Now That It's Now

Novum

2009-05-31T18:33:00.004-04:00

This blog is an attempt to think through the subject 'politics' to its conclusions, which may be variously labeled ontological, anthropological, hermeneutic, and theological. This means that at different times I will take politics to be about the orders and varieties of being, the cultural and evolutionary forms of human survival and flourishing, the interpretation and meaning of textual events, and the existential situation of human beings in relation to God.

My beliefs about politics stand in a perplexed and unresolved relationship to Catholic theology, but I would like to begin with the question of why I am fascinated by the political, and especially how this subject directly involves me in fantasies about power and my own feelings of powerlessness. In my daily experience, the persons who hold political power command a great deal of my attention. I read about them in online newspapers and listen to stories about them on the radio for several hours each day, and I talk about them constantly with friends and family. Their decisions matter to me a great deal, as do the explanations and justifications they give for those decisions. Choices about who has access to information, i.e., what is disclosed and to whom, bring figures from the media into play as equal objects of my interest. Most of the time I simply take this level of interest for granted and oblige the people around me to adjust to it.

In terms of my personal history, I was raised in a politically active culture in which being informed and expressing one's opinions on public affairs was a part of coming of age. My culture taught me to value political and intellectual independence, to hold unpopular beliefs in the face of opposition, and to use blunt sarcasm as a tool for gaining the floor and criticizing poor reasoning. Since I was raised in a very politically progressive culture, it was only natural that I rebelled against it during adolescence by becoming an outspoken libertarian. When I converted to Christianity in early adulthood, I renounced that position entirely and became a consistent advocate for a leftist approach to social justice issues. It is my firm belief that if Jesus' earthly ministry were to take place today, he would be rightly regarded as a threat to our socio-economic system, and so I can find no kinship with those who identify as Christians but give their support to the most extreme and brutal policies undertaken in the name of global capitalism.

I was a seminary student on the morning of September 11th, 2001, when terrorists used the airport less than seven miles from my house as a launching pad for murderous, sensational attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. The unmistakable intent of the terrorists was that the attacks be taken as a political event, not a criminal act, and that message made an indelible impression on me. In an enormously sensitive way, it made me acutely aware of my vulnerability as the subject of a particular political order, raising the twin questions in my adult consciousness of whether my government had provoked the attacks, and why God would have allowed them. This means that for me, what came under attack on 9/11 was the sanctity of reason itself, of a creation ordered for a purpose by a good God. I felt stripped of all comfort and dignity, painfully exposed to the fact of something deeply disordered in the fundamental form of my social, political, and economic life. My desire, then, was to understand it so that I could free myself from the pain and fear that I felt so strongly.

What I "learned" from the 9/11 attacks was a political message cast like a die into my emotional consciousness. It said that the world was under new management, that men of no conscience had assumed responsibility for its most personal and intimate details, and that I was powerless to challenge any of their decisions. From now on, they would decide all of the important questions, including power over life and death. My response was not to challenge this basic premise, but to join the resistance, as it were. I felt the painful loss of a metaphysical order - I intended to restore it. I felt marginalized and persecuted - I was determined to pronounce judgment against those whose passivity and complicity enabled the new regime. I felt demoralized - I would sacrifice myself as part of a secret plan to redeem the world from violence.

From this flowed all of the contradictions of my adult life. I became torn between irreconcilable desires, all driven by wild guesses about how to stop the pain: whether to restore the omnipotence of God or lead a revolt against it, whether to seek worldly success or lose myself in obscurity, whether to wed the secular and the sacred or divvy up their assets, whether to risk acknowledging my darkest emotions or dissolve them into the transcendence of a world-historical process beneath whose shadow I could remain safely formless and abstract. Perhaps most obvious to anyone who has listened closely during these past seven and a half years is that I cannot decide whether I am afraid that God is judging America or disappointed that she is not.

The seductive power of these contradictions is increasingly obvious to me. Thinking about politics feels like hoping for redemption. Imagining the miraculous restoration of a future order is like picturing a shortcut leading from the painful realities of the present to the fulfillment of my desires, without ever having to name them as such and so risk having to renounce them to the inexorable logic of internal self-criticism. In that metaphysical vision lie refurbished fantasies from my childhood: the public vindication of a prophet who was once a boy, the stunning ascent from prodigy to genius, the narcissistic gaze of the media illuminating at long last the manifold injustices to which I had been so cruelly subjected.

I have become so good at rehearsing my powerlessness that it's hard to remember I ever did anything else. This is especially ironic given my strong defense of publicly held values over private, and my criticism of religious and political cultures that base themselves on secrecy. The statements from pragmatists such as William James on the efficacy of true knowledge feel right to me, properly oriented towards the future and the common good, and I deeply want to believe in them. Yet it is unavoidably true that my fascination with the political betrays an erotic attachment to secret knowledge, one which exacts an enormous and painful cost. It is the lure of anonymity, the implied promise of a transaction in which my superiority to the ignorant masses is privately assured.

What I live with as the obverse of this is the continual anxiety that pervades everyone with something to hide: the fear of exposure, of losing what I've most sought to keep hidden, of public ridicule and humiliation, of having my prized possession used against myself by the same persons I hold in contempt. No secret society is safe enough for the recluse, the paranoiac nursing proofs of obscure grudges and triumphs, for the bizarre perfectionist waiting until the day that the impossible project is completed before unveiling it to the world. For that individual, appearances must be carefully manipulated in order to prevent the truth from being disclosed by the wrong person, at the wrong time. Living that life has become for me far too painful and costly, and the risk for the future is even greater.

My hope for this blog is that it may become one part of a larger project of reconnection and human interaction. I do not find anything inherently wrong with my belief that the political is one aspect of human life through which a loving God may be revealed, as long as there are many others.

Pres. Obama Shows His Annoyance

2009-03-25T01:42:00.003-04:00

President Obama's news conference earlier tonight seemed eerily reminiscent of some of the best of the old President, especially as he kept repeating lines like, "It's going to take time," and "If it were easy, it would have been done already," and "We're facing difficult challenges." I could picture citizen Bush sitting in front of his tv in Crawford, smirking and spouting, "Go on and say it, Mr. President! It's hard work, isn't it? Hard work? How do you like it now?" It was easy to see that realization dawning on President Obama, whose internal monologue must have sounded something like this:

I've got the redneck rump of the Republican party openly rooting for an economic collapse so they can hang me from a tree on the White House lawn, a know-nothing Democratic leadership that has absolutely no interest in governance or anything beyond protecting its own turf, and the worst financial crisis in 70 years threatening to wipe out the stock portfolios of all my best friends from Harvard. Now I have to find a way to shovel them enough cash so they don't jump ship and support the Republicans in the next election cycle, blame as much of the damage on Geithner and Summers as possible while still keeping them afloat, all while placating enough of the pitchfork crowd on the left and the right by pretending to keep my promise to run the most transparent administration in history. Oh, and I'm raising two daughters with a woman who would be a load for any man to handle even under normal circumstances but who just happens to have the biggest cheering section this side of the backup quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and the world's biggest media platform to make me look even more like a jug-eared square than ever. So you bet I'm angry. This job sucks and while all you reporters giggle like schoolgirls I'd like to see you try it.

just me and a couple of old friends

2009-03-25T00:42:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure why exactly the theological attribute of omniscience holds so much fascination for me. Maybe it's that like so many of my countrymen, I can't resist puzzling over a paradox that seems to split everything right down the middle. Why does it matter if God knows everything in advance? Would it change who I love today? Would it make any difference in what I do tomorrow? Would it solve one single problem that matters to me (like getting my verbatim done, which I'm procrastinating right now.) Yet my mind always wanders back to this game, this score settling. Who was right about what, and when?

I haven't written anything about the financial crisis these past five months in part because I haven't needed to - the world, it seems, has finally caught up to where Plato was 2,400 years ago. For my money, the questions being debated today were already settled then by Plato's thought experiment called The Republic, which proved decisively that a pure economy of desire could not and would not suffice as the basis of a sustainable human civilization. Plato's critique of capitalism ultimately inspired Marx, and it is that reviled genius who has been most vindicated by recent events.

The truth of this extremely obvious statement has finally been revealed to the most deluded people in history: wealth only has meaning in relation to work, i.e., material production. A system designed to reward people for not working is an absurdity, and a system such as ours, in which the greatest rewards are reserved for people whose expertise lies in creating the illusion of productivity on a grand scale, richly deserves whatever fate it receives.

I do take exception to one apparently unquestioned truth about the financial collapse, which is that it was brought on by the greedy actions of a few. This is simply not true. On the contrary, without the greedy actions of these few, our social model would have collapsed a long time ago. We ran out of wealth in about the year I was born. At least the conjurers in charge managed to sustain the illusion of prosperity for another thirty years. Even with a desperately gullible audience, that's a pretty good trick.

moving on

2008-11-05T22:18:00.002-05:00

It's time for me to move on from thinking and writing about politics for awhile. There are many other things in the world that I love, and I plan to re-discover some of them. During the past three years, this blog was a great help to me in learning to face some of my own inner demons, ones I chose to give names such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But they are already fading away, and I intend to renounce them the same way I used to renounce my nightmares, letting their evil just dissipate into the air. I feel strangely sad about the end of this era. But it's the kind of sadness that's the leading edge of something new, like the knife-edge of a strong breeze blowing in from the Bay. I am not saying that I've yet found where, or to whom, I belong. But the need for a change is very real. Old nightmares really can fade away; fears that once seemed enormous and terrifying can take on the creased obscurity of an old photograph. And maybe after those first few moments of terror have passed, you also feel a little foolish. Things weren't quite as diabolically evil, nor events as tightly structured, as they seemed. There really were a lot of accidents, and plenty of bad luck, along the way. No one was in the tank for anyone. Everyone has something to regret. Even I can see that now. So that's my apology, for wasting my own time and energy with a lot of drama. There was a better way, one that would have required more patience with myself and a greater willingness to listen to others. I should not have passed such strong judgments on anyone. I'd like to think that during this past eight years, I knew as much about what was happening in my corner of the world as anyone, and that might actually be true. But it was an impoverished kind of knowledge, as selfish and secret as Gollum's hoarding of his precious ring. It took me farther away from my heart's true desire, splitting open a chasm between us that only kept getting wider and deeper. And the tighter I clung to what felt like my last defense, the worse it got. That's it somehow, I think. One of my supervisors at work keeps telling me, you know, you're actually kind of likable - why not let more people know that? And the way I've lived, only a very few people ever get to. There's something immeasurably small in that, a shrinking that says, look at me, wound into an invisible ball. How many people have ever read this blog? But becoming small also means being able to squeeze into tight places. There's a different kind of perspective that can open up from there, from the places most can't or wouldn't choose to go. Could it be true that even complete obscurity has its virtues, its blankness the empathy of a transcended self? Or as William Desmond might put it, could there be something even more obscure (and thus more transcendent) than nothingness, which is the good? What would voicelessness sound like, if it was put to the test? Maybe something stronger and more convincing than we think. But if voicelessness, if powerlessness could ever rise beyond (or go beneath) despair, it would have to be genuinely open. It would have to join in community with others, equally powerless and thus equal to itself. With the old nightmares fading away, that means the old metaphysics is disappearing too. There won't be a grandiloquent ontology anymore, a bad infinite mocking me with its falsehood. What might replace all that are relationships. The demons labeled Bushadministration and Dickcheney have wreaked the damage of ten Katrinas. But that wreckage has another name too: it's called a second chance.

Fellow Chaplains Reflect on the War

2008-03-24T19:35:00.002-04:00

Following up on where I left off my last post, here is a wonderful piece from the AP on military chaplains reflecting on the war. In my own work as a chaplain, I've only dealt with a few patients who have been directly affected by the war. These brave Christians are serving God in the middle of it.

Five Years Ago Continued - Keeping Faith in a Dark World

2008-03-24T18:24:00.002-04:00

I've read quite a bit in the last few days from neo-cons wondering who first opposed the war and why. The thought process seems to be that since only dirty hippies oppose wars there must be some other explanation since they were right and the (apologies to Glenn Greenwald) Very Serious People who did their usual cheerleading act from the sidelines were wrong. I suppose it is logically possible that even hippies can be right sometimes in the same way that a broken clock is right twice a day, but there seems to be a genuine, almost anthropological curiosity from the Vanguards of Corporate America about the rest of us who proved on this occasion to be uncannily right. So, gosh, how did we get it so right back in 2003? I mean, was there a big secret or was it just one of those oracular hippie trips? In response to that I'd like to make the personal observation that staying sane in a society which is losing its mind is an extraordinarily painful experience. You don't know how much of your individual sense of well-being is invested in your perception of the rationality of others until that warm blanket is suddenly, violently wrenched away from you and you are left to contemplate the possibility that everyone around you may be going completely insane. Try waking up some morning and disbelieving everything you read in the newspaper, hear on the radio, or watch on television. And then tell me how that feels. Pretty bad, huh? That was what it felt like for the millions of us in the winter of 2002-2003 who could see in the most obvious and transparent way that the Bush administration was planning a war that no amount of factual evidence or diplomatic cooperation could possibly forestall. The most mind-bogglingly basic question of the lead-up to the war - if the Bush administration knew for a fact that there were WMD in Iraq, then where the hell were they? - was, amazingly, never asked by the media. After all, there were weapons inspectors on the ground, with unprecedented access to the whole country. All the Bush administration had to do was to call up Scott Ritter and let him know where the weapons were so the inspectors could finish their job. Yet it was stunningly obvious from the obscure scraps of innuendo peddled most infamously by Colin Powell at the U.N. that not only did the proof not exist - because if it did they surely would have used it rather than what they had - but that the "urgency" being blasted from on high through a thousand media outlets all at once was not a result of a threat (to anyone) being posed by Saddam, but the high likelihood that the inspectors would finish the job and prove once and for all that there were no WMD in Iraq. The complete and total obviousness of all of this made it impossible to believe any of the lies, even if I had wanted to. Actually, my favorite commentary at the time was in the Guardian (UK,) which perfectly expressed the insanity of the moment. It read something like, "Bush's claim that the U.S. needs to invade Iraq before the end of the month makes about as much sense as saying we must join with the Riders of Rohan in their battle against the dark forces of Lord Sauron." The case for war was fiction in the most literal sense of the word, as I've stated before. I don't know if that sufficiently answers the neo-cons questions or not. My experience of the war propaganda was one of intense, malicious psychic violation, something akin to being held hostage while everything you hold dear is ruthlessly, systematically destroyed. That may seem like an exaggeration, and I'm not saying it was the healthiest response, but in my defense I took for granted at the time that the war would last for years at enormous cost to each of us, so I got started on that grieving project early. Others may have experienced things differently. I'm in a much better place now, and I try not to take things so personally. This Lent, I even started praying again.

the iraq war goes to kindergarten

2008-03-24T17:36:00.002-04:00

Five years ago my nephew Peter was born. He's a cute kid. He's funny, independent-minded, and talkative. A couple of years ago when he was still a toddler his favorite phrase to yell in a tantrum was "No way!" which was funny to everyone except my sister who had to hear it a hundred times a day. In a few months, he'll be headed off to kindergarten. Being five puts him in some interesting company. What else turns five this year? Let's see -- itunes...the Toyota Prius...and the Iraq War. That's right, if the war were my baby instead of George Bush's, it would be time to send it off into the world to fingerpaint, snack and nap the day away with other little mass slaughters and historic blunders. In five years, not only has much water passed under the bridge, but 4,000 U.S. servicemen and women have died, in addition to uncounted scores of U.S. contractors and, for a moment's pause, up to 1.2 million Iraqis. By almost any measure, the war is the greatest humanitarian catastrophe so far of this young century. The last eight years have witnessed enough bloodshed and depravity to forever haunt a generation that, like my nephew, isn't even old enough to remember anything different. And that is really the most unbearable thing about all of this. It is hard enough to read the dates on those tombstones and feel a chill as you realize these sweet children were in middle school when the tyrant who ordered their deaths first came to occupy his present office. How much worse to contemplate the possibility that the future milestones of this war - where are you now, numbers five, six, seven thousand? - are sitting somewhere in a junior high school classroom, or hanging out at the mall, or doing a little homework while watching TV? There are so many issues facing this country right now but the war is like a locked iron door between America and its future. Until we make a commitment to stop the bloodshed we will continue feeding our children into the maw of this madness.

Mass Idiocy? Not At All

2008-03-20T10:41:00.002-04:00

David Brooks of the New York Times recently wrote that the financial crisis on Wall Street stemming from the sub-prime mortgage market meltdown is an example of "mass idiocy," justifying the intervention of the federal government in the form of a bailout. Setting aside the blinding contradiction from a fundamentalist such as Brooks that markets always work perfectly except when they don't, I respectfully disagree with his assessment. Those who profited handsomely from the subprime bubble were not idiots at all. They were capitalists. They were the economic heroes of the last seven years. Without their brave risk-management strategies and mind-boggling financial wizardry, we never would have recovered from the 2001 recession. It was their willingness to take on risk, to package it into ever new and exotic schemes, to invent for the 21st century a metaphysical language and style defying any effort by finite beings to comprehend, that we have all benefited from during this time. They were the ones that made it possible for the mighty American consumer to keep on trucking, even while wages remained stagnant and the government was hemorrhaging debt. It is understandable that a market fundamentalist such as Brooks would want to distance himself from the current fiasco by saying that what we are seeing is idiocy and not capitalism. But it's a lie, in the grand tradition of apologists for the Soviet Union who made fine distinctions between the supposed purity of socialism and its unfortunate manifestation in the form of the totalitarian state. What we are currently witnessing is none other than the most robust illustration of global capitalism at work. And this gets to my broader point. We often hear about incompetence, and now greed, wrecking what would otherwise be very fine plans, for instance, to expand wonderful economic opportunity to the rest of the world, or to liberate Iraq from itself, or whatever. I think this is mistaken. Just this week Vice-President Dick Cheney went to Iraq and declared it a success. His boss, President Bush, said the same. Why not take them at their word? Why assume the existence of incompetence when all evidence is to the contrary? Isn't it more likely that what's happening today, from Wall Street to Baghdad, was the plan all along?

Patriotic Grannies

2008-03-19T22:37:00.003-04:00

For all of us who have opposed the war from the beginning, here's a little piece of good cheer. We've got some of the toughest Americans on our side, and they're not backing down. Check out this story to brighten your day...

Local Ferrets Endorse Obama

2008-03-19T02:18:00.002-04:00

Local ferrets have decided to endorse Barack Obama, reports say. The turning point came recently when Obama proclaimed, "I'm skinny but I'm tough." In past presidential campaigns, ferrets have endorsed Zippy the Skunk, Harold the Happy Otter, and Abraham Lincoln.

Breaking News: Barack Obama Is Black

2008-03-19T02:15:00.002-04:00

According to a breaking news report on CNN, Senator Barack Obama is a black man. Not only did Obama have a black father, but he attends a black church in Chicago. Also, Obama's wife is black. CNN is refusing to confirm reports that Obama's children are also black.

Not Peak Oil Again? Do Shut Up

2007-07-11T20:51:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, I can't help it. I hear the words "peak oil" and I have to fight an urge to grab my shotgun and head for the hills. It's, like, something weird from my childhood, we don't have time to go into it right now. My point is, after reading this article in Salon on the recent International Energy Agency's report, my head is spinning again. There's a reason why most people do not want to know that bad news is coming before it actually comes, and that is because it is depressing. I don't want to live my life believing that forces beyond my control will soon irreversibly transform and partially destroy much of what I know and love, including, who knows, family, friends, cherished cultural institutions and traditions. That feeling, I have a hunch, is a small taste of a certain kind of dread, one all too familiar to many who have lived to see their worst fears realized. If possible, though, allow me to try and put my thoughts and feelings in order. To begin with, peak oil is only part of the problem, and so, by the way, is international terrorism. The real problems are much deeper - cultural, historical, ecological, spiritual. They are rooted in the origins of the modern free market as it emerged in 19th century England and even before that in the rise of European colonialism in the 16th century (for an excellent analysis of this, read John Gray's False Dawn.) What Gray shows unequivocally is that the "free market" was a political invention conceived in particularly conducive circumstances. The idea that this invention should or could be imposed universally as a global economic imperium is thus absurd. Gray compares this neo-liberal ideology to that of international Communism and predicts that its consequences will prove to be every bit as abortive and destructive. Certainly, international terrorism, economic instability, ecological crises, and hellishly genocidal civil wars are all among the consequences being reaped already. What globalization really signifies is just the opposite of what is claimed by the economic elite. We are told that globalization marks the final triumph of western ideology, the accession of bourgeois values in their most universal, indelible form. Everyone everywhere in the future will acknowledge the supremacy of market forces, privatization, and liberal democracy as the final and most advanced spiritual form of human life. This ideology is so pervasive and powerful that it has completely blinded us to the real story of our time, and this is the massive, unprecedented, and irreversible transfer of modern technology and knowledge from the western powers, where it has presided over a period of unrivalled hegemony, to the rest of the world - to everyone else. The leaders of the western powers do not seem to understand the situation. We are an elite minority which has ruled the world with staggering brutality for over five hundred years. For all of that time, we have exploited and hoarded the world's resources with little thought as to the vast suffering left in our wake. Now, not only is that excess on display for all of the world to see through the media, but the rest of the world is now arming itself with the tools to begin to fight back. This situation does not look good for us. We are vastly outnumbered. In my own lifetime, I have continually struggled with the question of how to interpret the images of global suffering which formed the backdrop to my own prosperous existence. My response to those images has swerved back and forth between left and right, between guilt-addled apology and defiant conspicuous consumption. Yet I think only now am I really beginning to understand them, and I do not know if it is too late. I always thought of my relationship to such suffering as a choice - after all, that was how it was always put to me in those television ads in which Sally Strothers would appear alongside starving Ethiopian orphans and implore that for the price of a cup of coffee I could save a human life. I could choose whether to help or not, yet whether I did so was entirely up to me and either way, my life would go on the same. I stood to gain or lose nothing except for the abstract knowledge that I had done a good deed. What I see now is that my generation has witnessed a colossal blunder - the squandering of one last opportunity to forge a lasting peace with the global South. Poverty was in the final analysis the defining issue of our time, not because as liberal consumers we needed to do something to alleviate our guilt, but because our survival as a people depended on it. The continuation of the old order was never an option. The only question was what the cost of the settlement was going to be. Even in the 2000's, if we had responded to the 9/11 attacks by embarking on a global effort to alleviate poverty (for instance, by investing the nearly $750 billion spent so far in the war on terror on bringing clean drinking water to the world) there might have been a chance to avert the catastrophe which is now almost upon us. Instead, we declared war on the world - a war we cannot win. The two great American disasters of this young century, 9/11 and Katrina, are the beginning of a painful process of awakening to our own precariousness and vulnerability, to the spiritual urgency of our situation. I am very much afraid that it may be too late.

Was I Ever Illusioned?

2007-07-11T20:02:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that my political mood fluctuates wildly. I confess I'm somewhat bipolar when it comes to assessing the current state of affairs, and that whatever happens in Washington, I take it personally. So last fall I got a big high out of the Democrats' victory and I rode that as far it could go. It's been kind of a steady decline from that NPR-fueled rush ever since, as it's become apparent to me (uh, I'm not smart that way) that the present dysfunctionality of the government goes beyond whatever illegal actions Bush and Cheney (for prison!) engaged in today. Let me just offer a few words expressing my opinion on how the Democrats are doing so far. Frankly, I would like to make it exactly three words but this is a family blog, and being a Christian man, I just can't say it. Instead I'll just say that it appears to this observer that the Democrats have absolutely no intention of ending the war anytime soon. To a cynic (I was once called this) it would seem like the Democrats are almost enjoying the catastrophe which has engulfed the President and the Republican party - why would they do anything to bring it to an end, and risk assuming one iota of responsibility for the debacle? Instead, they are content to simply let the conflict burn out of control, all the while pandering to their base (that would be me, but I'm not buying it) with various non-binding resolutions that have no chance of becoming law or of having any meaningful effect. In a nutshell, it's the same pet abortion of a strategy the Democrats pursued to such great effect in 2002 when they voted to give the President the authority to wage the war in the first place. Then as now it was a political calculation the Democrats were pursuing, in complete disregard for the moral consequences of their actions. This is not only disappointing but disgusting, and it is just the kind of cowardice that many Americans have come to associate with the Democratic party. Frankly, I can hardly blame them.

About the Ferret Posts

2007-06-06T14:16:00.000-04:00

Although the occasional appearance of ferret-related posts might seem surprising on a blog dedicated to philosophical and theological concerns, anyone who knows me knows what an important role ferrets play in my life, and how liable they are to make their presence known at any given time. Ferrets have their own spirituality (quite irreverent, not conventionally religious, and frequently profane) and even their own intellectual contributions to make (see the work of Mme. Peaches, the 18th century Dutch ferret, on the topology of tubular spaces.) Think of the ferret posts as deconstructive pauses. With ferrets around it is impossible to take oneself too seriously.

Because I Do Not Hope To Turn Again

2007-06-06T12:58:00.000-04:00

I enjoyed reading Gary Kamiya's recent article published in Salon, entitled "I'm Younger Than That Now," in which he struggles with the questions that life poses to him through the aging process. It's certainly instructive to compare today's "mid-life crisis" with Dante's "dark wood" or the "dark night of the soul" of St. John of the Cross, and to see how far we have come since then. Kamiya recognizes that there's a deep spiritual disconnect in today's culture around issues of aging which comes across in our endless affairs of vanity and denial (the immortality industry, etc.) but he can't quite put his finger on what's behind it. Why does our modern society lack understanding about the most basic truths of life and death? What gives us the illusion that we could have complete control over our passage through life, including its end date? Kamiya seeks consolation in the imaginative spirit of literature and religion, but can't quite bring himself to take the risk of accepting it. Instead he hesitates over whether religion is a "fairy tale" and a "childish consolation" or something that "restores the tragic sense of life" before dismissing religion for personal reasons he prefers not to speak of: "For many of us, God isn't an option." Yet without faith of any kind, it is exceedingly difficult to execute the turn which Kamiya recognizes, to his credit, as absolutely necessary. And this is the turn towards freedom. There is a kind of exhilaration in aging as old preoccupations fall away, leaving behind only the sheer satisfaction of life itself, of experience brought to its deepest fulfillment. Kamiya reaches towards this when he writes about the comedic nature of aging, the hilarity that ensues when one realizes there is nothing left to lose. Such joyful moments can also lead to a place of serenity and acceptance, which is the subject of Eliot's Ash Wednesday. Kamiya's failure to understand this poem (he writes of the "terrible line" that opens the poem) is suggestive of his deeper unwillingness to engage with matters of faith. What Eliot discovered through this poem was the liturgical structure of time, its ceaseless ebb and flow, its strange exceeding of limits, concepts, best-laid plans, and above all, its eternal return to origins, its endless flowing forth from eternity in the form of the primal spirit of nature. If religion and the arts are a cultivation of this wildness, then they can also lead us back towards it, can open up the way into it which is also our way forward in the world. I have a feeling that what Kamiya really is seeking isn't the contradiction of a hopefulness without hope but rather a way beyond the bureaucracy and marketing which consumes every inch of our lives and promises false hope for our own deepest fears. The real problem with aging and death in our society is our insistence on thinking of ourselves as agents of consumption, and the answer is to realize once again that we are agents of creativity, of life, and of love.

The Evasion of Reality in a Post-Modern World

2007-06-04T18:19:00.000-04:00

In a powerful address delivered to graduates of the UC-Berkeley Department of Rhetoric and published here, Mark Danner exposes the moral quicksand into which the Bush administration has plunged this nation. We have entered an age of epistemological crisis, in which facts have become malleable, reality has been elided, and the very notion of truth is considered old-fashioned. I am tempted to name this the fulfillment of George Orwell's dystopian prophecy of 1984, except for one crucial difference. Orwell remained wedded to the old model of centralized distribution, in which the message is distributed and maintained through rigid channels of communication. He never envisioned the rise of the new media and of popular culture. In fact, the run-up to the war in Iraq was an example of a new kind of propaganda, made possible by a new psychology which has become the bedrock of a new form of political organization, the media-state. As the spectacular success of the pre-war campaign demonstrates, such propaganda far exceeds in its capacity to deceive that of the classic campaigns of the 20th century. It is now possible using the organs of the media and of popular culture (for a cinematic example of this kind of fusion, watch Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog") to mass market political messages to a national audience in carefully orchestrated fashion, and in so doing, to completely control public opinion. This was how the Bush administration managed to achieve its revolutionary political objectives from the period of September 2001 to September 2005, right up until Hurricane Katrina blew up its fabricated image and restored the possibility of a legitimate opposition party. One need only recall the routine "terror alerts" in 2003-04 to see the effectiveness of this type of propaganda. So in an age of sophistry, truth has become an extremely precious commodity. To speak the truth in an age of deception is a powerful act of justice-making. The lies of official power deserve public scorn. The charlatans who speak them deserve disgrace. We must preserve the truth where we find it, and never cease to promote its cause at every opportunity.

Response to Christopher Hitchens

2007-06-02T14:15:00.000-04:00

Recent years have seen a resurgence of works devoted to skeptical themes, including Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," Daniel Dennet's "Breaking the Spell," and Christopher Hitchens' "god Is Not Great." Given the modest contributions which atheism has made to society over the years, this counts as news, and the sight of these dogged intellectuals butting heads with fundamentalists in public debates has at least made for an entertaining spectacle. It also provides thinking Christians with an opportunity to talk about our faith in a meaningful way, as encompassing the full measure of the spiritual and intellectual life. Hitchens' argument can be summed up in his phrase, "Religion poisons everything." This means that everything religious, insofar as it is religious, is bad, and that everything which has been affected by religion would be better off without it. Now as a statement of fact this is simply wrong and almost anyone not blinded by ideology can see that. Yet the argument also fails on a deeper level and it is on this level that the argument is of interest to religious minds. What Hitchens is proposing is a fundamental separation between what faith holds to be true and what reason knows. Therefore, we ought to be able to see this separation at work in a history of cultural achievement. A survey of Renaissance painting, for instance, should clearly reveal an absolute distinction between the contents of faith and the achievements of reason, such that an atheist could clearly point to the difference and identify where the purity of rational achievement ends and the "poisoning" of religion begins. Hitchens himself claims to be a great lover of the arts and even cites the religious poetry of John Donne and George Herbert as among his favorites. Yet this is bizarrely inconsistent, to the point that I would actually question the mental competence of anyone who claims to believe it. To try and separate the "religious" from the "rational" elements in Herbert's poetry is akin to trying to surgically remove the soul from a living creature. There is a kind of suicidal impulse in Hitchens' argument which is by no means peripheral to the "new atheism" which he represents. Dawkins and others have speculated about what would be the best means of "curing" the so-called virus of religion, and all options are on the table. This is not the first time a plan to get rid of either a single religion or all of them has been proposed. I would simply say that whenever public intellectuals begin discussing plans to purify the culture of foreign or undesirable elements, this is cause for concern. It is certainly reason enough for Hitchens and others to reconsider their position.

Ferrets Deny Stinking Allegations

2007-05-30T21:41:00.000-04:00

Local ferrets on Thursday denied allegations that they stink. "My clients have been tested repeatedly in the past two years, and have never tested positive for anything," said a spokesman for the ferrets. "We are all tired of the rumors, innuendos, and outright lies. Please respect the privacy of my clients at this time." The ferrets proceeded to deny any knowledge of shoes which have recently turned up missing.

Journey Towards Truth

2007-05-29T15:06:00.000-04:00

When I first started this blog a couple of years back my hope was to create a kind of Christian conversation around political, cultural, and social issues, using in particular the resources of the so-called "theological turn" in French phenomenology and Anglican theology. I don't think that conversation ever really got off the ground at least in part because I was too preoccupied by the soap opera of Bush-era scandals to make my central thesis understandable, which is that the errors of modern political movements are the result of fundamental failures to reason clearly, and especially, to reason clearly about matters of faith. What I really meant to be writing about from the beginning was the way in which philosophic wisdom can work together with Christian faith to shed much needed light on the causes of evil and injustice in the modern world, and to provide an alternative to the dominant discourse of global capitalism. It has always been my conviction that politics is, like theology, an art of interpretation, which simply means that to exercise power is to express one's attitude towards truth. Behind every public policy and every political action is an epistemology, a theory of what constitutes valid judgments and beliefs, of what counts as evidence, of what can be proved and what must be taken on faith, of such fundamental concepts as recollection, anticipation, discovery, conjecture, proximity, testimony. All of these concepts are the unspoken content of what is reported in the news on a daily and hourly basis. Even more profoundly concealed from our sight is the relationship between politics and ontology, which means the relationship of visible icons of power to a perceived invisible order, which may be variously located in the cosmos, the intellect, the will, or in the categorial structures of a priori reason. Thus, it is my contention that the seemingly intractable shortcomings of our present political and cultural situation, which we are all aware of to some degree, can be traced back to their source, and once exposed, can be overcome. In that sense what I am trying to develop might be called a "journalistic philosophy," or to use the language of phenomenology, an eidetic analysis of political and cultural discourse. Yet this is only one half of the problem. We have only focused on the possibility of using phenomenology as a resource for placing political actions in their proper context. The other half of the project is to show how Christianity - both natural theology and revealed truth - may also provide such a resource. This will be the subject of the next post.

It's Not Going To Stop Till You Wise Up

2007-05-29T00:08:00.000-04:00

That pithy line from Aimee Mann has always spoken to me of generational conflict, the way in which one generation hands to the next in almost ceremonial fashion its failures, burdens, unresolved traumas, addictions, superstitions, divisions, prejudices, and misunderstandings. It is a kind of inverse of education, a shrinking from responsibility, a failure of parenting. Such handings over can take place in small ways or large, in the intimacy of family life or on the overexposed surface of the world stage. Of all the painful rites of passage kept alive by human beings, surely the most grievous of them all is war. War is passed on like a curse from generation to generation, like a loathsome possession which clings to us despite our efforts to get rid of it. And it is part of the irony of war that it is so frequently propagated by those who fail to comprehend its uniquely awful burden, its plague-like symptoms, its sapping of human strength and possibility. These are the politicians with blood lust in their eyes, those who crave the trappings of credibility and moral purpose which accrue to public officials in a so-called "time of war." They seek nothing more than to enhance their own power by inflicting suffering and death on the innocent. Their appearance in positions of power marks the beginning of cultural and psychic decline, of a widespread failure of the ability to distinguish what is true and good from what is false and evil. This Memorial Day I am grieved by the thought that my brothers and sisters from the post-Vietnam generation, most of whom are younger than I am, are even as I write this being scarred by the psychic and physical wounds of war, inflicted upon them by a generation whose own moral failures continue to reap the most horrifying of consequences. It is the dates that mark the beginning and end of their truncated lives that startles me the most. These are children of the 1980's and 1990's, too young to remember the Reagan years, Iran-Contra, the Challenger explosion, Mikhail Gorbachev. They were raised on Bill and Hilary, on Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinksy's blue dress. Their graduation dates begin with "20." They arrived in this world barely two decades ago, and now they are already gone. Those that survive will live to bear the burden of their own damaged lives, to tell the story of the war they did not choose for themselves. I thought of this today while I was reading this article on the booming grave-stone industry in the Boston Globe. Read it and ponder what it means on this Memorial Day that these children are being sent to their deaths.

Obama Asked "How Long Have You Been a Black Senator"

2007-02-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

Senator Barack Obama sighed and rolled his eyes recently in response to yet another awkwardly phrased question about his blackness. "Mr. Obama, how long have you been a black senator?" came the question from the front row at a recent press conference, igniting giggles from other reporters seated nearby. Senator Obama attempted to impart a modicum of dignity to the proceedings by explaining to the reporter that he has always been black. "You see, my father is from Africa. The people there are black. Hence, I am black." The discussion then turned to other momentous topics such as Hilary Clinton's hairstyle and whether Sen. Joe Biden is gay.

Political Fiction and Post-Modernism

2007-01-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

In my last post I offered a psychological interpretation of how the United States ended up in its present bizarre situation of fighting to the death on behalf of our worst enemy. My conclusion was in effect that the Iraq war is the outcome of a fantasy, a projection of wishes, fears, and resentments onto a distant enemy. This is why at no point have the neo-cons made any kind of substantial contact with reality, and in fact all of the most intense and dramatic political conflicts of the past four years can be analyzed as failed communications between themselves and reality. This raises a rather interesting point about our current epistemological crisis. What we find in the present ascendancy of global bureaucratic capitalism is a curious merging of fact and fiction. It appears that as accounts of reality become more and more empirical, more devoid of the mediating role of symbol and metaphor, they also become more fictional, and even more fantastic. As Garrison Keillor wrote recently on Salon, what is really needed is not better journalism but "a good novelist." It's been a hunch of mine for a long time that fantasy is a medium for which the modern world is uniquely suited. Not only does fantasy drive the entertainment industry but it is really the engine of capitalism. A market must be imagined before it becomes a reality. In a strange way, a market becomes a reality as soon as it is imagined. So why should it come as a surprise that the major war of our time should come into being in the same way as, for instance, a new theme park? From the perspective of its creators, there really is no difference. A new war, a new product, a new religion. They all begin life as fantasies. That's their appeal, their unique defiance of reality. It brings something out in people, allows them to express something about themselves they otherwise wouldn't be able to. The neo-conservatives who brought us the Iraq war would have made marvelous novelists. It is our misfortune that they write public policy for a living instead.

Putting the Neo-Cons on the Couch

2007-01-10T11:07:00.000-05:00

The war in Iraq has long been compared to the Vietnam war and it certainly bears some similarities to that ideologically-motivated conflict. I would like to argue, however, that the Iraq war is something ultimately quite different, which I will call a psychologically-motivated conflict. In Vietnam, although the main arguments for U.S. involvement turned out to be wrong (the domino theory, etc.) it was at least true that we entered the war to fight communist forces and that is who we ended up fighting. The Iraq war is different first of all because it has come as a complete surprise to everyone who was directly involved in its planning. Bush's neo-con brain trust thought that the war would end with the capitulation of the Saddamist state and its rapid conversion into a fully complicit U.S. ally in the region. Thus, it has only very recently become clear to these people that the war we are now engaged in is different than the war they initially envisioned. With this comes the dawning realization that our present alignment in the war is nearly arbitrary and that we may be fighting for the wrong side. In other words, very recently Dick Cheney might have woken up in the middle of the night and asked himself why after all the United States is waging a massive military effort to establish an Iranian-dominated Shiite state in the middle of Iraq. And indeed this is a question that all Americans should be asking ourselves as well. Presumably this is the rationale behind Thomas Friedman's recent call to "re-invade" Iraq, the more easily to switch sides in the conflict and attack the very Iraqi army we have labored so mightily to build. Before we all get a little too giddy at that prospect, however, it is worth taking a step back to look at how we ended up here. How did it come about that the Bush administration, alleged master manipulators of the world, made the Duck Soup-like blunder of invading the wrong country and doggedly fighting a war on behalf of its sworn enemy? To answer that question we have to get into the head of our neo-conservative overlords, which is not a pretty place to be. Moving gingerly past their Ted Haggard-like repressed fantasies and resentments, we at least reach the place where they conceptualize power. It was in 1991 that the neo-cons first became fixated on Saddam Hussein. By remaining in power after the Gulf War, Saddam became a mocking symbol to the neo-cons of the failure of the first Bush administration, whose epitaph would be its realist legacy. George H.W. Bush failed as a president because he ultimately could not reconcile himself to the projection of American power, and the neo-cons would forever remember the conclusion of his Gulf War as a cowardly truce, a moment of humiliation rather than triumph. Cue Bill Clinton. During the Clinton administration, the neo-conservative fixation with Saddam grew into an obsession with each year that the wily Saddam successfully evaded U.N. sanctions and weapons inspectors. As their hatred for Saddam increased, so did their hatred for Clinton until the two obsessions fused into one. To get rid of Saddam, the neo-cons first had to get rid of Clinton, and so they focused their rancor on the great project of crippling the Clinton administration and removing it from power. Which takes us to the neo-con anointing of George W. Bush as the heir who would right the wrongs done by his father, banish the usurping Clinton administration into exile, and dethrone the tyrant whose very existence was a blight on the noble kingdom of America. And so off to war the United States went, with the blessing of Iraqi exiles whispering sweet nothings about democracy and WMD, and with the expectation that the fall of Saddam would bring the immediate fulfillment of every neo-con fantasy that had been so lovingly nourished over twelve years of frustration and impotence. Which brings us to today. The Bush administration has only with great reluctance gradually given up its hold on this mythology and acknowledged, three years too late, that there is something more afoot in Iraq than its glorious triumph over Saddam. But when you live in your own private castle, unpleasant, unexpected events aren't supposed to happen, and convincing the Bush administration just to pay attention has taken the collective work of nearly the entire civilized world over the course of three years. So it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise that one of the rumors coming out of the White House is that Cheney is leaning towards backing the Shiites. The fact that the United States would then be fighting a proxy war on behalf of Iran is apparently not a problem for Cheney. The Iraq problem is and always will be for Cheney a Saddamist problem, a Sunni problem. Crush the Saddamist remnants, and Iraq will finally be ours. And Bush will truly be king.

Those Pesky Christian Reconstructionists

2007-01-08T19:19:00.000-05:00

I wish Salon would stop publishing articles like this one . It's not that they're not informative, well-written, and fascinating. It's that they scare the hell out of me. For someone who's trying to go straight when it comes to doomsday politics (fingers uncrossed,) these articles are like candy. I just can't resist 'em. But really what's a day without a thought and a prayer for our right-wing friends, aka the Christian Taliban? Who could forget the great R.J. Rushdoony founder of the Christian Reconstructionist movement? It's good to know there's a theocratic movement out there founded by a guy who would have liked to have most of us stoned (no, not that kind of stoned,) and that it has powerful sympathizers in our elected government. But these lunatics are nothing to be afraid of, right? I mean, it's not like there's any historical precedent for a major economic, military, and cultural power collapsing into armed chaos? Ok, no recent precedent ? Look I'm not saying much, I'm just saying let's all say a little prayer tonight that we don't have a major terrorist attack or economic collapse anytime in the next ten years. Because I sure don't want to be answering to this guy for the rest of my time on this planet. Really.

All The Way to Baghdad!! (Huh??)

2006-12-03T14:41:00.000-05:00

One of the world's worst newspaper columnists, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, is urging the Bush administration to take a bold new step in its Middle Eastern foreign policy. He is recommending that the United States invade Iraq, conquer its peoples, and install a democratic government in Baghdad. This will touch off a wave of democratic reform across the Middle East and...wait a second, what year is this? Oh, forgive me, I thought we were talking about the first invasion of Iraq (or was it the second?) which Friedman also championed. What he is now proposing is a re-invasion, the purpose of which would be to kill all of the people who managed to survive the first invasion. I'm barely kidding, but Friedman is completely serious. Let's think for two seconds about the concept of the U.S. re-invading Iraq. The idea would be to fight all of the Iraqi sectarian and ethnic groups together this time. Really, this is just what Iraq needs. Something to bring all Iraqis together again, to remind them of why they are Iraqis. Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, it wouldn't matter. Just Iraqis joining hands across the desert in the common cause of killing Americans. How do you say Kumbayah in Arabic? Secondly, we would be attacking the government we are now trying to install. Presumably, all of the government ministers, soldiers, and civil servants we are currently training would become our new enemies, and we would try to kill them. Fortunately, they wouldn't put up much of a fight because we have done such a lousy job of training them so far. Really, would anybody miss the current Iraqi government after we had destroyed it? Would anyone wax nostalgic for the good old days of Ibrahim Jaafari, Abid Mutlak Al-Jubouri, and Saadoun al-Dulaimi? I didn't think so. Let's bomb these guys. Thirdly, one should at least ask the question of how many U.S. invasions the average Iraqi should be expected to endure in the course of their lifetime. Here come the Americans again? Really? Will Geraldo be involved? On the other hand, the average Iraqi lifespan is so short that there are probably precious few who remember the '03 attack, let alone the first U.S. invasion back in 1991. (Let's face it, who among us still has their original Desert Storm t-shirt? Even though those things are collectors items now?) Finally, if we do decide to grant the Bush administration the right to "do-over" the 2003 war, who else do we have to extend this right to? Here's a list of the nightmarish possibilities we may be facing:

1) Britney Spears gets to do over her first marriage to Jason Alexander in January of 2004
2) Janet Jackson gets to re-do her breast-exposure incident of that same month
3) John Kerry gets to re-do his famous windsurfing expedition of the spring of '04

You get the idea. I don't think this is a road we want to go down. We must regrettably say no to Thomas Friedman's otherwise brilliant idea of re-invading Iraq. And if we're feeling nostalgic for 2003, well we'll just have to break out our OutKast CD's and live the moment in our hearts all over again.

Ferret Border Poorly Enforced, Say Roommates

2006-11-27T19:47:00.000-05:00

The border between ferret designated areas and ferret-free zones has been poorly enforced, roommates of a local apartment alleged this week. "Ferret crossings into our bedroom have increased dramatically over the past few weeks," said one roommate who wished to remain anonymous. "We have noticed on more than occasion the telltale signs of ferret activity, including chewed items, books and CD's off of shelves, and mussed up bedclothes. These ferrets have no legal right to be in our bedroom, and we will avail ourselves of any and all means to remove them." Others counseled patience. "The fact is that enforcement of any border is an extremely difficult prospect," one roommate responded. "No one can guarantee that one hundred percent of ferrets will be kept out. Anyone who's dealt with these little guys knows that as soon as your back is turned, they move in. Just the other day three ferrets smuggled themselves over the border in laundry baskets. What can anyone do about that?" Anti-ferret hardliners insisted that something be done about the problem, however. "If need be, we will take matters into our own hands. That could include restriction of the free movement of ferrets, curfews, or even a border fence. If we don't act now, we will all wake up someday and find ferrets licking our faces."

Starting Over

2006-11-27T19:11:00.000-05:00

As I take a look back at what I've written on this blog thus far, I think that there is not only room for a great deal of improvement but also for a marked change in focus. I've used this forum to express what to me feels like a naked violation of the borders of my own emotional and political existence in the years since 2001, meaning, the trespass against my life as a citizen of this country, of what had always seemed most secure, of the basic conditions of trust and being provided for which most Americans, myself included, have always taken for granted. Thus these postings have taken the form of koans of rage, a sarcastic blurting out of the emotional pain that derives from having something taken away which was so precious that you never even knew you had it until it was gone. That, for me, has been the feeling of living in the post 9/11 world. It is a feeling of being under attack, constantly, from both within and without. That being said, I don't think that I have managed the post 9/11 world very effectively, and chief among those limitations has been my inability to express that pain in ways which would create communities: of sympathy, of justice, of determination, of reconciliation. Hence, the failure of this blog. Always a serial exaggerator, I have privileged moods of conspiracy, desperation, and frustration. I've conflated the political not only with the purely emotional, i.e. the pain which results from being oppressed by your government with the historical fact of its oppression, but with the theological as well - that tyranny in America would mean that God no longer loves the people living in this country and is in the midst of judging us harshly. The same could be said of my take on post 9/11 aesthetics. Does a bitch-fest between Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie really signal the onset of a permanent state of tabloid fascism (a face being stomped by a Manolo Blahnik, forever)? Is Dick Cheney really anything more than a bad man from Wyoming? I'm not foreclosing any of these questions, only beginning a new approach to answering them. There are creative ways of living even under less than ideal circumstances. I'd like to find some of them. And when I do I'll tell you what I learn.

How to End a War, Continued

2006-11-27T18:41:00.000-05:00

In my last post I wrote that the only way to end a war is to stop fighting it. Our elected officials have speculated endlessly about what must happen before the war in Iraq can end. The answer to this is nothing. The war can end tomorrow, if we decide to end it. In offering this judgment I have in mind the President's recent trip to Vietnam (his first visit there, of course,) which came at such a strange time in American history and thus carried with it such odd and powerful symbolism. There is no war taking place in Vietnam right now. It is, more or less, a typical Communist country in the post-Soviet era, still repressive but not unbearably so, at peace with its neighbors, benefiting from and strategically adjusting to the rise of China as an economic power and to the rising tide of globalization. In other words, thirty years after western powers left it, fifty years after being invaded, Vietnam is back to what it always should have been, to what it mostly has been throughout its history. It is not the axis of any kind of evil. It is not a domino waiting to fall. It is just another country, a backwater to the western powers, but one with its own struggles and aspirations. How did this come about? How was Vietnam transformed from a country divided against itself, the site of a global war which killed millions, into one in which peace now prevails? The answer is, the war ended. The United States simply left Vietnam. In the end none of the elaborate scenarios or calculations which the U.S. had made to explain its presence there, its objectives, or the preconditions for its departure, proved to have any substance at all. If they haven't been already, they will all soon be forgotten by history. They were fictions, projections, prevarications. History will record only that the United States left, the war ended, and Vietnam was left to resolve its problems on its own. I am not saying that the end of the U.S. war against Vietnam made any of these problems easier. The civil war continued for many years, and its cost was enormous. But the problems could not begin to be solved until the United States had left. The healing could not begin until the cause of so much of the suffering was gone. Only then could the scope of the problem as a Vietnamese problem, as an episode in Vietnamese history, begin to be resolved. The Vietnamese had to reclaim that history for themselves before reaching for a solution. Many years from now, the civil war in Iraq will finally end. The cost in lives, already staggering, will be unfathomable. It will take decades before Iraqi society can begin to forgive its acts of violence against itself and to knit itself back together again. Then Iraq will finally be at peace again. But that journey will not begin and cannot begin until the last American soldier leaves Iraq. There will come a day when a future American president will visit Iraq (probably for the first time!) and look at it curiously as President Bush recently looked at Vietnam, as a site where so much violence and suffering once took place. But that day will not move any closer to now until the U.S. war in Iraq comes to an end. Which can happen tomorrow.

How to End a War

2006-11-11T22:09:00.000-05:00

There has been much talk lately about the new course for the U.S. in Iraq, and everyone seems to agree on two things. One, the U.S. is not seeking to establish a permanent presence in Iraq. Two, there are certain conditions which must be met before the U.S. can leave Iraq. I would like to suggest that these are contradictory positions and that both cannot be true. My inclination is to believe that the first is a pretext - why invade a country if you don't plan to stay? - but let's proceed for a moment as if the first is true and focus on the second. Supposedly we are perfectly willing to leave Iraq but only after certain conditions are met, which alone would constitute a victorious withdrawal and not a defeat. The condition which is most often cited is an end to the violence in Iraq, which is always described as establishing security there in the form of an effective national government. This condition has always struck me as illogical. First, why would we want to train and equip a national Iraqi army, which would surely exact violent revenge against the Sunni insurgency and simply increase the violence? Secondly, why would we leave Iraq only after pacifying the insurgency? Once it's been crushed and Iraq has been restored to conditions conducive to our presence, why would we leave? If our real goal is to end the violence in Iraq, so that we can leave, why don't we just leave? Wouldn't that, eo ipso, end the violence, at least the part of the insurgency which is directed towards us? Imagine for a moment that a bouncer and a bar patron are fighting in a bar. The bouncer is trying to throw the patron out. The patron is trying to stay, all the while yelling at the bouncer that he is trying to leave and would have done so from the beginning if only the bouncer had not tried to throw him out. The incoherent position that the war must end before we can stop fighting it is a conceit worthy of Kubrick. There's only one way to end a war. And that's to stop fighting it.

The Filth Which is al-Qaeda

2006-11-10T15:52:00.000-05:00

Every generational enemy has its own brand of propaganda: its characteristic rhetoric, iconic images, slogans, and phrases meant to inspire awe and fear. Sometimes this propaganda itself rises to a kind of greatness and outlives the regime which inspired it. Think of Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," or Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." There is nothing grand, however, in the propaganda of al-Qaeda. On the contrary, it seems to reflect a particularly repulsive energy stirring at the bottom of global capitalism. It is a mixture of juvenile sarcasm and hyperbolic romance. It is a smirking kind of evil, deliberate in its universal disregard for human life, hinting at the depths of its own self-hatred, offering its own inflated martyrdom as the salve for the world's suffering masses. Take a look at today's press release from al-Qaeda in Iraq and you'll see what I mean. The way that al-Qaeda deliberately, smugly inserts itself into American political discourse is as predictable as it is repellent. What ought to be a celebration for Americans, a democratic election in which voters went to the polls to elect their chosen representatives, is twisted by al-Qaeda into signifying a victory for their own repugnant brand of evil. Their comments are intended to drive Americans apart, to thwart our collective purpose, to sow the seeds of political and social dysfunction. Knowing our weaknesses as a nation, they move to exploit them, and they do so with brazen confidence that they will succeed. Yes, tomorrow, we will see al-Qaeda's statements repeated endlessly in the conservative media and the conclusion will be as always to demonize the majority of Americans who stand firmly against the war in Iraq. But we don't have to stand for it. We don't have to listen to these agents of lies and calumny. On Tuesday Americans came together to proudly uphold our democratic traditions. That's something we should all be proud of. And al-Qaeda has nothing to do with it.

A Mandate for Peace

2006-11-10T15:09:00.000-05:00

When Republicans win elections, they announce their agenda, as in, "I earned political capital and now I'm going to spend it" (Bush in '04.) When Democrats win elections, they assure the voters that they will bend over backwards to work with the other party. Why is this? Nancy Pelosi's address accepting victory on behalf of House Democrats could have been a concession speech with a few changed words. Democrats plan to raise the minimum wage, to push for lowering the cost of prescription drugs, and to send a hallmark card to every grandmother in America on her birthday. Actually, I made that last part up, but could the Democrats' agenda be any meeker? "The Democrats: We Promise Not to Disturb You for the Next Two Years." On the key issue of Iraq, Pelosi said only that Americans voted for a "new direction," which is a little like describing the liberation of Normandy as a day at at the beach. Americans most emphatically did not vote for a new direction in Iraq. They voted for a direction out of Iraq. The Democrats should not mistake or deliberately mischaracterize the intent of the voters. Many of these voters were conservatives or moderates with deep misgivings about the Democratic Party, and yet they showed up and voted for it for one single reason: because they saw no other way to end the war. What little public support there remains for the war is politically and socially marginal. This means that the Democrats now have an opportunity to build something that hasn't been seen in this country in a long, long time: a national anti-war movement. Waiting for 2008 is too long. The opportunity for peace is now. The American people deserve to know that their voices have been heard, that the Democratic party stands united with them in their desire to end this war.

taking a chance on God

2006-11-08T16:17:00.000-05:00

The philosopher Jean-Luc Marion would have us believe that having faith in God means being radically open to possibility, which must mean, any and all possibilities. Taking his cue from the late medieval and early modern voluntarists (God could do anything, even make a square circle, even reverse the Ten Commandments!), he says more or less that our categories of good and evil, freedom and unfreedom, justice, truth, hospitality, et al, only apply to our world, and by no means do they apply to "God's world" which transcends being altogether. So, being open to possibility means being open to the possibility of something awful, something worse than I could ever imagine, as well as something infinitely greater than I could ever imagine. This means that all of us must roll the dice and take a chance on God, taking the risk that what we receive back will be much greater than what we sacrificed, being open to the possibility that it will not. This is simply another way of saying that we must be open to the possibility of our own deaths at all times, to live like there may be a future even when this belief is unwarranted by the evidence. Although Marion adds hastily that all possibilities are ultimately loving, this strikes me as more ominous than comforting. This could be taken to mean that even awful possibilities are in their essence really loving, possibilities such as being attacked or tortured. I am not allowed to have any presuppositions about these possibilities, according to Marion, I must simply be open to them. It strikes me that 9/11 was one such awful surprise, a moment of truly sublime evil. Are we willing to take a chance that the next revelatory event may be something as great as 9/11 was evil, even perhaps, infinitely greater than 9/11 was evil? After 9/11, are we still willing to be open to the future, whatever it may presage? What does it mean to show courage in the face of terror? Or to have faith?

Even I Can't Be Cynical Today

2006-11-08T15:55:00.000-05:00

Ok, I was wrong about everything. I wrote America off as an already failed pseudo-empire, constantly wondered whether the average American knew the difference between Norm Coleman and Gary Coleman, and obsessively followed The (tabloid) Globe's dogged coverage of George and Laura's failing marriage. On many occasions, and for a long time, I wanted to tell everyone I saw to just quit what they were doing and have a good time because the end of civilization in North America was near and there was nothing anybody could do about it. I may yet turn out to be right about all of these things. But for today...ah, today! Not only did I wake up this morning dead tired from a night of gloating over npr but when I checked my email at work I found I had won Patriots tickets for this Sunday's game. Who could believe it? What is going on today? On the same day that Americans completely prove me wrong and vote the bums out, lo, God delivers a ram. I may have to completely alter my perspective on life. I may need a brand new personality, or at least, my old one back. Is it possible that God hasn't condemned me and everyone else in this country to live in a hellish eternal darkness presided over by Bush, Cheney, and all the minions of hell? Look, what my political theology may be lacking in subtlety, it possesses in intensity. It is hard-wired for victory. All I know today is that I woke up this morning with that same magical feeling I had after the red sox had won the world series. It's a different world. Something new is happening. Everything might be ok after all. Things might turn out normal. It feels like morning in America again.

More Suggestions for Philosophers

2006-10-31T17:06:00.000-05:00

By philosophy I mean both the work of public intellectuals which is supposedly philosophical as well as popular notions which also count as being some part of philosophical discourse. I am saying that philosophy has failed on both counts. The adoption of post-modernism as a particularly vicious form of sophistry by the present ruling class (i.e., the neo-conservatives), as a means of defining and controlling discourse, ought to give every professional post-modernist not currently on the neo-con payroll a chill (that would exclude for instance Francis Fukuyama and other collaborating intellectuals.) I am saying that our present circumstances, i.e. as being ruled by the Bush-Cheney (for prison!) cabal, constitute the terminus of post-modernism in its official and its popular forms. In 2006 there is no way one can simply go off and deconstruct a cereal box without being complicit in the ongoing slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is what I am saying. As for the solution, I'm glad you asked. If truth is taken to be part of real-world conditions, a committment that we make in the midst of difficult and conflicting circumstances, if consciousness is an object in the world capable of theorizing and cognizing itself, one which is fundamentally open to those objects which disclose themselves to it, if art is taken to be an excellence or fulfillment or saturation of a type of living, if science can be inspired by the deep desire towards understanding the world as givenness and as gift, and if morality is the cultivation of virtue rather than a capitulation to some essence of apodictic certitude, then we are halfway towards solving our problems, halfway towards liberating this country from its death-grip in the hands of a fanatical regime and its morbidly alienated and barely entertained populist constituents (i.e. paris hilton.)

Terrorist Ferrets Plotting Major Attacks

2006-10-17T17:19:00.000-04:00

In a lengthy press conference yesterday President Bush vowed to take decisive action against terrorist ferrets who are allegedly plotting major attacks against the nation's living room carpet. "We will not rest," the President declared emphatically, "until these evil-doers are brought to justice. These little rascals could be hiding anywhere -- under the sofa, in the hamper, even in our kitchen cabinets, if Condi left them open. But know this: they are on the run." Terrorist ferrets are a growing problem, say intelligence experts. "The fact is that five years after 9/11, we are safer but not yet safe," said Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. "Potted plants are still vulnerable. Shoes, keys, and other draggable items are left out in the open. Half-full water glasses are simply left sitting on ledges. These types of targets are what the terrorist ferrets are looking for. Only last week an attempted attack against the nation's laundry detergent was thwarted. What else do these little guys have planned?" Some civil libertarians have raised questions about whether defenses against ferrets suspected of planning terrorist acts have gone too far. "The fact is we have seen an alarming array of abuses against ferrets, some of whom have done nothing more than sniff around in the kitchen," said the director of the ACLU. "Curtailed playtime, treats being withheld, even scruffing of necks has all taken place under this administration. Many of these ferrets sit around in cages all day long. Is this really the America we want to live in?" Many Democrats agreed. "The fact is if we are forced to abandon the ideals which made our nation great, the terrorist ferrets will have already won," said Kerry. "And I'll never find my car keys."

Don't Mess with a Man's Spinach

2006-09-19T20:44:00.000-04:00

Although no proof has yet been offered, I am convinced that al-Qaeda is behind the recent attack on the nation's spinach supply. If I am proved right, this will confirm my thesis that al-Qaeda is truly waging a war against American liberals. Think about it. Did the terrorists deliberately attack and poison America's storehouse of spare ribs? Our stockpiles of Twinkies? Our reserves of cheetos, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, or bratwurst? They did not. No, they attacked our spinach. And that, my friends, is war. You don't mess with a man's spinach. You don't cavalierly screw around with veggies. You keep your dirty B-rab fists out of my salad! Do you hear me, Osama? You'd better listen. Because you may have evaded the marines, but you damn well won't get away from Popeye.

Your Local al-Qaeda: Deaniacs?

2006-09-13T17:00:00.000-04:00

Conservatives often make the claim that messages broadcasted by al-Qaeda bear a resemblance to statements made by well-known American liberals and Democrats, thus not so subtly suggesting that Democrats are supporters of or sympathizers with terrorists. I would like to respond to this by pointing out some obvious deficiencies in this argument. First of all, Osama bin Laden and his global network of mass murderers are not exactly liberals. Does Osama drive a Prius? Listen to Moby on his I-Pod? Is he sitting in his cave, surfing dailykos while he waits for his turban to come back from the dry-cleaner? Isn't this the same outfit that was hosted by the Taliban, that takes its ideology from the fanatical Wahabbist sect of Islam? Politically and culturally speaking, the terrorists would seem to be, to put it mildly, highly conservative. If this fact does not seem immediately intuitive, it only goes to show the effectiveness of the Republican propaganda since 9/11 which has subliminally implanted the notion that the terrorists are liberals who hate us because we are so conservative. In fact it is just the opposite. The terrorists are conservatives who hate us because we as a nation are too liberal. In other words, if we ban gay marriage, the terrorists will have already won. Piss off a terrorist, have another latte. They would like nothing more than to kill not just Americans, but liberal Americans. Note for the historical record that the terrorists didn't attack freaking Alabama, they attacked Manhattan and Washington D.C. They wanted to kill as many liberals as possible. 9/11 was an attack against the bluest of states. Why didn't bin Laden attack the red states? Because he's crafty. He knows how dumb your average redneck is. He wants to keep as many of those Americans alive as possible. Those educated, urban elites? They're the ones he wants to get rid of. I find it puzzling that Ann Coulter is constantly ranting about wanting to kill various people she doesn't like, such as Jack Murtha, Justice John Paul Stevens, and the entire staff of the New York Times, yet she hates the terrorists for trying to do the exact same thing. Wait a second, couldn't they team up on this? I'm sure that bin Laden would love to behead a few liberals, and Coulter could hand him the knife. I mean, couldn't we at least agree that some conservatives are definitely terrorists, like Jerry Falwell? Surely Falwell hates America almost as much as bin Laden does, and for the same reasons. And if Osama is reading this right now? Then he's got his talking points for today.

How You Can Help If You Are a Philosopher

2006-09-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

I would hardly presume to tell philosophers how to do their job. However it does seem to me that given the present state of affairs in this country that we can use all the help we can get, and it may be time to at least consider how philosophers could be of some use. To begin with, it seems that philosophers are at least partly responsible for our present condition. In fact I would like to make the claim that the present crisis in America is to a certain extent a failure of philosophy. We live at a time in which post-modernism has become the dominant language of the ruling class. And it is not simply a benevolent elite, but a power-hungry cabal on an apparent arc towards tyranny. This fact ought to raise serious questions about the effectiveness of post-modernism in establishing a cultural standard of discourse. If anything, post-modernism has had a chilling effect on discourse, whose low ebb has been marked simultaneously by the erosion of traditionally democratic institutions, the emergence of rival institutions so remarkably shallow as to invite the spectre of nihlism to the kitchen table, and the rise of a new ruling class with apparently unlimited designs on power. If the task of philosophy is to clarify concepts, dispel errors, and foster the sciences as reservoirs of public knowledge, then post-modernism has certainly failed on all fronts. What is needed are new and more public committments to truth, a robust ethics which challenges the logic of capitalism, and an aesthetics which rejects the wallowing of post-modernism in popular culture. How can philosophers help with this present crisis? They could start by sweeping the floor.

Aporia Ahead

2006-09-12T17:58:00.000-04:00

In an interview on NPR, the other day, historian Howard Zinn made the interesting point that war is an impractical and ineffective solution to contemporary political problems. War has become too expensive, too unwieldy, too violent, and too unpredictable to justify the risk of waging it. This is why all of America's wars since the end of World War II have failed not only from a humanitarian perspective but from a practical perspective as well. None of them has achieved their intended effect. Instead, they have only made things worse. I suppose this may be why some have called for a change in strategy, that the war on terror, for instance, should be a smarter, smaller, and more opportunistic kind of war than the full-scale conflicts of previous generations. It seems obvious, however, that this has not been pursued because it simply fails to fulfill the appetite for war which is nearly always war's primary motivation. Small-scale operations to nab foreign terrorists or neutralize plots doesn't conjure the necessary grandeur of, say, shock and awe. If it's a demonstration of military might that we're after, this won't do. Nor does it get the money flowing in the right direction, because along with good old fashioned blood lust there is no drive to war apart from its potential as a business investment. This has been true of all the American wars since the end of WWII. Are we safer or better off for having fought any of them? Were we ever directly threatened by any of these so-called enemy states? War as an economic strategy is indispensable to American-style capitalism. Put differently, it is the foundation of our way of life. Without war, we could not continue to live as we do. (I believe many conservatives would agree with me on this point.) We are a war-making people, and increasingly, war is our business. I believe that the present ruling elite imagine a future in which America has cornered the market, as it were, on war, a future in which our primary export becomes war, in which our entire economic and political life is defined by our capacity to wage war. We are rapidly becoming addicted to war. To that end, much research is currently being devoted into the future of war-making. New types of violence are currently under construction the likes of which we cannot presently imagine. The future promises to contain a great deal of violence inflicted by America on the rest of the world. Unfortunately for us, this future presages an America in a constant state of insecurity, suspicion, and alarm. Extreme violence against Americans is likely to become a commonplace in the near future, and we will all have to live with it as best we can. All of this is being brought about by American policies towards the rest of the world, which is to say, by our way of life. Terrorism is a particularly evil consequence of our actions, as depraved as it is predictable. It is simply the violence we are exporting to the world, being imported back to us. Parts of the world really do look like Manhattan did on that September day five years ago as a direct result of American policy. Each of us support those policies in specific ways. Please do not misunderstand me. Terrorism, in all of its forms, really is the great evil of the modern world, and I am not ignorant of its dangers. It is a fact which I find tremendously difficult to accept, because it is the future of my country, my family, and my own life which I find to be at stake. It is a matter of intense personal concern. This is why I find it to be so ironic that everyone nowadays speaks of war as being not desirable but only necessary. We have no choice but to wage war, I hear all the time. In response I would say that this is not a war we can win. The metrics are all against us. To continue down the path of the Bush Doctrine is to wage a war of America and a handful of allies against the rest of the world. If we fight that war, we will lose our country. Do we have a choice to wage war or not? Of course we do. The matter in which we truly have no choice is to go on living as we are now. This way of life will come to an end in the near future. It cannot be sustained. The choice is between waging an agonizing struggle against the rest of the world with consequences so severe as to be unimaginable, or to begin to change the way we live. We must cease exporting violence to the world. But that means giving up our way of life, capitalism in the way we presently conceive of it. It means giving up our insane quest to monopolize the world's resources, to dominate the world's economic and financial systems, to overwhelm and obliterate local cultures with the influence of mass media and commercialized propaganda. Not only is it not possible for everyone in the world to live like an American, but it is not even possible for Americans to go on living like Americans. It is an unjust, opportunistic, malicious and blindingly short-sighted way of life. It is slow suicide. It means death for many innocents in foreign countries and now, post 9/11, it means death for ourselves as well. I take comfort in the fact that America has such a strong surplus of moral strength, ingenuity, and sheer bravado that our ability to meet the challenge is nowhere near exhaustion. There is so much to love about this country, and that too is reflected in the peoples of the world who have mostly given us the benefit of the doubt (Not even the French really hate America, because come on, who could?) But this is the challenge, and it is enormous, too big for one generation to accomplish. The struggle is not really with outsiders who seek to do us harm as it is with ourselves and our place in the world community. It is nothing less than deciding what kind of country we are going to be. Perhaps America is only now going through something like a national adolescence, and this present challenge will be our coming of age. Then I hope we will grow up wisely and well, so that we can look back in tranquility on these troubled times.

Git Them Terrorists, Gew Gew

2006-08-20T17:01:00.000-04:00

I was rudely awakened the other night by the sound of something scuffling around my henhouse in the farmyard, so I threw on my robe, grabbed my shotgun, and headed outside to see what was the problem. Lo and behold, it was them dad-burn terrorists again messin' with my chickens! Well I larned them a few lessons. Not only did I round them up, but I trussed them up in my barn all sexy like, dressed 'em in lingerie, then rolled 'em around in dog shit while I diddled myself silly. Ha, those terrorists. They'll think twice about comin' 'round here agin. At least, I think they was terrorists. They sure enjoyed it like they was terrorists, if you get what I mean.

Addiction and Hope

2006-02-01T17:46:00.000-05:00

President Bush said in the State of the Union address yesterday that America is addicted to oil. This is like the world's worst heroin addict blaming everyone else for his problem. Surely if there's ever been a poster-boy for the caption, "Addicted to Oil," it is George W. Bush. If Bush had said these words four years ago and actually meant them, there would never have been an Iraq war. If he means them now, then he's announcing that every single thing about his personal beliefs, his way of life, his governing philosophy, the friends and associates he has kept for life, is completely wrong. For these words to be true, Bush would have to immediately fire everyone in his administration. He would have to renounce his family fortune. He would have to become a totally different person. So we know that Bush doesn't really mean what he says, which shouldn't come as a surprise.

Of all the rich ironies in Bush's statement, I would like to focus on only one. During the speech Bush gave his impressions on the economy and he revealed that his is a pro-growth philosophy. Bush is a firm believer in the age-old capitalist principle of eternally expanding markets. For Bush, growth is the single condition which best defines national and economic well-being. So Bush is proud that the American economy has kept on growing during his Presidency. But, why has it been growing? What does it actually mean when "the economy" (which is an abstraction) "grows" (which is a metaphor?) The answer to that question deserves a great deal of further study but one very plausible, consensus answer might be "consumption." The American economy is powered by the American consumer. In fact, this is an understatement. Americans consume far, far more than we produce. The evidence of this is the trade deficit, which for the year 2005 is believed to have reached a record high of $710 billion. No other global economy has ever worked this way before. Industrialization, not consumption, has always been the key to global dominance. The current state of affairs - what appears to be American prosperity - is really a bubble sustained by foreign investors who accept less than market value for their investments solely for the privilege of being associated with the world's only economic superpower. So our current prosperity is really based on reputation more than performance. The economy continues to grow because Americans consume so much, and we can afford to do so because our habits are being financed by overseas investors in China, India, and Europe. This appears to be a classic case of what goes up must come down. Eventually, the economic balance will tilt back towards production, and when that happens, it will be the producing nations who find themselves in control.

But I want to get back to my point about the President's remarks. My point is that American prosperity as Bush defines it - his fideist belief in continuous, eternal growth - is precisely our addiction to oil. There is no difference. Back in 1973, America imported 35% of its oil. By 2003, that had increased to 55%. Where does Bush think American prosperity comes from? It comes from ever greater consumption of the world's energy supply. It comes from Americans driving more, eating more, buying more cars, building more homes, consuming more media, and fighting more wars than ever before. This truth is not lost on the energy industry. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, for one, chastised the President after his speech with this statement: “As bad as the policies proposed by President Bush are, the addiction rhetoric is much worse. President Bush might as well have said, ‘we're addicted to prosperity, comfort, and mobility, and I've got the policies to do something about it."

Yet oil is really not even the tip of the iceberg. If Bush really was serious about curbing America's dependence on foreign energy, he would have to tell us to change our entire way of life, our whole way of viewing ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. We would have to own fewer cars, build smaller homes, drive less, eat less, and stop fighting so many wars. This would cause a great deal of change in the world. For one thing, the American economy would slow considerably. (The American waistline, which has followed a parallel destiny, would also slim down!) The character of the economy would also change, as the balance would begin to tilt away from consumption and towards production. American life would be much less dominated by media, as we would have fewer dollars to spend on entertainment, and much more focused on craftsmanship. Doing more with less, the hallmark of virtue for millennia, would come back into style. Also, terrorists would stop attacking us, as our aggressive expansion into foreign lands would greatly decrease.

Taking the President at his word might seem like too much to ask, and the hypothetical sacrifice, too great to bear. Yet, there are no real alternatives. Our current lucky state of prosperity will not last for much longer. Reducing our consumption would be painful, but not as painful as the crisis which will inevitably befall us if we continue in our present path. America really is addicted, but it is an addiction to a base and corrupt set of values and a consequently unsustainable way of life. The President may not have meant his words truthfully, but he knows of what he speaks: every addict must eventually face the necessity of change. And every addict has the hope of grace.

Unsolved Spying Mysteries

2006-01-31T22:54:00.000-05:00

We are all used to hearing some whoppers told by President Bush whenever he stands up to talk. I for one look forward to them. There is one Presidential lie in particular which weighed on my mind, however, as I heard it being told. It was the story, told repeatedly in recent weeks, about how the CIA failed to monitor or catch two of the 9/11 hijackers who were living in San Diego before the attacks. Bush says they could have been caught if the NSA had been allowed to wiretap them. This claim is untrue on a number of levels(a Bush specialty,) as 1) no existing law would have prevented the NSA from wiretapping the plotters with a court order as FISA requires, and 2) the CIA already knew of their existence yet failed to disclose it to the FBI. What is really suspicious about this story though is the unanswered question of why the Bush administration first began to circumvent the FISA court in the weeks after 9/11. I don't believe that it's because the President didn't understand the law (though he now pretends not to) or out of sheer willfulness just decided to ignore it. Rather, the only plausible explanation is that the President started asking for warrants which the FISA court rejected. This would be truly extraordinary since the court exists for the simple purpose of oversight and has hardly ever interfered with any request for a warrant which a President has requested. There would have to be a truly exceptional reason for the court to refuse such a request, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. What could that reason be? The only possible explanation is that the President was requesting the power to spy on purely domestic individuals and organizations who were unrelated to any terrorist threat or national enemy. That means, most likely, peace groups, activists, and political opponents. Knowing what I know about the Bush administration, i.e. that it has no scruples and makes no difference between political opponents and enemies of the state, and given the tantalizingly unanswered questions about this case, I would be willing to bet that this is close to the truth.

The Twilight of Legal Abortion

2006-01-31T20:43:00.000-05:00

The swearing-in of Samuel Alito as the newest Supreme Court justice was a somber day for abortion-rights advocates, some of whom spoke very eloquently about what is likely the end of the era of legal abortion. Here was Catholics for a Free Choice President Frances Kissling, as reported in Salon:

"In a way," she mused, "Roe was a socially transformative decision made in a country that was not socially transformed. In terms of social values, in terms of attitudes towards women, it was a profound anomaly. And it's not surviving. Whether it gets overturned or continues on the road to restriction, the concept of women as moral agents in relation to their own bodies is being rejected year by year by year.

"It was so far ahead of its time," she continued. "It was a visionary decision. The failure, the sad part of it, was that we weren't ready for it. The sad, sad, sad thing is society is less ready for it than it was 30 years ago, but that's not the fault of Roe." Roe, and the larger philosophy behind it -- that women are capable of moral agency -- Kissling said, "was never really realized. But maybe what one can say is that in history, 100 years from now, or 200 years from now, when Roe is looked at, it will be looked at as one of the most-forward-thinking, principled decisions for women. Whether it survives or not, it existed. And it will be looked at as an important moment."

Those are serious, heartfelt words which bear careful thinking about. Kissling is probably right that Roe really did raise the cultural consciousness of "a woman's body" in a way which had never been done before, and gave women unprecedented power (executive, veto-power) over their own bodies even when that autonomy collided with that of other, even less visible bodies. However, that wasn't entirely a good thing. The pornography boom of the 1970's also heightened the awareness of women's bodies, and demeaned them for the sake of the same principle of autonomy. As I have written before, I don't believe that criminalization is a just or reasonable solution to the problem of abortion, especially when it is coupled, as it surely will be, with an insanely contradictory push to limit access to birth control. It is the anti-birth control fanatics who are the real danger, and they are also the ones who will be emboldened by future anti-abortion rulings.

So Kissling is right that something is changing, and something is being lost. An important era in history really is coming to a close. An experiment in women's rights is being concluded. It's hard to say if Roe was ahead of its time or if it was fatally flawed. Perhaps no one should be given as much power over their own bodies as Roe attempted to give pregnant women. Nevertheless there is little doubt in my mind that the confirmation of Samuel Alito is a bad thing for women, and that the consequences will be dire.

Perhaps what is really being lost with the passing of Roe is the possibility of a just and lasting solution to the abortion problem, one which would have balanced the right of women to determine the course of their own pregnancy with the objective reality of the fetus as a developing person. That solution was taking shape during the Clinton years, with the goal of making abortion "safe, legal, and rare." Like Roe, it's quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Hold Your Breath, The Big One's Coming

2006-01-13T17:47:00.000-05:00

Anyone who doesn't feel a chill down the spine hearing about the NSA spying case doesn't have a pulse. The more details that come out, the more I feel like we're reaching the "Revenge of the Sith" part of the epic, the part where all the pieces fall into place and everyone realizes what's been happening all along but it's too late to do anything about it. Am I in a paranoid mood today? It's hard not to be. The takeover of this country may really be about to happen. For anyone who thinks that's impossible, let me float a few thoughts your way. First of all, I was never fully convinced that the Bush administration would have actually abided by the results of the 2004 election if it had gone John Kerry's way. When you work this hard to consolidate power, break this many laws, cover up this many secrets - in short, when you go this far down the road of authoritarian rule, you don't just hand over power at the results of one little election. We never got to see the Constitutional crisis which could have erupted in 2000 had the vote-counting in Florida gone Al Gore's way, and the same goes for 2004. Two close misses in five years might mean time's up. So my question is, will there be a Presidential election in 2008? I am deadly serious when I say that I have no idea.

Secondly, it is very important to remember that the central principle being debated in the NSA case is not civil liberties versus national security. An accurate news item summing up the debate would read like this: "Sharp debate has issued from Washington lately on the question of whether the President has the right to break the law in matters relating to war and terrorism. President Bush's critics in Congress have argued that the President must abide by laws which govern his conduct of the war on terror. The President, in contrast, has argued that the laws do not apply to him in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief." So I ask you again whether I am being paranoid in wondering whether we are really approaching a watershed moment in American history. I know that past Presidents have often sought extraordinary powers, and usually been denied them. I know that Presidents have tried very hard to change laws that they don't like, sometimes unethically. I know about how Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War, how FDR packed the Supreme Court, and of course about Nixon and Watergate. But I don't ever remember a President arguing before that the laws simply do not apply to him, which is the same as saying that the Executive branch is not compelled to respect any decision or any action of Congress.

So there's an unprecedented fissure opening up between Congress and the Presidency, which will almost certainly provoke a major crisis. But that's not even the bottom of where this is heading. There's also an Executive war against the press which is about to boil over. A White House decision to take on the New York Times over its decision to publish the NSA story could light that powder keg. Will we see the government suspend freedom of the press in the name of national security?

All of this points to the fundamental social and political change which the Bush administration is seeking, ever so methodically, to bring about: the President's actions are to be deemed as always legal and always secret, and to report them or criticize them is to be deemed as always illegal. This is what the White House is basically arguing in its case against the New York Times and in its determination to find and punish those who leaked information about the NSA spying program to the press. National security depends on the President being able to act in secret above the law, and therefore it is a crime against national security to reveal any of these secrets. We are just beginning to see the outline of that argument as it appears.

Of course, this leads to the final war being waged by the administration which is the one against the American people. If Congress fails in its attempt to impeach the President or to compel the Executive branch to comply with elections in 2008 or to prevent the Executive from suspending freedom of the press, then we can expect to see an all out assault against the Bill of Rights, i.e. the freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, etc. Life in America will change in ways that are for the moment impossible to predict. I'll offer one prediction though, if this worst case scenario really does come true. Sometime after 2008, the government will outlaw the Democratic Party, and rename it al-Qaeda.

Weird Future Coming True

2005-12-14T17:54:00.000-05:00

My prediction that redneck conservatives would slowly come to embrace and support the Shiite majority in Iraq, perhaps even sporting "Go Shiites" bumper stickers on their pickup trucks, may be coming true. The other day President Bush had this to say on the topic of cultural diversity:

"One thing America must never do is lose our capacity to take people from all walks of life and help them become an American first and foremost. That's what distinguishes us from other cultures and other nations. You can come from wherever you are and I can come from Texas, and we both share the same deal: We're Americans first and foremost. I happen to be a Methodist, you're a Sunni."

Million Dollar Baby, Two Cent Ethics

2005-12-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

Warning: If you haven't seen the film, I am about to give away the ending.

Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning film Million Dollar Baby is in many ways everything a movie should be. Its period aesthetics, inspiring story, and wonderful screenplay are the stuff film-makers dream of. It would be hard to think of a movie in recent years with better performances. For its first ninety minutes or so, this film is perfect. And then comes an ending so cruel, so manipulative, so morally bankrupt, that it left me not just disliking this film but seriously questioning Eastwood's judgment as a film-maker. This film is gorgeous from an aesthetic perspective but it is an ethical disaster.
The viewer is clearly supposed to believe that the decision made by Frankie Dunn in the end to assist Maggie with her own suicide is heroic, because Maggie's desire to commit suicide is also heroic. I find this repellent but it gets worse. Why is Maggie such a hero for wanting to commit suicide? Because she has become disabled. This amounts to something like the following argument:

It is heroic to commit suicide if you can't live life on your own terms.
The disabled cannot live life on their own terms.
It would be heroic if the disabled were to commit suicide.

Let me clarify one aspect of the movie's ending which is deliberately obscured. Many viewers watching the movie the first time through get the impression that Maggie is terminally ill. After all, she is never shown outside of her hospital bed, and she breathes with the assistance of a ventilator. She is deliberately made to look like she is terminally ill, even though she isn't. The tactic is a bait and switch. If the film showed Maggie in her wheelchair, enjoying the outdoors or returning to her old gym, the viewers' emotions surrounding her suicide would be completely different. This is why the movie subtlely feeds the impression that Maggie's disability is the equivalent of a terminal diagnosis. The business about the ventilator only confuses the issue further, especially because Frankie Dunn kills Maggie by removing it at the end, which reminds viewers of end-of-life type situations. Yet Maggie's condition is no different than that of many paralyzed persons who must breathe through ventilators. Christopher Reeve lived that way for over a decade, and no one considered him to be terminally ill or receiving life support. Thus the film builds its case on the premise that becoming disabled is a death sentence.
The rest of the argument follows from there. Maggie is a hero because she recognizes that the life of a disabled person is not worth living. Dunn is a hero for accepting her insight and acting on it. This is morally repugnant. Maggie's suicidal ideation would be seen by any compassionate person as a cry for help. She feels her life is not worth living because she has suffered a great loss, the loss of her freedom, physical wholeness, and independence. What she needs at this point is intervention by the medical team and by her friends and community. She needs to feel their support and know that they will not reject her because she has become disabled. She needs to see that there are many things she can still do with her life which would be of great value to herself and others. She needs to feel that she is not a failure and not to blame for her condition. What she doesn't need is someone who ostensibly loves her to actually assist her with her own demise. What kind of human being, when confronted with a loved one's expressed intention to commit suicide, would actually help them go through with it? To cite the principle of autonomy here is to show the clear limitations of that principle. There are some decisions no one has a right to make for themselves, and suicide is one of them. It is my belief that suicide is never a rational choice, and that a society which permits it is a society which encourages it. To phrase the issue of assisted suicide as pertaining particularly to the disabled, as if the lives of the disabled are truly not worth living, is really an awful thing to say. In fact what Million Dollar Baby amounts to is an able-bodied fantasy. It is a fantasy about getting rid of the disabled, rationalized by the premise that to do so would in fact be heroic: we would be doing them a favor. How convenient.
What is really heroic, what really deserves to be celebrated on film and everywhere, are the lives that many disabled persons live every day in the face of insurmountable difficulties. There are hundreds if not thousands of people just like Maggie who instead of turning their faces to the wall get up every morning and meet life's challenges with dignity, perseverance, and courage. The value of their lives is not an illusion. It is not on loan from the able-bodied. It is strictly a fact. For his slick piece of propaganda, Eastwood received an Academy Award. He should have been ostracized.

Let's Settle the Civil War in Iraq

2005-12-07T19:50:00.000-05:00

There's a lot that's wrong with the Iraq war, but I still don't feel as if we've quite gotten to the bottom of it. Put aside for a second the phony weapons of mass destruction, the civilian casualties, everything that on the surface makes this war so wrong. Now focus only on the political element as it has developed since the war began: the minority Sunnis battling U.S. backed Shiites and Kurds. Recall that at the start of the war, coalition forces were fighting against the Iraqi army, Saddam's Elite Guard, and other assorted rag-tag militias. The Iraqi army ran away and then was disbanded after the fall of Baghdad, the Elite Guard never did much damage, and after initially getting bogged down by the militias, the U.S. forces moved on to Baghdad and left the British to mop up. Yet, after the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces continued to face an enemy and still do. The logical assumption then, is that it is the same enemy - the one we came to fight, and therefore, an enemy we must continue to fight until it is defeated. Yet, is this really true? It may be true in one sense that many of Saddam's loyalists were Sunnis and they comprise the core of the insurgency. The reasons that they are fighting, however, have changed completely. They are now fighting not to resist a foreign invasion but to oust the foreign backers of the ruling government, to reclaim control of territory that once belonged to them. Notice how the cards have changed. Setting a great deal aside, one could plausibly claim that the coalition forces fought the Iraqi army because Saddam was bad and deserved to be ousted, but why should we now be fighting the Sunni insurgency because it wishes to reclaim territory from its Shiite rivals? In other words, the U.S. never set out to intervene in a local dispute between Sunnis and Shiites, nor can I even imagine any politician suggesting that we do so. But that is what the Iraq war has become. Strangely, no one questions this. Democrats such as Hilary Clinton and John Kerry have stated repeatedly that the primary "exit strategy" for the U.S. must be the successful training of a new Iraqi army - i.e., a Shiite army capable of repelling the Sunni insurgency. This is the new mission of the coalition. Everything is predicated on the success of equipping and training this force. But why should we? One might argue that the tactics of the insurgents are evil and this is certainly true, but from the perspective of U.S. interests the dispute between the parties is purely political, and their current alignment is aribitrary. The Shiites have welcomed the American backed political process, knowing it would benefit them, the Sunnis have rejected it for the same reason. There is no difference between this rather mundane local affair and any number of conflicts around the world, most of which the U.S. takes no side in. Rather than waste our time and resources equipping one side against the other, the results of which will surely be a bloodbath, we ought to be trying to settle the conflict. If we could convince the Sunnis that a reasonable political settlement awaits them, the culmination of which would be the withdrawal of coalition forces, why wouldn't they agree to it?

Remind Me Again Which Side We're On

2005-11-29T17:32:00.000-05:00

I've never heard a good explanation as to why the United States is fighting for the Shiite majority against the Sunni insurgency in Iraq rather than the other way around. Would anyone really mind or even notice if tomorrow we just switched sides? I personally don't care whether Shiites or Sunnis rule Iraq. I can never even remember what the difference is between them, and I've taken a few world religion classes in my day. Which side claims to be the successors of Mohammed's brother-in-law again? I can't remember, but why should I care? Much less sacrifice the future of my country on behalf of this inane conflict? Just divide the bloody thing in half, declare victory, and come home, no? I have these thoughts every time I hear the politicians and analysts talking about how progress in Iraq is measured in terms of Iraqi security, i.e., our efforts to train and equip the Shiite majority to effectively fight the insurgency on its own. There is no good reason I can think of for us to want to do this. Getting involved in other countries' civil wars is never a good idea. What we should be doing is negotiating a cease fire and a peace agreement between the two sides. What we need to be is an honest broker in the region, a force for peace and justice rather than division and conflict. If we could actually settle the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shiites and bring peace to Iraq, that act alone would probably do more than anything towards repairing our damaged reputation and our long term goals vis a vis the Muslim world.

Rewriting History -- the Devil's Game

2005-11-17T14:13:00.000-05:00

One of the games the neo-conservatives like to play is to accuse their opponents of doing exactly what their opponents are trying to stop them (the neo-conservatives) from trying to do. For instance, if the White House urges Congress to pass an anti-regulation bill that would weaken environmental protection, and Democrats oppose that, then the White House will accuse Democrats of being anti-environmental. Note that they don't accuse Democrats of being unfairly biased against industry, or something logical like that - no, they make it out to look like they are the ones protecting the environment and the Democrats are against them. This strategy doesn't have to be 100% effective - it just has to fool a minority into believing that it's true and not offend the majority that knows it's not. If I recall correctly, in 2004 John Kerry barely won a majority of voters who said that the environment was their most important issue, which shows the effectiveness of the strategy. All this is to say that when Dick Cheney accuses Democrats of trying to rewrite the history of the Iraq war, he is really saying that its history has already been rewritten, that the war began as a rewriting of history, and that this history can't be unwritten. Cheney is playing the old sophist card of saying that a well-told lie is better than the truth, so much better that the truth can never dislodge it. He is trying to give his lies ontological permanence. The real history of the Iraq war, as Cheney knows, starts with his decision back in 2000 to select himself as Bush's running mate. The Iraq war is Cheney's personal legacy. It is his gift to us. So it makes sense that when the history of that war is criticized, Cheney takes it personally. It is this history, the truth about the war, which has yet to be fully written, and it is Cheney's task right now to ensure that it is never written. Cheney wants us to believe that it's too late to tell the truth now, that the fledgling lies he started telling back in 2000 have turned into such healthy, full-grown critters that we dare not oppose them now. But why should we believe him? That's the problem with the sophist's argument. It falters on the liar's paradox. Cheney is a proven liar, so I take his musings about the "truth beyond the truth" or however he thinks about it when he's falling asleep at night to be just that - more lies. A really skillful liar like Dick Cheney, someone who can lie openly to the entire world and remain almost entirely unnoticed, only comes along once in a generation. That's Dick Cheney's secret, that's the game he's playing with all of us. This whole time Cheney has been rewriting our history, rewriting us. His last trick before he disappears is to make sure we never rewrite him.

What a Journalist Should Be

2005-10-29T00:53:00.000-04:00

I've just watched George Clooney's marvelous new film, "Good Night and Good Luck" and I cannot commend his courage and skill highly enough. The movie tells the story of newsman Edward R. Murrow's expose of McCarthyism at its peak in the early 50's. It is a wonderful piece of drama - beautifully photographed, note-perfect performances, and of course so deliberately relevant to our own times. It is not often that a movie is this educational and yet entertaining at the same time. The film offers a trenchant critique of the declining state of journalism which was already evident to Murrow in 1958. Trivializing, superficial, insulating, cosmetically obsessed with balance but lacking all substance, these are a few of the not so subtle characterizations of the field. In its place the movie hopefully lifts up another, entirely different philosophy of journalism: moralistic, truth-seeking and truth-telling, a friend of justice, holding itself to the highest ethical standards, educating, courageous, principled, full of conviction. Murrow says, in effect, that journalism is and ought to be a public service which serves the common good, which preserves democracy by guaranteeing the free and accurate flow of information, which ceaselessly exposes corruption and lies, which facilitates the democratic union of the government and the governed by protecting both from each other. My favorite line in the movie is when Murrow says, "We are not descended from fearful men." I felt like standing up and cheering when I heard that line. Murrow is right. This country wasn't founded on timidity. It was founded by complex individuals who made difficult decisions based on the best knowledge that they had, who made the most out of the humanity they had to offer, who willingly made sacrifices, took risks, and accepted challenges. That's what Murrow represented in this film. It's what Murrow believed a journalist should be.

Bush to Base: Pipe Down Already

2005-10-29T00:38:00.000-04:00

President Bush's right-wing base is blowing his cover. The deal forged between Bush and his base, going back to 2000, is that Bush would bring conservatives to the table like no President had ever done before, but they had to keep quiet about it. No open communication in the mainstream media, period. To facilitate this, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes invented a code for Bush to use in the media and in his major speeches, consisting of quotes and allusions beloved by the right, including evangelical hymns, doctrines, and imagery. For those not in the know, this has sometimes resulted in some puzzling responses - recall the debate last fall in which Bush was asked about a recent Supreme Court ruling that he disagreed with and he answered, "The Dred Scott decision." But all that is changing now. The religious right is tired of being the other woman. It wants a public committment from the President. For Bush this could not be any more unwelcome than if his mistress had suddenly started calling him every night at dinner. By forcing Bush to withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers - whom Bush desperately pleaded and hinted with the right to accept - the religious right is demanding that Bush choose between it and the rest of the country. The contradiction of "compassionate conservatism," the cornerstone of Bush's political genius, is unravelling, and Bush has nowhere to turn, and nowhere to hide.

Squeezing Harriet Miers Till She Talks

2005-10-21T23:21:00.000-04:00

Charles Krauthammer’s comments in today’s Washington Post give some insight into the real reason why conservatives are now gathering in force against the Harriet Miers nomination. The nomination must be withdrawn, Krauthammer argues, not because Miers is unqualified, though he admits that she is, but because of what she knows about the Bush administration and about the President personally – information which she could conceivably be compelled to testify about under oath during the confirmation hearings. This would hand Democrats a golden opportunity to ask questions that President Bush in his ten years in politics has never answered. Imagine the possibilities. For starters, why did Bush’s 1998 re-election campaign for governor pay Miers' law firmthe unheard of sum of $140,000 for routine legal work, in addition to the $23,000 paid by Bush to Miers in 1994? At the time of the 1998 payment Bush was leading his opponent by 35 percentage points in the polls. What projects was Miers working on for Bush? Just to speculate, could it have had something to do with recurrent issues from Bush’s past – his avoidance of the draft during Vietnam, or his history as an addict? What does she know about Bush’s relationship with Ken Lay and the other Enron insiders who secretly helped Vice-President Cheney rewrite the nation’s energy laws? Does Miers know anything about the phony case for war in Iraq and the subsequent cover-up still under investigation? What about 9/11? Could Miers clear up any lingering doubts about the President’s response to warnings of an imminent terror attack in the summer of 2001? The list could go on and on. As Bush’s most trusted lawyer, Miers is a potential gold-mine for anyone interesting in unraveling the vast, intricately-linked criminal conspiracy which in essence is the Bush administration. (With an hour’s testimony, Miers could accomplish what it will take historians a generation to achieve.) As Krauthammer indicates in his column, that possibility has just occurred to him as well, and the image of a stage-struck Miers fumbling around under oath while trying to protect the President’s decades of secrets doesn’t sit well with him. Already, Krauthammer says, there’s the expected petty lies and malfeasance around the nomination process itself:

John Fund reports that in a conference call of conservative leaders, two Miers confidants explicitly said that she would overturn Roe v. Wade . The subsequent denial by one of these judges that he ever said that, and the subsequent affirmation by two of the people who had heard the call that he did say so, create the nightmare scenario of subpoenaed witnesses contradicting each other under oath. We need an exit strategy from this debacle. I have it…

Just imagine what Democrats could do with this kind of power, Krauthammer seems to be saying. He’s had enough of Harriet Miers. He’s telling the President to pull the plug on this one.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My...What?

2005-10-11T21:37:00.000-04:00

Like the GOP base, I'm all in a dither over Edith Miers. On the one hand, I like the name Edith. On the other hand, she kind of disgraces it. And she reminds me of my third grade teacher, but in a bad way (in case she is reading - I will always love you, Mrs. Fea.) Bush might as well have nominated his third grade teacher. There is barely any difference. Granted, who among us wouldn't have done the same thing? If I ever become President, I too want to be able to place all of my friends and family in positions of power, just like Vito Corleone did. Now, I just don't know whose side to take in this internecine fight. On the one hand, I know that the religious right (just like Ayn Rand) are always wrong. It's almost an axiological certainty. And they oppose this nomination. So, taking my cue from them as always, I support it, right? This seems to be the thinking of many Democrats, who would probably put Satan on the bench if they thought it might bug the Republican majority. And if Miers nomination is defeated, who's next? After all, these conservatives have been saying they oppose Miers for not being conservative enough! I don't relish the prospect of seeing the arch-torturer Alberto Gonsales on deck, or the rightist lunatic Janice Rogers Brown. Maybe having our family realtor interpreting Constitutional law for the next generation isn't such a bad idea. On the other hand, what an absolute toilet of a judge. Does Miers even, like, have any idea what she's doing? Does she even know which way the robe goes on? This is going to be like sitting through Legally Blonde III for the next twenty years. And the thought of seeing Bush out there in the courtroom passing her winks about how to rule turns my stomach as well. It's kind of like we're seeing the very worst and the not so bad of Bush cronyism at the same time. On the one hand, it's so blatant, it makes you want to cry. On the other hand, it's so inept and stupid it makes you want to laugh. I mean, is there anybody left from Crawford that Bush hasn't given a federal job to yet? Couldn't Bush find some work for the former grounds-keeper of Ameriquest Stadium, or maybe his old plumber? We'll know we're at the end of the Bush administration when the President runs out of nicknames for his relatives and old college buddies. Or maybe, as Dr. Strangelove would have it, the end of the world. ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." "Yeeeee-haw!")

Science, Truth, and the Politics of Deception

2005-10-10T00:56:00.000-04:00

Andrew Hehir, writing in Salon, makes some very important points about the current conflict between science and politics ("The Know Nothings," September 14, 2005.) What does it mean that the current administration rejects science not just in practice but in theory? And what vulnerability has the administration exploited in its surprisingly successful attempt to block scientific information from the public? Hehir is right to call this an "epistemological crisis," so right, in fact, that I would take it even further and name this the great philosophical problem of our time. (Of course as something of an idealist I tend to view social problems as symptoms of philosophical errors - please forgive me that bias.)
First, it is clear to me that the discipline of science as a public service, one whose purpose is to establish the public as an authority competent to govern itself, has stalled and even reversed. In May 2004 a report of the National Science Board, An Emerging and Critical Problem of the Science and Engineering Labor Force, sparked alarm among educators by predicting shortfalls of scientists and engineers based on current trends in education. (For the debate over this issue, see the following articles.) Even if it is unclear, however, as to whether science as a specialized profession is in decline, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence as to the decline of scientific knowledge among the general public. It is this state of affairs which the neo-conservative movement has actively exploited in pursuit of its anti-regulatory agenda, as Hehir chronicles. On matters of vital public interest, including global warming, public health, stem-cell research, sexual education, and the teaching of evolution, the Bush administration has repeatedly obscured the findings of science through a particularly effective and vicious new form of propaganda: the fake scientific debate. To use Al Gore’s phrase, the Bush administration uses an echo chamber which bounces manufactured debate between the walls of industry-sponsored think tanks and the conservative media, then baits the supposedly mainstream press into covering the "controversy." Once this false notion of a scientific controversy has been generally established in the public mind, the administration can then use the public’s confusion as itself further evidence of the existence of an actual debate. For instance, if only half of Americans "believe" in evolution, then this can be taken as evidence that the legitimacy of the theory of evolution may still be plausibly regarded as an open question. If the goal of science is to establish a public consensus of verifiable facts, then the goal of the Bush administration is to break that consensus through constant suggestion of uncertainty.
This suggests that the current epistemological crisis and the much discussed crisis in journalism are one and the same. The media appears to be functionally incapable any longer of distinguishing between good and bad arguments, information and propaganda, truth and fiction. So-called "balance," which is understood as being neutral to matters of truth, is the self-proclaimed goal of today’s media ("fair and balanced.") Once again this is a turn of events which has been ruthlessly exploited by the ruling conservative party. For instance, consider the recent political acts against public television, ginned up as an effort to provide "conservative balance" to PBS. Even more chilling is the conservative campaign against objectivity in higher education. The libertarian commentator Cathy Young has written about the need for "intellectual diversity," meaning a balance of conservative and liberal faculty appointments, at colleges and universities. Apparently there is nothing contradictory to Young about this kind of merging of the scientific and the political – as if research should be judged not simply on its empirical merits but on its political affiliation as well.
But we are not yet to the bottom of the current epistemological crisis. It’s no surprise that a powerful authoritarian regime would attempt to manipulate science for its own purposes, but what weakness has it exploited in doing so? The Bush administration could not have succeeded in its misinformation campaign unless the public had in some sense willingly assisted in its own deception. I would like to make the case that the prevailing conditions exploited by the Bush administration are the result of a set of epistemological errors resulting from a popular (and populist) misunderstanding of post-modernism, first introduced into politics by the left in the second half of the 20th century and now adapted and perfected by the new right.
Hehir hints at this when he says that the work of philosophers of science such as Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Feyerabend (I would add Thomas Kuhn) has contributed to a general sense of epistemological uncertainty which has arisen in the public mind in the past half century. A generous philosophy of relativism has become common property; science has become popularly regarded as an arena of dispute rather than of clarification and consensus. It’s beyond my intention here to mount a thorough defense of the work of these philosophers, but I will say that all of them would have been appalled at the appropriation of their work by a radical, authoritarian regime. Far from intending to undermine science, the purpose of their work was to bring about its advancement by liberating the western tradition from its foundationalist and idealist impulses and re-grounding it in the organic processes of language and culture. I’ll concede however that the failure of post-modernism to clearly articulate its liberal intentions has been one of the chief sources of the sloppy and nihlistic relativism which now pervades the popular understanding, and further, that skeptics such as Foucault either failed to realize or didn’t care that an unbridled skepticism is easily converted by the skilled sophist into the precise metaphysical authority it claims to be resisting.
The Bush administration’s mastery of post-modern sophistry deserves a closer study than I can provide here. At its most effective, it flattens discourse into a an exercise in futility, marked by absurdist non-sequiturs, flights of cynical fancy, and passive-aggressive posturing, all scored with a numbing fatalism. It is impossible to get a straight answer from the Bush administration and yet, until very recently, its reputation was always just the opposite. This is the mark of the truly exceptional sophist: when the weakness of one’s argument is so artfully presented as to be universally accepted as its greatest strength. In the case of the Bush administration, a record of stunning dishonesty and manipulation masquerades, successfully, as unvarnished candor. Which brings me to the greatest triumph of the Bush administration, and that is its masterful subversion of American values. The character played by the President is a composite of 19th and 20th century American archetypes: the evangelical preacher, the self-made man, the recovered addict, the lone ranger, and the WWII soldier. Each of these figures is meant to evoke an American value: selflessness, humility, earnestness, folk-wisdom, independence, piety, determination. Bush is adept at turning arguments on their head by retreating to one of these values and then accusing his critic of betraying it, forcing his critics to defend their patriotism rather than focus on objective arguments.
This brings the conflict between science and politics into sharper focus: if the goal of science is to clarify discourse so as to establish the public as its own authority, then the goal of the Bush administration is just the opposite. Its power derives from general confusion and ignorance, from a deliberate heightening of the general sense of indeterminacy (from an epistemological perspective) and anxiety (from a psychological perspective) which are the defining characteristics of capitalist societies.
Finally, let us delve once more into the history of philosophy to try and make some sense out of what brought the western tradition to this point. Why has the progress of science been so drastically halted? What factors have contributed to the philosophical and social impasse at which we now find ourselves? If post-modernism is a kind of black hole at the bottom of western metaphysics, then it is one whose existence has long been suspected and feared. From Plato’s dialogues the need for a foundationalist super-structure with which to buttress scientific inquiry is already apparent. This is the beginning of the essentialist strategy which becomes omnipresent in western philosophy. The reasoning goes that only a self-validating (or self-transcending) foundation would be capable of withstanding the skeptical assault; without it, science collapses into meaningless parody and self-reference. The long-noted problem with this strategy is that like any makeshift barrier, essentialism only provides a temporary fix. If essences themselves are proposed as part of a visibly material discourse, with all of the telltale signs of human construction, then what permits them to operate so exceptionally? The result is an infinitely repeated recourse to allegedly purer and purer regions untainted by the fallibility and temporality of human institutions. This problem was not solved by the Enlightenment, which only converted essentialism into a cult of personalized metaphysics – the individualist values of autonomy and self-determination. The Enlightenment project already foretold the failed state of post-modernism.
Yet if both essentialism of the classical variety and anti-essentialism of the post-modern variety lead to the same impasse, is there a future for science as a public discipline? Might we ever hope to live in a world in which the findings of science are cherished as the consensus beliefs of an informed public, and George W. Bush is known only as his father’s miserable son?
The answer, I submit, lies in the other great western philosophical tradition most articulately represented by Aristotle: naturalist in method, constructivist in its anthropology, pragmatic, adaptable, process-oriented, transcendental. If science is regarded not as the procurement of a fixed state of knowledge with reference to some theoretical essence, nor as a continual contest between equally arbitrary perspectives, but rather as a natural process unfolding through the fallible but nevertheless self-transcending institutions of language and culture, then science is as imperfect as the human life which temporarily possesses and proclaims it. What post-modernism should have taught us, but didn't, is that science doesn't take place in some theoretical, abstract realm but rather in the here and now. Consensus is gained through compromise, persuasion, and cooperation, not rationalist fiat. Progress is unpredictable, depending on the imaginative breaking and rebuilding of paradigms. Science is a creative process, a truly human activity. As anyone who has ever pursued science knows, truth and wisdom are rare gems indeed, gained only through struggle. Perhaps then science is a kind of revelation of a fragile and fleeting beauty which arises only briefly, like a flower, in the midst of great difficulty.

Good News For Everyone?

2005-10-07T23:23:00.000-04:00

"We're breaking out the champagne," Dr. Eliav Barr, Merck's head of clinical development for the new cervical cancer vaccine told the Associated Press today. He's not the only one. The vaccine, which works by blocking infection from the human papilloma virus, proved 100% successful in its initial trial phase. Merck hopes to bring it to market next year. One would think that such news would be welcomed from every quarter. After all, who would want to deny a life-saving cure to today's and tomorrow's women? Try Bridget Maher of the so-called Family Research Council. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," she said. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex." It turns out the Family Research Council is annoyed at potentially losing one of its pet arguments for abstinence - that the human papilloma virus can be transmitted even when condoms are used properly. This, weirdly, makes the disease an ally of the Council, much like a biological weapon. The Family Research Council claims to be a Christian organization but it's hard to see how this stance is at all consistent with the gospel. Jesus came to heal the sick, not to with-hold needed care or use illness as a weapon. In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus instructs his followers to offer healing without judgment. In Jesus' ministry, healing is a sign of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. From Genesis 1, we learn that God has given nature and all of its gifts to human beings to be used for the good of everyone. God commands human beings to be stewards over creation, to cultivate and transform and bring to fulfillment the potential of things. The scientists who worked on the human papilloma vaccine were obedient to that purpose. Their success ought to be good news for everyone.

Thinking Through the Neo-Conservative Challenge

2005-10-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon has done a fine job of chroncling the tangled web of conservative malfeasance which effectively constitutes the Republican party as we know it today. I especially admire his insight into the corrupt and exploitative relationships between lobbyists, corporations, conservative religious organizations, and political players. This is indeed, as he puts it, a "pay to play" game. I don’t entirely agree with Blumenthal’s assessment that this type of conservatism is an entirely new political and economic entity. It bears more than a passing resemblance to a crime syndicate, of the type which controls politics throughout much of the developing world. This leads to an important and often misunderstood point: organized crime is not chaotic. To the contrary, it is intensely bureaucratic. Such pseudo-political institutions always mirror the bureaucratic nature of their host systems. They are a repressed instinct of capitalist societies. To argue that the Bush administration represents an entirely new way of "doing business" in America ignores the instrumental role that organized crime has historically played in American economics and politics (for a wonderful literary example, read Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.) It was Max Weber who argued that the twin impulses of revolution and bureaucracy co-exist at the unsteady core of capitalism. What we are witnessing in the rise of neo-conservatism is the validation of that argument, the fulfillment of a capitalist impulse towards bureaucracy which, if completed, might rival the great Prussian and Stalinist regimes of the past three centuries. Liberals (of all types) are liable to be confused and frustrated if they operate under the mistaken belief that their government remains in the broad stream of the liberal tradition: deliberative, representative, transparent, responsive and accountable to the public (not to be confused with populist, which the Bush administration definitely is.) Thus to view the Bush administration in the light of its true lineage explains a great deal. Like any bureaucracy, its goal is to build the party of the future by monopolizing resources. Loyalty to the party determines access to these resources and to the lucrative schemes which advance the party’s agenda. The proprietary stance taken by the Bush administration towards information which would be considered public in a liberal society – the records of Vice-President Cheney’s energy task force, to take one obvious example – indicates that it simply does not regard itself as accountable to the public in any traditionally democratic sense. Rather, the party is fueled by populist sentiment (as for instance in the 2004 elections) which is generated through grandiose nationalistic pageants, suppression of information, strategically timed threats, official investigations of sexual impurity, and concealed propaganda distributed through the quasi-state outlets of the conservative media. Likewise, the Bush administration does not operate in the deliberative manner of a liberal government, i.e., one founded on a consensus of publicly verified facts. Instead it has waged a determined campaign to undermine and distort scientific findings whenever they come into conflict with the party ideology. Again, this infuriates the scientific community and the grass-roots democratic activists whose political credibility is staked on the premise of their research, but the Bush administration simply will not budge. It is a wholly political animal, and as such its founding principles of hierarchy, loyalty, and organization stand in sharp contrast to the objective correlate philosophy of empirical science. Finally, I would like to expand on my earlier comment that the true goal of the Bush administration, consistent with its principles, is the creation of a new social class, a "new man," as it were. I envision this man of the future as being raised and educated in strict conformity with the mandates of the party. He will show in his beliefs and his attitudes a deep loyalty to the party upon which his livelihood and reputation entirely depends, and an equally deep suspicion of potential heretics. In all likelihood he will work in a corporate office overseen by quasi-government officials and dependent on government favors for its continuing share in the market-state. He will be of the official denomination of the Christian faith, which is simply another manifestation of allegiance to the party. He will depend throughout his life on a network of patronage and graft which he will simply take for granted as the hallmark of respectable society. He will be a man made in the image of the party founder, George W. Bush.

Bush Keeps on Ticking

2005-10-06T17:48:00.000-04:00

President Bush's decision to nominate Harriet Miers as the next Supreme Court justice proves that neo-conservatism is still the great indestructible philosophy of our time. It was only last month, after all, that in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina and the FEMA disaster the President's philosophy of unabashed cronyism had been revealed, exorciated, and seemingly extinguished. Yet Bush will be Bush, and his single-minded focus is legendary. Hence, Miers, his long-time associate and confidante with no qualifications for the Supreme Court save for her close relationship with the President. Public opinion has never mattered to Bush except insofar as it can be manipulated, and neither do the views of those who oppose him. Now the President's undisguised intention of gathering together all three branches of government under the authority of a single all-powerful partisan executive is meeting with rebellion from within the ranks of his own party. That appears to be just fine with Bush. He has always been more focused on purging the Republican party of its moderate and movement-conservative heretics than in anything happening outside of the party anyway. If Republicans break ranks, that just starts a fight Bush is confident he will win. Like any good authoritarian, Bush loves to test the limits of power, to set traps that divide the loyalists from the realists. This points to one of the least recognized traits of neo-conservatism: it is a party-building movement. Yet this nascent party is not necessarily synonymous with the Republican party, and it may even be hostile to it. The Miers nomination as well as all of the other intra-Republican wars of the past five years (Colin Powell's State Department, George Tenet's CIA, etc.) demonstrate that the goal of neo-conservatism is to overthrow the Republican party from within, to free it from its traditionalisms and loyalty to Constitutional principles such as the separation of powers and its grounding in the liberal traditions of limited government and fiscal conservatism. In other words, the goal of neo-conservatism is to establish a party with the means of opposing the liberal tradition in its broadest and deepest sense - to effectively uproot the bedrock principles of constitutionalism and representative government upon which America was founded. That may seem far-fetched, but if history has anything to teach, it's that tyranny is never implausible.

Candles in the Dark

2005-10-04T20:23:00.000-04:00

I read an article in the Boston Globe recently about a blogger who blogged nothing but good news about the war in Iraq. Apparently he found enough good news to keep him working for a year and a half, and then he quit. Now I’m aware that I’ve written at length, quite cynically, about the decline of the humanities and about the efforts of the Bush administration to kill off the arts and sciences once and for all in the name of almighty corporate capitalism. I write books in my head with titles like "The Decline of Language." I reverse engineered the joke behind "Eats Shoots and Leaves" and laughed to myself out loud (my version had a Panda.) I’ve often been accused of pedantry when I’m not being accused of being a slovenly, half-educated philistine (both are sadly close to the mark.) But enough is enough. I’m turning over a new leaf. I’d like to begin a series dedicated solely to good news in the humanities. These are the stories that bring tears to my eyes, which make me feel like, dammit, something good is happening out there, even though the news won’t report it. I would like to call this series, "Candles in the Dark." And so I offer for recognition the preservationists from the Chicago Conservation Center who risked their own lives to save priceless works of art in New Orleans and the rest of the hurricane-damaged areas of the Gulf Coast. These dedicated servants of the arts literally donned rescue gear, complete with hoods, gloves, boots, and respirators, and made their way through the floodwaters to rescue the city’s artistic treasures. Let’s also honor the steady hands at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, and the workers at the New Orleans Museum of Art, who kept their post in the museum when all hell had broken loose outside. What this proves to me is that there are forces at work in the world more powerful than brutality, more formidable than cynicism, more brilliant than sophistry. There are still educators, and scientists, and poets, and painters, and musicians, and scholars, who care deeply about what is most precious, who know intimately the fragile beauty of artistic creation. It’s that spirit which has gotten humanity out of some of its toughest scrapes, which kept singing even when the guys with the guns showed up, which preserved light when darkness had fallen on all sides. And it’s their work which will emerge out of all the chaos, greed, stupidity, corruption, venality, cruelty, and petty strife which counts for news in this day and age, and it’s their work which will be preserved, and remembered, and honored by future generations.

Is This What They Call Bipartisanship?

2005-10-04T18:02:00.000-04:00

The nomination of somebody named Harriet Miers to be the next Supreme Court justice has been greeted with disapproval by both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are upset that Bush did not nominate a "lock" for advancing their radical agenda, and Democrats would not have had cause to celebrate any of the candidates among whom President Bush was deciding. This stunning salute to mediocrity, the promotion of a career Bush operative and political crony to the one job George W. Bush hasn't yet given her - a judge - may fit the President's style like a glove but offers little for the others who feed at the same trough. No one in Congress has yet come out in strong support of the nominee. Instead we have been greeted with the delightful sound of the conservative echo chamber fallen suddenly silent. Is the impossible possible? Could Miers really fail to be confirmed? Has Bush's base finally abandoned him? The most bizarre, and unexpected outcome of the Miers nomination may be a weird bipartisanship arising out of a unanimous disregard for the President. Under the pressure of Bush's repeated failures of leadership, supporting the President has now become a career hazard. The crass hybrid philosophy of a bloated government funneling profits to ever more exotic and corrupt locales - part Warren Harding, part Lyndon Johnson - has never pleased by the book fiscal conservatives, and it's now starting to enrage them. The evolution and now spectacular downfall of the Bush presidency is taking American politics to a weird place it's never been before, a place where liberals and conservatives alike agree that their coalition of the moment is anybody but Bush.

Morgan Freeman Typecast as Black Guy

2005-10-04T17:39:00.000-04:00

Morgan Freeman has been typecast as a black guy, movie-goers have reported. "He's always played the role of a black guy so perfectly, like in Driving Miss Daisy," stated recent film-watcher Melanie Johnson. "He seemed so natural you almost forgot he was acting. But lately I've noticed he has the same racial composition in every movie. He's definitely stuck in a rut." Freeman's dilemma is similar to that of many high profile actors in recent years. Among kung fu actors, for instance, there has been a growing complaint against being typecast as Asians. "Last year I auditioned for roles in dozens of movies," stated kung fu actor Jackie Chan. "In every single role that I was accepted for, I played the part of an Asian. I don't want to say that Hollywood is discriminating but if you asked most kung fu actors they would tell you the same thing." What to do about typecasting? Some actors, such as multimedia performer Will Smith, have managed to avoid the bug. "When I first broke into Hollywood, I knew I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing the part of a black guy," Smith said. "I made sure to diversify my roles early on, even if that meant taking a lesser role - like playing the part of a friendly neighbor instead of a bad-ass crack dealer or gang-rapist. Over time, that paid off. Now when studios look at me, they don't see a black guy. They see money instead."

America's Bipartisan Failure of Leadership

2005-09-25T00:10:00.000-04:00

The thin gruel which passes for public morality these days isn’t the fault of mammon-worshiping Republicans alone (though you might get that impression from this blog.) Liberals and democrats have contributed amply to this decline (witness the shameful collaboration of so-called liberals such as Thomas Friedman on the Iraq war.) The Democratic party has shrunk to its current sorry state in part because of its unwillingness to stand up for its convictions, or to even have any worth standing up for. Where has the Democratic party been for all these years while government has steadily turned its back on the poor, abandoned the environment, and cheer-led one war after another? The disappearance of leftist and socialist populism has fueled the rise of radical right-wing populism, which has poisoned contemporary discourse with its recognizable strains of paranoia, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and unabashed militarism. While Democrats were busy triangulating, Republicans first seized and then consolidated their grip on the nation’s institutions of power. In the meantime, there has been no one guarding the shop. With neither party apparently responsive to the needs of ordinary individuals, most Americans have fulfilled Timothy Leary’s prophecy and simply turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Hence the “culture wars,” which are really artificial distractions from the work of dismantling and looting the country which is taking place behind the scenes. The question for Democrats at this point is whether they will respond like a late-arriving burglar, looking to grab the last chandelier before the lights go out, or whether they will at long last offer Americans a reason to withhold our cynicism and favor democracy with at least the respect we lend the Oscars.

The Ruse of Privatization

2005-09-23T00:17:00.000-04:00

I've read a number of articles in recent days about how a philosophy of "small government" - allegedly the property of either the federal government or that of the Gulf Coast states - is to blame for the disastrous aftermath of the hurricane. Although there may be some truth to this response, overall I believe that it distorts the facts and the real reasons for the tragedy. First, there is no way to reconcile the philosophy of small government with that of the Bush administration. Under President Bush, federal spending has increased to record levels; Bush has never in his Presidency vetoed a single bill, signing some of the most egregious pork barrel bills to ever pass through Congress; Bush has aggressively promoted expansions of federal programs, most notably the Medicare prescription drug benefit; in January of 2004, in the middle of the Iraq war, Bush threw his support behind a multi-billion dollar plan to launch a manned mission to Mars. Whatever else government has been under George W. Bush, it hasn't been small. From what little I know of the government of Louisiana, it isn't particularly small either, and it wasn't smallness alone which led to the failure to adequately secure the city. Rather, it was a complete lack of efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Money was spent in the wrong places, at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons. Priorities were out of order. Special interests were served first. Calling this debacle small government is a misnomer. It is bad government.
The entire phenomenon of so-called "privatization" which has become the familiar hallmark of the Bush era needs to be re-examined. It's been commonly assumed that privatization means what fiscal conservatives say it means: a reduction in the size of federal budgets, overall decreases in federal spending, the populist empowering of the private sector ("it's your money.") As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that this is actually the case. Under conservative rule, government has continued to grow at a more than healthy rate. What's changed is how government operates and who it serves. Under the Bush administration, government has become steadily less transparent, less accountable, and alarmingly inefficient. Cronyism and loyalty has replaced competence as the guiding principle of job appointments; the burden of social welfare has been drastically shifted onto the middle and lower classes; the refusal of the federal government to pay its share has placed an unprecedented burden on state and local governments. The overall result is the precise opposite of what the traditional conservatives claimed would happen under privatization: the federal government is hemorraging cash at an unsustainable rate. How is this possible? The answer is that privatization is something completely different than what it has claimed to be. Far from a reduction in the power and scope of government, privatization is actually a radical expansion of it. Imagine, for a moment, what a future might look like under the successful prosecution of Bush's conservative revolution. The liberal-democratic model of government would be entirely subsumed by the rise of the new capitalist super-state. This state would write and enforce its own laws, dictate public policy, control the flow of information, and allocate natural resources on a global scale. Its authority would be practically synonymous with the global economy itself. Survival outside of its orbit would be practically impossible. This exercise in science-fiction reveals that George W. Bush is presiding over not a reduction in the size or capacity of a traditional democratic government but rather the renovation and expansion of a vast politico-corporate bureaucracy, a new social class. While the outward form of the liberal state may remain intact, the public functions it has traditionally served are being actively transferred to these new authorities. Again, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the power of government in this country is not on the wane. Rather, the power of democratic government is on the wane. Its usurper threatens to establish a hegemony not seen in North America since the forces of King George III were evicted - indeed, of much the same bearing and disposition.

Hurricane Katrina: 9/11's Delayed Reaction

2005-09-22T23:18:00.000-04:00

The catastrophe of 9/11 was recognized immediately as a wake-up call to America: an opportunity to repent of a national frivolousness which had been steadily eroding democratic values for a very long time (I remember reading woeful mea culpas about how the summer of 2001 had been dominated by the media obsession with Gary Condit and Chandra Levy.) Unfortunately, George W. Bush was the President on September 11th, 2001, and he masterfully subverted this mood into a militant nostalgia reminiscent of fascism, declared himself the reincarnation of Winston Churchill, and identified liberalism (and its supposed corollary, homosexuality) as the enemy in our midst which needed to be expunged. In fact the real culprit was the malignant capitalist state of which he was the hierarch (and liberal America's passive accommodation of it - the combination of which might be labeled "post-modernism,") but that was soon lost in debates over fictionalized weapons of mass destruction and imaginary Saddamist plots against America. (My favorite of these will always be the killer robots Saddam was said to be preparing to attack us. A perfect touch!) Now, four years later, the democratic revolution staved off by the Bush administration four years ago may actually take place, courtesy of the latest disaster to befall these United States. It appears that in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Americans are waking up. Reality, the declared enemy of the Bush administration, is setting in. Worried about fraying race relations? The rising cost of energy? Unmanageable health care costs? Frightening budget deficits? Caring for an aging population? The disintegrating state of government services for the poor, elderly, and infirm? Manufacturing and service jobs heading overseas? Global warming, ocean and river pollution, shrinking wetlands, toxic waste dumps? The endangered American town? Terrorism? American GI's getting blown to smithereens by an invisible enemy in Iraq? More unfunded wars and natural disasters on the horizon? Where $200 billion is going to come from to rebuild three states from scratch? Pick your poison. The feeling is that of waking up and realizing that there is nobody behind the wheel, and that soothing voice you've been hearing from the front seat is a recording. I started off this post a little more optimistically than what I ended up writing - the hope that in the wake of the hurricane, the lessons of 9/11 might finally be learned - and there is hope, but it's hope shrouded in darkness. Most Americans long ago accepted the Reaganesque notion that government should be left to manage its own affairs, but that's the truth that's now crashing down around us. The long-awaited revival of democracy is no longer a luxury, but an imperative. It's the only way forward to forgiveness and renewal on the other side.

Good News From the Culture Wars

2005-09-22T17:43:00.000-04:00

Some great news today courtesy of the Bible Literacy Project of Fairfax, Virginia, which has spent the past five years developing an Interfaith, non-partisan, well-researched textbook for teaching biblical literacy to high school students. The project was the result of cooperation from across denominational and religious boundaries, including "prominent evangelical, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish and secular experts" (AP.) I for one can't praise such an achievement highly enough. The lack of a standarized curriculum for religious education in high schools has seriously contributed to the decline of civic values. Please do not mistake me and think that for a moment I'm arguing in favor of right-wing populist shibboleths such as the Pledge of Allegiance or prayer in schools. Such rites are merely codes for discrimination. They do nothing to enlarge student's cultural or intellectual or spiritual horizons, they communicate nothing but partisanship and jingoism. I despise the modern conservative goal of replacing public education with religiously-inspired superstition. What I'm arguing for is simply the civic corollary to my conviction that religion and science must ultimately inspire each other. It is a fact that the twin tasks of civic (cultural, practical) and religious education have historically belonged together, and with good reason. To receive from respected authorities the most precious wisdom which any civilization has to offer is, without remainder, to experience the broadening of one's spiritual horizons, which is to say that education is a deeply spiritual process, and its outcome is strikingly similar to what St. Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Without this foundation, education can only justify itself through the contradictory logic of instrumentalism, an argument which renders the liberal arts and especially the spiritual arts a backwater. If education exists only as a subsidiary of the market-state, then literacy itself is dispensable, an archaism in the greater cosmos of the profit motive. Thus, while it may seem counter-intuitive, instrumentalization is eroding the very notion of a public space which is the essence of democracy. The willingness to act for purposes greater than oneself can only result from a knowledge of what I might call "sacred truth," and many of those truths are vested in religious traditions.
It's in this context that the achievement of the Bible Literacy Project deserves to be celebrated. In an era in which popular culture has nearly prevailed over cultural literacy; in which demagoguery has outflanked democracy; and in which political horizons have shrunk to such an alarming degree that violent radicalism seems like a rational choice to many, this is a triumph of moderation, respect, and mutual collaboration. This is the hard work of cultural renewal which will yield fruit for future generations. When education truly models the values that it professes, then we can all breathe the air of a better world: less jaded, less cynical, less crude; more open, more hopeful, more just. As American Jewish Congress attorney Marc Stern, an adviser on the effort, said "this book is proof that the despair is premature, that it is possible to acknowledge and respect deep religious differences and yet still find common ground." That's good news for us all.

Even an Act of God Isn't Going to Change George W. Bush

2005-09-21T20:30:00.000-04:00

A humble, devout man might interpret certain events - such as 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina - as warnings from God to get his act together. Since time immemorial, that's how religious people have interpreted disasters, with mixed results. President Bush, on the other hand, is a classic narcissist who always interprets disaster as confirming all of his prejudices. It is always disaster for someone else, because they deserved it, and vindication for him - further affirmation of the infallibility of his calling. (This is why the logic of Dr. Strangelove fits Bush so perfectly: if the nukes were to start falling, he would be on the phone with Karl Rove working damage control and trying to find a way to give the rich a tax break.) So it should come as no surprise that Bush is trying to use the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to push his kooky agenda - the same agenda which landed the Gulf Coast in its current predicament, only worse. I believe the definition of insanity is when no argument and no evidence could possibly convince a person otherwise. After three of the worst disasters in this nation's history (9/11, Iraq, Katrina) I think it's safe to say that nothing in heaven or on earth could get Bush to change his mind about anything.

My Friend Katrina Evacuates Her Name

2005-09-21T20:12:00.000-04:00

My friend Katrina has reluctantly decided to abandon her name, she told me the other day. "For a long time I held out hope that my name was salvageable," she said. "After all, no name has ever been completely destroyed by a storm before. I thought I could wait it out, but eventually it just got to be too much." Since the storm struck, my friend Katrina has been pounded by relentless media references to her name and a torrent of disapproval from strangers. "Everything I've put into my name has simply been washed away," Katrina stated. "There's nothing left to come back to." Katrina isn't looking forward to the post-Katrina era. "I never liked any of the nicknames for my name: Kat, Kit, Kitty," she reported. "I guess I'm going to have to pick one of them. Eventually I'll rebuild somewhere, but Katrina as I knew her is gone forever."

Operation "Able Danger"

2005-09-15T20:08:00.000-04:00

I've just read the disturbing news that a Pentagon employee is claiming to have destroyed key documents pertaining to the identification of Mohammed Atta as a terrorist back in 1999 at the orders of his supervisor. Apparently the documents were the result of a secret Clinton-era intelligence operation known as "Able Danger" - whose existence was so secret that 9/11 Commissioner Slade Gordon has stated "It just didn't happen." Does anyone know anything more about this operation or the circumstances under which the employee was ordered to destroy the documents? I won't prejudge the facts, but on the surface this seems like fuel for the fire for those who have claimed that the federal government had detailed knowledge of the movements of the hijackers. Recall, for instance, 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser's account of the exchange between herself and senior FBI agents, in which she questioned how the FBI managed to identify the very flight school in Florida at which some of the hijackers had trained within hours of the attack, and received the sarcastic retort, "We got lucky." I will keep a close eye on this story as it develops and welcome any new information anyone can provide.

Negotiating with al-Qaeda?

2005-09-14T19:03:00.000-04:00

In an Op-Ed in today's Boston Globe, Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, associate director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard, puts forth the notion that the United States should supplement its military campaign against al-Qaeda with a complementary strategy of direct negotiations and if necessary, concessions. I believe that there's a lot of merit to this idea, especially the paradigm shift that the U.S. should treat al-Qaeda as an organized militia with a specific political and military agenda rather than as a gang of blood-thirsty apocalyptic fanatics. Certainly this would help most Americans to come to a better understanding of the otherwise baffling war on terror (perhaps one of the main reasons why the Bush administration hasn't tried it.) However, I'm not as optimistic as Mohamedou that such negotiations would actually lead to a cease-fire with al-Qaeda, at least not in any initial phase. I take from Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan (and one of the best informed and most insightful commentators on the war on terror) that al-Qaeda's goal is to overthrow all of what it considers the pro-Western puppet regimes in the Middle East. What bin Laden hopes will emerge, according to Cole, is some kind of Islamist super-state, preferably nuclear armed, with the capability of launching direct strikes against Israel and western targets, radically reducing the regional accommodation of the state of Israel and forcing western governments to withdraw their forces. Al-Qaeda thus envisions a reversal of what it perceives as a century of Muslim accommodation and humiliation at the hands of the imperialist west, and a renaissance of Islamic power.

Clearly, these goals cannot be reconciled with those of the United States. There is no possibility of a U.S. withdrawal from Muslim lands, nor will the U.S. withdraw its support for Israel. If negotations ever become possible, it will be as a result of U.S. victories in the war on terror forcing al-Qaeda to scale back its plans. The way things stand now, however, it doesn't seem as if al-Qaeda has any reason to negotiate. Bin Laden's grand vision of an Islamist neo-caliphate is halfway to realization, thanks to the folly of U.S. policy in Iraq, which could very well result in a new regional politics dominated by Iran.

In the long run Mohamedou may prove to be right. But real negotiations between al-Qaeda and the United States are at the moment so implausible, it's almost not worth talking about.

Joker Escapes Again

2005-09-14T17:42:00.000-04:00

The Joker has escaped again, CIA director Porter Goss announced at a press conference on Tuesday. "We had him totally cornered on a catwalk in the Axis Chemical Factory, when all of a sudden he disappeared in a cloud of laughing gas," Goss reported. "By the time we came to our senses, he was long gone." Goss denied that any lapses in judgment had led to the failed operation. "You guys in the media don't know what we're going through up here. I've been on the phone 24/7 with Police Commissioner Gordon trying to solve this case. Rest assured, the government is doing everything it can to capture this killer," he stated. Earlier, President Bush defended his administration's actions. "No one in my government will rest until the Joker has been safely returned to Arkham Asylum where he belongs," he promised. "Then we will all sleep safely knowing that a sworn enemy of America has been brought to justice." The Joker is the prime suspect in a string of slayings, robberies, and public mayhem which has terrorized Gotham City for more than fifty years.

The Question of Evil

2005-09-12T18:11:00.000-04:00

One of the questions people inevitably ask in the wake of a horrendous natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina is how a good God could allow such things to happen. The genre of theological reasoning which attempts to answer such questions is called theodicy. In recent years theologians have had great success in attacking the classical form of the "argument from evil," which states that the existence of evil is incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful, good God. Theologians have successfully demonstrated that much of the evil in the world is the result of free will, and established the possibility that free will may ultimately be a greater good than all of the evil it causes. As the debate stands today, the question is not so much whether a good God might permit some evil, but rather why does God permit so much of it? And why does it always seem to happen to the wrong people? Further, what about natural disasters, which are beyond the control of human beings? Why doesn't God, for instance, whisk everyone out of the way when a hurricane is about to strike? Or why don't angels sound audible alarms from heaven? The argument from anti-theists is that the amounts and kinds of evil we actually find in the world make the existence of an all-powerful, good God seem implausible.
I believe that a successful response to this argument must hinge on a defense of the kind of world God created. We might start with G.K. Chesterton's rejoinder, what about the problem of pleasure? Why, the corpulent man of letters wondered, is life so enjoyable? If the non-theist can imagine a world which is far better than this one, the theist can easily imagine one which is much worse! If we begin to examine the world to learn what about it is so enjoyable, we will find there is a paradox to pleasure: it is often dangerous. If we take God to have "made" waterfalls, then God is also responsible for the possibility of being crushed by them. The same goes for the beauty of mountains, which are beautiful in part because they are high enough to fall to your death from. Lions and tigers would not be as glorious if they lacked the spirit and capability of devouring their prey (a lion fed manna by angels would be a disappointment.) What is this sense of intrigue and delight which is both thrilling and dangerous? I believe that it is close to the spirit of science itself. Adventure, discovery, and transformation, require a universe with enough heft, enough density and complexity, to make the journey worthwhile. Not only that but in that process there is always a sense of risk - a self-giving, self-sacrificing willingness to take chances in order to take that next step. For every "something more," there's a "something less," or at least the possibility of it, a natural ebb and flow which is close to the flesh and bone of science itself.
Would we give up the awesome power of hurricanes if we could know for sure that no one would ever be killed or injured by one? What else would we be prepared to give up - how child-proofed would we want God to make the universe - if it meant guaranteeing everyone's safety and security? Or isn't it the case that there's something to love in this creation, some gut response to the sheer power and beauty and even love we find in nature, even when it kills us?

More Responses to the Worst of the Worst

2005-09-12T18:06:00.000-04:00

ts said...
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
don't you think jacoby has a point about neutral organizations such as the red cross?
2:41 PM

weazoe said...
Did you actually read the articles? The Herald's investigation was based on an internal Unicef report, from which it quotes at length. In addition, the investigation cites first-hand reports from German and Iraqi journalists, and quotes human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Red Cross as saying that they are aware of and extremely concerned about the problem of child detainees. This is what the report says about the Red Cross:
Between January and May this year the Red Cross registered a total of 107 juveniles in detention during 19 visits to six coalition prisons. The aid organisation’s Rana Sidani said they had no complete information about the ages of those detained, or how they had been treated. The deteriorating security situation has prevented the Red Cross visiting all detention centres.
By the way at least one fact in this story has been widely reported on in the blogosphere and the mainstream media: the rape of a sixteen year old boy. You can read about it at cbsnews here and the washington post here.

New Show About Black President Marketed Like Science Fiction

2005-09-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

The new television drama, "He's the Chief," is a wild-eyed, fantastical journey through a dream-like, futuristic landscape, according to press releases. The premise of the show? A black man becomes President. "This show will boggle your mind," said studio executive Walt Evans. "It's going to be like the X-Files, only even more unbelievable. When you first get a glimpse of the President sitting in the Oval Office - and he's black! - you're going to know you're in an alternative universe." Some critics have questioned whether the show's premise is just too fantastical for audiences to accept. "It reminds me of that Max Headroom show back in the '80's," said Variety reviewer Bernie Wallace. "Critics loved it because it was so challenging and innovative, but audiences couldn't get their heads around the concept. Science fiction doesn't usually reach a wide audience." Some viewers were already looking forward to the premier, however. "I think it's going to be one of those cult things, like Twin Peaks," said Melodie Fairchild of Seattle. "I mean, it might be a little weird, but you have to hand it to these guys. A black President? Sometimes the craziest ideas make the best shows."

We'll Meet Again Someday

2005-09-11T01:52:00.000-04:00

The news that the Pentagon is revising the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations to openly declare the possibility of launching a first strike against terrorists or states suspected of harboring them doesn't exactly come as a surprise, since the Bush Administration has been seeking funding for bunker busting nuclear warheads for three years now and had already hinted that it has a pre-emptive nuclear policy in place. And also since the character played by Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, who rides a warhead bareback to its destination, is a perfectly eerie prophecy of George W. himself. So, the Bush administration has one last gift it wants to give to the world before 2008: a nuclear holocaust. We sort of knew that already. Nevertheless, it's not good news for those of us who plan to be inhabiting the planet for any of the next several decades. How exactly does one launch a pinpoint strike against a terrorist hideout? We can't capture bin Laden because supposedly we don't know where he is. Then what good are nuclear weapons against them? And does it really make sense to think that this policy would actually deter al-Qaeda from launching a WMD attack? I would think, if anything, it would encourage them to do so. The Bush administration has the worst record of any Presidency since the end of World War II on containing nuclear weapons in part because it has repudiated the successful containment strategies of its predecessors, including international non-proliferation and test ban agreements. What the Bush administration doesn't understand is that by rejecting the non-proliferation framework of the Cold War it has effectively promoted nuclear lawlessness, leaving states such as North Korea and Iran with no reasonable choice but to pursue nuclear weapons. These states, whose interests inevitably conflict with ours, have no other deterrent in light of the Bush administration's stated intention to topple their governments through any available means, including nuclear weapons. The Bush administration's nuclear policy is as unwise as it is immoral. It's a foolish government that gives its enemies no choice but to prepare to meet force with force.

Statisticians Inversely Correlate Lindsay Lohan, Houston

2005-09-10T19:21:00.000-04:00

Statisticians have discovered a remarkable inverse correlation between the collective weight of the city of Houston and that of Lindsay Lohan, researchers announced yesterday. "It's amazing," stated population analyst and celebrity guru Richard Sanchez. "Over the past two years, the ratio has never varied. As Houston has gotten fatter, Lohan has gotten skinnier. According to our latest calculations, Lohan now weighs about as much as an average Houstonian's butt-cheek." Concerned mathematicians were quick to draw the obvious conclusion. "If the city of Houston can't get its weight down, Lindsay is doomed," announced demographer Barbara Ellsworth. "She's already on the brink. A few more pounds on the part of the average Houstonian and Lindsay is just going to disappear." As of Friday researchers were desperately trying to get the word out on the street. "Please, Houstonians," Ellsworth pleaded. "The next time you go to grab that double-cheeseburger, think twice. Do you really want to be the fat-ass who killed Lindsay Lohan?"

What Happens Now? The End of an Ideology

2005-09-09T19:43:00.000-04:00

After 9/11, I woke up in a Bizarro-world where George W. Bush was the most powerful man on earth and whatever he happened to think on that day passed for absolute truth. Ever since, I've had the nagging feeling of having stumbled into the wrong reality - that somewhere in another dimension, Al Gore is President and everything is just the way it used to be. Well, history carries with it its own ironies, reversals, and concealed symmetries. It appears now that as the winds of Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, we may have been blown back into the "regular" world, the very one we departed from when the planes struck the World Trade Center.

What I mean is that although the catastrophe of 9/11 impacted America in ways that we still don't fully understand, one of the most significant and unexpected consequences was a sudden shift in the national and global balance of power, a dangerous and unfortunate accident which just happened to benefit an extraordinarily fanatical and corrupt regime. In effect the hijacked airliners struck a bulls-eye in the heart of the American democratic tradition, catalyzing an authoritarianism which might otherwise have simply lain dormant. 9/11 created a different America that had always been a possibility but had never yet become actualized. That was 9/11. That was one catastrophe, and its consequences.

Now almost exactly four years later, Hurricane Katrina has struck the United States with equal force, and its repercussions may be exactly the opposite of the previous disaster. In a "post-Katrina" America, it's the Bush administration which looks and sounds hollow and out of touch, with none of its ploys and feints working anymore. The hurricane and its aftermath has galvanized the very populace which has been most complacent in the gradual erosion of freedom and rationality from the character of American public life. The obligation of citizenship, so basic to any civilization, has resurfaced as a legitimate moral concern. The dry bones of democracy are threatening resurrection.

All of this comes at an enormous cost. The suffering of the hurricane and flood victims is just the beginning of the staggering debt we have accumulated through our moral complacency. It includes the suffering of tens of thousands of Iraqis sent to their deaths by American tax-payers, environmental destruction on a global scale, cultural annihilation from Baghdad to Darfur to New Orleans, and everywhere the burden of poverty: violence, crime, neglect, discrimination. This debt is simply the price of admission to our new sobriety, which must become a genuine accounting for our myriad failures as stewards of this time and place, and a realistic assessment of what is now possible and necessary given the damage that's been done.

What I'm saying is that our work is just getting started. We all bear our part in the catastrophe which has been this American way of life, of which the Bush administration has simply been the worst excess, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina its most visible consequence. Cleaning up after that disaster - that's the task that lies ahead.

Responses to The Worst of the Worst

2005-09-08T17:52:00.000-04:00

Isabella di Pesto wrote:

James Carroll had a wonderful column in the Globe the other day. He's my favorite writer there.
I used to write to Jacoby regularly to point out his inaccuracies and contradictions. I don't anymore.
I'm sending this post around in an email to everyone in my address book.
But I'm not sure Americans can cope with this disaster as well as the one in the Gulf Coast.
Words fail me.

I responded:

I agree with you that James Carroll is a wonderful writer. I didn't mean to impugn him in my post because out of the entire media he has probably been the most reliable, insightful, and sanest throughout the Bush years. When I spoke to him, it was after a talk he had given in Cambridge, and I told him about the Mackay article. I think that he didn't take me seriously because he thought I was some kind of conspiracy theorist, some crazy guy who had shown up at this talk, which is funny because that's what I felt like. What had happened to me was that in finally losing all faith in the media, I had turned myself into an outsider. I was by definition discredited by the circular logic so perfectly stated by Jacoby in his email to me: what I was saying must not be true because the media had not reported it, and the media would not listen to me because I was discredited. Being trapped by this argument made me feel more and more like a conspiracy theorist, but it was the feeling that society was going insane and not me. This must be what it feels like, I concluded, to try and retain one's bearings in a society which is lurching towards tyranny - almost impossible.

Bush In Plain Sight

2005-09-05T13:28:00.000-04:00

On Friday the Washington Times voiced a complaint against the President for his many failures in light of the disaster in the Gulf Coast, stating, "We expected to see, many hours ago, the President we saw standing atop the ruins of the World Trade Center, rallying a dazed country to action." The recollection of the President's visit to Ground Zero on September 14th, 2001, strikes me as a little off. Bush basically shouted some inarticulate words about revenge, and that was that. This was not exactly the Gettysburg Address. To conservatives who may finally be opening their eyes to the general lack of character and basic adequacy of this most powerful politician in recent history, I welcome you to reality the way the rest of us have been experiencing it lo these past five years. To me, the Bush whose lack of foresight, disconnectedness, excruciating insensitivity, unserious intellect, and inability to grasp the real nature of a crisis and respond to it, is the same Bush who spent 9/11 fleeing in Air Force One and taking orders from Dick Cheney, who ginned up a phony war based on conned intelligence, who has failed to lead the nation or even offer comfort during that war and the hardships it has imposed on all of us. It's the same guy. I don't know what Bush was thinking by joking to flood victims about his misspent youth in New Orleans, any more than I know what he was thinking when he said that Saddam Hussein was planning to attack America with unmanned aerial drones. For that matter, I don't know what he was thinking back in 1972 when he got drunk, urinated on a parked car, and yelled obscenities at police officers. What can I say? I've never voted for him, for just that reason. To those who did, I can only say that George W. Bush, as far as I can tell, has never changed. He's the same guy you voted for last November. The exact same guy. I promise.

The War Against, You Name It

2005-09-04T20:42:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with my low opinion of the right-to-life movement, due especially to its disgusting habit of enforcing its anti-woman ideology rather than even attempting to reduce the number of abortions which take place annually. Apparently nothing is going to change anytime soon. Last week the FDA announced that it is indefinitely delaying the decision over whether the morning-after pill can be sold over the counter, offering up the flimsy excuse that the pill would fall into the hands of horny 16 year olds who would use it for the nefarious purpose of screwing in the restrooms [pardon the paraphrase.] This excuse makes no sense because for one thing, pharmacies can solve the problem with a simple ID check and for another, everybody knows that teenagers never use contraception anyway. (Who would have thought that getting teens to take responsibility for their sexual lives could even be possible, let alone undesirable?) The means by which the FDA arrived at its decision is even weirder: it came as a fiat from the commissioner, apparently without the consensus or approval of the rest of the agency. Now FDA Assistant Commissioner Susan Wood has resigned in protest, and with good reason. This is a piece of such rank hypocrisy that it could only be the work of the religious right. There's not space here to wonder again why the Bush administration continues to wage its war on science. I had hoped, however, that a supposedly "pro-life" administration (whatever that means) might at least show a grain of interest in a tool which could cut the estimated 3 million unintended pregnancies which occur every year in half. No such luck. Given a choice between making real progress on abortion, and controlling female bodies like chattle, well there's no choice at all.

Black People Coming Out of Woodwork

2005-09-03T20:25:00.000-04:00

Black people are coming out of the woodwork, local and national media reported this week in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "What the - black people? Living in America?" stated Utah resident and white person Shane McConnell when confronted with the unexpected news. "Didn't they all leave this country - like after the Civil War or something? I had no idea there were any of them still hanging around." Other residents of all-white communities recalled seeing black people in movies and on stage, but never in real life. "I knew that Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, all of those guys were black and living somewhere in America," said life-long Kansas resident Janet Murphy. "But I was damn surprised to turn on my tv and see that all the people they kept saying were drowning and all that were black. I just thought to myself, where on earth did you people come from?" Media personalities were quick to capitalize on the new phenomena. "I need you to get me a black person for tomorrow's broadcast, pronto," Katie Couric was heard ordering to her staff. "I'll be damned if Diane Sawyer is going to be the first journalist to interview a black person live on national tv."

Massive Terror Attack on New Orleans Postponed Indefinitely

2005-09-03T18:46:00.000-04:00

Would-be suicide bombers, explosives operatives, and other terrorist foot-soldiers were disappointed this week to learn that the planned attack on New Orleans has been postponed indefinitely. "I couldn't believe it when I got the news," said a bitterly disappointed Yusuf Al-Hassad, a Yemeni radical who had been training with al-Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan. "This mission has been in the works for a year now. We had our gear ready to go and everything. I even made a suicide video," he said with obvious frustration. "Yes, now we are all out of work," his colleague and artillery expert Mohammed Al-Sadr agreed. "What am I supposed to tell my wife? Sorry, New Orleans has already been destroyed? I'm going to be hanging around the house for the next six months now." Long lines could be seen outside of Osama bin Laden's headquarters as terrorists received the news and started looking for work. "It's getting so that a suicide bomber can't even find decent work anymore," al-Hassad said as he leafed through an unemployment brochure. "George Bush has done more damage to America than we ever could."

The Worst of the Worst

2005-09-03T13:36:00.000-04:00

I first read this story on child torture by American forces, and this one, last year when it was published in the free daily paper the Boston Metro. It was never reprinted or mentioned in any other American paper. Last summer I started to believe that I was going crazy because I could not believe that such a shocking and profoundly significant story could simply be ignored by the entire American media. I spoke in person about the story to Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, and never heard or read anything more from him. In fact, my confusion led to the following bizarre interchange between myself and Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby:

Dear Mr. Jacoby,

You have frequently written about how Saddam Hussein's infamous atrocities justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq, citing as most egregious the imprisonment and torture of children as an interrogation technique. This is certainly the sickest thing I can think of in the modern world. Now it appears it is being practiced by the United States, as reported in this Scottish newspaper http://www.sundayherald.com/43773 and oddly, nowhere else. You have consistently denounced any comparisons between the actions of the U.S. in Iraq and what Saddam did there. Is this still a defensible position? Surely there is no way to spin, no way to rationalize, this kind of atrocity. If it's true, it's on par with the My Lai massacre and the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in WWII as examples of Americans acting no differently than the dictators we opposed. Those who have sanctioned it should be removed from power as soon as possible, prosecuted, and sentenced to prison. It is not a matter of partisanship but a matter of conscience for every American whose political will goes to support this war.

jacoby@globe.com wrote:

I'd like to know if the Red Cross or any other neutral organization has confirmed this
report. The media would certainly be all over it if it were deemed
credible.

Jeff Jacoby
Op-Ed columnist
The Boston Globe

Finally, in an attempt to save my sanity, I contacted the reporter Neil Mackay myself, and asked him if he would try to "prove" that he existed, a la Snuffalapagus. He told me that was well aware that the American media had frozen out anything it didn't want to hear, and that he had long since given up trying to "prove" anything. So there the story rested, until now. Recently I've read the rumors about the as yet unseen photos from Abu Ghraib, and apparently they will finally confirm the story that Neil Mackay broke over a year ago. And the media will pretend like this was the first time anyone ever heard of it.

I Liked this Movie the First Time I Saw It...

2005-09-03T13:00:00.000-04:00

Remember that movie The Day After Tomorrow? The disaster flick about global warming? A lot of conservatives pooh-poohed its pop-environmentalist message, using the film's Hollywood effects and cheesy storyline to pour scorn on the science of global warming. Well, Jake Gyllenhaal aside, that movie looks pretty prophetic now. From frightening weather conditions, to massive flooding, to enormous refugee camps, this may be the new face of global warming. In fact, the whole post-Katrina situation has that eerie feeling of science fiction suddenly becoming reality. Isn't this exactly the scenario that global warming Cassandras have been warning about for years? Which begs the question, will New Orleans be the last American city to end up under water? Or is this a sign of things to come?

Jake Gyllenhaal: Laughing Prophet of Doom?

Katrina Reveals The Ugly Truth About the Bush Era

2005-09-02T21:15:00.000-04:00

If the rest of the world didn't know already that the United States in the Bush era is a land of shocking economic disparities, inflamed racial tensions, and increasing poverty for a neglected minority of its citizens, it does now. The sight of masses of black refugees, many of them children and elders, dying while the Bush administration twiddled its thumbs can now be added to the canon of heart-rending and deeply disturbing images produced during the Bush Era, including Ground Zero, the invasion of Baghdad, the assassination of Saddam Hussein's sons, and the iconic torture photos of Abu Ghraib. What Hurricane Katrina has laid bare is the soul of a nation in a deep spiritual crisis, foundering for lack of any kind of leadership. It's a feeling which has become sadly familiar and promises only to become more so as the nation's problems worsen. The looting which occurred in the wake of Katrina is only a symptom of these problems. It is the sign of a people who have become totally disenfranchised from the political process. The distance between their lives and those who ostensibly govern them is immeasurable. They have no recourse, no voice, in Bush's America. That's what Bush has been working assiduously to take away for these past five years - from the gutting of the nation's social infrastructure through war and tax cuts, to vindictive federal "reforms" such as the bankruptcy and litigation acts. Over and over, Bush has proved that he does not even begin to understand such people. His government simply does not represent them. His mindset is entirely shaped by privilege, which produces his characteristic insecurity and defensiveness. America is rotting under Bush's leadership. The voices from across the social spectrum are growing more angry, more frustrated, and more demanding. If nothing changes - if the media refuses to hold the government accountable, if Congress refuses to regulate business and represent the people, if the government refuses to begin addressing the most grievous of its abuses - then there's more where that came from. This has been Bush's summer of discontent, but the worst is yet to come.

Life in New Orleans Pretty Much Like It Always Is

2005-09-02T20:53:00.000-04:00

This past week in New Orleans, many hundreds, mostly minorities, died or suffered due to inadequate health care, lack of shelter, malnutrition, dehydration, and gross neglect. This came amidst reports that well-off police officers and restauranteurs were waiting out the chaos in luxury hotels. "Actually, that's pretty much how things work here," said one of the cops as he relaxed in a four star hotel lobby sipping champagne. "It's good to know that even with the hurricane and all, some things about New Orleans never change."

Looting in Washington Continues Unabated

2005-09-02T20:23:00.000-04:00

The federal government continued to be ransacked by looters Friday night as authorities were unable to restore control. "The situation is worsening," said a desperate populace over-run by the violent thugs. "Remember that nine billion dollars stolen in Iraq? That's nothing compared to what's going on now." Some of the looters could be seen exiting the Capitol building, where they had grabbed valuable public assets such as pension funds, slush funds, transportation, defense, and health care dollars, and the United States Social Security system. The filthy savages could also be seen plundering the financial district, leaving with fistfuls of money stolen from gas, oil, and electricity-buying taxpayers.

One of the violent looters

Bush Assures Public New Orleans Safe to Swim In

2005-09-02T20:10:00.000-04:00

George W. Bush assured a public grown increasingly anxious over the recent flooding in New Orleans that the city is safe to swim in. "Now I know there's a lot of people saying that they don't feel safe swimming in New Orleans. They say they've seen sharks and alligators in that water, and they're afraid to go near it. They say there's decaying corpses floating around. I want them to know they have nothing to be afraid of. New Orleans is a safe, enjoyable place to take your family swimming." To back his words up, Bush took a brief swim down 17th Street, proclaiming the water "refreshing."

Is Nothing Sacred? The Right Tackles ID

2005-08-26T22:22:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons why I despise conservatives is that they take good ideas and mercilessly destroy them. This is the case, as I have argued, with sensible restrictions on abortion rights, and it's recently become the case with the theory of "intelligent design." It pains me that the way that most Americans have come to be acquainted with this theory is through the work of that great scientist, President Bush. Like an icepick it pains me. Before the Bush administration ruined it for everyone, Intelligent Design was a theory advanced by scientists (not Christians!) such as Paul Davies and Roger Penrose, as a deep reflection on the nature of the universe and the purpose and possibility of scientific inquiry. The science of intelligent design, which I cannot emphasize strongly enough is real science, focuses on questions such as the probability of this exact universe coming into existence among all possible universes, the origin and meaning of the laws of physics, the nature of time and eternity, and whether the universe was meant to create and sustain life. Such science is simply the rebirth of classical metaphysics, rejuvenated by the 20th century discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics and the concomitant displacement of the Newtonian universe. As Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle before him argued, the science of metaphysics is by no means the crass "God in the gaps" trick which Bush and his fellow morons have made it out to be. The created goodness of the world as Aquinas would have it, or its purposiveness according to Aristotle, is not a "first order" phenomenon, i.e., not an explanation for how rocks fall from bridges or how species adapt to fit their environments. Those phenomena can only be explained through observation which leads to an understanding of causes. Rather, metaphysics is a "big picture" science, the science of first (and last) things, which throws everything into the light in which science may discover it. It is trust in the coherence and reliability and essential goodness of things - the trust that the universe was in some sense "expecting us" and that we should feel at home here - that makes science possible, because it keeps questions open. The sense of wonder at the beauty of things is what shapes the scientists' mind, informs his or her methods, enriches that thinker's soul. So that primal awe is the fuel of scientific inquiry - it is the flame which must be kept burning. Intelligent Design theory represents the very best hope for the nascent dialogue between science and religion - which I believe must urgently take place if the western tradition is going to survive. Yet just when this olive branch between science and religion has been extended, along comes the ghoulish specter of the religious right, attempting to prove that everything bad ever said about religion is really true. Now President Bush, with his inimicable style, has probably ruined the science and religion moment for a long, long time. He has at least done incalculable damage to it with his disgusting, reactionary politics and bastard prejudices. Where science and religion are concerned, the right can only gaze on stupidly, not comprehending either one.

Totally Confused About Iraq

2005-08-26T21:20:00.000-04:00

I'm reiterating my thesis that Iraq is the new War of 1812. Nothing about it makes sense to me. It doesn't remind me of any other war. I can't figure out who is fighting and why. Somebody remind me again why are we fighting on the side of the radical Islamists? At least in the Cold War we knew enough to fight the communists. Whereas in Iraq we invaded a country that had nothing to do with "the terrorists" and then went ahead and joined forces with the only group that had any sympathy for them. Similarly, nothing about the political process has made any sense either, starting with the first of the arbitrary deadlines, the phony "transfer of sovereignty." The Bush administration just does not even seem to understand the concept of a political process. It seems to believe that the mere formality of a political process will suffice to create stability, even if that process is imposed from without by an occupying power and enforced through arbitrary deadlines. This makes no sense. No meaningful political process can take place without first negotiating a cease-fire. Then a framework for resolution can be agreed upon, and eventually a power-sharing arrangement can be negotiated. Only then, when trust has been reasonably established between the parties, can a permanent constitution be written and democratically ratified. Of course the Bush administration sees everything through the lens of its own blinkered ideology. It is characteristic of the administration to think in terms of incompatible idealisms - for instance, to insist that the "terrorists" are masters of evil who can only be dealt with by brute force, and at the same time to impose a chimerical psuedo-democratic process, apropos of nothing. It is surely a contradiction to wage a brutal, nihlistic war in a foreign country while at the same time wax utopian about the perfect democratic state which is supposed to descend from whole cloth as if from the clouds. It's this type of thinking which has prevented the Bush administration from actually understanding the conflict in Iraq, let alone telling the truth about it to the American people.

America Under Siege: The Gay Terrorist Threat

2005-08-25T17:52:00.000-04:00

Last year Rick Santorum implored Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage on the grounds that only a fully heterosexualized country will be fully equipped to defend itself from terrorists. "Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?" he stated at the time. Now a shocking new CIA report reveals the rationale behind his words: cells of gay terrorists, poised to strike at the heart of straight America. It has long been suspected that Osama bin Laden, who spends an inordinate amount of time hanging around with other men in the desert and has always come across as kind of effeminate on video, is a closeted homosexual. Yet what the CIA report reveals for the first time is the existence of a virtual army of gay terrorists waiting at bin Laden's command. Nor were these killers foreigners recruited and trained elsewhere. Rather, many of them are American citizens - young men who became disillusioned with straight society and then were radicalized at gay nightclubs and gyms in San Francisco and other hotbeds of radical homosexuality. The gay terrorist menace is an urgent threat to the safety and security of the straight country we all know and love. No straight American, in these perilous times, can afford to ignore the gay neighbor who is quite likely a suicide bomber and at the very least drives a Prius and always smells like patchouli. With your help and under the manful guidance of Overlord Bush we can defeat these suspiciously happy-clappy assasins and take back this country for straight folk everywhere.

Liberal Media At It Again

2005-08-24T22:42:00.000-04:00

Won't the liberal media ever leave President Bush alone? Yesterday it was the Salt Lake City Tribune's turn to pile on, calling the mission to bring democracy to Iraq a "fool's errand." What's next? The Denver Post?

George W. Bush, America's Greatest Cycling President

2005-08-24T21:44:00.000-04:00

Following the conclusion of his recent bicycle ride with Lance Armstrong, President Bush finally confirmed the rumors which had been swirling for months: he will compete in the 2006 Tour de France. "This is it," the President announced to an eager crowd of reporters. "This is why I became President: to lead the Discovery Channel team to sweet victory next year in Paris." While some in the media questioned the propriety of a sitting president chewing up the Grosse Pierre astride the eye-catching Superfahrrad, the President defended his decision. "Even though I'm President, I have the right to a balanced life," he stated. "And that means riding my bike wherever and whenever the hell I feel like it." Presidential scholars debated what the President's ultimate cycling legacy would be. "There's no question in my mind that Bush is the greatest cycling President in history," said historian Douglas Thornton. "I mean, Harding competed in a few minor events but nothing compared to what Bush has done." Other scholars weren't so sure. "Back in 1895 Grover Cleveland completed a six week circuit of the Chesapeake Bay - and that was back before bicycles even had seats. To beat that, Bush will have to at least place in the Tour de France," said Karen Roberts of Harvard. "That's simply not true," Thornton protested. "Bush has logged more miles on that bike than he has on the First Lady. To faithfully ride your bike while scores of American service men and women are being killed and wounded every day in a losing war - well, that takes real dedication."

Name Change

2005-08-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

I will heretofore be referring to the Bush administration policy in Iraq as the Coulter Doctrine after its founder, the great political thinker, mover, shaker, and wit - the Hannah Arendt of our time! - Ann Coulter herself.

Pat Robertson: Vigilante, Dick-Head

2005-08-24T20:27:00.000-04:00

I received a request for a comment on the recent fatwa against Hugh Chavez. My response is that no comment is necessary. Leftist leaders take note: Pat Robertson is out to kill you.

Fetal Pain Study

2005-08-24T20:22:00.000-04:00

Interesting study in the news today about fetal pain. The study concluded that fetuses probably don't feel pain until the seventh month. If the results of this study prove to be accurate (according to the article some researchers are disputing them) then this is ammunition for defenders of the objective arguments for abortion rights.

Republican Wrecking Ball

2005-08-24T19:32:00.000-04:00

The future of globalization on its present course doesn't favor the United States. That's a fact. Yet the outcome of globalization is by no means determined and there are specific actions which the government could be taking to give our children and grand-children a fighting chance. A reasonable government, even a reasonably conservative one, could have taken a multi-pronged approach to globalization of investing in education (especially science,) increasing conservation and energy independence, reducing the deficit, and shoring up Medicare and Social Security. Even partially meeting these goals would have given Americans a buffer during the difficult period of adjusting to new global realities which lies ahead. Unfortunately for future generations, the President during the crucial years of 2000-2008 was George W. Bush, a man so blindingly incompetent, so numbingly corrupt, and so unimaginably powerful that he single-handedly brought America from prosperity to the brink of economic and fiscal disaster within the span of eight years. Historians will find it difficult to exaggerate the depth of the damage inflicted by the Bush administration. This government has effectively taken a wrecking ball to the political and economic infrastructure of this country, no surprise since it was only the traditions of American democracy and prosperity which stood in the way of the right-wing takeover they craved.

Instead of acting to solve America's problems, the Bush administration and its allies saw those problems as an opportunity to effectively plunder the nation's resources. It hasn't been a government so much as a looting spree. Everyone has gotten a share at the trough - politicians, journalists, lobbyists, corporate executives, defense contractors. No one low enough to betray their country has been left out. In the last five years they have cleanly stolen a good chunk of America's future - the one that our grandparents, parents, and ourselves worked quite hard to secure. Which one hurts the most? The wholesale liquidation of natural resources such as the nation's air, water, and forests? The tax cuts which have imposed serfdom on the next generation? The boondoggle of a trillion dollar missile defense system which is not even claimed to actually work? Or could it be the utterly pointless war which has now killed and maimed tens of thousands in Iraq and elsewhere? From my very rudimentary knowledge of history, let me offer a word of advice to George W. Bush: every empire in history has sunk under the weight of pointless, unpopular, bankrupting wars. It's the worst thing a nation can possibly do to itself. It is suicide. The nine billion dollars which disappeared in Iraq could just as effectively have been burned to keep the homeless warm. That's my hard work, and everyone else's, and it's never coming back. That's my future that's just been stolen by the most craven, morally bankrupt, utterly godless gang of thieves this continent has ever seen in power.

Descartes' Error

2005-08-22T00:43:00.000-04:00

If philosophy has often been a history of brilliant misunderstandings, Descartes' contribution is one of the most impressive in western thought. On the one hand, Descartes' emphasis on cognition (i.e. computation) as a kind of universal authority led to a revolution in applied science; on the other hand, his formulation of reason as unbounded thought fractured the human person into the competing modes of mind and body, the legacy of which still weighs heavily on western philosophy to this day.

The mind/body problem as Descartes framed it is a defensive maneuver made necessary by his radical break with the medieval Aristotelian tradition. That tradition as interpreted through the lens of scholasticism had paid a great deal of respect to the innate qualities of objects through which they are made available to be known and loved by rational minds. From Descartes’ skeptical vantage point, however, he regarded the presence of such qualities within the objective world as highly doubtful. In contrast, he proposed a sharp distinction between appearance and reality. Reality apparently consists of an “every-day” world of objects, each containing certain properties, yet in truth these appearances are mere phenomenal projections resulting, almost by accident, from interactions taking place at an invisible level. No essential properties reside in objects themselves, because objects themselves do not actually exist in the way that we commonly assume them to do. The difference between Descartes’ position and that of his forebears is similar to the difference between a camera and a painter. A camera “captures” the phenomenal world, but it is a mere imprint, and not an actual representation of the objects which appear in the photograph. Descartes believed (and to a certain extent was proved right) that dissolving the theoretical properties which were believed to give objects their true identity would open the floodgates of science, in the sense that a material world consisting of purely commensurable energies would be infinitely open to manipulation and exploration. Yet, this enticing candidate for the emerging discipline of materialist science created an obvious problem. If matter is indeed reducible to a barely factual existence, then what becomes of mind – the cornerstone of the western tradition? Taken to its logical conclusion, Descartes’ argument appears to undermine everything keeping western philosophers off the ledge: the faculty of reason, supposedly the foundation of morality and just government, the uniqueness of the human species, and most importantly, the only good argument for free will. It appears that Descartes has gained science only at the cost of the freedom and rationality of humanity – which is to say, he has found and lost science in the same breath. This conclusion was intolerable for Descartes, and so he theorized an escape. The Aristotelian tradition which Descartes rejected had regarded reason as the perfected relation between human beings and the natural world which results from experience. Descartes, in contrast, located the principle of rationality entirely outside of the material world, i.e. within the theoretical entity of pure mind. This move enabled Descartes to preserve a canon of traditional beliefs which would have been otherwise threatened by the punishing logic of materalism. The entity of pure mind by means of which human beings are able to reason is everything the material world is not: infinite, eternal, immutable, authoritative, impartial, beyond dispute. By virtue of this faculty, human minds are free though bodies are not.

Of the many difficulties encountered by this theory, the most significant (and most interesting) is the mind/body problem. Is it not the case that all supposedly lofty, infinite thoughts are in fact generated by humble, material brains? Where is the consistency in skeptically disposing of individual essences only to relocate them in the mind? The fact that Descartes' arguments for the existence of God, which are the foundation of his philosophy, are generally regarded as reactionary defense mechanisms points to the possibility that Descartes did not wish to accept the reductio ad absurdum of his own conclusions. Descartes never was able to explain the way in which immaterial mind interacted with the material brain. Unwilling to abandon the material world to its own devices, he attempted to save it by splitting reality into dueling essences dominated by the wholly abstract, isolated and bizarrely self-sufficient faculty of pure mind. In fact, Descartes' formulation of the mind/body problem is one of the great errors in western philosophy.

To solve the problem takes a leap of two kinds of faith. The first is faith in the integrity of the natural world as an interlocking, multi-level system which makes sense at each stage in the process, yet progressively makes more and more sense as the process unfolds (spatially and temporally.) This means that the "every-day" world of human experience is a legitimate, though by no means exhaustive, sample of reality. This is not a blind leap, but more like an education. The second leap is simply the inverse of the first. If the natural world is taken as intrinsically coherent, then there is no need to "save" reason by inventing a theoretical entity called mind. Rather, rationality can be seen as simply the culmination of material processes, the transcendent point at which such natural principles as survival, organization, adaptability, and reaction become the uniquely human faculties of wonder, delight, empathy, and creativity. Aristotle's comparison between the web-spinning capacity of a spider and that of a weaver demonstrates the way in which awareness and understanding deepen purposes already found in nature. Civilization is not an ideal, abstract essence held apart from nature but is rather always grounded in natural processes moving towards fulfillment. Mind and body are interpenetrating modes of being, always in process, each in some sense the ideal form of the other. Contra Descartes, there is no shame in this. Nor is there shame in accepting the imperfections which permeate both mind and body. The philosophic life is a pathway through the world, not out of it. That should be good enough for anyone.

The Constitution Breached by False Religion

2005-08-22T00:37:00.000-04:00

I find a lot of affinities between the Constitution and the Bible, both of which express great suspicion for concentrated power and warn stridently against authoritarian governments founded on abusive religious practices. In fact, if there is one message which could be distilled from the entire Bible, it would probably be that most religion, most of the time, is a mortal threat to the freedom and welfare of humanity. So grave is this threat that the Bible declares it intolerable, and emphatically states that there can be no justice and no peace as long as false religion is allowed to take root. Now, the history of monotheism follows from that partially conflicted message, and no one can defend it in its entirety. But the gist of it is quite clear and is strongly echoed (with serious and consequential distortions) by the liberal movements of the 18th century, including the cause of American independence and the adoption of the Constitution. The founders saw no greater threat than that posed by the abuse of power under the cover of religious authority. The Constitution is simply a bulwark against such a government ever coming to power in the United States, which would potentially spell disaster for American freedom, pluralism, and independence. It had never happened here until the disputed election of 2000. The situation we are faced with today, courtesy of the Bush administration, is everything that the Constitution was designed to prevent. It is a government dominated by partisan issues of loyalty and ideology, with a ruling ethos of fundamentalist beliefs, market-driven economics, and militant adventurism abroad. It is soaked in an acid bath of corruption which has eroded all semblance of checks and balances. The judiciary and small pockets of Congress barely retain their independence but they are virtually ignored by the decision-makers in anything that counts. The economy is built on a breathlessly unsustainable model of foreign borrowing, national deficits, and consumer debt. And at every level, every abuse is justified with reference to the religiousness of the ruling party, which is considered to be beyond dispute. Just as the Bible condemns and just as the framers forewarned, state religion and political corruption have merged into a single amorphous entity whose claim to power is its own infallibility. It is a monstrous state of affairs which, if left unchecked, will be the beginning of a painful, permanent change in the American character and way of life.

The Moral Majority

2005-08-17T22:39:00.000-04:00

It is one of the conveniences of being a Republican that whatever you do is by definition considered moral. After all, everyone knows that the Republican party is the moral majority, so this makes living life as a Republican pretty sweet. You can do whatever you want, and that's just ok. If Tom DeLay wants to jet all over the world on all-expense paid trips by lobbyists, that is a moral thing to do. If Rush Limbaugh wants to snort OxyContin to deal with the excruciating pain of his third divorce, that too is very moral. Sometimes moral people have to do what might seem like immoral things, like revealing the identity of CIA agents to punish political enemies, as Karl Rove has recently done. But in the big picture, that's really moral. So is consorting with Islamist terrorists, as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been known to do on occasion. For that matter, if the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, one of the more moral things you can do for your country is to torture and sexually abuse prisoners of war in Iraq and elsewhere. And of course, as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has stated, the most moral action of all is to invade another country under false pretenses, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths. That is just the kind of thing that a highly moral person - if they're a Republican! - is likely to do. So, there is a fair amount of lee-way in what can be considered moral when it is the Grand Old Party doing the talking. The important thing to remember is that Republicans are always moral because it is the Republicans who get to say what morality is. And that right comes to them from their close personal relationship with God. As the President recently said, God told him to strike back at al-Qaeda, and so he did, and God told him to invade Iraq, so he did. That's getting it straight from the horse's mouth, that is. That's where morality comes from, when you're a Republican.

Stupidity Redefined in Iraq

2005-08-17T21:38:00.000-04:00

The Iraq war has to be one of the most pointless wars in recent history. Perhaps the closest parallel in American history is the war of 1812, in which the United States declared war on Britain over a blockade controversy which had already been resolved. The nations fought pointlessly for two years, including such lowlights of U.S. history as a failed attempt to invade Canada and the humiliating sack of Washington D.C. by the British. Similarly, the Iraq war has been waged over a non-existent threat (when we found out there were no WMD, shouldn't we have just declared victory and gone home?) and against a Sunni insurgency which on the surface would seem to be of no relevance to any U.S. strategic or political goals whatsoever. Why are we fighting this random Iraqi tribe? Two reasons are given, neither of which makes sense. The first is that we must defeat the insurgents before we can leave Iraq. Wait a second. The insurgents claim that their only goal is to get us to leave Iraq. Why don't we just end the war by leaving now? Why is it important that we "defeat" the insurgents before we do what they want us to do? The second reason is that the Sunni insurgents are fighting to maintain political and economic control of Iraq against their more numerous Shiite and Kurdish rivals. But why should we side with the Shiites? It is a purely arbitrary fact that the majoritarian government we're trying to establish in Iraq would favor the Shiites - hence, their relative cooperation with the American-sponsored political process, and the Sunni's militant rejection of it. But America has nothing to gain by aiding the Sunnis, which would only increase Iranian influence in Iraq. If anything, from a purely strategic perspective we should have backed the secular Baath party against its more radically Islamist opponents. There simply aren't any compelling political or military reasons for us to be fighting this war, any more then there would be if we had decided to invade Kyrgzstan, inflame political and ethnic tensions, and then pick a random side to fight on. The positive side of this is that there is no real reason why we cannot begin withdrawing from Iraq today. The conflicts now existing would be far better addressed by a United Nations peacekeeping force, or even by Iraqis themselves who would be free to have an honest war for their country's future untainted by charges of imperialism. Since there was never a real mission for the U.S. in Iraq, nothing will be compromised by our departure.

Where is the Anti-War Movement Anyway?

2005-08-16T22:24:00.000-04:00

Is there something missing from the liberal agenda this year, or is it just me? Now I remember - it's the anti-war movement. Unless I'm missing something, there hasn't been a single national protest, not in New York, D.C., San Francisco, anywhere. Are liberals still in hiding after last year's defeat? The fact that it's taken an aggrieved mother with no political expertise just to get liberals even talking about an anti-war movement says a great deal about how far we have to go. Why hadn't anyone thought about staking out Bush's ranch before? The fact is that over 60% of Americans are now on record as opposing the war. A true anti-war movement, like the one that briefly blossomed before this disaster began back in '03, would draw from a profoundly diverse cross-current of Americans, impossible to marginalize (not that the Bush administration wouldn't try.) There may be no better time for liberals to mobilize, and this may be our last opportunity before a draft goes into effect and the war escalates next year.