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Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Witnessing by Example

There isn't an explicitly Christian angle to this heartwarming story, at least that the Providence Journal reports, but Robert Sevigny offered a great example of what it means to witness through example when, after the horrible nightclub fire at the beginning of this year, he went to Rhode Island Hospital and asked to visit with a burn victim who had no family or friends in the area. The recipient of his goodwill was (former) Las Vegas music promoter William Long:

He said the Sevignys, and their unconditional friendship, have given him a new perspective.

"It's changed my values, one hundred percent," Long said. "I've always been known as a nice guy, but I was very selfish and self-centered. I was always nice to other people, but I came first, I was always chasing a career, or trying to shake hands with the right people. Now, my whole life has done a 180."

Bob Sevigny said simply that he had treated Long how he would want to be treated. He said of his new friend, Bill Long, "He's a brother."

Amen.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:38 PM EST

 

Free Archiving

One of the difficulties of the Internet is sifting through the over-supply of information, and it seems that, when money finds its way into the system, businesses could be built to aggregate and approve various sources. For the time being, we are fortunate that there are some who collect resources out of love of the material, and who provide those resources to the rest of us with only the vague hope that they will benefit in the form of satisfaction that others appreciate their efforts.

One such is my fellow Rhode Islander Marc Comtois, whose passion is history. If it's an interest you share, he's provided a great place to begin a journey... or even actual research.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:31 PM EST

 

If You're Winning, You're Not Trying Hard Enough

This paragraph, from an essay by Richard Mouw, rattled me with its truth:

God is not calling us to win the cultural wars. What is required is that we remain faithful to our deepest convictions while also showing, as the Apostle puts it, "gentleness and respect" toward those who challenge us to make a case for what we believe (I Peter 3: 15). Obviously, when it comes to matters of public policy we must also ask others to respect our convictions as well—especially our right to raise our children in the fear of the Lord without having the deck stacked against us by educators and the shapers of popular culture.

It is for others to change their own hearts. It is for God to succeed on the level of humanity. For us is only to try. Yet, on a personal level, it seems that proper effort ought to bring success at... something. What, I haven't figured out yet.

This world is for this world. But oughtn't there be some indication that we are behaving, in this world, as God requires?

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:24 PM EST

 

... Doesn't Mean They're Not After You

Ramesh Ponnuru — who, upon my asking, recently told me that he is an in-process convert to Catholicism — writes on the strategizing of the forces for abortion to use "international law" to bring abortion to the entire world, without reference to the will of the people... any people, anywhere:

The movement for legal and subsidized abortion in America has never had a particularly democratic character. Its signal victories have come through the courts. The Supreme Court in 1973 tossed out the laws of all fifty states to impose a more liberal regime in which abortion was permissible at any stage of pregnancy for any reason, and no state was allowed to legislate otherwise. In 2000, the Supreme Court held that states could not ban even partial-birth abortion, a type of abortion that a large majority of the public, and the governments of 30 states, rejected. The organizations that favor these legal outcomes were able to achieve them without having to win a social and political consensus for them—and without having to engage in the compromises that the formation of a consensus might have required.

A move to international law to achieve the same results was thus not much of a stretch. United Nations conferences during the 1990s saw several attempts to move toward the international recognition of abortion as a basic human right. What makes the memos politically embarrassing is their frankness in discussing the center's hope of bypassing legislatures here and abroad to impose its favored abortion policies: "Our goal is to see governments worldwide guarantee women's reproductive rights out of recognition that they are bound to do so."

Politically, practically, theologically... global government is a bad idea. As a realm of political power moves further from individual communities, it ought to have less specificity of power. At the international level, it ought to be nothing but a forum for nations of some degree of cultural agreement to exert what influence their common ties provide. To grant such a body rights to govern is the height of folly. As I wrote in an essay that is now only available in my Just Thinking book:

The wisdom of consolidation in any area of life depends hugely on the extent to which we trust the person or organization in which we vest responsibility. As a theoretical matter, it is best to spread power and influence as broadly as possible so those with ill intentions — the Devil, say, or even a run-of-the-mill con man or politician — cannot position themselves at the hub of too much of it.

ADDENDUM:
Incidentally, it is a matter of faith that we Catholics have trust in the organization in which we vest theological responsibility. And even then, we give varying degrees of weight to different types of pronouncements.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:15 PM EST

 

The Description of the Model

I've enjoyed participating in a (relatively) brief comment discussion in response to Disputations Tom's comparison of Aristotle's and Newton's views of spacetime:

As long as the sun rises in the morning and things still fall when they're dropped, most people probably aren't too concerned over who was right about what, but I think it's very unfortunate for our culture that Aristotle the philosopher was tossed out along with Aristotle the scientist several hundred years ago.

Yes, we have a way of tossing whole boxes of ideas, when we remodel, even if the items within them are discrete.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:54 PM EST

 

Child Killed, Father Conned, Mother Deceived... Middle-Aged Woman Completely Affirmed in Her Choice

Look, I prefer to err on the side of not standing in judgment of others, but John Chamless posted an email on the Dallas Morning News blog (which still has no direct links) that so illustrates the fundamental wrongness of a way of thinking that statements of judgment are the only reasonable response.

Mr. Chamless had suggested that they had "too much talk on this board about abortion with too little input from women." This statement is common enough, particularly among women who support abortion and think the only opposition comes from some distant patriarchy, and it is seldom challenged — merely passed by. But it isn't significantly valid. Sure, gather up every perspective possible for every issue, but privileging opinions about abortion on the basis of gender dismisses the concerns of men who wish to take as large a role in childbirth as possible and removes the demands on men who don't consider it their responsibility in any but the most superficial ways.

Among both genders, there are degrees of experience. What about young girls? What about women who were "lucky" enough to reach marriage, or even menopause, without ever having found themselves in situations in which abortion laws mattered? On the other side, what about fathers of daughters? What about boyfriends and husbands? Look, my daughter is only two, and I intend to foster a relationship that will encourage her to come to me with concerns or even (gasp!) for advice throughout her life. But until she is legally an adult, I assert that I have a right to know the important details of her experience, inasmuch as possible. It's called parenting, which involves guiding a child through the beginning stages of life in such a way as to enable her to live her adult life well.

But what's really — really — got me steamed is the blithe example of perennial adolescence that Mr. Chamless subsequently posted in the form of an email from a woman who is still viewing her relationships through a lens developed at the age of seventeen:

I was a high school senior when I found myself pregnant by my boyfriend of one year. Our birth control failed. My boyfriend offered to marry me but I knew that was not a good way to start a marriage.

Note the language, as if pregnancy is like coming across a babe in the woods. Actually, it was that the birth control actively "failed" — an inanimate object or substance causing the conception. And since her sexual behavior was not indicative of an emotional connection, the young mother decided that neither a potentially unhappy (for her) marriage nor illegitimacy was a better option than death for the human life thereby resulting.

I did not tell my mother, even though we were very close. My reasoning was that although I'm pretty sure she is pro-choice she would never again see me through the same eyes as she always had before. There was never any question that I wouldn't tell my father. He'd have cut off all my college funds and told me that if I could make a decision to sleep with a boy then I could make my own decisions how to pay for college.

Despite her complete innocence, the young woman feared that her mother might "find herself" (to borrow the woman's language from above) unable to maintain her motherly delusions about the purity of her daughter. Meanwhile, not-so-dear old Dad, like the birth control, would have behaved in an active, rather than passive, way. The girl knew that he must be allowed to maintain the same delusions about his daughter in order that she might defraud him of thousands of dollars that were apparently contingent upon her good behavior during her teenage years.

I had my abortion at age 17, and I have never regretted not telling my parents. My father died 4 years after my abortion, but my mother now lives with me and she'll go to her grave believing that her "little girl", now 43 and married 18 years with 3 beautiful children is just as sweet and wonderful as I was the day I was born.

It takes a moment to recover for words in response to the language of the second sentence. She measures her father's death, with some degree of precision, with reference to the abortion. Not "when I was 21," or even "a few years later," or even "four years later," but "4 years after my abortion," the procedure being something of which she is apparently willing to take ownership. (It wasn't "my pregnancy.") Then, rather than simply stating that she sees no reason, at this point, to taint her mother's view of her daughter's adult life, the woman measures the duration of her secret with reference to her mother's death, at which point the daughter will finally be free of the burden of keeping up the deception — a lie that she has carried for 26 years, and that covers an act that she admits makes her somewhat less "sweet and wonderful" than the day that she, through the blessing of her mother's kind permission, was born.

Finally, if my teenage daughter were to find herself pregnant, of course I would hope she'd feel comfortable coming to me for advice. But if she weren't, I'd want her to have access to abortion as a safe medical procedure before I'd want her to try to self-abort, or live with fear, or run away so she wouldn't be forced by law to tell me.

There's something almost sickly humorous about the first sentence. It isn't the suggestion that her daughter might be going about her life one day and "find herself pregnant," although that's telling and makes me wonder how the woman has addressed the topic of sex with her daughter. What I wonder more than that is what sort of "advice" the woman would give to her daughter should the girl admit to being pregnant. Presumably, she wouldn't forbid the abortion of any birth control–induced grandchildren. Therefore, if her daughter wanted to keep the child, there would be no need for a clinic's notification; if her daughter wanted to abort, the mother would offer affirmation, with even a story to unite the two women in experience. Because it ultimately doesn't matter whether a clinic is required to tell this particular parent that her daughter is with child, it seems to me that the woman's perspective, in her current role as a mother, is completely irrelevant to the public debate about parental notification.

Most of all, considering that the woman's fear is that her daughter might pursue dangerous routes, risking her life to avoid having her mother's sunny view of her tainted, it is surely a question why the woman doesn't endeavor to educate her daughter about those dangers of ad hoc abortions and to console the teenager as to the reaction that she would receive should she become pregnant. Would the woman want her daughter to live her whole life deceiving her mother, even as that very same mother would offer nothing but comfort and empathy regarding the difficult decision?

Anyone who thinks a teenage girl's life and emotional well-being are better served by forcing her to tell a parent with foreseeable serious negative consequences over taking steps to stop what she views as something she's seriously not prepared for doesn't know teenage girls. I do. I was one.

The emailer is right that I do not understand her thinking. Were parental notification the law, she would have incentive to communicate her opinion — and advice — to her daughter so that the girl would have a broader, more accurate understanding of her own circumstances in order to make her own informed decisions about abortion, birth control, and sex. In taking her public policy position, the woman isn't affecting her case. She isn't even affecting her daughter's case, because one would hope that she would ensure that her daughter knows that there are no "foreseeable serious negative consequences." She is extrapolating her specific childhood circumstances to all girls everywhere. She is seeking to affect the environments of other people's daughters — mine, for instance. Why should she believe that her opinion, in that light, "might just command a little more weight" than mine?

I, for one, find that her view of sex lightens the "weight" supposedly granted by her experience. That she apparently believes that teenagers cannot be expected to be responsible enough to make their own informed decisions about sex makes truly disturbing her subsequent conclusion that they must be assumed responsible enough to address the repercussions. I intend to make clear to my own daughter what I hope for and expect from her, including the assistance that her mother and I will provide — and the consequences that there will indeed be. It isn't the place of the government, let alone abortionists and activists, let alone some anonymous woman, to undermine the relationship and the environment for which I strive as a parent.

One last thing. All of this, it shouldn't have to be said, leaves as tangential the rights of those who are not given the opportunity ever to be teenage girls (or boys). While those rights may be compartmentalized for the purpose of discussion, they cannot be for the purpose of judgment. We should do all that we can to make ours a society in which the circumstances are not such that a girl can kill her child, deceive her mother, scam her father, and feel that these acts give her the moral weight to dismiss the rights of other parents. To those who believe that elective abortion is evil, this woman is complicit, bringing to the table an obvious incentive to maintain her own delusions about herself.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:53 PM EST

 

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Earth Apple," by Janette van de Geest Van Gruisen.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:04 AM EST

 

We've Both Got Our Views, but I'm Right

Lileks notes a perennial frustration of mine, even if it has given me ideas about the basic construction of reality:

... we live in an era of non-contiguous information streams. I believe one thing; someone else believes another – and the bedrock assumptions are utterly contradictory. This is what drives me nuts about discussing current events with some people. It’s like discussing the Apollo program with people who think it was all faked, or discussing archeology with those who believe the world is six thousand years old. I think the Iraq Campaign was part of a broad war against Islamicist fascism and the states that enable it; others think it’s all about oil and Halliburton jerking the strings of a Jeebus puppet. No. Middle. Ground.

Of course, Lileks suggests what we all know to be true (don't we?):

Viewed a century out, the murky present will seem stark and obvious, white bones on a black slab. Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the terrorist organizations in the Levant and Indonesia, the Islamist elements of Pakistan, the behind-the-scenes support of North Korea – history, in its blunt custom, will color these factions alike. The people who insist that secular Saddam would never hook up with a radical Islamist group will seem like doddering backbenchers in Britain who muttered that Hitler hated Bolsheviks too much to strike a pact. I suspect that a century hence, those who sniffed at the threat of Saddam and his sons will be regarded as equally irrelevant.

"Suspect" nothing; I'm positively certain.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:33 AM EST

 

The Depth of Derbyshire

Today's (rather, yesterday's) column from John Derbyshire was probably his best diary (or blog) type piece yet. It ranges across various topics and depths of brow. I'm in particular agreement that the "19th century was the greatest of all centuries for the human race, and the 20th simply didn't compare":

This is one of those things that is obvious once you have been told it, even if it never occurred to you before. Just look at The Nutcracker, first staged 1892. What can our generation offer to compare with it? And look at the bourgeois values that radiate from the stage in the opening scenes: the stern Papas and stately Mamas, the kids on joyful vacation from their Latin verbs and piano lessons, the servants in their livery and pinafores, the hierarchy and order and confidence. Sure, there was another side to that world — my own ancestors were digging coal for a dollar a day while Tchaikovsky was writing out his score. In the matter of great accomplishment, though, Murray has got it right: We just don't measure up. Going down into the Chancellery bunker near the end of WWII, Joseph Goebbels took a look around at the burning wreckage of Berlin and exulted to his diary: "These flames are consuming the last of 19th-century bourgeois civilization!" He got that right; and look at what was left when the flames had done their work.

It must be acknowledged that some magnificent technologies (whether gadgets or procedures) were forged in those flames, but it has seemed to me, since I made the beginnings of an intellectual inquiry into it, that various huge trends in Western culture came together during the 1800s — from music to literature to intellectualism to science. Unfortunately, to borrow from the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we chose poorly. Society walked a line throughout most of the 1800s between intellect and emotion, between individualism and morality, and thereafter began to stagger about.

Anyway, most of the other topics covered by Derb in his December Diary are similarly interesting and enlightening.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:24 AM EST

 

Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Panning the Blog

To be honest, I'm not as surprised as some that pan blogging attracted so much interest. It's a topic that's interesting almost in spite of itself — if the right angle is taken.

Fritz Schranck likens the discussion to manly discourse about tools. He goes on to offer such a discourse on the relevant attributes of various pans. For my part, although I use pans pretty much daily, I'm not a picky cooker — much as I'm not a picky tool user. Whatever comes my way and works, essentially.

What I found fascinating about the pan question wasn't the cookware itself, but the processes behind the facts that are observable to the customer. Companies tend to prefer to avoid guesswork, which means that there is research and debate behind every decision. If there's a $70 price gap between two items that aren't clearly differentiated, you can be pretty certain that a group of executives sat around a table, at some point, and batted around various considerations. Furthermore, to inform their discussion and, subsequently, to enact their decisions, employees further down the ladder spent their workdays on various matters ultimately resulting in this marketing mystery.

In our specific case, not only does the fact of purpose present us with a brainteaser of sorts, but the nature of our more-usual discussions on politics, religion, and other weighty matters can be exercised and displayed in the application of our thinking to an entirely separate, relatively mundane matter. Me, I just like to think. In my reactions to others, I often find it enlightening when they discuss matters with which I am familiar in my daily life. What input would Peter Jennings be able to offer in the pan debate? Who knows. But whatever he had to say (if he would discard his image long enough to comment) would surely tell his viewers something that isn't as immediately discernible amidst his usual content.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:55 PM EST

 

What a Totalitarian State Really Looks Like

If ever you need to reaffirm your suspicion that the United States is nowhere near resembling a totalitarian state or, God forbid, if you should begin to be persuaded by the rhetoric of the Left, just try to picture President Bush sending out agents to collect every copy of a newspaper that has a manipulated picture of him looking like Hitler, as Castro has done:

Although details of what happened remain unclear, what is known is that someone or some group at the newspaper appears to have risked all in the name of political satire.

Yesterday a spokesman for the newspaper confirmed that an investigation was under way, but that the photographer who took the picture was not responsible.

Now the talk of Havana is not just of what the image was supposed to mean, but of what has happened to those under suspicion. Rumours have spread, not least because the local offices of the Communist party went to work as soon as the change was noticed, ensuring that fewer copies than normal made it on to the streets.

Many people did not receive their daily delivery, while those sent to offices were subsequently recalled.

Don't get me wrong; I'm thankful that there are Americans willing to fight at the fringes of our freedom. What bothers me is the sense that, for many of them, the protection of freedom is subordinate to the protection of their political inclinations. This has been seen on multiple campuses, where liberal students have rounded up all copies of student papers that they've deemed to be offensive. It is also subtly apparent in the hilarious twist of emphasis with which the Guardian ends its story:

Young Cubans, particularly in Havana, have failed to immerse themselves in the revolutionary ideals to the same extent as those born before 1959 and President Castro's triumph over the former rightwing dictator Fulgencio Batista.

With the collapse in 1989 of the Soviet Union - Cuba's main international source of financial and political support - the island has been forced to turn to tourism.

Although this has brought in much needed dollars, and helped to fund education and healthcare, it has also been the source of discontent.

Wealthy foreigners parade along the streets of the capital, carrying digital cameras, mobile phones and wearing the kind of expensive sportswear of which the average Habanero can only dream. It is no surprise then that young Cubans look on enviously, while turning their backs on the Communist ideology that preaches against western consumerism. But, with the regime as vigorous as ever in clamping down on opposition, they may yet have to wait for change.

In this view, the activities of the Communists are partly to be excused because the rebellious youth of the nation have "failed" to get with the program, mostly out of envy of those tourists (so necessary to keep up the world class educational and healthcare establishments) who inspire them to "turn their backs" on Communism. Surely you see the difficult position in which Castro finds himself! For the good of his people, he is forced to invite representatives of the very ideology that defeated the Soviet Union (on which he previously leaned) to spend those ill-gotten dollars on his island, yet they bring with them a bad influence that threatens his utopia.

If only the Patriot Act were meant to ensure full payment of taxes to maintain a socialist healthcare system, then it might not seem so bad to those who proclaim Bush's similarities to a certain 20th century maniac.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 05:59 PM EST

 

Those Coastal Puritans

I realize that there are those who tune out anything that Ann Coulter writes, but when she's right, she's right:

Uttering the standard liberal cliche a few years ago, Richard Reeves described "representatives of the new South" as "Republicans of old puritan definition, righteous folk afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun." ...

Like all beliefs universally held by liberals, Reeves' aphorism is the precise opposite of the truth.

It's the blue states that are constantly sending lawyers to the red states to bother everyone. Americans in the red states look at a place like New York City — where, this year, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade featured a gay transvestite as Mrs. Claus — and say, Well, I guess some people like it, but it's not for me.

Meanwhile, liberals in New York and Washington are consumed with what people are doing in Alabama and Nebraska. Nadine Strossen and Barry Lynn cannot sleep at night knowing that someone, somewhere, is gazing upon something that could be construed as a religious symbol.

I've said it many times, mostly with reference to atheists: this sort of secular liberalism is fundamentalist in nature, purely and simply. The coastal elites have The One Truth, and it is therefore incumbent upon them to force it upon the rest of humanity. I'll acknowledge that I hold contrary beliefs that I would characterize as Truth, and that it is morally incumbent upon me to spread, but there's a pivotal difference in approach.

My Truths have to do with what people must feel to be true and what they must think to be true. For both thinking and (especially) feeling, force is not an effective method of persuasion. Therefore, it is counterproductive to seek to impose beliefs on others. In effect, I would seek to persuade somebody that the religious symbol that he's hung in the public square relates to incorrect presumptions (if I believed that to be the case) and to give full consideration to what is and is not applicable about it.

Secularists and liberals go in the other direction. Their Truths have to do with what people must say is true. They seek to tear down the manifestations of belief and to stigmatize it as something bad, or at least too dangerous to be given public airing. There is no differentiation between applicable and inapplicable qualities. As Ms. Coulter points out, there's not even any differentiation between monuments and laws, public parks and Congress, or honoring the Ten Commandments and establishing a religion.

That, in my view, is the essence of "fundamentalism" — restricting the word to its unfavorable connotation in modern discourse. If people in the sticks are forced to adhere to The Right Rules, surely they will come around to agreeing that the blue-staters are much further along in their ideological formation. Wherever inappropriate activities are pursued, they must be hunted down and stopped. No persuasion. No argument. No autonomy. Just lawsuits.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:58 PM EST

 

Songs You Should Know 12/30/03

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Saz Jam" by Mozaik. It's tough to describe this sound (which is why the band has coined its own genre). This song is a bit like Led Zeppelin meets the Grateful Dead at the synagogue.

"Saz Jam," Mozaik, Psychedelic Jewgrass
Stream (HiFi) Download
from Beyond Words

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:41 PM EST

 

Monday, December 29, 2003

Not Everything Is Relative

Amy Welborn links to a New York Times piece about the exchange of followers between the 65 million–strong American Catholic Church and the 2.3 million–strong Episcopal Church USA. The article's tone is clearly "some come, some go," but it's also clear that writer Laurie Goodstein prefers this to be the stronger impression:

"They're not coming in as they used to even three years ago announcing, `I'm just church shopping, I'm just looking around,' " said the Rev. Elizabeth M. Kaeton, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chatham, N.J. "The people I've seen recently have come to me and said, `Sign me up, I'm ready.' "

Ms. Kaeton, who is openly gay, supported the ordination of Bishop Robinson but said she had not dwelled on the issue in her church. She said her parish of about 300 families had recently gained 15 new members, many of them from Catholic churches, and lost one to a Catholic church.

Of course, the more significant aspect of Ms. Kaeton's comments is the impression that the "conversions" aren't really conversions at all — involving the quest for Truth and all that — but are statements of a faith already held. However, in its way, the statistical statement is just as important. 300 families; 5% increase (15 families); "many" from Catholic churches. The increase is the important part.

Of course, readers who make it to paragraph 30 (of 32) will find this by way of comparison:

About 25 percent of the congregation at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Dallas recently left after the votes on homosexuality, said the rector, the Rev. David M. Allen. Those who left included some of the church's bedrock, like its secretary and the two men who used to volunteer to mow the lawn every Tuesday, Father Allen said. All but one left for Catholic churches, he said.

This church also had about 300 families; 25% decrease (75 families); "all but one" gone Catholic. There are relevant factors, beyond geography, such as the lesbian-run church in the first case and the apparent theological conservatism of the "Anglo-Catholic parish" in the second case. However, these factors only further point to the heart of the trend: the Episcopalian Church, once socially conservative, has been driving away those followers with its policies of ordaining women, accepting divorce, and now accepting the practice of homosexuality. Unfortunately, the "target market" for which these parishioners have been discarded, tend to be of the more secularist Left, and they are transforming the Church into a venue to express their views rather than to seek God's will.

Father Allen understands what's going on, and I have to suspect that he understands where it is going:

"I think many people in this parish came to the conclusion that there was the apparent absence of any kind of authority that operates to restrain the Episcopal Church in any way," Father Allen said. "They wanted to be part of a church which they saw as being bigger than American culture, which had an authority which went beyond our cultural conventions."

At some point, forcing their petulant modern will on a symbol of moral authority will lose its caché for liberal Episcopalians, mostly because the roles of authority will have switched. Somehow, though, I don't think the Ultimate Authority against whom these people are really rebelling is going to change His rules.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:36 AM EST

 

When Stories Come Together

Cox & Forkum unite two stories in a way that is not to be missed.

(I'm continually tempted to purchase their t-shirt of cowboy Bush branding a donkey "W," but I'm afraid I be beaten up for wearing it.)

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:13 AM EST

 

What's in the Price of a Name

Glenn Reynolds ponders the odd currents of marketing, branding, and signature lines. I'm not an expert on any of these matters, but since the price comparison in question has to do with Fall River's Emeril, whose "bams" have long echoed across the bay to my hometown (metaphorically speaking), I thought I'd offer a consideration.

The crux of the matter is that an All-Clad stainless 12-Inch fry pan goes for about $130, while essentially the same item, from the same company, goes for $60 in the Emerilware line. So, does having a famous chef endorse its products lose All-Clad money? Surely not.

I suspect that including a product within a signature line changes the entire marketing dynamic. Prof. Reynolds may be inclined to avoid signature lines, but they obviously attract customers if companies pay for them. The question is whom Emeril attracts... probably not people willing to pay $130 for a pan. They are people who wouldn't otherwise depart from the baseline pan product (say a $10 to $20 iron job), but for whom Emeril's name might inspire them to pay three or four times as much to upgrade.

In a somewhat paradoxical way, if my guess is right, Emeril can be seen as a sort of collective negotiator for his fans — on the payroll of the company. He brings a bunch of new customers, who mightn't otherwise be in the market for the product, to the store, and to entice the greatest number of them to actually lay down their credit cards, All-Clad lowers the price.

The "generic" All-Clad stainless steel pan, on the other hand, brings a customer in search of a high-end pan. Hey, it may even be that under-pricing the Emeril pan makes such customers value the high-brow pan even more. At any rate, even if the company loses $70 from those among this group willing to live with a pan from that bam guy, or willing to do the research to discover that the pans are effectively the same, the numbers are small relative to customer pick-ups from the low-end.

Of course, having the pricing brought into the light by somebody like the famous Instapundit might shift the calculation.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:08 AM EST

 

Sunday, December 28, 2003

I Can't Wait to Vote for a Democrat!

Even when Senator Lincoln Chafee (RINO, Rhode Island) is apparently inclined to vote in accordance with my wishes as his constituent, he does so for reasons that are worse than disagreement would have been:

The news was a respite from Chafee's worrying over the biggest domestic issue of the year, the Medicare bill. Chafee had supported the Senate version of the bill in June, as a flawed but worthy downpayment on his promise to seek drug benefits for the elderly.

He feared that a compromise would emerge from Senate-House negotiations with too strong a dose of the House version's competition between traditional Medicare and the untested private insurance plans. But he concluded that the conservative public-private experiment was "pretty well neutralized" and "watered down" in the compromise unveiled the week before Thanksgiving.

As it happened, he voted for the bill anyway.

You know, I'm pretty partisan when it comes to the strategic matter of voting for the makeup of the national government. But if my Senator is consistently going to vote in contrast to my preferences, I'd prefer he or she at least make a platform out of that disagreement. In other words, assuming no Republican challengers and no viable independents, I'll be voting for the Democrat in that particular race... even if it turned out to be Patrick Kennedy. (Which would, from where I stand, be ideal.)

For one thing, social conservatives have got to start making some noise where it can make a difference, and undermining Republicans who actively advance the other side's causes minimizes practical risk. For another thing, it's harder to replace a bad Republican with a better Republican unless a Democrat intervenes.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:36 PM EST

 

In Search of the Moral Cure

As it happens, just the other day, I wrote a fairly lengthy post on the death penalty, only to decide that I hadn't gotten it sufficiently straight in my head to publish my thoughts. One of the complicating components that I was trying to fit together is that I believe that, paradoxically, those who oppose the death penalty ought to simultaneously advocate for harder terms in prison.

I also believe that inserting religious instruction would be an important part of any rehabilitation program. If one of religious folks' objections to the death penalty is that God can work miracles even in the souls of the most hardened sinners, then it would seem incumbent upon us to facilitate that connection. Unfortunately, I'm more than a little concerned about the potential for prisons to become recruitment centers for — oh, I don't know — radical Islam. I'm also less than optimistic about the reaction to public mandates for religious training.

That's why I filed it in the When Life Gets Back to Normal file when I came across Victor's discovery of faith-based prisons in Florida. Of course, the ACLU sees it as a breech of that separation thing, even though it doesn't look as if a particular denomination or even religion will be promoted, and even though inmates have the option of transferring out.

As Correction Secretary James Crosby Jr. puts it, all they've done is "developed a cocoon, a place where they can practice their faith and not have the severe negative pressures and interactions that naturally take place in some of our institutions." In other words, it is an opportunity for the state to exploit some stated intention of inmates to further submerse themselves in an area of thinking that has been widely held, throughout history, to affect behavior for the better.

I, personally, would be thrilled to see the program expand throughout the prison system, with increasing incentive for inmates, of varying degrees of preexisting religious devotion, to seek to enter into faith-based institutions. However, I could see that there might be a legitimate argument if it became the case that religious prisons received a notable degree of perks, unrelated to their central mission, for the purpose of attracting convicts toward conversion. I would tend to think that a positive development, but I would understand the argument that it wouldn't be appropriate.

In contrast, I'm not sure what to make of Tyler Cowen's comment on the Volokh Conspiracy:

Isn't this just yet another way to put the better-behaving inmates together in one place? I would expect that to improve human well-being, at least for the people I care about. But I would expect to get most of the practical benefits without the explicit introduction of religion. You do need some signal of good behavior, the question is whether religion is the only or the best option for such a signal.

To be honest, I'm still not sure what to say about this, because it seems to so dramatically miss what I take to be the point. Implicit in Cowen's view is that religion is, of itself, a benign and inactive endeavor — as if religion is just a demographic marker, not a pursuit that will affect prisoners and help them to change their approach to life. The goal of the program, after all, is not to change behavior within the prisons, although that's certainly a benefit, but outside of the prisons, which Governor Jeb Bush made clear in his speech at the inauguration of the new approach.

If one gives credence to spirituality, it may very well be that making prison less harsh of an experience for those willing to behave themselves within its confines will, in the long run, hurt their "human well-being." The larger concern, when it comes to handling criminals, is to help them change who they are, not to teach them to compartmentalize their behavior depending on which side of the bars they find themselves.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:46 PM EST

 

Friday, December 26, 2003

The Redwood Review Fiction of the Week

The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "The House of the Green Fairies," by Gary Bolstridge.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:53 PM EST

 

Thursday, December 25, 2003

The Redwood Review Nonfiction of the Week

The Redwood Review nonfiction piece of the week is "The Rider," by Gary Bolstridge.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:00 PM EST

 

Merry Christmas!

The significance of Christmas apart from the gift-opening, Santa Claus, Christmas movies, malls, day off aspect that had been its entirety throughout most of my life is finally beginning to settle in, several years after I scrambled my way to Catholicism.

I still remember the Christmas when it no ceased to feel like Christmas when I was a child. Up until that year, my mother's side of the family had gathered at my grandparents' house in Bennington, Vermont. A half-dozen adults, five children, a visit from Santa Claus after dinner, snow (often). But then Pops and his second wife began going down to Florida for the winter, and my parents and I had began having Christmas in New Jersey, sometimes (but not always) with my father's parents or uncles, aunts, and cousins from his side of the family.

The Christmas spirit disappeared a year or two later. I had just turned my bike onto Valley Rd., headed toward my friend Cliff's house, and it was a crisp, gray day. The roads were quiet. And I thought to myself, "Well, this feels just like any other day."

Until now.

Perhaps part of the increase in feeling has to do with my being a father, myself, now, with a daughter finally old enough to get excited about presents. However, more of it has to do with the sense that I'm beginning — at last — to understand the larger significance of the day.

Today, we recall that moment, over 2,000 years ago, when hope was squeezed from the womb. A hope so huge that it applies to every human being ever born. If God could bless us with such a hope — birthed so humbly, with so little pomp; quietly, as it were, among a half-dozen people (or so) and some animals — then how can we not have hope for the coming year, and the one after that, and after that, stretching out for eternity, even as we pass our own Christmas days quietly?

I had the good fortune to read these words, from Zephaniah 3, at Mass a couple of weeks ago:

Shout for joy, O daughter Zion!
Sing joyfully, O Israel!
Be glad and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!
The LORD has removed the judgment against you

he has turned away your enemies;
the King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst,
you have no further misfortune to fear.
On that day, it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged!
The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a mighty savior;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
and renew you in his love,
he will sing joyfully because of you,
as one sings at festivals.

Rejoice, because God rejoices over you. No matter how you pass the day, you pass it in the Christmas light of His gift to you.

And I pass my day in the light of your gift to me. Thank you for reading.

Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:43 AM EST

 

The Sweet Yellow Cake of Vindication

I received a little bit of heat (in email or in a comments section elsewhere) for finding it interesting that the Bush administration was coming under fire for its Africa uranium statement at the same time that the IAEA was investigating whether looted uranium in Iraq was contaminating villages.

Well, lookee here:

The CIA and the State Department had doubts about the purported Niger information because they knew that Hussein already had a stockpile of the same type of uranium that he was supposed to be seeking.

The funny thing is, as Cliff May notes, that the Washington Post still finds this fact worth only passing mention.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:02 AM EST

 

Wednesday, December 24, 2003

The Redwood Review Poem of the Week

The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Life Grows Richer Still," by Ingrid Mathews.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 02:26 PM EST

 

Ensuring Mobility of the Downtrodden

Last week, Froma Harrop took up the topic of population growth. The world's too crowded, she thinks, housing prices are too high, and the loss of a countryside through which to drive on the weekend is "heartbreaking." If it weren't the case that, over the years, I've built up higher barriers than my usual to responding to Ms. Harrop, I would only have been inclined to comment on this:

David Simcox, senior adviser for Negative Population Growth, regards the desire for multiplying masses as a vestige of an earlier age when humankind's future remained in doubt. "The naked ape is now the dominant animal on the earth," he says, "and its survival is not in question."

Somehow it seems such arguments are rarely made without recourse to, or at least hints of, an atheistic, materialistic view of the world. Reading a week's worth of discussion of Harrop's column on the Dallas Morning News blog it occurs to me that atheism isn't the only ism to frequently accompany fears of overpopulation.

Of course, one reason for continued population growth is that unilateral cessation gives tremendous advantage to a culture that doesn't go along with the global plan, as Europe is finding with its increasingly Muslim demographic. However, there's another factor that I haven't seen addressed: social mobility. Labor is necessary for the functioning of our society, and more laborers than managers are required. As a relative matter, it would seem to me that freezing the population at the lower end (which is where population growth would have to be frozen) would make it more difficult for families to rise out of the mire. Economically speaking, if there aren't more dollars to go around, then those who already have them will more fervently guard their ground.

The only response to this tendency would be enforced socialism, which seems to be a lingering hint among those who fear population growth, as well. Different positions on so many of these matters boil pretty quickly down to basic worldviews, don't they? Even if most people who hold them can't articulate the intricacies.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 11:52 AM EST

 

Tis the Season to Bash Christians

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Glenn Reynolds drummed up this knee slapper for your reading pleasure on Christmas Eve:

Our leading bishops demand hard evidence of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. If we were to demand the same level of proof from their profession, they would all be out of a job.

As much of a hawk as I am, I don't think even Reynolds wants our government to conduct the war on terror based on faith. On the other hand, atheists who supported the war might do well, in this context, to remember that they have, in fact, argued that a lack of "hard evidence" does not mean that the weapons did (and do) not exist.

All in all, it's a mild jab, but one questions its timing.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:45 AM EST

 

Anti-Israeli Sentiment for the Holidays

Bias.

All you can do is shake your head.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:31 AM EST

 

Oh, Just Say It: "Our Side Good; Your Side Bad!"

We social conservatives are particularly sensitive to revamped history, so I was quick to click when Instapundit noted "a doozy of an example" of historical airbrushing, spotted by Michael Demmons. The affront to honesty? Some changes being made to a touristy educational video at the Lincoln Memorial. Here's the story as told on the homosexual side, and here's the story from another perspective.

Apparently, part of the video, as it currently stands, has bothered some of my fellow pro-family, Christian types:

The video presented in the Lincoln Legacy Room at the Lincoln Memorial appears to suggest that the nation's 16th president would have supported modern-day, left-of-center political causes such as homosexual "rights," abortion "rights" and the modern feminist agenda.

The video features an actor impersonating Lincoln's voice over visuals of protest marches. Some of the visuals include signs and banners reading "The Lord is my Shepherd and Knows I am Gay," "Gay & Lesbian Sexual Rights," "Council of Churches Lesbian Rights," "National Organization for Women," "Reagan's Wrongs Equal Women's Rights," "ERA Yes," "Ratify the ERA," "I Had An Illegal Abortion In 1967 - Never Again," "Keep Abortion Legal," "I Am Pro-Choice America."

Let's get the honest truth on the table, right from the get-go: we all know that this very easily could be, and probably is, an instance of liberal propaganda, albeit on a minor scale. I've looked for the video online, but couldn't find it. However, I'm sure nobody in today's video-drenched atmosphere will have trouble picturing the scene. I imagine something from the Gettysburg Address as the above messages flash on the screen:

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Honesty of motive, however, is not permitted to enter into this discussion. So, although nobody's been able to tell me, in the comments on Demmon's blog, how it is possible for the "religious right" to demand the removal of footage from a year 2000 protest from a video made in 1995, the basic thrust is that gay protestors are a matter of the historical record, and therefore their inclusion is a sacred matter. I imagine the reaction would be different were this government-funded video to include the image of a Christian procession while any of the following sentences were read aloud:

Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty. (First Inaugural, 1861)

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. (Emancipation Proclamation, 1863)

...that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom... (Gettysburg Address, 1863)

(And don't even look at Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865!)

Hey, I know that the battle lines are drawn. I know that many will act as if all is fair in the culture war. But it's still disappointing to witness intelligent, often reasonable people striking poses of indignation and blithely ignoring anything beyond a thimble's depth of consideration.

In remedy, I propose that we hold a major rally at the Lincoln Memorial in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment and insist that footage from that be used in the film. You know — to remain historically accurate.

ADDENDUM:
My closing line in this post was meant as a joke (although the rally mightn't be a bad idea). I am sincerely bothered when what I consider to be my side fails to take the high road; in this case, I mean the "me too" solution for footage in the film. Considering what it is, there's no reason that latter 20th/early 21st century causes need enter into the film. It could be just as effective if generic footage were shown, by which I mean footage of the protests rather than the objects of the protests. In this particular instance, I think taking out the bight of specificity need not soften the video.

But, nobody's suggested that, as far as I can see.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:35 AM EST

 

Not Being Obnoxious to Those on the Attack

I highly recommend this interview with Barbara Nicolosi, particularly if you're a Christian with artistic or cultural interests. It really struck me, as one who feels very (very) strongly called to pursue artistic work that isn't explicitly religious for the purpose of bringing others to Christ. This paragraph was like a verbal slap to a man in a self-indulgent stupor (although, being only a relatively recent convert, I would substitute "conservative" for "Christian"):

Then you have the other extreme, the ones who end up getting thrown out of the business because they're too much in people's faces. And they're bitter—"I got fired because I was a Christian." No, you got fired because you were obnoxious. I know a few people like that.

Of course, it's difficult for the average Christian not to be bitter, let alone one who feels he is being thwarted in his passionate endeavors at every turn for ideological reasons. Consider two anecdotes that Nicolosi relates on her blog. The first has to do with active covering up of the effects of abortion on the mother. The second has to do with sitcom writers' false conception of Christian sexuality and the inability of even creative people to come up with a plausible reason to become Christian (which, I guess, makes sense, considering).

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:02 AM EST

 

Pass It On

Freedom is a good thing. And those are good who bring freedom to others.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:50 AM EST

 

Rolling Back Corruption in Reverse Order

At Dec 23, 8:12 AM, on the Dallas Morning News blog, Bob Moos asks an oft-heard question, lately, that sounds valid, but that really isn't:

The weekend story showing popular support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage got me thinking. How exactly would that shore up the many broken homes and families across America? If we really wanted to tackle the problem with the simple-mindedness some people apparently desire, let's just press for a constitutional amendment banning divorce. After all, wouldn't that attack the issue head-on?

The reasons that this turnabout is specious are manifold. For one thing, such an amendment would change existing law by means of the Constitution, while there are other — more procedurally feasible and less dramatic — methods of change, rather than merely affirming what has always been the de facto case, that marriage is man and woman. For another, I'd say that there are very few people who believe that there are never circumstances under which divorce is the best of a bad bunch of options. For yet another, divorce doesn't relate as directly to what marriage, as an institution, is.

No, while a policy of easy divorce is certainly the largest detriment that modern marriage faces, and laws should make the process more difficult, and with higher barriers, the most forceful front in the battle against divorce will be social. It isn't inconsequential that the movement for easy divorce came before the movement for gay marriage; first, marriage itself was cheapened, then its reason for being came into question. Thus, socially, its reason for being will be reaffirmed before it can be rehabilitated. As I've written before, articulating the reasoning behind opposition to gay marriage will lead to stronger, more intelligent opposition to divorce.

All of this has been noted before in this debate. The comment of Moos's that made it, in particular, a worthwhile spark for this post was the lesson drawn from what was apparently only a rhetorical question:

Of course, it also would hit too close to home for most folks. And as we all know, it's far easier to complain about your neighbor's yard than it is to clean up your own.

I wonder if Moos has any statistics about the makeup of that large majority of Americans who oppose gay marriage. I'm just guessing, but something tells me that divorce is likely to be somewhat less common among those who oppose gay marriage than among the general population. At any rate, I haven't been divorced and do not intend to be, so I'll consider myself at liberty to oppose gay marriage.

From that position of rhetorical freedom, I'd suggest a change in metaphor. It isn't a matter of two yards requiring independent cleaning. It's a matter of inviting in a notoriously messy family to a yard that one's relatives have already left a mess. Unless the newcomers pledge devoted effort to assist in the picking up, the prudent move is to declare that the party is over; one's yard is a living space, not a carnival.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:49 AM EST

 

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

What You Have to Do Versus What You Are

Over on the Dallas Morning News blog (which still doesn't have direct links), Bill McKenzie asks Rod Dreher a valid question bearing on the gay marriage debate:

Rod, why shouldn't states set their own rules for granting or not granting gay couples marriage licenses? I'm following your debate with Ruben from afar, and am not sure I understand the imperative for the feds on setting the rules.

Rod had previously mentioned the complexity of handling "married" homosexuals moving from one state to another, as well as the rules for such marriage-based federal policies as taxation. Because those ideas had been put on the table, I gather Mr. McKenzie is looking for something a bit more basic: why the genders of the spouses aren't akin to any other rules and restrictions that states place on couples that seek marriage licenses.

My sense is that there is less difference between states' policies than there may have once been, but nonetheless, I think the underlying distinction is that the variations have to do with what a couple must do to be married, as opposed to what the couple must be. Once a couple is married in one state, other states recognize them as such. I suppose, theoretically, if a state considered something sufficiently important — say, a marital course of some kind — it could conceivably require new citizens to accomplish undergo steps (as with drivers' licenses) to receive the full benefits of its marriage policy. But I don't think that any such thing exists. Once you're married, you're married.

As so often happens with questions such as Mr. McKenzie's we come right to the realization of what a major, radical suggestion gay marriage is. As it stands, any state differences have only to do with how a couple enters into marriage and what benefits they reap. If a couple moves, they might lose some benefits that married couples had where they were, but they will enjoy the benefits granted to every other married couple in the new state. Similarly, when a couple runs off to Las Vegas to elope, their home state just accepts that marriage as valid.

In essence, there has always been a federal understanding of what relationships qualify as marriage — one man and one woman. To change that even in one state would require a panoply of new laws and new policies across the nation, even at the federal level, including discrimination (in a neutral sense) between the validity of the same piece of paper in two different hands, and the likelihood is that the judiciary would reject such discrimination, federalizing the change, anyway.

ADDENDUM:
Here's an interesting question: could a state just decline to accept all marriage licenses from another state? The Full Faith and Credit Clause would seem to forbid it, although there's been some debate about whether it would apply to marriage in this way, if tested.

Again, however, the likely behavior of the judiciary makes the question moot. If gay marriage were going through the appropriate channel (legislatures), New Hampshire could threaten not to accept any marriage licenses from Massachusetts, for example, which might influence the people of Massachusetts in their policymaking. But if even the people of Massachusetts don't have a say, the leverage is post facto, and not very effective.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 08:04 PM EST

 

Songs You Should Know 12/23/03

The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "The First Noel" by Joe Parillo and David Key. It's too late to get it for this Christmas, but this CD comes highly recommended if you like jazz.

"The First Noel" Joe Parillo, Jazz
Stream (HiFi)
from The Angels Gather

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:09 PM EST

 

Monday, December 22, 2003

Preparing a Win-Win Strategy

Lane Core notes a great column from Janet Daley:

I am stunned with admiration at the mental agility of the anti-war lobby. Having spent months taunting George W Bush and Tony Blair for their failure to capture Saddam Hussein, and thus accomplish one of the most fundamental aims of the "illegal war" in Iraq, it was able to recover its composure almost instantaneously when the worst happened.

Within minutes of Paul Bremer pronouncing the words "We got him" to ecstatic cheers from Iraqi journalists, there were solemn-faced experts crowding on to my television screen to proclaim that the capture was largely irrelevant, or positively counter-productive, to the present difficulties in Iraq.

The very same interviewers who had once invited their interviewees to prophesy endless anarchy as a consequence of America's inability to locate this man were now asking more or less the same people if his arrest was not pretty useless after all. Or (better yet) if it might not "inflame" the situation even further.

She goes on to offer some talking points for the Left should such horrid events occur as the successful formation of a democratic Iraq.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:19 PM EST

 

Our Faith Is Not for Sale

This letter comes with deep regret and pain over the great loss that your actions have caused.

You know that the world is at a pivotal moment when a letter gives you that stand-up-and-cheer feeling, as when the hero of a great movie does The Right Thing. I thank Rev. Canon Stanley Ntagali of Uganda for providing such a refreshing statement:

Recent comments by your staff suggesting that your proposed visit demonstrates that normal relations with the Church of Uganda continue, have made your message clear: If we fall silent about what you have done promoting unbiblical sexual immorality and we overturn or ignore the decision to declare a severing of relationship with ECUSA, poor displaced persons will receive Aid. Here is our response: The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not for sale [Hooray!], even among the poorest of us who have no money. Eternal life, obedience to Jesus Christ, and conforming to His Word are more important.

Chris Johnson summarizes my reaction well ("Frank" is U.S. Episcopal Bishop Frank Griswold):

Sucks when your pet Third Worlders anathematize you, doesn't it, Frank? But that's what it's come down to. As far as Uganda is concerned, the ECUSA is no longer a Christian church. But if Frank and the liberals convert to Christianity, then they can come. Not before.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:12 PM EST

 

Married to a Something

Although I'm behind on this, I wanted to make sure to link to the second part of Jennifer Roback Morse's essay over on NRO. She's very much a woman who moved in the right direction when faced with a conflict of the modern promise:

I couldn't articulate it at the time, but in the years that have passed, I came to realize that a sperm-donor baby would have changed our marriage relationship in a fundamental way. The baby would have been my baby, with my husband as a bystander. He would have been supportive, like a good Sensitive New Age Guy. But he would have been a wallet and an assistant mom.

What about the baby? She is person; she has the right to be loved as for her own sake. I was reducing a Someone, the baby, to a Something, a project that satisfies and gratifies me. In the process, I was using my husband, a Someone, to get Something I wanted.

The piece is moving, and very much worth a few minutes of your time.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 10:00 PM EST

 

Keeping the Consensus of History

John Omicinski writes optimistically about the implication of the Anglican turmoil for the Roman Catholic Church:

The craziness in the American Catholic Church might well guarantee that no pope in this century will come from the United States. This branch has proven itself unstable and untrustworthy.

And, hope as they may, secular liberals are doomed to disappointment if they expect the next pope -- who will be chosen by John Paul's hand-picked men -- to loosen Vatican rules on celibacy, birth control or, for heaven's sake, abortion.

No. Unlike the Anglican/Episcopalians, the Roman Catholic leadership is likely to ride out the storm of sexual secularism even as its churches in Europe go silent.

Its leaders are well aware that those most loudly beating the drums are not well-wishers within the church but -- irony of ironies -- nonbelievers.

There seems to be quite a bit of that "you must change in a way that will result in your destruction" kind of thinking going around in this era. Omicinski remembers W.B. Yeats's great line, "The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

For strength and encouragement (albeit of an admonishing sort), it is useful to look to an essay by Steve Kellmeyer (enthusiastically recommended by Victor Lams):

You could look at Athanasius alone against the world and get the mistaken impression that he was alone in the college of bishops. He wasn’t. He had in company with him all the bishops who had ever or would ever keep Faith. Remember, the Catholic Church and Chicago have one thing in common: the dead always get a vote. Athanasius had a voting majority according to the rules of the Church. With the democracy of the dead on his side, he swept the election.

Remember Athanasius. Compare his condition to ours. Ours is not the first or the worst the Church has seen. It is not even the first set of heresies that the United States bishops have indulged in.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:38 PM EST

 

The Pendulum Begins to Swing Back

Well, what d'ya know... a refreshing editorial from the Providence Journal:

The First Amendment, which supposedly guarantees freedom of speech and religion, has been twisted into guaranteeing the right of any small number of citizens to avoid feeling offended. It's time for the public, and judges, to fight back and reassert freedom -- and common sense.

In Cranston, for example, citizens have put holiday displays on public land around City Hall. They've turned up with an inflatable Santa, an inflatable snowman, and a menorah, to mark Hanukkah. It was when that modern horror of horrors, a Nativity scene, made its appearance -- imagine, the birth of Jesus being linked to Christmas! -- that the American Civil Liberties Union reportedly received three complaints. Three, out of a city of more than 80,000 people.

Is America waking up? I think so. At some point, simple common sense cannot but reassert itself as the majority increasingly finds itself beholden to an irrational and bigoted minority. As the Projo says:

In protecting the freedom of all to worship as they please, we do not need to bring the might of government crashing down on anyone who remembers the message of Hanukkah or recalls that Christmas relates to Jesus. Using government power to obliterate any evidence of religion around a federal holiday -- one that was created out of respect for a religion adhered to by a majority of the population -- violates common sense, and maybe the First Amendment.

Amen.

(Can we start filing lawsuits against the ACLU? Imagine that...)

ADDENDUM:
I'd have never guessed it, but I just heard on the radio that Grace C. Osediacz, who is the central plaintiff, is a middle-school teacher. In other words, one of the 0.00375% of Cranston citizens who object to the display is not only on the public payroll, but is responsible for the education of other people's children. The world shouldn't be such that this fact would be so utterly predictable.

And how's this for ignoring the ironic slug on your nose:

The ACLU also claims that Laffey's policy, which allows him "unbridled discretion to determine what 'appropriate' holiday symbols may be displayed," also violates First Amendment protection of free speech.

Rhode Island ACLU director Steven Brown said, "Something is wrong when a mayor takes it upon himself to decide what are or are not appropriate displays for the celebration of religious holidays. As we have seen time and again, whenever government gets involved in religion, it ends up trivializing it."

In other words, not only is the mayor barred from allowing religious "speech" on public property, but he is barred from disallowing speech that some might consider inappropriate. Gotcha, Mr. Brown.

Reread that last quoted sentence. It's maddening, isn't it? Any argument in an addled brain, I suppose.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:57 PM EST

 

Are Congresspeople that Ignorant/Dishonest?

No answer necessary.

Steve from Absit Invidia is right that this is a clever gotcha:

U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) criticized what he saw as double standards in the Bush administration's policy of downplaying the importance of inspections in Iraq before the war but welcoming them in Libya's case.

"I welcome the president's decision to rely on International Atomic Energy Agency inspections to ensure that Moammar Gadhafi lives up to this new agreement. However, this is difficult to reconcile with the administration's previous ridicule of IAEA inspectors in Iraq," Markey said.

"President Bush started a war in Iraq on the grounds that, according to his administration, the anytime-anywhere IAEA inspection process was a joke. ... American soldiers are now dying daily in Iraq because the United States deemed the IAEA's search for weapons of mass destruction to be totally unworthy of support," he added.

Clever, that is, if one expects no more from a U.S. Congressman than one would of a bitter MTV-crowd stand-up comic. Even the most cursory of consideration reveals Markey's statement to be dumb partisan nonsense. The IAEA isn't, and isn't designed to be, an aggressive weapons-searching body. That's why the United Nations deployed UNSCOM and UNMOVIC in Iraq.

As the IAEA Web site puts it: "Three main pillars - or areas of work - underpin the IAEA's mission: Safety and Security; Science and Technology; and Safeguards and Verification." The word "verification" points to the actual statements that were made pre-war about inspections in Iraq. They are only effective if the nation is being cooperative, which is what Libya has promised to be.

So, it would appear that Markey's statements are the only "joke" in this matter. The question is whether he is embarrassingly uninformed himself or is cynically counting on his constituents' ignorance. Either way, I suspect we'll be hearing this riff again.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:37 PM EST

 

Spoiling for Spoilers

Since I already know the story, I've been seeking out reviews with "spoilers" of The Return of the King. I'd rather go into the theater knowing of the thematic and plot changes from the book that would otherwise have surprised me with disappointment. Gina Dalfonzo presents another: "Jackson never errs in the direction of making any character nobler." You can read the article to find out what Ms. Dalfonzo means for yourself, if you'd like.

Suffice to say that it seems to me that, in multiple ways, the creators of this cinematic trilogy, for all that they've gotten right and for all that they should be congratulated for accomplishing, were unable to resist some of those changes that ought explicitly to be avoided. It is one thing if producers decide to save a few minutes by cutting out a passing scene or even if they shift things somewhat to render the same message more effectively in the different medium. But when they stop trusting the author's understanding of his audience, they've stepped over a line. In the case at hand, Dalfonzo is on to something when she writes:

In the end, Jackson left [a different] scene out for fear of confusing the audience, but it hints at another reason for the liberties he took with the story: It may be that he finds evil more fascinating than good.

If this is the case, he's hardly alone. Our culture is sadly unused to fully realized portrayals of good characters. So was Tolkien's, in fact; when he created his hobbit hero, literary anti-heroes were very much in vogue (which may help explain why his own books were so popular). As he put it, "Goodness is . . . bereft of its proper beauty." Now we’ve gone so far down that road that, for the most part, we seem to have run out of the resources we need to portray a really heroic hero. We find our heroes much more palatable — or so the entertainment industry assumes, anyway — with a few major flaws thrown in, perhaps to make us more comfortable with our own.

Yes, in some ways evil is more fun. It's certainly easier, and it certainly makes us feel better about ourselves. And if Evil is so powerful as to sway even our heros, then surely we can be excused for slipping up from time to time... or even as a way of life.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:10 PM EST

 

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Whatever It Is, It Isn't Objective

What am I missing? (Don't answer that.)

Kevin Miller is head and shoulders above some of the company that he keeps, in my opinion, so this perplexes me all the more:

Such a video [as of Saddam Hussein's inspection] is indeed objectively (unnecessarily) humiliating, which is already problematic - furthermore, Krauthammer confirms that at least some American supporters approved of it for precisely that reason, which is even more problematic.

How is the video objectively humiliating? Is it humiliating to be shown as a human being, rather than a demigod? My nightmares about humiliation generally entail a bit more... something (nudity, forgetting some crucial bit of information [e.g., my wife's name] while speaking in public, being made to run as a Democrat in the next Presidential election, and so on). Then again, I've never claimed to be a superior iteration of my entire race.

Still less, to whatever extent it actually is humiliating, how could it be said to be unnecessarily so? Indeed, the Krauthammer piece that Miller cites is all about how historically necessary it was to "demystify" Hussein. To my subjective eye, the message was clearly that Saddam is no more than human, not that he was less than human. (And even so, if unnecessary humiliation is such a sin, where are Miller's sanctions of those among his writer friends for whom mockery is the sincerest form of rhetoric?)

Granted, Krauthammer calls the exam a "universal indignity," but not only would I argue that "indignity" wasn't the right word, but he puts it in contrast to these other strategies for dealing with captured enemy leaders:

In the old days, the conquered tyrant was dragged through the streets behind the Roman general's chariot. Or paraded shackled before a jeering crowd. Or, when more finality was required, had his head placed on a spike on the tower wall.

Iraq has its own ways. In the revolution of 1958, Prime Minister Nuri as-Said was caught by a crowd and murdered, and his body was dragged behind a car through the streets of Baghdad until there was nothing left but half a leg.

Moreover, Krauthammer goes to great lengths to ensure that Hussein's trumped-up image is the point of reference (note, too, that the word "calculated" would seem to argue against its being unnecessary):

We Americans don't do it that way. Instead, we show Saddam -- King of Kings, Lion of the Tigris, Saladin of the Arabs -- compliantly opening his mouth like a child to the universal indignity of an oral (and head lice!) exam. Docility wrapped in banality. Brilliant. Nothing could have been better calculated to demystify the all-powerful tyrant.

As for whether or not Cardinal Martino's comments display anti-Americanism, well, I guess the evidence will speak for itself differently among different people. Imagine yourself thrust in the international spotlight to make a brief, extemporaneous statement about the capture of Saddam Hussein. How you make use of that opportunity will be telling. That Martino used that moment to chide the United States for the indiscretion of illustrating Hussein's simple humanity seems to me to show that he is objectively (unnecessarily) inclined to treat the U.S.A. as a club of uncouth adolescents.

So, to sum it up, there are two objectionable components to Martino's statement: 1) that he seems to judge Hussein's dignity by the measure that Saddam had previously wrongly claimed for himself, and 2) that he seems to imagine the people of the United States, its leaders, and its military as a giggly lot of jeering peasants who require reprimand before they've come anywhere near doing what the average, reasonably humble person would consider humiliating.

I don't know about Mr. Miller, but I didn't react to that video of Hussein as one imagines the masses reacting when a fallen king was paraded through the streets dressed as a chicken. That Martino apparently saw it in those terms and then stated that the king deserved better treatment (which he didn't, by any objective measure of just deserts) instead of suggesting that the crowd ought to hold itself to a higher standard than the tyrant — emphasizing the minimally unjust damage done to him, rather than the spiritual damage that people do to themselves by indulging in revenge — hints at where his sympathies lie. Again, it's telling.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 09:27 PM EST

 

Miracles Barred by Church/State Separation

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court, this morning, just days after revelations that President Bush prayed specifically for Saddam Hussein's capture.

On December 16, the President told ABC's Diane Sawyer that he had only prayed to God generally for "wisdom and strength and guidance." New information leaked to the media has proven that the prayer for "guidance" involved a request that God provide coordinates for the Iraqi President's hideout.

"It is clearly a violation of the Establishment Clause that the President, as commander in chief of the armed forces, has appealed to his God for specific assistance in this civil matter," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "We have asked the court to order Mr. Hussein's release until he can be captured without recourse to religious procedures."

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told reporters that the President is reviewing his prayer policy to ascertain whether it would be legal for him to ask God to assist in ending hostilities in the Middle East and global terrorism. "We are looking at a number of options, including whether it would answer all legal objections if the President were to pray according to the beliefs of multiple religions."

To represent those who don't believe in God, Mr. McClellan said that President Bush would throw a quarter into the Reflecting Pool in the Constitution Gardens.

ADDENDUM:
This satire was inspired by the ending of a recent column by William F. Buckley:

What can the Christian hope for? Well, as once ventured in another cloudy situation, God might clear his throat. That is a fine metaphor, God stilling the storm, raising someone from the grave, eliminating AIDS for Christmas. But the believer knows that it doesn't work that way. You must believe in miracles, but it is wrong to expect them. Besides, miracles would certainly be rejected as unconstitutional by People for the American Way. Merry Christmas.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:00 AM EST

 

Saturday, December 20, 2003

The Scouring of the Moral

I haven't seen it yet, so it may be that I won't care once I've been wowed by the movie, but Jonah Goldberg said something in his review of The Return of the King that I feel compelled to address:

Okay. As everyone knows, the book ends with the "Scouring of the Shire." In the film, the Shire remains intact. It's been reported that this was Jackson's least favorite part of the book. I can certainly understand that, because the Scouring was what gave the book its bittersweet ending. The movie still ends on a bittersweet note, but it's much more Frodo-centric. I've gone back and forth about this for a while now, and I've decided to forgive Jackson. My understanding of Tolkien's intent in that final chapter was twofold: The first is to make a (Catholic) point about sacrifice. The second was to communicate Tolkien's own sorrow about the changing nature of traditionally rural England — which the Shire was always intended to symbolize.

Now, I may be weird in this respect (among so many others), but the "Scouring of the Shire" might actually have been my favorite part of the book. It's where we see the juxtaposition of the Fellowship hobbits with their previous setting, and it's where the "point" of the book was cemented (at least for me) in a more interesting way than one expects of fantasy fiction. (This is leaving aside the Saruman/Wormtongue reprise.)

On the former count, it is glorious to see these Middle Earth–saving warriors be treated according to their stature by those who don't realize what they've done and then prove that it was something in them, not just the company that they kept, that made them great. On the latter count, it illustrates that there is no earthly heaven to go back to. Taken together, these points suggest that the world will be able to find us no matter where in the world we go, but that the strength lies within us regardless. I have a hard time seeing that as "bittersweet." The people of the Shire fended for themselves; they didn't send a messenger for the help of "real" warriors.

There's also a message, here, that deleting the scene tears from the movie. When Sam looked in the magic water in Lothlorien, he saw the Shire burning — in both the book and the movie. It seems to me that leaving that vision in while cutting out the fact that it was an actual occurrence does cross the line into unjust manipulation. It makes the vision a selfish reason to continue on the quest (to prevent the Shire's fall) rather than a sacrifice for the greater good (albeit an inevitable one). In other words, it's sort of like a Christmas future, which the hobbits manage to prevent, rather than an unpleasant reality that they must accept and rectify as much as possible later.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 01:34 PM EST

 

Friday, December 19, 2003

The Cheney Christmas Card Litmus Test

You know certain Catholics (whom I won't mention here) are in a state of confusion when they react as would be expected from any modern Leftist to Vice President Cheney's Christmas card. I don't want to use words that are too strong, but it seems to me that, in losing their perspective of Christian fellowship, in aligning with political liberals and global anti-Americans, such Catholics are missing a delicious irony that I imagine put a brief smile on the VP's face.

Here's the quotation from Ben Franklin that appears on the card:

And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?

Focusing on the word "empire," the sentiment is being taken to imply that Cheney believes the United States — specifically the administration of which he is a part — is on a mission from God to expand the U.S. empire throughout the world. With all due respect, that's a foolish way to take this quotation. It comes from Ben Franklin's appeal to the Constitutional Convention that they ought to open each session with prayer (emphasis in original):

Mr. President, the small progress we have made after four or five weeks' close attendance and continual reasonings with each other — our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ayes — is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those republics which, having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist. And we have viewed modern states all round Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our circumstances.

In this situation of this assembly, groping, as it were, in the dark, to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a super-intending Providence in our favor. To that kind Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and, the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writings, that "except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed, in this political building, no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded; and we ourselves shall become a reproach and by-word down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter, from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

I therefore beg leave to move that, henceforth, prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.

Now, if you are a Christian, in the midst of the myriad laments that Christmas is on its way to becoming an unspeakable, who sees this card not as a very clever prod at those who would drive all hints of religion — from the Decalogue to the Creche — from the public square, but as "infelicitous at best, worrisomely revealing at worst," you really need to examine the tint of your glasses — the spiritual lens as well as the political.

Although, I guess in this day and age, Vice President Cheney oughtn't rely on Americans' knowledge of our own history. Nor, apparently, on fellow Christians' intellectual sympathy and charitable good will.

ADDENDUM:
The interior Biblical quotation, by the way, is from Psalms 127:1:

Unless the LORD build the house,
they labor in vain who build.
Unless the LORD guard the city,
in vain does the guard keep watch.

Layer upon layer of significance.

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Posted by Justin Katz @ 03:23 PM EST

 

Equivalence in the Hands of Men

Joseph D'Hippolito writes forcefully about the West's reaction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The Palestinian Authority's education ministry pollutes innocent minds through its textbooks, as a 2001 report by the Committee for Monitoring the Impact of Peace noted. One fifth-grade language text builds a lesson around this sentence: "The jihad against the Jew is the religious duty of every man and woman."

Suicide bombing, therefore, is not just genocide against Israelis. It's genocide against an entire generation of Palestinians who unquestioni