Once again, church leadership makes a mockery of church teachings. Catholic Dale Price lays into 'em:
Terry McAuliffe, former DNC Chair and unapologetic defender of partial birth abortion, is about to be honored for his selfless devotion to and efforts on behalf of the Catholic Faith by being admitted to the Knights of Malta.
Once again, those laboring in the trenches to uphold the Gospel are about to take a shiv between the shoulderblades. Once again, the unfaithful get front row seats while the laborers in the vineyard are told to shut up. ... And you know what? I'm not sure how much I care anymore. Sure, at one level I am outraged. But on another level, I'm thinking "What else is new?" I started lowering my standards concerning morally coherent Catholic leadership in 2002, and I haven't stopped since. And, you know what? I'm happy to report that they come closer to meeting my expectations every year. Bishop-proofed faith--the key to peace of mind.
She passed away from cancer here in Texas this afternoon. Her columns were thoroughly partisan, and made me angry more often than not, but she often made me laugh, which in my book covers a multitude of sins. And when she hit a target, it was a splendid thing to read, especially when she showed politicians given breaks to the rich and powerful, and the shaft to the little guy. Fair or not, she wrote with a fierce humanity. She was -- and I mean this as a serious compliment -- a Texas broad. I love broads, especially when they have a mouth on 'em. I like to think this passage from a column during the Bush-Gore Florida shootout was ... well, it wasn't typical Molly Ivins, but it was Molly Ivins at her best. R.I.P.:
Here's the challenge: Let's everybody with a dog in this fight -- meaning either pro-Gore or pro-Bush -- be obliged to make the case for the other side for at least 15 minutes.
Because I think we're watching something important, quite aside from the fate of the nation and the future of The World's Greatest Democracy (except for Florida).
In a mild and in some ways not terribly important case (I may have to eat those words), we're watching why wars start. What we see is the constant presentation -- because the media love to polarize -- of people who are apparently incapable of imagining what the situation looks like from somebody else's point of view.
UPDATE: What was I thinking? Jeez, how wrong-headed and mealy-mouthed was that?! Saying Molly Ivins was at her best when she was being nice is like saying H.L. Mencken was never better than when he scratched poltroons behind the ears. Check out this archive from the Texas Observer. Right, left or otherwise, if more newspaper columnists wrote with her style, we'd sell a lot more newspapers.
Bloggers are encouraged to watch live as eight of America’s leading thinkers on religion and politics gather at Regent University on Friday, Feb. 2, to answer the question, “How can religion and politics become like glue bonding us together, rather than like sharp scissors cutting us apart?”
WHAT: The Ronald Reagan Symposium 2007: The Future of Religion in American Politics
WHEN: Feb. 2 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. ET
WHERE: Webcast live at http://www.Regent.edu/admin/media/schgov/symposium07/
AGENDA: 9 – 11:30 a.m. (each presenter will speak 15-20 minutes on their noted topic, with a panel discussion/Q&A beginning at approximately 10:20 a.m.)
+ Hadley Arkes, Amherst College, “That Superintending Principle: The Author of the Law that was there before the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”
+ Daniel Dreisbach, Princeton University, “George Washington on Religion’s Place in Public Life”
+ Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute, “Lessons from the Founders”
+ Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago, “Religion in the Public Square”
1:30 – 4 p.m. (each presenter will speak 15-20 minutes on their noted topic, with a panel discussion/Q&A beginning at approximately 2:50 p.m.)
+ Marvin Olasky, WORLD magazine, “Evangelical Political Models: Fenimore Cooper or William Wilberforce”
+ Darryl Hart, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, “Left Turn? Evangelicals and the Future of the Religious Right”
+ Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center, “Red God, Blue God: Is There a God Gap between the Parties?”
+ Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, "Politics and Religion in the Post-Reagan Era”
I was talking last night to a new friend and co-worker, a black woman, about my secret love of Moon Pies, which is a Southern thing (she is not a native Southerner, but rather a Midwesterner). When I mentioned how much I adore greens -- mustards, turnips, collards -- she gasped. She said she had no idea white people ate them.
Really? , I said. I had never heard of greens being strictly a black thing. Then again, I grew up in the rural South. She was genuinely taken aback to hear this. She asked me, "How do you cook them?" I said I cook them down with salt pork, and eat them with cornbread. She was visibly startled, and kept saying, very sweetly, how she'd never in all her life heard of white people eating greens.
When I got home and mentioned this to my wife (who doesn't eat greens), she said that it might be a Texas vs. the South thing. My wife, a Texas native who grew up in Dallas, said white people around here really don't eat greens. I can't help wondering if that's true in rural Texas. Or are greens strictly something that poor and working-class Southerners, black and white, eat? I will say that when I was growing up in Louisiana, greens were something our parents (most of whom had grown up in the Depression or just after it) ate, but that we -- white kids, I mean -- thought were awful. I didn't start eating them until I was an adult, and now a mess of turnips is one of my favorite things. So I'm wondering if greens-eating is a legacy of the culture of the poor rural South, and it was taken north by African-Americans who migrated there, whose descendants may not realize that down South, eating greens is not a racial thing, but a class thing. Or was. Who knows? Do you?
Got in yesterday's mail an advance copy of Philip Rieff's "Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It Has Been Taken Away From Us," which will be released in February by Pantheon. Rieff wrote much of the book in the 1970s, but never published it. He completed, or allowed to be completed by assistants, the final draft weeks before he died last summer. Here, from the publisher's website, is a synopsis of the book:
Charisma has come to be understood today as a special gift or talent that celebrities–artistic performers, athletes, movie stars, or political leaders–possess, a quality that makes their lives exemplary and transforms them into objects of universal appeal or attraction.
In Charisma, Philip Rieff explores the emergence and evolution of this mysterious and compelling concept within Judeo-Christian culture. Its first expression was in the idea of the covenant between God and the Israelites: Charisma–religious grace and authority–was transferred through divine inspiration to the Old Testament prophets; it was embodied by Jesus of Nazareth, the first true charismatic hero. Rieff shows how St. Paul transformed charisma into a form of social organization, how it was reworked by Martin Luther and by nineteenth-century Protestant theologians, and, finally, how Max Weber redefined charisma as a secular political concept. By emptying charisma of its religious meaning, Weber opened the door to the modern perception of it as little more than a form of celebrity, stripped of moral considerations.
Rieff rejects Weber’s definition, insisting that Weber misunderstood the relation between charisma and faith. He argues that without morality, the gift of grace becomes indistinguishable from the gift of evil, and it devolves into a license to destroy and kill in the name of faith or ideology. Offering brilliant interpretations of Kierkegaard, Weber, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Freud, Rieff shows how certain thinkers attacked the very possibility of faith and genuine charisma and helped prepare the way for the emergence of a therapeutic culture in which it is impossible to recognize that which is sacred. Rieff’s analysis of charisma is an analysis of the deepest level of crisis in our culture.
I'm the sort of wildly disorganized reader who keeps several books going at once (percolating now: Rieff's "Triumph of the Therapeutic," D'Souza's "The Enemy at Home," P.D. James's "The Children of Men," and Tracy Wilkinson's forthcoming "The Vatican's Exorcists," which I'm reviewing for another publication). Nevertheless, I couldn't keep from reading the first chapter of "Charisma" last night. There I found a striking paragraph. Before you read it, understand that Rieff was not a religious man, though as a sociologist he was preoccupied with profound questions of the role faith plays in sustaining cuulture and civilization. In this new book, he sets out his belief that there are two types of "charismatics," by which he means people who have the natural authority, by force of personality, to lead. The first (and older) type is the authentic charismatic, who led people to adhere to a creed, to turn inward and overcome their own propensity for disorder and evil. The newer type is the fake charismatic, who leads people outward and away from the internal struggle to overcome, and rather to embrace instinct and indulgence and the casting off of all creeds. The older charismatic possesses grace in the service of holiness; the new charismatic uses fake grace to serve evil. Here's Rieff:
In this period of transition, our would-be charismatics are best understood as terrorists. The relation between the transitional, modern notion of charisma canned in the sense [Max] Weber, as I shall show, canned it, and terror needs some preliminary explanation. Perhaps the best place to begin is with the suggestion that holiness is entirely interdictory. A m
oral absolute thus becomes the object of all. Holy terror is charismatic; our terror is unholy. For our charismatics are engaged in no wrestlings of angels, but, rather, with the obeying of demons. Jacob was a charismatic when Laban and Jacob took mutual pledges before the God of their fathers; Jacob swears by the fear of his father, Isaac (Genesis 31:53). What is this charismatic fear? What is holy terror? Is it a fear of a mere father; in a phantasmagoric enlargement, Frued's idea is silly. Holy terror is rather fear of oneself, fear of the evil in oneself and in the world. It is also fear of punishment. Without this necessary fear, charisma is not possible. To live without this high fear is to be a terror oneself, a monster. And yet to be monstrous has become our ambition, for it is our amibtion to live without fear. All holy terror is gone. The interdicts have no power. This is the real death of God and of our own humanity. It is out of sheer terror that charisma develops. We live in terror, but never in holy terror. Those are the only alternatives, as I shall try to show in the course of this book.
A great charismatic doees not save us from holy terror, but rather conveys it. One of my intentions is to make us again more responsive to the possibility of holy terror.
In other words, you can have what the prophets and the preachers call the fear of the Lord, which entails understanding your own capacity for cruelty, anarchy and barbarian behavior absent a binding recognition of a greater authority that transcends you and requires your obedience. Or you can become a monster. Your choice. The prophet has the charisma -- the grace -- to call people to repentance and subjection to the moral code; the terrorist uses his charisma to call people to rebellion, disorder and cultural suicide.
Slate has started a feature collecting evidence from favorable press clippings that the Illinois senator is, in fact, the Son of God. Which for some reason brings to mind that great skit on SNL from the 1988 (I think) GOP primary campaign, in which an angry Bob Dole (Dan Ackroyd) explodes at Pat Robertson (Al Franken) during a candidate's forum. He says something along the lines of, "Pat Robertson, he's just an old-time faith healer in a business suit. You know it, I know it, the whole country knows it. Bit I'll tell you what Pat, you heal my right arm and I'll vote for you."
UPDATE: It doesn't matter to me if Hagel is being opportunistic. So what? He's saying the right things now, and frankly, he's the only Republican I have the least interest in voting for in 2008 (there are no Democrats). I'd bet that the Iraq situation, and the general international situation, is going to be so bad by year's end that we'll be looking for a man like Hagel to get us out of it and to set a new course in US foreign policy. Thing is, absent a profound change of heart on the part of the GOP rank-and-file primary voters -- and it could happen -- he's got a ghost of a chance for the Republican nomination. Jim Pinkerton suggests that Hagel would be a big hit with independents, and might consider an independent run for the White House. I think a Hagel-Webb ticket could pull enough disaffected Republicans, conservative Democrats and independents to whip anybody the GOP or the Dems are likely to nominate.
Juan Williams of NPR interviewed President Bush at length yesterday. You can go here to find the link to hear the interview, or read the transcript here. I learned a couple of new things from the president. Such as:
"I will tell you, 2005 was a great year for freedom, and then the enemy took a good look and said, what do we need to do to stop the advance of freedom, and 2006 was a tough year."
Oh, so that's how that happened. "Ahmed, dear, what do we need to do to stop the advance of freedom? I do so hate freedom. And apple pie really chaps my a**, too." Does anybody believe this comic-book stuff anymore?
And this (emphasis mine):
MR. WILLIAMS: So, some people would say, well, if you believe in spending restraint, why haven't you vetoed one bill, you know, one appropriations bill?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Because the United States Congress that was controlled by Republicans exercised spending restraint. Now, I didn't particularly like – the size of the pie was what I requested. It's some of the pieces of the pie that I didn't particularly care for, but that is why the president needs a line-item veto, and that is why Congress has got to reform the earmark process. What the American people need to understand is that sometimes special projects get put into bills without ever having seen the light of the day. In other words, they don't get voted on; they just show up, and we need transparency in the earmark process, and expose the process to hearings and votes so that the American people will know that any project was fully heard on the floor of the House and the Senate.
In other words, the record levels of spending engaged in by the GOP Congress was actually spending restraint, except when it wasn't, and that was Congress's fault for being so sneaky.
Did you know that Johnny Cash once upon a time recorded a children's album? Sure did. We got it for Christmas. My wife just phoned as she was driving with Lucas, who turned three last week, in the back seat. She called to say ixnay on the ohhnycashja around Lucas. One of the songs was about a bear hunter, and it sparked the following exchange from the back seat:
"Did he kill the Daddy bear?"
"No."
"Did he kill the Mommy bear?"
"No."
"Did he kill the baby bears?"
"No, honey."
"Did the bears he killed have babies in their tummy?"
It is so very daring to examine the delicate matter of bestiality, to apply one’s filmic aesthetic to the subject of men having sex with Arabian stallions.
Or, it’s another example of being drawn to depravity like flies to rot.
Or, it’s foolish parents and greedy studios exploiting a child and unwittingly tapping into spiritual forces of evil that will forever haunt everyone who took part in this misbegotten project.
Most pornography is harmless; it’s just pictures of the stuff we fantasize about anyway. Plus, I’ve heard of marriages that were saved through porn.
Or, it’s evidence that we’re monumentally bored with sex, that it takes more and more provocation to stir the faintest arousal. And equating one’s spouse with a piece of meat? Now that’s what I call romance.
One day our children will be thrust into a harsh and ugly world. Better to expose them gradually to all the varieties of degradation through books, film and the Internet so they’ll be prepared for what awaits them.
Or, teach them they can’t handle certain kinds of knowledge without being degraded themselves and give them the tools to make intelligent choices that preserve the purity of conscience.
Enough.
I know I’ve had enough.
One of us has got to be crazy.
Read the whole thing. Julie Lyons is not crazy. She's a voice of sanity in a culture that has lost its mind. This is a powerful column about the fragility of the human conscience, and especially the sacred responsibility parents have to nurture and protect and build up the consciences of their children. Julie has a seven-year-old son:
In certain moments of melancholy, I say to myself that if I accomplish nothing else in this world, I can take comfort in knowing that I played a role in giving life to this little boy, and that my husband and I did our very best to nurture and protect this single human soul.
Funny how the presence of a child instantly and irreversibly strips away layers of selfishness.
There are esthetes who appreciate the cross-eyed cartoons of Pablo Picasso, the random dribbles of Jackson Pollack, and even the pickled pigs of Damien Hirst. Some of my best friends are modern artists. You, however, hate and detest the 20th century's entire output in the plastic arts, as do I.
"I don't know much about art," you aver, "but I know what I like." Actually you don't. You have been browbeaten into feigning pleasure at the sight of so-called art that actually makes your skin crawl, and you are afraid to admit it for fear of seeming dull. This has gone on for so long that you have forgotten your own mind. Do not fear: in a few minutes' reading I can break the spell and liberate you from this unseemly condition.
Learning about that divide was a shock to the woman who spent her childhood in progressive Catholic schools. "We were taught just to accept people, that was just a given," Pelosi says. "I don't ever remember being told at Convent of the Sacred Heart that gay was wrong. They never even told us there was anything wrong with abortion. They were just choices.
"That's why it was weird when I'd go to these places and ... people would say, 'It's in the Bible.' And they fall back on the Bible for everything."
During Nancy Pelosi's speaker celebrations this month, as the Pelosi clan drove through the streets of Washington and Baltimore together, some protesters held up signs that read, "Pelosi Preys on Children" -- a reference to the speaker's pro-choice stand, which contradicts church doctrine.
"My mother, throughout her entire life, has been faithful to the church, even though the church has not been that faithful to her because of her politics. And I think that takes a lot of perseverance," she says. "And still, people protest her right to go to her own church."
Go read the long string of comments left by Amy's readers, all of them Catholics, and as far as I can tell all faithful to the Church -- and all of them very bitter about how their Catholic school experience destroyed (for a time) or threatened to destroy their Catholic faith. Note well: these aren't Catholics who are angry at the Church for being too strict; they are angry at the Church for not being the Church. It is an astonishing thread, really astonishing, because in it you can see pain and destruction caused by the Gramscian march through the institutions that the postconciliar Catholic left undertook. There is a whole world captured in those heartrending posts -- but also hope, too, because these people managed to endure and even triumph over their Catholic educations seemingly designed to turn them into ex-Catholics.
Here's something posted by Dad29, who sometimes posts on this blog:
We migrated to "alternative Catholic school" education for our children when the local parish school decided that education in sexual practices was appropriate for the 5, 6, 7 grades. That was a mandate from the Archbishop, who later resigned for some...ah....personal problems.
Interesting that the "alternative Catholic" school also provided a MUCH stronger Catholic atmosphere, as well as a MUCH stronger literature and math curriculum, AND actually taught 2 years of Latin (7th/8th.)
There are now three "alternative Catholic" K-8 schools in the area, all doing very well in terms of student-count, academic success, and spiritual success.
And the traditional parochial schools? Closing.
There's something important here: those Catholics who really wanted a serious Catholic education had to get outside the institutional parochial school framework and do it on their own. You'll find in this thread lots of evidence that people who kept their faith or found their way back to it had to do so not with the help of the institutional Catholic Church, but in spite of it.
If you want to go visit that thread to gloat at the suffering of Catholic laymen at the hands of unbelieving churchocrats, don't. It's cruel and pointless, and don't be deceived: the institutional decay within American Catholicism hurts the entire Christian community. The reason I post it here, though, is because what Amy's comboxes reveal is a hidden history (well, hidden from the mainstream, but certainly not hidden within orthodox Catholic circles) of how and why the Catholic
Church has gotten itself into such a ditch. It wasn't an accident. It was systematically engineered by the treason of the clerks, so to speak. One of the most mysteries and consequential tragedies of the last half of the 20th century was the suicide attempt of the Catholic Church. Thanks be to God, it did not succeed, and signs of rebirth are there (you can see them in Amy's comboxes). But there's a long way to go back, and I'm afraid my Catholic friends are right: a lot more to be endured, and fought for, until that destructive generation and their spiritual children die out.
Still, what fascinated me as a Catholic, and still fascinates me now that I'm outside the Catholic faith, is this question: If these priests, nuns and others ceased to believe in the Catholic faith, why didn't they leave? Why did they stay, and try to take the substance of that faith away from people, especially Catholic children in the parochial schools?
Here's a thought-provoking piece by Jim Schutze in the Dallas Observer, writing about how his funky Old East Dallas neighborhood is going to hell because of all the improvements that are breaking out all around him. Schutze's neighborhood is also my neighborhood, but you don't have to know a thing about Dallas to relate to this story. I suspect this kind of dynamic is taking place all over the US. Here's the lede, which gives you an idea of Schutze's sensibility:
I am concerned for my people. Last summer a neighbor spoke to me on my lawn in Old East Dallas—an artist, one of the original urban pioneers, a person who has lived an entire life of collapsing rooflines and spotty plumbing on our street midway between White Rock Lake and downtown. I wanted to believe she was looking over her shoulder while she spoke because she was ashamed. But she was not ashamed.
"I went inside one of those McMansions on the other side of La Vista," she whispered. "It was a real estate open house. And you know what, Jim? It was really nice!"
I said, "No, Valerie, stop. Please don't say these things."
"Everything worked. Even the windows! Everything. I bet they never have to call Roto-Rooter. And the kitchen! The kitchen!"
"You've got to get a grip on yourself. I'll tell Jordan on you if you don't."
"The kitchen was my dream kitchen!"
I am frightened. East Dallas, once a funky, diverse refugee camp for people on the lam from the real Dallas and maybe real life, is now well on its way to becoming the one thing none of us ever wanted. A nice neighborhood.
The nail in the coffin for me was the announcement in early January by Whole Foods Market Inc. that they will close their old store on Lower Greenville Avenue by the end of this year and open a gigantic new 50,000-square-foot foodie cathedral less than a mile away at Abrams Road and Skillman Street. When I went to neighbors hoping for commiseration, they stared at me instead with those unblinking, watery eyes the people had in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers after they'd been eaten by the space pods, and they said, "Oh, but Jim, the new Whole Foods will be so much nicer."
Nicer? Nicer? Like that's a good thing? In the old days we took pride in how crappy our part of town was. It took guts to live here. But that's all gone now.
I'm afraid I've got little patience for this sort of thing. Schutzism was alive and well in New York City in the Giuliani years. It came from the sort of liberals who loathed Giuliani for cleaning up the porn theaters and making Manhattan a place you might actually want to live. There is a certain kind of Romantic who finds decay and disintegration somehow more ... authentic, and in any case preferable to regeneration. What's interesting about Schutze's piece is that he went to talk to his longtime neighbors, and found that they don't really share his silly idealism.
Take, for example, Lorlee Bartos, a sometimes-correspondent of mine who writes to bash me for this or that conservative thing I've said. She's a longtime Dallas liberal activist and Democratic consultant. Schutze went to her looking for back-up:
She lives just south of East Dallas on the other side of Interstate 30 in a neighborhood that has come a long way under her tutelage but is still, shall we say, significantly challenged. Her neighborhood is where we were when I moved in. But every time I tried to tell her how sad I was about Whole Foods leaving Lower Greenville, she told me stories about her side of the freeway.
"It got so bad this summer one time, there's a house between the whorehouse and the drughouse, and the daughter showed up with a 3-year-old. She was bringing him in to use the bathroom, and she threw her car keys down on the seat. Then the minute she was in the house the skank w
ho was watching from the whorehouse stole her car."
I didn't call to talk about ugly things like that. I called to talk about the whole ethos of the Lower Greenville Avenue Whole Foods, how it was a tie to a kinder, gentler time. But she wouldn't listen.
"This young couple," Lorlee said, "I think they're from Balch Springs, they put up three Confederate flags, two on the outside and one in the window. And then they stole my neighbor's pregnant pit bull. Then they put some sort of chicken wire on the outside of the house around the windows with wood around it for trim, and somebody said that's because they've got a python in the house. And they've got a 3-year-old and a baby."
Her point, I gather, is that absolute stability is not an option. You can have change for the better or change for the worse. Pick your poison.
"I have some concern about McMansions," she said, "just from the size and in terms of destroying the character of a neighborhood, but a new house is nice. It's better than a whorehouse or a drughouse, and you can quote me on that.
"It's sort of exciting to drive through East Dallas to see new stuff pop up here and there. I'm not opposed to new houses."
"Better than a whorehouse or a drughouse." The house I live in was something of a drug house not too many years ago. The neighbors across the street -- one a librarian, one an accountant -- talk about how before the guy we bought the house from moved in and fixed it up, it was a tumbledown renthouse whose resident was a junkie. Literally! He'd sleep on the porch, and they'd find his needles in the yard. Our neighbors next door talk about how the drug gangs controlled this neighborhood in the 1970s, when they moved in. "It was so bad the police were scared to come down here, and they told us not to risk sitting on our front porch at night," said H.
That's all gone now. You can still hear gunshots at night in the distance, but the streets of our neighborhood are pretty safe now. You're starting to see more people with strollers on the streets. You can sneer at them -- at us -- as yuppie gentrifiers, and I guess we are, but was it better when these beautiful old Craftsman houses were falling down, and anybody who could afford to leave was getting out for the suburbs because of the crime?
Lorlee makes a point that we all have to come to terms with: you can't have absolute stability. If you're not getting better, you're probably decaying. You can do things to control the rate of change and the direction of the change -- that's what our neighborhood achieving Historic District status recently was about -- but change is coming one way or another. If things keep going this way for Old East Dallas, I can foresee a time when Julie and I will have to sell our house because we can't afford the property taxes, in which case the neighborhood would likely have changed so much that we might not feel comfortable living there anyway. That might be a sad day for us -- or maybe by then we will be ready to move, I dunno. But as a general matter, I find it impossible to think it's a bad thing for the city of Dallas to have neighborhoods that had been abandoned to crime, decay and despair coming back to life, even if the Wrong Sort of Person (from a Schutzian point of view) is moving in.
I'm glad Schutze wrote the column, because even though I disagree with him, he's touching on some pretty significant core issues at the heart of what it means to live in a community. Still, it's interesting to think that if Schutze, who is white, had written a column talking about how the blacks or the Mexicans were moving in and messing up the character of his neighborhood with their tastes, he'd be an absolute pariah. But because the offenders are pretty much white people who don't share his aesthetic sensibilities, he feels free to rip them. Don't get me wrong -- I think he should be free to write about them (well, us) like this, and I say that as the sort of per
son Jim Schutze is probably sad has moved into the neighborhood. I only say that to draw attention to how the absence of race as a factor makes it possible for us to talk about in public the kinds of culture-clash issues that everybody who lives in a transitional neighborhood talks about privately, all the time. It's also the case, I think, that the fact that Schutze's targets are upwardly mobile instead of downwardly mobile makes it easier to take shots at the gentrifiers. Then again, I bet when the Schutze family first moved into its house, there were people in that neighborhood who thought of them as interlopers. These wouldn't be people who had a newspaper column, though.
For his next trick, Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds traveling exhibit, is contemplating a doozy: displaying flayed corpses having sex. They'll call this necrophilic display "education" and "science," and they'll call anybody who objects a "prude" and a "fundamentalist."
Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. That number would have to include a significant number of independents and a lesser but still significant number of conservatives. Let's say you and your comrades were putting together big demonstration in Washington against the war, with the idea of getting US troops out of Iraq. If you really wanted to change minds and hearts, and build mass momentum toward ending the war, would you select as the featured speakers at that demonstration people like Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters, Susan Sarandon, Dennis Kucinich and JANE FREAKING FONDA?!? My guess is that these people set back the antiwar movement, such as it is, by trotting out the loony-lefties, thereby frightening the moderate to conservative people who have grave doubts about the war. If you wanted to relive the Sixties, folks, you did a splendid job. If you actually wanted to build momentum toward changing US policy in Iraq, well...
“Do you really want to know what I think of that thing? If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an ax and smash all the sets.” -- Marshall McLuhan, on television.
McLuhan, as you know, was the media guru and visionary best known for his observation, about television, that "the medium is the message." What he meant by that was that the facts television creates as a technology are more important than any message transmitted by TV. His quote above is why traditional Islamic culture is doomed if it accepts television, as it is doing, though it's going down fighting. TV formats us all to respond to things emotionally, and creates a consciousness that lives only in the present moment, ahistorically. What he's saying is that our civilization is the product of the Book -- and the Book has been displaced by electronic technology. Because of this technology, we will have a new civilization, whether we want to or not.
Interestingly, in light of Mark Shea's comment, here is what McLuhan (who was a committed Catholic) said three years before his death in 1980:
In a certain way, I also think that this could be the time of the Antichrist. When electricity allows for the simultaneity of all information for every human being, it is Lucifer's moment. He is the greatest electrical engineer. Technically speaking, the age in which we live is certainly favourable to an Antichrist. Just think: each person can instantly be tuned to a 'new Christ' and mistake him for the real Christ.
He's not talking about some "Left Behind" scenario, but about how global electronic media and how it changes the information environment, makes it possible for an Antichrist figure to emerge. (Whether or not you believe in the Antichrist is beside the point.)
Henryk Broder's essay in Der Spiegel is a useful corrective to Western self-criticism over our own decadence. This is why even though I fully grant the justice and accuracy of much of the D'Souzan critique of Western decadence, the alternative offered by Islam is intolerable. Here's Broder:
Those who react to kidnappings and beheadings, to massacres of people of other faiths, and to eruptions of collective hysteria with a call for "cultural dialogue" don't deserve any better.
"The West should desist from engaging in all provocations that produce feelings of debasement and humiliation," says psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter. "We should show greater respect for the cultural identity of Muslim countries. ... For Muslims, it is important to be recognized and respected as equals." In Richter's view, what the Muslims need is "a partnership of equals."
But Richter neglects to describe what this partnership might look like. Does achieving such equality mean that we should set up separate sections for women on buses, as is the custom in Saudi Arabia? Should the marrying age for girls be reduced to 12, as is the case in Iran? And should death by stoning be our punishment for adultery, as Shariah law demands? What else could the West do to show its respect for the cultural identity of Islamic countries? Would it be sufficient to allow Horst-Eberhard Richter to decide whether, for example, a wet T-shirt contest in a German city rises to a level of criminal provocation that could cause the Muslim faithful in Hyderabad to feel debased and humiliated?
The discussion over which provocations WE should put an end to so that THEY do not feel upset inexorably leads to the realm of the absurd.
The difference goes back to the point Pope Benedict may have been trying to make last year. We are faced with semi-barbarians in the Islamic countries (people who burn down embassies because of cartoons, celebrate suicide bombing, and the like) and semi-barbarians within the Western nations (the kind of cultural leftists and other decadents cited by D'Souza) -- but at least the ability to reason remains open to us in the West, because in whatever attenuated a form it exists today, it is part of our long heritage, part of who we have been and still are. In Islam, broadly speaking, it isn't there, not like we understand it. Force rules. God said it, they believe it, and that settles it. And woe betide anyone who disagrees. Yes?
How do those of us who agree that Western society is deeply decadent, but who recognize the rising tide of Islam worldwide as a serious threat to the West, find balance? Ideas?
The question I find myself asking, in light of biblical revelation, is this: which side of the conflict between the post-Christian West and the Foaming Bronze Age Fanatic Islamosphere is far more likely to give us "the lawless one ... the one doomed to perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god and object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, claiming that he is a god" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). Say what you will about Islam, but I don't see it producing that figure in a million years, whereas the West is ripe to give birth to him right now.
That's not to say I *prefer* the Foaming Bronze Age Thugs to win. It's to say that, in my heart, I cannot believe that they will. I think Scripture is true and that the coming of Christ will take place in a world that is apostate and (mark this) seriously ready to deify man, not in a world that never heard the gospel and which regards the deification of man with horror. That description fits the decadent West a lot better than than the Islamic East, so I retain a confidence, if you can call it that, that the winners of this particular "civilizational struggle" will be the post-Christian West, whose cultural and technological masters are laboring even now to create fresh sins that cry out to heaven and terrors that will dwarf Islam's crimes as continue on our post-Christian path toward "the supreme religious deception ... of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh."
When that will come, we don't know. *That* it will come is guaranteed by the word of God. And for my money, it seems much more like to come from a Decadent West triumphant over Islam than from Radical Islam triumphant over the West.
Peggy Noonan today pens a paean to Sen. Chuck Hagel for having the guts to take a difficult stand on the Iraq War. Excerpt:
We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and the cowardice that leaves a great deal unsaid. But I found myself impressed and grateful for the words of Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Because his message was not one Republicans or Democrats would find congenial, it may be accidentally dropped down the memory hole, so I'll quote at some length.
The committee was nearing a vote on what was, essentially, an announcement of no confidence in the administration's leadership in Iraq. Specifically it was a nonbinding resolution opposing the increase in troops the president has requested. This was not significant in a concrete way: The president has the power to send more troops, and they are already arriving. But as symbols go, it packed a punch. You couldn't watch it on television or on the Internet and not see that Mr. Hagel was letting it rip. He did not speak from notes or a text but while looking at his fellow senators. There seemed no time lag between thought and word. He was barreling, he was giving it to you straight, and he'd pick up the pieces later.
This is what he said: Congress has duties; in the case of the war, meeting those duties was not convenient; Congress did not meet them.
[snip] Mr. Hagel said the most serious thing that has been said in Congress in a long time. This is what we're here for. This is why we're here, to decide, to think it through and take a stand, and if we can't do that, why don't we just leave and give someone else a chance?
Mr. Hagel has shown courage for a long time. He voted for the war resolution in 2002 but soon after began to question how it was being waged. This was before everyone did. He also stood against the war when that was a lonely place to be. Senate Democrats sat back and watched: If the war worked, they'd change the subject; and if it didn't, they'd hang it on President Bush. Republicans did their version of inaction; they supported the president until he was unpopular, and then peeled off. This is almost not to be criticized. It's what politicians do. But it's not what Mr. Hagel did. He had guts.
Boy, do I ever agree with this. The Washington Post today writes that Hagel is considering a run for the presidency. Right now, that makes little sense. He's got no real support among Republican primary voters. But let us get to August with things in Baghdad unchanged or worse, and Republican voters will start to panic. There is no major Republican who has been as forthright and as straight-talking a critic of the Bush war for as long as Chuck Hagel -- and he is a Vietnam vet, too, twice the winner of the Purple Heart. But he did vote to authorize the war. Nevertheless, this is what Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a 2006 NYT Magazine profile of Hagel, about that moment:
When he rose on the Senate floor that October to explain his vote in favor of the resolution authorizing force — he'd persuaded himself that his vote might strengthen Powell's hand — he gave a speech that would have required no editing had he decided to vote against it. What sounded then to the venture's true believers like the scolding of a Cassandra sounds fairly obvious three and a half years later, which is to say that Hagel's words can reasonably be read as prescient: "How many of us really know and understand Iraq, its country, history, people and role in the Arab world?. . .The American people must be told
of the long-term commitment, risk and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets." The president had said "precious little" about post-Saddam Iraq, which could prove costly, Hagel warned, "in both American blood and treasure."
For that, he was mocked by the conservative media (National Review called him "Sen. Hagel (R-France)"). How the world has changed since then!
Hagel voted right on No Child Left Behind, on farm subsidies, and on the prescription drug benefit -- he was against them all as wasteful expansions of big government. He has a good record on abortion votes. So why not Hagel? Here's Lelyveld:
The problem with making a revival of old-time values of fiscal restraint at home and restraint in the use of American power abroad the starting point for a race is that it presumes a level of disillusion that latter-day Republicans — the people who'll vote in primaries in 2008 — show little sign of feeling.
That was true when this profile ran, one year ago. It's less true today. And if things continue on their current path in Iraq, Hagel will look a lot better to the GOP grassroots. I'm sure there are things about Chuck Hagel that I wouldn't much care for, but then again, I survey the field of Republican presidential candidates and I can't find any one that lights my fire. Still, managing the aftermath of the Iraq War will be an unfathomable challenge, and because Hagel understood far earlier than any other Republican contender what was wrong with the war, and with the strategic and philosophical thinking that got us into it, he might just be the Republican we need in the White House to deal with the deluge, and to keep us out of such foolish adventures in the future.
One more bit from the Lelyveld profile:
A Republican campaign pro, after an astute analysis of Hagel's virtues and drawbacks, zeroed in on a factor no one else had mentioned, one that he seemed to feel said a lot about the reason Hagel's party hasn't warmed to him, and therefore about his limited prospects.
"He doesn't have a happy face," the pro said.
Saints preserve us from politicians with happy faces!
I'm still making my way through Dinesh D'Souza's book, but let me direct you to David Kuo's Beliefnet interview with him, up today. It gets to the heart of why I think D'Souza goes wrong, but why his critique is still valuable.
In the interview, D'Souza says that now that we've got some distance from 9/11, we should apply critical thought to why the Islamists attacked us:
And it's time to ask the descriptive question, what motivated them to do it? And what I'm saying is, what motivated them to do it is what they perceive to be an atheist society whose values have the effect of undermining the family, corrupting the innocence of children, and eroding faith in God.
They see this as having happened over here, and they say we are projecting these values over there. In fact, their objection to our military force is that they see our military force as the transmission belt for transmitting these immoral values to the traditional cultures of the world which reject those values. [emphasis mine -- RD]
Our military force? No, the structures of market capitalism -- including the global media -- is the chief transmission belt! It's the same transmission belt that brings these corrupting (or liberating, depending on your point of view) values into the "Red" America that D'Souza valorizes. [N.B., before I say more, let me stipulate that the Islamic world can find in its Scriptures and Tradition ample reason to despise and make war on us infidels, which is another main flaw with D'Souza's thesis. But I want to focus in this post on his ignoring the role of aggressive capitalism in provoking the Islamic world to reaction.]
A much better book for those who wish to understand the role our own culture plays in provoking the traditional cultures of Islam is the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton's relatively brief "The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat." That book came out in 2002; Scruton didn't need five years after 9/11 to think about why it happened. He acknowledges in the book that there is plausible reason to blame Islam itself for 9/11. But it's not enough simply to say that 9/11 (by which he means the new terrorism) is all the fault of Islam, and leave it at that. Scruton too believes that the West has been aggressively provocative to all parts of the world that do not share its basic concepts:
To transfer [Western] values to places that have been deeply inoculated against them by culture and custom is to invite the very confrontation that we seek to avoid. ...Politicians, asked to define what we are fighting for in the "war against terrorism," will always say freedom. But, taken by itself, freedom means the emancipation from constraints, including those constraints which might be needed if a civilization is to endure. If all that Western civilization offers is freedom, then it is a civilzation bent on its own destruction. Moreover freedom flaunted in the face of religious prohibitions is an act of aggression, inviting retribution from those whose piety it offends.
It was brave of Scruton to have written that less than a year after the Twin Towers fell; if his book had attracted more attention, surely more people on the Right would have attacked him for blaming the victim. Anyway, I doubt D'Souza would disagree with this passage I quoted above. I strongly encourage curious readers to pick up Scruton's book, because it's argument is both complex and compact. Here, though, for our purposes is a key passage:
Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, adn the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, hoever, it means the loss of sovereig
nty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. ... People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it.
Globalization -- which is to say, modernization -- has brought with it economic structures and institutions that unavoidably disrupt traditional life. A century ago, what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert populated by tribes. It is now insanely wealthy, and therefore powerful. How can that not have disrupted and dislocated these tribal people? Similarly, the media revolution is now roiling the Arab Muslim world. When I was in Dubai a year or so ago, an American professor working in Damascus told me that the thing we in the West fail to understand is that thanks to satellite television, the Middle East is going through a cultural disruption/revolution that played itself out over decades in the West -- and that this revolution was occurring in a culture that was far more rigid than America's. Several people, mostly Arabs, told me that you could go to many capitals of the Arab world and find class and cul
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