Watch the Do-nut, not the hole...

It's interesting, first, that this even occurred in the second Republican candidates debate:

The most heated moment in the debate, which aired live on the conservative Fox News network, came when the former New York mayor and current GOP front-runner angrily refused to entertain a serious discussion about the role that actions taken by the United States prior to the September 11, 2OO1, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have played in inspiring or encouraging those attacks.

Giuliani led the crowd of contenders on attacking Texas Congressman Ron Paul (news, bio, voting record) after the anti-war Republican restated facts that are outlined in the report of the The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Asked about his opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Paul repeated his oft-expressed concern that instead of making the U.S. safer, U.S. interventions in the Middle East over the years have stirred up anti-American sentiment. As he did in the previous Republican debate, the Texan suggested that former President Ronald Reagan's decisions to withdraw U.S. troops from the region in the 198Os were wiser than the moves by successive Republican and Democratic presidents to increase U.S. military involvement there.

Speaking of extremists who target the U.S, Paul said, "They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting."

Paul argued that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "delighted that we're over there" in Iraq, pointing out that, "They have already... killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary."

Interesting because of how it is handled in the mainstream press. In the NYT, we learn:

Mr. Giuliani, trying to move his campaign past a week in which he has tried to convince conservatives that his positions on social issues should not disqualify him from winning the Republican nomination, repeatedly described the election as a referendum on Republican policies against terrorism, as he reminded an audience of what he had done in New York after Sept. 11. At one point, one of Mr. Giuliani’s lesser-known opponents, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, gave what turned out to be a big platform to Mr. Giuliani when he appeared to suggest that the United States invited the attacks of Sept. 11 by having originally invaded Iraq.

“May I comment on that?” Mr. Giuliani said, looking grim. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.”

The New York Post, not surprisingly, calls Paul a "fringe candidate" and his comment "shocking." It doesn't bother to quote the whole statement, however, but everything Giuliani said, including his request for more time to respond, is reported. The Washington Post goes a bit further, nothing that:

Paul refused to give in, saying that terrorists react to the United States' actions in the world. "If we ignore that, we ignore that at our risk," Paul said.

NPR doesn't mention it at all.

Giuliani used that as an excuse to remind everyone he was the mayor of New York City on 9/11. Needless to say, Paul is not winning friends and influencing people in the GOP with that attitude; I doubt he'd win that many supporters in the nation as a whole with that position. Sadly, of course, it's the truth, as The Nation points out:

The 9-11 Commission report detailed how bin Laden had, in 1996, issued "his self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia" and identified that declaration and another in 1998 as part of "a long series" of statements objecting to U.S. military interventions in his native Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general. Statements from bin Laden and those associated with him prior to 9-11 consistently expressed anger with the U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people and U.S. support of Israel.

The 9-11 Commission based its assessments on testimony from experts on terrorism and the Middle East. Asked about the motivations of the terrorists, FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the commission: "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States."

And yes, it is all about the framing. To read the articles today, you'd think Giuliani trounced Paul's absurd "Blame America First" statement. But, again, as The Nation points out, that's not what Paul said:

It is true that reasonable people might disagree about the legitimacy of Muslim and Arab objections to U.S. military policies. And, certainly, the vast majority of Americans would object to any attempt to justify the attacks on this country, its citizen and its soldiers.

But that was not what Paul was doing. He was trying to make a case, based on what we know from past experience, for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

Giuliani's reaction to Paul's comments, especially the suggestion that they should be withdrawn, marked him as the candidate peddling "absurd explanations."

And viewers on FoxNews agreed:

You Decide GOP Primary Poll Results

— 29% Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney

— 25% Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas

— 19% Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

Iraq is precisely the situation Reinhold Niebuhr could have had in mind when he argued that nations cannot afford to be moral agents.

Morally (and please note, not ethically; Aristotle gave us "ethics," and his understanding of the term was limited to the individual fulfilling their "telos" by achieving "Happiness"), we clearly have an obligation to fix what we broke in Iraq. However, "we" didn't break it; Bush & Co did, by their stupidity, their incompetence, their arrogance, their sheer inability to grasp what government is truly for. This is a consequence of democracy, of making "the people" sovereign, which in the end makes no one sovereign. And just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does governance; a vacuum of sovereignty is one that others will always rush to fill. The consequence can be, and has become, placing people into positions of power and authority in government who clearly have no understanding whatsoever as to what government actually does, and no consideration whatosever for the legitimacy of government. They understand government only as a means to power. As Molly Ivins said long ago, they don't want to govern, they want to rule.

And they've found out ruling is not all its cracked up to be, especially in a democracy, where the sovereign is not the government nor the elected officials, but the people. They may not always act the role of sovereign wisely or well, but they always have the last word. Our "leaders" have found out, once again, that rule over others is also just as complicated as it ever was, which is the primary reason our government was set up as representative, not as authoritarian. This is a secondary problem, one tied intimately to their inability to grasp the legitimacy of government, of any government: complete ignorance of history. The rule of kings and emperors just looks easy and inevitable to the ignorant who can only imagine history as we know it is history as it must be, and that it all leads inexorably to them, and their place on history's pinnacle.

Except history, of course, does not have a "pinnacle," any more than evolution is a process that leads to "success," any more than going to war means the only possible end is "victory" or "defeat." Sometimes it is simply disaster. The lesson of the "Good War" is the aberration; the lesson of Vietnam is the normative one.

So now we are in a quagmire in Iraq, a quagmire of our own making: should we stay, or should we go? As NPR reported this morning, the stark facts are the Iraqis have fewer jobs and less electricity, water, and food, than they did before the US invasion. Part of the problem is the ongoing violence, and so long as we stay, we prompt the violence caused by the objection to our presence. If we go, who is there to even pretend to prop up the powerless legislative body known as the Iraqi parliament? As Vali Nasr told Steve Inskeep yesterday, there is no mechanism in place for negotiations for peace between the factions currently dividing Iraq, and all talk of "benchmarks" is merely a fig-leaf for US domestic political consumption. Any expectation that an "oil law," or any law, coming from the Iraqis parliament will begin to quell the chaos in Iraq is, again, a complete ignorance as to what government is for, and how it actually functions to provide stability and prosperity. Nasr points out that our State Dept. should at least be trying to set up discussions between the Iraqis factions. Instead, we rely on more troops to brutalize the populace into submission. Even Hobbes was not as brutal in his argument for the power of the state. Even Rousseau was not as much of a Pollyanna as the fools running our government are. But, as Kevin Baker has pointed out, this was intentional, too:

...Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from the advent of mass democracy—and mass citizen armies—that the American and French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush's refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that immediate identification with our army's fortunes. Nor did it begin with the Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care, relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.

As Eliot asked at the beginning of the 20th century: "What live have you if you have not life together?" We have our answer, now.

Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush's rhetoric tries to make it one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.

The dolchtsosslegende Baker writes about is precisely built on the idea of a public morality: of a noble hero, icon of all the society holds true and good, betrayed by evil, by the immoral, by the one who "weds himself to inhumanity." But if there is no public hearth to share, what care I for your humanity? So here we stand, unable to win, unable to lose. What do we do now? What choices are we left with?

The dolchstosslegende, ironically, leads directly to the dissolution of democracy, as even the moral principles of the individual must be sacrificed for the security of the State, and even Niebuhr didn't think the State's inability to be a moral agent in the world gave it carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to survive, to ask literally anything (which can also be to ask nothing) of its citizens. Now, nothing having been asked of us, what question do we face? The only one we have allowed ourselves: should we stay, or should we go? If we stay, more American soldiers will be slaughtered or kidnapped; they will certainly all remain in harm's way. If we leave, we wash our hands of the mess we have made, and go home to try to wash away the blood. Morally, to go or to stay are both indefensible. But governments are not moral agents, and cannot be. We cannot continue to ask our soldiers to go to Iraq and die for our error in invading in the first place. That is a deeply immoral position. We cannot simply remove our forces and wash the blood off our hands. That is a deeply immoral decision.

Damned if we do; damned if we don't. No wonder Rick Sanchez on CNN resorted to the dichotomy of "stop killing them, thereby they'll stop hating you and wanting to kill you, or B, kill them all." So long as we think our national actions are somehow also moral actions, what other options does our political discourse offer?

Jerry Falwell 1933-2007

I know nothing about Jerry Falwell the individual, and I certainly don't want to speak ill of the dead. Had he not relentlessly promoted himself as a public persona, I wouldn't know his name at all. But he was a very public figure as the pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, and he made outrageous statements that, when he was called on them, he'd try to weasel out of:

On the broadcast of the Christian television program "The 700 Club," Falwell made the following statement:

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"

Falwell, pastor of the 22,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, viewed the attacks as God's judgment on America for "throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked."

But in a phone call to CNN, Falwell said that only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the deadly attacks.

"I do believe, as a theologian, based upon many Scriptures and particularly Proverbs 14:23, which says 'living by God's principles promotes a nation to greatness, violating those principles brings a nation to shame,'" he said.

It all depended on what audience he thought he was speaking to. But that's what public figures do; and that's why I have more regard for the desert Fathers than for most publicly religious individuals, from Jerry Falwell to the Rev. Barry Lynn. It's very difficult to be a public persona and still be true to what I consider core Christian principles. Still, even while NPR this morning replayed Falwell's later version of his excuse for those comments about 9/11, they didn't point out his role in the "Clinton Chronicles:"

A conservative political organization with ties to the Rev. Jerry Falwell covertly paid more than $200,000 to individuals who made damaging allegations about President Clinton's personal conduct, Salon has learned.

The money was paid out over a three-year period, between l994 and l996, by Citizens for Honest Government, headquartered in Orange County, Calif. The payments are detailed in the organization's confidential accounting ledgers and other internal records, copies of which were obtained by Salon.

The payments and the allegations -- some of which were either fabricated or grossly exaggerated -- were part of a covert and sophisticated political propaganda effort to influence public opinion against President Clinton.

One of the allegations, that Clinton protected an Arkansas-based cocaine-smuggling operation when he was governor of that state, spread from local talk radio shows to propaganda videos to the mainstream media, and eventually prompted an exhaustive, multimillion-dollar investigation by the House Banking Committee in 1994. The investigation concluded Clinton had nothing to do with the drug operation.

In another instance, in March, 1995, the Arkansas represenative of Citizens for Honest Government signed a contract agreeing to pay two Arkansa state troopers who had made questionable allegations supporting the theory that the late White House Counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered. The troopers, Roger Perry and Larry Patteson, who had previously told news organizations about Clinton's alleged extramarital affairs, had provided information about Foster's death to Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel.

The drug smuggling and Vincent Foster allegations were prominently featured in "The Clinton Chronicles," a video produced by Citizens for Honest Government and co-financed, publicized and distributed by Falwell. The notorious 1994 video also insinuated that Clinton's political adversaries often met untimely and suspicious deaths.

That's what I remember Jerry Falwell for: shamelessly promoting a package of evil lies for purely political purposes:

More than 150,000 copies of the video have been sold, according to Matrisciana. As many as double that number are reportedly in circulation.

The video's commercial success is due in large part to its promotion on Falwell's "Old Time Gospel Hour," as well as in an infomercial for the video, which viewers could order through Falwell's Liberty Alliance.

During the infomercial, Falwell interviews a silhouetted individual whom he identifies only as an "investigative reporter."

"Could you please tell me and the American people why you think that your life and the lives of the others on this video are in danger?" Falwell asks the man.

"Jerry, two weeks ago we had an interview with a man who was an insider," the mystery man replies. "His plane crashed and he was killed an hour before the interview. You may say this is just a coincidence, but there was another fellow that we were also going to interview, and he was killed in a plane crash. Jerry, are these coincidences? I don't think so."

Falwell reassured the man: "Be assured, we will be praying for your safety."

Falwell said in that NPR interview that they taught him in Baptist Bible College that religion and politics don't mix. They were right. And I will always remember Jerry Falwell as an object lesson in that truth.

In anticipation of a return to a reasoned discourse

Re: Christopher Hitchens and God is Not Great:

For examples of this honest critical assessment of the meaning, as well as both the strengths and limitations, of religion in today's world, I would recommend my book with Gianni Vattimo and John Caputo entitled After the Death of God, except that one can find a similar sentiment marked in almost any other current work in philosophy of religion.

And:

Hitchens seems to have done none of the reading on religion that might have broadened his thinking--no Wittgenstein, no Rudolf Otto, none of the phenomenologists who help explain why thoughtful, even intellectual people may be religious. I expected better from Hitchens, and I expect better from the rest of us.

On the other hand, what fun is reason when blogs make it possible for anonymice to become experts in matters where their opinions are untainted by any actual knowledge? Surely that is democracy inaction.

Where are the Mother's Days of Yesteryear?

*Be kind to your web-footed friends.
For a duck may be somebody's mother!
Be kind to your friends in the swamp!
Where the weather is very, very damp!
Now, you may think that this is the end...

WELL IT IS!



*Tune: Stars and Stripes Forever, 3rd movement, if you're wondering.

Ex-CBS Commentators Wanted

What does it say about the state of TV news when you have to go to a comedy show to have someone say what would be obvious to a well informed 10 year old?



And if you think he's exaggerating about Iran:

"With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike," said Cheney on a visit to the John C. Stennis aircraft carrier off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, a close U.S. ally.

"We'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region," he said, speaking from a cavernous hangar bay. Stennis officials said 3,500 to 4,000 of the 5,000 personnel aboard were on hand.

Iran denies any intention to develop nuclear weapons but the United States and Israel have refused to rule out military action if diplomatic efforts to halt its civilian nuclear drive come to nothing. Iran also denies U.S. and British accusations that it is fuelling violence in Iraq,

"I want you to know that the American people do not support a policy of retreat. We want to complete the mission, get it done right, and return with honor," Cheney said, drawing cheers.

Great; just great.

"Mimsy were the Borogoves"

is one of the great science fiction/horror stories of the 1940's. I call it a "horror" story because of the way it ends, with every parent's worst nightmare: losing their children to a world the parents can't begin to comprehend. Oddly, that 1943 story captured a sense of rapid change which perfectly characterized my Baby Boomer childhood, but doesn't reflect quite the world my daughter will grow in to. I was an adult before I began listening to Duke Ellington and some of the music my father grew up with; my daughter already listens to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and, as she says, she's probably the only person in her high school with Judy Collins on her iPod.

The story, by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and his wife, C.L. Moore) is my favorite Kuttner story, and the occassion of a movie based on it brought out a collection of his/their stories, which gives me a chance, finally, to have their stories in more than scattered anthologies. Until I saw the book, I vaguely worried that the movie was based on the story; now that I've seen the website, my worst fears are confirmed.

Padgett wrote a story typical of 1940's science fiction (and why it was a "Golden Era,") in which an inventor in a far and almost inhuman future (the differences are only hinted at throughout the story, heightening the "horror" affect) sends a box of toys back through time. Not for any particular purpose, but rather because the time machine he has created needs an object he can test. The randomly selected toys never return, so he tries again with more toys, then finally gives the whole thing up as a failure and thinks no more about it. A random act, in other words, with no malice or beneficence intended: the worst kind of horror of all, complete indifference.

Or rather, a complete inablity to imagine consequences. The first box arrives near Scotty, the 10 year old boy and protagonist of the story. He and his sister Emma soon start playing with the toys, and learning. Which would send a chill down the spine of any Boomer family who has raised children within the past two decades, what with all the "educational" toys and "developmentally appropriate" crib mobiles and such that came on the market (are they still around, or has that fad faded, too?).

This was the first story to make me realize children really are "different," that they are not "little adults," and that their minds are (conceivably, at least) open to alternate views of the universe (as if ours is the only one). Padgett leans heavily on this, pointing out that, for example, the Euclidean geometry we take for granted (pace Socrates) as a description of space is not necessarily the only system of description possible. The "non-Euclidean geometry" of the story is used as the "difference" between the parents and their children, a way of perceiving and thinking in a way meant to be complete inexplicable to those of us who think in Euclidean terms. Indeed, these toys teach the children to think in ways humans don't or, in the world of the story, haven't learned to yet. You can see how that could become a powerful metaphor for the "generation gap" of the '60's, or for the necessary differences between generations brought about by rapid technological change. You can see, in other words, where where the horror enters in. Think of grandparents perplexed by computers their grandchildren handle with ease. As the toys do what they are supposed to do, "teach" the children how to see the universe as the toys' designers have learned to, the children learn slowly but surely to leave their parents behind. By the end of the story, "all mimsy were the borogoves/And the mome raths outgrabe" stops being a snatch of nonsense verse, and becomes directions only a child, a properly trained child, can understand. And the story ends, as it must, in nightmare.

This could be, in other words, an absolutely visionary movie, a metaphor for our age, a revelation, of sorts (let's not get carried away here).

So what does the movie do, besides update the story from mid-20th century to early 21st century? Well, now the arrival of the box is not random and indifferent but, apparently, directed and intentional. And the change in the children is not frightening and ultimately horrific (for the parents; there is definitely a "childhood's end" in the original tale), but salvific. From the trailer, it looks like the two adorable kids, rather than terrifying their parents, end up saving the future.

Think Mulder and Scully as brother and sister but living an upper-middle class childhood and instead of alien conspiracies, technology helps us save us from ourselves and fix the future we haven't yet lived through and get to fix thanks to a time machine, a talking rabbit, and two appealing child actors.

Blecch.

All I can do is be grateful the movie gives me the book which gives me some Kuttner stories I didn't have otherwise.

ADDING: There is simply something infantile about taking a story with a very mature perspective on children and how "other" they actually are, and turning it into a story about how children will, essentially, save us from ourselves. The latter is the decayed and dessicated caricture of the navel-gazing 'Baby Boomer' generation, the generation which never really grew up and took responsibilty for its own actions. In that sense, the Bush Administration is a perfect metaphor for our times, and a movie that turns this kind of insightful story inside out to make it "warm and fuzzy" is also a perversely apt description of our pursuits. To wrap it all together with as many pop culture references as my poor brain will contain, last night Anderson Cooper ran a special: "What is Christianity? Where do you fit?" One brief (mercifully!) segment focussed on the "gospel of wealth" preachers like Joel Osteen. All three members of Cooper's panel (two conservative theologians, a Southern Baptist and Jim Wallis, and one American Baptist, a professor at Chicago Theologicaly Seminary) decried this kind of preaching as un-Biblical and completely at odds with the Gospel (thank goodness!). But the "Gospel of Wealth" is another metaphor for America, an America blissfully uaware that it is Omelas, resting very comfortably on the misery of the Third World, which we keep locked in a basement of neglect that we don't even pretend exists. It was not (quite) always thus, and stories like "All Mimsy were the Borogoves" is an artifact of a time when we were mature enough to face our fears of the future.

Now we wait expectantly, like small frightened children, for the future to rescue us from our inability to act. We drown in our self-interests, and look to our own children to save us from our selfishness. We turn stories of challenge inside out, the better to keep us from recognizing what we have done, and what we have not done.

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.