Ed MacMahon

While many of my fellow bloggers are lamenting the death of Michael Jackson in lyrical tones, and still others bemourn the loss of the blonde, I am in mourning for Ed MacMahon.

Jackson may have suffered from wanting to be white, having a gender confusion, and having an inordinate interest in children, but he could dance well, and could sing, too. He could even choreograph. Compare Ed MacMahon. What talent did he have? He had no discernible talent whatsoever: he couldn't dance, sing, write, paint, or anything else generally considered to be a talent. Talent is a wonder in and of itself, and is its own reward. And yet one can also make billions with a talent that has been successfully capitalized. MacMahon had next to no talent, and how he must have suffered. Plus, he was nevertheless in show business. What a situation! And he had payments to make on his Hollywood Home! He was nearly homeless when he couldn't pay the mortgage on his 5 million dollar house!

He might have had to move into a two million dollar house! He needed bailouts and Trump among others stepped up to help him! He had the power to attract friends. He could play a friend, a sidekick! Who doesn't need a sidekick? If only Michael Jackson had had a friendly sidekick, he might not have turned to drugs to get his kicks!

There ought to be a prize among the recently dead for the one who did the most with the least, and was a fairly successful capitalist on his thin assets. Fawcett was a beauty, and could turn America on with all those teeth. Jackson could dance like nobody's business. MacMahon? He sat around and smiled at nervous Johnny, and bailed him out when his jokes flopped. MacMahon also flew 60 flights over North Korea during the Korean war, and tried to help those people out, too, who must have been at least as nervous as Johnny.

What did Michael Jackson ever do for South Korea? What did Farrah Fawcett ever do for Seoul Power?

If Michael Jackson captured the imaginary of many teenagers and cultural theorists, and fascinated many with his unctuous moonwalk, and smooth gangster imitations, MacMahon flew under the radar to captivate us with his ability to just sit there and be comfortable. That's a talent few have. It might be the rarest talent of all.

I'll miss old Ed. If Jackson was the imaginary, and Fawcett the symbolic, Ed was the real. He kept it real. His death marks the death of an older America founded in small towns, in which you could trust your neighbor to be decent, rather than a NAMBLA-esque creep, or a feminist moon-bat. There will be plenty of other dancers and beauties to come along. No one will ever replace Ed MacMahon. He was one of a kind, just like everybody else. Unlike most, he was comfortable in his skin. He wasn't unsure of his beauty as was Farrah Fawcett (worried about the prevalence of her teeth), or unsure about his identity, like Michael Jackson. Ed MacMahon was what he was. He wasn't overly proud of it, or worried about it. He was just Ed. We could all learn something from him.

HAYEK'S THE ROAD TO SERFDOM

Reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom: The Definitive Edition, ed. by Bruce Caldwell (University of Chicago Press, 2007), I am struck with the similarity of his work to my own. Only his is lots better.

First off, he says quite bluntly that he is writing against socialism as totalitarianism at a time when everybody else thought that capitalism was totalitarianism, and thought that the Nazis were the last gasp of capitalism! No, he says over and over, they are a variant of totalitarian socialism. All socialism is totalitarianism. He says this, knowing it's going to cost him. But he's Cassandra! And he wants to save his world! He's the only one who knows! And darn it, people listened. He saved the world. But the socialist night is ever creeping, ever crawling, like vampyre worms who promise you a world of love, and then they suck all the life blood out of you and your loves and leave you all a pile of corpses and move on, complaining you must have been too capitalistic or it would have worked out.

Hayek has the brilliance to recognize that in America the term "liberalism" was originally used as "camouflage" to disguise the socialist takeover (45). I've thought as much and have said as much, over and over. The two terms have NOTHING whatsoever to do with one another. The term "liberalism" has been used by the left to cover their totalitarian ambitions. There is nothing at all liberal about socialism.

From the right, liberalism (in the mouth of Sean Hannity, for instance) is also a disparaged term. But the anti-intellectual conservatives like Hannity and O'Reilly are useful, and what's left of true liberty is owed to them, and to the likes of them, and it is with them that we last true liberals must make an alliance. I love Rush. Not because he's some kind of genius, or someone I would like to look at poems with, or call up at night for fun, but because he's almost alone calling the socialists on their sick game. Call it McCarthyism, or whatever you like, it functions. Liberalism is almost a mirage, but let's remember that it means INDIVIDUAL liberty, both in the market and in the market of ideas. Socialism means totalitarianism. I don't know what conservative means, but it's some kind of dumb screaming at the socialists. I approve of that, no matter who is doing it, or for whatever reason.

What are we fighting for? Why were we in Vietnam? Why did we fight the Nazis? why did we have the Cold War? Stupid Bruce Springsteen in his stupid song "Born in the USA" (wow, can he sing), says we were there to "kill the yellow man." What a dumb asshole! We were there fighting on behalf of the South Vietnamese you idiot! Just as we were in S. Korea fighting on behalf of the South Koreans!

The communist left demonstrated in our streets and made us leave Vietnam.

We were fighting to prevent totalitarianism. Vietnam is today a totalitarian state. It's not as bad as North Korea, but then what is?

Hayek LIKES socialists. He was surrounded by them in academia, just as I am. They are very hard not to like. They are sweethearts and teddy bears and candy assed lollipops who haven't got the faintest idea how to dress or how to raise their own kids or even change the oil in their cars. They're completely incompetent in every arena, but they are full of love, and who can dislike it? They have no idea that their plans for a centralized state were drawn up by Mensheviks who were later slaughtered by Bolsheviks and Stalinists, and they ended up hanging from meathooks in the Gulags, or that they will in their turn, too, since history has a repetitious aspect. still, they want to plan a centralized state and deny all freedoms in the name of love!

Socialists are nice people. They don't want to ever fight wars, and they want the sheep to lie down with the lions.

The lions have news for them: it's called Pravda. That's their newspaper forked tongue: now known as the NY Times.

Socialists are not inherently vicious. They are generally decent folks. Hayek DEDICATES his book to them. I am on the other hand unable to convince a single soul that socialism is totalitarianism, or that the ruffians are coming, or that Orwell's ordeals are becoming our ideals. If I wrote until the sun burned out, I couldn't get a single person to read Hayek. Actually, there is one person I can convince to read Hayek. Me.

I've skipped around a bit, but am now on p. 65. I intend to finish up in two days. The book is only 265 pages long, and I have already read two chapters toward the middle. I'm a lousy bedbug in Bedlam, but now that I have Hayek, I feel better.

"Serfs up!" (Bob Black)

Socialism After Sotomayor

Sitting at dinner the other night and having green beans and corn bread, my friend Mark Schneider mentioned that the boy next door had grown up to become a famous intellectual who had written a tome entitled Socialism After Hayek. The boy's name was Theodore Burczak, who now teaches at Denison University in Grandville, Ohio.

I didn't even know who Hayek was. Hayek was an Austrian economist who wrote a famous book in the 1940s entitled The Road to Serfdom. He taught at the University of Chicago for several decades. He died in 1991 shortly after having the Medal of Freedom hung about his neck by H.W. Bush. He was 92 years old.

I bought Hayek's The Road to Serfdom yesterday for $15.oo at Book Culture in the Columbia University area. In it, Hayek argues that Marxism and National Socialism come out of the same admixture of ideas, and that the offer of a social net comes at the price of government control of the people, and with this paternalistic or maternalistic concern for the people comes also the total denial of individual freedoms.

Hayek writes, "The 'German idea of the state,' as formulated by Fichte, Lassalle, and Rodbertus, is that the state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a Volkgemeinschaft in which the individual has no rights but only duties. Claims of the individual are always an outcome of the commercial spirit" (183).

In a note underneath the editor of the volume has written that Volkgemeinschaft translates as "racially pure community."

What does this mean? That all racial thinking that denies the individual is national socialist in its inspiration?

That therefore Sotomayor is a National Socialist in her Destefano decision to uphold the decision against the New Haven firefighters, which was repudiated yesterday by the Supreme Court? Is all racialist thinking radically racist in Hitleresque terms? I'm not certain that Hayek would go so far, but in trying to stretch his thinking to shed a ray of light on our own questions of today, one wonders whether Sotomayor is Puerto Rican at all in her thinking, and whether she isn't actually a German idealist who abstracts her national identity into a Marxian abstraction with which to club all contenders with National Socialist victimization theory.

It seems that Hayek thought that thinking in large Hegelian abstractions was a German notion, and that it was against the English tradition of thinking in terms of minute particulars. Orwell's great argument was to denounce the abstractions of the Marxist left and to write in concrete details. That tradition in turn perhaps extends back to the empiricists: Locke, Hume, Berkeley, as the counter-tradition to Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger.

Could Hayek, an Austrian, be on the side of positivism and individualism, against the great Hegelian abstractions? I'm still reading. It's not a long book, and the writing is fairly lucid for such a puzzling arena as comparative history of ideas.

Hayek quotes some proto-Nazi nut named Professor Johann Plenge who writes, "Because in the sphere of ideas Germany was the most convinced exponent of all socialist dreams, and in the sphere of reality she was the most powerful architect of the most higly organized economic system, -- In us is the twentieth century. However the war may end, we are the exemplary people. Our ideas will determine the aims of the life of humanity" (185). Plenge was writing in 1916 (he lived until 1963 where he taught at Leipzig), and was an advocate of organizational socialism (184). He uses the term "national socialism" throughout his 1916 book, a book to which Hitler and his cronies, Hayek suggests, goosestepped.

Plenge saw power as something the race-nation must seize, so as to push out all other peoples in their grab for control of the world's resources. Many of Plenge's writings, and the writings of his particular circle, espouse a militaristic conception of the nation-state. The editor of the volume mentions that one could read Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (Penguin 2004) as representative of this mentality.

It was a mentality that hated individualist liberalism, and proposed instead a militaristic national socialism in which a given people fought against other given peoples for the right to control the world's resources, with the race-state having total control over the economy.

It's odd to think how shattered and falsified the very words we use are in which "liberal" is now conjoined with "socialist," not only on Fox News and in the mouth of Sean Hannity and others, but also in books like Michael Berube's recent book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?

Which is in fact a socialist tome.

We have a very shallow understanding of the great ideas working underneath the surface over the last two hundred or three hundred years to use these terms interchangeably. Those who are shaping our arguments have almost no sense of the terms they are using.

People with just a tad more intellectual history under their belt understand the profound differences between these two powerful driving wedges. In Keywords, Raymond Williams writes,

"...liberalism is a doctrine based on INDIVIDUALIST (q.v.) theories of man and society and is thus in fundamental conflict not only with SOCIALIST (q.v.) but with most strictly SOCIAL (q.v.) theories. The further observation, that liberalism is the highest form of thought developed within BOURGEOIS (q.v.) society and in terms of CAPITALISM (q.v.), is also relevant, for when liberal is not being used as a loose swear-word, it is to this mixture of liberating and limiting ideas that it is intended to refer. Liberalism is then a doctrine of certain necessary kinds of freedom but also, and essentially, a doctrine of possessive individualism" (150).

How the terms became conflated so that they essentially mean the same thing is beyond me. Perhaps it's a shell game, but I doubt if our cultural pundits are that literate. I think rather that they have very blunt conceptions of history, and are doing the best they can with their blunted vision.

Let's try to clarify for one and all. Totalitarians want the state to rule, and they want a one-party state in which the individual has zero rights and we have a top-down system that can say, for instance, who gets a promotion and who does not, based on what some authority figure determines to be right for the race that they represent.

Liberalism is quite the opposite, it is based on individualism, and is laissez-faire.

Hayek in his day is arguing against the "Totalitarians in our midst" who would have the nation-state control the economy. I don't know why I had never heard of him. He's worth reading. It says on the book jacket that he is the "principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century."

When we think in large abstractions such as race and gender, I've always sensed that we are doing something we shouldn't. It comes to the fore in Marx, and in Hitler, and in many of today's feminists and race theorists. Hayek has many salutary comments against this. Hayek quotes Reinhold Niebuhr on one of the many side-effects of this thinking. "There is... 'an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.' To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group" (163).

At any rate, Hayek seems to have some good hits against the corporate thinkers arising out of German idealism.

Whether he in turn has something that I would back, is another issue. I'm not certain that I think that all-out individualistic capitalism is all that great, especially when it results in factories spewing arsenic into the atmosphere, and workers being abused, sexually assaulted by managers, as we now see in the news reports coming out of China (which is an absurd blend of all-out capitalism, and all-out state control).

The ideas behind our ideas are difficult to track down, and very few can really trace those roots reliably. Hayek's better than most.

I don't know yet about Theodore Burczak, the boy next door. First, I want to read Hayek. Then, I'll read Burczak, and then I'll read a variety of commentary on both of them, to see what light can be shed on the mysteries we confront.

Leon Redbone in E. Meredith

I remember Michael Jackson when Thriller came out, but he got lost in his fantasies or something. Redbone has a more enduring and endearing number. He played in a tiny church in the middle of nowhere built by the Scotch Irish in the 1850s.

Redbone was deliriously charmingly funny between numbers, and he played some of his classics. He kept talking about the heat, but it was chilly, and he kept talking about how the next one was a singalong, and it would be instrumental, or no one would know the lyrics. At one point people called out his hits, and I wanted him to play Speedo, but held my tongue. I thought Speedo was his, but just looked it up and it's Ry Cooder's hit.

Things poke and pop in my brain!

No one knows who Redbone really is apparently, but he's funny and the house was full up here in E. Meredith. He has a very full tour -- about 23 dates but this one kicked it off. I didn't know if he's making it work well with his pianist. Redbone seems such a private man. He's about sixty, and at the very top of his game. The pianist must have been about 34, and played well, very efficiently, but Redbone can drop into a soulful strange southern porch music, in heat with lemonade, or go to New Orleans, or Brazil, turn black, and play a hard mean blues, or go to Paris, and he's on the vaudeville stage, and the pianist was more or less just plain good, but didn't transport himself so easily. The house was packed, and Redbone was charming, made two encores. Someone got his signature and said I've seen you six times. Redbone said, "They haven't carted you away?." He played Big Time Woman, sang like a castrato, sorrowed over the lack of castratos, and at another point whistled so well I was wowed.

Leaving the church, the quarter moon curled nice over the secularized steeple.

YESTERDAY'S HIKE

Got up and went for a hike at a place called Little Pond with a witty electrical engineer named Mark Schneider. Schneider is the husband of my wife's pal, Julie Hilsun. We drove about forty five minutes down Route 2, and then commenced to hike. The Catskill Hikes book said 3.1 miles, but it didn't say that most of it was fairly steep climbing. Mark is a marathon runner and bicyclist, so suffice it to say I was walking after him as well as I could, breathing hard. It's rained 18 out of the last 21 days (as I type this there is a terrific thunderstorm) so the trail was sopping wet and almost a stream at many points, and steep. I think we climbed about 800 ft. in elevation (guidebook says 740 ft. rise), and spent 2.5 hours doing this 3.1 mile hike. Mark is very fit, and for about a year I've been using him as a model of fitness to get some off some fat.

This is part of the Catskill Forest tract but was once farmed. There was a basement to an old house with a tire in it up on a ridge. You could see about twenty miles out, and there were no visible houses. Just trees. If farms existed they were way off the grid. Some of the trees appeared to have been planted by hand -- a ridge of pines that formed a windbreak for what used to be the house. A bunch of apple trees. But the trail was nearly covered over as not many people seem to use this trail. Mark spotted a paw print for a bear. It was fresh, and pretty hefty, and I got a picture of it, but I don't know how to download the photo from my digital camera.

Mark is a Presbyterian. We talked about the George Tiller shooting and he said he had read my blog and wondered about the 60,000 abortions Tiller claimed to have done. He said do the math. I think that is a lot of abortions, but breaking it down into a year amount, over 20 years, you get about 3000 a year, which is about ten a day. How long does it take to do an abortion if women are coming down an assembly line, all anesthetized and there is no counselling before and after -- just the procedure itself? Tiller specialized in late-term abortions, and perhaps at least a few of the abortions might have been on twins or triplets, or even quadruplets, which would up the numbers while minimizing the time spent, but then since they were often third tri-mester (is that legal?), perhaps the children fought for their lives, which used up more time. It's hard to get the numbers straight because I would have to familiarize myself with the entire procedure, but Tiller's own websites proclaimed 60,000 successful abortions. I asked Mark what he thought about this, and he asked me what I thought, and we were both careful to be both Christian, and yet, reasonable, and to remain within the law. It's hard to know what to think about hot button issues and harder still to think about them when you're not sure where another's person's non-negotiables might be.

Mark is fairly conservative but open-minded. He said that Cuba's got some of the problems of localized food production licked due to their not being able to participate in globalization and that we ought to learn from them. He said 25% of the food that is eaten in Havana is actually grown in Havana. I suspected that this was 2nd-hand Cuban agit-prop, but it could be right. Mark checks his facts. Still, I've known people who claim that in Cuba you can do anything you want including just write poems, and I doubt if that is true, and if it is, the poems had better be about what a cool guy Castro is or you'll end up as fertilizer in a banana plantation on the outskirts of Havana. Havana Other Banana.

Back at his house later last night, we ate beans and rice and cornbread, with kale (a spinach alternative) and he told me about his erstwhile neighbor, a man named Theodore Burczak, who now teaches at Denison University. Burczak is an economic historian who has published a book called Socialism after Hayek. He grew up in the tiny hamlet of Delancey, so small it hasn't even got a store. I googled Burczak's book last night when I got home and read the 1st fifteen pages. Copyright doesn't allow me to read any more of it (his publisher is invested in private property!), but it seems to follow the economic theories of Hayek who taught at the University of Chicago for many years until his death in 1991. Hayek is the centerfold of much conservative economic theory that argues against centralized economies as unworkable. H.W. Bush gave Hayek a Freedom Medal in 1991. Burczak has attempted to revive Marxism using Hayek, it seems, and has garnered enormous interest among the usual elites. I might read the rest of Burczak's book, but it's quite expensive: $14.95 at Amazon.com for the cheapest used copy.

We appear to live in two worlds. In one, there is justice, and peace, and love. It's a kind of vertical economy. In the other, there is competition, market forces, and individual appetites. To bring the two together so that appetites are satisfied, and yet justice is maintained, is the millenial dream. If you focus too much on one, the other one suffers. That's why Luther separates them into two kingdoms. At the same time, he argues they are intertwined. The number 8 is often used as a symbol for the Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, but it is set on its side. That is roughly the same symbol we use for infinity. But inside of infinity is also finitude. We appear to be in both worlds at the same time. Our resources are finite, but the universe is infinite. There are probably a few Lutheran economists in the Scandinavian countries who do a better job bringing the two economies together, but they don't teach in our universities and write in unreadable languages, so their work is not available.

My legs are a little sore today. However, I ate too much food last night, so I did not lose weight.

The Tubular Aspect

If people evolved from worms, then there is a tubular aspect to humanity. We seem to have a tube that goes from mouth to anus. I believe that all mammals have this tubular aspect.

While I do believe there is such a thing as cross-species communication (we can talk to dogs, and throw frisbees to them, and they get it), can we actually share communion with a dog, or a cat? Are they capable of spiritual recognition having to do with the presence of God in a wafer? Or is a wafer always just a wafer to a dog or a cat? Can an animal think symbolically about the notion of eternity?

When we say that some peoples are "closer to nature," as it is often said of Native Americans, for instance, is that a good thing?

Cowboys are really horsemen. That is, the men who herd cattle, are generally seen as satyrs, men riding horses to the extent that they seem almost inseparable, joined at the hip. Such men have been thought to represent something important about America. What is it? Independence? And yet, neither the cow nor the horse is independent. We are all three very social species.

We can teach animals tricks. We can use them as symbols (the owl of Minerva, or the Sacred Bat in the Jim Carrey vehicles).

And we can become more like animals to some extent. We can say that someone is quietly walking like a cat, or that they have the curiosity of a cat, or that they are catty, to take one example of how we use the different characteristics of a cat to name similar propensities in people. (The more obvious brunt of the cat's simplicity clarifies similar attitudes that are harder to put your finger on in people.)

People can be like bears, or they can be like mountain goats. And sometimes whole populations take up a skill that is more or less like an animal's general propensity. Mountain-climbing Nazis, people speaking out of their rear end, or we say that older women who go after younger men are "cougars."

And increasingly we want to free animals. It may have started with the book and later the film, Turtle Diary. No, before that is certainly Black Beauty (written by a Quaker). And now more recently we've had Free Willie. In Free Willie whales are given many of the characteristics of humans -- long-term recognition of family, and the ability to strategize carefully, and play on human emotions.

The boundary between man and animal is unclear. If we have evolved from worms (most significantly at the Diet of Wurms), and yet still retain a tubular aspect (indicative of evolution), what does this mean?

Does it mean that animals have souls, and thus deserve human rights? What about slave-holding ants? When the painter Edward Hicks choreographs his animal kingdom paintings having to do with lions lying down with lambs, how do we correlate it with the PEACE that is present as a kind of end-game in communist theory? Peter Singer (a known Hegelian) and the animal rights people try to extend the logic of the Constitution (all men) to all species.

If we were created by God to play steward over the rest of creation, our superiority is clear. And yet there is the tubular aspect which seems to remind us that we are diet for worms.

We appear to be living in what might be described as a rotisserie of animal flesh in which our affinity for animals gives way to our rending of their flesh (our teeth indicate that we were intended as omnivores even if many today would have us living in harmony, and putting away our forks, and taking the subway to a vegetarian cookout in Safari Park).

Our church still has basement dinners after the service. I noted this weekend that there were "devilled" eggs, and "angel food" cake, as well as ham and muffins. If we cannot have a saintly attitude toward all living beings, then how can we be one with the universe? We clearly are not one with the universe if we must eat parts of it, in order to salvage our physical unity.

We eat (which is generally kind of disgusting). And worse, we poop. We do that in absolute private, turning the water faucet on to disguise the air rushing from the tube, and try not to fart in public, because it is yet another reminder of the tubular aspect. The spiritual significance of evolution has yet to be clocked. When we really hate someone we say that they are an animal. Can the faith be reconciled to the reality of evolution?

One aspect that is rarely discussed is sexuality. While the ELCA condoned masturbation in 1957, and since then has eased strictures on homosexuality, (they're just about to ordain homosexuals), they retain the stricture against abortion (at least it's frowned on, indicating they believe in the SANCTITY OF LIFE), the fact that we're bipedal as opposed to quadrupeds (so are chickens) and the fact of procreation itself (which the Catholic monks are not allowed to practice) remain vestigial traces of a disembodied spirituality which has yet to take on the facts of evolution. What does it mean that we are competitive, and that our genes must procreate, as our only means toward eternity, which is what the Darwinians claim?

Marxists are perhaps even more messianic in their drive toward non-competition than Christians. In the light of Darwin, is this realistic?

The tubular aspect threatens to destroy all values, and make us into mere animals. And yet at the same time, there is the attempt to make all animals into saints. The ontological uproar of Darwin's discoveries (the huge heads of Easter Island!) have yet to be reterritorialized into a clear understanding of our role in the world.

The tendency is for us to be dissociative, to deny the tube, even if it means turning on the tube. But now of course, there's Animal Planet right next to EWTN.

1, 2, 3 What Are We Fighting For?

At the Woodstock Festival a group called Country Joe and the Fish muddied the waters so to speak. They had a song that went, "1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for, don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam, and it's 5, 6, 7 open up the Pearly Gates, ain't no reason to wonder why, whoopee, we're all gonna die!"

I couldn't believe that the people who sang that song or penned it, really didn't understand why America was in Vietnam. It astonished me. It was about freedom! It wasn't about opening a market in Saigon for Pepsi, as the Communists claimed. It was about freedom! But this message has been muted by the communists who now effectively own most of our media outlets.

Nevertheless, I got my hands on Journal of Democracy a week back when I was visiting Princeton's Labyrinth Books. In it were wonderful articles. One was by Jean Bethke Elshtain, who argued that Protestantism and democracy are closely related. Another was an omnibus article by Arch Puddington in which he wrote about the rise and fall of democratic virtues in the world's countries. There are some pie charts and other things at www.freedomhouse.org if you can't get your hands on this exact journal.

Puddington wrote in Journal of Democracy, April 09:

"Dissidents and freedom advocates deserve the support and protection of the world's democracies. The emergence toward the end of the year of a movement of democracy advocates in China, under the banner of Charter 08, offers hope that something like a genuine community of dissidents is in formation. Charter 08 and similar groups, however, will fail to gain a foothold if their programs and personalities are ignored by allies in established democracies. President Bush set a good example by meeting regularly with dissidents, bloggers, women's rights advocates, and other champions of freedom. It is an example that other democratic leaders should follow" (106).

Obama on the other hand rewards authoritarian regimes by looking the other way and not mentioning their "policies of domestic oppression" (107), and pretending their leaders are hunky dory. He's enabling them by doing this.

We don't need to invade these countries, but we need to at least stand up to them and call them evil, as Reagan did, and as Bush did. I don't think the multiculturalists can do this, because they are devoted to the idea that all cultures were created equal, and therefore none is better than any other, and we must love everyone and everything equally, having no criteria at all by which to judge, since judging is bad. Which wipes out the very notion of change under which the current president was supposedly elected. But that term "change" has all kinds of slippage in it. Does the big O want regime change? Does he want freedom and justice for all? Or does he just want us to change our criteria so that we accept anyone, and anything, as equal? So that Hannibal Lector becomes the equivalent of Paris Hilton, and Imelda Marcos becomes the equivalent of George Washington?

Quotes Taken from "The 2008 Freedom House Survey," by Arch Puddington, published in Journal of Democracy, April 2009, 93-107.

The people in Iran may have only a vague notion of what they're fighting for, but they must have a better idea than Country Joe and the Fish. Among other things they want an electoral democracy where votes are counted fairly. They want a two-party system. Hey, that's a start.

Youth in countries all over the world want American freedoms.

No communist countries possess that attribute because we failed to help their people fight for it. Vietnam, Myanmar, N. Korea, China, and all the others, have none of the freedoms whatsoever that we take for granted, and that Obama thinks is just one virtue among many. You probably can't make this qualitative distinction with Country Joe and the Fish, who were so busy getting stoned and making noise that they have almost certainly lost their marbles by now, as well as their ability to hear.

For those who can still hear: Let freedom ring!

OBAMA ON IRAN

Obama is the biggest Obamaton. He waits to hear what he thinks people want to hear, and then, he says it, just the way he thinks they want to hear it. Until he has his polls out, he has no idea what to think or say. Obama is an Obamaton!

Anomalies

There are almost no norms left. Everything today is an anomaly.

In Munson, NJ at the sandwich shop called Brennan's, for example, the bathroom door SLIDES shut and then there is a sliding bolt shaft at the joint where the door meets the hinge. In the same bathroom to get paper you have to pull a bar down.

In the busses from La Guardia into Brooklyn, you had to have a yellow Metro card. You had to put it in vertically, with the stripe to the right. The bus driver expected me to know this. To get out of the bus I had to push the doors open, because they wouldn't open by themselves.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art I asked a guard where the bathroom was. I was finished with the Francis Bacon show, and couldn't find the bathroom. He pointed it out to me behind a glass wall. The toilet flushed itself when I walked in, and again when I walked out.

On the train home, I tried to push the doors open, but they wouldn't open. There was a silver knob to my upper right, and you had to push on that. The people in the train looked astonished that I didn't know this.

Every hotel has different breakfast hours, and different breakfast foods. At one hotel you got a choice of six items from a list, but first you had to present the breakfast voucher. At another hotel the breakfast ended two hours earlier, and there were no choices. You helped yourself. The Raisin Bran came in a glass stack next to Oatio's. You had to put your styrofoam bowl beneath the bin and turn a glass knob, which gave you about enough Raisin Bran to feed a bird.

All over the city I met such anomalies. Different prices at different museums. Different modes of payment at each green grocer's. Some wouldn't take cash. Some wouldn't take credit. Each one acted as if this was the normal and natural way of doing things and had been since Adam.

Don't get me started on churches, and denominations, much less on different faiths.

Every person is a walking set of anomalies, each convinced that this is the only way to go.

I don't want to leave the house for a week.

Argument & counterargument

Argument: God cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs, and therefore He does not exist.

Counterargument: hope, faith, charity, love, fairness, beauty, time, space, and happiness also cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs. Does this mean as well that they do not exist?

New York Impressions

1. From the 25th floor of the hotel on Lexington and 49th I looked at a reflective (glass?) building across the street reflecting the traffic from a block over and it looked as if the traffic was driving right into the building and disappearing.

2. This morning I was in an F train going from a place called Roosevelt Heights toward Central Park. The train was filled with minorities. I was in fact the minority. And one of the children was so cute. She was a tiny Indian girl about 4 years old. She had a funny shiny reddish purple jacket with shoes the same color. I had never seen this color before. The kid looked like a monkey. I am struck by how people from other cultures look like beautiful strange monkeys. I guess we really are monkeys, or something like a monkey. I don't mean to say this disrespectfully. We appear to be a kind of monkey that doesn't have fur. The kid was so cute!

3. I went into the Metropolitan Museum, and saw several intense shows. I saw the Francis Bacon exhibit. Bacon is a gay British painter who painted astonishing portraits of screaming popes. I never liked his work and felt bad going in, but felt I had to learn more about it, and him, as he could really paint! One odd thing in the video I watched is that he said if he wasn't a painter he would have been a thief. He just couldn't wait to break commandments, I guess. He said that he thought Christian people were more interesting than atheists, but that he hated them. It took me several minutes to overcome the palpable hatred of the show. I had to say the Lord's Prayer, and think very hard about Jesus, and kindness, before I could get my sanity back.

4. There was a show about the Korean Renaissance from 1400-1600. This Renaissance coincided with a rise of Confucian thought, as opposed to Buddhist thought, within Korean borders. The art of this period left a lot to be desired. Lots of paintings of people sitting cross-legged, letting their beards go unshaven.

5. I checked my email at an internet shop, and my eight-year-old updated me on the family's progress in Finland:

Hi daddy. Julian is a little wierd. He yells a lot here in Finland. It gets very enoying! I do not like it when he yells every second of my life. And do not ask about Lola. She tells on people. When ever it is not dinner time and we did not have dinner yet and she knows that... Guess what she does. Tells on me and everybody else. Julian just screamed because he did not want to go in the shower. Mommy gets realy angry a lot. When me and julian were playing this game in the elevators at pappas. Mommy started screaming and getting angry. We were not letting the other person get on the elevator at the sam time. Julian was trying to get in the elevator. But I jusst pushed him out of the elevator! Julian was knocking at the elevator and saying hey! And I did not get in trouble. But Julian did it was so funny! We were not aloud to go on the elevaor but mommy saw us. Mommy told me to go in the shower. So by daddy. From, Tristan

6. I then went to the Museum of the City of New York at 103rd and 5th. It seems that the Dutch Reformed Church had a monopoly on religious faith during the heyday of New York. Lutherans were not permitted to have a Lutheran minister. And the Dutch company that owned New Amsterdam didn't allow for free trade. So after the British army defeated the Dutch army in the wars from 1652-1654 there was religious and economic liberty.

The Dutch had started the colony for the trade in beaver pelts. They kept slaves, but had to ask permission from the Governor to beat them, and it was rarely granted. After about 1700, the life of slaves in New York worsened. But they were freed again in 1808. That's a hundred years of slavery!

Stoop, boss, cookie, cruller, and Yankee, are Dutch words. The Dutch are the 4th largest investors in America today.

7. Lots of NEGLECTORINOS surfacing. I got a note from Jerome Rothenberg who was a friend of a poet named Seymour Faust. Faust was in favor of the Vietnam War back in the 60s and his friends all shunned him. Now they want to be his friend again. I know Faust's address. So I am going to give it to Rothenberg. But Faust I bet won't write. Shunning really hurts a person. It hurts, I tell you! And being shunned for forty years -- I doubt if Faust is just going to forgive and forget.

Shunning is the harshest thing on earth, except maybe making someone a slave.

So don't tell me the Amish are non-violent: they are the meanest people on the planet. Shunning is the most violent of all activities. As a last resort, I can understand it. But people need acceptance.

Walking around New York you sense how lonely people are. They don't know why, but there are so many people, and many are locked in a bubble where nobody talks to them! So I chatted some up, and they appeared grateful. I talked to security guards, and to cookie people, and to lonely Indian men selling icecream bars in Central Park. They called me friend, and one almost cried! He called me friend, and then appeared ashamed!

8. I forgot something. Celine Arnauld was a Dadaist, but she was a woman, so she hasn't been in any of the big anthologies, and has been NEGLECTED. I have for years wanted to know more about her, because she was in some of the early photos as the only woman, and almost nothing is known. Browsing in the Metropolitan Museum bookstore I opened a book called Dada's Women by Ruth Hemus (Yale UP 2009). Arnaud wrote to Tzara in 1924 and said hey mention me in the Dada histories, don't just NEGLECT me. Tzara kept her letter, but never mentioned her. Celine Arnauld was a Romanian Jew named Carolina Goldstein who appeared at age 20 in Paris in 1915, and was the wife of Paul Dermee. When Dermee died, she committed suicide 1 month later in 1952. I find that kind of love to be touching, and have always wanted to know more about Celine Arnauld. In NYC, you feel you are in touch with the latest information.

9. There's a sandwich shop called Brennan's in a town on the Jersey Shore called Rumson. I thought the eggplant sandwich was great. Everyone in the world should get to eat once at Brennan's. My friend Paul liked his sandwich, too. We drove for an hour to get one. Life is kind of like that: it drags on and on through the horror of New Jersey, and then suddenly you're at Brennan's.

BANANAS ABOUT NEW YORK

I am in NYC which is a "trip" to see my old pal Paul who is conducting business here.

1.

On the metro there was a disheveled elderly man speaking to himself, and he said to himself, "Do you solemnly swear that you are not a nerd?"

He then responded, "I do hereby solemnly swear and attest to the fact that I am not a nerd."

His voice shifted to a second character in the second statement. He was not amusing himself, but was apparently having a serious internal trial about his status as a nerd.

2. The Jewish Museum near Battery Park has lots of extra guards around it wearing all kinds of military gear looking like they're out of the Terminator film series, apparently in response to the 89-year old Mensa member who went on a rampage in the DC Jewish Museum last week.

3. I saw Nick Cage filming an episode for a forthcoming Disney film entitled Sorcier's Apprentice. This was last night at Bowling Green Park, near Battery Park. Cage was being shot by a laser bolt from a bad wizard, and he had to leap in the air and land on his back. He had a stunt double do the actual leaping and landing, and the double landed right on his back on the pavement. They made the man do about twenty takes, but most of the time he got to land on a thick pad.

Nick Cage looked at me for a minute. he is one of my favorite actors, especially when he does low-budget indies. He had very luminous eyes, and is about 6'2". He looked annoyed that I was so close to the set, but I had permission. I was only about twenty feet from him at one point. I was being very quiet, but I felt bad that I might have been annoying him. He appeared to roll his eyes directly at me, and it was like a laser bolt that blew me right off the sidewalk until I landed on my back. Emotionally speaking, that is. My friend from High School Donna Maloney is the costume supervisor. She also did costuming for about 40 other films. She did some of the work on the English Patient, and also for the most recent film The Reader. She spent a year in Berlin on The Reader. I had heard that at least some of the characters aren't wearing much in that film, so maybe that job wasn't that hard, but I haven't seen that movie. It hasn't made it to TV yet, and movies like that don't make it to Delaware County, which has only two theatres, each about a twenty minute drive in tiny hamlets. It was fun to see Donna Maloney. She looks more or less the same, but I hadn't seen Donna for 35 years. She has a nice boyfriend named TR who was operating the boom (whatever that is), last night. He was very pleasant and engaging between takes. He went to RISD, and has been working on films for years.

3. Paul and I and his daughter saw Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in the Central Park Delacorte Production. It was magical. The best Shakespeare I've ever seen live. You get tickets by showing up at the box office at 1 pm on the west side of Central Park at 81st, and you have to stand in line for about an hour, and you get them for free.

4. Tomorrow Edward O. Wilson is going to talk about insect cooperation. I can't wait. It's at 5 pm at NYU.

5. I read a neat essay in a journal I picked up yesterday at Princeton's Labyrinth Books. The journal is called Journal of Democracy, and the article was by Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Lutheran by birth (she's drifted), but who is now an ardent champion and interpreter of democracy. The article is called Religion and Democracy. In it, she argues that Christianity had a huge role in the development of democracy, and that from the beginning, in Locke, until and through the civil rights movement in this country, and even for escaped slaves, it provided the notion of a promised land where human dignity would prevail. She argues that something similar exists within Islam, and that many moderates within Islam are struggling to articulate it from within their own parameters. It gave me a very precise new vocabulary to try out (I'll have to look up the word plebiscitic).

Garry Kasparov the Russian chess master in the same issue (April 2009) argues that Russian democracy under Putin is a sham and it's actually a mafia-esque oligarchy with increasingly diminished roles for dissidents.

6. That's all, folks!

7. Oh wait, I saw a show about French writers under the Occupation, and am now in the New York Public Library. They published a book about Jack Kerouac's preoccupation with Fantasy Baseball. It's a wonderful book with lots of color prints inside but is 25 dollars and hence well out of my budgetary range, unfortunately. Kerouac for years had a lively interior monologue going about his own fantasy baseball league. This was most active in his teens, but apparently was something he still thought about even as he squibbed his major novels. I saw a reference to this on Silliman's blog about a month back and wanted to check it out.

8. I had two slices of pizza at Lombardi's at 32 Spring St. (corner of Mott) in Little Italy last evening. Not too bad. The slices were so thin (crust-wise) that I don't think they were much more than 300 calories a slice. I am down to 174 in the morning and wanted to hit the 160s this summer. I may yet do that by walking enough, jogging when I can, and doing jumping jacks, plus not eating everything in sight. But there are food triggers everywhere. People cook sausages right on the street, and every other shop promises you some weird food from the Ukraine or Vietnam or whatever. So far today I had a bowl of oatmeal at Raffles at 48th, and put a half a banana in it. That should hold me until dinner.

9. Ten minutes left on the library computer in room 315 of the New York Public Library. It's a warm day out, and it may rain. What should I do next? There's a show about the Dutch in New York at the Historical Society. A show about Korean paintings from the 1400s at the Met. I don't know where my friend Paul is just now. He's adrift. He gave me a cellphone to contact him, but I have never used a cellphone and have no idea how it works. Every once in a while it hums or buzzes, but when I talk at it, it doesn't talk back. I tried opening it, and realized I could look up sports scores in it!

PARADES OF SHAME CALLED FOR BY LS COMMANDANT

1. When Euclid penned his five axioms of geometry he was thinking about a flat plane. Now that we have post-Euclidian geometry, it takes into account curved surfaces. Since no actual flat planes exist in nature, it's time that we caught up with space.

2. In veterinary science classes, they divide animals using various lines. It can be made according to domesticated animals (cats and dogs, but also, horses: these animals are also thought of as companionable), and wild animals, or animals that are used for food.

Some animals kick, some bite.

Chickens. Where do you put chickens?

3. Lutheran Surrealism divides the world into nations that support total freedom of inquiry, and those that do not.

a. Lutherans
b. Catholics
c. Muslims
d. Marxists


4. No culture should be proud of itself. There should be marches of shame. No culture should ever march with pride. Lutherans should lead the way in sorrow over the liaison with Hitler of many Lutherans. We should wave the pamphlets of anti-Semitism, and say, SORRY! We should hold posters of our mass murderers: the BTK killer, and the Milwaukee fellow: Dahmer.

Catholics should walk behind us wailing about the Inquisitions. Sorry! Sorry, Sorry! So so so so sorry! Galileo was right! We were wrong! What WERE we thinking?

Muslims should be embarrassed by 9/11, and killing the Jews at the Munich Olympics. They should say they're sorry they shot little girls in soccer stadiums who were only trying to read. Curiosity is natural, Muslims! Say you're sorry!

Marxists should say they're sorry about Kampuchea, the Cultural Revolution, N. Korea, Zimbabwe, Ceausescu, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring, the Potemkin, the slaughter of the anarchists in Spain. Marxists have a lot to be sorry about. But they already feel like they're victims, so it should be easy for them to run about, weeping.

Gay men should be sorry they have cost so much in medical fees to the nation.

Blacks should be sad that they cost so much to incarcerate.

Whites should be sorry they kept blacks as slaves.

Jews should be sorry they slaughtered the Canaanites.

We should have no more pride marches. We should just say we're sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

5. Mosquito management: about 3000 cases of West Nile occur every summer in the US of A. Last year, eight of these cases were in Connecticut, according to the head of the office of Mosquito Management for Connecticut. Biggest breeder of mosquitoes: unkempt swimming pools. Owners of such pools should march through the city, begging forgiveness, and flogging themselves. Another problem of such mosquito populations: encephalitis. While West Nile is rarely fatal, encephalitis is occasionally fatal, or can make you lapse into a coma. I heard this last night on the radio while driving across Connecticut at 73 mph. I was exceeding the speed limit, but so was everybody else, and we're all SORRY. Me, especially. Sorry I wasn't going even faster!

6. People from poor cultures are poor because their thinking is poor. People from rich cultures have nothing to be ashamed about. Their thinking is good. This is why they are so wealthy. Their thinking is not only up to speed, it's breaking the land-speed records.

7. What, then, is thinking? Thinking is thinking about thinking. Comparative study of cultures should begin not with pride, but with shame. All animals should be ashamed because they can't think about thinking. Squirrels are just plain squirrelly. They should be ashamed. Sheep are sheepish. That's a good beginning. Apes go ape. For shame! Dogs have been mean to cats. That isn't right. Rats are called rats for a reason. Ants are the basis of communism, as are bees, and should be equally ashamed. There are no animals that shouldn't be ashamed. All animals are not human, and they go around without clothes. They should be ashamed. The peacock should be especially ashamed for being so shameless.

The only animal that wears clothes should be the most ashamed, because the clothes rarely fit. Just look around. Almost nobody is wearing clothes that actually conform to the notion of beauty. They should feel ashamed. And if they do fit, then they are spending way too much time in front of the mirror. It's a shame: everybody should get out the flails and we should have a parade. Let's get medieval, people! Hair shirts for everybody: let's go to town!

UPDATE ON MY FEELINGS ABOUT OBAMA

I felt at the time that Barack Obama was the most morally insane candidate that the Democrats had produced since John Kerry. I still feel that way.

I don't think the Republican candidate offered much in the way of improvement. I thought McCain was wobbly and possibly dangerous. McCain had a powerful tradition behind him and his father did a good job, but McCain was sort of a natural adventurer, and I had just hoped the apple wouldn't fall too far from the tree.

With Obama, you just have to hope that not only did the apple far fall from the tree, but that it rolled about a half a mile.

IDA TARBELL

The crossword in the morning paper had as 41 down Writer Tarbell. From the surrounding letters I figured it was an Ida Tarbell, and looked her up. I had never heard of her before.

Ida Tarbell was a muckraker (1857-1944) who wrote a lengthy account of the Standard Oil Company (published in 1904) which helped to destroy its monopoly. She hid the fact that her father was an oil speculator who had been ruined by Standard Oil, and her brother ran a competing company called Pure Oil Co.

She also wrote biographies of Napoleon, A. Lincoln, and many journalistic pieces. She was asked to get involved in the struggle for women's reproductive rights, but refused. Often linked to Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, and other muckrakers, she didn't like the name "muckraker," and preferred "historian." Here we have her own take from Wikipedia:

"She didn’t like the label Muckraker and wrote an article “Muckraker or Historian” where she justified her efforts for exposing the oil trust. She referred to "this classification of muckraker, which I did not like. All the radical element, and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced.""

I think too that "balanced findings" are of a lot more interest in the long run, which is why I can't stand either Madcow Rachel, or Hannity Vanity. Tarbell's history of Standard Oil was mentioned as one of the top five journalistic books of the 20th century in an article that appeared in the NYT in 1999. Tarbell is now a feminist icon, and is in the Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY (where one of the first feminist congresses was held mid-nineteenth century).

Tarbell got her own postage stamp in 2002.

A LUTHERAN LIBERAL WRITES TO LS ABOUT ABORTION

Within the Lutheran church there are enormous divides almost as enormous as those which divide rivers into different watersheds. While I am myself now fairly conservative, I haven't always been. In my 20s, I read green anarchists. In my thirties, I was still a Democrat. When W. first got into office, I was scandalized. But after 9/11, I had some kind of seismic shift, and the water began to flow another way. One thing that had always bothered me about the left was their scandalous sexual disorientation. Not only the easy acceptance of abortion, but also promiscuity, and the angry demand that more money be funneled by the CDC into curing sexual diseases (it appears to be about 50% or more even now, which means that no money at all goes toward the study and prevention of Lyme's Disease, among other maladies). In a world with infinite problems, and finite resources, I think that it is better for men and women to limit their sexual contacts to monogamous committed relationships. I say it's BETTER. But of course people stray. The sex drive is so powerful, especially in the young, that it's likely to blow almost anyone off course if given the right circumstances. But I'm still against abortion. I think the unborn child is a person, and a person is a person no matter how small, as Horton put it. However, lots of people disagree. I received a giant letter today from a Lutheran Liberal who regularly takes me to task for my positions at LS, usually via back channel. Suffice it to say that there are dozens of such good citizens who write to me, and I write back to them. I find it valuable to exchange ideas. I work on the principle of the blind men and the elephant. I assume that everyone else sees something that I don't, partially because of the position that I and they occupy. This particular letter-writer wishes to remain unnamed, but he's a Lutheran who voted for Obama, and who believes in Obama, as do about 50% of Lutherans. The first sentence with the carot is mine. The rest of this is his. See what you make of it. It's the liberal position within Lutheranism, I think, as filtered through a very very good mind. It's quite long, and longer than anything I usually post, but it's so interesting, that I think it's worth printing. Normally, I would put it in a comments box, but perhaps -- because it's so timely -- just after the Tiller assassination, and on a topic about which we all disagree, that I think it's worth an entire post of its own. -- Kirby Olson

> I think all Lutherans are against abortion, but I'm not sure.

This does not admit a short reply. I'll start with the formal refutation, and move on from there...

From the ELCA social statement on Abortion:

Induced abortion, the act of intentionally terminating a
developing life in the womb, is one of the issues about
which members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
have serious differences. These differences are also found
within society.

Of course, this is only a refutation if you accept that the ELCA is a Lutheran confession. This is a controversial proposition within the confessing churches (by which I do not refer to Bonhoeffer's anti-Nazi churches, but rather the way certain contemporary Lutheran Churches to the right of LCMS, e.g., the ELS, describe themselves), but given that you belonged to an ELCA church until recently, I hope you'll go along with me on this.

Let me lay out this liberal's position, and try to demonstrate that it does not come from a reckless disregard for scripture, but instead comes from the attempt to apply the scriptural principles to the conditions of today. I'll note that Jesus often did this -- taking a old testament law, and reinterpreting it radically to fit the social situation of his day.

Let's start with Matthew 19:3-9.

Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked,
"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?"
He answered, "Have you not read that the one who made them at
the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For
this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be
joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? So
they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has
joined together, let no one separate." They said to him, "Why
then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal
and to divorce her?" He said to them, "It was because you
were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your
wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to
you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and
marries another commits adultery." (NRSV)

And I think that divorce is the right place to begin, because it is an analogous situation, but one in which we're in the same boat, in that both of our confessions have adapted policies that are more flexible than the clear word of scripture. This is from the LCMS:

The LCMS believes that divorce is contrary to God's
original design and intention for marriage. While divorce can
be justified Scripturally in certain situations (adultery or
desertion), it is always preferable for couples to forgive and
work toward healing and strengthening their marriage. Because
no two situations are alike, LCMS pastors deal on a
case-by-case basis with members (or potential members) who are
wrestling with the issue of (past or present) divorce.

The LCMS takes the position that divorce is an undesireable outcome, contrary to God's intent, but despite Jesus's clear statement "What God has joined together, let no one separate," it is no longer willing to say that divorce is always wrong, and therefore forbidden to its members. I do not raise this point in order to claim that "you're all sinners too," but rather because I believe that the LCMS is trying to be faithful to God in this, and to Jesus's message, but in a very different social situation than he faced.

Let me paint a picture of the ancient world, borrowing from Rodney Stark's "The Rise of Christianity." Stark, btw, is an interesting character. He's a fallen Lutheran, no longer Christian, but not atheist, nor even agnostic. He cares, but doesn't know what to make of the evidence. That said, he's a social conservative, maybe even a bit to the right of you.

In the ancient world, women were always under the control of men. Before they were married, they were under the control of their fathers; while married, they were under the control of their sons; once widowed, if lucky, they were under the control of their sons (modulo levirate marriages). If a woman was under the control of a man -- her husband, father, or even son -- and he said, "lie down," she did, with all that implies. If pregnant, and he said "abort," she did. If delivered, he could say, "expose the infant," and the child would be abandoned. Women were de facto property. If the husband wanted to divorce her, he did -- but she could not divorce him. If divorced or widowed, she would need to secure a male protector immediately -- her father, another husband -- or she faced a choice between prostitution and death.

The Christian community was very different. Divorce was forbidden, active widows served as deacons, and elderly widows were cared for by the church. And abortion was forbidden. Within the church (*), women and men were equal, and husband and wife were responsible for one another. The dominant abuses of the ancient world were cast aside, in favor of social organizations that were more equitable, more just.

Now, for the (*). Let me shift gears for one paragraph, following Borg and Crossan, "The Last Paul." The Pauline corpus is more complicated that literalist churches are willing to accept. The Pastorals (1st & 2nd Timothy, Titus) describe church organization as it existed after 100 CE. Indeed, the church structure of the pastorals is clearly later than the church structure described in Revelation. According to tradition, Paul died in 66-67 CE, under Nero's persecutions. I'm sure you see the problem. If we trim the Pauline epistles down to those for which there is a reasonable scholarly consensus, we lose the misogynistic passages often attributed to Paul, and are left with the passages of radical equality. Those passages, and similar passages attributed to Jesus directly, are at the core of our religion. The misogynistic stuff is later, and contrary to the clear message of Jesus and Paul.

So let's fast forward to the semi-modern world. I'm old enough to remember a world before divorce was legal in most states. I can remember clearly abusive marriages among my parents' friends and acquaintances. They were exceptions -- the most of the marriages were good -- but the bad ones were open secrets within the community. Women in bad marriages were beaten, humiliated, abused. Sometimes they died. This is not what God wants for us. We came to see that abandonment was no longer the dominant evil in the marriage relationships -- after all, women outside of the control of men can prosper in our society -- abuse was. So divorce laws changed. They became symmetric -- i.e., they could be initiated by either party. Divorce was no longer (dominantly) a means for men to exert control over women, and society (along with most Christian confessions) came to view it differently. The social problem of abusive marriages was not fully solved by admitting the possibility of divorce, but it has been greatly ameliorated.

As for abortion, a principle evil of the ancient world was that women were not viewed as fully human. If their controlling man said "abort," their desires simply did not matter. The early Church's stance on abortion represented the best possible approach in the world in which they lived. It got the common case, where the woman wanted to carry the child to term, but the man did not, right. But it today's world, a hard line against abortion in all cases amounts to, once again, men dictating to women what they must do with their bodies -- it is the old sin, recontextualized.

In our world, some women conceive because of rape or incest. Without abortion the crime that was committed against them is extended and intensified. Likewise, some fetuses are not viable, and carrying them to term increases the risks to the mother, and delays the start of the healing process. The ancient world did not present women with the tragedy of knowing that the child they would carry for the next four months (to take a case where late-term abortion would be considered today) would not survive. Where is the love of mercy in forcing that modern mother to carry her child? Where is the justice in murdering those who would provide for their relief? Where is the humility before God in deciding that we will judge what is in a man's heart, rather than leaving this to him?

The primary church body behind the anti-abortion movement (the Roman Catholic Church), has a attitude towards contraception which is in equal and large measures naïve and unyielding. I'd go so far as to say that as a practical matter, the Rome's policy on contraception has been the root cause of more abortions than any position ever taken or even contemplated by any Lutheran confession. Indeed, it remains the same attitude that Luther so rightly condemned in the context of monastic vows -- how can a boy of 10 or 12 make an informed vow of chastity? Our bodies and minds don't work that way. The Catholic Church would have us believe, simultaneously, that an infant is both God's greatest gift, which we must never decline, and God's punishment for those who live unchaste lives, which they must not reject.

I believe that a just world is a world in which abortion is safe and available, but rarely used -- a safety valve. It is the woman's choice, reachied in consultation with her medical and spiritual advisors. A just world requires effective sex education, and the availability of effective contraception. A just world is not a world of sexual license and immorality -- but our mere existence is proof enough that God's gift of sexual desire has been sufficient powerful to overcome all of the obstacles that human history has put in front of it. If we believe that we are clever enough to create new obstacles that will suffice, we are only fooling ourselves.

Finally, let me note that the scriptural witness w.r.t. abortion is no where near as clear as the scriptural witness w.r.t. divorce. Abortion was well-known in the ancient world, and was viewed as a separate category from murder. Taking the scriptural arguments against murder, and reading them as if they applied to murder, simply cannot be reconciled with their original meaning. That so called "literalists" insist on doing so shows how little that word actually means.

GARY SNYDER IN SEATTLE

When I used to live in Seattle Gary Snyder would show up every three years or so, and I'd always make it to his readings. He wasn't my favorite Beat, but he shared some of their more sanguine traits. In particular, he thought for himself.

In Seattle this week, he was asked about global warming. Seattle is a town full of nobodies who can't think for themselves. Perhaps the animal they most resemble is the lemming.

The following appeared at a website entitled Seattlest.com.

"During the long Q&A session after his Seattle Arts and Lectures talk, Gary Snyder was asked about climate change and everyone in Benaroya Hall mentally leaned in to hear. "I don't worry about it," said Snyder, taking the opportunity to mention that he thought about climate change in chunks of geologic time, 200 million years or so. There used to be palm trees in Greenland, he pointed out, and while we Pleistocene refugees may be freaked out at losing our glaciers, it's fair to say the world has warmed up more than this before."

Greenland was in fact green before the Little Ice Age that began in 900 AD. The Vikings grew grapes for wine there, and continued to try to eke out a living for another hundred years or so (I don't have the timeline exactly straight) before their settlements died out in the increasing cold during which time they could no longer fish due to the ice blocking the harbors.

I want Greenland to turn green again. I want Greenland to become prime real estate. The Lutheran Scandinavian countries would then be the best places in the world to live not only in terms of lifestyle, but climate, and Denmark's postage-stamp status (to which Napoleon had reduced it) would grow again, and become one of the world's biggest countries.

Danish would then be a world language rivalling English.

Dr. Lomberg -- a Dane who squibbed the volume entitled The Environmental Skeptic, has argued that an additional 500,000 people would not freeze to death every year if the greenhouse effect warmed up the earth several additional degrees.

Mr. Gore is so hard-hearted against Lutheran Scandinavia. But let's give those people a chance to warm up and spread out. Maybe they'll even turn back to their Viking Ways and attack the rest of the world with Lutheran church circulars.

Former VP Gore doesn't care who freezes to death so long as he has an issue that can convince the noble lemmings to vote for him.

Melt, baby, melt!

GEORGE TILLER SHOOTING CONDEMNED

I don't generally write about current events because I'm more concerned with theory. However, yesterday's shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller at a Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas, seems to dovetail theory with practice. Tiller worked as an abortionist, and his specialty was dealing with late-term abortions. He had apparently performed over 60,000 abortions. There is a page on his work here which has a quotation from his own voice bragging that he has performed over 60,000 abortions. I cannot vouch for its authenticity:

http://www.dr-tiller.com/biography.htm

Although the man had killed 60,000 babies, abortion is legal. Shooting the living (abortionist or evangelical) is not. Therefore, Lutheran Surrealism condemns the shooting, as we believe all laws must be followed by Lutheran Surrealists from the restrictions against murder (only the state has the right to put someone to death, in no case can a lone vigilante act on their own) all the way down to shoplifting or speeding. Law must be followed. If you don't like the law you can vote against it, or lobby for another law to replace it, using the first amendment. The move toward the second amendment is also a move against the commandment that we shall not kill. Killing is always wrong, therefore, unless it is sanctioned by law. There is perhaps one loophole here which has to do with a rogue state that doesn't allow for the four freedoms of Locke: life, liberty, health, and property.

Therefore, it was ok for Bonhoeffer to off Hitler. We approve of that attempt, (though not its bungled execution).

We do not think that Doctor Tiller qualifies as a Hitlerite, or as a Mengele, or as anything but a doctor who was doing what he thought was a good thing for women. It was legal for him to do this, has been legal since the 1970s, and we think it's therefore within his right to perform it, and to advertise for its performance.

Law is too important a thing to override. The lone vigilante who popped Tiller is no martyr. We do not believe in civil disobedience. We think it's always wrong. If your conscience absolutely forces you to do something, you must immediately turn yourself over to the law, as Socrates and Jesus did, (and as the Weathermen did not). Fleeing, as the lone vigilante did, doubles the crime, and should double the penalty.

We stand with the law, even if we find it disturbing that Dr. Tiller performed late-term abortions, and advertised himself as such, since it is well-known that late-term abortions are often inflicted on children that could have lived even without extensive neo-natal care.

We believe in the law.

(Btw., This is also why we are increasingly concerned about the Sonia Sotomayor case, and hope that she is not in fact a racially prejudiced individual who will attempt to render her judgment from within an imbalanced rubric in which race comes before impartiality, and that she will not in fact make the personal into the political, but be a fair judge, who is blind with regard to the racial identity of the accused. The personal is the political is a terribly imbalanced phrase, indicating violent partiality, especially when one is entrusted with state power from behind a bench or a lectern, whether or not it's justified by a Mein Kampf, or any other biographical spew.)