Prayer attributed to St. Francis

"O Lord, make me an instrument of your Peace!
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.
Oh Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life."

Attended the last eucharist of the school year at my daughter's school today. Left with this prayer on my mind. More about the provenance of the prayer later; no matter who wrote the words, they are compelling, and a good centering place.

One More Reason I Don't Care What Adam Nagourney Wrote About Democrats

Because columns about who should win in November, or even who will win, are thumbsuckers.

This is what really matters:

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's failures didn't inundate a city, kill 1,000 residents and inflict $100 billion in damages. Yet FEMA is justifiably disgraced, while Congress keeps giving the Corps more money and more power. A new 185-point Senate report on what went wrong during Katrina waits until point No. 65 to mention the Corps "design and construction deficiencies" that left New Orleans underwater. Meanwhile, a new multibillion-dollar potpourri of Corps projects is nearing approval on Capitol Hill.

That's because the Corps is an addiction for members of Congress, who use its water projects to steer jobs and money to their constituents and contributors. President Bush has opposed dozens of the most egregious boondoggles, but Congress has kept funding them and the Corps has refused to renounce them -- while New Orleans has remained vulnerable.

Even Prather, the agency's public representative on the Hill, complained in that private e-mail that the Corps has sacrificed its credibility by defending its indefensible projects -- he called them "swine" -- just as the Catholic Church defended its wayward priests.

"We have no strategy for saving ourselves," he wrote. "Someone needs to be supervising the Corps."

I was reading about the uselessness, the damage, and the danger of the Army Corps of Engineers in 1970. Nothing has changed, except now New Orleans has been drowned. Gossip about who will win, should win, and the strategies arising therefrom, have always been with us, too.

Which is more important? Which one should left blogistan hurl all its energy and abilities into? Maybe we should use our new-found influence to do something useful in the world, rather than continue the national game of musical chairs.

O God, come to my assistance

Make haste to help me.

Bad stuff happened in Iraq, stuff Adam Reuter doesn't want to talk about. Not with his friends, not with the line cooks in the burger joint where he worked when he first came home or the tenants in the apartment complex he manages now.

He doesn't even want to talk about it with his wife, who worried because he was jumping out of bed in the middle of the night.

But when he agrees to talk about the war -- really talk about it -- he goes right to how the insurgent crumpled after he pulled the trigger. How later, during the firefight, he ended up just a few feet from the corpse. Bullets buzzed by, and he was supposed to keep an eye on the alley, but he couldn't help but glance over.

"He just lay there," Reuter remembers. His eyes and mouth open. His whiskers a few days old. The bullet had gone in his neck cleanly, just to the right of his Adam's apple, but had come out ugly from the back of his head. He was maybe 25, a little older than Reuter. And his blood was pooling, thick and almost black in the darkness.

How can you describe what that was like? Who would understand it?

Nobody. So Reuter keeps his mouth shut. His army uniform is packed in a box in the garage. He hasn't looked at it in months. Instead, he kisses his baby boy every night. He gets on with his life, because that's what everyone else is doing.

At home in Newnan, Ga., there is no war.

"It doesn't cross their minds," Reuter said. "To them, everything is fine."

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them -- many of whom were still in the service, others who weren't -- to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn't understand what it's like.

You can't understand unless you were there.

Give us, O God, the needs of the body,
Give us, O God, the needs of the soul;
Give us, O God, the healing balsam of the body,
Give us, O God, the healing balsam of the soul.

Give us, O God, the joy of repentance,
Give us, O God, the joy of forgiveness,
Wash Thou from us the lees of corrupion,
Cleanse Thou from us the stain of uncleanness.

O great God, Who art on the throne,
Give to us the true repentance,
Give to us the forgiveness of sin--
Sin inborn and actual sin.

Give to us, O God, strong love,
And that beautiful crown of the King;
Give us, O God, the home of salvation
Within the beauteous gates of Thy kingdom.

May Michael, bright warrior of the angels,
Be keeping evil enemies down;
May Jesus Christ Son of David
Be giving us hospitality in the brightness of peace.

Tipping Point?

Aren't we past that point by now?

"The truth is putting on its boots while a lie has travelled half-way around the world."

It is amazing how willfully clueless some pundits can be:

Are we at a tipping point yet? What author Malcolm Gladwell described as small things that make a big difference seems like an apt metaphor for the latest developments on civil liberties and the Bush administration. First was Thursday morning's USA Today story, declaring, "NSA Has Massive Database of Americans' Phone Calls." The story dominated the morning news shows and drove the day's events, with the President racing to the microphones in the Diplomatic Room of the White House before departing on a trip to Mississippi. Bush didn't get into the specifics of the USA Today story, but he did defend the program, saying the federal government is not "mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans."

Let's see: Bush's approval rating is down as low as 29%, and nowhere above 36%. Do you think the public might have turned against him by now?

Oh, we're just talking about approval or disapproval of the wiretapping programs? Well, nobody likes those, either. Back in February, 20% of Americans thought they had been wiretapped. Wonder what the percentage is now?

And, of course, now we have the resignation of Mike Luttig, which is being linked to civil liberties issues even if there is no connection; lawyers from the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility getting shut out of a professional ethics investigation by the NSA; and apparently new allegations ready to spill forth (which, in fairness, Mr. Cooper could not have known about when he wrote his column). Even Newt Gingrich isn't trying to defend this program.

So to review the bidding: Bush's Justice Department is blocked from investigating its own controversial spy program; a leading conservative jurist resigns, reportedly in part over the government's handling of civil liberties; and a big NSA program of eavesdropping on Americans' phone-calling patterns is revealed. Will this be enough to turn public opinion against Bush on civil liberties and terrorism?

The question is not, will opinion turn against Bush on civil liberties, but how much more it will turn against him.

Which may finally shock the Beltway denizens into awareness of just how angry most people really are.

The Rock of rocks

On the Rock of rocks,
The peace of Peter and Paul,
Of James and John the beloved,
And of the pure perfect Virgin,
The pure perfect Virgin.

The peace of the Father of joy,
The peace of the Christ of the pasch,
The peace of the Spirit of grace,
To ourselves and to our children,
To ourselves and to our children.

--From Carmina Gadelica

The Irony of American History

The fortunes of war favored Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old--
but not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table. The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come....

Beowulf, tr. Seamus Heaney

Construction on the Pentagon began on September 11, 1941.

Woe to him who says,
"I shall build myself a spacious palace
with airy roof chambers and
windows set in it.
It will be paneled with cedar
and painted with vermilion."
Though your cedar is so splendid,
does that prove you a king?
Think of your father: he ate and drank,
dealt justly and fairly; all went well with him.
He upheld the cause of the lowly and poor;
then all was well.
Did not this show he knew me? says the Lord.
But your eyes and your heart are set on naught but gain, set only on the innocent blood you can shed,
on the cruel acts of tyranny you perpetrate.

Jeremiah 22: 14-17 (REB)

Serendipity or Spirituality?

This post was long enough, I decided to add this one.

Entirely by coincidence (the first post was published before the show came on the radio), my local Pacifica station ran a lengthy interview with the Rev. Jim Rigby, pastor of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, and his most famous (or infamous) member for the moment, professed atheist Robert Jensen. (The interview should be available here soon. If you're interested, check their archives occassionally.) Jensen actually did a better job defending his decision to join a Christian church, and his position vis a vis Christianity, in the interview than he did at AlterNet. This decision has prompted concerns within the Presbyterian church, which is entirely a matter of polity for them. Whether or not the Rev. Rigby is, or should be, disciplined is not a matter I will comment on. But Mr. Jensen's comments were particularly interesting.

His defense of his decision was essentially one of "negative theology." He professed a position of humility toward the universe, of the limitations of human knowledge as exemplified both in science and in religion. He put great weight on the mystery of existence, on how much we do not and probably cannot, know (always curious to put so much weight on what might be known sometime in the future. What good does that do us now? We might one day know how to power Hummers with nothing more than air. Does that mean we should simply rely on that hope now?) And basically he sounded almost like a seminary student. With a crucial difference, of course: even a negative theology admits the reality (let's avoid that misleading "existence" debate) of God.

No surprise, I suppose, as he is a philosophy professor at UT-Austin. But it seemed to me the only thing I wouldn't qualify him for would be ordination as a minister. He is certainly more articulate and intelligent about his faith than most Christians, and clearly more committed to Christianity as something lived, not simply professed. In fact, he bases his decision on his commitment to living the Christian faith, not just professing traditional Christian doctrines. I must admit that, whereas I was a critic of the decision to make him a church member when I first read the two articles they published, I've quite changed my mind listening to the interview.

And it brings us back to the central question: what is faith, and how must it be expressed in order to enter the "sacred community"? The interviewer, by the way, used that term, asking Jensen if he hadn't found a sacred community which he decided to join. The phrase made me think of Derrida's insistence on "holy" as that which is marked off, set aside, meant to be kept pure from corruption. Certainly an ecclesiological ideal, but if we insist on it too firmly, who among us is worthy? And do we decide worthiness solely upon profession, (which may or may not be sincere? As Jeremiah records God saying: "The heart is devious, beyond all fathoming. I, the Lord, test the heart...")? Or do we decide based upon action?

Or must it be a combination of the two?

Desires

May I speak each day according to Thy jusice,
Each day may I show Thy chastening, O God;
May I speak each day according to Thy wisdom,
Each day and night may I be at peace with Thee.

Each day may I count the causes of Thy mercy,
May I each day give heed to Thy laws;
Each day may I compose to Thee a song,
May I harp each day Thy praise, O God.

May I each day give love to Thee, Jesu,
Each night may I do the same;
Each day and night, dark and light,
May I laud Thy goodness to me, O God.

--from Carmina Gadelica

Prophets, Saints, and Insanity

Please allow me to apologize for my extended absences from both the blog and the comments. I assumed that I would be able to, and have much to post on, after my ordination interviews were over. While I do have much swimming around in my soul and mind, I have been unable to sit and focus any of it.

You see, I have been somewhat preoccupied with my stepdaughter's spiral into mental illness. It has reached a crisis point recently, which, oddly, freed me up enough to spend some time thinking aloud about it.

Some background is essential here...

As my stepdaughter, M, is an adult, I will respect her privacy and not refer to her by name. She is almost 22 years old. Mr. left rev. and her mother have been divorced since she was an infant. They had a custody sharing agreement that was somewhat testy, but honored by all concerned. It was pretty equitable overall.

M's mother was Mormon, something that contributed to the break-up the marriage, as Mr. left rev. was NOT at that time (and harbored some intense resentment towards that church). She remarried a Mormon fellow and proceeded to raise M in that faith. Mr. left rev. was not thrilled, but did not interfere directly.

I joined this picture when M was six. The year we married, M was spending the school year with us, due to family pressures at her "other house." A pattern soon emerged that we would get extended custody of M whenever they were having family issues. I was able to be with her a great deal as she was growing up and could see (more clearly in hindsight, of course) the development of some of her issues. She was a poor student, she was very impulsive, she was given to strong emotional attachments to animals, but not so much to people, she had difficulty keeping friendships, she was passive aggressive. And she was a very needy, caring child who felt emotional upsets very deeply.

When M was 14, we were given full and legal custody of her, as her mother and stepdad were overwhelmed by the onset of adolescence. My daughters were 3 and 7 at the time. I was in seminary and we were living in a two bedroom apartment. Things were very tense.

The acting out began immediately...skipping school, failing grades, threats to run away or to hurt herself. She was a victim of date rape, she began using recreational drugs, she was incapable of holding a job and was arrested for stealing from her employer, a pharmacist. We tried several times to get her into therapy, but she proved extremely resistant to using any drugs she was prescribed for ADD and depression. She was ordered into therapy as a result of the arrest, and we attended the sessions faithfully with her, each time discovering how deeply our beautiful girl was hurting and feeling more and more frustrated that we could do so little about it. She would stabilize out for long periods of time, make passing grades, and seem to be at peace with herself. Then things would begin to slide again. Together, we and her began realizing when this was happening and take steps to head it off. As she got older, it was looking like she might be able to get this under control and live as normal a life as anyone could who refused to take prescription medication.

She even began going back to church. Something that occurred during one summer visit back to her mother's home made her reembrace her Mormon upbringing with all the fervor of the born again. She studied, attended faithfully, and completely embraced all aspects of Mormon doctrine in all aspects of her life as she was able and agonized when she fell from the standards she set for herself.

A friend asked me if it bothered me that M was a Mormon. My response was that I did not agree with her theology or doctrine, but that I had a 19 year old daughter who didn't drink, smoke, do drugs, eat meat, or sleep with her boyfriend and who took her responsibilities to her apostate hell-bound family only slightly less seriously than she took her responsibility to God. What the hell did I have to complain about?

I don't for a moment mean to suggest that the Mormon faith was the source of her mental instability. All it did was provide a context and a catalyst, and that could be said of any faith when embraced with utter uncritical fervor to the exclusion of all else.

While mental illness can take many forms, I was distinctly taken aback by the form it took in this case.

Religious delusions. Big time.

M would spend a great deal of time in prayer and study everyday. Sometimes she would talk about the "revelations" she had received as a result, and we would even discuss our relative understandings of Scripture. But, as she began spending more and more time locked away in her room, she spoke to me less and less. She began refusing to take calls from her boyfriend. She would occasionally talk aloud behind her closed door. Our voiced concerns about her job selling insurance and her nocturnal existence were answered with assurances that she was going to get busy again very soon. One day, a month and a half ago, she made a rare appearance out of her room during the daylight hours and paced anxiously back and forth in front of me, informing me that something very special had happened to her.

She had been taken as a bride by The Holy Spirit (an actual, physical spirit in her interpretation of Mormon pneumatology). There had been a ceremony and everything. She had physically felt his hand in hers, and as a result of their union, she would be equipped with special revelation to share in order to save the world.

How does one respond to this? I think I must have just sat there BLINKING at her for five solid minutes as she went on and on about the special relationship she shared with The Holy Spirit. Clearly, something had happened for her; to her mind, this was entirely real, exhilarating and empowering. She was hearing voices, having visions, and receiving special revelation.

Was I in the presence of a prophet? Irrational behavior, in so far as society determined that standard, was no bar to being a prophet of God. I did not immediately judge her disclosure to be that of schitzophrenic rambling; that came later. It didn't come when her own bishops told her to quit talking about her experience at church-prophetic voices are often silenced by the status quo. Her message was one of hope and peace to the world when they receive the truth of Heavenly Father, and that things weren't moving fast enough toward the second coming because even the most saintly of Heavenly Father's saints (i.e.-good Mormons) couldn't hear all the wisdom through the distractions that surrounded them. They needed to be refined in constant prayer and focus on the Scriptures.

Her church didn't appreciate being told they weren't doing a good job. This was the gist of her message, at first. And I was able to maintain as neutral a front as possible, probing gently around the edges to get as much information as I could about what was happening to her. She submitted to a "healing" and "patriarchal blessing," in order for them to receive the Spirit and know she was telling the truth. Because they didn't tell her directly that she was in need of therapy, she assumed that the Spirit was working on them.

Later, she quit talking about the elders in her church. She quit going altogether. She began taking long walks outside at night and refusing to speak to anyone for days. Then she upped the ante. It was Jesus Christ whom she married. And it wasn't simply the gnosis that would usher in the second coming, but her personally. She was pregnant with Jesus' baby.

I am not making this up. I discovered this when I rushed her to the ER after she began experiencing heavy bleeding. She thought she was miscarrying Jesus' child because she had made some mistakes, strayed from the true path. I was afraid she was pregnant, and that "Jesus" who still lived with his Mom while trying college for the third time, was going to be a tough nut to crack for child support.

Her explanation to the ER staff was confusing and contradictory. They tested her. Not pregnant. She didn't believe them and requested that they do an exam. They did just that. Not pregnant. Now she was convinced that the doctor doing the exam had tried to abort her baby because he didn't think that she wanted it. Then she was convinced that she was pregnant, that the baby was under the care of the Holy Spirit and they couldn't see it. If she became the perfect vessel, she would be privileged to bring God's kingdom to birth on earth. Now she would become a saint.

I still don't see how she got out of the ER without being held for a psyche consult. I guess they just didn't want the grief.

Being unable to convince us that she was indeed expecting Jesus' child, she pondered these things in her heart for three days, then stole the car we had just put $300 worth of work into and drove to her Mom's home, 1200 miles away with less than $100 in her pocket.

She took only her cat.

We are against her, you see. We were given the truth, but we did not hear it. We tried to get her to turn to doctors instead of listening to Heavenly Father's desires for her. Now she will not talk to us. Through her mother, she asked only for her journals, which she also accused us of destroying.

I search through her last ramblings to us-disjointed, sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes accusatory-for some sign that she hears God as she so desperately wants to. Perhaps it is sufficient that God hears her. I pray that it is so.

In Search of Lost Time

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical. And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a person's soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the couse of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, tr. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin 2004), p. 84

Bush responds to "Fahrenheit 911"

Bush said the worst moment was September 11 when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

"In such a situation it takes a while before one understands what is happening," Bush said. "I would say that this was the hardest moment, once I had the real picture before my eyes."

Which explains a lot about that day.

And his best moment?

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

You can't make this stuff up.

Addendum: Yes, Bush really has lost his mojo.

The man widely expected to be President George W. Bush's choice to lead the C.I.A. encountered surprisingly strong bipartisan opposition today, with the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee bluntly calling him "the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two things about this article: it leads with quotes from Democrats, but still describes the opposition to Hayden as "bi-partisan." And it includes quotes from two Republicans, but no one says "The opposition won't derail the nomination."

And this will be the crunch point:

One Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said he believed that even were General Hayden to resign his military commission, serious conflicts would remain.

"I think the fact that he is part of the military today would be the major problem," Mr. Chambliss said on ABC-TV. "Now, just resigning commission and moving on, putting on a striped suit, a pinstriped suit versus an air force uniform, I don't think makes much difference."

"Calgon, take me away!"

Fifth Sunday of Easter--

I wrote this a few days ago, then withheld posting it. This morning I came to check the news, but by habit went to Eschaton, where I find left blogistan in full war mode against another "enemy." It isn't just Atrios; follow the link to "Lawyers, Guns & Money," and you'll find a link back to Atrios in one of the comments, which in turn links to still other blog postings about Caitlin Flanagan (who?). Then read the blogrolls on any of those blogs, and they all link rather incestuously back to like-minded and similarly aroused (albeit, perhaps, on other subjects) blogs, and, well, it begins to seem that, indeed, left blogistan is all about creating community by selling a product and that product us: the "enemy."

Which is, according to sociologists, precisely how groups establish an identity. But it isn't much of an identity, to constantly declare how you are not like "them," and it isn't a healthy identity either, for the simple reason Nietzsche noted: "The man who fights dragons too long becomes a dragon himself."

Woke up this morning with that impertinent thought in my mind. I tend (I am a creature of habit, if not of addictions) to get up in the morning and "wake up" by turning the computer on and seeing what the news is/what the blogs are saying. This morning as I waited for the screen to rise I thought of that old ad, where the harried mother and housewife escapes all the pressures of middle-class existence (the struggle for survival! The labor in the fields! The battle with the elements! Okay, maybe not....) only with the purchase of yet another consumer product, one that does for her what all the other consumer products cannot, and I thought:

"Is that what I'm doing, and why I'm doing this? Computer, take me away?"

It's an old cliche that in a consumer society we can do nothing for ourselves, we can only do what we can purchase. The subtext of the Calgon ads was that we couldn't even find repose and rest, without buying one more product, one more thing to do it for us. We are actually quite systematized thinkers, in the sense that we all expect a system to take care of us: politics, society, the church, the schools, the policeman on the corner, capitalism. Someone will take care of us and all we need do is play our faithful part, press the bar and recieve our reward at the end of the maze.

Yes, I know, cliches abound.

But then it occurred to me: have we just brought that attitude over to blogistan? It isn't obvious at all, but aren't we all still consuming, buying, selling, what we are convinced we cannot provide on our own, by ourselves, as individuals? There is a tightrope here, a fine line, and a yawning abyss. We are social creatures, we need each other. But even blogs are essentially a one-way medium. The true communities of commentary are sharply defined, and the boundaries rigidly enforced. There is less an exchange of ideas than there is a transfer of agreements. But even that isn't the ultimate question. The ultimate question is: what do we expect from blogs? Power? Money? Control?

And how do we get that without selling a product, without promising to do for you, what you cannot do for yourself? And all without that "imponderable (and almost intolerable) bloom"?

Faith on Earth?

A few words from H. Richard Niebuhr:

Questions about faith arise in every area of human existence. Though me word seems to be primarily religious, so that it is associated with such other terms as God, church and creed, we also use it, with its synonyms and antonyms, in many other connections. We adjure each other to have faith in democracy or in the people or in the scientific method or that right makes might. We speak of "keeping faith" with .hose who have died in our nation's wars; we honor men of "good faith"; we contrast the faith of democracy with the creeds of totalirarianism. Questions about faith arise in an urgent and tragic form as we view massive and petty breaches of faith-treasons, lying propaganda, the cultivation of mutual distrust as measures of party and national policy, the use of pretended loyalty in conspiracies against State and civilization, the enlistment of men as faithful followers of causes that depend for success on practices of deception. [In this situation a dark prospect opens before us as we reflect on the meaning of Jesus' question: "When the Son of man comes will he find faith on eanh?" (Luke 18:8). He may have meant, "Will he find belief or trust ill God?" But he may also have meant, "Will he find any faithfulness among men?"] The experiences of the twentieth century have brought into view the abyss of "faithlessness" into which men can fall. [We see this possibility-that human history will come to its end neither in a brotherhood of man nor in universal death under the blows of natural or man-made catastrophe, but in the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty and "word of honor" is given and accepted in deception and distrust. If men no longer have faith in each other, can they exist as men?]
...
These many questions about faith seem to be highly heterogeneous. We are not dealing, it may appear, with one complex of interrelated problems concerning an integral element in human experience, but are rather simply following the meandering route of a stream of con-sciousness as we proceed by means of a process of association from one set of difficulties or debates to another. Is not the word faith so highly equivocal or even indeterminate in meaning that it cannot be significantly used in such various connections in the course of one conversation? Now it means belief in a doctrine; now the acceptance of intuited or self-evident truths; now confidence or trust; now piety in general or a historic religion. In some cases the word applies to man's relation to the supernatural but again it refers to human interpersonal relations. Do not these meanings vary so greatly that it is an illusion to think of all these faiths as having anything in common that can be a fit subject for inquiry? It may be so. It may be that the visual or auditory sign faith represents not one word but several, pointing to various unrelated things or concepts, as the sign "organ" means in one context musical instrument, in another, a part of a body, and still another, a newspaper. But it may also be that faith points to a complex structure of which now this, now that, element is focused in the attention while the remainder of the structure is implied. It may be a word like reason, which, equally various in its uses, yet seems to indicate a single complex process of perception and conception, distinction and comparison, experience and abstraction, intuition and inference, action and contemplation. Whether or not this is so only an inquiry, not into the uses of the word, but into some of the experiences to which the word points, can bring to light. Should it appear that believing a proposition is intimately connected with trusting a person, that trust and fidelity are inseparable, that trust in God and interpersonal faithfulness are closely associated, then it might also be indicated that there is a structure of faith, while the stresses and strains in that structure might also be brought into view. On such an inquiry we embark, not in the hope of being able to map the world of faith but with the desire to understand, albeit roughly and in outline, the relations of some of its continents and seas.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, ed. Richard R. Niebuhr (New Haven: Yale University Press 1989), pp. 1, 4-5.

Just as I wonder (here, here, and here) how deeply Daniel Dennett considered the question "what is 'religion'," I wonder how deeply Sam Harris considered the question "What is 'faith'"? Niebuhr tries to answer some of these questions, and here I can do no more than leave them as discussion points, or the beginning of a discussion.

What, then, do we mean by "faith on earth"?

Life imitating art

Epidermal Macabre--Theodore Roethke

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

I suppose one should make a Platonic, if not Christian, reference here. Instead, I'll just offer an explanation. The picture is from an exhibit that is in Houston just now (yes, it's a real human body). But I saw the picture on a poster in a classroom where I was teaching Roethke (though not this poem). From the poem I was teaching I followed a link to this one, and immediately thought of the poster, and immediately knew the two were made for each other.

So there you are.

Seek ye first...

I was teaching this speech the other day, trying to explain how it functioned, how it was put together, when I realized just how radical it's premise is. It's radical in a way we easily overlook.

King starts with the premise we all accept (which is its real genius; King begins with what we know, and moves us toward what we should know): law creates order, and the two together, given world enough and time, produce justice.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

The first half of the speech is built on that premise. For King, it is the Emancipation Proclamation that is the law, which comes imposing a new order, and in imposing that order, promises justice, finally, for slaves, for African Americans, for those who came to this country not illegally, but wholly unwillingly. That promise of justice, however, is unfulfilled: "...one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free."

The Proclamation was issued 100 years ago, but the root is in the Constitution:

So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

The promissory note was that law and order would lead inevitably and finally to justice; justice for once, and justice for all. But it didn't happen; and so King describes the frustration of 100 years of history, and the understanding that justice has been promised, and justice is still available, and that justice must be done:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

But King is not Malcolm X; he is not placing before the nation the either/or of peace or violence, of justice or anarchy.

The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

He makes a slow turn here, as he must, but the turn is quite clear,a nd it isn't just the turn of pacifism, of "turn the other cheek" and "bless those who curse you." It is a more radical turn than that. And it comes in the contrast between the opening of the speech, which we usually ignore, and the closing of the speech, which we usually praise and even bathe our memories in. It comes in the most radical call of all: justice first, and order and law will follow. It is, in the purest sense, the most democratic of sentiments.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

King does not bring them to Washington, D.C. to seize power, or enact more laws, or esatablish a new and improved legal order. He brings them to D.C. to teach them about justice. He brings them to D.C. to upend the American order, the one we are sure "tamed the West" and "forged a new country." He comes, not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. And bury him is exactly what King does.

Caesar represents law and order, the rule of the state, the control of the mass in what we know call (wrongly) a Hobbesian vision of imposing upon "the rule of nature, red in tooth and claw" the civilizing power of authority. Law first, taught Augustus Caesar, creates order. Piety, then (and Augustus was a master of promoting filial piety; James Dobson and Jerry Falwell could learn a thing or two from him; Peter Marshall and Rocbert Schuller didn't have a patch on Augustus in promoting the status quo based on the famliy and piety) seals the family into the social pact, and insures order at the most basic social unit, because the family follows the law. And from that does justice come? Well, certainly not the justice the Hebrew prophets would recognize. But with law establishing order, and order creating peace, is justice far behind? Perhaps we should ask the citizens of Omelas.

King turns those assumptions on their head, and does it so beautifully, so masterfully, we don't realize we've been had. We assume, even, that one day American law and American order will finally create King's vision of American justice; but King doesn't say that day will come through Congress:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

That day will come through people enacting justice. Not demanding justice; that is still to play the game of law and order, of the belief tha only power matters, and only the power of the state enacted through law can impose the proper order that allows fragile, feeble, weak, and tremulous justice to begin to see the light of day, and even then only if justice creates the greatest good for the greatest number. But that is not justice at all: that is simply more law, and more imposition of order. And more force is not just; it is simply a greater effort at control over someone else. It is the conviction that there are circumstances under which we need not treat each other with love; but no such circumstances exist.

Which King understands; and so King's dream is a vision of justice first, which will give rise to a new and better order, and then, if necessary, laws for what is left over, for those who still reject justice.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

King started talking about law, and about the order it was supposed to create, and about the justice it failed to provide. It is time to set aside that model, is King's proclamation, and seek first the kingdom of God, where the first are last, and the last first, and all are seen as equals. It is time to seek first justice; and all the rest will follow.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

But freedom without law and order is precisely what we fear. Freedom without law and order is anarchy, is barbarism, is the antithesis of civilization. To establish freedom is precisely why we brought civilization to the "savages" of the American West; it is why we fought in the jungles of Vietnam; it is why we invaded Iraq. Because freedom is not possible without first establishing law and order. But King has another vision:

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

And there it is, but covered in such a sweet coating we don't even recognize what we have swallowed: law and order do not produce justice. If they did, the promissory note written to the African Americans would long ago have been paid in full. Justice is not a byproduct of law, and law is not necessary in order to impose order. The nature of humanity is not bestial, only held in check by power and reason. And the nature of the universe is to do justice, and love mercy. Freedom is rooted, not in power or in order, but in justice. Seek justice, and you will have freedom; seek justice, and you will establish order; seek justice, and you will not need to concern yourself with law.

That struggle is going on again. That struggle continues.

Fools tell themselves,
"There is no God."
Their actions are corrupt,
none of them does good.

The Lord looks down
to see if anyone is wise,
if anyone seeks God.

But all have turned away,
all are depraved.
No one does good,
not even one.

Are these evil-doers mad?
They eat up my people
like so much bread;
they never pray.

They should cringe in fear,
for God sits with the just.
You may mock the poor,
but the Lord keeps them safe.

If only a saviour would come from Zion
to restore the people's fortunes!
Then Jacob would sing,
and Israel rejoice.--Psalm 14

Just sayin....

Okay, there's a complex trail here. Attytood links this claim, not to Vanity Fair, but to Drudge. [Update: Boreas, in comments, provides the Vanity Fair link] So take it for what it's worth. Still, here's the story:

[Todd] Purdum [author of a profile of V.P. Cheney in latest issue of Vanity Fair] reports that Cheney travels with a chemical-biological suit at all times. When he gave his friend Robin West and his twin children a ride to the White House a couple of years ago, West commented on the fact that Cheney’s motorcade varied its daily path. “And he said, ‘Yeah, we take different routes so that “The Jackal” can’t get me,’” West tells Purdum. “And then there was this big duffel bag in the middle of the backseat, and I said, ‘What’s that? It’s not very roomy in here.’ And [Cheney] said, ‘No, because it’s a chemical-biological suit,’ and he looked at it and said, ‘Robin, there’s only one. You lose.’”

Isonically (or satirically?), a friend had loaned me the DVD of Jarhead and I got around to watching it last night. Shortly after the Marines arrive in the desert they are setting up their tent and their Staff Sergeant walks in with a stopwatch in his hand. He almost immediately announces a gas attack drill and the Marines frantically struggle with their NBC suits. 60 seconds of Keystone Kops struggles later, the Staff Sgt. pronounces them all "dead." No one has managed to get more than the mask or part of the full suit on.

Jarhead is a memoir of the Gulf War, so I have no doubt that scene is accurately portrayed. The suits are bulky, cumbersome, and not easily put on without great familiarity and practice. Now think about it: 20 year old well-trained Marines in an open space (a tent) cannot, in 60 seconds, get into their anti-gas gear. How likely is it Dick Cheney, a senior overweight man who has had multiple heart attacks and wears a pacemaker, is going to get that "chemical suit" out of the duffle bag in the back seat of a limo and get into it quickly enough?

The baseline of paranoia, at least as the term is commonly defined, is an irrational belief both that you are subject to constant threats, and that you can do something about them. Isn't this kind of attitude of a piece with the idea that tactical nuclear weapons are a viable part of the U.S. arsenal, and can be used in a "first strike" capacity?

The Wrong Thing

After seeing Madeleine Albright on "The Daily Show":

According to almost every Iraqi, the Americans "came as liberators and now they are occupiers." For Americans occupation conjures images of postwar Germany or Japan, and the repair of damaged societies. In Arabin, tahrir, or liberation, and ihtilal, or occupation, have greater moral and emotional significance. Ihtilal means the Crusaders who slaughtered Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, it means the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century, it means the British imperialists who divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire with the French, and it means the Israelis in southern Lebanon and Palestine. It is hard for Americans to understand just how deeply they are hated by ordinary Iraqis.

Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird (New York: Simon & Schuster 2006), p. 3.

Americans long to liberate the world from history, as they feel they have been liberated. That is our fundamental problem. We mistake our ignorance of history for purity of heart, and then we will one thing.

Addendum: no surprise, then, that we are led into war by people like Kenneth Pollsck.

The Concept of Irony

Colbert's irony is making me re-read Kierkegaard:

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing." So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

Kierkegaard on Socrates:

He belonged to that species of human beings with whom one is not content to reamin with the external as such. The external always suggested an 'other', an opposite. He was not like a philosopher lecturing upon his views, wherein the very lecture itself constitutes the presence of the Idea; on the contrary, what Socrates said meant something 'other'. The outer and inner did not form a harmonious unity, for the outer was in opposition to the inner, and only through this refracted angle is he to be apprehended. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, tr. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press 1968, 50).

The Concept of Irony was Kierkegaard's dissertation (or the equivalent thereof in the American system; the degree was granted by a Lutheran seminary). It's an interesting text because in the pseudonymous authorship S.K.'s personae praise Socrates as the most important thinker in human history. His analysis of Socrates in Irony, however, reveals just how much irony there is in that praise. For S.K. (not the pseudonyms), Socrates is not the greatest thinker, but rather the most dangerous, in human history. It is through Socrates, S.K. writes, that irony entered the world.

Here is an instructive comparison made early in the argument, a comparison of the Gospel of John and Plato's writings:

On the other hand, the observation concerning the relationship of Plaot to John is also correct if one maintains that John found and immediately saw in Christ all that he, by imposing silence upon himself, has depicted with complete objectivity, for his eyes were open to the immediate divinity in Christ; whereas Plato creates his Socrates through a poetic activity, since Socrates in his immediate existence was wholly negative. (52-53)

This is the key to irony in S.K.'s conception: it is wholly negative, and as such, wholly destructive of everything, including itself. But before we get there, consider the aptness of this observation. S.K. proceeds by considering Socrates from the point of view of three contemporaries other than Plato. One of them is the playwright Aristophanes (who mocked Socrates in his comedy Clouds). S.K. notes:

Indeed it would be a great loss if we lacked the Aristophanic evaluation of Socrates. As every development usually ends by parodying itself, and such a parody is a guarantee that this development has outlived itself, so the comic conception is also a moment when, in many ways an infinitely correcting moment, in the total illustration of a personality or tendency. (158)

Unfortunately for the world (or left blogistan), such a moment is precisely "an infinitely correcting moment," which means it never ends, never comes to a conclustion: the emperor is never revealed as stark naked and the scales never fall from the eyes of the deluded or the ignorant or the willfully blind or the just plain apathetic. We are in that moment of parody now. Stephen Colbert has portrayed it for us all, in the "real world," not safely inside a TV studio in front of a TV lens, with all the distancing that setting implies and applies. He has carried it out into the arena of the "grown ups," and shown them what they really are.

But no one recognized themselves in the mirror. No one accepted the parody as the final representation of reality, as the guarantee that this development has outlived itself," because it is an "infinitely correcting moment," and that means it never has to come to a conclusion. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends/We're so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside.... But it is also in that infinitely correcting moment that irony strikes, and becayuse it is negative, irony is infinitely dangerous:

As irony conquers everything by seeing its disproportion to the Idea, so it also succumbs to itself, since it consistently goes beyond itself while remaining in itself.

Think of the worm Ouroboros, eating its tail. But in this conception, the worm manages to take the last swallow, and the world disappears.

Irony is always negative, and can sound no positive. Consider Swift. In all of Gullivers' Travels, the most rational and peaceful creatures he meets, are the Hounhyms, the intelligent horses, and Gulliver's despair is absolute when they reject him from their society. In "A Modest Proposal," Swift is clearly as disdainful of the Irish who suffer under the British system of absentee landlords, as he is of the British who literally feed on the flesh of the Irish. One has to remind oneself Swift was the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Still, here is S.K.'s description of what Swift may well have intended:

Irony may exhibit itself through a relation of opposition in a still more indirect fashion when it chooses the simplest and most limited human beings, not in order to mock them, but in order to mock the wise.

In all these instances irony exhibits itself most nearly as conceiving the world, as attempting to mystify the surrounding world not so much in order to conceal itself as to induce others to reveal themselves. But irony may also manifest itself when the ironist seeks to lead the outside world astray respecting himself. (268)

Swift in "A Modest Proposal." Colbert, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And here is the problem:

Irony...has no purpose, it's purpose is immanent in itself, a metaphysical purpose. The purpose is none other than irony itself. When an ironist exhibits himself as other than he actually is, it might seem that his purpose were to induce others to believe this. His actual purpose, however, is merely to feel free, and he is through irony.(273)

But is irony then, merely doubt? If I doubt, am I not free? No:

With doubt the subject constantly seeks to penetrate the object, and his misfortune consists in the fact that the object constantly eludes him. With irony, on the other hand, the subject is always seeking to get outside the object and this he attains by becoming conscious at every moment that the object has no reality. With doubt the subject is witness to a war of conquest in which every phenomenon is destroyed, because the essence always resides behind the phenomenon. But with irony the subject constantly retires from the field and proceeds to talk every phenomenon out of its reality in order to save himself, that is, in order to preserve himself in his negative independence of everything.
....
For irony everything becomes nothingness, but nothingness may be taken in several ways. The speculative nothingness is that which at every moment is vanishing for concretion, since it is itself the demand for the concrete...The mystical nothingness is a nothingness for representation, a nothingness which yet is as full of content as the silence of the night is eloquent for one who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothingness is that deathly stillness in which irony returns to 'haunt and jest' (this last word taken wholly ambiguously.)(274-75)

This is not what the reporters object to, but it is what they should object to. Colbert was attacking "official Washington," which has come to include the White Houst Correspondents as much as it does the employees of the Federal Government. But was the attack fair? Or was it ultimately dangerous? No doubt it was necesary. But David Foster Wallace is wrong: Irony is not a "ground clearing." It is a clearing of the ground. It is a clearing of everything.

Although perhaps that is what our political discourse, at this point, needs.

Why Stephen Colbert is "Not Funny"

Froomkin

So let me tell you a bit about my night [at the White House Correspondents' Dinner]. After exchanging brief pointless smalltalk with Tony Snow, Dan Bartlett and even George Clooney at the Newsweek pre-dinner party, I repaired to the ballroom where I found myself sitting next to -- of all people -- Kristen Silverberg.

Now you may not know who Kristen Silverberg is, but I've been following her movement through Bush's inner circle for quite a while now. First she was a campaign worker, then a young aide in the chief of staff's office, then a high-level policy adviser.

....

In pretty much any other circumstance, if I had a chance to talk to Kristen Silverberg, I would grill her about Bush's plans for Iran, or about her mentor Karl Rove, or on the inner workings of the White House.

But here she was sitting next to me as the guest of a Washington Post White House correspondent, and it wouldn't have been appropriate. Not to mention, she's sweet as pie. Heck, I was pushing the limits of propriety by introducing her to everyone at the table this way: "She's John Bolton's boss!!!"

We ended up talking about Karl Rove, but only in the most general terms. I noted that she might be Rove's protege, but that -- according to my wife, at least -- Rove is my greatest muse. (He does seem to inspire some of my finer columns .)

As a result, Silverberg very kindly offered to introduce me to my muse. I said I couldn't possibly. She insisted. And next thing I knew we were over at table 54, chatting with Rove himself.

In person, Rove was charming. He looked genuinely confused when I told him that the headline of my Friday's column had been " Rove Worrier ," a reference to his possibly imminent indictment in the CIA leak investigation.

And in fact, he didn't look the least bit worried.

The conversation quickly turned to the fact that he adores Silverberg and thoroughly grills every one of her potential suitors.Of course, what I wanted to do was ask him: Why did he lie to journalists about not having been one of the people who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak? What exactly did he tell the grand jury last week? How does he feel about getting kicked across the hall into a windowless office? (He's moving into Michael Gerson's old digs.) Is there any serious chance of a detente with the press?

But this was not the time. Instead, I went back to my table with Silverberg, still not talking about Iran.

And not only had I gotten nothing useful out of Rove -- but now I was beholden to Silverberg.

As luck would have it, I was able to wipe that particular slate clean in short order. Silverberg kept eyeing actor James Denton, the hunky plumber from "Desperate Housewives," who was sitting a few tables away. I went over and persuaded him to come say hello. Silverberg was thrilled. And I was off the hook.

But what value did any of this have to my readers? Not much.

Journalists covering the White House have a job, as Froomkin notes:

Ideally, every chance we get to talk to these people, we should be pumping them for information. And ideally we would be consistent in expressing our frustration with them -- not for personal reasons, not for partisan reasons, but because they're making it nearly impossible for us to do our job, which is to inform the public on what's going on in the White House and why.

The coziness of the dinner is a perfect example of what's gone wrong with access journalism. What's in it for the readers?

But it's not for the readers; it's for the journalists.

Which is why Stephen Colbert simply was not funny; but the President was.

May Day

According to Garrison Keillor:

Today is May Day, a celebration of the return of spring that goes back thousands of years in European traditions. Various May Day celebrations included the gathering of wildflowers and green branches, the weaving of floral garlands, and the setting up of a decorated May tree, or Maypole, around which people danced.

May Day never developed a Christian equivalent. In order to celebrate the holiday, workers had to stay home from work against their employers' wishes. It became known as a people's holiday, and in 1889, a congress of world Socialist parties held in Paris voted to choose May 1, 1890, as a day of demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day.

While it is not an official holiday in America (as it is in many countries), the link between May Day and labor started in this country, with the Haymarket Riots.

And the reason for the riots? Workers were trying to establish an eight-hour work day. Most of those who rioted and were demanding this change in labor law were, by the way, immigrants. Not "illegal" immigrants, as that concept didn't exist in American law in the 19th century. But they were immigrants, and identified as such.

So when someone today worries that today's called boycott will do more harm than good, or erode some support for fair immigration laws, remember that people died to secure the concept of the 8 hour day.

And it started in Chicago; on May Day.

P.S. This is, if you didn't know, a recognized day by Congress. It is "Loyalty Day." I trust you are all being loyal Americans today. You can go here, to learn all you ever wanted to know about it. The irony is delicious.