Happy Shamrock Day

Mr. Right didn't take my bait. He didn't start a campaign against the secularization of St. Patrick's Day. I probably told him about it too late in his creative process. Instead, he got some opinions about the Spitzer scandal off his chest. It was a bizarre column dedicated to a large extend to damning any attempt to psychoanalyze Spitzer. Not acknowledging that this puts him at odds with such conservatives as Bill O'Reilly and David Brooks, he insisted that Spitzer's downfall be blamed exclusively on bad character. Mr. Right doesn't care how many scholars and academics assert the existence of sex addiction; he says there is no such thing. While the whole exhibition left me scratching my head a bit, wondering who actually made such a claim about the former governor, I can't entirely disagree with the column. Someone in Spitzer's former position has a greater obligation than private citizens to exercise self-control, whether over his libido or his avarice or his prejudice. Whatever doctors say, we have every right to regard the man as a moral failure. Having said that, I remain disappointed that we didn't get to escalate the War on St. Patrick. Maybe next year ...

Who Speaks for Me?

I got a letter from the Unitarian Universalist Church this morning. After assuring me that their church "celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every person and seeks to build a peaceful, just and compassionate society," and that "We believe no one should have their beliefs defined for them," church president William G. Sinkford passed the hat.

"Our greatest challenge today," he wrote, is "to give public voice to progressive values and take a stand for social justice. Not to shy away from the debate about moral values, but to embrace the discussion and reframe it while there's still time to have a positive impact on the current political season."

It's an admirable sentiment. But do you find something wrong with the picture when, after this inspiring exhortation, I'm asked to give money to them so they can embrace and reframe the discussion. Here's the closing pitch:

Here's what I can promise you. For the next several months one side will be swinging their 'moral values' like a blunt weapon. Either we respond peacefully but insistently with moral values of our own, respecting the broad diversity of faith in this country, or we yield the debate to them.
We believe that, in a democracy, voting is an act of faith and an act of hope. And so is speaking up for what you believe!
I think the greatest calling for people of conscience in the year ahead is to advance our progressive morality and protect religious freedom...With the political campaign season in full swing, we urgently need your help to raise our voice and put liberal moral values into action to create a more moral society.

I got a similar letter last week from Barack Obama. The Senator goes on for a page with inspiring stories of people who stood up and said, "Yes, we can." Then he warns that "Now, we know change isn't going to be easy. It's not going to happen overnight. We're going to have to work for it and fight for it. But if you're willing to do that, then I urge you to consider a contribution of $50, $100, $250 or even more if you can to Obama for America."

Teddy Kennedy sent a letter along with Obama's. He says "we know dreams alone do not change a nation. Action does." As for Obama, action takes the form of a donation in one of the suggested denominations.

I know that the Supreme Court once ruled that campaign donations were a form of political speech, but this is ridiculous. I thought I was a citizen in a democratic republic, and that I had a personal responsibility to make my voice heard, or my words seen, for what I believe in. I learn instead that I can best exercise my rights, best take "action," by donating money so politicians can buy commercial time and religious lobbies can -- well, I'm not sure exactly what the Unitarian Universalists intend to do, but it probably involves buying advertising space or time. Economics of scale dictate all. Freedom of speech for millions of people is best concentrated into an Obama campaign ad. Believe it or not.

Call me stubborn or even antisocial, but as long as no candidate, no party, or no lobby represents fully my own interests and beliefs, I would only be alienating my own integrity by becoming a donor for any of these fundraising machines. I speak for myself, and I write for myself on this blog. I flatter myself that I'm doing my part to advance the debate by adding an idiosyncratic viewpoint that can't be reduced or labeled in the usual way. If more people did likewise, we might sooner realize how few of us are actually represented by the Democratic or Republican parties. The more we learn to speak for ourselves rather than give others money to speak for us, the sooner we might cure ourselves of the Bipolarchy that has plagued the nation for nearly 200 years.

Who speaks for me? I do, and to a more limited extent I speak for the Think 3 Institute, but I don't claim to speak for anyone else. To everyone else I say: speak for yourselves, or obey without question.

Rev. Wright's Wrongs

Is Rev. Jeremiah Wright the "afronazi" I dared people to produce to counterbalance the existence of "feminazis" in the Clinton campaign? The evidence is incomplete. He preaches and dresses like a black nationalist, but I haven't seen anything attributed to him that suggests that Sen. Obama's race is a qualification to rule the country.

The Senator's own disclaimers are disingenuous. I can't believe that he'd never heard Wright utter such things unless he's not as good a parishioner as he wants his local constituency to believe. That fact, actually, I could believe, because Obama is a politician. I can't help but suspect that he associated himself with Wright in the first place only to give himself street cred among Chicago blacks.

To hold that against Obama is probably equivalent to disqualifying any black politician who comes out of Chicago, since that area appears to be a hotbed of black nationalist sentiment. Since the real problem here is with hypersensitive conservatives who can't stand hearing any American say a cross word about his country, the better solution is to tell those right-wingers to get over it or get used to it.

How can it surprise, much less shock some people (Mr. Right will have something to say about this soon) that black people might not share their rosy vision of American history, and might not regard the United States with the sort of unconditional love they seem to require? Does it really blindside these rightists to learn that descendants of slaves may not agree that the U.S. is the greatest country that ever was, or that the nation's vaunted good deeds abroad outweigh its sometimes unfortunate internal record? The funny thing about the current exchange of outrage is that, if anyone, blacks are the people best positioned to accuse all the self-righteously indignant conservatives of moral relativism. After all, conservatives make a quantitative argument for American superiority: we've supposedly done more for the rest of the world than any other country. This attitude doesn't take into consideration the possibility that some people might judge based on a moral standard according to which all countries are found wanting, and none has any special freedom of action in the world. Other people could postulate such standards -- Marxists, for instance, -- but blacks have an obvious basis for skepticism toward America.

I might be accused of holding a double standard if I stall over condemning Rev. Wright for saying "God damn America" but was quick to denounce Revs. Falwell and Robertson for their post-9/11 comments. I plead innocent, since I'd be guilty only if I ever said that religious people had no right to comment on the event. I condemned the conservative preachers because I deny that anyone's sexual conduct provoked an angry God to let the planes hit the towers. Rev. Wright has preached that 9/11 was "chickens come home to roost," to borrow Malcom X's language. In another context, he might have called it "blowback." If he has ever claimed that 9/11 was God's punishment for anything, then he's wrong, but if he sticks to foreign policy, his views are debatable but unobjectionable to anyone but hysterical nationalists.

Finally, I note with interest his church's invocation of the "social gospel" tradition in defense of Rev. Wright's remarks. It's a timely reminder that American Christianity wasn't always a blanket endorsement of everything the U.S. stood for, and that the prophetic tradition can just as easily be aimed at the nation itself as at its enemies foreign and domestic. If more Americans realized this, maybe there'd be more tolerance for atheism in this country.

The War on St. Patrick's Day, or: My Apologies in Advance

Did you ever have one of those moments where you can't resist causing mischief, not because you're feeling angry or mean-spirited, but simply because you feel mischievous? When a spirit of play possesses you without regard for consequences, simply in the hope of amusement? Well, the moment hit me this morning when I walked into Citizens' Bank to deposit my paycheck. The place was decorated for the festive weekend, with paperboard shamrocks hanging from the ceiling. I had to wait in line for a moment, so my eyes fell upon the novel decorations, and I did a double-take.

Inscribed upon the shamrocks was the motto: "Happy Shamrock Day."

Was that possible? Could someone really have done something so dumb? Did they really just open up another front in the "war on Christmas? Is someone really waging that war? They all had to be kidding, and I wanted to burst out laughing at the absurdity of what I'd seen. Mind you, I'm as secularly humanist as anybody, so on principle and personal preference I have no problem with "Happy Shamrock Day." But now I know how a shock-jock feels, because I knew that this would enrage some people, and I knew that their rage would be funny. In fact, I knew specific people whom I could guarantee to be enraged....

* * *

When I first saw Mr. Right this afternoon he was arguing with Mr. Peepers. The latter had been reading to him from a recent letters page of the Albany Times Union, from before Governor Spitzer resigned. As I remembered, many writers were upset at the prospect of Spitzer's departure; they thought there was a double standard at work. To summarize: why should Spitzer have to resign over having sex with a prostitute when George W. Bush hasn't been compelled to resign for lying to get us into war, murdering thousands of Iraqis, waterboarding, etc.

Mr. Peepers feels toward Mr. Right all the time the way I was feeling today. He seems less interested in somehow converting Mr. Right to liberalism than in making him angry, and in that he succeeded.

"So you think President Bush should resign but Spitzer shouldn't have?" Mr. Right sneered.

"Well, what did Spitzer do wrong?"

"He broke the law! He violated the Mann Act!"

"Aww, nobody's been prosecuted for that in decades."

"No, all that matters to you is the letter that comes after their names! As long as it's a D they can't do any wrong, but if it's an R then they're criminals!"

Here I commiserated with Mr. Right. My view, and that of the Institute, is that Spitzer should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Once it was us against Mr. Peepers, he slunk away. It was time to change the subject.

"Hey, have you heard anything on the radio or on conservative websites about St. Patrick's Day displays?"

"No, what do you mean?"

I then told him what I saw at Citizens' Bank.

"You've got to be kidding me," Mr. Right responded, "What are they trying to do, deny that the man even existed? Un-f***ing-believable!"

Mr. Peepers then passed through again.

"This is what you're people are doing!" Mr. Right yelled at him.

"Are you sure nobody's talked about this anywhere in the media?" I asked again. He couldn't recall and didn't think so.

I then gave him an escape hatch. "Could it possibly be because the people at Citizens' Bank are actually observant Catholics and they know that they're not actually supposed to celebrate St. Patrick's this year because it falls in Holy Week?" He didn't buy it because he figured that Church fathers, in this country at least, would give dispensations for the annual festivities. While we agreed that we couldn't necessarily infer a trend from one incident, he seemed inclined to believe that secular humanism was again on the march, and he was arguably more annoyed than when I found him.

* * *

I did a Google search before raising the subject with Mr. Right and there was barely any mention of a "war on St. Patrick's" Search for "Happy Shamrock Day" yourself and you'll mostly see sites that sell stuff so labeled. So if you start hearing about it over the next week, it may well be that all the fuss started here. That's why I offer an apology in advance, but it was just too good to resist. How often do you get the chance to start a hoax based entirely on fact?

The Double Standard, Updated

Mr. Peepers: What do you think of Spitzer resigning?

Mr. Right: I told you back when he was running that he prosecuted certain people on Wall Street on very little evidence while totally ignoring Democrats who were doing similar things. I knew back then that he was an arrogant bully, so none of this surprises me.

Peepers: So why don't Craig and Vitter resign? The Republicans are just as bad as Spitzer.

Right: You see, I would never say that all Democrats are just like Spitzer, but you do this all the time. You're always saying all Republicans are just like Craig or just like Vitter. That's the difference between us. But do you want to know why they haven't quit? It's because they see Democrats stay in office in spite of scandals that are just as bad, and I'm sure they tell themselves, "If they don't have to resign, why should we?"

Peepers: But Spitzer resigned ...

Collar City Censorship

As Crhymethinc has informed us in his comment on the "I Don't Know Art" article below, the Republican regime in Troy has shut down the Sanctuary for Independent Media in an obvious reprisal for Wafaa Bilal's "Virtual Jihadi" exhibit. All you need to know is that the Public Works Commissioner here is Robert "Bobby" Mirch, the same county legislature majority leader who led a protest demonstration against the exhibit at Monday's opening and has called it "anti-American."

Mirch is brazen enough to tell the Record that "he did not know the building had been closed to the public until he was contacted by several local reporters." He's hiding behind the deputy mayor, Dan Crawley, and city spokesman Jeff Buell, both of whom note that complaints against the building came in on Monday afternoon -- just before the exhibit opened. They claim that the Sanctuary was notified of code violations 14 months ago, but is only now being punished for failure to comply.

Crawley is at pains to deny that the Sanctuary has not been "shut down," but he confirms that the city "asked that they do not hold public gatherings until all issues are resolved." If that's not a shutdown, what is?

Steve Pierce, the Sanctuary director, knows the real score. "They shut us down," he told the Times Union. To the Record, he said, "Apparently if you do something the Republican administration doesn't like, they shut you down." He notes that inspectors toured the Sanctuary on Monday afternoon and told him "they were fine with what we planned to do" to meet code standards, -- "Then I got a call as I was driving in [Tuesday] saying that they had shut down the building."

Bill Dunne, a Democratic City Council member, told the Record that the shutdown is consistent with an oppressive pattern. "It looks like the city is using code enforcement officers as some form of political retaliation," he said while suggesting that the council, which has a Democratic majority, might subpoena the code enforcement authorities to tell who ordered them to take this action. The council president, Clement Campana, agrees that the incident "should be investigated," according to the Times Union.

These are standard tactics in the authoritarian states that Americans love to complain about. They're not normally so blatant as to declare dissent itself illegal. Instead, they use petty regulations like these to crack down on dissidents, so they can later tell the world that even dissidents still have to obey the law. Study history a little and you'll find that these were standard tactics for much of American history as well. In modern times the preferred tactic is to force dissent into "free-speech zones" far away from the powerful people protesters want to reach. In Troy, the Republicans have stooped to old-school thuggery to suppress a form of dissent that doesn't even threaten their own power in any way. This is self-evidently an attempt to punish the "thoughtcrime" of opposing the Iraq War. Wafaa Bilal may be a dubious artist, but as a dissident he has to be defended to the utmost. If the United States wants to be regarded as "better" than other countries, one of the best arguments we can make is that, unlike in many places, here dissidents get the benefit of the doubt. If that means we must risk mischaracterizing the motives of authorities or hurting the feelings of patriots, so be it. If they object to the exhibit, and if they object to our objections to its suppression, let them go to Russia or some other more congenial country where patriotism crushes all protest. Today the "Home of Uncle Sam" is a national disgrace.

Quotes for the Day

"In politics, the choice is not between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable."

-- Raymond Aron

(1905-1983),

as quoted by

Michael Brendan Dougherty,

who adds:

"Of course this gives incredible license to 'the preferable' to act detestably."

-- The American Conservative,

February 25, 2008.

The Feminazis Are Here?

Let me make myself clear: I despised the word "feminazi" when radio talkers like Rush Limbaugh popularized it. I understood that he equated "feminazism" with feminism itself and with its attendant "political correctness." Merely to promote a feminist agenda aggressively and passionately was to be a "feminazi" in reactionary eyes.

And yet, suddenly, after two days worth of Geraldine Ferraro, no other word popped into my mind. I can't immediately think of a better word to describe the hard core of Clinton boosters, those who seem to really believe, and with intensifying fanaticism, that "we need a woman" in the White House. How else to describe the stridency with which a letter writer to The Nation ascribes all criticism of the Destined One to "misogyny and sexism, overt and covert" while stating, presumably with a straight face, that Senator Clinton is "the most brilliant, prepared candidate since Adlai Stevenson." Stevenson's preparation must be judged conjecturally, of course, since he was a two-time loser in the 1950s, but take my word for it -- this is an extreme comparison. After all, how can Stevenson 's experience be compared with the Senator's -- he never slept with a President!

I invite anyone who happens to read this to show me any speech, any article, anything that asserts that the United States "needs" a black President. If it exists, I'll call it "Afronazism" until someone suggests a better term. On analogy, by "feminazi" I mean specifically anyone who affirms the ideological notion that women bring generically distinct and generally superior virtues to the political realm that require the election of one to the White House at the first opportunity. This is a theory of gender supremacy. There is no other way to characterize it. If that sounds harsh, then remember that these are harsh times. The feminazis are playing dirty, so here's some dirt back at them.

* * *

None of the above should be construed as giving Rush Limbaugh and his ilk license to use the term to further their own agenda. To them, it means the same thing it always has, and in their mouths it's meaningless. My object is to rebrand the term so that it's no use to them anymore. At the same time, let's agree that the majority of Clinton supporters are not feminazis. A person can sincerely, if questionably, believe that she's the best candidate. You only cross the line if you claim that her gender has anything to do with it.

I Don't Know Art, But ...

Troy, New York, has its own little free-speech controversy that you may hear of soon. It seems that Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) was to host a "Virtual Jihadi" exhibit by one Wafaa Bilal, but canceled the show after locals protested that it was "wrong, un-American and destructive."

Wafaa Bilal appears to be a conceptual artist, someone whose college degree entitles him to label anything he produces as "art" so long as a critic can find something to talk about in it. His past work marks him as a sort of Arabic David Blaine, allowing himself, for instance, to be a live target for virtual paintball shooters. "Virtual Jihadi" was born when Bilal adapted an American video game, "Quest for Saddam," that had already been adapted by al-Qaida hackers into "The Night of Bush Capturing." Bilal's contribution is to turn the main character of the al-Qaida game into himself, garbed in a suicide vest and reportedly assigned to blow up President Bush.

The artist told the Troy Record that "he wants Americans to understand the plight of Iraqis and his intent was to spark dialogue" by getting people out of their "comfort zone." It remains unclear from the newspaper account exactly what sort of dialogue he meant to spark. It's even less clear whether he's willing to engage in dialogue with those who've condemned his installation.

Bilal has moved "Virtual Jihadi" to the Sanctuary for Independent Media, an admirable institution that inhabits a former church in the North Central section of town. The grand re-opening this evening was scheduled to be picketed by some patriotic citizens, including the majority leader of the Rensselaer County legislature. Photos I saw in the newsroom before I left work showed counterdemonstrators protesting in defense of free speech and against a "Republican Fatwa."

As you might suspect, I suspect that, as an artist, Wafaa Bilal is just another academic hustler with an effective line of bull that obscures his lack of real creativity. I have no use for his exhibit, but when I hear people in the office erupt with hatred for the very concept of challenging perceptions of the war, my Voltairean instinct kicks in. On they came: Duffy the Ancient Sportswriter ("They should blow up that sanctuary"); Mr. Peepers ("You see what happens when we let those foreigners into this country"); and, of course, Mr. Right, for whom this was a reprise of the controversy over the British "Death of a President" movie of two years ago. To him, it is a form of lese-majeste (he calls it "bad taste") to even imagine the assassination of George W. Bush. Of course, there are probably plenty of hack thriller novels that imagine the same possibility, but they get a pass, I suspect, because they probably portray people protecting the poor man. To actually imagine him getting killed, Mr. Right seems to think, suggests that you want him dead.

Inevitably, he had to turn this into another case of liberal hypocrisy. He's convinced that most people who defend Bilal's free speech when it insults Bush would want his head or the head of anyone who portrayed a fictional assassination of the sainted Clintons. He warned me that I don't dare deny this because he believed I wasn't so naive. I might have felt challenged to research the matter and unearth fictional Clinton assassinations and the liberal outrage against them if I thought I might find anything. Overall, I felt it was all too easy for Mr. Right to make that claim without any evidence to back him up.

I shouldn't have expected anything different from any of these characters. At the same time, my sympathy for Bilal can only go so far, since this is exactly the reaction he probably wanted. In fairness, however, I'll give him the last word. "I wonder why RPI is outraged over a video game instead of the 800,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans killed during the war," he said.

I'm feeling generous tonight, so here are more last words from Mr. Bilal, thanks to YouTube:

Spitzer

You'll find no sympathy for the disgraced governor here. He proved himself a hypocrite, a man who says one thing and does another. We can talk another time about whether prostitution should be illegal; for now it only matters that Spitzer broke the law. There's no room for a political defense of the man on the ground that he was the victim of a partisan entrapment scheme. The only thing I will regret about this scandal is the likelihood that conservatives will somehow see it as a vindication of all the white-collar criminals Spitzer rightly prosecuted as Attorney General, as if he had no right to prosecute anyone because of his own crimes. I'm not here to say that Spitzer should resign, but I see no reason why he shouldn't.

Of course, we don't know how long this has been going on, but I expect we'll learn soon enough. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Spitzer succumbed to the privileges of power, the perks that come with giant campaign war-chests that candidates can spend at whim. Read enough and you'll see that elected officials enjoy an unprecedented degree of luxury that the Founders would have recognized immediately as a danger to the republic. Who's to say that many more people haven't indulged in the same way that Spitzer has? The real challenge will be getting ordinary Americans to recognize that, even among those politicos who haven't necessarily broken a law, things have gone too far. Because Spitzer has apparently committed a crime, this won't be the time to get people to see the other abuses. They'll have to do that work themselves, since most of the media are unlikely to help them.

McCain vs. Obama: the Hundred Years' War?

Today's Albany Times Union has an op-ed from Jonathan V. Last, a Philadelphia columnist, that defends Senator McCain against Senator Obama's charge that the Republican is asking for 100 years of war in Iraq. Last accuses Obama of distorting McCain's statement, but the real issue isn't whether the Democrat correctly characterized McCain's words, but whether the Arizonan's words are correct.

Basically Last recycles McCain's standard argument: American troops remaining in Iraq for 50 or 100 years will be unobjectionable to the electorate as long as there aren't casualties. McCain wants to establish an analogy with our long-term presence in Korea, Germany, etc., to which few apart from "isolationists" object. Last himself admits that Iraq isn't the same as these places, but proceeds to ignore the most crucial differences.

Last has the gall to add to McCain's list of long-occupied countries the Philippine Islands, where we stayed from 1899 to 1991, not counting our temporary eviction by Japanese forces. He notes that, after suppressing an insurrection, "U.S. troops stayed there even as the country took baby steps toward self-governance." Only when he notes that the U.S. granted the islands independence in 1946 does he acknowledge that the Philippines were, for all intents and purposes, an American colony. Presumably McCain is smart enough not to cite this as a model for America's future in Iraq.

South Korea is occupied, of course, to protect the country from an attack from the North. Japan is occupied to protect it from China. Germany was occupied to protect it from the Soviet Union (and why now???) None of these occupations involved the suppression of a native insurrection. Contrary to what some Bushies said in 2003, nothing of the kind emerged in Germany and Japan in 1945 because both countries considered themselves fairly and rightly beaten. However Iraqis feel about Saddam Hussein, most clearly don't consider themselves rightly beaten or legitimately occupied. That's a formula for perpetual insurrection and perpetual casualties. It's the same if you factor Iran into the equation. McCain might argue that we need to stay in Iraq to deter an Iranian invasion, but that's a ridiculous notion. Iran is most likely interested only in having a friendly regime next door, and they're likely to have that if we let history take it's course. So preventing Iranian (i.e. Shiite) hegemony most likely means suppressing the Iraqi majority, which sounds like another formula for perpetual insurrection and perpetual casualties.

Last closes his column by saying, "Obama's distortion of [McCain's] remark, however, is the first sign that he may not be a serious-minded candidate." It seems more likely to me that Obama was simply trying to expose the fact that McCain himself isn't taking things seriously.

Terrorism: Whodunnit?

The gunman who killed the yeshiva students in Jerusalem had a name. It was Ala Abu Dahim. It remains unclear whether he acted alone, as Israeli police initially suspected, or as a terrorist foot-soldier. Reuters reported that Hamas claimed responsibility, but this source says the organization has repudiated the claim as a piece of disinformation.

My hunch remains that Dahim was a lone wolf, not because the cops say so, but because he was a shooter instead of a suicide bomber. There was reportedly a claim of responsibility from a newly-minted organization named after the leader who was recently killed by the Israelis. If Dahim belonged to this group, my guess would be that it's a small, relatively egalitarian outfit. Again, I base this on what I presume to be the psychology of the gunman as opposed to the suicide bomber. The latter is somebody else's weapon, whether he thinks he's Allah's or his handler's from Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Aqsa or whomever else. He is the ultimate passive-aggressive, acting out of a fanatic sense of duty to a larger cause. The shooter, I still suspect, is more autonomous. He acts for his reasons as well as if not more than for larger purposes. He requires the personal satisfaction of seeing his victims die, while the suicide bomber is apparently satisfied by the dying thought that he has done his duty to his people or his god.

The other possibility, of course, is that Dahim and/or his pals had neither the means or the knowledge to put together a suicide belt, but this possibility is too prosaic to pursue further.

More Power to Samantha

Hillary Clinton is a monster. She's a crude parody of feminist progress trying to turn the United States into a parody of democratic republicanism like Pakistan and India are. In Pakistan a 19 year old boy is the leader of the leading opposition party because of his lineage. In India an Italian woman is the leader of the governing party (but has the common sense not to serve as president or prime minister) because of the family she married into. Senator Clinton's claim on American votes is little better. She is a monster like George W. Bush is, like Teddy Kennedy was before voters repudiated him in the 1980 primaries.

Samantha Power wasn't talking about any of this when she called Clinton a monster. She was apparently complaining about the Senator's campaign tactics, and as an adviser to Senator Obama she came off as a whiner -- if only because her interviewer refused Power's explicit request to keep that particular comment off the record. The Obama campaign isn't supposed to whine; that's what the Senator himself says. So it was probably right for Power to go, not because of what she said about Clinton, but because it was bad form for her position. But with all that being said, Hillary Clinton is a monster. There may be worse monsters out there, and we may yet be forced to choose among monsters, but we shouldn't have to hold our tongues while we hold our noses.

Terrorism: Quality, not Quantity

Don't let the small scale of the explosion and the damage it caused and the lack of casualties obscure the fact that all the king's horses and all the king's men, not to mention all the king's warrantless wiretaps, failed to prevent the bombing of an army recruiting station in the middle of Times Square. Therefore, don't let anyone tell you that there hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since 11 Sept. 2001. What do you call this, after all -- vandalism?

Word is that there's been a responsibility claim of some kind in the form of an e-mail to members of Congress showing someone standing in front of the targeted station. That looks like terrorism to me. So let's keep focused on the crucial issue of our time and how the Republicans, i.e. Senator McCain's people, failed to protect us. Don't forget that this happened in what's most likely target area number one for the whole country, the site where I've been anticipating an explosion every Dec. 31 for the last six years. While I've welcomed every new year with happy disappointment, this shows that people other than the usual suspects are motivated to do mischief in the Crossroads of the World, and Homeland Security couldn't do anything about it. The fact that no one was hurt doesn't mean that everyone was safe. Call this fearmongering if you wish, but it doesn't hurt to emphasize that the Republican regime dropped the ball in a big way today.

Terrorism: I Stand Corrected?

The news from Jerusalem of a mass school shooting, perpetrated by a Palestinian, throws into question the theory I developed a few weeks ago about cultural differences between Muslim terrorists and American mass killers. I had suggested that cultural factors somehow explained why Muslims preferred to blow themselves up, dying at the same moment as their victims, while Americans preferred to go down shooting, presumably getting some satisfaction from seeing their victims fall.

Now we have a Palestinian shooting his victims and going down shooting. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the shooter had some kind of American roots, but I have to admit that it seems unlikely. Of course, until the authorities identified the shooter as a Palestinian, I was willing to assume that this was disgruntled Israeli-on-Israeli violence on the American model. Since this remains an exceptional act, to my knowledge, I'm not ready to concede that I'm wrong about cultural differences among killers in general. We need to know more about this guy and his affiliations. Did he belong to a fringe group that eschews the standard suicide tactics, or was he possibly a lone wolf, which would be more in line with the American model?

A detail that worries me is the fact that a gun-toting student is taking credit for taking out the shooter. This is the sort of propaganda that comes in the NRA's wildest dreams, and I'm sure they'll make the most of this whether the student's claims are authenticated or not. While I might acknowledge that conditions in Israel are such that a civilian might go about armed with more justification than any American, I'm pretty sure gun nuts won't appreciate the distinction. Apart from the deaths caused by today's shooters, the worst consequence of his rampage and its abrupt termination would be if the story made insane crossfires and augmented casualties on American campuses more likely.

Thou Shalt Not: A Follow-Up

Wouldn't you know? Just after I watch the documentary and post my commentary, the next morning's paper has an op-ed from some Christian group griping over how the Academy Awards didn't honor popular, family-friendly, pro-Christian movies. Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder represent an outfit called Christian Film & Television, which publishes film reviews from a "family-values" standpoint online.

Their op-ed complained that many of the Oscar-nominated films were dark, violent, anti-American, anti-family, even anti-God. They propose alternate criteria of quality according to which Will Smith in I Am Legend was more deserving of the Best Actor prize than Daniel Day-Lewis, because "it takes a much better actor to play compelling heroic characters." Since I haven't seen I Am Legend, I must withhold judgment on how compelling Smith's performance was. But since the writers refer in passing to "effete secular critics," I need not withhold judgment on the quality of their thinking.

The writers, it must be admitted, were less concerned about the films than about the Academy Awards, which they believed were becoming irrelevant because of their elitist irreverence toward traditional values. Nevertheless, it's only a short step to demanding that Hollywood make more "positive" product, which brings us back to 1934.

Some people can't help but see all art as instruments of indoctrination. They can't help but demand that art send positive messages, as if they believe, as I suggested below, that by telling the right stories we can change people's perception of reality, or to some extent get them to renounce reality in favor of mandatory idealism. In this, America's professional moralists are very similar to the former seminarian Joseph Stalin, who supposedly described writers as engineers of human souls. These U.S. culture warriors are actually no different from the people they once considered their worst enemies in their obvious effort to use culture to mold audiences into an ideological image. It makes no difference if they call themselves traditionalists or if they try to distinguish religion from ideology. Tradition on the defensive, especially when faith-based, is indistinguishable from ideology. When it seeks power, we can expect similar results.

The Code of Movie Sexuality: A Speculation

I just saw a new documentary called Thou Shalt Not on Turner Classic Movies. It's an account of the "pre-code" era in Hollywood, roughly from 1929-34, when movies expressed a frankness about sexual matters that wouldn't be heard again for another 30 years. That doesn't mean nudity (though there were bare-breasted maidens in the silent Ben-Hur) or profanity (though a Warner Bros. cartoon character appears to throw an F-bomb in a black-&-white short). It does mean frankness in acknowledging sex as a factor in everyday life, and admitting that sex could be used for social climbing and other unwholesome purposes. It means acknowledging the existence of homosexuals, even if they were mostly figures for ridicule.

This type of moviemaking flourished as the Great Depression set in, and the documentary suggests that it faded out once the New Deal got going and gave people a feeling of optimism. That got me thinking that you could see a similar pattern in the 1970s. The '70s were also a period of widespread pessimism and, in the latter part of the decade, economic decline. In both periods, you see a franker exploration of sexual issues, albeit more explicit in the '70s. I think this is because audiences were more interested in seeing how other people survived, with sex often becoming a survival strategy. In circumstances like those, people seemed more tolerant of truth than they would be later.

Thou Shalt Not notes the decisive role of American Catholics in suppressing the sex impulse in 1930s cinema. I don't think the Moral Majority played the same role in the 1980s, but you do see a decline in sexual frankness in Reagan-era cinema, so that a film that might have earned a PG rating in the '70s would probably get an R today. While there wasn't a moral crusade that I can recall (that arguably came later when Blockbuster Video refused to carry more explicit films), we should recall that the Reagan era was defined by its alleged optimism. If the documentary is right, it seems that audiences have a greater appetite for escapism under more optimistic conditions than under harder times. We shouldn't draw a sharp distinction here, since there was plenty of escapist content in pre-code or '70s cinema, but there are clear differences in the way the content is presented. Compare the stupendous woman-piles of the Busby Berkeley musicals, for instance, with The Wizard of Oz.

I note the Catholic influence in passing as another bad mark on the faith's record during the 1930s. Catholicism seems to have been a malevolent force in that decade, counting the influence of Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic radio priest, and widespread Catholic support for Franco's fascism in Spain. You could understand why Rev. Hagee might fear Catholics, if only he appealed to history instead of theology. Even today, you get the feeling that William Donohue of the Catholic League, currently directing his fury at Hagee, would like to exercise the same censorious power over movies that his co-religionist Joseph Breen did back in the '30s and '40s.

We shouldn't dismiss the movies made between 1934 and 1968 as somehow neutered. Genius and talent will achieve expression under almost any constraint, and these were the years that gave us Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, the whole film noir canon, and much more besides. But something clearly went wrong, and something clearly was lost. What happened was the imposition of ideology on American movies, just like the enforcement of "socialist realism" on Russian cinema and Nazi strictures on German films. Breen and other hardcore Catholics, as well as their Protestant allies, wanted Hollywood to reject realism in favor of an idealized worldview in which evil was always punished, sexual deviancy was always condemned if it couldn't be ignored, and traditional authority was nearly always confirmed. This development is worth emphasizing. If we agree that part of the problem with the country today is that too many people have an ideological way of seeing things, and an almost reflexive denial of certain realities, we might also agree that many of them learned that way of thinking from the movies they saw -- on the big screen or on TV, a medium that succumbed to the same ideology in its early decades. Who knows if America might be a different nation today if our movies hadn't been subverted by moralistic ideologues over seventy years ago?

al-Qaeda in Iraq: the True Story?

Back on Wednesday night they had the network news on in the office while Mr. Right was filing a report on his sports beat. We heard a sound bite from Senator McCain, who seemed to believe that Senator Obama didn't know that al-Qaeda was currently active in Iraq. The Republican inferred this from Obama's comment at the last Democratic debate about re-invading the country should the terrorist outfit form a base there. McCain felt he had scored a point by noting that, at the present time, there is an organization called "al-Qaeda in Iraq." To his mind, this demonstrated that Obama was foolish for wanting to withdraw from Iraq in the first place.

The network ran Obama's riposte, in which he argued that there was no such thing as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" before the invasion. His observation was meant to make their presence President Bush's fault. Obama presumably draws a distinction from the terrorists' mere presence in the country and their ability to form a base, but Mr. Right never got to that point in the argument. He disagreed strongly with the assertion that al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before 2003.

I reminded him that it was impossible for there to be an "al-Qaeda in Iraq" before Saddam fell, because any organization that declared its existence by that name would have been wiped out quickly by Saddam's secret police.

He remained convinced that there were terrorists in the country before the invasion, and that Saddam trained terrorists there. I conceded that point, but the question was about "al-Qaeda." I insisted that there was no way that a self-proclaimed "al-Qaeda" could exist in Iraq when Osama bin Laden was a known enemy of Saddam.

Since he couldn't answer that point, the conversation petered out. I found it useful because it reminded me that labels like "al-Qaeda" only obfuscate the real issue in the Middle East. It's been obvious all along that suppressing that group has not been the Bush Administration's highest priority. Bush's "war on terror" is more general in scope. It's really a campaign against anyone who might challenge the world order that was imposed in the region during the 20th century. There are many groups with such intentions, many of which have never struck a blow against the United States. But the Bushies are happy to blur distinctions in order to convince us that anyone with a beef in the Middle East really just wants to kill Americans because they hate our freedom. The Bushies think that arguments like Obama's are merely splitting hairs, because they think they've had enemies in Iraq all along regardless of whether you or I have.

For the record, this is what Obama said at the debate -- figure it out for yourself.

As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad.

Campaign '08: Time for a Gentlemen's Agreement

Senator McCain said the right thing yesterday as controversy arose over the endorsement he received from the Rev. John Hagee, an evangelical crackpot. In response, the Republican said that Hagee's endorsement of him didn't mean that he endorsed Hagee. This is the only sensible response to the controversy. After all, McCain is soliciting votes from tens of millions of Americans. Should he have to answer for the character of everybody who supports him?

Ideally, McCain and the Republicans will learn a lesson from this. We'll know if they have if we never hear another word about Louis Farrakhan for the rest of the campaign season. If we do, then Democrats have every right to make Hagee Farrakhan's running mate, so to speak, and cite his name and his views every time someone questions Farrakhan's endorsement of Senator Obama.

My hunch is that the candidates can work out a gentlemen's agreement to keep quiet about their respective crazy backers. Whether they can enforce such an agreement on all the rogue 527s out there is another matter, but we should hope to hear nothing about Farrakhan or Hagee in any ad that has a candidate's voice saying, "I endorse this message."

By the way, I propose a "gentlemen's agreement" not because I hope to exclude Senator Clinton from any such deal, but because, to my knowledge, she has not been endorsed yet by any religious lunatic. If anyone knows differently, please correct me.

The Ricin Mystery

Now the Las Vegas investigators tell us that there were firearms and an "anarchist" handbook with a page on ricin marked, not to mention the main ingredient of ricin, in the room where they found a comatose man. Meanwhile, they continue to insist that they don't consider this a "terrorist" case. That begs the question: what do these people mean by terrorism? Is it not terrorism because they haven't found a Qur'an? Or because they haven't managed to identify the sick man as a card-carrying member of some organization? Or they haven't deduced some political purpose behind manufacturing ricin in a hotel room? Or do they simply not want to incite a tourist panic? All I can say at this point is: keep an eye on this story.