I watched my blog in Newport Pagnell....

(I think I've done that one before.)

Amy Welborn: I'm not done yet with this post, and don't expect I'll even make a sortie on the comments; but I'll be thinking about it for a while....

...The question that has bugged me for ages is different from that I hear asked by others. Others try to rebuild, to recreate that old sense of Catholic culture--which is admirable, but is it possible? No, what I wonder about is how do we reconstruct Catholic life in the catacombs? By that I don't mean the extremes of persecution, but as Christians living in a culture that is really inimical to the Gospel, at every point, to the celebration of materialism, consumerism, economic success, personal appearance, to the rank hostility to life and the commoditization of sex. Christianity was born and flourished in the Roman Empire, in conditions hostile to it. There was no "Catholic culture" as we associate it with Christendom on. I'm thinking it is more useful and to the point to imagine myself, as a Christian, living in the time of Domitian, than thinking that the answer is to try to recreated 13th century Italy. As I've written before, as the witness of Ireland and Quebec show so painfully--is there a shadow to "Catholic culture"? As there is a shadow to everything?

much more

Balkinization: Marty Lederman vs John Yoo:

...Why was this the one point of absolute consensus within the Administration? Isn't that odd -- that the easy point of unanimous agreement was to keep our detention operations outside of our own nation, above all else? It's not as if these captured persons were all detained where they were found. No -- they were shipped halfway around the world; but instead of, say, detaining them at a military brig in South Carolina, which would have been the logical plan, the planes and ships made a sharp left turn at the last moment so that these folks would disembark in Cuba, which is less than 100 miles from the Florida coast.

The reason, of course, for such a resolute determination to keep the detainees offshore, was (as John quite candidly writes) because the lawyers assumed GTMO was a law-free zone -- a location impervious to any judicial oversight. And of course, in light of what we were doing to these detainees, there was damn good reason to keep our operations out the plain sight of any courts, lest they have the temerity to insist that the Administration follow the law.

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and Brian Tamanaha tells a story I am linking because it interests me, not because I endorse any underlying purposes or assumptions (whereas I think I do endorse the Lederman post in content and purpose--I don't know nearly enough to do more than find the Tamanaha post interesting):

...I am able to recount the details of this event because the assistant federal public defender was me, handling the case in the mid-1980s. To recap the hard-to-believe basics of the situation: in the middle of a trial, I was charged with three criminal offenses on the grounds that the questions I asked in open court prompted the witnesses to disclose classified information. At the time of these supposed offenses, the prosecutors objected neither to the questions nor the answers, and neither they nor the judge gave any indication of a problem until the moment the charges were lodged against me. So there I was, still handling the ongoing trial, but now also facing my own trial to begin 30 days after the current trial was over. Despite my compromised position, I was not allowed by the judge to withdraw as defense counsel, and our request for a mistrial in the ongoing case was denied. I continued to examine witnesses from the CIA, but now with pending criminal charges hanging over my head, and a real prospect of more to come.

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For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction. It preserves mystery for the human mind.
--The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (much more from her soon--this is such an awesome, fun, fruitful book!)

DANGER: MEMETIC HAZARD. And other warning signs for tomorrow.

Via Mixolydian Mode.

OLD SCHOOL: Kiriko Nananan's Blue. Manga, high school girl with crush on local "bad girl," read on recommendation from Journalista among others. It's a very, very well-done example of the "poignant, aching first love at boarding school" gay genre. (Although the school in Blue isn't actually a boarding school. But you guys know exactly what I mean, yeah?) Breaks no new ground, but is lovely to look at--black and white line drawings so crisp they're dreamlike, capturing that adolescent state of mind where nothing in the world seems real except you and her. The back cover copy reads,

The sky that stretches out above the dark sea.
The school uniforms and our desperate awkwardness.
If those adornments of our youth
Held any color
It would have been deep blue.

You see what I mean about old-school? If you are really into this genre, like I am, you will love this manga foolishly, like I do. If you're not, you still might take a look, since the artwork is intensely pretty.

WISE CHILDREN:

Does biology matter?

Ask Rebecca Hamilton, a sperm-donor baby who’s now grown up. She has been searching for her biological father for years. “It’s a very human need to be able to look at a face and say, yes, that’s where I come from,” she says. She thinks the widespread practice of donor anonymity does a huge injustice to the offspring.

The first generation of sperm-donor babies can now speak for themselves. And what they are saying raises disconcerting questions about biology, identity, and families. Is it right to deprive people of knowing who their natural parents are? What happens to your sense of identity when one of your biological parents is missing? Is there a difference when you’re raised by “social” rather than biological parents? What if those parents are two women, or two men, or perhaps three people? Are children’s understandings of parenthood as flexible as we would like to think? How do kids feel about all this? And do their feelings matter? ...

In an ideal world, a reasonable response might be, “So what?” But this is not an ideal world. Already, courts in the U.S. are wrestling with custody issues that not even Solomon could sort out. They are frequently required to decide who a child’s parents are, picking among the many adults who might be involved in planning, conceiving, birthing, and raising her.

“Once you get three legal parents, why not four or five?” asks Ms. Marquardt. “What if they can’t agree? It’s hard enough for two parents to agree. What if these three people break up? Is the child supposed to travel between three different homes? How many homes are necessary to satisfy the parenting needs of three separate adults?”

No one doubts “social” parents love their children, or that their children love them back, or that same-sex couples can be great parents. “Love is not the question,” stresses Ms. Marquardt. “The concern and good intentions that non-biological parents have for their children are not in question.” The question is whether it’s okay to deprive a child of half her biological inheritance before she’s born.

Rebecca Hamilton marvels at adults who claim that what children really need is a loving family, and biology doesn’t matter. Yet it obviously matters quite a lot — to adults. “If biology didn’t matter, infertile couples would just adopt, instead of taking themselves through expensive fertility treatments,” she says. And if biology doesn’t matter, then why do so many parents of donor-conceived children keep their origins a secret?

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The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adults' Rights and Children's Needs (I haven't read yet)

And the air hangs heavy like a blogwatch wine...

Balkinization: What the administration won't say about waterboarding. (There's a lot of stuff there about the implications of the McCain/Bush compromise for habeas corpus, too, but I haven't sorted through it yet. Scroll down for that.)

Cinecon on Visconti's Death in Venice, and other DIVa-ish thoughts.

YouTube in the womb. (Via Amy Welborn.)

MARC ALMOND'S "DEATH IN VENICE": I thought a bit more today about why I would so love to hear this imaginary opera. A big part of it is that MA would get the distance Britten sometimes seems to lack--Britten's opera sways into sentimentality, which Mann's novella stringently avoids. If anything, MA would probably be too scathing; but I'd prefer that error to the sentimental one.

It was then I knew that I'd rather be
with a .22 caliber next to me
than the blond boy...

FOUR LINKS: These are in alphabetical order-ish, which is why the second one seems so out of place.

Amy Welborn:

...Modern views of St. Francis present him as a nice, if eccentric fellow, presenting us with an alternative lifestyle through which we can clear our lives of bother and make them happier. It is all much harder than that in reality, and in understanding the story of St. Francis, the most important thing is to now how the story ends (on earth at least)--St. Francis, having suffered grievous physical pain for years, ready to meet Sister Death and be joined to the Lord, but his movement in disarray, alienated from his original vision, an aura of, in earthly terms, failure, surrounding him.

Name it and Claim It, indeed.

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Hit & Run: In November, 11 states will vote on ballot measures restricting the use of eminent domain for private uses--i.e. the government taking your property and giving it to some developer or corporation. Is your state on the list?

NYTimes: "In one sign of their approach to tragedy, Amish residents started a charity fund yesterday not only to help the victims' families but also to help the gunman's widow."

How to donate to the Amish School Recovery Fund.

Last two links via Mark Shea.

LIVEBLOGGING DEATH IN VENICE: OK, not completely liveblogging, since I went back and edited my impressions before posting. But I watched/listened to the 1981 filmed version of Britten's DIV opera, and after about half an hour I began to suspect I would get more out of it if I gathered my impressions and asked opera-savvy readers to comment (or dispute). So this is my completely uneducated take; I know I was handicapped by a) loving the novella a lot, b) having a hard time with opera generally, and c) taking notes, probably being too aware of my own reactions. Still, onward and upward!--or, in the case of DIV, downward. (...And the timing of this was completely accidental, which is all I'm going to say about that.)

First impressions of Death in Venice opera:

1. Aschenbach has a weird, reedy, strained voice. I am guessing Britten was going for an exhausted tone, but it's unpleasant, grating, and we have to listen to it CONSTANTLY! Esp that whole vibrato thing. No like the straining vibrato.

2. English is maybe too colloquial for this opera? Too many contrasting sounds in the words--I usually like this diversity, how English can be thorny or supple by turns, but it isn't working here. The words seem alternately flat (instead of poignantly casual, dramatic irony) and turgid (instead of lush, infected, doomy). Some of the turgidity is in the music, as well, though see below. Without the libretto and the voice, I don't think I'd notice a problem in the music. ...Oh bah, Asch's thoughts about Tadzio and his form and whatnot really don't work when the slightly pompous, self-deceiving monologue is sung rather than written. I'm not really sure why--maybe when it's sung you have to look at it too long or too intently. Maybe it's just a very difficult tone of voice to do in operatic form??? (...Hee, he has to sing the words "human relationships." Poor singer.)

3. In prose, when you're just reading, the casual conversations about e.g. the vaporetto and how you can't take baggage on the vaporetto and welcome to our hotel, etc., can fall quietly to the ground like leaves, and just stay there in the reader's mind rustling a little. But when these lines are sung, you have to pay too much attention--too much weight is placed on them, weight they can't support.

4. I think I like the music, sans singing. Possibly I like it a lot. But then Aschenbach starts singing over it and gah! But maybe that is just because I'm more used to movie scores than to operas?

5. Oh, yeah, I do think the music is better at conveying a creepy, febrile beauty. OTOH, it is kind of the exact music you would expect from an opera of DIV. Evil carnival music. I'm such a sucker for evil carnival music.

6. Heh--it doesn't really work to have a Tadzio we can see and judge. Must be equally hard to cast your Helen. The costuming is fine but I just don't think this is filmable....

7. OH, here's the problem: In the story, the descriptive prose and internal monologue have to continue because they create the mood, the background to the action, whereas in the opera the music is the background, and so the libretto often feels intrusive.

8. AUGH, when the music tells you he has been overwhelmed and is fleeing, WE DO NOT NEED THE LIBRETTO TO SAY SO TOO!!!! Haaaaaaate for the libretto.

9. Hee, "naw-see-us." Human relationships!

10. Ai carai, the staging/filming here gets hideously overdone (just before A sings "Iiiiiiiiiiii love you," which itself does not work for me either). Again, the music is better than everything else.

11. "A sweetish medicinal cleanliness/overlaying the smell of still canals"--the imagery I like, but the actual lines are too sibilant, and it's made worse by that thin vibrato voice. "The city fathers are seldom so solicitous"--is he doing this crazy amount of sibilance on purpose?? Because it IRKS. It feels clumsy, not serpentine or whatever it is supposed to be.

12. Wargh, the Apollo vs Dionysos thing is really bad. Clunky. Although I like the clichéd-but-effective end ("I go, I go now"). Then it gets amazingly clunky again. ...Marc Almond could pull this scene off (in the style of his song about the bullfighters, or the cabaret Rimbaud), definitely, but Britten apparently can't. ...Actually I would LOVE to hear the Marc Almond version of DIV. Wow.

13. The Phaedrus section is really good, though. The lighter voice works wonderfully here, the music is mysterious and gentle and foreboding, and only the staging in this version causes trouble. The libretto can be ignored when it gets silly or too obvious, because the voice is working. "I will go" is a good echo of the Apollo leavetaking, too. ...Yeah, that was good.

14. The ending of this is so much better than the beginning. POSSIBLY BECAUSE THE END IS WORDLESS.
-----------
okay, so... that was my first impression. Other reactions, comments, howls of execration??

TWO LINKS: Disputations: "The hoarded wealth not only cries aloud, but after it corrodes, it acts as a witness for the prosecution -- and, in a particularly ghoulish image, it goes on to corrode the flesh of the rich!" (more, brief but really interesting & powerful)

and, via Journalista, a good review of Jaime Hernandez's Ghost of Hoppers. I commented on the comic here, but Derek Badman's review does some very cool quickie panel analysis to show how awesome JH really is. The cool thing is that there's more to say about both of the sequences he discusses--the way the tree stump parallels Izzie's posture, and the rhythm of "noticing" features of the landscape fits with the theme of Maggie's return to her old neighborhood; the POV shift at the end of the ghost-dog sequence, when we suddenly see Maggie from the back.... JH is awesome. There will be more comicsness here soon, maybe before the weekend.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: 'WICHY WOMAN. So, inspired by this "Top Chef" episode, I've been trying out a passel of sandwich ideas--a change from my ol' favorite. These are all hot sammiches:

Mushrooms, bacon, gruyere, balsamic vinegar: Heat oven to 375. Take a largeish roll, split it down the middle, then cut the halves lengthwise. Put the bottoms of the roll halves on aluminum foil. (Do that for all of these recipes, except for the french toast one.) I used a mealhada roll for this. Any relatively plain roll would work--portuguese, for example. Slice mushrooms and yellow onion, and cut two bacon slices in half. Layer mushrooms, onion (drizzled with balsamic vinegar), and bacon on the roll-half bottoms, top with sliced gruyere, and cover with the roll-half tops. Wrap in foil and bake 15 minutes. ...The verdict: Neh. Tasted indistinct and weirdly antiseptic. Not sure what the problem was--possibly the vinegar?? Caramelized onions might work better.

Rosemary roll, bacon, and fontina: Oven to 375, foil, open rosemary roll. Fill it with thinly-sliced mushrooms, tomato, and red onion, then bacon and sliced fontina; cover with roll top, wrap in foil, cook 15-17 mins. The verdict: Fine, but not a standout or showstopper. The red onion was probably the best part. The fontina didn't seem to add much--probably overwhelmed by the high roll-to-cheese ratio. Would have worked better as an open-faced sandwich cooked in the toaster oven.

Mushroom, yellow pepper, and munster cheese: Roast a couple 'shrooms on a foiled baking tray in the oven--about 15 mins. at 375? Then prepare a mealhada (or whatever) roll as in the first recipe. Fill it with sliced vegs: tomato, roasted mushroom, red onion, and yellow bell pepper. Top with munster cheese, cover with tops of roll halves, wrap in foil, bake 15 mins. at 375. The verdict: This was really yummy. The pepper was especially delicious. Yellow pepper would work really well in these toasted sandwiches in general, I think.

Chopped fresh cilantro should also work here (on top of the cheese), and in the recipe below. Sort of like Mexican Radio Sandwich, which is delicious and which I ate practically every day for a week or two last year.

Pinto beans, bacon, yellow pepper: Exactly like the sandwich above, except using a rosemary roll layered with canned pinto beans (very easy--only slightly goopy), tomato slices, onion slices, bacon, yellow pepper, and munster cheese. The verdict: Good, but not great. Maybe would have been better without the bacon? (How can that be???) The pepper was, again, delicious.

And a breakfast sandwich: Make two slices of french toast in whatever way is your favorite. Drizzle with maple syrup and fill with crispy sliced bacon (cooked 1 1/2 mins. on paper towels in the microwave). Verdict: This was yummy, but needed maybe one extra component--a slice of fontina, say, or a fried egg. (Or both, if you typically use challah or another thick bread for your french toast. I make very thin french toast.) I'd also be interested in possible herbs for this, like rosemary.

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN: Awesome para. from Australian Cdl. Pell:

...The most profound changes emanated from the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the most problematic of all the Council documents at least in its implementation. This constitution quite properly called for dialogue with the surrounding culture rather than condemnation and urged us to emphasise what was common rather than to begin immediately with our differences. This is fundamental to the way we now see ourselves as an integral part of Australian society, the main reason why the majority accepts us as such and why all educated Australians now automatically and rightly presume that they have every right to comment publicly on distinctively Catholic teachings on e.g. the impossibility of women's ordination, or contraception or the mandatory celibacy of priests. Most Australians are much slower to do this with e.g. the Orthodox or the Jews and Moslems.

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See, the neat thing about this passage is that it talks about something that ordinarily really irks me--random people who barely know Balaam's ass from a hole in the ground, yapping away about Crap They Wot Not--and points out that it's due to engagement with the surrounding culture, which I love about Catholicism. The Church is such a tabloid religion, so willing to get down in the gutter and start punching, so willing to bring the Cross to the people. Mysteries without secrets; an up-front and brazen faith. And if you shake it in people's faces... people will talk about you. Because you're hot.

I SCOURGE THE BODY ELECTRIC: "To borrow an analogy from Boston College professor Peter Kreeft and give it a twist, if I were to announce at a cocktail party that I just got my tongue pierced, I would be surrounded by an eager crowd of spectators. But if I were to announce that each morning before work I take a cold shower as a religious ritual, I would soon be talking to myself." (more--a really good piece) Via Amy Welborn.

Every single one of his blogs
Is titled a number, and starts with a watch....

Balkinization: Scroll down for links to Marty Lederman's essential posts on the detainee abuse (since I guess we can't call it "torture" because it, like, makes Laura Bush feel bad?) compromise; but for now, a leftist's union blues.

Disputed Mutability is back!!! R0xx0rz. And as usual, her comments section has a ton of interesting stuff, like this comment about expectations of same-sex friendships.

Hit & Run: Heart of Tony Starkness. Iron Man is one of my favorite superheroes, in part because he was the only bright spot in the first vol. of Mark Millar's irksome Ultimates. If people have awesome Tony comics (...or fanfiction?) to recommend, I'm all bionic ears.

SpaceBlog: What does outer space smell like? Anousheh Ansari, Iranian space tourist lady, tells us. This is... really just terrific. I was made for an age like this, you know?

As long as we're geeking out here--are any of you all watching Heroes? It sounds really well-conceived and maybe well-written: Super-Hiro and Wolverine the Cheerleader and the Flying Shark all sound kind of awesome to me. But I've heard the acting is crap. True/false? (...Yeah, not that this is wildly relevant in the short term, since in the spring my television decided to give up television for Lent, so I'm lucky if I get one channel. But still--Heroes? y/n?)

And: In re the blogwatch heading, I recently pushed "OK By Me," from Martin Tielli's Operation Infinite Joy, on a music geek who gushingly compared it to David Bowie. (I'm thinking Spiders from Mars era.) This comparison is less true of We Never Even Suspected That He Was the Poppy Salesman; but it really does work for OIJ, I think, and if it intrigues you, why not check the guy out?

PRESTER JOHN... KING ARTHUR... RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY:

...I am getting ready for a book tour to promote a new Rumpole. Unlike some writers, I enjoy book tours. Writing novels is a lonely business; your feet and legs get cold and you have no direct contact with your audience. ...

Rumpole keeps going because all his stories are a comment on the passing scene. At the moment, he is engaged in defending a Pakistani doctor accused of being a terrorist. He takes part in extraordinary trials of prisoners anxious to be freed from Belmarsh. In these alleged judicial proceedings, the prisoner and his lawyer cannot be told the particulars of the charges. When these vital matters are discussed, the accused and his advisers have to leave the court.

Such abandonment of our civil liberties as this, the diminishing right to silence, the partial elimination of jury trials and, in some cases, placing the burden of proof on the defence are all, in Rumpole's view, a victory for the terrorists who want to change our way of life. It is to be hoped that his latest escapade will irritate everyone at the Home Office and in the new, unnecessary Department for Constitutional Affairs.

more (I forget where I found this, maybe Hit & Run?)

A humourous piece of AA advice is: "Ask yourself what a sane, intelligent, caring person would do, then pretend you're that sort of person and do it!"
--Kathy Shaidle, A Seeker's Dozen: The Twelve Steps for Everyone Else

OH, PATSY. This weekend's discovery: Absolutely Fabulous season five is the best since the very first season. Go! rent!

COSTUMED VIGILANTES: OK. I fully admit that I have not been plugged-in enough this past week to have a robust opinion on the McCain/Bush interrogation compromise. But it's troubling that no one else seems really to know what happened either. And this,

The Administration has been suggesting that it would somehow be inappropriate for the legislation, or the Senators, to say specifically which techniques the law would prohibit, i.e., that the law must remain so opaque that the Congress and the public don't have any idea what it does and does not prohibit. ...Senators McCain, et al., do not need to, and they probably should not, publicly reveal the extent to which, or circumstances under which, the CIA makes use of lawful techniques. But of course the Congress can and should specify which techniques are unlawful, if for no other reason than that it would be irresponsible for legislators to vote on a bill without having a clue what it does and does not prohibit.

from Marty Lederman, reminded me forcefully of the most powerful arguments for judicial restraint. What on earth is the point of voting if you have no idea what you're voting for? What's the point of laws if you can't have any idea what the laws mean?

But I'll never blogwatch your heart...

So... in my absence, apparently everything has gotten crazier than usual. Can't say I'm surprised. Here are a few photographs from the latest lipstick vogue.

The Agitator, awesomely, may get a man freed from Death Row. Wow.

Balkinization: What does Sen. McCain think the "torture compromise" does? And this is the most important post I've found thus far on the issue.

Jane Galt: Why a time machine stuck at 1973 would clarify our understanding of economics. More here!

NIGHTSHIFT: So, because I am awesome, I had a nightmare in which I was romantically rejected by

(wait for it)

the Virgin Mary.

Our Lady.

I hate you all!

PUTTING THE RAT BACK IN "LITERATE":

I've been meaning for awhile now to do a series of short posts about--to pick an arbitrary number--21 writers or works that are very personal to me; the idea would be to try and encapsulate why, for each, using somewhere between 10 and 450 words. It having finally dawned on me that there's never going to be a time when doing this is actually convenient, I've decided to just do it in dribs and drabs (and in no particular order).

In the first episode, we get In Search of Lost Time; Story of O; and Portrait of a Lady. (Ratty's such a girl....)

A SMALL THOUGHT. It seems we're now in the part of the argument where people want to draw distinctions between "real torture" and, you know, just a little smacky-face. So it might be useful to link again to this excellent Washington Post op-ed from a Soviet dissident, on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" as (not) opposed to torture:

...As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

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And my small thought is this: Two of the most searing photographs from Abu Ghraib were an American woman with a naked Iraqi man on a leash, and a hooded, shrouded man on a box. According to the makers of fine distinctions, neither of these two photographs depict real torture--just degradation, threats, and "stress positions" (as well as sleep deprivation). It's easy to use euphemisms and concealing terminology. But when you see the thing, it's repellent....

Anyway, Balkinization is your source for information about the competing interrogation bills. See recently here.

There was whiskey on Blogwatch and tears on our cheeks...

Disputations: Christ's scars as "a source of recognition." And more. So profound and powerful. Very helpful in something I'm writing.

Mark Shea:

...I became Catholic because I came to see that the Faith was beautiful and fulfilling, the desire of my heart. The notion "I better do this or the Great and Terrible Oz will damn me to Hell" was about as far from my mind as the thought that I had better marry Janet or unspeakable things would happen to me. In one sense only, that was true: if I didn't marry Janet, I wouldn't marry Janet, which would be a horrible loss. Likewise, if I refused to be Catholic, I wouldn't get to be Catholic, which would likewise have been a terrible loss. But the notion that either God or Janet were standing over me with an ax, threatening "Love me or ELSE!" is foreign to what a love relationship is.

(more)

YOUR DEADPAN HEADLINE OF THE DAY.

WAR:

...President Bush pointedly cited the capture and interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah in his speech last Wednesday announcing the transfer of Mr. Zubaydah and 13 others to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And he used it to call for ratification of the tough techniques employed in the questioning.

But rather than the smooth process depicted by Mr. Bush, interviews with nearly a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials briefed on the process show, the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah was fraught with sharp disputes, debates about the legality and utility of harsh interrogation methods, and a rupture between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. that has yet to heal.

more (via)

And many links and info re sending care packages to our soldiers.

We care a lot about Blogwatchers, yeah they're more than meets the eye...

The Agitator: "The TV show Cops has actually sent cameras on several raids that ended up targeting the wrong address. At the request of police, each time they've decided not to air the footage."

Hit & Run: US longevity stats:

...A new study out from the online journal of the Public Library of Science has some unexpected findings on longevity. Race remains relevant (blacks and Indians are the shortest-lived), but income is less important than conventional wisdom holds. And three biggest predictors of longevity?: Location, location, location. ...

Other interesting tidbits:

* American Indians who don't live on or near reservations in the West have life expectancies similar to that of white people.

* Lack of health insurance wasn't a powerful factor, it explained only a small portion of differences observed

* Longevity gaps have been about the same for the last 20 years, despite increased focus on race-related health problems and numerous government programs designed to better insure minorities.

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Plus bonus link: Catholic Vietnamese rebuilding New Orleans.

Stuart Buck: Quotes from Mark Gerson's book on teaching in a Jersey City Catholic school:

Because they worked hard and wanted and expected to work hard as adults, my students took an almost instinctive interest in money and economics. One of the parts of the Constitution that captivated them was the interstate commerce clause, because it allowed the government to limit the number of hours they could work. I did not expect to spend much time on this, but the students were fascinated by the idea that the federal government could regulate working conditions in a Jersey City restaurant on the basis of the fact that the tablecloth was made in New York. I was surprised that this point generated significant ire among my students. Carmen reacted first: "No one should tell me how much I should work except my mother. How does Bill Clinton know how much money we need or how many hours I can work and do well in school?"

Walt added, "She be right, yo. And if I ain't workin', you think I'm studyin'? No. I am out with my boys."

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And She-Devil author finds God: "The soul is the essential part of us, the inner recognisable core which stays the same while the body which ties us down changes." Plus lots more, on women vs. men, adultery vs. divorce, visions, vodka, and vicars.... (via Thunderstruck)

Blogwatchers are there,
The smell of blog is everywhere...

Hit & Run: Are Gypsies still being targeted for sterilization? The post recalls a lot of the points I made here--even without a policy of racist sterilization, there are a lot of reasons to think the dominant groups will get there anyway.

The Rat: ?!?!? (or, philosophie dans le boardroom.)

And from the Telegraph:

The notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors. ...

An independent witness who went into Abu Ghraib this week told The Sunday Telegraph that screams were coming from the cell blocks housing the terrorist suspects. Prisoners released from the jail this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and on Wednesday, 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Conditions in the rest of the jail were grim, with an overwhelming stench of excrement, prisoners crammed into cells for all but 20 minutes a day, food rations cut to just rice and water and no air conditioning.

Some of the small number of prisoners who remained in the jail after the Americans left said they had pleaded to go with their departing captors, rather than be left in the hands of Iraqi guards.

(more; via The Corner; and I'd really like to think that James S. Robbins isn't implying that as long as Americans aren't the worst possible option, anything we do wrong should be glossed over.)

JUST CONDUCT IN WAR: A bunch of links.

"Mixed messages on torture":

...Meanwhile, across the Potomac, an Army general unveiled a new Army interrogations manual designed to fit squarely within the protections of the Geneva Conventions. That new manual specifically bars hooding, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, mock executions and many of the other "tough" techniques allegedly practiced in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and the black sites.

The new manual was presented by Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence in a press conference that aired live Wednesday morning on the limited-circulation Pentagon Channel. During the press conference, Kimmons expressed a view about the effectiveness of "tough" interrogation techniques utterly different from the president's.

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices," Kimmons said. "I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the past five years, hard years, tells us that." He argued that "any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility." And Kimmons conceded that bad P.R. about abuse could work against the United States in the war on terror. "It would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used," Kimmons said. "We can't afford to go there."

more--not the most important point (the most important points are that torture is wrong and that degrading others is degrading to our interrogators), but worth saying.

Jack Balkin comments on a draft bill on military commissions.

Marty Lederman on the administration's proposals. And here. And here.

My old series of posts on torture.

ANTI-CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM ROUNDUP. There's a lot to like about John McCain, but McCain-Feingold was stupid and wrong.

MORE ON "PATH TO 9/11": 1. It's a docudrama, not a documentary, which I didn't know and which seems seriously lame, especially due to point #2:

2. Apparently there is quite a bit of important falsehood in the portrayal of some Clinton-administration figures, inc. Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger. Ick.

3. I still think the Dem senators' letter had troubling overtones of "make the movie nicer to the Clinton administration or we'll cause difficulties with your broadcast license"; but criticism certainly seems warranted, and this sounds like a very dumb move on ABC's part. I apologize for previous overreaction/going off half-cocked.

SO YOU WALKED BACK IN THE REVOLVING DOOR, AND DID IT ALL AGAIN: Or, more fun with sin!

[EDITED to remove an analogy that was interesting to me, but probably unhelpful in the wider conversation. Also, I need to sleep now, but when I wake up I'll put in some more links, I think.]

OK, Noli Irritare Leones comments on previous posts here. But this post is actually about Anactoria's replies to my comments here. And please do read her post before going on with this one, okay?

I think things are getting a bit tangled here. Anactoria and I agree, in many ways, about which issues are connected--but we disagree, I think, about how they're connected. So let me try to card the wool here. (I suspect this might be more of a riff on her post than a reply to it.)

I thank God that my sins are not like those of this publican!: Anactoria is coming from a tradition in which rejecting the community's understanding of Christian faith meant that you were shunned, completely cut off from everyone who'd loved you and raised you. I can't express how awful that sounds. I am so sorry that anyone goes through that--in fact, it's a part of why I write about my whole deal on this blog, that I hope it will make that horrible breaking of families at least a little less likely. I don't understand how shunning is Christian and... and I think I should rein myself in, here, because I start wanting to talk about how awful this approach is, and that gets perilously close to a self-righteous focus on Other People's Faults.

So instead I will just say that I am incredibly lucky that the orthodox Catholics I met were totally awesome, admirable, welcoming people, willing to listen to me babble on about heterosexism or whatever other random thing I wanted to talk about. They were up-front with me about what I'd have to give up, but equally up-front about what they had struggled with in their own lives.

Well I've been a drag racer on LSD...: That said: There are a lot of possible methods I don't think you get to use in order to figure out what is right, what is wrong, what is a dealbreaker when you try to make sense of the world, etc. And my strong impression is that Anactoria is using methods that I just don't think work, for distinguishing possible belief systems from impossible ones.

"I wouldn't shun someone who believes his identity is based in doing X" doesn't mean X is actually okay to do. [this is where the analogy was--and keep in mind that Anactoria says I'm still misreading her in this section....]

In order to figure out if something is okay to do, you can't just ask whether people who seem like good upstanding citizens (according to some culture or subculture's definition of "good"!) want to do it. I mean... I know a lot of good upstanding citizens who wouldn't bat an eye if somebody shoved bamboo sticks up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's fingernails. Doesn't make it right to do. Culture can't be the final word on moral truth; nor can individual inclination be the final word. This actually strikes me as one of the stronger arguments that if there is a distinction between right and wrong, it requires a Creator God.

Strange things seem to occur, somewhere behind the nursery door: And now we get to the question of original sin.

Look--I find that language really illuminating. I think Augustine's influence on our understanding of the inclination to sin is right-on and awesome. It explains cultural myths of a Golden Age (Orwell yay!); it is dark in the right places (Pat Barker yay!) and bright wherever it can be. I've written here and here (bonus Queen reference!) about life as exile from Adam's happiness.

But a good friend pointed out that the language of "original sin" might be getting in the way here. And that might well be true. I know I had a really hard time taking Christianity seriously until I a) met awesome Christians and b) read St Anselm's Cur Deus Homo (How God Became Man) and thought, "Hey wait now--is that what Christians mean when they say 'sin'? Because that actually makes sense!" ...Plus, I remember how an Eastern Orthodox friend had to explain to freshmen, every single year, "Christians don't think you need to feel guilty for original sin!"

So okay. I like the language of original sin, because it implies a homeland and an exile. But if it doesn't work for you, okay. All I am really talking about in the previous post is an undertow: a terrible riptide pulling us toward sin.

I don't think we stand in front of a crossroads and calmly choose good or evil. I think it's more bewildering than that, less rational. We choose wrongdoing when it won't benefit us; we choose it even when we know it will hurt us. We choose it when we really don't know why--and when no explanation really explains why.

And I think we do this because something very big has gone wrong. One of the most compelling things, to me, about the Christian story, is that it responds to my sense that something terrible has happened. Something equally great and terrible has to respond to the shock and sorrow and outrage with which it's appropriate to meet what we see in the world every day. The torture and death of God seems... lurid enough for a lurid world.

NICE BROADCASTING LICENSE YOU'VE GOT HERE. SHAME IF ANYTHING WAS TO HAPPEN TO IT. Democratic Party leaders yell at ABC over "Path to 9/11," including some stuff that sounded to me like a veiled threat.

[edited--man I am sloppy!--to tone down the melodrama. But also to add this: I haven't seen the documentary. And of course people should vigorously counter anything they think is a distortion. But one odd thing is that the various right-wing sites I frequent have been saying for a while, basically, "This is a really powerful documentary. Clinton comes in for a lot of criticism, but so do Clinton-impeaching Republicans, and the Bush administration in general and Sec'y Rice in particular." I wonder what people-in-general will think when it is broadcast.]

YEAH, BUT IF I DON'T SOUND MY BARBARIC YAWP, WHO WILL?: Ended up re-reading some old articles, and found things I'd still promote. Including but not limited to my piece on prison reform; and "Christianity from the Outside," a really compelling symposium in which people pose the hard questions, and my best friend is brilliant as usual. (Um. I feel like people won't read it if I say that. Christopher Hitchens is in it too--? But also many, many Jews? Yeah? Look--lots of people liked it! I am not crazy!)

WHY on earth do we rush to apply dehumanizing terms like "vegetable" to actual living humans?

[title changed and other link deleted--it was this, but I had actually forgotten what was in the article, and it turned out not to have some stuff that I had thought was in there. Sorry...]

SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE: Wow, every single aspect of this story sounds awful.

1. I've expressed before (oh, at length!) my problems with the "ex-gay movement." (And I do think "ex-gay" as a political cause is different from "ex-gay" as a personal narrative. I agree with the people who suggested that if you're looking for people who used to consider themselves 100% super extra gay, and now do not, the "ex-gay movement" is the last place you should look.) So... I'm really, really not on board with this TV show. Actually I would love to come on as a guest, and wreak polite havoc.

2. But--I'm kind of inarticulately horrified at the way that professed "ex-gay" people are having their own honesty and vulnerability used against them. OMG, Alan Chambers says he stole stuff! I wonder if Jesus had anything to say to repentant thieves! ...No, probably not. Jesus came to save the good people--not the sinners. YA RLY.

Actually, this article reminds me of nothing so much as the constant stream of "gay people are evil drug-using alcoholic miserable losers!" commentary from anti-gay lit. Every single thing you ever do wrong in your life is used against not only you, but an entire class of people who may have nothing to do with your own personal mess. If any gay guy admits that ten years ago he tricked or snorted coke, all gay people are promiscuous cokeheads; if any ex-gay guy admits that years ago he stole stuff or prostituted himself, all ex-gays are promiscuous thieves. Which is so compassionate. And so in line with Jesus' actions. ...Oh, and if you succumb to the pressure placed on you to be "one of the good ones," and lie about or conceal the stuff you do wrong, expect triple the fury if you are ever exposed. But if you talk about where you lost your way, expect blame not only for what you did, but for being a self-aggrandizing Oprah-culture professional victim.

Yeah... riled, a little. This got under my skin.

Use each man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?

ROCK ME, MACHIAVELLI: Last night I dreamt that I was trying to explain "The Three Waves of Modernity." With a chalkboard and everything.

I NEED A VACATION.

EASE THE MARKET FOR ORGAN DONORS: From the Rocky Mountain News

...A 1984 federal law prohibits organ donors from receiving any "valuable consideration" for their life-saving generosity. A live donor can be compensated for medical expenses (which are usually paid by the recipient's health insurance), travel and lost wages, but nothing more. And if you choose to donate organs at death, your survivors get nothing.

The medical establishment has long considered it anathema to allow donors or their survivors to "profit" from their beneficence. The worry is that poor people will sell their organs out of financial desperation and thus in some cases compromise their health. But there are ways to minimize the risk that such a fully open market might pose.

For example, Washington could alleviate the shortage by considering pilot programs. One idea is federal income tax relief along the lines of laws operating in eight states, including Utah. Those states offer up to $10,000 in income-tax deductions to repay donors' travel expenses and lost wages.

Another possibility: "futures" contracts, in which recipients would pay up front some of the funeral expenses of those who elect to donate organs at death.

And the medical establishment should drop its objections to organizations like MatchingDonors.com. This site lets organ recipients find willing live donors and make transplantation arrangements privately.

We're certainly not comfortable endorsing a full-fledged market in organs, a regime that would allow donors to auction kidneys on eBay. But the current system is not compassionate; it amounts to a death sentence for thousands of Americans each year.

more (via Virginia Postrel)

FOOT-WASHING SPARKS ATONEMENT DEBATE: "The thorny issue of white atonement for apartheid has been thrown under the South African spotlight after a white former hardline minister washed the feet of a black preacher his forces once tried to kill." (more) Via Colby Cosh.

MY FAVORITE DESCRIPTION OF KATHY "RELAPSED CATHOLIC" SHAIDLE: "She does all her own stunts."

(um, more Fun With Sin soon, but maybe not tonight.)

THE NIGHT IS YOUNG, AND WE HAVE HEDGEHOGS IN OUR DRINKS!

SAVE OUR BLIGHT...

and for pity's sake, save our cheap beer, too! If a man's house is his castle, surely a man's Duff is his royal mead....

(Both links via Hit & Run, which also offers this... and this.)

HEAD OF US CHALDEAN GROUP:

Joseph Kassab, head of the Chaldean Federation of America, met Aug. 25 for the sixth time this year with officials from the State Department to press the case to allow Chaldeans -- Iraqi Christians -- fleeing their homeland to emigrate to the United States. ...

He estimated that less than half of the 1.1 million-1.2 million Chaldeans who were in Iraq before the U.S. war began in 2003 remain in Iraq today. Kassab said most of them -- 92 percent -- have fled to Greece, Syria, Turkey and Jordan. ...

However, a federal regulation that was passed as part of the Patriot Act forbids the entry of immigrants determined to have provided material support to the enemy. Paying ransom to kidnappers has been interpreted as providing material aid, Kassab said. Even the Iraqi citizen who helped locate U.S. Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch and aided in her rescue has been denied entry because he had to pose as being sympathetic to the Iraqis, Kassab said.

Kassab told the story of a Chaldean woman he identified only as Miriam, whose house was occupied for a week by insurgents. They forced Miriam and her daughters, ages 16 and 15, to cook for them and give them directions. On the last day of their stay, the six insurgents raped Miriam and her daughters and told them they would be killed if they ever said anything. After the ordeal, Miriam and her daughters fled to another country -- the name of which Miriam did not want disclosed for fear of the insurgents' revenge.

The family was denied U.S. entry because the cooking and directions under duress were construed by U.S. officials as providing material support.

more (via Mark Shea)

SHE THINKS I STILL CARE (Feast of Augustine Dance Remix): Follow-up to post below re: gay identity and stuff. Likely to be at least as scatterbrained and demi-coherent as its progenitor. ...This is the really really Christian mix, as opposed to the original really really gay version--but I swear they're saying the same thing!!! It's like those pictures that are an old lady, but also a duck.

The kindness of strangers: First of all, um. Thanks very much to everyone who commented on the previous post. I really didn't expect much of a response. ...Religious Left Online comments here; Now the Green Blade Riseth sets me on fire with envy by reminiscing about the Smiths; and an anonyreader writes:

...I think your comment on unmixed pleasures is right on target. I've long thought that those who oppose identifying oneself as gay or whatever in even a general sense (I'm thinking of the Courage people here) miss that. Certainly, it doesn't say everything there is to say about a person, but it does carry a heavy chunk of real meaning, and that *does* say a great deal about someone's identity as a *person*.

What I think gets left out a lot of the discussion, and which you seem to be bringing into it, is that homosexuality is more than just the moral disorder that a guy wants to bang another guy. It influences how we interact with friends, how we look at gender roles in general, and can sensitize us to shades of meaning that we would otherwise not see at all, or only with great difficulty. And having experienced what it is to be an outsider in a very particular way, we tend to be a bit more aware of the marginalized in general, as you mention. Failure to recognize that wider sphere of queerness leads to discussions that can see in homosexuality nothing but a cross to be suffered or a peril to society and one's soul. It also leads otherwise good Christians to say very wretched things about people suspected of being gay, even if those people may be as pure as the driven snow, because the identity has been reduced to the mere category of lust. To struggle against the principles of lust doesn't, I think, require anyone to flee from everything else that homosexuality brings with it.

One last thought, on identity and community, that may make sense from a Jewish p.o.v., too. Growing up a Catholic totally surrounded by Protestants and looking for the handful of people that were also Catholic, who saw the world through similar eyes and had similar problems and experiences, sort of felt analogous to looking for the handful of people who were gay. There was always the danger of projecting one's own experience onto them (or vice versa, assuming that if they had gone through certain things, then I had to, also), but the sense of identity, discovery, and automatic community was very real.

So. Yeah. I totally agree about the danger of projection, by the way, and suspect I may engage in it in some of these posts, so really, people should call me on it where they see it.

How to do things with wants: In comments over at Claw of the Conciliator, Anactoria offers some challenges:

Her position has always really disturbed me.

Does her choice of inaction mean that she believes god would condemn any action on her part towards her lesbian desires? Since her sexuality is part of her, like it or not, does that mean she abhors a part of herself? Or believes that god does?

Hey, man, if I were going to abhor a part of myself, it would be the part that paid good money for this!

...No, okay. Some thoughts: First, it's very clear to me that Catholic teaching is much more affirming of my worth as a person than I might be on my own. Unlike me, Catholic dogma is not moody. It just keeps saying, day after day, that all people are made in the image of God, and that all our failures and cruelties can't take that away.

Second, Christ can get very hardcore on the subject of what one should hate: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Any love or longing, no matter how good it might ordinarily be, must be abhorred and put aside if it leads us away from Him.

And I think it works the other way around, too: What leads us to Him, we should cling to. (Hey, look, Thomas Aquinas has my back here!)

So the question, with any desire, is how to turn it into something like Diotima's ladder of love: how to move, through longing, upward to Christ. This is what I mean when I bubbitz on about sublimation. I won't say sublimation comes easily to me--kind of by definition, the sublime is never easy--but it's a move I find intuitive and one I think I understand pretty well. I wanted to have a bit in this post listing and describing the ways in which I'd "acted on my lesbian desires" by, e.g., writing fiction; going to Confession and Communion; seeking greater humility in my relationships with others, and, especially, trying to be more servant-like in my relationships with my friends; investigating new philosophical paths, giving people the benefit of the doubt, trying to view others the way I viewed the women I loved. Unfortunately, I think if I got specific enough to be practical and useful, I might also make it a little too obvious which women I'm talking about, so, uh, this is all you get. You want more, try the Symposium....

It is shaped, sir, like itself: In a separate comment, Anactoria replies to somebody else (= not me) by saying, "...I don't quite see the correlation between an inherited or acquired bad temper and a person's sexual orientation. To me, that's like comparing apples and oranges."

And I do see the objection, there. I've used the temper analogy before (here--also a journalism analogy!), and I've used other analogies as well, like cultures that associate masculinity with cruelty. None of these analogies captures everything important about same-sex desire, by any means! All of the analogies miss out on a lot of important stuff; which is why I've tried to write very plainly about the experience of same-sex attraction, to keep in all the elements the analogies miss.

But the analogies often do small, specific things pretty well. The temper analogy was powerful for me because I do have a hot temper, but I've come a fairly long way in mastering it, and so I can draw on that experience when I try to figure out how to increase my humility and lovingkindness in other parts of my life.

The journalism analogy is fun because it is so obviously culture-bound, and I wish people would stop pretending that contemporary gay identity is some kind of fixed constant in human affairs. It isn't. It's maybe 120 years old, and has only really gained currency in the past thirty years. So something can be a very significant part of a person's identity (I am really passionate about being a journalist, the professional ethos of it, even though I am a shank and do not do nearly enough reporting) without being some kind of eternal verity.

One analogy I used here is the medieval culture of "courtly love," and its glamorization of adultery. That's super interesting for me in the gay context (it's super interesting in itself, really, but especially w/r/t Gay Stuff) because parts of that culture actually did get transformed into something deeply Christian. CS Lewis's excellent study The Allegory of Love gives the details there. (Cliffs Notes version: Edmund Spenser began the project of transforming a tradition celebrating adultery into a celebration of married love.) So part of my project, I think, is exploring ways in which (parts of) the gay culture might similarly be transformed. We already had a sub-sub-subcultural version of this transformation in the 19th-c Aesthetic movement. Why not go for a larger-scale version? ("Celebrate Gay Humility"? *g*) Maybe it would sound like this....

Anyway. I do agree with the critiques of analogies, really. I just want to point out that there are good reasons for using them, even though there are also good reasons for clinging more closely to the specifics of gay identity.

Nice girls, not one with a defect: And finally, Anactoria muses:

I suppose it would help if I believed in the whole concept of humanity being an inherently sinful and "fallen" race but I don't. The Genesis account of man's supposed fall from grace doesn't mesh with my idea of a god of love.

I wanted to save that bit for last, because although I do suspect it helps explain our differences, I didn't want to use it as an "easy out"--I wanted to deal with the part of the iceberg that's above the surface, first.

But in case talking about what it means to be Fallen will help, here goes. First off, I will repeat what I said (and elaborated on) a couple years ago:

So I ran across this person who says she doesn't believe in original sin.

Fine.

But what I want to know is, what does she call it? What does she call that yearning toward hate, that reverse heliotropism? What does she call the damage that all of us bear from the time of our earliest memories?

Chesterton, I think, said something about how the Fall is the only obvious Christian doctrine (?). And I agree with that so thoroughly that I'm not even sure how useful I can be in defending the idea--it's too central to my experience of the world. I mean, look: My mom works in prisoners'-rights litigation. If you want to be convinced that humans are not naturally good, I am hard pressed to think of a better school.

People want, and want very badly, a lot of really awful things. The fact that somebody really, really wants to do something, or believes it's embedded in and intrinsic to him, doesn't actually tell me very much about that thing's moral worth.

But I absolutely, 100% deny that humans are naturally bad or evil, either. If that were true, how could we ever long for or recognize beauty and truth? To be Fallen is to share both the legacy of Adam's sin, and the memory of his happiness. (See--right up there in the title, I promised you some Augustine, and there it finally is....) Something's gone wrong with us, yes, but somewhere deep down we do still remember what it was like to be able to love. And by following that submerged and occluded memory, we can learn to accept grace, and be healed, and love truly.

But the thing is... the effects of sin, in our hearts and in the world, are not trivial. They're deep and subtle and really hard. That's why people have had to give up things they truly loved, to follow Christ: occupations, relationships, life itself. What I've been asked to give up is not that much, compared to the sacrifices of others.

(And yeah, I know I totally haven't addressed why I'm Catholic and not some other thing that would be all "gay-affirming" or whatever. But that isn't what I wanted to do in these posts; I'm not wildly good at it [it ends up just being, "Nothing except Catholicism made any sense, and the Church said I had to stop gettin' girls, so, you know, that's the end of that party"]; and I am currently a lot more interested in how to be Catholic, anyway. ...So, with that unsatisfying parenthesis, I will end this enormous post.)

No one escapes my love.
--Quentin Crisp

And the tears of it are wet: One postscript. If you're reading this, and you pray, please do a thing for me, okay? Please pray for the repose of the soul of L.S.; and for his family. ...Thanks.

AUGUSTINE!!! Woohoo!!!

Read him online here.

Dappled Things on our man and gradual conversion.

(yes, I promise to post about replies to the gay-identity stuff, tonight, sometime before 3 a.m. EST....) ETA: except for the part where, not. Sorry. It is coming soon. And wouldn't you rather read Augustine anyway?

THEOLOGY REDSHIRTS: Oh, well, I've been thinking a lot about things I don't write about here, because I don't have anything coherent yet to say. And just-war theory vs pacifism is one of those things. (Yes, your reading recommendations very much welcomed.) Camassia hits close to one of my biggest problems with (certain strains of) Christian pacifism:

...I would put that more bluntly: why the hell would anyone in government go along with a narrative that says their main function is to serve a church that they don't believe in? It sounds a lot like the Muslim concept of "dhimmitude," only instead of just inconveniencing the infidels with taxes and other minor burdens, it expects the dhimmis to perform dangerous jobs like policing on behalf of the privileged group. ...

If you look at it that way, there really isn't a whole lot of daylight between Yoder's position and the Lutheran one. The princes of Luther's era also "used the tools" that they inherited to do what they thought was right--in their case, the tools being things like armies and judicial fiat. The only real difference seems to be that while Luther felt it was OK for Christians to wield the sword of the state in a just manner, Mennonites apparently feel it's OK to hire other people to bear the sword according to their direction.

Because make no mistake about it: any time you pass a law, you are backing it up with the sword. Notice that in my first Yoder quote above, he mentions "the state's judiciary and police machinery" in the same category as international wars. Near the end of the paper he oddly remarks that, "In a highly christianized culture it is an available alternative to have unarmed police and no capital punishment," and I am totally confused as to whether he means "christianized" in a Constantinian sense or not. But either way, that is clearly not the society we live in now; so every law is backed up with violence.

more

There's a reliance on people who must stand outside the peaceable community, in order to protect that community. There's a weird acknowledgment that so many of our little kindnesses, and all of our conspicuous lack of martyrdom, depend on the guns in the hands of men who haven't yet accepted the pacifist interpretation of the Gospel. And I maybe can see acknowledging that fact... but I'm not sure I can see accepting it. And I can't see admiring the pacifists behind the walls more than the soldiers at the sentry towers.

TIGER BEAT: Martin Tielli's We Never Suspected He Was the Poppy Salesman.

Oh, well, yeah.

This album opens with a fantastic song that reminds me of nothing so much as Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains. It keeps going in this same pretty, broken-open vein, and while the first half of the album is mostly stronger than the second, there's a song somewhere in the second half with imagery that managed to remind me of both the Iliad and Kathy Shaidle's "The Missionary Performs an Exorcism." In sound, it's interestingly Cat Power-ish: lyrics and vocals reminiscent of her earlier albums, mostly Dear Sir, but with a poppy-prettiness level closer to her more recent and more popular album Free.

There's something with this guy. I said before that his Operation Infinite Joy is flawed, and yet I can't stop playing it!, and both of those things are still true. WNSHWTPS is more consistent, less self-doubting or jaggedly veering, and definitely the best things on it are better than even the best things on OIJ. You should go find this thing.

And as my pusher noted, it's available here for "$15.00 Canadian! ZOMG cheap!"

I HAVE DRUNK, AND SEEN THE SNAKES ON A PLANE: A-plus, cats and kittens. The Platonic form of "Samuel L. Jackson stars in 'Snakes on a Plane,'" instantiated now at theaters everywhere! Rock.

Geoffrey Chaucer on "Serpentes on a Shippe" (spoylerez)! Super awesome for those who have seene ye movie. Via Angevin2 maybe?

Would you believe that yesterday
That girl was in my arms and swore to me
She'd blogwatch eternally...

Disputations: Saints behaving badly.

Jane Galt: Against the corporate income tax.

Sed Contra: David S.:

Things used to make so much sense, and I never used to doubt anything about my life or my faith. Now, approaching the age of forty and finally coming to terms with the facts that both ordained religious life and married life are out of the question for me, nothing makes sense anymore.

What do you do when that happens?

more

From the NY Sun: "With the cost of health care looming as an election issue in America this fall, doctors in Canada are speaking out about their own system and voicing some serious displeasure. The latest sign is the selection this week of the head of Canada's largest private hospital, Brian Day, to become the president of the Canadian Medical Association in August 2007. Dr. Day's election is being viewed as a sign that Canadian doctors are getting fed up with socialized medicine. After all, their president-elect has been a forceful advocate for a greater private role in medicine and is technically a criminal, since the law bars clinics like the one he heads." (via the Club for Growth; and not intended as an endorsement of the American health care "system," which is obviously insane, but as a caution against adopting the Canadian approach as a solution.)

From the Telegraph:

A blind activist who exposed a campaign by Chinese officials to force women to have abortions was jailed for more than four years yesterday in one of the country's most controversial human rights cases since the Tiananmen Square massacre.

more (via Amy Welborn)

From the New Statesman:

"Ma", in broad translation, means interval or pause, and Kawabata's best sentences in Japanese are distinguished by suspensions in the action and by pauses between clauses, the equivalent of the use of white space in Japanese ink painting, or the long pause in haiku.

more (via Mumpsimus)

The birds are the opposite of time.
--Oliver Messaien, program notes for Quartet for the End of Time (via About Last Night)

WELCOME TO THE MALIGN FIESTA!: Search requests that brought you to my blog.

God's spoken documents to have black panthers powers in 1965 for old little roman pope citizens (I am the second result!)
peanuts subjunctive (fourth result...)
Home Euthanize rodent
never underestimate human poets
boola Catholic theology
shark porno
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ecstasy shark (I finally know what I want to be if I grow up!)
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Eve Tushnet intellectual and moral conceit (I love you too)
HOMEMADE WAYS GROW EYEBROWS
Problems humans face
is the pentagon not telling us we are going to have a ice age
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Hiding Things from Parents
what does undercooked mean in French (it's like a bilingual Mobius strip!)
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human nature lecherous fever
GASHUNK GASHUNK GASHUNK
king lear link king kong literacy
telos platypus (And on the eighth day, God said, "Heh--now I'm just messin' with them.")
psychology of long hair male multiple chains around neck facial
expression babycakes
find an article about a loquacious person

SHE THINKS I STILL CARE (lightly edited): OK, so ever since I read it, I've been obsessing over Disputed Mutability's description of "moving past gay identity." So. Why that is not how I am.

First of all, this is NOT criticism of DM or of her stance. It is solely a discussion of why I am where I am. There are really good reasons to be where she is, and I think she articulates them well, and I'm not disputing (ha) any of them. (And I really wish I could quote her entire paragraph on the subject here, but for some reason my mouse is wigging on me, so please do go here and read her discussion FIRST, just so you can see the degree to which I'm just riffing rather than actually "replying" to her post.) If I overstate, at any point, or say something you think is haring off in the wrong direction, please do let me know.

Second, this is really scattershot, and... I'm not sure how coherent it will be. So if something's unintelligible, please do let me know about that, too.

So: Why do I "identify as" queer, or whatever?

Destroyed, my people are destroyed/For lack of knowledge: Dude, if I don't, who will? Eugene Debs believed a lot of very dumb things, but I have never been able to shake his old catechetical formula: "While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free." I've paid out a lot of hours listening to guys in US Army issue glasses talking about watching their friends die from AIDS. I can't turn away from that. Because of where my experiences have led me, I can't walk away from the situations/identity/whatever that shaped some of the bravest people I've ever met. And as long as those people are still getting messed with, growing up hating themselves, or any other kind of suffering, because of a sexual identity we share, well. "I am not free."

And the only sound was the women in the chapel praying: I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until somebody doggone listens (!): might not be Catholic if I weren't queer. You got to dance with the one what brung you, yeah? As with the point above--I think I owe it to all the people I never got to thank in person. (And all the people who wouldn't accept my thanks if it were offered.)

Oh, I still see sunny days; oh, I go that far: Before my baptism, I was really shaken by the idea of making such a serious break in my identity. I felt like I'd worked really hard for any sense at all of continuity of identity--a sense of a self, rather than fractured and unaccountable selves. It was actually reassuring to me to think that while the guilt of sin would be expunged through baptism, the tendency toward sin--and thus the past, the person I'd been until Easter 1998--wouldn't be removed. Similarly--I know people say all these very intelligent things about how "coming out" is an individualist/Gnostic thing, and yeah, I see that. But I don't think I can completely reject that experience of hearing the key turn in the lock, feeling like the world made sense, without rejecting wholesale my ability to recognize truth when it presents itself--and therefore rejecting my conversion, as well, a much more profound "coming out" experience.

And when I get excited...: a. I can't shut up, anyway, about anything; and b. I kind of don't think I should. A lot of other people in similar situations have excellent reasons for not being super hardcore about gay/queer identity. I don't have any of those reasons. I'm out, self-employed, completely unable to keep from yapping about myself at every opportunity. (...And yes, you might say that last thing is one reason I should occasionally shut my cakehole. You wouldn't be wrong. But...) Somebody has to talk about the joys of life as ye olde same-sexe-attracted Catholicke, and the various ways of handling troubles, and, well, the fact that I completely suck at it shouldn't stop me! As Chesterton says, anything worth doing is worth doing badly.... (And as the Bagthorpes say, too much is never enough!)

Hay una discoteca por aqui?: I can't think of any culture--possibly not even Jews! maybe not even Catholics!--that has provided as much joy in my life as gay culture. It's been more than a decade since my first girlfriend gave me a tape with The Smiths up one side and Your Arsenal down the other, and I still remember why I'm here each time "Reel Around the Fountain" plays. Socrates, in the Philebus, is totally unhelpful: In this life, there are no unmixed pleasures. So we should honor joy and longing where we find it, even if it's attached to other things we can't hold on to.

Hang on to your ego: And finally, I suspect I am postmodern enough to take this whole category of "identity" both seriously and lightly. (Kafka: "A belief is like a guillotine: just as heavy, just as light.") Seriously enough that it really matters to me, you can say "gay solidarity" and I won't totally laugh (maybe just a little), it'll always be a huge part of my True Hollywood Story. Lightly enough that I know my sexual orientation can't and shouldn't be more central than my identity as a woman or especially as an image of God. Plus, I believe we're all double-tongued, subtle disloyalists, spies in our own hearts, our own enemies--we're our own Nathan Hales and our own Kim Philbys--and I think that makes it easier for me to claim this admittedly unheimlich identity.

Dreaming of Mercy Street--
I swear they moved that sign....

"TAKE IT AWAY... AND BRING ME ANOTHER LOVER!": A quick expansion on part of my comments below about Do the Right Thing: You know how I said that Withnail & I was fantastic, but more self-indulgent and less scathing than Absolutely Fabulous? The same thing is going on in DTRT (and with much less justification)--children are absent in W&I, which is exactly right, but which does draw the movie's fangs a bit; but in DTRT they are not even a subplot, just a plot device.

For W&I children are irrelevant. That's fine--I really love that movie--but it means the movie can't be as horrible as possible.

For DTRT children exist, but aren't real. That's... yeah, consistent with the view of male human nature I've formed over five years of working at a crisis pregnancy center. Sorry.

For AbFab, children may be vicious little rodents, but at least they're real. [eta: I love Saff, she's awesome if scary, but my point is that even if you take the perspective of the immature adults all around her, she still matters and affects their lives.]

Which one was written by a woman? You get three guesses, and the first two don't count.

If I could find a souvenir
just to prove the world was here--
and here is a red blogwatch;
I think of you and let it go...

Well, the world managed not to blow up on my birthday. Ace. Let's see if we can hold out until I get a chance to see Snakes on a Plane.

The Arabist: Linknesses. Iraqi SMS culture. Stuff like that. Via Oxblog, I think.

GetReligion: Cosmopolitan rats, they would kill you if they knew.... (Or, "You hate me! You really, really hate me!")

Mumpsimus: "...I would love to see a version of The Man in the High Castle directed by Wong Kar-Wai." OMG yes.

Virginia Postrel: "...People who worry about organ markets because they're concerned about the poor are on the wrong side of the issue. Poor patients, and there are many of them, would greatly benefit from payment, which would also save taxpayers money compared to keeping people on an infinite entitlement to dialysis."

THIS HEAT IS HOTTER THAN THE SUN...: Now I get it. The way to make heirloom tomatoes taste amazing, better than normal tomatoes, is to roast them. This is sooooooo good.

(...yes, I will say something interesting soon. Maybe.)

DOLPHINS ARE DUMBER THAN RATS. Vindicated!!!! Take that, hippies of the sea!

...In other news, "I Walked with a Zombie" is awesome; "Cat People" is excellent; "Curse of the Cat People" isn't my thing, but if you're into this kind of storybook/sensitive/childhood thing I can see why you'd like it; and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" kind of sucks. ...And as long as I'm telling you about my Netflix adventures, "The Testament of Dr Mabuse" is fantastic, though I don't think I would have picked up on the political subtext if I hadn't known it was there; "The Changeling" was lame (ooh, punny); "Do the Right Thing" has problems, and is a lot less ambiguous than I think it was intended to be, but nonetheless rocked my world, I loved it stupidly and it felt real; "Little Caesar" was perfectly serviceable; and "Forbidden Planet" was wild and creepy and shakily surreal. (I'm much more an expressionist than a surrealist, despite my love for the horror artist Magritte; but yeah, "Forbidden Planet" was lovely.)

...dolphin-unsafe link via The Corner.

SAND IN THE PAGES: Kelly Jane Torrance has a follow-up to her summer-reading column! (I participated in the first one.) I didn't know Ralph Ellison wrote movie reviews.... And my belief that the Dartmouth Review is not nearly as cool as Yale's Finest Publication is shored up yet again: If we ever did an anthology, we'd have to go with a title more like, The Yale Free Press Pleads Guilty. ("Their case is fuzzy and circumstantial!")

Anyway, the column is here, and it is fun.

A master of music came with the intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument.
I thanked him for nothing, but bid him be gone,
For my little blogwatch should not be played on!

...Despite the cute intro (you all should get the Baltimore Consort's "Art of the Bawdy Song" CD!! I got it off Amazon Marketplace this past week, having last heard it freshman year of college, and it is fun fun fun in the sun sun sun), most of these links are pretty awful. Sorry....

Balkinization: Fun with war crimes! (...See what I mean about these links?) Actually I'm with the commenting professor who says focusing on humiliation and degradation is at least as important as focusing on cruelty. My only problem with the section on torture in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain was that it completely ignored humiliation, when it seems to me that humiliation is the point of the pain, and a big part of what distinguishes the pain of torture from the pain of e.g. dentistry. Whether I'm right about that or not, though, wouldn't change the points made here.

A "hardcore urbanist" reads Jane Jacobs for the first time. Via Virginia Postrel.

Jonathan Rauch on Louisiana life a year after Katrina:

....Back in St. Bernard many people, presented with such arguments, will concede that every rule has its reasons. When a fire marshal told Voitier, the school superintendent, that she could not use an urgently needed mobile classroom because the doors were too close together, he was following a rule that may well make sense in normal times.

The trouble is that nothing--not anything--is normal in St. Bernard. The collective effect of all the rules and procedures has been to slow recovery in the early stages, when momentum was critical. Still more damaging, perhaps, is the psychological toll, a gooey mixture of anger and demoralization that drains energy and amplifies despair. It amounts to bureaucracy fatigue. Most welfare mothers know this feeling well, and many become used to it (or learn to game the system), but St. Bernard had always cherished its sense of independence. The parish was stunned by the hurricane, and then was stunned again to be pitched into a blizzard of pettifoggery, precisely when it felt too prostrate to cope.

more; via Hit & Run; seriously, please do read.