One for Tena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The central problem, though, is this one:

"You cannot lead people toward the good."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: We'll see if this system works.

Tena comments (in part):

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

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

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

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

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

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

One for the Mad Priest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: and yes, the world is watching:

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

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

One for DAS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One for Mimi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ya ready, boots?

Pastor Dan said this:

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

Which prompted me to say this:

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

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

Or to walk away from this system altogether?

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

Which prompted him to say this:

Fine. Start walking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody else seeing a pattern here?

This is not the first government quarantine for tuberculosis even in 2007. But it is, apparently, the first by the federal government. The similarities are striking:

The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. The CDC told him he couldn't fly aboard commercial airliners.

"I thought to myself: You're nuts. I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said.

He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta.

He is not facing prosecution, health officials said.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the paper. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."

And this is still the issue: is TB as contagious as the common cold?

We do not want this disease in the United States, although it's clearly here. And we do want to take reasonable measures to make sure that it's not spread in the community. But it does not require locking anybody up in a jail. TB is not that easy to get. I mean, if you hang around in homeless shelters, in prisons or in places where a lot of people are immuno-compromised, like have HIV disease, then it's certainly going to be spread. But just someone walking around, at least if he doesn't go right up next to you and breathe in your mouth for a couple of hours, you're not going to get TB that way. So we have to learn something about tuberculosis, as well as something about the inappropriateness and, I think, unconstitutionality of locking people up with the disease.

This is the same strain of TB Robert Daniels has. And CDC officials are not (yet) saying this unnamed individual is highly contagious:

"Is the patient himself highly infectious? Fortunately, in this case, he's probably not," Gerberding said. "But the other piece is this bacteria is a very deadly bacteria. We just have to err on the side of caution."

But the fear of a form of TB that can't be treated with drugs is very high:

But Gerberding noted that U.S. health officials have had little experience with this type of TB. It's possible it may have different transmission patterns, she said.

"We're thankful the patient was not in a highly infectious state, but we know the risk of transmission isn't zero, even with the fact that he didn't have symptoms and didn't appear to be coughing," Gerberding said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"We've got to really look at the people closest to him, get them skin tested."

So far, our reaction to this fear has been to lock up the person who is the source of our anxiety, and think ourselves well-served by that.

Are we?

"Is our children learning?"

“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

This is from a report on an evaluation of interrogation techniques used since 9/11. The report found, among other things, that the techniques being used "are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable," and the "interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices."

We already know the military is concerned about the impact of such shows as "24," which make torture seem like the only way to deal with terrorists (but then, when every new horror show that comes out presents torture as a form of entertainment, e.g., "Saw I-III, Hostel I-II, The Hills have Eyes I-II, what surprise is "24"?) But maybe it will make a few old Cold Warriors sit up and take notice if we say we've become the enemy we opposed for so long, and are becoming the enemy we oppose now. And if that doesn't work, there's always the good old argument from utility:

...in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

But consider the comment about the questioning of German prisoners by those who "'had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,' and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning", and the subtle racism of this justification for torture:

A. B. Krongard, who was the executive director of the C.I.A., the No. 3 post at the agency, from 2001 to 2004, agreed with that assessment but acknowledged that the agency had to create an interrogation program from scratch in 2002.

He said officers quickly consulted counterparts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other countries to compile a “catalog” of techniques said to be effective against Arab and Muslim prisoners. They added other methods drawn from those that American troops were trained to withstand in case of capture.

(That last reference to "methods drawn from those that American troops were trained to withstand" is a reference to SERE. The article takes the very safe route of not acknowledging any public reporting on SERE until the release of a Pentagon report on May 18. But Jane Meyer was reporting on SERE two years ago. NIMBY for the NYT, I suppose.)

I don't think we had an interrogation system in place when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the threat to the US was much more substantial then. But somehow we managed to create an interrogation system which worked without resort to "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams" or individual interrogation programs designed by medical doctors, or legalistic reinterprations of the word "torture".

I don't want to jump to a condemnation of violence used as entertainment, but when I see something like this I have to wonder: could Olivier and Hoffman perhaps have done better simply to play Shakespeare?

Mr. Krongard even recalls receiving a proposal for help with questioning Qaeda suspects from an American dentist who said he “could create pain no human being could withstand.”

There's an irony here: Shakespeare lived in a world where torture was commonplace, and those who threatened the public peace wound up with their heads affixed to London Bridge. Lodovico's last speech in "Othello" makes it clear what lies ahead for Iago:

[To IAGO] O Spartan dog,
More fell than anguish, hunger, or the sea!
Look on the tragic loading of this bed;
This is thy work: the object poisons sight;
Let it be hid. Gratiano, keep the house,
And seize upon the fortunes of the Moor,
For they succeed on you. To you, lord governor,
Remains the censure of this hellish villain;
The time, the place, the torture: O, enforce it!
Myself will straight aboard: and to the state
This heavy act with heavy heart relate.

But Shakespeare seldom shows torture on stage, or tortures his characters even in the course of a play. The most famous scene I can think of, gouging out the eyes of Gloucester in "Lear," is clearly presented as an act of barbarous evil, not as a justified treatment of an enemy. Now, however, having removed torture from our everyday existence, from the accepted practice of the state, we've made it part and parcel of our entertainment. It is still evil, but it is evil that is meant to sustain our attention for almost two hours. And is it really too much of a leap to say that, having done so, we now easily make it part and parcel of our security apparatus, our need to defend ourselves? The US military, as I noted, doesn't seem to think so.

I'm not so sure this descent into barbarism is so surprising, nor so abrupt.

Memorial Day 2007

(I'm repeating myself, because I've cannibalized this post already today. So be it.)

If ever there was any doubt Santayana was right, this episode of This American Life would dispel it.

Not only were we warned about what would happen if we invaded Iraq, we had history as our teacher. Every schoolchild knows that World War I simply bled over into World War II. You may not know (I didn't!) that we occupied Germany after World War I. You won't be surprised, given Hitler's rise to power (often blamed on the way Germany was treated after that war) that the occupation was a disaster. Supposedly we learned that lesson, and did a better job rebuilding Germany the second time. But we've been resting on those laurels ever since.

So now our Vice President continues to demonize the very forces we were warned we would unleash, which is the very definition of denying responsibility for your actions. Perhaps he should spend more time in Iraq:

"I thought, 'What are we doing here? Why are we still here?' " said Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. "We're helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us."

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

A small minority of Delta Company soldiers - the younger, more recent enlistees in particular - seem to still wholeheartedly support the war. Others are ambivalent, torn between fear of losing more friends in battle, longing for their families and a desire to complete their mission.

With few reliable surveys of soldiers' attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

Memorial Day, of course, didn't start as a day to honor veterans who "died for our freedom." Ironic, because the last war fought "for our freedom" before WWII, was the Civil War. We had a lot of wars in the 19th century, most of which we ignore: the Spanish American War, the Mexican War, the war in the Philippines, the war in Panama, all the imperialist efforts Mark Twain decried and Henry Thoreau protested. Memorial Day was not a day to remember we'd won our freedom at the expense of others; it was a day simply to remember dead family members, those who had died in the Civil War. Now we extrapolate the concrete reality into an abstraction: "they" died for "our freedom."

Bollocks. Our freedom wasn't threatened in Vietnam, or Korea, in the Persian Gulf, either time we fought there in the last 20 years. It wasn't threatened by the sinking of the Maine or in the Philippines, either. It was threatened in the Civil War, and Memorial Day came from that conflict. Memorial Day is simply a day to honor the dead. Perhaps we would better to limit it to the dead we know, and if we don't know any war dead, to be respectful of those who do. Perhaps we would do better to remember the uncut hair of graves, and to visit a graveyard and remember these dead were once as young and fair as you, or me. Perhaps we would do better to simply remember Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and let it go at that. We can certainly do better than to continue the slaughter:

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die,” he continued. “If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Call the names. Call the names. Call the names.

America as Othello

I don't know why I didn't see this earlier. It seems rather plain, now. America is Othello. Bush is our Iago. Iraq, is our tragedy.

Paul Krugman:

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their trust had been betrayed.

Tragedy, for Sophocles, did not involve an enemy; merely fate. Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" come closer to this ideal than his other plays. Aristotle called "Oedipus" the perfect tragedy; in the Poetics, it is (ironically) his Platonic form for all such plays. There is no villain in "Oedipus," nor yet again in "Antigone." Fate, in the perfect tragedy, is the antagonist of the tragic hero, largely because the Greeks did not have the moral view of the universe Christianity has taught us to have. The Greek view of the universe was entirely ethical. Chaos was the normal condition of the universe, and into chaos the universe would one day return. Reason, the logos, imposed order; but it imposed order against a chaos that is implacable and unceasing, that is never eliminated, and so one day will return when the energy of the logos is exhausted. It is, as we say, as inevitable as sunrise.

So the Greek universe was not moral, sprung from good and tending toward good, but ethical: unleashed against chaos, the only telos of the logos is improvement, "happiness," which must inevitably be lost against the permanent state of disorder and disaster for those who seek order. Oedipus seeks order out of the horror of his predicted fate, as does Jocasta, and both are doomed to fail in their efforts. But, given the predictions, both are doomed to make their efforts, too.

Othello is doomed only by his naivete, his willingness to trust Iago even when he should trust Desdemona. But he hasn't learned to trust her, yet; he hasn't learned to rely on her as a husband can learn to rely wholly on a wife. And he hasn't learned yet to trust Cassio, his newly appointed lieutenant. He trusts Iago because Iago tells him just enough of the truth to make Othello think Iago is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is only when Othello begins to repeat Iago's lies to others, repeat them as explanation for his actions, that he begins to realize Iago's statements are lies. Just before he kills Desdemona, Othello all but explains himself to Emilia, Iago's wife and Desdemona's handmaid. Emilia assures Othello that her mistress is faithful to him, and Othello almost doubts the lies of Iago. But only after Desdemona is dead, and Emilia has revealed all about the handkerchief which became a symbol of Desdemona's supposed infidelity, does Othello realize what he has done, and how responsible he is.

That is where we are now: just now realizing what we have done, and how responsible we are. Frank Rich notes there are 4 million Iraqi refugees as a direct result of the US invasion. But he also notes this Administration sweeps that information under the rug, tacitly and explicitly:

How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

At some point one can only wonder: just who is this Administration representing?

We wanted to believe we are a force for good in the world, and so we went to war. I know a Navy chaplain who told me how much good the Navy does, how much humanitarian work is done by the aircraft carrier he was sailing on. But the military is not organized and structured and trained to do good: it is meant for one thing, and that is to destroy the enemy. We knew before this war what we would face. We were warned, in excruciating detail. We also know we were ill-equipped to rebuild the society we destroyed. We learned that lesson in our occupation of Germany after World War I. We didn't repeat it after World War II; but we quickly forgot the lesson again. We preferred to listen to the honeyed lies of Iago, rather than the gentle truths of Desdemona.

Now we are only waiting to accept responsibility for what we have done. But as a nation, will we? Can we? Paul Krugman is right: ridicule for the war-mongers would be a good place to start. But that won't happen this weekend; not on Memorial Day.

Memorial Day began as a day for families to remember their dead. Not everyone else's dead: their dead. Real people who had really died. We've turned that into a national celebration of American uniqueness, of those who "died for our freedom," as if freedom were bought only in blood on the battlefield. The tragedy is that we don't understand our errors, and we keep repeating them. Like Othello, we may be gifted at military command, but we seem wholly incapable at civil administration. It is not freedom our soldiers are dying for now: it is for our innocence, our naivete.

Let us pray for peace; and for forgiveness.

Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy!

I should post this at Fr. Jake's place, where it won't go unnoticed; but a comments block is no place for what I have to say in response to this:

Usually it is the progressives who are blamed for often being too quick in taking the consequentialist approach to most ethical questions; the greatest good for the greatest number is the right thing to do. The problem with this approach is that it can create victims. Sometimes, that cannot be avoided, when faced with difficult moral decisions. Apparently, the "centrists," or at least one of them, are now choosing to use this ethical approach to justify bigotry.

Sorry, but the simple, short, and direct response is: utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) is NEVER the correct response to an ethical question, especially when faced with "difficult moral decisions." Let me give you an example from a play I was just teaching: Shakespeare's "Othello."

In the course of teaching that play I realized something about the characters of Desdemona, Othello, and Iago. Desdemona and Othello have much in common, despite the seeming differences which Iago, from the beginning of the play, sets out to exploit. Iago assures Roderigo in the very first scene of the play that the newly-minted marriage between the Moor and the "supersubtle Venetian," as he calls her, will not last. Desdemona, he tells Roderigo, will soon tire of her exotic warrior and his tales of world travel and courageous fighting, and realize that, as a sophisticate of Venetian society she has little in common with the military commander who rose through the ranks to his position of power. And Othello will all too soon realize he has no understanding of the ways of Venetian society Desdemona takes for granted.

Iago, in other words, can't see Othello and Desdemona being other than he is: a worldly materialist grounded only in his self-interests and self-aggrandizement. Before he begins to discourse on Othello and Desdemona, Iago tells Roderigo how he despises those men who do their duty to others and end up worn out and discarded. The men who "have some soul," as Iago puts it, are those who show their duties outwardly, but privately take care of themselves and so, when they are cashiered, have lined their coats (again, Iago's metaphor) so they are taken care of when retirement is forced upon them. If you hear echoes of the parable of the unjust steward and the lesson "Make friends on earth so that when the end comes, they will welcome you into the eternal homes," I don't think that's an accident. Iago also tells Rodgerigo, in a clear reversal of the famous "I am that I am" from the burning bush: "I am not what I am." But that's another analysis for another time.

Iago is wrong about the love between Desdemona and Othello, because what Iago actually preys on is not Othello's easy boredom with Desdemona, but Othello's transcendent sense of right and wrong: his morality, in other words. Emilia, Iago's wife, might as well be speaking for her husband when, at the end of Act IV, just before Othello enters that same bed-chamber to murder his wife for what he thinks are her thousand infidelities, she and her mistress discuss the possibility of cuckoldry:

DESDEMONA
Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

EMILIA
The world's a huge thing: it is a great price.
For a small vice.

DESDEMONA
In troth, I think thou wouldst not.

EMILIA
In troth, I think I should; and undo't when I had
done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a
joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for
gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty
exhibition; but for the whole world,--why, who would
not make her husband a cuckold to make him a
monarch? I should venture purgatory for't.

DESDEMONA
Beshrew me, if I would do such a wrong
For the whole world.

EMILIA
Why the wrong is but a wrong i' the world: and
having the world for your labour, tis a wrong in your
own world, and you might quickly make it right.

DESDEMONA
I do not think there is any such woman.

EMILIA
Yes, a dozen; and as many to the vantage as would
store the world they played for.
But I do think it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

There it is: the eye for an eye, the tooth for a tooth. If men wrong us, argues Emilia, we have every right to balance the scales by wronging them. Two wrongs don't make a right, but the first excuses the second, if only that rude justice be done. This is not morality, but ethics: the pursuit of that which assures happiness for the pursuer. And it is, as Iago is as well, resolutely horizontal: that is, it remains on one plane, flat; there is no transcendence in it at all, nothing that rises above the material level of a zero-sum game where if you make me lose something, I regain only by taking something from you.

And it is precisely in the issue of transcendence that morality departs from ethics, and the two are distinguished.

Othello to some degree, Desdemona to a far greater degree, understand the importance of morality over ethics. As Desdemona says to Iago:

Unkindness may do much;
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love.

She stays true to this resolve. Even as Othello smothers her, she accepts her fate; so much so that when she revives long enough to speak to Emilia, she tries to deny her death is either suicide or murder by her husband. In her morality she is linked to Othello: they both understand that it is the transcendence of morality which makes it true. That morality, of course, also blinds them to the evil of Iago, but it preserves their souls and makes Othello a tragic, and not just a pathetic, figure.

What torments Othello and causes Desdemona, even on her death bed, to refuse to blame Othellos for her death, is something that transcends the material universe Iago is bound to, and utilitarianism affirms. As Othello says to Iaqo, speaking of Cassio but actually speaking of himself:

They that mean virtuously, and yet do so,
The devil their virtue tempts, and they tempt heaven.

Iago, of course, never means virtuously, and so the devil never tempts his virtue, for he has none. As he says shortly after Othello's words, speaking of Desdemona but actually speaking of himself:

Her honour is an essence that's not seen;
They have it very oft that have it not:

Here is the crux of the play, in fact: honor is what we give others, just as we give them our trust. But both are earned from their actions, and may be, as Iago proves, entirely undeserved. Still, without them, how would we function? And yet honor and trust that remain rooted only in the horizontal plane of the material, are worthless, whether they are spent on Iago or given to Desdemona. Only when they are transcenden, are they truly valuable. As Emilia tells Desdemona, virtue is a thing of the world; gain the world, and you can redefine virtue. But Othello and Desdemona understand that in gaining the world, you will lose your own soul. And no redefinition of virtue will win that back for you.

So, is there a point where "unavoidable victims must be created for the greater good"? It depends, of course, on what you consider the "greater good." Iago unashamedly sets himself up as the only valid recipient of the "greater good," but he does so by assuring himself that everyone else thinks the same, and those who don't have no soul. Desdemona and Othello know better; and it is the violation of that transcendent morality (or his perception of it, relying too much on the lies of Iago) which drives Othello to his madness. He is not even concerned with the world's view of him. When Lodovico comes from Venice to relieve him of command and allow him to leave Cassio behind, Othello is not assuaged by the apparent assurance that whatever cuckoldry may have happened, the cause will soon be far from his spouse; instead, he takes it as one more sign of preferment, one more indication that in a fallen world the moral man must stand for the right despite the consequences. When Othello kills Desdemona he does not, like Iago, resort to further murders in order to hide his crime; instead, he confesses it, even in the face of Desdemona's death-bed denial of his crime.

The first sacrifice of morality must always be the moral agent herself. A morality which asks a sacrifice of the other greater than that asked of the moral agent is no morality at all; it is, at best, a cruel ethic. The problem with utilitarianism as an ethic, in a nutshell, is that it is a materialist ethic. The greatest good is always defined as a horizontal good, and that is always an unalterably a zero-sum game unless the greatest good is defined as something transcendent rather than merely imminent. So long as the greater good is confined to the horizon the latter, there must always be "unavoidable victims...created for the greater good." That may yet be ethical; but it is never moral.

None of which is to condemn Fr. Jake nor the point he has to make in his post about the ABC's failure to invite Bishop Gene Robinson to Lambeth (it is a serious slight, indeed, IMHO, and not one to be excused because the good Bishop is seen by some to be a divisive figure. No less so, frankly, and for no better reason, than our Presiding Bishop. Yet the reason for not inviting one, while inviting the other, is surely a distinction without a difference, since many in the Anglican Communion still object to women priests, as well.). What the Archbishop of Canterbury is faced with is the dilemma of the institution: like nations, can the institution itself afford to be moral? Can it ask sacrifices of its constituents that they would not ask of themselves? If it does not, it is not transcendent of the individuals which comprise it. But if it does, is it transcendent? Or tyrannical? If the church as an institution is not moral, what good is it? But if it is not cognizant of the material, what virtue does it have? Desdemona recognizes that virtue is a thing of the world, and in the world. Emilia sees it only as a thing of the world. Desdemona also sees, however, that it must be transcendent, as well as immanent: or it is no virtue at all, it is, as Iago says, merely "a fig!" And if that's all it is well, then, the church, and we, have a problem indeed.

What Could Have Been

Dennis Kucinich:

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, you know, there’s a fundamental misperception about the path the Democrats should be taking. We shouldn’t be offering any legislation at all. We should just simply tell the President we’re not going to fund the war. And this idea about funding the war to help the troops is absurd. You want to help the troops, bring them home.

I offered a plan, HR 1234, that would provide for a plan that would bring the troops home, close the bases, end the occupation and reach out to the international community for an international peacekeeping and security force that would move in as our troops leave. But we can’t do that until we end the occupation. We can’t end the occupation until we stop funding the war. We simply do not have to have a bill, Amy. It’s just as simple as that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What about those Democrats who argue that they could not get a majority vote or at least one that would survive a presidential veto to stop the funding, so that they’ve got to then have a concession of some sort?

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I want to make sure I’m being clear about this. I’m saying that it’s not necessary to have a bill, that the process depends on legislation to keep the war going. But there’s money in the pipeline right now to bring the troops home. We simply should tell the President we’re not going to fund the war, period. We don’t need legislation to do that. And the idea that somehow we need to fund the war to help the troops, again, it’s an absurd thought, and we need to start to reorient ourselves to getting out of Iraq. This administration isn’t going to do that, and frankly, the Democratic Congress is failing the American people at this moment.

Nancy Pelosi:

This is not the end of the debate. … We will have legislation to repeal the President’s authority for the war in Iraq. We will have that vote. We will have votes on Mr. Murtha’s defense appropriations bill, one of them the regular order defense appropriations bill, another one the supplemental that has been requested by the Bush Administration.

We could have taken a giant step in a new direction, instead we’re taking a baby step. But as I said, this is not the end of the debate.

As we think about all of this, I’d like to recall the words of a philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who once observed that nations are driven to an endless flywheel of violence because they believe that one last, one final gesture of violence will bring peace. But each time they sow the seeds for more violence.

6/26/2006:

In the poll, 57% say Congress should pass a resolution that outlines a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops; 39% say that decision should be left to the president and his advisers.

Precisely half support withdrawing all U.S. forces immediately or within 12 months, while 41% say the United States should keep troops there for as many years as needed. Eight percent call for sending more troops.

The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll (link courtesy Holden):

A majority of Americans continue to support a timetable for withdrawal. Sixty-three percent say the United States should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq sometime in 2008.

While the troops remain in Iraq, the overwhelming majority of Americans support continuing to finance the war, though most want to do so with conditions. Thirteen percent want Congress to block all spending on the war. The majority, 69 percent, including 62 percent of Republicans, say Congress should appropriate money for the war, but on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks for progress and that the Iraqi government meets those goals. Fifteen percent of all respondents want Congress to approve war spending without conditions.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

--W.H. Auden

"It is moronic!"

If only because I want to keep it handy for repeated viewing.

When I was 12 years old

Thanks to Tena I find this NYT article, which includes this very interesting observation:

The evangelical movement, however, is clearly evolving. Members of the baby boomer generation are taking over the reins, said D. G. Hart, a historian of religion. The boomers, he said, are markedly different in style and temperament from their predecessors and much more animated by social justice and humanitarianism. Most of them are pastors, as opposed to the heads of advocacy groups, making them more reluctant to plunge into politics to avoid alienating diverse congregations.

We forget that Jerry Falwell was not a "Baby Boomer." He was already 22 years old when I was born, and I'm in the middle of the "Baby Boom" generation. Falwell was denouncing Brown v. Board of Education before most Boomers knew what that opinion was:

"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."

While some Boomers are nearing retirement age, and almost all are middle aged or older, such is the peculiar nature of churches (even more peculiar than government; Clinton was the first Boomer President) that only now are the prevailing voices in the churches beginning to be Baby Boomer voices (one need only look to the Roman Catholic church. Although "Baby Boom" was a U.S. phenomena, Pope Benedict is old enough to have been among the Hitlerjugend, a claim no "Boomer" could make.).

Churches are extremely odd this way; an oddness that really has to be stared at to be appreciated. True enough, young pastors and priests enter the ministry every year. But the median age of their congregations has changed little in several decades: all that has really changed is the people making up that "median." Older people have removed themselves due to attrition, younger people have grown older and moved into replace them. But by and large, the church is still your father's church. The Boomers are a huge demographic, but as they have aged their parents have lived on. I'm not so sure this isn't the first time in human history that so many generations have lived together at one time in such large numbers. And in the Church, that repository of all that is traditional, that place where it is proclaimed that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever," that phrase has more and more come to mean: "And that means the way he was when I was 12 years old!"

And that timespan between today and "when I was 12 years old!" has been getting longer and longer and longer.

Consider the shock of Falwell's words about the 1954 desegregation decision. Try to imagine uglier words being preached from a pulpit. I grew up among the generations that could formulate those words; but I couldn't do it today, not even to denounce such an attitude. The concepts wouldn't even occur to me. My daughter's generation doesn't see race as I did when I was their age. When will the church speak for them? My father's generation is still alive (which is not to say they are all racists; but their theology and experiences are not mine, nor my daughter's). Who in the church speaks for them?

There are pastoral and ecclesial problems here, but there is also an observation: which is that the mills of God grind slowly, indeed. They may also grind exceeding fine, but they seem to move slower and slower as the generations move faster and faster. Rick Warren, as the NYT article points out, does not speak to the generation Jerry Falwell gave voice to. No doubt Rick Warren will be around as long, if not longer, than Rev. Falwell; and he may be just as, if not more, influential. Who can say? But such is the peculiar nature of the Church today, that those who finally get to speak for their generation are always speaking from experiences already long past and largely unknown or forgotten by those who most need to listen. And they are not speaking to the situation that is so much as to the situation that was.

To Live In Communion

I'm taking this from something the MadPriest put up; but he won't mind, it was obviously meant for sharing (of course, I could be wrong):

My theology continues to tell me that it is in and through our widest councils that we will most fully discern both what we should do, and how we should go about it.

This is the summing up of an excellent capsule history of the Anglican Communion, which, it turns out, is not that old, and yet not that new, either:

The word Anglicanism first emerged in the 1830s, and the phrase 'Anglican Communion' was first used in 1851, and by 1860 was recognised as referring to our fellowship of legally independent Churches, worshipping in the tradition of the Anglican Prayer Book, with a ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and in communion with the See of Canterbury. In this sense, the 'Anglican Communion' was never established, as was the case of, for example, the Lutheran World Federation.

What, by the way, does it mean to be an Anglican? Does it mean adherence to a doctrine, a set of teachings about Christianity, submission to an ecclesial authority? No, not really:

Until recently (with the conclusion of various regional agreements) it was the case that it was sufficient to be in communion with the See of Canterbury to be in communion with the whole of the Anglican Communion.

Coming out of a congregational polity (where I still hold my ministerial standing and will have my ordination until I die), this is the air of the Reformation I breath most deeply. My profoundest understanding of Christianity is that, through Christ, I am in communion with all persons, with all of Creation. Which, yes, is a little grand and universal, but there we are. I am certainly more comfortable with a polity that understands itself to be bound fundamentally by being in Communion with the See of Canterbury. As much as Archbishop Akinola disagrees with my stance on homosexuality (if he knew it he would!), and I disagree with his, we can still be together in communion with Canterbury. And may that communion draw us both closer to Christ as we are drawn to see each other as children of God.

But of the parts I love in this speech, this is the part I love the most:

When we look back on the history of the Church, it has always been assailed with divisions to be overcome. The unity of Christ's people is one of the prime targets of the devil, who does not want the world to look at us and say 'See how these Christians love one another!' The devil's purposes are far better served when people look at us and see us fighting and quarrelling, and doing so in ways that fail to reflect the spirit of charity, tolerance and gracious magnanimity that has always characterised the best of Anglicanism! So whether it was the preaching of the gospel to the Gentiles, or the precise understanding of the Eucharist, or the various models of salvation, or slavery, or usury, or contraception, or women's ordination - or even questions over vestments, and whether, and how high, to raise up the bread and wine with the words of consecration - well, God is bigger! And the unity that he grants us is a gift of grace that can overcome all manner of human disagreement.

Of course, some may leave the Communion as a result of our current problems. But we must not take ourselves too seriously. As Joost de Blank once said 'God works his purposes out, despite the confusion of our minds.'

There is a question of institutionalized ambiguity here. But ambiguity is at the heart of Christianity. What, for instance, does it mean to live in communion? The more narrowly you define that, the more tightly you nail down the boundaries of the answer, the more you exclude someone out. And when do you know that someone is not the Christ? When are you certain you have not put Christ beyond the pale? The more certain you are, the more likely you are to be wrong. That institutionalized ambiguity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the Anglican Communion. The Most Revd Njongonkulu Ndungane attributes the forces of division to the devil; I would attribute them to power, to something my own theology practically raises to the metaphysical level of having its own existence. I recognized the awkwardness of that even as I advance it, and perhaps with another twenty years study of Derrida and Heidegger I will have the vocabulary for that understanding. For now, however, I can only point out what seems to me the obvious: that power is very seductive, that power always seeks its own ends, and that we who think we wield power are never more than its servants. Thus the importance of the power of powerlessness.

I began with the opening quote because that is precisely how I read the Bible. Too many people, I find, read that collection of books (it is not one book but many; "Bible" itself is the root of our word "bibliography," or "biblioteque" in French, which we call "library.") rigidly and sternly, when they are in fact bursting with life and humor and contradiction, and yet all held together by the revelation of God, by the communion with the Godhead, just as Christians are (or should be): "united in accordance with the will of the Triune God whom we seek to serve." Ecclesiastes is placed, in no small part, to respond to and rebuke some of the smugger sureties of Proverbs (the latter a favorite text of many, the former largely overlooked except for the first lines of Chapter 3). Deuteronomy is one text, Leviticus quite another, as DAS has pointed out to us. Jonah teaches us, not about the whale, but about human vanity and God's great mercy. There is a fight going on between Peter, Paul, and the author of Hebrews in the New Testament; John ignores Matthew and Mark, but picks up the bits of Luke he likes or that suit his purpose; the Pastoral letters ignore the concerns of the ecclesial ones. It's not all fight and conflict, but it is more communion than commonality and congruence. It is, in other words, a great conversation in which the common topic of discussion is the presence of God. Small wonder if it is also contentious and shot through with discomforting ambiguities.

The questions and concerns the Bishop addresses to the Communion are ones I agree with, and I agree are the most important for all the instrumentalities of the Communion to consider. I cannot improve on what he says, and there are other outlets with people who understand the details of this situation far better than I. In the particulars I am certainly nothing more than a student. Still, I think the Bishop's conclusion absolutely accurate, and absolutely applicable to any number of occassions when Christians, particularly Christians of one denomination, differ with one another:

I suspect that future generations will see this as something of a storm in a teacup, and certainly not as central to the Christian life. For the centre of Christian life is Jesus Christ. As I said at the TEAM conference, God's eternal Word did not come as a philosophical concept, nor as a political programme. Nor was the Word made text. But the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

It is not where we stand on this or that particular issue which is definitive for our salvation - nor even our understanding of this or that passage of Scripture. What matters is our relationship with Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us on the cross, and who was raised to new life, so that we too might find new life in him.

Or, as has been said much, much earlier: our lives really should be lived so that others say: "Look at how these Christians love everyone!"

After all, is communion enjoyed better when we can reflect on who is not invited to the table, and on who is not permitted to do the inviting?

All News is Gossip

I just find this information surprisingly hard to come by, and very interesting when it's available:

Despite having the most costly health system in the world, the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries. This report—an update to two earlier editions—includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems. Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes. The inclusion of physician survey data also shows the U.S. lagging in adoption of information technology and use of nurses to improve care coordination for the chronically ill.

The interesting bit is in the executive summary:

The U.S. health system is the most expensive in the world, but comparative analyses consistently show the United States underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance. This report, which includes information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries' health systems, confirms the patient survey findings discussed in previous editions of Mirror, Mirror. It also includes information on health care outcomes that were featured in the U.S. health system scorecard issued by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System.

Among the six nations studied—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2006 and 2004 editions of Mirror, Mirror. Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last on dimensions of access, patient safety, efficiency, and equity. The 2007 edition includes data from the six countries and incorporates patients' and physicians' survey results on care experiences and ratings on various dimensions of care.

The most notable way the U.S. differs from other countries is the absence of universal health insurance coverage. Other nations ensure the accessibility of care through universal health insurance systems and through better ties between patients and the physician practices that serve as their long-term "medical home." It is not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. substantially underperforms other countries on measures of access to care and equity in health care between populations with above-average and below average incomes.

With the inclusion of physician survey data in the analysis, it is also apparent that the U.S. is lagging in adoption of information technology and national policies that promote quality improvement. The U.S. can learn from what physicians and patients have to say about practices that can lead to better management of chronic conditions and better coordination of care. Information systems in countries like Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K. enhance the ability of physicians to monitor chronic conditions and medication use. These countries also routinely employ non-physician clinicians such as nurses to assist with managing patients with chronic diseases.

The area where the U.S. health care system performs best is preventive care, an area that has been monitored closely for over a decade by managed care plans. Nonetheless, the U.S. scores particularly poorly on its ability to promote healthy lives, and on the provision of care that is safe and coordinated, as well as accessible, efficient, and equitable.

From my anecdotal knowledge (i.e., personal experience), managed care plans are on the way out. HMO's have not kept costs down, as promised, and are no longer the favored solution for health insurance companies.

Especially intriguing here is the fact that, purely as a question of economics, we are getting screwed:

For all countries, responses indicate room for improvement. Yet, the other five countries spend considerably less on health care per person and as a percent of gross domestic product than does the United States. These findings indicate that, from the perspectives of both physicians and patients, the U.S. health care system could do much better in achieving better value for the nation's substantial investment in health.

And yet, when I Google news articles on this, I only find two domestically: a press release by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and an article in the Detroit Free Press; both from two days ago.

Maybe the NYT will mention it in their Week in Review. Although the tribulations of Paul Wolfowitz, a man who has absolutely no effect on the lives of Americans, seems to be much more interesting.

It ain't necessarily so...

Grandmère Mimi called me out for the post below where I wrote:

We're all dazzled by big congretations and massive gatherings of people.

"Not quite all of us are dazzled," she tartly (and rightly) responded. My attempted point was that large churches and more members is a pressure every church feels, and every pastor or priest looks rather anxiously to see how many attend services, and what the membership rolls look like. And the reason we all do this, as Josh Marshall astutely points out, is because the mega-churches and the James Dobsons of the world, spend a lot of time telling us just how big they are:

Dobson's organization says his daily radio program is heard by as many as 220 million listeners over 3,500 stations in the United States. He's also seen on 80 television stations, and 10 Focus on the Family magazines have 2.3 million subscribers, the group says.

(emphasis added) As Josh says: 220 million listeners? Really? 2/3rds of America tunes in regularly?

But where else do these numbers come from, except the group that claims them? There is no independent body, no government agency, no third-party which regularly assesses the attendance in churches or the number of listeners to radio stations or TV stations (well, there is for the latter, but they don't publish those numbers in regular press releases). We know these churches and groups are big, because they constantly tell us they are. And since they are big, they must be doing something right. Right?

Like making sure they tell us how big they are. And relying on us not to pay too much attention to the numbers, just to be impressed with, well, with how big those numbers are.

It's kind of the sea we all go swimming in. I do know small churches which are perfectly happy to be small, because they know they always will be. And my point (this time!) is: this entire obsession with size comes about because the people with the biggest megaphones are always telling us how big they are.

And like most bragging about size, it's almost always done by men; and it's not to be relied on as....well, as gospel.

UPDATE: Josh has now noted that the Dobson website claims that listenership is world-wide, not nationwide. Which just raises the issue of innumeracy among journalists (could no editor catch that error?), and doesn't quite blunt the fact that it's numbers that matter. Especially anything that sounds like really BIG numbers.

Final Words

The "legacy" of Jerry Falwell continues to pester my consciousness, if only because I'm not sure there will actually be one. David Kuo , as I mentioned earlier, gave an excellent commentary on the price many Christians will pay for a long time because Jerry Falwell was the public face of Christianity in this country (although he never led the largest congregation in the country, nor was he the head of a denomination or the champion of a institution other than his own Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University. ) Falwell was media savvy the way, say, Joel Osteen is media savvy. We're all dazzled by big congretations and massive gatherings of people. But Ted Haggard's former church is suffering now that he's gone, in no small part because of the blazing hypocrisy of the scandal that caused him to step down. Still, his presence is clearly being missed. Falwell's "Moral Majority" is truly neither, now; it's a spent force in American politics, although the GOP debates indicate the last people to get the news are the GOP candidates (No surprise, of course. As Sen. Christopher Dodd said yesterday, the American people are far ahead of the Congress on the need to get out of Iraq. Political tectonic plates take a long time to shift.) But will there be 6000 people in Thomas Road Baptist Church this Sunday? Probably. However, how many will be there a year from now?

As Ed Kilgore has pointed out, Falwell was not actually the favorite son of Lynchburg. Which is neither here nor there, except it points out Falwell was like the rest of us, and put his pants on one leg at a time. And now, to put it crudely, that he won't be putting pants on ever again, whither Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University? Or, more crucially, where will the cable news networks and Sunday morning talk shows turn for a sound bite about "moral issues" in America? As NPR pointed out yesterday, Falwell's influence among like-minded Christians was waning before his death. What possible influence can he have now?

One of the peculiarities of mega-churches and non-denominational churches with charismatic leaders, especially those who earn fame and fortune from their preaching, writing, or personalities, is that such churches seldom outlast their pastor. Joel Osteen's church is the exception that proves the rule. He's done nothing more than do his father one better, carrying the church onward and upward in ways that Richard Roberts tried in vain to do for his father Oral, who was once a "big deal" in his own right, but whose "ministry" (what he called the institution he tried to set up) has faded from public notice (the last I heard he was trying to get the city of Tulsa to pay for the hospital he built against their wishes. But that was about 2 decades ago, and I've heard nothing about him since). Before Osteen there was Jimmy Swaggert, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Pat Robertson, and Robert Tilton. Tilton is still carrying on in the backwaters of cable TV, and Robertson, per NPR, is steadily losing influence just as Falwell did. But there is more to this than is publicly visible.

A dynamic, charismatic, powerful, and influential pastor, is largely the product of Protestantism. True, there are Dorothy Days and Oscar Romeros and Thomas Mertons in Roman Catholicism, but they never have the institutional power at their fingertips that even a Joel Osteen does right now. And their legacy remains alive because of the institution, which may tend to honor them more in death than in life, but honors them just the same. It is, in other words, the institution which carries on. The influence of the personality flickers out with the life of the person.

Retired pastors learn this lesson the hard way, especially in congregationally based churches. The more you move away from a church with a hierarchy, an overarching institutional tradition or polity, the more the congregation comes to see itself as "the church," and it's favored pastor as the reason for its blessings (the distinction between episcopal and congregational polities is a very subtle one in this case, I understand). Inevitably, the pastor retires, though, and then the church much adjust, and at that point it becomes an institution apart from the pastor who shepherded it for what may have been decades. Sometimes that transition goes very smoothly, and the pastor is a healthy person who simply walks away. Just as ofthen, though, it is like a divorce after a very long marriage, or even a death, and the grief at finding out you aren't that important after all, that you can't continue to inspire and influence people after retirement, leads, in the very worst of cases, to an almost Lear-like situation. Pastors, in other words, soon realize that they have influence only so long as they have responsibility, only so long as they are still the pastor. Retirement is often the death of influence, especially if they, like Jerry Falwell, want to insist their views are the views everyone else should adhere to. When pastors retire and go graciously, they can be honored for their service and still be a guiding hand. But it is, as ever, a question of power: you can't keep the power forever, and you certainly can't wield it, once you are no longer there to do so. I've known pastors who understand this; I've known pastors who had to learn it the hard way. Jerry Falwell, of course, is past all such considerations now.

But his church isn't; his institution isn't. It may turn out, however, it was already long past such influence, and the death of its famous and media-savvy personality and public leader, simply reveals what we all should have known. It will certainly be interesting to see if anyone rises to become the next choice of the media for a religious soundbite or a guest seat speaking for Christians. It seems unlikely, and it seems very likely Falwell's lasting legacy for the nation will be a negative one: he will be the public face of Christianity that almost anyone can revile, the public face of Christianity as intolerant and duplicitous and just as power-seeking as any politician. Christianity, in other words, as just another human, all too human, institution. I can't think, at this point, of much that he did which was a net positive for Christianity; not as a public figure. There are legitimate questions as to whether his opinions were even worse than we remember. Still, the institutions of Christianity will carry on; and as long as people seek out the famous and respond to the infamous, we will have Jerry Falwells among us. They seem to arise about once every generation or so, and are sustained by the generation which gave birth to them; but seldom by much beyond that

When I consider how my light is spent...

It seems the occassional and necessary fit that comes over me and prompts a truly navel-gazing post along the lines of "What am I doin' hangin' round?" It's a zeitgeist thing; I've seen it in the air lately, as news events slow down and politics turns in favor (slowly, but surely) of left blogistan. Jerry Falwell's death has prompted a new round of interest, mostly of people trying to assess the famous (or infamous) pastor without quite speaking ill of the dead. Pastor Dan has taken two stabs at it (here, with a convenient roundup of still other opinions, and here), and even NPR ran both an excellent story on "Whither the conservative Christian voter now?" as well as an excellent assessment of Falwell as a Christian pastor. It's been interesting to see how the public person is regarded while assidously avoiding personal remarks. But that will wear out soon, and it will be back to business as usual: politics and the outrage du jour, or even of the hour.

Pastor Dan states the issue fairly clearly over at Street Prophets; but it isn't an issue limited to that blog, or to this one. Still, it's an issue that has been claiming more and more of my attention lately:

What are blogs for?

There is, as I said, something in the air. There have been more than a few "meta-blogging" posts and comments going around lately, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one, all revolving around this newspaper column (irony!). The best ones use "navel-gazing" ironically, so as to distance themselves from the very thing they are doing ("Look, Ma, no hands!"), but navel gazing is all it amounts to. This, in itself, is not surprising. It isn't only the consequence of slow news days, or the weariness of working up new outrage at new revelations. Time has simply passed. Like the monks who enter the life of the monastery driven by a vision, an experience, a feeling they want to both share and prolong, the time of acedie inevitably sets in. And the question becomes: how does one go on? What is interesting is that the zeitgeist seems to have brought them all out nearly simultaneously, with only a few prompted by the simple defensive reflex which seems to have gotten blogs started in the first place. But Pastor Dan's post is not defensive at all, and isn't really navel-gazing (though he tags it as such). He raises the question blogs need to be raising as the level of white noise (the sheer number of blogs) rises, and blogging as a "phenomenon" (I'm not sure that word shouldn't apply only to acts of nature) begins to settle into...well, non-phenomenal status.

What are blogs for?

I don't have an answer; but I have come to think blogs are not for this. They are not for ceaseless whining and endless re-assessment of news stories and opinion columns (even as I continue to do it, like a reflex or a bad habit; three in one day alone! But I can quit whenever I want to....) and when all else fails the constant defense of bloggers' rights to do it any way bloggers damn well please to do it. Well, they can be for that, but who really cares when they are? I've come to realize blogs are just like books, the only difference being they are free to everyone. They cost nothing to produce, nothing to sustain, and if you're really, really lucky, they'll even earn you some money. Not many of them, of course, do that; just like books. I've seen too many people in the bookstore spending their days hawking books no one really wants to read, or hawking vanity press publications they are sure will get great word of mouth and notice from Oprah, and they don't hang around the bookstores long enough (who does, besides the employees?) to notice how many books published by major houses end up remaindered (that's why Barnes & Noble always has shelves of "discount books" in their stores, and discount booksellers line tables with stacks of volumes). People publish stories and opinions and information every day, and other people expend a great deal of money to get those stories and opinions and information out to a waiting public who, it turns out, weren't waiting for that at all.

Blogs are no different, except for the money part.

So what are blogs for? And how much longer can they keep it up? And why bother, anyway?

Monks enter a community which has known acedie for millenia; literally, millenia. They know how to cope with it. The story is told of Mother Teresa going to Calcutta because of a mystical vision of Jesus directing her to serve the poor. Decades later a seeker came to her hoping for insight into achieving a mystical vision himself, and she told him she had not had another vision since the one that led her to Calcutta. Never again, in all her long life of devotion, would she have another vision. Acedie. It can last a lifetime.

And what do you do then?

"Eventually," I said once before, "it's not about what you feel, but what you do." But that's the question: what do blogs do? More importantly, what should blogs do? Lately, the conviction has been growing on me that Wittgenstein would have made a fine blogger. And what would he say about this?

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

And what would silence on a blog look like? And what might it produce?

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan

"Kill them all; God will know his own."

Or not:

Scores of civilian deaths over the past months from heavy American and allied reliance on airstrikes to battle Taliban insurgents are threatening popular support for the Afghan government and creating severe strains within the NATO alliance.

Afghan, American and other foreign officials say they worry about the political toll the civilian deaths are exacting on President Hamid Karzai, who last week issued another harsh condemnation of the American and NATO tactics, and even of the entire international effort here.

What angers Afghans are not just the bombings, but also the raids of homes, the shootings of civilians in the streets and at checkpoints, and the failure to address those issues over the five years of war. Afghan patience is wearing dangerously thin, officials warn.

The civilian deaths are also exposing tensions between American commanders and commanders from other NATO countries, who have never fully agreed on the strategy to fight the war here, in a country where there are no clear battle lines between civilians and Taliban insurgents.

Hmmm...do you think treating civilians as "collateral damage" is not exactly a way to win hearts and minds? Note, also, the subtle way the third paragraph undermines the entire thesis of the opening paragraph.

Just what are we doing in Afghanistan? The excuses sound painfully familiar; and simply pathetic:

But American officials say that they have been forced to use air power more intensively as they have spread their reach throughout Afghanistan, raiding Taliban strongholds that had gone untouched for six years. One senior NATO official said that “without air, we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops” in the country. They also contend that the key to reducing casualties is training more Afghan Army soldiers and police officers.

But since we can't do that, the solution seems to be: dust off and nuke the whole place from space.

It's the only way to be sure.