back in the day, and it's wrong to do it to anybody now. And morality aside it makes for a duller newspaper.
Conservatives like me hoped that the GOP would lose the House, not only because it hugely deserved to, but because we thought that was the only thing that would cause it to repent of its big-spending, lobbyist-loving, corrupt ways, get back in touch with why voters gave control of the House to them in the first place, and come back ready -- and deserving -- to win in 2008. So it is pretty startling to see that the lesson the surviving House GOP members have learned is ... that it's necessary to re-elect Boehner and Blunt, the same membership team that led them to defeat. Barring a change of heart by Friday, it looks like the Old Guard will retain its leadership roles, with the conservative reform team of Pence and Shadegg sidelined. Don't the GOP members understand how this looks outside the Beltway bubble? Most people don't follow the intricacies of legislative maneuvering. They'll just look at this, note that after having lost its majority in large part because of corruption, the GOP did nothing to change its leadership, and conclude that wow, they really are the Stupid Party.
Meanwhile, conservatives like me banked on the Pelosi Democrats making foolish moves that would remind voters why they don't trust the Democrats with power. Happily from a partisan perspective, but unhappily from a good-government one, that seems to be happening already. I appreciate John Murtha's stance on the war, and some of what he stands for otherwise, but for Pelosi to get behind his bid for Majority Leader after promising to run the "most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history" is stunningly obtuse. Ruth Marcus of the WaPo explains why Murtha is ethically unfit for the job. Murtha's an old political ally of Pelosi's, so it seems that politics as usual trumps the need to be, or at least to appear, ethically sound. The rank-and-file of House Dems looks like it's going to go for Steny Hoyer, so Pelosi'll probably lose this one.
Much worse is what Pelosi looks like she's about to do with the chairmanship of the House Intelligence committee. Jane Harman is the ranking Democrat, and is widely respected as able, experienced and very smart. She's on Pelosi's bad side, so she's out. Coming in is Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat who was a federal judge until he was impeached by a Democratic Congress for bribery and other corruption on the bench. Unless Pelosi shifts course, this is the scoundrel she's entrusting with custody of some of the country's most sensitive intelligence secrets. Hastings happens to be black, and the speculation is that she's afraid of cheesing off the Congressional Black Caucus. What a gift to the GOP a Hastings appointment would be: the appearance that the Democratic speaker is too petty a politician to let a solid, well-respected rival run Intelligence, and too politically correct to risk passing over a black man for the extremely sensitive job, corrupt though he appears to be. But what a loss to the country.
Well, after all that, the Catholic bishops came up with a statement on homosexuality praised thus by CourageMan:
I must say I haven't been this encouraged by a Church document in a while. Frankly, it brought tears to me eyes in a couple of places (and I am not really referring to the approving mention of Courage and Encourage in Footnote 44. Yeah, it might have been better to have been in the text, but I can't quarrel with such a relatively-empty formalism).
If the footnoting doesn't bother a guy who's actually in Courage, then it shouldn't bother me. Good for the bishops for saying what needed saying, especially this (emphasis mine):
It is crucially important to understand that saying a person has a particular inclination that is disordered is not to say that the person as a whole is disordered. Nor does it mean that one has been rejected by God or the Church. Sometimes the Church is misinterpreted or misrepresented as teaching that persons with homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered, as if everything about them were disordered or rendered morally defective by this inclination. Rather, the disorder is in that particular inclination, which is not ordered toward the fulfillment of the natural ends of human sexuality. Because of this, acting in accord with such an inclination simply cannot contribute to the true good of the human person. Nevertheless, while the particular inclination to homosexual acts is disordered, the person retains his or her intrinsic human dignity and value.
Courage is a very fine organization for same-sex oriented Catholics who wish to live chaste lives in accordance with Church teaching. I've had several friends who are now or who once were part of a Courage chapter. It's not a group that tries to force same-sex-oriented members to "become straight." As I understand it -- Courage Man, who posts here sometimes, correct me if I'm wrong -- the group supports members who do attempt reparative therapy, but mostly it's there as a support group.
Anyway, the US Catholic bishops, gathered today for their annual meeting, took up a proposal by one archbishop to explicitly recognize the Courage ministry. Read Amy's liveblogging of the event for a sense of the debate. Especially this: Bishop Sullivan: Against the Burke amendment - it's a divisive issue. Such a complex issue.
The amendment failed -- but it will be relegated to a footnote in the eventual document. Think of it: a majority of the Catholic bishops of the United States of America voted down a proposal to recognize what may be the only Catholic ministry to gays and lesbians that actually supports Roman Catholic teaching.
Bruce Frohnen, who was one of the very best contributors to NRO's Crunchy Con blog, on the lesson of last week:
In his heart, every conservative knows “our” party deserved its shellacking because Republicans ignored regular people and pursued disastrous, liberal policies at home and abroad.
If conservatism is to be relevant again its adherents must give up their perks as Washington insiders, or stop listening to those who won’t. They must demand an end to corporate-welfare policies that hide behind claims of “privacy” and “free markets.” They must reject the claim that “big government is here to stay” and insist that Washington cede back to the states and localities the power to control their own lives — from what their towns look like, to what can be done in the local public square.
Conservatism’s roots do not lie in facile slogans about natural rights and free markets — let alone angry, dismissive rhetoric that casts aside the poor and treats rich people as above the law. They lie in our attachment to families, churches, towns, and small businesses. It’s time to remember who we are and who we should be defending.
If conservatism is simply a way of organising people to squabble over scraps from the high table of government or as a means of getting “our” kind of people up to the high table, not only is there no terribly interesting future for it but I would not be all that interested in being part of such a thing in the first place.
I am drawn back again to a powerful line in the very clever film Max, in which the title character, fictitious art dealer Max Rothmann, says to a young Hitler about art and politics, “What would you rather do? Change the way that people see or the way they pay their taxes?” By the end of the movie, Hitler has made his choice. The challenge of instilling a conservative ethos (which, at its best, is not a conservative ethos as such but one that would be recognised as humane and sane by all, regardless of party or policy preferences) is much the same as the one posed by the character of Rothmann: do we concern ourselves with a way of life, an entire vision of what constitutes good order for our communities or do we focus on narrow questions of policy and politicking?
There are undoubtedly also important questions of policy to be tackled, and I don’t belittle the hard work and imagination that this kind of work takes and the necessity of having people who do this kind of work. However, if there is something we all need to remember before we can start undoing the damage of the last few years it is that a conservatism that places high priority on living an ethical life and shaping the life of the community to be as conducive to that sort of life is what intellectual conservatism has always aspired to present. As problems of ethics, aesthetics, meaning and a well-ordered everyday life have taken a back seat to the struggle to dominate the greasy pole, conservatism has lost much of what used to make it genuinely interesting and what gave it such intellectual vitality.
We have a handful of regular combox commentators here who can be pluperfect jerks, or, in the case of that one north Texas typist, a Travis Bickle in training pants. But unlike commentators on the Reason blog, nobody here makes fun of a politician's dead baby boy. Take a look at these comments, if you can stand it.
They are disappearing from the Holy Land. They can't win. They have to endure the pains of being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation, as well as persecution from the Islamic Palestinian majority. From the story:
"We are stuck in no man's land," said a leading Palestinian Christian activist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of reported death threats. "In the eyes of the West, we are Arabs. In the eyes of Arabs, we are a fifth column."
When I was in the Holy Land in 2000, I spent a Sunday morning among Palestinian Catholics in a West Bank town. I went to mass with them, and stayed after for coffee. I was working as a reporter, and they filled my notebook with stories of Israeli oppression (even to the point of hysteria, claiming that they were suffering a Holocaust worse than the one the Nazis inflicted on the Jews). Though I rolled my eyes at that sort of thing, riding back to Jerusalem with a Palestinian priest, and having to go through all these checkpoints, it was easy to see how humiliating and difficult life under occupation was for them. I thought that if I were having to live like that, I'd probably hate the Israelis too. But I noticed in talking with various Palestinian Christians, they could not understand why the Israelis felt compelled to set up those security measures; they didn't seem the least bit willing to grant that if the Israelis did not do that, they'd be under constant terrorist attack.
Back in Jerusalem, I noticed an interesting thing. When I'd have my notebook out, Palestinian Christians would denounce Israel up and down. But on the occasion when I'd put my notebook away and start talking to them as a visitor, not a reporter, they would express abject terror at the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism. It became clear to me that they hated the Israelis, but they absolutely feared their fellow Palestinian Muslims. I remember these two young men in particular. We sat at near a wall by the Old City, talking. They were both educated, but said their chances of getting a job in Israel were virtually nil. I think they worked in the medical field, but I wasn't sure. They said that the Israelis reserved job openings for their own people first, which effectively meant that there were no jobs for Palestinians in that field. Meanwhile, they said, the Islamists make life increasingly impossible for Christians within Palestinian society. They felt they had no hope, and were hoping to emigrate.
I think it's probably true: they did have no foreseeable hope of building solid and secure lives there. I hope they managed to get out. And yet, if they themselves succeeded in going on to a better place, that only meant that the likelihood that Christianity will survive in the land of its birth -- survive as a living community of lay persons, not just monks and clerics in the churches -- is that much smaller. I don't know how to resolve this. But I did come away from that trip with greater skepticism of the reports we so often see in the West wholly blaming the Israelis for the plight of Palestinian Christians. From what I could tell, the greater threat by far was fundamentalist Islam -- and the fact that not a single Christian I met was willing to talk about it on the record spoke volumes.
We keep crossing these bright red lines, all in the name of compassion, and the greater good. To be fair, the Anglican policy report does not call for the wholesale killing of disabled infants, and says only that it is in some cases compassionate to withhold or withdraw treatment when the situation for particular infants seem hopeless, and the cost of keeping a severely deformed infant alive is astronomical. It's worth having a discussion over when it is appropriate to allow a human being to die a natural death. But this report from the C of E, coming as it does in a time and place where the sense of the sacredness of human life is rapidly being lost, and replaced by a utilitarian and materialist ethic that judges the value of life on the basis of its absence of suffering within it and its usefulness to the wider community, ought to set off alarms. How is it that we can find the money to fund wars of choice in faraway lands, but are beggars when it comes to providing for the weakest and the sickest?
Where are the Cardinal Galens among us today? In his famous 1941 sermon condemning Nazi euthanasia programs, the Cardinal said: "[T]here are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one has the power to release us and which we must fulfil even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being kill an innocent person apart from war and legitimate self-defense.
He went on:
If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill 'unproductive' fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail! If one is allowed to kill the unproductive people then woe betide the invalids who have used up, sacrificed and lost their health and strength in the productive process. If one is allowed forcibly to remove one's unproductive fellow human beings then woe betide loyal soldiers who return to the homeland seriously disabled, as cripples, as invalids. If it is once accepted that people have the right to kill 'unproductive' fellow humans--and even if initially it only affects the poor defenseless mentally ill--then as a matter of principle murder is permitted for all unproductive people, in other words for the incurably sick, the people who have become invalids through labor and war, for us all when we become old, frail and therefore unproductive.
Then, it is only necessary for some secret edict to order that the method developed for the mentally ill should be extended to other 'unproductive' people, that it should be applied to those suffering from incurable lung disease, to the elderly who are frail or invalids, to the severely disabled soldiers. Then none of our lives will be safe any more. Some commission can put us on the list of the 'unproductive,' who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves.
Who will be able to trust his doctor any more?
He may report his patient as 'unproductive' and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted and followed.
Woe to mankind, woe to our German nation if God's Holy Commandment 'Thou shalt not kill,' which God proclaimed on Mount Sinai amidst thunder and lightning, which God our Creator inscribed in the conscience of mankind from the very beginning, is not only broken, but if this transgression is actually tolerated and permitted
to go unpunished.
UPDATE: Amy Welborn says that the media misreported what the Anglican report actually said, conflating it with a leading British medical group's call for more active euthanasia. We're sorting out the differences in the comboxes, but it appears that my reaction above, which was based on media reports, overstates matters somewhat. In which case, my apologies ... but I'm going to have to find the time later this morning to go over this more closely. I appreciate the comments below of those who parse the Anglican statement and who can bring clarity to this matter.
Readers of "Crunchy Cons" know that one of its animating ideas is Alasdair MacIntyre's intuition that our civilization is like the late Roman Empire in that we have fragmented and continue to fragment, having lost a common moral language and the metaphysical consensus undergirding it. If that's so, then we have a duty to fall back into the kinds of communities and institutions that will help us withstand the dark ages to come with our faith and our morals intact. I can't say how close I think we are to a new dark age, but I do believe that the indicators are of decline.
In last month's Vanity Fair, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson penned an essay comparing and contrasting the contemporary West with the late Roman Empire, trying to see if there are parallels. He believes there is plenty to worry about. Read the whole thing and see what you think. I don't know enough about history to know whether he's right or he's wrong, but I'd say he's more right than wrong. If he's wrong, why is he wrong? And if he's right, what, if anything, should we do about it?
"According to Gibbon," Ferguson writes, "Rome fell through a combination of external overreach, internal corruption, religious transformation and barbarian invasion." Here's how, in brief, -- you really should read the essay -- Ferguson sees that playing out in contemporary Europe and the US:
I. External overreach. We have too few troops to carry out our imperial responsibilities, and we don't, as a culture, have the social vigor to maintain a fighting force large enough to enforce our will internationally. America has the best-equipped and best-fed army in the world, but it's doubtful how well it can hold out in a protracted, low-intensity conflict.
II. Internal corruption. Our wealth is illusory. It is built on a mountain of debt, of money borrowed both from foreigners and from the future (that is, by not prudently preparing for the costs that will be exacted from future generations in entitlement payments). We're living on an economic bubble, and pretending it's solid ground. What's more, our love of true learning is wasting away, our entertainments are vulgar and pornographic, and we're turning ourselves into a nation of soft-bellied fatties. And in Europe, populations have become sapped of their work ethic by the welfare state. What's more, parts of Europe -- especially the UK -- are in worse physical shape than the US.
III. Religious transformation. Gibbon blamed Christianity for sapping the Roman martial spirit. Nowadays, Europe has become the world's first post-Christian society. "With the decline of Christianity," writes Ferguson, "Europe is also experiencing a rise in what politicians euphemistically call 'antisocial behavior.' ...On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunekn, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police." The conquest of Europe by atheism and nihilism, and its replacement by materialism, is destroying Europe's spiritual vigor.
Barbarian invasion. The demographic transformation of the West as the European birthrate collapses, and non-European peoples move in to keep those senescent societies afloat. Ferguson says the roots here are in feminism, as the social transformation it wrought, not only in terms of opening up careers to women, but also in technology and legal reforms giving them unprecedented control over their own fertility, caused the birth rate to crater. Personally, I would say this is also the fruit of religious transformation.
Ferguson says the US suffers mostly from Nos. 1 and 2, Europe from Nos. 3 and 4. Discuss.
Reihan Salam likes Obama, but is a bit uneasy with all the hero-worship. Writes Reihan: "I wonder if the kid gloves treatment has something to do with out reluctance to tarnish a figure we all (or most of us) badly want to see succeed, in part because of his unique background."
I think so. Obama is, of course, biracial, and literally embodies the racial reconciliation men of good will long for. I think one reason his 2004 Democratic Convention speech was so powerful in part because he was such a hopeful contrast with that malicious, race-baiting boob Sharpton, who also spoke that year. I think it's also the case that many Americans of both parties are so weary of polarizing political figures. Reagan excepted, I can't think of a single politician in my lifetime who came across as a leader who had the common good in mind. I know, I know, not everybody felt that way about Reagan, but what I'm trying to say is he came across to very many Americans as optimistic and hopeful and someone who can speak for the common good, and who seems somehow bigger than the sum of his partisan parts.
I think it's also probably true that our collective need for such a figure accounts for so much of our projecting it onto Obama. Whatever Reagan really was, he fit the country's need at the time for a leader who could bring us out of the pessimism and enervation of the 1970s. We need at the present time a leader who can speak to our need for a renewed sense of common purpose. Whether Obama is that leader or not I guess time will tell. But the fact that people are going ga-ga over him probably tells us more about us than it does about Barack Obama.
As I've said, I'm going to wait until the Bramwell attack on conservatism from the Right is available for everyone to read before I write about it critically (which is a high-minded way of saying I'm completely snowed under with election-related work at the paper to devote any time to the analysis the piece deserves right now). My short take on the essay is that it is problematic, and everybody will find something to dislike about it, but it serves as a great argument-starter for what's gone wrong on the Right, and how to fix it.
Daniel Larison continues to blog about the essay here and here. Moving along to the stout reactionary Fr. Jape, who thinks Bramwell's piece is "deeply confused." Excerpt:
The overall picture that emerges from Bramwell’s taxonomy of conservatives is so bizarrely Rousseauian as to nearly bugger description. .... What becomes apparent is that Bramwell condemns conservatism in its non-ideological forms. He can accept the neocons as at least being a legitimate political movement precisely because they are the only group of ideological conservatives. Which is to say that they “know what they think” and that what they think results in specific policy prescriptions as opposed to the mere postures of eccentric men or, even worse, the pre-political attachments of merely social relationships. In this sense, Bramwell is expressing an almost undiluted form of Rousseauian political philosophy; the very philosophy which the conservatism of Burke to Kirk has existed to stand against. Kirk famously defined conservatism as the absence of ideology. Is it any surprise that he and his intellectual heirs would exhibit their political thought principally as a “posture” rather than as a set of policy prescriptions?
...In the end, what Bramwell despises is any pre-political loyalty of any kind. Even party loyalty, which is only barely pre-political, must be dispensed with in favor of purely individual political calculus. How, I wonder, is this anything but a rather smart version of Andrew Sullivan’s prescription for conservatives? That it should appear in the pages of The American Conservative is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it.
[Note from Rod: I disagree; one reason that I've enjoyed reading TAC, even when I've thought the content uneven, and disagreed with this or that position, is that it's entertained a diversity of ideas from the Right. Unpredictable.]
Before you conclude that J.D. Hayworth's and Randy Graf's getting their clocks cleaned counts as a definitive defeat for anti-immigration forces, check out Mark Krikorian's piece. Excerpt:
What’s more, if legalizing illegals is so widely supported by the electorate, how come no Democrats campaigned on it? Not all were as tough as Brad Ellsworth, the Indiana sheriff who defeated House Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Hostettler, or John Spratt of South Carolina, whose immigration web pages might as well have been written by Tom Tancredo. But even those nominally committed to “comprehensive” reform stressed enforcement as job one. And the national party’s “Six for 06” rip-off of the Contract with America said not a word about immigration reform, “comprehensive” or otherwise.
The only exception to this “Whatever you do, don’t mention the amnesty” approach appears to have been Jim Pederson, the Democrat who challenged Sen. Jon Kyl (a grade of B) by touting a Bush-McCain-Kennedy-style amnesty and foreign-worker program and even praised the 1986 amnesty, which pretty much everyone now agrees was a catastrophe.
I agree it's really between those two, and no others. If you don't buy that premise, then, well, which of these two is the better band? REM stinks now, and has stunk for a long time (1992's "Automatic For the People" was a pinnacle, and I liked the snarling new sound of 1994's "Monster" -- but bought their next two albums and finally gave up on them, like I eventually did with Woody Allen when it became obvious that the muse had departed). U2, of course, is pretty much as good as it ever was, having gone through a creative trough.
But back in the day, REM was the better band. I don't know that any REM album was as good from start to finish as U2's "The Joshua Tree," but I find myself returning far more often to "Murmur," "Reckoning" and "Fables of the Reconstruction" -- a trifecta that arguably matches the Stones 1968-1971 masterpieces "Let It Bleed" "Beggars Banquet" and "Sticky Fingers" (though the Stones crowned those three with the greatest rock album of all time, "Exile on Main Street," a feat that REM failed to match). U2 was anthemic; REM was introspective, and maybe it was just because I was one of those Chimes Street, round-glasses-wearing, vintage-paisley-shirt-wearing, floppy-haired egghead college-boy types, but REM was ... our sound. Like the author of the piece linked to above, we puzzled over Michael Stipe's obscure (and pointless) lyrics, as if they had secret wisdom to impart to us.
I remember sitting in freshman dorm one beery night when my roommate claimed to have decoded the line from "Can't Get There From Here": "If you're needing inspiration/Philomath is where I go." Joe claimed that "philomath" was the philosophy of mathematics, or the love of mathematics as a source of esoteric knowledge. As I found out later, Joe was full of crap: Philomath is the name of a town in Georgia, where REM is from. But that's college for you. For me, REM was the soundtrack to college life in part because its sound was so distinct. Nobody else had Peter Buck's jangly guitars paired with Stipe's brooding delivery.
I realize I have not made a musical case for the superiority of REM over U2, only a nostalgic and personal one. I think it's hard to write about what makes one band better than another, especially when you're dealing with two inarguably great bands. For me, it has something to do with U2 being a what-you-see-is-what-you-get band, whereas REM's work was mysterious and alluring. U2 was Aerosmith for the college radio crowd. REM was something that only the college radio got, at least for a long time, while they were still great.
David Weigel, on the Reason blog, reminds us of how crazy the Republicans were, and why they deserved to lose:
What did the GOP ever do about its raft of scandals, anyway? They responded to the problems of Rep. Tom DeLay by, first, trying to change the rules to keep him in power even if he was indicted, then pushing back the Congress’s schedule in early 2006 to comport with his trial schedule. They responded to the political cornucopia of the William Jefferson scandal by defending a criminal Congressman’s right not to be searched by the FBI. They dealt with the Foley scandal by wheeling Dennis Hastert out to “take responsibility”… by neither resigning nor apologizing. They had plenty of time, a full two years, to convince voters that they could right their own ship and reform spending, and pork, and earmarks, and control members of their caucus. They decided instead to commission the guy who directed Scary Movie 4 to make anti-Democrat ads.
Democrats: Hillary will have the organization, but she won't make it. For one thing, the Democrats aren't going to be foolish enough to nominate someone who can't win. Her negatives are very, very high, and she'll drive GOP turnout like nothing else. If Obama decides to run, he's the odds-on favorite. I think he will run, and I think he'll be nominated. He's the most electric politician in America today, and will be the media darling even more than McCain was in 2000. I think he'll be the nominee, and his running mate will be either Iowa governor Tom Vilsack or Democratic vice-presidential also-ran John Edwards, whose populist message will be much more appealing in 2008. I'm thinking that Edwards probably wouldn't relish being the No. 2 again, but his Washington experience and presidential campaign trail experience, would add gravitas to the ticket. So, my prediction: Obama-Edwards.
Republicans: It won't be McCain. I think he could win the general election, especially in a world in which Iraq and foreign affairs will be the most pressing issue. But he's got a couple of big problems: 1) in a time in which the public is clamoring for drawing down from Iraq, he wants to send more troops; and 2) the GOP nominating base doesn't like him. Unlike Democratic primary voters, Republicans tend to unify behind the candidate anointed by the party establishment. With George Allen's flameout, that candidate will be Mitt Romney. He's a solid, regular Republican acceptable to the religious conservative wing as well as the business wing. And as a state governor, he's got enough distance from the war for it not to be a liability (something that would doom a Condi Rice candidacy, assuming she wanted it). But who would be his running-mate? I say Rudy Giuliani. Though his dazzle has faded somewhat since 9/11, he's the closest thing the GOP has to a rock star, which'll be important if the Dems run Obama. And his social liberalism will have lots of crossover appeal, but won't turn off social conservatives, so long as Romney is at the top of the ticket. My prediction: Romney-Giuliani. (I think the fact that both Republicans are Northeasterns running as standard-bearers from a largely Southern party won't matter one bit.)
Obama-Edwards vs. Romney-Giuliani. What a hell of a campaign that would be!
We all have things we would say to the new Congress if we could. We are a country that makes as many speeches in the shower as it sings songs. I would say this: Focus on the age you live in. Know what it is. Know what's coming. The old way is over; the old days are over; the old facts and habits of mind do not pertain, or no longer fully pertain.
This is the age we live in: One day in the future either New York or Washington or both will be hit again, hard. It will be more deadly than 9/11. And on that day, those who experience it, who see the flash or hear the alarms, will try to help each other. They'll be good to each other. ... I would say: Keep that picture in mind. Cut to the chase, be good to each other now.
Make believe it's already happened. That's the only attitude that will help us get through it when it does. I do not mean think like Rodney King. We can't all get along, not on this earth. But we can know what time it is. We can be serious, and humane. We can realize that we're all in this together and owe each other an assumption of good faith.
There are rogue states and rogue actors, there are forces and nations aligned against us, and they have nukes and other weapons of mass destruction, and some of them are mad. Know this. Walk to work each day knowing it, not in a pointlessly fearful way but in a spirit of "What can I do to make it better?"
What can you do in two years? The common wisdom says not much. But here's a governing attitude: First things first.
Do all you can to keep America as safe as possible as long as possible. Make sure she's able to take a bad blow, a bad series of them. Much flows from this first thing, many subsets.
That's going to sound sentimental to a lot of people, but I think it's essentially correct, and it's the kind of thing I get at in "Crunchy Cons" (here's a link to the new paperback edition) In the penultimate chapter, I'm talking about an afternoon I was sitting in a neighborhood bar, and got to talking with a group of liberal Baby Boomers, who said with startling insouciance that they'd love to see a Muslim drive a truck bomb into a well-known Baptist church. It upset me so much that I had to get in my car and leave. From the book:
Trying to pull it all toegher, I think how much I hate thos nice people in that bar. Stupid g.d. liberals. Hell, yeah, I'm a Republican!
And then I think, This is how it happens.
That is, this is why we conservative put up with just about anything the Republican Party does. Our hatred of liberals is what holds us together, just as the liberals' hatred of us holds them together.
Fear and hatred, the conservative historian John Lukacs has written, are the primary emotions motivating modern democratic politics. ... Most all of us, left and right alike, are on more intimate terms with what we fear and what we loathe than what we embrace and what we love.
...We had better change our priorities while there is still time, and build the networks, social and economic, that will help us prevail over or at least withstand what terrible things might be coming.
This is not goo-goo, "We Are the World" politics. This is real, and this is practical. In five minutes, I'm going to have a telephone interview with Matthew Dowd, the GOP strategist who is co-author, with Democrat Doug Sosnik and former AP reporter Ron Fournier, of a book called "Applebee's Ame
rica." In that book, the authors say that the new era of American politics will be driven by the public's desire for community, authenticity and purpose. This "we're all in it together" sensibility is, I think, is the kind of thing they're getting at.
UPDATE: Victor Morton, from the comboxes below:
I mean, it's fine to talk about Americans wanting community, authenticity and purpose. But even when they talk a good game, Americans simply do not mean the same things by those words, and often mean exactly the opposite things. I can't find the exact quote very quickly, but it's from Pat Buchanan's autobiography, "Right from ther Beginning" -- a suitably non-Bushite source: "One part of America thinks that to be a good society, we should conform ourselves more closely to the Old and New testaments. The other part thinks progress is measured in terms of how far away we get from such repressive and stifling nonsense."
The man from the land of the Bay City Rollers has a point. In my conversation this morning with Dowd, I asked about the difficulties of creating community without a shared sense of values. I'll have to transcribe the tape to make sure I got it right, but I don't recall that he had a good answer to my question about how our deep devotion to individualism squares with our craving for community.
He did say that megachurches are so successful because they put creating community before doctrine, and people are drawn to them because they crave community. I can believe that -- but doctrine has to come in at some point, because real communities, as MacIntyre so crucially insists, only exist on the basis of shared beliefs, however broadly outlined. This is why so many traditionalist Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox and Jews can feel more of a connection with each other than with modernist members of their own religious traditions. Anyway, you can't just say, "People need community, so let's declare a community and they'll come" -- which seems to be the strategy at a number of Catholic parishes I've attended over the years. People will come when ideals are proclaimed and stated that they agree with, and the structure of the organization is set up to facilitate community-building around those shared values. Father Paul Weinberger, a wonderful and orthodox Catholic priest in Dallas, built a big and vibrant Catholic parish in the Dallas barrio by diligently and enthusiastically preaching the Gospel and offering traditional Catholic devotions -- including even saying the Novus Ordo mass in Latin. Lots of Anglos came from all over to his masses, joining the Latino members of the parish, because everyone knew what this parish and its pastor stood for.
Anyway, point being that Victor's right: you can't have real community without shared values. Given that you are never going to get people to agree on everything, what are the civic values that most Americans can still agree on?
I had a big laugh over this one: an ex-Defence Ministry official in the UK says that Her Majesty's government is not paying sufficient attention to UFOs, which he believes are real, thus leaving the nation vulnerable to alien attack.
Which probably explains why Tom Cruise has been allowed to run amok. Arf, arf!
OK, it's funny ... but that bit did make me think about the time when I was a very small boy growing up in rural Louisiana, when this couple who were friends of my parents came bursting into our house late one night, scared out of their wits. White as ghosts. They and their little girl had been out driving down a country lane when some sort of aircraft suddenly appeared over their vehicle. They never clearly saw it, but only were bathed in its light. Terribly frightened, the man sped up to outrun it. The aircraft stayed with them, even as he went around twists and turns of this narrow road. When their car reached the main highway, the aircraft shot straight into the sky at lightning speed and disappeared. This family were too afraid to go back to their house, so they came to our place.
These are not loopy people. The husband was a mill worker, and his wife was a schoolteacher. They don't know what the thing was, but they do know this happened to them.
You hear about these things, and you see videos that you can't easily explain. The only time I ever saw anything like this was about 10 years ago, on a visit to my mom and dad's place. It was about 10 at night, and I was on the phone outside. I saw in the night sky some sort of aircraft in the distance, about at the height of planes taking off from the airport 30 miles away. It hovered there for a good five minutes. It had red lights, but not in the place they are on normal aircraft. I watched it closely. It moved to another position not far from its original one, and hovered again for 10 more minutes. I finally got bored with it and went inside. Who knows what it was? I didn't give it much more thought, but I will say that I've never seen any aircraft behave like that.
I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of ufology ... but what are these things, anyway? They can't all be hallucinations, right?
From Lee Podles at Mere Comments comes very sad news that a Hungarian Roman Catholic cardinal, the former primate of the nation, was an informer for the communist government, and is apparently not so repentant. Excerpt:
Not only was Paskai informing on his fellow priests, the majority of the Hungarian delegation to the Second Vatican Council were in fact secret police informers, and in 1977 alone 421 priests informed on their fellow Catholics.
Paskai lives in comfortable retirement, and justifies what he did: “Ah, this history....I have never talked about it and I don’t imagine I ever will.” He added: “It was all to the good, that we spoke with the powers of the state. One had to do that.”
...American bishops betrayed sexually-abused children so that the ecclesiastical machinery would continue to function smoothly and without disruption; Hungarian bishops and priests betrayed fellow priests to a Communist dictatorship so that the Communists would allow ecclesiastical machinery to function smoothly. Somehow I do not think that Jesus is pleased.
Lee is an orthodox Catholic who has written bravely and uncompromisingly about the sex abuse scandal. But of course Roman Catholics aren't the only Christians who suffered through members of their clergy and episcopate betraying them to the Communists. The various Orthodox churches behind the Iron Curtain had bishops who were secret police agents, or who in other ways collaborated with Communist persecution of Orthodox, Catholics and other Christians. Recently an Orthodox friend told me a story about an Orthodox priest who was sent to prison and tortured by the communists. He found out that his bishop had turned him in to the secret police. When the priest was finally released, he sought out the bishop, and found that his betrayer was elderly and in poor health. The former prisoner committed himself to caring for his betrayer for the rest of the elderly bishop's life, as an act of love.
Can you imagine?
We have no idea how fortunate we are in this country. It's tempting to sit in harsh judgment of these Catholic and Orthodox collaborators, and I'm in no way saying that they shouldn't answer for their crimes. But how well would we do if the US were taken over by a fanatical anti-religious dictatorship, and began in earnest to persecute Christians. Here is a YouTube video of Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a Protestant who was imprisoned for 14 years by the Romanian communists, in which he describes some of the brainwashing techniques used on Christians. In 1966, Pastor Wurmbrand, who had been freed from captivity, testified before the US Congress. Excerpt:
But I will tell you that in a prison they crucified a cat before ourselves. They beat nails in the feet of the cat and the cat was hanging with the head down, and can you imagine how this cat screamed and the prisoners, mad, bead on the door, "Free the cat, free the cat, free the cat," and the Communists very polite, "Oh, surely we will free the cat, but give the statements which we ask from you and then the cat will be freed," and I have known men who have given statements against their wives, against their children, against their parents to free the cat. They did it out of madness, and then the parents and the wives have been tortured like the cat. Such things have happened with us.
And later:
The Christian prisoners were tortured in a form which should mock their religion. I tell you again in the prison of Pitesti one scene I will describe you about torturing and mocking Christians, and believe me I would renounce to eternal life to paradise after which I long, if I
tell you one word of exaggeration. God is here and knows that I do not say everything. It cannot be said. There are ladies here. There are other people hearing it.
One Sunday morning in the prison of Pitesti a young Christian was already the fourth day, day and night, tied to the cross. Twice a day the cross was put on the floor and 100 other cell inmates by beating, by tortures, were obliged to fulfill their necessities upon his face and upon his body. Then the cross was erected again and the Communists swearing and mocking "Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ." And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it. And I asked him afterward, "Father, but how could you make this?" He was half mad. He answered to me: "Brother, I have suffered more than Christ. Don't reproach to me what I have done." And the other prisoners beaten to take holy communion in this form, and the Communists around, "Look, your sacraments, look, your church, what a holy church you have, what fine is your church, what holy ordinance God has given you."
And:
Then came the brain washings. "Your wives are laying in bed with men," obscene words, "Your children hate you. You have nobody to love in the world. You are the only fools. Give up faith. Nobody is more Christians. Christianity is dead."
How well do you think you would hold out under that kind of torture? Would you collaborate? I don't think any of us can confidently say the answer. None of which is, of course, to excuse the collaborating cardinal, who for his own salvation, if nothing else, should repent and beg forgiveness. Still, thank God we have not been tested in the way that Christians under communism were (and no doubt still are in China).
But as for the bishops in this country who had no communist torturer to fear, what is their excuse for betraying children and families?
Jonah Goldberg's got a typically well-written column out saying that the elections prove not that conservatism has failed, only that Republicans have. I think he's mostly right, and he makes a particularly valuable point when he says that we're going to be hearing an awful lot about how the reason the GOP lost was too much social conservatism and war, because that suits the prejudices of the mainstream media (reminds me of Christopher Johnson's insight that the reason the Episcopal Church, a small Protestant denomination, gets attention all out of proportion to its actual influence in society because, "The Episcopal Church is what the secular media wants the Roman Catholic Church to become.")
But I think Jonah's view, which is fairly common on the Right in these post-defeat days, goes too far when he says:
It's also true that the Iraq war is unpopular; that's because it's not going swimmingly. If it were otherwise, Iraq would be a political boon to the GOP. Now, you might say, "Yeah and except for the brief unpleasantness, Mrs. Lincoln had a wonderful time at the theater." But the fact is that it is not the conservative position to botch wars.
That's a half-truth, in this case. Of course conservatives do not believe in running wars badly. Do liberals? Nobody does. Would the Right accept from liberals a defense of failed welfare-state policies that amounted to, "But the fact is that it is not the liberal position to create a vast socially-failed underclass wholly dependent on the government"? True enough, but that did in fact happen because the failed welfare-state policies grew out of flawed ideas about human nature and society, not just incompetent bureaucrats.
Ideas, as we all know, have consequences. Similarly, we got ourselves into this war precisely because of a certain set of theories about human nature and governance put forward by neoconservatives. At the risk of oversimplification, neoconservatives believe that freedom and democracy for foreigners means security for Americans. They also advance a highly moralistic foreign policy based on universalist Enlightenment values, the exporting of which they believe to be a political imperative. Bush's Second Inaugural Address is a deeply neoconservative document. See especially this passage:
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rightsand dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.
Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
Not all conservatives believe this by any means! But neoconservatives do, and their kind of conservatism has thoro
ughly dominated the Bush Administration. The Iraq War debacle has, for all intents and purposes, discredited neoconservatism as a guiding foreign policy idea. The neocons will say (and are saying) that it's not the ideas that were wrong, but the botched execution. Maybe they're right, but it's hard to prove that thesis. It is more likely, in my judgment, that the theory that freedom and democracy are a panacea for all the tribalist and sectarian ills of the world is dangerous nonsense, and can actually make those ills far worse. If that's true -- and I think it is -- then neoconservatism as foreign policy has, in fact, failed. And the Right needs to deal with that, and not retreat, a la Limbaugh, into a curiously insulating bubble that Jonathan Chait identified earlier this year in The New Republic (subscription required):
At any given moment, conservative activists are usually celebrating the top officials of the Republican Party while simultaneously demanding greater ideological fidelity from them. They are constantly hedging their bets so they can go either way with the clear-cut final determination. Today, conservatives "know" that George H.W. Bush sealed his fate when he abandoned Reaganism for mushy GOP centrism. Conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke expressed the movement's definitive judgment when he told a conservative gathering in late 1992, "We didn't lose this election. ... Some people whose politics we can sort of tolerate lost this election." ... The liberal author Rick Perlstein once said of the right's mindset, "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." Bush has failed. Therefore, he cannot be a conservative.
WARNING: If you've never read "The Lord of the Rings," a major spoiler follows. Stop reading now if you want to avoid it.
I'm reading "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy aloud to Matthew. He's capable of reading it himself, but I'm really enjoying doing this, not only because it's pleasurable to rediscover the book through the eyes of a child, but because we're able to stop and talk about the characters, and the meaning of the events, and the choices they make. It's turning into a kind of catechism.
For example, earlier in the week we read about the company's journey into the mines of Moria. That occasioned a neat discussion about Gandalf as a Good Shepherd, and Moria as the Valley of the Shadow of Death from the 23rd Psalm. We read from the book at night, and talk about what we read on the commute to school the next morning. I found that talking with Matthew, who's really inquisitive, about Gandalf as a Christ figure surprised me, in that his simple questions make me think more deeply into what Tolkien accomplished with this work.
And so last night, we read the "Bridge at Khazad-Dum" chapter, in which Gandalf dies to save the company from the Balrog. I had prepared Matthew for the chapter in advance by telling him that something big was going to happen. When the Balrog made his appearance, Matthew cut me off.
"Dad, Dad!" he said. "If there are any pictures of the Balrog in that book, don't show me."
Well, when we got to the scene in which Gandalf plunges to his death, I read the wizard's last words -- "Fly, you fools!" -- and, I swear, I started to cry. I tried to compose myself, but I had to stop for a minute. Matthew looked at me like I was out of my mind. I laughed, and apologized for getting all emotional, but told him that Gandalf was a hero, and that this is what it means when Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends." We talked about that for a short while, until Matthew's sentimental father pulled himself together and finished the chapter, feeling terribly abashed.
Still, I am loving this journey through Tolkien with my son. If you've never done it with your kids, by all means start.
What's going on with "economic nationalists," better known as Lou Dobbs Democrats? Michael Barone says they flopped:
In cycle after cycle, we hear that certain forms of populism–full-throated opposition to immigration and free trade–will sweep all before them. The 2006 results, at least as I see them now, provide less than full-throated support for this proposition. Two of the loudest critics of illegal immigration–incumbent J. D. Hayworth and open seat primary winner Randy Graf, both in Arizona, where illegals have been famously streaming through the border–both evidently lost. And in upstate New York, where National Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds was in terrible trouble after the Mark Foley scandal broke, his Republican-turned-Democratic opponent Jack Davis also lost, in a region where there had been a huge loss of manufacturing jobs. Nativism and protectionism are political weapons that in a certain light look very strong, which seem to be gleaming swords that will slay all before them. But, again and again, they crack like glass in your hand. If nativism can't work on the Arizona border, and protectionism can't work in upstate New York, where can they work?
Most of those who reclaimed Republican seats ran hard against free trade, globalization, and any sort of moderate immigration policy. That these Democrats won makes it likely that others will take up their reactionary call. Some of the newcomers may even be foolish enough to try to govern on the basis of their misguided theory.
There is an important distinction to be made between economic populism and economic nationalism. Many of Tuesday's Democratic victors stressed familiar populist themes: the little guy against the big guy; corporate misbehavior; and tough times faced by working people. Al Gore ran in 2000 as an economic populist and so, implausibly, did John Kerry in 2004. Raising the minimum wage (which Republicans stupidly failed to do before the election) is a classic populist position. Opposing Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is another. But in places where Democrats made their most-impressive inroads this year, one heard a distinctly different message of economic nationalism. Nationalism begins from the populist premise that working people aren't doing so well. But instead of blaming the rich at home, it focuses its energy on the poor abroad. The leading economic nationalist today is probably Lou Dobbs, who on nights other than Election Night natters on against free trade, outsourcing, globalization, and immigration on CNN.
There hasn't been ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism, for at least two to maybe four years. ... Now, I mentioned to you at the conclusion of the previous hour that people having been asking me how I feel all night long. I got, "Boy, Rush, I wouldn't want to be you tomorrow! Boy, I wouldn't want to have to do your show! Oh-ho. I'm so glad I'm not you." Well, folks, I love being me. (I can't be anybody else, so I'm stuck with it.) The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I'm going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don't think deserve having their water carried. Now, you might say, "Well, why have you been doing it?" Because the stakes are high! Even though the Republican Party let us down, to me they represent a far better future for my beliefs and therefore the country's than the Democrat Party and liberalism does.
Rush turned himself into a GOP shill, claiming to have done so in violation of his own convictions, and only under duress. But yesterday's shattering defeat was really a victory, at least for him, because now he's free to be himself. Which he wasn't free to be before, even though he's fabulously rich and popular and influential. You might say, "Look, Rush, if you really felt that way, why didn't you use your influence two, maybe four years ago to speak prophetically to the Republicans, to get them to change their ways so as to avoid a catastrophe like, oh, losing both houses of Congress." But see, saying that could imply that you believe this flimsy attempt to save credibility in the face of a humiliating repudiation of the politicians Rush put his reputation on the line to defend.
Warning to the White House: Nixon tried buying peace with the Left. Hence, we have the EPA, OSHA, affirmative action, etc., and it didn't work. (Yes, I know Bush doesn't have Nixon's ethical issues; that's not the point.) Bush is misreading them. The libs want the White House in 2008 and their tactics the last few years will be seen as effective now that they won Congress. Dumping Rumsfeld, a higher minimum wage, etc., will buy the president nothing.
Good grief. Rumsfeld is being dumped for political reasons, yes, but why do you suppose that politics demands it? Because America is losing in Iraq, and Rumsfeld is the chief architect of that war. The American people are fed up with Iraq, and this administration's conduct of the war. The polls showed that before the election, and the only poll that counts, yesterday's balloting, that there are consequences for failure. The idea that canning Rumsfeld is merely an attempt to appease the left is dangerously deluded, as is its ideological corollary: that annoying the left is reason enough to keep Rumsfeld (which possibly prevented some conservatives from evaluating Rumsfeld objectively; if he infuriated liberals, well, surely he was doing something right). Nota bene, it wasn't only liberal voters who forced the president to accept reality.
Why am I weirdly happy? I’m a conservative. Many people I know and admire lost tonight. And yet somehow this strikes me as a good night for the country. First, there would be something wrong for the country if the Republicans got to act this way in the House and then keep their majority. That would be a sign we’d become a one-party state. But more than that, the voters have voted for change, but they haven’t gone overboard. They did not choose the Ned Lamont wing of the Democratic Party.
Hmm. Wasn't it just last week that The Decider said that Rumseld was going to stay on for two more years? What a difference a Tuesday in November can make.
This was a long time coming. And if it had happened two years ago, the Republicans might not be in this ditch today. But at least it has happened.
You have been weighed and found wanting. This morning, the Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves for this disaster. The President got us bogged down in this foolish war and arrogantly refused any prudent change of course when it might have done some good. And the Republican Congress did not challenge him. The Congress gave itself over to an orgy of spending, and let the lobbyists have their way. I hope Tom DeLay feels like crap this morning. This result is partly his handiwork.
Nemesis always follows hubris.
And now, how will the Republicans rebuild themselves? What should the priorities of the fractured conservative movement be? I am actually buoyant this morning. Justice, of a sort, was done yesterday, and now that some idols have been smashed, it's possible to have a real debate over the meaning of conservatism. Conservatism is by no means dead--that quite a few conservative Democrats will be entering the house is gladsome tidings--but the kind of conservatism that's best for America, and which party, or party coalitions, that best embody it, is an open question.
This is just stunning: the entire GOP establishment has been wiped out in Dallas County. Dallas is now a true-blue Democratic city. Every single Republican judge but one lost. The County Judge (who is the top county executive) lost -- she was really great, too, very strong on clean air, and the Dem who beat her -- how to put this charitably? -- is very much not ready for prime time. Our new Democratic DA has never tried a felony case in his life. The local GOP was not burdened by scandals or anything else. They've been good leaders, for the most part. This is all about demographic changes -- chiefly, more Hispanics pouring into the county. And about the "straight ticket" voting option here. Dems just pressed the "straight ticket Democrat" button, and that was that.
You want to know how Hispanic immigration is changing American politics? Look at Dallas County.
Kate O'Beirne at The Corner reports most PA Catholics went for Casey, even though Santorum is strongly Catholic. Big-Catholic Santorum got the Evangelical vote.
Bill Bennett said that Santorum might have a shot at the presidency in '08. At first I thought that was nuts, but you know, he just might. I think he could do very well in the GOP primaries. The problem is, would he strike people as Dubya.2? He sounds like a "compassionate conservative" -- and he's strongly with Bush on Iraq, which is the politically disadvantageous position.
I think he's been nuts on Iraq, but I'm still sorry to see Rick Santorum go. My Bnet colleague David Kuo notes that:
the United States Senate has lost the ONLY Republican who regularly fought on behalf of compassion programs to help the poor. Yes, that speaks to the dismal state of the Republican party on compassion programs. But it is still a loss.
Agree. Plus he was solid on the issues I care about most. He'll be missed. But I'll tell you, I was wondering the other day how I'd vote if I were a Pennsylvania voter -- for me, the choices would be either Santorum, or not voting -- and thinking about Santorum's close embrace of Bush on Iraq, I really don't know what I would have done.
Hey, you want to hear something wild? GOP incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee lost in Rhode Island to the Democrat. CNN's exit polling showed that something like 62 percent of Rhode Island voters approve of the way Chafee is handling his job -- but they voted him out anyway! It's no coincidence that over 70 percent of voters in that same poll are strongly against the Iraq War. Chafee was a very liberal Republican, but he is in the same party as The Decider, so they defenestrated him.
I have to admit that I'm excited about this next era of American politics, which'll start tomorrow morning. The Dems will take the House, and maybe the Senate, and their Congressional delegation will be more socially conservative than the Dem leadership. The Democratic future is in social conservatism married to economic populism, I think (did you notice that Webb in Virginia picked up one-third of Evangelicals? That's important). There's going to be a lot of turmoil among Democrats; are they willing to make room for social and religious conservatives, even if it means diluting their commitment to liberal social values? If it means they can actually win?
For the Republicans, E.J. Dionne is right: there is no coherent governing philosophy there. There's going to be all kinds of discussions and arguments among Republicans after tonight, trying to put the coalition back together. How economically populist can they afford to go?
Take a look at this information from the Pew political typology study. The action is going to take place at the socially conservative/economically populist center.
CNN reporting its national exit polls find that Iraq is not as high on voters’ Most Important Issues list as the Economy, Terrorism and Corruption. Though they are all pretty close, Corruption was the No. 1 issue – and not surprisingly, voters who cited that as “extremely important” broke heavily for the Democrats. Those who picked Terrorism, also unsurprisingly, broke Republican, but interestingly enough, 46 percent of the Terrorism people said they voted Democratic. Here’s the most amazing thing: voters who chose the Economy went heavily for the Democrats! That’s really amazing.
CNN also reports that Webb got one in three Evangelical/born-again voters. Whether or not Webb wins, this shows that the GOP doesn't have a lock on Evangelicals.
CNN exit polling showing that a majority of women voters in Virginia went for Jim Webb, suggesting that Allen's attacks on him for his anti-women-in-combat stances of years ago didn't work. Interestingly, a third of Virginia voters who voted to ban gay marriage also voted for Webb. Democrats really do have a chance to peel away social conservatives if they actually run socially conservative Democrats.
Leading British medical authorities are calling for euthanizing disabled infants because, in their words, "A very disabled child can mean a disabled family."
Good God. But you know, 10 years from now, this will make all the sense in the world to people. Why should the living be made to suffer, and the infant endure a life not worth living? (the reasoning will go).
Richard Dawkins compares the Evangelicals to Nazis, but mark well, it's the men of British science who are actually proposing Nazi-like programs.
Get a load of this: British atheist Richard Dawkins interviews the Rev. Ted Haggard. Dawkins poo-poohs the "childish" idea of seeing the world in black and white, yet he compares the service at the New Life Church to a Nuremberg rally. Haggard rightly dings Dawkins for "intellectual arrogance," but in that conversation, denied the scientific age of the Earth. One cringes all around.
Meanwhile, you're not going to believe this insane "Halloween Mass" at an Orange County Catholic church. It's got a couple of laypeople in devil costume distributing communion and helping on the altar. Vomit. Go read Amy Welborn's discussion of this junk.
Ah, YouTube. You put me in touch with my inner Ignatius Reilly. And this blog is just an electronic Big Chief tablet.
"Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence or partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "Cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favor of the British war effort or of pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours - and the more "religious" (on those terms), the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.
E.J. Dionne notes that Republicans used to blame Democrats as the party with no ideas, but now they can claim that mantle for themselves. They've campaigned this fall on one theme: We're not as bad at the Democrats! (As far as I've been able to tell, the Dems main theme is We're not Republicans! -- but then again, it has been a long time since people like me have seen the Democratic Party as a party of ideas, as distinct to mere interests).
Dionne says, accurately, that there's no coherent governing philosophy among Republicans anymore. The party can't agree on immigration. It can't agree on Iraq. He should add that it can't claim with any plausibility to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Nor can it claim to be the party of good government. After the last six years, it's hard to know what being a Republican means anymore, except to be Not A Democrat.
Dionne:
That is why the most interesting battles over the next two years could take place not between the parties but within them. After a miserable year, Republicans have a lot of scores to settle. And conservatives, many of whom know they've lost their way, will be devoting a lot of energy to figuring out exactly who they are.
As I've said here before, I actually look forward to the arguments ahead. They will be clarifying, and, with luck, renewing for the conservative movement. Or, we could do like the Democrats, who have had a long time to figure out what they stand for, and haven't really mastered it, even though they may win today. If Dems take one or both houses of Congress, it really will be far more a rejection of the Republicans than a vote of confidence in the Democrats. Which will be cold comfort for the GOP, granted...
John Podhoretz sends the extremely welcome news that Sacha Baron Cohen is going to star in a remake of the 1998 French farce "Le diner de cons," which was released in English as "The Dinner Game." It's one of the funniest movies ever, and I can only imagine how gut-busting it's going to be with SBC involved. Meanwhile, it seems that SBC is going to make a Bruno movie now. Bruno is his outrageously shallow, outrageously gay Austrian fashion reporter character. This is great news too, but how on earth is he going to fool anybody anymore? Everybody surely must know by now who Cohen is, and must be aware of his shtick.
TimesSelect is free this week, so I'm pleased to link to John Tierney's column today. In it, Tierney explores the depressing fact that the more we talk about political issues, the more extreme we become:
But when people informally discuss politics, they often don’t hear a range of views. As in Boulder and Colorado Springs, they may be surrounded by like-minded people in their neighborhoods, churches and offices. During local elections, they’re much more likely now than in the past to hear one-sided rhetoric because gerrymandering has produced so many one-sided districts, making it impossible for moderate candidates to survive.
Thanks to cable television, talk radio and the Internet, it’s easier than ever for people to have their opinions validated around the clock. As the media audiences segregate themselves ideologically, they become more extreme in their views — and more convinced than ever that they represent the sensible middle.
You know that shopworn anecdote, attributed (perhaps
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