Wax Banks

Building.

Don't say 'My work is bad,' say 'I need to do this better.' Or better yet just do it. No one cares about 'you' - only about living with you. Which is work.

Charity.

¹Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

²And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

³And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

⁴Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

⁵Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

⁶Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

⁷Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13, King James Version)

Q: What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? A: It doesn't matter.

Senator Edward Kennedy lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. Afterward he gave one of the most important orations by a liberal speaker since WWII. He cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and felt betrayed when it was underfunded by the Republican administration and Congress. Kennedy killed a woman named Mary Jo Kopechne on Martha's Vineyard forty years ago and 'got away with it.' He had lots of money and power and was spoiled. He took out a second mortgage on one of his homes to help pay for his 1994 senatorial campaign. He was expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test and was readmitted because Harvard is full of people like him. He drank a lot. He endured the assassinations of two brothers. Kennedy was a vociferous antiwar advocate in the early 70's. He pushed for universal health care for nearly 40 years. He supported busing in Boston despite vicious attacks from his constituents. He believed that ending poverty was a Christian responsibility, and worked toward that end.

In the mid-80's Ted Kennedy publicly defied the racist white South African government in support of Bishop Tutu. Ronald Reagan appointed him special go-between in negotiations with Gorbachev. His father Joseph was a criminal and a successful politician. Ted Kennedy was a firm supporter of women's rights. The women in his family have not been accorded the same status and privilege as the men. He felt a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He stayed conscious through the operation that removed his brain tumor. His speech about Robert Bork was effective demagoguery. The Kennedys and their many handlers and hangers-on are under the mistaken impression that they deserve power because of their status. Ted Kennedy worked very hard. He was an important and effective senator. He died this week.

Facts are facts; categories are bullshit. What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? Don't ask stupid questions. He was a man, he made mistakes, he profited, he paid, he suffered, he worked, he died. Narratives of 'redemption' and 'class privilege' and 'the prerogatives of power' and 'the lion of the senate' don't apply - or rather, they apply each in part, and help us get a grasp on the life of a dead man, which shared these qualities with every other human life: it was difficult and it ended. We demand that he be something more than the sum of his actions and experiences because we wish the same for ourselves. We remain ignorant, terrified, angry, hopeful, attached, and so death is difficult for us to understand. We wish our stories ended in something other than everlasting darkness.

Ted Kennedy was many things, and the television and newspapers and magazines are full of rich idiots bloviating on his 'meaning' and 'legacy' and 'nature' and so forth. On 'the Kennedys' and other gossip. These declarations might inspire but they do not educate. They bring us no closer to the man. He has gone beyond our reach now. Ted Kennedy worked hard and died having lived fully, for 'good' or 'ill'; the work remains. We should attend to it, and to the facts of the man's life, instead of groping about for his 'true nature.' His category, his identity. As if such things, in this world of acts and objects, meant anything at all. As if they could keep night from falling on us too.

Late: Eagleton on The God Delusion.

This is how you slaughter an intellectual out of his depth:

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford.

[...]

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Eagleton got me through my first Literary Theory class in college, and remains one of the most entertaining Big Brains in the Big Talk. I think I'll read his new book at some point. Anyhow, there that is.

Why, despite the near-constant fury he provokes in me and others, I still read Andrew Sullivan.

From Johann Hari's profile:

With the scenery of conservatism collapsing all around, Sullivan was one of the first major [umm... --wa.] champions of Barack Obama as a future president. He found his temperament—empirical, doubtful, discursive—immediately congenial. This brought yet more howls of betrayal from the right. But now Obama has won, will Sullivan’s Obamaphilia clash with his small-state conservatism, as Obama embarks on a programme of big-government Keynesian reflation?

This question cuts to an unacknowledged tension in Sullivan’s thought that has lain dormant since his Oxford days. Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”

When I ask Sullivan about this, he says: “It’s very hard to be a consistent Oakeshottian, to not let dogmas creep in. Perhaps my belief in markets has become like that. Over the next few years, in my blog and writing, I’m going to be thinking this through.” It seems he can imagine reasoning himself to a more Obama-friendly pro-intervention viewpoint—surely provoking yet more cries of betrayal from conservatives.

He believes his greatest future conflicts will centre on religion—the topic of his next book. He learned his Catholicism as an altar boy in East Grinstead. For him it is a sacramental religion, all about smell and sight and touch. Ritual is at its core, because “ritual has no point beyond itself. Only ritual can approximate the ineffability of the divine, enact its truth while not purporting to explain or capture it.”

Read the (cleverly titled) whole thing.

Notre Dame, Obama.

To read The Corner you'd think contraception and abortion rights had something to do with something or other called 'the human soul.' You'd also think a teenage virgin named 'Mary' gave birth to a walking Jewish god-being named 'Jesus,' and that aforementioned Jesus thought that emergency contraception and abortion and (!!!!) embryonic stem-cell harvesting were Big Time Sins, whatever 'Sins' meant. And you might - to read this bizarre little weblog - shiver to hear of Notre Dame University's big time donors withdrawing their financial support from the school because of the school's decision to invite Barack Obama to give their 2009 commencement address. National Review Online's symposium on this topic - 'Should the University of Notre Dame honor our most anti-life president?' - contains exciting statements like this:

The word “perfidy” derives from the Latin “perfidus,” that is, “faithless” or “detrimental to faith”; it is also synonymous with “treachery,” or “violation of allegiance or trust.” The University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Obama as its commencement speaker in May is perfidious and treacherous in the extreme.

President Obama has zealously moved in his first weeks in office to carry out the most radical anti-life, un-Christian agenda of any American president...

It's all very thrilling, very serious. Unfortunately these 'criticisms' are so stupid that one hardly knows how to respond without embarrassing oneself by association. The successor to the warmongering mock-Christian hypocrite Bush is a 'radical anti-life, un-Christian' zealot? Or check out this sweetness:

[I]t is an outrage for a Catholic university to provide a stamp of approval to someone who just last week wrote the death warrant for millions of embryonic human beings, the most recent of a long line of anti-life acts. Obama’s pro-abortionist extremism relegates a whole class of human beings — unborn human beings — to the status of mere sub-personal objects...

Well, yes. The infinite category of 'unborn human beings,' extended to include newly-fertilized eggs, renders the (admittedly and alas) finite category of actual human beings meaningless, robs it of any actionable scale or sense or character. But never mind (il)logic, just stay at your lab bench: to speak of the 'dignity' and 'rights' of a collection of a hundred cells is so loopy, so arbitrary, so utterly dependent on base antiscientific mysticism, that you kind of want to let more run-of-the-mill stupidity like the following just roll on past -

Obama is also receiving a Doctor of Laws degree from Notre Dame. “Laws” — as in the things he tried to prevent in the Illinois legislature on the matter of protecting infants who survived abortion? The Notre Dame Observer today posts its Sunday interview with Fr. John Jenkins, the school’s president. It is titled “Jenkins: Obama 'honored' University by accepting.” I’m sure that’s just how Mary (a.k.a. Notre Dame) is feeling right now.

- to keep from losing your mind. 'Mary' the 'mother of the church,' who was assumed into heaven and apparently had a permeable hymen and the world's luckiest ovaries and so forth, is of course a fictional character; Mary the (sure!) historical mother of Jesus is a desiccated corpse who does not, in all probability, intercede in the deliberations of Our Lord on behalf of faithful petitioners, and talking about her feelings is sub-Sporting News rhetorical gasbaggery. (I always hated The Sporting News out of some totally irrational Sports Illustrated partisanship. Talk about religious zealotry.)

As in the New Testament, the craziest shit gets saved for last:

This is a highly cynical act, contemptuous of the Church’s prophetic voice in civil society and wagering that there will be no retribution. If a midwestern school seeks attention by granting Mr. Obama an honorary doctorate in law, the next logical step would be to grant Judas Iscariot posthumously an honorary doctorate in business administration.

Yes. Barack Obama, constitutional law professor and firm Christian, is to the study of law as Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus and the central villain in the central morality play in Western culture, is to MBA programs.

Well, it's 6am and I can barely focus my eyes; and it's comforting, in a way, that I'm not the only one who can't see straight. I mean it's not super comforting or anything.

Oh, check it out!

I never tire of making extraordinarily beautiful things for you, Reader(s). 'Christ our light!' 'Light of Christ!' (Hey, I'm stately and plump too, though without a bathrobe or shaving bowl. Mockeries of the Mass - loving, I assure you, in this case - are within the ambit of this blog.)

[Extra laughable bonus fun time for reader(s)! That unbelievable grotesque Victor Davis Hanson sez: Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Yes, Vicki. By all means let us forget Halliburton and Enron and 'etc.' By all means! Because what possible use could memories of the Bush era be in this, our dark collectivist future? No use at all, baby. You fucking troglodytic hack.]

Take this and you'll be happy. Really.

Of course the value of advice isn't its correctness but its usefulness. When it comes to happiness and how to attain it, the correct advice tends to be useless and the useful advice tends to be ignored. What produces lasting happiness? Exertion in the name of what we believe in, i.e. the world we imagine and the world we inhabit syncing up. How do we produce this state? With great difficulty. No one wants to hear advice like that, which is why we scoff or laugh to hear it: 'How do you get to Carnegie Hall?' 'Practice.' If you think the best possible life is idling on a beach and you find a way to idle on a beach all the time, you'll be happy - unless you were wrong about it being a good life. (The only way to know is to do it.) If you realize that your strength is in making music, commit yourself to improving your skills, and find a way to make a decent living playing for people, then you might not always be satisfied - that's the fast lane to producing bad music - and you might not always like where you are but you'll be happy with what you're doing. This is called 'fulfillment,' which is lasting happiness.

Everything always changes; pinning your happiness to your location (your state), rather than what you're doing with it, is a recipe for disillusionment.

Well if it's so simple, why are there so many self-help books? Shouldn't one be enough? Aah, but this is to misunderstand the purpose of the 'self-help' literature, which isn't to expand your capability or deepen your activity but to improve your mood. 'I saw results right away!' No. In the history of mankind that's never, ever been true. Meaningful change characterizes processes. When you quit smoking you have an easier time walking up stairs, sure, but the important thing isn't that symptom, it's the fact that your lungs are no longer being poisoned. The real growth and change occurs over time, a process you can't see.

Ever fall in love? Lemme guess: you realized one day you were in love, and if you can point to 'the moment it happened,' all you're doing is indicating a point in your personal narrative that has particular meaning or resonance for you now. This whole idea of 'love at first sight' is nonsense: we made it up so the inscrutable process of deepening interdependence could make sense to us. We see not essences but edges, contrasts.

We notice that we're happy and we weren't, so something must've changed, whatever could it be? But we're simply at another stage in each of a million ongoing processes.

There's no such thing as a 'nice personality' because personalities aren't real. We 'are' what we can see and sense, our actions aggregated and labeled at a given moment. Which is why it's always 'the quiet one' who shoots up the post office: there are no 'quiet ones,' only people keeping quiet. They always have their reasons.

Trying to identify a 'personality type' is like trying to dampen only part of a sponge: there's a process always underway, homeostasis, changing without moving. You can't see it but that doesn't unmake the change. Balance and stillness aren't the same thing. Self-help is about stopping, but happiness is balance. Ever ride a bicycle? Gear it too high and you'll find it hard to move the thing, too low and you'll pedal the chain right off the gears. Get good at it and your unconscious aim will be not fixed velocity but steady cadence, meaning you better figure out that gearshift, rookie. Same as in a car: if it shakes when you shift you're not smooth enough. 'Correct' and 'smooth' are different things and you'll figure out which one comes first.

We ask ourselves 'Am I happy?' but are just hiding from the real question, the only question: 'What the hell am I doing?' And don't lie, now. 'It's only a one-time thing' is a self-deceptive pep talk; 'I am cheating on my wife' is a statement of fact. 'Is this the right job?' can't be answered but 'Do I think this work is worthwhile?' sure can, and the answer points toward a course of action. You're hard-pressed to know whether you've written a worthwhile novel - but 'How can I make the next one better?' moves you forward, however painful it may be to contemplate. (Of course there's the danger of wanting to rush to the next project without completing this one - irresponsibility in a literal sense. Resist it.) The worth of the work doesn't inhere in you or it. Give it away and keep moving. We stop breathing otherwise.

Maybe you're scared to quit your job though you admit that you hate it; you don't know what life will be like without it. But ask yourself: is the important thing about this job having it or doing it? If the former, the job wastes your time, and you probably waste your employers'. The job you have should be the one you like to do, ideally the one you'd do for free. You don't find such positions, you make them.

In your belief that there's some precious aspect of your Self that won't survive a change in action or situation - in your cowardice - you are the cause of your unhappiness. How does the song go? 'Whatever will be will be / the future's not ours to see.' Which is to say we're fools for thinking we choose anything but our actions. A liar said, 'That depends on what the definition of "is" is.' Let's help the man out: mostly, Bill, the word means nothing at all.

Scents and lies.

[Wrote this the other day.]

Italian fella and his girl just sat down next to me and - I swear I'm not just repeating a meanspirited commonplace here - the B.O. is overpowering. I mean I understand the appeal of not using deodorant, fine, back to the natural state and whatever but Jesus Christ!

But on the other hand.

On the other hand maybe there's something to the idea that it's precisely the sanitary nature of our public spaces that's robbed us of connections to things? The same way urban spaces give us too many right angles, too much visual information, not enough use of other sensory channels...maybe the loss of one another's smell is precisely the cause of some of our unhappiness, our inhumanity to one another? Maybe improvements in hygiene make it increasingly possible for us to abstract one another's humanity away entirely. We talk about the need for strong sensory connections, along with connections in channels we can't necessarily detect with the five canonical senses - you know I don't want to admit it but I do believe in something like extrasensory perception, not 'psychic' but basically augmented senses, a sensory gestalt, perhaps sensory processing we don't yet know about or can't conceive of.

In every culture there are myths and folk beliefs about additional senses - the root of religious belief, basically, is that alternate states are accessed through alternate sensory or cognitive channels, to which we get access only through disciplined action. But in the U.S. today we haven't integrated such beliefs into our actions; they come overdetermined by crazy religious riders, etc. Atop which we poison our olfactory sense with perfumes, artificial flavours at astonishing concentrations, the absence of traditional natural cues and clues about the identities of things, their trustworthiness, intentions, the olfactory history of skin and flesh...

We think of Italian culture as sensuous, and of course we need to include as part of that evaluation not the 'absence of deodorant' (which is a perspectival mistake) but the positive presence of strong human smells, a dataset we're biologically equipped to understand richly and directly. As the B.O. fades you get something like a strong olfactory identity. And after a while it's not unpleasant anymore. Like so many things. We get accustomed to what we initially think of as an imposition; we train ourselves to allow, forgive, welcome in. (Consider anal sex - possibly the most backward possible violation of the human body's intention, yet a fixture throughout human history, in some cultures considered a means of transmitting wisdom, for millions a source of pleasure - even extreme pleasure. And yet what blocks, exactly, do you have to overcome to experience anal sex as pleasure? Why is it worthwhile to overcome those blocks? You might answer, 'The pleasure itself is sufficient reason.' To which 'the very concept of "civilization" says otherwise' is perhaps an unfair answer?) Sometimes an act is enjoyable precisely because it's a forgiven imposition: 'I could be biting you, but we're kissing instead.'

Part of the appeal of heading out into the country for a while is the olfactory analogue to the visual shift from hard angles and bright lights to the sunlit day-rhythm and organic, chaotic variegation of leaves and stone and water. Topology rather than simple geometry. We've destroyed our minds slowly by overpowering them. And how do you write? Go alone to a cabin in the woods somewhere. The absence of noise and interruption, sure, but also the full presence of you, your own complex physical identity no longer drowned out by the multimodal distractions of the city. You can let part of your mind rest. A 'sensory deprivation tank' doesn't actually deprive your senses, it heightens them - by limiting what they have to deal with. Starting with: you smell yourself. You hear your breathing. You become hyperaware of the location of your hands, arms angled, legs touching at the knee, the hairs of your forearms standing up...In other words, you reawaken a proprioceptive faculty linked to your perceptual apparatus, supplementing and heightening both.

We forget ourselves, stop thinking of ourselves as linked by kind and intention and emplacement to the humans around us. We abstract - and we become capable of evil. (It was segmenting the world into 'good' and 'evil' that got Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden - and made possible the murder of Abel, the first abstract act, the beginning of civilization. Original sin was: taxonomy.)

One thing that soap and deodorant do is discretize our sensory experience of the world; they put a temporary stop to our olfactory history and impose a new, completely artificial olfactory texture upon us - and thereby upon our interactions with others.

We don't know what perfume means. The smell of perfume isn't natural; it's an imposition. We become accustomed to it but we never learn how to speak back to it. There's no appropriate response. In despair at our own inability to communicate we respond abstractly - isn't the perfumed, made-up whore a type throughout all time? Goddess and whore: either way not quite human. Because we have no behavioral language for responding to such olfactory and visual abstraction. What emotion is a clown depicting? Happiness, but fake. We react instinctively to its parodic reproduction: first with discomfort (laughter), then with horror.

Not to say cultures with less deodorant react more badly - Italy's gone through how many goddamn governments in the twentieth century? - but rather that sensory overload coupled with sensory deracination, a Culture of Plenty of Nothing, causes a certain form of despair. We talk about the sweatiness of sex as part of its appeal, recognize the importance of pheromones in dating, and then the very first thing we do before a date is: 'clean up,' removing not foul odors but all olfactory information, and then providing false information in its place. This creature at ten paces is: Old Spice, 'Swagger.' This human-shaped being has the smell of: Pantene Pro-V, 'Icy Clean,' with...is that a hint of Chanel? 'How a woman should smell,' the bastards have the temerity to claim.

I've argued in the past that the model and culture of French sensuality was tied in part to the comparative widespread French use of the bidet - which provided, if not necessarily total sanitation, a reprieve from the shame (if not the fact) of our defecatory orifices being stained with shit. (The idea of being fully cleaned by toilet paper is absolutely laughable - and yet it's a point of American pride. But then much of our pride is laughable.) But let's point out the obvious: our culture is preoccupied with masking smells, not with sanitation but its grotesque appearance, its simulation. What we take for cleanliness is only absence, sparseness. And so the most tasteful home interiors contain nearly no furniture, no accidents of human array, none of the consequences of human presence, no trace of our passage. The 'ideal' American home looks as if no one lives in it; luxury is to abstract and arrange away any hint of mere humanness. The Pharaohs' tombs were pyramids of straight lines, congruent angles, geometric array - but at least the Pharaohs had the sense not to entomb themselves until after they were dead. Wealthy and upwardly-mobile Americans, unmotivatedly industrious as we've always been, get a head start on our journey to the afterlife, stocked by Williams-Sonoma no doubt.

Refinement 'purifies,' but 'purity' is impossible in nature - good thing too, as it's not desirable anyhow. Our measure of civilization, of progress, is 'refinement.' Refinement gave us calculus, penicillin, the Sistine Chapel, the Manhattan Project, YouTube, the KGB, indoor plumbing, Joe the Plumber, a billion humans in poverty. 'Refinement' made all of this possible, and helps you figure out exactly how to feel about it. Civilization is the result of a process of abstraction which is - by definition - the sidelining or abandonment of natural impulses. Our justice system is a machine for getting past 'an eye for an eye,' and that's the genius of humanity, its ultimate value - but then we're arguably the only animal with a concept of 'revenge' either, the only creature twisted enough to derive satisfaction from retribution against proxies.

And we hide our smells - our names - to hide from one another. It's only a fig leaf: it covers a shame we didn't realize we felt until we covered it - because until then, it didn't exist. The secret is the betrayal, its existence, its idea. Not what's hidden but the very notion that there's something to hide. You didn't create sin, merely instantiated it. What's betrayed is the natural capacity of all human creatures, our need for one another. The way we know other humans - the way we recognize our needs - is via that rather tricky thing, our human sensorium, the extent of which we don't yet know, whose channels and modes we can't yet count. Wouldn't know how. Another thing we've hidden from one another, from ourselves.

Embryos?

If destroying a 5-day-old embryo or a thousand such embryos will save human lives, then any belief system that seeks to prohibit scientists from carrying out such procedures on 'moral' grounds is monstrous and should be fought. There is no argument for such restraint other than the religious claim (from what is most precisely and simply described as ignorant superstition) that blastocysts are 'human beings,' and the shabby 'slippery slope' half-argument.

The Cornerites are embarrassing themselves utterly today on this issue. It's charming, in a way.

Actually no, it's not.

Knowing.

Recognizing that my sense of myself as fraudulent - this crushingly heavy realization I occasionally have that ('(un)like everyone else') I'm not capable of relating authentically to anything - is itself largely an indulgence, specifically of my fear of not knowing things and stemming largely from my I'd-like-to-think much more accurate sense that the things I'm supposed to do in this world, if such a category or narrative even exists (and I know at some level that it doesn't), I'm supposed to do with my brain: this recognition doesn't actually spare me from the weight, nor the fear, nor the desperate wish for the narrative to be real. And so thinking I can think my way around to better thinking is exactly what it sounds like, i.e. going in circles. But then saying 'I know the rabbit's not real, I know this race has no meaning' doesn't mean you're not a dog. And in fact you can stop and think about the rabbit, or the other dogs, or the whole concept of dog racing and betting money on the outcome of this ridiculous ritual, rent money, but if you don't reach the finish line in good order and good time the fate awaiting you is much, much, much worse than just feeling bad. So run. But then that simple advice is - here's the real horror - useful and true and right not if you follow but only specifically maddeningly as you do so, in motion. i.e. You take comfort in running not while running but by doing so, meaning there's this total existential gap between you (thinking about what it will feel like to be on that track that day the sun out angry middle-aged men in the stands remembering they used to come here with their fathers was it thirty years ago my God how time passes) and the comforting mindset that's gonna help you get through the running, but the only way to access that mindset, to cross this yawning philosophically/historically overdetermined abyss, right, is to actually run. And you might be thinking, 'But I have to overcome my fear in order to run,' and I'll say yes, yes you're right; then you come back with 'But I have to run in order to overcome my fear,' and I'll nod sagely eyes bright thinking By Jove he's got it etc., but then even though I'm able to write out what seems to me the (some-illogical-form-of-)logical conclusion, the formula 'Fear is not running,' that can't have any meaning for me unless I'm pounding dirt in the middle of the pack my heart going a thousand a minute and teeth bared to the wind that is my passage, but worse - maybe worst - once I'm out there I'll be unable to understand what all the fuss was about. And that is the desired state, OK, because that's the state I can at least imagine, the rabbit just there electrical and so stupid a dog can see it, but if I knew - really knew - then what I'd know is, running is silly and worrying is silly, but then if I could enter a state that contained both states, along with (sure) all others, then what would I be? Some greater thing of which this the fraud-o-phobe and that the running dog are only components, a macroorganism for which there is no and can by definition never be a word. That thing which would be content to run in circles all the live long day, or to think on it unmoving in the cage that is waiting-to-begin, or to melt, eat, bark at nothing, die; we don't have a word for that sort of contentment. Recognizing this unimaginable deficiency in my language doesn't spare me the next race, nor the present worry. Running I won't know what I did when I wasn't running; and 'knowing' is unimaginably deficient too, I suppose. I don't mean the word.

Pro-life views hurt the Republicans as much as bad foreign policy.

This, from the intelligent but really-really-imperfect Daniel Larison, is simply false:

Doesn’t it seem obvious that foreign and economic policies, in which the GOP is widely viewed as having failed, have much more to do with the woes of the party than pro-life views? These would be the policies that the administration put into action, as opposed to its pro-life rhetoric, which has more or less changed nothing.

The answer's no.

It's possible that Larison doesn't actually live in the world and interact with people, but not likely. So how does he manage to misunderstand this simple point? 'Pro-life' fundamentalism, like institutional and individual 'homophobia' (i.e. 'hatred of faggotry and distrust/hatred of those who practice it'), colours all discussions of domestic cultural policy, just as ridiculous anti-tax/'small-government' rhetoric (read: calls to cut social services for the poor, nonwhites, et al.) colours economic policy. The policies we get from Washington might not be 'conservative' in any pure sense, but they reflect the disproportionate influence of those politically active right-wingers who hold these views. The window of acceptable conversation is narrow, and that narrowness is one important measure of the influence of various political organizations.

Which leads us back to Kathleen Parker. Larison's criticism of Parker amounts to, 'It's the war that fucked the Republicans up, and our policies don't actually reflect evangelical beliefs.' Half of which is half-true (the war is a rallying point but this wasn't ultimately an election about the war, nor about George Bush, as polls overwhelmingly show), and half of which is totally irrelevant. Christianists (to borrow an increasingly-popular term) might not determine the final outcomes of social debates, but they dictate their terms to a remarkable degree. The idea that 'life' begins at conception, that a 3-day-old fetus has the same rights as a 3-day-old neonate, is absolute insane bullshit. Yet we have to take into account the feelings - purely religious beliefs, in other words - of the people who hold onto such notions, when setting domestic cultural policy. That's a direct result (and not the only one) of the disproportionate power Christianists have over domestic policy debates.

Proposition 8 was a blow to the civil rights of all Americans. At a moment when the state could be altering the legal definition of marriage to remove religious considerations, we remain shackled to a conception of marriage that no longer has procreation as its main goal, no matter what lies the pro-Prop 8 types spread around. That's a function of the influence of largely right-wing (culturally/socially conservative) religious organizations - though not of 'religious beliefs' or even 'Christian beliefs,' obviously, as those are up for very public debate and e.g. Barack Obama's 'heterodox' Christianity has the same claim as the laughable James Dobson's on the public's attention. Again: Larison wants us to believe that Christianists have no power because they always vote Republican. He's choosing to misunderstand this point (he's far from stupid). The Republican Party doesn't ever deliver the cultural counterrevolution the Christianists want - but it's doing its best to arrest any social progressivism that rears its head. Which is in part - to whatever degree - a function of Christianist (politicized Christian) loyalty to the GOP.

Which is why they won't have a place in the Republican Party forever. Political parties are compromises; soon the Christianists may well realize they needn't compromise with the likes of Cheney, Gingrich, and Rove any longer.

'Wellllll...that'll be an interesting day.'

[Doc - I'll get to your comment tomorrow, probably.]

Kathleen Parker.

Over at the Corner they're stewing about Kathleen Parker's WaPo column, which boils down to: 'Religious conservatives are destroying the Republican Party.'

Of course there are few facts in the column to back up this assertion; Parker's not a terribly interesting pundit, and her heterodoxy on Obama this go-round doesn't suddenly make her interesting any more than it makes her Adlai Stevenson. She mentions some demographic numbers but mostly complains about how Bible-thumpers are mongoloids:

the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party [...] Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. [...] [The GOP] has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners. [...] the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows. [...] [The 2008 GOP convention] felt like an annual Depends sales meeting.

All of which is run-of-the-mill condescending big-media-market bitch-slapping and not impressive at all. But her concern isn't that evangelicals are stupid jerks ruining the fun for everyone (though she clearly feels this); it's that Republicans can't run the country without their permission. In other words: the Republicans have sound ideas, a strong identity, and are being hijacked by fundamentalists - can we assume she means 'just like the Democrats and their Dean/Kos wing'?

Well, if you take away the evangelical-fueled domestic policy interests of today's Republicans, what's left?

Nationalism.

Corporatism.

Imperialism.

And a strain of libertarianism, tinged with standard 'populist' anti-intellectual resentment, that is less philosophical (i.e. principled friendly-anarchism, interest in rule by the nongovernmental collective, willingness to provide for local welfare as cost, etc.) than aesthetic (guns as symbol of masculine strength, the countryside as fantasy-staging ground, SUV's as symbols of freedom, etc.).

It's one thing to go down a list of proposed policies and haggle details, but let's stay abstract for a second: 'libertarian nationalism' is an oxymoron; 'nationalist corporatist imperialism' went by another name during the 20th century; corporatism and nationalism are increasingly at odds (nationalists' impulse toward protectionism comes to be anti-business even in a country of 300 million, 3,000 miles across - you'd think there'd be room...). 'Free' markets assembled at the barrel of a gun are a threat to everyone - and come back to haunt the pistol-packing marketeer. The national-defense types basically call for an American Empire - the least libertarian thing imaginable, and incidentally a bad deal for most of the world's businesses.

Parker isn't unjustified in pointing out the growing rift between evangelical voters and the rest of the tenuous Republican coalition (please, please read Thomas Frank on this); 'culture war' is a pretty easy sell but it's hard to maintain (e.g. as scientific advances make anti-abortion arguments, which are really anti-sex arguments, increasingly irrelevant) and requires pulling resources from other efforts (e.g. check out Big Bobby Jindal putting out a health care reform package!). The current Republican strategy seems to be to yoke the modern-day Democrats to something called 'socialism' that in no way resembles Actual Existing Socialism; but as long as the evangelicals want to legislate bedroom morality, roll back scientific understanding in schools, and keep investing ungodly amounts in defense, that argument isn't gonna fly.

Just look at McCain: a genuine Republican reformer, once upon a time. And what happened this time out? He tried to run for, and in the manner of, his 'base' - meaning god/guns/gays Christian right-wingers. A young black Senator with four years of experience in national politics beat the living hell out of him. He embodies Kathleen Parker's argument. And yet...what if he'd won? Leave aside the anti-Roe stuff, the gay-marriage stuff; what else did he have in his platform this time out? 'Small-government' boilerplate that would expand our largest budget items (de-fense! de-fense!), 'low-taxes' faux-libertarianism that would have deepened the gap between rich and poor (which may well be a goal of American libertarians, who knows)...there wasn't much of a there there, with or without the sad concessions to the Moral Majority types.

Here's how Parker ends her column:

The young will get older, of course. Most eventually will marry, and some will become their parents. But nonwhites won't get whiter. And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way.

Given those facts, the future of the GOP looks dim and dimmer if it stays the present course. Either the Republican Party needs a new base -- or the nation may need a new party.

There's no 'either/or' about it. Here's my guess: just as we have an evangelical counterculture, just as we have an increasingly fervent radical-Christian media sphere, as the Republican coalition wakes up from the nightmare of Bush and sees what it has enabled, we'll have a 'conservative' (i.e. Christian theocratic) third-party candidate in the next fifteen years, and it'll be a big problem for everyone - especially the GOP.

What is the heart of American conservatism?

Depends on whom you ask, of course. Ross Douthat's answer:

Social conservatives, a group in which I count myself, might profitably meditate on how to disentangle our primary political goal - the protection of the unborn - from secondary issues like, say, abstinence-only education and the debate over evolution and intelligent design, which dovetail too easily with caricatures of religious fundamentalism (as Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin both discovered in the media coverage of their campaigns). Meanwhile, those Republicans who wish that the GOP spend more time talking about, say, capital-gains tax rates and less time talking about abortion should recognize that in this election, the McCain ticket did exactly that, sidestepping the social issues and instead emphasizing a business-friendly tax agenda and (late in the game) Joe the Plumber's case against progressive taxation. This strategy did not exactly reap impressive returns.

Since I feel that 'the protection of the unborn' is an insane choice of a central political tenet - literally insane, a perversion of Christian morality so extreme as to render the name of 'Christian' almost meaningless - I'm put off a bit by this claim that abortion is social conservatives' main concern. But if you grant that there are people who feel this is the basic question facing American conservatives, and grant (for the sake of argument) that they're reasonable adults who like living in the real world and just happen to care a whole lot about cutting off access to reproductive health care, then you can move on to Finding #2, which is: Douthat is dead right, and the further he gets from his own social-con biases, the more right he is. The whole article is worth a look. He's not as much of a flouncing attention-starved jackass as Reihan Salam, his Grand New Party coauthor; quite the opposite, he's a wet noodle taped to a cold fish wrapped in a ball of uncooked dough. (Dick Cheney's favourite dessert treat, I've no doubt.) Douthat's one of the ones to watch, though.

[For Adrian, BTW, lemme reiterate: of course it's possible to be 'pro-life' (anti-reproductive-freedom) and be able to function in the real world. But to make outlawing abortion the central tenet of your political philosophy is madness. I don't know how I've managed to live in this particular bubble for so long, but I've always believed that anti-abortion beliefs are part of a comprehensive American-Christian morality that's (to me) fucked but at least consistent, an actual moral code. I'm finally coming to realize that it's just not that way, that this single to-me-somewhat-midsized belief actually takes over people's entire political programs. I can't understand it. I sure as hell can't sympathize with it. Those conservatives for whom this isn't true are a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Hard to believe my problem is I'm too charitable!]

Also, this sounds familiar:

Ronald Reagan attracted me to his side in 1980 with five words: "family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom." It was Barack Obama who spoke in those timeless terms in this election, and he received his just reward Tuesday evening. What's more, he spoke about them by using well-considered, new ideas—for example, universal health insurance, as well as a national commitment (and not just an anemic executive order) for faith-based and often neighborhood social-service delivery.

The bit about Romney looking and acting 'like a president' is a little startling, but no matter. Good read.

Not funny crazy but walk-away-backwards crazy.

Scott Johnson, everyone. Take it away, crazy guy:

In the course of the Democratic caucuses and primaries Obama emerged as a messianc [sic] figure come to redeem the time. He is a quasi-religious figure for non-believers, playing to the same market that made films such as "Ghost" and "The Sixth Sense" such enormous successes.

[...]

Obama's race was an asset to his candidacy at every step of the way. Americans want to prove their racial good will.

I can enjoy a dose of crazy sometimes. Today's not the day for it.

The first point there starts from a reasonable implied observation: Americans want deliverance from racism, historical and contemporary, and as the ascendancy of George W. Bush demonstrated, Americans are happy to settle for 100% symbolic politics without policy substance. Where Johnson runs aground is the stupid implied false equivalence: the election of Barack Obama really is an earth-shattering moment in the history of civil rights for black Americans, but the culmination of a historical progression is not the same as the forcing of a political issue for the purpose of expiation. Or, less messily: Obama's candidacy was always about political transformation, but most of that quality comes from outside the campaign. Indeed Obama's rhetoric has always eschewed cult-of-personality talk; he's emphasized his biography only as much as McCain showcased his own, but the differences in their biographies didn't need overemphasis. Many Americans figured things out for themselves.

Johnson's second point is half-stupid (Obama's race was hardly an 'asset' when Rev. Wright was the only national news story for several days) and half-devious (the people most invested in having our racist past washed away are...racists). Its silliness is self-evident: Barack Obama helped himself and made an asset of his background and mixed race; that has nothing to do with racial difference and hatred in general, in America. If Johnson's first point is true - Obama's ascendancy is symbolic expiation - then his second must be false, else no expiation would be necessary.

And when he says 'Americans want to prove...' he means: 'Real Americans (whites) want to show niggers they don't hate them anymore.' It's no more complicated than that, alas. You can change the wording if you want - 'niggers' is a deliberately offensive choice on my part - but the sentiment is the same.

The 'messianic' quality of Obama's candidacy is and has always been a Republican talking point first, and a sociological observation a distant second.

One forward, two back.

California Prop 8 seems to have passed. But justice will prevail in time.

Rush Limbaugh is a...

I used to be a fan of the man's radio and TV shows, when I was in middle school.

Listen to this shit:

See, conservatism is what it is. It doesn't need to be moderated. It doesn't need to be redefined. It doesn't need to be upgraded. It's based on personal liberty: individual freedom, a small state that functions for the express purpose of defending and protecting the population. The minute you say that conservatism includes people who are pro-choice, you've destroyed conservatism because conservatism stands for "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness." Without life, there is nothing else here, and if we're going to sit around indiscriminately deciding who lives and who dies based on our own convenience, that's not conservative. Individual liberty. The essence of innocence is a child in the womb who has no choice over what happens to it. [my emphasis --wa]

It's important to spell this out: Limbaugh believes that the notion of the human 'soul,' present from conception and created by a benevolent God, is central to conservatism. I forget that it's possible to believe things like this and still function among grownups (though I'm not the drug addict in this blog post either).

My kind of crazy!

Please try to comprehend: the new Focus on the Family mailer, 'Letter from 2012 in Obama's America.'

Best piece of sci-fi you'll read all week!

From here we go sublime.

When you've had an experience that no one else seems to understand - or let's say you're preoccupied with the fact that understanding complexly personal experiences is very difficult for certain people, and you generalize this to everyone - or maybe you've simply been close to what you understand as 'death' that you feel you have to shy away from the daily pleasures and affirmations of mere human coexistence -

No, start over. When you can't reconcile your experiences with your beliefs, something's got to give. You can deny your experiences, or you can alter your beliefs. Neither is easy. One is reasonable.

'Spiritual' and religious beliefs address needs that simply don't square with any of our lived reality (I need meaning). They answer questions that we can't ask except in spiritual terms, not because religions and mystical belief systems offer the best ways to understand 'supernatural' occurrences, but because sophisticated vocabularies of e.g. altered consciousness and metaphysics are inaccessible to the average human. Or else no one's bothering to explain to them, which amounts to the same thing but can at least be remedied in theory.

The language of 'chakras,' for instance, doesn't actually seem to correspond to contemporary medical knowledge (mystical energy flow? Really?). But you don't have any contemporary medical knowledge, so what language is available to you when you become aware of the physicalization and localization of cognition? Or the idea of 'storing' a memory in a body part? What happens when you're sitting quietly and are struck with a total understanding of something - or rather, an experience of totality? The dispassionate observer might say that a switch has flipped in your head granting the experience, however unfounded, of 'totality,' analogous to deja vu. (Deja vu is trivially understood on the far side of a very, very convincing false perception compounded by superstition - no this hasn't happened to you before, that very feeling is incorrect. Can't trust your own head, and who wants to hear that?)

An ad hoc practitioner of meditation - someone who makes a habit of sitting quietly and emptying her head for a while, to aid focus - could go years without finding a description of what she's doing. Now, if she walks into the MIT Press bookstore and sees a copy of Zen and the Brain, and for no reason picks it up, she'll find scientific answers to some of her questions in there, questions that themselves pertain, it turns out, to neuroanatomy and cognition and the very shape of the brain, etc. If, on the other hand, she happens to go for a walk up Mass Ave and ends up in the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center (for whatever reason), she'll find a set of spiritual practices, a set of ethical principles, a long cultural history, and a theory of the universe that is (alas) filled to the brim with reborn souls and enlightened leaders and an emphasis on simplicity, all of which feels good and coherent and complete somehow, the same way The Wire feels like Baltimore to a New Yorker. And if our heroine goes for it, if she decides to embrace Buddhist practice and faith and so forth (and please refrain from quibbling over the use of 'faith' with is descriptive but not meant to imply cosmology, though Jesus, just look at the stuff), and a year later she stumbles upon Zen and the Brain at the bookstore (or, hell, at the GBBCC), she'll instead most likely incorporate this more nuanced understanding of the neuroscience of meditation and altered consciousness into her practice and her spiritual beliefs. 'This,' she might say, 'is the physical analogue to what I know to be the Truth about our shared path,' etc., etc., etc.

Having 'grown up' within this language.

No, start over. It's the ubiquity of tortured metaphysics and fantasy that makes it so difficult to converse about simple things like altering your mode of perception. We do have a fallen version of such a discourse - the language of self-help - but it is on the one hand shot through with dime-store mysticism and the remnants of sickly New Age aesthetics, and on the other hand absolutely geared toward quick fixes and corporate head-cleaning, offering little inducement to alter behaviours in a considered, systemic way, meaning, if you can stand back and look at the whole 'Self-Help' shelf of this awful corporate-cosmic bookstore, that while there are simple ideas aplenty about how to 'fix what's wrong with you,' they offer none of the satisfaction of religious (totalizing) belief.

Like, say, the '9/11 Truth' kids. About whose particular beliefs let's not concern ourselves, same with 'UFOlogists' and so forth, but isn't it nice to hold a belief such that everything around you affirms that belief? Skepticism is hard work because being skeptical means constantly being buffeted by things crying out for investigation and consideration and (odds are) refutation. Whereas if God can do anything, or the government can cover up anything, or (e.g.) all things are somehow connected - and not just by physical coexistence and interdependence but in a kind of cosmic-literary register with all kinds of loopy ethical correlates like 'eat plants but not meat' and so forth, what? - then every possible experience has a slot to slip into, and an explanation readymade, and that's basically the most comfortable position you can possibly be in. Your preacher fucks his male meth dealer, which not only recalls but in fact confirms the doctrine that 'people sin, the elect can be saved through their repentance, if he'd only had an even closer personal relationship with The Man Jesus everything would have been alright,' which is nothing more than the metaphysical correlative to 'the problem with Nixon is that he wasn't conservative enough.'

Which isn't about 'authoritarianism,' it's about being taken care of by your own thoughts, by your head, by an imagined body of laws-makers and belief-limners, in the absence your mother and father. Kids don't need all that jarble because they have actual people there to help them through the world. Which is part of the reason why hyper-religious kids and Nazi kids and four-year-old 'virtuoso' musicians and middle-school-aged Goldwater Girls freak us out so goddamn much: why have these kids been forced to seek solace in systemic belief and practice, in constant affirmation most likely hollow, when they should have with them the constant affirmation and total comfort (in being loved) of, um, just their parents? Which maybe, just maybe, leads us to a Jazz Parenting insight, which might simply be that when the Baby arrives, you have a responsibility to loosen your hold on rigid ideas and plans and preoccupations, because they will stifle your Baby's ability to trust in love. If you show a system other than 'I am here for you and I will help you be safe and happy,' that system comes to stand in (maybe?) for love and fellowship and peaceful coexistence as an operating principle.

Which isn't the sales pitch for the Anarchist Mommy series of guidebooks, quite the opposite. Just asking en passant for a little more improv, a little less certainty. Which lets more experience in - without dictating in advance its meaning. Kids don't need that; they'll find their own way, so long as they have a chance to develop the tools for it. You can't change anyone's feelings, you can only offer them new experiences.

* * *

Not surprisingly, aesthetic/cultural criticism seems to work similarly to religious belief as I've waved at it above. Well you know this I imagine. So long as we have a theory (ahem - a Theory) that's affirmed by all 'experience' (and snarky scare quotes notwithstanding, let's swerve around the the gigantic 'literary theory isn't a real job you sissy nerds'-shaped pothole in the road, who put that there?), we can be happy all the time - only not really. Rather we can be occupied all the time, given a 'purpose' which is comforting but not fulfilling, which is why every day you hear a variation on 'he was always so quiet, I could never imagine him doing something like this.' We're absolutely fucking useless when it comes to distinguishing between forms of happiness, between satisfaction and fulfillment, between sustainable feelings and momentary impulses. Everyone has a kind of punishment he's eager to come back to. Everyone. But, criticism: an apparatus that allows you to analyze all things without fail wouldn't be a Theory at all, it would be The World. Which - asshole! - you already have, or at least have heard of. The desire for a scientific Theory of Everything is the desire to make a grander universe; its literary/cultural analogue is pure unmitigated laziness and fear. (Well laziness is fear, innit.) Guilty as charged!

PZ Myers: amateurish, juvenile, self-obsessed...bigot?

Myers - of Pharyngula - was indispensable when it came to anti-evolution textbooks and so forth. Now that he's got nothing to talk about he's...well, have a read.

Unfortunately for Myers, his Big Project - 'arguing' (roughly) that Religion Is Evil And Its Adherents Stupid - is a hell of a lot less interesting than he thinks it is; unfortunately for everyone, so is Myers himself. The big finish to his 'acquire and desecrate a (consecrated) Communion wafer': he put a rusty nail through it and dumped it in the garbage. How very angry-teenager of him. His rousing goodbye:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Since Myers doesn't seem to understand the concept of a 'provisional fiction,' since he doesn't seem interested in the psychology of fantasy (nor the transformative power of ritual [see below]), since he's high on his 15 minutes of low-grade Internet fame, there's little point in treating the stunt as anything more than it is - the acting-out of someone who's convinced he has nothing to learn about something, and loves attention. This seems to happen to professors who blog all the time: they taste a little online fame, they realize that blog comments are a lot more fun that seeing kids sleep through their college lectures, and out of enthusiasm (or more cynical fame-obsession) they get a little shrill (see also: John Quiggin, Ann Althouse).

Myers's 'history lesson' about Catholic anti-Semitism is typical of a certain contemporary intellectual set: he's obsessed with medieval Catholicism (though not learned) because it's a lot easier to snark about Dark Ages superstition than to empathetically discuss 21st-century religious ritual and culture.

Anyone who thinks that 'rituals...build only self-satisfied ignorance' is, I'm sorry to say, an imbecile: ignorant of history and basic psychology - or worse, a cynical liar happily misrepresenting his views to boost his hit count. Since the concept of 'sacred space' and the 'magic circle' informs everything from children's play to religious observance to the structure and function of narrative fiction and drama, if we take Myers's words at face value we can assume that he sees no value in human interaction or culture of any sort. Since he's asserted the opposite as well, we can conclude - again - that he's a fool or a liar. It's good to treat fools kindly; it's good to stamp liars out.

Myers is out of his depth; he's not arguing from a coherent worldview, he's going after something that bothers him. In my experience, the things that bother me most are the things I think I understand but turn out not to. My tech-school education taught me, in part, that everything can be broken down and analyzed and understood. Which is a limitation of tech school, sure, but also my own limitation: the need to believe such an obviously false notion, to cling to order - to hope. I've come to understand this limitation as the source of faith, and have come to understand my own (lapsed) faith, the Catholicism of my youth, as a way of integrating that coping mechanism productively into my social existence. I suspect Marx was right: the smallest unit of civilization is the pair, the electricity between two people, the contract, the shared interest and mutual recognition and trust. The word for this connection is 'covenant'; the means by which we remember it in one another's absence is called a 'sacrament.'

Harsh start; truth.

The GF says a 'harsh start' is a beginning to an argument that puts you immediately on the defensive: e.g. 'DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW TO MAKE A SHOPPING LIST?!' She also says:

'There's a claim that women are responsible for most 'harsh starts,' but I believe that's because men are inferior. They need so much direction.'

And that's why I love her.

Hat tip to Ai-ris for bringing this truth into our lives.

Well-put and true.

[Update: Thanks to the Canadian for remedial linking classes!]

Pastor Dan (to whom I linked a couple months ago?) blasts Rev. Pfleger, Jeremiah Wright, and the leadership of Trinity Church:

But at the same time, there is a pastoral issue here. You never, ever, ever call out a specific member of your congregation from the pulpit. Ever. When you stand to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, that is what you do. You give them good news and the hope of redemption. If you have to condemn them, you do it in private with some of the elders. Because worship is a time to give thanks and praise to God for God's good works, not to reprove specific individuals, not to pronounce judgment on them.

As an extension of that principle, you do not embarrass members of the congregation. Never. Intentionally or otherwise. The last thing you want to do is provide a stumbling block to somebody else's faith. Your role, as pastor and preacher, is to protect, defend, and build up the flock you have been given, not to drive them off by accident or on purpose.

And the last - the very absolutely goddammit I really mean it last thing you want to do is embarrass somebody's else parishioner. Even if it's somebody you've known for twenty or thirty years. Even if he's a candidate for the highest office in the land. Even if it is his home community, and they need defending. It's not your community, and you've got no business messing in it. You stay the freak out of the way, you do not provide a distraction, you let people get on with their business without causing more trouble - and more personal embarrassment - to that parishioner. You do not drive the gospel in like a damn shank and then wonder why they walk off with a bemused expression. Even if everything Pfleger and Wright said was 100% on the money - and it wasn't - there is still the issue of the personal effect it had on a member of the congregation.

You. Do. Not. Embarrass. People. It is not pastoral.

Eloquent despair. As they say: Read the whole thing.

Religious thought is...

...a framework by which we rationalize the belief, or hope, that when we are in trouble someone will help us. Because friends betray or fail at every turn, it's important that we have some force that can not fail - an unfalsifiable claim on our trust. Unsurprisingly this is a pretty lucrative business for the less scrupulous among us, and for crazy people. They found churches.

This of all things, he of all fellows, now of all times.

[Wrote this yesterday, wondered whether it was sensible. I still can't tell; to hell with it.]

Well, the Obama-Wright nonstory got new legs today. (Check The Corner for a full day's poison, if you can stomach it.) I'm saddened by the state of things; as I wrote yesterday, Wright's interview with Bill Moyers inspired me, showing both the pragmatism of the man's teaching and his ability to link high-flying spirituality with a sense of shared cultural history (and trajectory). While people are overreacting to much of what he said today - his 'chickens coming home to roost' answer is an easily-misunderstood redaction of his marvelous September 2001 sermon and trivially correct about American attitudes toward violence, while his insistence that attacks on him are really 'attack[s] on the black church' is both grandstanding and an obvious, uncomfortable truth (the punditocracy's fear of Wright is grounded not in 'race' but in race-hatred; criticism of his teaching is another thing) - OK never mind the structural ugliness of this sentence, OK? - anyhow while his speech is nowhere near as disagreeable or ugly as Well-Meaning Types are saying it is, I imagine it's not the sort of speech the Obama campaign was hoping to hear from Rev. Wright.

I'd like to see myself as uncynical here, but it's harder today than yesterday. Wright just gave the idiot mainstream news media a week's worth of bullshit to yap about; Obama's magnificent Philadelphia speech on race relations and social justice, which for a moment looked like it might alter the discussion about race in this presidential campaign, is now (no doubt) to be put aside - as our talking-heads subculture was obviously excited to do - in favour of more 'Denounce or be damned!' nonsense.

In my fantasy, Barack Obama says 'I'm not going to waste anymore time explaining or rebutting or responding to Jeremiah Wright. He's my former pastor, he's helped me, and this campaign isn't about him. If you want to know what he thinks, watch his sermons; if you want to know what I think, read my speeches and my books. And let's move on.'

But we can both dream of a better world and live in this one, sure.

Unmoderated; immoderate.

God yes, an unmoderated Obama/Clinton debate would have been great - three months ago, when the outcome of the Democratic primary election was still up in the air. And I say this both schoolyard-style - 'I bet my guy can whip your guy's ass' - and effete-intellectual-élite-style, hating the TV newsmen's fatuity and cynicism. The last debate was bad for the country; a Lincoln-Douglas redux would probably be the other thing. (It would play to both candidates' strengths - I might be alone in thinking that while Obama's written speeches are fantastic, he's an even more exciting speaker when responding off-the-cuff to a rhetorical impulse or the energy of the crowd. Meanwhile Clinton is America's Most Cynical Soulless Wonk, But Still A Wonk, and if her speeches and posturing make me want to get out the rusty knives, she'd be a good foil for Obama's anti-cynicism campaign.)

But yeah: why bother at this point? What do the candidates have to say to one another now? If you've heard each critique the other and haven't made up your mind, I can't imagine what you could be waiting for (other than some political/social advantage yet to be determined, or feared retribution, ahem superdelegates). I can't see this as a principled move by the Clinton camp, and that makes me resistant to its genuine appeal. Would it be good for the country in general? Maybe. But the potential downside is that a strong showing could legitimate Hillary Clinton's moribund campaign, which to my mind would be bad for the country on a scale we don't want to think about. (The Obama campaign's bête noire here isn't Clinton or the Republicans, it's machine politics in general, and from their perspective the leading term in the 'how good will the next president be' question isn't party affiliation but fealty to big money, identity-politicking interest groups, cynical religious/social movements, and the alternate-universe foreign policy establishment. OK I admit I just wanted an excuse to use the phrase 'bête noir' for the very first time in my life!)

* * *

Meanwhile, if you want to lift your spirits a little after the tawdriness of the ongoing Dem primary (which notwithstanding John McCain's genuine, if occasional, ideological unpredictability, will sort out along the same lines as the general election and our authoritarian fantasies in general - Establishment vs. Insurgency), check out these invigorating excerpts from last week's Bill Moyers/Jeremiah Wright interview:

[Dr. Martin Marty, Wright's mentor at U.Chicago] put a challenge to us in 1970, late '69, early '70, I'll never forget. He said, "You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you've stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And what do I mean by that?" He said pick up the church bulletin. You leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that's the world you leave. And you come in; you pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second Sunday. The children's choir will be doing. He said, "How come our bulletins, how come the faith preached in our churches does not relate to the world in which our church members leave at the benediction?" Well, it hit me. And it hit me several different ways. Number one, I know there's a church publication, the bulletin, the weekly bulletin. But what about the ministry? And what about the prophetic voice of the church that's not heard? We're talking about things that our members are wrestling with a whole bunch of other things. And the sermons and the ministries of the church don't touch those things.

Wright's politics and mine diverge rather strongly in many places, but he amazes me by speaking so directly to my own church experience, which left me disillusioned not because of the probable nonexistence of a Supreme Being (so what?), but because of its unappealing fantasy of escape, the dullness and irresponsibility of Moping Together For A Weekly Hour instead of carrying on the Church's millennia of community outreach and caretaking. The above-quoted paragraph isn't just an explanation of Wright's activist theology, it's a call for every group built on a shared fantasy (whether TV fans or Democrats or churchgoers or Red Sox fucking Nation or...ugh...bloggers) to go beyond themselves and their satisfactions and their aesthetics. The shape of his thought appeals to me and strengthens my faith in him. Which, we might point out, is what the average churchgoer is clinging to when he or she forgets what is the hard work of faith in God. Maybe that makes me your brother or something.

Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch!!

Go yeah go!

[Update: His next project is a show about NYC cops in the early Seventies, during the Black Liberation Army's cop assassinations, developed with NYPD Blue producer Bill Clark. The videos at the bottom of the page duplicate the content of the podcasts above, but the second link is an extraordinary discussion of religion and art, building to Milch's goals in creating John From Cincinnati and the presentation of the episode six sermon (the show's greatest moment; maybe Milch's greatest moment). Sidenote: he used to work as a script doctor on features?!]

Galactica's finale, Razor, and trauma-as-destiny.

[Note: The Galactica-specific material goes up to the asterisks, then things get general, and more interesting. It turns out not really to be about the show. Spoilers abound but so what.]

4x01 was excellent all-around, no question; the first act was as strong as any 10 minutes of the Season Three finale, and if things got a little mellow immediately thereafter, one can't really argue - there's an FX budget to worry about, and no doubt plenty of space-race stuff to shoot later. Todd has the goods over at House Next Door; his review nails it.

Katee Sackhoff was much better in Razor, though. Which is confusing because Razor was in general a little bit of a letdown. The lead, Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, had apparently never seen the show before(!), and she did good-enough work within a very limited emotional range. (The only time she really let an inner self sing through was when she got the XO job on Pegasus - a lovely moment, even if you never had any doubt what was coming.) I enjoyed her performance but honestly couldn't identify a single exceptional thing about it, except perhaps her charming accent. Michelle Forbes as Admiral Cain was excellent, expressive but restrained, never moreso than when her lover's identity was discovered - and by the way, can we agree that Tricia Helfer, former runway model with no prior acting experience, has done a phenomenal job as Number Six? In that red dress she's basically the ironic-sexpot-robot-fantasy she's always been, but in her other incarnations she's shown almost as much range as the heavyweights that lead the show's ensemble.

What was Razor's problem, exactly? I confess I don't know. The big payoff - the prophecy - wasn't world-shaking, and Chaves-Jacobsen's big sacrifice at the end readily fell back onto action-movie cliché (yes, the self-sacrificing butch female soldier does have a partner named Hudson). And the dialogue erred on the cheesily declamatory side more than once - skeptical as it is about military rule, Galactica is a show given to warrior-pride breast-beating at times, and Razor was absolutely drowning in testosterone; the fact that it was mainly women running the show doesn't make it any more palatable. The plot was fine, such as it was - the finale on the bridge of Pegasus gave a fine bit of insight into Lee and his dad - but in the end it all fit neatly into a few TV-drama slots:

* All behaviour stems, fucking invariably, from some Big Childhood Trauma, usually a single incident;

* When they realize they have something in common with other people, sociopaths tend helpfully to die, obviating any onscreen rehabilitation;

* Prophets are always both thuddingly literal and maddeningly, pointlessly vague;

* Presidents and other leaders are given to standing around spouting exposition and carrying on moral debates in the middle of intergalactic crises, and are never (for example) safely ensconced in protected quarters;

* No one ever tells anyone anything until the last possible second. This is one of the irritating staples of pulp drama - Admiral Adama, in Razor, reveals that he (of all people) once set foot in the building where arguably the single most important scientific experiment in the universe was being carried out, and didn't tell anyone for several decades, until it became necessary to let it slip as justification carrying out an insane revenge mission on the fringes of space. Lost is premised on the incorrect (debatable in any case) claim that people are simply not capable of talking to one another, even in moments of extreme crisis; Galactica's cohort are literally the last 40,000 members of the human race, yet nothing about their interactions has changed - no break in the pettiness and recriminations and withholding of invaluable goddamn historical information that characterized prewar times. It only sounds like social commentary. This is indeed a basic dramatic premise, and writers justify it to themselves with slogans like 'Otherwise we wouldn't have a story' and 'It's a dramatization of how bad people really are,' as if mere fidelity to the complexity and adaptability of human interaction would be too difficult or dramatically unsatisfying to put on television during prime-time. Ron Moore's a great, great TV storyteller but that's bush-league shit.

Wow, a lot of italics in that paragraph.

I loathe the tendency to reduce dramatic characters to a single trauma; one great moments on The Sopranos was the revelation that Tony's meat-induced anxiety attacks stemmed from a particular awful childhood memory, that this was only a symptom of his deeper problems, and that his psychotherapy arc had a long way to go. The usual practice is wish-fulfillment at its most debased: the notion that we can chase our bad dreams and bad choices back to a single visit from the bogeyman is the therapeutic analogue to 'God made everything' and 'Empty yourself of desire and you'll become enlightened.' If only we could spit out the Single Big Thing that's bothering us, we'd immediately have our ancient responsibilities lifted. In the meanwhile we are exempt from our current responsibilities.

'I just can't deal.' What a tawdry phrase - the selfish unwillingness even to attempt to name what afflicts you. You'd like to know but won't ask. So what do you think you deserve?

There's an analogy to be drawn between the Western emphasis on diagnostic and remedial medicine, rather than preventative medicine, and the Western dramatic obsession with expunging the revealed sin (original sin, ultimately) - an emphasis, maybe misplaced, on the state of things rather than the process by which we come to it. As if the process could never have been changed. The flaw here isn't the belief that any one thing determines our destiny, it's the childish insistence that there's such a thing as destiny at all. Yeah: childish. Who else claims powerlessness as a prerogative? And for whom else do we as adults claim that right, too? Guiltily 'protecting' the young from seeing into the future. A belief in destiny is a belief in the value of innocence, and if you'll pardon the expression, fuck that. There's no state of grace to return to, I'm betting, and your stories don't change that.

Paschal wager.

I'd like to wish you a happy Easter; it was always my favourite day in the liturgical calendar when I was a churchgoin' lad, and I hope that the loveliness of Easter celebration and the extraordinary images of the Easter story inspire and breed fellowship among Christians of all stripes today - and that their ways of being in the world make that world better for everyone. On this day the material trappings of Christianity are at their richest - the most complicated services, the most lavish decorations, even the promise of spring heralding change - but it's also the central holiday in the tradition in mythological terms. If you don't get this one you don't get it: the Resurrection is the central mystery of the Christian faith. Not the Passion, the death of Jesus, with its emphasis on worldly suffering, politics, broken friendships; that's the long setup, the cultural context. Easter is about the greatest (and we will not today say 'emptiest') hope:

Fail and fall if need be, you'll get another chance.

This hope is embodied in the story of Jesus's resurrection from the dead, but it's central to the entire sweep of Christian myth-history narrative, with its emphasis on the redemption and return: the Prodigal Son's journey and restoration, unexpected assistance in the form of the Good Samaritan, Lazarus plucked out of the grave, the one sinner saved on Golgotha, Jesus's hand of welcome to doubting Thomas, and - reminding us that Jesus was a Jewish mystic long before he was a Christian origin story - in the reinterpreted tales of the Israelites in exile and bondage, Daniel among the lions, manna in the desert, etc.

Second chances. We leave something of ourselves behind. For who comes next.

Authentic sorrow and recommitment demand forgiveness, which demands growth; all of which are predicated on a sense of common purpose and trust. 'Brothers and sisters in Christ' is how I've heard it, but you can take out the last two words and still have something extraordinary to start from.

More life! Which is maybe the most literal meaning of Easter, and that's not so bad, Reader(s), wouldn't you say? And so a happy day and more to you.

What one will accept, and what one will say.

[Wrote this yesterday.]

In response to the Good Doc's post - and feeling both peaceful and energized after a rough bike ride into cold headwind out by the Charles - I'd like to take up (briefly, since there's much to do today) a political question in the guise of a moral question. Or sorry, the other way around I suppose.

Well one of those questions is only: What will I excuse?

When the Wright clips surfaced, Obama said in an interview: 'If I had heard Rev. Wright making these statements when I was in the pews, I would have talked to him afterwards and said, "I am very troubled by these statements."' The statements in question (which are not what you think - watch the astonishing post-9/11 sermon in question) are, as others have pointed out, an adaptation of both black-militant rhetoric (the 'chickens coming home to roost' trope is borrowed from Malcolm X) and a Left-inflected Christian pacifist rhetoric not far removed from the admirable restraint of conservative leaders who preached caution and historical reflection in the wake of 9/11. They are, additionally, a paraphrase of others' words; Wright was not making the argument ascribed to him, only limning it for his parishioners, to contextualize the spiritual argument at hand.

So the question in question: did Obama lie about having heard Wright's post-9/11 sermon? I don't know whether he was in the church on that day, but let's say he was, and let's say he did lie, for whatever complex of reasons. And bonus horror: let's say he did so on national television.

Does this bother me? Well it's Good Friday and I confess to you: it does not.

I don't suppose the reasons are complex though I know many people would not stomach them easily. On the one hand, I know that Wright's use of the phrase 'chickens coming home to roost' is tough for whites to hear (for one reason) and also tough for conservatives and nationalists (for another). But I hear in his message a simple claim: we look the other way when horrific violence is carried out in our name, or in the name of our country, or in the name of our cherished myths of self and community.

That bothers me. I should not excuse it; I shouldn't excuse myself for that sin (if anything is a 'sin').

I hear also a call for self-reflection, which is to say, for quiet and questioning, which - though it might not have stopped the awesome violence of American invasion (nor, perhaps, Al Qaeda's mass murders in New York and Washington) - might nonetheless have limited the scope of that violence. Perhaps with a few moments of reflection we might have noticed the dangerous lust for violence and power of those in command of our government, or their staggering lack of preparation for their long-dreamt-of sojourn to the Middle East.

That message bothers me; its messenger does not (in that respect).

Jeremiah Wright apparently believes that the U.S. government created HIV as an anti-black plague; I think that belief is not only incorrect but quite possibly insane. Should I excuse it?

Obama's speech this week answered that question: we can disown the message, or part of the message, without disowning the culture in which and from which the message arose. Indeed we can't do the latter: it means letting go of a part of ourselves, our life stories, instead of coming fully to grips with its ramifications in our lives.

But we've posited that Obama lied about it. And we don't want to spend all day asking why.

So can we excuse his lie?

Yes, we can.

Here's why:

Because a lie is not the end. By lying regularly, or cynically, or simply because we can, or simply out of disdain or self-aggrandizement, to enter into an agreement under false pretenses...these acts build up in others' eyes an indictment of the liar, who in the long run always serves as his own prosecutor (and often executioner). But that's not the end of a relationship, nor of a responsibility. Nor of an opportunity.

A dear friend of mine died last summer. In the wake of his death I wondered whether I should forgive him his many transgressions, his grotesque behaviour, the manipulations, the irresponsibility and hurt that seemed to surround him, given the extraordinary joy and overflow of life he brought into my world and those of my loved ones. I realized that it didn't matter whether I did so: he's beyond my forgiveness, he's nothing now. My task, in the wake of his death, was and is only to come to terms with the difficult lessons of his life - good and bad - and cherish them. That seems to me an appropriately unsentimental approach to life, or part of life anyhow, and one compatible with both the secular morality I'm hopefully forming and the Christian morality that shaped me as a young person.

There's the matter of scale, you see. Obama's speech on race was not primarily about Jeremiah Wright and his particular opinions, it was (it is) about how we relate to our national and familial legacies, the responsibilities they create, the opportunities they afford us, the grievances they impart to us, the awesome injustices and complex webs of social relations they encode and obscure. The challenge of Obama's speech - to go beyond racial grievances when they serve not justice or appropriate redress but the existing political/social structure in all its horrific unfairness and violence - makes Wright's comments that much smaller. He puts his words in context, and insists that in this case the context is the important thing, not least because Obama's candidacy is not just about one man's choices, but about a nation's choices.

The young man puts the old man in his place.

(And maybe, you say, that's part of the appeal of the speech to a young man like me. Well I can't argue with Psych 101, never did take it myself.)

When John McCain traveled last year to Iraq and took his infamous walk through the 'safe' marketplace, that was no doubt a show of personal ex-military bravado, at least in part. But it was also an important political maneuver. His personal motivations were complicated and I understand them, in part.

But it turns out that the marketplace is not safe, was not safe even at that time - that it was sanitized and emptied out by his armed forces minders, for cynical political reasons: to stage a photo op in order to show an American media audience that the war in Iraq is going well, in order to secure political cover for the president and for his political party going into the 2008 election season.

I can not excuse that. Do you see the difference? Am I even fully aware of the difference, for that matter? But I can't: some lies are more dangerous than others.

Must we talk again about the WMD's in Iraq? Or Iraq's supposed connection to 9/11? Or the need to defend oil resources to maintain a suburban, crosscountry-shipping way of life? No, we needn't do so right now. Let us only say again: some lies are bigger than others, and we've heard some whoppers of late: that's the American way.

But Obama is really a militant, you (someone) might say.

No, he's clearly not. There's nothing in his personal writing, in his political platform, to suggest this; there's nothing in his relationship with the Democrats (he's more conservative than average on some scores) and the Republicans (he's more bipartisan in his approach than most) to suggest that he harbours the same America-will-get-what-it-deserves mythology as the people with which he's been connected by the (cynical) political news media.

So no, I don't believe that this is a dangerous lie (if it is indeed a lie, as we've posited). I don't believe he's a Trojan Horse sent by some cabal of black separatists to fragment the country. Do I believe he'll pull the U.S. military out of Iraq in a week, leading to total civilizational collapse? No I don't. I think the danger of that is nil. But the possibilities - of having a smart young president committed to moving beyond narcissistic identity politics, who can speak to Republicans and Democrats, to secularist Lefties and Bible-thumping Righties - should be enough to give anyone hope who isn't committed to a hard-Right or hard-Left program irrespective of its feasability or fairness.

In other words: I am happy to excuse that he may have lied about being in the church on that day or some other day; I am happy, indeed, to excuse the possibility that Obama joined the church in the first place out of some complex feeling of political and racial solidarity alongside his belief in the importance of its mission of faith. These things do not undercut my belief in his sincerity and seriousness; I can well imagine him wrestling authentically with such questions in a way our current leaders do not, and his opponents do not.

I don't just feel that he's the best candidate; I think he is. I calculate that he is. We roll the same dice.

* * *

[Wrote this today.]

I think I'll leave it there for the moment; I was going to talk more about lies in general and my willingness to countenance deceit for my own personal purposes, but I think (after this thinking) that it would distract from the political issue at hand, which isn't timeless - i.e. come November I can talk about my own bullshit all I like, but right this instant there's a race to win. And maybe that raises some moral questions too but as a young person of limited means and less limited arrogance I'm sure I'll have 80 years or so to fix myself. Fixing you comes first. Learned that somewhere.

Stay strong and well, and Happy Easter (a day early).

Belting out 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in Freddie Mercury's gym.

Before an audience of churchgoing black Texans, Obama gets a question about LGBT rights.

Elect this motherfucker now.

'Liberal guilt'? Why not 'conservative guilt'? (Or: 'Liberalism offers a set of conservative best practices.')

The other day I was listening to Paul Simon's Songs from the Capeman (did you know Derek Walcott co-wrote the lyrics?) and something struck me. The first song on the album, 'Adios Hermanos,' contains these lyrics, in the voice of convicted 16-year-old killer Sal Agron:

I entered the courtroom,
State of New York, county of New York
Just some spic they scrubbed off the sidewalk
Guilty by my dress
Guilty in the press
Let the Capeman burn for the murders

Well the Spanish boys had their day in court
And now it's time for some fucking law and order
The electric chair for the greasy pair!
Said the judge to the court reporter

The AllMusic review of the album calls Songs from the Capeman 'a cerebral exercise, not only in writing but also in white liberal guilt, and [...] an exhausting one at that'; the NYTimes talked about the album/play's 'bleeding heart'; and so forth. Critics responded badly to this 'liberal guilt' aspect of the show, sounding the usual refrain that Simon's 'liberal pieties' got/get in the way of his undeniable songwriting skill. And of course you hear this phrase all the time: everyone knows 'liberal guilt' is the reason self-proclaimed liberals give parking spaces to cripples, let negroes out of prison, offer broads unearned raises in salary, punish nice boys for killing faggots, and object to torturing ragheads.

Now, the phrase 'conservative guilt' makes little sense for the definition of 'guilt' in use here (basically 'regret at having done something wrong'). But of course 'guilt' is what you're imbued with by virtue of having done something wrong: being guilty and feeling guilty are different things. The common slander is that liberals feel guilty - specifically, they feel unnecessary guilt. Give Willie Horton a job making license plates so as to continue having a life of some sort, that's cold economic/cultural necessity; give him a weekend of free air, that's pure pity. Must be; liberals don't think rationally about such things. (Never mind that the stated intention of the Massachusetts prisoner furlough program that set child-murderer Horton free to twice rape a Maryland woman was 'rehabilitation,' whether or not it was a terrible idea.)

Paul Simon's apparent sin, in humanizing the Capeman Salvador Agron, is extending to him sympathy to which he's no longer entitled, even in the context of an aesthetic experience like a Broadway musical.

One creepy aspect of the contemporary American conservative media establishment - which is largely inseparable from the conservative political establishment, if such things could ever have been teased apart anyway - is its twofold insistence that on the one hand, inequality and oppression are natural outcomes of human nature, not to be regretted or corrected, while on the other hand, its largely tacit acknowledgment that there's cause to feel bad/guilty about unfairness and systemic injustice, but great leaders know better. The reason for this last justification is simple: great leaders (starting with the Great Leader in the sky) have access to wisdom about the true worth of people, and the most moral way to move the human race forward is to write off the Human Failures of all kinds - criminals, C-/D+ students, the underpaid, the homeless, the diseased - up to the point where they personally affect us. The leader of the tribe gets to decide what's good for the tribe; in America, that's the president, in the county that may well be your cousin or neighbor, while in the home, that's Dad (occasionally Mom). So it makes sense to oppose legal abortion (the first example of 'conservative guilt' I could think of) nationally while paying for your daughter (or your friend's) to have an abortion.

'Liberal guilt,' in those terms, is an unnatural inversion of the precedence rules baked into the Way of Things. If you would make the same exceptions and provisions on a large scale that your more conservative brethren would only ever do locally or in their own homes, you are feeling something they don't, and that's fucked up.

Let's call this fucked up feeling...kinship with the (distant) other.

But is there a more admirable conservative trait than that?

* * *

[Some hands get waved hereafter.]

One way of defining conservatism is 'guarding your own.' In obvious terms, 'your own' is your family - and taking care of your family maybe means 'I keep what I earn so as to spend it on my loved ones,' 'I bear what arms I deem necessary to guard our well-being,' 'we pray how we like (or don't) and no one can take that away from us,' 'don't touch my stuff without asking,' and so forth. On a broader (but eminently reasonable) scale, that means providing for your neighbours, looking out for them and for your shared interests, seeking to maintain quality-of-life in your town, policing the streets, interacting fairly in a business/trade/coproduction sphere, enforcing property rights of one or another kind (this is key), and so forth. If the goal of conservative living is to preserve a way of life, then conservatism-with-teeth is an effective enough lifestyle, modulo the corrupting influence of the Internet and so forth. OK.

But one of the precepts of what I take to be smart, sensible liberalism is expanding your definition of 'your own.' Nowadays it's 'conservative' to wish that inequality didn't exist but do nothing about it at any level beyond the purely local, the ad hoc, and to decry attempts to systematize understanding of inequality/injustice (in their various forms). But I'm saying that an expanded sense of shared experience makes the parochialism and tribalism of reactionary conservatism richer, more effective: liberal 'pieties' are actually best practices for conservative living. i.e. If you have neighbours you don't know and therefore don't trust, the answer isn't to enlist their neighbours to watch them, it's to introduce yourself and get to know them. If they're the same colour as you and their last name sounds a bit like yours, this is nothing more than politeness; if they're darker or lighter, and their last name sounds like something out of Conrad, this is 'motivated by guilt' or somesuch. Yet even for an insufferably 'well-meaning liberal' type, this is a pragmatic maneuver, same as introducing yourself to Mr Smith and his smiling pink kids: strengthening your community. Implementing a more effective version of the same 'guarding your own' principle. This isn't to say liberalism is conservatism; it's to say they share aims, and can be compared as means.

Similarly, the way to be 'tougher on crime' is obviously not to be indiscriminate in who gets called a criminal, nor to be more brutal toward individual criminals; in most cases, I should think the answer is clearly to provide more and better alternatives to crime - to expand our thinking about how we might live lawfully. There are wicked people, yes, and they'll be even more obvious, easier to find and corral if necessary, once you've made altruism and communalism more profitable (in one or another sense), because the truly wicked will be making even more considered choices to behave the way they do. Meanwhile, those who commit crimes because they have no alternative...will have alternatives. For instance, inexpensive digital content delivery really is a viable alternative to illegal downloading. It works. Background checks don't restrict access to guns, only put a lower limit on strength of rationale for purchase. 'Tough on crime' means making it tough both to commit crimes and to justify doing so; it doesn't mean affecting a general air of 'toughness' and hoping the numbers work out. (Man, if you don't watch The Wire you're missing the most haunting journalistic work ever shown on television. Just for God's sake rent the thing. Season Four just came out on DVD; it's the best yet.)

Or look. It's well known that exposure to different lifestyles increases one's capacity for empathy. Tourism doesn't, except by accident: all you see as a tourist is a given community's tourist-facing businesses and 'attractions,' the fake version of itself it's put up for sale. But the only place 'city slickers' ever existed was in the minds of their rural counterparts; within the social system of a small town the slack-jawed yokel of urban myth is replaced by the usual, somewhat boring, complex lives of individuals; spend a week somewhere other than your hometown and you'll come home to a new place that's more complex, not less. Same goes for sexual desire: my childhood bigotry toward homosexuals lasted until I met my first happy, healthy, out gay fella(s) (in college) - and it's not liberal guilt that compels me to point out that the gay fella whose friendship I put aside in high school was unhappy and unhealthy in part because people like me didn't know how to be friends with people like him. But this awareness of the possibility of plain-ol'-love between two people with penises (or the other thing) hasn't undermined my ability to love women; it's enriched it, undercut some of the ludicrous myths about destiny and The Perfect Woman (And Her Perfect Man) that I held on to before I knew how relationships actually work. I'm not particularly old-fashioned about marriage and so forth, but the liberalization of my beliefs about relationships has strengthened my belief in the power of certain institutions and rituals and social orders, as well as expanding the definitions of those things. That's not a contradiction, it's a growth of imagination.

And let's say right here: the work of great art is to expand our imaginations by providing us with new ways of knowing and believing. If an artwork only flatters and reaffirms what we know and/or what its creators know, it's not great art, full stop. Hence, propaganda can not be great art, and great art can not also be propaganda. Creative freedom means resisting reductiveness in favour of clarification. Oh man they are so not the same thing.

OK so I wasn't out to toot my own horn a couple of paragraphs up; I'm a shithead and I hate everyone. But hopefully you see the value of personal example here. OK: moving on.

* * *

I hate feeling guilty, particularly about things I didn't do and can't control. I don't feel I've inherited the guilt of my slave-owning ancestors (expelled from Cuba to Puerto Rico in the mid-1800's, I'm told, by a slave revolt), because I don't believe in the inheritance of sin. But I've inherited circumstances, as have the descendants of their slaves, and those touched by the wickedness of the slave trade (i.e. everybody). We can look at circumstances and say they are or aren't fair, but that's slippery territory. Easier, more elementary, so ask whether they're good. And for whom. Now, the desire to rectify unjust situations may just stem from sympathy, which to my eyes is mainly selfish (I wish for bad things to be out of my world) and is an aesthetic failing to boot, or empathy, which is radically unselfish (I'll use up my wish for that guy). Great art and fair living grant you complex views of the world, which make empathy possible - and make mere sympathy crass.

Guilt is a lot more about sympathy than empathy (let's give Camille Paglia the benefit of the doubt and say, in passing, that shame (vs. guilt) is more authentically communitarian and therefore closer in spirit to empathy). Why the hatred of 'liberal guilt'? Because those who call out such a supposedly crass emotion don't want to be reminded of their own complicity. Yes there's a pathetic martyrdom-complex-by-proxy that's at work in NIMBYist fuck-the-pigs-hug-the-marginalized reactionary politics. But nothing makes people feel inadequate and immoral like seeing someone else play the martyr - or worse, actually be the martyr. Particularly if you're not part of the Chosen Few. And the real crime being pointed up by conservative critics of 'liberal guilt' is precisely that: suffering on their behalf. Because when you pledge to support affirmative action hiring laws or extend nondiscrimination protection or make a better, more efficient and humane welfare program, whose policies are you pushing back against? Generally not your 'well-meaning' liberal leaders', no. Liberal guilt implicitly points a finger: you got us into this mess. Which might not always be fair, this finger-pointing, but then unfairness is part of life, an unavoidable consequence of the Way Things Go, and who are we to blow against the wind?

* * *

Salvador Agron did stab two kids to death in Hell's Kitchen. The guilt for that action lay always with him, and his rehabilitation and rebirth in prison are testament to both the possibility for individual redemption and the value of second chances - even in our way-beyond-fucked-up judiciary and penal systems. He died at the age of 43, having lived twenty of those years behind bars. He was guilty of a wrong thing. The rest is up for grabs, and if you don't mind, I'd like to insist on the human right to feel bad not just for him, not just for the men he killed, but for the way-beyond-fucked-up world, thank you very much. I'd like to insist that we can grow from there. You may call me an optimist. Guilty as charged.

Monsters.

Vile fucking monsters.

Dear James Dobson.

Hey Jim!

I read your op-ed. You are so awesome. One quick thing though: I think you misspoke in your first paragraph, and again in your second, third, fourth, sixth, and seventh paragraphs. You repeatedly used phrases like 'traditional family values' and 'traditional moral values and beliefs.' Probably your prose got turned around at the editing stage - I hate that too! - but I'm sure your first draft used less awkward phrasing, as you and I both know that 'traditional' isn't the same as 'conservative,' and 'moral values' has long implied things like 'separation of church and state,' tolerance toward 'alternate' lifestyles, and a belief in the advancement of moral principles in tandem with advances in the sciences and arts. It's funny that your column makes this mistake in all but one of its paragraphs. Indeed the only one your dunderheaded editor didn't completely screw up is the fifth, the one about political calculation and how important a hold on the Presidency is to the moral lives of 'conservative Christians' - implying, weirdly, that 'conservative Christian' identity is essentially political rather than in any meaningful way religious.

Last thing, sorry: I know 'pro-family' means one thing to 'the organization [you] represent or the other leaders [who] gathered in Salt Lake City' - I know you mean Focus on the Family and the whole 'personal opinion' thing is a smokescreen that hasn't made sense in decades, don't be bashful Jim! - but in the rest of the world, 'pro-family' has nothing whatsoever to do with preventing life-saving medical procedures or keeping faggots sodomites from getting married. Next time out it might be sensible to alter that phrasing, so as to reach out to a wider audience. I know that reaching out is your specialty after all!

Love,
Wa.

ps. If you vote for a third-party candidate then the president of the U.S. will probably be a spook or a dyke junior Senate Democrat. You and I might be grownups about it but is the rest of the country ready to see people like that in power?

Dear conservative hardline Hindus: Fuck you.

This would be laughable if it weren't, y'know, awful:

Immigration officials at Mumbai airport briefly detained [Bollywood actress Shilpa] Shetty, saying she was still wanted for obscenity charges filed in the wake of the public kiss with [Richard Gere], her publicist, Dale Bhagwagar, said Thursday.

[...]

"I can understand something like this if I'd committed a criminal offense. But what was my offense, when I'm just an actor, going to perform a musical on foreign land," Bhagwagar quoted Shetty saying.

Gere embraced and kissed Shetty on her cheek at a public AIDS awareness event in New Delhi in April, sparking an outcry among conservative hardline Hindus, who claimed the pair had violated the country's strict anti-obscenity laws.

A regional court issued arrest warrants against Gere and barred Shetty from leaving the country. The order was soon overturned by the Supreme Court.

But the Supreme Court ruling didn't show up in the immigration department computer system, Bhagwagar said.

Biggest democracy in the world. Marvelous. (Yes, yes, I know: this is a drummed-up controversy to aid the political fortunes of theocratic bigots. But consider that India actually has an obscenity law that can be interpreted to preclude kisses on the goddamn cheek.)

Ross Douthat grasps at straws; world unsurprised.

Here's Douthat reviewing Hitchens's God is Not Great:

There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion.

Claptrap? I'm guessing our poor boy was a humanities major up at Harvard.

Never mind the hypocrisy on display (Douthat likes the transcendentalist syrup as much as any addict, just doesn't like his crew being dissed), what's galling is that Hitchens is merely correct: even a bare fraction of existing knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even computer science, is enough to occupy philosophical and artistic speculation for a lifetime or ten. If religion's main value is the monomaniacal brand of comfort it provides, the 'inspiration and consolation' of sustained reflection and confrontation of infinitude (real or imagined, of course), then Douthat should put down his pen (please!) and start studying for his GRE's; he'll find grad school a spiritual experience of its own. But he protest mainly out of pique, and his complaints are just bleats about offense rather than proper counterarguments. Douthat isn't able to disprove Hitchens's claims about religion so he dismissively calls them 'anecdotal' (my favourite books of fictional anecdotes begin with 'In the beginning,' in general); he calls Hitchens out for 'lack of rigour' while circling the wagons in the name of his own Christianity; he tries to make a hard distinction between tribalism and theology when both forms of parochialism share mythologies of transcendent connection - presumably he's playing dumb, and can you blame him? Then there's this:

But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain [...]

Lazy, lame, and insulting. If Douthat were equipped to review Hitchens's book he'd be more familiar with the long history of moral frameworks that have nothing to do with God's soft cradling hand, and he'd be (at the minimum) able to grasp the complex principles and communitarian best practices emerging from the interplay of amoral natural systems. But ultimately the grossness of his review is this: he seems incapable of acknowledging that given the totally awesome scope of religious claims to truth, when it comes to the nature of the universe believers bear the burden of proof - particularly since, to all appearances, religious belief is with nearly 100% likelihood merely incorrect. It better have tremendous value - and 'inspiration and comfort' aren't enough to carry the day (nor would Douthat have the better of the field if they were). This is lazy, resentful, insipid writing from a young man who's generally alright as a commentator; he can do better, but I'm not convinced it's in anyone's interest to wait for the day.

I used to enjoy blogging like this; now I find I have little taste for it. But to find a new way...not easy.

Stewart Copeland is God.

Go read laugh awesome yeah!

Happy Easter.

Everyone wonders where they're going. That doesn't seem so strange.

Of all days this is the day to remember that at the center of Christian belief about the world is the mystery - which is to say the story - of the resurrection of Jesus, called Christ. It's the best-known version in western culture of the oldest of stories, the fantasy of overcoming death. And the sins committed by Christians in the name of their faith aren't authentic expressions of that faith but failures to live up to its moral imperatives, to the full ramifications of the central (and universal) story. The authentic Christian response to the mystery of the Resurrection is humility and hope, and the desire to awaken joy in others - the joy that comes from knowing more and better. Which isn't to say the desire to preach: to teach, rather. Which is a learning process.

We'll make up stories whether we're told to or not. They can turn to water, wine, or blood; that's up to us. Hating beliefs is natural too, I guess. But hoping for our fellowmen is a higher calling, and finer way of being. Today's a good day to hope Christians live up to their chosen Way.

I was raised Catholic; those days are largely gone. I don't think often about the Resurrection, and when I do, it's distantly and with detachment. I believe at this point in my life that the event itself never occurred. We don't live forever and we don't get a second chance after we've gone to the ground. But the hope is enough: there are other ways to live outside of time. For Catholics, that means seeking good works. For Catholic narcissists that means great works. Greatness is giving; the Resurrection is part of Christianity's great story of giving, but only part. Textualists, all together now: Jesus's Resurrection is the literary gesture, form, flourish, that completes the story of the Passion (the sacrifice). It's no concession at all to notice what a wonderful and affirming story it is, Christian or none.

Today seems like a good day to ask Christians everywhere to live up to the generous loveliness of their cherished story...and to join with them in celebration. Theirs - ours - is a better lovin' world. Failure to find and honor the fullness of Christian humanity and humility is an indictment of Christians, yeah, but not of Christianity. There are better ways of being than to call someone out for mere humanity. I'd like to think.

Not just because of where I come from.

Elizabeth Edwards is a goddamn badass.

From a Newsweek interview:

Having lost a child, I promise you that making certain that I do not have regrets when we finally say goodbye is really important to me. I think the hardest question—and this, I think, we haven't adequately explained to people—is the children. I think we've pretty much settled on what it is we're going to do. I think the children will finish out the school year and then, in the fall, they'll travel with us. We will home-school them. We'll employ a tutor to travel with us to help teach them. I hope it will be an extraordinary experience for them.

If you go to doctors and they say, "Look, there's this drug that's in clinical trials right now. It's no guarantees. We have no long-term data on it. It is going to make you sick, your hair is going to fall out," are you going to do it?

Yes. I'm going to do it. I have an obligation to try to live as long as I can for my family. So if I campaign less or if I campaign with a wig, then I'll do those things.

Brava.

Short version of a longer post to come.

So the tendency toward religious belief is part of our biological makeup?

Swell. So are tendencies toward racism, deceit, and megalomania. Fucking awesome.

Here's to the separation of church and state!

I am big man! I strong!

Strange noise come from toilet!

Noise confuse me!

Exam!

Think??

I point finger and fix!!

Big strong!

So hairy chest!

Oedipa wept.

Harold Bloom:

There is no Yahweh in the United States. I mean God the Father is just about gone. There is of course the BVM [Blessed Virgin Mary], or as I like to call her, thinking of her manifestation in the Houston Astrodome, visiting the refugees there, the BBB, the Blessed Barbara Bush. That's our deity, or one of our deities. My wife is particularly fond of the Blessed Barbara Bush. I guess I like her too. She is very good value. It's fascinating that we have an American Jesus, and he's always been an American, not a Jew at all, but the Christian right has now so compromised him, that when Hispanics come pouring into this country from south of the border or the Caribbean or further down, like so many African-Americans and like so many increasingly poor whites in the South or even in the Midwest, they're turning to Pentecostalism, which is the fastest growing religious movement in the United States, which has nothing to do with Jesus really, or Jesus Christ. It's all about the Holy Spirit, which is pouring down upon them and they're all shouting and jumping with him. I'm not so sure that in the end this will not be a Pentecostal nation. In which case it's true pre-Scripture will turn out to have been The Crying of Lot 49.

The interview is maddening but Bloom dreams some of the same dreams I do, I fear. [Update: Read GoDaddy's comment.]

Honest Abe Foxman; denying the past its place of rest.

There was an interesting profile of ADL head Abe Foxman in the Sunday New York Times; Matt Yglesias has a helpful clarification. Here's the detail that stuck with me, from the Times profile:

Foxman was born in Poland in 1940 as his parents fled before the Nazi advance. The following year, when the Nazis reached Lithuania, Foxman was placed with his Polish Catholic nanny, who pretended to be his mother and raised him — as a Catholic and, Foxman has written, as a Jew-hater. Both his parents, miraculously, survived the war and then reclaimed him, though not without a bitter fight. Foxman escaped the worst of the Holocaust, but it has deeply shaped his sense of the world and is presumably responsible for his feeling that nothing short of supreme and unflinching vigilance will ward off the next cataclysm. Perhaps his childhood also accounts for his air of brazen self-assertion. "Then he had to hide his identity," as Jonathan Jacoby, the founder of the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal advocacy group, told me. "Now he’s the most out Jew in the world."

It never occurred to me to wonder about Foxman's childhood, but his biography makes a kind of dramatic sense: he survived the Holocaust, yes, but has no memory of it. It exists for him, in other words, as an aspect of his biography that is important because of its ramifications and its absence - its status as nearly-grasped memory - rather than its historical facticity. My relationship with my birthplace, Puerto Rico, is complicated, because I have no memory of it, yet it was always present throughout my childhood as a source and setting of my parents' stories; when I return there (I've done so three times in recent memory, for weddings and funerals mostly) I feel as if I'm relating inauthentically to it. Yet the cousins and aunties and great-uncles are always glad to see me and my dad and brother, always happy to welcome us as family. They don't share my sense of my own fraudulence, which is to say they have a very different idea of what constitutes a family connection than I do. I love being in Puerto Rico, and when I come back to Boston I think of that island as home for a time, but that feeling fades rapidly - not least because there is a shared faith (in the Church, in family, in copresence and history and geography) that I'm just not a part of.

Foxman, of course, has that shared faith in spades:

Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust. He spends a month or so each winter in Palm Beach, moving in the company of elderly folk, many of them Holocaust survivors, who revere him. He seems to understand the survivor mentality far better than he does the lighthearted and lightheaded culture of disposable, custom-made ethnic identity.

[...]

Foxman invited me to hear him speak in December at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Conn. The temple has 700 members, mostly younger families, but the crowd at the event, and especially at the $250-a-person reception beforehand, was an Abe Foxman crowd — older, richer, more conservative. Foxman gamely grinned and hugged and mugged for the camera; the bodyguard straightened his collar. One by one, the congregants approached to consult him on matters Jewish and Middle Eastern; Foxman fielded the questions with due solemnity. A woman who introduced herself as the daughter of Holocaust survivors said that Jimmy Carter was just as bad as Ahmadinejad — another Israel-denier. Foxman demurred on the comparison but said he planned to write to Tim Russert, the NBC interviewer, asking why he had treated Carter with "kid gloves." A short, bearded man who said that he was a member of Aipac asked, "What do you think of John Bolton?" The American ambassador to the United Nations had just tendered his resignation. Both agreed that it was a shame. The A.D.L. had taken out a full-page ad applauding Bolton as a staunch defender of Israel. More hugs, more pictures.

I skip happily over quotes from Foxman in articles about the Middle East and America's Israel/Palestine policy; he has nothing to add to debates about Israel, in my mind. Indeed, his connection to the Jewish nation is precisely that he's not a part of it, that he can't be: the tribes of (oft-discussed literary character and dimly-remembered historical figure) Israel were sundered by the Holocaust, and the Jewish diaspora is connected to its worldwide faith community through the lens of that event (which was, after all, a religious event, part of the depressing march of preordained time). When Foxman 'dwells imaginatively in the Holocaust' he's not reliving history, after all, he's dreaming it; his homeland was always gone. Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favourite authors as a kid) once said, 'It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity,' by which I take her to mean that in the absence of serious sustained introspection about one's beliefs, about their historical truth, it's (anti-intellectually) comforting to believe in a myth, in a dream, in a set of images connected dramatically rather than merely historically.

This isn't to call Foxman an anti-intellectual, though I think his constant invocation of 'old anti-semitic canards' has a distasteful anti-intellectual aspect to it; rather it's to say that his biography clarifies, for me, his unflagging stridency relative to the seemingly minor slights he's constantly calling out. The image of him standing at the front of Temple Sholom, giving out $250 handshakes, listening patiently to a procession of old conservatives asking their fellow Survivor to ratify their resentments - that's what sticks with me. If you can't know, believe.

* * *

The previous paragraph of this post was meant to finish with the following sentence: 'Less a Jew, more Jewish.' Writing it I couldn't help feeling that (a) it'd read more nastily than intended, and (b) it's one thing to criticize someone's habit of invoking the Holocaust as the primary historical analogue for seemingly every incident of racial disharmony but I have no right to imply that Foxman is inauthentic in his relationship to his faith - and I should avoid even that unintentional implication. There's a problem posed for the secularist liberal here: how can I communicate briefly in prose that while I find the Jewish myth-history (the Covenant, a litany of tests and trials by God, the reunion to come in the Promised Land, and miracles aplenty where mere history might suffice) no more credible than the Resurrection or the dictation of the Koran to Mohammed by an angel, I nonetheless wish to preserve as a virtue an authentic (introspective, scholarly, skeptical) connection to one's moral and religious history, even when its counterfactual nature is acknowledged? And also, since people are skittish and sensitive: as a non-Jew, how should I go about criticizing the particulars of an individual Jew's imaginative link to his shared history (e.g. the Holocaust) when, at day's end, the Holocaust really is that big an even, really is one of the central elements of humankind's most titanic bloodletting, the long war of the 20th century's first half, and guy does have a direct connection to it? Especially when I'm happy to make excuses for (e.g.) my own father's issues with trust, authority, and so forth, on the basis of his experience of the Blitz and evacuation?

The weak answer is, my dad hasn't made a living out of accusing people of hating Englishmen. OK fair enough, but let's not go down that slope. The stronger answer, one that I worry is a step beyond my level of intellectual seriousness, is that it is possible to criticize Foxman's apparent imaginative stance toward the history of his tribesmen as it manifests in his public actions and evident private statements, and that it is good to do so, even absent a judgment as to whether the bigger risk to the culture is Foxman or the forces he criticizes.

[Journalist and former A.D.L. muckety-muck David] Lehrer says that when he raised his view that the A.D.L. had to learn to speak to this new, confident but less affiliated generation of Jews, Foxman dismissed it out of hand. The generational question does not interest him. "It's not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not," Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. "I do feel. And I've got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this."

It's clear from this quote that, however honorable his conscious intentions - and the article does advance the claim by Foxman's allies that he's not cynical as so many of his critics might suspect - however total his belief in a world of anti-semites out to get him and his, the effect of his belief is to reproduce and relive his own essential trauma. He desires, in other words, to pass on his scars, and by equating the 'maturing process' for young Jews with being beleaguered, with a feeling of 'insecurity,' Foxman is perpetuating a canard that transcends cultural and national borders but which has a particular centrality in Jewish myth-history: suffering is ennobling, and no one has suffered more than Us, which is as it should be. It's not unreasonable, I think, to identify that tendency - whether rhetorical or deeper-down - as perverse, especially since his disposition toward suffering is linked to cultural myths no more valid than claims of Jesus's divinity.

No more valid, we might add, than yours or mine.

Four years ago we buried my mother in a family tomb in San Juan, in a cemetery by the sea (every headstone it seemed was gleaming white, and the fortress above us dark stones) surrounded by generations of Puerto Ricans and alongside family members - Mejías - going back centuries. I was in a dark suit too warm for the weather, same as my brother and dad. The aunties sang a hymn in Spanish, and I could've sworn I knew the tune, though I understood hardly a word. Afterward my brother and I stood alone by the family tomb and I thought, if only for a moment, that I was part of this line, that a way of belonging had passed from Mejía to Gorlin to Holland despite miles and years. But they closed the tomb up, and we flew our separate ways, and a couple of days later I remembered that I would not be buried there myself. Indeed, that I feel no desire to do so. Nothing is owed in either direction, I think, and they're only dust - as I'm sure I will be someday, and an end to it there.

All I could think about was the song, how familiar it seemed, how much I wanted to hear it again. I dreamed about it.

But I should've been thinking about the suit, and how even a fool remembers how to dress for a 'homecoming.' I should've seen myself in the present: the air was clear and tasted of the ocean, we were watching over the dead in dark woolen clothes from another country, but no one was watching us. It was ever so. Haven't you heard.

Fantastique!

I love this country and I love my fellow man!

One as the other - forms of the supernatural.

Two men.

First, Judge Roy Moore discussing Rep. Keith Ellison's desire to swear his Congressional oath on a copy of the Koran.

In 1789, George Washington, our first president under the Constitution, took his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God." Placing his hand on the Holy Scriptures, Washington recognized the God who had led our Pilgrim fathers on their journey across the Atlantic in 1620 and who gave our Founding Fathers the impetus to begin a new nation in 1776. Soon after Washington's oath, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which required all judges of the federal courts to "faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties" incumbent upon them "agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God." Placing their hand on the Bible, the members of Congress had already sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States ... So help me God."

Thus began a long tradition that extended both to state and federal government of acknowledging the Judeo-Christian God as the source of our law and liberty. Today, some believe that it does not matter what we believe or before Whom we take our oath. But as Keith Ellison is demonstrating, it does matter.

Next, Christopher Hitchens describing his Halloween.

At the airport, a man in front of me is made to empty a pot of face-cream he has bought for his wife. In vain does he point out that he purchased it after going through security. Our protectors never sleep - or do I mean that they never seem to wake up? Back in Washington, the whole city is en fete for the most boring holiday of the year - Halloween. A few decades ago, a false rumour about a razor blade in some candy shrouded the whole event in precautions and hysteria. Now, no pot of cream is safe, either.

Wearing my SpongeBob suit under some protest, I pace the well-policed streets in company with hordes of essentially bored children. Worse still, this means that tomorrow the stores will switch themes from witchcraft and start playing 'Jingle Bell Rock'. To me, one version of the supernatural is just as null as the other.

I would like in this regard as in many others (but not all) to count myself a member of Hitchens's party. But not yet. And I can take comfort that at a minimum I am, in next to no senses, a member of Roy Moore's.

Loss.

Sullivan writes today another variation on a theme that's shot through his blog for years now:

I never believed [the Iraq war] would be easy but I didn't believe the Bush team would ever have been this reckless or incompetent.

Translation: I can't believe Daddy failed us.

I have a lot of sympathy for Sullivan's loss of faith in righteous authoritarianism - I'm a lapsed Catholic after all, with an iron-fisted Catholic parent (now dead) a weak spot for representations of strong older men weeping, and the usual series of conversion stories: loss of belief in true love, loss of faith in God, loss of trust in The Government. I felt alienated from my peers as a kid and projected the Catholic narrative of the heavy-handed Saviour into my personal future, hoping for deliverance from disconnection, abstracted (as a solitary scientist/engineer wannabe will do) into some vision of meritocratic Fortune or the like. A dose of rugged individualism but mainly the expectation that Circumstance would change, that Order would be reasserted, and that I might be directing my future in a tactical way but that fate was in, if not divine hands, then the control of someone or something wise and benevolent. When the Twin Towers fell I couldn't stop thinking that in my family we were never allowed to go to bed angry or scared - we always talked through our problems and reconciled on a 24-hour timescale - a parental policy I look back on with deep gratitude. The trauma of that day took shape in my mind partially as a horror that when we all went to sleep it would be alone in a cosmic sense, that no one was watching out for us.

For Sullivan - who maintains a belief in God and a deep concern for the Church, as well as a spiritual relationship to the political Right in America and Britain - the failures of the Republicans and Blair, and the viciousness of Pope Benedict, recapitulate those childhood and adolescent losses of innocence. And as I say, I can sympathize with him. Hell, I can empathize to an extent. When the first girl I slept with broke up with me I replayed in my heart every drama of rejection-from-Paradise ever written. That's first 'grownup' (college) love and first sex and first a lot of things, all of them shown to be imperfect. Then the same with religion. Then the same with politics. And to find out that your parents are only human, atop everything else, and that they argue, and weep, and even die...

I feel for Andrew Sullivan.

But there are lessons he's failing to learn - because right now the drama of loss is what consumes him, the pain of abandonment. He doesn't seem to have entered yet into the greater drama, of self. He sees his expectations (which is to say his dreams) shattered daily, but hasn't learned to question his expectations. He remains the 'tough' Thatcherite beating his breast, too busy bemoaning the failures of his heroes to put a checkmark next to his usual resentments today, chastened but fundamentally unchanged. His faith 'sustains' him, but it's not doing him any favours. Less sympathy today. And less tomorrow.

Issue #0.

Bunch of skinny Jewish guys - real nebbish types - out on the fringes, they're immigrants, they're feeling left out. Mayer and Goldwyn their names are not; we're talking about just tradesmen here. Just this bunch of friends and they're looking around and thinking, Well shit. Politically speaking times are not ideal, which for the Tribe has historically been something of an understatement. Has there ever been a good time to be Jewish? Everyone else has had a goddamn shot at ruling the world. We get books called How the Irish Saved Civilization, which has got to be the Special Olympics of civilization-saving at a certain level.

The differences between Evangelical Christians and Mormons...

...are apparently important to conservative political pundits.

Mormons believe that a man named Joseph Smith was given cosmic spectacles by an angel and told to share the wisdom stored on a collection of golden plates hidden on a hill in western New York State.

Evangelicals do not generally believe this; indeed as far as I know they tend to believe it's complete bullshit. (Mormon baptisms are not recognized by most Christian churches, incidentally.)

They believe, among other things, that 2,000 years ago a Jewish mystic walked on water, rose from the dead, and brought several others with him - after being born to a virgin.

Actually all Christians believe that; the divinity of Christ, His Resurrection, the historical truth of even the sci-fi bits of the Gospels, all of it. Sort of basic to the whole 'being a Christian' thing. Evangelicals in particular are known for their general belief in 'biblical inerrancy' - i.e. the Bible is the revealed Word of God, right on down to the (totally frickin' sweet) calculation that the universe is about 6,000 years old.

There's much talk of late in Right Blogistan about whether Mormons are 'really Christians' and so forth. It's worth mentioning, in the context of those discussions, that Mormon core beliefs are ('faintly') ridiculous - but no more so than Christian mythology in general. At day's end, if you think God knocked up a 13-year-old and later took her up bodily into Heaven, then you've pretty much forfeited the right to criticize the content of the religious beliefs of others. Ethics are another thing but let's be serious. We can get into the details later if you want; I just wanted to post this helpful reminder.

Warm morn: dumb Frum.

David Frum, you're an idiot! But then you (everyone but the NR subscribers) likely knew that. Here's his latest spew:

A sensational but to-date unsubstantiated allegation has been hurled at a major American religious figure. On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

The reaction on the Left has actually for the most part been, 'This hypocrisy is grotesque and undermines anti-gay credibility further - but fucking other guys is no crime. Certainly it's less morally damaging than preaching lies for a living, no?' The lying and cheating are wrong of course but the interest in the scandal isn't in his behaviour, it's in the politically-charged space between Haggard's deeds and his 'teachings'. What Haggard does publicly is very, very bad for this country. What he does privately is no different from what most men do privately - only it involves a male whore instead of a female one. It gets worse, of course. With the Frumtrellescent one it always does:

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue - or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

Let's be clear here: this is not an interesting or reasonable argument. It is in fact an insane quasi-argument - a knee-jerk rationalization for closeting as a morally upright response to homosexual desire, coupled with the insistence - apropos in Frum's case of, um, nothing - that homosexuality is somehow morally destabilizing to family and society. His defense of Haggard consists of 'At least he didn't throw it in people's faces.' The appearance of rugged, windblown strength and accordance with God's/Reagan's laws, as substitute for any kind of moral complexity or in fact honesty.

He really thinks these things. Gets paid to write them as well.

David Frum, you are our moral idiot of the week. (Good work! There was stiff competition.) And William Buckley? You get an honorary such award for inflicting this drooling imbecile on the world. Shame.

Yglesias gives Sully's new book the once-over.

From the excerpts I've read - and my own daily reading of pretty much everything Sullivan writes, for several years now - I get the sense that Yglesias's Prospect review of The Conservative Soul does Sullivan a slight disservice in one respect: Sullivan's tendency to see his ideological enemies as symptoms of a grand spiritual problem is a problem, but he seems to be interested in making a less hysterical philosophical argument about Christianity and politics, one that marks and criticizes the death of skeptical introspection in various political/moral/aesthetic/spiritual discourses. Now, this is a more-than-slightly hypocritical stance from Sullivan in some ways, as the emphasized (by me) passage below highlights. But I think that Sully's capable of making serious moral arguments beyond his own disgusting knee-jerk tendencies, and I suspect that his book's rhetorical gestures work against its Big Argument.

This is how Yglesias's review ends:

Which brings us to the real problem here, such as it is. Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal. Far from "bold and provocative," Sullivan offers up an unusually colorful expression of what is, in fact, the bland conventional wisdom of the Anglo-American elite. In foreign affairs he's hawkish, chastened by Iraq but not so chastened as to revisit any of the empirical or theoretical premises that led America into its current quagmire. In economics, he's disdainful of European social democracy, a supporter of balanced budgets and sound money while dismissive of concerns about inequality. On cultural matters, he's generally progressive, but doesn't much care for feminists. He loathes academic postmodernists but doesn't seem to actually know anything about them.

These elite consensus views have, in the way that only an elite consensus can, an enormous amount of political power behind them already. What the elite consensus lacks is what it's always lacked -- a serious electoral constituency -- the very problem that led it to increasingly ally itself with the very forces of more populist right-wingery that Sullivan deplores. This, though, is hardly a new story; from the Red Scare and McCarthyism to Nixon's Southern Strategy, "respectable" conservatism has long found a need to ally itself with base demagoguery to obtain power. As a gay man, Sullivan finds the current configuration of this alliance unusually obnoxious, to an extent he doesn't seem to have minded, say, Ronald Reagan's implicit appeals to segregationist sentiment. So far as that goes, good for him. But the conservatism of doubt -- which is to say the conservatism of elite complacency -- as a mass political movement is an impossible dream, and always will be.

The bang is Matt's; the whimper is Sullivan's. But that final dismissal is too glib for my tastes, too bitter. Oh well. I'd like to read the book. Sullivan's much more serious in print than on his blog, where so many of his posts read like ad copy for a cowboy movie in which he's the star.

Making people feel bad about themselves; the use and abuse of fiction; offhand bathhouse comment.

Goddamn, I'm such a downer sometimes.

That's the cost of being right about everything.

Survival.

Last year several housemates and I took regular trips - twice weekly for a while - to the MIT Climbing Wall for indoor rock climbing. A friend - artist/scientist/bon vivant Solar O., which by the way if I'm an exotic dancer on a moonbase in the future my stage name will be 'Solar O' - anyhow Solar's one of the keepers of the Wall. He's in freakishly good physical condition for an MIT graduate student, all biceps and posture and so forth; his condition is made all the stranger by the fact that the only exercise he gets, apparently, is rock climbing. No aerobics as I recall. (He used to row for MIT's Crew team, but those days are gone.)

So we climbed the Wall, and while suspended from a horizontal surface a couple feet off the ground, I mulled over this state of affairs.

I could do it, you know. I'm not much of a climber - my form was horrible - but after only a couple of trips to the Wall I had noticed a tremendous increase in strength and dexterity, and in calm. Solar recommended traversals - horizontal trips around the 3-sided Wall, rather than up it - and his advice paid enormous dividends right away. Rock climbing, it would seem, is an activity at which rapid meaningful improvement is the norm. I loved it but haven't been back since doing something nasty to my lumbar region one day and taking a couple weeks off to recuperate. It's fine now; I should return. God knows I need the exercise. (But don't go too often; the pads on your fingers will thank you.)

Hanging there, my back to the earth, straining muscles I didn't know I possessed to reach a 'rock' large enough to fit three fingers half-bent, part of my (too-great) weight held up by the curve of one foot, knee hypercompressed, akimbo, off to one or another side - like a monkey in fuzzy still-frame - I had a flash of insight, among other things.

Months later I've had another. It has to do with near-death experiences, and the possibility of Heaven; tangentially it concerns National Novel Writing Month, and video games. This is to say, it is about the value of terror.

[Warning: uninformed airy speculation follows. Probably there's a 101-level CogSci textbook out there that'll clear all this up for me. But I like writing it and I have the time, so no matter.]