Daniel Larison's website has been down all day -- the bandwidth has been exceeded. Argh! I need my daily fix of the Dark Paleocon Lord's brilliant musings, and I'm not getting it. John Podhoretz, I know you're behind this somehow...
So, if it's understandable when society evolves to discard myths that no longer serve its perceived interests (or at least desires), why shouldn't religion be subject to the same laws of evolution? The modernist says they absolutely should; the traditionalist says they should not.
But here it gets complicated. Tradition has to be flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances without losing its core principles. And when the required/desired adaptation is too difficult to manage credibly, sometimes tradition will make a face-saving adjustment, and call it fidelity (e.g., the fact that modernizing Islamic nations have developed a Muslim banking system that somehow gets around Islamic prohibitions on interest). The question facing Christians now is whether or not the Christian faith should adapt itself to modern sexual mores. As anybody reading these comboxes can see, it's a question that generates far more heat than light.
One can more easily give up, say, reverence for the Alamo, or Robert E. Lee, etc., than reverence for the Bible and the saints, because the former is secular history, and the latter is sacred history. The fate of one's eternal soul does not depend on whether or not one reveres Stonewall Jackson (though the fate of one's culture probably does). Real religion, serious religion, instead of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is a myth that's true. That was Tolkien's line to Lewis, explaining Christianity in a nutshell: a myth that's true. R.E. Lee, or the King of France, or Tsar Nicholas, might have been a hero or a villain, but in the end, the Kingdom of God doesn't stand or fall on who you say they are. In the Christian view, it does stand or fall on who you say Jesus is.
I get "This American Life" via podcast, and listened to the latest one this morning (you can download it by following that link, or in iTunes). It was a stunner. One of the segments was about the work of Conrad Crane, a historian at the US Army War College, who with colleague W. Andrew Terrill produced this February 2003 monograph. It was a document, based on study of historical experience, intended to guide the American occupation of Iraq, by warning the military what would happen if they did, or failed to do, certain things. Like the TAL correspondent said, it reads like a letter from the future predicting exactly what did happen in Iraq. Here's the PDF version. Note especially the warning that to disband the Iraqi army would be to annihilate one of the only sources of unity in the country, and could send its soldiers straight into the arms of sectarian militias.
This is not a new story; James Fallows reported on it a couple of years ago in The Atlantic. But it's new to me. The point is, nobody in the administration can say they weren't warned about what could happen in Iraq. They were. They chose to ignore it because it didn't suit their ideological vision. Nothing that happened in Iraq after the end of the first phase of the war surprised Conrad Crane. It shouldn't have surprised President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, or any of them. They chose not to believe it. And now look.
It seems that Rumsfeld et alia chose to disbelieve it because if historian Crane was right, then he, Rumsfeld, was wrong in his theories about how the US military needed to be transformed. So he -- and the commander in chief he served -- chose theory over experience. The arrogance simply beggars belief. If you listen on in that This American Life podcast, you'll hear an interview with the WaPo's Tom Ricks, on the ground in Baghdad, warning that people who expect a clean and swift withdrawal from Iraq are deluding themselves. He says we will see months of long convoys crawling across the desert to Kuwait, trailing refugees, and possibly coming under enemy assault. It will be a long, drawn-out, ugly humiliation.
Why do elites do this to themselves and the organizations and people they serve? Is there a grand unified theory of elite behavior that explains this? Catholics were asking the same question about their bishops in the wake of the sex abuse disaster. No bishop could claim he didn't know what was happening, and what was going to happen if it wasn't dealt with (in fact, the 1985 Doyle-Mouton Report was in many ways an analogue to the 2003 Crane-Terrill Report). See, I don't believe that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith wanted to do harm to the military and the country -- not in the least. Nor do I believe that the Catholic bishops wanted to harm the Church. In both cases, I take it as a given that they thought they were doing the right thing. But in both cases, they were so blinded by their own mistaken interests that they chose the wrong path, with catastrophic results.
How does political theory explain this kind of failure of leadership? I seem to recall from my college studies that someone -- Schumpeter, maybe? -- said that in time, elites will unconsciously come to identify the institution's best interest with their own. This could explain the Catholic bishops' institutional behavior, but can it really explain Bush's and Rumsfeld's, given their status as short-timers?
Are there other examples of a leadership class making the same terrible mistakes? I don't count people like the Enron executives, because I think they made their decisions out of deliberate, knowing corruption.
I was thinking this morning about the (cultural) fate of the Alamo myth in this era of mass Mexican migration spurred by the economy, and I reflected again on Daniel Bell's point about each age constructing the myths that work for it. (I use "myth" here not in the sense of something being untrue, but in the sense of a story that a society tells to explain itself to itself). Bell, again:
Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world. These meanings specify a set of purposes or, like myth and ritual, explain the character of shared experiences, or deal with the transformations of nature through human powers of magic or techne. These meanings are embodied in religion, in culture, and in work.
I thought about the role all the myths of the Old South play in the culture in which I was raised. It's not news that the history of the Confederacy, which was pretty sacred to my grandmother's generation and older, means relatively little to my generation. Key word there: relatively. It's hard for white people my age and younger to have anything like the same cultural and emotional relationship to the Civil War that our parents, grandparents and older relatives did. I find that the only time I really think about the Civil War figures is when somebody wants to sandblast the name of Robert E. Lee off the side of a school. I generally hate changing history to suit the mores of the moment, but it's also true that I resent the implication that I have to be ashamed of everything about my culture.
And yet, I find that I don't care much about the Old South. I grew up in the Deep South, yet we didn't often hear those old tales told growing up. I was raised in the time of the so-called New South, when the Southern overclass made a point of distancing itself from the South's history. And who can blame them? The civil rights era was just ending, and so much of the vicious, racist reaction to it was expressed using the history and symbols of the Old South. Fair or not, Southern regional consciousness was bound up with anti-black hatred. The Southern business class realized that it was in their economic interest to put all that behind us.
And so we did.
I'd like to be proved wrong, but I doubt very much you could walk into a classroom in most Southern towns and get five good sentences out of your average schoolboy about R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or any of the other sacred Confederate personages. My mom can tell you about Jefferson Davis, but I can't, not really. It's not that my generation despises Davis, or Lee, or anybody else. It's that we're largely indifferent to them. And our culture made it so: yes, the New South business mentality that made Atlanta "the city too busy to hate" (but also made it the city that traded its particular identity to be as bland as any Yankee city); but also, I think, the widespread exposure to television, which provided a powerful counternarrative. I say "counternarrative," but what I really mean is not that it challenged Southern particularism directly, but that it replaced it by making Fonzie, Barbarino, Bo & Luke Duke, et alia, the mythic figures in our young imaginations. I'm not joking when I say that Boss Hogg was more real to me than Jefferson Davis. You may call that a tragedy -- and now, at 40, I do -- but there it is. The Southern culture in which I was raised, either by design or benign neglect, didn't pass on those stories to its children -- or did so in a greatly diluted form.
In Bell's terms, you could say that the Old South myth no longer suited Southern society's needs. The white ruling class saw that holding so tightly to those myths were impeding solving the racial problem, which was keeping the South from progressing economically. Economic progress being judged the most important thing, the myths were allowed to die. Aside from economic progress, insofar as clinging to those myths wer
e allowing white people to hold fast to the apartheid system, at least in their minds, they needed to die. The point here is not to argue about the relative goodness or badness of the South; the point is that within living memory Southern white people generally had a real knowledge of and emotional relationship to the gods of the Old South. And now they don't. What larger forces transforming Southern society caused that to happen?
The same forces, I'd wager, that will make something similar happen to the Alamo myth here in Texas. When a myth ceases to have power over the heart of a people, and only exists in their head, it will die. This is true with religion; a religion that is only carried in the head is a religion that is on its way to oblivion in the next generation or two. I have not been in Texas long enough to know how the younger generations feel about the Alamo. I spoke to a 50-year-old friend the other day, a Texas native who is a liberal Democrat, and she was visibly shocked by the thought that any Texan would do anything other than revere the Alamo myth. She honestly couldn't comprehend that anyone would believe Santa Anna the hero of that story. I thought for a second about the difference between her and me -- I honor the Alamo myth in my head, but for her, it is primarily a felt thing.
How many Texans in the coming generations will feel devotion to the heroes of the Alamo (who, fortunately for them, aren't tainted by slavery as Lee, Jackson, Davis and the others are)? Will the needs of business in this rapidly Latinizing state require a renegotiation of that myth -- or will people simply allow it to fade away, because they don't grasp its importance? How important is it, anyway?
When the United Methodists voice their slogan "Open hearts, open minds, open doors," they're not kidding:
Yesterday - after undergoing a sex-change operation and taking on a new symbolic name - the Rev. Drew Phoenix received another one-year contract to head St. John's United Methodist Church.
"This is about more than me," Phoenix said after the decision by the bishop of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. "This is about people who come after me, about young people in particular who are struggling with their gender identity. I'm doing this for them."
As Diogenes at Catholic World News says, that's one way to settle a controversy over the ordination of women. Wasn't there a Catholic bishop not too long ago who gave permission for a man surgically rearranged to resemble a woman to enter a convent as a nun?
Perhaps you thought Holland's free-for-all sex culture had no standards. You may have thought that the recent arrest of an HIV-positive rape gang, which sexually assaulted men with the intention of infecting them with the AIDS virus, was unsurprising, given the prevailing sexual ethic in the Netherlands, which is pretty much, "The only thing that is forbidden is to forbid."
Well, you're wrong. There are, in fact, standards in the liberal paradise. From the news account:
The case has deeply unsettled the Netherlands, and caused it to cast a hard look at its easygoing views on sex, with some figures suggesting that frequent homosexual orgies posed a public health risk.
"That homos organise orgies is nothing new, but this is something else. This is unimaginable," said Frank van Dalen, the president of a gay rights group called COC.
Last year, Julie and I rented "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" on the recommendation of a friend, but with great trepidation. We thought it would amount to a bunch of vicious jokes making fun of the idea of sexual purity. But surely, we thought, there must be something more to it, or our friend wouldn't have praised it so highly.
The Judd Apatow film was pretty raunchy, and pretty hilarious. And Andy, the title character, turned out to be the hero, a true mensch whose commitment to purity came out of his genuine respect for women, and his sweet little devotion to true love. You end the film cheering for this golden-hearted dork, and realizing that you have just seen perhaps the most subversive feature-film presentation for social conservatism that you'll ever witness. It was terrific.
Ross says that director Apatow's latest, "Knocked Up" -- a comedy about a dork who gets a woman pregnant after a fling, and responds by deciding to clean up his life -- offers more of the same. I loved this passage from the NYT Magazine's profile of Apatow:
“My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it,” Apatow told me when we first met in the fall of 2005. “That’s how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole defense mechanism is now really destructive.”
I had to laugh at this because it's exactly what happened to me. Julie reminded me how we'd come to learn that there's no such thing as irony in the birthing room. There's something about becoming a father or mother for the first time that annihilates ironic detachment. In fact, if you do remain ironically detached -- cool, in other words -- as a parent, something is wrong with you. I think about how snotty and cruel (but funny) my own writing used to be before I had kids, and I just shake my head. It's fatally easy to make fun of everything when you don't have a stake in it.
Whatever might be said about her husband's politics, Mrs. Dennis Kucinich has exquisitely crunchy tastes in clothes-shopping: she buys a lot at resale shops and thrift stores. I'm never prouder of my wife than when she brings out Baby Nora in some gorgeous piece of clothing, and I think, "Oh gawd, how much did that set me back?" -- and Julie says, "Got that for 50 cents at the Salvation Army -- isn't it beautiful?"
Mark Krikorian agrees that Mrs. K. is not to be mocked by conservatives in this, but applauded.
From the conservative columnist Georgie Anne Geyer's latest:
But by all reports, President Bush is more utterly convinced than ever of his righteousness.
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."
I think somebody needs to find Henry Kissinger and have a moment of White House prayer. Or something.
Karl Rove says that things are moving the GOP's way, because America grows more religious (ergo, culturally conservative), and more enamored of the economic liberties granted by the free market:
“There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.” As for spirituality, Rove said, “As baby boomers age and as they’re succeeded by the post-baby-boom generation, within both of those generations there’s something going on spiritually—people saying it’s not all about materialism, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things. If you look at the traditional mainstream denominations, they’re flat, but what’s growing inside those denominations, and what’s growing outside those denominations, is churches that are filling this spiritual need, that are replacing sterility with something vibrant, something that speaks to the heart of the individual, that gives a sense of purpose.”
Ross Douthat points out the obvious problem in that analysis, saying that "It's hard to imagine a balder description of the essential contradiction at the heart of the GOP coalition, and yet Rove seems unaware that there's anything contradictory here at all."
The contradiction is that American religion does not necessarily make one more culturally conservative -- and indeed, the wealthier societies become, the less attached to traditional conservatism they become. There is, in this sense, no more revolutionary society than America's. And before we get to the crucial point, let's review this passage from Daniel Bell's "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism":
Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world. These meanings specify a set of purposes or, like myth and ritual, explain the character of shared experiences, or deal with the transformations of nature through human powers of magic or techne. These meanings are embodied in religion, in culture, and in work.
The religion that our individualist consumerist culture has developed to sustain itself is called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I'm glad Ross brought it up; I first heard about this at Ken Myers' talk here in Dallas this spring. The term was coined by two sociologists of religion, who used it to describe the spiritual sense of American teenagers. The link in this graf will take you to The Revealer's account of their findings. Excerpt:
The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate:
"Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.
These beliefs are killing American religion. The authors call it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The creed is simple and, yes, conventional -- but, where the authors find that it matters, MTD is not traditional. Basically, God exists and watches over human life, which was created by God. God wants people to be nice, as it says in the bible and in most world religions. God does not have to be involved in our lives except to solve our problems and make us happy. Good people will be even happier in heaven after they die. The religious beliefs of American teens tend to be -- as a whole, across all traditions -- that simple. It’s something Jews and Catholics and Protestants of all stripes seem to have in common. It is instrumentalist. "This God is not demanding," say the authors. "He actually can’t be, because his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good." [snip] The authors really seem to care about these kids, who, in being treated by most adults like rebellious aliens, have been entirely misserved. The instrumentalist parasite of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is killing off the "historically key ideas in America’s main religious tradition, Christianity": "repentance, love of neighbor, social justice, unmerited grace, self-discipline, humility, the cost of discipleship, dying to self, the sovereignty of God, personal holiness, the struggles of sanctification, glorifying God in suffering, hunger for righteousness." And this is lamentable.
The ongoing displacement of historic Christianity by MTD in American life helps explain results like this one. I'd say that well over 90 percent of the homilies I ever heard in Protestant churches or Catholic parishes are examples of MTD (it may also be the case for Orthodox churches in America too, but I don't know because I only really have experience with my own parish). The point is, I don't see that church attendance will make one more culturally conservative. MTD is hollowing out American religion from within -- and American politics will surely follow.
Remember the case from a few summers ago of the Arab men behaving strangely on that flight to LA -- the one passenger Annie Jacobsen made a big deal over, and was subsequently pilloried by CAIR and some government officials for being an Islamophobic hysteric?
Well, an Inspector General's report on the affair released last year -- but heavily redacted -- has been obtained by The Washington Times via a FOIA request, and it seems that Jacobsen's concern has been vindicated. These men were likely on a terrorist dry run -- and government security officials bungled the investigation, and put out false information to calm the public. Excerpt from the Times account:
"This report is evidence of Homeland Security executives attempting to downplay and cover up an unmistakable dry run that forced flight attendants to reveal the air marshals and compel the pilots to open the flight deck door," said Robert MacLean, a former air marshal who was fired last year for revealing that the service planned to cut back on protection for long-distance flights to save money. [snip] "What is disturbing to us as pilots is that there are now a number of incidents like this taking place across our industry and the vast majority of our flights are still defenseless," said Captain David Mackett, president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance.
"If I were a member of Congress, I'd be asking some hard questions about why such a small percentage of flights have armed pilots or air marshals aboard, while the TSA whistles past the graveyard, asking us to believe none of this is related to terrorism," Mr. Mackett said.
Meanwhile, Annie Jacobsen has a fresh account about a Saudi "student" who appears to have gotten into the country under extremely suspicious conditions ... and disappeared.
I ran across something over the weekend about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the presidential lie that launched the Vietnam War, and got to thinking the other day about my friend N., who used to serve in a position very close to the civilian war-making leadership in Washington. N., a staunch conservative, became disillusioned about the war fairly early on, when N. observed leaders outright lying in their public statements about what we knew was going on in Iraq. N. was seeing the same set of facts that the leaders were, and initially assumed that they must have access to other information. Eventually, though, N. came to believe that the leaders simply weren't telling the truth to the American people.
Via Dan Larison, here's some eye-opening information about Alan Foley, who headed the CIA operation making the case for Iraq's possession of WMDs. This is taken from a new book about the case for war,
"There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush's State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university's faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. 'Not much, if anything,' Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book."
So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here's the answer (p. 119):
"One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center's analysts: 'If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.' The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded."
Apparently this information is not new; it's been previously reported, but not with Foley's name attached.
You will remember the Downing Street Memos from 2002, in which the British government was informed by its own diplomatic team, which had consulted with senior US officials in Washington on war planning, that ... well, read this passage:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
I believe that the Bush administration used 9/11 as a pretext to go to war with Iraq. I believe it decided that Iraq could be turned into a decent country if Saddam were gone, and that a regime change in Iraq would be the catalyst for a positive revolution in the Mideast. I believe the administration knowingly told whatever lies it needed to tell to win over the American people to its policy. I believe our president, for whom I voted twice, is a dishonorable man who will be ill-remembered by history. I find the manifest and catastrophic incompetence
forgivable; I find the dishonor and mendacity far less so.
Last night I was reading a Robert D. Kaplan essay from the forthcoming issue of The American Interest, an advance copy of which I received yesterday. Kaplan talks about the warrior class in American life, and how perilous it is to have an Army that is asked to fight for a society that no longer believes in itself -- by which Kaplan means no longer believes there is anything worth fighting for. I don't believe that is America, and neither, it seems, does Kaplan. But it could be America. The blowback of this war on American society will be ferocious, when it gathers full strength. We have lost this war, because in truth, the war was never winnable. And the war wasn't even necessary. In the end, when the full cost of the war comes home, the American people will not forgive Bush this humiliation. But when we come to examine in Congressional hearings -- as we will in the next Democratic administration, most likely -- the lies that were told to justify this war, who can imagine what kind of loss of confidence in American authority that will result?
One very bright spot, pointed out by Kaplan: unlike in the post-Vietnam era, the American people revere and love our soldiers. Kaplan points out that the troops refuse to be seen as victims, and they resent being condescended to as such. So we should refrain. Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that we sent the finest men (and women) this country has to fight a war that should never have been fought, in pursuit of a foolish policy built on deception. And now America is poorer and less secure because of it, and the Middle East is a more dangerous place than ever.
There has got to be a reckoning for this. There simply has to be. I know you've heard all this from me before, and it's a boring point by now to make, but ... damn, this is frustrating. We have got to keep fighting this war against Islamist terrorists, but the Bush administration has made trusting our leadership extremely difficult.
Victor Morton observes the death of a great American: Charles Nelson Reilly, one of the crown princes of '70s trash TV. He quotes yours truly thus:
I've got on my refrigerator a yellowed newspaper photo of Charles Nelson Reilly, Brett Somers and Gene Rayburn in a publicity still from the show. My wife, born in 1975, thinks I'm a weirdo. I cannot in good faith contradict her. I remember calling my mom to hurry and pick me up from my friend's house so I could get home on New Year's Day in time to watch the Match Game '73 sign change over to Match Game '74.
When Richard Dawson goes to that Great Blank in the Sky, life will no longer be worth living. Is what I'm saying.
Did you know that Iraqi Christians are sneaking across the US-Mexico border, fleeing Islamist persecution? Here's a fascinating story from the San Antonio Express-News detailing the phenomenon. Excerpt:
The journey north from Guatemala through Mexico to the Texas border lasted 17 days. Finally, on the evening of Feb. 26, 2006, the young family of four saw the river come into view.
Weary and beaten, with the baby starting to fuss, the family was driven in a car right up to the Rio Grande.
And there, it stopped in a cloud of dust.
George and his wife, Baida, were Iraqi refugees. They fled their homeland because Muslim extremists had made two things clear: They didn't like the family's Christian faith, for one. What was worse, to the gunmen prowling the neighborhood, were the sons' names, George and Toni, which seemed to lionize President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The decision to hire a smuggler to get them to America was clinched after militants told George Sr., a milk delivery man, that he was next on the beheading list for being an "infidel Christian," and after caregivers at their children's nursery became untrustworthy.
The other day I mentioned in a blog posting how striking I found it that a fourth-grader in a local school -- a Hispanic boy, the son of Mexican immigrants who can't speak English -- stood in the presence of visitors and gave a recitation about his favorite figure from history: Santa Anna, the villain of the Alamo. It was striking to me because this first-generation Texas boy had completely inverted the founding myth of Texas. And by 2020, say the demographers, Hispanics will be the absolute majority in Texas. How will Texans of the future think about Texas, when the villains and the heroes of the Alamo are reversed?
My second thought was that Texans are already losing Texas, as it was, because of people like me. The Texas population has increased by one-third since 1990 -- and half of those newbies are immigrants (either foreign or people like me, from within the US). To me, the Alamo is a John Wayne movie. Well, that's putting it too harshly, but it's true that I don't have the sort of emotions about the Alamo that native Texans do. I didn't grow up with that story. It's not my story. It's not my history. It's a beautiful story, but only that to people like me. I recognize the Alamo's importance as a myth, but it's not a felt significance, as it is for older native Texans I meet. I wonder how important it is to Texans my age and younger. I honestly don't know.
Anyway, I was musing today on how culture is something we carry in our heads, and if we forget about it, it's pretty much gone. Cut off from place, it becomes quite difficult to maintain cultural traditions. Modern America -- which is to say post-agrarian America -- is all about mobility. We've built an economy and an entire way of life around mobility, and the rootless individual is the ideal American. It seems to me that we constantly hear immigration apologists on the left and the right say that anyone who points to significant differences between Americans and the Mexicans who are moving here en masse in the great migration from the south is some sort of racist or nativist. They're just like us, is the constant refrain, and it's insinuated, or said outright, that you're a racist or a nativist if you believe otherwise. This strikes me as exactly the kind of idiotic error that got us into this mess in Iraq -- the idea that inside the breast of every foreigner is an American, dying to come out. This is not to say that we shouldn't have immigration, certainly, but it's to say that we ought to realize that by importing millions and millions of poor people who are rather unlike modern Americans, we are going to cause a big cultural shift.
Don't take my word for it. In 1995, Jorge Castaneda, the Mexican political scientist who went on to become his country's foreign minister, wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly, talking about how profoundly different Mexico was from the United States -- and how little appreciated this is in America. The link is here, though I suspect it's behind the Atlantic firewall. Castaneda wrote it in the wake of the economic disaster of the mid-1990s, when Mexico devalued the peso. Relevant passages follow:
As so often in the past, a deeper series of factors made Mexico mysterious, even to the most trained or sympathetic eye. The key to that series, the single element that explains the opacity of Mexican society and politics to so many, is the simple but critical fact that Mexico is radically, substantively, ferociously different from the United States, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The mistake that many outside Mexico made was to believe that the highly perceptible differences of the past were superficial enough to be swept away by a modernizing leader and an apparently acquiescent population. The mistake that many inside Mexico made was to persuade themselves (ourselves)that those differences would surface automatically, almost immediate
ly, and work their magic directly in the streets and villages and at the polls. From abroad, the absence of reaction to change was interpreted as support -- enthusiastic at best, resigned at worst. Domestically, opposition was reduced to waiting for the children of Sanchez to rise up in arms or protest over the destruction of their myths, if not their world. Both views missed the point: the Mexican difference is everything a difference should be -- no more, no less.
Castaneda identifies one of the most profound differences as the degree of social inequality in Mexico, versus the United States. The US is a middle class nation, but Mexico is ruled by an oligarchy. Secondly, there's the Mexican conception of time. People stand in a radically different relationship to it in Mexico, versus the US, the result, Castaneda theorizes, of the enduring social stasis in the country, as well as its climate. And this opens up to the third gulf of understanding separating the US from Mexico: their views of history. Here's Castaneda:
In this conception of history, what little change there is acquires inordinate importance. Each cluster of events becomes crucial. The rest of the time not much occurs, but whatever does is overloaded with meaning and import for the future. Although the different significance attached to history has often been emphasized -- leading to the cliche that Mexicans are obsessed with history, Americans with the future -- the deep gap it opens between two nations and cultures makes it far more than a matter of temperament. For the United States, history is folklore plus the recent past; for Mexico it is the essence of the present.
There are many good reasons for this difference. To begin with, history has played different roles in nation-building in the two countries. In the United States, the quintessential country of immigrants, history has barely served to forge the ties that bind a nation together, because the past is not common to successive waves of immigrants. Many other factors fill the void that history leaves: the rule of law, the frontier, an ideological attachment to a unique form of government, and so forth. Mexico, on the other hand (a country whose only large-scale immigration was the Spanish conquest and 300-year colonization), to the (dubious) extent that it is a fully consummated nation, is so because of a common origin, from which everything else stems: territory, la raza, language, religion. These all date back to the conquest, and to the successive episodes of Mexico's subsequent transformation: independence, the reform and Juarez, the Revolution. In a country as deeply divided as Mexico, as segregated socially and as splintered regionally and ethnically, one of the few unifying themes is precisely, though paradoxically, a shared history, even if an official version of it has to be invented in order for its study and reading to be common to all. [snip] Mexicans harp on past tensions and conflicts with the United States not because of anti-Americanism but because of the significance of history. It's the history that counts, not the Americans' specific part in it. The United States is just one slice of Mexican history, whereas the idea of history cuts across every segment of Mexican political and cultural life: its literature and archaeology, its education and art, its identity or lack of identity. If the American dream is the archetypal bond in the United States, the Mexican memory unites Mexico. Without it the country as we know it might simply not exist.[Emphasis mine -- RD]
What is the American dream? Prosperity and individual autonomy. A commitment to the obligations of history and the ties that bind us to place inhibit the realization of the American dream. The globalized consumerist economy, the same thing that makes it possible for Americans like me and migrants from Mexico to move to Texas to pursue our fortunes, requires severing or at least weakening the bonds of history, and a
ll that entails -- our personal commitment to place, to extended family, to tribal myth.
The Mexicans that come north will be chewed up by the dynamism of capitalism too, in time. But if Castaneda is right, they have a lot more psychological resources with which to resist assimilation. And certainly the contiguity to Mexico, plus the overwhelming numbers in which they're coming and settling here in the Southwest, makes assimilation less likely to happen, or at least to happen more slowly. In time, they'll be turned into rootless consumers like the rest of us. But by then, there will be a new Alamo myth displacing the old one. And a new culture in this land.
Perhaps it can't be stopped. I suspect it can't be. But people ought to think about this. This is what it costs us to be prosperous and modern.
UPDATE: At dinner just now, I was thinking about this post, and about how I used to read Matthew the story of the Alamo over and over when we lived in New York. He was really little then, but he loved that story (from Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues). Once after hearing it, he cried and said, "I hate the Mexican Army!" He was not yet four when we moved to Texas, and once, while I was on a business trip, Julie and her mom took him to Sea World down in San Antonio, and to see the Alamo. Julie told me that little Matthew put his fingers in the bullet holes, and he saw Jim Bowie's knife, and he wept again. The Alamo myth has entered his heart, and he was born on the west side of Manhattan. Maybe I need to get my lame a** down to San Antonio on a pilgrimage to the Alamo, and take the story into my own.
The couple met 15 years ago this week, shortly after Mr. Lewis moved to New Jersey.
Mr. Lewis didn’t find the idea of dating another priest unusual or enticing, so when a friend in New York volunteered to introduce him to Mr. Winslow, he had little interest. “It wasn’t, ‘Oh, what a rare bird, I must see it,’ ” Mr. Lewis said. He added, “I was assuming he would be pious and narrow-minded.”
But six months later, he happened to drop by the same friend’s home in New York when Mr. Winslow was visiting. “I did a complete thunderbolt thing,” Mr. Winslow said.
“Our eyes met from across the apartment,” Mr. Lewis said. “We have been together since that day.”
One of the grooms got his priestly training at Nashotah House, the conservative Anglo-Catholic seminary.
Here's my DMN column on tradition from today's paper -- the column I blegged for help on a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to everybody who participated, especially the Lutherans who wrote in. I had to take the Lutheran passage out on the final edit, because the piece was too long. I also had to omit a part about the "emergent church" for the same reason. Anyway, here it is. I end by quoting from Philip Larkin's great sacramental poem "Church Going," which comments (in its final lines) on tradition from the point of view of a cyclist who stops by a country church in an age of unbelief:
Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new- Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognizable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation -- marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these --for whom was built This special shell? For, though I've no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round
An ingredient that's in lots of soft drinks -- LIKE DIET COKE, SOFT DRINK OF THE GODS -- could mess up your DNA. Oh great. Somebody please do the necessary googling to prove that it's all a big fat lie! Meanwhile, I'll go snort a line of Sweet 'n Low.
Turns out that two people wrote to Prof. Andrew Bacevich, the Vietnam and Gulf War vet whose son died a couple of weeks ago in combat in Iraq, and told him that his opposition to the war killed his son. Aren't people lovely? In the WaPo, Dr. Bacevich writes for the first time since his namesake and only son died. Excerpt:
The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."
To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.
To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.
Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.
This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.
Tomorrow is Pentecost, which William Pike calls "the crazy uncle we just ignore." He notes that it's the very birthday of the Church, yet so many Christian churches today either don't observe it, or just pass over it lightly. I didn't realize until I read Pike's blog entry that Pentecost occurs on Shavuot, the Jewish holiday marking the giving of the Law to Moses on Sinai. Fascinating parallelism there.
Matthew finished the first grade on Friday. His school, Providence Christian School of Texas, held their end-of-year school program, which ended with all the children from the lower grades singing the hymns they'd learned that year. I had to get to work and couldn't stay for the entire program, but Julie said there were lots of un-dry eyes listening to those angelic young voices. Julie said these kids were singing with all their hearts, and they knew the words, because each month they study a hymn.
We got to talking last night about what an unsurpassable gift that school has been to our son and our family. Last spring, as we were reaching the end of the line on trying to homeschool Matthew, and didn't know what we were going to do, I got an e-mail from a reader of "Crunchy Cons" who had liked the book, and suggested that we check out his kids' school, Providence, if we ever wanted to put our kids into formal schooling. He said that all the spiritual and educational values I extol in the book are at the center of the school's vision. This kind reader's e-mail came at just the right time, and we took him up on his offer to tour Providence. We were bowled over. By the grace of God -- no, really -- Matthew got the last available place in the first grade class starting fall 2006.
I won't bore you with details of how the year went, but it says something, I think, that on the way to school on Friday, Matthew prayed aloud from the back seat, "Dear God, thank you for my school, thank you for my teachers, thank you for everything about Providence." I could have prayed those words too. Matthew thrived in the orderly environment there, and he has learned so very, very much -- both academically and spiritually. Julie said last night that Providence has pulled off something you don't often see: being a place that is both academically and spiritually rigorous, and a place that provides for astonishing growth for its students. Matthew is somewhat diffident in his outward expression of religion, so we weren't quite sure how much of the religious content of his schooling was taking with him. But when I was at the Kirk conference this spring, and tornado sirens went off here in Dallas, Julie said Matthew kept himself calm by quoting Scripture and repeating lessons he'd learned in school about the power of the presence of God. That boy has picked up a lot more than he lets on.
We owe so much too to his teacher, Sue Windrick, whom he loves dearly. She's been such a light in his life. She's pushed him hard, but with real love and care for him, and she prays for him all the time. He's been so devoted to her that I suspect we're going to have a little trouble in the fall as he tries to get used to not being in Mrs. Windrick's class. I'm confident he'll be fine. I've sensed that the teachers in that school are so missional in their approach to education. The school really is built on the idea that true education not only builds up the mind, but the soul, the character. They don't slack at Providence. The commitment to excellence in every aspect of these children's education is so inspiring.
I hope I don't sound like a commercial for the school, but Julie and I were talking last night about how much Providence, and the people of Providence, have come to mean to our family. The peer group Matthew's been around is also such a gift. These are kids who come from families who are serious about faith and serious about education. I've mentioned before how a minor policy of the school -- no talking about pop culture on campus -- has been a godsend to families like ours, who are trying to raise our kids to learn to love good books and movies and art instead of existing on a diet of junk food. Having our son in a school where the parents are missional too is a blessing. As a matter of policy, Providence insists that parents play a direct role in their children's education. You can't be a Providence parent and offload the education o
f your children onto the school. It expects parents to play an active role in the mission of educating their children.
I still regret that homeschooling didn't work out for Matthew, but as he gets older, we're learning more about why he, specifically, could not thrive as a homeschooler. Thank God, literally, that through the kindness of a stranger (now a friend), He opened the door to Providence Christian School. That school is, above everything else you might say in its praise, a work of love.
What a pleasure to read Rebecca Mead's "Talk of the Town" entry in the current New Yorker, detailing conversations she had at a Manhattan cocktail party to honor the actress Ellen Burstyn, who has just written a memoir, and the New Age author Marianne Williamson. The pleasure is to read what passes for religion among these overprivileged celebs. Example:
Burstyn, who was to appear that evening at the 92nd Street Y with Williamson, stood under Duke’s black ceiling and explained that her memoir, “Lessons in Becoming Myself,” concerned her life’s spiritual journey. “I’m a Sufi,” she explained, with a beneficent smile. “I like the expression ‘I am one cell in the mind of God.’ ” Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir “Eat, Pray, Love,” was telling Parker Posey that she had recently bought an eighteenth-century Presbyterian church in New Jersey to live in. “It’s very Yankee, with fifteen-foot wavy-glass windows,” Gilbert said, before adding that Julia Roberts had signed on to star in the movie version of her book. Gilbert said that she had asked her sister, a historian, whether she should beware of ghosts: “She said, ‘Presbyterians won’t bother you, with your yoga and your Buddhas and your cursing. It’s not like they’re Methodists.’ ” “I’m a yogi, and I meditate,” said April Kramer, who has been married to Joey Kramer, the drummer for Aerosmith, for twenty-eight years—“One of the original wives,” she said—and who was wearing on a chain around her neck a diamond-studded white-gold peace symbol. “The women I know are all gravitating to a much more spiritual place,” Kramer said, at which her friend Myra Scheer, who raises money for the Rainforest Foundation Fund, laid her hand on a pearl peace-symbol pendant that she was wearing over her Dolce & Gabbana suit. “I went to a Kabbalah course, and it said that women have to bring light to men,” Scheer said. Among the men to whom Scheer had brought light was Billy Joel, who wore a pendant like hers onstage at the last Rainforest Foundation Fund benefit. “Though he didn’t wear pearls—he wore Swarovski crystals,” she said.
Delicious, yes? I would give my next paycheck to hear a drunken Christopher Hitchens give a dramatic reading of the entire column.
...maybe that reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church that I thought was so encouraging wasn't all it was cracked up to be. From a column in the Wall Street Journal:
As long as the Church Abroad existed as an independent entity, it implicitly challenged the authority of Moscow to speak for the Russian Church. It consistently denounced the collaboration of the church with the Communist Party, called for a more positive valuation of Russia's prerevolutionary and anticommunist past and served as a hopeful beacon to Orthodox Christians in Russia seeking an alternative.
Many in the Church Abroad wonder how this merger went through at all. The process was secretive, and there has even been speculation that some American businessmen with Russian ties helped to push it along. But now having accepted Moscow's authority, the former Church Abroad faces many questions. Can its leaders press Moscow to reject the church's tradition of collaborating with both the Kremlin and the KGB? Can they hold on to the church properties they have maintained for the past 80 years? Will the Moscow Church dispatch pro-Kremlin clergy to promote political aims? And, above all, can the leaders of the Church Abroad stem the tide of defection from the disappointed faithful that has already begun?
Dr. John Bickle of the University of Cincinnati writes:
Since there's no test (a la Jeff Foxworthy) for determining whether one is a crunchy con, I thought I'd go to the source and ask you. My wife Marica Bernstein and I for a long time voted Republican, although being from the localist (limited government) extreme of the party, we've found ourselves increasingly distanced from recent Republican politics. Neither of us are believers in the supernatural--classically speakikng, we're both more agnostic than atheistic (and so have little patience with the Dawkins-Harris-Hitchins blowhards). We're staunch believers in the economic superiority of free markets on a local scale and are strict constructionists about Constitutional issues--especially a "pro individual gun rights" reading of the 2nd amendment, a literal interpretation of the 10th amendment, and a narrow interpretation of the 14th amendment. On these points, we don't sound much like your crunchy cons.
However, it's our lifestyle that warrants the interesting comparison. A few years back we began living a "simpler" life. I've been a long-time collector of old cookbooks, many published by local organizations (church groups, PTA associations) in the south in the 1950s and 1960s, and out of them I've been culling "The Big Food Manual." We started baking our own bread from scratch, making our own wines and sausages, smoking our own meats, and slowly moving further and further "off the grid" (though we still have satellite internet in our cabin--we're not kooks). One of our lefty friends even labled us "right wing hippies" last summer. Our motives for adopting this lifestyle, however, aren't the ones you mention for the crunchy cons. We're doing it to hone our survival skills, preparing for the day when the federal government in this country collapses or turns truly tyrannical, and civil war breaks out. (We judge that day to be in our not-too-distant future, given the outlook for the next couple of national election cycles.)
(Oh, and to assure you--I'm a professor of philosophy and neuroscience at a major research university, and Marica is a biologist by training. We aren't inarticulate boobs.)
So what do you say? Do we warrant a place under your newly-described "tent"? Or are we misfits even for y'all?
Cookbook-collecting decline-and-fall-ists who get called "right-wing hippies"? Can there be any doubt that these people are crunchy cons? Y'all are welcome in the big tent. Just don't let me catch you passing notes while the rest of us have our heads bowed in prayer. ;-D
Got a letter in the mail from the RNC yesterday. Here's a paragraph I found interesting:
"Your commitment to our core principles of lower taxes, a strong national defense, limited government and individual freedom is the driving force behind our achievements today and our goals for tomorrow."
The remainder of the letter focuses on the danger of a President Hillary Clinton, Sen. Maj. Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi repealing the Bush tax cuts.
Now, I think tax cuts for the rich and everyone else stimulate the economy; I believe, in some sense, in a 'strong national defense' and certainly in 'limited government'; and I may believe in individual freedom, depending on what that might mean in a given case.
But note what is missing: nothing about the importance of the traditional family or the culture of life, the chief reason many of us bother to vote Republican at all.
I'll continue to vote Republican, simply because Republicans in office means social conservatives in more positions of power in government bureacracies, more conservative judges, and so forth. Conservatives can only operate in government when Republicans are in power. That said, it troubles me (although it doesn't necessarily surprise me) to see the RNC focusing on these above-mentioned issues and not others. The letter might as well have come from a Libertarian party.
It's often said of neoconservatives that they approve of religion in instrumentalist terms: because religion makes for more successful individual and societies. The people who point this out do so by way of criticism. And why not? If you believe in religion because religion in some sense "works" -- as opposed to believing in religion because it's true -- then in what sense can you be said to be a believer at all? What happens when law or circumstance puts your religious belief to the test, and suddenly, it costs you something substantial to hold on to your faith? If you're been a faith-based utilitarian, you compromise. Whatever works.
If that is religion, to hell with it. So say I.
David Brooks disagrees. In his column today (sorry, behind TimesSelect), he argues that the most successful Catholics -- indeed, the most successful people -- are religious believers who believe as little as they have to to be part of the club. Excerpt:
On the one hand, modern Catholics have retained many of the traditional patterns of their ancestors — high marriage rates, high family stability rates, low divorce rates. Catholic investors save a lot and favor low-risk investment portfolios. On the other hand, they have also become more individualistic, more future-oriented and less bound by neighborhood and extended family. They are now much better educated than their parents or grandparents, and much better educated than their family histories would lead you to predict.
More or less successfully, the children of white, ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods have managed to adapt the Catholic communal heritage to the dynamism of a global economy. If this country was entirely Catholic, we wouldn’t be having a big debate over stagnant wages and low social mobility. The problems would scarcely exist. Populists and various politicians can talk about the prosperity-destroying menace of immigration and foreign trade. But modern Catholics have created a hybrid culture that trumps it.
Let's see how well the Catholic faith survives in any meaningful sense in these families over the next couple of generations. There's a reason why Jesus, as well as the Hebrew prophetic tradition, warns about the corrupting power of wealth and materialism. Personally, I'd rather be Christopher Hitchens than an instrumentalist squish.
UPDATE: Mirror of Justice has posted the entire Brooks column. To clarify a misapprehension that I think my pal Victor Morton has made in the combox thread, I don't deny that religion can have socially useful effects. It's perfectly normal to point that out. It's just that Brooks seems to be prescribing what has been called, in a Jewish context, "flexidoxy" . In other words, if I'm reading him right, he encourages a consumerist-utilitarian-instrumentalist approach to religion, with the telos being not a deeper relationship to God, but material success. The ideal Brooksian Catholic, then, would be the cultural Catholic who maintains ironic detachment from the rules and rituals of his religion, except insofar as they can be assimilated into his bourgeois lifestyle. The educational manifestation of this is any number of Catholic (and Protestant) institutions which sold out their religious identity for material success.
I can understand why the anti-war left is angry at the Democrats for not holding firm on the war funding bill, and sending President Bush a no-strings-attached supplemental. But they need to chill. This victory is the last one the president will have. Gen. Petraeus makes his report to Congress in September, and not even Bush and SecDef Gates expect it to be good. Meanwhile, many Senate Republicans have signaled that September is the end of the road for them on trusting the president to get the war right. And the public mood on the war is tanking, according to today's CBS News/NYTimes poll. Consider that opposition to the war has never been higher than now. Three out of four Americans, including a majority of Republicans, believe the surge has been a bust. Some 63 percent of Americans want a timetable for withdrawal -- the very issue on which the president defeated the Dems this week. For the first time ever, more Americans trust the Democrats to make the right decisions about Iraq than trust Republicans. And in another blow to the GOP in advance of the 2008 election:
More Americans — 72 percent — now say that “generally, things in the country are seriously off on the wrong track” than at any time since the Times/CBS News poll began asking the question in 1983.
So with all this, why'd the Democrats cave on timetables? Because the overwhelming majority of Americans still favor funding the war. I don't agree with that, but you have to recognize that the Democrats really are where the American people are. I believe Dems correctly judged that if they didn't fund the troops through the summer, they'd get the blame for it. It's bad that we're going to have more US soldiers die in this thing before we start to wind it down this fall, but it will start to wind down this fall, and the Dems will have the wind at their back.
A reader writes a long, thoughtful objection to the Ron Maxwell essay:
I share many of your anxieties about the effects of mass immigration from the Global South, above all Mexico and Central America, to this country. But reading what I took to be your approving posting of the fellow who wrote disparagingly of those who support basically open borders as 'present tensers,' indifferent both to history and posterity, permit me to offer a few cautionary remarks.
First, historically and tempermentally, true conservatives (I am not talking about utopian neo-cons, religious millennarians, or the business establishment's toadies and sycophants) have a weakness for 'declinist' narratives, and tend to hark back to some earlier time as the (relative) ideal from which we have now fallen away. The problem with this notion is that it is fundamentally religious, echoing the idea of the prelapsarian in secular, historical contexts.
Please be clear: I am not attacking this idea in its CHRISTIAN context (I am not Christopher Hitchens). But as a way of parsing historical events, it is worse than misleading. As far as the history of immigration goes, as you know, there was virtually unlimited and unrestricted immigration to this country through the middle of the 19th century and then virtually unlimited and unrestricted immigration from the white world until shortly after the First World War. So in effect, the declinist narrative is an account of less than a century of events.
Second, I would put it to you that, whether any of us like it or not, this is an era of mass migration---perhaps the greatest since the dispersion of the poor of Europe to the New World, Australia, etc., in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps greater. It is not an American phenomenon but rather one that affects all rish countries (including, increasingly, places like Japan, not to mention the Gulf States, etc.). It is pure fantasy to imagine that there will be an American exception to this. It can be managed but not stopped.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, that people had tried to stop the great European out-migration. You can't because it is such a preposterous counter-factual as to be virtually unimaginagle. Note, I am not speaking of justice here, but rather of historical reality.
Third, the notion that those who support (or are resigned to, or dare not oppose) basically open-borders are nihilists or 'present tensers' is silly. By what moral measurement? If we want to talk about identity, let's talk about identity. The present era has seen a radical shift in the idea of identity. Epiphenomena of this development include the disappearance of the peasantry in the rich world, the emancipation of women, the historically unparalleled rise of tolerance of homosexuality, an unheard of degree of mobility, and the collapse of many kinds of traditional inter-genetational family relations.
In any case, national identity is itself an historical artifact with a specific history. In the eighteenth century, for example, less than half of the people in France (whose national borders had been largely fixed more than a century earlier) spoke French. Germany was formed in 1871. Etcetera, etcetera.
In other words, if we are talking about what Braudel called 'la longue duree'---the broad sweep of history---nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. Whatever else it is, it is not to be confused with tradition in any serious historical sense of the word. In any case, the reality of economic globalization has hollowed out the nation state. That cannot simply be sneered at as 'present tensism.' Again, we may rue the fact, but it is a fact.
It is true that we are in an era of great flux. But unless we admit that, the conversation won't be serious. Just as it is unserious to discuss immigration without discussing what the US, or any other state is FOR. My ow
n prejudices, obviously, is that states exist to advance the interests of the powerful whether it is the US Chamber of Commerce or the Chinese Communist Party. But then I read a lot of Foucault at an impressionable age. To say this obviously does not mean saying that all states are equal or that some aren't preferable to others.
I hope this advances something. Obviously, it is written from a largely materialist perspective (Weberian rather than Marxist, though I actually think Marx still has much to teach us). But I hope you will not dismiss it out of hand for all that.
My first thought: I wonder what Dan Larison and Spengler make of this?
My second: Speaking for myself, I am less interested in the idea of preserving the "purity" of America as a nation than I am in the idea of the rule of law and responsible self-government. I don't mind immigration in principle. Seriously, I don't. Half the people at my church are immigrants. Every city I've lived in since leaving college -- which is to say, over half my life -- has been profoundly marked by the presence of immigrants: Latino and Asian especially. At the most trivial level, I eat a lot better today than I did growing up, because I eat so much Mexican and Thai food. In the daily life I lead, in this time and place, mass immigration doesn't hurt me, and in fact it provides benefits to me and my family. I'm a cosmopolitan who has traveled overseas quite a bit. I'm comfortable around foreigners and the foreign-born.
But I don't use the public hospital in Dallas for my family's medical care -- the same public hospital that's overrun by illegal immigrants. I don't have my kids in the public schools in my city, many of which are overwhelmed by children who don't speak English. My livelihood is not affected by mass immigration, because unlike working-class Americans, my vocation is in a line of work that illegal workers can't do. For now, my neighborhood is not becoming home to houses full of migrant males who may or may not be legal, but who are breaking codes that the city will not or cannot enforce. And I haven't yet had a car crash with an illegal alien who doesn't have insurance. Point is, it's easy for people like me to wonder why others are so bent out of shape by the illegal immigration problem, because we just don't see it. Moreover, because people like me are pretty well educated, well traveled, and relatively sophisticated, we tend to look with disdain upon people like us who happen to strongly prefer their own particular culture. I can much easier sit down and have a meaningful conversation with a white-collar professional in the Netherlands than I can sit down and have a meaningful conversation with the white mill worker from my own hometown. And I bet many of you readers can too.
We cultural elites are the kind of rootless people who will worry about the disappearance of the native culture in some far off Third World place, and fret about the business interests busy extinguishing that traditional culture. But we will look at people in our own backyard who are facing the same kind of challenge to maintain their own way of life, and condescend to them as backward racists.
The thing is, there's something deeply concerning about the idea that a national border doesn't exist, and cannot be made to exist, and that laws governing who comes into this country are routinely violated -- and moreover, that it is pointless to try to enforce them, because the mass migration is inevitable. Like my correspondent, I believe that states exist in reality to serve the interests of the powerful, and I don't think that's ever going to change. But if the system works to provide a decent modicum of power to the non-rich, I can live with that, as it's vastly better than most people in the world today, or ever, have ever had. What's happening today is that ordinary people who are legitimately concerned about national soveregnty and the rule of law vis-a-vis the immigration crisis are being told t
ime and time again that nothing can be done about it -- and moreover (this is crucial), that to object to them and their presence is tantamount to racism.
[An aside: I visited a wonderful elementary school recently, a church school that serves children of the barrio and ghetto. Several fourth graders gave a presentation to us visitors, in which they spoke of their favorite historical figure. A Hispanic boy explained why he thought Santa Anna was so great. Admittedly, Santa Anna was a great historical figure. But this is Texas, which takes its state history very seriously, and this little Texas boy had just expressed his supreme admiration for the Mexican general who slaughtered the men of the Alamo, and who was in turn defeated by Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. You tell an Anglo Texan that to worry about how the Mexicanization of Texas is nothing to worry about. Historical memory is identity, and the identity of Texas is changing rapidly. A Texas in which the Alamo is seen as a tragic defeat that gave the people their sense of identity is not the same Texas in which the Alamo is seen as a great victory.]
So: one is told that not only are you powerless to control your own fate (your property, your job, your livelihood), but that to object in any way to this loss of control is to reveal yourself to be wicked.
This is getting far afield from the reader's point, I fear, so maybe this will bring it back. The reader seems to be saying that the idea that we can protect American identity against this larger sweep of history is a false hope. And, if I'm reading him correctly, it's a false hope for the same reason that trying to maintain any kind of traditional culture is a fool's game in the world today: that global capitalism is cleansing the planet of all rootedness, all tradition. Someone recently pointed me to a 1994 essay by David Rieff , which is an extended riff on the E.M. Cioran quote, "A civilization progresses from agriculture to paradox." What Cioran meant, if I understand him correctly, is that once a civilization progresses beyond agriculture, which made civilization possible to begin with by delivering people from a nomadic existence, it moves into an industrial economy, which abstracts people from the places to which they've been tied, even as it makes them wealthier. The further along this process becomes, the more we return to the nomadic state, though incomparably wealthier.
Rieff makes use of this Cioran observation to talk about how we Americans don't deal well with paradox. For example, he says that for all the contemporary obsession with diversity, we are strikingly homogenous and conformist (cf. the white American yuppie who enjoys the "diversity" of watching a DVD film by the gay Spanish director Almodovar, while eating take-out sushi -- but who can't stand the idea of the NASCAR fan taking the family to Burger Doodle to eat in the car before rushing home to watch "Walker, Texas Ranger" on TiVO; some cultures are more, ahem, diverse than others). Rieff's broader subject is the alleged world hegemony of American culture. Here, for our purposes, is the chief insight of the Rieff essay:
In the end, when we talk about the dominance of one culture, or even, less agonistically, of the globalization of culture, it is important to keep in mind that what is really at issue is the victory of culture that makes money over all other forms, and, particularly, over both folk culture and elite culture. Examples of this are everywhere and, if anything, the tendency toward bottom-line thinking is accelerating. Think of "art" filmmaking, a relatively accessible form when compared to, say, serial music, and how it has become about as relevant to the movie industry as antiquarian bookselling is to the publishing business. And if high culture now exists on life support, the culture of tr
aditional societies, for all the lip service rendered to it by pious academics and political activists, is everywhere in retreat, and, in many parts of the world, on the brink of extinction as a living rather than as an artificially preserved set of forms.
...The essential point is that most people want this consumer culture, however much they may resent its effect on, say, the status of women. And yet such changes come as part of the package, since American consumer culture is corrosive of all traditions and established truths. In any case, the position of people in the Third World, which can be summed up as wanting more of this culture and resenting and fearing its triumph, is finally untenable. In the end, the market simply has more resources than a traditional society incapable of providing prosperity in an era of demographic increase and urbanization.
Rieff goes on to say that American mass culture is so exportable because unlike other nation's mass culture, it is not organic to a particular place. (The pseudonymous columnist Spengler, I think, often makes a similar point about Evangelical Christianity, which is booming among the world's poor). And it's not organic to a particular place because particularity has no strong roots in a country as young as ours. What does it mean, then, to get all anxious about maintaining one's traditions in the face of mass foreign immigrations when our "traditions," such as they are, are so shallow-rooted, and when, in fact, we have created a mass culture that is simultaneously the most efficient generator of wealth the world has ever seen, and the deadliest enemy of traditions, old certainties, venerable loyalties?
I sense that it is in this light that the reader who sent in the initial observation critiques Ron Maxwell. We are all complicit in this consumer culture, and have freely abandoned our cultural traditions as the price of admittance. Why are we only talking about traditions, and rootedness in place, in the face of anxiety over the effective dissolution of the southern border? Isn't there something phony in that? (he seems to be saying).
So: Have we become so accomodated to the condition of material ease that resistance to this tectonic aspect of modernity (the reality of mass immigration) in the name of a long-abandoned sense of tradition really is futile? Are we all really nomads now, with pretenses to the traditions that no longer exist for us, and haven't really done since the agricultural age? If so, Juvenal was right: "Luxury is more ruthless than war."
Noting that the Pew poll found that 47 percent consider themselves Muslim first and American second, while 42 percent consider themselves Christian first and American second, an Andrew Sullivan reader writes, snarkily, that he hopes American can assimilate those Christians too.
That's an understandable remark, but an ill-informed one. I think of myself as a Christian first, and American second. If the state forced me to choose between my God and my country, I hope I have the courage in the moment to choose my God. And I would expect that any true Muslim would believe the same. If you want to see what happens when a people are persuaded to worship their nation instead of their God, observe the behavior of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer grasped early the mortal threat nationalism posed to the church, but he was in a minority. Do those who sneer at Christians (or any religious believer) who considers his primary loyalty to be not to the state, but to his God, really want the church (or the synagogue, or the mosque) to be subservient to Caesar? If yes, then Thomas More was a villain, and "A Man For All Seasons" is a play and film about a traitor who got his just desserts.
Secondly, the reason this figure about Muslim loyalty causes anxiety whereas the Christian figure doesn't has to do with the concrete circumstances of the present moment. Some Muslims are making war on this nation in the name of the Islamic religion. Given that, it is neither unsurprising nor irrational for most Americans to look with suspicion upon Muslims who proclaim (with total justification, I emphasize) a higher loyalty to Allah than to America. A more apt historical analogy from the Christian side would be the 1570 papal bull in which Rome declared Elizabeth I of England to be a heretic, and instructing English Catholics that they no longer had any loyalty to her. Thus did the pope stupidly make every English Catholic into a traitor in the eyes of the state, no matter how much they loved their country. This is not, of course, in any way to justify the terrible persecutions and martyrdoms visited upon faithful English Catholics during the time of the English Reformation. But it must be admitted that given that the Pope declared war on the English throne and attempted to incite Catholics in England to rebel against their sovereign, patriotic Englishmen would understandably regard the Queen's Catholic subjects with suspicion.
It's going to get national distribution! This just in, from a press release from Oregon Public Broadcasting:
Oregon Public Broadcasting to Distribute “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center”
Portland, OR, May 23, 2007 - Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) today announced that it will distribute Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center to public television stations under an agreement reached between The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Oregon Public Broadcasting.
"Islam vs. Islamists addresses very difficult issues," said Steve Bass, president and CEO of Oregon Public Broadcasting. "We are pleased to facilitate a dialogue on one of the central issues in the world today in conjunction with the broadcast.”
"As stewards of the investment in public broadcasting, this fulfills our responsibility to the taxpayer," said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Look now for Islamist groups like CAIR to pressure local PBS affiliates to bypass the film. Contact your local PBS station and tell them you want to see it!
If you read nothing else today, by all means read this superlative, deeply felt, uber-crunchy, populist essay by Ron Maxwell, on the meaning of home in an age of mass immigration. He says the people who want mass immigration to help the economic bottom line now insult the past and dismiss the future. Excerpts:
What we have is an entire population -- north and south of the border -- being reduced, by the 'present tensers', to the only thing that matters to them. A human being with all his immense and limitless capacity for imagining and capable of connecting across time and space, being reduced to the only two things that matter to the masters of this new world order; the worker bee, and the consumer. ...
The primary concern of the "present tensers" is to use other human beings as worker bees and consumers in the interest of maximizing their own profits. "Fair enough" some might say, "what's wrong with that? Isn't that just free enterprise at work?" But can free enterprise long endure in a country where citizenship is degraded and the rule of law is defiled? Where the bed-rock of America, its middle-class, is undermined, ignored and pushed aside? Where it is burdened by ever increasing taxation to pay for expenses that are not of their own making or of their own choosing, where fair-play is thrown by the boards, and where even the language they speak is not good enough by itself anymore?
And:
Our borders are turnstiles for coyotes, drug lords, human traffickers and terrorists. Our border patrol agents are being incarcerated for doing their jobs. We're under attack, under assault and our government is looking the other way. Even making excuses for illegality and promising rewards for law-breakers. Yes, unbelievably they are promising the reward of US citizenship to anyone who can run the gauntlet of the US Border Patrol and make it into the United States. Home free home! And then, to add insult to injury, they want us to believe this should not be called amnesty.
Our neighbors, fellow citizens and tax-payers -- know it is they, not the businesses who are luring them here and making money off their cheap labor, who are footing the bill for these increasing millions of third world migrants -- for health care, for education, for welfare, for added security and for their own depressed wages. The American people are a generous people - but they are not dupes and fools. They have moved from skepticism, to mistrust, to outrage. Where is our leadership? Who is defending America and our way of life? Not just in Iraq or in Afghanistan -- who is defending it here - in our own homes and our own communities? It's a healthy feeling of self-survival that the American people are feeling and which they are finally turning into political action and imposing on their elected officials who sometimes forget who elected them and whom they are supposed to serve. Americans intuitively understand that what's at stake here is nothing less than the survival of our country.
My newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has for some time taken a position in favor of immigration reform along the lines of what's being proposed in this compromise bill. I'm in the minority on the editorial board in opposing this kind of reform. A reader of ours has a pretty good take, I think, on what this newspaper -- and, I would say, quite a few others -- is advocating. The reader used to live in a suburb, but sold his house (at no profit) and moved away when he concluded that illegal immigration was bringing down property values (he now lives in Nebraska, in an ethnically mixed neighborhood, and is fine with that). So he's not a disinterested observer. This from him appears on the DMN editorial board blog, where we've been fiercely debating this issue (you might want to visit our blog to read the argumentation; it gives a pretty good picture of the debate inside a major media outlet in a border-state city where illegal immigration is a hugely controversial issue):
Here is what I read in The Dallas Morning News:
1. Can’t deport 12 million people so do nothing.
2. Won’t enforce the law, so keep the law and just look the other way.
3. Can’t secure the border 100 percent, so don’t bother building a fence.
4. Allowing 12 million people to stay in the country indefinitely isn’t amnesty.
5. We have to accept mediocre law because the Senate won’t reconsider for years if we don’t agree to this one.
6. The federal government won’t enforce the law, so the people have no recourse to do so locally.
7. Whole cities can obstruct justice, and the federal government won’t do anything about that, either.
8. No one suggests that we repeal the immigration laws that we don’t enforce because that would be politically untenable.
9. U.S. citizenship is meaningless to both Democrats and Republicans.
10. The United States -- and only the United States -- has no right to secure its borders.
11. We want to rely on cheap labor by ignoring the borders, yet advocates for the illegal aliens want them unionized and paid as much as citizens.
12. National security is at the top of everyone’s list unless it offends Hispanics or the Mexican government.
13. Municipalities ignore their own zoning laws for illegals driving down property values -- like not telling people not to park five nonrunning cars in their yards -- for fear of being called racist.
I asked a friend of mine who practices immigration law in a major Midwestern city what he thought of the immigration bill. I know him to be a conservative Republican and a supporter of President Bush. This is what he wrote back, which I post with his permission:
My initial answer is: I am pulled in two opposite directions. When Iago cried "My daughter! My ducats!" he could not have been more torn than I.
On the one hand – and I won't kid you – the personal financial possibilities arising from this bill are incredible. I have a very real possibility of becoming wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.
I have a friend who did immigration law in the 2000-2001 time frame. Bill Clinton, by decree, extended something called the "245(i) program" (the old 1986 amnesty) by four months between January to April 2000.
In that four months my pal’s little law firm made $50,000 off of 245(i) applications.
A day.
Every day.
For four months.
Each application took 90 minutes to do.
Each brought in $1,000 in fees.
Ka ching.
And yet.
On the other hand, this bill is a terrible, terrible idea.
It's amnesty, pure and simple. No b.s. No, it goes beyond amnesty. It completely cuts the legs out from under immigration enforcement.
Look, I have no love for la migra. BICE – the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – can be real Nazis. They have the power to pick up aliens and hold them in detention indefinitely. They can say someone is a 'security threat' and they are not required to show any evidence that this is so. The only hearing the alien has coming to him is via TV set from the jail. I'm not even allowed to consult with my client in the course of the hearing. I can't tell him to shut up; I can't tell him to explain his answer; I can't talk to him sotto voce to hint to him or to advise him.
All I can do is shout at a TV screen in front of opposing counsel and the judge. That's Soviet justice.
It's purely Orwellian, and it's why I do immigration law. It's just un-American how the Gov't does things in the immigration world.
Last year I represented a young woman in an asylum case. She was arrested at the border fleeing sexual slavery in her homeland. She had been in detention for eleven months. I could not even sit next to her–the entire hearing was from a jail cell via teleconference. And had we lost, she would have died. (We didn't lose. This time.)
But much as I hate their methods, we need these guys, we need BICE, for the same reason we need a lower intestine; we need something resembling an excretory function as regards illegals who flout visa and immigration laws. But now every time that la migra picks up someone working illegally the illegal can smile and say "I have a Z visa application in the works." Once this bill passes – no, ever since the bill became public knowledge – the BICE lice have been completely demoralized. They know that the dam has burst and they are the first ones to be swept away by it. (You can tell. I was just there at [my city's] BICELand yesterday and they were actually polite.) And I'm sure it's worse in the Mexican reconquista areas, SoCal, AZ, NM, and (ahem) Texas.
The long an the short of it is this: this bill has no enforcement to it at all.
Look, it says, in effect, that 'no Y [guest worker] or Z [amnesty] visas will be issued to anybody until the following steps are taken to seal the borders.' But in the mean time, provisional Y and Z visas will be issued, with exactly the same effects and benefits except that they can't be turned into LPR (green card) status.
There is no requirement that the border be 'sealed', just that they hire more people (yay*) and build a tripwire fence (double yay*) and throw out a few more 'criminal' aliens (no yay here, this means that more misdemeanants wi
th US citizen kids will be thrown out).
*((insert the sounds of cheering made when they ate Robin's minstrels here))
And as for the Great Wall of Texas? Forget it. Won't never be built. Not while the Dems are in office.
Furthermore, there are about 30 million non-citizen immigrants, and eight to twelve million illegals in this country. There are 180,000 Homeland Security bureaucrats, of whom about 40,000 or so work for BICE, from border patrol to Homeland Security paperwork drones, for the whole country. I work in one of America's biggest cities, and here, with a half million aliens in this state, BICE and its sister organization, US CIS, have together – count 'em – 30 people processing papers. It takes five years to get a marriage green-card interview. Five years.
Look, this is the crew that gave Mohammad Atta a green card six months after he destroyed the North Tower. And they expect these people to process twelve million Z visa applications in the next three years??? WHO ARE THEY KIDDING?
And yet. And yet.
This debate as to whether they should be here at all is over before it started. They're here. End of story. Throwing them out en masse would require we act like Romans or Germans, not Americans. Short of losing Baltimore or Seattle to a shipboard nuke, we're not going to have boxcars to the borders. We must therefore do what is necessary. You build a sidewalk where people walk.
Real comprehensive immigration reform – seal the borders, amnesty those here – is never going to happen. The Democrats don't want to seal the borders, ever, because immigrants (eventually) vote Democrat (legally, if we're lucky). One third of the Republicans don't want to amnesty because they're immigrant (and Muslim!) hating know-nothings (I'm a conservative GOPer myself and I've learned this the hard way). Another third want to amnesty and also don't want to seal the borders because it is good for the economy. And the last third, who want a balanced approach, don't have the power to win on the issue, being one third of one half. Oh well.
So lacking border sealing, and lacking a working immigration agency, amnesty is, given the current political constellation, likely an inevitable necessity. But since we are not going to seal the borders, we can kiss a major city goodbye to Al Qaeda in the next five to ten years. If that.
It has become painfully clear to me since the bitter defeat in November that the American people have decided to have a collective fit of amnesia about a recent certain act of mass terrorist criminality, and to pretend that crucifying George W. will absolve us of our sins. Well, there's a saying in the criminal defense law community: "You can't save your client from himself." If the American people choose to be stupid, then stupid they will be. But then it will take losing a port to wake us up. All we can do is be prepared for the consequences.
And one more thing. It is also clear to me that a million Mexicans flying Mexican flags in L.A. and Dallas and Houston means a significant possibility, maybe even likelihood, of eventual civil war. Not now, not tomorrow, but soon enough. Twenty, thirty years. Sooner if we lose in Iraq. But anyway, in our lifetimes. I'm sure that amnesty by itself will neither delay it nor speed it since whether amnesty is given or no, they'll still be here regardless. Only sealing the borders can delay it to keep things from getting worse. And if we don't seal the borders, it is coming.
The Pew Center has produced the first truly independent, comprehensive survey of American Muslims and their beliefs. The results are surprising, and mostly encouraging. It finds that most US Muslims are middle-class, assimilated or assimilating, and far less alienated than their co-religionists in Europe or elsewhere. The social mobility offered by America really is working, it seems. I was startled to read that just over half of US Muslims report little or no participation in mosque activities. Zuhdi Jasser says (in the "Islam vs. Islamists" film that PBS suppressed) that there are large numbers of US Muslims who want nothing to do with mosques because so many mosques are controlled by Islamists who politicize the faith. This survey suggests in several ways that he's right.
On a more troubling note, the survey finds that young Muslim adults (aged 18 to 29) are more religiously involved, and more sympathetic to radicalism, than older Muslims. Still, the numbers are fairly small, but worrying nonetheless. I was relieved to find that only five percent of Muslims surveyed expressed sympathy for al-Qaeda -- until I realized that that number corresponded to about 125,000 people! (But a significant number of Muslims -- 19 percent of 18-29s, 29 percent of over 30s -- declined to answer that question one way or the other; if you held an unfavorable opinion of al-Qaeda, why wouldn't you say so?)
Still, the survey is mostly good news. It does suggest to me, though, that American mosques -- which Muslims like Dr. Jasser and Sheikh Hisham Kabbani have been warning are largely under the control of Islamists -- ought to be viewed much more skeptically. Similarly with Islamist-run organizations like CAIR and ISNA. These groups claim to be the spokesmen for American Muslims, but the Pew survey would appear to indicate that they are the spokesmen only for a portion of the Islamic community. The moderate silent majority needs to find its public voice.
For what it's worth, the survey found that most Muslims heavily identify with the Democratic Party, and are big-government social conservatives. Also, four in 10 believe that someone other than Arabs carried out 9/11. That's wack.
A reader in the Texas capital who's a friend of mine has been telling me from some time now about no end of problems from a day labor site in his neighborhood, established by the People's Republic of Austin. It has become very difficult to talk about the very real difficulties around this site because ... well, here's what the reader says:
Here's what happens when you stick your head up . . .
What are you if you complain about your city putting a day labor site in your neighborhood? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the rise in violent crime in the neighborhood because of the day labor site? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the local elementary school being overwhelmed with non-English speaking students who are the children of illegals using the day labor site? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the squalid apartment complexes near the day labor site that now house illegals using the day labor site? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the increase in public drunkeness and drug dealing around the apartment complexes near the day labor site? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the lowering of your property values because of the day labor site? A racist.
What are you if you complain about the illegal bus station next to the day labor site that brings people from Mexico? A racist.
What are you if you complain about all of the above, give up, sell your home for a loss, and move to the suburbs? A racist.
A follow on the last post. The kind of traditionalist conservatism I espouse advocates working to re-establish a sense of place, and of neighborhoods, and neighborliness. One of the disorders of our age -- and indeed, the source of so many disorders -- is mobility, rootlessness. Americans today tend to think of housing as a consumer good -- once you've used it up, sell out and move on. It's just a roof over your head, after all.
Crunchy conservatism is about learning to think of our houses as homes, with all that entails. It is impossible to freeze a neighborhood in time, but homeowners have to be able to count on a reasonable amount of stability to protect their investment of money, labor and affection in their house. To that end, people have to be able to count on the rule of law being enforced on their streets. Order has to be maintained. If not, your property values go down, and you may have no choice but to leave before your investment collapses. This is true on the question of crime, and it's true when it comes to illegal immigration.
Here is a column written a few years ago by Glenn Clingenpeel, and published in the Dallas Morning News. I can't find a link to this piece, so I have to quote it in full. Irving is a suburb of Dallas:
I love Irving, or at least I used to.
About five years ago, my wife and I settled down here. We bought a modest home in a quiet little neighborhood and had two children. Being dutiful parents and good citizens, we became involved in the PTA and the local neighborhood association.
I was elected chairman of the group, and in that capacity met many interesting people. There were folks who built their homes in Irving when Highway 183 was a two-lane country road. I love hearing the stories of how Irving used to be, how it has grown, and I've enjoyed interacting with city staffers and elected officials.
But I am leaving. I am taking my family out of this south Irving neighborhood in which we have invested so much, and I am moving.
At first this was a hard decision. That is until Irving's finest, dressed in full body armor accentuated with black ski masks and accessorized with automatic weapons, began showing up in my neighborhood. I applaud these cops for their service, but I must confess that I was not entirely happy to see them standing in a yard a couple of houses down from where my children play.
You can imagine the blank expression on my face as I drove by. One of the courteous officers, seeing my empty stare, raised a gloved hand in a friendly greeting. I timidly waved back quickly and with considerable effort converted my face into a pathetic little fraud of a smile. Two months later, they were back. I passed about a dozen of them searching a home on the other end of the block on my way to work.
Although that would be quite enough, the story of my decision to leave does not end or even begin there. The principal reason is this: The demographics of my neighborhood are changing faster than the speed of light.
Oops. Now I've done it. By raising the race issue, this white guy has planted himself squarely in the middle of a field of land mines. Let us tread cautiously.
A change in demographics toward a predominantly Hispanic population is not necessarily a bad thing. Many of the best neighbors on my block are Hispanics. They are courteous, outgoing and maintain their yards and homes in a way that makes me proud to share the block with them. These are people I want as neighbors, and you should too.
However, this is not always the case, and as so often holds true, the bad examples outweigh (if not outnumber) the good. Let's be honest: It doesn't matter if you are from Nicaragua, Norfolk or Nirvana. If you have six cars outside your house that impede traffic and perpetually ooze a caustic concoction of petrochemicals; if you hold frequent outdoor parties until the wee hours of the morning with blaring music; and if
you house multiple families - often times a half-dozen young males - in a single-family residence, you're not a good neighbor.
What follows when these unfortunate examples take root is a self-perpetuating degradation that eventually leads to more and more visits by men with machine guns. In Irving we have codes that have been put in place through the democratic process we all cherish. Unfortunately, I have sat through too many neighborhood meetings when city staffers have shrugged their shoulders and told us there is nothing they can do. They are either unable or unwilling to enforce the laws that should apply equally to all Irving residents.
I remember learning in Government 101 that one should never enact laws that will not or cannot be enforced. It is high time the city enforces our existing codes, particularly as they apply to single-family residences. This is necessary to protect our neighborhoods so that they will be safe and inviting places for all Irving residents, Hispanic or otherwise.
It's too late for us, though. We're going to Arlington. It's people like us - middle-class families of whatever ethnicity - that no city can afford to lose. But Irving is. --- Now, this is just one man's story, but he faced a question that more and more American homeowners will face. Here is a man who invested time and effort and affection into building equity in his house and connections in his neighborhood. Yet he decided to cut his losses because the city would not enforce laws against a lawbreaking immigrant population. What if you were in his shoes? You might be one day.
I think about my little house. Our neighborhood gentrified after the police finally got serious about fighting crime there. Our neighbors (who are working-class Hispanics) tell us that when they arrived, in the 1970s, you couldn't even go outside at night for all the drug violence. That's all changed. It's an up-and-coming neighborhood now. Old run-down houses have been restored. A once-blighted area is coming back to life, and people are working hard to preserve the quality of the neighborhood.
We are close, though, to a barrio. If the continuing tide of illegal immigration, which the US government obviously has no intention of stemming, results in a situation developing in my neighborhood like that faced by Glenn Clingenpeel, I will face a similar question: should I sell my house while I still can, or risk putting up with crime and the degradation of the quality of life in the neighborhood? If we were faced with the prospect of selling, even if we could recoup our investment, we'd have to sever ties with all our neighbors, as well as leave a house we've come to love.
Mind you, in a free society, nobody is guaranteed the right that their neighborhood will never change. It is equally likely, I think, that the rapidly gentrifying sector of Dallas in which we live will end up pushing property values so high that we can't afford the taxes on our house, and will have to move. In that case, though, we'd more than recoup our financial investment, and in any case, our dislocation will not have come about through lawbreaking or a refusal by the authorities to enforce the law.
My point in this ridiculously long post is to make the illegal immigration crisis concrete. People get passionate, and rightly so, about their homes -- and it's not only a matter of financial investment.
It is clear to me that neither the Democratic nor the Republican party has the will or the intention to enforce the immigration laws as they exist. It does seem that the system is stacked against homeowners, who are effectively powerless. And for whom can they vote to change matters? Nobody. Nobody now, anyway. All you can do is pick up and move, severing bonds of community and friendship, all because business interests and ethnic activists and the government don't give a rat's rear end.
This is not going to end pretty, I fear. You cannot tell people that they have to be prepar
ed to abandon their homes because the government is unwilling or unable to enforce the law against illegal immigration, and expect them to sit back and take it forever.
As expected, a federal judge has temporarily suspended the recently approved city ordinance in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb, that would have required apartment owners to verify the residency status of those seeking to rent. The idea is to prevent illegal aliens from establishing residency in the town. Though the ordinance backers were outspent 7 to 1 in the recent referendum, they won by a decisive 68 percent of the vote. And now, in a stroke, a federal judge has overturned that decision, saying that only the federal government has the right to determine who is in the country illegally.
To be sure, if the ordinance violates federal law, the judge had no choice but to suspend it. But consider the message here. We all know that the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to control the US-Mexico border. Yet the judge is telling local communities that they have no right to act to prevent people who by definition have no right to be in this country from living there. The message from the federal government, therefore, is, "We won't protect you from this invasion of lawbreakers, but you don't have the right to protect yourselves either."
If the judge's ruling is upheld, you are going to see communities that find themselves under siege by illegal aliens -- who, let's not kid ourselves, are going to continue to pour over the border that neither George W. Bush or anybody else intends to secure -- selling out and moving away. But because there is no defense allowed under current law, you are going to see an angry anti-government populist movement arise from people who are sick and tired of having this happen to their communities, and being told by the establishment that they just have to live with it -- and who are sick and tired of being portrayed by the news media as nothing but simple-minded racists.
On Saturday, we drove out to the country to attend the open house of Rehoboth Ranch, the Hutchins family farm (if you read "Crunchy Cons," you'll remember the Hutchinses as a conservative Christian farm family raising livestock organically, because they believe that's as God intended). Their meat and eggs are fantastic. While there, we ran into Connie Hale, who was also in "Crunchy Cons"; the Hale family farm, Windy Meadows, specializes in chickens. I told Connie how excited Julie and I were to see recently on the menu of an upscale restaurant here in Dallas a baked chicken labeled "Windy Meadows." It was a pleasure to see so many people at the Rehoboth event. Julie and I made some new friends, and had a grand time with old ones too.
Robert Hutchins talked on his tour of the fields about how much costlier it is to raise livestock the natural way, but how they wouldn't do anything else. On several occasions he mentioned the hidden costs, nutritionally and otherwise, that our society pays in its mania for efficiency. We want it fast and cheap, no matter what. But we pay in other ways.
In that light, consider this e-mail from a reader:
Excellent post on the immigration bill. I think you're absolutely right that the key is what Americans want to pay for things, and, more profoundly, what kind of society they want to live in. You can't have it both ways. I'm sure you remember cabs in NYC. They're expensive by US standards but by European standards, they're preposterously cheap. The reason's simple: the immigrant labor. The same is true of food, landscaping, you name it. But are people really willing---and that's where I think you're right to ask the question---to envisage an America without helots?
Personally, I doubt it. As far as I can see, the 'Brazilianization' of the US, a herrenvolk democracy of whites and Asians with a servant class of blacks and Hispanics (I'm simplifying wildly, of course: there is a black bourgeoisie and some Hispanic groups, notably Cubans have joined the 'masters' of our society) is already a fait accompli.
Americans hate immigration, yes. But they'd be lost without it.
I understand people who want illegal immigration stopped, no matter what the cost. And I understand people who are fine with high levels of immigration, and consider it to be on balance a benefit to the economy. What I don't understand are people who want prices and services to remain as they are now, but want the illegals to go home and the borders to be closed. Can't be done. One way or another, we're going to pay.
Everybody ought to read the original reporting series the Dallas Morning News did on the illegal worker culture at the (subsequently raided) Swift meatpacking plants in Cactus, Texas. Again, there's something there to disturb Americans of all political persuasions. We simply cannot keep living like this as a country. The costs -- financial, criminal, and above all moral -- are too great.
But you know how we contemporary Americans are: expecting something for nothing, never expecting the bill to come due.
The proposed immigration "reform" bill does very little for the immigrant and nothing for the communities which are unable to absorb their masses, but is a boon for corporations and liberal grandstanders needing to show their tolerance for diversity.
For the record, it is Big Business and liberals - not racists, "Bible thumpers" and "raving Dobbsians" - and sweethearts like your reader who relates the
discussion about the farmer and his 35 cent peach, who wish to institutionalize a type of serfdom, one where employers do not need to provide brown-skinned Mexican worker bees with a minimum wage or benefits of any kind. All perfectly legal as long as we keep getting our fruit at a discount and our tables bussed cheaply.
And it is liberals - champions of government services - who apparently want to ensure that cities like Los Angeles where I live, must forever bankrupt and shut down community hospitals and emergency medical services; endure public schools jammed to the rafters with children of immigrants illiterate in their native language let alone English; and paralyze public transportation and other infrastructure simply by being overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring across the border every year.
Last week, the south Jersey mosque where three of the alleged Fort Dix terrorists worshiped held an open house to declare itself a peaceful mosque, and to demonstrate to the public that they couldn't have learned anything about terrorism there. Later, Najeem Badat, a spokeswoman for the mosque, appeared on Steve Malzberg's radio show (link to that interview here). When asked straightforwardly if Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists, Badat said that the definition of terrorist is different for different people.
Gosh, I can't imagine why people would have suspicions about the atmosphere at that mosque.
Question: if the Irish Republican Army had destroyed the Twin Towers five years ago, and some Irish Catholics from south Jersey had been arrested on charges of planning a terrorist attack on Fort Dix, and a spokeswoman for the Catholic parish where they prayed wouldn't condemn the IRA as a terrorist organization -- would it be anti-Catholic to view that parish with suspicion?
I think Jonah Goldberg puts his finger precisely on the reason why this immigration compromise is in trouble on the right:
The chief cause of misunderstanding is the issue of trust. The White House thought that that if they had all sorts of conservative mechanisms in the bill that conservatives would be placated. What they didn't understand is that the anti-"amnesty" wing of the Republican party simply doesn't believe any of these enforcement measures will implemented until they in fact are implemented. "Trust but verify" has simply become "verify." And until there is real enforcement — both in terms of current law and new laws — the base simply doesn't care about any other bells and whistles. "Been there done that" is the de facto official policy of the base when it comes to promises of enforcement, i.e. "No more promises, just enforcement. Then we'll talk"...
Over the weekend, National Review's David Frum had a really smart political analysis of the effect the immigration compromise will have on the GOP. Frum predicts a wipe-out at the polls next year over this deal. These Frum points struck me as particularly apt:
1) The typical (median) American worker has seen his income stagnate under George W. Bush. Immigration is not the only reason for this wage stagnation, but it is certainly one of the reasons. With this immigration bill, the GOP is telling hard-pressed workers: Go look to somebody else to help you.
2) As complicated as this immigration deal is, it rests on a simple compromise: The Democrats get the amnesty they want - in exchange for the Republicans getting the guest-worker program they want. By identifying the guestworker program as the GOP's highest immigration priority, the deal also identifies the GOP as a party that in the crunch puts employers' interests first.
Frankly, I don't trust the government when it says it's going to make the border secure -- I say, "Show me first, then I'll believe you" -- and I believe that the Republican Party by and large cares about the interests of corporations in this matter, not the grassroots. As I think Mark Krikorian has pointed out, if Bush had spent his presidency till now getting tough on enforcing the actual immigration laws we have now, he'd probably have the credibility to sell this thing to conservatives. But he didn't, and so he doesn't.
Andrew Sullivan has a reader who spent the weekend visiting a couple of California farmers, and wrote to say the following:
One held up a fancy white peach to me and said: "Today, you can buy this for about 35 cents in the Safeway. If I were paying my fieldworkers a regular minimum wage and benefits to care for and harvest that peach, it would cost you about $1.50. These people ought to think about that before they start raging against the immigration bill."
The reader makes a good point. Americans are going to have to decide if keeping consumer goods relatively cheap is worth all these hidden costs, socially and morally. Do we really want to support a system that guarantees us cheap produce but does so at the expense of exploiting these workers, driving down US wages, and causing all kinds of social disruption? There's plenty around this issue to challenge the assumptions of the left and the right.
Matthew was ill this morning, so Lucas and I left Julie and the baby home while we went to liturgy. Liturgy in the Orthodox church is long, so we usually bring a picture book or something to distract Lucas during the service. Today he had a kid's book that explains what happens at liturgy. He's only just past three, and not old enough to read, so he looks at the pictures.
Today, before communion, he showed me a drawing in the book of a priest blessing a child. "Look Daddy," he said, pointing at the priest, "that's me, all growed up."
Later, in the car after liturgy, we were pulling out of the church parking lot. A middle-aged Latino man with a pot belly, wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a trucker's hat, flagged us down. He leaned into the passenger side window.
"Sir, me and my wife and two girls just came in from Colorado," he said, flashing gold teeth. "We got nothing. Can you help us?"
I was sure he was lying. "Did you talk to the archbishop? He's standing right back there," I said.
"Yeah, he said come back on Monday. But we've got nothing for tonight."
"I'm sorry, I can't help you," I said. I rolled up the window and we drove on.
"Dad, that man needed money," Lucas said from the backseat.
I thought about how yesterday, when we were out driving, a drunk standing by the onramp held out a sign begging for money. Lucas had told me then that I should give him some ("Don't we have money, Dad?"). I told him yesterday that yes, we do have money, but some people who ask for money will use it to buy whiskey, which hurts them. But today, the Latino man didn't look like a drunk. In fact, he looked a lot like our neighbor Mr. Ernest, who was taken away late last night in an ambulance after having suffered a heart attack. Could I really be sure that man back in the church parking lot was lying? No, I couldn't. But I did know that he was, in a Christian sense, my neighbor.
"Dad," Lucas said. "If Babboo" -- his name for his older brother Matthew -- "needed something, I would go beg money for it."
"You would stand in the street and ask strangers for money if your brother needed something?"
"Yes."
OK, now I felt like a heel. Lucas had heard that man ask for money for his children. Maybe the man was lying. Maybe he was the biggest liar in the world. But did I want my little boy to see his Dad pass up beggars two days in a row -- and this last time, after church?
I turned the car around and drove back toward church. We found the beggar in a restaurant parking lot. We gave him some money, and drove on toward the supermarket.
As we drove, I told Lucas that he might make a good priest, because he likes to help people.
"I'm already a little bit of a priest," he said. "I like to serve God, and I like to help people. But priestis aren't afraid, and I'm a little bit afraid."
I told him that priests are afraid sometimes, like everybody else, but they trust God to help them overcome their fear. They do serve God, I said, and they also help people when they're sad, or lonely, or in trouble.
"Yeah, and they tell the po-pos" -- the police -- "to be nice to people. Dad, can priestis have a wife?"
"Yes, in our church they can."
"Who is the priestis' wife?"
"Matushka Lydia is Father John's wife, and Matushka Kathy is Father Joseph's wife. Vladika doesn't have a wife because he's a bishop."
"I want to be a bishop. Because if the bad guys come around, I can POW! bishop them right in the head."
"Well, you could do that," I said. "But it would be even better if you convinced the bad guys to turn good."
"That can't happen. I need to bishop them."
"Sure it can happen," I said, then told him about the conversion of Saul.
We were arriving at the supermarket parking lot. Lucas is learning his toilet training at long last. I asked him if he need
ed to go inside to potty before we started our shopping.
"No Dad," he said, in that I-can't-believe-you-asked-me-that tone that's brand new. "Priestis don't need to tee-tee. But did you know that bishops know how to fix potties?"
Andrew Sullivan gets a letter from a reader, who writes:
What American 'conservatism' has become fits closely within the definition of fascism: an intensely nationalist movement intent on defining membership in the 'nation' on linguistic, religious, and (increasingly) ethnic/racial criteria, accompanied by an unquestioning loyalty to (male) authority, enshrined in family leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, and especially, the leader of the nation, who is seen as embodying the Nation. Loyalty to the Party or Movement and its ideology is of great importance. Violence is the preferred means of accomplishing goals. Diplomacy, compromise, negotiation, are all identified with (feminine) weakness. The rule of law is also despised, because it lacks the immediacy of (violent) action, and its emphasis on balance and its concern with proper procedure is also seen as a sign of (feminine) weakness.
This is the outcome of the bargain the GOP made with the Devil back when it decided to go for the Wallace voters after the ’68 and ’72 elections. Kevin Phillips has repented a hundred times over for counseling the Southern Strategy, but too late. The GOP has discovered that when you sell your soul to the Devil, the only question is when does the Devil come to collect? Well, he's come.
Let me make clear that I believe this anonymous reader tries to claim way, way too much by making the Faustian moment the GOP's appeal to Wallace voters. The history is too complex for that facile analysis. It's like those who insist that the people in the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch who voted over 2-to-1 to support a city ordinance making it illegal to rent apartments to illegal aliens -- and those who (like me) support them -- are merely racists. Are there racists among the yes voters? No question. But there are some vitally important principles at stake in the question of how one's city is to be governed (my DMN colleague Mark Davis wrote a great column about this). Andrew's reader would seem to taint all the socially conservative concerns many voters had in late 1960s and 1970s with Wallace's racism. Had Wallace never existed, the backlash against counterculture-driven social liberalism would still have come into being.
That said, the reader, despite his obvious attempt to cast every concern of conservatives in a proto-fascist light, has something of a point, one echoed in the rightist historian John Lukacs' last book, "Democracy and Populism." Lukacs believes that American conservatism is degenerating into nationalist populism. If he watched the GOP debate the other night, Lukacs must have been appalled by the candidates' eagerness to appear ruthless on torture (McCain and Paul the honorable exceptions). This is the kind of thing that plays very well to an emotivist nation schooled on the barbarism of "24" -- and Lukacs sees mass electronic media as a barbarizing technology, because it simplifies and emotionalizes complex issues, de-emphasizing reason and dispassion. Well that he might: Andrew Sullivan (again) notes an astonishing smear on Ron Paul that appeared on Fox News, one that simply rewrites history.
I wonder too what Lukacs makes of the Midnight Ride of Gonzales and Card. The idea that the chief executive is so monomaniacal about increasing the security powers of the state that he would not only override his own top legal officer, but would dispatch his men to pressure the justice minister on his own sickbed -- well, it reveals a cast of mind that ought to rightly disturb people. We have seen over and over again how this president
has worked to accumulate more power to his office, mostly in the name of national security, and has labored with contempt for Congress (which under the Republicans was compliant anyway) and its role in lawmaking (signing statements, anyone?).
This is a difficult and perilous era. It cannot be doubted that our enemies will seek to exploit weaknesses in our system to hurt us. Often I wonder if the ACLU understands what kind of world we're living in. At the same time, the most lasting damage they could do to us will not be in buildings destroyed and lives snuffed out, but in the evisceration of constitutional government. When Rudy Giuliani can effectively declare discussion of American strategy off limits by invoking the emotional power of 9/11 and his own authority derived from his honorable performance in that crisis, we have reason to worry. To say nothing about stuff like this.
Writes Lukacs:
"It may be that in the future the true divisions will be not between Right and Left but between two kinds of Right: between people on the Right whose binding belief is their contempt for Leftists, who hate liberals more than they love liberty, and others who love liberty more than they fear liberals... ."
A reader just wrote to ask why I'd deleted his post, because it didn't seem overly harsh to him. I told him I hadn't deleted it, or even seen it. Haloscan must be acting up again. Just wanted y'all to beware of this, and to know that I've not gone on a deleting spree.
You've all by now heard the jaw-dropping tale, from former Justice Department No. 2 James Comey's testimony, of how White House Counsel Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card slipped into the hospital and tried to get a gravely ill Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve a domestic spying program that the Justice Department had already advised was illegal. We got the details from James Comey, at the time Ashcroft's No. 2, who'd been tipped off that the White House pair was going to try to pull this on Ashcroft, and who rushed to the hospital to prevent it, while FBI director Mueller ordered his agents on guard to keep Card and Gonzales from ejecting Comey from the room. Benjamin Wittes parses out the meaning of the story. Excerpt:
At least as Comey relates it, this affair is not one of mere bad judgment or over-aggressiveness. It is a story of profound misconduct on Gonzales's part that, at least in my judgment, borders on the impeachable. Put bluntly, faced with a Justice Department determination that the NSA's program contained prohibitive legal problems, the White House decided to go ahead with it anyway. In pursuit of this goal, Gonzales did two things that both seem unforgivable: He tried to get a seriously ill man to unlawfully exercise powers that had been conveyed to another man and to use those powers to approve a program the department deemed unlawful. Then, when Ashcroft refused, the White House went ahead and authorized the program on its own. In terms of raw power, the president has the ability to take this step. But it constitutes a profound affront to the institutional role of the Justice Department as it has developed. The Justice Department is the part of the government that defines the law for the executive branch. For the White House counsel to defy its judgment on an important legal question is to put the rawest power ahead of the law.
The must-derided John Ashcroft, on the other hand, showed himself when it counted to be a man of courage and substance whom history will surely treat more kindly than did contemporary commentary. Few attorneys general get tested as Ashcroft did that night in 2004. One can disagree with him about a lot of things and still recognize the fact that ultimately, he passed the hardest test: From a hospital bed in intensive care, he stood up for the rule of law. More broadly, the Justice Department seems to have performed admirably across the board--from the OLC having taken its job seriously, to the willingness on the part of the department brass and Mueller to lose their jobs to defend the department's ability to determine the law for the executive branch. Had the story ended with Comey's victory, it would have been an ugly crisis with a happy ending.
But it didn't end there. Less than a year later, Gonzales replaced Ashcroft as Comey's boss. Within a year of that, none of the four people who had stood up to Gonzales in that hospital room remained in government.
Leaving aside the rather important question of why the administration apparently went ahead for a period with a program its own Justice Department had warned was illegal, it's worth pondering what this disgusting episode tells us not only about Al Gonzales's character, but about this administration. They were so bound and determined to get their way that they were willing to bulldoze the law and common human decency. It's perfectly clear now why an independent attorney general who felt his duty to the law took precedence over his duty to the president was a stumbling block for the Bush White House. Which is why we got compliant Fredo and those hacks Goodling and Sampson -- and why they moved to get US attorneys who weren't sufficiently compliant out of the way.
God bless John Ashcroft. Alberto Gonzales is an utter disgr
ace to his office, and a walking condemnation of the president who put faith in him. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal editorial page says there was nothing illegal about the "politically unwise" hospital visit, so what's the problem? Sheesh, talk about defining deviancy down!
I'm working on a column for future publication about Pope Benedict's expected ruling that will grant universal permission for the celebration of the Latin mass (at the moment, it's only permitted with permission of the local bishop, many of whom will not grant it). My column will be about the impulse among many younger believers to return to traditions abandoned or suppressed in the 20th century. I'm not only going to focus on Catholics, but also on Orthodox (specifically, the attraction of Orthodoxy to those brought up in a form of Christianity that was not traditional), and Jews leaving Reform Judaism for Orthodox Judaism (in either its modern or traditional forms). I'm also interested in movements among younger Protestants to rediscover tradition within the churches of the Reformation.
Any insights, advice or comments? If you wish to be considered for quotation in the paper, please leave your name, or at least an e-mail address so I can contact you to confirm the quote. Or you can write me at work at rdreher(at)dallasnews.com.
I'm interested in the promise, the pleasure and the problems with a return to religious traditionalism in the present moment. Thanks!
It's good news that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia has now ended its schism with the Moscow Patriarchate. But get a load of the 2003 quote by ex-KGB man Putin, which set into motion the reunion:
The atmosphere was tense, laced with nearly a century of mistrust and bitter feelings, when President Vladimir V. Putin met in New York in 2003 with leaders of an émigré church that had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church after the Bolshevik Revolution. The breakaway church had vowed never to return as long as the “godless regime” was in power.
“I want to assure all of you,” Mr. Putin said at the meeting, “that this godless regime is no longer there.” Then, recalled the Rev. Serafim Gan, a senior priest of the breakaway church, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, he added, “You are sitting with a believing president.”
Who could have imagined the day that a former KGB man would proclaim himself a believing Christian? Then again, is he doing it only as a means of controlling the populace? Hmm.
More, from today's ceremonies in Moscow:
President Vladimir Putin joined the celebration, broadcast live on television. [Russian Orthodox Patriarch] Alexy thanked him for helping end the split by meeting with leaders of the church abroad.
''They saw in you a man devoted to Russia, and it was very important to them after decades of repression,'' Alexy said. The patriarch presented Putin with a set of icons.
In remarks reflecting centuries of pre-Soviet tradition of a close relationship between the dominant Orthodox church and Russia's rulers, Putin told the congregation that the agreement was ''a nationwide event of an historic scale and of vast moral importance.''
''The church division resulted from a deep political split of the Russian society,'' and ending the rift was a step toward healing society's divisions, he said.
Worshippers and white-robed clergy packed the Christ the Savior Cathedral, symbolic of Russia's rejection of its Communist past, when atheism was state doctrine and many believers were arrested and imprisoned.
''We came to celebrate the holiday, and because our church is finally reunited,'' said Zinaida Yushinskaya, 70, a retired geologist who said she was reprimanded for wearing a cross in the Soviet era and would have been fired for worshipping openly. She called the pact part of a revival of ''the millennium-old tradition'' of Russian Orthodoxy. ''It's in our genes,'' she said.
Hmm. Again, this is a good thing, not only for the healing of the Church but also of Russia. Whatever is in Putin's heart, he's allowing this to happen, and that can't be taken away from him. Although the whiff of Caesaropapism stings my Western nostrils. It struck me as telling that Alexy praised Putin's essential quality, the thing that won over the ROCOR holdouts, as devotion to Russia, not to Christ.
I've been interested in and somewhat excited by Ron Paul not because I could vote for him -- he's a libertarian, and I'm a conservative -- and not because I agree with his stringently non-interventionist foreign policy (the guy thinks NATO was a bad idea). I'm glad Paul is around because he's the only candidate in the Republican field who challenges the Iraq War and the premises of Bush's foreign policy. As I said yesterday, quoting Prof. Bacevich, it's important for the country to take more seriously the heavy price we pay for our military interventions. Paul may be wrong in some particulars, but at least he's put this on the table.
Then again, as Ross says, that someone with as implausible and politically irrelevant a foreign policy as Ron Paul is actually getting some positive attention now says less about the brilliance of Paul, and more about how woebegone the Republican Party is on foreign policy:
The vacuum that Paul currently occupies is supposed to be filled by an internationally-minded realism. Indeed, it's precisely the coexistence of realism and idealism in Republican foreign policy, the fruitful tension between the two strains of thought, that has long made the GOP the party to be trusted in international relations - because the idealists elevate the realists, and the realists keep the idealists grounded. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction or another, this tension has usually produced a correction, of the kind that, say, the original neocons and then Reagan provided to the cynical machtpolitik of Kissinger. But there's no sign of a realist corrective in the current GOP field: There were ten candidates on that stage besides Ron Paul yesterday night, and not one of them was willing to call the Iraq War a mistake, which seems to me like the place that a serious realist critique of his Presidency's foreign policy needs to begin.
Then again x 2, Daniel Larison points out that there's no sign that the GOP base is fundamentally opposed to the Iraq War, as distinct from its poor execution. When I tend to be around Republicans these days, and the war comes up, I see a lot of anger over the situation, but it usually gets expressed as frustration that the US military is not really fighting hard enough to win. The sense is that if only we took the gloves off and got more ruthless, then we'd bring Iraq to heel, and all would be well. I get no sense that there's any awareness of how this exactly the wrong way to run a successful counterinsurgency, or that there's a caustic irony in their wanting the US to essentially run Iraq like Saddam Hussein did. They want to win at all costs, period. The mildest form of this is proposing to continue the occupation in Iraq for another year, two years, etc. Mostly, though, I'm hearing exponents of the "winning is everything, it's losing that's immoral" school.
Iraq has slipped beyond our ability to control in any sense that the American people would stand for, or should stand for -- and perhaps even beyond that. When we cut our losses and withdraw, there will be a powerful impulse on the right to blame "defeatists," Democrats and the media for the loss -- as if the only thing separating the US from victory were sheer willpower. (Was it Romney or Brownback the other night who said that what America needed to do to win was to "come together"? Sheesh.) If this conclusion finds traction on the Right, 15, 20 years from the point of departure in Iraq, we'll have forgotten entirely its lessons about the unwisdom of starting these kinds of wars, and we'll be at it again. Watch.
Reader Rob, a high school teacher, sent in this link to a four-minute Eisenhower campaign commercial from 1956. It's really something to watch it today, with its constant appeals to peace, and to grasp that a Republican president was appealing to the public to vote for him as a more certain guarantor of keeping America out of war. One reason the old general could do this was that an enormous number of American men (and, by extension, their families) had lived through the horrors of World War II and Korea, and knew how precious peace was. I wonder how different our politics would be if a draft had caused a large number of Americans to have to serve in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, instead of our volunteer army.
Just to be clear, I do not believe that America "deserved" 9/11, nor do I believe that our presence in the Mideast is the only, or even the most important, reason the Islamists attacked us. And my support for Israel is non-negotiable. I do support Israel in part because of religious reasons (no, I'm not an Evangelical rapture believer), but mostly because they are a Western democracy besieged by cutthroats and suicide bombers. If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, I don't think it would be us a moment's reprieve from the Islamists. They would still exist in a miserable state of affairs, wherever they were, but they'd simply be deprived of one more bad excuse for their own misery -- and therefore they'd redouble their hatred of the West.
That said, why Paul's remarks were so important was that they challenged the shibboleth that the United States is a benign hegemon (culturally and militarily), and that we are eternal innocents tramping about the world only seeking to do good for ingrates. Read Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest." The conservative British philosopher talks about how traumatic globalization (which means the universal export of Western culture) has been for traditional peoples, including the Muslims. Scruton doesn't defend Arab Islamic practices and beliefs, but he tries to get his readers to understand that we simply can't expect there not to be blowback from cultures whose mores and structures are upended by the advance of Western market culture. Within living memory, Saudi Arabia has gone from being a giant patch of sand whose people lived in tents, into being a fantastically rich country. Ideas have consequences. Sayyid Qutb was a totalitarian lunatic, but he was no fool: he correctly saw the threat of the West to traditional Islam, and he came up with his own idea for resistance: jihad.
Again, none of this justifies 9/11. But if we insist on seeing ourselves as unsullied and misunderstood innocents, and on seeing our enemies as merely jihad-crazed nutters who attack us without the remotest cause, we're going to misread reality and wind up in situations from which we cannot easily extricate ourselves.
I went to bed last night thinking about the Paul-Giuliani exchange at the debate last night. I viscerally reacted against Paul for bringing up the possibility that America could bear some responsibility for 9/11, because of our prior military involvement in the Middle East, even though I grudgingly admired him for having the nerve to do that, and to stand his ground when Rudy Giuliani (R-9/11) rared up on him. This morning, I opened up Prof. Bacevich's "The New American Militarism" to re-read it for a project, and came across this passage:
The point here is not to argue that in their time La Follette and Taft got things exactly right. They did not -- although events proved them to be more prescient than either Wilson or FDR, each of whom prophesied that out of war would come lasting peace. Rather, the point is that in those days, there existed within the national political arena a lively awareness that war is inherently poisonous, giving rise to all sorts of problematic consequences, and that military power is something that democracies ought to treat gingerly. Today, in sharp contrast, such sensitivities have been all but snuffed out. When it comes to military matters, the national political stage does not accomodate contrarian voices, even from those ostensibly most critical of actually existing policy.
Prof. Bacevich's book is an analysis of how the way contemporary Americans think about the military, its uses and America's place in the world leads us into dangerous folly divorced from America's principles and America's real interests. In the introduction to the book, which came out last year, the conservative scholar (and retired officer) says it would be too easy to blame Bush and his coterie for the Iraq folly; in truth, he argues, that fault belongs to the American people, because the Iraq policy was the natural consequence of our own bad ideas about the military and its role in fulfilling our romantic ideas of American greatness.
I'm thinking that as obnoxious as Ron Paul's remarks came across last night in the moment, he said something important and necessary to think about. If we're ever going to avoid getting into quagmires like Iraq again, we've got to be able to talk about the kind of thing that Ron Paul had the bad taste to bring up last night. It feels good (felt good to me, anyway) to watch Giuliani's eyes blaze and smoke come out his nostrils in rebuking Paul, but really, indignation is not the same thing as refutation. And insofar as indignation is allowed to kill the discussion of US foreign policy and its relationship to anti-American Muslim extremism, it does not serve the national interest. Ron Paul's argument deserves to be answered, not shouted down as beyond the pale of discussion. "How dare you!" is not an argument, but an argument-ender.
I want to pull that bottle of Tito's out of my freezer and climb into it. This is really depressing, though not unrelievedly so.
I think Tommy Thompson is coming off the worst. He's coming across like an animatronic figure in the Beer Hall of Presidents at Duff Gardens. His hands and shoulders have not moved all night. His answer to Wendell Goler's question about which one program he would cut to reduce government spending was like some sub-Simpsons parody.
These guys -- Ron Paul excepted -- are on another planet with regard to the war. I thought Brownback was the looniest, saying that all we need to do to win is to pull together. Seriously, it's bizarre how all these pro-war Republicans have nothing to offer except gutting it out, and saying, one way or another, "We can't lose." That's no answer.
I find it remarkable that these Republicans can stand there with a straight face and talk about spending cuts. Romney promised to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. At least McCain and Paul admitted how ridiculous the GOP candidates look mouthing the usual Republican platitudes about spending reduction. They have absolutely no credibility there. Well, Paul does, and you can't blame Huckabee because he has no Washington experience. But I find it impossible to believe this line again from most Republicans. The GOP had a chance to show what it stood for when it had both houses of Congress and the presidency. Now we know.
Ron Paul is one of the few candidates who says interesting things. Probably because he has nothing to lose. So does Tancredo.
"I, according to George Will, ran the most conservative government in 50 years in New York City," said Rudy Giuliani, the best ballerina in Galveston.
Oh wait, Thompson just moved his hands slightly!
Does anybody really believe Rudy Giuliani really "hates" abortion? Huckabee is right: This really is like saying that you hate slavery, but think people should have the right to choose it. I'm starting to like that Huckabee. He seems like the most normal person of the lot. He had a fantastic response to the abortion question. He had the best line of the night so far, saying that the GOP Congress spent money "like John Edwards in a hair salon."
UPDATE: Duncan Hunter was terrific on the question of border security. He wants to build a fence. He understands that all the complicated programs Washington is proposing won't mean diddly if we can't secure the border. Me, I'd be willing to give amnesty to every illegal here now in exchange for a fence.
Ron Paul is going very close to blaming America for 9/11. Bad form. Just bad. Rudy Giuliani had real fire in his eyes responding to that, and got off a good shot at Paul. But Paul, to his credit, wasn't intimidated by Mr. 9/11. I think Paul is being principled and courageous to say that sort of thing at all, especially in this forum. But he's wrong. It's a complicated question, because what Paul's saying has some -- some -- truth to it, however unpleasant it is to hear. Gotta say my heart is with Giuliani on this, and most of my head too (because I believe that if we had nothing to do with the Mideast, they'd still attack us); but I do appreciate that Paul is willing to buck the conventional "they hate us because we're free" Bushian wisdom on this issue, and to stick by his guns when Giuliani chose to strike. So, a win for Rudy and a win for Paul.
Tancredo, on global warming, says that for every scientist who says that global warming is humanity's fault, he can find one that says it's not. I don't think that's true at all.
UPDATE.3: McCain on torture, even in a case of imminent terrorist attack: "It's not about the terrorists. It's about us. It's about the kind of people we are." Good for him. He speaks with real conviction here, as we know -- but judging from the audience reaction to the others,
McCain's view is unpopular. Giuliani endorses torture ("any method they can think of"), and bizarrely suggests that if we had been able to torture people, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. Mitt: "Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. We ought to double Guantanamo." And Mitt says that "enhanced interrogation techniques, not torture" should be used. He apparently wants to deploy sophisticated euphemisms. Interestingly, the Catholic convert Sam Brownback says he'll do anything necessary to save US lives, even if it involves torture, and he'll apologize for it later (presumably he'd have to mention it to his confessor).
Would even Mrs. Gilmore vote for Jim Gilmore for president?
Jonah Goldberg has a great, and painfully accurate line about what Mitt Romney seems to be saying when you hit the mute button: "What Do I Have to Do To Put You In This BMW Today?"
I watched the debate tonight mostly because my pal JPod told me that Huckabee was great in the last one. Well, Huckabee was quite good in this one too, and I'm finally interested in a candidate. And I watched it partly to see what Ron Paul would say. He is a pepperpot, that one, and it's great to have a candidate who says what's on his mind, not some pre-programmed response. But whatever intellectual case can be made for his blowback comment, it offends me that the main thing he had to say about 9/11 was that it was mostly our fault.
UPDATE.4: OK, I've thought about it for all of a half hour. Giuliani won, if by winning, one means advanced his prospects for the nomination. Why can't that nice, smart, thoroughly likeable Huckabee man get any traction?
Well, I don't know if he's a conservative, but Paul Atkinson's certainly crunchy and Catholic. Here's the story of Laughing Stock Farm in Eugene, Oregon. Excerpt:
Paul does this because he sees farming as an act of stewardship of God's creation. The farm's not his, he says, it's God's. Paul believes "that to eat from local farms is the most universal introduction and connection to 'home' and to 'place.'" As an intentional disciple of Jesus, he's doing his best to change food production in his county. He has worked with other farmers to improve the sustainability of pasture and livestock management through the development of a grazing network in Lane County, OR. He's taken his findings regarding land use to the state legislature. He's helped school children understand better where food comes from, and led a Lenten study project at St. Thomas More parish in Eugene which allowed members of the community to understand the hidden costs in the cheap food we so often find in our mega-super-dooper-markets.
George Kennan had an outstanding remark about “that curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans for radical change everywhere else.” This is often on display in mainstream conservative rhetoric vis-a-vis Islam or any non-Western society: traditional and customary structures at home are good, admirable and have stood the test of the time, testifying to their importance and meaning, while traditional structures elsewhere must be torn down and those living in those structures must be dragged, kicking and screaming, into enlightened modernity. The cultural radicalism we conservatives presumably deplore at home becomes a gift of liberation for the peoples of the world. There must be some sort of happy middle ground between this combination of domestic social conservatism and radical emancipationism abroad and a D’Souza-like call for American conservatives to discover their abiding common ground with traditional Muslims.
Well, there goes half the conservative Evangelical sources in the average American journalist's Rolodex. When Pat Robertson goes to be with the Lord, what on earth will the news media do?
OK, sorry, that's not the way to get into a discussion of the Rev. Falwell's legacy. As my liberal Evangelical colleague Bill McKenzie said on the Dallas Morning News blog, love him or hate him, Falwell was the most politically consequential American religious figure since the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I think that's a fair and accurate assessment.
Falwell helped energize conservative Evangelicals around political issues, and organized them into a potent force. His movement was the vanguard of the Reagan Revolution, and he (as well as Pat Robertson and others) forcibly won a place at the American political table for Evangelicals. These two were the great boogeymen of American politics (I once heard a ranking editor at a news meeting complain angrily about why "we always hear about what radical Muslims are doing, but we never focus on what Falwell and Robertson are doing" to threaten America). In truth, I didn't agree with a lot of their style, and some of their substance. But nobody can deny the significance of Falwell to US politics. Christian conservatives like me may not have liked Falwell's style much of the time, or some of the causes he championed. I once wrote something extremely uncharitable about him after he blamed 9/11 on gays, feminists and so forth; it was so nasty that I regretted it afterward, and I wish I had thought to send him a note of apology; but he ought not to have said what he said. For all that, there's no denying how important his work was to the cause of the unborn, and other issues that matter to folks like me.
The truth is, though, Falwell was really yesterday's news. His passing today is not only the passing of a man, but the passing of an era. The next generation of engaged Evangelical pastors aren't like him and his generation. I'm generalizing, of course, but they are conservative, but not so partisan, and not as eager to cast their lot with the GOP. And they care about bringing their Christian faith to bear on a wider range of issues than that which galvanized the Falwell generation. This makes crunchy-con me quite happy, but the truth is that no matter how politically engaged Christian conservatives regard Falwell's legacy, we all owe him a debt. I'm pleased that Falwellism existed in its day, and I'm pleased that it is fading from the scene. And I pray that Jerry Falwell rests in peace.
Via Reihan, this essay by libertarian Edward Glaeser. Key passage:
I start with the view that individual freedom is the ultimate goal for any government. The ultimate job of the state is to increase the range of options available to its citizens. To me, this is not a maxim, but an axiom that is justified by both philosophy and history. On a basic level, I believe that human beings are the best judges of what is best for themselves. I also believe that the right to make our own decisions is an intrinsically good thing. I also believe that people become better decision-makers through the course of regularly making their own decisions.
That's as concise a definition of the libertarian ethos as I've seen. One can certainly see why it's attractive. But it is not traditionally conservative. A traditional conservative sees the state not as the mechanism by which choice is expanded -- an essentially consumerist vision of statecraft and society -- but as the means by which the common good is defended by maintaining the rule of law and a strong defense against outside enemies. Libertarianism sees "the common good" as the aggregate of all the freely made choices of the people in a polity; it's focus is not on what's chosen, but on the fact of choosing. Traditional conservatism sees the common good as defined by an objective standard of virtue; it's focus is on what is chosen, not the fact of choosing.
A tradcon could not affirm that human beings are the best judges of what is best for themselves, because he is aware of the distorting effect of the Fall (which is to say, mankind's intrinsic imperfection). This is not to say that tradcons favor an authoritarian state. Ideally, the people will make proper use of their liberty to make virtuous choices. It is generally the case that in a pluralistic secular society like our own, the only way tradcons can carve out a space for themselves and their communities is through a libertarian order. For example, the public school system is inimical to the kinds of values tradcons believe are necessary for the proper and sustainable function of the schools. There is no way to reform them around tradcon lines. The best option available to tradcons, then, is to favor the libertarian policy of school choice, including the right to homeschool.
But making tactical alliances with libertarians -- fusionism, basically -- is not the same thing as endorsing libertarianism. In his new book "Consumed," the political scientist Benjamin Barber observes that a society organized around the values of consumer capitalism can become materially rich but spiritually and morally poor. This is the standard religious critique of consumer capitalism, and it does not follow that poverty and want make one virtuous. Where I think Barber makes a real contribution to the current discussion is his argument that the materialism of late capitalism undermines the virtues necessary to make capitalism sustainable. That is, capitalism (which he favors, as do we all, yes?) is an unparalled success at improving the material conditions of society, but it did so only within the framework of the virtues, in particular the ascetic conviction that gratification of desire should be delayed for a higher end. But today, people are acculturated toward the consumerist ideal that if you want it, you should have it right this very instant. The people -- the freely choosing people -- tend, then, to lose an appreciation for the difference between what they want, and what they need. Hence a nation and a booming economy built on massive indebtedness. Hence a society in which the idea of objective truth is losing its coherence, as "truth" becomes a matter of what you choose to believe -- a "fact" or a standard that "works" for you, not
an objective principle around which one organizes individual and common life.
I stand with Pope Benedict, who criticized both Marxism and consumer capitalism as distortions of human nature that can lead individuals and societies astray from their proper ends. The problem facing tradcons in this society is that absent a commonly shared religious sense to both instruct and bind us, there can be no agreement on "proper ends," and thus a libertarian social order may be the only real alternative to preventing the hostile state from transgressing what tradcons see as its boundaries. On the other hand, a libertarian social order tends to leave us unprotected against the depredations of big business, as under our legal order, businesses are seen as akin to persons.
Not sure where all this ends up, though as you know, MacIntyre believes that it will all fall apart because there is no center to hold it together. I do wish, modestly, that conservative Christians would wake up and realize how consumer capitalism and its values undermine what we profess to believe in. You cannot be a conservative, especially a Christian conservative, and view the free market uncritically.
Lee Penn e-mails this morning with sad news: the son of the military theorist Andrew J. Bacevich has been killed on duty by an IED in Iraq. Dr. Bacevich is a Boston University professor, a retired officer and a conservative who has forcefully argued against the Iraq War. This from an American Conservative essay by Dr. Bacevich last October:
Step by bloody step the Iraq War moves toward its denouement. Having set this tragedy in motion, the United States today finds itself consigned to the role of bystander, the world’s only superpower having long since lost control of events. As things unravel, the president—the most powerful man in the world—is demonstrably powerless to affect the outcome. Meanwhile, American soldiers fight on, even as it becomes increasingly apparent that the Army only recently thought all but invincible will not win this war. [snip] As the evening of his presidency approaches, George W. Bush alone persists, armored in ignorance and resolve but adamant that from perseverance will come victory. Were it not for the wreckage that he has strewn in his wake, one might almost feel a twinge of sympathy for the man.
And now that wreckage includes the life of Dr. Bacevich's son. But we lurch on, "surging" toward this September, though everybody perfectly well knows where we are going to be then: in more or less the same place we were last September, when Dr. Bacevich penned those brutally realistic words. Except the world will have changed for his son and all the other US soldiers killed since then. God knows how many more American soldiers will die for this futile effort before the Republican Party gets its just reward for this folly, the last stumbling block is removed and the US is able to get out of Iraq. George W. Bush will be remembered as the failed president that led his nation to a humiliating defeat in an unnecessary war that nearly broke the most powerful military in the world, and destroyed the GOP's prospects for years and years (in this he had plenty of Congressional help, it must be said). But I suspect they will remember him somewhat differently in the Bacevich household. God be with those poor people, and the families of all our military dead.
VIENNA, May 14 — Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on a far larger scale than before, according to the agency’s top officials.
2. Pakistan, land of Taliban-loving Islamist nutters, is paralyzed by an anti-government strike. Whither Perv?
Oh hell. Wouldn't now be a good time for a slice of rhubarb pie?
George Weigel writes about Pope Benedict's new book. Excerpt from the Weigel:
These are themes that Joseph Ratzinger has been developing for almost half a century. In that sense, Jesus of Nazareth (and its promised successor volume) is a great summing-up of a lifetime of learning, refined into insight and understanding by a lifetime of praying the New Testament as well as studying it. If, amidst some familiar Ratzingerian themes, there is a new chord struck with particular force, it is Benedict XVI’s insistence, repeated several times, that a Christian Church faithful to its Lord cannot be a Church of power. Benedict does not quite describe Christianity’s alliance with state power as a Babylonian captivity. Still, he comes very close when he writes that “the temptation to use power to secure the faith has arisen again and again in various forms throughout the centuries, and again and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle for the freedom of the Church, the struggle to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure, is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power and must bend to its criteria.”
How do we discern the difference between religious believers legitimately bringing their witness and values to the public square, and them doing so in the inauthentic way warned against by the pope? Ideas?
Interesting e-mail responses to my Sunday column about Muslim moderates, like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and their courageous struggle against Islamists. This struggle is documented in the PBS-commissioned film "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center," which PBS has inexplicably declined to broadcast. This first one comes from a Muslim American former military officer:
Thank you for your opinion piece in the Sunday Dallas Morning News. What Dr. Jasser faces is not at all uncommon. For a long time, I was shunned by many in my community in [deleted] for having ideas outside the mainstream. Those ideas were completely harmless and included support for electing Republicans to office and support for the first Gulf War. My parents and sister, who still live in [deleted], have had to endure snide remarks and insults because of what I have said publicly . Groups like CAIR and MAS tend to do the heavy lifting for the Islamists in the US and this does truly pervade the mosque/school systems in many cities leaving many moderates no where to go.
Your help in our struggle is appreciated.
This one comes from a non-Muslim in Arizona:
Great and important article Rod. I happen to be a patient of Dr. Jasser's. He is a hard working, compassionate, up-to-date professional physician. He is very open to people of all faiths or no faith. I also happen to have lived and worked in Islamic cultures as a language teacher, in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. I speak Persian and some Arabic. I can do the call to prayer better than lots of Muslim religious leaders. I know many Middle Eastern cultures at their best and worst. I worked 17 years in the Middle East, in 2 to 4 year blocks, between 1965 and October 2001. I have many Muslim friends here in the U.S., especially in the Phoenix area.
Let me assure you that the problem of Islamists taking over Muslim American communities, and thinking, is far worse than the American media and government bureaucrats can imagine. Their critical analysis is impaired by the fear of being tagged as "Islamophobic" for commenting on the obvious. Europe, America and open, related states are in grave danger of destruction from within by Islamists who knowingly, or out of ignorance, pave the way for terrorist acts, by individuals or groups, which will grow in frquency and in spectcular devastation.
If you haven't seen this essay from yesterday's NYTimes, stop whatever you're doing and read it now. A woman and her husband travel to China to adopt a baby. Before they even leave China with Baby Natalie, a doctor discovers that something appears to be seriously wrong with her, physically. She's not only not perfect, but she could have major medical problems that will be with her all her life. So sorry, says the orphanage, perhaps you'd like to trade her in for another baby...
What do you do if you are that mother? You'll be amazed by what Elizabeth Fitzsimons did. And not only amazed. Just read it.
Professor Bainbridge offers his ideas about qualities he'd like to see in the next president that have nothing whatsoever to do with the job. Here's my short list:
+ doesn't give a rip about staying physically fit, or sports + prefers Stones to Beatles, wine to beer + invites Diana Krall and Elvis Costello to every White House party, and leaves the couple a standing invitation to the Lincoln Bedroom + likes the French + hangs out with historians + invites accomplished high-culture artists to the White House, like the Kennedys did + holds regular poker night with Christopher Hitchens, Lucianne Goldberg and Father Wilson. + is married to a spouse who doesn't feel the need to take up some dull, eat-your-spinach charity work (literacy awareness, ugh), but rather takes up some slightly daring, somewhate eccentric cause. Running the Dr. John Fan Club, or something.
After all the money and the foofarah, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric remains in the ratings toilet. Why does this surprise anybody? The audience for the evening news is a serious one -- meaning that if you're going to make the investment of time to watch a national evening newscast, you're not likely to appreciate it being powder-puffed up by America's Sweetheart Emeritus.
I don't think it's a woman thing. I think it's a Katie Couric thing. She's perfectly pleasant in the morning, but she lacks the kind of gravitas you want in the evening. Diane Sawyer would have been a totally different deal in that slot, I'm thinking. Actually, I got into the CBS Evening News when Bob Schieffer was the pre-Couric anchor. I almost never watched it with Rather, but I really liked Schieffer. Then he left, and Couric lost me. I shuttle between ABC and NBC, though I almost always start with Charlie Gibson.
There are probably about three people who read this blog who give a rat's patoot about the network evening news.
From my Dallas Morning News column today, criticizing PBS for suppressing its excellent documentary "Islam vs. Islamists," which features anti-Islamist Muslim Americans speaking out:
"They've basically turned our mosques into a political party of their own," says Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician. "We have nowhere to go to have this debate."
He's talking about the discussion regarding their religion and its role in a pluralistic society, especially in this time of war. Dr. Jasser warns that many Muslim denunciations of terrorism are deceptive.
"Terrorism is simply a means," he says. "The Muslim community has not had a debate about whether or not they endorse the ends of the Islamists" – namely, an America that is thoroughly Islamicized and organized around sharia law.
In the film, Dr. Jasser expresses confidence that most American Muslims are not violent but advises that most accept the Islamist view of world politics – conspiratorial, self-pitying and quick to blame America for all the Muslim world's problems. We also see in the movie a leading Arizona imam denouncing the reasonable and patriotic Dr. Jasser as an "extremist liberal."
Which raises a troubling question the film does not answer: How representative of the Muslim mainstream are these Muslim moderates? The truth, as one counterterrorism investigator told me, is that the Jassers and Fatahs are probably in the minority – "but their voices need to be heard."
Note especially Dr. Jasser's distinction between terrorism as an end, and as a means to an end. He's saying that we need to be asking of Muslims not only "do you support terrorism?" but "do you think America should be governed by Islamic law?" I am not all that comforted to learn that this or that Muslim is against terrorism, if he or she nevertheless wishes to see our Constitutional order overturned and replaced by Islamic law. Again, go back and read the transcript of the Dallas Morning News editorial board's meeting with some local Muslim leaders. Pay special attention to how difficult it is for me to get a straight answer from these folks about the question of sharia in America.
I finally saw last evening "The Lives of Others," the Best Foreign Film winner at this year's Oscar awards. Here's Anthony Lane's rave review in The New Yorker. Go there for details of this incredible, unforgettable film; I don't want to give away too much of the plot here (be advised that Lane discusses it in great detail). In brief, it's set in East Germany in 1984, and tells the story of Wiesler, a committed Stasi officer, who bugs the apartment of Dreyman, a playwright, in an effort to establish him as a subversive. Dreyman is the country's leading playwright, politically well-connected and loyal to the state though apparently also a man with real talent (i.e., not a communist hack). He and Wiesler are both in some sense true believers in Marxism. But they both undergo a radical reappraisal of the state and their own souls over the course of the film. Wiesler sits in a vacant attic above Dreyman's apartment listening constantly to the conversations going on there. Both men, through events beyond their control, come to appreciate the dehumanization of life under communism, and to appreciate the cost to their souls of cooperating with the state.
What made "The Lives of Others" so astonishing was the complicated humanity of nearly all the characters. You could easily see how basically decent people could be compelled to collaborate by the secret police, who were experts at taking advantage of ordinary human weakness, and even ordinary human virtue, to compromise people. In an early scene, Wiesler demonstrates to a class of secret policemen in training how to break a suspect through interrogation. When he turns the man into putty -- through psychological manipulation, not physical torture, note well -- he then hits him squarely in the gut by telling him that if he (the man) doesn't give up the information the state wants, he'll have his kids taken away and put into a state orphanage. The man crumbles, and sells out his neighbor, just like that.
Over the course of the film, we see how difficult it would have been to have kept a clean conscience and a sense of integrity in a society in which the state manipulates the love one has for one's children such that one is turned into a moral monster. (One character who accidentally sees the Stasi men leaving an apartment they've just bugged is warned that if she breathes a word of it to anybody, her daughter will lose her place at college). This morning, I wondered how on earth I would have lived under communism without selling my soul in some way. Wiesler's Stasi boss has a phone conversation with a priest who is a Stasi informant, and threatens him. And I thought: what if I were a Catholic living under communism? Would I dare to go to confession? How can you *not* go to confession, though? Catholic and Orthodox believers under communism lived with this every day. I like to think that I would have been brave and noble and uncompromising, but if the state had threatened my children, it probably could have gotten me to have done anything. More mundanely, we see in the film one artist whose sense of self is bound up in the artist's work. To have the possibility of not being permitted to create any longer -- well, if the state told me I would never be able to write again unless I collaborated, would I have had the strength to have resisted?
I think so. I like to think so. But I don't know so, and I don't think any of us who have never been tested in that way can say for sure what we'd do. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
I drifted off to sleep last night thinking about this extraordinary film, and about how here we are almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 15 years after the end of the Soviet Union, and we in the West have almost entirely ignored the communist legacy in our film and literature. I do not believe this is an accident. But I know it is a
black mark against us. In a way, our own artists are collaborators, even though their collaboration costs them nothing, and gains them nothing. Anthony Lane did a Talk of the Town piece on the 1960s actress Julie Christie the other week. It ends like this:
Told that she should see “The Lives of Others,” the award-winning movie about East Germany, Christie paused, then replied, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.” And with that she laughed, unlocked her bike, and pedalled off into the sunshine.
Laughed, and pedalled off into the sunshine. Despicable woman. But, I'm thinking, probably representative.
UPDATE: Rawlins sez I'm missing Christie's subtle joke here. Christie was a star of "Doctor Zhivago," which suggested that Communists are awful people. Maybe he's right. I had forgotten that she was in that film.
UPDATE.2: Here's John Podhoretz's Weekly Standard take on the film. Of particular interest is this passage, after JPod took note of the startling fact that the Berlin Film Festival refused to put "The Lives of Others" on its 2006 program:
We can only speculate about the answer. Donnersmarck believes it's because Germany has never really dealt with its Communist past--there was little effort made to bring East Germany's murderers and monsters to justice--and that, by making The Lives of Others, he had upset a cultural consensus to let the past lie.
I think there may be another reason for the reluctance of the makers of pop culture worldwide to reckon with communism, and that is shame. The ideological struggle against leftist totalitarianism was something that did not arouse the interest or enthusiasm of cultural elites in the West during the Cold War. Far from it; from the 1960s onward, the default position of the doyens of popular culture was a presumption in favor of the Communist struggle, as personified by Mao, the Viet Cong, Castro, the Sandinistas, El Salvador's guerrillas, and the so-called African liberation movements.
This was not a reasoned, or thought-through, view. It was little more than fashion. And rarely, if ever, has history rendered a more devastating verdict on the wrongheadedness of fashionable Western groupthink than it did when the walls and statues came down, and Lenin was removed from his unholy pedestal.
They got it wrong. And though they may not know it, they are ashamed of it and do not wish to be reminded of it. Perhaps that's why it took a 33-year-old to make this masterpiece--a 33-year-old who was too young during the Cold War to have joined any camp in any meaningful way. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck found a great story to tell with a great setting and he told it with peerless skill while bearing none of the scars of past ideological battles.
Maybe he will be followed by other young filmmakers and writers who can bring fresh eyes and a new perspective to the great struggle of the second half of the 20th century.
If you live in the Cookstown, NJ, area, please go buy a pizza from this poor man, who appears to have done nothing wrong, but is on the verge of losing everything.
Asked on Thursday how he was coping, an anguished Mr. Tatar rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his silver hair before saying: “You have kids? You put yourself in my shoes.”
You might recognize Dale Price's name from the comboxes, and/or his own blog. He, his wife Heather, and their unborn child need your prayers right now.
Apologies today for no blogging. I had a very busy day at work, and this is the first chance I've had to get to the blog. One of our regular readers, a small businesswoman, wrote me privately about Orson Scott Card's proposal for how to revive Mom and Pop grocery stores. With her permission, I'm posting it here, but I've changed the name of the product she sells, just for the sake of privacy. Here's her e-mail:
Mr. Card needs to go own a small business for ten years and then get back to us with his newly educated reality. There's a huge problem with his "computer model" of a grocery store idea: Massive overhead in the form of employees.
Case-in-point from a real life experience that happened to me today - a carryover from last Saturday at my shop:
I had a middle-aged couple come in looking for a wedding gift for their daughter. A [sprocket], of course, is the perfect solution. I did not have what they wanted in stock, so, Helpful and Personable Small Business Owner that I Am, told them that I am also a dealer for [Spacely Sprockets], and that they are among the finest in the industry. I volunteered the [Spacely] product catalog to them, and stood with them as they asked me a million questions about quality, price, size, etc. In other words, I gave them a complete education on the correct purchase to make.
That was last Saturday. Today at the shop, Mr. A called me and said that he found the exact [Spacely Sprocket] they're interested in, on the internet for a lot less than the price I quoted him. Ballsy - oops, I mean - Mr A, said he preferred to do business locally, had shopped at one of our competitors and on the internet, and decided he wanted to do business with me. Would I match the price he found on the internet?
Here's how I handled it, and then I'll tell you what I should have said:
I asked Ballsy where he found the price and I went to the website to double-check. I also called the website's 800 number to inquire about their warranty service. Their employee told me that all clock warranties are handled by [Spacely] and must be sent back to [Spacely].
Not wanting to lose the sale, I called Ballsy and agreed to the "internet price" (which was more than 200 dollars less that what I quoted.) He gave me his credit card, and I ordered the clock.
So let's review what just happened:
Ballsy shopped my store on Saturday, took 45 minutes of my time to ask questions and educate himself, used my dealer catalog to write down item numbers, went to the internet to get the "best price", then came back to strong-arm me into meeting it. ALL ALONG GIVING ME THIS SACCHARINE SONG AND DANCE ABOUT HOW HE WANTED TO DO BUSINESS LOCALLY.
Sorry Bud, but all you're interested in is keeping the most dollars in YOUR pocket...
But hey, it's the free market and I'm free to say, "no"...Yes?
Let's review again:
It took 45 minutes of my time and a loss of over 200 hundred dollars to play his game.
But wait! There's more!
Here's what I should have said to him, on the phone today, in response to his "internet price-matching" game:
"You know, Mr. A, I spent 45 minutes with you on Saturday, educating you and directing you toward a good quality product - all the while absorbing the cost (overhead) just to offer you the privilege of walking into my adorable little shop...
...In addition, I offered free 5 year service on the [sprocket] and told you we would handle all warranties in-house as part of our personalized service...
So...Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly... You're asking me to meet the discounted price of an internet dealer WHO ANSWERED NONE OF YOUR QUESTIONS AND WON'T EVEN HANDLE A WARRANTY ISSUE FOR YOU?"
[Sorry for the shouting. I assure you my tone of voice would have remained calm.]
(Oh, by the way, I plan to tell Mr. A
that his warranty issues will be handled by [Spacely Sprockets], and not us. It's all part of the price he's "willing" to pay.) "You pay internet-level price, you get internet-level service", I will tell him when he picks the [sprocket] up. ................
Thus my problem with the 'little grocery on the corner.'
A small brick and mortar shop simply cannot handle the overhead (read: personnel and time) necessary to make "computer grocery shopping" viable. Shoot, the shipping costs per individual item alone are enough to kill that idea.
People simply won't pay the price for an idealized dream. Besides, what's stopping grocery stores from offering that option now? Again, it's unmanageable overhead in the form of employee costs of doing [that kind of] business. A small corner grocery simply cannot afford the labor to make something like Card's idea work. A computer wouldn't streamline anything in that business model. It actually increases overhead. Somebody's gotta handle the stuff when the orders come in. Somebody's gotta answer customer questions. "Somebody's" cost a lot of money to employ.
End of rant.
(Oh yes, I made a small profit on Mr. A.'s [sprocket] order, but there is no way I could do that indefinitely and keep my doors open.)
Thank God, 99% of my customers appreciate my local, personalized service and that the internet rarely interferes with my retail business. And, thank God, the internet NEVER interferes with my repair business - which represents the bulk of our monthly gross.
Dom Bettinelli calls our attention to an Orson Scott Card column arguing for designing cities to make it more possible to live without being so dependent on cars. The part of the essay that really caught Dom's interest was Card's imagining a way Mom and Pop shops can use technology to compete against big-box stores. Excerpt:
We already have all the pieces in place for a new retail model that will affect, not just grocery stores, but most retail outlets.
Computers make it possible.
At the moment, grocery stores are doing almost nothing with the data they collect using their frequent shopper cards. They know which stores we shop at and what we buy. But they still don't use that information to tailor their grocery stores to fit the neighborhood and the shoppers.
Idiotically, they still make decisions about what to stock based on the big numbers, as if they were still doing their figures on paper with quill pens. They could develop just-enough stocking practices that would allow small neighborhood stores to stock only what they actually sell to regular customers, plus a little more of the most popular items for walk-in trade.
They could make special-ordering quick and easy, using the internet, so that customers can get extra quantities for special occasions. The profitable corner grocery is easily within our reach.
In fact, we could have grocery stores every few blocks -- competing on quality of tailored service as well as price and selection. Those regular-customer cards could become memberships or subscriptions that bring the privilege of having the things you buy regularly always in stock for you.
Regular customers could easily be rewarded for letting the store know when they'll be out of town so they won't be making their regular purchases. They would come to think of it as their grocery store, with far higher loyalty.
Grocery stores are the foundation of neighborhood retail. Once they're in place, you have a neighborhood; until then, you don't. But the corner grocery model, with just-enough stock management, would quickly be adopted by other stores.
I didn't want this addendum to the long Homestead Heritage post below to get lost, so here it is in a second post. There's a Part 3 to the Waco newspaper's story, in which Homestead Heritage defends itself from the charges of cultishness. This was sent to me by a Catholic friend here in Dallas who says he's had lots of dealings with the HH folks in professional matters, and has always found their workmanship to be solid, and the workmen to be scrupulously honest. This, from the Waco story, is about what I expected:
Homestead Heritage is one such group and is especially easy to single out, Wheeler says, because its beliefs are fundamentally at odds with the prevailing mores of today’s Western society. Modern culture prizes individual rights beyond all else, so groups such as Homestead Heritage that set different priorities are suspect in the minds of many, he says.
All critics have to do is twist such groups’ views of authority into authoritarianism and many people are willing to condemn them, Wheeler says. Add in distortions about customs and claims of abuse and even the most wholesome religious group can be branded a cult, he says.
Watchman Fellowship has done that in a variety of ways, Homestead Heritage members say. It began with Arnn individually contacting people who left the group. Then came a so-called “recovery workshop” in April 2005, a forum for ex-members to discuss their experiences.
Those steps were critical, Homestead Heritage followers say, because they allowed Arnn to convince ex-members that Homestead Heritage is a cult. Once that frame was built around the group, Arnn could introduce the idea of spiritual abuse.
End result: Homestead Heritage became a scapegoat for ex-members. Many are trying to rid themselves of the discomfort of sin that forced them to leave the group, Wheeler says. Others don’t want to admit they freely made a decision to join a group they later ended up disagreeing with, he says.
By the way, at the Kirk conference I attended, I spoke with a noted scholar who has had lots of dealings with the Homestead Heritage folks. He was real high on them. He talked about how someone outside the group had reported the group to the county on suspicion of child abuse because the children weren't going to county schools. An angry judge, the story goes, hauled them all down to court, prepared to throw the book at them, but decided after talking to the children that these were the nicest, most polite and happiest kids he'd ever seen. The judge became a big fan of Homestead Heritage after that. So said the scholar.
I am exhorted by She Who Must Be Obeyed to post a link to this NYTimes story about a way to grow lettuce and other greens in your backyard without a garden. Excerpt:
If you love fresh greens, there is no reason not to grow them yourself, even if you have only a tiny terrace or handkerchief lawn.
When Jon Traunfeld, a regional specialist for the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension, showed me his homemade salad table, I wanted one, and I wanted to put it right outside my kitchen door. It has a whole different appeal — less work! proximity! — than my big vegetable garden.
Essentially, it is a garden on wheels that you can move around, into sun or shade, a big benefit when the sun gets too hot for spinach. It’s waist-high, so people with creaky knees or bad backs can just stand there and pick a few leaves for dinner. And it’s a cinch to water and weed (not like that jungle I call my kitchen garden.)
“It also means the groundhogs and the rabbits aren’t going to bother you,” Mr. Traunfeld said, standing by his leafy table, which sits on a terrace at the extension service’s Home and Garden Information Center in Ellicott City, Md. “Though, we have two deer trapped inside our fence. If they find this, we’re sunk.”
Today, Republicans are to warfare what Democrats traditionally have been to welfare. Both insist that we must be willing to “sacrifice” and “pay any price” for the sake of higher ideals, but in both cases the ones insisting on all the sacrifice and paying very rarely have to do either. Republicans have an attitude towards the lives of Americans that Democratic redistributionists have for the property of Americans: it is always worth it if someone else gives up his, provided that the goals of the policy are being pursued.
David Frum's post about the crop of GOP presidential hopefuls is getting a lot of deserved attention. He makes a brief case that the GOP field is objectively one of the best we've had in ages -- but that the lot are running lackluster campaigns. And then:
But as much as I blame the candidates, I have to blame the party too. Have Republicans absorbed how much trouble their party is in? To the (limited) extent that we do, we tend to to attribute everything to Iraq — as if Katrina, the Schiavo affair, corruption in Congress, and the intensifying irrelevance of our domestic-policy agenda did not exist. And so we demand from our candidates ever more fervent declarations of fealty to an ideology that interests an ever dwindling proportion of the public.
I wish somebody at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems — and we need very different answers. Here are mine."
But if one of the candidates had said that, would we have hearkened? Or would we say: The path to the nomination will be crossed by the candidate who does the best job of ticking the boxes of a coalition that probably now spans no more than 30 percent of the electorate?
Frum's onto something. We Republicans have gotten so politically correct about our issues that we've made it very difficult for our candidates to step outside the narrow constraints we've constructed for them. A few years ago, when I was reporting on the social and political conditions in Holland that paved the way for liberalism's conquest of that once-conservative country, historians and others told me that after the Second World War, the country tried to reconstitute itself according to its old pillarization system. But the people had lost faith in it, and just went through the motions. When the counterculture winds started to blow in the 1960s, the old order thoroughly collapsed from internal weakness. People had been going through the motions for so long, paying ritual obeisance to an outmoded political and social structure, that they simply walked away from it at the first real opportunity.
I wonder: is the GOP going through a similar collapse from internal ossification, and a concomitant insistence on unity above principle, and creative intellectual ferment? When I posted yesterday that a group of Republican Congressmen had gone to the White House to tell the president that they'd pretty much had it on Iraq, someone went to the comboxes and called these members RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). That's exactly the kind of thinking that's helped shipwreck the GOP, and made it difficult for the party and its leaders to adapt to changing circumstances. Burke said that a willingness to change is the means by which any society conserves the things that matter most to it. Any movement, and any party, that wants to maintain its relevance has to rethink its principles as they apply to changing times. That's not to say abandon its principles, but we've got to realize that a political party is not the custodian of revealed religion.
I don't agree that Iraq is only part of the GOP candidates' problems this year. Absent the war, the Republican field would have serious problems dealing with the legacy of the GOP Congress's spending, as well as exhaustion with eight years of Bush (though to be fair, it's impossible to know how the Bush administration would have turned out absent the war). But Iraq looms so very large that I don't see how any of the candidates can overcome it. The hardcore GOP primary voters have not gone south on the war, so any candidate that breaks from Bushian war orthodoxy in any serious way likely dooms his candidacy. But it's unthinkable that he could hope to go into the general election backing the war and hope to win. I'm su
re that I'm one of a vanishingly small minority of Republicans who simply can't (at this point) foresee voting for any of these candidates, because of their support of the war, and of Bush's foreign policy in general.
So when Frum says:
If we want to win, we have to offer the American voter something fresh and compelling. I think most of us understand that. And yet at the same time we are demanding that our candidates repeat formulas and phrases from two and three decades ago.
...I think he's exactly right. Yet unless these candidates are willing to cross Bush on the war, it's hard for me to think of anything "fresh and compelling" they might say that would appeal to me. I know I'm an atypical GOP primary voter, but I'm not an atypical American voter in this regard. If those GOP primary voters actually want to win in 2008, they've got to realize how out of touch they are with the broader electorate, and find a candidate who would be a reasonable compromise. Like Frum, I don't know if the GOP primary voters are capable of understanding the trouble the party is in, and opening up some room for the candidates we actually have to stake out some risky ground. I wouldn't vote for Giuliani for several reasons, but I applaud his willingness to quit being a mushmouth fake on abortion, and actually to stick up for what he really believes in -- abortion rights. I of course believe he's very wrong on this issue, but if he's willing to take a bold risk, it might just fire up the other guys to do the same on other issues. At this point, it's hard to see what they have to lose.
From Sarkozy's first speech as France's president-elect:
"I want to launch a call to all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance, of liberty, of democracy and of humanism, to all those who are persecuted by the tyrannies and by the dictators, to all the children and to all the martyrized women in the world to say to them that the pride, the duty of France will at their sides, that they can count on her. France will be at the sides of the Libyan nurses locked up for eight years; France will not abandon Ingrid Betancourt; France will not abandon the women who are condemned to the burqa; France will not abandon the women who do not have liberty. France will be by the side of the oppressed of the world. This is the message of France; this is the identity of France; this is the history of France."
I know, I know, it sounds wonderful. But so did Bush's second inagural address, in which he said it's the identity of America to stand for freedom for the oppressed of the world. This is beautiful, inspiring rhetoric, and you probably feel like a heel for opposing it. But if we really do believe that we have the obligation to run around the world vanquishing oppressors, we'll end badly. Q.E.D.
I've been making an informal list of communities I want to visit for researching my next book. One of them is just down the road from me here in Dallas: Homestead Heritage, a Protestant Christian community where about 900 members live on 500 acres and commit themselves to living a traditionalist "back to the land" lifestyle. Christian agrarianism, basically. I tried to go visit them and look around to profile them in "Crunchy Cons," but things didn't work out in time to meet my deadline. Take a look at their excellent website -- or just read this excerpt from a recent news story gives you an idea of what they're like:
Homestead Heritage also holds a celebration each Labor Day when sorghum is harvested and turned into syrup. It hosts school field trips each spring and offers year-round classes that teach such skills as woodworking and quilting. Six days a week, the group also operates a popular deli and bakery, offering everything from brisket sandwiches to homemade ice cream.
Homestead Heritage also interacts with the surrounding area through the businesses its members own, such as a trucking company and a plumbing business. A member-owned company even helped build the house on President Bush’s 1,600-acre ranch near Crawford.
Although those businesses are privately owned, members don’t consider them as being completely apart from the group, Wheeler says. Only 20 percent of adult members work directly for the church, either in agriculture or a business such as the deli. Nearly everyone else works in a member-owned business.
These employment arrangements are in sync with the group’s overall mission of living in community, Wheeler says. One driving force behind their lifestyle, followers say, is to provide and care for one another instead of having to rely on an “impersonal economy.”
That’s why Homestead Heritage adherents have learned to keep their own gardens and bake their own bread. It’s also why they help one another have babies at home or make attempts to care for those who are ill before going to the doctor, Wheeler says.
While Homestead Heritage’s beliefs don’t completely mirror those of any other religious following, it has adopted many customs and some doctrine from Anabaptists, members say. Living in community is the bedrock of those beliefs, along with living simply and in a way that allows people to encounter creation as God intended, says Homestead Heritage member Abraham Adams, one of the founder’s sons.
Pretty much a crunchy-con idyll, yes? Well, maybe not. My colleague Jeff Weiss at the Dallas Morning News religion blog points me to this story from the Waco Herald-Tribune, which tells of ex-members of the group complaining about abusive treatment and cultishness. This Part Two of the series -- and trust me, it's worth taking 30 seconds to register with the Waco paper to read this series -- details the complaints: that the leadership is overly rigid and controlling, that the "Anabaptist Disneyland" aspect of the community is designed to fool the public into thinking the group lives happy, harmonious traditionalist lives in cooperation with God, nature and each other, and that there is a Gnostic element in which the group's "real" theology is guarded by a group of leaders, who reveal it gradually over time. Said one person who left the group:
“There were so many red flags,” Engell says. “But it just looks so good, you want to ignore them. You want to think it’s your imagination, because this is your dream, this is what you have wanted all of your life.”
What
to make of all this? I know there will be readers who say, "Ah ha, see! This is what happens to anybody who wants to live in community. They go crazy." That might be the case with Homestead Heritage. I don't know, and I'm wary of passing judgment on them based only on these newspaper stories and the accounts of some ex-members. If you read the comments section of the Herald-Tribune's stories, you'll find some ex-members who say they voluntarily left the group, but have nothing but good feelings about it, and don't understand where the criticism from other exes is coming from.
Let me stipulate that I am concerned about all these accusations, especially the stuff about the group's leadership trying to control the minutiae of everyday life. It brought to mind something I was told a few years ago when Julie and I were thinking of leaving New York, and wanted to move to a town where we could find a vibrant conservative Catholic community. We picked out this one fairly well-known place, and started researching housing there. Then a friend who lives there, a devout conservative Catholic, warned us that there was an aspect of the town that we would find hard to take. It's the kind of place, we were told, where plenty of Catholic moms wouldn't let their children play with ours because Julie wears pants, which Good Catholic Women Are Not Supposed to Do. Things like that. According to our trusted friend, too many good Catholics there had taken a desire to do a good thing, and taken it way too far. In our friend's view, these people had adopted a siege mentality, and were sliding into operating out of fear -- terrified of the bad more than celebrating the good.
We changed our mind about moving there.
Anyway, reading the Heritage Homestead stories, I am reminded of Tom Wolfe's definition of "cult": a religion without political power. The word is heavily loaded. Wendell Berry has observed that anyone who has the vision and the courage to dissent from the contemporary way of life is in danger of being condemned and ostracized. If you think about it, the grounds that some of Homestead Heritage's critics stand on to blast the thing would also get lots of religious groups condemned as cults. If a hierarchical, strictly regulated community of believers where individuality is suppressed is what constitutes a cult, then all monasteries are cults. Any community with what strike us as strict rules and a strong sense of separateness runs the risk of being condemned as a cult. One of the critics of Homestead Heritage cites the group's prohibition of artificial birth control as a sign of cultishness. Hello! The Roman Catholic Church prohibits artificial birth control! (I know, I know, for a lot of these people, the Catholic Church is a cult. Still.) If the Homestead folks believe that contraception is sinful, expecting members of the religious community to observe the moral law there is not necessarily a sign of cultishness, any more than expecting people who profess Orthodox Judaism to keep kosher is a sign of cultishness.
This is why I read stories like this keeping in mind that our society judges countercultural groups like this by the standards of radical individualism that pervade our thinking. As I wrote about in "Crunchy Cons," Alan Ehrenhalt has observed that the kind of community life that so many of us pine for today, and that even many of us remember from our 1940s and 1950s childhoods, was only achievable at the expense of losing a lot of individual freedom and mobility. You can't have the kind of personal liberty we've come to take as normative today without also having a breakdown in the bonds of community and social authority. Any group of people, especially religious people, who wish to step back from radical individualism and live in community overseen by relatively strong authority will strike the mainstream as weird and even cultish.
And they may be! All I'm saying is that we should read stories like this critically, aware of our own biases. Most people, I t
hink, have a favorable view of the Amish as pastoral agrarian separatists, which they are. But it is also a fact that some of the problems that critics have identified in Homestead have also been identified among the Amish. It is impossible to escape sin. At the same time, I am unpersuaded by those who point to problems with communities like this as conclusive evidence that the only sane way to live, therefore, is like everybody else. The crowd can be quite mad, you know; they persecuted the Prophets. Then again, not everyone claiming to be a prophet was from God.
One thing I hope to do with my next book is to visit a variety of communities trying to live out the virtues together amid the chaos of modernity, and see what they've found works, what doesn't, and why.
NBC's Tim Russert had an exclusive report tonight on a White House meeting this week between the president and his top advisers and 11 GOP Congressmen. Topic: the war in Iraq. According to Russert, participants in the meeting described it as unusually blunt -- with one member of Congress telling the president that he no longer had credibility on Iraq, that the only one who does is Gen. Petraeus. Another reportedly said, "Mr. President, my district is prepared for defeat." I'm not sure whether that meant defeat in the war, or the defeat of the Republican Party. I think the former, but it wasn't entirely clear.
Christianity Today interviews Baylor's Francis Beckwith, the just-resigned president of the Evangelical Theological Society, on his recent decision to return to the Catholic Church of his youth. Well worth reading. I especially liked Prof. Beckwith's discussion of how Evangelicals could learn a lot from reading the Church fathers:
Look, you're not going to come up with the Nicene Creed by just picking up the Bible. Does the Bible contribute to our understanding? Absolutely it does; the Nicene Creed is consistent with Scripture. But you needed a church that had a self-understanding in order to articulate that in any clear way. I am not saying that necessarily means that you have to be a Catholic. But we have to understand that the Reformation only makes sense against the backdrop of a tradition that was already there. Calvin and Luther did not go back and re-write Nicea. They took it for granted. There's nothing wrong with conceding that and celebrating it and reading those authors.
Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical. When did these practices come to be? It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles.
And I think that would do a couple of things. It would turn down the volume of the rhetoric from evangelicals, at least free-church Protestants. They would understand this goes back a long way. That may not convince them that it is right, but at least it would show them that it was widely held and that Christians who were right there on top of the early church practiced them. That was quite liberating for me, when I became aware of the writings of some of the church fathers and especially the liturgical aspects.
As an Orthodox Christian, I'm naturally pleased that Dr. Beckwith, whom I've had the pleasure of spending time with here in Texas, has returned to the Eucharistic, apostolic, liturgical and patristic tradition. I've been hesitant to comment on this because I know the Beckwith news is a shock to many of our Evangelical friends, and I strongly don't want to be seen as triumphalistic. And as this interview shows, neither does Dr. Beckwith. I hope, with him, that his reversion leads all Christians to greater understanding, especially of the common roots of our Christian faith, and of course to greater charity with each other. As someone who has been grateful to the very many Catholics who wished me well, even in their sadness and disappointment, when I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy, I hope Evangelicals upset with Dr. Beckwith can find it in their hearts to pray for him all the same, and to still see him as a brother in Christ.
My Dallas friend Christine Allison is the mother of a Down daughter. Jack Fowler on the Corner quotes a 1989 piece she wrote for Human Life Review about her little girl. It's beautiful -- but it indicates that that the 90 percent figure is nothing new:
Most women who choose to be tested (amniocentesis to detect Down’s Syndrome) will also choose to abort the baby if the test is positive. Some studies say the figure is 90%. . . . to muddy matters even more, the women who test are more often than not the mothers of “wanted” babies. That is, I want you if you are the baby I want. The idea that a mother might ever choose to have or not have her child based on knowing something about that child – his IQ, what he will look like, his emotional demeanor – defies all logic of the heart. But this is an age where even the risk of accepting one’s own progeny, for better or for worse, has become too much to contemplate . . .
In one of the most poignant, fierce, and determined battles to live deeply and well, Down syndrome people are breaking through the walls of their own retardation and grasping their world. Yet, as a species they appear to be doomed. Unlike those who would abort them, these Down people have accepted the dare of life, which is to live it. In California, an eleven-year old girl writes her first line on a computer. She painstakingly taps out “I like God’s finest whispers.” In Brooklyn, a Down fifth-grader dashes off the bus to his mother with a report card from his yeshiva; he has earned average grades in all his classes and speaks and writes in three different languages. And then there’s our Chrissie, who last week crawled seven paces for the saltine cracker her dad held outstretched to her. She had been battling for that saltine for two months . . .
Chrissie is a blessing in a way a normal child is not. It is in describing her that the word “special” rises from banality and comes grippingly alive. That she may now be a member of the last generation of her kind, a group silently and methodically targeted for extinction, alarms my heart. Especially now, knowing as I do that when she is older, Chrissie will be able to read – and understand – what I have written.
A group silently and methodically targeted for extinction. Yes, that's precisely it.
How true are the words of Holy Scripture, 'We know not what a day may bring forth.'
If anyone had told me that I would be standing here today to take this office, I would have been totally unbelieving. [snip] I believe that Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule.
How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our Province. Today we have begun to plant and we await the harvest.
That's what the Rev. Ian Paisley, the hard-line Protestant leader, said yesterday in his inaugural speech as a top minister in the new power-sharing Northern Ireland government. Ian Paisley, of all people, standing next to IRA men, who also pledged their fidelity to peace and reconciliation! Good on all these men, Catholic and Protestant alike. Maybe a new day really has dawned. Please God, let it be so.
One of the major players in what came to be known as the "Religious Right" in the 1980s has shut its doors. The Center for Reclaiming America, based in Ft. Lauderdale, part of Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, has decided to close. It will also shut its Washington, D.C., office known as the Center for Christian Statesmanship.
Kennedy, who is 76 years old and recovering from a heart attack he suffered in December, is one of the best educated and most compelling of all the cultural conservatives who sought to use the political process to reverse the "moral slide" in America. Most of Kennedy's televised messages in recent years have strayed from traditional preaching and focused primarily on politics and social issues.
Brian Fisher, executive vice president of Coral Ridge Ministries, told the Miami Herald, "We believe that by streamlining the operations we will be able to return to our core focus." One hopes that will be preaching the unadulterated Gospel of Jesus Christ, unencumbered by the allures of the political kingdoms of this world, because that is where the greatest power lies to transform lives and ultimately nations. It does not lie in the Republican Party, with which Kennedy's organization was almost exclusively associated.
Obviously -- and happily (say I) -- we will still have religious conservatives among us. But it's increasingly obvious that the "Religious Right" as we've come to know it is winding down -- the victim, in part, of its close identification with the Republican Party. I do not believe that religious conservatives should get out of politics entirely. I do believe that we should be more sophisticated about the way we practice politics (for example, coming to understand that unrestrained capitalism undermines our families and moral base as well as permissive sexual and social morality does), and put political engagement in perspective. I'd like to see us throw the greater weight of our energy on building extrapolitical institutions that renew the moral imagination and communal life. As Prof. Claes Ryn put it here. Excerpt:
The kind of intellectual, aesthetic, and moral-spiritual renewal that might have transformed the universities, the arts, the media, publishing, entertainment, and the churches never quite came off. Without a major reorientation of American thought and sensibility, conservative politics was bound to fail.
The neoconservatives reinforced the preoccupation with politics and public policy. They claimed that before their coming to the rescue American conservatism had been intellectually feeble, but, in reality, it had exhibited far greater scope and depth prior to their arrival. Mentioning just a few thinkers of the 1950s and ’60s proves the point: Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Robert Nisbet, Peter Stanlis, Wilhelm Röpke, Peter Viereck, Eliseo Vivas, Eric Voegelin, and Richard Weaver. Behind several of them stood the perhaps most powerful and prophetic American thinker of the 20th century, the Harvard Professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933). Instead of fully exploring, developing, and applying the insights of such thinkers, the conservative movement wanted to get down to politics without delay, first by trying to elect Barry Goldwater president. Having a flawed sense of priorities, conservatism would before the end of the 20th century go almost completely off the rails, becoming a captive of party, money, and media celebrities.
I certainly don't claim to have the answers. But I think we religious and social conservatives need to be asking new questions, not only of ourselves but of the society in which we live.
Hey, President Bush, how's it going for fellow Christian believers in liberated Baghdad? Uh, not so great, says the Chicago Tribune:
Christians are fleeing in droves from the southern Baghdad district of Dora after Sunni insurgents told them they would be killed unless they converted to Islam or left, according to Christian leaders and families who fled.
Similar episodes of what has become known as sectarian cleansing raged through Baghdad neighborhoods last year as Sunnis drove Shiites from Sunni areas and Shiites drove Sunnis from Shiite ones, but this marks the first apparent attempt to empty an entire Baghdad neighborhood of Christians, the Christians say.
The exodus began three weeks ago after a fatwa, or religious edict, was issued by Sunni insurgents offering Christians a stark choice: to convert to Islam and pay an ancient Islamic tax known as "jizyah," or to depart within 24 hours and leave their property behind. If they did neither, they said, they faced death.
Today, the fast-growing cadre of corporate leaders pressing for climate action welcomes a new member: Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, the media empire that encompasses Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins, MySpace.com, and dozens of newspapers in Australia, the U.K., the U.S., and beyond.
At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch launched a company-wide plan to address climate change that includes not only a pledge to reduce the company's emissions (which has come to be expected at such biz-greening events) but also a vow to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.'s many holdings.
"The challenge is to revolutionize the [climate change] message," Murdoch told the crowd. He emphasized the need to "make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior."
Clearly the Rev. Al Sharpton is a boob, and not just because he said this about Mitt Romney (and is ludicrously trying to backtrack):
"As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don't worry about that; that's a temporary situation."
What an absurd thing to say. Obviously Mormons believe in God, or at least a god. It does raise a more interesting question, though, which is what I think Sharpton was getting at: Are Mormons Christian?
For me, it's merely a matter of theological interest; I wouldn't hesitate to vote for a non-Christian for president if I believed he or she were the best candidate for reasons of character and policy. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest if we had a Mormon president. In fact, given that I've had nothing but wonderful personal dealings with Mormons, and my admiration for their pro-family ethic, I'd probably be kind of comforted by it. But it is a big deal for a lot of Evangelicals, though, who won't consider voting for Romney because they believe he is not a Christian.
In what sense could a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints not be a Christian? They believe in Jesus, yes? Indeed they do. The clearest case -- and it's a respectfuul one -- for a negative judgment was made by Father Richard John Neuhaus. Read the whole thing here -- the key part for our purposes starts out like this:
Asking whether Mormonism is Christian or Mormons are Christians (a slightly different question) is thought to be insulting. "How can you ask that," protests a Mormon friend, "when we clearly love the Lord Jesus as much as we do?" It is true that St. Paul says that nobody can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). But that only indicates that aspects of Mormon faith are touched by the Holy Spirit, as is every element of truth no matter where it is found. A Mormon academic declares that asking our question "is a bit like asking if African Americans are human." No, it is not even a bit like that. "Christian" in this context is not honorific but descriptive. Nobody questions whether Mormons are human. To say that Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists are not Christians is no insult. It is a statement of fact, indeed of respect for their difference. The question is whether that is a fact and a difference that applies also to Mormonism.
The rest of it, in summary is:
1. Mormonism actually teaches that non-Mormons who claim to be Christians are in fact not.
2. Mormons cannot affirm the Apostles Creed, and in fact oppose it on certain points.
3. Mormons are not monotheistic, believing in a plurality of gods.
4. Mormons explicitly reject the Great Tradition of Christianity. Neuhaus:
Christians disagree about precisely where that Church is to be located historically and at present, but almost all agree that it is to be identified with the Great Tradition defined by the apostolic era through at least the first four ecumenical councils, and continuing in diverse forms to the present day. That is the Christianity that LDS teaching rejects and condemns as an abomination and fraud.
5. Though Mormonism is obviously incomprehensible apart from Christianity, it is so radically different from what Christianity has been understood as for two millenia that it is better thought of as another religion, though one with Christian elements. -- So, in Neuhaus's view -- and I find this persuasive -- the answer is no, Mormons are not Christians. Doesn't make them bad people, but their theological claims differ too greatly from normative Christianity to include them within the broad range of confessions that include Orthodoxy,
Catholicism, Protestantism and other expressions of the historic Christian faith. Remember that Neuhaus is merely examining whether the term "Christian" adequately describes Mormons, from the point of view of historic Christianity. He obviously does not intend this as an insight to Mormons. Indeed, he concludes:
[W]e owe to Mormon Americans respect for their human dignity, protection of their religious freedom, readiness for friendship, openness to honest dialogue, and an eagerness to join hands in social and cultural tasks that advance the common good.
I certainly agree with that. Anybody care to take up the question of the compatibility of Mormonism with historical Christianity, from either side? I'd love to read a Mormon response (or two, or more) to Neuhaus. Anybody iin this forum who takes the opportunity to insult or degrade Mormons will have their posts deleted. I would invite Mormon readers who choose to post not to assume that negative judgments on the question are personal insults.
I'm late getting to this (our issue of the New Yorker always arrives a week late), but last night I read Larissa MacFarquhar's much-discussed profile of Barack Obama, and I've gotta say it only makes me more curious about the guy. Check this passage:
Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.
So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound.
Of course, in a sense, by choosing to leave his family and move to a place to which he had no connection, he was doing exactly what his parents had done, but, unlike them, he decided to believe that his choosing self had been shaped by fate and family. There was, at least, something organic, something inescapable about that. “I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone,” he wrote, “and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.” Choosing was the best that he could do. In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church. “I came to realize,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone.”
And this:
In his view of history, in his
respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”
Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem. For example, I think the impact of parents and communities is at least as significant as the amount of money that’s put into education.” Obama encourages his crossover appeal. He doesn’t often criticize the Bush Administration directly; in New Hampshire recently, he told his audience, “I’m a Democrat. I’m considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or a Conservative or a libertarian or a free-marketer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody and in that sense I’m agnostic.”
Now, how conservative could Obama really be if his philosophical peregrinations always deliver him to liberal conclusions? Seriously. I appreciate the idea that policies that we associate with the Democratic party could actually serve socially conservative ends. But is that what Obama is all about? I'm not asking rhetorically; I'd really like to know. There's a saying -- "A long face is not a moral disinfectant" -- that contains within it my question about Obama. Is he merely the same old thing in a new package, or is there something truly different going on with him?
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