Rod Dreher: October 2007 Archives

Vice President Cheney will be in Dallas on Friday to deliver a speech to the World Affairs Council. I'll be there. Today I learned from someone involved with the speech that Cheney will make a "major announcement" in the speech. No further details.

I also learned today that Condi Rice will be coming to meet with the Dallas Morning News editorial board next Friday. This was very sudden. She's only done this once before.

Hmm.

So says Theodore Dalrymple, a British atheist who warns against throwing the Baby Jesus out with the pre-Enlightenment bathwater. Excerpt:

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

I'm against Mukasey, in part because I can't believe we have a man in line to be the chief law enforcement officer of the US who won't go on the record on whether or not he believes that it's against the law to subject captive prisoners to controlled drowning. If he won't go on the record about waterboarding, then ask him if he thinks the signing statement President Bush attached to the torture ban represents a valid and correct legal judgment. From the Boston Globe's coverage:

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president's signing statement, which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New Year's weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the law.

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman, said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in special situations involving national security.

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush, when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief, and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case," the official added. ''We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

A friend who supports Mukasey points to this exchange from earlier testimony as sufficient to exonerate Mukasey on this count:

LEAHY: Can a president authorize illegal conduct? Can the president -- can a president put somebody above the law by authorizing illegal conduct?

MUKASEY: The only way for me to respond to that in the abstract is to say that if by illegal you mean contrary to a statute, but within the authority of the president to defend the country, the president is not putting somebody above the law; the president is putting somebody within the law. Can the president put somebody above the law? No. The president doesn't stand above the law. But the law emphatically includes the Constitution. It starts with the Constitution.

This is the kind of locution that the word "lawyerly" was made for. The reasoning here is circular: it appears that Mukasey's saying the president has to obey the law unless the president decides the law doesn't apply to him because it's unconstitutional. Which gets us exactly nowhere. Ask Mukasey to say if he believes the president has the constitutional right to ignore a Congressional anti-torture statute if, in the president's judgment, he needs to torture for the greater good of the country. Anything short of a "no" makes Mukasey unfit for office, in my view.

I'll tell another ghost story.

I have a friend I'll call Alice. A few years ago, Alice and some friends went to see a psychic, just for kicks. The psychic was doing a reading on one of the women (not Alice), and said she saw in the room a man. She described the way the man looked, and said he was wearing a military uniform, which she described in detail. It didn't make sense to any of the women.

But on the way home, it hit them: their high school classmate "Jack" had been killed in a car wreck a few years after graduation, and had been buried in his military uniform. Could that have been Jack? It seemed so from her description.

Alice told me shortly after that she began having dreams in which Jack would come visit her. He was wearing his uniform. He wouldn't speak to her, but she understood somehow that the purpose of his visit was to convey the information that he was in a good place now. Alice thought she was merely having a dream based on her visit to the psychic, and that it was an expression of her desire that Jack's soul be at peace. Then one day, she got together with "Becky," one of the women who'd gone along with her to the psychic, and Becky told her over coffee that she'd been having recurring dreams of Jack. Becky's dreams were the same as Alice's. Interestingly, Jack had dated them both in high school, and was in love with Alice when she married her husband. Jack begged her not to marry the guy, but she told him that she was in love with someone else, and that was that.

Then Alice had a dream in which Jack led her to an old barn on property where they all used to party in high school. Jack climbed up onto a rafter, sat in the middle with his legs dangling, smiling, and pointed down to the ground, at a particular spot. When Alice woke up, she called Becky to tell her about the dream. After some time, they decided to sneak onto the property where the barn sits, and see if they could find a clue.

So, they get to the barn, and they call out, "Jack, we're here because we think you want us to be here. If you can hear us, show us what you want us to find." They walked around looking for anything unusual. Alice told me the barn had been out of use for a long time. Then, she said, she remembered Jack pointing to a particular spot on the ground. She walked over to that rafter, then put her foot down on the spot.

The ground gave way slightly.

Alice shrieked and drew back her foot. Something had clearly been buried there. Alice told me she and Becky began to dig with their hands, but they became overawed by fright, and ran away.

That was several years ago. She's never recovered the nerve to go back. I've visited her since first hearing this story, and tried to convince her to take me to the barn with a video camera and a shovel. She won't let me do that. She says that she and Becky are afraid they'll get caught trespassing, but personally, judging by her deep anxiety in talking about this whole thing, I think she's too frightened of what might be buried in that barn.

What do you think is buried in that barn?

Today's NYTimes op-ed page features a cool ghost story, told by a writer who grew up with ghosts in her old house (she also grew up as a boy, but that's another story). The family that lived in the house before her own were the Hunts. Al Hunt, the Bloomberg journalist and ex-Wall Street Journal columnist, was one of them:

A few months later I talked to the four Hunt children, all grown up now, who’d lived in the house before me. One of the boys, Al, who’s grown up to become a well-known journalist, said he’d never detected the presence of anything disembodied in the house. “That was totally off my radar, Jenny,” he said.

His siblings Bill and Babby hadn’t seen any ghosts either, although Babby did provide me with further information on the life of Jesus [the name of a monkey the previous owners kept in a bathroom at the house -- RD]. Apparently the monkey that lived in the bathroom was allowed out one day a year, on his birthday.

I wanted to ask her, “What day was Jesus’ birthday?” But then I realized I already knew the answer.

Christmas.

As for the youngest Hunt sibling, St. George, he said he’d seen plenty of spirits on the third floor, near the Haunted Room. One time, one of them managed to convince him to jump out the window. He’d gotten one leg out the frame before his father arrived on the scene and asked him what he thought he was doing. St. George didn’t have an answer.

Would he spend a night in the house alone, now, I asked? Not for a million dollars, he said. Not for any price.

Here's what I find interesting about this. I've written before about the haunting at my own mom and dad's house, after my grandfather died. I heard the banging. My mom saw a spectral presence. My dad heard, saw and even felt the ghost. My father is not the kind of person these things happen to, but they centered on him, as it was his father who had died, and his father who had wronged him in the last years of his life. In general, though, my mother and I, for some reason, seem to be a lot more sensitive to this sort of thing than my dad and my sister.

I think it's simply the case that some people are more open to the moving of spirit than others. Look at the Hunt family in the Times essay. Most of the kids saw nothing, but one kid was so frightened by what he saw that he couldn't bear to think of returning to the house. This put me in mind of an old 19th-century house I lived in for a while, as a house-sitter. I chose the upstairs bedroom with the best view as my own for the duration. I kept waking up, though, thinking that I was being watched. I thought for a while that I was just skittish about living in an old house down a country lane in the middle of nowhere. But the creepy feeling persisted. I started sleeping with a nightlight on, like when I was a kid. It didn't help.

Finally, the house's owner and her husband came for a visit from the city one weekend. Embarrassed, I told her I thought I was going to have to move, because I wasn't getting any sleep. I told her I couldn't shake the sense that there was another presence in my bedroom. She rolled her eyes and laughed at me. Then her husband spoke up, saying that he never has been able to sleep in that bedroom, for the same reason. He suggested I try another room. Which I did, and never had another problem.

It turns out that in the 1920s, a man hanged himself in that house. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. But I found out later that one night, sleeping in their downstairs bedroom, the husband woke up from what he thought was an intense dream, and found that he was floating several feet above his body. He looked to the side and saw three female ghosts, floating alongside him, beckoning him. He refused, and fought hard to get back into his body. When he finally did, he woke up, drenched with sweat. His wife thinks he had a bad dream. He insists that it was no dream, that it was real. Nothing like that had ever happened to him, nor has happened since.

What do you think? Do ghosts exist? If so, what are they? Why are some people open to them, and others not? I'll have another really neat ghost story to tell later today.