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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Once again, church leadership makes a mockery of church teachings. Catholic Dale Price lays into 'em: Terry McAuliffe, former DNC Chair and unapologetic defender of partial birth abortion, is about to be honored for his selfless devotion to and efforts on behalf of the Catholic Faith by being admitted to the Knights of Malta.
Once again, those laboring in the trenches to uphold the Gospel are about to take a shiv between the shoulderblades. Once again, the unfaithful get front row seats while the laborers in the vineyard are told to shut up. ... And you know what? I'm not sure how much I care anymore. Sure, at one level I am outraged. But on another level, I'm thinking "What else is new?" I started lowering my standards concerning morally coherent Catholic leadership in 2002, and I haven't stopped since. And, you know what? I'm happy to report that they come closer to meeting my expectations every year. Bishop-proofed faith--the key to peace of mind.
She passed away from cancer here in Texas this afternoon. Her columns were thoroughly partisan, and made me angry more often than not, but she often made me laugh, which in my book covers a multitude of sins. And when she hit a target, it was a splendid thing to read, especially when she showed politicians given breaks to the rich and powerful, and the shaft to the little guy. Fair or not, she wrote with a fierce humanity. She was -- and I mean this as a serious compliment -- a Texas broad. I love broads, especially when they have a mouth on 'em. I like to think this passage from a column during the Bush-Gore Florida shootout was ... well, it wasn't typical Molly Ivins, but it was Molly Ivins at her best. R.I.P.: Here's the challenge: Let's everybody with a dog in this fight -- meaning either pro-Gore or pro-Bush -- be obliged to make the case for the other side for at least 15 minutes.
Because I think we're watching something important, quite aside from the fate of the nation and the future of The World's Greatest Democracy (except for Florida).
In a mild and in some ways not terribly important case (I may have to eat those words), we're watching why wars start. What we see is the constant presentation -- because the media love to polarize -- of people who are apparently incapable of imagining what the situation looks like from somebody else's point of view. UPDATE: What was I thinking? Jeez, how wrong-headed and mealy-mouthed was that?! Saying Molly Ivins was at her best when she was being nice is like saying H.L. Mencken was never better than when he scratched poltroons behind the ears. Check out this archive from the Texas Observer. Right, left or otherwise, if more newspaper columnists wrote with her style, we'd sell a lot more newspapers.
This sounds interesting: Bloggers are encouraged to watch live as eight of America’s leading thinkers on religion and politics gather at Regent University on Friday, Feb. 2, to answer the question, “How can religion and politics become like glue bonding us together, rather than like sharp scissors cutting us apart?”
WHAT: The Ronald Reagan Symposium 2007: The Future of Religion in American Politics
WHEN: Feb. 2 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. ET
WHERE: Webcast live at http://www.Regent.edu/admin/media/schgov/symposium07/
AGENDA: 9 – 11:30 a.m. (each presenter will speak 15-20 minutes on their noted topic, with a panel discussion/Q&A beginning at approximately 10:20 a.m.)
+ Hadley Arkes, Amherst College, “That Superintending Principle: The Author of the Law that was there before the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”
+ Daniel Dreisbach, Princeton University, “George Washington on Religion’s Place in Public Life”
+ Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute, “Lessons from the Founders”
+ Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago, “Religion in the Public Square”
1:30 – 4 p.m. (each presenter will speak 15-20 minutes on their noted topic, with a panel discussion/Q&A beginning at approximately 2:50 p.m.)
+ Marvin Olasky, WORLD magazine, “Evangelical Political Models: Fenimore Cooper or William Wilberforce”
+ Darryl Hart, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, “Left Turn? Evangelicals and the Future of the Religious Right”
+ Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center, “Red God, Blue God: Is There a God Gap between the Parties?”
+ Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, "Politics and Religion in the Post-Reagan Era”
More information here.
I was talking last night to a new friend and co-worker, a black woman, about my secret love of Moon Pies, which is a Southern thing (she is not a native Southerner, but rather a Midwesterner). When I mentioned how much I adore greens -- mustards, turnips, collards -- she gasped. She said she had no idea white people ate them. Really? , I said. I had never heard of greens being strictly a black thing. Then again, I grew up in the rural South. She was genuinely taken aback to hear this. She asked me, "How do you cook them?" I said I cook them down with salt pork, and eat them with cornbread. She was visibly startled, and kept saying, very sweetly, how she'd never in all her life heard of white people eating greens. When I got home and mentioned this to my wife (who doesn't eat greens), she said that it might be a Texas vs. the South thing. My wife, a Texas native who grew up in Dallas, said white people around here really don't eat greens. I can't help wondering if that's true in rural Texas. Or are greens strictly something that poor and working-class Southerners, black and white, eat? I will say that when I was growing up in Louisiana, greens were something our parents (most of whom had grown up in the Depression or just after it) ate, but that we -- white kids, I mean -- thought were awful. I didn't start eating them until I was an adult, and now a mess of turnips is one of my favorite things. So I'm wondering if greens-eating is a legacy of the culture of the poor rural South, and it was taken north by African-Americans who migrated there, whose descendants may not realize that down South, eating greens is not a racial thing, but a class thing. Or was. Who knows? Do you? Man, I'm hungry now.
Got in yesterday's mail an advance copy of Philip Rieff's "Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us," which will be released in February by Pantheon. Rieff wrote much of the book in the 1970s, but never published it. He completed, or allowed to be completed by assistants, the final draft weeks before he died last summer. Here, from the publisher's website, is a synopsis of the book: Charisma has come to be understood today as a special gift or talent that celebrities–artistic performers, athletes, movie stars, or political leaders–possess, a quality that makes their lives exemplary and transforms them into objects of universal appeal or attraction. In Charisma, Philip Rieff explores the emergence and evolution of this mysterious and compelling concept within Judeo-Christian culture. Its first expression was in the idea of the covenant between God and the Israelites: Charisma–religious grace and authority–was transferred through divine inspiration to the Old Testament prophets; it was embodied by Jesus of Nazareth, the first true charismatic hero. Rieff shows how St. Paul transformed charisma into a form of social organization, how it was reworked by Martin Luther and by nineteenth-century Protestant theologians, and, finally, how Max Weber redefined charisma as a secular political concept. By emptying charisma of its religious meaning, Weber opened the door to the modern perception of it as little more than a form of celebrity, stripped of moral considerations.
Rieff rejects Weber’s definition, insisting that Weber misunderstood the relation between charisma and faith. He argues that without morality, the gift of grace becomes indistinguishable from the gift of evil, and it devolves into a license to destroy and kill in the name of faith or ideology. Offering brilliant interpretations of Kierkegaard, Weber, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud, Rieff shows how certain thinkers attacked the very possibility of faith and genuine charisma and helped prepare the way for the emergence of a therapeutic culture in which it is impossible to recognize that which is sacred. Rieff’s analysis of charisma is an analysis of the deepest level of crisis in our culture. I'm the sort of wildly disorganized reader who keeps several books going at once (percolating now: Rieff's "Triumph of the Therapeutic," D'Souza's "The Enemy at Home," P.D. James's "The Children of Men," and Tracy Wilkinson's forthcoming "The Vatican's Exorcists," which I'm reviewing for another publication). Nevertheless, I couldn't keep from reading the first chapter of "Charisma" last night. There I found a striking paragraph. Before you read it, understand that Rieff was not a religious man, though as a sociologist he was preoccupied with profound questions of the role faith plays in sustaining cuulture and civilization. In this new book, he sets out his belief that there are two types of "charismatics," by which he means people who have the natural authority, by force of personality, to lead. The first (and older) type is the authentic charismatic, who led people to adhere to a creed, to turn inward and overcome their own propensity for disorder and evil. The newer type is the fake charismatic, who leads people outward and away from the internal struggle to overcome, and rather to embrace instinct and indulgence and the casting off of all creeds. The older charismatic possesses grace in the service of holiness; the new charismatic uses fake grace to serve evil. Here's Rieff: In this period of transition, our would-be charismatics are best understood as terrorists. The relation between the transitional, modern notion of charisma canned in the sense [Max] Weber, as I shall show, canned it, and terror needs some preliminary explanation. Perhaps the best place to begin is with the suggestion that holiness is entirely interdictory. A m
oral absolute thus becomes the object of all. Holy terror is charismatic; our terror is unholy. For our charismatics are engaged in no wrestlings of angels, but, rather, with the obeying of demons. Jacob was a charismatic when Laban and Jacob took mutual pledges before the God of their fathers; Jacob swears by the fear of his father, Isaac (Genesis 31:53). What is this charismatic fear? What is holy terror? Is it a fear of a mere father; in a phantasmagoric enlargement, Frued's idea is silly. Holy terror is rather fear of oneself, fear of the evil in oneself and in the world. It is also fear of punishment. Without this necessary fear, charisma is not possible. To live without this high fear is to be a terror oneself, a monster. And yet to be monstrous has become our ambition, for it is our amibtion to live without fear. All holy terror is gone. The interdicts have no power. This is the real death of God and of our own humanity. It is out of sheer terror that charisma develops. We live in terror, but never in holy terror. Those are the only alternatives, as I shall try to show in the course of this book.
A great charismatic doees not save us from holy terror, but rather conveys it. One of my intentions is to make us again more responsive to the possibility of holy terror. In other words, you can have what the prophets and the preachers call the fear of the Lord, which entails understanding your own capacity for cruelty, anarchy and barbarian behavior absent a binding recognition of a greater authority that transcends you and requires your obedience. Or you can become a monster. Your choice. The prophet has the charisma -- the grace -- to call people to repentance and subjection to the moral code; the terrorist uses his charisma to call people to rebellion, disorder and cultural suicide.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Slate has started a feature collecting evidence from favorable press clippings that the Illinois senator is, in fact, the Son of God. Which for some reason brings to mind that great skit on SNL from the 1988 (I think) GOP primary campaign, in which an angry Bob Dole (Dan Ackroyd) explodes at Pat Robertson (Al Franken) during a candidate's forum. He says something along the lines of, "Pat Robertson, he's just an old-time faith healer in a business suit. You know it, I know it, the whole country knows it. Bit I'll tell you what Pat, you heal my right arm and I'll vote for you."
No, says Mickey Kaus, merely opportunistic. UPDATE: It doesn't matter to me if Hagel is being opportunistic. So what? He's saying the right things now, and frankly, he's the only Republican I have the least interest in voting for in 2008 (there are no Democrats). I'd bet that the Iraq situation, and the general international situation, is going to be so bad by year's end that we'll be looking for a man like Hagel to get us out of it and to set a new course in US foreign policy. Thing is, absent a profound change of heart on the part of the GOP rank-and-file primary voters -- and it could happen -- he's got a ghost of a chance for the Republican nomination. Jim Pinkerton suggests that Hagel would be a big hit with independents, and might consider an independent run for the White House. I think a Hagel-Webb ticket could pull enough disaffected Republicans, conservative Democrats and independents to whip anybody the GOP or the Dems are likely to nominate.
Juan Williams of NPR interviewed President Bush at length yesterday. You can go here to find the link to hear the interview, or read the transcript here. I learned a couple of new things from the president. Such as: "I will tell you, 2005 was a great year for freedom, and then the enemy took a good look and said, what do we need to do to stop the advance of freedom, and 2006 was a tough year." Oh, so that's how that happened. "Ahmed, dear, what do we need to do to stop the advance of freedom? I do so hate freedom. And apple pie really chaps my a**, too." Does anybody believe this comic-book stuff anymore? And this (emphasis mine): MR. WILLIAMS: So, some people would say, well, if you believe in spending restraint, why haven't you vetoed one bill, you know, one appropriations bill?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Because the United States Congress that was controlled by Republicans exercised spending restraint. Now, I didn't particularly like – the size of the pie was what I requested. It's some of the pieces of the pie that I didn't particularly care for, but that is why the president needs a line-item veto, and that is why Congress has got to reform the earmark process. What the American people need to understand is that sometimes special projects get put into bills without ever having seen the light of the day. In other words, they don't get voted on; they just show up, and we need transparency in the earmark process, and expose the process to hearings and votes so that the American people will know that any project was fully heard on the floor of the House and the Senate. In other words, the record levels of spending engaged in by the GOP Congress was actually spending restraint, except when it wasn't, and that was Congress's fault for being so sneaky.
This should save your dying-on-the-vine church by getting the Youth of Today in the doors. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Did you know that Johnny Cash once upon a time recorded a children's album? Sure did. We got it for Christmas. My wife just phoned as she was driving with Lucas, who turned three last week, in the back seat. She called to say ixnay on the ohhnycashja around Lucas. One of the songs was about a bear hunter, and it sparked the following exchange from the back seat: "Did he kill the Daddy bear?""No." "Did he kill the Mommy bear?""No." "Did he kill the baby bears?""No, honey." "Did the bears he killed have babies in their tummy?"On and on like this. Raffi, anyone?
Julie "Bible Girl" Lyons, at it again: One of us has got to be crazy.
One of us has got to be deluded, dumb and blind.
It is so very daring to examine the delicate matter of bestiality, to apply one’s filmic aesthetic to the subject of men having sex with Arabian stallions.
Or, it’s another example of being drawn to depravity like flies to rot.
The human body is an exquisitely beautiful machine, so let’s peel back the layers of cadavers acquired through mysterious means and celebrate the glory of animal flesh.
Or, it’s yet another way to defile, degrade and dehumanize the crowning achievement of creation — man.
Rape is real, it’s awful and it even happens to kids. So let’s use a 12-year-old girl to tastefully convey the terrible reality of sexual violence.
Or, it’s foolish parents and greedy studios exploiting a child and unwittingly tapping into spiritual forces of evil that will forever haunt everyone who took part in this misbegotten project.
Most pornography is harmless; it’s just pictures of the stuff we fantasize about anyway. Plus, I’ve heard of marriages that were saved through porn.
Or, it’s evidence that we’re monumentally bored with sex, that it takes more and more provocation to stir the faintest arousal. And equating one’s spouse with a piece of meat? Now that’s what I call romance.
One day our children will be thrust into a harsh and ugly world. Better to expose them gradually to all the varieties of degradation through books, film and the Internet so they’ll be prepared for what awaits them.
Or, teach them they can’t handle certain kinds of knowledge without being degraded themselves and give them the tools to make intelligent choices that preserve the purity of conscience.
Enough.
I know I’ve had enough.
One of us has got to be crazy. Read the whole thing. Julie Lyons is not crazy. She's a voice of sanity in a culture that has lost its mind. This is a powerful column about the fragility of the human conscience, and especially the sacred responsibility parents have to nurture and protect and build up the consciences of their children. Julie has a seven-year-old son: In certain moments of melancholy, I say to myself that if I accomplish nothing else in this world, I can take comfort in knowing that I played a role in giving life to this little boy, and that my husband and I did our very best to nurture and protect this single human soul.
Funny how the presence of a child instantly and irreversibly strips away layers of selfishness. Amen and amen.
Monday, January 29, 2007
... you hate modern art! So says Spengler: There are esthetes who appreciate the cross-eyed cartoons of Pablo Picasso, the random dribbles of Jackson Pollack, and even the pickled pigs of Damien Hirst. Some of my best friends are modern artists. You, however, hate and detest the 20th century's entire output in the plastic arts, as do I.
"I don't know much about art," you aver, "but I know what I like." Actually you don't. You have been browbeaten into feigning pleasure at the sight of so-called art that actually makes your skin crawl, and you are afraid to admit it for fear of seeming dull. This has gone on for so long that you have forgotten your own mind. Do not fear: in a few minutes' reading I can break the spell and liberate you from this unseemly condition.
Fascinating, red-hot thread over at Amy's, about Catholic schooling, kicked off by Alexandra Pelosi's comments in this SF Chronicle story: Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.
"That's why it was weird when I'd go to these places and ... people would say, 'It's in the Bible.' And they fall back on the Bible for everything."
During Nancy Pelosi's speaker celebrations this month, as the Pelosi clan drove through the streets of Washington and Baltimore together, some protesters held up signs that read, "Pelosi Preys on Children" -- a reference to the speaker's pro-choice stand, which contradicts church doctrine.
"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church." Go read the long string of comments left by Amy's readers, all of them Catholics, and as far as I can tell all faithful to the Church -- and all of them very bitter about how their Catholic school experience destroyed (for a time) or threatened to destroy their Catholic faith. Note well: these aren't Catholics who are angry at the Church for being too strict; they are angry at the Church for not being the Church. It is an astonishing thread, really astonishing, because in it you can see pain and destruction caused by the Gramscian march through the institutions that the postconciliar Catholic left undertook. There is a whole world captured in those heartrending posts -- but also hope, too, because these people managed to endure and even triumph over their Catholic educations seemingly designed to turn them into ex-Catholics. Here's something posted by Dad29, who sometimes posts on this blog: We migrated to "alternative Catholic school" education for our children when the local parish school decided that education in sexual practices was appropriate for the 5, 6, 7 grades. That was a mandate from the Archbishop, who later resigned for some...ah....personal problems.
Interesting that the "alternative Catholic" school also provided a MUCH stronger Catholic atmosphere, as well as a MUCH stronger literature and math curriculum, AND actually taught 2 years of Latin (7th/8th.)
There are now three "alternative Catholic" K-8 schools in the area, all doing very well in terms of student-count, academic success, and spiritual success.
And the traditional parochial schools? Closing. There's something important here: those Catholics who really wanted a serious Catholic education had to get outside the institutional parochial school framework and do it on their own. You'll find in this thread lots of evidence that people who kept their faith or found their way back to it had to do so not with the help of the institutional Catholic Church, but in spite of it. If you want to go visit that thread to gloat at the suffering of Catholic laymen at the hands of unbelieving churchocrats, don't. It's cruel and pointless, and don't be deceived: the institutional decay within American Catholicism hurts the entire Christian community. The reason I post it here, though, is because what Amy's comboxes reveal is a hidden history (well, hidden from the mainstream, but certainly not hidden within orthodox Catholic circles) of how and why the Catholic
Church has gotten itself into such a ditch. It wasn't an accident. It was systematically engineered by the treason of the clerks, so to speak. One of the most mysteries and consequential tragedies of the last half of the 20th century was the suicide attempt of the Catholic Church. Thanks be to God, it did not succeed, and signs of rebirth are there (you can see them in Amy's comboxes). But there's a long way to go back, and I'm afraid my Catholic friends are right: a lot more to be endured, and fought for, until that destructive generation and their spiritual children die out. Still, what fascinated me as a Catholic, and still fascinates me now that I'm outside the Catholic faith, is this question: If these priests, nuns and others ceased to believe in the Catholic faith, why didn't they leave? Why did they stay, and try to take the substance of that faith away from people, especially Catholic children in the parochial schools?
Here's a thought-provoking piece by Jim Schutze in the Dallas Observer, writing about how his funky Old East Dallas neighborhood is going to hell because of all the improvements that are breaking out all around him. Schutze's neighborhood is also my neighborhood, but you don't have to know a thing about Dallas to relate to this story. I suspect this kind of dynamic is taking place all over the US. Here's the lede, which gives you an idea of Schutze's sensibility: I am concerned for my people. Last summer a neighbor spoke to me on my lawn in Old East Dallas—an artist, one of the original urban pioneers, a person who has lived an entire life of collapsing rooflines and spotty plumbing on our street midway between White Rock Lake and downtown. I wanted to believe she was looking over her shoulder while she spoke because she was ashamed. But she was not ashamed.
"I went inside one of those McMansions on the other side of La Vista," she whispered. "It was a real estate open house. And you know what, Jim? It was really nice!"
I said, "No, Valerie, stop. Please don't say these things."
"Everything worked. Even the windows! Everything. I bet they never have to call Roto-Rooter. And the kitchen! The kitchen!"
"You've got to get a grip on yourself. I'll tell Jordan on you if you don't."
"The kitchen was my dream kitchen!"
I am frightened. East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood.
The nail in the coffin for me was the announcement in early January by Whole Foods Market Inc. that they will close their old store on Lower Greenville Avenue by the end of this year and open a gigantic new 50,000-square-foot foodie cathedral less than a mile away at Abrams Road and Skillman Street. When I went to neighbors hoping for commiseration, they stared at me instead with those unblinking, watery eyes the people had in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers after they'd been eaten by the space pods, and they said, "Oh, but Jim, the new Whole Foods will be so much nicer."
Nicer? Nicer? Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now. I'm afraid I've got little patience for this sort of thing. Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed Giuliani for cleaning up the porn theaters and making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. There is a certain kind of Romantic who finds decay and disintegration somehow more ... authentic, and in any case preferable to regeneration. What's interesting about Schutze's piece is that he went to talk to his longtime neighbors, and found that they don't really share his silly idealism. Take, for example, Lorlee Bartos, a sometimes-correspondent of mine who writes to bash me for this or that conservative thing I've said. She's a longtime Dallas liberal activist and Democratic consultant. Schutze went to her looking for back-up: She lives just south of East Dallas on the other side of Interstate 30 in a neighborhood that has come a long way under her tutelage but is still, shall we say, significantly challenged. Her neighborhood is where we were when I moved in.
But every time I tried to tell her how sad I was about Whole Foods leaving Lower Greenville, she told me stories about her side of the freeway.
"It got so bad this summer one time, there's a house between the whorehouse and the drughouse, and the daughter showed up with a 3-year-old. She was bringing him in to use the bathroom, and she threw her car keys down on the seat. Then the minute she was in the house the skank w
ho was watching from the whorehouse stole her car."
I didn't call to talk about ugly things like that. I called to talk about the whole ethos of the Lower Greenville Avenue Whole Foods, how it was a tie to a kinder, gentler time. But she wouldn't listen.
"This young couple," Lorlee said, "I think they're from Balch Springs, they put up three Confederate flags, two on the outside and one in the window. And then they stole my neighbor's pregnant pit bull. Then they put some sort of chicken wire on the outside of the house around the windows with wood around it for trim, and somebody said that's because they've got a python in the house. And they've got a 3-year-old and a baby."
Her point, I gather, is that absolute stability is not an option. You can have change for the better or change for the worse. Pick your poison.
"I have some concern about McMansions," she said, "just from the size and in terms of destroying the character of a neighborhood, but a new house is nice. It's better than a whorehouse or a drughouse, and you can quote me on that.
"It's sort of exciting to drive through East Dallas to see new stuff pop up here and there. I'm not opposed to new houses." "Better than a whorehouse or a drughouse." The house I live in was something of a drug house not too many years ago. The neighbors across the street -- one a librarian, one an accountant -- talk about how before the guy we bought the house from moved in and fixed it up, it was a tumbledown renthouse whose resident was a junkie. Literally! He'd sleep on the porch, and they'd find his needles in the yard. Our neighbors next door talk about how the drug gangs controlled this neighborhood in the 1970s, when they moved in. "It was so bad the police were scared to come down here, and they told us not to risk sitting on our front porch at night," said H. That's all gone now. You can still hear gunshots at night in the distance, but the streets of our neighborhood are pretty safe now. You're starting to see more people with strollers on the streets. You can sneer at them -- at us -- as yuppie gentrifiers, and I guess we are, but was it better when these beautiful old Craftsman houses were falling down, and anybody who could afford to leave was getting out for the suburbs because of the crime? Lorlee makes a point that we all have to come to terms with: you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another. If things keep going this way for Old East Dallas, I can foresee a time when Julie and I will have to sell our house because we can't afford the property taxes, in which case the neighborhood would likely have changed so much that we might not feel comfortable living there anyway. That might be a sad day for us -- or maybe by then we will be ready to move, I dunno. But as a general matter, I find it impossible to think it's a bad thing for the city of Dallas to have neighborhoods that had been abandoned to crime, decay and despair coming back to life, even if the Wrong Sort of Person (from a Schutzian point of view) is moving in. I'm glad Schutze wrote the column, because even though I disagree with him, he's touching on some pretty significant core issues at the heart of what it means to live in a community. Still, it's interesting to think that if Schutze, who is white, had written a column talking about how the blacks or the Mexicans were moving in and messing up the character of his neighborhood with their tastes, he'd be an absolute pariah. But because the offenders are pretty much white people who don't share his aesthetic sensibilities, he feels free to rip them. Don't get me wrong -- I think he should be free to write about them (well, us) like this, and I say that as the sort of per
son Jim Schutze is probably sad has moved into the neighborhood. I only say that to draw attention to how the absence of race as a factor makes it possible for us to talk about in public the kinds of culture-clash issues that everybody who lives in a transitional neighborhood talks about privately, all the time. It's also the case, I think, that the fact that Schutze's targets are upwardly mobile instead of downwardly mobile makes it easier to take shots at the gentrifiers. Then again, I bet when the Schutze family first moved into its house, there were people in that neighborhood who thought of them as interlopers. These wouldn't be people who had a newspaper column, though.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
For his next trick, Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds traveling exhibit, is contemplating a doozy: displaying flayed corpses having sex. They'll call this necrophilic display "education" and "science," and they'll call anybody who objects a "prude" and a "fundamentalist."
Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. That number would have to include a significant number of independents and a lesser but still significant number of conservatives. Let's say you and your comrades were putting together big demonstration in Washington against the war, with the idea of getting US troops out of Iraq. If you really wanted to change minds and hearts, and build mass momentum toward ending the war, would you select as the featured speakers at that demonstration people like Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Susan Sarandon, Dennis Kucinich and JANE FREAKING FONDA?!? My guess is that these people set back the antiwar movement, such as it is, by trotting out the loony-lefties, thereby frightening the moderate to conservative people who have grave doubts about the war. If you wanted to relive the Sixties, folks, you did a splendid job. If you actually wanted to build momentum toward changing US policy in Iraq, well...
Friday, January 26, 2007
“Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an ax and smash all the sets.” -- Marshall McLuhan, on television. McLuhan, as you know, was the media guru and visionary best known for his observation, about television, that "the medium is the message." What he meant by that was that the facts television creates as a technology are more important than any message transmitted by TV. His quote above is why traditional Islamic culture is doomed if it accepts television, as it is doing, though it's going down fighting. TV formats us all to respond to things emotionally, and creates a consciousness that lives only in the present moment, ahistorically. What he's saying is that our civilization is the product of the Book -- and the Book has been displaced by electronic technology. Because of this technology, we will have a new civilization, whether we want to or not. Interestingly, in light of Mark Shea's comment, here is what McLuhan (who was a committed Catholic) said three years before his death in 1980: In a certain way, I also think that this could be the time of the Antichrist. When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer's moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favourable to an Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a 'new Christ' and mistake him for the real Christ. He's not talking about some "Left Behind" scenario, but about how global electronic media and how it changes the information environment, makes it possible for an Antichrist figure to emerge. (Whether or not you believe in the Antichrist is beside the point.)
Henryk Broder's essay in Der Spiegel is a useful corrective to Western self-criticism over our own decadence. This is why even though I fully grant the justice and accuracy of much of the D'Souzan critique of Western decadence, the alternative offered by Islam is intolerable. Here's Broder: Those who react to kidnappings and beheadings, to massacres of people of other faiths, and to eruptions of collective hysteria with a call for "cultural dialogue" don't deserve any better.
"The West should desist from engaging in all provocations that produce feelings of debasement and humiliation," says psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter. "We should show greater respect for the cultural identity of Muslim countries. ... For Muslims, it is important to be recognized and respected as equals." In Richter's view, what the Muslims need is "a partnership of equals."
But Richter neglects to describe what this partnership might look like. Does achieving such equality mean that we should set up separate sections for women on buses, as is the custom in Saudi Arabia? Should the marrying age for girls be reduced to 12, as is the case in Iran? And should death by stoning be our punishment for adultery, as Shariah law demands? What else could the West do to show its respect for the cultural identity of Islamic countries? Would it be sufficient to allow Horst-Eberhard Richter to decide whether, for example, a wet T-shirt contest in a German city rises to a level of criminal provocation that could cause the Muslim faithful in Hyderabad to feel debased and humiliated?
The discussion over which provocations WE should put an end to so that THEY do not feel upset inexorably leads to the realm of the absurd. The difference goes back to the point Pope Benedict may have been trying to make last year. We are faced with semi-barbarians in the Islamic countries (people who burn down embassies because of cartoons, celebrate suicide bombing, and the like) and semi-barbarians within the Western nations (the kind of cultural leftists and other decadents cited by D'Souza) -- but at least the ability to reason remains open to us in the West, because in whatever attenuated a form it exists today, it is part of our long heritage, part of who we have been and still are. In Islam, broadly speaking, it isn't there, not like we understand it. Force rules. God said it, they believe it, and that settles it. And woe betide anyone who disagrees. Yes? How do those of us who agree that Western society is deeply decadent, but who recognize the rising tide of Islam worldwide as a serious threat to the West, find balance? Ideas?
In his discussion of the D'Souza book, Mark Shea throws a bomb that no Christian can fail to take seriously: The question I find myself asking, in light of biblical revelation, is this: which side of the conflict between the post-Christian West and the Foaming Bronze Age Fanatic Islamosphere is far more likely to give us "the lawless one ... the one doomed to perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). Say what you will about Islam, but I don't see it producing that figure in a million years, whereas the West is ripe to give birth to him right now.
That's not to say I *prefer* the Foaming Bronze Age Thugs to win. It's to say that, in my heart, I cannot believe that they will. I think Scripture is true and that the coming of Christ will take place in a world that is apostate and (mark this) seriously ready to deify man, not in a world that never heard the gospel and which regards the deification of man with horror. That description fits the decadent West a lot better than than the Islamic East, so I retain a confidence, if you can call it that, that the winners of this particular "civilizational struggle" will be the post-Christian West, whose cultural and technological masters are laboring even now to create fresh sins that cry out to heaven and terrors that will dwarf Islam's crimes as continue on our post-Christian path toward "the supreme religious deception ... of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh."
When that will come, we don't know. *That* it will come is guaranteed by the word of God. And for my money, it seems much more like to come from a Decadent West triumphant over Islam than from Radical Islam triumphant over the West.
Peggy Noonan today pens a paean to Sen. Chuck Hagel for having the guts to take a difficult stand on the Iraq War. Excerpt: We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and the cowardice that leaves a great deal unsaid. But I found myself impressed and grateful for the words of Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Because his message was not one Republicans or Democrats would find congenial, it may be accidentally dropped down the memory hole, so I'll quote at some length.
The committee was nearing a vote on what was, essentially, an announcement of no confidence in the administration's leadership in Iraq. Specifically it was a nonbinding resolution opposing the increase in troops the president has requested. This was not significant in a concrete way: The president has the power to send more troops, and they are already arriving. But as symbols go, it packed a punch. You couldn't watch it on television or on the Internet and not see that Mr. Hagel was letting it rip. He did not speak from notes or a text but while looking at his fellow senators. There seemed no time lag between thought and word. He was barreling, he was giving it to you straight, and he'd pick up the pieces later.
This is what he said: Congress has duties; in the case of the war, meeting those duties was not convenient; Congress did not meet them.
[snip]
Mr. Hagel said the most serious thing that has been said in Congress in a long time. This is what we're here for. This is why we're here, to decide, to think it through and take a stand, and if we can't do that, why don't we just leave and give someone else a chance?
Mr. Hagel has shown courage for a long time. He voted for the war resolution in 2002 but soon after began to question how it was being waged. This was before everyone did. He also stood against the war when that was a lonely place to be. Senate Democrats sat back and watched: If the war worked, they'd change the subject; and if it didn't, they'd hang it on President Bush. Republicans did their version of inaction; they supported the president until he was unpopular, and then peeled off. This is almost not to be criticized. It's what politicians do. But it's not what Mr. Hagel did. He had guts. Boy, do I ever agree with this. The Washington Post today writes that Hagel is considering a run for the presidency. Right now, that makes little sense. He's got no real support among Republican primary voters. But let us get to August with things in Baghdad unchanged or worse, and Republican voters will start to panic. There is no major Republican who has been as forthright and as straight-talking a critic of the Bush war for as long as Chuck Hagel -- and he is a Vietnam vet, too, twice the winner of the Purple Heart. But he did vote to authorize the war. Nevertheless, this is what Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a 2006 NYT Magazine profile of Hagel, about that moment:
When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force — he'd persuaded himself that his vote might strengthen Powell's hand — he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it. What sounded then to the venture's true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later, which is to say that Hagel's words can reasonably be read as prescient: "How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told
of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." The president had said "precious little" about post-Saddam Iraq, which could prove costly, Hagel warned, "in both American blood and treasure."
For that, he was mocked by the conservative media (National Review called him "Sen. Hagel (R-France)"). How the world has changed since then! Hagel voted right on No Child Left Behind, on farm subsidies, and on the prescription drug benefit -- he was against them all as wasteful expansions of big government. He has a good record on abortion votes. So why not Hagel? Here's Lelyveld: The problem with making a revival of old-time values of fiscal restraint at home and restraint in the use of American power abroad the starting point for a race is that it presumes a level of disillusion that latter-day Republicans — the people who'll vote in primaries in 2008 — show little sign of feeling. That was true when this profile ran, one year ago. It's less true today. And if things continue on their current path in Iraq, Hagel will look a lot better to the GOP grassroots. I'm sure there are things about Chuck Hagel that I wouldn't much care for, but then again, I survey the field of Republican presidential candidates and I can't find any one that lights my fire. Still, managing the aftermath of the Iraq War will be an unfathomable challenge, and because Hagel understood far earlier than any other Republican contender what was wrong with the war, and with the strategic and philosophical thinking that got us into it, he might just be the Republican we need in the White House to deal with the deluge, and to keep us out of such foolish adventures in the future. One more bit from the Lelyveld profile: A Republican campaign pro, after an astute analysis of Hagel's virtues and drawbacks, zeroed in on a factor no one else had mentioned, one that he seemed to feel said a lot about the reason Hagel's party hasn't warmed to him, and therefore about his limited prospects.
"He doesn't have a happy face," the pro said. Saints preserve us from politicians with happy faces!
I'm still making my way through Dinesh D'Souza's book, but let me direct you to David Kuo's Beliefnet interview with him, up today. It gets to the heart of why I think D'Souza goes wrong, but why his critique is still valuable. In the interview, D'Souza says that now that we've got some distance from 9/11, we should apply critical thought to why the Islamists attacked us: And it's time to ask the descriptive question, what motivated them to do it? And what I'm saying is, what motivated them to do it is what they perceive to be an atheist society whose values have the effect of undermining the family, corrupting the innocence of children, and eroding faith in God.
They see this as having happened over here, and they say we are projecting these values over there. In fact, their objection to our military force is that they see our military force as the transmission belt for transmitting these immoral values to the traditional cultures of the world which reject those values. [emphasis mine -- RD] Our military force? No, the structures of market capitalism -- including the global media -- is the chief transmission belt! It's the same transmission belt that brings these corrupting (or liberating, depending on your point of view) values into the "Red" America that D'Souza valorizes. [N.B., before I say more, let me stipulate that the Islamic world can find in its Scriptures and Tradition ample reason to despise and make war on us infidels, which is another main flaw with D'Souza's thesis. But I want to focus in this post on his ignoring the role of aggressive capitalism in provoking the Islamic world to reaction.] A much better book for those who wish to understand the role our own culture plays in provoking the traditional cultures of Islam is the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton's relatively brief "The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat." That book came out in 2002; Scruton didn't need five years after 9/11 to think about why it happened. He acknowledges in the book that there is plausible reason to blame Islam itself for 9/11. But it's not enough simply to say that 9/11 (by which he means the new terrorism) is all the fault of Islam, and leave it at that. Scruton too believes that the West has been aggressively provocative to all parts of the world that do not share its basic concepts: To transfer [Western] values to places that have been deeply inoculated against them by culture and custom is to invite the very confrontation that we seek to avoid. ...Politicians, asked to define what we are fighting for in the "war against terrorism," will always say freedom. But, taken by itself, freedom means the emancipation from constraints, including those constraints which might be needed if a civilization is to endure. If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilzation bent on its own destruction. Moreover freedom flaunted in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends. It was brave of Scruton to have written that less than a year after the Twin Towers fell; if his book had attracted more attention, surely more people on the Right would have attacked him for blaming the victim. Anyway, I doubt D'Souza would disagree with this passage I quoted above. I strongly encourage curious readers to pick up Scruton's book, because it's argument is both complex and compact. Here, though, for our purposes is a key passage: Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, adn the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, hoever, it means the loss of sovereig
nty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. ... People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it. Globalization -- which is to say, modernization -- has brought with it economic structures and institutions that unavoidably disrupt traditional life. A century ago, what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert populated by tribes. It is now insanely wealthy, and therefore powerful. How can that not have disrupted and dislocated these tribal people? Similarly, the media revolution is now roiling the Arab Muslim world. When I was in Dubai a year or so ago, an American professor working in Damascus told me that the thing we in the West fail to understand is that thanks to satellite television, the Middle East is going through a cultural disruption/revolution that played itself out over decades in the West -- and that this revolution was occurring in a culture that was far more rigid than America's. Several people, mostly Arabs, told me that you could go to many capitals of the Arab world and find class and cultural divides asserting themselves and deepening, and it had a lot to do with the revolutionary effect of satellite TV: in the wealthier areas, people favored Western-style TV programs, and Western styles of dress; in the working-class areas, people favored the more extreme Islamist TV programs, and were dressing more religiously. A clash is coming, driven heavily by technology, which came from the West, and which serves as a vector transmitting Western values into those pre-modern societies.Again, I haven't finished D'Souza's book, so I might be off here. But it seems clear to me that D'Souza fails to appreciate how much resentment that democratic free-market culture, which is built on the autonomous, freely-choosing individual, breeds in cultures that fear and loathe this concept. David Kuo tries to get D'Souza to acknowledge this in the interview, suggesting that the behavior of corporations -- which is to say, economics -- has as much to do with Islamic anger as the cultural left. Says D'Souza: I agree with you. But this is not my topic. My topic is not the sins of America, but rather what is the source of the volcano of hatred that is directed at America coming from much of the traditional cultures of the world, and specifically from the Muslin world? ... [T]his has nothing to do with the golden arches of McDonalds, or the high cost of Nike shoes. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Americans are a hundred times richer than Asian Indians, or Africans. Those are valid and important issues, but in this book, I'm trying to look at what has produced the furnace of rage toward America from the people who want to kill Americans.
So, you think there's no distinction, then, between the cultural and the economic? That the economic does not influence the cultural?
No, what's happening here is that much of the world is indeed mired in desperate po
verty. But, much of the world has been mired in desperate poverty since time immemorial. ... D'Souza is entirely missing the point. The Muslim terrorists are not angry because America is wealthier than they. They are angry because the market culture that has made America so wealthy is built on and sustained by an ideology that would destroy the things they hold to be true, and indeed constituitive of their very identity. You don't even need to go to the Muslim world to see this. I've written before about the fallacy that small-town America -- "Red America," as D'Souza might put it -- is a refuge from corrosive modernity. As long as you have cable and satellite television, you are pipelining Hollywood values right into the living rooms. You might think you can live in a small town and be free of it, but you can't: the kinds of values D'Souza rightly despises are everywhere. Cultural conservatives rightly worry about it, but rarely if ever stop to think about how the free market we so uncritically champion works to undermine and obliterate tradition, authority and the institutions that uphold and transmit values. What I'm saying is that if D'Souza's critique were more honest and accurate, he would have to parcel blame to capitalists who push a system that does to traditional cultures precisely what the Islamists fear it will do. But he can't do that, because that would mean that the "enemy" is not solely the cultural left, but the economic right. It's very hard for US conservatives to see this, because we are soaked in free-market dogmatism, we rarely if ever question whether the market is a limited good. Frankly, I don't know what the solution to this is. Muslim countries can't say they want to be part of the modern world, but reject the market and reject modern communications. Individuals can, of course, but not societies. If they accept these things, then they accept the possibility -- indeed, the certainty -- that the mindset that goes with these things will erode traditional religion, morals and communal identity. In any case, nobody's forcing the Islamic world to accept capitalism, global media, or any of these other things (well, the US is forcing Iraq to democratize, and we see how well that's going). In time, the Muslim world will reconcile with modernity, and the apocalypse that the imams fear will come true. We'd all be a lot safer, I think, if they'd let go of their fierce religion and moderate themselves into being liberal democrats and good Wal-Mart shoppers. But we on the Right shouldn't pretend that something profoundly important to pious Muslims would be lost if that were to happen. And that's what lots of these Muslims are angry about. If I were Muslim, I would hope that I wouldn't want to lash out violently, but I can't say that I wouldn't be deeply anxious, even angry, about what was happening. And I would hope that I would have the sense to realize that the distinction between so-called Red Americans and so-called Blue Americans on this questions is largely meaningless: Americans of whatever hue are modernists, and therefore radical (if largely benign) enemies of the Islamic view of man and society. To be sure, Westerners were enemies of Islam and all it entails in pre-modern times, by virtue of the fact that we were Christians, not Muslims. So the enmity would be here no matter what. The point I wish to make, though, is that D'Souza's notion that American cultural conservatives have anything more than a superficial commonality with traditional Muslims strikes me as wrong. That doesn't mean we should be fighting -- I would hope for peaceful coexistence -- but we shouldn't pretend that all we US cultural conservatives need to do is to repudiate Michael Moore and Paris Hilton, and all will be well. The problem, from a pious Muslim point of view, is not Blue America. The problem is America itself, the nation-state personification of modernity. That may not be politically useful to the Right or the Left, but I believe it's true. Anyway,
D'Souza's book is useful in that it encourages Americans to consider that maybe, just maybe, the Islamists who are trying to destroy us might have a point about the way we live. Trying to understand this, rather than weakening us, should help us better figure out how to resist them.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
There was all this great and surprising news out of Turkey this week, as crowds of Turks came out into the street to express sadness over the murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist killed by Turkish nationalists angry over his writing about the Armenian genocide. With ordinary Turks showing public revulsion over the killing, and expressing solidarity with Armenians, and with even Turkish leaders talking about getting ride of Article 301 (the penal code provision that makes "insulting Turkishness" -- including pointing out that the Turks slaughtered Armenians in 1915-1917 -- a crime) -- well, it looked like some real good was going to come out of Dink's murder. Wrong,alas. Check this out: But a darker reality already has set in: Many Turks are rejecting the appeals for solidarity and democratic reform.
They say the tens of thousands who joined Dink's funeral procession in Istanbul on Tuesday were mainly urban intellectuals, hardly representative of a nation of more than 70 million people where conservative Islamic values are deep-seated and nationalist pride in ''Turkishness'' is strong.
[snip]
Selami Ince, news editor of the Istanbul-based Su TV, run by the Alawite Muslim sect, answered by saying few of the funeral marchers were Turks with roots in the Anatolian heartland.
''Unfortunately, they do not represent the Turkish public,'' Ince said. ''The Turkish public has not filled the streets with demands of democracy and freedom. They were leftists, Armenians, Kurds and those intellectuals who favor multiculturalism.''
A reader just wrote to say that he liked my book and identified with a lot of the ideas there, but he was so sick and tired of me criticizing President Bush over the war that he no longer thought of himself as a crunchy con. I responded by saying that that made no sense: there was little or no discussion of Bush in the book, and that my bloviating about Bush and the war here doesn't invalidate the ideas he liked in the book. And though I didn't mention it in my reply to him, I deliberately avoided the war in writing the book, in part because my own views were ambivalent and changing at the time I was writing it, and in part because I know people who share a lot of the same views re "small is beautiful," consumerism's destructive effect on the family, and so forth, who have come to opposite conclusions on the Iraq War. I don't see one's position on Iraq or the Bush presidency as being determinative of how one stands on the kinds of things that define crunchy conservatism. The reader wrote back and said: But you can understand, can't you, that a blog titled "Crunchy Cons," run by the author of the book, might speak for all of "us," right?
If not, it might be worth making some sort of distinction on the blog. If that's asking too much, I understand.
I do keep reading the blog; I have it bookmarked. But I do sometimes question why. Well, if it matters to readers, I don't consider that I am the first or last word on any of this stuff. This is just a blog, not the Crunchy-Con Pravda, laying down the party line. As regular readers know, most of the posts here are about daily news events, and don't really have a lot to do with anything discernibly "crunchy." I'm writing editorials and columns throughout the day as I write this blog, and I usually stop to file a blog item when I've come across something in my work here at the newspaper that struck me as interesting. I try to keep the commentary here a mix of newsy stuff and more offbeat stuff. If you see something especially "crunchy" that you'd like me to consider posting to or commenting on for this site, e-mail it to me.
Be a car slob. I mean, if you're a guy, cultivate a personal automotive aesthetic that requires you to throw Big Gulp cups on the passenger side floorboard of your car. Because one day you might run out of gas on the tollway, because your gas gauge is broken on your old car, and you might have to wait a really, really long time on the shoulder of the road for your wife to get the kids dressed and make her way through morning rush hour traffic with a can of gas, and with the passage of time, you might really, really, really come to regret having downed a pot of coffee before you hit the road, and in your moment of agony, you will spy the cup of salvation on the floor. IJS. Trust me on this.
Any of you planning to watch the Alexandra Pelosi movie about Evangelicals tonight on HBO? Me no got HBO, so me no watch. But I'm real curious to hear what you think. Here's the review from today's NYTimes. Excerpt: “You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,” Mr. Haggard waggishly told a documentary filmmaker a few months before his secret came out. On “Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi,” which will be shown tonight on HBO, Mr. Haggard coaxes a member of his congregation to say how often he has sex with his wife (“Every day. Twice a day.”) and how often she climaxes (“Every time”). Let me stop right there and say that if my pastor asked me in front of a TV camera, or at all, that question, I'd punch his lights out. Back to the review: Ms. Pelosi stays off camera and out of the way in “Friends of God,” and we only occasionally hear her voice. “So explain to me the concept of this Biblical mini golf,” the filmmaker says to a man who putts on a paper-and-glue parted Red Sea. (The ninth hole is a papier-mâché miniature of the Holy Sepulchre.)
Mostly, Ms. Pelosi lets pastors, creationism teachers, Christian stand-up comics and rockers and the founder of the Christian Wrestling Federation speak for themselves. I've read interviews with Pelosi in which she's expressed a genuine affection for her subjects. I believe her. You don't win friends in Alexandra Pelosi's social and professional circles by saying this to the New York Times: ''I believe in the culture war,'' she said. ''And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war I'll take their side,'' meaning the Christian conservatives. ''Because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I'll take Jesus.'' The thing is, I really don't understand much about Evangelical popular culture. I know cultural stuff that's totally normal to Catholics (as I was until recently) totally mystifies Evangelicals, for innocent and understandable reasons. I get that, and I never was defensive about it as a Catholic, or at least tried not to be, when Evangelicals would express genuine puzzlement at this or that aspect of Catholic culture. What I'm trying to get at is that not understanding a certain culture does not necessarily imply hostility to it. All of which is to say I think what I don't get about Evangelical culture (as distinct from Evangelical faith and theology, which I'm a lot more comfortable with) can be summed up in one word: TestaMints.
David Kuo has been reading the message boards on Pat Robertson's CBN website. You will never believe what he's found there.
I recently changed jobs within the editorial department of my newspaper, chiefly to get more time for myself to spend with family in the evenings, and so I could finally have the time for activities at church and elsewhere -- things I've not been able to do, coming home at 7:30, 8pm every weeknight for the past couple of years. Last night, I went to the Wednesday night Vespers service at my church. It lasts about an hour, and involves constant singing and chanting of liturgical prayers, Psalms and Scripture. It's difficult for me to disengage from the harem-scarem frenzy of my work, so it's really tonic simply to stand there and be still for an hour, and let the prayers, chanting and incense wash over me -- to give myself over to the experience. I was talking earlier this week with one of my priests about how I'm having to learn how to be a Christian in community. Until the past year or so, I had not fully appreciated how thoroughly individualistic I was in the practice of my faith. I would have denied it had you asked me, because I really didn't see it. But I was living a kind of Christian life that, with the exception of mass, involved private prayer, and me alone with my own thoughts. I read a lot about the faith, and gave intellectual assent to its teachings. But outside my own family and narrow circle of friends, that was it. And I thought that was enough. Mind you, this was not the fault of Catholicism (so please let's not go down that path in the comboxes). In fact, I think you could find Christians like me in Protestant, Catholic and Evangelical churches. I should say that I am temperamentally not a Joiner, so I think there should be a place in churches for people who feel the need to work out their salvation in private. That said, I've come to see that I was using that as an excuse not to get involved in the life of the parish -- as an excuse not to grow in the practice of virtue and holiness in community, which is what I believe we Christians of whatever confession are required to do. I have always believed that, but I had not been living it. Anyway, going to Vespers, participating more fully in the life of the little platoon at the parish -- my little platoon -- is a surprisingly good thing, I'm finding. Not sure why I'm more open to it now than I was in the past, but my guess is presiding over a growing family has a lot to do with it. My priest mentioned to me the other day that when he was raising his own children, he and his wife made sure the kids knew that going to services at church and participating in the liturgical life of the parish was not something that we do; it's something that we are. I'd never thought of it that way.
David Brooks's column today (behind Times firewall) is a hard slap. Excerpt: Iraq is at the beginning of a civil war fought using the tactics of genocide, and it has all the conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek correspondent, Christian Caryl, wrote recently from Baghdad, “What’s clear is that we’re far closer to the beginning of this cycle of violence than to its end.” As John Burns of The Times said on “Charlie Rose” last night, “Friends of mine who are Iraqis — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — all foresee a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that would absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now.”
Iraq already has the warlord structures that caused mass murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Violent, stupid men who would be the dregs of society under normal conditions rise amid the trauma, chaos and stress and become revered leaders.
[snip]
The weakness of the Bush surge plan is that it relies on the Maliki government to somehow be above this vortex. But there are no impartial institutions in Iraq, ready to foster reconciliation. As ABC’s Jonathan Karl notes in The Weekly Standard, the Shiite finance ministries now close banks that may finance Sunni investments. The Saadrist health ministries dismiss Sunni doctors. The sectarian vortex is not fomented by extremists who are appendages to society. The vortex is through and through. Brooks goes on to say that the Jim Webb approach -- some sort of withdrawal, even if we keep troops on bases in Iraq -- would put America in the position of staying out of it while a genocidal slaughter takes place literally under our noses. Are we prepared to do that? (Brooks clearly thinks that track would be morally unacceptable). He asks if we're prepared for the decades of US fighting in the Mideast that would result from a Sunni-Shia explosion. And he concludes by saying that the only thing that stands a chance of averting the genocide is the US getting behind some form of "soft partition." I happen to think he's right about this, even though I doubt very much at this point that partition would work, even if it were possible to engineer. Still, it's worth trying. But we won't try it because George W. Bush is bound and determined to follow this doomed surge strategy that's fundamentally misconceived because it's based on the idea that there is a neutral government in Iraq worth defending. Nemesis is upon us. I've written before speculating on how watching on TV daily Iraq convulse with genocidal slaughter will affect American politics. I don't mean it at the crass "is it good for the Democrats?" level. I mean it at the fundamental moral and psychological level. If this thing happens, how will it affect the way Americans think about the place of our country in the world? About ourselves? About human nature? How will knowing that this hideous thing happened principally because we destroyed the thing -- that is, the person -- who was keeping (by terror) these demonic passions bound? How will we live with ourselves and what we will have done? I don't think anybody knows. But I think we will find out.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Fred Reed is a veritable Sun Tzu of the Bozart. No joke, this is quite a piece of writing. Excerpt: Being a military thinker of the profoundest sort, I offer the following manual of martial affairs for nations yearning to copy the American way of war. Read it carefully. Great clarity will result. The steps limned below will facilitate disaster without imposing the burden of reinventing it. The Pentagon may print copies for distribution.
(1) Underestimate the enemy. Fortunately this is easy when a technologically advanced power prepares to attack an underdeveloped nation. Its enemy's citizens will readily be seen as gadgetless, primitive, probably genetically stupid, and hardly worth the attention of a real military.
(2) Avoid learning anything about the enemy—his culture, religion, language, history, or response to past invasions. These things don’t matter since the enemy is gadgetless, primitive, and probably genetically stupid. Anyway, knowledge would only make the enlisted ranks restive, and confuse the officer corps.
Blank ignorance of the language is especially desirable (as well as virtually guaranteed). For one thing, it will allow your troops to be seen as brutal invaders having nothing in common with the population; this helps in winning hearts and minds. For another, it will allow English-speaking officials of the puppet government to vet such information about the country as they permit you to have.
(3) Explain the invasion to the American public in simple moral terms suitable for middle-school children at an evangelical summer camp: We are bombing cities to bring the gift of democracy and American values, or to defeat some vague but frightening evil, perhaps lurking under the bed, or to get rid of a bad dictator no longer of service to us, or to bring freedom and prosperity to any survivors. (This doesn’t work in Europe, which is honestly imperialistic.) The public can then feel a sense of unappreciated virtue when the primitives resist. Sententious moralism should always trump reason. Follow the link to read the whole thing.
"Why were you elected? If you want a safe job, go sell shoes." -- Sen. Chuck Hagel, lighting into his fellow GOP members of the Foreign Relations committee for opposing the president's war plan, but not being willing to vote against it.
Roberto Rivera comments on my "American Idol" guilty feeling, suggesting that talentless contestants might not be deluded about their lack of talent, but might actually be willing to humiliate themselves on national TV simply for the exposure. I think this is overthinking it, but who knows, he might be right. How else to explain "Girls Gone Wild"? Meanwhile, Peter Suderman writes about my feeling bad over ultrasnarky film reviews I've written in the past: The answer is more complicated than Rod seems to make it. I might agree with him that there's little need to lay into someone as deluded as the AI contestant. But when a filmmaker makes a product designed to waste your time, money, and thoughts--when a filmmaker, either by intention or incompetence, makes a sucker of you, the paying audience, then I think there's a good argument that he or she deserves to be the target of scorn, if not ridicule.
I also tend to think a critic has a responsibility to honestly portray their own reactions. Movies (or politicians, or sculptures, or restaurants, or architecture) that make a critic irate should be treated as such. And critics also have a responsibility to engage their readers--which means that they, like movies themselves, need to make use of entertainment, humor, wit, etc. Publications don't pay for pep talks to filmmakers, nor do they pay critics to squelch their own views. As a good employee, a critic has a responsibility to both readers and bosses to write in an honest, engaging manner--which often means being, well, what Rod might call "cruel." I don't really disagree with this. The point I was trying to make had to do with my subjective reasons for writing as I often did. What I find regrettable today is the pleasure I took in stomping a mudhole in my targets. It was just crude. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker is the master of the stiletto-wit put-down. I routinely admire his wit, which can be stinging, but I never get the idea that he writes from malice. I can't say that about my reviews. Nothing is more fun to read than a good ripping of a film (Roger Ebert, I think, said that the entertainment value of a movie review exists in inverse proportion to the quality of the film reviewed). Am I saying that it's okay to be cruel in print as long as you feel bad about it? No, not at all. What I'm saying is that a critic should refrain from being gratuitously cruel, from making the unrestrained and gleeful destruction of someone who isn't actually a bad person (but rather an untalented one) an occasion for entertainment.
I've pointed out how crazy-making the president was last night with his dogged insistence that the Iraq War is a battle of the Good Moderates Of The Central Government trying to stave off the Bad Sectarian Militants -- heedless of the fact that Shia militants are pretty much the government. The commander in chief believes, or pretends to believe, that there is an Iraqi government worth defending. But wait, there's more! NYTimes front-pager today reports that so few Iraqi parliamentarians bother to show up for work that the Parliament rarely has a quorum present. From the story: Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.
Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials also said they feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country’s fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, Parliament’s relevance has gradually receded. What, exactly, are US troops killing and dying to defend? Parliament is now little more than a nice idea. I mean this seriously: if Parliament is a confederacy of phantoms, and the Maliki government and its ministries are dominated by Shia sectarians with deep militia connections, in what sense could President Bush possibly be right in his characterization of the war? Fred Kaplan of Slate finds more Bush SOTU dreaming: He then said, "Americans can have confidence in the outcome of this struggle because we are not in this struggle alone. We have a diplomatic strategy that is rallying the world to join in the fight against extremism."
This is mind-boggling. The largest "coalition" partner, Great Britain, plans to pull out by the end of the year. Most of the others have long since vanished. There is, clearly, no "diplomatic strategy," no "rallying" to recruit others to the fight. A diplomatic strategy and energetic leadership are precisely what everyone is waiting for. They are what President Bush once more failed to offer tonight. I know there are still a lot of folks, including readers of this blog, who believe in the president and the war. Seriously, how do y'all square the president's rhetoric with facts on the ground? UPDATE: A reader responded to my question, "What, exactly, are US troops killing and dying to defend?" He said: "This."
Actor Isaiah Washington is seeking Hollywood's standard ritual ablution to cleanse him of the sin of using an anti-gay slur: he's checked into rehab to take the cure. Show of hands: who in the room believes Isaiah Washington really has a drug and/or alcohol problem? This is just his attempt to save his career. It's cynical, but I can't blame the actor one bit. If he had, oh, drugged and raped a young girl and jumped bail to flee prosecution, he wouldn't have much of a problem in Hollywood. But in a fit of pique, he said the F-word, so Drastic Measures Must Be Taken. I'm not defending his use of the anti-gay slur. He ought not to have said it, but once he did, he should have apologized, and demonstrated true contrition by making it up to those he offended. But we can't let common sense and grace operate in these moments. These days, elites cleanse their reputations by going into therapy. If his moral failing can be transmuted into a health issue, all is forgiven. After Washington completes his course, he will appear on Oprah, confess his sins, and receive absolution. "I once was sick/But now am healed...""Isn't there something, I dunno, Soviet about using the psychiatric profession to punish those guilty of political crimes? IJS.
Paul Cella notices that the more we talk about respecting diversity, the more rigid we become about enforcing sameness of thought. In the old days, conservatism attracted real characters -- brilliant eccentrics like Kirk, Kendall, Belloc, Chesterton, Chambers and so forth. Here's Cella: My point is that these men were examples of the real practical variety of human life that the ideologues of Diversity would annihilate. Kirk even made variety one of his Six Canons: Conservatives affirm an “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” Sometimes this comes down to something so simple as being able to hold two complex thoughts in mind at the same time; for example, that a regime which countenances or even embraces a great evil like slavery or abortion, may yet produce good and admirable men. Or that even soldiers fighting for wicked men and wicked causes are capable of valor and gallantry. Cella blames capitalism for the eclipse of genuine variety in public culture: It is Capitalism, after all, that inflicts upon us all a mass culture that is fundamentally pornographic and often simply vile. During last Sunday’s football games, there had to be at least a half dozen lucid commercials for these preposterous horror films — films, I’m told, that are among the most reliably profitable of any genre — that made me grateful my girls were playing in the other room. In short it is not government; it is not Leftism; it is Capitalism that has made even a football broadcast untrustworthy. It is Capitalism as well that insists upon the dispossession of our culture for cheap labor. It is, in other words, Capitalism that lubricates the skids toward a centralized uniformity. About football broadcasts and the corruption made possible by irresponsible capitalism, I heard from a friend today: The other day I was trying to watch the football games with my sons, and a commercial for some show came on showing a man posing nude for a painting being done by a girl. The man was holding a sword above his head and the girl says: “I don’t think your sword will fit” and the guy says: “I get that a lot” … da-dum. And I’m thinking, I really can’t believe what I just saw and heard … during prime time and during a BALL GAME of all things. I really felt like “my America,” the America of ball games with your boys was being invaded by a hostile force. Frankly, I do feel far more threatened by Western driven decadence than by anything Islam can throw up. So who is the enemy? Good question. Islam is not the enemy, so far as I can see. Our own rampant sickness is. This does not require romanticizing Islam. Instead, it is the war of two versions of America. My friend makes a point worth pondering. I'm not where Dinesh D'Souza is on this issue, but unless my kids are victims of Islamist terrorism, the toxic cultural sludge they and all of us have to swim in is more of a proximate threat to them than Islam. Which doesn't mean the spread of Islam is no threat, you understand.
Your Working Boy will be a panel guest on Fox News Channel's "Live Desk," round about 1:30 Eastern/12:30 central. Tune in to see how funny lookin' I am when my lips are moving. Watch for me to work in an impassioned plea for America to make more No-Knead Bread, thereby cutting down on trips to the supermarket and saving energy. Or something. That, and cuckoo clocks.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
I hate this convention of SOTU addresses in which the president has to put heroes and other worthies in the audience to call the public's attention to their goodness, as part of the speech. Good grief, could you imagine Churchill or Roosevelt stooping to such Oprah-style pandering? I suppose it's mostly harmless, but one of the chosen ones tonight cheesed off my crunchy-con self. The president singled out for special praise Julie Aigner-Clark, the Baby Einstein genius who made millions playing off American parental anxiety about their children, and encouraged them to think that introducing little bitties to TV watching early is actually going to make them smarter. Here's what her bio page on the Baby Einstein site says: Today, The Baby Einstein Company has become a world leader in infant developmental media products and was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in November 2001. Infant developmental media products. Git a rope. She's a villain, if you ask me. But kind of a babe, yes?
What'd you htink of the president's speech? He was clearly subdued, but not fatigued, as he appeared in his recent televised Iraq address. What a long, long way he's come from his first SOTU, in 2002, with 84 percent approval in the post-9/11 era of national unity. I went back to read his SOTU from last year, and the language was still remarkably idealistic, soaring even, about America's place in the world. Three weeks later came the Golden Mosque bombing, which finally set off Iraq's civil war. There was little of that uplifting oratory tonight. Nor should there have been. But look, how on earth can the president still say things like this with a straight face? Look: In recent times, it has also become clear that we face an escalating danger from Shia extremists who are just as hostile to America, and are also determined to dominate the Middle East. Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah – a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.
The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat. But whatever slogans they chant, when they slaughter the innocent, they have the same wicked purposes. They want to kill Americans ... kill democracy in the Middle East ... and gain the weapons to kill on an even more horrific scale. The Shia extremists are part and parcel of the government in Baghdad that we support. That our soldiers are fighting to defend. Here's more dangerous nonsense from the president: Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies – and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates, reformers, and brave voices for democracy. Well, that "most" gives him an out to explain why the Palestinians used their free vote to choose Hamas to lead them, I guess. But look at Iraq: only 2 percent of Iraqis used their ballots to vote for the liberal secular parties. All the rest voted their sectarian interests. Now we have sectarian civil war in Iraq. I know the president didn't intend for things to turn out that way, but they did, and I do wish he'd clam up about this stuff. It's just not true. Where is the evidence that free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies? Were the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party not free? Were the Southerners who voted for pro-slavery candidates in antebellum America unfree? Democracy gives people the opportunity to vote what's in their hearts and minds -- good, evil or otherwise. The idea that giving people democracy means giving them the chance to unleash their inner Rotarian is bosh, as Iraq proves. Anyway, the speech was better than I expected, but I think it was almost completely irrelevant to what's actually going to happen in Washington over the next year. It's all Iraq, and for better or for worse, the Dems are in control.
Slate's holding a Book Club back-and-forth this week about Paul Barrett's new book "American Islam." The participants are Reza Aslan and Daniel Benjamin. I agree with Benjamin's view that the American news media have done generally a lousy job of reporting on the American Muslim community since 9/11. But the most interesting comment so far comes from Aslan, who writes: But as I read the individual profiles in American Islam, it became clear to me that it is more than mere economic factors that have allowed Muslims to so thoroughly assimilate into American society. (Maybe it is this assimilation that explains why so many Americans think they have never met a Muslim. Perhaps they assume all Muslims look and dress like Osama Bin Laden.)
Although Barrett does not press the point, I truly believe the ease with which Muslims have assimilated into American culture has less to do with economics than it does with America's long and storied history of assimilating different cultures and ethnicities under a single shared political and cultural ideal—an ideal we can label simply as Americanism. The Muslims who settled in Europe formed insulated ethnic enclaves cut off from the rest of European society. But American Muslims have seamlessly integrated into almost every level of American society. Indeed, they represent the most powerful argument against the prevailing "Clash of Civilizations" mentality that pits Islam against the West.
Finally, as a Muslim who lives in the United States and who has spent a great deal of time among Muslims in Europe, I can tell you that, more than anything else, it is the core American belief that faith has a role to play in the public realm that has allowed American Muslims to so seamlessly reconcile their faiths, cultures, and traditions with the realities of American life. Say what you will, this is not, nor has it ever been, a "secular" country. It is, in fact, the most religiously diverse and religiously tolerant nation in the world. In no other country—and certainly no Islamic country—can Muslims pursue their faith and practice in whatever way they see fit than in the United States. It is, in short, America itself that has made American Muslims so much more resistant to the pull of jihadism than their European counterparts. Interesting point of comparison to D'Souza's contention that Muslims abroad see America as one big Gomorrah. Couldn't both Aslan and D'Souza be right, and it's a matter of which narrative is seen as more powerful in the broader Islamic world?
A friend writes saying he's looking for an organization, network, listserv or something for Christians who are interested in discussing food and food culture from a spiritual and moral perspective -- basically a Christian version of Slow Food. Surely something like that exists. Yes? If not, who wants to start one?
From Daily Variety's review of a Sundance Film Festival documentary entry: A horse is a horse, of course -- unless it's the one at the center of "Zoo," a breathtakingly original nonfiction work by Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor (whose "Police Beat" was among the highlights of Sundance's 2005 dramatic competition). Based on the widely reported July 2005 incident in which a man died of a perforated colon after getting intimate with an Arabian stallion, pic will disappoint those seeking cheap, perverse thrills and likely baffle as many viewers as it intrigues. But enthusiastic reviews and sheer curiosity value should bring healthy specialized biz and strong festival interest to this ThinkFilm release.
[snip]
Given a premise that smacks of sensationalism, Devor and co-scenarist Charles Mudede have taken anything but an exploitative approach. They've crafted a subdued, mysterious and intensely beautiful film that presents bestiality not for the purpose of titillation (a la the 1970s porn films starring Bodil Joensen) or comic relief (as in last year's "Clerks II"), but as a way of investigating the subjective nature of morality.
In "Zoo," Devor and Mudede show considerably less interest in the events of that July night than in the circumstances that brought them about -- specifically, the online world of zoophiles, of which Pinyan and others at the scene were members.
The men speak with remarkable candor and lack of embarrassment, explaining their animal affinity as a natural desire. ... Despite the film's compassionate approach, the question of whether these men were right or wrong is one on which the filmmakers reserve judgment, instead turning their attention to the larger question of how human beings have revised and re-evaluated codes of acceptable behavior over the ages. ... The film's dramatic re-enactments, shot in lush 16mm by cinematographer Sean Kirby (previously responsible for the equally impressive 35mm widescreen lensing of "Police Beat") create a fascinating blurring of the line between narrative and documentary storytelling, reminiscent of the work of Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. Yeah, I bet those dramatic re-enactments are fascinating. I'm reading Dinesh D'Souza's book blaming the cultural left for 9/11. As you've probably read, D'Souza's caused a huge ruckus by claiming that traditional Muslims hate us because we're culturally decadent and exporting our decadence. I've got big problems with much of this -- and I'll be writing more about it later -- but Dinesh D'Souza is not all wrong. I find it hard not to despair when I realize we're defending a culture that prizes nonjudgmental documentaries about people who have sex with animals. D'Souza's main point is that this is not representative of America as a whole, but of a decadent culturally liberal part of America -- and that culturally conservative Americans ought not be afraid to side with traditional Muslims in deploring it and condemning it. I think D'Souza's thesis has big holes in it -- again, more on which later -- but boy, what do you say to Muslims abroad who'd genuinely wonder why, if this kind of decadence is the fruit of American liberty, they should welcome what we have to offer? I believe that we have got to fight hard to defend the West against Islamic aggression. What, though, are we defending? D'Souza is right about this: the kind of people who make and celebrate "compassionate" movies about people having sex with animals are civilization's enemies. One point of strong disagreement I have with D'Souza (and I'm only a third of the way through his book) is with his conclusion that therefore American conservatives should align themselves with Muslims against their own countrymen. I see the reasoning here, but reject it, in part because I believe that Muslims abroad, generally speaking, would resent and try to defeat us even if Hollywood were Mayberry (critics have had a f
ield day pointing out to D'Souza that Sayyid Qutb went berserk condemning the chaotic morals of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s -- the point being, there's no pleasing these people). And I reject D'Souza's strategy in part because I do not want to live under sharia or cultivate affinity for sharia-based societies, whose values I find in particular instances to be perverse and inhuman. Horse-screwers and hand-chopper-offers, take your pick. That said, it's depressing and confusing to realize upon reading stuff like this review that I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time.
...for practicing tough love with indulgent parents. Call me insensitive, but delaying a flight 15 minutes so parents can try to get control of their three year old is going above and beyond the call of duty. When my own children have been bratty in public, I have appreciated the kindness of strangers. But there is a limit to what can be reasonably expected of strangers. I've been in situations on airplanes and in public places (e.g., doctors' offices) before when parents thought their own kids should be able to do whatever they wanted to do, and they (the parents) expected the whole world to accomodate them.
Monday, January 22, 2007
In a New York Sun essay today, Israeli historian Benny Morris recalls this scene from the Nazi Holocaust, in a quote from Daniel Mendelsohn's recent book. It took place in Poland: "A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house, found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties of bystanders didn't help and she was taken from her home in a nightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall. There … she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd of Ukraininans present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth and she gave birth to a child. The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bits hanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall of the town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to the train station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train to Belzec [extermination camp]." Says historian Morris: "In the next Holocaust there will be no such heart-rending scenes." The Iranians will achieve their extermination of Israel with nuclear weapons atop missiles. They will not have to look their victims in the eyes.
Today is the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. I've avoided blogging on it all day because I couldn't come up with anything sufficient to the gravity of the evil done on this day in 1973. For me, the reailty of what abortion means became personal a few years ago after I visited a crisis pregnancy center in the south Bronx (I've told this story here before; old readers, I beg your pardon for repeating it). I went to the Christmas party, held in a small Salvadoran restaurant, for children who were alive to celebrate because their mothers chose not to seek abortion, but instead to seek the help of this center and to have their babies. It's an awesome thing to stand in a room full of laughing, playing children, and to realize that none of them were supposed to be here. All those voices silenced. I wrote a column about that for the New York Post, and that was that, or so I thought. A few months later, I got an e-mail from a woman out on Long Island who had read that column as she contemplated abortion. She was pregnant with twins. She was in a bad way financially and otherwise. She felt trapped. But she called a CPC after reading that column, and they offered her and her unborn children a lifeline. She had the babies. She attached a photograph of the little infant girls. She said she could not have imagined in her moment of crisis how happy her baby girls would make her. None of that is an argument against the legalization of abortion, I know. Those arguments are familiar to most readers. It's just to say that when we talk about abortion, we are talking about human beings. We are talking about a state of mind -- of heart, actually -- that refuses to accept that life is supposed to be about maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Here's the mother of a Down syndrome child: I suppose at one time I was fearful about Down syndrome. But in 1993 when they placed the blue-blanketed bundle in my arms and I could see he looked - well, just a little different - I actually felt a sense of awe. Here will be a challenge - so many things to learn.
It helped that we already had a few "normal" children. But other things had opened my heart as well. There was Amy, a six-year-old cutiepie we babysat for now and then. Amy's dad had left shortly after her birth - just couldn't get into having a daughter with Down syndrome. On the brighter side was the dad and daughter duo I'd seen a month before riding the merry-go-round. A gleeful almond-eyes three-year-old, a father helplessly in love. There's something special here, I thought.
In this society, for a parent without one to see something positive in a child with Down syndrome requires a paradigm shift, I know. But if my counterculture years - and later, my relationship with Jesus - taught me anything, it was to question prevailing attitudes. I don't believe abortion will ever be outlawed in this country, not in my lifetime. If Roe were to be overturned -- as it should be -- all that would mean is that abortion would be returned to the states to decide. I suspect that the great majority of states would quickly legalize abortion -- which would put pro-lifers pretty much where we are today: in the position of having to change the way Americans think about the meaning of life, and our duties to each other. We can and should try to change the law, but we won't see any real change on abortion until and unless we change hearts and minds.
Finally succumbed to the buzz and watched "24" the other night. I'm with Clark Stooksbury: there's not much to it. I was startled and intrigued that there is actually a TV show in which Muslims are depicted as terrorists (but not only terrorists, to be sure; the point is that film and television dramas are so afraid of cheesing off CAIR that they typically do stupid things like make Islamic terrorists into Serbian neo-Nazis). So, score one for realism. But I was put off by the graphic violence, and worse, by the violence the scriptwriters do to the English language. The lines were so wooden I thought surely the producers had dragooned The Timbertoes into the writing pool. I want to see what happens on the show now that much of Los Angeles is a smoking radioactive ruin. But I don't think I want to see it so much that I'll subject myself to that dreary writing. Whatever criticism one might have had about Aaron Sorkin's knee-jerk liberalism, the guy can write dialogue.
Britain's Telegraph reports on a leaked document from the Burmese military junta in which the junta proposes to wipe out Christianity in Burma. Excerpt: The military regime in Burma is intent on wiping out Christianity in the country, according to claims in a secret document believed to have been leaked from a government ministry. Entitled "Programme to destroy the Christian religion in Burma", the incendiary memo contains point by point instructions on how to drive Christians out of the state.
The text, which opens with the line "There shall be no home where the Christian religion is practised", calls for anyone caught evangelising to be imprisoned. It advises: "The Christian religion is very gentle – identify and utilise its weakness."
Its discovery follows widespread reports of religious persecution, with churches burnt to the ground, Christians forced to convert to the state religion, Buddhism, and their children barred from school. I guess that means little Burmese schoolchildren will be able to read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in peace without being troubled by the Christian Taliban. UPDATE: Christianity Today editorializes on the suffering church in Iraq. I wonder how those Christians, who are suffering from beheadings, bombings and all manner of persecutions, feel about teaching "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"? Shouldn't we find out before we go out to help them? I mean, one feels sorry for them and all, but they are probably no different from the Taliban. [I hope the more literal-minded among the readership will note my sarcasm.]
Part Two of Bible Girl's report on how anti-Christian hysteria instigated in part by the state attorney general drove a public controversy in Wisconsin. Whenever anyone in this country compares Evangelicals to the Taliban, they reveal themselves to be completely in the grip of hallucinations and hysteria. It's not possible to disagree, and disagree strongly, in this country anymore without denouncing your opponent in the most strident terms. Over the weekend, Andrew Sullivan put up a YouTube clip from a "Firing Line" of a generation ago, in which Bill Buckley and Noam Chomsky disagreed vehemently with each other. But notice how they conducted themselves with civility. You could actually follow the argument, and weigh both positions against each other. Can you imagine a public discussion of the proper role of parents in determining what kind of material their children should be exposed to in the public schools being conducted at anything remotely approaching this level? That's a discussion in which we might all actually learn something, no matter from what position we begin. But we don't do that in America anymore. We contemporary Americans of the right and the left seek to overwhelm our opponents by force of our own outrage. This is not reason. This is the opposite of reason. It is barbarism, and is the emotional precondition for fascism. Note well: it's not proto-fascist to disagree, and disagree strongly, with the Wisconsin couple's point of view about "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." What's proto-fascist is showing up with signs decrying a "Christian Taliban," and carrying on like screaming meemies in an attempt to defeat the Christian parents by demonizing them.
Is it just me, or is the fact that Art Buchwald taped a zillion interviews from virtually his deathbed, to be broadcast after he expired, kind of creepy?
Apparently I am determined to fashion my house into a den of eccentricity. There's the bread cultishness, of course. And from my last trip down to Louisiana, I brought back the mounted head of a 12-point buck I killed when I was a kid. Seemed to me that he ought to find a home on one of our walls, as a Mystic Oracle or somesuch thing. Our house is pretty small, so he'll dominate the room wherever he winds up. His name is Eustace, after St. Eustace (look it up). What I have hung is the cuckoo clock. A friend sent it to us the other day after one of the kids murmured a longing for one. I put it up on the wall last night, and I've got to tell you, if you want to make little kids happy -- I mean squeal-with-delight happy -- get a cuckoo clock. It's the coolest thing. I thought it'd be something I'd have to put up with for the kids' sake, but I've got to say, I loved it instantly. Who has a cuckoo clock anymore? Let the comments about right-wing cuckoos begin. But first, make your kids happy and encourage your friends think you're weird (or, weirder): our cuckoo clock came from Anthony's Clocks in Durham. It's imported from Germany by River City, but while you can see the models River City offers on its website, you can't order from there, only from a dealer like Anthony's. Anthony's is a small family-owned shop that doesn't seem to have a website, but can be contacted at 2022 South Miami Boulevard Durham, NC 27703-5706
Phone: (919) 957-8740
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Last night at bedtime, I pulled off my bookshelf "Things Worth Fighting For," a collection of Michael Kelly's journalism, published after he died in a Humvee crash in Baghdad. He was the first American journalist killed in the Iraq War. I was a huge admirer of his work, and especially his column in the Washington Post. I knew him very slightly, and knew his parents, who were neighbors of mine on Capitol Hill, much better. Some of his best work -- like this piece about walking in the woods with his four-year-old son -- had nothing to do with politics. But it was his political journalism that made him famous, or infamous, depending on whose ox was being gored. Though Mike generally took conservative political and cultural stands, I never once thought of him as a conservative. Rather, he struck me as an old-fashioned Irish Democrat whose basic political belief seemed to be that somebody ought to stand up to phonies and bullies with power. One of his best columns, the one that leads off the book (and which I can't find online), is a remembrance of Frank Sinatra that manages to be an utterly convincing defense of the kind of squareness that Sinatra displaced, and a critique of the "cool" that Sinatra brought to the culture, without seeming the least bit schoolmarmish. Kelly admired the pre-cool American hero, of which Bogart in "Casablanca" was the ultimate pop-cult expression. He admired decency and straightforwardness. Thus he utterly loathed Bill Clinton, with the same vehemence as Christopher Hitchens. Here's a characteristic Kelly passage from a column (unavailable online) on Clinton's speech to the nation, in which he admitted having had sex with Monica Lewinsky: This speech wasn't a mea culpa. It was an everybody-else culpa. It was an insult. It was pathetic.
And it was a lie. Even in confessing his lying, Clinton lied. He said that in the Paula Jones deposition that started it all, he had given answers that were "legally accurate," but that he did not "volunteer information." What he was referring to was his answer to one question about sex with Lewinsky -- sex as defined in narrow and confusing terms by a legalistic definition. In denying sex as defined, he may have managed to stay just barely inside the borders of what was "legally accurate." But Clinton was also asked a question in which sex was describedin commonly understood language, not in legaliese: "Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?" To this, the president simply and perjuriously replied: "No."
This man will never stop lying. To borrow a hyperbolic description of another of the century's historic prevaricators, every word he utters is a lie, including "and" and "the." He will lie till the last dog dies. Strong stuff. One can only imagine how Kelly, had he lived, would have savaged Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. And he would have: again, though his targets when he wrote his Post column were often Democrats, and he tore into a liberalism which tried "to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue," he was not driven by partisan motives, at least it seems that way to me, as much as he was driven by a moral vision. Michael Kelly died reporting on a war he backed. That moral vision of his put him foursquare behind the effort to toss out Saddam Hussein. Reading his collected reportage and commentary leading up to the war was useful to me for several reasons. It reminded me how different things looked in 2002 and early 2003, and how it seemed that the people with the most decent and humane instincts -- the Bogarts-in-Casablanca -- were for the war. Here's a powerful Kelly column from 12/26/02 recapping a decade of failed poli
cy against Saddam. Excerpt: And where are we now? We are in a position of triumph, and potentially much greater triumph. A few months ago, all was still in tatters. Hussein still defied with impunity, still ruled unchallenged over his torture state, still schemed to advance his dreams of himself as the atomic Saladin. The United Nations still went to work every day, conspicuously (not to mention purposely) failing at its charter mission. Everything was still a disaster and still in train for greater disaster. The will of one man, George W. Bush, changed all this.
Now, for the first time since 1998, the inspectors are back in Iraq -- and they are back in with a determination and a power they never had before. Now, Hussein backs down, and down, and plays for whatever time he can get. Now, he is so desperate that he is forced to empty his prisons and to begin to free his captive people. Now, the United States is backed in its actions by a United Nations that is beginning to see, as in a sort of miracle, that it actually can be a force for peace and law in the world. And here he is in a powerful Post column, written on the eve of the war, making a moral case for liberating Iraq. This is Bogie Kelly at his best: Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face.
I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot? And here he is making fun of the media for being defeatist. He wrote this in November 2001. And here, in his final Atlantic Monthly dispatch from the front (it was published posthumously, and is behind the subscriber firewall), is Kelly talking about the stakes of what's about to happen: On the whole, I"d say, the phoniness quotient is down this time. We are spared, at least, much of the death-and-destruction-and-quagmire talk that preceded the last conflict here. The lessons of the campaign in Afghanistan, adding to the lessons of the campaigns in Kosovo and Bosnia, have sunk in. ...Rather, the argument concerns whether the employment of this almost unfathomable power will be largely for good, leading to the liberation of a tyrannized people and the spread of freedom, or largely for bad, leading to imperialism and colonialism, with a consequent corruption of America's own values and freedoms. The question is real enough and more: probably the next hundred years hinges on the answer. It is painful to read it now, in light of what's happened. In fact, it's all pretty painful to read. Notice in that last passage that it doesn't occur to Kelly to anticipate that the tyrannized people we were about to liberate were not going to be the liberated people we imagined. He saw the only danger from victory in Iraq being America turning into a colonial power. It's not like there weren't voices warning about the threat from sectarian hatred, but they don't seem to have gotten to Kelly. They didn't get to me either -- the positions Kelly argues for here are pretty much the ones I held at the time. You read that passage above in which Kelly talks about fighting tyranny, and you think, "This is the side I want to be on." The best people, it seemed, back then said and believed things like that. You wanted to be brave, you w
anted to take care of that taunting bully Saddam once and for all, you wanted to show the French that America is not like them, trying to find any reason it can to avoid doing what decent people ought to do. The emotions and morals behind Kelly's stance were entirely worthy, and worth championing. Reading him now, it's easy to understand why things that look so obvious today, in light of the catastrophe our country's involvement in Iraq has become, was so hard to see in those days following 9/11. We were not emotionally prepared to see them, and those who pointed them out were fatally easy to ignore, not so much because they were wrong, but because they seemed like fraidy cats. Jonah Goldberg wrote dismissively about my NPR commentary in which I talked about the emotional context for my reasoning, or failing to reason, about the Iraq War. But when you read Kelly's writing, you really do come to appreciate the role emotional context played in arguments about the war, whether one likes to admit it or not. It was so clear -- it felt so clear -- to so many of us that "High Noon" was the emotional template through which to understand what was happening: villains threatened the world, and America had to play the Gary Cooper role to save a thankless and craven citizenry that lacked the courage to stand up to bullies. Kelly's judgment was blinded by his own American decency. It never seems to have occurred to Kelly -- nor did it to many of us -- that the US could fail. He believed in the power of America. He believed in American virtue. In his voice, you can hear the best of the American character: a scrappy, passionate and unapologetic faith in truth, justice, straight-shooting, and a willingness to fight on the side of the underdog. But in his war writing, you also see the tragic flaw in the American character: naivete about the ways of the world, and the absence of a tragic sense of life. I wonder what Michael Kelly would have to say about Iraq today, and George W. Bush, and America. And himself. God, I wish we still had him around.
Friday, January 19, 2007
If you haven't seen it, Mark Bittman published an update to his original recipe for the phenomenal bread. In the update, he talks about variations on the bread, how to handle temperature fluctuation, different pots you can use, and so forth. Worth a look. I get the sense that a lot of you will be trying this recipe this weekend. If you do, please come back to the comboxes and tell us all how it turned out, and what people you served it to thought of it.
This could hardly be a timelier book. More and more people are coming to the realization that the materialism, the rootlessness, and the hedonism of this consumer's paradise we've built for ourselves are taking America down a dead-end road. E.F. Schumacher shows where liberals and conservatives go wrong, and Joseph Pearce makes Schumacher relevant for a new generation -- one that despaerately needs to hear Schumacher's message. Pearce shows why "small is beautiful" is the only sane and human response to our insane "supersize me" culture. -- my blurb on the back of Joseph Pearce's " Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered". Read the Godspy interview with Joseph Pearce here. Check out the book's blog here.
Writing in the Times of London, Simon Jenkins says that as we slip further and further into our individual pods, we're risking more than we know. Excerpt: People who hog their screens and no longer practise de Tocqueville’s “habit of association” disempower themselves. When they treat their communal worries as someone else’s business, that of a centralised state, they are taking a short cut to Weimar and after. Such lack of personal responsibility is becoming a British way of life.
A beneficial outcome of the happiness craze is to teach us that the more we acquire the less we value things as against experiences. We want not just a car but one that brings us adventure. We go to a concert not to hear music, which we can do at home, but to meet a friend and perhaps fall in love.
Likewise a community, whether it is a village, city or nation, is not just a collection of houses and atomised individuals. It is a web of human relationships balancing personal freedom and collective action, the stuff of self-government. If people do not find happiness in that, for sure they will one day find misery. I agree with this, but I'm usually at a loss to figure out a practical way to fight the isolation of individualism. I'll give you an example. On my street, there is a young couple that moved in not long ago. They have a pit bull, and they don't take care of it. On Christmas Day, my brother-in-law walked onto our front porch to head out to his car, and was driven back in by this angry dog, barking and snapping at him. A neighbor who couldn't walk her dog because this dangerous pit bull was on the loose called the city's animal control officers, which finally came to deal with it. Officer said the neighbors were gone, and had left their back door open. The dog ran out. Now, in the past, we neighbors could have gone over there and had a word with the owners, let them know that their dog was endangering the neighborhood, and asked them to take better care of it. And in the past, they likely would have apologized and promised to do better. Nowadays though, it feels too hinky to approach them. I've seen them in the yard, and they do not look like friendly, approachable people. They're renters, and so are transient. The temptation is to just let the city handle it: if their dog gets out, we'll call the authorities, and press charges if we have to (in fact, my next-door neighbor and I told the animal control officer that we would press charges; I'm unnerved by the thought of what could happen to one of my kids if this dog got out and attacked while they were getting out of the car, or if they were on the front porch). I don't have a good feeling about turning to the authorities to deal with this problem, without at least going down the street and trying to talk to the young couple with the dog. But people, in general, aren't like they used to be. They get all up in your face about their rights, and don't want to hear about their responsibilities. Maybe I'm worrying too much about it, but I don't want to risk a confrontation with these people, about whom nobody on the block knows anything other than that they have a bad dog that they don't take care of. A small example, but perhaps a telling one, of why it can be difficult to build community bonds.
Earlier this week we talked -- well, raved -- about the amazing No-Knead Bread recipe, and how unbelievable it is that you can make crusty bread this over-the-top good at home, following a recipe that's as easy as drop biscuits. If you haven't tried the recipe by now, by all means do: it's the foodie equivalent of cold fusion. I mean, for food nuts, it's like discovering that you can run your car on water out of the hose pipe. We like good bread at our house, and have gotten used to paying three, even four dollars for a loaf. Julie figured last night that these homemade loaves, which are better than you can buy at even the best bakeries here, cost maybe a dollar each to make. You can't even buy spongy, mass-produced junk bread for that. Julie doubled the recipe last night, which filled our small-ish cast-iron Dutch oven entirely with a gorgeous tall loaf -- with a height much better for slicing and using for sandwiches. Won't somebody nominate Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery, who came up with this recipe, for a Nobel prize or something? I swear, if we ever get a crunchy-con president, Lahey's going to get a Congressional Medal of Honor.
Pat Buchanan sympathizes with Maliki, for an entirely understandable reason: And consider what it is we are asking Maliki to do.
We want him to use Sunni and Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi Army, in concert with the U.S. Army, to smash the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the most popular Shia leader in the country and the principal political support of Maliki. We are asking Maliki to turn on his ruthless Shia patron and bet his future on an America whose people want all U.S. troops home, the earlier the better.
For Maliki to implement fully the U.S. conditions would make him a mortal enemy of Moqtada and millions of Shia, and possibly result in his assassination. Whatever legacy Bush faces, he is not staring down a gun barrel at that.
The truth: There is only one U.S. policy guaranteed to work if we are resolved to keep Iraq in the U.S. camp. That is to send an army of 500,000 to 750,000 U.S. troops into Iraq for an indefinite period, to pacify Baghdad, retake and hold Anbar and secure the borders against jihadis. Even that kind of commitment, beyond the present capacity of the U.S. Army and Marines, would not secure America's position, once the inevitable withdrawal began.
It is over. ...
I was reading one of the threads below, and couldn't believe how pleasant it was. Then it hit me: we'd posted about eight or nine posts without anyone making a personal attack or throwing some sort of bomb. It's a shame that that so rarely happens. Some of you write me from time to time to tell me you are put off from posting in the comboxes because of an atmosphere of undue rancor, ugliness, and personal vitriol. I hate to hear that. That's not what this forum is supposed to be about, and I'm sorry that I have contributed to that from time to time. We're going to do things differently around here from now on. We will be riding fairly strict herd on the combox discussions to keep out the personal attacks that poison the atmosphere on many of these threads. I want to make it clear that I welcome dissent, even vigorous dissent from my point of view. I learn a lot from y'all challenging me, and I hope you learn from challenging each other; I don't want to discourage that at all. But everyone -- that includes me -- will be expected to abide by the Beliefnet Rules of Conduct, particularly the following terms: Courtesy and Respect: You agree that you will be courteous to every Beliefnet member, even those whose beliefs you think are false or objectionable. When debating, express your opinion about a person's ideas, not about them personally. You agree not to make negative personal remarks about other Beliefnet members...
Disruptive behavior: You agree not to disrupt or interfere with discussions, forums, or other community functions. Disruptive behavior may include creating a disproportionate number of posts or discussions to disrupt conversation; creating off-topic posts; making statements that are deliberately inflammatory; manipulating topic lists to disrupt conversation; posting in a language other than English without providing an accurate English translation; expanding a disagreement from one discussion to another; or any behavior that interferes with conversations or inhibits the ability of others to use and enjoy this website for its intended purposes.I will try to be as lenient and tolerant as I can about free expression in the comboxes, but I should emphasize that Beliefnet has these rules for the sake of protecting free expression. That is, so people can feel free to post in the comboxes without having to worry about being personally attacked, and without being turned off by an atmosphere polluted by personal vitriol or dragging old disputes constantly into new threads, and in an inflammatory way. I welcome your disagreeing with me and with each other. But those who cannot disagree agreeably -- those who cannot limit their critical remarks to a person's ideas, and not that person -- are not welcome here to spoil things for those who can. And they will have their posts deleted.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Charles Murray has been writing some bracing stuff this week in the Wall Street Journal about the way we educate our children in America. Today's entry was perhaps his best, and certainly will be his most controversial column of the three-part series. He begins by stating an unpopular and discomfiting truth: that the most important jobs in our society are done by the smartest people: People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.
Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence. Murray goes on to say that the federal government does nothing, literally, to improve the education of this elite class upon whom so much depends: How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out. Parents of these kids will do what they can to help them succeed, he says, and anyway, on balance we're doing fine with the best and brightest. Here's the gist of Murray's column: "The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens."Murray says that the gifted must be educated not just in academic subjects, but in wisdom, and the kind of humility that you might describe as meritocratic noblesse oblige. Part of this is helping them to understand what they cannot do. Many gifted kids breeze through conventional schooling; what they need is to learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire. And here Murray swings for the fences: All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. Elitist? Of course. But Murray says we can't change the fact that our society is directed by a cognitive elite. We'd all be better off if we acknowledged that, and figured out how to best prepare them for leadership. Earlier in the week, Murray wrot
e -- bravely, I thought -- that there is simply no way to defeat biology and make kids who are, through no fault of their own, cognitively unable to handle complex schoolwork, into top students. That's not to deny the moral worth of slower students, certainly, but it should make us more cognizant of their special needs, and instead of trying to jam everyone into the same mold, work within the boundaries of the realistic. Murray followed with a column saying that not everybody is cut out for college, and that we should get off this kick that everyone ought to be in college; trade schools where people learn to be craftsmen would be a great solution for many (An aside -- my dad is one of the most intelligent men I know, and he has many times told me how much he wished he had gone to trade school and pursued his real interests, instead of being pushed into college and a subsequent desk job by his family.) His larger point, or so it seems to me, is to assault the egalitarian idea of leveling, and its effect on our society. This speaks to the point that some of you have made in combox discussions about Simon Cowell: that Cowell may be cruel, but he does individuals a favor by being brutally honest with them; they've been coddled by a culture that tells them that they're terrific at every turn, giving them a totally unrealistic idea of their own abilities, and what they can expect from life. I think the Dutch have a more sensible idea about how to structure an educational system to account for real differences among people with respect to their levels of academic ability. They have a multi-leveled system -- a Dutch university student explains it here -- that sorts students out based on test scores after primary school, and puts them on an educational track best suited for their particular gifts and needs. Writes the Dutch student, Marijke Keet: Essentially it boils down to the fact if you want to recognize that children do not all have the same intellectual capabilities, or treating everybody equally (though there are geek groups in the Anglo-Saxon schools, so some are apparently more equal than others after all).
But what is, or would be, best for society? What type of adults do you need to keep the world go round? And after that is defined, what type of system would fit best to educate children to become what you just have defined you want to see the next generation to do with society?
To be able to answer the first two questions, you are probably a couple of dissertations down the road and some day I will write more on that topic. But for now, the service-oriented Western societies at present (2002), there is no need for a whole generation of average mutts, also known as office clerks in their cubicles. Of course, they are necessary, but so is the carpenter, electrician and researcher (generalist and specialist). Does an egalitarian school system promote this required diversity? I think not. Me neither.
In his column today, Bob Novak reports on the sense growing among GOP leaders that the Iraq debacle is shaping up to be a long-term disaster for the Republican Party. Excerpt: This hastens the desire of Republicans, who once cheered the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East, to remove U.S. forces from a politically deteriorating condition as soon as possible. "Iraq is a black hole for the Republican Party," a prominent party strategist told me this week. What makes his comments so important is that he is not a maverick Republican in Congress but one of Bush's principal political advisers. I believe that sooner or later, despite our best efforts and against our will, American soldiers are going to have to withdraw to the periphery of this civil war and watch the Sunni and the Shia slaughter each other. The tide of bloodlust and hatred will be too much for us to hold back. God knows I don't hope for this outcome, but I don't believe it is avoidable absent some sort of miracle. If and when this happens, the American people are going to witness on television every night a savage civil war that will shatter our consciences, because we will know that our country made all this possible. What effect this will have on our politics I have no idea. Somehow, just contemplating what could, and likely will, come makes partisan speculation seem petty and crass ("Iraq Genocide: Good for the Dems?"). Far beyond hurting or helping either party, I wonder what kind of effect this catastrophe playing out on television would have on the way Americans think about the role of our nation in the world. I wonder how it will affect how we think about the Islamic world and its discontents. Thoughts?
Thoughts from an L.A. Times blogger on "American Idol": If there is one message to take away from the audition episodes of the most powerful show in the history of television, it is this: Do not trust your friends!
The thrill of the audition weeks is piecing together what on Earth these people can possibly be thinking — the freaks, the uncoordinated, the tone deaf, the wearers of hot-pink mesh body stockings. Can they actually believe that their screeching is passable singing, even in a neighborhood karaoke bar? Are they that deeply deluded about how they are seen? Or is it just a joke to get on TV? One possible explanation that suggested itself repeatedly Wednesday night was the malevolent influence of friends in a person’s life — friends who reassure you, who tell you, “No, really, you have an amazing voice.” Friends whose fear of upsetting you leads you to wear that ridiculous suede vest in public — or to audition for “American Idol.” Well, if we didn’t have friends in life, perhaps we wouldn’t need Simon Cowell. If George W. Bush had had Simon Cowell in his cabinet telling him the unvarnished ugly truth about Iraq in 2002 instead of his yes-men telling him what he wanted to hear, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess today. I'm just sayin'.
It's all but certain that Southern Methodist University here in Dallas will be the home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. This is great news. Regular readers know how outdone I am with the Bush Administration, but it's an honor for SMU to have a presidential library, and it will be a great resource for historians and scholars. But there are some SMU faculty members who take a dim view of the Bush presidency, and who therefore don't want the Bush library, or the think tank that will be part and parcel of it, on their campus. I would like to think that it's odd that academics would seek to narrow the bounds of intellectual inquiry and restrict the intellectual discourse on campus, but of course that's not how it works at most American universities. Park Cities People, a community newspaper serving the area around SMU, has a terrific editorial about the matter. Excerpt: Did the University of Texas endorse the policies of Lyndon Johnson by hosting his library? Should it have benefited financially from his “legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death in dismissal of broad international opinion”? Or has the University of Texas benefited instead from three decades of active scholarship, historical inquiry, conferences of foreign policy experts, and other activities that have been attracted to Austin because of the LBJ Library? If the professors think George W. Bush’s legacy is violence, destruction, and death, isn’t a Bush Library precisely the place to examine it?
But, the complainants argue, the Bush Library foundation would never allow such open discussion. Perhaps not. An institution operating on behalf of a living ex-president can be expected to exercise a certain diffidence regarding its namesake. After all, one would not expect the trustees of the Carter Library to host a seminar on Mr. Carter’s recently revealed anti-Semitism. But a presidential library isn’t built for the present generation. It is not our present ethical sensibilities but history that transcends partisan politics.
As for the idea of the library becoming a think-tank for conservatives, nothing would delight us more. In fact, the prospect of the Bush Library at SMU becoming as intellectually vital and respected as the Hoover Institution thrills us.
We can forgive those faculty who presume this means the library might become an ideological encampment. They are apparently under the delusion that conservatives are like themselves — in other words, that they think in lockstep. Mr. Bush himself might be the one to set them straight on that one.
Conservative intellectual Heather McDonald [sic], for one, recently denied that Mr. Bush could even be called a conservative; she described him as a “neo-Wilsonian absolutist.”
If for no other reason than to help two insular SMU theologians broaden their knowledge of the intellectual world beyond the tiny corner they inhabit, we’d love to see conservatives such as McDonald and Bruce Bartlett (author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy) discussing the Bush presidency. Presumably those kinds of conservatives would be acceptable. What our professors are afraid of is that someone might actually defend the Bush presidency. We wonder if their ears are too tender or their moral noses too high in the air to be able to bear such an experience. It makes us ask who here is really afraid of debate?
I must be the only person left in America who has never seen "American Idol." Last night I caught a few minutes of it. I watched some schlub in the tryouts talking about how great she was, and how her husband didn't support her trying out because, in her view, he was jealous of her desire to soar. She talks for a bit about how much of her own self-worth and dignity and dreams and yadda yadda are riding on this tryout. Sure enough, she stood in front of the panel of judges, and she's horrible. Excruciatingly bad. And boy, did they let her know. I'd heard that this Simon person is especially cruel, but it shocked me how harsh he was with that young woman. She begged for another opportunity to sing, but after the second one, they sent her away with a fusillade of insulting remarks. Offstage, she sobbed, which you knew was coming. She graspingly tried to salvage her dignity by saying that she was "sick," and that that had affected her voice. But she was, of course, completely untalented. She didn't realize that. She does now, most likely. I did something I never would have done 10 years ago: I turned off the TV. The schlubby young woman was a fool, but it was unbearable watching her torn down like that. To be honest, it reminded me of when I used to be a critic, and would gleefully trash untalented filmmakers, actors and the like. Had a blast doing that. Never once thought about the real people with real hopes and real dreams, however tawdry and delusional, that I was bashing. My reviews could be really funny and entertaining, but if I were ever to return to criticism, I wouldn't write reviews in the same way. I'm not saying that I would pull punches, and overpraise something that didn't deserve it just to be nice. But I would put aside callow cruelty, of which there is too much in the world. I regret having added more than my share back in the day. For me, I think this comes not so much from having gotten more serious about my faith, but from raising children. Seeing how fragile people are, and how hard it is to build up someone's character, and how easy it is to tear them down -- well, it affects the way you relate to the outside world. Every day I'm given to spend with my children is an opportunity for conversion. I have a long way to go.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
(Hat tip: Barbara Nicolosi) Take the quiz and find out. Here's my result. Born and raised in Louisiana, but as this shows, I've always been a native of TV Land: | What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio. | | Philadelphia | | | The South | | | The Northeast | | | The Inland North | | | The West | | | Boston | | | North Central | | What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz |
When I was in college, I noticed something annoying: that the writers and thinkers throughout history that seemed wisest about life and how to live it were men who believed in God. They didn't believe in God in the same way -- Kierkegaard's God is not the same as Dostoevsky's, if you follow me -- but they all believed in God. At the time, I counted myself an agnostic, and I couldn't get away from the feeling that I was missing something. If Kierkegaard believed in God -- indeed, if most educated men throughout history have believed in God -- then maybe I was the one with the unsustainable presumption. Eventually this nagging thought helped drive me toward reconsidering theism, and ultimately to Christianity. Daniel Larison makes this point in his answer (well, one of them) to Heather Mac Donald's claim that theism is not necessary to conservatism. He's responding in particular to HM's offhand remark that she didn't study enough history at university. That's the problem, says Larison. You really need to read his complete set of comments, but I thought this part was especially good: Perhaps the most stunning thing about atheism is the sheer presumption of it. I don’t mean simply the presumption against God, which would be enough in itself, but the presumption that you and a few other adventurous souls have figured out something that the vast majority of mankind has never known about a subject for which the atheist can obviously have no empirical evidence one way or the other. Heady stuff, indeed. Say whatever else you will about it, this setting of the ideas of the self over and against the inherited wisdom of ages is one of the main things that is unconservative about atheism. Even if atheists were right, we should be clear that there would be nothing conservative about their position, but would, if adopted by society as a whole, quite obviously involve a cultural revolution and destruction of a significant portion of our cultural inheritance. In the end, what is it that atheists would conserve of our civilisation, when so much of the substance of our civilisation has its origins in Christianity or in the cultural derivatives thereof?
Would greater familiarity with history weaken an atheist’s certainty that religion is unnecessary for the healthy flourishing of society? I almost have to think that it would. The nightmare of the 20th century, defined to such a great extent in so many parts of the world by organised godlessness and the official repudiation of all religion, should give any convinced atheist pause. If man does not flourish in a godless regime, and if godless regimes have a record of unusually great barbarity and human cruelty, it does at the very least suggest that religion aids in human flourishing and probably has some moderating effect on the use of political power. On sheer pragmatic grounds alone, someone familiar with the historical record would have to conclude that atheism, at least if embraced officially, is bad for the health of society.
John Podhoretz says the Dems in Washington are doing exactly the right thing if they care more about advancing their party's political advantage than they do about helping end the war they oppose. I think he's right about their cynical strategy. I was talking yesterday with a colleague who is a Democrat, and who shares my view about the Iraq War. I told her I thought the Dems were trying to have it both ways -- trying to get credit for opposing this unpopular war, without having to take responsibility for taking risks to end it -- and that I thought that was understandable, but dishonorable. She agreed. This really is an interesting political moment: the country is solidly against the war, and solidly against the president's new plan. So why is the opposition party so reticent to act? The answer, of course, is that they don't want to be beat up by Republicans in 2008 for "losing" Iraq by "cutting and running." You can see why they have that fear, but do they fear GOP attacks more than they care about stopping a war they correctly gauge as having been lost? They have powerful arguments on their side to refute any present and future Republican assault. Why are they so timid about using them? I also wonder why more Republicans aren't speaking out. It's easier to grasp why they would be reticent to go against a Republican president, but the same principle applies: if they see this war as lost, do they care more about their party saving face, or the good of their country? Obviously if they still believe in the war, they are right to back Bush to some degree. But it not, not. Some senators, like Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl, have come out backing Bush, post-speech. Others, like Chuck Hagel, Norm Coleman and Sam Brownback, have gone into opposition. What about the vast middle? Let's hear from them.
I'm working on an essay about wealth and happiness now, which I'll post a link to later after it's published in the Dallas Morning News. The most interesting thing about recent social science findings is how they empirically vindicate the teachings of the major religions: that wealth not only doesn't make you happy, its relentless pursuit can make you miserable. After one's minimal material needs are met, there's really not a big payoff in terms of happiness by getting richer. In fact, the richer you get, the more you want. It's a never-ending cycle. Adam Smith recognized that the common illusion that wealth makes one happier can be harnessed as the engine for capitalist growth. But at some point, people have to get off what's called the "hedonic treadmill," or they make themselves miserable and put at risk one of the few things that make people really happy: their social relationships. More on which later, after I've published. But feel free to talk about that here. With this happiness thing on my mind, I was struck this morning by a remembrance, published in the new issue (not yet online) of the Orthodox magazine Again, of Lynette Hoppe, who was a missionary devoted to helping rebuild the Orthodox Church in Albania after communism. Since 1994, Lynette and her husband and young children lived among the poor in Albania, sharing their struggles and helping them find the way back to Christ after decades of communist persecution and desolation. She died of breast cancer last year. According to the Again article, Lynette wrote toward the end of her life: "I am so grateful for my own pain. Now I can have a much deeper sense of compassion for the suffering of others. ...[In fact], these are very happy days for Nathan and me and our children, perhaps the happiest we have ever known as a family. Nathan and I continue to delight in each other's company. ...He is helping me to focus on the blessings of today and not on the uncertainties of tomorrow. ...Living in the present is a moment by moment effort. I still find my mind wandering off into the future on occasion, but I try to pull it back. I want to live fully today, being patient with my children, helpful to my husband, attentive to my mother [who was also dying from cancer], and rejoicing in my Lord!" Can you imagine? This was the same lesson the dying Pope John Paul II tried to teach an uncomprehending world: that pain and suffering and deprivation can be redeemed because they can bring us closer to each other, and grateful for the present moment. The peace which passes all understanding -- that's what the dying Lynette Hoppe had. That's what the dying pontiff had. That's what we all can have ... but not if we place our hopes in earthly treasures, or worrying about accumulating them as bulwarks against future deprivation. This is a lesson I struggle to learn every single day. Here, from the Lynette remembrance, is practical wisdom from Bishop Gerasimos of Abydou: "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived."Again: "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived."I'm going to go through this day with that principle in mind, and see how it changes the way I relate to the tasks set before me, and all the people I meet. UPDATE: Doug Cramer, editor of AGAIN, writes to say that the Hoppe piece is online here. Read it and be inspired.
Any Alaska readers of this blog? I'll be speaking at the University of Alaska in Anchorage on the evening of March 1, and hanging around through Saturday afternoon to see the opening of the Iditarod. What do you do in Alaska on a cold Friday in early March? Might it involve beer? Don't even suggest winter sports to me. I tried snow skiing once. I fell off the lift right out of the gate on my first try, right in front of the Norwegian snow bunny I was trying to impress. My male ego bruised, I took off my skis and stalked into the bar, and started my avant-ski happy hour. Far better to preserve one's dignity that way. Winter sports are best experienced from the warmth and safety of the bar at the lodge, watched on TV, if you ask me.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Bruce Bartlett, who initially supported the Iraq War, but later showed himself to be a BIG OL' STINKIN' FAKE CONSERVATIVE by writing a book calling the Bush Administration out for betraying conservative principles with its stewardship of the economy, says it's time to get out of Iraq. His column is behind TimesSelect, so you can't read it if you're not a Times subscriber. Here's an excerpt: By August 2003, I warned that the Iraq invasion was looking more like a war for empire than self-defense. I finally denounced the war in an April 2004 column and expressed dismay that the administration’s justification for it had shifted from W.M.D.’s — which had been a reasonable, if incorrect, basis for war — to liberating the Iraqi people. If Bush had from the beginning justified the war only on grounds of liberation, there would have been no war because there would have been close to zero support for it.
This still leaves the question of what to do now that we are in Iraq. Just because the war was wrong in the first place doesn’t necessarily justify an immediate pullout. There is danger this could make a bad situation worse, might embolden our enemies and invite new attacks. That is why I have hesitated calling for disengagement.
But I have come to the conclusion that the situation could not be any worse and that the American presence in Iraq is causing as much conflict as it is preventing. Therefore, I think we should disengage as rapidly as possible. Adding additional troops, as Bush plans to do, simply means throwing good money after bad. ...At this point, it is obvious even to Bush that the status quo is untenable, and he has put the last of his chips on the table to try to salvage something he can call a victory. But there still is no realistic plan for achieving it — or even a definition of victory in the context of Iraq. Consequently, I don’t see how this troop surge can possibly succeed. All it will do is put off the inevitable pullout by another year or more, which means that hundreds more of our fighting men and women will die in vain. On "Meet the Press" this past Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl tut-tutted Sen. Chuck Hagel and other Bush critics for putting down the surge plan before it's had a chance to be tried. Sen. Kyl's like the husband irritated with his wife for fussing at him because he threw his paycheck away on lottery tickets. How dare she criticize him before his get-rich-quick scheme has a chance to work?
For what it's worth -- and please, consider the source -- the Kuwait-based Arab Times is reporting that the US will launch a massive attack on Iran by April, in part because that is supposedly Tony Blair's last month in office (the British tabloid The Sun has reported that Blair will leave at the end of May, but all Blair himself has said is that . Says the paper's editor in chief, basing it on a single confidential source: He went on to say “although US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice suggested postponing the attack, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on attacking Tehran without any negotiations based on the lesson they learnt in Iraq recently.” The Bush administration believes attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calm down the situation in Iraq and pave the way for their democratic project, which had to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, he continued. The attack on Iran will weaken the Syrian regime, which will eventually fade away, the source said. This is not the kind of report that would turn up in an American newspaper -- not a report so important, not based on a single confidential source. Still, it is difficult to explain various things Team Bush has been doing -- especially the CentCom command going to an admiral and the transfer of Patriot missile batteries to the region -- if the US weren't preparing to attack Iran. This report is harder to dismiss. Radar has a blunt feature contrasting the careers of several pundits who (like yours truly) got the Iraq War wrong, but who (like yours truly) have continued to prosper (the Fareed Zakaria entry is particularly startling) with the careers of several pundits who called it correctly, and who have not prospered. It's not an exercise in fairness, heaven knows, but I point it out to say that conservative analyst William Lind is one of the latter. Here's part of what Radar says about Lind; you'll want to pay attention to the very last line: This arch-conservative commentator may have been the most prescient voice in the American media warning against the military dangers facing us in Iraq. His career began as a protégé of America's greatest military strategist, colonel John Boyd, and he has since achieved his own renown in that field. Prior to the war, Lind warned that invading Iraq would be of inherent benefit to both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. He predicted, "When American forces capture Baghdad and take down Saddam Hussein, the real war will not end but begin ... as an array of non-state elements begin to fight America and each other." Bottom line: "It won't be pretty." He also pointed out that a basic tenet of military theory is that a democracy cannot win any prolonged war if the people are at all uncertain about the reasons for fighting. At that point, prior to the invasion, more than half of Americans thought Saddam had a hand in 9/11.
Career status: Still writing for a small audience. Lind is a contributor to the American Conservative and websites like military.com, counterpunch.com, and antiwar.com. No major publications have come calling, so not many people are hearing the urgent warning he's offering now. "I think we're probably going to hit Iran and that situation could be ten times worse than what we've got in Iraq," he tells Radar. Do you think the president is planning to attack Iran? If so, what do you think of that plan? UPDATE: TNR's Jon Chait puts his finger on what's wrong
with the entertaining Radar list: Senator John Kerry, who opposed the first Iraq war and favored the second, has a more dismal record than Vice President Dick Cheney, who at least got one of his wars right. Does that mean Cheney is necessarily a wiser foreign policy sage than Kerry?
What's even sillier is judging someone's foreign policy insight solely based on his or her stance on the last war. Over-learning the lessons of the last war is a classic foreign policy blunder. Yet many liberals want to make the lessons of the Iraq debacle the central basis of American foreign policy. The story in Radar is of a piece with this growing impulse.
But this is the flip side of the same impulse that got us into the current mess. Because the doves made so many bad predictions leading up to the Gulf War--remember the mass uprisings in the Arab world and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties?--many of us ignored warnings this time that proved more prescient. That's what I meant in my discussion of how the behavior of the left made it harder to take their case against the Iraq War seriously. Again (and again), it's not the left's fault that so many of us on the right misjudged the wisdom of this current war. But it's hard to listen to someone whose idea of a valid argument against invading Iraq is "Bush = Hitler." Of course we hear what we want to hear; it's very human. The left, generally speaking, doesn't want to listen to pro-life arguments, so it convinces itself that all pro-lifers must be screaming radicals. This is what a lot of us did with the antiwar left leading up to the war -- it was foolish, but it must be admitted one didn't have to go far to find left-liberals who carried on as if deranged by hatred for Bush. Like Chait said, just because the Left was right about the Iraq war doesn't make them right about everything on foreign policy henceforth, and just because the Right was wrong, ditto. What I fear is that following the coming collapse of Iraq, it will be hard for the general public to take conservatives seriously about anything foreign policy-related for some time. And that is dangerous.
Helpful words on the Polish church scandal from Michael Novak at the First Things blog. Excerpt: In those [Soviet] days, it was extremely difficult to be on guard in resisting every blandishment. Yet many millions of brave and faithful souls did so, in one of the most beautiful displays of spiritual resistance in human history. The Polish nation and the Polish church were conspicuous in steady, daily, humble but heroic acts of fidelity to the truth.
That is why the recent admission of the Archbishop hurt so much. It was public—it had to be—and it hurt the reputation of the country and the church. Of course, we do not yet know the full truth about what happened. Yet even a small surrender leaves the one who signs a document vulnerable forever to blackmail. This case is such a personal tragedy, and so sad.
But this case can also be a new beginning for a new Poland, with a new openness and a new honesty, and a real accounting for the unpleasant past which all would be happy to forget.
Years ago, during the Second Vatican Council (where I first learned the name of Karol Wojtyla), I wrote a history of the second session of the council in 1963, which was entitled The Open Church. The church should be transparent, like a pane of glass, so that the light of God’s grace may shine into it and out of it.
The great political philosopher Karl Popper made a similar argument about the free society in The Open Society and Its Enemies—except not that grace should shine in and out, but at least honesty and reasonableness.
The two goals—the open society and the open church—are always goals worth striving for. We need constantly to begin anew and to do better than in the past. ...As many societies around the world have found out in practice, from Chile to South Africa, the best social cure is at least public honesty and public repentance. One way the lavender mafia maintains its grip on the Catholic priesthood is through blackmail. As I wrote in National Review several years ago, back when I was a Catholic and conservative Catholics liked reading someone saying out loud what they'd been saying among themselves for some time: The raw numbers are less important, though, if homosexual priests occupy positions of influence in the vast Catholic bureaucracy; and there seems little doubt that this is the case in the American Church. Lest this be dismissed as right-wing paranoia, it bears noting that psychotherapist Sipe is no conservative — indeed, he is disliked by many on the Catholic Right for his vigorous dissent from Church teaching on sexual morality — yet he is convinced that the sexual abuse of minors is facilitated by a secret, powerful network of gay priests. Sipe has a great deal of clinical and research experience in this field; he has reviewed thousands of case histories of sexually active priests and abuse victims. He is convinced of the existence of what the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the left-wing clerical gadfly, has called a "lavender Mafia."
"This is a system. This is a whole community. You have many good people covering it up," Sipe says. "There is a network of power. A lot of seminary rectors and teachers are part of it, and they move to chancery-office positions, and on to bishoprics. It's part of the ladder of success. It breaks your heart to see the people who suffer because of this."
[snip]
An especially nasty aspect of this phenomenon is the vulnerability of sexually active gay priests and bishops to manipulation via blackmail. Priests, psychiatrists, and other informed parties say they encounter this constantly. "It's the secrecy," says Stephen Rubino. "If you're a bishop and you're having a relationship, and people know about it, are you compromised on dealing with sexually ab
usive priests? You bet you are. I've seen it happen."
[snip]
Other Catholics who are more liberal than Novak on many Church issues go further on the question of gay ordination: Sipe believes gays shouldn't be admitted into seminaries at the present time — for their own protection, against sexual predators among the faculty and administration, who will attempt to draw them into a priestly subculture in which gay sex is normative behavior. Fr. Thomas P. Doyle, another critic of celibacy who has been deeply involved in the clergy-abuse issue, concurs: "Ordaining gay men at this time would be putting them, no matter how good and dedicated, in a precarious position." In those same interviews, Fr. Doyle and Dr. Sipe -- both of whom are on the Catholic left -- agreed that the way these networks work in affected seminaries is by targeting seminarians who are either gay or struggling with their sexuality. If a seminarian has a moment of weakness, and falls, the network takes notice, and that priest is permanently compromised. Though there is always the danger of McCarthyism (as Matthew Kaminski warns could be going on in Poland right now), Michael Novak is right: sunshine is the best disinfectant.
CNN is now doing live coverage of Donald Trump receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. God help us all. I 'spect the Rapture'll happen by the time Oprah airs this afternoon.
E.J. Dionne writes today that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee could be the GOP 2008 presidential candidate to watch, because he's socially conservative, pro-green, and has no direct ties to the president's war policy. Excerpt: What Huckabee understands better than most Washington-based Republicans is why, with the call-ups of so many National Guard members and reservists, the Iraq War is creating such apprehension, even in the conservative heartland.
"When a person is in a guard unit, two months ago, he was selling nails in a hardware store or he was a police officer on the beat or he was a schoolteacher. ... And he's probably a little older, and he has kids, and he's well-established in the community. When he's killed, the impact has dramatic effect in that community because they didn't expect that this citizen-soldier was going to be subject to that prospect.
''That's why I think that what we're seeing is that there is very strong support for the soldiers," he concludes, "but there's a lot of angst about the war itself.'' And that's why a faithful Republican with no ties to Bush's Iraq policy could be very popular come 2008. Could be. Given his policy positions and religious sensibility, Huckabee is someone I have a natural attraction to -- and hey, I gave him a copy of "Crunchy Cons" when he came through Dallas last year -- but judging by E.J.'s column, Huckabee is being way too tentative about the war now, as if he's trying to test which way the wind is blowing. That might be smart politics, but it does suggest that Huckabee's thinking about the war could be opportunistic. If he's against the Bush war plan, he should speak out now, when it might cost him something, but when it might also do some good. Waiting to see if the surge policy fails before taking a firm position doesn't strike me as particularly inspiring.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Andrew Sullivan publishes a powerful poem he received from a US Marine in Anbar. It's about how impossible it is to escape the dehumanizing effect of war. Paul Fussell writes about this with anger undimmed by the passage of time in his memoir "Doing Battle." Here's a 2004 report from The New Yorker about the toll kiling takes on those who do it professionally. Excerpt: Since Vietnam, the Army has not had to dwell on how soldiers are affected by the killing they do. The first Gulf War was very short, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were largely fought from long range, with airpower and artillery, which rendered the killing abstract. In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known—as General Tommy Franks said, “We don’t do body counts”—but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have “looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed.” American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, “There’s just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they’re all dead.” Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they’d done, a pall would settle over them.
[snip]
Dan Knox, the son of a Presbyterian minister (he is my wife’s cousin), takes no comfort from the Old Testament; he figures that his moral upbringing not only got him into a war but also left him disabled by it. A compact, wiry man of fifty-seven, Knox joined the Army in 1966, after seeing a photo essay on the depredations of the Vietcong in Life. He felt that it was his duty to defend Southeast Asia from Communism. Knox’s infantry suffered huge casualties, but what bothers him most, more than three decades later, is not the fear, the carnage he witnessed, or the loss of friends but the faces of the people he killed while serving as a helicopter door gunner. “If they told me to kill a whole village, that’s what I’d do,” he said. “I still see images—a woman and her children rolling in the dust.” When I asked Knox how often such images arise, he thought for a moment and said, “Every ten minutes.” Later, he added, “Really, it’s more like I’m always looking at a double image. I see you sitting there in that chair, and I’m also watching this funeral party I gunned. In a few minutes, it will be a sampan I gunned on a river, with a woman and her babies falling out of it into the water and kicking around as I shoot them.” This thing we're about to send our men to do, this pacifying of Baghdad, is going to mean close combat, house-to-house stuff. It's likely to be Grozny. And the Iraqi government, on whose behalf we're doing this, doesn't really want us to bother. We are going to send men to kill and die in excruciatingly close combat for ... what, exactly? What achievable goal? Why are we doing this to our men? I say that with a beloved family member, a husband and father, waiting to learn if he's going to be thrown into this fire.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
And now for something completely different. Back in November, chef Mark Bittmann wrote a column in the NYT about how someone at the Sullivan Street Bakery had stumbled upon an insanely simple recipe for baking bread at home that solved the problem of the mushy crust, which is apparently the bane of at-home bread makers. Julie said, "We should try that sometime." Well, this weekend she did. She pulled it out of the oven a short time ago, and we tried it. It is fantastic. I've never had homemade bread with a crust this crunchy. Really, it was the easiest thing to make, too -- it only requires time (lots of time) for the bread to sit tight and rise, and a black-iron pot with a lid to cook the bread in. Oh man oh man, is this bread great. Try the recipe and see. Here's Bittmann's description: Mr. Lahey’s method is striking on several levels. It requires no kneading. (Repeat: none.) It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. It takes very little effort.
It accomplishes all of this by combining a number of unusual though not unheard of features. Most notable is that you’ll need about 24 hours to create a loaf; time does almost all the work. Mr. Lahey’s dough uses very little yeast, a quarter teaspoon (you almost never see a recipe with less than a teaspoon), and he compensates for this tiny amount by fermenting the dough very slowly. He mixes a very wet dough, about 42 percent water, which is at the extreme high end of the range that professional bakers use to create crisp crust and large, well-structured crumb, both of which are evident in this loaf.
The dough is so sticky that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits in a covered bowl, undisturbed, for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped (I mean in 30 seconds), and allowed to rise again, for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked. That’s it. Just that simple. And it makes a loaf that's better than anything I've ever bought at Whole Foods.
Howard Fineman in Newsweek says Iraq is realigning US politics , with the momentum moving in Washington to the antiwar left. I'm hoping that the antiwar Right can get its act together, because this country does not need MoveOn.org and Ted Kennedy as guiding forces in its foreign policy. I was impressed by Sen. Chuck Hagel's blunt remarks on "Meet the Press" this morning, in which he talked about the folly of throwing American troops into the middle of a civil war. If he and Sen. Warner buck up and speak out, they could rally Senate Republicans to their side.
From reader Simon, in one of the comboxes below, these intelligent remarks: Look: No one other than the Paleocons and the Reagan/Bush '41 "realists" ever made the CORRECT arguments against the war.
From the Islamist/Left alliance we heard gibberish about U.S. imperialism, intentional slaughter of "hundreds and thousands of innocents," the likelihood of uprisings against us by the "Arab Street," and, of course, the charge that the whole thing was motivated by Halliburton and war profiteering.
These arguments were not -- and still are not today -- worthy of intelligent people, and there is no doubt that they help drive the large majority of Americans into support for the war.
The plain reality is that a war in Iraq was, to use an old-fashioned word that needs to be reclaimed, grossly IMPRUDENT. Bush and his pals meant well enough. They recognized Saddam as a very dangerous character in an unstable part of the world, and they genuinely hoped to transform Iraq into a democracy and make it a model for transformation of the cesspool that is Arab world.
But the project was from the start too grandiose. You can't mold a civilized republic from a benighted collection of semi-barbarians. And if you can't do that, you have no exit strategy other than (1) impose a strongman, or (2) carve Iraq into 3 parts. Since neither of those alternatives are acceptable to the White House and Pentagon, they've been forced to keep trying relentlessly to do what can't be done.
THAT'S what's wrong with this war. And Rod is right: No one on the Left understood that in 2002-2003, and you still don't hear it from them today.
Andrew Sullivan picks up on what he calls an "anti-war, socially conservative surge" on the Right, with Sen. Sam Brownback's turning against the war, and with a majority of Evangelicals now saying they oppose the president's policy. Says Andrew, "Now all you have to do is add economic populism to that mix, and you've got yourself a powerful electoral combination." Oooh, oooh! Me like. It's frustrating to get e-mails from people on the Left who assume that because I've lost faith in the president and the war, I've become some sort of liberal, and from people on the Right who believe the same thing. It only shows how distorted the war has made American politics. I'm no more enamored of the Left's social agenda than I ever was -- and my conservatism is primarily social/cultural/religious. Besides, it was realizing how this war and my initial support of it violated conservative principles that I ought to have been defending at its outset that finally turned me. Chiefly I should have been completely suspicious of the social engineering that the US government set out to do in Iraq. It didn't work in the Great Society, and there was no reason to believe that it would work in Iraq. You don't march in and turn a tribal society that follows a fierce religion into a nation of Western-style liberal democrats. A key conservative truth is that the material order rests on the spiritual order. Iraqi society did not have the spiritual or moral wherewithal to become the kind of nation we set out to make them. It was our Jacobin hubris, our prideful belief in our own power, that got us into this mess. There were conservatives warning against this in 2002, but most of us on the Right didn't want to listen. The thing is, I strongly believe that the president is right: we are fighting a war that's going to take generations to see through. I have been very outspoken about the threat to America and the West from Islamic fundamentalism. But this Iraq debacle -- which was unwise and unnecessary -- is going to set back the war against Islamism incalculably. I think the US should realize that in this battle, we've been licked, and we should retreat to defensible borders, so to speak, and rebuild for the next round. Because there will be a next round. I look forward to a conservatism that is far more realistic about what America can and should do in the world. I don't want to convert the whole world to democracy at the point of a gun. I don't even want the whole world to be democratic, at least not now. Democracy in the Palestinian areas has only served to empower the Jew-hating terrorists of Hamas. I want a conservatism that looks out after American interests narrowly defined. I want a conservatism that takes this war seriously (that means not putting unqualified personal loyalists like Karen Hughes in charge of the critical information war that we're hardly fighting). And frankly, I want a conservatism that takes border security instead of corporate interests seriously. I appreciate e-mails from conservatives -- including a couple whose names many on the Right would know as staunchly right-wing -- who applaud my NPR essay, and who say that it's time for the Right to do some serious soul-searching about our beliefs and priorities. As I wrote in my book "Crunchy Cons," there are a lot of policies and ways of thinking that go under the label "conservative" that are in fact not conservative at all. I didn't write about the war in my book because my own views on the war were evolving at the time. Had I to do it again, I would say that the idea that the United States should commit its blood and treasure to crusading into the heart of the Middle East and attempting to fashion a liberal secular democracy in a nest of tribal Islamist vipers is not remotely conservative. I see that now. I didn't then. It's time for the Right to quit trying to salvage the discredit
ed Bush vision, and to instead pioneer a more realistic and sensibly conservative foreign policy that is no mimicking of old-style Democratic dovishness, but is muscular and hard-eyed in its assessment of American interests abroad. We are in this war with Islamists for decades, and we've got to fight smarter. I don't see that the Left has any serious ideas (yet) on how to prevail. Our big idea on the Right has blown up in our collective faces. Now what? I think the most important contribution conservatism will make to the debate going forward is a deep understanding of how decisive culture is to the making (or un-making) of societies. That, and an appreciation of the tragic sense of life. I don't think that's been much a part of American conservatism for a long time. Perhaps the Iraq catastrophe will change that. Perhaps. But chances are, quite a few conservatives will choose to believe that the news media caused us to lose there, and will therefore learn nothing. And the Angry Left will be so busy shrieking "I told you so" and seeking whatever psychological and emotional comforts there are to be had from gloating that they will refuse to learn any useful lessons from this experience either. Dark times ahead.
Don't miss this long story in today's NYTimes about the rise of Pentecostalism in New York. I found myself cheering for them and wincing over them throughout the piece. The report captures my own divided feelings, as a Christian who is a communicant of an ancient, apostolic, hierarchical church, over the Pentecostal movement. Nobody can deny -- nobody with any sense does deny -- that the world is moving to Pentecostal Christianity. It is populist, it is morally conservative, it is emotional, it is experiential, and it is what you might call portable. On that last point, consider that traditional liturgical Christianity is to Pentecostalism what an orchestra is to a boombox. It's a lot more complicated to assemble the former to produce music than the latter. Let me stipulate at the outset that I have very little attraction to Pentecostalism. The closest I ever got to it was time spent with charismatic Catholic friends. I admired greatly their faith, and the undeniable fruits of the Spirit in their lives. But it definitely wasn't for me, not only as a matter of personal temperament, but also for reasons that I'll get into below. What is so appealing (to me) about the Pentecostals, and Pentecostalism, in the Times story is the life-changing power of the kind of faith these people embrace. It's like nobody told them that the power of the Holy Spirit was something distant, something to be put into a box, or bracketed in quotes -- the kind of thing that so many of us in older Christian traditions do, consciously or not. In the 1970s, in my hometown, for white people there was a Catholic church, a Methodist church, a Baptist church, and an Episcopal church. Most everybody belonged to one of these. And then there was a tiny little Pentecostal church. We -- meaning the mainstream -- thought these people were freaks. You could tell the Pentecostal women by their long hair, dresses and no make-up. In fifth grade, we had a Pentecostal girl in our class named Jodie. My friends and I were so mean to her. Called her "holy roller." Made her life miserable, I'm sure. She didn't come back the next year. I think about her from time to time, and I am ashamed of myself. The point being, though, that in white society, Pentecostals were the Untouchables. They were beneath respectability. They were the poor. The outcasts of Christianity. And in the Times story, it's Pentecostalism that attracts the poorest of New York society. No believer in Jesus Christ can fail to be impressed by that, and to ask why the poor are drawn to these storefront churches, and not to the more traditional churches like our own. Here's part of the answer, and in fact most of the answer: Here, in cramped storefronts like Ark of Salvation, people whose lives are as marginal as their neighborhoods discover a joyful intimacy often lacking in big churches. They find help — with the rent, child care or finding a job. As immigrants, they find their own language and music, as well as the acceptance and recognition that often elude them on the outside.
They find the discipline and drive to make a hard life livable. Leaving aside the theological reality of what's on offer there, look at it sociologically: here is where poor people battered by life find real community, a real sense of dignity and worth, and the emotional and psychological wherewithal to endure their lives, and even to triumph over adversity. All these things, though, are not possible to separate from the theological. It's their intense shared belief in God -- and a particular conception of God -- that produces all these tangible benefits for them. There's nothing meta about the way they worship. These are true believers; you can even glimpse in them what it must have been like to see the early Christians whose faith enabled them to endure martyrdom: The souls who worship at 1463 Amsterdam Avenue have gotten by for six years on their faith, their wits and whatever breaks — even a drug bust — come their way. As they chase outsize dreams of a bigger building and a far bigger flock, they are guided only by Scripture and a quiet man who assures them that the meek really shall inherit the earth.
“We are not complacent,” Pastor Florian explained. “We are more ambitious than Rockefeller.”
Here is one thing that makes me wince:
Years later, feeling betrayed by politics and worried about his wife’s depression, he let a nurse bring her pastor to their home one night to pray. Mr. Romero converted quickly, with the same intensity he had brought to politics.
His wife, Esperanza, took longer to let go of her Roman Catholicism, particularly the room she had filled with statues of saints — worthless idols, according to Pentecostals, who believe that people should pray directly to God. Mr. Romero persuaded his wife that the statues had to go.
“I went in that room with a hammer, and I broke every saint that was there,” he recalled. “I smashed a table, a fountain full of water, an expensive one. I broke it all. I tied it up in a bag and tossed it in the farthest dump.”
He paused at the memory. “And nothing happened to me.”
I find this kind of iconoclasm not only heartbreaking, but infuriating, as any Orthodox or Catholic Christian would. But after I got over the impulse to anger over this, I asked myself what would drive a man to do this sort of thing. My guess is that he was raging over what he believed was a false religion -- at things that keep God in a box, that distract the believer from the life-changing power of the Holy Spirit. I find this objectionable for reasons both theological and practical. Besides which, there is something to my mind inhuman about this impulse.
But I know it's true that too many of us sacramental believers -- Orthodox, Catholics, and others -- too often place our faith in a kind of superstitious credulity, and allow ourselves to forget that the saints, icons, statues, and other sacramentals are there not as ends in themselves, but to point the way to the Almighty. I want no part in a revolutionary religion that smashes icons and statues. But it behooves us traditionalists to think of how we've allowed our sacramental devotions to become too formalized and ritualized, and have drained them of their power. One of the things I loved about being in the presence of charismatic Catholics is how they looked at statues of the saints, holy water and whatnot and saw them rightly: as powerful tools to bring us closer to the hidden God, to disclose to us what He's like, and to help us become more like Him.
Similarly, there is this to like about Pentecostalism:
When she arrived in New York from the Dominican Republic 35 years ago, she worked in a hotel laundry, ironing until her eyes stung from the steam. Her lunch included a bottle of Heineken stashed in her purse. She played the numbers. And, she said, she practiced the sort of once-a-week Catholicism that was more habit than conviction.
“You can sit next to me, and when the service is over you don’t even know my name,” she said. “You don’t ask, ‘How are you?’ It’s foom, and you’re out.”
It's not just Catholicism. I've been to Orthodox and mainline Protestant services that give you the same treatment. Haven't you? The other day I spoke with a guy at work who's having a lot of trouble in his large church. "I feel like I'm sitting on the subway when I'm there," he said, talking about the loneliness of being part of that crowd, and his belief that the pastor never says anything that "takes you out of yourself, that tells you to go serve the poor, or deny yourself, or anything."
Here is something else that Pentecostals do very well, I think: make human connec
tions to lonely and troubled people:
Eneida Vasquez was window-shopping at a 99-cent store one day when she spotted Kenia Ledesma, a sad-eyed woman with three young daughters and a rocky marriage. She walked up to the stranger, told her she was not alone and hugged her. Ms. Ledesma joined the church that week.
The Times piece reports that anti-Catholicism is a big part of this Pentecostal experience (N.B., the report is about a poor storefront church in Harlem that ministers to Hispanics). The (Latino) pastor of the Catholic Church in this neighborhood says that the kinds of Latinos who go to these storefront Pentecostal churches are only nominal Catholics. He generously says of the Pentecostals that if they're bringing the unchurched into some kind of relationship with Christ, more power to them. And the priest also says, of the Pentecostals' worship:
“It lifts you up,” he said. “You’d have to be a stone not to feel it. They give life.”
While I believe as this priest does -- that any church working to bring unbelievers to Christ is doing good -- and while I would rather see these Christians fully united to the historical and apostolic church, either as Catholics or Orthodox, there's something in me that suspects this idea that the only Latinos coming into these churches are nominally Catholic is just whistling past the graveyard. I don't know to what extent the Orthodox churches in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe are dealing with the kind of challenges the Catholic Church is facing in Latin America from the Pentecostals, but if it's not a big deal for the Orthodox now, it soon will be.
There's a temptation among some Catholics and Orthodox (and mainline Protestants) to downplay the significance of Pentecostalism. It's crude, it's emotional, and besides, We Have the Fullness of Truth -- and emotionalism untethered to authoritative doctrine is bound to go off the rails in time. All of that is accurate. But so what? There is something the Pentecostals offer to people today that we in the older churches aren't offering. It won't do to look down our collective noses at them and their style of worship. We need to re-examine ourselves in light of the success the Pentecostals are having, and pioneer ways to reinvigorate our own traditions.
I don't believe it requires turning liturgy into a rock concert. I don't believe it requires speaking in tongues during mass (though I have seen that) or liturgy. All it takes, I think, is a rediscovery of zeal, and a rededication to the life-changing power of God. In other words, it takes revival, it takes really believing in this stuff, it takes living like the ancient truths passed down in our traditions really are true. A Catholic convert friend, reading about Eucharistic miracles and miracle stories from the lives of the saints, and so forth, once said to me, "Why doesn't the Church put this stuff out front? This is amazing! Think of how people would respond if they knew this history!"
Ultimately, here is the secret of the Pentecostals' success. The Times story ends with the storefront Pentecostal pastor consoling a member of the congregation who had been out evangelizing, but who came back with only the promise from one person to come check out the church. She thought herself something of a failure, but the pastor was filled with joy:
“Do you know what it is to save a soul?” he asked. “Just one soul? Priceless.”
Saturday, January 13, 2007
We're having an ice storm here, and you know what? The local news is running church closing information on the crawl, where normally you'd see school closing news. Only in Texas, kids, only in Texas.
I can't quite get out of my head the problem of Authority in the contemporary age. As Rieff and others have explained, for various reasons we live in a place and time in which authority has devolved to the individual. The Polish bishops say that only the Holy See has the right to judge a bishop, and as a matter of ecclesiology, they're right. But as a practical matter -- as a matter of the sense of the faithful -- I suspect they're wrong. They would certainly be wrong in the West; it's only a question of how far along the path Poland is. When I say "authority," I'm talking about the way their authority in (canon) law is perceived in the hearts of the faithful. As recently as 30 years ago, it would have been unquestioned in Poland. Fifty years ago in the US, same deal. But today? No. Understand that I'm not saying this is how it should be. I'm saying that's the way it is. This is why Rieff was pessimistic about the old culture ever reappearing. How do we recapture the old way of thinking, of seeing? And all of us have to deal with that. The problem is more acute for those of us who are members of hierarchical churches, because as a matter of faith we believe that God has created an authoritative hierarchy. The challenge for those of us who do believe in the hierarchy's authority in principle is to figure out how to respond when the men who possess that authority misuse it. And this is where I think having grown up in modernity puts us at either an advantage or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it. On the down side, it is simply impossible for many, even most, of us to act by force of will to ignore what we learn about the way the authorities have behaved. You can't un-learn these things, and if you choose to ignore them, you do so at a great price to your conscience. You can choose to follow a strategy of ironic detachment, trusting in the authority of the office even as you dismiss the man occupying it. Or you lose your faith in the institution entirely -- even against your own will. Rightly or wrongly, the discrepancy one perceives between the authoritative office and the man or men who inhabit it become too difficult to bear -- intellectually, emotionally, psychologically -- and you cease to believe. It has always been possible for men to make these decisions, but it seems so much easier to make them in conditions of modernity, when we are acculturated to believe that everything is, and should be, a choice. Even if we reject that in theory, it's impossible to fully get that mindset out of our system. On the upside, though, the modern worldview provides the psychological wherewithal to refuse to submit to the abuse of authority. Fifty years ago, people accepted abuses by authorities that they wouldn't today. They just won't stand for the things that their fathers and grandfathers did, because That's The Way It Is. The good thing about this is it forces those in authority to be more accountable to those they rule. It is no bad thing for rulers to be responsible for ruling justly. Human nature being what it is, anybody who holds power without accountability is bound to abuse it, unless he or she is a saint. All things considered, I would rather live under a system (religious, political, economic, etc.) in which the leaders were held accountable for their behavior. The form of accountability needn't be the same in every case, but there has to be some way to make those in authority subject to the Law, else they act like they are a law unto themselves. A group of church bishops, say, can lament their loss of effective authority under modernity, but they could also regain or shore up that authority by respecting the law and being seen to do so. But I'm getting a bit far from the point I want to make. Is it possible to have a stable society if authority is held up to constant scrutiny and judgment? Jung, I believe it was, said that "people can't stand too much reality." If we are constantly made aware of the faults of our rulers, how
is it possible to believe in them over time? Eventually the ability to believe in this or that authority drains away under the constant pounding of revelations. I don't think it's such a danger when the public loses faith in the individual person holding an office. I, for example, lost faith in the Bush government some time ago, but I still have faith in the office of the presidency, and in any case recognize that (just like Clinton) he is the president, and insofar as his commands are lawful, we are bound to obey them. Yet as I pointed out in my NPR commentary, I have lost my ability to trust the judgment any president (or general) as a matter of course, because of what we've seen with this administration. Anybody who knows history -- even recent US history -- knows that one should always be suspicious of leaders, and that that suspicion is healthy. They are only men, after all. What I'm getting at, though, is this: when does a healthy suspicion become unhealthy? When does it cross the line into being destructive, and indeed indiscriminately destructive? And how do we know the difference? I've focused a lot in recent days on how the question of authority plays out in the church, because I care more about what happens in the church than I do about what happens in the government. But it's a question that affects all social relations in our place and time. In my line of work, the news media, we are living through a revolution in which our authority is being shattered by several things: 1) the proliferation of alternative sources of media that challenge our version of events; 2) a widespread sensibility among ordinary people that they should be suspicious of the "official story" as presented in the traditional news media; and most worryingly, 3) a growing indifference to news and information, which sees all news not as a necessary thing to understanding the world, but as an entertainment product that one can consume as one wishes (which implies that reality is something not to be understood, but constructed). As someone who has spent his entire career inside the mainstream media, I welcome the breakdown of authority in some respects, because consciously or not, we have not used it well in all cases. But at the same time, I also recognize that there is a lot more legitimacy inside mainstream media than most critics on the right and left give it. It becomes an easy pose to be radically suspicious of all news media. As the conservative commentators Rich Lowry and Max Boot have both written recently, conservatives would have understood the situation in Iraq a lot better if they had credited the Bush administration and its generals less, and the mainstream media more. The people who think they're freethinkers who bow to no authority almost always are fooling themselves. I met recently a man who is now in the catechumenate for the Catholic Church, who was once a member of a large and powerful Baptist church. He said, "They'll tell you all the livelong day how awful the Pope is, and how silly those Catholics are to believe in the Pope, but they can't see that they treat their pastor like their own personal pope. What he says, goes. And they don't even see what they're doing." People cannot live without authority. What characteristics will those persons and institutions who wish to accumulate and to preserve authority now and in the near future have to have? I think one non-negotiable characteristic is transparency, and an eagerness to accept fault and make substantive and visible efforts to remediate error. Had George W. Bush not been so defensive for so long, and had been willing to make changes early on, he wouldn't have fallen to such low esteem in the public's eye. Had the US Catholic bishops done the right thing to start with regarding the sex abuse scandal instead of trying to cover up, they wouldn't be in such bad shape today. In my own church, the OCA, the attempt to hide or deflect or suppress the financial scandal surrounding the Metropolitan is actually subver
ting the authority of the hierarchy, not protecting it. That's something that those in secular and religious authority can't seem to grasp: that in the present day, genuine humility is the key to maintaining authority, and power.A second question: what disposition toward authority do we ordinary people have to maintain for our own good? We cannot be permanently and corrosively suspicious of all authority; that way lies madness, and at least social dissolution. How much reality are we prepared to allow ourselves to ignore, for the greater good? Is it ever moral to turn away from knowing the truth about the authority's behavior, because to know the truth would not set us free, but would make us prisoners of our own chronic mistrust?
Friday, January 12, 2007
Here's the latest from the scandal rocking the Catholic Church in Poland. The good news: the Polish bishops have voted to undertake a full investigation of the role clergy may have played in collaborating with the communist authorities. The bad news: they're not going to make their results public, only send the findings to the Vatican. Said Archbishop Jozef Michalik, head of the Polish bishops conference: "Nobody in Poland has the authority to judge and assess a bishop, only the Holy See has such authority." Right. That's gonna go over real well.
Bruce Bartlett blogs behind the Times Select firewall, so I hope you can read this item in its entirety. If you can't, here's an excerpt: One of the most frustrating things about being a conservative these days is suffering from both sides in the debate about George W. Bush. As soon as one admits to being conservative, one is assumed to be a supporter of the administration. It takes a lot of effort to explain why almost nothing this administration has done is “conservative” by the standards of what conservatism has meant historically.
Liberals don’t believe you and figure that you are just a rat deserting the sinking Bush ship. Independents don’t understand what you are talking about, because they have been told over and over again that this is the most conservative administration in history.
Meanwhile, many of those in charge of the institutions of conservatism — magazines, radio talk shows, think tanks, television news networks and such — have adopted the view that Bush defines conservatism. As comedian Stephen Colbert explained to me when I was on his show, a key tenet of conservatism is support for the president. Therefore, whatever Bush does is conservative.
To me, Ronald Reagan was a conservative. Yet conservatives constantly harped on him when he deviated from the conservative line. Reagan was continually berated for not doing enough to cut spending, for acceding to tax increases during budget negotiations, for appointing moderates to key positions, and for not doing enough to pursue a conservative agenda.
Today, many of those same conservative Reagan critics are among Bush’s strongest supporters. They robotically defend everything he does no matter how unconservative or even anti-conservative it is. This phenomenon truly baffles me.
Jonah Goldberg takes notice of my NPR commentary. He starts by noting the intro text NPR put up on its site to promote my commentary: Commentator Rod Dreher has been a conservative since he was 13. Now on the cusp of turning 40, he's still a conservative, but is so dismayed at the way President Bush is handling the Iraq war that all of his prior beliefs have come into question. I didn't write that, and it doesn't reflect what's actually in the commentary. If it were an accurate reflection of what I actually said, it would read that "some" of my prior beliefs have come into question. The essay was about losing faith in the rightness of my own side on matters of national security, a rightness I took for granted in large part as a reaction to the weakness of Jimmy Carter and the era's Democrats (as I explain in the piece). I initially had a line in the essay saying that the actual weakness of the Democrats in the face of Soviet communism made it easy to lionize Republicans, who were right on that enormously important issue. NPR edited it and other material out, because the piece had to come in at under three minutes. (They also edited out an explanation of how I spent a few years in high school and early college as a liberal; any of my friends from those days hearing that I've been a conservative since 13 no doubt rolled their eyes.) Anyway, I make it clear in the piece that I'm still a conservative, but that the experience of conservative government with regard to the Iraq war has done away with any illusions I had about the importance of having a Republican president when faced with a national security crisis. Jonah: You'll actually have to go there to hear him 'cause I'm not going to type up his comments. I can't fault Rod for his frustration with the war, though I think he comes across as pretty anti-intellectual and unfair in his tirade — as if there was no good faith or no good arguments for the positions he once held and which lots of folks he respects still hold. I should also say that the comparison to Jimmy Carter is really quite weak. Simply because Carter's feckless foreign policy and Bush's over confident foreign policy elicited similar feelings in Rod doesn't mean that they can be glibly equated. You want a detailed and complex analysis in a three-minute commentary? Please. In my essay, I talked about how the conduct of the war was what alienated me. That includes the falsehoods and half-truths told to get us into this mess -- for example, the things we were told back in 2002 by this administration and took on good faith, which we ought to have been far more skeptical of. The Carter comparison is in my piece precisely because so much of my embrace of the GOP -- and I would say the embrace of a lot of people of my generation made of the GOP and of Ronald Reagan -- was in reaction to the failure of Jimmy Carter and the Democrats. Carter brought the nation to a bad place; Reagan dug us out. My error was to think that all Republicans were like Reagan, or to be more precise, that "Reaganism" -- standing tall, carrying a big stick -- was always and everywhere the right response. I failed to be as critical of GWB as I ought to have been before it was obvious to everyone with eyes to see what a disaster his administration has been re: Iraq. What's Jonah's excuse? Likewise, simply because Rod has the same feelings as hippies that doesn't mean the hippies were right then (or that Rod is right now). In short, there's a lot of talk about feelings. I hope you'll listen to my commentary, if you haven't already, because Jonah has a habit of mischaracterizing my work. I brought up the hippies in my commentary because that's exactly how I'd always written off anyone who was against the Vietnam War -- as pretty much a hippy who bla
med America first. It was an emotional response that made it easy to dismiss the valuable warnings about government power and government deception that many of the anti-war protesters of the Sixties pointed out. I didn't want to listen, nor did I want to listen when some of these same people -- and some on the Right (who NR called "unpatriotic," and I agreed at the time) -- tried to make similar points about Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war. If calling conservatives who were against the war "unpatriotic" as a way to dismiss their criticism isn't about rash emotion, what is? I considered the "hippies" to be unpatriotic, and didn't want to take anything they had to say about government power in wartime seriously. But look, I am not the only one in the room on the Right susceptible to making emotional judgments. And those of us who called Pat Buchanan et alia "unpatriotic" owe them an apology. Because you know what? America would be in a far better place today if we had listened to them on the war. Also, the commentary leaves the impression that Rod's anti-Bush epiphany and conservative crisis of confidence are solely the product of the war. I know how these NPR things are put together so I understand the limits they impose. But for clarity's sake it's worth reminding people who didn't read Crunchy Cons, that Rod's straying from "mainstream conservatism" has more authors than the Iraq war alone. My anti-Bush epiphany was about more than the war. It was also about Katrina and Harriet Miers. Yet my commentary was explicitly not about my thoughts about economics, or social policy, or anything other than trusting conservatives in power to do the right thing on war and foreign policy. Once again Jonah, as is his habit, distorts. Hard as it is to believe, one can be a conservative and have little or no faith in the Bush administration. In fact, that's getting to be pretty much a requirement nowadays. Jonah: One last point. NPR has a habit of doing this sort of thing (so does the New York Times, of course). I was last invited to come on to beat up Trent Lott. Rod's on there to beat up Bush. Maybe NPR could stretch a little bit and find some conservatives to make a positive case for their beliefs that doesn't involve confirming liberal or Democratic arguments? Or is that too much to ask? One last point: nobody from NPR approached me about anything. I've done commentaries for them in the past -- one on my book, and one on the experience of driving around Dallas in the summer without air conditioning -- so I have a relationship with a producer there. When I went home from the office on Wednesday night after watching the speech at office, I was so agitated over it that I wrote that commentary, and e-mailed it to the producer. She invited me to record it the next day. So I approached them. For the record.
Run, don't walk, to Julie Lyons' new Bible Girl column. Here's how it starts: Once you’ve lost your innocence, you don’t think about it much anymore. We accustom ourselves so quickly to compromise, to an acceptable level of sin. Really, it’s our only line of defense from a loss for which there is no remedy.
That and depression.
One day, though, you’ll get a smack-in-the-face reminder of what you were, and what you’ll never be again. If you’re a parent like me, you want to grab your kid and spirit him away to a safe place where a semblance of innocence can grow.
If you’re a conservative Christian in a generally hostile culture, you’re continually faced with a choice: fight or flight. Now Momma can fight. But when it comes to my 7-year-old son, I figure he’ll have plenty of battling to do as an adult, when he’s slimed every day with greasy gobs of pop-culture oobleck.
But for now, I say flee. Because I don’t want him to turn out like me. She goes on to talk about going home to small-town Wisconsin to visit family over Christmas, and becoming acquainted with a huge controversy over Maya Angelou's memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" being taught in a literature class to 15 year olds. The book includes graphic descriptions of a child rape (which the author suffered). A Christian couple objected to material this explicit being offered in the classroom to their 15 year old daughter. Apparently all hell broke loose -- though we'll have to wait for next week's Bible Girl column to see how it was resolved. Judging from the set-up, though, Julie was taken aback by how hostile the mainstream culture is to conservative Christians on matters like this. As regular readers, and readers of "Crunchy Cons" know, I strongly believe in dropping out of the mainstream, especially when it comes to raising kids. And you are going to take a lot of crap from people about "sheltering" your kids, and so forth. Fine. Bring it on. I can deal with it. What I cannot deal with is throwing my kids into that toxic stream and telling them to dogpaddle for their lives. Form alternative communities, where the virtues can be lived with like-minded people.
Peggy Noonan was prepared to support the surge ... until she heard Bush's speech. The most interesting part of her column is not her critique of the president, but her observing that a collapse of our authority and policy in Baghdad will be met with a collapse of authority in Washington. There will be a power vacuum in both capitals:
The Democrats of Capitol Hill will fill that one [in Washington]. And they seem--and seemed in their statements after the president's speech--wholly unprepared to fill it, wholly unserious in their thoughts and approach. They seem locked into habits that no longer pertain, and absorbed by the small picture of partisan advancement at the expense of the big picture, which is that the nation is in trouble and needs their help. They are sunk in the superficial.
[snip]
Right now, in the deepest levels of the American government, intelligence and military planners should be ordered to draw up serious plans for an American withdrawal, and serious strategies for dealing with the realities withdrawal will bring. It would not be the worst thing if the Maliki government knew those plans were being drawn up. It might concentrate the mind.
What is paramount is a hard, cold-eyed and even brutal look at America's interests. We have them. I'm not sure they've been given sufficient attention the past few years. In fact, I am sorry to say I believe they have not.
The ATC Commentary thread below is turning out to be another thread of war commentary instead of an exchange of opinions about how Bush and the war changed, or will change, American conservatism. I'm really interested in what you all think about this. As a general matter, I believe that the failure in Iraq, once the fuller dimensions are apparent to the general public, will do very much to discredit organized conservatism here. Whether that's right or wrong, I think that's going to happen. There is a conservative tradition that's true to conservative values, and that sees Bush-style conservatism -- in particular, the crusading universalism -- as anathema. But that kind of conservatism has been marginalized for a long time, and I think the general public -- again, right or wrong -- will identify conservatism with the Bush administration and its Iraq failure, and in the short term will reject Republicans at the polls. Interestingly, I don't think they will embrace liberalism; the only reason the Dems are in power now is disgust with Republicans, not that the American people woke up one day and decided that the Dems were right after all. Still, I believe the Bush years -- and yes, this includes the Republican Congress -- will have done tremendous damage to the cause of conservatism as a political movement. Conservatism will always be with us, because in my view it provides a set of political principles that are truest to human nature. But it's one thing to be true; it's another to be politically viable. Please understand that what I'm talking about here is the political viability of conservatism. Anyway: what will a post-Bush conservatism look like? What should it look like to be politically viable? Thoughts?
Pat Buchanan says that it doesn't make sense that Bush would describe, as he did in his speech the other night, the apocalyptic consequences if the US failed in Iraq, and then commit only a paltry number of new troops to the task of averting this end. If things really were going to be as bad as Bush said if the US lost, then he would be tripling the number of troops there, and vowing to fight an open-ended war. But what, asks Buchanan, if that's not Bush's real game here? Excerpt: Midway through his speech, almost as an aside, Bush made a pointed accusation at and issued a direct threat to – Tehran.
To defend the “territorial integrity” of Iraq and stabilize “the region in the face of extremist challenge,” Bush interjected, “begins with addressing Iran and Syria.”
“These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
Now, any networks providing “advanced weaponry and training” to jihadists and insurgents are outside Iraq. Otherwise, they would have been neutralized by air strikes already.
So, where are they? Answer: inside Syria and Iran. And Bush says we are going to “seek out and destroy” these networks.
Which suggests to this writer that, while the “surge” is modest, Bush has in mind a different kind of escalation – widening the war by attacking the source of instability in the region: Tehran.
“I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region,” said Bush. “We will deploy … Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.”
But there is no need for more carrier-based fighter-bombers in Iraq. And the insurgents have no missiles against which anyone would need Patriot missiles to defend. You only need Patriots if your target country has missiles with which to retaliate against you. It's not just Buchanan on the Right seeing this. Here's an excerpt from the right-of-center Georgie Anne Geyer's column on the Bush speech:
When new officers were announced this week both in the Middle East military command and in the highest quarters of American intelligence, the acts seemed oddly confused. Then the larger post-election power panoply became clear.
Why would Bush appoint a Navy man, Adm. William J. Fallon, as the new chief of Central Command for the Middle East, naming the former Navy fighter pilot and current head of the Pacific Command to oversee two ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why, too, would the Pentagon move two U.S. carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf -- carriers being exquisitely inadequate to deal with any possible guerrilla insurgency on the ground? And why would John Negroponte, the respected director of national intelligence, be suddenly and inappropriately moved to the State Department?
Then another pattern emerges. If the coming war is to be not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to involve some kind of strike on Iran, then an admiral, who knows about taking out targets from the air and keeping sea lanes open, is a perfect chief to oversee the vulnerable Persian Gulf and its Strait of Hormuz.
If that war involves another question about nuclear power -- this time the extent to which Iran's nuclear program has moved -- then you surely do not want John Negroponte, one of the most honorable men around Washington, saying as he has been that Iran is not urgent and could not produce a nuclear weapon until the next decade.
And if it is also true,
as the London Sunday Times reported on Jan. 7, that the Israelis are preparing for a war strike on Iran, the picture becomes even clearer.
Are we prepared as a nation to widen this war to Iran? We had better be, because absent a vigorous effort in Congress and elsewhere to stop it, I'd say it's a safe bet that we're going to wake up one morning, sooner rather than later, to learn that US forces have attacked Tehran.
Here's an audio link to the commentary I delivered yesterday on NPR's "All Things Considered." After coming home late Wednesday night from the office, where the editorial board watched the Bush speech, I found I was so restless over the speech and the war that I had to write something. I sent it to a producer friend at NPR, and the next morning I recorded it. In the commentary, I talk about coming to terms with the end of an illusion. As someone who came of political age under Reagan, I've been a conservative for most of my life (for the sake of brevity, NPR edited out the part of the essay in which I explained that I'd had a high school and early-college dalliance with liberalism). I disdained the Vietnam-era "hippie" mentality with regard to national security. I took it for granted that those people were hung up on Vietnam, and ought not be listened to because they were blame-America-first liberals. (NPR also edited out, for brevity's sake, my line about how it was fairly easy to maintain that viewpoint because the left in the 1980s were such appalling squishes on Soviet communism.) I formed my political views on national security in the confident glow of Reaganism. For me, it was a fact of life that Republicans were strong, capable and confident, and Democrats were weak, vacillating and incompetent (Carter's failed hostage rescue mission was the template). When Bush led us into the Iraq War, I thought the liberals who predicted doom -- and, crucially, the conservatives (like Buchanan) who did as well -- were either fools, cowards or unpatriotic. But now I see that I was the fool. In the NPR piece, I wrote about how I sat there watching Bush's speech and thought that when they get old enough to understand these things, I have got to teach my children never, ever to take the word of presidents or generals at face value. To question authority, because the government will send you off to kill and die for noble-sounding rot (e.g., crusading for democracy in the Middle East). And it hit me that this is precisely the message that so many of those who lived through the Vietnam experience tried to tell my generation -- in my case, and in the case of so many other Gen X Reagan Youth, in vain. I wonder if my kids will take me seriously in the future when I tell them what happened in this war, and how the Republican administration that their father believed in and voted for twice brought this country to this terrible place, through its mendacity and incompetence. Or will they think me a crank? Will they have to learn for themselves? The thing is, I am no less conservative now than I was at the outset of this war. I've had some e-mails from listeners accusing me of apostatizing to the left. That's only true if you think the sum of conservatism is to support the Bush government and its war. Which is nonsense -- and part of the foolish mindset that led me to think that conservatives who opposed this war from the beginning on principle were somehow doing so in bad faith. But I am a different kind of conservative. I am vastly more suspicious of the state, and of the mob mentality, which I joined at the time. I can't help feeling that all the trust in governmental institutions that Reagan so painstakingly built up after the disillusionment of Watergate and the Vietnam debacle will now have been shattered by Bush, though we won't realize that until the Iraq adventure collapses fully. Yesterday after the commentary aired, my phone rang. It was an old high school friend I hadn't heard from in a while. He's a military officer, a staunch conservative, and he served combat tours in Iraq. He was calling on his cell phone, stuck in traffic outside his US base. When I heard his voice, I thought, "Oh boy, he's going to lay into me for that." In fact, he said, "Thank you for saying exactly what needed to be said. That was perfect." UPDATE: I agree with
Andrew Sullivan here: A few people - James Fallows, Joe Klein, Brent Scowcroft, for example - opposed the war for sane reasons. They deserve kudos as much as I deserve criticism for not listening to them closely enough. But I went to the pre-war anti-war marches as an observer. I did not hear arguments about the difficulties of managing a sectarian society, nor questions about troop levels, nor worries about the impact of the war on Iran's status in the region. I heard and saw often reflexive hostility to American power, partisan hatred of Bush, and blindness toward Saddam's atrocities. I remember what I saw. And I feel as estranged from that reflexive position today as I did then. I covered a massive antiwar march in NYC in 2002. It was a madhouse, like they'd opened the doors on all the asylums and told the loons to converge on Manhattan. In retrospect, that, to me, was the antiwar movement. Seeing those people and their blind fury was emotionally powerful: it made it far too easy to assume that anyone who opposed the war was someone like that, or a fellow traveler. That is, that there was no good case against it. That doesn't excuse people like me our error in judgment, but that was part of what created the mindset that wanted to believe and stand with Bush.
This is funny, but it's not ha-ha funny: Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich say New York City's recovery has lessons for fixing Baghdad. Daniel Larison addressed this point a day or so ago, writing: Yes, I think we all remember when the car bombs used to go off in Times Square and the police would daily dredge up five dozen or so bodies of Mets fans who had been tortured, killed and dumped in the East River by irate Yankees fans. The cleansing of the ethnic Italian neighbourhoods was particularly grim. Instead of Moqtada, you had Milken, but the carnage was much the same. It was a tough town back in the ’80s! If only Maliki would outlaw jaywalking in Baghdad, I’m sure that the death squads would cease their killings forthwith.
US intelligence chiefs tell Congress that the Iraqi military is badly compromised because of the infiltration of Shia militias, and at the present time cannot combat the insurgency. This would be the same Iraqi army that the Commander-in-Chief's new plan requires to ... combat the insurgency. Do you suppose it's a coincidence that the intelligence chiefs' testimony came a day after the president made his speech? Hmm. The thing that burns me up so much (well, most of all) about the Bush speech was that there was no recognition of the political realities on the ground in Iraq. His plan would be fine, if the Iraq he's planning for actually existed. From his address to the nation: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad's nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations -- conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.
To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. But we already know, and have known for some time, that the Iraqi national police are thoroughly corrupt by militia infiltration. And now we have US intelligence chiefs testifying that the Iraqi military is so badly compromised by Shia militia that it can't do its job. And yet! Read on: The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy, by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom, and to help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East.
...But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world -- a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them -- and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and our grandchildren. This is all well and good if the government we were fighting to defend were not dedicated to Shia hegemony above all. But I've said this before. Honestly, it drives me around the bend to think that the president has the nerve, after all that's happened, to get on TV and give a speech that defies reality. I'd respect him more if he had the courage and the forthrightness to acknowledge the problem with militia infiltration of both the Iraqi government and the security forces, and if he'd talk about how he was going to deal with that. But he doesn't, because to do so would reveal the situation to be far more bleak than he lets on. It is deception. He knows how bad it is. He's got to. Is he lying to himself, or is he lying to the American people? I honestly don't know. We are about to enter a phase of this war in which our troops are doing vicious house-to-house fighting with these militias. We are about to s
ee our troops ensnared in Grozny, for the sake of a state of affairs that does not exist, and cannot exist, given the passions unleashed by events of the past few years. Do the American people understand this?
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Condi Rice testified in front of the Senate today that the new Bush plan is not an "escalation" but instead an "augmentation." Craziness! Chuck Hagel was withering going up against her.
From a piece in today's NYTimes: He put it far more bluntly when leaders of Congress visited the White House earlier on Wednesday. “I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out,” the president told the Congressional leaders, according to two officials who were in the room. Pressed on why he thought this strategy would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: “Because it has to.” Because. It. Has. To. Feel better about things? I knew you wouldn't.
Steve Sailer's cover story in The American Conservative raises some provocative questions. He notes that we prize "diversity" in this culture, but the more diverse a neighborhood is, the less real community it has. He quotes Robert Putnam, the Harvard prof of "Bowling Alone" fame, who concluded: In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us. What's fascinating about Putnam's observation, according to Sailer, is how fiercely the professor avoided making it. It initially came in a massive study of civic engagement. According to a Financial Times account of Putnam's study: When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.’ Putnam went ballistic over FT's story, saying it left out other findings about the benefits of diversity (here's Putnam's "corrected" version). Putnam points out that we can build cohesive social bonds, but his research seems to indicate that this can only be done with strong pressure from an assimilationist culture. Which we do not have today, and in fact disdain. Sailer's AmCon piece rambles, but I found his general point -- that cultures in which there is a high level of trust among people -- are the ones in which civil society is the strongest. And people, understandably, trust those who are most like them. I, for example, wouldn't want my kids going to most public schools in Dallas, but nor would I send them to the most elite private schools here, even if money were no object. I want my kids going to school where the community shares the same basic moral and spiritual orientation. I can trust what happens in that school, because the people who run it are like me where it matters: not in terms of race, but in terms of values. Anyway, Sailer points out that there's a reason for why various ethnic cultures have different levels of social capital: because their organic social arrangements and mores reflect varying levels of trust within those cultures. I was thinking the other day about how Iraq is doomed not because Arabs inherently can't govern themselves, but because of the cultural patterns that organize society around clan and tribe -- and assume that anyone not within one's own group must be out to cheat you. Arabs who come to the United States and get free of that mindset and a society and economy organized around it prosper. They are as intelligent and as capable as anybody else; they just need the freedom that the rule of law and a government that will enforce contracts provides. Members of other ethnic groups adapt particularly well to America, says Sailer: Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and co-workers. What's frustrating is that it is impossible to have a serious critical discussion about the role personal and communal culture has in driving or retarding individual success in this country. Everybody's terrified of being called racist. So we in the media adopt an idealized Lake Wobegon-ish approach to the discussi
on of "diversity" matters, in which every ethnic/religious group is Above Average, and Wonderful in Every Way. It's so pollyanna. You can only talk about difference if you are going to make a complimentary point about the ethnic or religious group in question. Which is not the worst thing in the world, I guess, but ordinary people of all races make these sorts of observations and generalizations all the time -- and decisions based on them.
It's amazing how fast the news/blog cycle goes. Blogger was down for most of yesterday, so I didn't get to post a thing (that Father Neuhaus/First Things post below has been stacked up over Bnet waiting to land since early yesterday afternoon). And now when I have the chance to write something about the president's actual speech, I'm feeling that everything that can possibly be said has already been said, 50 different ways. Nevertheless! I don't see how anybody can hope this new approach fails. But I also find it hard to grasp how anybody can think it will work. True, nobody knows whether or not it will work, but that's the logic I use to talk myself into buying a lottery ticket. Hey, ya never know. The fundamental problem with the plan is two-pronged: 1) it depends on the competence and credibility of the Maliki government, which demonstrably has neither, and which doesn't want these new American troops; and 2) it is premised on the president's fictitious belief that this is a war of freedom-loving moderates versus terrorists. If neither of those premises -- that the Maliki government is capable and reliable, and that this is a war between good democrats and evil theocrats -- is true, the plan is D.O.A. Neither of those premises is true. US soldiers are going to continue to die to prevent a civil war that's going to happen anyway. I've been thinking favorably about a partition plan as the last gasp before full withdrawal. By the time this Bush plan fails, there won't be time or energy for partition. So where does that leave us? Seems to me, then, that withdrawal may be the only realistic option left, given Bush's choice. I have to say I find the Democrats' plan to hold a non-binding vote on the war to be cowardly. They want to be on record opposing Bush's conduct of it, but they don't want to do anything substantive to end it. What's respectable about that?
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Powerful stuff on the First Things blog regarding the Wielgus scandal. I had not realized that Abp Wielgus, in his resignation, told the congregation that he had come clean to the Pope before -- before -- he accepted the promotion to archbishop. So the Vatican knew what they had on their hands at the time, and they went ahead with the appointment anyway. How astonishingly foolish, to take that risk! Even if the Pope forgave Wielgus, you simply do not entrust a man who formally collaborated with communist oppressors to a paramount position of spiritual headship of a people who were terribly oppressed by the communists. Not if you want to keep the trust and obedience of the people. And now Cardinal Re in the Vatican is saying that Rome actually didn't know about Wielgus. Which has got to be a lie. Thank God for a free press. Here's an excerpt from Robert Miller's post:
More important, in both the sex scandals in the United States in 2002 and in the spy scandals in Poland in 2007, the press—regardless of its motives—is doing what the bishops and the Holy See ought to have been doing—that is, ensuring that men unfit to be priests or bishops cease to function as such. By accepting his resignation, the Vatican has conceded that Wielgus’ past activities make him unsuitable to be archbishop-metropolitan of Warsaw.
Now, either the Vatican knew about Wielgus’ past when it appointed him, as Wielgus says and as the Vatican’s statement in December strongly suggests, or else it did not, as Re now maintains. If the former, then the Vatican’s investigation of Wielgus prior to the appointment was grossly negligent, failing to discover information that was readily available in Poland. If the latter, as seems much more likely, then the Holy See exercised very poor judgment in making the appointment in the first place and even worse judgment in attempting to ram it through even after the truth about Wielgus became public. It stood by Wielgus while it knew he was lying to the faithful by denying the allegations. Many faithful Catholics looking at this situation will think that our bishops, rather than their critics, are the ones doing the real harm to the Church here.
And here's part of what Father Neuhaus has to say about the matter (he sides with Miller on the whole): For many years I have been involved each summer in the Tertio Millennio Seminar on Catholic social doctrine in Cracow, Poland. This summer there were long and agonizing conversations with various Poles about information regarding priests and prelates who may have crossed the line from innocent cooperation to culpable collaboration with the communists. Poland has set up an Institute of National Memory that is going through miles and miles of documentation from the communist years. This is not an anti-Church project. There are devout Catholics among the scholars involved who only want the truth to be known. They had warned that the Wielgus appointment to Warsaw would be a great mistake. But they weren't listened to by the Holy See. Why not? Let me tell you a similar story about this country. Some years back, it became clear that a man I will call Bishop Doe was to be advanced to a leading see in the United States. A group of prominent orthodox Catholic laymen, and at least one priest, journeyed at their own expense to Rome to warn the Vatican not to make this move. According to my personal interviews with two men who were on that trip, they warned a Vatican official in detail about private sexual behavior of Bishop Doe that badly compromised him, and could lead to grave scandal were this to come out in the press (not to mention how a bishop with those kinds of compulsions might administer his new diocese). They weren't listened to. Bishop Doe got his appointment. I spoke to tw
o men -- solid faithful Catholics -- who were on this trip, and to a third who in effect confirmed the trip. None would go on the record, so the story -- with names and places -- never got written. I assure you that when Bishop Doe first found out that sources were talking to me about this, he intervened by proxy in an unsuccessful attempt to get me taken off the story. He knew he was a fraud. Rome knew he was a fraud. But none of that mattered. All that is water under the bridge, I guess, and Bishop Doe is no longer in a position to do any damage. But Father Neuhaus's remark brought the role of those faithful orthodox American Catholics back to mind. They did their part to protect the Church from a morally compromised bishop. And the Holy See did not listen to them. The Holy See had other priorities.
Just did a conference call with Dan Bartlett of the White House, who was advancing Bush's speech tonight. He told us, basically, that Bush is going to get real tough with Prime Minister Maliki, and that the president would be saying tonight that there will be unspecified consequences for Maliki if he doesn't get serious about stopping the militias. Maliki, said Bartlett, will be announcing a big new security strategy. Given that everything the president will announce tonight depends on the credibility and the capability of the Maliki government, why, I asked Bartlett, is the president still willing to have faith in Maliki? He didn't have much of an answer, I'm afraid. The truth is, because that's all we have left. Apres Maliki, le deluge. Unfortunately the call had to end before anybody could ask about domestic political realities. I wanted to ask Bartlett (who's a really good guy -- we've interviewed him here at the News before) why the American people should trust the president's plan this time, when nothing else the president has ever put forward on Iraq, after the invasion itself, has worked? The USA Today/Gallup poll from over the weekend found the American people oppose sending more troops to Iraq by almost two-to-one -- and nearly three out of four Americans believe Bush has no idea how to fix Iraq. Because he doesn't.
The clerical crisis in Poland deepens. A Catholic priest, Fr. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, plans to publish a book next month naming names of priests who collaborated -- including three active bishops. The most explosive aspect to these new revelations is how they go directly to the questions of what did John Paul know about the collaborators, and when did he know it? Did he know that men he appointed as bishops had been secret police informers back in the day? Or was John Paul kept in the dark? Or, as seems plain from his mishandling of the clerical sex abuse scandal, did he know but refuse at some level to accept it because the truth was too hard to bear? You might recall the case of the Polish archbishop, Juliusz Paetz, who resigned under pressure over allegations that he was sexually harrassing seminarians; John Paul, a personal friend, had protected him for some time, but finally was pressured by Polish church officials into relenting. John Paul apparently could not bear the ugly truth in these cases. Which is no excuse, no kind of way. Whatever the case, Fr. Zaleski is for now accepting the view that silence was kept to protect the pope. He says: “The church didn’t want to hurt the pope, but actually, more harm was done by keeping silent,” Father Zaleski, 50, said in an interview at the hilltop compound of a charity he runs outside Krakow. So now the Polish church is faced with having to explain why it protected known collaborators in the priesthood. To those who have followed the hierarchy's handling of the sexual abuse crisis in the US, the sequence of events laid out here by Father Zaleski will sound familiar: “The church is guilty because it had the possibility to cleanse itself by publishing honest data about the clergy’s activities during the Communist time,” Father Zaleski said. The church argues that coming to terms with the past is a matter of personal sin that should be handled within the church in a spirit of forgiveness. It also argues that the public disclosure of secret service files on clergy members could do the church harm because many of the documents are false or misleading.
“I just couldn’t imagine that there were priests who had cooperated with the secret police,” he said.
He sought guidance from the Krakow archbishop, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, a longtime personal secretary to Pope John Paul II. But Father Zaleski said he was at first ignored and then told to pray. Eventually, his superiors advised that he burn the documents.
“They weren’t interested at all in knowing anything about this,” he said, rifling through a stack of photocopies stamped by the Institute of National Remembrance. And get this: the cardinal told Father Zaleski initially to remain silent for the good of the Church: When Father Zaleski decided to begin publishing disclosures in May, Cardinal Dziwisz forbade him to do so or to speak to the press because it would undermine “love for the church and Christ.” The cardinal issued an order prohibiting any member of the clergy from delving into Krakow’s secret police archives without his authorization.
But after he met with Cardinal Dziwisz in June, the archbishop agreed to let him proceed on the condition that Father Zaleski seek comment from the clergymen he intended to identify. They. Never. Learn. The fatal impulse to "protect" the public is disastrous. In fact, this is not about protecting the faithful in the least; it is all about covering the rear ends of the hierarchy. And it's all coming down now. The damnedest thing is, everybody knows that the Polish church, in the main, heroically resisted communism -- just as everybody knew
that most priests in the US church were not sex abusers. But this crazy idea that people require the Church -- and its leadership -- to be spotless and perfect in every way or everything will fall apart led the bishops to make horrible decisions that are damaging the Church far worse than simply owning up to the sin and dealing with it forthrightly would have done. They have brought this entirely upon themselves. Entirely.
Writing in the L.A. Times, neocon war supporter Max Boot says that if we lose the war in Iraq (which he says seems "likely, though not inevitable"), there will be a mythology arising on the Right that blames the media for it. This would be very wrong, writes Boot, because the media have been a much more trustworthy guide to what's actually been going on in Iraq than the US government has been. If you wanted to figure out what was happening over the last four years, you would have been infinitely better off paying attention to their writing than to what the president or his top generals were saying. If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq — which the administration defines as a "unified, stable, democratic and secure nation" — it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point. I remember a high-ranking US military officer giving a briefing to a group of journalists I was a part of last summer, telling us with a straight face that the pacification of Baghdad program was a success. It later emerged that the military could only claim success by cooking the numbers. I think that when all is said and done in Iraq, much of the confidence in the military and in the presidency that the Reagan and Clinton eras slowly built back up after Vietnam will have dissipated. What a legacy George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are leaving to their country.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Andrew Sullivan is quite right to worry about what he terms a "looming gay genocide" presaged by reports that in some places, up to 90 percent of all unborn children diagnosed prenatally with Down Syndrome are aborted. (Read this heart-rending protest against this genocide of the "unfit" by a former Washington Post reporter who is the mother of a Down child). Now top medical experts are advising that all pregnant women undergo testing for Down Syndrome -- the unspoken reason being so you can abort the child. We have never had prenatal screening for Down in any of our kids, because we would have accepted the child no matter what. But dramatically fewer people make that choice. What worries Andrew Sullivan is that if a gay gene is discovered, and a prenatal screening test can be devised, that all kinds of people will quietly abort their gay unborn children. Oh, they'll convince themselves that it's all humanitarian: that this world is so cruel that they'd like to spare their child the suffering. But the truth is, they don't want a gay child. So they'll kill him or her in the wound. Ironically, the mothers and fathers who will accept such children will be, aside from cultural liberals, conservative Christians who hold all life to be sacred, period. These are the same people who were called troglodytes and hicks back in the early 1900s, when eugenics were all the rage among the most progressive sorts. As the prophetic Philip Rieff told us, we now live in a therapeutic world in which right and wrong are determined by a utilitarian calculus: to increase pleasure and decrease pain. The value of suffering, of struggle toward compassion (com + passio = suffering with), fewer and fewer people accept. If you believe that an individual has the right to take the life of her unborn child, on what grounds do you complain when people exercise that right to kill their girl children in India, or their gay children in the US?
A reader is also a fan of Jack Beeching's "The Galleys of Lepanto," the popular history of the famous 1571 sea battle that saved Europe from the Ottoman Turks. The reader writes: It's a fine book, isn't it? A lot of things are illuminated by Beeching's treatment of that age. I was struck by his demonstration (1) of the feebleness of Capitalism (the Venetian intrigues and waffling) in the face of a determined enemy, and (2) of the indifference or even hostility of the Spanish (including the great Don John) to freedom as a political doctrine. One of Christendom's greatest heroes would be utterly perplexed and alarmed by the banner under which we today fight same enemy. The reader is correct. There was real concern in Europe that the Venetians would in effect sell the Turks the rope they'd use to hang Christendom. According to Beeching, they did sell their lousiest galleys to the Pope for an earlier botched attempt to turn back the Turks. One thing that struck me is the overwhelming cruelty of the age, on all sides. Beeching mentions that as cruel as the Christians were, it was in violation of their religious teaching, whereas there was no prohibition on same within Islam. Even so, it is hard to read that book without realizing that what we're seeing now in Baghdad, and what we saw a decade or so ago in the former Yugoslavia, is how life has been for most people on the planet, most of the time. Civilization as we know it is a rare and precious thing -- and not the natural state of mankind. One final thing: how many people realize how extensive the Islamic raids into Europe were? Muslim pirates would rape and pillage entire villages, and haul off human cargo to be sold in the slave markets of Constantinople, and elsewhere. One U.S. scholar claims that over 1 million Europeans were taken into slavery by Muslims, though that number might be smaller (still, if it were half that, that's still incredible). To be sure, nobody emerges from the history of Muslim-Christian engagement with clean hands, but whenever you hear someone griping about cruel the Crusades were to Muslims, remember the 300 years of slave raids in coastal Europe conducted by Muslims.
Monday, January 08, 2007
A Catholic priest friend sent the news that Warsaw Archbishop Wielgus had resigned over collaborating with the communist secret police, and subject-lined his e-mail: "Amazing. One of them has taken responsibility." What he meant was that it was extraordinary that a bishop actually owned up to his grave moral fault, and stepped down. We don't know whether Wielgus stepped down voluntarily, or was pushed out by the Vatican, but here's an interesting paragraph from the Catholic News Service account: By Vatican standards, the statement by its spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, was unusually direct: "The behavior of (Archbishop) Wielgus during the years of the communist regime in Poland seriously compromised his authority, even with the faithful." If that's in fact why Pope Benedict canned Wielgus -- that the compromised archbishop would have "seriously compromised" authority -- then it speaks highly of Benedict's judgment. This is the same basic point that I and others made about the cost of Pope John Paul leaving in power US bishops who had been seriously compromised by their conduct in the sex abuse scandal. The actions of bishops like Cardinal Mahony and others were so beyond the pale that standing behind them did not make the Church seem strong, but rather eroded people's trust in its moral authority. Which is always a big deal, but even moreso when the effective moral witness of the Church is desperately needed to fight the Culture of Death. I was thinking about this yesterday flying back from Florida, and engrossed by a book sent to me by a friend, "The Galleys at Lepanto." It's a gripping narrative of the events and personalities leading up to the historic defeat of the Turkish fleet by the fleet of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto. I was struck by how morally serious Pope Pius V was about the need for personal holiness among clerics and ordinary Christians as the battle that would decide Christendom's fate drew near. This austere Counter-Reformation pope had apparently had enough of the corruption in clerical ranks, and deeply believed things needed to be cleaned up before God's eyes. From a purely sociological/psychological perspective, one could say that it became important for the people who would be asked to fight and even die in this war to believe that they were doing so for a sacred purpose. And part of doing that was shoring up the moral authority of the Church. Also on the flight, I watched "The Queen," that terrific current film staring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II. Can't recommend it highly enough. It is a portrait of how the Queen, living in isolation, literally cannot comprehend how her seemingly unfeeling response to Diana's death was seriously eroding her standing -- and that of the monarchy itself -- with the British people. As the film depicts events, it's not that Elizabeth is a bad person (though she is frosty) so much as that she is operating under an older standard of behavior that has no power any longer. She believed quite sincerely that the thing one does is stand firm on protocol; she did not grasp how much the world had changed, and her inability to grasp that the British public had far different expectations of her than they did when her own personal standards were formed deeply damaged her personal authority, and the authority of the institution she embodied. In the end, she was dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing, and the crisis subsided. But she had no instinctive feel for it. I wonder to what extent John Paul's intransigence on the sex-abuse crisis and the responsibility of US bishops reflected a similar kind of regal "lostness" in modernity. Nobody can doubt that the late pope was a good man, indeed a holy one. But he was so
blind about the damage the sex-abuse scandals were causing to the Church's authority. He didn't see it, didn't want to see it. As Jason Berry would report about the sex scandal that swallowed up Cardinal Groer of Vienna, the Holy Father resisted facing the ugly facts, until Cardinal Schoenborn, Groer's successor, apparently broke through John Paul's denial. Meanwhile, the Austrian church hemorrhaged authority. I think it's likely that John Paul, playing by the old-world rules, honestly thought that the people would lose confidence in the institution if its high personages were seen as fallible; in fact, in modern times the Pope's having moved decisively against a gravely corrupt high churchman would be more likely to bolster the confidence of the people in the institution and its leaders. The old way of doing business actually caused the church to lose face. What do you suppose accounts for this phenomenon? I'm sure there's a Rieffan point to make here about psychological man as the archetype for our times, but I think there is also a matter of how people understand justice in an age of mass media and mass democracy. In an age of mass democracy, people have little sympathy for the idea that there are institutions -- the monarchy, the church hierarchy, and so forth -- in which the leaders sit atop an eyrie far above the people (this is a point brought out brilliantly in "The Queen"'s treatment of Tony Blair). And in an age of mass media, that sense is emotionalized, amplified and spread ubiquitously. Elites can, like Elizabeth and her inner circle in the film, look upon the new conventions with contempt and defiance, but they only hurt themselves. Ultimately, you cannot stare down the camera. Anyway, with regard to Wielgus, say a prayer to Fr. Jerzy Popieluzcko, a heroic Catholic priest martyred by the Polish secret police, for his soul.
So the New York Times Magazine does a Q&A with Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. Here's an excerpt: For all your devotion to education and good deeds, government officials in various countries have tried to link you to extremist groups, including Hamas. What do you think of Hamas?
That’s an extremely loaded question.
Can you try to answer it?
I have never supported a terrorist group or any group that did other than charity and good to humankind.
O.K., but many of us here in the States would like to see moderate Muslims make more of an effort to denounce the extremist fringe of the faith. Very few mainstream Muslims have publicly criticized their radical brethren.
If I am not an example of that, then tell me, Who is?
So would you say you have contempt for a terrorist group like Hamas?
I wouldn’t put those words in my mouth. I wouldn’t say anything on that issue. I’m here to talk about peace. I’m a man who does want peace for this world, and I don’t think you will achieve that by putting people into corners and asking them very, very difficult questions about very contentious issues. Hmm, here's a Muslim cultural leader unwilling to answer a simple. straightforward and legitimate question, and who in fact blames the reporter for causing conflict by bothering to ask the question. Golly, where have I heard that before? Where, oh where?
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Set your bookmarks now for Monday's debut of the "Small Is Still Beautiful" blog, which will explore ideas in Joseph Pearce's new book on the continuing relevance of E.F. Schumacher's thought. Jeremy Beer writes: Crunchy cons, reactionary radicals, localists, conservationists, decentralists, agrarians, traditionalists—this blog is for you. And if you hate all of that stuff, well, you may want to check out this blog—and Joseph Pearce’s book—just to see what the enemy is up to now. I've read the book, and it's wonderful. If you liked "Crunchy Cons" at all, you'll definitely want to read "Small Is Still Beautiful." And the blog discussion should be a lot of fun. This, from Pearce's opening post: Schumacher, along with that other great subsidiarist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, championed the idea of self-limitation. This necessary virtue for a healthy economy, a healthy culture and a healthy environment, is enshrined in the everyday realities of family life. Families teach us to be selfless and to sacrifice ourselves for others. It is these very virtues that are necessary for the practice of the economic and political virtues so sadly absent from our ailing and deteriorating world.
The increasing atomisation of society in the direction of self-centred individualism not only undermines the family but undermines the present and future health of the economy and the environment. The elevation of so-called “rights” over responsibilities has further accentuated the rise (preceding the fall) of heedless hedonism with its rampant consumption of the world’s resources.
In short, therefore, and to conclude these opening remarks, all true economics begins with the Family and ends with the Family. Small is still beautiful because families still matter!
This is the only thing I remember from this morning's paper, this story that makes you want to scream with rage: Eight people have been found dead since Jan. 1, seven of them shooting victims, with the most recent being a young woman found lying on her bed in the Uptown section Friday morning, shot in the head.
As the police were scrambling to investigate that killing and the others, mostly of young men gunned down in high-crime areas, grief-stricken neighbors gathered outside the house of Helen Hill, an independent filmmaker, and her husband, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, who were shot by an intruder early Thursday morning in the Faubourg Marigny section, the authorities said.
Ms. Hill, 36, well known in the local film community and the recipient of several awards, was killed; Dr. Gailiunas, who specialized in treating the city’s poor, survived his wounds. The police found him kneeling by the front door, bleeding and holding the couple’s 2-year-old son in his arms. His wife lay nearby, shot in the neck. The child was not hurt. Just imagine that scene, will you? No wonder the Gailiunas's neighbor said: “You know, there are people in this neighborhood trying to bring it back,” said Mr. Jones, the bed-and-breakfast owner. “I’m tired of this. I’m ready to torch the whole neighborhood.” Anybody reading this from New Orleans? How do you feel about this killing, and the spate of killings this new year? Does it make you want to leave? Will you? I visited with a friend of mine over the Christmas break. She and her husband live near downtown. They're passionate New Orleanians, but she seemed worn out and despairing over the city's fate, and its prospects for recovery. You want to be hopeful and encouraging, but the absolute horror of this crime against that family is -- well, for me it's too much.
Next week President Bush will announce plans to deploy 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad. I hope he walks right into a buzzsaw. Even neocon Charles Krauthammer, who has backed the Iraq war to the hilt, sees the uselessness of this gesture in light of the Saddam hanging. His column is a must-read. Key excerpt: The world saw Hussein falling through the trapdoor, executed not in the name of a new and democratic Iraq but in the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose death squads have learned much from Hussein.
The whole sorry affair illustrates not just incompetence but also the ingrained intolerance and sectarianism of the Maliki government. It stands for Shiite unity and Shiite dominance above all else.
We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government. This governing coalition -- Maliki's Dawa, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Sadr's Mahdi Army -- seems intent on crushing the Sunnis at all costs. Maliki should be made to know that if he insists on having this sectarian war, he can well have it without us.
You really can't find a better guide to the new Pelosi Congress than Andy Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard. The smothering Washingtonian crappiness of it all, I mean (and you know good and well that if the GOP had held the Congress, he would have given that sorry-a** bunch the same treatment). Great piece. Thanks to reader Minkoff for sending it in.
The Catholic writer Gil Bailie notes that Nancy Pelosi, Washington's most prominent Catholic politician, has voted time and time again against her Church's teaching on the sanctity of life. Bailie makes a point that cannot be made often enough: Of all the many principles that constitute the Church's social and moral teachings, the sanctity of life and the mandate to protect the most innocent and most vulnerable from being killed in their mother's wombs is paramount. The Church's position on war, political injustice, discrimination, immigration, economic inequality, and so on, are all matters of prudential judgment with which the Church as a moral teacher is quite legitimately concerned, but for which she does not take a stand that is in any way comparable to her stand on the sanctity of life. The sanctity of life issue is not one among many. Why do some Catholic bishops continue to succor politicians like Pelosi? Where is the courage of Catholic bishops of yore, like the late Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans, who excommunicated several segregationist Louisiana Catholic politicians who tried to make it illegal for the Church to integrate Catholic schools? (And yes, because every time I write about Catholics, a small but vocal minority assumes I'm trying in some way to extol the virtues of Orthodoxy by criticizing Catholicism; it's not true, but all the same, here's an Orthodox priest rightly calling for the Orthodox Church to censure of pro-abortion Orthodox politicians Sens. Paul Sarbanes and Olympia Snowe. And here's an Orthodox writer criticizing the Ecumenical Patriarch for publicly praising the pro-abortion Sarbanes as a "good and faithful servant.") When church leaders -- Catholic, Orthodox and otherwise -- fail to reprove or impose any sanction at all upon members of the Church who actively promote the evil of abortion, they not only fail in their responsibility before God, they undermine the moral authority of their church. Mark Gordon says that this coddling Caesar instead of speaking prophetically to him has a grave potential cost. Here's Gordon, who is Catholic: Not only do many bishops expect the star treatment for themselves, they are often eager to extend that same perquisite to other members of their social class: the rich, the powerful, the “connected.” This sad truth was punctuated for me in 1998, when one of the innumerable Kennedy family scions, Michael Kennedy, died in a tragic skiing accident in Colorado. On the day following the mishap, Bernard Cardinal Law, then the Archbishop of Boston, cancelled his appointments and made haste via chauffeured limousine to Hyannisport in order to “minister” to the once-more stricken Kennedy clan, whose members had been quite noisily thumbing their nose at the Church for decades. The Cardinal’s response was characterized by some as an act of mercy, if not evangelization. The truth, I think, is that it was merely a gesture of class solidarity. The cardinal reflexively considered himself to be personal pastor to the powerful, the wealthy, the important people, people like him. Fact is, he wouldn’t have thought of not going.
I remember reflecting at the time how askew the Cardinal’s priorities must have seemed to a hypothetical Margaret O’Sullivan. Imagine a lace-curtain Irish lady who lives on the third-floor of a tenement in Dorchester. She attends Mass every morning, silently reciting the Rosary while walking the several blocks to her family parish. Faithful to the Church’s teaching, Mrs. O’Sullivan and her late husband, a mechanic for the transportation authori
ty, raised eight children. Two are toll-takers on the Mass Pike and two are housewives. There’s a cop, a priest, a junior at UMass and a graphic artist. Mrs. O’Sullivan never had a proper education, and so there is plenty she doesn’t know, but this she surely does: if one of her children or grandchildren is killed skiing in New Hampshire (none of them could afford Aspen), there is no way - none - that the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston is going to cancel his appointments, hop the Red Line to Morrissey Boulevard and climb the wainscoted back staircase to the O’Sullivan compound. And he won’t be offering any graveside comfort at Cedar Grove either. And if you suggest he might, Margaret will reply sharply, “Yeah, right. Who am I, Rose Kennedy?”
Here’s my point: Until leaders in the Church begin to say to unfaithful politicians, “I’m sorry, I’ve got a wake in Dorchester this evening and that’s far more important than your award from the women’s studies department at Boston College,” or “Senator, do not present yourself to me for Communion unless you first confess and make a public act of contrition” or “No, Governor, you’re going to have to take your case to the marriage tribunal like everyone else” — until then they have no hope of winning back the O’Sullivan family. Because what I didn’t tell you about Margaret is that while she’s still faithful, most of her eight grown children, including the priest, think the Church is a crock. If you want to know why you can ask Cardinal Law, whom you’ll find at the Basilica of St. Mary Major, Rome, where he serves as archpriest. It’s a very appropriate sinecure for a Very Important Person. (There's a real-life Mrs. O'Sullivan: her name is Margaret Gallant, and here are the letters she wrote to Cardinal Medeiros of Boston begging him to do something about the child-molesting priest John Geoghan. She was ignored.) When I hear well-intentioned people of whatever church respond to this or that example of egregious clerical behavior by saying that no church is free of sin, I agree with that, but I wonder what the person making that statement is really saying. More often than not, it's a kind of invocation against despair, and having to come to terms with what serious moral failure on the part of authoritative religious leaders might mean. In ages past, when our culture was more unified, clerics could get away with various sins and hypocrisies because the Church (broadly speaking, to include all confessions) had such institutional respect. That day has long gone, and the cost of failing to live up to institutional standards can be great. Here's sociologist Philip Rieff, from "The Triumph of the Therapeutic": The death of a culture begins whe 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 little 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 actuely 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. Rieff was a secular Jew, and did not mourn the demise of Christian culture. But he did observe, as a sociologist, the fact that whatever else you might say about the Church, it held together Western civilizati
on, and now its power to do so is gone. Crucially, Rieff says that every culture establishes itself as a "system of moralizing demands" that guides those within the culture. He writes: Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority. With more or less considered passion, men submit to the moral demand system -- and, moreover, to its personifications, from which they cannot detach themselves except at the terrible cost of guilt that such figures of authority exact from those not yet so indifferent that they have ceased troubling to deny them." [emphasis mine -- RD.] This is why it's risky to be indifferent to the failure of religious authorities to take the faith seriously, and to demonstrate that they do by their actions. They are counting on the masses to be too habituated to deferring to their office, or to guilt-ridden, to defy them. I doubt very much anybody's going to walk away from the Catholic Church because Archbishop Smith or Monsignor Jones failed to rebuke Nancy Pelosi, or will throw off Orthodoxy because the Ecumenical Patriarch sucked up to Paul Sarbanes. Still, whether foolish or not, people do tend to identify faith with its personifications. And as Mark Gordon observes, when religious leaders effectively deny the truth by what they do or what they fail to do, they make it a lot easier for people tempted to think that the Church, or the faith itself, is a crock. UPDATE: Favog comments, managing to bring in the skeezy ex-Dolphins coach Nick Saban into the mix. I'm still down in south Florida, and that guy's name is beneath mud here. His reputation is so low it could stand up under a pregnant rattlesnake and still have room to wear its Stetson.
Did you watch Saddam's hanging on video? I did. It meant nothing to me, not really. But then again, I'm not an Iraqi Shiite. I'm not an Iraqi Sunni. I'm not an Arab Muslim. But insofar as their reaction(s) affect the future of Iraq, a nation that my country is currently occupying, and the broader Middle East, the Saddam video very much affects me. And that video, it must be said, is an absolute masterstroke of contemporary warfare in the mass media age, in which information matters enormously. It was astonishing, really, how the official Iraqi government story about Saddam's execution was obliterated almost instantly by that video. Saddam went to his death with his head held high, defiant and contemptuous. He was not humiliated. Score one for the Sunnis. But the Shia made sure that Saddam knew that in his last moments on earth, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of his enemies from the opposing tribe, and that they, at least, saw his hanging not as a victory for justice, but as a victory for them. Score one for the Shia, for making the mother of all Iraqi insurgent propaganda videos. But it's useful propaganda for both sides, and their allies in the region. The civil, maybe even regional, war ramps up. And we can do very damn little to stop it. This is a great example of what military analyst David Kilcullen, quoted in George Packer's recent New Yorker story, means when he says, "The globalized information environment makes counterinsurgency even more difficult now." Kilcullen's great insight is that the war that various Islamic radicals are fighting is primarily an information war: “When you go on YouTube and look at one of these attacks in Iraq, all you see is the video,” Kilcullen said. “If you go to some jihadist Web sites, you see the same video and then a button next to it that says, ‘Click here and donate.’ ” The Afghan or Iraqi or Lebanese insurgent, unlike his Vietnamese or Salvadoran predecessor, can plug into a global media network that will instantly amplify his message. After Kilcullen returned from Afghanistan last month, he stayed up late one Saturday night (“because I have no social life”) and calculated how many sources of information existed for a Vietnamese villager in 1966 and for an Afghan villager in 2006. He concluded that the former had ten, almost half under government control, such as Saigon radio and local officials; the latter has twenty-five (counting the Internet as only one), of which just five are controlled by the government. Most of the rest—including e-mail, satellite phone, and text messaging—are independent but more easily exploited by insurgents than by the Afghan government. And it is on the level of influencing perceptions that these wars will be won or lost. “The international information environment is critical to the success of America’s mission,” Kilcullen said.
In the information war, America and its allies are barely competing. America’s information operations, far from being the primary strategy, simply support military actions, and often badly: a Pentagon spokesman announces a battle victory, but no one in the area of the battlefield hears him (or would believe him anyway). Just as the Indonesians failed in East Timor, in spite of using locally successful tactics, Kilcullen said, “We’ve done a similar thing in Iraq—we’ve arguably done O.K. on the ground in some places, but we’re totally losing the domestic information battle. In Afghanistan, it still could go either way.” Do you know who's in charge of the U.S. Government's informational warfare strategy? Karen Hughes, whose primary qualification seems to be that she knows the president and she's been a helpful domestic political adviser. In terms of effectiveness, isn't this kind of like putting Karl Rove in charge of CentCom?
A reader writes: Can a crunchy con love Louis Vuitton? Are luxury goods consistent with a crunchy con lifestyle?
I am a future homeschooling, NFP-using, farmers' market-going SAHM and self-professed crunchy con who was the recipient of a very nice Louis Vuitton wallet from my husband from Christmas. I confess to some squeals of delight. But then I began to think about how luxury goods fit in with my avowed crunchy con-ness. At first, I thought they were incompatible. Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Prada, etc. seem like hallmarks of the commercialized, trendy, materialistic modern culture that crunchy cons shun.
But if a person has the financial means, is paying more for a finely- made wallet that will last years really different than paying extra for organic milk and produce or hormone-free, grass fed beef? I like to support small dairies and family-run farms with my grocery purchases. Similarly, while most luxury houses are large corporations, they employ skilled leather makers in developed countries who produce fewer, more expensive items than say, Wal-Mart, who imports cheaper wallets from lesser developed countries mass produced by laborers who are paid mere cents a day. When I thought about it this way, I came to the conclusion that perhaps acquiring luxury items was not wholly inconsistent with a crunchy con lifestyle after all. Or am I just justifying something that, fundamentally, is overtly materialistic? Does anyone really need a $700 wallet?
If you have any thoughts on this (and the time to share them), I would really appreciate it. Thank you very much! Thanks for the question. Nobody "needs" a $700 wallet, but I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with having one, especially as a gift. Your analogy of paying more for milk because of issues having to do with quality and social goods (supporting local busineses and family farmers) is a good one. And sometimes a more expensive good provides greater value in the long run. I drive an old Mercedes that I bought fairly cheap, and which is so solidly made that I expect to be driving long after my wife's 2005 Ford minivan bites the dust. Ten years ago, I bought an Armani suit to wear to my wedding, and though I justified the expense by saying that it was a special-occasion expenditure, I've been gratified by how well that suit has held up over the years, in large part because of the craftsmanship of the garment. Mind you, there's no way that today, with a family of three and a mortgage, that I could afford an Armani suit, and to spend that kind of money on one would be in my case an unjustifiable extravagance. My point is that it's hard to come up with hard and fast rules on whether or not a specific purchase is morally justified. We should always be aware that we can rationalize any temptation. I constructed a complex case for getting rid of our old, tiny color TV and buying a big old flat-screen TV this Christmas. We don't watch a lot of TV, but we do Netflix movies on the weekends. Wouldn't it be nice to watch them on the big screen? And given how small our living room is, wouldn't it be great to mount the flat screen on the wall and regain the corner where the old-fashioned set now sits? Flat-screen TVs are finally in my price range, and I made some extra money this year, so really, buying one wouldn't have been a big hit for us. So, honey, why not? Julie reminded me that we need to spend a significant amount of money to make some repairs on our house. There's no way to justify buying an appliance that we wouldn't often use with those expenses hanging over us -- to say nothing about the need to save, and to put money up to pay for the kids' college. Moreover, it's still a television, she said, and it's hard to justify spending $1000 on a TV, period, at least on our income. She had a few more reasons, but she revealed to me that I'd totally rationalized buying something we absolutely didn't need, and r
eally couldn't justify on any solid grounds. It was a good exercise in me seeing how willing I was to deceive myself and abandon my principles to get what I wanted. Anyway, if I were in your shoes, I'd be glad my husband bought me such a thoughtful gift, and I'd cherish it not only for its beauty and utility, but also because the day will surely come when you do have kids, and the idea of being able to drop $700 on a leather wallet will be a fond memory. ;-D
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Writing in Christianity Today, Bradley Nassif, an Orthodox believer, explores the reasons why more Evangelicals are engaging Eastern Orthodoxy, and why it appeals to them. He also says that Orthodoxy is bound to be changed by Evangelicals embracing it -- and changed for the better, in part because Evangelicals can help the Orthodox figure out how to make their ancient faith speak effectively to the modern world: I haven't merely thought about Orthodox and evangelical compatibility; for most of my life, I have lived it. I'm a Lebanese American who grew up in the Orthodox Church of Antioch and was transformed by Christ during my high school days in Wichita, Kansas, through the leading of evangelical friends. I did my doctoral studies under the late Orthodox theologian Fr. John Meyendorff. A portion of my scholarship over the past two decades has been devoted to introducing the Orthodox tradition to evangelical students and faculty in North America. I've also pioneered dialogues between Orthodox believers and evangelicals, and I have spoken on the subject at World Council of Churches meetings in Egypt and Germany.
Thus, I bring an intellectual and experiential knowledge of both communities, which is probably why I have a love/hate relationship with them. I'm not fully at peace with either one. Although I'm absolutely committed to the theological truth of the Orthodox church, I'm equally persuaded that we have not made that truth meaningful or accessible to our own parishioners or to those who peer inside our windows. And because of my Orthodoxy, I'm also committed to the evangelical faith.
[snip]
Of course, faithfulness to the truth of the Great Tradition, not organizational continuity, is what counts most. My point is simply that those who value classical faith will increasingly engage with Orthodox churches, which incarnate the Great Tradition day by day as a living tradition. I'm not arguing that the Great Tradition is the exclusive property of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is not. Early church fathers, mothers, ascetics, councils, creeds, art, music, and spirituality are the rightful heritage of all orthodox Christians—Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike. There is no room here for Orthodox triumphalism or romanticism. All orthodox believers share a common ecumenical heritage. But few historians would dispute the conclusion that in comparison to the 20,000 Protestant denominations in existence today, the Orthodox community can most justifiably claim to be the fullest heir apparent of the Great Tradition.
So I've just landed in Key West for a Liberty Fund conference on "Wealth, Happiness and Liberty in Modern Economic Debate." I'm huddled in a lean-to on the beach, ministering to bedraggled Cuban rafters as they slog ashore, and unable to offer the rum because I gave all my cash to a little Muslim match girl at the airport who was collecting donations to buy Bratz dolls for the orphans in Gaza. All I can manage to do to comfort the poor souls is to translate Mises in pidgin Spanish. Please pray for poor me, stuck in Key West in January. I'll check back in when I can.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Here's a sobering meditation on human evil by Theodore Dalrymple, who is a prison doctor. He's reviewing a book about the Rwandan genocide. Writes Dalrymple: One of the most haunting things in this book, if it is possible to pick anything out in particular, is that many of the victims did not so much as cry out when caught by the murderous genocidaires: they died in complete silence, as if speech and the human voice were now completely worthless, redundant, beside the point. I have often wondered why the people went into the gas chambers silently, without fighting back, but I suppose that when you witness absolute human evil committed by the people with whom you once lived, and who, at least metaphysically, are just like you, you see no point in the struggle for existence. Non-existence, perhaps, seems preferable to existence. Dalrymple ends by saying that if you're the sort of person who thinks things couldn't possibly get worse (so it's okay to toss prudence to the wind), you need to read this book.
The Rev. Pat Robertson says God told him there would be mass killings in the US at the hands of terrorists this year: "I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that." Well, I think that prediction is a safer bet than that the Mahdi will arrive, but still, Rev. Pat doesn't have a very good track record re: prognostication. Honestly, why on earth does he bother? I think he's a very sincere man about this kind of thing, but why drag God's name into guesswork? As I've mentioned before, I spent a year or two as an adolescent obsessed with "The Late Great Planet Earth." It's interesting to look back at that monster bestseller now and to see how much Hal Lindsey got wrong. But his career as a prophecy-monger doesn't seem to have suffered. Every so often I catch Jack Van Impe and his wife, the lovely Rexella, on TV. Their program hasn't changed in decades. They're still reading the newspaper and finding solid evidence that Jesus is going to come back the day after tomorrow. You'd think after a while people would stop paying attention. You'd think that they would wise up. But why should they? They've got a profitable gig going, playing off people's fears. Thing is, I don't think they, or Pat Robertson, or most of these televangelists who traffic in prophecy are being cynical. I think they're entirely sincere. Which in some ways is even more disturbing. Anyway, now's a time to restate Rod's Locutionary Rule: Whenever someone starts a sentence with "God told me," disregard the rest, and watch your wallet.
The January issue of Chronicles turned up in my office over the holiday break, and in it I found an appreciative review of Roger Scruton's new memoir. The review's author, Derek Turner, penned a paragraph that stayed with me: Scruton is in love with loss for loss's sake -- for instance, he is captivated by the idea (born of discovering his grandfather's real surname) that he may be partly of German-Jewish ancestry and a descendant thereby of a lost cerebral culture. This Gothic sensibility is one that will be instinctively familiar to many readers of Chronicles; it is at once conservatism's most appealing characteristic and its chief weakness -- for how many will follow a repining trumpet any more than an uncertain one? I thought: well, that's me. And further: my own conservatism has deepened and grown more pessimistic in recent years, and in fact I see a dividing line at 9/11/01. Since that day, I've found myself, in a broad sense, preoccupied with issues of Decline and Fall. I suppose that's easy to understand. The trauma of that day for me lay not only in actually having witnessed one of the towers fall, and that autumn's aftermath, but in having to come to terms with the dread fact that nothing humans build is permanent, and that a few evil and audacious men can, in the space of a single cloudless morning, wreak previously unimaginable destruction. Also in that time I lost my Catholic faith, upon which I had built so much of my own self-awareness, identity, certainty, because I lacked the resources to endure the scandal (the sexual abuse of children, yes, but like Father Wilson says, that is only one manifestation of the general emergency in the Church). And I became a father of three; true, my oldest was not yet two on 9/11, but what I mean is I grew into a more full awareness of the responsibilities of fatherhood, as well as had two more children -- which has a way of focusing one's attention on the permanent things and their durability in the face of corrosive modernity. And then there was the war, which I supported completely, for reasons that now appear absurd. Our country has been humiliated by this adventure, by our hand devils have been unleashed in the desert, and God knows what's coming next. My generation -- I am almost 40 -- is now having to deal with something that we, formed by the triumphalist confidence of the Reagan era, never have done: the limits of American power, and in turn the falsity of a vision of the world that assumed that hyperpower America could pretty much do what it wanted. I think I've come to regard with deep suspicion, and probably even contempt, the blithe optimism that seems to be our American way. To borrow a phrase from Turner, I believe it's liberalism's most attractive quality and greatest weakness to be constantly focused on the future, and to turn the expectation that things will keep getting better and better into a conviction. There is something sterile in a repining conservatism, true, but there is something unreal in the kind of liberalism that characterizes the American spirit (and even the spirit of many Americans who claim the label "conservative"). It is more fecund that repining conservatism, true, but so many of its projects are stillborn disasters. In this light, better the repining trumpeter than the pied piper. I'm getting ready to head to Florida for a Liberty Fund conference on Wealth and Happiness, and as part of the advance reading, I've been delving into Adam Smith, Max Weber and other economic writers. Weber observes that the spirit of capitalism is a new thing, a product of modernity, which for the first time conceived of moneymaking itself as a virtuous end. And broadly speaking, what one learns from these writers is that to succeed, capitalism requires people to keep working hard under the illusion tha
t wealth will make them happy, that they can find their heart's desire in possessing material things. It would seem to follow that the production of wealth requires that one keep moving, always moving, and the thing to avoid most of all is the tragic spirit. And so we in America have cast it out. And yet, for all my increased Derbish gloom and cultural pessimism, I find that the pleasure I take in private life and personal pursuits is ripening. The more I grow to dislike people in the abstract, the more I like them in the particular. The more despairing I become about the world in abstract, the more affection for and hope in the world in particular I have. And in my religious faith: driving on the outskirts of my hometown the other day, and seeing acres and acres of trees I grew up with gone, the ground scraped bare to make way for the four-lane highway, I felt acutely the Christian truth that we are no more than wayfarers. Nothing lasts but God, and how grateful I am that He will have me and mine, however damaged and unworthy we may be. On the eve of middle age, I feel drawn ever more to the idea of shoring up, of gathering in, of building battlements against the fragmentation, the desolation, the destruction that is upon us and is to come. I always have Alasdair MacIntyre's words before me: 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. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a God, but for another - doubtless very different - St. Benedict. My joys and my pleasures are considerable, but they are much narrower and smaller than they once were. It is hard to convey them, I think because we are so conditioned to a particular kind of optimism -- which is in fact unreal -- that amounts sometimes to a forced cheerfulness. I believe I've come through the last five years to find the virtue of real hope, versus the false hope of mere optimism. The temptation conservatives like me have to face is indeed that of the repining trumpet (it's not for nothing that my favorite jazz trumpeter is the melancholic Chet Baker), and instead to work with clear eyes and stout hearts toward locating that hope amid the ruins, and making it live for however much time we are given. Indeed Russell Kirk was right: the world remains sunlit despite its vices. I almost always sign copies of my book with a line from Auden's marvelous poem "Atlantis," which is about the search for Arcadia, which I take as a prescription, even a command: "Stagger onward rejoicing!"
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
A reader writes, about Bratz and suchlike: As the father of a soon-to-be-two-year-old son, I can't say I'm happy about the choices of toys and games being offered up these days. And yet, I feel considerable sympathy for the Mattel executive who justified making Barbie more sexually explicit in order to compete with the Bratz doll. Let's face it; he's in the same situation as movie and TV producers, musicians, and other entertainers. You don't see TV shows like Ozzie & Harriet or the Waltons any more because it's perceived that the vast majority of viewers won't watch wholesome TV with virtually no sexual content. Writers and directors who insist on such material will soon find themselves unemployed - and possibly unemployable. A toy manufacturing executive like the one in your column is no different. If Barbie doesn't adapt to the new market and fails to compete with Bratz, a lot of Mattel's executives will lose their jobs.
It's easy to lambaste Mattel for changing Barbie's appearance and going with the flow of more sexually explicit garbage going to ever younger children. The problem is that if parents are going to allow kids to purchase the slutty Bratz doll while leaving the more wholesome Barbie on the shelf, then all Mattel will have done is lose money for good reason except to soothe somebody's conscience. That's not the free-market capitalist way of thinking and the last time I looked, not many Republican politicians were demanding that private enterprises ignore market reality. You almost need a law like those used for air pollution, hiring practices, and product quality to ensure that conscientious companies don't kill themselves through unilateral disarmament.
The fact is that Mattel wouldn't even consider making changes to Barbie except that parents these days let their daughters buy dolls that look like they work at the Mustang Ranch of Reno, NV - and apparently in sufficient quantity to pose a danger to Mattel's very existence. It's really up to parents and other authority figures to set better examples by not allowing kids to buy this garbage. Or perhaps you enact a law that children under 18 cannot purchase a toy deemed explicit. The reader is right: the free-market, capitalist way of thinking would, in its purest form, have no problem with Bratz, Slutty Barbie, or anything else. The market is purely a mechanism for getting what customers want to them with maximum efficiency and lowest cost (and convincing them that they want things they didn't realize they did). But if we are to live in a purely capitalist order, why should Mattel not sell cigarettes to kids if that's what kids want? The fact is very few people wish to live in that kind of anarcho-capitalism. So we draw the line somewhere. Like the reader, I blame parents for participating in the corruption of their children. Unlike the reader, I don't give corporate America a free pass. The reader is indulging in a right-wing version of the liberal excuse for bad behavior: "Society made them do it." It's not exculpatory to say, "Capitalism made [corporation X] do it." Both consumer and corporation play a role in this destructive dynamic. To be sure, I don't believe selling Bratz dolls should be outlawed, for heaven's sake, but I don't believe everything that is immoral should also be illegal.
This New York Times abortion scandal is pretty amazing stuff. The American Thinker has a good wrap-up, quoting extensively from the Times's own ombudsman's damning verdict. The gist of the story is this: a New York Times Magazine cover story from last April exposed the alleged inhumanity of El Salvador's strict anti-abortion laws. It was built around the case of a woman serving jail time for having aborted her 18-week old fetus. It turns out that the woman was actually in jail for having murdered her already-born baby. The Times writer, Jack Hitt, never checked the court documents. Even worse -- something that the American Thinker piece doesn't mention, but ombudsman Byron Calame's column does -- is this: Exceptional care must be taken in the reporting process on sensitive articles such as this one to avoid the slightest perception of bias. Paul Tough, the editor on the article, acknowledged in an e-mail to me that in reporting this story, Mr. Hitt used an unpaid translator who has done consulting work for Ipas, an abortion rights advocacy group, for his interviews with Ms. Climaco and D.C. This wasn’t ideal, he said, but the risk posed for sources in this situation required the use of intermediaries “to some degree.”
Ipas used The Times’s account of Ms. Climaco’s sentence to seek donations on its Web site for “identifying lawyers who could appeal her case” and to help the organization “continue critical advocacy work” across Central America. “A gift from you toward our goal of $30,000 will help Carmen and other Central American women who are suffering under extreme abortion laws,” states the Web appeal, which Ipas said it took down after I first contacted the organization on Dec. 14. An Ipas spokeswoman called the appeal “moderately successful.” And finally, when Calame called top Times editors on the carpet about it, they stonewalled. They still are stonewalling. Calame concluded, with great restraint, "Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect." Gee, ya think? This is a story that the Times writer and editors clearly wanted to be true. It was politically useful to them. So they cut corners. I think what's more troubling and offensive about the matter is not so much Hitt's sloppiness, but the refusal of the Times editors to own up to it.
Reason magazine, taking note of how peeved many people were over Time's selecting You as its Person of the Year, polled a number of pundits and others to get their choice. They asked me, and I said "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," and explained why. Check out the full list. My favorite choice was Jacob Sullum's selection of Sacha Baron Cohen, who "managed to be accused of elitism for producing a hit comedy that relies heavily on jokes about drinking," defecating and incest."
I've said for some time that we are not paying enough attention to the role religious thinking is playing in the strategic thought of the Islamic world. Here's something new(ish), and freaky: an official Iranian news agency is apparently saying that the Mahdi could appear as early as March, and lead the Muslims in a victorious rout of the Jews and other infidels. (I can't get this particular state-run news agency English language page to open, so I'm going on Joel Rosenberg's interpretation). Here's Rosenberg: The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website says the world is now in its "last days." It claims that the Mahdi will first appear in Mecca, and then Medina. He will conquer all of Arabia, Syria, Iraq, destroy Israel, and then set up a "global government" based in Iraq, interestingly enough, not Iran. Such Islamic eschatology (end times theology) is driving the Iranian regime and helps explains why Iran has no interest in helping the U.S. and E.U. create peace in Iraq or the region, much less in ending its bid for nuclear weapons, the Iraq Study Group Report notwithstanding. The idea that the Islamic messiah is on his way really very soon is, in my view, balderdash, but it's not important that you or I believe it. Does the Iranian leadership believe it, and are they proceeding as if it were true? (How long do you think it will be before someone puts a post in the combox below claiming on the basis of diddly-squat that President Bush believes in "Left Behind" and is making US foreign policy according to Tim LaHaye's teaching? How fast do you think Harvey Lacey can get to his keyboard?)
Reading the lively thread below on the "End is Near" post -- which starts by noting how shocked a NYTimes editorialist was to go to a middle-school pageant recently and see the little girls simulating intercourse while dancing -- I see that there's some discussion about whether or not Christians like me are too preoccupied with sexual decadence in the culture, and what the Bratz mean, and so on and so forth. Fine, I like discussion. But I do wonder at what point more discussion fails to clarify matters, and in fact obscures things, and allows us to avoid making hard decisions that make us squirm. To be blunt, it occurs to me that for those with eyes to see, what's happening in our culture is pretty simple: Look around you. What you see is the Culture of Death. If you partake in it, you will die. If you want to live, you must refuse it, and find some other way to live, and people who will help you and your family keep choosing life. But you cannot be morally neutral, and you cannot compromise with it.In 1999, in the wake of the Columbine massacre, Peggy Noonan wrote an insightful meditation on the event, one that is as fresh as today's headlines. Excerpt: The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam.
Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines on the newsstand, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by--all are waves. The fish--your child--is bombarded and barely knows it. But the waves contain words like this, which I'll limit to only one source, the news:
. . . was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested . . . had her breast implants removed . . . took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired . . . said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide . . . is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens . . . court battle over who owns the frozen sperm . . . contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women . . . died of lethal injection . . . had threatened to kill her children . . . said that he turned and said, "You better put some ice on that" . . . had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself . . . protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism . . . showed no remorse . . . which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student . . . which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiancé . . .
This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody...
And there's more. We forget, those of us who are middle-aged, that we grew up in a time of saner, less sick-making images and sounds.
For instance, the culture of crime only began to explode in the 1960s. We have lived in it for 30 years, and most of us turned out OK. So we think our children will be OK too. But they never had a normal culture against which to balance the newer, sicker one. They have no reference points to the old, boring normality. We assume they know what we know: "This is not right." But why would they know that? The water in which they swim is the only water they've known...
A man called into Christian radio this morning and said a true thing. He said, and I am paraphrasing: Those kids were sick and sad, and if a teacher had talked to one of them and said, "Listen, there's a way out, there really is love out there that will never stop loving you, there's a real God and I want to be a
ble to talk to you about him"--if that teacher had intervened that way, he would have been hauled into court.
Yes, he would have. It occurs to me at the moment that a gun and a Bible have a few things in common. Both are small, black, have an immediate heft and are dangerous--the first to life, the second to the culture of death...
One more thing: I think every intelligent person I know has been having thoughts like this for years, and they don't want to, and they're right not to want to, because it just may be true that this is one problem our resourceful and brilliant country cannot solve. The dark genie is out of the bottle, and swims in the seas.
I can't tell if this NYT op-ed piece is behind the TimesSelect firewall or not, but I sure hope you can read it. It's by a man writing about the pre-Columbian tribes of what is now Mexico and the United States, and how the archeological evidence irrefutably points to their human sacrifices, and even cannibalism. Writer Craig Childs continues: With knowledge of such widespread ferocity, I recently saw Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto,” which deals with the gore of the Mayan civilization. I had heard that the movie’s violence was wildly out of control. But even as I winced at many of the scenes, as a writer and researcher in ancient American archaeology, I found little technical fault with the film other than ridiculous Hollywood ploys and niggling archaeological details.
Indeed, parts of the archaeological record of the Americas read like a war-crimes indictment, with charred skeletons stacked like cordwood and innumerable human remains missing heads, legs and arms. Childs goes on to say that far from dehumanizing the Maya by depicting their savagery, the Gibson film actually humanizes them, by showing them having complex and recognizably human emotions -- even as they behave like savages. For political and cultural reasons, this makes many people squirm. Here's Crawford: How do we rectify the age-old perception of noble and peaceful native America with the reality that at times violence was coordinated on a scale never before witnessed by humanity? The answer is simple. We don’t. It's all of one piece. You can't separate the good from the bad, but have to somehow account for it all. Is this really so far removed from the question of how was it that the most technologically and culturally advanced people on the planet -- the Germans -- could have turned themselves into a nation of mass murderers? It hits even closer to home: on our trip to Louisiana last week, you can't go anywhere in my home parish without seeing gorgeous antebellum plantation homes. But the beauty and grandeur of those houses and the land upon which they were built cannot be divorced from the economic system that built them: one that was built on dehumanizing and brutalizing African people. Now, you have plenty of people who would ignore or downplay the slavery issue, and focus only on what was good and beautiful about the Old South. You also have plenty of people who only want to focus on the slavery, and insist that nothing can ever be good about the culture of the Old South because of its savage treatment of African slaves. There is a great deal of emotional satisfaction in taking either side. There's not much satisfaction to be had in trying to work through the complex truth, and to come to terms with the difficult fact that great good and great evil can exist side by side, both in individual people and within cultures. Perhaps this is the point of the ending of Apocalypto -- with Jaguar Paw and his family not embracing the Spanish conquistadores, but fleeing more deeply into the forest to start over. Gibson could be saying that there is something in the heart of all men that would conquer, and seek a will to power over other men -- that that is an inescapable part of what it means to be human, and to live in civilization. It is difficult, and maybe impossible, for a civilization to be both great and (entirely) good. It is not to embrace relativism to recognize that the capacity for the worst evil exists in all of us, and would express itself if given the chance. Gibson's film forces us to deal with the question of to what extent is civilization -- any civilization -- an alibi for rationalized savagery? [Don't worry, I'm not going Rousseauist on you; I don't believe mankind is naturally good, and civilization corrupts; I believe, though, that civilization is the more or less imperfect way g
roups of men have devised to manage life together in community, and that the good and bad in particular civilizations depend on the good and bad in individuals within that civilization.] See, this is why I think the Holocaust is the most important event of the 20th century, and indeed the most important event of modern history: it destroys once and for all the idea of permanent moral progress, and the related notion that education guarantees moral improvement. In the case of the Nazis, education only helped them kill Jews and other undesirables more efficiently.
Monday, January 01, 2007
It must be. Someone on the New York Times editorial board has discovered that the sexual revolution the Times ballyhooes at every possible turn has some disconcerting effects on kids today. Excerpt: It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so ... one-dimensional.
It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address. You can go on telling yourself that everything is okay, and that it would be elitist or priggish or at least impossible to fight this culture, and shrug and get on with it. Or you can refuse and resist and smile politely in a Bartleby the Scrivener kind of way at those who give their children over to this culture, while inwardly saying, "You people can go to hell if you like, but you're not going to take my kids with you, not if I can help it." I, of course, recommend the latter approach. Which makes for a lot harder job as a parent, but when you consider the alternative...
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