"Sick" is too kind an adjective

A break from our relentless pursuit of definitions to recommend that, if you didn't hear/see it yesterday, you really should listen to the Democracy Now! stories on Michael Moore's new film, "Sicko."

I mean, you gotta love a movie that uses this for a trailer:

GEORGE BUSH: We got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many ob-gyns aren't able to practice their love with women all over this country.

[music]

NARRATOR: When Michael Moore decided to make a movie on the health care industry, top-level executives were on the defensive. What were they hiding?

EXECUTIVE: That's not on, right?

MICHAEL MOORE: No.

EXECUTIVE: Okay.

EXECUTIVE: The intent is to maximize profits.

MICHAEL MOORE: If you denied more people health care you got a bonus?

WOMAN: When you don't spend money on somebody, it is a savings to the company.

POLITICIAN: I want America to have the finest health care in the world.

MICHAEL MOORE: Four health care lobbyists for every member of Congress. Here's what is what it costs to buy these men, and this woman, and this guy, and this guy. And the United States slipped to 37 in healthcare around the world - just slightly ahead of Slovenia.

[laughter]

HEALTH CARE WORKER: I denied a necessary a man a necessary operation and thus caused his death. This secured my reputation and it ensured my continued advancement in the health care field.

NARRATOR: In the world's richest country...

WOMAN: I work three jobs.

BUSH: You work three jobs?

WOMAN: Yes.

BUSH: Uniquely American isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic.

NARRATOR: Laughter isn't the best medicine.

WOMAN: I get a bill from my insurance company telling me that the ambulance ride wasn't pre-approved. I don't know when I was supposed to pre-approve it. After I gained consciousness in the car? Before I got in the ambulance?

NARRATOR: It's the only medicine.

MICHAEL MOORE: There's actually one place on American soil that had free universal health care.

MICHAEL MOORE: Which way to Guantanamo Bay?

GOVT OFFICIAL: Detainees representing a threat to our national security are given access to top-notch medical facilities.

MICHAEL MOORE: Permission to enter. I have three 9/11 rescue workers. They just want some medical attention - the same kind the evildoers are getting...Hello?

NARRATOR: Michael Moore's Sicko.

I say "stories" because that link will get you to the remarks made by Mr. Moore to the California State Assembly. This link will take you to the people featured in the film, and their comments on the state of American healthcare. It's worse than being 37th in the world; much worse:

DAWNELLE KEYES: On May 6, 1993 my 18-month-old daughter Michelle became very ill. She was vomiting, had diarrhea and was having trouble breathing and a very high temperature. I called an ambulance, which took her to the nearest emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr. Medical Center in Los Angeles. The doctors believed she probably had a bacterial infection, which could be treated with antibiotics. But he didn't conduct a simple blood culture or treat her with antibiotics because our health plan, Kaiser, told him not to. You see, Martin Luther King hospital was not a Kaiser facility. Kaiser said the simple test and treatment had to be done in a Kaiser hospital. But Michelle became sicker and sicker. She became lethargic and unresponsive. I pleaded to them. I pleaded for her treatment. And no one would give her antibiotics. Over two hours later Michelle had a seizure. Only an hour after that Michelle was transferred by ambulance to Kaiser. Within 15 minutes of arriving, she died.

I went to court to hold accountable those who were responsible for Michelle’s death. As my attorney put it, Michelle died, not because a doctor didn't know what to do, but because of her health care coverage status. We won our case but, sadly, the jury award was cut to a fraction of what they felt was fair because of a horrible California law that caps damages in these kinds of cases called MICRA. This law has been on the books since 1975 and should be re-appealed. My case is a good example of why we need guaranteed and universal health care in California and in America. No one should ever have to go through what my family had to go through. I hope the movie Sicko, which I am proud to be a part of on behalf of my daughter, helps achieve that goal. My daughter was not treated and died because she was in the ER that was not affiliated with her health plan. This should never happen in America. Had it not happened, my daughter would be 15-and-a-half years of age and enjoying high school. Thank you.

No, no; don't stop now. Tip of the iceberg. Let's hear some stories about hospitals dumping patients on Skid Row in Los Angeles (the increasingly inaptly named):

Three years ago, my predecessors found that a woman had been dropped off by a hospital. She walked in with an IV in her arm, sat down in our guest area and died 10 minutes later from pneumonia. We set up what is now called a hospital dump can out in front of the building. And in the fall of 2005, we had a gentleman show up in a gurney, having seizures and the hospital attempted to drop him off, but the captain of the police force, Andy Smith, happened to be at our place in a meeting, he ran down, intervened, made the man – the ambulance driver - put him back in the ambulance and sent him back to the hospital. Shortly after that, in December, an undocumented day laborer showed up covered in blood. He’d just been released from a hospital in Arcadia, brought all the way to downtown Skid Row, walked in, we took him back to our guest area and shortly thereafter, he became so ill from the beating he had taken right before he went to the hospital, that we had to call the medics and haul him back to the hospital. He stayed there for several days.

That was publicized. I think eleven hospitals were documented as doing drop-offs. It was somewhat publicized. But in March of 2006, I was standing outside with the moms from the Mission, waiting for their kids to return. Their bus had been in an accident, so I was out much later than I normally would have been. I couldn't believe my eyes as the cab pulled up and did a u-turn. And a little lady in a nightgown stepped out of the back of the cab, unassisted, was given no directions to our door. She's several hundred feet from our door. She started walking northward on San Pedro to some of the meanest streets in the United States. Fortunately, I was there. I called the Captain, Andy Smith. I sent a staff person to rescue the lady that I later found out was Carol Reyes. Hospital document showed she had high blood pressure, a low-grade fever, had dementia so bad that she didn't know time or place. Yet she was brought 20 miles to be dropped off on to the meanest street of our city.

Absorb all of that: it started three years ago. It go so bad, so frequent and constant, the mission set up a camera to videotape it. It took almost three years for this to get bad enough to gain public attention, world-wide attention. We are the richest country in the world. We consider ourselves "compassionate."

We lie to ourselves so we will sleep better. Because even the attention to Carol Reyes didn't stop anything:

Unfortunately, there have been over 35 hospital drop-offs since Carroll Reyes made the news. One man, a paraplegic, dropped off without a wheelchair without a walker, dropped himself out of the van onto the curb with his clothes in his mouth and colostomy bag ruptured. Fortunately, one good thing that came out of this was that twelve homeless witnesses stepped forward and said enough is enough. No more of this kind of treatment for human beings.

We don't have human beings in this country anymore; we have economic units. We value people based on what they produce for the GNP, based on what the Dow-Jones did today, based on the value of someone else's stock portfolio. Don't tell me we don't, because after three years of dumping patients on Skid Row and no one asking questions, even after it becaume an issue, 35 more patients were dumped. And if that doesn't bother you, listen to Dr. Linda Peeno:

LINDA PEENO: I should say right from the beginning that when you see the film this afternoon, you’re gonna think that I’m an imposter, because when Michael's team called me about a year ago to talk to me about the film, I was actually so despondent about health care that I couldn't give an interview. So they had to use the old material. And so it was just so exciting for me to see all those nurses today. I just cannot tell you. After twenty years of trying to get people to pay attention to exactly what Michael said, and what shocked me into this and the thing that will be the focus in the movie is that as a young, naive physician twenty years ago, I realized that with just a flick of a pen I could condemn a person to death and did, all because he was expensive. And I have already seen references to the fact that that case is too old, it is a mere anecdote, all the things that came out when I testified eleven years ago before Congress. But, when I testified in 1996 in May before Congress about this case, I realized just the other day as I was thinking about this, I could give exactly the same testimony again, exactly, word for word, I would only have to add that things have become unimaginably worse. I think the thing that had begun to defeat me over the past couple of years is the thousands and thousands of e-mails I would get from people every week, to the point where I couldn't even stand to turn my computer on.

This system is of our doing, our manufacture, our making. This is no force of nature, no hurricane from the Atlantic, no earthquake or drought or famine; this is entirely human-made, and we are the humans making it.

I can't wait for this movie to come out. But I don't have high hopes it will even start a national conversation on this topic. I've seen people deny responsibilty for their own actions before. It's so reflexive, I'd almost call it an instinct.

In the Church, we call it "original sin."

Enemy Combatant

I'm not satisfied that any of this is definitive, but I've done a little digging (googling, actually) into the issue of 'enemy combatant,' and this is what I've come up with.

The term seems to have originated in Ex Parte Quirin, a habeas case involving German born persons all of whom had lived in the US prior to WWII. (The General Counsel of the Department of Defense rested his argument/definition on Quirin in December, 2002. I can't find anything, or anyone, who cites a use or definition of the term earlier than Quirin.) There was a citizenship question for at least one defendant, but the Court ruled that issue irrelevant in light of its holding. All the defendants were brought to the US in a German U-boat and smuggled into the country with the aim of furthering the German war effort. If I read the opinion correctly, after they were captured, FDR responded:

The President, as President and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, by Order of July 2, 1942, appointed a Military Commission and directed it to try petitioners for offenses against the law of war and the Articles of War, and prescribed regulations for the procedure on the trial and for review of the record of the trial and of any judgment or sentence of the Commission. On the same day, by Proclamation, the President declared that 'all persons who are subjects, citizens or residents of any nation at war with the United States or who give obedience to or act under the direction of any such nation, and who during time of war enter or attempt to enter the United States ... through coastal or boundary defenses, and are charged with committing or attempting or preparing to commit sabotage, espionage, hostile or warlike acts, or violations of the law of war, shall be subject to the law of war and to the jurisdiction of military tribunals'.

The Proclamation also stated in terms that all such persons were denied access to the courts.

For "Articles of War" we would, today, read "UCMJ." Part of the issue raised by the defendants was the legality of this Presidential Order. They argued that they must be tried in a civilian court, that the President had no authority to declare their cases could only be heard under the Articles of War in a military court. The Supreme Court disagreed, in part because:

Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military
tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful.

Note the Court uses the term "unlawful belligerent." A whole 'nother post (or two!) rests in the transition we've made since World War II from "War Department" to "Defense Department," from "Articles of War" to "Uniform Code of Military Justice," and from "unlawful belligerent" to "unlawful combatant." Euphemism makes so many foul things so much more palatable.

That's as much of Quirin as is relevant, here. Whether Quirin gives the President the power he claims today, is quite another matter. According to Wikipedia (I told you this was not carefully researched!), pursuant to AUMF, Bush, on November 13, 2001, issued "a Presidential Military Order: 'Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism' ". This order specifically found that:

Given the danger to the safety of the United States and the nature of international terrorism, and to the extent provided by and under this order, I find consistent with section 836 of title 10, United States Code, that it is not practicable to apply in military commissions under this order the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.

And the order basically covers anyone who is not a US citizen:

The term "individual subject to this order" shall mean any individual who is not a United States citizen with respect to whom I determine from time to time in writing that:

(1) there is reason to believe that such individual, at the relevant times,

(i) is or was a member of the organization known as al Qaida;

(ii) has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit,
acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefor,
that have caused, threaten to cause, or have as their aim to
cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its
citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy; or

(iii) has knowingly harbored one or more individuals described in subparagraphs (i) or (ii) of subsection 2(a)(1) of this order;

and

(2) it is in the interest of the United States that such individual
be subject to this order.

It also, by the way, gives an extraordinary amount of power to the Secretary of Defense, and is clearly the basis for the "black prisons" in Europe:

Sec. 3. Detention Authority of the Secretary of Defense. Any individual subject to this order shall be --

(a) detained at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense outside or within the United States;

(b) treated humanely, without any adverse distinction based on race, color, religion, gender, birth, wealth, or any similar criteria;

(c) afforded adequate food, drinking water, shelter, clothing, and medical treatment;

(d) allowed the free exercise of religion consistent with the requirements of such detention; and

(e) detained in accordance with such other conditions as the Secretary of Defense may prescribe.

The Pentagon, 4 years later, issued a broader, much more comprehensive definition of "enemy combatant." Which may explain why the "black prisons" were run by the CIA. As for the application of this order only to US citizens, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals soon ruled that the President had the power to declare them "enemy combatants," too. That was the Hamdi case, where the Supreme Court reversed and remanded to allow Hamdi "a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker." Which puts the recent 4th Circuit ruling in a very interesting light, indeed.

We've been down this road once or twice before; and I don't think the ride is getting any smoother for Gonzales or his boss. But it's pretty clear "enemy combatant" means "Anyone I want it to mean," if you're the President. It's also clear the courts are less and less impressed with that claim of authority, the further away we get from 9/11.

UPDATE:

A case in point, if only because it involves the issues of imprisonment, judges, and the 4th Circuit, again:

Walton never appeared to waver from his opinion that a delay was unwarranted. After 12 prominent law professors filed documents supporting Libby's request, the judge waved it off as "not something I would expect from a first-year in law school."

He also said he received several "angry, harassing, mean-spirited" letters and phone calls following his sentencing but said they wouldn't factor into his decision.

Libby is the highest ranking government official ordered to prison since the Iran Contra affair. His monthlong trial offered a rare glimpse into the White House in the early days of the Iraq war.

Trial testimony showed that Cheney was eager to beat back criticism of prewar intelligence. One of the administration's most outspoken critics in mid-2003 was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Amid a flury of news coverage of that criticism, Bush administration officials leaked to reporters that fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked as an undercover analyst for CIA. That disclosure in a syndicated newspaper column touched off a leak investigation that brought senior White House officials, including Bush and Cheney, in for questioning.

Libby argued he had a good chance of persuading an appeals court that, when Attorney General John Ashcroft and other senior Justice Department officials recused themselves from the leak investigation, they gave Fitzgerald unconstitutional and unchecked authority.

Walton was skeptical, saying the alternative was to put someone with White House ties in charge of an investigation into the highest levels of the Bush administration.

"If that's going to be how we have to operate, our system is going to be in serious trouble with the average Joe on the street who thinks the system is unfair already," Walton said.

Federal judges are ferociously independent. Any judge tends to rule his courtroom like a fiefdom, the better to assure you the full weight of the State is behind her/him. But I've seen state judges intimidated by public figure (like former state AG's), although I've seen state judges who don't give a wet snap for any lawyer in their courtroom, because they treat all of them equally.

But Federal judge simply don't intimidate. My first brush with one was in a complex products liability case involving the fairly novel (at the time) question of holding a defense contractor (McDonnell Douglas) liable for the design of an ejector seat on an A-10 "Warthog" that broke the pilot's neck when he had to eject. Both sides figured the trial would go for weeks, with all the experts and evidence they'd need to present on either product design, or how the manufacturer had built what the Pentagon had ordered (it's a complex process, getting a military plane into commission). The Federal judge gave them one week. No more. Two and a half days for the plaintiff (IIRC), and a day apiece, or so, for the two defendants (MCDouglas and Fairchild, the builder of the plane).

Federal judges do things their way. For which we should all be grateful. What makes me say that? The last line of the article:

Walton is a Republican judge whom Bush put on the bench in his first term.

I'm not jumping for joy that Scooter Libby is going to jail. I just want the laws applied to everyone, equally. When a Bush appointee and I can agree on that, there is at least reason to expect signs of hope from our legal system. The support for the legal positions of this Administration just continue to erode.

Speaking of "defining evil"

"Military justice is to justice as military music is to music."

What I know of military law is contained in that cliche, one I remember from my Criminal Law professor decades ago. So when the Center for American Progress says the detainees in Gitmo should be tried in Kansas under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I am less than sanguine about the prospect. I agree with Colin Powell: let these "terrorists" be tried in a civilian court, with the full protection of the criminal law, because the circumstances of their capture and detention is dubious enough. Mike Huckabee, (yes, that Mike Huckabee) on the other hand, is just plain crazy:

BLITZER: But the argument isn’t so much the physical condition as to the legal system that they face. These suspected terrorists, these detainees are being held, by and large, without charges, without any evidence. They’re just being kept there indefinitely. And that’s causing a smear on the U.S. reputation.

HUCKABEE: I understand that. But I’ll tell you, if we let somebody out and it turns out that they come and fly an airliner into one of our skyscrapers, we’re going to be asking, how come we didn’t stop them? We had them detained.

There’s not a perfect solution. The perfect solution is to get people to quit being terrorists. And that’s not something we can easily control. If we’re going to make a mistake right now, let’s make it on the side of protecting the American people. That’s the number one role and responsibility that an American president has right now.

Funny we don't apply that standard to everyone we have in jail now for serious crimes, isn't it? Maybe because we can't build enough prisons. Maybe because that concept undermines any notion of "justice," or even a "system." We declare you guilty, we lock you up, problem solved! We don' need no steenken' badges!

Does protecting the American people really mean destroying the system we cherish in order to save it? Because these are the conditions he is talking about:

JONATHAN HARETZ: Well, um, initially, he was subjected to…well, uh, held incommunicado as I mentioned, without any access to anyone in the outside world. He was held in a tiny cell with no one to talk to. Um, there was no, it was all metallic services, he developed severe pain, he was denied things like a blanket, denied the Koran, subjected to religious abuse, not permitted to practice Islam, um, denied any kind of stimulation, of any - what I mean by - any books, any knowledge of what was going on. Just basically locked in a cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not permitted to see sunlight. There were threats were made against him, against his family, that they would – his family would be sent to Egypt, that his wife would be raped. Uh, just actually horrible, horrible things. This has improved somewhat, in part with response to the lawsuit we filed, and part, response to actually the men and women at the military brig, who are not setting the policy, and are, are um, you know, realize they have a human being there, and are acting accordingly. But uh, you know, at the highest levels of government, there was a decision made to detain him as “enemy combatant”, to subject him to this kind of torture and abuse that you can’t get away with in the civilian justice system, because its just flatly illegal and unconstitutional.

Note, first, that simple humanity is trying to triumph over abstractions such as "enemy combatant," a determination made by people who wouldn't know Mr. al-Mari if he shook their hand. Note, too, that Ali al-Marri was arrested in the US, and is being held in a military prison. Jonathan Hafetz, his lawyer, speaks continually of the military in his interview. Since when did we pass a law that the US military was judge, jury, and executioner of sentence on anyone the President labelled "enemy combatant"? And I don't consider the ex-post facto authorization of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" to be a valid authorization of that authority, especially in the case of Mr. al-Marri. Why is this man in a military prison, and being subjected (apparently) the military law?

And, as I was saying, maybe we were the good guys in WWII only because we weren't the bad guys:

The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

"I think Robert Jackson, who's the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949."

King, 88, served under Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was the chief prosecutor at the trials created by the Allied powers to try Nazi military and political leaders after World War Two in Nuremberg, Germany.

"The concept of a fair trial is part of our tradition, our heritage," King said from Ohio, where he lives. "That's what made Nuremberg so immortal -- fairness, a presumption of innocence, adequate defense counsel, opportunities to see the documents that they're being tried with."

And this was for the Nazis, the people we still uphold as the standard of human evil. What of the people in Gitmo?

King, who teaches law at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, also questioned whether former Guantanamo prisoner David Hicks deserved to be tried as a war criminal. After being held at Guantanamo for more than five years, the Australian pleaded guilty in March to a charge of providing material support for terrorism and was sent home to serve the rest of his nine-month sentence.

"He's not an arch-criminal type, just a guy who was disaffected from the system," King said.

Hicks, who admitted training with al Qaeda and briefly fighting on its side in Afghanistan, is the only person convicted in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals.

And the world knows this, if our politicians do not:

What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still ohers have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

2. Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”
(essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought. After the suffering they went through, they were released without a word of apology or any compensation – with one remarkable exception owing to the ethical and responsible approach of the Canadian authorities – and also have to put up with the opprobrium of doubts surrounding their innocence and, right here in Europe, racist harassment fuelled by certain media outlets. These are the terrible consequences of what in some quarters is called the “war on terror.”

3. While the strategy in question was devised and put in place by the current United States administration to deal with the threat of global terrorism, it has only been made possible by the collaboration at various institutional levels of America’s many partner countries.

This perhaps deserves a seperate post; but it is all of a piece. Consider, for example, the remarks of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe:

I have just seen the follow up report investigating allegations of “extraordinary renditions” and secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, which was prepared by Dick Marty and made public today by the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly.

It is too early to make any definite judgment on the content, but it is evident that Dick Marty and his team have invested a great deal of effort and that his conclusions are a matter of concern. They should be carefully studied by the governments of all Council of Europe member states.

The report also adds additional weight to the need for Council of Europe governments to take action on the recommendations which I made to them a year ago, and which contain specific proposals on how to prevent such violations of human rights in the future.

The language used by the lead investigator is really quite blunt:

Invoking state secrets in such a way that they apply even years after the event is unacceptable in a democratic state based on the rule of law. It is frankly all the more shocking when the very body invoking such secrets attempts to define their concept and scope, as a means of shirking responsibility. The invocation of state secrets should not be permitted when it is used to conceal human rights violations and it should, in any case, be subject to rigorous oversight. Here again, Canada seems to demonstrate the right approach, as will be seen later in this report.

7. There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania. These two countries were already named in connection with secret detentions by Human Rights Watch in November 2005. At the explicit request of the American government, the Washington Post simply referred generically to "eastern European democracies", although it was aware of the countries actually concerned. It should be noted that ABC did also name Poland and Romania in an item on its website, but their names were removed very quickly in circumstances which were explained in our previous report. We have also had clear and detailed confirmation from our own sources, in both the American intelligence services and the countries concerned, that the two countries did host secret detention centres under a special CIA programme established by the American administration in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 to “kill, capture and detain” terrorist suspects deemed to be of “high value”. Our findings are further corroborated by flight data of which Poland, in particular, claims to be unaware and which we have been able to verify using various other documentary sources.

8. The secret detention facilities in Europe were run directly and exclusively by the CIA. To our knowledge, the local staff had no meaningful contact with the prisoners and performed purely logistical duties such as securing the outer perimeter. The local authorities were not supposed to be aware of the exact number or the identities of the prisoners who passed through the facilities – this was information they did not “need to know.” While it is likely that very few people in the countries concerned, including in the governments themselves, knew of the existence of the centres, we have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.

I am compelled to point out the Washington Post has reported on this memorandum, but you will look in vain for any mention of its involvement in this story as cited in the memorandum. Even Eugene Robinson is more discreet than that. Always a better narrative when we can make sure "they" are the ones responsible. Robinson, in fact, quotes approvingly what he calls the "conclusion" of this memorandum, which is in paragraphs 14 and 15"

14 We are fully aware of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the danger it poses to our societies. However, we believe that the end does not justify the means in this area either. The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. I hold this view not only because methods of this nature conflict with the constitutional order of all civilised countries and are ethically unacceptable, but also because they are not effective from the perspective of a genuine long-term response to terrorism.

15 We have said it before and others have said it much more forcefully, but we must repeat it here: having recourse to abuse and illegal acts actually amounts to a resounding failure of our system and plays right into the hands of the criminals who seek to destroy our societies through terror. Moreover, in the process, we give these criminals a degree of legitimacy – that of fighting an unfair system – and also generate sympathy for their cause, which cannot but serve as an encouragement to them and their supporters.

But the memorandum is much more concrete than that:

16. The fact is that there is no real international strategy against terrorism, and Europe seems to have been tragically passive in this regard. The refusal to establish and recognise a functioning international judicial and prosecution system is also a major weakness in our efforts to combat international terrorism. We also agree with the view expressed by Amnesty International in its recent annual report: governments are taking advantage of the fear generated by the terrorist threat to impose arbitrary restrictions on fundamental freedoms. At the same time, they are paying no attention to developments in other areas that claim many more lives, or they display a disconcerting degree of passivity. We need only cast our minds to human trafficking or the arms trade: how is it possible, for example, that aeroplanes full of weapons continue to land regularly in Darfur, where a human tragedy with tens of thousands of victims is unfolding?

17. In our view, it is also necessary to draw attention to an aspect we believe to be very dangerous: the legitimate fight against terrorism must not serve as a pretext for provoking racist and Islamophobic reactions among the public. The Council of Europe has rightly recognised the fundamental importance of intercultural and interfaith dialogue. The member states and observers really should carry these efforts forward and maintain the utmost of vigilance on the issue. Any excesses in this respect could have disastrous consequences in terms of an expanded future terrorist
threat.

18. In the course of our investigations and through various specific circumstances, we have become aware of certain special mechanisms, many of them covert, employed by intelligence services in their counter-terrorist activities. It is not for us to judge these methods, although in this area, too, great liberties appear to be taken with lawfulness. Many of these methods give rise to chain reactions of blackmail and lies between different agencies and institutions in individual states, as well as between states. Therein may lie at least a partial explanation for certain governments’ fierce opposition to revealing the truth. We cannot go into the details of this phenomenon without putting human lives at risk. Let me reiterate that we are fully convinced of the strategic importance of the work of intelligence services in combating terrorism. However, we believe equally strongly that the relevant agencies need to be subject to codes of conduct, accompanied by robust and thorough supervision.

Indeed, the memorandum ends with this observation:

We must condemn the attitude of the many countries that did not deem it necessary to reply to the questionnaire we sent them through their national delegations. Similarly, NATO has never replied to our correspondence.

So much for our good intentions. And so much for relying on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, too (there is a serious jurisdictional question there; and to the extent Congress even gave the UCMJ jurisdiction over non-military personnel in these matters, I think it should be withdrawn.). After all that, the Huckabee defense is really all we have left: hey, military prison ain't that bad! You should see how we treat our own citizens in Arkansas!

Wait; that sounded better before I said it....

Can we first define "evil"?

The nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in February, 2007:

In his opening remarks, Mullen, a Vietnam War veteran, told Pearl Harbor sailors: “I honestly believe this is the most dangerous time in my life.

“The enemy now is basically evil and fundamentally hates everything we are — the democratic principles for which we stand … This war is going to go on for a long time. It’s a generational war.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick, apparently without irony, would label this attitude "making war to keep peace." And, apparently, it really is all about "how we comprehend evil." So let's consider, outside a religious context, if we can, what "evil" means.

Is it slasher films and "gorenography"? There is more than a passing connection. "Hostel II" is, once again, set in Europe. Americans have always known, implicitly now, but explicitly before, that Europe was "decadent," so the premise of the films is easily accepted in that setting. Then again, all the victims are unpleasant and deserving of punishment (just as in the slasher films, where the teenagers who engage in hot sex for our prurient viewing, are the first to die at the hands of the maniac killer); so we get to eat our cake and have it, too. Just as easily, we can believe (though this is not a chicken or egg proposition vis a vis horror films) that the world outside our borders is decadent (just as it once was inside our borders, until we "pacified" the natives by exterminating them) and so we must make war in order to assure peace.

It's not that I don't think evil is a real concept, names a true thing, has, as we loosely say, "existence." But evil should be, always was, extraordinary; it was a word set aside for the worst imaginable. Adolf Hitler was evil, we were told. The Holocaust was evil. It was so evil, we had to coin a new word for it: genocide. Extraordinary Evil: Why Genocide Happens, a book coming out in the fall, captures that meaning, almost preserves it, now. Because evil is on its way to becoming banal, when it isn't linked to religion. And it's hard to argue that claiming the people killing in the name of, on behalf of, because of, or simply for the reason of, a religion, is not itself a religious use of the word. Moreover, it makes the conflict of "good" (us) and "evil" (them) religious as well. No one doubted when we took on the Axis powers that they were evil (if only because they were agressors); but no one cast the battle in explicitly, or even implicit, religious terms. Any who did were clearly marginalized at the time, and by history. But now we've come to rely on evil as our good. We need evil in order to justify our violence. This is an old song in American history, but it can only carry us for so long. Having declared Hitler evil, how do we go higher? When evil is no longer evil enough, what do we look for then?

There are two ways to approach this: one is philosophical/theological, and abstract. The "irony of American history," if you will; the idea of a pure nation (America) in a fallen world (everybody else). We cling to that one whether it is in our foreign policy, or our choice of horror films. What Adm. Mullen wants to claim is an exalted status for us, one that sets us apart from our enemies in every way. No surprise: Alberto Gonzales has made the same claim. Niebuhr, as I said before, saw this. Niebuhr, as it turns out, was also too much of an optimist, and not enough of a Calvinist:

"The Christian understanding of human nature, of course, is that we are always like our enemy. Reinhold Niebuhr called it the "Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue." Writing about America's response to Communism during the Cold War, Niebuhr noted the irony of our opposition to Communism:

John Adams in his warnings to Thomas Jefferson would seem to have had a premonition of this kind of politics. "Power," he wrote, "always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party." Adams's understanding of the power of the self's passions and ambitions to corrupt the self's reason is a simple recognition of the facts of life which refute all theories, whether liberal or Marxist, about the possibility of a completely disinterested self. Adams, as every Christian understanding of man has done, nicely anticipated the Marxist theory of an "ideological taint" in reason when men reason about each other's affairs and arrive at conclusions about each other's virtues, interests and motives. The crowning irony of the Marxist theory of ideology is that it foolishly and self-righteously confined the source of this taint to economic interest and to a particular class. It was, therefore, incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power which would creep inevitably into its paradise of innocency. In any event we have to deal with a vast religious-political movement which generates more extravagant forms of political injustice and cruelty out of the pretensions of innocency than we have ever known in human history.

"Niebuhr was writing about the tendency of America to become like the Marxist system it then fiercely opposed, often with the same language of facing a "new enemy" in a "perpetual war." But he was optimistic that matters would not decay to the point that the Marxist systems would become indistinguishable from the American one:

The liberal world which opposes this monstrous evil is filled ironically with milder forms of the same pretension. Fortunately they have not resulted in the same evils, partly because they are not as consistently held; and partly because we have not invested our ostensible "innocents" with inordinate power. Though a tremendous amount of illusion about human nature expresses itself in American culture, our political institutions contain many of the safeguards against the selfish abuse of power which our Calvinist fathers insisted upon. According to the accepted theory, our democracy owes everything to the believers in the innocency and perfectibility of man and little to the reservations about human nature which emanated from the Christianity of New England. But fortunately there are quite a few accents in our constitution which spell out the warning of John Cotton: "Let all the world give mortall man no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . And they that have the liberty to speak great things you will find that they will speak: great blasphemies."

"The irony now is, in the name of that same Calvinism, the current Administration is hell-bent on tearing apart all of those safeguards against the selfish abuse of power. Niebuhr saw it as The Irony of American History. What he couldn't foresee was just how ironic American history would become, and just how much like our enemy." Niebuhr was more optimistic than that. Interestingly, Al Gore, using Niebuhr, recognizes it:

"Our founders," Gore told [Arianna Huffington], "had an incredibly sophisticated understanding of human nature. They believed that there is the potential for good and bad in all of us. They had a view very similar to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King's guru, who put forth the idea that we all have the potential for good and bad and that the ways in which we relate to one another, and the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease."

I would note, as Gore does, that you don't have to be a theologian to understand that human nature is complex, human motivation ambiguous, and that "the conditions within which we live our lives, have a big impact on whether our vulnerabilities for bad or abusive behavior increase or decrease." The Founding Fathers, after all, weren't running a seminary. And, as Auden observed: "I and the public know/what all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom violence is done/Do Violence in return."

The other way to respond to this is concrete. Chris Hedges has a book scheduled for release at the end of the year: Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians. I have no more than the catalog copy on it, but it tells you something:

Collateral Damage is organized around key military operations on the battlefield — Convoys, Checkpoints, Detentions, Raids, Suppressive Fire, and “Hearts and Minds.” Hedges and Al-Arian uncover how the very conduct of the war and occupation have turned the American forces into agents of terror for most Iraqis. The military convoys that speed through the centers of towns, often driving on the wrong side of the street or on sidewalks, have become trains of death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity at checkpoints; pregnant women being rushed to hospital have been killed at roadblocks when their husbands failed to slow down and children have watched in horror as their parents have been killed.

Hedges and Al-Arian show how this widespread pattern of civilian killing has fueled the insurgency in Iraq, giving rise to instability, sectarian violence, and total chaos.

I read that, and I think of the "ordinary American" I saw on a panel on CNN yesterday, who kept saying we need to "remove the restrictions" on our military, so they can win. Because, after all, the greatest military power in the world can't be defeated except by its leadership, right? What all schoolchildren learn, and yet some of us still can't learn it. Now can we talk honestly about "evil"? Because those to whom violence is done, have their own understanding of who is "evil."

POWELL: They are. Guantanamo has become a major, a major problem for America’s perception — as it’s seen, the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo — not tomorrow, this afternoon. I’d close it. And I’d not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system’s all about? And by the way, America, unfortunately, has too many people in jail, all of whom had lawyers and access to writs of habeas corpus. And so we can handle bad people in our system. And so I would get rid of Guantanamo and I’d get rid of the military commissions system, and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts martial. I would do that because it’s more equatable and it’s more understandable in constitutional terms. But I’d also do it because every morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. So essentially we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it. But remember what I started this discussion saying, don’t let any of them go. Put them in a different system, a system that is experienced, that knows how to handle people like this.

And this, of course, is all just the public narrative, the secular one. These are the arguments you pile up in response to the guy who says the military is "restricted" and could "win" if we'd "just let them." He was quite explicit in what he meant, this unknown gentleman: "Wipe 'em all out, that'll stop 'em," are not his exact words, but very close. "Kill 'em all," the priest allegedly said, "God will know his own." Interestingly, one argument for the historical validity of those words is that they are peculiarly Christian:

The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians. Indeed it is characteristically Christian. It only makes sense to those who believe in heaven and an afterlife. The phrase would be meaningless to an atheist.

Or, for that matter, to any adherent to any other religion which did not accept the fundamentally Platonic doctrine of immortality. Such is the ambiguity of human nature which Christians are called to witness to. As God says to Jeremiah: "The human heart is devious; who can fathom it? I, God, test the heart...." When even God is not sure what human beings will do next, or why, who are we to be sure we can know, and identify, "evil" in others?

It's an interesting concept, "evil," for a number of reasons. It assumes there is an opposing force in the world, which limits the power of God. There is a problem right there, especially for an omnipotent God. If God allows evil to exist, then perhaps Gloucester is right, as "As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods." But if all things come from God, must we now, as Job admonishes his wife, accept ill as well as good? Either God is the author of all we know in this life, or God abdicates a certain portion of it to an evil power who sports with us. It's a bit of a theodicial trap.

So let's back up from evil a moment, and reconsider the thoroughly debased Romantic ideal that it is all about us. That's hard to discard, because it's also the basis of existentialism and, while few of us may claim to be existentialists, or even now understand just what the philosophy espouses, we are hard-pressed to propose another theory of existence that we can subscribe to, a valid alternative that explains "the meaning of life" to us. We are all, in Western culture at least, Romantics through and through. Even questioning "why am I here" is a question of radical self-importance that would have been literally unthinkable earlier than the 19th century in Europe. We like to imagine that is a universal question, but you will search in vain for it in the stories of Chaucer's pilgrims, among Beowulf and his warriors, or in the Iliad or Sophocles' greatest tragedies. If anyone ever earned the right to ask "Why am I here?", it would be Oedipus, yet the question never crosses his lips. Seek it in the Bible; you won't find it there. Even the Westminster Catechism, written long before Wordsworth and Coleridge set pen to paper to re-invent poetry and being creating the modern world, doesn't cast it's first question in terms of "Why am I here?," but speaks of the chief end of humanity. And what is that chief end? "To glorify God and enjoy him sic forever." Not much Romantic purpose, there; not much to validate my individual existence. But that affirmation is part of the narrative of Romanticism, of Western European culture since the 19th century; the narrative of the authors of the catechism was another narrative, a different narrative, a narrative bound up with a confession of faith. And the question is: what happens when you remove that confession of faith from the narrative, but maintain the vocabulary? The authors of the Westminster Catechism were no doubt quite comfortable speaking of "evil." But we are no longer comfortable using their narrative. We like their vocabulary, though. It's familiar, and we think we know what it means. The problem is, of course, we don't; and it's leading us into nightmare.

Evil connected to religion, at least "evil" as traditional Christian doctrine understands it, is not "them" and something "over there." It is the state of human nature, the condition of human existence. But when evil is then reserved for Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, for genocide and terrorism, we quickly remove it from ourselves, convinced we aren't that bad. And we aren't; evil is too easily turned into a club to beat others with, another weapon of our power, our need for control. But then we lose control of "evil," too, and it no longer does our bidding. If only "they" are evil, then only "they" deserve to die, and "wiping them all out" to solve the problem becomes the only solution to every perceived international problem (and national; that same sentiment lies at the heart of the immigration debate today). But if we take evil back into ourselves, if we recognize our complicity in the violence of the world, if we stop thinking of ourselves as "innocent nation" in a "decadent world," perhaps we could start to make a change in the world. For Christians, being "in the world, but not of the world," means recognizing a struggle; Israel called it the "struggle with God." Muslims, as I understand, call it the "jihad," the struggles of the spirit. If those of us who are Christians would start to understand that evil is us, too, perhaps we would start to recognize the struggle is in us, not aimed at us. And the rest of us could at least recognize the religious basis of our vocabulary, and begin to choose our words, as well as our wars, a bit more carefully.

UPDATE:

Robert - I don't know if you heard my story a little while back. This truly stunned me.

I was just reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, which is Carlo Levi's account of his year in exile in Lucania - the back of beyond - in Italy under Mussolini. During that year Italy declared war on Abbyssinia. Word for word, this is what Levi tells the reader Mussolini told Italians:

"Abyssinia hates us for our freedom."

I about stroked out when I read that. Word for word.
Tena

Perhaps the only reason we were the "good guys" in WWII is because we weren't the "bad guys."

UPDATE II:

I feel the need to clarify: When Rick (my grate gud frend, as Molesworth would put it) says this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

This is certainly news to me.

But of course you are right that the first duty to "fight evil" is to fight it within, to struggle against my own evil. That doesn't relieve me of any obligation to recognize that good and evil are capable of gradation and that greater and lesser evils require differing responses. The fact that my motives are always mixed may still require that I take a stand against an external evil. But a failure to sufficiently recognize the ubiquity of original sin, a failure to see that there is no essential difference between myself and an Osama bin Laden, can lead us to become his miror image (and to a large extent, has).

The difficulty is in navigating between the extremes, between, on the one hand, thinking only the other is evil, and, on the other, thinking my own evil is so ingrained that I refuse to confront it outside myself. To act righteously we need both self-knowledge and self-criticism. Our heart is dark, but it's the only thing we've got.
Rick Allen

And I say this:

"The idea of "Killing them all" and leaving it to God to sort out the souls of the dead is a popular one among traditionalist Christians."

I don't accept it, either, nor do I consider it Christian. But then, my Christianity makes me a pacifist, which is also a position at odds with "traditionalist Christians," at least as judged by history. And then there is the question of whether I am permitted to do evil in order to oppose evil. Just because the heart is all we've got, doesn't excuse us from responsibility for doing evil.

I don't meant to be critical or issue a rebuke. But morality is something of a zero-sum game for me; you can't excuse your evil by appealing to good intentions. We're right back, in other words, to the question of power. Is it okay for me to wield power, if I intend to do good? That's the usual excuse, but I think the teachings of Jesus undercut every effort we make in that direction. Faith is radical, and radically individual, and it requires a radical trust ("faith") in God, a trust which may appear to be sheer lunacy. Certainly the early church had to struggle for a long time to make sense of the crucifixion.

That ambiguity and lack of clarity is truly at the heart of Christianity. As Paul said, Christians must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, in the apousia, not parousia, of our Lord. It is, indeed, a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Where has all the compassion gone?

David Kuo touches on the relevant point of the discussion of religion in the "marketplace of ideas" here. But he just touches on it; because the problem of discussing religion in the marketplace of ideas is that you have to discuss religion in the vocabulary, in the context, of the marketplace. And that results in conversations like this:

Last night in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidates were long on conservatism and short on compassion. On immigration, on Iraq, on virtually every issue, the consensus was that America hasn't been tough enough. No compassion for anyone — particularly those 12 million Americans who got here illegally.

When it came to the hungry — or, more precisely, those the Bush Administration has categorized as "food insecure" — there was silence. So, too, on issues like poverty and youth violence and the epidemic of the uninsured. There was, in short, no evidence of the compassionate conservatism George W. Bush once promised would be his governing philosophy.

Try as you might, in reviewing this discussion you won't find much emphasis on compassion, either. Nor here, either. Even less discussion of religion as responsibility, especially (since the questions of the candidates were all presumptively limited to Christianity and, unless I missed someone on the panel, Roman Catholicism and American Protestantism within that (no Orthodox views, no Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.) the responsibilities Christians presumptively have for the least among us. No, none of that. Just some vague kinds of Pietism ("How would prayer influence the decisions that you make as president? And, most importantly, when you pray, how do you know if the voice that you are hearing is the voice of God or your own voice in disguise? ") or poverty (Wallis), abortion (the Rev. Joel C. Hunter) or other social problems (Msgr. Kevin Sullivan). Nothing too specific, in other words, nor necessarily "religious." Responsibility, yes, but the kind of social responsibility Europe has managed to take up "without Marx or Jesus," as the saying used to go.

Now, if we're really going to change the conversation, or even shift the terms of the discussion, how do we make people listen when we talk about the kind of responsibility reflected in the parable of the sheep and the goats, and how do we model compassion by insisting that our version of the conversation is the one that must be held now!?

Can we force people to sit and listen to us discuss compassion? Can we take power, and still be compassionate about it, especially when we are trying to get people to listen?

UPDATE: "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?" Steve Inskeep apparently thinks compassionate people are silly. Especially if they are celebrities who wear coloured glasses.

What? Me Panic?

Actual sign seen on the freeway in Houston:

HURRICANE SEASON IS HERE

KEEP YOUR GAS TANK FULL

The irony of this, or rather, the stupidity, the "right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing?" That sign was on a road in north Houston, just south of Tomball. It's a "message board," one maintained by roadway authorities to give information about road conditions, closures, accidents, etc. And it's located about as far from the Gulf Coast as you can get and still be "in" Houston. Local authorities in Galveston (they don't call 'em "barrier islands" for nothing!) are trying to implement a plan to announce evacuations (when necessary) by zip codes; because the panic of Rita (caused by Katrina before it) two years ago led to people in the neighborhood of this sign fleeing north to Dallas, which so blocked up the roads the people from Galveston couldn't get off the island (Interstate 45 "starts" in Galveston and runs through Houston).

You'd think all the authorities in Houston would remember this:

Obviously, you'd be wrong.

One for Tena

As I've said elsewhere, the Biblical message is about sacrifice and the greater good of the community. That's not a popular message or even, really, a populist one. You don't win crowds of people by telling them they must be last of all, and servants of all.

Isn't that message of the gospels? I thought Jesus preached that message to multitudes. So I have a bit of trouble seeing this as something that is a message the world cannot embrace; only individuals can.

If that's true, Robert, then what are ministers for? What is theology for? If it's one on one and all revelatory, then you're talking gurus and students and knowledge passed directly through methods the invoke that revelation.
Tena

On the other hand, the relation between these two hermenuetics begins to reverse itself once we begin to consider the other side of the narrative, namely, the confession of faith.

This is the most important thing Ricouer has to say, but when you put it in the context of hermeneutics and the phenomenology of Heidegger, it tends to get lost. Still, this is the crux of the matter: the confession of faith as foundational to the narrative of the religious.

If you look at this dispassionately and entirely as an academic matter or an intellectual exercise, you follow Ricouer's thought or some similar line (not that there's anything wrong with that!). But if you apply it pastorally, to an ecclesial setting, and try to see it at work there, you get something that can only be understood passionately; which is not to say solely with great emotional fervor devoid of understanding or discernment.

What Ricouer is discussing, if you apply it pastorally, is: what is church for? This is the question Tena raised, because our culture has been shaped now to understand church as doing one of two things: offering worship of God (which pretty much offends our democratic sensibilities; after all, why should we bend our knee to anyone or anything? And isn't "worship" simply ego-aggrandizement for rulers?), or evangelism (and all aspects of church life are bent constantly in that direction). I got into the latter side of this discussion over at Fr. Jake's, an argument that truly went 'round in circles because, at heart, it depends on where the emphasis lies: is the kerygma of the Christian gospel Matthew 25 (the parable of the sheep and the goats)? or is it in the "Great Commissioning" ("Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all nations")? Read the latter exclusively, and the two are absolutely irreconcilable; the "Great Commissioning" also makes all worship about reaching masses, otherwise:

...then what are ministers for? What is theology for? If it's one on one and all revelatory, then you're talking gurus and students and knowledge passed directly through methods the invoke that revelation.

Which is not to say I would reduce the gospels to one parable (any more than it should be reduced to John 3:16), but the line between the two understandings of Christianity can be drawn between those two sets of teachings. We also have to keep in mind that, while Christianity is an evangelical religion, it is not solely evangelical in the American sense of that word. There are a lot of Christians, not just Roman Catholics but several flavors of Orthodox, not to mention Egyptian Coptics, who don't rely on either the technigues, nor even the theology, of American evangelicals, and feel no particular loss from that at all.

So, what is church for? Is it for evangelism and instruction, or for worship? The Protestant emphasis on the sermon has pushed worship about as far toward single purposes as it can go. Joel Osteen is regularly on one of the cable channels here, and I never seem to see any more of him than his sermons. The same is true for other local TV preachers who get televised at times other than Sunday morning. The focal point of the broadcast is clearly on what the preacher has to say. And how does the preacher speak to people who have no confession of faith, whose narrative about the world doesn't include a confession at all?

I've run aground in English literature classes trying to explain Milton's Paradise Lost or even the reference to Cain's descendants in Beowulf, teaching high school students with no experience in a Christian church. The confession of faith of Christianity is certainly no part of their narrative of the world, but neither is the story of Jonah or even David and Goliath. It can be tricky trying to explain the story of Noah's ark or Jonah and the whale, or even the Crucifixion and the story of Creation when I teach "The Dream of the Rood" or "Caedmon's Hymn"; now try preaching from a position of faith on those subjects to such an audience. Which is to say, the church more and more finds itself back on the ground it started from in the pre-Constantinian world.

But our worship services, especially our Protestant ones, were always heavily dependent on the culture for their shape and meaning. The Reformed service which rejected the Catholic liturgy was rejecting a model known to almost everyone in that society. It is a model almost unknown today.

The central problem, though, is this one:

"You cannot lead people toward the good."

Yes, but you can encourage and nurture the good in people, just like you can encourage and nurture the bad. Isn't that obvious? Doesn't this government encourage and nurture the very worst in people, and almost strictly through persuasion and controlling the message that they send out not one on one, but to the "community"?

You can, of course, encourage people toward the good; but the "good" is, as Wittgenstien said, "outside the space of facts." It is non-material, and yet what we have learned since at least the Industrial Revolution, is that we can find happiness in the material, that we can purchase the "good," that it is (or should be) easily accessible to all. That's part of the problem: pastors/priest cannot lead people toward something which does not exist in material form, or even in the "space of facts." The other part of the problem is that, as Auden said, "Maps can point to places where live is evil now." The good may be outside the space of facts; but evil seems to be quite real, and quite present. Which makes the good seem even weaker, if it cannot be present, also.

So what "Good" are we looking for? What does our faith confess?

One of my favorite lines from my childhood among the Presbyterians is the opening line of the Westminster Catechism. Presbyterians are linked to "dour Scots" and the "frozen chosen" (but almost every Protestant group claims that title, at one time or another), yet the first line of the Catechism is a revelation:

What is the chief end of man?
The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

It's a lovely sentiment, when you think about it, and a lovely aim for life: not to be healthy, wealthy, and wise; or dour, ascetic, and "holy." Just to glorify God, and enjoy God forever. But that brings us back to the entrance requirement: the confession of faith. Even that narrative makes no sense without a confession of faith, if only because the 'glorify God' language sounds, in this post-Modern, post-Enligthenment context, like empty and shallow ego-gratification so the volcano god doesn't explode and rain ash and lava down on us again. Which isn't what worship is about at all; but until you penetrate the confession of faith, how do you know that?

We're wandering into issues of conversion, here. Fr. Jake had an excellent post on that recently, though I disagree with his idea of conversion altogether (that's yet another matter!). The excellence actually (no offense to Fr. Jake) in the book he cited, Take this Bread by Sara Miles. Her experience is more than a little relevant to my discussion, because her conversion experience came about through very physical means: the bread and wine of the eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, to those of us who make the confession of faith of Christianity. She made the conversion based on the offering, and more importantly the acceptance, of these things. From them she was led to make the confession of faith, to hear the narrative with that understanding. This was an individual decision, but without the community of believers, without the church to walk into, without a priest speaking to a crowd (however small), there would have been no offering for her to receive. Is this good? Yes, but it's also, clearly, outside the space of facts. Non-believers will say it is good for her; though some atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, probably won't say that much. But that puts us in another peculiar position: if evil for anyone is bad, and I can know that; why isn't good for anyone good? Why can't I know that?

I meant to answer more questions than I raised, when I started this. That's why it took so long to finish this one; and here I am, still unable to finish. Well, something to work on, then....

UPDATE: We'll see if this system works.

Tena comments (in part):

This is a problem of learning. It's one I worry about, with kids growing up with clocks that don't go around. I do worry about the future survival of classic literature - will anyone read it,will they understand it? But that's a different issue than the rest that you've talked about.

A very good working knowledge of the Bible is a requirement of understanding literature. I agree. But that is nothing to do with faith.

A fair point, but I think that's the point of the narrative being connected to a confession of faith; because, after all, the narrative is the concrete thing which leads us to and which confirms our faith. The eucharist which drew Sara Miles into the church is from a narrative, and is bound to a confession of faith. It is very much, as Ricouer understands, a matter of what narrative you know.

Missionaries going to a culture with no background in European Christianity (or in European thought, for that matter; the Grecian thought that is the basis for our culture is hardly universal) struggle with this. The church in Western European culture assumed the centrality of a Christian basis to all thinking, including morality and especially stories such as "Adam and Eve."

But unless Bible stories are taught as cultural matters (which raises all sorts of hackles, and frankly, even in private non-religious schools, doesn't show up on an achievement test), most students who don't go to a Christian or Jewish church/synagogue, don't know about Jonah and the Whale, David and Goliath, or Adam and Eve (or even Cain, if you're talking about Beowulf and Grendel).

And if you don't know those stories, it's rather hard to understand what the preacher is talking about on Sunday morning unless, like Joel Osteen, you never mention them. So as a preacher, I have two audiences: one steeped in Biblical lore, and one completely ignorant of it. And how do I, for 15 minutes on Sunday morning, inculcate faith in both of those groups?

One for the Mad Priest

*#@%$"*#@%$*&@#!*!@!!!!

If it weren't so serious, it would be funny

A military judge threw out charges against two "detainees" in Gitmo because two judges found the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the cases. Why? Because the detainees in question had not been found to be "unlawful" enemy combatants. At a prior status review hearing, they, and all the detainees of Gitmo, were simply found to be "enemy combatants."

Even the Pentagon wants to dismiss this as "semantics" and a "technicality." But it won't go away that easily. Because jurisdiction is fundamental to the function of any legal system, even one as cobbled together as the system created by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Without jurisdiction, that is, without the authority to act over the defendant, no US court will act, at all. These two judges wisely upheld that basic tenet of the law. Congress may have shredded habeas corpus, but they can't destroy the concept of jurisdiction.

Here, in fact, is the language of the Act (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Sec. 948d. Jurisdiction of military commissions
(a) Jurisdiction- A military commission under this chapter shall have jurisdiction to try any offense made punishable by this chapter or the law of war when committed by an alien unlawful enemy combatant before, on, or after September 11, 2001.
(b) Lawful Enemy Combatants- Military commissions under this chapter shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants. Lawful enemy combatants who violate the law of war are subject to chapter 47 of this title. Courts-martial established under that chapter shall have jurisdiction to try a lawful enemy combatant for any offense made punishable under this chapter.

And here's where the whole thing got hung up:

(c) Determination of Unlawful Enemy Combatant Status Dispositive- A finding, whether before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense that a person is an unlawful enemy combatant is dispositive for purposes of jurisdiction for trial by military commission under this chapter.

Clear enough even a lay person could understand it. No jurisdiction, no trial. This is not a semantic difference. This is not a technicality. This is the law. It's not a bug; it's a feature. And the person responsible for it, is the person who insisted on it.

And that's the really ironic part of this, the "Thomas More" part where the devil turns round on you when the forest of the laws are leveled, is the devil of your own making. NPR was reporting there is no appellate procedure available, and the AP report almost contradicts it, so clearly this is so new and unexpected no one quite knows what's going on. But the government, the prosecution in these matters, is, according to NPR, thinking of appealing the ruling of these two judges. Only one problem: Bush made sure they did away with those nasty appeals. So there's nothing for the prosecution to appeal to, either. There is a provision for appeals, but it depends on the Administration to act first:

““§ 950g. Review by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States
(a) IN GENERAL.—(1)(A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit shall have exclusive jurisdiction to determine the validity of a final judgment rendered by a military commission, pursuant to Section 1005(e)(3) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.
“(B) The Court of Appeals shall not review the final judgment until all other appeals under this chapter have been waived or exhausted.

That second provision refers to a previous part of the law:

““§ 950f. Review by Court of Military Commission Review
(a) COURT ESTABLISHED.—(1) The Secretary shall establish a Court of Military Commission Review which shall be composed of one or more panels, and each such panel shall be composed of not less than three appellate military judges.

This is the Court authorized to hear appeals; and until it does, the US Appellate Courts can't do anything. One problem: that Court does not yet exist.

And what do you think the Appellate Courts will do with a lower court called hastily into existence precisely to rule on this issue? Anything short of shredding its jurisdiction will make this entire system a farce. The only recourse now is to start over again, from scratch.

Well, it's not like the detainees are going anywhere....

UPDATE: and yes, the world is watching:

The ruling seemed to galvanize Canadian opposition MPs who, until Monday, had mostly stayed on the sidelines as the Harper government pointedly refused to intervene on Mr. Khadr's behalf — unlike the British and Australian governments that arranged to have their detained citizens brought home.

"Whatever we may think about Mr. Khadr and his past, he is a Canadian citizen with rights," Liberal MP Michael Ignatieff said. "The Canadian government should take up his case actively," he added.

One for DAS

This post has prompted better comments than I could have hoped for. I can only hope I've given replies worthy of them.

But this time 'round, the focus was on what message clergy -- Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Moslem, etc. -- give in preaching and in other sorts of scriptural exposition vs. what congregants expect. Often clergy, at least those educated in mainstream seminaries, and even many of us lay preachers, are steeped in Biblical scholarship and can communicate in some detail various aspects of how the Bible came to be the document it is, what the deeper meanings of Biblical lessons teach us, how the Bible (and in our case, the Talmud) construct morality, etc.

But many people don't come into a church or synagogue or mosque or temple seeking enlightenment or even moral instruction -- they come in for a sense of community (which role is very much acknowledged in Jewish tradition, e.g. calling a house of worship also "a house of meeting" or even the term synagogue, which, IIRC, referred to Christian houses of worship before it referred to Jewish one), a sense of hearing familiar prayers and stories, etc.

To hear a Pastor preach about the goals of the Deuteronomaic school or even to hear a Pastor teach the Biblical message of sacrifice is often not why people come to church in the first place.

But, in part, it used to be. Re-read the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Cotton Mather. John Donne preached in his shroud to remind everyone of their mortality, was the Dean of St. Paul's in London, and was so popular a speaker people came from miles around to hear him. "No Man is an Island" is from one of his sermons, and it ends with that great line: "Therefore, send not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Imagine hearing that as a funeral sermon today!

You are right, on the other hand: the word that was drummed into us in seminary was 'community,' and my seminary worked hard to prepare us pastorally as well as theologically. But there is still a fundamental difference between a seminary and a Bible College, and no amount of education teaches you how to deal with the clients, so to speak. I think there's a wholly separate problem of the old-fashioned "generation gap." At my last church I preached to people who had grown up coming to that church in a horse and buggy (literally!) and to young people who spent their time on the Internet, for whom the moon landing was ancient (and largely unremarkable) history. What narrative do you use, except the narrative of either the liturgy of the church (Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian) or the narrative of that "ol' time religion"?

Which is why, at bottom, I don't think it's because fundamentalists "tell 'em what to think." Their popularity stems from a compelling and familiar narrative, one they think is as historical as "Inherit the Wind" (which has as much to do with history as "Birth of a Nation", though it's a better movie. Still, both are meant largely to be propaganda, not history.) That, and they offer, as you say, the Church of Meaning and Belonging, not the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging. Which is not to say the best preaching comes from being "steeped in Biblical scholarship and can communicate in some detail various aspects of how the Bible came to be the document it is" or even "what the deeper meanings of Biblical lessons teach us, how the Bible (and in our case, the Talmud) construct morality, etc." Sometimes people just want to hear that they belong.

Which brings us back to the narrative, though, doesn't it? It's true that God loves stories: but what stories do we tell, and why? No, there isn't an answer to that question; or at least, not an easy one. There is a direction toward an answer, but that direction is not necessarily toward the "good." As Wittgenstein observed: "You cannot lead people to what is good; you can only lead them to some place or other. The good is outside the space of facts." Still, even that's a bit tart for a congregation to suck on once a week. How does one set about the craft of pastoring, without simply pastoring people into being comfortable with who they are and what they prefer? That, of course, is the challenge. Maybe so long as the confession of faith remains inseperable from the structure of the story....

One for Mimi

This post has prompted better comments than I could have hoped for. I can only hope I've given replies worthy of them.

Back to you, Robert. You have more readers than I, but neither of is even a blip on the screen of the blogscape, so why can't we just do what we like and pray that we do a little good on the way? You've done good by me.
Grandmère Mimi

Blogs in left blogistan tend to fall into four categories: the "group blog" of Kos and FDL, where everybody posts and rants about what they want to rant about, and the audience is huge because all the bloggers love to see their words in print, and everybody else's words, too; the "Digsby" blog, where one blogger rants and everybody raves about what they rant about, and the audience is huge because Digsby/whoever catches the zeitgeist and says what everyone already things, and everyone loves to think they're as clever as that, and as right; the Atrios blog, where everybody rants and raves about everybody else's comments, largely regardless of what Atrios posts about, and the audience is huge because everyone loves the sound of their own voice and each other, and like the other three groups, the community created tends to be self-affirming and self-reflexive and self-supporting (and besides, Atrios scoops up what everybody else in blogistan is ranting and raving about); and then there are all the other bloggers, doing whatever they're doing, and garnering or losing audience, based on the number of friends they have, acquire, or how they manage to catch the attention of Google and Technorati.

The first three categories seem to be the models for success and popularity, the last is the catch-all of "everybody else." And if this post ever gets noticed, partisans of the first three will slam me for not "getting it" or being a "wanker" or whatever new designation of shame and outrage is de rigeur at the time, or just claim I'm jealous. Because partisans of blogs protect their turf with the ferocity of a junk-yard dog.

But I'm not jealous; I'm cynical. There's a huge difference.

All of which otherwise has bugger-all to do with me, except that even the mitey cheese that stands alone absorbs odors from everything else in the refrigerator unless it's left to suffocate in plastic; and all human endeavors are ultimately not sui generis but an imitation, pale or hale, of what everybody else is doing. And so the question I'm really asking is not: Is Pastor Dan a wanker for dissing me? Nor even: am I worthy any longer? Nor the old chestnut: Does a blog make a noise if there aren't enough people around to hear it?

Because truly, I only care that this is worthwhile, once in a while, to the handful of people who comment here, or who regularly read it. Tena is right: I care very much about "getting it right." What I don't really care about, is getting it broadly accepted and approved; being "popular," in other words.

So why all the agonizing? Not because I am in anguish, but because I'm wondering: can I do this without ranting and raving? Without seeking an outrage du jour I can put my "spin" on? Can I provide something meaningful to the conversation (which is all I really want to do) when the conversation seems to be solely about how annoying it is that there are so many stupid people in the world because they don't think like us!

And because of all the other stuff in the refrigerator, mitey cheese that I might be, I'm not sure I can. And if I can't, what's the point? Because outrage is cheap, and frankly, it's tawdry, and honestly, I'm tired of it. It makes me feel good, briefly, to exercise my thoughts and prove, once again, how right I am. But beyond that, what's the point of it? I'd be better off emulating The Wounded Bird (no, seriously!), but that would be carrying coals to Newcastle. I can provide my own, far too serious, far too scholarly, far to theological and intellectual and philosophical, notes to the conversation (and probably I will), but it's getting harder and harder to have anything to say.

And then I write a post that prompts me to write three posts, any one of which would sustain an invaluable conversation (for me, anyway!) for weeks if not months. But I find that kind of conversation doesn't last long on blogs, either. Either you'll get bored, or I will. It's not like a chess game, after all, where we both have the same board and can take plenty of time to think about the next move as it interests us. Mine is a jackdaw mind; I swoop down on shiney things. And this is a jackdaw intellectual's blog; more of a public notebook, really.

Which means it'll be here for quite awhile, I have no doubt. But sometimes it will say less than it seems to, and sometimes more; and I'll probably never be finished with anything. Because if I could just once bring something to a conclusion, I'd probably keep it to myself and look for a publisher. And if I could just keep the right kind of company (friends of this blog excepted, please!), maybe I could quit re-inventing the wheel and get back to something useful. Of course, that solution wouldn't solve my archy the cockroach problem.

"expression is the need of my soul."--archy the cockroach

Ya ready, boots?

Pastor Dan said this:

We need a new media system, for religious issues as for many others. I'll leave it at that, since so many other bloggers have said it so much better than I have.

Which prompted me to say this:

Do we really? Or do we need to reconsider the value we put in "media systems"?

What is our purpose as Christians, IOW? To serve Christ in the world? Or to raise up better spokespersons? To agree the best system is this system, just with us in control, or at least with a louder or more persuasive voice?

Or to walk away from this system altogether?

I know, I know, same song, second verse. But everytime I hear we need to play their game better, I get these nagging questions....

Which prompted him to say this:

Fine. Start walking.

Which, I presume, is meant to be an ironic challenge (or maybe just a curt and disgusted dismissal; who can say?); but my prolonged silences here lately are evidence that, by and large, I already have. When I wondered what silence on a blog would sound like, I was serious. But I only come back to this because I happened to start re-reading Ricouer (serendipity? or the work of the "wild goose" that goes where it wills? I report, you decide):

On the other hand, the relation between these two hermenuetics begins to reverse itself once we begin to consider the other side of the narrative, namely, the confession of faith. But this other dimension remains inseperable from the structure of the story. Not just any theology whatsoever can be tied to the narrative form, but only a theology that proclaims Yahweh to be the grand actor of a history of deliverance. Without a doubt it is this point that forms the greatest contrast between the God of Israel and the God of Greek philosophy. The theology of traditions knows nothing of concepts of cause, foundation, or essence. It speaks of God in accord with the historical drama, instituted by the acts of deliverance reported in the story. This manner of speaking of God is no less meaningful than that of the Greeks. It is a theology homogenous with the narrative structure itself, a theology in the form of Heilsgeschicte.

Paul Ricouer, "Philosophy and Religion," Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, tr. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1995), 40.

I want to come back to Ricouer's essay and put that more fully in the context of this discussion, but for the moment, by "narrative" he means the Biblical texts, the history of Israel as related through its experience in history, of God. That's a good starting point, though, for the problem of seeking a "new media system, for religious issues as for many others." Or, as Judas asked Jesus: "Why'd you pick such a backward time, and such a strange land?" And the answer is: because the narrative structure is essential to the message. And that's the problem with seeking "a new media system." Media systems have nothing to do with this narrative, and everything to do with their own narratives.

I used to be roundly criticized at Eschaton by commenters who said that I, as a "liberal Christian," should be doing more to counter the message of conservative and fundamentalist Christians. But the reason Falwell and Robertson and Dobson are successful in their message is not because of their vocabulary (although I used to think so), or because of their media skills, or even because they tell people comforting lies (they don't, always). It's because the message they deliver, is essentially the narrative of the media system. And that narrative is not the Biblical narrative. Which is my problem with their message. But I can't correct that problem by resorting to a media system, even a new one. I can only create new problems, without ever conveying the Biblical narrative I mean to propose. As Ricouer says: "The theology of traditions knows nothing of concepts of cause, foundation, or essence." And yet those are the only concepts the narrative of media systems has, or knows.

Media systems are all about cause, foundations, and essence. Use the right words, visuals, concepts, images, graphics, and music, and you achieve the cause you aim for: usually power. The foundation of such a narrative is well understood, from Freud on down to McCluhan and out to Bill McKibben and "We Believe in You!" The essence is the appeal to the individual, to ego, to comfort and suasion or even assurance that you, beleagured as you are by the evil forces of liberalism, Hollywood, and Democrats, can be in control. Each of those things can be analyzed and is manipulated by the very people Pastor Dan would oppose with "a new media system." And none of that has anything to do with the Biblical narrative. Indeed, it's antithetical to the Biblical narrative, in no small part because the Biblical narrative's claim to knowledge is a claim based on revelation, not discovery.

As I've said elsewhere, the Biblical message is about sacrifice and the greater good of the community. That's not a popular message or even, really, a populist one. You don't win crowds of people by telling them they must be last of all, and servants of all. It's certainly a "new media system" to make that proclamation, and to make it via a crucified God, even in this age when it seems the messages of Christianity are so familiar as to be old hat. But Jim Wallis long ago stopped being about the work of Sojourners, and started being about the selling of the message, and to do that, he had to become a bit more respectable than a tent-maker in the agora. So it is still not a media system the world has embraced; indeed, it's a message the world cannot embrace; only individuals can.

Several issues here; more than I can, or want to, squeeze into one post. Ricouer has more to say, too, and I need to be fair to his discussion and include that context, and show how he is more relevant to this discussion than just some high-falutin' intellectualism. After all, they don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care; but what you care about, is also important.

Something about where your treasure is, and where that means your heart will be.