Trust 'Em As Far As We Can Throw 'Em

On the one hand, Sarah Palin says we need to trust the oil companies. On the other hand, they do stuff like this.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King said tonight that he has told representatives of BP Plc. that they should stop circulating settlement agreements among coastal Alabamians.

The agreements, King said, essentially require that people give up the right to sue in exchange for payment of up to $5,000.

Personally, if a rep from BP came knocking on my door and asked me to surrender my right to sue for a measly five grand, I'd sick my guinea pigs on him. Since conservatives are all about personal responsibility, and insist corporations, being persons under the law, should be treated the same as individuals, I wonder how many conservatives are going to insist that BP do the right thing and face the consequences of their actions.

If there is even one, I'll be surprised.

I realize that BP could potentially be destroyed, financially, should litigation move forward. I also realize this is an accident, not a deliberate act on their part. Yet, they know, because they are British Petroleum, the necessity of redundant safety measures required in other legal jurisdictions where they drill. Since the Bush-Cheney gang said that all that safety stuff should be "voluntary", BP volunteered not to install it. This is why voluntary, rather than legally mandatory, regulation is necessary (as if we needed more object lessons). People are dead, and the whole country is facing an environmental disaster. Sorry to say, but I don't trust any corporate entity to act in any way that poses a threat to its basic function - to make money. This most definitely includes endangering the lives and health of its employees.

So, no, Mrs. Palin, I guess I won't trust the oil companies. They have screwed the Gulf Coast. Now, they are trying to screw the residents who live there, bribing them with quick and easy cash. It might just be time to consider how it is we allow foreign companies to operate in ways that are potentially hazardous to our national environment. You know, all that sovereignty stuff might come in handy about now.

Minnesota Gubenatorial Candidate Doesn't Know Constitution

From TPM:

With the backing of Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota Republican party just nominated for Governor Tom Emmer who says no federal laws should apply in Minnesota unless 2/3 of both houses of the state legislature approve the law in advance.

Ah, if only there weren't that pesky 14th Amendment to contend with. Since the Supreme Court has held that Amendment applies both rights and limits to all the states, this kind of talk just proves how far down Stupid Street some Republicans have traveled. I can't wait to read a defense of this.

Why I Don't Like The Arizona Anti-Immigration Law Or Right-Wing Blather About It

I have stated many times that I am usually reticent to discuss my attitude toward laws enacted in other states. That is their business; good or bad, what possible relevance does my position have, living here in Illinois?

I feel compelled, however, after all the talk, all the nonsense to say what should be obvious. I do not like the law. I am confident, however, it will be tossed out by the courts, so I don't get too fussed about it.

You know what really disgusts me about the whole thing?

Human beings aren't "illegal". Human beings aren't "aliens".

It's really that simple. All the talk about "illegal aliens" - just those two words strung together modifying one another as they do - just sickens me. That there are those who call themselves Christians who bleat those two words without the slightest grasp of how dehumanizing they are is even more sickening.

It would be nice if we could have a substantive debate about immigration reform; right now, however, with the Republicans in hock to the kooks on the right, and the Democrats in their usual disarray, all I can think is we shall have a repeat of 2007, when it was tried and failed miserably.

RIP Charlie Gillett

One of the highlights of my Saturday trips home from DJing has been BBC's "A World of Music", hosted by Charlie Gillett. Soft-spoken, incredibly knowledgeable, the sounds he managed to find were always exciting, and even stuff that was forty and fifty years old, just because it was unknown, sounded fresh and new. So, I was saddened to hear last night that Gillett (pronounced GILL-ett, not jill-ETT) passed away last month. They have yet to replace him for what is probably the excellent reason that there is no one to take his place.

Whether it was traditional Bulgarian music updated for a recording session, finger-style guitar players from western Africa (Mali and Senegal in particular produced wonderful finger-style guitar, some of the best recordings done back in the mid-1960's, usually in France), or pop music from Israel, Vietnam, or even Bollywood, Gillett had it, played it, and conveyed his love for it to his listeners.

Last night, they replayed a show from last September in which Gillett featured music that been huge hits in America and Britain and Europe, but originated in either Caribbean nations or in Africa. Included in the playlist is this marvelously funky number from 1972. The band is from Cameroon, a country with a special place in my own heart (my sister was a Peace Corps volunteer there in the very early 1980's). "Soul Makossa" combines their love of American soul/funk and traditional Cameroonian dance in its title. The rhythm is infectious, that bass line just slides around, slick and funky as anything by Earth, Wind, & Fire or Ohio Players. This is a remix for dance clubs.



While I am sure there is a backlog of shows that will be able to fill the time slot (i:30 am Central Time), until a new host is found, new sounds coming on the scene, plus the wonderful variety of sounds out there will have to wait.

Saturday Rock Show

One of the great American heavy metal bands was Pantera. Along with Metallica, in the dim, dark days of the late 1980's and early 1990's, they kept alive a kind of pure faith when so many thought Motley Crue was heavy metal, and the popularity of Anthrax's speed metal was aided by their ubiquitous t-shirts. With brothers "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott on guitar and Vinnie Paul on drums - two flamboyant, charismatic musicians - they provided simple, clear heavy metal for true believers.

When Darrell Abbott was murdered on stage in late 1994, while certainly horrible, it provided a certain levity because I sat and listened to the report read by Carl Castle of NPR news. Hearing Castle intone "Dimebag" with his resonant baritone was truly a crossing of cultural barricades.

Out Of Control Prosecutor

Via Thers at Eschaton, read this article.

In papers sent to UVA April 23, [Virginia Attorney General Ken] Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

“Since it’s public money, there’s enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data,” says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.

Just a couple thoughts. It sounds so public spirited, don't you think? Investigating the investment of public money in science. Except this is the kind of thing routine reporting on grant approvals usually covers. At least from my own experience with receiving grant money, there is a requirement to report back to the grantor on how the money was used - in excruciating detail - at several points along the way, with a final report when the grant period has ended. There is really no need for this kind of thing, of course.

Precisely because scientific research is about seeking answers to specific questions - what Kuhn called solving puzzles, as it were - the possibility that a particular answer might just be "no", as we all know. I am really curious as to what, exactly, the Attorney General thinks might be a crime, might be worth wasting the time and even more public money looking for. Fraud? In what way? That Mann might have willingly and knowingly perpetrated a fraud in the course of using his public funds? Since science is a public enterprise by habit and practice, the AG can peruse the publication list, one would think. All the other stuff - emails and private correspondence - might be interesting. Or not. It might relate directly to the research. Or, it might be gossip. I really doubt that, even if Mann were stupid enough to perpetrate fraud in the course of using taxpayer money, he would be dim enough to write something like, "So, what do you think of my outline for defrauding the Commonwealth?", or, "Do you think my paper, as written, disregards the data enough to prove global warming even though it doesn't exist?"

This whole thing is nothing more than an example of an ignoramus being given far too much power. Aren't there marijuana farmers in Brunswick County to harass?

My Last Word On The Habermas Business

I think one reason - beyond the obvious defects - this blog just doesn't generate comment threads that stretch on forever is I am not in the business of continuing arguments. I realize others find it annoying, even (gasp!) somehow against the spirit of the internet. After all, isn't shouting at one another with our keyboards what the internet is all about? Why else is there a CAPS LOCK key?

As far as the recent business related to a Stanley Fish article reporting on a symposium including Jurgen Habermas and respondents on the place of religion in society, I really have only a couple things to say, then I really am quite finished, unless someone wants to send me the book in question so I can read what Habermas and his critics are actually saying, rather than read about it second-hand.

First of all, I see no reason why I, or any other person, or Church for that matter, should look at Habermas' attitude with anything other than disdain. Please note, the entire "proposal" consists of Habermas, occupying no role other than a semi-public intellectual from another country, grudgingly accepting that (a) religious life is an on-going reality; and, therefore, (b) it might be a part of our public conversation, as long is it dresses well and doesn't say a whole lot.

I guess, after a bit more thought, my own response would be, "Uh, Jurgen, who died and appointed you public discourse monitor?" Last time I checked, no individual, group, community, what-have-you has to pass a litmus test to be a part of the never-ending discussion, debate, and power game concerning how to be a good society. Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples - these are part and parcel of our lives, the lives of our fellow citizens. Whether Jurgen Habermas accepts that or not, or understands it or not, these folks have a seat at the table just because. Indeed, Habermas pose of intellectual (and, always lurking behind that, moral) superiority should be greeted with a heart chuckle at best. As soon as he can explain - without reference to denigration - why it is there are millions, perhaps billions, of human beings who actually believe in a set of religious doctrines as a real, living guide to their life, and that as parts of religious communities they are vitally concerned with the larger public good, I think he should have a Coke, a smile, and shut up. It's really that simple.

The idea that a European intellectual actually would deign to grudgingly admit that religious folks have a place at the table might sound all wonderful. Why, however, would any self-respecting member of any religious community want to be apart of a larger discussion of which Jurgen Habermas is a member, let alone leader, considering his attitude?

Good Riddance To Bad Rubbish

I have cleared another website from the old blogroll. I have been, to say the least, disenchanted, with Crooks and Liars. Increasingly going off the rails, seeing the imminent return of right-wing Republican governance along with, say, theocracy and racism thrown in for good measure, they are almost wholly out of touch with their obsession with the Tea Party, their constant flogging of Glenn Beck, and their hyping of both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow at the expense of serious, substantive discussions.

We are not on the verge of a Republican renaissance. Despite the on-going sluggishness of the economy; despite the natterings of the "left" that there is not a dime's worth of difference between Obama and Bush; despite the crazy train on FOXNews and right-wing websites - the Democrats will do just fine this fall, and the Republicans, offering nothing, void of ideas, let alone positive policy options, will flounder toward further irrelevance. Indeed, I am still willing to take any bets on the outcome of the mid-term Congressional elections, predicting (once again) the Democrats will make gains in both Houses of Congress.

Anyway, as much as I enjoyed C&L in its heyday, when the Democrats were in a rising minority, and the Republicans increasingly tone-deaf to the mood of the country (quite apart from any economic disaster), it served a useful function. Stuck in 2005, or even 2006, however, Amato and his cronies offer nothing more than ignorant hyperbole masquerading as a clarion call of pending doom and disaster. I am quite weary of the nonsense. So, as sad as it is to say, they're gone.

The world has moved on, as have I. Crooks and Liars, sad to say, has far too much invested in their view of themselves as a source of serious information with a liberal slant they have forgotten that. So, like digby and some others, I think it's time to celebrate what they meant once upon a time, and leave them where their best moments lie - in the past.

Seeking Clarity

In order to move my thoughts forward beyond asking what some might consider interesting questions regarding a Christian understanding of the state, I think it is necessary to clear the decks, as it were, of such dreck and effluvia from our usual public discourse so that clarity concerning our current situation can be approached. In short - I wanna cut through the BS. A whole slew of terms and catch-phrases, cliches and nonsense is going to be explained away.

First and foremost, precisely because of the centrality of questions of economy, I think I should make clear that any discussion that thoughtlessly bleats out "socialism" or "capitalism" without a clear understanding of what those words actually entail serves far more to dirty the waters than clarify. For instance, all the discussions of the glories of American "capitalism" ignore the simple reality that, by and large, our largest corporations are heavily subsidized by the federal government. Indeed, corporations are legal creations of the various state governments, so they already owe their existence to the state. Anyone who espouses the belief that our government should step aside and allow corporations to act in their own best interests should be aware that, if this were truly the case, many of even the largest would cease to exist.

Thus, reality already muddies our attempts to set clear boundaries between "capitalism" and "socialism" precisely because ours is a heavily publicly-subsidized private sector economy.

Further and related, very often in discussions of economic "theory" (in a vulgar sense, at any rate), we hear that our economy values competition, whereas socialist economies and polities discourage it, and therefore economic growth and general welfare. Yet, the largest corporations actively seek to eradicate competition as inefficient, a waste of resources, and a drag on potential profits. Every law and stricture on corporate action is tested over and over again, seeing if it passes legal muster.

Back at the end of the 19th century, and continuing on through to the beginnings of the Great Depression of the 1930's, much populist rage was directed at a certain sector of the economy that produced nothing, sold nothing, bought nothing, yet was understood by many to be the engine of economic activity. In our normal parlance, they are bankers; since the 1930's breakup of commercial and consumer banking, they are the investment bankers. The populists had a far more colorful term - social parasites. In the wake of the economic collapse brought on in large measure by certain creative "investment products" - most notoriously treating debt instruments as capital and collateral for funding ever greater debt - there has been a back and forth about the question of the role of investment banking in the larger economy. One would think this older terminology, while certainly provocative, might find a bit more traction. The money made and lost by investment bankers, especially in the real estate market with the "bundling" of mortgages, was all just lines in an accounting book. While it is true that many banks and other investment firms - like the insurance company AIG - based their real market value upon these lines, they were by and large unreal. Indeed, the economic collapse was due in no small part precisely to the unreality of the assumed value of so many of these very assets.

The real economy is not a creature of banks. Make no mistake, investment in economic activity is vital; no business would begin, or even continue, without the injection of capital from interested parties who see this or that business as an opportunity for wealth. Banks serve a necessary function as conveyors of investment capital between those who seek to make money and those who seek to use that money for their own purposes. Yet, that is all banks are. Their health and vitality is certainly necessary, but when investment becomes not a bridge between real economic actors, but rather an end in and for itself, the real driver of economic growth - the production of goods and the practice of services - becomes subordinated to the investment sector. When banks no longer serve as a conduit between real economic actors, but increasingly are seen as the real drivers of economic growth, this distortion of their role, almost of necessity, creates the conditions for the general collapse of economic activity.

All of these mundane realities become unclear if we spend our times worrying over nonsensical discussions of "capitalism" versus "socialism", and reduce "freedom" to the ability to make money. Any Christian witness on the State, on social life, on justice becomes meaningless without keeping even this sketchy survey in mind.

"Socialism", at least in its Marxist variety, is most definitely not what we currently have. For Marx, "socialism" was a stage of social development in which the workers controlled the levers of state power through a dictatorship. Marx clearly was not fond of this stage, yet he understood it as dialectically necessary, the historical counterweight to the age of bourgeois freedom and (mostly sham) democracy controlled by the industrialists. The closest real-world examples of a kind of Marxist socialism, it might be argued, are the post-WWII Labour governments of Great Britain, in which all sorts of economic activity from health care to transportation, was nationalized and ownership transferred to the state (it isn't called British Airways for nothing, you know . . .). The kinds of central planning one saw in Stalinist states has absolutely nothing to do with socialism, even less "communism" as Marx understood that term.

To sit around and insist that what I am pondering is some kind of Christian defense of socialism, or that I am blind to the socialist tendencies of our current federal Administration are nonsensical on their face. In the first instance, it should go without saying - but I'm saying it anyway! - that any dictatorial rule is not anything I am interested in defending. Any attempt to address questions of socio-economic and political life of a certain necessity need to grasp the reality of our situation; any Christian attempt to do so must take the further step of insisting that this or that temporal, contingent political or economic philosophy, regardless of its intrinsic merits, must answer to the bar of the cross of Christ, where we come face to face with that most political question of all - do we side with the powers that sought to execute this man to maintain their power?

A Yes And A Partial No

To the quote below included in this comment, I can give partial consent, but also hold some partial reservations:

[Religious man] must therefore live in the godless world, without attempting to gloss over or explain its ungodliness in some religious way or other. He must live a "secular" life, and thereby share in God's sufferings. He may live a "secular" life (as one who has been freed from false religious obligations and inhibitions). To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man--not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.

First of all, for the most part, the spirit (Spirit?) of this particular passage is one I can accept almost without reservation. I say "almost" only because the "religious man" is a kind of abstraction for me. Obviously, individuals do inhabit a variety of roles, but they are always constituted of relationships. We define ourselves as part of a variety of groups and webs of relations, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes incommensurable. The challenge, I suppose, is taking stock of which identity we assign top priority. Are we a parent first? A spouse? A child, sibling, employee? Do we define ourselves by our jobs, as in, "I am a doctor"?

Of course, a response - and it would most certainly be mine - is that to live as a Christian embraces all these partial definitions, fulfills them, and (to follow Wesley, I suppose) sanctifies our own participation in them. To be fully human is certainly the goal of life as a baptized Christian. That means, if it is to mean anything, that in our various relationships, in the various ways we live out our lives, we live fully and completely as family member, as this or that employee/worker, as a citizen. Going further, it is precisely here that the so-called Christian right goes off course. They assume that there is a distinctive Christian sine qua non for living in the world, precisely because theirs is a kind of simplistic dualism that, silently or explicitly, gives the lie to one of the favorite Biblical passages (John 3:16).

As to whether the "world" is "godless", I guess I just cannot affirm that, from a theological view. Do we reserve God, then, only for the elect in the community of faith? Perhaps by living in the world as a Christian qua Christian, we demonstrate through just living that the world is, indeed, not godless. "Secular" is not the same as declaring the world "godless", unless one accepts a broad understanding of "secular". Since the part of the mission of the Church is to live out Divine love for the world, this would most certainly include simple living, in all the ambiguities and contradictions entailed therein. Yet, we betray that mission when we give pride of place to this living without reference to the Divine condescension in the cross and resurrection of Christ. This latter places us firmly within a web of relations that not only are horizontal - spatial, that is, relations with other individuals who also are Christian - but vertical - temporal, stretching across time, confession, even language. Thus embedded, if we allow ourselves to become aware of this intricate web, we can live in other relationships more fully precisely because we claim their fulfillment in the cross and empty tomb.

Not A Way Forward

On second and third thoughts, and despite Feodor's endorsement - which I understand, and grant - I cannot see where Habermas' attempted partial turn toward "religion" can avail itself as even a conversation-starter. In particular, this description of Habermas' position by Stanley Fish sticks out and calls out for a response:

. . . Habermas does not want to embrace religion wholesale for he does not want to give up the “cognitive achievements of modernity” — which include tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement — and risk surrendering to the fundamentalisms that, he says, willfully “cut themselves off” from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant. The “truths of faith” can be heard but only those portions of them that have secular counterparts can be admitted into the realm of public discourse.

Briekskorn is exactly on point. For what possible reason would the Church surrender its ratio? For entry in to the public realm, but only on terms inimical to its unique vocabulary? What of the Church's critique of state action? Is it not already compromised by accepting these terms?

While some of Habermas' further comments seem to suggest a certain begrudging acceptance of a role for the religious life as more than a social palliative, I cannot but think that Habermas is not so much offering a new way forward so much as acknowledging the status quo as one that at least offers to believers a role that is no longer intellectually second class.

Furthermore, a short retort on the marvelous gains of the Enlightenment. With the victory of instrumental rationality, we have seen the perfectly sane, bureaucratized butchery of millions of human beings in the pursuit of goals that were rationally defended. The hands of the Enlightened are as bloody as the rest of ours, and an appeal to some kind of instrumental, functional superiority for the "rational" claims of the Enlightenment project would be lost in the screams of the dead, if they could speak. Since they can't, I think my own feeble objection will have to suffice. Like America's perpetual innocence, always lost yet always found again in a heartbeat, the nobility and humanity of the Enlightenment project is declared atop a mountain of corpses. While this makes it no different than most other human projects, intellectual or political, it does not make it, morally speaking, able to pronounce upon the rational or moral acceptability of other dissonant voices.

Tentative Beginnings . . .

So John Quiggin has noticed me, or at least noticed me noticing him, which amounts to the same thing. Anyway, he opens up the linked thread and what one finds is, in a sense, the same, sterile back-and-forth that leaves me wondering if these folks understand what it is they're saying. Not in the sense that they are writing about topics about which they have no knowledge; rather, I wonder if they grasp how so much of their discussion is in a vocabulary that, really, no longer holds up. In particular, the whole question of tactics versus strategy - incremental versus revolutionary change, that kind of thing - becomes a quagmire precisely because it states the problem without addressing the utterly changed context.

As I stated yesterday, our world is currently in a muddle, politically. The de facto reality is the senescence of the nation-state and the reality of international capital existing outside any controlling legal framework of accountability. It seems to me that even stating this reality cuts through so much of the nonsense one hears on the news and reads on the internet. Some seem to be aware of it, yet wish to address it in terms similar to those, say, of Matt Yglesias, who seem to land in territory that says, in effect, incremental bureaucratic management of capital is the best offer on the table, using the relative success of the mixed economies of western and northern Europe as models. Yet, he is pretty explicit in saying that his conclusion is the result of the current alternatives having exhausted themselves as practical failures.

While I have to admit admiring Marx as diagnostician, I think using him as a guide for moving forward in an age when, in many ways, his predicted withering of the state is already at hand, only under the auspices of transnational capital rather than the victorious proletariat, leaves us at sea. For this reason, as attractive as social democracy seems in many respects, its victories are those of the past, and cannot address our current reality.

Just one example of our current confusion is this comment:

It is an unhappy fact that if the Third World suddenly became inacessible (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) the 1st World would barely notice. If Africa, for example, suddenly vanished, it would change the economic course of the 1st World almost not at all.

The Third World is the First World's garbage pit, the source of our cheap labor, the source of our elite beverages and snacks (often at the expense of local, indigenous, sustainable agriculture), and contain vast amounts of currently inaccessible mineral wealth (only because of endemic political and social instability, mostly the result of hundreds of years of imperial exploitation). To state as bald fact that we would not even notice the disappearance of Africa is ignorance masquerading as thought.

I believe the problem is stated accurately, if not fully, at the two posts Quiggin has written. The solutions, however, still range over issues that by and large were settled decades ago.

So, how does a Christian who accepts this reality (very sketchy and certainly incomplete) move forward? In the first instance, I think we need to consider a range of questions from the traditional formulations of the doctrine of the state (at least in its Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed versions) to how we understand terms such as "power", "authority", "justice", and "law" in an age where these are decreasingly concentrated in state actors. Indeed, in many ways, while it seems reactionary, considering the traditional Roman Catholic understanding of the place and role of the secular power might be as good a starting point as any. From W. A. Whitehouse (pp. 69-70 of The Authority of Grace):

God created men, and the world in which He set them, with the purpose of establisheing the human race in supernatural communion with Himself. The Kingdom of God which accomplishes this purpose is realized in the relation between Christ and His believing people; that is to say, in the Church. The powers of Christ in His kingdom are communicated to His people, and though not realized in their fullness in any indivudal, they are completely deployed in the total hierarchically ordered life of the Church. The Kingdom may therefore be identified with the Church of Jesus Christ, made visible through the ages in the Roman communion, under the headship of the Pope.

The bearing of these powers on politics is to reinforce in man the active pricinple of natural community, which can be apprehended by the intellect, and affirmed in moral freedom in particular concrete acts which establish a State, whose end is "right order," expressed, preserved, and developed by the proper functions of the State in the community. The political life gives to all men the possibility of self-realization of their social nature, towards an end of natural self-sufficiency. . . . The Kingdom of God in the Church embraces that whole life of man, and it is from the Church that the believer learns true political life, in terms of "Natural Law." He learns that politics is concerned only with the natural life of man. As a political creature, made for community with his fellows, he affirms the State as an ordinance of God which guarantees the public order, and expresses the inner moral necessity that the lives of individuals be organized in community. He learns also to require of the State, to which he gives political allegiance, that it acknowledge the supreme status of the Church as above all other communities.

Lutheran thought, usually dubbed "Two Kingdoms theory", differs little with the sole exception that the "Kingdom of Man" as an ordinance of God bears particular responsibility for natural order - usually termed "the power of the sword", or what we would call "police power" - and this is a power and authority received directly from God under the orders of creation.

While moderns might blanch at the thought the state would derive its authority from the Church, and Protestants would certainly more than quibble over the declaration that the primacy of the Roman communion is the source of state power, the basic source of this doctrine lies, Biblically, in St. Paul's exhortation for the Christian communities of Rome to pray for their leaders precisely because they have received their power and authority from God. This basic Biblical formula, for all its contentiousness, remains the fount of much political theology, even in an age of political repression and mass death.

Yet, from a different vantage point, there are all sorts of questions that cannot be answered if we consider the question from this point of view. If we start, not from St. Paul, but from the crucified and risen Christ as Divine revelation in its fullness, how are to understand "justice", "power", and "authority"? For the last, do we turn, say, to Philippians 2 and the kenosis hymn, which recognizes that all authority is granted to the risen Christ, and all knees shall bow and all tongues confess the Lordship of Christ? Of what does the power and justice of God under the sign of the cross consist but the rejection of "power" as coercion, and the embrace of those who commit injustice? How can a state ever attempt to reign in the powers that be if it rejects the kind of temporal power thus expressed, and seeks justice through grace?

To begin, I think we need to consider that traditional Roman formulation with a more ecumenical mind and heart, and always keep the cross of Christ shadowing our words and thoughts. The order thus considered under "natural law" is not the traditional Natural Law of the Scholastics, even less of the high Enlightenment thinkers for whom the term meant something very different. Indeed, it has been my contention all along at this site that the word "nature", whether in its scientific or philosophical understanding, is far too muddled to serve as anything other than an obfuscatory role. It confuses rather than clarifies. Considered in light of the full revelation of God in the crucified and risen Christ, what is "natural" might just mean something completely different than we normally grant; indeed, as the whole created order is restored through the sacrifice of Christ, that would include, of course, the natural order, which includes it seems the political order.

These are tentative statements by way of prolegomenna, I guess. Thoughts, anyone?

The Demise Of The Roman Church? (UPDATE)

Even more than the scandal of concubinage a thousand years ago, or the Protestant Reformation half a millennium ago, the current daylight being shed on what can only be called systematic pederasty among priests in the Roman Catholic Church is doing more than just undermine what moral authority it may have left. Might we be seeing the real beginning of the end?

A Belgian Bishop has retired after admitting to long-term abuse of a family member. The US, Germany, Ireland, now Belgium - is it possible this is pandemic in the church as it is currently structured? Clearly, because he is so severely compromised, if he had any integrity left, Pope Benedict would resign, and the Curia would confront the entire situation with openness and confession. Any Cardinal compromised by this scandal would, I would think, be unfit to serve as pontiff. Of course, that might just mean an interregnum as worst case, perhaps an African or other non-Western Pope. In any case, the current power-structure of the Church is far too riddled with the taint of this systematic predatory behavior upon boys. Unless the Church comes clean, opens itself to external legal audit, forces the resignation of much of the current hierarchy, and perhaps installs a caretaker coalition until the various national legal messes can be sorted out, I do believe this has far reaching implications for the long term survival of the Roman Church.

UPDATE: Let me heighten the controversy just a smidge by offering the following view. As agents not just of a spiritual organization, but also of a foreign state - Vatican City is recognized by most countries as a sovereign state - how do individual nations respond to what can only be interpreted as a decades long attack upon the children of a variety of states by these agents?

Befuddled

So I turned from Stanley Hauerwas to a far more traditional, and quite dead, theologian - W. A. Whitehouse - and am now bewildered on what I think is an important question.

Can Christian theology, in its liberal Protestant variety (never mind the Roman Catholic, much less Orthodox varieties, let alone conservative Protestant mode) give a theological account and defense of the liberal republic as its exists? While I think it can certainly undermine the natural law and contract theories that underpin the American versions (via Locke and Montaigne), my question is really whether, by ridding ourselves of this ahistorical and metaphysically unsatisfying stuff, are we left with anything we, at the beginning of the 21st century, can hang our hats on with integrity? Considering the traditional Protestant Christian defense of the state derives, in part, from ideas rooted in western European feudal monarchies, in both their original Lutheran and Reformed traditions (not to mention the Anglican), I am at a loss to say how relevant they can be to our current situation.

Yet, the idea that the State is part of God's natural order for curbing our sinful nature, controlling our tendency toward destructive, and self-destructive behaviors seems, well, unAmerican to me. It reduces the state to a nanny of the worst sort. At the same time, secular liberal insistence on the primacy of the individual and that individual's pursuit of his or her individual self-interest as the root of social growth is so easily shown to be a god that failed. Do we start with traditional Scriptural passages in light both of their historical use and exegesis? Do we start with doctrinal affirmations concerning human sin and agency? Do we assume from the get-go the conflicted nature of the church and state?

In part, this is driven by a the reality that the nation-state, as it has existed for the past four centuries is increasingly superfluous. Might it not be necessary for the purposes of moving forward to concentrate less on a defense of an already antiquated socio-political form than to imagine something more forward-looking, something that addresses our current reality? Not necessarily "cosmopolitanism" as western European intellectuals have considered it, but certainly something approaching it?

Just some questions in search of honest responses . . .

Muisc For Your Monday (UPDATE)

OK, so it isn't for everybody, but Rammstein's extra-loud, very German Industrial Metal keeps my eyes open. I have to confess really liking the way the vernacular fits the music so well, even better than grunting Norwegian Death Metal.







With thanks for the suggestion, here is "Hallelujah", with a rough translation in the video!

Reasons For Hope

This post at Crooked Timber addresses itself to the related topics of the intellectual barrenness of the right, and the equally muddled discussion on the left. What I find most interesting about this entire topic is the opportunity provided for a truly Christian alternative in the midst of the chaos.

While it is true that the right is currently self-destructing, supporting ideas and policies untethered to anything resembling reality, Quiggin is also correct that the left has not offered any meaningful alternative, preferring to pick of the soft targets of the right in a display of intellectual bravura that belies the lack of serious alternatives, including engagement and the acceptance of certain conservative positions (Burke on the organic nature of society; Popper on historicism; Hayek on central planning) that have proved to be spot on.

In the midst of this intellectual vacuum, it seems at least possible that some in the church might offer the viability of an entirely different vocabulary, one that sets to one side the intellectually and practically exhausted categories of "left-right", "liberal-conservative", and speaks of human life, hope, and the common life in a wholly different way. The Christian humanist tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, certainly have a deep and wide well from which to draw; that they are relatively unknown to most people today would add the benefit of novelty to their introduction. Finally, offering as a serious counter to the barrenness of so much of our current discussions a way of speaking about living a fully human life that is not reducible to economic, sociological, or even political categories would force the discussion away from territory so tramped upon it really has nothing left to offer.

It would also, at a stroke, force the intelligentsia to address a topic it refuses to face squarely and honestly - the survival of uniquely Christian vocabularies on human agency and society long past the time they were supposed to slide in to oblivion. While many on the intellectual left simply assume that any religiously-based vocabulary is incoherent, they cannot give reasons for its ongoing vitality and increasing relevance in the face of the decline of other ways of speaking about living our lives in the world. There is simply no way the left can defend the position that "religion", in particular Christianity, is in fact dead precisely at the moment it might just offer new life to the musty back and forth of our public discourse.

So, in the graveyard of our current public discourse, I have to wonder why so many on the left are looking for something living among the dead. Might it not be possible to claim that the Christian message of real, abundant human life under the sign of the cross of God offers some hope to a world bereft of any defense against the intractable march of the machinery of economic and military death?

Prior Questions - Hauerwas On The Church, Marriage, Sex, And Capitalism

Reading Stanley Hauerwas' account of his own vicissitudes on the United Methodist Church's Study Commission on Homosexuality in the early 1990's reminds me of my first encounter with my seminary advisor, Dr. James Logan, also a member. Logan was telling me of his own situation, leaving due to health concerns, but expressing his own frustrations at the hopeless divisions and lack of communication and common ground.* There is irony in one simple reality - had Logan sided with Stanley Hauerwas, there might have been the beginning of a real healthy discussion of the topic, one that might have transformed the entire process and made the Church's statement something worth reading.

The short essay Hauerwas includes in A Better Hope on his time on the commission is entitled "Resisting Capitalism", which should give the reader a clue that he is approaching the topic from a completely different angle. Indeed, early on Hauerwas insists that he attempted to frame the discussion not in terms the rest of the commission members were attempting - he even puts quotes around the description, "science" - and says that he tried, and ultimately failed, to turn to the discussion in to a theological statement concerning marriage, sexuality, promiscuity, and childbearing. His reasons were simple. If the members of the commission could formulate a distinctively Christian theological vocabulary about these topics, it might be possible to discuss homosexuality in the vocabulary that emerged. Instead, the commission seemed bound and determined to restrict itself to the question of scientific evidence on human sexuality and innate sexual preference.

What is interesting is that had such a distinctive theological vocabulary emerged, the church's ongoing muddling on the question of the place of sexual minorities in the denomination might just have become a model for others to follow, and been the beginning of a real breakthrough on all sorts of related topics (which was, I believe, Hauerwas' intent; he says at one point the church can't even muster a good theological discussion on marriage and divorce, promiscuity and fidelity, so it's no wonder it is at sea on the topic of sexual minorities).

One of the ways Hauerwas attempts to change the entire vocabulary of the discussion is to remove the question of sexual identity from the realm of "science" to the realm of the economic superstructure (to adopt some Marxist terminology). He quotes Nicholas Boyle's Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market From Hegel to Heaney on the relationship between capitalism and identity:

Sexual preference, once detached from the process of bodily reproduction, loses touch with the necessities and enters the realm of play - it becomes part of the entertainment industry, a choice to be catered for, but not a constraint on producers. Indeed, worldwide consumerism makes use of homosexuality as a means of eliminating the political constraints which regulate sour role as producers: if marriage is redefined as a long-term affective partnetership, so that it may be either homosexual or heterosexual, the essentially reproductive nature of male and female bodies is no longer given institutional (and therefore political) expression. Bodies are seen as the locu only of consumption, not of production; production is thereby repressed further into our collective unconscious, and producers, particularly women, are deprived of the political means of protest against exploitation.

Hauerwas notes, immediately following this quote (on p. 50 of the text):

Capitalism thrives on short-term commitments. The ceaseless drive for innovation is but the way to undercut labor's power by making the skills of the past irrelevant for tomorrow. Indeed, capitalism is the ultimate form of deconstruction, because how better to keep labor under control than through the scarcity produced through innovation? All the better that human relationships are ephemeral, because lasting commitments prove to be inefficient in ever-expanding markets. Against such a background the church's commitment to maintain marriage as lifelong monogamous fidelity may well prove to be one of the most powerful tactics we have to resist capitalism.

In this context, then, the issue is not the science of human sexual desire as a part of an individual's genetic and developmental make-up. Instead, sexuality becomes subsumed under the issues of human agency in an age of increasing capitalistic exploitation. Seen from this vantage point, attempting to draw upon a theological vocabulary on matters of marriage and divorce, promiscuity and fidelity, cuts across old (and largely nonsensical) "liberal-conservative" lines, and attempts to draw out the implications of the church's endorsement of fully-lived, fully-human lives, under the shadow of the crucified and risen Christ with reference not to science, but to the church's witness in a world governed by the destructive logic of the global market.

Do I think this would satisfy many whose commitment to the issue of supporting sexual minorities in the life of the church? Probably not. Hauerwas admits this sounds like it supports certain "conservative" social positions, but insists this is not the case. He is correct. It does so only if one continues to think in the old, "scientific", sociological categories that even now dominate so much of the church's discourse on these and other topics. If one begins with the premise that the issue is the church's witness and fidelity to the God manifest in Jesus Christ, a whole and wholly different understanding of these topics can emerge that challenges all our presumptions, liberal or conservative.

*The report of the study commission, released prior to the 1992 General Conference, was a muddled affair, with the two sides, liberal and conservative, hopelessly divided. Nothing was resolved.

Shock To The System

In one of a pair of posts libertarian Julian Sanchez has written that has sparked a whole lot of discussion concerning what he terms "epistemic closure" (an inartful if technically correct description of the current right-wing refusal to seriously engage liberal and left-wing arguments), he offers the phenomenon of Constance McMillen, a teenage lesbian in small-town Mississippi, who petitioned to be allowed to attend her prom with her girlfriend. Specifically, he recounts the flood of emails received at a site dedicated to the issue from all over the world that, in essence, must have shattered their view of themselves as doing nothing out of the ordinary.

Let me tell my own version of this kind of thing, only from the other side.

In June, 1994, my wife and I were preparing to move to southern Virginia where she would take up her first appointment as pastor of Centenary UMC in Jarratt, VA. She was to be ordained a deacon under the old order of ordination at the Annual Conference that year, held in Norfolk. Her mother came out from Illinois, and we took a suite on the beach in Virginia Beach, just a hop, skip, and a couple jumps away. While staying there, I decided to pick up a copy of the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, which would be the paper we would have access to while in Jarratt.

At the time, there was much buzz concerning a custody case in which a woman sought custody of her grandchild because her daughter, who currently had custody, was a lesbian (this case became the basis for a TV movie featuring Valerie Bertinelli). It should go without saying that I found the whole thing nonsensical; of course the woman had no reason or privilege under law to take a child from her birth mother solely because that woman was a lesbian. It was absurd on its face.

While sitting in my suite one morning, coffee slowly bringing wakefulness, I read an editorial that not only supported the woman's case, but did so in a manner I found blatantly dishonest. The editors' contention was that the child's mother was an unfit parent because she admitted, under oath, to breaking Virginia's sodomy laws. Without actually referencing the particularities, the editors said that, as an admitted violator of the law, this woman was, ipso facto an unfit parent.

My initial reaction - and I am being honest about this - was to consider the editorial a joke, a kind of National Lampoon-style hyperconservative argument to show how ridiculous it all really is.

Except, it dawned on me they were completely serious.

Now, I suppose that my own relatively young age (I was 28) and inexperience (I had lived my whole life sheltered from the far reaches of conservative ideas, and was in the waning days of four years in a seminary of a liberal mainline Christian denomination in the nation's capital) certainly played a part in the shock I felt. I still think the argument, at least as presented by the editors, was intellectually dishonest. After all, the "law" the woman "broke" was admitting, under oath, to performing oral sex on her female partner. Under this standard, what set of parents would be "fit", precisely because they, too, engage in "sodomy" as defined by the Commonwealth's statutes?* Their real objection wasn't that she was "an admitted criminal". They didn't like that she was a lesbian who had custody of a child. Everything else was nonsensical drivel.

When it dawned on me the editors were serious, it also occurred to me that they might not be outliers, but represent a good chunk of opinion, the thought of people in the area to which I was moving.

So, I sympathize with the folks in that little Mississippi town who realized, via the miracle of the internet, that their insistence that local traditions not be messed with in the name of oddments like "equal protection" and "respect for diversity" found themselves the target of so much vitriol. It can, indeed, be quite stunning to realize that not everyone holds the same set of ideas. It can be even more stunning to hear from people who hold your own views in contempt, as a sign of one's own malicious nature.

I do not know what the solution to this particular conundrum, if it is such, might be. A start might just be a willingness to move beyond caricature, and engage in substantive discussion, not excluding rancor but also not including a refusal to grant a certain benefit of the doubt to one's ideological opponents.

*I do not know for sure, but I think it probable that Virginia's overbroad sodomy statutes were invalidated when the Supreme Court declared such unconstitutional.

"God never tires of miracles"

The possibility of reconciled memory between peoples who have wronged and been wronged by one another is but another name for a church. - Stanley Hauerwas

I opened A Better Hope not quite at random this morning. I searched the table of contents and decided that, if I was going to read Hauerwas, I had better read something the title of which kind of irked me. The essay I chose was perfect in that regard: "Why Time Cannot and Should Not Heal the Wounds of History, But Time has been and can be Redeemed". Originally a presentation given in Northern Ireland at a conference entitled "A Time To Heal", Hauerwas offers the deeply theological, deeply cruciform idea that our most cherished desire as human beings - for community, even with those with whom we share a bloody past - must not and cannot be achieved through "forgetfulness". On the contrary, using examples from American history, the Balkan conflicts, and South Africa, Hauerwas is adamant that it is only through remembering, a remembering done in a certain context (the church) that real reconciliation is ever achieved. He calls the politics of this kind of real reconciliation, one that keeps alive the memories of mutual animosity and violence, that never quite erases the blood from our lives and lands, "illiberal".

The main point he is making is one that our too-often conflicted identities miss for its simplicity and clarity - it is God in the person of Jesus crucified and resurrected that redeems. Part of that redemption includes the redemption of time and memory. We learn to live together as we learn we pray together, he says at one point, and while that seems a facile statement in light of his insistence his essay that he wishes to overcome simplistic, superficial pieties, it really isn't. When we learn we pray to the same God, we are granting that we pray to the God who has made something that was formerly impossible - living together in the full knowledge of mutual hatreds - possible. It is God who redeems, who forgives, who makes not just the future possible, but the past as well.

His comments at the beginning of the essay are particularly interesting. Drawing on the American predicament of race, our peculiar modernist insistence that only through "forgetting" is reconciliation between black and white possible, is belied by the reality that we are a people for whom the past as history, sadly, insists it has no hold. Thus, the intertwining of our collective stories, black and white, as an American story is lost in a confused and well-meant but ultimately futile attempt to live forward without actually creating a vocabulary with which we can address one another in the fullness of our shared history. Thus, the endless cycle of resentment, guilt, fear, and rage becomes unbreakable precisely because, at a fundamental level, we continue to hope for a better future without acknowledging the on-going reality that the past still grips us.

I must confess that I picked up Hauerwas with reluctance. Part of me wants to hear what he has to say. Yet, part of me also finds him aggravating. Reading this essay, however, is a nice surprise precisely because I was inclined to reject it just from the title. Instead, I allowed myself to listen to his words, and to hear his insistence on the reality of God as the only true redeemer. As a critique of so much of the platitudinous liberalism that surrounds us, it is a marvelous theological statement. It is also humbling because it reminds us that we need to awaken from our dogmatic slumber, the dream that is the modern promise of a bright future with no past, in order to truly live as a people together.

Saturday Rock Show

At the Transatlantic show on Tuesday, in the midst of performing an entire album without a break, and three pieces each roughly about half an hour long, they performed this song, the title track from their second studio release. Neal and guitarist Roine Stolt performed a lovely instrumental duet while Neal sang.

Rage Against The Machine

Feodor expresses his rage at what seems to be Divine apathy in the face of massive human suffering. Despite a certain Satanic advocacy on my part, I do understand. The earthquake that struck Haiti, the loss of life, the structural, political, and other impediments to recovery create even more suffering. It makes no sense. If we have a God that does, indeed, love us as we claim, how do we account for the absence of care when a people, already suffering the slings and arrows of centuries of imperialism, racism, exploitation, neglect, and (too-often imposed) despotism now have to cope with a quarter-million dead because of a natural disaster.

Rather than hector, I pose the problem without offering any answer of my own. The dead very often cry out for answers and we, the living, find ourselves voiceless in the face of their pleas. Thoughts?

The DaVinci Code On My Car

This is truly stupid. It's one thing for me to say this guy is kind of ignorant. It's another thing for me to be glad he parades that ignorance for all the world to see, rather than hiding his light under a bushel.

For the VA DMV to recall his vanity tag based on a kind of convoluted "symbolic message" . . .

Back when I lived in the Commonwealth, they DMV recalled a tag in the northern VA Washington suburbs that read "Two Dykes". People screamed and hollered, including myself. As far as I'm concerned, even if this is some secret code praising a German dictator against whom the US fought a war, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of human beings, if this dork in VA wants to drive around letting people know where he stands, so much the better.

You either allow vanity plates or you don't.

Sorry, but this is a free speech issue for me.

I drive a Kia. Next thing you know, people will find a secret message encoded in that word, or perhaps the model, a Sentra. This is truly, awfully stupid and bordering on unconstitutional infringement.

Owning Up To One's Collective Past

This post at Crooked Timber considers the question of "guilt-by-association" vis-a-vis contemporary "progressives" and their century-old counterparts using the same name who also pushed eugenics. Surprisingly, I have to say I disagree with the notion that we to the left on the political scale do not owe some kind of thorough explanation as to these more scabrous details of our heritage. In them lie the roots of much of the white, middle-class arguments for a pro-life position, i.e., they sound an awful lot like Margaret Sanger (a progressive, advocate for birth-control, and eugenicist extraordinaire) saying that we don't need all these poor, dark-skinned people overwhelming us with their babies. We should be adult enough at least to admit there is something disturbing about a bunch of upper-middle class white women claiming they are speaking on behalf of the poor and minorities who might have different opinions.

In any event, another reason I find this fascinating is that, over the years as I've been reading and writing on the internet, I have come across many, many examples of people who take the Christian Church to task for, specifically, the Crusades, the witch-hunts, various pogroms official and otherwise, slavery, racism, sexism, and other sundry things progressives reflexively find distasteful. I have argued that (a) the Church does indeed need to agree that granting tacit or overt approval to these and scores of other crimes needs to be repented in the active sense of acceptance and doing something to counter; and (b) there are denominations out there that are doing just that, and congregations within denominations, and persons within congregations, all working to make amends by acknowledging these things as part of our collective heritage, and working to erase the stain from our current lives.

Would, I wonder, these same folks argue that we need not acknowledge the role of liberals in slavery. Would they argue we no longer need to make amends for the ongoing consequences of liberal support for policies that discriminate against African-Americans, Indians, Latinos, Asians. As I support government reparations to the ancestors of slavery, and would go further and support the same policy for the ancestors of Chinese coolies who were, in essence, imported slave labor brought here to help build the railroads, part of that stems from a sense of current debt owed due to past injustice. A person, a society, a group needs to understand and own the entirety of her and their own collective past, and accept the bad with the good, in order to move forward. Indeed, part of the problem with the contemporary conservative movement (as evidenced from the post linked) is the refusal of contemporary conservatives to accept, for example, that the ideological divisions of a previous generation were not also partisan (thus the Republican nonsense concerning the role of Republicans in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thus proving conservatives are not, in fact, racist).

Part of moving forward is a complete accounting for the past, not just those parts of which we are proud. This is true for individuals, parties, political movements, and whole nations. This is a lesson we forced on the losers of the Second World War; the victors of the First World War tried it a bit ham-handedly. In this case, I see no reason at all for we modern liberals to agree that, yes, progressive politicians and political activists of a century ago were, indeed eugenicsts. We should then take the next step and say, without shame, that it is remarkable how far our movement has become, indeed how scientific precisely because we are able, without any problem at all, to reject that kind of nonsense and embrace, and be embraced, by all sorts of persons precisely because they understand the goal of leftist politics is a better, more just society for all.

Critics . . .

(via Scott on Facebook, with thanks)

Hold on to your hats and opinions, folks. Some authors, including those we love, get their asses handed to them. Sometimes by literary figures, sometimes by folks like Samuel Johnson who had more opinions than he should have. This is linked and copied in fun.

8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898)

About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up 'The Old Curiosity Shop', and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot's. If a novelist can't write where is the beggar.

9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000)

How to read 'Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone'? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov

Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity -- all this is difficult to admire.

24. J.D.Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962)

I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.

And my favorite . . .

Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. - Mark Twain

Justice Delayed But Not Denied

The link is to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, but I heard the story last night on BBC World Service.

Argentina's last dictator was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison Tuesday for kidnappings and torture during the nation's 1976-1983 military regime.

Reynaldo Bignone, 82, was convicted along with five other former military officers in 56 cases involving torture, illegal detentions and other crimes in one of Argentina's largest torture centers, the Campo de Mayo army base.

These events, over thirty years past, seem more part of an historical record than the stuff of court cases. While the wheels of official justice occasionally grind slow, they do grind, and former General Reynaldo Bignone will spend the remaining time he has left on earth in jail.

For those who wish for the Obama DOJ to go after Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others for doing many of the same things, we should remember that sometimes, a full accounting awaits the comforting distance of some time. With this conviction, Argentina shows the United States how one deals with national "leaders" who flaunt the rule of law in the name security. It may take time, but at some point, a prosecutor will put at least some of those responsible in the tank for their crimes and we, the people, will be able to say that we have, finally and fully, restored the rule of law.

Music For Your Monday

The summer of 2001 I went on a music buying binge. During the days around the birth of our younger daughter, Miriam, I saw a CD from a band that included Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. Being a huge fan, I bought it because of him, and the fact they did a cover of a Procol Harum song, "In Held (Twas In I)".

The day Miriam came home from the hospital, I sat in our living room, with Moriah on one side, and a tiny Miriam on the other, and headphones on, listening to Transatlantic's SMPTe. The first song, "All Of The Above", is not exactly for the faint of heart. Thirty minutes long, it had better deliver something to keep one from hitting the "next" button. I sat and rocked my two daughters to sleep with that song in my ears, and was transfixed.

The band was a multiple side-project. Portnoy and Spock's Beard-founder Neal Morse (multi-instrumentalist and lead singer/songwriter) had asked bassist Pete Trewavas from the venerable British band Marillion and long-time Swedish prog-rocker Roine Stolt from The Flower Kings to gather together and put together some music. In the early 2000's, Morse became a born-again Christian and left both his own band and Transatlantic. But, it seems time has done its work, and they got together and released some new music last summer (The Whirlwind) and, now, are touring. Tomorrow night, they are playing the Park West theater in Chicago, and I will be there.







That funny looking guy with the long hair on stage in the last video is Daniel Gildenlow, leader of Sweden's Pain Of Salvation, hired as a side-man.

Lost In Space Program

Like his predecessor, Pres. Obama has announced ambitious plans in regards to the exploration of space. As I wrote last summer, I fail to see where any serious attempt at human exploration of Mars, absent other, practical reasons, makes any sense.

Part of the problem with all the talk of human space exploration misses a couple points. While it might be true that humans have always pushed the boundaries of exploration, they did so in the past either to flee various threats (the Huns, Magyars, and other eastern ethnic groups that started settling the eastern Danube basin in the times of the late Roman Empire did so because they were fleeing Mongol and Tartar oppression) or to search for exploitable natural resources (the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and British weren't exactly doing what they did in the 16th and 17th centuries for the good of humanity; they wanted to get rich). We are, slowly, becoming sophisticated enough politically to understand that we cannot flee current threats to human survival on earth, but need to address them politically. While escape certainly might seem an attractive alternative to some should those efforts fail, they still should be a last resort.

As a kid, I remember my older brother - an avid, rabid, science fiction reader - talking about the possibility of mining asteroids, mining other planets. It seems to me if there was money to be made doing that kind of thing, the mining companies and others would either be pressuring the government to get the ball rolling, or designing and building their own, private fleets for doing so. They aren't. Neither the Moon nor Mars (that planet that seems to dominate discussion of human exploration at the moment) have enough mineral wealth that would be exploitable without a serious investment in either terraforming or otherwise making life comfortable enough for those who would do the work.

The natural barriers to human space exploration are multiple. We are, like it or not, bound to earth by biology. The human body barely tolerates the stresses of space flight; zero-gravity leeches bone and muscle mass, and there is as yet no way to counter it. The assaults upon our bodies by unshielded cosmic rays are manifold.

Then, of course, there is the turn-around time involved. Even with improved technology, a trip to Mars takes months. The cost of keeping human beings fit and comfortable for the duration of the trip out and back, it seems to me, outweighs any gain that might come from actually planting our feet on Martia firma.

While I know there is something romantic, dashing, about the prospects of human space travel, I for one just don't see it as a viable policy initiative. Robotic space exploration has been extremely effective and even popular. I say, we should go with our strengths. While every President since the end of the Apollo program has iterated American commitment to human space exploration, the actual investment in it has been minuscule, for a very good reason - it just doesn't make sense.

Fifteen Years . . .

I was sitting down to check CNN as my lunch was getting ready. Like the day nine years before when the Challenger exploded, the scene before me made no sense, because my mind refused to countenance what I was seeing. Then, again like the Challenger disaster, it gradually sank in. Something horrible had happened.

What is most odd, and frightening, about our current climate is how this single event, rather than serving as a caution to those on the right to temper their rhetoric, and consider the dangers of talking about tyranny and the end of America and whatnot, has become a focal point of so much discussion. There are those out there who wish to own this event, and celebrate the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, as a great patriot. That should be enough of a caution.

Times are passing people by at such a rapid pace, the desire to turn the clock back to the previous decade seems overwhelming. Many desire a return to the prosperity of the 1990's. Some others to Republican ascendancy. Still others want to delegitimize yet another Democratic President by any means necessary. Our times are not theirs, however. Our challenges are greater precisely because we need to move forward rather than glance back at what has been.

Yet, we should never forget what one person, intelligent, resourceful, and bent on destruction, can do. The fallen in Oklahoma City - a city some of whose residents I have come to know and love - should be a constant reminder that "government" is not some abstract "thing", but people just doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. Sometimes, "government" includes a space for the children of these people, and on April 19, 1995, there were children in the Murrah Federal Office Building. Faceless bureaucrats? Rather, our neighbors.

I Am Better Than Everyone Who Criticizes Me (UPDATE I, II, III . . . VII)

Please note the following is a parody of a typical Glenn Greenwald column.

Because of my vast experience and superior understanding, there is not a single blogger, commentator, author, or other authority who can lay a finger on me. My arguments here, here, here, and here prove that to any disinterested reader and observer. That isn't enough for some, however. Rather than simply accept both my superior arguments and innate purity, they pretend to be offering arguments that substantively disprove my own claims. In doing so, however, they not only prove their own shallowness, but their willingness to serve the powerful at the expense of the Constitution. All the while, they attack me personally, making even more plain their own stupidity and lack of imagination.

The most blatant stupidity is offered as a serious argument.

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
see how they fly
I'm crying
Sitting on a cornflake
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you've been a naughty boy
you let your face grow long

I am the eggman
they are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g' joob

Mr. city policeman sitting
pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky
See how they run
I'm crying
I'm crying, I'm crying
Yellow matter custard
Dripping from a dead dog's eye
Crabalocker fishwife
Pornographic priestess
Boy, you've been a naughty girl
you let your knickers down

I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g' joob

Sitting in an English garden
waiting for the sun
If the sun don't come you get a tan
from standing in the English rain

I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g' joob

Expert, texpert choking smokers
don't you think the joker laughs at you
See how they smile like pigs in a sty
See how they snide
I'm crying
Semolina pilchard
climbing up the Eiffel tower
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking
Edgar Allan Poe

I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo goo g' joob
Goo goo g' joob
Goo goo g' goo
goo goo g' joob goo
juba juba juba
juba juba juba
juba juba juba juba
juba juba

Obviously, the ravings of someone who has not paid attention to my cogent argument here, let alone the substantive point I made in an interview here. Anyone who takes these criticisms seriously does not have the US Constitution in the forefront as their sole concern, as I do. Neither are they intelligent. Any mention of my political beliefs, no matter how obvious, is a clear indication they have no idea what they're talking about, because even though I know my own purity precisely because of my political and social stance, they cannot bring that up unless they are willing to grant that purity that lives in my heart forever.

Since I am the lone voice of true Constitutional wisdom in a world filled with neo-conservative hacks it should go without saying that their criticisms have the most base motives imaginable; they differ little from members of the Bush Administration, really, who all belong behind bars. Not because that has been adjudicated, but just because I say so.

The lack of recognition for my own simplicity, let alone genius, is evident in my opponents refusal to engage the central point of every argument I make - it's all about the law, except when it's about their own cupidity and blindness. My observations on my opponents lack of personal hygiene and truly horrendous ugliness is not at all an ad hominem, but rather the objective description of their current condition. Any mention of error on my part, however, is instantly recognizable as an incoherent attack on my personality.

So, being above it all does come at a price. I am attacked from all sides, even as none of the criticisms actually address my main points. I can take it, though, because I am a brave soul, fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves.

UPDATE I: Obviously, this reader just doesn't get it at all.

And after calming me down with some orange slices and some fetal spooning
E.T. revealed to me his singular purpose,
He said you are the chosen one.
The one who will deliver the message.
A message of hope for those who choose to hear it
And a warning for those who do not.
Me, the chosen one
They chose me
And I didn't graduate from fucking high school!

You had better
You had better
You had better
You had better listen

None of this has anything to do with what I wrote. If this critic had been smarter, a better reader, a more careful observer, he might not have made the fundamental mistake of not understanding how clear I was in what I wrote above. What could be clearer?

UPDATE II: This discussion strays way off the mark. Perhaps the writer should learn English.

UPDATE III: To restate the obvious, this critic has no idea what I wrote.

UPDATE III: While I might be able to grant the possibility that there is some substance to this, doing so would undermine a key point - my own simplicity and purity, which makes all my arguments unassailable (as I pointed out here, here, and most cogently here).

UPDATE IV: Neocons need no answer other than the back of my hand.

UPDATE V: Finally, a worthy opponent!

Who let the dogs out
(woof, woof, woof, woof)
(woof, woof, woof, woof)
(woof, woof, woof, woof)
(woof, woof, woof, woof)

Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof)
Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof)

(woof, woof, woof, woof)

When the party was nice, the party was jumpin' (Hey, Yippie, Yi, Yo)
And everybody havin' a ball (Hah, ho, Yippie Yi Yo)
I tell the fellas "start the name callin'" (Yippie Yi Yo)
And the girls report to the call
The poor dog show down

Except, alas, it doesn't address something central to my position. So, yet another loser.

UPDATE VI: Ditto.

UPDATE VII: This commenter makes an excellent observation.

Go fuck yourself.

Need I say more?

An Appeal For Information

I read this review of a biography of C. Wright Mills, and a couple things occurred to me. First, that I really don't know much more than that he was a radical critic during a time of intellectual conformity (a pretty typical view, and one challenged by the biography under review).

Second, what occurred to me is that much of Mills description of the way the interests of the various sectors of American elite society intersect reminds me of my own thoughts on my first reading of Noam Chomsky. His description of the way consensus is formed on foreign policy in America is remarkably similar to the description of Mills' The Power Elite given in this review.

So, has there been any work done on the relationship between Mills and Chomsky? Are Mills' works still available?

Criticism, Free Speech, & Responsibility

I got thinking about the intertwining of freedom and responsibility, the Tea Baggers and our public discourse, and then I read some remarks Bill Clinton gave in Oklahoma City to honor the fallen from the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City.

But I think that the point I’m trying to make is, I like the debate. This “tea party” movement can be a healthy thing if they’re making us justify every penny of taxes we raised and every dollar of public money we spend. And they say they’re for limited government and a balanced budget; when I left office, we had the smallest workforce since Eisenhower and we had four surpluses for the first time in 70 years.

--snip--

... By all means, keep fighting. By all means, keep arguing. But remember words have consequences as much as actions do. And what we advocate commensurate with our position and responsibility, we have to take responsibility for. We owe that to Oklahoma City.

We owe it to keep on fighting, keep on arguing. They didn’t vote for me in Oklahoma in 1996. It was still a Republican state. But I loved them anyway, and I will till the day I die, because when this country was flat on its back mourning their loss, they rallied around the employees of the national government and they rallied around the human beings who had lost everything, and they rallied around the elemental principle that what we have in common is more important than our differences. And that’s why our Constitution makes our freedoms last – because of that bright line.

Just prior to this beautiful paean to the power of our freedoms to transcend the petty differences of politics, he also said the following, which puts these remarks in their proper context.

Before the bombing occurred, there was a sort of fever in America in the early 1990s. First, it was a time, like now, of dramatic upheaval. A lot of old arrangements had changed. The things that anchored peoples’ lives and gave a certainty to them had been unraveling. Some of them, by then, for 20 years. ... And there were more and more people who had a hard time figuring out where they fit in. More and more people who had a very difficult time living with confidence and optimism in the face of change. It is true that we see some of that today.

... But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or reduce our passion from the positions we hold -- but that the words we use really do matter, because there's this vast echo chamber and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody.

But one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.

Look, I'm glad they're fighting over health care and everything else. Let them have at it. But I think all you have to do is read the paper everyday to see how many people there are who are deeply, deeply troubled. We know, now, that there are people involved in groups – these “hatriot” groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others – 99 percent of them will never do anything they shouldn’t do. But there are people who advocate violence and anticipate violence.

In other words, a certain amount of common sense should suggest to at least some people that, in w setting in which the inflammatory rhetoric of an unknown, angry citizen suddenly becomes the voice of an entire movement - how many times in recent months have we had the most extreme voices become The Voice of the Tea Baggers? - it might be wise to consider the possibility that all the talk of violence, of civil war, treating difference as moral error, obsessing on already-disproved nonsense like the Birthers and Obama's alleged socialism and ties to The Weather Underground; all of this might just lead some people to consider violence as a proper response?

This same rhetoric, turning difference in to moral error, has led to the murder of abortion providers and the bombing of women's health clinics. This same rhetoric has led to threats on the lives of law makers. This same rhetoric makes it impossible to discuss the merits or demerits of policy precisely because too many amplified voices on the right do not see merit in any policy offered by the Democratic Party. The current Republican members of the Senate display their solidarity with this view by blocking legislation and Administration political appointees. How far-fetched is it to wonder whether or not it might be possible for some who swallow whole the nonsense on the right to consider violence as a necessary evil to fight the threats to our freedoms?

Yet, Clinton here, and Obama on many occasions, and many others, have said the question is not the Tea Bag crowd, or the debate. Pres. Clinton expressly supports the Tea Baggers. I have no problem with them, either. I disagree with their policy stances, to be sure, but that doesn't mean they should be silenced; on the contrary, the more voices the merrier.

The issue is not the Tea Bag crowd and their legitimacy; it is understanding that with great freedom comes responsibility. I would add this goes for the Left as well as the Right. By highlighting the fringe elements of the Tea Party protest movement, giving the voices of racists and hate-mongers as the "leaders" of this still-nascent, coalescing movement, the Left too often falls in to the same trap. How often do we read scurrilous, sneering posts on the ignorance and silliness of the Tea Partiers? How often do we see, accompanying a story on this or that outrageous statement by an attendee at a Tea Party rally, the assumption that this voice is the voice of the multitude?

Many on the Left are comforted by the thought that, yes, indeed, these ignoramuses are all there is to the Tea Party. That makes us as much a part of the problem as those who voice these outrageous comments. We become part of what Clinton called "the echo chamber" - and to our peril.

So, responsibility extends not just to the Tea Party itself and its supporters in right-wing media. It also extends to those on the Left who get baited by instances of extremist rhetoric in to pretending, or actually believing, it is the voice of the movement itself. This further erodes the our public square, making it that much harder to hear legitimate voices of protest and questions of priorities. We can mock the Tea Party as nonsensical, violent, and extreme without considering the possibility they might have a point worth listening to.

I would extend the necessity of responsibility to those on the Left who wish to marginalize the Tea Party by playing this game. In our country, these voices should be heard and considered on the merits.