Saturday, February 24, 2007

24 Feb 2007 08:20 pm

Auden

Here's a good essay by James Fenton in the Guardian on a great poet. A reader comments:

Always my personal favorite poet by a country mile - from my early teenage years on - and I'm not that big a poetry fan.  His early poetry (despite the one puzzling reference in this essay to his "obscurity") managed to avoid the enormous 20th century trap of what may be called Decoder Ring Poetry (see, for instance, early Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and - as I've most recently discovered, to my disappointment - Yeats), while also avoiding the lesser but real trap of excessive simple-mindedness. That is, it's intelligent and complex, but by God you can nevertheless understand all of it.

Starting in the 1940s, unfortunately his poetry did slide too far toward Offensive Transparency - some of his late stuff looks like Winnie the Pooh - but to the end of his days he remained an absolutely delightful, incredibly readable reviewer and analyst. If I had to name a single book to give to any high-school student (not just the gifted ones) to get him interested in literature, I would unhesitatingly pick Auden's 1973 anthology "Forewords And Afterwords".

Larkin has him beat, I'd say, especially on the grounds of readability. But re-reading Auden always reveals some new detail or meaning or nuance. In some of his greatest poems, he also manages to make almost philosophical arguments about the world in ways that only poetry can. My own understanding of homosexuality, for example, was altered deeply by his poem, "In Praise of Limestone." The poem was a lodestar for the second essay in "Love Undetectable," called "Virtually Abnormal."

By the way, I'm considering adding occasional short verse to the blog. Once a week, maybe just on the weekends. Any objections?

(Photo: Limestone formations along the Wujiang River are seen on November 29, 2006 in Gongtan Township of Youyang County, Chongqing Municipality, China. By China Photos/Getty Images.)

24 Feb 2007 07:30 pm

In The Annals of Conservapedia

A reader writes:

I ended up surfing over to conservapedia.com for good laugh after I saw it posted on your blog. I came across the following sentence while reading their "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia"

"For example, even though most Americans (and probably most of the world) reject the theory of evolution, Wikipedia editors commenting on the topic are nearly 100% pro-evolution. Self-selection has a tendency to exacerbate bias in the absence of affirmative steps to limit it."

I don't know if it strikes you or anyone else as funny that a group of conservatives has used a reasonable definition of natural selection - "a tendency to exacerbate bias through self-selection" - to refute, er, evolution.

A small joke, I guess. The bigger joke is that conservatism is now allied to creationism.

24 Feb 2007 06:01 pm

Modernity and Spirituality, Ctd.

A reader writes:

In the post "Modernity and Spirituality", you and the reader both equate the term "modernity" with "freedom". But "freedom" is not the part of "modernity" that people who believe in traditional religion are worried about. (By "traditional," I mean a religion that holds to traditional understandings of miracles, the existence of a spiritual realm, God/church authority, etc.)  Modernity does not simply represent liberty, it represents the philosophical movement of Modernism coming out of the Enlightenment whereby science and reason are enthroned with authority, and religion (as if it were always opposed) is to be hidden away in the corner of a private home. Modernity is more like a worldview than a period in time. 

Karen Armstrong in The Battle for God, argues that Modernity and Fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin - Modernity uses a narrow view of science and reason to push God into a corner, and Fundamentalism uses a narrow view of God and theology to push back, with equal and opposite force. I think Armstrong is wrong about a lot of things, but this argument (which you have made as well) I find very compelling. And I think you'd agree with me that much of this battle between Modernity and its sidekick Fundamentalism is on the wrong track, and it hurts both science and religion in the process (and creates a lot of confusion for the thoughtful religious who strive to hold the two together, against the polarization of an error-filled but widespread worldview).

Many who study such movements would say that only some of the world today is in the realm of Modernism - some societies are premodern (no need to name names) while others are increasingly postmodern. There is considerable overlap.  Postmodernism as a philosophy is, like Armstrong, wrong about a lot of things, but one area where it has gained traction is this: Science and reason do not have all the answers. Narratives, myths, and many other ways of knowing and experiencing the world cannot be discounted. Therefore, your reader's list of spiritual storefronts in LA are more a sign of Postmodernism making inroads than Modernism allowing religion to flourish.

The latter point is only true, though, if the only religions flourishing in post-modernity are "spiritual" and not "traditionally religious." Contemporary America has all of the above: traditional faith, fundamentalist faith, spiritual faith - and many over-lapping variations on the three.

A reader of my book argued that is is essentially a manifesto for post-modern conservatism. I prefer to think of it as a case for modern, secular conservatism, with profound respect for traditional and non-traditional inquiries into the divine. But - shameless plug - read it for yourself and see what you think.

24 Feb 2007 05:34 pm

A Lynching in Jamaica

A mob attacks two allegedly gay or transexual men in Jamaica, chasing them into a store. The cops seem unwilling to protect the men. One gay activist alleges he was subsequently beaten by the cops. An account of the incident from a rabidly anti-gay Jamaican blogger can be found here. A YouTube of Jamaican television's report can be seen here. If two Jews had been attacked by an anti-Semitic mob, or two blacks attacked by a white mob with police support, I have a feeling it would become global news.

Update. A reader adds:

That's probably true. It's also probably true that if the attackers of these gay men had been white Christians, the story would also have become global news...

24 Feb 2007 05:07 pm

Walter Reed

A reader writes:

The soldier's email about Walter Reed reminds me of this quote, which Bernard Fall used as an epigraph for "Hell In A Very Small Place", his classic history of Dien Bien Phu:

"When a nation re-awakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for its liberation. When empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers."

That's Menachem Begin, in 1951.

24 Feb 2007 04:38 pm

Iran's Isle of Lesbos

I kid you not.

24 Feb 2007 04:12 pm

Hearts and Souls

The obvious riposte:

I think it was proven that the heart does not reside in the soul with the advent of heart transplants. If you get a new heart, do you get a new soul? Are you soulless for the period of transition?

I seem to recall many recipients of heart transplants occasionally speaking of all sorts of strange and alien experiences living with someone else's heart. But my point was perhaps too cryptically expressed. Science, it seems to me, is ill-equipped to tell us anything definitive about a concept unknown to science. Yes, neuroscience may well unpack many of the secrets of our living consciousness. But a soul is eternal. It may be dismissed as such by scientists. But they can't disprove something not susceptible to proof. They can merely try to delegitimize those of us who take the unprovable seriously.

24 Feb 2007 03:28 pm

Conservapedia?

Hey, it's a post-modern world, and truth isn't always truthiness.

24 Feb 2007 03:22 pm

Bush At the Oscars

Chris Kelly has a movie clip package all prepared before the president walks on stage to present an award.

24 Feb 2007 02:15 pm

Face of the Day

British Ultimate Fighting Champion Michael Bisping poses for photographs during the photocall to announce the arrival of Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in the UK. 23 February, 2007, Manchester, England. Ultimate fighting, a mixture of martial arts is claimed to be one of the world's fastest growing sports and the largest championship in Britain is to be staged at Manchester's MEN arena on 21st April. (By Christopher Furlong/Getty.)

24 Feb 2007 01:37 pm

Landslide Rudy?

These Quinipiac numbers are stunning. Giuliani has more Republican support than McCain, Gingrich and Romney put together.

24 Feb 2007 12:43 pm

The Obama-Clinton Kerfuffle

Maybe I'm biased, but I think Obama is easily the winner. (I'm with Bill Kristol and Mickey Kaus on this. Mickey had exactly the same reponse to Adamnag's piece as I did.) Obama's prised Hollywood off the Clinton teat; he got the Clinton campaign to throw the first stone (there's no evidence Obama knew of Geffen's deliberate gaffe in advance); and revealed how scared the Clintonistas are of the star they have to obliterate.

But whoever you think got the upper hand, there's one aspect to the incident that merits more notice. This was a classic political A-list dust-up. It got national attention. It was the first real skirmish in the presidential campaign. And no straight white men were central players. This was an openly gay man dishing to a female reporter about a black man's threat to another woman's campaign. Yes, the mud flew. But look who was throwing it.

24 Feb 2007 12:30 pm

The View From Your Window

Wallhalla, Michigan, 8.30 am.

24 Feb 2007 12:15 pm

TNR Goes Bi

The magazine I once edited is going bi-weekly and has some serious new investors. JPod worries that a fortnightly changes TNR's DNA irreparably. So would its disappearance - and I fear that the weekly magazine is simply defunct in the age of the web. (The New Yorker and the Economist are the exceptions that prove the rule.) The bottom line is that TNR's future looks a lot brighter than it did recently. That's a very good thing, if you care, as I do, about the magazine, its history, its legacy and its continued capacity to attract real talent. Frank Foer understands the need to make some trouble at a political mag - it's already far livelier; Ryan Lizza and Mike Crowley are great reporters; Jon Chait, who's taking over TRB, is an astringent, witty man of the left; Leon Wieseltier, although we've had deep personal conflicts, is an indisputably great literary editor. I love TNR, understand its need to reassert its liberal identity (I had a good time pushing at that envelope for a few years), and hope it flourishes as an out bi publication. Good luck, guys.

24 Feb 2007 11:00 am

The New Gitmo

A prison expert visits the new facility for innocent as well as guilty prisoners. Hey, this is the Bush administration. What's the difference? Money quote:

Camp 6 includes detainees who have been cleared for transfer because the military has determined that they are no longer considered to be a danger to the United States or its allies, that they no longer have any intelligence value and that there is no other reason to keep them locked up. They remain only until they can be repatriated to their country of origin, or another country willing to accept them. Can there be any justification for a civilized country to hold any of this group of approximately 100 men, in conditions worse than maximum security? The answer is surely no. Yet we do ...

The men imprisoned in Camp 6 are alone in cells with walls, floors and ceilings of solid metal 22 hours a day. There is no natural light or air and no windows except strips of glass next to the solid metal door that allow only a view of an interior corridor. During cell time, the men have no contact with any human beings other than guards.

'Rec time' consists of a transfer in shackles to a 'pod' of five pens separated by chain-link fences. Each detainee is placed alone in a 12- by 9-foot pen for two hours and allowed to communicate with others should there be men in adjacent pens.

Somwhere, Cheney smiles.

24 Feb 2007 10:06 am

The Heart, the Soul, and Science

Here's a strange paragraph in an otherwise sensible essay:

One of the most important contributions a scientist can make is to successfully question opinions that seem self-evident and obvious to the public. Once it was commonly accepted in the West that the world was flat and that the heart was the residence of the soul.

And here's a good response:

Where's the evidence that the soul does not reside in the heart?

The debate continues here.

24 Feb 2007 09:10 am

The End of A Narrative?

A reader writes:

I felt compelled to write about this Vlahos article. Every diplomat should read it. As an officer who worked in public diplomacy for two years in a developing country, I was torn by the end of the article. I saw people who desperately wanted democracy. I also saw people who were scared as hell by the chaos and change that democracy and free markets bring. They all wanted to know more about America, wanted to get a visa, wanted to see our grand experiment for themselves — but they knew we were not infallible and had provoked something big in Iraq. They could sense the blood in the water, yet they still basically wanted to be just like us.

I supported the war and now feel depressed; as a diplomat you almost have to buy into our 'city on the hill' narrative or you will wonder what the hell we are doing out there in places where our strategic interest is almost non-existent. Yet we have totally embarrassed ourselves. I don't buy everything in the article, but Vlahos certainly made me think about the very nature of what I do.

Another reader comments:

I would suggest that Vlahos' historically-recurring 'imperial narrative' shares the characteristics of the pathological fundamentalisms you've discussed in the Harris debate: fear of change and instability, a desire for transcendence, and a disconnect from reality that both sustains the pathology and results in its downfall. In the post 'The Dangers of Fake Faith,' you reference not only Islamist and Christianist pseudo-religions, but the atheistic alternatives of Soviet Marxism and German Nazism, of which imperial narratives are a central part of the meme. As you suggested in one of your epistles to Sam Harris, his narrative of triumphant science would result in imperialism as well, since it would grant the institution of science the same supremacy of authority as a sole hegemon or a fundamentalist religion. I also think it's fair to say that the fundamental, authoritarian, or imperial aspects of the Bush administration (and its resultant hubris and decadence) have been its defining characteristics.

What are the consequences? Vlahos argues that this is at least the end of the Pax Americana, if not a setback for modernity and civilization itself. He seems to think that the narrative is now locked into place like a Chinese finger-trap. That's where I disagree with him. The same rhythms of history that validate his initial argument undermine his conclusion. To wit: from the battles of Lexington and Concord to the secession of the southern states is 85 years, and from there to Pearl Harbor is another 81.  From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 is only 60.  The last phase of this narrative drama is still playing out before us, so let's not jump the gun on defining our era in history.

I am 21. I am coming-of-age in the climactic phase of this historical cycle, like the Sons of Liberty, the Yanks and Rebs, and the Greatest Generation. I am not 'the D-list to the Greatest Generation,' I am its rightful successor. The future does look grim, and we face many challenges. But I refuse to accept the proposition that I cannot make a difference.

I feel the same way. The original essay - it's long and needed more editing - is here.

24 Feb 2007 07:47 am

Beards and Cats

An inquiry.

Friday, February 23, 2007

23 Feb 2007 09:45 pm

Enter Ross

The contretemps that began with Alan Wolfe's review of Dinesh D'Souza continues.

23 Feb 2007 08:21 pm

The Slave Trade Today

From Southern Sudan, human beings for sale:

23 Feb 2007 07:56 pm

What's A Neocon?

Did the president ask his dad that? We may never know. But on this Tim Noah and I now have to agree:

Throughout the current administration, I've had the experience again and again of learning some new fact that indicated life in the White House was much worse than I'd previously allowed myself to believe.

23 Feb 2007 07:14 pm

The View From Your Window

Napa, California, 1 pm.

23 Feb 2007 06:46 pm

The Torture of Prisoner 063

A review from the American Journal of Bioethics. If you are still in the denialist camp about authorized torture at Gitmo, you should give it a read.

23 Feb 2007 06:15 pm

Modernity and Spirituality

A reader writes:

I find it difficult to stomach this kind of conservative humbug, that Modernity is anti-spiritual. Western society is the mechanism that allows groups like the Pentacostalists (and cosmos-loving atheists, and Wiccans, Buddhists, et al.) to exist. It is the ground in which they survive. What seems to irritate some conservatives is the fact that they cannot impose their will upon all of society and poison the soil which succors them. If anything, and the USA is the exemplar of this, modern Western society is besotted with spirituality. 

You cannot drive down a street in the greater Los Angeles area, a zone of the country supposedly noted for its secular ways, without encountering churches, synagogues, mosques, reading rooms, meditation centers, Scientology storefronts and other physical manifestations of the "higher" realms. Spiritual desert, bah! It's an earthly garden of a thousand blooms.

I couldn't agree more. The notion that freedom and spirituality are incompatible is an old one. It isn't an American one. The freedom that creates Anna Nicole Smith is the freedom that makes America the most religious and spiritual advanced country on the planet. And the freedom is indivisible.

23 Feb 2007 05:50 pm

The Surge Continues

Doonesbury follows along.

23 Feb 2007 05:30 pm

Quote for the Day II

"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed... Healthy emotions tell every young man and every honourable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal ... Away with Jewish brutalisation of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!" - a Nazi magazine in Pomerania in the 1930s. It forms the epigraph for Art Speigelman's "Maus."

23 Feb 2007 05:02 pm

Face of the Day

Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, M.D., surgeon general of the Army, holds a news conference after leading members of the news media on tours of outpatient housing at Walter Reed Army Medical Center February 22, 2007 in Washington, DC. Military officials held the news conference to address stories in the Washington Post about the poor living conditions for some outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed.

23 Feb 2007 04:55 pm

A Republican For Gay Equality

The next generation speaks - in Wyoming.

23 Feb 2007 04:30 pm

Douglass On Federalism

Once slavery had been abolished in law, it remained in the mind and soul and culture. How to extirpate it? Frederick Douglass got it right, I think:

Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation ... Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise — a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.

States' rights; equal suffrage; and national progress. Not a bad triad.

23 Feb 2007 04:15 pm

The L-Word

Suze Orman, financial guru to millions, is a lesbian in a committed relationship of seven years. Money quote:

Orman says they'd like to get married, and both "have millions of dollars in our name. It's killing me that upon my death, K.T. is going to lose 50 percent of everything I have to estate taxes. Or vice versa."

You're a second class citizen, Suze. Do something about it. Call Tim Gill.

23 Feb 2007 04:14 pm

Campaign Ad Schlock

Everybody likes Ike! Actually, I have a serious soft spot for this cartoon ad for one of the most under-rated presidents in U.S. history.

23 Feb 2007 03:18 pm

Ten Steps

How to restore America's moral authority.

23 Feb 2007 02:56 pm

Quote for the Day

"I went to bed and slept as usual, but awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately. I searched for an old sheet of paper and an old stub of a pen which I had had the night before, and began to scrawl the lines almost without looking, as I learned to do by often scratching down verses in the darkened room when my little children were sleeping. Having completed this, I lay down again and fell asleep, but not before feeling that something of importance had happened to me," - Julia Ward Howe, describing how she came to write "The Battle Hym of the Republic" which was first published in the Atlantic in February 1862. She was right. Something of importance had occurred.

Sage Stossel records the full context:

Julia Ward Howe, the wife of a prominent Boston abolitionist, had visited a Union Army camp in Virginia where she heard soldiers singing a tribute to the abolitionist John Brown (who had been hanged in 1859 for leading an attempted slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry). A clergyman at the camp, aware that Howe occasionally wrote poetry, suggested that she craft new verses more appropriate to the Civil War effort, to be set to the same rousing tune.

It was the hymn that Churchill, the great Atlanticist, mandated for his funeral.

23 Feb 2007 02:34 pm

A Paleocon Revival?

There's some interesting chatter out there, and this post from a self-described "anti-imperialist reactionary from flyover country" is among the more interesting exhibits. Daniel Larison both loathes what he sees as the cultural degeneracy of Blue America (a D'Souza meme), and the neocon interventionist war-making endorsed by Red America (a Scowcroft meme). And he wonders if there isn't a candidate out there who could bring them together in a total recast of U.S. foreign policy:

What is potentially quite interesting is what might happen if we could somehow miraculously get together the large constituency on the left that focuses specifically on U.S. policy and the fairly large and, I think, growing constituency on the right that focuses on cultural decadence to create a popular cause demanding the dismantling of the hegemony and moral renewal.  The only problem is that the two groups generally regard each other's America as the heart of the problem that 'their' America has with the rest of the world.  I promise a nice steak dinner to anyone who can come up with the plan that unites these two basically mutually antagonistic groups together in a force for anti-imperialist cultural regeneration.

It's well worth reading and mulling. I hear a new cultural development out there and a phrase springs to mind: a paleocon is a neocon mugged by reality.

23 Feb 2007 02:17 pm

John Brown's Spirit

Without his passionate, violent radicalism, slavery might have endured in America. Here's a fascinating article from the Atlantic that details the ways in which the abolitionist magazine covered the memory of Brown through the centuries. Check out Hitch's recent essay and an insightful memoir from one Gamaliel Bradford, from 1922. Money quote:

The influence of such a man and such a life and such a death flowed out and on, beyond the men who obeyed him, beyond the men who met him, to those who never knew him and had hardly even heard of him, to the whole country, to the wide world....

That is what Brown meant when he said, 'I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose! That is what men of his type achieve by their fierce struggle and their bitter self-denial and their ardent sacrifice. They make others, long years after,—others who know barely their names and nothing of their history,—achieve also some little or mighty sacrifice, accomplish some vast and far-reaching self-denial, that so the world, through all its doubts and complications and perplexities, may be lifted just a little toward ideal felicity.

23 Feb 2007 01:24 pm

The Jews and Tom and Jerry

Of course, the Iranian fruitcake was unaware that Disney had nothing to do with Tom and Jerry. He was also unaware that Joseph Barbera, who did create them, was of Lebanese descent.

23 Feb 2007 01:13 pm

The Surge's Problem

It's good to see some small progress and a few arrests of Shiite thugs. But the fundamental flaw is still obvious. This simple well-reported piece from Baghdad tells you all you need to know:

It was a translator working with the Americans, interviewed a day after the fact, who had overheard the Iraqi police tipping off the Iraqis. "They were telling people in the neighborhood to hide your weapons from the Americans," he said. The police were Shiites, he said, and inclined to favor others of their sect in the district, which is mostly Shiite but has a considerable Sunni population.

On another patrol, an American commander said, Iraqi residents told American soldiers that a national policeman had warned them to hide anything incriminating including paraphernalia about Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite militia leader whose forces are targets of the Baghdad crackdown.

You have a military and police force so infiltrated by or beholden to Shiite militias that there is no chance of cracking down on every aspect of the insurgency in the name of a nominally "national" government. Almost all the heavy lifting is still being done by Americas; and everyone is waiting for their departure so that a real war and a new balance of power can take the country forward:

To many Sunnis the Iraqi forces remain little more than instruments of Shiite hegemony, and the Baghdad plan appears to have done little to change that view. "They can’t protect the Sunnis in the Shiite districts, and they will never fight the militias because they are from the same sect," said Ahmed al-Mashhadani, a Sunni resident of west Baghdad, where other Baghdad security operations took place last week. "We don’t trust them, and if American troops leave, we will call back the resistance platoons to protect ourselves."

If we continue as we are, I don't see any way past this problem. We will become de facto part of a Shiite government fighting Sunnis and al Qaeda. Maybe that's what Cheney wants - to take the Shiite side in such a civil war. If so, the repercussions of that should be on the table.

(Photo of Iraqi boy protecting a poster of al-Sadr in Baghdad after his house was inspected by U.S. and Shiite Iraqi troops. By Wissam al-Okaili/AFP/Getty.)

23 Feb 2007 12:53 pm

Another Trashing

D'Souza gets it from the New Criterion. From Powerline's Scott Johnson.

23 Feb 2007 12:41 pm

The "Jewish Walt Disney Company"

Here's Iranian television's latest exercize in journalism. The translation is not by Stephen Colbert. It's for real.

(Hat tip: Danny.)

23 Feb 2007 12:22 pm

Top Design

Who wants

bright skylights, inset lighting fixtures, a top-floor kitchenette with a built-in espresso machine, new hardwood floors and soft pistachio carpeting up the winding stairs... heated floors, a firefighting system, speakers for music throughout the building, and spacious bathrooms, one with a Jacuzzi?

The Iraqi "government" for their new U.S. embassy. Where do they want it? Across the street from Cheney's place.

23 Feb 2007 12:12 pm

Slavery and Torture

On the aniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, it's worth recalling that torture is inextricably linked to slavery. As Scott Horton explains more fully here, when Wilberforce and Wesley aimed to persuade the British elites that the slave trade was evil, they did not cite Biblical proscriptions against slavery. Why? Because the Bible is actually very ambiguous about slavery (the Southern Baptist Convention even used scripture to defend slavery in America). So Wilberforce stressed that the slave trade required unspeakable cruelty, abuse and torture of its victims. That was his rhetorical gambit. He framed his case against the slave trade as a case against inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. The print above was part of the abolitionist case and it was designed to show human beings whose dignity has been violated. The detail I find most arresting is that the small text explains how tightly packed the slaves were on the ship "in the manner of galleries in a church." Wilberforce was appealing to his fellow Christians. And he believed he could persuade them about inhumane treatment more easily than he could persuade them about slavery.

But the two were and are inextricable. Torture was necessary to maintain slavery. It was integral to slavery. You cannot have slavery without some torture or the threat of torture; and you cannot have torture without slavery. You cannot imprison a free man for ever unless you have broken him; and you can only forcibly break a man's soul by torturing it out of him. Slavery dehumanizes; torture dehumanizes in exactly the same way. The torture of human beings who have no freedom and no recourse to the courts is slavery.

Torture, like slavery, is the anti-freedom; it is the negation of freedom. George Washington was right when he defined the meaning of America in part by his radical, unconditional and absolute disavowal of such a practice. I find it telling that Wilberforce's peers were more troubled by torture than they were by slavery itself. Today, slavery is unthinkable. But torture? It's just "coercive interrogation."

This is surely Lincoln's and Wilberforce's lesson for us: an America that includes torture is no less a self-refutation than an America that includes slavery. There are political causes and there are moral causes that leave mere politics behind. The end of torture is now one of these causes, just as the end of slavery once was.

Remember Washington. Remember Wilberforce. It is not too late to give America back to herself. And it is not too late for the Christians in this country to follow Wilberforce's example and speak this truth to the power that now resides in the White House. Here's one place to start.

23 Feb 2007 11:01 am

"A Man And A Brother"

"A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a horse or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind of property is - how shall we say it so as not to violate our Constitutional obligations? - that it is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man, speaks human language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we all acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left behind - in short, hath the same organs and dimension that a Christian hath, and is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a simpler and more earnest faith. There are people at the North who believe, that, beside meum and tuum, there is also such a thing as suum, - who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren...

The encroachments of slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward ... the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it," - James Russell Lowell, The Atlantic Monthly, October 1860.

(The woodcut above appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains." The design was originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s, and appeared on several medallions for the society made by Josiah Wedgwood as early as 1787.)

23 Feb 2007 10:38 am

Hewitt vs Odom

It's a priceless interview as you hear one empty gas-bag of ideology slowly deflating. General Odom does not fully convince me that swift and total withdrawal from Iraq is in our best interests, but as time goes by and the evidence mounts up, I find him far more plausible than I did a year or two years ago. And this is a riposte I wish I'd come up with when I was subjected to Hewitt's bad-faith questioning:

Why do you keep asking me a question that I'm giving you an answer to?

Heh. It takes time to realize who is interviewing you. There's a sickening moment when Hewitt tries to accuse Odom to his face of being the modern equivalent of Neville Chamberlain. But Odom's candor throughout is immensely refreshing and Hewitt deserves props for allowing him to win the argument. This interaction was particularly revealing, I thought. It's about the consequences of withdrawal:

HH: Did you predict or see coming the Cambodian holocaust after our withdrawal from Southeast Asia?

WO: That would have happened if we'd stayed.

HH: But did you predict it?

WO: We didn't ... we were not in Cambodia.

HH: But did you ...

WO: We [helped] perpetrate that.

HH: Did you or anyone you work with at the time see it coming? Did you see the reeducation camps in Vietnam?

WO: No, we didn't. I wasn't focused on that then. I was focused on Vietnam.

HH: And what about the reeducation camps and the boat people?

WO: Well, what about them?

HH: Did we foresee that? Did anyone sit down ...

WO: Well, we said that things much worse than that were going to happen.

HH: John Kerry, when he testified before the Senate, actually thought it would be a couple of thousand people that would be…

WO: Well, I'm not John Kerry, and I don't ... I'm not defending John Kerry’s position. I’m saying the big scare in Southeast Asia was that there will be a whole group of countries that became pro-Soviet bloc, and pro-Chinese. Well, two more went communist, but they were not pro-Chinese. We were pursuing a war to contain China, the Soviet policy had become containing China. We were presenting a half a million U.S. troops in pursuit of Soviet foreign policy objectives. Right now, we are pursuing al Qaeda and Iranian foreign policy objectives in Iraq.

Ouch.

23 Feb 2007 10:05 am

Gallup Backs D'Souza

If the battle is one for the Muslim mind, the past few years have been Dunkirk for the West. More interesting:

Gallup's Centre for Muslim Studies in New York carried out surveys of 10,000 Muslims in ten predominantly Muslim countries... The Gallup findings indicate that, in terms of spiritual values and the emphasis on the family and the future, Americans have more in common with Muslims than they do with their Western counterparts in Europe. A large number of Muslims supported the Western ideal of democratic government. Fifty per cent of radicals supported democracy, compared with 35 per cent of moderates.

Grist for D'Souza, I'd say.

23 Feb 2007 09:15 am

A Great Week for Romney

So says Dean Barnett, who bravely tackles the small issue of whether "Romney is a flip-flopper and an opportunist":

As someone who knows him and who is familiar with his character, it annoys me no end to see Romney’s detractors so relentlessly peddle such an inaccurate caricature.

But there's an undeniable political upside to this development. It will hardly be possible for the press to release a big 'breaking news' story on the eve of the Iowa primary that says in effect, 'This just in: Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper!!!' By the time the public is steeling itself to take a hard look at who should be its next President, the press will have punched itself out as far as Mitt Romney is concerned. Believe me – Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani should be so fortunate.

And when the time finally comes for Romney to counterpunch after all the breathless 'exposés' have been written and all the YouTubes have been aired, Romney will find his opponents in the media as easy to knock out as George Foreman was in the 8th round of the Rumble in the Jungle. The governor will be able to respond to his critics with two easy smackdowns that will be devastating when the time is right. The first is an old John F. Kennedy saw: "It's not where you come from, but where you stand." The second will be a completely justified swipe at the pettiness and endlessly repetitive nature of these attacks: "I want to talk about our country's future. I will, even if the press and my opponents are obsessed with my past."

The fact is, Mitt Romney will have enough money and enough political skill to define himself when the time is right. The fact that the hostile factions of the press will no longer be relevant when that time comes is a wonderful bonus.

23 Feb 2007 08:55 am

Amazing Grace

A new movie opens today about William Wilberforce and his campaign to end the slave trade. It's directed by Michael Apted. The website is a rich resource on the subject. Manohla Dargis's review is here. Money quote:

The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance. Wilberforce often comes across as too good to be true, which may be why the fine Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, doubtless with the encouragement of his socially minded director, plays him with a hint of madness in his eyes.

23 Feb 2007 08:15 am

"Authentic Faith"

"I fear for the future of authentic faith in our country. We live in a time when the common man in our country is thoroughly influenced by the current climate in which the cultural and educational elite propagates an anti-Christian message... Is it any wonder then that the spiritual condition of our country is of little concern to those who don’t even educate their own children about true Christianity? Their conduct reflects their absence of concern, not only for the state of Christianity in their own country, but also for the need to communicate the message of Christ to those in other parts of the world who have not heard this truth.

Some might say that one's faith is a private matter and should not be spoken of so publicly. They might assert this in public, but what do they really think in their hearts? The fact is, those who say such things usually don't even have a concern for faith in the privacy of their interior lives. If you could see their hearts, you would find no trace of authentic faith. God has no place among the sources of hopes, fears, joys or sorrows in their lives. They might be thankful for their health, success, wealth and possessions, but they give no thought to the possibility that these are all signs of God’s provision. If they do give credit to God, it is usually done in some perfunctory way that reveals that their words have no sincerity.

When their conversations get really serious, you will see how little of their Christianity has anything to do with the faith taught by Jesus. Everything becomes subjective. Their conduct is not measured against the standard set by the gospel. They have developed their own philosophies, which they attempt to pawn off as Christianity," - William Wilberforce, "A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity" (1797).

Today is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain. It took America a little longer. The Dish will offer up a series of posts in commemmoration today.

23 Feb 2007 07:16 am

Campaign Ad Schlock 2006

Here's proof that American can still produce campaign camp in the twenty-first century. Go Vernon Robinson!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

22 Feb 2007 09:49 pm

Beards and Dogs

A reader writes:

I had tried many times to grow a beard but was frustrated by a large bald spot on my right jaw. I finally grew a beard that covered the bald spot, but the bald spot came back after a year, leaving me looking like I had a case of he mange.   At about that time my wife and I adopted a rescued pit bull puppy.  The pup constantly licked my face, and in no time the bald spot was gone!  That was 13 years ago, and while that dog is (sadly) no longer with us, we have continued to adopt rescued dogs, my faced has been licked every day, and my bald spot has never returned.

I just thought I'd pass that along.

Er, thanks.

22 Feb 2007 09:00 pm

The Gay Insurgency

The rebellion of gay writers and activists against the useless, bloated behemoth called the Human Rights Campaign is gathering steam. The Emily's List hack who now runs the place according to the dictates of the Clintonistas, Joe Solmonese, is getting more and more defensive. Michael Petrelis has the latest. Money quote:

The problem, as I see it, is that HRC and Solmonese believe they are above reproach and any criticism leveled against them is tantamount to betrayal, which is simply not the case. Here are a few recommendations for Solmonese and HRC: Start dealing honestly with the mounting valid complaints against your operations, develop a thicker skin and stop equating HRC as the entire movement.

Patience with these losers is finally wearing thin.