I imagine I'll get dogpiled for saying so, but I deeply love France, and all things French. I'm completely unreasonable on the subject. You can trash France all you like, and I might even agree with you, but it won't make a fig of difference to me. I love the place. My friend Fred Gion and I spent a terrific evening in December of 2005 at La Table du Perigord, a little restaurant in the St-Germain neighborhood of Paris. Our meal was simple but sublime, and we spent almost four hours lingering over it, drinking wine and enjoying ... life. My love affair with France began when I was a little boy, not even old enough to read, and I listened to my elderly great-aunts tell tales of serving as Red Cross nurses in Dijon during the Great War. Aunt Hilda was seized by a Frenchman on the Champs-Elysees when the armistice was announced, and he kissed her madly. She pretended to be scandalized 60 years later. I thought it was amazing. Just think! The old ladies sat me on their leather couch in their cabin and showed me their photo album from France in the war, and I was in heaven.
When I was in high school, I discovered Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," his supposedly non-fiction account of life in Paris in the 1920s, when he was a poor and unknown journalist. I. Could. Not. Get. Enough. Of course he lied, but they were fantastic lies, and I loved them. Since then, I've been to France a number of times, and I cannot get enough of the place. I learned, sort of, the French language, but of course it has faded from disuse. But I love to hear it spoken, I love to hear it come out of my mouth. I met a couple from Montreal when I was in Louisiana a few weeks back, and just speaking my rudimentary French with them was pure pleasure.
When I was dating Julie, I took her to Paris, and showed her the places I loved. It was all part of my elaborate courtship ritual: Paris helped me win my true love's heart. Not that you asked, but there is no finer feeling than to be young, completely and ridiculously in love, and in Paris in the springtime. The French are impossible, of course, but God love them, they know how to live. Back during the days leading up to the Iraq War, when idiots were pouring French wine down sewer drains (hey, I volunteered to make my gullet their sewer!), I wrote this defense of France on National Review Online. I think it holds up fairly well, especially because the French were wiser about the war than we were.
What prompts my reverie was reading over dinner tonight this story from the Times about the love letters of Ernest Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich, which are to be released. This passage struck me:
“I love you and I hold you tight and kiss you hard,” Hemingway ends one letter. In another he writes, “I can’t say how every time I ever put my arms around you I felt that I was home.” He begins another: “What do you really want to do for a life work? Break everybody’s heart for a dime? You could always break mine for a nickel and I’d bring the nickel.”
And yet the timing was never right. As A. E. Hotchner writes in his book “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir,” Hemingway once told him: “The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Île de France, but we’ve never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion.”
On that first trip to Paris with the woman I'd dreamed of and prayed for and hoped existed somewhere in this world, undiscovered, we paused on a bridge linking the Ile St-Louis with the Right Bank, and I kissed her hard. And then we went to Berthillon and had Earl Grey tea ice cream. She loved me! Me! In Paris! The memory of that time is realer than real. That was 10 years ago this mont
h. One decade and three children later, she's still the same woman I fell in love with, and Paris is still the city I fell in love with. It was the realization of a dream that I thought existed only in books. France is where dreams come true. My dreams, anyway. I can hardly wait until my children are old enough to take to Paris. I hope there will be a place for us at La Table du Perigord.
Watch this video of a soldier just home from the war surprising his five-year-old son by turning up in his kindergarten class, and the reaction of the little boy. Nothing any of us can say about it could possibly transcend the meaning of the moment. Just watch.
I know from my own observation that sexual immorality is widespread among Pentecostal clergy, and in many cases no church governance structure exists to do anything about it. Church leadership is frequently passed down in families as though salvation is acquired through DNA.
Prosperity teaching — which, when taught responsibly, can extract people from the mire of poverty mindsets — has degenerated into unabashed greed and charlatanism, with preachers shilling for multilevel marketing schemes that will never benefit the vast majority of the peons who buy into their promises of easy money.
...There was a time when all Pentecostals preached a high standard of holiness. Sure, there were frauds — drunks and debauchers who pretended to be one thing and were found to be another. In the South, especially, the concept of the double life has a storied existence, evidenced by the plantation masters who proudly occupied the family bench in church on Sunday and ravished slave girls on Monday.
But in the Pentecostal churches, among the brothers and sisters, where few had earthly riches and social status was of no account, sin was an enemy for which there would be no quarter. Sinners had but one place in church: on the mourners’ bench. Jesus, after all, came to free us from the bondage of sin, and Pentecostals took him at his word.
In recent years, though, I have seen a type of church emerge that has many of the bells and whistles of Pentecostalism, such as prophetic “words” from God, exuberant worship and high-octane preaching, but there is no standard of holiness. I call these people post-holiness Pentecostals — rollers without the holy.
In place of preaching against sin, the leaders exalt their status as “prophets” and teach that their followers have no right to question them. If they do, they’re branded “Jezebels” with “rebellious spirits” who’ve become instruments of Satan to bring down God’s anointed. None of this has a speck of Biblical support, but even one’s right to examine teaching through the lens of Scripture is discounted. When these leaders end up in grievous sin, members are shamed into believing that their only recourse is to shut themselves in the private prayer closet and beg for God to speak to their leader.
Which, by the way, I’m sure God has already done, many times over. If the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, we are continually made aware of our own sin.
I’ve never figured out how these leaders and their followers get around Paul’s command to “expel the immoral brother,” or his warning not even to eat with someone who calls himself a brother and involves himself in sexual immorality, or his counsel that we have a duty to judge those in the church. I’ll guarantee that you’ll never hear in these churches the testimony of Jude, who foresaw a day when the church would be dominated by “…godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.”
Look around you: We are living in that day.
The recent scandals among Pentecostals have shaken me. I struggle to understand how people who’ve come into contact with the very presence of God through worship, who’ve seen the power of the Holy Spirit at work in miraculous ways, can get involved in such craziness.
I was talking yesterday to a dear Catholic friend about church scandal, and I mentioned to him how down I was about the mess in the Orthodox Church in America -- but how I was determined to find a w
ay to get through it without violating my conscience by turning away from it, or to shipwreck myself as I did within Catholicism. I have no idea how to do that, but I know I have no choice but to find a way. He said, "It does seem like the Lord won't let you get away from having to face the reality of sin." Yes, it does.
The Discovery Institute's president has sent the following letter to the heads of the geology, biology and anthropology departments at SMU:
I am writing to invite you or a representative from your faculty to participate in a dialogue about the theory of intelligent design on Friday night, April 13th, ahead of the formal commencement of our conference that evening on your campus. We noted with interest the comment of one of your SMU faculty colleagues, Dr. Bretell, who stated in the Dallas Morning News that the science faculty plan to use the conference “as a teaching moment.”
As educators ourselves, we applaud you for this and would like to enhance the teaching opportunity for your students by creating a forum in which your faculty can participate in an open dialogue with proponents of intelligent design—in particular, with our three conference speakers, Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and Dr. Jay Richards.
If you accept our invitation, I will arrange for the first portion of our Friday night program to be devoted to this discussion. We propose the following format: one of our speakers would make a fifteen-minute presentation explaining the merits, from our point of view, of the theory of intelligent design. Then we would invite one of you to make a presentation explaining your main criticisms of the theory. We would then allow your panel to ask us a series of challenging questions of your own choosing. After that we would open the discussion to a few questions from the audience.
We are all committed to respectful scholarly dialogue and to the use of scientific methods of reasoning in the investigation of nature. In our view, science progresses in part as scientists and scholars discuss and evaluate competing interpretations of scientific evidence. We think that the format we are proposing will allow for such discussion and will, therefore, create a teaching moment for all who participate and observe the discussion.
We hope you will join us. May I ask you to respond at your earliest convenience by contacting Robert Crowther in our Seattle office at [deleted], or [e-mail address deleted].
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Chapman
President, Discovery Institute
Sounds good to me. Will the professors agree to participate in this teaching moment? I'd love to hear both sides make their presentation, and I bet I'm not the only one.
UPDATE: A colleague of mine at the paper e-mails to say:
I completely disagree. The SMU scientists should not take the bait. Framing this as a debate puts evolution and ID on equal footing -- "On the one hand, some experts believe THIS. On the other hand, other experts believe THIS." This is precisely the fraud that the Discovery Institute wants to perpetrate. Because if both "theories" are considered valid, well, then, why not teach both in science classes? Why exclude one? Is that fair?
ID and evolution are not two scientific theories to be weighed against one another, as if on a balance scale. One is a scientific theory, supported so massively and consistently by empirical evidence as to be virtually unassailable. The other is an interesting notion -- rather like reincarnation, or ESP - that is intriguing to ponder, but absolutely without scientific support.
There is, in other words, no experimental evidence -- none -- to support the idea that the world is so wondrously complex that some intelligent designer "must have" created it. Maybe that's true. As a matter of theology, I happen to believe that it's true. But it isn't science.
We don't teach "alternative theories" of gravity in physics class, or "alternative theories" of neurology in medical school. And we shouldn't.
I see his point, but I see this controversy as akin to a debate about global warming. To me, the evidence for man-made global warming is overwhel
ming, and those who disbelieve in it are operating primarily on faith, not evidence. But there are significant numbers of people who do hold those views, and I think it would be in the public interest to see a critical exchange between the two sides. I would hope that it would educate the disbelievers, or at least open some minds. Or maybe the other side would come up with facts or logic that caused me to reconsider some of my positions.
About ID: I believe that God created us, and evolution was the method he used to do it. But I simply don’t know enough about the case for ID to say conclusively that I disbelieve it -- and I certainly was unfavorably impressed by the sneering, over-the-top presentation the anti-ID folks made to the DMN editorial board a couple of years ago. Which doesn't make the case for ID any more or any less valid, but it did make me more curious to hear that case. There's something about ID that reduces opponents to sputtering, which creates the impression that they're trying to make you feel like an idiot for asking questions.
Here’s something from Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science who’s written about the struggle between ID and Darwinism. I interviewed him last year for the Sunday commentary section of the DMN. Ruse calls ID "creationism lite," but says scientists are making a mistake by refusing to engage the debate:
More scientists should get involved in this debate. There's a very strong negative force among young scientists not to get involved in the public domain. If you're trying to get tenure, you don't spend your summer fighting ID. Many people are not good at public involvement, but I'd like to see more of it.
I see evolution and creation as very much the top end of the iceberg. It's a litmus test of this whole red-blue division in America. I'd like to see the left, the Democrats or whatever we call ourselves, be more open to people's concerns. I mean, it's not helpful, and certainly not in America, when Richard Dawkins says all religion is evil. We have got to talk about moral values. We people of the left, we people of the Enlightenment, if you like, have got to start talking about broader issues. I would like to see science teaching, including the teaching of evolution, to be part of this, rather than something we isolate.
I think Ruse is right: people are thinking about this and talking about it, so why not meet them where they are? As disgusting as I think "Loose Change," that 9/11 conspiracy film is, if there were to be a debate about it on SMU’s campus, given how widespread the belief in a conspiracy is (a Scripps poll found that one-third of the American public believes the US government was involved in killing 3,000 of its own citizens), it’s worth dignifying the conspiracy nuts by sharing the podium with them, just to refute their case with facts and logic. Mind you, I don't at all equate the ID folks with conspiracy nuts. I'm just saying that it'd be smarter for the SMU professors to engage the ID people in a public forum and show the audience why the ID people are wrong. Refusing even to talk to them is not causing any fewer people to believe in ID. If ID is as dangerous as the SMU profs say, then they should not hesitate to take it on and try to debunk it.
"We're obviously surprised by the overwhelming response and offense people have taken," said Matt Semler, creative director of a Manhattan art gallery, who presumably made that statement with a straight face. Semler's gallery is planning to exhibit a large chocolate sculpture of Jesus -- complete with penis -- at the start of Holy Week (the timing was a complete coincidence, Semler claims; watch your wallet around this Semler creep). The title of the statue? "My Sweet Lord."
Here, from artist Cosimo Cavallaro's website, is an image of the Christ statue. Cavallaro is inviting gallerygoers to taste the statue before it's taken down on Easter Sunday. Boy, won't that be fun, watching people break off the Lord's penis and eat it on Easter Sunday. Just imagine the catty blasphemy you'll hear. Oh, what would we ever do without those oh-so-brave New York hipsters.
The thing is, they're cowards. If they had guts, they'd create and display a statue of a naked Muhammad, with his penis exposed, on Ramadan. To be clear, I would think it a terrible thing if they did that, would hope they wouldn't, and would denounce them if they did. But of course they wouldn't do that, because they know exactly what would happen to them if they did. Christians, though, are fair game to be shat on by our cultural betters.
Of course the Catholic League has gone ballistic:
"This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever," said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group. "It's not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding."
No, it's not remotely one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities. Language like that makes it easier to dismiss Christian complaints. The heroic Msgr. Pius Ncube, a Catholic archbishop in Zimbabwe, recently announced his willingness to be shot to death by his government to stand up against the dictator Robert Mugabe. If the worst thing American Christians have to worry about is some jackass artist making blasphemous fun of Christ on Holy Week, we've got it better than most of our brethren in the world. That said, this really is offensive, and so completely gratuitous. I'm glad Bill Donohue is going to make some bad people miserable for a few days. What is to be gained by this exhibit? What artistic or public interest is served by it? If Christians had the reputation for threatening to silence critics through violence and threats of violence, you could see possibly the rationale. But there's no rationale, other than the ersatz thrill of blasphemy. That, and publicity.
Like my DMN colleague, former religion editor Bruce Tomaso, I'm glad we live in a country where people are free to be blasphemous creeps and not have to face criminal action, or the threat that their gallery will be firebombed, or the likelihood that some bishop will put a fatwa on their heads and some believer will attempt to carry it out. Still, this is rotten, and I hope no Christian ever again stays at the Roger Smith Hotel, in whose in-house gallery this thing is to be exhibited. In fact, I have to make a reservation today for a quick business trip to NYC, and was looking for a cheap hotel to stay in. Scratch that one off my list, forever. What a great thing it would be if Catholics and other Christians in NYC staged a peaceful Holy Week prayer vigil outside this hotel.
UPDATE: My Bnet colleague David Kuo has a somewhat different take on the matter, saying that this offensive artwork is a good reminder for Christian
s about how Our Lord was mocked and despised by the public in his day, and he patiently endured it out of his love for us. Thanks for that reminder, David.
UPDATE.2: The Chocolate Jesus exhibition has been cancelled. And Matt Semler resigned. I'm sure Bill Donohue has sent him a conciliatory bouquet of tulips.
A few years ago, the Washington Post advertised for a religion writer, saying that "The ideal candidate is not necessarily religious nor an expert in religion." Can you imagine the Post, or any newspaper, advertising for a sportswriter who is not necessarily enthusiastic about sports or an expert in athletics? Or a business writer who didn't know or care much about economics? As Julia Duin reflects, this discloses the unseriousness with which the MSM regards religion as an area of human endeavor. It's not that an atheist necessarily makes for a bad religion reporter, but for one of the most important newspapers in the country to say that no familiarity with the workings of religion are necessary to cover it is really telling.
“I’ve been an atheist all my life,” she says. “Jon convinced me not to use that word. He said I was defining myself negatively.
“So I don’t call myself anything,” she says. “A seeker, perhaps.”
Quinn was casting about for her next move when she sought guidance from a higher authority.
“I had been interested for a couple of years in religion and how it affects policy,” she says. “I was thinking of writing a book about religion in Washington.”
Why not religion online? “I described my idea to Don Graham,” Quinn says. “He thought it was a great idea.”
She then told Graham: “I don’t know anything about religion.”
Detroit Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper says it doesn't matter if a dead elderly homosexual died of gay-bashing, as he claimed, or, as the autopsy found, of a degenerative disease that caused his spine to compress. What really matters, she says, is that he's a useful symbol for pushing hate-crimes legislation.
There is no evidence that this man was gay-bashed, but Desiree Cooper finds it so useful to believe that she's decided the truth does not matter. And she's a journalist! What would Desiree Cooper say to the US military officials who decided to play Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death as a death-by-Taliban, because it was more politically useful that way?
By the by, I'm completely against hate-crimes legislation, which is really just criminalizing thought. All crime is in some sense hate crime. I resent the idea that one beating is somehow worse than another because of the motive of the thug who committed the crime.
The new issue of the paleoconservative monthly Chronicles features a favorable review of the book "Food Is Different: Why We Must Get the WTO Out of Agriculture," by agronomist Peter M. Rosset. The review is not available online. According to reviewer Tobias J. Lanz, Rosset decries the role big government has played in revolutionizing the world's agricultural economy, resulting in giant agribusiness displacing small and family farmers the world over. Though conservatives see this as merely the fallout from increased market efficiency, Rosset argues that government is not leveling the playing field, but rather taking the side of big business against the little guy -- with serious social consequences in Third World countries. From the review:
Agriculture is the last economy being transformed by industrialization and commercialization, and Rosset argues that this should not happen. Food production differs from other forms of production because it is so closely linked to human health and survival. In addition to providing nourishment, a stable food economy sustains social and political stability in rural areas and preserves cultural traditions and the environment. Rosset argues that food is more than a commodity; it is the foundation fo a complex web of social and ecological relationships that are simplified and ultimately destroyed when big businesses (and big government) reduce agriculture to mere production for the market.
Rosset's goal is food sovereignty, which would be based on creating government programs and markets that support small producers and rural communities over the interests of big corporations. With the right policies, small producers can provide stable food supplies at reasonable prices and higher quality than large producers can.
I'd like to know what those policies are, and I definitely plan to get the book to evaluate for myself how sensible they are. Here's more from review, which criticizes the author for not discussing the role consumers play in driving the industrialization of agriculture by their demand for cheap food at all costs. He also dings Rosset for not recognizing "the spiritual nature of food and agriculture." Here's Lanz (who is a political scientist at the University of South Carolina):
In all healthy societies, food, like sex, is respected because it is essential to life. As such, food production and consumption are enshrined in rituals and customs that celebrate human participation in the life cycle. When food, or sex, is removed from the protection of the community and given over to the domain of government and the market, it loses its spiritual value and becomes a purely material good.
Lanz notes that agrarians recognize the vital importance of farming to a "good and orderly society," and says that when agriculture declines, so does culture. In "Crunchy Cons," farmer Joel Salatin suggests that this is because farmers maintain a natural humility and piety because they understand how contingent life is, and cannot afford the luxury of believing (falsely) that man can refute nature with his own power. Lanz asserts that consumers can fight the war for the redemption of a healthy culture by supporting their local food producers in their personal purchases over distant agribusiness interests.
Here's an important crunchy con point, from Lanz:
Unfortunately, conservatives, like most Americans, do not view food and agriculture as important political issues. What is more distubring is that the political left does. Leftists are the ones taking up the fight for small farmers and communities throughout the world. T
he left-leaning publisher of this tract, Zed Books, has published an entire series on agricultural issues. ...The worst long-term consequence of the current agricultural revolution is that, if a counterrevolution every materializes, it will probably be a leftist operation, allowing the left to monopolize the debate over how to protect agriculture and community life. In accomplishing this, the left will penetrate the last bastion of traditional life and transform it into a radical one. That would be the greatest revolution of all.
D. Kyle Sampson, A.G. Gonzales's recently departed chief of staff, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Sen. Arlen Specter said that this will probably be the most interesting testimony since Anita Hill. I'm going to be watching it all day, and blogging on it here. I invite you to consider this an open thread for all those watching the testimony to comment.
UPDATE: Well, this is going nowhere. Nobody's offering full coverage of the hearings. I did catch Sampson's opening statement, though. He's claiming that because US Attorneys are political appointees, there’s no meaningful difference between canning a US Attorney for not being politically reliable, and canning him or her for poor performance. Fired US Atty David Iglesias, commenting on CNN, observed that Sampson has never been a prosecutor, so he doesn’t know what prosecutors do. Iglesias said he couldn’t disagree more with Sampson on this point, and that A.G. John Ashcroft told him to his face that when you’re a US Attorney, “politics stops at the door of your office.” Said Iglesias: “We are not rated on political effectiveness. We’re rated on performance.”
It would appear that for the Bush Administration and A.G. Gonzales, the pursuit of justice in the federal system is just waging politics by other means. That's corrupt. Gonzales should go.
It is telling that they initially tried hard to deny the role politics played in this US Atty affair – the NYT today talks about how DOJ first denied that Rove had anything at all to do with them, but subsequently released documents revealed that Rove was all over them. This pattern of lying tells me that the White House knew it was treading in dangerous waters. I presume that Sampson will get hammered on this point, but it’s hard for me to see how at the end of the day, the confidence of Congress or the public in Gonzales’s leadership will be strengthened by what we learn.
Andrew Roberts' "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900" turned up in the office mail recently. Hick that I am, I had no idea that Roberts is an English historian and conservative commentator. I thought the Churchillian title was a bit ... ambitious, but other than that didn't know what to expect. I thumbed through the book, and alighted at once on a passage on p. 647, sniffing at the feeble threat that Islamic terrorists pose to Anglo-American mastery of the globe:
Even were terrorists to strike a further, perhaps chemical, biological or nuclear blow against one of the English-speaking peoples' principal cities, it would not destroy that primacy. As George Will has observed, 'Al-Queda[sic] has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Queda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity.'"
What an odd thing for a historian to say. If history teaches us to do anything, it's to cultivate a sense of the tragic. Neither the Visigoths, nor the Alans, not the Sueves nor any other barbarian tribes had a rival model for how to run an Empire like Romes. But they did know how to destroy it, which suited their purposes. One thing that's so striking about accounts of the end of the Western Roman Empire is how unable the Romans were to foresee their doom. They thought it would last forever for them. Anyway, Roberts' glib triumphalism (I found other examples in my cursory examination of the book), according to Jake Weisberg, could account for why President Bush is so fond of Roberts. But on Weisberg's account, the book's not very reliable.
Bill Holston is a Dallas lawyer who works on human rights and asylum cases. He won a good one this week, and helped deliver a man from evil. Read his account of it and be glad that there are men like Bill in the world.
A question about the state of the conservative movement that puzzles me: why has the either irrelevance or falsity of global warming become such a touchstone? To me, it has something of the quality of a portion of the academic left denying the reality of Al Qaeda, not least in its refusal to accept the expert consensus.
But perhaps I'm missing something. I certainly think of myself as an opinonated person (too opinionated at times, in fact), but I am astonished to read people with no expertise on such matters confidently dismissing the views of the vast majority of the scientific community. Without in any way making a cult of expertise, it seems to me that one needs a very good reason to challenge an expert consensus and apart from an allergy to people like Al Gore, I don't see that reason.
Anyhow, I'd love to know how you view this.
I've had this question in my in-box for a few days, trying to figure out how to answer it. I do share this reader's puzzlement over the intense emotion that so many on the right invest in fighting the idea that humans have anything to do with the globe warming. I don't think I have a clear answer for him, but I do have some thoughts:
The environment is to conservatives what defense is to liberals: the big issue that we don't instinctively get, and that makes us suspicious. It's an instinctive thing. Whenever many conservatives think "environmentalist," they think of Beavis & Butt-head's Mr. Van Driessen. I was this way for a long time, and never gave it a second thought (because no one I knew did) until reading former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's "Dominion," which makes a conservative case for treating animals and the natural world in general with respect. As I later wrote about in "Crunchy Cons," it had never occurred to me that the hunting culture I'd grown up in was full of environmentalists, after a fashion, but they called themselves "conservationists." And if memory serves, they limited their conservationism to maintaining good hunting and fishing grounds -- which isn't nothing, and in fact forms a common-ground basis on which environmentalists might have reached out to them.
But the problem with environmentalists (and I'm generalizing) is that they're culturally out of sync with conservationists. Both sides, I think, tend to view each other with mutual suspicion. Conservationists tend to be cultural conservatives, outdoorsmen, and hunters. Environmentalists tend to be liberals who use the outdoors recreationally, but don't like hunting. There's a whole package of cultural assumptions that come with both. That's one reason I thought Jerome Ringo, a Louisiana hunter with working-class black roots, was such an inspired choice to head the National Wildlife Federation in 2005. He told Mother Jones:
MJ: You spoke just a moment ago of being a conservationist who happens to be black. There’s a popular stereotype that environmentalists are white and wear fleeces and that the roots of environmentalism date back to the 1960s. But I think environmentalism is far broader historically, ideologically, and culturally.
JR: Well, you go back in history—the National Wildlife Federation was formed in the 1930's when many of the conservation organizations were first organized. FDR was a conservationist; he was a president that truly promoted conservation. He was also a sportsman. During that time, the majority of environmentalists/conservationists were sportsmen. Those folks that were members of organized conservation and environmental organizations were those folks that I say that would fish to hang on the wall.
People that fished to put the fish on the plate, didn't join clubs! They fished to eat. So therefore, the organized movement was
mainly made of those sportsman did not include people who couldn't afford to join clubs and who were off feeding their families. And unfortunately, that was many people of color and poor people. Over the years, the movement has evolved to where those sportsmen now recognized the impacts of their actions and society's actions on their sporting and lifestyle. If the air is dirty or the water is dirty there are surely less fish and deer and animals to hunt.
So there has been a marriage between sportsman, environmentalists, and conservationists, because we all focus on pretty much the same thing, and that's protecting the earth for generations to come. Now, the National Wildlife Federation as well as many other conservation organizations realize that they will not be successful in their future if they don't build broad coalitions that involve African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics… This country's a melting pot – we all drink the air, we all drink the water, therefore, we should all be involved in the process.
I'm digressing. The point I wanted to make was that there is a visceral distrust for environmentalism on the right. It's an ill-informed distrust in many cases, but it's there, and it's a very, very difficult thing to overcome. The more extreme statements and actions from environmental activists don't help. I think you'd find a lot more people in this country who would agree with positions held by enviros, but would shun the label. Wendell Berry, who is nobody's idea of a right-winger, told me personally that though he can't abide corporations exploiting and tearing up the land, he keeps professional environmentalists at arm's length, because he can't get them to recognize that people matter too, that people are part of the natural environment too. Man is not an alien, but is of nature.
Maybe that's it: conservatives have a feeling that environmentalists just don't like ordinary people. Right or wrong, there it is.
Which might explain the hard-to-fathom passion so many on the right bring to despising the global warming crowd. I don't have a problem with legitimate challenges of scientific claims, but when you do some reading in the area, and you grasp how overwhelming the basic scientific consensus is, you wonder why on earth so many conservatives seem desperate to believe that it's all a hoax. Not arguing around the margins, but denying the basic premise of human-forced climate change.
Could it really be because they don't want to confront the possibility that they will have to change their way of life? Are they like those gay men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the ones Randy Shilts wrote about in "And the Band Played On," who blamed Reagan and everybody else for the epidemic rather than confront the role their own behavior played? Surely that's part of it. But I don't think it can explain all of it.
As for me, I'd really rather not believe in global warming, certainly not living where I do, in one of the most miserably hot areas in the country. But the facts are so overwhelming, and the denial is so pervasive and emotional, that anti-environmentalism (re: global warming) strikes one as a dogmatic religious commitment. The idea that man-made climate change is a hoax seems to fulfill some deep emotional need in quite a few people on the right.
But it must be said that -- in my observation at least -- it does the same thing for many on the left. Harper's Magazine ran a piece last year calling the climate change apocalypse the left's version of "Left Behind." We are all prisoners of Truthiness to some degree.
Anyway, via NRO's Planet Gore blog, here's Roger Pielke, Jr.'s thoughtful discussion of why the science of climate change has become so politicized in this country. Excerpt:
[I]t is entirely natural that the climate debate attracts participant
s ranging from experts to the lay public, who together I call the chorus. And people are attracted to the issue because of its partisan nature, and the nature of blogs and media coverage amplify the voice of the chorus. And in turn the chorus reinforces the partisan nature of the debate through several forms of dynamics.
First, climate change is a perfect issue for the scientization of politics. This refers to the tendency to characterize political debates in terms of technical disputes -- remember the Hockey Stick? There is an endless supply of climate science to debate and discuss and always the presence of irritating skeptics who challenge the current consensus (see discussion at RealClimate). This situation elevates the authority of subject matter experts in political debates, which makes it appealing for some experts, but also inevitably politicizes the expert community as they self-segregate according to political perspectives.
Second, self-segregation is not unique to experts. A short tour around the web reveals the truth of Cass Sunstein's notion of internet-based "echo chambers" in which people talk only with those who share their views and lambaste as evil subhumans those who they disagree with. It is a rare discussion on climate change that involves a thoughtful exchange of ideas from people who hold fundamentally different political views. The self-segregation has the effect of increasing the partisan nature of the debate as people come to believe more strongly of the absolute truth in their views and the absolute lack of morals in their opponents.
Good news on the bee front. Julie found on the web an amateur beekeeper in the Highland Park area of Dallas, who came right over this morning. Julie writes:
OK, extremely cool experience with the wonderful Tom DeNolf. Amateur beekeeper, lives in HP (says the neighbors love it), been doing this for 4 years. He dressed Lucas up in the veil and hat, explained the whole thing, did the poofs of smoke thing, showed us the combs left in the box. Whacked the hammock with a brush, they swarmed out and calmly went into the box. Lucas and I stood a few feet away and watched the whole thing (I so count this as my homeschooling for the week). Lucas can now tell you all about how smoke calms bees down. Charged us $20; said he started charging it because otherwise people blew him off and weren't home when he got there.
Very, very cool. He's even gonna send us a photo of the colony!
Tom and his nephew have a (now-dormant) bee blog, tracking the progress of their city hives. Come on guys, let's get cranking again! I'm all curious now about beekeeping in the city.
Steven Emerson's excellent and detailed New Republic column about the terror connections of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the New York Times's air-brushing of same, is a great example of why the US media are biased towards giving Islamic extremists in America a pass. As Emerson shows, it is embarrassingly easy to demonstrate how objectionable CAIR is, and how closely it's tied to our enemies in the war on Islamist terror. But you rarely read about this in the mainstream media, and CAIR spokesmen are often quoted as if they were no different from any other interest group. Read the Emerson piece; does CAIR sound like the ADL, the NAACP, La Raza, GLAAD, et al.? As Emerson points out, leading Democratic politicians are starting to get wise to CAIR's game, and avoid them:
Yet, just as people began to realize this and to ostracize CAIR accordingly, The New York Times arrived with a life raft. Earlier this month, Neil MacFarquhar wrote an incredibly generous profile called "Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S." MacFarquhar's piece is so fraught with errors--of commission and omission--that it is a coup of CAIR propaganda.
MacFarquhar gets off on the right foot, noting, "Several federal officials said CAIR's Washington office frequently issued controversial statements that made it hard for senior government figures to be associated with the group." But he cites none of these "controversial statements." Nor does he mention the CAIR-sponsored fund-raisers and conferences featuring former neo-Nazi leader William Baker and jihadist cleric Wagdy Ghoneim. (At a 1998 CAIR event, Ghoneim sang, "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." And, after he was deported in 2004 for overstaying his visa, Hussam Ayloush, CAIR's Southern California director, called Ghoneim's removal from the U.S. "a dent in our civil rights struggle.")
What we have here in north Texas is a failure to communicate. When a man can't make a weepy audiocassette to be played for his pet monkey while said monkey is on an overnight trip without being accused of interspecies onanism, the world really has gone to hell in a handbasket, ain't it? Excerpt:
Mr. Crawford said he did send a tape for the monkey to listen to, but that he was probably crying when he recorded it and that it contains nothing but comforting baby talk. He said there was nothing sexually suggestive on the tape and called Mr. Dunlap's initial conclusion "ridiculous."
"I don't have sex with my monkey. That's absolute crap," Mr. Crawford said. "Why would I do that? I gave him an audiotape, but it didn't have anything like that on it. It said, 'I'm coming home, I'm coming to get you. Daddy's coming, he's coming to get you,' " Mr. Crawford said.
Mr. Dunlap said that he made a "gross error" and that his interpretation of the tape was just that – his and no one else's.
"I interpreted what I heard and saw in my own way, and I can't say that's correct. It's just me, what I think. I can't argue with Mr. Crawford about what he meant," Mr. Dunlap said. "I took it on surface value about what he said. I just don't want to deal with it anymore. He may be totally honest and right in what he thinks about the way he sounded."
I love this story and can't get enough of it. I hope it goes on and on forever. If Texas didn't exist, you'd have to make it up.
So I get home tonight and my three-year-old Lucas has told his mother that there's a beehive in the backyard on the hammock. She thinks it might be a small wasp nest or something that the kid is overreacting to. I go out with a flashlight to check, and damned if it's not a bona fide swarm, as big as a small melon, attached to the hammock! Never seen anything like it in my life. The bee removal people are coming tomorrow to take care of them. Do you know how much they charge for this service? An unbelievable $175. But what are you going to do? Drive them to the Superdome and freeze them yourself?
Peter Suderman wants to know. He says liberals are always on about community-building, but don't seem to like it one bit when megachurches succeed at it. Excerpt:
The church I grew up in, for example, provided significant financial support for needs in the local community, regardless of whether they were members/attendees, as well as a gym, basketball court, plays, classes, clubs, and various other community events and facilities—most open to the public, not just members. Many megachurches provide exactly the sort of facilities and programs you see progressives arguing should be provided by government, and they manage to do so largely without public funding. Progressive activists , however, tend to be suspicious of—if not outright hostile toward—religious groups that perform these services, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
UPDATE: To be perfectly honest, there are conservatives who don't like megachurches either. I have a semi-bad attitude about them, but I think it's because of a couple of things. One, I'm guilty of the same fault Suderman attributes to liberal critics: I've never been to a megachurch. I instinctively don't like bigness, and the kind of megachurch services I've seen on TV turn me off. But as I learned last fall when reading "Applebee's America," megachurches really are all about small groups. Which makes sense to me. Secondly, the spectacle and emotionalism I associate with megachurches is not necessarily the fault of the size of the church, but is a worship style that doesn't appeal to me, but which could be found in much smaller Evangelical and/or Pentecostal churches. Point is, the disdain for megachurches based in ignorance is not just something many liberals have. I'm going to make it a point sometime this year to visit one or more in my area, and see what's going on. I have a feeling that a lot of the community-building that I, from my crunchy-con perspective, long for is happening at megachurches, and has been happening for a while. I just have such an instinctively negative reaction to church-as-rock-concert that I have been guilty of prejudice against megachurches.
A candidate’s religiosity is not enough for most evangelicals, though it may cause evangelical voters to stop and consider the political hopeful’s agenda. Instead, evangelicals care about issues and where politicians stand on them.
In this regard, evangelicals are closer to Jews (particularly observant Jews) and African-Americans than to Irish or Italian voters who already have blended into the American melting pot. A politician can wear a kippah (a skullcap worn by observant Jews), eat knishes and say that “Fiddler on the Roof” is his favorite movie, and he still won’t get Jewish votes if he opposes Israel and says he wants to Christianize America.
Republicans have spent decades reaching out to the African-American community, but they have made only minimal gains with black voters, in part because of the party’s position on affirmative action and its overall conservatism.
Evangelicals, like blacks and Jews, have a strong group identity and see themselves as outsiders from the dominant social and political culture. Since all three groups tend to be wary of one of the parties, it takes more than words — and in the case of evangelicals, “giving God his due” — to pull them away from their allies.
Those mainstream evangelicals who talk increasingly about protecting the environment or addressing poverty are not discarding their traditional commitment to cultural issues such as abortion. They are not going to support a pro-choice, pro-gay rights Democrat because he or she is an environmentalist or wants the government to help the poor.
My hope -- and my guess -- is that Evangelicals are going to change the Republican Party, not abandon the GOP for the Democrats.
Fred Thompson and Tommy Thompson are both running, or thinking of running, for the GOP presidential nomination. Daniel Larison asks, "Why not a Thompson-Thompson ticket?"
Oh joy! But only if Captain Haddock can run the Defense Department.
Certain kinds of religious leader gravitated toward eugenics in the early twentieth century, ministers anxious about the changing culture but also eager to find solutions to its diagnosable ills. Theirs was a practical spirituality. . . . And it was when these self-identified liberal and modernist religious men abandoned bedrock principles to seek relevance in modern debates that they were most likely to find themselves endorsing eugenics. Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science.
The troglodytic Catholics and (fundamentalist) Protestants were the only Christians who resisted this evil, and were despised by the progressive bien-pensants for it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
There are some who, out of a laudable effort to resist any eugenic thought, attempt to ignore or deny all genetic difference among humans. That's wrong: if it's true, it's true. The solution is to always keep at the front of our minds, and at the bottom of our hearts, the non-negotiable conviction that human dignity is universally shared, and that human worth does not depend on having been favored by genetics. The man in the wheelchair is worth no less and no more than the marathon runner.
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