Is it just me, or did it strike anyone else that James Cameron announces the premiere of a documentary film that claims to prove that the central claim of Christianity -- that Jesus rose from the dead, and through his resurrection humanity can be saved from death -- is utter garbage ... and Christians worldwide fail to burn embassies, call for Cameron's murder, or say much of anything.
Well, the Catholic League did put out a press release. So I guess Susan S. is right, and there really is no difference between conservative Christian leaders and their Muslim counterparts. My bad.
Light blogging for the next few days; I'm off early in the ayem to Anchorage, Alaska, where I'll be giving a talk at the university's student union on Thursday night (see the Anchorage paper's feature here). I won't be wearing pants, so come out to jeer. You have been warned. In the meantime, here's a missive from a reader who believes global warming has a bad name. Discuss:
What about global warming benefits?
1. Those shorter, milder winters will mean less demand for heating, which means lower heating bills, less fossil fuel burned, and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Those longer summers will mean longer growing seasons, which mean higher crop yields.
3. If global warming persists long enough, our oak forests will expand northward and yield lots of high-quality lumber for centuries.
4. The expanded warm-weather habitat means bass fishermen, et al, will rejoice.
The above benefits are not trivial (well, maybe 4.). Worldwide, they mean trillions of dollars saved in energy costs which could be used to construct sea walls to protect coastal cities (see the Netherlands). The thawing tundra is exposing millions of acres of nutrient-rich soil, and, for example, Siberia could become the next breadbasket for the entire world, alleviating world hunger. Northern Canada and much of Russia will become hospitable for civilization, and new cities could emerge, alleviating population crowding elsewhere.
I have now lived long enough to see many examples of how the media catastrophize change. I remember that, in anticipation of Y2K, we were urged to stock up on bottled water and food, buy a gasoline generator, and hoard cash to protect ourselves from the coming calamity. I remember those African "killer bees" that were moving up from South America to Mexico and were going to kill the California honeybees that pollinate our crops, devastating our state's agricultural economy. And now that global warming is about to extinguish half the species on earth I'm reminded that some of those same climatologists were telling us in the mid-70s that the next ice age was imminent!
I'm all for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but let's put global warming in perspective. The earth regularly goes through cycles of warming and cooling, and the geologic record clearly shows that life has been in its greatest abundance and diversity during the warm periods. Think how warm it must have been when dinosaurs existed. Those huge, cold-blooded creatures needed a lot more warmth than even the most pessimistic climatological models are predicting for the current warming period. And life flourished. The warm oceans teemed with life. Fern forests grew in Colorado.
It's global cooling that we must fear! Before this warming period started, the Laurentian Ice Sheet covered what became Manhattan Island to depths up to thirty feet! Life was not in abundance in that environment. Should the next ice age be similar to the previous ones, folks in the temperate zones will be in deep trouble. I have no idea how we would cope with the enormous demand for energy to keep warm. Maybe we'll have alternate sources of energy. Maybe we'll have to burn fossil fuels to generate greenhouse gasses. Or maybe there will be a tremendous migration to the equatorial zones which are little affected by global cooling and warming. Now that will be a population density to contend with!
I don't mean to alarm you, Rod, though we are about due for the next cooling period, geologically speaking.
I do suggest we start now to figure out how to take advantage of the benefits of global warming in addition to mitigating the disadvantages. That seems much more sensible than just hawking gloom and doom.
I hate clowns. Hate them. Mimes, by the way, are the most annoying of all clowns. And I know I'm not alone.
But even if I did love clowns, I'd still say: What the heck is wrong with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee?!? The inimitable Diogenes over at the Catholic World News blog draws attention to the archdiocesan newspaper's puffing of a priest who gads about in clown drag -- Father's nom de clown is "Stripes" -- and calls it "ministry." Writes Diogenes:
Why not feature a man who finds the spiritual satisfactions of his priestly life -- not in social work or dance or twisting balloons into animal shapes -- but in sacramental ministry? After all, do we want to entice into the priesthood the kind of 22-year-old male that would be attracted by Stripes?
Clowns belong in the circus. Priests belong in church. Any priest who dresses up like a clown forfeits any claim to spiritual authority, as far as I'm concerned. One of these days, the "Godspell" generation will pass from our midst. Hurry!
I've wondered for a while if technology would make it possible for small towns in rural areas to repopulate with knowledge workers and their families -- people who want to get out of the cities and into smaller communities, and for whom that's possible via telecommuting. The kinds of cultural amenities that people used to only be able to get in bigger cities -- a good selection of movies, big bookstores, record stores with a decent selection -- are now available over the web (Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc.). Plus you can order specialty foods over the Internet if you can't find what you want locally. And the homeschooling revolution makes families less dependent on local educational institutions. Point is, technology makes small town and rural life more doable for people who before the Internet wouldn't have been able to choose that kind of life without giving up their careers, or certain pleasures of city life. The idea that if you live in a small town you're going to be bored silly is outdated.
Well, Joel Kotkin says this out-migration from urban areas has actually been happening slowly for a while, and it's picking up steam. Excerpt:
Another type of Heartland growth could be described as re-emerging rural hubs. These are usually small and midsized cities that grew up during the period of agricultural expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then began to decline or plateau as early as the 1920s. Prominent examples include Fargo, Sioux Falls, Des Moines and Boise. These communities are exploiting their lower costs, good public schools, universities and better quality of life for middle-class families to lure high-end professional service firms, information companies and diversified, often innovative small manufacturers.
In coming decades, these trends may be further driven by aesthetic preferences, particularly those of retiring baby boomers, for a less dense environment. In contrast to always popular stories about people “returning to the cities”, more than twice as many adults say they would prefer to live in a rural or small town area. That is partly because most Americans perceive rural America as epitomizing traditional values of family, religion, self-sufficiency—someplace attractive, friendlier and safer, particularly for children. These views are held by the majority of suburbanites as well as by a slightly larger proportion of rural residents, suggesting that there is a large, mostly untapped market that would consider a move to a smaller community in the Heartland. As one demographer suggests, “America’s love affair with suburban life may be winding down in favor of the countryside.”
There's a discussion in the piece about Fargo, ND:
These characteristics are the main draw, particularly to relocating thirty-somethings, notes Mike Chambers, founder of the fast-growing biotech firm Aldevron. It’s an experience common to many companies in this buckle of the Brain Belt. “Wherever you go you find people who went out and came back”, says Howard Dahl, CEO of Fargo-based Amity Technologies, a fast-growing agricultural machinery firm, and former head of the local Arts Council. “We constantly get resumes from people at Boeing in Seattle or somewhere else. They don’t come for the mountains or the sunshine or the culture—they come back because of the kind of people who are here.”
Dahl, a former Lutheran seminarian, says religion also plays a major role, but not in the loud, assertive tones one might find in Houston or Dallas. “Religion and family play a huge role in everything, but it’s quiet. It’s people’s sense of ethics”, he suggests. “It’s that you care about your community and can count on your neighbors.” Such values, Aurora’s Gary Allen believes, are the real secret behind the nascent Heartland resurgence. In a town of barely 4,500, there
are more than thirty non-profit foundations, with assets in excess of $45 million. It is all part, notes Gary Warren, of a community spirit reflected in the city’s extensive recreation facilities, its well-maintained central square, library, senior center and museum. “Community building is a way of life here”, Warren offers. “You give to your community the way you give to your church on Sunday. It’s the essence of what it is to live here, and it’s why people decide they want to come here.”
Having grown up in a good small town, I would caution against idealizing any place. It can't be said often enough that as long as cable/satellite TV exist, there's no way to escape popular culture entirely. But boy, I sure would love to be able to live here, even if there were no jobs for me there.
The new issue of National Geographic has a big feature on how Orlando, Fla., is pioneering the template for American living in this century. Here's how writer T.D. Allman starts his piece:
Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it's far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities' exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming. Who are all these people? They're you, they're me, and increasingly, they are nothing like the blue-eyed "Dick and Jane" of mythical suburban America. [snip] All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.
Welcome to the theme-park nation.
The Geography of Nowhere. Shoot me now. Actually, the piece is neither critical nor celebratory, just a great collection of observations and reflections about Orlando, Walt Disney, and how both shape the landscape of contemporary American life. And it has the kind of quote journalists live for. Linda Chapin, a former county commissioner and an official largely responsible for turning the place into one giant strip mall, tries to stay positive, in that oh-so-American way: "Just because we've ruined 90 percent of everything doesn't mean we can't do wonderful things with the remaining ten percent!"
Here's a good overview of the Muslim demographic situation in Europe, how it came to be, and prospects for the future -- this in a just-released paper from an Israeli professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. Highlights:
+ The aftermath of World War II brought about an acute shortage of manpower in Europe. Former colonies, where manpower was available that required relatively limited cultural adaptation, became the plentiful sources for unskilled laborers who would replenish the dwindling pool of workers in Europe.
+ These workers constructed Muslim communities in certain localities throughout Europe, where their numbers created local majorities that no candidate for elective office could ignore. The growth of these communities required the construction of mosques and Muslim cultural centers, some of which grew into secret lodges of subversion, incitement, and recruitment of radical youth.
+ Muslim communities have imported the Middle Eastern conflict into their host countries, with attending acts of violence and unbridled anti-Semitism toward local Jewish communities which had otherwise lived peacefully except during the Holocaust interregnum.
+ Some European Muslim leaders make no secret of their intent to change Europe to their tune, not to adapt to it. They demand their own school systems, in their own native languages, financed by the host state and, in the long run, to its own detriment.
+ European countries have adopted multiculturalism, and increasingly multilingualism, as an imposed reality whereby they have abdicated their role to absorb the newcomers and integrate them into the existing systems, and instead let the immigrants dictate their own visions of "integration," which means in effect separatism, secession, or an eventual takeover when demography had run its course.
+ There are already areas in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain where Muslim children constitute the majority of the school population. In addition, there are a growing numbers of converts to Islam in major European countries such as France and Britain - 50,000 in each in the past decade.
I've been corresponding with a reader of this blog, a distinguished left-liberal journalist and commentator who writes frequently about war and foreign affairs. With his permission, I quote from the exchange, which began off my quoting the Nick Cohen essay from the Journal (which is now available online here). Cohen, you'll recall, is himself a secular-left commentator who is appalled by the Euro-left's embrace of Islamists. Cohen wrote that his leftist confreres appear to have embraced an appeasement mentality, in (vain) hope that the fearsome Islamists in their midst will leave them at peace. In my response, I pointed out that though I believe the Iraq war to have been a colossal mistake, I don't believe that we can escape the struggle with Islamism, and that sometimes we will have to use violence in that struggle.
N., the commentator, who frequently reports from Europe and the Mideast, wrote:
I'm not unsympathetic to Cohen's view as you report it, but when you talk about the need for the US to struggle, "sometimes violently," with radical Islam, I think you don't take into account the question of interests that divides Americans and Europeans. The fact is that the Islamic immigration to Europe makes such a violent struggle a de facto call to civil war. In the great urban areas of France, Germany, The Netherlands or the UK, to go to war in this sense means going to war against the newsagent, the hospital nurse, the schoolteacher, the bus driver, the neighbor. In other words, the problem is not European cowardice or lack of will ---here I do part company from Cohen---but a prudential calculus. Are you really comfortable condemning this? After all, there are wars that are simply too costly to fight and times when accomodation, and, yes, appeasement, is better than war.
I don't for a moment doubt Cohen's account of the pathologies of the European left for whom anti-Americanism now trumps secularist and, indeed, feminist and post-Christian principles. But I think he is turning an (admittedly important) second order problem into the principal one. The problem here is not will; it's reality. Think of our own immigration situation, which, of course, is far less agonistic. Fighting bilingualism is, as a practical matter, a losing cause now that a critical mass of hispanophones now live (and in some cases predominate) in major American cities. You don't need to speak English in much of LA, for example (and certainly Houston and probably Dallas as well). Imagine an American Nick Cohen attributed the spread of bilingualism simply to an absence of will, or cowardice. Whatever your anxieties about immigration, I think you'd find that account too simple.
This provoked a thought experiment. I live in a city that is filling rapidly with Mexican immigrants. The proportion of Hispanic residents to non-Hispanics is quickly moving in Hispanics' favor. In the 2000 census, Hispanics constituted 35 percent of the population here, making them Dallas's largest minority. Their number has without question only increased this decade. For obvious reasons, it is very, very difficult to go anywhere in Dallas without encountering Hispanics and Hispanic culture. Similarly, the Netherlands' four largest cities will soon be majority Muslim. N.'s remark made me wonder what it would be like if every Hispanic I encountered going about my business in Dallas were a Muslim. How would I feel then about the wisdom of promoting a conflict, possibly violent, with them?
This set me back. It would be a nightmare, in the most literal sense. My own neighborhood, which is mixed between Hispanics and non-Hispanics, and surrounded by predominantly working-class and immigrant Hispanics, would be a war zone. N. is right: if conflict between Hispanics and non-Hispanics in Dallas became violent, the consequences would be unthinkable. And yet, says N., this
is the reality that Europeans are facing today. Whether it should have been allowed to get to this stage is beside the point; this is where they are.
In my response to him, I said that in my own trips to the continent, I've been amazed and appalled by the willingness of Europeans to stand paralyzed before the threat. In Holland, to take a very minor but telling example, the Dutch have been closing public swimming pools to bathers after thuggish young Muslim males have been harrassing Dutch women there, calling them sluts and whores. The Dutch found it easier to close the pools than confront the thugs. This is insane in my judgment, and no good can possibly come of it. But I must admit that it's easy for me to make this judgment from the position of my safe American home.
Is it really too late to do anything to stop the Islamization of Europe (by which I mean the collapse of European secularist values in the face of an aggressive Islam borne by immigrants)? I wrote to N. and asked if he really thought that the Europeans had no realistic choice but to sit tight and try to ride this thing out, hoping that a moderate Euro-Islam emerges among them. He responded:
I AM suggesting that Europeans have to ride this out. The corollary is that I do not think it in Europe's interests to get too involved with the American project of the global war on terrorism (or 'long war' or whatever you want to call it), precisely because, as I wrote you, I do not think it in the interests of European countries to do so on prudential grounds.
There's a lot to say on all this and I'm not sure I can do so this morning. But a few points:
The reason I 'red-flagged' your remark about resisting or using violence to combat Islamic extremism is that I believe the real threat of Islamic extremism comes from countries where we are not going to be able to use force (e.g. Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, etc.) and from Islamic diasporas in Europe. What happened recently in Somalia, which is certainly defensible, is going to be the exception rather than the rule.
I also don't entirely see the point of going to war anywhere at present (police work, including secret police work is another matter entirely, and something I support, though I believe it can and must be done without torture). More precisely, to use the military term of art, I don't see how we can achieve the desired end state of moderating Salafism and radical Shi'ism through violence. The only place we're actually widely liked in the Islamic world is Iran, where we have been unable to influence events. Familiarity (with us) breeds hatred; it doesn't engender change. That for me is the real lesson of the American way of war in our time.
Much as I hate paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, you deal with the Islamic world you have, not the one you wish you had. Force is only going to make more recruits for the extremists. As far as I'm concerned, you do your best to track, arrest, deport, imprison the terrorists. But going to war? I just think that's a recruiting poster for the extremists. Britain could never stamp out the IRA, Rod! You thhink force is going to stamp out what is, in effect, a millennarian movement within the Islamic world at least as powerful as Protestantism in the current condition of the mass migration of peoples?
For me, a combination of bribes, along side longterm efforts to more intelligently assimilate people, and removing hot button 'recruiting poster issues' like Israel-Palestine (which are in some way pretexts, but effective ones nonetheless) are the best we're going to do The template for this situation is urban Cairo and suburban Paris, not Afghanistan or Somalia, and force is a minor component of what is needed in such places, which to me is why the war idea (call it what you will) is so misleading and counter-productive.
Lastly, to finally come around to your question about suitcase bombs [I'd raised what I considered the li
kelihood of Islamic terrorists using a suitcase nuke to take out a European city -- RD], sure, I suppose it's possible. But again, to the extent it's possible to believe this can be averted, it will be done through surveillance and cooptation (and they must go hand in hand; alone, either will fail)---that is, because the authorities are informed on time, which is going to require local community support as borders are simply too porous to make keeping the bombers out a feasible option.
You spoke of the Netherlands. Look, what Ayaan Hirsi Ali stands for is what I believe in too. But her influence in the Islamic community is zero. In contrast, I have grave doubts about Tariq Ramadan. But he may represent a moderating influence in his own community. On a practical level, who is more valuable in the struggle against Islamic radicalism within the diasporic Muslim communities that are the point of the spear? I submit, assuming he's not a complete fraud, it's Ramadan, much as I might wish it otherwise.
I'm not a pacifist. But I am persuaded the challenge the Islamists pose will not be successfully resisted---to use your word---or even blunted through war.
You know, I've come to believe, as does N., that in the wake of the Iraq war's failure, conventional war as a means of fighting Islamic terrorism is not only useless, but actually counterproductive. Someone in one of the comboxes a day or so ago said, basically, "OK Mr. Smart Guy, you think Bush has bombed, but what would you do?" My answer is pretty much what N. suggests: constant police action, counterterrorism, espionage, and so forth. I don't see that we have a better idea.
But I find myself deeply distressed by N.'s words about Europe and civil war. He knows much more about the situation in Europe than I do, and while I resist his conclusions, it's mostly from a sense of instinct than from reason. (In other words, I keep thinking, "The Europeans have got to fight the Islamists, they can't give in." Which is admittedly a sentiment, and an easy sentiment for an American to have; it's not much of a basis for policy. Is it over for Europe? If to meaningfully resist its own Islamization would be to provoke civil war -- and a well-known British journalist shocked me last year by saying quite soberly that he foresees "religious war" coming to the UK -- is there nothing left to do but to manage Europe's capitulation? Was Jean Raspail right in "The Camp of the Saints"? (M. Raspail certainly believes today that it's all over but the shouting.)
Is European resistance to encroaching Islamism even feasible at this point, given the angry Muslim ghettos the Europeans have allowed to develop in their midst? At what cost? Discuss.
The central purpose behind BerkShares is to strengthen the local economy, perhaps even inoculate it against the whims of globalization, by encouraging people to support local businesses. Amazon does not accept BerkShares, for example, but the Bookloft on Route 7 does.
Five months into the experiment, some people embrace it, some endure it, some ignore it altogether. At the very least, BerkShares have reminded everyone just how complex this thing called community is.
I'll say. Read the story if you can get behind the firewall -- or better yet, read the BerkShares website for more information. The problem with BerkShares, according to the Times story, is that even a local economy depends on being able to trade with vendors far away, making it difficult to accept local-only money. That, and the social pressure being put on local tradespeople who won't accept the BerkShares. Still, what a fascinating experiment. I'd love to know what y'all think of it -- especially if you have experience using BerkShares.
...please proceed to Sy Hersh's big New Yorker story and untangle the meaning for us. Best I can figure is a) the Bush administration is planning to attack Iran (which I completely believe, despite the denials), and b) whatever the US does in the Middle East, we're screwed, owing to political and religious alliances and rivalries that make the Byzantine court look like a model of simplicity.
Some years ago, First Things caused a massive row after publishing a symposium around the question of abortion, the judicial usurpation of politics, and the legitimacy of the American government. At hand was the question of, in the words of the editors, "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientioius citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." The idea was that judges had usurped the proper functions of legislatures in a democracy, and were forcing laws onto people that violated their consciences intolerably. At what point would the American government be properly judged despotic, and no longer worthy of support?
All that came to mind today when I read Wesley J. Smith's report on the FT blog about a bill before the California legislature that would require Catholic nursing homes to allow euthanasia. Writes Smith:
If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide. That this could cause untold misery for thousands of helpless sick and elderly people matters to its authors not a whit. The culture of death brooks no dissent.
To be sure, the FT symposium was hugely controversial, with some people closely associated with the magazine leaving it angry that the publication even suggested that ceasing to support the US constitutional framework is on the table. That said -- and having just finished P.D. James's "The Children of Men," which I was reading in tandem with Corrie ten Boom's "The Hiding Place" (about how she and her Christian family were sent to the concentration camp for hiding Jews) -- I do wonder at what point the "culture of death" will have progressed so far into law (either by judicial fiat or democratically) that morally responsible people will in some significant sense have to become enemies of the government. The Holocaust didn't happen all at once, and it wasn't imposed on the German people. It involved a gradual process of desensitizing them to the sanctity of life, and getting them to slowly but steadily accept the concept of "life unworthy of life." For the German Cardinal Clemens von Galen, that day came in 1941, when he delivered a stunning speech denouncing the Nazi government's forced euthanasia program. For the Lutheran pastor-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that came earlier, in the 1930s, when he returned to Germany and organized church resistance to the Nazi program.
Might that day come to the United States? If so, how will we know it? And what will it mean for Christians, Jews and others, whatever their political orientation, who understand what's going on, and refuse to go along? Thoughts?
UPDATE: A conservative Catholic friend and reader of this blog e-mails:
I like to fantasize about a Catholic bishop saying something like this:
“Hell is going to freeze over before we give in. Come and get us. Sue us out of existence. Send the police to shut our homes down and put our patients on the street. I promise you: the cameras will be rolling while granny clutches at her IV stand as some jackboot drags her off, weeping, to a lice-infested state-run sewer. I’m sure your opponents will be only too happy to have that footage available when election-time rolls around.
“And when it’s all over, the taxpayers of California will have the privilege of shouldering even more of the healthcare burden than they do already, I’ll get to dump one of my biggest moral, financial, and administrative problems on somebody else, and you’ll look like stupid jerks. I’ll be laughing my [expletive] off at you while I try to decide what to do with all my new-found spare time and money. Enjoy it while you
can, mongoloids!”
(Wow, it felt really good to write that.)
Of course, you have to be a man to play chicken with the badguys.
There was an interesting piece in yesterday's NYTimes opinion section, showing graphs from the General Social Survey tracking the change in Americans' opinions on particular issues over 34 years. The link to the short accompanying essay is here, but you have to click on the slide show part to see the graphs themselves. Worth doing.
To me, the most surprising thing is how steady opinions have held on so many controversial issues over the last 34 years. I would have predicted a big gap between the number of people who in 1972 said sex outside of marriage is "always wrong," and the number who said so last year. Not so: the drop is only 8 percent (34 pct then, versus 25 pct now). The number of people who say they are afraid to walk in their neighborhood at night has hovered around 40 percent for a generation. The number of people who believe in life after death has been only a few points north or south of 70 percent for over 30 years. There's been little variation in the reported level of happiness in the population, despite the significant growth of material wealth among average Americans. Most people are "very happy" in their marriage, and the percentage saying that has barely budged in a generation.
For me, the most startling graph was the one tracking the support of abortion rights from 1972 to 2006. The GSS tracks the conditions under which abortion rights supporters back legal abortion (e.g., rape and incest, life of the mother, any reason at all). Over 34 years, the lines are virtually flat. Can that really be right? If I'm reading the data correctly, for all the Sturm und Drang over abortion since Roe v. Wade, the country is no more liberal and no more conservative on the issue than the day SCOTUS spoke.
Fascinating change: which of the following five institutions -- religion, Congress, the media, medicine, the military -- is the only one to have grown in respect in 30 years? That's right, the military.
Fascinating change, but for a different reason: the percentage of people who say homosexuals should be allowed to teach in universities has gone up from 48 percent in 1972 to over 70 percent last year. And I'm thinking: 30 percent of Americans think gays shouldn't even be allowed to teach college? Man. I would have thought it was something like 10 percent, and even 34 years ago, the idea that a majority of people opposed gays teaching in college is startling to me, and disturbing.
How has the public's point of view on whether or not gays should have the right to marry changed over 30 years? We don't know. They haven't been testing for it, because until virtually the day before yesterday, it never occurred to the overwhelming majority of people to ask.
Another one for the Get Religion analysts: today's Wall Street Journal (sub.req.) features an informative front-page story on the rise in anti-Shia fear, even fanaticism, in Bahrain and elsewhere in nations governed by Sunni Arabs. The story, by Andrew Higgins, explains the historical roots of the Sunni-Shia divide, and discusses at some length the theological concerns Sunnis have about rising Shia influence, particularly with Shia Iran ascendant in the region. And then we arrive at this paragraph:
Fear of Iran, of course, is anchored in real-world issues. Tehran's nuclear research push has caused widespread jitters and prompted Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to suggest they might start nuclear programs, too. Iran's involvement in Iraq since the toppling of Mr. Hussein's Sunni tyranny has stired real fear that Iraq will be led by a Shiite regime loyal to Tehran. [Emphasis mine -- RD]
Classic. It appears that religious concerns are not, in the view of this reporter, part of the "real world." It appears that to this reporter and his editors, religion is a sideshow to the real world. And we wonder why our elites -- and we who depend on them for news, information, analysis and leadership -- have so much trouble understanding how the Middle East works.
I wish I could think of a single interesting thing to say about the Oscars. Time was when I really cared about them (well, I was paid to care about them, but aside from a professional interest, I really did). Now I fail to see the point. Glad Helen Mirren won -- "The Queen" was a wonderful film. But having watched a decent portion of the Oscar telecast between going back and forth trying to get No. 2 Son to stay in bed, for crying out loud, I kept wondering, "Was it always this boring?" I'm generally environmentalist in my outlook -- see my Sunday column from yesterday -- but all the sanctimony surrounding Al Gore and the global warming issue was hard to take. The highlight (lowlight?) had to have been Leonardo di Caprio earnestly advising viewers to visit the Oscar.com website for hints on how they could help save the planet. It's not the cause that puts me off -- in fact, the advice given on the Oscar site is reasonable -- but rather Hollywood itself. What a wonderful world it would be if they would just shut up and entertain.
Writing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal -- the essay is not on the web, yet anyway -- the left-wing British journalist Nick Cohen excoriates left-liberal Europeans for selling out all their principles to embrace "ultra-reactionary [Islamic] movements", versus America. How to explain this? Cohen has an idea:
Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.
(This might be the point to say that while I believe the Iraq war was a foolish mistake, I still believe that we have no choice but to struggle, sometimes violently, with radical Islam.)
Steve Sailer's column on the chicanery of No Child Left Behind is yet another reminder that we can try all the government schemes we want, but nothing is more important than personal culture in the education of students. We don't know how to fix that, so we'll wreck the schools in an effort to pretend that we can fix the problem.
How in the name of all that is good and holy is American strategy in Iraq once again dependent on that weasel Ahmad Chalabi, who helped manipulate us into this stupid war?
This week's Bible Girl column tells an incredibly grim and graphic -- you have been warned -- tale of an influential black Pentecostal minister in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who has been formally accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual abuse of women in his church. As we so often hear, the alleged victims claim they were told that if they went public, they would be defying God's will by bringing shame to His Anointed One, and that they would end up ruined.
If you've ever wondered what a middle-aged New Jersey suburban yenta looks like trying to act like a stripper at a kaffeeklatsch, check out today's NYTimes. From the story:
Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration.
“I want the women to feel strong within themselves,” explained Ms. Cottam, 29, who teaches pole dancing at a local gym as well as at home parties. Noting that some middle-aged suburban women lose themselves and their sense of sexuality as they are consumed by the responsibilities of motherhood, she added: “When you come to my class you are beautiful, you are. I want to show them that strength inside, and unleash that sexual kitten.”
How pathetic is that? It's just so comical -- unleashing the sexual kitten inside flabby, overpermed suburban matrons -- that you (well, I) can barely work up the outrage. Then again, if Viagra can turn Homer Simpson into Fabio, at least in his own mind, this is to be expected? You can apparently convince women to accept anything as long as you shellack it with a feminist gloss and call it empowering. Why are people so eager to cast off their personal dignity? This has mystified me for a few years, as readers of my 2002 "Rampant Rabbit, Licking Lizard" piece in NRO will remember (the piece was about the phenomenon of suburban and small-town sex toy and lubrication parties). I'm not particularly interested in whether or not lovers slather their stiffened giblets with fragrant unguents, poke each other with blenders, or gad about their bedchambers like pole dancers. Fine, knock yourself out, just don't frighten the horses.
What does interest me is the willingness to take what was more or less outlaw behavior and domesticate it. When middle class women are willing to ape strippers in their living rooms, and pass around dildos and lubricant as they once did Tupperware, something very strange is up. Tom Wolfe wrote about this kind of thing a generation ago, so it's really not new. Still, morality aside, I find the whole business exceptionally trashy, and wish these people would rediscover their inhibitions, because they're embarrassing themselves. Weyrich and Lind caught a lot of guff for briefly valorizing the 1950s in their AmCon essay, but one thing that we could stand to recover about the Fifties -- aside from the great jazz -- was the expectation that grown-ups would act like grown-ups.
In the first place, as much as some hierarchs and ecclesiastical bureaucrats might dispute the point, churches need the press to play its traditional watchdog role. It was a free press that forced the churches to confront the sexual abuse crisis, and today a free press is also running down stories of financial mismanagement. Institutions prefer to deny their own dysfunction, and an effective press won't let them get away with it.
The problem with the kind of sloppy coverage described above is that it enables apologists to dismiss any critical reporting as biased. Many reasonable people, familiar with the track record of the British press, are already inclined to write off even credible reports as fruit of the same poisonous tree.
Second, inaccurate stories such as this week's about a secret plan for union with the pope can wreak real havoc, in this case not only in Anglican/Catholic relations, but within Anglicanism. If the story were true, that might well be a risk worth running, but otherwise it seems terribly reckless.
Third, I know how important English journalism is around the world. The BBC and The Times still in many ways set the "gold standard." For precisely that reason, when the British press sneezes, the rest of us catch cold.
Via Daniel Larison, here's a rather diverting passage from Myrna Minkoff Marcotte's latest epistle to the sexually unenlightened:
I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.
[snip] Also, saying that abortion is morally questionable, even if you’re pro-choice, is a huge insult to the brave men and women who risk life and limb to perform them. Being an abortion doctor is a pretty thankless task, because a bunch of “Christian” men who have emasculation issues are gunning to kill you in hopes that brings their huevos back. Meanwhile, other anti-choicers are running around claiming that being an abortionist is like this super great career that people only indulge in for the money. This is [expletive] and pro-choicers need to push back and remind everyone that abortionists are heroes, who put up with all sorts of abuse because they want to help women.
To which Larison replies, in part:
Note how perverse this is–she doesn’t say abortion is necessary or unavoidable or even the least bad option in a range of options. She says it is good. In the interests of the self, pure utility dictates abortion. ...Marcotte is hardly the first person to advance a supremacist logic that justifies the murder of other people, but most supremacists nowadays at least cushion the blow of their hideous ideas with euphemistic language. Give Marcotte credit for this much–no one will ever accuse her of rhetorical subtlety or nuance.
Here's a good one for the Get Religion gang. Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer has an excellent column this week about the role that syncretist Latino-African religions play in the local crime scene -- this, off police in south Dallas discovering palo mayombe paraphernalia, including a human skull, under a bridge near where human bodies were found dumped. Schutze, who wrote a book about those grisly occult drug gang murders in Matamoros some years ago, makes a couple of points well worth contemplating:
1. That despite the knee-jerk attitude some have of wanting to defend native religions against attacks from Christians and others (secularists?) from Western traditions, the fact is that these religions can and do have some pretty ugly aspects, and political correctness shouldn't cause us to turn away from that. Schutze:
Look, I understand why the academics and the priest want to defend these beliefs from an automatic association with crime. All kinds of racism, bigotry and ethnocentric foolishness often deform the way dominant white culture views non-European belief.
But we also need to not kid ourselves. This stuff is often closely wrapped with crime, and as a motivational and disciplinary force it can be very powerful.
2. That whether or not we believe palo mayombe, santeria and suchlike has any effect at all -- i.e., even if we think it is nothing but mumbo-jumbo -- the people who practice it believe it is real, and they predicate their actions in the real world on their faith. (Similarly, it doesn't really matter whether Allah really will reward the suicide bomber with 72 virgins if he blows himself up in an Israeli pizzeria; all the Israelis need to know is that there are people who believe that, and will act on it). Schutze again:
White people, Europeans, the industrialized world, whatever you want to call us: You know who I mean. Us. We have enormous faith in our own powers, so much so that we think our power can always kill their power. We can kill them with our hands tied behind our backs.
But that's what I mean about let's not kid ourselves. People to whom we condescend are not necessarily less strong or less courageous than we. They have their own ways of kicking ass.
At the ranch where Mark Kilroy was ritually tortured and killed, police found remains of 13 other victims, including another U.S. citizen and a 9-year-old child. The gang that killed Kilroy was caught because one of them drove straight into a police roadblock, believing he was invisible.
He wasn't. But he thought he was. Think about that. Then think about Dowdy Ferry Bridge.
Kudos to Schutze, a secular liberal writing for an "alternative" publication, for taking religion's interaction with the real world with appropriate seriousness.
Hard-to-read story on today's Times front page, about the heavy cost being paid by families of men serving in Iraq, but full-time soldiers and reservists. Here's the lede:
In the nearly two years Cpl. John Callahan of the Army was away from home, his wife, he said, had two extramarital affairs. She failed to pay hi
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