Critics of Religion

Atrios made a post Saturday, inspired by the Marcotte-McEwan controversy, where he lays out his views on commenting about religion. It’s a thoughtful statement that I respect and largely agree with.

He starts in a funny place, though:

To me, one of the biggest barriers to having any kind of honest discussion about religion generally and religion in politics specifically has been in the rise of ecumenical and interfaith alliances of all kinds. While these things were probably well-intentioned, they tend to first divide people into "faithful" and "faithless" camps, and work to obscure the wide differences in religious belief and practice among the "faithful."… The substitution of largely meaningless and undefinable words like "faith" and "spirituality," which merely point to an undefined belief in something, for the more concrete "religion," which connotes a specific set of beliefs, traditions, and practices, has prevented an honest examination and understanding of what religion actually is, in its many forms, in this country.

I’m not sure of the relevance of this to Marcotte-McEwan; maybe there is a connection in Atrios’s mind that he doesn’t make explicit. But I have a couple of objections. One, substituting “spirituality” for “religion” is a real problem for organized religion. It has to do with the ascendancy of individualism over institutionalism. (“Sheilaism” is one term for a belief system that is spiritual but not religious.) Atrios implies that it’s a plot, or deception, or other incursion by religious authorities into mainstream life. If anything, it’s an incursion of pop culture into religion. Two, the complaints about interfaith alliances and shifting terminology—I fail to see the point, other than it complicates the reality of lived religion and makes things harder for Atrios to understand. He takes a defensive attitude: Somebody’s obscuring things. A better attitude would be: This is complex, I might not see all the angles, maybe I ought to tread lightly, ask for clarification, etc. Duncan would probably never make a blunt value judgment about African-American or Latino culture, partly for fear of giving offense unintentionally. Well, the same potential exists when you comment on a religion that’s not your own.

The post of Amanda's that generated the most outrage was the one about Plan B, the Virgin Mary, and the “hot white sticky” Holy Spirit. That one didn’t make me mad when I first read it; didn’t push my buttons. On reflection, though, I think I see how it could have made other people sincerely angry. It was funny, and it made a legitimate debate point about Plan B contraception. It was also a big fat finger in the eye to Christians who care about the Virgin Mary and the Trinity. And those are central to the faith life of many if not most Christians. The Vatican's views on birth control are not nearly so central. (Here is another tentative observation: the Trinity and the Virgin Birth are among Christianity's most irrational or abstruse beliefs, and just as they appear the most ridiculous articles of faith to outsiders, they are particular sore spots for insiders--the hardest items of doctrine to sign on to, the biggest source of doubt or ambivalence. Best to steer clear of those if you can, Mr. or Ms. Politician.)

Maybe I'm guilty of pushing my pre-existing agenda, and probably I'm in the dreary albeit familiar position of stressing the tone of criticism over the content. But it's a fundamental political task, finding common ground between groups of overlapping but not identical priorities. Establishing trust and good will is a major part of that task. And when you attack religious differences recklessly,you risk destroying good will by treading on tenets or practices that are precious and intimate to many, many people.

Duncan B. recognizes a crucial distinction, between the “many paths to God” viewpoint and the proselytizing, judgmental, one-path-only viewpoint. The latter approach is the one that most often merits criticism, precisely because it involves imposing Tom’s beliefs on Dick and Harry. I don’t think Duncan sees, though, that the “many paths to God” posture is the one that leads to interfaith alliances. There are reasons not to hold out much hope for interfaith dialogue, but I think it should be encouraged.

Incidentally, Butterflies & Wheels pointed me to this opinion piece by a Mark C. Taylor, who teaches religious studies at Williams College. (As usual, I take a slightly different point from the piece than B&W does.) Taylor is troubled by the increasing resistance to a comparative-religions approach among undergraduates, and argues that critical and comparative study of religions is a key to meeting the challenges of the next century.

Until recently, many influential analysts argued that religion, the vestige of an earlier stage of development, would wither away as people became more sophisticated and rational. Obviously, things have not turned out that way. It is now clear that religion is not going to disappear. Indeed, the twenty-first century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable a few short years ago. These conflicts will be less struggles between belief and unbelief than they will be clashes between believers who have the faith to doubt and those who lack it. The warning signals are clear: unless we establish a critical dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the conflicts some people welcome and others fear will surely become even more deadly.

One more on the Edwards bloggers

Well, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan still have their jobs, which is good. They had to humble themselves a little, but in a way it’s nice to see progressives using the “non-apology apology” that right-wingers so often turn to.

Via Ezra Klein, I see this piece at politico.com quoting a couple of religious Democratic “leaders” (neither of whom I’ve heard of before) who feel Edwards should have dumped the two bloggers.

Democrats -- and Edwards in particular -- have embraced the language of faith and the imperative of competing with Republicans for the support of religious voters. His wife, Elizabeth Edwards, even sits on the board of the leading organization of the religious left, Call to Renewal. But in private conversations and careful public statements today, religious Democrats said they felt sidelined by Edwards' decision to stand by his aides.

"We have gone so far to rebuild that coalition [between Democrats and religious Christians] and something like this sets it back," said Brian O'Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader who chairs the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, a Democratic Party group. O'Dwyer said Edwards should have fired the bloggers. "It's not only wrong morally – it's stupid politically."

O'Dwyer e-mailed a statement to reporters saying: "Senator Edwards is condoning bigotry by keeping the two bloggers on his staff. Playing to the cheap seats with anti-Catholic bigotry has no place in the Democratic Party."

“Stupid politically”—hmm. I disagree, given the circumstances. It would’ve looked terrible for Edwards to knuckle under to Michelle Malkin and William Donahue. Here, though, are some tougher hypothetical questions. What if Mr. O’Dwyer had publicly called for Amanda to be fired? What then would be the politically smart move for Edwards to make? Who is a more important constituency, religious liberals or the blogosphere?

Personally, I identify with both constituencies, but that overlap is perhaps small. The question points to a more fundamental one in politics: reach for the center or energize the base? One could quibble, but most people would place open-minded religious believers in the center, and the readership of Pandagon on the left.

It pains me to pose the question this way. I find that trying to occupy the slot of “religious liberal” is exhausting; there are roadblocks, misunderstandings, frustrations every direction you turn. Being a resident of the blogosphere is more energizing. Correspondingly (I don’t know what the causal relationship is, it’s a chicken-egg thing) the religious left is weak in getting things done. The blogosphere—it sounds funny to say it, but it does have a shaggy kind of organization and is growing in influence. If I do the math, I come out in favor of the blogosphere.

Marcotte “playing to the cheap seats?” I guess he means crude reflexive atheists, and/or people who like a good jizm joke no matter what. Marcotte and McEwan also play to smart people--young, smart, passionate people out here in Flyover Country.

This whole stupid thing with McEwan and Marcotte pushes several of my buttons. I realize it’s a tempest in a teapot and ought to die a quick death as a news story. Yet I'm flashing back to a summer when I was in my 20s, between jobs, hanging out with friends in Dupont Circle, having vague thoughts about trying to get work in Washington, then discovering to my disillusionment that these people were unprincipled, or if they had principles they were invisible under layers of intrigue. They thought about their careers 24/7 and I was unlikely to ever get on their wavelength. It wasn’t that these people flat-out rejected me—I’d let it slip out that I might be job-hunting and they were trying to be helpful. But they turned me off with obnoxious networking behavior, pressing business cards on me when I was standing in line to get a beer. I was lacking in ambition, sure, but they were lacking in perspective.

There needs to be more room in politics for people who are smart and passionate, yet sometimes irreverent and not laser-like in their focus. People with a sense of humor. People who get context (which was the first casualty when people were ripping sentences out of Pandagon for scrutiny). Room for regular people, in other words.

Myers: visionary genius. But Briggs? No-talent hack.

I went on a staff retreat (so-called, but training class would describe it better) this week built on the Myers-Briggs inventory. We all filled the thing out, got our results, and discussed the various types, their implications, their interactions.

While some of my co-workers seem to find Myers-Briggs to be a key to self-understanding, I’m skeptical. To tell the truth I was a little bothered by some of my results (I am too compassionate! Sometimes, a little! And I don’t fear intimacy that much!). Yet the seminar concluded with some exercises that seemed to hold promise for handling certain work-related situations better. If I’m an introvert and my boss is an extrovert, that suggests some strategies for relating to him better. It’s something to grab onto, as if any paradigm for figuring out relationships is better than no paradigm.

My college had all incoming freshmen take the Myers-Briggs; the housing office claimed that it used the test to match us up with roommates. This method seemed to work okay; most people got along pretty well with their assigned roommates. One pair of guys was a particularly bad match—one roommate bullied the other mercilessly—but I came to learn that the bully guy had blown off the Myers-Briggs, he had his little brother fill it out for him. So that certainly looked like the exception that proves the rule. I had some problems with my roommate (a gung-ho ROTC kid, currently a career Army officer) but I figured maybe we were just at the tail end of the matching process; we thrown together more potluck style than others. I used to console myself that although ROTC Kid bugged me sometimes, it was a plus that we were the same height and build, so at least we could borrow each other’s clothes on occasion. Then when I looked around at other people in the dorm, I noticed that a LOT of sets of roommates were about the same size. So maybe height and weight were the key traits and the college was just shining us on about the MBTI.

One doubt about the Myers-Briggs test that I can never shake is that its theoretical pedigree is dubious. It’s based on Jungian psychology, which nobody in academic psychology thinks much of. Yet lots of organizations use it, and I can’t help but think that the MBTI works in certain practical applications.

A lot of people nowadays bash Freud, and with a lot of good reasons, but while I wouldn’t go for treatment to a Freudian analyst, I would never try to deny that Freud was major. He had some fundamental insights: People behave irrationally. Childhood experiences imprint us and stay with us forever. Sex is a powerful force in our lives, and hard to control. Somewhat similarly, I could quibble with the Myers-Briggs test all day, but if nothing else it highlights some simple but useful truths: People are different from one another. You should take different tacks in approaching different people. A group or organization (especially a large one with complex goals) benefits from involving diverse people with diverse perspectives.

Edwards campaign bloggers

Man, I hope this isn’t true. I’ve been reading Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon since she arrived there. I have occasionally been annoyed by Amanda's posts about religion. But man, it never dawned on me that it was the slightest bit relevant to her employment with the Edwards campaign. She seems to be hard-working, adept at blogging, down with the Edwards agenda, etc. (The Edwards agenda includes support for women's rights and freedom of religion -- it may not highlight those issues but it encompasses them, I believe.)

Those are the relevant qualifications. I can't fathom her being fired due to exercise of her free speech rights as a private citizen prior to being hired by Edwards 08. Particularly with the impetus of an organized right-wing oppo campaign.

If Edwards is firing people, he ought to look at Jennifer Palmieri, if she really said to the New York Times that Edwards is “weighing the fate” of Marcotte & McEwan.

John, here’s what to say: “I don’t take advice on personnel matters from Mr. Donahue. In any case, they’re just words, ideas, opinions. Mr. Donahue shouldn’t be afraid of them.”

"Constitutionally incapable"

Another Rick Perlstein gem in the New Republic. Hat tip to Yglesias.

Perlstein is praising the blogosphere for doing a better job than the establishment press in a couple of recent instances. What Firedoglake is doing with its wall-to-wall blogging of the Scooter Libby trial is really quite remarkable.

"We've been beating them," Wheeler notes of The Last Hurrah's coverage of the CIA leak scandal. "The New York Times can't cover the story. They're constitutionally incapable."

She puts it even more bluntly in her book: "[T]he CIA leak case is a story about how our elected representatives exploited the weakness of our media." Part of that weakness was their overweening self-regard. At first, in the eighteenth century, when an anonymous writer launched charges against "gentlemen"--quite often in the rudest language imaginable--it was a scandal "in a social order of deference," Warner writes in Letters of the Republic. But, by striking down deference, pseudonyms forced arguments to be stronger; Warner even argues that the anonymous culture of print is what made republican consciousness possible. Like "jjcomet," "dmbeaster," and "Newton Minnow," our Founding Fathers only had only their words to rely on for their authority. Every day, I find faceless netroots citizens reprising their wisdom, as against gentlemen and gentleladies of the press who sometimes seem more interested saving face than doing sound work.

And the account of Jay Carney being spanked by blog commenters--well, this kind of thing is a familiar story by now. Ezra Klein and Oliver Willis laid a drubbing on David Broder yesterday for his account of Wesley Clark speaking at the recent DNC meeting. I was taken slightly aback at Willis calling Broder a liar, I wouldn't go quite so far, but Broder is just so damn insistent to have things fit into his preconceived narrative. Jay Carney, the same thing. Like Orwell wrote, it takes a lot of effort just to state accurately what is in front of your face.

Wolfe

I wanted to blog briefly about a talk I just heard by Alan Wolfe, whom I admire and have commented about in this space a time or two. His title today was "Who's Afraid of American Religion?" Wolfe began by remarking on the recent run of new books that are critical if not hostile toward American religion: the Richard Dawkins school of wanting to overthrow religion per se; the David Kuo / Damon Linker strain of religious conservatives who became disenchanted at the crossroads of religion and politics; and the Michelle Goldberg / Kevin Phillips school warning of creeping right-wing Christian theocracy in American politics. Wolfe has a three-part argument why he deosn't fear a right-wing American theocracy.

1. The separation of church and state is a well-established tradition in this country. When push comes to shove, even evangelicals may come to remember how they have relied historically on the protections of the First Amendment. (Dr. Wolfe discussed John Leland, a Baptist preacher and contemporary of Madison and Jefferson, who influenced Madison to insist on the First Amendment in the Constitution.)
2. If we were to establish a religion in this country, which one would it be? The largest single religious category in the U.S. is Catholic, but that only represents 20% of the populace. (Interesting tangent / fun fact: 5 out of 9 current Supreme Court justices are Catholic, and there is much more rigorous political and legal writing coming from the Richard John Neuhaus crowd than from anybody in the Protestant camp. So maybe it would be a Catholic theocracy, based on the principle of the smartest group winning out. Yeah, that's often been the case in American history.)
3. America is a religious nation but not a theological nation, which would be a barrier to installing any religious-based political program.

A good discussion ensued, especially about the third point. Another way of putting it is, religious labels are less important than they were, say, in the 1960 JFK campaign. Nowadays pro-life Catholics and pro-life Baptists accentuate their common ground rather than their differences. One audience member commented, with some justification, that this argues against Points 1 and 2.

Wolfe made a personal reflection -- The AJC controversy that Matthew Yglesias and Jonah Goldberg and other bloggers have been involved in, has swept up Alan Wolfe as well. Basically, he's been tarred as an anti-Semite for criticizing the Israeli government, despite being a Jew himself. He finds it interesting that one's views of US foreign policy seem to be the measure of how good a Jew one is -- by that measure Condoleeza Rice is a heckuva good Jew.

"these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand"

Whew -- tired today, and I know exactly why: I got caught up in watching All the President's Men on TV last night and stayed up later than I should've.

This movie is an old favorite of mine, but I think last night marked the first time I've watched it since the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat. Not that verisimilitude is the best yardstick, but Hal Holbrook's performance actually holds up great, and is even a little amplified, compared to my sense of what Mark Felt was like. Felt was one of the very top people in the FBI, an accomplished, meticulous man, fundamentally conservative. (The creepy thing I noted in the Deep Throat expose in Vanity Fair two years ago, was how highly Felt regarded J. Edgar Hoover.) Not at all the closet liberal I would "expect" to be spilling the beans about Watergate. He represents not the whistle-blower as disgruntled peon or ax-grinder, but someone with high standards of integrity and professionalism, who has the loftiest possible motives for informing. The offense he takes at Nixon's misdeeds is not visceral, it's almost intellectual. His sense of order has been insulted. Deep Throat seems almost a Godlike figure, setting the ground rules for when and where he meets Woodward, what he divulges, when and how much revelation to give. He is also a kind of rescuer: The emtional climax of the film is when Deep Throat warns Woodward the reporters' lives are in danger.

Another reaction: though it's been several years since I'd seen Robert Redford-as-Bob Woodward, I've seen the real Woodward quite a bit lately in various interviews and talk shows, and man, does Woodward come off better in the film. Who among us men wouldn't like to be played by Redford in the filmic version of our lives, of course, but movie Woodward is so hard-driving, fast-talking, working all night and burning up shoe leather. The real Bob Woodward speaks in this almost excruciatingly slow cadence with a flat Midwestern accent. Also, nowadays Woodward is the farthest thing from a muckraker, he's a court historian, who reportedly receives interview subjects in his elegant Georgetown home; they come to him, they make appointments. To think of him as eager and hungry in 1972-73 -- it's a hard mental leap.

I noticed more flaws in the movie than I ever had, some awkward expository dialogue, although of course it's a hard story to tell visually. I still enjoyed it, though. You can't miss the parallels between the flailings and maneuverings of the current administration, and those of Nixon's men: the pettiness, the incompetence, the frat-boy arrogance of "ratfucker" Donald Segretti, the two-facedness of Ken Clawson (whom Ben Bradlee blackmails for information with the knowledge that the married Clawson went to a young woman's apartment for a drink). Perhaps Deep Throat put it best: "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."

The Sin of Being Right; The Joy of Blogscenity

Radar Online must have done something right, because they sure irritated some people with this article, comparing the professional fortunes of pundits who advocated the Iraq invasion in 2003, with those of pundits who opposed it. The conclusion was that the hawkish ones, who have been proved so abundantly wrong, are still higher and getting higher still on the political pundit food chain than the doves, who were merely correct as opposed to "serious."

The liberal-hawks doth protest an awful lot, with a lot of fake humility and various rationalizations: the doves were right, but just got lucky; or the doves were right, but that will make them cocky and therefore less likely to be right next time; or, the doves were right, but not for the right reasons.

I don't mean to bore you all, singing verse after verse of the same song, but prestige journalists continue to flounder and to be exposed as emperors-with-no-clothes by the new online news 'n' opinion outlets they so disdain. In the first week of operation of Time magazine's group blog of TV pundits, Joe Klein showed his ass, and then tried to pull rank on Greg Sargent of TAPPED and TPM (Rank on Sargent? No, I didn't do that on purpose), where at this point Greg Sargent is worth a whole Town Car load of Joe Kleins.

And then there is a whole exchange, centered at MyDD and TPM Cafe, whether the Internet left is worthy of the name or just a nest of monosyllabic brainless drones whose only useful attributes are its Paypal accounts. That deserves its own post.

I found a little gem today, poking around the archives of the Guardian website, and wanted to bookmark it. Theo Hobson riffed on Polly Toynbee's first brush with the blogosphere, and her offended reaction to her blog commenters:

When the pseudonymous anarcho-bloggers put up two fingers to the established columnist, they are performing a very useful corrective function. By replying to a wise, measured essay with comments that are nasty, brutish and short, they are injecting a crucial realism. They are saying that none of us is a pure, godlike intelligence calmly surveying the world; that we are all passionate, fallible and limited by our perspectives - and less wise and good than we like to seem.

They are true satirists - puncturing pomposity with low realism. And (this will really rile them!) they are performing a crucial theological function. By mocking the tone of calm, polite rightness, the blogscenity-mongers are reminding the omniscient columnist that she is not God. They are reminding us that real life is not a calm debate but a struggle - intense, passionate and messy. We are not wise spirits who look down on the world's terrible problems: we are down on ground level, fully involved and implicated. We are all guilty; we are all part of the problem.

Blogscenity is a refreshing reaction to the absurd and pompous hangover of the Enlightenment that is the print pulpit. The detached, benign, omniscient voice is a fraud - and a blasphemy. Knock it.

Feedback welcome.

The Mystery of Dumb Smart Guys

Malcolm Gladwell, "Open Secrets," The New Yorker:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

{...}
If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

A good article -- Malcolm Gladwell doing his thing. He discusses the Enron financial implosion at length, as an example of a mystery. There were thousands upon thousands of pages of disclosure documents that Enron produced in the late 90s; the signs of their downfall were not lacking.

Now: Richard Dawkins, Comment Is Free blog at the Guardian:

But I want to add another and less obvious reason why we should not have executed Saddam Hussein. His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars...

[H]is execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data....

What were the formative influences on [mass murderers]? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels? Could the danger have been nipped in the bud by an alert psychiatrist before it was too late? How would Hitler, or Saddam Hussein have responded to a different style of education? We don't have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.

... It is in the nature of research on ruthless national dictators that the sample size is small. Wasn't the judicial destruction of one of the very few research subjects we had - and a prime specimen at that - an act of vandalism?

Right. Small sample size of genocidal dictators. What a shame. Maybe it's not too late, though, to preserve Saddam's brain in a jar of formaldehyde, the way the Soviets did with Lenin...

(For the record, I thought the execution of Saddam Hussein was a travesty as well, but the lost opportunity to have him fill out questionnaires did not occur to me.)

Doug Feith is still the heavyweight champ, though

Via Ezra Klein we discover Jane Galt calling Daniel Dennett a contender for the title of “stupidest smart person in the world.” Dennett is comparing the need to eradicate religion from modern life, with public health campaigns against tobacco. Ms. Galt, shall we say, has problems with his argument.

The Dennett tangent, though, pointed me to Edge.org, a site I had forgotten about, which does this annual New Years’ stunt where they ask 160 or so really smart people to answer a really big question. This year’s question is: What Are You Optimistic About? Why? It’s very much worth browsing around in.

The people are mostly scientists and philosophers, and where they touch on religion, as in Dennett’s case, it’s in the vein of predicting religion’s demise or at least its remission. The one writer they truck with at Edge.org who's sympathetic to religion is Andrew Brown of the Guardian, whom I’ve blogged before.

[A]n enquiry into religious belief would be distinct from an enquiry into religious opinions: Religious "belief" would involve all of the largely unconscious mechanisms which lead people to behave superstitiously, or reverently, or with a disdain for heretics; religious opinions would be the reasons that they give for this behaviour. We need to understand both. It may be that their opinions would correspond to their beliefs but that is something to be established in every case by empirical enquiry. It's obvious that in most cases they don't. Intellectuals are supposed to be motivated by their opinions; some of them actually are. But everyone is motivated by their beliefs and prejudices as well.

Welcome 2007

Happy New Year, cyber-space-men and space-women.

My wife and I attended a New Year’s Eve party, our first in I don’t know how many years. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, getting discreetly intoxicated and chatting with an interesting array of people. Almost everybody there told some variation of a story that went, I have this fairly pedestrian desk job Monday thru Friday, but I also play music, or make films, or get to travel to some interesting places and in that way combine work with fun and broadening myself. Hanging out with people who are objectively like me, and also subjectively passionate and creative and funny--it made me feel a lot better about my place in life and this mid-sized Southern burg I live in.

I met and began dating my wife in a workplace—-we were both door-to-door canvassers for an environmental organization. Thanks to Ralph Nader and his lefty inheritors, thousands of Americans by now have been through this rite of passage in their young adult years. As a job, canvassing is demanding and sometimes even grim; few people last for more than a year or two at it. As a stage of life, though, it has its charms. You meet a bunch of people roughly your age, with similar interests, all of whom share your unusual daily schedule (noon to 9 pm, give or take) and your subsistence-level income bracket. So the job comes with a built-in social life—-in fact you stand a pretty strong chance of meeting your future spouse.

Due to family life and job changes and moving from a more boho neighborhood to a staid middle-class one, we had drifted away from these folks. It’s been 17 years (yikes) and stuff happens. But through a happy accident, a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing, we have gotten reacquainted with some of them, and a handful of them were at this party. It was a lot like old times, especially since the site of the party was around the corner from the group house where many of our circa-1990 parties took place. The most obvious new feature for 2006/7 was the presence of a passel of kids, some of them teenagers, having their own parallel party in the backyard, playing ball and shooting fireworks, in close proximity to their obscenity-spouting and not-100%-sober fathers and mothers. Dunno that they paid us much attention; dunno that it would matter if they had.

One old friend we caught up with at the party, I’ll call him Joe, was our canvass director. Characteristically, he cringed when I referred to him as my “old boss”; all of us were always primarily friends, not employer and employee, and he used to struggle with his role as the guy in charge. (Speaking of my own case specifically, he should have fired me for lack of performance; there were objective fundraising quotas we were supposed to meet, I consistently had trouble meeting them, and he consistently covered for me until I finally said “uncle” of my own accord.) But Joe has a really terrific way with people; he was uncanny at counseling us, bolstering our self-esteem, and keeping us in the daily routine (as long as we were meant to) of knocking on doors and talking to strangers. The other night, in reminiscing about old times, he paid my wife a compliment that made her absolutely beam. I am halfway chagrined that he did that the first time he’d seen her in over a decade--I see her every day and don’t say things that make her light up like that.

In his current job Joe consults with companies about their smokestack permits. He travels throughout the U.S. and still maintains and is sustained by relationships from his canvassing days. As an "expert canvasser" he used to cross-train in other states with sister organizations of ours, so, as he was telling it the other night, he now has invitations to stay in the homes of people he met 15-plus years ago and may have "known" for only a few weeks. A couple of others of the old canvassing crew are doing environmental regulation or consulting, fashioning a career from their concern for the environment. Whatever they're doing, all these folks are setting good examples of lives lived with integrity and passion.

reasons to quit

The L.A. Times reported the other day on the response of evangelical church leaders to the recent spate of scandals involving megachurch pastors and same-sex activity. (Hat tip Hullabaloo.)

I think this piece is pretty well done. Isolation is a persistent problem for ministers, because of the nature of the work (embodying virtue and optimism, at least to their flock) and the type of people who go into it (demanding of themselves). The problem will play out in different ways in different kinds of church context. I strongly disagree that gay sex is a sin, but many people do believe that, and the Times reporter takes those people seriously and on their own terms. The story ends with the "ex-gay" minister and his strategies for how not to act on his same-sex desires, as if he were trying to give up cigarettes or trans fats. That gets right to the heart of the matter.

The best bit is right here:

In his 14 years at the helm of a conservative Baptist congregation in Colorado Springs, the Rev. Benjamin Reynolds found it almost impossible to have an honest conversation with his deacons. He set up a monthly "check-in," but everyone responded to his questions with a reflexive "I'm blessed."

"I wanted to say, 'Please! I feel like crap!' " Reynolds said. "I felt like I was not dealing with human beings."

Talking with members of the congregation was even harder, he said; they held him to such a high standard that he could set off a round of gossip just by running out for a carton of milk on a Saturday night — a time they expected him to be home in prayer, preparing for Sunday worship.

Reynolds, 45, struggled for years on his own with the realization he is gay.

That Stepford-like optimism that a lot of evangelicals have--I sure couldn't deal with it every day. Reynolds ended up coming out to his congregation, then resigning his position. I would like to know what he's doing now; the story doesn't say.

Magisterium

Remedial blogging, not especially appropriate to Christmas Day...

Via The Revealer, an article by Warren Goldstein in the Yale Alumni Magazine, about Yale Divinity School. I want to bookmark it. Note to self: update the link as necessary.

The article's Yale-centrism (which was intended, of course) is a little annoying as boosterism within the realm of American seminaries and denominations. But it's also noteworthy as an effort to validate Yale Divinity School's continued existence, to the realm of Yale alumni and the larger Yale community. Warren Goldstein argues that better days are ahead for liberal mainline Protestantism as a force in American society. All I can say is, from his lips to God's ears. Whether the optimism is well-founded or not, the diagnosis of what has happened to the liberal denominations since their peak in the 1960s, is well-stated. In its headline ("What the fuck would it take?") The Revealer highlights Goldstein's account of a 1980 debate, televised on the Phil Donahue Show, between William Sloan Coffin (longtime Yale chaplain, exemplar of theological liberalism) and Jerry Falwell. Falwell eats Coffin's lunch in the debate, largely because Coffin cannot take the Lynchburg upstart and his movement seriously, and perhaps doesn't take the Donahue Show seriously, either, as a public venue. We can read quite a bit about the last few decades in American religion from that encounter.

But there's other good stuff in here as well. William McKinney makes some great points:

Nearly everyone has a theory about what caused the mainline decline; it's the $64,000 question in the sociology of modern Protestantism. One theory emphasizes the mainline's discomfort with emotion in worship, a focus on social issues, and consequent neglect of personal faith. McKinney, of the Pacific School of Religion, cites sociologist Robert Booth Fowler in arguing that however much Americans may like liberalism, they find it "too cerebral" and "spiritually unsatisfying." (Anyone recognize a couple of recent Yale-educated Democratic presidential candidates?) "Americans like liberalism but they don't like liberal religion," he says. "They want it hot, passionate; they want to feel it."

In the sidebar to the story, Lillian Daniel does a great job of encapsulating the problem ministers have when they leave seminary and enter a local church:

"When I graduated I was confronted with hemorrhaging membership numbers. I was associate minister in a suburban church. They were saying, 'How do we grow?' And I had no idea. We never covered that in divinity school. 'How do we attract the kids? Oh, I missed that day. I can tell you about Saint Augustine. I had no idea you would want to grow the church.' It was a huge disservice.

"I liken Yale Divinity School to a liberal arts education. You don't cover the professional and technical skills; the idea is that you will be grounded in the tradition and in learning and reading critically, and the other stuff you'll pick up on the job. The problem with that model, where it breaks down, is that the mainline church is in crisis. There aren't that many healthy, vibrant ministers and congregations to teach you."

Schaller and Perlstein

Two current political writers whose books I've been meaning to pick up are Rick Perlstein and Tom Schaller. Here’s a lazy man’s way out: why not read a short article BY Rick Perlstein ABOUT Tom Schaller?

Schaller’s thesis, crudely stated, is that the Democrats’ surest path to winning national elections is to direct resources everywhere except the South. Perlstein boils Schaller’s insight down to this: Compare white Northern voters to white Southern voters, then look for the factor that explains why the Southerners vote Republican at higher rates. Identifying as a conservative doesn’t explain it. Pro-life or pro-choice? Hawk or dove? These items don’t explain it. What explains it is racial prejudice: whether the respondent believes the proposition that black Americans face systemic inequality.

Tom Schaller is a hot topic among Democrats right now. Greater blogs than mine, like Ed Kilgore and Lawyers Guns and Money and Matthew Yglesias, are batting this around. (Here is Ed Kilgore's Salon review of Schaller's book "Whistling Past Dixie.")

A Southern Democrat like me is naturally somewhat resistant to Schaller's argument. I guess the nub of the matter is that it feels, or would feel, a little pathetic to be attached to a political movement that doesn't consider me worth having as a full member on account of geography. But the argument based on survey data appeals to the amateur sociologist in me. Also, in trying to find a voice for this blog, and figure out where to direct my writerly resources, it would be nice to steer clear of hair-splitting arguments, or matters of semantics and tone. Religion and region are two subjects where I find myself being hyperdefensive, when the fact is I don't so much object to what the secular-liberal consensus says, as to the way it says it. I don't get paid to fight those battles.

(Some people do get paid to fight those battles. Ed Kilgore writes on his blog, "We think the progressive message, presented with sensitivity to regional variations, can create a long-term Democratic majority." I can get behind that statement, and it's interesting that "we" includes Howard Dean. But Kilgore appends a final clause, "and that anything less will likely squander that opportunity." Maybe he's right, I don't know, but that's the statement of a Democratic consultant trying to defend his turf.)

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Since the Perlstein piece will retreat into TNR's archives soon, I am going to cut and paste a part from near the end. This is less specifically pertinent to Schaller, but an interesting forensic note about what's wrong with political journalism in the U.S.:

After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America."

That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968.

(To finish Perlstein's thought, calling a spade a spade means accepting that in the near term, the Democratic platform won't win in the South.)

I actually did check Schaller's book out of the library, so maybe I'll have something more substantive to say about it at some point.

Obama and Evangelicals

Barack Obama is attracting a lot of press right now as the fresh-faced new entry in the Democratic presidential sweepstakes. His barnstorming goodwill tour hit a bump recently: he was invited to speak at a conference on HIV/AIDS at Saddleback, Rick Warren's Southern California megachurch, one of the capitals of evangelicaldom. But due to his pro-abortion-rights record, Obama's scheduled appearance sparked expressions of protest from evangelical leaders, including Phyllis Schlafly.

My sense is that many Democratic observers are skeptical, right out of the gate, of Obama's attempts at outreach to evangelicals, and were quick to read this as a setback for Obama. My off-the-cuff response when I first saw this news item was, Phyllis Schlafly is past her prime, and in a battle of the titans, my money would be on Rick Warren.

Sure enough, Warren responded politely but firmly, and and the bottom line is that Barack Obama is still invited to Saddleback. This article tells us that while Obama is in SoCal he's going to squeeze in an appearance on the Tonight Show. Rick Warren didn't just fall out of a tree, and he would have to be real afraid of Phyllis Schlafly to diss a Tonight Show guest. He's not that afraid of her.

One of my points here, to channel Amy Sullivan for just a moment, is that your average journalist or Democratic politico has a view of evangelicals that's stuck in the past. Writers like Eric Kleefeld attach a lot of weight to names they recognize: Falwell, Schlafly, and Robertson. None of those three is a heavyweight contender anymore. Rick Warren is a contender, Richard Land and James Dobson are contenders. Ted Haggard was a contender until recently.

Another news story that caught my attention this week is that the president-elect of the Christian Coalition has opted not to take the job, because of the resistance he encountered in wanting to broaden the Coalition's focus:

"My position is, unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we're not carrying out the full message of Jesus," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "They began to think this might threaten their base or evaporate some of their support, and they said they just couldn't go there."

The Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson's onetime base of operations, is circling the drain. This is because of garden-variety institutional stagnation, and also because (my second point here) pro-life politics are in trouble. (Note the setbacks on Election Day: the abortion referendum in South Dakota, the stem-cell referendum in Missouri.) An overwhelming focus on protecting the unborn and harassing gays, to the exclusion of every other issue, makes the Schlafly types look out of touch and mean. The future of evangelical politics is global humanitarian issues and the environment, and Barack Obama may be onto something.

Update, 12/4/06: The text of Obama's speech at Saddleback

Midterm Elections Recap

I can't add too much to my friend Snoopy's reaction. I really tried not to make predictions or have high expectations, but it was hard to avoid it. For months Democrats were just aching with anticipation, while cowering in fear of GOP dirty tricks, John Kerry gaffes, and The Myth of Karl Rove's Genius. But I went through the day November 8th tired, but with a smile on my face, which just got bigger with each news update: Don Rumsfeld, George Allen, Conrad Burns...

Here's something strange, though: Bush's postmortem press conference inspired James Fallows to muse, "Has Bush Been Smart All Along?" This is an odd little column, that Fallows half-apologizes for as he's writing it. By way of background, Fallows had written a story in The Atlantic in 2004 that examined Bush's oratory going back to his days as Texas governor, and concluded that GWB's verbal acuity had declined noticeably over the years. Anyway, Fallows listened to Bush in the aftermath of his midterm "thumping" and thought the President sounded eloquent and sure of himself, as if some his rhetorical brain cells had regenerated; Fallows even praised him for pronouncing words like "cumulative" and "nevertheless" without a hitch. (Christ, do our pundits ever grade Presidents on a curve!)

Has Bush been smart all along? The overwhelming consensus is No. (In the days before the election, I savored the fact that while Bush seemed eager to be out on the campaign trail, his party would only send him to out-of-the-way places where they figured he couldn't hurt them. It turned out that he hurt them anyway in formerly Red States like Montana.) I didn't think Bush sounded especially smart on the Day After; he was robotically repeating the phrase of the day, "fresh perspective" (as in, flushing Rumsfeld was not an admission of failure, it was a quest for a "fr...) and his peevishness was competing with the need to extend a hand to Nancy Pelosi.

However, I wonder if this drubbing at the polls was a psychic watershed for Bush. I see certain hints that he is sure of himself in defeat. There's been lots of discussion of the Rumsfeld firing, and its timing, and a tangent about Bush "lying" to reporters about Rumsfeld's job security the week before the election. What I take from the Rumsfeld story is that the President implicitly agrees with the proposition that the 2006 midterms were a referendum on him and his wars. In my view Bush has been a fundamentally weak and insecure leader, urgently trying to puff himself up, surround himself with yes-men and cheering crowds and triumphalist campaign advisors. Now his bubble has burst, and part of him was sure all along that it would, and I wonder if he feels a tremendous relief and unburdening. I think he'll take to being a lame duck better than Clinton did.

One intemperate election prediction I did make had to do with a certain Senate race in Connecticut. I guess I'll never publish the anti-Joe Lieberman post I wrote back in August at the height of Ned Lamont fever. Don't want to make the Independent Democrat angry. (Watch out! He's a maverick! Stand back while he DOESN'T issue subpoenas!)

The Right Stuff!

Have you ever met a real-live astronaut? I have, last Saturday night, in fact.

I'm going to struggle to keep the names and places out of this post--This was a guy who piloted the Space Shuttle on one of its early missions. He's retired now from NASA but still does public appearances, for a fee, I am told. (Did he get appearance fees when he still worked for NASA? Is being an astronaut a money-making gig? I wonder.) He gave a talk, with a slide show, at a fundraising event at a science museum in my town.

It was a polished presentation that I'm sure he's given a hundred times. He summarized his career, the selection process for becoming an astronaut, the history and future of the space program. He included some human-interest details about what it's like to spend several days in zero-gravity conditions: for instance, he got about 1.5 inches taller in space, because without gravity your spinal column de-compresses. The Astronaut says it's great if you have back trouble. He displayed some humorous, nonchalant bravado; he said you pull 3 G's during a shuttle lift-off, "no problem for an old Navy pilot like me, a little rough on the Air Force guys." When he spoke of the astronauts who died in the Challenger and Columbia accidents, he was respectful but matter-of-fact and still a little nonchalant. Those men and women understood the risks, and understood that the program was bigger than themselves, he said; words to that effect anyway.

Then there was a brief question-and-answer period, then The Astronaut got a standing ovation. Many people become star-struck little kids in the presence of an astronaut. The Astronaut's talk had been 30 or 40 minutes long, then we moved to the evening's other activities, eating and having cocktails and dancing (there was a live band). The Astronaut stayed for the party. Most men were in dark suits and ties, while the Astronaut wore his bright blue and yellow NASA flightsuit. You could say that he stood out in the crowd.

The Astronaut is in his 60's (a few years younger than my dad; I know this because in chatting with him I learned he went to the same high school as my dad, a few years behind) but ruddy-faced and just a little thick around the middle and thin up top. He invited us to call him by his first name, for which I was grateful because I wasn't sure how to address him (Commander?) Imagine Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper in The Right Stuff, 30 years older but still the cocky test-pilot: holding court with a cluster of men and even more women hanging on his every word, smiling, winking, NASA patch on his breast, telling stories of missions accomplished and deaths defied. It was a good party, and I for one don't get enough chances anymore to dress up and have a few drinks too many and try to remember how to dance. People were looking their best and the liquor was flowing, and while nobody made a royal ass of him- or herself, I felt it was something of a workout for dormant middle-aged libidos. I don't know if the Astronaut achieved liftoff that night, but it sure looked like he could have.

"a sort of clown"

Gary Wolf, "The Church of the Non-Believers," in Wired magazine. A profile of today's fiery evangelists of atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris).

Preferring sincerity to reality

A blogospheric efflorescence was sparked yesterday by this Amy Sullivan piece in The New Republic (curiously, two weeks after it was published). Ms. Sullivan was talking up the newly-published book Tempting Faith by David Kuo, a Christian conservative who is frustrated over the Bush Administration's lack of follow-through on its campaign promises to promote evangelical values in national policy.

One might think that evangelical voters would get fed up one of these days with how little bang for the buck they're getting from the GOP, and would kick the tires of the Democratic Party. That's certainly Amy Sullivan's hope, that the Democrats would highlight Kuo's story of Bushian betrayal, but her fear is Dems are in the throes of "theocracy hype." Anyway, it's a relatively minor point she's making, it's a poor time to be making it (one week before the midterms, which are not being fought on social-compassion terms), and some of the bloggers and commenters miss her point anyway. The best takes on Sullivan, I thought, were (1) Matthew Yglesias wondering how you make nice with people who think you're going to hell, and (2) Scott Lemieux wondering what's the payoff: how many evangelical voters are really amenable to a marketing pitch from the Democrats, in the absence of major policy concessions on stem cells, abortion, et.al.

It's a shame in a way, because what people ought to be reading in TNR this week is Alan Wolfe's review of Tempting Faith. Wolfe is knowledgeable about evangelicals and where they fit in the landscape of American religions. At the same time, he avoids mealy-mouthed PC-ness and gives us a really sharp takedown of Kuo and the credulousness he exemplifies:

Tempting Faith is in its way a significant book, not for what it teaches about the Machiavellians in the White House--surely there are no longer any surprises to be had on that front--but for what we learn about young, idealistic, and phenomenally naïve Christians such as David Kuo. It is not an analysis of a mentality, but a documentation of it. To be sure, there is no doubting Kuo's sincerity. His faith in God is unwavering. He is truly committed to good work on behalf of the poor. He did eventually leave the White House, and with the publication of this book he testifies to the cynicism that he found there. But his recovered righteousness is itself a kind of alibi. For people like him served as enablers for one of the most immoral presidencies Americans have ever endured. If we are to know what makes Bush so bad, we need to know more about why people who are so good could ever have been seduced by him.

The way David Kuo was seduced, first by John Ashcroft, later by George W. Bush, was that each leader had a "testimony," a personal story about how he had felt God's power in his life. Testimonialism is a powerful paradigm in evangelical life; having a testimony is considered a mark of sincerity and trustworthiness. These testimonies are often a little too good to be literally true, and besides that, the willingness to be charmed by these heartfelt stories is crippling for a political operative.

If theocracy is not a looming danger to our democracy, bathos might be. For every evangelical leader spewing hate, there are ten evangelical followers who believe that all you need is love. David Kuo is one of them. He brought to the White House neither money nor mission, but only mush. ...His intentions were not malevolent. They were oblivious, which may be worse.

I like me some Alan Wolfe. He is a public intellectual of a high order, even from his perch in academia. If you missed his Washington Monthly piece from a few months ago, "Why Conservatives Can't Govern," do yourself a favor and read it.

Now I'm hungry

Anthony Bourdain on barbecue. While barbecue is a Platonic ideal and perennial subject for debate, and THE perfect recipe is unknowable, he writes that the Eastern North Carolina variety is as good as it gets. Woo hoo! Bourdain makes an interesting statement, and I bet it's true, that the fall-off-the-bone character of Southern barbecue evolved thanks to a combination of (1) tough critters that had to be cooked and (2) rotten teeth in the mouths of the settlers.

Anthony Bourdain's travel & cuisine TV show "No Reservations" is fun and thought-provoking. It was actually a kind of good luck that Bourdain and his crew happened to be in Beirut when the Israeli rocket attacks began there this past summer; the end product was an impromptu documentary with a humane ground-level perspective on the attack. But all his shows offer an offbeat sensory experience of a foreign locale.

Bridge Day Tragedy

Fayetteville, West Virginia is home to the New River Gorge Bridge, the highest single-span arch bridge in the world. Every fall Fayetteville celebrates Bridge Day, which is your basic town fair and street festival, but with the added feature that the state closes the bridge to traffic for the day, so people can walk out on it and check out the view from 876 feet above the river.

Bridge Day is renowned among BASE jumpers--people who parachute-jump off of fixed structures (Buildings, Antennas, Spans, and Earth [i.e. a really high cliff] ). Several hundred folks each year make the Bridge Day pilgrimage in order to leap off the thing. In 1984 I attended Bridge Day with my grandmother. I'll never forget watching those men and women, one after another, diving off the railing into the void. As much as their daring, I remember their skill in steering their parachutes: almost every jumper hit the strip of sand, 20 feet wide or so, between the water and the trees.

Fatalities are rare among BASE jumpers, but last weekend's Bridge Day festivities were marred by the death of a jumper named Brian Lee Schubert, who happened to be one of the pioneers of BASE jumping, having leapt off El Capitan in Yosemite National Park 40 years ago. NPR's Noah Adams happened to be present and to have interviewed Schubert a few minutes before he jumped. Schubert was 66 years old and hadn't made a parachute jump in a number of years, and had never used the type of chute he wore that day. An investigation will be made, but one suspects it was a case of overconfidence and human error: Schubert never let go of the pilot chute in his hand. Strange, and very sad.

More pictures of Bridge Day BASE jumpers here.

Riffing on Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel appeared on NPR a couple of weeks ago and got testy with Steve Inskeep--not an easy thing to do in itself (picking a fight with Inskeep, I mean). I've rarely heard an interview, especially with a person whose ideas or work I've been sympathetic to, and come away with such a strong feeling that the person is an asshole. After reading this profile in the Washpot, I have a greater (grudging) appreciation for him. (The NPR-Inskeep piece opened with Emanuel complaining how little sleep he was operating on; I guess he's earned the right to complain. The Washpot quotes Paul Begala comparing Emanuel's work ethic to that of LBJ, who per Begala used to wind up many campaigns in a hospital bed.)

I found the Washpot piece via Neil @ Ezra Klein's place; I enjoyed his discussion of the Democratic leadership in the House. The GOP is trying to demonize Nancy Pelosi as Hillary-gone-to-San Francisco; reportedly more Republicans than Democrats nationwide now know Pelosi's name. I think Pelosi is sharp as hell, and putting Emanuel at the DCCC was one of her best moves to date. I'm less than 100% ecstatic at the thought of Democratic subpoena power, just because I see every reason to think that Bush and Cheney will treat subpoenas as toilet paper. But don't get me wrong: I want the subpoenas sent and the hearings held; I sure would like to see that drama played out.

Read Werewolf Neil's comments on Steny Hoyer vs. Jack Murtha for majority leader. Jack Murtha has been great for the party, but I did not realize he has a 0 rating from NARAL.

I've been struggling for two months to write something coherent about the tensions in the Democratic Party that were on display in the primary contest between Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman. Suffice it to say that I was all in favor of an insurgent Democratic campaign to beat Lieberman--though that CT Senate race is a source of worry right now; it really looks like Lamont peaked in August, and some of his foot soldiers had regular jobs or law-school classes to return to after Labor Day.

What grated on me most about Lieberman and his supporters in A-list Washington society, was an intimation that Lieberman's seniority should protect him, absolutely and unconditionally, from primary challenges. You'd think politicians would accept having to run for election as a routine hazard of democracy, but it seemed to me that Lieberman resented having to face the voters. Joe'd prefer to purchase them wholesale via Don Imus and Tim Russert. Rahm Emanuel was one of those in the party leadership who wanted to cushion Lieberman and shoot down Ned Lamont; at the time I was angry at Emanuel's meddling. (Emanuel successfully snuffed a handful of other primary challenges this year, including Paul Hackett in Ohio, a hero of the Left Blogosphere like Ned Lamont.)

Anyway, after reading the Post, I can't charge Emanuel with being a chardonnay-sipping Georgetown idler, or of shrinking from contact with voters and donors, of not doing the hard work of party politics. It's just possible he knows his business better than I know his business. Pelosi is the leader of the party at the moment, the unifying force. Emanuel is not a unifying personality, but he's Pelosi's guy, and so, in my small way, am I. It's humbling, this party discipline, putting one's trust in the brusque asshole from Chicago, embracing someone who's anti-choice like Jack Murtha.

I have no predictions for November 7th--I just hope the Democrats aren't overconfident. All these polls are great that show trouble for Republicans in the generalized aggregate abstract. But that anti-Bush zeitgeist has to filter down and convert into votes for Jim Webb, for Ted Strickland, for Heath Shuler, etc. The filtering-down doesn't happen automatically.

Mark Foley, in three movements

I suppose I'll say something about Mark Foley. I got into an online chat Tuesday night that wound up getting a little heated. I've cooled off now, hopefully my friends have as well, and I would like to speak to some of the points that came up at that time.

On Monday, Slate published an article by John Dickerson which cautioned Democrats against overplaying the Foley scandal. “The question is whether Republican leaders were grossly negligent or clumsily stupid,” he wrote, and if it’s only the latter, then for Democrats to press too hard would be to appeal to homophobia.

GOP leaders might not have done the right thing because they wanted to protect a safe GOP seat. But my reporting suggests for the moment that instead of being craven, they were just incompetent wimps. They knew Foley was gay and in the closet, and they just didn't want to get into whether he was following through on his flirting. When he explained that his e-mails were just a part of mentoring, they were probably relieved. Foley had given them an excuse they wanted to believe.... Sure, they could have handled the situation better, but who could know that Foley was going after young boys?

[snip]

For GOP leaders to pay a heavy political price requires either more evidence that they really knew what Foley was doing or for Democrats to form an alliance, at some level, with people who find homosexuality outrageous no matter what the age.

Let's break this down a little. Theoretically, of course, the Democrats could use the fact that Foley is gay in an irresponsible and incendiary way. However, experience has taught us that the U.S. political party with a penchant for gay-bashing is decidedly not the Democrats. (Notice this week who is actually trying to conflate (1) being gay with (2) hitting on teenagers in the workplace? The GOP, in a campaign to bamboozle us and account for their slow response to Foley rumors. Wouldn't want to be perceived as homophobic, dontcha know.)

(To be fair, Monday was a looooong time ago in Foley-time, and Dickerson might very well revise some of his statements in light of subsequent revelations.)

Furthermore, Dickerson's line between negligence and stupidity is a distinction without a difference. They got a thing in Washington called "plausible deniability." It's a way of eliding the difference between evil and ignorance, to make it okay for "good men" to do nothing. It's kind of silly to apply a negligence test--to raise even the theoretical possibility that Hastert or Reynolds knew for certain that Foley was hustling teenagers, and made a deliberate decision to protect him anyway. No: Despite that there was plenty enough smoke to arouse suspicions about Foley's activities, the GOP leaders passed the buck. They wanted to preserve deniability, they wanted NOT to know to a certainty. "Craven" political considerations (Foley represented a safe seat and a good source of campaign funds) dovetailed with more normal emotions (embarrassment, desire to avoid conflict, whatever), and it was more expedient and comfortable for them not to confront him. Foleygate is a case study of plausible deniability and its shortcomings. On something as straightforward and commonsensical as protecting underage employees, technically-not-knowing doesn't cut it. "Mere" stupidity? No, toxic stupidity, reflecting moral laziness and deficient decency and character.

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Okay, is this Foleygate thing the comeuppance that the 2006 Republican Party deserves? Not even close. It's a sad commentary, in fact, that this sex scandal has greater destructive power than Abu Ghraib or the recent NIE--that some upset or offended teenage boys from well-connected families, signify more heavily than senseless loss of life, or the squandering of America's world standing.

Some of the House pages seem to have been discomfited by Foley's come-ons, but I can't tell that anyone was harmed. In our Tuesday chat, my friends and I batted around the question of whether "predator" is an appropriate term for Mark Foley and his behavior. If it sticks, I think it's because Foley was pursuing pages via the Net; when I hear "sexual predator" nowadays, I think of older men deceiving and manipulating young kids online. I don't think it has a gay connotation, necessarily. But "preying" could encompass kidnap and rape and other awful stuff. I find Mark Foley closer to pathetic than predatory.

To me, Foleygate has a certain symbolic weight, because I find it so perversely apt that this chicken-hawk Mark Foley, this trenchcoated stranger-with-candy, chaired the Missing and Exploited Children caucus. That's the Republicans all over--their total cynicism about government leads to these absurd pairings of people and roles: draft dodgers are setting military policy, Luddites are in charge of science and technology, torture-lovers are running the Justice Department, despoilers are running the EPA and Interior Departments. With Hurricane Katrina the anomaly became too glaring to ignore; maybe with Foleygate as well. But this is just me. I doubt whether there's a TV ad or campaign bumper sticker in this idea.

I'm of a mind to exploit the Mark Foley controversy if it's got political legs. Exploit it for all it's worth. Is this playing footsie with gay-bashers? Maybe. Do it anyway, I say, if it'll help win the midterms. Rub the GOP's face in their grotesque hypocrisy, and the way they play "family values voters" for suckers. As I wrote the other night, I don't see it as recruiting homophobes to the Democratic Party, I would see it as trying to depress the homophobic Republican vote. I don't think this is an issue the Democrats could lose their soul over.

Exploiting Foleygate isn't a long-term strategy, and the thought of it doesn't exactly give me a noble feeling. I'm not even brimming with confidence that it will make a crucial difference. (I'm not getting my hopes up this Election Day. My heart hasn't healed from 2004 yet.) But if it kept one gay-hating judge off the federal bench, it would be worth it.


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Related to the Dickerson / Slate article, I took a swipe the other night at Slate as an entity. Let me elaborate on my anti-Slate grudge.

Last fall, in the same humble blog template that you now behold, about the time of the Scooter Libby indictment, I wrote this reaction to columns by Jacob Weisberg (Slate) and Richard Cohen (Washington Post):

These guys are geniuses of self-promotion, in their way: calculatedly provocative, they are card carrying liberals who go against the grain of liberal conventional wisdom, in a way that might seem brave to their readers, but keeps them in the good graces of their sources and the Washington social scene. On the very day when anticipation over Plamegate indictments is at its height, both of them come out with columns saying that Fitzgerald's investigation is bad for liberal principles and he should shut it down. They're going for their "contrarian's merit badge," in James Wolcott's phrase.

I perceived similarly fishy timing in Dickerson’s piece this week: as the bad news for the GOP was still in crescendo, he was urging the Democrats to apply some diminuendo. I don’t think it’s intentional on any of these journalists’ part, I think it’s an instinct to calm the waters, and the nerves of their friends and neighbors. Permanent residents of Washington don’t like big scandals, and they’re scared at the prospect of a mid-term electoral tidal wave. So John Dickerson isn’t just making a clever and seemingly counter-intuitive argument in a column. He’s boosting the morale of his colleagues and loved ones at the same time. The falcon can hear the falconer; the center can hold.

The New Republic are the undisputed champs of “liberal contrarianism,” but Slate runs a close second. (I freely admit, I read Slate because it’s free online. I’d read TNR more if all its content were free, but I won’t send them any of my money. Sue me; some people read Jack Chick tracts to get them riled up, but they wouldn’t buy the things.) I think these guys think they are being edgy or at least clever, always zigging when liberals zag, but it gets real predictable after awhile. As I commented once, I’d rather not exert the mental energy needed to hold these people in their suspended state of liberal contrarianism; I’d rather just think of them as former liberals.

Generally, it makes me suspicious when a mainstream (i.e. ostensibly fair-minded) Washington pundit can take a damage-control nightmare for the Republicans and quickly turn it into a problem for the Democrats. It’s an overused rhetorical maneuver, and it’s often unfair or unobjective; it cheers for a particular outcome to an unfolding controversy. The underlying assumption, I believe, is that only conservatives can speak strongly and forcefully, while liberals always have to parse their words, for fear of angering one of their touchy sub-constituencies, or else failing in their role as guardians of fair play and objectivity. Liberals have to be civil. Only conservatives have permission to pop off intemperately. One might respond that this is the way the political landscape really is. I say perception makes the reality, and the media reinforces this habit of perception, one that puts the liberal side in an unequal position. "Strong but wrong" often works in U.S. politics, as Bill Clinton has observed. Liberals should be permitted to be "strong."

Also, it may seem strange to say this about Slate, an Internet-only publication, but they share a little of the print media's fear and ignorance of the online world. Kinsley and Weisberg and Saletan and Dickerson (formerly of Time magazine) are print journalists, pad and pencil men, at heart. The main manifestation of this is in snide remarks about "angry bloggers," but sometimes it shows up in simple misunderstandings of how many people use computers nowadays, how online communications are changing Americans’ lives. Dickerson downplays these “overly friendly” e-mails as flirtation, at least there was no follow-through that we know of. This attitude gives short shrift to the intimacy, or invasiveness, online communications can attain. Again, maybe Dickerson would say something different in light of the newly-published salacious details. But in an important sense, the IM's weren't just the prelude to a sexual encounter, they WERE the sexual encounter. Would that Dickerson were more hip to that fact.

Lame

I forgot to mention that I had a fall and broke my left wrist, two weeks ago last weekend.

Briefly, I was out running (for exercise) in the evening, it got dark, and I ran smack into a metal post in the greenway path. Never saw it. I fell forward, hard, and tried to catch myself with my hands. I got up slowly, inventoried all the places that hurt (right kneecap, right shoulder, left wrist) but was able to walk home. I thought I'd gotten away with bruises and maybe a sprained wrist. But the throbbing in my wrist got worse, I couldn't sleep, so after dithering for a few hours (should my wife drive me? who could we call to watch the kids?) I finally drove myself to the ER at 2 a.m. (Steering with my knees, right hand supporting my injured left hand, eyes watering from pain, but I made it.)

As trips to the ER go, it was good. I waited an hour or so before someone saw me, but everybody I talked to was pleasant and soothing and answered all my questions. It took two separate trips to the X-ray room, but they eventually found a fracture: a small crack in the navicular or scaphoid bone.

So I'm sporting a cast, thumb immobilized, though I can make the "OK" sign, which is more than I could do with the splint I got at the ER. The cast is made of fiberglass (the PA who put it on jokes I'm part man, part Corvette), and it's blue. I joke that it's not to honor any sports team (the shade is in between Duke and Carolina colors) but to reflect my renewed love and loyalty toward Blue Cross / Blue Shield. Sorry, I know they're lame jokes.

My kids want me to let them write and draw on my cast. That's not what you do when you're a grown-up with a cast. Is it? I'm saying it's not what you do, but I'm afraid I may be wrong. I'm more of a grouchy spoilsport dad than usual lately.

The scaphoid bone is the most common wrist fracture. It's a little bone near the base of the thumb, but a troublesome little bone: doesn't get good blood flow, so healing is slow and unreliable. I'll be in this cast for 8 to 12 weeks total, if things go well, which seems like a long time for such a little crack in a little bone. I think if I had neatly snapped in half one of the big bones in the arm, my recovery time would be shorter.

I make a lot of lame jokes lately. I'm tired of explaining how it happened to everyone I see--the truth is boring and stupid--so I'll say I was wrestling alligators or leaped from a burning airplane. I'm tired of people asking if it hurts--it doesn't hurt--so I'll complain over-dramatically of the hardships of not being able to tie my shoes or cut my meat.

My pride is bruised. Personal hygiene is suddenly difficult and time-consuming. I shower with a plastic bag over my cast to keep it dry; it seems like the right side of my body hasn't gotten a good washing in over two weeks. The women in my life (wife, co-workers, even daughters) are helping me with simple physical tasks. Bugs the shit out of me. Makes me feel old. It doesn't seem like tripping on the sidewalk should cause this much damage, but I must be more brittle than I used to be. And what I did was pretty doggone stupid, an egregious breakdown of common sense. I was running, hard, in the pitch dark; you wouldn't do that in your own house, much less the outdoors. If I was in the routine of running, or just being outdoors, like I should be, I would know what frickin' time the sun goes down.

I miss my arm. Miss just seeing it. In two weeks I go in to get the cast changed, and I'm looking forward to having no cast for a few minutes, to scratch the itchy places freely, and just to see my arm, to have bodily integrity again.

Bleagh.

McKibben, "The Gospel of Green"

Via The Revealer, here is an interesting article by Bill McKibben about the growing alliance, or convergence, between U.S. evangelicals and environmentalists. This convergence could eventually upset liberal/conservatives polarities, in a positive way. Stewardship is a resonant theme in Judaism and Christianity, and may have a special resonance for younger generations.

Disturbing factoid from this story: In a recent poll, three-quarters of American Christians answered that the saying "God helps those who help themselves" is from the Bible. (It's from Aesop and later Ben Franklin--two great pagans.) As McKibben says, the American church has become way too comfortable with the "hyperindividualism" (his word) of American culture.

Occasionally I attend brown-bag lunch discussions sponsored by Duke's Theology and Medicine program; I've mentioned them before on this blog. They can be studies in well-meaning dysfunction: academically sound research projects that fundamentally miss the point; clergy and physicians talking past each other. Yesterday an MD reported on her research about trauma among missionaries, and the effects of religious orientation on post-traumatic stress as well as post-traumatic growth (a novel concept, to me). It seems to me that if you dedicate yourself to a life of religious mission or service to others, and open yourself up to experience, without overlaying expectations on it, embracing the universality of suffering, then the very potential for "trauma" shrinks, if not disappearing entirely. Anyway, several former missionaries attended the discussion, and one of them reported that one of her "traumas" was leaving Africa and returning to the hyperindividualism and isolation of American life.

Roto retrospective

My fantasy baseball team, Hot Doughnuts Now, finished in seventh place, which is disappointing. The most obvious reason for the team's mediocrity was a bad run of injuries. (Second most obvious is that I stole the team's name from a friend's defunct band, without permission, and he stole it himself from the Krispy Kreme Company. Could have resulted in bad juju.) Derrek Lee, whom I was counting on to be a stud, missed most of the year with a broken wrist. Eric Chavez was hampered by chronically sore forearms (a newly discovered medical condition, as far as I know) and had a bad year. Rickey Weeks got knocked out at midseason, and Jim Edmonds was playing at half-strength like Chavez then later was out completely. Scott Kazmir had two stints on the DL. I could name some more names.

But rather than just hope for better luck next year, I'm trying to look and see what I could have done better. The secret of good pitching still somewhat eludes me; I want to study this season's results some more. One thing I've wondered is whether I should use relief pitchers more than I do, but actually I'm in line with the more successful teams. 200-300 relief innings out of your 1500 total innings seems about right. (But I should have had more saves to show for my relief innings.)

I had 15 players on my end-of-season roster that were there all year long. (Roster size is 25.) That is on the high side; most of the more successful teams in our league tinker more than that. The second-place team also had 15 players all year long, but he had an extraordinarily good draft and good crop of keepers. It should have been obvious to me by about May that the cards I was holding were not that good. I should have tinkered a lot more--traded more, actually. I'm chicken when it comes to trades, I tend to just try to fill gaps and get marginally better. You have to trade boldly.

I did the worst job of almost any owner of using my quota of games for position players and innings for pitchers. By my quick count, there were 92 hitter-games that I didn't use, and 270 pitcher innings. I was vaguely aware of this during the season, and tried to rationalize that at least it didn't hurt me as far as rate stats like ERA. But other owners did better on rate stats than me while using their quotas more fully. The remedy is just spending more time and attention.

Contrarians' contrarians

I still check in on Butterflies & Wheels now and then. I occasionally find links to articles that I like, although Ophelia plainly means for me not to like them.

Andrew Brown is a science and religion writer. In this post at the Comment Is Free blog at the Guardian, he's piling on Richard Dawkins a bit (fine, but enough about Dawkins already) but I imagine he's also describing his credo for writing about religion.

No: Marx had that aspect right. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, and the heartlessness of the world is a terrible fact that can't just be wished away. No one gets a wonderful life just by choosing it, unless they are very lucky indeed. But then a decent respect for the role of luck in the world might lead one to sympathise with the believers, some of them even fundamentalists, who are trying to clear up their little corners of it.

If theology is, as Dawkins says repeatedly, nonsense about nothing, then anyone who gives a theological explanation for their actions is either mad or lying. In either case, there is no reason for a scientist to take their explanations seriously. But I think people who talk about God are trying often to communicate something about their own experience of the world, or about their place in it.

In that case, it is more useful to try to understand what they are saying, and why, rather than dismiss them as deluded fantasists. At the very least, the atheist is required to admit the existence of widespread patterns of experience which can reasonably and naturally be taken as the experience of supernatural beings. Gods undeniably exist in this world as they do in Terry Pratchett's: wherever people believe in them strongly enough, they're there.

So the question becomes, what do we do about them? This shouldn't be essentially different, to a thoroughgoing atheist, to the question of what we do about money. Money causes quite as much misery in the world as religion does. People will commit terrible crimes to make or save it and view with the utmost indifference the sufferings of strangers who stand in their way. Yet the way to diminish these sufferings is not to abolish money or to pretend that the needs it serves are unworthy of human beings.

That's been tried. It didn't work. We've learnt, instead, how to make the capitalist system work better: to arrange for self-interest to be, so far as possible, enlightened. Similarly, if we want to diminish the suffering caused by religion we need to make superstition, irrationality and social organisation benefit, so far as possible, the human race. This isn't easy, and it may not be possible. But there really is no practical alternative. Even if God is no more than a word for luck, we should say "There, but for the grace of luck, go I"; and not "I thank you, luck, that I am not as other men." If religion is human, then humanists must try to understand it, to sympathise and not to sneer.

Luck. Loss. Fate. Grace?

Timothy Garton Ash, "Islam in Europe" (NYRB)

Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: "As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive." This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let's not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri [the jihadist who murdered Theo Van Gogh] was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the "unbelieving fundamentalist."

Judt

I'm not going to track it down, but I think I owe another hat tip to Matt Yglesias. (Fanboy? Me?) Tony Judt in the London Review of Books. He's writing to a European audience about the poor state of liberalism in the U.S. He has some pretty sharp things to say about "liberal hawks" and strong-but-wrong moderates who prefer a tough stance to a thoughtful argument.

I have written a couple of approving words here and there about human rights as an organizing principle for foreign policy. So this quote caught my eye:

In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms. In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.

(I didn't realize Vaclav Havel had endorsed the invasion of Iraq. Another hero bites the dust.)

Steinfels

I'm leaving myself a bookmark here. Matthew Yglesias linked me to this American Prospect piece by Peter Steinfels, in which he reviews several books about religion and politics in the U.S.

A couple of these authors, notably Kevin Phillips and Michelle Goldberg, throw around the word "theocracy" quite a bit--to the point of hyperbole. Overhyping the threat of American theocracy is a problem, first because it leads progressives to take their eyes off the ball: corporatism and hard-right ideology. Steinfels writes that it's rather silly to argue that the Bush Administration's policies are driven by Christian fervor. Emotional issues like abortion and gay marriage are wielded as campaign causes to fire up religious-right voters, but once in power in Washington, the GOP has addressed these issues "in cautious, halting, inconsistent, or purely token fashion." Furthermore:

Exaggeration and inaccuracy also matter because they decrease any chance of mobilizing the opposition to the country’s current course, as these writers ardently desire. They draw bold and broad lines between empiricism, science, tolerance, rationality, and democracy, on the one hand, and faith, theology, revelation, persecution, irrationality, and authoritarianism, on the other; and they assign whatever they like or dislike to one side of the divide or the other. This dualism disregards rational dimensions of faith and theology (as well as faith dimensions of science and rationality) and neglects the historical reality that the modern world of empiricism, science, and Enlightenment reason has produced its own irrational nightmares. Treating the moral questions that agitate conservative Christians as obviously settled beyond all reasoned argument does not just target theocrats. It sprays bullets widely into the ranks of moderate evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and even many centrist and liberal believers.

I love that paragraph. I'd like to be like Peter Steinfels when I grow up.

Somewhat related, there was a bit of a fuss last weekend at Echidne of the Snakes and Pandagon. Someone at EotS posted about atheists who make online comments offensive to religious people, and that for the sake of their political fortunes, those atheists should cut that out. Amanda Marcotte protested. I commend the Steinfels quote above to her. I can't quantify how many votes are at stake here, but I'm pretty damn sure that there are no votes to be had via entertaining one's fellow hipsters by calling God "the Sky Fairy." That pisses me off, frankly. So do bloggers who wonder why astrology doesn't get the same legal and cultural respect as Catholicism or Judaism (Atrios). So do writers who describe faith as a mental illness or a form of child abuse (Richard Dawkins). I'm not asking anyone to "adopt religious language," or adjust their views on issues one inch.* Just don't be gratuitously insulting. You think it's funny, I say it's not, it's an abdication of your principles in public debate, and it harms my trust in you as an ally.

(* I feel I should give credit here: Amanda Marcotte has influenced my views on reproductive rights quite a bit. I used to toy with various triangulations on the abortion issue, but Amanda has helped me to see that controlling your own body is an absolute.)