Is it just me, or did it strike anyone else that James Cameron announces the premiere of a documentary film that claims to prove that the central claim of Christianity -- that Jesus rose from the dead, and through his resurrection humanity can be saved from death -- is utter garbage ... and Christians worldwide fail to burn embassies, call for Cameron's murder, or say much of anything.
Well, the Catholic League did put out a press release. So I guess Susan S. is right, and there really is no difference between conservative Christian leaders and their Muslim counterparts. My bad.
Light blogging for the next few days; I'm off early in the ayem to Anchorage, Alaska, where I'll be giving a talk at the university's student union on Thursday night (see the Anchorage paper's feature here). I won't be wearing pants, so come out to jeer. You have been warned. In the meantime, here's a missive from a reader who believes global warming has a bad name. Discuss:
What about global warming benefits?
1. Those shorter, milder winters will mean less demand for heating, which means lower heating bills, less fossil fuel burned, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Those longer summers will mean longer growing seasons, which mean higher crop yields.
3. If global warming persists long enough, our oak forests will expand northward and yield lots of high-quality lumber for centuries.
4. The expanded warm-weather habitat means bass fishermen, et al, will rejoice.
The above benefits are not trivial (well, maybe 4.). Worldwide, they mean trillions of dollars saved in energy costs which could be used to construct sea walls to protect coastal cities (see the Netherlands). The thawing tundra is exposing millions of acres of nutrient-rich soil, and, for example, Siberia could become the next breadbasket for the entire world, alleviating world hunger. Northern Canada and much of Russia will become hospitable for civilization, and new cities could emerge, alleviating population crowding elsewhere.
I have now lived long enough to see many examples of how the media catastrophize change. I remember that, in anticipation of Y2K, we were urged to stock up on bottled water and food, buy a gasoline generator, and hoard cash to protect ourselves from the coming calamity. I remember those African "killer bees" that were moving up from South America to Mexico and were going to kill the California honeybees that pollinate our crops, devastating our state's agricultural economy. And now that global warming is about to extinguish half the species on earth I'm reminded that some of those same climatologists were telling us in the mid-70s that the next ice age was imminent!
I'm all for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but let's put global warming in perspective. The earth regularly goes through cycles of warming and cooling, and the geologic record clearly shows that life has been in its greatest abundance and diversity during the warm periods. Think how warm it must have been when dinosaurs existed. Those huge, cold-blooded creatures needed a lot more warmth than even the most pessimistic climatological models are predicting for the current warming period. And life flourished. The warm oceans teemed with life. Fern forests grew in Colorado.
It's global cooling that we must fear! Before this warming period started, the Laurentian Ice Sheet covered what became Manhattan Island to depths up to thirty feet! Life was not in abundance in that environment. Should the next ice age be similar to the previous ones, folks in the temperate zones will be in deep trouble. I have no idea how we would cope with the enormous demand for energy to keep warm. Maybe we'll have alternate sources of energy. Maybe we'll have to burn fossil fuels to generate greenhouse gasses. Or maybe there will be a tremendous migration to the equatorial zones which are little affected by global cooling and warming. Now that will be a population density to contend with!
I don't mean to alarm you, Rod, though we are about due for the next cooling period, geologically speaking.
I do suggest we start now to figure out how to take advantage of the benefits of global warming in addition to mitigating the disadvantages. That seems much more sensible than just hawking gloom and doom.
I hate clowns. Hate them. Mimes, by the way, are the most annoying of all clowns. And I know I'm not alone.
But even if I did love clowns, I'd still say: What the heck is wrong with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee?!? The inimitable Diogenes over at the Catholic World News blog draws attention to the archdiocesan newspaper's puffing of a priest who gads about in clown drag -- Father's nom de clown is "Stripes" -- and calls it "ministry." Writes Diogenes:
Why not feature a man who finds the spiritual satisfactions of his priestly life -- not in social work or dance or twisting balloons into animal shapes -- but in sacramental ministry? After all, do we want to entice into the priesthood the kind of 22-year-old male that would be attracted by Stripes?
Clowns belong in the circus. Priests belong in church. Any priest who dresses up like a clown forfeits any claim to spiritual authority, as far as I'm concerned. One of these days, the "Godspell" generation will pass from our midst. Hurry!
I've wondered for a while if technology would make it possible for small towns in rural areas to repopulate with knowledge workers and their families -- people who want to get out of the cities and into smaller communities, and for whom that's possible via telecommuting. The kinds of cultural amenities that people used to only be able to get in bigger cities -- a good selection of movies, big bookstores, record stores with a decent selection -- are now available over the web (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc.). Plus you can order specialty foods over the Internet if you can't find what you want locally. And the homeschooling revolution makes families less dependent on local educational institutions. Point is, technology makes small town and rural life more doable for people who before the Internet wouldn't have been able to choose that kind of life without giving up their careers, or certain pleasures of city life. The idea that if you live in a small town you're going to be bored silly is outdated.
Well, Joel Kotkin says this out-migration from urban areas has actually been happening slowly for a while, and it's picking up steam. Excerpt:
Another type of Heartland growth could be described as re-emerging rural hubs. These are usually small and midsized cities that grew up during the period of agricultural expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then began to decline or plateau as early as the 1920s. Prominent examples include Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines and Boise. These communities are exploiting their lower costs, good public schools, universities and better quality of life for middle-class families to lure high-end professional service firms, information companies and diversified, often innovative small manufacturers.
In coming decades, these trends may be further driven by aesthetic preferences, particularly those of retiring baby boomers, for a less dense environment. In contrast to always popular stories about people “returning to the cities”, more than twice as many adults say they would prefer to live in a rural or small town area. That is partly because most Americans perceive rural America as epitomizing traditional values of family, religion, self-sufficiency—someplace attractive, friendlier and safer, particularly for children. These views are held by the majority of suburbanites as well as by a slightly larger proportion of rural residents, suggesting that there is a large, mostly untapped market that would consider a move to a smaller community in the Heartland. As one demographer suggests, “America’s love affair with suburban life may be winding down in favor of the countryside.”
There's a discussion in the piece about Fargo, ND:
These characteristics are the main draw, particularly to relocating thirty-somethings, notes Mike Chambers, founder of the fast-growing biotech firm Aldevron. It’s an experience common to many companies in this buckle of the Brain Belt. “Wherever you go you find people who went out and came back”, says Howard Dahl, CEO of Fargo-based Amity Technologies, a fast-growing agricultural machinery firm, and former head of the local Arts Council. “We constantly get resumes from people at Boeing in Seattle or somewhere else. They don’t come for the mountains or the sunshine or the culture—they come back because of the kind of people who are here.”
Dahl, a former Lutheran seminarian, says religion also plays a major role, but not in the loud, assertive tones one might find in Houston or Dallas. “Religion and family play a huge role in everything, but it’s quiet. It’s people’s sense of ethics”, he suggests. “It’s that you care about your community and can count on your neighbors.” Such values, Aurora’s Gary Allen believes, are the real secret behind the nascent Heartland resurgence. In a town of barely 4,500, there
are more than thirty non-profit foundations, with assets in excess of $45 million. It is all part, notes Gary Warren, of a community spirit reflected in the city’s extensive recreation facilities, its well-maintained central square, library, senior center and museum. “Community building is a way of life here”, Warren offers. “You give to your community the way you give to your church on Sunday. It’s the essence of what it is to live here, and it’s why people decide they want to come here.”
Having grown up in a good small town, I would caution against idealizing any place. It can't be said often enough that as long as cable/satellite TV exist, there's no way to escape popular culture entirely. But boy, I sure would love to be able to live here, even if there were no jobs for me there.
The new issue of National Geographic has a big feature on how Orlando, Fla., is pioneering the template for American living in this century. Here's how writer T.D. Allman starts his piece:
Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it's far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities' exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They're you, they're me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed "Dick and Jane" of mythical suburban America. [snip] All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.
Welcome to the theme-park nation.
The Geography of Nowhere. Shoot me now. Actually, the piece is neither critical nor celebratory, just a great collection of observations and reflections about Orlando, Walt Disney, and how both shape the landscape of contemporary American life. And it has the kind of quote journalists live for. Linda Chapin, a former county commissioner and an official largely responsible for turning the place into one giant strip mall, tries to stay positive, in that oh-so-American way: "Just because we've ruined 90 percent of everything doesn't mean we can't do wonderful things with the remaining ten percent!"
Here's a good overview of the Muslim demographic situation in Europe, how it came to be, and prospects for the future -- this in a just-released paper from an Israeli professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Highlights:
+ The aftermath of World War II brought about an acute shortage of manpower in Europe. Former colonies, where manpower was available that required relatively limited cultural adaptation, became the plentiful sources for unskilled laborers who would replenish the dwindling pool of workers in Europe.
+ These workers constructed Muslim communities in certain localities throughout Europe, where their numbers created local majorities that no candidate for elective office could ignore. The growth of these communities required the construction of mosques and Muslim cultural centers, some of which grew into secret lodges of subversion, incitement, and recruitment of radical youth.
+ Muslim communities have imported the Middle Eastern conflict into their host countries, with attending acts of violence and unbridled anti-Semitism toward local Jewish communities which had otherwise lived peacefully except during the Holocaust interregnum.
+ Some European Muslim leaders make no secret of their intent to change Europe to their tune, not to adapt to it. They demand their own school systems, in their own native languages, financed by the host state and, in the long run, to its own detriment.
+ European countries have adopted multiculturalism, and increasingly multilingualism, as an imposed reality whereby they have abdicated their role to absorb the newcomers and integrate them into the existing systems, and instead let the immigrants dictate their own visions of "integration," which means in effect separatism, secession, or an eventual takeover when demography had run its course.
+ There are already areas in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain where Muslim children constitute the majority of the school population. In addition, there are a growing numbers of converts to Islam in major European countries such as France and Britain - 50,000 in each in the past decade.
I've been corresponding with a reader of this blog, a distinguished left-liberal journalist and commentator who writes frequently about war and foreign affairs. With his permission, I quote from the exchange, which began off my quoting the Nick Cohen essay from the Journal (which is now available online here). Cohen, you'll recall, is himself a secular-left commentator who is appalled by the Euro-left's embrace of Islamists. Cohen wrote that his leftist confreres appear to have embraced an appeasement mentality, in (vain) hope that the fearsome Islamists in their midst will leave them at peace. In my response, I pointed out that though I believe the Iraq war to have been a colossal mistake, I don't believe that we can escape the struggle with Islamism, and that sometimes we will have to use violence in that struggle.
N., the commentator, who frequently reports from Europe and the Mideast, wrote:
I'm not unsympathetic to Cohen's view as you report it, but when you talk about the need for the US to struggle, "sometimes violently," with radical Islam, I think you don't take into account the question of interests that divides Americans and Europeans. The fact is that the Islamic immigration to Europe makes such a violent struggle a de facto call to civil war. In the great urban areas of France, Germany, The Netherlands or the UK, to go to war in this sense means going to war against the newsagent, the hospital nurse, the schoolteacher, the bus driver, the neighbor. In other words, the problem is not European cowardice or lack of will ---here I do part company from Cohen---but a prudential calculus. Are you really comfortable condemning this? After all, there are wars that are simply too costly to fight and times when accomodation, and, yes, appeasement, is better than war.
I don't for a moment doubt Cohen's account of the pathologies of the European left for whom anti-Americanism now trumps secularist and, indeed, feminist and post-Christian principles. But I think he is turning an (admittedly important) second order problem into the principal one. The problem here is not will; it's reality. Think of our own immigration situation, which, of course, is far less agonistic. Fighting bilingualism is, as a practical matter, a losing cause now that a critical mass of hispanophones now live (and in some cases predominate) in major American cities. You don't need to speak English in much of LA, for example (and certainly Houston and probably Dallas as well). Imagine an American Nick Cohen attributed the spread of bilingualism simply to an absence of will, or cowardice. Whatever your anxieties about immigration, I think you'd find that account too simple.
This provoked a thought experiment. I live in a city that is filling rapidly with Mexican immigrants. The proportion of Hispanic residents to non-Hispanics is quickly moving in Hispanics' favor. In the 2000 census, Hispanics constituted 35 percent of the population here, making them Dallas's largest minority. Their number has without question only increased this decade. For obvious reasons, it is very, very difficult to go anywhere in Dallas without encountering Hispanics and Hispanic culture. Similarly, the Netherlands' four largest cities will soon be majority Muslim. N.'s remark made me wonder what it would be like if every Hispanic I encountered going about my business in Dallas were a Muslim. How would I feel then about the wisdom of promoting a conflict, possibly violent, with them?
This set me back. It would be a nightmare, in the most literal sense. My own neighborhood, which is mixed between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, and surrounded by predominantly working-class and immigrant Hispanics, would be a war zone. N. is right: if conflict between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in Dallas became violent, the consequences would be unthinkable. And yet, says N., this
is the reality that Europeans are facing today. Whether it should have been allowed to get to this stage is beside the point; this is where they are.
In my response to him, I said that in my own trips to the continent, I've been amazed and appalled by the willingness of Europeans to stand paralyzed before the threat. In Holland, to take a very minor but telling example, the Dutch have been closing public swimming pools to bathers after thuggish young Muslim males have been harrassing Dutch women there, calling them sluts and whores. The Dutch found it easier to close the pools than confront the thugs. This is insane in my judgment, and no good can possibly come of it. But I must admit that it's easy for me to make this judgment from the position of my safe American home.
Is it really too late to do anything to stop the Islamization of Europe (by which I mean the collapse of European secularist values in the face of an aggressive Islam borne by immigrants)? I wrote to N. and asked if he really thought that the Europeans had no realistic choice but to sit tight and try to ride this thing out, hoping that a moderate Euro-Islam emerges among them. He responded:
I AM suggesting that Europeans have to ride this out. The corollary is that I do not think it in Europe's interests to get too involved with the American project of the global war on terrorism (or 'long war' or whatever you want to call it), precisely because, as I wrote you, I do not think it in the interests of European countries to do so on prudential grounds.
There's a lot to say on all this and I'm not sure I can do so this morning. But a few points:
The reason I 'red-flagged' your remark about resisting or using violence to combat Islamic extremism is that I believe the real threat of Islamic extremism comes from countries where we are not going to be able to use force (e.g. Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, etc.) and from Islamic diasporas in Europe. What happened recently in Somalia, which is certainly defensible, is going to be the exception rather than the rule.
I also don't entirely see the point of going to war anywhere at present (police work, including secret police work is another matter entirely, and something I support, though I believe it can and must be done without torture). More precisely, to use the military term of art, I don't see how we can achieve the desired end state of moderating Salafism and radical Shi'ism through violence. The only place we're actually widely liked in the Islamic world is Iran, where we have been unable to influence events. Familiarity (with us) breeds hatred; it doesn't engender change. That for me is the real lesson of the American way of war in our time.
Much as I hate paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, you deal with the Islamic world you have, not the one you wish you had. Force is only going to make more recruits for the extremists. As far as I'm concerned, you do your best to track, arrest, deport, imprison the terrorists. But going to war? I just think that's a recruiting poster for the extremists. Britain could never stamp out the IRA, Rod! You thhink force is going to stamp out what is, in effect, a millennarian movement within the Islamic world at least as powerful as Protestantism in the current condition of the mass migration of peoples?
For me, a combination of bribes, along side longterm efforts to more intelligently assimilate people, and removing hot button 'recruiting poster issues' like Israel-Palestine (which are in some way pretexts, but effective ones nonetheless) are the best we're going to do The template for this situation is urban Cairo and suburban Paris, not Afghanistan or Somalia, and force is a minor component of what is needed in such places, which to me is why the war idea (call it what you will) is so misleading and counter-productive.
Lastly, to finally come around to your question about suitcase bombs [I'd raised what I considered the li
kelihood of Islamic terrorists using a suitcase nuke to take out a European city -- RD], sure, I suppose it's possible. But again, to the extent it's possible to believe this can be averted, it will be done through surveillance and cooptation (and they must go hand in hand; alone, either will fail)---that is, because the authorities are informed on time, which is going to require local community support as borders are simply too porous to make keeping the bombers out a feasible option.
You spoke of the Netherlands. Look, what Ayaan Hirsi Ali stands for is what I believe in too. But her influence in the Islamic community is zero. In contrast, I have grave doubts about Tariq Ramadan. But he may represent a moderating influence in his own community. On a practical level, who is more valuable in the struggle against Islamic radicalism within the diasporic Muslim communities that are the point of the spear? I submit, assuming he's not a complete fraud, it's Ramadan, much as I might wish it otherwise.
I'm not a pacifist. But I am persuaded the challenge the Islamists pose will not be successfully resisted---to use your word---or even blunted through war.
You know, I've come to believe, as does N., that in the wake of the Iraq war's failure, conventional war as a means of fighting Islamic terrorism is not only useless, but actually counterproductive. Someone in one of the comboxes a day or so ago said, basically, "OK Mr. Smart Guy, you think Bush has bombed, but what would you do?" My answer is pretty much what N. suggests: constant police action, counterterrorism, espionage, and so forth. I don't see that we have a better idea.
But I find myself deeply distressed by N.'s words about Europe and civil war. He knows much more about the situation in Europe than I do, and while I resist his conclusions, it's mostly from a sense of instinct than from reason. (In other words, I keep thinking, "The Europeans have got to fight the Islamists, they can't give in." Which is admittedly a sentiment, and an easy sentiment for an American to have; it's not much of a basis for policy. Is it over for Europe? If to meaningfully resist its own Islamization would be to provoke civil war -- and a well-known British journalist shocked me last year by saying quite soberly that he foresees "religious war" coming to the UK -- is there nothing left to do but to manage Europe's capitulation? Was Jean Raspail right in "The Camp of the Saints"? (M. Raspail certainly believes today that it's all over but the shouting.)
Is European resistance to encroaching Islamism even feasible at this point, given the angry Muslim ghettos the Europeans have allowed to develop in their midst? At what cost? Discuss.
The central purpose behind BerkShares is to strengthen the local economy, perhaps even inoculate it against the whims of globalization, by encouraging people to support local businesses. Amazon does not accept BerkShares, for example, but the Bookloft on Route 7 does.
Five months into the experiment, some people embrace it, some endure it, some ignore it altogether. At the very least, BerkShares have reminded everyone just how complex this thing called community is.
I'll say. Read the story if you can get behind the firewall -- or better yet, read the BerkShares website for more information. The problem with BerkShares, according to the Times story, is that even a local economy depends on being able to trade with vendors far away, making it difficult to accept local-only money. That, and the social pressure being put on local tradespeople who won't accept the BerkShares. Still, what a fascinating experiment. I'd love to know what y'all think of it -- especially if you have experience using BerkShares.
...please proceed to Sy Hersh's big New Yorker story and untangle the meaning for us. Best I can figure is a) the Bush administration is planning to attack Iran (which I completely believe, despite the denials), and b) whatever the US does in the Middle East, we're screwed, owing to political and religious alliances and rivalries that make the Byzantine court look like a model of simplicity.
Some years ago, First Things caused a massive row after publishing a symposium around the question of abortion, the judicial usurpation of politics, and the legitimacy of the American government. At hand was the question of, in the words of the editors, "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientioius citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." The idea was that judges had usurped the proper functions of legislatures in a democracy, and were forcing laws onto people that violated their consciences intolerably. At what point would the American government be properly judged despotic, and no longer worthy of support?
All that came to mind today when I read Wesley J. Smith's report on the FT blog about a bill before the California legislature that would require Catholic nursing homes to allow euthanasia. Writes Smith:
If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide. That this could cause untold misery for thousands of helpless sick and elderly people matters to its authors not a whit. The culture of death brooks no dissent.
To be sure, the FT symposium was hugely controversial, with some people closely associated with the magazine leaving it angry that the publication even suggested that ceasing to support the US constitutional framework is on the table. That said -- and having just finished P.D. James's "The Children of Men," which I was reading in tandem with Corrie ten Boom's "The Hiding Place" (about how she and her Christian family were sent to the concentration camp for hiding Jews) -- I do wonder at what point the "culture of death" will have progressed so far into law (either by judicial fiat or democratically) that morally responsible people will in some significant sense have to become enemies of the government. The Holocaust didn't happen all at once, and it wasn't imposed on the German people. It involved a gradual process of desensitizing them to the sanctity of life, and getting them to slowly but steadily accept the concept of "life unworthy of life." For the German Cardinal Clemens von Galen, that day came in 1941, when he delivered a stunning speech denouncing the Nazi government's forced euthanasia program. For the Lutheran pastor-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that came earlier, in the 1930s, when he returned to Germany and organized church resistance to the Nazi program.
Might that day come to the United States? If so, how will we know it? And what will it mean for Christians, Jews and others, whatever their political orientation, who understand what's going on, and refuse to go along? Thoughts?
UPDATE: A conservative Catholic friend and reader of this blog e-mails:
I like to fantasize about a Catholic bishop saying something like this:
“Hell is going to freeze over before we give in. Come and get us. Sue us out of existence. Send the police to shut our homes down and put our patients on the street. I promise you: the cameras will be rolling while granny clutches at her IV stand as some jackboot drags her off, weeping, to a lice-infested state-run sewer. I’m sure your opponents will be only too happy to have that footage available when election-time rolls around.
“And when it’s all over, the taxpayers of California will have the privilege of shouldering even more of the healthcare burden than they do already, I’ll get to dump one of my biggest moral, financial, and administrative problems on somebody else, and you’ll look like stupid jerks. I’ll be laughing my [expletive] off at you while I try to decide what to do with all my new-found spare time and money. Enjoy it while you
can, mongoloids!”
(Wow, it felt really good to write that.)
Of course, you have to be a man to play chicken with the badguys.
There was an interesting piece in yesterday's NYTimes opinion section, showing graphs from the General Social Survey tracking the change in Americans' opinions on particular issues over 34 years. The link to the short accompanying essay is here, but you have to click on the slide show part to see the graphs themselves. Worth doing.
To me, the most surprising thing is how steady opinions have held on so many controversial issues over the last 34 years. I would have predicted a big gap between the number of people who in 1972 said sex outside of marriage is "always wrong," and the number who said so last year. Not so: the drop is only 8 percent (34 pct then, versus 25 pct now). The number of people who say they are afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night has hovered around 40 percent for a generation. The number of people who believe in life after death has been only a few points north or south of 70 percent for over 30 years. There's been little variation in the reported level of happiness in the population, despite the significant growth of material wealth among average Americans. Most people are "very happy" in their marriage, and the percentage saying that has barely budged in a generation.
For me, the most startling graph was the one tracking the support of abortion rights from 1972 to 2006. The GSS tracks the conditions under which abortion rights supporters back legal abortion (e.g., rape and incest, life of the mother, any reason at all). Over 34 years, the lines are virtually flat. Can that really be right? If I'm reading the data correctly, for all the Sturm und Drang over abortion since Roe v. Wade, the country is no more liberal and no more conservative on the issue than the day SCOTUS spoke.
Fascinating change: which of the following five institutions -- religion, Congress, the media, medicine, the military -- is the only one to have grown in respect in 30 years? That's right, the military.
Fascinating change, but for a different reason: the percentage of people who say homosexuals should be allowed to teach in universities has gone up from 48 percent in 1972 to over 70 percent last year. And I'm thinking: 30 percent of Americans think gays shouldn't even be allowed to teach college? Man. I would have thought it was something like 10 percent, and even 34 years ago, the idea that a majority of people opposed gays teaching in college is startling to me, and disturbing.
How has the public's point of view on whether or not gays should have the right to marry changed over 30 years? We don't know. They haven't been testing for it, because until virtually the day before yesterday, it never occurred to the overwhelming majority of people to ask.
Another one for the Get Religion analysts: today's Wall Street Journal (sub.req.) features an informative front-page story on the rise in anti-Shia fear, even fanaticism, in Bahrain and elsewhere in nations governed by Sunni Arabs. The story, by Andrew Higgins, explains the historical roots of the Sunni-Shia divide, and discusses at some length the theological concerns Sunnis have about rising Shia influence, particularly with Shia Iran ascendant in the region. And then we arrive at this paragraph:
Fear of Iran, of course, is anchored in real-world issues. Tehran's nuclear research push has caused widespread jitters and prompted Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to suggest they might start nuclear programs, too. Iran's involvement in Iraq since the toppling of Mr. Hussein's Sunni tyranny has stired real fear that Iraq will be led by a Shiite regime loyal to Tehran. [Emphasis mine -- RD]
Classic. It appears that religious concerns are not, in the view of this reporter, part of the "real world." It appears that to this reporter and his editors, religion is a sideshow to the real world. And we wonder why our elites -- and we who depend on them for news, information, analysis and leadership -- have so much trouble understanding how the Middle East works.
I wish I could think of a single interesting thing to say about the Oscars. Time was when I really cared about them (well, I was paid to care about them, but aside from a professional interest, I really did). Now I fail to see the point. Glad Helen Mirren won -- "The Queen" was a wonderful film. But having watched a decent portion of the Oscar telecast between going back and forth trying to get No. 2 Son to stay in bed, for crying out loud, I kept wondering, "Was it always this boring?" I'm generally environmentalist in my outlook -- see my Sunday column from yesterday -- but all the sanctimony surrounding Al Gore and the global warming issue was hard to take. The highlight (lowlight?) had to have been Leonardo di Caprio earnestly advising viewers to visit the Oscar.com website for hints on how they could help save the planet. It's not the cause that puts me off -- in fact, the advice given on the Oscar site is reasonable -- but rather Hollywood itself. What a wonderful world it would be if they would just shut up and entertain.
Writing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal -- the essay is not on the web, yet anyway -- the left-wing British journalist Nick Cohen excoriates left-liberal Europeans for selling out all their principles to embrace "ultra-reactionary [Islamic] movements", versus America. How to explain this? Cohen has an idea:
Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.
(This might be the point to say that while I believe the Iraq war was a foolish mistake, I still believe that we have no choice but to struggle, sometimes violently, with radical Islam.)
Steve Sailer's column on the chicanery of No Child Left Behind is yet another reminder that we can try all the government schemes we want, but nothing is more important than personal culture in the education of students. We don't know how to fix that, so we'll wreck the schools in an effort to pretend that we can fix the problem.
How in the name of all that is good and holy is American strategy in Iraq once again dependent on that weasel Ahmad Chalabi, who helped manipulate us into this stupid war?
This week's Bible Girl column tells an incredibly grim and graphic -- you have been warned -- tale of an influential black Pentecostal minister in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who has been formally accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual abuse of women in his church. As we so often hear, the alleged victims claim they were told that if they went public, they would be defying God's will by bringing shame to His Anointed One, and that they would end up ruined.
If you've ever wondered what a middle-aged New Jersey suburban yenta looks like trying to act like a stripper at a kaffeeklatsch, check out today's NYTimes. From the story:
Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration.
“I want the women to feel strong within themselves,” explained Ms. Cottam, 29, who teaches pole dancing at a local gym as well as at home parties. Noting that some middle-aged suburban women lose themselves and their sense of sexuality as they are consumed by the responsibilities of motherhood, she added: “When you come to my class you are beautiful, you are. I want to show them that strength inside, and unleash that sexual kitten.”
How pathetic is that? It's just so comical -- unleashing the sexual kitten inside flabby, overpermed suburban matrons -- that you (well, I) can barely work up the outrage. Then again, if Viagra can turn Homer Simpson into Fabio, at least in his own mind, this is to be expected? You can apparently convince women to accept anything as long as you shellack it with a feminist gloss and call it empowering. Why are people so eager to cast off their personal dignity? This has mystified me for a few years, as readers of my 2002 "Rampant Rabbit, Licking Lizard" piece in NRO will remember (the piece was about the phenomenon of suburban and small-town sex toy and lubrication parties). I'm not particularly interested in whether or not lovers slather their stiffened giblets with fragrant unguents, poke each other with blenders, or gad about their bedchambers like pole dancers. Fine, knock yourself out, just don't frighten the horses.
What does interest me is the willingness to take what was more or less outlaw behavior and domesticate it. When middle class women are willing to ape strippers in their living rooms, and pass around dildos and lubricant as they once did Tupperware, something very strange is up. Tom Wolfe wrote about this kind of thing a generation ago, so it's really not new. Still, morality aside, I find the whole business exceptionally trashy, and wish these people would rediscover their inhibitions, because they're embarrassing themselves. Weyrich and Lind caught a lot of guff for briefly valorizing the 1950s in their AmCon essay, but one thing that we could stand to recover about the Fifties -- aside from the great jazz -- was the expectation that grown-ups would act like grown-ups.
In the first place, as much as some hierarchs and ecclesiastical bureaucrats might dispute the point, churches need the press to play its traditional watchdog role. It was a free press that forced the churches to confront the sexual abuse crisis, and today a free press is also running down stories of financial mismanagement. Institutions prefer to deny their own dysfunction, and an effective press won't let them get away with it.
The problem with the kind of sloppy coverage described above is that it enables apologists to dismiss any critical reporting as biased. Many reasonable people, familiar with the track record of the British press, are already inclined to write off even credible reports as fruit of the same poisonous tree.
Second, inaccurate stories such as this week's about a secret plan for union with the pope can wreak real havoc, in this case not only in Anglican/Catholic relations, but within Anglicanism. If the story were true, that might well be a risk worth running, but otherwise it seems terribly reckless.
Third, I know how important English journalism is around the world. The BBC and The Times still in many ways set the "gold standard." For precisely that reason, when the British press sneezes, the rest of us catch cold.
Via Daniel Larison, here's a rather diverting passage from Myrna Minkoff Marcotte's latest epistle to the sexually unenlightened:
I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.
[snip] Also, saying that abortion is morally questionable, even if you’re pro-choice, is a huge insult to the brave men and women who risk life and limb to perform them. Being an abortion doctor is a pretty thankless task, because a bunch of “Christian” men who have emasculation issues are gunning to kill you in hopes that brings their huevos back. Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is [expletive] and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women.
To which Larison replies, in part:
Note how perverse this is–she doesn’t say abortion is necessary or unavoidable or even the least bad option in a range of options. She says it is good. In the interests of the self, pure utility dictates abortion. ...Marcotte is hardly the first person to advance a supremacist logic that justifies the murder of other people, but most supremacists nowadays at least cushion the blow of their hideous ideas with euphemistic language. Give Marcotte credit for this much–no one will ever accuse her of rhetorical subtlety or nuance.
Here's a good one for the Get Religion gang. Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer has an excellent column this week about the role that syncretist Latino-African religions play in the local crime scene -- this, off police in south Dallas discovering palo mayombe paraphernalia, including a human skull, under a bridge near where human bodies were found dumped. Schutze, who wrote a book about those grisly occult drug gang murders in Matamoros some years ago, makes a couple of points well worth contemplating:
1. That despite the knee-jerk attitude some have of wanting to defend native religions against attacks from Christians and others (secularists?) from Western traditions, the fact is that these religions can and do have some pretty ugly aspects, and political correctness shouldn't cause us to turn away from that. Schutze:
Look, I understand why the academics and the priest want to defend these beliefs from an automatic association with crime. All kinds of racism, bigotry and ethnocentric foolishness often deform the way dominant white culture views non-European belief.
But we also need to not kid ourselves. This stuff is often closely wrapped with crime, and as a motivational and disciplinary force it can be very powerful.
2. That whether or not we believe palo mayombe, santeria and suchlike has any effect at all -- i.e., even if we think it is nothing but mumbo-jumbo -- the people who practice it believe it is real, and they predicate their actions in the real world on their faith. (Similarly, it doesn't really matter whether Allah really will reward the suicide bomber with 72 virgins if he blows himself up in an Israeli pizzeria; all the Israelis need to know is that there are people who believe that, and will act on it). Schutze again:
White people, Europeans, the industrialized world, whatever you want to call us: You know who I mean. Us. We have enormous faith in our own powers, so much so that we think our power can always kill their power. We can kill them with our hands tied behind our backs.
But that's what I mean about let's not kid ourselves. People to whom we condescend are not necessarily less strong or less courageous than we. They have their own ways of kicking ass.
At the ranch where Mark Kilroy was ritually tortured and killed, police found remains of 13 other victims, including another U.S. citizen and a 9-year-old child. The gang that killed Kilroy was caught because one of them drove straight into a police roadblock, believing he was invisible.
He wasn't. But he thought he was. Think about that. Then think about Dowdy Ferry Bridge.
Kudos to Schutze, a secular liberal writing for an "alternative" publication, for taking religion's interaction with the real world with appropriate seriousness.
Hard-to-read story on today's Times front page, about the heavy cost being paid by families of men serving in Iraq, but full-time soldiers and reservists. Here's the lede:
In the nearly two years Cpl. John Callahan of the Army was away from home, his wife, he said, had two extramarital affairs. She failed to pay his credit card bills. And their two children were sent to live with her parents as their home life deteriorated.
Then, in November, his machine gun malfunctioned during a firefight, wounding him in the groin and ravaging his left leg. When his wife reached him by phone after an operation in Germany, Corporal Callahan could barely hear her. Her boyfriend was shouting too loudly in the background.
“Haven’t you told him it’s over?” Corporal Callahan, 42, recalled the man saying. “That you aren’t wearing his wedding ring anymore?”
Really, read the whole article. Once again, we're confronted by the fact that a very small number of Americans are bearing a crushing burden for the sake of this war. As I said the other day, my brother-in-law's National Guard unit has been put on alert for possible imminent deployment to Iraq. If he goes, he will leave behind a wife and three small kids. Tens of thousands of men like him have had to do the same thing. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what Julie and I can do from this distance to help my sister and her family make it through the year deployment, if it comes. They're luckier than many Guard families, but like the Times piece says, as tough as these long, even multiple, deployments are on all military families, the active-duty military families at least have a ready-made community on bases and suchlike; that's not the case with Guard and reservist families.
Have to say that I've heard some pretty heartless stuff about the price being paid by these families, along the lines of "They knew this was a possibility when they signed up" and "You call this a war? Three thousand dead is nothing!" This strikes me as mostly a way of dismissing their hardship and suffering, not trying to put it in context. There is a certain amount of truth to both statements, but they also miss the main point, which is this: if we are going to ask our fighting men and their families to make heavy sacrifices, including possibly the sacrifice of their lives, we had better make sure the goal is worth it.
Is the goal in Iraq worth the continuing sacrifice? Can we "win" in any meaningful sense? I don't believe we can, but reasonable people differ on this question. But the question has got to be asked, and anyone who still supports the US mission in Iraq has the moral obligation to read that Times story and contemplate whether the Iraq mission -- which has now lasted longer than the Second World War -- continues to be worth putting soldiers and their families on the home front through this.
Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, laments that the GOP is continuing to blow an opportunity to be relevant to the climate change debate. Excerpt:
I am a conservative conservationist who worries that sea levels and government intervention may end up rising together. My earnest hope going forward is that we can find conservative solutions to the climate change problem -- ecologically responsible solutions based on free-market principles that both improve our quality of life and safeguard our freedoms.
For if conservatives cannot reframe, reclaim and respond to climate change with our principles intact, government will undoubtedly provide a solution, no matter how taxing it may be.
Peggy Noonan says that Obama backer David Geffen's attack on Hillary Clinton this week shows her vulnerability. Noonan paraphrases Geffen's attack on his old friends the Clintons like this: "I've known them intimately for almost 20 years, and they're bad people and bringers of trouble." Excerpt from Noonan:
Mrs. Clinton has never gone after a fellow Democrat quite the way she's going after Mr. Obama, and it's an indication of how threatened she is not only by his candidacy but, one suspects, his freshness. He makes her look like yesterday. He makes her look like the old slash-and-burn. I doubted he could do her serious damage. Now I wonder. [snip] At the Democratic forum in Carson City, Nev., on Tuesday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Mrs. Clinton if Mr. Obama should renounce Mr. Geffen's remarks. She answered, "I want to run a positive campaign" and referred to "the politics of personal destruction." Every time she gets in a spot, she pulls that one out. And for good reason: It has always worked. It works because it confuses people. Is this the boys beating up the girl? Are they sticking her pigtails in the ink well? Is Geffen mean? If Obama is nice, shouldn't he make sure everyone is nice? It's not so much a diversion as a non sequitur. Mrs. Clinton is like the little girl who steals the boy next door's candy and hits him on the head with a hammer. He runs, "Mommy, she stole my Snickers and hit me on the head!" She turns to the mother, hammer in hand, and gestures at the boy. "This . . . is the politics of personal destruction."
As I say, it's always worked in the past. The question is, will it work in the future?
Personally, I've never had the slightest regard for the Clintons, but I've never shared the Clinton-hating passion on the right. It's just not that interesting to me. I was talking with some friends over lunch yesterday, though, telling them how I thought that the surest way for the Democrats to lose the presidency in 2008 is for them to nominate Hillary Clinton. The friends, who are foreigners, seemed surprised by this, and I told them that Hillary projected a cold, unlikable, calculating personality. Of course she has her fan base, but I think most people, if they feel positive towards her, it's because she has made what they consider the right enemies.
Obama, on the other hand, is a very hard guy not to like. Conservatives who criticize him call him shallow and a phony. Notice that they're saying the nice-guy persona masks major flaws -- which may well be true, but the point is that everybody seems to grasp that he's a guy you really want to like. He's the most naturally charismatic national politician I've seen since Reagan (not even Clinton was this good; I could see his geniality, but it was the geniality of the huckster who was chatting you up to make a sale). In that way, he strikes me as Hillary's polar opposite. If people like Hillary, they do so for ideological reasons. If they like Obama, it comes naturally.
An entire generation of videogaming has passed me by. The last time I was into videogames was round about the time that Atari came out with its supercrappy home version of "Pac-Man." I was a big fan of Atari's "Missile Command" and "Warlords," but after that got boring, I quit fooling around with videogames, and completely missed the Nintendo/PlayStation revolution. Which is fine by me: there aren't enough hours in the day to read what I want to read, much less play video games.
But reading Vic Matus's story about the joys of "Civilization" makes me want to leave the office this morning, go straight to the Apple store, and buy the latest version (I'm hoping that this is not a PlayStation/Nintendo thing, but that you can buy it for Apple; I suppose I'll find out as soon as I post this blog, and check it out online). One of the constant disappointments I've had since leaving college has been the impossibility of finding a group of people to play "Diplomacy" with (do they make a computer version of "Diplomacy" that one person can play?). This is not "Diplomacy," really, but it sounds like it's got similar strategic challenges. Any readers here fans of "Civilization"? If so, talk about it.
The Catholic apologist Mark Shea has some good thoughts on what he wants potential Catholics to know before entering the Catholic Church.
Excerpt:
The main counsel I give anybody coming in to the Church is that "faith" means "you stay." The Catholic Church is and always has been the vessel of salvation for the *world*. That means that most of the people you meet are going to be *ordinary*--like you and me. They are going to have the ordinary tastes, prejudices, mediocrities, failures, and virtues of their time and place. There are, to be sure, great heros and extraordinary people in the Catholic communion. But to expect that as the norm and then be outraged and disappointed when it is not is, I think, great folly and, in the end, great pride. One of the things I came to appreciate very early was the counsel of Uncle Screwtape, who urges Wormwood to keep far from his "patient's" mind the thought, "If I, being what I am, can consider myself in some sense a Christian, then why can't these people next to me in the pew"?
I appreciate Mark's words, but I wonder -- and I'm not asking this to be antagonistic in any way, I'm just thinking speculatively -- how far one can take this. The poor faithful Episcopalians who are having to endure the decline of their church into absurdity -- to what extent should "you stay" guide them? To be sure, Anglicanism doesn't make the same claim of exclusivity for itself that the Roman church does (or Orthodox churches do), so the hold on individual believers is weaker. Is there a point, however, in any given church (Catholic, Orthodox, whatever) when to remain in place is in some real sense to risk losing Christ oneself?
Interesting set of comments from The Guardian today, from British troops serving in Iraq, on the UK war effort there. Excerpt:
A corporal in the Queens Dragoon Guards who has been on three tours
I feel sorry for some of the true Iraqi people that want to get on with their lives yet cannot because of the intimidation they suffer from some of the police and the militia. If we get out now I think Iran will try to stake its claim in the south of Iraq. We must stay until the job of building Iraq into a secure nation is complete. The frustration is: will it ever be a secure nation? So do we waste more British lives on a country that is ungrateful? I never want to go there again
Do we waste more American lives on a country that will not have stability absent repression? Is what I'm asking.
The problem with the need for authority, or authority figures, is this: Every time you turn around authority figures are behaving in ways that indicate they don't deserve to be authority figures. You would say this of Bush, though i wouldn't, but I would say that's arguable. I'm thinking today about judges -- the guy in the Anna Nicole Smith case, Reggie Walton presiding over the Scooter Libby case who admits he doesn't understand the case etc. Maybe the problem with a society requiring authority figures is that in an open society it's the nature of the openness to expose the hollowness behind those who fill that role. That was less true before the whole society cracked open. But think of it -- is it better or worse that the president of Harvard isn't considered a wise man who knows all? I'd say that's better. Is it better that we know judges are often foolish people? That may be trickier, as it leads to lessened respect for law. But then what about those who make the laws? Isn't it proper to look at them critically?
The reader makes an excellent point, and I'm not sure I have an easy answer for him. Take the case of the Catholic bishops post-scandal. I would say that it's a great thing that Catholics have had many of their bishops exposed as men who were more interested in protecting pedophile priests and the image of the Church than in protecting Catholic children. The bishops hid behind their mantle of authority, and did incalculable harm to individuals and families. They completely trashed their own moral authority, and it was only when that happened that we began to see some movement toward reform.
One down side of this is that at a moment in America's history when the public witness of the Church's teaching on any number of issues is badly needed, the bishops have no compelling voice. First Things' Jody Bottum has written many times about the political effect of the self-inflicted collapse of the bishops' authority. Here, from a 2003 Crisis article, is the point he often made:
The full consequences of [the scandal] have yet to be calculated, either in America or in Rome, but here’s one small measure, as viewed from Washington, D.C.: On December 1, 2001, the Catholic Church was at the absolute forefront of the fight against cloning. Three months later, by February 1, 2002, the Catholic Church had essentially disappeared from the battle. In the middle of the campaign to force Tom Daschle, then majority leader, to allow an anti-cloning bill to come to the floor of the Senate, one major metropolitan bishop told me that he didn’t dare lobby his senators on the issue—for fear they would answer, “Who the hell are you to lecture me on a moral issue?” and rupture their relationship forever.
We are suffering from a crisis of authority in American culture, and as the reader suggests, the open society has a lot to do with that. One wonders if it's possible at all to build credible authority under current cultural conditions, when there are few if any technical or moral constraints keeping one's flaws and secrets from being exposed. Were we better off when most people thought President Kennedy was a fine, upstanding specimen of respectable American manhood, instead of a reckless pill-popping horndog? Were we better off when most people thought Cardinal Spellman was a vigorous and upright prince of the Church instead of -- you see where I'm going with this. I can't say that I'd rather live in a world where authority was maintained on the basis of lies. Perhaps, then, if something good is to come out of the open society with regard to authority, it's that the kind of men and women who rise to positions of authority in coming generations will of necessity be clean, honest, and everything they're supposed to be.
No society can do without authority figures. Every
society will have them. The question is, on what criteria will we invest figures with cultural authority?
A soldier writes to Andrew Sullivan about the disgraceful conditions at Walter Reed Hospital's outpatient facilities:
My only hope is that this causes a ground swell of both concern AND action. It's one thing to say "those poor Soldiers. Damn this administration." It's something else entirely to actually do something about it. Start a 501(c)(3) that funnels real help to those Soldiers and Marines who return to face nothing. Something. Anything. The Army - given its extremely limited resources faced against the challenge of a multi-front war - clearly can't do it all on its own.
Those poor soldiers. Damn this administration. Now, what more can we do? Does anybody know of any nonprofits who help wounded soldiers and their families? Because I'd like to send them some money.
Remember when I said the other day that our newsroom was looking into an Orthodox scandal? It's on the DMN's front page today: the longtime pastor of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church here in Dallas has been suspended from ministry after church officials found, "There is no doubt that Father Nicholas engaged in serious moral transgressions." The alleged abuse of minors occurred decades ago in a parish elsewhere, according to national church officials, though there has been an accusation from a former altar boy at the Dallas parish who claims to have been abused by the priest in the 1980s.
Questions remain, among them:
1. Why did church officials allow Fr. Nicholas, who is 72, to retire last July, and then days later suspend him from ministry, without telling the Dallas congregation what had happened?
2. Are these two cases the only ones involving this priest?
3. How aggressive has the Greek Orthodox Church in America been in policing its own clergy with regard to sex abuse?
4. Fr. Nicholas is married with children and grandchildren. What does this incident say about having a married clergy as a bulwark against child sex abuse?
I pray for the people of this parish, which I've visited. It's a vibrant parish, and Fr. Nick, who has overseen lots of evangelical efforts there, has been a major figure on the Dallas religion scene for a long time. Those people are hurting, undoubtedly, and will continue to hurt. But the truth must out, and there must be severe consequences for clerics abusing children. Period. The end.
I'm sure some will say to me, "See, you left Catholicism over the sex scandal, but it exists in the Orthodox church too." Again I say: I didn't leave Catholicism only over the sex scandal, and moreover, I never believed, nor have ever claimed, that the Orthodox church, or any church, is free of this evil. All I can say is that through bitter and heartbreaking experience, I'm better able to deal with this kind of horrible news now than I once was.
The Pentagon is planning to send more than 14,000 National Guard troops back to Iraq next year, shortening their time between deployments to meet the demands of President Bush’s buildup, Defense Department officials said Wednesday. [snip] Changing the reservists’ schedules means abandoning previous promises that they would get several years between deployments. And the acceleration means that soldiers who usually drill just once a month and for a few weeks in the summer will have to begin intensive preparations right away. [snip] Given that they would be in Iraq for about nine months, that would leave only three months for training before they go. In the past, six months of training has been the norm before heading to the war zone.
A journalist friend, quoting a source in military intelligence who had been deployed in Iraq, told me the other day his source said it is "criminal" -- the intel guy's word -- what the military is doing to the National Guard. He meant specifically deploying them into a combat zone with inadequate training.
If this is the kind of thing we have to do to keep the Iraqis from killing each other, to hell with the mission. In my hometown -- a very small town, of the sort where a disproportionate number of the soldiers dying in this war come from -- a lot of men are in the National Guard. I can just imagine how the news that the military is breaking its promise to the Guardsmen, and sending some of them back into the war zone early, with inadequate training and possibly without sufficient equipment, must feel to Guard families and their friends. This has gotten real personal to me since finding out the other day that my brother-in-law's Guard unit has been put on alert for mobilization to join the surge. George W. Bush and the Republican Party are going to reap the political whirlwind from this abuse. It's a long way from 2008, but I can't see myself voting for any Republican who backs this surge.
From the head of a liberal Episcopal organization, collected and posted on Fr. Kendall Harmon's blog:
The Sunday after General Convention I returned to my home parish for Gay Pride Sunday and participated in a Disco Mass for which gays and lesbians turned out in force. The opening hymn was a beautiful jazz rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” Musical offerings came from gay men in sequined tank tops and from the Director of Music who was ushered into the service singing a disco number complete with Go-Go girls. The queen of St. Mark’s appeared in full drag to deliver the homily and the closing hymn was, Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.” As I stood singing among straight men and women, young parents with their children, gays and lesbians, teenagers in hip hop clothing, Asians, whites, African Americans and Spanish speaking people I realized I was part of the realm of God and I was glad to be there - in a place where God’s creation of a new thing was being lived out.
Does your parish church have an official drag queen? Maybe Archbishop Akinola is just jealous because his doesn't.
Guilt is the ruling emotion of every credal culture; those inside such a culture are compelled to responsibility for themselves. This is to say that they must act entirely within the enclosing symbolic. Any other action is transgressive. The enclosedness of the symbolic is not separable from the sense of responsibility. A society too "open" destroys the sense of responsibility, for then men lose confidence in the lmites they actively defend against transgressive behavior. Such a sesne of responsibility against the transgressive expressions of self or group, in defense of the enclosing symbolic, constitutes the guilt without which culture has no alternative except to engage in its destruction; all of what we now call "aggression" are really the amoral forms of cultural auto-destruction; all aggression is transgression, loosed from its true constraining sense. In such a cultural condition, the only possible form of greatness is transgressive. Stalins and Hitlers are more than possible.
This press release flopped over the transom just now. If this is not a joke, clearly KFC has decided to give up good taste for Lent. "Modern Take on 'Loaves and Fishes'" -- good grief!:
KFC Appeals to Higher Authority by Asking for Papal Blessing for New KFC® Fish Snacker Sandwich
New Fish Snacker Offers Modern Take on 'Loaves and Fishes' for Today's Lenten Observers
LOUISVILLE, Ky., February 21, 2007 ? The world's most popular chicken restaurant chain is offering fish for the first time nationally with the introduction of the new KFC® Fish Snacker. The company has asked the Pope himself for his blessing, with KFC President Gregg Dedrick sending a personal letter to the Vatican.
KFC's new Fish Snacker Sandwich, a tender, flaky filet of 100 percent Alaskan Pollack topped with tangy tartar sauce and served on a warm sesame bun, extends KFC's popular Snacker line-up and is ideal for American Catholics who want to observe Lenten season traditions while still leading their busy, modern lifestyles. The company has turned to Pope Benedict XVI, beseeching him to bestow his Papal blessing for this innovative new menu item. Vatican officials confirmed they received KFC's request, and the company is hopeful to get the Pope's blessing this Lenten season.
"People can enjoy the flavor of the new Fish Snacker any day of the week, but we believe it will be especially popular on Fridays," said James O'Reilly, Chief Marketing Officer for KFC. "It's perfect for an on-the-go lunch or any time of the day when you need a quick snack but don't want to sacrifice taste."
KFC has more than 5,500 locations across the country, which means Americans won't have to travel to Vatican City to find the New Fish Snacker. The KFC Fish Snacker costs 99 cents plus tax at participating restaurants -- a price that is significantly less than most restaurant-made sandwiches.
For our Western Christian brothers and sisters, a blessed Ash Wednesday to you, and welcome to Lent. This morning I was up early, and had time to follow the link a reader posted in a combox yesterday, to an interview with a Russian Orthodox monk who works with Westerners seeking Orthodoxy. I found this part helpful:
If you don’t want to be a cork on the surface of the water you are to find some moments, a half-hour, an hour every day to isolate yourself from everyone and everything. Then, stand before the face of Jesus Christ as if you have only one moment before the Last Judgement. You are about to come before your Heavenly Judge and you only have one minute to repent of your whole previous life! “Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!” You are to collect all your sins into one vessel of repentance and throw this vessel into the sea of God’s mercy. This is what St. Ignatius Brianchaninov teaches us.
If you are successful in this prayer of repentance, you will come to understand that your prayer is your life, it is not a technique… “the technique of the Jesus Prayer.” It is not something that you are to combine with your breath, or with the beating of your heart. No, it is your life. All technical advice is something functional. Your prayer is your life - your life is your prayer. And if you are constant in this secret standing before the face of God, you will see that your heart begins to change. You will find your prayer becoming deeper and more attentive, and one day you will understand what it is to pray with all your heart, from the depths of your soul. When little children cry for something, they do it with all their being, and this is like real spiritual life. God will teach you how to conceal your pious intentions and thoughts, how to keep it such a secret that no one ever guesses what you have in your heart. You will be living a life completely unknown and unnoticed by anyone, and you will begin to love solitude as the most satisfying way of speaking with your Creator. The moment you begin to pray from your heart, asking for everything that the Holy Spirit finds appropriate and necessary for you, you will be instructed and enlightened.
I tried that this morning in prayer -- imagining that I was at the last moment before Judgment, and had to confess my sins. It's amazing how that focuses the mind, and one's prayers. I'd also been thinking about Forgiveness Vespers, and how even though my family was too ill to make it this year, we still need to ask each other's forgiveness. Praying this morning with the Judgment in mind, it came straight to my attention how hard-hearted I've been toward my son Matthew lately. To say he's a strong-willed child is to say that McDonald's sells hamburgers. We've had some serious struggles lately with his attitude and behavior, and speaking for myself, a lot of frustration. But this morning, in prayer, I thought about how God the Father must see me, and how deeply frustrating my constant falling back into bad habits of the heart must be to Him -- and how I trust in His mercy and patient lovingkindness. I felt convicted over the way I've been treating Matthew. It's so difficult to tread the line between exercising firm and legitimate authority, and being merciful. Dad doesn't want to be a pushover, but he also doesn't want to be a stern authoritarian. I want to be what my father was to me: someone who rules with gentle and loving authority. But boy is it hard.
I thought: I need to ask his forgiveness. But then I thought: Matthew has been more in the wrong here, by a long shot. Will I undermine my parental authority by apologizing to him? Will he conclude that he was right all along? And then I thought: that's a risk I'll have to take; all I know is that I am not proud of the harshness of some of my words to my son, and I need to take responsibility for that, humble myself and tell hi
m I'm sorry.
So, when Matthew woke up, I took him into my study, put him in my lap, and -- this was hard -- humbled myself to ask his forgiveness for the harsh words and actions I've had for him lately. I told him that we start Lent by asking each other's forgiveness, and that I needed his forgiveness. I told him he must never forget how much I love him, and that there is nothing on earth that could separate him from my love. He thanked me, then I told him that tonight when I got home, he would need to ask each member of the family for their forgiveness for the bad things he's done to them. Then we got on with our morning. I thought that was the end of that.
Later, as we were driving to school and we were saying our morning prayers, he began by saying, "Dear God, thank you for Lent." He's a seven year old kid, and isn't fasting or anything. I asked him why he was thankful for Lent. He said my telling him I was sorry and asking for forgiveness made him feel really good inside. And I thought: maybe I should do that more often.
Little things. You never know what kind of effect they'll have on people.
In Britain's Daily Telegraph today, a former editor of the Catholic Herald urges fed-up Anglicans thinking of swimming the Tiber to safe shelter in Rome to discard any illusions they might have before doing so. She writes:
Editing the Catholic Herald in the early 1990s made me realise that the popular view of the Catholic Church owed more to fiction than fact. The British saw my Church as an Evelyn Waugh creation steeped in incense, tradition and heavenly choirs. How they recoiled when they set foot in their local Catholic church and found a liberal Lefty priest preaching that raising taxes was part of God's plan, while tone-deaf youngsters wailed Kumbaya.
In the same way, those Anglicans who want to break away from Canterbury over gay priests will be horrified to learn that a great many Catholic priests are of a similar persuasion. Those who bemoan their wishy-washy liberal clergy will be shocked to find that much of the Catholic hierarchy is trapped in an Old Left mentality that regards Neil Kinnock as dangerously Right-wing. Anglicans who hold up the Church of Rome as a model for its black-and-white certainties should consider that, even under a German Pope, Catholicism is about the Italian art of arrangiarsi - or getting by. Thus, the Church bans birth control, but the majority practise it; condemns divorce while allowing annulment; forbids homosexuality, but shields paedophiles within its ranks.
I think this is really wise advice. Really wise. I have recently been asked by a couple of Catholic catechumens what kind of advice I, as a former Catholic, would give them about the Catholic Church. I've told them that there are great things about the Catholic Church, and that I didn't want to be seen as discouraging them, but that they should go into it with eyes wide open. Both these people are adults leaving ECUSA in disgust, and I told them that if they are thinking that they'll find a safe home in the Roman church from the kinds of things that bedeviled them in ECUSA, they're mistaken. The Pope is a wonderful and holy man, but Rome is very far away. Don't do as I did, and come into it with illusions and expectations that the Church can't possibly fulfill. It's very, very easy for converts to have a romantic vision of the church they're going to (Catholic, Orthodox, whatever), exaggerating its virtues and minimizing its faults. But that's dangerous.
As a new Orthodox, I have tried hard not to make the same mistakes in this regard that I made as a Catholic. I got some bad news today from a journalist about an Orthodox scandal, but it didn't get to me as it would have before as a Catholic, not because it's less bad when it happens in Orthodoxy (it's certainly not), but because I'm trying to learn from my past errors, and deal with this kind of thing with more spiritual maturity. Seems to me from my own unfortunate experience that in church matters as in marriage, if you exaggerate the virtues of your beloved, you will also be susceptible to exaggerating your beloved's vices down the road. I am reminded of Tolkien's wonderful advice to his son about how to regard women: not as mystical and perfect creatures on a pedestal, but as "companions in shipwreck."
That's my advice to anyone thinking of going to another church: there might be good and completely justifiable reasons for doing so, and if that's what you're called to do, go with God. But you'll be far better off if you see your new communion not as the embodiment of an ideal, but as companions in shipwreck. Because that's what they -- that's what all of us -- are.
I'd like to open up a thread for converts to talk about things they wish they had known about their church before joining. This is not to say that they regret becoming Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant/whatever, but only good advice for others considering their tradition. Be c
haritable. I don't want this thread to turn into a religious war, so I'll say now that I'm going to be especially vigilant about deleting posts that threaten to disrupt the conversation with their incivility. Keep your mind not on complaining about what's wrong with your church -- we've all got our lists -- but on what useful advice you'd give to potential converts for how to adjust to it and to find peace, spiritual sustenance and the good things your church has to offer despite its problems.
Tony Blair will reportedly announce in Commons tomorrow that his government will withdraw about half the British force in Iraq by Christmas. Then, no doubt, the Shia militias will turn on each other in the British-patrolled south. Anyway, there goes the alliance. America is on its own. Time for us to start bringing our men and women home too, in stages.
The Anglican Communion bishops wrapped up their meeting by telling the Episcopal Church that it has until September to formally ban same-sex blessings and the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians, and it has provided for alternative pastoral oversight for conservative Episcopalians who have abandoned the US church and Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori.
Of course one would be a fool to place any hope in any "or else" laid down by the Anglicans, but it certainly does seem that the prelates have sent Bp. Jefferts Schori back home with her wings severely clipped. According to the Times account, the special provision made for the more conservative Episcopalians is seen by some as an unusual restriction on the PB's authority:
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, but then the American Episcopal Church went pretty far off the reservation, very much counter to what the Anglican Communion said was its policy,” said David Hein, a religion professor at Hood College in Maryland and co-author of the book “The Episcopalians.”
“It is an unprecedented response to an unprecedented action.”
ECUSA liberals are certainly not going to take this lying down. How can formal schism possibly be avoided now? As an outsider, I don't see what ECUSA really gets out of being part of the Anglican Communion. They certainly don't share the same faith, as a general matter (individuals do, of course). Would most Episcopalians prefer to stay with ECUSA, or does membership in the worldwide Anglican church mean more to them? One thing's for sure: though ECUSA pushed this schism by flagrantly ignoring the rest of the communion and its wishes, to say nothing of Scripture and tradition, the church left will blame the vast majority of world Anglicans, who stand on Scripture and Tradition, for being the communion-breakers.
Reader Rob Grano found this in the Touchstone magazine files, from 1999. Touchstone, in case you don't know, is an ecumenical Christian magazine whose orientation is orthodox and traditional. Father Patrick Reardon wrote it in the name of the editors. This excerpt below follows a sober reflection on the fact that most Americans approved of President Clinton, despite his extramarital sexual affair and his perjury. This bears special reflection in light of events in this administration. Emphases below are mine:
This melancholy appraisal, nevertheless, hardly justifies a general retreat of Christians from the public square, nor, as far as I know, have any responsible believers drawn such an inference. On the contrary, our evangelical obligation to leaven the social lump is in no way diminished by the increasing magnitude of the task, nor does the growing darkness lessen our duty to hold high the discernible light delivered to our stewardship.
That said, one may suggest three further biblical truths of which the political events of this past year may serve to remind us:
First, the pursuit of wealth is never without risk, and the danger grows as that pursuit itself casts off godly and humane restraints. Whereas limitless economic growth is an idolatrous ideal that Christians should employ every effort to repudiate, it is a rare thing to hear conservative Christians do so nowadays. To the contrary, for too long a goodly number have fashioned dubious political alliances with those elements in political life devoted only to individual freedoms and the limitless pursuit of material prosperity, forgetting the deep gulf that divides those who deny that “man lives by bread alone” from those who assume that he does.
If conservative Christians would actually sit down and study the atheistic economics of such darlings of the political Right as Ludwig von Mises in the light of what they already know from their reading of, say, the prophet Amos, they would quickly discern how little they have in common with the former. (Maybe they will want to do what I did several years ago: spend Lent reading the whole of Human Action to its last disgusting and indigestible page; it was a penance more severe than flagellation.)
Second, war is a very evil thing that God hates, and constant preparations for war will eat away at a nation’s moral heart. This must especially be the case when such preparations include weapons designed to destroy civilian populations. If conservative Christians in the public forum have been excessively disposed to align themselves with purely wealth-driven forces, some of them have likewise failed to put sufficient distance between themselves and those who favor our nation’s growing indulgence in geopolitical military adventures. Simply put, politically conservative Christian voices in this country have been too muted with respect to world peace and the danger of trying to solve each international problem by recourse to armed force. Christians will, on the contrary, instinctively abhor violence and go to sacrificial lengths to prevent it, knowing that if God resists the purely wealth-driven, he reserves a yet more special wrath for the warmonger.
Finally, minds and hearts are converted one by one. In recent years a number of conservative Christian activists have succumbed, in some measure, to the modern urge to replace repentance by program. That is to say, they have channeled their necessarily limited resources toward gaining political results instead of gaining souls for Christ by the spiritual transformation of minds and hearts. One is not here describing an entirely either-or thing, of course, but it is a plain fact that certain sorts of activity require curtailing other sorts; I cannot run and swim simultaneously.
A colleague came by just now to say, "You've got to watch this Anna Nicole hearing. That Florida judge is a nut." I've had it on for 10 minutes, and boy, it's true. Broward County Circuit Court Judge Larry Seidlin is like a Seinfeld character. If Kramer were a judge, he'd be Larry Seidlin. He's a native of the Bronx and a former NYC cabbie -- and hoo boy, can you ever tell. You can't believe this idiot actually sits on the bench. I guarantee you that whatever decision he makes in this hearing, it will be appealed successfully. Really, if you can, drop by one of the cablers covering this thing -- you won't be sorry. Unless you are a resident of Broward County, and might have to end up in this boob's courtroom.
A reader writes to say he found the following comment from the "Retroculture" thread very telling:
“Believe me, premium cable beats the hell out of weeding a garden any day of the week.”
He adds:
I guess that is the most concise statement of the problem there is, eh? We will lose and lose and lose until the incentives described in this comment reverse. It’s that simple. And they will reverse eventually. And it won’t be pretty.
I'm late getting to this, but the WaPo published a stunner of a piece this past weekend, detailing the abysmal conditions our wounded soldiers are having to endure as outpatients at Walter Reed Hospital. Un-freaking-believable that we would ask these men to go overseas to fight for this country, and then they come home beat to hell and back ... and have to exist like this. Shaem of the nation. Reports today are that the Army's going to fix the problem. But good grief, how'd they ever let things get so bad? Excerpt:
Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
CNN reporting this afternoon an interview with a top Army official who made an inspection today, and said that this is not a resource problem, but rather a "leadership" problem. OK, then, does Congress want to support the troops? How about Congress kicking the butts of those who are directly responsible for our wounded soldiers having to live like homeless people.
Though these women ultimately stand accountable for their choices, the rest of us are not innocent in their fall. A prime characteristic of the media age is that even when we want to, we can barely look away. Everywhere, we are mesmerized by spectacle. Our attention is held not by force, but by our sense that we deserve to see everything, know everything, judge everything.
The entertainment ethic has dulled our hearts to the suffering of the famous and obscure alike. When we see it now in our friends, daughters, neighbors, we barely even recognize a problem. We go right on, looking past the heart of the issue, but still looking.
As for Spears, just a decade ago we were only too happy to be entertained by the singing teen wriggling in short skirts and belly baring tops. Now, we’ll be just as amused to witness her destruction. We’ll scrutinize every move she makes, quietly gleeful to watch her fall apart. Life or death,dignity or depravity, it makes no difference to us so long the show is good.
Forgiveness Vespers mark the start of Lent in the Orthodox Church. It includes a lengthy ritual in which each member of the parish personally asks for (and offers) forgiveness to each other member of the parish. The Drehers weren’t able to go to Forgiveness Vespers at our parish, St. Seraphim’s, last night, because we’re still sick (though there’s light at the end of that depressingly long tunnel, Deo gratias). A friend of mine who, along with his wife and kids, is a catechumen at our parish, wrote the following to me about what happened last night. I post a slightly modified version here with his permission:
I don't know 98% of the people at St. Seraphim's. But let me tell you dude, putting my forehead to the floor before every single person, asking their forgiveness, kissing them on the cheek, receiving their forgiveness - even if neither of us had sinned against each other - all of it was incredibly humbling. I felt stripped and washed clean. And then, after having gone through the whole line, bowing before [my wife] and the boys . . .. it brought me to tears. [My four year old] had been following me around the whole line, so he knew what to expect and how to do it. But when it came time for me to bow before him and ask his forgiveness, he resisted. He didn't like Daddy seeking his forgiveness. He reacted the same way when [his mother] bowed before him. I think in some small way he is learning what it means to give, and receive, forgiveness. Receiving can be the hardest part sometimes, even for a child.
It was so freeing to be there, in the church, everyone busily bowing and kissing and asking forgiveness, paying no mind to anyone or anything else except the person in front of them. I've just never been at a church service like that whose very purpose is to clean the slate and reconcile with one another. It was just so total, all-encompassing, and freeing. I felt safe.
Paul Weyrich and William Lind have already begun rethinking the future of post-Bush conservatism, and have published an American Conservative cover story that once again shows why the magazine is vital to keeping fresh thinking alive on the Right. They start by noting that conservatism as we know it is exhausted:
Were Russell Kirk still with us, what would he now call himself? If conservatism is to be re-established as an intellectual force, and not merely a label for whatever the establishment does to its own benefit, it must first re-awaken intellectually. We need a new conservative agenda.
And they go on to say some things that make my crunchy-con self very, very happy:
While conservatives have won many political victories since the election of Ronald Reagan, the Left has continued to win the culture war. Unfortunately, culture is more powerful than politics. Conservatives have thus won tactically while losing strategically, with the consequence that American society has continued to decline into the abyss that opened before it in the 1960s.
If the next conservatism is to reverse this decline and begin to recover the America we knew as recently as the 1950s, the last normal decade, it must do three things. First, it must aspire to change not merely how people vote but how they live their lives. It must lead growing numbers of Americans to secede from the rotten pop culture of materialism, consumerism, hyper-sexualization, and political correctness and return to the old ways of living. The next conservatism includes “retroculture”: a conscious, deliberate recovery of the past.
This recovery should not be, indeed cannot be, imposed through political power. This is the second action the next conservatism must take: putting power in its place. Tolkien’s ring of power is power itself, which in the long run cannot be used for good. The rejection of the counterculture that has become the mainstream culture must proceed bottom-up, person by person and family by family, on a voluntary basis.
You really, really have got to read this essay. The Weyrich-Lind program calls for a recovery of the agrarian tradition:
Further, the next conservatism should revive the dormant conservative agrarian tradition. As the Amish demonstrate, the small family farm can be economically viable. Organic farming, conservation and restoration of the soil, farmers’ markets and “crunchy cons” should find an honored place in the next conservative agenda. Family farms are good places for children to grow up. While environmentalism is becoming an ideology, conservation and care in the use of God’s creation have long-standing conservative credentials. In turn, agriculture has always been a conservative culture.
They also embrace New Urbanism against the dehumanized strip-mall sprawl, the return of trains and streetcars to wean us from the automobile's teat, and -- get this -- "confront[ing] the social and cultural effects of technology." They say that we need to get on board with "retroculture," by which they mean taking the best from the past and reviving those traditions.
Basically, Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind are arguing for the creation of a new conservative movement that has everything in common with what I wrote about in "Crunchy Cons." And they do call for a movement -- but say it must not make the mistake of the conservative movement has in the past, which is to subordinate itself to the Republican Party.
Their conclusion:
So the next conservative movement is just this: a growing coalition of people who are committed to living differently. They share a common rejection of the popular culture, of a life based on wants and instant gratification, and of the ideology of multiculturalism and political correctness. They seek to work with ot
her Americans, and perhaps Europeans as well, who know the past was better than the present and are committed to living as their ancestors did, by the rules of Western culture. They carry their quest into the political arena, lest their enemies mobilize the power of the state to crush them. But they look beyond politics to lives well lived in the old ways, as lamps for their neighbors’ footsteps, as harbingers of a world restored, and as testimonies to the only safe form of power, the power of example. We might add, as gifts to God as well.
Well said, gentlemen, well said. Sign me up now. But I should add that I have trouble understanding how you make an effective political movement out of these principles. That probably says more about my lack of organizational imagination than anything else. But it's a question.
UPDATE: Don't miss the three responses to the Weyrich/Lind essay. Jim Pinkerton says it's folly for the two to advocate against technology, and that a conservatism that eschews technology instead of accomodating itself to it. John Derbyshire argues that their prescription is hopelessly nostalgic, and pines for a false idyll that conservatism has no business trying to recreate. David Franke says that Weyrich and Lind will have a lot of trouble drawing people who identify with conservatism away from the standard-issue suburban lifestyle -- but he's glad that people are free to choose to live that way if they like.
In brief, I would say this: 1) I don't see that W&L advocate Luddism, but only a skeptical and detached attitude toward technology and its role in society. And by "technology," I take it they don't mean merely throwing out the television, but also adopting a critical, even adversarial, stance toward technologies, like the coming biotech advances, that denigrate human life. Nothing wrong with that, and in fact much right with it. 2) To the extent that Derb is right, and W&L want to recreate the 1950s, well, sure, it's folly. But I think this is something of a straw man. What they want is the social order and cohesion that began to fall apart after that decade. As Alan Ehrenhalt has written about the era , you can't have that kind of strong community in the absence of strong authority. What conservatives who find the W&L vision attractive must do is focus on how to build (rebuild) communities of authority, and in turn create spaces and places that make it easier to practice the virtues in community. That task is not a conventionally political one, though it is political. Which brings me to 3) David Franke's remarks, which make the most sense to me. He doubts the appeal to the broad range of conservatives of the reactionary W&L program, and I'm sure he's right. But he also acknowledges that people are free to try the program out, which is also true -- and, I think, the best chance any of it has for being realized. Perhaps the best thing people who find W&L's vision to be attractive at some level can do is to work locally to create the institutions, neighborhoods and the like to bring this kind of cultural revival to life. Those are my off-the-cuff thoughts, anyway.
I use this blog to think out loud, and through your comments help me to refine my own thinking, and form my opinions. What follows is only that: thinking out loud, trying to put down some inchoate thoughts, in the hope that I can come to a more firm conclusion about what religious and social conservatives need to do to prepare for the post-Bush era.
Following up on my post below about Jody Bottum's despairing First Things essay on that state of social conservatism, I want to offer the following observations, some of which I've said before:
1. The anti-gay marriage movement is for practical purposes dead. If social conservatives can't get the Federal Marriage Amendment passed with an Evangelical president, the Senate in the hands of Republicans, and a majority of Americans against gay marriage, it will never happen. This is especially true because anti-gay marriage sentiment is heavily weighted toward the older demographic. In ten, 20 years, this won't be an issue at all. It is absolutely clear to me that the Republican Party has been demagoguing in this issue, and has had no real interest at all in taking a political risk to enshrine traditional marriage in the Constitution. It has only been interested in the issue insofar as it will get religious and social conservatives to turn out to vote Republican.
2. On abortion, the Supreme Court may or may not overturn Roe -- I devoutly hope it does -- but if it were to do so, that would not outlaw abortion, only return the issue to the states ... where abortion would be legalized in most places, quickly. That would still be progress from a pro-life point of view, but given the minimal actual changes in abortion practice that would follow from that SCOTUS action, abortion isn't as important an issue relative to others in the present moment. Besides, as Bottum points out, under the Bush administration and the GOP Congress, "we haven’t yet established any permanent advances on the life issues." In fact, they collapsed on the stem-cell debate. Again, I ask: if we could not do that with an openly pro-life president and a Republican Congress, what is the value of dedicating social-conservative votes wholly to the GOP? As a pro-life Catholic friend puts it, he doesn't feel obliged to consider a presidential candidate's stance on abortion and stem cells, because he's morally certain that they're not going to do a thing to stop it anyway.
3. On affirmative action, I've seen polls indicating the public opposes it, and others suggesting that they support it. But what has the president and the GOP Congress done to roll back racial discrimination in the form of preferences, or even to make an argument against it on equal protection grounds?
4. On illegal immigration, in Republican circles, the interests of big business trump those of social conservatives. Neither party pays attention to us on this matter. So what, then, is the advantage of allowing the GOP to think it has a lock on our votes?
5. A lot could change between now and the primaries, but as it stands now, the leading Republican candidates -- Giuliani, McCain and Romney -- are either outright hostile to social-conservative views (Giuliani), not trusted on them (McCain, who, though he's more socially conservative than people think, would certainly not put soc-con issues atop his agenda), or a slippery flip-flopper (Romney). Brownback and Huckabee are the most socially conservative candidates, but both of them are long shots, and in either case, I would not vote for any candidate, no matter how good he was on "my" issues, if he supported the war and the general thrust of Bush foreign policy.
6. As a religious/social conservative, I believe that there are threats to the integrity of the traditional family and to civic health that Republicans traditionally don't pay much attention to. The environmental situation, e
specially global climate change, for one. Reckless consumer culture, for another. The health insurance crisis, for a third, and in general, the wreck the Republicans have made of the government's finances. Do I think any of these are more important than the sanctity of life? No. But they aren't nothing, and inasmuch as the only good GOP government seems to have been on sanctity of life issues is to keep things from going downhill as fast as they otherwise would have, the "culture of life" political trump card loses its value.
7. I invite fellow social and religious conservatives to read "The Death of Environmentalism," a 2005 essay by environmentalist leaders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, with particular attention to their critique of the political strategizing of the environmentalists. The authors begin with this:
Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.
We have strikingly little to show for it.
From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties, environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, people in the environmental movement today find themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half decades ago.
Yet in lengthy conversations, the vast majority of leaders from the largest environmental organizations and foundations in the country insisted to us that we are on the right track.
[snip] Our thesis is this: the environmental community's narrow definition of its self-interest leads to a kind of policy literalism that undermines its power. When you look at the long string of global warming defeats under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, it is hard not to conclude that the environmental movement's approach to problems and policies hasn't worked particularly well. And yet there is nothing about the behavior of environmental groups, and nothing in our interviews with environmental leaders, that indicates that we as a community are ready to think differently about our work.
What the environmental movement needs more than anything else right now is to take a collective step back to rethink everything. We will never be able to turn things around as long as we understand our failures as essentially tactical, and make proposals that are essentially technical.
Now, there are substantial differences between the political problems facing the enviro movement, and that that will face the social-conservative movement at the next election and beyond, so this is not a blueprint for our side to adapt. But we do need this kind of systematic thinking. It simply will not do for our leaders to keep going to the same old GOP well. One area where Nordhaus & Shellenberger do offer good advice, inadvertently, to soc-cons is when they instruct enviros to get out of the ghetto -- meaning start thinking beyond the narrow confines of the movement. Soc-cons have long been doing that, making strategic alliances with others in the GOP coalition. Our ghetto is not the same as their ghetto, but it's still a ghetto. And too often we speak the language of the ghetto, following a Rove-style strategy of rallying the base instead of reaching out to build a broader coalition.
One of the most gratifying things about having written "Crunchy Cons" is when I hear from liberals who say they don't agree with conservatives on this or that issue, but that they're pleased to have read that they do have common grounds with conservatives, at least traditional conservatives, on some issues. Two areas that social conservatives' views dovetail with the conventional Democratic views (and against Republican policies) are on job security and globalization, as well as universal health insurance. As well it should: little puts as much stress on families and communities as the prospect of seeing one's job shipped overseas, or falling into bankruptcy after catastrophic illness. But because social conservative leaders have defined our issues so narrowly, the better to make us a good fit within the Republican coalition, we have forfeited good opportunities to make common cause with Democrats around shared values.
What I'm saying is I expect that the Republicans are going to get creamed in 2008. Whether they do or they don't, I don't have any interest in the old-guard social-con leadership running its usual campaigns against Democrats in power, with an eye toward putting the GOP back in power. I certainly don't say we should switch alliances to the Democrats. The Dems are not going to be a socially conservative party anytime soon, and as the recent John Edwards debacle with the anti-Christian blogger shows, there is in the party's activist core a fear and loathing of people like us -- and that's not going to go away. What I'm saying, though, is that we need to rethink not only our political strategizing, with an eye toward breaking out of the GOP ghetto, but that we also need to rethink what it means to be a religious/social conservative in the post-Bush era. And to go from there. There was a reason socially conservative people like my parents and grandparents voted Democratic until they got shown the door at the 1972 convention, when the cultural left took over the party. Maybe there's something in that history worth another look. -- I don't have the answers, but I am certain this is a discussion we on the right need to have. Your ideas?
I nearly choked on my (creamless -- it's Lent) coffee this morning when, in the NYT story about how Hillary-hating ain't what it used to be, I read this passage:
Mr. Scaife, reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, spent more than $2 million investigating and publicizing accusations about the supposed involvement of Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in corrupt land deals, sexual affairs, drug running and murder.
But now, as Mrs. Clinton is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Scaife’s checkbook is staying in his pocket.
Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”
“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”
Could it be that two Bush terms have made even the stoutest Clinton haters miss him? This is like opening up the New York Times in 2014 to find Markos Moulitsas waxing nostalgic for Dubya.
The only major Democratic candidate I think at this point would be a terrible president is Mrs. Clinton. That said, the idea of cranking up the old anti-Clinton machine is depressing to contemplate. Notice how the whole right-wing book genre that's been so hot for about a decade has hit the skids lately? For better or for worse, the hate-Hillary moment has passed, I think. Again, I still think she'd be a terrible president, but the thrill of hating Hillary has gone. When the usual conservative suspects start marching the same old tropes out, it will have all the electricity and urgency of a Traveling Wilburys concert.
Here's my column from yesterday's Dallas Morning News, in which I take on the local Catholic bishop for saying local authorities who are trying to keep illegal immigrants from moving to their town are the same kind of people who wouldn't have given Joseph, Mary and the Baby Jesus a place to lay their heads. Excerpt:
Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, in First Things, adds that it's important for bishops to recognize "the need for a highly diverse, rule-of-law society to be careful about the messages it sends to persons who wish to become part of that society." Ms. Glendon, a leading Catholic intellectual, quotes Pope John Paul II's teaching that holds all members of society, not just the strong, to account: "Those who are weaker, for their part, in the same spirit of solidarity should not adopt a purely passive attitude, or one that is destructive of the social fabric, but, while claiming their legitimate rights, should do what they can for the good of all."
Could the pope's words have meaning in the Farmers Branch controversy? Is the growing influx of illegal immigrants in our area "destructive of the social fabric" in ways that make it morally problematic for Catholics and other Christians? Do people concerned about the stability and integrity of their neighborhoods have no claim on justice? These are all legitimate and important questions, and they deserve a thoughtful response, not sentimental speechifying and back-of-the-hand moral preening from prelates.
Bishops, priests and clergy of all faiths could and should play a constructive role in the wrenching and divisive public debate over immigration. We need the prophetic voice of the church to help all of us – immigrants and citizens – navigate between the demands of justice and the call to mercy.
But those bishops and other church folk whose idea of moral leadership is to write off immigration skeptics as nothing more than nasty nativists who make the baby Jesus cry aren't helping.
A News reader wrote this morning to say:
While most of us Catholics agree that we should extend a loving hand to legal immigrants, one has to wonder if our clergy has considered the debilitating effect on our own working poor of the super cheap wages for which illegal immigrants are forced to and are willing to work. Do illegal immigrants deserve more consideration than our working poor? Next time you are debating with a Catholic priest, ask him how he interprets Section 2241 of the Catechism which states in part, “Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying its civic burden.” Entering illegally, regardless of industriousness, to accept unfair wages to the detriment of resident working poor, using social services without contributing to their cost and refusing to assimilate does not meet the requirements of the Church’s teaching set forth in Section 2241.
I ought to have learned right now that nothing comes between Jonah and his shtick, but for the record -- and once again, despite the straw man that has the durability of Rasputin -- I do not believe organic produce has any special nutritional value, and do not buy it for my table (I don't feel the same about organic meat and dairy). Moreover, though many who have been enthusiastic for "Crunchy Cons" would disagree with me here, I don't believe that organic farming is ideal, though I am glad that we have organic farmers. What I particularly support is a movement away from industrialized agricutlure back to small farms, in part for the sake of develping a diverse local agriculture, and in part for the conservation of agrarian values, even in an urbanized and suburbanized society. Don't tell Jonah (not that it would do you any good), but there's a good case to be made that that's something social conservatives ought to be supporting.
The LA Times reports today that many churches have quit burning palm fronds from the previous Palm Sunday to make ashes for Ash Wednesday services, and instead order them from an ashes supply shop. "It's just a lot easier and safer for most churches," said Father Tom Behan, who has served off and on at the Los Feliz parish for 40 years. "It's what Ash Wednesday means that matters."
Does the Father not understand the sense of continuity and connection between this year's ashes and last year's Palm Sunday services. To dust everything living returns? Good grief! All in the name of convenience. But wait, it gets worse:
In the Book of Genesis, God chastises Adam and Eve for committing their first sin, reminding them of their mortality by saying, "For dust you are and to dust you will return."
It's the phrase ministers or priests have commonly recited while marking worshipers' foreheads with ashes. But [Loyola Marymount professor Father Dorian]Llywelyn said now Catholic churches often say, "Turn away from sin and believe the Gospel."
"It's more of a positive spin, more to encourage you than frighten you," Llywelyn said.
The change in wording, like the move to buying ashes, reflects how churches adapt their practices over time, he said.
The Episcopalian friend who sent the story to me remarked: "Good Lord, if Ash Wednesday isn't allowed to be frightening, then what is? Can we now end Maundy Thursday with confetti shooting out over the congregation?"
A few years ago, I had been struggling with a parish I was in, and went to Ash Wednesday services there. Jam-packed. When the pastor came out to give the homily, he began with, "You might expect me to give a homily about sin and repentance today, but" -- pause for dramatic effect, slight chuckle -- "that's not my style." The homily went on to talk about how Lent was a time when we needed to learn to love ourselves more. After that, I concluded that this place was simply not serious about the Christian life, and moved on. Religion as therapy is no religion at all, at least no religion worth a damn.
David Brooks observes today (behind TimesSelect) that the once widely-held belief in goodness as the natural state of mankind has faded. Too much reality. Here's Brooks:
This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.
[Emphasis mine.]
Amy Welborn makes a similar point I've bolded in her long "Theory of Everything" post. Here's what you might call Welborn's Law:
Everything will eventually go haywire.
Therefore, it is safest to have deeply-rooted, concrete, content-rich, standards and reference points expressive of tradition as our framework in order to keep us even within shouting distance of the original vision, aka The Truth.
She goes on to explain that human nature is always going to take the easy way out, to go with the flow, to adapt itself to the spirit of the age. No matter how well we mean, when we cut ourselves off from tradition -- and those institutions and practices that embody and convey the tradition -- we will go wherever the wind blows us, even in spite of ourselves. And given our nature, we will go toward darkness, disorder, violence, sensuality. Like the song says, "Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable/And lightness has a call that's hard to hear." Here's Amy:
In that context, I am thinking more and more that since things go haywire, and that darkness within and without is so pervasive, that it just makes sense - and is not a matter of "liberal" or "conservative" to let the Church be the place where things are clearly stated, and where worship is structured so the temptations of the egos that run it are not given any room to be served - we are free to take it all or leave it - but at least we will know where we stand.
Amen and amen. One thing I appreciate about the Orthodox Church is that for all its problems -- and every church has problems -- nobody's going to spring any liturgical surprises on you. As Hugh O'Beirne, who left RCism for Odoxy, says in "Crunchy Cons," "I used to fight the intra-church battles in the Catholic church as much as I'd fight against Protestants. But there's no war footing within Orthodoxy. You can go that way, and I've seen it happen, but it's not there in the same waqy as it is in Catholicism." In my short time in the Orthodox Church, that has also been my experience, though I must say that my experience has been almost entirely of one OCA parish. Orthodox readers of this blog should feel free to correct me, but I sense that there is far less of a spirit of individualism present in Orthodoxy, in the sense that any one individual feels free to mess with the liturgy, or the teachings of the church. There is an unspoken understanding that this is something we are supposed to conform to, in part because it's so much older and bigger than we, and we have no right to tinker with it. Of course as Fr. Schmemann memorably observed, this sort of thing can turn into a worship not of the living God, but of Tradition. Wrote the great Orthodox theologian: “What used to be an organic, natural style became stylization, spiritually weak, harmful. The main problem of Orthodoxy is the constraint due to style, and its inability to revise it; a prevalent absence of self-criticism, of
checking the tradition of the elders by Tradition, by love of Truth. A growing idolatry.”
Still, one is grateful for a community that at least stands foursquare against the modernist dogma that we should be free of all constraints imposed by tradition. I thought about that the other day when talking to a friend whose mainline Protestant parish is undergoing a small revolution wrought by its new pastor. The new pastor has decided that the old way of doing things there had to go. They sing different hymns now, and pretty much are conforming to every trend in pop Evangelicalism. My friend hates it, and tells me lots of the old guard in the parish hate it ... but there are lots of new people there who don't remember what it was like before, and who are going along with the new changes for lack of a better idea. Judging from my friend's admittedly biased account, it doesn't sound like the old guard would have opposed any changes at all, but what they're having thrust upon them is a radical break from the traditions in this parish, and it's alienating a lot of people. People who won't stand up for themselves, it appears to me, because they don't want to be in the position of bucking the parish leadership. It does sound like the new pastor considers this parish his own personal stage, and the people and their local traditions merely clay for molding. This will not end well, because either this pastor will move on to a bigger church and career, or will be dismissed. In either case, he will have left behind a parish broken at some level and embittered because it was dragged along so radically from its roots, and ... for what?
I was thinking about all this yesterday while reading further into the deeply pleasurable "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism and the Sacred," that collection of essay's by Notre Dame architecture department head Philip Bess that I was raving about here recently. One of his essays speaks of Catholic church architecture, and the radical architectural break with the Catholic past that occurred around 1950. Bess observes that in their architecture and design, modern Catholic parish churches have by and large abandoned the role they have always played in conveying the Church's teaching through symbol. He speaks of the "evangelical" role church architecture has (and when I read this, I instantly thought about how I began my journey into Catholicism quite unexpectedly at age 17, when on my first trip to Europe, I visited Chartres Cathedral, and with every fiber of my being wanted to be part of the tradition that could erect something so complex and overwhelmingly beautiful to God; what must they know about the nature of our God to allow them to have built something that made me feel so small in the presence of His majesty, but also so ennobled by being in its presence?). Bess says that traditionally, church architects have understood that the way you built a temple to God says something about God's nature. If that's true, what do you suppose this parish church tells worshipers and passers-by about God? That he owns a nuclear power plant (God as C. Montgomery Burns)? Or this Brazilian cathedral -- that God is a medieval court jester? Actually what they both say is precisely nothing about God, and everything about the architect and those who hired him. What they, and churches like it, convey is a sense of complete discontinuity with the past, and in turn a sense that the people of the present time have no natural connection to what came before, and therefore no responsibility to honor and preserve it.
Think about it: there's a reason people prefer to get married in beautiful old churches, no matter how humble, instead of these modernist churchatoriums. Why do you suppose that is?
Why do you suppose that for the really important stuff, like marriage, they want to be inside a building that conveys the gravity of the occasion, but for the stuff that really doesn't count -- like, oh, the daily and weekly religious life of the parish community -- they settle for crap?
But I digress. Here's what I wanted to quote from Bess:
All architecture that endures shares a concern for what architects call "tectonics," the basic constructional principles and elements of all building. "Styles," however, differ, as do modes of architectural expression. The Church has always recognized this. Nevertheless, architectural styles -- a shared aesthetic sensibility embodied in buildings and extended over time -- depend upon healthy traditions for their transmission and development.
Modernism, the dominant ideology of 20th-century architecture, was anti-traditional; and continues to be so in the early 21st century, lacking any aesthetic principle for sustaining itself other than an incessant search for novelty. Only from sheer cultural habit does neo-modernism remain abstract, adversarial, utopian, and uninterested in materiality; in its gnosticism simultaneously "spiritual" and positivist; insistent upon emphasizing and symbolizing discontinuity rather than continuity in both architecture and culture. ...The qualitative trajectory of contemporary modern architecture, both intellectually and as buildings, is downward. If the Church occasionally embraces a modernist aesthetic, she should do so cautiously -- and certainly not as a substitute for her many well-tested and well-established aesthetic traditions.
I suppose there's no way to quantify this, but I'd bet that the one lesson we teach our young by the way we build churches and, well, most everything today is: none of this matters, it's all take-or-leave as you like, you have no obligation to the past or the future, only the Everlasting Now. It's most culturally and spiritually disabling when the church (by which I mean all Christian churches) yields to this modernist worldview, not only in its architecture, but in its liturgy and its theology, because like Amy says, when the entire world is in such flux, the one place that should be a rock of stability and changelessness should be the house of the eternal God.
Here's a piece from the new First Things in which FT editor Jody Bottum and contributor Michael Novak discuss the state of conservatism in this grim political moment. I want to focus on Bottum's piece, which is fascinating, and bears quoting at length. Here's the lede:
After six years of President Bush-thought by nearly every observer to be the most socially conservative president of recent decades-where does social conservatism stand? No one can deny there have been some bright spots: the defeat of the Democrats’ Senate leader Tom Daschle in 2004, the nominations of Justices Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005, a few successful state referenda in 2006.
What isn’t so clear is what it all amounts to. The noise has been overwhelming since George W. Bush took office. Abortion, euthanasia, stem cells, public Christmas displays, same-sex marriage, pornography in the movies, faith-based initiatives, immigration, visible patriotism: We’ve been warned by the media, over and over again, that Republicans are reshaping America into a Puritan’s paradise. But, at the end of the day, the media mostly won and the Republicans mostly lost. Social conservatism is in little better shape now than it was when Bush was first elected. In many ways, it is in worse shape.
...Every conservative I know is depressed these days, and they are right to be. Under President Bush, conservatism has won only in the sense of not losing as quickly as it would have under a President Gore or a President Kerry.
Bottum says the problem is not, as various Bush critics on the Right have said, that Bush is a fake conservative. The problem, Bottum bluntly asserts, is that Bush is "incompetent." How are things worse for conservatives? Bottum:
President Bush was absolutely right that social security is a looming disaster, and as a result of his efforts, social-security reform is now dead for a generation. The White House saw clearly that education in this country needs a complete overhaul, and we got as a consequence only the bureaucratic annoyance of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Republicans’ lack of political savvy abandoned an astonishing number of unconfirmed judicial nominees-and now we have a Democratic Senate unlikely to confirm any conservative judges at all.
And then he gets to the elephant lollygagging on the coffee table: the war, which Bottum declares that we have lost. He doesn't concede that we have actually been defeated, but he says the perception that America has lost is now fixed, no matter what happens next, and that in terms of our now and future politics, that's what counts. Bottum concludes that the war was justified, but that Bush blew its execution badly, and that will hurt the conservative cause for a long time to come.
So, what to make of this? For one, I don't believe that making Bush a scapegoat for the Iraq failure is entirely fair. Without question his (i.e., his, Rumsfeld's, Bremer's, et al.) handling of the war has been thoroughly incompetent. But the original sin was the war itself, by which I mean choosing to launch a war of conquest and democratic nation-building in a region and among a people who were obviously spectacularly unsuited for it. We went to war with the broader goal of stopping Islamic extremism in the region; now, the best we can hope for is a stable Shia theocracy. How, exactly, could better execution of the war prevented this ultimate outcome? If we'd gone in with vastly more troops, and if Bremer had not disbanded the Iraqi military, we possibly wouldn't have civil war right now. But when given the vote, the Iraqi people voted for their sectarian parties, unsurprisingly. One way or the other, we would have been fated to have tried to dam a river, a river that's going to go the way it wants to go, despite our exertions. To the extent that conservatives s
till believe this was a wise or just war, only incompetently executed, we will have failed to have learned its lessons, and will not be worthy of the American people's trust on foreign policy.
Which leads to the more interesting question, first suggested to me by a friend who read the Bottum essay. This next election will be about Iraq. Foreign policy will dominate US politics for the foreseeable future. Given that social conservatives have lashed ourselves to the GOP and to the Iraq War, to what extent will our continued association with this failed war cripple our prospects for seeing our policy goals implemented? The American electorate is still more or less socially conservative, meaning that on the issues that matter most to social conservatives -- e.g., abortion, gay marriage, racial quotas -- they agree with us more than with the Democrats. [N.B., on abortion, obviously most Americans don't want it outlawed, but most Americans do favor some form of restriction on the practice, which the Democratic Party does not]. But because organized social conservatism is so closely tied to the GOP and, in turn, to the war, our fortunes in the political arena are going to continue to decline.
What to do? It seems to me that social-conservative leaders have got to start doing some thinking and strategizing independent of the GOP. The environmentalist movement has been in such a ditch for such a long time because it became so closely allied with the Democratic Party. Even though environmentalism is broadly popular with the American people, it's anathema to the GOP. Had environmentalist leaders not put all their eggs in the Democratic basket, and demonized Republicans, they would have learned how to talk to Republicans and conservatives about green issues in conservative terms, and would have diversified their portfolio, so to speak. In the next political order, social conservatives are likely to find themselves in the same position as environmentalists were in the order now passing away: leading a movement whose principles have a lot more public support than its leaders do among the political elite.
I don't expect the Democratic Party to welcome back with open arms the social conservatives they drove away at the 1972 convention and thereafter, at least not anytime soon. But it is in the interest of both the Democrats and social conservative leaders to reach a modus vivendi with each other. And social conservatives really do need to come to terms with the war and where we stood on it then, and stand on it now. I think it's true that at least some of us suppressed misgivings about the war because our allies in the broader conservative movement were all for it, and we either trusted their judgment, or at least didn't want to be seen abandoning them and siding with the liberals against whom we stood on most other important issues. The Iraq debacle calls the efficacy of those old alliances into question. There is no reason why church people whose social and cultural agenda is conservative should feel compelled by force of habit to stand by this failed war and those who waged it. It might be a good time to ponder the difference between being conservatives, and being partisan Republicans.
Story today -- and more fodder for Theodore Dalrymple's dystopian but compulsive readable musings -- about the rising violent crime rate in London, and how some in Britain are blaming the collapse of the family for social breakdown. Interesting quotes from the Tory leader David Cameron:
David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservatives, said Friday at a public meeting that the United Nations report this week “shows that our society is in deep trouble.”
He blamed the malaise of a society he depicted as too ready to forfeit family values in the face of economic pressures. “When you look at the people caught up in these events, what you see is a complete absence in many cases of fathers, and a complete presence of family breakdown,” he told a television interviewer. “That, I think, is what is at the heart of it.”
In political terms, Mr. Cameron’s words represented a marked shift away from the individualistic and materialistic values that underpinned Conservative thinking in the Thatcher era. “We used to stand for the individual,” he said. “Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood in a word, for society.”
Hmm. Well, I naturally sympathize with Cameron here, but I want to understand the context in which he's speaking. My understanding of British politics is limited. I'd been under the impression that Thatcherism was a reaction -- and a necessary, salutary one -- to statism. If it's the case that Cameron is saying that Thatcherite individualism is insufficient, then of course he's right. But in practice, what does that mean? How would the social and political vision of Cameron's Tory party differ from what Labour has to offer? How does Cameron propose reconstituting the Burkean little platoons?
Clive Davis, can you help me out here? Or anybody else with a better working knowledge of contemporary British politics?
The NYT brings us news today that more and more girls are participating in high school wrestling. If you're me, you think what kind of girls would want to do that? But it gets better, or worse: because there are so few female wrestling teams, most of these girls end up joining the male teams. Which is an idea so spectacularly dumb it could only have originated in a culture that denies essential nature in the name of egalitarianism.
Jessica Bennett, Montville High School’s 103-pound wrestler, waited until Rich Wood went down to try to grab her leg, then launched herself onto his back, and got him down to his knees. After a brief stalemate later in the match, Jessica, 15, lifted him off the ground and took him back to the mat, for more points.
At that, several of Rich’s teammates, from St. Bernard High School here, looked down at their feet. There is still some pain in watching a teammate being beaten by a girl — even a girl like Jessica, who has won 23 of her 35 matches this season.
Well, yeah. As Roger Shaw, who heads a women's wrestling program, told the Times: “A boy who goes out on the mat against a girl doesn’t win. If he beats her, he was supposed to, and if he doesn’t, he’s dead meat.” Poor Rich Wood, humiliated like that in front of other boys. How damaging that could be to his psyche. But if he had beaten her, that would be damaging in its own way. For one thing, there's no honor in beating a girl at wrestling. For another, in order to muster the psychological wherewithal to compete on equal footing with a female wrestler, Rich Wood has to overcome deep cultural conditioning that will have taught him to think of women as persons men should exert physical labor to protect, not to conquer. The powerful and invaluable taboo that says men must never hit women will need to be eroded somewhat so Rich Wood can compete. Ten, twenty years from now, when Rich Wood is having a terrible argument with his wife or girlfriend, one wonders if it will be that much easier for him to give in to the temptation to strike her.
More stupidity, from the story:
One thing that coaches, parents and wrestlers — both boys and girls — agree on is that sex is the last thing on wrestlers’ minds as they pull and push and turn their partners, same sex or opposite.
“They’re so pumped up with adrenaline when they’re out there on the mat, they’re not thinking of anything but wrestling and winning,” said Gary Wilcox, Jessica Bennett’s coach.
I find that impossible to believe, and wish that Camille Paglia would descend upon these nincompoops and explain to them the intertwining and subliminal relationship between sex and violence. Having been a teenage boy, I can say without fear of contradiction that sex is never the last thing on a teenage boy's mind. In fact, it's at best No. 2 or 3, but never below that. I'm just an armchair psychologist here, but it strikes me as really dumb and dangerous to have teenage boys working out their competitive aggression groping and grappling with teenage girls. Boys at that age are in the grip of something natural that's more powerful than they can understand, and they live in a culture that gives them virtually no help in restraining and channeling those impulses into something constructive. Strenuous athletic endeavor is one traditional way of working out those tensions, of sublimating them. And now feminist egalitarians are putting males in the position of being aggressive and physically intimate with their female peers, in a situation of dominance ... or, in Rich Wood's case, humiliation.
Myrna Minkoff vents her spleen today over her departure from the Kingfish's campaign. You will not be surprised to learn that she and Melissa McEwan are -- wait for it -- victims of misogynists. Excerpt:
One question that's hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that's viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. ... That two young feminist women were the targets of such a strenuous harassment campaign from bloggers and the Catholic League hints of more being at stake than scalp-collecting for conservatives. The posts that sent Donohue into a well-financed swoon were on topics such as the right to abortion, the right to contraception and gay rights. Donohue and the long list of culture warriors on the league's board of advisors are dedicated to stomping out those very rights McEwan and I were defending. It's unlikely they took issue with just the coarse, comedic vernacular that we used to defend those rights.
Regardless of its motive, the result of the smear campaign was to send a loud, clear signal to young feminist women. It tells them that campaigning for Democratic candidates, and particularly doing so in positions that would help the candidate connect with young feminist communities like the one that thrives in the blogosphere, is a scary, risky prospect.
What self-serving twaddle. It's not their feminism that got them in trouble, it's their filthy mouths and extreme anti-Christian spite. There are plenty of feminists who share their convictions about abortion rights, gay rights, the Catholic Church and what not, to whom it wouldn't occur to express those views in blasphemous, pornographic and hugely insulting terms. Marcotte wants to be able to be praised for her lurid opinions by her online fans, but doesn't want to be held responsible for them by the wider community. Can't have it both ways.
There is something to be said about the worrying phenomenon of one's antagonists taking something controversial one said on a blog, twisting it and using it in a smear campaign. A few months after 9/11, on The Corner, Rich Lowry and I were discussing what the US should do if Islamic terrorists nuked an American city. We raised the prospect of whether or not the US should retaliate by obliterating an Arab Muslim city -- even Mecca -- or should have a stated policy that this would happen. I wrote that the US should respond in kind against Arab capitols (I no longer believe that, for the record, and regret even having considered it), and that while nuking Mecca would be emotionally satisfying to Americans who had just seen one of their own cities annihilated by Islamic terrorists, it would be a bad idea. And I said it was insane even to be talking this way. To this day I hear from this or that angry Muslim accusing me of being an advocate for dropping a nuclear bomb on Mecca, when I do not advocate any such thing, nor have ever advocated it.
So yes, it does happen that one's ideological opponents can twist one's blog words for the sake of smearing. But that's not what got Marcotte and McEwan into trouble. They got in trouble not for what they didn't say, but for what they plainly said. Judging by their ages, it could well be that Marcotte and McEwan inhabit the world detailed by Emily Nussbaum in this must-read New York magazine article, a world in which young people blog all their thoughts and actions online, and don't think there are any real consequences for it. Well, ladies, welcome to the real world.
To be honest, it's not a world I'm keen about living
in. Though I think Marcotte and McEwan got what they deserved in losing their gigs on the Edwards campaign, it must be said that it's frightening to think that something stupid any of us might have written online when we were young and didn't know any better could follow us forever, and even affect our employment prospects. But that's the world we're in now. Thank God they didn't have blogs when I was in my twenties. Don't blog while drunk. And don't blog anything you can't defend if it ends up on the front page of the paper. Because it just might.
Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Jerry Falwell went on Pat Robertson's program and suggested that God allowed them to happen because of gays, lesbians, abortionists, the ACLU and others. Robertson agreed. Falwell also said:
And with biological warfare available to these monsters; the Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats, what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact, if in fact God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.
I recall at the time being so completely overcome by anger at them for this, and wrote a regrettably intemperate column denouncing them. Now, I've got mixed feelings.
I thought about them the other day reading Bruce Bawer's review of Dinesh D'Souza's book. Bawer says that D'Souza, by claiming that America's wickedness brought the 9/11 attacks upon us by inflaming the Muslim world, is not only wrong, but guilty of treason. I think D'Souza is mistaken, but it's going too far to call him treasonous. In fact, as uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, no Christian or Jew can rule out the possibility that God will judge America, and judge it harshly. And perhaps is judging America. The Bible, particularly the books of the prophets, are full of examples of God calling Israel to repentance, and bringing her to ruin when she refused. That God used the Babylonians as an instrument of chastisement does not imply that He endorsed the Babylonian Way of Life.
Jim Kunstler, the "Geography of Nowhere" writer, in a speech delivered not long after the Columbine massacre, said:
I often joke that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished. But the joke is, it’s no joke. I believe it with all my heart. I also often remark in my public utterances that when we succeed in creating enough places that are not worth caring about, that we will succeed in becoming a nation that is not worth defending, and a way of life that is not worth carrying on. We are guilty of foreclosing our own future, and we are evil because we don’t care.
I doubt Kunstler is any sort of theist, but he's talking about the same sort of things as those who adhere to the prophetic tradition are: that America is bringing judgment upon itself by its refusal to repent. Falwell has his list of the sins America is guilty of; the secular left has its own. And there is surely truth in both assessments. I believe strongly that God is furious at abortionists. I don't know why the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would be any less furious at conservative business tycoons who grind the face of the poor.
When Bush 41 said "The American way of life is not up for negotiation," he was expressing what I think many conservatives (and liberals too) believe: that we Americans are not under anyone's judgment. From a Christian point of view, that's dangerous and wrong. We are under judgment. Humanity is. There is always reason to repent. That doesn't mean that we should become masochistic, blame-America-first self-loathers; that would be pathological. But it's also true that as we fight justly to defend ourselves, that we consider the things we oughtn't to have done that we have done, and the things we ought to have done that we've left undone, and get about the business of repentance, both personal and corporate. God is patient, but He won't wait forever. Something to think about on the eve of Lent.
Got a nice letter this morning from a Catholic grad student in NYC. I post it here with his permission:
I thought I would write a quite note to say 'thanks' for doing what you do. I came to your book, funny enough, through reading a review of it in First Things. While I had never heard of you at that point, I knew enough to disagree with almost everything in that review. The very next day, I went and checked out your book from the local library. Living in New York City, it was actually easier to find it in the library than on a shelf at a bookstore--at least the kind I like to support (ironic, eh?). At any rate, what a find! Until finding your book, I had trouble identifying myself as a conservative. As a graduate student in philosophy specializing in moral and political theory, I have reckoned myself to a conservative, neo-Burkean, communitarian outlook, but I while I could espouse the thought of Elshtain or Sandel, it was still difficult for me to identify myself as 'conservative' publicly, given that this committed me to (or at the very least usually aligned me with) a look at commerce and consumerist culture that was far from...well...conservative. Reading your book made me realize that I could comfortably call myself a conservative....albeit a 'crunchy' one. :)
Now, it's nice that there are books out there (like yours) sending out the good word of conservative, crunchy living; but wouldn't it be great if there was a magazine as well?
As of now, there's a huge market for these crunchy-conservative ideas, but there is no regular publication (blogs don't count) that fills this market. You got AdBusters: while you must admire their cries for sensible sustainability and their criticism of our toxic, advertised and product-infested culture, a true conservative should loathe their childish, pagan (and dare I say narcissistic?) approach to religion, family, sexuality, and education. To get good analysis on these latter issues, one turns to a great publication like First Things. Yet, like many 'conservative' publications, their acquiescence to and passive acceptance of the worst of our centralizing capitalist culture (never de jure but almost ALWAYS de facto) is a point of continual frustration. Furthermore, my roommate reads The Nation (edited by Myrna Minkoff herself), and who do I see writing for them but our own Wendell Berry! Why, I ask, is Berry getting ink there, but not in any respectable conservative magazine? What's wrong with conservatism when it's own prophet as to turn elsewhere to get a voice?
Long story short, I'm glad you are helping conservatism be conservative with your books and newspaper articles (and (gulp) blog). But! Have you ever thought of starting a magazine? Imagine! A magazine that has the best of First Things and AdBusters! A magazine with 'Weekly Standard' sensibilities, but with the message of Kirk instead of unbridled consumerism. A publication echoing the cultural and literary concerns of the New Criterion, but with some of the same environmental and agricultural concerns as Mother Jones! A magazine that could draw the thought of Robert P. George and Wendell Berry both!
It's possible...you know it!
Anyway, I might have to do this on my own anyway. But it would be nice to have you on board. :) Let me know what you think. I'll send you my resume. :)
Give it some thought!
We'd bounced around an idea like this before, with a regular reader of this blog offering some money to invest in it. Magazine costs are so high, though, and it's so difficult to build up a subscription base that I can't see this taking off without major support from a private benefactor or foundation. Thoughts?
Day Five of the siege, here in the Coughateria. It seemed like things were on the upswing -- the childrens' fever had subsided. But guess what? All three are running temperatures again, Julie's fever has never left and ... well, at least I'm not feverish anymore, though I suspect if UN weapons inspectors tested the foul cauldron bubbling in my lungs, they'd flag me for WMD production.
And this isn't even the flu! We've been tested.
I'm to the point of calling the Hazmat unit and asking them to swing by and hose us down. Barring that, I'll start making Thera-tinis (2 parts Theraflu lemon, 1 part Tito's vodka, and a Halls Mentho-Lyptus cough drop for garnish) to get through the day. I'm kidding, but a Louisiana friend sends this homemade recipe for what he calls "Cold Hooch":
About 2 1/2 fingers whiskey (Canadian or bourbon) in a coffee mug, about the same of orange juice, about three dashes or so of lemon juice, then top off with water and loads of honey. Heat up in microwave, mix well. If it doesn't cure you, at least you won't really care anymore.
I keep hearing that this stuff has been going around various regions of the country, and that it lingers in some form for a couple of weeks. Any of you had similar bouts?
Today I am 40. I spent it mostly in bed, sleeping off this flu and fever. My voice sounds like what you might hear if Jack Klugman and the Three Billy Goats Gruff attempted to croak the Hallelujah Chorus. The UPS man brightened my day considerably when he brought by half a case of Italian wine, sent to me by a bibulous Brooklyn parson of my fond acquaintance. We'll sure have a grand time when Lent is over.
I can't think past the next dose of Advil to come up with any Deep Thoughts on entering middle age. I've never been the sort of person to fear or even to dislike getting older. Life has only gotten more interesting, I've found, with each passing year, especially as some of the youthful passions fade, and I find the patience to investigate the subtleties that lie within the overlooked interstices. That's such a common experience that it's trite even to mention it. But its true. Pass the Robitussin.
Frederica Mathewes-Green sends along news of something she encountered on a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest: The 100-Mile Diet. It's an idea hatched by two Vancouverites who wanted to limit themselves to supporting and developing a local food culture. The idea is to only eat things grown within 100 miles of where you live. Here are 13 reasons to do the diet.
Day Two of life in the Snot-o-drome. Oh boy, is this fun. Neither fever nor coughs nor a head full of mucus will prevent the boys from whaling the crap out of each other at every opportunity. Bleah. The problem with having a wife at a time like this is she interferes with my self-medication regime. My approach to combating serious colds/flu/whatever is best described as "shock and awe." I say scorch that earth with whatever chemicals you've got. If I could get away with it, I'd eat those little red Sudafed pills like Red Hots. But nooooooo, women think you should actually follow directions on the box.
You know, after having seen Amanda Marcotte's review of "The Children of Men," which went up a day or so ago on Pandagon, I'm starting to wonder if the crackpot blogger's continued presence on the Edwards campaign staff wouldn't be worth it for the literary pleasure it affords. Take a look at this Marcotte passage:
I’ve seen some feminist bloggers take on the movie Children of Men, but none so far from an explicitly feminist point of view, so I thought I’d take that on. I expressed anxieties earlier that a film that raised hysteria about underpopulation when we are in fact a world facing overpopulation might be reactionary, but upon seeing the movie last night, I have to state outright that I was utterly wrong. If nothing else, people who express anxieties about “underpopulation” in America and Europe are usually anti-immigration folks, and this film took an unabashed pro-immigrant stance, which I appreciated.
First, a note about the aesthetic value of the film—even if Children of Men were every bit as reactionary as the blurbs make it out to be, it would be a movie worth viewing.
There's only one person I know ("know") who writes like that. Here she is:
He handed me this brilliant pamphlet that showed in detail how the Pope is trying to assemble a nuclear armory; it really opened my mind, and I forwarded it to the editor of The New Democracy to aid him in his battle against the Church. ...I don't imagine that your sociological or political ideas are getting any more progressive either. Have you abandoned your project to form a political party or nominate a candidate for president by divine right? I remember when I finally met you and challenged your political apathy, you came up with this idea. I knew that it was a reactionary project, but it at least showed that you were developing some political consciousness. Please write to me aout the matter. I am very concerned. We need a three-party system in this country, and I think that day by day the fascists are growing in strength. This Divine Right Party is the sort of fringe-group scheme that would syphon off a large part of the fascist support. ...Please get out of the house, Ignatius, and enter into the world around you. I am worried about your future. ...
Yes, Amanda Marcotte is the real-life incarnation of Myrna Minkoff -- the minx from "A Confederacy of Dunces"! In fact, can't you see La Marcotte delivering this talk, from the novel?:
LECTURE! LECTURE! M. Minkoff speaks boldly about "Sex in Politics: Erotic Liberty as a Weapon Against Reactionaries" 8 p.m. Thursday, the 28th YMHA -- Grand Concourse Admission: $1.00 -- OR -- Sign M. Minkoff's Petitiion Which Aggressively Demands More and Better Sex for All and a Crash Program for Minorities! (the petition will be mailed to Washington.) Sign now and save America from sexual ignorance, chastity, and fear. Are you committed enough to help in this bold and crucial movement?
O Fortuna! Please don't go away, Amanda. I am loving the fact that a Democratic presidential candidate has hired Myrna Minkoff to run his blog operation. This is just gonna get better and better. Better even than a fridge full of Methadone and Slim-Fast!
Now that the White House has confirmed Karl Rove's impolitic remark the other day -- "I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas" -- Mickey Kaus calls it "Gaffe of the Year." Kaus:
This is not the man you want comprehensively reforming immigration. Dividing work into skilled jobs fit for Americans and unskilled jobs unfit for Americans is certainly one logical reaction to the increasing returns to smarts and skills in our economy. But, as Krikorian notes, it's a reaction that would alter America's essential self-conception. Democrats complain about the inegalitarian effect of various Republican tax cuts, but that's a minor and superficial inequality compared to formalizing the snobbery of the skilled.
I noticed the NYTimes had quite a gentle adjective the other day to describe the Kingfish's potty-mouthed blog girls' remarks: "intemperate." Yesterday's L.A. Times had a lame editorial sniffing at the whole affair. "Expect this kind of nuttiness to continue until voters show that they care more about a candidate's thoughts than those of the hired hands," concluded the paper. It is inconceivable to think that either publication would have been so blase' about campaign bloggers that had bashed Jews or Muslims in the same terms.
The Catholic League's Bill Donohue hits Newsweek for its downplaying the controversy. Here's Donohue's statement:
“Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman was disingenuous when he said that two employees for Edwards came under fire because they ‘criticized Roman Catholic and religious conservatives on their personal blogs.’ It is not criticism of Catholicism when someone makes a comment about the Virgin Mary being injected with semen by the Lord. Nor is it criticism when religious conservatives are called motherf---ers. It is hate speech. And these are only two of their incredibly vulgar assaults. To read what they actually said, in uncensored form, click here.
“Newsweek reeks of a double standard. In its December 11, 2006 edition, it said that Michael Richards had gotten himself in trouble for his ‘racist rant,’ and in the same article it recalled Mel Gibson’s ‘anti-Semitic remarks.’ On February 5, 2007, it said that Isaiah Washington got himself into hot water for making a ‘homophobic comment.’ In other words, when someone makes a racist, anti-Semitic or anti-gay remark, Newsweek labels it as such. But when obscene comments are made about the Mother of God or religious conservatives, it counts as mere criticism.
“As I said last week, we will use the John Edwards matter as a springboard to a national discussion on the duplicity that colors the entire conversation about bigotry in America. Newsweek has now made its own contribution to this issue.”
Exactly. There is a double standard.
UPDATE: Let me add a couple of things. Many on the left can't see what the big deal is, and say that Christians who are offended by this wouldn't have voted for Edwards anyway. Really? My "Kingfish" gibes aside, I was interested in what he had to say about the economy, and populism. But now, forget it. I doubt very much that John Edwards is a bigoted man, but by retaining Marcotte and McEwan, who are in my view anti-Christian bigots, he has shown that he will tolerate it. What if a candidate had retained in high-profile positions a pair of bloggers who spoke so disgustingly about the most sacred mysteries in Judaism? Would the candidate have expected Jews to just get over it? Would the news media have dropped it? Would sympathetic bloggers have dismissed the presence of noxious anti-Semites on the campaign staff of a presidential candidate as something only thin-skinned Jews should be concerned with? Of course not.
John Edwards is right -- there really are two Americas, and in his America, it's not such a big deal to use the filthiest, most blasphemous language, as long as your targets are traditional Christians. And Democrats wonder why they have trouble getting many people of faith to listen to them.
Light blogging today -- am stuck at home with the same creeping crud everybody seems to be getting around here. What's more, all three kids are sick, and so is Julie. Happily, though, the misery didn't strike until yesterday morning, after we'd disposed of all the wine and beef from the birthday dinner.
Heard a funny line from my DC friend who came in for the dinner. He was talking about how he is looking at buying a small place out in or near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. "Everybody knows DC's gonna be dirty-bombed," he said. "So it'd be smart to have a place to go." I don't think he was joking.
My pal, who works in television, also introduced me to a new word: "trend-humping," a term used to describe the unthinking and instinctive frenzy to exploit a rising social trend in one's coverage. Well, the trend around the Dreher house today is: mucus, and lots of it. Send Theraflu, won't you?
I trust you heard the news today that Zsa Zsa Gabor's elderly husband claims to have been having a longtime affair with Anna Nicole Smith, and says he might be the father of her baby. Guy says he even thought about adopting Anna so he could be with her without divorcing Zsa Zsa. True fact! My colleague Mike Hashimoto has done some research, and determined how had this adoption gone through, Anna Nicole and Paris Hilton would have then been related.
Well, finally something non-controversial and fun to talk about. An old friend is coming to town this weekend to celebrate my 40th birthday with me (b-day isn't until next week, but we're having a special dinner this weekend with my pal). A generous benefactor has given me $200 for my birthday, but only on the condition that I use it to buy wine for this dinner. What a great gift -- I love wine, but have never spent more than $40 on a bottle of wine, ever. Now I get to do that.
So, my question to CC wine lovers is this: if you had to buy four bottles of wine for this dinner, what would you buy? Seriously, I need your advice. I'm going to get a bottle of champagne, probably Veuve Clicquot (but if you have another suggestion, please make it), which still leaves about $160 for three more bottles. Julie and I are serving steak, so I'll want three different reds. Suggestions? I want to get three memorable bottles. This is going to be a late night.
I just lurv these non-apology apologies put out by the trash-mouthed Christian haters running the Edwards blog operation. Here's Marcotte: "My intention is never to offend anyone for his or her personal beliefs, and I am sorry if anyone was personally offended by writings meant only as criticisms of public politics." And here's McEwan: "It has never been my intention to disparage people's individual faith, and I'm sorry if my words were taken in that way."
Mm-hmm. Mocking the Incarnation as if you were writing a letter to Penthouse Forum was not meant to offend anybody. Sorry if you were offended.
What a crock. And it's more than a little embarrassing that some on the Catholic left don't have enough self-respect to stand up for their faith. Mark Shea is all up in the grill of a Democrat-affiliated Catholic group running interference for the Edwards campaign. Excerpt:
You know as well as I do that Edwards bloggers did most certainly intend to insult Christians and, in particular, Catholics and in terms so obscene you can't print them in the paper. So all the "we had not intention to offend" language is complete [b.s.]. I already extend forgiveness to your bloggers both for the insults to the Church, the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Father. But I don't believe for a second they have taken any serious step to receive that forgiveness, because they have only compounded their naked insults (must I quote them for you?) with naked lies.
Don't insult my intelligence, therefore, with your "we're more forgiving than thou" language. Ted Haggard didn't just say "Mistakes were made. Didn't mean to offend." He stepped down as pastor. Mel Gibson didn't say "I never intended to insult anybody." He made a real act of contrition and sought to enter into both treatment and dialogue with Jewish people for his outrageous words and actions. These little Klanswomen got off scot-free and retained their jobs. This tells you all you need to know, both about Edwards and about your phony, wholly-owned-subsidiarity-of-the-Democratic-Party operation. I repeat: these bloggers must go.
It profits a person nothing to gain the whole *world* and lose their own soul. But for *Edwards*?
Meanwhile, a liberal Catholic commentator over at the Commonweal blog can't abide Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, but says the left doesn't understand what it's doing here:
[T]his episode points up to a real problem in how the left blogosphere relates to people of faith. There seems to be an emerging consensus among liberal bloggers that this is a nothing story and that only folks in the thralls of [Bill] Donohue and [Michelle] Malkin's demagoguery would be even remotely troubled by Marcotte's posts, folks who would never vote for Edwards anyway. Hence, they have generally responded by trying to discredit Donohue and Malkin (and, now, the Catholic left). I think that's a childish way to approach this, and one that is utterly out of touch with the reality of the situation.
Look, I can understand that we shouldn't let Donohue set the agenda for our discussion, but it makes no sense to take the reactionary stance that if a charge comes from a hyporcritcal thug like Donohue that it has no merit whatsoever and is not worthy of discussion. You can admit that the blog posts in question gratuituosly evinced overt hostility to Catholics, and were therefore at least problematic for someone attached to a presidential campaign in a communications capacity, without crediting in Donohue's idiocy. Reacting as the liberal blogosphere has, by simply closing ranks and deny
ing that there is anything wrong with defaming the religious symbols of the largest (and most Democratic) Christian constituency in the country simply feeds into the stereotypes that keeps people like Donohue in business.
I know many people believe this is a tempest in a teapot, and that few people who would be inclined to consider voting for Edwards would likely be put off him by this incident. Maybe. But messing with people's religion is a dicey thing. As the GOP strategist Matthew Dowd, the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, and Ron Fournier argue in "Applebee's America," the American people vote not so much on political positions but on gut instinct about a politician's character. If they have a good gut feeling about a candidate, they will vote for him, or consider voting for him, if they like his policies. And if they don't make that positive gut values connection, they won't. Ultimately, what many people will remember about John Edwards is that he hired on his campaign staff to run his blog operation a young woman who despises the Catholic Church and Catholics so much that she used pornographic language to blaspheme God. And that when he had the opportunity to reject that kind of anti-Christian hatred, he declined, and kept her on. This is the kind of person John Edwards is pleased to have working for him. That tells us something about John Edwards, and the kind of person who might get hired in an Edwards administration. Like I said yesterday, useful to get that learned.
Remember the top secret "Downing Street Memo," prepared for PM Blair in July 2002? Remember this quote from the memo (emphases mine)?:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Now, about today's Pentagon Inspector General's report (see executive summary here), the IG's finding that Doug Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" sounds a lot like "intelligence and facts ... being fixed around the policy."
Via the Mighty Favog comes more horrible news from New Orleans. Kid returns from Katrina exile with his mom on Wednesday. Kid gets into a fistfight with teen thug. Thug goes home, whereupon his mama gives him a pistol and tells him to get out there and get even. Thug finds kid, shoots and kills him.
How do you create a civilized society in a place where mothers give their children guns to settle arguments? I'm not asking rhetorically. What, aside from locking these cretins up, can government do? What, aside from escaping, can ordinary people do? Please don't go into the "it's government's fault for ignoring the poverty it's Bush's fault for not handling Katrina right." There is a degree of dysfunctionality present here that is downright Hobbesian, and that can't be fixed by cutting more checks, building more community centers, electing more Democrats, etc.
Once upon a time, I was a garbageman at a trailer park. It was not the kind of job that got teenage boys a lot of respect, or attention from girls. Twice a week, I'd spend a couple of hours collecting trash from the barrels behind house trailers, loading them into my pickup, and driving them to the town dump. This was a particularly challenging job in the hot months in south Louisiana -- which is to say, for much of the year -- because being beset by heat, humidity and the aroma of rotting melons, crawfish and other savories really has a way of keeping you humble.
I hated that job, but I'm glad I had it. My dad owned the land the park was on, and he could have paid somebody else to pick up the garbage, but why should he? I was a strapping boy, I had an old pick-up truck, and I was not too good to pick up other people's stinking trash. My dad, who grew up during the Depression and who worked his way into the middle class by studying and by the sweat of his brow, has had nothing but contempt for men who look down on physical labor as beneath their dignity.
I wonder what my dad would think of this item "this item Mark Krikorian put on The Corner. Excerpt:
According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them. [snip] This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.
UPDATE: John J. Miller makes a fair point: that before stringing Rove up, we need to have stronger sourcing for this quote than an anonymous GOP lawmaker's wife. I wish I had noted that earlier. I do so now, with apologies -- but the discussion about the dignity of manual labor is still an important one to have.
Indianapolis area readers might want to register for a Saturday April 14 ISI conference in which several speakers, including Your Working Boy, will talk about Russell Kirk and the future of conservatism. Follow the link to register.
Found out this morning that a National Guard officer who is personally very close to me is being deployed to Baghdad for a year, leaving behind his wife and little kids. Tens of thousands of men and women have had to do the same, but this is as close as the war has gotten to me, and I'm having a tough time dealing with it. N. will be sent there into the middle of a civil war, to implement a policy few in Washington believe will work, and in which two-thirds of the American people disbelieve. Meanwhile, here is the lede from the top story in today's Washington Post:
Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.
Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."
I remember the words Sen. Jim Webb spoke in his SOTU response:
Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues - those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death - we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm's way.
We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us - sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.
The less I say this morning about the despicable men of whom Sen. Webb so justly condemned, and whose actions condemn them, the better. God bless and keep all our fighting men and women, and their families.
UPDATE: The Washington Post has issued a prominent correction to its article. Here it is:
Correction to This Article A Feb. 9 front-page article about the Pentagon inspector general's report regarding the office of former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith incorrectly attributed quotations to that report. References to Feith's office producing "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" and that the office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda" were from a report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in Oct. 2004. Similarly, the quotes stating that Feith's office drew on "both reliable and unreliable reporting" to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration" were also from Levin's report. The article also stated that the intelligence provided by Feith's office supported the political views of senior administration officials, a conclusion that the inspector general's report did not draw.The two reports employ similar language to characterize the activities of Feith's office: Levin's report refers to an "alternative intelligence assessment process" developed in that office, while the inspector general's report states that the office "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida re
lationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers." The inspector general's report further states that Feith's briefing to the White House in 2002 "undercuts the Intelligence Community" and "did draw conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence."
This is an important correction, because it reveals that the initial report attributes statements to the IG that were actually Levin's. The IG's executive summary does not draw the harsh conclusions that Levin's did. It's still unclear to me what, exactly, the IG found, other than that Feith's work in this regard was "inappropriate." That doesn't make Levin wrong or right, but the Post made a whopper of a mistake.
A few years ago, I was on a bus in Israel, and struck up a conversation with an American Jew who had moved to Israel to teach in an exchange program at a Palestinian school. It was a post-Oslo program set up to bring Palestinian teachers into Israeli schools, and vice versa, as a way of preparing the kids to live in peace with each other. The American was real down about it. He said that the Palestinian principal at his school had been a good guy, and was genuinely devoted to the program. But the man, who was older, took so much grief from the Palestinian Authority for being friendly to Jews that he keeled over of a heart attack. The PA was not the least bit interested in educating for peace; they wanted to prepare their children for eternal war with the Jews. Check the textbooks out for yourself.
Textbooks used in Iran's schools are instilling students with hatred toward the West, especially the United States, and urging them to become "martyrs" in a global holy war against countries perceived to be enemies of Islam, a new study says. An Iranian human rights activist, Ghazal Omid, praised the findings, saying they prove hard-liners in Iran are using the books to turn children into "ticking bombs."
...
"I am an Iranian, a practicing Muslim woman, who sees it as her responsibility to stand up to hard-line Muslims who use Islam to brainwash children of that faith, in particular Iranian children, who the Iranian government is turning into ticking bombs," she said.
Good for her. Some American book critics will probably call her a self-hating Muslim. But good for her. Ah, and did you see the story the other day about the Saudi-funded school in Britain whose textbooks describe Jews and Christians as "apes" and "pigs"? A school official said that people were taking the words "out of context." No, really, he did.
Whom the gods would curse, they first make Anna Nicole Smith, who was just pronounced dead in Florida. No cause yet given. Sad, this. Rich, famous, beautiful, miserable -- and now, gone, leaving behind a six-month-old baby. Lord have mercy. What a messed-up life, as anybody who watched her show could tell. I hope she finds peace. As the Pat O'Brien of the 19th century said, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
UPDATE: No disrespect to the dead intended, but good grief, did nothing else happen in the world today but the passing of a very minor celebrity? CNN and Fox News have been on this thing constantly, with no let-up. And there hasn't been any new news for hours.
The Kingfish is standing by his foul-mouthed, anti-Christian bloggers. His statement:
The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.
Had those women spoken of racial minorities, or believers in minority religions, in the same foul-mouthed and hate-filled way, they would have been fired at once. And they should have been. This is not about disagreeing with or merely (if strongly) criticizing another faith. That would be fine. This is about complete contempt, spoken of using filthy verbiage. But it is not a firing offense in the Edwards campaign to speak of Catholics/Catholicism as Amanda Marcotte did, or of one's political opponents in that gutter-mouthed way. This is useful information to have. Tells us a lot about John Edwards.
Big row going over the National Book Critics Circle jury nominating Bruce Bawer's "While Europe Slept" as a finalist for its year-end prize. Today's NYTimes reports on the resulting tempest, started by book critics who accuse the Bawer book of racism and "Islamophobia." You really couldn't ask for a better example of liberalism's suicidal tendencies.
Bawer is an openly gay man who lives in Europe, and who once wrote a book highly critical of fundamentalist Christianity (and has been critical in print of orthodox Catholicism). But the book in question: "Why Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within," warns that Europeans are in serious danger of seeing the liberties they enjoy eroded by their craven tolerance for Islamic extremism in their midst. Just making that claim is considered racist by some liberals -- and I believe explains why the American news media has done such a rotten job of reporting on the complexities within the American Muslim community. It's worth quoting Bawer's blog response at length:
As I and many others have pointed out a few million times, radical Islam is not a race. (Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali a racist? Is Irshad Manji? Is Chahdortt Djavann?) But it's easy – and, in some circles, highly effective – to fling the "R" word instead of trying to respond to irrefutable facts and arguments.
One of the most disgraceful developments of our time is that many Western authors and intellectuals who pride themselves on being liberals have effectively aligned themselves with an outrageously illiberal movement that rejects equal rights for women, that believes gays and Jews should be executed, that supports the coldblooded murder of one's own children in the name of honor, etc., etc. These authors and intellectuals respond to every criticism of that chilling fundamentalist code – however cogent and correct the criticism may be – by hurling the "R" word.
I will not be cowed by such disgraceful, duplicitous rhetoric. Civilized, tolerant, pluralist values are at stake – values that affect freedom-loving individuals of all races.
And then, this arrow through the heart of his critics' case:
Some people think it's terrific for writers to expose the offenses and perils of religious fundamentalism – just as long as it's Christian fundamentalism.
This is how the left works: yell "bigotry" to silence critics who confront them with arguments they don't wish to have. In Holland, Pim Fortuyn -- an openly gay hedonistic libertarian with a wicked sense of humor -- ran for prime minister on a platform that in large part warned the Dutch that they were going to lose their liberal democracy if they didn't confront the growing forces of Islamic extremism within their country's immigrant population. The hysterical left -- which is to say, the media and academic establishments in Holland -- called him a fascist, and left it at that. Fortuyn was so far to the left he made Barney Frank look like the Queen Mother, but none of that mattered to the left-wing Dutch establishment.
I honestly don't get this. Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging
from the gallows.
In the Dallas suburb of Euless, a Santeria priest has filed suit against the city, saying its laws prohibiting animal slaughter at home interferes with his First Amendment right to practice his religion. I hope he loses, because Santeria is ... well, I don't want to break any Bnet rules here, so let's just say it's not a religion I would want practiced in my community. No how, no way. But I bet he wins.
Meanwhile, police yesterday discovered a so-called Santeria shrine in the woods outside of Dallas, near where the bodies of a kidnapped couple were discovered. According to cops, several other bodies have been found over time in the same general area. The shrine contained, among other things, a human skull. Cops are calling it "Santeria," but from what we know now, it seem that it could be any of the Afro-Caribbean religions practiced in Latin America, some of which are wickeder than others (for example, palo mayombe, related to Santeria but trafficking in darker spirits, can involve human sacrifice).
Some people in the First World laugh at this stuff, consider it benign. They should talk to missionaries who have had to deal with it head-on in Haiti, Africa and elsewhere.
Ross (and Caleb) draw attention to a little-known part of the Barack Obama picture: his church's adherence to a black self-help doctrine, one that is compatible with the localism and particularism espoused by traditionalist conservatives.
I dunno, this 2008 election is going to be interesting for me as a social conservative. I've got no natural candidate to support -- unless Huckabee and/or Brownback get all Smoove B on me -- and I would by no means rule out voting for Giuliani. Like Ross says, social and religious conservatives are a lot more complicated than our opponents give us credit for. Giuliani (and for that matter, Obama) is far from my ideal on the issues. But with Giuliani, he's tough and innovative, and he's absolute right on law and order issues. I think Bush was the last hurrah for the social right regarding substantially changing abortion policy at the federal level, and for passing a constitutional amendment to prevent SCOTUS from declaring gay marriage. And frankly, I am incapable of believing the pandering of Republican politicians to my side on these issues. The war and its aftermath is more acutely important right now, and Giuliani has not been on the right side here. Still, I would trust him infinitely more than I would trust Hillary Clinton.
When I say "the war and its aftermath," I'm talking in general about the war on Islamist terror. I am one of those religious conservatives who does believe that this is a civilizational war, and that we're going to be fighting it for the rest of my life, at least. And that we haven't been fighting it well under Bush. There is no national politician I trust more to understand what is at stake here than Rudy Giuliani, and not to go soft. What I want to know, though, is if he learned the lesson of our failure with the Iraq adventure. Because I don't care how much of a harda*s he is, if he's going to bring us more of that Bush-style messianic Wilsonianism, we cannot afford to have him in office.
As for Obama, I really like him. A lot. It's hard to see myself voting for someone who holds such doctrinaire liberal positions, but if he can move this country past the same old stalemated and stale battles over race and poverty, what a gift to America that would be. The thing about Obama, I find, is that I want him to succeed. Every time I hear him or see him, I'm rooting for him. I want the left to produce politicians like him. And I definitely want to know more about his localist/particularlist vision, if he really has one. Again, at this point it's hard to imagine myself voting for him -- but not impossible.
UPDATE: See, this is why I'm interested in Obama, and what he has to say. Via Andrew Sullivan comes this link to a speech Obama gave last year about religion and its role in American life. In the end, of course, Obama, like all politicians, should be judged not by what he says, but by what he does. But it's a great thing to hear a Democrat talk like this, and to admit that his mind was changed by a religious conservative. Here's an excerpt in which he talks about a letter he got from a doctor who explained why he probably couldn't vote for him:
The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be "totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of the Republican agenda.
But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had
read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, which suggested that I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor went on to write:
"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice...and I also sense that you are a fair minded person with a high regard for reason...Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded....You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others...I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
Fair-minded words.
So I looked at my website and found the offending words. In fairness to them, my staff had written them using standard Democratic boilerplate language to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.
Re-reading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in fair-minded words. Those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.
So I wrote back to the doctor, and I thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own - a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.
Like I said, even if I couldn't, in the end, bring myself to vote for Obama, I'm glad he's around. Both parties need more like him.
Robert J. Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, says don't believe the hype that we're going to do something about global warming. We're not:
The dirty secret about global warming is this: We have no solution. About 80 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), the main sources of man-made greenhouse gases. Energy use sustains economic growth, which -- in all modern societies -- buttresses political and social stability. Until we can replace fossil fuels or find practical ways to capture their emissions, governments will not sanction the deep energy cuts that would truly affect global warming.
Samuelson says it's not that we should do nothing about global warming; in fact, he offers some practical measures that we ought to focuse on. He's saying only that anything that's feasible is not going to make much difference, and anything that would make a big difference would be so massively disruptive it's unlikely to be tried. Even though India and China are going to surpass the US as the world's biggest carbon emitters, how do you tell them, "Sorry, you can't have the wealth and stability the US has, because you're heating up the globe"? You don't. I mean, you can, but don't expect them to do anything but smile and you and keep on keeping on.
If Samuelson is right, and I'd guess that he is, we should keep researching scientific solutions, but should also start adapting to the inevitable. How, though, do you labor with seriousness of purpose at fighting the onset of a condition that you see as inevitable? Hmm. Well, that's the human condition, isn't it?
Well, that's my cheerful bit for the day. Now, on to finding jokes about the diaper-wearing astro-nut...
ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran has been reading John Edwards' new blogger-in-chief Amanda Marcotte's site, and finds this disgusting comment in a Marcottian screed against the Catholic Church's position on contraception:
"Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit? A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology."
Beautiful. Just beautiful. Moran asks: "If a Republican candidate teamed up with a right-wing blogger who spewed this kind of venom, how would people react?" Edwards had better can this ragemonkey now, or he's going to be answering questions like this from here on out. Maybe he didn't know all this about her before hiring her, but he's got no excuse now. I find it impossible to believe that there are no first-rate left-of-center bloggers who aren't so crack-brained by hate.
Fascinating interview with Mailer on Entertainment Weekly's website. Mailer's new novel, "The Castle in the Forest," is about the childhood of Adolf Hitler. Excerpts:
Do you really believe the devil was present at the conception of Adolf Hitler, as he is in the book?
Uh, yeah. I mean, if I say that, and you see it in print, it sounds bizarre, lunatic, unsettling. But if we can believe that God or Gabriel was present at the conception of Jesus, then it seems to me we can believe that the devil was present at the conception of Adolf Hitler.
What about the people who hear you talking about God and the devil and think, ''He's crazy!''?
That's the hazard, of course. You talk about God and the devil and you're crazy! If you don't believe in God and the devil, I wouldn't say you're crazy, but you're intellectually malnourished, because I defy anyone who doesn't believe that something created us to give an answer to how we got here.
[snip]
What do you think about Philip Roth? He seems like the one guy everyone loves.
Roth is very respected today, but that's for a reason. He's very talented, don't get me wrong. But he satisfies something right now in the group of people I call the acumenarians. These are people who do not believe in God or the devil. They are children of the enlightenment, and they pride themselves on their acumen. They like to be right on things. They distrust the fanciful, the mystical, and the unanchored. Roth's not messy. And he writes wonderful books. So they love him and they adore him. Now whether he's a major novelist or not, I can't begin to tell you, because as I told you, I just don't read the good ones anymore.
JPod flags a moving explanation by the NYT's magnificent correspondent John Burns, on why the American mission in Iraq has gone so wrong. Burns says he's been to many nasty places over the course of his career as a foreign correspondent, and except for North Korea, none was as bad as Saddam's Iraq. He said US forces really were greeted as liberators, but Iraq was so fractured anyway, and horribly traumatized by Saddam, that ... well, here's Burns:
We just didn't understand, and perhaps didn't work hard enough to understand, what lay beneath this carapace which is a deeply fractured society that had always been held together, since the British constructed it, by drawing geometric lines on the map — Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia in the 1920s — a country that had really always been held together by force and varying degrees repression. The King, King Faisal, is remembered, the King who was assassinated in 1958, as a kind of golden era, but even that is really, was not really a parliamentary democracy. It was still basically an autocratic state and I think we needed to understand better the forces that we were going to liberate.
And my guess is that history will say that the forces that we liberated by invading Iraq were so powerful and so uncontrollable that virtually nothing the United States might have done, except to impose its own repressive state with half a million troops, which might have had to last ten years or more, nothing we could have done would have effectively prevented this disintegration that is now occurring.
The new issue of The Atlantic Monthly reports the mag's poll of 44 top US foreign-policy experts, who were asked if they thought a major (50,000+) presence of US troops would still be in Iraq five years from now. Three out of four said no. None of the experts had their names attached to specific comments, but one said:
“No. Slowly, too slowly I believe, the American public and the next administration will realize that the continued presence of American troops in Iraq does not make Iraq more secure and, even more disturbing, makes us party to a sectarian conflict where neither side adheres to the core values of American society. The American military senior leadership and the administration is being corrupted and compromised by the political necessity of ignoring, explaining away and, too often, simply lying about the atrocities being committed in Iraq in the name of 'democracy.' The real question is not whether the withdrawal of American troops will be followed by increased 'sectarian warfare, growing violence or a slide toward chaos'—it will—but that will also happen if we stay. We began with a fatally flawed war plan that did not look beyond the end of "major combat operations" and then compounded this error with arrogance and faith-based intelligence and leadership that refused to adapt to the realities on the ground as events spiraled in a very different direction than Washington had predicted. The opportunities lost in 2003-2004 cannot be recovered by sacrificing another 3000 soldiers, surging 30,000 soldiers or keeping 50,000 soldiers in Iraq for five years. The real question is how long will it take to realize that prolonging our presence, at any level, is only increasing the damage to our vital military and political institutions and America's reputation and leadership in the world.”
Well, that was quick. The Senate floor debate over the Bush surge plan fizzled before it started. I understand that the GOP wants to have a vote that will show division in the Democratic ranks, just as the Warner-Levin amendment will show division in the Republican ranks. Harry Reid got out-maneuvered by the Republicans (it's telling that Sens. Warner and Hagel, who are against the surge, voted with the GOP in this matter). I wish Reid would open the floor up to the GOP amendments, and let them talk about it all. Still, if this doesn't go any further, I bet the public will see this as the Republicans trying to use procedure to prevent an open debate on the Iraq War.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards -- henceforth known on this blog as "the Kingfish" -- might want to look into the background of the woman he's appointed as his campaign blogmistress. As Kathryn Jean Lopez details, she's got a history of making extremely nasty anti-Catholic/Christian statements. And oh, the class! Check out her description of Edwards' former Senate colleague, Rick Santorum:
The problem with Rick Santorum is that every time he talks about sex, that little part of all of us that wants to run into a preschool and yell “f**kslut” or go to a born-again church and scream about how God loves to come in our backyards for our milkshakes, well, it just grows a hundredfold, and the restraint that most of us show just flies out the window. As a Senator, however, Santorum finds himself frequently faced with many of the most pressing issues of penis insertion that have ever faced America—and so he must speak, lest his lack of self-control be manifested by f**king his desk on the Senate floor. (There’s a knothole that’s just the right size, y’know.)
Read Kathryn's column for more of same. Come on, Kingfish, surely you don't want to have to explain this hire to Christians you actually want to vote for you, right? Shoot, if a candidate had a blogmeister who wrote so filthily, and in such a deranged manner, about anybody -- Christian, atheist, liberal, whoever -- I'd worry about the judgment of that candidate.
The DMN editorial board had a lunch meeting today with some of our community contributors. One older gentleman remarked that he didn't like the caustic tone of many letters to the editor we publish, especially those that take out after President Bush. He said it's not the criticism of the president he minds so much as it is the harsh and spiteful tone.
"One day I met a client of mine in one of the tall buildings in Dallas, to take him to lunch," he told us. "When I picked him up, they were watching on TV President and Mrs. Kennedy de-planing at Love Field. My client said, 'Somebody ought to shoot that guy.' During our lunch, somebody did."
He went on to say that he couldn't stand to hear people speak with such personal spite toward this or any other president, because he's seen where that kind of hate, taken far enough, leads. Point worth remembering.
...or so he realized during three weeks of "intensive counseling." D'oh! What was I thinking? Of course I'm straight!
Assuming that the pastor quoted in the story is accurately reflecting Ted Haggard's belief, I'd respect Haggard if he admitted that he had some degree of same-sex attraction -- which is why he ended up with a rent-boy and crystal meth -- but that he was trying to deal with it, and that he didn't believe his SSA defined him. But the "completely heterosexual" stuff -- hmm. Well, look, I have a feeling that we're going to be hearing from Bro. Ted again, and we're not going to like it.
In Dallas, Bishop Charles V. Grahmann recently denounced efforts by the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch to make renting housing to illegal immigrants against the law. Said the bishop:
"I often wonder if Joseph, Mary and Jesus would find a place in Farmers Branch. They would probably be told they would have to find another place."
Some Dallas-area Catholics are cheesed off:
Tom Bohmier doesn't buy it. Raised Catholic, he is one of the more visible citizen-activists in favor of the ordinance. Jesus' parents were breaking no Egyptian law when they fled, he said.
"The reference is unclear, inappropriate and made a lot of Catholics very upset," he said.
He's been church-hopping for a while and was about to come back to his Catholic parish when the bishop's comments hit the news, he said.
"I told the local father, 'I'm not coming back for a while, now,' " Mr. Bohmier said.
Read the whole story in today's Dallas Morning News. The piece takes up the question of whether or not religious leaders are right to speak out in favor of going easy on immigrants in the country illegally. My sense is that unless these migrants are fleeing persecution, religious leaders should stand up for the law, and not the lawbreakers. Are laws regulating immigration inherently unjust? If that's what Bp. Grahmann and other believe, I understand their stance, though I disagree with it. But if immigration laws are just, and the Farmers Branch city council is simply trying to come up with a way of enforcing the law that the federal government is unwilling or unable to enforce, in what sense is their ordinance requiring renters to prove that they are in the US illegally an unjust law? I don't get it.
Spengler says it's tragic what's happening in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, but ultimately unimportant to the broader world. Excerpt:
I do not think any responsible analyst now believes that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue has much bearing on stability in the Middle East. Which Israeli was it who began the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict? Iran's delusions of grandeur and messianic expectations stem, I have long argued, from the simple fact that the country is entering a combined economic and demographic crisis from which it has poor hopes of recovering.
The present conflict in the Middle East is not between Arab and Jew, but between Arabs and Jews who seek their way in the modern world on the one hand, and Arabs and Persians who reject the modern world on the other. The latter have nothing to lose and are prepared to fight to the death; how else do we explain the unlimited supply of Muslims who are prepared to die to murder Muslim civilians?
If individuals or indeed entire peoples are determined to destroy themselves, it is extremely difficult to prevent them from doing so at length. The tragedy, I expect, will continue in Iraq, as it did in Spain 1936-39, or the United States 1861-65, until there no longer are sufficient young men to put into the line. The world will little notice or care.
The Palestinians are destroying themselves with their Fatah-Hamas firefights. Destroying their libraries, their universities, their science labs -- destroying the possibility of civilized life. "We don't deserve a state," says one anguished Palestinian civil servant. True. Not now, anyway. But the usual suspects will continue to say that the solution to the Mideast crisis depends on solving the Palestinian question. They don't know what else to say, and reality -- that the only people who can solve the Palestinian problem are the Palestinians, who are utterly dysfunctional -- is too hopeless to consider. That a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in Eilat the other day to remind his countrymen that they really ought to be killing Jews instead of each other is about the blackest joke ever.
ISI Books is without question one of the most important publishers in America. If there is ever to be a broad revival of dynamic traditionalism, ISI Books will be right at its center. I've been getting their new releases lately, and I almost wish they'd stop sending them, because each one makes me want to stop the world, sit down in my chair and read them from cover to cover. On Saturday, a copy of "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred" by Philip Bess arrived at my doorstep. It's a collection of essays by the head of the graduate program in architecture at Notre Dame, which has become a center of renascent traditionalist urbanism.
Just so you know, in the first chapter, Bess, a Catholic who considers himself to be a New Urbanist, invokes Rieff, MacIntyre and St. Benedict. I thought I was going to levitate! That chapter sets out Bess's ideas about how traditional urban architecture proceeded from an Aristotelian understanding of human nature. Human beings reach their fullest potential living virtuously in community, and cities should be constructed in ways that encourage that goal. In so doing, the public spaces will reflect the sacred order (by which, if I'm reading Bess correctly, he doesn't necessarily mean a specific theological order, but a metaphysical understanding of how the unseen world is constructed). Our public spaces -- their architecture and their design -- should help us to become more civilized. We can say that being "civilized" means at least living virtuously in a stable community.
I don't have the time or the space to get into the specifics of Bess's discussion of Aristotle, the polis and architecture, but it is enough, perhaps, to state his view -- consonant with Rieff's and MacIntyre's -- that we are now living, and have for some time been living in, a highly individualistic "emotivist" society (emotivism being the philosophical stance that denies objective truth, saying rather that truth-claims are nothing more than statements about the feelings of the speaker), in which the feelings of individuals are considered the absolute telos, or goal, of society. Maximizing individual liberty and pleasure is considered the highest good. Bess writes that emotivists are "highly individualistic and assume an autonomous self whose good is achieved largely by its emancipation and inner detachement from what are perceived to be and experiences as the constrants ("fictions") of various communal roles and commitments. In contrast, communitarians contend that individual selves cannot achieve their good apart from the network of roles, privileges, and obligations attendant to various communal pursuits."
Bess calls both suburban landscapes and avant-garde architecture to be the fullest flowering of America's individualist potential: the individual, cut free from the past and communal constraints. The New Urbanists, with their ideas of returning to the ways civic spaces were designed in the past (e.g., human-scaled, pedestrian-oriented), hope to revive a civic and communal spirit among people, by creating public and private spaces that reflect a traditional understanding of how human communities flourish. The New Urbanist communities would thereby revive a dormant communalism suppressed by modernist planning. That's the optimistic scenario.
But here's the thing, says Bess: what if America is too far gone down the path of fragmentation and individualism to recover an older civic sense? Were that the case, the hopes and the work of the New Urbanists would not revive community in all its rich textures and facets, but would only mask the further break-up of community:
In this tragicomic scenario, emotivist culture and a global market economy conspire to creat a "m
arket niche" for "traditional urbanism" that in reality they cannot succor. New Urbanist towns turn out to be merely one more aesthetic option for the private lives of a relatively wealthy and elite class of people, and tend to obscure further the historic relationship between traditional urban aesthetics and traditional urban culture. In perhaps the greatest irony of all, the New Urbanism would function culturally exactly like the art and architecture of its avant-garde critical theory antagonists, its success or failure a simple consequence of the individual tastes of that class of peple who can afford to buy art. For in an emotivist society, unliek a traditional city, de gustibus non disputandum est.
If the Tocqueville Scenario is naively optimistic, says Bess, that leaves us with the Benedict Scenario, based on that famous final paragraph of Macintyre's "After Virtue," which I often quote here:
"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 that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . 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. . . . 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 Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict."
If Macintyre is right, says Bess, then the only way for true community to be revived is for people who share the belief that the purpose of community life is for something other than maximizing individual pleasure and freedom to come together and share the same urban spaces. Membership in this community wouldn't be a matter of class, but of a shared moral sense, including a conviction that individuals and communities must share a common vision of sacred order. Bess says that it's understandable that middle class people would want to go to the burbs to escape underclass crime and bad public schools, but he strongly implies that such a movement is destroying the ideal of community and citizenship. Bess writes that, "Perhaps therefore the way to begin promoting development that is not so class exclusive is to encourage and promote physical development by institutions and individuals whose primary interests include objectives other than maximizing their return on real estate holdings."
Do such persons still exist? If so, where are they likely to be found? To put this another way, what kinds of communities and institutions, pursuing what kinds of practices, can we find in contemporary America where membership is, or at least could be, based upon factors other than class? Several communities and institutions come immediately to mind, all with numerous historical antecedents: religious communities, ethinc groups (particularly recently arrived immigrants); and college and university communities. Perhaps there are others: the commercial corporation, provided its primary objective is the stable, profitable, and long-term production of particular goods and service; the bugeoning medical community; perhaps the America military. Are there would-be town founder/developers from among such communities interested in the re-association of community and place, willing to make provisions in town and neighborhood master plans for both their affluent and less affluent members? If so, how do the New Urbanists find and identify them?
I was thinking last night after having read all this how g
reat it would be to be able to buy an old building with two or three other families from church, or who shared our basic religious and moral stance, and renovate it into a multi-family dwelling, where we all lived separately in our apartments, but we could also live in close community. But who has the capital for doing something like that today? And with everybody's jobs so insecure, given globalization, the prospect of putting down roots and staying put it harder to commit to. On the other hand, if you read "Crunchy Cons," you know that Paul and Rachel Balducci's parents, as members of an intentional Catholic community, did just this very thing a generation ago, by buying up houses in a somewhat blighted part of their town, renovating them and living together.
One more thing. Later in the Bess book, he talks about the Benedictine monasteries as examples to us today of how to create community out of chaos. Bess is talking here about how the Benedictines, in the Dark Ages, converted Europe to Christianity out of those monasteries:
How they did so is instructive, for it was not by preaching alone, or perhaps even primarily; it was by embodying Christian faith and virtue in their lives -- and, not least, the physical organization of their communities. A monastery is after all almost a polis; and for several hundred years monasteries were as much of a polis as anything that Western Europe had to offer. This too is instructive. Joseph Ratzinger [later Pope Benedict XVI -- RD.] has remarked that
the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the *saints* the Church has produced and the *art* which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church's human history. ...
Bess continues:
So what are some possible models for how Christians actually might engage and be engaged by the New Urbanist agenda? I will suggest three and describe one. The first is the most obvious; and though rare, the most common: the Christian citizen-developer who out of his or her own faith commitments conscientiously attempts to do traditional neighborhood developments. A second model is the Christian institution as a developer. This model is actually not uncommon. Its prototype is the church-based community development corporations that historically have focused on providing housing, but in principle could be both broader in their concerns and more sociologically and formally savvy by engaging in and promoting housing as part of a larger focus upon traditional neighborhood develompent. A third model is the Christian institution that partners with developers. This is the rarest model, and the one I'd like to describe in greater detail as a potential new strategy for American churches anywhere, but especially for new suburban parish church developments.
I'll stop here. Do buy this book -- it's full of exciting ideas, and written in a way that a layman can understand.
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