Well, we're worn out from all the traveling, so it's a quiet New Year's Eve here. The boys are in bed, the baby is in her bassinet, and Julie and I just popped open a bottle of ice-cold Veuve Clicquot, because we know that we're too tired to make it till midnight. We're going to sit down by the fire in a few minutes and chill. Just so you know what a fashion plate I am, I'm wearing the Nesting Uniform, a.k.a. a Crunchy-Con shalwar kameez (a faded L.L. Bean tartan nightshirt, with clashing plaid pajama pants). I'm telling you, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that around here. Woo.
The best thing that happened to me this year was the birth of my daughter, Nora Lucia. The second-best thing that happened was the publication of "Crunchy Cons," which has helped me make a lot of new friends. Funny, but the bad stuff escapes me right this moment. Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for reading. As Miss Ella once asked, "What are you doing New Year's Eve?" Let us know below.
Just got in from Louisiana. Somebody should invent the perfect cocktail to slurp to decompress after 7 1/2 hours in a minivan with two little boys. Maybe that somebody should be me.
We made sandwiches and stuff for the road, so we didn't have to stop for food, but we did have to stop to go to the bathroom. I've come to realize why chain restaurants (e.g., Cracker Barrel, Burger King) are the place to stop for roadtrip tee-tee breaks involving little kids. Because unlike the French Market gas station/mini-mart in Natchitoches, La., just off the exit 138 from I-49, they don't put trashy French tickler machines above the urinals, forcing dad to order his seven-year-old to keep his head down and not look up. And unlike the management of that Chevron gas station/mini-mart on the south loop exit in Shreveport, Cracker Barrel managers tend to paint over or scrape off obscene graffiti on the men's room walls, which put dad in a bad spot vis-a-vis the seven-year-old.
So there.
Two days ago, I stood in a winter garden with an onion sack full of turnip roots and greens, and a grocery bag full of mustard greens, all of which I'd just pulled or picked, and talked with the farmer about the time the UFO chased him and his wife. It didn't occur to me until later that this was an odd conversation to have. Louisiana can seem so hopeless and beat-up and dismal much of the time, but there sure are a lot of wonderful people there. I drove through Avoyelles Parish this morning listening to Cajun music on the radio, with the DJ speaking Cajun French in an accent so thick I could hardly make it out, and I thought, "Nowhere else but here, baby." It was a happy feeling.
This will be my last post for a day or so. I'm still down in Louisiana, but there are terrible thunderstorms, and a tornado warning has been issued for a nearby town. Probably time to shut down the laptop until I get back to Dallas tomorrow night. But before I sign off, I wanted to take a moment to mention how terrific the new Mars Hill Audio Journal is. MHAJ is now available in MP3 format, so subscribers can download it straight into their iPods (it's also available in older formats). Once you get into Mars Hill, it quickly becomes indispensable for serious Christians who need to understand the intersection of faith and culture. I e-mailed a friend last night to tell him how terrific the new MHAJ is, and he responded by saying that he's been a subscriber since the beginning, "and it keeps getting better and better." (For a free downloadable sampling of the bimonthly MHAJ, go here.)
I've listened twice to host Ken Myers' 25-minute piece on Philip Rieff, which includes extensive quotes from philosopher Stephen Gardner, and I expect to listen to it three or four more times to fully mine its riches. Here, in short, is its message. Rieff first made his name as an interpreter of Sigmund Freud, and you first have to understand how revolutionary Freud was to grasp how deep Rieff's insights into the culture of modernity were. Freud grasped that the power of religion and tradition to bind human behavior had fatally weakened. Generally speaking, he posited as its replacement the gratification of desire, especially sexual desire, as the telos, the highest goal, of society. What Freud, who was fairly conservative by the standards of the day, didn't foresee was that he was laying the basis for what Rieff labeled "anti-culture." If culture is that systems of symbols and values that serve to bind human action and channel savage passions and impulses into socially constructive ends, then a culture that prizes the fulfillment of desires -- and not merely socially approved desires, but individual desires -- is destructive of the idea of culture in principle.
Moreover, in a culture (anti-culture) that locates human identity and dignity in an individual's desires, to disapprove of those desires is in some deeply felt way to negate the dignity of that individual. People in such a culture will tend to take it personally if their desires are criticized. Rieff predicted decades ago that the culture of the future -- the one we're living in now, as a matter of fact -- would be marked by non-judgmentalism, emotionalism, and a cultural imperative to help people live as they wish to live (versus how they "ought," which is a meaningless concept in such a culture) without feeling bad about it. The therapeutic culture.
I listened twice to the Rieff presentation on my iPod on the drive down here, and it's been much on my mind since. Rieff's insights dovetail perfectly with Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of our cultural fragmentation and the possibly terminal nature of it (how, MacIntyre asks, can we hope to live in a coherent and strong culture when we have come to comprehend the world emotionally, thereby denying an objective, commonly held authority to bind and loose?). Have we gone past a situation in which "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity," into a situation in which even if the best had conviction, it is very, very difficult to appeal to the masses on the basis of those conditions. I mean, we live in a media and commercial culture in which the fulfillment of individual desire is considered the highest possible goal. The propaganda that comes at people every single day seeks to detach them from any tradition and authority save for the Almighty Self (I am reminded of what a teacher I know who is an audiophile said recently about how his experience in a public school classroom has caused him to despise ra
p music: the aggressive sexuality, the violence, the valorization of the self and its own lawless desires that are celebrated in rap music are destroying the civilized community within the school, making learning -- key to the civilizing process -- impossible). MacIntyre believes that we might well be into a new Dark Age, in which people who believe in the virtues withdraw into communities within which those virtues make sense, and can be lived. I incline to his view. A gloomy thought, but it's a gloomy day outside.
Anyway, insofar as the problem of morality, culture and the common good is a central one in our time, MHAJ helps you think deeply about it, and is therefore an indispensable tool. I couldn't recommend it more highly.
Well, he certainly had it coming. I can't pity him. Though I'm generally opposed to the death penalty, there was absolutely no doubt of his guilt, nor of the enormity of his crimes. The Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is permissible if there are no bloodless ways of protecting society from the criminal. Given Saddam's notoriety, one doubts that anything short of execution would have been sufficient to protect Iraqi society from his living presence (though it should be noted that the Vatican denounced the execution)tnr.. I remember reading lots of accounts of ordinary Iraqis being terrified, even after Saddam's capture, that he would return. The monster is now dead.
If being opposed to the death penalty but blase about the hanging of Saddam makes me a hypocrite, that's a hypocristy I can live with. I think Marty Peretz, in successive posts has some apt words from the prissiness of the Vatican, the UN and others, showing such concerns about Saddam's execution.
That said, it is cruelly poignant to reflect on the abused child who grew up to become one of the 20th century's most infamous mass murderers. Read this long post. As the poet wrote, "Man hands on misery to man..."
Went to a fun party at a hunting camp down by the creek tonight. Met a woman there who makes pinatas. She made one this year of the Baby Jesus.
People were startled. Can you imagine, someone said, beating the Baby Jesus at a Christmas party till he bursts?
"Well," she explained, "people love Dora the Explorer, but they like their Dora the Explorer pinatas too."
Hmm.
I also heard a story about an impromptu field hysterectomy of a cow whose uterus had fallen out, and a story about a difficult sex change at the local nuclear plant. I ate a bowl of something called "Sex in a Pot" that involved mustard greens and crowder peas. And drank two Abita Christmas ales. Ah, Louisiana...
I have very few memories of the Ford Administration, because I was six years old when he became president. I remember watching him on TV announcing the pardon of Nixon, and remember being really worried about it, not because I had the faintest idea what it was all about, but because I watched a lot of TV back then and I remember the pardon upset a lot of people. And I remember Sarah Jane Moore, and Squeaky Fromme. Come to think of it, I remember being anxious back then, even as a child, that things were falling apart. I remember asking my dad over and over again if I was going to grow up to have to fight in "Indochina," as they called it on TV back then. Ford was part of that. My parents voted for him over Carter, and my memory of him -- no doubt colored by their support of him, such as it was -- was that he was a decent man outmatched by history.
My impression of him was also shaped by Chevy Chase's cruel stumblebum caricature. (I told you I watched too much TV: the first season of SNL was 1975-76, and I knew it well; in fact, I am reminded how old and media-obsessed I am when I'll make some Generalissimo Francisco Franco remark, or crack wise about a floor wax and a dessert topping, and realize that the reason my wife isn't laughing is because she was an infant when SNL debuted. But I digress.) I tell you all this because I can't form a clear impression of Ford. The truth is, I don't think much of him -- meaning not that I think poorly of him, but that I don't know what to think about him, and I'm wondering if I'm judging him too harshly because Reagan -- in many ways the anti-Ford, insofar as he took the fight to liberalism instead of dutifully following the GOP establishment line -- burned so bright. In fact, the greatest contribution Ford might have made to conservatism, and indeed to America, is to have lost to Carter to pave the way for Reagan. That's not nothing. And he certainly seemed like an honorable ex-president. I suppose we'll be talking about whether or not he should have pardoned Nixon for a long time. My head tells me no, but my heart says that was probably the wiser move for the country, even though it probably cost him the election.
Sorry, I wish I had stronger opinions about Ford. I also wish I had stronger opinions about mashed potatoes. R.I.P.
Greetings from St. Francisville, Louisiana, my hometown. I'm down here visiting my family for a few days. I haven't been here for seven or eight months, so my folks warned me not to be too shocked when I saw the clearing-away that the state had done to make way for the four-lane highway.
Well, I was shocked. Flabbergasted. Appalled. It looks like what Saruman did to the forests around Isengard. "Look at those great oaks," my dad said as we passed what was once Mr. Clyde Harvey's yard, but which is now going to be the outermost northbound lane, and the shoulder. There were no oaks there anymore, only stumps. And dirt. Miles of this!
The truth is, this has to happen. West Feliciana Parish is rapidly growing, and expanding the highway must be done to accomodate the increased traffic. Still, I don't have to like it. A big part of the landscape of my youth -- trees, trees, trees -- is now destroyed. Progress. I found myself driving into town this morning, thinking about how one day I'm going to say to my boys, "This used to not be like this. When I was a boy." And then I thought: That's exactly what my dad said to me about the same place when I was a kid." When my dad was the same age as my son Matthew, he stood out on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 61 and saluted as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's motorcade passed by. Highway 61 was a gravel road then.
Everything was different then, I guess. When I was a boy in the early 1970s, same age as my son Lucas, my mom used to give me a couple of diapers and watch me as I walked through a pecan orchard and around the bend to the little cabin where my ancient aunts (great-great-great aunts, to be precise) Lois and Hilda lived. I'd spend the day with them, and they'd tell me about serving in the Red Cross in France during the Great War, and all the exciting things that happened to them once upon a time (a French soldier grabbed Hilda on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and kissed her square on the lips; I don't think she ever got over it). Lois, an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, would take me into her garden, and lean on her bamboo staff while telling me about japonicas, camellias, magnolias and all the other flowering trees and bushes in her orchard. I'd climb trees in her dense little forest, and create my own imaginary worlds in the bamboo grove. I had no idea how good I had it back then. That was just life in the country.
Hilda and Lois are long dead. Their property was sold ages ago, all the trees chopped down, the cabin destroyed, and the whole place is now a housing development. I'm the last one in my extended family to have any living memory of life there (I mean, I'm the youngest member who can remember them). When I'm dead and gone, it will be like they never existed.
I know, I know: life is like that. Everything changes. But I tell you, when my children are grown, and if they come back here to visit their cousins, they are going to be tourists in the Geography of Nowhere. I can't count that as anything but a loss, though I am equally at a loss to say how it could have been prevented. What's such a puzzle to me is I never meet people who are happy with how things are changing around here, but most everybody wants a Wal-Mart to come to town.
Here's something interesting: there are Mexican laborers in town now. More and more of them. A local businessman said to me, "If you want to get anything done nowadays, you have to hire Mexicans." He explained that the black day laborers that people around here used to hire for agricultural or small-scale construction work aren't available anymore. He speculated that this must have something to do with the way the drug culture -- especially crack -- has made serious inroads into the black community here. Frankly, I'm so shocked by this that I can't even think about being sad. Crack for sale in this sleepy Southern town. I guess I'm too Romantic, too naive.
Well, the boys are in front of the fire playing with their loot, Julie and Nora went back to bed, and I'd be there too if there weren't a danger that we'd sleep straight through church later this morning. Oh, and the danger that the boys would conk each other on the head. Since I typed that last sentence, I had to go into the living room, snatch up a toy mailbox, and tell one of them that I meant it when I told him he couldn't play with it if he kept yelling at his brother.
And they say that James Brown is dead, though that can't possibly be true. It can't. So don't believe it.
Good morning. Merry Christmas.
I intended to write last night, on Christmas Eve, after the kids went to bed and Julie and I pottered around the house waiting for Santa Claus. I enjoy Christmas Eve so much more than Christmas morning, probably because Christmas morning comes so dang early if you have kids, and also because ... well, I dunno, there's so much pleasure in the anticipation, you know? On Saturday, we all made a long car trip to Julie's aunt and uncle's ranch, but the three-hour drive back took a lot longer than that because Nora cried and cried. And cried. And then, when she finished, she cried some more. We must have spent 90 minutes in various parking lots nursing her and trying to calm her down. We didn't get home till after midnight, and were all so worn out from it that we decided to spend Christmas Eve nesting at home. I made a massive pot of jambalaya, nursed the traditional Christmas Eve Rob Roy to be properly cheerful if Diana Krall decided to come down the chimney and sing for Daddy (Linus has the Great Pumpkin, Senor Crunchy has Diana Krall the Special Christmas Elf), built a big fire to ward off the wet chill, and read Christmas stories to the boys until it was time for bed.
Anyway, church later this morning will no doubt put me in a more cheerful mood. Because hey, it's Christmas! As a late, great poet of the people once hymned: "Happiness -- good God, uhh! -- I got plenty of. Would you believe I got peace of mind? And I be groovin' at Christmastime."
If this doesn't beat all: Hispanic groups are calling the handful of US raids on workplaces capturing illegal immigrants engaged in ID theft and other document fraud reminiscent of Nazi Germany:
"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up the Jews for no reason and locking them up," Democratic Party activist Carla Vela said. "Now they're coming for the Latinos, who will they come for next?"
Ah yes, the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy. This kind of hysteria makes me wish we'd have more workplace raids. Now. Chop-chop.
The other day I blogged about a meeting the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News had with leaders in the local Muslim community. I described the Muslims as defensive and evasive. Mohamed Elmougy, who led the group, wrote a subsequent e-mail to my supervisors and to me describing me as dishonest, saying that I've singlehandedly burned the bridges the Muslim community and the DMN have built, and that I should be fired.
I've spent a good part of today transcribing the recording of the meeting. I have the entire transcript posted here on the DMN editorial board blog. It's over 7,000 words, but I strongly recommend that you go read it, to get a flavor of the questions we asked, and the answers they gave. We're going to try to convert the soundfile to a postable format, so you can listen to the meeting at some point. But I wanted to get this transcript up today.
Note especially the obfuscation, the evasion (e.g., avoiding a direct answer to the repeated question of whether the US should live under sharia law), the defense of sharia punishments like hand-chopping and stoning, and the attempt to answer legitimate questions by challenging the motives of the journalist for asking it. Note the unwillingness to say that there's anything wrong with Islamic youth reading Sayyid Qutb, that the real wrong is thinking that it's wrong. And so forth.
Though I agree with Rep. Virgil Goode that it's a smart idea to sharply reduce immigration from Islamic countries, at least at the present difficult time, I find appalling his behavior toward Muslim convert Keith Ellison's intention to use the Koran at his swearing-in in Congress. Ellison, who's right in this matter, has responded like a real gentleman in all this, much to his credit, and to his opponent's embarrassment.
For those who feel enlightened or interested by this week's long combox exchange with Mohamed "Abu Humaid" Elibiary, I invite you to take a look at this epistolary back and forth between ME and me. See which of us makes the more credible case. Oooh, and this one too, which contains this excerpt:
I bring it up here as a lesson. Notice how these folks strategized not to meet my own arguments with presumably better arguments of their own, and to have this debate in the public square. They discussed operating a whispering campaign, and co-opting unsuspecting churches, temples and business owners in a stealth effort to paint me as a David Duke bigot to well-meaning non-Muslims.
I can't say how representative this small group is, or was, of Muslim leadership, but I will say that every time someone like Elibiary trots out the "stirring up hatred and inciting violence" charge as a response to criticism, I think about this shabby little backroom discussion I stumbled onto. I think about how members of that listserv were discussing ruining my reputation and harm my newspaper with a groundless whispering campaign designed not to rebut a critic, but to destroy him professionally and to intimidate a newspaper into silence.
Well, I finally got to see "Apocalypto" yesterday, and let me start by saying that I was wrong about the movie in my earlier comments here. It is a stunning film, and I heartily recommend it to those who can stand some gore. I did look away a couple of times, to be sure, but for most of the film, the violence is profoundly contextualized; I was not prepared for Gibson to show in the faces and reactions of his characters the pain of violence and cruelty. In this, it's much like "The Passion of the Christ," in which the violence was given deep meaning. In the moments before the mini-apocalypse strikes the peaceful village where Jaguar Paw and his tribe live, we see, among other things, Jaguar Paw lying down by the fire with his son and pregnant wife, and him observing his unborn child moving underneath the skin of his wife's belly. It's a moment of almost unbearable tenderness (says the father of a newborn). By the time Jaguar Paw and the others are led as slaves into the evil tribe's city, and we see from a distance heads rolling down the stairs from the high altar where humans are being sacrificed, we understand that the casual cruelty we've seen inflicted on Jaguar Paw's tribe is in fact the apotheosis of the sadistic civilization that has enslaved them.
In fact, I can't think of a film that is at once so violent and such a protest against violence. For me, the key moments of "Apocalypto" come atop that high altar, when the high priest is ripping the hearts out of and decapitating prisoners, while the bored royal family looks on. They've seen it all before. This is their "normal." Their ho-hum, anesthetized reaction to the unbelievable sadism they're inflicting on human beings is more shocking than any disembowelment. When I saw that, I thought about the concentration camp workers who went about their satanic jobs, then went home to their wife and kids and slept peacefully. And I thought about our ancestors who, not terribly long ago, enslaved Africans and treated them with similar barbarism, and yet were quite civilized. And I thought about how we today are even more civilized, yet we tolerate this -- and indeed quite a few Americans see this as a virtual sacrament. The Mayans in the "Apocalypto" grotesquely sacrificed innocent humans so that they could live as they wished to live; so do we, in our way. I came away from "Apocalypto" unsettled, convinced in an unfamiliar way that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with us humans. We are born to trouble and violence, and will to power.
I'd said in my earlier postings that I suspected Gibson didn't know what he was doing -- that his filmmaking in fact embodies the thing he supposedly protests. I based my remarks on the number of reviews I'd read in which the gore level was explored and condemned. Having seen "Apocalypto" myself, I completely agree with Ross Douthat's observation that most critics, in this respect, reviewed the film in bad faith. While the movie is gory, it is by no means gorier, or even as gory, as plenty of films whose brutality passes without complaint, or is celebrated for its "kinetic" qualities, or whatever. The violence in Apocalypto is anything but ironic -- though it must be said that Gibson really, really, really is in need of some artistic restraint On this point, I urge you to read Tom Hibbs' insightful thoughts on how Mel Gibson and M. Night Shymalan need to work together, because each bolsters what the other lacks.
[I should say too that as an exercise in pure filmmaking, "Apocalypto" is a phenomenal piece of work. I realized at the end that I had just watched a two-hour film about tribal derring-do, filmed in an ancient Indian tongue, and I had been entirely engrossed, as if hardly any time had passed at all. Any filmmaker who can do that is a master. If somebody other than Mel Gibson had m
ade this film, he'd be the toast of Hollywood.)
Knowing that Gibson is a conservative Catholic, I puzzled over the film's ending: Jaguar Paw's life is saved when he reaches the beach, exhausted, with two pursuers still chasing him. The three tribesmen confront a party of conquistadores rowing ashore, along with them at least one cleric bearing a cross. The conventionally Catholic thing for Gibson to have done would be to have the evil pursuers run away, and Jaguar Paw embrace his saviors, foreshadowing the eventual triumph of Christianity over the pagan death-cult civilization. But that's not what happens. Jaguar Paw runs back to the forest to rescue his family, while the two evil pursuers run forward to greet the Spanish. And the final scene shows JP and his family, reunited, consciously choosing not to join up with the Spanish, but instead to retreat further into the jungle "to make a new beginning."
What is the Catholic Gibson saying here? I can't mull this over without considering the opening quote for the film, Will Durant's observation that great civilizations first decay from within before they are conquered from the outside. Plainly Gibson intends to show us a Mayan civilization whose complexity is only a thin mask for grotesque cruelty -- the skin over the skull. I tried last night after seeing the film to think of "Apocalypto" as a contemporary socio-political allegory, but I just can't see that it works that way. Rather, I think this is Gibson's commentary on civilization, period. The Spanish are going to be better than the Maya -- this Gibson knows, this we all know. But given human nature, Gibson appears to be saying, they are doomed to create institutions that will ultimately make violence and inhumanity abstract, with the effect of reducing, even abnegating, the humanity of all members of that civilization. If I'm reading Gibson right here, there's something about Bigness that makes us less human. We become part of the System, and can justify the most barbaric cruelty because of it.
In fact, it may be unavoidable: one of the most poignant moments of the film comes when the evil Maya who has led the slave-gathering expedition tells his adult son, who has been with him on the trip, that today, he has proven himself a man -- and then he (the father) passes the mantle of manhood on to his son in the form of a hunting knife. It really is a tender moment between father and son, because in risking their lives to gather slaves, they have enacted a ritual that their civilization teaches them is a good and necessary thing to become fully a part of society. And yet, they have done great evil. It is easy to imagine a slave-ship captain sailing out of Ghana with a load of human beings in the hold, genuinely praising his own son for having bravely done a man's work that day. It is hard not to wonder what cruelties you and I accept, tragically unaware, as part of our role in our own civilization.
And me being me, I couldn't help thinking of how many Catholic bishops in all sincerity thought tolerating and covering up for the cruelty of clerical child abuse was actually a noble and necessary thing, to keep the "civilization" of the Church running -- and how that corruption has in fact led to a weakening of that civilization. Given Gibson's deep faith as well as his disdain for institutional Catholicism, I find it hard to believe that this thought didn't cross his mind.
It's not a Catholic thing, mind you, but a human thing, and insofar as the Catholic Church, or any other institution, is made up of humans, we will see things like this. Gibson seems to be saying that cruelty and violence is an inescapable part of our nature, and that the only institution that you can finally rely upon as a refuge from the world is the family -- or at least smaller social units, where the humanity of your neighbors is always before you. A question left unexplored is how the small unit -- the village, say -- is to protect itself from marauders. The answer, of course, is that ..
. they build cultures and civilizations, working together for the common good. Until they eventually succumb to corruption, and die out first spiritually (the cynicism with which the high priest and the royal family go about their duties suggests that when the leadership of a civilization ceases to believe in sacred truths at the heart of the civilization, it is bound to fail), and then in material ways. The civilization represented by the conquistadores appears to be expiring from exhaustion and loss of faith. Gibson seems to be endorsing the social cycle theory of history, and saying that civilizations may come and go, but the family endures, and in the family is our hope. And that idea -- that the family, not the individual, is the natural basis for society -- is deeply Catholic, deeply conservative, deeply true -- and deeply un-American.
These are just my random musings a few hours after having seen "Apocalypto." I wanted to make sure to get them down, even if they're disordered, because I'd made such a big deal about how I wasn't going to see the film, and I wanted to say how mistaken I was. And I wanted to thank those like Charlotte Allen, Ross Douthat, Peter Suderman and readers of this blog, whose public and private comments to me convinced me that "Apocalypto" was worth seeing.
Just had a fascinating hour-long interview with Texas oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, who has been active for years in Republican politics (he's backing Rudolph Giuliani's presidential run in 2008). Among the things we discussed was global warming. He said that global warming is not a theory, but a fact. He qualified that by saying that he believes we would have had some natural warming even if humans hadn't been burning hydrocarbons at a high rate for the last century or so, but that there can be no doubt that this is a real phenomenon, and we have a lot to do with it. We'll publish his full remarks in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday.
I'm sitting here at my desk just now. Phone rings. It's my wife. She's at the bookstore buying Christmas presents.
"I'm embarrassed to admit this, but what's the name of the guy who wrote 'A Confederacy of Dunces'?"
You see what I have to live with? Do you see? Pray for her. Pray for me. This is what happens when a generation is raised without proper theology and geometry.
There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers. So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:
Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic — without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.
Daniel Finkelstein of the Times of London is running a "Chuck Colson Award" contest, so named because he once passed Chuck Colson in the street. He writes:
I am looking for all contact - spotting in the street yesterday, autograph collected in your youth, meeting held with, picture taken with, gift received from, or whatever - with political figures.
Now famous is fine but semi-famous is even better, faintly ludicrous is best of all. Pictures are particularly welcome, especially if they show the semi-famous figure doing something prosaic.
Oh what fun. By all means go to the blogsite and share your entry. But include it in the comboxes here too.
I have three entries:
1. In college, I got drunk with washed-up Sixties radical Abbie Hoffman (who was also loaded on pills), and went speeding through the campus of Jimmy Swaggart Bible College after midnight, with Hoffman leaning out the window shouting, "Lock your doors! Bar your windows! Heathen Jew on campus!" The Jimmy Swaggart Bible police stopped us for trespassing, and nearly took us in.
2. Once, while a writer at the Washington Times, I met the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who shook my hand and said, cryptically, to an associate, "Young man."
3. I was standing in a press pool onsite at Ground Zero, when it was still a smoking charnel house, covering a presidential speech. When the most powerful man on the planet walked directly in front of me, as we both stood in the pit of hell, and at the very spot where the 21st century began, all I could think was, "Oh wow, I'm taller than him."
The “good news” that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments. But the opening of schools and hospitals is not particularly newsworthy, at least not compared with American casualties and with sectarian attacks meant to bring Iraq down around everyone’s heads in a full-scale civil war. An old conservative chestnut has it that only four of Iraq’s 18 provinces are beset by violence. True, but those provinces include 40 percent of the population, as well as the capital city, where the battle over the country’s future is being waged.
In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.
“Realism” has gotten a bad name lately from its association with James Baker’s daffy Iraq Study Group. But realism is essential in any war, and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources.
Turns out that George W. Bush was wrong: there are, in fact, jobs that Americans will do ... if you pay them a decent wage. Seems that Swift & Co., after having been popped by the feds and having much of its illegal immigrant workforce eliminated, has been hiring more US citizens. Excerpt:
Several union officials said Swift, which has denied knowingly hiring illegal workers and has not been charged, improved its wages, benefits and bonuses before the raids.
“They're trying to staff up their plants and they've been raising their wages the past few weeks,” said United Food and Commercial Workers spokeswoman Jill Cashen. “To me, it's an example that when you make the job more attractive you get a different kind of applicant.”
Imagine that. When big business has to pay workers a decent wage, it will follow the law. Of course this will raise prices for meat, but I've got no complaints there. We should all pay what things are worth. People like me can't complain about the law being broken, yet expect to profit by it on our grocery bills. If my family can't afford to eat as much meat, we'll just do without.
When I agreed to do a story about demonic activity, possession, and exorcism for Crisis, I thought it would be fun—a spooky thrill. I’d write the article, warn about being too preoccupied with the subject matter, and be done. Instead, I got sleepless nights, horrifying conversations with those who have been involved in exorcisms, and a new point of view on the demonic world.
For those who have never had any direct contact with this world, it sounds utterly ridiculous. For those who have, and know those who have, it's impossible to deny the mysterious and hideous reality of what lives beneath the surface of things. You never forget.
Mohamed Elmougy, the longtime Dallas Muslim leader who headed the delegation that came into see us at the paper the other day, did not like my blog recollection of that meeting. He e-mails:
One would have hoped that you would at least be honest in recanting our meeting last week in your blog! Of course I could respond to you point by point and prove to everyone that you’re blinded by bias and hatred towards Islam & Muslims, but you don’t deserve my time!
I copied your bosses in hope they can discern for themselves that you don’t belong on the Editorial Board.
You have single-handedly managed to damage the goodwill and bridges that we worked hard on building between DMN and the local Muslim Community.
Rod, you need to seek some type of help as American Muslims are here to stay. The more you spread lies and paranoia, the more we adhere to our beloved faith, so thank you!
Well, I'm sorry that it's come to this, and I mean that sincerely. I've met twice with Mohamed, and found him to be quite cordial both times. But it surely cannot be the case that the relationship between a newspaper and the Muslim community, or any community, can only exist on terms dictated by one side. I recognize that Mohamed and his colleagues are deeply frustrated with me for the things I write and the questions I ask, and for my dissatisfaction with the answers they give. But indignation is not a sufficient response.
In 2003, after I'd only been in Dallas for a few months, we had a meeting with Dr. Sayyid Syeed, head of the Islamic Society of North America. Dr. Syeed was as pleasant as could be as long as we talked very generally about peace and cooperation. But when I asked him how he squared his professed belief in peace and tolerance with the indisputable fact that members of the ISNA board had been directly linked to extremist organizations and viewpoints, he became furious, shook his fist at me, told me that I would one day "repent," and said my questions reminded him of Nazi Germany.
It was a hysterical performance, and one that raised far more questions than it answered. I believe that many US Muslim leaders try to substitute "How dare you!" for a substantive response to serious and legitimate concerns, in hopes that those asking the questions will withdraw them out of shame. Sorry, but that doesn't work with me, and it ought not work with anybody who didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday. In the meeting here the other day, when the topic of Sayyid Qutb's thought being part of a quiz competition at the big local mosque came up, Mohamed and some of the others tried to minimize Qutb's importance. You might have believed that if, like most Americans, you know nothing about Qutb. But anybody who knows anything about him understands his absolutely central role as the philosopher behind modern jihadism. To learn that Qutb's thought has been welcomed into a mosque does not put one's mind at ease. Here, for example, is Qutb on the possibility of building bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims, i.e., those living in Ignorance:
The only way to bridge the gulf between the two is for Ignorance to liquidate itself completely and substitute for all its laws, values, standards and concepts their Islamic counterparts.
The first step that should be taken in this field by the person calling on people to embrace Islam is to segregate himself from Ignorance. He must be separated to the extent that any agreement or intercourse between him and Ignorance is absolutely impossible unless and until the people of Ignorance embrace Islam completely: no intermingling, no half measures or conciliation is permissible, however clever Ignorance may be in usurping the role of Islam or reflecting it. The chief basis of the pers
onality of the person inviting others to Islam is the clear manifestation of this fact within himself and his solemn conviction of being radically different from them. They have their own religion, and he has his. His task is to orientate them so that they may follow his path without any fraud or pretence. Failing this, he must withdraw completely, detach himself from their life and openly declare to them: "You have your own religion, and I have mine."
This is a sine qua non for the contemporary advocates of Islam.
Now, you simply cannot tell me that teaching the thought of a man who believed the only way to relate to non-Muslims is entirely on terms set by Muslims, who should intend ultimately to destroy non-Muslim beliefs and way of life and substitute Islam -- you can't tell me that exposing kids to this way of thinking in the biggest mosque in Texas is not something worthy of the larger community's concern. You can't dismiss him as a fringe figure, or dismiss his being taught here as nothing compared to all the good that the mosque does. You just can't, not credibly. We are seeing
Add to Del.icio.us 
Digg This 
Fave on Technorati