Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
THE ONLY THING I DON'T LIKE ABOUT THIS PROTEST OF THE "RAVE" ACT is that apparently, in order to protest Congress's bizarro anti-drug/glowstick bill, you have to listen to rave music. Sorry, not my idea of ecstasy. Nonetheless, I've marked my calendar for September 6. I note that depending on how this bill gets interpreted, something like 20 or more of my friends could get pulled in on charges. (And that's not even counting charges for actually ingesting illegal substances.)

As an old anti-drug-war ad (can't remember who did it?) read, "Many marijuana users go on to harder things. Like grad school."

A friend once gave, as a reason not to do Ecstasy, the fact that it made you say dumb stuff like, "Your sweater! It's so... sweatery!" This would turn me off pronto, but I was already no Ecstasy fan, just on the grounds that I think its main effect is supposed to be hugginess, or generally acting like an overactive puppy. Eeewww. I've already got a religion that tells me I've gotta love everybody; I don't need a drug that will make me like everybody. But whatever, gettin' stupid isn't illegal, why should this particular method of stupidizing be?
posted by Eve at 2:43 PM

 
RICK BROOKHISER SHOULD GET A BLOG (of his very own), so that he can offer us daily reflections on how various founders (especially Gouverneur Morris) anticipated modern-day events... like the Sex for Sam contest. I note that http://rakishfounder.blogspot.com is not taken, nor is http://propheticroue.blogspot.com.
posted by Eve at 2:01 PM

 
OK, I SUSPECT THERE'S A LOT OF HYPERBOLE in this article about whether crows are disappearing from DC due to West Nile, but the article does give a great picture of why people love the big bad black birds so much. (Link via Roy Sheetz.)

UPDATE: TAPPED agrees that the "ring the alarm... another crow is dying" angle is bogus. But again, the article is worth reading for its loving portrait of corvine life.
posted by Eve at 11:13 AM

 
"FUN SIZE" BLOGWATCH: Good, funny post from Barlow in re Jim Beam idiotic bathroom policy. Read the comments too, of course.

And E. Volokh sums up my basic stance re home-schooling, testing/accountability, parental rights, and libertarianism. Scroll up or click here for the John Ford "110 Stories" poem, as well, which I have not read yet (wanted to work up the mental and spiritual energy first), but which has gotten a lot of good reviews in the blogosphere.
posted by Eve at 11:07 AM

 
COOLER THAN HOWARD ROARK: KRAKOW--The old quarry where Karol Wojtyla began to work at age 19 is today a silent place, a huge open hole in the south of the city. But the Divine Mercy Shrine, which now dominates the scene with its ultra-modern tower, is not the only change in the surrounding landscape.

On Aug. 17, after consecrating the shrine, Pope John Paul II spent some time in another place near the quarry where he learned to appreciate the value of manual labor and the dignity of a worker during the Nazi occupation.

In the semi-vacant field, which the Pope blessed in the presence of several hundred professors, an imposing library of the Pontifical Academy of Theology will soon be erected. The Holy Father founded this institution in 1981 following the 1950 closure of the theology department of Jagiellonian University by the Communist government.

There will soon be other buildings, as the field will become the new campus of the university, in which Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope, began to study philology. He studied until Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and ordered the destruction of Polish culture, the closure of the university and the deportation of the professors to concentration camps.

The old stone quarry is becoming a scientific center; philosophy, theology, exact sciences and biomedical sciences will be studied here.

Rector Franciszek Ziejka reminded the Holy Father that in September 2000, "you said to us in Rome that Poland needs learned citizens, ready to sacrifice themselves for loveof the homeland and the good of Europe. Here we are building that future." (From Zenit via the National Catholic Register.)
posted by Eve at 10:51 AM

 
IN RE ALLAN BLOOM (II): One way of getting at some of my thoughts on the reason/passion connection: Philosophical discourse is always better with someone who's sung some songs with you. Preferably when you have both had a mint julep, or two. You don't need to do the singing and the philosophizing on the same night... but it can't hurt.
posted by Eve at 10:03 AM

 
IN RE ALLAN BLOOM (I): Those who have been following the rock'n'roll stuff on this blog (and apparently at least one brave soul actually fought his way through the immense screed below) may enjoy this article from Shamed's college days: "DMX: The Darker Side of Modernity."
posted by Eve at 9:59 AM

 
IF YOU GET TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES, you're in for a treat tonight at 11:15, when the channel will be airing Tod Browning's "Freaks." At 9 PM it will be showing David Lynch's "Elephant Man"; I haven't seen that one, but I have seen "Freaks," and it's one of the best horror movies ever made. It's a moving and furious story of the beautiful aerialist who betrays a circus freak. There are moments of intense sweetness and intense brutality. (I don't know if TCM will be showing the censored American version, or the, ahem, "uncut" English version.) The direction is just terrific. Go! watch it!

Ooh, and they're showing "Double Indemnity" at 5. An excuse to plug this fun site!
posted by Eve at 9:56 AM

 
"The future is a drag, man. The future is a flake."
--Beatnik chick, "High School Confidential!"
posted by Eve at 2:25 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: Because it's hideous and gray and drizzly outside. I need one last hit of August. From Ira "No, I'm His Brother" Gershwin and DuBose Heyward:
Summertime, an' the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin' an' the cotton is high
Oh, Yo daddy's rich an' yo' ma is good lookin'
So hush, little baby, don't you cry

One of these mornin's, you goin' to rise up singin'
Then you'll spread yo' wings an' you'll take the sky
But till that mornin', there's a nothin' can harm you
With daddy & mammy standin' by
posted by Eve at 5:37 PM

 
ONE KIND READER has emailed me a farm-subsidy-related link, which I'm about to post over at TFD. I know you want to do the same! eve_tushnet@yahoo.com, y'all.
posted by Eve at 3:14 PM

 
STUCK BETWEEN A ROCK AND CATHARSIS: Two (belated) replies to my post about Allan Bloom and rock&roll. First, from someone who prefers anonymity (she's in bold, I'm in plain text): Although I don't share Bloom's distaste for rock 'n' roll (I'm a product of my age; for better or worse I've been formed by the stuff, like you), I don't think that he would find the case you make convincing, as it doesn't address his real concerns.

Like Plato, Bloom believed that all the arts were potentially dangerous. Not because they necessarily threatened the status quo, but because they threatened the principle virtue admired by philosophy: the virtue of reason. Wanting to create a virtuous and democratic state, Plato feared that the passions stirred by the arts (but most of all by music), undermined the citizen's commitment to rational order and aroused the "pity and terror" that could be so usefully exploited by demagogues, kings, and other forces hostile to democracy. Strike up a patriotic anthem; sing a sentimental ballad about your mother; and you can persuade an audience to do almost anything. He thought that music, in short, was anti-democratic.

Aristotle's theory of art, his view that it could be a means of releasing and resolving the passions through catharsis, and not simply
stirring them up, was intended as a defense of the arts and an answer to Plato's criticism of their demagogic character.

Bloom, learning from both Plato and Aristotle (and Nietzsche) saw rock music as an art form that stirred up passions WITHOUT subsequently calming them. And I don't think you've addressed this issue in your blog comments. However pleasurable it may be (and it is to our generation) you can't deny that rock music, and in fact all the popular music of our culture, does exactly what Bloom feared.

What Bloom was really trying to argue is that our culture is musically obsessed to an unprecedented degree; that many people link their very identities to the music they listen to (people choose their mates according to the bands they prefer, for heaven's sake!); and that this is a sign of something larger, a sign of the weakening hold of reason upon our personalities. A society composed of such personalities is one in which the democratic virtues are bound to grow weaker.

The fact that rock music usually (but not always) deals with sex and aggression is really only one of Bloom's criticisms of it, and not the most important one. What matters is that the driving rhythms of rock (whatever the words may say) banish thought in favour of emotion, in a way that the more complex rhythms of baroque music, or even the cathartic story-telling musicality of opera, do not attempt. Bruce Springsteen could do anything with his audiences: it's only our good fortune that he hasn't tried (and not everyone would agree that he hasn't tried).

I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, believe it or not. I'm only saying that if you want to argue with Bloom, you have to tackle the issue of whether rock music is really as anti-cathartic, stirring up dangerous passions without resolving them, as he seems to have believed. You cannot do so simply by insisting that the songs are sometimes more intelligent than he realised.

Fair enough--all good points and very well put. Let me lay out what I see as the six basic points here, and throw out some scattered thoughts on them, from last to first. (Oh, and for those playing the St. Blog's Drinking Game: vast post ahead!) PLATO: 1) Art is dangerous because it replaces reason with passion. 2) Passion is the tool of demagogues and proto-fascists. (Points off for ahistorical reference, I know.) ARISTOTLE: 3) But art that provokes a catharsis can ultimately calm the passions, cleansing the soul and clearing the way for the unopposed reign of reason. BLOOM: 4) Rock stirs passion without catharsis, and thus is anti-democratic and generally bad. 5) We're musically obsessed, and we lack reason. 6) This passion-vs.-reason conflict is a bigger part of Bloom's criticism of rock than the sex/aggression or masturbatory qualities of (some) rock.

Now: 6) Hm. It's likely that I am simply misremembering The Closing of the American Mind (which is where Bloom's attack on rock appears), but certainly the most memorable passages in the section on rock are those dealing with the mind of the typical teenager plugged into his blaring Walkman, and those passages focus on the stuff I talked about rather than on a general critique of art-as-such. Bloom also praises some experiences and literature that themselves privilege passion over reason, poetry over philosophy (I'm thinking specifically of his praise of eros and his lament that so few of his students have read the Bible). So that's why I focused on the sex/aggression stuff. But that doesn't matter so much since the rest of this post will address the larger questions about the relationship of art and reason.

5) Criticism of American contemporary response to/use of music. I largely agree with this; see previous post. However, our society is so complex, and we have our faces pressed so close against it, that we can't really see it well enough to discern internal conflicts as well as we might. We certainly have an oversupply of Oprah-esque "feelings worship" (vote Bush--for the children!), but we also have a strong streak of bureaucratic intellectualism--why aren't we more upset that we're ruled by self-crowned philosopher-kings? We have an astonishing tendency to abstract and intellectualize (she's not a child, she's a choice) at the same time that we accept anecdotes as data in public debate. So I'm not sure how to describe the peculiar problems with the American passion/reason imbalance.

Partly this is due to my confusion about the use of the term "reason" here--throughout this post, I will be using "reason" to mean "ratiocination" (is that the word I want?), syllogistic reasoning, the standard stuff you find Socrates unleashing on everybody except Parmenides, who opens a big ol' can of syllogistic whoop-ass on Socrates (to the gleeful Schadenfreude of millennia of philosophy students). I know there's also an understanding of "reason" that is more like what I mean by "right reason" or perhaps "prudence," in which reason includes only those processes of ratiocination that actually lead to true conclusions--in other words, reason includes both the process and the necessary true premises. Thus Communism would be irrational, say, or Objectivism, even though both philosophies obviously make use of syllogistic reasoning. ANYWAY, like I said, I will be using "reason" to mean "ratiocination" and not "prudence" or "right reason." Thus reason, too, can be misused, misdirected, or misleading. Apologies if that definition obscures rather than clarifies matters.

A further complication, of course, is that passions themselves can spur rationalizations. (Chesterton's line about the man who says he disbelieves in the Trinity, but what he means is that he's sleeping with his neighbor's wife.) I'd rather not even get into that for now.

4) Rock is catharsisless. (Try saying that three times fast.) The boring response: This isn't true of all rock. Elvis Costello's "Little Palaces," which I listed in the earlier post, has a degree of catharsis; so does "99 Luftballons."

More interesting response: Catharsis is very rare in rock. Does that matter? I'll get into a more vigorous defense of the passions later, but for now, let me just point out that rock songs tend to be short. Expecting catharsis from a single song (an album might be different; and many do, in fact, provide some degree of catharsis) is like expecting it from a Weegee photograph. Rock songs are snapshots, not movies. Again, this is only a problem if a) exciting passion is always bad, and b) your society, as ours does, favors rock/pop intensely as vs. other forms of art or communication.

3) Catharsis is the justification for art. I think there are others, of which more below, so I will avoid taking issue with Aristotle in order to skip directly to taking issue with Plato.

2) Passion is anti-democratic. This Glenn Reynolds column on Elvis Presley might make an interesting contrast here: Reynolds lauds Elvis for inventing the rock star--providing, basically, a way for people to feel part of something larger than themselves and bond with others. Reynolds's column is too quick-and-easy, and the thread of the argument gets a bit lost, but some relevant good points stand out: You can't ignore, suppress, or dissolve the passions. You can only guide them. Even catharsis doesn't really do the trick--first, because catharsis can sometimes be simple exhaustion, but second and more importantly, because catharsis must somehow appeal to the passions while drawing them toward reason. Thus the end-result of reason must be continually supported, either by an ebb-and-flow cycle of catharsis, or by a more constant attraction toward reason and self-government. In other words, we have to keep wanting self-government; if we reason our way there without any emotional forward thrust, the reasons alone simply won't motivate us enough.

Similarly, democracy and freedom (very different concepts!) require emotional support. If they are to stand against (often very persuasive) counterclaims, and against the always-persuasive claims of our emotions, they need to be supported by other emotions themselves. This is one of the many ways rock music can operate: It can oppose one passion with another. The example that springs to mind is using pity to oppose lust. This is one reason I kept yammering about the dialectical nature of rock; it often embeds a critique and a conflict. It often expresses a conflict within our own souls, generally coming down on one side or the other. That dialectical and passionate approach is often more effective than a purely reason-based approach, since it acknowledges and respects our experience of the passions rather than simply dismissing it.

And finally, 1) Art is dangerous because it replaces reason with passion. Earlier, I discussed possible confusion about the word "reason." A parallel confusion has probably seeped in with regard to the word "passion." I've been using it as a strange medley of "emotion" and "motive." There are emotions that are obviously motives--like anger, sexual desire, or adoration--and emotions that are less obviously motives--like resignation, hope, or regret. Rock is just as good at expressing the latter kind of emotion as the former. (In fact, this whole thread started because Unqualified Offerings pointed out that rock's bluesy lineage makes it especially well-suited to expressing resignation and endurance.)

I'll defend both kinds of emotion as legitimate. Reason (/ratiocination) isn't the only means of attaining wisdom. Ecstatic experience is one terrific way of gaining insight, even if one needs to return from the ecstasy in order to articulate the insight. Rock, like other art, is able to "take you places." Art often offers insights even when that wasn't the artist's explicit or acknowledged intention; you can put a lot more in a piece than you intended. (I write fiction, and that's definitely true of my experience.) Rock is non-rational, no kidding. No matter how "intelligent" it is, most of its appeal will always be non-rational. (The earlier post includes some thoughts on why this is especially true of music, but it is really true of all art, as my correspondent noted.) I don't view the emotions as opposed to reason such that stimulating one necessarily reduces the other. So perhaps much of my disagreement with Bloom should be traced to that disagreement.

I've been focusing on art's effect on its audience, partly because I'm being too clinical, and partly because I really don't want to open yet another area of inquiry in a post that is already too complex and too long. But the reasons artists do their thing should also be taken into account. The whole notion of art as "sub-creation" is really interesting. Art (including rock) is also a means of distilling the world, simplifying and intensifying it, responding to our belief that the world and its events and inhabitants mean something-- that they are, to some degree or another, allegorical. But this post is probably not the best place to get into that whole discussion.

As I said before, there's also a lot of rock that's just fun. Some of that fun comes with an admixture of raunchy or critical or regretful or resentful elements; I don't ultimately think that matters too much. Rocking out is about pure physical joy. It's like running or eating chocolate. Sometimes there's also a strong element of aesthetic wonder, making the experience more like watching a tiger's fur shimmering over its muscles as it leaps, or like looking out from a rock promontory, or like touching or tasting rough icicles. The combination of that pure pleasure with perhaps less pure pleasures doesn't necessarily bother me--the Cramps, for instance, are fun not just because they're inherently fun but also because they clearly have loved much of the same music that I love, and because bawdiness without grossness is always fun (maybe a later post on this). And because of a lot of other stuff. No pleasure is really "pure" in the sense of "unmixed."

Anyway, it was a good letter. Don't blame my correspondent for provoking this (drink!) vast post.
posted by Eve at 3:08 PM

 
ALLAN BLOOM, HEP CAT: And from Michael Tinkler (the Cranky Professor): I fall back on the great, misguided, but useful division of all into Apollonian and Dionysiac and/or listening music in opposition to dance music. The condemnations of the waltz are very much the same as the condemnations of Brand New Lover (B.N.L. and Right Round Baby are both in high rotation on my iPod this month!).

I think that part of this can be put down to middle age, and part of it to temperament. Bloom was obviously just not much fun at parties.

Now I know that's shallow, biographical criticism, but we've all known people who elaborate positions about the world to fit their temperaments, and I fear most musical commentary falls into that category.
posted by Eve at 1:35 PM

 
MUG SHOTS: Come 'n' get your mugs! (and other gear.) We've got pro-life feminist mugs. We've got Ratzinger Fan Club mugs. We've got Yale Free Press mugs. Mugs mugs mugs!

(For whatever reason, I've been seeing a lot of cool CafePress links lately. Hence this post. I do have some advice for CafePress users, though: Match the item to the message. For example, a BBQ apron with the words, "Abolish Abortion," is freaky.)
posted by Eve at 12:03 PM

 
Blog Watch, where are you?
Everybody's eyes are closed
I can't see why I miss you so
So Blog Watch, where are you?

Ted Barlow: Iraq now vs. Vietnam then (good roundup post); Islamic banking restrictions, and how people get around them.

E-Pression: Lots of good stuff, including a link to this pro-life Catholic feminist guy (who likes Artemisia Gentileschi!), and thoughts on parental divorce and religious conversion.

Unqualified Offerings: Arguments for privatizing libraries. I spent a summer as a volunteer assistant children's librarian, and I really haven't found any problems with the DC public library system. (I know three libraries pretty well--one branch in a ritzy neighborhood, one in a middle to lower-middle class neighborhood, and the main library, MLK.) None of the problems described in the article UO cites (they're ugly, they're never open when you want them, they have no selection) could be found in the libraries I know. Those libraries have a lot of books (not everything, but inter-library loans get you pretty much everything you can reasonably expect from a non-university library), friendly and knowledgeable staff, and interesting book sales. I enjoyed my time in the Chevy Chase children's section immensely. However, I fully realize this could be one of those suburban "My kid's public school is great, I don't get why all those people want vouchers" problems with anecdotal evidence.

On the larger question, the for-profit booklending outfits sound great, the private charitable libraries (how the US public library system started, if memory serves--another example of public aid killing private charity, or of the government relieving the rich of their responsibilities, or of the government attempting to "equalize" charity and ending with inequality and big free-speech hissyfits) also sound terrific, and building a private library foundation or network might be a really interesting project. Just as there's no hope for welfare reform without a vigorous network of small private charities, so there's no point in talking about privatizing libraries unless you already have the skeleton of a working private system. (The article UO cites is too sunshiney about the difficulties involved in this project, though. One of the biggest hurdles, I would guess, is the need for informed and enthusiastic librarians--at least for the larger libraries.) And a working private system is one that serves poor and rich alike. If the libertarian arguments are right, such private libraries should be able to do better at serving the poor than the government has. Let's find out if that's as true of libraries as it is of welfare.

The Widening Gyre is back.

The St. Blog's Drinking Game; and the funniest Jonah Goldberg column in a long time (and I don't just say that because of the libertarian undercurrent).

Why? Because emus can't fly.
posted by Eve at 11:46 AM

 
"You have to listen! You have to listen to what the bees have to say!"
--Angel Tompkins, "The Bees"
posted by Eve at 10:47 AM

 
MUST-READ POST on science and religion, from The Old Oligarch (a physics and philosophy major). It's the second post on the page, in case Blogger links are screwy.
posted by Eve at 4:04 PM

 
WHAT I LEARNED LAST NIGHT: Jeeves shares the Rat's love of Dostoyevsky "and the great Russians." One presumes, however, that he does not share her taste in footwear.
posted by Eve at 2:33 PM

 
SUNDAY LITANY: Tom Kreitzberg writes: Catching up on my blogreading, I see you've recently read Dies Domini. We discussed this letter in my Lay Dominican chapter last summer, and I was moved to construct a "Litany of the Day of the Lord" from the words and phrases of the Pope.

Re-reading it a year later, I think I'd drop the "First Day of that Cosmic Week" line (the phrase works in the letter but comes off a bit crystal-and-pantheism here), and find a livelier translation than, "In the midst of the church I will praise you."

Otherwise, I think a rousing recitation of this or a similar litany at sunrise every Sunday would help make the Lord's Day something Catholics might bother to keep.

Also, I found this through, I think, Father Tucker. It's terrific. Poke around there a bit.
posted by Eve at 10:53 AM

 
"Let us eat, then we will transplant the brain."
--Dr. Frankenstein to assistant, "Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell"
posted by Eve at 10:31 AM

 
HEH!
posted by Eve at 6:52 PM

 
PRAYER TO SAINTS: Lynn Gazis-Sax asks a good question: "What does prayer to the saints add to your devotional life, that wouldn't be supplied simply by prayer directly to God?" I think her summary of the theology behind prayer to saints is fine, so I'll just address the experiential, "what does it feel like?" side.

The veneration of saints has all kinds of salutary effects, especially on judgmental or impatient souls like mine--click here for a previous post on that subject. (If link is broken--and I apologize, I really don't know how this software works, I just type and click--go here and scroll down to "There Is No Future in Einstein's Dreaming.") But the experience of praying for the intercession of saints is different from the experience of meditating on the lives of saints or being sharply reminded of some event in a saint's life.

Prayer to saints gives me a very strong feeling of community that has persisted throughout time. This is similar to the way that I think Christians generally feel knit together in community when we ask one another to pray for a sick relative, or a teen facing an exam. Prayer to saints specifically unites us with the Church Triumphant in heaven, and thus is a much-needed reminder that the Church has endured for almost 2,000 wild and woolly and often hideous years. That's one reason I find prayer to saints especially helpful amid the current priestly-abuse crisis.

Also, there's pretty much nothing you or I face that a saint hasn't already undergone. Saints have dealt with everything under the sun, it seems. Simply being reminded of that fact is strengthening; we can call on the prayers of holy men and women who have suffered all kinds of different trials. And this is not true of prayer to Jesus, for the saints have undergone sin and repentance from sin. Just knowing that there are saints who backslid, saints who tried to hedge and escape the Hound of Heaven, saints who screwed up, saints who denied Christ three times, saints who accepted Christ only at the point of death... knowing all that gives me hope for my own soul and the souls of those I love. It reminds me that nothing human is alien to the Church. I'm especially heartened by remembering how many saints faced hostility or condescension from the Church authorities of their day; that helps me to remember that the Church's claims about herself and her structure have never rested on the personal holiness of her clerics. Perhaps we should say that God works through the Church, but He sometimes has to work around bishops...

Anyway. Saints are more than role models. Prayer to saints also allows me to join in fulfilling God's plan for their lives. Maybe the example of St. Michael the Archangel will help clarify this point. I'm not sure whether Protestants who have a problem with intercessory prayer to dead holy humans also have a problem with intercessory prayer to angels--my guess is no, but really I have no clue. There's a basic, simple, but fiery prayer to St. Michael that makes it clear that one of his roles is specifically to defend us against the Devil. Similarly, each of us has a place in God's plan. We're generally confused about what that place is; we have to be ready, always, to ditch our preconceived notions and let God surprise us--often unpleasantly! Patron saints are one of the ways that the Church emphasizes this notion that each person has a role to play. Thus when I pray to Elizabeth for assistance in counseling pregnant women, I'm both acknowledging her role as friend and counselor to the Blessed Mother, and acting in harmony with her as she performs one of her roles as intercessor for counselors of pregnant women. (I doubt there's a specific patron saint for such counselors, but it should really be Elizabeth!)

The main things, in terms of how intercessory prayer feels, are: a) kinship with others who have doubted, suffered, railed against God or the Church, and ultimately trusted and believed; b) a sense of harmony with the Body of Christ, a sense of acting in concert with the saints; c) a strong reminder that God didn't just swoop into history and then swoop right back out--He has been with us since the beginning of time. Prayer to saints, like the Eucharist in which we do encounter God directly, helps us keep a very "incarnational" faith, in which God's transcendence never eclipses His presence in our lives.

Other people should feel free to email me about their own experiences of prayer to saints; but check out the email policy to your left before you hit "send."
posted by Eve at 6:16 PM

 
BIG BIG SPIDERS OF THE SILVER SCREEN. We seem to be on a spider kick over here.

Oh, and here are four one-line reviews taken at random from this site (it doesn't really matter what the movies are called, does it? Scroll down to "The Letter U" if you must know...): "A killer mutant cat that hides inside another cat."
"Another example why malaria, alcoholism, and dinosaurs don't mix."
"Huge fish threatens a resort full of morons."
"I am firmly against nuclear war if it means people are going to make movies like this."
posted by Eve at 2:47 PM

 
SPIDERS AND WATER: Two random links to things I haven't read (entirely) yet! First, "Spiders," a terrific comic about one possible alternate-future scenario for the war in Afghanistan. Haven't finished yet, but it looks really, really interesting. Plays on all kinds of relevant themes--dynamist war being the most obvious one. The view of Islam seems a bit simplistic, but whatever. Go read it! --uh, when you're done working, that is.

And the New York Times has been running front-page stories on the world's water crisis. The Times, predictably, thinks the free market is the problem. Here's a chapter (in PDF format) from Sustainable Development: Promoting Progress or Perpetuating Poverty?, which offers a very different take on the role of property rights and markets. You can get the whole book here. (Edited to add that I haven't even started this one yet, but it is vouched for by Someone Who Should Know, so it is likely to be well worth your time.)
posted by Eve at 10:13 AM

 
TRUFFAUT ON HITCHCOCK: One of the charges frequently leveled at Hitchcock is that the simplification inherent in his emphasis on clarity limits his cinematic range to almost childlike ideas. To my mind, nothing could be further from the truth; on the contrary, because of his unique ability to film the thoughts of his characters and make them perceptible without resorting to dialogue, he is, to my way of thinking, a realistic director.

Hitchcock a realist? In cinema, as on the stage, dialogue serves to express the thoughts of the characters, but we know that in real life the things people say to each other do not necessarily reflect what they actually think and feel. This is especially true of such mundane occasions as dinner and cocktail parties, or of any meeting between casual acquaintances.

If we observe any such gathering, it is clear that the words exchanged between the guests are superficial formalities and quite meaningless, whereas the essential is elsewhere; it is by studying their eyes that we can find out what is truly on their minds.

Let us assume that as an observer at a reception I am looking at Mr. Y as he tells three people all about his recent holiday in Scotland with his wife. By carefully watching his face, I notice he never takes his eyes off Mrs. X's legs. Now, I move over to Mrs. X, who is talking about her children's problems at school, but I notice that she keeps staring at Miss Z, her cold look taking in every detail of the younger woman's elegant appearance.

Obviously, the substance of that scene is not in the dialogue, which is strictly conventional, but in what these people are thinking about. Merely by watching them I have found out that Mr. Y is physically attracted to Mrs. X and that Mrs. X is jealous of Miss Z.

From Hollywood to Cinecitta no film-maker other than Hitchcock can capture the human reality of that scene as faithfully as I have described it. And yet, for the past forty years, each of his pictures features several such scenes in which the rule of counterpoint between dialogue and image achieves a dramatic effect by purely visual means. Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions as suspicion, jealousy, desire, and envy. And herein lies a paradox: the director who, through the simplicity of his work, is the most accessible to a universal audience is also the director who excels at filming the most complex and subtle relationships between human beings.

--Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock
posted by Eve at 9:55 AM

 
MORE MURNAU: Over the weekend, I realized that I'd completely neglected to give Murnau props for the astonishing technical/artistic achievement of "The Last Laugh" (scroll down to previous Murnau post if you want to find my disses of the master): TLL is a silent film with no title cards. (Maybe one or two, but no more than that.) This means that the entire plot, all the inner life of the characters, everything we typically expect from dialogue, must be expressed physically and visually. No words. This is doubtless one of the main reasons TLL was so groundbreaking, and why it was especially loved by filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock who use the camera to "replace" or counterpoint the dialogue. (I'll post an apposite quotation above.)

So let me try to make my problem with TLL clearer. It's remarkable that I could follow the plot of TLL, get a sense of the characters' motives, with no words. But that's all you get. The doorman (the main character) gets a pretty complex characterization--we see his pride in his position, but also his love of children, his pompousness but also his kindness. But none of the other characters are anything more than a collection of actions and motives. We know that his daughter and her husband reject him, but why? What in their personalities prompted the rejection? What in their personalities spoke against it but was overruled? Nothing, as far as we know. The movie offers melodrama in place of psychological insight. Camerawork can and should turn a character into a (relatively) full personality, not a mere plot device. So put it this way: Objectively, TLL features excellent camerawork; subjectively, in the way the movie was experienced by at least one viewer (hi there), the camera didn't do what it needed to do in order to make the picture more engaging than any random melodrama I could have seen.
posted by Eve at 9:44 AM

 
"Well, I've had enough of the unknown for one afternoon."
--Mara Corday, after facing off with a giant spider, in "Tarantula"
posted by Eve at 9:31 AM

 
IF YOU CAME HERE BECAUSE AMY WELBORN said unnecessarily nice things about this page, you want to scroll down to yesterday's posts, and start with the one headed, "Faith." It continues through several posts ending with "Final thoughts."
posted by Eve at 1:39 PM

 
LET US MURNAU PRAISE FAMOUS MEN: Sorry! Sorry! Anyway, I got this email from a friend, in re this post: Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but to describe the camera work in The Last Laugh as "nothing special" is factually incorrect. There are at least two great shots in the film: the opening ride down the elevator, through the lobby, and out onto the street (cameraman on a bicycle), and a view through a window, down to a courtyard, finishing in close-up (camera on a pulley-rope). Plus many other instances when the camera leaves the tripod behind or crouches at odd angles; this remains one of the most mobile cameras in film. Maybe it's not your thing, but it is certainly special.

Once sound came in, cameras had to be put in cages, lest their noise make it onto the soundtrack, and Murnau's brand of creativity largely disappeared for most of the '30s. Only later, with quieter cameras, more sophisticated sound systems, redubbing, zoom lenses, Steadycams, and other gadgets, were cameras freed again. Yet even then, the truly great shots remained silent (that is, accompanied by music, not dialogue), including the greatest moving-camera shot of all time: the opening of Touch of Evil (1957). Even today, you will find crummy movies (Return to Me) with magnificent opening shots, thanks to the crane- or helicopter-mounted zoom lenses that no doubt filled Murnau's dreams.

The film's ending is, alas, indefensible. But that's Hollywood. Or UFA. Whatever.

OK, here's the deal: I didn't notice cool camerawork, and I was looking. "Cool camerawork," for me, is defined as camerawork that in some way illuminates what's going on; makes the movie visually more striking (to me); makes me go "oooh!"; in about that order. What I like best in camerawork: a combination of subject matter, angle, and lighting that either underlines the point of a scene or, better yet, shows the scene's subtleties and complexities. I like both very sensual or thing-focused camerawork, and also camerawork that forms a counterpoint to the scene (am I using that term right?), kind of the way the guitar and bass often play differing and almost opposing, but complementary, lines in Smiths songs.

All of the above is not to say that "The Last Laugh" was not groundbreaking. I'm sure I missed things. I'm also sure I was judging the movie pretty harshly because a) I wasn't particularly sold on the plot or characters, so I was looking hard for other things to be interested in; b) I had high expectations for Murnau; and c) I had relatively recently seen "The Bat Whispers," a later movie but with (to those of us who know little about film history) a similar old-timey "feel." TBW is a fun, cool movie, and includes several showy but not-unrelated-to-the-plot camera swoops and angle choices. Perhaps the most important reason I missed all the good stuff going on with TLL's cameras is simply that I don't know enough about film history to know what is groundbreaking. But for whatever reason, even trawling my memory of the movie I can't come up with any directorial choices that seemed to enhance or deepen the movie. But I've only watched it once; I defer to the judgment of people who know the period and the movie itself better than I do.
posted by Eve at 11:39 AM

 
"THAT'S A LOT OF MAN YOU'RE CARRYING IN THOSE BOOTS, STRANGER" (John Carradine to Sterling Hayden, "Johnny Guitar"): So what brings you to this fair website? Is it any of these search requests, perchance? (You can find tons of hilarious, though sometimes very VERY off-color, search requests here.)

"jonah goldberg annoying arrogant"
"haiku marriage" Keep your pants zipped up/Unless you can face shotgun/With a diamond ring. How's that? Or, It's a sacrament/Not an excuse for your fam/To eat lots of cake.
"jokes about nagging" You are always joking about nagging and it makes me so mad!
"picture on winnie the phoon"
"alien peace through superior firepower" What if I prefer Earthling peace through superior firepower?
"interracial asian white love spells"
"nickel and dimed unnatural" I'm no huge Barbara Ehrenreich fan, but this seems a bit harsh...
"prudential claims and ethics" None of that here!
"robin hood of disney porn" Uh, he wasn't a fox in that sense...
"closeted homosexual republicans" This website has no comment.
"juicer restaurant product homemade carrot juice" Well, if this one is from Bugs Bunny, perhaps he should meet up with Robin Hood of Disney and become a closeted Republican...
"free gay picks free sides" They're free you know!
"elvis priestly marriage"
"joycelyn elders genius" You've gotta be kidding me.
"ark of hopelessness"
"odin goth anderson" Arthur Andersen changes its name to something more homey, trustworthy, and all-American...
"what is the symbol for tentmaker" I think it's a little picture of a person making a tent.
"how to outwit a libra"
"flaming eyeball clip art"
posted by Eve at 10:57 AM

 
INTERESTING SMACKDOWN OF MARTIN AMIS but gets one thing very wrong: Simon Carr opens his review with, "There are very few novelists of our generation (I’m assuming you’re 50) whom we can quote by heart. Perhaps there aren’t any. When you cast back over your reading list — Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Sebastian Faulkes, Salman Rushdie, David Lodge, Clive James, even — what are your favourite lines? Anything spring to mind? At all?"

I've never read a single one of those authors. But I did read a review of Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh once, and it quoted this terrific parenthetical description of an Iranian restaurant in Bombay, called the Sorryno: "(so called because of the huge blackboard at the entrance reading Sorry, No Liquor, No Answer Given Regarding Addresses in Locality, No Combing of Hair, No Beef, No Haggle, No Water Unless Food Taken, No News or Movie Magazine, No Sharing of Liquid Sustenances, No Taking Smoke, No Match, No Feletone Calls, No Incoming With Own Comestible, No Speaking of Horses, No Sigret, No Taking of Long Time on Premises, No Raising of Voice, No Change, and a crucial last pair, No Turning Down of Volume -- It Is How We Like, and No Musical Request -- All Melodies Selected Are to Taste of Prop)."

For some reason, that has stuck with me for more than six years. Good stuff.
posted by Eve at 10:26 AM

 
"Once they were men. Now they are land crabs!"
--"Attack of the Crab Monsters"
posted by Eve at 10:13 AM

 
FATHER TUCKER'S HOMILY on the Queenship of Mary, a feast that is very important to me, in part because of a reason you may find illuminated here. (If that link is broken, go here and scroll down to "On this day.") It looks like there's been an enormous amount of cool stuff on his site lately, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
posted by Eve at 7:54 PM

 
FAITH: I wrote too much below. But I did want to explain one other thing: Why my faith in the Church has not been shaken by these scandals. I feel a little strange that it hasn't, at least not for very long. Random personal weirdnesses, crushes, stress, etc. have shaken my faith much more than what is obviously a crisis in the Church in the USA. So I don't know if this makes me a better witness or a lousier one. But my experience is all I've got, so I present it in hopes that it may help some people.

And as for the stuff below: If you're sick of this discussion, by all means, skip it. It's several posts long because I ran off at the mouth, sorry. Now, why my faith has remained pretty steady:

1) I didn't really know anything about the Catholic hierarchy when I became Catholic--all I "knew" was that they'd done the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and whatnot--so I had low expectations. My reasons for becoming Catholic (as vs. Protestant--or, when I learned a bit more about it, Orthodox) were that it made the most sense, and the witness of the Catholics I knew personally. (Including Zorak and her mate.) Why not Protestantism? Partly it was standard questions like, Who actually maintained a connection to the Apostles and the early Christians?, Where's the Bible from?, and Does it make the most sense to interpret Christ as promising a lasting and visible Church? But also, Catholicism was more sensual, more "incarnational," more scholarly, and simultaneously more rational and more mystical than any variety of Protestantism I knew about then or since. But none of that had anything to do, really, with the hierarchy; and especially not with their personal holiness.

2) I find a lot of hope in history, the ways that the Holy Spirit has corrected and sustained the Church when things looked completely hopeless. Also the saints, especially the ones who were rejected or harassed by the hierarchy (which is a lot of them!).

3) Amy Welborn and her companions in Catholic blogging provided me with a model of honesty, righteous anger, and the kind of charity that doesn't slide into falsehood and cruelty. Credit where it's due and all that.

4) This is immensely important: I know and hang out with faithful Catholics a lot. People in crisis need community. They need it especially when the crisis is taking place in the Church, which is a mystical community. If you're feeling confused or troubled, talk with priests who are up-front and who understand why you're having difficulty trusting the Church. Face to face, "real time," personal contact with other Catholics who make no excuses and who embrace the Church is one of the best sources of hope.

I think CS Lewis says somewhere, "The Devil tempts most at the steps of the altar." I think I was prepared to believe that even before this dramatic and terrible confirmation of it. When one serves the Church in a visible and obvious way, it is so easy to think that serving oneself is serving the Church; so easy to begin to confuse one's own desires and ego with God's will. And similarly, I think some lay Catholics also confuse serving the Church with serving particular bishops or priests. (Note: I am not saying that all lay Catholics who have, say, disagreed with Rod Dreher of thinking this! That would be really lousy of me.)

I think also of Lucifer, who (I think--?) initially ranked high among the angels. Rank doesn't seem to imply virtue in any variety of Christianity.

I'll try to post more on keeping the faith as I think about it more. But for now, that's what has been sustaining me. That, and prayer, especially prayer to the saints.
posted by Eve at 7:33 PM

 
SHEPHERDS AND SCANDALS: So Rod Dreher's op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Pope John Paul II for being overly lax in his governance and allowing American bishops to shield predator priests, has provoked a pretty enormous hurricane in the Catholic blogosphere. I'm coming to this discussion very late (Internet time moves fast--too fast, really), so I will use this post to collect the statements I find most persuasive (or, alternatively, the ones we most need to grapple with and respond to), and make a few observations I haven't seen elsewhere. You can find a lot of the discussion here, here, and here, especially in the comments sections.

First I have got to say that the level of vitriol directed at fellow Christians in this dispute has been startling. Although I think that I basically disagree with Tom Hoopes's position (as laid out here), he's been attacked personally; people have assumed that he has no children (bizarre, inappropriate, and false); people have assumed that he's a bland yes-man who would set fire to an infant if the pope told him to. Hoopes was my boss for a year, and so I know how ridiculous this image of him is. But the vitriol directed at him is as nothing in comparison to that directed at Dreher himself. So let me start out by saying that I absolutely agree with Amy Welborn's assessment of what Dreher was and was not saying in his WSJ piece. Of the people who have replied to Dreher, I found Hoopes to be the most challenging, and although there were some misunderstandings of what he was saying, it seems they've been cleared up. And like I said, I know and like Hoopes personally, so there's my deal.

I don't want to psychologize too much, but I wonder if the rhetoric is so ferocious not only because of the emotions of anguish, shame, and protective urges (toward the ailing pope, the Church, falsely accused priests, and, of course, the victims of abusive priests), but also because none of us wants to be saying this stuff. I doubt anyone wants to be cast in the role of apologist for cardinals who have shuffled abusive priests from parish to parish. I doubt anyone wants to be viewed, by other orthodox Catholics, as performing "spin control" for a callous bishop or an out-to-lunch Vatican. And I am 100% certain that Rod Dreher neither expected nor desired to find the sewer of filth he has spent the past several months excavating. Dreher's love (yes, love) for John Paul II shone, in my view, from his WSJ piece. He was careful to say that he was deeply grateful for the pope's teaching, for his personal witness, indeed, for everything except his administration of the Church. That gratitude did not seem to me to be in any way forced or "for show." I mean, for Pete's sake, the guy says that John Paul II will most likely be remembered, eventually, as John Paul the Great! There was not a sentence in Dreher's article that I could not sign my name to.

But honestly, I don't care too much why people are assuming the worst about one another, I just want it to stop. So.

What does Dreher want? What do I want? I don't want heads to roll throughout the American hierarchy--I can see that that would leave our dioceses in chaos. I don't think it's necessary, either. But to leave every single one of the cardinals who have sheltered predators in place seems to me like a colossal mistake. Many have participated in the creation of this horror in some way, but some are (much) more egregious than others. The worst should go.

Even if you disagree with that, I think it's impossible to take issue with a point Dreher made in a comment at Mark Shea's site: "[W]hy doesn't the Pope order his bishops to quit frustrating the attempts of secular authorities to investigate what has happened? Why doesn't he instruct his bishops to knock off the ugly legal strategies being employed against victims with legitimate grievances? You would scarcely believe the abuse many of these people have had to take at the hands of diocesan lawyers paid for with our tithes." Similarly, the Pope could meet with abuse victims. That would, it seems, make the "Carmelite approach" (discussed below) all the more obvious, just, and striking. So it seems like even if you think that every single cardinal in the USA should keep his office, there are still actions the Vatican could take (and take publicly, to promote accountability!) that it has not taken.
posted by Eve at 7:09 PM

 
THE WAY OF THE CROSS: Mark Shea has suggested (and he has always presented it as a possibility, not a certainty) that the Pope's inaction here is the expression of his Carmelite spirituality, and especially his focus on the Way of the Cross. In essence, this view holds that the Pope is forcing Cardinal Law and the other abuser-shufflers to undergo public humiliation, to take the consequences for the harm they have worked, to take up the cross of public shame. Shea's reasoning, I think, is based on two pillars: the Pope's evident holiness, and the pain that, no doubt, Cardinal Law is suffering.

I doubt neither of those pillars. But I think there are simpler explanations: Holy men do not always make good governors of the Church. Sandra Miesel, also in a comment at Shea's blog, points to the example of St. Pius V's excommunication of Elizabeth and proclamation that English Catholics needed bear no allegiance to the Queen. And while the Pope is, as far as I or anyone can tell, deeply holy, he is also very far away. We've been seeing the up-close effects of clerical "insiderness" and protection-of-the-group here in the US; is it impossible to believe that even a holy man in Rome can succumb to the temptation to imprudently protect clerics at the expense of lay Catholics?

And: OK, so let's assume that the Pope did in fact refuse Cardinal Law's offer of resignation [edited to note that I'm not sure that rumor/report was ever actually confirmed], and did not ask for the red caps back from anyone else, because he desired the cardinals to take up the cross and take public responsibility for the mess they made. Like Shea's, my crystal ball is on the fritz, and so perhaps in the long run this is the best thing to do. I can't know. But neither can the Pope, folks! It is perfectly acceptable to point out the obvious prudential and spiritual down-sides to this "Carmelite" approach. (In quotes not because I think Carmelite spirituality sucks, or whatever, but just because I am not sure that Shea's tentative explanation is the accurate one.) Prudential: When the Vatican does not act, does not impose some humiliation itself (since the Carmelite explanation assumes that humiliating bishops is one of the benefits of the Pope's hands-off approach), many, many lay Catholics and non-Catholics will look at the situation and say, For crying out loud. Do they expect us to do all the work of keeping the clergy from monstrosity? Can't the Pope pitch in here, or will he leave it all to the Boston Globe? And similarly, it is not hard to imagine that many bishops breathe a sigh, not of pain and humiliation, but of relief, when they see that not even Cardinal Law will suffer removal from office. The spiritual down-side is a direct result of the prudential: People--clergy, laity, and non-Catholics--who look at the Pope's inaction in the way I have just described may be wrong about what the pope intends, but their reaction is understandable and it presents a major spiritual stumbling block for them. That's what scandal is. How many people do you know of who have left the Church in part as a result of the sex-abuse crisis? How many of them would have been so comforted, so much more willing to listen to the Church, to trust her, to try to conform themselves to her, if they saw some public action from the Pope--if the worst bishops had been either removed or publicly reprimanded and (say) instructed to cooperate fully with civil authorities? Calling the cardinals to Rome was not enough, I think, to provide real accountability. When major malfeasance has occurred, accountability almost always requires someone to step down. (To quote Dreher on Fr. Johansen's blog: "The solution is not more rules, I agree. The canons were already in place to have prevented this catastrophe; they were widely ignored by bishops, who rightly figured that there would be no consequences from Rome for allowing these things to slide.")

Let's also ask whether Cardinal Law can be a good shepherd right now. His remaining in office is, no doubt, a cross for him to bear. But isn't it also a cross for pretty much everyone else in the Archdiocese of Boston? That should also be considered, when we are considering the spiritual effects of the Pope's decisions.

And finally, I do not think any of the things I or Dreher have said so far (and I link our names this way because I agree with his substantive points, not because I would have phrased things the same way) require a view of the Church as a corporation or some other secular model. We can respect the mystical reality of the Church and still say, The Pope has had several opportunities to make prudential judgments. He's made, as far as we can tell, the wrong choices. He is still the Vicar of Christ. We are still his flock. The Church is still the Bride of Christ. None of that means that the Pope's prudential judgments in this matter have been right.
posted by Eve at 7:08 PM

 
WHY TALK ABOUT THIS? Is there a point in discussing this question, since none of us are likely to influence clerical (let alone papal!) decisionmaking? And, in a related question, should Dreher have published his criticisms somewhere other than a secular journal? I think there is a point. People are very, very confused as to what the scandals mean about the Church and the faith. If people who disagree with the Pope's actions, but nonetheless remain loyal to the Church, can discuss that, I think we can provide a lot of hope to people who wonder if the only options are agreeing with everything the Pope does or leaving the Church. Thus I think it's pretty important that Catholics who do think the Pope is being imprudent (and this is a matter of prudential judgment; I understand it's an extraordinarily difficult situation to handle, and no approach will be perfect) explain why we believe that and, more importantly, why that does not lead us to leave the Church. (I'll post on that toward the end.)

As for where Dreher published his piece, honestly, there are major benefits to the Church as well as drawbacks. The drawback is, of course, that the piece is more likely to be read by people who don't wish the Church well and who will use Dreher's claims, against his intention, as ammunition in their various disputes with the pope or God. The major benefits are, a) many Catholics don't read Catholic publications!, and b) many non-Catholics are confused in just the way I described above, and Dreher's piece would help them see that anguish and anger at the scandals need not be accompanied by hatred of the pope, rejection of the Church, or agitation for women priests or whatever.

But the criticism directed at Dreher for publishing in a secular journal reminds me of one of the weirdest aspects of the scandals: the way Catholics have retreated into an insular, suspicious mindset that is utterly alien to the "new evangelization" we've been called to. Frankly, I associate that mindset--in which no criticism of pope or clergy is allowed, in which congregations applaud and praise their molestor-priest, in which if you must say something unpleasant about the clergy can't you at least say it where none of the Protestants will hear you?--with the late 19th century, or maybe the era of Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? We've been called to engage with the culture, and I think part of that includes respectful, loving acknowledgment of the Church's faults. Pope John Paul II has done this, by apologizing for sins committed by members of the Body of Christ. We too need to show that the Church is accountable and up-front, not hiding and retreating when challenged.

I used to wonder whether Vatican II had come at the wrong time culturally. I wondered whether it didn't open the floodgates to a destructive and almost insane culture. I wondered whether rhetoric of "aggiornamiento" was really the greatest idea on the threshold of the 1960s. Now I wonder if maybe Vatican II didn't come early enough. Many of the abusers attended pre-Vatican II seminaries; but more importantly, the instinct to protect the Church's reputation by refusing to publicly acknowledge real faults or crimes strikes me as absolutely opposed to the kind of change Vatican II was in fact trying to provoke. We should be, as John Paul II has emphasized so often, reclaiming the culture, and that includes Catholic culture, where it has become ingrown and oppressive. It does not hurt the Church nearly as much to expose abusers as it does to shield and make excuses for them.
posted by Eve at 7:08 PM

 
HOW MANY ARE REALLY GUILTY?: Who knows? I think there's been some misuse of the maxim, Innocent until proven guilty. It should be obvious that there are false accusations out there; we are in the late stages of a (delayed, and understandable) media pile-on, after all. In any individual priest's case, we should always keep that possibility in mind. But "innocent until proven guilty" is a principle of the courtroom, not everyday life. Think about it this way: Do you really believe that OJ Simpson is out there looking for the "real killer"?

So I really take issue with the people who have challenged Dreher, sometimes even implying that no minors were ever raped by clergy. Dreher has detailed some of the awful things he has seen and heard as a reporter. He's explained that many of those cases will never come to court, because necessary witnesses have refused to testify. (Hmm, that doesn't sound like most other rape cases, does it?) That doesn't mean the abuse never happened. I believe Dreher because a) he has personal credibility, and b) more importantly, he's clearly reporting something that goes against his own biases and desires. When the Boston Globe reports on priestly abuse, it's more understandable that Catholics might dismiss it (although such Catholics would have been proven wrong, of course). When Dreher reports it, I believe it for sure, because he has no reason to be making it up. Oh, and because it fits in with the way the world works: People abuse power; people shield those who seem "like them"; people blackmail in order to cover up their own crimes; people refuse to testify as witnesses in rape trials. All. The. Time.
posted by Eve at 7:07 PM

 
FINAL THOUGHTS: Scattered comments I agree with on other aspects of this stuff: Is it un-Biblical, and not warranted by Church history (especially the models of the saints), to take the Pope to task lovingly but publicly? Fr. Paul, commenting on Mark Shea's blog: "Regarding St. Catherine approaching the Pope privately, he forgets the rest of the scriptural admonition: start privately, then bring a witness, then bring in the Church. In the vast majority of the cases, the victims did exactly that: going first privately, then, after being rebuffed, bringing in witnesses, then after further rebuff, going to the Church, where they were stonewalled. And now they have the option our Lord himself gave: 'treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.'

"- And finally, 'set straight through exhortation'? Yep, St. Paul did indeed exhort his people: 'Drive out the wicked person from among you.' (1Cor5) Sounds like action to me. Action that hasn't been taken."

This is too important to be left as a tag-end here, but I couldn't think of a place it would fit in. We need to be very careful that in calling for needed accountability, we also reiterate again and again that the Church is the place for sinners. All sinners. Including rapists. If we throw to the wolves a cardinal who shielded abusers, how can we expect to witness to anybody--women who have had abortions, people who have been involved in Satanism, alcoholics, people who have destroyed reputations through gossip, men who have used prostitutes, people who have lusted, cheated, lied, stole, hated, or killed?

But charity is not like a "rewind" button, making it as if misdeeds never happened. Charity doesn't mean abusers go free. Charity doesn't mean no cardinal should ever forfeit his position due to his actions. Charity is visiting prisoners--not releasing them to prey on more victims. Misguided attempts at charity can actually become cruelty, by enabling wrongful actions. I envision myself in Cardinal Law's position, and I empathize for him, and we should pray for him and let him know that he is still one of us, one of the sinners in Christ's flock. But I don't see why that means he should still be a cardinal. And I don't know why there seems to be some kind of mental dissociation that allows people to empathize with bishops but not victims, with priests but not with scandalized laity. Surely we're called to love all of them. Not just some.

And finally: 1) Whenever other people fail (as so many bishops failed), especially people in authority, it is easy to slip into resentment and pride. It's easy to feel superior, and to thank God that our sins are not as bad as the sins of that tax collector. I don't know of any response to that temptation except to pray, watch yourself, remind yourself of your own brokenness, and seek Christ's humility. 2) Whatever you say about this stuff--and if you say nothing!--the only thing to do is to give it to God, to pray, and to trust in Him. Duh.
posted by Eve at 7:07 PM

 
MORE ON D.C., PLUS TWO CORRECTIONS: I'll respond to the Lord Mage of Good later (probably tomorrow). For the moment, some good points (including correction #1) from Steven desJardins: Correction: We do know that DC's Medical Marijuana initiative passed in 1998, with 69% of the vote, because a federal judge ruled that Congress couldn't prevent us from counting the vote. The results were announced 321 days after the election.

You reject the idea of merging DC with Maryland because Maryland wouldn't take us. Okay. But what about a merger just for federal voting purposes? A Constitutional amendment providing that DC and Maryland shall be considered as a single unit for purposes of federal representation, while maintaining separate governments, avoids the problem of giving DC two Senators. (We still would have Senators who would be responsive to our needs, but we'd share them with Maryland.) We would get our own Representative. Our representation in the Electoral College would drop from three delegates to a one-delegate increase in Maryland's electoral tally, but those Maryland delegates would be more likely to swing Democratic. The result is a small overall plus for the Democratic party, but a
tremendous increase in fairness to DC. Speaking as one of the disenfranchised, I'd be happy with it.

This still wouldn't solve the budget-oversight problems, would it? But it's better than status quo, and an intriguing idea.

And Rodney Welch notes, for correction #2, that the Sex Pistols album I like so much is, of course, Never Mind the Bollocks, not "God Save the Queen."
posted by Eve at 5:29 PM

 
SPECIAL OPS FOUNDATION UPDATE: You know that very cool charity whose link I posted earlier this week? The one that pays for the education of children of Special Operations fighters who die in the line of duty? Maybe you were skeptical of them, or of charities in general, and held off on donating.

Worry no more. JB the Kairos Guy shared your concerns. He did some investigating (apparently he works in fundraising), and found that although the foundation has high expenses (sometimes, but not always, a bad sign) its finances are sound and its fundraising is standard-issue for that type of charity. So please consider making a donation. Here's the link again. And thanks to JB for his very helpful (and appropriately skeptical) investigation.
posted by Eve at 4:39 PM

 
NINOMANIA, a blog devoted to the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia. Not quite as scary as this... but almost! (I think both links were ultimately from Cacciaguida.)

Edited to add that Ninomania looks like it will be pretty meaty and intriguing. And I know the guy who runs it... another one of the YaleMafia.
posted by Eve at 4:24 PM

 
INTERESTING STUFF ABOUT COPYRIGHT here.

Plus what may be the first candidate for US Congress with her own blog. She looks pretty sketch though. Oh well, the ragged edge of innovation ain't always pretty! (Link via Pigs and Fishes.)

It's a fool's game to try to predict the course that a new technology will take; but here are a couple rough thoughts on blogging candidates for political office.

Benefits to the candidate: If you have an idea-oriented campaign, blogging is a great way to show how your ideas respond to or flow out of events in the daily news. For example, if one of your big issues is cutting regulations that hinder small businesses, you'll probably find something to blog about in the news every few days, at least. Each egregious example of just the sort of thing I'll stop if you send me to Congress! is one more piece of evidence that you're right on your pet issue(s), that you've identified a genuine problem, and that your opponent is obviously not as on-the-ball as you are. Moreover, each little piece of news that you blog will allow you to highlight your own practical solutions and philosophical approach. You can talk about what, specifically, you would do to fix this problem and why. You can also spotlight innovators who are already successfully using your approach.

If you have a scandal-oriented or scandal-plagued campaign, blogging might also be helpful. Your candidate site might become the place to go for updates on your opponent's troubled financial dealings, for example--a sort of opposition-research Drudge Report. You could break news, ideally, but also simply show connections, truffle up overlooked aspects of the scandal, debunk your opponent's excuses, and, of course, influence the spin. If you're the one with bimbo eruptions or whatever, you can use the blog to get your spin out ASAP. (This is one of the ways Jesse Ventura used his email list, JesseNet, during his gubernatorial campaign. The press would run some report--sometimes accurate, sometimes not--in which Jesse ran his big mouth, and he would quickly issue a "clarification" or correction stating either that he didn't say it or that he didn't mean it quite the way it sounded. Obviously that's not a scandal, but similar strategies would apply.)

It looks hip and with-it.

Having to produce material at a bloglike pace, with archives and everything, would mean you'd be going on the record a lot. That's an obvious drawback (you might say something you'll regret). But it could become a potential, hidden benefit if it gives the impression that you're accountable and willing to say what you think.

Drawbacks for the candidate: It takes time--yours or your staffers'.

Blogging, unless you have a comments box, is one-way rather than two-way communication. You want to be able to know how your constituents are responding to your message, and blogging won't necessarily give you that information.

Uh, not many people read blogs. Sure, some influential types (like op-ed journalists) read 'em a lot, but even the editor of the New York Times only has one vote.

I predict that while a few campaigns will end up blogging, most will not--although they might incorporate bloglike features (a news ticker, or a small blog along the side of the page, or something) onto pre-existing web pages.
posted by Eve at 4:16 PM

 
HEY-O THE DERRY-O, THE FARMER ON THE DOLE: I know I haven't updated my page on farm subsidies in a while. That's because I haven't seen any new developments or arguments. So this is my twofold plea: 1) Please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com if you see any intriguing, strange, or troubling farm-dole news, or, especially, if you read any defenses of the subsidy regime that are either popular or persuasive. I'd also like more stuff on Republicans and the farm dole; the history of farm subsidies; information on the Farm Aid concert; blogs, webrings, and other personal pages of farmers; pages on information technology and farming; and, most importantly, web sites for farmers who need support but don't want to perpetuate the farm welfare system. Some of that info (like the history and Farm Aid items) I'll eventually scrounge up myself. But much of the site's future goodness will depend on links people send me and things I just happen to run across. Be a part of the goodness!

2) I read somewhere or other that Google finds and ranks sites partially based on links--in other words, if people keep linking to pages debunking Marc Herold's Afghan civilian death estimates, eventually those pages will be first in the rankings when you Google "marc herold afghan civilian deaths." Similarly, I'd like to make The Farm Dole a much better site than it is--and I think it does have some good stuff on it now--so if you all like the page and want me to get more responses for it, please consider doing this: farm subsidies
on your own sites.

Thanks. And now back to our feature presentation.
posted by Eve at 11:16 AM

 
"She didn't die of pneumonia, she died of life."
--Red Buttons, "Harlow"
posted by Eve at 10:59 AM

 
DREHER AND POPE: I've been reading the blog-discussion of Rod Dreher's WSJ piece (try here and here, and be sure to read the many comments) and will comment on it (and the sex-abuse scandals generally) tomorrow. I'm deeply sympathetic to Dreher and think he is basically right, though I think there have been some valid points made about what the Pope can or should do. More presently.
posted by Eve at 6:07 PM

 
BUT I THOUGHT CAPITALISM SUPPRESSED DISSIDENT VOICES!: From the Village Voice article linked below (Palast is Greg Palast, the leftist author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy): "'What I'm happy about is that with no money, no marketing, and a completely amateur operation, you can get 40,000 copies sold in the U.S.,' Palast said, 'if you've got something to say.'"
posted by Eve at 3:13 PM

 
KEEP ON ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD: News from around the USA.

"Quirk" may free man who admits he killed 13 women and vows to kill again

At custody trial, judge forces mom to represent herself (her lawyer broke his foot)

Barnes & Noble plans to prominently display Noam Chomsky's 9/11 on September 11, 2002
posted by Eve at 3:11 PM

 
PERFECT: Uncertain Principles has a very useful definition of the "perfect album": "A really great album is a collection of songs that all work together, and add up to something more than the sum of the individual tunes-- mediocre songs should be lifted up in the context of a really great album, and sound better than they would on their own. It's also crucial that none of the songs be actively bad or annoying."

I might like individual songs from other bands or albums more (hello, New Wave one-hit wonders, my adored companions...), but there's something so satisfying about a band whose worldview and basic attitude is so unified that it can sustain an entire great album. So here's my (extremely personal) list of Perfect Albums; you get get UP's at the link above, and several other folks' in his comments section.

In the order in which they spring to mind (and I'm including compilations, live albums and whatnot, because, uh, because I am):
The Smiths, Rank. I know Morrissey sounds like he's trying to swallow a hive of honeybees, but this is a fantastic live album. Brings out the growl behind the gloomy bounce. The Smiths Peel Session also rocks, but has only four songs, none of which are "Rusholme Ruffians" or "Vicar in a Tutu," so no dice. If live albums are excluded I'd name The Smiths, but although I love every song on that album, if you listen to them all together portions are much too slow and Mike Judge's boring drumming eventually begins to bother you (by which I mean, me) a lot. The Queen Is Dead is also a runner-up, now that I like "Frankly, Mr. Shankly"; but it's a bit too poppy for me and just not as intense as plain old The Smiths or flawed-but-terrific Meat Is Murder.

The Slits, Peel Session. If live recordings are out, Cut. Freaky, shattered girl-punk. Runner-up: Return of the Giant Slits, which is a reggae-fied heatwave, but with only two standout individual songs (the one that goes "Am I looking for love," which has an excellent noir-ish bassline, and the one that goes "This heat is hotter than the sun," which pretty much defines DC summertime for me).

Patti Smith, Horses. There's nothing bad on this album, I don't think. Wow.

Huggy Bear, Taking the Rough with the Smooch. Crashing, half-coherent juvenile delinquent album. Runner-up: Our Troubled Youth, which is fun but slightly less distinctive and which I've only seen as the B-side to the gets-old-fast Bikini Kill album Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Cat Power, Myra Lee. Spare, high-lonesome voice plus creepy oblique imagery plus occasional rock-outs = terrific album. "Wealthy Man" and "Ice Water" (which I think is on this album???) are some of the saddest, countrified, rip-your-heart-out songs I know. When she sings, "All the lies aside, I believe I am the luckiest person alive," you want to just crawl into a whiskey bottle and never, ever come out. Good stuff.

Violent Femmes, The Violent Femmes and Why Do Birds Sing?. "Blister in the Sun" is my least favorite song from TVF, which should tell you something. WDBS? doesn't have too many songs that stand out by themselves, but the angry, fun sum is greater than the parts.

Fugees, The Score. Again, the better-known songs (the covers of "Killing Me Softly" and "No Woman No Cry") don't do nearly as much for me as the rest of the album. Swinging; good mix of rough and smooth. Runner-up who may soon take the top spot: Wyclef Jean, The Carnival. This is growing on me as an album rather than a few great tracks ("Apocalypse," "Year of the Dragon," "Sang Fezi"). Just terrific sampling, lyrics, swing, rock, Haitian infusion... all marred by the super-annoying between-songs shtik that was a lot less annoying on The Score.

X-Ray Spex, Germfree Adolescents. OK, not as great as some of the other albums here, but that fantastic scraping wail, weird sax, day-glo lyrics, and general I-don't-care-what-anybody-thinks-ness of this album make it another perfect summertime pick.

The Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen. You, uh, really get the sense of where they're coming from. Snarly. And has "Submission" as well as the more famous songs.

Velvet Underground, VU and Nico. Whoa, how did I forget this until now? Probably the "perfect album" with the widest variety of styles or sensations. How gritty New Yorker plus strung-out Valkyrie plus wig-out violin add up to a coherent album is beyond me, but there it is.

The Raincoats, The Raincoats. Harsh, matter-of-fact breakup album with off-kilter vocals that sometimes seem dissociated but sometimes seem like the girl next door. Runner-up: Odyshape, quieter and wavier album with boring B-side.

The Doors, The Doors. Admit it, you love this one too. Runner-up: Waiting for the Sun.

Exceptions and caveats: Blondie, Best of Blondie. Contains "Rapture," a song with some of the dumbest lyrics ever, and is a best-of album, but gives such a strong sense of "place" or consistent vision, and is so much fun, that I had to at least give it a shout-out.

Jane Hohenberger, Lickety Split. She comes so close!!! The ultimate outerspace breakup album, ranging from the pure eeriness of "Tooth Fairy" ("She's the tooth fairy/Come to kill me"--no, I promise, she makes it work...) to the mad-as-hell "Redemption Song" ("Even the garbage is better off than me!... Wish I were a tin can, then someone could redeem me"), but ruined as a "Perfect Album" by random passages of boring noise. Some of the random noise is really cool; most of it just sounds like she was trying to fill space. Too artsy for its own good. That doesn't mean you shouldn't buy it... if you can ever find a copy. (I think even this site doesn't have it.)

Nirvana, Nevermind. The A-side is perfect, the B-side scattershot.

Trying Too Hard And Thus Failing to Make a Perfect Album:
Nation of Ulysses, Plays Pretty for Baby. Much fun, screechy squawky punk weirdness, ultimately too much pretentious revolution/"the kids" rhetoric, plus all the songs kind of sound the same. Like eating too much Kool-Aid powder. The Make*Up (some of the same people) then did Destination: Love--Live!, which is vaguely churchy-sounding, significantly more pretentious, and generally too much of a muchness, but when taken in small doses it's more fun than PPFB.
posted by Eve at 1:46 PM

 
PASCAL'S GOT MY BACK: From the Pensees: "The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none."

From me: "But while an experience of beauty in inanimate objects is a radical encounter with the present tense, an experience of beauty in human beings or human acts is more often a radical encounter with the subjunctive tense--the might-have-been. Human beauty is always 'almost,' always more poignant and more sublime because of the great disjunction between what we are and what we feel we should have been. ...Human beauty, to my mind, is a clue that man is not inherently good (since our beauty always comes with this downward pull toward decay; and since we are even able to pervert beauty and submerge it in lust or hate), nor inherently bad (since it would not be nearly as painful--as sublime--to see a bad thing just being its ordinary bad self), but fallen--a good creature that cannot, in this life, be what he was supposed to be."

I was reminded of the Pascal passage by this good article on original sin.
posted by Eve at 12:28 PM

 
WHAT I THINK ABOUT ON WEDNESDAY MORNINGS: If Dr. Laura battled Dr. Ruth... who would win?

(Of course, in some sense we'd all be winners....)
posted by Eve at 12:24 PM

 
"War! War! That's all you think of, Dick Plantagenet! You burner! You pillager!"
--Virginia Mayo to George Sanders, "King Richard and the Crusaders"
posted by Eve at 12:23 PM

 
IS "WINGS OF DESIRE" A BAD MOVIE?: A letter of dissent from Geistbear. He's in bold, I'm in plain text, you know the drill... Okay so you didn't like "Wings of Desire", I don't agree, simple difference of opinion, but then you say "Does the world really need another movie about preferring the evanescent and temporal to the eternal? Are we really beset by a passion for eternity that denigrates mere fleshly life?" I kinda more got that impression from Nick Cage/Meg Ryan remake of it that the original.
Haven't seen remake, so I think my perceptions of the Wenders flick were relatively uncolored by expectations of what I thought it was "supposed to" be about.

Besides, it so speaks of the Wall and German mindset about Berlin at the time in a lot of ways that were a lot more concrete at the time. 12 years after the Wall is gone, if you don't know the history and social environment maybe it comes off as "incredibly pretentious art flick". But I think it really reflects the Germans and their lives at the end of the Cold War.
Yeah, I'm sure I missed any German cultural references, and perhaps that explains at least some of my dislike of the movie.

...As for Murnau, you didn't like that film ["The Last Laugh"], but he deserves a lot of credit: He basically invented the horror film as a style.
Oh, yeah, in general I'll give mad props to Murnau, and in fact that's why I was so disappointed in "The Last Laugh."
posted by Eve at 5:00 PM

 
SPECIAL OPERATIONS CHARITY: I guess our armed forces really do need a bake sale. From the web site: The Special Operations Warrior Foundation strives to relieve Special Operations personnel of the one concern, their families, that might distract them from peak performance when they need to be -- and when America needs them to be -- at their very best.

Since the tragic day of September 11th, thirty Special Operations members have lost their lives leaving behind 33 children. Today, over 370 such deserving children exist who should not be denied the education their fallen parent would surely have wanted for them. Currently an annual estimated outlay of nearly $1.2 million is required to meet this need through the year 2020.

Link via Shamed.
posted by Eve at 4:55 PM

 
DISTRICT OF CHAOS: Christopher Badeaux, the Lord Mage of Good, writes (he's in bold, I'm in plain text, as is traditional): A few points:

First, you mentioned two reasons why D.C. won't become a state any time soon. I'm sure you know this, but there's also the Constitution -- you know, Article II, Clause 17 -- and that seems to preempt full autonomy for DC.

There's a good argument to be made that Congress may authorize the creation of a new state (or lay aside all power) from/over the District -- but that's for another time, and I think it fails. (Then again, it's similar to the argument for and against legislative handoffs to executive branches, and my side has lost that battle for the last seventy years.) Anyway, point is, there's a big, potentially even amendment-big obstacle to complete home rule.
Oh sure. I was discussing what I thought would be the best thing for the city, barring Constitutional issues. I figure once we figure out what we want, we can figure out how to get it, and if it takes an amendment, we could push for that. My main purpose in the big DC-related post was just to rebut people who claim the District's current situation is actually good or "as good as you can expect for those Barry-votin' freaks."

There's also the plenary concern -- yes, this is a more integrated, nation-first, state-second country than at the Founding, but is it really that good an idea to give schizoid Virginia or screwed-up Maryland control over the seat of Congress? I still have friends in the area, in both states, and none are impressed with either state -- and that's with what they're dealing with now.
I guess I just don't see what they could do. Could they screw up DC worse than quasi-home-rule-quasi-colonialism has? Yeah, I'm not impressed with many governments, but there is no "only good governments get to control the District" option. If Maryland or Virginia wanted to jerk around the District, they could do it now; in fact, by linking DC's fortunes to Maryland's, the re-absorption plan might make such jerking-around less likely. I wouldn't put money on that, but it seems at least as likely as whatever state-sponsored scuzziness Badeaux is envisioning.

I lived in D.C. I really didn't like it. (Yes, the seafood, especially at Phillips, when you can afford it, rocks. But being shot at on the way to a $580/month studio apartment does not.) One *can* move. In fact, people -- based on the census over the last couple of decades -- have moved. It happens. (In response to your point about NYC and the burbs: (1) That's a false analogy, except, insofar as I
understand it, Albany can revoke NYC's city charter at will; (2) Hells, yeah, they should move if things get ugly. Then again, I moved seven or eight times before I turned eighteen. I didn't get stuck on one particular place.) The DC metro area is so tiny that the differences are really, to my eyes, only in crime rates.
I'm sorry, I think I wasn't clear--I certainly didn't mean that you can't move, or that people shouldn't, or whatever. What I meant is that "You could always move!" isn't a good argument for withholding self-government. If you don't like DC, by all means, skedaddle. But just as I wouldn't say to a New Yorker, "Bloomberg's smoking regs are fine--I mean, come on, you can always just move if you don't like them!", so I think it's even lousier/stranger to say to a DC resident, "You know those guys you didn't get a chance to vote for or hold accountable? If they jerk you around, get over it--you can always move!" Conversely, if "you can just move" is a good enough argument for jerking around DC, it should be good enough for jerking around NYC. That's all I meant.

Before you say anything, I concede how lousy Metro service is beyond (and in) the District; but last I checked, that was getting better too.
[shrug] I got no beef with the Metro. Anyway, thanks for the letter.
posted by Eve at 4:04 PM

 
INFANT BLOGWATCH: Julian Sanchez replies re baby-killing. I've only had time to skim this; for now, at least, Sanchez gets the last word. I'll return to the fray later, possibly.
posted by Eve at 3:49 PM

 
SUNDAY MORNING: Recently read the apostolic letter Dies Domini (On Keeping the Lord's Day Holy). Good stuff. Some characteristic JPII touches--lots and lots and lots of citations of the Second Vatican Council (this pope always makes it crystal clear that he sees his job as clarifying and extending, not rejecting, the council); a strong emphasis on the millennium and the philosophical study of history; and a significant amount of quotations and insights from Jewish thinkers. Anyway, maybe I'll blog about other tidbits from the letter later, but the first point that really leaped out at me was the description of Sunday as a re-enactment and honoring of pre-Fallen human life, the crowning act of God's creation. Sunday is a small Eden in the week. Hence we refrain from unnecessary labor. A small connection, but one I'd never considered.

There's also a good discussion of the connections between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday, including a discussion of why Christians don't celebrate on Saturday as Jews do. Mike Yaeger asked about that in this symposium that you all should read, so, Mike, check out DD--it's short, and provides some insight into the Jewish Sabbath as well.

There's a lot to criticize in the Pope's governance of the Church (and Rod Dreher says it about as well as it can be said, in today's WSJ), so I feel a bit odd posting this; but there's no reason to ignore the immense teaching work John Paul II has done, despite what Dreher (as far as I know) accurately characterizes as an overly hands-off, un-authoritative governance.
posted by Eve at 2:19 PM

 
GIVING THE LIE to the statement, "You won't have Marshal Tito to kick around anymore!" (Link via The Rat.)
posted by Eve at 1:58 PM

 
OUR DEVICES STILL ARE OVERTHROWN: InstaPundit links to this tribute to Charlton Heston's acting skills. I suppose this is the time to confess one of my less pleasant moments. I really disliked Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" movie--I thought Ophelia was directed very poorly, Branagh couldn't handle the soliloquies (neither could Mel Gibson, whose "Hamlet" was on balance the better movie; at least Gibson didn't jump around as much as Branagh), and the whole thing felt very choppy and incoherent. But one actor did stand out: the Player King. He was grimly majestic, bringing out the famous "purpose is but a slave to memory" speech that usually gets buried because "everyone knows" the Player King is a bit part and so we're not conditioned to pay any attention to him. Unfortunately, I don't remember the movie well enough to give more specifics--I'm not even sure if I'd still like the Player King portrayal today--but I do remember my shock when I found out that the role had been played by Charlton Heston. This is what I mean by "one of my less pleasant moments." Heston was, I'd been told, a buffoon ("Get your hands off me, you damn dirty ape!"), a reactionary idiot, sort of William Shatner in a KKK hood. (I certainly had never heard that he marched with Martin Luther King Jr.) That was the received standard wisdom of the generalized New York Times-y atmosphere in which I moved. But Branagh's "Hamlet" showed me Heston as a genuinely great actor. Now that I also agree with Heston's most famous political stance, I like him even more; but it was good to be reminded, back then, that even people we sharply disagree with can be extraordinarily talented and sensitive artists. Anyway, Heston was terrific in "Hamlet"--and now seems like a good time to recall and celebrate his triumphs.
posted by Eve at 12:03 PM

 
"When I'm sitting here with you, I don't even think about slime people...."
--Hero to heroine, "The Slime People"
posted by Eve at 11:28 AM

 
Uh, what's happening CC?
They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.
Can you dig it, blogwatch?

(Continuing the local theme.)

Amptoons: Good post on men and responsibility. Ginger, go read this! (Update: Maybe she has.)

Stuart Buck: Supreme Court shenanigans on the right; interesting comments-box fight about one variant on the Argument (for God) from Order.

Chickpea Eater's Bookblog: Much stuff, from Carmelite spirituality (does it exist?) to Richard Epstein to consciousness.

Mobius Strip: Gene Vilensky of Yale Free Press fame gets a blog.

The Rat: "Assisted" suicide.

Unqualified Offerings: Absolutely ridiculous and egregious, if true.

Volokhs: Good post on potential practical drawbacks of jury nullification.
posted by Eve at 5:06 PM

 
MIXED METAPHOR ALERT!: From that DC post below: "...one of the reasons we fell so hard for the same racialist and leftist toxins that other cities also adored in the 1980s..."

I don't have the energy to go fix it. But I just wanted to say that I do realize people typically don't fall in love with toxins.
posted by Eve at 4:24 PM

 
TWIN CITIES: From a (very good) post by Ben Domenech: "Washington is largely populated by up-and-comers, who sit down having never met you before and say they want to be President."

Very true; but in light of the post below, I'd add, "Washington is also largely populated by people who look for 'WE TAKE WIC' signs before they do their grocery shopping..."

Which twin city is the evil twin???

Note: This is not to pick on Domenech, who seems to have his head screwed on straight (including w/r/t my swampy hometown, but also on much more important matters), and comes across as a cool and humble guy.
posted by Eve at 4:22 PM

 
WASHINGTON, D.C.: SO FAR FROM GOD, SO CLOSE TO THE UNITED STATES... Is it the heat, or the humidity?

Something about DC seems to provoke weirdly illiberal statements from bloggers who should know better. Recently InstaPundit and Matthew Yglesias have decided to defend the District's bizarre crypto-colonial status (you know, the whole taxation-without-representation thing). There's one interesting argument and a bunch of non-interesting ones here. Taking the interesting one first, here we go:

IF WE GAVE 'EM THE VOTE, THEY'D ONLY SCREW IT UP. Matt Yglesias goes to bat for the notion of "instrumental democracy" as vs. "constitutive democracy." CD is what people in cities like San Francisco and states like Florida have: You get to vote on lots of fun stuff, and unless you overstep the boundaries of the state and federal Constitutions (or, uh, whatever your local judicial oligarchs have determined said boundaries to be, but leave that question aside for the moment) those votes get results. The presumption is that you "deserve" a vote, even though in particular cases the outcome of that vote might be unconstitutional and thus thrown out.

ID is very different. ID begins with the true-enough statement that ends are more important than means. Some countries, lacking the rule of law, might be best advised to institute liberal reforms before democracy. Democracy itself is just a tool; it can lead to lousy decisions, even evil decisions. America is by no means purely democratic; some degree of ID is built into our constitutional-republican system.

But Yglesias, in applying the instrumental democracy concept to DC, turns into a classic paternalistic manager. (Actually, his post is kind of cagey, so he may not be subscribing to the position he presents; because it makes referring to his post easier, though, I'll assume for the moment that he at least sympathizes with the instrumentalist stance against DC self-government.)

The first and most obvious fallacy of the instrumentalist case against DC self-government is that in the particular case of DC, Congressional oversight has screwed up all kinds of wacky things, so it's not as if we'd be trading incompetent-but-democratic government for rule by philosopher kings. Think about it: Would you like to live in a city in which every budgetary decision (and thus every governmental decision) had to be vetted by Congress? Would you expect that city to be well-governed? Or would you expect every local decision to be held hostage by various posturing Congressmen? An example of the sort of thing that makes DC residents skeptical about managerial rule: Did the District vote to legalize medical marijuana in 1998? We'll never know! Congress refused to allocate money to let the votes be counted. Blatant, no?

You might reply, Yeah, OK, but the parts of DC that local people are allowed to run have screwed up much more important things than medical marijuana. Like the entire police force, say. I agree. But I think the current lack of home rule, the heavy-handed Congressional intervention, exacerbates these problems. When you treat people like subjects rather than citizens, they tend to respond with irresponsibility and resentment. Marion "Keep on Rockin' in the Free World" Barry is a perfect example. He kept getting elected, even after dragging the city into an abyss of mismanagement and crime, because he played expertly on local resentment of Congress. A vote for Barry was a big middle finger to the Man. You may find that stance stupid and self-defeating (I do), but please don't pretend it's unusual or symptomatic of some peculiar DC-native pathology. People who are treated like children (in a country that exalts the ideals of representative government and the ability to "have a say" in what happens to you) often tend to react childishly. People voted for Barry because they wanted Congress to know just how much we hated them--even this crackhead is OK as long as he yells about our white overseers!

Self-government is fundamentally about responsibility. It's about having a sense of ownership of one's own life. One of the reasons DC is so screwed up--one of the reasons we fell so hard for the same racialist and leftist toxins that other cities also adored in the 1980s--is that since the 1970s, we've been in this one-foot-in, one-foot-out position where we have just enough home rule to get the blame but not enough home rule to get real responsibility and self-control. To say, "We won't let you have the rights of citizens until you show you can use them wisely!" is to misunderstand a) how people learn responsibility, and b) what citizenship in the USA means. People don't learn responsibility by being treated with contempt, by being playthings for other people's political agendas, or by being told that they can have a say in things except when it matters. And US citizens shouldn't be treated as subjects because they, or their neighbors, have made asinine political decisions in the past. (If we did yank self-government from every city that screwed up, gevalt, the whole country would be a federally-managed protectorate! DC is, at its worst, different only in degree of lousiness, not in kind. Other cities have been and will be worse than us.)

DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?: But the District is different from all other cities, supporters of the status quo argue. True enough, but are these differences relevant? Status-quo supporters argue that the District should have sharply limited self-government because:
A) DC is really small. Uh, so what? Does the fact that we're only larger than one state (Wyoming) have anything to do with anything, really? This might make sense (sort of) as an objection to DC statehood (more on this in a moment), but as an argument against being able to vote for Congressional representatives and/or being able to actually control our own city's budget, it's pretty weak.

B) There are lots of transients in DC. I suspect this point only seems compelling because it's easier for most bloggers to imagine themselves as Capitol Hill staffers in town for the summer than as people who, you know, have lived here our whole lives. Such people do exist. (Hi!) The fact that an area has a large transient population should really not be relevant in assessing whether everyone who lives there should be managed by the Feds. Think of college towns, many of which almost certainly have an even higher proportion of transients in the population than DC does. Would anyone suggest that the citizens of those towns--undergrads and townies alike--should submit all their local decisions to the U.S. Congress? It may be irresponsible for someone who won't be living here in the long-term to vote on policies that won't affect him much. (That's why I never voted in New Haven elections--I knew I'd be leaving soon, and wouldn't have to suffer the consequences of any bad policies I supported.) But that's no reason to withhold self-government from an entire city. If you think Capitol Hill staffers who plan to leave soon (and many people who come here for politics do stay; I'd guess that much of the District's transient population is actually immigrants gathering the cash to move to the suburbs, rather than specifically federal-city newcomers, so again, DC is not this freakish anomaly among cities) shouldn't vote, you need to persuade them of that; why penalize people who do live here and do accept the consequences of their votes?

C) DC residents could move. Um, OK. So if we withdrew home rule from New York City, or the city of your choice, that'd be OK since hey, you could move to the suburbs? Would it be OK if NYC hadn't had home rule before, so anyone who moved there (or their parents; or their grandparents...) knew beforehand what they were getting into? If a law is lousy, I'm not sure why "they don't have that law next door!" is a good reason for people who live there to stop trying to overturn the law.

This argument at first appears to be localist, since it's modeled after the localist argument that if you don't like local mores and laws, you can always move. But when applied to DC in this context, the argument is actually anti-localist; it's saying that Congress can impose a lousy law from above, and if you don't like it, don't live there. Look at it this way: When Mike Bloomberg institutes ridiculous anti-smoking regulations in New York City, Glenn Reynolds doesn't say, "Whatever, folks, you can always live in Westchester!" If the US Congress were to institute such regulations, again only in NYC, I can only imagine the torrent of invective that would pour from Reynolds. So why is "you could move!" a good argument against DC self-government?

Now, we come to the really hard part: What should happen to this little chunk of swampland? And here's where my certainty dissolves. I have no real problem with people who make the argument that the status quo should stay because it's better than the alternatives; I disagree, but that stance is much more reasonable than the stance that the status quo is actually a good thing because the District doesn't deserve democracy.

DC statehood, that muddlebrained fantasy, isn't gonna happen in the foreseeable future for two basic reasons. The first: two more Dem senators. Uh-uh. The GOP will fight that to the death, and the Dems will have an impossible task presenting a statehood push as anything more than a blatant political power grab. As many people have noted, the GOP might accept (if forced) an extra Dem representative, but senators are an absolute no-go.

The second reason: finances. An independent DC state would collapse almost immediately. Cities are revenue sinkholes; real states pay for the government jobs and welfare-state entitlements of their cities by taxing the revenue-producing suburbs and exurbs. DC's budget already sways under the weight of pension liabilities, Medicare, and all the other ills that modern urban flesh is heir to; without regular cash infusions from the feds, we can't make it on our own. Not even close.

Radley Balko has brought up a much better idea (and I think Ben Domenech did too, but I can't find the link): Instead of representation and taxation, why not give DC neither? The "tax-free zone" idea has a lot of cool features--I think it would revive the District's zombie economy, and it might also provide an incentive to do all kinds of necessary pro-business reforms (like cutting regulation). I would prefer both to neither, but because having enough money really does enhance one's ability to control one's own life and exercise responsibility it's a pretty close call. My own preferred solution (which is pretty pie-in-the-sky, I know) is for the District (perhaps excepting a tiny federal district) to be re-absorbed into Maryland. We should be a city like any other. Now, there's no way this will happen soon, because Maryland wants another broken city to pay for about as much as you want a tarantula in your Jockeys. It is possible that if a tax-free zone revived the District's economy sufficiently, we'd become an asset (after all, we've got tourist attractions that ain't goin' nowhere) rather than a liability. Thus, in an annoying twist, the tax-free zone might make absorption into Maryland possible--but if we were then absorbed, the whole justification for the tax-free zone would disappear (since we'd be represented).

Really, either option--tax haven or Just Another Maryland City--would do a lot to diminish the resentment and helplessness that DC residents feel toward the federal government. Either rule us right, or don't rule us at all, basically--either help us become a jewel in the federal crown, or let us become just like everybody else. But don't treat us like vassals, grade-schoolers, or Enemies of the People. Most people who live "inside the Beltway" are as much "Beltway insiders" as your dog.

None of the above vitriol toward Congress should be taken to let DC residents off the hook. We've seriously screwed up, again and again. But you know that already. I don't think continuing to pit DC against Congress--thus giving both groups someone else to blame (Barry: "Blame the white man!"; Congress: "Blame the crackhead!"; nobody actually has to take responsibility)--will spur DC residents to do any better than we have in the past. We can improve on our own, for sure--and we need to. But if people outside the city are going to pontificate about what should happen to us, at least try not to argue that we're so uniquely stupid/evil that Jesse Helms could run our city better than we can.
posted by Eve at 4:12 PM

 
"Maybe space driving is easier for dizzy dames. There's less traffic in outer space."
--Narrator, "Sexy Proibitissimo"
posted by Eve at 10:51 AM

 
WE LIKE ALL KINDS OF MUSIC. But I like American music best, baby. Anyway--more stuff about Allan Bloom and rock'n'roll, here and here. I got a good challenging email on this subject, so I'll return to the fray, maybe Monday. I'll also post about DC "statehood"/dependence/blah blah blah, the topic that leads smart classical-liberal-type bloggers to say dumb managerial-imperialist things. (Except The Agitator, who is Making Sense.) I'd do that today, but apparently the Internet, and/or this computer, has a vendetta against me and my whole family. Grar.

For the moment: "Statehood" is a muddlebrained fantasy, and even its supporters know that (I used to be one), but the managerial democracy supported by InstaPundit and Matthew Yglesias is paternalistic, self-defeating, and lame. This sweeping statement to be defended later! Off to snuffle up some of the best ice cream in the greater D.C. area....
posted by Eve at 1:46 PM

 
HILARIOUS.
posted by Eve at 1:27 PM

 
"You don't look like my ex-wife at all. She was well-bred and rather frail, except for her famous mammalia. You look more like a cow than my late wife. Oh, no offense. I'm very fond of cows. Mooooooo!"
--Robert Mitchum to Elizabeth Taylor, "Secret Ceremony"
posted by Eve at 1:09 PM

 
ANTHONY BURGESS ON "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE": "It is not, in my view, a very good novel, but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about 1960, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest [that the young criminals] were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment... There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy... Society, as ever, was put first."

"The reviews it received not only failed to whet an appetite among prospective book-buyers: they were for the most part facetious and uncomprehending. What I had tried to write was, as well as a novella, a sort of allegory of Christian free will." (here; this refers to the book, of course, not the movie.)
posted by Eve at 5:43 PM

 
DO YOU LIKE AMERICAN MUSIC?: Unqualified Offerings defends rock'n'roll against Allan Bloom's charges that rock "provides premature ecstasy... [and] artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors--victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and discovery of the truth."

Bloom actually has a series of charges to press against rock. His first and most accurate point is that contemporary Americans have forgotten or ignored the power of music. Music seeps into virtually every moment of our lives. You can't go anywhere without Muzak (there's even a term, "elevator music," suggesting how all-pervasive the stuff is) or radios or background music. There's music to make us shop, top 40 hits at the local eatery or the grocery store, and Walkmen if you want to live your whole life to a soundtrack. Bloom, with the ancients, argues that far from being a harmless diversion, music is one of the more powerful forces in shaping our characters. I can't recall the arguments he presents in support of that claim (I think he mainly argues by anecdote), but here are some possible reasons he's right: Music is perhaps the art form least accessible to rationality, so it's easier to be influenced by music without even noticing or being able to analyze what's going on; our defenses are down when we hear beautiful music; music strikes the senses immediately, providing an instinctual attraction or revulsion, and only makes its way to our reason much later if at all; music is occult, not transparent or quickly intelligible, and thus some passions can be stirred by music that would be taboo if they were spoken outright (although this claim is less relevant in an anything-goes society); music, through rhythm, changes the heartbeat and thus even physically has a more visceral and less rational impact. Anyway, whatever the reasons, I find very persuasive Bloom's basic claim that we are paying much too little attention to the music that colors almost all of our public moments.

Bloom's specific claims against "rock'n'roll" as a genre are much more scattershot and ideological. He makes some good points; for example, he points out that many rock songs have a rhythmic structure that mimics sexual arousal and release. Such songs often give the listener a private, masturbation-like experience, in which arousal is unconnected to another person (or, as Bloom would be the first to recognize, an ideal or other outside object of love). He doesn't point this out, but many of these rock songs also rely on (and therefore reinforce) a visceral connection between sex and aggression. I think it's patently obvious that this connection exists in reality, in the human soul; but reinforcing the sex/aggression link leads to various screwed-up mentalities in which aggression is eroticized and fetishized, while sex is made more animalistic. Contemporary America fetishizes and exalts grievance, unearned alienation, manipulative (whether intentionally or not) sex, and instant gratification; unsurprisingly, so does lots of rock. (Which came first? Neither. Musicians reflect the surrounding culture, either to sell records or simply because cultural stances and poses are what they actually believe and want to express; the music, by making sexualized aggression cool, reinforces the culture.)

But there are two major problems with Bloom's criticism: He conflates pop-culture, top-40 music with "rock"; and, like most authors of conservative jeremiads, he refuses to give contemporary culture any credit. The top 40, for good (Lauryn Hill, say) or ill (my favorite bad example is that song that goes, "Every freakin' night and every freakin' day, I wanna freak ya baby, in every freakin' way"--which was popular around the time I first read Bloom), is full of music only tangentially connected to rock'n'roll. If Bloom wants to pick fights with the top 40 he has a complicated brawl on his hands. (Oh, and on a related note, I don't think any of Bloom's criticisms apply at all well to pre-'60s rock. "Tutti Frutti" just doesn't do what "Sympathy for the Devil" does.)

UO has already talked about rock's connection to rhythm and blues; because of that connection, it's no surprise that rock is a terrific form for expressing yearning and resignation. Bloom also forgets that virtually every artistic genre contains the potential for self-critique; rock is as dialectical as anything else. Precisely because rock appeals to very visceral urges, desires, lusts, and longings, rock has produced ferocious, compassionate, or conflicted criticisms of our responses to those visceral facts. (The lyrics to "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," for example, are not what Bloom might expect or assume.)

UO gives a brief playlist of songs that express this rejection of the easy answers Bloom thought rock promoted. I think UO may be focusing too much on lyrics, at least in his descriptions of the songs (and I bet I'll fall into the same trap; it's much easier to talk about lyrics rather than music). Here're some songs that I think disprove Bloom's thesis about rock. These are all songs that I think can be fairly easily categorized as "rock"; I didn't include stuff like Huggy Bear's "Children Absent From Heaven Says," anything by the Raincoats, any Cat Power, any rap, etc., because they're too far from the kind of rock Bloom is trying to criticize.

1 & 2) Rolling Stones, "I Don't Know Why I Love You," and Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City." These are paired because in both lyrics and music they're painful, terrific expressions of longing and confusion--not the sort of emotions Bloom associates with rock! I think IDKWIL is a cover, but it's hard to imagine that the original could have been better than the Stones' version. It's the classic "why do I love her when she hurts me so?" plaint, but possibly the best song of that kind that I know. There's a tough, resigned rock swing to it, and a kind of beautiful-loser's swagger that reminds me of Raymond Chandler. "Atlantic City" also reminds me of film noir, though really only in its central question, which it shares with "Sweet Smell of Success": How much of your soul will the world make you sell? Unlike SSOS's Sidney Falco, the narrator of "Atlantic City" is just trying to scrape by; but the same false (and they know it's false!) hope that you can pawn your soul and then redeem it later animates both characters. The role of the woman in "Atlantic City" is also heartbreaking. Lyrics here.

3) Nirvana, "Polly." So my theory (and look, another movie connection!) is that pretty much all of Nirvana's songs are the rock equivalent of "The Ice Storm": a look at the despair and chaos that whipsaws people who try to live as moral beings in an amoral society. People without moral compasses, but who still desperately want to be good. "Polly" is the best example of this; as with all Nirvana songs, the lyrics aren't super-illuminating, but as far as I can tell it's the story of a woman who is used by a man who, even as he's using her, tries to respond to her; a man torn between love and selfishness. Somewhere or other (emails on this point are appreciated), I think I read that Kurt Cobain did in fact intend "Polly" to be about what I think it's about, and that he stopped playing a fast and furious version of the song (which I've heard as "New Wave Polly"), replacing it with the slow, dragging version on the album, because he hated it when guys would start moshing to this song about something close to rape. Anyway--like "The Ice Storm," Nirvana doesn't offer any positive vision, but its negative vision is, in my opinion, honest, raw, and moral.

4) You can find all kinds of fun (and rockin') implicit criticism of cock-rock in P.J. Harvey's "Sheela-Na-Gig" and the X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" Among many, many, many others. (Bikini Kill's "Strawberry Julius" and "I Hate Danger" also come to mind.)

5) Blondie, "Dreaming." Wistful--the hopeful wistfulness of a teenage girl imagining what it'll be like when she's grown up, when she's for real. Reminds me of the young Penny Century (Beatriz Garcia) from Love and Rockets. I guess "One Way or Another" might be the older Penny Century?? The "Dreaming" girl should ask the guy in Elvis's "Blue Moon" out... then they can both become disillusioned together.

6) Patti Smith, "Birdland." Sweet, sad song.

7-10) A totally random assortment: The Clash, "Rudie Can't Fail" (get up! get on up!); the X-Ray Spex, "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" (much more fun than reading freakin' Naomi Klein or whatever); Patti Smith, "Horses" (because not even Allan Bloom could figure out what's going on there... except that it's good); Elvis Costello, "Little Palaces" (how my friend Mike convinced me to get into EC).

11) The Smiths, "Rusholme Ruffians." A stand-in for all the other great stuff from the Smiths--the guitar plays against the bassline, the brightness of the music plays against the sly darkness of the lyrics, and it all adds up to an awesome, ambiguous, totally enjoyable song.

I should add that even songs I know Bloom would reject can be really well-done--the Stones' "Under My Thumb" and "Rocks Off" are definitely on my all-time top 10 list. They're fun; UMT is musically nuanced; yeah, they sexualize aggression (I mean, this is Mick Jagger we're talking about here), but given that Bloom is willing to see the point of authors (like Nietzsche) whom he finds ultimately destructive, you'd think he'd be able to see why listening to the Mickster now and again would not necessarily portend cultural collapse. The problems Bloom rightly notes in some/most rock are, in my view, only really pressing problems because they are so prevalent; and so the solution, as usual, is not to reject pop culture but to make better culture.

Also, I agree with rock-haters that we should question why we find some things "fun." If you really doubt this, take a gander at what other cultures have considered a laugh riot--the way the Spartans baited helots, say, or the virulently racist gag gifts sold in this country. If you'd be leery of someone who, in 1964, thought a big-lipped black woman eating a watermelon was a hilarious shape for a cookie jar, then you should accept that it's worthwhile to challenge your own sense of humor or pleasure. But some stuff really is just fun. Some aggressive, raunchy rock is just pedal-to-the-metal intense fun. Any social critique that can't see the point of the Cramps, or "You Spin Me Right Round," is clearly wack.
posted by Eve at 5:30 PM

 
If you close the door, the night could last forever,
Leave the wineglass out and watch a blog to never...

Buscaraons: An answer to my "Why did World War One happen? And why did people get excited about it?" questions. Feel free to chime in on this.

Cacciaguida: Mary, Ark of the Covenant.

Dappled Things: Praise for the Low Mass; Jewish hymnody and Gregorian chant; problems with a "Low Mass mentality" (so true! I may know only enough Latin to fumble my way through the Novus Ordo, but that doesn't mean I don't want incense and music!); and good, very brief post on grace in everyday human life.

Kairos: His booklist. Much more novel-heavy than mine; but then mine was serving a more specific purpose. (If that permalink is broken, go here; it's the second-to-last post on that page.) If I tried to do a list of all the books I'd recommend... sheesh, we'd be here all night! Anyway, interesting list, and equally interesting discussion in the comments section. I'll blog a bit about Chesterton later.

And drop by my blogchild.
posted by Eve at 1:37 PM

 
"They came... They thawed... They conquered..."
--Ad slogan for "The Chilling"
posted by Eve at 11:39 AM

 
TOO. CUTE. FOR. WORDS. I hate myself for loving stuff like this.
posted by Eve at 4:30 PM

 
GO TO CHURCH!: It's the Feast of the Assumption. Amy Welborn's experience. My priest did something very cool, despite some time-wasting rambling at the beginning of his homily. He basically connected the Assumption of Mary into Heaven with the importance of the body. Catholicism is famous for being a very sensual religion; although it's falsely accused, these days, of hating or rejecting the human body, it in fact honors the body and considers it a gift that God gives to us and that, in marriage, we give to each other. The priest didn't mention this, but the homily reminded me yet again how many contemporary evils (especially sexual evils) arise from the fact that we don't honor the body as Christ would have us do. Contraception (as opposed to giving one's body wholly, including a woman's natural cycle of fertility and infertility), abortion (it's just a body, so it can't have worth), promiscuity (what I do with my body doesn't mean anything; my body is just a tool I use to obtain or give pleasure)--it all goes against the vision of the glorified body that we find throughout Church teachings. The resurrection of the body, the Eucharist, the Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven, Thomas putting his finger into Christ's wounds--those are signs of a faith that respects the body and knows that, despite its evident corruption, decay, and failures, the flesh is good.
posted by Eve at 3:43 PM

 
And the whole world
Has to blogwatch right now
Just to tell you once again
Who’s bad...

The Agitator: Jimmie "J.J." Walker, a dyn-o-mite libertarian! And fake plants, but a real monkey.

The Rat: Who ever would have predicted something like this? (You'll have to follow another link there, but it's worth it for her headline.)

Mark Shea: What it does (and doesn't) mean to "reject Christ"; and squishy martyrs. Oh, and Jews, and Jews.

Unqualified Offerings: Don't Tread on Me vs. the Million Mom War.

Also, in re the poetry post below, the Agitator sends this link. Og like.
posted by Eve at 3:29 PM

 
POETRY WEDNESDAY: Three poems called "The Hippopotamus." There's a fourth (here), but it's lame. From Ogden Nash, T.S. Eliot, and Hilaire Belloc respectively.

The Hippopotamus
Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.

The Hippopotamus
The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the true church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way -
The church can sleep and feed at once

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in old miasmal mist.

The Hippopotamus
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
posted by Eve at 2:29 PM

 
THE RABBIT DONE DIED (MAYBE): Weird science. I got no problem with this sort of thing, really, although the glowbunny scientist sounds like a sketch and a half. Then again, if that were what I worked on all day, I'd probably get a little odd(er) myself....
posted by Eve at 1:39 PM

 
"Ever since Karen got killed it's been a real drag."
--Teen party boy, "The Horror of Party Beach"
posted by Eve at 1:36 PM

 
CAAAAWWWW!!!!: Two posts about my favorite bird, the crow. Links via Charles Murtaugh and Father Jim Tucker respectively. That first link is especially cool.

Murtaugh's also been doing some fine posting on the flaws of Intelligent Design; this is my favorite post so far, but scroll down for more.

And John Betts has been posting very interesting excerpts from various apocryphal and/or Gnostic gospels. Start here and scroll down. Link also via Fr. Tucker, I think.

Mortimer is not quite a crow, but he's still super cool.
posted by Eve at 5:42 PM

 
"OVERPAID, OVERSEXED, AND OVER HERE": To which the American response was, "The problem with you British is that you're underpaid, undersexed, and under Montgomery."

--from reader Robert Wenson

posted by Eve at 5:23 PM

 
"I WAS JUST TUCKING INTO MY SECOND HELPING OF EGGS AND B. WHEN MONSIGNOR REEVES SHIMMERED INTO THE ROOM." Hilarious and topical pastiche from Disputations, who's also got various posts about Saint Dominic and so forth.
posted by Eve at 4:52 PM

 
IF GOD DOESN'T WANT US TO EAT BABIES, WHY ARE THEY MADE OUT OF MEAT?: Why Sanchez's notion of identity and moral worth is wack. For those of you coming late to the party, this started out with Russo's post on science and abortion; Sanchez then said, Yeah, Russo's right that if infanticide is wrong then abortion is wrong, but infanticide isn't wrong unless you're a random groundless theist. (You may have guessed that I'm paraphrasing.) You can follow the back-and-forth via the links on Russo's page.

I've tried to indicate in earlier posts reasons for taking physical continuity and physical individuality seriously; but I think those claims slide quickly into the realm where reason is ineffectual because the premises clash too much, so the two sides can only rely on what Richard Rorty calls "redescription"--I give what I hope is the most compelling account of my position, and I try to connect it with your experience. Note that the fact that an argument must at some point become redescription does not mean the argument is flawed--in fact, if one disputant disagrees with the other deeply enough, any argument becomes redescription. For example, if the two parties disagree on the definition of reason, appealing to rational arguments just won't go anywhere; first, a shared definition of reason would have to be accepted, and such a definition can only be proposed through redescription. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that this post will instead be about why Sanchez's own position doesn't meet the standards he himself has set. I know negative argument is always easier than positive, and I would offer positive if I thought it would actually address Sanchez's concerns.

Final caveat, before we hit the main body of the post: You'll notice that there are several different types of argument below. I take some of them more seriously than others; some I'm advancing not because I agree with them, but because I'm trying to speak from within Sanchez's conceptual framework rather than my own; some are more "syllogistic" and others more "suggestive" or prudential. So if one argument leaves you really cold, please do keep reading; it's possible you'll be struck by something later on.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS POLICE
Sanchez: "'[I]dentity' is just, as I've said earlier, a shorthand for a cluster of other things like links of memory and disposition and character." These things seem to include, for him, consciousness; reflectiveness; possibly the use of language (I can't come up with another good reason that he separates our duties to consciousness-having humans from our duties to other kinds of beasties); hopes; plans; and desires. Throughout this post I'll use the shorthands CRLHPDM (the M is memory) and "mentality" to signify this stuff.

A) This is awful shaky stuff on which to build a (libertarian!) case for abortion and infanticide. Once you've demonstrated these subjective attributes (the least subjective of which is probably the use of language, but even that can certainly be fudged), the state protects you; 'til then you're fair game. I'd think a libertarian would see the danger here--that's why I pointed out earlier that when the definition of who gets to live is this subjective, there are strong incentives to keep raising the bar. How much reflectivity, etc., must an unwanted, living human individual show before he merits state protection? Whatever you think about many popular slippery-slope arguments (I've posted about which ones I think do and do not work before), this seems like a swift and deadly slide waiting to happen.

B) Sanchez describes the body or physical continuity as a "placeholder" for what we really value: CRLHPDM. But what makes these things, in themselves, worthy of moral protection? Why couldn't one argue that CRLHPDM are themselves placeholders for worthy, or beautiful, or loving, etc., states of mind? There's nothing self-evidently valuable about a plan to watch "Animal Planet" with the sound off for a few hours (...I've done this), a desire to gossip and backstab, or a hope to get all the way down the sidewalk without once stepping on a crack. We value the abilities to CRLHPDM because they signal the potential for states of mind that are worthy in themselves; we don't bother specifying which states of mind because, as Hayek or Postrel would leap to tell you, you can't specify that stuff in advance. But if you argue, "Oh, but the person desiring/hoping for/reflecting on things in a lousy or base way--the person with a base consciousness--is nonetheless valuable because she has the potential, and is probably even now moving towards, deeper, richer, greater states of mind"--well, you're in a bit of trouble. Because the infant, the fetus, the blastocyst also has this potential and is also even now moving toward its fulfillment--perhaps more slowly than the "Animal Planet" watcher, but hey, perhaps not.

C) To put matters another way, by rephrasing a challenge Sanchez offered to me: I know that Julian has a basic conviction that it's wrong to kill beings with consciousnesses, but not why.

WHO IS JULIAN SANCHEZ?
Sanchez's identification of personhood (or, more relevantly, individual human identity) with CRLHPDM gets him in trouble. I think he was starting to acknowledge this in his comments section: "...[A]s I suggested earlier, 'personal identity,' unlike the more precise logical concept of identity, is mostly a way of talking about certain kinds of continuity we care about and find morally important. ... I don't find (2) all that disturbing, though. Consider: is falling asleep really necessary to die? In other words, is even our waking consciousness really 'continuous'? Perhaps it's more like a high-speed strobe light; we wouldn't notice the gaps because, of course, we're not conscious in the gaps. If that's the case, it might even be that we 'die,' in your sense, with every thought. But that doesn't strike me as an important or frightening way of dying."

This won't do. It doesn't matter how it "strikes" him; it strikes me as pretty frightening to be ripped limb from limb while still within one's mother's womb, but that doesn't seem to matter to him. The problem of continuity of personal identity is bigger than he's making it appear here.

For Sanchez's view, personal identity is a flux, a will-o'-the-wisp; a new constellation of CRLHPDM emerges and changes from moment to moment. The life of a "person"--a mentality--is thus less than a second.

Sanchez tries to salvage personhood by saying, "Of course, Eve has done things she doesn't remember, and it really was 'still her' that did them, in that the actions arose from a set of character dispositions sufficiently overlapping with the ones she currently holds." But what can "sufficiently overlapping" mean? I'd wager that there are other 23-year-old Catholic chicks for whom the sum total of their CRLHPDM is more like mine right now than the sum total of the CRLHPDM of the-person-then-known-as-Laura-Eve-Tushnet's were at age 7 or age 18 ("You converted to what?!"). Are these other Catholic chicks me, and Laura-at-age-7 not me?

I think this problem emerges most clearly in a hypothetical Sanchez uses to support his own position: the neural scan. I have big problems with this hypothetical (I still think it begs the question--although it's a different question from the one I thought it was begging before!), but leave that aside--I'm planning a separate post about Sanchez's hypotheticals, and the use of hypothetical arguments in general, which you'll get later, maybe next week. For the moment, let's just tweak the hypothetical. (When I revisited Sanchez's comments section today, I was reminded that someone there had already gestured toward this approach.) Suppose instead of replicating my current neural patterns, the scan replicated neural patterns very slightly different--a mentality I could have, but don't.

Is it me?

Let's stipulate that the scan is more like me than my 18-year-old "self" would be. If you destroy my body, do I live on via the scan?

More fun: What if the scan replicates my mentality of four years ago?

What if you scan my mentality just as it is, but the new brain develops (due to either free will or the necessarily different surrounding circumstances, it doesn't matter which) in a different direction? Perhaps it makes some sense to say, then, that my mentality has been "cloned." But as those who support reproductive cloning are quick to remind us, my clone is not myself.

As far as I can tell, even accepting Sanchez's understanding of identity, the neural-scan-brain is only "me" for the split second it perfectly mirrors "me"; and, consequently, I am only "me" for that split second.

Sanchez's actual position turns out to be, "A person in a body once occupied by a person, or a body which was in the past and probably will be in the future occupied by a person [e.g. if the body is sleeping or unconscious or whatever], has the right to life. But a body that will probably be occupied by a person in the future, but hasn't yet hosted a person, does not have the right to life." Hence all the dead babies. Sanchez says he is not forced into this position ("Are the capacities that account for our moral worth less fully realized when we are unconscious, or just in a daze? Yes. Does our moral worth vary correspondingly? No. Does our moral worth vary with the maximum potential for (or past instantiation of) the realization of those capacities? Not above the minimum threshhold, because the difference between a very self-consciously reflective being which represents values and goals to itself [insert other features I've cited, etc.] and one which does all those things to a lesser extent is one of degree, not kind. Not to say that animals and other nonhuman beings deserve no moral respect, but my view is that our obligations to them are qualitatively very different"), but as they might say in Monty Python, that's not argument, it's just assertion.

Possibly Sanchez would prefer to define identity not as the constellation of CRLHPDM, but rather as the consciousness containing this constellation. But the consciousness is then defined by its contents. If "I" am "the consciousness containing constellation of CRLHPDM #436377A," then when the reflections, memories, and/or desires (I'm not sure how much would have to change, since again, this is a flexible standard of identity in which I'm really not sure what Sanchez considers "minimal functioning necessary for rights," "sufficient overlap to prove continuity of identity," and so forth) change, the consciousness--the "I"--vanishes. How about a different definition of identity, not as CRLHPDM nor as the consciousness containing CRLHPDM but rather as the being who has this consciousness? I suspect that's what Sanchez is actually getting at when he says my past (but unremembered) sixth-grade self is "sufficiently overlapping" with my current self. Maybe not; anyway, I think it's the only coherent notion of identity he can hang on to. But if he does grab that notion--dude, what is this "being" if not the "further fact" of identity that Sanchez denies? What is this disembodied consciousness-having being, if not a soul?

WHY I AM WRITING THIS: Why spend so much metaphorical ink trying to convince Sanchez that killing babies is wrong? Five reasons, really: 1) I like the guy, 2) He's smart, 3) Therefore I can sharpen my brain on his, 4) I think he tries to be a mensch, and 5) I hope our discussion will convince others that the "human is just a state of mind" ("human is just another lifestyle choice"? "human is a journey, not a destination"?) abortion-rights position is immoral, infanticidal, and incoherent. Thus, not menschly.

As in my previous post on this subject, I want to again stress that although the stuff above has gone in all kinds of wacky science-fictional, abstract directions, infanticide is for real. The ancient Romans, famously, did it. We're doing it--check out partial-birth abortion. If there's a slippery slope, we're pretty far down. For all his argumentation, I doubt that Sanchez would actually counsel a female friend to smother her unwanted baby; I doubt he would help her do so. What he can do, though, is help to create a climate in which the abortion-rights argument slowly, slowly mutates into the infanticide-rights argument. The press is already helping him along, as witness all the headlines saying that the Born Alive Infants Protection Act is about "fetuses born alive" or "fetuses surviving outside the mother." So as bizarre as all this might sound, I do think there are practical reasons to work on this particular line of argument.

All for now.
posted by Eve at 3:27 PM

 
FUNNY STRANGE OR FUNNY HA-HA?: The Agitator has posted his lists of Awful Movies Seen Recently and Funniest People. This inspired me to post similar stuff. (More substantive posting, like part one of a response re Julian Sanchez and abortion, coming this afternoon. For now, I realized that I have already read 1/3 of the books on my fall reading list, so I'm gonna slack a bit.) I don't watch enough TV to give you a Funniest People list (although here's a start--the kid who plays Dewey on "Malcolm in the Middle," Drew Carey and many of the other people on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", the Simpsons writers, and especially Stephen Fry). But here's my bad-movie list.

WORST MOVIES SEEN EVER: 4) "Wings of Desire." I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but I found this an incredibly pretentious art flick. (I have a very low tolerance for German Deep Thoughts.) Does the world really need another movie about preferring the evanescent and temporal to the eternal? Are we really beset by a passion for eternity that denigrates mere fleshly life? Two irksome/cheap touches: The pain felt by the angel (sorry, but the nick you gave yourself shaving or whatever really does not work as a stand-in for the pains and terrors of fallen human existence--where is the real agony in this movie? If the angel saw that, and chose our life anyway, I would have much more respect for this film), and the sexy, elusive, Meaningful acrobat. Does this woman have any lines? Or is she just yet another abstracted and cliched Eternal-Feminine? I wanted to like this movie, since at least two of the people I most respect named it as their favorite, but I really couldn't. If you think I just need to watch it again or something, please email, since this is the movie on this list whose awfulness I'm least sure of.

3) "Fellini's Satyricon." What was the point of this movie? Apparently it makes a bit more sense if you've read the actual text of the Satyricon; for me, it was a five-hour trip to Wacky-But-Dullsville. An insipid boy who for some reason is very attractive to those around him; endless scenes that close with a sunset, tricking you into thinking the movie is over; and nothing remotely resembling a point, a plot, or a conclusion.

2) "Sweet Sweetback's Baaadddaassss Song." Or however you spell it. The first and last moments of the movie were great--"Starring the Black Community" and "Watch Out!" So that's about two good minutes. The rest of the movie was crapsploitation. Gross, boring, etc. Why is Sweetback having sex with hippies in the desert? Why are we viewing a close-up of his fake wound? Why is he eating a rubber lizard? Why are the gospel tunes in the soundtrack so annoyingly off-key and out of synch? These are only some of the mysteries that await the viewer of "Sweetback."

1) "Prinzen in Holleland" (Prince in Hell). An indescribably bad German art-flick. The wanderings of distressed young heroin addicts. The disgusting antics of a dog. A hanging. A turtle with its neck snapped off. Much artiness. I can't believe I watched this.

You'll note the theme here--I can watch any number of lame-o B movies ("Critters IV," anyone?), but I hate, hate, hate pretentious artsiness.

MOST RECENT BAD MOVIES SEEN, FROM MOST TO LEAST RECENT: 1) "The Last Laugh." F.W. Murnau silent movie about a proud doorman at a ritzy hotel who's fired and reduced to serving as a lowly washroom attendant. I would have liked this movie except that a) the camerawork, lighting etc. were nothing special, and b) the ending is bizarre and unearned.

2) "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." The only Tennessee Williams I can deal with is "A Streetcar Named Desire," which I really like. COAHTR, on the other hand, had all the sturm-und-drang I associate with Williams, plus the kind of Suhthuhn Hollywood acting in which every male character has a one-syllable name that the female characters stretch out to three or four syllables--"Oh, Rhay-ah-yett, honey!" However, this movie wasn't as bad as I'm probably making it sound; it's just that I haven't watched many movies lately, so I have a smaller pool of lameosities.

3) "The Haunting." The Boring is more like it. Subtle horror = A-OK. But this movie was so "subtle" I almost fell asleep.

4) "Burnt Offerings." A haunted-house movie. There is no actual burning in this movie.

5) "Cloak and Dagger." Again, not actually a bad movie, just a mediocre one, but I judge it harshly because it was directed by Fritz Lang, who is not allowed to be boring. C&D had many nice touches, and good acting, but the plot petered out and didn't justify the movie's length. Oh, and while I'm beating up on generally terrific directors, Hitchcock's "Frenzy" is trashy, gross, and unworthy of the master.

Now you know.
posted by Eve at 1:06 PM

 
FROM DEEP WITHIN THE WUGGLY-UMP: A blogless friend forwarded me this Federalist Society report from the American Bar Association annual meeting:

Here’s the latest from the ABA Annual meetings in Washington, DC…

Former First Lady Rosalyn Carter was the featured speaker at today’s Pro Bono Publico Awards Luncheon. Her speech expressed her fervent opposition to the death penalty. She states the death penalty is an “obvious violation of human rights” and this “disturbs me more than I can say.” She asserts its application is both “unfair and discriminatory,” and she outlined her chief areas of concern. First, Mrs. Carter stated “it should be an embarrassment to every American that we execute our children.” She compared the U.S. to Somalia in that both countries have not ratified a major international law treaty condemning the execution of children. Furthermore, because most children committing capital crimes have been abused, they deserve additional compassion in sentencing. Second, Mrs. Carter condemned the execution of the mentally ill or retarded, as it “does not make sense as a deterrent and it undermines our criminal justice system.” She declares that it is wrong to treat prisoners for their illness when a reason treatment is administered is to make the prisoner fit to stand trial. She commended the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Atkins v. Virginia. Third, Mrs. Carter cited the unfairness in the administration of the death penalty because minorities are more likely to receive a death sentence than whites. She does not think it is fair that indignant defendants receive a lower level of legal representation than wealthier defendants, which explains the discrepancy between the races. Fourth, Mrs. Carter criticizes defense counsel as inadequate. She stated she was “appalled to learn how many attorneys who are incompetent or uninterested or even drunk” at trial. She believes it is not the worst who receive a death sentence, but those who have the worst counsel.

Mrs. Carter stated we need a death penalty moratorium, and she advocated passing two pieces of legislation: a bill sponsored by Senator Russ Feingold calling for a federal death penalty moratorium, and the Innocence Protection Act. She also called for more volunteers to defend condemned persons.

After her speech, ABA President Bob Hirshon proclaimed, “At some time we will celebrate together a time when our country stops killing its youth.”

***

Outgoing ABA President Bob Hirshon issued his parting remarks to the ouse of Delegates this morning. He stated “it is important that
everyone in this House understand that this Association continues to refuse to allow itself to become the hand maiden for the politics of either the extreme left or the extreme right, notwithstanding the pressures to do so. Instead we carry on our proud tradition of charting an independent course. And don’t let anybody ever tell you differently.” The ABA and the profession are both “strong and robust,” and “we didn’t have to attack another group of professionals to gain members, either.” (Curiously, this last line did not appear in the official transcript for the speech.) He describes the ABA as a “living organism” with components coming from “diverse backgrounds, from different legal philosophies, from every possible ideological and political point of view.”

Hirshon touched on the events of September 11 in his speech, and opined that not all of the changes offered by government leaders will be effective. He stated, “The tenor of these times lead some to believe that any such changes are to be accepted, without question and without any debate. Indeed, the new mantra heard regularly on talk shows and in casual conversation is that concern for constitutional provisions and legal procedures is a ‘luxury that our nation cannot afford in the current circumstances.’” Hirshon “respectfully disagrees” with this belief. He declares, “I find no patriotism in the rejection of fundamental traditional American values such as freedom of speech, due process protections, and adherence to the rule of law.” He tells the House that the ABA has the duty to weigh in on these debates, such as it did last February concerning military tribunals. In the future, Hirshon proposes the ABA lends its voice to the debate concerning immigrants who are detained by the government in the war on terrorism, the detention of American citizens classified as “enemy combatants,” class action reform, and corporate responsibility. Hirshon believes “we must not ignore what is happening in this country and pretend that these compelling issues which are so close to our core mission are not crying out for thoughtful analysis.”

In the afternoon, incoming ABA President A.P. Carlton outlined his policy objectives to the House of Delegates. These include: increasing the access of justice to Americans; promoting diversity in the profession, especially by promoting the advancement of women and creating new leadership roles for minorities; continuing its active role in federal judicial selection by contributing timely evaluation of judicial nominees by its Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary and by urging the expeditious nomination and confirmation of judges; and continuing the debate on the best methods of state judicial selection, including the promotion of the ABA’s preferred method, merit selection.

Tomorrow, BARWATCH will bring you the votes in the House of Delegates, including resolutions concerning federal judicial selection,
immigration, and cloning.

***

Identifying "the religious right" as potential "bad guys" in their struggle for same-sex family unity, today's panel, “At the Borders of
Love: Gay and Lesbian Immigration and Asylum Issues,” emphasized the inconsistency of an immigration system that is driven by a policy of family unification--except for same-sex families. This movement to extend spousal immigration benefits to same-sex partners seems to be driven by homosexuals whose foreign-national partner cannot obtain a visa any other way. Where a heterosexual individual can gain entry for a foreign spouse, same-sex partners cannot. This puts United States homosexuals in a position where they have to "choose between their country and the ones they love." As one panelist remarked, "To the delight of the religious right, homosexuals are forced to take flight." For those who choose to immigrate to other countries, 14 nations (Australia, Belgium, Canada,
Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) have recognized gay and lesbian couples for immigration purposes.

For those who choose to remain here, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) has sponsored the Permanent Partners in Immigration Act. This Act would allow U.S. citizens and permanent residents to sponsor their same-sex partners for immigration to this country. To qualify under the Act, the "permanent partner" (1) must be at least 18 years old, (2) must be in a "committed, intimate, relationship with another adult where both parties intend a lifelong commitment," (3) must be financially interdependent with the sponsoring individual, (4) must not be married or in a permanent partnership relationship with anyone else, (5) must be "unable to contract with that person a marriage cognizable under the INA," and (6) must not be within a third-degree blood relation. The current strategy to pass the bill is to quietly gather support, one congressman at a time. So far, the bill has the support of 97 congressmen, including Connie Morella (R-MD) and Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), and has not faced any serious opposition. The panel encouraged the audience to contact their representatives about the bill.

***

The ABA announced a new book, “Counselors: Conversations with 18 Courageous Women Who Have Changed the World” by Elizabeth Vrator, an attorney with the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. The book profiles 18 women who have won the Margaret Brent Award established by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1991 to recognize “women who have achieved excellence, influenced other women to pursue careers, and opened doors closed previously to women.” The foreword was written by former President
Clinton. Vrator writes in her introduction that Clinton “advanced the opportunities for an status of working women more than any other
American president….Compared to this record, the forty-one previous presidents did little to address the needs—and promote the talents—of the female half of the population. Mr. Clinton showed visionary leadership by aiding women in the groundbreaking work of obtaining positions of power and responsibility. Future presidents who now do the same will be viewed as following in his footsteps and fulfilling the promise of the revolutionary quantum leaps his administration took for American working women—as President Kennedy did for civil rights. I cannot thank Mr. Clinton enough for his inspiring foreword here.”

The women profiled include: Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg; former Attorney General Janet Reno; Lynn Hecht Schafran, the Director of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts (a project of NOW); former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, Clinton Administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick; Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Hilary Marshall (who is also married to New Yotk Times columnist Anthony Lewis); NAACP Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Elaine Jones; Berkeley Law Professor Herman Hill Kay; Equal Rights Advocates founder Nancy Davis; Bar Association of San Francisco Executive Director and General Counsel Drucilla Ramey; Justice Joan Dempsey Klein of the California Court of Appeals; Judge Patricia Wald; California Supreme Court Justice Joyce Kennard; MALDEF President Antonia Hernandez; and Judge Norma Shapiro.

Eve again: My friend's comments: "The Federalist Society's report on the ABA convention (they try to report w/o commentary; sometimes they fail--note the well placed introductory clause "curiously," in a parenthetical).

"Notice at the very end, when discussing the award created by Hillary Clinton, the ABA's slight (and probably unintentional) snub of
President Johnson when they credit Kennedy for his pioneering support of civil rights."

I'd add only that I've heard some real horror stories about the quality of counsel in death-penalty cases, and so I endorse Mrs. Carter's remarks on that score. Anyway, I thought some of my readers might be interested in this note, so here it is.
posted by Eve at 12:40 PM

 
"You can't mesmerize me! I'm British!"
--Peter Cushing, "At the Earth's Core"
posted by Eve at 11:48 AM

 
IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM: Sorry for the delay. Here are a lot of scattered thoughts on why visiting the Imperial War Museum was, by far, the best thing the Rat and I did while we were in London.

First of all, the IWM was the least condescending museum I've ever visited. Even the section on submarines, which was specifically designed for small children, was informative and engaging; there were lots of fun features, but they never served to hide the dangerous and deadly work of the submariners. Yeah, there were "scratch and sniff"-type panels where you could get a whiff of month-old male sweat (although, perhaps fortunately, these weren't working when we were there); there's a dead mouse in a glass; there's an in-depth account of how to flush a submarine toilet. But there's also a terrific echolocation activity--you try to tell the difference between the radar reports made by whales, enemy subs, missiles, and so on. And the exhibit was very up-front about how difficult it was for submariners to escape their ships. According to the exhibit, one in three World War II UK submariners died; by way of comparison, an exhibit elsewhere in the museum told us that one in four prisoners in WWII Japanese POW camps died.

And the museum didn't hammer home some contemporary political point about diversity or tolerance, a temptation far too many museums would succumb to. Two examples: The portraits of soldiers included portraits of Indians, but the commentary, instead of telling us all about The Minority In The British Army, treated these soldiers exactly the way other soldiers were treated. (This is not to say that there's nothing interesting about The Minority In The British Army--just that too often every portrayal of a woman or a racial minority tells the same story, as if women and minorities never have experiences in common with white men.) And, more importantly, in the exhibit on WWII, there was a section on British internment camps for enemy aliens (=aliens from enemy countries, not aliens who'd been proven to be enemies--a crucial distinction). Instead of engaging in lots of pious hand-wringing (which typically only serves to make museumgoers feel superior to their predecessors, rather than encouraging critical thought), the IWM presented toys, sketches, and a newspaper made by internees; reminiscences from internees; and, most striking to me, a scathing political cartoon drawn by an internee, attacking the government for locking up harmless random German shopkeepers. The cartoon, because it was a direct expression of what people at the time were thinking, made the anti-internment point much more poignantly and memorably than museum-speak boilerplate would have. There were also newspapers, pamphlets, and other paraphernalia of conscientious objectors to both WWI and WWII, which noted that some CO's performed honorable service in nonviolent roles like nursing.

One major flaw was the transition from the World War I wing to the World War II wing. There basically wasn't any transition. I think this was unintentional--a flaw in the design of the wings--but WWII was presented as simply a continuation of WWI. This presentation made an unhelpful Kaiser/Hitler parallel unavoidable; you got the impression that WWII was fought not against totalitarianism, fascism, Nazism, etc., but against, instead, the Evil Hun. The museum design discouraged nuance.

The WWI wing left me with a basic question that, perhaps, reflects my lack of historical understanding. I don't get why WWI happened. I don't get, especially, why (some) people were enthusiastic about it--why English women sent their sons off to fight. I know there must have been some glamour associated with it simply because it was a world war--"the Great War"--and because of its (unprecedented?) scale--but still, I don't get it. Some scattered thoughts:

Some of the propaganda displayed in the WWI wing appealed to repugnance at the actions of the Germans--especially the execution of Edith Cavell and the sinking of the Lusitania. A memorable poster created right after the sinking depicts a drowned woman plunging to the bottom of the ocean with her infant in her arms. Both people look peaceful, both are awash in watercolor curves and swirls, but both are clearly very dead. The one-word caption: ENLIST. The exhibit did not mention the many false atrocity stories that were circulated to whip up anti-German fervor; that was another way in which the museum tacitly made WWI look more like WWII than it actually was. (The false atrocity tales continued their deadly work after WWI ended; knowing earlier atrocity rumors to have been false, many people did not believe the first rumors of the Holocaust.)

There was no sense of differing ideology (even on matters like the militarization of society; and certainly not on imperialism!) between the two sides. The Christmas truce brought this essential agreement forward very clearly: Can anyone imagine a Christmas truce, complete with soccer across the trenches, in an ideologically-motivated total war? (I know people wanted a "Ramadan truce" in Afghanistan, but it's not surprising that it didn't happen; and even there, the two sides would not, in general, have been celebrating the same holy day.)

Another fact giving the sense that WWI was sharply different from WWII: The Soviet Union, after Lenin's takeover, could just withdraw. Not with Hitler around, my friend.

A note found in a WWI trench that had been abandoned by the Germans: "TOMMY, thank you for this piece of land. It has served its purpose and you may have it back. FRITZ."

The section on the Holocaust began with truly poignant films, photos, and voice-over narration and music depicting pre-Nazi Jewish life. I think that was one of the places where I teared up. The exhibit did not point out that German and Austrian Jews were among the most assimilated in the world at the time (although one of the voice-over narrators did say, "I didn't even know [my friend] was a Jew until I noticed he had different holidays at school"). I'm not sure what to make of that fact (beyond the obvious, Audre Lorde point that "your silence will not protect you"), but I do want to figure out if there's anything that can be gleaned from it. The exhibit seemed somewhat scattershot and perfunctory, but it had an exellent section on Britain's and the US's refusal to take in Jewish refugees. The exhibit ended, in a good and English touch, with Edmund Burke's famous statement (from memory, sorry if misquoted), "For evil to triumph, it is only necessary that good men do nothing."

There was a hall of photographs of the English at war, paired with quotations that strongly supported the belief that man's natural condition is war--that peace is the temporary absence of war, rather than the usual state of things. I can't remember most of the pairings (although they were uniformly striking and illuminating), but one showed a young recruit wildly waving his cap as he set off for war; the accompanying text read something like (again from memory), "Many young men had never participated in a war before, and thus were in no way unwilling to enter this one. --Thucydides."

The WWII exhibit made it obvious how much there was for ordinary people to do to protect their country. You could raise a pig, serve with the Home Guards, care for a neighbor's children while she worked in a factory, and on and on--each tiny helpful activity promoted by scores of posters and pamphlets. I think many people now are frustrated because our own country is threatened, and yet the nature of the threat is so vague that it's difficult to figure out what, if anything, we can do about it. Hence programs like TIPS, which attempt to reassure us that something is being done. There was a whole genre of TIPS-esque propaganda in the WWII exhibit--the "Careless Talk Costs Lives/Keep Mum, She's Not So Dumb!" genre, in which your neighbor or your girlfriend might be a spy. The paranoia in these posters was lightened by their humor and grace; and also by the fact that they were aimed at a much more homogenous society than our own, in which people generally did know one another and could tell more easily when something was amiss. The biggest missed opportunity in the current war (for which the only useful name I can think of is WWIV--"the war on terror" is bizarre, and "the war on terrorism" false) is that as far as I can tell, the government is not (publicly anyway) trying to enlist the communities that would be the most helpful--obviously, the American Muslim communities. To the extent that those communities are homogenous, to the extent that people in them would be better able than I would to distinguish threatening behavior or suspicious activity, they should be receiving two types of propaganda: 1) You're one of us; you're being called to your duty as Americans, since you likely have special knowledge (of language, of communities, of religion); serve your country in the army, in intelligence, or just by proving to the radical Islamists that Muslims can be good Americans and Americans can be good Muslims; and 2) If you do see something that gives you serious reason to believe that terrorist agents are involved, contact the FBI. (And hope they do something about it--but that's another story.) Instead, after 9/11 Bush and most other public figures focused on difference and diversity, exhorting non-Muslims to respect Muslims (necessary and good thing to say) but generally without the parallel exhortation to Muslims to aid their country. American Muslims were treated as exotic outsiders needing protection from the torch-bearing yokels; they weren't addressed as Americans, like the rest of us, with responsibilities and love of country and neighbor.

World War II also makes a handy test for those who would try to draw a philosophically isolationist conclusion from pragmatic isolationism. By "philosophically isolationist" I mean "opposed to all American intervention abroad except in the event of clear and present threat to American lives or self-government [or, for some but not most isolationists, American interests]." By "pragmatic isolationist" I mean "starting from a position of deep skepticism about American intervention abroad except in the event of etc." As I've made clear on this site before, I'm not especially certain of my views on foreign policy, but I tend toward pragmatic isolationism. However, World War II makes some of the limits of that position clear, I think; and not just because of the evident evil of the Nazi regime. Many regimes are evil, and evidently so. What makes WWII (and especially the Nazi war against Britain) different from almost every other armed conflict I can think of: 1) There were obviously preferable alternatives--people who could wield power when the war was over. This was true in Germany, and even more so, of course, in France and England. A far cry from our interventions in Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan... etc. 2) One side was demonstrably, and unmistakably, more hideous than the other. 3) Defeating Hitler (especially defeating him earlier...) was unlikely to produce worse leaders elsewhere in the world. 4) We understood the cultures involved; especially, but not solely, the French and the English. This wasn't about grievances dating back to 1322 or what have you. This is one case in which "humanitarian warfare" made sense. It's one major reason that I can't be a philosophical isolationist. There was an English political cartoon on display, in which a man stands alone on a tiny island amid a raging ocean storm, captioned, "Very well then--alone"; it made me ashamed that my country had not come into the war sooner. (Although the material aid we were sending Britain was much appreciated--cf. Churchill's famous line about the Lend-Lease program, "one of the least sordid acts in history.")

The WWII exhibit also reminded me of something I must have learned about in high school, but had forgotten--the "Phoney War," the period right after Chamberlain's careful, defeated-sounding statement that "a state of war exists" between Britain and Germany. What followed that statement was the kind of confusion, ineffectual action, and uncertainty that should be familiar to all of us, less than a year into this new war. I took some comfort from the fact that WWII had not exactly started out on the right foot.

One propaganda film was especially interesting because of the particular images of besieged Britain it chose to show. One scene showed rescue workers at a bomb site digging out and saving a cat (and frankly, this appeal to naked sentiment totally worked on me); another scene displayed a crucifix (from a bombed church?) while the voice-over narration spoke of British self-sacrifice. I don't know how one would appeal to the necessary self-sacrifice today; such an explicitly Christian appeal would be ruled out, of course. I suspect that the new popularity of "God Bless America," and the fact that it was sung by the members of Congress on the steps of the Capitol in the wake of the attacks, is a response to the understanding that self-sacrifice, hope, and courage require some deeper meaning to sustain themselves--something greater than revenge, practicality, or survivalism. I hope that the only alternative to public piety is not a kind of worship of one's country. We haven't seen anything particularly intense in that direction because, frankly, most of us have not needed to sacrifice anything yet. (Longer lines at the airport don't count, folks.)

Another big omission: the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. The Soviet Union was treated as a dictatorship, but its role in WWII was somewhat prettified.

Something I hadn't thought about: all the governments-in-exile stationed in Britain during the war. Pretty amazing to think about, this island haven, full of refugee governments from across Europe.

A headline at war with its subheds: From the end of the Munich Conference. Banner headline something like, "PEACE IN OUR TIME"; subheds: "Prague's day of sorrow" and "[NUMBER--can't recall] British troops sent to the Sudetenland."

Throughout WWII, all of the newspapers' front pages on display bore liquor ads.

Common denigratory description of American GIs in England: "overpaid, oversexed, and over here." There were fascinating pamphlets from both US and UK military sources detailing how GIs should relate to the English and vice versa; the biggest bones of contention were pay (the US soldiers really did get a lot more money than the Tommies) and US soldiers trying to rub Britons' faces in the role the US had played in WWI ("we saved your sorry asses," essentially). The latter was especially unappreciated given that the English had been living through regular and intense bombing runs well before America entered the war.

The British government had a pamphlet on everything during WWII. One pamphlet gave advice to people who were caring for refugee children who wet the bed.

Queen Mary had a ration book. Her surname was listed as, "Her Majesty."

The practicality of the Marshall Plan came through pretty clearly--though again, this was not a condescending museum and it did not spell this out for you. But the Marshall Plan was presented as an anti-Versailles, a way of preventing future grudges, economic disaster, and ensuing war.

Final impression left by IWM: The twentieth century was a chamber of horrors. To quote Oliver Larrabee from "Sabrina," "The twentieth century? I could pick a better century out of a hat!" (Please don't email me about all the wonderful stuff that happened in the 20th century. I know. But visit the war museum, and see if you really feel like talking about that.)
posted by Eve at 6:03 PM

 
I need a blogwatch!
I'm holding out for a blogwatch 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life...

Amptoons: Lots and lots and lots of interesting links--a roundtable on Zimbabwe, sad and sickening news from Iran, lots more about Iran, sexual abuse at the UN, and much more.

Amygdala: War with Iraq? This Doug Bandow column is really good. At first it seems like Bandow is, in part, pulling the unpersuasive "Since we can't overthrow every bad regime and replace it with a better one, we shouldn't mess with any bad regimes" argument, but in fact he's pointing out ways in which attempts to mess with Saddam Hussein will produce worse results than the (admittedly awful) status quo.

Tim Drake: Benefits of Natural Family Planning, plus mad links on same subject; and scroll down for his World Youth Day diary.

Unqualified Offerings: I don't even like Bruce Springsteen (exception: "Atlantic City"), but I thought this post on the Boss, 9/11, loss, and rock'n'roll was fantastic. Wish Allan Bloom had read this.

The War on Drugs Clock. I don't know anything about needle exchange, and the site definitely tends toward the sketch when it claims that "nearly 4,000 new HIV infections can be prevented before the year 2003 if the federal ban on needle exchange funding is lifted this year" (count the unspoken assumptions!); but the other stuff on this page is very useful. Link via E-Pression.

The Fathers of the Christian Church: A Weblog. Neat, neat, neat. Also via E-Pression.
posted by Eve at 3:18 PM

 
"Aw, man, you're jivin' me! Look, man, I don't mind bein' a vampire and shit, but this really ain't hip!"
--Newly-bitten vampire to Blacula, "Scream, Blacula, Scream!"
posted by Eve at 12:23 PM

 
MINI-MAILBAG: LONDON, HISTORY, TIME TRAVEL, SHARK-JUMPING: I know there are emails buried in my inbox that I have neither time nor energy to dig out. (That's also why I haven't posted contest results--so if you still feel like being funny about Elvis Costello and/or the 2004 election, feel free....) So these are the emails that are easy to find and deal with.

Comments on my London post, from Lee Schwartz: “The houses were almost all white, with some dark houses; bright color was rare. Perhaps this is different in immigrant neighborhoods? It was strikingly non-U.S.-like.”

Very interesting observation on your part. [It was actually The Rat's observation--ed.] In late February my wife and I made our first-ever visit to London. In my mind’s eye I still see London rendered in the black and white of an old film from the 40’s, even though Piccadilly Circus was fully as garish as Times Square. Your commentary is bang dead on.

“Londoners have walled-off or hedged-off gardens instead of big green "My lawn is my manhood!!!" King of the Hill-style lawns. The gardens are much prettier and more individual than lawns, but also much more standoffish. The contrast was almost too easy.”

I believe this to be a more the English have carried with them to other countries. About four years ago my wife and I visited Australia and new Zealand, We stayed for awhile in a private home in Kew, a small suburb outside Melbourne. The train station into the city was about a 15 minute walk through some very nice old neighborhoods where almost every house had the fenced-in front garden, including some with miniature fruit trees. Similar gardens could be found in Auckland and Rotorua New Zealand.

Interestingly, there weren’t many of these gardens in Sydney. The explanation I was given by a Melbourne resident who went to school in the States went something like this: “Melbourne is Boston. Sydney is New York City.”

From Nigel Harris: "memorials to historic local vileness" -- I think most Londoners are amused, not depressed. Historic vileness is apparently what tourists want to see, and the tourist industry has responded accordingly. The Clink and The London Dungeon are recent innovations, heavily marketed to tourists and unvisited by locals. Madame Tussaud's has been around for longer, but has also always been a pure tourist attraction. The Tower of London is the only one with real historical significance - built as a powerful symbol of subjugation of the city by William "The Conqueror" in 1077, using alien white stone from Caen in Normandy and the site of a great deal of genuine historic vileness in later years. But I dare say most Londoners' mental map of their own city has "here be tourists" written on the uncharted territory within the castle walls. And that's fine by us, if it keeps the main tourist crowds away from the true gems of the city -- some of which, like the IWM and V&A, you were wise enough to seek out.

"white houses" -- You won't find many bright colored houses anywhere in England, immigrant neighbourhoods included. In parts of Suffolk the houses are traditionally painted pink, but it's a very subtle shade of pink!

"astonishingly ugly" Tate Modern -- this building was originally a coal-burning electricity plant.

Good points from Lise Legault: The most effective and inclusive way to study history--and widely accepted and taught among historians (though not in high school, perhaps, where it might count the most) is through the study of cultural history--and not just "high" culture but culture in its totality. The definition of cultural history is worthy of an essay in itself, and I don't have time to go into it here. But worthy practitioners are Natalie Davis, Carolyn Bynum, Peter Brown, Peter Burke, Paul Johnson, Simon Schama, even (as a literary historian in works like The Discarded Image) C.S. Lewis--and hundreds, perhaps thousands of others.

To focus on great men without understanding the kind of society from which they came will make you short-change their achievements and misunderstand their connection with their own society. It leads inevitably to the "take him down" mentality, as students begin to read widely enough to see that Abraham Lincoln, for example, said some foolish as well as some inspiring things. To know why he was great you have to know what he came from. (Also, not everyone who was great in his/her own time remains well-known today--but such people are often worth studying if you can.)

On the other hand, the kind of "social history" that was fashionable in the 1970s-80s--with its endless quest for new archival materials of piddling worth, its statistical charts, its yearning for "scientific" objectivity, and its ruthless refusal to take individual experience
seriously--encourages a numblingly materialistic understanding of human experience.

Cultural history--in the broad sense of the term culture--is the way to go.

From Avram Grumer: In my eyes, the best time travel stories ever are Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. I think the collection -- called just The Time Patrol-- is still in print, and includes every story but for the novel The Shield of Time, which isn't as good as the shorts anyway. I especially like "Delenda Est" and "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth".

I'm also very fond of John Kessel's Corrupting Dr. Nice, a time travel comedy with interesting political metaphors. One of the protagonists is the apostle Simon, from an alternate timeline in which Jesus was taken into the future by time travellers (possibly to become a talk show host).

Similarly from Jendi Reiter: Your comments on "The Man Who Folded Himself" made me think you might enjoy "Changing the Past" by Thomas Berger. Without giving away the ending, it's about a guy who is magically given several chances to erase his past and start over, each time with a different gift -- good looks, brains, talent etc. But each time, he ends up a lonely, unlikable person. Why? You will like the answer, I think.

Another reader informed me that "sci-fi" is considered derogatory--I had no idea. Always heard it called that. Of course, I always said I was a Trekkie, too, and apparently people who get het up about such things say it should be "Trekker." Ah well. I really like science fiction, so rest assured, I wasn't dissing the genre.

From Jim Christiansen: Your question: "why romanticism but not Enlightenment rationalism a la Voltaire? Is it just because
nationalism is being considered one of the core constitutive elements of modernity in this reading, and nationalism is more romantic than rationalism?"

Well, since you asked, and at the risk of seeming to take this diversion far too seriously, here's one answer: the most satisfactory sneer I can make in retaliation for the Enlightenment's sneers at the Middle Ages is to assert that the Enlightenment is in fact merely the decadence of the Middle Ages. Strip away its self-congratulation and Enlightenment rationalism is not much more than a continuation of trends you can find back at least as far as the thirteenth century, and arguably the eleventh. The continuities tend to be obscured by the century of the religious wars, but they're there. Even anti-clericalism has antecedents in the Middle Ages;
Voltaire is not a lot more anticlerical than Boccaccio, who's as medieval as they come.

In a lot of ways, Voltaire is just the last, least chaste, and most complacent in the line of monastic reformers going back through Erasmus and St. Bernard to Peter Damian. Yes, he's doctrinally more fluid than his predecessors, but he's recognizably of the same type. But with Rousseau and Goethe and the German idealists the mind of Europe seems to change. They're after something entirely different; they are creators, not reformers, and it never occurs to them to sneer at abuses, since they have no ideal order in mind. They mark the sharpest break since the mid-eleventh century. One feels that Peter Abelard or John of Salisbury could have understood Voltaire far better than Voltaire could have understood Feuerbach or Coleridge.

Of course, ask me again tomorrow and I'll give you a completely different answer.

And from someone who may be named Dylan: Would Oscar Wilde's decision to counter-sue the Marquess of Queensberry
(for slander, I think) be considered a shark-jump?

Yes.--ed.
posted by Eve at 10:55 AM

 
DUBYA STANDARDS: The Sydney Morning Herald subhed (link via Amptoons): "A contract for atomic power plants is a breathtaking example of Bush's double standards." The story: In Iran, Russians want to build six nuclear power plants. The Bush administration wants the Russians to stop, to keep Iran from using the stuff to make weapons. But in North "Axis of Evil" Korea, "if all goes well, today [Pyongyang] will pour the concrete foundation for the first of two US-supplied nuclear reactors, from which it will be able to extract sufficient 'near-weapons-grade' plutonium to make dozens of bombs." The Russians, predictably, are pissed.

Now this seems like a dumb thing to do. Why are we giving Dear Psycho Leader nuclear materials? The SMH explains: "A deal between the US and North Korea in 1994 calls for the North to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, especially its inspection provisions, and for a freeze on Pyongyang's nuclear program. In return, the US will build it two big nuclear-power plants; and until they are up and running, Washington is pitching in half-a-million tonnes of heating oil each year."

Well, this tit-for-tat might have been a good idea, might not have; I really don't know. But do note who was in the White House in 1994--someone whose name is never mentioned in the SMH article.

More: "The point at which Pyongyang was to be subjected to inspections is in dispute--the 1994 agreement stipulates a non-specific time when 'a significant proportion' of the reactors is complete. The [International Atomic Energy Agency] argues that thorough inspections will take so long that they should have started months ago. But the fear in the north is that Washington only wants inspections now in the hope that they will throw up sufficient reason to abandon the project. ...When Bush refused to certify North Korean compliance with the 1994 agreement earlier this year, Pyongyang railed against the 'nuclear lunatics' in the White House, it threatened to abandon the deal and it put out feelers for nuclear assistance in Moscow.

"The US State Department argues that the plants to be built in North Korea are 'proliferation resistant.' But this assertion is rejected in the strongest terms by nuclear experts like Victor Gilinsky, who served on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission under three presidents, and Henry Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre.

"They argue that the light-water reactors being built in North Korea and Iran could produce enough weapons-grade plutonium to make dozens of bombs. Studies had demonstrated that plutonium could be cheaply and quickly extracted from spent fuel rods.

"They dismiss the claim that any bomb-making would be detected well before completion, saying: 'This is hard to sustain in view of the North Koreans' nonproliferation treaty violations, their stiff-arming of IAEA inspectors and the slow reaction of the world powers.'

"But fear not. Washington is making sure that the despotic north, as Bush calls it, does not have an easy life. The US is opposing a South Korean proposal to build a mobile phone network in the north. Explaining the military basis of the objection, a diplomat asked: 'Do we really want their soldiers equipped with high-tech cell phones?'

"Indeed. It would be a pity if one of them were to make a call that gave away Pyongyang's plans for the imminent expansion of its nuclear weapons program."

Is it just me, or does this article make it sound like Bush is trying very hard to get out of the nuclear-plant commitment Clinton made? Again, maybe that's a bad idea--those "feelers to Moscow" don't sound promising--but this article really doesn't make the case that Bush is "soft on North Korea." In fact, the article reads like a warblog (North Korea really is evil; it really does share features in common with Iran and Iraq; the State Department is a bunch of starry-eyed wusses; Clinton got us into this big mess by appeasing rogue regimes) with an anti-Bush-screed coating.

I don't get it.
posted by Eve at 10:31 AM

 
THE LAST OF THE FILM-NOIR QUOTES, at least for a while. I've got something else up my sleeve...:

"Take it easy, Reese. Things are tough all over. Pretty soon a man won't be able to sell his own mother."
–Michael O'Shea, "The Underworld Story"
posted by Eve at 10:13 AM

 
OFF COME THE THONGS FOR THE GAY SAMURAI REVUE. Link via The Rat.
posted by Eve at 1:52 PM

 
WHEN SHE WAS GOOD. Stayed up late (despite developing cold... sigh) to finish this Roth novel. It takes a long, long time to get off the ground--for a good chunk of the book, I was thinking, "OK, this is very vivid writing, and I'm picturing each scene and person clearly, but honestly, is this telling me anything new? It seems like just a standard portrait of the American 1950s." In the end, though, the book is a deeply painful read, compelling and sharp. The edition I have includes snippets from reviewers' commentary, and almost all the reviewers are stunningly misguided--their criticism comes off as tainted by misogyny, in fact. The most accurate description was something like, "The tragedy of a woman obsessed with moral rectitude." I would describe WSWG as a tragedy about the necessity of both strength and forgiveness.
posted by Eve at 12:36 PM

 
BACK FROM NEW YORK, but I hab a code, so I'm really not firing on all pistons. Blogging will be light until I stop feeling like a dying sofa. For now: More on the giant squid!!! (link via Murtaugh.)

Barlow on hunger and reporting. My take is in the comments box.

Will reply to Sanchez when I stop feeling like a dying etc. For the moment I should point out that I don't think his argument can be supported on fully secular premises any more than mine can (Russo nodded to this in her initial speech, so maybe all those attempts to persuade her to my ex-Platonist position did some good!)--why protect stuff just 'cause it has a consciousness? How is that any more secularly justified than protecting stuff just 'cause it's a human individual? Will write more about soul vs. consciousness and the nature of identity, but don't expect that this week. I hope I haven't been presenting my objection to abortion as strictly secular--as you'll see if you click the "my ex-Platonist position" link above (and scroll down for two more posts that might clarify things), I believe that very, very few of my controversial moral beliefs can be supported through strictly secular reasoning. However, a) I think Sara was speaking to people who share premises in common (esp. "killing babies is wrong, end of story"); starting from those premises, a purely secular argument against abortion can be made, though I don't believe that the premises can be justified on purely secular grounds. And b) you can see my ex-Platonist position as either evidence for the moral rightness of killing babies, or yet more troubling evidence that there might be something to this God business after all. When these options are viewed in conjunction with other aspects of Christian anthropology (its understanding of justice and mercy, its emphasis on the importance of the physical world [if you want a good book on this, try Chesterton's biography of St. Thomas Aquinas], its understanding of transcendence through submission [cf. Chesterton's bio of St. Francis of Assisi, which is even better than the Aquinas book], and much more), I tend to think the latter interpretation is the better one.

Also, if you've emailed me, especially if you've emailed me with a link to your blog, I apologize for not doing anything about it. Things here are kind of crazed and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I will look at all these blogs... eventually.
posted by Eve at 12:30 PM

 
"Death's at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals."
"You mind if I use that line in my next Western?"
–Trevor Howard and Joseph Cotton, "The Third Man"
posted by Eve at 11:42 AM

 
OK, JUST ONE MORE: Mark Shea pointed me to this very interesting site--a dude is in RCIA, preparing for Confirmation, and blogging all the way to the altar, as it were. Check it out.
posted by Eve at 8:34 PM

 
I AM GOING TO NEW YORK tomorrow, back either Thurs. or Fri. Posting will resume then, but I will be super-busy since today is the last non-crazed day I will have for quite some time. When I can, I'll post about: The Imperial War Museum, with scattered thoughts on our current war; more vouchers!; contest results; and more shark-jumping. And other stuff, presumably.
posted by Eve at 7:44 PM

 
BAD THEOLOGY WATCH. Grunt.
posted by Eve at 7:08 PM

 
ABORTION. Julian Sanchez replies to me and Sara Russo. It's a sophisticated presentation of a position with which I radically disagree. But here're my thoughts. Sorry for the length.

Julian writes, "Despite the public rhetoric associated with the debate, I think that most responsible pro-choice thinkers will grant that a fetus is biologically alive. If this were not clear, then certainly much more of the debate would be on the scientific than philosophical terrain, since most plausible ethical theories would converge on the conclusion that, if the fetus were totally internally inert, lacking both brain and organ activity until birth, it did not count as a moral person."

Alive, OK maybe. But the rhetoric surrounding abortion ("a blob of cells"; "the products of conception"; "ending a pregnancy") is deeply evasive even of the basic fact that a human embryo is a human life. And try asking people who support legal abortion various questions about when brain waves can first be detected, when hands and feet form, and so forth, and you'll find out why the pro-life movement focuses so much on science rather than philosophy. Women considering abortion don't know this stuff. It can change their minds. One of my clients at the pregnancy center said that her views on whether she should abort were strongly affected just by the basic scientific hands-feet-eyes stuff; she was still undecided, but, as she said, "I didn't know..."

Sara was definitely discussing philosophy as well as science, of course, and I wouldn't draw the distinction between the two as sharply as she seemed to in her initial post; Julian's right that she is not relying solely on biology. But I think her main point was the one that Julian accepts--that in their rhetoric, the legal-abortion side has swung to notions of soul or consciousness etc., while the pro-life side has swung to ultrasound and embryology textbooks. That's because people often don't know what's in the textbooks, and because most people share with pro-lifers some important premises that Julian denies.

Julian: Russo "relies on the link between biology and the other things I think are important--moral agency, rationality, a subjective 'inner life,' reflective consciousness, etc. If human DNA very frequently produced creatures without these features, the link would vanish."

I'm not so sure. I'm not sure how we'd know, or how we'd think about these things, but here are two reasons to believe that Julian's off-base here: 1) In nations and time periods where infant mortality rates are very high, "human DNA" (by which Julian means an individual, developing human, and not, say, a foot or a cancer, which also would have human DNA) very frequently doesn't produce reflective adults, because the kids die before they attain the ability to understand language. If the link between body and human worth "vanishes" then, a mother (or father, or anybody really, unless you believe children are the parents' property before they attain reflective consciousness, in which case only the mother or father) could kill her children because lots of other children die. What?

2) I'll just repeat what The Rat said about this line of argument. Sorry to repeat, but I think she puts it better than I would: "Are we more and less human throughout the day as our brainwaves become more or less intense (i.e. obviously when we're awake rather than sleeping, but also if we're concentrating hard on Urdu poetry, or having sex, or playing a trombone)? If it's activity that defines us, why shouldn't the degrees of activity be accompanied also by relative degrees of 'humanness'?"

I'm not gonna get into the Chinese room stuff because I doubt I understand it. It's been a few years since I made myself think about mind/brain supervenience, and I don't really think I need to do it now.

Julian: "The frozen man is a placeholder for a recoverable self, a full set of life plans and values which would be lost if the body were destroyed. The crucial difference is that in the case of the fetus, we are dealing with a person-stage which is linked to none of those. Nobody's consciously formulated ends are frustrated by the destruction of the fetus, no prior flow of thought and desire is ended for good."

See, I don't get why this matters--why you need to have been reflectively conscious once before your moral worth jump-starts and people can't kill you. I dunno, I keep returning to a basic conviction that it is wrong to kill infants, and under Julian's philosophy it isn't. That's still true even when one considers his hypothetical about the cryogenically frozen guy revived as an amnesiac. (Maybe it's because I have such a supremely lousy memory, but I really don't see why it matters that Thawed Man wouldn't be able to remember his previous life, would have/develop a different personality, etc. I've done all kinds of junk I don't remember. It was still me who did it. I'd love to be able to say it wasn't--ever since elementary school, people have been getting on my case because I did some lousy or dumb thing I couldn't even recall doing--but wishing won't make it so.) Julian's philosophy here also relies on the fact that nobody (or, anyway, nobody who has power of life and death over the fetus) wants the fetus--nobody's plans or hopes or wishes are disrupted when the unborn child is killed. This is an interesting account of the real meaning of the slogan, "Every child a wanted child." The unwanted ones get snuffed. Again, as Julian notes later on in his post, there's no rationale here for distinguishing between infants and fetuses; abortion may be child abuse, but it's still okay. The future self of the fetus and/or infant is unimportant; only the fact that he has not yet been able to develop a past self matters. (I note that it would also be OK then to kill Mr. Frozen Amnesiac Man right after he regains consciousness--after all, you're not killing pre-frozen Bob Johnson, you're killing some worthless not-yet-rational blob of cells.)

Julian: "As a sort of corollary thought experiment, imagine a world in which our brains could be scanned and stored, making it possible at any time to recreate my precise psychophysical state as of, say, three minutes ago, in the event that I were killed. Murder would still, of course, involve a repugnant failure to treat people as ends, and possibly also the infliction of pain and fear. But I wonder, would we regard it as the heinous crime we now do? Or would we come to regard killers as, to be sure, thugs, but also as little more than an annoyance, eliminating a kind of covering ultimately not much more important than a favorite sweater? Would you look upon your impending death in that world with trepidation, or rather nonchalantly, confident that nothing truly important would be lost?"

I wonder at Julian's severe dissociation of mind and body. What's up with this? My experiences, my personality, all that I know and am have been decisively shaped by the fact that I'm incarnate. Matter matters; physicality is a part (not a whole) of my identity. (Evidence for the defense: Virtually all poetry, ever. As an aside, this poem is part of why I became Christian, because it forced me to pay attention to the thingness of things, the incarnate aspect of our lives, and the meaning and importance of that incarnation. But I digress. Really almost any poetry will do, and prose fiction even more so.) After death, I will be incomplete until I am resurrected bodily. (You don't need the theological conclusion to agree with the earlier stuff.)

I very much doubt that it would be possible, in this life, to reproduce my mind without my body (and Julian's hypothetical assumes much of its conclusion by assuming such reproduction is possible); even if such reproduction could be done, the thief who stole my body would have committed a crime much more terrible than Julian seems to acknowledge; and I for sure don't want to be making public policy decisions based on the hypothetical that if mind and body can be separated then we wouldn't mind the separation too much so killing infants and the unborn, who have not yet got mental "selves," is OK. That's a John Rawls what-we'd-choose-behind-the-veil-of-ignorance-like hypothetical, sheltering far more assumptions than I think the argument can bear.

Re Julian's claims about the slippery slope: He's right that slippery-slope arguments don't necessarily do all that much. I was writing my previous post under the assumption that he/most people considered the more accurate description of the Nazis, "They believed that some human lives were subhuman and unworthy of life," rather than, "They believed that some lives were unworthy of life" (i.e. including bug lives, bacterial lives, tiger lives, and assorted living whatnot), or, "They believed that some humans with complex inner lives and rationality were unworthy of life." Of course, it's not as if everyone the Nazis killed did have complex inner lives, rational self-reflectiveness, and the ability to appreciate the poetry of T.S. Eliot; one of their target groups was the mentally retarded, some but not all of whom were presumably severely retarded enough to lack the kind of consciousness Julian seems to require here. And when moral worth and human lives hang upon whether certain unwanted and disruptive humans are sufficiently self-reflective, I think we should expect a trend to define fewer and fewer unwanted humans as worthy of life. In fact, I think we've seen the descent down the slippery slope, from Roe to Stenberg to, well, infanticide.

I don't want to hammer too much on this, because I know that the Nazi analogy is not sufficient, and it doesn't address Julian's basic claims. I brought it up--and I defend it here--because I think it's a salutary reminder of how careful and mindful of history we should be when we begin defining human lives as unworthy of life. Similarly I would point out, in some discussions of abortion, the terrible legal reasoning used in all the Supreme Court's abortion cases; I know that doesn't mean abortion is wrong, and I would not present the Court's moral vacuity as proving that abortion is wrong, but reading the actual decisions was what made a good friend of mine begin to question his support of legal abortion. It's a way of bringing people down to earth, so that the abstruse (necessary, but abstruse) claims about personal identity and continuity and consciousness can be approached with an appropriate degree of intensity and care. (I'm not accusing Julian of lacking this care; I wrote the earlier post not just for Julian, of course, but for anyone who reads this blog and might be struck by a point that, while not directly relevant to Julian's post, did approach it from a side angle.) More on this down-to-earth-ness at the end of this post.

Random: The "deer in the forest" analogy was Sara's, not mine; I don't find it especially persuasive, basically for the reasons Julian lays out. It assumes more agnosticism or latent pro-life-ness on the subject of fetal moral worth than I had when I still supported legal abortion. For people who are more agnostic or latently pro-life than I was, the d. in the f. is relevant and compelling, but for me it's not.

In all honesty, I don't know that I have any responses or objections to make to an argument that accepts infanticide. I'm serious about that. There are certain points in argumentation when the premises clash too much, and all you can do is a) try to delineate what you think is going on in the arguments, and b) suggest places where the other person might experience the things that led you to accept the premises you hold. I don't know how well I've done that in these posts (and in my previous stuff about abortion, links to which are in the post below). I guess the only thing I can really say, in the end, is that this issue of abortion-->infanticide is not an abstract one, to be discussed mainly in philosophy-department faculty lounges; it's in our lives today. There's partial-birth abortion; there's the Born Alive Infant Protection Act; there's the desperate, dazed teen girls who stuff their babies in dumpsters. Ideas, as somebody once said, have consequences.
posted by Eve at 6:41 PM

 
THE COUNTERLIFE. I also read The Counterlife on my vacation--finished it on the plane from Heathrow to the airport that should still be named Idlewild. Philip Roth is a great novelist, and I strongly recommend this book. Especially to bloggers who are interested in Israel, and that seems to cover a lot of us, from Unqualified Offerings to the YalePundits. The Counterlife suffers from a degree of fatalism. That may sound odd if you know the strange, overlapping nature of the plot (which I won't reveal, but it jumps off the rails a few times in some really well-done metafictional ways). What I mean is that the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, sometimes seems to have an unrealistic view of the world as divided into the good people and the rest of us. (As with the book reviewed below, I have no clue to what extent the narrator's view is shared by his author.) For the good people, even the hardships of life are softened by the comforting knowledge that they are good and decent. For the rest of us, however much we might want to be good and decent, our desires and corruption make that decency unavailable to us. It's a metaphorically Calvinist view of the world, and Roth presents it with nuance and compassion; but I hate it. I am probably oversensitive to this particular kind of fatalism because I used to believe it very strongly. It was one way of explaining the strong sense of wrongness and alienation that I've felt pretty much all my life; it allowed me to build a livable identity on that alienation, accepting "wrongness" but not accepting the possibility of redemption. If you accept the possibility of redemption, you have to change. So throughout The Counterlife I found myself wincing as turns of phrase, both implicit and explicit, declared that change was impossible, that a life begun in alienation and (what I think Heidegger called?) thrown-ness must remain there, that some people are Good and others are Not.
posted by Eve at 4:56 PM

 
BECAUSE THERE ISN'T REALLY A REASON FOR IT TO EXIST, I'm not updating the Booklog ("stuff I've said about stuff I've read") site anymore--I'll just give you book reviews over on the main blog here. Old reviews are still there. Here's the first of two reviews of books I read while in England.

I read David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself because it was described (by National Review's John Derbyshire, I think) as "getting time travel right." I didn't expend the effort needed to verify that statement--the logical puzzles involved in time travel make my brain hurt--but certainly from a casual, vacation-type reading Derbyshire's praise seemed warranted. The book was lots of fun most of the time, a bizarre workout for the brain, a suggestive look at what one man does when he becomes the only person he knows who can travel in four dimensions.

But the narrator, the time traveler, was a truly disturbing character. It was difficult to tell whether Gerrold was aware of just how disturbing this guy really was (not that the author's obliviousness would make the book worse, necessarily). The narrator is lonely, alienated from others, and he becomes progressively more self-centered as he travels through time. Instead of folding himself, he seems more to collapse in on himself. There are some parts of the book where the damage caused by this self-centeredness is made explicit, but there is simply no alternative presented--there are virtually no characters except for different time-slices and "versions" of the narrator, and selfishness or the pursuit of personal happiness/pleasure is the only value system ever discussed or acted on in the novel. So you get the impression that although an excess of self-involvement is ultimately harmful, taking one's own pleasure as the standard of value is A-OK as long as you're careful--yes, you'll have regrets (the sections of the book dealing with the nature of irrevocable acts are really good), but basically selfishness is the way to go. The novel begins to feel claustrophobic, and ultimately pretty hopeless, which I don't think was the author's intention. (Could definitely be wrong here.) It's a quick and exciting read, and I recommend it to any sci-fi or time-travel fans, but in the end TMWFH feels like a parable about anti-eroticism, fear of difference, and personal collapse.
posted by Eve at 4:30 PM

 
some boys take a beautiful girl
and hide her away from the rest of the world
I want to be the one to walk in the sun
oh girls they want to watch blogs
oh girls just want to watch blogs...

New blog monitors the BBC for bias and various forms of journalistic turpitude. Link via The Edge of England's Sword.

Good posts on invading Iraq from Istanblog (an American in Turkey) and Unqualified Offerings. Scroll down on the latter link for more UO on the subject.

My brother-in-law's "Layperson's Reading List in American History."
posted by Eve at 4:17 PM

 
I'D RATHER HAVE A POPE WHO'S A HARLEM GLOBETROTTER than an archbishop who's a druid.
posted by Eve at 3:57 PM

 
DIALECTIC: Hitchens's essay (see below) has some great descriptions and defenses of dialectic as a way of approaching the study of history. He doesn't talk about the conditions that make dialectic easier or harder; so I guess I'll have to. Here's my incomplete list of stuff a class should have if it wants the most robust, personal, rigorous dialectical approach to history:

1) Core knowledge. Students who don't know what they're talking about can't challenge their own beliefs, since they barely know what their own beliefs are. (Cf. my post below on vouchers/religious education--which I promise I'm coming back to!) Core knowledge--who was Alexander Hamilton, which were the original 13 colonies, how much did American colonists actually pay the taxman, what was the Triangle Trade, etc. etc.--forms the basis of any discussion of history. It's easy to get bogged down in these facts, letting them obscure rather than illuminate; but if you don't have them, there's no point in trying to get a discussion started at all. That doesn't mean the "fun stuff" of dispute and questioning has to wait until you've spent weeks memorizing names and dates--core knowledge should come naturally as you move deeper and deeper into the problems and questions native to the period under study. The more core knowledge you accumulate, the more difficult or vigorous your questioning becomes.

2) Trust. Students who feel like they will be laughed at, dismissed, or accused will not speak honestly and will not question themselves or their classmates. Students need to know one another; some understanding of one another's backgrounds and beliefs is necessary. I don't have any huge insights on how to foster that kind of trust, but generosity and openness on the part of the teacher is really helpful--teachers who are up-front about their own beliefs, or who unobtrusively discuss their own experiences where relevant, can turn a tentative and repressed classroom into a symposium-like group of investigative and honest companions. Two quick examples: a high-school Spanish class in which our teacher occasionally talked about why her family fled Cuba; a college philosophy professor who at one point revealed that reading Augustine was what had led him to take up a life of philosophical questing (he was basically a Platonist, I think); and a college religious history class in which the professor made clear what he thought about the Catholic Church's relationship with Jews during the Middle Ages, avoiding easy or comforting conclusions and speaking his mind whether it disconcerted Catholics or those who sought to demonize the medieval Church. Counterexample, showing how a teacher can foster mistrust due to the way he revealed his own beliefs: a college biology professor who interrupted class to rant about how evolution proved atheism. The watchwords here, I think, are: up-front; relevant; attentive; and generous. The first and fourth are the most important. The bio prof muffed the last three. Students have to be willing to put themselves and their beliefs on the line, and professors can be great role models in that difficult task.

3) Comradeship, or a sense of shared purpose. This can be more or less specific. I wrote a while back about how exciting it was to be in a class on Christian doctrine in which I was (to my knowledge) the only non-Christian; we all had an invigorating and challenging sense that understanding what we were learning was absolutely essential for the rest of our lives, so we needed to work hard and risk a lot. Other classes can be equally intense and truth-seeking when there's much more diversity of belief; what doesn't work is a classroom in which some students, because they disagree radically with the professor or the rest of the class, insist on keeping the discussion at an elementary level, rehashing the same fundamental problems over and over rather than letting the class move on to questions that require some degree of shared assumptions. For example, we could never have discussed Anselm's theory of the Incarnation (which turned out to be one of the major reasons I became Christian) if we'd spent the whole semester on whether the existence of God was possible. Students who try to disrupt the class's forward motion are sometimes helpful dissidents or questioners; sometimes, though, they just don't want the class to be able to discuss anything other than their own pet obsessions. In some cases, they need to be--not to put too fine a point on it--suppressed, like the hamster (gerbil?) in Alice in Wonderland.

4) Authority. Somebody has to be able to redirect conversation when it veers into irrelevancy; someone has to be able to provide corrections when people get stuff plain wrong; someone has to provide structure; someone has to have the responsibility for injecting new topics and problems into the class. Someone has to be respected enough to play peacemaker and judge when feelings are injured (judge, because either the injurer is off-base, or the injured party is being too sensitive--or both, of course). A classroom can't work like a group of friends; the personal ties aren't strong enough, and the group is usually too large to handle the inevitable differences in interest level and personality type without some center of authority.
posted by Eve at 3:51 PM

 
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. Here's some stuff I wrote a while ago about dissent and the study of history: "Today there are all kinds of creeds that teach us that ...[s]tudents do not need “fifth-century eyes,” because the Western past is irrelevant to them. Although they attend a Western university, and therefore in some sense must be within the Western tradition, they deride theories of education which emphasize that tradition as outdated at best and racist at worst. Dido of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo are irrelevant because they’re different from us—their cities are gone and their bones are dust. At a rally last year to reform Yale’s curriculum, a student held up a sign reading, 'MY EDUCATION SHOULD REFLECT MY EXPERIENCE.' This is a direct attack on difference, on the notion that an education ought to make us greater than just an accumulation of our experiences. If we already know everything that needs knowing, if our experience gives us sufficient help in understanding the world, why read anything at all? Du Bois and de Beauvoir fail the experience test too, even if Socrates fails it more spectacularly.

"It’s odd that this stance claims to be a critical one. In removing the encounter with unassailable difference which education ought to provide, we remove any grounds for evaluating the present day. If students don’t have “fifth-century eyes” or their equivalent, the only other option is twentieth-century eyes. Without a knowledge of the alternatives, and a knowledge of how we got where we are, our criticism of American democracy, capitalism or anything else must necessarily be without basis. Any arguments we make will be irresponsible because they are uninformed."

Full article, which I like a lot, is here.
posted by Eve at 3:01 PM

 
THE GREAT MAN THEORY OF HISTORY. The ideological conflict between the "great man" school of history education and the "social history" school does nobody any good. The two "sides" are chosen primarily due to aesthetic sympathies, as far as I can tell--great man history, focused on certain towering individuals, feels individualistic and almost monarchic, while social history, focused on ordinary folks, feels communal and close to the People-with-a-capital-P. Social history can, but need not, sway into vaguely socialist territory, in which the Great Men are the capitalists or industrialists--so a social history of the transcontinental railroad would downplay Stanford in favor of the laborers who lost their lives building his dream. In that form of social history, the People can become stereotyped as the eternal victims of the upper classes. The "winners," who wrote the history books in years past, are identified with the captains of industry. Social history really doesn't need to assume that kind of antagonism, though; it's just as possible to do a social history of midwestern entrepreneurs, abolitionists' or slaveholders' wives, children of industrial tycoons, or Mafiosi. The point is that social history focuses on the group and the ordinary guy, whereas great man history focuses on the individual and the extraordinary.

In my experience, though, these two schools shouldn't really be in conflict. In general, great-man history is primary insofar as the great men lay out the rhetoric and philosophical aims of their time--they do most, though not all, of the work of framing the questions that we need to ask ourselves. So I would teach kids great-man-style history first.

But students will gain a deeper understanding of the great men themselves--and a much sharper sense of what the stakes are in historical debates--if they also study the lives of ordinary people. There's no need for the study of ordinary people to be collectivist or anti-individual: The best social histories are illuminating precisely because they show distinctive, struggling human personalities trying to work within the historical circumstances that fence them around and define their choices. (Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made is a great example of this.) Moreover, social history often includes descriptions of "unknowns," people you've never heard of, who performed truly heroic acts.

We tend to underestimate the importance of rhetoric and inspiration--not necessarily what the people need, but what the people love--in history, and great-man-style history places rhetoric and inspiration in the spotlight. We learn the Founding of the USA through the lives and especially the writings of the Founders; we learn slavery through the almost archetypal figures of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. Great-man history often reads something like an Ayn Rand novel (only more philosophically complex and realistic...), in which philosophical passions are as character-defining as cultural trends or self-interest. It's only once students understand how those archetypal figures thought and spoke, in my experience, that they can really grapple with the effects of leaders' rhetoric and actions on ordinary people. But, as I said above, learning about those effects on ordinary people deepens our understanding of the leaders themselves. Without the framing and philosophical edge provided by great-man history, social history can often seem (especially to students in intro courses) like a chaotic morass of random factoids, irrelevant to the present day. Without the everyday concreteness of social history, great-man history can become remote and simplistic.

If I were designing an intro course, I think my solution would be to teach in a mostly great-man-centered fashion (not that it's necessary or even wise to think in these terms, since as I'm arguing, the great-man/social-history dichotomy is exaggerated), but dip into social history both to illuminate the effects of leaders on everybody else, and to show students how to apply philosophical concepts and rhetorical tropes to everyday life. What did John Randolph's formulation, "I am a conservative--I love liberty, I hate equality," mean to the people who heard it? How did that distinction play out through the twentieth century? How did understandings of liberty change; why; and where did this rhetoric pop up where you might not expect it--for example, in understandings of marriage? Stuff like that. I doubt that's the world's greatest example, but really, if you read any good biography you'll get some sense of how non-famous people responded to and were shaped by the words and actions of the biography's subject.
posted by Eve at 1:24 PM

 
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON U.S. HISTORY EDUCATION. I'm going to post a bunch of thoughts related to this excellent essay, but first, here are some quotes to get you excited: It was time for one of those full-dress cultural sham-fights, like the earlier one about core values and "Western Civ," that animate the op-ed pages every decade or so. We need new standards! Alas, with no galvanizing Sputnik to unlock real money and talent, and with no encircling foe to spark another rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance, federal monies went to subsidize a rather pallid and prolix set of "guidelines" that might as well have been marketed as "American History--Making a Difference Since 1776" or "Our Past--Serving the Community with Pride." As with many such trite labelings, however, the small print should have carried the dire admonition "Contents Under Pressure" or "Some Assembly Required."

...In 1950, Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison jointly produced a textbook entitled The Growth of the American Republic. Describing the antebellum state of affairs below the Mason-Dixon line, they wrote:

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears,
there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other
class in the South from its "peculiar institution."

I would not, personally, wish to be deprived of this excerpt when teaching American history. Essay questions and classroom discussions might inquire: (1) What "reason to believe"? (2) Why were abolitionists so moved? (3) What gave rise to the notable coinage "peculiar institution"? (4) Why did both camps believe they had biblical authority? and (5) What has changed in America since 1950 to stop distinguished Yankee historians from employing the term "Sambo"? I think any competent teacher would and should have been able to cope with any "hurt feelings" that might arise in or out of the classroom. (If there were no such feelings, then something other than history would be the subject being taught.) But as matters stand, we have Southern textbooks that euphemize the Confederacy, Northern ones that scant the whole unpleasant subject, and a recent national debate on a possible presidential "apology" for slavery so etiolated that hardly anyone thought to ask whether President Lincoln's Second Inaugural had not in fact contained a rather finely worded section on the subject, dealing not just with apology for slavery but with real-time revenge for it.

....This is how the Greeks, more honored by invocation than by emulation, conceived the theory and practice of teaching by dialectics. What was the influence of Pericles' funeral oration on the Gettysburg Address? This engrossing question, open to any mind of average ability, cannot even be asked if, as was recently discovered, the majority of America's schoolchildren don't know in which century the Civil War was fought. But if an appreciation of history as a continuous argument, and not a dull Whiggish series of "problems resolved," can be instilled, then a student entering college might be ready to attempt the pleasurable exercises of a reasonably trained mind. False and emptily moralistic trails, such as "Are We Too Eurocentric?" or "Was Columbus Ecologically Friendly?" can be abandoned in favor of the real thing. Why did Basil Davidson have to refute Hegel in order to show that Africa had a history? Was Bertrand Russell right in saying that the disappearance of North American Indians was no tragedy? And why was he banned from teaching in the United States? Had Russell read Bartolome de Las Casas, first historian of the Americas, who doubted that the "discovery" had been a good thing? Why did the first historian of the Americas have a Spanish name? Why do New Yorkers no longer speak Dutch, and who proposed that the official language of the United States be German? Was the Civil War really fought to free the slaves? Why are Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" unthinkable without Lenin's dissolution of the Constituent Assembly? Was the Great Depression caused by too little government intervention or too much? Why is the largest military base in Cuba an American one? Why is it possible to swim from America to Russia?

Each of these questions admits of several answers, many of them equally "valid."

More on this presently--but there's much more good stuff in the essay, so click that link!
posted by Eve at 12:45 PM

 
"I'm no Humphrey Bogart. He gets slugged and he's ready for action; I get slugged and I'm ready for pickling."
–Robert Gist, "Scene of the Crime"
posted by Eve at 12:37 PM

 
LOVE IN THE EASTERN WORLD: Great email from H.D. Miller. I only note that he's taking issue with Denis de Rougemont's narrow focus and to some extent his scholarship--not the philosophical conclusions de R. draws.

Allow me for a minute to be a quiet voice in the wilderness calling out against de Rougemont's version of the birth of Romantic love.

In many respects, de Rougemont's book is outdated. First up, most people, including the OED, accept that the Troubadours were most profoundly influenced by Muslim singers and poets, including slave girls trained as singers and poets who were brought into France as booty (ha!) from various campaigns in al-Andalus. (I mention the OED because they recently settled on the Arabic word "taraba" "to sing" as the root of the French word which became the English word troubadour. This settled a long standing controversy over the origins.)

Second, I've always thought that de Rougemont didn't pay enough attention to secular Arabic poetry, which is filled almost entirely
with themes of lost, or unattainable love. A very high percentage of pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabic poems start with the poet racing across the desert on a camel, riding through the night and arriving at just-deserted camp site, one his beloved and her family have abandoned only an hour before. As he kicks through the still warm ashes of the camp fire, he weeps bitter tears of loss and longing. He has no idea where she's gone, and even if he did, her family would seek to keep them apart. Slave girls were trained to sing songs that would have treated this theme extensively.

De Rougemont focuses instead on Arabic mystic poetry, much of which is too late, or too obscure to have caused the wider influence of the secular Arabic poetry. He does, however, rightly cite Rumi, whose Leila and Majnun poems are the stuff of romantic dreams. (For proof of this check out the liner notes to Clapton's "Leila" sometime. He gives Rumi credit for lyrics on another song on that album, and of course, the name "Leila".)

Also, another giant problem I have with de Rougemont is that he gives only a single mention to Ibn Hazm on the topic of love. That's like trying to talk about the history of free market economics and not mention the name Adam Smith. Ibn Hazm's greatest work, Tawq al-Hamammah, "The Neck Ring of the Dove", written in the first half of the 11th century, is the earliest book devoted solely to the topic of romantic love. One of the reasons de Rougemont's book is considered outdated is because it was written before much of the current scholarship on Ibn Hazm was produced.

By the way, I do have a dog in this fight, since some of my translations of Ibn Hazm's "Tawq al-Hamammah" have been published, most recently in Maria Rosa Menocal's "The Ornament of the World", which is a good place to find a more current opinion on this topic. Better on the topic is her book "Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric." I highly recommend it. (It's where that Leila observation comes from.)
posted by Eve at 6:28 PM

 
SHARK JUMPING IN HISTORY: So you all have sent many awesome replies to my request for Historical Shark-Jumps. Here are your comments.

First, from Tom Hoopes, a better definition of jumping the shark than the one I provided (although since this definition also narrows the field of play, you'll notice that it's pretty much discarded in what follows. Honored more in the breach than in the observance and all that): 1) A shark-jump must be an attempt to salvage oneself that goes awry, not merely a dumb move. (Joe McCarthy's list was his shark-jump; calling the senate a "handmaiden of communism" wasn't.)

2) A shark-jump must epitomize the wrong-headedness that leads to its doer's demise; it can't be a plausible but failed attempt.(ie ... moving the capital to Richmond was a shark-jump for the Confederacy ... but not the battle of Gettysburg.)

But then I suppose I'm a rigorist on the question ...

From James Christiansen: The ends of eras is a great topic. Let's start with Sasha Volokh's off-the-cuff remark about whether "A Man for All Seasons" is set in the Middle Ages. One possible answer: all but the film's last 15 minutes. The Middle Ages in England ended in June of 1535 with the execution, two weeks before More's, of John Fisher, the only effective opponent of the English Reformation. The traditional date of 1485 really just marks the transition from an inept medieval dynasty to an effective one. The Tudors did things in traditional medieval fashion until the advent of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell, who in addition to decapitating saints reorganized English administration and, still more important, dissolved the monasteries, a terrific change socially and economically. So the 1530's are indeed the hinge decade for English history.

Maybe for all of Europe. The Middle Ages last at least until Contarini's failure to conciliate the Protestants at the council of Ratisbon in 1540. By then St. Ignatius has founded the Jesuits, an immense step not just for the progress of the Counter-Reformation but for the whole future of Europe, especially its schools.

Of course, it's not exactly radical to contend that the Reformation ended the Middle Ages. So let's try a more interesting date -- say, 1806, Napoleon's dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. That's not quite as frivolous as it sounds. One can argue seriously that the supposed innovations of the early modern period -- Descartes, rise of nation-states, even the Reformation -- pale in comparison with (1)
the Industrial Revolution, (2) the appearance of romantic individualism as an alternative to traditional religion [why romanticism but not Enlightenment rationalism a la Voltaire? Is it just because nationalism is being considered one of the core constitutive elements of modernity in this reading, and nationalism is more romantic than rationalism?--ed.], (3) the consolidation and rationalization of European states, and (4) the growth of nationalism. By 1806, the Industrial Revolution is in full swing in England and beginning elsewhere, and Napoleon has established himself as the perfect romantic hero. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire is the symbolic beginning of the process leading to German and Italian unification and the fall of the Hapsburgs. This process is more significant than the early-modern development; in 1789, France and England were not vastly more centralized and "national" than they had been in 1517 or even 1215, and Germany and Italy were arguably even less so.

There's also a pretty clear break in the intellectual world. Calvin, Descartes, Bossuet, and maybe even Hume are all more like Aquinas and Occam than any of them is like Feuerbach or Vico or Hegel.

Three hundred years from now, all this will be a lot clearer, and adjustments will be made. When I was in college, there was a course called "Revolutionary Europe, 1648-1848"; someday we'll have, "Early Modern Europe, 1789-1989". (Historians will probably prefer 1789 to 1806 as a more dramatic date, but to me the fact of the revolution is ultimately less significant than its fulfillment/betrayal in
romantic autocracy.)

But when do the Middle Ages start? It would be convenient to keep them at a thousand years, so maybe we can push them forward to, say, 751, when Pepin the Short deposes the last of the feeble Merovingians. But that attaches all of the barbarian interlude to
ancient history, which is counter to our usual notions. The traditional date, 476, is a lousy choice -- the deposition of the Western emperor didn't mean much because the western emperor hadn't meant much for a while. Maybe a better choice is the Lombard
invasion of Italy in 568, which pretty much establishes that the barbarians are here to stay. Up till then, right through Justinian's reconquest, you could think they were just a phase. People say the reconquest was doomed, but everything that fails seems doomed in retrospect, and it doubtless looked very different to Justinian.

But 568 isn't a real fun date, so let's go with 529, the traditional date of St. Benedict's founding of Monte Cassino, which, by a wonderful and suggestive coincidence, is also the date Justinian closed Plato's Academy.

OK, when did the Middle Ages jump the shark? Earliest possible date: 1215, a memorable year, fourth Lateran council and Magna Carta. But the slope still seems to be definitely upward through most of the thirteenth century. Maybe we jump the shark with Boniface VIII's promulgation of Unam Sanctam in 1302, and the problems that follow, but the decline seems to have set in a little earlier. Probably it's clear we're moving into a decline phase with failure of the Seventh Crusade in 1270 upon the death of St. Louis, probably the last man really imbued with the confidence of the High Middle Ages.

As for Rome, you got two candidates for the shark-jumping date. The early one is A.D. 8, battle of the Teutoburg Forest, after which the Romans never really made a serious attempt to cross the Rhine. At the time, of course, there was a boy growing up in Palestine who would make something of splash. That's very early in the history of the Empire itself, but arguably the high-water mark for the Republic/Empire. A later and less interesting date is Gibbon's, 180, the death of Marcus Aurelius and the accession of the first of a lot of scumbags.

From Michael King: I have to enter this, since it seems like Eastern Christianity gets shorted by many blogs (actually, I'm a former Orthodox who's just converted to Catholicism--right now I'm technically Byzantine Catholic, while I wait for the paperwork to officially become Roman).

The Middle Ages started when the Roman Emperor Heraclius was defeated by the Muslims at the Yarmuk River in Syria (I think that's right) sometime in the 630s--I guess my equivocation explains why I've decided to be an econ rather than history grad student.

After Islam conquered the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in the mid-seventh century, (Egypt, North Africa, the Middle East) and made significant inroads into modern Turkey, then the break with the classical world is lost. Islam in many different ways helps the schism between the Eastern Churches and Rome. Now the Roman Empire is only called that in theory--no more will there be Latin speaking Emperors like Justinian with realisitic goals to (re) conquer Europe.

Except for bigoted Byzantine scholars who like to point out that, yes, technically, the Roman Empire really fell on May 29, 1453, and that Byzantium was still Pax Romana, and so much more sophisticated than the West, etc, the state with its capital at Constantinople really becomes a Greek mini-Empire, with a significantly heterogeneous population (at least until decline sets in in the 11 century). In other words, Byzantium now overtakes the Roman Empire, and turns into a mere regional power, that in no way can be realistically called "The Roman Empire."

The political cleavage of Byzantium from its Roman roots, and away from the west, has momentous consequences, and is really from where I start the Middle Ages.

From Jane Wangersky: For me, the Cold War ended the day I saw the headline in front of a newsdealer's in The Hague: HET MUUR GAAT NEER, which even I could tell is Dutch for "THE WALL COMES DOWN". Just months earlier (before getting thrown out of the Air Force) I'd been stationed in what was then West Germany, crawling into my chem suit and gas mask every few weeks to pretend the Soviets were attacking, because we had to be ready for it -- we were "the
tip of the sword". So now it was all just over?

When did the Cold War jump the shark? At the court-martial of a certain American soldier who got his German girlfriend to smuggle him into East Germany in the trunk of her car so he could defect. Eventually they got all the way to Russia, grew sick of life there -- surprise! -- and crawled on back, where he hired a civilian lawyer who whined about anti-Soviet prejudice. He was sentenced to -- a bad-conduct discharge and time served.

Didn't know that still bothered me.

I don't know about you all, but I'm totally fascinated by these questions and responses. So please, fight about the stuff posted here already, or send in your own thoughts on when various historical eras or institutions began, ended, or jumped shark. Bonus points if you can find historical examples of the categories used on jumptheshark.com (e.g. "They Did It!").

And I'll post contest results TOMORROW, so if you have any funny thoughts about Elvis Costello or the 2002 presidential race get 'em in pronto. You'll also get a real mailbag, with, like, replies and stuff, tomorrow.
posted by Eve at 6:24 PM

 
OF WHAT DID THE DUUMVIRATE DELIBERATE DURING THEIR ITINERARY?: (Sorry. It's the only line from Ulysses I can do off the top of my head besides the idiotic stuff about the horsehooves tingaling, linglingling, prrfffttt, aaaaan.) Here's what Ratty and I did in England.

SUNDAY. Brompton Oratory. Many thanks to everyone who suggested this. We slept like two great sleeping things, so I missed the ornate Latin Mass, but the priest was deeply reverent even in the clipped and somewhat curt afternoon Mass.

MONDAY. Shopping for used books on Charing Cross Road--I bought The Glass Bead Game.

Watched "The Mousetrap." It's a bizarre play. Difficult to do well, I'd imagine, and the current cast (it's the longest-running play in the world or some such) didn't make it work. That's not entirely their fault, since the plot involves several of Agatha Christie's recurring themes but doesn't really tie them together. The plot hinges on a truly terrible act--a child dies of neglect--and at the very end there's a wheels-screeching-around-the-corner moment when suddenly the plot does a 180 from tragedy to comedy, without actually coming to terms with the tragic elements Christie's introduced. Christie's belief in the power of genetic inheritance is briefly on display--she refers to the belief that people follow their parents often throughout her books, although she also discards that idea whenever it gets in the way of the mystery. "The Mousetrap" also touches on her view of how England changed after World War II--the dislocations, the strangers, the way there would be people in your village whose histories you didn't know at all. Her best book for this is probably The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side, which is one of her best overall. (My votes: Toward Zero, The Hollow, Ten Little Indians, Death on the Nile, Murder in Retrospect, Curtain, The Mirror Crack'd..., The Labors of Hercules. Absent in the Spring, a non-mystery written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, is also really good--a heartbreaking story of a woman's confrontation with her own failures and hatefulness.)

TUESDAY. The Imperial War Museum, which was phenomenal. I'll post about that separately, possibly tomorrow.

WEDNESDAY. The Victoria and Albert Museum, that fantastic attic. I roamed the halls of locks and keys, medieval accouterments, and random artifacts, practically purring with pleasure. The Hall of Casts was terrific--plaster casts of scores of famous, imposing, or merely beautiful works of art. You got your Michelangelo David, you got your Trajan's Column, all in one place where people who couldn't afford to travel could come and see the world. It was much like museums' Internet sites in that respect. There was also a German church door that reminded me of George Herbert's poems--the left-hand side told the story of the Creation, the Fall, and the murder of Abel, descending; then, ascending the right-hand side, the Gospels, from the Annunciation to either the Resurrection or the Ascension (I forget which). Very very cool.

THURSDAY. The Tate Modern, home of the cans of artist excrement you've read so much about. An astonishingly ugly building. A small Giacommetti collection. A collection of grim Soviet propaganda posters--like the evil twins of the WWII British propaganda posters from the Imperial War Museum. The same themes were sounded, only instead of using charm, humor, or sentiment, the posters simply used brute force. The English had, "Careless talk costs lives!" and, "Keep mum--she's not so dumb!"; the Soviets, "DON'T TALK." The final poster was post-Communist (maybe Czech? Ukrainian?), and simply said, "THE END."

The Clink, a prison museum. Not at all informative or well-designed; not really worth it at the price. (Most of the tourist-y things we did were free.) I did learn that Henry VIII legalized boiling in oil.

We tried to find a place to eat in Southwark on a Thursday afternoon. Apparently this is a mistake.

The Cabinet War Rooms--where Churchill and co. plotted to save England from Nazi invasion. Basically a shrine to Churchill, which is A-OK by me. The little audioguides were very useful and fun--you got to hear stories from secretaries detailing how demanding Churchill was (and they got to see a lot of him, since many of the secretaries would stay overnight in the underground bunker day after day), and an aide described the great man's hilarious reaction to war news. Churchill started the morning by working in bed, and he would have the day's news brought to him there. If he read good news, he would bounce up and down happily; if the news was bad, he would slowly sink down into the bedclothes, pulling them up toward his head a little more with each lousy piece of information, until you could only see his eyes. I bought several copies of a photograph of Churchill "inspecting a tommy gun"--he looks totally hardcore.

Then we sat in the English equivalent of Lafayette Park--the park opposite Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Nearby, there were statues of Lincoln and (again) Churchill, the latter wrapped in an enormous and windswept coat.

FRIDAY. We visited Highgate Cemetery and left, on Karl Marx's grave, a picture of Hayek with the legend, "VIVA HAYEK! The Committee for Freedom, Yale University, United States of America, August 2002."

Then to Kew Gardens. We admired cacti. There's a carnivorous plants room there! And a piranha and two excellent, flowing stingrays.

SATURDAY. The Portobello Road market. Hectic fun, lots of music from boomboxes.

The Museum of London. Disorganized and not that exciting. But I did see an ancient Roman bikini (really). And learned this totally fascinating fact: On Holy Thursday, the King of England would wash the feet of the poor--one poor person per year of the king's age. The last king to perform this Christian custom? William IV.

Harrods, where the Rat shopped while I had two suckaos (indescribably good--you know how H.P. Lovecraft gets all bizarre and un-specific when he tries to talk about the nameless horrors of Zoggoth or whatever? Well, for "horror" read "ecstasy," and you've got me plunging my muzzle into a suckao).

SUNDAY. Brompton again, this time with its lovely and intense choir; then the airport.

Get the Rat's take on things here (and scroll down).
posted by Eve at 6:07 PM

 
"WHEN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK IN NEW YORK, IT'S STILL 1938 IN LONDON" (Bette Midler): General thoughts on England as vs. America.

1) Midler isn't right, of course, but she isn't entirely wrong either. Both the Rat and I found that England felt weirdly Orwellian--not because of the "CCTV in Operation" spycam signs posted all over the place, but because of the bizarre sense of just-like-in-the-books English life shoved up against the year 2002. Red-faced, white-haired old guys hawking fruit, beer glass wedged between the strawberry boxes; and, on the lamppost, a wheatpasted sign calling Londoners to Rally for Islam. England did feel older. This may well be the result of our own expectations coloring our experience; I can't tell.

2) Related: On this trip I got to find out what my mental furniture looks like. Apparently my mental picture of England is composed of, in about this order: Michael de Larrabeiti, George Orwell, Diana Wynne Jones, Lee Miller's "Grim Glory" series, Helen Cresswell, the Rolling Stones, the Clash, Huggy Bear, and (of course) Paddington Bear.

3) The houses were almost all white, with some dark houses; bright color was rare. Perhaps this is different in immigrant neighborhoods? It was strikingly non-U.S.-like.

4) Londoners have walled-off or hedged-off gardens instead of big green "My lawn is my manhood!!!" King of the Hill-style lawns. The gardens are much prettier and more individual than lawns, but also much more standoffish. The contrast was almost too easy.

5) Traditional English breakfasts are delicious. Oh yes. Fat, salt, sweetness--mmmmmmmmm... Very Southern/soul-food-like.

6) Sometimes it seemed like half of London was made up of museums commemorating Horrors of English History. Makes you see the bright side of American youthfulness/amnesia. London did not seem nearly as parasitic on its past as, say, Athens; nonetheless I think it would be depressing to live in a city with (at least!) four major memorials to historic local vileness. (The Clink; the Tower of London; the London Dungeon; Madame Tussaud's...)

7) The news on the newsstands seemed very... 1990s. Shark-attack stuff. I became acclimated to hideous, grand-scale news--attack, war, chaos, pederastic priests, more war, "a crisis in American capitalism," etc. etc., and it was bizarre to go back to local murders and similar Chandra-like news. That news isn't trivial in any way--Chandra Levy's death wasn't trivial either, and it was grim watching thoughtless commentators use her and her Congressional connection as a symbol of "meaningless" pre-9/11 news stories--but the British newspapers didn't have the same perpetual crisis feeling that you get from walking past a row of American newspaper kiosks these days. This general trend in British news was interrupted at the tail end of our visit by news that London hospitals were stockpiling radiation pills.

8) As if to contradict the above, security was much tighter in London than in D.C. or New York City. There were signs posted all over the Underground instructing people in how to deal with suspicious packages; I saw a traveler get told off by a station attendant for leaving his baggage for a moment; there were no trashcans in any of the stations, which I assume is an anti-bomb measure (I think some DC stations have also removed their trashcans--am I right?--and if so, it's hard to imagine that our canless stations are as clean as the Tube stations). Before 9/11, there was the IRA.

9) In a single Borders Books outlet, you could purchase the following magazines: Class War; Class Struggle; and the Socialist Review, not to mention numerous less explicitly pinko publications. Very very not-like-home.
posted by Eve at 4:39 PM

 
Well she got her daddy's car
And she's cruisin' through the blogwatcher stand now
Seems she forgot all about the library
Like she told her old man now
And with the radio blasting
Goes cruising just as fast as she can now...

Blogadder: Reply to The Rat re marriage. Expect more from our rodent friend presently.

Russo's Republic: Sara's speech on abortion. UPDATE: Julian Sanchez rebuts Russo here; her reply is here. My comments: 1) Can't every single one of Sanchez's claims about the fetus be applied exactly as well to the newborn?

2) One of the most troubling aspects of the current abortion debate is the belief that all personhood is defined relatively--in other words, there is no "self," there is no "person," but we use these words as conventions to denote relationships between people. Thus I can apply, withhold, or withdraw personhood or personal identity from the child (/Blob Of Cells) I carry depending on how I feel about it (...her) or how it (or he) is treated socially. I've said before that the entire history of the 20th century should make us shudder at this kind of reasoning--and not a philosophically-unsupported Kass shudder either! I'm not clear on where Sanchez's argument differs from this relative-personhood view. (It may well differ, but he hasn't really made clear his own understanding of what creates or fixes an identity. He's suggested rationality or the presence of "mind"; but surely those two terms are as open to skepticism and controversy as the terms "self" and "person." How much mind is enough? How much "abstract symbol manipulation"?)

3) You can get my basic takes on abortion and personhood here, here, and here--click here to skip to the bit about brainwaves. Sorry for the repetitive quoting from Maggie Gallagher--she puts things really well, and since I've written about the same subjects in many different places, some of the same quotations and phrasings will come up several times.

4) Russo's sketching a little on the basis of ethics, but whatever, I'm not convinced that her hemi-semi-agnosticism should really prevent Sanchez from agreeing with her.

Amy Welborn: Great stuff in the comments on this post--including these fun anecdotes from a priest: "Reminds me of the best line from my seminary days: professor says, 'if they found the bones of Jesus, it wouldn't affect my faith...' To which one of the seminarians responded, 'if they found the bones of Jesus, I'd go out and get laid.'" And from the same priest: "Another of his great lines: the same professor, 'Of course Jesus wouldn't have gone around claiming to be God... that would have been heresy to the Jews.' To which our intrepid seminarian responded, 'Yeah, they probably would have crucified him.'"

Also, a random shout-out to Sandra Miesel. I love her no-nonsense, up-front takedowns of sketchy miracles and much other Catholic wishful thinking. Here's an excellent article she wrote on the witch burnings in Europe. Apparently she also writes science fiction, but I haven't read any yet. She rocks; get a blog, Miesel!
posted by Eve at 2:01 PM

 
"Lili, a sizzler at the Fol-de-Rol. A figure like champagne and a heart like the cork."
–Robert Gist, "Scene of the Crime"
posted by Eve at 1:19 PM