This I Believe

For a couple years now, I've been thinking of submitting an essay to the This I Believe project. I've listened to a whole lot of them, and am variously moved, amused, confounded, and generally supported in my own sense that the sheer variety of human reactions to the universe, to life, to all the things around us is something to embrace and celebrate. So, as they say, here goes nothing.

I believe life, a mystery filled with beauty and terror, offers us the unique opportunity to discover the one thing that allows us to make our way through the flurry of experiences around us: a life focused on the needs of others, variously in the midst of the banality of the day-to-day or immersed in joy, or perhaps blinded by one horror or another is more powerful than any weapon, more potent than any drug, more threatening than any political slogan.

Nearly two decades of life as a clergy spouse has taught me how little of all that happens, both wonderful and awful, has to do with me. Rather than insist it is only intelligible if I make it mine, I recognize the integrity these events have as events in the lives of other people. My own and only proper attitude should be a truly human being with these men and women as they search for the resources to find their way through, whether it is the joy of the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one, a job found that opens doors and opportunities, the horror of domestic violence, the confusion of a loved one lost in addiction, or the criss-crossing lines of racial, gender, and sexual discrimination and hatreds. Injecting myself in to the midst of these many and varied experiences steals from the people in the midst of the them the freedom and duty to live in them and through them; the best I can ever offer is the reality that they are not and will not be alone, even as the world seems to collapse around them, or perhaps opens up in ways that they couldn't have anticipated.

As the father of two girls, I have tried as hard as I can to teach them never to lose that sense of wonder and awe as their lives unfold. It hasn't always been easy to restrain my desire to intercede for them as they've experienced the many physical and emotional pains that life brings. All the same, what kind of parent would I be if I taught them that it was possible to erase from one's life any experience that was overwhelming? Being with them, without interceding for them, has given them the chance to learn how to live with broken arms and broken hearts without me telling them how they should respond. With one caveat: that they should always respond, even if it is only tears or laughter, disgust or boredom, a time of happiness or mourning.

In St. John's Gospel, the night before he is crucified, Jesus tells his disciples that there is no greater love than laying down one's life for one's friends. While this certainly includes the willingness to physically die for those we love, I believe it also means we lay down our self-centered desire to make the world about us, to be with others in a spirit of love and fellow-feeling that may well be the most true expression of the Kingdom of God there can ever be.

There's A Right Way To Do Things

A couple days ago, I got around to posting some thoughts on the whole Kony2012 video and campaign. I have to admit, I was reluctant to do so. There are many, many people who support Invisible Children, and find in the video something laudable. I couldn't refrain from saying something out of fear either of being misunderstood or being told I was missing the point (which is a claim I never quite understand) or . . . I don't know, maybe supporting or even enabling Kony and the LRA because I was making clear my feelings about the many inadequacies of the Kony2012 video and campaign.

The last, of course, is so much fun. Being told that I support a psychopath makes my day.

On Facebook, one person in particular defended the video and campaign with that marvelous stand-by that it at least served the purpose of educating an until-then ignorant public about the activities of the LRA, so it had achieved something laudable, right?

That's the kind of counter-question I find difficult to counter. Yet, it seems a kind of special pleading, as if all the other criticisms have merit, but, hey, people know a name now, right?

Than I came across this, thanks to Rachel Rosenfelt on Facebook.

It is the campaign’s insistence on the exceptional nature of Kony’s crimes that produce both Kony and his victims as Outside, exceptional to our everyday. Indeed, as political philosopher Sayres Rudy pointed out to me, anti-Kony and knee-jerk anti-anti-Kony may “contribute to a broader pattern of accepting the systemic instrumentalization and massacre of innocents, by rendering Kony/Invisible Children as exceptional instead of typical, allowing their offenses to constitute similar systemic actions as normal, legitimate, or acceptable.” His further insight is that American soldiers who are often neither old enough to drink or vote are sent to kill, but we don’t think of these as child soldiers slaughtering innocents.

If the discussion around #Kony2012 stops without exploring these connections, we are left not with politics but with elite-liberal mutual masturbation over the way to address the exceptional rather than the systemic

This New Inquiry article was a treasure trove of links, leading the way down an alternative path toward answering the questions posed by those who find in the Invisible Children video any little scrap of virtue worth saving. One of those is TMS Ruge who addresses the whole matter of "awareness-raising" head on:

“Raising awareness” (as vapid an exercise as it is) on the level that IC does, costs money. Loads and loads of money. Someone has to pay for the executive staff, fancy offices, and well, that 30-minute grand-savior, self-crowning exercise in ego stroking—in HD—wasn’t free. In all this kerfuffle, I am afraid everyone is missing the true aim of IC’s brilliant marketing strategy. They are not selling justice, democracy, or restoration of anyone’s dignity. This is a self-aware machine that must continually find a reason to be relevant. They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.

Cause, you know, that works so well in the first world.

Further down, Ruge writes the following about The Women of Kireka:

The Women of Kireka are the most resilient group of individuals that I know. Spend a day with them and you will wonder how they manage to so calmly describe to you watching their entire families burned alive, their husbands and children hacked to death, in front of them. They do it so calmly, methodically, with such articulate prose that it leaves your soul victimized for it’s privilege. Yet they don’t pause from rolling a perfectly crafted paper bead for a beautiful necklace. They don’t waste their time lamenting the lack of justice for the fallen or the abducted. Why? Because it doesn’t bring back the dead, it doesn’t dissolve the horrific images of their huts burning, or ease the scars borne of running scared into the night.

Instead, they want work and respect and business to be able to make decisions that move their lives along. They want desperately to forget and rebuild anew; thankful for their lives. They want radios and cell phones and grasp at any semblance of normalcy. They cuddle and nurse their newborns like delicate, cherished gifts. What they don’t talk about is justice. They talk about how to forgive and move on.

But I can’t tell you their story. Why? Someone else has taken over their part in this complex saga, simplified it, branded it, packaged it and is reselling it as an Action Kit.

Another great commentary comes from political scientist Adam Branch, who writes in Dissent:

My frustration with the group has largely reflected the concerns expressed so eloquently by those individuals who have been willing to bring the fury of Invisible Children’s true believers down upon themselves in order to point out what is wrong with this group’s approach: the warmongering, the self-indulgence, the commercialization, the reductive and one-sided story it tells, its portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white Americans, and the fact that civilians in Uganda and Central Africa may have to pay a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about themselves, and a few can make good money. This, of course, is sickening, and I think that Kony 2012 is a case of Invisible Children having finally gone too far.
--snip--
First, because Invisible Children is a symptom, not a cause. It is an excuse that the U.S. government has gladly adopted in order to help justify the expansion of its military presence in Central Africa. Invisible Children are “useful idiots,” being used by those in the U.S. government who seek to militarize Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to build the power of military rulers who are U.S. allies. The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy—how often does the U.S. government find millions of young Americans pleading for it to intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The U.S. government would be pursuing this militarization with or without Invisible Children—Kony 2012 just makes it a bit easier. Therefore, it is the militarization we need to worry about, not Invisible Children.

Second, because in northern Uganda, people’s lives will be left untouched by this campaign, even if it were to achieve its stated objectives. This is not because things have entirely improved in the years since open fighting ended, but because the very serious problems people face today have little to do with Kony. The most significant one they face is over land. Land speculators and so-called investors, many foreign, in collaboration with the Ugandan government and military, are trying to grab the land of the Acholi people, land that they were forced off of a decade ago when they were herded into camps. Another prominent problem is nodding disease—a deadly illness that has broken out among thousands of children who grew up in the government’s internment camps, subsisting on relief aid. Indeed, the problems people face today are the legacy of these camps, where over a million Acholi were forced to live, and die, for years by their own government. This is the legacy of the government’s counterinsurgency, which received full support from the U.S. government and international aid agencies.

One of the threads running through the pieces from Prasse-Freeman, Ruge, and Branch can be summed up in one word: learn. None of the people mentioned here (and so many more) are arguing that the Lord's Resistance Army was something to be ignored. None of them support Kony, or are enabling Kony, or do not want the American people to be aware of the situation in Uganda.

What they want is for people to learn what's really going on. Kony2012 fails so utterly and completely at this that, at the end of the day, even the tattered virtue of "awareness-raising" crumbles under the relentless reality that the picture it paints of Uganda, the Ugandan people, and their current situation bares no relationship to the realities on the ground.

What are these realities? Writing in Review of International Political Economy in August, 2002, William Reno details the interlocking structures, from an international legal regime that demands respects for sovereign borders, legal frameworks from semi-supranational organizations such as The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that demand structural adjustments from states to meet debt obligations, and the predatory habits they encourage that create conditions for on-going war, in particular in central Africa which is rich in multiple mineral resources. Far from creating conditions for development, the many actors including the governments of states across the continent - not only Uganda is mentioned, but also Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe - exist in conditions where the multiple cross-pressures create conditions for the perpetuation of war as a structural tactic for maintaining stability and order without necessarily creating conditions for the development of internal infrastructure for local sustainability. When people talk about "neo-colonialism" and the structural impediments for development and political and civil cohesion, Reno's piece goes a long way toward defining it and limning its many threads.

In the years since Reno's piece has appeared, new factors have arisen that have exacerbated the situation in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The explosion in demand for the variety of electronic devices has created a demand in particular for rare earth metals, in which both DRC and CAR are quite rich. Keeping both countries weak and unstable, various outside actors, including Uganda, keep a military presence in these countries, in particular in the northeastern parts of the DRC, where senior military officials have created networks of resource extraction and trading for personal gain. Allowing Uganda to skim some off the top to help their balance of payments and fiscal situations, these entrepreneurial military officers create long-running issues that, with the introduction of American military forces, have only been made worse. The Chinese, in particular, have a large presence across the continent, so it should surprise no one that the United States is developing a policy of military presence to protect its own interests, not the least of them keeping various trade relations (including with various military entrepreneurs, not only from Uganda) on a sure footing. Combined with the already-existing interlocking structural deterrents to stability, our current policy, using Kony as an excuse, is perpetuating the misery, in particular in DRC, which suffered international neo-colonial attention when it was known as Zaire.

As I was contemplating how to continue what I believe is a real discussion about these matters, I learned on the news that Jason Russell, who is the singular auteur behind Kony2012, was detained yesterday for public intoxication and masturbation.

Danica Russell, in a family statement obtained by NBC News, suggested sudden attention and criticism of the film about African warlord Joseph Kony, may have led to her husband's behavior.

"We thought a few thousand people would see the film, but in less than a week, millions of people around the world saw it," Danica Russell said. "While that attention was great for raising awareness about Joseph Kony, it also brought a lot of attention to Jason -- and, because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard.

--snip--

In an earlier statement Friday, Ben Keesey, CEO of Invisible Children, said:
"Jason Russell was unfortunately hospitalized yesterday suffering from exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition. He is now receiving medical care and is focused on getting better. The past two weeks have taken a severe emotional toll on all of us, Jason especially, and that toll manifested itself in an unfortunate incident yesterday. Jason's passion and his work have done so much to help so many, and we are devastated to see him dealing with this personal health issue. We will always love and support Jason, and we ask that you give his entire family privacy during this difficult time."

So the narcissism of Kony2012 continues.

There is a right way to do things. It includes getting your facts straight, listening to people who actually know what they're talking about, hearing more than a single voice weep and moan about lost loved ones, and first and foremost not making oneself both subject and object of concern. One could make a professional video about current conditions in Uganda (not "Africa") that was informative. Kony2012 is not.

We Don't Know Even More

On Tuesday, I wrote a post regarding the murder of Afghan civilians by an Army Staff Sergeant. The conclusion to which I came was simple enough to understand, I think:

There are just too many questions with no answers here. There just doesn't seem to be enough information to make any judgments regarding the sergeant's mental and emotional state; all this discussion, while on one level refreshing for its candor, just doesn't feel right. Accountability for this crime may well rest not only with the person who committed it; it might just implicate policy makers, military health-care providers, and - dare I say it - we the people who have not worked hard enough to end this conflict, follow through on our commitment to care for our military personnel who have volunteered to sacrifice so much on our behalf. We need to be sure we don't end up covering our own asses even as we try to untangle the many knotted questions that surround this case.

Some of the things "we don't know" include the situation on the ground in Afghanistan as our troops experience it. With a report of an Afghan man on fire as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Kabul raising the subject of so-called "green-on-blue" attacks - attacks on US and coalition forces by members of the Afghan Police or Security forces - I thought it important to make clear the even-deeper gulf of ignorance we at home need to cross before making hasty judgments regarding what, precisely, was the seed-bed of the murder rampage.

On March 9, NPR ran a story profiling Army Capt. Joe Fritze, whose job it is to train Afghan police and security forces. In the midst of situation already volatile for any number of reasons, Capt. Fritze's job is made all the more difficult by the mutual lack of trust between American and coalition forces on the one hand and the Afghans on the other. With the recent revelations that American forces burned copies of the Holy Q'uran (I picture a high ranking officer hanging up the phone when he received the news, putting his face in his hands, and wondering if it isn't too late to try his hand at being a golf pro somewhere soon), the ensuing violence (it was called "rioting" in the press; it was far more like a series of coordinated attacks on US and other military installations that left many on both sides dead and wounded; the battle over the burned Q'uran, as it were), and now these murders, questions need to be asked about the conditions under which our military personnel serve in Afghanistan, the nature of the mission in which many are involved, and the nearly insurmountable obstacles in the way of securing their objectives.

Which is not to mitigate the gravity of the crime itself. It is rather, to wonder about the wisdom of a policy - the pacification and modernization of Afghan law enforcement under the tutelage of American and coalition forces - and ask whether or not it might not be far better for all involved if getting the hell out of there weren't the better option for everyone. In one of the LA Times articles linked above, Defense Secretary Panetta and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, insist that everything is going along just as it should:

"[They] believe we have achieved significant progress in reversing the Taliban's momentum and in developing the Afghan security forces, and they believe that the fundamentals of our strategy remain sound," said Pentagon spokesman George Little.

What else are they going to say? That our strategy is ridiculous, the goals unachievable, and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly?

Whether or not the Taliban is or is not a viable political force within Afghanistan is, it seems to me, not a matter for US military personnel to handle. Whether or not the Afghan government is capable of sustaining its policing infrastructure is not something with which the US should concern itself. Preventing Afghanistan from becoming "a safe haven for terrorists" is an impossible task for any individual or group.

None of this is to slight the Afghan people, their traditions and history, or their current feelings regarding US and coalition forces. They are who they are, and the US for far too long has sought to impose upon Afghan society a foreign model of self-governance that disregards their own traditions and histories. This isn't the fault of the US military; it is, rather, the fault of US policy-makers who entered Afghanistan without any serious study or consideration of the realities a foreign occupier would face. Our troops have been given a nearly impossible task, and with each passing day, week, month, and year, achieving results recede ever further. Future American-Afghan relations are already questionable; we have outstayed our welcome, and the mutual animosities that threaten both Afghans and American troops will only get worse.

All this, not discussed or even considered relevant in the case of the Army sergeant and his murderous shooting spree, adds necessary depth, light on the darkest corners of the current difficulties our soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen face. While it is important, even necessary, for us to talk seriously about the event in question, it is always important to understand how little we know or understand about the conditions our troops face. While it may well be the case the individual in question was not in full mental health, it seems irresponsible to the point of negligent not to consider the fullness of a context in which our troops do not - and probably cannot if they are to stay alive - trust those with whom they work. The entire situation is a recipe for many disasters. Many have already happened, and the body count on both sides rises.

If we surrendered our illusions regarding nation-building in Afghanistan and brought our troops home, we might yet do right by those who serve us under conditions none of us who haven't served can imagine.

Yet Again, The Point Is Simple - It's Not About Us

To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

Guy Debord

Thanks to social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, the biggest hit on the internet is a video produced by a group called Invisible Children about the Lords Resistance Army of northern Uganda and its fugitive leader, Joseph Kony.



Professionally done to the point of slickness, the video is also patronizing, narcissistic, overflowing with that patented American sense of optimism that disregards the complexities and histories and conflicting narratives about those histories that, in the end, leave me both fascinated and worried. I'm fascinated that a film that purports to be about bringing to justice an international fugitive seems far more about the film-maker's self-righteousness and smug sense of superiority than about the LRA, Kony, the war between the Ugandan military and the LRA, and the victims caught in the middle. For a film that is supposed to be about Kony, his name isn't mentioned until nearly nine minutes in, almost a third of the way through this 30-minute video presentation.

Did I mention there isn't a face of color in the first four or five minutes of the film, in which the film maker "sets the stage" with home movies of himself, his family, and in particular his son (at one point, this same son is shown using a camera to "blow up" a woman in line at a grocery store, and isn't that ironic for multiple reasons, considering Kony's use of child soldiers). It is clear to me, at least, this film has little to do with the LRA and everything to do with "making a difference" for a bunch of wealthy, disconnected, white Americans. I laughed out loud at one point, as the clip showed a car moving through a camp where teenage refugees and escapees, caught between the Ugandan military and the LRA's "recruiters", were shown occupying abandoned buildings, open fields, anywhere they could grab a space to sleep; a voice in the background says that, if there were such a scene in the US for even one night, it would be on the cover of Newsweek. Because, obviously, there is no problem of homelessness among children and teenagers in the United States, now, is there, young people trapped between the police on the one hand and gangs that use violent intimidation to recruit new members?

The many layers of ignorance are astounding.

Three pieces on the website for the English language edition of Al Jazeera make clear the many ways #Kony2012, for all it may have raised awareness in some general sense, is actually counterproductive. Adam Branch, a professor of political science at San Diego State University, as well as a researcher at the Makarere Institute in Uganda, writes:

Kony 2012 and the debate around it are not about Uganda, but about America. Uganda is largely just the stage for a debate over the meaning of political activism in the US today. Likewise, in my view, the Kony 2012 campaign itself is basically irrelevant here in Uganda, and perhaps the best approach might be to just ignore it. This is for a couple reasons.

First, because Invisible Children's campaign is a symptom, not a cause. It is an excuse that the US government has gladly adopted in order to help justify the expansion of their military presence in central Africa. Invisible Children are "useful idiots", being used by those in the US government who seek to militarise Africa, to send more and more weapons and military aid, and to bolster the power of states who are US allies.

The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for this strategy - how often does the US government find millions of young Americans pleading that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other resources? The US government would be pursuing this militarisation with or without Invisible Children - Kony 2012 just makes it a little easier. Therefore, it is the militarisation we need to worry about, not Invisible Children.

Mahmood Mamdami, director of the Makarere Institute for Social Research, writes:

Young adults recall the time from the mid-1990s when most rural residents of the three Acholi districts were forcibly interned in camps. The Ugandan government claimed it was to "protect" them from the LRA. But there were allegations of murder, bombings, and the burnings of entire villages: first to force people into the camps, and then to force them to stay put. By 2005, the camp population grew from a few hundred thousand to over 1.8 million in the entire region - which included Teso and Lango - of which over a million were from the three Acholi districts. Comprising practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts, they were expected to live on handouts from relief agencies. According to the government's own Ministry of Health, the excess mortality rate in these camps was approximately 1,000 persons per week - inviting comparisons with the numbers killed by the LRA even in the worst year.
--snip--
Critics asked why the ICC was indicting only the leadership of the LRA, and not government forces as well. Ocampo said only one step at a time could be taken. In his words: "The criteria for selection of the first case was gravity. We analysed the gravity of all crimes in northern Uganda committed by the LRA and the Ugandan forces. Crimes committed by the LRA were much more numerous and of much higher gravity than alleged crimes committed by the UPDF (Uganda Peoples Defense Force). We therefore started with an investigation of the LRA." That "first case" was in 2004. There have been no others involving Uganda in the eight years that have followed.

Finally, for all the sincerity expressed by the filmmakers that #Kony2012 is "for" the people of Uganda who have lived through the terrors of the Lord's Resistance Army, the video was only recently screened in northern Uganda, due to limited access to the internet. Al Jazeera reporter Malcolm Webb reports from the town of Lira, where a riot, sparked by anger at the film, erupted, cutting the viewing short as rocks started raining on the screen.

The point of this discussion should be clear enough. Reacting to the arresting and moving scenes and stories from northern Uganda, well-intentioned but ignorant outsiders arrive on the scene and announce both their authority and the means to solve the problems they suddenly declare to be of profound importance to the world's only superpower. Thus did Pres. Obama send one hundred military advisers, along with an unspecified number of UAV's to assist the government of Pres. Museveni of Uganda. Uganda had already invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was preparing to mount an invasion of the Central African Republic (CAR) in search of Kony. This was done because Museveni, for all he came to power in the late 1980's as a beacon of hope after years under dictators including Idi Amin and refused to surrender power, has refused to participate in any mediated political solution. Much of the current misery in the northern areas of Uganda is the result of the Ugandan Army's campaign against the LRA. The African Union, along with the Government of South Sudan, has been working for years on a political settlement that would bring home the members of the LRA; Museveni has refused to sign any legislation offering amnesty to LRA members because those bills have always included amnesty for Kony. Kony's indictment by the ICC, rather than a moral victory for the jurisdiction of the court, has only complicated and thwarted possible political solutions. With the entrance of the United States military, the possibility for a peaceful settlement retreated further; the US is not even a signatory to the convention creating the International Criminal Court. Should Kony fall in to the hands of the US military, who's to say if he will be bound over for trial in The Hague, turned over to the Ugandan military, or returned to Uganda and turned over to their legal authorities.

Standing off from a distance, it is easy enough, I suppose, to become overwhelmed by the situation in Uganda. Kony is an easy enough target for hatred and disgust. Hatred and disgust at an easy target is not a substitute for careful thought, for educating oneself on the facts of the matter, and for constructing possible responses out of a sense both of how much as well as how little one knows about a particular situation. The American response, I maintain, is rooted as much in guilt over our inaction - and, according to a report from the Organization for African Unity released in 2000, its complicity - during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990's as our concern for the specifics of the struggle between the LRA and the Ugandan military. That the Uganda of today has far different concerns and problems stemming from the heavy hand of the dictator we are currently supporting would, if we were a bit more aware, mock our good intentions.

It is all well and good, I think, to desire to do something to alleviate suffering. It is all well and good to believe and work on the principle that individuals can make a difference in the world. Done without regard to the realities on the ground, rooted in an unreflective, patronizing racism that is all the worse for going unrecognized, the #Kony2012 video is a travesty, a mockery of the very ideals from which it purports to come. As the epigram from Guy Debord makes clear, however, it is easier for us to rely on the spectacle of the video and the equally engrossing possible spectacle that shows us riding to the rescue of the Ugandans; these nightmares have the singular virtue of being those of other people. We can sleep at night knowing that, watching a video, we have done something. The consolations of our detachment keep us from the far more difficult work of actually learning things and doing things.

Going From Worse To Horrible

As if it weren't bad enough for the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church that its representatives in the persons of its bishops were insisting that women should just shut up and not behave like people, the Church itself is now targeting an advocacy group for victims of clerical abuse.

Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

Adding disgusting to the creepiness, Bill Donohue has sidled up to the bishops and adds his two-cents to the mix.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”

That last line is particularly gruesome in light of a decade of revelations from around the world that Roman prelates considered altar boys little more than a buffet line for their predatory habits (I know, nuns wear habits). One would think that (a) hundreds of priests in countries all over the world being serial rapists was a menace to the Catholic Church; (b) the hierarchy, up to and including the current occupant of the throne of St. Peter, covering up the abuse, shuffling the pedophilic predators from parish to parish like deck chairs on the Titanic is a menace to the Catholic Church; (c) having a public advocate who says things like this were a menace to the Roman Catholic Church:

The overwhelming majority of those abused are postpubescent males—they are not children. Breaking the seal of the confessional could not have saved any of them; nor will it protect anyone in the future.

As we move through this next phase of the Holy Mother Church's public defenestration, let us remember that, while it is true enough both those accused of abuse and the Church as an institution have every legal right to defend themselves against the accusations made against them.

When it became clear, a decade or so ago, that the various cases of clerical abuse were revealing both a network of priests in contact with one another, as well as an effort by the hierarchy to hide evidence of the abuse, the Bishop of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church released a statement that I recall in detail. Bishop Joe Sprauge said that the on-going cases in the Roman Catholic Church effected all clergy, all denominations, all persons involved in the work of the Christian Church. He called upon all United Methodists in northern Illinois to pray for forgiveness, to reach out and advocate for victims of abuse by clergy. Instead of whining about how horrible it is that everyone is saying mean things about the Christian Church because its clergy were revealed around the world as predatory pedophiles, he came out squarely on the side of the victims.

Would that we all took a lesson from that. Especially Bill Donohue.

It's A Conspiracy!

It's funny. I got to thinking a few weeks back that I wanted to do a post on conspiracy theories. I've put it off for a variety of reasons, when I ran across a bunch of information at Rolling Stone magazine, due in large part to an investigative report published by Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay.

Then, I went back just to make sure I hadn't written about my love for conspiracy theories. Turns out I had, back in September, 2007. Part of the problem with having a long-running blog like this without any tags is I have to be thorough in checking to make sure what I have and have not said in the past. I'm glad I did in this case because my main interest, for the present post at least, is my fascination with the death by investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. He was found dead in a motel room in Martinsburg, WV in August, 1991. His death was ruled a suicide.

Casolaro was a part of a network of conspiracy investigators. Claiming to be hot on the trail of what he called "The Octopus", the reaction to his death among what one writer has called "conspiracy culture" - that his death was "obviously [a] faked" suicide - without any mainstream research in to his life and death begs for serious re-examination.

Journalist and author Dave Cullen spent ten years researching everything about the mass murder at Columbine High School, publishing a book that destroyed every long-held myth the public had not only about the events themselves, but the students who carried it out, as well as the victims. I think nothing less is called for in the case of Danny Casolaro.

Not because I believe his was a faked suicide, the alleged perpetrators stealing his many research notes and papers (none of the research Casolaro claimed to carry with him at all times was found either at the motel or at his home; an alternative conclusion to that promulgated in "conspiracy culture" is he had no research materials). On the contrary, I'm guessing that an investigation in to the death of Casolaro's life and death would go a long way toward undermining the glamour and mystery that surrounds so much conspiracy-mongering. Of course, folks who insist on the reality of multiple conspiracies would only insist this shows how insidious such conspiracies are; the lack of evidence for their existence is definitive evidence for their existence.

One point I made in that post from '07 is still valid, I think. The fact that there are a whole lot of people who believe all sorts of silly conspiracy theories does not mean that conspiracies do not exist. Indeed, as I wrote then, conspiracies are abundant, plentiful, and by-and-large easy to find and detail. Conspiracy-mongers, on the other hand, give folks who detail the collusion among various groups toward specific ends that might either be contrary to the public interest or violate the law a bad name. Noam Chomsky is a good example of this. Derided and dismissed, at least among much "respectable" opinion in the United States, as a conspiracy-monger, it would be difficult, despite the millions of words he's published over the decades, to find any mention of "conspiracy" in his work. He is not a conspiracy theorist in the way, say, folks believe the Freemasons are planning on taking over the world through their lackeys in the Rhodes Scholarship program, Skull & Bones at Yale, and Opus Dei in the Roman Catholic Church are conspiracy theorists. The latter such are marvelous creatures with great entertainment value. Chomsky, on the other hand, notes the reality that certain expressed interests of powerful industrial, financial, and other corporate actors seem to wind up being expressed as American foreign policy, too often contrary to the interests of people in other countries (as well as an alternative foreign policy, sometimes even the expressed policy of a given Administration). This is not "conspiracy" mongering; it is, rather, little more than the description of what should be, to even a casual observer of politics, the unsurprising alignment of interest, power, money, and action.

Polling ahead of today's Republican Presidential primaries in Mississippi and Alabama showed that a plurality of Republican voters in those states believe Pres. Obama is a Muslim. One man, interviewed by NPR after a candidate's forum expressed typical "birther" views. These should trouble anyone who cherishes this country and our history as well as hopes for our future.

Conspiracy theories are good fun; from aliens both at Area 51 and Wright-Patterson AFB (Hangar 18, remember . . .) to the Council on Foreign Relations plans for world domination, they make marvelous fodder both in real life and as the source for rousing good yarns and stories. When they become the subject of serious inquiry by a "conspiracy culture", however, we have many reasons to worry.

We Don't Know

So I was just listening to The Diane Rehm Show where she and her guests are discussing the mass murder of Afghan civilians by a 38 year old Army Staff Sargeant, tying it to questions regarding recruiting, training, and the treatment of people who have a variety of psychological problems. The first person to whom Diane spoke mentioned that current military policy requires two years between deployments; the person in question had less than a year between his deployment in Iraq, where he apparently suffered an unspecified Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and his current deployment to Afghanistan.

Swirling around these questions, as a former RAND analyst on the panel looking at military recruiters noted, are questions of the pressures put on recruiters to meet quotas. This led to many recruiters overlooking various problems that may well have led, in peacetime, to these persons not being let in to the service.

Of course, there have also been questions raised regarding the status of the treatment of mental health issues, post-deployment, particularly with regards to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and specifically questions regarding the level and quality of care at this particular soldiers home base, Joint Base Lewis McChord, in Washington.

All of these are questions that need to be discussed, and should have been discussed, all along. All of these are matters that impact all of us, as these soldiers place themselves in our care, with the promise that for their service to our country, we will take care of them. All of these questions float around the broader policy questions of the status of our current mission in Afghanistan, and how that policy has continued to be implemented after ten years.

All the same, the specifics of the case seem to mitigate any kind of attention to these questions. A soldier walks off base, killing sixteen Afghan civilians, most of the victims being women and children, then calmly walks back to base and turns himself in. With emotions already riding high, thanks to the thoughtless burning of the Muslim holy book, the murders seem to show a certain callousness on the part of American military personnel for the life and well-being of the very people we claim to be serving (secondarily).

There is more than a whiff of CYA in all this talk of TBI, non-treated PTSD, questions regarding the status of the sergeant's mental health prior to his enlistment, etc. I'm guessing if the Army can convince the world this person had multiple issues of which it was not aware, or were only flowering under the pressure of his current deployment, they are in no way responsible through their policies and procedures, for the man being in a place and time where he would suddenly decide that indiscriminate mass murder seemed a good idea.

Since the beginning of our far-too-long military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been persistent, nagging questions regarding the treatment of military personnel with mental and physical health issues. Suicide rates among veterans are enormous, as are rates of domestic violence, divorce, alcoholism, and other indicators of psychological dysfunction. No matter how often these matters are raised, they never seem to be resolved. The people who pay the price are our currently-serving military personnel who are not receiving adequate treatment (let alone standard down time between deployments, at least in this case, which proved to be one case too many for sixteen dead Afghan civilians) and our veterans, who have routinely had their requests for treatment denied. Recently, under court order the military is reviewing thousands of applications for re-evaluation of their diagnoses for PTSD and other psychological problems precisely because the trend has been to deny its presence.

There are just too many questions with no answers here. There just doesn't seem to be enough information to make any judgments regarding the sergeant's mental and emotional state; all this discussion, while on one level refreshing for its candor, just doesn't feel right. Accountability for this crime may well rest not only with the person who committed it; it might just implicate policy makers, military health-care providers, and - dare I say it - we the people who have not worked hard enough to end this conflict, follow through on our commitment to care for our military personnel who have volunteered to sacrifice so much on our behalf. We need to be sure we don't end up covering our own asses even as we try to untangle the many knotted questions that surround this case.

The Living Dead

There's a scene in Stephen King's It that, when I first read it, struck me almost immediately. The first chapter tells of the brutal murder of George Denbrough. Later, George's older brother, Bill, enter's Ralph's bedroom, in an effort to connect with his brother. His parents, grieving separately and silently, do not speak of George. Trudging through a silent house, Bill is left to deal with his pain and loss on his own. Standing in George's room, cleaned and made each week by Bill's distraught mother, Bill opens the closet door and is confronted by the ghastly, one-armed corpse of his dead brother, who pronounces Bill's guilt for his own death.

I'm guessing something similar happened to my father.

In 1928, while out for a family drive on a Sunday, a doctor who was well known as a drunk, came zooming out of his driveway, striking the car in which my father's family was riding. Sitting up front on his mother's lap, my father's older brother, Everett, who was known as "Ikey" to the nicknaming bunch in the car, was thrown violently against the metal dashboard. My father, sitting in the back bench seat next to his older sister on the side of the car struck by the on-rushing vehicle, broke his arm. Two weeks later, having never left the hospital, Ikey died from pneumonia. Having lost her only brother to the slaughter bench of World War I, my grandmother descended in to a grief from which she would never recover. Ikey's was a name never uttered in her presence. The silence was so total, even as an adult, my father rarely speaks of his older brother. I can count on the fingers of one hand the references to Everett Safford even having lived. I have no idea what kind of boy he way; I know he was good with his hands, with tools, like my grandfather. I don't know if he liked baseball, though, or if he had a sense of humor. In his death he became what the accident rendered him - a corpse standing and staring out at my father's family, a revenant whose sole purpose was to remind them all that he had died.

As with families, so, too, with nations. Death not confronted leaves us only with ghastly corpses, mute witnesses to our collective brutality and unwillingness to confront who we have been. One of the functions of history is the confrontation with our worst selves, our failures and collective responsibility for injustice, cruelty, and evil. If not dealt with, we remain surrounded by the living dead, zombies who demand to feed on our lives and souls. We kill these voracious monsters of our own creation, in the end, by looking them square in the eye and, with some luck and skill and honesty, seeing who we are that gave us these horrid gifts.

I read a short review of James Cone's new book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Despite some problems with the review - "societally" is not a word; diagnosis is not a verb; Billie Holliday, as far as I know, never ever shouted in her songs, and she was a jazz singer, not a blues singer - it offers up a good introduction to what should be a seminal work in theological confrontation. Cone's early work held a mirror up to white American smugness and self-satisfaction and demanded answers to questions we just weren't willing to hear. Now, after may years of relative silence, he has returned in full prophetic style, demanding answers to more questions we don't want to hear. I look forward to reading this book precisely because the juxtaposition of the cross and the lynching tree seems so obvious, I hate myself for missing it as a point of serious theological reflection and concern.

The review author in the linked post reminds readers of William Faulkner's quip, "The past is never dead. The past isn’t even past." That's only true if we refuse to confront it. I'm variously amused and concerned when people, discussing questions of the history of race relations in America, deny any responsibility for our current state of affairs. Since they have never owned an African-American slave or murdered an African-American in that ritual of communal cleansing known as lynching, they share none of the guilt and shame those institutions carry. Since I've yet to hear anyone say participation in these social institutions is a necessary prerequisite for recognizing the burden they place on us as a nation, I'm never quite sure what such statements mean.

Except now, I think I do. I think these people, like Bill Denbrough, peer in to the dark closets of our history, and see the horrible image of all the mutilated men and women staring back at them. Fearful of confronting the walking dead whose accusations are felt too keenly, they would rather we sweep it all under the rug, not talk about it, and blame the victims of our ongoing collective refusal to look the dead square in the eye for their problems.

Cone's work is, I would think, a good place to start a recovery of the reality of our violent past for a full and proper reckoning. We cannot be a just society if the dead are unquiet due to our refusal to see them for whose they are - our own. While we have started down the long road of understanding who we are through images such as the one above, by linking the reality of lynching in America to the claims of faith from the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ, we may yet make our way a bit further toward claiming our on-going responsibility for these crimes because of our ongoing refusal to see them.

Nothing Matters And What If It Did?

When I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America, I took what I thought would be a seminar on Aristotle's Politics. The professor was one of the most popular, well-respected scholars teaching in the School of Philosophy. I'd taken a course on moral philosophy from him and the seminar was to be the first of two parts, the second being a seminar on Hobbes' Leviathan. The problem, however, was that there were almost thirty people signed up for a graduate seminar. It turned from an intimate discussion of issues within a classic text to a long, tedious line-by-line exegesis. About half way through the semester, a student interrupted the monotone presentation of yet another ridiculously boring read-through with a simple question: "Who was Aristotle writing for?"

The professor paused and said, "Why, he was writing for the ages."

At that point, I realized I would get nothing out of the rest of the class.

No one, certainly not Aristotle, ever does anything for the ages. Aristotle didn't because the very concept would have been unintelligible to him. The Greeks had no such concept. We, who supposedly have some kind of historical consciousness, are led to believe that if our lives are to have meaning, we are to make a mark that lasts. Even an ahistorical hyper-romantic like Richard Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that the best any of us can do is add a line or two to the poem of the world.

Neil Strauss's Everyone Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys Into Fame And Madness has an "Epilogue" that, if anyone had been paying attention, was redundant. Setting out eleven "lessons" that shaped the structure and narrative framework of the sprawling set of interviews - bits and pieces that span two decades, 228 in all - they all return to what Strauss says was the impetus behind the formation of the book: Does what we do have any meaning?

A long-time rock journalist and critic, working with publications as various as The New York Times, Spin, Esquire, Maxim, and The Village Voice, Strauss has also published works written in co-operation with Motley Crue and Marilyn Manson, Dave Navarro, and porn/pop phenom Jenna Jameson. The subjects span from Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley through Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton, and Bruce Sprinsteen to Snoop Dogg, Wu-Tang Clan, The Backstreet Boys, Lady Gaga, and The White Stripes. Some of the subjects, like Trent Reznor, Clapton, Springsteen, and Snoop Dogg, and Marilyn Manson, seem held-together (except, of course, Reznor was in the midst of a years-long heroin addiction; even for that, the parts of his interview seem the most honest even if self-deprecating). Others, such as Jonathan Davis from Korn, Julian Casblancas from The Strokes, Twiggy Ramirez from Marilyn Manson, Question Mark from Question Mark and the Mysterians, rapper The Game, and Christina Aguilera are, variously, neurotic, drunk, coked up, schizophrenic, and too self-absorbed to comprehend how much of a flash-in-the-pan he is. The end result is not so much an exploration of the single meta-question that drove this work as a series of quick-cut presentations that, while interesting in and for themselves, accumulate weight over time. The question of meaning, makes itself clear from page one, where a drunken Julian Casablancas dodges an interview by getting so stupidly drunk, the interview becomes a lesson in and of itself of the dangers and threat posed by fame.

In our capitalist society, the question of meaning is usually relegated to an interesting non-sequitur. For the people whose interviews are within the pages of this book, however, the question of the meaning of their work is paramount. One story Strauss catalogs, the loss and recovery of a set of costumes from a Country Music Wax Museum that closed in the 1980's; the costumes were all original sets of clothing donated by various figures from Jimmie Rogers and Johnny Cash to Barbara Mandrell and Minnie Pearl. Quite apart from the monetary value, the historical significance of sets of clothing can be debated.

Or can it?

Reading the back story to the search and discovery of the clothing, I couldn't help but think, "Wow, all those old costumes. First they were gone, now they're back." I think most anyone, even someone not particularly interested in country music, or pop culture more broadly, would agree this is an issue of significant importance. It's a connection, a very real connection, between people. The black shirts Johnny Cash would wear; the hair and bell-bottoms Barbara Mandrell was famous for; Minnie Pearl's hats - these are symbols that tell us who these people were as performers. They signify what they meant to us and for us.

Some of the people whose interviews Strauss includes got lost somewhere along the way. Either through drugs or fragile psyches or chronic, untreated mental illness or (as in the case, say, of Brian Wilson) some combination of all three, what made them who they once were is destroyed. Like everything else in our capitalist society, the producers of our popular culture have become disposable commodities; planned obsolescence isn't just about a new car model every year. No one expected Chuck Berry to continue performing in to the first decade of the 21st century. No one thought The Beach Boys were creating a template for pop music writing and production that would continue even as the technology for music production exploded. No one thought Trent Reznor would make it through his years of rage and heroin to win multiple Academy Awards for soundtrack composition.

No one thought an illiterate share-cropper from Mississippi named Otha Turner would, at the age of 91, be one of the last in a legacy of fife-and-drum performers who would be able to continue his legacy of a dying, marginal musical form that has roots to African fife-and-drum rituals because a few enterprising, interested journalists and musical ethnographers would insist listening to him was important.

Yet all these things, and so much more, are indeed important. They have meaning because, despite the totalitarian insistence of capitalism that meaning is irrelevant, a question best left to drunk college students or stoned-out bohemians who have nothing of substance to contribute, all these - and so much more - tell us who we are.

Nothing makes that more clear than the chapter entitled "Cannibalism Is The Answer". Holding a mirror up to America over the past couple decades, we see an ugliness of racism, idiotic superficiality, and triumphant over-coming that boggles the mind. Whether its the Skullbones Amphitheater in Tennessee, with its booths selling racist paraphernalia, Paris Hilton being Paris Hilton, or the failing and triumphal national tour of Iceland's only indigenous country western band, we see the many contradictory realities of who and what we are shining back at us. Perhaps Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat shows this most clearly. Crossing the many lines of performance art, entertainment, and social commentary, we see and hear who we are and the result is both hilariously funny and incredibly sad. In a rare interview as himself (until that time, Cohen only interviewed as his characters Ali G and Borat; Strauss got a glimpse at the man behind the curtain and discovered, as he did with Stephen Colbert, the sanity behind the madness) Cohen shows Strauss that the keys to unlocking the many doors we would prefer remain closed lie in being able to make us laugh even as we are disgusted at what we are seeing. In a short snippet of an interview with Hanson, we see a rare moment when a group of teenagers display more wisdom than far too many adults; rather than discuss their personal religious beliefs as a way of labeling and pigeon-holing themselves, they only want to talk about the music they make (the fact they had both more musical merit and talent, and displayed this singular maturity also tells us something about who we are; we would far rather label a group of musicians as a way of restricting them, even dismissing them, than hearing what they have to say as musicians).

Strauss's book is a monument, despite its pedantic epilogue, to the importance of popular culture even as it quickly becomes more historical product than lasting statement of historical significance. Whether it's a lost free-jazz artist living on the streets of New York City, Britney Spears being astounded at a con-job, or the nine-year saga of the writing and production of Cher's last number one song, it's all important because we see who we are in the midst of what is both best and worst about ourselves. The things that will last, the things that are popular, the things that define us at any given time become touchstones, signifiers of the panorama of American (and, more broadly, western) culture.

What Is It About Sex?

While it has been fun to watch the sinking ships called advertisers desert the rat's radio show, it has been sad to be bombarded by the demand that only a single narrative is operative through this whole mess. Since the narratives themselves share nothing in common, it becomes impossible to arbitrate which should have primacy. Is it about women's health and equality and freedom? Is it about sex and sexuality? Is it about the ethical demands of a faithful life? Is it about the freedom of religious institutions to practice their faith without coercion by the state?

I suppose it's about all of them.

If this were about access to insulin, I'm not sure the debate would be as heated. Diabetes just doesn't have that ring of titillation to it that contraception does.

The use of biochemical contraception was not only a pharmacological breakthrough; it sparked a social and cultural revolution the reverberations of which are still present. While contraception existed prior to the pill - the condom is probably the oldest pharmacological device invented; turtle-shell condoms pre-dating written language have been found in both Mesopotamia and China - the pill is so effective it opened up a world of possibilities for women that hadn't existed. Before the pill, if a couple had sex, despite the prevalence of the condom, it was the man's decision whether or not to proactively prevent insemination. The burden of sex was born disproportionately by women in the forms of pregnancy and social ostracism. Now, with the fear of pregnancy set to one side, women had the opportunity to explore their sexuality in ways that had previously been the sole provenance of men.

Entwined within this whole discussion, yet barely brushed against, are matters of personal and social piety regarding sex. In the west, which for a variety of reasons considered itself the arbiter of proper social and cultural mores for the entire planet, the Christian teaching regarding human sexuality (little different from the teachings of other religions) had placed the moral burden for sexual immorality on women. Even a cursory examination of the history of various Christian teachers referring to women as "ordure" and "vomit", to their sexual organs as "pits of despair", and to women's basic moral stance as little different from the view of the demonic forces constantly tempting men away from virtue should convince anyone that ours has been, and in large measure continues to be, a society deeply bound to a fear and hatred of women, and the power they have over men as sexual beings.

Freeing women from the burden of pregnancy and child-rearing was bound to tear open the fragile social super-ego that maintained the truce between the sexes. The male id, open now to the frightful proposition that, regardless of law and custom, women were now as free as men to explore and exploit their sexuality, has reacted violently. Recent events should disabuse any but the most casual observer that there still lies within the western heart a deep revulsion and fear of the power women have over men because of sexual desire.

In the meantime, some Christian denominations have been re-examining the "traditional" teachings of the faith regarding human sexuality and gender relations. Not to remove the sting of the strictures against fornication; rather to come to a deeper understanding of why it might be thought a good thing for human beings to treat the gift of sexuality with more care than, say, defecation. Of course, there have been other Christian denominations that have adamantly refused to revisit "traditional" teachings about human sexuality, seeing in the strict insistence on chastity and forbearance a solid rod for imposing what they see as both a personal and social good.

One can, I would think, affirm both the goodness of human sexuality as a gift from God without removing from any teaching about human sexuality the sting of restriction. Indeed, in coming to understand human sexuality as a good thing, a marvelous gift of a loving God, the demand for chastity makes as much if not more sense than in the "traditional" teaching that sees sex as an evil, with women as the snare drawing us to that evil against our (male) better judgments. One can, in other words, insist that living a disciplined sexual life is in keeping with a proper, faithful understanding of God's love for humanity, for creation, and for society without demeaning sexuality or human beings (women in particular) in the process.

One would also think it quite possible to affirm the social benefits that come with a proper use of the pill. The question, it seems, has become whether or not we Christians, through our organizations, either can or should or do subsidize certain practices that run counter to our teaching about how best to live a fully human, fully ethical life. That is, recognizing that women who are not married or otherwise in a monogamous relationship might wish to use the contraceptive pill to prevent unwanted pregnancy as they have sex, should church's and church-affiliated organizations be put in the position of providing what was once called occasions of sin?

It seems to me we are here up against what one writer has noted is a conflict between our commitment to Civil Theology and Christian Theology. This is not only, or at least shouldn't be, an issue of primacy. Again, as the linked author notes, for Christians, our first duty is to the Kingdom of God as professed and witnessed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet, this also places upon us the burden of being faithful within our reality as citizens of various nations, to whose maintenance and success we are called just as much as to the ongoing project of the furthering of God's kingdom. We can, I suppose see this as a simple enough conflict, in the glare of right and wrong, good and evil, relying not only upon our primary commitment to God and the Kingdom to which we are to bear witness in both word and deed. All the same, we should also recognize that the God incarnate in Jesus Christ was not a God of compulsion. On the contrary, as St. Paul noted so clearly, the most precious gift we received from the Father in the Son through the Spirit is freedom - for freedom's sake.

We should also recognize the fundamental pluralism and diversity of the world in which we live. We Christians can always choose the path of distinctiveness rather than that of accommodation to the larger society in which it finds itself; this has always been a temptation, one even at its height of social, legal, and cultural influence the Church has found difficulty resisting. At the heart of the conflict, of course, is how are we to remain faithful witnesses to the Christ who proclaimed release from the bonds that hold us while following what seems to many a sensible legal requirement for equal treatment for the health care of both men and women.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that the multiply entwined ethical, political, social, legal, theological, and cultural demands show why this particular matter has, despite a wide social consensus on the singular issue of contraception (even among Roman Catholics, who oppose the church's official teaching not only in word but also in deed by overwhelming majorities) brought to the surface the antagonisms we have seen over the past couple weeks. I don't have a final answer because I'm not sure there is one. Reasonable people of good faith can disagree on the matter (and even on my presentation here) without either of them being wrong. For myself - the only one for whom I can and do speak - I see no reason why any institution should deny access to contraceptive care as part of a comprehensive benefits package; I do not see how this compromises any ethical, theological, or social teaching the Church in question might profess. Others are free to disagree. All I've tried to do here is show why this matter has become the source of so much heat and light.

What Sandra Said (UPDATE, UPDATE II)

I thought it might be a nice idea to offer folks the opportunity to read Sandra Fluke's testimony before Congress. The transcript is easy enough to find. Instead of talking about Limbaugh, let's hear what Ms. Fluke said. It isn't very long at all, and the key portion follows:

This is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends. A
woman’s reproductive healthcare isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority. One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.
As one student put it, “this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn’t understand our needs.” These are not feelings that male fellow students experience. And they’re not burdens that male students must shoulder.

In the media lately, conservative Catholic organizations have been asking: what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school? We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success. We expected that our schools would live up to the Jesuit creed of cura personalis, to care for the whole person, by meeting all of our medical needs. We expected that when we told our universities of the problems this policy created for students, they would help us. We expected
that when 94% of students opposed the policy, the university would respect our choices regarding insurance students pay for completely unsubsidized by the university. We did not expect that women would be told in the national media that if we wanted comprehensive insurance that met our needs, not just those of men, we should have gone to school elsewhere, even if that meant a less prestigious university. We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and weresent that, in the 21st century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make this
choice simply because we are women.

It's impossible to find a transcript this morning from Limbaugh's program (I've tried every which way; even the link at Google take you to a blank page on his website), but luckily, someone did post a partial transcript.

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control….Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage. Apparently,four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.”

Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope. “‘Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported. It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“‘Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,’ Fluke told the hearing. $3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex — and, she wants us to pay for it.”…You guys who are thinking you’re not gonna go to college? Let me just say one thing to you: Georgetown. They’re admitting before congressional committee that they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!

What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal: If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch....

Apart from having no relationship whatever to what Fluke actually said, Limbaugh's depraved mind sexualized this young woman to the point the real Sandra Fluke ceased to exist.

So, there you are. Ms. Fluke's testimony versus Limbaugh's . . . whatever it was.

UPDATE: At Salon, Iris Carmon takes on the growing pushback that claims liberal misogyny is just as bad as anything Rush said.

But the problem with Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, and other conservative commentators who gleefully approved of Rush, was not just their use of words “slut” and “prostitute” — the two words on which Powers (and Mitt Romney!) conveniently focused. As this helpful ThinkProgress mashup helps drive home, those words, or the sexualization of a woman simply because she’s out in public being female, are not the beginning and end of his offense. His offenses include defending the exclusion of contraception coverage on the grounds that he and his listeners shouldn’t have to pay for the greedy sexing of loose women (once again, that’s not how insurance works), and using leering, crude sexuality to demean a woman simply because she spoke up about reproductive health.

Yes, Ed Schultz called Laura Ingraham a "slut". He apologized the next day and exiled himself from the airwaves for a week immediately afterward. Yes, Maher called Sarah Palin a "slut". That he, along with long-time Hilary-haters Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann are still on the air is due far less to some liberal conspiracy against women than to corporate misogyny that supports them in their disgusting habits (I ignore Maher; Matthews and Olbermann are regularly taken to task for their hate-filled rants by many on the left, including me).

It would be ridiculous to ignore Limbaugh's two decades of misogyny when talking about this. Media Matters for America has, quite literally, pages and pages of transcripts from Limbaugh's show where he routinely treats women with disdain, crassly sexualizing any and every woman whose name crosses his desk.

The fight for women's equality doesn't know political parties or ideologies. This isn't about the fact that Limbaugh is "conservative". It is, rather, about the fact that his long history of pornographic musings about women as a way of dismissing their voices is finally catching up to him.

UPDATE II: Well, at least I'm not going totally insane.

The Atlantic Wire points out that his website has scrubbed a few offensive comments. While the “slut” comments still show up in other rants by Limbaugh, his site has removed his sex tapes comment from March 1. “The pages were clearly working a few days ago — several sites linked to them,” Elspeth Reeve reports. “The pages don’t show up on the February 29 and March 1 archives, either, though links to them still exist on other transcripts related to the controversy.”

"Why is reality-denial turning out so badly . . .?"

It was a couple years ago that John Quiggin and others were discussing "agnotology", a discussion I joined. Now, a couple years later, and Quiggin wonders why this once-successful strategy seems to be crumbling?

The news that Republican members of the Wyoming Legislature wanted the state to investigate buying an aircraft carrier[1] as insurance against a possible collapse of the US seems as good an occasion as any to signify the final descent of the party into irredeemable loopiness. Add to that the revival of birtherism, the inability to deal with Rush Limbaugh, and the absence of any coherent economic policy except tax cuts for the rich and you have a party that has seriously lost touch with reality.

--snip--

On any standard political calculus, they ought to be cruising towards a clean sweep in November – the economy is still in poor shape, and enthusiasm for Obama has declined massively as a result of policies in areas like civil liberties[2]. Instead, Republican pundits are already giving up on the Presidential election, and even on the Senate, and are starting to focus on whether they can even retain control of the House.[3]

A couple things about Quiggin's post. In comments, several readers take him to task on points two and three, variously (although few quibble about both; there are partisans for each). I'd rather not dive too deeply in to the well of these two points so much as remark that they are peripheral to Quiggin's main point: the Republican Party, as an institution, has invested so much in such a wide variety of reality-denying, it has ceased to function as a viable institution for organizing real political interests and public grievances. In the run up to the mid-term elections in 2010, with the economy still not doing much despite Pres. Obama's assurances that it should be chugging right along; with the drawn-out fight over the Affordable Care Act still rumbling around, the frenzy feeding the starbursting career of Glenn Beck; some tactical application of agnotology seemed to work. With the Republican victory that fall, however, they paid attention to the wrong investments that brought them victory. It wasn't the successful application of craziness like birtherism or tax-cuts-for-the-rich; it was the many failings of the Obama Administration that brought the spoils of victory their way.

Time, as the saying goes, has marched onward. The Affordable Care Act, with its provisions providing expanded health care for people under their parents' insurance plans and those with pre-existing conditions, has already started to show its many benefits. The economy seems to be yawning and stretching, even though it hasn't quite awakened all the way yet. Most of all, the race for the Republican nomination has shown that a once great political party has devolved to a contest among an ego-maniacal mediocrity, a religious zealot obsessed with other people's sex lives, an aging Bircher, and the ephemeral front-runner who seems to stand for whatever he believes at any given moment might win him an applause line.

Reasonable people can disagree, sometimes with gusto, vehemence, and even a bit of vitriol, about things for which they feel much passion. Unreasonable people, however, paint all existence as a struggle between good and evil, usually with themselves as the White Knights (with the "White" having a double meaning in our racist society) standing athwart the varieties of evil and immorality and demanding an end. Thus, for example, Feodor and I can disagree on support for Pres. Obama and some of his policies, yet still remain on friendly terms. Why? Because we share a fundamental respect for certain things, among which first and foremost is reality. Others, it seems, insist that reality is a fungible concept, open to whatever definition fits best the current moment. Thus, for example, when I observed that real socialists were dismissive of Pres. Obama, opposing much of his agenda, I was told by one right-wing blogger that "socialist" has many definitions, and I was privileging my own; he was using his own, therefore the President is a socialist.

How do you deal with something like that?

You ignore it.

That isn't cowardice. Acting as if something that is not real in fact is real only enables the on-going insanity. I would no more choose to discuss matters with someone who insists reality is whatever he chooses to say it is than I would trust a medical doctor who didn't accept neo-Darwinian evolution.

There is the way things actually are. There is the way we human beings choose to talk about them. The two never - quite - meet up, and there is always a need for a bit of space, some humility if you will, to give reality the room it needs to intrude upon our most cherished beliefs. For the Republican Party as it currently exists, "ideology" - left and right, conservative and liberal - not longer serves to define them. Indeed, voters and many office-holders among the Republican Party, have left politics, the negotiation of power relationships within a society, to one side altogether.

The short answer to Quiggin should be clear enough, regardless of political preference, party identification, or any other identifier: Reality denying is turning out badly because reality always comes around and kicks our asses. We may not like that; we may not acknowledge what has happened as precisely that, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Here's A Reason

For those who may be wondering if I'm serious about the whole "not voting for Barack Obama in November" thing, trust me: I am deadly serious. As deadly, apparently, as any President wishing to kill an American citizen, at least according to Eric "I'm not John Ashcroft because I uncovered the boobies" Holder, our Attorney General:

On Monday, the Obama administration explained when it's allowed to kill you.

Speaking to students and faculty at Northwestern University law school, Attorney General Eric Holder laid out in greater detail than ever before the legal theory behind the administration's belief that it can kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without charge or trial. In the 5,000-word speech, the nation's top law enforcement official directly confronted critics who allege that the targeted killing of American citizens violates the Constitution.

Charlie Pierce is right. John Yoo's "torture memo" is small potatoes compared to this scary pile of crap. And forgive me if I laugh at you when you say, "But it's OK, because Obama would never abuse such authority." The authority itself is abusive. I no more trust Barack Obama with this alleged authority to kill folks because he says so that I trusted the Bush Administration to waterboard because, hey, it isn't torture if I say it isn't torture. Right?

There won't be any drone strikes in Denver anytime soon. But you might want to be careful when traveling abroad, because Holder made it clear that there are no geographical limits in the fight against Al Qaeda. "Neither Congress nor our federal courts has limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan," Holder said. "We are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country."

This is the same tired, horrible argument we've been hearing from war-porn-bloggers for years now. Just because it's coming from an allegedly Democratic Attorney General doesn't suddenly make me go, "Wow! The fact that terrorists aren't regular soldiers is something I never realized before. Here you go, Executive Branch, let me hand you this shred of the Constitution." The point, I thought, was to do this whole fight-against-al-Qaeda better than the losers in the last Administration. Like the man said, wrong again, honey.

If the standards for when the government can send a deadly flying robot to vaporize you sound a bit subjective, that's because they are. Holder made clear that decisions about which citizens the government can kill are the exclusive province of the executive branch, because only the executive branch possess the "expertise and immediate access to information" to make these life-and-death judgments.

Holder argues that "robust oversight" is provided by Congress, but that "oversight" actually amounts to members of the relevant congressional committees being briefed. Press reports suggest this can simply amount to a curt fax to intelligence committees notifying them after the fact that an American has been added to a "kill list." It also seems like it would be difficult for Congress to provide "robust oversight" of the targeted killing program when intelligence committee members like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are still demanding to see the actual legal memo justifying the policy.

I trust Congress's robust oversight powers. They certainly did a bang-up job with Enron, AIG,the investment banks, BP, the natural gas industry (actually, that's a lie; since 2005, fracking for natural gas has been exempt from testing and pretty much any environmental oversight), and that whole Iraq war thing. How many billions just vanished in to the pockets and bank accounts of war profiteers while we reduced Iraq to a steaming pile of rubble and our soldiers, Marines, and airmen were blown to bits or had their psyches shattered, only to be shoveled in to rat-infested VA hovels? I've got your Congressional oversight right here.

The question is no longer an abstract one. In September, radical American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike in Yemen alongside fellow American Samir Khan. Awlaki and Khan produced the English-language extremist publication Inspire, but until the sentencing of underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab, the US government provided little evidence they were much more than propagandists. Awlaki's son, Abdul Rahman al-Awlaki, also an American citizen, was killed about a month later.

These deaths and those to come, Holder insisted Monday, do not represent a violation of America's founding principles. "This is an indicator of our times," Holder said, "not a departure from our laws and our values."

At the time, I stated:

there are people out there who are actively engaged in planning to do our country and our fellow Americans serious physical harm. We may not like that protecting the United States involves messy stuff like killing people, but this isn't about people's feelings. We may not like that some of those who are targets of our national defense are fellow Americans.

I now take that stupid, purblind defense of the indefensible back. The Obama Administration,in the person of AG Holder has now stated it is legal to kill Americans.

Anyone.

Anywhere.

The naked, Cheneyesque heart of the Obama Administration was laid bare yesterday by AG Holder. I see no reason to grant them my vote anymore than the Bush Administration deserved it. Rather than show the world we could fight terrorists while adhering not to "our principles and values" but - hey! what a shock! - our Constitution, Obama and his Administration has gone Full Monty, letting it all hang out there for the world to see.

I do so hope the Nobel committee calls and asks for the statue and check back.

Sweet Meats

You thought New Coke was bad?

In a shocking decision delivered Feb 28th, President Obama's Security and Exchange Commission ruled that PepsiCo's use of aborted fetal remains in their research and development agreement with Senomyx to produce flavor enhancers falls under "ordinary business operations."

Sounds horrible doesn't it? Well, as this is Bizarro World, things aren't quite what they may first appear as reported among the fruits and nuts:

While fetal components are currently not in the final product, there is growing concern among consumers that it could happen in the near future. With the explosion of health foods on the market, there is nothing to stop companies from using fetal remains as protein ingredients.

In other words, obviously no one is experimenting with fetal tissue as a flavor additive. All the same, since there are no rules preventing it, it is quite possible that it could happen. After all, who wants to finish off a nice, fresh Pepsi on a hot summer day, only to discover they've just drunk they're neighbor's aborted fetus? Since there are no rules regarding the use of fetal tissue in foods, even though it isn't happening, it could.

Yes, indeed.

Something For Most Everyone

Because I feel like it, that's why.

The Event Horizon Of Thoughtfulness

In down time, I have wondered over the years, "What would the comment section of this blog look like if it were more popular?"

The reality of an answer came crashing down on me today when, after reading an op-ed article on American parenting in today's WaPo, I decided to wade through the first few comments.

The article itself offers the hardly shocking thought that, perhaps, parents should loosen up a tad, set some limits, encourage some discipline, then make sure their kids have a chance to be kids, all the while making sure that, as parents, they are taking care of themselves. One could quibble about bits and pieces here and there, such as the tendentious, repeated reminder that America doesn't provide either paid parenting leave or quality, state-sponsored child care (the French creche on the corner becomes a mantra in the article). I say "quibble" because, while I would certainly support such policies, I can understand how they might just become a source for arguments. Taken as a whole, though, the article isn't really much more than a calming voice for parents: sit down, have a cup of coffee, and stop trying so damn hard. Good advice, by and large, rooted as it is in common sense.

Then along come the comments. Man, oh man, oh man. Let's just say I am SSSOOOOOOO glad no one likes this blog.

Some fun begins when one commenter, "Nymous", writes: "The misery of American parents is made of profits. Capitalism fails at child care and health care miserably." "Phiggits" responds "that doesn't even make sense. Capitalism is agnostic when it comes to how public money is spent. sounds like you just have an axe to grind. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail..." to which Nymous responds (carefully, without losing any cool even though the point was clear enough, for a blog comment): "Those two things it does really badly. They're related & get interwoven too. That's why I put them together. I don't think you have a very good understanding of capitalism if you think it's somehow agnostic towards literally any way of profiting."

Then the fun really begins with Sharpes50: "Those profits from the tax payers dumped into a never ending hole are sure helping 30 million parents of uneducated illegal aliens." That's the kind of thing that makes me wonder if it's possible to communicate with other people. A sentence like this is like overstuffed luggage. Popping it open to unpack it sends stuff flying all over the room, leaving you wondering how to get a handle on it, where to begin. Shouting something like this is so much easier than saying something.

Then there's Nparry: "First, you want taxpayers (that's including you parents) want the government to pay for birth control, then you want to pay you for having the baby, then pay for a creche, then lunch at school for 18 years, followed by funding for college. A couple of years work, then your baby is ready for unemployment benefits. If this is what is parenting is - relentless whining - decide beforehand, we'll pay for the birth control glady. It's that much cheaper!!"

There's little to no actual discussion of the article, save for a tossed-off sentence like this from peterroach: "This article describes parent neurosis." And Telin writes, in part: "Article starts out with a "no" we are not a nation devolving into "ad" parenting and then points out every reason that we are."

The article provides reports on social science surveys and statistical data, the latter with links for readers to check for themselves (the way too much academic research sits behind pay-walls, especially when it is used in journalism, is really annoying; if a study is used in the popular press, make it available for readers to see for themselves!). Little to none of the relevant data is discussed. Most of the comments revolve around "my opinion". The article is an opinion piece; it is one backed up with data that just sits there, not referenced or checked either for accuracy or relevance. Even the best opinion is meaningless if no one decides to check and see if the facts the person holding it pass muster.

Let's just say I'm glad I don't have slews of commenters. The whole intent of this humble little spot is for me to vent on occasion concerning matters I think are important. Not interested in starting a discussion, unless those who are commenting are actually discussing what I wrote, I see little value in argument or discussion for its own sake, as such usually ends up being little more than pissing contests. If someone likes or agrees with something I've written, that's wonderful. No writer would deny the thrill from getting some kind of reaction from readers. On the other hand, considering the depths of idiocy comment threads can descend, it's far better to stifle attempt to keep a discussion going if it only serves to make the commenter sound off.