Follow the Money

Many on the Democratic side of the aisle seem to be hell-bent on bringing down the Bush administration--even if it takes wrecking the United State's national security to accomplish it.

Taleena at Sun Comprehending Glass has intemperate words for the editors and publishers of the New York Times regarding their publishing of the details of a anti-terrorist program that tracks international funds transfers.

On Fox News Sunday, the often-likable NPR commentator Juan Williams felt that it was a good thing that the news was published because, as he said, the terrorists would stop moving money around--there was no alternative to the international banking system.

I weep.

The First Rule of Fight Club is: You Don't Talk About Fight Club.

The Second Rule of Fight Club is: You Don't Talk About Fight Club.

You never, never, never expose to your opponents your intentions, capabilities or actions. Perhaps your opponent doesn't know; perhaps he suspects, but isn't sure; or perhaps he's got the information, but he's looking for confirmation.

Mr. Williams certainly knows that on June 13th Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar was breifly delayed at the Cairo airport with seven suitcases stuffed with cash.

The foreign minister is the third Hamas official to enter at the Rafah crossing into Gaza carrying large amounts of cash. Last month, a Hamas lawmaker passed through with $4.5 million in banknotes. Before that, a Hamas spokesman brought in $800,000. Not a single dollar of these cash deliveries ever reached official Palestinian national coffers. Rather, Palestinian sources report that the cash covered the wages of Hamas’s militiamen and “security forces” — that is, the hired killers of “one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world today.”

The reason the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times did what they did is that they could count on Bush Derangement Syndrome to cover their ass. And now we are facing international terrorism with one less weapon.

In the words of Jake Gittes:

You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which'll probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.

Well, now we are going to have a harder time following the money.

How Shall We Find the Concord of this Discord?

A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.'
Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

The Seattle Times has run an unsigned editorial about the resignation of Dean Logan.

For those who are not familiar with him, Mr. Logan was Elections Director for King County, Washington during the late Gubernatorial* race. Mr. Logan's department mislaid ballots, certified ballots that were in clear and open violation of state elections law, and kept finding "lost" ballots until Democrat Christine Gregoire edged ahead of Republican Dino Rossi. The ill will generated by that debacle will poison Washington state politics for a generation.

Now Mr. Logan is to decamp to sunnier climes of Los Angeles County. I wish him safety, for Los Angeles is rough political scene. That kind of electoral jiggery-pokery will have Orange County rioting like South Central.

But what I want to look briefly at that editorial. It contains two paragraphs of amazing prose:

Logan was by no means perfect. His office made many unacceptable mistakes during the 2004 election. He accepted responsibility for the missteps and then worked tirelessly and cooperatively with three committees or task forces to fix the problems.

But few people can withstand incessant ranting of talk radio and sometimes rabid musings of the blogosphere, not to mention heavy-handed political posturing from the County Council.

So in the first paragraph we have "unacceptable mistakes" for which Mr. Logan has "accepted responsibility." I think I know what they mean, but someone needed to see the conflict between those sentences before they went to print.

The next paragraph contains the coining of the phrase, "rabid musings" of the blogosphere. Rabid evokes images of uncontrolled ferocity straining to break the leash, while "musings" evokes those of quite, even ironic, reflections. How do those get along?

Finally we have "heavy-handed political posturing." The metaphores have not been merely mixed, they've been blended to a frappe like a mochaccino.

Of course I don't believe a word of this stuff; but, once again, it's like the Democrats are sending in the second-string team.

------------------------------------------
* I just love that word, "Gubernatorial." It's like all state executive officers are at heart, Jimmy Carter. Gubernatorial!

Summer Re-reads

I wonder how many people start summer, or re-affirm summer, by re-reading a specific book each year. I had thought that I was the only one who did such a thing, but I have met, through the years many people who do it.

Years ago, my friend Alex told me that every year since seminary he has started each summer by re-reading Dune. I completely understood. Dune is a novel that, if you are lucky, takes you in and transports you to a distant, not altogether nice, place. But the lapse of a year allows the ideas and themes of the novel to grow roots in your mind; and re-reading the novel allows new growth to experience of reading.

A former boss, Bill, told me that he started every summer re-reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. I read through that series twice, both times carried by its story and repelled by its anti-hero. I cannot imagine doing that to myself again. But for Bill, summer didn't start until he had cracked open Lord Foul's Bane.

What triggers this rememberance is R. Andrew Newman's article on NRO about his summer ritual of re-reading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

It’s not, I think, a bearing in life I seek. It’s an annual desire to reacquaint myself with the vistas of summer. Vistas wide and golden as the prairie itself. Times when school hallways darkened and three months of light beckoned. Days when the air seemed saturated with possibilities.

And, that, I think is the key. The annual desire to reacquaint ourselves with books that changed how we viewed the world.

And my annual summer read?

*Sigh*

It used to be The Lord of the Rings, but I have set that aside for a while. I'm looking for the next big, complex narrative, loaded with the frieight of ideas and new viewpoints that will be worth re-reading.

Any suggestions?

Hard Falls

So no sooner did I post the haiku about getting flung, than it happens. Last Friday Mrs. Islander had customers to attend to, so I took off to attend aikido class alone.

I arrived late (something I loathe) and thought that I would just wait out open-hand techniques and participate only in weapons class. Pierce Sensei had other ideas. He called a senior student over to show me the current technique. The attack was a ryotetori (two-hand grab) and the defense was a type of koyu nage or throw. (My ignorance is due to my late arrival.)

I am still gokyu (rank beginner) , so my partner was releasing me into forward rolls. At least she was trying to. Because I had been late arriving, I had not warmed up, I had not seen the technique demonstrated, and I was being a poor uke. If you can imagine someone stepping onto the dance floor and attempting a new step for the first time, bumping into their partner, treading on their partner's feet, that was me.

After a moment, Pierce Sensei came over and asked my partner to sit seiza. We bowed and he signaled for me to attack.

Now, about the only real error you can make in this situation (attacking your sensei) is to make your attack half-hearted or to not follow through with the attack you have begun. I would make neither of these mistakes. I stepped towards Pierce Sensei, grabbed his wrists firmly...and entered the maelstrom. He stepped back with a quarter-turn, grabbed my wrists and swept my arms (and the rest of my body) up and around. I approached the portion of the technique where nage should release my hands to allow me to execute a graceful ukeme forward roll.

Except Pierce Sensei never released my wrists.

With my wrists pinned in his fists, my body sailed up over my hands and I landed streched out, flat on my back in a hard breakfall. No one was more surprised than I. I landed okay, keeping my breath, so stood back up and prepared to attack my sensei again.

Expecting a roll,
Kohai rushes at Sensei.
The mat rushes up.

What is Haiku?

What is a haiku?
five syllables, followed by
seven, then five more.

Pondering the cup,
sitting seiza, we can see,
that it is empty.

Oh lowly kohai,
do not correct your betters,
lest Sensei fling you.

After Class

Last Wednesday, Mrs. Islander and I attended our usual akido/kenjutsu class. After the aikido class, Pierce Sensei held the weapons class two doors down the street in a room with mirrors lining one wall. It was unnerving but helpful to work out in front of the mirrors. It's great to be able to keep an eye on your posture as you move through an awase.

When the class ended, the students trooped back down the street to our usual classroom. I grabbed a vacuum cleaner and went back to the mirror room and began vacuuming it out. I was alone for 10 or 15 minutes, pushing the machine back and forth, up and down the long room. Alone with the whirring sound of the vacuum, focusing on the threads and lint that had fallen from people's dogi while they practiced, I reflected on the practice of cleaning the dojo.

When I was a child, one of my teachers told us that Japanese children spent the last 10 minutes of each school day cleaning up the classroom. We were all aghast. Couldn't they afford janitors? At that age, school seemed to be a great burden on my free time. Cleaning it up every night seemed to imply that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had moved to town and gotten elected to the school board. All that gum stuck underneath the desks! Ugh!

But nowadays I see things differently. Cleaning the dojo after class shows respect for the school, makes us responsible for the conditions under which we practice, and allows us to participate in the space in which we learn, not just the content of the lessons.

It was nice to take a few minutes to reflect on where I had been and where I was. I finished the job, wound the cord, and returned to our classroom to put it away.

Using the Rules

Taleena posts about a Connecticut school district that has instituted a rule that no high school football team shall win a game by more than 50 points. In a comment to that post I reminded her of Torvill and Dean and their run-ins with the ISC over their interpretations of the rules.

I found this on Wikipedia:

Getting around Olympic rules

Ravel's original Boléro composition is over 17 minutes long. Olympics rules clearly state that the free dance must be four minutes long (plus or minus 10 seconds). Torvill and Dean went to a music arranger to condense Boléro down to a "skatable" version. However, they were told that the minimum time that Boléro could be condensed down to was 4 minutes 28 seconds. This is still 18 seconds in excess of the Olympics rules. Torvill and Dean reviewed the Olympic rule book and found that it stated that actual timing of a skating routine began when the skaters started skating. Therefore they could arguably use Boléro if they did not place their skates' blades to ice for the first 18 seconds. They timed the performance so that when Jayne first places a blade on the ice, they would have the maximum skating time remaining. In their medal-winning Boléro routine, Torvill & Dean move their bodies to the music for 18 seconds before they began skating.

Barracks lawyers the lot of them! But man, when I watched that routine my jaw was on the floor.

Peggy (Hearts) Rudy?

The early markers are being laid down for the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections. This promises to be an very interesting contest--the best since 2000, perhaps since 1980. Neither side has an heir-apparent. Let the tournament begin!

Hillary Rodham Clinton (I am never sure whether to use her maiden name, so she ends up with the assasin's three-name moniker*) has oodles of cash, which she has not been hoarding, Midas-like. She has built up a reputation as a hard-working senator and a good and generous campaigner. When the day comes, she will have I.O.U.s from all over the country to collect.

That old comedy team of Kerry and Edwards have broken up and are going solo. Edwards is the Tab Hunter of the Democratic party--a pretty face, but eventually he'll wind up opposite Devine in some John Waters production.

In modern times Vice Presidents are often an Administration's heir-apparent, but Dick Cheney has said that he won't run; and his behavior as Vice President hasn't been the behavior of someone looking to a future election. He has fiercely loyal partisans, but among the general electorate he has very high negatives.

I see Newt Gingrich on the Sunday talk shows very regularly now. He's showing a little ankle to his supporters, but hasn't declared his intentions. With the failure of the congress to contains spending and the growth of government, his Contract With America looks better and better.

But the big boys on the Republican side as of today are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. And Peggy Noonan seems quite taken:

Let me close with something that I thought had the sound of the future in it. I was at a Manhattan Institute lunch this week at which Rudy Giuliani spoke. He impressed the audience of 200 or so, which was not surprising as it was his kind of group, urban-oriented thinkers drawn not to ideology but to what works and will help in the world. (I am a longtime supporter.) At one point he was asked about national education policy. Mr. Giuliani said he wanted more national emphasis on choice. He spoke of it as a civil rights issue, and told stories to illustrate the point.

Then--this is the part with the sound of the future in it--he laid out the reasons both parties have failed to push the ball forward. The Democrats fear the teachers unions and the educational establishment. The Republicans are heavily represented in and by suburban and country areas, which tend to have good schools, tend to be happy with them, and are wary of a movement they fear might take something from them. And so the students who need the most help, city kids who would benefit the most from creativity, are held captive to a failed public-education monopoly.

His candor was refreshing. Mr. Giuliani's approach was nonpartisan in the best sense--i.e., not fuzzy but frank. It wasn't Public schools want to be free; it was This is what will help, this is why it isn't happening, this is why we have to make it happen. That didn't sound like the same old same old. It didn't sound like the past.

Peggy Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. She's a devout Catholic from an urban, working-class Irish background--the very people that the Democrats drove off in 1973 and need desperately to woo back.

If she can live with Rudy's checkered personal life, he may have a bigger chance in 2008 that I had first suspected.


* From the movie Conspiracy Theory:

Jerry: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck...

Alice: What about them?

Jerry: Serial killers. Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman...

Alice: John Hinckley. He shot Reagan. He only has two names.

Jerry: Yeah, but he only just shot Reagan. Reagan didn't die. If Reagan had died, I'm pretty sure we probably would all know what John Hinckley's middle name was.
---------------------------------
Jerry: I just thought of another one: James Earl Ray, the guy who got Luther King. Then of course, there's Sirhan Sirhan. I still haven't figured that one out. Maybe it's Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan, I don't know.

A New Direction for America

This week Democratic members of Congress and other elected officials unveil their "New Direction for America," the party's declaration of its reason for being.

It's symbol? Two arrows pointing in opposite directions.

By the way, the phrase "New Direction for America" has been used. Check out this John K. King listing of rare books:

THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION: A NEW DIRECTION FOR AMERICA.
N.p. (The Republican National Committee) n.d. (1972?). Photos, 12.5x11", stapled wraps, page numbered 9-16, stples rusty, pages a bit worn and soiled. SIGNED ON THE COVER BY THEN-VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO T. AGNEW.

Book Id: 94-0378

Price: $95.00

Are you guys even trying?

The Price of War

Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass posts about the problem of suicides at the Guantanamo detention faclity. Her take is to compare the suicide rate at Gitmo against the suicide rate at other American prisons and jails. I wonder though, what is the suicide rate in a prision in the Middle East or Persia? Those who read the book or saw the movie Midnight Express back in the late 1970s must suspect that the rate is much higher than anything that exists at Gitmo.

But I think that we should realize that war is never sanitary and nobody fights in a war without violating the norms of civilized conduct.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club writes about the likely possibility that Jordan tortured Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly to gain information of the whereabouts of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; and that Jordan passed that information onto Coalition forces who used the fruits of torture to carry out a "targeted assasination" of a opponent. Both actions are roundly condemned by the international community.

It does no good begging the question by saying that Zarqawi should have been taken alive. I do believe that coalition forces would have done so had that been a realistic option. As it happened, the only assets that could get on site quickly enough were "fast movers," and they carried 500-lbs bombs, not tasty cream puffs.

This situation poses a kind of grisly "laboratory case" of ethics:

The interesting thing about the Zarqawi case is that it allows one to examine the effect of necessity over law in an actual case. There's no need for a hypothetical like "what if you could save Europe by targeting Hitler?" or "what if you could save the lives of hundreds of children by torturing a terrorist?" In this case the hypothetical is actual. This has the effect of inverting the roles of the principles on trial. Would it be justified not to resort to unlimited measures in order to hunt down a person responsible for killing thousands of individuals? Can one ever allow a person like Zarqawi to live a single day more knowing that hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents will die for our scruples? How many lives is a punctilious observance of the Geneva Convention worth? One, one hundred, one thousand, one million? And if a million is the price, what are our principles except for sale. The only question being the price.

Yet, some would say, if the ends justify the means then where do we stop? Historically the Allies did not stint at incinerating Hamburg and Dresden to beat Hitler; to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki to avoid a bloody invasion that may have killed even more Japanese. Nor did they stick at engaging in unlimited submarine warfare or machine-gunning the survivors of sinking Japanese troopships in the Bismarck Strait. We flatteringly call them the Greatest Generation not only because they bore the burden of the fighting but more importantly because they conveniently carried a burden of moral responsibility that we would never care to face. The Greatest Generation committed atrocities to secure victory. Because atrocities they were. Regrettable but past and so we could forget them. And for sixty years their victory kept us from needing to make such choices and we were glad of it. Until we faced our own war.

...I'm not sure if there are any canonical answers to the question of when it is proper to cast away the law. But I think it's important to make the choices clear to the public. It's dishonest to promise to keep them always safe; to ever "connect the dots" yet simultaneously promise never to match savage men for savagery. It would be better to tell the truth: that if in order to maintain our values we must sometimes stop short of harsh methods, we must also risk and spend lives to preserve those ideals. That if we hold them dear enough then a price must be paid for keeping them. In the very same way that US soldiers must daily risk their lives to obey rules of engagement. And a public unwilling to bear that risk should take the moral burden upon itself and change the rules rather than expect men to transgress them in secret for its guilty peace of mind.

Both Democrats and Republicans hark back to the "Good War" that was World War II. But even with all the ambiguities and uncertainties we suffer in the I don't think that we would want to return to the uncomplicated racism of that time.

New Template

Maybe it's the changing season. Maybe it's that Taleena over at Sun Comprehending Glass is changing her look.

I just got tired of the dark black. This green is more my current mood.

Climate (Lack of) Control

This weekend was a perfect example of Puget Sound weather. Saturday, which had been predicted to be rainy, was sunny and blue. A perfect opportunity to get out and mow the backyard. The temperature was in the mid sixties (Fahrenheit) and humidity was above 70%. Warm and just slightly muggy. I know my Los Angeles siblings will smirk to read mid-60's as "warm," but I have become acclimated to the Sound and I was sweating freely by the time I was finished.

I spent an idle hour on the front deck, reading some technical manuals, waving at the neighbors as they walked by, and listening to the dive-bombing buzz of the hummingbirds as they chased each other from the feeders that Mrs. Islander has hung on the eaves.

Sunday I woke to the sound of soft dripping. I stepped into the backyard with my cup of coffee and sat at the patio table, underneath the umbrella, and watched the heavy mist fall from the air. Too quite to be heard itself, only it's collection in eaves, leaves, and the patio umbrella provided enough mass to drip. I tried to lean underneath the umbrella as much as possible, but the mist was light enough that It didn't soak through my fleece robe.

In the trees around the neighborhood I heard the raucous sounds of the songbird's dawn congress. I sipped my cooling coffee and noted how perfectly conifer needles are adapted to this climate. I was struck again that I lived just across Admiralty Inlet from North America's temperate rainforest.

I had plans for the weekend that expected rain on Saturday. When Saturday was fair, my plans for Sunday changed to require that it, too, to be fair. Nope. My plans had no control over the weather.

Quiet. Cool. Wet.

I felt an absurd sense of peace.

Books about the Love of Words

People who love words must seem strange to people who are indifferent to words. I am fascinated by word origins. (I sometimes dream that I have traveled back in time and learned to speak Proto-Indo-European. ) This is the source of bemusement to my long-suffering wife.

I am reminded of Fred Pohl's comment, "Number theory is like religion. It's either of no interest or of transcendent interest."

David Crystal pens this installment of the Wall Street Journal's opinion page's "Five Best Books" series with the Watch Your Language, giving his list for the top five books of the history and use of English.

Four more rare, out-of-print books for me to track down. Happily, I have read and reread the fifth book of his list: Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson. Subtitled, "English and How it Got That Way," this book should be on the reading list of every high school student.

Anyone who enjoys Mother Tongue will enjoy Mr. Bryson's follow-up volume, Made in America, a wonderful look at American English which is becoming a world language.

If I can suggest a sixth book to Mr. Crystal list, it would be The Story of English, by Robert MacCrumb, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.

It is from The Story of English that I first encountered this Bernard Leving quote (which is one huge sentence):

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise - why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I were dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness' sake! what the dickens! but me no buts - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

You're Strange. But in a Good Way

Over at the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett reviews Red! Blue!, D. Quinn Mill's novel about a civil war between Democrats and Republicans. He concludes by pointing out how politically aware people are completely clueless about the rest of the population's indifference to politics:

BUT WHERE MILLS STUMBLES is in his assumptions about American political passions. If you're reading this story, you're strange; strange in a good way, but strange nonetheless. You're by definition a high-end consumer of news. Few Americans have ever heard of, let alone often read, political magazines or websites.

Most Americans maintain an attitude towards politics that is best described as benign indifference. Even when the Bush-Gore battle hung in the balance, concerned partisans did not take to the streets in significant numbers. When the Supreme Court put an end to that struggle, there were some delirious Republicans and some despondent Democrats. But most of America shrugged its shoulders and began looking forward to the second season of Survivor.

There's a good explanation for this. On the global political menu of ice cream flavors, if we called George W. Bush vanilla and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad New York Super Fudge Chunk (with extra nuts), our elections give Americans a choice between vanilla and French vanilla. Elections matter and ideas have consequences. But the American political system has already worked out the biggest questions--democracy, free market capitalism, individual rights, suffrage, etc. Even in the most polarized of times, the differences between the parties aren't so stark as to warrant a manning of the barricades. That's a very good thing.

UPDATE: Re-reading this reminded me of a wonderful line by a British comedian whose name escapes me. His quip was explaining the U.S. political system to fellow Brits:

Like Britain, the United States has two legislative houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is like our House of Commons, and the Senate is like our House of Lords.

Again, like Britain, the United States has two major political parties, the Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans are like our Conservative Party, while the Democrats are like our Conservative party.

The United States is, by comparison to the rest of the world, a very conservative place.
A situation that drives many people I know and love to drink.

Losing the Evangelical Vote: The Right

I've pointed out in earlier posts how Democrats lost the Evangelical vote and are still losing it today, both locally in Washington State and nationally.

In the Wall Street Journal's editorial content, Naomi Schaefer Riley points out how some on the right can be as tone-deaf as those on the left.

Tomorrow morning, Sen. John McCain delivers the commencement address at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Conventional wisdom has it that Mr. McCain is trying to win support from the religious wing of the GOP for a presidential run. The decision to appear at a university founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell has not gone over well with Mr. McCain's fans on the left. "You're killin' me here," Jon Stewart told the senator when he appeared on the comedian's "Daily Show." "I feel like it's a condoning of Falwell's kind of crazymaking."

Mr. McCain's advisers probably saw this reaction coming but felt it was worth the hassle if it meant getting evangelicals on the "Straight Talk Express." What they didn't consider, but should have, is the evangelicals who cringe when they hear Mr. Falwell's name. It is exhausting to recount the ways in which Mr. Falwell offends many devout Christians, but Mr. McCain should get used to hearing them....

So why doesn't Mr. McCain just go to Wheaton? Or Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, whose 7,000 members more closely mirror mainstream evangelicals? Or Saddleback, the Southern California church led by Rick Warren, whose "The Purpose Driven Life" has sold more than 20 million copies? Or how about a meeting of World Vision, a Christian relief organization operating in 99 countries?

John C. Green, a pollster and senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, tells me that "there are lots of other places that Sen. McCain could go where there wouldn't be the downside" associated with Mr. Falwell. Mr. McCain could still appeal to "the religious right" by talking to what Mr. Green calls the "centrist" evangelicals.

I guess that politicians, Left, Right, and Center don't see Evangelicals as people whose primary focus is (for better or worse) otherworldly. The see demographic figures and power blocks. I'm sure that it is much easier to pick up a phone and talk to a Fallwell or a Robertson, than to deal with the untidy mass of individuals represented by the broad swath of Evangelical Churches in America.

I'll bet though, that Senator McCain deosn't lecture the graduates about his favorite New Testament book of Job.

Vegas, Baby!

I'm currently sitting in a room of the Paris hotel on the strip in Las Vegas. You cannot imagine the cognative dissonance that this situation ring in my head. I am a much more down-home, guy-next-door kind of person and being here seems to require that you channel your inner Rat Pack character.

It's OK, though. I'm here attending the 53rd annual convention of my professional society.

First impressions: The Paris hotel is gaudy, overdone Chateau de Versailles with lots of people in shorts and halter tops wandering around with drinks.

It is kind of weird walking down the sidewalk, crossing the street and being surrounded by people with cocktails.

But, enough for now. Tomorrow is a big day. First session "Using Dita to Develop XML Documents!"

The fun never ends!

Faith as a Component of Political Views, or I am Not Montel

Here's why I often comment on the missteps of political machines and people when those missteps are within the field of the Christian faith: I am a Christian.

By this statement I mean more than I was born in a country that was predominantly Christian (though it was), to parents who were practicing Christians (though they were), or that I attend the church of my choice on a regular basis (though I do.)

What I mean is that I take my religion straight---no chaser. I have experienced things that do not make sense in a materialist worldview. (My atheist friends would say that that statement shows a lack of imagination.) I have examined both the materialist and supernaturalist worldviews and find myself on the supernaturalist side.

This is not to say that I have only supernaturalist friends. Many are far from my beliefs. Many friends are supernaturalists with views that I consider ill-formed to heretical.

The only thing I require is that if you are going to honk on about "faith issues," especially if you are trying to influence my political behavior, is that you have some idea of what you are talking about:

JOHN KERRY AND JESUS:

Continuing his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, John F. Kerry addressed (by telephone) a conference convened by that racist hustler and prevaricator Al Sharpton who won, if I'm not mistaken, exactly one delegate at the party convention in 2004. According to The New York Times yesterday, in what appeared to be rather inchoate remarks, Kerry used Iraq as a trope but offered a ten-point plan for the nation from soup to nuts ... well, from getting Osama bin Laden to legislating lobby reform. The Times alluded to Kerry's well-known verbosity. So it wasn't surprising that he also went off and said, "Not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicare." I'd actually go Kerry one further: I doubt that Jesus ever mentioned Medicare at all. Still, it's probably significant that some presidential aspirants--Kerry, for one--want to demonstrate that there are among them some real live Democrats for God. Or, as the Times said about him, he is "A Roman Catholic, who has struggled at times to talk about his own faith ... Mr. Kerry also told the group that he believed 'deeply in my faith'." Now, there are many Catholics including high ecclesiastics who doubt this. But who am I to have a point of view on what is essentially an intramural fight? In any case, as it turns out, Kerry is not only a Roman Catholic but also an ecumenicist. Once again I rely on the Times: Kerry asserted that "the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles had influenced a social conscience that he exercised in politics." My God, what bullshit politicians feel obliged to utter! Or maybe the bullshit is already second nature, or even first. But since Kerry raised it, let me ask: What hadith of the Prophet influenced him the most, and why? And here I have a personal interest: Which of the injunctions of Leviticus and who among the Prophets have the most meaning for him? Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn't ask such personal questions of a politician. In the spirit of Jesus, Kerry will certainly forgive me for doing so.

--Martin Peretz

I am reminded of Richard Belzer's character Detective John Munch in Homicide: Life on the Street:

You're saving your really good lies for some smarter cop, is that it? I'm just a donut in the on-deck circle. Wait until the real guy gets here. Wait until that big guy comes back. I'm probably just his secretary. I'm just Montel Williams. You want to talk to Larry King.

...If you're going to lie to me, you lie to me with respect. What is it? Is it my shoes? Is it my haircut? Got a problem with my haircut? Don't you ever lie to me like I'm Montel Williams. I am not Montel Williams. I am not Montel Williams.

That's the message, Democrats: I am not Montel Williams.

Democrat Angst

One of the things that I encounter again and again is people's surprise that I'm a fairly nice guy. I mean this in the context of my political propensity to conservatism and my party affiliation to the Republicans.

Why would a nice guy like me associate with those horrible, mean, puppy-kicking Republicans? How can a person who can count to 20 without taking off his shoes fall for all their lies?

Attention, Democrats. The reason that I am not a Democrat is because you have drawn lines that leave me no possibility of considering your party. Caitlin Flanagan has been able to hold out, but it seems as if the author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife encountered all the casual contempt and even open hostility that make the Democrat Party inhospitable to me.

...there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn't in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren't the Hollywood elite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it's not so much my party's platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush's brutality to the poor continues much longer. It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican. The image of the Democratic Party that used to come to mind was of a workingman and his wife sitting at the kitchen table worrying about how they were going to pay the bills and voting for Adlai Stevenson because he was going to help them squeak by every month and maybe even afford to send their kids to college.

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues--paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It's the contempt, stupid.

I admire Ms Flanagan tenacity, and I'm sure she has enough advice so that she won't need mine; but if the Democrats can't stick a sock in the hate speech of their standard-bearers, they are going to loose many, many more wonderful people like Ms Flanagan--if not to the Republicans, then to a third-party candidate or political cynicism and apathy.

Robot Theocons

I've been watching the Battlestar Galactica first-season DVD set (thanks to Taleena and Todd). I am enjoying it hugely. I've heard some nationally published television critics call it "the best television on television," and I agree.

One of the elements of the show that is so striking is fact that they are addressing several big issues. But because they are operating in an almost cartoon-like setting (and it is cartoon-like in the best sense), they can take up themes and motifs that would be very difficult in a more mundane setting. (Of course doing those themes successfully in a mundane setting would be high art. Battlestar Galactica settles for being great television.)

The theme that I love most, that fills me with glee, is the handling of religion. The only other show that dealt with religion in such an engaging way was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And it turns out that Battlestar Galactica's creator, Ronald D. Moore, was a staff writer for Deep Space Nine.

Last night as Mrs. Islander and I sat watching a funeral scene in the episode "Act of Contrition," she turned to me and said, "They're Christians." I started to disagree and gas on a bit about how they weren't really, they were some kind of fusion of New Age mysticism, ancestor worship, and Mormon backstory, but then I stopped. She was right. No matter what came out of their mouths, their actions, the roots of their behaviors are "Christian."

This is not surprising. Mr. Moore is a product of his culture. And this is not a bad thing. You cannot understand either Shakespere or Oscar Wilde without being aware of the Christian presuppositions of their work. A good writer can provide keen and close observations on their own culture.

What really tickles me is that while the "Colonials" struggle to make sense of their moribund religious beliefs using their modern sensibilities (Gaius Baltar is merely the most outspoken of the skeptics), the Cylons are ablaze with evangelical fervor. The drop-dead gorgeous Number Six delivers street-corner preacher lines ("God loves you Gaius, and he has a plan for your life,") even as she seduces Gaius to allow her kind to commit genocide. The robots have blasted through modernism to arrive at a post-modern religious sensibility.

I guess I would differ from some of my co-religionists in my viewpoint, but one of the things that make Battlestar Galactica so compelling is that they are portraying religious beliefs and religious believers and taking them seriously.

Robot theocons. What a concept!

Can We Blame Lee Harvey Oswald?

The Constant Reader will remember my earlier remarks on the remarkable journey the Democratic Party has taken in my lifetime.

The goo-goo campaign of George McGovern could only have taken place in the wake of the Democratic Party Convention riots of 1968. The riots of 1968 could only have taken place in the wake of the convention seating conflict of 1964.

Now, James Piereson, in Commentary Magazine, focuses on the JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

In Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up, Mr. Pierson reminds us of how vital and central the Democratic Party, and Liberalism in general, were to the American scene. And motes how the political left and right have swapped places.

Liberalism entered the 1960'’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, "“the 60's."” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950'’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.

No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation'’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960'’s--—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself--—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy'’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders--—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them--—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

Piereson reminds us that the nation was ready to see American intolerance as the root cause of Kennedy's death. When the assasin was shown to be a Communist, indeed a Castro supporter, the cognative dissonance was too great for many liberal-thinking people. So they created the Queen Mother of all conspiracy theories.

John F. Kennedy's very coolness (and believe me kids, he was the essence of cool) became the inkblot upon which every kook faction of the Democratic Party, not to mention the Socialists, Communists, and every other party of the left could project their own gestalt.

In the end, the mantle of Paranoid Party passed from the John Birchers and their insistence that flouridation was a Ruskie plot to poison our precious bodily fluids, to the Democratic Underground types that see plots and conspiracies everywhere.

Illuminati, thy name is Haliburton.

The Inevitable "Da Vinci Code" Posting

Our Pastor has set aside the next six weeks for a series of teachings [spurred by | focused on | countering | you-name-it] the upcoming movie release of The Da Vinci Code.

This means six weeks of apologetics (evidences for faith) rather than the church's usual focus on evangelism (declaring the good news). Of course there is a fuzzy boundry between these two categories. It's always good news to hear how your belief are supported by the historic record; and you can't study the historic record without declaring the good news that the evidence is about. And I, for one, am always delighted by a good apologia.

But I must admit that I have yet to read The Da Vinci Code. Years ago I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the book from which Dan Brown cribbed much of Code), and had a tough time keeping a straight face.

Years later I read a great brainy thriller that seemed to anticipate much of the current Code madness: Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Let me crib from Gene Halliford:

In Foucault's Pendulum, Jacopo Belbo says: "There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools morons, and lunatics." These classifications, he suggests, can be used to understand how any given individual makes sense of the world.

Cretins are those individuals who seem to go through life without any clear understanding of the world or their place in it. They are---as the current expression goes---clueless. Cretins crush beer cans with their foreheads and go up the down escalator, never realizing the inherent inappropriateness or impossibility of these actions.

Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject... Fools don't claim that that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs.

Morons generally say and do the right thing. The problem with morons is not with what they do but how they think. "Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark...Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason." One must be very careful when dealing with morons because they often sound both reasonable and logical. Deciding how and why their reasoning is flawed often takes close analysis.

Lunatics. While morons proceed cautiously toward false conclusions, lunatics are not concerned with logical paradox or common sense. Their reasoning proceeds by quantum leaps of faith and mystical inspiration. Random chance is replaced with the belief that all occurrences are interrelated and inherently meaningful. For the lunatic, any event or experience can be used to support their internal belief system. And, says Belbo, "sooner or later [the lunatic] brings up the Templars."

And so we come to The Da Vinci Code, a modern thriller that tells you that the entrire Roman Catholic Church is a giant front operation for...wait for it...supressing the Templars!

Let me end with a link to Amy Welborn's great site, "Jesus Decoded"

The Da Vinci Code is a mess, a riot of laughable errors and serious misstatements. Almost every page has at least one of each. It would be easy to get swamped up in the small stuff, to spend hours debating the relationship of Marian imagery to Isis or who’s who in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks The good news is, however, that’s not necessary. When discussing the factuality of The Da Vinci Code, all you really need to do is stick to a few fundamental points...

I sometimes wonder why people are so fascinated with the Jesus of The Da Vinci Code and why they so resolutely ignore the Jesus we meet in the Gospels and through the Church, why people don’t want to take that Jesus seriously. Why they just want to brush him off and focus on esoteric, abstract windy speeches on inner light offered by a stick figure.

But then I go back to the Gospels, and I read…Sell everything you have and give the money to the poor…love your enemies….Feed the hungry…clothe the naked…visit the imprisoned…Blessed are the poor…those who mourn…the peacemakers…what you do to the least of these, you do unto me…the last shall be first…

Of course. No surprise. No wonder we don’t want him to be the real Jesus. No surprise at all.

Bush vs. the Erotic Thriller

Are these people even trying? Is there any problem or trend in America (or the world!) today that cannot be traced back to Bush and his dark master, Rove?

Even dirty movies fall before their power:

Paul Verhoeven, director of the first "Basic Instinct" (which scored $353 million world-wide) as well as the widely ridiculed "Showgirls" (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre's demise to the current American political climate.

"Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States," said the Dutch native. "Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends."

Scribe Nicholas Meyer, who was an uncredited writer on 1987's seminal sex-fuelled cautionary tale "Fatal Attraction," agrees, noting that the genre's downfall coincides with the ascent of the conservative political movement.

"We're in a big puritanical mode," he said. "Now, it's like the McCarthy era, except it's not 'Are you a communist?' but 'Have you ever put sex in a movie?'"

It's so annoying when you are watching a good erotic thriller and just when the bisexual serial murderess is pulling the ice pick from under the pillow--the jackbooted minions of Jerry Fallwell kick down the door and frog-march you away to re-education Vacation Bible School.

Oh, that hasn't happened?

You mean that the hyper-rich people are frustrated because they are unable to make even more money on sleazy trash, yet are unable to figure out why?

Well, no.

[Nicholas Meyer] admits that the appetite for the genre has taken a hit, and he blames the international market.

"Korea used to be a big erotic thriller market (in the '80s and '90s). Japan, too. You used to be able to cobble deals together based on those markets, but it has become more difficult," said King, who also produced "9 1/2 Weeks" alongside Damon. "There used to be a way to finance erotic thrillers if you had the right cast based on the foreign market. The foreign market doesn't support it in the way that it used to. They are now embracing more mainstream fare."

Part of the problem, King said, is that agents are loath to put their actors and actresses in titillating fare despite the fact that Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Richard Gere and Sharon Stone rocketed to fame thanks to memorable R-rated performances.

But in recent years, some high-profile actors have tackled the genre with mixed results. Meg Ryan, who made her career cultivating a girl-next-door persona, teamed with Oscar-nominated director Jane Campion in 2003 for the titillating "In the Cut." Ryan's performance was widely panned, and the Screen Gems film was a box office dud, earning less than $19 million world-wide.

So everything they said before? About puritanical Americans? Never mind.

But there is something creepy and disgusting on tap in the erotic thriller calendar:

Nevertheless, the studios have only a handful of erotic thrillers in development. They include the Jim Carrey starrer "The Number 23" at New Line Cinema, the Jennifer Garner starrer "Sabbatical" at Disney's Touchstone Pictures and the "Basic Instinct"/Hitchcock homage "Need," which revolves around a psychiatrist, a patient and an extramarital affair.

An erotic thriller starring Jim Carrey. Uuuhghghghghhh....{shudder}....

Bizzaro World

Tivo has really changed my television viewing habits.

I don’t idly flip through channels to see what’s on. What I do is check out my “Tivo Suggestions” folder. Because my “To Do” list has several of the news magazines in it, Tivo catches other public-interest programming. After several weeks of telling Tivo I really didn’t want news programming in Cantonese, Korean, or Cambodian, the selections have settled down to Charlie Rose, Face the Nation, Ben Wattenberg's Think Tank, and a few others.

Last night I was flipping through the Tivo suggestions folder and saw that Tivo had captured The Tavis Smiley Show, and that Tavis’s guest was former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. I checked the listing and saw that Senator Hart was going to be promoting his book, God and Caesar in America. Gary Hart was a real contender for the Democratic presidential nomination to run against Ronald Reagan's pick, George H. W. Bush. Hart was a very smart guy, who said the kinds of interesting things that someone who is not up for office can and will say. I pushed “Play.”

Have you ever felt as if you have woken up in some alternate, bizzaro, reality? That was my reaction to this program. There was Gary Hart, Senator “Monkey Business” himself, telling me why what I believed wasn't authentic Christianity.

Now, Senator Hart did attend Bethany Nazarene College, then went to Yale Divinity. And I think that we need to make large distinctions between the message and the messenger. And yet...

In the interview Senator Hart displayed a real lack of seriousness about issues addressed by Christianity, and I don't mean necessarily political issues.

Hart: ...as I indicate in the essay, I was heavily motivated, and still am, by the teachings of Jesus.

Almost all of which are contrary to the current religious right, which is very judgmental, very divisive. Jesus was non-judgmental, and very inclusive. And in the famous, famous, I guess that's the wrong word. The well-known Sermon on the Mount, those he blessed were the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, those who hungered and thirst after righteousness. The merciful.

I guess that this Oprah-ized gospel plays well with people who are, at best, casual readers of the Bible. But Holy Hanna!

First let's go to the tape: Matthew 5: 29-30, part of that "famous" "Sermon on the Mount"

If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.

If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell.

Yeow! Hellfire! But maybe Jesus is ill represented by a single quote. Let's look a little later in Matthew, chapter 25, where Jesus addresses the concept of "judgement."

"But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left.

"Then the King will say to those on His right, 'Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world...

...Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Now, we may debate the terms of this judgement, but I think that in this passage Jesus shows that He is indeed, judgemental.

Next Senator Hart takes on the issue of popular revivalism in American history:

Tavis: I wonder how that you think it is - how do I wanna phrase this? That we got off track? How did we get off track? That is to say, how did we end up, do we now live in a nation where the people, to your point, at least, the way you see it, the people who are talking to us every day about Jesus. So many of these televangelists on the right are not true to what Jesus taught with regard to how we ought to live our lives?

Hart: Well, it's the central question of our time, at least politically, I think. First of all, I think you have to go back to the sixties. The infamous age of sex, drugs and rock and roll. And a lot of people concluded then that America was losing its soul. And as you know, starting with Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening in the 1600s, America goes through cycles of reform and renewal and evangelical reformation and revival.

And this is one of those. What distinguishes this one from the Billy Graham and Billy Sunday and Jonathan Edwards revivals is it's very political. And I think it became political over issues like abortion. And that's what triggered people on the religious right to think the country really was on the path to Hell, and they had to do something about it. And they did it through the Republican Party.

Senator Hart seems to miss the great religious revival of the early 1800s that led great numbers of Christians to get very political--in the Abolitionist movement. That particular revival led to the Civil War and many Americans joining the brand-new Republican Party.

Hart also dodged the political questions of faith. Though he was able to trace the swing of many Christians from neutral/Democratic to the Republicans to 1972's Roe v. Wade decision, he seemed unable to make that connection to the $64,000 question of today's Democratic Party: "Why did it lose the Evangelical and mainstream Catholic vote?" He attributed that loss of support to the mean old Republicans hijacking the terms "faith" and "values," then emptying them of meaning.

When questioned about the popularity of the Republican Party’s message, Hart posits that the Republican Party has been captured by three distinct groups. The Christian Right has taken over domestic social policy, neo-conservatives have taken over foreign policy, and libertarians have taken over tax policy. All three groups are “out of the mainstream.” How does that answer the question of the dominance of Republicans in the recent election cycles was unanswered.

(In my view, all three of those groups feel that they are receiving short shrift from the Bush administration, not to mention discontent by secular groups such as the deficit hawks.)

In all, Senator Hart displays the same deafness to what is happening in current culture as many of the rest of his Democratic comrades, and that's too bad. Hart has the background, the education, and the pulpit, if you will, to engage the Evangelical Right in a real dialog about the role of God in American public life and Ceasar in the American church. I'm going to read his book.

But I'm not expecting much.

Is What's Bad, Good?

Conservatives such as myself complained for years about a dysfunctional welfare system that encouraged poor women to have children to increase their government stipend. But could what once was seen as a bug, be a feature?

Michael O'Hare comments on the long-term depopulation of Europe due to Europeans declining to have children:

...fertility rates in Europe are at levels never observed in countries not at war or the grip of psychotic dictatorships. Even in France, which has had aggressive pro-natalist policies in place since the thirties, the population pyramid has very broad shoulders and fashionably slim legs...

The phenomenon is creepy, but what's like a science fiction movie about zombies is the pervasive lack of concern. Good studies are commissioned and filed away, governments have started some tentative child-subsidy tax programs, especially generous in France, but there's no conversation about it, nothing in the newspapers, an election in a week in Italy and I can't find a word about this impending catastrophe from a candidate in the newspapers or on TV. The current administration seems to have spent its entire term in office keeping the prime minister out of jail, not attending to this (or anything else, as far as I can tell).

What could possibly be more important to Italy than the looming extinction of Italians? And even if the society had decided it's time to roll up the enterprise and pass the peninsula to someone else, or just turn out the lights and close the door, what do the twenties and thirties of today expect to have for dinner when they're old, having paid taxes to support their (more numerous) parents most of their working lives? Why is everyone acting as if this isn't happening??!!

As an italophile on many dimensions, sitting in a comfortable train [this is shorthand for a competent system of public services that provide a high quality of life] between Rome and Milan where life is very good in so many ways, in the land of Giotto, da Vinci, Fermi [supply your own pages of really smart Italians who think outside the box], I find myself suppressing a tendency to grab people at random by the collar and yell at them, "forse queste cose non mi riguardono, ma siete pazzi, voi? ciecchi?" (si, amici miei, questo è per voi) [maybe this is none of my business, but are you people nuts? blind?]

Megan McArdle speculates that the rise in incomes generally, and of women specifically may have raised the opportunity cost of raising a child too high. Yet the United States has a booming economy and we have a birthrate above the replacement level:

...we still need to come up with an explanation of why America, which is still getting richer and putting women into the workforce, isn't below replacement rate. But much of our fertility comes from poor women and immigrants, who have a much lower opportunity cost for childrearing than overeducated professionals like me. Our welfare policy may be inadvertently pro-natalist--since, unlike Europe, the only way for a healthy woman to collect benefit is to have children.

There are two objections that I would make to Ms McArdle's reasoning. First, are there enough children of poor or single parents that can rise high enough in economic class to replace the "missing" children of wealthy non-parents? If not, then the children born to a lower economic strata may be unable to provide the economic base from which future benefits should be paid. (A complaint against the old welfare system was that it made its clients net consumers, not net creators of wealth.)

My second objection is that the question of natalism in the United States is not completely reducible to economics. The US has an Evangelical religious culture largely not found in Europe. That culture is very pro-natal, pro-child. For all the demonization of anti-abortion protesters by the political Left, these people are the expression os a demographic component that my be providing the managers, craftsmen, and artisans that pay for all our Social Security benefits!

UPDATE: Rich Lowrey over in NRO, says this about immigrants that lack a high-school diploma:

The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma — whether legal or illegal — consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime. An immigrant with only a high-school diploma is a net cost of $31,000. Eighty percent of illegal immigrants have no more than a high-school degree, and 60 percent have less than a high-school degree.

This may be comparable to native-born children without a high-school diploma. In that case the economic case for the pro-natal consequences of our welfare policy is even weaker than I thought.

Early Spring

So I had to get out of the office. It was just so quite and warm, I thought that I would fall asleep and pitch forward onto the keyboard.

So, even though I Ain't Lileks, I hied my tender self down the block to Zeitgeist Coffee and am mooching free WiFi. They are playing some kind of very weird alt-techno music and there is the sound of grinders and barristas pounding espresso baskets. Very different from the office, provocative. Zeitgeist is the very model for Cafe Nervosa on the old TV show Frasier. Lots of exposed brick and attitude. Very Seattle.

I'm gonna hang here until my vanpool meets at 5 pm.

It's Anxiety About Us

I just posted a response to Rob Harrison on myWhidbey.com. His posting was about the immigration debate that we are currently having in our country. He sets up a straw-man argument by short-quoting Emma Lazurus's sonnet The New Collosus.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I posted the entire sonnet:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Anyway, go read my response there, if you wish. But in the synchronicity of things, the very next page I looked at was Peggy Noonan's column, Patriots, Then and Now.

What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally.

Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows...And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Which is exactly my point. When immigrants come to America today, are they imparted spirit?

The latest cat-calls from some on both sides of the aisle are that their opponents aren't patriotic. This is more than just unfortunate--this erodes the framework upon which we carry out or national conversation.

I don't pretend that my country's actions have always been without spot or blemish, but I love my country with full-throated love, and I have no ambivalence.

Jane Galt on Healthcare

I'm been a big fan of Megan McArdle since her Live from the World Trade Center days. She has become my model for not jumping into a discussion without questioning the assumptions. Here are four of her recent blog entries on healthcare, culminating with her suggestion for addressing the problem. I have included excerpts, but this is something that I think deserves a lunchtime read-through of the original entries.

I am going to advocate her approach to my congresscritters.

What's happening on health care?

A few weeks back, I noted that national health care seemed to be the only major policy programme that the left could basically agree upon. Now, I hear the stirrings of a push for national health care rippling through the liberal blogosphere like a rising storm wind.

If this movement actually takes off, I expect that we'll see a great deal of vehement argument between conservatives screaming that the liberals are going to screw up our health care system, and liberals arguing that conservative people are hardhearted bastards who want the poor to die. So before that happens, I thought I'd set down some quasi-reasonable thoughts about what we want from our health care system, what a single-payer US system would probably look like, and what the pro's and con's of such a system would be.

The first point to make is that our health care system is already screwed up. The practice of having your employer pay for your health insurance is lunatic. We should not be surprised at what we get when the person who pays for your health insurance is not the person who consumes it....

Health Care, Part II

Let's think about where the money actually goes:

• 30% of all healthcare expenditures occur in the last six months of life
• 31% of expenditures are on hospital care
• 9% of spending is on nursing homes
• 22% of spending is on physician and clinical services
• 10% of spending is on prescription drugs
• 10% of spending is on dental/other professional care
• 10% of spending is on medical equipment, supplies, and construction
• 7% of spending is on administrative expenses

So how likely are either Health Savings Accounts, which encourage consumers to shop around because they're spending their own money, or single payer, to reduce any of these categories significantly?

In theory, either HSAs or single payer could cut down on many of these expenses. In practice, colour me unconvinced...

Health Care, Part III

It is possible, even likely, that a government-run health care system would be able to batter cost savings out of suppliers of medical equipment, supplies, and pharmaceuticals. But that doesn't strike me as a good thing. The high returns on medical equipment and drugs are what encourage people to invent more such. Get rid of the return, and you get rid of the innovation. Generating cost savings on new technology in order to cover today's uninsured simply privileges one small group of unfortunates over the very much larger group of people, living now or in the future, who have diseases which we can't currently cure. The lucrative American market is currently the only incentive left for medical innovation; I am very much against destroying it.

Single payer advocates retort that pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money on marketing, which is true, but irrelevant--forcing pharmaceutical companies to price at cost-plus will kill the research along with the marketing. Actually, if I were running a pharma company, and something torched my profits, I'd kill the highly speculative research before the lucrative marketing campaigns. If we want to stop pharmaceutical companies from advertising, or selling directly to doctors, surely outlawing those things is a much more effective way to manage it than slashing their profit margins and hoping that they cut only the things you want them to.

Others argue that the government can take over the research. Perhaps the government is necessary to fund basic research; I haven't studied the question. But looking at the defense industry, where the government is the sole purchaser and major funder of new technology, it's very, very hard to believe that applying a similar model to health care would result in greater value for money. Rather, it seems very likely to me that politically popular diseases would get an even more disproportionate share of funds than they do now. Pharmaceutical companies have to pay attention to things like the size of the market, and the strength of demand. Politicians pay attention to how loud the lobby is, which is why breast cancer and AIDS get research funding all out of proportion to the number of people they kill...

Health Care, Part IV

All that's very nice . . . but how do we bell the cat?

Here is my suggestion. It is simple and elegant enough to be explained in a single sentence, yet powerful enough to meet all the criteria above:

Have the government pay for all health care expenditures above 15% of adjusted gross income, and cover 100% of health care expenditures by people living under 200% of the poverty line.

This preserves the market in most health care services--happy [Health Savings Account] advocates! It is progressive, and provides universal coverage--happy single-payer advocates! It directs coverage to those who really need it--the very sick--without a middle class subsidy--happy Jane! And it preserves market prices for almost everything from hospital beds to surgical procedures, since a significant fraction of the market will be paying their own way. That keeps the government from having to set prices, which as Soviet Russia showed us, is generally a bad idea. Most importantly (from my perspective) it preserves the market for innovations in drugs and medical equipment.

It is certainly not perfect. For one thing, I make no promises that it will control costs; I only allege that it will improve quality.

But you know what? We're rich. We're really, really rich. We're the richest country in the entire history of the world.

We're so rich that we have stores full of nothing but beautifully sculpted plumbing. What do we want to spend our money on that's better than health care?

The Next (10) Big Things

One of the things I don’t do on this blog is blog about work.

A few days ago though, I had an experience that took my breath away. I stood in an warm, overcrowded conference room, leaning around the people standing in front of me to see the slides and hear the speaker. What I heard were people laying the groundwork for the next five, ten, or one hundred revolutions in the biological sciences. Yesterday I wasn’t just glad to have a job, I was proud to be associated with my company, Teranode.

The speaker was John Wilbanks, Executive Director of the Science Commons. He had come to our company, Teranode Corporation, to brief us on what was happening in the NeuroCommons project. I almost hesitate to try to recap what he said, because I know that I cannot recapture the jaw-dropping, "Eureka!" sensation I felt.

Creative Commons began as an attempt to create “open source” copyright law. The Creative Commons website allows users to point and click to create a usage license that they can then associate with their creative work. Creators can decide how many and what kind of rights to grant users of their creations.

But what begins as a simple, easily-used tool can create unintended results. The obvious parallel to draw is with TCP/IP and HTTP, the simple, unpatented tools that created the current global network. With the Creative Commons licenses, creative people can allow other creative people to draw from their work, incorporating existing work into new works. If that usage is tracked (as at sites such as ccMixter), it becomes easy to see whose creative work is the most used, the most influential, and the most "important" to subsequent works.

What is interesting and cool in the music community becomes earth-shaking in the science community. Kids, If you thought that the RIAA was jealous of easy access to the product of artists, you haven't seen what science and medical journals do to protect the data contained in their published articles. ScienceCommons is a project to allow scientists and univestities to allow freeer access to their work, so that their work can inform and influence other scientists and labs working in related areas. NeruoCommons is the proving ground for the technologies of the ScienceCommons

Right now academics live by the rule, "publish or perish." Scientists are measured by how many peer-reviewed articles they can get published and how often those articles are cited by other published papers. But cites are a second-order measure of importance. Measuring the actual use the of information from a discovery to enable a further discovery would be a direct measure of the first discovery's importance. The ScienceCommons project makes this measurement possible.

One of the mantra repeated by Mr. Wilbanks was, "We aren't making new discoveries; we are laying "cable" for a new network."

If the NeuroCommons network has a fraction of the impact that the Internet has had for the economic community, watch out.

Monster from the Superego

Some movies are so iconic that rumors of their sequels are evergreen. There are always people talking about a remake or sequel to Casablanca, and there actually was a sequel (of sorts) to Gone With the Wind. So when New Line Studios announced back in 2000 it had bought the rights to Forbidden Planet, fans of Robbie the Robot pricked up their ears.

Well, it's been six years and no remake.

During this morning's commute, the topic of a Forbidden Planet remake or sequel came up. We quickly realized that you couldn't use the "monster from the id." That's been done.

If I wrote a sequel to Forbidden Planet it would have a "monster from the superego." It would have the voice of John Lithgow and it would be constantly nagging the United Planets officers about how they were falling short in thier duties and what would all the other spacemen think?

...And Peter Jackson sleeps easily.

My Take on John Stewart's Oscar Hosting (*YAWN*)

It really wasn't John Stewart's fault that the entire Oscar presentation show sucked doorknobs; but he was the guy standing out front, so he takes the heat.

Part of the problem is bloat. The Academy Awards show is now competing with new award shows the spring up, mushroomlike, on basic cable and the weblets every week. So every year it tries to distinguish itself by becoming more and more long-winded, more and more pretentious and self-congratulatory.

Pretty soon all this self-importance and political "awareness" and "courage" will fuse and they Academy will declare itself the third branch of the US legislature. Or, perhaps some new UN Council on Eating Your (Political) Vegetables.

Once again, it's not fair to John Stewart, but look back at the times Johnny Carson hosted the awards. Carson's shtick as the bemused midwesterner surrounded by Hollywood glamour worked. Perhaps because it wasn't based on condescension to mid-America and uber-hippness.

Or, for a crushing comparison, go back to Bob Hope's hosting. Bob, a show business insider from the days of vaudeville, still adopted the stance of an outsider, bemoaning his lack of an Oscar as he skewered those who received them.

Oh, well. Stewart won't be asked back. Maybe next year it will be Kanye West and Snoop Dogg co-emceeing. Bet that would make 'em tune in...

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan agrees with me!

But viewership of the Oscars continues to decline, even in the great movie-loving nation. Why? Here's one practical reason.

What happened to the Oscars is what happened to the Olympics. They became common. They made themselves common. When the Olympics were held every four years, they were a real event. It was something to look forward to and be surprised by: The Olympics are on this year. Four years was enough time for a whole new cast of athletes, what felt like a whole new generation, to come up. Enough time for history to have passed, to have yielded up new geopolitical realities, new reasons to applaud and hope for this nation or that one.

Everyone watched. It was a success. So they decided to get even more success by making the Olympics every two years. It's not an event now, it's an expected thing, part of the usual tapestry. It's more common, less special. Viewership is down.

In the same way, the Oscars used to be the big awards show. Then another came by, and another: Golden Globes, People's Choice, Independent Spirit, Foreign Press.

Movie stars put on their gowns and tuxes all the time now. It must be embarrassing--I mean this seriously--to spend half your year accepting awards on TV, and for what is already highly compensated work.

It's like what happened a few years ago, when network programmers found that "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was an overnight sensation. So they put it on four nights a week. And it stopped being a sensation.

Hollywood should stop diminishing its own mystique. It should discourage the proliferation of awards shows. They're getting embarrassing for everybody.