And the people shall answer....

Regarding, again, the Beatitudes, I really should know these things, but then I don't make any real claims to being a scriptural scholar; and New Testament studies have moved off toward historical criticism, leaving literary criticism behind as if it were a dirty step-sister deserving of no more attention than a scullery maid (yes, I'm an English major, and yes, that is a not very oblique reference to "Cinderella." At least I'm honest about it.)

All of which is to say, I should have known Luke was a good student of the Hebrew scriptures, and that Matthew's opening the Sermon on the Mount, with its clear reference to Sinai and Moses, the Law-Giver, with the Beatitudes, was not a coincidence or just the workings of "Q":

These shall stand upon mount Gerizim to bless the people, when ye are come over Jordan; Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph, and Benjamin:

13 And these shall stand upon mount Ebal to curse; Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali.

14 And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel with a loud voice,

15 Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people shall answer and say, Amen.

16 Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.

17 Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen.

18 Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way. And all the people shall say, Amen.

19 Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen.

20 Cursed be he that lieth with his father’s wife; because he uncovereth his father’s skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen.

21 Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast. And all the people shall say, Amen.

22 Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.

23 Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the people shall say, Amen.

24 Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbour secretly. And all the people shall say, Amen.

25 Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen.

26 Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen

That's actually Deuteronomy 27, which begins the litany. Not exactly kind stuff, but if the people are faithful, they get the blessings:

1 And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

2 And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God.

3 Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

6 Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

Luke, of course, reversed the order; and Matthew dropped the "curses" altogether. I don't even mean to compare either version (Luke's or Matthew's) line by line, so much as to put the "Beatitudes" into their proper context. Once again, we don't hear what Jesus' original audience heard, because we hear in a different context, one in which Deuteronomy 27 and 28 are not part of our regular religious discourse, but the Ten Commandments are. What intrigues me, to begin with, is the ritual nature of these curses and blessings. This is actually part of the identification of Israel as a people; part of the covenant which makes them children of Abraham and subject to God. Verses 9 and 10 of chapter 27 precede all of this, and make the ritual apparent: "And Moses and the priests the Levites spake unto all Israel, saying, Take heed, and hearken, O Israel; this day thou art become the people of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the LORD thy God, and do his commandments and his statutes, which I command thee this day."

I mean no disrespect to point out the connection between the Levites and Leviticus, the book we commonly think of as the "laws" of Israel which most non-Jews generally disparage. That's the one with the dietary laws and the laws about "cleanness," the stuff that makes us uncomfortable or which we disparage as "legalistic." Many Christians and non-Christians associate it, without knowing much about it, with the Pharisees of the Gospels, and discard both as erroneous and misguided. But one of the purposes of Leviticus was to keep the people of Israel holy, to make them, in their quotidian lives, remember that they were subject to a covenant with God, and that covenant was the source of their blessings. As I said, it offends our modern sensibilities to consider curses at all, and certainly to consider them as preceding any blessings, but we can note how that marks the Beatitudes of Jesus as radical without turning and disparaging the source Jesus was drawing on.

So this was meant to be a ritual text, one the people would use to remember who they were and whose they were. Again, put it in context: look at the whole of chapter 26:

And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and possessest it, and dwellest therein;

2 That thou shalt take of the first of all the fruit of the earth, which thou shalt bring of thy land that the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt put it in a basket, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose to place his name there.

3 And thou shalt go unto the priest that shall be in those days, and say unto him, I profess this day unto the LORD thy God, that I am come unto the country which the LORD sware unto our fathers for to give us.

4 And the priest shall take the basket out of thine hand, and set it down before the altar of the LORD thy God.

5 And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous:

6 And the Egyptians evil entreated us, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage:

7 And when we cried unto the LORD God of our fathers, the LORD heard our voice, and looked on our affliction, and our labour, and our oppression:

8 And the LORD brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders:

9 And he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey.

10 And now, behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land, which thou, O LORD, hast given me. And thou shalt set it before the LORD thy God, and worship before the LORD thy God:

11 And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you.

12 When thou hast made an end of tithing all the tithes of thine increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast given it unto the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that they may eat within thy gates, and be filled;

13 Then thou shalt say before the LORD thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them:

14 I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead: but I have hearkened to the voice of the LORD my God, and have done according to all that thou hast commanded me.

15 Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

16 This day the LORD thy God hath commanded thee to do these statutes and judgments: thou shalt therefore keep and do them with all thine heart, and with all thy soul.

17 Thou hast avouched the LORD this day to be thy God, and to walk in his ways, and to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his judgments, and to hearken unto his voice:

18 And the LORD hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments;

19 And to make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the LORD thy God, as he hath spoken.

Rituals are not rote acts repeated mindlessly because the people are sheep and puppets; they are islands in the sea of time which connect us to the past and the future in an ever-changing present. Ritual is another way of forming identity. Which casts an interesting new light on the Beatitudes. When Jesus speaks these words, they resonate with the history of Israel; interestingly, too, they resonate more for Luke, the Gentile, than for Matthew, the Jew; but that's another issue.

The source of the Beatitudes is clearly performative language: the priest announces each one, and the people say "Amen" ("so be it"). Now Jesus replaces the priests (and, by inference, Moses) with new performative language. And that language is clearly meant to recall, and to reinterpret, this language. But notice where the emphasis falls in this chain of curse and blessings: it falls on everyday life. These are not the sweeping pronouncements of the Ten Commandments ("Thou shalt not kill." How many of us have to worry about violating that one in daily life?), but the day to day issues of living in community. "Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger, fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen."

"The stranger, fatherless, and widow," by the way, is a very concrete formulation for describing the poor, the powerless, the outcast, those who always live on the extreme margins of any society, for only the kingdom of God as envision by Jesus is a place with no margins and no boundaries. The Ten Commandments don't reach the issue of the orphan, the widow, and the alien; but this ritual curse-as-warning, does. And the blessings are tied directly to them: avoid the things abjured by the curses, and you will be blessed, not just as a member of the nation, but in your quotidian life. Begins to sound more and more like the Beatitudes all the time.

It has been noted before that Matthew generalizes, or "spiritualizes" the Beatitudes, while Luke makes them concrete. The "poor" in Luke are "poor in spirit" in Matthew. The ones who are hungry now in Luke are the ones who "hunger and thrist after righteousness" in Matthew. And Matthew leaves out any mention of curses, which Luke, like the original, links directly to to the blessings. But both versions serve their disparate purposes: to announce the presence of the kingdom of God, and to declare by declaring blessings on precisely those on the margins: not the stranger, fatherless, and widow this time, but the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the hungry, the peacemakers. These words originally re-announced the covenant of Israel: "Deuteronomy" is the title from the Septuagint for this fifth book of Moses, and it means roughly "restatement of the law." It was drafted after the Exile, as a restatement of the continuing covenant between the generation which never knew Jerusalem, and the God of their ancestors. It is a liturgy pronounced in the aftermath of Exile, hearkening back to a time when that Exile was unimaginable and unimagined. It is, in short, an act of healing. Which gives us an even better context for the pronouncement of the blessings and curses of the Beatitudes.

The words of Moses are for the people of Israel; the words of Jesus imply no such limitation. The meek, the poor, the peacemaker and pure in heart, the hungry and those who hunger for justice, can be found in any nation, among any people. As we have seen in America today, the assumption of power is that justice and righteousness and blessings flow from power and authority, that blessings only come to those who first claim privilege by dint of arms. 30 years ago we took to caling it the "thin blue line," the people who stood with authority and power between civilization and the "out=law," the one literally pushed to the margin of society because they threatened society so. That is the view of Caesar, to use a metaphor from Jesus' time. That is the perspective of a government which uses crucifixion to suppress opposition, and war to distract the people from the fact that there is no bread, and the circuses are just empty circles. The beatitudes and their originals in Deuteronomy teach a different lesson: the blessings of life flow from God, who offers them to those who practice justice and righteousness, who do not cheat the stranger and the fatherless and the widow, who live their daily lives in consideration of others, who know that the true power is powerlessness.

Handwriting on the Wall

Regarding the World Bank from afar, it's hard to believe there isn't something intentional here, something more deliberate than error or confusion:

The leadership crisis engulfing the World Bank began with talk of favoritism for a girlfriend and ill feeling about the Iraq war. But as the bank's board this week considers the fate of President Paul D. Wolfowitz, the ethics controversy has swelled into a test of who controls the institution and its future relevance in battling global poverty.

The outcome could determine whether governments from Berlin to Buenos Aires would be willing to contribute new funds in support of the bank's mission.

"There's a real danger because of this Wolfowitz stuff that donors are going to find a reason not to give," said Elizabeth Stuart, senior policy adviser for Oxfam International, an anti-poverty group in Washington.

After all, the mission of the World Bank is to eradicate world poverty; and since when has the Bush Administration cared about poverty?

The situation isn't getting any better, either:

Under an arrangement in place since the bank's inception in 1944, the United States has the right to name the World Bank president, and Europe names the leader of the bank's sister institution, the International Monetary Fund. A senior administration official has said that if Wolfowitz is forced out at the bank, Europe could lose its rights to name the leader at the fund.

And it's not just the Board of the World Bank, or the Bank's ethics committee:

In much of Europe, Wolfowitz is reviled as a primary architect of the Iraq war and as a symbol of a U.S. administration seen as arrogant and aloof -- sentiments that have deepened as the ethics controversy has emerged. The European parliament has called for Wolfowitz to resign.

But this is the Bush Administration; they don't give a wet snap for world opinion, or for "Old Europe," as Rumsfeld so memorably described it, and they won't yield on the issue of a particularly bad, dare we say offensive, appointment to the World Bank. Coincidence? I think not:

"What is at stake here is not merely Wolfowitz's position, but the whole system by which all of these positions are chosen," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former IMF official and fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It's an incredible anachronism, and it's time for it to go. If it persists, it makes the World Bank an embarrassment."

One can't help but think making the World Bank an 'embarassment' would suit the Bush Administration right down to the ground. Especially since Wolfowitz has already tried the Bush Administration's favorite line: when caught with your hand in the cookie jar, blame the cookie jar:

"While I am prepared to acknowledge that we all acted in good faith at the time and there was perhaps some confusion and miscommunication among us, it is grossly unfair and wrong to suggest that I intended to mislead anyone, and I urge the committee to reject the allegation that I lack credibility," Wolfowitz wrote. "Rather than attempt to adjudicate between our conflicting interpretations of the events that occurred here, the board should recognize that this situation is the product of ambiguous bank rules and unclear governance mechanisms."

Not exactly the response of a leader seeking to heal wounds and mend fences and call for consensus. But very much in keeping with the "leadership style" of George W. Bush. Can any of this be read as anything other than either incompetence, or a deliberate attempt to break the Bank?

It's hard to know what else to call it. And the distinction between the two, is one with hardly any difference at all.

"Your rulers are rebels, associates of thieves;
every one of them loves a bribe
and chases after gifts;
they deny the fatherless their rights,
and the widow's cause is never heard."--Isaiah 1:23 (REB)

Nowhere to Hide

This is a New York Times article, not an Op-Ed piece:

For months, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and other governors have warned that their state National Guards are ill-prepared for the next local disaster, be it a tornado, a flash flood or a terrorist’s threat, because of large deployments of their soldiers and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, last Friday night, a deadly tornado all but cleared the small town of Greensburg off the Kansas map. With 80 square blocks of the small farming town destroyed, Ms. Sebelius said her fears had come true: The emergency response was too slow, she said, and there was only one reason.

“As you travel around Greensburg, you’ll see that city and county trucks have been destroyed,” Ms. Sebelius, a Democrat, said Monday. “The National Guard is one of our first responders. They don’t have the equipment they need to come in, and it just makes it that much slower.”

For nearly two days after the storm, there was an unmistakable emptiness in Greensburg, a lack of heavy machinery and an army of responders. By Sunday afternoon, more than a day and a half after the tornado, only about half of the Guard troops who would ultimately respond were in place.

...

Ms. Sebelius’s comments about the slow response prompted a debate with the White House on Tuesday, which initially said the fault rested with her. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said the governor should have followed procedure by finding gaps after the storm hit and asking the federal government to fill them — but did not.

“If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it,” Mr. Snow told reporters on Tuesday morning.

...

As State Senator Donald Betts Jr., Democrat of Wichita, put it: “We should have had National Guard troops there right after the tornado hit, securing the place, pulling up debris, to make sure that if there was still life, people could have been saved. The response time was too slow, and it’s becoming a trend. We saw this after Katrina, and it’s like history repeating itself.”

....

In Kansas, the National Guard is operating with 40 percent to 50 percent of its vehicles and heavy machinery, local Guard officials said. Ordinarily, the Guard would have about 660 Humvees and more than 30 large trucks to traverse difficult terrain and transport heavy equipment. When the tornado struck, the Guard had about 350 Humvees and 15 large trucks, said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general. The Guard would also usually have 170 medium-scale tactical vehicles used to transport people and supplies — but now it has fewer than 30, he said. On the other hand, General Bunting said, it had more cargo trucks than it needed.

The issue is not confined to Kansas.

....

Two recent reports have raised questions about Guard preparedness. An independent military assessment council, the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, released a report in March that stated: “In particular, the equipment readiness of the Army National Guard is unacceptable and has reduced the capability of the United States to respond to current and additional major contingencies, foreign and domestic.”

Another report, released in January by the Government Accountability Office, concluded that the continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had “significantly decreased” the amount of equipment available for National Guard units not deployed overseas, while the same units faced an increasing number of threats at home.

Late Tuesday, in a statement, Ms. Sebelius repeated her message:

“I have said for nearly two years, and will continue to say, that we have a looming crisis on our hands when it comes to National Guard equipment in Iraq and our needs here at home.”

Mysterium Liberationis

Following up on this post, NPR now has the audio up on an even better story about liberation theology in Brazil. Better not only because NPR quotes Leonardo Boff, but because it didn't talk to the wrangling "church leaders" and garner a few select quotes, but actually recorded the voices of the people in the field (including bishops!) who are struggling with the problems of "development" in the country.

Ignore the written article at that link, it's lame. Listen to the report. My favorite bit is when Julie McCarthy challenges Father Edilberto Sena about his claim that development is not leading to improved conditions for the poor:

Fr. Edilberto Sena: ...You cannot go to Communion on Sunday and on Monday you destroy the forest. It's against the law of God! I am trying to save Amazonia for twenty-three million people that live here.

McCarthy: Father, let me ask you about that. The people on the other side argue, we are trying to do that by virtue of developing this place. Is there an argument to be made that the Cargills of this world do have a place here?

Sena: Human development means education, food, house, and hope of the future. Where is the growth? Where is the development? And you want me to be quiet?

I'm gonna have to dig out my copies of Mysterium Liberationis, Christology at the Crossroads, and You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free and start reading again. Much to do, much to learn, much to change. As Bishop Carlos says: "When you treat the last as being first, you rescue their dignity."

God's Funeral

has been postponed, as the announcement appears, once again, to have been premature.

Dear old MadPriest (I think that's the properly British form of endearment) put me on to this, and it is interesting, if only because it says (in part) what I've been saying all along. The qausi-interesting point is this:

The danger is that the aggression and hostility to religion in all its forms (moderates are castigated as giving the fundamentalists cover for their extremism) deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/faith debate. The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking, one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary psychologists acknowledged to me recently. Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human wellbeing? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?

Which I would just encapsulate as: world religions. Human beings are not just inherently reasoning creatures (a very Greek view, btw, and not at all universal; nor need it be); they are also, quite clearly, inherently religious creatures. And there are far more religions in the world, Virginia, than Christianity and Islam. And far more versions and types of Christianity than American Protestantism (which has all the critics cited in the article upset) and Roman Catholicism (which is hardly so solidly unitary, either, eh?) So, is religion really going anywhere just because the Enlightenment mind has established evolution as the "grand unified theory" of existence (and when did that happen, by the way?)?

Well, as the article notes, this argument that God is really, really, dead, we mean it this time!, has been going on since the Victorian era. And frankly, it's about as obsolete as the phonograph and the coal-fired steam engine. But I digress.

The really interesting part of the article is here:

This isn't the kind of debate that the New Atheists are interested in (with the possible exception of Dennett, who in an interview last year was far more open to discussion than his book would indicate); theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding. But even on the political front, one has to question whether all the aggression isn't counterproductive. Robert Winston voiced increasing concern among scientists when he argued in a recent lecture in Dundee that Dawkins's insulting and patronising approach did science a disservice. Meanwhile, critics in America argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting the cause of non-deism back rather than advancing it.

This is, of course, the nature of polemics. They do not seek to persuade, they seek to incite; they do not seek to inspire, they seek to enrage. They are the person urging the mob to action, then running out in front of it and claiming the leadership role. So long as the mob lasts, their power lasts. And all in all, it's a pretty shameless display. I've already mentioned that Sam Harris is nuts, and Richard Dawkins's "expertise" is unburdened by any knowledge of the subject he rises to denounce. This bit is particularly funny:

Dawkins is an unashamed proselytiser. He says in his preface that he intends his book for religious readers and his aim is that they will be atheists by the time they finish reading it.

I heard a story in seminary which I took as true when I first heard it. Later I thought it might be apocryphal, but only the last part; the first part I was quite sure was true. The story goes that a pastoral candidate in a particular denomination (that part I'm quite sure is untrue) reached his ordination proceedings after 3 years in seminary, and when asked if he "accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior," said that no, he didn't. After three years of seminary training, he was an atheist, having lost all faith in the religion of his ancestors.

That part, I believe. People imagine seminary is like 3 years of Sunday school, where you learn about Noah and Jonah and David and Goliath. In 4 years of seminary (I took the last two years part-time to work while in school), the only one of those stories I actually studied was Jonah's, and we didn't focus on the "whale." We learned there was no "Red Sea" anywhere near Egypt; that Solomon was not "wise" (he was rich; he kept scholars on staff and bought their knowledge); and that Jesus most likely didn't walk on water or perform miracles. Believe me, seminary is not where you go to get your mythology reinforced. But Dawkins, sure in his ignorance that he is wiser than the trained priest (who, after all, is a brainwashed servant of a vast multi-national institution which is only one grand conspiracy against the laity), overlooks all of that in setting up his straw man and getting out his box of matches.

Bunting mentions, but has little space (alas!) to develop the idea that religion is an inevitable part of politics (Dr. Martin Luther King, in my lifetime, didn't act motivate people to non-violent resistance out of appeals to the reasoning Dawkins and company pursue, nor to the piety of Dobson, Robertson, or George W. Bush. He was much closer to the liberation theologians still busy in Brazil. I can think of many examples outside of my lifetime, too.), so she ends with this:

I suspect the New Atheists are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use religious identity in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension, they may be morale boosters for a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised - the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition - but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand.

I especially like her jab at "the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition." Ouch! But read Sam Harris and tell me it isn't dead on target (or don't bother; I'm not going to waste my time on Hitchens). Of course, I think Bunting's primary thrust is exactly right: Dawkins and Hitchens and all the rest are generating far more heat than light. Indeed, if this is the best eloquence Hitchens can muster against monotheism: "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events" (and does he even understand the concept of radical monotheism?), then he's not even generating sparks. And that heat is not really going to become any kind of wildfire. After all, who really wants to start an atheistic version of jihad aimed at those who believe in any religion whatsoever?

Religion, for better or worse, is a motivator of human conduct. For better, it leads to the American abolitionist movement, and later the Civil Rights movement; for worse, it leads to the Crusades and the brutality of European empire, often conducted on the backs of Catholic monks serving their particular State (and later, Protestants, too. The UCC has atoned for its role, as the Congregational church, in some of the sins of the destruction of culture and life in Hawaii). But the death of God has always been announced prematurely, and the death of religion always has a peculiarly narrow, and wholly Hellenistic, ring to it; as if the Greeks were still the only "civilization" on the planet, the only progenitors of proper human conduct, and those who claim to be their heirs the persons authorized, if not anointed, to declare: "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". That is the position of the "civilized" man pronouncing those who do not think like him "barbarians." The Greeks would understand that well; and understand the hubris of it, too. (Funny how this argument always comes back to: "If we do it, it must be what nature intended!") Indeed, the very idea that religion is merely a vestige of human evolution is laughably reductionist, and apparent only from a very narrow point of view which tries to slice the evidence so thinly it has only one side. No surprise: reductionism seems to be the point of science. But if there is a nuerobiological basis for religion (Dawkins is a biologist), then there must also be a neurobiological basis for atheism:

After donning a helmet wired with electromagnets, some subjects reported experiences they described as mystical, or at least misty. When Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, put on the hood, it only made him a little dizzy. Persinger was quick to note that Dawkins had scored way below average on a psychological questionnaire measuring temporal lobe sensitivity—hints of a neurobiological correlate for atheism.

As Thomas Adams points out (for whom I must also credit the Slate link):

Johnson's last line here is brilliant. After all, if theism is simply a product of neurochemistry, then so is atheism - something that the "explainers of religion" all too often forget. Perhaps, in the end, the neurotheologians will show that it is atheism, not theism, which is caused by a mental defect (this would be the logical conclusion, of course, since the vast majority of the world's current and past inhabitants have been theists). If so, will Slate.com then treat us to articles that attempt to explain the "atheism meme" and the "agnostic delusion"? (emphasis supplied)

That parenthetical is, of course, exactly right. But whether or not Slate, or anyone else, ever attempts to explain the "atheism meme" or the "agnostic delusion" is really neither here nor there, because in the last analysis this entire discussion is not a discussion but is, as Bunting points out, the same old song, and it is only about power. Power, however, serves no one, and makes sure always that its own ends are served. If Dawkins and Harris and now Hitchens, want to claim control over that power, it is my duty as a Christian to let them, to not try to stand in their way, to not try to oppose their power with mine. It is my duty to preach and to observe the power of powerlessness, and to remember that there is no power without resistance.

"In the land of mankind, conceived as a pyramid..."

I was surprised to see a copy of the New York Times in Starbucks this morning, and was surprised (and gratified) to find out rumors of the death of liberation theology were greatly exaggerated.

Over the past 25 years, even as the Vatican moved to silence the clerical theorists of liberation theology and the church fortified its conservative hierarchy, the social and economic ills the movement highlighted have worsened. In recent years, the politics of the region have also drifted leftward, giving the movement’s demand that the church embrace “a preferential option for the poor” new impetus and credibility.

Today some 80,000 “base communities,” as the grass-roots building blocks of liberation theology are called, operate in Brazil, the world’s most populous Roman Catholic nation, and nearly one million “Bible circles” meet regularly to read and discuss scripture from the viewpoint of the theology of liberation.

It is tempting to engage in an argument with a news article; but that is a bootless enterprise. The teachings of John Paul II are not summed up in a quote, like: “This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the church’s catechism.” And it is quite another thing to consider this statement when made by a ptochoi or when made by a Cardinal:

More recently, he said, “it seems to me we need not theology of liberation, but theology of martyrdom,” and argued that the movement will become a valid theology “only when it refuses to accept power and worldly logic” and instead emphasizes “inner liberty.”

But, of course, I agree with the argument, insofar as Christians are not called to accept power and worldly logic. But "in the land of mankind, conceived as a pyramid," what are we to tell the people being crushed at the bottom? Congratulations?

The real fight here, of course, is over what the Church teaches. And is that liberation, or salvation?

That drew a sharp rebuke from Felipe Aquino, a conservative theologian whose views are often broadcast on Catholic radio stations here. “In spite of having received the Vatican’s cordial warning, you continue to be incorrigible, poisoning the people with the theology of liberation, which, as Ratzinger noted, annihilates the true faith and subverts the gospel of salvation,” he wrote.

Is it, in simpler terms, love of people? Or love of ideas?

This is not a simple issue. The question of "what keeps mankind alive?" goes back to Jesus of Nazareth, at least. Indeed, we can take it back to Elijah, who asked the widow during a drought to fix him some food from a store of food that wasn't enough for her and her son. But feeding all three, all three survived the drought, as the meal and oil miraculously never ran out. Hardly the gospel of prosperity, but neither was it simply "inner liberty." And the central celebration of Christianity, the unique eucharisto of this world religion, is the table to which all are invited. Paul's house churches were radical in at least one specific way: all members of the household, from the patriarch to the slaves, at a meal together in thanksgiving (eucharist) of the fact they were all equal in Christ. But of course Christians early on became exclusionary, too, which annoyed the civil powers no end.

It was the question of salvation over liberation, and which to choose. That the former more often won out over the latter is a tribute to the seductive nature of power. Re-read the comments of Felipe Aquino above; that is an institutional rebuke, dressed in the language of "God's will for all," which, of course, is salvation. Unless it is, instead, liberation. But there the argument revolves. Eusebius, the earliest chronicler of the church (well, after Luke), took the salvation line. His history of the church begins with Jesus of Nazareth, but he actually takes John's first chapter quite literally, presenting all appearances of God in the Hebrew scriptures as actually appearances of Jesus (the Logos). It is the Word who rains fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah; the Word who wrestles with Jacob at the Jabbok; the Word who appears to Abraham at Mamre. And why?

Reason would never allow that the uncreated and immutable substance of Almighty God should be changed into the form of a man, or, alternatively, that by the illusion of any created thing it shoudl deceive the eyes of the beholoder, or that Scripture should falsely invent such a tale. Who then could be spoken of as God, and the Lord who is the judge of all the world and does justice, appearing in human shape? As it is not permissible to suggest the First Cause of the universe, there is only one answer--His pre-existent Word.

Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, tr. G.A. Williamson (New York: Penguin 1989), p. 4-5

Thus is the Hebraic understanding of the ineffable translated into Greek reason. And so salvation comes first, and liberation only later, and as an ancillary consequence. Because first we must know how God is possible; and only later, how God works. Possibility precedes practice; essence precedes existence.

"In the land of mankind, conceived of as a pyramid, there are few at the top, and many at the bottom,” the congregation sang. “In the land of mankind, those at the top crush those at the bottom. Oh, people of the poor, people subjected to domination, what are you doing just standing there? The world of mankind has to be changed, so arise people, don’t stand still.”

If the words of the Gospel are a challenge to the way we live, are they addressed to us as individuals? Or as members of a community, as citizens of a society? If Christianity indeed says that "sound doctrines are all useless," and "[t]hat you have to change your life (Or the direction of your life)," how does that not affect how we live in the world? Unless we are going to teach that everyone is called into the desert, along with the Desert Fathers? And even they didn't think that was right.

But if we are going to call people into action, especially political action, how does the Church do that? Don't we have to start with: "Congratulations, you poor!"? And where do we go from there?

The True Decline of Civilization

This is what they did to "Star Wars," which was never that good to begin with:

Spider-Man will return for at least three more movies, its studio has said after the super-hero's third film broke North American box office records.

Sony Pictures chief executive Michael Lynton told the BBC: "Everybody has every intention of making a fourth, a fifth and a sixth and on and on."

There would be "as many as we can make good stories for", he pledged.

And, of course, it's all about the good stories:

Spider-Man 3 is now the most successful new release in history, making $148m (£74m) in its opening weekend.

I feel like Mandy telling Otter in "Animal House:" "You weren't that good!" I liked Spider-Man Nos. 1 and 2; but I agree with the NYTimes: this one was "overly long and complicated." 4, 5, and 6? Feh. There aren't that many interesting situations a guy in a costume can get into, not in a movie. In a comic book? Yeah. But what happens in a comic book just looks dorky on a movie screen, and you can only translate so many comic books stories to the screen before you're just filming comic books. Two, seems to be the limit.

Time to go back to Proust and Paul; and Matthew, and Mark, and maybe Augustine. Summer is a long season, even in the church; but it's not that long.

Pray for Greenburg, Kansas

Give to the LORD, you heavenly beings, give to the LORD glory and might;

Give to the LORD the glory due God's name. Bow down before the LORD'S holy splendor!

The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over the mighty waters.

The voice of the LORD is power; the voice of the LORD is splendor.

The voice of the LORD cracks the cedars; the LORD splinters the cedars of Lebanon,

Makes Lebanon leap like a calf, and Sirion like a young bull.

The voice of the LORD strikes with fiery flame;

the voice of the LORD rocks the desert; the LORD rocks the desert of Kadesh.

The voice of the LORD twists the oaks and strips the forests bare. All in his palace say, "Glory!"

Well, maybe not:

The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state’s governor.

Governor Kathleen Sebelius said much of the National Guard equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies is gone. She said not having immediate access to things like tents, trucks and semitrailers will really handicap the rebuilding effort.

The Greensburg administrator estimated that 95 percent of the town of 1500 was destroyed by Friday's tornado.

The Kansas National Guard has about 40 percent of the equipment it is allotted because much of it has been sent to Iraq.

No, I'm not being a smart-aleck. Just pointing out another consequence of this misbegotten foreign adventure. The only excuse for this is that Bush was supposed to rebuke all sources of natural disaster and tell them to "be still" until the National Guard could return.

That, or this Administration truly doesn't think the National Guard serves any purpose other than to be reserves for military misadventures. Either way, Psalm 29 is a powerful hymn of praise to the power of Nature and of the Creator behind that power. It serves to remind us where the real power lies. This, I will only point out, is just the voice of the Lord.

The LORD sits enthroned above the flood! The LORD reigns as king forever!

May the LORD give might to his people; may the LORD bless his people with peace!

Amen.

28% Approval is Too High

AP

Crouch and an unknown number of others among the 140,000-plus single parents in uniform fight a war on two fronts: For the nation they are sworn to defend, and for the children they are losing because of that duty.

A federal law called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is meant to protect them by staying civil court actions and administrative proceedings during military activation. They can't be evicted. Creditors can't seize their property. Civilian health benefits, if suspended during deployment, must be reinstated.

And yet service members' children can be _ and are being _ taken from them after they are deployed.

Read the entire article. Then consider that the courts are right: the best interest of the child must be the standard. Unlike any other civil remedy, that interest cannot be put in limbo for 18 months, 2 years. Consider, too, that unlike the "Greatest Generation," this generation has a very high percentage of divorced custodial parents in uniform. I barely knew a family, when I grew up, that had known divorce. My daughter barely knows a family that hasn't. That's not a criticism, it's a reality.

So this trainwreck was inevitable; as inevitable as the disaster of invading Iraq. What it indicates is not neglect by the military, or a misreading of the law by family law courts. What it indicates is that there are so many threads binding us all; touch one, and you touch every one of those threads.

And that has consequences: for generations, and for the lives of individuals long after individual politicians have left office.

What have we done? What have we done?

Like eating chocolate covered coffee beans

Stop when the trembling is uncontrollable:

"If art serves 'to arouse feelings' is, perhaps, perceiving it with the senses to be included amongs those feelings?"

"An example that shows how monstrously vain wishes are is the wish I have to fill a nice notebook with writing as quickly as possible. I get nothing at all from this; I don't wish it because, say, it will be evidence of my productivity; it is no more than a craving to rid myself of something familiar as soon as I can; although as soon as I have got rid of it I shall have to start a fresh one and the whole business will have to be repeated."

"The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called 'miracles' must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture."

"The way you use the word 'God' does not show whom you mean--but, rather, what you mean."

"Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be."

"I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

"It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

"The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription.--But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction.--(I.e., this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned around.
Wisdom is passionless. But faith, by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion."

"People nowadays thinks that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them--that does not occur to them."

"In religion every level of discourse must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.

For instance, at my level the Pauline doctrine of predestination is ugly nonsense, irreligiousness. Hence it is not suitable for me, since the only use I could make of the picture I am offered would be a wrong one. If it is a good and godly picture, then it is so for someone at a quite different level, who must use it in his life in a way completely different from anything that would be possible for me."

"Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, tr. Peter Winch

Thoughts for the Morning

"If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice are cursed."

"The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work."

"Early physcists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to cope with physics; and in almost the same way young people today can be said to be in a situation where ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that mastering it would require an exceptional intellect. Because skill at playing the game is no longer enough; the question that keeps coming up is: can this game be played at all now and what would be the right game to play?"

"Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it."

"Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can only do as a result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don't take the same attitutude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.--There is nothing paradoxical about that!"

"Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns 'universal truths of reason'! Rather, because historical proofs (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e., lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.

A believer's relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability), nor yet that to a theory of 'truths of reason'. There is such a thing.--(We have quite different attitudes even to different species of what we call fiction!)"

"You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1937

Biting the feed that hands me

As long as I'm griping about the internet, let me say a word against Google (my humble hosting service! Ha! Another blow for freedom for contrarians!).

Until the day comes when GoogleMusic comes into existence and can identify a tune for me from: "Bum-te-tum-tee-dum BADAM!-barump--tee-tum" or a song from "Something something something baby something", both of which are preferably spoken rather than written out (honestly, how am I to know if its' Bum-te-tum" or "Bum-dee-dum?" If I was sure, would I have to ask?), or until Google can find the picture I am looking for from such perfectly ordinary clues as "The one with the people in it, and a horse," then the internet has failed to live up to its potential, or even to be of much use at all.

What good is all this information out here if you have to know what you are looking for before you can find it? Why, for that matter, should I have to type everything? Why is Google so logocentric? Inquiring French phenomenologically influenced minds want to know!

Until the machine serves our needs as we have them, we were merely slaves to the machine!

White Noise

or, "Why Going 'Meta-' Does Not Necessarily Mean Going Above the Fray."

Jay Rosen makes an interesting point here, discussing journalism and its favorite tool, the "interview:"

Rutenberg's article made me wish I had followed, in this instance, blogger Dave Winer's policy. When asked for a phone or e-mail interview, he usually declines. "If you have a few questions, send them along, and if I have something to say, I'll write a blog post, which of course you're free to quote," he said last week. Responding to Winer, and to this event with Jason Calacanis and Wired magazine, Jeff Jarvis wrote: "The interview is outmoded and needs to be rethought."

I know I'm rethinking it. Rutenberg and I had a pretty detailed conversation about the put down of the establishment press under Bush, certain failures of imagination in Washington journalism, the interpretation of Colbert's performance in 2006, and the "musty" feel that the invitation to Rich Little had. I pointed out, for example, that Little was at his peak at roughly the same cultural moment that the Washington press corps was at its peak in the afterglow of Watergate.

But what Jim needed me for was the bloggers vs. journalists debate.

Which is a frame I've been fighting for two years. "In hiring an impersonator practiced in an old-school approach to comedy, meant to entertain but not offend, the White House Correspondents' Association has, however, provoked left-leaning political activists, who see his assignment as a retreat from last year's dinner." (Subtext: Wow, the left is as angry with the press as the right was. Just listen to the so-called Net roots attack us for not carrying their message.)

As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has learned, what you say and what get's published by a journalist can be two very different things. Rosen discusses another occasion, when he was interviewed for a Frontline documentary, and ended up with two lines in the two-part documentary. Which, he explains, is par for the course. Now, here's the issue:

If Jay Rosen and Jeremiah Wright don't talk to broadcast media like Frontline, or print media like the New York Times, are they simply trees falling in the forest which nobody hears? The answer blogistan wants to promote is: no, not if they make their noise on-line. But frankly, I don't know who Dave Winer is. And I wouldn't even know to seek out his blog and read his "interview" if I didn't have a reason to already.

I do know, to my chagrin and disappointment, who Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, and Glenn Beck are. I also know Paula Zahn is now on CNN, that Katie Couric is with CBS, and that Brian Williams has a giant head in Jon Stewart's studio. I know this not because I watch their shows (except for Stewart's), or read their columns, but because they are in print and broadcast media which are readily available to me, and because their presence presents a very low, shall we say, signal to noise ratio. Which is something the Internet not only can't overcome, but isn't designed to overcome.

A lively discussion sparked over at Eschaton about Daily Kos. I know the site is popular, because everyone tells me it is. But outside of left blogistan, I know of absolutely no one who has heard of it. I also contend it is extremely popular because anyone who wants to (practically) can start a diary there. It's basically Blogger at a centralized website, and that means to get to the diaries you go through the Kos address. Which makes it "popular" not because it serves its audience well (like a TV show or a newspaper), but because its audience is its "staff." Not strictly, of course, but it takes many more people not connected to the newspaper to make it viable, than it does to make a website viable. But does that make DKos a media powerhouse? Does that mean bloggers can replace journalists and, as Jay Rosen suggests, self-publish their interviews?

Who will read them? The same number of people who read the interview with Jeremiah Wright in the NYT? Or the same number of people who have actually heard of Dave Winer, and know he has a blog, and know how to find it, or even bother Google to do so?

Let me put one number to this; anecdotal, but still people love to throw largely unsubstantiated numbers around in this discussion, so this number is as valid as any other you're going to get outside of a carefully vetted study. This is Eric Boehlert commenting on the media coverage of the Edwards' haircut story:

Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media critic, addressed the haircut story not once but twice online. And according to Dave Johnson and James Boyce, writing at the Huffington Post last week, the haircut story spread rapidly: "If you do a Google search for pages that contain the words 'edwards', '$400' and 'haircut' there are already 187,000 web pages that contain those terms!"

No, it's not the question of how much attention was paid to a stupid hair cut; Boehlert is right about that. It's the inundation. 187,000 web pages? Can you say "Road kill on the information superhighway?" Can you say "white noise"? 187,000 web pages, and all of them certainly full of trenchant and penetrating commentary, no? No, actually; probably not. But who is going to sort through those for the nuggets of valuable information? Yes, Boehlert's point is that stories like the $400 haircut sprout like mushrooms after a heavy spring rain, but almost any issue in the news sprouts a similar number of "mushrooms." And by and large such commentary and consideration keeps us in the dark and feeds us...well, you know.

If I have a complaint about blogging, this is it. Bogs tend to coalesce around similar opinions/attitudes, but re-creating the echo chamber is not dismantling the echo chamber and making the discussion democratically available. Alternatively, adding voices to the discussion is not a bad thing, but it's not a sign of salvation, either. All we're really doing is creating a national town meeting as cacophony. There's no simple answer to this problem, except to imagine democracy as a representative republic, which is what we have, for better or worse. The Greek democracy was far from ideal. To make it work, they limited it to white males; and even then, imagining the function of a trial such as Socrates underwent makes the mind boggle.

Is blogging causing this problem? No; but it isn't solving it, either. We've shifted the venue to a more accessible forum; but "access" is not to be confused with "democracy." That's the mistake the Beltway journalists have made.

Let's face it; it will always be easier to push a button on a remote control than to ask Google or Technorati to show you the most interesting blog comments on the web. That doesn't make blogging worthless; but that does make it quite a bit less than a revolution. It may give us all a chance to voice our opinion. But it doesn't mean everyone, or even anyone, is actually listening. And that may well be because it just gets harder and harder to hear anything in all the noise.

Same as it ever was

I know I'm in danger of hammering on this point too hard and too long, but it is a hobbyhorse if only because bloggers sometimes write as if they only noticed this problem, therefore it only just occurred. So when Digby says:

Political journalism in America has mostly become an elaborate kabuki dance. Blogs may not be the answer, but they are at least an antidote for those of us who have been watching this show for the past decade or more and are simply desperate for some assurance from others that we aren't crazy --- those guys with the black and white make-ep are performing some sort of ritual, not doing journalism. Moyers went a long way toward putting that together for the non-blog reading news junkies last night. Maybe now it will begin to sink in.

My first thought is: when was it not?

"Kabuki dance," of course, is the latest metaphor for what centers of power always do: accrue lots of layers of hangers on and levels of absurdity until the whole thing crashes to the ground, one way or the other. The more layers, the more ritualistic, the more arcane, the manners of the court, the richer and more fabulous and more elegant it is. After all, the mark of the gentleman has always been the ability to enjoy leisure time. The distinctions (and there are always layers of distinction) quickly become how elaborately you can find ways to fill that leisure time with even more unncessary activity. The French are masters at this, and at observing it. Proust's In Search of Lost Time is mostly taken up with close observation of the social customs of fin de siecle France, when there were still Princes and Princesses. In a wonderful scene in Marie Antoinette, Kirsten Antoinette Dunst awakes her first morning in Versailles to find she must be dressed in a roomful of attendants, each with a specialized and singular task, and the first garment of the day put on her by the highest ranking member of the royal family in the room at the moment. She says, quite reasonably: "This is ridiculous." The reply: "Madame, this is Versailles!"

Even at the end, when the palace is surrounded by the angry mob, it still takes three people to serve the king a single glass of wine. It's at that point you realize how many servants there were at meals in that dining room, and how many of them were performing such specialized functions you couldn't keep up with the machinery of service because it was so elaborate you didn't know what to look for. But the foolishness of power dances and elaborate ritual is not confined to European monarchies. Although Abraham Lincoln used to run sheep on the White House grounds, the D.C. of today came of age after World War II, when the Pentagon was built, and the elaborate federal structure begun under FDR began to take root and metastasize. This is no critigue of tne New Deal, just a recognition of reality. We actually got along quite well without the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI until the Truman and post-Truman era. The other Federal agencies of D.C. have grown up just as rapidly. And with the power they represent has grown the need to establish ever more delicately nuanced rituals of just who is closest to the real power in the capitol.

The elaboration and cliqueishness of D.C. bloggers observe today is nothing new. When David Halberstam named Kennedy's staff "the best and the brightest," the ironic shaft was aimed at their spectacular failure in leading us into the quagmire (his name, too) of Vietnam; but it was also aimed at the isolation and intimidation the Ivy Leaguers and East Coast intellectuals inflicted on LBJ, whom they saw as a rube and a bumpkin. My memory of Halberstam's book is that he made the brothers Rostow and McNamara and the rest equally as culpable as LBJ for the disastrous foreign policy of the US which dominated the 60's and '70's. And most of it was because of who was "in" and who was "out." Who, in other words, was sitting at the "cool table."

As Orson Welles made clear, William Randolph Hearst was as responsible for irresponsible reporting as ever Tim Russert or David Broder (or Chris Matthews, Cokie Roberts, FoxNews, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, stop me when I've run out) have been. Remember the Maine? The only difference now is the number of news outlets anxious to sit at the feet of the powerful and report on their every activity. In that, indeed, we are more like Versailles under the Sun King than we are like Rome. Certainly the level of elaboration is greater. But is it quantifiably different? I don't really think so.

Lewis Lapham, in his years as editor at Harpers, was fond of pointing out how much and how little things had changed over the course of American democracy. He liked to cite the experience of his mentor, Walter Karp, and to refer to his own experience among the rich and powerful, most of whom are easily persuaded the world exists for them and turns its face upward, like the hawk in Ted Hughes' poem, for their inspection and ease of prey. This really isn't news and, again, there is a long history of Christian doctrine, tradition, and teaching related to it. I don't mention that because Christianity has an exclusive lock on such insight, but because it is the tradition I know. It's a very old human story. Indeed, you can see a great deal of it in the plays of Shakespeare; from "Richard III" right through to "King Lear."

Lapham's words in Theater of War, in an essay published 6 months after 9/11 could, with a few changes for technological references, have been written by Mark Twain about American imperialism in the 19th century:

"If I can understand why the managers of the state monopoly regard the privatization of terror as unwarranted poaching of their market, as a prospective consumer presented with variant packagings of the product I find the same instruction on the labels. Fear the unknown, reflect upon the transience of flounders, pay the ransom or the tax bill, pray for deliverance. The message is by no means new. The miraculous births of Fat Man and Little Boy in Los Alamos in 1945 pressed the fire of Heaven into the service of a religion (jury-rigged and hastily revealed) founded on the gospels of extortion. Powers once assigned to God passed into the hands of physicists and the manufacturers of intercontinental ballistic missiles; what had been human became divine, the idols of man's own nuclear invention raised up to stand as both agent and symbol of the Day of Judgment."

Let me put it this way, to prove I'm not just picking on Digby in a lame attempt to boost my own cred. Digby is absolutely right in this post about Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was fired for telling the truth. But then, even the sainted Edward R. Murrow wasn't canonized for telling broadcasters the truth. Truth hurts, as Mark Knoller showed in his reponse to Bill Moyer's report. Truth will cost you; ask any historian about almost any significant historical figure, and many not so significant figures. So it's not really like this kabuki dance just started a decade or so ago, or like screaming "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore" is really going to change things. Because, as Paddy Chayefsky showed us, even if you do have a TV show and reach millions of people, they're still only watching TV.

The bottom line is: if you want to change the world, you have to do the hard work of changing yourself. And just reading a blog, or writing a blog, or watching TV, won't make you do that. The world is just slightly beyond your grasp. And what is within your grasp, is notoriously hard to get hold of.

Mayday! Mayday!

Sweet Memories

"Where your treasure is..."

According to the Congressional Research Service, the cost of the war in Iraq could soon top $564 billion.

What could that kind of money buy?

A college education - tuition, fees, room and board at a public university - for about half of the nation's 17 million high-school-age teenagers.

Pre-school for every 3- and 4-year-old in the country for the next eight years.

A year's stay in an assisted-living facility for about half of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older.

Not surprisingly, opinions about the cost of the war track opinions about the war itself.

"If it's really vital, then whatever it costs, we should pay it. If it isn't, whatever we pay is too much," said Robert Hormats, author of "The Price of Liberty," a newly published book that examines the financing of America's wars.

Before the war, administration officials confidently predicted that the conflict would cost about $50 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey lost his job after he offered a $200 billion estimate - a prediction that drew scorn from his administration colleagues.

"They had no concept of what they were getting into in terms of lives or cost," said Winslow Wheeler, who monitors defense spending for the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research institute.

Bush and his economic advisers defend the growing cost as the price of national security.

"It's worth it," Bush said last May, when the tab was in the $320 billion range. "I wouldn't have spent it if it wasn't worth it."

"...there will your heart be also."

One more reason Jesus of Nazareth wasn't interested in war. His teachings were aimed at the heart; not at who had, or sought, power.

Habeas Schmabeus

I'm listening to this episode on This American Life right now. And trying to keep my blood pressure down.

And wondering how hard it would be for Congress to pass a law outlawing these practices. It's not even a funding issue, a "support our troops buy mine-proof vehicles" issue, a "Don't leave the troops stranded without bullets in a war" issue.

It's a simple issue of law, and of lawlessness. How hard would this be to correct?

Said the Joker to the Thief

I didn't think it was possible to make the US experience in Vietnam look good, but somehow this Administration has managed it:

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program.

But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort.

The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States.

Winning hearts and minds, indeed. This Administration can't even mimic the vaunted reconstruction of Europe which replaced the horror of World War II with the European Union of today. It can't learn anything from history at all.

I remember two distinctive things about Vietnam: Soldiers served a two year tour and went home; and they could go to Saigon in relative safety. We didn't lose control of Saigon until we withdrew, but in Iraq, with a "surge," we can't even control access to the Iraqi Parliament in the Green Zone. And our standard of sucess in Iraq has sunk so low now, it can no longer be seen:

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

I haven't bothered to look up the transcript to see how Mr. Rose followed that absurd declaration. Frankly, anything less than: "Are you insane?" could hardly be considered an honest response.

So we've poured out money like water in the desert sands to rebuild Iraq, and we haven't done that right. We've poured out American and Iraqi blood in order to pacify and stabilize Iraq, and we haven't done that right. We've displaced almost 4 million Iraqis, and almost nobody in America seems to even notice. Frankly, I think we are numb.

Is there anything about this Iraq debacle that has been done right? Anything at all?

Update: And I never even got to Katrina the first time around....

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

The struggle to apply foreign aid in the aftermath of the hurricane, which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion so far, is another reminder of the federal government's difficulty leading the recovery. Reports of government waste and delays or denials of assistance have surfaced repeatedly since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

I think it's safe to subsitute "difficulty" with "absolute and complete inability."

Congratulations!

I've been wanting to come back to the topic of the Beatitudes. As I've said before, the Beatitudes can be understood as reversing our view; they are are about reversing our expectations, our understanding, our knowledge of what is good. But to get to that point, I want to start with what Boreas said here:

Robert is, of course, using The Complete Gospels, Annotated Scholars Version, Revised and Expanded Edition, Robert J. Miller, editor; (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) Miller is also responsible for this translation, as well as an Introduction to Luke and notes to the Gospel.

Miller's note regarding this passage reads as follows:

Congratulations (makarios) traditionally translated "blessed." "Congratulations" better expresses the performative language of the Beatitudes, which grant the recipient recognition of good fortune.

Later, in an explanatory note regarding the usage of "Congratulations" and "Damn you" in these passages, he says,

The traditional translation "blessed" lives on primarily in its connection with the Bible, apart from sayings like "bless you" when someone sneezes....In colloquial English, bless does not mean a declaration of God's favor.

The language of the beatitudes is performative: performative means that the words accomplish what they say...."Blessed" is archaic language and now nearly empty of meaning. To translate "happy" or "fortunate" is to introduce connotations that are not present: the poor and the hungry are not "happy" or "fortunate." Further, "happy" or "fortunate" misses the performative character of the language.

Damn: The traditional translation of the Greek interjection ouai is "woe."....Like the term "congratulations!," "Damn" is performative language: it is like pronouncing sentence on a convicted criminal.

Other opinions may (and probably do!) differ, but I find that these translations bring life to Luke 6:20-26 in a way I have never perceived it before.

The question of performative language raises the question of translation and interpretation, two conditions which often appear alike (as the poet said).

"Performative language" is not a grammatical term, but one taken from speech act theory, specifically from the work of J.L. Austin. Already we are wading into waters I haven't really entered since graduate school almost 30 years ago, so what I can say about speech act theory is limited, at best. These two sources, however, give us enough of a window onto the theory to be helpful. Let's start with the first one:

As John Searle puts it, "All linguistic communication involves linguistic acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the symbol, word, or sentence, or even the token of the symbol, word, or sentence, but rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance of a speech act." Meaning, then, should be regarded as a species within the genus intending-to-communicate, since language itself is highly complex, rule-governed intentional behavior. A theory of language is part of a theory of action. The basic emphasis of speech act theory is on what an utterer (U) means by his utterance (x) rather than what x means in a language (L). As H.P. Grice notes, "meaning is a kind of intending," and the hearer's or reader's recognition that the speaker or writer means something by x is part of the meaning of x. In contrast to the assumptions of structuralism (a theory that privileges langue, the system, over parole, the speech act), speech act theory holds that the investigation of structure always presupposes something about meanings, language use, and extralinguistic functions.

Clear as mud yet? Perhaps a bit of detail will help:

Austin divides the linguistic act into three components. First, there is the locutionary act, "the act of 'saying' something." Second, there is the illocutionary act, "the performance of an act in saying something as opposed to the performance of an act of saying something." Third, there is the perlocutionary act, for "saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, of the speaker, or of other persons." In other words, a locutionary act has meaning; it produces an understandable utterance. An illocutionary act has force; it is informed with a certain tone, attitude, feeling, motive, or intention. A perlocutionary act has consequence; it has an effect upon the addressee. By describing an imminently dangerous situation (locutionary component) in a tone that is designed to have the force of a warning (illocutionary component), the addresser may actually frighten the addressee into moving (perlocutionary component). These three components, then, are not altogether separable, for as Austin points out, "we must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued -- the total speech act -- if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances." In contradistinction to structuralism, then, speech act theory privileges parole over langue, arguing that external context -- the context of situation -- is more important in the order of explanation than internal context -- the interrelationships among terms within the system of signs.

These ideas arise from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. To put it in the context of Western philosophy, David Hume left us apparently unable to speak about anything of importance. Analytical statements, Hume concluded, gave us facts, but those were largely self-evident to his empirical mind. Synthetic statements asserted opinions, principles, conclusions, arising from those facts, but as they were unprovable empirically, they were useless and discussion of them fruitless. Wittgenstein took up that point and argued that all problems of philosophy were the result of misunderstanding the nature of "language games" (which is, you understand, to over-simplify Wittgenstein grotesquely, but this isn't a philosophy seminar now, is it?). This example may seem gnomic or even gnostic, but I think it sums up Wittgenstein fairly well, at least for our purposes here:

It is true that we can compare a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally true that we always eventually have to reach some firm ground, either a picture or something else, so that a picture which is at the root of all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition.

I think of that as Wittgenstein moving from Hume to Kant in a fairly compact way. Perhaps this will illustrate a bit better Wittgenstein's primary concerns:

God's essence is supposed to guarantee his existence--what this really means is that what is here at issue is not the existence of something.

Couldn't one actually say equally well that the essence of colour guarantees its existence? As opposed, say, to white elephants. Because all that really means is: I cannot explain what 'colour' is, what the word "colour" means, except with the help of a colour sample. So in this case there is no such thing as explaining 'what it would be like if colours were to exist.'

And now we might say: There can be a description of what it would be like if there were gods on Olympus--but not: 'what it would be like if there were such a thing as God.' And to say this is to determine the concept 'God' more precisely.

How are we taught the word "God" (its use, that is)? I cannot give a full grammatical description of it. But I can, as it were, make some contributions to a description; I can say a good deal about it and perhaps in time assemble a sort of collection of examples.

Remember in this connection that though we might perhaps like to give such descriptions of the use of words in a dictionary, all we in fact do is give a few examples and explanations. But remember too that more than this is necessary. What use could we make of an enormously long description?

Alright; enough, I hope, that you get the idea, or at least the larger context. Here is perhaps a clearer statement then, of Austin's concerns:

In his famous work, "How to do Things with Words," J. L. Austin outlined his theory of speech acts and the concept of performative language, in which to say something is to do something. To make the statement “I promise that p” (in which p is the propositional content of the utterance) is to perform the act of promising as opposed to making a statement that may be judged true or false. Performatives cannot be true or false, only felicitous or infelicitous. Austin creates a clear distinction between performatives and constantives, statements that attempt to describe reality and can be judged true or false, but he eventually comes to the conclusion that most utterances, at their base, are performative in nature. That is, the speaker is nearly always doing something by saying something.

For Austin, what the speaker is doing is creating social realities within certain social contexts. For example, using an explicit performative, to say “I now pronounce you man and wife” in the context of a wedding, in which one is marrying two people, is to create a social reality, i.e. in this case a married couple.

That last example is particularly felicitous, because speech act theory, as indicated by Miller's comments on the Beatitudes, has become a favorite topic in theological and scriptural studies circles; in no small part because it allows theologians and biblical scholars to talk about things they formerly literally had no concepts for.

When God comes on the scene in Genesis 1 and says "Let there be light," it is the ultimate performative act. John later picked up on this, making logos both the creative force of the cosmos, and the creative function. We are accustomed to hearing that famous phrase of the beginning of creation as a command, a directive. But to whom would God address such a command? Creation itself? Isn't that what God is doing? How do you address and command something which does not yet exist? But if you think of it as performative language, as an "illocutionary act," it becomes clear that God's speech is, indeed, action. (This is why the singer Alanis Morissette is a speechless deity in the movie "Dogma." God's speech is the ultimate performative act. God does not command; God does. You can see, our language can't quite contain the concept we are trying to express here; which is another philosophical problem).

Again, when Ezekiel prophesies to the valley of dry bones, it is performative language: his speech, through God, causes the bones to be alive again, flesh to be knit on them, breath to enter them (although that breath comes from God). There is a marvelous and powerful intimacy here, as pneuma (Gr.) and ruach (Hebrew) both mean, equally, breath; wind; and spirit. Without all three, there is no life. If you have one, you have all of them. And what are words, except breath? And yet certain words, Christains profess, also have the Spirit in them.

Well, you can see where that goes. Returning to the Beatitudes, why should be consider them "performative language," since there is no way to determine that from the grammatical case used by Matthew or Luke or Q? (Jesus would have spoken Aramaic; already we have a translation/interpretation problem, as the Gospels are written in Greek.) Clearly an airtight case cannot be made (grammer trumps all?), but a fairly strong one can be built simply by considering who Jesus was speaking to. Was he speaking to them? Or to us?

It's a simple but fundamental shift in thinking which the analysis of "performative language" underscores. If Jesus is speaking to the crowd, but is merely describing a condition which should exist, or which someday will exist, it is nothing more than an empty promise and a statement of conditions in an indeterminate future. A uselessly cruel statement, in other words, especially as it is addressed to the ptokoi; not, as Dom Crossan notes, the poor, but the absolutely destitute. Crossan points to the play Plutus, by Aristophanes, where Poverty, or Penia, distinguishes itself from beggars, the ptochou. The address here is to Poverty, who responds:

What have you got to bestow but a lot
of burns from the bathing-room station
And a hollow-cheeked rabble of destitute hags,
and brats on the verge of starvation?...
For a robe but a rage, for a bed but a bag
of rushes which harbor a nation
Of bugs whose envenomed and tireless attacks
would the soundest of sleepers awaken.
And then for a carpet a sodden old mat,
which is falling to bits, must be taken.
And a jolly hard stone for a pillow, you'll own;
and for griddle-cakes barley and wheaten,
Must leaves dry and lean of the radish or e'en
sour stalks of the mallow be eaten....
Are the blessings which Poverty brings in her train
on the children of men to bestow!

POVERTY:
The life you define with such skill is not mine;
'tis the life of a beggar [ptochon], I trow....

These are the people Jesus pronounced "blessed." Odd enough to make such an announcement; but to announce it in a way that would be understood as coming at some eschatological future still too far away to be even imagined, would make his words not stirring and memorable to those who first heard them, but utter madness and quickly forgotten. If we hear them as addressed to us, who don't even grasp what ptochoi means, if we hear them, in other words, in an eschatological context, they make sense to us. However, there is no way they would make sense to the original audience, or even to Matthew or Luke's audiences. If we hear them as performative language, however, as language with the same import as "Let there be light" or "I now pronounce you man and wife," we can understand why they would have been remembered, and why they would endure. And if we hear them as performative language, we hear them as something very different from the declaration that God loves us all just as we are, and will take care of the poor and the hungry on the day of the eschaton; or even that God's blessings are what we would have them to be.

So what does it mean to understand the Beatitudes as performative, rather than descriptive, language? What does it mean to hear God pronouncing blessing on the destitute, rather than promising blessing in the sweet bye and bye? It gets at the truly subversive nature of the blessings pronounced in Matthew and Luke. We first have to hear them as being pronounced, not announced. If they are pronounced, they are declared active upon the recipients, they are made real by the very act of stating them. If they are merely announced, they are said for the benefit of us, 2000 years later, who need to know what the situation is, or more properly, what the situation will one day be. If the blessings are merely an eschatological statement, they still have no meaning aside from "this, too, will come true. Someday. Eventually." But if they are not, then they upend our understanding, and declare to us that everything we know is wrong; that in spite of appearances, a blessing is made, given, poured out, on the destitute; on the hungry; on the mourners.

I heard a man today tell the friends and family of David Beverly that they had not lost a father, a husband, a friend, because they knew he was now "with the Lord." That isn't a theology I kick at, or mean to kick at, but it's also never been a sentiment I've ever expressed at a funeral. Many find comfort in it; I've always been troubled by denying the reality of death. But in the face of death, it's a powerful comfort for many to say the dead are not gone. However, in the face of mourning, especially to those who have yet to hear of, to experience, to begin to struggle to understand the resurrection, how much more powerful is it to pronounce a blessing on their sorrow? How much stranger is it? Who among us even today would stand up at a funeral and say: "Congratulations to you mourners, because you will have your comfort!"? But that is precisely what Jesus says.

You see in that example the difference between performative and what I'm calling descriptive, language. One says you will be blessed later for your suffering now; the other says you are blessed, now, in your suffering; in your destitution, your hungry, your devastation. Not because of it, but in it. The essence of the blessing, if there is one, does not guarantee its existence. It is the pronouncement of the blessing which matters. It is performing the act, as opposed to making a statement which may be judged true or false. Are the destitute, the hungry, the sorrow-filled, truly blessed? That's not the issue! This isn't a statement about them; it is an action to them! In that distinction lies a world of interpretive difference; it is the gap between eschatological and present, between to come and now. If I tell the mourners at the funeral "Congratulations to you who are crying! You will laugh!", they would not be comforted (and yes, social context greatly affects the performative nature of language). The second phrase would mean nothing to them; the first would get caught in their throats. But if I say "Blessed are you who mourn," I would undoubtedly be on safer ground, and what they would hear would be a comforting eschatological promise that their mourning would eventually be ended. But is that a memorably dynamic so powerful it echoes in 3 gospels (Matthew, Luke, and Thomas)? Or is it a statement about inevitability so bland it is practically meaningless? By the same token, if I tell the hungry beggars under the freeway overpasses that they will have a feast, am I blessing them? Or just being cruel?

The problem with saying the familiar Beatitudes are actually unfamiliar "performative language" is that it means we don't know what to do with them. The problem with saying they are not performative language, but simply address the question of meaning within language, is that we do know what to do with them: smile politely and take our comfort from their familiarity, and move on.

What would it mean to live as if such blessings were enacted rather than described?

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers..."

The Justice Department wants to keep laywers out of Gitmo. Why? Because they promote violence, of course:

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

This is an old complaint. Initially, the blame was laid on Newsweek. Of course, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross showed that blame was, shall we say, misplaced. Since then we have learned that Gitmo should simply be described as a "gulag." And Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross weren't the only ones concerned; even the FBI was troubled:

The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons, many of them secret prisons in which people are being disappeared. They are being held in incommunicado detention without access to the judicial system.

That is similar to the gulags. They are being held without access to their families; that is similar. And in many cases, they are being mistreated, abused, and even killed. In fact, there have been at least a hundred deaths of detainees, 27 of which have been ruled to be homicides by medical examiners.

Now, at Guantanamo Bay itself, you don't to rely upon Amnesty International for reports of abuses that have taken place there and of the violation of the Geneva Conventions. In terms of abuses, a Kentucky guardsman, for example, reported detainees whose heads had been slammed into walls.

The FBI agents there at Guantanamo Bay reported their concerns about people held in stress positions for eighteen to twenty-four hours. The Red Cross itself reported on sleep deprivation there.

And we've heard reports of female interrogators smearing what they represented as menstrual blood upon the faces of those prisoners, some of the prisoners there, which certainly is inhumane and degrading treatment, even if it doesn't rise to the level of torture.

And then there were the suicides, which were not blamed on access to lawyers, but the lack of access:

But attorneys for the men_who the military initially said had no lawyers_say that had the detainees known of legal efforts on their behalf, they might be alive today.

What could lead people to commit suicide, aside from despair and hopelessness? Perhaps conditions like these:

I want to just quote a section of your book that gives a harrowing account. You write, "The most traumatized detainees were kept in Delta block. It was equipped like the others, but its occupants seemed to constitute a psychiatric ward, rather than a prison block. The prisoners here were truly mentally disturbed. At any time, at least 20 prisoners were being held in Delta block."

And you go on to say that "cameras were installed along the ceiling and in the back section. A few cages have been converted into a large office where nurses and guards watched the detainees from dozens of monitors. Inside their cages, the detainees exhibited a wide range of strange behaviors.

”Many of them acted like children. I’d stop to talk to them, and they would respond to me in a child-like voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over. Some would stand on top of their steel-frame beds and act out childishly, reminding me of the king of the mountain game I played with my brothers when we were young.

”Unlike those in the other blocks the prisoners here were allowed the privilege of paper and crayons. They would lie on the floor or on their beds drawing pictures. The nurses let them hang the pictures on their cage wall, and every cell was plastered in pastel drawings of animals, the guards, their cells and mosques. A mental health expert later explained to me that an adult who takes on the attributes of a child is suffering from regressive behavior. It affects people who have been so traumatized by prolonged stress that they lose the sense of themselves and revert to the mindset of a child."

Long before the Supreme Court ruling that allowed these prisoners to have lawyers:

The prisoners were so depressed and frustrated by the way they were being treated that one by one, they tried to hang themselves.

The position taken by the Justice Department is a direct result of the suspension of habeas corpus, of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It is also the most rankly cynical, most barbaric and reprehensible and simply unjust, position I can imagine any lawyer taking. If taking a position that directly violates the interests of the justice system isn't a violation of a lawyer's oath, then there is nothing a lawyer can do that violates that oath, and it has become a meaningless act. The position taken by the Justice Department is consistent with the posture of the Bush Administration for the past 6 years; government doesn't mean doing anything for the people; government just means being in control.

It is long past time to simply declare them evil.