Daniel Larison's thoughts on Wal-Mart's ability to bring down the price of prescription drugs by squeezing suppliers brings to mind what may be the only Gerald Ford quote worth remembering: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything you have."
There's a passage in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War" juxtaposing Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's upbeat public speeches about the progress of the Vietnam War with the grim news he was privately delivering to the president at the time. I thought of that when I read this from Bob Woodward's front-page story in the Sunday WaPo:
On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."
A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.
On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.
I wonder when it will sink in with most of us that we cannot trust this government to tell the truth about the war, much less to wage it?
Do not fail to note this passage in the Woodward story, involving Gen. Abizaid, who is running the show in Iraq:
This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."
So it turns out that the Speaker of the House knew months ago about that pervy Rep. Mark Foley coming on to an underage Congressional page, and apparently did nothing about it. I don't understand either why Rep. Rodney Alexander, the Louisiana Republican for whom the 16-year-old boy worked, didn't raise hell until this Foley freak had his hash settled. Well, yes, I understand it all too well; it's how big organizations work, and besides, to have made a big deal of this might have helped the Democrats, and we can't have that; better to be quiet about it for the greater good of the Cause -- it's expedient, after all). I think Rahm Emanuel is probably right:
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, questioned yesterday why Alexander had gone to the House Republicans' chief political operative, rather than to other party leaders. "That's to protect a member, not to protect a child," Emanuel said.
And this from the WaPo story:
Rich Galen, a Republican political strategist, worried that voters might lump Foley's name with former representatives Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), all of whom were forced to resign or were indicted amid various scandals this year.
"This sense of entitlement that members of Congress can do anything to anyone or for anyone has got to end," Galen said.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committeing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: "Know thyself."
Contronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good.
Solzhenitsyn goes on to mention the case of some Soviet officials who used holy icons for target practice. We prefer to think people so given over to evil can't exist, he says. The problem, the author continues, is how literature depicts classic evildoers: they are conscious at some level of their evil. In reality, though, the real evildoer has to be convinced that he's doing good, "or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with the natural law." Otherwise, the conscience will restrain the evildoer before his evil gets too out of hand. Shakespeare's evildoers, he cites as an example, stopped after a few corpses because they lacked ideology.
Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory wihich helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquererors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
Ideology, Solzhenitsyn writes, made the 20th century the century of mass murder on a previously inconceivable scale. He speaks of a rumor that during one period immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the secret police in Petrograd supposedly fed those condemned to death to the animals in the city zoos. Solzhenitsyn says he can't prove it was true, but how else would they have kept zoo animals alive during those famine years? "Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn't it expedient?"
That is the precise line that the Shakesperean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
...Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.
Would somebody please point me to a source where I can get a straight answer on two issues related to this "torture"/"habeas corpus" bill we've been arguing about? Here's what I want to know:
1. What interrogation techniques will be allowed under this bill? Will waterboarding be allowed? (I've been going on and on about how it will be permitted in some instances, but to be honest, I'm now confused, and doubting that that's the case.) How much latitude does the president have to define which techniques are okay to use? I ask because it's fine to say that it bans "torture," but not if President Bush gets to define the meaning of torture.
2. Who loses his habeas corpus rights under this bill? If, as I believe SCOTUS declared, enemy combatants have statutory (as distinct from constitutional) rights to challenge their detention, will they still have them if this bill is signed into law? Will it be possible that someone will be thrown in jail indefinitely, with no opportunity to have his case reviewed, or to challenge evidence against him? The NYTimes editorial board says: "All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial." Is that true?
And now for something completely different: a wonderful essay by Eric Miller, who's quoted in the new chapter in the "Crunchy Cons" paperback (out next month), writing about the metaphysics of honeybees, and what the fate of the bees has to teach us about our own.
I got this advice to Ross Douthat too late for him to take advantage of it on his recent trip to Paris, but now that we're getting into the autumn, and all discerning and enlightened people's thoughts turn to cassoulet, I've got to tell you something. If you're in Paris, you will have one of the best meals of your life if you stop into a small, family-run restaurant in the St-Germain district, called La Table du Perigord. My crunchy-con Parisian pal Fred Gion, knowing of my devotion to cassoulet, took me there last December when I passed through Paris on business. It was one of the best meals of my life, and it didn't cost a fortune either. Good times, good times.
A Catholic friend who gave me a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" some months back writes today to chide me for not yet having read it:
It is, you see, the single-most important treatise on the evil of torture - thanks to its stark description of the twisted mentality of it's administrators. It is written in the superior and passionate prose of a Christian intellectual who lived to tell.
(You can almost hear him spit on the ground as he recounts his gruesome story.)
For anyone interested in apologetics the book is indispensable. When one realizes the depravity that overtakes, possesses and eventually destroys the inner man, the reasons are self-evident as to why we should never allow such tactics to be used in the name of "justification" for the greater good.
The book is a fascinating study on human depravity and the corrupting influence of sadistic power given to little men.
I love our military guys as much as anyone, but the portrait of evil presented in that breathtaking book convinced me that we must never tempt anyone in our military with a likewise fate. To do so is to do them a grave disservice.
Put simply, human nature cannot be trusted to handle the power of evil.
Just got this from a friend with whom I can't recall ever having had a substantial disagreement, and who is a former military intelligence officer who was once married to a military interrogator:
I have to say that I think your torture post is a little off. The problem folks seem to have in debating this issue is that there are actually two conflated issues involved. One, is torture permissible as an end; and, two, is torture permissible as a means to an end. Aside from the criminally insane, I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that torture as an end in and of itself is permissible, legally or morally – who in his right mind would argue otherwise?
The second issue, torture as a means to an end, is more difficult, and it’s what I think was actually debated by the administration and McCain et al. If the end sought is to prevent the loss of innocent life, then I have absolutely no problem with torture as a means to achieve that end. If we have a reasonable belief (and I stress reasonable) that some wack-job has information about an attack that is imminent, then I’m all in favor of using whatever methods necessary to extract that information – and I frankly think to do otherwise is to commit the much greater sin. But if the information isn’t perishable or of lesser intelligence value, then torture would not be appropriate (and probably wouldn’t be necessary in the first place, there are other better methods to gain information).
The NY Times and Andrew Sullivan have set up the first issue as a straw man. Implicit in their railing against torture is the belief that the administration and our interrogators are advocating the use of torture as an end (this is, I’m sure, deeply satisfying to those who feel that the Bush administration is evil personified). That is pure nonsense. The adult debate has been over what techniques (means) are permissible to acquire intelligence information (defined ends) under various circumstances. In this argument, the only people guilty of torture are Sullivan and the Times, guilty of torturing logic.
I've got a bunch of page proofs to read right now, so I'm not going to be blogging for a while. Y'all discuss -- and please, don't get into name-calling. Let's talk about the actual issue, and not trash each other's motives.
I was out all morning, and see that there has been a lot of activity in the comboxes on my previous entry. I can't even look at it -- I have way, way too much to do here in the office this afternoon. I do want to say a couple more things on the topic, though.
1. I am familiar with the question, "But what if you believed the suspect had information that could stop another 9/11. Wouldn't it be morally right to torture then?" I suppose it's possible to come up with a particular situation in which it would be morally justifiable to resort to torture. I can think of plenty of situations far, far less weighty than "another 9/11" in which I would personally get medieval on someone to get information (e.g., a captured kidnapper of my child). If I were in such a situation, I would do what I thought I had to to save my kid, and throw myself on the mercy of the court, or take my punishment. I would think it dangerous for the law to sanction torture, by whatever euphemism we choose to call it.
Anyway, if we operate on the principle that the good of the whole depends on seriously violating the moral law in specific instances, where do we draw the line? I keep going back to the Church scandal because as we know, so very, very much wrongdoing was overlooked, and that turning-a-blind-eye justified by those in a position to do something about it, on the principle that "the good of the Church" demanded it. I personally know of a case in which a priest used information obtained in the confessional to blackmail a married penitent into having a sexual affair with them. It only came to light when she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and told her husband everything. When they went with their lawyer and her psychologist to see the bishop, he told them that if she made this public, he would see to it that she was ruined. "I have the welfare of the people of God to think about," he told her. And I think that bishop, who retired with honor not so long ago, honestly believed what he said: that her suffering, and the injustice done to her, was nothing compared to the putative harm that would come to the Church if she told what had been done to her.
Let me put this another way: I don't have grave reservations about the path this country is taking with regard to torture and the rights of terror suspects because I care so much about them. I believe and feel as I do precisely because in my heart, I don't give a damn about them, and would just as soon see them thrown to the sharks. I bet quite a few of my fellow Americans feel the same way. We can't let ourselves go there.
2. Today is my son Matthew's seventh birthday. I watched him bound into the school building this morning like a little puppy, carefree and full of life and joy. I was thinking driving away that if he has to go to war someday as a soldier of his country, I will grieve that my boy will have to maim and kill for the sake of his country's survival, but I will accept it and pray for his soul to be as unstained as possible, and his mind unshaken, by him doing his duty. But if I knew that a son of mine was standing over another man and waterboard him, or otherwise torture him, I would come close to losing my mind. Not a pleasant thing to ponder on the tollway.
I have not blogged about the torture bill till now, in part because I found its constitutent elements to be somewhat confusing, and I didn't quite know what to say. This morning, I see that it has now passed the Senate, and is headed to the president's desk to be signed into law. I realized this morning that something snapped in me last evening on my drive home, listening to the president on the radio defending this thing, saying (once again) that we -- meaning the government -- can't say that it's doing everything it can to keep the American people safe unless it has "the proper tools" to do the job.
"The proper tools." I am sick of this euphemism, as if torture and all the rest of it were just part of a handyman's fix-it box. These words allow us to conceal from ourselves just what it is we do, and what is done in our name.
I have serious concerns about what this legislation does to our Constitution. This New York Times editorial lists them as succinctly and as powerfully as I've seen anywhere. Given that the government will now have the power to hold and waterboard and otherwise torture indefinitely men who might be innocent, the idea that these men will have no right of habeas corpus is deeply worrying. But if you say something like that, you get accused of being soft on terrorism. Take, for example, what House Speaker Denny Hastert said last night when House Democrats voted against warrantless wiretaps: "For the second time in just two days, House Democrats have voted to protect the rights of terrorists."
It's perfectly fair to criticize the Democrats for their position on this issue. What bothers me a very great deal is the corrupt and corrupting language the Right uses to criticize them. Oppose this bill, and you are for the terrorists. One is reminded of Orwell's observation:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
Proper tools. Protect the rights of terrorists. You see? Or do you see
? This, via Andrew Sullivan, is what is now permitted. This is a waterboarding device, or as our Christian president would say, "a proper tool." How can Christians in good conscience support this? We allow ourselves to accept this kind of thing because we allow its proponents to obscure the difference between harsh interrogation -- I don't think anybody with a lick of sense expects terror suspects to be treated as gently as a guest on "Larry King Live" -- and torture. Others have written far more eloquently and intelligently than I can ever hope to about the legal and moral ramifications of all this. What weighs on my mind this morning is what accustoming ourselves to this sort of regime is doing to our individual and collective consciences.
Here's what I mean. I hate terrorists, and I believe I have enough hatred for them in my heart to bless a policy that would throw them in a pit and, in Orwell's phrase, see to it that they have a jackboot on their faces forever. In fact, my hatred of these Islamist monsters is so raw, and so close to the surface -- it surfaced again this past 9/11 -- that I really can't allow myself to dwell on it for too long. And yet, being aware of what terrible things I am capable of doing, or having done, to these creatures -- I should say, these human beings -- makes me all the more afraid of what our government is up to. Of what the rest of us have effectively signed off on. I know how much evil I'm willing to see done to other men to appease my own fear and loathing of them. I know what's in my heart. It will always be in my heart -- and in yours too -- until the day I die. But it should not be sanctioned in the law.
I don't think I can do nearly as well writing about the immorality of this as Mark Shea (see this, for a great example) and Andrew Sullivan -- now there's a pair you rarely see on the same side of any issue -- have done, so I don't dare try. But I think Mark really speaks prophetically here:
Much has been said of the Rule of Integrity ["To do evil in order to accomplish good is really to do evil."] here, because it is the single most fiercely opposed Rule on the Right at present. It is called all sorts of names. But it remains true: you cannot do evil that good will come of it. If you try it, you will encounter the same Judgment as Judas Iscariot, who found that all the evil was his, and all the good that came of it was God's.
But in addition, there is also the Eschatological Rule ["The victory is assured; my job is to run out the clock in style."], which not a few frightened post-9/11 people seem to have completely forgotten. It is this: "What shall it profit you to win the war and lose your soul?" That, in the end, is what the torture debated comes down to.
The Rule of Realism [" "Remember that Satan is eager to corrupt my efforts to build up the Kingdom, and he's smart enough to figure out a way to do it." -- which is another way of enunciating the principle of Original Sin] is the principal defense we have against the pride that cocoons all fallen men from reality as they reflect on their goodness and compare themselves with the badness of their foes.
And the Petrine Rule ["Nobody ever built up the Church by tearing down the pope."] is about the handiest touchstone for day to day sanity. Recently, I ran across somebody on another board who was baffled over my puzzling inconsistency. He had some kind things to say about my theological scribbles (for which I thank him) and then shook his head, "That's why it breaks my heart to see those "torture" posts. If he's wrong about that, than what happens to his "credibility" on other matters?". It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that my remarks on torture are just as rooted in the Church's teaching as my remarks on everything else. Al
l I'm doing is repeating the teaching of the Church, accessible in any Catechism, as well is in conciliar and papal teaching, that torture is intrinsically immoral, gravely sinful, and so forth.
There are only two ways out of this. One of them is to just say the Church is wrong and torture is *not* gravely sinful, etc. This is usually achieved by saying that the Church is hopelessly unrealistic in not recognizing that "24" is exactly like real life, where "ticking bomb" scenarios are a daily fact of life. Another strategy is to say that human beings who are guilty, or suspected, or foreign, or named "Maher Arar" don't have basic human rights and so we can see to it they are tortured if we think it will keep us safe. All of these have the disadvantage, for the putative Catholic, of ascribing fundamental error to the Church's moral teaching by saying that something the Church declares intrinsically immoral is not really intrinsically immoral.
The other strategy is to endlessly quibble about what techniques constitutes "torture". The problem here is that, in my case, I have resolutely refused to play that game. My argument has been, whatever trained interrogators (which I am not) have hitherto deemed "torture" is not in sudden need of redefinition since 9/11. Attempts to redefine torture are simply attempts to call what is intrinsically immoral by a new euphemism so as to get away with it.
As my longtime readers know, I have worn myself out and even wrecked my own Catholic faith by endlessly railing against the Catholic bishops for their own aiding and abetting of the great moral evil, of the kind that corrupted the entire church, of child sex abuse by some of the clergy. I don't believe, and never have believed, that the great majority of these bishops are any more or any less evil than me, than you, than anybody else. What they did is allow themselves to believe in their own goodness, and in the rightness of their mission, and in doing things that no Christian or even decent human being should do because they accepted, consciously or not, that The Good of The Church demanded it. And even to this day, I believe, they have not faced the full truth of what they sanctioned. Nor, in my view, has the broader church. We prefer to speak in euphemism. It's human nature. It's Original Sin.
The point of bringing that up is not to start another argument about the Church and sex abuse. It is rather to say that I'm coming to understand this torture business in the same way. That a lot of good men and women who have the right intentions are signing off on things that we have no business signing off on, because We Mean Well, and anyway, there We Have Enemies, so let's keep the focus on them, and not on our own hearts and our own motives, and our own culpability before God. That's the road to Hell.
A French philosopher is now living under police protection after having published a column in a mainstream newspaper protesting against Islamic bully-boy tactics. Here's my translation of a snippet of the Nouvel Observateur story linked in this item:
In his column, titled "Facing Islamist intimidation, what must the free world do?", Robert Redeker affirmed notably that "hatred and violence live in the book by which any Moslem is educated, the Koran."
"Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites delegitimize violence," writes Robert Redeker, professor with the college of Pierre-Paul-Riquet at Saint-Orens de Gammeville, "Islam is a religion which, even in its holiest text, and some of its customary rites, exalts violence and hatred."
Concerning Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, the author affirms: "Exaltation of violence: chief of pitiless war, plunderer, mass-murderer of Jews and polygamous, that's the Mohammed revealed through the Koran."
I'm trying to find a down side to Wal-Mart's plan to offer cheap prescription drugs, making them affordable to people who don't have health insurance, but I can't. This sounds like a great deal, and the company is to be commended for it. What am I missing, if anything?
+ The highly-touted $75 million US project to build the Baghdad Police Academy has gone to hell. The building is such a mess that they might even have to tear parts of it down and start over. Poop and piss was raining down on some students from the ceiling. Who's to blame? A US company that got a $1 billion contract for Iraq reconstruction projects, and our friend the US Army Corps of Engineers, who look to have put as much oversight into this project as they did in building the levees that kept New Orleans safe from Katrina. Excerpt:
"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."
Gosh. I know! Let's talk about whether or not George Allen ever said "neener-neener" to lesbians when he was in college.
The WaPo's David Ignatius agrees that Iraq is a mess, but takes the Democrats to task for ducking the debate over what to do about it, instead satisfying themselves by taking pleasure over Bush's misery:
Here's a reality check for the Democrats: There is not a single government in the Middle East, with the possible exceptions of Iran and Syria, that favors a rapid U.S. pullout from Iraq. Why? The consensus in the region is that a retreat now would have disastrous consequences for America and its allies. Yet withdrawal is the Iraq strategy you hear from most congressional Democrats, whether they call it "strategic redeployment" or something else.
I wish Democrats (and Republicans, for that matter) were asking this question: How do we prevent Iraq from becoming a failed state? Many critics of the war would argue that the worst has already happened -- Iraq has unraveled. Unfortunately, as bad as things are, they could get considerably worse. Following a rapid American pullout, Iraq could descend into a full-blown civil war, with Sunni-Shiite violence spreading throughout the region. In this chaos, oil supplies could be threatened, sending prices well above $100 a barrel. Turkey, Iran and Jordan would intervene to protect their interests. James Fallows titled his collection of prescient essays warning about the Iraq war "Blind Into Baghdad." We shouldn't compound the error by being "blind out of Baghdad," too.
Jake Weisberg says that neither party will talk about the war, not only because each sees political advantage in avoiding the topic, but also because nobody has a clear idea what to do about it. Weisberg surveys the options for What To Do About Iraq, and says "neener-neener" to all of them.
At the University of Texas in Austin, there's only university housing for 20 percent of students. The rental housing market is insane there. Some students are dealing with the problem by living in co-op housing. It's not simply a matter of seeking more affordable housing. It's for community:
“It’s not just that people are arriving on big, anonymous campuses, but the homes these kids are coming out of are more isolated,” Mr. Jones said. “One of the problems in American society today is that people don’t eat together anymore. It’s the whole bowling alone thing, and co-ops are one of the few places where people can really come together.”
I graduated from college in 1989, so when I started this story, I thought, "Yeah, these co-ops are probably patchouli-reeking hippy havens, especially down in Austin." Newp. Times have changed:
For anyone with a certain idea about the free-ranging spirit of American college life, the taste for bureaucracy and logistics among co-op members can seem staggering. “One of the things that amazed me when I came here,” said Alan Robinson, the general coordinator of College Houses, “was that so many students wanted to impose rules on themselves.”
In addition to a labor czar, each house has various managers and officers, committee and subcommittee delegates, as well as a representative who serves on the board of either College Houses or the Inter-Cooperative Council, the other umbrella organization through which the co-ops here function. In most houses, regular meetings are held to discuss paint colors, parking, guest policy, labor infractions and ways to market co-op life.
[snip]
Members can also decide whether the ornery or impertinent among them should be submitted for review. The choice of one condiment brand or another can prompt impassioned debate. Recently, at Pearl Street, there was much discussion over how to handle students who might use drugs. A few weeks ago one member called the police to report the smell of marijuana in a nearby room.
Such an act would have seemed unimaginable 30 years ago on the premises of Pearl Street, easily the most storied building on campus. Originally constructed as a women’s dormitory in 1961, the house, called Mayfair House then, was home to Farrah Fawcett in her undergraduate years. Later it was reinvented as a co-op known as the Ark, where in the late 60’s and the 70’s beer replaced soda in the vending machines. By the 80’s drug habits were so pervasive in the Ark that it was shut down in 1988 because of “anarchy and building destruction,” as the brochure for College Houses puts it.
French House, the co-op where Mr. Stovall lives, is in many ways emblematic of a new ethos in student communal living, one in which social hedonism, commitment to a vegetarian diet and a monolithic political view no longer hold as the predominant conventions. French House is also known as the carnivore’s house; meat is served every evening. Ten of its 20 residents attend the Hill Country Bible Church nearby every Sunday. Dating within the house is discouraged. “The stereotype is that we are hippies and drug addicts,” said Patrick King, an art student and one of Mr. Stovall’s housemates. “We are neither hippies nor drug addicts.”
This is really great stuff. I hope that by the time Matthew is old enough for college, there'll be a crunchy con co-op at UT. Though he probably won't want anything to do with it. He's not a very crunchy kid. I was over at the doubleplus uncrunchy Virginia Postrel's place not long ago, and told her that my kid keeps going on and on about modernism, and modernist design, and how he wants to go to IKEA to look at the cool design, and how Jackson Pollock is his favorite artist and Frank Gehry is his f
avorite architect, and so forth. She good-naturedly cackled at my comeuppance. Who wouldn't?
One reason I love podcasting is that it gives me an opportunity to hear talk shows that I miss during the day. This morning, I heard most of an interesting exchange from the Diane Rehm show (download the podcast here, among a guy from the Family Research Council, a scholar from the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, and the head of the National Council of Churches. The topic? Religious voters this election season. It was a good discussion, though I didn't have time to hear the entire thing. One thing that annoyed me about the Rev. Bob Edgar, the NCC head, was his framing of the discussion. I know why he does it, but still, the spin is pretty irritating. He describes conservative Christians as the "far right," as if they were some sort of Christofascists. They can't simply be "conservatives" or "on the right;" no, it's the "far right," as if they were some fringe nut group on the margins of American religious life instead of well within the mainstream. In point of fact, the liberal churches that Rev. Edgar leads are less a part of the mainstream than the Evangelical conservatives (as the phrase goes, the mainline has been sidelined).
Not, of course, that this has anything much to do with the rightness or wrongness of their positions on the issues. Still, the language is intended to manipulate, and obscure understanding rather than increase it. But have you noticed that the media won't even use the word "liberal," even when it applies? There are "conservative Democrats" but "moderate Republicans," for example. There are "moderate Muslims" but not "liberal Muslims." And so forth. More on the substance of the Diane Rehm show conversation later, after I've taken Matthew to school...
Did Saddam make Iraq what it is, or did Iraq make Saddam what he is. This may shed some light Excerpt:
The [senior U.S. military] official said political parties who were plundering ministries were squandering chances to make progress that could reduce sectarian violence.
“I can tell you in every single ministry how they are using that ministry to fill the coffers of the political parties,” the official said. “They are doing that because that is exactly what Saddam Hussein did.”
There's good news on the German opera front -- a meeting of German Muslims and non-Muslim leaders came to agreement that whatever one thinks of that controversial opera, the show must go on. See, there is hope for agreement and conciliation, right? Right?
Well, maybe, but don't be too quick to judge based on this conference and its happy ending. Buried at the bottom of the NYT story is this nugget:
Mr. Schäuble, who oversees antiterrorism policy, warned Muslim leaders that they must abide by the German Constitution and the principles of a democratic society if they wanted to be included in the conference.
Ah. In order to be admitted to the table, Muslims had to concede at the outset what the kind of Muslims members of liberal democratic societies worry about refuse to concede. So how representative can it possibly be? This reminds me of something an Arab Muslim told me at a Mideast conference in Dubai last year: "Islamists never get invited to these conferences. But you can't really understand what's going on in the Muslim world unless you talk to the Islamists" -- who are much more popular than we in the West prefer to think.
Now here's an interesting situation. Remember the big controversy not long ago over the pro-life pharmacists who didn't want to sell the so-called morning-after pill because it's potentially abortifacient? Remember how they said it would violate their conscience to sell the pill, and how a lot of people got up in arms over it? At the time, I thought they should have the right to refrain; this is a matter of life and death to them. Refusing to sell contraception? No. But this is perhaps the only medication in any pharmacy that when used as directed could cause the death of another human being, in their eyes. To grant them the right to abstain on conscience grounds was a reasonable accomodation, or so it seemed to me.
Well, it seems that at least two Muslim shopkeepers in Brooklyn are refusing on religious grounds to sell alcohol. Excerpt:
“The people who think about the money sell beer,” Mr. Saleh said. “The people who think about their religion more don’t do it.” In addition, he said, students from Middle School 51 across the street used to try to buy beer, and he preferred not to run the risk of getting into trouble for selling to minors.
Kassem Salem, the manager of the Salem Deli, offered similar reasons for filling his beer cooler with Perrier. “Beer’s a big seller,” he said, “but first of all you have to think of your religion.”
I have to admit that I admire these guys for making a stand that costs them money, for the sake of honoring their religion. Though I would be deeply annoyed if I lived in their neighborhood and wanted to buy a six-pack. Do you see any kind of parallel in principle between these men refusing for reasons of conscience to sell beer, and the Christian pro-life pharmacists?
What about the Muslim cabbies in Minneapolis who refuse to transport arriving airport passengers suspected of carrying alcohol? If they refuse a fare, the airport makes the cabbies go to the back of the line. That seems just to me. Declining to sell somebody alcohol is one thing, but refusing to give a ride to someone who has a bottle of Scotch from the duty-free? No. The reader who sent me the link takes a dim view of all of this, saying "Sharia law is slowly becoming a part of our daily lives as we acquiese to these demands."
A German state opera company has cancelled a performance of a Mozart opera out of fear that Muslims will react violently to a scene in which the severed head of Mohammed is onstage. Funny, the scene also features the severed heads of Christ, the Buddha and Poseidon, but nobody much worries about Christians, Buddhists or worshipers of Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters burning down the opera house or blowing up tenors and sopranos.
OK, before we go where you know I'm going to go, let's stipulate one thing. This, from the NYT account of the controversy:
The disputed scene is not part of Mozart’s opera, but was added by the director, Hans Neuenfels. In it, the king of Crete, Idomeneo, carries the heads of Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon on to the stage, placing each on a stool.
“Idomeneo,” first performed in 1781, tells a mythical story of Poseidon, or Neptune, the god of the sea, who toys with men’s lives and demands spiteful sacrifice.
This jackass Neuenfels was being deliberately provocative, and to what end? So many contemporary artists think nothing of defecating on the most deeply held religious beliefs of a very great number of people. In fact, it's seen as a mark of legitimacy in their circles. There is a nasty, spiteful part of me that takes pleasure in the squirming of these artists under such circumstances. I went to see Terrence McNally's blasphemous but ersatz and boring gay Jesus play "Corpus Christi" in NYC a few years ago, on assignment for the Weekly Standard, and saw hundreds of Christian protesters peacefully demonstrating outside the theater. McNally and his supporters thought they were being so brave. One wonders what they'd do if they had to worry about Christians being as demonstrative about blasphemy as they do about Muslims. A vicious little part of me likes to see them squirm. I have to confess this.
But that sentiment is very wrong, and I reject it. As angry as we may get at the blasphemies of artists, we absolutely must object to this capitulation on the part of the Germans in the face of Islamofascism (yeah, I used the word: what is fascism as a tactic -- as distinct from a political philosophy -- if not using the threat of violence to suppress speech you don't like?). The right to free speech doesn't mean that speech will always be exercised wisely, or tastefully, and there are forms of speech -- child pornography, say -- that must not be exercised at all. The right to blaspheme, though, must be protected, for our own good. Hundreds of years ago, European Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and vice versa. The right to be able to speak your mind on religious and political questions was not won easily or quickly. If Europe keeps capitulating to Muslim sensibilities instead of standing up for Western free-speech principles, where will it end? In dhimmitude.
What's next for Europe? Cancelling Western civilization itself?
John Derbyshire reviews a new book that examines the horrible practice of Europeans kidnapped and forced into African slavery by Muslim pirates. He concludes:
This whole terrible episode in European history has been forgotten. Is there any chance we might persuade the Muslim nations of North Africa to erect modest monuments to the million or so European Christians who suffered and died as slaves of their ancestors? My guess would be: no chance at all.
In a welcome essay, Lee Harris notes that columnist Madeleine Bunting of The Guardian cited "papal stupidity" for provoking Muslims into acts of violence. Harris notes:
"Papal stupidity" is strong language. But a few paragraphs before this harsh phrase, Madeleine Bunting has prepared us for it by arguing that "even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Islam teaches...that reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable. What unites all Muslims is a passionate devotion and commitment to protecting the honor of Mohammed." A Pope who did not know that "reverence for the Prophet is non-negotiable" must, therefore, be guilty of egregious stupidity.
Harris then proposes this thought experiment:
Suppose that the eminent English biologist Richard Dawkins delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg in which he attacked supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design theory as "ignorant boobs" -- words that he has already applied in them in a written article. Now, let us imagine that Christian fundamentalists all over the United States, outraged by this inflammatory language, went on a violent rampage. Suppose that they lynched an elderly professor of biology, and attacked biology departments at several universities. Suppose that teachers of high school biology went about in fear of their lives, while many simply quit their jobs.
What kind of article would Madeleine Bunting write about such a hypothetical incident? Do you think she would violently condemn Richard Dawkins, writing something along the lines of:
"Even the most cursory knowledge of dialogue with Creationists teaches...that reverence for the Biblical account of man's creation is non-negotiable. What unites all Christian fundamentalists is a passionate devotion and commitment to the inerrancy of the Holy Bible."
I think we all know the answer to that question. Would you see any article like that in any American newspaper? Unthinkable. It should be unthinkable. And yet...
Iraq is in a civil war now that could embroil the entire Middle East in a general war. Afghanistan is going to hell. Iran is marching undeterred towards nuclear weaponry. The US Army is stuck in a quagmire that we can't fight successfully, and we can't withdraw from. Nobody in Washington seems to have the faintest clue what to do about any of this. Let's not even bring up the ongoing bankrupting of the country via deficit spending.
But the US Senate race in Virginia will be decided on whether or not the frat-boy Republican incumbent used the n-word in college. What a country.
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