Jesus SMASH!

First of all, an admission: I actually thought last Sunday was Fathers' Day. In fact, as you know, Fathers' Day is this coming Sunday. Just something for you to keep in mind as you read anything else I write.

I've been intending for a long time to comment at length on Jeff Sharlet's Harpers Magazine piece about New Life Community Church in Colorado Springs. The moment has kind of passed. I did comment over at the High Hat Blog about my visit to a megachurch about five years ago. I could relate to Sharlet's arguments about consumerism and exurban migration. As to the millenialism and weird geopolitics -- I got nothin'.

Wait, here's a tangent. My last book read was God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson, about the creation of the King James Bible. It was pretty good, and incidentally not a devotional book at all, but intellectual history that provides a window into Jacobean England. Anyway, one tantalizing bit of info there was that some of the scholars on the KJ translation committee wanted to exclude the Book of Revelations. They got voted down. Revelations is the source of all manner of trouble and nonsense. The Armageddon, the Rapture--all that stuff is in Revelations, and stands out like a sore thumb next to the Sermon on the Mount and all the rest of the New Testament. Jesus is like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk in that book. I understand generally how Revelations got written: it was 100 AD and people thought Jesus was coming back the day after tomorrow to overthrow the Roman Empire. But why it has continued to be part of the Biblical canon, I don't really understand. I've never read Revelations, have never heard a sermon preached from it, which is not odd since liberal Protestants and all Catholics basically ignore Revelations, yet the religious right sometimes gives the impression that Revelations is ALL they read. How about somebody doing an edition of the Bible that leaves Revelations right the fuck out?

Here's one particular thing that struck me in the Sharlet article. In my job I hear and read a lot about the joys and struggles of ministers in their careers. I was reading something recently in which a preacher contrasted graduate school (seminary), where you get a fresh start every 4-5 months--new topic, new teacher, new group of peers--with a parish church, where the content is always the same, and the faces are always the same. Soon after reading this, I picked up the Sharlet article, and New Life guru Ted Haggard describes the small-group structure of his church: it's on a semester system, so if people dislike a class or a group of classmates, they naturally get a chance to jump ship after a few months. That's the consumerist approach megachurches take: lots of choices, lots of room for the theology and doctrine to be market-tested and tailored to what people like. Whereas traditional churches tend to operate on the unspoken assumption that you are a Methodist or whatever by virtue of family and civic ties, so your church is your church, and you have to take it as you find it.

The bad news is, these are bad assumptions nowadays--people WILL drive to the next town over, they WILL shop around, etc. The better news for these old-style churches is they have a chance to offer a realer, more familial type of community, which you only get when you are somewhat stuck with people. This preacher I was reading also talked about the emotional whiplash he felt as a young man early in his ministry, how tough it was to go from celebrating a birthday or baptism in the afternoon, then visiting a dying person in the evening. You think Ted Haggard ever does a funeral? Or comforts a dying person? Rarely, I bet. These Colorado Springs assholes, these postmodern gypsies, if they get sick or old they're going to move back home, or close to a family member who'll care for them.

There's a site called Butterflies and Wheels that I've dipped into now and then. Its stock in trade is being indignant over Intelligent Design, etc.: with religious fundamentalism interfering with science. They're smart folks over there--Brits, some of them, don't you know--and more conversant with philosophy and hard science than I am. Stuff I am somewhat conversant with--social science, religion, and critical theory--they're fairly hostile to. I sort of left the comments board of their blog with my tail between my legs. I felt I ended up making content-free arguments in favor of simple civility. Weak tea, not much fun for me. On the other hand, those folks congratulate themselves for going to a friend's funeral and refraining from heckling the eulogy. I'd call that strident. But again, they're smart, and I'll continue to browse there now and then.

Here at Dix Hill I've mentioned that in real life I get to hear some really interesting lectures and panel discussions on theology and medicine. I alluded to a couple of them at B&W and got sneered at, but I'm going to re-present them here. In one presentation, a guy was proposing a methodology for measuring an individual's religiosity. By way of background, this dude works in a program on spirituality and health, studying issues like whether people who profess religion, pray, etc., have better health outcomes. That prayer-and-healing stuff generally leaves me cold, but this guy rolled out what I thought was the best application of critical theory I have ever heard. Knowledge is socially constructed; religion and secularism alike are knowledge systems, held together by the trust their adherents place in them. Religion is best understood not as a checklist of beliefs but a worldview, a lens, a framework. The best measure of religiosity is not fidelity but fluency. The specific content of any worldview, religious or not, is less significant than whether one can articulate it coherently. (As I tried to tell the science/philosophy geeks, "Einstein wasn't a great scientist because of the number of theorems he had memorized.")

In another talk, a public health researcher compared two small Missouri towns that were similar in geography and demography. One town was marked by a stronger religious community: more vital congregations, and (significantly) warmer and more cooperative relations among different congregations. There were some positive public health indicators associated with the more robust religious climate. He did a social capital analysis suggesting that religious institutions create "bridging" social capital that enables resources to be shared and transferred effectively. Admittedly, this was a qualitative study, that argued correlation rather than causation, but it appealed to me as making a case for religion based on its effects. I have forgotten the name of Town A in the study, the high social capital town; sadly, however, Town B, marked by selfishness and distrust, was Hannibal, Mark Twain's hometown.

Anyway, that's This Week in Dix Hill religion.

Military Contractors

NPR this morning had two stories (near the bottom of the page) about bad blood between US Army/Marines personnel, on one hand, and American private security personnel on the other. Last month, a group of private troops strayed into the wrong place at the wrong time, and were detained by regular Marines. These men report being kneed in the back, kicked in the balls, and abused by their Marine captors in numerous other ways both physical and verbal. (In its official denial of the story, a Marine spokesman said these Americans received the same humane and respectful treatment as all detainees in US custody--which made me laugh out loud.)

Obviously, these two groups are supposed to be on the same side, but communication and coordination are poor between the uniformed military and private forces. And it's not hard to see why a Marine would be resentful of the situation where private security guards receive 5 times the pay for work similar to what he (the Marine) is doing: roughly equal in status (these contractors aren't just doing laundry and serving meals, they are doing "mission-critical" work in many cases), and if anything probably lower in personal risk (which is a relative statement--no American in Iraq is safe).

The main source for the NPR story is an ex-Marine who left his job as a firefighter to go to Iraq in the employ of Zapata Engineering. He's completely upfront about his reasons for taking the job--$$$$--and he's retained a lawyer in the wake of his run-in with the Marines. The US government has banned him from further employment in Iraq. The Marines are flatly denying the charges these detainees are making, and Zapata flatly denies the military's claim that the Zapata guys fired on a military position first. This really doesn't sound, all in all, like a simple misunderstanding by like-minded people in fundamentally friendly organizations.

Chris Hedges, writing about our troops in Iraq:

The young soldiers, trained well enough to be disciplined but encouraged to maintain their naive adolescent belief in invulnerability, have in wartime more power at their fingertips than they will ever have again. They catapult from being minimum wage employees at places like Burger King, facing a life of dead-end jobs with little hope of health insurance and adequate benefits, to being part of, in the words of the Marines, "the greatest fighting force on the face of the earth." The disparity between what they were and what they have become is breathtaking and intoxicating.

The disparity recurs on the other end, when the soldiers muster out and return home to a mundane job with low pay and dim prospects. This Zapata employee was a firefighter, but it must not have paid a middle-class income, because he jumped at the chance to go to Iraq as a mercenary. I know the Army and Marines and National Guard are having terrible trouble meeting their recruitment quotas of 18-year-olds, but I bet that the private security firms have a lot less trouble hiring. There's the money, obviously, plus I believe there are plenty of 35-year-old former soldiers who are itching to get back in the action. Making an unscientific judgment from the military vets I've known, it seems that military service in the all-volunteer era creates a class of folks whose only skills are tough-guy skills. The only jobs they're qualified for, and the only jobs that stimulate them the way active military duty did, are jobs as police officers or firefighters.

And this has repercussions, incidentally, for the profession of law enforcement. Some young men today are advised that military service is the ONLY appropriate preparation for a job as a police officer. Again, I'm going on media images and my limited experience, but it seems domestic US law enforcement is much more military-like than it used to be. Cops don't wear neckties and brogans or carry nightsticks. They wear Kevlar and combat boots and carry M-16s.

As Matthew Yglesias observed recently in a completely different context, the wholesale replacement of government employees with contractors, ostensibly to reduce government and control expenses, is a ruse pioneered by Republican administrations and validated, unfortunately, by the Democrats under Clinton. Not only is the government not saving money this way, but they (the Republican-controlled Executive Branch) are rewarding a GOP-friendly company, and ensuring that some of the tax dollars going to fight the war, will ultimately flow into GOP campaign coffers.

I'm talking myself into being an advocate for a national-service draft. Be all you can be? Learn computers? My ass. When I think about it, the notion of the military as an avenue of upward mobility, or a place for young people to obtain marketable skills, is a bit troubling. De-professionalize and, by all means, de-privatize the military. (Reason # 103194 why I will never hear the words "Senator Dix.")

Fathers' Day

I'm racing the clock to get this post up while it still IS Fathers' Day--

My oldest daughter (code name Xaviera) put on a Caitlin Cary CD in the car the other morning. I like C.C., though I suppose she's corny. She has this wise, maternal singing persona, and in some songs she's actually giving advice to a lovelorn friend. "What Will You Do" has her commiserating with the co-dependent wife or girlfriend of a self-destructive tortured artist type of man. Of course you love him, but he's a trainwreck and you need to protect yourself, is the gist of the song. Cary is not exactly the voice of Grrl Power, but she's not a doormat, either, and in the end she seems to land at an eyes-open, road-tested, jaded-but-hopeful appreciation of men. Can't live with him, can't live without him. That seems true and satisfying to me.

There's a classmate of Xaviera's, call her Charlotte, who carpools with us some mornings. Charlotte is painfully shy--some days we can hardly get a word out of her, and she misses school every now and then with headaches or stomachaches that seem anxiety-related (even her mother thinks so). Her parents are divorced, and her father is not a big part of her life. I'm not always sure whether being with our family adds to her anxiety or not. We're pretty boisterous, especially on the days when I drive the kids. I'm less organized, so there is more yelling "hurry up" and general display of bad temper. My car is smaller so the kids are more cramped. I have a CD player so there's likely to be loud rock music. I might steer with my knees for a moment while I drink coffee and fumble for a CD.

One day my middle girl Yolanda rolled down the car window and stuck her arm out while we were riding. Charlotte was alarmed ("Never stick your arm out like that!") and I said, a little sheepishly, "That's right, honey, not so far out," but the truth is I let stuff like that slide, much more than my wife does. So Charlotte doesn't bother to show alarm any more.

A kid needs a Dad to bend Mom's rules and let them stick an arm out the window occasionally.

(Before anyone makes any outraged comments or e-mails, I would like to hear you marshall some evidence, even anecdotal, of anybody losing an arm due to hanging it out the car window.)

It's odd that I choose Charlotte as the case that argues the value of a father, a masculine influence in a child's life--there's another boy we know, younger kid, who is the type that craves male attention and who, every time he sees me, attaches himself to me like a barnacle. Charlotte may very well not even like me. Yet I'm just cocky and reckless enough to think I'm the kind of influence Charlotte needs. Put it this way: If my influence doesn't kill her, it will make her stronger.

This is my reflection on fatherhood this year. My wife and I had a big fight over Christmas because I allowed one of the children to do something unsafe. I won't specify what it was--no harm was done, but I did make a big error in judgment. Hopefully I learned a lesson, but that continues to be the dynamic in our family: She will err on the side of overprotectiveness, I will err on the side of recklessness.

Yet kids' lives need a dose of physicality and recklessness and loudness and devil-may-care attitude.

Here's to you, Dads. You're the guy who lets them stick their arm out the car window. You're the guy who let them climb onto the porch roof. You're the guy who says with a chuckle that french fries can technically be considered a vegetable.

You're the guy. Don't go changin'. Listen to your wife, of course, but don't go changin'.

Aw crap. Fathers' Day plus one.

Who Died and Made You Elvis?

Hello. Just wanted to drop by and say that this is a good post by Amanda at Pandagon. The love of good music is a perfectly good foundation for patriotism.

If you're ever feeling disillusioned about your identity as an American (or as a red-stater relative to the blue states), think of the music. Jazz, blues, country, and rock are maybe America's greatest lasting legacy.

I have a friend and mentor who is a sociologist, but with a sense of humor, and he has some favorite jokes about the uses and misuses of social science and statistics. (He likes to tell about the man who drowned in a lake whose average depth was six inches.) I came across a funny statement a couple of days ago: if current trends continue, by the year 2019 one-third of the earth's population will be comprised of Elvis impersonators. Think about it: in 1954 there were no Elvis impersonators. Today there are tens of thousands. Sociology in action.

Now Reading

American Stories by Calvin Trillin. A collection of his New Yorker writings from the 1980s. Out of print, I see; I got it at Nice Price Books, a used book and CD store.

If you don't know, Calvin Trillin does human-interest stories, in the best possible sense. He writes a lot about food, and about travel in the U.S., and he's quite interested in murder, but when he writes abut murder (a few of these pieces are about murder cases, and the title of another of his collections, Killings , says it all) he does so without an iota of luridness. No hardened criminals, and few entirely-innocent victims, just workaday Americans whose lives took an unfathomable catastrophic turn, and Trillin dispassionately dissects each case to see how family or neighbors managed to rub each other so very wrong. Sometimes we never learn the culprit's identity, just about the atmosphere and chain of events that makes murder thinkable.

I enjoy the heck out of Trillin and gobbled up this book like candy. He's not flashy, but he picks great subjects (or at least, the right subjects for him) and as he explains in an afterword to this collection, he gives a lot of thought to the beginning, middle, and end of each story. Most of his subjects are little-known, but he has revealing takes on some quirky celebrities: Ben & Jerry of ice cream fame; the magicians Penn & Teller. (No murder cases in these.)

There's always a central turning point, delivered very drily and offhandedly, when a fairly humdrum bourgeois life turns weird. Trillin often writes in the first person, so his humdrum midwest-Bourgeois persona adds to the effect. In one story, Trillin has an old friend, an ex-preacher and longtime newspaper editorial writer, who decided to return to his hometown in Kentucky, to open a small dinner theatre and farm a bit, and how curious it was when a federal grand jury indicted him for growing marijuana. By this time we know Calvin Trillin--family man, bit of a nerd--and the thought of his being friends with a drug supplier is incongruous to say the least, but it opens us up to wanting to learn how one becomes a middle-aged ex-Baptist-preacher eastern Kentucky pot farmer.

Safe, comfortable, totally interchangeable

Here is the latest in the New York Times's Class Matters series. It's about "relos," corporate ladder climbers who bounce from job to job, area code to area code, subdivision to subdivision, every two to four years, never really putting down roots anywhere in particular. I think Peter Kilborn captures this milieu so well, I'm reminded of Ruth Shalit or Stephen Glass--I mean, some of these quotes are almost too good to be true.

I have a friend who fits the relo stereotype--six moves in 15 years, by my count. I sincerely admire the guy: he's a planner, a goal-setter, the most focused and successful person I know, on his own as well as society's terms. But "rootless" is an apt word. At times he seems like a human resume'. Like Mr. Relo of the NYT piece, he experienced a corporate merger, and not only survived (which is more than a lot of workers can say) but thrived in the aftermath. My friend is more attuned to corporate cultures than geographic ones: Chicago, Houston, Baltimore are pretty much the same to him.

Raleigh-Cary is a sweet spot for relos. We have the magic combination of good jobs, good schools, and reasonable housing prices. The problem with relos, though, is they're not citizens. They don't really live here, they're just touching down briefly on their marvelous life journey. They're most concerned with low taxes and the value of their house--the rest of the community be damned. These people shouldn't get a vote. The bit in the NYT story where Ms. Relo lobbies against school redistricting? She knows she may be leaving in a year, yet she wants to hoard the best schools for her family and their kind. She should butt the hell out.

Review of Reviews (RevRev)

Well, here was the thing: In the same weekend, the same two books about stock car racing were reviewed in the New York Times and in the Raleigh News & Observer. The reviews contrasted in ways that were not terribly surprising yet irresistable to my neurotic Flyover State self, hence this post. The NYT review by Jonathan Miles irritated the conservative Tennessee blogger Instapundit, and while I hate siding with Instapundit on anything, it IS curious that before undertaking to write about NASCAR, Mr. Miles is at such pains over whether NASCAR is fit (as in, not too distasteful) to write about:

For a certain segment of the population, Nascar's raid on American culture... triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that's unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What's more, they simply don't get it... Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.

The Raleigh N&O review is by Scott Huler, a good feature writer and former N&O staffer, who has written a book about NASCAR himself, and in the Raleigh paper could confidently assume that his reader needs no introduction to the subject. Huler gives thumbs up to Full Throttle: The Life and Fast Times of NASCAR Legend Curtis Turner, but a mild pan to Sunday Money, an account by Sports Illustrated writer Jeff MacGregor of a year on the NASCAR circuit.

The problem is, at the end I don't really know the subject of MacGregor's book. MacGregor practices what might be called the American Magazine Style, in which every object is worthy of comment, the comment often more important than the object.

Mr. Miles in the NYT likes Sunday Money (the one NASCAR book a non-Hun might want to read) and compares MacGregor's approach to Tom Wolfe, Mr. American Magazine Style himself--which is apt, considering Wolfe's Esquire profile of Junior Johnson is still probably the pinnacle of NASCAR lit. MacGregor's sojourn with the ballcap wearers of NASCAR Nation is a 21st century counterpart to Wolfe's long strange trip with the Merry Pranksters--calculated to scare and titillate the Eastern establishment.

As I blogged once before, NASCAR tries to have it two ways: honoring its disreputable Appalachian roots, yet aspiring to be the perfect modern marketing vehicle, sleek and squeaky clean, high-tech and family friendly all at once. Personally, I'm turned off by the marketing side of it but am fond of the scruffy side, represented by Curtis Turner and Junior Johnson. My regard for NASCAR got a big boost when I learned that Junior Johnson (a superstar of the sport) had to take a year's hiatus at the height of his career to serve federal prison time for bootlegging. My affection wanes, though, as NASCAR adds races in Dallas and Miami and Los Angeles, leaving behind historic small tracks like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro.

I think Jonathan Miles is right to say that NASCAR has a looming identity crisis, an "Elvis-comes-out-of-the-Army moment." NASCAR is in the process of establishing a Hall of Fame, and I heard somebody on the news the other day, probably Bill France, arguing that the Hall needs to be located in North Carolina because of NASCAR's roots here. Well, Bill, you sure didn't bat an eye when you abandoned Rockingham.

"Shut Up and Get On the Plane"

Sorry for the lack of blog lately. I made a few false starts at posting, but life has just been damn busy.

I bought myself a couple of CD's last weekend at Nice Price Books. One was an old familiar one, Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. The other was a newish one I've been wanting to hear for a while, the Drive-By Truckers's Southern Rock Opera. I had no idea that the DBT album makes direct reference to Neil Young (by way of Young's relationship with Lynyrd Skynyrd).

I listened to Southern Rock Opera, read Gary Mairs's thoughts about it, and now need to give it another listen. For one thing, I'm slightly hung up on the paradox that the Drive-By Truckers may simply be better than Lynyrd Skynyrd, the band they are paying tribute to. For another thing, while I share the Truckers' dismay at the knee-jerk political demonization of the South, the kneejerk response to demonization, i.e. that Southerners are good folks albeit misunderstood, leaves me cold as well. Maybe the lyrics of a rock song just aren't going to resolve this one for me.

The album appeals to me most as a meditation on manhood, duty, and violent death. There was a New York Times piece the other day about NASCAR (this may be the subject of another post soon) and one of its arguments is that death on the highway is a more major feature of life in the South than in other parts of the country. This album certainly is haunted by vehicular mayhem, routine car wrecks as well as Skynyrd's fatal plane crash. Good-hearted duty-driven traveling men who meet their fate stoically.

Basic Cable

For an evening spent vegging out watching broadcast TV, yesterday evening was pretty good. Three shows in a row touched me for different reasons.

My kids like Nanny 911--my four-year-old says we need the Nannies to come to our house: "I'm out of control!" Try harder, kid. I normally just tolerate the show. But last night, instead of the usual spoiled-rotten kids and insipid parents, they featured a couple who (I think I have the numbers right) have adopted 32 children. Nine have grown up and moved away, leaving 23 boys living in this house. Some of the kids have been adopted from abroad, where they faced neglect or abuse in nightmarish orphanages. Some of the kids are disabled, with problems ranging from ADHD to cerebral palsy. What's more, the dad himself is disabled (wheelchair-bound), so the mother is an absolute workhorse. The whole nanny squad goes to the house, not to correct the boys' behavior but just to give this mother a few days' break.

They were plucking the heartstrings for all they were worth: handicapped kids and refugee kids, making a mural for their mother, writing and performing a song for their nannies... Did I get choked up? What, am I made of stone? Let's just say something got in my eye. My wife was out of the house--if she'd been watching she'd have been a puddle. One mitigating element in the schmaltzfest was contemplating what kind of person adopts dozens of children. On some levels, this mother was pathological--it damn near took a whip and a chair to get her to leave the house, and in a creepy way she seemed to enjoy the rest of the family being dependent on her. In the end, though, I see that household teeming with life--lots of chaos and some frustration, sure, but plenty of happiness. And it's easy to imagine those boys in bleak and isolated situations if not for that half-crazy mother. And when the Nannies are at their breaking point but the teenager with cerebral palsy steps up to his Big Brother role... something got in my eye.

(Next week Nanny 911 will feature a household where the kids are acting out after the death of their father. I wonder if the charm of run-of-the-mill bratty kids has been exhausted, and now the show is going for kids who due to melodramatic circumstances are bratty-for-a-reason. Some of the air must be coming out of the reality TV balloon. The home-makeover shows seem to be making a similar move: nowadays only people who've been struck by tragedy are eligible.)

Then my kids went to bed, and I switched over to public TV, where the American Experience had an hour-long doc about the Carter Family. I knew the broad outlines of their story, but really want to read and learn more now. It's just heart-rending, the clash between the magic the Carters had together as a musical group, and the marital discord, eventually rupture, between A.P. and Sara Carter. They made world-changing music against a background of profound unhappiness. A.P. was the engine of ambition that drove them; he was combing the mountains for new songs, drumming up record dates, etc. Sara, the possessor of a one-in-a-million singing voice, really got no satisfaction from public performance, and would have preferred to stay home on Clinch Mountain. She did it for the money, and out of a sense of duty, until she couldn't stand to do it any longer. The program really brought the Carters to life, and showed them as rural but modern people grappling with momentous changes, in history and in their own lives, in a courageous way.

After that, a re-run of a Johnny Cash retrospective interspersing TV clips of Johnny's performances with commentary from people who knew him: some contemporaries of Johnny's, some younger followers like Rodney Crowell and Marty Stuart. God, do I love Johnny Cash. The show contains a late-50s Cash performance of "Big River" that's just indelible, and Marty Stuart has a great spoken-word essay about it, where he classes Johnny with Hank Williams: singers with whom we can "hear every cigarette in their voice." The performances of "Man in Black" and "A Boy Named Sue" (Johnny bellows at the camera, "Now you're gon' die"--I've seen it before and I still almost wet my pants) have got to be some of the most spine-tingling minutes in television history.

If it's Friday, must be Culture Wars

Actually, I don't know if it's just me, but the debate over religion-in-politics seems to be coming to a head recently, so I have a number of things to comment on.

David Brooks's latest strawman argument is that liberals are up in arms (or would be if they only knew) that Abraham Lincoln prayed and tried to discern God's will before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The NYT letters page is full of great dope-slap replies, all to similar effect: political leaders are welcome to pray privately on a decision. They just can't express or justify or limit discussion of the decision on grounds that it's "God's will." I don't mind that Bush prayed before deciding to take us to war. But when he (to Ariel Sharon) or his military officers claim that our invasion is divinely sanctioned, I mind.

Two other things. One, if there was ever a decision to pray over, Emancipation was it: a momentous, unprecedented moral course correction. A "no atheists in foxholes" kind of thing. Lincoln, as Brooks knows but won't say clearly, wasn't particularly pious--if HE prayed over it, it was big. Brooks is asking us to equate freeing the slaves with appointing a judge to the Third Circuit Court. Two, Lincoln's choice was defined for him in political terms, by events and by economic and religious pressure groups on both sides He saw a course of action, he felt it was right but knew it would be hugely difficult, and he prayed for resolve. And of course, there was plenty that was practical, not absolute, about the Proclamation. It freed only slaves in the South, not the North; it was timed right after a midterm election; etc. If it was a prayerful decision, it was only in a very narrow sense.

With a spate of op-eds in March and April warning of a "Christian jihad," John McCandlish Phillips (who was an evangelical in the New York Times newsroom, a thing rarer than an albino alligator) protests that evangelicals are being unfairly caricatured by the liberal punditocracy. His case would be stronger if he even mentioned Terri Schiavo or the nuclear option or anti-abortion legislation, instead of leaving us to think that this anti-Christian sentiment came out of nowhere. He finishes with a tangent about religious language in government--"ceremonial deism," in the Bush Justice Department's phrase--that's rather disingenuous. Issues like right-to-life are about a lot more than that. Also, while I'm ambivalent about stuff like the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, things were a lot different in 1789, when the spectrum ran from Anabaptist to Anglican and "God" pretty much covered everyone equally, than today, when Americans include Muslims and Hindus and believers and non-believers of many stripes.

Phillips also completely misrepresents Paul Krugman's views of suposed liberal bias in academia. Krugman, in Phillips's account, says that belief in God makes one unable to do valid scholarly work. I read that Krugman column, and that's not what it said at all. It pointed out, rightly, that the GOP leadership is hostile to academic freedom, to scholarly work that reached conclusions that were politically incorrect for GOP ideology. If you have a scholarly bent, and academic freedom is a priority for you, conservatism is announcing that it doesn't want you.


***


We got into a discussion of religious fundamentalism vs. the science of evolution over at PeoplesForum yesterday, and I found myself in the position of the beleaguered conservative in the discussion, which I hate. Let me expand here. Yesterday's chat focused on a recent Salon interview with Richard Dawkins. I posted a while back about Kenneth Miller of Brown University. Miller is one of the leading authors of high-school biology textbooks in the US, so his interest in the evolution-creationism debate is pretty damn concrete. Unlike Dawkins, sitiing in a hotel suite in his "crisp white shirt and soft blazer," uttering provocative bon mots to the delight of Salon readers, Miller goes to lobby the Kansas State Legislature, he goes to offer expert testimony in Georgia, and he speaks to audiences of divinity students in North Carolina. He gets his hands dirty, so to speak. He's not a bomb thrower, he's an infantryman. Miller is no less committed to the struggle over creationism than Dawkins, and he will get a lot more accomplished. For what it's worth, Miller was very much on my mind when I was criticizing Dawkins.

My beef with Dawkins, in sum, was that he lumps all religious folks together under the most unflattering label. The funny thing is, in some of his comments Dawkins comes so close to what I believe. Dawkins describes the wonder that scientists take in the natural processes that they understand so well, with terms like "almost transcendental" and "quasi-religious." Well, take off the weaselly modifiers and you have my view. I think Dawkins's problem with religion boils down to (1) the idea of divine intervention in nature or history, and (2) the notion of an afterlife. Well, I'm an agnostic on those things myself, yet I identify (a little uncomfortably) as a Christian. Religious categories are not as simple as a checklist of doctrines one affirms or denies. These are culture groups, somewhat fluid but somewhat persistent, which is why it's easier to speak of a Catholic child than it is to speak of a Keynesian child.

The Ludic Kid had a post yesterday about Dawkins, and I'm guessing that I'm one of the Dawkins "revilers" he's picturing. I didn't mean to come off that way. I'm no expert on the history of American evangelicals, but I'm pretty sure the Kid is leaving out some things in his analysis. The 1960s, Billy Graham, the shrinking economic pie, the fraying Protestant consensus--I suspect those things deserve a mention.

This shit makes me angry, too, this rampant yahooism. For one thing, I worry for my kids and the kind of education, the kind of economy, the kind of country they're going to grow up to. But I'd like to invoke the spirit on Tom Frank and say, progressives are not going to get far treating our opponents as idiots or children. I agree, Ted Haggard is not persuadable, but Ted Haggard's (the megachurch movement's) power is organizational. He's got 10,000 worshippers (or whatever, maybe more). You suppose 10% of them are persuadable?

The answer to so much about the predicament of the American left, I'm more and more convinced, is to organize. Nothing is going to change quickly. The great successes of liberalism in this country, like civil rights and the labor movement, took decades to build. That's got to be our time frame.

In general, there are quite a few voices on the left whom I respect, but who are pretty clueless about religion, particularly as it's actually practiced. I read Atrios, uh, every day like clockwork, but every time he comments on religion I want to throttle him. He just gets things wrong, and while he's usually humble in the face of a subject outside his expertise, he'll mouth off about religion with no compunction. He's done it recently, about Barbara Bradley Hagerty of NPR (not as bad as Atrios says) and this Baptist church that expelled members for voting for Kerry (well, that's bad, but there must be a whole lot more going on there than we can learn in a 40-second TV news clip, plus there is already some backlash against that church and there may be more to come).

I'm still working my way through the issue of Harper's that Ludic and Mr. Obscurity have been praising. The Gordon Bigelow piece was very enlightening, and all new to me. (That old crone Cora Nelson, who taught me Econ 101 freshman year--probably a Baptist! No wonder I got a C-minus!) The piece on the Colorado Springs megachurch is by Jeff Sharlet, whom I read regularly at The Revealer, and I think I can say something about his account compared to my own reading and experience. More later.

Speaking of Jeff Sharlet, here is a review he wrote of a new biography of Jonathan Edwards, that sheds a little light on the history of evangelicals in this country.

Private Geography

Dorothea Dix Hospital is a state-run inpatient mental health facility in Raleigh. Founded in 1856, its several red brick buildings sit on top of a hill. Over the years, many a North Carolina child has been threatened with being "sent to Dix Hill" if he couldn't regulate his behavior.

For ten years I lived within a stone's throw of Dix Hill, in the Boylan Heights neighborhood adjacent to the hospital grounds. In the early and mid-1900s, Boylan Heights was rather intimately connected with Dix Hospital. Dix nurses and orderlies were likely to live in the neighborhood. Halfway houses and other, less formal assisted-living arrangements eased some patients' re-entry into the community. As Boylan Heights gentrifies, the relationship becomes less intertwined. But Boylan residents value the Dix campus greatly, as nearby green space and for recreation value. A city greenway with a hiking/biking path runs along the near side of Dix Hill. I went running or dog-walking there regularly. During the summers my wife and I picked blackberries there. There is an open grassy area with a picnic shelter, and behind the shelter the hillside rises with a stand of oak trees, some of the biggest old trees in the city. On snowy days, rare though they are, people would come from far and wide to sled on Dix Hill. My children were introduced to sledding there.

It sounds awful to say your neighborhood is bordered on one side by the state mental hospital, and on another by the maximum security prison--which Boylan Heights is: Central Prison, kitty-corner from Dix Hill, is the Big House, home to North Carolina's Death Row. But I found it was no problem living next door to these places. Central Prison's security was formidable, as you'd expect, and if not for the faint sound of loudspeakers (announcing Lights Out or whatever; I could never make out any words), you could forget the prison was there. With Dix, you occasionally read of security lapses, patients wandering off, but I never worried, since the few times I'd encountered patients (supervised, out for a walk usually) they weren't threatening: quite the contrary, they tended to be blissed out of their gourds on meds.

I was very fond of the neighborhood, still sort of grieve having to move away, and I have nothing but good memories of Dix Hill. It's a significant and distinctive landmark in my adopted home city, and I'm amused by the irony of the Bedlam associations, the boogeyman function Dix Hill has for native Tar Heels. So I claimed its name for my blog.

Dorothea Dix Hospital is scheduled to be closed in two years. in 1856 Dix Hill was a good out-of-the-way site for a sanitarium. Today it is a prime piece of real estate, 300 acres with a view of the Raleigh skyline, and there is intense interest in how it's going to be developed. Dix Hill has resonance for students of public policy as well: for changes (not necessarily for the better) in mental health treatment, and as a major crossroads in Raleigh's city planning. I may have more to say about those public developments, but I wanted to write up what Dix Hill means for me.

She Used to Do the Pony, She Used to Do the Stroll

Here Be Monsters has an excellent post on the story (cough) of Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride in Duluth, Georgia. What a country! What a news industry! Those were minutes and brain cells that we'll never get back.

According to HBM, one of the New York City tabloids says that in the South, an unmarried woman of Wilbanks's age is presumed to be "insane, in prison, or gay." I laughed out loud to read this. Ms. Wilbanks didn't sound desperate for a husband, from what I could tell. The wedding was going to be pretty lavish, the groom is from a prominent family in that town. Everybody around her was so happy FOR her, they just took for granted that she was happy herself. Wrong-o. Personally, I find pre-wedding jitters to be a believable and serious thing. The couple of people I've known who have honorably backed out of a church wedding after the invitations have been mailed, I rank as some of the bravest people around. I would sooner bolt at that point rather than face the music. I was sure all along that Ms. Wilbanks had bolted; it was the likeliest explanation.

What I don't quite understand is why the families were so publicity-hungry, even after the whole emergency turned out to be a big misunderstanding (to be charitable--"hoax" would be uncharitable). Why is the groom appearing on Sean Hannity, of all shows? Why is the father of the groom "forgiving" Wilbanks on ABC, NBC, and CBS simultaneously the other morning (separate taped interviews, but his face was on three channels at the same instant)? Why is the bride's uncle standing up in front of the TV cameras saying that Jennifer had some issues the family wasn't aware of? No shit, Uncle Sherlock. I think, if not shame, at least reticence is called for by the principals in this situation. Just go inside and pull the shades. The cameras will go away pretty soon.

The groom is willing to give her another chance. That doesn't make him a saint; it's what he should have done. They'll go through worse things in the course of a marriage. I hope it works out for them in the end, but in any case, the family should just make a brief written statement to the Duluth paper. Remember when we and the TV networks made utter fools out of ourselves over a jittery bride? Well, briefly, here's how that turned out...

Final thought on the subject: You know why the Duluth authorities are pissed and considering throwing the book at the bride? Not because of wasted manpower, not because she's trashy. They're embarrassed because they treated the groom, who was decent and blameless through the whole thing, as a murder suspect.

a Frank bulletin

When I posted about Tom Frank a while back (here), I remarked that Kansas didn’t really deal with electoral strategy per se. Well, Frank makes up for that deficit in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. I don’t think he breaks any new ground in NYRB (and was Zell Miller’s conversion really much of a net gain for Bush?) but he can be forgiven for saying I told you so, because Kansas foreshadowed a lot of what happened in the ’04 presidential race.

Incidentally, Bernard Henri-Levy had an interesting take on Tom Frank (either summing Frank up or explaining him away) in an interview at the Atlantic Monthly’s website:

[Frank] wondered whether it was a surprise that so many Americans were ready to vote against their economic interests. To vote against one's economic interests means ideology—-means politics. It is the very definition of politics. If people voted only for their economic interests there would not be politics. What [Frank] was surprised by, and in a way discovered, is that America is becoming a place of strong political debate.

So Bad, It Might Be Good

Prime-time White House press conference? That's never a sign that things are going smoothly on Pennsylvania Ave. Karl Rove must have been desperate to get those pictures of Dubya and Prince Abdullah holding hands off the airwaves. I watched a little of last night's tableau. I'm sure Bush hates doing a press conference, but I can't objectively assess whether he's had a good performance and achieved his aims with the thing, or not. Most people obviously don't see what I see: a guy getting inappropriately pissed off, at a bunch of people just doing their jobs, whom he (Bush) invited there to ask him questions in the first place. Maybe the conference did him some good, I sure can't tell.

GW Bush, Donald Rumsfeld ("Are we getting our ass kicked in Iraq? You bet."), Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Das Ahnuld, John Bolton, and more of my least favorite people, have all had a bad week, and that's good. Too good to believe, and so I won't believe it yet, not until Social Security is safe and the danger of a troglodyte getting lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court is past.

Being more of a rhetoric kind of a guy than a policy kind of a guy, in the flurry of bad news for the Pubbies I've been particularly transfixed by the Beltway sleight of hand by which the GOP has tried to redefine the term "nuclear option" as a threat from the Democrats. This is even more brazen than the White House's efforts to strongarm the media into calling them Social Security "personal accounts," rather than "privatization," the commonly accepted term of long standing.

Reality is, Trent Lott coined the term "nuclear option" for the threat of the GOP's eliminating the Senate filibuster on judicial nominations, and it's been perfectly well understood as the biggest mashie in the Republicans' golf bag. But Frank Luntz must be giving them an earful how the n-phrase is killing them in the polls.

As an aside, you think the Goopers do a collective headslap thinking of the Trent Lott debacle of two years ago? That Strom Thurmond birthday toast was a killer, less for the stain of racism it put on the GOP (eh, what's one more) than for the elevation of featherweight Bill Frist to the post of Senate Majority Leader. Say what you will about Lott, he would not paint himself into a corner the way Dr. Frist consistently does.

I don't see how a meat-eating Republican can go along with this namby-pamby stuff, these word games. How can they strut around Capitol Hill like committee room tough guys, then turn into wussies when they encounter the soccer moms? Embrace your inner bully, wingers. Besides, I thought the GOP was the party of national strength. They're real comfortable talking about the actual nuclear option, yet they get all squeamish about the parliamentary one? What, have they turned into Jackson Browne all of a sudden?

Most of all, I guess I hate being instructed in proper vocabulary by Dubya and his ilk. Listen, Mr. Preznit, don't tell me how to operate the English language, and I won't tell you how to fuck up the country.

Geeks A-Poppin'

Latest book is The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz, about baseball statistics. It's for people who found Moneyball to be not geeky enough. Schwarz does a decent job, but this is pretty arcane stuff: the evolution of the newspaper box score, etc. I never knew of this book's existence until last week--if it had been out in 2003 when I wrote about fantasy baseball for The High Hat, I'd feel embarrassed for not addressing it, but it didn't come out until 2004.

Sabermetrics has been largely driven by devoted volunteers for a long time, and as with so many geek subcultures, when the first move was made to turn a buck on it (the formation of STATS Inc. in the mid-80s) there were bitter feelings of betrayal, some of them somewhat justified. Baseball stats actually offer an interesting lesson in proprietary versus open-source business models. The Elias Sports Bureau dominated the field of compiling sports statistics for many years (for pro football and basketball as well as baseball), but Elias hoarded its data. It assumed it only had a few dozen possible clients, and had to charge each one $1000's. STATS proved there was a market of average fans who wanted baseball data broken down a zillion different ways--1000s of customers at $20 each. Both companies were successful on their own terms, but STATS puts out a much better product because it invites mass scrutiny and mass input.

The level of fixation on numbers by some baseball fans can only be called a fetish. For example, Hack Wilson (Cubs, 1930) holds the single-season record for runs batted in. Generations of fans knew the magic number to be 190, and there was amazing resistance to the finding that Mr. Wilson had been shortchanged: he actually batted in 191 runs that year. First of all, you'd think people would favor accuracy, and second, for those who favor heroic achievement, the revision was in Wilson's favor. But people howled.

I'm on a bit of a sports-book jag lately. I did get hold of Michael MacCambridge's new one about the NFL. I'll probably get to it before I get to Karen Armstrong.

Fish Wars

I heard a talk Friday by Kenneth R. Miller, a noted biologist at Brown University. He is co-author of a widely-used high school science textbook. In fact, his is the book that the Cobb County, GA school board slapped with a warning label: Caution: Contains Darwinism. Avoid Contact with Brain. Flush with Scripture Immediately if Exposure Occurs.

Miller is a point man for the pro-Darwin forces, testifying in court and participating in public debate in Kansas and Cobb County and other flashpoints in the struggle. He has written a book titled Finding Darwin's God, and he outlines the conflict between science and fundamentalism, and the way he resolves it, with authority and impressive clarity. There is nothing weak or shaky about evolutionary theory that makes it more vulnerable to attack than physiology or organic chemistry or any other aspect of natural science. It is purely a matter of the cultural implications Darwin has for some conservatives. How to respond? Develop a proper understanding of science. Answer the scientific objections calmly and respectfully. And fight the presumption that evolution is anti-religious.

Miller is an engaging speaker and peppered his lecture with a number of funny asides. For instance, in 1999, the Kansas State School Board didn't stop at removing evolution from schoolbooks, it removed or rewrote much scientific consensus, including the fossil record and much geologic theory. The latter deletion was protested by the Kansas petroleum lobby: "for God's sake, that's how we find oil." If I were Miller and a coast-to-coast network of nitwits and charlatans was harassing me and slandering my life's work, I wouldn't have nearly the amount of good humor and equanimity that he has. In his good-humored way, though, he demolished the arguments of the intelligent design crowd (he called intelligent design a brilliant PR maneuver, but not much more than that).

But he also cited some overreaching statements by scientists. The assertion that science alone can lead us to truth is a philosophical one, not scientific in nature. Unlike some of his religious opponents, Miller has read the Book of Genesis closely, and he finds room there for a Darwinian view ("Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures... Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds..."). Remarkably, I learned today, St. Augustine in AD 411 wrote "On The Literal Meaning of Genesis," in which he implored fellow Christians not to talk nonsense about science; it embarrasses the church. Augustine encourages the study of nature, and part of his intellectual legacy is that the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, was an Augustinian monk.

Good stuff all around.

The So-What Question

Nothing like a game of moral values ping-pong between the centerish and leftish factions of the Democratic Party. It doesn't make us look silly at all.

I've read Amy Sullivan quite a bit, and I have some affinity for her basic position: bringing a religious sensibility to progressive politics. But her recent project has been to carve out a niche in the DC pundit empire by parodying herself, and honing a schtick: making the Democrats palatable to her Baptist granny back home in the Midwest. It's tiresome. Others have jumped on Sullivan plenty for fudging on the principle of reproductive choice, so I won't pile on. But I'm confused by her anti-Hollywood tirade. Is the objective here to take a principled stand against obscene or otherwise harmful content, or is it to score points a la Sister Souljah at the expense of Susan Sarandon? Because Susan Sarandon is hot, and America needs her to be a little more obscene, not less. Fewer mother roles, more groupie roles. What was my point again?

I wrote up some stuff about my wife's and my efforts to regulate our kids' TV and movie consumption, but I felt like an ass after reading it. I'm definitely open to charges of being lazy or hypocritical. I'm bothered by some of what my kids watch on TV, but not always bothered enough to be the bad guy and turn the thing off. And it IS a parent's responsibility, if it's anybody's, to be the gatekeeper for his or her kids. So I have no room to bitch. And a lot of people are in my boat. As I was reminded recently, when the Southern Baptists tried to rally their members to boycott Walt Disney, because Disney offered employee benefits for gay partners--that was biting off more than the SB's could chew. Sorry, preacher, but I can't deny my kids their theme park vacation and their Mulan 2 video.

The Democrats do need to find a narrative that lifts up family life and critiques pop culture. Why do we coddle our kids? Why do we feed junk to both their brains and their bodies? Why do we settle for a vapid popular culture? How can we get more time and security and public space to enrich our family life? Perhaps these questions could acknowledge parents' concerns and rally them to act. But flattering hypocrites and congratulating them for their hypocrisy--that's pandering.

Pop culture is the slippery slope to hell? As the title of this Digby post says: Prove it. What's the cause and effect here that we should be worried about? "Friends" contains dirty jokes. Teenage girls wear hip-hugger pants. Young black men play their car stereos loud. So what? Where do any of these observations get us, beyond the fact that something makes you uncomfortable? We need to go a step further.

Fastball

Slate's Sports Nut pieces are either quite wrongheaded or quite good. I liked this one, about the physical limits on how fast a pitcher's fastball can be. (Summary: Pitchers are pretty close to the limit, probably have been since at least the days of Bob Feller in the late 1930s.)

The interesting thing about being a basketball fan in my lifetime (and a little before) is that we could see the sport evolve before our eyes. Bill Russell, Julius Erving, Michael Jordan--each of them represented a quantum leap forward in the basic physical toolkit of top players. Basketball's heyday in terms of its maturation and rapid change was about 1955 to 1995. The comparable period for baseball ended about 1920 with the Babe Ruth revolution. Not that there's been no change since then, but the envelope hasn't been enlarged very much.

As of today I am hatefully jealous of Noam Scheiber, who gets to write political analysis for The New Republic, and moonlight as a baseball writer.

Roundball Roundup; or, Basketball Blather

I posted last summer about Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, basketball coach and leadership studies guru. Time for an update: Separate from the fate of his team, Coach K has been getting some attention recently (not all of it positive) for showing up in a bunch of television commercials. One spot is for the American Express card, and Coach portrays himself as "a leader who happens to coach basketball"--much more than a guy with a whistle and a chalkboard, but rather someone imparting life skills to his young charges.

Today I stumbled across this Wall Street Journal profile of Krzyzewski. It's a puff piece for his leadership institute, and more generally for the relevance of team sports (basketball perhaps most of all) to leading in a business or other grown-up context.

The article alludes to the fact that college ball is more and more being raided of its best players by the pros, and college coaches have to do a lot of ego-stroking. The WSJ attributes the trend to the celebrity status of the players. But they don't mention the way the NCAA takes advantage of these kids. One thing I notice in the American Express ads is how Krzyzewski's face and even that of his assistant coaches can be shown, but no player can be identified (we glimpse a headless torso in a white-and-blue jersey). Coach K can pocket a fee, Duke U. can enjoy some incidental advertising, but the players remain faceless and uncompensated--the NCAA makes sure of it.

Celebrity status of the players? Somebody inform CBS. Personally I don't tune in a game in order to watch Bobby Knight or Krzyzewski in action, but to hear the college hoops media oftentimes, you'd think it's all about the coaches. But I have to admit, in the college basketball industry, the CEO is all-important, much more so than in most industries. The University of North Carolina won the Big Dance the other night, you may have heard, and the major story line was coach Roy Williams's success in keeping his core of talent (a) enrolled at Carolina and (b) pulling together. Roy didn't dazzle with X's and O's, and he didn't seem to inspire his boys to tap some previously unknown hidden strength. But he got them to raise their defensive effort just enough, and take turns in the offensive spotlight. (Sean May was a rock-solid contributor every game, and then one other guy, a different guy each time, would shine: McCants one day, maybe Felton or one of the Williamses the next.) He got them to keep their mouths shut in public and compromise their egos for the sake of the team enterprise. Each player did what we knew he was capable of, and didn't get in the way of the next guy. That's a mighty bland way of speaking about a championship team (Illinois, the runners-up, had a lot more style and synergy to their game). But what Roy Williams did this year was a pretty fair example of postmodern leadership in action.

Rashad McCants, after sitting on the bench the last few minutes of the title game because he couldn't guard anybody--McCants didn't even seem particularly happy after the buzzer sounded and the Tar Heels had won. He didn't quite seem part of the celebration. He seemed relieved. These Chapel Hill lunatics had gotten what they wanted, he hadn't screwed it up, and now he was free to move on and get the star treatment somewhere else that Carolina had withheld from him. He informed a reporter of his intent to turn pro and skip his final year at UNC before he had left the arena Monday night. Not that anyone is surprised, not that anyone necessarily blames him (his mother is ill, so the family probably needs the NBA money), but it would have shown class if he could have sat on his announcement for a week or two and not distracted from the team's celebration. McCants is a hell of a scorer, and Carolina couldn't have won without him, but he's an incomplete player and was sort of a live grenade all year--he couldn't wait to release the stress of having to behave. It'll be interesting to see if he can get his act together in the future.

Bioethics for Dummies

My March 30 post notwithstanding, I've become interested enough in the Schiavo controversy that I dragged myself over to a brown bag lunch hour discussion of the case on Monday. It was sponsored by Duke University's Institute on Care at the End of Life.

The discussion didn't touch much on the political and media aspects of the Schiavo phenomenon. The speakers were pretty circumspect, and to me were partly taking an opportunity to give their standard rap on palliative care at a time when public interest in their field is high. They discussed the importance of a living will or advance directive, AND of discussing your wishes with loved ones (there is potential for court challenges even with the existence of a document), AND of being careful when you assign power of attorney (a spouse or other loved one may be too overwrought to carry out your wishes effectively).

The lead speaker at the meeting, Dr. Payne (don't bother, he's heard them all), happens to be a neurologist as well as a theologian, and so could comment substantively on Ms. Schiavo's condition. He had grabbed Ms. Schiavo's CAT scan off the Internet (it's widely circulated due to all the legal and media wrangling) and used it in his PowerPoint file. Dr. Payne did hedge, saying he couldn't diagnose someone he hadn't examined. But the scan seemed to illustrate his definition of a persistent vegetative state, where the brain stem is intact but the cortex has died. The strongest statement of opinion Dr. Payne made was one of condemnation of Senator-Doctor Bill Frist, who contradicted Ms. Schiavo's doctors based on his viewing of a brief video clip of her.

One aspect of Ms. Schiavo's case that I didn't know was that she was bulimic, and purging may have led to the cardiac arrest that caused her brain injury. The folks at the meeting ruminated on the idea that feeding Terri was a desperate mission for her parents. Significantly, though, in light of the emotional pleas of the Save Terri crowd not to "starve her to death," Dr. Payne commented that his experience even with dying patients who are conscious, is that they don't ask for food or water, beyond what they need not to have a dry mouth.

In my job I get some wonderful opportunities to attend lectures and discussions. This one was not among the best ones. Most of these are not directly applicable to my job duties--I owe big thanks to my supervisors who give me a lot of latitude to "raise my awareness" of issues I may never have to do or say anything about. The least I ought to do with these experiences is blog about them, I figure. I plan to do some make-up posts about other talks I've heard in the past few months.