Month: November 2006

Christianism

by tristero

Recently, the term “christianism” seems finally to have caught on to describe the political movement that exploits Christian symbols for secular gain. And with its acceptance has come the usual denials and attacks from the right.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, takes on Ann Althouse who claims to find the term offensive as well as Glenn Reynolds who calls it “a variety of bigotry.” In an update, Glenn notes that Hugh Hewitt characterizes “christianism” as “hate speech.”

I can’t improve on Glenn’s summary of the issue and his rebuttals but I would like to add this:

Now you know why I wrote “Voices of Light.”

My respect, even admiration, for many religious traditions is deep and genuine. I find much that is beautiful and even true in these traditions. “Voices of Light” is, among many other things, an expression of that admiration. And it’s not limited merely to Catholicism, the specific religion within which the events of “Voices of Light” take place. I’ve used texts from many different traditions in other works.

Naturally, when you take the time and effort to write a large piece of music, you have many reasons to do so. One reason that was very important to me was that I felt that I had something to contribute to the American discussion of religion and spirituality, namely that there is a huge difference between the desire to understand what is meant by God and political acts undertaken in the name of God. Failure to discern the two can be, and events have shown, is, very dangerous for American democracy.

However, I well knew that the public discourse on religion was overrun with hateful ideologues who would rather beat you to death with a Bible (metaphorically speaking) than practice the mercy of Christ (literally speaking). I wanted to make sure that before anyone presumed to speak up for what I stood for, I had made it crystal clear that my respect for religious tradition is deep and sincere. I think that even if you don’t like “Voices of Light,” it is hard to argue that the person who wrote it didn’t take Joan seriously and with great respect, as well as respect the religious traditions she practiced.

Regarding my possible personal beliefs, or possible lack of same, I felt then, and still feel, they are irrelevant to a serious discussion of religion in a public space. What is important, the only thing that is important as far as I’m concerned, is that it is clear that I have no interest in undermining religious beliefs (or unbelief) but totally respect them and try to learn what I can of many different traditions. By the same token, I have zero interest in promoting any religious system (or lack of same).

I have a very different attitude towards the political exploitation of religious symbolism and belief. To be blunt, I find it immoral that anyone would dare to corrupt the religious impulse – which, for so many, is crucial to their understanding of their lives – for cheap, secular, partisan gain. I’m talking Pat Robertson here, Jerry Falwell,followers of Rousas Rushdoony, Joseph Morehead, Randall Terry and the whole sick crew of sleazy political operatives eagerly working to wreck the American system of government and establish a theocracy.

They deserve no respect, no quarter, whatsoever. It is very important to understand that whatever their personal beliefs – which are all but unknowable – they have made it clear through their public statements that they are dangerous political extremists who have celebrated the virtue of their intolerance on numerous occasions. Some have gone out of their way to excuse, advocate or even perpetrate murderous violence in the name of their utterly sick beliefs. They have generously funded elaborate efforts to undermine science with sophisticated marketing campaigns to teach cruddy lies to science students.

And they have blasphemously used the cross and other religious symbols as if they were trying to ward off vampires in a cheesy horror film. They degrade the cross, a symbol beloved and honored by millions who have nothing in common with these people. And they do so not to affirm their religious beliefs, whatever they may be, but in the most cynical fashion, merely to counter legitimate expressions of outrage at their hateful behavior or ideas.

For all these reasons, I think it is crucial that a distinction be made between the expression of religion and its political exploitation. Therefore, a few years ago, I proposed the term “christianism” to distinguish the political movement from Christianity. I urged others to adopt it. Other terms have been proposed such as Michelle Goldberg’s “Christian Nationalism” but I like the parallels between “christianism” and “islamism.”*

One word about the provenance of the term, which I would like to be clear about. I’ll post the links tonight, when I have more time. When I wrote the 2003 post, I was completely unaware, because I have, with rare exceptions, never read him, that Andrew Sullivan had used the exact same term with a similar definition a few days before I did. The first I learned about the Sullivan post was when William Safire discussed the term “christianism” about a year or so ago in the New York Times Magazine. Actually, the word has been used for centuries, I believe.

While it is more than possible that I used the term in comments on other blogs long before I wrote that June, ’03 post, I’ll cheerfully concede precedent to Sullivan (and when Dave Neiwert credited me at one point, I wrote to tell him that Sullivan preceded me). What is far more important is that finally, finally, American public discourse on religion has begun to acknowledge the important difference between genuine religious expression and the dangerous political operatives that are operating with impunity behind the robes of priests. If I have had even a small role in helping people make that distinction, then I’ll feel that all the dozens of blog posts I’ve written on the subject was well worth the effort.

*As my original post made clear, there are differences not only between Christianity and christianism but also christianism and radical christianism. And, of course, there are many kinds of christianisms, those that emphasize Catholic symbolism as well as those that focus on Protestant evangelical traditions.

PS Those of you familiar with Joan of Arc’s story surely realize that religious faith and its relationship to politics are central to that story. I am quite aware that Joan’s story poses very disturbing questions that often seem at odds with my personal values. It was partly because the story was so deep and ambiguous that I found it so irresistible a subject. Art, as I see it, is not supposed to tell you how to feel, but should provide an opportunity for you to examine and contemplate your feelings and those of others, including the artist. Art does much more, of course, but that is another subject for another time (grin).

Cheney Agrees To Cooperate Fully With Democratic Congress And Abide By All US Laws

by tristero

I know, I know. That headline was a really bad joke:

A close look at key moments in Cheney’s career — from his political apprenticeship in the Nixon and Ford administrations to his decade in Congress and his tenure as secretary of defense under the first President Bush — suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects.

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor, predicted that Cheney’s long career of consistently pushing against restrictions on presidential power is likely to culminate in a series of uncompromising battles with Congress.

The real issue is not going to be serving subpoenas. Oh, they’ll serve them all right. Nor will the issue be whether or not the White House will obey them. They won’t.

No, the real issue is what will happen when the White House refuses to respond to nearly any subpoenas. One thing is for sure: Bush and Cheney are prepared to bring down the the US government rather than comply. What will Congress do then? And how far will Congress be willing to push?

[UPDATE: A question for all of you: Does anyone remember any article like this in the mainstream press or media back in 2000, that Dick Cheney has a long history of advocating replacing the president with an emperor and breaking the law? I don’t. Would’ve been nice for the American people to know that back then….]

Questions For The Iraq Study Group

by tristero

Dear Iraq Study Group,

How many of you folks speak Arabic? I count three, maybe four based on your names. Let’s be generous and say ten members are fluent in Arabic.

As for the rest of you, easily the majority, that don’t speak Arabic, how the fuck do you think you can contribute any truly substantive expertise about the situation in Iraq to the study group? Sure, some people need to be expert on things that don’t necessarily require Arabic language skills. But most of you? What kinda sense is that? Y’think you have expertise ’cause you recently skimmed a summary of al Jazeera broadcasts? That’s like thinking you can advise on heart surgery ’cause you watched Marcus Welby a lot when you were a kid.

Just asking.

Love,

tristero

h/t Glenn Greenwald who, in a typically brilliant post writes:

Back in 2002, when the U.S. was debating whether to invade Iraq, those who opposed the invasion were, for that reason alone, dismissed as unserious morons and demonized as anti-American subversive hippies. Despite the fact that subsequent events have largely proven them to have been right, and that those who did the demonizing were the frivolous, unserious, know-nothing extremists, this narrative persists, so that — even now, when most Americans have turned against this war — the only way to avoid being an “extremist,” and to be rewarded with the “centrist” mantle, is to support the continuation of this war in one form or another.

A desire to keep troops in Iraq even in the face of what is going on there may be many things, but “centrist” is not really one of them. Any Commission which commits itself in advance to keeping American troops fighting in Iraq for the foreseeable, indefinite future is itself “extremist” — whether that term is seen as a function of public opinion or assessed on its own merits.

The Root Of All Selfishness

by poputonian

Perhaps Antifa was right:

Psychologists: Money is the root of anti-social behavior

A team of psychologists has discovered why money can’t buy happiness.

Pictures of dollar bills, fantasies of wealth and even wads of Monopoly money arouse feelings of self-sufficiency that result in selfish and often anti-social behavior, according to a study published in the journal Science.
…
Money makes it possible for people to achieve their goals without asking for help. Therefore, Vohs and her colleagues theorized, even subtle reminders of money would inspire people to be self-reliant — and to expect such behavior from others.

A series of nine experiments confirmed their hypothesis. For example, students who played Monopoly and then were asked to envision a future with great wealth picked up fewer dropped pencils for a fellow student than those asked to contemplate a hand-to-mouth existence.Money also influenced how people said they preferred to spend their leisure time. A poster of bills and coins prompted students to favor a solitary social activity, such as private cooking lessons, while students sitting across from posters of seascapes and gardens were more likely to opt for a group dinner.

The expected behavior of others comment reminds me of Ronald Reagan, who used himself as a model of how to rise from nowhere. If he could become president, anyone could achieve whatever they wanted. In a system that rewards self-interest, you just have to constantly act in your own self-interest, society be damned.

Chickenhawks Part Deux

by tristero

A lot of fascinating discussion in comments to this post on chickenhawks, a subject that has more odd angles than one might originally suppose. One of the most intriguing response to my post is that two regular commenters, Jose Chung and DavidByron, who I always assumed would never agree about a thing, both strenuously objected to the notion that willingness to serve in the military confers some sort of special status in opining about Bush/Iraq. Another was DavidByron and Jill Bains’ insistence that my opposition to both the Bush/Iraq war and the Afghanistan catastrophes is diluted by a barely disguised willingness to accept the premises of America’s manifest destiny trope. A lot of other folks also made interesting, thought-provoking observations as well, and they all made me refine, perhaps even revise, some of my opinions on the subject. Thank you, one and all, for your contributions.

1. Jose Chung and DavidByron both seem to believe (and I’m sure they’ll correct me if I’m wrong!) that the chickenhawk issue really is about whether only those with military service are qualified to opine on the subject of war. But that’s not quite right. Of course, military service, or the lack of, has no genuine importance to the worth of an argument pro or con the Bush/Iraq war.* The real issue is the total cluelessness of a particular group of war advocates whose drooling enthusiasm for war isn’t grounded in reality.

I tried to make it clear in my post – but it wasn’t clear enough, apparently – that the hostile question, “well, if you support the war so much, why doncha serve?” is no query at all, but an angry, exasperated, assertion amounting to saying, “You don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about, or you wouldn’t talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way.” So yes, as DavidByron says, the question is a nasty, sarcastic, ad hominem attack. What makes it appropriate is that the reasoning of the chickenhawks was beyond serious discussion. Thomas Friedman’s insistence that even if Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 or had WMD’s, “we” still oughta whack him because “we” can. George Packer’s utterly naive kumbaya-save-the-world attitude. John Podhoretz’ floating the suggestion that maybe US forces should have killed more young Iraqi males at the beginning of the invasion. And, of course, the 101st Keyboarders who talk as if Mr. Kurtz’s “Exterminate all of the brutes” doesn’t go far enough by half.

There are various ways to respond to such garbage. Given an unlimited lifespan, I completely agree that we should examine each of the chickenhawks’ assertions in detail and respond in a logical, reasoned, way. But the truth is that life is short and Friedman, Packer, Podhoretz, and many others aren’t making arguments or assertions that are intended to be seriously discussed. These are crude, impulsive, thoughtless reasons to go to war – uttered from a virtual barstool – and they are usually accompanied with equally crude and thoughtless personal attacks on those who disagree: “you’re not with us, you’re against us!”

Since that is the level of the chickenhawks’ reasoning, it makes more than enough sense – to me, but maybe not to everyone – to respond, “okay tough guy, put up or shut up.” It’s another way of making the point that the chickenhawks – not necessarlily ALL advocates of Bush/Iraq who didn’t serve – aren’t serious people. It is mocking them, not asserting in any serious way qualifications for ALL discussions. And it is a terrible tragedy that those of us opposed to the war didn’t find ways to mock them earlier and in even nastier ways. Why? Because one of these profoundly unserious people is the president of the United States who was in a position to, and did, order US troops to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq.

Is sneering mockery the ONLY weapon against idiots like Bush, or the single BEST weapon? No, and no. But it is one tactic, nevertheless, and it has its place, and its uses. It may not discredit the chickenhawks in your view, dear reader, as you are knowledgeable enough to ask deeper questions, but it has the potential to do so with others.

2. Regarding the manifest destiny business, I am, unlike DavidByron, an American. It is possible that somewhere, somehow, I buying into that ugly, dangerous, myth of exceptionalism. But I truly doubt that some unacknowledged sympathy for manifest destiny influences my attitude towards Bush/Iraq or Bush/Afghanistan. I have been consistently and publicly opposed to both long before it was fashionable and have often framed the argument by saying America has no business spreading its cooties hither and yon. We are one great country among many great countries. But America has many serious flaws and has no reason to assume that its institutions are uniquely good for everyone, or that America has the right to do as it pleases in the world.

I fail to see how anyone can be serious in asserting that these are the views of someone who advocates manifest destiny, even without realizing it.

Jill Bains, however, tries to. She wrote, “If you fail to support the Taliban and whomever else is trying to physically expel the United States from Afghanistan, then, despite all your protestations to the contrary, you become a de facto supporter of the American occupation.” This is exactly the kind of false reasoning that leads others to conclude that if you’re opposed to Bush/Iraq, you’re “objectively pro-Saddam.” I reject it because it sets up an unnecessary and false dichotomy; it requires me to align myself with moral monsters in order to “prove” the seriousness with which I oppose Bush, an alignment I utterly refuse; and because it is needlessly tendentious.

Perhaps the best response to Jill Bains’ assertion is something close to what Arundhati Roy said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that a reasonable alternative to Osama bin Laden is not George W. Bush. Likewise, a reasonable alternative to Bush is not the Taliban. This, of course, goes without saying for most of us, but it bears repeating.

It is vitally important, in trying to articulate a 21st century liberalism, that liberals continue to insist upon finding and creating alternatives to this kind of false polarity. That is no easy job, but we’ve seen the kind of horror that quickly results when those alternatives are cavalierly swept off the table.

*Except, to a greater or lesser extent, in regards to technical issues. For instance, I am certain that General Shinseki’s considerable military expertise gave him a far better sense of what a reasonable level of troop deployment might be if Iraq was invaded and occupied by a US coalition than Paul Wolfowitz. That said, I maintain that no level of troop strength could possibly have led to a result much different than the one we see today. Bush/Iraq was a stupid idea that had no chance of an acceptable outcome.

Saturday Night At The Movies

A Long Goodbye

By Dennis Hartley

I was going to write a movie review (after all, this post is billed as “Saturday Night At The Movies”) but as a dedicated film buff I feel compelled to pay my respects to Robert Altman, who we lost on November 20. OK, he was 81 years old, so on one level I can’t say I was completely blindsided-but this was a “senior citizen” who was not planning his next golf outing, but in the midst of wrapping pre-production on his next film, for Christ’s sake. We lose great actors and directors all the time, but there are some whose loss precipitates something much deeper than just a momentary “Wow…bummer” reflection. Robert Altman wasn’t just a “maverick” or an “iconoclastic Hollywood outsider”-he was his own genre (“Altmanesque” has become part of the cinematic lexicon for good reason). Contemporary directors like John Sayles and PT Anderson owe their entire filmmaking approach to Altman’s pioneering groundwork. No American filmmaker before or since could Question Authority (on and off-screen) whilst flaunting cinematic conventions so….cinematically. Rather than boring you with more superlatives, I’ll let the Man’s work speak for itself. Here are some of my recommendations:

M*A*S*H The obvious place to start. Groundbreaking, ballsy (for its time) anti-Vietnam meditation cloaked in bawdy anti-authoritarian hijinx. Launched the careers of Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Tom Skerritt and more.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller -Brilliant, gritty, resonant “Northwestern” with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. The creators of HBO’s “Deadwood” need to own up.

The Long Goodbye -Altman stands film noir on its head and coaxes a career best performance from Elliot Gould as he reinvents Phillip Marlowe for the Me Decade.

California Split Elliot Gould and George Segal are priceless in Altman’s existential Vegas pastiche. A close cousin to “The King Of Marvin Gardens” in its bittersweet examination of beautiful losers and the elusive American Dream.

Nashville Considered by many to be Altman’s masterwork; it certainly qualifies as “Altmanesque” -dozens of disparate vignettes eventually intersect at the scene of a (fictional) political assassination. (Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby” sounds suspiciously derivative- which I will be able to either confirm or retract once I screen it-stay tuned!)

Secret Honor In just under 90 minutes, Altman cinematically sums up the Shakespearean train wreck that was the Nixon administration. Unique in the Altman canon in that it features a cast of just one. Phillip Baker Hall’s fearless and profane invocation of the madness of King Richard has to be seen to be believed.

All of the above films are currently in print on DVD and easy to track down for purchase or rental. These are only a handful of the 40-odd films in the Altman canon; see ‘em all!

Digby adds these two:

The Player

Short Cuts

.

Leftovers: Plymouth Rocked

by poputonian

Here is a link to an excellent essay about Mayflower historians, including the original one, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford, the man who also discovered capitalism. New Yorker writer Jill Lepore begins with a sketch of Samuel Eliot Morison, who entered Harvard and never left, and then does a smooth takedown on Bradford, followed by one of journalist neo-historian Nathaniel Philbrick, author of the current best-seller Mayflower – A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Philbrick’s book takes you from Bradford’s voyage across the “vast and furious” ocean to that seminal event, King Phillip’s War. The essay should be read in its entirety by those with an interest, but nonetheless, here is an excerpt:

THE NEW YORKER
Critic at Large

PLYMOUTH ROCKED
by JILL LEPORE
Of Pilgrims, Puritans, and professors.
Issue of 2006-04-24

Philbrick, a former all-American sailor and Sunfish-racing champion who lives on Nantucket, seems, at first glance, to be following in Morison’s wake. Waves slosh through all of his books, whose titles sound like the names of sea chanties: “Sea of Glory,” “Away Off Shore,” “Second Wind,” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for nonfiction. Like Morison, he finds most history books written by professors a chore to read. Trained as a journalist, Philbrick once explained his decision to include a bibliographic essay instead of footnotes or references to works of scholarship in his text: “I wanted to remove the scholarly apparatus that so often gets in the way of the plot in academic history.” Sam Morison never met a footnote he didn’t like, but his relationship to academic history was a complicated one. At Harvard, he was neither a natural teacher nor a beloved one. He never held office hours, he made his students come to class in coat and tie, and he refused to teach Radcliffe girls (he considered them frivolous). He liked to lecture in riding breeches and, in later years, in his Navy uniform. “Even before he became an admiral, you felt as though he were one and you were a midshipman,” a former student, the eminent Yale historian Edmund Morgan, recalled. But Morison believed, ardently, that there was something about university life that mattered, that made people more honest, more accountable, and less likely to get things wrong. In a 1948 review in the Atlantic Monthly of a book by the historian Charles Beard, who had left Columbia thirty years earlier to live on a dairy farm, Morison suggested (pretty cruelly, since Beard was on his deathbed at the time) that Beard’s work had suffered from his isolation: “You get more back talk even from freshmen than from milch cows.” Maybe if Nathaniel Philbrick had had to answer to freshmen he might have learned to be a bit more skeptical of his sources. The first half of his book stars William Bradford, and relies, appropriately, on Bradford’s history, or, rather, on Samuel Eliot Morison’s invaluable edition of Bradford’s history. So much did Morison admire Bradford, so much did he despise the myth of the Puritans, so much did he want Americans to read better history, that he spent five years meticulously preparing an edition of Bradford’s history “that the ordinary reader might peruse with pleasure as well as profit.” Working closely with his faithful secretary, Antha Card, to whom he read Bradford’s every word aloud, Morison altered the original’s antiquated spelling and cleared the text of notes and scribbles made by everyone from Bradford’s biographers to his descendants, material that had been injudiciously included, and mistakenly attributed to Bradford himself, in earlier printed editions. Morison applied his magnifying glass to every trace of ink on the manuscript’s pages. Where earlier copyists had Bradford concluding that “the light here kindled hath shone to many,” Morison pointed out that the light actually shone “unto” many; a splotch that looked as though Bradford had crossed out the “un” turned out, on closer inspection, to be “merely an inadvertent blot from the Governor’s quill pen.” Published in 1952 as “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Morison’s definitive edition of Bradford is now in its twenty-third printing.

I very much related this next part to current times:

In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New England’s Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: “Where is Your O God?” One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victim’s gutted belly. Puritans interpreted such acts as a sign of God’s wrath, as punishment for their descent into sinfulness. Not only had they become, over the years, less pious than the first generation of settlers; they had also failed to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us, when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

Reading those scarlet letters, Puritans concluded that God was commanding them to defeat their “heathen” enemies by any means necessary. For the English, all restraint in war, all notions of “just conduct,” applied only to secular warfare; in a holy war, anything goes. Ministers urged their congregations to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” Such a policy, then as now, breeds nothing if not merciless retaliation. As a Boston merchant reported to London, the Indians, in town after town, tortured and mutilated their victims, “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts.”

Brutal.

Leftover Retch Phlegmball

by poputonian

Unbelievable.

Several people commented that they wanted Digby to make a stronger point-by-point refutation of Retch’s The Real Story of Thanksgiving. But really, folks, is that the way radio guys work, by discussing details? C’mon. They paint pictures with words.

So, I had heard that one of R’s ancestors, someone called T’mush Graungerball, an ol’ bugger, had actually been executed in Plymouth Colony. But I never expected to actually find it documented in the original records.

From Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Stratton, 1986), p199 (original quotations from Bradford’s History and Plymouth Colony records):

Though fair-minded in determining guilt, the Plymouth leaders themselves acknowledged that their punishments were severe. Bradford wrote concerning the year 1642 that it was surprising to see how wickedness was growing in the colony, “wher the same was so much witnesed against, and so narrowly looked unto, and severly punished.” He admitted that they had been censured even by moderate and good men “for their severities in punishments.” And he noted, “Yet all this could not suppress the breaking out of sundrie notorious sins…espetially drunkennes and unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men and women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. But that which is worse, even sodomie and bugerie, (things fearfull to name,) have broak forth in this land, oftener then once.”

The event which apparently provoked these observations from the governor was mentioned very briefly in court records of 7 September 1642: “Thomas Graunger, late servant to Love Brewster of Duxborrow, was this Court indicted for buggery wth a mare, a cowe, two goats, divers sheepe, two calves, and a turkey, and was found guilty, and received sentence of death by hanging untill he was dead.” The executioner was Mr. John Holmes, the Messenger of the court, and in his account he claimed as due him £1 for ten weeks boarding of Granger, and £2/10 for executing Granger and eight beasts. Bradford described Granger as about sixteen or seventeen years of age. Someone saw him in the act with the mare, and he was examined and confessed. The animals were individually killed before his face, according to Leviticus 20:15, and were buried in a pit, no use being made of them. Bradford relates that on examination of both Granger and someone else who had made a sodomitical attempt on another, they were asked where they learned such practices, and one confessed he “had long used it in England,” while Granger said he had been taught it by another, and had heard of such things when he was in England.

Wow. Retch’s ancestor screwed a turkey.

I’m not too sure of the source of this next one, but it sounds about right:

“Wretch Flemball was deetayned for sundrie notorious sins upon returning from Quisqueya in Hispanolia wher hee had erectile-dysfunction with sum little boys, who hee disapointed very much.”

This is the real story of Thanksgiving, people. Sexual perversion set loose by Retch’s ancestors for its trek though American history. Read other entries on Sex and Morality in Plymouth Colony.

(I swear I have not been drinking.)

Advocating War If You Haven’t Served

by tristero

Kevin Drum writes

When nations decide whether to go to war — or whether to continue an existing war — everyone in a democracy is entitled to a view and everyone is entitled to be taken seriously. But if non-veterans, by virtue of having never served, are denied the moral authority to advocate in favor of war, their views will quite rightfully be entirely marginalized. After all, why should anyone care what they think if, as O’Donnell suggests, their non-serving status predetermines their only honorable opinion?

I’m not willing to leave decisions on the use of military force solely to combat veterans, but that’s where this sentiment leads us. It leads to a place where military veterans are put on a pedestal and anyone who hasn’t served is ipso facto less qualified to hold an opinion on isssues of war and peace than someone who has.

Sounds reasonable, but I think Kevin’s reasoning is out of context and flawed.

First of all, the objection is not to everyone who hasn’t served expressing an opinion about war, but only to those who haven’t served who also are advocating war. I do not believe that it is necessary to experience war in order to oppose it.

Furthermore, I don’t object in general to people who advocate war who haven’t served. I object to the specific situation we have in regards to Bush/Iraq. I strongly object to the chickenhawks for their warped attitude in regards to this particular war. It is not merely that they are advocating war without having suffered the consequences. It is their loopy, ungrounded-in-reality enthusiasm for this war that I find revolting, an attitude that minimizes war’s horrors rather than focusing on them, as any responsible person would.

Chickenhawks rarely if ever try to make the case that as awful as the sufferings of war are for everyone involved, reluctantly, this war is necessary. That is because there simply is no case to be made, never has been. Instead the chickenhawks are happy to go to war; rather than acknowledge that sometimes war is a solemn, unavoidable obligation, we hear about Grand Global Strategies or that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, or war is some kind of of post 9/11 therapy. And the chickenhawk discourse descends rapidly to the moral sewer, where a demented John Podhoretz will blithely talk about how the biggest mistake at the beginning of Bush/Iraq was that “we” didn’t kill enough young Iraqis. (The biggest mistake at the beginning of the war was starting it.)

But the chickenhawks go even further than just excitedly embracing the prospect of waging war against Iraq for no reason. They have the unmitigated gall to denounce everyone who opposed Bush/Iraq as naive, as traitorous, as third-rate minds, as not really comprehending the nature of the threat, and so on. They are perfectly willing to describe the tens of millions of people who marched in February ’03 in opposition to the war as “objectively pro-Saddam,” a remark as utterly ignorant as high-five enthusiasm to fight a war is.

In short, it is the lack of even the slightest comprehension of what war really is, combined with their belligerent, dismissive arrogance that makes the question of the chickenhawks’ own willingness to serve in the Bush/Iraq war a more than fair question.

Again, the question of happy-war advocates being willing to serve is specific to this war, a war which has never been a legitimate cause, either strategically or morally. In contrast, while I strongly opposed the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan in 2001,* I certainly understood that a legitimate case could be made for it (and that war was inevitable no matter what I, or anyone else, thought). The lack of experience of war advocates never entered the equation.

It is the hysterical, clueless, and reality-free warmongering over Iraq that makes the question, “Well, since you feel so strongly about it, why don’t you enlist and go fight? ” an inevitable one. The question is really another way of saying, “You don’t know a damn thing about what you’re talking about, or you wouldn’t talk about Bush/Iraq in such a foolish, callous way.”

For my own part, I strongly believe that those advocating this war must, in some meaningful sense, get involved in the war effort. That doesn’t mean staying in your pajamas and typing on a blog that your smarter countrymen are traitors. Nor does it mean that you have to volunteer for night patrols in Sadr City. But if you are as gung ho for bang bang as the National Review gang was, it behooves you to support the war in an active manner, by enlisting, by joining USO, by volunteering in hospitals, and so on. It is simply disgraceful how little responsibility or involvement the chickenhawks have. If the threat is that serious that you think your neighbor has to be willing to die to meet that threat, then the least you should feel obligated to do is to help confront that threat. That, my friends, strikes me as close to a moral absolute.

By focusing on what really is a non-existent issue, one that no one really disputes – who in general has the moral standing to advocate war rather than the obnoxious attitude of the Bush/Iraq chickenhawks – Kevin missed the important point of O’Donnell’s post, namely the enormous, unjustifiable distance between the people fighting the war and those empowered to figure out what to do about it now. O’Donnell, in defending Rangel’s call for a draft, gives us a very telling anecdote:

In my one conversation with Kissinger, which occurred on TV, I asked him if he knew anyone who got killed in Vietnam. He was completely thrown. He doesn’t go on TV to be asked such small-minded questions, he goes on TV to pontificate and TV interviewers are happy to let him do it. Kissinger sputtered and ran away from the question, leaving the distinct impression that he did not know anyone who was killed in the war he managed. His memoir of the period does not mention a single casualty. If you have ever stood at the Vietnam Memorial and run your hand over the name of a relative on the wall, as my mother and I did last month, you can get as angry as Charlie Rangel does about people like Kissinger deciding how long our soldiers should be exposed to enemy fire in a war we know we can’t win.

Of course, Rangel doesn’t want a draft. But somehow the reality of this war must be made palpable to the American people. It is not, and as a consequence, the drooling warlust on display by the chickenhawks attains a credibility it doesn’t deserve. It is a lot easier for a lunatic like Cheney to sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he lies that the war is going “remarkably well” when there are no photos of coffins of American soldiers, no tally of Iraqi deaths, and no images of what war really looks like to the people unfortunate enough to be caught up in it.

*My objections to Bush/Afghanistan were both tactical and moral. A few reasons. First of all, it was patently obvious that bin Laden, for a variety of reasons, was trying to provoke precisely the kind of invasion and slaughter that took place. One should never do what an enemy wants you to do but what is in your best interest. It was not in America’s best interest to get quagmired in Afghanistan. Related to this is the fact that no one in the American government knew enough about Afghanistan to wage an effective war, ie, one that would end with a positive outcome. In regards to the morality of Bush/Afghanistan, I simply didn’t understand how killing thousands of innocent Afghans “in revenge” for 9/11 could be justified. I still don’t. The 9/11 attacks were bin Laden’s doing, they were not even the Taliban’s doing, let alone the majority of Afghans.

While in a normal discourse the following would go without saying, we don’t have a normal discourse here in America in the 21st Century. Sooo…. the Taliban were, and still are, exhibit A for the obscenity of theocracy. I need no lecture from a rightwing apologist for James Dobson to know that. To oppose the Bush/Afghan war in no way implied an endorsement of Talibanism. Likewise and just as obviously, I strongly believe that bin Laden and his henchfolk must be brought to justice which, not being naive about such things, means he will be killed – no country would dare imprison him. As Afghanistan gets worse and worse, and bin Laden remains on the loose, I see no reason to revisit my initial opposition to the Bush/Afghan war. In 2001, I saw a moral and strategic disaster in the making and sadly, I was right.

It’s Official. And Getting Worse.

by tristero

LA Times:

Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

Emphasis added.

Any questions why it is immoral to invade a country that is not an imminent threat? Any questions why it is the height of idiocy to claim you can impose democracy by force? Any questions why Richard Cohen should resign and get psychiatric help for opining America needed some therapeutic violence after 9/11?

Finally, any questions why anyone who gave five minutes of study to the situation – except rightwingers and others with third-rate minds – could see this coming long before American tanks rolled over the border and the deaths and atrocities started to mount?

PS. Special note to all the liberal hawks who supported the invasion: It’s gonna get a lot worse. Guaranteed. And your apologies and contrition mean nothing.