Goodbye 2006

Well, we're worn out from all the traveling, so it's a quiet New Year's Eve here. The boys are in bed, the baby is in her bassinet, and Julie and I just popped open a bottle of ice-cold Veuve Clicquot, because we know that we're too tired to make it till midnight. We're going to sit down by the fire in a few minutes and chill. Just so you know what a fashion plate I am, I'm wearing the Nesting Uniform, a.k.a. a Crunchy-Con shalwar kameez (a faded L.L. Bean tartan nightshirt, with clashing plaid pajama pants). I'm telling you, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that around here. Woo.

The best thing that happened to me this year was the birth of my daughter, Nora Lucia. The second-best thing that happened was the publication of "Crunchy Cons," which has helped me make a lot of new friends. Funny, but the bad stuff escapes me right this moment. Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for reading. As Miss Ella once asked, "What are you doing New Year's Eve?" Let us know below.

Home again

Just got in from Louisiana. Somebody should invent the perfect cocktail to slurp to decompress after 7 1/2 hours in a minivan with two little boys. Maybe that somebody should be me.

We made sandwiches and stuff for the road, so we didn't have to stop for food, but we did have to stop to go to the bathroom. I've come to realize why chain restaurants (e.g., Cracker Barrel, Burger King) are the place to stop for roadtrip tee-tee breaks involving little kids. Because unlike the French Market gas station/mini-mart in Natchitoches, La., just off the exit 138 from I-49, they don't put trashy French tickler machines above the urinals, forcing dad to order his seven-year-old to keep his head down and not look up. And unlike the management of that Chevron gas station/mini-mart on the south loop exit in Shreveport, Cracker Barrel managers tend to paint over or scrape off obscene graffiti on the men's room walls, which put dad in a bad spot vis-a-vis the seven-year-old.

So there.

Two days ago, I stood in a winter garden with an onion sack full of turnip roots and greens, and a grocery bag full of mustard greens, all of which I'd just pulled or picked, and talked with the farmer about the time the UFO chased him and his wife. It didn't occur to me until later that this was an odd conversation to have. Louisiana can seem so hopeless and beat-up and dismal much of the time, but there sure are a lot of wonderful people there. I drove through Avoyelles Parish this morning listening to Cajun music on the radio, with the DJ speaking Cajun French in an accent so thick I could hardly make it out, and I thought, "Nowhere else but here, baby." It was a happy feeling.

Rieff, Freud and us

This will be my last post for a day or so. I'm still down in Louisiana, but there are terrible thunderstorms, and a tornado warning has been issued for a nearby town. Probably time to shut down the laptop until I get back to Dallas tomorrow night. But before I sign off, I wanted to take a moment to mention how terrific the new Mars Hill Audio Journal is. MHAJ is now available in MP3 format, so subscribers can download it straight into their iPods (it's also available in older formats). Once you get into Mars Hill, it quickly becomes indispensable for serious Christians who need to understand the intersection of faith and culture. I e-mailed a friend last night to tell him how terrific the new MHAJ is, and he responded by saying that he's been a subscriber since the beginning, "and it keeps getting better and better." (For a free downloadable sampling of the bimonthly MHAJ, go here.)

I've listened twice to host Ken Myers' 25-minute piece on Philip Rieff, which includes extensive quotes from philosopher Stephen Gardner, and I expect to listen to it three or four more times to fully mine its riches. Here, in short, is its message. Rieff first made his name as an interpreter of Sigmund Freud, and you first have to understand how revolutionary Freud was to grasp how deep Rieff's insights into the culture of modernity were. Freud grasped that the power of religion and tradition to bind human behavior had fatally weakened. Generally speaking, he posited as its replacement the gratification of desire, especially sexual desire, as the telos, the highest goal, of society. What Freud, who was fairly conservative by the standards of the day, didn't foresee was that he was laying the basis for what Rieff labeled "anti-culture." If culture is that systems of symbols and values that serve to bind human action and channel savage passions and impulses into socially constructive ends, then a culture that prizes the fulfillment of desires -- and not merely socially approved desires, but individual desires -- is destructive of the idea of culture in principle.

Moreover, in a culture (anti-culture) that locates human identity and dignity in an individual's desires, to disapprove of those desires is in some deeply felt way to negate the dignity of that individual. People in such a culture will tend to take it personally if their desires are criticized. Rieff predicted decades ago that the culture of the future -- the one we're living in now, as a matter of fact -- would be marked by non-judgmentalism, emotionalism, and a cultural imperative to help people live as they wish to live (versus how they "ought," which is a meaningless concept in such a culture) without feeling bad about it. The therapeutic culture.

I listened twice to the Rieff presentation on my iPod on the drive down here, and it's been much on my mind since. Rieff's insights dovetail perfectly with Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of our cultural fragmentation and the possibly terminal nature of it (how, MacIntyre asks, can we hope to live in a coherent and strong culture when we have come to comprehend the world emotionally, thereby denying an objective, commonly held authority to bind and loose?). Have we gone past a situation in which "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity," into a situation in which even if the best had conviction, it is very, very difficult to appeal to the masses on the basis of those conditions. I mean, we live in a media and commercial culture in which the fulfillment of individual desire is considered the highest possible goal. The propaganda that comes at people every single day seeks to detach them from any tradition and authority save for the Almighty Self (I am reminded of what a teacher I know who is an audiophile said recently about how his experience in a public school classroom has caused him to despise ra p music: the aggressive sexuality, the violence, the valorization of the self and its own lawless desires that are celebrated in rap music are destroying the civilized community within the school, making learning -- key to the civilizing process -- impossible). MacIntyre believes that we might well be into a new Dark Age, in which people who believe in the virtues withdraw into communities within which those virtues make sense, and can be lived. I incline to his view. A gloomy thought, but it's a gloomy day outside.

Anyway, insofar as the problem of morality, culture and the common good is a central one in our time, MHAJ helps you think deeply about it, and is therefore an indispensable tool. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Dead Saddam

Well, he certainly had it coming. I can't pity him. Though I'm generally opposed to the death penalty, there was absolutely no doubt of his guilt, nor of the enormity of his crimes. The Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is permissible if there are no bloodless ways of protecting society from the criminal. Given Saddam's notoriety, one doubts that anything short of execution would have been sufficient to protect Iraqi society from his living presence (though it should be noted that the Vatican denounced the execution)tnr.. I remember reading lots of accounts of ordinary Iraqis being terrified, even after Saddam's capture, that he would return. The monster is now dead.

If being opposed to the death penalty but blase about the hanging of Saddam makes me a hypocrite, that's a hypocristy I can live with. I think Marty Peretz, in successive posts has some apt words from the prissiness of the Vatican, the UN and others, showing such concerns about Saddam's execution.

That said, it is cruelly poignant to reflect on the abused child who grew up to become one of the 20th century's most infamous mass murderers. Read this long post. As the poet wrote, "Man hands on misery to man..."

Camp

Went to a fun party at a hunting camp down by the creek tonight. Met a woman there who makes pinatas. She made one this year of the Baby Jesus.

People were startled. Can you imagine, someone said, beating the Baby Jesus at a Christmas party till he bursts?

"Well," she explained, "people love Dora the Explorer, but they like their Dora the Explorer pinatas too."

Hmm.

I also heard a story about an impromptu field hysterectomy of a cow whose uterus had fallen out, and a story about a difficult sex change at the local nuclear plant. I ate a bowl of something called "Sex in a Pot" that involved mustard greens and crowder peas. And drank two Abita Christmas ales. Ah, Louisiana...

Memories of the Ford Administration

(That was the title of a novel by Updike, which I didn't read, but given the title, who did?)

I have very few memories of the Ford Administration, because I was six years old when he became president. I remember watching him on TV announcing the pardon of Nixon, and remember being really worried about it, not because I had the faintest idea what it was all about, but because I watched a lot of TV back then and I remember the pardon upset a lot of people. And I remember Sarah Jane Moore, and Squeaky Fromme. Come to think of it, I remember being anxious back then, even as a child, that things were falling apart. I remember asking my dad over and over again if I was going to grow up to have to fight in "Indochina," as they called it on TV back then. Ford was part of that. My parents voted for him over Carter, and my memory of him -- no doubt colored by their support of him, such as it was -- was that he was a decent man outmatched by history.

My impression of him was also shaped by Chevy Chase's cruel stumblebum caricature. (I told you I watched too much TV: the first season of SNL was 1975-76, and I knew it well; in fact, I am reminded how old and media-obsessed I am when I'll make some Generalissimo Francisco Franco remark, or crack wise about a floor wax and a dessert topping, and realize that the reason my wife isn't laughing is because she was an infant when SNL debuted. But I digress.) I tell you all this because I can't form a clear impression of Ford. The truth is, I don't think much of him -- meaning not that I think poorly of him, but that I don't know what to think about him, and I'm wondering if I'm judging him too harshly because Reagan -- in many ways the anti-Ford, insofar as he took the fight to liberalism instead of dutifully following the GOP establishment line -- burned so bright. In fact, the greatest contribution Ford might have made to conservatism, and indeed to America, is to have lost to Carter to pave the way for Reagan. That's not nothing. And he certainly seemed like an honorable ex-president. I suppose we'll be talking about whether or not he should have pardoned Nixon for a long time. My head tells me no, but my heart says that was probably the wiser move for the country, even though it probably cost him the election.

Sorry, I wish I had stronger opinions about Ford. I also wish I had stronger opinions about mashed potatoes. R.I.P.

Saruman down South

Greetings from St. Francisville, Louisiana, my hometown. I'm down here visiting my family for a few days. I haven't been here for seven or eight months, so my folks warned me not to be too shocked when I saw the clearing-away that the state had done to make way for the four-lane highway.

Well, I was shocked. Flabbergasted. Appalled. It looks like what Saruman did to the forests around Isengard. "Look at those great oaks," my dad said as we passed what was once Mr. Clyde Harvey's yard, but which is now going to be the outermost northbound lane, and the shoulder. There were no oaks there anymore, only stumps. And dirt. Miles of this!

The truth is, this has to happen. West Feliciana Parish is rapidly growing, and expanding the highway must be done to accomodate the increased traffic. Still, I don't have to like it. A big part of the landscape of my youth -- trees, trees, trees -- is now destroyed. Progress. I found myself driving into town this morning, thinking about how one day I'm going to say to my boys, "This used to not be like this. When I was a boy." And then I thought: That's exactly what my dad said to me about the same place when I was a kid." When my dad was the same age as my son Matthew, he stood out on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 61 and saluted as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's motorcade passed by. Highway 61 was a gravel road then.

Everything was different then, I guess. When I was a boy in the early 1970s, same age as my son Lucas, my mom used to give me a couple of diapers and watch me as I walked through a pecan orchard and around the bend to the little cabin where my ancient aunts (great-great-great aunts, to be precise) Lois and Hilda lived. I'd spend the day with them, and they'd tell me about serving in the Red Cross in France during the Great War, and all the exciting things that happened to them once upon a time (a French soldier grabbed Hilda on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and kissed her square on the lips; I don't think she ever got over it). Lois, an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, would take me into her garden, and lean on her bamboo staff while telling me about japonicas, camellias, magnolias and all the other flowering trees and bushes in her orchard. I'd climb trees in her dense little forest, and create my own imaginary worlds in the bamboo grove. I had no idea how good I had it back then. That was just life in the country.

Hilda and Lois are long dead. Their property was sold ages ago, all the trees chopped down, the cabin destroyed, and the whole place is now a housing development. I'm the last one in my extended family to have any living memory of life there (I mean, I'm the youngest member who can remember them). When I'm dead and gone, it will be like they never existed.

I know, I know: life is like that. Everything changes. But I tell you, when my children are grown, and if they come back here to visit their cousins, they are going to be tourists in the Geography of Nowhere. I can't count that as anything but a loss, though I am equally at a loss to say how it could have been prevented. What's such a puzzle to me is I never meet people who are happy with how things are changing around here, but most everybody wants a Wal-Mart to come to town.

Here's something interesting: there are Mexican laborers in town now. More and more of them. A local businessman said to me, "If you want to get anything done nowadays, you have to hire Mexicans." He explained that the black day laborers that people around here used to hire for agricultural or small-scale construction work aren't available anymore. He speculated that this must have something to do with the way the drug culture -- especially crack -- has made serious inroads into the black community here. Frankly, I'm so shocked by this that I can't even think about being sad. Crack for sale in this sleepy Southern town. I guess I'm too Romantic, too naive.

Groovin' at Christmastime

Well, the boys are in front of the fire playing with their loot, Julie and Nora went back to bed, and I'd be there too if there weren't a danger that we'd sleep straight through church later this morning. Oh, and the danger that the boys would conk each other on the head. Since I typed that last sentence, I had to go into the living room, snatch up a toy mailbox, and tell one of them that I meant it when I told him he couldn't play with it if he kept yelling at his brother.

And they say that James Brown is dead, though that can't possibly be true. It can't. So don't believe it.

Good morning. Merry Christmas.

I intended to write last night, on Christmas Eve, after the kids went to bed and Julie and I pottered around the house waiting for Santa Claus. I enjoy Christmas Eve so much more than Christmas morning, probably because Christmas morning comes so dang early if you have kids, and also because ... well, I dunno, there's so much pleasure in the anticipation, you know? On Saturday, we all made a long car trip to Julie's aunt and uncle's ranch, but the three-hour drive back took a lot longer than that because Nora cried and cried. And cried. And then, when she finished, she cried some more. We must have spent 90 minutes in various parking lots nursing her and trying to calm her down. We didn't get home till after midnight, and were all so worn out from it that we decided to spend Christmas Eve nesting at home. I made a massive pot of jambalaya, nursed the traditional Christmas Eve Rob Roy to be properly cheerful if Diana Krall decided to come down the chimney and sing for Daddy (Linus has the Great Pumpkin, Senor Crunchy has Diana Krall the Special Christmas Elf), built a big fire to ward off the wet chill, and read Christmas stories to the boys until it was time for bed.

What a kick to watch children ping off the walls waiting for Santa. Unlike our pal Terry Mattingly, who says Christmas belongs entirely to the church, we come down on the Erin Manning side of things, taking a pro-Santa line. (You'll want to follow the hyperlinks in the previous sentence to read their dueling columns from yesterday's Dallas Morning News. And by the way, here's something I wrote in this weekend's News: the only Christmas column you'll ever read containing the words "hydrocephalic sluts."

Anyway, church later this morning will no doubt put me in a more cheerful mood. Because hey, it's Christmas! As a late, great poet of the people once hymned: "Happiness -- good God, uhh! -- I got plenty of. Would you believe I got peace of mind? And I be groovin' at Christmastime."

The Dream of Joseph Rago

Ha ha ha! Thank you, James Urbaniak.

Helpful hint

Somebody needs to work on their irony-detecting chops. I was agreeing with VDH, man.

How do you say "Reductio ad Hitlerum" en Espanol?

If this doesn't beat all: Hispanic groups are calling the handful of US raids on workplaces capturing illegal immigrants engaged in ID theft and other document fraud reminiscent of Nazi Germany:

"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?"

Ah yes, the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy. This kind of hysteria makes me wish we'd have more workplace raids. Now. Chop-chop.

A transcript you should read

The other day I blogged about a meeting the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News had with leaders in the local Muslim community. I described the Muslims as defensive and evasive. Mohamed Elmougy, who led the group, wrote a subsequent e-mail to my supervisors and to me describing me as dishonest, saying that I've singlehandedly burned the bridges the Muslim community and the DMN have built, and that I should be fired.

I've spent a good part of today transcribing the recording of the meeting. I have the entire transcript posted here on the DMN editorial board blog. It's over 7,000 words, but I strongly recommend that you go read it, to get a flavor of the questions we asked, and the answers they gave. We're going to try to convert the soundfile to a postable format, so you can listen to the meeting at some point. But I wanted to get this transcript up today.

Note especially the obfuscation, the evasion (e.g., avoiding a direct answer to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law), the defense of sharia punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and the attempt to answer legitimate questions by challenging the motives of the journalist for asking it. Note the unwillingness to say that there's anything wrong with Islamic youth reading Sayyid Qutb, that the real wrong is thinking that it's wrong. And so forth.

Just read it.

Virgil Goode and Keith Ellison

Though I agree with Rep. Virgil Goode that it's a smart idea to sharply reduce immigration from Islamic countries, at least at the present difficult time, I find appalling his behavior toward Muslim convert Keith Ellison's intention to use the Koran at his swearing-in in Congress. Ellison, who's right in this matter, has responded like a real gentleman in all this, much to his credit, and to his opponent's embarrassment.

An oldie but goodie

For those who feel enlightened or interested by this week's long combox exchange with Mohamed "Abu Humaid" Elibiary, I invite you to take a look at this epistolary back and forth between ME and me. See which of us makes the more credible case. Oooh, and this one too, which contains this excerpt:

I bring it up here as a lesson. Notice how these folks strategized not to meet my own arguments with presumably better arguments of their own, and to have this debate in the public square. They discussed operating a whispering campaign, and co-opting unsuspecting churches, temples and business owners in a stealth effort to paint me as a David Duke bigot to well-meaning non-Muslims.

I can't say how representative this small group is, or was, of Muslim leadership, but I will say that every time someone like Elibiary trots out the "stirring up hatred and inciting violence" charge as a response to criticism, I think about this shabby little backroom discussion I stumbled onto. I think about how members of that listserv were discussing ruining my reputation and harm my newspaper with a groundless whispering campaign designed not to rebut a critic, but to destroy him professionally and to intimidate a newspaper into silence.

I was (mostly) wrong about Mel Gibson

[Warning: Spoilers follow.]

Well, I finally got to see "Apocalypto" yesterday, and let me start by saying that I was wrong about the movie in my earlier comments here. It is a stunning film, and I heartily recommend it to those who can stand some gore. I did look away a couple of times, to be sure, but for most of the film, the violence is profoundly contextualized; I was not prepared for Gibson to show in the faces and reactions of his characters the pain of violence and cruelty. In this, it's much like "The Passion of the Christ," in which the violence was given deep meaning. In the moments before the mini-apocalypse strikes the peaceful village where Jaguar Paw and his tribe live, we see, among other things, Jaguar Paw lying down by the fire with his son and pregnant wife, and him observing his unborn child moving underneath the skin of his wife's belly. It's a moment of almost unbearable tenderness (says the father of a newborn). By the time Jaguar Paw and the others are led as slaves into the evil tribe's city, and we see from a distance heads rolling down the stairs from the high altar where humans are being sacrificed, we understand that the casual cruelty we've seen inflicted on Jaguar Paw's tribe is in fact the apotheosis of the sadistic civilization that has enslaved them.

In fact, I can't think of a film that is at once so violent and such a protest against violence. For me, the key moments of "Apocalypto" come atop that high altar, when the high priest is ripping the hearts out of and decapitating prisoners, while the bored royal family looks on. They've seen it all before. This is their "normal." Their ho-hum, anesthetized reaction to the unbelievable sadism they're inflicting on human beings is more shocking than any disembowelment. When I saw that, I thought about the concentration camp workers who went about their satanic jobs, then went home to their wife and kids and slept peacefully. And I thought about our ancestors who, not terribly long ago, enslaved Africans and treated them with similar barbarism, and yet were quite civilized. And I thought about how we today are even more civilized, yet we tolerate this -- and indeed quite a few Americans see this as a virtual sacrament. The Mayans in the "Apocalypto" grotesquely sacrificed innocent humans so that they could live as they wished to live; so do we, in our way. I came away from "Apocalypto" unsettled, convinced in an unfamiliar way that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us humans. We are born to trouble and violence, and will to power.

I'd said in my earlier postings that I suspected Gibson didn't know what he was doing -- that his filmmaking in fact embodies the thing he supposedly protests. I based my remarks on the number of reviews I'd read in which the gore level was explored and condemned. Having seen "Apocalypto" myself, I completely agree with Ross Douthat's observation that most critics, in this respect, reviewed the film in bad faith. While the movie is gory, it is by no means gorier, or even as gory, as plenty of films whose brutality passes without complaint, or is celebrated for its "kinetic" qualities, or whatever. The violence in Apocalypto is anything but ironic -- though it must be said that Gibson really, really, really is in need of some artistic restraint On this point, I urge you to read Tom Hibbs' insightful thoughts on how Mel Gibson and M. Night Shymalan need to work together, because each bolsters what the other lacks.

[I should say too that as an exercise in pure filmmaking, "Apocalypto" is a phenomenal piece of work. I realized at the end that I had just watched a two-hour film about tribal derring-do, filmed in an ancient Indian tongue, and I had been entirely engrossed, as if hardly any time had passed at all. Any filmmaker who can do that is a master. If somebody other than Mel Gibson had m ade this film, he'd be the toast of Hollywood.)

Knowing that Gibson is a conservative Catholic, I puzzled over the film's ending: Jaguar Paw's life is saved when he reaches the beach, exhausted, with two pursuers still chasing him. The three tribesmen confront a party of conquistadores rowing ashore, along with them at least one cleric bearing a cross. The conventionally Catholic thing for Gibson to have done would be to have the evil pursuers run away, and Jaguar Paw embrace his saviors, foreshadowing the eventual triumph of Christianity over the pagan death-cult civilization. But that's not what happens. Jaguar Paw runs back to the forest to rescue his family, while the two evil pursuers run forward to greet the Spanish. And the final scene shows JP and his family, reunited, consciously choosing not to join up with the Spanish, but instead to retreat further into the jungle "to make a new beginning."

What is the Catholic Gibson saying here? I can't mull this over without considering the opening quote for the film, Will Durant's observation that great civilizations first decay from within before they are conquered from the outside. Plainly Gibson intends to show us a Mayan civilization whose complexity is only a thin mask for grotesque cruelty -- the skin over the skull. I tried last night after seeing the film to think of "Apocalypto" as a contemporary socio-political allegory, but I just can't see that it works that way. Rather, I think this is Gibson's commentary on civilization, period. The Spanish are going to be better than the Maya -- this Gibson knows, this we all know. But given human nature, Gibson appears to be saying, they are doomed to create institutions that will ultimately make violence and inhumanity abstract, with the effect of reducing, even abnegating, the humanity of all members of that civilization. If I'm reading Gibson right here, there's something about Bigness that makes us less human. We become part of the System, and can justify the most barbaric cruelty because of it.

In fact, it may be unavoidable: one of the most poignant moments of the film comes when the evil Maya who has led the slave-gathering expedition tells his adult son, who has been with him on the trip, that today, he has proven himself a man -- and then he (the father) passes the mantle of manhood on to his son in the form of a hunting knife. It really is a tender moment between father and son, because in risking their lives to gather slaves, they have enacted a ritual that their civilization teaches them is a good and necessary thing to become fully a part of society. And yet, they have done great evil. It is easy to imagine a slave-ship captain sailing out of Ghana with a load of human beings in the hold, genuinely praising his own son for having bravely done a man's work that day. It is hard not to wonder what cruelties you and I accept, tragically unaware, as part of our role in our own civilization.

And me being me, I couldn't help thinking of how many Catholic bishops in all sincerity thought tolerating and covering up for the cruelty of clerical child abuse was actually a noble and necessary thing, to keep the "civilization" of the Church running -- and how that corruption has in fact led to a weakening of that civilization. Given Gibson's deep faith as well as his disdain for institutional Catholicism, I find it hard to believe that this thought didn't cross his mind.

It's not a Catholic thing, mind you, but a human thing, and insofar as the Catholic Church, or any other institution, is made up of humans, we will see things like this. Gibson seems to be saying that cruelty and violence is an inescapable part of our nature, and that the only institution that you can finally rely upon as a refuge from the world is the family -- or at least smaller social units, where the humanity of your neighbors is always before you. A question left unexplored is how the small unit -- the village, say -- is to protect itself from marauders. The answer, of course, is that .. . they build cultures and civilizations, working together for the common good. Until they eventually succumb to corruption, and die out first spiritually (the cynicism with which the high priest and the royal family go about their duties suggests that when the leadership of a civilization ceases to believe in sacred truths at the heart of the civilization, it is bound to fail), and then in material ways. The civilization represented by the conquistadores appears to be expiring from exhaustion and loss of faith. Gibson seems to be endorsing the social cycle theory of history, and saying that civilizations may come and go, but the family endures, and in the family is our hope. And that idea -- that the family, not the individual, is the natural basis for society -- is deeply Catholic, deeply conservative, deeply true -- and deeply un-American.

These are just my random musings a few hours after having seen "Apocalypto." I wanted to make sure to get them down, even if they're disordered, because I'd made such a big deal about how I wasn't going to see the film, and I wanted to say how mistaken I was. And I wanted to thank those like Charlotte Allen, Ross Douthat, Peter Suderman and readers of this blog, whose public and private comments to me convinced me that "Apocalypto" was worth seeing.

T. Boone Pickens on global warming

Just had a fascinating hour-long interview with Texas oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, who has been active for years in Republican politics (he's backing Rudolph Giuliani's presidential run in 2008). Among the things we discussed was global warming. He said that global warming is not a theory, but a fact. He qualified that by saying that he believes we would have had some natural warming even if humans hadn't been burning hydrocarbons at a high rate for the last century or so, but that there can be no doubt that this is a real phenomenon, and we have a lot to do with it. We'll publish his full remarks in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday.

The shame of it all

I'm sitting here at my desk just now. Phone rings. It's my wife. She's at the bookstore buying Christmas presents.

"I'm embarrassed to admit this, but what's the name of the guy who wrote 'A Confederacy of Dunces'?"

You see what I have to live with? Do you see? Pray for her. Pray for me. This is what happens when a generation is raised without proper theology and geometry.

Paranoid obsessives on the march

Victor Davis Hanson today:

There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers. So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:

Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic — without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.

Plainly this man is a paranoid obsessive. Ahem.

The Chuck Colson Award

Daniel Finkelstein of the Times of London is running a "Chuck Colson Award" contest, so named because he once passed Chuck Colson in the street. He writes:

I am looking for all contact - spotting in the street yesterday, autograph collected in your youth, meeting held with, picture taken with, gift received from, or whatever - with political figures.

Now famous is fine but semi-famous is even better, faintly ludicrous is best of all. Pictures are particularly welcome, especially if they show the semi-famous figure doing something prosaic.

Oh what fun. By all means go to the blogsite and share your entry. But include it in the comboxes here too.

I have three entries:

1. In college, I got drunk with washed-up Sixties radical Abbie Hoffman (who was also loaded on pills), and went speeding through the campus of Jimmy Swaggart Bible College after midnight, with Hoffman leaning out the window shouting, "Lock your doors! Bar your windows! Heathen Jew on campus!" The Jimmy Swaggart Bible police stopped us for trespassing, and nearly took us in.

2. Once, while a writer at the Washington Times, I met the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who shook my hand and said, cryptically, to an associate, "Young man."

3. I was standing in a press pool onsite at Ground Zero, when it was still a smoking charnel house, covering a presidential speech. When the most powerful man on the planet walked directly in front of me, as we both stood in the pit of hell, and at the very spot where the 21st century began, all I could think was, "Oh wow, I'm taller than him."

(Hat tip: The guys sitting in for Andrew Sullivan this week. Hi Clive! You guys are doing a great job.)

A broken clock is right twice a day

NR's Rich Lowry, on how conservatives believing our own biases regarding the mainstream media only hurt ourselves:

The “good news” that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war. An old conservative chestnut has it that only four of Iraq’s 18 provinces are beset by violence. True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country’s future is being waged.

In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.

“Realism” has gotten a bad name lately from its association with James Baker’s daffy Iraq Study Group. But realism is essential in any war, and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources.

Well now!

Turns out that George W. Bush was wrong: there are, in fact, jobs that Americans will do ... if you pay them a decent wage. Seems that Swift & Co., after having been popped by the feds and having much of its illegal immigrant workforce eliminated, has been hiring more US citizens. Excerpt:

Several union officials said Swift, which has denied knowingly hiring illegal workers and has not been charged, improved its wages, benefits and bonuses before the raids.

“They're trying to staff up their plants and they've been raising their wages the past few weeks,” said United Food and Commercial Workers spokeswoman Jill Cashen. “To me, it's an example that when you make the job more attractive you get a different kind of applicant.”

Imagine that. When big business has to pay workers a decent wage, it will follow the law. Of course this will raise prices for meat, but I've got no complaints there. We should all pay what things are worth. People like me can't complain about the law being broken, yet expect to profit by it on our grocery bills. If my family can't afford to eat as much meat, we'll just do without.

Beneath the surface

Via Mark Shea, here's a chilling account by Tom Hoopes, who writes:

When I agreed to do a story about demonic activity, possession, and exorcism for Crisis, I thought it would be fun—a spooky thrill. I’d write the article, warn about being too preoccupied with the subject matter, and be done. Instead, I got sleepless nights, horrifying conversations with those who have been involved in exorcisms, and a new point of view on the demonic world.

For those who have never had any direct contact with this world, it sounds utterly ridiculous. For those who have, and know those who have, it's impossible to deny the mysterious and hideous reality of what lives beneath the surface of things. You never forget.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

This is a pretty neat animated video about Intelligent Design. Still, you think about Blake's tyger, and you wonder...

(In case you wonder, I believe God created life on earth, but it doesn't bother me to think He did it through some evolutionary process.)

Best time-waster ever!

I love the Despair.com guys -- and their DIY Demotivator poster has got to be one of the best time-wasters ever!

On bridge-burning

Mohamed Elmougy, the longtime Dallas Muslim leader who headed the delegation that came into see us at the paper the other day, did not like my blog recollection of that meeting. He e-mails:

One would have hoped that you would at least be honest in recanting our meeting last week in your blog! Of course I could respond to you point by point and prove to everyone that you’re blinded by bias and hatred towards Islam & Muslims, but you don’t deserve my time!

I copied your bosses in hope they can discern for themselves that you don’t belong on the Editorial Board.

You have single-handedly managed to damage the goodwill and bridges that we worked hard on building between DMN and the local Muslim Community.

Rod, you need to seek some type of help as American Muslims are here to stay. The more you spread lies and paranoia, the more we adhere to our beloved faith, so thank you!

Well, I'm sorry that it's come to this, and I mean that sincerely. I've met twice with Mohamed, and found him to be quite cordial both times. But it surely cannot be the case that the relationship between a newspaper and the Muslim community, or any community, can only exist on terms dictated by one side. I recognize that Mohamed and his colleagues are deeply frustrated with me for the things I write and the questions I ask, and for my dissatisfaction with the answers they give. But indignation is not a sufficient response.

In 2003, after I'd only been in Dallas for a few months, we had a meeting with Dr. Sayyid Syeed, head of the Islamic Society of North America. Dr. Syeed was as pleasant as could be as long as we talked very generally about peace and cooperation. But when I asked him how he squared his professed belief in peace and tolerance with the indisputable fact that members of the ISNA board had been directly linked to extremist organizations and viewpoints, he became furious, shook his fist at me, told me that I would one day "repent," and said my questions reminded him of Nazi Germany.

It was a hysterical performance, and one that raised far more questions than it answered. I believe that many US Muslim leaders try to substitute "How dare you!" for a substantive response to serious and legitimate concerns, in hopes that those asking the questions will withdraw them out of shame. Sorry, but that doesn't work with me, and it ought not work with anybody who didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. In the meeting here the other day, when the topic of Sayyid Qutb's thought being part of a quiz competition at the big local mosque came up, Mohamed and some of the others tried to minimize Qutb's importance. You might have believed that if, like most Americans, you know nothing about Qutb. But anybody who knows anything about him understands his absolutely central role as the philosopher behind modern jihadism. To learn that Qutb's thought has been welcomed into a mosque does not put one's mind at ease. Here, for example, is Qutb on the possibility of building bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims, i.e., those living in Ignorance:

The only way to bridge the gulf between the two is for Ignorance to liquidate itself completely and substitute for all its laws, values, standards and concepts their Islamic counterparts.

The first step that should be taken in this field by the person calling on people to embrace Islam is to segregate himself from Ignorance. He must be separated to the extent that any agreement or intercourse between him and Ignorance is absolutely impossible unless and until the people of Ignorance embrace Islam completely: no intermingling, no half measures or conciliation is permissible, however clever Ignorance may be in usurping the role of Islam or reflecting it. The chief basis of the pers onality of the person inviting others to Islam is the clear manifestation of this fact within himself and his solemn conviction of being radically different from them. They have their own religion, and he has his. His task is to orientate them so that they may follow his path without any fraud or pretence. Failing this, he must withdraw completely, detach himself from their life and openly declare to them: "You have your own religion, and I have mine."

This is a sine qua non for the contemporary advocates of Islam.

Now, you simply cannot tell me that teaching the thought of a man who believed the only way to relate to non-Muslims is entirely on terms set by Muslims, who should intend ultimately to destroy non-Muslim beliefs and way of life and substitute Islam -- you can't tell me that exposing kids to this way of thinking in the biggest mosque in Texas is not something worthy of the larger community's concern. You can't dismiss him as a fringe figure, or dismiss his being taught here as nothing compared to all the good that the mosque does. You just can't, not credibly. We are seeing in England the poisonous fruits of the wider community having turned a blind eye to the spread of this poisonous ideology among the youth. We can't afford the same mistake here.

To ask these questions is not to show hatred for Muslims, and to assert such a thing is transparently an attempt at moral bullying. On the contrary, asking hard questions and expecting credible answers is to take Islam and its doctrines and believers seriously. And it is to take the journalists' role seriously. I mean it sincerely when I say that I welcome dialogue with our Muslim neighbors. Dialogue, not monologue. Mohamed seems to believe that dialogue is only possible if the outcome is predetermined, and it can only be agreement with his side's views. I respectfully but firmly dissent.

"Body Worlds"

Heard about the "Body Worlds" exhibit, in which actual eviscerated and dissected human bodies are turned into a plastic-like substance, then posed and exhibited for museum crowds? It's here in Dallas now, and I asked two smart guys to go see it and write their opinions for the section I edit.

In his pro-exhibit essay, Dr. Daniel Foster, a member of the president's Bioethics Council, says that "Body Worlds" could inspire in viewers a sense of wonder at the complexity of the human body. Excerpt:

As a physician, I examine living bodies almost every day. I also know much about the body at the molecular level from my own research and study. Yet I came away from the exhibit thinking it unique and quite wonderful. There are not many experiences that provide education about the body and how it sustains life; awe at the marvel of that body; thoughts about serious things like health, mortality and death; and, perhaps, now and again, a near-religious experience.

In his anti-exhibit essay, Thomas Hibbs, a Catholic philosopher and professor of ethics and culture at Baylor, says "Body Worlds" is a kind of pornography masquerading as pedagogy:

Let's be honest: The draw of Body Worlds is not its promise to instruct the masses on how the human body looks and functions underneath the skin. We could do that with very sophisticated artificial models, but it's unlikely such an exhibit would cause much of a sensation, or (therefore) be an attraction.

No, the exhibit's equivocation about "real bodies" discloses its real agenda: to present flayed, disemboweled and deconstructed humans, while using a pedagogical and pseudo-scientific rationale to disarm moral squeamishness.

...Merely asserting that one is engaging in the laudatory practice of overcoming taboos about the proper use of dead bodies does not make it, in fact, laudatory. One might equally claim that hard-core pornography can educate viewers about sex by reducing sex to the manipulation of body parts stripped of any larger human significance.

The problem with death in our culture is not that we have taboos about it, but that we lack a rich language for articulating the experience and its meaning. It's hard to see how Body Worlds will help solve that problem. Indeed, what is on display is not the mystery of death, but the reduction of bodies to inert plasticized parts displayed for viewers – a pornography of the dead human body.

Regular readers should have no doubt about where I stand on the matter. But both essays are worth reading, and discussing.

Mike S. Adams is my hero

Read this. Savor it. Pass it on to everyone you know.

Regarding the burgeoning civil war among the Palestinians, Shmuel Rosner notes that the West, in backing the elected PA president Mahmoud Abbas over the elected Hamas parliamentary government, the West is having to pretend to believe that the "moderates" of Fatah are the authentic voice of the people, and not the wack jobs of Hamas, who happen to be, well, popular. Which raises some questions:

Is it wise to be involved in a peace process with a ruling party that doesn't have the support of the people (polls don't count)? Isn't this policy of giving up on moderate Arab democracy a sign of racist or colonialist tendencies? What are the implications of this trial and error for other countries—namely Iraq and Lebanon? Whatever you think of the Baker-Hamilton report and its shortcomings, it is realism that is making headway this week in the Palestinian territories. Realism—and a healthy dose of cynicism.

So, the Palestinians who oppose Abbas' moves will be right when they point to this chain of events as the culmination of Western hypocrisy. But those who support him—in Palestine and around the world—will also be right. Sometimes, hypocrisy is the most basic way to recognize reality.

By the way, via Amy Welborn we learn that an internal Anglican church investigation accuses Riah Abu El-Assal, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, of being a crook. Dunno if he's a crook, but he's certainly a piece of work: we met with him here at the paper on a visit he made to Dallas in late 2005. In his meeting with us, he made some startling, and frankly absurd, claims. From the interview we published:

(On Arab persecution of Jews)

RIAH: We were not party to persecuting the Jews in modern-day times. They lived among us from 70 A.D. until recently. We became enemies because some Western powers had a hidden agenda - the whole question of oil in the Arab world. They allowed Israel to come. They persecuted the Jews in Europe and made the Palestinians pay.

TDMN: But the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was allied with the Nazis. He went to Berlin and met with Hitler, and he did inspire anti-Jewish pogroms. That did happen.

That's recorded by Westerners, the way Westerners write about Islam. I'm a student of Islam.

So he was never allied with the Nazis?

He was never allied with the Nazis. He did visit Germany, no question, but he was never allied with the Nazis.

In 2001, you made a controversial statement. You said, speaking of the Palestinians, "We are the true Israel. No one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and, after all, the promises were first given to Abraham, and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew. ... He is the father of the faithful." Is that an accurate quote, and can you explain what you meant by that?

Definitely. People today speak of Israel as a piece of land given by almighty God, a divine intervention concerning land. It was given to Abraham. Check your Bible. Tell me where in the Bible Abraham is spoken of as a Jew.

Abraham is not a Jew?
No. He's an Iraqi. He comes from Iraq. That's why I'm upset that we went and ruined the homeland of Abraham. Second, I am the true Israel. This is not Riah Abu El-Assal saying this. This is St. Paul saying this. Paul was the apostle to the nations. He spoke of the Christian community as the true Israel. I'm not trying to say we replace the Jews in the world. No. What he said is that we have inherited the promises. We are the true heirs of the promises.

< /div>

 

Orthodox Christmas

This year marks my first Christmas season as an Orthodox Christian. That means it's the first year I've observed the Nativity fast, and boy oh boy, have I ever whimpered through it (and backslidden too). Orthodox Christians deny themselves the feasting that is common in our culture through the month of December, observing the weeks from mid-November leading up to Christmas as a sort of mini-Lent. Much to my surprise, I learned that this was the ancient custom of the universal church, though it fell out of favor in the West in the High Middle Ages. I had no idea that the Advent preparation was to be one of fasting, prayer and penance, though I suppose if I had given it a second thought, I might have inferred it. Taking my cue from our popular culture, I've always assumed that the Advent preparation meant getting in a progressively more festive frame of mind through December, leading up to Christmas. Uh, no. I hope I do better with the Nativity fast next year. It is a shock to my system, I must admit.

I also really miss Christmas carols at church. Whimper, whimper. But there are lovely new customs to learn: the Holy Supper, for example, which comes from the Russian Orthodox tradition.

And now, Texas Baptists

SNAP is asking the Baptist General Convention of Texas to make public information from its files related to clergy sexual abuse. The Baptist organization is declining. Excerpt:

Emily Row, coordinator of leader communication with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said there are several reasons [for maintaining confidentiality].

“This is not a list of people, but a file that includes incidents of clergy misconduct reported by the churches that cooperate within the convention,” Row said. “Baptists don’t have denominational structure like most denominations. Churches choose to participate or not, and we have no overarching hierarchical system.”

The file contains incidents of clergy misconduct that include extramarital affairs as well as sexual abuse of children, she said. Churches voluntarily provide this information.

If there has been a confession, a conviction or substantial evidence of misconduct has been documented, that information is included in the file, Row said.

Officials of any church associated with the convention may request in writing whether a particular pastor is included in the file, she said. They receive a yes-or-no answer, Row said. The convention provides no particulars.

“We don’t provide details to protect victims,” she said. “They [church officials] can then pursue a conversation with that minister. We highly encourage every church hiring a minister to send a request, but we can’t require it.”

Row said that anyone convicted of a sexual crime already is on a public list of sexual offenders. Churches should conduct extensive background checks, including looking on sexual offender lists, she said.

“Most of the people lobbying for it to be published don’t understand our denomination structure,” she said.

What does the denominational structure have to do with keeping this information secret? I can understand wanting to keep false or doubtful accusations confidential, but the story says that confessions, convictions or substantive accusations are in those files. Wouldn't members of congregations where abusive pastors are now serving, or would wish to serve, want to know what they were getting into? Whose interests are being protected by this policy?

The Denton (Texas) Record-Chronicle reported Sunday on two cases of Baptist pastors in their area being sued for allegedly molesting underage girls in the past. One of the lawsuits was settled ("I confess that proper boundaries were not kept," the pastor involved told his congregation, manfully using the passive voice to describe his seduction of and extramarital sexual affair with a 14-year-old girl); the other is still ongoing. The alleged victim, who went public in the article, alleges that the pastor forced her into a sexual relationship when she went to him for counseling as a young teenager, and when he impregnated her, she was forced by him and church leaders to denounce herself in front of the congregation, and ordered not to disclose that the pastor was her baby's father. In a deposition, the pastor admitted to having had a sexual relationship with the woman, but said it began when she was 17, and therefore at the legal age of consent. Lovely, just lovely.

The Record-Chronicle noted in an editorial:

As the Record-Chronicle’s Donna Fielder completed her exhaustive reporting on the stories that appeared in Sunday’s paper, she began to hear from supporters of one minister or another, asking that the stories not be run. One e-mail said publication would bring about “the destruction of the subject parties and the cause of Christ.”

It is hard to understand this attitude. The Roman Catholic Church has been rocked by revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated by priests upon young boys. We would hate to believe that concern for the possible sexual abuse of young women produces less outrage among Baptists, but it is a hard thought to dismiss.

Faith, even more than forgiveness, is central to any religious belief. It is indeed the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But blind faith in human beings can bring disastrous consequences. The Catholic Church has learned this over the last few years. Texas Baptists may soon be finding it out.

An education in misery

Ross has some thoughts about that Margery Eagan column I posted the other day, talking about how the Needham, Mass., school quit publishing the honor roll for the sake of lessening pressure on kids to succeed. The fear there was that the pressure was responsible for a spate of teen suicides. Ross makes the interesting point that this story exemplifies a paradox: it is both a case of silly accomodation of therapeutic egalitarianism, and a case of the crazy-making impetus to succeed driving young people to despair.

This reminded me of a friend of my wife's telling her about the year she taught first grade at a tony private school. She'd sent home a report card with a particular child saying that the child needed help in this or that area. The furious parents contacted the school threatening a lawsuit, out of fear that this blemish on their first-grader's record would make it harder for the kid to get into Harvard. True story.

This also reminded me of my friend N., with whom I was close in high school. She ended up at Yale as an undergraduate, and I ended up at LSU. Whenever I'd see her on holiday breaks, I was dismayed by how miserable she was at Yale. I envied her for getting an Ivy League education, but she'd come home down and out, routinely. Talking to her about her college experience was enlightening. She painted a portrait of a society so status-obsessed that almost nobody dated. She didn't put it this way -- in fact, she had no explanation for it -- but it seemed clear to me that undergrads were so caught up in the pressure-cooker mentality that they were afraid to take a chance on dating, for fear they'd choose the wrong person. In other words, you couldn't just relax and be normal, because there was far too much riding on every choice you made. As I recall, N., who was smart and conversational and attractive, came home feeling horrible about herself, because she didn't have as much money as others there, or she wasn't this, or she wasn't that. The poor woman was in such despair.

I used to think that the Yale experience said a lot about her, but not so much about Yale. But over the years, I'd meet people around our age (I'm nearly 40) who'd gone to Yale, and who said yeah, that was pretty much how it was there. If any Yalies read this and care to offer a counternarrative, by all means do. I've got nothing against Yale, to be sure, and insofar as this is an accurate account about Yale's dysfunction, it's no doubt true of all or most elite universities.

Your thoughts?

Muslims and the Holocaust

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about the time as a refugee in Holland, that she learned about the Holocaust. She told her sister, also a Somali refugee, what had been done to the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators:

With great conviction, my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed or massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."

She was not saying anything new. As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.

Later, as a teenager in Kenya, when Saudi and other Persian Gulf philanthropy reached us, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.

Hirsi Ali goes on to ask where is the counter-conference in the Muslim world to that foul Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran. Why are mainstream Muslims not denouncing or disassociating themselves from it? Here's her answer:

Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations, the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed — that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such? In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he shall not want for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.

More on Separationism

Lawrence Auster notes this blog's discussion of his idea that the West must separate itself from Islam, for its own self-defense. Earlier, I'd written that I more or less accept his first four premises:

1. Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.

2. But we cannot destroy Islam.

3. Nor can we democratize Islam.

4. Nor can we assimilate Islam.

...but I can't get to the conclusion:

Therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from Islam is to separate ourselves from Islam.

I acknowledged in my earlier post that I can't reach that conclusion in part because I don't want it to be true -- and that if that's my prime reason, it's intellectually indefensible. Wanting something to be true, or untrue, doesn't make it so. I'm still thinking about it, because the premise of Auster's that I wrestle with is No. 4, which holds that Islam cannot be assimilated. I doubt it can, but I hope it can, because if not, I see no reason why Auster's conclusion is wrong.

At the Dallas Morning News the other day, our editorial board received a delegation from the local Muslim community. They came in large part to complain about editorial coverage of the community, which is to say they came mostly to complain about me. Which is fine: they accurately recognize that I don't believe their claims that they are completely innocent of radicalism, and are wholly victims of irrational fear of Muslims. Once again, I came away from a meeting with them even more convinced of my views in this regard. I recorded the entire meeting, and hope to have the time in the next week or so to post lengthy excerpts. In summation, though, the group was defensive, evasive, and wouldn't give a straight answer to simple questions.

I asked the delegation's leader to clarify something he'd said to me and some colleagues last time we met, about his belief that homosexuals should be killed, adulterous women stoned, etc. He launched an elaborate defense of this position, saying that Judaism and Christianity are against homosexuality. Yes, I said, but they don't require that gays be killed for being gay. Do you believe that they should? An imam jumped in to explain why the sharia is right to require hand-chopping of thieves. Later, the delegation's leader said that if I'm asking him to apologize for what his religion requires, he's not going to do it.

Trying to get at the heart of the matter, I asked if they thought sharia should be the law of the land in our secular pluralistic democracy. Another round of long-winded answers, amounting to, "It would never happen here." That's not what I'm asking, I said; should it happen here. Someone explained that Muslim community would never be big enough in this country to make that happen. Which is, of course, entirely beside the point, but we moved on. I had my answer.

The group complained that the DMN editorial page picked out small faults in the Muslim community locally, and highlighted them. Among their complaints: our editorial criticizing the Dallas Central Mosque for stocking anti-Jewish, anti-Christian hate literature in its library. And the Dallas Central Mosque's teaching the violent, revolutionary, jihad-promoting writing of Sayyid Qutb to its teenagers. Members of the group said Qutb was an "obscure" writer who had some good ideas for improving Islam, but had some fringe ideas. They tried to portray him as a marginal oddball. Which is b.s. -- Osama bin Laden has cited Qutb as his spiritual godfather, and his work is at the intellectual center of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is no small thing that the largest mosque in Texas is having its teenagers read Qutb's work. One of my colleagues, a reporter who covered the British subway bombings when he was stationed in London, said to the group that he'd visited Islamic bookstores, and discovered Qutb' s books and other Islamic extremist literature there on the shelves -- and this was where the subway bombers and radicalized Islamist youth in Britain were getting their ideas.

The group rejected the implications of this, with someone even suggesting that it was the West's fault that these youth were becoming radicalized.

And so forth. The conclusion I drew from this meeting is that the Muslim community's leaders here will not accept any criticism, no matter how legitimate, considering it to be bigoted. They will not admit to any radicalism going on in their community, and try to minimize it, even as it goes on. They said we were wrong to criticize the DCM's imam for turning up at a "Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary, The Ayatollah Khomeini." Which is just nuts.

I don't want to think ill of the Muslim community in Dallas, or anywhere. But like I said, wanting to believe something does not make it true. Oh, and it was instructive to hear from this group that the adulteresses in the Prophet's time asked to be stoned to death. The Prophet was apparently doing them a favor. Wonderful.

What I keep seeing from these meetings is an attempt -- a sincere attempt -- to mau-mau the media into ignoring disturbing things going on in the American Muslim community. By all means we should cover the good stuff. The group the other day kept making the point, "You focus on the few bad things, and ignore all the good things." But charitable works don't somehow make it okay to include hate literature against Christians and Jews in your mosque, and certainly don't make it un-newsworthy. Being kind to others doesn't obviate concerns over what kind of fanatical jihad literature you're teaching to your teenagers. I do believe that most of the American media are unwilling to give this kind of thing the scrutiny it deserves. I'm pleased that my editorial board does not give them a free pass, and is not willing to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing -- even though it does cast into doubt the idea that Islam can be assimilated into American life.

It would help the case made by men and women like those of the delegation if instead of engaging in denial and trying to make journalists feel like heels for even raising questions, they would deal with them straight on. But to do that, I suspect, would amount to conceding that Islam, as they understand it, is incommensurate with basic American values.

Liberal religion in time of crisis

Fifteen years ago, I went to midnight Christmas Eve mass in the Netherlands. I don't speak Dutch, so I don't know what precisely was said. But the music -- anti-war pop songs (the world was on the verge of the first Gulf War) -- was off-putting. And the Dutch Catholic church has a reputation for being the most liberal in the world. After the mass was over, I reflected on how intensely the Dutch of this region suffered under Nazi occupation, and wondered if this was the kind of religion that got them through that time of trial.

I thought about that today when I listened to the Mars Hill Audio "Audition" interview with Alan Jacobs concerning P.D. James' novel, "The Children of Men" (you can download that interview for free via iTunes or here; that same issue of Audition also contains an interview with Baylor's Ralph Wood about James's crime fiction, and an interview with James herself). The novel -- the film version of which will be released on Christmas Day -- is set in England in the 2020s. No child has been born in the world since 1995 -- total global infertility. Facing the extinction of humankind, the British now live in a police state, and have responded to their impending doom by ... well, here's Jacobs:

One of the most interesting things to me about the book is how James seems to be saying that in an overwhelming and incalculable crisis of this kind, that liberal theology just simply disappears. People either give up religious hope altogether, and like the majority of people in England try to get what comforts they can from what remains of human existence. Or they turn to a much stricter, more traditional, orthodox, fully supernatural view of religion, a fully supernatural Christianity. James seems to be saying it’s only in this old faith that people can find comfort. It’s only in these traditions that religion is meaningful, and that watered-down religion simply disappears from the map. It cannot serve any meaningful function to people in such a horrible crisis.

Think about this point with reference to the thread below about religion in the Global South. What does la-te-da liberal American and European styles of Christianity have to say to people in the Third World, who have to live daily with death, poverty and suffering the likes of which we can scarcely imagine? Admittedly some of the expressions of Christianity coming out of the Global South are startling and alien, even to a troglodyte like me. But still...

(And for that matter...)

News of Orthodox villains

I said if somebody had current news of clerical sex crimes in a church other than the Roman Catholic one, I'd blog it. Here it is. The insurers of a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia monastery in Blanco, Texas -- a monastery that has been shut down, I think -- have reached a settlement with a man who claims he was abused there as a child. Two monks are already in prison in connection with abuse there, and I believe others face trial.

This is particularly painful to me, because that monastery plays a significant role in my life. I went on my first "date" with my wife there, and prayed before an icon of the Virgin that if she was the one God had for me to marry, that she would ask God for the graces to help Julie and I know this. Four months later, we went back to the monastery, and while kneeling in prayer there, I asked Julie to marry me.

I remember seeing on one of those visits a young boy in clerical robes. I am afraid that this poor kid was one of the abuse victims. This really is heartbreaking to me in a personal way, beyond the crimes committed against children there, because my memories of that monastery are forever tainted. But let justice be done, is what I say.

Fortuna, save us!

Well, this cinematic abortion would NEVER play at the Prytania! Check out what Hollywood once tried to do to the Fifth Gospel:

Throughout Dunces' history, studio chiefs have been reluctant to bet on a colloquial story involving an overweight intellectual who avoids sex and is fond of alluding to Roman philosophers. In many cases, the suits simply didn't get the book. For a version considered in the early '80s, Orion Pictures founder Mike Medavoy suggested that Ignatius be made thin, so that aerobics-crazy audiences would take to him, which is like suggesting that Captain Ahab be made kinder to ocean mammals so Moby Dick appeals to environmentalists. Yet these same executives are often attracted to the book's status as an "important" work. And therein lies the tension that keeps a Dunces adaptation forever on life support. As Will Ferrell has said, "It's the movie everyone in Hollywood wants to make but doesn't want to finance."

Priorities

It's good to know that the National Council of Churches has its priorities straight. Ha.

This is the kind of thing that gives environmental awareness and activism among Christians a bad name. I do believe that proper stewardship of the natural world should be a serious concern among religious believers. But this NCC thing is petty as all get-out. Evian for Darfur now!

Jesuits were martyred for ... this??

Over at the Catholic World News blog, Diogenes discovers that Bishop Richard Sklba of Milwaukee is dancing with wolves. Good grief. Those poor Canadian martyrs. Like St. Yogi of Berra said, if they were alive, they'd be spinning in their graves.

Speaking of authority

Who is gullible enough to believe the word of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth? Yesterday the diocese announced the suspension of a priest it had left on duty despite his having admitted to abusing a child in the 1970s. Excerpt:

A Tarrant County judge ordered the diocese to review all clergy files in 2004 and turn over all records of abuse allegations to Dallas lawyer Tahira Khan Merritt, who had filed a lawsuit accusing the diocese of covering up such matters. Those files included nothing about Father Pansza.

Ms. Merritt reacted angrily Thursday to Bishop Vann's announcement that the church had left Father Pansza on duty, despite the admission of sexual abuse.

"This so-called sudden discovery of an additional file raises in my mind serious questions about whether the judicial process was abused," she said.

"How many more files are yet to be discovered?"

Indeed. Maybe none, but who can take the bishop's word on the matter now? The cops ought to seize all the records of the Fort Worth diocese and go through them themselves. Enough of this garbage.

Where the country is

A new NPR poll of likely voters conducted by Democrat Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger finds the country still really cheesed off at the Republican Party, with numbers that look particularly daunting for the 2008 GOP presidential nominee (46 percent say they would vote for the generic Democrat, versus 28 percent who say they'd vote for the generic Republican). And the president is in deep, deep trouble: though his approval rating is still at 40 percent, the intensity of opposition to Bush is much stronger than intensity of his support: 45 percent "strongly disapprove" of his leadership, versus 17 percent who "strongly approve."

What's more, two-thirds of all voters -- and about half of Republican voters -- want to see America start withdrawing troops within the next six months. Pair that with strong disapproval ratings for the GOP and the president, and ask yourself how likely it is that the people and the Congress will get behind Bush if he decides to pour substantially more troops into Iraq, as the scuttlebutt has it.

The American people appear to have decided that we have lost the Iraq war. That would be a correct judgment. Bush says that going forward, he will not choose a strategy that will lead to "defeat." Sorry, but that horse has left the barn. I am strongly unwilling to see more Americans die in Iraq so the president can save his reputation fighting for a victory that won't come, not for lack of skill or bravery on the part of our troops, but because there is simply no will among the Iraqis to live together in peace. Iraq will have its civil war, no matter what. Perhaps we can delay it, at the cost of more American blood and treasure, but there will be a civil war in Iraq, and every American who dies from here on out will die for a lost cause.

I think also the Republican Party, barring a surprising event, is going to get shellacked in 2008. If we're still in Iraq, voters will take it out on the GOP. If we're out of Iraq, and Iraq is consumed by carnage (as it will be), voters will take it out on the GOP.

I was thinking this morning about our discussion below on the Rieff thread, and about what Rieff said on the nature of authority. Having seen how this administration lied either to itself or to the American people, or both, to get us into this war, and having seen how willing I was personally to believe what they were saying back in 2002, I doubt I will ever be able fully to trust the government again on such matters. When I was younger, I used to scoff at the Boomers I knew who were deeply cynical about the government because of Vietnam. I felt sorry for them, and thought that they should get over it already. I was wrong.

Therapeutic triumphs in high school

Minkoff sends along this Margery Eagan column from the Boston Herald, arguing that we're so afraid that our kids are going to feel bad for failing at something that we're making them crazy. Seems that a high school in Needham, Mass., decided to quit publishing the honor roll so kids who didn't make it wouldn't feel bad about themselves. Excerpt:

Parents, ask yourselves: How often did you see every third-grade science project get a gold star no matter how shabby? How often did every 6th grade basketball player get equal game time, no matter how dismal their skills? The irony is that nobody’s fooled. Even first-graders know who can run fastest and read best. It’s parents - competing with each other - who think they can fix all.

So what we have in affluent towns like Needham, Newton, Wellesley and Brookline are expensive tutors and SAT courses, private college consultants, one-on-one sports coaches and more therapists prescribing more anti-depressants to more 15-year-olds. Meanwhile, few are expected to clean up their rooms or walk, heaven forbid, the half-mile home after school. What we have in affluent towns - and this is about affluent towns - are overinvolved parents, hoverers, I call them, so busy greasing the skids for their kids that their kids cannot learn to fail. And they’re afraid to as well: What will mommy or daddy do?

[snip]

You know, when I was little we all went to Mrs. Lyons’ Dancing School. Girls outnumbered boys 3 to 1 and every class began with boys in blazers marching across a wide room to pick girl partners in lace anklets week after week. The same girls didn’t get picked and it was awful, terrible, so humiliating. If Mrs. Lyons pulled such a sadistic stunt today, surely she’d be shot at dawn. Yet the overlooked little girls did learn a lesson: Since they’d never be femme fatales, better to cultivate other skills.

Spengler on the Global South

This week, Spengler reviews Philip Jenkins's new book about Christianity and the Global South. Excerpt from the review:

Westerners have spent the past 400 years in a grand effort to make the world seem orderly and reasonable without, however, quite suppressing the strangeness and wonder of life. Now come the new Christians of the Southern Hemisphere, who confound enlightened Western prejudice.

The Bible, and above all the Hebrew Bible, speaks immediately to the new Christians of the global South precisely because their lives are fragile and fraught with danger, Philip Jenkins argues in his most recent book, unlike the complacent and secure Euro-American Christians who find disturbing the actual Bible of blood and redemption. Southern Christians will dominate the religion within a generation or two and, if Jenkins is right, will bring it closer to its original purpose and character.

This observation makes Professor Jenkins' new volume indispensable not only for its understanding of global change, but also for its understanding of what Christianity implies. Southern Christians hold to biblical authority not because they are backward, but because they have embraced the Bible for what it really is. Euro-American Christians who interpret Scripture to suit their evolved cultural tastes are soon-to-be-ex-Christians.

Like these folks, no doubt. Reading Rieff last night, I thought about contemporary American religion and contemporary American journalism, two things which occupy much of my brainspace. The fields of religion and journalism have a leadership class that, as a general matter, is heavily invested in the therapeutic approach to their vocation. It occurred to me that Katharine Jefforts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, probably has a future in journalism once her church collapses.

"Little Hotties"

Click here to read the full text of that Margaret Talbot article in the New Yorker, re: the hydrocephalic hoochies Bratz, that we were talking about last week. Excerpt:

For [Bratz manufacturer] M.G.A., holding on to the six-to-twelve-year-old market -- a group that, until the eighties, wasn’t yet letting go of childish things -- means making dolls that look like celebrity hotties. As Larian wrote in Brand Strategy earlier this year, "Bratz are not merely dolls but ‘fashion icons’ that look to the runways and what kids wear in and out of school for inspiration." With Bratz, the company is selling the notion that divahood is something for girls to aspire to, with or without a talent to go with it. This is the attitude that fuels, for example, the success of Club Libby Lu, the chain of mall stores where six-year-olds can get makeovers for their birthdays, complete with hair extensions and lip gloss; it’s also the attitude behind T-shirts for little girls bearing slogans such as "So Many Boys, So Little Time" and "My Heart Belongs to Shopping." Many parents find this aesthetic weird, even repellent, but somehow hard to dodge.

Indeed, marketers counsel companies not to feel guilty about "going around moms," as the 2004 book The Great Tween Buying Machine puts it, and advertising products that parents dislike. The book’s co-authors, David L. Siegel, Timothy J. Coffey, and Gregory Livingston, who run the marketing agency WonderGroup, write that, thanks to the "nag factor," there are "plenty of examples of successful products that moms really don’t like for themselves, but they buy anyway." They cite unusual color innovations like green Heinz ketchup and blue Hawaiian Punch: "Moms do not like any one of these products, yet each has generated millions of dollars in sales." Calling "Mom-centricity" a "heinous disease," they remind marketers that all they have to do is "appease" parents, not please them. With Bratz, a parent might think, Sure, they’re sexy-looking, but at least a ten-year-old girl playing with them is a ten-year-old still playing with dolls. Fara Warner, the author of Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers-Women, goes further, writing that Bratz represent "a future where young girls don’t need their dolls to show them the career choices they have open to them. They already know they can choose any career and pursue it. It’s a future where the rules about the size and shape of women’s bodies, and how women express their sexuality, are far broader and more open." Whether a seven-year-old actually needs a doll that hints at how broad the rules of sexuality now are is not a question Warner addresses.

This line of thinking gets even trickier when it comes to M.G.A.’s Bratz Babyz: baby dolls with makeup, lacy lingerie, and bikinis, and bottles slung on chains around their necks. ("Step back in time with the Bratz and see how it all began, as they xpress themselves with lots of style, and Baby ‘Brattitude!’ ") Parents buy Bratz Babyz for girls as young as two. A ten-year-old might see irony -- or humor -- in the outrageous shoes, collagen-plump lips, and attitude-laden pout of a Bratz doll; irony is generally lost on toddlers.

"The Triumph of the Therapeutic"

ISI has issued a 40th anniversary edition of Philip Rieff's landmark book "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." I recently received a copy, and began it last night. Amusingly, I almost instantly regretted it, because I can tell this is an incredibly demanding book whose pulsing intellectual energy is almost radioactive. I'm not going to have time to give it the attention it deserves over the holidays. But it's a thrilling book, so I'm going to put down a few thoughts about the first chapter now, while it's on my mind, hoping that some of you might be drawn to it.

Rieff, who died earlier this year, today commands the respectful attention of cultural conservatives, though he himself was no conventional conservative, nor, despite his focus on the role of faith and cultural authority, was he religious (as far as I can tell). Driving in to work today, I was thinking about how to describe the point of "Triumph" (gleaned from his introductory chapter, as well as the preface by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn), but nothing I could come up with beats this Wikipedia summary:

The Triumph of the Therapeutic
Rieff continues the theme established in Freud in which he sees the therapeutic ethos – as exemplified by Freud's analytic attitude – become the dominant cultural attitude in its placing of the conflicted individual at the center of his own stage. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1965), Rieff traces the way in which therapy, which aims not at "the good life" but at "better living," has become the reigning mode of life in Western culture. The rise of "Psychological Man" marks for Rieff the death of a culture whose ideals had lost their power to sink deep into the character of its members. In modern culture, virtue gives way to value, and what is of value is whatever conduces to the well-being of the individual. Except as therapeutic devices, commitments (faiths) cease to be possible: "the psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones." The therapeutic mode of thinking and acting calls for a flight from the discomforts of fear, the responsibility inherent in identity, and authority itself. In the therapeutic, everything is a game, and all truths are contingent and negotiable. "Truth" is a means to the end of present therapy.

Rieff was interested in the question of whether a culture with such a foundation can long endure. In Triumph, he left open the possibility, both rhetorically and analytically, that it can.

In Fellow Teachers (1973), Rieff presents his argument that it cannot. Chief among the reasons for this is that the therapeutic mode leads in the absence of all other modes to an abyss of identity nihilism. Rieff observes that the deconstructive effort coming out of art and the academy itself is working tirelessly, and in cooperation with the technologists, to instruct fresh generations in the murder of their own culture's authoritative interdicts.

In the introductory chapter of "Triumph," Rieff says that the overturning of Christian civilization has given rise to a civilization in which people wish to retain inherited morality without "the hard external crust of institutional discipline." But this isn't possible, according to Rieff, because any culture survives by the strength of its institutions, and their ability to "bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs" in ways that are "commonly and implicitly understood." When a culture stops to think about why we do things this way and not that way, and there are no institutions powerful enough to say, in effect, "Because that's the way we do it" -- then you have a culture in decline.

The impact collapse of Christianity as a binding civilizational force in the West cannot be overestimated. We now live in a world where any appeal to idealism is immediately suspect. Writes Rieff: "The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?" That is, can people who do not believe in the existence of objective truth, and the possibility that it can be authoritatively expressed, ever form a durable civilization?

(If this reminds you of Alasdair MacIntyre's conclusion in "After Virtue," you're right.)

You cannot have culture without "cult" -- that is, without religion (understood sociologically as that set of rules, presented as objective and sacred truths, around which a society organizes its individual and collective lives). With Christianity dead in this sense, we have supplanted it with the search for individual fulfillment and well-being. We seek not to find truth, but to find -- you've heard this phrase -- "what's true for me." Which is to say, what set of beliefs makes my life comfortable, easy and pleasurable. This, of course, is soft nihilism.

Rieff says he's not really interested in the validity of this or that truth, only its social viability. And here is where I was struck hard by the situation of churches in our contemporary culture. Rieff:

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. "Is not the very fact that so wretchedly litte binding address is heard in the church," asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, "accountable for a goodly share of her misery -- is it not perhaps the misery?" The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

What he's saying is this: A culture begins to die when people cease to believe what its institutions say, which comes in part from the institutions themselves lacking the power to say what they stand for in persuasive ways ... which comes in part from the elites running those institutions losing faith in those truths. Suddenly I saw the profundity of what a Catholic priest friend of mine once said about the Catholic bishops, and many of his fellow priests: "They simply do not believe in Jesus Christ." He was making a Rieffian point about the loss of faith in the Faith among the clerical class. If they can't make a case for Christianity, if they cannot or will not articulate the truths of the Catholic faith for the masses, it's probably because they themselves no longer believe them deep down. The crisis of the Church (by which I mean not just the Catholic church, but all institutional Christian religion) is that its leadership class has been overwhelmed by the disintegration that has overtaken the entire civilization. Rieff is skeptical that any recovery of institutional authority can take place in a culture like ours, where we are constantly questioning everything -- and, as he later indicates, in which the only generally recognized authority is the sovereign autonomous Self.

And there is this prophetic passage from the end of the first chapter:

The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, bur rather in doctrines amount to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it ha s taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfuly conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the po2ers that be perserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. ...Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use. ...If "immoral" materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody's sense of well-being, then they are useful. The "end" or "goal" is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

Forty years ago, Rieff anticipated a culture in which the only things that really matter politically is that the government keeps us satisfied with consumer goods and free to choose whatever makes us happy. The pursuit of virtue and the practice of faith is fine, so long as we realize that it's merely entertainment, and shouldn't be thought of as proclaiming any truths binding on anyone else. The primary criterion used in judging phenomena is instrumental and therapeutic: that is, not is this right or wrong? but does this serve the goal of making me happier? Because that, ultimately, is the only standard of progress.

Sound like a culture you know? Is it possible to refuse and resist it from generation to generation? If so, how? That, of course, is the principle concern of "Crunchy Cons." I wish I had read Rieff before writing the book, though.

The Sexual Revolution may not be questioned

Writing in the WSJ today, Danielle Crittenden reviews a memoir written by a campus health professional that examines the psychological and biological suffering of young college women who partake of all the liberty that the Sexual Revolution has won for them. Excerpt:

Heather is not an unrepresentative case. The author meets patients who cannot sleep, who mutilate themselves, who exhibit every symptom of psychic distress. Often they don't even know why they feel the way they do. As these girls see it, they are acting like sensible, responsible adults: They practice "safe sex" and limit their partners to a mere two or three per year.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong. As the author observes, surveys have found that "sexually active teenage girls were more than three times as likely to be depressed, and nearly three times as likely to have had a suicide attempt, than girls who were not sexually active."

And should all this joyous experimentation end in externally verifiable effects--should girls find themselves afflicted with a disease or an unwanted pregnancy--then (and only then) do their campus "women's health" departments go to work for them. They will book the abortion, hand out a condom or prescribe a course of antibiotic treatment. And then they will pat their young patients on the shoulder and send them back into the world, without an admonishing word about the conduct that got them into trouble in the first place.

"Look at how different health decisions are valued," the author advises. "When Stacey avoids fatty foods she is being health conscious. . . . When she stays away from alcohol, she is being responsible and resisting her impulses. For all these she is endorsed for keeping long-term goals in mind instead of giving in to peer pressure and immediate gratification. But if she makes a conscious decision to delay sexual activity, she's simply 'not sexually active'--given no praise or endorsement."

The author of the book is Anonymous; she fears that by putting her name on the book, she would be punished professionally and personally. That she is not free to say what she observes to be true tells us a lot about the fierce intolerance of the sexual Jacobins in control of our culture. Refuse and resist, I say.

The bitter fruits of "choice"

UNICEF says India is killing 7,000 unborn female children a day in sex-selective abortion. Pro-lifers rightly see this for the moral horror that it is, but I don't want to hear a single pro-choice feminist or fellow traveler complain about the basis on which the Indians are exercising their right to choose abortion.

How many little Indian girls are we talking about losing to the abortionist's knife every single day? Each dot below -- there are 7,000 of them -- represents a life:

..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
........................................... .......
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................
..................................................

Every. Single. Day.

More holiday hissy fits

This time, in Chappaqua, NY. From the NYTimes report:

WHEN the New Castle Town Board was brainstorming ways to attract holiday shoppers to downtown Chappaqua, a local merchant suggested lining the two main streets with flags, as is done for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.

Last week, about 50 flags — blue and white with snowflakes, six-pointed stars and “Welcome” down the side — appeared. The problem, some residents said, is that the flags use two of the three colors traditionally associated with Hanukkah, are shaped like dreidels and use letters in a Hebrew-style block font.

“There seems to be confusion,” said Janet Wells, the town supervisor, who received several phone calls and e-mail messages last week from residents upset that a hamlet as religiously diverse as Chappaqua would pay for flags that appear, at first glance, to be inspired by a particular faith.

But the town did not pay for them. Tara Caverzasi, the owner of Desires by Mikolay, a jewelry store on King Street, did.

Ms. Caverzasi, who lives in Kent, approached the board after watching nearby towns light up for the holidays, attracting shoppers and inspiring cheer. She said the town board warned her that Chappaqua residents were hard to please, but Ms. Caverzasi spent $3,000 of her own money on the blue-and-white flags, in the belief that more downtown decorations would bring more business.

Instead, they brought angry calls. One person called Ms. Caverzasi a communist. Another told Ms. Wells that the snowflakes looked like menorahs and that the flag resembled Israel’s. In all, Ms. Caverzasi said, she and the town received about 20 calls.

Late last week, Ms. Caverzasi said she wondered if she should have used the money on a vacation instead.

What is it about the holiday season that turns people into such pluperfect asses? Mr. Hankey, help! Incidentally, it's hard to beat Mark Shea's hilarious assessment of the Sea-Tac Holiday Tree Hoohah. And also via Mark, is Rabbi Daniel Lapin a great guy, or what?

OK, I'm going to see it

Charlotte Allen praises "Apocalypto" -- and tells me that it's nowhere near as violent as the critics say. I have a feeling that on the violence thing, I might well have been had, for reasons that Ross identifies:

There are a few moments in Apocalypto where the violence does feel gratuitous, but for the most part, the critical battering that Gibson's taken over his taste for blood strikes me as an egregious exercise in bad faith by a critical establishment that's happy to endorse violence in just about any other cinematic context.

It's okay when Quentin does it, but not Mel, in other words. Well, I'm going to see the movie for myself and make up my own mind.

Meanwhile, Ross again:

Rod's argument, meanwhile, which seems to be that any filmmaker who defends the artistic value of violence is ultimately making "an attempt to justify indulging in base savagery by coating it with a phony moral glaze," at least has the virtue of consistency, but I don't think it holds up terribly well either. Violence can be exploitative, designed to provoke a "yeah, right on!" response from thugs in the audience; it can also be a necessary part of the pantomime (just ask Shakespeare). Pace Rod, artistic intent matters a great deal. The Passion, for instance, was an extremely bloody movie, but it didn't strike me as sensationalistic, because at every moment it demanded that you identify with the victim of the violence; you can't imagine anyone cheering on the Roman torturers, the way idiots (myself included, sometimes) cheer for, say, Tony Montana in De Palma's Scarface. The same goes for the D-Day scene in Saving Private Ryan, or the horrors on display in Schindler's List. Context is important.

I'm sorry that the lack of clarity in my earlier post led Ross to conclude that I was blasting any and all examples of cinematic violence. In fact, I agree with Ross's take, which is that context is important. The reason I said in an earlier post that Peter Suderman's observation that the new Gibson movie "celebrates" violence matters so much: if explicit violence is necessary to telling a story, that's one thing, but to "celebrate" it for its own sake is, it seems to me, decadent. The point that I was trying lamely to make is that most explicit violence in contemporary filmmaking exists for the sake of titillation, not for serious artistic reasons. And my sense is that we often tell ourselves that explicit sex or violence in film, music, etc., is artistically necessary when in fact we just want to see people getting it on or having their head blowed up real good.

Local example: Here in Dallas, the Body Worlds exhibition just opened. I talked to a friend who saw it over the weekend, and he said that the exhibitors have puffed it up with high moral seriousness and pedagogical trappings, when in fact the real draw is showing eviscerated corpses to the gawking masses. The ne plus ultra of this sort of thing is the testimony offered by art experts in the 1990 Mapplethorpe trial in Cincinnati. From the New York Times account:

Janet Kardon, who organized the offending retrospective exhibition, ''Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,'' for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, called Mapplethorpe ''one of the most important photographers working in the 1980's in the formalist mode.''

When asked to comment on one of the photographs, one that shows a finger inserted in a penis, Ms. Kardon, who is a former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, said, ''It's a central image, very symmetrical, a very ordered, classical composition.'' Asked about a picture of a forearm inserted into a man's anus, she compared its composition to one of Mapplethorpe's images of flowers.

More on the menorah

Just to clarify my earlier post, it's not that I opposed a menorah at the airport. Not at all! I would have welcomed one. What I didn't like was the Chabad Lubavitch rabbi threatening to haul the airport into federal court if they didn't put up a menorah right away. I generally like Chabadniks, but I hate how everything in this society seems to get worked out by people dragging others to court, or threatening to, from the get-go. Anyway, the real fault here lies with the skittish public officials, who ought either to have approved the menorah or told the rabbi to take a hike, that the "holiday tree" absent Christian symbolism is value-neutral.

Terry Mattingly at Get Religion -- now celebrating its 2,000th post -- relates that there's more to the airport tree story. Excerpt:

However, unless I have missed this fact in all of the coverage, it does appear that the Seattle Times failed to ask one crucial question in this story. It’s a rather obvious question: Who opposed the erection of the giant Hanukkah menorah in the first place?

That question may have been hard to answer. You see, there is a reason that lawyers are so nervous about giant menorahs — they represent a fault line in the public square between the left and right wings of Judaism.

A crunchy-con Christmas

Religion columnist Cary McMullen has written a generous column about approaching Christmas the crunchy-con way. Thanks, Cary. They need some crunchy-con Christmas right this very minute in Britain, where a new study finds that

Childhood is under threat from a deluge of marketing and advertising aimed at the young, according to a new report endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The impact of the consumer society is now so deep that seven out of 10 three-year-olds recognise the McDonald's logo but only half know their own surname, said Compass, a Left-of-centre think-tank.

Children were "engulfed" by images – sometimes of a sexually suggestive nature – of how they should look and what they should own.

Parents were subverted by the barrage, which "exploited children's emotional vulnerabilities in the name of profit".
[snip]
Today's report says the bombardment of children with messages of what is cool pits children against each other and their parents.

Wal-mart, for example, has taken the concept of Santa's list to a new level. On its website, Toyland, it asks children to pick items they would like from a conveyor belt and to enter their parents' email addresses so the list can be sent on and the company can "help pester your parents".

A Wal-mart spokesman said: "Kids have been writing lists for Christmas presents for hundreds of years. All we've done is put a modern slant on the tradition."

The Compass report concludes: "Millions of pounds are spent conditioning children to become young consumers. Who is forming our children – parents, guardians, friends, families, teachers, community workers – or an army of psychologists, branding gurus, marketing experts, advertisers who are spending billions to shape young minds in the name of profit. Can children be children before they are consumers?"

Of course we're in the same boat on this side of the Atlantic.

Gay Evangelicals

Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn't complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It's that we don't do so that they dislike. If we can't say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn't say anything at all.

But the issue -- the issues -- won't go away. This morning's New York Times has a front-pager about Evangelical gays struggling to find acceptance. They don't want to abandon their Evangelical beliefs, which is what many liberal gay Christians want them to do. But they don't want to deny, either in theory or in practice, their homosexuality, which is what many conservative Evangelicals would have them do. Theirs is a profoundly human, even tragic, story:

“A lot of people are freaked out because their only exposure to evangelicalism was a bad one, and a lot ask, ‘Why would you want to be part of a group that doesn’t like you very much?’ ” Mr. Lee said. “But it’s not about membership in groups. It’s about what I believe. Just because some people who believe the same things I do aren’t very loving doesn’t mean I stop believing what I do.”
[snip]
But even when they accept themselves, gay evangelicals often have difficulty finding a community. They are too Christian for many gay people, with the evangelical rock they listen to and their talk of loving God. Mr. Lee plans to remain sexually abstinent until he is in a long-term, religiously blessed relationship, which would make him a curiosity in straight and gay circles alike.

Gay evangelicals seldom find churches that fit. Congregations and denominations that are open to gay people are often too liberal theologically for evangelicals. Yet those congregations whose preaching is familiar do not welcome gay members, those evangelicals said.

Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition. He said that churches he encountered either insisted that he give up his antiquated notion that gays should live celibately, in accord with clear Scriptural and traditional mandate; or, if they were conservative, they treated him standoffishly. He finally found an Evangelically-oriented Episcopal parish that welcomed him in genuine love, but told him they would not yield on sexual teaching. Here's a Godspy link in which David tells his story and addresses this dilemma:

Gail's situation is not that unusual among the same-sex-attracted men and women who often correspond with me. A student at a large, predominantly conservative Christian university in the United States, Gail recently wrote me about the difficulty she would confront if she asked the support of her fellow Christians in her struggle to refrain from acting on her same-sex attraction. "It has been my experience in Christian circles that telling gets you into more trouble than keeping it to yourself," she wrote.

"Suddenly the people you tell act as if you are stricken with the Black Plague of the thirteenth century. Some don't know what to say to you. Worse, others that used to be your best friends may not want to have anything to do with you. Still others may doubt your faith in Christ. [My advice to anyone thinking of di sclosing would be to] pray really hard for discernment before you decide to tell any other Christians about what your struggles are."

Experiences like hers, and of thousands of other men and women, make me treasure my apparently singular experience at Trinity Church, a small Episcopal church in northern Virginia into whose company I drifted in the days immediately following my conversion to Christianity.

When, after six weeks of anonymously attending services, I first went to the rector and told him of my life of gay activism and my conversion to Christ, I did so almost trembling with anxiety. After all, I knew what many Christians think of gays and lesbians. I half-expected Nicholas to throw me-politely, since he was an Anglican-out on my ear. But he didn't.

After courteously listening to everything I had to say, he turned to me and said: "David, if you need me to affirm what you do in bed, I cannot, because I think that is sin. But if you need me to affirm you as a brother in Christ, I can do that, because anyone who welcomes Christ is welcome here." And he, along with his wife and family, and many other families at Trinity, meant it. Their love for me, a seemingly rock-solid gay activist, even as they disputed the immorality in my life, gave me a lasting lesson in Christianity's depth and reality.

Although most of the parishioners, steeped in Evangelical Anglicanism, possessed a thoroughly Christian identity and a solid disapproval of sexual expression outside of marriage, many of them, particularly those who went out of their way to befriend me, also knew a great deal about acceptance, compassion, and deep friendship. Including me in their bake sales and car washes, family reunions, Bible studies, and other mundane activities even as they knew I was a gay activist, appears such an insignificant thing. But allowing me to be a part of their day-to-day lives forced me to reevaluate the little box of prejudice into which I had previously placed "Christians."

Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ's reality and love, Christianity's doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."

Christ had answered me when, in desperation over the emptiness of my life, I cried aloud for him. But it was the Christians at Trinity who made his presence in my life a daily reality and, in turn, provided the witness I needed to abandon even gay pornography and any lingering backward glances for the fleshpots of my former nights.

Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail's than mine....

(David's now a Catholic, FYI.)

In my view, that Episcopal church's response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian. Turning your back on gay people is not. Neither is turning your back on what Scripture and authoritative Christian tradition says about sexual morality (straight or gay).

The disappearing e-mail

The Waco Tribune-Herald, which has the reputation of being an anti-Sloan newspaper, published a very long story over the weekend purporting to tell the story of the quashed book publication -- but did not even mention the fact that the peculiar former president apparently attempted to blackmail the book's editors into abandoning the project. How on earth can you write credibly about this event without mentioning that former Baylor prexy Herbert Reynolds, who is extensively quoted in the story, fired off a lunatic e-mail claiming he was going to release secret information that would damage ex-president Robert Sloan? Isn't that, like, a really big deal?

To be fair to the writer, one wonders if he was allowed by his superiors at the paper to write about the disgraceful and hugely embarrasing e-mail. One does.

The airport that stole Christmas

Today I arranged for a Muslim writer who contributes sometimes to my section to write a piece about what he teaches his kids about Santa and American Christmas traditions, given that they don't observe the Christian faith. To my surprise, he told my colleague that he and his family, though observant Muslims, put up a tree. I thought that was marvelous: for that family, the tree doesn't represent faith in Jesus Christ, but a tradition that's pretty much secularized. If I lost my faith in Jesus tomorrow, I'd still put up a tree. It's what we do in this country. European pagans did it as a festal sign of life in the dead of winter, before Christians adopted the tradition to their own uses.

I can't tell you how cheesed off I am at the gutless officials at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, for taking down all the trees in the airport in the face of a lawsuit threat. Why do public officials run scurrying to hide under the bed when jerks like Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky of Chabad Lubavitch threaten to take the airport to federal court over it? Well, one possible answer would be that Chabad Lubavitch had a gun to their head, so to speak: "It was either, 'put up the menorah,' or they would go to federal court and sue us 18 hours later," Port of Seattle Commission President Pat Davis said. "They wouldn't wait."

Now the rabbi feels like crap, as he certainly should. He and the sniveling Sea-Tac officials ought to be put into a room and forced to watch the "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo" episode of South Park, which offers a sane take on all this Christmas offensensitivity stupidity.

More on "Apocalypto"

OK, two bloggers whose opinions on most anything I take seriously have seen "Apocalypto," and really liked it. Here's an excerpt from Daniel Larison's review:

Another one of these points, and this is the moral of the story, is pretty clearly that of hubris calling down nemesis. This is hubris in both its senses of violence and arrogance, which invites the downfall of those who try to raise themselves up too high or who believe about themselves that, as the bloody priest claims, “we are a people of destiny, we are masters of time.” Whom the gods would destroy, they first make insufferably self-important. These words do not necessarily echo (and indict) any particular leader, any particular elite or any particular civilisation (though it is a timeless message and one that all would do well to heed), but rather the tendency of every ruler, every people and every civilisation in its time to claim the mantle of the predestined, the chosen, the invincible, History’s favourites for whom the rules are different and to whom the normal course of history, change and decay does not apply. The perfect irony of the priest’s declaration to be one of the masters of time on the eve of his civilisation’s fall seems to have been somewhat lost on many of the critics. If we cannot see how this lesson relates to us or how we can make use of it, we really are in trouble. If the audience forgets or overlooks this part of the film, I think they have pretty much missed what Gibson is trying to say.

Larison goes on to say that:

all the critics have done Apocalypto a grave disservice in their emphasis on its supposedly overwhelming violence. This aspect of the film has been talked up so much that it almost convinced me, sight unseen, to not see it because the way people were describing it I came away with the impression that this was going to be something like the Chichen Itza Chainsaw Massacre. It was nothing like that, and not anywhere even close.

Oh really? Maybe I should reconsider my decision not to see it, especially given Larison's judgment that the film "is, in its way, the greatest anti-statist movie of the last ten years."

Stuart Buck liked it too, and he later approvingly sent me a link to a glowing review by the Catholic blogger Bill Cork, who observed:

But while Mel never says it, he knows, and hopes we know, that the aid that these children will get will come not from a merciful mother moon, but from a merciful Mother who stands on the moon; whose son is not a returning Mayan god but the Son of the Most High God. This is a movie about the destruction of an evil society, from within--and from without. It is a movie about fear and hopelessness--but also of hope, and a new beginning, heralded by the arrival at the end of ships bearing on their sails a sign of contradiction, of death and new life. As survivors of a harrowing chase stand on the sea shore, boats come toward them, bearing the men who will be instruments in the creation of that new world, through the preaching of the cross.

But this new world is not created through external salvation alone--grace perfects nature. Gibson has a Catholic sensibility. There is good in this world that is worth preserving. There is evil, but there is innocence. The new civilization that will arise will not be a mere subjugation of the old, or a replacement by what is new, but a blending of the two to create a new reality.

It is no accident that this movie was released on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the day before the feast of St. Juan Diego, and days before the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The film ends with the coming of the Spanish conquistadores, who would in time work to crush the savage Indian religion. One professor is furious about the way the Mayans' faith was depicted as insanely violent, even though it was:

We have evidence to suggest that there were group sacrifices. But it would probably have been done as a pious act with solemnity. Some of it was probably public spectacle.

And we are to mourn the passing of this blood-soaked evil because...? Whatever evil they worked in their time, thank God that the Spanish came, and opened the way for Our Lady of Guadalupe to convert the nation. Anyway, Daniel and Stuart have me rethinking seeing the film. I was startled, in a good way, by this passage from Seattle newspaper review William Arnold, quoted by Larison. Arnold writes:

But this is not at all apparent from the movie. What is apparent is that the movie is an all-out attack on tribal culture, which Hollywood has idealized throughout its history and made a fetish in the era of political correctness.

I’m not sure how conscious this is on Gibson’s part. It’s likely not a position he has carefully thought out. In many ways, this is the work of an angry, unstable, self-destructive artist guided by pure instinct: a Modigliani or Van Gogh painting on a $100 million canvas.

But his movie definitely is telling us that tribal sensibility, which films like “Dances With Wolves” celebrate so nostalgically, actually is primitive and backward; and its resurgence in Africa and the Middle East is causing all the problems in our world.

In the climax of “Apocalypto,” when signs appear that the white man and his Christian civilization are coming, we feel relief. That relief flies in the face of everything the movies have taught us since the ’60s, and no one but Gibson would have dared try to induce it.

Daniel, who hadn't seen the movie when he penned these lines, said:

It is not, I am guessing, a simple story of savage natives destroying themselves, only to be delivered by the white man–in fact, I am doubtful that the conclusion is meant to be a relief. It is probably intended as judgement, a confirmation of the Durant quote cited at the beginning about the collapse of civilisations, and proof that the mayhem you have been watching for the past two hours has had the consequences of distracting everyone from real dangers by focusing on phantoms and illusions and seeking false solutions through an orgy of violent bloodletting. (What could the movie be referring to, I wonder?)

OK, OK, enough of me quoting what other people have to say about the movie. I'm going to steel myself against the violence, and try to see it over the next week or so.

House un-Intelligence

You're not going to believe this. Turns out that Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat tapped to head the House Select Intelligence Committee, doesn't know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and doesn't even know that Hezbollah is. I'm not making this up. In this, the most powerful nation on earth, there are few intelligence officials more important than the head of this House select committee. And he doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.

It's not just Reyes -- and it's not just members of Congress. The FBI has trouble grasping elementary but vital concepts that anybody who reads the daily paper with any regularity. Check out this NBC News report. Excerpt:

Dale Watson, now retired, was the FBI's top counterterrorism official before and after 9/11.

In a deposition taken on Dec. 8, 2004, Youssef’s lawyer Stephen Kohn asked Watson: “Do you know who Osama bin Laden's spiritual leader was?"

Watson: Can't recall.

Lawyer: And do you know the differences in the religion between Shiite and Sunni Muslims?

Watson: Not technically, no.

John Lewis was until recently the FBI’s deputy assistant director of counterterrorism. During his deposition on May 17, 2005, he was asked if he knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis.

Lewis: You know, generally. Not very well.

Lawyer: Was there any relationship between the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks?

Lewis: I'm aware of no immediate relationship other than all emanates out of the Middle East, al-Qaida linkage, I believe. Not something I've studied recently that I'm conversant with.

It's probably better we don't know what our leaders don't know, else we'd never sleep at night.

Journalism as social engineering

A journalist friend passes on this column from today's Washington Post, knowing that it's the kind of thing that drives me nuts about my profession. Deborah Howell, the paper's ombudsman, writes:

The Post needs more opinion writers and columnists who are of the female persuasion or are minorities. Overwhelmingly, Post columnists are white guys. Some are among the paper's best columnists, but more diversity would make The Post a richer paper.

Numerical equality is not what readers look for, but women and minorities want to see themselves well represented in the news and opinion pages of The Post. This is a remarkably diverse region, and that should be better reflected in columnist jobs.

She then does an exhaustive (and exhausting) inventory of WaPo columnists, sorting by race and gender, concluding that women and minorities are underrepresented in the Post's column mix. Howell has the sense to understand, as anybody who works in today's resource-starved newsrooms must, that newspapers can't just go out and add more staffers in a time of declining circulation and ad revenue. There's no money for it, and besides, the "news hole" -- that is, space in the paper for columns and stories -- is shrinking. She writes:

So how could The Post increase diversity as the staff and space for stories got smaller? It wouldn't be easy, but here are some thoughts. On the op-ed pages, don't run all the columnists all the time. Create some space for new voices. In Close to Home, make a point of seeking out more women and minorities. Outlook can also bring in more such voices.

The Metro section needs a female columnist, and it also needs a columnist attuned to the region's burgeoning Latino communities. A Latino columnist could appear in the Extras since they are oriented toward counties and neighborhoods. Not all new voices have to be on the staff; they could be regular contributors. Metro's new Page Three could be used to bring in more female and minority voices.

The point is not to toss excellent white male columnists; the point is to add more and lively voices to The Post.

Of course she will not admit that that is precisely the effect that this prescription would have, because journalists who advocate this kind of diversity-by-numbers cannot stand to admit that they are advocating race and gender-based discrimination that could have an affect on the quality of the product. But that is what she's doing here. "On the op-ed pages, don't run all the columnists all the time," she writes. OK, so let's say you cut back George F. Will to once a week for the sake of running someone acceptably "diverse." You are in effect tossing an excellent white male columnist by cutting his workload in half. There is exactly no chance that Will would accept his paycheck being cut in half, so the Post would have to pay for work it's not getting from Will, in addition to half the number of columns it would normally expect from the Diverse Columnist, or risk losing the popular and influential Will to someone who will pay him what he's worth on the market. Which is stupid, so it's not going to happen.

There are several unexamined assumptions people like Howell make. First is that there is such a thing as a "woman's perspective," a "black perspective" a "Hispanic perspective," and so forth. Thomas Sowell is a black conservative economist and columnist. I, as a white male conservative, agree with Sowell's columns with great frequency. Conversely, I rarely agree with the columns of Paul Krugman, the white male liberal. I am vastly more likely to identify with whatever the Hispanic conservative Linda Chavez says than what the white liberal Maureen Dowd says. The point is, the ideas in Sowell's and Chavez's heads make them interesting, not their race or gender. Now, blacks are far, far more like ly to vote Democratic; but by Howell's calculus, they should be pleased if a newspaper chose to run as its sop to diversity Tom Sowell, simply because he is black. That's awfully patronizing. I imagine how I'd feel if whites were the minority, and the newspaper decided that in an outreach to people like me, it would run Maureen Dowd as its columnist dedicated to bringing the "white perspective" to the paper's pages. But this is what you get when you bring to a creative field an idea of diversity that has nothing to do with ideas, and everything to do with race and gender.

Second is the idea that there are an unlimited supply of equally talented op-ed columnists of both genders and all ethnicities. It's just not true, and never will be true, any more than there will be an equally talented supply of poets, painters or playwrights of both genders and all ethnicities. Life just doesn't work that way, and neither does the profession of persuasive writing, which is as much art as craft. For some reason, Jews are vastly overrepresented (by the standards of the diversocrats) in journalism. If a newspaper were to follow the diversocratic agenda, and apportion columns according to quotas, it would have to publish fewer columns by Jews -- not because they have flawed ideas or lousy writing, but only because they are Jews. How can that ever be moral? But that's what you end up with when you publish columns for any reason other than the quality of the writing and analysis.

One way diversocrats get around this is by declaring that diversity has objective value. Yes, the line goes, you might have to sacrifice quality work by white males to publish more columns by [fill in the blank], but there is value in doing so. OK, but where does that value come from? Do we really want to be in the position of saying someone's work is better solely because of the color of their skin, or their In order for that not to be a purely racist and/or sexist standard, you have to believe the fiction that there is such a thing as "the" black perspective, "the" Hispanic perspective, "the" female perspective, and so forth. Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald is one of the finest opinion columnists in the country, someone who's more liberal than I am, but also someone whose column I would not miss, because he's smart and creative and a good writer. He also happens to be black. Newspaper editors who get a thrill out of publishing Pitts because he's black are in the same moral boat as those people who would groan because the paper is publishing a black man (and there are such people: a reader called my boss the other day complaining that we run too many conservative columnists; when she told him that we keep track of these things, and we run the same number of liberals as conservatives, he said OK, but your liberals are too often blacks and Jews, and there are a lot of us liberals who aren't black or Jewish. Which was shocking, but come to think of it, if we follow the philosophy that race is an aspect of quality when judging the worth of op-ed columnists, why exactly is this racist reader wrong?).

To be sure, there are solid reasons for wanting to hire people of various ethnicities. If you have a growing Latino immigrant community, it makes sense that you want reporters who can report well on what's going on in that community. That reporter will need to speak Spanish, which privileges people of Hispanic heritage. Fine. But keep in mind that you would not (or should not) say that you wouldn't assign a black reporter to cover a white community, on the theory that only whites can cover whites. There are some very delicate moral lines here. And anyway, you wouldn't, or shouldn't, hire someone who was subpar simply because he had the right ethnic make-up. Also, it's important to remember that diversity is seen very narrowly in newsroom hiring: nobody's out looking to make the newsroom reflect the religious and political demographics of its readership, which, given the kind of people who choose journalism as a pro fession (secular liberals, in the main) would be very difficult to do.

If newspapers were to accept the truth that for whatever reasons, some groups perform better at some tasks than others, they'd not place such a high premium on social engineering through hiring and promotion. Nobody expects the NBA or the NFL to practice this kind of silly diversity in their hiring practices. Sports teams live or die by performance and performance alone. As Tom Sowell has observed, reality will eventually set in, and newspaper executives will have to return to a more objective, non-racist and non-sexist standard of judging performance. Or they will lose out to competing newspaper executives who will.

UPDATE: I should make it clear that the above views are entirely my own, and do not represent the policies or opinions of my employer.

Fools

I was talking not long ago to a friend down in New Orleans. I asked him what he thought the prospects for the city's comeback were. Grim, he said, and sounded like he believed it. He's probably ready to jump off the Mississippi River Bridge tonight. Bill Jefferson, the fabulously corrupt US Congressman from New Orleans, has been re-elected. From the Times-Picayune:

Guilty pleas by aides and associates who admitted to bribing the congressman and the revelation in court documents that FBI agents had found $90,000 in marked bills stuffed into Jefferson's freezer had put the scent of blood in political waters.

A field of a dozen candidates began circling Jefferson in the primary. He finished first, but with only 30 percent of the vote, inspiring conjecture that his performance amounted to repudiation of an incumbent and that he would surely lose the runoff against state Rep. Karen Carter, D-New Orleans.

Instead, Jefferson, 59, scored a dramatic upset by racking up huge pluralities in African African-dominated precincts in Orleans, and winning outright in Jefferson Parish, where Sheriff Harry Lee had spent his campaign.

I can't bring myself to kick New Orleans while she's down. But good Lord.

UPDATE: The Mighty Favog, a fellow Louisiana expat, thinks the Jefferson results should make President Bush redeploy our troops from Iraq to undertake a nation-building effort in the Bayou State.

My Dallas testosterhome

We had a friend to dinner last night, and were talking with him about the differences between life in Texas and life in the Northeast, from which both our families moved a few years ago. T. and I agreed that there were things we missed about life in the North -- I never miss New York City more than at this time of year -- but that for social and religious conservatives like us, Texas really is better for raising kids. Julie and I often talk about this whenever we watch our boys do typically boyish things, and reflect on how this sort of thing would be taken if we were still living in NYC. In our neighborhood park in Brooklyn, mothers fretted intensely over their little boys engaged in swordplay with sticks. Too violent! Once when our Matthew was very small, Julie had him stand back from the ladder on the slide at the playground to let a little girl go ahead of him. "Ladies first," Julie instructed, and got a baleful look from the girl's mother. Too sexist!

Last week, our Lucas, who is about to turn three, pulled two candy canes off the Christmas tree, pointed them at me like pistols and with a huge grin, shouted, "POW POW POW POW POW POW POW!" That doesn't work so well in New York. That works fine in Texas.

Turkish Trojan horse

Well, well, well. Seems that a Turkish government ministry got caught directly interfering in recent Dutch elections. Brussels Journal has the story:

In an e-mail sent to thousands of ethnic Turks in the Netherlands the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs called on them to vote for Fatma Koser Kaya, a 38-year old woman whose family emigrated to the Netherlands when she was six years old. Koser Kaya is a member of the leftist “social-liberal” Democrats 66 (D66) party. On 22 November, D66 lost three of its previous six seats in Parliament. Koser Kaya, however, though only sixth on the list of D66 candidates, was elected as one of the party’s three parliamentarians thanks to the 34,564 individual votes she got, possibly as a result of the Turkish government’s interference.

Immigrants are known to overwhelmingly vote for candidates of their own ethnic group. Since they have often not integrated in the country where they have settled their loyalties lie with their countries of origin. This has created a situation where the immigrants in Western democracies become Trojan horses of foreign nationalism and religious fanaticism. This phenomenon became apparent in this year’s local elections in the Netherlands and in neighbouring Belgium. It tipped the balance in favour of parties that put forward immigrant candidates. At the same time, however, it worked to the disadvantage of indigenous candidates on these parties’ lists, causing considerable resentment among the latter.

In an e-mail, sent from a government address in Ankara, the Turks in the Netherlands were asked to vote for Koser Kaya. The e-mail was sent by Ali Alaybeyoglu, the advisor to Mehmet Aydin, the Turkish minister of Religious Affairs. The first paragraph reads:

“We all realize that no-one can represent Turks better than Turks. The Turkish community is threatened by assimilation. If we do not unite and vote for a common candidate our position will only worsen in future.”

Got that? "The Turkish community is threatened by assimilation." That is, the more culturally Dutch that Turkish citizens of the Netherlands become, the less likely they are to put the interests of a foreign power above that of their own nation. The idea, obviously, is that the Turkish government -- which denies sending the e-mail -- sees Dutch citizens of Turkish origin as Turks first, Dutchmen second.

Meanwhile, in England, a local government has capitulated to Islamic demands and is opening public pools for "Muslim only" bathing sessions.

Handwriting on the wall, people, handwriting on the wall...

[Hat tip: The Corner.]

Go Rachel!

Rachel Balducci, who's in "Crunchy Cons," has a neat blog about family life with boys called Testosterhome -- and it's a finalist in the Best Parenting Blog category on the 2006 Weblog Awards. Go vote for Rachel. Not only is her blog wonderful, but she's seriously under the weather today, and could use some cheering up.

Check out why the Balduccis are having trouble getting their Christmas card picture done. I know the feeling well.

The future of journalism

Had a drink with Virginia Postrel last night, and in a conversation about media, she said I should check out the link on her blog to this Jay Rosen interview. Rosen talks with John Harris, who left the WaPo (along with colleague Jim VanDeHei) recently to head a start-up political news publication and website called (for now) The Capitol Leader. Lots of fascinating stuff in here. It was startling to read that Harris left one of the most coveted jobs in journalism -- political editor of the Washington Post -- to go try something new -- and that he took one of the Post's star political reporters with him. But Harris notes that "we live in an entreprenurial age, not an institutional one."

[In] general organizations like the Post or the New York Times have been insulated from the spirit of the age— precisely because they were secure and prestigious places to work. Once people got a job there, they tended to stay for years and even decades. Most of the people in those newsrooms are creative, and in my experience they tend to think of themselves as individualists and even iconoclasts. But the reality for many (including me until two weeks ago) is that they have careers that are more reminiscent of the 1950s, when people got hired at General Motors or IBM and stayed put. I believe that for people who want this type of stability, journalism is not going to remain an attractive profession for much longer. But people who adapt will thrive and end up having more fun than in the old days.

That phrase -- "having more fun" -- jumped out at me. Seven years ago, when I was about to move to the New York Post, my friend the Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby told me that I would enjoy working for then-Post publisher Ken Chandler. Jeff said that Chandler is one of the few media bosses left who remains in journalism for the reason most people got into it in the first place: to have fun. Truly, I never had more fun as a journalist than I did working for the NYPost. Say what you will critically about the paper -- and I might even agree with you -- but the Post pulsates with life. Very, very few American newspapers are any fun to read. Most newsrooms are not fun places. They are places where Serious And Important Work gets done, but looking at the final product, you might wonder how they managed to iron out the life in the process. You might get an idea in this Harris quotes:

Journalistically, Jim VandeHei and I are placing a bet. We believe that if we assemble a group of reporters and editors—some young people and some in mid-career—with energy and talent, then create a work environment where ideas are nurtured and sharpened,[emphasis mine -- RD] we”ll have the essential elements of a very interesting publication. Robert Allbritton, the publisher of our enterprise, believes in this bet and has made clear he is willing to support it. Again, the key is trying to create a collection of journalists who have distinctive signatures—by virtue of their personalities or source networks or ability to connect the dots in illuminating ways. The reordering of the media universe because of the Web has created opportunities for journalists of this sort that did not exist in an organization-driven age.

In other words, this new publication would seem to favor iconoclasts, eccentrics and original thinkers -- the kind of people who will bring, yes, life to its pages. Sure, I'm betraying my bias, but I'm thinking that publications that value exciting ideas, and that are willing to explore them and talk about them fairly but fearlessly, without the shackles of political correctness or High Seriousness, will thrive. The current American journalism model we have now certainly isn't -- I mean, look, I can think of five or six blogs on both the left and the right that I could clic k on right now, and find more interesting opinions and lively, challenging, provocative thinking and writing than in almost any newspaper today. It really shouldn't be all that surprising to career MSMers like me why people don't want to read us: we're boring them. I've said before that if the great H.L. Mencken showed up at most major American dailies today, they'd never let him get into print. Too controversial. If Harris and VanDeHei will find a way to bring professional rigor to the reporting and commentary of creative young journalists willing to shake up our increasingly moribund industry with the power of their own ideas, curiosity and aggressiveness, it seems to me that they can't help but prosper on the power of their ideas, the quality of the prose they publish, and the audacity of their reporting.

Harris again:

I sometimes think that if Washington political reporters ran the government their ideal would be to have a blue ribbon commission go into seclusion at Andrews Air Force base for a week and solve all problems. It would be chaired by Alan Greenspan and Sam Nunn. David Gergen would be communications director, and the policy staff would come from Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute. They would not come back until they had come up with sober, centrist solutions to the entitlements debate, the Iraq war, and the gay marriage controversy.

It took me a while to realize how this instinct for rationalist, difference-splitting politics can itself be a form of bias. It is ideologues, rather than Washington technocrats, who make history. On the right, ideas about free markets that a generation ago were exotic are now mainstream. More recently, what started out as the left’s critique of the Iraq war increasingly defines the center.

Ideologues value ideas. Technocrats value process. Which do you think will produce more interesting newspapers? Which do you think are producing our newspapers now? Which do you think will be producing our newspapers 10, 20 years from now?

The tragedy -- or hypocrisy? -- of Mel Gibson

"Apocalypto" opens today. As I've said, I don't intend to see it. I haven't the stomach or the heart for the kind of graphic savagery that every review has said is front and center in this film. I believe it is as grotesque as they say, because that's part of Gibson's aesthetic (and arguably the core of it). It's almost always wise to see or read a work of art before commenting on it, but I'm not sure that it's necessary to see what a beating human heart looks like after it's ritually ripped from the chest of a sacrificial victim and held up for the adoration of savages in order to conclude that that sort of thing is morally wrong and sociologically dangerous. If you think that my opinion means nothing without having seen the movie, I respect that position, but you shouldn't read further.

Mel Gibson, of course, is very far from the only filmmaker who makes a fetish of gore. What's so bothersome about Gibson, at least in this movie, was captured by LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan in his NPR review this morning. Turan notes that "Apocalyto" begins with that famous quote from historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within." Gibson's apparent message to us with this film is that our own decadence could easily lead to our destruction. A solid and necessary point, to be sure. But Turan points out that by any sane measure, our civilization's capacity for reveling in extreme violence is a sign of decline. On evidence of this film, says Turan, Gibson is not the cure for the problem, but part of it.

I was driving in this morning when I heard the Turan review, and it made me reflect on the first time I saw on-screen violence that made me want to leave the theater. I went to see the widely-praised 1993 ghetto drama "Menace II Society." It was a sadistic movie, but there was a moment that shook me up, a few seconds in the film in which a human head went rolling down the street like a ball. What got to me more than the scene itself was the reaction of young black male teenagers in the audience: they cackled and hooted. To them, this was cool. The inhumanity of their reaction rattled me so hard that I've not forgotten it. Mind you, I saw it in a theater in Washington, DC, where I was then living. Violent crime was epidemic. The lesson of hearing those putative gangbangers chortling over this act of purest sadism depicted on screen was ... instructive.

Now, I suppose one could have said that "Menace II Society" depicted the world as it is, and that the graphic violence was necessary to make a fundamentally moral point. In fact, as I recall the filmmakers argued at the time that they were trying to depict the consequences of the evil moral choices that the protagonist made. That may be, but as far as those louts in the theater were concerned, this film glamorized those choices. Whenever I hear people defending the brutality and misogyny of gangsta rap as being somehow true to reality, I think: this is an attempt to justify indulging in base savagery by coating it with a phony moral glaze. (You want to see the ne plus ultra of this sort of thing? Check out Dr. Jack Kevorkian's paintings, which purport to be an investigation into the mystery of death, but which are really nothing more than expressions of one man's perverse fascination with the macabre).

I suspect that Gibson is probably up to the same thing in "Apocalypto": indulging his passion for savagery -- a passion he might not fully understand -- and attempting to justify it by saying that he intends it for a moral purpose. If he knows what he's doing, he's a hypocrite. But if he doesn't -- and my guess is that he is blind to his real motives -- then he's a tragic figure.

You do wonder where it's all going to take us, this popular culture of ours, with its continuous ramping up of explicit sex and explicit violence. Walker Percy talks about our culture's obsession with the demonic, by which he did not mean ooga-booga "The Exorcist" stuff, but our inability to resist giving ourselves over entirely to the Dionysian spiritual forces that threaten to overwhelm us. I will tell you where it is going to take us all eventually: to the same living hell those teenagers in that theater exist in.

Percy once wrote in a private letter, of his vocation as a writer: What I really want to do is to tell people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live. Hmm. Do graphic depictions of torture and ritual murder on screen conveys in any sense to people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live as human beings, not savages? Or do they lead to the kind of enjoyment of sadism and dehumanization that will kill, and is killing, the spirit of our civilization?

UPDATE: Peter Suderman, reviewing the film in NRO today, puts the ultraviolence in a moral and political context:

But Apocalypto is more than a high-velocity Hollywood adrenalin rush. It’s also, arguably, the ultimate reactionary movie, a savage rebellion against modernity that holds up technology and urbanity as poisonous to society. After warming his audience to the good-natured rural villagers, Gibson reverses this trick and paints their urban counterparts as ghoulish and decadent, almost inhuman. The captives’ journey into the city is filled with nightmarish sights — slave markets, sickly children, chalk covered laborers in a stone quarry looking like hollow-eyed ghosts — and capped off with a terrifying scene of ritual human sacrifice. Gibson films it all like an ancient macabre freak show, implicating the sin-filled city, with its suffering masses, devious leaders and enslaving inventions, in the desecration of the simple agrarian life he presents at the beginning.

The film sees modernity as an affront not only to man, but to nature, and it too has its revenge. In the second half of the film, the forest comes alive, and its beasts lash out against the urban invaders (though never against the protagonist). Like the villagers, these creatures are defending their homes and lives against marauding outsiders — and, of course, adding to the gory spectacle. This is a movie that fights bloody tooth by bloody nail for peaceful, traditionalist values. It’s like a Crunchy Con-produced splatter film.

OK, maybe so. But the question remains, even for Suderman, as to whether Gibson is morally serious, is simply indulging in his taste for sadism under the guise of morality ... or both. Here's Suderman again:

Gibson is giving permission — even encouraging — his audience to unleash their hate, their desire for blood-spattered vengeance. ... This jarring contrast almost requires one to ask: Is Gibson’s home-and-family mantra merely an excuse to indulge his bloodlust? Possibly. Or it may simply be that the film reflects, in a variety of ways, the paradoxes and inner turmoil of its creator. Apocalypto simultaneously celebrates both man’s peaceful, communal side and his most primal, violent instincts.

"Celebrates." On that word hangs everything.

There goes that Oscar nomination

"Dreamgirls" star Jennifer Hudson is being buzzed about for what they say is an incredible performance in the upcoming film version of the musical. She might get a Best Actress Oscar, they say. Don't be too sure: in an interview with a gay newspaper here in Dallas, the Baptist actress says that homosexuality is a sin:

As a Baptist who’s singing at circuit party, has Hudson reconciled her spiritual beliefs and her gay fan base? Does she support same-sex marriage?

“Nobody has ever asked me these questions,” she says.

“Everybody sins,” Hudson continues. “No sin is greater or different than the other. To each his own. If it don’t bother Jennifer, then Jennifer don’t mind. I don’t really even think about it because I don’t believe in judging people for what they do.”

When referencing themselves, lots of divas probably do that schizophrenic thing where they toggle between first and third person. But did Hudson just say that being gay is a sin?

“According to the way we’re taught, and what it says in the Bible — it is,” Hudson says.

If her answers didn’t already sound like fundamentalist clichés, Hudson then added, “I have plenty of gay friends.”

Hello, Oscar blacklist!

Mary Cheney is pregnant. Big whoop.

Not a few conservative Christians are having a fit over the fact that the Vice President's lesbian daughter Mary is preggers. I don't like it any more than most conservative Christians, I'd wager, but what do people want from Dick and Lynne Cheney? To say that they're ashamed of their daughter? That they won't have anything to do with the baby?

I think they said, via the VP's spokesman, the right thing: that they're looking forward to another grandchild. That's what I would have said, and I'd leave it at that. Liberals ask me all the time what I would do if one of my kids turns out gay. The answer is: love them with all my heart, through whatever challenges may arise, and never, ever turn my back on them. Loving someone doesn't mean approving of all that they do or believe in. I cannot imagine anything coming between the love of me for my children -- and the children they produce, in whatever circumstance. New life is good, and always and everywhere to be welcomed.

I have no idea what Dick and Lynne Cheney believe about their daughter Mary's sexuality and choices, but I believe they love their daughter, and will love any children she chooses to have. Good on them, say I. That's admirable. If any of my kids should conclude that he or she is gay, and is having a child with his/her partner, that will be a matter for our family to deal with. But if anybody should ask or expect me to denounce or distance myself from my flesh and blood over it, I'd sock them in the nose.

Separationism

Lawrence Auster has a controversial suggestion on how to deal with Islam: build a metaphorical wall and disengage. He calls this "separationism." Details:

We separationists affirm the following:

1. Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.

2. But we cannot destroy Islam.

3. Nor can we democratize Islam.

4. Nor can we assimilate Islam.

5. Therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from Islam is to separate ourselves from Islam.

Other writers who might be called separationists include Serge Trifkovic, Diana West, Randall Parker, the Norwegian blogger Fjordman, and Hugh Fitzgerald. Of course, each of these writers has his or her own emphases, and I don’t wish to impose an unwanted label on anyone. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a common core of ideas among the writers mentioned, and “separationism” would be as good a way to describe it as any.

Hmm. I believe 1, 2, 3 and 4, with caveats. First, Islam is only a mortal threat to our civilization in its current form. It has been a mortal threat in centuries past, whenever Islam has been powerful in relation to the West. It was not a mortal threat for most of the 20th century. But technological advancements (e.g., the development and dissemination of WMD technologies) and economic realities (e.g., the rise of Mideast petroleum states), Islam appears to be waxing once again as a threat to the West. Second, we cannot democratize Islam, that only Islam can democratize itself, and I see no reason to believe that Muslim nations seeking democracy mean democracy in a form unthreatening to the West. Third, I believe that we can only assimilate Islam to the extent that assimilated Muslims become significantly less devoted to the core doctrines of their faith. If I were a practicing Muslim, I would not be willing to trade the core truths of my faith for the sake of being a "tame" Westerner.

Of course there certainly are many Muslims who live here and are absolutely no threat at all, and it's awful that they face suspicion and ostracization because of the actions of the radicals. They don't worry me a bit; what worries me is that I have not seen within Islam anything within its theological structure that says the Islamic fundamentalists -- are essentially wrong in what they say Islam requires of believers. I am therefore, to restate, concerned that Muslims can only substantially assimilate if they become less essentially Muslim. A hundred, three hundred years from now, perhaps worldwide Islam will have evolved and figured a way to reconcile liberal democracy with Islam. But we don't live in that world now, and I do wonder if Britain, seeing how radicalized so many younger native-born Muslims there are now, would have been so quick to open the doors to their parents' generation, which worked reasonably well, I think, within the existing system. I'd feel a lot better about prospects if leading American Muslim organizations weren't so radical.

But I can't affirm No. 5, though I freely admit that I don't know whether the premises don't support the conclusion, or whether it's because I don't want it to be true. Which, if it's the latter, is pathetic. Anyway, how does a civilization that is so utterly dependent on a substance that comes primarily from Islamic countries decide that it's not going to have anything to do with those countries, beyond the barest minimum?

Thoughts? If premises one through four are more or less correct, is five therefore true?

Baker-Hamilton blahs

Well, I've read as much of it as I can manage this afternoon, and it's pretty depressing stuff. The best thing about it is that it shifts the debate away from the administration's blue-sky, open-ended commitment to the Maliki government, and ratifies a "graceful exit" -- which Bush said last week was nuts -- as the establishment consensus position. With this report coming on the heels of the election, Bush is now completely isolated. Iraq, at least as he imagined it would be, is now a fantasy only he entertains. And it might be lost completely, the report says, painting an extremely grim picture of what would likely result were that to transpire.

Get to know that scenario, because it's going to be playing out in the front pages over the next few years. That's because the ideas that Baker-Hamilton come up with to try to stabilize the situation are pretty weak. It's not their fault, exactly; there simply aren't any options left.

The report calls on the US to focus its policy on withdrawing US combat troops while simultaneously helping the Iraqi military to protect the government. But the Iraqi military, such as it is, has little or no loyalty to the idea of Iraq and its government. As we pull out, the Maliki government is going to fall. It might fall anyway, if we stayed. Point is, there's nothing left to save. All this report does is provide for a way to accept the inevitable, and blame it on the Iraqis ("Hey, we gave you guys a year to get your act together").

The report also calls on engaging Syria and Iran in negotiations to stabilize Iraq. This is crackhead stuff. Why on earth would either of those nations, which have been working so hard to destabilize Iraq, decide that they should call off their dogs, so to speak? What does the US have to offer them? In Syria's case, Lebanon? In Iran's case, permission to build nukes? We can't do either, obviously, so it's not clear to me why it's in either nation's interest to help the Great Satan out of the trap it made for itself.

The report also calls on the US to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. More crackhead raving. Who on earth do the Israelis have to negotiate with? The Pals are on the verge of their own civil war. Anyway, the last time the Israelis gave up land -- Gaza -- the Hamas berserkers used it as a launching pad for rockets into Israel. A majority of Palestinians voted into office a party whose sworn aim is to wipe out Israel and create an Islamist state. Negotiations? Pass the crack pipe, Jimmy B.

Look, anything that could keep the region from collapsing into all-out war might be worth trying, but good grief, we've been deluding ourselves for so long about this thing, I'm not sure how much more of it we can afford to indulge in. At this point, I cannot see how anything we can do can stop this from happening, though God knows a regional peace conference (another of the commission's recommendations) is worth a try before this year's version of the Guns of August start to destroy nations. Here's Christopher Dickey writing in Newsweek, suggesting that all-out civil and ethnic bloodletting is inevitable, no matter what we do:

As a Hakim supporter in the government told me privately the other day, "Moqtada should be behind bars, underground or across the border—those are the three options he has—and a fourth one is for him to behave. The U.S. doesn't need to tackle him. They don't need to do the dirty work. We will do the dirty work. They should stay over the horizon."


Indeed, that could well become the model for the whole war, and we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised. This is an old tradition. Democracy in El Salvador, such as it is, was made possible by right-wing death squads operating “over the horizon” to obliterate the guerrillas’ urban infrastructure. The dying Augusto Pinochet still has supporters in Chile. They believe his American-backed savagery cleared the path for the present democracy.

But there’s a particular irony in Iraq. As respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld pointed out when I called him at Hebrew University in Jerusalem the other day, the notion that Americans can teach Iraqis the brutal arts of counterinsurgency is at best improbable. “I think that this whole idea of Americans training Arabs is so silly I cannot take it seriously,” said Van Creveld, whose new book, “The Changing Face of War” (Presidio), will be out early next year.
If winning hearts and minds is supposed to be part of the plan, then the U.S. troops just don’t have the means. They don’t speak Arabic, they don’t understand the culture, they don’t share the faith, they don’t know the history. Van Creveld doesn’t mince his words: “The American military have proved totally incompetent.”

The United States, grabbing here and there for a politically correct model to control the chaos, has only engendered more bloodshed. Most Iraqis want us gone, according to the polls, and the U.S. trainers giving instruction in combat techniques eventually will see that knowledge turned against us by their students. “All they really teach is how to fight Americans,” says Van Creveld. “How stupid can they be?”

The essential point is that Iraqis on all sides of the divide think they know precisely what an effective counterinsurgency campaign looks like, and it’s not the relatively fastidious one the U.S. would have them wage. “The Iraqis under Saddam [Hussein] were world champions at counterinsurgency,” notes Van Creveld. The former dictator has been standing trial, and already has received one death sentence, for doing what he thought needed to be done to crush rebellions by Shiites and Kurds—and it worked. Now the United States has turned the tables, the former victims don’t want to be held back. “Maybe they are not trained in the American sense, but they are very well trained to do what they have to do in Iraq,” said Van Creveld.

The sad fact is that insurgencies are defeated only rarely, and then by imposing the peace of the grave on hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. How much more can Washington let itself be implicated in such carnage? How far over the horizon do American troops need to pull back to escape the stench of such a victory? One answer: all the way home.

Should Catholic priests have the right to marry?

A Protestant friend who saw the video of Father Plushy giving his Barney blessing -- and truly, I don't know what is more irritating, the priest or the full house of ninnies who sat there singing and clapping -- writes this morning to say:

That video you just posted is the best single argument I have ever seen for ending the celibacy of the priesthood.

Well, maybe. One is entitled to wonder how seriously Father Plushy takes his vow of celibacy, or anything about the dignity and responsibilities of the priesthood. Still, even if priests were allowed to marry, why would that necessarily prevent future Father Plushies from entering the priesthood? On paper, it wouldn't, but if it made the priesthood open to men who would consider it if they could also fulfill vocations as husbands and fathers, it seems to me that you'd stand a greater chance of creating a more healthy manly culture within the ranks of clergy.

Priestly celibacy is not a dogmatic teaching, but rather a discipline of the Catholic Church. The Pope could not overturn the Church's teaching on (say) abortion, but he could theoretically change the celibacy discipline with a stroke of his pen. But should he?

Mandatory clerical celibacy is a discipline that was imposed on Catholic clergy in the Middle Ages. In the Orthodox churches, priests are still permitted to marry, as was the ancient practice. There are limitations on this -- you have to marry before your ordination, and the bishops are drawn from the monastic ranks, which means they must be celibates. But parish priests can and do have families. I've been going to an Orthodox church for a year or so now, though only in full communion for a few months, and I see that the two priests at my parish -- both of whom are married, and have children -- are really wonderful. I find it hard to understand why the Catholic Church insists on clerical celibacy.

Well, let me take that back: for many conservative Catholics, the celibacy requirement is seen as a valuable sign of contradiction to our oversexed age. That resonates with me. I think, though, that it's also the case that many orthodox Catholics resist thinking about ending the celibacy discipline because it's something that progressive Catholics have been pushing for, and to do so would appear to be a major concession to their agenda. But I tell you, after the Scandal revealed how the Catholic priesthood has become heavily gay, and at least some of the gays in the priesthood in positions of power were shown to be systematically using their power to discourage straight men considered a threat to them from continuing in the priesthood -- the "Goodbye, Good Men" thesis, and believe me, I have heard directly from seminarians and priests in the trenches how this works -- more than a few orthodox Catholics (including at least one deeply conservative priest) have said to me that it's time to consider ending mandatory celibacy. Before I even considered becoming Orthodox, I had spoken to Catholic friends about my own doubts on the wisdom of maintaining an exclusively celibate clergy (the distinction being that there will always be men and women called formally to the celibate state, and they must be honored and provided for, as they always have been in the Christian church.)

I think they're right. I mean, look, by year's end we will have seen ordained to the Catholic priesthood of two former Episcopal priests, Al Kimel and Dwight Longenecker, who converted to Catholicism. I have every expectation that they'll be wonderful, faithful, orthodox Catholic priests. And they are also married men. If they are to be welcomed and affirmed as Catholic priests, why not others? To be sure, these men are not campaigning for the end of the celibacy discipline, and as the Longenecker article I linked to in this sentence brings out, a married clergy poses special problems of its own.

Still, I think it's worth talking about, especially because to open up the Catholic priesthood to married men requires no change in the Church's doctrinal teaching. Would bringing married men into the priesthood cause a culture change within the priesthood that would discourage the Father Plushies from celebrating their diversity? I don't know. But I'd sure like to hear what orthodox Catholics and others have to say about it.

Father Plushy

Here's another priest who really would do better moving on to a new career as a massage therapist, or something touchier-and-feelier. Really, if you show up at the end of mass in Barney drag to give your parishioners a "Barney blessing," what on earth is the point of even pretending that anyone should take you seriously as a spiritual father?

Party girls

Meanwhile, in a Slate piece today, Michael Kinsley praises George W. and Laura Bush for keeping their twin girls, Jenna and Barbara, out of the media spotlight, and he agrees that now that the girls are adults, you can't blame their parents for how they behave.

Nevertheless, there is a war on. It's a war that has killed 3,000 Americans, most of them around Jenna and Barbara's age or younger. It has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis of all ages. And even more Americans and Iraqis have been injured, lost limbs, suffered excrutiating pain. President Bush can be quite eloquent in talking about the sacrifices of American soldiers and—he always adds—their families. In the Reagan style that has become almost mandatory, he uses anecdotes. He talks of Marine 2nd Lt. Frederick Pokorney Jr.: "His wife, Carolyn, received a folded flag. His two-year old daughter, Taylor, knelt beside her mother at the casket to say a final goodbye." And of Staff Sgt. Lincoln Hollin, who "in his last letter home from the Middle East … said how much he appreciated getting mail from his family. He added, 'I wish my truck and boat knew how to write.' "

Bush says truly, about the American dead, "They did not yearn to be heroes. They yearned to see mom and dad again and to hold their sweethearts and to watch their sons and daughters grow. They wanted the daily miracle of freedom in America, yet they gave all that up and gave life itself for the sake of others."

Living your life according to your own values is a challenge for everyone, and must be a special challenge if you happen to be the president. No one thinks that the president should have to give up a child to prove that his family is as serious about freedom as these other families he praises. But it would be reassuring to see a little struggle here—some sign that the Bush family truly believes that American soldiers are dying for our freedom, and it's worth it. Who knows? Maybe they have had huge arguments about this. Maybe George and Laura wanted the girls to join the Red Cross, or the Peace Corps, or do something that would at least take them off the party circuit for a couple of years. And perhaps the girls said no. But I doubt this scenario, don't you?

Yep. It seems to me that were their father the president during World War II, the Bush twins would have felt obliged to have spent their time serving in some useful capacity doing charity work with the Red Cross, working in military hospitals, something. Anything. Noblesse oblige, you know. Nobody expects them, or should expect them, to put on uniforms, but doing something other than being jet-set party Bratz when other people's children are coming home in pine boxes or paralyzed and maimed is the least these two privileged young women could do. The very least.

Hooching up little girlz

If there is a children's toy more odious than the slutty Bratz dolls, I don't want to know about it (here's the Wiki entry on them, and here's the official website). They, and their Baby Bratz spinoffs, are hugely popular with little girls. James Lileks nailed 'em right here:

Bratz are the main reason I do not keep a supply of bricks around the house, because everytime the commercials come on I wish to pitch something kiln-fired through the screen so hard it beans the toy exec who greenlighted these hootchie toys. The Baby Bratz are as bad as you can imagine: “Bottles with Bling.” Judas on a stick, why not just refit the Bratz so they have Real Oozing Gonorreal Flow Action?

“They know how to flaunt it, and they’re keeping it real in the crib.”

What exactly is the penalty for failing to keep it real in the crib? Someone busts a cap in yo Pamper? I know I am old and so out of step it’s a wonder I don’t just appear as an indistinct smear, but was it really necessary to push the Age of Sultry Hussyism down to the infant stage? And who, exactly, are the Babyz flaunting it for? Are we going to see a commercial with Elmo in sunglasses, sitting with his legs sprawled, spanking some pliant Babyz with one hand while gumming down some mashed crack?

Well, the Dec. 4 New Yorker has a long Margaret Talbot piece out (but not online) on how Barbie is in decline, losing market share to the Bratz. The NYer is not a magazine known for its cultural conservatism, but jeez, you don't need to be a cultural conservative, just morally sane, to despise the Bratz and what they tell us about our culture. Here's Talbot:

What Bratz dolls are both contributing to and feeding on is a culture in which girls play at being "sassy" -- the toy industry's favored euphemism for sexy -- and discard traditional toys at a younger age. (Girls seem to be growing out of toys earlier than boys are, industry analysts say.) Toy marketers now invoke a phenomenon called K.G.O.Y. -- Kids Getting Older Younger -- and talk about it as though it were a fact of modern life over which they have no control, rather than one which they have largely created.

They call it "Girl Power," but what empowering females in this context means is modeling for pre-teen girls overt sexuality and crass materialism as virtue. Can we talk about forming children's imaginations? Do you want your little girls growing up thinking that this is the icon of femininity that they should aspire to emulate? That's what's happening to today’s girls, as evidenced by the sales stats: Bratz are kicking perennial fave Barbie out of the top toy slot, girls' division.

But Barbie is learning to play the game. Here's Talbot again:

In 2002, Matttel introduces a new line of dolls: My Scene Barbie, which kept Barbie's basic dimensions but had bigger eyes, plumper, shinier lips, and and hotter clothes. A recent incranation of the line is the unsubtly named My Bling Bling Barbie. (The Barbie Web site says of one of these dolls, "Chelsea burns up the Bling Bling scene, in an ultra hot halter top and sassy skirt sooo scorchin'.") When not "getting their groove on," the Bling Bling girls are "mall maniacs." An animated video on the Barbie Web site depicts them struggling to lay off shopping for a day. They manage only a brief visit to the park -- where the puppies they coo over turn into high-heeled boots, the fountain spouts jewelry, and the clouds above them spell out "SALE" -- before they give in and head to the mall.

One hardly knows what to say about this aside from: Refuse and resist. I'm the father of a little girl now, and I refuse to give these people the opportunity to colonize her imagination.

Here's the full text of the e-mail former Baylor president and chancellor Herbert "Paladin of the Progressive Baptists" Reynolds sent to the editors of book about the Baylor 2012 plan that was to be published by the university, but now no longer will be:

From: [deleted]
Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 7:18 PM
To: Schmeltekopf, Donald; Hankins, Barry G.
Subject: Notice


Messrs. Schmeltekopf and Hankins:

I want to ensure that the two of you understand, as editors of Baylor
Beyond the Crossroads: A Story of Aspiration and Controversy, that I am holding you
responsible for the individual chapters of the book since you had the opportunity to revise or reject (as you did in at least one case) any and all such chapters, or any portions thereof. I also have a copy of The Baylor Situation, the topic of the
paper delivered by Schmeltekopf and Sloan at Notre Dame in September 2005. There is
nothing of a substantial scholarly nature in either of these works.

In re: Sloan's chapter in the book, I will be releasing one or more documents which
I have kept in my "asbestos" files. Readers will quickly see an unvarnished picture
of this "Intentional Christian." You and he, and most certainly others, have opened
the door with both your much publicly touted "Intentional Christianity" and ad hominems. I have placed strategic items in the hands of a trusted confidant who will release them timewise as I have instructed him, so they are now out of my hands.

My tertiary specialty in the Air Force was psychological warfare and I was no mean
student thereof. It is imperative to know everything conceivably possible about your
adversaries and their soft underbelly--and have the patience to await the most strategic moment to strike.

The foregoing is just the beginning. I am nearly 77 years of age and I have nothing to lose. When I was overseas without my wife and small children for a year and a half well over 50 years ago I embraced the truths of Romans 8:35-39 and Phillipians 4:6-7. They have sustained me well in dealing with adversaries such as you and those
in your coterie.

Since you have dispensed with moderation, so shall I.

Most sincerely yours,

Herbert H. Reynolds

In the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on the e-mail and the controversy surrounding it, former Baylor president Robert Sloan said:

"I have written and spoken and preached publicly, and my life has been pretty well scrutinized for the past few years," he said.

"What does disappoint me," he added, "is that the book is not going to be published. I think it's always unfortunate when people give in to external pressure to suppress information. This is a very collegial disagreement that needs to be aired. That's why we have universities and books like these. The suppression of a book -- or threats that some have made if a book is published -- is completely antithetical to
Baptist principles of academic freedom and open discussion."

Speaking to a Chronicle reporter, Reynolds said the e-mail was in fact his own, but denied that it was an attempt at blackmail. "I just wanted them to think twice about what they were doing," he said.

So, let's see: Reynolds warns the editors of a book that if they go ahead with publication, he is going to release secret, damaging information on Robert Sloan, and likens it to military psy-ops warfare. It would be tempting to say that the old fellow is having his General Sash moment (that is, a Flannery O'Connor-ish late encounter with the enemy) -- but this is really serious. It looks like an attack on the academic freedom of the faculty by a powerful former top official of the university who still has an office on campus.

If it's not attempted blackmail, then what is it?

 

"Asbestos files"?

As I mentioned on the DMN blog, according to a Waco TV station, former Baylor president Herbert Reynolds is so mad about a forthcoming book having to do with Baylor's 2012 plan that he allegedly sent a smokin' e-mail to the book's editors threatening to release info from his "asbestos files." Get this:

"My tertiary specialty in the Air Force was psychological warfare, and I was no mean student thereof. I am nearly 77-years of age and I have nothing to lose."

The book's now not going to be published by Baylor. There's speculation that the Reynolds threat might have had something to do with it, though the university denies that.

Asbestos files? Psych war? Ah, Christians. Ah, the Religious Left (of whom Reynolds, in the Baylor context, is a partisan).

Children, imagination and elephants

David Brooks's column yesterday (firewalled) writes about the mind. Consider, says Brooks, borrowing a metaphor, that the human mind is like a boy riding atop an elephant. The boy is the conscious, rational mind, but the elephant is the instinct. Writes Brooks:

These days, scientists are spending a lot of time trying to understand the elephant, and journalists are popularizing their results. In “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes how the elephant can pick up and process information, and even draw instant conclusions before the boy is aware of what he is seeing. In “Social Intelligence,” Daniel Goleman describes how elephants talk to each other while scarcely letting the boys in on the conversation. Fear, laughter and other emotions can sweep through crowds before the individuals in the crowds understand what’s going on.

The elephant is the repository of tacit knowledge. As Robert Sternberg of Yale notes, tacit knowledge is procedural. It’s knowing how, not knowing what. It’s knowing how to listen, how to see and organize what you see.

A child born into a home where people use a lot of words develops a sophisticated ability to use language, without even having to sit down and consciously develop this skill. A child born into a home where actions have predictable consequences learns to restrain impulses and practice self-control.

The elephant doesn’t acquire its knowledge from self-conscious study. The elephant absorbs information from the environment. The neural architecture of the brain is shaped by experiences and habits, often during the sensitive periods early in life.

This way of dividing the self is beginning to have a powerful influence on education policy and urban policy, and across a whole range of other practical spheres.

He goes on to talk about this must-read Times Magazine story (also firewalled) that explores education policy in light of what we're finding out about how people learn. In short, scientists are finding out that from the get-go, middle-class children are raised in family environments in which they are frequently encouraged, engaged and verbally stimulated -- and poor and working-class kids are generally not, to their great disadvantage. Excerpt:

Their work also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren't primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents -- and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite -- but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students th at would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?

The Times story goes on to talk about how some charter schools, like the KIPP Academies, are improving test scores and the like for disadvantaged inner-city kids, in part by giving the kids what they're not getting at home (e.g., discipline, a structured environment, a positive culture). We seem to have this idea that if only we pour more money into the schools, or impose new tests and standards, we'll turn this thing around. Not gonna happen, not without a dramatic change within the culture of schools. It's the elephant, stupid.

What most interested me about the Brooks/Tough pieces was how they complemented an excellent essay by my friend David Mills in the current issue of Touchstone. I'm sorry to tell you that the essay is not on the magazine's website, but by all means pick up the December issue on the newstand, or better yet, subscribe. David's essay argues for the proposition that parents have a special obligation to form their children's imagination. Excerpt:

By "imagination," I mean the faculty that controls what we, and especially children, think the world is like. It give us the map by which we plot our course. It gives us our vision of the world about which our mind thinks and on which our will works. It tells us what feels normal, average, to be expected, what feelings should go with what actions.

To the extent a child has learned it in childhood, it changes his whole life, even when he thinks he has left his childhood behind. Even if he insists on losing his faith, it limits the sort of faith he will adopt instead. If he insists on sinning, it limits the sorts of sins he can commit with (so to speak) a clear conscience. It will determine how he rationalizes his sins.

What he's talking about, in large part, is the elephant. David goes on to say that modern Christians parents rely too much on knowledge, on the idea that it is enough merely to instruct a child on what is right and true. This is a mistake, says David: it is one thing to know that (say) premarital sex is wrong, but if you don't feel that it is in your gut, you will be far more likely to rationalize committing what you know in your head is a sin. Writes David:

Revulsion is a much better protection from the force of the passions than an intellectual understanding by itself. To feel "This is yucky" is not a final protection from sin, but it is better than thinking "This is wrong" but feeling "This is okay." Lust offers the paradigmatic case (examples come quickly to mind), but this is true of pride, gluttony, envy, and all the rest, even sloth.

What to do? David says we have an obligation to "try to form [children's] imaginations, to give them an alternative to the worldly lessons even the sheltered child absorbs as if from the air, by immersing them in books that express the Christian understanding of the world. ...A good story will not make him good, but it should help him understand goodness a little better and make doing good a little easier by making it feel more normal. It will teach him that the world is this kind of place and not that kind."

In other words, we all ride atop elephants, but the kind of elephants atop which our children will ride depends very much on what kind of imaginative environment we raise them in. It is not enough to graft morals on top of the culture we have, and think we've done right by our kids.

Chapter Three: A New Hope

Via Amy, this from the Orthodox blogger Joshua Trevino's account of the Divine Liturgy at which Pope Benedict was present:

Finally, it comes time for Communion. My father asks me if I will go, and I reply that I probably should not. He urges me to, and I give in. Now, we file forward, toward the Ecumenical Patriarch His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, holder of the last office of the Eastern Empire, who gives us the Body of Christ. Mere feet away, Benedict XVI sits on the Papal throne, looking down upon us supplicants. I am overcome and cannot glance toward him. Behind me, others have more courage: they break from the line, rush forward, and kiss Benedict's hand. He is calm and gentle. He smiles and clasps their hands, saying a few words in German and English, before urging them to go receive the Eucharist. It is profoundly moving too see these devout Orthodox who have come to pay homage to the bishop of the New Roman, and who are so overwhelmed with the presence and love of the bishop of the Rome that they must give him the same. The small space encompasses a universe, and we are at its center.

Bartholomew ascends to the iconostasis and welcomes Benedict in Greek. Benedict, aware of the cameras surrounding him, replies in English. We must, he says, recall Europe to its Christian heritage before it is too late -- and we must do it together. Then they emerge into the cold sunlight of a cold day. They ascend to a balcony overlooking the courtyard where we gather in expectation. They speak briefly. And then, they clasp hands, Pope and Patriarch, smile and raise their arms together. Tears come to my eyes, and I am shocked to see several media personnel crying openly. For an instant, the Church is one. For a shadow of a second, the dreams of Christendom are again real.

Under the Turkish guns, the Christians roar.

It just about kills me that Josh invited me to go on this world-historical trip, and I couldn't get the time off of work to do it.

Bad manners in Washington

Nora Ephron doesn't think Jim Webb's guilty of bad manners, as G.F. Will does. She thinks it's actually refreshing that someone's not willing to play the Washington game. Excerpt:

[Will's sniffy reaction] is truly Washington, in case you wonder what Washington truly is. Washington is a place where politics is just something you do all day. You lie, you send kids to war, you give them inadequate equipment, they're wounded and permanently maimed, they die, whatever. Then night falls, and you actually think you get to pretend that none of it matters. "How's your boy?" That, according to George Will, is a civil and caring question, one parent to another? It seems to me that it's exactly the sort of guy talk that passes for conversation in Bushworld, just one-up from the frat-boy banter that is usually so seductive to Bush's guests. George Bush once said to someone I know, "How old is that seersucker suit anyway?" and my friend (who should know better) went for it lock stock and barrel.

So finally someone said to George Bush, Don't think that what you stand for is beside the point. Don't think that because you're President you're entitled to my good opinion. Don't think that asking about my boy means that I believe for even one second that you care. If you did, you'd be doing something about bringing the troops home.

George Will thinks this is bad manners.

I don't.

I think it's too bad it doesn't happen more often.

On the wings of a snow-white Dove

Benny Hinn is tired of flying commercial. Benny Hinn wants a Gulfstream jet. Benny Hinn has already taken delivery on a new Gulfstream jet, and wants you to pay for it, because "it is the only we Pastor Benny can continue to go as God directs." If you don't pony up for Benny Hinn's jet, "safety will plummet," Pastor Benny will be plumb tuckered out, and most importantly, untold numbers of precious souls who might have been saved will go to hell. All because of you. But if you do help pay for Benny Hinn's jet, he'll put your name in the special prayer cabin he's going to use as he races across the planet aboard, ahem, "Dove One," fulfilling the Great Commission from "the highest prayer tower in the world ... where he will intercede for you... ." And God will hear him better because he'll be 40,000 feet closer to heaven.

You think I'm making this up? Act quickly, for as Benny Hinn says in his appeal for the rest of the $6 million downpayment on the jet, "What we do for the sake of the Gospel, we must do now!"

(Hat tip: FrontBurner).

News of the Grabby

A couple of years ago here in the Dallas area, a suburban priest named Fr. Bill Richard got caught up in a huge mess. Seems that a group of his parishioners got fed up with his defending the employment of a music minister who'd been busted on sex charges in a shopping mall men's room, and made a huge stink. The parishioners pulled off the highly unusual feat of forcing Bishop Grahmann to remove the guy from his pastorate. It came out that in the 1990s, there'd been complaints about Fr. Richard at the Catholic high school where he'd been teaching -- male students alleging that he was too rubby and grabby with them, and that he was eyeballing them in the gym shower, and ...well, here's how the Dallas Morning News reported those allegations against Fr. Richard:

A lawyer wrote the bishop in 1993 to say that Father Richard had been sexually harassing several boys at a Dallas Catholic high school and a Plano church. Sworn statements from three boys followed, describing unwanted looks, requests, comments and massages of the chest, back and shoulders.

The complaints allegedly prompted Bishop Grahmann to transfer Father Richard to the suburban parish, which a decade later he would leave under a cloud -- and eventually he'd ditch the priesthood.

Well, he's back, and in business as -- wait for it -- a massage therapist. Here's the bio on his website:

I was born and raised in Taft, a small town in central California, and have lived in Dallas since I began college at the University of Dallas where I majored in philosophy. I have many interests, including music and singing, movies, reading, writing, politics, community involvement and volunteer work, gardening, cooking (and eating!) and hanging out with my friends. I live in old east Dallas with my two dogs: Sapphira, a chocolate lab, and Jezebel, a black and tan mixed breed.

Hmm, something's missing here. Oh, that's right, that priesthood thing.

Webb vs. Bush

I'm late to the kerfuffle between Sen.-elect Jim Webb and President Bush. According to the WaPo, this is the exchange they had at a White House event:

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

Who was the jerk here? Were they both jerks? It seems to me that Bush was more sinner than sinned against. "That's not what I asked you," sounds so snippy and petty. He might have responded simply, "I do too, Jim. Hang in there." Or something like that, and that would have been that. If my son were stuck over there risking his life in this quagmire Bush had gotten us into, I can't say that I'd be too keen to put on a happy face either. Webb probably could have handled it more gracefully, but then again, he's the man with a son who might come home from overseas in a pine box because of a foolish war George W. Bush started. Bush doesn't labor under that burden. I'd say neither man covered himself with glory in this undiplomatic exchange, but Bush handled it worse.

Abundant irony

An Anglophilic RC priest friend writes:

"I started reading this with great interest, thinking, "The old Church of England ariseth!" Then I read further..."

"This" is an account from the Sunday Times of London about how Britain's oldest chain of church bookstores is no longer stocking copies of the Koran because it believes the Islamic holy book is "inimical" to Christianity. It's not that the Anglicans have developed a spine; rather, it's because a majority stake in the chain was recently purchased by a charitable trust with ties to the Eastern Orthodox church, and which openly states that it wants to be missionary, and to reverse the advance of Islam and secularism:

“Stocking books which are inimical to Christianity, which without question the Koran is, could well create the wrong impression among some that we endorse the belief systems of other religions as equal or viable alternatives,” said Mark Brewer, the Texan lawyer who chairs the trust. ... The trust says on its website that Britain has become “extremely secularised in recent years and witnessed an explosion of Islam”, and adds that it intends to “re- establish Christianity in areas where it has been driven out”.

Bully for them. If the UK's Anglicans no longer believe in Christianity, perhaps they could graciously bow out and hand over their means to those who still do, while there's still a chance, however slim, that Christianity might be saved in Britain.

(Just so you know, if I heard that a Muslim bookstore was stocking copies of the Bible, I would be mystified and probably embarrassed for them.)

Tradition rears its contrary head

A lesbian reader of the New York Times Magazine, chagrined at a recent cover story exploring the complexities of two gay couples, their children, their turkey baster, and all the resulting foofarah, composed an epistle to the editors to draw a moral line in the sand. From today's Letters column:

As a young couple who hope to have children someday, my partner and I believe that we would like to raise our children in much the way we were raised — with two loving parents. The mumbo jumbo of alternative parenting in your article failed to represent the way that many gays and lesbians wish to approach parenting. In reading it, I could not but feel worried about the fate of the traditional family. I don’t intend to give my kids multiple parents, just two mommies.

Nikki Usher
Los Angeles

Benedict wrap-up

I could look at Josh Trevino's photo of Pope Benedict and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew holding hands in triumph for a long time. What an image of hope! As I argued several years ago in a Wall Street Journal essay, when some angry Orthodox monks of Mount Athos were protesting John Paul's visit to Greece (where he was welcomed by the Greek patriarch) by calling the pope a "two-horned grotesque monster" and the like:

Word has not yet reached Mt. Athos that the new Babylon is not Rome but Hollywood and the shopping mall. (How's that for a two-horned monster?) But it will.

By the time the Orthodox awaken from their self-satisfaction and grasp the true nature of the spiritual and moral crisis engulfing their respective cultures, what will they do to fight it? Perhaps they will consult "Veritatis Splendor" and "Evangelium Vitae," as well as other prophetic writings of John Paul II, an authentic Christian humanist who truly grasped the promise and the peril of the postmodern world. Too late, it may dawn on the Orthodox religious authorities what kind of wise and holy man they, in their narrow-mindedness and pride, rejected out of hand.

Whence the "self-satisfaction" accusation? Partly from the lament that a late, great Orthodox theologian set down in his diary:

The late Alexander Schmemann, the eminent Russian Orthodox theologian, lamented his faith's "complete indifference to the world," claiming that official Orthodoxy lived in a "heavy, static, petrified" world of "illusion." Orthodox consciousness "did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great's reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life," Schmemann wrote in his private journal. "In brief, it did not notice history." John Paul does.

The thrust of my argument was that the Orthodox who rejected John Paul's overtures based on historical hatreds going back centuries were harming themselves and their own cause most of all. The world has changed immensely since 1054, and Orthodoxy's greatest enemy is today now the greatest enemy of all people of faith: corrosive secularism, which has morphed into hedonism and nihilism (I wrote the piece in May 2001; were I to do it again, I'd also mention militant Islam). John Paul confronted the world as it is, and spoke prophetically. I could not see any good reason at all for the Orthodox to reject him, when they -- and all traditionalist Christians -- face a critical crisis that will need us to muster as much unity as we can manage without giving up the theological essentials of our various confessions. I criticized the Athonite monks not out of hostility to Orthodoxy, but rather in admiration of it, and a desire for it to thrive.

So you can see why I am so filled with hope, and even joy, to see the friendship between pope and patriarch, and dare to hope it is a herald of better times ahead. I chose St. Benedict as my patron saint in Orthodoxy, not only because of devotion to the father of Western monasticism (N.B., all Western saints prior to 1054 are also saints to the Orthodox), but also out of respect and admiration for Pope Benedict. This has been a very good week, I judge.

And yet, now that I am Orthodox, I see a couple of things about the East-West relationship more clearly than I did back then, as a Catholic. Catholics tend to think of the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy as relatively minimal, and much easier to overcome than they actually are. Even if Catholic and Orthodox leaders came into dialogue with the greatest possible amount of goodwill, there are theological facts that cannot be ignored or overcome. The 800 years of history since the Great Schism has seen tremendous theological development in the West. Whether this represents progress or dec line is beside the point; the point is, Catholicism is now fundamentally different from Orthodoxy on some important points. For someone like me, it's sobering and even sad to realize how far apart the churches are, because I can't see how reunion is possible on a basis of shared belief, without requiring either Catholicism or Orthodoxy to change things that can't be up for negotiation. What I'm trying to say is I thought as a Catholic that the Orthodox had a lot more room to move than they really do, and were just being obstinate, and fixating on historical grievances. Even though you can find without too much trouble individual Orthodox believers who don't require much provocation to launch into an anti-Catholic rant about the Sack of Constantinople, the plain fact is that even if you forget all the historical animosity, you have two expressions of the Christian faith whose self-understanding would appear to close the door to the restoration of full communion. Which is not to say that we cannot and should not work for unity at every possible level. But I just don't see how unity in every respect is possible.

I should say too that being Orthodox, I wouldn't be so dismissive of the Orthodox for being lost in history, as Fr. Schememann termed it. I mean, Schmemann was right, but at the same time, looking at Catholicism from the perspective of Orthodox life and worship, you really do fear what the encounter with modernity would do to the faith. As traditionalist Catholics would no doubt agree, the post-Vatican II rush to embrace modernity has devastated the liturgy in the West, as well as led to widespread chaos at the local level, and the loss of Catholic essentials in many, many cases. I don't want to dwell too much on that, but as I learn to live and pray as an Orthodox, I have a growing understanding of why Orthodox are so deeply wary about modernity, especially given the absolutely central place the Divine Liturgy has in Orthodox consciousness. Put simply, Orthodox survey the situation in much of American Catholic parish life, and wonder what exactly the Church of Rome gained by making all these changes in the council. The modern spirit is one of change and speed; the Orthodox spirit is squarely opposed to that, and from an Orthodox point of view, Catholicism's embrace of modernity has been devastating to the Church. Catholics need to be sensitive to Orthodox concerns on this point.

In any case, the division between and among Christians is indeed, as Pope Benedict said, a scandal. I do pray -- literally, I do pray -- that the goodwill between Catholics and Orthodox that comes out of this historical pilgrimage will bear fruit in the near and long term. There is so much good in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and as someone who has lived on both sides, I earnestly believe there is much we have to learn from one another, and thank God for the marvelous work He did in Constantinople this week.

"Morals slapped onto the prevailing culture"

Since I announced that I'd become Orthodox, I hear from people here and there who are interested in Orthodoxy. One Dallas-area Evangelical man about my age wrote, and I invited him and his family to join us for worship at our church. I hadn't seen them since they visited that Sunday, and asked today if they were still interested in Orthodoxy. I worried a bit that the otherworldliness of it had been threatening. He replied that yes, they were still interested in Orthodoxy, and had been back to a mission parish of our cathedral parish closer to their home, and were moving closer to embracing Orthodoxy. He wrote further:

We're just tired of our church/faith tradition looking like everything else in our lives, ya know? Much of Evangelical Christianity (even in "orthodox" "bible-believing" Anglican parishes, such as ours) is little more than morals slapped onto the prevailing culture. We both want - really, need - our faith tradition to be something NOT like the prevailing culture. Orthodoxy is other-worldly, and that's what [my wife] and I need to be equipped to live properly as Christians in this world.

That has been my experience, however brief, of Orthodoxy. It's just so not-of-this-American-world that it reorients you entirely. In her wonderful book "Facing East" -- which I highly recommend to anyone curious about the daily life in an Orthodox parish -- my friend Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about how her husband, a former Episcopal priest, was a lot more eager to embrace Orthodoxy before she was. It seemed really demanding to her, she writes -- but that was the thing that initially attracted her husband. She's said to me in conversation how interesting it is to see men respond so strongly to Orthodoxy -- the challenge it poses is meeting a need in males that "easy-listening" Christianity doesn't.

I liked very much the phrase "little more than morals slapped onto the prevailing culture." The incisiveness of that phrase cuts like a stiletto thrust. I think the challenge faced by any religion -- and I suspect this is true of Orthodoxy in Russia, Greece and other countries in which it is the majority faith -- is to avoid becoming that. Either Christianity is radical -- meaning transformative at the root -- or it's little more than acculturated moralism.

Can you pray the gay away?

That's the question Julie Lyons takes up in her two most recent Bible Girl columns. Before we get to the columns, I remind you that Julie, a Pentecostal, is editor of the Dallas Observer, the alt-weekly here in Big D, and has written this year of her own struggles with same-sex attraction.

Before we get to the substance of these pieces, a word about what Julie does. This Bible Girl column she has going on the Observer's website consistently astonishes me. If there's a religion column anywhere in this country that's so consistently raw, fearless and engaging, I've not found it. It's worth pondering why. A few years back, Eric Celeste, a friend of mine and at the time a media writer for the Observer, wrote that established newspapers will never be able to reach young audiences the way alt-weeklies do because the established papers, unlike the alt-weeklies, will never bring themselves to print the f-word. He explained, "Smartly written publications must be willing to offend those of average or below-average intelligence, and newspapers will never do that." I don't at all agree with Eric about the f-word as a proof of a newspaper's creativity or daring, but I think there's a broader point here, about how the unwillingness of mainstream American journalism to take chances, both in terms of style and content, puts them at a real disadvantage when it comes to grabbing reader attention. I wrote a few weeks back about how dull and timid so many newspapers these days are. If my industry is declining -- and we are -- surely some part of it has to do with the fact that a column written like Lyons', which is so full of real life you flinch sometimes when you read it ("Julie Lyons can't say that, can she?"), would be too hot for most papers to handle. (N.B., I wonder why it doesn't appear in the print edition of the Observer? Can the paper's core readership handle it?)

Anyway, reading the "Can you pray the gay away?" Bible Girl columns made me reflect on conversations I've had with real people, here in Dallas and elsewhere, about issues raised in those columns, and how Julie writes what a lot of people talk about ... but which never makes it into the MSM. I wonder why that is. Seriously. Do you ever get the feeling that there's a separation of news media from life as many people actually live it? I do, and I am a card-carrying member of the MSM.

Now, on to Julie's columns. The first one is here, and the follow-up, an interview with Francis MacNutt, is here. The gist of what she argues is that yes, it is possible to be healed of same-sex attraction through prayer. But she calls the question "Can you pray the gay away?" (which was put to her by a hysterical critic who haunts her comboxes) "hugely simplistic." Why?

Homosexuality is a sin condition, according to the Word of God. Whether it’s spiritual, genetic, learned or some combination thereof, what’s indisputably clear from Scripture is that it is not God’s ideal. Sin can be defined as anything that misses the mark of God’s intended purposes.

Oh, I know that makes us all guilty of sins piled upon sins piled upon sins. That’s why we need God’s grace to get us out of our predicament. That’s why anyone who’s guilty of treating gays with hatred or contempt has committed a sin as serious as any he’d purport to expose in another’s life.

The Scriptures establish a starting point for any sin condition: Repent. That means much more than offering lame apologies to the Creator; it means to turn away from sin. It is an act of the will, and it is generally only a beginning, particularly when the sin condition, such as homosexuality, involves so many complicating factors: a lifelong identity. Sexual habits. A means of meeting deeply felt emot ional needs.

As someone who recently converted to Orthodoxy, I find the Orthodox understanding of what you might call the "anthropology of sin" to be illuminating. They use more of a medical model than the legal one dominating Western Christian thought. If you think of sinfulness -- whether it's greed, lust, whatever -- as a spiritual illness, it might be easier to understand that overcoming sin is a process of healing, of coming into wholeness, of restoring brokenness. People who are deeply broken don't get fixed quickly or easily. Of course many (most) gays take deep offense at the idea that there is anything broken or disordered about their condition. I respect that. But Christians who are true to Scripture and Tradition have no warrant for that conclusion.

(I know that this post is going to set off the usual round of screamers, but I refer you to "Megan," a combox commentator on the Bible Girl blog. Megan identifies herself as a female Pagan bisexual who has "very little (if anything) in common" with Julie re: spirituality and morals. "That being said, I find absolutely nothing antagonistic, hypocritical, bigoted, idiotic, or deranged (to borrow the words of a few previous posters) about her article. I don’t agree with it, but guess what, folks? She’s not asking us to!" Good on you, Megan.)

Anyway, the more interesting part of Bible Girl's critical analysis is her take on how Christians respond to the challenge of homosexuality:

One camp simply says “Repent.” When they get no results, they chalk it up to the homosexual’s unwillingness to make the right “choice.”

The other camp continues to wring its hands. “Oooh…ahhh…now that’s a tough one…” (Wring, wring.) “We must show compassion…” (Wring, wring.) “On the other hand, the Bible says it’s a sin…” (Wring, wring.) “Maybe it is genetic. If it’s genetic, does that mean it’s really a sin?” (Wring, wring.) “You know, I think we’re putting too much emphasis on this issue. If we just talk about sin all the time, I’ll alienate my friends.” (Wring, wring.) “Hey, we should probably just leave this to the experts. I don’t really feel comfortable around gays anyway.”

A third camp, she says, is the US Catholic bishops, whose view is pretty much "Take up your cross and suffer in celibacy." Julie says she respects that view and the moral courage it takes to live it out, but it's unsatisfying to her. She believes in a sovereign God who wants to make his creatures whole. Julie, who identifies as a Pentecostal Evangelical, sees two ways of denying the fullness of God's power to release and heal one from sexual brokenness:

Some of my evangelical brethren expend much energy devising theological explanations for why the power of God is so seldom evident in people’s lives, and the phrase “inner healing” just gives them the heebie-jeebies.

Need a miraculous transformation by the grace of God? Better knock on someone else’s door.

Then you’ve got my Pentecostal brothers and sisters, God’s ADD children. They’ll slap you on the forehead and proclaim you healed, then usher you back to your seat to the beat of a thumping gospel tune. Funny, hardly anyone ever asks anymore if your healing has actually manifested. They don’t ask, because they don’t want to know.

This is challenging to me, personally. I do believe that God can and does heal one from this deep brokenness. It happened to me. For years, I couldn't figure out why I was so terrified of commitment, and why I kept living out certain patterns destructive of what I knew to be right, and what I wanted. Without boring you with details, after I became a Catholic (which is to say, once I started taking faith seriously as an adult), I began praying the rosary intensely and faithfully, specifically for God to heal any brokenness inside me that kept me from healthy relationships -- or, if it was not His will for me to be married, for me to be at peace with that. And over time -- we're talking two or three years of devoted, insistent prayer, frequent confession, reception of the Sacraments, etc. -- it happened. I mean, supernatural things began to happen, things that I could tell were not merely a psychological shift. There was never an ooga-booga moment, but things -- how to put this? -- let's just say that the Spirit dealt with things inside of me that I was powerless to deal with (e.g., Why was I always falling hard for this kind of woman?). I'm being cagey not because I have anything to hide -- close friends have heard this story from me before -- but because it's just so banal, ultimately: geeky aesthetically inclined guys who overintellectualize relationships and set themselves up to fail by impossibly idealizing women and romance (sorry, Romance) aren't exactly uncommon. (There was a reason, and a dark one I came to believe, why I thought this movie was the coolest thing, and kept this movie poster on my wall as what amounted to an icon).

But for reasons of my own, there was this brokenness that I couldn't just decide to overcome. It only got healed through diligent personal prayer -- but prayer that asked only for healing, without setting any conditions on what that would mean. And I believe with all my heart that it was only those prayers, and that healing process, that made it possible for me to recognize the woman I married as the One in the very instant that I met her. Had I met her with my heart and soul in the condition it was before I became a Christian, I would have been blind.

So what does this have to do with Bible Girl's column? Well, despite my own experience with healing, I am a lot more reserved about the phenomenon than Bible Girl. But until I read her column, I hadn't though about why. Mostly, I think, it's because I wouldn't want to encourage false hope in people, or set them up to think that they're bad, or God is unfaithful, if they seek healing through prayer and it doesn't work. Sometimes God really does intend for us to carry this or that manifestation of brokenness as a cross. And too, when people talk about the idea of healing prayer, I think there's this idea that the person in need of healing gets hands laid on him, prayers said over him, and ba-da-bing, it's over. In my experience, that is a completely false and misleading idea. What happened to me was slow and gradual (and always involved me praying alone), but did occasion at least two rather startling moments that let me know beyond a shadow of a doubt that something -- Someone -- not myself was working within me for the good. And that healing only took place as part of a gradual deepening of faith, and regeneration (which continues to this day, and will until the day I die, if I'm faithful). What I'm trying to say is what I went through demanded a lot from me: fidelity, patience and a willingness to put aside my own preconceptions, and open myself up to the Spirit. It was hard. Really hard. And mysterious. And comes with no guarantees.

But you know, Bible Girl challenges me to question my own assumptions here. Maybe I am being too timid and fearful. Wasn't the healing that I underwent, however modest it was in the grand scheme of things, possible only because I first believed that it really was possible?