I imagine I'll get dogpiled for saying so, but I deeply love France, and all things French. I'm completely unreasonable on the subject. You can trash France all you like, and I might even agree with you, but it won't make a fig of difference to me. I love the place. My friend Fred Gion and I spent a terrific evening in December of 2005 at La Table du Perigord, a little restaurant in the St-Germain neighborhood of Paris. Our meal was simple but sublime, and we spent almost four hours lingering over it, drinking wine and enjoying ... life. My love affair with France began when I was a little boy, not even old enough to read, and I listened to my elderly great-aunts tell tales of serving as Red Cross nurses in Dijon during the Great War. Aunt Hilda was seized by a Frenchman on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and he kissed her madly. She pretended to be scandalized 60 years later. I thought it was amazing. Just think! The old ladies sat me on their leather couch in their cabin and showed me their photo album from France in the war, and I was in heaven.
When I was in high school, I discovered Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," his supposedly non-fiction account of life in Paris in the 1920s, when he was a poor and unknown journalist. I. Could. Not. Get. Enough. Of course he lied, but they were fantastic lies, and I loved them. Since then, I've been to France a number of times, and I cannot get enough of the place. I learned, sort of, the French language, but of course it has faded from disuse. But I love to hear it spoken, I love to hear it come out of my mouth. I met a couple from Montreal when I was in Louisiana a few weeks back, and just speaking my rudimentary French with them was pure pleasure.
When I was dating Julie, I took her to Paris, and showed her the places I loved. It was all part of my elaborate courtship ritual: Paris helped me win my true love's heart. Not that you asked, but there is no finer feeling than to be young, completely and ridiculously in love, and in Paris in the springtime. The French are impossible, of course, but God love them, they know how to live. Back during the days leading up to the Iraq War, when idiots were pouring French wine down sewer drains (hey, I volunteered to make my gullet their sewer!), I wrote this defense of France on National Review Online. I think it holds up fairly well, especially because the French were wiser about the war than we were.
What prompts my reverie was reading over dinner tonight this story from the Times about the love letters of Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich, which are to be released. This passage struck me:
“I love you and I hold you tight and kiss you hard,” Hemingway ends one letter. In another he writes, “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.” He begins another: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I’d bring the nickel.”
And yet the timing was never right. As A. E. Hotchner writes in his book “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,” Hemingway once told him: “The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.”
On that first trip to Paris with the woman I'd dreamed of and prayed for and hoped existed somewhere in this world, undiscovered, we paused on a bridge linking the Ile St-Louis with the Right Bank, and I kissed her hard. And then we went to Berthillon and had Earl Grey tea ice cream. She loved me! Me! In Paris! The memory of that time is realer than real. That was 10 years ago this mont
h. One decade and three children later, she's still the same woman I fell in love with, and Paris is still the city I fell in love with. It was the realization of a dream that I thought existed only in books. France is where dreams come true. My dreams, anyway. I can hardly wait until my children are old enough to take to Paris. I hope there will be a place for us at La Table du Perigord.
Watch this video of a soldier just home from the war surprising his five-year-old son by turning up in his kindergarten class, and the reaction of the little boy. Nothing any of us can say about it could possibly transcend the meaning of the moment. Just watch.
I know from my own observation that sexual immorality is widespread among Pentecostal clergy, and in many cases no church governance structure exists to do anything about it. Church leadership is frequently passed down in families as though salvation is acquired through DNA.
Prosperity teaching — which, when taught responsibly, can extract people from the mire of poverty mindsets — has degenerated into unabashed greed and charlatanism, with preachers shilling for multilevel marketing schemes that will never benefit the vast majority of the peons who buy into their promises of easy money.
...There was a time when all Pentecostals preached a high standard of holiness. Sure, there were frauds — drunks and debauchers who pretended to be one thing and were found to be another. In the South, especially, the concept of the double life has a storied existence, evidenced by the plantation masters who proudly occupied the family bench in church on Sunday and ravished slave girls on Monday.
But in the Pentecostal churches, among the brothers and sisters, where few had earthly riches and social status was of no account, sin was an enemy for which there would be no quarter. Sinners had but one place in church: on the mourners’ bench. Jesus, after all, came to free us from the bondage of sin, and Pentecostals took him at his word.
In recent years, though, I have seen a type of church emerge that has many of the bells and whistles of Pentecostalism, such as prophetic “words” from God, exuberant worship and high-octane preaching, but there is no standard of holiness. I call these people post-holiness Pentecostals — rollers without the holy.
In place of preaching against sin, the leaders exalt their status as “prophets” and teach that their followers have no right to question them. If they do, they’re branded “Jezebels” with “rebellious spirits” who’ve become instruments of Satan to bring down God’s anointed. None of this has a speck of Biblical support, but even one’s right to examine teaching through the lens of Scripture is discounted. When these leaders end up in grievous sin, members are shamed into believing that their only recourse is to shut themselves in the private prayer closet and beg for God to speak to their leader.
Which, by the way, I’m sure God has already done, many times over. If the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, we are continually made aware of our own sin.
I’ve never figured out how these leaders and their followers get around Paul’s command to “expel the immoral brother,” or his warning not even to eat with someone who calls himself a brother and involves himself in sexual immorality, or his counsel that we have a duty to judge those in the church. I’ll guarantee that you’ll never hear in these churches the testimony of Jude, who foresaw a day when the church would be dominated by “…godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.”
Look around you: We are living in that day.
The recent scandals among Pentecostals have shaken me. I struggle to understand how people who’ve come into contact with the very presence of God through worship, who’ve seen the power of the Holy Spirit at work in miraculous ways, can get involved in such craziness.
I was talking yesterday to a dear Catholic friend about church scandal, and I mentioned to him how down I was about the mess in the Orthodox Church in America -- but how I was determined to find a w
ay to get through it without violating my conscience by turning away from it, or to shipwreck myself as I did within Catholicism. I have no idea how to do that, but I know I have no choice but to find a way. He said, "It does seem like the Lord won't let you get away from having to face the reality of sin." Yes, it does.
The Discovery Institute's president has sent the following letter to the heads of the geology, biology and anthropology departments at SMU:
I am writing to invite you or a representative from your faculty to participate in a dialogue about the theory of intelligent design on Friday night, April 13th, ahead of the formal commencement of our conference that evening on your campus. We noted with interest the comment of one of your SMU faculty colleagues, Dr. Bretell, who stated in the Dallas Morning News that the science faculty plan to use the conference “as a teaching moment.”
As educators ourselves, we applaud you for this and would like to enhance the teaching opportunity for your students by creating a forum in which your faculty can participate in an open dialogue with proponents of intelligent design—in particular, with our three conference speakers, Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and Dr. Jay Richards.
If you accept our invitation, I will arrange for the first portion of our Friday night program to be devoted to this discussion. We propose the following format: one of our speakers would make a fifteen-minute presentation explaining the merits, from our point of view, of the theory of intelligent design. Then we would invite one of you to make a presentation explaining your main criticisms of the theory. We would then allow your panel to ask us a series of challenging questions of your own choosing. After that we would open the discussion to a few questions from the audience.
We are all committed to respectful scholarly dialogue and to the use of scientific methods of reasoning in the investigation of nature. In our view, science progresses in part as scientists and scholars discuss and evaluate competing interpretations of scientific evidence. We think that the format we are proposing will allow for such discussion and will, therefore, create a teaching moment for all who participate and observe the discussion.
We hope you will join us. May I ask you to respond at your earliest convenience by contacting Robert Crowther in our Seattle office at [deleted], or [e-mail address deleted].
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Chapman
President, Discovery Institute
Sounds good to me. Will the professors agree to participate in this teaching moment? I'd love to hear both sides make their presentation, and I bet I'm not the only one.
UPDATE: A colleague of mine at the paper e-mails to say:
I completely disagree. The SMU scientists should not take the bait. Framing this as a debate puts evolution and ID on equal footing -- "On the one hand, some experts believe THIS. On the other hand, other experts believe THIS." This is precisely the fraud that the Discovery Institute wants to perpetrate. Because if both "theories" are considered valid, well, then, why not teach both in science classes? Why exclude one? Is that fair?
ID and evolution are not two scientific theories to be weighed against one another, as if on a balance scale. One is a scientific theory, supported so massively and consistently by empirical evidence as to be virtually unassailable. The other is an interesting notion -- rather like reincarnation, or ESP - that is intriguing to ponder, but absolutely without scientific support.
There is, in other words, no experimental evidence -- none -- to support the idea that the world is so wondrously complex that some intelligent designer "must have" created it. Maybe that's true. As a matter of theology, I happen to believe that it's true. But it isn't science.
We don't teach "alternative theories" of gravity in physics class, or "alternative theories" of neurology in medical school. And we shouldn't.
I see his point, but I see this controversy as akin to a debate about global warming. To me, the evidence for man-made global warming is overwhel
ming, and those who disbelieve in it are operating primarily on faith, not evidence. But there are significant numbers of people who do hold those views, and I think it would be in the public interest to see a critical exchange between the two sides. I would hope that it would educate the disbelievers, or at least open some minds. Or maybe the other side would come up with facts or logic that caused me to reconsider some of my positions.
About ID: I believe that God created us, and evolution was the method he used to do it. But I simply don’t know enough about the case for ID to say conclusively that I disbelieve it -- and I certainly was unfavorably impressed by the sneering, over-the-top presentation the anti-ID folks made to the DMN editorial board a couple of years ago. Which doesn't make the case for ID any more or any less valid, but it did make me more curious to hear that case. There's something about ID that reduces opponents to sputtering, which creates the impression that they're trying to make you feel like an idiot for asking questions.
Here’s something from Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science who’s written about the struggle between ID and Darwinism. I interviewed him last year for the Sunday commentary section of the DMN. Ruse calls ID "creationism lite," but says scientists are making a mistake by refusing to engage the debate:
More scientists should get involved in this debate. There's a very strong negative force among young scientists not to get involved in the public domain. If you're trying to get tenure, you don't spend your summer fighting ID. Many people are not good at public involvement, but I'd like to see more of it.
I see evolution and creation as very much the top end of the iceberg. It's a litmus test of this whole red-blue division in America. I'd like to see the left, the Democrats or whatever we call ourselves, be more open to people's concerns. I mean, it's not helpful, and certainly not in America, when Richard Dawkins says all religion is evil. We have got to talk about moral values. We people of the left, we people of the Enlightenment, if you like, have got to start talking about broader issues. I would like to see science teaching, including the teaching of evolution, to be part of this, rather than something we isolate.
I think Ruse is right: people are thinking about this and talking about it, so why not meet them where they are? As disgusting as I think "Loose Change," that 9/11 conspiracy film is, if there were to be a debate about it on SMU’s campus, given how widespread the belief in a conspiracy is (a Scripps poll found that one-third of the American public believes the US government was involved in killing 3,000 of its own citizens), it’s worth dignifying the conspiracy nuts by sharing the podium with them, just to refute their case with facts and logic. Mind you, I don't at all equate the ID folks with conspiracy nuts. I'm just saying that it'd be smarter for the SMU professors to engage the ID people in a public forum and show the audience why the ID people are wrong. Refusing even to talk to them is not causing any fewer people to believe in ID. If ID is as dangerous as the SMU profs say, then they should not hesitate to take it on and try to debunk it.
"We're obviously surprised by the overwhelming response and offense people have taken," said Matt Semler, creative director of a Manhattan art gallery, who presumably made that statement with a straight face. Semler's gallery is planning to exhibit a large chocolate sculpture of Jesus -- complete with penis -- at the start of Holy Week (the timing was a complete coincidence, Semler claims; watch your wallet around this Semler creep). The title of the statue? "My Sweet Lord."
Here, from artist Cosimo Cavallaro's website, is an image of the Christ statue. Cavallaro is inviting gallerygoers to taste the statue before it's taken down on Easter Sunday. Boy, won't that be fun, watching people break off the Lord's penis and eat it on Easter Sunday. Just imagine the catty blasphemy you'll hear. Oh, what would we ever do without those oh-so-brave New York hipsters.
The thing is, they're cowards. If they had guts, they'd create and display a statue of a naked Muhammad, with his penis exposed, on Ramadan. To be clear, I would think it a terrible thing if they did that, would hope they wouldn't, and would denounce them if they did. But of course they wouldn't do that, because they know exactly what would happen to them if they did. Christians, though, are fair game to be shat on by our cultural betters.
Of course the Catholic League has gone ballistic:
"This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever," said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group. "It's not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding."
No, it's not remotely one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities. Language like that makes it easier to dismiss Christian complaints. The heroic Msgr. Pius Ncube, a Catholic archbishop in Zimbabwe, recently announced his willingness to be shot to death by his government to stand up against the dictator Robert Mugabe. If the worst thing American Christians have to worry about is some jackass artist making blasphemous fun of Christ on Holy Week, we've got it better than most of our brethren in the world. That said, this really is offensive, and so completely gratuitous. I'm glad Bill Donohue is going to make some bad people miserable for a few days. What is to be gained by this exhibit? What artistic or public interest is served by it? If Christians had the reputation for threatening to silence critics through violence and threats of violence, you could see possibly the rationale. But there's no rationale, other than the ersatz thrill of blasphemy. That, and publicity.
Like my DMN colleague, former religion editor Bruce Tomaso, I'm glad we live in a country where people are free to be blasphemous creeps and not have to face criminal action, or the threat that their gallery will be firebombed, or the likelihood that some bishop will put a fatwa on their heads and some believer will attempt to carry it out. Still, this is rotten, and I hope no Christian ever again stays at the Roger Smith Hotel, in whose in-house gallery this thing is to be exhibited. In fact, I have to make a reservation today for a quick business trip to NYC, and was looking for a cheap hotel to stay in. Scratch that one off my list, forever. What a great thing it would be if Catholics and other Christians in NYC staged a peaceful Holy Week prayer vigil outside this hotel.
UPDATE: My Bnet colleague David Kuo has a somewhat different take on the matter, saying that this offensive artwork is a good reminder for Christian
s about how Our Lord was mocked and despised by the public in his day, and he patiently endured it out of his love for us. Thanks for that reminder, David.
UPDATE.2: The Chocolate Jesus exhibition has been cancelled. And Matt Semler resigned. I'm sure Bill Donohue has sent him a conciliatory bouquet of tulips.
A few years ago, the Washington Post advertised for a religion writer, saying that "The ideal candidate is not necessarily religious nor an expert in religion." Can you imagine the Post, or any newspaper, advertising for a sportswriter who is not necessarily enthusiastic about sports or an expert in athletics? Or a business writer who didn't know or care much about economics? As Julia Duin reflects, this discloses the unseriousness with which the MSM regards religion as an area of human endeavor. It's not that an atheist necessarily makes for a bad religion reporter, but for one of the most important newspapers in the country to say that no familiarity with the workings of religion are necessary to cover it is really telling.
“I’ve been an atheist all my life,” she says. “Jon convinced me not to use that word. He said I was defining myself negatively.
“So I don’t call myself anything,” she says. “A seeker, perhaps.”
Quinn was casting about for her next move when she sought guidance from a higher authority.
“I had been interested for a couple of years in religion and how it affects policy,” she says. “I was thinking of writing a book about religion in Washington.”
Why not religion online? “I described my idea to Don Graham,” Quinn says. “He thought it was a great idea.”
She then told Graham: “I don’t know anything about religion.”
Detroit Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper says it doesn't matter if a dead elderly homosexual died of gay-bashing, as he claimed, or, as the autopsy found, of a degenerative disease that caused his spine to compress. What really matters, she says, is that he's a useful symbol for pushing hate-crimes legislation.
There is no evidence that this man was gay-bashed, but Desiree Cooper finds it so useful to believe that she's decided the truth does not matter. And she's a journalist! What would Desiree Cooper say to the US military officials who decided to play Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death as a death-by-Taliban, because it was more politically useful that way?
By the by, I'm completely against hate-crimes legislation, which is really just criminalizing thought. All crime is in some sense hate crime. I resent the idea that one beating is somehow worse than another because of the motive of the thug who committed the crime.
The new issue of the paleoconservative monthly Chronicles features a favorable review of the book "Food Is Different: Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture," by agronomist Peter M. Rosset. The review is not available online. According to reviewer Tobias J. Lanz, Rosset decries the role big government has played in revolutionizing the world's agricultural economy, resulting in giant agribusiness displacing small and family farmers the world over. Though conservatives see this as merely the fallout from increased market efficiency, Rosset argues that government is not leveling the playing field, but rather taking the side of big business against the little guy -- with serious social consequences in Third World countries. From the review:
Agriculture is the last economy being transformed by industrialization and commercialization, and Rosset argues that this should not happen. Food production differs from other forms of production because it is so closely linked to human health and survival. In addition to providing nourishment, a stable food economy sustains social and political stability in rural areas and preserves cultural traditions and the environment. Rosset argues that food is more than a commodity; it is the foundation fo a complex web of social and ecological relationships that are simplified and ultimately destroyed when big businesses (and big government) reduce agriculture to mere production for the market.
Rosset's goal is food sovereignty, which would be based on creating government programs and markets that support small producers and rural communities over the interests of big corporations. With the right policies, small producers can provide stable food supplies at reasonable prices and higher quality than large producers can.
I'd like to know what those policies are, and I definitely plan to get the book to evaluate for myself how sensible they are. Here's more from review, which criticizes the author for not discussing the role consumers play in driving the industrialization of agriculture by their demand for cheap food at all costs. He also dings Rosset for not recognizing "the spiritual nature of food and agriculture." Here's Lanz (who is a political scientist at the University of South Carolina):
In all healthy societies, food, like sex, is respected because it is essential to life. As such, food production and consumption are enshrined in rituals and customs that celebrate human participation in the life cycle. When food, or sex, is removed from the protection of the community and given over to the domain of government and the market, it loses its spiritual value and becomes a purely material good.
Lanz notes that agrarians recognize the vital importance of farming to a "good and orderly society," and says that when agriculture declines, so does culture. In "Crunchy Cons," farmer Joel Salatin suggests that this is because farmers maintain a natural humility and piety because they understand how contingent life is, and cannot afford the luxury of believing (falsely) that man can refute nature with his own power. Lanz asserts that consumers can fight the war for the redemption of a healthy culture by supporting their local food producers in their personal purchases over distant agribusiness interests.
Here's an important crunchy con point, from Lanz:
Unfortunately, conservatives, like most Americans, do not view food and agriculture as important political issues. What is more distubring is that the political left does. Leftists are the ones taking up the fight for small farmers and communities throughout the world. T
he left-leaning publisher of this tract, Zed Books, has published an entire series on agricultural issues. ...The worst long-term consequence of the current agricultural revolution is that, if a counterrevolution every materializes, it will probably be a leftist operation, allowing the left to monopolize the debate over how to protect agriculture and community life. In accomplishing this, the left will penetrate the last bastion of traditional life and transform it into a radical one. That would be the greatest revolution of all.
D. Kyle Sampson, A.G. Gonzales's recently departed chief of staff, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Sen. Arlen Specter said that this will probably be the most interesting testimony since Anita Hill. I'm going to be watching it all day, and blogging on it here. I invite you to consider this an open thread for all those watching the testimony to comment.
UPDATE: Well, this is going nowhere. Nobody's offering full coverage of the hearings. I did catch Sampson's opening statement, though. He's claiming that because US Attorneys are political appointees, there’s no meaningful difference between canning a US Attorney for not being politically reliable, and canning him or her for poor performance. Fired US Atty David Iglesias, commenting on CNN, observed that Sampson has never been a prosecutor, so he doesn’t know what prosecutors do. Iglesias said he couldn’t disagree more with Sampson on this point, and that A.G. John Ashcroft told him to his face that when you’re a US Attorney, “politics stops at the door of your office.” Said Iglesias: “We are not rated on political effectiveness. We’re rated on performance.”
It would appear that for the Bush Administration and A.G. Gonzales, the pursuit of justice in the federal system is just waging politics by other means. That's corrupt. Gonzales should go.
It is telling that they initially tried hard to deny the role politics played in this US Atty affair – the NYT today talks about how DOJ first denied that Rove had anything at all to do with them, but subsequently released documents revealed that Rove was all over them. This pattern of lying tells me that the White House knew it was treading in dangerous waters. I presume that Sampson will get hammered on this point, but it’s hard for me to see how at the end of the day, the confidence of Congress or the public in Gonzales’s leadership will be strengthened by what we learn.
Andrew Roberts' "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900" turned up in the office mail recently. Hick that I am, I had no idea that Roberts is an English historian and conservative commentator. I thought the Churchillian title was a bit ... ambitious, but other than that didn't know what to expect. I thumbed through the book, and alighted at once on a passage on p. 647, sniffing at the feeble threat that Islamic terrorists pose to Anglo-American mastery of the globe:
Even were terrorists to strike a further, perhaps chemical, biological or nuclear blow against one of the English-speaking peoples' principal cities, it would not destroy that primacy. As George Will has observed, 'Al-Queda[sic] has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Queda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity.'"
What an odd thing for a historian to say. If history teaches us to do anything, it's to cultivate a sense of the tragic. Neither the Visigoths, nor the Alans, not the Sueves nor any other barbarian tribes had a rival model for how to run an Empire like Romes. But they did know how to destroy it, which suited their purposes. One thing that's so striking about accounts of the end of the Western Roman Empire is how unable the Romans were to foresee their doom. They thought it would last forever for them. Anyway, Roberts' glib triumphalism (I found other examples in my cursory examination of the book), according to Jake Weisberg, could account for why President Bush is so fond of Roberts. But on Weisberg's account, the book's not very reliable.
Bill Holston is a Dallas lawyer who works on human rights and asylum cases. He won a good one this week, and helped deliver a man from evil. Read his account of it and be glad that there are men like Bill in the world.
A question about the state of the conservative movement that puzzles me: why has the either irrelevance or falsity of global warming become such a touchstone? To me, it has something of the quality of a portion of the academic left denying the reality of Al Qaeda, not least in its refusal to accept the expert consensus.
But perhaps I'm missing something. I certainly think of myself as an opinonated person (too opinionated at times, in fact), but I am astonished to read people with no expertise on such matters confidently dismissing the views of the vast majority of the scientific community. Without in any way making a cult of expertise, it seems to me that one needs a very good reason to challenge an expert consensus and apart from an allergy to people like Al Gore, I don't see that reason.
Anyhow, I'd love to know how you view this.
I've had this question in my in-box for a few days, trying to figure out how to answer it. I do share this reader's puzzlement over the intense emotion that so many on the right invest in fighting the idea that humans have anything to do with the globe warming. I don't think I have a clear answer for him, but I do have some thoughts:
The environment is to conservatives what defense is to liberals: the big issue that we don't instinctively get, and that makes us suspicious. It's an instinctive thing. Whenever many conservatives think "environmentalist," they think of Beavis & Butt-head's Mr. Van Driessen. I was this way for a long time, and never gave it a second thought (because no one I knew did) until reading former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's "Dominion," which makes a conservative case for treating animals and the natural world in general with respect. As I later wrote about in "Crunchy Cons," it had never occurred to me that the hunting culture I'd grown up in was full of environmentalists, after a fashion, but they called themselves "conservationists." And if memory serves, they limited their conservationism to maintaining good hunting and fishing grounds -- which isn't nothing, and in fact forms a common-ground basis on which environmentalists might have reached out to them.
But the problem with environmentalists (and I'm generalizing) is that they're culturally out of sync with conservationists. Both sides, I think, tend to view each other with mutual suspicion. Conservationists tend to be cultural conservatives, outdoorsmen, and hunters. Environmentalists tend to be liberals who use the outdoors recreationally, but don't like hunting. There's a whole package of cultural assumptions that come with both. That's one reason I thought Jerome Ringo, a Louisiana hunter with working-class black roots, was such an inspired choice to head the National Wildlife Federation in 2005. He told Mother Jones:
MJ: You spoke just a moment ago of being a conservationist who happens to be black. There’s a popular stereotype that environmentalists are white and wear fleeces and that the roots of environmentalism date back to the 1960s. But I think environmentalism is far broader historically, ideologically, and culturally.
JR: Well, you go back in history—the National Wildlife Federation was formed in the 1930's when many of the conservation organizations were first organized. FDR was a conservationist; he was a president that truly promoted conservation. He was also a sportsman. During that time, the majority of environmentalists/conservationists were sportsmen. Those folks that were members of organized conservation and environmental organizations were those folks that I say that would fish to hang on the wall.
People that fished to put the fish on the plate, didn't join clubs! They fished to eat. So therefore, the organized movement was
mainly made of those sportsman did not include people who couldn't afford to join clubs and who were off feeding their families. And unfortunately, that was many people of color and poor people. Over the years, the movement has evolved to where those sportsmen now recognized the impacts of their actions and society's actions on their sporting and lifestyle. If the air is dirty or the water is dirty there are surely less fish and deer and animals to hunt.
So there has been a marriage between sportsman, environmentalists, and conservationists, because we all focus on pretty much the same thing, and that's protecting the earth for generations to come. Now, the National Wildlife Federation as well as many other conservation organizations realize that they will not be successful in their future if they don't build broad coalitions that involve African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics… This country's a melting pot – we all drink the air, we all drink the water, therefore, we should all be involved in the process.
I'm digressing. The point I wanted to make was that there is a visceral distrust for environmentalism on the right. It's an ill-informed distrust in many cases, but it's there, and it's a very, very difficult thing to overcome. The more extreme statements and actions from environmental activists don't help. I think you'd find a lot more people in this country who would agree with positions held by enviros, but would shun the label. Wendell Berry, who is nobody's idea of a right-winger, told me personally that though he can't abide corporations exploiting and tearing up the land, he keeps professional environmentalists at arm's length, because he can't get them to recognize that people matter too, that people are part of the natural environment too. Man is not an alien, but is of nature.
Maybe that's it: conservatives have a feeling that environmentalists just don't like ordinary people. Right or wrong, there it is.
Which might explain the hard-to-fathom passion so many on the right bring to despising the global warming crowd. I don't have a problem with legitimate challenges of scientific claims, but when you do some reading in the area, and you grasp how overwhelming the basic scientific consensus is, you wonder why on earth so many conservatives seem desperate to believe that it's all a hoax. Not arguing around the margins, but denying the basic premise of human-forced climate change.
Could it really be because they don't want to confront the possibility that they will have to change their way of life? Are they like those gay men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the ones Randy Shilts wrote about in "And the Band Played On," who blamed Reagan and everybody else for the epidemic rather than confront the role their own behavior played? Surely that's part of it. But I don't think it can explain all of it.
As for me, I'd really rather not believe in global warming, certainly not living where I do, in one of the most miserably hot areas in the country. But the facts are so overwhelming, and the denial is so pervasive and emotional, that anti-environmentalism (re: global warming) strikes one as a dogmatic religious commitment. The idea that man-made climate change is a hoax seems to fulfill some deep emotional need in quite a few people on the right.
But it must be said that -- in my observation at least -- it does the same thing for many on the left. Harper's Magazine ran a piece last year calling the climate change apocalypse the left's version of "Left Behind." We are all prisoners of Truthiness to some degree.
Anyway, via NRO's Planet Gore blog, here's Roger Pielke, Jr.'s thoughtful discussion of why the science of climate change has become so politicized in this country. Excerpt:
[I]t is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participant
s ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.
First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes -- remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.
Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.
Good news on the bee front. Julie found on the web an amateur beekeeper in the Highland Park area of Dallas, who came right over this morning. Julie writes:
OK, extremely cool experience with the wonderful Tom DeNolf. Amateur beekeeper, lives in HP (says the neighbors love it), been doing this for 4 years. He dressed Lucas up in the veil and hat, explained the whole thing, did the poofs of smoke thing, showed us the combs left in the box. Whacked the hammock with a brush, they swarmed out and calmly went into the box. Lucas and I stood a few feet away and watched the whole thing (I so count this as my homeschooling for the week). Lucas can now tell you all about how smoke calms bees down. Charged us $20; said he started charging it because otherwise people blew him off and weren't home when he got there.
Very, very cool. He's even gonna send us a photo of the colony!
Tom and his nephew have a (now-dormant) bee blog, tracking the progress of their city hives. Come on guys, let's get cranking again! I'm all curious now about beekeeping in the city.
Steven Emerson's excellent and detailed New Republic column about the terror connections of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the New York Times's air-brushing of same, is a great example of why the US media are biased towards giving Islamic extremists in America a pass. As Emerson shows, it is embarrassingly easy to demonstrate how objectionable CAIR is, and how closely it's tied to our enemies in the war on Islamist terror. But you rarely read about this in the mainstream media, and CAIR spokesmen are often quoted as if they were no different from any other interest group. Read the Emerson piece; does CAIR sound like the ADL, the NAACP, La Raza, GLAAD, et al.? As Emerson points out, leading Democratic politicians are starting to get wise to CAIR's game, and avoid them:
Yet, just as people began to realize this and to ostracize CAIR accordingly, The New York Times arrived with a life raft. Earlier this month, Neil MacFarquhar wrote an incredibly generous profile called "Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S." MacFarquhar's piece is so fraught with errors--of commission and omission--that it is a coup of CAIR propaganda.
MacFarquhar gets off on the right foot, noting, "Several federal officials said CAIR's Washington office frequently issued controversial statements that made it hard for senior government figures to be associated with the group." But he cites none of these "controversial statements." Nor does he mention the CAIR-sponsored fund-raisers and conferences featuring former neo-Nazi leader William Baker and jihadist cleric Wagdy Ghoneim. (At a 1998 CAIR event, Ghoneim sang, "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." And, after he was deported in 2004 for overstaying his visa, Hussam Ayloush, CAIR's Southern California director, called Ghoneim's removal from the U.S. "a dent in our civil rights struggle.")
What we have here in north Texas is a failure to communicate. When a man can't make a weepy audiocassette to be played for his pet monkey while said monkey is on an overnight trip without being accused of interspecies onanism, the world really has gone to hell in a handbasket, ain't it? Excerpt:
Mr. Crawford said he did send a tape for the monkey to listen to, but that he was probably crying when he recorded it and that it contains nothing but comforting baby talk. He said there was nothing sexually suggestive on the tape and called Mr. Dunlap's initial conclusion "ridiculous."
"I don't have sex with my monkey. That's absolute crap," Mr. Crawford said. "Why would I do that? I gave him an audiotape, but it didn't have anything like that on it. It said, 'I'm coming home, I'm coming to get you. Daddy's coming, he's coming to get you,' " Mr. Crawford said.
Mr. Dunlap said that he made a "gross error" and that his interpretation of the tape was just that – his and no one else's.
"I interpreted what I heard and saw in my own way, and I can't say that's correct. It's just me, what I think. I can't argue with Mr. Crawford about what he meant," Mr. Dunlap said. "I took it on surface value about what he said. I just don't want to deal with it anymore. He may be totally honest and right in what he thinks about the way he sounded."
I love this story and can't get enough of it. I hope it goes on and on forever. If Texas didn't exist, you'd have to make it up.
So I get home tonight and my three-year-old Lucas has told his mother that there's a beehive in the backyard on the hammock. She thinks it might be a small wasp nest or something that the kid is overreacting to. I go out with a flashlight to check, and damned if it's not a bona fide swarm, as big as a small melon, attached to the hammock! Never seen anything like it in my life. The bee removal people are coming tomorrow to take care of them. Do you know how much they charge for this service? An unbelievable $175. But what are you going to do? Drive them to the Superdome and freeze them yourself?
Peter Suderman wants to know. He says liberals are always on about community-building, but don't seem to like it one bit when megachurches succeed at it. Excerpt:
The church I grew up in, for example, provided significant financial support for needs in the local community, regardless of whether they were members/attendees, as well as a gym, basketball court, plays, classes, clubs, and various other community events and facilities—most open to the public, not just members. Many megachurches provide exactly the sort of facilities and programs you see progressives arguing should be provided by government, and they manage to do so largely without public funding. Progressive activists , however, tend to be suspicious of—if not outright hostile toward—religious groups that perform these services, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
UPDATE: To be perfectly honest, there are conservatives who don't like megachurches either. I have a semi-bad attitude about them, but I think it's because of a couple of things. One, I'm guilty of the same fault Suderman attributes to liberal critics: I've never been to a megachurch. I instinctively don't like bigness, and the kind of megachurch services I've seen on TV turn me off. But as I learned last fall when reading "Applebee's America," megachurches really are all about small groups. Which makes sense to me. Secondly, the spectacle and emotionalism I associate with megachurches is not necessarily the fault of the size of the church, but is a worship style that doesn't appeal to me, but which could be found in much smaller Evangelical and/or Pentecostal churches. Point is, the disdain for megachurches based in ignorance is not just something many liberals have. I'm going to make it a point sometime this year to visit one or more in my area, and see what's going on. I have a feeling that a lot of the community-building that I, from my crunchy-con perspective, long for is happening at megachurches, and has been happening for a while. I just have such an instinctively negative reaction to church-as-rock-concert that I have been guilty of prejudice against megachurches.
A candidate’s religiosity is not enough for most evangelicals, though it may cause evangelical voters to stop and consider the political hopeful’s agenda. Instead, evangelicals care about issues and where politicians stand on them.
In this regard, evangelicals are closer to Jews (particularly observant Jews) and African-Americans than to Irish or Italian voters who already have blended into the American melting pot. A politician can wear a kippah (a skullcap worn by observant Jews), eat knishes and say that “Fiddler on the Roof” is his favorite movie, and he still won’t get Jewish votes if he opposes Israel and says he wants to Christianize America.
Republicans have spent decades reaching out to the African-American community, but they have made only minimal gains with black voters, in part because of the party’s position on affirmative action and its overall conservatism.
Evangelicals, like blacks and Jews, have a strong group identity and see themselves as outsiders from the dominant social and political culture. Since all three groups tend to be wary of one of the parties, it takes more than words — and in the case of evangelicals, “giving God his due” — to pull them away from their allies.
Those mainstream evangelicals who talk increasingly about protecting the environment or addressing poverty are not discarding their traditional commitment to cultural issues such as abortion. They are not going to support a pro-choice, pro-gay rights Democrat because he or she is an environmentalist or wants the government to help the poor.
My hope -- and my guess -- is that Evangelicals are going to change the Republican Party, not abandon the GOP for the Democrats.
Fred Thompson and Tommy Thompson are both running, or thinking of running, for the GOP presidential nomination. Daniel Larison asks, "Why not a Thompson-Thompson ticket?"
Oh joy! But only if Captain Haddock can run the Defense Department.
Certain kinds of religious leader gravitated toward eugenics in the early twentieth century, ministers anxious about the changing culture but also eager to find solutions to its diagnosable ills. Theirs was a practical spirituality. . . . And it was when these self-identified liberal and modernist religious men abandoned bedrock principles to seek relevance in modern debates that they were most likely to find themselves endorsing eugenics. Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science.
The troglodytic Catholics and (fundamentalist) Protestants were the only Christians who resisted this evil, and were despised by the progressive bien-pensants for it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There are some who, out of a laudable effort to resist any eugenic thought, attempt to ignore or deny all genetic difference among humans. That's wrong: if it's true, it's true. The solution is to always keep at the front of our minds, and at the bottom of our hearts, the non-negotiable conviction that human dignity is universally shared, and that human worth does not depend on having been favored by genetics. The man in the wheelchair is worth no less and no more than the marathon runner.
I don't mind telling you that when it comes to dentists, I'm the biggest wuss this side of the Pecos. I devolve into Woody Allen-style hand-wringing and whining and nervous joke-making and everything you can imagine. Happily, I have a very good dentist. I take sedatives an hour before going in, and get the gas, take a shot of Novo, and listen to loud rock music on my iPod while blitzed in the chair. And still I grab the armrests for all their worth. But as I'm 90 percent blotto, I don't be carin', mon. The trouble is that I have to take so much Halcion just to keep from freaking out that I'm no damn good for hours afterward. And Halcion gives you weird dreams. While in my drug-induced slumber, I dreamed that I was at a Liberty Fund conference in a Key West swimming pool with Mort Kondracke, Bill Kristol and Bill Bennett.
"Nuh-uh, you did not," Julie said this morning when I told her.
"For true," I replied, truthfully.
"You are so weird."
The word is geeky, love. But you're right.
Anyway, when I was in Brooklyn, I had a dentist who let me take a couple of shots out of a bottle of Stoli in the office fridge -- this before I hit the chair. He said he used to have an elderly Russian immigrant patient who wouldn't take Novocaine shots. The old man kept a bottle of Stoli in the fridge at the dentist's office, and slammed nine shots before he was worked on. Worked like a charm. Until my dentist starts offering morphine, I'll stick with the Halcion. Ah, sweet little happy pill, don't go changin'...
My colleague Jeff Weiss had a nice piece in the Dallas Morning News this weekend about members of the faculty at Southern Methodist University up in arms over a planned presentation of intelligent design theory on campus. The Discovery Institute of Seattle is the presenter, and the program is sponsored by the Christian Legal Society at the university. From the story:
Science professors upset about a presentation on "Intelligent Design" fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.
The “Darwin vs. Design” conference, co-sponsored by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society, will say that a designer with the power to shape the cosmos is the best explanation for aspects of life and the universe. The event is produced by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization that says it has scientific evidence for its claims.
The anthropology department at SMU begged to differ:
"These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits," said the letter sent to administrators by the department. "They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask."
Similar letters were sent by the biology and geology departments.
The university is not going to cancel the event, interim provost Tom Tunks said Friday. The official response is a statement that the event to be held in McFarlin Auditorium April 13-14 is not endorsed by the school:
"Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support of the free marketplace of ideas, providing facilities for those programs does not imply SMU's endorsement of the presenters' views," the statement said.
What snots these academics be. Let's say for the sake of argument that the ID crowd is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. If that were any reason to keep someone off campus, many faculty members would have to clear out by sundown. The school administration is exactly right: a university is a free marketplace of ideas. The solution to speech you find unreasonable is to provide a reasoned rebuttal. Not this:
Many SMU science professors say they are worried that merely allowing "Darwin vs. Design" on campus could give the public impression that Intelligent Design has support from scientists at the school.
Oh, please. If the school allowed the Young Socialist Alliance to meet in the student union, nobody would be under the slightest impression that the school's political science faculty had been infilitrated by Marxists. And Jeff reports that some of the professors likened ID supporters to Holocaust deniers. What a bunch of obnoxious hysterics.
We have far more to fear from professors who would ban from a university campus a (non-violent) viewpoint they don't like than we do from the idea that some college student might come to believe that the universe is the product of an intelligent mind (which all theists believe in some sense anyway). The funniest aspect of all this was captured by Jeff Weiss in his blog afterword (in which he disputes as well with the Discovery folks, though he says they were honest in their portrayal of the event, while the SMU profs were not):
And finally, it is a matter of some irony that the science professors protest a presentation they say is essentially religious, to take place at a university that still has “Methodist” as its middle name.
GetReligion's Mollie Ziegler flags a "truly horrible story" by a Reuters reporter, in which the reporter inadvertently discloses not only her ignorance of basic tenets of the Christian religion -- the reporter is under the impression that "Left Behind" theology is rampant in America because four out of five Christians believe in the Second Coming of Christ ... which is, of course, has been a basic tenet of the faith since the beginning -- but also her agenda. It comes with the use of the word "moderate" in the sense of "Christians I approve of, not like those awful fundamentalists." As Mollie points out, a reporter choosing to deploy the word "moderate" to describe the liberal side in an institutional conflict is loaded. She quotes NYTimes editor Bill Keller's 2005 instruction to his newsroom:
We must . . . be more alert to nuances of language when writing about contentious issues . . . the way the word “moderate” conveys a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme, the misuse of “religious fundamentalists” to describe religious conservatives . . .
That was a minor problem I had with the LA Times Rome bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson's book "The Vatican's Exorcists." Her book is not polemical, but she tips her hand by repeatedly calling Roman Catholics who actually believe in their church's teachings "fundamentalists." It's a perjorative and loaded description. There is a distinct subset of American Protestantism called "fundamentalism," and it proposes specific doctrines. You can't lift the phrase from its Protestant context and apply it to any conservative religious faction, or use it to describe the conservative side in a religious dispute. Besides, the word is so toxic in the US media environment that any time I see it, I assume that it tells us more about the reporter's worldview than it does the worldview of the faction labeled "fundamentalist" in the story.
Likewise with "moderate." A pet peeve of mine has been the way the mainstream media describe the rightward edge of the Democratic party in Congress as "conservative Democrats," but the leftward edge of the GOP in Congress as "moderate Republicans." Ever notice that? I nearly drove my car off the road the other day when I heard an NPR report describe the Blue Dog Democrats as "moderate." I literally have never heard or read that description applied to them. Frankly, I would call them conservative Democrats, as I would call the left-leaning Republicans "liberal Republicans" (except there aren't many of those left in Congress). If there are members who fall somewhere in the middle, those would be the moderates. Yes?
This should be good. The influential Reformed writer Douglas Wilson has read "Crunchy Cons," and is now beginning a series of blogs reviewing it. He apparently liked the book, but is not uncritical. I'm grateful for his attention, and am looking forward to his critique. Excerpt from the first entry:
Dreher is really strong in describing some of the soul-wasting assumptions that are frequently found on America's right wing. But the solution, whatever it is, will still not be imposed from the top down, even if there are local and personal reasons for thinking that "there ought to be a law." And in addition, there are a multitude of statist restrictions and regulations (by definition applied from the top) that will impede the restoration of sanity in our local communities. In short, the solution is going to be found in worship of the triune God -- no baals can deliver us. Not the home-grown organic local baals, and not the nationalist Baal of war, commerce and empire. I believe that Dreher would agree with this, but in the course of this review I want to push it a good deal further than I believe he does.
"This is not to encourage a head-for-the-hills utopianism (though sometimes the hills do start to look pretty inviting), but rather a movement to change our own lifestyles so that they are more faithful to our convictions as conservatives, and over time rebuild the strength and stability of our communities, our schools, our churches, and all the 'little platoons' that Edmund Burke identified as necessary to civil life" (p. 23).
This is all very good, but it brings the central question I have about this book to the forefront. As we are investing ourselves in Burke's little platoons, what are we willing to make other people do, and why? This is the question underneath all matters of law and justice, and answering it will tell us how to take and apply this book. Eating free range chicken for dinner and supporting legislation that will restrict carbon emissions (to prevent 2017's laughing-stock, global warming) may seem like different aspects of the same worldview. But they are not at all. The first is a personal choice in a free country, and the second is bad coercive law based on bad science, in what is decreasingly a free country. The former feeds the mouths of your family and the latter feeds the maw of the state.
All this said, I enjoyed this book greatly, and hope that the questions it raises will be as profitable in this series of reviews as they were for me in the book itself.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon working on the proposal for my next book, which will push the questions further than I did in CC. I don't want to reveal too much about it until my agent has the final proposal and is shopping it around, but I think it will both widen the audience for these ideas, and take the diagnosis and prescription significantly further than "Crunchy Cons" does.
Many thanks to reader Jon Luker for bringing this to my attention. Jon, a Reformec Christians of traditionalist conservative sensibilities, blogs here. I'm enthusiastically adding his blog Politeuma to my personal blog roll.
I think that his general view of life is actually quite close to the rather attractive position known in the USA as 'crunchy conservatism', for which I have a lot of time.
This involves being genuinely conservative about institutions, religion, architecture, landscape, language and art - while accepting that a lot of the things that the post-1960s generation enthuse about have a point. Bicycles are a good way of getting around crowded cities. Organic farming - for example - may not produce healthier food. I don't know. But there is no doubt that it is hugely beneficial to the countryside and the creatures and plants that used to flourish in it.
Before it was kidnapped by the zealots, the environmental cause involved small, reasonable moral actions taken by individuals for their own benefit and the benefit of others, rather than highly-publicised gestures designed to look correct without actually achieving anything. (A good word should be put in here for a critic and opponent of mine, George Monbiot, who in a TV programme a week ago pointed out with some force that much government and corporate 'action' on global warming is in fact empty posing.) I think Charles was an early advocate of such measures.
I think his charitable work is thoughtful and often effective. I think his management of the Duchy of Cornwall is generally benevolent. I think his attack on crass modern architecture was entirely justified. I think Poundbury is a reproach to much modern housebuilding. And I think that his instinctive feeling that he can act as the champion for people disenfranchised by Blairism is also right and justified.
A couple of you have made combox reference to this incredible undercover account of a reporter who worked as a car salesman. I'm so glad you did. What a great piece. People, you need to read this to be prepared for the car-buying experience. I found this passage especially illuminating -- and it made me glad that I walked into the dealership with my Internet printouts from Edmunds.com, telling me what the invoice prices of the cars I was interested in were. Make the Internet work for you!:
Since I was still a "green pea" the other salesmen tried to push me to wait on undesirable ups — the undesirable customers who the salesmen thought wouldn't or couldn't qualify to buy a car. My manager had, at one point, described the different races and nationalities and what they were like as customers. It would be too inflammatory to repeat what he said here. But the gist of it was that the people of such-and-such nationality were "lie downs" (people who buy without negotiating), while the people of another race were "roaches" (they had bad credit), and people from that country were "mooches" (they tried to buy the car for invoice price).
I'll repeat what Michael, my ASM, told me about Caucasians . He said white people never come into the dealership. "They're all on the Internet trying to find out what our invoice price is. We never even get a shot at them. I hate it. I mean, would they go (to a mall) and say, 'What's your invoice price on that beautiful suit?' No. So why are they doing it here?"
I was already beginning to see the impact of the Internet because of something that happened during my first few days there. I was sent to the service department to talk to customers waiting for their cars to be fixed. Salespeople feel this is a good source of leads to buy new cars. Say a customer has just gotten nailed with a $2,000 quote for a transmission. Now's the time to move in and pitch the virtues of a new car.
There were typically a dozen or more people waiting for their cars to be serviced. They would either watch TV or read while they drank coffee and Cokes from the vending machines. I handed out my business card and chatted with a few people. One young guy was killing time by goofing around with his Palm Top computer. He was outfitted in designer jeans and a T-shirt, so I wasn't surprised to hear that he had just bought the radical new SUV our dealership sold. Michael had told me these vehicles were selling for over sticker prices, so I asked Mr. Palm Top how he made out.
"I got an awesome deal," he said.
"How awesome?"
"Three hundred below invoice," he smugly answered.
I asked how he did it. He said he checked prices on the Internet. He then called the fleet manager and made the deal over the phone.
I had a schizophrenic reaction to this. Part of me admired the fact that he had outfoxed the dealer. But the car salesman side of me was angry that I never "got a shot at him." It seemed like just a matter of time before people who, in the past, walked onto our car lot, would be on the Internet making deals.
The salesmen are only vaguely aware of this developing trend. I was standing on the curb next to George and we saw one of these high-demand SUVs ready for delivery.
"Another damn Internet sale," George said. "Why don't they turn that car over to us? We'd get a grand over sticker. Instead they're selling it at invoice. Does that make sense?" As the days passed I noticed more and more cars marked "carsdirect.com." And as I approached people on the car lot they often informed me that they were here to see the fleet manager. More Internet customers.
If you want to cut to the chase, and read the author's recommendations for how to buy a car, go here. But you owe it to your
self to read all that comes before.
The car search continues today, but it will involve one less dealership. The other day, I visited an area dealership and talked to the manager about what I was looking for in a car. While we were waiting on some figures, we started talking about reputation. I mentioned to him that when I'd first moved to Dallas, I'd called a particular Honda dealership and talked to them about an advertised special. They told me one thing, and when I drove out to the dealership, they immediately bait-and-switched me. It was blatant, ugly and high-pressure, so I walked away -- and have used every opportunity in the years since to warn people away from that unscrupulous dealership. I told the manager I was talking to that it's really, really important for a dealership to maintain high ethical standards, because nowadays, with the ease of communication (via blogs and other websites), it's very easy for a customer who has been misled or mistreated to get the word out.
He agreed, and spent five minutes giving me reasons why his dealership is not like the others. I had no reason to believe him or doubt him; I just wanted him to understand that getting my business, and the business of anybody I know and talk to and communicate with, depended heavily on my ability to trust this dealership.
Yesterday, I was getting a haircut, and I told the friend who cuts my hair that I was in the market for a new car. When I mentioned that I'd gone to Dealer X's to check out the wares, and appreciated how friendly and low-pressure they were, she went off. Turns out she and her husband had just had dealings with them. She had done a lot of research into the model they wanted, the financing and so forth, and went to the dealership armed with information. My friend spent about half an hour describing the manipulation and the outright lying they had to deal with with this dealership. She gave me chapter and verse, and described in detail a very unpleasant conversation she had with the same manager I'd talked to, who'd given me such a stirring testimonial to his dealership's honesty, in which she told him that the documentation she had from the manufacturer, based on the vehicle's VIN number, completely discredited the story he was trying to tell about the model they were trying to sell at a higher price. And she said during one of their trips to the dealership, they'd gotten into a dispute about facts with a particular salesman, and the salesman left to get "my sales manager." My friend found out later that the man who presented himself as a sales manager was in fact just another salesman who had been recruited, apparently, to play that role. Real Jerry Lundegaard b.s., you know?
The whole thing made her so angry that she severed her five-year relationship with the dealer (she'd been taking her old car there for service), and went to Carmax instea, where she wouldn't have to open herself up to manipulation by Jerry Lundegaards. And is now the happy owner of a nice used wagon.
Here's the thing: I can't independently verify whether my friend is telling the truth, and was mistreated by unscrupulous car salesmen, or whether the dealership has been slandered (which is why I won't add to the potential slander by naming them). But I do know that I believe my friend -- so would you -- and will not take a risk on such a big purchase with such people as these slicksters at the dealership. This dealership has lost my business, no matter what kind of deal they offer. And they did it by treating a young couple as boobs to be manipulated, not as customers who deserved to be treated fairly.
Remember how the A.G. said that he wasn't in the loop on the U.S. Attorney firings? Oops! Seems that documents show he was in fact present at a November meeting at which the plans were finalized. Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this disclosure make the Attorney General either a dissembler or a dope? That is, either he's unethical, and deliberately tried to mislead people about his role in this, or he's incompetent, and unintentionally said misleading things in public about a very important matter, thereby compounding the administration's problems with this scandal.
Even if you believe the US Attorney firings were completely justified, I don't know how you can continue to have confidence in Al Gonzales as Attorney General. I'm sure the president believes he's doing a heck of a job, Brownie, but wouldn't the prudent political thing to do at this point be to ask for his resignation, and throw in a Medal of Freedom (the Bush Administration version of Rice-a-Roni, Turtle Wax and other Lovely Parting Gifts that say, "Thanks for playing, loser")?
Here's a pretty powerful analysis, from a Christian perspective, about what leftism in power increasingly means for Christians and social traditionalists. It's written by a conservative disgusted with the conservative movement and the Republican Party. It brought to mind something Ken Myers advised last night: that orthodox Christians ought to start thinking a lot more about our loyalty to our faith, and a lot less about identifying with the American state. I unequivocally reject the reflexive hostility to Israel in the analysis I'm about to quote from, but that doesn't obviate the wisdom in a powerful piece. Here's an excerpt:
The fact that the secular Left, around the world, is engaged in a systematic persecution of Christianity, per se—even as it bends itself into knots to accommodate other religions, and every conceivable lifestyle perversion. The only reason that the secularist elites in this country haven’t tried harder to crack down in the U.S. is the presence of a large, Evangelical Christian movement—and a few Catholic intellectual cheerleaders. The presence of that movement serves as a bulwark against these forms of repression—for the moment.
But with every occasion on which the Christian Right squanders its moral capital, every unjust war it supports, every foolish statement designed to provoke a war between Israel and her neighbors, every ham-handed attempt to keep Christians from taking the environment (and the survival of God’s Creation) seriously, that bulwark erodes just a little. Intelligent young people look at the movement which can sanction such irresponsibility, which touts the likes of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, and turn away in disgust. Like the Catholics of Spain who associate the Church with Franco’s secret police, they shudder and look for something else—a worldview which is not so manifestly juvenile and irrational.
They may very well turn to the secular Left. The Christian Right could vanish like the “massive” Southern resistance to desegregation, like the Temperance movement which once outlawed alcohol in 50 states, like the Black Power movement… like every other half-baked ideological crusade which faded away with the irrational emotions that had driven it, in the absence of serious thought.
And then we will be in the same boat as our cousins in Brazil, Quebec, and England. We’ll be facing real persecution by a “soft” totalitarian system that holds the family in contempt, regards Christianity as its enemy, and covets cradle-to-grave control over the thoughts, feelings and actions of its subjects.
The only hope of resisting the partisans of secular intolerance is to clean up the Christian Right (Catholic and Protestant), to purge it of jingoism, anti-intellectualism, and end-of-the world nihilism, then to break up its shotgun wedding to the hacks who run the conservative movement. The Christian Right must become less “Right” and much more Christian, reassert its intellectual and moral independence of partisan politics, and insist on applying its principles consistently. Pastors must stop endorsing torture, public Catholics must choose their pope above their president, and all of us must remember that the real war is not between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between the Church and the World. And the battlefield lies within our hearts.
The nonpartisan Pew Center has a new study out measuring American political attitudes, and it's bad news for conservatives. From the L.A. Times report:
Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged since the second year of George W. Bush's presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political dominance for more than a decade, a major new survey has found.
The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for People and the Press, found a "dramatic shift" in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, half of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while only 35% aligned with Republicans.
What's more, the survey found the public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats' values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has edged down.
Those findings suggest that Republicans' political challenges reach beyond the unpopularity of the war in Iraq and Bush.
According to Pew's Andy Kohut, the percentage-point difference between Republicans and Democrats is greater than at any time in the last 20 years they've been doing the poll. But -- and this is key -- he also said that the shift mostly reflects the defection of independents from the party rather than a more favorable overall assessment of the Democratic Party. The independents are sick of the GOP, but they haven't fallen for the Dems. Point is, this is an opportunity for the Democrats to win the loyalty of all those independents who have fallen away from the GOP, but they could easily blow it. (And knowing them, they probably will.)
Still, you really should read the study overview, which is full of fascinating information, all of it bad for social conservatives like me. I mean, I like the rising support for a more populist economic worldview, but I'm more concerned about social issues and religion. Support for socially conservative policies is steadily falling off, as is religiosity. Interestingly, religiosity levels are holding steady among Republicans since the 1990s, but among Democrats, they're falling. (So much for the rise of the Religious Left).
Other tidbits:
+ Only 45 percent of white-collar Democrats like Wal-Mart, but two-thirds of blue-collar Dems do. + There is a striking rise among middle-class voters in the perception that the system is stacked in favor of the rich. And there is also lots of evidence that financial anxiety is starting to get to people. + Twenty percent of Generation Y (those born in or after 1977) identify with no religion, making them the most secular American generation living. The religiosity of each generation does not change over time, according to the poll, meaning that Americans are no more or no less secular as they age. + Americans are losing confidence in their government's ability to solve problems. + Americans are losing confidence in their own ability to solve problems.
Those last two points are really troubling. I'm reading books now about the fall of Rome. The weakening of society that helped lead to the collapse was an estrangement of the people from their government, and the inability of the Roman people to deal with the problems that beset them (that is, they could perceive what the problems were, but couldn't muster the strength and the focus to take care of them). Hmm.
Anyway, that's some legacy President Bush is leaving to the conserva
tive movement (look at the graphs with the Pew report, and you can see that confidence in the GOP began to dive after the Iraq War began). Given the gloominess and leftward drift of the country, is there any doubt who the Democrats will nominate for president in 2008?
I'm kidding, of course, but I do think that the 2008 election will be a placeholder election, with the really decisive election either cementing Democratic gains in 2008, or signaling a GOP comeback (under socially liberal Giuliani Republicanism) in 2012. Either way, I don't see how religious and social conservatism, which reached its apogee of influence in the Bush Administration, is going to be nearly as dominant for decades to come. Alas.
Am I wrong here? What would conservatives have to do to win back the independents? As a purely political matter, it seems clear they'd need to nominate someone like Giuliani. But as a matter of principle, many traditionalist conservatives would rightly wonder what would be the point of calling a Giulianized GOP conservative in any meaningful sense (as distinct from, "not as liberal as the Democrats").
I'm starting to really see Claes Ryn's point that conservatives won the political battle of the last 40 years, but lost the cultural war ... and now, in the generations to come, will now lose the political battle too.
I heard a good talk last night by Ken Myers, the happy genius of the indispensable Mars Hill Audio Journal household. Our host was Dr. David Naugle, head of the philosophy department at Dallas Baptist University (N.B., for Dallas area readers, Ken's going to be speaking today at DBU at noon, on "Why There Really IS A War Between Science and Religion: C. S. Lewis's Vision of a 'Repentant Science'"; the lecture is free -- follow the link to Dr. Naugle's webpage for details). I've become a big fan of the Mars Hill interviews, and can't encourage thoughtful Christians interested in the intersection of faith and culture strongly enough to subscribe. So it was a treat to hear Ken speak in person. He talked last evening about how from the days of the founders, the American way of thinking about the role of religion in public life was not only to privatize it, but to individualize it. He explained how the inevitable result of this was to make Christian faith peripheral to the substantive questions in public life. Moreover, the principles behind this privatization of religion inevitably lead to the corruption of religion, because it becomes primarily a matter of expressing how individual men feel about God, rather than being an expression of how God feels about individual men, and what He calls us to do.
The upshot is that even among the most religiously enthusiastic Americans, the faith has become so inculturated that it has been turned inside out, and is no longer prophetic, but therapeutic. Ken talked about an interview he did in 2005 with sociologist Christian Smith, who had just written a book on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. What he found was a consistent set of religious beliefs across denominations, and even traditions (i.e., Muslim teenagers told him the same thing). But it wasn't the beliefs of the particular traditions the kids came out of; rather, it was what Smith calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." It's principles, as Ken listed them, were startlingly familiar: God exists, but you really shouldn't get overly involved with Him unless you get into real trouble or something; the point of life is to be happy; it's important to be nice; good people go to heaven, and most everybody is good; et cetera.
What struck me when I heard Ken listing Dr. Smith's litany was how this vague message has been the basic orientation toward Christianity that I've heard in nearly every Protestant or Catholic church I've ever been a part of. This is not something that teenagers today have arrived at on their own. This is something they were taught. Ken said that in his own conversations with pastors, they are often astonished by the level of theological illiteracy among young people today, as opposed to 50 years ago. I suppose you might say that even if a religious dissenter within a tradition rejected the tradition, he at least knew what he was turning his back on. No longer. And I thought perhaps the most important thing Ken said all night was his observation that in past generations, young people were ashamed of themselves when they became aware that they didn't know something important, and they endeavoured to learn it. Today, so many are proud of their ignorance, or at least profoundly unmoved to combat it.
(It's not just teenagers; I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with adults in recent years that get aborted when the other person says, "Well, I'm entitled to my opinion" -- this, even though their opinion is based on clear factual error. It's so weird, because you'd think that if someone had reached an opinion based on an error of fact or logic, they'd want to know that. Wouldn't you? I know I would. You see, though, the philosophical basis for Truthiness: the belief that truth is essen
tially therapeutic -- meaning that what's true is what makes us feel good.)
Anyway. After Ken's talk, I asked him about his opening statement that Christians should not retire from the culture to their prayer towers. It seems to me from everything that followed that it is virtually impossible to maintain any sort of religious particularism amid the Moralistic Therapeutic Deistic (MTD) Kultursmog pervading our culture at every level. Wouldn't it make sense for Christians (or frankly, any religious believer interested in maintaining the integrity of his or her own religious tradition) to withdraw from the broader culture? Cloistered monks, nuns and hermits excepted, total withdrawal is neither practical nor even desirable for Christians -- nor is it Biblically defensible. But it seems to me that not to be conscious of oneself as a member of a strongly countercultural Christian community, and to constantly be reminded of one's apartness from the mainstream culture, is to be unable to resist being absorbed by the MTD Borg.
Ken, who is Evangelical, responded in part by saying that when he was younger, the conservative Christians always understood that they were apart from the mainstream. It was just a given that Jesus's people were going to be outsiders. That's not true anymore, said Ken, at least not among Evangelicals. He said that the rise of "the so-called Religious Right" served to mainstream Evangelicalism, and that now there is a big fear among Evangelicals of being thought "fundamentalist" for insisting on religious particularism or tradition. That remark brought to mind the line, can't remember from who, to the effect of, "There's no telling how much good might be done if not for the fear of being insufficiently progressive."
It was a good evening, even if my l'esprit d'escalier question went unasked: "Hey Baptists in the audience, everything Ken Myers has said tonight implicitly indicts the core Baptist doctrine of soul competency. How do you respond?"
Let's say you're a struggling student, and you need some extra work to help make ends meet for your large family while you complete your advanced degree. Let's say that a nice Dallas lady needs some yard and handyman work done around her house, and you answer her ad on the school electronic bulletin board, an ad she placed because she wanted to be helpful to struggling students just like you. If you show up at that lady's house, and her little kids are acting like complete imbeciles in the backyard, it's probably smart to assume that she's having a bad day, and doesn't want to embarrass you by strongly disciplining her children in front of the stranger.
Whatever the case, what you don't want to do -- not if you want the job -- is to tell your prospective employer, "Your child either needs more spankings or more hugs," and then make recommendations for the child-discipline books the lady needs to buy. And then you really don't try to hug the misbehaving child. Not if you want the job. Is what I'm saying to you.
Our Scion xB-loving combox friend Rawlins Gilliland has discovered truthiness. Hear (or read -- but really, you need to hear his smooth-bourbon Texas voice) his public radio commentary denouncing Internet rumor-mongering here. I can't get my dad to stop forwarding me rumors he gets off the Internet. For a while I was going to Snopes.com and sending him facts debunking whatever he'd just passed along. What I don't understand is why people pass this stuff along without checking it first. Sometimes these rumors are really damaging to a person or company. If Acme, Inc., is really grinding up the bones of illegal immigrant babies to make paint pigment for Scion xBs, that's such a scandalous accusation that one has an obligation to make a minimal effort to see if it's true before spreading the rumor. But nooooooo...
Timothy Noah gets all up in Jonah Goldberg's grill over the oft-delayed debut of "Liberal Fascism." Noah speculates, with unsheathed glee, that the book, which purports to tell us how much contemporary American liberalism has in common with classical fascist doctrine, has fallen victim to the Zeitgeist shift away from red-meat conservative books. Jonah says no, the book simply isn't finished yet.
I haven't communicated with Jonah in about a year, and regular readers will know that there's no love lost between us over "Crunchy Cons." I suspect I have as much doubt about the thesis of his book as he did about mine (though Pod has read some of it, and says it's good). I think it's reasonable to wonder, given how the bottom seems to have fallen out of the conservative genre, if the publisher has gotten cold feet over Jonah's book.
But I am 100 percent certain that Jonah is telling the truth about why his book is delayed. I say this as someone who was over a year late meeting the deadline on "Crunchy Cons." What people who aren't writers don't realize, especially when they see so much writing on the web and in the newspaper from people like Jonah and me, is how incredibly difficult it is to write books. Can't speak for Jonah, but I'm a writing machine, and still, writing my book was the most difficult professional thing I've ever done. Why?
Simple: we columnist/pundit/blogger types are champion sprinters. Though there are notable exceptions -- that Christopher Hitchens manages to write so many strong columns, reviews, essays and books, while being massively liquored up, makes him a god to writers -- most of us are not temperamentally cut out for marathons. It's a discipline thing. By far the greatest obstacle to me finishing my book on time was my inability to focus on the task at hand. The temptation to blog, to surf the Internet, to work on a column -- anything but write the damn book -- was overwhelming. Writing a book requires the ability to sustain focus, and that's hard to do when most of your writing appears in 800-word (or less) bursts. I had to check into a hotel one miserable weekend two springs ago here in Dallas, and resolve never to check my e-mail, just to get my book finished. I had reams of notes and dog-eared books scattered over two hotel beds and all over the floor. And the only thing that focused my mind enough to get the job completed was my editor at the publishing house calling to gently remind me that the book was a year overdue, and if I didn't plan on writing it, perhaps we should discuss my paying back the portion of the advance I'd been paid. Which I'd already spent.
Point is, even prolific and talented writers, as Jonah certainly is, can be utterly sidetracked by a book project. I'm working on a proposal for my next book, and there's part of me that dreads it, but another part of me that knows from hard experience the kinds of things I'm going to have to do to make sure I deliver this one on time.
Another thing people don't get about book-writing: the overwhelming majority of books published in the US lose money. My book was well-reviewed in prominent places, got lots of talk radio attention and even a sympathetic cover story in the Washington Post Style section. And still, it only did OK in terms of sales. A friend who's in publishing warned me ahead of time that it was extremely unlikely that my book -- or anybody's book (Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Scott Turow and others excepted) -- was going to turn a profit. Basically the entire publishing business is supported by a relative handful fo mega-successes. I didn't want to believe him, but it's actually true. I mentioned last year to a friend who'd gotten a big advance and strong advance publicity for
his first book not to get his hopes up too high, but he didn't really believe it. The sales number for his book suggest that his book was a big money-loser for its publisher.
A third thing people don't understand: just because you've published a book, or have a byline, or get on TV, that does not mean that you are rich. I keep running into people who assume that I'm rolling in cash because I'm the guy who wrote that book. Couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, when I was at National Review and said on the Corner that I was interested in renting a house in rural Virginia, a kind reader wrote and offered me his $3,500/mo. rental. He seemed shocked when I told him that me and my wife lived paycheck to paycheck on my journalist's salary in NYC, and that this was pretty normal for our business. My sense from the conversation was that he thought that because I worked for a major political magazine, and turned up on national TV every couple of weeks, that I was a man of substantial means.
OK, enough professional writer whining. Because I've taken 15 minutes to pound this post out, that's 15 more minutes I'm going to have to spend at the paper tonight finishing next week's column, or 15 more minutes I'm going to have to spend at home tonight wrapping the piece up after hours. You see where the blogging thing gets you? My advice to people who want to be serious writers someday: go into any line of work other than publishing.
Jeremy Lott has an interesting interview with Philip Jenkins, who has some observations that might surprise. Among them, the belief that even though the Second Vatican Council bears some responsibility for the big falloff in Catholic orthodoxy and observance in the past four decades, it doesn't explain it all:
In fact it's interesting to think of an alternate world where Vatican II never happened. A lot of the spiritual upsurge in the 1960s and 1970s would probably have done what it had done in the past—would find its way into the Catholic Church—as opposed to going off in some of the New Agey directions.
It contributed [to decline] but I don't think it was enough on its own. I think there were demographic trends already in progress which were contributing. Vatican II just came at the worst possible time because it aligned the Church with a kind of modernity that was already looking dated. Stark is right to say it's important, certainly. But I think the single biggest factor of decline in the 1970s and 1980s was the decline of children.
Jenkins also thinks fear of a Muslim Europe are off-base:
[B]ecause the numbers at present are very small. And while they're going to grow, by American standards Muslim minorities in Europe are not going to be that huge. The other big issue is that when people talk about Muslim minorities, they automatically assume that everyone of Muslim background is going to continue to be a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore Muslim in Europe.
He also observes, as has Spengler in his column, that all the talk of the demographic tsunami in the Muslim world fails to notice that birth rates there are collapsing.
I gotta say it's impressive that George P. Bush, Jeb's son and 41's grandson, has volunteered for military service as a Navy Reserves intelligence officer. As we know all too well from the Iraq experience, reservists could easily see active duty. I've never met George P. Bush, who lives and works here in Dallas, but friends of mine know him fairly well, and say he's a great guy. This certainly speaks well of his character. He's doing very well for himself in private business here in Dallas; he could have taken an easy road, and still had a bright political future ahead of him -- but he didn't. Excerpt:
Bush, 30, said in a telephone interview from his office at a real estate development firm in Fort Worth, Texas, that he was moved to join the service in part when he attended the rainy commissioning in October of the aircraft carrier named for his grandfather -- the USS George H.W. Bush.
"My grandfather's my hero, and what really sold me on the ultimate decision was having the chance to see the CVN-77 be commissioned under his name," he said. "That was pretty moving, and I had a chance to meet some Navy admirals, as well. I had a chance to talk to them briefly about the opportunity, and I was won over."
George Prescott Bush, the oldest son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL player and Army Ranger who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 in what was later determined to be a friendly-fire incident, "was a wake-up call for me." He said he even "looked into active duty" and had somber conversations with his wife about the possibility.
Bush said he had not intended to announce his plans. "Honestly, I'm kind of a little disappointed that the word got out," he said. "I was hoping to keep this as confidential as possible. I'm not doing it for political purposes or anything along those lines. I'm just doing it because I've been inspired by the friends of mine that have served, either through the JAG (military law) program or through the Reserves. I thought this was a small way that I could get involved."
I think David Brooks has a sensible take on the US Attorneys' Firing controversy today. I am more troubled by the firings, and therefore more sympathetic to the Democrats in this case, than Brooks is, but overall his take seems to me to be the most astute I've read yet. It's behind the NYT firewall, so you can't see it unless you're a subscriber, but it's worth summarizing the column:
1. U.S. Attorneys are political appointees. They get their jobs through politics, and are put in place largely to carry out the president's law enforcement policy priorities. This is normal.
2. But there is a difference between carrying out policy and practicing politics; the line can be difficult to detect. Brooks:
Prosecutors, like other professionals, develop a code of honor to help them steer through the gray areas. This code of honor consists of a series of habits and understandings to help individual prosecutors know how to behave when loyalty to the law is in tension with loyalty to the president.
People in well-led agencies are acutely conscious of this sort of honor code. ... But what’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.
Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.
3. The Democrats are acting like partisan crazies, making rational discussion of the Justice failures and what to do about them impossible. They smell blood in the water, and are going off in a feeding frenzy.
4. Brooks:
And the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences.
This whole thing would have been avoided, says Brooks, "with a few distinctions about the proper role of politics, and a little sense of honor."
The Justice scandal is yet another fruit of President Bush's management style. If you surround yourself with a management team whose primary reason for being picked was personal loyalty to you, you all but guarantee that personnel decisions will be made for reasons of loyalty, both ideological and personal. We've seen many examples of this. And if this is the atmosphere you create, it's unlikely that decision-makers within that culture will appreciate how their actions look from the outside, and the potential problems they'll create for themselves. I think the most important point Brooks makes is his noticing that the top Justice people didn't see this controversy coming, and his judging that that's because they came out of a culture that sees the world in terms of loyalty. I mentioned to some friends in the Katrina aftermath that, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" was going to be this administration's political epitaph. It's turned out to be true, insofar as that comment of Bush's captured the management culture of cronyism that has badly affected the judgment of the president and his underlings.
She's got Stage 4 breast cancer, which is the final stage. Her doctor said that this kind of cancer is "heterogenous," meaning that some people who get it respond well to treatment, but others don't. It is not curable, only manageable at best.
He's staying in the presidential race. I don't understand this decision, frankly. His wife is dying. She looks healthy now, but the breast cancer is in her bones now, and she's never going to be well. She was quite noble and brave at the presser, saying -- and saying convincingly -- that she strongly believes her husband should remain in the campaign. She said that as hard as it is for her to deal with this, traveling around the country on the campaign has brought her into contact with lots of people who face worse situations -- situations she believes her husband would be able to alleviate if he became president. Therefore, she said this morning, she believes her husband should continue his campaign.
On its face, that's incredibly noble and self-sacrificing. I suppose you could be cynical about it, and you might be correct. I take her words at face value, and in charity, don't see any reason not to. But I must say that as a husband, I do find it difficult to imagine putting my ambition to be president over being wholly and unreservedly available to my wife in her struggle (and to be fair, John Edwards said that when his wife needs his presence during the campaign, he will drop whatever he's doing and rush to her side). Anyway, this is a decision they've made together, and I think the right thing to do is to respect them and pray for them.
BTW, White House press secretary Tony Snow, himself a cancer survivor, had some very classy words this morning about Mrs. Edwards' medical situation.
UPDATE: According to the NYTimes story, Stage 4 breast cancer patients have only a one-in-four chance of living five years from point of diagnosis. So if John Edwards were to be elected president, the American people would likely watch their First Lady die. What a thing to think about.
I deleted the Cardinal Mahony post from yesterday. I believe it is certainly possible to have a rational and respectful critical conversation about the Cardinal and related issues. But a couple of people cannot seem to do this without screaming anti-Catholic lines that belong in a Jack Chick comic. Normally I just delete obnoxious posts on various threads, so those who want to carry on a discussion can do so, but I'm not going to be able to watch this one closely today (way too much work to do), and there's something about this particular topic that generates too much heat. So, apologies to those of you who posted on the thread.
Got the news yesterday from my mechanic that the problems facing my 1993 sedan will cost two to three times the car's worth to fix. It really is the end of the road for the old girl. And the problems are so serious that I'm driving on borrowed time. I have to buy another car this weekend, or in any case no later than next.
I don't drive a lot. I put 7,000 miles, max, per year on my car, pootling around Dallas. I'd just as soon buy a safe, reliable car that gets decent gas mileage, and drive it for 15 years. I'm looking at models like a four-door Honda Civic, or a Volkswagen Jetta. I'm strongly disinclined to buy a new car, but the frustrating thing is that the models I want are so high-quality that they depreciate very slowly. There's not a lot of price difference between a new Jetta and a three year old Jetta, according to my Internet research. I can't afford anything that costs more than $18,000, and I'm hoping for at least a couple thousand on my trade-in. The idea of signing on for a three or four year car note depresses me, but I've got no choice. Gloom, despair and agony on me!
Daniel Larison helpfully points out that there are no small number of us who are sick and tired of the Baby Boomer Sturm und Drang playing out in presidential politics. Reading this part of his post gave me insight as to why I like Obama: because he's on the cusp of Generation X-dom, and doesn't seem to see the world through the same generational set of eyes as the Boomers:
By the way, this may be another factor behind Obama’s rise as an alternative to HRC: in his age, if not in his actual policy views, he does represent a change from the preoccupations of the Boomers, which is something that all Americans under 45 would very much like to get away from. We actually are tired of refighting the battles of the 1960s and 1970s, since many of us were not even born then, and we are definitely tired of having to speak about foreign policy with Vietnam constantly looming over our heads. To the extent that 2008 represents one of the last gasps of this old argument, it does not point to the future but represents the beginning of the end of the brief Boomer ascendancy that began in 1992.
The weariness of the younger generations with this dated bickering may be why some young conservative and progressive bloggers are impatient with the worn-out dogmas held over from the ’70s and ’80s in both parties, since these ideas, if they were ever useful, stopped having much relevance in about 1991. It has taken many people of our parents’ generation the last fifteen years to figure out that the world cannot be understod through the respective lenses of bankrupt neoliberalism and neoconservatism, while some of us growing up in the midst of this tired rehashing of old points of dispute have instinctively moved away from the ideologies that seem suited, if they were ever suited to anything, to the end of the Cold War. Both have failed primarily in the failure to recognise that the Cold War did, in fact, end and that this would have implications for both foreign and domestic policy. The insane, bipartisan obsession with demonstrating hostility and opposition to Russia is one of the more destructive legacies of this inability to adapt. The inability to confront jihadis in a way that faces up to the explicitly religious and specifically Islamic nature of the threat and the constant recourse to inaccurate and confused labels of generic terrorism and fascism both reflect how useless the old doctrines are for combating the threats of the present.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life did an interview last year with Samuel Huntington, focused on his "Clash of Civilizations" thesis five years after 9/11. Good stuff. Here's Huntington explaining why he came to believe that culture and religion were so important to the study of international affairs:
I came to the conclusion that central for shaping how [civilizations] evolve is their culture, meaning their values and attitudes. Cultures evolve and change, but they almost always include large elements of tradition. ... I certainly don't think I have ever argued that culture is the only thing that counts. But it is very important because it furnishes the basis for people starting to think about international relations and how people relate to each other. I think we all feel much more at home with people who have similar cultures, language and values than we do with other people. ...Religion is one component of a people's culture. There are other things, such as language that are centrally important, but religion is also vitally important because it provides the framework in which people look out at the world. Language enables them to communicate with the world. Bur religion provides the framework, in most cases.
Though a Democrat, Huntington says he's not all that unhappy with the way Bush has handled the conflict with Islam: "I guess I am reasonably satisfied with what has happened just because I can contemplate how it could have been so much worse."
White House press secretary Tony Snow is earning his money right now. He's being jumped in the press briefing over the Justice Department scandal. I don't find him particularly convincing in all this, but Bush should thank the Precious 8 Lb., 6 Oz. Baby Jesus that he's got Snow fronting for him in all this, and not Scott McLellan.
But you know, Tony Snow wasn't always a stalwart defender of executive privilege. Here's part of what he wrote in a 1998 column about executive privilege, when Bill Clinton was claiming it:
Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.
Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.
One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold -- the rule of law.
Slate takes up the question of whether or not it's licit for Christians to smoke pot. What do you think? Leaving aside the matter of breaking the law by using marijuana, do you think it's a sin? I'm not so sure. I don't use marijuana, and never have (OK, except for that trip to Amsterdam a decade ago, when I tried the space cake). I would hit the ceiling if any of my kids even got near the stuff, and I oppose it's legalization (except for medical use, which I support).
But I spent my late teens and twenties around people who used it socially, and I confess that I can't find it within me to get worked up about adults using it within moderation (though I admit when I hear about someone my age smoking pot, I think, "Oughtn't you have gotten that out of your system by now?"). I wonder if the moral prohibition many of us adhere to regarding marijuana make us guilty of turning a mere cultural taboo into a moral principle. Am I wrong? If marijuana were made legal, and using it wouldn't require violating the law, would it be morally wrong to use it? Were pot legalized, how would one morally justify using alcohol -- which in my observational experience tends to make people a lot more obnoxious than pot -- but not pot?
In a combox thread below, a regular commentator wrote, of religious believers:
Seriously: the embrace of irrationality is a slippery slope. Once you stop requiring some sort of reasons for what you believe, then where are you? I'd suggest you're in the fun-house of distorting mirrors, a place that's far from fun if you're not just visiting for kicks but plan on living there.
You've asked me recently what sort of response I'd like, as a freethinking rationalist visiting this mostly Catholic/Orthodox site, from you and/or your readers.
I guess I just want to convey that life outside the funhouse of irrational "belief" is not only possible, but not necessarily despairing or perverse or empty.
You keep inviting people inside the house of mirrors: I think it's only fair that I invite them, and you, to come out into the open air. That's what Plato did in the parable of the cave, after all.
It's not so bad out here. Kurt Vonnegut's over there, sitting in the grass with his shoes off, smoking a cigarette. Birds chirp. It's the first day of spring.
..."Belief" in ghosts and the supernatural claims of religion prepares the mind for accepting all sorts of hogwash not backed up by evidence: "We know they have weapons of mass destruction--we know where they are," etc. That's one reason Bush was overwhelmingly the choice of religious, especially fundamentalist, Americans.
We're having a robust discussion on that thread on the relationship between religious faith and intelligence. My view is that the "rationalist" view taken by the commentator is self-congratulatory, and even hubristic: history has examples of self-identified rationalists who testify to all sorts of irrational humbug (I don't believe there were many religious believers among the acolytes of communism), and many of the wisest men and women who were religious believers. Clearly, if religious belief marks one as a boob, dupe or poltroon, we're going to have to re-examine our esteem for Solzhenitsyn, for Walker Percy, for Flannery O'Connor, for John Paul II, and so on. Along those lines, here's a National Geographic interview with Francis Collins, the scientist who heads the Human Genome Project. Excerpt:
Horgan: What do you think about the field of neurotheology, which attempts to identify the neural basis of religious experiences? Collins: I think it's fascinating but not particularly surprising. We humans are flesh and blood. So it wouldn't trouble me—if I were to have some mystical experience myself—to discover that my temporal lobe was lit up. That doesn't mean that this doesn't have genuine spiritual significance. Those who come at this issue with the presumption that there is nothing outside the natural world will look at this data and say, "Ya see?" Whereas those who come with the presumption that we are spiritual creatures will go, "Cool! There is a natural correlate to this mystical experience! How about that!"
I'm working on a column revisiting Samuel Huntington's 1993 book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" -- this inspired by David Frum's gloomy (and correct) claim that Huntington is a winner of the Iraq War. (By which he meant Huntington's vision of intractable conflict, versus the sunny neocon view that once the dictator was removed, Iraq would be on track for a healthy liberal democracy). Re-reading the book, it's striking to me how widely misinterpreted Huntington's thesis was. People seem to think it provides theoretical justification for making war on Islamic civilization. Quite the contrary: Huntington identifies nine distinct civilizations (Western, Sinic [Chinese], Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American, African and Buddhist), and says each has its own core values. Westerners are prone to mistake their own civilization's core values as universal, which will get them into all kinds of trouble in this emerging post-Cold War order, Huntington warned. His book can (should) be read as a warning to the West not to forget that the rest of the world is not like us, and doesn't necessarily want to be like us. Modernization does not necessarily bring with it Westernization. We forget that at our peril. If we want to avoid needlessly provoking wars and conflicts with other civilizations, we have to keep squarely in front of us that culture determines politics and everything else, and not assume that Western values are universal.
You can see why Frum, who supported the Iraq War, looks at the Iraq mess and concludes that Huntington has been vindicated.
Though Huntington's book does not focus on Islamic civilization, I was particularly struck by his analysis of the challenges it poses to the West in the post-Cold War environment (remember, this book was published in 1996). He makes these points, among others (emphases mine):
1. "Wherever one looks along the permieter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. ...Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming. ...Islam's borders are bloody, and so are its innards."
2. "A third possible sources of Muslim-non-Muslim conflict involves what one statesman, in reference to his own country, termed the 'indigestibility' of Muslims. Indigestibility, however, works both ways: Muslims countries have problems with non-Muslim minorities comparable to those which non-Muslim countries have with Mulsim minorities. Even more than Christianity, Islam is an absolutist faith. It merges religion and politics and draws a sharp line between those in the Dar al-Islam [house of Islam] and the Dar al-harb [house of War]. As a result, Confucians, Buddhists, Hindus, Western Christians, and Orthodox Christians have less difficulty adapting to and living with each other than any one of them has in adapting to and living with Muslims."
3. "American leaders allege that the Musliims involved in the quasi war [what we'd now call the terror war on the West] are a small minority whose use of violence is rejected by the great majority of moderate Muslims. This may be true, but evidence to support it is lacking. Protests against anti-Western violence have been totally absent in Muslim countries. Muslim governments, even the bunker governments friendly to and dependent on the West, have been strikingly reticent when it comes to condemning terrorist acts against the West. ...
"The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civiliz
ation whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basis ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West."
4. "Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. ...Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice."
It's this sort of analysis that causes me to deeply worry for the future of Europe, which has so many Muslim immigrants. Notice Huntington understands that Western culture is fundamentally incompatible with Islamic culture, and vice versa. You don't get rid of 1,400 years of cultural orientation against the West overnight -- just as you don't get rid of a culture fundamentally antagonistic to Islamic values overnight (especially if that culture is your own, and native to your land). I'd like to know why we don't see the kind of conflicts between Muslims living in America and the American mainstream that we do in Europe. Is it a matter of numbers? Anyway, is it not clear that the extent to which Muslims are capable of living smoothly in the West, not just tolerating the different culture but embracing it, is the extent to which they abandon the historical Islamic cultural foundation, and replace it with a Western orientation, even though they might be Islamic on the outside? That is, they accept that Islam and Muslims are part of a pluralistic secular society -- which would kick out two major foundational concepts in Islam (e.g., the idea that religion is not to be separate from politics, and the idea that Muslims are to rule over non-Muslims).
What am I not seeing here?
Observing the 14 centuries of hostility between Islam and the West, and the facts showing a disproportionate amount of violent conflict between contemporary Muslims and members of other civilizations, what is the rational conclusion to draw about the wisdom of Islamic immigration into the West at the current historical moment?
I do believe that one reason so many Westerners have trouble even considering the possibility of the incompatibility of Islam with the West is because it denies the universality of Western values. N.B., I don't think Huntington is a relativist in the sense that he believes one set of values is as good as another. I certainly don't believe that. What he's trying to say is that we in the West wrongly assume that others share our values, because the way we Westerners see the world is the default position for humanity.
The shape of a building, a courtyard, or a street does not mechanically determine what happens there—right form only makes certain patterns of activity possible. It is perfectly possible to be nihilistic and bored in Prague or Paris, and perhaps even in Venice. Liturgy is not imposed.
But it can be denied altogether. Wrong spatial configurations can and often do make impossible, for example, the mingling of children and adults throughout the city, including in places of work; it can force women into the cruel position of having to choose either to be isolated housewives or to be full-time professionals far from both home and children.
As William Cavanaugh points out in his Torture and Eucharist, there is no dividing line between the politics of the body and the well-being of the soul. The health of both requires a rejection of self-enclosure. In the liturgical city, time present is permeable to the past and the future, and every particular space is complexly permeable with what surrounds it. The liturgical city is a city of Eros.
In America, a good city, like good bread, is considered a luxury whose enjoyment is a necessity only for the virtuous, in other words, for the wealthy. It is not considered necessary for the poor to be allowed to be human.
In the liturgical city, by contrast, the spiritually rejuvenating patterns—architectural beauty, running water, small shops and tall Cathedrals, enduring human relationships, diverse streets to walk on—are a free resource and are open to all.
From Stuart Buck's blog comes this incredible story of a black educator from the early 20th century, who was miraculously delivered from a lynching in the South. The rope was around his neck, and he was told to say a few words before he died. And when he finished speaking, he was set free. You've got to read this. You've got to.
OK, this is scary. I have no idea whether or not any of this is true, but based on my own experience, I definitely agree with this:
"So at that moment, my belief system absolutely crashed," he said. "You can't understand what that's like. If you're a nonbeliever, and all of a sudden this thing is put in front of you, your whole idea is changed."
In today's Los Angeles Times, I review the new book "The Vatican's Exorcists," by Tracy Wilkinson, finding it frustratingly even-handed. Excerpt:
You step out of the book feeling as if you've read a newspaper series in which the reporter has dutifully and professionally touched the bases, but only that. The profound questions the book's subject matter raises about the nature of evil and the mysteries of mind and spirit, as well as the more mundane but still intriguing world of ecclesial politics, are left tantalizingly under-explored.
Maybe it's because I've been in similar situations as a journalist, but I kept wanting Wilkinson to drop the disinterested observer mask and tell us what she thought of the strange things she was seeing and hearing, in person (Wilkinson is present at an exorcism) and from the priests, sufferers and others to whom she speaks. It would have been interesting to have learned how she personally came to terms with what she was learning.
Despite its shortcomings, "The Vatican's Exorcists" is a useful, readable and serious-minded overview of a complex and controversial subject. One appreciates the attention that a journalist of Wilkinson's stature devotes to an ancient phenomenon that is far more important to the lives and experiences of ordinary Christians worldwide than the scoffers in newsrooms, on faculties and even chanceries care to recognize.
She could have turned away from this story either in fear or in mockery — I have seen journalists do both — but did not. Good for her for taking exorcism seriously. Too bad she didn't take it further.
Rolling Stone magazine put together an all-star intelligence panel (Zbigniew Brzezenzki, Richard Clarke, Michael Scheuer, Nir Rosen and others) to figure out what would be the Best Case Scenario in Iraq, the Worst Case Scenario, and What's Likely to Happen. Read the results here. Here's Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's bin Laden desk, on the best case:
No matter what happens now, the Islamists will have beaten both of the superpowers -- first the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and now the United States in the heart of Islam. The impact of that in Islamic civilization is going to be enormous. We have made bin Laden a prophet: His organizing concept for Al Qaeda was "The Russians are a lot tougher than the Americans. If we can beat the Russians, then we can eventually beat the Americans." Even more important, Al Qaeda will have contiguous territory on the Arab peninsula to attack from.
Here's Gen. Tony McPeak (ret.), former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Most Likely scenario:
We're going to see a full-scale intercommunal war that may not burn out until one side is all dead, all gone. The Kurds would like to sit on the sidelines, but I don't see how they stay out, especially up in the Kirkuk area, where they sit on a lot of oil. This is going to be ethnic cleansing like we had in Kosovo or Bosnia -- but written big, in capital letters. And we can't stop it.
Here's Nir Rosen on the worst-case scenario:
Iraq will be the battleground where the Sunni-Shia conflict will be fought, but it won't be limited to Iraq. It will spread. Pandora's box is open. We didn't just open it, we opened it and threw fuel into it and threw matches into it. You'll soon see Sunni militias destabilizing countries like Jordan and Syria -- where the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood is very strong. It took about ten years for the Palestinians to become politicized and militarized when they were first expelled from Palestine. You're likely to see something like that occurring in the huge Iraqi refugee populations in Syria and Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan is resented for being an American stooge and an accomplice with Israel. I'm convinced that the monarchy in Jordan will fall as a result of this, and Israel will be confronted with a frontline state on its longest border with an Arab country.
You're going to see borders changing, governments falling. Lebanon is already on the precipice. Throughout the region, government officials are terrified. Nobody knows how to stop it. This is World War III. How far will it spread? Anywhere there are Islamic movements, like in Somalia, in Sudan, in Yemen. Pakistan has always had Sunni-Shia fighting. The flow of Iraqi refugees will at some point affect Europe.
How bad do you think it will be? Pessimist that I am, I think it's going to be massive regional warfare, which will inflame the Islamic populations of Europe, causing violence and civil unrest in European capitals. How it ends, I have no idea.
But I will say this: I think come late 2008, we're all going to be pining for a time when we had the luxury to take into consideration a presidential candidate's stand on abortion.
Before you buy the idea that the West needs to ban all Muslim immigration please keep in mind that my parents (hard-working, bright, thoughtful people) are Muslims and that I (a decent guy if I must say so myself, and right-of-center) am an American-born secular Muslim myself. The guys you're reading on the "Muslim menace" have a lot to learn from Reuel Gerecht. The Moroccan kids in Holland you're talking about don't come from crime-plagued societies. Muslim immigrants in America thrive.In Britain they wind up in jail. You think this is a coincidence?
I appreciate the reader's point, and how it complicates my own ability to think clearly about the whole terrorism/crime/immigration issue with regard to Muslims in the West. It's hard to generalize, and as soon as I post something generalizing, I'm often reminded at once of this guy, and other Muslims I know who I would in no way want to keep out of this country. I do think that Europe faces a much different situation than we do with regard to Islamic immigration, for reasons that probably have a lot to do not only with the relatively rigid nature of European societies, but also with where the Islamic immigrants are coming from.
For example, a Dutch criminologist pointed out to me that the Muslim immigrants causing so much of the crime in Holland are heavily drawn from the Moroccan community. And that they come from a rural, mountainous region of Morocco -- Morocco's hillbillies, you might say. They are thrown from a primitive, Third World rural environment into a First World city, and are completely dislocated. Religious extremism provides a way for them to establish identity, and to act out their fears and hostility. Holland's extremely liberal and patronizing way of dealing with its immigrant population -- give them anything they ask for, don't pressure them to assimilate -- has only helped them to further self-ghettoize and refuse assimilation.
The point here is that the situation can be a lot more complicated than simply saying, "It's Islam's fault." And if you make a blanket indictment of Islam itself, as my friend points out, you risk marginalizing good people, solid citizens. But on the other hand, when you look at poll data of British Muslims, for example, you find shocking levels of support for Islamic law (versus British civil law). Whatever the root causes of this state of affairs, it's frightening.
I am reminded by all this of how little, really, we know about the Muslims who live in the West. Or at least in America. I know the kinds of Muslims I've interacted with professionally here in Dallas, and it's not encouraging to me as someone who would welcome truly moderate Muslims here. On the other hand, I've been told by Muslims and non-Muslims, people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, that the leadership in mosques and Islamic institutions in the US has been bought by Saudis, and that ordinary Muslims don't dare object. Here's an excerpt from a 2003 National Review piece I did about fear and mistrust between Muslims and non-Muslims in my Brooklyn neighborhood:
If it's too dangerous for Arab Christians to speak out against Islamist neighbors, what is it like for dissenting Muslims? A senior terrorism analyst with The Investigative Project, which specializes in monitoring Islamic radicalism, insists that Muslims of goodwill believe, with reason, that standing up to Islamist thugs will get them killed. "Fundamentalists are the ones who have the drive. For non- fundamentalists, speaking out against them is not worth their life," explains TIP's Evan Kohlmann.
Kohlmann says that Islamic radicals get away with their activities both by stifling dissent within Muslim communities
and by "turning any criticism into a civil-rights and a humanitarian issue. They know that by appealing to our sense of diversity and humanity, they evade scrutiny." Indeed, many non-Muslims in the liberal neighborhoods flanking the al-Farooq mosque would consider it racist and McCarthyite to question the loyalty of their Muslim neighbors.
Mansoor Ijaz, an American-born, New York-based consultant of Pakistani descent, says that most Muslims in America want nothing to do with Islamic radicalism. Those Muslim communities most open to radical appeals are like Brooklyn's: filled with God-fearing, working-class immigrants struggling to make it in a strange land where they don't speak the language, and who feel they are discriminated against. They get angry, and are easily manipulated by the radicals who run some of these mosques.
"We shouldn't blame the immigrants. They're basically shut inside a room where all the walls are caving in on them at the same time," Ijaz says. "The real disease exists in those people that run these mosques and religious institutions."
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't know where to take a hard stand on this issue. If all Muslims living in the West were like my friend and his folks -- or, for that matter, like the friendly Muslim shopkeepers I came to know and care for when I lived in Brooklyn -- I'd know exactly where to stand. If they were all like the loudmouth Euro-jihadis and smooth-talking U.S. Muslim Brotherhood backers, I'd know exactly where to stand. Fortunately America is not Europe, so I'm not faced with the kinds of choices Europeans are. But that's evading the issue, isn't it? Anyway, I think many of us have made our minds up that the Muslims among us are All Good, and that anyone who doubts that must be a racist, or that the Muslims among us are All Bad, and that anyone who doubts that must be a dupe. Demonstrably, neither is true.
But what is true? Thoughts?
UPDATE: A reader posts in the comboxes a link to a story that quotes Pope Benedict XVI (back when he was merely a cardinal) saying:
...the Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present [in society] just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, [Islam] would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.
This is my understanding of Islam. What particularly concerns me is that the degree to which Muslims are adapted to living and accepting Western liberal democracy and pluralism correlates with the degree to which they are alienated from normative Islam.
No matter what you think of the Iraq War, you really owe it to yourself to read George Packer's long report on how this nation has treated the Iraqis who risked everything to help us succeed there. It'll rip your heart out, learning the stories of Iraqi men whose potentially fatal error was believing in the United States. The question now is: Will the U.S. make provision to evacuate these people and their families, all of whom will surely be slaughtered as collaborators when the US eventually leaves (and even, as the story makes clear, before that). Excerpt:
I was granted an interview with two [American embassy] officials, who refused to be named. One of them consulted talking points that catalogued what the Embassy had done for Iraqi employees: a Thanksgiving dinner, a recent thirty-five-per-cent salary increase. Housing in the Green Zone could be made available for a week at a time in critical cases, I was told, though most Iraqis didn’t want to be apart from their families. When I asked about contingency plans for evacuation, the second official refused to discuss it on security grounds, but he said, “If we reach that point and have people in danger, the Ambassador would go to the Secretary of State and ask that they be evacuated, and I think they would do it.” The department was reviewing the possibility of issuing special immigrant visas.
To receive this briefing, I had passed through three security doors into the Embassy’s classified section, where there were no Iraqis and no natural light; it seemed as if every molecule of Baghdad air had been sealed off behind the last security door. The Embassy officials struck me as decent, overworked people, yet I left the interview with a feeling of shame. The problem lay not with the individuals but with the institution and, beyond that, with the politics of the American project in Iraq, which from the beginning has been conducted under the illusion that controlling the message mattered more than the reality. A former official at the Embassy told me, “When we say that the corridors of power are insulated, is it that the officials aren’t receiving the information, or is it because the construct under which they’re operating doesn’t even allow them to absorb it?” To admit that Iraqis who work with Americans need to be evacuated would blow a hole in the Administration’s version of the war.
Several days after the interview at the Embassy, I had a more frank conversation with an official there. “I don’t know if it’s fair to say, ‘You work at an embassy of a foreign country, so that country has to evacuate you,’ ” he said. “Do the Australians have a plan? Do the Romanians? The Turks? The British?” He added, “If I worked at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, would the Hungarians evacuate me from the United States?”
When I mentioned these remarks to Othman, he asked, “Would the Americans behead an American working at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington?”
Packer explains why what we did for (far too few) South Vietnamese who helped us as we departed is not likely to happen in the case of Iraq. From that passage:
Richard Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell during the first years of the Iraq war, served as a naval officer in Vietnam. In the last days of that war, he returned as a civilian, on a mission to destroy military assets before they fell into North Vietnamese hands. He arrived too late, and instead turned his energy to the evacuation of South Vietnamese sailors and their families. Armitage led a convoy of barely seaworthy boats, carrying twenty thousand people, a thousand miles across the South China Sea to Manila—the first stop on their journey to the United States.
When I met Armitage recently, at his office in Arlington, Virginia, he was not confident th
at Iraqis would be similarly resettled. “I guarantee you no one’s thinking about it now, because it’s so fatalistic and you’d be considered sort of a traitor to the President’s policy,” he said. “I don’t see us taking them in this time, because, notwithstanding what we may owe people, you’re not going to bring in large numbers of Arabs to the United States, given the fact that for the last six years the President has scared the pants off the American public with fears of Islamic terrorism.”
Even at this stage of the war, Armitage said, officials at the White House retain an “agnosticism about the size of the problem.” He added, “The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful.”
Despite my fear of Islamist terrorism, I strongly believe the US has a moral obligation to resettle these poor souls here.
The other day I mentioned in a blog a recent line by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which she said the failure of European liberals to stand up to criminal and fascistic behavior by Muslims living in Europe only serves to enable the future coming to power of real Eurofascists, who certainly will stand up to it, and then some. Here is something really troubling posted by the blogger Fjordman on Brussels Journal, and sent in by a reader. In the lengthy essay, Fjordman -- who is not a Eurofascist -- discusses the intolerable situation members of the European public find themselves in, vis-a-vis Islamic immigration and crime, and the fact (says Fjordman) that Europeans are persecuted by their own governing and media elites if they dare to raise their voices against the situation, and the civilization-killing scheme that is multiculturalism.
In 2002, after the assassination of Pim Fortuyn (a free-market social liberal and open homosexual who was denounced in the Dutch media as a neofascist simply because he had the nerve to say that Holland's high rate of immigration from Islamic countries threatened Dutch civil liberties), I traveled to Holland and wrote about the situation there. Here's a key passage from my story:
Immigrants, who have a high unemployment rate, are another irritant. Eight percent of Holland's 16 million people are of foreign descent, with more than half of them Muslims, mostly from Turkey and Morocco. Holland's four largest cities — Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht — are home to the majority of immigrants. Almost half the population of Rotterdam, where Fortuyn launched his political career, is of foreign descent.
This has had unfortunate consequences. Earlier this month, the trade association representing Holland's supermarkets announced that it would be shutting down stores in the immigrant-heavy inner cities unless the government got serious about policing the areas. That's because young immigrant men from these neighborhoods are disproportionately represented in Dutch crime statistics. According to criminologist Chris Rutenfrans, a study in 2000 found that 33 percent of all criminal suspects are foreign-born, as are 55 percent of prison inmates. An astonishing 63 percent of those convicted of homicide are immigrants — Moroccans, Antilleans, and sub-Saharan Africans are the chief culprits. "The reason always given to explain these statistics is that they live in deprived circumstances," says Rutenfrans. "But other minorities are similarly deprived, and they aren't criminals."
Some Muslims bring with them a culture of religious extremism, encouraged in part by religious schools — at least one-third of which are funded by the Saudis, according to a government report. The report also revealed that 20 percent of Holland's Islamic schools receive funding from the radical Islamic organization Al-Waqf al-Islami, or have radical Muslims on their boards. The government warned that the country's Islamic schools showed very little commitment to preparing their students for integration into Dutch society.
More troubling, the government intelligence service warned as long as a decade ago that the Netherlands was becoming a center of Islamic terrorist recruitment and operations. Since September 11, terrorism experts have warned that violent Islamic extremists are conducting operations in Holland, in part because the country's deeply ingrained taboo against intolerance gives them relative freedom from scrutiny.
Fjordman proposes the following. I'm betting that if some version of this isn't instituted by the mainstream parties of the left and right in Europe, we will see a far more severe program implemented with the support of fed-up electoral majorities who can see exactly where their elite
s are leading their nations.
A European Declaration of Independence
We, the citizens of the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary, (fill in the blanks) demand that the following steps are taken immediately:
We demand that our national governments should immediately and without delay pull their countries out of the European Union, which should be dismantled entirely. European citizens pay up to half of their salaries in direct or indirect taxes to their nation states. If these nations do not control their own borders nor their policies, and they don't as long as the EU exists, those taxes are a scam. National taxes require national borders. If our national borders are not enforced, we have no obligation whatsoever to pay national taxes.
We demand that all documents regarding the Euro-Arab Dialogue and the creation of the Eurabian networks for "Euro-Mediterranean cooperation" between European countries and Arab countries since the 1970s, as documented by Bat Ye'or's work on Eurabia, are published and explained in their full significance to the general public. Those chiefly responsible for this - one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization - should stand trial, followed by a period of general de-Eurabification of our laws and regulations.
We demand that all financial support to the Palestinian Authority should cease immediately. It is proven beyond any doubt that this has in the past been used to finance campaigns of Jihad terrorism against Jews in Israel and against Christians in territories under PA control. A public statement in support of Israel against Muslim aggression should be issued, and the money that has previously been awarded to Palestinians should be allocated partly to Israel's defense, partly to establish a Global Infidel Defense Fund with the stated goal of disseminating information about Muslim persecution of non-Muslims worldwide.
We demand that the ideology of Multiculturalism should immediately be removed from all government policies and school curricula, and that the state should adopt a policy of supporting the continuation of the cultural heritage and traditions of the indigenous populations. Multiculturalism has never been about tolerance. It is an anti-Western hate ideology championed as an instrument for unilaterally dismantling European culture. As such, it is an evil ideology bent on an entire culture's eradication, and we, the peoples of Europe, have not just a right, but a duty to resist it and an obligation to pass on our heritage to future generations.
We demand that all Muslim immigration in whatever form should be immediately and completely halted, and that our authorities take a long break from mass immigration in general until such a time when law and order has been reestablished in our major cities. We will not accept any accusations of "racism." Many European nations have for decades accepted more immigration into our countries in a shorter period of time than any other people has done peacefully in human history. We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of being mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed and even killed by violent gangs of Muslim thugs, yet being accused of "racism and xenophobia" by our media and intimidated by our own authorities to accept even more such immigration.
Europe is being targeted for deliberate colonization by Muslim states, and with coordinated efforts aimed at our Islamization and the elimination of our freedoms. We are being subject to a foreign invasion, and aiding and abetting a foreign invasion in any way constitutes treason. If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization and desire self-determination then Europeans have that right, too. And we intend to exercise it.
If these demands are not fully implemented, if the European Union isn't dismantled, Multiculturalism isn't rejected and Muslim immigration isn't stopped, we, the peoples o
f Europe, are left with no other choice than to conclude that our authorities have abandoned us, and that the taxes they collect are therefore unjust and that the laws that are passed without our consent are illegitimate. We will stop paying taxes and take the appropriate measures to protect our own security and ensure our national survival.
More interesting stuff from Sam Tanenhaus, about his WFB piece. Here's Tanenhaus explaining why he thinks Bill Buckley is a lot more critical of Bush and the GOP than National Review, or the more established conservative journals:
Well some of it has to do with the position Buckley now occupies in American cultural, intellectual, and political life in general, and also within the conservative movement. Buckley has a long career of loyalty, even fealty, to the conservative cause, which has often been the conservative, Republican cause. But now he does not have that attachment, to the party, to the Bush administration in particular, and to the people surrounding it, so he looks at it with more detachment. Whereas I think much of the conservative movement--including a fair number of contributors and editors at National Review, the publication Buckley formed in 1955--are still closely allied with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. So for them, any alternative is worse, the most important thing is for Bush to succeed, for the policy to succeed, for the movement to succeed. The irony is that the Iraq expedition, or adventure as Buckley sometimes calls it, has actually undermined the movement. That has weakened it politically and as a kind of cultural force. So Buckley, viewing all of this with detachment, sees the danger, the real peril--and in the piece I say he is very clear about this being the Republican version of Vietnam. Buckley was on the scene watching closely when the Vietnam war unraveled. When the liberal consensus that dominated politics then unraveled, he was the leader of the movement that led conservatism into the center, and now he sees the opposite happening. And because he has no particular allegiance to anyone in office or in power now he can say this more directly than others do.
And then there's this final exchange between the interviewer and Tanenhaus:
This is my last question for you. Do you think or do you know if Buckley thinks that the sort of disaster for the Republicans in the 2006 elections and their involvement in Iraq, presents an opportunity for conservatism to actually gain some of the intellectual vigor that it was seen as having 20 years ago or even 40 years ago when it was more in the wilderness?
Buckley was able to build this movement because he was an optimist. Interesting because conservatism, at least sociologically, is pessimistic. So yes, he looks ahead. And this seems, to him, to be the sort of moment for conservatism to regroup, ideologically. He said very clearly, he said it in a television interview, that George Bush will have no ideological legacy. He said "There will be no legacy from Mr. Bush." So it's just wiping the slate clean, and it's a matter of course of political figures and thinkers coming forward who can articulate a compelling and new-sounding conservative ideology. There's not another Bill Buckley on the scene right now to do that, so I have no idea who it's going to be.
Anybody care to speculate on what qualities a "new, and doubtless quite different, Bill Buckley" would require? What would his vision be, and what qualities would he need to shepherd that vision into reality? It's pretty clear that the old Reaganite tropes are played out, that we need a new articulation of conservative principles. What form would a new and vigorous conservatism -- one that could actually win elections, that is -- take? I'll post my thoughts later -- as Ian Shoales used to say, I gotta go.
From a couple of years ago, here's the Catholic philosopher's explanation for why he was planning to sit out the 2004 election. Worth thinking about as we prepare for 2008. Excerpt:
But the only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target.
Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.
The basic economic injustice of our society is that the costs of economic growth are generally borne by those least able to afford them and that the majority of the benefits of economic growth go to those who need them least. Compare the rise in wages of ordinary working people over the last thirty years to the rise in the incomes and wealth of the top twenty percent. Compare the value of minimum wage now to its value then and next compare the value of the remuneration of CEOs to its value then. What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.
We note at this point that we have already broken with both parties and both candidates. Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try to advance the case for economic justice as we have described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court. Above all, insist, as we are doing, that these two cases are inseparable, that each requires the other as its complement, and you will be met with blank incomprehension. For the recognition of this is precluded by the ideological assumptions in terms of which the political alternatives are framed. Yet at the same time neither party is wholeheartedly committed to the cause of which it is the ostensible defender. Republicans happily endorse pro-choice candidates, when it is to their advantage to do so. Democrats draw back from the demands of economic justice with alacrity, when it is to their advantage to do so. And in both cases rhetorical exaggeration disguises what is lacking in political commitment.
In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote case for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.
CBS News reporting just now that the president is going to fire Alberto Gonzales in an attempt to stanch the bleeding from the US Attorney firing scandal.
One more reason why The American Conservative is becoming such a hot read: Michael Brendan Dougherty's critical analysis of the cult of 24's Jack Bauer on the Right, and how it undermines the public's moral sense. Excerpt:
Agent Jack Bauer has tortured his own brother, used household appliances to electrocute a terror suspect, staged the execution of a child, and even shot a man’s wife to get information from him. On any given day, he will disarm suitcase nukes and presidential assassins. The orders of superior officers at the Counter Terrorist Unit don’t deter him, the rule of law and even the threat of death do not diminish Bauer’s iron will to defend America. [snip] The frequent recourse to torture has attracted the attention of both the military and veteran interrogators in the FBI. As reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, several experts advised 24’s creative team about techniques that are more effective than torture at obtaining information. Army Brigadier Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, let producers and writers know that the show exerted a strong and noxious influence over his students. The newest recruits have been watching Jack Bauer since they were 14. The general told Mayer, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.” One former Army interrogator related how soldiers in Iraq watch DVDs of the show and then try to imitate Bauer’s interrogation methods on their own prisoners. [snip] The devotion to 24 and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, 24 is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.
I think there's an analogue between Jack Bauer and Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry -- the cop who was willing to do whatever it took to subdue the forces of criminal anarchy at a time when the institutions fail to protect the public. Dirty Harry became a popular icon at a time when the public -- at least the conservative member of the public -- were sick and tired of out-of-control crime, and pusillanimous public officials' inability to deal with it.
One can certainly understand the attraction of a Bauer figure in these times, just as Dirty Harry was completely understandable as an expression of the popular anxiety of the 1970s. But as Dougherty points out with reference to Bauer, it's a dangerous temptation for conservatives to accept and esteem a fantasy figure who breaks the law -- especially the moral law (e.g., torture) -- in the service of his mission. And conservatives are very quick (and quite accurate) to argue, when it comes to sexuality, that the content of popular culture has real-world consequences by making acceptable previously taboo ideas. As the Jane Mayer piece cited by Dougherty pointed out, "24"'s valorization of torture is having an impact. Here's Mayer:
Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, “I tried to impress on them that this t
echnique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”
Liberals who sneer at conservative complaints about the deleterious social effects of film, television and music would do well to consider this point about "24" and torture. In her New Yorker report, Mayer continues:
Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, “the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes.” The Parents’ Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of “24”—more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council’s senior director of programs, said, “ ‘24’ is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture.”
The show’s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law.
The show's lead writer describes to Mayer what he does as "improvisations in sadism."
Improvisations in sadism -- and he's not bothered by this. This cannot be a matter of moral indifference to conservatives. Cheers to Dougherty and TAC for having the stones to write and publish this essay.
Christians in America are tempted to think of issues like abortion primarily in legal terms such as "rights." This is because the legal mode, as de Tocqueville pointed out long ago, provides the constituting morality in liberal societies. In other words, when you live in a liberal society like ours, the fundamental problem is how you can achieve cooperative agreements between individuals who share nothing in common other than their fear of death. In liberal society the law has the function of securing such agreements. That is the reason why lawyers are to America what priests were to the medieval world. The law is our way of negotiating safe agreements between autonomous individuals who have nothing else in common other than their fear of death and their mutual desire for protection.
Therefore, rights language is fundamental in our political and moral context. In America, we oftentimes pride ourselves, as Americans, on being a pragmatic people that is not ideological. But that is absolutely false. No country has ever been more theory dependent on a public philosophy than America.
Indeed I want to argue that America is the only country that has the misfortune of being founded on a philosophical mistake--namely, the notion of inalienable rights. We Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about what it means to be a creature. Notice that the issue is inalienable rights. Rights make a certain sense as correlative to duties and goods, but they are not inalienable. For example, when the lords protested against the king in the Magna Charta, they did so in the name of their duties to their underlings. Duties, not rights, were primary. The rights were simply ways of remembering what the duties were.
Christians, to be more specific, do not believe that we have a right to do with our bodies whatever we want. We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is that we should, and should not, do with our bodies. I had a colleague at the University of Notre Dame who taught Judaica. He was Jewish and always said that any religion that does not tell you what to do with your genitals and pots and pans cannot be interesting. That is exactly true. In the church we tell you what you can and cannot do with your genitals. They are not your own. They are not private. That means that you cannot commit adultery. If you do, you are no longer a member of "us." Of course pots and pans are equally important.
...Under the veil of American privatization, we are encouraging people to believe in the same way that Andrew Carnegie believed. He thought that he had a right to his steel mills. In the same sense, people think that they have a right to their bodies The body is then a piece of property in a capitalist sense. Unfortunately, that is antithetical to the way we Christians think that we have to share as members of the same body of Christ.
So, you cannot separate these issues. If you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake. So the problem is: how, as Christians, should we think about abortion without the rights rhetoric that we have been given--right to my body, right to life, pro-choice, pro-life, and so on? In this respect, we C
hristians must try to make the abortion issue our issue.
You can take Prof. Hauerwas's point about the privatization of life in America and apply it to the way we Americans think about all kinds of things.
Powerful prophetic witness from the OCA's Archbishop Job of Chicago, and Father John Reeves of Pennsylvania! In all human enterprises, only God knows how much wrongdoing and suffering might have been avoided if only good men had chosen to speak up instead of remaining silent "for the good of [the Church, the company, the institution...]."
Archbishop Job and Fr. Reeves chose the road rarely taken -- and they have apparently made a big difference.
Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: “This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.” A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue.
“The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief,” she said.
Garbage. Vile, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew hatred is rife throughout the Arab world. We have to talk about it (read Ruth Gledhill's commentary, in which she summarizes a paper he gave on the subject at Yale last year.) Once again, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's charge of left-liberal cowardice in the face of Islamism is vindicated. Hirsi Ali said the other day that by refusing to stand up to this Islamofascism now, European leftists are paving the way for the coming of a new Euro-fascism, which will stand up to its Islamic iteration. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a mainstream British commentator, wrote in Slate at the time Muslims were rioting over the Muhammad cartoons:
There can be no separation of church and state for Muslims, because Islam has never accepted "render unto Caesar," [British Islamist leader] Choudary said. It is a religion that is not confined to the mosque but that informs every aspect of social and political life at all times. Censoring transgressive cartoons and books is only a beginning. Sharia law must rule everywhere; the black flag of Islam must fly over Downing Street.
As a severe critic of the Blair regime, even I don't think that would be an improvement. And that's why the most depressing thing I have seen or heard this past week (which is saying something) was from someone who suggested that there was a fundamental incompatibility between Islam "and our democratic secular values." If that's a view that, as I have more than hinted here, I am close to sharing, why was it so depressing? Because the speaker was a leader of the brutal white-supremacist British National Party.
Leave aside the impudent hypocrisy of a bigot and racist invoking secular democracy, something has gone badly wrong when fascists speak for bemused skeptics. Recently, it has been quite easy to think that many Muslims are fanatics who don't understand our values. Looking back over the past week, it's hard to believe that this is entirely the fault of the liberal west.
The always-fascinating Asia Times Online columnist Spengler writes this week that the death of Christianity in Europe means the death of Europe. We'll get to that in a second, but I was taken (for obvious reasons) by this conclusion to his column -- which is particularly interesting given Spengler's deep admiration for Pope Benedict XVI:
To recapture Europe means re-creating the faith. It is hard to imagine that the Roman Catholic Church might re-emerge as Europe's defining institution. The European Church is enervated. But I do not think that is the end of the matter. As I argued last month, Russia has become the frontier between Europe and the Islamic world and, unlike Europe, is not prepared to dissolve quietly into the ummah. Pope Benedict's recent pilgrimage to Turkey, it must be remembered, only incidentally dealt with Catholic relations with Islam; first of all it was a gesture to Orthodoxy in the form of a visit to the former Byzantium, its spiritual home.
Franz Rosenzweig, that most Jewish connoisseur of Christianity, believed that the Church of Peter (Rome) and the Church of Paul (Protestantism) would yield place to the Church of John (Orthodoxy) - that the churches of works and faith would be transcended by the church of love. If Europe has a future, it lies in an ecumenical alliance of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and at least some elements of Anglicanism.
For the time being, Europe's constitution will be stillborn. But Europe is not yet dead. Russia is the place to watch, and the quiet conversation of Catholicism is the still, small voice to listen for.
That's how the column ends. I know Spengler checks in on this blog from time to time. I'd love to read him expand on this point. What did Rosenzweig mean by RCism and Protestantism yielding to Orthodoxy? That Orthodoxy would displace both in the West (because it's certainly not happening in the Global South, where Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism are going great guns)? If that's what he meant, then by what means did he foresee such a radical event taking place? In a reunified Christian church that has healed the Great Schism? From a sociological point of view, why would a population that had grown indifferent to Catholicism and Protestantism embrace Orthodoxy?
I'd like to go back to a couple of others statements Spengler made in the column:
Without the faith, Europe's civil society could not exist, and a challenger to the authority of faith, no matter how powerful, ultimately must fail. ...But the unifying concept of Christendom is what made it possible to create nations out of the detritus of Rome and the rabble of invading barbarians.
It sounds like Spengler here makes similar points to Alasdair MacIntyre's in "After Virtue": that Europe's (and MacIntyre would say our own) emotivist secular ethic, devoid of the absolute telos provided by shared belief in transcendent morality, has no power to bind or create social cohesion, and that a people alienated from the narrative that formed the precepts of their culture will necessarily dissolve as a people.
Sure, Garrison Keillor is a flawed spokesman for traditional marriage. But what about David Blankenhorn? Here's a USA Today profile of him. Excerpt:
David Blankenhorn may be best known as an advocate for the importance of fathers, but the 51-year-old think-tank founder and author is about to step onto the firing line with a much more controversial issue: gay marriage.
The Harvard-educated Mississippi native is a former VISTA volunteer and community organizer who has made a career of thinking about big issues and telling others what he believes. He's written scores of op-ed pieces and essays, co-edited eight books and written two: the 1995 Fatherless America, which attributes many of society's ills to the lack of involvement of fathers in children's lives, and now, The Future of Marriage. In it, he argues kids need both a mother and a father, and because same-sex marriage can't provide that, it's bad for society and kids.
"We're either going to go in the direction of viewing marriage as a purely private relationship between two people that's defined by those people, or we're going to try to strengthen and maintain marriage as our society's most pro-child institution," he says.
He may sound like a conservative Christian, but Blankenhorn says he's a liberal Democrat.
Watch some on the left describe Blankenhorn as a stalking horse for the troglodytic theocons because he doesn't toe the ideological line on this issue.
Anyway, I think Blankenhorn is right, and I wish him well. I'll probably end up writing a column on his book. The thing I want to talk to him about, though, is how you go about renewing respect among the general heterosexual population for the constraints that come with traditional marriage, especially when we live in a culture that constantly posits individual self-expression and self-fulfillment as the absolute telos of human existence?
Fascinating Sam Tanenhaus piece on how William F. Buckley is watching the movement he as much as anybody else built go to pieces over Iraq. Excerpt:
Beyond this, Buckley recognizes, as Bush's defenders have not, that the trouble originates with the Iraq war, not with its opponents. When I asked him recently if Iraq is the Republicans' Vietnam, he said, "Absolutely." It is a serious admission for one who knows that Vietnam destroyed cold war liberalism and, with it, the Democratic Party's control of national politics. Iraq now threatens the right and the GOP, Buckley says, with the "identical" fate. [Emphasis mine -- RD.] No wonder, then, that in a July interview with CBS News, he said that if Bush were the leader of a parliamentary government "it would be expected that he would retire or resign." He has been somewhat kinder to Dick Cheney, whom he characterized in an interview last year not as a liar but as a dupe, who had "believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction" and then thundered forth so confidently on it. If, by contrast, Cheney knowingly misrepresented the facts, Buckley has privately acknowledged, Bush would be a candidate for impeachment.
I suppose now we'll hear from those on the right who'll whisper that the old man is going senile.
Via Andrew Sullivan, word comes that Garrison Keillor is getting blistered for having made disparaging remarks about gay marriage. From Keillor's Salon.com column:
Monogamy put the parents in the background where they belong and we children were able to hold center stage. We didn't have to contend with troubled, angry parents demanding that life be richer and more rewarding for them. We blossomed and agonized and fussed over our outfits and learned how to go on a date and order pizza and do the twist and neck in the front seat of a car back before bucket seats when you could slide close together, and we started down the path toward begetting children while Mom and Dad stood like smiling, helpless mannequins in the background.
Nature is about continuation of the species -- in other words, children. Nature does not care about the emotional well-being of older people.
Under the old monogamous system, we didn't have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents -- Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck -- and need a program to keep track of the actors.
Keillor goes on to explicitly condemn, in that rumpled, avuncular way of his, gay marriage. Now, I would agree with Keillor about the social benefits of the traditional family. But as Dan Savage points out in a profane, completely over-the-top but still hard to dismiss rant, Keillor is hardly in a position to lecture others about the benefits of the traditional family:
Keillor has been married THREE TIMES. He has children from two of his marriages, children who presumably need a computer program to keep track of their step-siblings, half-siblings, and sprawling extended families, children that have to be “apportioned out on Thanksgiving and Christmas.” Okay, fine, whatever. Keillor can recognize marriage, life-long commitment, and less complicated family structures as the ideal, even if he himself has failed—failed spectacularly—to live up to that ideal himself. It might have been nice, however, if the withered old hypocrite had admitted to Salon readers that he has failed to live up to the ideals he’s espousing.
As Savage notes, Keillor made his second marriage by leaving his longtime partner to marry a Danish woman he met at a high school reunion, and then broke that marriage up by having an affair with his Danish language teacher. None of which obviates Keillor's point, which stands or falls on its merits, but it does bring to mind that heterosexuals in the last 50 years have made such a hash of traditional values when it comes to marriage and family that we lack credibility when it comes to instructing gays. I suspect that has something to do with the fact that among 18-to-25 year olds, there's a lot more acceptance of gay marriage.
That's what Giacomo Cardinal Biffi told Pope Benedict XVI in their recent Lenten retreat, according to a fascinating entry on Ruth Gledhill's blog (which is itself based on reporting from the Catholic news agency Zenit). Cdl. Biffi, who said in 2000 that he suspected the Antichrist was alive today, based his Lenten homily for the pope on the work of the Orthodox mystic Vladimir Soloviev (who was intensely interested in reuniting the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and converted to Catholicism four years before his death, though he insisted that he had not left Orthodoxy). Excerpt from Gledhill's blog:
Citing Soloviev’s final work, 'The Three Dialogues and the Story of the Antichrist', which he completed on Easter Sunday 1900, shortly before he died, Biffi said he was struck by how clearly Soloviev foresaw that the 20th century would be 'the epoch of great wars, civil strife and revolutions.' All this, he said, would prepare the way for the disappearance of 'the old structure of separate nations' and 'almost everywhere the remains of the ancient monarchical institutions would disappear.' This would pave the way for a 'United States of Europe'. Soloviev predicted that the Antichrist will be a 'convinced spiritualist', a philanthropist, a pacifist, a vegetarian and a determined defender of animal rights. He will not be hostile 'in principle' and will appreciate Christ’s teaching. But he will reject the teaching that Christ is unique, and will deny that Christ is risen and alive today.
How interesting that this is what's on the pope's mind these days.
Atty General Alberto Gonzales has employed the classic passive-voice description of a scandal. He's taken "responsibility" for the scandal, which is meaningless: "taking responsibility" is what modern politicians do to give the appearance of personal courage, but of course it never occurs to them that if they really took responsibility, they would resign, or impose some sort of cost; it's their way of making a scandal go away by offering the simulacrum of responsibility. And nobody ever calls them on it.
But look, you've got to see the entire quote to appreciate the crumminess of this guy's stance:
``I acknowledge that mistakes were made here,'' Gonzales said. ``I accept responsibility. I've overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney general. I am not here because I give up.''
What self-pitying rot. I cannot wait for Chuck Schumer to haul this guy, and Rove and Miers and the whole lot of them, up to Capitol Hill and roast them alive. The thing is, Harriet Miers is getting some grief for having suggested that the administration replace all US Attorneys at the beginning of the second Bush term. That might be a bad idea, but it's not at all unprecedented. Clinton did the same thing. The problem is that when they got around to trying to push out particular USAs, they got real political, and apparently dealt harshly with those they wanted to shove out because they wouldn't use their offices to help Republicans at election time. And get this -- the Senate Republican staffer who inserted the provision into the Patriot Act allowing the president to bypass the Senate in naming USAs was later named US Attorney for Utah!
The moral shabbiness of this administration is astonishing, even now. When the Republicans get obliterated in 2008, I hope they'll know why.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall's blog has a list of the false information the administration has provided to Congress about this mess.
NR's Rich Lowry tells a hard truth about "the governing principle of abortion politics in America: Almost no major politician really cares about it." In other words, they'll say what they need to say to get elected.
Theocon Cal Thomas, though, says that the fact that conservative Evangelical voters are not allowing the personal failings of the leading Republican candidates get in the way of considering them seriously shows "political maturity." Excerpt:
No politician can "fix" broken heterosexual marriages. If they could, some of those mentioned above would have fixed their own. The crumbling "traditional" family is the result of many social and cultural factors. The solution, like the fault, lies neither with government, nor with politicians.
While "character issues" can overlap with other concerns when considering for whom to vote, conservative evangelicals are beginning to see them as less important than who can meet the multiple challenges faced by the nation. Put it this way: if you are about to have major surgery and your only choice was a church-going doctor with a high mortality rate, or an agnostic with a high success record, which would it be? I'd choose the agnostic.
Thomas isn't specifically talking about abortion, but taken together, these columns do raise a question: if no major presidential politician takes abortion seriously, doesn't that mean pro-life voters are more free to consider a wider range of factors in considering who to vote for? Can pro-lifers justify voting for a candidate who might do something significant about stopping abortion, but who is in other ways incompetent or mistaken in the direction the country needs to go on Iraq, on foreign policy, on fiscal policy and other very serious areas? You know where I stand on this.
Here is a great example of why the First Amendment is so important:
After this April's implementation of the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SOR's), British religious schools may no longer be allowed to teach school children that the Christian viewpoint on sexual morality is "objectively true," a government report says.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights, made up of members from Parliament and the House of Lords, has issued a report on the implementation of the Regulations recommending that religious schools be required to modify their religious instruction to comply with the government-approved doctrine of "non-discrimination".
Although religious schools will be allowed to remain open and may continue to give instruction in various religious beliefs, instruction must be modified "so that homosexual pupils are not subjected to teaching, as part of the religious education or other curriculum, that their sexual orientation is sinful or morally wrong."
The report says the Regulations will not "prevent pupils from being taught as part of their religious education the fact that certain religions view homosexuality as sinful," but they may not teach "a particular religion's doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true".
Published February 26, the report says, "We do not consider that the right to freedom of conscience and religion requires the school curriculum to be exempted from the scope of the sexual orientation regulations."
Can you imagine the state telling private schools that they could not teach children that homosexuality is NOT sinful? That they were required by law to instruct the traditional Christian position on homosexuality, and were not free to tell the children that the Christian view is nonsense? That would be offensive. But this progressive intolerance and state coercion shows how far liberals are willing to go to extirpate liberty in the name of egalitarianism. I believe that if we didn't have a First Amendment in the United States, they'd be pushing for the same thing. In fact, they already have been, with the campaign for so-called "hate speech" laws, which the courts have struck down as unconstitutional.
A liberal named Benjamin Nugent has written a pretty interesting piece wondering why Republicans don't write good novels. Daniel Larison's answer to the question is vastly more interesting than the Nugent piece itself. I exhort you to read his entire entry -- Daniel ought to turn this into an essay, and The American Conservative,which is where the most surprising and unpredictable commentary on the Right is being published today, ought to make it a cover story. Anyway, Daniel says that the question isn't why don't Republicans write good novels, as ideologues aren't ever going to produce good art. Rather:
The real question ought to be why conservatives generally don’t write fiction.
The answer is actually much more straightforward: the sorts of grand conservative thinkers who were scholars of literature (Weaver, Bradford) and writers of ghost stories (Kirk) are sadly no longer with us, they have not found worthy replacements and the importance of imagination is much, much less in the thinking of most self-styled conservatives than it was in theirs.
Part of the problem is indeed an excess of optimism, and optimism on the American right is one part Yankee, one part capitalist and one part Reagan. Whatever else you want to say about these three, they are not generally regarded as the fathers of great writing. Optimistic people typically are not the best artists, and I don’t just say this because I prefer the pessimists among us. Their frame of mind does not allow for real tragedy or real failure. For the optimist failure is not only unlikely, it does not ultimately, truly exist. The best days are always yet to come! But without a sense of nostalgia for a lost age or a lament for your people or even a full appreciation for the petty indignities of life combined with reverence for sacred mysteries (and sometimes, if a writer is really wise, he knows how to find the mystery in the petty indignity–see Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn), I think it is very difficult to write really captivating, good fiction.
This is right, it seems to me, and I really don't have a lot to add to Daniel's excellent observations. Larison's post crystallized for me why I find myself so alienated from mainstream conservatism: it has no room for a tragic sense, and too often suffocates mystery and ambiguity in syrupy nationalistic uplift or platitudinous moralizing. Besides, I think most people on the right -- shoot, most people, period -- don't trust art any more than they trust religion (real religion, the wild and terrifying stuff, I mean, not just bourgeois churchiness). The more intelligent people on the right understand that culture is more important than politics, but have no idea where to begin creating works of art that live and breathe.
Barbara Nicolosi of Act One, the program that trains Christians in screenwriting, lays into the faithful for their haughty ignorance and attitudinizing. Here's a more polite version of the spiel I've been privileged to hear in person:
Flannery O’Connor, perhaps the greatest Catholic novelist of the past century, once noted, "Christian writers should be much less concerned with saving the world than with saving their work." Many begin the Act One program with a slight cockiness that our seasoned faculty likes to call "the Messiah complex." At some point in their lives, they swore off the cinema out of either fear or disdain, and they have come to Act One with the idea that they can save it from the outside. It takes several days of showing them some of the stunning and profound work being done in secular cinema before we can really begin to teach them. [snip] Ken Gire, an Act One alumnus, wrote in his book, Reflections on the Movies: Hear
ing God in the Unlikeliest Places (Chariot Victor, 2000), "I would rather be exposed to an a R-rated truth than a G-rated lie." Having no conviction of hope, the entertainment industry tends to obsess over the only realities of which it is certain: confusion, darkness, isolation, fear, and depravity. Skewed as it is in its representation of what it means to be human, this kind of cinema can still hold profound truth for us about life without faith and, on another level, about using the screen art form in powerful ways.
Substitute "conservatives" for "Christians" and it still makes sense. Many conservatives, it seems to me, see art as an instrument for propagandizing for a particular worldview, as opposed to telling the truth, even telling hard truths (especially telling hard truths). The last great American novel I read was Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead." I don't know whether Robinson is liberal or conservative, or whether her novel was either. But it was luminous, and it was true. That's all that matters.
I wonder if there's a connection between the fact that there are few conservatives among the ranks of novelists, and that there are few conservatives in US newsrooms. I remember when I was on my college paper's staff, and was pretty liberal, campus conservatives bitched and moaned constantly about how biased we were. When I was in a position to invite them to contribute commentary to the paper, they weren't faithful about meeting deadlines, and often never turned anything in at all. My guess is that conservatives love to complain about how biased the media are, and they're more or less correct. But it's rare to find conservatives who actually love journalism for itself, and what it can do. I've met young conservatives who aspire to be journalists, and they have the idea that they're going to go into the business to tell stories "from the conservative point of view," or somesuch thing. And I hope they fail. We don't need to replace liberal bias with conservative bias. We need people to go into journalism because they want to tell the truth, and because they respect the art and craft of journalism. I don't know why journalism as a profession appeals more to people who are pretty liberal politically. But it does. Perhaps the same is true with art -- just as banking tends to attract conservatives.
But really, I'm the wrong person to pontificate on such matters, as I don't read much fiction. I find contemporary fiction to be dull, as a general rule, and spend my time reading history and history-related books. That's where life is, as far as I can tell. My wife is a conservative, and she reads almost nothing but fiction. But not much contemporary fiction. Do you who read a lot of fiction think that there's much good fiction being written by anybody today? If so who, and why is it good? It's the case, certainly, that the overwhelming number of novelists are liberals, but it seems to me that if they're any good as a novelist, it's not because they're liberals, but because they understand something about human nature, and keep their art free from the proprieties of political correctness.
Larison is spot-on in his final observation, which is that the triumph of the therapeutic did away with a lot of suffering, but also seems to have erased the conditions that make for good art:
The therapeutic has driven out most of whatever remained of the tragic. The spirit of Atlee has spread like a poisonous cloud over the green fields of Logres, and the purpose-driven life has driven us into Babylon rather than leaving us to remember Jerusalem at the edge of her waters.
I'm sitting here tonight in a part of the country that is, I'm sorry to say, rapidly suburbanizing. For most of my adult life lived outside of the rural South, I've simply told stories about the kind of stuff I saw and heard growing up. And people think wow, what a good storyteller he is. But it's not me: it's the stories, and I've just reported what I've seen. That
world, in all its crazy vitality, is going away. It just about kills me to think of what will pass away before I die. Sitting on the front porch with my dad today, we were talking about loss. He told me that he's always had confidence that he could pull himself and us kids through any hardship, because growing up dirt-poor in the country during the Great Depression required him to learn how to do all kinds of things for himself. And I felt stupid and small just hearing that, thinking about how little of that I know. How little of that most people of my generation know. I wouldn't trade the comfortable middle-class life I had growing up for the little cabin on a hill without running water than my dad had in the 1930s and 1940s. But it must be said that my generation is anesthetized by prosperity and the expectation of endless prosperity. There is plenty of suffering and tragedy in all this air-conditioned cheer, of course, but where are the conservatives who can see it and articulate it?
Shortly after Rowan Williams was named to Becket’s chair, we spent a cordial ninety minutes together at Lambeth Palace, Canterbury’s London headquarters. I gave him a copy of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II; we spoke of John Paul’s theology of the body, and then fell to discussing the difference between “sacramental” and “gnostic” understandings of the human condition. The former insists that the stuff of the world – including maleness, femaleness, and their complementarity — has truths built into it; gnostics say it’s all plastic, all malleable, all changeable. The sacramentalists believe that the extraordinary reveals itself through the ordinary: bread, wine, water, salt, marital love and fidelity; the gnostics say it’s a matter of superior wisdom, available to the enlightened (which can mean, the politically correct). Dr. Williams seemed convinced that the gnosticism of a lot of western high culture posed a great danger to historic Christianity and the truths it must proclaim.
Will we be Gnostics pretending to be Christian, or will we be truly Christian? In this killer line, Weigel identifies why there can be no reconciliation over the homosexuality issue:
Some [Anglicans] argue that [homosexual acts] are sinful; others that they are sacramental.
Either/or. It can't be both. And on the answer to that question, so very much depends.
I went out today to Audubon State Park, a couple of miles from my mom and dad's place, to visit Oakley House. It's a plantation house where John James Audubon lived for four months in 1821, tutoring Eliza Pirrie and working on his "Birds of America" folio. I grew up with Oakley just down the road, and went there many times as a child, but as is usual with this kind of thing, didn't realize how special any of it was until I was an adult living far away. For me, walking through the grounds was the sensory equivalent of listening to those old songs on my iPod: the sights and smells reacquainted me with my oldest memories. Springtime is the most beautiful time of the year here in West Feliciana Parish. The azaleas are blooming, and the air is fragrant with the smell of sweet olive blossoms. Walking under the moss-strewn oak trees, admiring the camellias and japonicas and the magnolia fuscata (not yet blossoming), I remembered that this is what I thought the whole world was like when I was as young as my boys are now. My elderly Aunt Lois, a fine amateur horticulturist and woman of the world, used to tend her camellias and japonicas with exquisite care, little me helping her. We'd walk through her orchard looking at the jonquils, the King Alfreds, the rain tree and even the old speckled king snake that would stretch itself across the lane to warm himself in the sun. Loisie taught me that it was okay to step right over him, that he was a good snake, and nothing to be afraid of.
God, I really was raised in the country, and all the exposure to the natural world that I took for granted back then is suddenly very dear to me. My wife grew up in the suburbs. She doesn't have these memories to draw on. No city kid does. Not my own, for sure.
I wish I had a sweet olive tree in my own backyard in Dallas. Nothing smells more like Home to me than a sweet olive. In fact, I wish I could right this very second take a book and sit out there in the shade of those oaks and read all afternoon. But, as you know, I have a schedule to keep.
I thought as I was driving away how easy it is for us Louisiana expatriates to despair of the state from far away. The problems here seem so stark from afar. But when you're actually here, it's so easy to fall in love with it again.
Newsweek quotes one of the dismissed US Attorneys thus:
Another fired prosecutor, John McKay, of Seattle, tells NEWSWEEK that local Republicans pressured him to launch a criminal probe of voting fraud that would tilt a deadlocked Washington governor's race. "They wanted me to go out and start arresting people," he says, adding that he refused to do so because there was "no evidence." After McKay was fired in December, he says he also got a phone call from a "clearly nervous" Elston asking if he intended to go public: "He was offering me a deal: you stay silent and the attorney general won't say anything bad about you." (Elston says he "can't imagine" how McKay got that impression. The call was meant to reassure McKay that the A.G. would not detail the reasons for the firings.)
Again, that this stuff is being vigorously investigated by Congress is one reason to be glad that we have divided government once again. But you know, it did remind me that the politicization of the federal justice system did not start with George W. Bush. Once upon a time, reports citing government documents revealed that Janet Reno, Clinton's A.G., and her deputies were pressuring the FBI to help them build criminal cases against the pro-life movement. Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch said at the time: "We were told by one source that some in the FBI objected to the monitoring of these groups on legal and ethical grounds but were overruled by upper levels at Justice."
I'd heard the same thing, and after a few phone calls, got a high-level FBI agent on the phone to talk about it. He confirmed the reports, and said that agents kept trying to tell Reno's people that there was no reason to investigate the wide panoply of pro-life groups. But Reno's gang wouldn't listen. They wanted pro-lifers heads on pikes, he said. This agent also told me that he was considering early retirement, because Reno's people were promoting unqualified agents within the bureau because, in his view, they were lesbians. He was sick of the way Reno's Justice was politicizing the FBI.
Turns out my source got his early retirement anyway, just not on his own terms. Maybe you've heard of this guy. Name of Robert Hanssen.
Anyway, I hope the Democrats and conscientious Republicans in the Senate keep at this US Attorney scandal. The American people have a right to expect fairness and impartiality from government attorneys. If the Bush administration and its allies have been putting the squeeze on US attorneys to use their offices to help the party at election time, heads gotta roll.
The other shoe has dropped in the scandalous case of the Greek Orthodox priest in Dallas who retired last year, and who was revealed recently to have been accused -- credibly in the eyes of the Greek Orthodox episcopal authorities -- of molesting youth. Turns out that the Greek authorities knew a long time ago what was alleged against Fr. Nicholas Katinas, and kept it hush-hush for months -- not even telling the parishioners of the parish. It appears that the Greek Orthodox leadership in this country observed the catastrophe that befell the US Catholic Church because of episcopal cover-up of sex abuse ... and learned absolutely nothing.
Fools. Cover-up never helps this or any church. If ever it did, it certainly doesn't anymore, not in this day and age. You have to get the information out there, and let the chips fall where they may. Theodore Kalmoukas observes quite correctly:
The Katinas case should make us think very seriously as a Church. We need to stop behaving like ostriches, burying our heads in the sand, and stop cultivating the same culture of secrecy which led the Roman Catholic Church into catastrophic circumstances.
Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a pretty amazing pro-Obama YouTube video that should instill fear in the hearts of the Sentient-American community. Just imagine four years of Hillary!
Columnist Richard Reeves says the Democrats are pussyfooting around on the war. They were elected to get America out of Iraq, he writes, but they're dawdling, and running around in circles:
Democrats were elected to end the war, not to debate it. The American people, enough of them, are past debate. The war was a mistake. The government lied. The war is lost. It does not matter when we leave; the same horrific things will happen in Iraq no matter when we leave. The only difference to us now is how many more Americans (and Iraqis) will be killed or maimed or ruined -- for no good reason.
Meanwhile, the pro-war caucus in Washington is still telling itself that this thing is winnable:
But in Washington, they still think they can talk their way out of the chaos we have wrought. This paragraph is from The New York Times last Thursday, covering still another hearing: "'You have to protect the (Iraqi) people long enough to get economic assistance to them and change their attitude and change their behavior,' said Jack Keane, the retired vice chief of staff of the Army, who has argued that the troop buildup should last 12 to 18 months. 'You cannot do that in weeks. It takes months to do that. The problem with the short-term surge is that the enemy can wait you out.'"
Wait us out? Of course they will wait us out. They live there. We don't. They have been there for thousands of years. They will be there for thousands more. We are leaving; it is only a matter of when.
Something that irritates me about the Democrats: they are not out there making a sustained and reasonable argument for getting out of Iraq. President Bush is wrong, in my view, about what to do about Iraq, but at least he's got a position and is sticking to it. What's the Democratic position? Granted, they have division among them (something Reeves notes in his column), but I wish those who are ready to withdraw would spend as much time making the public case and trying to sway voters' minds as they're spending arranging complicated legislative strategies. If we're going to get out of this thing, the Democrats can't expect to achieve that result while skulking around the halls of Congress trying to craft a legislative plan that seems to shield the American people from what they're trying to do.
My column from yesterday's Dallas Morning News, in which I explain why the admirable Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a tragic hero three times over. In brief, it's because: 1) though she's more European than the Europeans, the people whose culture this foreign-born woman has come to defend don't want to listen to her; 2) she's come too late onto the scene for the Europeans to turn the situation around; and 3) the militant secularism she espouses will only make it more likely that the Islam she despises will triumph in the West.
There's a couple living one parish over from St. Francisville who are totally off the grid, and pretty much growing their own food. Here's a feature story on them from Country Roads, a good local publication. They sound kind of New Agey -- I think it's a pretty safe bet that they aren't remotely conservative -- but I admire their dedication to living only on food they grow themselves. They built their own oven out of local clay, and use it to bake bread.
The thing is, according to the story they eat raw food almost exclusively. I wonder if that's really true. Here's a letter that the husband wrote to the Weston A. Price Foundation (which advocates a traditional diet, but one avoiding processed food) four years ago, telling them how weak and constantly hungry he and his wife were following the raw vegan diet:
Thank you! Your information is so important to us. We had been following a strict vegetarian lifestyle for the last 10 years and really believed it was the right way to go. In fact, it helped my wife overcome chronic fatigue syndrome--she only got well after a cleansing raw food diet. But as time went on we both started feeling weak and tired all the time. This really surprised us, and all the information we read and studied kept telling us that we just had to detox more or take supplements. We stayed at it, but eventually started to realize that there was something wrong with our diets. When we found your information, we were opposed to the eating of flesh foods and still deathly afraid of milk products, but further reading and study, especially Dr. Price's book, began to convince us more and more.
We started with raw goat milk and homemade cream cheese, then we started purchasing cultured butter. These two things made a world of difference in our level of energy and helped us begin to feel much better. Next we started having fresh yard eggs cooked in butter. Wow, it was so incredible to eat this way again! Next, our neighbor gave us some fresh deer meat and bones and we spent a whole Saturday boiling them down to make stock. We drank the broth and used it for cooking soaked beans, soups, etc.--wow, the flavor!
We realize now that the trouble with a raw food vegetarian diet is that we felt so hungry. We were not absorbing certain nutrients, even though the foods were organic and fresh. All we thought about was food. I had long been into baking homemade, whole wheat and rye, naturally fermented sourdough bread and that was pretty much the only cooked food we were eating, that and lots of olive oil. We were still afraid of butter because of the misinformation we had been exposed to for so long. Whenever we would have real butter it felt like we were cheating. Now we are making our own butter from locally produced, non-homogenized, grass fed cows milk. And it is so wonderful.
In just a few weeks we've had a complete dietary turnaround from where we were. And we have learned so many valuable skills; namely sprouting, indoor greens, crispy nuts, fermented vegetables and beverages, homemade cheeses, sour milks, soaking and preparing beans by skimming off the foam, etc. We are doing all of it, and we love our food more than ever! Your work with the Weston A. Price Foundation is very valuable and we want you to know how much we appreciate all that you are doing.
This is pretty much an encouraging word. A reader from Washington, DC, sends good news about Bishop-elect Kevin Farrell of Dallas, who is presently serving as an auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Washington. Excerpts from her letter:
I am one of the 84 people he met with regarding sexual abuse issues. He was very kind to me at first, but then the caring priest became a cold-hearted administrator when the rubber hit the road. Even so, I feel unexpectedly sad at the thought of him leaving Washington. ...
I don't know very much about the Diocese of Dallas, but even with what I have recently gone through here in the ADW, I have no hesitation in saying that the people of Dallas have been ****INCREDIBLY BLESSED**** to get Bishop Farrell. He has shown that he can reach out to people, AND, keep a diocese in line.
Up until these last few months, my impression of him was of a very kind and caring person when he needed to be. However, make no mistake about it, as vicar general he was the one running the diocese while Cardinal McCarrick was away (most of the time) traipsing all over the world. He was the one who approved the new building contracts, he was the one who disciplined the priests, etc., etc.
When I first called him regarding what had happened to me (in the Fall 2002) he returned my call, spoke with me at length, asked me a lot of questions that could be verified on his end about the priest, and offered to meet with me personally at any parish of my choosing. I chose a parish close to my job, and he met me there. (He was very unassuming, he kept his own calendar – to keep victim’s identities confidential I think – he drove himself to the appointment, he called the morning of to confirm the appointment.) He also gave me his personal office phone number that I could call whenever I felt I needed to talk to him about my experience and what I was going through. And when I called, he answered, or called me back. Until recently. Maybe he feels guilty about forcing me to do something that resulted in so much pain.
While I met with him the first time, he told me that he offered to meet with everyone who called with an allegation of sexual abuse, even if the offending priest was not from the ADW. (And apparently, most were not.) The people he met with were uniformly, understandably upset, and he basically served as the whipping post for the Church. This was something he accepted as coming with the territory. He offered me a lot of practical advice; but, the real point of the meeting as to determine what it was that I REALLY wanted from the ADW, i.e., was I hiring a lawyer and filing suit? He determined that the only thing I wanted from the ADW was spiritual direction to help get me through all the issues that were being reopened due to the scandal that was consuming the church at that time, not a lawsuit and millions of dollars from the church. We left on cordial terms.
I met with him again one year later, this time in his office at the Pastoral Center. It was there he said something that really struck me. I was looking at his framed um, don’t know exactly how to describe this, official document of becoming a bishop signed by Pope John Paul II, and I was awestruck by it. I said it must be really cool being a bishop, and he said no, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, being named a bishop. He spends all day, everyday, in back to back meetings (well don’t we all), but I think he meant he was no longer doing sacramental duties all day, but administrative duties. We talked about my trying to find a role in the church as a wife and mother (above and beyond just being a wife and mother). ...
Regarding the Post Traumatic Stress I have to deal with. We had a conversation once regarding this, and he said that everyone has something difficult that they have to deal with. Something that comes up very frequently, haunts us so to speak, and will always be there.
He gave me an example from his own life. In the 1970’s he was in a serious car accident. The other three people in the car with him were all killed. As the only survivor, he spent a lot of time wondering why he survived. Why wasn’t he killed along with the others? I told him it was clear to me it was because God had a plan for his life; God had a lot more work for him to do, such as being there to help people like me. (And now, I guess, healing Dallas.) But the accident is always with him. He said that at least once a month he wakes up in a cold sweat dreaming about the accident. His point was that each of us carries something – our cross. His is the accident, maybe also being a bishop; mine is the abuse.
This is all very interesting to me, and I'm encouraged by it. The reader reports some bad interaction with the Office of Child Protection in the archdiocese, and she believes that Bp Farrell didn't stand up for her, which is at least partly responsible for her disappointment with him. I've not included those details because I don't want to air specific grievances without giving that ADW employee she says mistreated her a chance to respond. And it's worth keeping in mind that perhaps Bp. Farrell had a good reason not to be in further touch with this reader. The point that stands out to me is that even though the reader thinks Bp Farrell disappointed her recently, it tells me a lot that she still loves him, and thinks the Diocese of Dallas is "incredibly blessed" to have him.
I could be proven wrong, of course, but I am particularly impressed by the story she tells of Bp Farrell's deep personal suffering (surviving the car crash); I'm betting that wound gives him the capacity for the kind of empathy the Dallas Catholic diocese needs from its shepherd. This sex-abuse victim seems to think so. The fact that Bp Farrell reportedly thinks becoming a bishop was a cross because it took him away from ministering full-time to the faithful tells me he's probably got what it takes to be a good bishop.
It's only one perspective from a single reader, but not just any reader: she's a sex-abuse victim who has had interaction with Bp. Farrell. And still she thinks the world of him. Interesting. This reader's e-mail makes me hopeful and excited about his arrival later this year.
Moreover, here are some comments from the blog of an unidentified priest of the Diocese of Dallas, who is also pleased by Bp Farrell's imminent arrival:
One really positive impression I got was from one of his current flock. This individual, after saying how exciting it must have been to be made a bishop, quotes Bishop Farrell as saying: “It was the worst day of my life.” I take that to mean that he wasn’t looking for administration but rather for pastoral ministry. I am very weary of those who seek the episcopal zucchetto. There are too many bishops out there already with limited pastoral experience, who come from Vatican congregations and administrative positions. Most of us priests want a bishop who has been in the trenches as priest and pastor, and is willing to get down there again, unafraid to get the purple dusty or dirty. I look forward to working with a bishop who “never forgets that at the end of the day he's a priest."
I am comforted to know that he is “comfortable reading balance sheets and financial statements,” because maybe he can explain the Diocesan finances to me and my brother priests, who really don’t know where the money goes. Every year the Diocese reports on the annual income and expenses in the Texas Catholic, and until I encountered it I thought I knew how to read a budget. It is a great mystery.
I don't listen to a lot of music in the car anymore. I live close to the office, and live most of my life in Dallas within a fairly circumscribed area. So I'm not in the car much. When I'm driving, it's NPR news and talk, or nothing at all, because I can't stand commercials screaming at me.
But when I drive down to see my folks, I use my iPod. Today I tried to get caught up on podcasts I've missed, but it's hard to fool with the thing and keep your eyes on the road. Just south of Shreveport, I gave up trying to find the right Diane Rehm Show, and just hit play. Immediately I heard the opening chords from Joni Mitchell's album "Blue" -- and it was like a Proustian madeleine for me. Suddenly I was sitting on the front porch of my friend Leslie Gregory's house in Natchitoches, and I was 18 years old, and she was playing "Blue" for me for the first time, and I couldn't believe how good it was. I could conjure up how her old rent house on Percy Street felt and smelled -- cool and musty, like a house should smell, because it was in perpetual shade. I spent my last two years of high school in Natchitoches, and they were among the happiest of my life. I listened to "Blue" and thought about Leslie, how cool she was, and how much good sense in books and music she imparted to me along with her friendship. (It was Leslie's paperback copy of "The Seven Storey Mountain" that caused me to fall in love with Catholicism and monasticism, by the way). She still lives in Natchitoches, and has a family of her own now. I keep meaning to stop by when we drive through, but we usually have a schedule to keep. I hate having schedules to keep.
I surfed blindly through the iPod just south of Exit 136, where you turn off for Natchitoches, and stumbled across a couple of stray David Bowie tracks ("Young Americans" and "Let's Dance"). We listened to a lot of Bowie in my high school. I got so emotional thinking about my friends there, and Rachel Carner, who first introduced me to Bowie, that I almost started to cry. Where are you now, Rachel Carner? Did Katrina wash you out of New Orleans? What got to me was the usual nostalgia-trip stuff: the joy of life in my high school, how much I loved my friends and teachers there, and knowing that I'll never have friendships that intense again. I'll never be that intense again, thank God. But those two years were the happiest I'd ever been till then, and after my experience in my hometown school, happier than I thought it was possible to be. We had a soundtrack to everything we did back then, and Marc Caplan was more or less the deejay. The minivan rolled on toward Alexandria, and I felt that I was almost hallucinating, so intense were those memories, and my affection for those people. Nearly all of whom I've lost, for no other reason than that time passes, and you get busy. You have a schedule to keep.
Every time I pass through Alexandria on the trip to St. Francisville, I think about how I really ought to stop and say hello to Marc's mom and dad. Haven't seen them since Marc's wedding in NYC almost 10 years ago. But I never do. I have somewhere I need to get to, and drive on.
You see how it happens.
South of Alexandria, the iPod wheel caught the first two songs from the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," probably the best rock album ever recorded. Why did I have only two songs from Exile on my iPod? And why those two? God, were the Stones great. I thought: I will buy a lottery ticket when I stop next, and if I win I will pay them whatever they want to come to Tipitina's in New Orleans and get together with Dr. John, and hold a big fundraising concert for hurricane relief and rebuilding. They'll have to perform "Exile on Main Street" live, exactly in the order it was recorded, and I and everybody else in the room will experience a foretaste of the beatific vision. (I ended up stopping later and buying a lottery ticket and a six-pack of Abita Amber, just so you know).
Just before the Bunkie exit, the iPod rolled across "I've Been Waiting," a cut from Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend," one of my most favorite discs. It came out sometime in the mid-1990s, and I was deeply into it when I met Julie. The yearning in Sweet's songs is so pure and exquisite. I remember putting several of them on a mix tape that I hoped would prove to her what a swell guy I was. Listening to "I've Been Waiting" brought it all back -- the sweet pain of hoping that she would like me, and the anxious delirium when against all odds, she did (anxious, because I couldn't believe that finally the thing I'd wanted more than anything else was happening to me, and I thought that it couldn't be real). But it was real, and we married, and this afternoon listening to that song, I thought, isn't life something: here I am a 40 year old shmo with three kids, a gut and a minivan, and she still has the power to make me feel as young and ecstatic to be alive as Matthew Sweet sounds. Churchill said that meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, and getting to know him was like drinking it. That's what being with Julie all these years has been like for me. The bottle is bottomless, and does anybody ever get tired of champagne?
I finally put the iPod away. Given the reveries it was provoking, it's a wonder I didn't drive off into a bayou, lost in thought. I hadn't anticipated having so many memories attached to old songs I haven't heard in ages. I know somewhere on my iPod hard drive is the song Julie and I think of as "our" song: "Nightswimming" by REM. I'm sitting here in bed at my mom and dad's house, and everyone is asleep. The iPod is in the car. Maybe I'll go out and get it, and turn the lights out and listen to "Nightswimming." Or maybe I'll turn the lamp off and go to sleep. I have a schedule to keep tomorrow.
I have a death in the family to report: my Birkenstock sandals have expired. The pair of black-leather Birks that I famously purchased at my wife's insistence in the spring of 1998 have finally, nine years later, given up the ghost. They've come apart in the front, and are disintegrating into layers. When you see me coming, it looks like I'm wearing some sort of talking leather clams on my feet. Alas, they are beyond repair.
I was thinking last night how much wear I've gotten out of them. Those shoes have walked for I don't know how many miles, most of them in Brooklyn and Manhattan. But I've worn them to Galilee. I've tromped around the Old City of Jerusalem in them, stood in the Garden of Gethsemane wearing them, gallivanted through the Loire Valley and Paris and Amsterdam and points in between with them on. I've trekked through the Muir Woods, Beverly Hills and the Louisiana swamp in those sturdy old shoes. They have well and truly given me good service. Best shoes ever. I will miss them.
Believe it or not, I can't find a story in Dallas that carries my kind of Birkenstock (Milanos, in black, size 42). I was in an outdoors shop last night, and was tempted to try on different brands. I confess to you that I slipped my feet into a pair of Merrills. I felt cheap and tawdry, and they certainly couldn't hold a candle to my beloved. I fled the store in shame. I'm about to head down to Louisiana for a few days, and I've already found on the Birkenstock website a store in Baton Rouge that carries them. Let's hope for the best, shall we?
Did I mention that I'm going to wear my flappy superannuated Birks? Better them than any other shoe, is what I say.
If you wanted to read the best histories of the fall of the Roman Empire (OK, you Orthodox, the Western Roman Empire), which would be the ones to read? Besides Gibbon's, I mean. And why?
Bible Girl continues the story of the powerful Dallas-area Pentecostal pastor accused of shocking abuse of women. Excerpt:
In what kind of church atmosphere would a woman submit to the unthinkable — allowing her pastor to paddle her repeatedly in various states of undress, sometimes causing bruises and bleeding? And, after several years of this treatment, accept his rationalizations that it’s OK to have sex with him too?
Read it only if you have a strong stomach. Bible Girl is a Pentecostal too, and she provides good insight into why aspects of the Pentecostal mindset would have made it possible for this pastor to get away with what he is alleged to have done.
As regular readers know, I encourage people to buy locally-grown fruits and vegetables over organic ones. Reader James Kabala sends along the cover story from Time magazine -- which poses the "organic vs. local" question. It's an excellent tour of the various aspects of the question from an average-guy perspective, and very, very readable.
Rich Lowry writes that he was taken aback by how good Barack Obama's Selma speech was. Here's the text -- and yes, it's very, very good. The words on the page only suggest how stirring this speech must have been to hear in person. Rich says, "At his best, this guy is something special." Couldn't agree more. There's something fresh and new and hopeful there. If he is on the ballot in November 2008, I probably wouldn't vote for him for reasons of political principle (that is, because I don't share his politics). But I think some good things would happen in this country under a President Obama. If he were able to help black and white Americans think about and talk about race in a fundamentally new way, Obama would do his country a tremendous service. And like I said earlier, even if you don't share his politics, there's something about Obama that makes you want him to do well. Charisma, I guess. I find him impossible to dislike.
Rich Lowry has an interesting post up on The Corner observing that Giuliani's unwillingness to pander to the social right, and his heartlessness in his last divorce might actually play to his benefit:
For the moment, Rudy's weaknesses and failings may be playing into the strategic strength of his candidacy. The weakness on social issues plays into the idea that he says what he means and means what he says, and the personal failings are perhaps (incredibly enough) playing to the idea that he's mean as hell at a time when Washington could use someone like that at the top. So the things that should be dragging him down may be boosting him more as the straight-talking, tough SOB—for you.
Add to Del.icio.us 
Digg This 
Fave on Technorati