In the way ideas and life seem often to interact, it just so happened that the very week that I began to find a profound thread in the still-jumbled topic of radical life extension, I witnessed the birth of my second daughter and received news that an acquaintance (not close) of about my age was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia and immediately lost her summer prospects to similarly aggressive treatment.
To be sure, while looking through glass at a roomful of newborns, a parent would prefer to have more pleasant thoughts in his head than this:
There will be progressively fewer children around, but we'll get used to that just as easily as we got used to wearing these absurd rubber contraptions whenever we have sex just in order to avoid having too many kids once infant mortality wasn't culling them any more.
That absurdly disturbing prediction is one aspect of what life will be like in a world of "indefinite lifespans," according to Cambridge University biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey in an interview with Glenn Reynolds. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a man who believes that children and condomless sex are of equal social significance can nonchalantly declare that life, for an immortal society, "will be very much the same as now... except without the frail people."
Upon reflection, the unpleasant dissonance of such thoughts while pain-faced women shuffled past, with rattled men hovering around most of them as if ready to, at any instant, dive for a catch, was an echo from my self-loathing atheist days. Since we are all doomed to die, the dark thought went, it is ultimately birth that kills us; parents bring their children into the world condemning them to a life spent in knowledge that, eventually, they will cease to be. But what if we come to believe that birth into this world does not require death from it? Well, then we get this sort of thinking:
my universal response to all the arguments against curing [aging] is simple: don't tell me it'll cause us problems, tell me that it'll cause us problems so severe that it's preferable to sit back and send 100,000 people to their deaths every single day, forever. If you can't make a case that the problems outweigh 100,000 deaths a day, don't waste my time.
It ceases to be the nature of life that causes death. Rather, those who prevent, or even impede, the search for the Fountain of Youth become the cause of death. So thoroughly does this frame of mind set in that de Grey feels justified in sweeping away all objections. It isn't even a matter worthy of moral consideration. It isn't even a question. The next step in this logic would be, for example, to state that a presidential administration that stands in the way of funding for such research is thereby sending 146 million people to their deaths, owing to the four-year delay.
This — one needn't be a theologian or novelist to see — is a fanatical religion awaiting adherents. Not only are the claims of other faiths soul-destroyingly wrong, but they are ridiculous superstitions to believe. (To the Orthodox Intellectual, superstition is the sign of the infidel.) "Once [people] realise that we may be able to reach escape velocity within 20-30 years, all these silly reasons people currently present for why it's not a good idea will evaporate overnight." Although I believe de Grey dramatically overestimates the number of converts that he can expect from other religions, I've no doubt that many among the irreligious, or mildly religious materialists, will rush to the laboratory-table alter. When its promise draws near:
The only way to have a sense of proportion about this period is to remember that it'll be the last chapter in what we can definitely call the War On Aging -- people worldwide will readily make the same sort of sacrifices that they make in wartime, in order to end the slaughter as soon as possible.
In context, de Grey is talking about the "staggering" cost of providing "rejuvenation therapies" to everybody, rich and poor, but money isn't the only sacrifice that people make during wartime, and the "War On Aging" won't be purely against a fact of nature. If people are willing to kill to secure a salvation that they must take on faith, how much more extreme will their drive be when salvation is from the necessity of death? Imagine the rabid desperation of people who think there's a clock to beat before eternal life becomes eternal oblivion. Even if nobody stands directly in the way of the research, the pent-up desire will make for a powerful weapon, no matter the ulterior motive for wielding it.
If de Grey's comments are any indication, passions will further be stoked through hints of utopia. Beyond the optimistic view that "adult education" will be adequate occupation to make "life never get boring" (which, if it does nothing else, stands as an example of the academic's myopia), de Grey further prognosticates:
Another important difference, I'm convinced, is that there will be much less violence, whether it be warfare or serious crime, because life will be much more valued when it's so much more under or control.
Broadly speaking, to begin with, will life in fact be "much more valued"? My experience has been that things under our control are more apt to be taken for granted. By this, I mean that the fact of life going on and on will be the norm; people will keep a white-knuckle grip on their own mortality, but the sense of life's preciousness will dull. When natural causes take the lives of the young, we ache more not necessarily because a higher number of years have been lost, but because the death was less to be expected. What our collective view will be when death is never to be expected may not be as easy to predict as it would seem.
It could be that the end of natural deaths will mean that people who don't value others' lives at all will gain control over them; murder may become much more frightening a threat when its outcome isn't inevitable anyway. Violent people, inasmuch as they can be understood in a general way, don't seem to care whether their victims are 20 or 80, so the length of life deprived is not a deterrent. Moreover, a certain dementia will surely be exacerbated when people all ages have a teenager's sense of mortality. And who will risk his own life to save others' when the sacrifice is eternity?
Warfare only translates these difficulties to a grander scale. Won't tyrants perceive this new weakness? When one can tally infinite years in a currency of pills, the barrel of a gun or, for that matter, blockage of the medication will see a rise in premium. Experience and history both teach that people will always exist who do not value life; the advantage of that distinction will only increase to correspond to everybody else's clinging to it.
It may be, I'll concede, that violence will become somewhat less alluring among the general population when it is more a reminder, rather than a distraction and defiance, of lingering mortality. Still, one need only look around modern society to see the possibility that killings would simply become antiseptic and, therefore, forgettable. After all, even now, we kill those with the most life ahead of them and call it a "procedure."
Having laid all this out, I finally come to the aforementioned thread of profundity, and although it has the darkest implications, it also brings a whiff of hope. The apostles of this new religion have found a mythology and symbolism in Nick Bostrom's piece in The Journal of Medical Ethics called "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant":
Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.
That brought to mind another dragon, one who brings forth a beast from the sea and heals the beast to rule over men, who precedes a great whore of a city as well as another beast, an echo of the dragon, about whom it is said:
The beast, which you saw, once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss and go to his destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because he once was, now is not, and yet will come.
To be honest, I can't help but feel that the modern version of the quest for eternal life on Earth is yet another hopeless endeavor. We don't know what we don't know. Will we get far enough that people will be astonished at a return of death? Or will the prophets of this new religion work enough miraculous signs to enthrall some number of people to wreak another shameful era for humanity and then fade away into history?
Whatever the case, my religion suggests that catastrophe must precede salvation, and that we must eventually choose between either:
Behold, I come like a thief! Blessed is he who stays awake and keeps his clothes with him, so that he may not go naked and be shamefully exposed.
Or:
They overcame him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Vituperative," by Gary Bolstridge.
Gambling, of itself, isn't sinful as far as I'm concerned. Yes, having a somewhat addictive personality, I've noticed the aftertaste of the temptation that it represents. Yes, the first notable scene that I came across upon entering Foxwoods Casino's parking lot in Connecticut when I was in college was an older couple — cusp of retirement, I'd say — crying in each other's arms.
Still, a night of roulette, blackjack, and slot machines, with a reasonable expense cap, isn't wrong or corrosive in the way that a night costing the same amount at a brothel would be. For some patrons, the all-you-can-eat buffet is the more seductive opportunity for excess.
So, I've been more or less ambivalent about the matter of allowing a Rhode Island tribe to build a casino on its land. For one thing, I know families that have suffered the consequences of a gambling addiction facilitated by just the Jai Alai enterprise in Newport, so any state policy toward a full-blown casino can't stand on anti-gambling principle. If the objection is to the greater draw that a casino would have, then it seems to me that regulating size is the logical answer.
For another thing, as much as I don't believe gambling to be an undeniable sin, I'm not comfortable with governments' seeing it as a source of revenue. Whether or not a casino yields a public profit seems to me irrelevant to the yes/no question of whether one ought to be allowed in the state. Of course, as Marc Comtois points out, Connecticut is finding that its casinos are expensive for the surrounding areas. This, however, seems another cause for creative regulation, to pass the expenses on to the company. Making area security, road repair, and adequate employee housing and education direct costs of doing business would prevent shuffling of the bill to local communities that receive inadequate reimbursement from the state government, which collects the revenue.
Perhaps the strongest argument against a casino is that it would attract a bad element from elsewhere and would concentrate Rhode Island's homegrown hoodlums. To be honest, I'm not sure that this wouldn't be true of any major attraction, regardless of its nature. Moreover, I was amazed at the distance that Foxwoods-goers had to travel through town roads to find the joint, so it could be that choice of location and direct access to a highway would answer most of the concerns of nearby towns.
It's probably a flippant attitude to take, but I have to admit amusement at the degree to which this issue traps various parties — many already corrupt — in their own decisions. From what I understand, other gambling facilities have been buying not just legitimacy, but special deals from the state's politicians. For its part, beyond the addiction to revenue from gambling in the form of lotteries endemic among states, Rhode Island has mainlined its fixes from Jai Alai and the Lincoln Park dog track. On top of this must be layered the strange arrangements that America and its states have made with Indian tribes over the centuries.
So, ultimately, I agree with Marc that it is for the people of Rhode Island to decide whether they want a casino to be a partially defining aspect of their state. And it's for the various parties to either regulate or find ways to compete as they're able. Which way I'll vote, I'm not yet sure. Allowing a casino could prove to be a bitter pill of disruption that will help to knock the state back on track.
ADDENDUM:
Sorry if this post isn't as strong and/or clear as it probably should be. As you can tell, I'm still working out my thoughts.
I have a whole post on the move to negate human aging that's been ready to spill out of my noggin for days. I had hoped to do the tipping tonight, but I'm just too tired. Tomorrow... maybe...
Increasingly, the comments to my posts make for better reading than the ramblings to which they append. Such was most definitely the case with yesterday's post about the lack of Christian and conservative engagement in the same-sex marriage battle. The comment debate's interest is largely attributable to the response of Chuck Anziulewicz, and although I'm not sure from whence he came, I'm glad he found his way here with sufficient concern to express his disagreement.
Disagreement on this topic tends to wear a circular rut in the discourse, and tempers rise with each lap. However, Chuck's latest volley stands as evidence that this needn't be the case — that a bit of civility and consideration can move the worn topic to another level. Meriting a spun-off thread, Chuck writes:
As for my life with my partner Greg, I think God understands my heart, mind, and motivations better than any self-appointed moral guardian, and for Him to summarily condemn the joy we have in our commitment to each other seems completely illogical by any remotely human standard.I am committed Greg, as he is to me. We are both Gay; our mutually shared sexual orientation is as fundamental to our emotional and biological makeup as liking food. We were fortunate enough to have been introduced to each other five years ago (June 29, 1999) by friends who felt that we would be compatible, and sure enough, we are. Since we both take a rather conservative approach to love and relationships, we are monogamous and avoid situations in which we might be tempted to stray. Greg is my love, my life, and my inspiration; he seems to feel the same way about me.
HOWEVER: For the more conservative Christians, none of this matters. There are no moral distinctions to be made between promiscuous Gay men as opposed to couples such as us. It's all simply wrong, wrong, wrong. The Scriptures, they inform me, are clear on this matter: That no matter how righteously I conduct my life, if I remain unapologetic for maintaining my committment to my spouse, God will most assuredly damn me to an eternity of withering punishment.
To avoid this, I am told, Greg & I must end our relationship. We need to put an end to our love for and committment to each other. Gay relationships are simply out of the question, case closed. My spiritual redemption is at stake.
MY CHOICE: Either to continue to do well and good by my spouse, to continue to do everything I can to ensure Greg's happiness and the joy we share in each other's company ... OR to avoid the eternal torments of Hell.
Since the latter of the two seems rather selfish, I'll stay with Greg, thank you very much. No Supreme Being comprehensible by me would punish what we have together. And any God that would punish us because we have chosen to honor our love and committment to each other is not a God that I would wish to ally myself with.
This view of God, although common, resonates like an odd blend of New Age relativism and Book of Judges rejectionism. It's a romantic cliché, in our times, to say such things as "if this is wrong, I don't want to be right," but Chuck might as well have refused to "ally" himself with a notion of biology that renders exhilarating free falls dangerous.
His conclusion is embedded in his premises, so he doesn't adequately weigh the possibility that those "conservative Christians" are actually right. If God is not a therapeutic intellectual device to be constructed, but rather an aspect of reality to be understood, then Chuck's choice could be cataclysmically false. It isn't between ensuring Greg's happiness and feeling the promise of Heaven. Instead, in fulfilling his apparent definition of worldly "well and good" for Greg, he condemns them both.
But that isn't the whole story; Chuck and Greg can secure both the joy that they "share in each other's company" and salvation. They just have to develop a relationship that isn't sexual. Why that should be so — why the seemingly simple pleasure of physical gratification should be an intimacy too far — I don't know. I'm not making up God on the fly to accord with my prejudices, but interpreting revelation, experience, and thought.
We'll probably all agree that love and commitment aren't bad, in God's eyes. Per se, they are unmitigatedly good. However, that's precisely why distortion of their expression is so objectionable. Who would knowingly reject God if sin were tied to sharp, immediate pain? If one believes, as I do, that Hell is self-inflicted, who would choose it if he didn't think he was pursuing something pure, like love?
"Ally," in Chuck's usage, means nothing less than a refusal to believe in God as most Christians believe Him to be. If Christians are right, and if we see God as the One who is rather than the "one I choose," then Chuck has made himself an example — the logic — of how expression of homosexuality expands toward rejection of God, the choice of Hell.
How much dishonesty is packed into Fahrenheit 9/11? So much that it is spilling out into coverage and opinions about the movie. Here's "film historian and former Journal reporter" Bob Leddy writing in the Providence Journal:
Conservatives hope that the whole Michael Moore business will dissipate in the national atmosphere of short attention spans. And anyway, the film will be seen only by those who already hew to Moore's politics, right? "There's only a very small percentage of Americans that are going to go and see this movie," said David Bossie, head of a conservative group called Citizens United.Well, maybe. ...
As a movie event, Fahrenheit 9/11 is the real deal, the likes of which were not equaled even by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. On the first day of its national release (on fewer than 900 screens), Fahrenheit 9/11 took in $8 million. The figure had tripled by the close of the opening weekend.
Note that, grammatically, it is the "movie event" that was "not equaled even by" The Passion. Naturally, the reader wonders what the measure of realdealdom is, and most writers will satisfy that curiosity by offering explanation in the subsequent sentence. At first glance, one might believe Leddy to have done just that, but if his measure is first-day gross, Moore's film would have made the top 10 list, because Passion currently sits at #10, with $26,556,573. That number, by the way, puts Gibson's film at #3 on the list for films that opened on a Wednesday. (Fahrenheit opened Friday.) As for Moore's movie tripling in revenue — well, almost tripling, to $23.9 million — for opening weekend, well, so did Gibson's (and then some), which took in $83.8 million, Friday to Sunday.
The best I can figure, giving Mr. Leddy (an expert, after all) the benefit of the doubt, and seeing how oddly impressed he is that Moore could rack up those figures "on fewer than 900 screens," he might have been comparing Moore's $27,558 per-theater average to Gibson's $27,554. Or something.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Hasidic Surf" by Mozaik. The band calls its sound "psychedelic jewgrass," and one needn't listen long to understand the reason for the unique category. If you're in the mood for something different, give "Hasidic Surf" a listen, and maybe even pick up a copy of Beyond Words from Confidence Place.
"Hasidic Surf," Mozaik, Psychedelic Jewgrass
Stream (HiFi) 
Download
from Beyond Words
Leveraging her perspective as a coastal, urban, lawyer, Christian woman, Kimberly of IrishLaw has taken up the online conversation concerning what women want in men (and why they aren't finding it). One issue that Kimberly notes as false is the notion of competition: "If men embody traditionally masculine virtues, that must threaten women's ability to also be successful, independent, and strong." This dynamic within the job marketplace nicely encapsulates a matter of society-wide self-deception: if masculine qualities are thought to make for success, those qualities must be suppressed as a factor among men and encouraged among women.
One of my wife's friends, arguably the most attractive among them, considers herself to be in competition with men to a sometimes ridiculous degree. A running half-joke between us, for a few years, was that she intended to beat me in an arm wrestle. For that to have ever been possible, either I would have had to deteriorate beyond recognition, or she would have had to take extreme biological measures, destroying much of what is feminine in her physique. (She claimed to have beaten sturdy men in the past, but she blushed when I wondered aloud how many had asked for her phone number afterwards.) It may be harder to admit, because it's easier to deny, but surely this general difference isn't limited to physical attributes.
My anecdote isn't meant to suggest that men don't exist whom my wife's friend couldn't best palm-to-palm, nor that there aren't women who could beat me. Similarly, most careers don't lend themselves exclusively to one gender or another. However, they may require qualities that come more naturally to men or to women. We've grown accustomed to wincing at the notion that our sex or gender might affect who we are in ways that, in turn, limit some choices, but what we seem to have overlooked in inculcating this reflex is that limiting choices can mean expanding others.
In reverse, the more-constructive question isn't whether women can out-male men, but whether womanhood can be made an asset. As Kimberly writes:
Women can be feminine and still be strong and independent; men can be masculine and not threaten the success of others... Was there a way to just be successful women and not act like men? Is there a way for men not to fall into the stereotypes of promiscuity, or the faux confidence of the metrosexual, and be good men?
It's a matter of developing ourselves as who we are, rather than redefining who we ought to be. Therefore, Kimberly puts her finger directly on the problem with an insight that didn't occur to me in this context (whether because of gender or personality is up for debate):
The difficulty, of course, anymore is that it's hard to find the right models for how to be confident women and honorable men. Children who grow up without fathers desperately lack role models for how to become real men, and no matter how loving mothers are or how hard they work, it's hard for women to provide that model.
Mothers and fathers can, through effort, diminish the detrimental effects of a child's lacking a parental mirror, but at parents' incalculably subtle degree of influence, women aren't as naturally suited to the occupation of fatherhood, and vice versa. And it is this very subtlety — indescribable, but detectable — that seems to be the certain something that the questing singles have been at a loss to articulate. In other words, dating and its shifting difficulties, although often portrayed as frivolous, connect with our individual and collective essences.
Hugo Schwyzer, whose thoughts I found via Marriage Debate blog, adds another piece toward comprehension of these tumbling matters of gender, parenthood, friendship, competition, and attraction:
Opposite sex friendships are especially appealing to the young, and not merely because they often offer the "spice" of sexual attraction. What is most appealing is the freedom from the competition and the judgment that so many young men and women feel in the presence of their same-gender peers. But invariably, those who have no close friends of their own sex feel at a loss at certain critical life points. In order to lead healthy lives, we have to work to overcome our own fears about being judged by those of our same sex. We're going to need folks beside us who know what it is like to live incarnate as a man or a woman. What makes me a man is more than my Y chromosome and my genitalia -- it is a thousand thoughts, feelings, experiences that so many of my brothers know so well. Men need each other, desperately.And if there is one thing I have come to know with near-certainty, it is that men who have other men (not just boys) in their lives to love them and hold them accountable make much better husbands and lovers, fathers and brothers to the women around them.
In that respect, one might justifiably suggest that Kimberly's (and my) appeal to Christ as a male role model is partly, or especially, necessary in a world of androgynous wishful thinking in the service of lust and egos. Far from diminishing the Divine Role Model to a sort of second best, this observation provides some explanation for why there is so much overlap between traditional and religious. If we follow our roles — our callings — to the fullest extent, we will naturally complement each other, and our material world will naturally complement the spiritual one to which we've been so busy building barriers. We deny this, as we have for decades, at our peril.
If it stands as an indication that political inclinations can seep into the work of music journalists, John Jurgensen's "In his youth, John Kerry could rock" is also evidence that the two combine poorly:
Forget the photo ops on the snowboard, the hockey skates, the Harley. Never mind the shaggy visage of the rebel Vietnam vet. If John Kerry's supporters still need to prove that their candidate isn't a stiff-necked square, maybe they should be blaring "Guitar Boogie Shuffle" at top volume.
Whether or not this comment applies to Jurgensen, I don't get the impression that Kerry's supporters — at least those not encouraging him to stay out of the spotlight altogether — understand their guy's problem. It's as if they've all succumbed to the blindness whereby the dork doesn't understand that aping Cool exacerbates the image he seeks to dispell. (Believe me, I speak from experience on this one.)
Look at the group picture that introduces his old band's cashing-in Web site; he's the stiffest of a generally stiff bunch. Listen to his bass intro to "You Can't Sit Down" (MP3), which sounds as if it has been badly quantized. As band member Larry Rand (guitar) recalls:
He describes a young Kerry in terms that all of the candidate's acquaintances seem to use: determined, serious, studious."We did want him to loosen up, but I'm not sure we were applying that to John Kerry specifically," Rand says. "We were applying that to all of us."
At least on the snowboard, John Kerry could get down.
Chuck Colson wonders why citizens, particularly Christian citizens, aren't being more vocal about same-sex marriage:
I think some don't really believe this is such a critical battle. To them I can only say—wake up and pay attention. This issue has the potential to redefine and, ultimately, to destroy the institution of marriage in this country—and with marriage goes the family. You can't ignore this.But there are other Christians who recognize the importance of the battle over same-sex "marriage" but are still not speaking up. For many of them, I think the problem is a lack of faith.
Now, that may sound harsh, but I can't think of a better way to put it. A lot of Christians—even some of our most prominent leaders—seem to have succumbed to a "What's the use?" attitude. They believe that the cultural climate has turned so much against us that we'll never be able to stop the advance of same-sex "marriage." And they have heard that we don't have the votes to pass a constitutional amendment in this session of Congress—so they don't even want to urge the House and Senate to vote. Some Christian commentators have sounded a defeatist note.
The factors that Colson names are certainly in effect, as conservative writers Cal Thomas and Max Boot have proven. But I'd suggest that the issue is still distant for most. Whether they are turning away from ickiness or finding it difficult to get their heads around the bizarre shifts of the modern world, most people just don't have a sense that the news is real and that it will have real effects. Imagine trying to explain winter to people who have only known summer; you might find it difficult to convince them to buy snowsuits while they are available at a discount.
Bruce Bartlett has given some thought to the economic aspect of liberal media bias. This isn't representative of the breadth of the piece, but it begins to formulate a response to the economic "proof" that the media isn't too liberal:
Economic theory says that conservative news outlets should have come into existence to serve that market. However, Prof. Daniel Sutter of the University of Oklahoma points out that there are severe barriers to entry into the news business that make it very difficult to start a new newspaper or television network, thus allowing liberal bias to perpetuate itself.Another answer comes from a study by Prof. David Baron of Stanford. He theorizes that profit-maximizing corporations tolerate liberal bias because it allows them to pay lower wages to liberal journalists. By being allowed to exercise their bias, they are willing to accept less pay than they would demand if they were in a business where bias was not tolerated. Conservatives are perhaps less willing to pay such a financial price.
I'm not so sure about that last sentence. To my limited experience, there are plenty of conservative writers who would pay that price were the offer on the table. Baron's point, it seems to me, is more of an extension of Sutter's. The bias is ingrained among the newsie folks, and the business folks let it remain thus not just because it enables lower wages, but perhaps more because a battle between the administrative and content departments would be hugely disruptive. (I'm sure there is also aversion to shifting an outlet's "voice" too quickly.)
ADDENDUM:
Chris Muir's got cartoon commentary related to this topic.
The Providence Journal ran, last Wednesday, an editorial drawing attention to atrocities in Sudan. Hopefully, its attention is indication that we're in a transitional stage of public awareness that will eventually lead to some form of action. This part — emphasis added — is particularly refreshing:
the United States must shame fellow U.N. members about their cavalier attitude toward Third World genocide, to obtain a resolution warning Khartoum of economic and other consequences if it fails to stop the murder and open Darfur to international humanitarian aid. The United States should also try to persuade the African Union to send forces to protect Darfur refugees from roving Arab militias.In dire human-rights situations, the United Nations is often useless. Darfur represents a chance for the U.N. -- and the United States -- to integrate rights rhetoric with reality: to cast off a double standard and raise the quality of international relations. It's even more important, right now, than the Gaza Strip...
Don't miss Bill's interview with Andrew Sullivan on INDC Journal (even if it doesn't strike you as something in which you'd be interested).
Apologies for the lack of posts. As you can imagine, things are a bit hectic just now — probably more so than I've indicated. Over the past couple of days, I've barely had time to think; in the days and weeks coming up, I'll have plenty of time to think, but not as much to sit at a computer to write.
This Weekend
We'll be bringing home the baby this morning and will hopefully not discover that we aren't as prepared as we'd thought. At the same time, I've got the usual weekend chores to do. (Although, with the backyard dug up for a new septic system in some places and heavy machinery to do the digging in other places, at least the mowing is minimized.)
On top of that, I didn't get to work as much as I wanted, yesterday, so I'll have some catching up to do before Monday. And something came back to me for final edits (you'll see), which I promised to make before the weekend came to a close.
Lastly, at some point this evening, I hope to take the dog for a nice long walk. Maybe then, he can stop looking at me so dolefully.
This Week
It looks like we'll be closing on the house this Wednesday, which was, after all, the day named in the contract. I've taken a couple of weeks off work in the hopes that it'll leave sufficient time to prepare the house for our arrival — getting done the necessary tasks, such as painting and laying carpet in the playroom, and accomplishing other projects that would be more difficult in a house that's occupied. In other words, I'll be engaging the sorts of activity that leave much mental capacity for thought, but keep the hands away from the keyboard. (Which need only mean that the ideas will spill out all the more rapidly when I finally sit down.)
And Beyond
Hopefully, we'll be settled in time for me to start a new job. (The "hopefully" applies both to the settling and to the job.) While the additional work is looking likely to be part time — bringing my overall schedule to full time — through the summer, autumn will bring sixty-hour work weeks.
Which is all to say that I'll be pretty busy for the foreseeable future. Counterbalancing, I hope, will be the fact that the various contingencies of my family's life will be settled to an extent that we haven't yet experienced. Once the foreseeable future is, well, foreseeable, I intend to sit down and list, prioritize, schedule, and plan to keep everything moving along toward my long-term goals. Blogging, it perhaps isn't necessary to tell other bloggers and readers of blogs, will certainly be a part of the daily itinerary.
In closing, I'd like to note that there's still time for somebody to provide me with a sufficiently large stipend to preclude the necessity of non-writing labor. (Hey, you never know who's out there.) Whatever the case, I thank you all for reading — a gift that lays a foundation of motivation for all that I do.
Over among the comments on Domenico Bettinelli's blog, Rod Dreher has been wondering whether it's "outrage fatigue" that has kept the Dallas Morning News's series on the international movements of priests accused of abuse from getting the attention he believes it to deserve. I responded that the problem may be more that there's no real news to the discovery that abuse was (to some extent) not restricted to the United States, and as I suggested might be a problem before the series began, there isn't much investigation about the why to make more of the what worth raised anxiety.
Today's iteration, as the worst so far, provides a good example of the various factors that may be keeping the heavy investment of the DMN from paying off as well as I'm sure the paper expected. Reading it, I couldn't help but feel that the reporters hadn't managed to find as much as they thought their global travels would reveal.
Overall, the story is just odd. The priest, Yusaf Dominic, was young and perhaps not particularly talented. He was ordained in Pakistan — information that immediately derails the mind to more pressing matters — and found his way to London by the early '80s. Thereafter, he moved from country to country again, winding up back in England. In 1996, two young men came forward to accuse him of having molested them in 1984. He was arrested, a priest bailed him out, he went to a "clergy treatment center," and he skipped the country — back to Pakistan. Since then, he hasn't stayed still for long, moving around the world, relying on suspicious cover provided by his home base's bishop.
There's no mention of any further incidents, after 1984, and the Dallas Morning News only tracked down one of the accusers, of whose tale the reporter offers very little to give any sense of the form of the abuse, even in the article's "The human toll" section. The allegation appears to involve a single night, when the boy was nine; to the priest's plea that the accusation is false and had something to do with money, the alleged victim says only, "That's B.S."
As I suggested, there's less here than in the other stories, but they've all had a similar feel of expecting unstated premises to be accepted, as if they all pull up short of something, for whatever reason, and assume the reader will fill in the blanks. In other places, they dig up and point to anecdotes that are difficult to see as damning.
In this vein, today's piece spends seven paragraphs explaining that it "is a crime in Britain even to agree to indemnify someone who is liable for a bail payment." After Dominic skipped the country, the diocese paid the money that the priest who had bailed him out of jail had posted. Maybe the Church officials knew that the action wasn't licit; maybe they did it for some reason other than that the liable priest would have had difficulty coming up with $3,600. I don't know, but none of the incriminating possibilities seem required by the facts.
The most dramatic aspect of the story, which Rod noted in the aforementioned comments, is that a church in Newark housed Dominic during the same summer that the American bishops instituted their "zero-tolerance" policy. But here, again, there simply isn't enough of a concrete nature to get worked up about. We get no specific dates, and we hear that his presence there was, above all, "odd" from an administrative perspective. The diocese apparently sent a background check form to the archbishop in Pakistan, but he never returned it, and Dominic cut his trip at around the two-month mark "because of problems with his religious worker's visa."
In short, the worst we can confidently claim is that there was more confusion around this priest than there ought to have been — including among civil authorities — and he slipped through some cracks. It would seem that the hierarchy in Pakistan played some role in the abscondence, but reporter Brooks Egerton gives the reader no reason to take quotes and insinuations at face value. Before the piece has even gotten rolling, Egerton brags that the "Dallas Morning News tracked [Dominic] down after Scotland Yard failed." Such unnecessary commentary makes it very difficult not to believe that the entire article has been crafted to fit Egerton's preferred storyline, perhaps with visions of recognition and rewards.
All of this — the vague or missing details, the sense of similarity to stories already heard, the distance of incidents in time and place, the lack of internal counterpoise, the wall before the why of the larger problem, and the distrust-instilling heavy hand of the reporter — weighs this series down. It does so much more, in my opinion, than any "scandal fatigue." The experience of reading the stories, multimedia presentation notwithstanding, is akin to hearing one son's bathetic tale of an exotic scrape while finally beginning to catch one's breath after having accompanied the other son to the emergency room. Is that fatigue or perspective?
ADDENDUM:
Terry Mattingly thinks (or appears to think) that the lack of response is a conspicuous silence largely attributable to factors external to the stories themselves and the reportage. As "a cynic might say":
This is not a sexy story anymore. And the Boston Globe owned the old story, two years ago. The Globe has the Brand Name nailed down.The U.S. bishops have done something and discussing whether they did the right things gets complicated. We are headed into an election year and the sacramental status of Sen. John Kerry is getting the Catholic ink. People are tired of the story and it does not sell newspapers, magazines or books. The Catholic left has reasons to be silent and so does the Catholic right. We don't have sexy art, yet.
These factors come into play to some degree (although I'm skeptical about the brand-name idea), but I still think the minimal splash has more to do with the nature of the series (so far) than with readers' predisposition to ignore or downplay it.
Ferry Halim has posted yet another beautiful Flash game. I still think he ought to use them to promote independent musicians.
Then, having tempered your mood with animation and clicking, Jan Bussey's photographic reminder that, even as we enjoy the fruits of summer, autumn offers much to which to look forward, as well, will ease you into the proper frame of mind to tackle the challenges of the mere hours until the end of the workday.
Edward Achorn continues to slip encouragement to Rhode Island conservatives — actually, to anybody who opposes our corrupt one-party government. Yesterday, he noted a relatively small, but hugely symbolic, victory on the part of Governor Carcieri:
When [the doling out of power and money] was over, and the budget passed 49 to 22, House Democrats held a victory party with beer and wine. [Union boss Frank] Montanaro stopped by to celebrate yet another triumph for his special interests.But the celebrations may have been premature. As Republicans were quick to point out, the state constitution requires the "assent of two-thirds of the members elected to each house of the general assembly" to pass certain spending in the budget. And there are 75 elected members. Forty-nine falls one vote short of two-thirds. ...
In the end, the most powerful politician in the state -- Speaker Murphy -- was reduced to stalling for time, while Democrats feverishly tried to round up a 50th vote. Meanwhile, Mr. Fox railed on the House floor, shouting at foes, as Mr. Caprio put it, "like Howard Dean times 100." When Mr. Murphy failed to scrounge 50 votes, he had the chamber approve the budget anyway and send it to the Senate -- a tactical mistake, surely, since that threw the ball into the Senate's court. ...
Whatever happens, though, Friday's budget maneuvers revealed a flaw in the machine that for decades has been running the state as a wholly owned subsidiary of the public-employee labor unions. Mr. Murphy has rebellious Democrats in his ranks. Governor Carcieri, rather than wave the white flag to more powerful forces, has made it clear that he intends to do battle.
Have I mentioned that the sun has broken through the clouds?
The Redwood Review poem of the week is "Elsewhere," by B.E. Delaplain.
Although temperatures have risen, the clouds and rain and dreariness have persisted in claiming much of each week — at least in perception. The morning into day and day into night offer but blurs, shades of darkness. Still, shades of light remind that it isn't every day, and not forever.
I'm tired today. When time becomes a fog of expectations, one walks a bit farther at the tail end of the waking hours, hoping to sleep under clearer skies. Something resolved; something finished. It's a silly hope, in defiance of all experience. It would be better to sleep, following a schedule, and take tasks up in the morning, refreshed. Why is it such a difficult lesson to learn?
Perhaps because, on those too-rare mornings when the sun shines through and blue spreads across the sky, one glimpses what restful days will be like. In those evenings when the sparse clouds streak above, shades of orangish pink, like sherbet, the taste of memories not yet had heralds the future. Crisp, cool by contrast, although temperatures have risen.
I've gotten some wonderful notes about this blog, lately, which collectively and individually grant a degree of encouragement that those who haven't spent years pouring out words in exchange for preprinted, scissor-cut rejection slips mightn't appreciate.
If that's the case, many readers also mightn't have any experience with the stage at which an author's emotional investment transfers from the individual pieces to Writing itself, from the personal qualities reflected in a given work to the possibility that the work will improve the person. Put more simply, one becomes more open to criticism because the true investment and return rests within the mind, and whatever winds up on paper or on the computer screen is only important inasmuch as it conveys and compounds that value.
What I'm getting at, here, is that, as much good as compliments do me, I'm always open to suggestions about content or execution. If you prefer when I write about something that I begin to write about less frequently, let me know. If the intellectual structure of my posts begins to lose its coherence (assuming you believed it to have been there to be lost), let me know that, too. Whatever comes to your mind to say. My email link is to the left.
PROEM:
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I've bookmarked this and put it aside. Resolved to post it and decided not to. Thought perhaps a new tone was in order and, now, decided to call a hypocrite by her name. Here's Providence Journal blogger Sheila Lennon on June 17:
As last week's portraits of Bill and Hillary Clinton were unveiled in the White House last week, the former President noted that we need to "return to vigorous debate about who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad." Jarvis quotes Clinton repeating the concept last night.I'll say Amen to that. I'm weary of hearing political partisans call each other "haters." I'm tired of manufactured outrage.
We're all in this America together. We can disagree about our course, but polarizing attacks on those who don't think like you swears at the idea of the melting pot, of living together peaceably based on our common interests. Demonizing others in the name of God or country diminishes us.
Stirred up by talk radio for ratings and profit, our meaner instincts are a lousy set of values on which to base a fair and just society.
Thus far the various considerations have been enough for me to put aside all of her promotion of the Left's own hate-mongers that I've noticed at least as far back as her glowing recommendation, in February 2003, of a foul-mouthed writer who called a man speaking in support of the war an "Oreo" and a "traitorous black person representing the [pro-war] 'cause.'" Maybe, I reasoned, actually upholding the ideal that others only mouth is the better way to prove the point.
But today, I noticed a post about the reemergence of the protest song — protesting whom, you can guess. Among the links is a Flash video that juxtaposes the Bush daughters and the corpses of the Hussein boys. Lennon also links directly to a song by John Gorka called "Brown Shirts" (MP3), which begins, "brown shirts here in the White House/brown shirts up on the Hill." I was particularly impressed with the lyrical twist that the White House brown shirts "speak of God as their witness, but they would kill Jesus again."
Maybe Ms. Lennon was only "weary of hearing political partisans call each other 'haters'" because it hadn't been put to music yet. "Demonizing others in the name of God or country diminishes us." Right. I'll keep that in mind.
The Timshel Music Song You Should Know this week is "Song for J.W." by Joe Parillo and Christine Harrington.
"Song for J.W." Joe Parillo, Jazz
Stream (HiFi)
from Sand Box
I came across a few more items yesterday to which I feel obliged to link, but about which I've nothing significant to add. To begin with something relatively light, Neil Cavuto laments President Bush's unreciprocated niceness when introducing that portraits of the Clintons; when it was Clinton's turn:
He wasn't nearly so kind, and he wasn't nearly so generous. While he acknowledged the president's graciousness, he didn't pass along one compliment, not one kind tit-for-tat. I wasn't looking for him to praise George Bush . . . after all, they are political opposites. But, please! Couldn't you throw the guy a bone, Bill? Maybe acknowledge he responded well to terror after Sept. 11, or that he's kept us safe in this country since that day? Maybe mention something goofy, like commending the president for the nicknames he gives those pesky White House reporters? Anything?No. Nada. Zippo. Zilch-a-rino. Perhaps the contempt for this president from this former president is so acute, so intense, that he can't find the words -- apparently any words -- to say anything nice. Frankly, I find it classless.
Paul Cella, meanwhile, addresses a different side of an idea that seems to be in the air, lately:
Modern education generally provides only the negative impulse, the impulse to distrust: an unfledged cynicism full of bluster but empty of real substance. This impulse is peculiarly treacherous, and cunning propaganda will readily conquer it; for the skepticism inculcated by modern education will rarely include a distrust of one's own emotions (the doctrine of original sin having been discarded) which comprise precisely the organ at which propaganda aims its contrivances. Moreover, to leave discontented the human hunger for belief in something, to provide no armor against the poison of despair, is simply to make vulnerable young minds. It is no accident that Nazism began as a student movement in an age of disillusionment; or that the ideologists of what Burke so memorably labeled "armed doctrines," together the greatest of modern scourges, bled the ground red with the blood of young skeptics and freethinkers.It may seem almost a truism to say that wicked ideas are not resisted by skepticism but by good ideas. But it is only a truism because it is a truth that is slipping from our complacent grasp. Skepticism by itself is aimless and emasculated; and it is only by the light of principle that skepticism is armed. It is precisely because I know courage to be a great virtue that I am skeptical of any attempt to denigrate courage practiced. It is because of the doctrine of original sin, which I see so plainly to be true in myself, that I know that power cannot be trusted in human hands. By the light of doctrine, of principle, the world is illuminated; and skepticism is, if I may use the phrase, baptized.
John Leo finds a reflection of this truism in the "under God" issue at the Supreme Court:
Call me a cynic, but I think the liberals on the court didn't want to cause an uproar that would help Republicans in an election year. Better to come up with a soothing but temporary political decision -- restoring "under God" for now while clearly inviting a future challenge that the court will be only too happy to grant once the political coast is clear. ...To defenders of the "under God" phrase, this is the key point: that the reflexive hostility to religion that now guides much of American liberalism will result in the step-by-step elimination of all these references, most of which, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and others have argued, are harmless expressions of "ceremonial deism." ...
The strategy is simple: Never take the case to the American people -- use unelected judges and the bullying threat of litigation to force unwanted change. And focus on even dubious marginal issues to create the impression that any religious reference in public is toxic. ...
The battle behind the "under God" issue pits true pluralists against intolerant secularists who are willing to accept religion, but only if it is defanged and totally privatized.
Lastly, I can't help but see something of an indication of our future, should we lose this battle, in a story to which Jeff Miller points:
Young Norwegians can earn a merit badge in sex this summer. The pin, modeled on a popular summer swimming merit badge, is an offer from Swedish-Norwegian sex education group RFSU, also the main producer and importer of condoms to Norway, newspaper VG reports.The badge, which displays sperm cells swimming in waves, can be won by correctly answering 10 out of 13 questions about sex.
"You need a license to drive a car and you should have a sex certificate that shows you don't take health risks. This is done seriously and with humor and the goal of course is to get more people using condoms," said RFSU manager Tone-Berit Lintho.
Yes, how quickly the phrase "if they have sex" has fallen off the end of that goal. Jeff's quip, if you ask me, is a bit more appropriate in its seriousness and humor.
A brick wall into which one often runs when attempting to explain conservative policy prescriptions to semi-interested fellow citizens is explaining why government simply isn't well suited for every task that citizens might want, need, or think they need to want. Mostly the difficulty is in conveying the nature of the beast, which ultimately relates to the beasts inside us all. Michelle Malkin explains one example:
When private schools fail, they shut down. When private nursing homes fail, they shut down. But when negligent government social service agencies fail, they stay open, get more money, and claim more victims. The latest horror story out of Washington state involves Suzy Sclater, a woman with cerebal palsy and the developmental abilities of a toddler, who was raped in a state-operated group home for which her mother had helped raise $300,000.
In yesterday's Bleat (in the off chance that you haven't read it yet), James Lileks suggests that post-9/11 unity mightn't be reprised in the event of another attack:
Why, I even remember back to the end of 2001, when the general mood seemed to favor bold action to forestall future catastrophe. If we hadn't deposed Saddam, and Bush had won a second term, and there had been a terrorist attack in 05, [Stephen Hayes's] book would be the Democrat's brief for impeachment. BUSH KNEW and did nothing.And it's not going to get better. I don't think the next attack will bring us together like 9/11. Last time a small portion of the nation went straight to blaming us for enflaming poor Mo Atta and his motley crew; the last three years have seen that poison spread and flourish, and blaming America for the ravings of medieval theocrats is now a legitimate argument in polite society. I'd almost venture to say that a third of the country would conclude that a radiological device exploded in Manhattan would be Bush's fault, because he made the "evil doers" (roll eyes) super-extra-fancy-grade-AA mad.
For the last few weeks I've had this gnawing belief that bin Laden got lucky by attacking during Bush's term. Conventional wisdom says the opposite, because Bush fought back. But he's the enemy now. I ask my Democrat friends what they’d rather see happen – Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They're all honest: they'd rather see Bush defeated.
Rhode Island's union cartel isn't happy about certain noises being made about curbing their power. They're going after the (Republican) governor with deceptive ads:
And so a campaign of ads against the governor has been unleashed. One published recently featured unattractive pictures of Governor Carcieri and slammed him for the pension he receives as a retired corporate executive. What it didn't point out is that the taxpayers pay for public-employee benefits -- not for Governor Carcieri's private pension -- and that most of the taxpayers doing the paying do not receive benefits nearly as plush. Nor does the ad point out that property taxes are going through the roof in many communities, and that elected officials are unable to manage efficiently, in part because of giveaways in contract negotiations. ...The union leaders say their latest attack was in response to a May 10 fundraising letter by the governor. ... In a state where politicians have traditionally been too fearful to awaken powerful enemies, this talk borders on heresy.
To get rid of the thorn-in-the-side (Republican) mayor in Cranston, their strategy is a bit less rooted in the First Amendment:
The union that represents the city's crossing guards, Public Service Employees Local Union 1033 of the Laborers International Union, sent letters June 1 and June 7 asking union members to disaffiliate from the Democratic Party so they can vote against Mayor Stephen P. Laffey in the Sept. 14 primary. ...The cards were then delivered en masse to the Board of Canvassers office, at City Hall.
The board's registrar, Jaclyn Caruolo, said most of the roughly 260 cards were dropped off in bunches. The rest, she said, were filled out individually at the office and witnessed by the clerks in the office, who serve as notaries.
Democrat City Committee Chairman Michael Sepe — through his sparkling level of class — evinced the degree to which he is a union stooge:
"I think the mayor right now needs a diaper change after what the unions are doing to him," Sepe said. "What's his problem? Now that they want to get into the Republican primary, you can't be crying about that."
My first reaction to this news was to wonder what people do with their money:
It takes about $50,000 for a Rhode Island family of four to scrape by with the bare necessities.No Friday night dinner at Chuck E Cheese's. No trips to Walt Disney World, or karate lessons after school. Just rent, food, utilities, bills.
And they are the fortunate ones.
Roughly half of all families in Rhode Island -- 47 percent -- earn less than $50,000 a year, according to a study being released this morning by the Poverty Institute, a policy and advocacy group at Rhode Island College.
Primary among the discordant details of the article is that the story's central profile, that of April Brophy, doesn't fit the claims of the piece. Apparently, she and her husband were doing just fine on $35,000 — paying for a mortgage, two cars, "a modest savings account." Then divorce dropped her to $14,000 per year, but the state's temporary safety net was enough to get her rolling, even with only a GED foundation to start with. She still relies on state-subsidized healthcare and daycare for her children, but she's making ends meet, earning around $23,000 per year. So why do the state's social workers believe her to require almost twice as much?
The answer opens up all those sticky areas in which different worldviews lead directly to incompatible solutions. The first thing to note, looking at the Poverty Institute study that formed the basis of the article (PDF) is that the $50,000 figure neatly rounds up from just over $48,000 for a two-parent home. More importantly, the numbers are a theoretical sum of various expenses, calculated from separate estimates; they therefore do not take into account the sorts of decisions that people make to stay comfortably afloat.
For instance, the $391 per month for transportation strikes me as high. The $650 per month of medical assumes, at the least, an extremely poor benefits package at work (especially for jobs supporting that level of income). Not surprisingly, the biggest chunk is the $1,215 per month ($14,580 per year) for childcare. These few factors go a long way toward explaining how the Brophys survived before the divorce. Merely mom's staying home with the kids increases the income value of $35,000 per year to $49,580. A job that completely covers health insurance (like public school teacher in Rhode Island, ahem) adds another $7,800-plus of value.
And that is where the policy differences really begin to come into play. To isolate one factor, the high income ceiling for subsidies for childcare encourages double-income families. A family with two parents and two children can make $42,413 and still receive $9,588 from the Rhode Island taxpayer (if they pay the maximum co-payments, however that works). A family like the nuclear Brophys, making $35,000, has incentive, not for the mother (or father) to stay home and save $14,580 on daycare, but to work at least part time.
With the system as it is, the taxpayer reward for having two incomes exacerbates the job shortage and keeps wages down. It doesn't seem insignificant that the income that the Poverty Institute claims families to need is in the range of what might be thought of as the subsidized baseline. Meanwhile, encouraging parents to put their children in daycare inflates the demand for childcare providers, which raises the price. A similar (albeit more complicated) dynamic comes into play with the free or cheap healthcare that Rhode Island offers to all children whose household income is less than 250% of the national poverty level (or a little over $47,000 for a family of four).
All of these various policies are debatable at the individual level and become a mess of causes and effects, incentives and side-effects, in the broader view. Trying to solve them through ever-expanding giveaways, however, will tend make the problems worse. Unfortunately, the urge to do just that is all-pervasive — strangling Rhode Island from every angle:
Along with protecting the subsidies for struggling families, Gewirtz says the state should demand higher-paying jobs from companies that move to Rhode Island."The best way out of poverty is a good job," Gewirtz said. "A lot of times we give tax breaks to companies that promise to bring jobs, but they are often poverty-level jobs. There needs to be more accountability."
Apart from the interesting tidbit that the jobs Rhode Island attracts are in the range in which employers find the government covering much of what they would have to offer to secure workers, the extent of belief that a state can just force higher incomes is astounding. Demand higher-paying jobs. Accountability for creating the wrong types of employment. For companies that move to the state. Something tells me that the number of such companies would continue to decline.
Rhode Island, in short, is approaching calamity from two directions through its urges toward socialism. Driving away businesses while pushing the publicly funded benefits for citizens ever up the income scale will eventually create a state attempting to subsidize everybody with revenue from nobody.
ADDENDUM:
This is the first post of a new "Rhode Island" category.
In a piece extolling dogma, Jonah Goldberg touched on a reality that has come up here, in recent weeks, in the context of discussions between liberals and conservatives (broadly defined):
And this is where my renewed faith in dogma comes from. Without getting too deep in the weeds, dogmas are simply values or principles that cannot be proven, but that we accept as true or divinely decreed (and therefore true). Chesterton and Hayek explain to us that the right dogma is just as liberating — if not more so — as bad dogma is oppressive. For example, you could never be a first baseman on a baseball team unless everyone else, on both teams, accepted any number of dogmas uncritically. Everyone would have to agree that it's worthwhile to play the game in the first place. Everyone would have to accept that the umpire's decisions are final. Everyone would have to accept that the rules were clear and applied to both sides equally. Everyone would have to agree that cheating is both wrong and deserving of punishment when found out. And so on.Now, I would wager that very few baseball players can give you very articulate and knowledgeable explanations of why these things are all so. But I would also bet that most baseball players are certain these things are true nevertheless. In Anthony Lewis's world, these people are enemies of decency and humanity. But in reality it is exactly the opposite. Without an unthinking agreement to play by the rules, you could have five first basemen all squabbling over the bag. You could have ties settled by fistfights. Indeed, you could have horrendous bloodshed. As Hayek noted, society's adherence to traditional morality guarantees the most fundamental freedom: freedom from getting your ass walloped by everybody else. (Okay, I'm paraphrasing).
After a short break, the Providence Journal news department has returned to its advocacy for same-sex marriage to be brought to Rhode Island. Here are the circumstances of the latest effort:
Massachusetts Governor Romney and Attorney General Tom Reilly cited the law -- which some say was originally written to be used against interracial couples -- in denying marriage licenses to out-of-state gay couples.After gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts last month, several city and town clerks openly defied the law and issued the documents to nonresidents anyway, until Reilly ordered them to stop or face penalties.
"The governor simply can't dust off this law to discriminate against gays and lesbians," Michelle Granda, a lawyer for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, which represents the eight out-of-state couples, said at a news conference yesterday.
Gotta love the "some say" clause thrust between the actors and their action. It isn't until paragraph twenty-five — just before sixteen paragraphs describing the parties to the lawsuit against the law — that we find hints that the law hasn't been dormant since the pre–civil rights era: "Issues such as whether they were cousins or if they were married to other people could make their marriages illegal in Massachusetts." For how much longer?
Wendy Becker, one half of a professorial lesbian couple and "a teacher in the social work department of Rhode Island College... completing her doctoral dissertation in law, policy and society at Northeastern University," clarifies the objective:
We want our kids to know we love and support each other in the same way as their friends' parents do. And we want them to grow up in a world free from discrimination based on anything.
Silly question: What isn't allowed in a world free from discrimination based on anything?
Anybody who either 1) has doubts about the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime or 2) still believes Ted Kennedy and his ilk to be admirable should read Nick Schulz's description of and commentary about the short Ba'athist torture video:
I must confess that in recent weeks I had begun to harbor some doubts about a war I had supported. And I was not the only war supporter to begin second-guessing recently. We doubting Thomases had been perhaps most perplexed at President Bush, steadfast in the wake of mounting Coalition deaths, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and other bad news. Did this man not see what we were seeing?There is no doubt that he had. But President Bush — along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has also remained resolute despite withering and unfair criticism at home — had also seen things that we had not. Seeing this footage helps one better understand the mindset of President Bush and of his stalwart British ally and explains their resolve in the face of tremendous difficulties and setbacks. Seeing these films and ones like them out there, will, I believe, make any fence sitter shed his doubts about the appropriateness of destroying Saddam's regime. If anything, they make one wonder, almost shamefully, how and why it took the civilized world — or at least part of that world — as long as it did to rise up against it.
Although I haven't come across any examples, yet, I'm sure somebody, somewhere has already objected that this is yet another shifting of justification for the war. The strategy of those who opposed the war (and continue to oppose the Bush administration) is to pull apart all of the pieces of the other side's argument and prance around between them so as to obscure the fact that they can't conclusively knock down a single one. Just over a year ago, in an edition of my since-discontinued Just Thinking column, I wrote the following, which is still, surprisingly and sadly, applicable today:
Before the war, the administration's appeals to the human atrocities in Iraq were often dismissed as lip service. Even those who attributed some degree of sincerity to them tended to move discussion on with a "yeah but." Plenty of regimes abuse their people, the argument went, why attack Iraq? Now that the extent of those atrocities is being revealed in heart- and gut-wrenching detail, some post-war-anti-war advocates require reminding that President Bush mentioned the humanitarian crisis in every speech in which he made the case for war. He did so to illustrate the loathsome nature of the regime. He did so in the context of enumerating the many United Nations mandates at which Hussein had thumbed his nose. And he did so as a simple matter of moral principle, apart from international relations.
The atrocities are bad enough, Lord knows, to condemn the regime. But it was their combination with shadowy terrorist connections and proven ambitions to procure WMDs that made war a necessity — even in defiance of an international effort to maintain inside deals with the monster. A dictatorship that would order prisoners to have their hands hacked off a knuckle at a time is one that would gas one of its own villages is one that would work with terrorists to deliver blows to a hated nation of free people.
Patrick Sweeney disagrees with the notion that some American bishops are making noises about John Kerry's receiving communion "to curry favor with the current Pope, or a possible future Pope, Cardinal Arinze." And to be honest, I don't even see that as the clear message of the piece by Joseph D'Hippolito to which Patrick is responding. On the one hand:
Such concerns provide an opportunity for ambitious prelates to curry favor with Rome. Tom Roberts, editor of the liberal National Catholic Reporter, cites Newark Archbishop John H. Myers as an example."Myers fits this papal administration's template for upward career mobility," Roberts wrote. "Staunchly conservative, he is a prolific pastoral-letter writer, a soldier in a campaign against the prevailing culture and someone for whom, given the nature of those letters, there are no unanswered questions or shades of gray."
But on the other:
One Catholic state senator said he would leave the church. Gov. James McGreevey, a former altar boy, said he would neither receive communion publicly nor let the church influence his positions.Myers retreated.
"We have an understanding that I won't personally criticize [the governor]," Myers told the New York Times. "And we are working together on a lot of issues, like providing social services to the poor and helping people with HIV."
In other words, Myers chose retaining influence with politicians to asserting the Vatican's position.
If Joseph's point were entirely that bishops are acting from some motivation other than doctrinal fidelity, I'd suggest that he's being a bit too cynical, but that he raises legitimate points for discussion. He takes his argument a step farther, however:
The controversy ignores the fact that the number of abortions has been declining in the U.S. through private initiatives, such as a greater emphasis on abstinence. Since constitutional or judicial changes appear unlikely, private-sector solutions offer the greatest hope.
One can't tease apart private initiatives and the Church's actions vis-à-vis public figures; Joseph misconstrues the purpose of denying communion to Kerry. The move is (or would be) primarily an assertion of Church teachings. The action that requires public rebuke, in other words, is less Kerry's actual votes than his flaunting of vocal support for abortion in contravention of what adherence to his religion requires. The focus with which Joseph closes his piece misses the heart of the matter:
Suppose all the American bishops ordered the priests under their authority to deny communion to Kerry. Suppose those priests complied. Given Kerry's ideology and voting record, would he really forsake his views on abortion for the faith he claims to profess?More importantly, would one unborn child be saved?
He's right, in the paragraph before this, that many bishops could probably offer more public support to groups that pull on the positive side of the struggle against abortion, and priests could stand to speak more about sexual and reproductive morality. Even so, rebuffing Kerry at the altar, in its way, itself supports these groups' efforts by making the Church's position clear and reaffirming not only that opposition to abortion is required of us all, but also that it is an important call to answer.
Would one unborn child be saved by such decisive actions? Absolutely.
If you haven't perused Lane Core's Blogworthies entry for the week, I recommend doing so. From church singing to terrorists and oil.
Look. I'm not going to express the first thought that came to mind when I read this front-page article from the Providence Journal, because if I did, I'd be sure to raise ires all over the place. Nonetheless, that at which we laugh today tomorrow can bring our tears:
BEAVER, the animal psychologist who is president-elect of the American Veterinary Medical Association, says that years ago, the dog was "the protector of the farm. Then it became the dog in the backyard; now it's the dog in the house. And as we are living closer to them, their relationships with us become much closer."And as the culture has changed, legislatures and the courts are now starting to amend the way they look at companion animals. Historically, courts have allowed a pet owner who brings a lawsuit to recover only the "market-value" of the animal. But in 2000, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law giving a pet owner the right to collect damages for loss of companionship. Two years later, Illinois passed a similar law. A bill has been introduced in the Colorado legislature to allow people to seek damages of as much as $100,000 for loss of companionship of a pet.
Ah-hum. Read the whole article for a more-thorough sense of how creepy this could get.
ADDENDUM:
Martin Grace quotes the part of the Projo piece that hints at the leap from "clearly... not a relative" to, well, I guess to "close enough."
Andrew McNabb is among the best writers of fiction whom I've had the good fortune to know personally. He writes extremely well, of course, but more than that, he infuses his work with the perspective of a devout Catholic. The majority of his stories, at least that I've read, aren't explicitly religious in nature, but that sense is there, as it ought to be in life, undergirding the plot.
Offering encouragement to all unknown Christian writers, Andrew has begun to place his stories where his perspective is arguably most desperately absent — among the nation's many "literary reviews." Latest of these successes is the short story "It's What It Feels Like," in Potomac Review. (Note that the quirks of formatting were probably the doing of the Web master, not the author.)
I had the privilege of critiquing this piece at our writers' group, before Andrew moved to Maine, and I think it's among his best. One need only have heard the audible reaction of the writers when Andrew's reading had wound toward the final scene to know that he had reached a level above us. Somebody, somewhere among the Catholic bloggers recently asked where the Flannery O'Connors of our day could be found. Well, here's one.
Here are all of Andrew's stories that I'm able to find online:
"The Reluctant Preacher" in The Redwood Review
"A Night at Dorian's" in The Adirondack Review.
"A The Bronwyn Tale" in The Redwood Review
It's edifying to know that the draw of Salve Regina University, in Newport, RI, is such that its panel on "War, Law and Human Rights" can attract three speakers who are so intelligent that they've all come to the same conclusion:
[David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes during the Clinton administration] spoke yesterday afternoon at Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy during a panel discussion entitled "War, Law and Human Rights: What Way Forward?"He was joined by Christophe Girod, North America chief of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, a professor of international law at the Naval War College.
They talked about international humanitarian law and how it applies to the war in Iraq and the United States' campaigns against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. To varying degrees, they all raised concerns about the administration's attitude toward international treaties.
No doubt, any students in attendance learned that higher skill — so crucial to success — of nodding wisely. Girod suggested that the United States is undermining international law; von Heinegg thinks the administration's reading thereof is "an abandonment of values." As one might expect, Scheffer, "the lead U.S. negotiator during the formation" of the International Criminal Court, thinks we ought submit ourselves to its jurisdiction.
I really wish I had the time (and wherewithal) to attend these things.
Well, Rod Dreher has succeeded in whipping up pre-release buzz in the Catholic blog neighborhood for the bitter fruits of the Dallas Morning News's year-long investigation of the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal around the globe. One reporter has already been on NPR, and the paper is apparently looking for prominent nationwide coverage.
Whether or not DMN timed the story for this effect, and I believe Rod that it didn't, it surely won't be lost on the major media that the news comes at a time when the devotion of the Democrats' presidential candidate, John Kerry, to the teachings of his Church is being questioned and at a time when the Church stands as one of the central supports of such moral issues as abortion, genetic research, and same-sex marriage. As Lane Core suggests, interested parties might want to register with DMN's Web site before the lines form.
Fr. Wilson — who is, if I'm not mistaken, good friends with Rod — wasted no time, after Friday's Morning Edition, in defending the newspaper from recriminations that hadn't yet been made:
How rude of the Dallas Morning News to look under the bed at the chaotic mess that had been swept out of sight. It is still common to hear a certain type of Catholic sneer at the reporting on the Scandal with dismissive references to the 'anti-Catholicism' of the Boston Globe or the Dallas Morning News; "You know, Father, they're no friends of ours. They hate the Faith," I've heard time and again.Surprising that the DMN reporters, given their extensive exposure to the life of the Church and the antics of our fathers in God, aren't edified into the full communion of Holy Mother Church, isn't it?
Yes, I'm sure the news department was overflowing with weekly Mass-goers and on-the-cusp converts in the mid-'90s. Equally, I'm sure the 200 priests will be placed within the proper proportions, with some admirable, if not heroic, profiles of other priests to leaven the impression. I'm sure the data will be carefully and clearly delineated along lines of degree — not inflating the worst incidents through inadequately qualified inclusion among broader statistics — and drawn along an accurate timeline. And I'm sure some effort will be made to give an full sense of the victims — how many were seven and how many were seventeen, for example. In short, we can only wait and see whether the DMN reporters — and all of the other reporters around the world — will give some indication of awareness that the bad tidings that they bring will be painful to the core of millions of people.
To be sure, we Catholic believers must accept this trial. If it is meant for us to live through painful times, then let us grit our teeth and get on with it. If we must express our faith through an acrid fog, let us plunge in. Hopes are high that this is all just part of expelling the stain of dark days from the Church. Mark Shea calls it "the Great Enema." Domenico Bettinelli adds a sound effect: "The giant flush you hear is the Big Enema going global."
Personally, as much respect as I truly do have for all of the above, and admitting that they are much better informed on matters pertaining to the Catholic Church, I'm not, well, I'm not optimistic. Taking them as a group, it hasn't seemed to me that the bishops, with a "zero-tolerance" policy and an investigatory commission, have behaved, thus far, in such a way as to suggest that the information that is apparently forthcoming will push them over some edge of responsibility.
I come to this conclusion for two reasons. First, the actions already taken have not suggested full cognizance of personal culpability in acts supremely offensive to God. There has been a bit too thick an aversion to consequences. Second, from a worldly perspective, strong stands on principle generally require either absolute confidence of blamelessness or proximate exposure of something that will really reorder one's life for the worse.
As appalling as it may be, I don't think any number of indications of administrative malfeasance — even directly attributed and undeniably proven — will spur institutional response. We live in a Western culture in which people believe that it absolves Pontius Pilate of blame to portray him as only having crucified our Lord out of cold political interests. Credibility will be lost, yes, but position and prominence can be preserved through a knee-high wall of extenuating circumstances.
If there is to be a purge, the deeper cause of the corruption will have to come bubbling to the visible surface. And as Rod Dreher notes in a comment to a different post on Bettnet.com (Jun 17, 04, 12:01 pm), the media is complicit, this time, in keeping the matter submerged:
... your comment did bring to mind something a Fox News staffer told me at the Dallas bishops' meeting two years ago. I told this person that Fox should find and interview Michael S. Rose, whose "Goodbye Good Men" had just come out, and who could illuminate a key aspect of the scandal that most media wouldn't touch. The staffer told me that they had orders from the very top of the network not to touch homosexuality in their reporting from Dallas.
For Catholic laypeople, the pervasive infiltration of sin into the Church would bring the outrage. For the public at large, for whom the acts, if consenting, would be largely ignored or excused, the hierarchy would have been proven guilty of the greatest crime known: hypocrisy.
Without a public revelation about the why, more of the what of the long-running abuse scandal will be about as effective as airing unwashed linens. The neighbors will gawk, but the only people shamed will be those who must walk among them.
Yesterday, the Providence Journal ran a letter by West Warwick Republican Town Committee chairman John Clarke that begins with this utterly unsurprising anecdote:
Last night, I had a long conversation with one of my neighbors, a registered Democrat named Paul, who expressed his support for a casino because "it will bring jobs to Rhode Island." When I tried to explain that the jobs that a casino brings tend to pay poorly and that a casino does not bring wealth to the community, all he could counter with was his concern for jobs.
Paul wants to do right by people. He probably began voting for Democrats years ago because they ran on a platform promising to do just that. And now that Democrat rule is strangling the state, it probably makes his head hurt a little think about having to separate political rhetoric from the real effects of policy.
Such is the environment that allows a state senator to blurt arrogant asininity in response to constituent concerns that Rhode Island is driving out the sort of people who will help its economy to grow. As Mr. Clarke says:
Senator Alves, as chairman of the Finance Committee, is doing his best to ensure that the talented people who could fix the "no-good-job" problems that he and his party have created in this state stay away.It is an embarrassment to the people of Rhode Island -- and especially the people of West Warwick who voted for him -- that Mr. Alves is complaining that he is tired of hearing from high-wage earners. He would do well to recognize that those people invest in businesses and create jobs.
The two groups that come a-knockin' fairly regularly at my door: Jehovah's Witnesses and the Sierra Club. The latter has an odd method of conversion: "The best way to stop the current administration from destroying the world is with a check."
By way of confession, I admit that I couldn't help but smile inwardly as I allowed the two young college men to stand on my front steps and run through their entire pitch, punctuated with slaps at the mosquitoes that infest our little corner of the island. When I was in college, students majoring in fields related to the environment assisted some organization or other to rehabilitate the marshes that line much of my neighborhood's waterfront.
Where's the scythe-handed Bush administration when you need it?
I've forgotten where I came across the link, but I wanted to note Samuel Huntington's exploration of atheists' outsiderness in America:
Although the Supreme Court did not address the question directly, Mr. Newdow got it right: Atheists are "outsiders" in the American community. Americans are one of the most religious people in the world, particularly compared with the peoples of other highly industrialized democracies. But they nonetheless tolerate and respect the rights of atheists and nonbelievers. Unbelievers do not have to recite the pledge, or engage in any religiously tainted practice of which they disapprove. They also, however, do not have the right to impose their atheism on all those Americans whose beliefs now and historically have defined America as a religious nation. ...... if increases in non-Christian membership haven't diluted Christianity in America, hasn't it been supplanted over time by a culture that is pervasively irreligious, if not antireligious? These terms describe segments of American intellectual, academic and media elites, but not the bulk of the American people. American religiosity could be high by absolute measures and high relative to that of comparable societies, yet the secularization thesis would still be valid if the commitment of Americans to religion declined over time. Little or no evidence exists of such a decline.
Unfortunately, it is the folly of fanatics that they insist that reality conform to their own preferred history, present condition, and future state.
Maureen Mullarkey's latest Notes & Commentary essay is "An American Original," reviewing Guy Péne du Bois at James Graham & Sons. (For art samples, click the exhibition names.)
And why is it so important to have groups in government who aren't most observable in their amity? Well, here's one reason:
In the closing rush of this year's legislative session, Rhode Island Chief Justice Frank Williams is seeking to boost his power by trying to cut out the governor from decisions about the judiciary's annual budget request. He calls this a "separation-of-powers" issue -- that the judiciary should be able to do what it wants without the governor having a say.
The unelected, office-for-life judiciary wants to slap away the hands of one of the branches of government — the most individually visible office — from its purse strings.
He wants his request for money to go straight to the General Assembly, without the filter of the governor. So a chief justice would have much more power to cut deals with legislative leaders. Some 28 percent of House members are lawyers, and many of them argue in front of state courts regularly. They could conceivably get a better deal for their clients if they funded the judiciary to a chief justice's specifications.Moreover, he or she would apparently set the salaries of judges, conceivably using that authority to reward and punish, without any check on that power, since state judicial appointments are for life.
As the Providence Journal editorial notes, this fall, Rhode Islanders will have the opportunity to vote for a popular amendment to increase the amount of weight the governor has in the balance of power. These last-minute grabs would not, presumably, sit well with the voters, and if more — and more vocal — representatives of the governor's party were in place to be presented with the hasty proposal, an editorial would not have to be the news breaker.
ADDENDUM:
I'd say "unbelievable," but it's really not surprising that there's more:
Some last-minute changes sprung on the public with little debate would put financial control of the public colleges directly in the hands of the General Assembly. A member of the Board of Governors for Higher Education since 1997, Michael Ryan, called the proposal "the most troubling document I've seen." Jack Warner, commissioner of higher education, said the change would undermine a "bedrock principle of education" and erode protections against its being "politicized."
One wonders what's slipping through...
On Tuesday of this week, Edward Achorn wrote about Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey's maneuvers at the state Republican convention last Thursday, which I mentioned (with some video footage) last Friday. (I emailed the link to Mr. Achorn, with whom I periodically attempt to make contact, but he hasn't responded.) Achorn assesses the situation thus:
Well, it suggests Mr. Laffey is trying to do more than clean up the financial mess in Cranston. He is trying to put his stamp on the party and change the political culture of Rhode Island.That irritates some people.
For one thing, it enrages the Republican establishment, small as it is. The country-club set, moderate and pragmatic, is convinced that the GOP in Rhode Island will always be on the losing end of the big battles. It will never compete in the General Assembly, which is overwhelmingly powerful at the state level. The best that the GOP can do is to play nicely with the Democrats -- and with the source of the Democrats' dominance, the public-employee unions -- and quietly claim a gubernatorial, Senate or mayoral seat from time to time. Like the small child of a raging alcoholic, establishment Republicans gingerly avoid giving offense, seeking to smooth over troubles and improve their lot in tiny increments.
Mr. Laffey is more inclined to punch the bully in the belly, and take his chances.
The key issue for Rhode Island voters, right now, is breaking the white-knuckle grip that a single party and the groups whose interests it primarily represents have on state government. The simple question, for the Republicans, is whether they'll benefit from that electoral desire by being the same politicians with different buttons on their lapels or by being contentiously distinct. I think the latter; at this level of domination, increased Republican representation won't threaten the Democrats' key issues, but it will send a message and insert a natural alarm, of sorts, for objectionable goings on in the state house.
I'll go further, though, and declare that I don't think the people of Rhode Island are as supportive of the Democrats' ideological positions as most people assume — whether on government, social, political, or any other issues. There's tremendous apathy, here, and apathy is a quality that comes in degrees. One can be apathetic and simply not care, or one can care, with the apathy obstructing inquiry and thought.
By bringing their differences to the public's attention, conservatives can spark thought among those who care. And by making confident noise in a polity accustomed to skulking whispers, they can perhaps spark inquiry among even those who don't think the people who run our state are worthy of attention.
ADDENDUM:
Be it known to anybody in Rhode Island who stumbles across this blog that I'm willing to help as much as I'm able. For some reason, however, it's proving difficult even to find takers for that assistance when I actively offer it.
Although they state overconfidently the genetic predetermination of homosexuality, Rabbi Marc Gellman and Msgr. Thomas Hartman offer some firm and fair guidance for those whose religions hold the choices of family members to be sinful:
First of all, we must have courage to say what we think is right.Your granddaughter had courage, just like Tom's brother, in confronting a pious Catholic family with a life choice that violates the clear and unambiguous teachings of the church. But her announcement is not the only act of courage called for in this ongoing discussion. Your courage is also needed to tell her, with equal love, that you cannot accept the choices she has made.
The second virtue we must all have if this deep spiritual and moral thinking about gay marriage is not to descend into bitter vituperation is humility. You must find a way to say no to your granddaughter's decision to have a commitment ceremony without saying no to your love for her.
The old cliché of disapproval's precipitation of disownment would, in many ways represent an easier model to follow, just as inherently affirming passivity would be in the other direction. We oughtn't forget that people can change, though, and inasmuch as it is possible, we want change toward truth to be an appealing one.
The Redwood Review fiction piece of the week is "Guest of Honor," by me.
8 pounds, 11 ounces, 20 inches