Matthew Yglesias comments on conservative team spirit, riffing off this part of Brooks's last column, the one about prospects for conservatives:
Second, there is the corrupting influence of teamism. Being a good conservative now means sticking together with other conservatives, not thinking new and adventurous thoughts. Those who stray from the reservation are accused of selling out to the mainstream media by the guardians of conservative correctness.
So says Brooks. Yglesias responds:
That said, why shouldn't "being a good conservative" mean "sticking together with other conservatives?" It seems to me that that's exactly what it ought to mean.
Well, because to go along with whatever most people who call themselves conservative are pushing in a given time or place can mean violating conservative principle. Were the conservatives who signed off on the crazy pork-barrel spending during the years when the presidency and the Congress were in putatively conservative hands being "good conservatives" -- or just team players? Or something that implicates me: when the conservative mainstream marched off rah-rah to war, and condemned conservatives who didn't agree with us as somehow false conservatives, were we really being true conservatives, or were we wielding the term "conservative" as a way to suppress thought?
Obviously I have a personal interest in this question, because I've tried to make the case for my sort of neotraditionalist conservatism based on conservative principles. Some critics, rather than argue the principles, have decided that because my ideas don't sound like the standard-gauge GOP line, especially on economics and culture, then they couldn't possibly be conservative. On the other side, a fellow I met at the Kirk conference recently, who said he was moving toward the left, wondered why I had to identify as a conservative at all. I told him that I was, or was striving to be, a Kirkian conservative. If that put me closer to Democratic Party policy on some matters, well, so be it. I don't see that that makes me a bad conservative, but it does make me not such a good Republican. I imagine pro-life Democrats who remain so out of liberal conviction that tells them the law should protect the most vulnerable human beings might feel the same way.
Point is, whether we're on the left or the right, we can't all be eclectic gadflies and get things accomplished in the political realm. But when any movement gets caught up in groupthink, and forgets first principles in favor of power politics, it runs the risk of ossifying. As Burke said, change is the method by which we will conserve that which most needs conserving. What we conservatives should be doing is seeking to reinterpret our principles in light of present circumstances, and figuring out how they might best be transformed into policy. I fail to see what is to be gained by treating conservatism as if it were a dogmatic religion.
I've come to see SCOTUS's recent partial-birth abortion decision like this: it's a good that the Court put a limit, however minor, on the unrestricted practice of abortion, but the reasoning here is pretty feeble. As William Saletan points out, the only thing separating an unborn child protected by the SCOTUS ruling from one the exact same age who could be legally killed by dismemberment is a matter of inches. It makes no moral sense to say that a late-term baby whose life is protected by law because it has been partially born has no right to life even though she resides wholly inside the mother's womb.
That being said, doesn't this put pro-lifers more or less on the same ground as pro-choice Roe diehards, in that we appreciate a weakly-reasoned SCOTUS ruling for its instrumental value? I don't feel so great about that.
Saletan, who is pro-choice, points out that the next front for pro-lifers is passing bills requiring women seeking abortions to watch an ultrasound image of their unborn children before exterminating them. He writes, "Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we." More:
Critics complain that these bills seek to "bias," "coerce," and "guilt-trip" women. Come on. Women aren't too weak to face the truth. If you don't want to look at the video, you don't have to. But you should look at it, and so should the guy who got you pregnant, because the decision you're about to make is as grave as it gets.
UPDATE: A lawyer reader disagrees about my negativity on the SCOTUS ruling, writing:
While I agree with you about being happy on the way this case turned out, I have to disagree with the assertion that the reasoning was feeble or weak. After distinguishing the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act from the one struck down in Stenberg, the Court does not have to give reasons why "intact D&E" and "D&E" are different and therefore one is better, morally, than the other.
What the Court does (and should do) is examine Congress' factual findings regarding the banned procedure. While some of the conclusions are disputed, the Court rightly decided that Congressional factual findings are due more deference than some district court judge's findings made in this trial. That was as far as the Court needed to go, it was merely an application of law.
The difference between reliance on this case and reliance on Roe is that this case is not made up whole-cloth. It's a standard application of legal principles, settled precedent, and not the hijacking of the Constitution and replacing it with personal preferences. While it's not as far-reaching as Justice Thomas's dissent would wish (ie, reversal of Roe v. Wade), that question wasn't properly before the Court and it properly wasn't reached in the majority opinion.
Really sad news this morning: the historic Eastern Market on Washington's Capitol Hill burned down last night. I used to shop there when I lived on the Hill, and loved it. The WaPo's Marc Fisher gets it right in this requiem:
Eastern Market was what people talk about when they get all misty about the possibilities of a city. It was a place where people came not merely to gather necessities or shop for frills, but rather a place where people came to see and be among each other. I don't live on the Hill. I don't even live within 20 minutes of the Hill. But my family and I try to get over to Eastern Market regularly because we know for a certainty that we will run into people we know, that we will meet folks who will enrich our lives, and that we will feel as if we are part of something less random than a walk through downtown or a visit to a suburban shopping center.
The Hill residents who live nearby and stop in at the Market each morning or afternoon to buy meat, cheese, bread or produce, or the people who make it a habit to buy a salmon cake or crab cake from Market Lunch on the way to work are, along with the merchants, the heart of Eastern Market. This was the kind of gathering spot that many city neighborhoods once had. After the collapse of the O Street Market in Shaw and the conversion of a similar facility in Georgetown into a very upscale gourmet shop, Eastern Market was all we had left. It became, all at once, a neighborhood marketplace, a symbol of what the District could be for people of all races and economic levels, and a draw for tourists and visitors.
Citing US military documents, today's WaPo reports that the Maliki government has been cashiering Iraqi military and police officials who have been aggressively going after Shia militia leaders:
"Their only crimes or offenses were they were successful" against the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia, said Brig. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, commanding general of the Iraq Assistance Group, which works with Iraqi security forces. "I'm tired of seeing good Iraqi officers having to look over their shoulders when they're trying to do the right thing."
Do you remember the three goals that President Bush, in announcing the surge, said he expected the Iraqi government to make progress on? Oil revenue-sharing, reversing de-Baathification, and amending the constitution? They're all but dead in the water. And while our soldiers risk their lives in oppressive heat daily to make Baghdad safer, the Iraqi Parliament is planning to take a couple of months off this summer (better not do that, fellas, said the House Armed Services Committee chairman today).
But look, here's the really stunning evidence of the collapse of White House policy. The CBS News/New York Times poll last week made news because of its findings about how public opinion has become more favorable with regard to the environment. But check out the full poll results in this PDF file. According to the poll question Do you think the United States should or should not set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq sometime in 2008?, 64 percent said yes, 32 percent said no. That's a seven-point increase in support for a troop withdrawal deadline in only two weeks.
And this question's response is a stunner: . Currently, President Bush and Congress disagree about what to do about U.S. troop levels in Iraq. Who do you think should have the final say about troop levels in Iraq: the President or Congress?
Get this: 57 percent of those polled believe Congress, not the Commander in Chief, should have the final say over troop levels. Only 35 percent said that the president should retain ultimate authority in this regard. The president lost nine points on this question in just two weeks. That is a collapse. . Condi Rice said yesterday that the administration won't accept any timetables on a spending bill. She's just whistling past the graveyard. Reality is going to impose a timetable on this president and his party. When Bush vetoes the military spending bill this week and sends it back to Congress, they should pass a compromise that funds the troops, without a withdrawal deadline -- but only for the next six months. Let's revisit the funding issue in November after 10 months of surging. We'll see how many Republicans are willing to stand by "no withdrawal deadline" staring down the barrel of an election year.
David Brooks writes today (behind Times Select) that the Republican Party's mood on Capitol Hill is that of a slope-shouldered mob passively marching off a cliff. Excerpt:
And at the presidential level, things are even worse. The party is blessed with a series of charismatic candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting. Instead of offering something new, each of them has been going around pretending to be the second coming of George Allen — a bland, orthodox candidate who will not challenge any of the party's customs or prejudices.
Ain't that the truth. The Dems have their own stifling orthodoxies too, which is why it's pretty clear to me that the enthusiasm for them in the polls is mostly a factor of disgust with the spent Republicans. One sign of how exhausted the GOP and the broader conservative movement is right now is the constant hearking back to Reagan. I was at a dinner party in Dallas last week with a group of smart Republicans, almost all of whom were gloomy. One said to me that the Reagan nostalgia you hear so often these days among anxious and depressed Republicans is a sign of decadence. Out of ideas, and roped to a presidency foundering on the shoals of Iraq, Republicans are reduced to pining for the Reagan magic. But the Reagan magic, such as it was, had as much to do with Reagan being the right man at the right time as it did with anything in his character.
Who is the right man (or woman) for the crises of the current moment? And what would that man advocate? Reagan didn't just sell himself. He sold a philosophy that was vigorous and suited to where the country was coming out of the malaise of the 1970s. It's a different world now.
I love this line from the Brooks column:
The libertarians and paleoconservatives have been losing for so long they are suddenly quite interesting.
After the Republicans get smashed to bits in 2008, it will be fascinating to see what happens to the paleos, the libertarians and the traditionalists, with regard to the Republican party. I predict that the GOP will go more libertarian, a la Giuliani, because libertarianism is a more natural fit with autonomous individualism (in fact, it's the purest expression of it), and it offers no significant opposition to corporate interests. Could the Democratic Party could once again become the home of socially conservative populism -- and therefore prove a greater draw for traditionalist conservatives? If the Republican Party Giulianized itself, this could happen.
It's like when Martin and Lewis broke up. It's like when Lennon and McCartney split. It's like the peanut butter disassociating itself from the chocolatey coating in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. I speak, naturellement of Ross and Reihan going their separate ways. Happily for all, it was an amicable parting, as Ross's boss has put him to work on his own blog. And unconfine relief and joy, Reihan's still going strong at The American Scene. The Republic staggers onward, rejoicing.
Michael Medved told me a while back, just after my first child was born, that I shouldn't be under the impression that my wife and I could create for our children an environment that would be sufficient to shape their character. He said (and I paraphrase): "You and Julie can do your very best to bring up your children in the right way, but if you don't share the same basic values as the parents of their playmates, a lot of your work will be undone."
So much of the external disorder we see about us today is only the outward manifestation of inward disorder. As Kirk taught, the material order rests upon a spiritual order. A people who are fit to govern themselves externally must first become masters of their personal lives. It is no coincidence that during the Roman Republic, sexual morality was relatively austere -- but during the Empire, especially toward the end, it was a freestyle burlesque. With inner disorder regnant, divorce became common, and social bonds weakened to the point of collapse. It would be inaccurate to say that sexual disorder caused the Roman Empire to collapse, but the personal and communal debilitation that pornography and its effect on the Roman moral imagination definitely played a role.
I mention these two things as a prelude to bringing up this incredible story from today's NYT Magazine. It's about Peter Acworth, a 36-year-old Ivy-educated entrepreneur who has become quite rich by making and marketing online pornography involving people giving and receiving torture for sexual pleasure. His company, Kink, just bought a big historic building in the middle of San Francisco, and makes porn there. The most important thing to note about this story is how porn has become so mainstream that it is no longer the province of Seventies-era greaseballs. It's the kind of thing that well-educated "respectable" careerists become involved in on the business side. Here's the key passage:
[Paul] Cambria, the attorney [for pornographers], says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago. “Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,” he told me. “But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.” The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it, “the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ ” he explained. “Familiarity leads to acceptance.”
The porn business, in short, has a community standard of its own. What starts on the fringes works its way to the center. And this affects all of us since, more and more, the center of porn culture has converged with the fringes of popular culture. But Kink’s purchase of the armory represents a quirky quantum leap in the process Cambria describes: taking a real-life fetish traditionally relegated to underground clubs and the ethereal back channels of the Web and moving it directly into a brick-and-mortar landmark in the middle of a city — unabashedly, with the conviction that both it and porn can belong there.
For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.
But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk i
nto Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”
It makes itself unobscene. There is nothing in our law to prevent pornography -- even sadomasochistic pornography -- from making itself unobscene. Technology assures that. The "community standards" test is meaningless when a porn fiend in Waxahachie can download and view the exact same kinky garbage as a porn fiend in San Francisco, or anywhere else. Our culture of nonjudgmentalism acculturates us to tolerate what we ought to recoil from, even if we don't personally wish to partake. What happens when porn -- even sadomasochistic porn -- becomes unobscene? What happens to women? To men? To children? To the common good?
If history is our guide, at some point, men and women of goodwill will be left with only one course of action: The Benedict Option.
My brother-in-law Michael James Leming, a Louisiana National Guard officer, got his deployment orders on Friday. He's shipping out to Baghdad, via a short training stint in Wisconsin, on July 15. That's later than we thought it would be, but that, of course, won't lessen his time there.
A really cool -- spectacularly cool -- thing happened last night for Mike. He lives, like my family, in Starhill, which we jokingly call a suburb of St. Francisville. St. Francisville's got only about 3,000 people in it, so you can imagine how small Starhill is. My late Uncle Murphy was the self-appointed Mayor of Starhill (which doesn't have a government, naturally); he was a real character. One night, during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, he'd had a little too much bourbon and somehow used his connection with Sen. Russell Long to talk some poor staffer on the night shift at the State Department into giving him the private number of the Ayatollah Khomeini's palace in Qom. Murphy phoned the Ayatollah's place, finally got an English-speaking staffer on the phone, told him that the Republic of Starhill was breaking off diplomatic relations with Iran, and then gave the Khomeini staffer a good cussing. The phone bill came to around $100, but Murphy considered it money well spent.
(It will not surprise you to learn that Uncle Murphy and Aunt Patsy gave me "A Confederacy of Dunces" for Christmas the year it was published. He knew me well.)
Murphy also started a short-lived tradition called the Bopotamus Ball. He'd lead an annual hunt for the elusive bopotamus as a prelude to a big throwdown in honor of the non-existent creature. It was just an excuse to party, though once Murphy and his cronies dragged a TV crew from the ABC affiliate in Baton Rouge through the woods on the ritual bopotamus hunt. After Murphy died, they kept up the Bopotamus Ball for a few years. They don't do it anymore, but I tell you all this to give you an idea of the kind of community spirit there is where I grew up. This is a place where people know how to pass a good time.
But it's also a place where they know how to take care of business. Last night they had another big community party in Starhill -- this one in honor of Mike, my brother-in-law, as a farewell to him before he heads to Iraq. The men and women of Starhill had been quietly planning the affair for a couple of months, and keeping it quiet from Mike. It was a total surprise, then, when my sister Ruthie drove him over to a neighbor's house, and there he found a couple hundred of his friends and neighbors waiting to toast him. They had a live band, a bonfire, and two wild hogs killed on Cat Island that they roasted, cochon de lait-style. My sources tell me lots of beer was drunk, and that there was dancing late into the night out under the stars. The local state representative showed up and gave a short tribute speech to Mike (who must have died a thousand deaths; he is quiet and deeply humble by nature). The rep said that Mike shouldn't worry about his wife and girls being taken care of while he's in Iraq, that he (the rep) will be at the front of the line making sure groceries stay in the pantry and everything gets taken care of. Mike's a Baton Rouge firefighter by trade, and lots of his buddies from the fire station showed up to pay tribute to him too -- and according to my folks, all of them pledged to Mike that they would take care of my sister and the girls while he was away serving his country.
Some of Mike's National Guard friends who have already served a tour in Iraq came too. One by one, they made the same pledge: Don't worry about your family. Take care of business over there. We've got your back.
I wish I had been there to see and hear it. On second thought, it's probably best that I wasn't. I find it hard enough even to think about it without getting emotional. We hear a lot about how most Americans aren't sharing the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
their families back home. But that's not true of the men and women of Starhill.
It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. All those bombings, explosions, assassinations: we are driven to believe that they are, so to speak, spontaneous.
When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease? The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn’t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.
... There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma.
One more, ahem, defeatist for the usual suspects to denounce...
A soldier-reader in either Iraq or Afghanistan who posts here under the name "AnotherBeliever" put this on the most recent war thread here last night. Well worth reading:
We soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, even those of us who are not banging down doors on patrols, do feel a little bitter and alienated from the rest of you. Especially when you complain about little things. You are perfectly safe and have 18 brands of toothpaste to choose from. Your schools and buses are not blowing up everyday, you are not being mortared by night, you aren't spending parts of everyday trying to calculate if gunfire is being aimed AT you, and if so, how far away it is. We watch and experience these things every day. We come home, and people see us in uniform, and sort of look the other way. It ain't what it used to be.
General Petraeus is rock star to us. He calls it like it is, acknowledges our hard work and sacrifice. He knows we might not succeed, that we will be in more danger for longer tours in country, and that many of us will die in the process. But his honesty and inspiration are enough to keep us going. When he says that more commitment is needed, and more over time, however, I hope that means more will be asked of the average American than an extended shopping spree.
But even after Iraq, we have a long way to go. Especially since the current administration doesn't think too highly of diplomacy. I will go no further down that road.
LTC Yingling's comments were published in an unofficial journal which openly states that its purpose is free and open discourse. He has a few good points. Conformity and loyalty and supremely important in the armed forces, ESPECIALLY in the higher ranks. Us juniors at the bottom of the heap can only cause so much damage by insubordination. But at the top, it risks everything below breaking down. Inexcusable in war or peacetime. The Lieutenant Colonel may well suffer for his words. But I hope that they will be heeded anyway. The loyalty must not extend past the point of moral courage.
We have, as a nation, entrusted a great deal to General Petraeus. Let him play it out for another six months. Things are not going to work out perfectly to our advantage. A stable government in Iraq will likely NOT be a great power-sharer. The most likely outcome: it will be a Shia-dominated Iran-friendly government which will curtail sharply the civil liberties of its minority citizens (of a necessity, as the Sunnis will continue to cause mayhem until we withdraw, and then will tone things down but still cause damage on a regular basis.) If it can do this without killing or openly persecuting very many of them, I think we will have to take it, and hand power over to it, and go home somewhat gracefully. We may very well have to settle for stability only slightly better than Saddam's regime. Because I don't see partition working out peacefully. Read up on the split of India and Pakistan sometime. And I don't foresee these people willingly choosing to compromise.
My heart goes out to those Iraqis who helped us, and who have fled Iraq for their lives, and who wait in refugee camps for someone to take them in. Our government has shown no signs of being willing to do this.
1. Saith Ruth Gledhill, the BBC will air, as part of its Sunday worship programming, a recording of a "gay mass" from San Francisco's church of the Most Holy Redeemer, a Catholic congregation in the Castro. The event happened last October. A spokesman for the Archdiocese of San Francisco denied that it was a "gay mass," but rather merely a prayer service. Oh. That changes everything.
2. A conservative Anglican missionary in Africa was poisoned in Malawi, after he successfully campaigned against a liberal London cleric from being appointed bishop there. There is no doubt that the priest, Canon Rodney Hunter, died from poisoning. The question is, who did it? The priest's family say that supporters of the liberal Londoner had spent the last few months making Canon Hunter's life hell. TMatt wonders how come nobody outside the blogosphere is paying attention to this story.
3. Courage Man makes a great point about how the dirty rotten way ex-New Jersey Gov. Jim "I Am a Gay American" McGreevey treated his wife and family in the course of carrying on his affair with a male paramour has gotten a pass from the media culture -- a pass that was (quite rightly) denied to Newt Gingrich for the way he treated one of his wives at the break-up. CM also notes other double standards being applied to McGreevey concerning his conduct -- stuff that if a straight politician were doing it, would be cause for outrage -- concluding that the media are giving the sleazy love guv a break because of his membership in the Oppressed Americans demographic.
According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him:
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
And in today's NY Times it says that more than a ¼ of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished. The article continues with a lot of head scratching as to why but sort of says “gee, we dunno.”
In Speigel, the German newsmagazine, they say, “Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.”
A month or so ago I read a similar article that said the bees were disappearing out west. Then, a few weeks later, I read a seemingly unrelated article that said that growers of GM tangerines were furious with beekeepers for allowing their bees to wander into the GM-planted fields.
We don't know, but Byrne suggests that genetically modified crops could be at fault. Could he be right? Anybody know? I am skeptical of Frankenfood alarmism, but if a connection could be made between the die-off of bees and GM food, that would be catastrophic.
This week I read "Plenty," a book written by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who started the famous "100 Mile Diet" (only eating food raised within 100 miles of where you live). The book tells the story of what it was like to live for a year on the diet. What the authors bring out beautifully is what doing the diet, and thinking about food and food culture, taught them about the spiritual crisis of our rootless modern condition. These aren't religious people, but the concern they write of is in part religious. From the book:
My whole generation, I think, feels these tensions. No one I know seems able to settle in one calling or one place. It no longer seems believable that there once were people who spent a lifetime working on a single illuminated manuscript. This is an era not of spiritual dedication but of spiritual shopping -- of shopping, period. We have delayed or abandoned every form of commitment -- from marriage to child-rearing -- with the exception of debt. ...A part of us seems to hunger for collapse -- for the moment when we are truly forced to change.
This 100 Mile Diet seems to me like a secular version of a religious fast: it seeks to reorient the individual, to remind him of Things That Are, and of our radical dependence, despite the illusion of freedom. In fact, as Wendell Berry has written, it's a form of un-freedom to be at the mercy of industrialized and globalized agriculture. If the transportation system breaks down, and you're not able to eat because your food can't be shipped in from halfway around the world, how free are you? And spiritually, what does it do to your understanding of the world and your place in it when eating becomes an entirely commercial and abstract act? Writes Berry (from "What Are People For?"):
Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.
If you go here, you can punch in your zip code and get a map telling you what the 100-mile radius from your home is. Could you survive if all your food and drink had to come from within that radius? When my dad was a little boy back in rural Louisiana in the 1930s, they pretty much lived the 100-Mile Diet all the time, especially with hunting, fishing and growing gardens. My dad tells me if hard times come again, he'd know how to feed himself and his family. Me, I don't have a clue. I haven't had to learn it like he did back in the day. But it bothers me that there's not a local agriculture within a hundred miles of where I live capable of supplying an adequate amount of food for my area in case of crisis. Granted, I do live in one of the biggest cities in America, so it's not really fair to expect 100 miles to feed all of us. Still, it's a point well worth considering.
Last night at bedtime, I read around in E.B. Sledge's WW2 memoir "With the Old Breed." Not the thing to read before sleep. Sledge was a Marine who fought heroically on Peliliu, Okinawa and other island hellholes. He writes of unimaginable savagery, and of seeing good, decent, brave American men reduced to primitives by combat. Paul Fussell calls this book one of the most important memoirs to come out of that war, and Ken Burns was deeply affected by Sledge's book in the making of his forthcoming documentary (Sledge died a few years ago).
Like Fussell, who wrote his own deeply affecting memoir of World War II, Sledge is a conscious witness to the "insanity" (his word) of war. He never doubts the necessity of the Second World War, but he does write with great force and purity of how alienated he and other soldiers were from the folks back home, who had no idea -- and who could have no real idea -- what kind of terror their soldiers were undergoing. It wasn't so much blaming the folks back home (though Sledge did say that men who had had to kill and watch their buddies be killed had zero patience for Americans who whined about small things) as it was a shock at the unreality with which those who didn't live with combat saw life.
I was thinking about Sledge and his men this morning when I read about how former CIA director George Tenet is now saying -- here's a quote from him -- "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."
Think about that. The president and his inner circle, according to someone who was there, never seriously discussed whether or not Iraq was a clear and present danger to our country. They apparently just assumed it was, and went forward. They were determined to start this war, facts or logic or prudence be damned.
And now look: Gen. Petraeus says that the U.S. effort "clearly is going to require enormous commitment and commitment over time," and that the fight in Iraq "may get harder before it gets easier." More American lives. More resources taken from an already strained military. Without an end in sight.
And for what? Bush shellacks the Democrats for pushing for an "artificial timetable" to leave Iraq, but all Bush promises is an open-ended commitment, with no plausible explanation of how our soldiers are supposed to succeed in stopping a civil war. The timetable passed by the Democrats is a bad option. But what the president offers is worse.
How much more of this kind of thing do we have to see before we understand what's right in front of our eyes? Please read it. Please. Read. It. It is a searing indictment of America's generals, published in the Armed Forces Journal and written by Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, deputy commander of the 3rd Army Cavalry Regiment. Here's the lede:
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimat
e of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
This officer is risking his career to sound the alarm. Lt. Col. Yingling clearly wishes to differentiate himself from the conformist officers who have helped lead the country and its military to the Iraq disaster:
While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.
Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.
It is clear that we cannot win in Iraq. We have to end this thing, and let the chips fall where they may. We have to have accountability at the senior level of our military, and certainly within the civilian leadership (the 2006 election was only the first steps toward accountability; the coming 2008 blowout will be the next one). We have got to rebuild ourselves and our institutions, because the enemy, who has won a substantial victory because of the foolishness of our civilian and military leadership, the press corps (mea maxima culpa) and yes, even the American people, most of whom were all too eager to send our men into war (again, mea maxima culpa). As Lt. Col. Yingling writes, "The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War."
But the first thing we have to do is get out of Iraq. And remember Robert Novak's words: "Always love your country -- but never trust your government!
Oh my. Bob Novak reports that Bush has tunneled down deep and is not, not, not going to abandon Gonzales, no matter how much it costs him:
Such derision of Gonzales is viewed by Bush as the arrogance of Washington, and he seems determined not to appease that mind-set. For now at least, the president refuses to yield on grounds that Gonzales -- whatever his shortcomings -- broke no laws.
Bush's position, however, may be undermined by an unexpected development this week. It was announced that a little-known government agency -- the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, headed by Scott J. Bloch -- has launched an investigation into possible illegal White House political participation in the case of the U.S. attorneys firings. The irony here was not noted in early news accounts.
Bloch, a devout Catholic, has been under attack for three years in leading the independent investigative agency because of his interpretation of statutes covering workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also has been publicly accused of hiring too many Catholics. Clay Johnson, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and another Texan brought to Washington by Bush, joined the attack on Bush-appointee Bloch. The case became a cause celebre on the right when Bloch was told by a prominent Catholic layman close to Bush that it would be better if he just resigned.
Now, the tables are turned, with Bloch investigating the White House.
If you want to hear despair in Washington these days, talk to Republicans. The Democrats are exulting in their newfound political power and are eager to profit from Bush's difficulties. But Republicans voice the bitterness and frustration of people chained to the hull of a sinking ship.
I spoke with a half-dozen prominent GOP operatives this past week, most of them high-level officials in the Reagan and Bush I and Bush II administrations, and I heard the same devastating critique: This White House is isolated and ineffective; the country has stopped listening to President Bush, just as it once tuned out the hapless Jimmy Carter; the president's misplaced sense of personal loyalty is hurting his party and the nation.
"This is the most incompetent White House I've seen since I came to Washington," said one GOP senator. "The White House legislative liaison team is incompetent, pitiful, embarrassing. My colleagues can't even tell you who the White House Senate liaison is. There is rank incompetence throughout the government. It's the weakest Cabinet I've seen." And remember, this is a Republican talking.
A prominent conservative complains: "With this White House, there is loyalty not to an idea, but to a person. When Republicans talked about someone in the Reagan administration being 'loyal,' they didn't mean to Ronald Reagan but to the conservative movement." Bush's stubborn defense of Gonzales offends these Republicans, who see the president defiantly clinging to an official who has lost public confidence, just as he did for too long with former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
You see the news that Toyota has passed General Motors to become the world's No. 1 car retailer? In this interview with a BusinessWeek automotive correspondent, Toyota's top US auto executive explains that money isn't the most important arbiter of successful business practices:
[Reporter:] I remember a story related to me by a supplier company: They entered into a contract to supply axles for pickup trucks. It was the first contract his company had with Toyota. He said he was awarded the contract with no discussion of price. It was all based on whether his company's processes and quality were acceptable to Toyota. He was flabbergasted. Is that a common way Toyota does business?
[Executive:] Toyota's thinking based on the Toyota Way is teamwork with suppliers. This teamwork is going to be a long-lasting relationship. Price is only one element. Trust is a more important element. The relationship is a sharing concept, and should always be win-win. Price is important, too. But trust is perhaps more so. This is an idea that American business schools have come to preach. IBM (IBM), General Electric (GE), and other companies talk about how important the mission of the company is. Toyota is only doing intelligently what the business schools are teaching.
In the church when you get married, the priest or minister doesn't ask each partner how much each will get from the other in terms of money. You're asked about how well you get along. What is your commitment to one another? [Emphasis mine -- RD] Now, in real-life situations, some companies practice this, and some don't. Some practice this in the U.S. Some don't. It's the same in Japan. So there are fantastic achievements in both countries, and there are bankruptcies in both countries. So, it isn't a Japanese issue or an American issue. It's a company-culture issue.
The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns was in Dallas last night to give a talk at an awards dinner. I was lucky enough to hear his speech, which included showing clips from his upcoming 14.5-hour PBS documentary "The War," which is about World War II. It tells the story of WWII from the perspective of four American towns: Waterbury, Conn., Luverne, Minn., Mobile, Ala., and Sacramento, Calif. Burns went to those towns and talked to people who had participated in the war -- soldiers, families, workers on the homefront, anyone who had anything to do with the war and was willing to talk about it (which turned out to be harder than you might think, Burns said; there are many, many men who fought in that war who will go to their graves without ever really talked about what they lived through). The film looks fantastic, and I can't wait to see it.
Burns came by the newspaper earlier in the day to meet with a few of us from the editorial board, because we wanted to know about the dust-up with Latinos over "The War." Some Latino activists were put out because in their view, "The War" ignores the contribution Latino soldiers made to the war effort. Never mind the fact that no Latinos lived in those cities during the war, or if they did they didn't come forward to be interviewed. There's no way to tell how big the US Latino population was during the war years; the US Census didn't start measuring for Latinos until 1970. But today, they're America's largest ethnic group. Contemporary activists got organized, got the Hispanic caucus in Congress behind them, and prevailed upon PBS to force Burns to add Latino material to his already-finished film. They're still not happy: Burns had to hire a Latino filmmaker to help him put together an extra hour of Latino-focused material, but the activists demand that Burns re-edit his finished film to insert the Latino stuff into the body of the work instead of being tacked on at the end.
Yesterday in meeting with us, Burns insisted that this was a win-win situation. He said that he works for public broadcasting, and the public has a right to have its say, and he was pleased to have listened. I can't tell if he really means it, or if this is the Official Story, but I have my suspicions.
Personally, I think it's an outrage what was done to Ken Burns here, and it sets a dangerous precedent. Let me be clear: this is not about denigrating the sacrifice and service of the hundreds of thousands of Latino soldiers in WW2. To me, this is about art and politics.
If PBS lets a special interest group do this to Ken Burns, of all people, they'll let them do it to anybody. (Here in Dallas, the local public TV station KERA cravenly allowed Muslim leaders to scotch the airing of a documentary on the Middle East peace process on the virtual eve of its broadcast -- even though the filmmaker had worked with the station for years, and was respected for his films). I completely agree that the public has a right to have input on art that tax dollars fund -- even to the point of refusing to fund it. I covered the NEA controversy in the 1990s, and the utter arrogance of the arts bureaucracy, and the contempt they had for legitimate questions and concerns posed by the people who paid their salaries, were startling to see up close. If a majority of the American people don't want their tax dollars to pay for sadomasochistic and pornographic art, they have the right in our democracy to refuse to pay for it.
But the right of the public to have a say over the art that it pays for can't be unlimited. Once an art project has been green-lighted, and even finished, it's unconscionable to force the artist to make changes to suit a special interest group's political agenda. I thought, for example, it was a scandal that the NEA endowed work by this sicko (who, in one performance, soaked paper with his HIV-infected blood and sent it sailing on a clothesline out over the panicked audience). But having done so, the artist should be free of the obligation to suffer meddling from arts bureaucrats who want to change his work as a result of political pressure. On that principle, if PBS thought the Burns project was kosher when they approved it from the start, they should have left it alone, period. Will any ethnic group that doesn't feel that the Burns documentary gives a proper shout-out to its WW2 vets step up to demand redress? On what grounds will PBS deny them?
Like I said, a dangerous precedent here. If a group of politically organized conservative Christians were to round up a posse in Congress and demand that PBS alter this upcoming pro-atheism documentary to be more fair or accurate, in their view, to religious believers, what would PBS say? What they should say is, "Go jump in the lake, we're not about to alter this film to suit you or anybody else" or even better, "Go jump in the lake, we're not about to alter this film to suit you. But if you have a proposal for a documentary telling a different angle of belief and disbelief, we'd like to hear it." Somehow, I think PBS would find its spine if Bill Donahue and Jerry Falwell came calling.
By capitulating like this to activists and politicians, and siding with them against the artist, PBS has left itself with no ground to stand on next time it gets bullied by the politically correct and politically connected. And believe me, it will.
WASHINGTON, April 24 — Melamine, the chemical suspected in the deaths of pets around the country, was in food given to hogs and chickens in several states, and the Food and Drug Administration is trying to determine if the animals entered the human food supply, F.D.A. officials said Tuesday.
Go ahead, laugh at we who work hard to eat meat raised naturally, not factory-farmed.
First Lady Laura Bush, on the Today show this morning, was asked about the war and its effect. She answered: “Believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this.”
Writing on today's NYT op-ed page, Linda Hirshman says it's just awful that more women are dropping out of the work force to become stay-at-home moms:
New mothers with husbands in the top 20 percent of earnings work least, the report notes. As Ernest Hemingway said, the rich do have more money. So they also have more freedom to leave their jobs. But why do they take the option? It’s easier in the short term, sure, but it’s easier to forgo lots of things, like going to college or having children at all. People don’t — nor should they — always do the easier thing.
What an insulting, ignorant remark. The easier thing? When I get home at the end of most days, no matter how difficult a time I've had at the office, it's not been as demanding as my wife has had raising three small children and taking care of the house. In what sense do stay-at-home moms take the "easier" route? They, and their families, give up the extra income, as well as the personal satisfaction obtainable through office work. They also give up the security of having built a career to fall back on if something were to happen to their husbands, leaving them the sole breadwinner. They invite the scorn of many in their generation who, like Linda Hirshman, denigrate homemaking.
And for what? For the sake of putting their children first, and not handing them off to strangers to raise.
Everybody gets pissy about this issue, because women on both sides feel judged by the other side. I don't want to get into that fight. I know mothers who work because they choose to, and I know mothers who work because they have to to make ends meet. Julie and I chose the stay-at-home option because we believe it's the right thing to do, but also because we are fortunate enough to be able to afford it. Contra Linda Hirshman, it was in no way an easy decision to make.
Hirshman again:
Should we care if women leave the work force? Yes, because participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society. And once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had.
Yes, because you see, children raised with the emotional security and character-building opportunities that come with having their mothers fully available to them at home, their mothers aren't using their talents "to powerfully affect society." Because in Hirshman World, the only measures that count are income and professional status. What elitist nonsense.
Hirshman:
That the most educated have opted out the most should raise questions about how our society allocates scarce educational resources. The next generation of girls will have a greatly reduced pool of role models.
In Hirshman World, education is only useful if it can be applied to salaried work. None of the liberal education that my children's mother received at university could possibly be of use in forming the character and the intellect of our three. We have a little girl, actually, and I think her mother and the other intelligent, well-educated women we know who have chosen to put family over career are exemplary role models for her, even if she ultimately chooses to become a career woman (and I'm grateful that our girlchild has that path open to her).
Hirshman:
Labor statistics are always couched in such dry language, but it reveals a powerful reality: working mothers, rich and poor, struggle with their competing commitments. Now that we have seen the reality, it is time to address it.
Here's a powerful reality: women struggle with their competing commitments because they can't have it all. I'd be in favor of changing laws or the tax code to help working women -- many of whom have no choice but to work, given our econom
y -- better balance the demands made on them. But what I strongly reject is the idea that there is nothing lost to children of two-income families who spend a lot of time being raised by strangers in childcare. If that's the choice you make, Linda, own it. Don't try to make yourself feel better about the choice you made by putting down women who have made the difficult and countercultural choice to be a traditional mom.
Four years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, Spengler hailed the ongoing release of the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy as "the most important cultural event of the past decade" (a claim he backtracked on later). In this fascinating analysis, Spengler compares Tolkien's trilogy to Wagner's Ring cycle, and contends that Tolkien sought to take the source material that inspired Wagner's great work -- the collapse of the spiritual foundation of the West -- and redeem it:
He did not emulate Wagner's Ring, but he recast the materials into an entirely new form. "Recast" is an appropriate expression. A memorable scene in Wagner shows Siegfried filing the shards of his father's sword into dust, and casting a new sword out of the filings. That, more or less, is what Tolkien accomplished with the elements of Wagner's story. Wagner will still haunt the stages of opera houses, but audiences will see him through Tolkien's eyes.
What does one do when the immortals depart? One acts with simple English decency and tenacity, says Tolkien, and accepts one's fate. The Lord of the Rings is an anti-epic (as Norman Cantor puts it), whose protagonist is a weak, vulnerable and reluctant Hobbit, as opposed to the strong, wound-proof and fearless Siegfried. The Hobbit Frodo Baggins does his duty because he must. "I wish the Ring had never come to me! I wish none of this had happened!" he exclaims to the wizard Gandalf, who replies: "So do all that come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." No utopian is Gandalf; what one must do is to muddle through.
Now, Spengler returns with a review of the "new" Tolkien book, "The Children of Hurin." Excerpt:
With the reconstruction of the young Tolkien's prehistory of Middle-earth, we discern a far broader purpose: to recast as tragedy the heroic myths of pre-Christian peoples, in which the tragic flaw is the pagan's tribal identity. Tolkien saw his generation decimated, and his circle of friends exterminated, by the nationalist compulsions of World War I; he saw the cult of Siegfried replace the cult of Christ during World War II. His life's work was to attack the pagan flaw at the foundation of the West. [snip] Tolkien is a writer of greater theological depth than his Oxford colleague C S Lewis, in my judgment. Lewis is a felicitous writer and a diligent apologist, but mere allegory along the lines of the Narnia series can do no more than restate Christian doctrine; it cannot really expand our experience of it. Tolkien takes us to the dark frontier of a world that is not yet Christian, and therefore is tragic, but has the capacity to become Christian. It is the world of the Dark Ages, in which barbarians first encounter the light. It is not fantasy, but rather a distillation of the spiritual history of the West. Whereas C S Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children's masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us.
Archbishop Chaput has written the most important thing you will read today. I cannot say enough good things about this talk and its significance. It explores Kirk's view that conservatism is built on a fundamental recognition that the material order rests on a spiritual foundation. Excerpts:
Only one question really matters. Does God exist or not? If he does, that has implications for every aspect of our personal and public behavior: all of our actions, all of our choices, all of our decisions. If God exists, denying him in our public life—whether we do it explicitly like Nietzsche or implicitly by our silence—cannot serve the common good, because it amounts to worshiping the unreal in the place of the real. [snip] But Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness.
Religious believers built this country. Christians played a leading role in that work. This is a fact, not an opinion. Our entire framework of human rights is based on a religious understanding of the dignity of the human person as a child of his or her Creator.
The archbishop is making the point that in our attempt to exile God from public discussion -- such as the effort launched today in Washington by religious progressives seeking to marginalize the orthodox religious perspective from public health practics as "sectarian" -- is an ideologically motivated campaign that is not true to American history, and worse, that's a betrayal of metaphysical truth. He goes on to talk about the final essays of the French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, and what Bernanos had to say about the signs of the times:
Regnery published the lectures in English in 1955 as The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos.[N.B., it's out of print, but Alibris.com has a couple of copies left; I just ordered one. -- RD] I hope you’ll read them for yourselves. They’re outstanding. Bernanos had an unblinkered vision of the “signs of the times.” Remember that, just after the Second World War, France experienced a Catholic revival. Recovering from a global conflict and the Holocaust, the world in general and France in particular seemed to turn back—briefly—to essentials. It was during that hopeful season that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council gave us Gaudium et Spes.
But Bernanos always saw the problems beneath the veneer. He wasn’t fooled by the apparent revival of Catholic France. And so his work is a great corrective to the myth that our moral confusion started in the 1960s. As Bernanos makes clear, our problems began with the machine age—the industrial revolution—but not simply because of machines. They were the fruit of a “de-spiritualization” that had been going on for some time.
Bernanos argues that the optimism of the modern West is a kind of whistling past the graveyard. The Christian virtue of hope, he reminds us, is a hard and strong thing that disciplines and “perfects” human appetites. It has nothing to do with mere optimism. Real Christian hope comes into play as the obstacles to human happiness seem to grow higher.
Bernanos takes it upon himself to show us just how high the obstacles to real human freedom have become, even in liberal democracies. He argues that our modern optimism is a veneer over a despair bred by our greed and materialism. We try to fool ourselves that everything will turn out for the best, despite all the evidence to the contrary—crime, terrorism
, disease, poverty—and we even concoct a myth of inevitable progress to shore up our optimism. American optimism in particular—Bernanos refers to the United States bitterly as “the Rome, the Mecca, the holiest sanctuary of this civilization”—is really only the eager restlessness of unsatisfied appetites.
Two themes dominate these last essays by Bernanos. The first is man’s eagerness to abolish, forget, or rewrite his own history in favor of determinisms like liberal capitalism, which makes society nothing more than a market system, and Marxism. For Bernanos, the attack on human memory and history is a primary mark of the Antichrist.
As Bernanos explains it, big ideological systems “mechanize” history with high-sounding language like progress and dialectics. But in doing so, they wipe out the importance of both the past—which they describe as primitive, unenlightened, or counterrevolutionary—and the present, which is not yet the paradise of tomorrow. The future is where salvation is to be found for every ideology that tries to eliminate God, whether it’s explicitly atheistic or pays lip service to religious values. Of course, this future never arrives, because progress never stops and the dialectic never ends.
Christianity and Judaism see life very differently.
If I quoted everything vital and liberating that Abp Chaput said in this essay, which began as a speech he delivered last week in Philadelphia, I'd quote the whole thing. Just go to the First Things site and read it yourself. One more bit:
The “common good” is more than a political slogan. It’s more than what most people think they want right now. It’s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It can’t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.
The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. That’s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity.
That, readers, is what is called speaking truth to the Powers that Be. God bless the Catholic Archbishop of Denver for his words. As the battle lines become clearer and clearer, we are going to need prophetic voices like his.
Photographer Norris Harrington photographed an eerie statue at Dallas's Fair Park. Look at the interesting shadow cast by this statue; it brings to mind the statue of the demon Pazuzufrom the Exorcist movies. Ever so slightly creepy, that.
A reader in Singapore sends this cool video clip of a Bjork-like singer named Feist, who sounds like a non-insane Bjork (did you see Bjork on SNL over the weekend? Banshee time, have mercy!). It reminds me of an obscure Norwegian pop trio, Tre Sma Kinesere, I fell for 13 years ago, on a trip to the Land of Seven-Dollar Beers. Anyway, I heard this morning about a leading Swedish journalist who reads this blog (big shout-out to the Swedish Catholics in the house!).
Which makes me wonder: this blog has readers in Russia, in Germany and England -- that we know from the comments boxes. I'm wondering where else outside the United States this blog has readers. I'm also wondering how this crunchy-con sensibility applies in other countries, and how much of it is specific to the United States. My friend Fred Gion, who lives in Paris, read the book and tells me that so much of its concerns are quite congenial to traditional conservatism as it's understood in France. That's not the case in the US. How about where you live? And where do you live?
Readers continue to write me privately about Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita." One non-Christian reader wrote to say that in his reading, the first chapter offers insight into the Orthodox mind because of the way the Devil says that in the face of death, what matters is not a rational defense of the Faith (the Catholic response, according to Bulgakov), but an acceptance of man's absolute helplessness, which, if I'm reading my correspondent correctly, calls forth an irrational response (e.g., casting oneself upon the mercy of God). Hmm. Makes me wonder if the anti-ecclesial Protestant Soren Kierkegaard would have made a good Orthodox Christian.
Reader Scott Galupo at the Washington Times points out that The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" was inspired by Bulgakov's novel. And an Orthodox monk in Germany writes:
I've read the book twice, visited several of the places in Moscow mentioned in the book (including Patriarchs' Ponds and the scene of the decapitation -- in fact there are now sculptures there depicting the conversation between the editor and the poet). I'm also an Orthodox monk and deacon, as well as a former seminary teacher.
As much as I enjoy the book for its dark humor, wild imagination, and wicked satire, I can pretty well assure you that you'll learn nothing about the Orthodox mind from reading it. Bulgakov's father was a professor of theology, and Bulgakov himself had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the Church, to say the least. The book is a cult favorite in Russia (the fictional apartment where much of the action of the novel takes place has been made into a shrine whose only American parallel is Jim Morrison's grave in Paris), and a good bit has been written about the novel from an Orthodox perspective in Russian, most of it negative.
I'm so curious about this novel now! One of these days, we should start a book club on this blog, where we all read the same book and talk about it. I simply don't have the time to do that now, in part because I'm going to be moderating an online book club at the Dallasnews.com site this summer. Still, maybe this fall we can read "The Master and Margarita" together.
The most obnoxious thing about this Tony Auth cartoon depicting the Supreme Court justices who ruled in the majority on the partial-birth decision as Christian bishops is its facile assumption that the only reason anybody could oppose partial-birth abortion is religious. The second-most obnoxious thing is its facile assumption that religion should have no bearing on discussions of public morality. One wonders if Auth would have depicted the SCOTUS majority in Brown v. Board in clerical collars, and made a snide "church and state" remark, because of the religious cast of public opposition to segregation. Actually, one doesn't wonder at all. Not one little bit.
A soldier serving in Afghanistan wants to know how come President Bush orders flags lowered at his Afghanistan base to commemorate the deaths of the Virginia Tech students, but not the deaths of US soldiers based there.
I had a conversation today with a colleague about why it is that the professoriat seems so irrelevant to the national conversation. Why are all our public intellectuals either think-tankers or journalists? One reason Camille Paglia is so captivating is that whether or not you think she's a loon, she's at least attempting to communicate big ideas to the wider public. My colleague and I agreed that academics spend so much time talking only to each other, in that specialty jargon that any clerisy uses to talk shop, that they have forgotten how to speak of important things to ordinary people. Which is a shame, because it does neither academics nor the public much good for neither side to be able to talk to each other.
My conversation brought to mind a close friend from undergraduate days. I went to work straightaway in journalism, and he went on to work on advanced degrees in comparative literature and German. He came back home to visit once from his master's program, and I wrangled an assignment for him to review a new production of a German play. I thought he would enjoy using his expertise to write a review for a daily newspaper. Well, he saw the play ... and couldn't write about it. He sat in front of a computer terminal at the newspaper for hours before finally giving up. This man was, and is, brilliant, but he could not find a way to make his interpretation of the play comprehensible for a general audience. It was strange to me to see that -- my friend, an eloquent conversationalist, reduced by his academic training to churning out lit-crit jargon -- but since those days, I've come across it time and time again in my professional work.
Steve Hutchens of Touchstone talks about the phenomenon here. I think some academics like to think that they're taking a stand against dumbing things down. Well, maybe, but more often than not, I'd say they're trying to hide their inability to write clearly and persuasively behind what they like to think of as high principle. What think ye?
I'm working right now on an editorial about the life and times of Boris Yeltsin. Two images come to mind, both of which tell us something true about him. The first was his standing on top of the tank outside the Russian White House, defying the Soviet military coup. The second is his drunkenly conducting an orchestra in Germany. You can't take away the man's courage. But you can't ignore his terrible failings. If Yeltsin hadn't let the oligarchs run wild, would we have authoritarian Putin to worry about today? But: could anyone have done a better job running post-Soviet Russia than Yeltsin?
A big man with a ruddy face and white hair, he was full of peasant bluster — what the Russians call a real muzhik — and came to Moscow with a genuine warmth and concern for his countrymen.
During a visit to the United States in 1989, he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by the centralized, state-run economic system where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare.
He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.”
He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “’I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.”’ An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
Edward Cardinal Egan, the Archbishop of New York, gives an interview to the New York Times today. When asked why he hasn't followed the lead of other archdioceses and made his archdiocese's financial report public -- after all, whose money is it, anyway, if not the donations of the faithful? -- the cardinal delivered a quintessentially Eganesque response:
Cardinal Egan considers the idea for a second or two, and offers a smile more suggestive of steel than humor. Wall Street titans sit on his finance council and study his ledgers. The cardinal sees no point in public inspection.
“I am transparent to the best possible people,” he said in a rare interview in his 20th floor office on First Avenue in Manhattan. “So when you say, ‘We don’t know,’ well, my ‘we’ knows.”
The best possible people. How Eganesque. In a world of uncertainty, it's good to know some things never change.
1. In a column I wrote last week, adapted from a blog post here, I mentioned that discovering Kierkegaard in college helped lift me out of my freshman-year depression and introduced me to the living Christian faith as an adult. Well, the column went out on the wire, and was picked up by a newspaper read by the son and daughter in law of Howard and Edna Hong, the great translators of Kierkegaard. It was the Hongs' translation that I read back in the day. The Hongs' daughter in law kindly wrote me to mention that her mother-in-law died three weeks ago at age 94, but that Howard still lives on, and would probably enjoy hearing from me. I'll write to him this week. What a gift the Hongs gave to the world with their translations, and their life of faith and scholarship. Any English-speaking admirer of Kierkegaard owes much to the Hongs.
2. A non-Orthodox friend e-mailed the other day to say that a Russian friend told him to read the first chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" if he wanted to understand the Orthodox mind. I was in Borders yesterday on an errand, and stopped to read that chapter. In it, the devil pays a visit to an atheist editor and a poet sitting on a park bench one hot day, and talks to them about atheism and the existence of Jesus. It was a fascinating chapter and I would have bought the book if I didn't have a stack of books at home that I have to get read for various projects. Any of you know anything about "The Master and Margarita," and what that chapter tells us about the Orthodox mind. Masha in Moscow, are you there? Can you help?
Here's my column from today's paper, based on my interview with Camille Paglia. It's probably the only place in the history of the written word you will find the names of Camille Paglia and Russell Kirk in the same paragraph, to say nothing of the phrase "feminist bisexual maniac." Excerpt:
Our cultural crisis is precisely that serious, says Dr. Paglia, who believes – as does Pope Benedict, one of the most cultured men on the planet – that we could well be reliving the last days of the Roman Empire.
"If the elite class sees nothing in the West to defend, we're reproducing this situation of the late Roman Empire, which was very cosmopolitan and very tolerant, but which was undone by forces from within," she says.
What are those who want to conserve the traditional Western humanities as a refuge from cultural barbarism supposed to do? Said Dr. Paglia, emphatically: "It's up to people to educate themselves."
By the way, the reference to the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in the end has to do with the fact that Paglia was interviewed in connection with her role as a judge in a major humanities prize contest administered by the Dallas Institute.
Thank you for Russell Shorto’s insightful article (April 8) on Pope Benedict XVI and his determination to provide a spiritual underpinning for an increasingly secularized West.
The pontiff may well be correct in identifying Christianity as the religious foundation of Europe, as a counterpoint to pathologies of reason and as a religious bridge to Islam. Yet it would seem problematic for the church to advocate for the inclusion of a religious viewpoint within the European cultural debate but be unwilling to suffer dialogue internally on issues of the day, including abortion, priestly celibacy, gay rights, etc. The church under Benedict XVI, sadly, has drawn a clear line as to what constitutes permissible theological debate.
Jim McGreevey
The letter writer, the Democratic governor of New Jersey until he resigned in scandal, sadly disgraced himself by cheating on his wife with a man he put on the state payroll. So I'm not sure he's in any credible position to lecture Pope Benedict on how to run the church when he couldn't even run his own professional or private life with integrity. But we'll leave that for now.
What interests me about this letter is its manifestation of a common complaint from the theological left: the right's supposed unwillingness "to suffer dialogue internally on issues of the day." Of course the last thing the left wants is true dialogue; what it wants is dialogue as a strategy toward getting the church to change its positions. Is there any leftist who would enter into such a dialogue with the remotest awareness that he might emerge from the encounter convinced that the orthodox position is, in fact, the correct one? The point of such dialogue is to keep talking until the orthodox are worn out, and give in.
It must also be admitted that the right -- by which I mean the small-o orthodox -- has nothing to gain from this kind of dialogue. It is inconceivable -- at least from a Catholic/Orthodox point of view -- that the church would change its position on bedrock moral issues like homosexuality and abortion, on which the teaching is long and clear. The only legitimate dialogue, it seems to me, is on how to adapt the traditional and authoritative teachings to modern circumstances. But you don't have real dialogue with people who don't accept the authority in the first place.
This is why I think the Anglicans are going to schism. The progressive and conservative forces don't simply disagree on interpretation of Scripture. They disagree on the ultimate source of authority. They're on the same planet, but come from different worlds.
On the public radio show Open Source recently, Camille Paglia spent most of the hour talking about God. The bisexual ex-Catholic said that she didn't understand why gays didn't have the courage -- her word -- to leave the Catholic Church. She believes the Catholic Church, which she has rejected, should not be expected to change its teachings to suit gays, or anybody else.
UPDATE: I had to leave for church before finishing that final thought. It seems to me that Paglia is somewhat reductive in boiling it down to a lack of courage to leave the Catholic Church (N.B., I don't see in Orthodoxy the same kinds of movements to get the Church to change teachings on homosexuality, women in the priesthood, and the sorts of things that preoccupy much of contemporary Catholicism, though it may be there, I dunno). I think it's wrong as well as futile to think that Catholicism is going to change on these issues to accomodate itself to early 21st-century Americans. I've never understood how it is that Catholics can disagree so fundamentally with their Church and yet remain Catholic. On the other hand,
there is something about Catholicism -- the rituals, the culture -- that gets into your bones. Somebody, can't remember who, said that Catholics who lose their ability to believe become atheists, not some other form of Christian. That's not really true: look at me. Still, I think the general point holds. There's a wonderful book called "Once a Catholic" by Peter Occhiogrosso profiling a diverse group of people, some of whom have left the Church, talking about the way having been Catholic once marked them for life. Frank Zappa's in the book talking about how much he loved the Latin mass. Still, one wishes that dissenters of all stripes would make whatever accomodations they feel they have to, in working out their own salvation, while leaving the Church alone in its doctrine and liturgical practice.
Maybe the Virginia murderer was mentally ill. Maybe he was wicked. Maybe he had been abused by others. Maybe a combination of all these things. Or maybe, as Bible Girl says, Cho Seung-Hui was oppressed or possessed by evil spirit:
I have observed demons being cast out on a few occasions, as well as other spiritual phenomena that I can't identify as easily. (I'll stick with the handful of instances in which I'm confident what I saw wasn't conjured up by an emotionally disturbed or exhibitionistic individual, because I've seen that too.) What I witnessed doesn't fit any natural explanation I could come up with.
(Oh, go ahead and reach for your own. But try to wrestle down your prejudices of Third-World people before you do.)
In a Pentecostal church in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, I saw a boy of about 10 drop to the floor during a service and begin speaking in a deep, guttural grown man's voice--yep, not unlike the "demon" voices you hear in horror movies. He spoke in fluent, complex English, employing biblical imagery and terminology, among people who were much more comfortable in their native dialect (generally Igbo).
At the same service I saw an adult woman fall to the floor and begin rolling around with such force -- no, she wasn't having a seizure, she was rolling -- that she scattered a bunch of plastic chairs in every direction.
In one instance in a Western country where I saw a demon cast out, a young woman writhed, arched and twisted with such strength that several men were needed to restrain her. She, too, spoke in a deep, growling man's voice, though I couldn't understand anything that was said.
I know it's challenging to one's worldview to consider that there might be a spiritual realm beyond the limits of time, matter and our ability to comprehend.
But to me, that's a smaller leap of faith than to say a young man killed without mercy because he didn't like rich kids.
Ross notices conservatives like Mark Levin getting all mad at Harry Reid for saying that we've lost the Iraq War, and asks:
Is there any imaginable point in any imaginable conflict where Mark Levin would admit that the United States had lost a war?
Ross goes on to say that he wishes Reid hadn't said what he said, but that it is a metaphysical certitude that the United States, like any country, can, in fact, lose wars. So at what point will these conservative die-hards conclude that yes, in fact, we've lost this particular one?
Answer: never. Why? Because by never conceding that we have lost, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how many American soldiers are dying in vain, the die-hard war backers must protect their future ability to blame the media, the left, the anti-war right, and everybody else for the defeat. We just didn't believe hard enough. Ten, twenty years from now, candidates from this school of thought will be able to run on the myth that the Democrats and the unpatriotic conservatives caused us to lose. And you know, it just might work.
Terry Mattingly sends an amazing WaPo piece about a recent social experiment the Post conducted in a busy DC metro station at rush hour. The post paid Joshua Bell, one of the world's leading classical violinists, to pose as a street musician and play the most beautiful music in the world on his Stradivarius -- this, to see if people would stop and listen.
They didn't. Well, a handful did. Others tried:
The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
How does this happen? How can we walk by beauty like this and not even stop to behold it, if only for a second? Would I have stopped that morning? I don't know. I think now I understand why there is so little beauty in our public spaces in a democratic age, while the age of aristocrats produce more beauty than we can stand. From the story:
In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.
"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?
Yes! What else are we missing?
Then again, the poet W.H. Auden suggests that this tragic indifference to the extraordinary around us is part of the human condition. From his "Musee des Beaux Arts":
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
WASHINGTON - Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
Well, that's just swell ... but no surprise to anyone who has been following the hapless training of Iraqi troops. Like the US officer said on Frontline the other night, we can't be sure if we're not simply equipping the Iraqis to fight a civil war. We cannot be certain of their loyalties at all. Anyway, here's Plan B:
One State Department official, who also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, expressed the same sentiment in blunter terms. "Our strategy now is to basically hold on and wait for the Iraqis to do something," he said.
Actually, it's worse than that, according to this long account from National Journal about the factors playing into the Iraqi endgame. It's an axiom of military strategy that troop withdrawals are dangerous, and get more dangerous as the withdrawal approaches the end. You've got to know what you're doing to get out safely. Excerpt:
The military could take a host of steps to help mitigate the risks of a U.S. troop drawdown, including staging a carefully phased and deliberate withdrawal; continuing U.S. support, and accelerated training and equipping, for the Iraqi forces that must fill the security vacuum; and keeping a residual, albeit smaller, U.S. military presence inside Iraq or around its periphery. But all of those options require the careful planning and hard decision-making that Sinnreich fears are being stymied by the deadlock in Washington. "The downside of this political theater in Washington, and the disingenuous refusal to admit that we've lost the political will to keep American troops heavily engaged in Iraq indefinitely," he said, "is that it keeps military planners from developing a timetable and a deliberate plan for withdrawal." [Emphasis mine -- RD.]
It's almost impossible for the military to seriously plan for a contingency -- withdrawal -- that the commander-in-chief won't even discuss, Sinnreich noted. "The probability that it would leak to the press is too high, and no one in uniform wants to take that chance," he said. "Yet only with deliberate planning will we be able to take some of the sting out of what will surely be seen as a U.S. retreat. My point is, there are defeats -- and then there are defeats."
Megan McArdle, a libertarian who considers herself to be "moderately pro-choice," doesn't like the SCOTUS decision on partial-birth abortion, but believes that America's abortion politics would probably benefit from Roe being overturned and the abortion issue being sent back to the states for decision at the local level. Excerpt:
This argument has a lot of appeal. As one of my colleagues at The Economist pointed out, Europe had the same conversation as America about abortion in the sixties and seventies. The difference is, European countries either passed laws, or submitted the question to referendum. Even those who weren't happy with the outcome felt the process by which it had been reached was legitimate. In America, neither group feels that the Supreme Court's process was morally legitimate--or at least, I infer that pro-choicers do not, since they seem to view an attempt to ban abortion by exactly the same process as a completely illegitimate usurpation of power by conservative ideologues.
But what if, in a Roe-less world, Congress starts making abortion law for the whole country? McArdle wouldn't like it, but:
Still, you have to ask whether a Roe-less world with federal restrictions would be worse than than the status quo. The restrictions that could actually be passed at the Federal level would probably bring our abortion law roughly in line with the rest of the world's: no abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for the life and health of the mother, mental health not being included in those exceptions. That wouldn't actually stop very many abortions, though obviously it would make unhappy anyone who thinks that you should be able to abort right up until the moment the doctor slaps it on the ass.
But even with a suboptimal law--and I'm sure that it would be more restrictive than I'd like, since what I'd like is pretty much no restrictions--would probably be better than the current situation, because as in Europe, the process would legitimate the decision. It would burn out a lot of the energy on both sides for packing the courts in order to legislate from the bench by fiat.
Makes sense to pro-life me. I think McArdle is right that one thing that generates so much passion on my side is the reality that SCOTUS simply invented the constitutional right to abortion out of thin air; thoughtful pro-choice liberals admit that Roe is very shaky as constitutional reasoning, and that it's wrong, or at least has been imprudent, to have given the public no say resolving such a monumental question of public morality. If the polls are correct, overturning Roe would not result in the banning of abortion; in fact, it would result in abortion being somewhat more restricted in most states than it is now, but almost nowhere would abortion be made illegal. It would get both pro-choice and pro-life sides out of the business of making the Supreme Court the be-all and end-all, and force both camps to put their arguments to the public. What's wrong with that?
Alec Baldwin goes medieval on his 12-year-old daughter. If you listen to this phone message, which was released publicly this week by ex-wife Kim Basinger, keep in mind that the actor is talking not to a longshoreman, but to a 12-year-old girl.
I am not a pacifist. The late Rev. George Zabelka wasn't either, but he became one after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Catholic priest here reflects on his role as a military chaplain in the south Pacific during the waning days of World War II, and how he blessed the war machine. This is hard teaching, and I struggle with it. But it's wrong to ignore or dismiss Father Zabelka's witness. This especially got to me, considering what our soldiers in Iraq must be going through:
Zabelka: As a Catholic priest my task was to keep my people, wherever they were, close to the mind and heart of Christ. As a military chaplain I was to try to see that the boys conducted themselves according to the teachings of the Catholic Church and Christ on war. When I look back I am not sure I did either of these things very well.
Q: Why do you think that?
Zabelka: What I do not mean to say is that I feel myself to have been remiss in any duties that were expected of me as a chaplain. I saw that the Mass and the sacraments were available as best I could. I even went out and earned paratrooper wings in order to do my job better. Nor did I fail to teach and preach what the Church expected me to teach and preach – and I don’t mean by this that I just talked to the boys about their sexual lives. I and most chaplains were quite clear and outspoken on such matters as not killing and torturing prisoners. But there were other areas where things were not said quite so clearly.
Q: For example?
Zabelka: The destruction of civilians in war was always forbidden by the Church, and if a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child’s head, I would have told him absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful. But in 1945 Tinian Island was the largest airfield in the world. Three planes a minute would take off from it around the clock. Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands of children and civilians – and I said nothing.
Q: Why not? You certainly knew civilians were being destroyed by the thousands in these raids, didn’t you?
Zabelka: Oh, indeed I did know, and I knew with a clarity that few others could have had.
Q: What do you mean?
Zabelka: As a chaplain I often had to enter the world of the boys who were losing their minds because of something they did in war. I remember one young man who was engaged in the bombings of the cities of Japan. He was in the hospital on Tinian Island on the verge of a complete mental collapse.
He told me that he had been on a low-level bombing mission, flying right down one of the main streets of the city, when straight ahead of him appeared a little boy, in the middle of the street, looking up at the plane in a childlike wonder. The man knew that in a few seconds the child would be burned to death by napalm which had already been released. [Emphasis mine -- RD]
Yes, I knew civilians were being destroyed, and knew it perhaps in a way others didn’t. Yet I never preached a single sermon against killing civilians to men who were doing it.
Q: Again, why not?
Zabelka: Because I was "brainwashed"! It never entered my mind to publicly protest the consequences of these massive air raids. I was told it was necessary; told openly by the military and told implicitly by my Church’s leadership. To the best of my knowledge no American cardinals or bishops were opposing these mass air raids. Silence in such matters, especially by a public body like the American bishops, is a stamp of approval.
The whole structure of the secular, religious, and military society told me clearly that it was all right to "let the Japs have it." God was on the side of my country. The Japanese were the enemy, and I was absolutely certain of
my country’s and Church’s teaching about enemies; no erudite theological text was necessary to tell me. The day-in-day-out operation of the state and the Church between 1940 and 1945 spoke more clearly about Christian attitudes towards enemies and war than St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas ever could.
I've been told that in the Orthodox Church, a soldier has to go to confession and be purified before he can be admitted to communion, even if he has been fighting in a just war. Killing is always a stain, even if it is unavoidable, defensive and licit.
My Dallas Morning News friend and colleague Mike Hashimoto explains why the Cho shooting reaction reminded him why he never bothered joining the Asian American Journalists Association.
I'm often on Derb's side, but Pod's completely right here: it's bizarre and wrong to blame the dead students for not fighting back when, oh, a gun-wielding maniac bursts into their classroom and starts firing. God bless the teachers and students who had the presence of mind to resist. Trust me, most people would be too much in shock to do anything. A reader of mine in Dallas e-mailed to say he was once in what turned out to be an exercise in a law school class. An assistant DA was giving a lecture, and two men burst into the room, fired guns at him, killing him, and fled. My correspondent said the entire class sat frozen through the attack, terrified, unable to move, staring at their dead professor ... who stood up and told them that the entire thing had been staged, and asked them quickly to write down everything they saw. It was an exercise in how stress can make you see things incorrectly -- the students all had substantially different recollections of what they'd seen. The lesson was about how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. But the other lesson was in how sudden fright can paralyze.
If someone kicked in the door to where you're sitting right now, and started firing shots at you and everyone around you, how quickly do you think you would be able to react to it? Seriously.
Pod recommends reading David Maraniss's account of what happened in that classroom. Do it. Do it.
I won't like to David Brooks's column today, because it's behind TimesSelect, and my cookie won't work, so I'm flat out of luck. But it's about how discoveries in neurochemistry and genetics are undermining the idea that we have free will. Or to be more precise, are narrowing the scope of our free will. It seems a lot clearer today than it was yesterday (when I wrote about the plight of the alienated loner, and how it might be ameliorated by kindness) that Cho was seriously psychotic. So while my general point stands about the need to be kind to strangers, David Brooks is surely correct to write: "It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons." Or with friends.
Brooks continues:
But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.
After all, according to research by David Buss, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had a vivid homicidal fantasy. But they didn’t act upon it. They don’t turn other people into objects for their own fulfillment.
There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It’s just that these selves can’t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.
Anti-depressants like Zoloft, Prozac, Effexor and others raise fascinating philosophical questions about the nature of personhood. I've never taken anti-depressants (unless you count Abita beer as an anti-depressant, as I certainly do), but I've had close friends who have and who do, and I think they're amazing, heaven-sent drugs. My friends are men and women who struggled in great pain with clinical depression, which deformed, I think, their character. By which I mean that bearing up under depression was so difficult for them that they could no more be "themselves" as depressives than a man could stand upright with a piano tied to his back. I knew them before depression hit, and afterward; the drug made it possible for them to return to the selves they were before their brain chemistry went haywire. I think the Scientologist campaign against anti-depressants is objectively evil. I really do.
But: if it were possible to drug the entire population to take away anxiety and make for more peaceful social relations, would it be morally licit? If you were the leader in charge of making that decision, would you do so? Would you consider it to be no different than flouridating the water for better health?
Rich Lowry asks if Cho's plays included savage violence and slurs aimed at women or minorities, would Virginia Tech have been so tolerant of his speech, or would they have taken concrete measures against him? It's a great question, not because Cho is useful for beating up on PC, but because it really does raise serious questions about what we in liberal society consider threatening -- in particular, what we consider threatening enough to act against.
In the coverage and commentary on the Virginia Tech massacre I see no signs that America has learned the lesson it needs to learn if such events are to be prevented in the future. Thus President Bush and many others call the crime "senseless." But there was nothing senseless about it. A young man, deeply alienated and isolated and filled with hatred, was descending ever deeper into demonism and openly revealing his homicidal imaginings and impulses to the people around him. This is a well-known phenomenon. Something very similar happened just a few years ago at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The pattern is understood. There was nothing senseless about the killer's behavior. It was entirely intelligible.
The horror crying out to be explained here is not the killer's motives and actions, but society's failure to stop him even though he had clearly and repeatedly manifested his sick and murderous thoughts. People don't want to try to explain society's failure to stop him, because that would require criticizing the ruling beliefs of society that precluded his being stopped...
I was overjoyed yesterday by it, but on second thought, Ross is rightl, it's not as big a deal as pro-lifers wish it were or pro-choicers fear it is. Excerpt:
Remarkably successful? Because a quarter-century after Roe vs. Wade, in a country where majorities are at least sympathetic to pro-life aims, pro-lifers have managed to pass some parental notification laws and ban exactly one (particularly barbaric) abortion procedure nationwide?
Everybody's talking about how this ruling will make abortion rights front and center in the 2008 presidential race. I think Republicans will cower and dissemble, but they really should welcome this discussion. Make Democrats explain why it's a threat to the republic to ban an abortion procedure that requires puncturing the skull of a partially-born child and sucking her brains out. Even though a clear majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade, only about one in four supports making partial-birth abortion legal. This ruling is a winning issue for Republicans!
Moreover, I think it's probably true -- does anybody have hard numbers, though? -- that most Americans are under the impression that if Roe were overturned, abortion would be illegal in this country. It's complete nonsense. If Roe were overturned, all that would mean is that there is no right in the Constitution to abortion. It would mean simply that state legislatures can regulate abortion as they see fit. If they want to legalize it, they'd have that right. If they want to ban it, they'd have that right. And anything in between.
What is wrong with that? Does anybody actually believe that abortion would be fully outlawed anywhere if Roe fell? The Republicans shouldn't allow the Democrats to flack the erroneous idea that the back alleys would return if Roe were overturned. The Republicans should make the Democrats defend the gruesome procedure that most Americans -- including many generally pro-choice voters -- abhor as barbaric.
Anyway, I've heard nothing but outrage from Obama, Clinton and Edwards over this ruling. Whatever else they want people to believe, the fact is they're pro-abortion hard-liners, well to the left of the American people. Their reaction to this ruling proves it. Obama is the real disappointment. Despite all his talk about transcending our political differences, about how Democrats have to be more open to churchgoers, and suchlike, here's how he responded to the ruling:
I strongly disagree with today's Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman's medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.
I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman's right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women.
Well, useful to get that learnt. If these Democrats can't even take a stand against partial-birth abortion, as savage as it is ... it's hard to know what to say about them. You know how angry and disgusted I am with the Republicans, my party, over the war and other issues. I find it hard to think of voting Republican for president in 2008, mostly becuase of the war. But it is morally abhorrent to me to think of voting for a presidential candid
ate who believes partial-birth abortion should be legal. Anyway, I certainly hope nobody is fooled into thinking that the Democrats care about reaching out to economically progressive voters who are socially conservative. In the end, abortion is their sacrament, and they are as militantly loyal to it as any Counter-Reformation Jesuit was to the Pope.
UPDATE: And by the way, pro-life Republicans can hardly have been pleased with Giuliani's pro forma response, which I reprint completely here:
The Supreme Court reached the correct conclusion in upholding the congressional ban on partial birth abortion. I agree with it.
That's it. That's all he said.
I just got back from lunch with an old friend, a pro-lifer who comments here from time to time. He says, persuasively, that this ruling is actually a bigger deal than I might think. For the first time it sets a limit on abortion, however minor in the grand scheme of things. If abortion can be limited at all, that's significant, because now pro-lifers have established a beachhead in the law from which to advance our cause -- "and the pro-aborts know it."
Touchstone's Tony Esolen is a remarkable writer. Here he reflects on the decline of England, as evidenced by a recent example of crushing speech there:
The National Catholic Register reports that a new law has been enacted in Little Britain, on whom it seems the sun does nothing but set, prohibiting Catholic teachers in Catholic schools from teaching Catholic doctrine to Catholic students. It's easy to guess the specifics. The British Duma is not exercised over that most revolutionary of Catholic and Christian affirmations, that the God through whom all things were made took flesh of the Virgin and became man -- a doctrine that John Adams, alas, once called pernicious. Catholics may talk all they want about that, because that is thought to be irrelevant. But they may not talk about the sin of sodomy, lest they offend the feelings of those people -- some lonely and unfortunate, some simply confused, some wilfully perverse -- who are committed to the sin, and who demand that they be free from criticism for it. The law, apparently, has been pushed by a woman member of the Blair cabinet, a Catholic and, what's more, a supernumerary of Opus Dei. She's delighted by the innovation, as is her fellow Catholic Mrs. Blair.
And so it is that the hard-won freedom of speech, and the even harder-won freedom to exercise one's faith, are dismissed as inconsequential, or rather are put to death, for what exactly? For what great boon to civilization? Even if you disagree with faithful Christians on this matter, is such a law really worth the ruin it must bring? [Emphasis mine -- RD]. For it is unimaginable that freedom of speech, once so blithely abrogated, will be respected and safeguarded in all other instances. And these freedoms are, as our own Declaration suggests, inalienable from man as a rational creature. Or perhaps we now consider instead that man is a creature distinguished not by the mind, but by regions further south, and for that reason we must keep tight control on what he thinks and says and teaches, but that he can copulate as he pleases is a right so precious that all others must cede to it.
What puzzles me is the fecklessness of it all, and the colossal historical ignorance. Rights like these were paid for in blood, and there are even now many millions of people across the earth who know nothing of them. But the rights are traded away for what is either a passing madness, or a late stage in the sexual and cultural collapse of the west -- it must prove to be one or the other.
One thing I respect about Andrew Sullivan's position in the matter is that even as he execrates traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality, he opposes attempts to criminalize speech advocating that teaching. One recalls the well-known exchange from the Robert Bolt play "A Man for All Seasons," about the danger of abrogating settled law to wipe out evil. William Roper has told Sir Thomas More that he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil. More responds:
Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
I'm listening to Alberto Gonzales's Senate testimony live, and boy, is he ever getting roasted. He's in deep, deep trouble. He's being evasive, he's shuffling blame off to his staffers, and he's demonstrating that he was really disengaged from running his office. He comes across as having been a rubber stamp for whatever the political operation of the White House wanted. When asked directly why he fired David Iglesias, Gonzales hemmed and hawed over the answer, but then said something very revealing: that Iglesias had "lost the confidence" of Republican Sen. Pete Domenici.
Excuse me, but who runs the Justice Department, the Attorney General or a Republican senator from New Mexico?
Sen. Schumer pointed out in the beginning that he was not going to accept "these US Attorneys serve at the president's pleasure" as a statement that ends the matter. It's true, as far as it goes, said Schumer, but if the president decided to fire every US Attorney with an IQ over 120, that wouldn't make the decision correct or defensible, and certainly doesn't make it beyond question or review. This might come as news to some, but the President of the United States is the nation's chief executive officer, not the Vicar of Christ.
Russell Kirk defined "moral imagination" as the power of ethical perception. He wrote:
When the moral imagination is enriched, a people find themselves capable of great thing; when it is impoverished, they cannot act effectively even for their own survival, no matter how immense their material resources.
...Personal and social decadence are not the work of ineluctable forces, but are the consequences of defying normative truth: a failure of right reason, if you will, resulting in abnormality. ...An abnormity, in its Latin root, means a monstrosity, defying the norm, the nature of things. ...An abnormal generation is a generation of monsters, enslaved by will and appetite. To recover and apprehension of normality, then, is to acquire an understanding of one's real nature. The alternative to such recovery is not a piquant pose of "nonconformity," but monstrosity in the soul and in society. If normative art expires, the people perish.
Kirk goes on to say, "Normality is not what the average sensual man ordinarily possesses: it is what he ought to try to possess."
I was thinking of this today when I read Larry Auster's post about how the teachers and classmates of Cho had lost their normative reason by tolerating his sicko plays. Auster quotes classmates saying they were unnerved by the sadism and the violence in Cho's work, and wondered if he would end up a Klebold/Harris type. But they did nothing about it. Auster says a sane society would regard a young man who writes extremely violent and twisted plays as a potential menace, and would seek to remove him from that society until he can be examined psychiatrically and until it can be determined that he's no threat to that society. Auster:
That's what a society would do that values life and wants to live. But valuing life requires that people make moral distinctions between that which furthers life, and that which threatens it; it requires that they feel fear and indignation at the sight of that which threatens life, and that they instinctively take action against such a danger. Liberalism cuts out, at their moral and spiritual root, the very possibility of such normal and healthy reactions.
This is what you get too from a society that tolerates all manner of lurid, explicit violence in its visual art, and forbids nothing except the impulse to forbid. I don't think for a minute that everyone who watches slasher films, or who plays violent video games, or who reads sadistic novels, or who listens to violent music, will turn out to be Klebold, Harris or Cho. Clearly that's not the case, and it would be stupid to claim that. But when we have no taboos on the nihilistic and violent in our art, when we live in a culture in which hearts and minds marinate in this acid, we lose our ability to recognize the abnormal and the threatening. We become desensitized to the culture of death. By numbing our own collective moral imagination, we prepare the way for our own perishing.
For the first time in, I dunno, two years, I'm feeling good about my 2004 vote for Bush. Because that meant John Roberts and Samuel Alito on SCOTUS. Which in turn meant today's major pro-life victory: SCOTUS upheld the federal ban on partial-birth abortion by a 5-4 majority. Anthony Kennedy (!) joined the majority.
I like what Doug Johnson of National Right to Life had to say: "Finally, it is illegal in America to mostly deliver a premature infant before puncturing her skull and removing her brain, which is what a partial-birth abortion is." It is rare that we take one step backward from barbarism in this culture, but today we did. Thanks SCOTUS. Thank you, President Bush.
This morning I was saying my prayers, and I prayed for the dead at Virginia Tech, and then for their friends and family. Then I thought to pray for the parents of the murderer ... and I paused to consider whether or not I should pray for him. Of course I should pray for his soul, but it was hard to do. I did it against my will, because as a Christian, I recognize that it's the right thing to do. But I didn't want to.
After prayers, I logged on and found this sobering personal reflection from Reihan Salam. Reihan writes about how when he was 21, he was living in Washington, away from home in Brooklyn, and was suffering severely after having his heart stomped by a girl:
I was depressed. Dangerously depressed, I'm afraid. I made it to work every day and I think I did a decent job, but as soon as I returned to my own cocoon I felt awfully hopeless and alone. My army of good friends was still in Massachusetts and New York, and I languished in the District. I vividly remember reading books all night in my dank basement bedroom, listening to the song "Photobooth" on endless repeat. It was bad. Really, really bad.
One day he came home and found his mom waiting for him. She lifted him out of the pit, made everything okay:
On the rare occasions when I reflect on those really rough weeks I think about how lucky I was to have friends who were attuned to my pitiful mood, and to have a crazy, wonderful mother who'd go to tremendous lengths for me. So when I hear that Cho Seung Hui was "a loner," my heart hurts. Not as much as it does for his victims, not by a longshot, and not nearly as much as it does for the thousands of women and men who take their miseries and anger out on themselves. But there you have it.
That's a painful truth, but it struck home. Reihan's entry put me in mind of the spring of 1986, when I was in my second semester as a college freshman. I was living alone in a dorm room, and seriously depressed. I was still pining away over unrequited high school love, and felt incredibly and crushingly alone in the world. I was in such a state that I couldn't concentrate on my classes, and would walk to an off-campus bar most nights, and drink until I couldn't stand any more, then stumble home and listen to the Velvet Underground until I fell asleep. By the grace of God, I got pulled out of that hole by the advent of a marvelous life-loving lunatic from New Orleans named Joe Zahavi, who became my roommate and my friend. And I got out of it by starting down the road to religious faith after discovering Kierkegaard, and Thomas Merton. But Reihan's post got me to thinking about 19 year old me, lying there in the darkness and solitude of that dorm room, filled with self-hate, listening to sad music, unreachable. My anger and depression was never directed against other people, only myself, and I doubt I ever seriously thought about suicide. But I was closer to that trap than I ever have been, and it's a little frightening to think back at how things might have turned out for me had I continued drifting down that dark river.
With that in mind, it pricks to read this quote from a story in today's NYTimes in which Cho's teacher recalls meeting with him three timesin individual tutoring sessions. Cho would show up in sunglasses. “He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.
Understand, I'm not trying to sentimentalize this mass murderer. I'm trying to understand how a human being gets to the place where he can commit mass murder. In the summer after 9/11, I was still so consumed by anger over the mass murders committed by the terrorists (as well as the Catholic church scandal) that I was grinding my teeth at night, and was distracted in various ways by the anxiety it cau
sed. So I agreed to my wife's request to see a Catholic therapist and learn how to let go of the anger. The therapist began by suggesting that what Mohammed Atta et alia had done was something that was within my capacity as a moral agent to do. I angrily resisted this, for obvious reasons, but the therapist was working to get me to see that what those terrorists had done, their act of infamy, was something that I was capable of under certain circumstances. The idea, I think, was to move me toward understanding their act as all too human, and helping me to find some sort of forgiveness, of letting go. It was an infuriating thought, and I don't know how far we could have gotten with this line of thinking in therapy. Our sessions ended abruptly after about a month when the therapist yelled at me for about an hour and told me I was tempting hell by having written critically of John Paul's handling of the sex-abuse scandal.
Maybe his taking the "you could have done this" tack re: the 9/11 terrorists was as unprofessional and wack as his abusing his position to berate me over my stance on the scandal, I dunno. But I think he was right, in the end, about the terrorists' actions being something within my, and anybody's, capacity to carry out, under the right circumstances. It took me years to be able to put my hands around that thought. I still can't pray for the souls of Atta and his despicable confederates, but I can't see them anymore as entirely alien to me. I'm not sure what to do with that either, and I absolutely don't want to relieve Atta, Cho, or any murderer of responsibility for their evil actions. We must reject the French maxim, "To understand all is to excuse all." But thinking of the miserable and wretched Cho, that tormented boy overtaken by deranged malice, it is impossible for me to think of that awful college semester, and how lost I was before I was found, and how grateful I am for the mercy of rescue by love, and by Love Himself.
Why didn't Cho find the same lifeline? Had it been offered, but he was too lost in a fog of self-pity and loneliness that he couldn't see it? That mystery, I'm sure, died with him, and with those poor souls he pulled into the grave with him.
UPDATE: On the way to work, I thought of something that I was involved in back in 1992. I was a reporter at The Washington Times. One day I was checking voice mail and instead of deleting the message from the cranky guy who left them overnight, I decided for kicks to listen to it to the end. In that message, "Jeff" threatened to kill the president. I played the message for my editor, and we called the Secret Service. They arrested Jeff. Jeff called my office line the next night, and said chillingly, "Doubtless, yours was a patriotic act" -- and he then reestated his threat to kill President Bush. The Secret Service came out again, and arrested him a second time (a miscommunication with the local authorities in northern Virginia, where Jeff lived, caused him to be released after the first time).
The Secret Service agent told me that Jeff fit the classic profile of an assassin. He was a white male, early 30s, a loner who lived in a basement flat in Alexandria, and who lived a quiet, solitary, nondescript life. Jeff had gone through an intense religious period at some point in his life, the agent said, and claimed to have been brutalized in some unspecific way by his father.
A few months later, I saw Jeff face to face when I took the witness stand in his trial. He looked so small in his suit. He looked, to be honest, like Pee-wee Herman. I felt kind of guilty for having reported him, so mousy and afraid did he appear, but there was no doubt in my mind that I'd done the right thing. The Secret Service was perfectly clear that men like him fit the demographic and psychological profile of the political assassin to a T.
Jeff was convicted. I don't know what happened to him, but he did leave me one more message on my office voice mail. I can hear his sad, faraway voice in my h
ead now as I type this: "When I saw you on the witness stand, in those glasses, I thought: 'I could have been like him, if people hadn't done things to me.'"
Had people "done" things to him, or was he imagining things? The federal agents did say that his father had been abusive, though they didn't say how. I have no trouble believing that Jeff had been a shy, put-upon outsider. He looked like the type. He looked like a whipped puppy, actually. But he had threatened to kill the president, and he had to be held responsible for his actions. Pity for him did not obviate this fact. Still, there he was, a pathetic human being, lonely and confused and mistreated and filled with hate, or self-hate: a sinner.
But he was stopped before he visited harm on the president, or anyone else.
Be kind to people. Who knows what kind of battle they're fighting.
Max Goss at Right Reason has some kind things to say about Your Working Boy's presentation at the Kirk conference, and some illuminating commentary about Prof. Dermot Quinn's remarks on Kirk and religion (Prof. Quinn seemed to be saying that Kirk reduced the practice and pursuit of religious faith to utility -- because it makes one happy -- but Max suggests a way out of that trap).
I'm cleaning up my Kirk conference speech (taking out all the profanity, the Cajun French, and the long disquisition on the Gnostic meaning of early Michael Stipe lyrics, which I've sent on to Reihan) and will be sending it to Max to reprint on Right Reason. Max came up to introduce himself after my speech, and I recalled his name attached to a critical review of "Crunchy Cons." Indeed Max had, on Right Reason, where he said he didn't think "Crunchy Cons" did traditionalist conservatism justice. But he liked the speech a lot more. So, good!
Gotta say that next time there's an ISI conference in your neck of the woods, by all means go. This was my first one, and it was a real treat. It was a pleasure meeting writers whose work I've admired from afar (e.g., Allan Carlson, George Nash, Mark T. Mitchell) and making new friends like Seton Hall's Dermot Quinn, Hillsdale's Nathan Schlueter, and all the scary-smart college students who were there.
... Cho Seung-Hui was to dramaturgy. From his college one-act play titled "Richard McBeef":
JOHN: I hate him. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick ... Richard McBeef. What kind of name is that? What an asshole name. I don't like it. And look at his face. What an asshole face. I don't like his face at all. You don't think I can kill you, Dick? You don't think I can kill you? Gotcha...got one eye. Got the other eye.
Then again, if he'd only gone to Bennington instead of Virginia Tech, Cho might have ended up a literary star.
UPDATE: How long do you think it's going to take before some sickos stage "Richard McBeef," film it and post it to YouTube? I say by sundown tomorrow.
...is what Douglas Wilson wishes I had titled the chapter on housing in "Crunchy Cons." He really likes the chapter, by the way. I appreciate his continued critical attention to my book. He's somewhat more critical of the chapter on Consumerism, and even moreso of the chapter on Food. This is the kind of serious but constructive criticism that makes me a clearer thinker and a better writer, so I really appreciate it.
"Pat often inhabited a world of high society many of us here aren't familiar with, but we all had something profound in common with her, since she loved NR and loved Bill Buckley."
Last night Julie and I stumbled across a PBS film about Iraq War veterans who have written about the experience of war there. It was riveting. Painful to watch at times, but we couldn't look away. I found this essay, a soldier's reflection on dealing with the father of a man who had been killed by mistake by Americans, the most riveting, but you can follow that first link to read them all.
The writer and veteran Tobias Wolff appears in the film to say that a country like ours that expects these soldiers and their families to bear the burden of fighting this war alone, and that doesn't even want to know about what they're going through is a country mired in decadence (his word).
This has got to be one of the strangest quotes of the day:
"Above everything it's his family values we share. When we're eating our dinner, watching TV at night and we see two homosexual men kissing, it upsets us. As Muslims, and as decent French citizens, it shocks us."
It's a French Muslim explaining why up to 8 percent of French Muslims intend to vote for the far-right anti-immigrant presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Okayyyy....
Moving along, Father Neuhaus takes on Philip Jenkins' newest book, which stands against the gloom-and-doomers about Europe's future, and imagines a more hopeful outcome. Father Neuhaus respectfully differs. Excerpt:
Jenkins says European Christianity must accommodate itself to being a “creative minority.” In relation to Islam, that sounds an awful lot like dhimmitude, in this case joined to secularism’s toleration of Christians so long as they mind their manners, which means that Christians agree that their faith is a private religious preference without public consequence. But, of course, that need not be the case, and the creative in creative minority could have culture-transforming effects that we cannot now anticipate.
Jenkins operates within a very short time frame. He suggests that by 2050 there will be thirty million Muslims in Europe. Other scholars believe the figure will be much higher. Whatever the more plausible number, 2050 is, in historical perspective, only a few years distant. The life of nations is, in their own self-understanding, very long. The Novus Ordo Seclorum on the Great Seal of the United States may be a self-flattering conceit, as may be France’s belief, stemming from 1789, that it bears the destiny of humanité, but to invest in and sacrifice for the future of a people and its way of life—the most palpable form of which is in having babies—requires a timeline much longer than 2050. People who do not, in continuity with the world they know, hope to have grandchildren who will hope to have grandchildren do not have babies. The sacrifice of the identities of nations and peoples to the deracinated idea of “Europe” as institutionalized in the European Union, combined with the forceful counternarrative of Islam, does not suggest a future in which many will make an intergenerational investment.
But then, and despite his roseate projections, perhaps Philip Jenkins knows all this. Recall his observation that “both Christianity and Islam face real difficulties in surviving within Europe’s secular cultural ambience in anything like their familiar historic forms.” Europe is a historical phenomenon, and Europe without its familiar historic forms is not Europe. To speak of the death of Europe is not to suggest that the continent called Europe will disappear. It is possible that “Eurosecularity” in sustained tension with an Islamo-Christian cultural ambience will flourish, at least economically, for generations to come. But, with the establishment of Eurabia or the Maghreb, Europe “in anything like its familiar historic forms” will be a memory. That is what is meant by the death of Europe.
At a recent dinner party with European intellectuals, I put to an influential French archbishop Daniel Pipes’ projection: Either assimilation or expulsion or Islamic takeover. That, he said, puts the possibilities much too starkly. “We hope for the first,” he said, “while we work at reducing immigration and prepare ourselves for soft Islamization.” Soft Islamization. It is a wan expression.
Now -- stay with me -- you really must read Spengler's column today, about how the imminent fate of Kosovo will portend the future of Europe. Writes Spengler:
If Serbia and Russia draw a line in the sand over the independence of Kosovo, we may observe the second occasion in history when a Muslim advance on Europe halted on Serbian soil. The first occurred in 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, when Sultan Mehmed II was thrown back from the walls of Belgrade, "The White City", by Hungarian and Serb defenders. The Siege of Belgrade "decided the fate of Christendom", wrote the then Pope Calixtus III. Not for nothing did J R R Tolkien name his fictional stronghold of Minas Tirith "The White City".
He points out that the UN plan for granting the Muslim-majority Kosovo independence has inflamed the Russians, who, along with the Serbs, prefer to have the 10 percent of Kosovo (the historic Serbian heartland) that is majority-Christian partitioned and joined to Serbia. Spengler:
Without apologizing for past Serbian misbehavior, I believe that Serbia and Russia are correct to offer partition rather than independence for Kosovo, that is, breaking off the Christian-majority municipalities of the north and attaching them to Serbia proper, while permitting the Muslim majority to determine its own fate.
This is the obvious, humane and commonsense solution; the fact that the State Department refuses to consider it inflames Russia's worst fears about America's intent. To broad Russian opinion, the sacrifice of the Kosovo Serbs seems like yet another prospective humiliation, on top of the deployment of anti-missile systems on Russia's border and the buildup of American forces in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
Finally, Spengler predicts that Russia won't let Washington make an example of Kosovo's Serbs for the sake of "US-Muslim partnership." And if that means the resumption of shooting war in the Balkans, we may well get that. Writes Spengler:
No-one, least of all Russia, wants an open conflict with Muslims. But there are limits to what the Orthodox Christian world will tolerate, and they may have been reached in Kosovo.
Well, I hope so -- and I say that not as one of those tiresome people who, having become Orthodox, adopts all the Old World's grudges as one's own. I would believe this even if I were still Catholic, and here's why.
A decade ago, I was passionately in favor of the NATO bombing of the Serbs. I found the Bosnian Serb atrocities against the Bosnian Muslims horrifying (and still do). Slobodan Milosevic was an evil man. But in that charming way we Americans have, I insisted on seeing the Balkans war as a clear-cut case of good vs. evil. Americans have to be on the side of good. Ergo, bombs away on the Serbs.
"But what about the Kosovo Muslim atrocities against the churches there?" an Orthodox friend asked. I didn't have a good answer for her, so I never did answer her. Perhaps I felt that the Kosovo Serbs had brought the destruction upon themselves (as if their sins merited the demolishing of ancient churches and the desecration of holy Christian icons). Yes, NATO is supposed to be protecting churches under the peacekeeping regime, but is it reasonable (I said then) to expect them to halt all acts of revenge? But see this from a 1999 British media report (The Independent) from the scene:
But this demolition cannot be just "revenge" - Nato's usual excuse for the destruction under its auspices. You do not just fill with rage and spend days gathering explosives to blow up churches. This is vandalism with a mission.
Outside Klina last week, I came across another blasted church, blown to pieces just two months ago. Its shattered dome lay over walls and crosses and iconstasis. And wandering amid the rubble was a Kosovo Albanian, Ymer Qupeva. What on earth was he doing here? I asked. Sympathising with the Serb worshippers? "I have come to view the professionalism of the destruction," Mr Qupeva said. "They did very w
ell - they planted explosives against all four walls."
Mr Qupeva was a graduate of "pyrotechnics" at the University of Zagreb and wanted to make sure the Kosovo Albanians had done their job well. It was, he said, a "Karic" church - the Karic brothers in Belgrade are reputed mobsters - and one of many built across Kosovo. "They used the stones from the Klina Partisan memorial to build the walls," Mr Qupeva said. "The Serbs claimed someone had a dream that they should build a church next to the old tree by the road." And blowing up the church? Did he agree with that? "It was good," he said bleakly.
Now the church is finished. Blown up with great professionalism. And - for good measure - so is the old tree beside it.
It is now plain that there are no simple good guy/bad guy scenarios in the Balkans. Criminal elements among the Albanians have looted and destroyed and practiced atrocities against the Serbian Orthodox, and are setting up a narco-terrorist state there. Recently, Wahhabi-trained terrorists have been found there. It in no way excuses past Serb atrocities to recognize that granting Kosovo independence under the NATO plan would appear to be the West's signing off on a jihad state at its borders.
Samuel Huntington has said that the West would do well not to involve itself unnecessarily in adventures in other civilizations, but should instead work on rededicating itself to its own traditions. He identified Western civilization and Orthodox civilization as two distinct entities. Nevertheless, given the demographics-driven geopolitical situation in Europe and Russia, along old Christendom's frontier with Islam, it seems a suicidal act to sell out the Kosovar Serbs in this manner. Funny, but I, like many Americans, completely bought the idea in the 1990s that the Serbs were uniquely demonic. It wasn't true. Why don't we hear in the Western media stories about the Kosovar Muslim atrocities against the Serb minority? Why aren't we debating in public what giving Kosovo independence will mean to the bearers, however flawed, of our own civilization in that blood-stained and battered part of the world?
In any event, I hope Russia doesn't yield an inch in the Security Council.
UPDATE: A prominent journalist who has actually reported from the Balkans and from Europe in general writes:
I've never heard of 'Spengler.' But I do know enough about Kosovo to know that his argument is rubbish. Invidious historical analogies aside, the reality is that the areas of Kosovo that are of symbolic importance to Serbs for either nationalist or religious reasons (to the extent the distinction is of any value) are well south of the 10% of Kosovo that could be ceded to Serbia. What is being suggested in the partition deal is basically the city of Mitrovica north of the river, and then the territory to the Serb border including the Trepce Kombinat -- an old industrial and mining center).
The salient point is that from a CULTURAL point of view, either prospectively or retrospectively, the significance of this 10% is nil. So I genuinely don't see why you view this as a make or break issue in terms of Western will versus what you persist (baselessly in my view) to call 'dhimmitude.' As far as Russia goes, incidentally, don't exaggerate the importance of Kosovo to them (even to the Patriarchate). That's what was said during the Kosovo War itself, about Milosevic's ouster, etc.. These days, if anything, Kosovo is even less significant in terms of Russian policy goals, though you may well be right that they will end up blocking the current independence deal in the UN Security Council. But the idea that in doing so it will be a case of a latter-day Horatius at the bridge seems to me far-fetched.
I'd also urge you to be careful about phrases like narco-state. As opposed to where? Orthodox Montenegro?
Incidentally, it is a mark of just how
wrong people like Neuhaus, Steyn, and, it seems, yourself are in your 'Eurabia' thesis that you're surprised by the Le Pen story. The truth is that there is so much assimilation (though to say this is not to underestimate the degree of exclusion and alienation) of Maghrebi immigrants to France that a certain number feel comfortable with Le Pen.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's most famous remark was surely "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." He meant it in a specific philosophical way, but I find the general sentiment appropriate in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. I have seen nothing so far in this that can be explained or ennobled by anything anybody has to say, aside from prayers for the living and the dead, and words of comfort for everyone involved. The rush to explain is understandable, maybe, but also trivializing, at least at this point. At least it seems that way to me.
Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.
Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.
She's right. That's why we have ritual prayers: they say what needs saying when all we have is our pain, grief and confusion. Ask yourself: What would the Amish do? Actually, we know what they did when this happened to them. Go thou and do likewise.
The stance by [physicians], taken on ethical grounds, has led to a doubling of abortions carried out by private clinics, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
The swell of medical staff joining the unprecedented moral revolt means that there may soon not be enough doctors to carry out sufficient terminations to meet the public demand.
Katherine Guthrie, a spokesman on family planning for the RCOG, said: "You get no thanks for performing abortions. You get spat on. Who admits to friends at a dinner party that they are an abortionist?"
How sad for those doctors, facing public disdain because they dismember unborn children in their mother's womb. I'm just heartbroken.
Seriously, why this "unprecedented moral revolt" in Britain? The UK is not religious, and as far as I can tell, the pro-life movement is not influential there (please correct me if I'm wrong). Whence this welcome moral awakening?
From the speech I gave in Indianapolis on Saturday:
Now, I’ve been talking about applying the traditionalist conservative worldview toward the right ordering of our relationship to the world as it is. But I think the most delightful aspect of crunchy conservatism – and perhaps the most distinctly Kirkean – is its celebration of what the Sage of Mecosta meant when he described himself as a “Bohemian Tory.”
It is true that traditionalist conservatism is in most respects a lament for what has been lost. But properly understood, it is also a cheerful celebration of what has been saved. It is an affirmation that, in Dr. Kirk’s words, “the world remains sunlit, despite its vices.” The historian George Nash described Dr. Kirk as “a romantic traditionalist by instinct.” This is true. The phrase “Birkenstocked Burkeans,” which I coined to describe crunchy cons, is a rather less poetic way to say “Bohemian Tories.” Here is Dr. Kirk from his “Confessions of a Bohemian Tory”:
A Tory, according to Samuel Johnson, is a man attached to orthodoxy in church and state. A bohemian is a wandering and often impecunious man of letters or arts, indifferent to the demands of bourgeois fad and foible. Such a one has your servant been. Tory and bohemian go not ill together: it is quite possible to abide by the norms of civilized existence, what Mr. T.S. Eliot calls the permanent things: and yet to set at defiance the soft securities and shame conventionalities of 20th-century sociability.
We hear there the voice of the true humanist. I think my favorite line in all of Kirk was his claim that “I would have given any number of classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”
"The slave-labor camps of the communist Chinese are economically efficient, after a fashion – but only because they take no reckoning of human lives or moral principles. Thus our American economy, though good in itself, is important not merely for its own sake – its real importance is the contribution it makes to our justice and order and freedom, our ability to live in dignity as truly human persons."
-- Russell Kirk, from "The Essential Russell Kirk," just published by ISI Press. It's an excellent introduction to Dr. Kirk's thought.
For your Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse file, this story from the latest issue of New Scientist, about the return of a disease that devastates wheat crops, and which stands to put the whole world into famine:
"This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction." Startling words - but spoken by the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, they are not easily dismissed.
An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.
And so, it happens again, this time at Virginia Tech. One man -- evil, insane, or both -- has ended the lives of at least 31 people (including his own), and wounded an unknown number of others. For both the living and the dead at that university, a world has ended.
Regular readers have seen me say time and time again that for me, the lasting effect of 9/11 was having to face the reality that nothing is certain. Nothing. You and I don't know what is going to happen to us today, or even in the next hour. If we stopped to think about all the things that could go wrong, we'd be paralyzed. You can't live like that. In order to get through the day, we unconsciously construct from experience a probability narrative to help us face the day calmly.
It usually works. Except like today, when it doesn't.
I can look out my office window and see Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was shot. It’s an ugly place, devoid of grandeur, which makes it even more astonishing to think about the historical magnitude of the crime that took place there. I think we have conspiracy theories as a psychological response to irrational evil. That is, we think there *must* be a rational explanation for it, because if there is, then there is a rational way to deal with it to keep it from happening again.
Similarly with this situation – as with Columbine, as with the Amish school shootings – it is deeply human to think that this must be the fault of the liberal gun laws in the US. While I personally do think the gun laws are probably too liberal, the truth is I grew up in the country, around hunters who had many guns. Guns were widely accessible to everyone, even teenagers. And yet nothing like this happened. Ever. It was unthinkable. I find it hard to relate to the abject horror many urbanites have at the very idea of guns. Guns were normal where I grew up. People took guns very, very seriously.
But then again, back then, social conventions and social bonds were stronger. Conservatives might say that the center isn't holding here, that this kind of thing is the natural fruit of a society that's coming apart, of a society where the internal and social restraints people place on themselves and others are unraveling. There is surely truth in that.
And yet, a stronger culture didn't stop Lee Harvey Oswald. That didn't stop Charles Whitman. School shootings happened back then too.
We always look for Reasons when things like this happen, and that's appropriate, if only to figure out how we might prevent it in the future. But the deepest truth of the matter is probably the most terrifying: there are no Reasons. Maybe the Virginia Tech shooter just didn't like Mondays. There is something deeper at work here in these horrible crimes, something disorder of the human spirit, of human culture, that is beyond the ability of statutory law to deal with. We can and should build up borders against anarchy like this, but in the end, there are no safe places. If an Amish schoolhouse isn't safe from irruptions of savage evil, is any place? If the history of the world can be utterly changed in a single morning by a small group of evil and determined men with rudimentary flight training...you know?
Liberty is a blessing from God, but it is also a curse. Sartre, the atheist, said that "man is condemned to be free." Today's shooting is part of that sentence. Learning to live with this evil, and to repair its tear in the fabric of our human community, is our fate. What we are not permitted to do is despair, finally; what we have to do is redeem the time.
Sad news this morning that William F. Buckley's wife Patricia has died. Julie and I were remembering this morning the time we went with a National Review group to the Buckleys' place in Connecticut for a magazine staff cookout. Pat Buckley had a deserved reputation as one of the grandes dames of New York society, and that reputation could be intimidating. She was one of the people you moved to the big city to meet, but that you never really got to. Well, we got to. At one point she and Julie got to talking about how unregenerately evil were squirrels, who ate tulip bulbs and wreaked mayhem on gardens. Pat told Julie that at one point, she got so tired of the little bastards that she stood out on their bedroom balcony there in Stamford and picked them off with a .22-caliber rifle.
I love that image: one of the nation's premier socialites locked and loaded and taking out squirrels from her balcony with a rifle. What a life, what a lady. RIP.
Well, that was fun. It’s really encouraging to get together with people who are intensely interested in the life of the mind, and in traditionalism, to drink wine and talk about ideas. Specifically about Russell Kirk’s ideas, and what we’re supposed to do with them now. Of course a group of students and professors at a Russell Kirk conference is going to be a highly self-selected crowd, so it shouldn’t surprise me that the impression I got is of deep dissatisfaction with contemporary conservatism -- but it was there, at least in most of the conversations I had. It seems to me that no one was under the impression that liberalism had anything to offer. Rather there was frustration that organized conservatism has reached such an impasse, and that we conservatives are, at the moment, pretty much a spent force.
The great and erudite John O’Sullivan gave the closing address last night, but it left me wanting. He spoke on prospects for conservatives, and counseled that the things conservatives should focus their attention on are fighting multiculturalism, opposing open immigration, lowering taxes and rolling back the regulatory state. There’s a case to be made for all of these things, though absent real spending cuts, I would oppose tax reduction. Still, it was strange to think that aside from some remarks about the threat of jihadism and recent developments in the European Union, this was a speech that could have been delivered 10 years ago. In fact, it called to mind the way I felt last year after the Spence dinner in which Phyllis Schlafly spoke with real conviction and passion about the need for conservatives to fight corruption in the judiciary and in public education. I happened to agree with her positions on those matters, but it was hard to escape the sense that she is fighting yesterday’s battles.
I don’t mean to say that conservatives shouldn’t engage in political fights over the judiciary, or public education, or multiculturalism, or any of this. We should, when the opportunity presents itself. It just seems to me that these things amount to scrapping at the margins of the real problem, or set of problems, that we face. Last night at dinner, I was talking to a conservative Catholic professor about the decline of moral order amid America’s prosperity and individualism, and about how feeble the conservative response to it has been – and, to be precise, how inadequate anybody’s response has been. None of us at the table had the prescriptive answers either, though I think it safe to say that we were all in agreement that the answers will have to come from a collective spiritual regeneration. This professor said he feared our society was going to have to undergo some sort of dire collapse before we would collectively begin to return to the sources of moral and civilizational order.
This morning I had breakfast with a conservative Protestant professor who, like me, is raising young children. We share, I think, the same convictions about faith, culture and the moral order. I live in the city; he lives in the country. Yet he said that his children are thought of as freaks by their neighbors because they don’t have a television, and because he reads to them instead. I mentioned to him that at my son Matthew’s school, there’s a policy forbidding the kids to talk about pop culture at school. The professor’s eyes widened. “That’s a huge victory right there!” he said. (And I said silently: “Thank you, God, for our school.”) We talked, the professor and I, and one of his students, about the acute challenge of raising children to be virtuous in a culture informed by mass media to be contemptuous of the virtues. The student had been homeschooled in a fundamentalist Christian community, and she was emphatic about the dangers of giving in to a separatist mentality, in which you start to consider everyone outside the narrowly-bound community to be shunned. We can agree, I think, that we don’t want to g
o there.
But if you raise your kids to be wide-open to the culture, you’re setting them up for ruin. We talked for a bit about how the children of affluent homes, even ostensibly conservative homes, emerge with values shaped more by the hedonistic and materialistic culture than by the tradition of faith and virtue.
What is the answer? Humans were made to live in community. It really does take a village to raise a child. But what happens when, as Caitlin Flanagan wrote, you’re doing everything you can to keep the village and its values away from your child?
Twenty-five years after Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue,” it is hard to deny what he saw so clearly back then: that the loss of commonly-held faith in transcendentals has become general, and society will not hold – cannot hold – like this indefinitely (although Ross Douthat has pointed outin an essay I can't find to link to that it looks like conservatives were wrong, at least in the short term: it seems that our prosperity means we really can flout tradition and more or less get away with it). But for how long? Various people asked me if I was working on another book, and I told them yes, that I was intending to investigate MacIntyre’s “Benedict option” – that is, the idea of intentionally separating to some degree from an irreformable mainstream society, and constructing new communities where it’s possible to live a life of moral virtue in community. I not only want to investigate the sociological genius of the Benedictine order of the Dark Ages, but I want to look into diverse traditionalist lay communities today who are managing to do this sort of thing in a balanced and sustainable way, without succumbing to an oppressive spirit of separatism. It was encouraging to see people’s eyes light up. More and more conservatives share a sense that our prosperity is merely masking a deeper crisis of decadence (and not just conservatives: Camille Paglia, you’ll remember, said to me the other day that the slothful ignorance and indifference of contemporary students and the cultural elite to tending the roots of our cultural order portends catastrophe). I hope I’m not projecting my own thoughts here onto others, but it seems to me that more people – serious, thoughtful people – are starting (but only starting) to lose faith in shoring up the imperium (to use MacIntyre’s phrase for the Roman spirit in its final days), and are beginning to wonder if the times require a more radical response. In his critical biography of Kirk, James Person writes of a time when Kirk stood with President Nixon at the White House window, looking out at crowds of student protesters on the Mall. The president asked Kirk if there was any hope. Kirk replied that it depended on whether the people thought there was something worth saving. If yes, they could be rallied to save it. If not, not.
That, increasingly, is the question we now face. Understand me clearly: I’m not trying to advocate easy despair, i.e., a casual sense that things are going to hell, and that we shouldn’t fight to reform and save our institutions. That day might come, but we’re not close to there yet. Even so, there is a feeling among many of us that there has been a broad and profound loss of internal moral order, which comes from a loss of the religious sense (by which I mean a pre-rational conviction that we are all bound by the enduring moral norms known as the Permanent Things). Today’s NYTimes reported that many Hispanic immigrants coming to America are losing their religious faith as they assimilate into our materialist, individualist culture. You don’t need God here; the Self suffices. If you listen to the popular preachers on TV, so much of the god-talk is not so much about the Almighty, but about the Almighty Self – with Yahweh playing the role of a personality coach to help us be the richest and happiest Selves that we can be. When it
is pointed out that America is more religious than Europe, I am skeptical of how good that news is.
I mentioned at breakfast this morning a story a public school teacher related to me recently. A 12-year-old boy said to her in the bus line after class one day, "Hey Miss [name], this boy here wants you to have his baby!" I was completely shocked by this. I asked the teacher what she did. "Nothing," she said. "What can you do? That's their culture today."
The shocking thing is that a 12-year-old said something like that to a teacher. The more shocking thing is her "whaddaya gonna do?" shrug.
Am I crazy for seeing that as a "canary in the coal mine" moment?
Anyway, despite the gloom-talk, it was encouraging to have so many good conversations with like-minded conservatives, and to meet so many smart, engaged students (Camille ought to come to an ISI conference sometime). If the time is to be redeemed, these are the people who are going to figure out how to do it. Yes, we're going to have to fight multiculturalism and all the rest, but none of that is going to turn things around. It's going to require something deeper. It's going to require lots of thought, action and, yes, prayer. It's going to require, I think, institutions like ISI. And more conferences where people drink wine and laugh and talk about beauty and imagination and tradition.
I left Indianapolis feeling not optimistic, but certainly hopeful.
So I come back to my room here at the Columbia Club in Indianapolis after the ISI dinner, and call Julie to say goodnight to the boys. She answers the phone like this: "We're fine!"
"Is something wrong?"
"You don't know?"
Turns out they've had tornadoes tonight in north Texas. "We've spent part of the night in the nook under the stairs," Julie said. "We went there when the tornado sirens went off."
If the weather cooperates, I'll be leaving later today for Indianapolis, where I'll be speaking at ISI's Saturday conference on "Russell Kirk and the Prospects for Conservatism." If you're a crunchy con or any other sort of traditionalist in the area, you'll really want to make every effort to be there. Here's the line-up of speakers:
Rod Dreher, "Crunchy Conservatism" Michael Federici, "Russell Kirk and the Conservative Constitution" George Nash, "Russell Kirk and The American Conservative Movement" Dermot Quinn, "Religion and the Conservative Mind" Ted McAllister, "The Romance of Conservatism: Russell Kirk and a Conservative Aesthetic"
Should be a great time. Follow the link above to register.
I had a blast today talking on the phone with Camille Paglia. I hadn't spoken to her in several years. I'm writing a column in connection with a local humanities event she had something to do with, so I'm saving my choicest quotes for the paper, but I can share some of our conversation here.
I was pleased (though not surprised) by how much we agree on the culturally desolating quality of modernity, and how imperiled Western civilization is by the loss of the religious sense. Camille said it's at the heart of Europe's cultural decline. She said that even a bisexual atheist like her can see how important religion is to keeping civilization stable and alive (in fact, her "Sexual Personae" argues that the cultural genius of the West lies in the creative and life-giving tension between its Greco-Roman pagan roots and its Judeo-Christianity). She thinks we're likely in a Late Roman Empire phase, in which tolerance and rigor has gone over into acedia.
"I think its possible that the Muslim culture will win," she told me. "I think it's quite possible. It all depends on which of the two cultures is mor econfident, more vital and more creative. I don't think we know how that's going to come out. I do think my fellow Democrats are far too complacent about this issue. They honesty think that if we're nice ot everybody they'll be nice to us. But I've studied history."
Camille said that she's been really disturbed over the last five years by the lack of knowledge among her students of basic Biblical concepts, characters, themes and motifs -- the forgetting of which makes so much Western art, literature and culture opaque. Get this:
"The worst moment was a year and a half ago. I have a class on song lyrics, and I was presenting the Negro spiritual 'Go Down, Moses.' I was talking about how it's a coded message of liberation, a way for slaves to make political statements without being recognized. I suddenly realized to my absolute horror that so many of these students had no idea who Moses was! In this class of 30, not one white person, only African-Americans, understood the Biblical references. The only people I'm getting at my school [Philadelphia's University of the Arts] who recognize the Bible are African-Americans. And the lower the social class of the white person, the more likely they are to recognize the Bible. Lots of these white students, if they go to church, it's all feel good social activism. There's no preaching anymore. The Bible is one of the West's foundational texts, and they don't know it anymore."
Our interview ended with this grim observation about the West: "People here live in a bubble. They think it's going to go on forever."
I was driving this morning and (like a good American) growing bored with the silence so I flipped on the radio and it happened to be Rush Limbaugh, who I haven’t heard much of in recent years. He was in the middle of criticizing Al Sharpton for saying that the Duke lacrosse players shouldn’t be praised because, after all, they were at a party and had hired a stripper (a “neked woman” as Sharpton put it) and such dehumanizing behavior is often a precursor to domestic violence even if it did not lead to violence in this case. Limbaugh went off on this saying that there was absolutely nothing illegal about hiring a stripper and then said that such economic exchanges were actually good because “single moms” can “earn $100,000 a year” as strippers.
Unbelievable. This episode strikes me as quite similar to the outrage in Britain (and America) that Ahmadinejad rebuked Britain for sending a woman and mother into a combat-type situation.
The “American way” especially as defended by alleged conservatives is now fully vested in pimping our most vulnerable as strippers and soldiers all for the glories of the GNP.
Of course this is nothing new, but it is very interesting and instructive that characters as repulsive and diverse as Sharpton and Ahmadinejad now understand the best way to undermine America is to pose as traditionalist conservatives. Sheesh.
UPDATE: A transcript of this portion of the Limbaugh show has been posted. Check it out for yourself, but it appears from my reading that Limbaugh was not endorsing stripping as a career move, but rather pointing out that strippers aren't always passive victims, but responsible moral agents who choose to exploit themselves for material gain. Ergo, they are not necessarily passive victims, but morally culpable participants (along with the men who hire their services) in their own degradation. Limbaugh could have been clearer here -- I can understand why Caleb was confused by hearing him on the radio -- but I think reading the transcript makes a judgment favorable to Limbaugh the correct reading.
UPDATE.2: Caleb's not buying it. He e-mails:
What Limbaugh was clearly doing was exonorating the Duke players from any wrongdoing by placing their actions in the context of economic activity which is entirely consensual. This is a classic liberal move. Of course the women remain culpable. Of course Sharpton/Jackson are hypocrites. That is not the point.
However the Duke lacrosse rape case turns out, one lesson that absolutely will not be learned is this: You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don't hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money.
Also, you can severely reduce your chances of being raped if you do not go to strange men's houses and take your clothes off for money. (Does anyone else detect a common thread here?)
Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) has been a war hawk. He teaches at West Point, and has just come back from touring the Middle East. He talked to a Dallas Morning News reporter yesterday in Dallas. Read it and weep. Or something. Excerpt:
In a harshly worded critique of U.S. national security policy, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey said Wednesday it is too late to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and that Saudi Arabia is likely to follow. Furthermore, he said, the U.S. is woefully unprepared to handle new threats, let alone the ones it now faces.
Gen. McCaffrey, interviewed during a Dallas visit, sharply criticized the Pentagon's handling of the Iraq war, saying the military is debilitated and on the verge of disaster as it confronts up to 100,000 armed insurgents and militiamen there.
The four-star general suggested that another major crisis, such as a military threat from North Korea or Iran, could force the U.S. to respond with nuclear weapons because it lacks the resources and staffing to fight another conventional ground war.
Gen. McCaffrey, formerly head of the U.S. Southern Command and once the Army's most highly decorated generals, made his assessment after completing trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait at the invitation of the U.S. Central Command in February and March.
On Iran's nuclear research program, which Tehran insists is for peaceful purposes, Gen. McCaffrey warned that the Persian Gulf country will have a nuclear bomb within the next five years. "It's too late, without question. They're going nuclear," he said.
"The sad part is ... they [the Iranians] are not going to be any safer. The region will be less stable, and they will be acutely at greater risk," he said. If Tehran were to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear attack, it should expect the severest possible response, he said.
"If we ever saw a threat to our key allies or ourselves, there's no question in my mind: We would, if required, deploy a nuclear weapon."
He added that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim kingdom, would not sit idly by if its Persian Gulf Shiite neighbor acquired nuclear weaponry.
"For sure, if the Persian-Shia bomb becomes a dominant factor in the security of the Middle East, there will be a Sunni-Arab bomb to counter it," he said. [snip] He responded harshly to Pentagon announcements during the past week about extended troop deployments in Iraq and a recall of Texas-based troops who have had as little as seven months at home since their last combat tour.
"These completely inadequate ground combat forces cannot sustain that level of deployment unless we ask them, essentially, to stay in near-continuous combat" far beyond the Pentagon's one-year deployment target, he said. [snip] "Their equipment is shot. It's coming apart. We are in a position of enormous strategic peril," Gen. McCaffrey said. "What happens if the other shoe drops?" he asked, listing a possible major natural disaster or a direct military confrontation with Iran or North Korea.
The military "is grossly under-resourced. ... It's a flippin' disaster," he said. "You have to have generators, tents, trucks, helicopters just to sustain troops in a natural disaster. The question is: Can we put four divisions [70,000 to 80,000 troops] into Korea in 90 days? The answer is, of course we can't."
As a result, he said, "we'd probably have to use nuclear weapons before we lost 30,000 U.S. troops on the ground. If they're getting their asses kicked, we'd probably go nuclear."
Lots of buzz today about a Wall Street Journal cover story on Europe's evangelical atheism. It's a subscriber-only story online, so I can't link here. Here's how it starts:
CAEN, France -- With 40 minutes to go before show time, the 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium was already packed. A fan set up a video camera in the front row. A sound engineer checked the microphones.
The star: Michel Onfray, celebrity philosopher and France's high priest of militant atheism. Dressed entirely in black, he strode onto the stage and looked out at the reverential audience for his weekly two-hour lecture series, "Hedonist Philosophy," which is broadcast on a state radio station. "I could found a religion," he said.
Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books, stands in the vanguard of a curious and increasingly potent phenomenon in Europe: zealous disbelief in God.
Passive indifference to faith has left Europe's churches mostly empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in part because of anxiety over Europe's growing and restive Muslim populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics and public policy. That is all adding up to a growing momentum for a combative brand of atheism, one that confronts rather than merely ignores religion.
Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and prominent British author on religion, calls the trend "missionary secularism." She says it mimics the ardor of Christianity, Islam and Marxism, all of which have at their core an urge to convert nonbelievers to their worldview.
Mr. Onfray argues that atheism faces a "final battle" against "theological hocus-pocus" and must rally its troops. "We can no longer tolerate neutrality and benevolence," he writes in "Traité d'athéologie," or Atheist Manifesto, a best seller in France, Italy and Spain. "The turbulent time we live in suggests that change is at hand and the time has come for a new order."
As with many fights involving faith, Europe's struggle between belief and nonbelief is also a proxy for other, concrete issues that go far beyond the supernatural. In this case, they involve a battle to define the identity of a continent.
Half a century after the 1957 Treaty of Rome laid the foundations for the now 27-nation European Union, Europe has secured peace and prosperity. But it is deeply uncertain about what binds the bloc together beyond mere economic self-interest. Says Ms. Armstrong: "There is a big fight going on to define European civilization."
Canary in the coal mine time for the faithful in Europe: This best-selling author preaches that the time for tolerating religious believers in Europe is past, and it's time for a "final battle." What's this you atheists who comment here like to say about the hostility and intolerance of Christians? Dream on, dears.
Europeans, by turning their back on the cult that created their culture, and substituting an ersatz religion of secularism and hedonism, are committing civilizational suicide. Mark Steyn has been beating the drum about demographic disaster in Europe for some time. Writing in the new issue of National Review, he cites this quote about the demographic changes upon us: "The expected global upheaval is without parallel in human history."
Know who said that? The United Nations. In fact, check out this most recent comprehensive revision of the UN's demographics forecast. It predicts a demographic catastrophe for Europe in the decades to come. Somebody's got to stick around to take care of all those old people who decided not to have children, and that somebody is going to be immigrants -- most likely Muslims, who have the bad taste (by Euro standards) to believe in God. In his NR column, Steyn takes on those who point ou
t that fertility rates in Muslim Tunisia are falling. In response, Steyn points out that Turkey is rapidly de-secularizing because the Western-oriented Kemalists of the cities have been outbred by the intensely religious Turks of rural Anatolia. Writes Steyn:
That's a lesson in demography from an all-Muslim sample: No pasty white blokes were involved. So the fact that Muslim fertility is declining in Tunisia is not consolation: All that will do, as in Turkey, is remove moderate Muslims from the equation too early in the game.
The demographic tide will recede eventually over the Islamic nations as they develop (e.g., Spengler has been pointing out for some time now the demographic crisis in Iran). But who will be left standing to inhabit Europe when that happens? It's not going to be the people who run the place now. And it's certainly not going to be the evangelists for atheism.
I completely agree with John Podhoretz about how classy the three exonerated Duke lacrosse men were yesterday in that press conference. I feel pretty strongly about that case for some personal reasons. For one, my first impulse was to believe the accusations, because they confirmed my own bias, based on college memories, as to what college athletes are like. I quickly regretted that prejudice when it became obvious that the accuser was unreliable, and that the DA was a showboater who was going to roast those fellows for his own political advantage. And then, watching what became of them at the hands of Mike Nifong and the credulous media, I thought about my own two sons, and how they might be treated one day if they, as white middle-class males, fell afoul of a DA and a news media whose agenda included assuming that they must be guilty because they fit a cherished stereotype. I've said here before how I was told point-blank by a newspaper editor who had earlier told me he wanted to hire me on the basis of my published work, that he was turned down by his boss solely because I am a white male.
That was unjust, but very minor. What happened to the Duke men was unjust, and major. But the principle behind both actions is the same. To be perfectly clear, when it happened in the past, or happens today, to a member of a minority group, it is unjust, and should not be tolerated. But see, what we have too often in society today is not an attempt to seek justice, but to seek retribution, and leveling even at the cost of injustice to individuals. I burned this morning when a black woman student in Durham commented on NPR about the result by saying that the Duke men should have been put on trial, because in her view black men in a similar situation would have been. The facts in the case meant nothing to her. To judge by her comments, all she was interested in was the emotional satisfaction of seeing white males suffer. That is an outrageous and disgusting opinion. But not a surprising one in contemporary society.
I should say as well that this ugly episode -- and let us hope that Mike Nifong's legal career is over -- brings to mind again how dangerous it is to politicize justice (yes, I'm talking about the US Attorneys scandal). If those USAs were dismissed because they wouldn't follow legitimate policy goals, that's one thing. But if, as it seems, they were dismissed because they wouldn't use their power to pursue partisan political goals, that is a corruption of justice in the same moral ballpark as what Democrat Mike Nifong did. We need oversight hearings to get to the bottom of this.
The editorial board met today with George Abercrombie, who heads US operations for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman La Roche. He's in Dallas today to speak to a group at SMU's business school about the necessity for corporations to have plans for operating in an avian flu pandemic. He's got a product to sell: Tamiflu. The US Government is attempting to stockpile 81 million courses of the drug in advance of an avian flu pandemic, as part of a plan to limit the destructiveness of the virus.
He said that Roche is in a difficult place. If it tries to encourage governments to stock up Tamiflu (which has a five-year shelf life) now, some will accuse it of trying to profit from fear of what might happen. Given the expense of manufacturing the drug, Roche can't produce hundreds of millions of doses that nobody might buy, for a pandemic that might not occur before the expiration date arrives. But if avian flu does mutate and enter the human population, it will be impossible for Roche to meet demand for the drug, which is complicated to manufacture. In that case, they'll be accused of Not Doing Enough. "People will expect us to be able to flip a switch and supply the world, which we can't do," he said.
We talked about public perception of the threat. Abercrombie pointed out that many people mistakenly believe that the threat of pandemic has abated because the news media don't talk much about it anymore. If you listen to scientists, though, they say the threat has never been more present. Nobody can predict when it will happen, only that it will happen. (Here's the US Government information clearing center on avian flu).
What does all this have to do with crunchy-con themes? I'm so glad you asked. Abercrombie talked about how "society could collapse" -- and if you know anything about the potential world crisis from an avian flu pandemic, you know this is by no means alarmist rhetoric. We're talking about deaths and disruption -- social, economic, everything -- on a scale we've never seen in living memory. We will see civil society tested in ways we can scarcely imagine, and I do worry about how well we'll show ourselves.
A business security consultant prepared a paper forecasting what we might see. The interesting part of that -- to me -- is his idea that the breakdown in global trade will force the localization of economies worldwide. That seems plainly logical, and calls to mind the question of how increasing economic localization now will help regions and localities weather the future pandemic more intact.
The avian flu pandemic is not a scare like Y2K. If you'll spend two minutes looking over the literature, flu pandemics go through human populations routinely. We are overdue for another one, historically. What makes H5N1 avian flu so terrifying is its astronomical mortality rate. When this thing crosses over into the human population, we have to be on guard against panic. One way to do so is to prepare while we have time. And one way to prepare is to rededicate yourself to building the social networks that are going to be necessary to get through what's coming, one of these days.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democratic candidate for president of a nation that faces serious crises in Iraq, Afghanistan, economically (re: the deficit and entitlements), immigration ... is on TV now being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer about Don Imus's big mouth.
What next? "Sen. Dodd, did you ever fear that you might be the father of Anna Nicole's baby?"
I'm watching on CNN right now coverage of an anti-Imus rally at Rutgers, and I'm thinking if anything makes me feel sorry for the wrinkled old buzzard, it's this "Bonfire of the Vanities"-style pile-on. That bathetic press conference by the Rutgers women's basketball team was too much. Driving in from the airport last night, I listened to the News Hour on our local public radio station, and their 15-minuteor so report on the press conference. I can only imagine that the visuals were compelling, because on radio, it came across as wildly overblown.
I've never listened to Don Imus, and I think what he said about those women was stupid, unfunny and offensive. But good grief, is their self-esteem so fragile that an offhand comment by a shock jock causes such agony? Really? And the idea that Al Sharpton -- Al Sharpton! -- is the person to whom Imus goes crawling seeking absolution is vomitous. A few years ago, I wrote a New York Post column about the grandiose funeral plans for the dead young pop star Aaliyah, and said that we in this culture esteem celebrities too much. Here is National Review's account of what happened next (N.B., I was not a NR writer at the time):
The 22-year-old pop singer and actress Aaliyah died in the Bahamas when her plane crashed, after her entourage overloaded it with equipment. Her fans were stricken, and her funeral on Manhattan's Upper East Side featured a horse-drawn hearse, a silver-plated coffin, and the release of 22 white doves.
This struck Rod Dreher, a columnist for the New York Post, as a little much. "The family of Aaliyah," he wrote, "does the poor woman's memory no favors with this tasteless gesture."
This struck the Rev. Al Sharpton as much too much. Sharpton held a rally and a press conference at his Harlem headquarters, and hung Dreher out to dry. "What you really mean is, you should have a nice little Negro funeral." (Dreher had actually compared the singer's exequies with those of Princess Diana-"a ghoulish saturnalia of sentimentality . . . the epitome of modern celebrity worship.") "To say that she was less than someone else is abysmal, insulting, and racist." (This is Jefferson run amok-everybody is equal in every way.) But this was Sharpton's kicker: "We will bring down anybody who tells us how to mourn our own."
As if on cue-no, exactly on cue-the Post's phone lines lit up with threats to Dreher. Here is one beauty: "Look, white bitch, you're not answering your phone, but you can't hide forever. One of us is going to be waiting for you outside your building . . . We're gonna step out and choke your motherf***ing neck."
New Yorkers know better than to take these threats lightly. In 1995 Al Sharpton's National Action Network fastened on a landlord-tenant dispute in Harlem. A Jewish-owned store, Freddy's Fashion Mart, itself the tenant of a black church, was accused of jacking up the rent on a black subtenant. Sharpton set up pickets, manned by a lieutenant, which heckled black customers as "traitors" and Freddy's as "Jew bastards" and "bloodsucking Jews." Sharpton sometimes addressed his minions himself. One fine day, one of the mob, a nut with a criminal record, shot four people and burned the store down, killing seven (including a black security guard). When Sharpton incites, people die.
New Yorkers know Sharpton's record, but they will not speak of it. This dangerous clown has become a kingmaker in the New York City mayor's race, and he has announced plans to run for president in 2004. Sharpton is presumed to speak for black people-which is truly abysmal, insulting, and racist.
The New York Post, Dreher's newspaper, is one of the few outlets that have kept a spotlight on Sharpton throughout his dismal career. But now that one of its own has been threatened, the Post seems to have taken a powder. In response to the threats, the paper's new editor, Col Allan, made one minimalist grunt: "I stand by Rod Dreher. He had a right to express an o
pinion." The silence from the rest of the New York media has been deafening. Since a Democrat is almost certain to win in November, Sharpton will be given the keys to City Hall. The press does not want to offend the city's new lords spiritual, not even in the cause of defending the reputation-and perhaps the safety-of one of its own.
Happily, a Democrat did not win the mayoralty, but everything else in NR's account was true. I had to go into hiding in my own apartment after numerous death threats. Some black thug got on cable access and told his viewers that he had spoken to me, and I'd made racist remarks to him. The crowd worked itself up into a frenzy. They also chanted "Kill Giuliani! Kill Giuliani!"
The point here is not whether my column was offensive. It was arguably ill-advised, but what's important is that Sharpton took my comment about the phenomenon of celebrity, racialized it, and used it to promote himself at my expense -- this at a time when I was under death threat because of it (one message warned that "we know where you come out of the building, and we'll be waiting for you, and you won't see us coming).
Sharpton is a racist thug. Anything he touches is contaminated. None of that puts Don Imus in the clear, and don't misread me as apologizing for Don Imus. I'm not. What he said, again, was racist and offensive, and he should face some kind of sanction for his remarks (and he is facing that from his employers). I really don't care if they fire him, except that it gives the repulsive Sharpton a scalp to hang on his belt.
But let's be honest: the way this thing is being covered is a racially-correct media feeding frenzy. Note well the point made by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue:
“Two years ago, Penn Jillette (of the comedy team Penn and Teller) went on Showtime calling Mother Teresa ‘Mother F—king Teresa’ and called the nuns who worked with her ‘f—king c—ts.’ Showtime is owned by Viacom and that is why I wrote to its chief, Sumner Redstone, to register a complaint. He wrote back extolling the merits of ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘tolerance.’ Last year, on Viacom-owned CBS radio, Jillette said Mother Teresa ‘had this weird kink that I think was sexual,’ compared the saintly nun to Charles Manson and said she ‘got her [sexual] kicks watching people suffer and die.’ Again, nothing was done about this.
“In 2005, Bill Maher went on HBO at the time of the death of Pope John Paul II and said, ‘For those who could not make the funeral, the Vatican has asked that in lieu of flowers, just stop touching your d—k.’ He also said that the whole story of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection was ‘grafted from paganism’; he ended by mocking the death of the pope and the upcoming conclave. The letter I received from HBO said that ‘it’s a free country, and people are free to say silly things—even on HBO.’ [snip] “In other words, Catholic bashing is humorous and an exercise in liberty. Racism is awful. Bigotry, then, is neither good nor bad—it just depends who the target is.”
As a professional matter, it would seem that Don Imus's problem is not that he's an unfunny bigot. His problem is that he's not bigoted against the groups our media overseers allow to be mocked with impunity.
There is, or was, a little Orthodox monastery in Blanco, Texas -- they were freelance for a while, I think, then at least for a time hooked up with ROCOR, which I believe gave them the boot -- which throughout the 1990s claimed to have a miraculous weeping icon of the Virgin Mary. I used to go to it back in the day to pray to the Virgin for her intercession in helping me to meet the woman I was to marry, if that was God's will. I made several pilgrimages out there. The penultimate time was in the company of Julie, on October 12, 1996; I'd just met her the day before. And the last time I went there was to propose marriage to Julie four months later, kneeling in a prayer of thanksgiving to God for bringing us together, and to the Virgin for her prayers.
And then it all came out that that monastery was a cesspit of sex abuse. Now, a deposition has been offered by a former monk there that the monks (including himself) were having sex with each other, smoking pot, and that the weeping icon was fake. All this was allegedly going on while I was out there praying. We know by faith and by evidence that God can bring good out of evil, and I am confident that the Virgin heard my sincerely offered prayers, and the prayers of all the people who offered them in good conscience at that den, and honored them. The evil of those unworthy monks does not detract from the goodness that existed in that spot, like wheat among the tares.
Nevertheless, let justice be done. And I think it would be a just thing were that monastic compound to be destroyed, and the earth salted so that nothing ever grew there again.
Well, brethren and sistren, I have returned. I see that the Murphy thing blew up in my absence, and that James Taranto got it all explained for us. You will notice that in my initial posting on the foofarah, I used the phrase "if it's true" three times. It sounded far-fetched, but not implausible, at least to me. Taranto says that "hatred" of Bush blinded me and others on this matter. Oh? I am happy to have had my suspicions on the Murphy matter dismissed, but seriously, it's not an act of malicious irrationality to view this administration as at least capable of abusing civil liberties and/or improperly politicizing the functions of government.
I will be away from the blog for a day or so, and headed to the New York area to give a talk on Tuesday at Bergen Community College. No new postings till after I get back. Y'all be good -- I've deputized someone to monitor the comboxes. Oh what fun. Onward!
Two bishops -- the Catholic bishop for the British armed forces, and the Anglican bishop of Rochester, a top Anglican prelate -- have come out in praise of the Iranians for releasing British captives! Excerpt:
The Roman Catholic bishop who oversees the armed forces has provoked fury by praising the Iranian leadership for its "forgiveness" and "act of mercy" in freeing the 15 British sailors and marines last week.
Bishop Burns said Iran demonstrated 'faith in a forgiving God' The Bishop of the Forces, the Rt Rev Tom Burns, said that the religious beliefs of the Iranians had played a large part in their decision to release the hostages after holding them for more than two weeks.
His words were echoed by a leading Anglican figure, the Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, who said Iran had acted within the "moral and spiritual tradition of their country" and contrasted this with Britain's "free-floating attitudes"
Words fail. What a disgusting display. If I were a radical Muslim, I'd be tickled pink at this. At least one Briton is properly appalled by the Iranian captive mess:
Col Tim Collins, who led the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said: "It's a close call as to which organisation is in the deepest moral crisis - the Church or the Ministry of Defence."
He's a retired law professor from Princeton and a Marine Corps veteran. If this story is true -- and I devoutly hope that reporters are checking it out -- he is an enemy of the state simply because he criticized President Bush. Excerpt from what Prof. Murphy is said to report:
"On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving."
"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years."
"I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "
If this account is true, and if it's true that just going to a peace march puts you at risk for being on the terrorism "no-fly" list, I'd say Congress had damn well better hold hearings about this at once, and find out just exactly what powers the federal government are exercising against law-abiding citizens who happen to oppose administration policy. We could be deep into Nixon territory.
John Tindell, the father of Joe Tindell, another of the hostages, said his son had turned down an offer of £10,000. “The MoD said if you want to earn money you are free to go out and do it. I was a bit surprised. The MoD said to the marines, ‘Go out there, tell the truth and make the money’.”
He claimed the marines were planning to sell on eBay the vases given to them in their “goody bags” by the Iranians.
The freedom they were given surprised Max Clifford, the storybroker, who said the MoD was “frogmarching them out to win the propaganda war”.
Colonel Bob Stewart, a commander of British UN forces in Bosnia, said: “I am appalled the MoD is encouraging them to profit from a military disaster. Some of them are acting like reality TV stars.”
What were we saying about honor and this crew?
(P.S. OK, OK, this'll be the last I write about this topic. Wish I knew why it gets to me so.)
Stuart Buck sends a link to a one-hour video conversation between Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben. Happily for my work schedule this afternoon, my Mac here at home doesn't have the right plug-ins to watch it. Later, on the laptop, tho'...
Wal-Marts, sprawl, strip-malls, downtown businesses closing, mom-and-pop stores being bought out, local cultures being obliterated, traditions evaporating, having to drive anywhere of significance, opportunities to take walks and greet the people in your neighborhood disappearing, buildings with character being demolished or patched with vinyl windows and siding. (If you thought houses were made of ticky-tacky in the 1950s, open your eyes and see what kind of crap they're building them out of now!) It's not only heartbreaking to me. It's tearing apart the fabric of society at the seams!! After reading chaper two of your book, I am so grateful to know I have company!
Again, it's not left or right, although the left-right paradigm is shifting somewhat. I am a great fan of Ed Schultz's radio program, and he frequently interviews Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, both of whom share many of his concerns about immigration and outsourcing in the name of the 'free' market ruining our economy and our very way of life. (The 'politically correct' attempts at whitewashing culture are not helping, either. Like the Puritans who failed at a similar attempt centuries ago, they do not understand how cultures evolve.)
If you know of any organizations dedicated to redeeming our sense of rootedness and connectedness, community and beauty, please let me know.
How about it, readers? Can you direct my correspondent to the organizations he's looking for? I've got to go out to do some work, but I'll put a few up when I get back.
A couple of weeks ago, on the thread about the giant chocolate Jesus statue that was so controversial, one of you remarked something to the effect of how depressing it was to see American Christians freaking out over crap like that, when around the world so many Christians are truly suffering threat of life and limb for their faith. That challenged me, as one of the original freaker-outers, and eventually I wrote a column on that point in today's Dallas Morning News. Excerpt:
Perhaps no hell on earth – no hell that ever was on earth – compares with North Korea. Soon Ok Lee, a former North Korean communist who was imprisoned in the gulags there, suffered and witnessed unspeakable tortures. After escaping to South Korea, she said that to the North Korean regime, "the No. 1 enemy is God," and that for a time, Christians were treated most harshly of all in the prison camps.
"In the spring of 1990, I was carrying a work order to the cast iron factory in the male prison," Ms. Lee testified to Congress in 2002. "Five or six elderly Christians were lined up and forced to deny their Christianity and accept the Juche ideology of the state. The selected prisoners all remained silent at the repeated command for conversion. The security officers became furious by this and killed them by pouring molten iron on them one by one."
Those Christians have death by molten iron for Jesus' sake. We have to live with molten chocolate formed into a blasphemous image of Our Lord. How very blessed are we.
I got this e-mail today from a reader of the column:
I cannot thank you enough for shedding light on an all too forgotten aspect of the Iraq war; the Assyrian-Christian people (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs). As an Assyrian-Canadian, it is frustrating to witness the majority of western news media outlets repeatedly failing to mention the plight of the Assyrian people in Iraq. With no organized militia or governmental body to back them, and being non-Muslims, non Arabs in a Muslim dominated country, Assyrians are the most vulnerable community in Iraq. They do not enjoy the same freedoms that Muslims in North America demand and receive, clearly a double standard.
Growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of news about Assyrians in the western media, I created my own blog ( www.assyrianlife.com ) in order to increase awareness about the plight of Assyrians. As such, I welcome any and all news articles that mention the Assyrian people. Your article motivates me to carry on with my blog and I encourage you to help spread the awareness for the sake of the Assyrian Christians.
On behalf of the Assyrians in Iraq and the rest of the world, I wish to thank you for your honest reporting and hope that you continue to speak up on behalf of this forgotten Christian community.
Along those lines, the Washington Post mentions today a US Muslim teenager who was baptized and received into the Catholic Church last evening:
Donya Botkan, 16, a junior at Damascus High School, had to overcome the concerns of her Muslim parents, who assumed she was just going through a phase. She had been attending Mass at Mother Seton as a purely social event with her Catholic friends, but Jesus's message of compassion and forgiveness, she said, wove its way into her heart.
"You don't hear that as much in other faiths compared to Christianity," she said.
For what she did last night, Donya Botkan would be condemned to death in much of the Muslim world.
For we who appreciate the University of Dallas as a Catholic institution of higher learning that's reliably traditional, this blog item from the Dallas Morning News' metro desk. Kent Fischer is an education reporter:
Apparently the University of Dallas wants to hippify its image.
Fellow ed reporter Kent Fischer got a call today from a Connecticut professor taking a survey. A few questions in, the professor 'fessed that he's polling on behalf of UD, and that it wants to break its conservative image. Sure enough, UD has been rated the country's 8th most politically conservative college (just above A&M) and we all trust those college rankings.
Good grief. The last thing this country needs is another liberal Catholic university, which are in oversupply. I suspect there are quite a few UD alumni who will react to this surreptitious campaign with displeasure.
...and boy, is he sleepy. Well, I am. Was. I'm drinking coffee now WITH HALF-AND-HALF, YAY! We got in from Pascha liturgy at 5 a.m., exhausted and very, very happy. This was our first Pascha as Orthodox Christians, and it was both wonderful and exhausting. In Orthodoxy, I don't think you can separate the two. Our church was jammed when the liturgy started at midnight; shortly thereafter, the congregation made a procession around the outside of the church three times, the clergy in dazzling robes, and carrying crosses and icons, singing a hymn of Resurrection. I thought: what must the neighbors think? It was so otherwordly and transporting. The Orthodox Paschal liturgy is, to a newbie like me, really complicated, and it doesn't help one focus to have to keep track of kids during all the prayers. But you learn to let the beauty and the majesty wash over you. The shouts -- "Christ is Risen! Khristos voskrese!" -- and the same hymn (troparion) -- "Christ is Risen from the dead/Trampling down death by death/And on those in the tombs restoring life!" -- recurring throughout the three-hour liturgy as a leitmotif of joy. We sang in English, Russian, Arabic, Greek and Spanish. This liturgy is impossibly rich; our friends, who are coming into the Orthodox Church at Pentecost, stayed almost to the very end (3 a.m.), and their two young sons remained awake the entire time -- Matt, the dad, said he thinks that the colors and sounds and pageantry overwhelmed the boys. I can easily see that. The liturgy and the congregation was flush with the overwhelming joy of the Resurrection, and it was just a fantastic thing to be a part of. We so love this little congregation and community.
After liturgy ended at 3, those who remained -- must have been about 150 folks -- retired to the church hall for the blessing of the Pascha baskets. This is a great tradition. Orthodox people -- maybe all Orthodox, I dunno, or maybe just Russians -- fill baskets with foods, especially meat and dairy (from which we've been abstaining throughout Lent) to be eaten during Bright Week (that is, the week after Easter day). But we also feast that night. The archbishop came and blessed all the baskets brimming with wine, sausages, cheeses and Paschal breads and cakes, and everybody chowed down. It was like we'd just finished a marathon, and most of us were close to delirious from sleepiness and fatigue. But a good fatigue.
And then we learned that after liturgy, a young couple in the parish, Michael and Joan, had gotten engaged! Michael proposed as soon as the liturgy ended, and Joan said yes. They'd met in church. Joy on top of joy! He is risen indeed.
How did Easter go in your church? Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants -- let's start a thread.
Charles Moore, a Catholic and distinguished British editor, writes about attending a high-profile public debate recently on the subject of whether or not society would be better off without religion. A fair-minded fellow, Moore admits that the atheists on the panel -- including Prof. Richard Dawkins and the controversialist Christopher Hitchens -- made the better case. But:
I feel that atheism may be acquiring precisely those characteristics that atheists so dislike about religion - intolerance, dogmatism, righteousness, moral contempt for one's opponents.
When you hear or read people like Richard Dawkins, you have to admit the force of many of their arguments. Religious people do often say extraordinarily indefensible things about their faith, and can be astonishingly evasive or confused. Very few of us (certainly not I) can competently maintain the standard arguments for the existence of God against a determined onslaught.
And yet the Dawkinses and Graylings, the Hitchenses and the Parrises, seem somehow to be missing the point. What they say is dry and unnourishing. I think one reason for this lies in their underlying conception of what it is to be human - they think that the highest quality is to be clever.
I hasten to say that I am not arguing against cleverness. Intelligence is a great gift, and should be cultivated, if possessed, by all possible means. ...You probably know some people with high IQs. You may even have met members of the Royal Society. Does it strike you, brilliant though they are, that they have a deeper understanding of truth, beauty and all that you need to know about life than the rest of us? [snip] What begins to emerge - and it lurked strongly behind the anti-religion side of the Intelligence Squared debate - is the idea that atheism is an elite state, a superior order of being, a plane of enlightenment denied to thickoes.
This seems to me to present certain problems. A religious faith is not, primarily, a set of propositions, although it will contain such propositions and must use all human intellectual resources to understand and explain them. It is a belief about what governs the whole of life, indeed the whole existence of everything.
It therefore matters not only how we reason, but how we feel, how we act towards others, how we speak, sing, dance, laugh, cry, eat and wash, how we die, how we pray and how we love. [snip] The Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury once criticised Roman Catholicism for being "an excellent religion for peasants and women". But what sort of a religion would it be which was not excellent for peasants or women (who made up about 90 per cent of the world's population in Salisbury's day)?
And what sort of a belief system is it that asserts the superiority of Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, over the woman who toils in paddy fields, or the child who begs in the dirt, or the prisoner in his chains?
I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Christopher Hitchens, despite his vicious attacks on Mother Teresa's reputation. That said, I would a thousand times rather live in a world guided by Mother Teresa's ethic than Christopher Hitchens'.
Columnist Marina Hyde, writing in Britain's leftist daily The Guardian, inadvertently answers Harvey's call to provide military figures critical of the British sailors' behavior in Iranian captivity. (The title of this blog post, and the reference in her final line, has to do with Hyde's characterization of the happy-clappy final photo taken of the captives with their Iranian captors):
Yet First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Jonathan Band insists the crew "acted with considerable dignity and a lot of courage," going on to say that "they appear to have played it by the rules". In which case, perhaps a review of the rules might be worth considering. Revolting as Ahmadinejad's exercise was, getting caught up in such a situation is a risk inherent in the type of work for which the navy personnel signed up. Many might disagree with Admiral Band that they did not put others in danger: what was there for all to see was the apparent ease with which British service men and women can be coopted as propaganda tools.
A contrast with the two RAF Tornado crewmen captured during the first Gulf war, and paraded silent and bloodied on Iraqi television, may be unfair. But in terms of reserve, it is slightly unfortunate when comparisons with five-year-old Stuart Lockwood - who shrank from Saddam's hand as the dictator ruffled his hair during the Kuwait hostage crisis - do not flatter these latterday detainees.
Appearance is crucial. So pliant did the 15 appear in their nightly media outings that it was not long before tactfully bemused commentators were raising the possibility of Stockholm syndrome, presumably casting Leading Seaman Faye Turney in the Patty Hearst role, with the iconic black beret replaced by a hijab in this version.
More worthy of serious consideration, though, is the fact that several former senior military figures have taken the step of speaking out against the charges of luminous heroism. "This situation looked like a bloody shambles," Lt General Sir Michael Gray told yesterday's Daily Mail. "It did not look good. The shambles also relates to how and why these people were picked up in the first place. The Royal Navy appears to have been inept - but that is another story." [snip] Perhaps those of us made uneasy by the spectacle of the past fortnight are just stupidly nostalgic for this kind of world - the old days when wars were waged against expansionist nations, as opposed to on an abstract noun. The days when hostage situations didn't share disturbing amounts of iconography with the Big Brother house, and captured personnel did not emerge asking for "space". Then again, as our leaders constantly remind us, we are fighting a new kind of enemy. Perhaps all this goes with the territory.
But there is a certain moment in life when those of us who consider ourselves conscientious objectors to just about everything but imported US TV dramas suddenly find ourselves a heartbeat away from ending a sentence with the words "and we'd all be speaking German now". For this armchair general hack, that moment was the Tehran Ryder Cup photo.
It is Holy Saturday here in Dallas, Texas, and a fire burns in my hearth here at home, and I'm looking out the window of my home office at snowflakes falling. And I can hear birds singing.
Woke up this morning thinking about this British sailor business again, and about some things I've been reading lately to prepare for my Russell Kirk lecture a week from today in Indianapolis. Well, really I woke up thinking about coffee, but then this.
In his biography of Kirk, James Person quotes from a letter the literature teacher Tom Howard wrote to Kirk late in Kirk's life. Person relates how Howard would give his college English lit students an "exercise in the permanent things" at the beginning of each semester. He would give the class a list of words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendor, ceremony, taboo, mystery and purity. Howard told Kirk that the young adults consistently reacted thus: "either a total blank, embarrassed snickers, or incredulity." He added:
The entire list of words land in their laps like a heap of dead basalt meteorites lately arrived from some other realm. They don't know what to do with them. They have never encountered them. The words are entirely foreign to the whole set of assumptions that has been written (or should I say televised) for these students' imaginations for the whole of their lives. Majesty? The man must be mad. Valor? What's that? Courtesy? What a bore. Virginity? Ha-ha -- there's one for you!
Howard went on to write that "this awful list of words names an array of qualities that any Jew, any pagan, and any Christian, up until quite recently in history, would have not only understood, but would have extolled as being close to the center of things."
I bring this up because what really gets to me about the British sailors' behavior is not only that they behaved as they did under duress, but also -- and moreso -- that there seems to be no expectation among so many people that they should have behaved otherwise. As Tom Howard points out, until virtually yesterday, it was widely held among human societies that honor -- the preservation of which included the willingness to suffer great hardship rather than betray one's country in captivity -- was a given, a "permanent thing" common to the human spirit. What constituted "honor" changed from society to society, with some fussy cultures going to absurd and destructive lengths to enshrine honor (one thinks of the shame/honor dynamic within gang culture). But what few denied, what few would dare deny, was that honor meant something, and was worth preserving -- and when one chose to relinquish one's claim to honor and embrace humility, it should not be done lightly, but in a morally (and religiously) meaningful way.
Sigilaris had a thoughtful post about how honor, traditionally understood, conflicts with Christianity. Nietzsche despised Christianity because it made humility a virtue. But humility, in the Christian sense, is not the same as cowardice. Christ died on Good Friday even though he, as we Christians are confident, could have called down legions of angels to free himself and punish his torturers. But he went willingly and in humiliation to his ignominious death, because he served a higher purpose. "Greater love hath no man...." I don't think honor disappears within Christianity, it's only given to different virtues. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a good example of this. The Samaritan is thought lowly by Israelite society of the day, by virtue of his status as a Samaritan. But Jesus showed that the Samaritan proved his superior virtue by stooping to help the robbery victim that all the supposedly superior people passed by. Honor, taught Christ, goes to the man who practiced charity. That is why we honor the example of the "unclean" Samaritan, even today. That is why our civilization (minus Christopher Hitchens) will honor the name and memory of poor gnarled and homely Mother Teresa for as long it lasts, but will forget about Donald Trump almost instantly.
Anyway, Christ made a gift of his honor -- and his life -- to save the souls of humanity. Or so we Christians believe. But that is not the same as denying that honor exists, and is important.
What does the apparent fact that so many today look upon traditional notions of honor as quaint customs from the past say about our collective moral imagination? The relative ease with which those soldiers violation of the taboo against participating in propaganda broadcasts of the enemy -- and the decision of the Royal Navy to ignore the violation -- strikes me as a "canary in the coal mine" moment. The first thing that alarms the traditionalist is that so ancient a taboo was broken in the first place. What does it mean when a virtue so universally professed, and for so long, is violated -- and it's not treated as such a big deal?
What this indicates is a poverty of the moral imagination. We are living in the time C.S. Lewis called an age of "men without chests." Here is a key passage from Lewis's "The Abolition of Man" that speaks to the cost of the impoverishment of Western moral imagination in these times:
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Lewis is saying that if we don't raise up generations to feel disgust, for example, at the thought of glad-handing with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the sake of enemy propa
ganda, we will be in serious trouble. Would you feel safer living in a country whose soldiers live by the ethic demonstrated by those Brits, or whose soldiers live by the ethic demonstrated by an Italian security guard named Fabrizio Quattrocchi, who yanked his blindfold off at his own execution ritual at the hands of Islamic terrorists, and shouted, "Now I'll show you how an Italian dies!"? They shot and killed him. That was a man, Fabrizio Quattrochi.
Kirkean conservatism believes that the most important task of contemporary conservatives is restoring the moral imagination dessicated and fragmented by modernity and materialism. Here's a passage from Person's biography that gets to the heart of Kirk's project:
On one occasion, [Kirk] addressed a group fo businessmen on the moral imagination, only to have one spectator arise during the subsequent question-and-answer period and loudly retort, "We don't need any imagination. We're practical." The substance of Kirk's reply found its way into one of his essays, "The Recovery of Norms": "When the moral imagination is enriched, a people find themselves capable of great things; when it is impoverished, they cannot act effectively even for their own survival, no matter how immense their material resources."
I do not think we can dispute that the British sailors' conduct breaks with tradition (one wonders what Lord Nelson would make of them). The dispute, as I see it, is over whether or not it represents progress or decadence. You know where I stand. I am certain the lesson of this humiliation will not have been lost on the Iranians or their fellow travelers within Britain.
P.S.: Here's another way to think of it. We are willing to suffer most for what we love most. A man who would not suffer torment for the sake of his wife and children is a dishonorable man, or at least one who does not love his wife and children as he should. Similarly, it strikes me that a soldier who so easily capitulates to a coerced attempt to participate in enemy propaganda against his own country does not love his country as he ought, particularly given his status as a soldier pledged to defend that nation with his life.
If you have to teach a man why it's dishonorable to betray his wife and children, the battle is lost. If you have to teach a soldier why it's dishonorable to betray his country, the battle is lost. Some things, as Lewis knew, have to be felt before they are known.
We honor the New York City firemen who died on 9/11 because they did their duty, knowing in the moment they chose to enter those towers that they weren't likely to come out. The rationalist/materialist can make no sense of their choice. Had they decided it was too dangerous to go up, I honestly don't think dishonor would have accrued to them under those circumstances. But they did go up and try to save people, because that's what firemen do.
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