The REAL Elephant in the Drawing Room

Frank Rich will get all the attention for his column, but just when you think he's going to strike the nail on the head:

Even now, I wonder if many of those who have since backtracked from the Sherrod smear — including some in the news business who reported on the video without vetting it — have watched her entire speech. What’s important is not the exculpatory evidence that clears her of a trumped-up crime. What matters is Sherrod’s own story.

Not the best lead up, but an indication he may finally return our focus to what Ms. Sherrod's speech was about: what she learned about racism and class in America. Sadly, no:

She was making the speech in Georgia, her home state, on March 27, the 45th anniversary of her father’s funeral. He had been murdered when she was 17, leaving behind five children and a wife who was pregnant with a sixth. Sherrod had grown up in Baker County, a jurisdiction ruled by a notorious racist sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who was nicknamed “Gator” for a reason. Black men were routinely murdered there but the guilty were never brought to justice. As Sherrod recounted, not even three witnesses to her father’s murder could persuade the grand jury to indict the white suspect.

Sherrod had long thought she’d flee the South, but had an epiphany on the night of her father’s death. “I couldn’t just let his death go without doing something in answer to what happened,” she said. So she made the commitment to stay and devote her life to “working for change.” She later married Charles Sherrod, a minister and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose heroic efforts to advance desegregation, including his imprisonment, can be found in any standard history of the civil rights movement.

All really excellent information but not really the point of Ms. Sherrod's speech. For that, we should turn to Bob Herbert a day earlier:

Which brings us to the most important part of the Shirley Sherrod story. The point that Ms. Sherrod was making as she talked in her speech about the white farmer who had come to her for help was that we are all being sold a tragic bill of goods by the powerful forces that insist on pitting blacks, whites and other ethnic groups against one another.

Ms. Sherrod came to the realization, as she witnessed the plight of poverty-stricken white farmers in the South more than two decades ago, that the essential issue in this country “is really about those who have versus those who don’t.”

She explained how the wealthier classes have benefited from whites and blacks constantly being at each other’s throats, and how rampant racism has insidiously kept so many struggling whites from recognizing those many things they and their families have in common with economically struggling blacks, Hispanics and so on.

“It’s sad that we don’t have a roomful of whites and blacks here tonight,” she said, “because we have to overcome the divisions that we have.”

There is no way we’ll overcome those divisions if people who should know better keep bowing before and kowtowing to the toxic agenda of those on the right whose overriding goal is to foment hostility and hate.

No mention of economics or class in Rich's column. He does focus on the continuing evil of racism, and points me to this interview with Media Matters in which Ms. Sherrod makes the trenchant statement:

"I think it is race. You think we have come a long way in terms of race relations in this country, but we keep going backwards," she said. "We have become more racist. This was their doing, Breitbart put that together misrepresenting what I was saying and Fox carried it."

Which I think pretty fairly applies to Fox News (which has nothing to do with "news", and should be treated the same way society treats David Duke or regards Bull Connor); but I'm not sure it applies to American society. I don't think racism has been eliminated in America; but neither do I think most Americans sympathize with the views of Andrew Breitbart, especially on the question of race. And I find it interesting that the most explosive topic in Ms. Sherrod's speech is the question of economic classes in America. Which makes me think, too, Mr. Herbert is missing the mark. There is no way we’ll overcome those divisions if people who should know better keep bowing before and kowtowing to the moneyed class whose overriding goal is to hang on tightly to what's theirs and to exploit anyone and everyone to get it and keep it. Those are the blinders we have to remove first, if we are going to start to remove the blinder of racism in this country.

That's what Shirley Sherrod was saying; and still, nobody wants to hear it. That's a lesson Will Campbell almost 40 years ago. It's the one we all still need to learn.

Carry Me Back to Ol'....

The real ugliness is not being a racist; it's being called a racist.

That national conversation on race in America can't start until we all agree there are no racists anymore. And that race isn't a problem anymore. And if it is, it's a problem because black people keep bringing it up. Which makes them the real racists. So we don't need to have a national conversation on race. We just need to marginalize the racists. Who are black people who dare to suggest some white people who are not Southerners like David Duke (and so already marginalized) might be racists.

Problem solved.

Actually, and almost as a longish footnote, I don't think most people think this way, despite the desperate efforts of people like Breitbart, Vandeihei, and Blankley. I think most people understand the complex issue of race in this country. The problem is not with the people, it's with the idea that anything on TeeVee or Talk Radio or on the pages of a newspaper or magazine resembles a "conversation." Even blogging and Facebook and what-have-you, are not technological substitutes for the agora. If there is a problem with the American "conversation," it's that we don't have one, at all; and then imagine mass media (TeeVee, Intertubes, talkradio, etc.) is a proxy for that. It isn't. So I'm not so much outraged, or surprised, at what opinions people have about race, especially whites. While I'm working from Digby, she thinks this means the narrative has shifted. I can only assume Digby is younger than I am by at least a generation. To put the paragraph Digby quotes in context (!):

Gallagher, the radio host, says the appearance of anti-white bias at the Agriculture or Justice Department "creates white racists."

"White people sit around, and they get angry and they think this is the world they live in, and it's not fair. I hear it in the frustration of my callers," he said.

"White America understands by now, you'd better be very careful in the way you treat people of color. In this history of this country that's great advice. That's as it should be. We've had a shameful past," he said. "Now the fear is that the pendulum has swung so far the other way, that white people mind their P's and Q's and don't say anything that can be perceived as racist, but blacks can talk about hurting people."

That one is as old as American racism itself. Whites aren't racist because they consider blacks inferior, or even because their ancestors enslaved Africans, who were notable as slaves because of skin color (the first such kind of slavery in human history, and so the "peculiar institution."). No, it was because blacks made whites racist.

There is a plaque on the backside of a column in the Texas Capitol that purports to honor the "South" in the Civil War, by denying that the war was about slavery, but rather was about "states rights." Which, of course, means it wasn't about being racists and owning people, it was about freedom from government that wouldn't allow Texans to own people (the same reason for the Texas War of Independence from Mexico; Mexico outlawed slavery, and at the time, Texas WAS Mexico.). The plaque dates from the 1950's, about the time the civil rights movement actually got started. And the animosity against blacks in the 1960's was never because they were black, but because they were disruptive, or uppity, or didn't mind their place. It was always the fault of the blacks that the whites had to react so violently.

Same as it ever was. Except most people don't see it that way, now. Most people are appalled by such language, such thoughts. And the Tea Parties and Andrew Breitbart and FoxNews all know it. I don't see this a resurgence of that evil; if anything, it's the last blush on the cheek of a dying age. But bad ideas never really die, so I don't expect this one to. The fact that it is still the subject of open discussion, while disappointing, is not a reason to assume there is something new under the sun.

This is not new at all. What is notable is that such a small instance brings it all out again. Maybe what we really need is more such instances; maybe what we really need is a new civil rights movement.

Or maybe just a conversation that's a little more coherent than that AP article:

Some liberals have long maintained that racism requires power, and so black people can't be racist. Obama's election undercut the first argument and made the specter of black racism appear more threatening.
....
Perry, the Princeton professor, pointed out that blacks have 10 cents of wealth for every dollar possessed by whites.

"We can hardly say whites as a group are suffering under the weight of racial discrimination. That said, we do have to find ways of talking about race with more openness but also with greater sensitivity," she said.

"There is a lot of work for everyone to do in this regard, and people of color are no exception."

The words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart...

I detect a pattern here.

Jeremiah Wright overcame racism in his lifetime (just consider his age, and where and when he grew up. Res ipsa loquitor.). Shirley Sherrod lost her father to murder at the hands of a Klansman, and was still feeling resentment that she should help white farmers, in 1986. She learned from her mistakes, to embrace people as people, not as skin tones. So did Jeremiah Wright, although he preaches the lesson quite differently than Shirley Sherrod does.

And both get hung out to dry by the Obama Administration*, and by society in general. Of course, the gross injustice done to Shirley Sherrod shows signs of reversing already. The exposure may finally ruin Andrew Breitbart's ability to influence the public discourse, though I won't put any money behind that speculation. I'm quite sure it won't end the knee-jerk reaction to video-tape=IRREFUTABLE PROOF! that continues to plague our You-Tubed age (although, as an aside, I have to note a cable channel almost entirely devoted to playing security tapes of robberies, burglaries, etc., in which we all clearly see the suspects are absolutely unidentifiable, and where often the narrator tells us the alleged criminal is still at large. I still remember when security cameras were going to assure us no criminal would ever get away with a crime again....)

But to trace this back to its roots, does this sound familiar?

So in an attempt to turn manufactured right-wing ammo into blanks, Obama has completely separated himself from his minister and his church. What worries me is this: Can we expect a President Obama to cave in to the whims and will of the right on policies and issues he knows are important, if this nation is to move forward in a progressive and compassionate manner? Can we expect him to genuflect to negative reports by an uninformed, misinformed or ill-willed media? Is the candidate of change willing to go-along in a willy-nilly get-along fashion?

Yes, apparently, he is. And it's all about the race question. This race question:

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

I should point out, first, those are not my words; the first quote is from Monroe Anderson, someone I've otherwise never heard of. The second is from a column by Frank Rich, a white man; as is Andrew Breitbart. Interestingly, we still allow white people to conduct our national discussion on race. What we really don't like, is when black people do it.

Barack Obama knows this, down to the soles of his shoes. So this embarrassment on his part, the feet of clay he has on this subject, are not entirely unforgivable. Barack Obama never had the experiences of Shirley Sherrod or Jeremiah Wright, so he's never had the reason to say things like this:

MODERATOR: What is your relationship with Louis Farrakhan? Do you agree with and respect his views, including his most racially divisive views?

WRIGHT: As I said on the Bill Moyers’ show, one of our news channels keeps playing a news clip from 20 years ago when Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion.

And he was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter is being vilified for, and Bishop Tutu is being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago.

I believe that people of all faiths have to work together in this country if we’re going to build a future for our children, whether those people are — just as Michelle and Barack don’t agree on everything, Raymond (ph) and I don’t agree on everything, Louis and I don’t agree on everything, most of you all don’t agree — you get two people in the same room, you’ve got three opinions.

So what I think about him, as I’ve said on Bill Moyers and it got edited out, how many other African-Americans or European-Americans do you know that can get one million people together on the mall? He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That’s what I think about him.

I’ve said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Farrakhan speaks, it’s like E.F. Hutton speaks, all black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.

Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan anymore than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. Do you remember that Ted Koppel show, where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro was our enemy? And he said, “You don’t tell me who my enemies are. You don’t tell me who my friends are.”

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn’t make me this color.

Let me first note that at least twice in that interview Rev. Wright mentions comments he made to Bill Moyers that were edited from the broadcast tape. You can but the irony with a knife, because we all know that what's on tape is all we need to know. But it's that last statement, of course, that's the bridge too far for white people; even for white liberals. We have never, in our literature, portrayed slavery as the cruel and inhuman institution it was (it took Toni Morrison to do that, in Beloved. Need I point out Toni Morrison is not white?) We have repudiated the "peculiar institution" of slavery, so why does this black man keep bringing it up? We are supposed to be trying to 'get beyond color,' and here's a black man refusing to let us do that. It's the same reason Andrew Breitbart wanted to highlight the comments of Shirley Sherrod: because in her edited remarks, Ms. Sherrod seemed not to have gotten "beyond color," and we all know that can only mean: "RACISM!" But don't take my word for it:

"I think the video speaks for itself," [Breitbart] said. "The way she's talking about white people ... is conveying a present tense racism in my opinion. But racism is in the eye of the beholder."

Should I mention again that Andrew Breitbart is white? Do I need to? Shouldn't I get beyond color by now?

And so the Obama Administration reacted; as, to be fair, did the NAACP. And I don't recall the NAACP rushing to the defense of Jeremiah Wright, either; but maybe they weren't responsible to. Fair is fair, and let's not invent responsibilities for other people we don't want for ourselves.

But as I noted at the time, there were commenters, black and white, who regarded Wright (and probably still do) as too radical, as a threat to Obama's chance to be the first black President. Whites, you see, are in charge of the discussion; they still get to determine what is "racism," and what is not. I was not, for a long time, a fan of the idea that "racism" is only possible when one is in a position of power, a position to oppress, as a black liberation theologian like Jeremiah Wright might say. Now I've completely changed my mind, because the discussion of racism hasn't changed since my pre-Civil Rights Act childhood. Racism is still an ugly thing bourgeois whites find objectionable and a label they would consider slanderous. But that's because they are still in charge of defining it, and determining how it is used. And we diligently whitewash history to do it:

I was going to start this on a better note, but then I listened to Juan Williams giving us his expertise on the "black church", and if there was any better evidence that the two parties to this national conversation are talking past each other, that "analysis" is surely it. Just listen to him re-write King's history and theology. The person Williams describes doesn't sound at all like the person who wrote these words from jail attacking the "white church." Nor does Williams include room for the vilification of King that followed his speech on Vietnam, a speech that attacked both war as a tool of statecraft, and economic injustice. Williams fails to note that King's stance was considered so radical that even the Washington Post turned against him, as did many of his supporters who thought the fight for civil rights had nothing to do with war or economic policy. And when King died he was in Memphis to support a garbage worker's strike; very likely that is the straw that broke the camel's back, since civil rights and voting rights had been passed into law years earlier. Williams pointedly draws the distinction between King and Wright by saying that King always "preached the gospel," and neglects the fact that the preaching of that gospel led King to promote economic justice, not just civil rights. To hear Williams tell it, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated for being too inspirational and bringing too many people together. Just the kind of plaster saint Jeremiah Wright refuses to be.

This, after all, is what Jeremiah Wright said to the National Press Club:

Maybe now, as an honest dialogue about race in this country begins, a dialogue called for by Senator Obama and a dialogue to begin in the United Church of Christ among 5,700 congregations in just a few weeks, maybe now, as that dialogue begins, the religious tradition that has kept hope alive for people struggling to survive in countless hopeless situation, maybe that religious tradition will be understood, celebrated, and even embraced by a nation that seems not to have noticed why 11 o’clock on Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America.

We have known since 1787 that it is the most segregated hour. Maybe now we can begin to understand why it is the most segregated hour.

And maybe now we can begin to take steps to move the black religious tradition from the status of invisible to the status of invaluable, not just for some black people in this country, but for all the people in this country.

But the narrative was all, and Sen. Obama found Rev. Wright's comments on 9/11 (he was quoting a U.S. Ambassador about the "chickens coming home to roost"), Louis Farrakhan, and Palestine/Israel, "appalling:"

“I’m outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters here today. He added, “I find these comments appalling. It contradicts everything that I’m about and who I am.”

The message, of course, being: I'm safe for white voters. I'm not a scary angry black man.

Now, nor is he a supporter of angry black women who talk about white men in 1986 acting "superior," or who confess they weren't, at the time, inclined to help them. When she worked for a private organization dedicated to helping black farmers; and from the white farmer she learned that poverty is the enemy, not race. I don't have a lot of confidence that Obama wants to take up the cudgel of that issue either, though. "Class warfare" is as scary as "racism" to white Americans; especially non-poor white Americans.

You know, even Glenn Beck said this Shirley Sherrod business was screwy, and she deserves to get her job back. Glen Beck!

Maybe it's time this Administration grew a backbone about the fact that the President is black. People mostly don't care; and the ones who do, are the ones who should be called out for their racism. They certainly shouldn't be allowed to set the terms of the discussion. For the moment, though, I have to agree with a comment Phila made after the "race speech" which was supposed to transform our national discussion of race (and didn't; not one jot):

Hope for the future is swell, but I get very tired of people either ignoring our victims or paying lip service to them (which amounts to the same thing). As I said over at my place, my worry is that Obama's presidency won't be influenced enough by Wright, so to that extent, his speech wasn't reassuring; we always "getting over it," and finding "closure"...it's one of the worst goddamn things about us, and that's what I hate to see Obama (and everyone else) pandering to.

Same as it ever was, in other words. And that may be because we still expect politicians to hold this discussion for us; and don't want to listen to pastors like Jeremiah Wright, who do. Politicians, after all, we can control: we can berate them, castigate them, decry them, and keep them in the public eye dancing like a bug on the hot griddle of our attention. Pastors we ignore, unless they spend lots of time on TV and seem to have large audiences. And those pastors never challenge our opinions about race, or make us feel like we might be racists; so we safely ignore them.

And that conversation on race in America, continues to be postponed....

Hastily attached addendum: 20 minutes after I post this, the beat goes on. That conversation is NEVER going to happen.



*or simply by Obama, to be more accurate

To Kill a Bad Idea

In which the author proves he is a Southerner, and probably a racist, to boot. Maybe. We'll see.

Battle has been joined on the topic of the 50th anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird. Let me first say I am amazed to see this book still on most "required reading" lists in the high schools around me. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but you might be surprised just how many books you read in high school (especially if high school was 30+ years ago) that are still being read there. I know my father didn't read a lot of them because they weren't in print when he was in high school, but the bulk of the titles I first encountered in high school English still fill the bookshelves of bookstores in the "Literature" section. In some cases, like The Catcher in the Rye, I don't understand that (if ever there was a book that was particularly a product of a particular class and locale and time period....). In the case of Mockingbird, I do. I find it hard to understand the world of Holden Caulfield, a world I never knew. I find it easy to enter the world of Scout Finch, also a world I never knew. But I almost did; as I say, I'm a Southerner.

Although by the time I was growing up in the South, the civil rights movement was already underway. Interestingly, we forget it was underway under Eisenhower; that Truman even gave it a nudge when he integrated the armed forces. The Civil Rights Act was not an act sui generis by LBJ: he did it hot on the heels of the death of JFK, using that horror was another impetus to get a law begun under JFK, passed. And of course, that law didn't end the problems of race in America, either. So there's a continuum here, one that began long before the Articles of Confederation were a gleam in anyone's eye. Hard not to pay attention to these things if you're a sentient Southern boy.

But I digress....

The major problems with Mockingbird seem to be that it is an artifact of its time, and insufficiently anticipates the attitudes of white liberals in America in 2009-10. Malcolm Gladwell, of Tipping Point and Blink fame (and whom I consider an idiot; his books are textbook examples of how NOT to do causal analysis) thinks Atticus is a flawed liberal icon because he is a good lawyer. No, seriously.

This is essentially the defense that Atticus Finch fashions for his client. Robinson is the churchgoer, the “good Negro.” Mayella, by contrast, comes from the town’s lowest breed of poor whites. “Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells,” Scout tells us. “No truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings.” They live in a shack behind the town dump, with windows that “were merely open spaces in the walls, which in the summertime were covered with greasy strips of cheesecloth to keep out the varmints that feasted on Maycomb’s refuse.” Bob Ewell is described as a “little bantam cock of a man” with a face as red as his neck, so unaccustomed to polite society that cleaning up for the trial leaves him with a “scalded look; as if an overnight soaking had deprived him of protective layers of dirt.” His daughter, the complainant, is a “thick-bodied girl accustomed to strenuous labor.” The Ewells are trash. When the defense insinuates that Mayella is the victim of incest at the hands of her father, it is not to make her a sympathetic figure. It is, in the eugenicist spirit of the times, to impugn her credibility—to do what A. A. Sizer did in the John Mays case: The victim, coming from the same inferior stock, would likely share her father’s moral character. “I won’t try to scare you for a while,” Finch says, when he begins his cross-examination of Mayella. Then he adds, with polite menace, “Not yet.”

We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

You see? Atticus is not supposed to defend a client against an unjust charge. He's supposed to indict the entire culture of the South! YEAH!

Wait? Huh?

Mark this as another example of why I consider Gladwell an idiot. Any lawyer who did that, EVER, would be properly dealt with only when he'd been found liable for malpractice. Not to mention, as Thers says: it's a book! Get over it!

Actually, what led me to this righteous rant is the other problem this country has had since before the Articles of Confederation, and that is the conviction that while we are "one nation, indivisible," some parts of that nation just aren't quite as, well, "correct" as other parts. And while this is undoubtedly true, statements like the quote below make me want to recall the halcyon days of the "Southies" in Boston rioting when their schools had to be integrated. It happened a good decade after my Southern East Texas high school was integrated (and no, we did not go quietly into that good day, either; but neither did we riot to the point it made national news):

In July 2010, we might be more comfortable with an Atticus Finch who was less compassionate toward his racist neighbors. In explaining people and events to his young daughter, Scout, Finch noted that these were not bad people (even though some did want to commit violence against blacks), just misguided.

From where we sit today, this attitude is both ludicrous and offensive. One can't distill "not bad" from what is clearly bad. But, then, who is to say that Lee thought otherwise? Sometimes truth is better received through a reflex of recognition than by a blow to the head. Remember, too, Finch was trying to explain a hateful world to a child in terms familiar in the church-going South: Hate the sin, love the sinner.

I know it's not quite as egregiously stupid as Gladwell, but still... Let's start at the end, and work backwards. First, "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a phrase I heard in my mid-adulthood, not in my childhood. I grew up at the other end of the era Harper Lee describes in Mockingbird, but I doubt either of us ever heard that insipid phrase, or were told to apply it to anybody. We might have been told to love the repentant sinner, but distinguishing sinner from sin? That would be like knowing the dancer from the dance; we wouldn't be able to begin to know how to do that. And the rigid Calvinism that lay behind much of the Christianity of the American South would consider such an idea yet another sin, if not an outright heresy. So let's lay that aside and begin to peel this back a little further, shall we?

Yes, Atticus is trying "to explain a hateful world to a child." But then, I remember my parents lamenting my grandfather's free use of the "N" word. They told themselves he used it because it was the word he grew up with, not because he had any animosity toward blacks. And he didn't; no overt animosity, anyway. Today I see clearly that the word designates a different class of person, and that's the problem with it. It's no different from talking about "illegal aliens", although that term is less offensive in polite company than "wetbacks" or "spics." But the meaning is the same, and it's what my grandfather meant. Was he, then, in the strictest sense, a racist? I suppose so. Should I not love him?

It's not an idle question, because Atticus is talking about friends and family he has to live with everyday. You want to wear the hair shirt of your moral superiority for all to see, you won't seem all that morally superior to anybody but yourself. You want to change the morality of a culture, of a society, you either do it by withdrawing entirely from that society and throwing stones at it from a safe distance (in the form of either your moral superiority, or critiques of the immorality of those you are safely away from), or you do it in whatever small way you can manage. You get to be Socrates in jail, or the Socrates who accepts exile. You don't do it by declaring everyone around you inferior because you find them morally dubious. He who is without ANY sin can cast that first stone, and just because you may have purged your soul of racism doesn't mean you are a paragon of virtue.

As for ludicrous and offensive: I remember the crowds screaming at black faces as schools were integrated under court orders. I not only saw the pictures of such crowds, I was in the middle of them a time or two, on my own high school campus. I didn't think much of the people who were screaming, but it was only my adolescence that let me imagine I was, in any way, morally superior to them. Martin Luther King was, ultimately, right; as is Atticus; as was Nelson Mandela: if we go around pointing fingers of blame at everyone we deem blameworthy, we eventually form a circular firing squad of sorts. Sure it's better to imagine that "today" we expunge the racists from our midst and cast them into the outer reaches where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth: but try telling that to the "tea parties," who are gleefully calling the NACCP "racist." But the fact is, we can go on pointing out who is insufficient to be in "our" group, or we can embrace the vision:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

No mention there of expunging the racists from the South, of shipping them off to their own state or country. The message is about transformation, and Dr. King was right: we really can't do both. We can't claim moral superiority and end immorality. Which was the great lesson of Atticus Finch, the lesson above all that Scout learned that summer.

"I swear I saw your face change, it didn't seem quite right."

A simple question re: Nation-building.

Why do we imagine that water-treatment systems and power plants will automatically lead to peace and a stable nation?

Not to disparage such ideas as necessary to civilized existence, or as a definite good, but the comparison here to Germany and Japan is important. Both nations were defeated in war, not invaded and overrun, or suffering under ineffectual governments or suffering absolute civil collapse, or civil collapse consequent to invasion. It's the civil condition that's critical, not the condition of the infrastructure. Germany and Japan already had social stability; infrastructure merely aided in maintaining that stability. Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan: all had suffered social collapse or prolonged social instability. Water treatment plants and electricity were not going to replace what culture could not provide. Which is not to say culture could not eventually provide it; but technology is not a substitute for culture. If it was, there'd be no ghettoes in America, no "wrong side of the tracks," no neighborhoods where you keep your car doors locked and don't stop at red lights. (Yes, I exaggerate, but to make a point.)

It's peculiarly Western, or perhaps peculiarly American, that we think all problems are solved by owning or providing to society the right "things." And yet we only apply that lesson abroad; we never apply it at home, where we know it doesn't work (or imagine it leads to personal corruption). It isn't that the advantages of industrial society are actually disadvantages: but they aren't the reason for civil order or social happiness.

And yet we go on telling ourselves so, at least when we extend our reach abroad and try to bring peace and order to foreign lands. Or, more accurately, we tell ourselves it is so simply because it benefits contractors like Halliburton, who build the power plants that don't work and the water treatment systems that never get completed. Such socialism is anathema at home, but de rigeur abroad. As always we have again committed fornication, but, it was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.

I guess there is some value to a liberal arts education, huh?

And, to go on too long, that subject is connected to this one. Which I mention only because of the second comment.

The unemployed are a constant reminder of the failure of Republican policies.

Seriously, the economy has changed as we sent all of our jobs to China. We have a lot of 50+ people who may never work again. What are we to do with them?

This marks at least the third time within my lifetime that unemployment has hit so many people in middle age. I remember the spate of books that came out then, like Executive Blues, a book I remember reading as an article in Harper's in the mid-90's:

Jerry Meyer was a certified success story--the youngest-ever vice-president of McDonnell Douglas at the age of 40. At the age of 50, he was unemployed and on the flip side of that dream, a victim of corporate downsizing. His bewildering journey from corporate success to white-collar joblessness is a memoir that Fortune magazine called "brilliant, original, and raging".

But that's the "nice" review, and Myer's problems started, not in 1995, but in 1991:

If you thought that receiving a nice severance package and having out-placement specialists assisting you makes job search easier, think again. Meyer chronicles his experience in job hunting after being laid off from a corporation. He begins in 1991, weaving past and present into his narrative and revealing to the reader the many forces that shaped his career and his often conflicting feelings about working and the future. The subjective nature of the narrative is both the strength and the weakness of the book. Meyer taps feelings that a downsized employee could relate to and even encourages introspective thinking, yet he is cynical. His tone might be too discouraging for a job seeker.

That's a much more accurate review of the book. And that was nearly 20 years ago, long enough for a new generation to grow up ignorant of the immediate past (as all American generations seem to do). And that was after the collapse in the economy in the 80's. Anybody remember Jerry Meyer? Anybody remember the number of people in their 50's in the '90's who were suddenly unemployed and unemployable? That time, we blamed Japan, not China. Anybody else remember we've seen this movie?

And if all of this starts to sound like territory Barbara Ehrenreich has covered more recently, that's because it is.

As I say, I'm in my 50's now, and I've seen this movie three times. When do we start to take a lesson from it? Or will we just keep treating it as a movie, and continue in our uniquely ahistorical posture?

The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man

As usual, fools rush in, etc., etc. Which means: I'll bite:

Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a ­fanatic.

Hitchens is right, actually. It's a question seminary students struggle with. And the answer is: it depends on who Jesus was talking to.

Seriously; that's not a cop-out. There is a general presumption that whatever Jesus said, it was for general application and was meant to be applied to all persons in all circumstances. But it is an incorrect presumption; and here arises the first great distinction of Christian doctrine, based on precisely how one understands soteriology (which may or may not be the Euler's Identity of Christianity, although many seem to think so; but I am not among those "many", as we shall see).

First, credit where it is due, Hitchens' analysis of Pullman's position on Christianity is a fairly insightful one:

The difficulty that Pullman never quite confronts is that this involves what is vulgarly known as fundamentalism: an unmediated contact with the original message. Atheist though he is, Pullman turns out to be a Protestant atheist.

Although I'm not sure how a Protestant atheist differs from a Roman Catholic one, Hitchens does do something here I think he never intended: he locks Christians and atheists together in a way that makes them the twin sons of one mother Pullman posits in his novel. It's probably a more unintentionally revealing sentence than Hitchens has scribed in a long time. As a self-described atheist he is Lazarus from the original Star Trek, doomed to be locked in battle with his "evil twin" for eternity. Or at least until he gives up caring about Christianity.

What I find funny about books like Pullman's are the matters atheists find so important; things like this: "His method [writes Hitchens] is to show Jesus more or less as we “know” him, giving moral lessons to ever larger crowds." On the other hand, "Christ [the "evil" twin] goes on to witness and write up a non-miraculous Feeding of the Five Thousand (everyone simply shares the extra food they have brought) and to suborn a disciple of Jesus to give him secondhand accounts of events at which he cannot himself be present." Does it never occur to atheists to question the "ever larger crowds," especially a gathering of 5000 people to hear a man speak in first century Palestine? What, did Jesus commandeer an amphitheater, or steal a megaphone from somebody, or point a stick at his throat and mutter "Sonorous!" like the wizards in Harry Potter? Atheists do this all the time: strain at gnats and swallow camels. The same gospels that describe miracles like the loaves and fishes, also describe crowds larger than most of the villages Jesus walked through; yet one is impossible, the other quite acceptable. It's funny, really. Seminary students learn to accept this for what it is: first century propaganda. Atheists, meanwhile, skeptics to a man as they claim, swallow it whole. Huh.

Take the Sermon on the Mount, which Hitchens mentions here. Matthew has it on a mountain, a la Moses. Luke has it on flat ground (scholars call it the "sermon on the plain") and clearly says Jesus "looks up" and addresses his disciples, a/k/a, "the Twelve." How anybody else hears what Jesus says is a mystery. (Mark and John don't have it at all, but that's another matter.) That's the problem with seeking an "unmediated contact with the original message." We really don't have one. The one we do have is so mediated, we can't separate the dancer from the dance. And if we did, would we really have anything?

Which makes the conclusion of Hitchen's review downright funny:

I said earlier that Pullman was a Protestant atheist. Even so, he may well have been annoyed at the welcome given to his book by the clerical establishment in the person of the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who has described the “Jesus” character as “a voice of genuine spiritual authority” and the book itself as “mostly Pullman at his very impressive best, limpid and economical.” Pullman himself, echoing the common modern question of “W.W.J.D.?” — a question that in most modern contexts comes with no answer at all — claims that “my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said.” We in the infidel community do not pronounce anathemas or proclaim excommunications, or make the easy distinction between religious faith and “organized religion,” but this latest attempt to secularize Messianism is a disappointment to those of us who can never forgive the emperor Constantine, not just for making Christianity a state dogma, but for making humanity hostage to the boring village quarrels and Bronze Age fables that were drawn from what remains the world’s most benighted region.

The whole bit about "humanity" being "held hostage" is laughably ethno-centric, not to mention historically dull-witted; but no matter. It's Pullman's assertion I find the funniest: “my version is much closer to what Jesus would have said.” Really? On what basis is that claim made? You studied a translation, maybe a parallel gospels edition? You really want to dance with Biblical scholars who may not be all that religious themselves, but who know these texts and their transmission, historical context, translation (Jesus spoke Aramaic; the gospel are all written in koine Greek), etc., to a level of detail that would make many an expert in other fields wonder if they knew enough about their subject? You did a more thorough job than the Jesus Seminar? Somehow, I doubt it.*

As for Hitchens, I love people who think they know more than "organized religion," as if modern bureaucracy were merely another version of "the Church," and all organized forces were the true source of evil in the world. I'm not terribly impressed when people act in groups either; war, after all, is a group effort, and churches can engage in truly un-Christian acts. But then I consider the lone serial killers who slaughter without mercy, or the paranoid individuals who simply chase away census takers every 10 years at the point of a gun, and I think individuals acting alone aren't necessarily Nature's last word, either.

But let me not leave Hitchens' opening question dangling. "[H]ow is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs?" I'm not sure of the immorality of condemning a fig tree, or infesting pigs with demons, so I'll leave that aside as mere rhetorical flourish. As for claiming a monopoly on access to heaven, I reject the versions of Christianity which do, so I won't defend that as "moral," either. It is the first question, then, that is interesting, and it raises the pertinent question: who did Jesus call, and how did he call them?

That's not an idle question. Jesus did tell the man who wanted to follow him to "leave the dead to bury their dead," and that no man who put his hand to the plow and looked back was worthy of the kingdom of God. There are two points here: what is morality (is it merely Aristotle's "ethic," what the community accepts as good? And if so, Euripides wants to know where Medea's complaints fit in?)? The second is: who was Jesus talking to? You? Me? Hitchens?

Sometimes Jesus says easier things, you see. Like the woman caught in adultery, or the woman who washes his feet with her hair in Simon's house. In neither case does Jesus say "Sell all you have, and come, and follow me." He just says: "Go, and sin no more." That's a moral directive, of course, given in the context of Jewish/Hebraic (the historical context muddles things a bit) of the situation. But it's not the same directive in each case. Is this an inconsistent morality? Or a question of who is being addressed, and what they are being told to do?

Today we understand this distinction as the difference between ordained clergy, and the laity. One has a more serious burden of discipleship than the other, although theologians like Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer want to erase those distinctions a bit more than some others might. We certainly hold our clergy to higher standards; and we certainly don't imagine that all laypersons are to be the examples of discipleship that clergy should be. So is there really a moral inconsistency in the examples Hitchens cites? Not unless you take the Christian fundamentalist view of soteriology, there isn't.

Ironic, no?




*My New Testament professor in seminary is a member of the Jesus Seminar. He all but bragged about voting to reject as authentic almost every statement of Jesus found in the Gospels. There was a group, and they voted, and the majority ruled. I'm trying to imagine Pullman using a similar process in the privacy of his study, to evaluate what Jesus would have said. This is the problem, you see, with "organized religion." Especially when it isn't so organized along the principles you imagine it to be organized along.

"I know a fireman who looks after the fires...."

I've never cared for the basic premise of assertions like this. That is to say, I've been fairly well educated in the sciences, and did a lot of reading in science when I was young (I did a lot of reading in a lot of subjects; I still do). Yet I can never remember what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is (pace C.P. Snow; and your idea of the "Two Cultures" was rather weak anyway), and I'd never before heard of Euler's Identity (nor did the link to Wikipedia enlighten me much; surprise, surprise.). I do, however, think Wittgenstein would have a lot of fun with a statement like this:

After proving Euler's Identity during a lecture, Benjamin Peirce, a noted American 19th Century philosopher/mathematician and a professor at Harvard University, stated that "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

But oddly, I still don't consider myself scientifically illiterate. I speak jargon in three different professions(academic English; law; and theology/philosophy), so I understand the concept of "speaking science." I'm just not impressed by it. It's a minor skill set, a set of vocabulary, a specific lexicon. But it's still a language game. Big deal.

I could tell you how you don't speak my jargon, therefore you have no business talking to me. I could establish foundational claims in philosophy of religion, or theology, or literary criticism, and fling them about proving you are a fool unless you speak as me! Feh. Had enough of that in graduate school. Left academia the first time to get away from it. I'm not interested. It proves nothing.

On the other hand, I despise ignorance and affect; which is probably why this kind of pose bothers me. At either extreme we can establish a litmus test, an initiation rite, a test which you must complete in order to be allowed into the charmed circle of discussion. We need some standard, of course: it is pointless to argue with fools. Ultimately, though, I've come to the conclusion that it is simply pointless to argue.

Do you want to establish your position and persuade others it is sound? Fair enough. Do you want to sweep the agora of all foolishness and wrong-headed nonsense? Might as well stop the tide coming in while you're at it.

Now, to be fair, Gareth Harris is inviting a dialogue, not dismissing the ignorant as impossible to teach. I agree with him, ultimately. If you would discuss a subject, learn it first. I guess I just prefer a bit more humility in the approach. The more I have learned, and I have learned a great deal, the more I realize I know very little about a lot of things. But the more the world comes to resemble Borge's Library of Babel for me: as full of books as there are stars in the sky, indeed more full than that. It is a library that comprises the universe itself, but none of the books are written in a language I can read, even though the books themselves comprise all language. My knowledge is a paltry thing, and the more I apply myself to learning the greater portion of one field, the narrower my scope becomes, and the less I know of the universe itself. Although I imagine that if I simply persevere in one pursuit, I will finally see the universe in a grain of sand, and know all eternity in an hour, I also know this is not true, that the microcosm is not the macrocosm, and that the more I learn about one thing, the less I learn about all things. So I abjure jargons.

Could I set you a task of understanding the world's literatures, or just those I know best, from Western culture? But which way will I have you learn it? What will I establish as fundamental? The moment I choose something, I set it apart as a mountain, but to climb a mountain is merely to reach the top. What about all the other mountains, and the valleys, and the deserts, and the beaches, and the plains? Philosophy of religion? Which is more important? The Christian question of theodicy? The metaphysical nature of the Ground of Being? The experience of eternity, the mystical union with the Godhead? The peace that passes all understanding? Which must you know before we can converse? Must we learn the nature of the soul? Must we agree there is a "soul"? Must we accept that the most important things in the universe are knowable to the human mind? Must we decide that what is not knowable is worthless? Should we first decide what it means to "know"?

So you should understand the fundamental concepts of epistemology, then? But whose? Those of Socrates? Or Locke, Berkeley, Hume? Kant? Gadamer? When do you know enough that we can discuss existentialism in the realm of Christianity? After you've read all of Kierkegaard? Or Kierkegaard and Tillich? Or should we read Buber together in order to both grasp the nature of the I-Thou as he understood it? Is this essential? Or merely my interest, my hobbyhorse, the way I came to the understandings I have now?

I don't know. I don't know. The commandment was that we love one another. Are we doing that now? (I address only other Christians now, I know.) And if not, why not? What else are we called to do? Evangelize? Wouldn't loving one another do that? Wouldn't it do it better than anything else?

But which is easier? To evangelize? To set some ground rules before you can talk to me? Or to love one another? Three guesses; first two don't count.

I really need a hobby.....

According to this New Yorker profile, 2.4 million people read Andrew Breitbart's blog every month. That would be about half the population of Houston, or not enough people to keep a syndicated radio program on the air nationwide, or even a basic cable program ("The Daily Show" got a reported 1.4 million a night back in 2009., just for comparison's sake). I can't think of 10 people I know in real life who've heard of Andrew Breitbart. Actually, I can't think of one. And what does he traffic in?

No battle is too petty for Breitbart, no target too small or pathetic. He once showed me a series of messages that he had received from an apparently unhinged visitor to his Web sites. One missive concluded with a postscript: “You drank human urine three times—how did it taste?” Breitbart recalled, “That is when I said, O.K., I am not going to ignore him anymore—I want to create a level of pain for him that makes him realize this is not worth this.” He published the messages, as well as the sender’s name and photograph, on Big Journalism, along with a scathing editorial saying that the sender’s “stylings deserve a far greater public platform.” Breitbart told me, “I am sure if you talk to shrinks, or prosecutors, who are experts in these types of people, it is best to avoid them. But that’s not how my brain works.”

Pretty much what anybody blogging about politics traffics in, in other words. Outrage. Outrage and argument. In fact, here's political blogging in a nutshell:

He does not pretend to be an expert in policy, or to be particularly interested in it. “Just because I am paying attention to politics and culture doesn’t mean that I should be talking about the health-care bill, talking about the minutiae,” he told me. Instead, Breitbart is obsessed with wresting control of the political narrative from the established media organizations. If the wire services that Breitbart aggregates, and the bloggers he recruits, serve as his content providers, then Breitbart might be called a malcontent provider—giving seething, sneering voice to what he characterizes as a silenced majority.

Will the real America please log into the internet and stand up?

But it reaches further than that; Breitbart's response to John Lewis claiming the tea party members shouted racial slurs at him outside the Capitol several months ago goes a bit beyond the level of politics blogging going on:

The editorial was a typical Breitbart gesture: a brazen, blustering provocation disorientingly couched as a reasoned response to a brazen, blustering provocation. If his logic was weak (the absence of documentary evidence of an incident does not prove that the incident did not occur), his rhetoric was effective, repositioning the congressmen not as victims of racism but as perpetrators of it.

Now we're into Christopher Hitchens territory.

A place I promised myself I wouldn't go, but maybe it's just as well I did. Hitchens, much in the manner of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, sets up a straw man of his own imagining and proceeds to set it on fire. He does this in front of an audience as ignorant as he is, and his eloquence (such as it is) passes for intelligence, and wins him crowds anxious to have his book signed, which is, after all, what he's really there for. There was a reason Plato had Socrates condemn the Sophists, and when I regard people like Hitchens, my sympathies for Socrates go up just a bit. It's a problem of language games, in the Wittgenstein sense: Hitchens disparages experiences he doesn't accept, accepts experiences he does, and the whole thing runs on wheels. It is essential, in Hitchens world-view, that everyone think as he does, so we must all accept the reality of quarks and mesons, even though the evidence for them is simply that physicists have declared they have a reality, and their particle accelerators and equations prove it. I don't doubt they do, but I have to take it on faith, since I'm not a physicist. It has nothing to do with my life, of course. Quantum physics may affect computing, but it will never effect how the electrician wires my house, or how the plumber fixes my toilet, the mechanic repairs my car. Yes, yes, at some level it is important (I don't deny it), but does it affect my daily life? Do I have an experience of quantum mechanics? No. It may explain questions I haven't asked, and don't need to ask; but that doesn't prove it essential to my life, or even true. Truth, as Kierkegaard pointed out, is subjective. Quantum mechanics may well be "true." But what does that mean to me?

Nothing. Not really.

So I don't discard quantum mechanics, but I accept it as valid. It fits, I am told, with the same science that makes this computer and the internet possible, the same science that makes my lights come on, my refrigerator hum, my car run reliably. Good enough. But none of these things are truth to me, either. They may be valid facts; but they are not "truth." What is truth? Ah, that's not really the realm of science.

It's not the exclusive realm of religion, either, or the only realm of religion. But to speak of matters relevant to religion is not to speak of anything Christopher Hitchens has publicly espoused as valid for discussion. So why should I try to converse with him? He wants me to accept the reality of quarks because physics says so, when he knows no more than I how such things can be, or even if they are. He accepts what the physicists say; he trusts. And "faith," as that word is translated from the koine Greek of the New Testament, is most commonly rendered into modern English as "faith." But for Hitchens, faith means "believin' what ain't so." And Hitchens doesn't have the good grace to so much as read William James and reconsider that assertion.* He doesn't need to; he has his eloquence.

And Andrew Breitbart has his outrage. Per that New Yorker profile, he provokes a lot of thoughtful people, people whom I admire and respect for their opinions. But arguing with Breitbart, or Hitchens, is like wrestling with a pig: you get muddy, and the pig likes it. In the meantime, Breitbart and his friends are keeping the dream alive:

Mike Silver, a businessman who is Breitbart’s neighbor, remembers being at Breitbart’s house for the 2004 Super Bowl, when Janet Jackson had what her co-performer, Justin Timberlake, characterized as a “wardrobe malfunction.” Silver recalls, “He immediately grabs his laptop—he has all these disciples who send him things—and the phone starts ringing off the hook. He wrote the story, calling what Jackson was wearing a ‘solar nipple medallion,’ and then for the next couple of hours you could see that phrase popping up on all the broadcasts. I couldn’t believe how quickly they could influence the Zeitgeist of the world.”

I had never heard that description before. I guess my Zeitgeist is not the world's Zeitgeist.




*I.e.: "The freedom to ' believe what we will ' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, " Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider."

PEACE AND FELLOWSHIP AMONG THE NATIONS

(from The Hymnal of the E&R Church)

Our heavenly Father, who hast declared that all the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom of thy Son, bless all the races of mankind, banishing from among them all hatred and enmity, purging them of all pride and vainglory, delivering them from all lust for power and greed for gain.. Incline the hearts of all peoples to open their gates to the Lord of lords, and King of kings, that he may enter into their cities, their churches, and their homes, to dwell there and to govern all things by his Word and Spirit. So may justice, mercy, and peace prevail throughout the world, and thy Name be glorified; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

AMEN.

O God, the Lord of might and love, control the nations of mankind by thy gracious power, and make them to long for the reign of good will in the earth.

HEAR US, HEAVENLY FATHER.

Guide the hearts and minds of all who govern, that they may seek first thy kingdom, and bring forth justice for all nations, whether small or great.

HEAR US, HEAVENLY FATHER.

May the children of our own and every land grow up in hatred of war and in love of peace; and, renouncing all self-seeking, may they devote their lives to the service of Christ in the upbuilding of a righteous and peaceful world.

HEAR US, HEAVENLY FATHER.

Save us from the spirit which leads to strife, from the temper which refuses to forgive, from the ill will that has no wish to forget, and from lack of faith in thy power to change the hearts of men.

HEAR US, HEAVENLY FATHER.

Grant thy Holy Spirit to those who bear on their hearts the burden of the world's sin and pain; prosper their work for the welfare of human life, and inspire them with wise judgment, that they may build a brotherhood of nations in the fatherhood of God.

HEAR US, HEAVENLY FATHER, AND GRANT US PEACE. AMEN.

Killing foe for peace...bang, bang, bang. bang, bang, bang...

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. --George C. Scott Patton

Preparatory to July 4th, and another round of tales about how many people died for "our" freedom, I remembered this line from the speech that opens the movie "Patton." It's the thing we don't focus on when we praise those who "died" for our country, as if their deaths were not intimately connected to the deaths of others. Every time we praise someone for "dying" for their country, we really mean to praise them for killing for their country, for making other people die.

Because if freedom is secured only through war and bloodshed, that's how it's done.

The whole question of whether we exist as a country because of our military, or our military exists because we are a country, is another matter. As is the question of whether the military should exist apart from the citizenry. As Andrew Bacevich points out, the "Greatest Generation" signed on for the duration; not for life, or until retirement. We seem to have lost our way on that, too.

Alberto Agonistes

I went to the dentist today, and actually found a current magazine! Clearly a sign I should blog about the article on Alberto Gonzalez! Which contains such journalistic insights as these:

“Listen, we’re in a war, and the only way to win a war is to be tough,” he would tell me several weeks later, noting that the Obama administration has continued many of the policies he gave legal blessing to, both as White House counsel and as AG under George W. Bush. “Everyone is learning that to be successful in this environment, you have to go to the limit of what the Constitution allows.”

(No mention that torture violates Federal law, and the "When the President does it, it's legal" argument, goes back to Richard Nixon and Watergate.)

When I mentioned torture memos, he interrupted me to ask which torture memos I was referring to.

Classic Texas Monthly style, that. No answer to the question, no clarification, no follow up. Because it really matters how you define "torture," you see. We really must argue the point awhile, because it's a gray area.

This circle was easily the most hawkish and aggressive within the administration. The caustic, imposing Addington, who as a longtime Washington hand knew more about presidential wartime power, the Constitution, and Capitol bureaucracy than just about anyone in government, set the tone with his contempt for those who advised caution, or were soft. He was, like Cheney, not interested in opposing opinions, and members of the State Department or Congress were excluded from meetings.

I.e., don't blame Alberto. He was only doing his job. He didn't know anything about the Geneva Conventions. He relied on others. He was only following orders. And that whole "opposition" thing? That's how we do it in courts of law, so the law is followed and the truth determined. But this was a crisis, so protecting the country "legally" meant whatever John Yoo thought. Seriously:

The only person in the administration who knew as much about presidential wartime powers as Addington was a young legal scholar from Berkeley named John Yoo, who was the deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC. A product of Harvard and Yale Law, Yoo was a whiz kid whose conservative bona fides—he’d clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas—were indisputable. Within weeks of the attacks, Gonzales was asking Yoo for memos outlining the limits of the Geneva Conventions. Yoo was generous: Since Al Qaeda and the Taliban militia did not constitute a nation or a state, he concluded, they had no protections.

All the opposition to Yoo's legal opinions? Alberto has an answer for that, too:

Would it have been nice to invite everyone to these meetings? Sure, but it just doesn’t work that way. Were there times others should have been invited? I have to concede it may have been helpful, but we did the best we could under the circumstances.”

See, it's not his fault. He couldn't help it. You can't blame him. He didn't try, but trying is hard! Besides, does this sound like torture to you?

In March 2003 Yoo sent out another crucial memo, this time exploring the limits of prisoner interrogation. He concluded that military interrogators were not subject to federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, or other uses of force during questioning because the end goal was “to prevent further attacks on the United States.” The memo suggested that acts like dousing prisoners with scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substances; slitting an ear, nose, or lip; or disabling a tongue or limb were not criminal.

Well, it's certainly not what they meant:

To Gonzales, Abu Ghraib was not, as critics would charge, the logical outcome of the administration’s permissive view of “enhanced interrogation.” He told me that he lamented it as the “despicable conduct” of a few “knuckleheads.” When the news broke, he worried that people would think prisoner abuse was part of White House policy, which, in fact, many people did. “We had worked very hard to do what was right,” he told me, “and now everyone would assume this was a by-product of what had been authorized.”

And that's it for the article. Which torture memos was Swartz asking Gonzales about? Dunno. Why was torture Constitutional when it is clearly banned by statute? Dunno. Why am I telling you this? Oh, because of this:

From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

Will Bunch expands the point to indict the political culture of the entire country on seemingly unrelated terms:

Increasingly, we're losing our perspective, maybe our minds. We have candidates for the U.S. Congress comparing the taxes that we pay to finance the U.S. military or to pay for public schools to slavery, or to the Nazi-led Holocaust. As Americans, we should all seek higher ground over what we talk about when we talk about slavery, and what we talk about when we talk about torture.

A point that I would, again, call Kierkegaardian. I hope to explain that meaning soon. But for now, the beat goes on. And the country, apparently, keeps marching to it.

Is this a great country, or what?

An update, because it just gets better:

However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper's usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

The Times spokesman added that outside of the news pages, editorials and columnists “regard waterboarding as torture and believe that it fits all of the moral and legal definitions of torture.” He continued: “So that's what we call it, which is appropriate for the opinion pages.”

I remember Ted Koppel interviewing Jon Stewart during the Democratic Convention in 2004. The exchange went something like this:

Ted Koppel made the distinction between fact and truth, using himself as an example. [Actually, Ted Koppel told Jon that he was confusing "truth" with "facts."] What if, he said, President Bush revealed at the convention that Ted Koppel is a "drug dealer and pedophile." Would it be a fact to report that the President said that?

"There is a difference between facts which are reported immediately [and the truth]," Koppel said. "The truth may not catch up for another week or two."

Except what I remember Koppel saying was that he'd report what Bush said, and let someone else refute it. Later. Much later. Long after the lie was half-way 'round the world. Because, like Lara Logan, his duty is not to the truth, nor to his audience. In fact, let me just point out it can be done. People can be called on their lies:

Brewer nonetheless stuck by the claim that undocumented immigrants are murdering Arizonans when asked about it last weekend on a local Arizona political show.

"Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that have been beheaded," she said.

The anchor notes that he couldn't find "any beheadings in any kind of news search."

The Arizona Guardian followed up, asking the state's county coroners -- who would examine any body connected with a crime -- if they'd seen the headless bodies from the desert.

They hadn't.

A newspaper investigates, a reporter in real time challenges a statement. Was that really so hard?

Apparently for Ted Koppel, this violates some journalistic standard of "objectivity." Kinda like the New York Times here. I know this idea of the "objective journalist" gained traction after the "yellow journalism" days of William Randolph Hearst, but honestly, hasn't it become more of a detriment than a benefit?

Andrew Sullivan is right: this is newspeak. This is using words, or reporting (take your pick), dishonestly, so as not to offend those in power. And really, it doesn't even have to be this way; except, one has to admit, the Governor of Arizona is not exactly a "position of power." Not in national politics.

There is no truth in this kind of 'objectivity," and none to be found through it. Truth can only be found in spite of it.

God save the Republic. Something tells me I'd better activate my prayer capsule....

"A vapid and hollow charade...."

I was looking at this, and thinking about how, as the author says, most use of "anonymous sources" is just an excuse for lazy reporting. And then there's the "blowback" against the Rolling Stone McChrystal article; if Lara Logan is a representative example of journalists today, their job is not to report the news, but to report the news their sources want them to report, when they want it reported. That's simply what she says there: sources tell her when to report, and when not to, and respecting sources is much more important than reporting news. Because, apparently, we only need to know what the sources want the reporters to let us know, and while the journalists may know much more than that, their first duty is to their sources, never to the general public.

It's a problem of Kierkegaardian proportions. But let's get back to the first issue, first: the problem of "anonymous sources" is not entirely laziness; it's also a matter of technology. If you want to boil it down to one source, let's blame Ted Turner.

Turner was praised as a visionary (or damned as a madman) when he turned "TBS" from a "superchannel" (remember those?) to the basis for a cable network that soon spread to CNN, CNN Headline News, and TCM. But it was CNN that did it: 24 hour cable news. Information around the clock, from around the world, to you in your living room. What could go wrong, with a world to choose from? How could you ever run out of information?

Except, of course, CNN doesn't bring you the world: it brings you America, and a damned small portion of that. Mostly what it brings are stories that claim national attention (hurricanes, floods, oil well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico) and politics, which means mostly D.C. Turner tried to center his network in Atlanta, Georgia, but technology is a two-edged sword, and the power to send out a signal from somewhere besides New York or El "A", meant the power to receive a signal back from those places, too. In the end, the incoming signal proved stronger than even geography. Long before "cyberspace" made location irrelevant, it didn't matter where Wolf Blitzer's "Situation Room" was physically located: psychically, it was rooted in D.C. So news didn't change; it got worse.

And reporters got jobs; except, of course, TV journalism is not print journalism, and CNN doesn't compete with "60 Minutes" (is that still on, by the way?). But cable news, and now internet news, and any kind of news at all, is a hungry monster: it needs to be fed. The apt comparison is the mortgage backed securities game, which soon needed more mortgages than the market could offer in order to meet the demand from investors for more such securities. The response was not to limit the number of such securities available; the response was to prompt the market at the other end to supply more mortgages. And we all know how well that worked out. The same thing happened with "news:" we needed more of it, wherever it came from. Had anonymous sources not existed when this happened, we'd have needed to invent them.

Today it's the simplest thing in the world to find new "zombie lies" traveling all over the news, now starting with reputable. v. internet, sources. ABCNews recently reported that Phoenix, AZ bears the dubious distinction of being the "number two kidnapping capital of the world." No, not even close. But it makes a good story, and we need to fill air time, so let's report it! Now, in fairness, that may just be an egregious lapse on the part of ABCNews; but politicians have decided there is no downside in promoting outrageous lies in campaign ads and speeches, sometimes based on nothing more than what they heard on Glen Beck's radio show, or just made up out of whole cloth. And are these lies ever investigated, disputed, dismissed by journalists? No, not really. They're too busy defending their sources and their professional conduct, and seeking reports from anonymous sources so they have something to put on the air when the camera turns to them and Wolf wants the next story that's a "situation."

FoxNews, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN....that's a lot of airtime on a lot of channels that need something to say. And then there's Huffington Post, and TPM, and Drudge, and Slate, and Salon, and....I'm not even touching the surface, or trying to equate all of these sites; they're just the ones I think of off the top of my head. Lots and lots and lots of internet sites seeking eyeballs, and blogs and Twitter and Facebook seeking commentary, and stories go 'round and 'round and 'round, and it all becomes true because everybody's saying it, and once in awhile we bemoan the "pack mentality" or reliance on "anonymous sources" and we condemn "lazy journalism" or listen to one reporter tell another reporter not to report everything he knows, especially when he's on the road to Paris with a four-star general who only sleeps four hours a day and eats one meal a day and has been drinking beer with you for hours and just starts talking as if you were his oldest buddy in the world, which suddenly you are and how dare you betray him because you're there as a journalist, not as his drinking pal....

And we keep striking at the branches of the tree of evil, and no one takes an axe to the roots. It is a Kierkegaardian question, as much as that is an image from Thoreau; but the two great individualists of the 19th century have much to teach us in the 21st century. Much, indeed. But it won't help us much to change the nature or politics in America, or journalism, or the intertubes. Maybe something closer to home, and harder to work on, is what needs to change.

Maybe.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning..."

There's a reason a book like this is published in the popular press rather than among the experts in the field:

Bering argues that the strangely deeply-rooted sense that some intentional agent created us as individuals, wants us to behave in particular ways, observes our otherwise private actions, and intends to meet us after we die would also have been felt by our ancestors, leading them to behave in ways that favored
their reputations--and thus saved their genes.

IOW, Richard Dawkins meets St. Augustine, and the result? Bollocks.

Funny, I was just reading some notes on Augustine's Confessions, and even the editors of Norton's Anthology of World Literature pointed out that the three characteristics of Augustine's remarkable work would have been strange and, indeed, incomprehensible to his peers and his predecessors, especially the idea that we were created as individuals, that the gods wanted us to behave in particular ways, and that the gods would be the least bit interested in our personal, indeed in our interior, lives.

That's all Augustine. Every bit of it, rooted in Augustine's Confessions. And it is no more a summary of human religious experience than John 3:16 is a summary of all Christian theology. It's just pure, mindless crap. It's just another "expert" taking some simplistic, reductio ad absurdum view of religion, shoe-horning it into a "scientific theory" (of which it is neither) and peddling it for purposes of making a buck from the gullible and naive. The author, Jesse Bering, is noted in the catalog from which I took that precis (and for which, to be fair, he is not responsible) as "one of the principal investigators of the Explaining Religion Project. I can only hope their efforts are better informed than this.

Oh, and the thesis of the book, apparently, as if you couldn't guess:

But in today's world, these psychological illusions ahve outlasted their evolutionary purpose and Bering draws our attention to a whole new challenge: escaping them.

Same song, different verse: a little bit louder, a little bit worse.

In other news, Sam Harris continues to set fire to the straw men in his head:

Bestselling author Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith—that a moral system cannot be based on science.

I can only say that was probably "the most common justification for religious faith:" in the nineteenth century. And World War I pretty much set fire to it, as "The Waste Land" and most of the ouevre of the "Lost Generation" eloquently recounts. And there are plenty of "moral systems" based on simple observation (which is, essentially, science), starting with the great-granddaddy of them all: the Nicomachean Ethics.

Lord, deliver me from fools. Please.