August 2007 Archives

In Dallas, the Department of Justice is presenting evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial tying the Islamic Society of North America closely to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, which, according to a MB planning document introduced into evidence, has a secret plan to overthrow the American order and institute an Islamic state. Lovely.

But this weekend in suburban Chicago, that same Department of Justice is sponsoring a booth at the annual ISNA convention. Well, DOJ, which is it?

As Steve Emerson rightly notes:

...the fact that the DOJ has an official presence, sponsorship or otherwise, at a convention held by an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, can be used by defense attorneys to argue that the prosecutors are not on the same page as other sections within the DOJ, who are not at all concerned with ISNA and its participation in the Hamas fundraising conspiracy.

Additionally, the unindicted co-conspirators themselves can exploit this apparent inconsistent approach, arguing (falsely) that a band of overzealous prosecutors are merely engaged in a "war against Islam," since other elements within the same agency are more than happy to engage Muslim Brotherhood front groups, who apparently pose no threat nor were a part of the larger conspiracy. This is just the latest in another example of the shortsightedness of various government agency outreach programs, not taking into account the long term consequences of short term goals.

If you had told me on September 12, 2001, that six years later we'd be dealing with politically correct insanity like this, I wouldn't have believed you.

And now for something completely different, and more fun.

I was wondering this morning what five to ten movies I would recommend to a young adult to explain to them what life is all about. I'm not talking about the best movies, the most important movies in film history, or even the most morally edifying movies. I'm talking about the movies whose lessons offer crucial insight into what it means to live a fully human life.

Here are ten that come to my mind right off. My list will probably change tomorrow. I look forward to seeing what you all have to say. Please offer a line or two explaining why you chose the films you did:

1. "The Bicycle Thief": A man who loves his family tries to do for them. Fate and society humiliate him in front of his son. The human condition, laid bare. This film is a call to mercy as a basic stance toward humanity.

2. "The Godfather, Parts I and II": The corruption of Michael Corleone shows how good things -- family, faith, loyalty -- can be manipulated such that one feels compelled to choose evil for the sake of maintaining power. Plus, the moral nuances in the characters and the narrative awaken one to the ethical complexity and shadow side of human society, and its temptations.

3. "Schindler's List": Because the Holocaust, the most important event in modern history, happened, and happened in the most culturally and technologically advanced nation on earth, this film is a warning against hubris. And it also shows that even a bad man can become a hero, that redemption is always possible.

4. "It's a Wonderful Life": A sentimental favorite, yes, but it's hard to beat the lesson that the meaning of a man's life is measured by his willingness to be of service to others before self.

5. "Big Night"/"Babette's Feast" (double feature): These films teach about the sacramental nature of life, and how love and passion is conveyed through food. And "Big Night" is especially moving in its life lesson about how the value of doing a thing lies in the thing well done, not in its instrumentality.

6: "The Mission": Sometimes a man has to be prepared to die in defiance of authority for the sake of conscience -- and there is more than one way to sacrifice for your beliefs.

7. "Moonstruck": Life is a comic opera. Love conquers all. Italians are the Chosen People. Brooklyn is paradise. There are no great moral lessons in this film, but to be seduced by it is to give yourself over to a generous and sustaining vision of life.

8. "Crimes and Misdemeanors": Absent belief in the existence of God, and what it implies for ultimate justice, life is about doing whatever you like, as long as you don't get caught and can rationalize your guilt. This is a parable about the dangers of nihilism.

9. "High Noon": The mob can be counted on to be cowards, usually. Be brave, be true to what you know is right, and to hell with the rest.

10. "12 Angry Men": Resist passion, apply reason. Emotions can badly mislead.

These aren't my favorite 10 films, though there is some overlap. What about you? OK, you don't have to name 10. But you do have to give a short explanation for why you chose the ones you did.

Have to say I was taken aback by the vehemence and vitriol against the idea of sexual purity expressed on yesterday's thread. I can understand why some people don't agree with the idea, and I can understand why people find the idea of the father-daughter purity balls off-putting (I'm not sure how I feel about them myself). But it's interesting to me, and dismaying, to see how infuriated so many people become by the very thought that sexual purity is an ideal worth living up to, even if one doesn't share that idea themselves.

I hope readers will take a few minutes to read the transcript of the PBS Frontline documentary "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," exploring the roots of a syphilis epidemic that struck students in three public high schools in an affluent suburb of Atlanta. This devastation to the bodies and the souls of teenagers is what you get when you turn your back on any notion of sexual restraint. Note especially this passage:

NARRATOR: Jennifer is 17. Her friends, Penie and Kira, are 16. They are devout Christians.

INTERVIEWER: Are you guys all virgins?

JENNIFER, KIRA, PENIE: Yes. Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Why? Why have you stayed virgins?

KIRA: Because that's- that's my morals that I live by. My parents have taught me from- since I was little that that's a good thing to do. I mean, it's just always been a right to me. It's always been right to save it.

NARRATOR: The girls say their way of life has isolated them from their peers.

KIRA: We got into high school, and high school's a lot different than middle school. Sex is the cool thing, and drugs is the cool thing, and drinking is cool. I went to one party in 9th grade, and I just- I just didn't like it after that. I mean- I mean, I wanted to go, I mean, because everybody wants to go to parties. And I got there, and I just knew that was not what I'm- that's not what I'm about. I'm about something different.

NARRATOR: The girls all left the Conyers public schools for a private Christian school called Springs Academy. Their circle of friends has narrowed, too, to those who share their beliefs.

JENNIFER: Guys definitely seem to be intimidated- I don't know by other Christian girls, but seem to be intimidated by me. Sometimes it's hard, and it's- like, you question yourself. It's, like, "Why is this worth it?" It's, like, "These guys are there afraid of me." It's definitely been lonely at times.

PENIE: It really is hard, you know, when you try to be good, and then people want to always tar you and say, "Oh, no. You're a hypocrite," you know? It's really hard.

NARRATOR: At times, the girls say, they have even been harassed by their peers.

PENIE: People like to say things. You know, they said that I was sleeping with- around with a lot of guys, you know, and that's not the case, you know? And they'd say I get drunk, and I was not doing that at all, you know? And drugs and anything else you can imagine. You know, none of that was true.

INTERVIEWER [switching to another set of interviewees -- RD]: What do you think of girls who decide they're going to stay virgins till they get married?

KATY: It's not going to happen. I mean, there's still a few out there that actually do stay virgins till they get married, and that's real good. I wish I could have done that. But it's just- most of them that say that that's going to- they're going to do that, it's not going to happen because of peer pressure and just being curious, falling in love with somebody.

NARRATOR: Katy and her friends are freshmen at one of Rockdale's three public high schools.

INTERVIEWER: What's the typical age for girls to lose their virginity?

KATY, BRIDGET, CHRISTINE: Thirteen. Fourteen. Thirteen or fourteen.

BRIDGET: Fourteen.

INTERVIEWER: That's typical?

GIRLS: Uh-huh.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of music do you guys like?

GIRLS: Rap.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

GIRLS: Like, Master P. Tupac, definitely. Oh, I love Tupac.

INTERVIEWER: What do you like about rap?

GIRLS: The beat. The beat. And the words. And it's just, like, loud. You can really get up and dance.

CHRISTINE: And the way that it's, like- they can talk about something that's, like, completely stupid, like drugs and stuff. [crosstalk] But it's the way they put it, it sounds interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Give me an example.

CHRISTINE: I can't think of a song.

GIRLS: [singing rap] Oh, take three witches and put 'em in a [unintelligible] I take clothes off you, and I'm blowing [unintelligible] mind. Take one more before I go [unintelligible] Seven b***es get f****d at the same time. The [unintelligible] she can s**k a ding-dong all day, all night, all evening long. b***h has never done it. She says she never tried. [unintelligible] mother-f****g [unintelligible] if the b***h is a good trick. Anybody can talk to a b***h and get the b***h to f**k, but how many [unintelligible] talk to a b**h and get their d**k s****d like me? A pimp that you never saw [unintelligible]

INTERVIEWER: That's about group sex.

GIRLS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Is that something anybody does around here?

GIRLS: Uh-huh!

BRIDGET: Lots of people. A lot of people.

CHRISTINE: Yes, a lot of people.

In which school's peer culture would you rather your children -- female and male -- be immersed? I would much rather my children go to a school where however dorky the attempts to build a culture of purity of heart, mind and body may be, they at least make the attempt, than send them off into such a snake pit.

Can any civilization survive such moral degradation and chaos being accepted by its mainstream? I'm serious. This is the culture of death.

Philip Rieff, from "The Triumph of the Therapeutic":

In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil. The best spirits of the twentieth century have thus expressed their conviction that the original innocence, which to earlier periods was a sinful conceit, the new center, which can be held even as communities disintegrate, is the self. By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world. [snip] That there are colonies of the violent among us, devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, best describes, I think, our present temporarily schizoid existence in two cultures -- vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom.

Rieff goes on to say that all cultures require remissions [i.e., thou-shalt-nots], and in Christian culture, the chief remission had to do with mastering the "sexual opportunism of individuals." But this was:

...not ascetic in a crude renunciatory mode which would destroy any culture. Max Scheler described that culture accurately, I think, when he concluded that "Christian asceticism -- ast least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy -- had as its purpose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative, asceticism -- aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blocakge by the automatism of the lower drives." That renunciatory mode, in which the highest powers of personality are precisely those which subserve rather than subvert culture, appears no longer systematically efficient. The spiritualizers have had their day; nowadays, the best among them appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing expressions of therapeutic aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope -- the therapeutics need no doctirnes, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in trying to maintain cultural contact with constitutencies already deconverted in all but name.

What the sociologist Rieff (who was not a Christian) is saying is that classical Christian culture was built around a creative renunciation of the sexual urge. It did not crudely suppress it, but only channeled it and regulated it toward culturally useful ends. But (to oversimplify) the great Freudian revolution in consciousness overturned this cultural regime, and replaced it with a "therapeutic" model in which fulfilling the individual and his desires was highest goal of Western culture. This inevitably disintegrates culture, because there are no binding remissions commanded by shared authority. As Rieff presciently recognized (this book was published 40 years ago), the spokesman for the old Christian cultural order have little credibility; most of their flock have been deconverted by the culture.

Forty years after his prophetic book, I think Rieff is wrong about one thing (which he couldn't have foreseen anyway): the best of the Christian thinkers are no longer trying to negotiate terms with the therapeutic overculture. That culture war has been lost. They are instead trying to build a counterculture, and countercultural institutions, to save their children's moral sanity. We return, once again, to MacIntyre:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

But we do not want, or should not want, to retreat behind the castle walls and pull up the drawbridge. I prefer Pope Benedict's more hopeful scenario, about which I blogged yesterday. Wrote Benedict:

The [early] Chrsitians were able to demonstrate persuasively how empty and base were the entertainments of paganism, and how sublime the gift of faith in the God who suffers with us and leads us to the road of true greatness. Today it is a matter of the greatest urgency to show a Christian model of life that offers a livable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society forced to make increasing recourse to drugs because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures. Living on the great values of the Christian tradition is naturally much harder than a lfie rendered dull by the increasingly costly habits of our time. The Christian model of life must be manifested as a life in all its fullness and freedom, a life that does not experience the bonds of love as dependence and lmitation but rather as an opening to the greatness of life. Here, too, I refer to the idea of the creative minorities that enrich this model of life, present it in a convincing way, and can thus instill the courage needed to live it.

A secularist friend of mine suggested to me recently that this might be the only real option for convinced cultural and religious conservatives: small, cohesive communities where truly creative work can be done, because so much focus and energy doesn't have to be diverted to fighting a war against a culture that is unremittingly hostile to traditional cultural conservatism.

One last thing: we have a cleaning lady that's comes on Fridays to help out. Maria is a marvel. She's an immigrant from Mexico who is raising two young teenage girls virtually alone, as her husband works in another state. She is a stalwart at her Pentecostal church, a Hispanic congregation. This morning she was telling me about how much practical help, in terms of spiritual and moral support, she and her family gets from her church community. I asked her if she had always been Pentecostal, and she said no, that she was raised Catholic. Why did you leave? I asked. She said that the Catholic parish in her small village in Mexico "didn't tell us nothing." I asked her to explain, and she said that the priest never gave them any practical help with living their very hard lives. Pentecostalism did. And it does here in America, she says. She told me the pastor at her parish last night preached a sermon that she and her oldest daughter ("who wants a boyfriend, but she's too young for that") needed to hear to encourage them.

Why am I bringing this up in this context? Not as a criticism of the Catholic Church, but rather to show that people who live on the social and economic margins have a profound practical need for an active community of virtue. I mean, we all need that, but the poorer you are, the more you need it, and I could see in Maria's face and hear in her voice that her church is not just a nice place for her to go. It is her lifeline. Why? Because, in part, Maria's daughters are in the highest demographic for teen pregnancy in this country. Economic circumstances have forced her to be, in effect, a single mom. With two girls in public school, at high risk for having a pregnancy that could ruin their chances at attending college and making a stable middle-class life for themselves. These daughters are adrift in a culture that does everything it can to tear down the kind of traditional morality that would help Maria and her daughters make it through the teen years safely. That little Pentecostal congregation to which she belongs is the only thing Maria and her girls have.

You can laugh at the ideal of sexual purity all you want, and think (wrongly) that we traditional Christians are nothing but a bunch of Church Lady prudes out to spoil everybody's fun. But you should well consider who really gets hurt the most in a culture that sneers at the ideal of sexual restraint. Bill Maher and his ilk are deadly enemies of Maria and her girls. And me and my children too.

Ten years ago today, the Princess of Wales died. Where were you when you heard the news? I was at my mom and dad's house in Louisiana, visiting from Florida. We were talking about my upcoming trip to Canada to cover the Toronto Film Festival when a bulletin came on TV. And that's how we found out.

In Toronto the following week, I found myself wanting to watch a lot of TV instead of movies. I never really gave a fig about Diana and all that, but I am fascinated by cultural phenomena, and woke up before daylight as an adolescent to watch her wedding to Charles because ... well, it seemed like the thing to do. I was more taken with it as a meta-phenomenon, I think (e.g., "Wow, isn't it cool that I'm up early watching a wedding with a global television audience?"). I felt the same way about the Diana death obsequies. The Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto became a veritable flower dump. It's all anyone wanted to talk about. I woke up early once again to watch the funeral in my Toronto hotel room, and shocked myself for crying over it all. I hadn't followed Diana's melodrama, and to the extent that I had I tended to sympathize with the Windsors. Still, the idea that someone so young, rich, beautiful and vital could die so horribly and so young -- well, I didn't cry for Diana so much as I cried over the realization that nothing protects us from an untimely death. Well, that, and I wept for those poor orphaned boys, and the hand-lettered card reading "Mummy" embedded in a bouquet of flowers that they put on their mother's coffin. That was heartbreaking. Then I felt like an ass for getting emotional over the spectacle, put on my coat and went to the movies.

Alex Massie throws a big fat stinkbomb today, writing that dying was a great career move for Diana, good for the monarchy, and good for Britain. Excerpt:

She died at the optimum moment for her reputation. We have generally chosen to overlook the squalor of the her final months. As it was she died as the saintly Diana, friend to the weak, the sick, the maimed, the - yuck! - "People's Princess". That tiara that would have slipped eventually, however. Harsh though it is to say, one wonders how long it would have been before Diana's string of love affairs with men of questionable suitability tarnished her reputation. Not too long I suspect. How long before public sympathy for her plight curdled into condemnation of her actions? Had she continued to see coke-snorting Egyptian playboys such as Dodi al-Fayed and other dubious members of that social world, one wonders how long it would have been before the public began to see her as, not to put too fine a point on it, a tart.

I know, I know, the Massie piece is in incredibly poor taste. And yet, as cultural analysis, I find it impossible to disagree with. You really should read the whole thing.

Is the administration planning to roll out an attack plan for Iran this fall? You'd think, "What are they, nuts?" Ha! There are rumors. And take a look at this:

BOB Baer, the former Middle East CIA operative whose first book about his life inspired the oil-and-espionage thriller Syriana, is working on a new book on Iran, but says he was told by senior intelligence officials that he had better get it published in the next couple of months because things could be about to change.

Baer, in an interview with The Weekend Australian, says his contacts in the administration suggest a strategic airstrike on Iran is a real possibility in the months ahead.

"What I'm getting is a sense that their sentiment is they are going to hit the Iranians and not just because of Israel, but due to the fact that Iran is the predominant power in the Gulf and it is hostile and its power is creeping into the Gulf at every level," Baer says.

He says his contacts have told him of his book: "You better hurry up because the thesis is going to change. I told them submission is in January but they said, 'You're probably going to be too late'."

(Hat tip: Larison, proving once again, happily for us, that his promises of fasting from blogging are in vain).