In a press conference yesterday, on the day that contents of confidential Fort Worth Catholic diocese files on sexually abusive priests hit the papers, FW Bishop Kevin Vann held a press conference. He profusely apologized for the abuse, which took place under the, ahem, leadership of his late predecessor, Bishop Joseph Delaney. But he repeatedly refused to criticize Delaney's handling of the matter. Vann told the press: "Not being here at the time those decisions were made, I can't say that they should have done this or that."
Oh, [barnyard epithet]. Why on earth is it impossible for Bishop Vann to say, "It was wrong for Bishop Delaney to let priests who molest children stay in ministry"? Is the idea that you have to be so loyal to your predecessor, even though his bad decisions put innocent kids and their families at risk, that you can't even find the stones to say that this was wrong? With these guys, it really is about saving face, no matter what. Nobody blames Bishop Vann for what happened before he got here. But now people are mad at him for refusing to say the bleeding obvious, for whatever reason.
This incident reminds me of something a conservative priest told me about running into a well-known conservative Catholic bishop at a large gathering of bishops. The priest remarked to his ideological confrere, "Well, it's good to see a good bishop at last." The bishop didn't think the compliment was funny, chastising the priest thus: "Every bishop is a good bishop."
Reader Conor sends a link to a must-read Commonweal essay from Andrew Bacevich, the retired colonel and professor of international relations. He's a conservative, but has long been a critic of the Iraq War. In this long, wide-ranging essay, Bacevich warns that the United States is in danger of losing the Republic because of cultural decadence combined with a crusading pridefulness that refuses to acknowledge the limits of our own power to remake the world to suit us. This is the fault of both left and right, in Bacevich's view (which is the same view I put forth in "Crunchy Cons"). Here's a key passage:
During the same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations-notably those in the Islamic world-to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]
The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and self-gratification. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once observed, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.” In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence.
The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing behavior once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative.
Laws, traditions, and social arrangements impeding the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and children raised in single-parent homes-all once viewed as problematic-lost much of their stigma. Pornography-including child pornography-reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. And popular music became, in the words of cultural critic Martha Bayles, a “masturbatory fantasy.”
Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign-policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world-those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights-today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with-and even reinforced-the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of “stuff.”
Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillmen
t (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption-acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets.
By the end of the twentieth century, many Americans had concluded, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, that “to consume was to be free.” The events of 9/11 did not dislodge that perception. In early 2006-with the nation locked in what President Bush insisted was an epic confrontation with “Islamofascism”-an article in the New York Times Magazine posed the question “Is Freedom Just Another Word for Many Things to Buy?” In the conduct their daily affairs, countless Americans, most of them oblivious to Bush’s war, answer that question in the affirmative.
Along the way, consumption eclipsed voting or military service as the nearest thing to an acknowledged civic obligation. If citizenship today endows “the sovereign shopper with the right to select from store shelves,” Cross comments, it also imposes “the duty to spend for the ‘good of the economy.’” Americans once assessed the nation’s economic health by tallying up the output of the nation’s steel mills or the tons of bullion locked away in Fort Knox. Today, consumer demand has emerged as the favored metric of overall economic wellbeing. In recent years “Black Friday” has taken its place among notable dates on the national calendar-the willingness of consumers to open their pocketbooks on the day after Thanksgiving having become a key indicator of economic vigor. Woe betide the nation, should holiday shoppers spend less this year than last.
American globalism did little to foster this radical change in American culture. But the cultural revolution-both the sexual liberation demanded by the Left and the conspicuous consumption promoted by the Right-massively complicates our relations with those beyond our borders, who see our reigning conceptions of freedom as shallow and corrosive.
Bacevich goes on to say that the central question posed by the failure in Iraq is:
Are ongoing efforts to “change the way that they live” securing or further distorting the American way of life? To put it another way, will the further expansion of American dominion abroad enhance the freedom we profess to value? Or have we now reached a point where expansion merely postpones and even exacerbates an inevitable reckoning with the cultural and economic contradictions to which our pursuit of freedom has given rise?
If we're going to continue to defend "the American way of life," it's going to require massive infusion of money -- which we're borrowing from abroad -- and a commitment to militarizing our society for the sake of reforming the world. Far better for us to focus on reforming ourselves, and our own habits, both cultural and economic. We are, Bacevich says, writing checks on a bank account that's already overdrawn, and living as if the law of gravity (so to speak) had been repealed by force of American will. And we are slowly moving towards tyranny, which will be required if we are to keep up our self-indulgence. Bacevich again:
Our own self-induced confusion about freedom, reflected in our debased culture and our disordered economy, increases our susceptibility to this totalitarian temptation even as it deadens our awareness of the danger it poses. Escaping its clutches will require something more than presidents intoning clichés about America’s historic mission while launching crusades against oil-rich tyrants on the other side of the globe. We are in difficult straits and neither arms (already fully committed) nor treasure (just about used up) will get us out. Our corrupt age requires reformation.
A final thought: from time to time here, I mention lessons I learned at a Dubai media conference last year at this time. I am haunted -- the word isn't too strong -- by what I saw among the Arab Muslims, as they grapp
led with the new media world that was going to wipe out, or at least dramatically alter, their traditional culture. As an American scholar of the Arab world told me at the time, we Americans have to understand that the media revolution our culture underwent took place over 50 or 60 years, and within a culture that was much more able to receive it. The Arabs are getting it jammed up within about 10 years, and they're far less culturally flexible. Some things are going to break. And despite the problems I have with Islam, and my desire to see some pretty basic aspects of Islamic culture (e.g., the way they treat women) change, I can't be enthusiastic about American cultural hegemony. The idea that the Middle East would become an outpost of Hollywood depresses me. Better Hollywood than Peshawar, to be sure, but still, those of us here who lament how corrosive the nihilistic American popular culture is should consider how it must look to Muslim men and women overseas, who quite rightly see us as a threat to the things they hold dearest.
If, as Turkey's senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope on his arrival, Islam is a religion of "vast tolerance" that rejects all violence and terror and "assumes that killing an innocent person is a heavy crime and sin," it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?
If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic" to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of Turkey's tiny Jewish minority.
Islam is a religion of peace, and those who say otherwise had better watch their backs.
Back in 2004, Fr. Gassalascus Jape pondered Turkey's possible entry into the EU in light of the advantages it will supposedly bring to the small number of Christians living in Turkey. Excerpt:
Moll quotes Verhuegen’s smug approval of Turkey’s “improving situation” and notes the testimony of a Greek Christian living in Turkey that: “Turkish membership in the EU will be the best guarantee for the future of this dwindling community.”
In no way do I wish to trivialize or downplay the significant persecution those Greek Christians have faced in a predominantly Muslim country, but somehow the vision of “Saddleback on the Black Sea” seems to demean the centuries old story of those Christians’ particular survival even more. Moll ends with an American missionary in Turkey who comments breezily that “we are relatively free and we are tolerated now.”
If this is the sum and substance of western missionary zeal these days–to be free and tolerated–(and I fear that all to often it is) then Christians have good reason to question the compromises with Liberalism they are wont to make.
Yep. Irreversibly open up the remnants of Christendom to mass migration of a culturally alien people in a time of dramatic population and cultural decline, all for the sake of the hope that Christians living in Turkey won't get beaten up when they go out for a carton of milk. Is this really a worthwhile exchange?
The subject line is a quote from Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth files, released yesterday by a state judge. The files are diocesan records on seven accused child-molesting priests whose cases were part of a 2003 lawsuit against the diocese. Here's the story from today's Dallas Morning News. The "he" in question is Father Philip Magaldi, who told the late Bishop Joseph Delaney that yes, he'd paid high school boys to administer enemas to him. Bishop Delaney left him in ministry, and let him continue as chaplain to Boy Scouts, and gave him chance after chance, despite more and more sex-related complaints piling up against him.
The files also show that Bishop Delaney wrote, in one confrontation with his old pal Magaldi: "There is no way that -- that I can defend myself before God or before the people of the diocese or before the world if ... [a reporter for The Dallas Morning News], for instance, tomorrow morning, published all of this. There would be no defense."
The only reason the DMN (and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) are publishing them today is because we went to court to request that these trial documents be made public. Bishop Delaney was clearly more interested in saving face than saving the Catholic children of his diocese from his predatory priests. The diocese fought to keep these records secret, but failed, thank God (to his credit, the new bishop, Vann, decided not long after he took over from the deceased Delaney to stop fighting to keep the records sealed). People need to know what was done. It can't be undone, but it must not be forgotten. If not for the courts and the newspapers, this would all have gone down the memory hole.
The Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a nondenominational megachurch in Longwood, Fla., said he resigned as the coalition's incoming president because its board of directors disagreed with his plan to broaden the organization's agenda. In addition to opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Hunter, 58, wanted to take on such issues as poverty, global warming and HIV/AIDS.
"My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we're not carrying out the full message of Jesus," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They began to think this might threaten their base or evaporate some of their support, and they said they just couldn't go there."
It's hard to blame the old-guard leadership at CC headquarters for this. They say they had four state chapters break away in protest of Pastor Hunter's statements indicating he wanted to expand the conservative activist group's areas of concern. Notice expand not change -- but the old-line grassroots revolted. Well, if that's how they feel about it, fine; I think what Pastor Hunter represents is terrific, but I'm not a member of the Christian Coalition. But do please note that this reveals once again how fractured Evangelicalism is, and how the coming generation of Evangelicals have different priorities.
If she hadn't passed away earlier, Benedict's capitulation on Turkey's EU bid would have killed her. Well, the Vatican is saying that it's not that big a deal, Benedict's saying that he now encourages Turkey's bid to join the EU, when in the past he had been against it. That means that the Pope is now pretty much on the same page as Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew on that question. Bartholomew wants it because he believes that it will result in more religious freedom for the few remaining Christians in Turkey. The price of this, though, would be opening up the entire European continent to unrestricted immigration from a strongly Islamic nation of 70 million -- and this would risk annihilating European culture. If the Turks were having to consider a massive influx of European Christians, of which there are fewer and fewer each day, into their country, they'd be quite right to be concerned about how their Islamic culture and society would be permanently altered. But everybody knows that virtually no French, Germans, Italians and Spaniards will be migrating to Ankara; the movement will be entirely westward.
In 2004, when he was still a cardinal, Benedict said publicly that historically and culturally, Turkey has always been distinct from Europe. What he might have said too was that in fact the Turks have for centuries been the sworn enemy of Europe. Now, no one should want enmity to continue, but seeking peaceful coexistence in no way requires political union. Why Turkey (and more broadly, Islamic civilization) has been the enemy of Christendom have to do with geopolitics, yes, but also with very different and incompatible cultural values. Benedict is now saying that if Turkey meets EU requirements on free speech and freedom of religion, then its entry into the EU would be fine. But the state changing its laws does not change what's in the hearts of its people. What happened to the Ratzinger who once understood that, and understood that European Christian culture, or what's left of it, would be permanently altered, and maybe even eliminated, by the Islamic flood from Turkey? And for that matter, why on earth does the Orthodox Patriarch believe gaining more legal liberty for the few Orthodox remaining in the former Constantinople is worth Europe's opening the gates to massive legal Muslim immigration -- especially with Western Europe so spiritually and culturally weak, and failing to reproduce itself?
A lovely post from "eCurious" in the Santa combox below:
Sigh. Here it is again, the idea that having Santa (or even St. Nick) constitutes lying to your children.
In the great classic "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Don Quixote lives in a world of his own imagining. But a funny thing happens when he encounters 'normal' people; they find themselves pretending to see and believe in the things he does; they must enter his world in order to communicate with him. In a way, I suppose, they are 'lying' to him by entering into his fairy tales. But if they stay in the mundane world, they can't relate to him at all.
The world of a child is a mysterious and magical place. The blooming of a rose in the garden is an enchanted event beyond all understanding; the weekly arrival of the great noisy garbage truck is anticipated with the fear that it might not happen and the joyous dread that it will. When my oldest daughter, nearly a year old, was brought out of her crib late at night to see the lights on our Christmas tree for the first time, she whispered, "Wow," an as-yet unknown richness in her tiny vocabulary. She said it a lot that first Christmas, as enchantments she'd never dreamed of appeared all around her.
We adults forget the fairy-tale lace that drapes childhood and screens it from so much of the ugliness in the world. It is our privilege at Christmas to attempt to add a little to the embroidery, with our Saint Nicholas and our hidden generosity. We're clumsy at it, no doubt. We're a little like the people in Don Quixote, pretending we see giants and ladies and noble squires instead of the mundane and everyday. But underneath it all, there's a stirring at our hearts, and I think it's then that I understand, a little, what Our Lord means when He says we have to be like little children to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
In a combox thread below, we're talking about whether or not to do the Santa Claus thing with your kids. Some readers are saying that they celebrate St. Nicholas' feast day on December 6. You might be interested to know that in the Netherlands, that's the day that Dutch kids get their Christmas presents. As far as I know, it's a tradition peculiar to Holland and the Flemish part of Belgium. "Sinterklaas" -- whence "Santa Claus," though Sinterklaas looks like a bishop, not a jolly old elf -- arrives by boat from Spain, accompanied by "Zwarte Pieten" -- Black Petes -- who help him deliver presents to Dutch children.
With the children’s frivolity out of the way, the Dutch observe Christmas as more of a religious holiday – or, given how secular Holland has become, at least observe a more sober festival than the American pageant of consumerism.
We learned the Sinterklaas tradition from Dutch friends, and observe it in our household out of affection for them and their culture. Yet the real Christmas tradition my Dutch friends gave to my family came to me in 1991, when I spent the holiday with the Jeurissen family, in a southern town called Valkenswaard.
Miriam Jeurissen and I had become pen pals as high school students in the 1980s, and I’d gotten accustomed to visiting her and her family whenever I could score a cheap flight. I thought it might be fun to fly in from Louisiana to spend Christmas in Europe that year, and her parents, Arthur and Mieke, welcomed me. I didn’t know what to expect, having never experienced Christmas outside America.
It turned out to be a revelation. The close-knit Jeurissens began Christmas Eve with Mama, Papa and the sisters gathering with family friends to cook. I made a gumbo as my contribution. (Ever tried to find okra in North Brabant? Don’t.) Everybody pitched in to help, as you might expect, and there was much joyous eating and drinking around the table.
And then, when it was time for the family to exchange Christmas gifts, a quietly astonishing thing happened. The Jeurissen tradition was to give presents that each person made, not purchased. One sister read poems that she had written for her siblings. Another presented siblings with hand-sewn clothing. And so forth. Everyone received their gift with obvious gratitude and pleasure.
Just before midnight, we all rose, put on our overcoats and walked down to the town square for mass. Then we all meandered home, in the cold, and dropped sleepily to bed. And that was Christmas.
But from an American perspective, this was astonishingly countercultural. Every year, we all talk in our culture about how important it is to get back to the “real” meaning of Christmas – that is, to put consumerism in its proper place -- but somehow we never do. Yet for once, I had seen what it was like to have a Christmas where the gift-giving had nothing to do with credit cards, commercials or mall-induced hypertension. It was entirely about faith and family. It was also, to me, a minor miracle. O little town of Valkenswaard…
I can’t say whether I saw a manifestation of Dutch culture, or just one family’s lovely tradition. But it made an impression on me, one that came out years later, when I had a family of my own, and found myself struggling to keep the true meaning of Christmas in sight, and to pass it on to my children. It takes on special meaning this Christmas, because Mama Mieke died from cancer earlier this year. She was the happy genius of that household, and the epitome of gezelligheid – that untranslatable Dutch word that conveys a sense of the rightness of the world one experiences in the company of good friends.
The Jeurissens, comfortably middle-class citizens of a prosperous country, could have had the Yuletide blowout common in America. But they – typical Dutch – chose the more modest path. And because of that, the
richness and humanity of that plain Christmas has not been forgotten by an American who tries to pass a similar tradition on to his young family, half a world away.
The Jewish historian Bat Ye'or has written about how invisible to the West are the persecuted Christians in the Islamic world. It has long been my view that American journalists are far more worried about offending Muslims than they are about standing up for human beings who are persecuted because they happen to be Christians. I believe that many US journalists hear "Christians" and think "Falwell" -- imposing their own American experiences and biases on Christian believers around the world. American journalists, in general, are far more worried that somebody in Peoria might look askance at a Muslim wearing a headscarf than they are concerned that Christians are being massacred by Muslims in Indonesia.
Anyway, here's a real-life story I just heard from a friend of mine who's an immigration attorney here in Dallas. I publish his e-mail with his permission:
I represented a Pakistani Christian for asylum successfully, beautiful man, very brave. He belonged to the Protestant church that was hand-grenaded in Islamabad. We were interviewed for a story for national TV for Thanksgiving. At the last minute they told us, our segment had been deleted out of concern by the network about ‘content.’ What content? The production co. said concern about Muslim sensibilities. My client spent hours in my office retelling the story only to be told after the fact (months later) that the network was concerned about sensibilities. Unbelievable.
My anger eventually gave way to sadness that the plight of these brave people was not told. He’s even nervous here. Our contract stated his name could not be used and they would obscure his face. People should know these stories.
If it was for a Thanksgiving show, no doubt they were talking to this persecuted Christian about how grateful he is to live in a country where he has religious freedom, as opposed to Muslim Pakistan. But media elites cannot abide that. Too politically correct.
The person who stole my Diana Krall Christmas CD had better return it right this second, before someone gets hurt. She's my special Christmas elf, and all. Have a heart, willya? Willya?
Have to admit, painfully, that I was in a Starbucks last night and heard them playing the Charlie Brown Christmas CD, a perennial favorite, and I thought ... ugh, this again? Heresy! That's one of the great Christmas albums, and I'm tired of it on the first hearing of the season. Something's wrong with me, I just know it.
Father Wilson sent me "A Celtic Christmas Sojourn" a few years ago, and it's got to be my family's favorite Christmas album. I played the disc a couple of nights ago, and it's just wonderful, wonderful stuff. Never get tired of listening to that one, which always puts me in the mood of that haunting final paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead":
Yes, the newspapers are right: snow is general all over Ireland. It is falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, father westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It is falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lies thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swoons slowly as he hear the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Another Christmas disc I never grow tired of: The Roches' "We Three Kings" Not only is this exquisite Christmas music, but these songs have deeply personal meaning to me and my family, as you'll see if you read this old Touchstone essay of mine, which concludes with us hearing the Roche sisters perform an a cappella Christmas concert in a snowy park near Ground Zero, 2002.
Please share with us in the comboxes your favorite Christmas discs.
Tmatt has the goods on a yummy "clarification" the Episcopal Church has put out to counter the blogstorm that erupted over Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's limousine-liberal condescension towards Catholics and Mormons. Once again we see the vindication of Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe: when a public official inadvertently tells the truth.
Matthew and I pray together for part of the way to school. This morning, I nearly swerved off the road when I heard him say, "Thank you, God, for Santa's birthday coming soon." I think he was just messing with me, though, but he still got swiftly corrected. In any case, it brought to mind the question many observant Christian parents deal with: what to tell the kids about Santa Claus?
I have friends on both sides of the issue. Some don't even get started on the Santa Claus thing, because they don't want to distract their children from the true religious nature of the holiday. I respect that, and admire it. We chose to take our chances with the Santa myth. Our thinking was that we'd rather deal with the temptation for our kids to take Santa more seriously than Christ rather than deprive them of the pleasure of believing in Santa. We work diligently to remind them of what Christmas is really about, and to tell them the story of St. Nicholas. Truth to tell, with the three-year-old at least, the Santa stuff is clearly at the forefront of his mind this time of year. And that does worry me a bit. But I came through a dualist (Santa-and-Jesus) Christmas childhood just fine, and I think as long as the parents work to keep the focus primarily on religion in the home, most people will do okay.
How do you handle the Santa question in your home?
Here's my Dallas Morning News column today about Benedict's trip to Turkey. In it, I talk about the suffering of Christian populations under the Islamic yoke, and how important it is for Eastern and Western Christianity to find as much unity as they can manage now as they try to survive both militant secularism and militant Islam.
UPDATE: Here's a graf from the column:
Benedict has a clearer eye about Islam than his predecessor, who rarely missed an opportunity to abase himself before Muslims for the sake of improved relations and received little for his efforts. This pope is different. He is not prepared to pretend that it is of no matter that in Europe Muslims are free to worship as they please and to build mosques at will, while in Turkey and the Muslim world, Christians are generally not permitted to build churches and face state-sanctioned discrimination. It is better, says Benedict, to speak frankly about the world as it is, rather than about the world Western elites wish we lived in.
On the Right-wing Film Geek blog, Victor spies a particularly obnoxious form of seasonal Christophobia:
CHICAGO (AP) — A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film "The Nativity Story" might offend non-Christians. New Line Cinema, which said it was dropped, had planned to play a loop of the new film on televisions at the event. [snip] An executive vice president with New Line Cinema, Christina Kounelias ... said she finds it hard to believe that non-Christians who attended something called Christkindlmarket would be surprised or offended by the presence of posters, brochures and other advertisements of the movie. "One would assume that if (people) were to go to Christkindlmarket, they'd know it is about Christmas," she said.
Victor points out that this is a classic example of free speech -- a benign form of it, one might add -- being chilled. And why? What sort of thin-skinned cretins are so sensitive that they're offended at being reminded of, you know, Christ at a German Christmas market, for crying out loud?! Here's a suggestion to the Christophobic and their spineless enablers in government bureaucracies: if you're offended by the idea of Christ, don't go to the Christkindlmarkt. For those of us, Christian and non-Christian, who actually enjoy the season, leave us alone. Victor adds, accurately:
Christianity = "controversial"; other religions = "celebrate our diversity."
Got a nice e-mail from a Baptist clergyman in a Dallas suburb. I've edited out a couple of details to protect his privacy:
I wanted to tell you briefly about a crunchy con dilemma I encountered this weekend and the cost that was involved.
This weekend when going with our little girls to find a Christmas tree we noticed an older couple selling trees right by our house. We were compelled by the fact that they slept in their camper in the parking lot for a month every year, sold trees that they bought from a friend and local farmer and brought down from Wisconsin every year. We got out of the car, walked the lot, had a great conversation with the couple (in which my wife invited them to dinner) and then faced some serious sticker shock. The trees were more than double the price of trees three miles down the road at Wal-Mart. Seriously, we were looking to spend $100 for a 7 foot tree. It was there we faced the real decision. Do what I know is right or save 50 bucks?
I never intended to be a crunchy con. I didn’t read your book and think, “Man, I would like to be one of those.” But when faced with choosing small and local over large and industrial, I had to do it. And although I would love to have saved the $50, I found myself feeling as though to leave that lot would be a moral deficiency on my part. I could have done it, but not with a clear conscience. As I had a conversation with this older man about the different kinds of pine, then looked over at my wife who was talking to his wife about her travels from Wisconsin, and watched my daughter run through the trees in a parking lot and say, “Dis one daddy” then I had to make the purchase.
It was worth it – and for some strange reason, I feel like a better person for doing it.
Via Reihan, this thought-provoking column by the conservative Ben Stein, based on a conversation he had with Warren Buffett in which the second-richest man in the world told him that the rich were making out like bandits. Excerpt:
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
It has become such a cliche among conservatives, to resort to the "class warfare" bogeyman whenever someone points out that the rich really are getting a lot richer, while the rest of us are treading water. Stein goes through all the standard conservative arguments meant to quash any talk about tax fairness, then arrives at this point:
People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?
Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?
Crazy Ben Stein! Where'd he get that idea? Doesn't he know that the Republican line is to keep their voters from asking these questions by making discussing class conflict taboo? And to suppress discussion of how big business is doing very well with effectively open borders that are changing our culture in some deleterious ways (that are not going to much affect the neighborhoods where the business-owning class live)by praising free markets uncritically, and suggesting that those who object are really closet racists? And until recently, it was to suppress discussion on the unwisdom of expecting the Iraqi people to be able to govern themselves as liberal democrats by accusing those who said that the Iraqis were unready for democracy of being, yes, closet racists (e.g., "How dare you say that Arabs can't handle democracy!")
And so forth.
We on the political and cultural right need to start talking about this sort of thing. Republican unwillingness to address the unfairness that that raving communist Warren Buffett warned Ben Stein about is just going to elect more Democrats.
Here's Rebecca West, in her 1941 classic "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia," reflecting on the poor inhabitants of a Dalmatian island, and in particular a "heartrending figure" of a despairing woman, sitting on a stone wall.
This was cause enough that Rab should be poor; but there was a further cause which made her poorer still. It is not at all inappropriate that the men and women on these Dalmatian islands should have faces which recall the crucified Christ. The Venetian Republic did not always fight the Turks with arms. For a very long time they contented themselves with taking the edge off the invaders' attack by the payment of immense bribes to the officials and military staff of the occupied territories. The money for these was not supplied by Venice. It was drawn from the people of Dalmatia. After the fish had rotted, some remained sound; after the corn had paid its ten per cent, and the wool and the wine and the oil ahd been haggled down in the Venetian market, some of its price returned to the vender. Of this residue the last ducat was extracted to pay the tribute to the Turks. These people of Dalmatia gave the bread out of their mouths to save us of Western Europe from Islam; and it is ironical that so successfully did they protect us that those among us who would be broad-minded, who will in pursuit of that end stretch their minds till they fall apart in idiocy, would blithely tell us that perhaps the Dalmatians need not have gone to that trouble, that an Islamized West could not have been worse than what we are today. Their folly is certified for what it is by the mere sound of the word "Balkan" with its suggestion of a disorder that defies human virtue and intelligence to accomplish its complete correction. I could confirm that certificate by my own memories: I had only to shut my eyes to smell the dust, the lethargy, the rage and hopelessness of a Macedonian town, once a glory to Europe, that had too long been Turkish. The West has done much that is ill, it is vulgar and superficial and economically sadist; but it has not known that death in life which was suffered by the Christian provinces under the Ottoman Empire. From this the people of Rab had saved me: I should say, are saving me. The woman who sat on the stone wall was in want because the gold which should have been handed down to her had bought my safety from the Turks. Impotent and embarrassed, I stood on the high mountain and looked down on the terraced island where my saviours, small and black as ants, ran here and there, attempting to repair their destiny.
Along with that, even young children are having to deal with peer pressure and other societal influences.
Beyond the drugs, sex and rock'n'roll their boomer and Gen X parents navigated, technology and consumerism have accelerated the pace of life, giving kids easy access to influences that may or may not be parent-approved. Sex, violence and foul language that used to be relegated to late-night viewing and R-rated movies are expected fixtures in everyday TV.
And many tweens model what they see, including common plot lines "where the kids are really running the house, not the dysfunctional parents," says Plante, who in addition to being Zach's dad is a psychology professor at Santa Clara University in California's Silicon Valley.
He sees the results of all these factors in his private practice frequently.
Kids look and dress older. They struggle to process the images of sex, violence and adult humor, even when their parents try to shield them. And sometimes, he says, parents end up encouraging the behavior by failing to set limits - in essence, handing over power to their kids.
"You get this kind of perfect storm of variables that would suggest that, yes, kids are becoming teens at an earlier age," Plante says.
Natalie Wickstrom, a 10-year-old in suburban Atlanta, says girls her age sometimes wear clothes that are "a little inappropriate." She describes how one friend tied her shirt to show her stomach and "liked to dance, like in rap videos." Girls in her class also talk about not only liking but "having relationships" with boys.
"There's no rules, no limitations to what they can do," says Natalie, who's also in fifth grade.
Nope, nothing much wrong with this mainstream culture of ours. Nothing we can't handle. Throw your kids into this piranha tank, just to prove that you're no elitist, that you're no better than anybody else.
Right.
The center is not holding, and I detect no general will to resist the decline. For some of us parents, that means we must seek out alternatives, no matter what anybody else says. As I've said before, there comes a time when it's foolish to stand in the yard and tell people it's going to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, so they'd better make ready for it. At some point, you've got to get onto the ark ... or drown.
It's not online, but here, from the print edition of today's Dallas Morning News, is my short interview with Army 1st Lt. Daniel Ebarb, to whom I spoke last week, and for whom I'd asked y'all to pray when news came a few weeks back that he'd been shot by a sniper on patrol in Iraq. When I talked to him by phone, he had not the slightest trace of self-pity in his voice. None. Wherever you stand on the war, you have to admire the awesome physical and moral courage of this young man.
Where and how are you spending Thanksgiving weekend?
I will be in Houston for Thanksgiving, at a spinal rehabilitation specialty clinic at the VA Hospital. I was deployed to Iraq as an infantry platoon leader with the 1st Cavalry Division, when I was shot in the neck by a sniper. The resulting wounds from the bullet have caused me to be completely paralyzed from the chest down. My wife and the majority of my family are going to drive to Houston from our home in Louisiana to be with me for Thanksgiving. It won't matter that we're not at home; everyone is just extremely excited to be together as a family for the holiday.
What are you thankful for this year?
This year I am most thankful for being able to spend the holiday with my family. From the moment that I realized that I would survive getting shot, all the way until now, I've been so thankful to be alive and to have the ability to come home. Physical health has taken a back seat to just being alive this year.
The support for my health and my family's welfare has been absolutely overwhelming and very humbling. It's been amazing how an event like this has brought people together from all over the country and world. The support that's been shown for me as a wounded soldier is unbelievable. I'm thankful that I was a part of what our country is doing in Iraq, and hope that all the deployed soldiers get a chance to see the love and support that our country has for them as well.
You married in August, deployed in October, and came home paralyzed weeks later. Explain "thankful" in that context.
I believe in the mission. I actually got to see how our military was able to help hte Iraqis. They weren't able to do it on their own, and we were able to give them a sense of confidence. I'm proud that I was able to contribute to what our country was doing for them.
Via Ross, you must read this long essay by Mark Danner, about the Iraq situation. It is the most lucid and straightforward presentation of how we got into this miss, and how difficult it will be to get out of it, that I've read anywhere. It focuses on how the President and all his men deliberately deceived themselves about what we'd likely face in Iraq, because they were determined to fight the war they wanted to fight, instead of deal with the world as it is. It's a story of blindness, of hubris, and of catastrophe. Danner sets up his piece by recalling being in Anbar province in October 2005, just before the country voted on the constitution. He was in the company of a smart, hardworking young US diplomat, who assured him that the Sunnis were going to vote "yes." Here's Danner:
I took the young diplomat's words as an invaluable bit of inside wisdom from the American who knew this ground better than any other, and I kept them in mind a few hours later as I traveled from polling place to polling place in that city of rubble, listening as the Fallujans told me of their anger at the Americans and the "Iranians" (as they called the leading Shiite politicians) and of their hatred for the constitution that they believed was meant to divide and thus destroy Iraq. I pondered the diplomat's words that evening, when I realized that in a long day of interviews I'd not met a single Iraqi who would admit to voting for the constitution. And I thought of his words again several days later when it was confirmed that in Anbar province—where the most knowledgeable, experienced, indefatigable American had confided to me what he had plainly ardently believed, that on the critical vote on the constitution "a great many people would vote yes"—that in Anbar ninety-seven out of every hundred Iraqis who voted had voted no. With all his contacts and commitment, with all his energy and brilliance, on the most basic and critical issue of politics on the ground he had been entirely, catastrophically wrong.
And we go from there, following the motif set by 98-year-old George F. Kennan's line abotu the nature of war, before the Iraq hostilities started: "You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end." Here's Danner again:
Anyone wanting to answer the question of "how we began" in Iraq has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.
A mere summary can't do justice to the power of this review essay. I found myself at several points having to put it down (I printed it out -- it's 28 printed pages) to absorb the skull-cracking, ideologically-driven incompetence of the president and his team. As I was reading it, CNN was reporting on yesterday's horrific events in Baghdad, and on widespread speculation that the country was at a tipping point into all-out civil war, with all those people powerless before death squads and militias who burst into their homes and kidnap them and chop their heads off or drill into their brains, or just kill them with car bombs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer, the whole lot -- stained with infamy, forever. Danner again, on the next act in this gruesome drama:
We are well down the road toward this dark vision, a wave of threatening instability that stands as the precise opposite of the Bush administration's "democratic tsunami," the wave of liberalizing revolution that American power, through the invasion of Iraq, was to set loose throughout the Middle East. The chances of accomplishing such change within Iraq itself, let alone across the complicated landscape of the entire region, were always very small. Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the pr
oduct of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity. Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope—in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.
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