The Exotericist

The battle for Peshawar

2008-06-28T11:20:00.002-05:00

The good news: Pakistan is finally starting to fight some of the Taliban-allied militias on its northwest frontier.

The bad news: It's only because they're about to capture a city of 3 million people.

FLASHBACK: The battle for Swat, a region some of us know all too well.

Death and the archbishop

2008-06-26T16:31:00.008-05:00

So now we know what got Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, killed earlier this year: He wouldn't pay up anymore.

This is from the front page of the Times this morning. Not sure what to think yet -- other than that (with the possible exception of the photo they put above the fold) it's one of the more blood-boiling things I've seen in quite a while.

It's the flip-side, I guess, of the mass exodus of Iraqi Christians since the rise of the insurgency: Those who have stayed have been forced to pay handsomely for the privilege -- with the protection money becoming a major source of funding for Al Qaeda & Co.

I've been trying for a while to imagine myself in the shoes of one of those Iraqi priests -- and increasingly longing for the stark moral clarity of a deny-Christ-or-be-eaten-by-lions type deal.

I hope I could say with a straight face that I wouldn't pay; cooperating with that kind of evil just doesn't seem to fall under the rubric of "rendering unto Caesar." As for those who did: There's a kind of humbling relief that such a decision wasn't my cross to bear -- just as it's now not my place to judge.

Still, I can't help but be struck by the model of Archbishop Rahho. Who knows whether he felt any of the shame for making the payments that comes through from the other Christians in the article -- but it certainly didn't stop him from denouncing them as soon as he saw his opening. Probably a lesson there.

May his martyrdom be a powerful one -- especially in a climate that tosses that word around far too often.

Rest in peace.

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

2008-06-22T09:14:00.003-05:00

Not that you were going to see The Happening anyway.

For the record, I enjoyed the movie -- which is like some of the other M. Night Shyamalan films I've seen in that they often need to age a little while before you realize just how silly they are.

One of Shyamalan's more obnoxious tells is that whenever he wants the audience to know something of significance to the plot, he'll have one of his bit characters just come out and say it. Thus, he uses his own cameo in Signs to tell the Mel Gibson character -- without any indication as to how on earth he might have come across this knowledge -- that he thinks the scary alien invaders are allergic to water. Which, of course, turns out to be true.

So as soon as the creepy old botanist who's fleeing the yet-unknown phenomenon that's causing everyone along the eastern seaboard to kill themselves randomly tells Mark Wahlberg, "I think I know what's doing this. It's the plants." -- well, you know it's the plants.

Turns out, the entire northeastern flora has up and decided its finally time to punish humanity for their wicked, polluting ways -- or, in more scientific terms, rapidly evolve a chemical defense mechanism that attacks people's self-preservation instinct.

Anthony Sacramone over at First Things has some interesting and only half tongue-in-cheek thoughts as to why the film's message might not be entirely as eco-radical as meets the eye, before coming to the conclusion that it's best not to think too hard about all this.

Which is probably true, because what I picked up from the film was a sneaky and none-too-coherent attack on nuclear power.

The question gets raised from time to time throughout the movie: Why is this "happening" only happening in the northeastern United States? We never find out for sure. But during the split-second that Wahlberg flips on the radio in an abandoned truck he finds, Shyamalan makes sure the entire audience knows (see above rule) that the northeast contains the highest concentration of nuclear power plants in the country. Then there are those cooling towers ominously (and probably anachronistically) looming over our heroes as they flee through the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. And the very last scene -- after everything's supposedly returned to normal -- contains rumblings of a new attack in (of all places) France.

Though one wonders whether Shyamalan's killer flowers have really thought this out all the way. If its really nuclear power that's got them in such a tizzy -- as opposed to deforestation, or greenhouse gasses, or suburban sprawl -- do they really want to be killing off all the people who run the plants in the first place?

Among the Albanians

2008-06-13T22:19:00.003-05:00

I'm a radio star!

Okay, not quite -- but among the many adventures of my junket to Albany was a brief appearance on Post State Editor Fred Dicker's daily radio show, which he hosts every morning from his office on the third floor of the Capitol. I'd be remiss, I suppose, if I didn't at least confess to the existence of a recording -- and though I at least held my own, I can't say my appearance was all that impressive.

Some people, as they say, have the face for radio. I'm still working on it.

Had I had my wits about me, I might have observed that Albany is a city of paradoxes. The first is the state version of that old chestnut that everyone hates "Congress" but loves their own congressman. I really did enjoy most of the politicians I met -- with full knowledge that they wouldn't get many votes if they weren't good at leaving that impression. Their office also pleads their case: A people worthy of democracy must be capable of elevating at least some competent and honorable men and women to lead it.

Otherwise, "By their works you shall know them" -- though that's perhaps not as friendly a judgment. I recommend Fred's show for a taste of what all this actually looks like.

The other paradox is something akin to what G.K. Chesterton called the "entirely practical and prosaic statement" that "whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it" -- or perhaps to Merry the Hobbit's insight from Lord of the Rings: "The closer we are to danger, the farther we'll be from harm." In other words (Chesterton again) the paradox of courage.

Not that you see much courage up there, of course; it's rather that if you look with open eyes, you start to see with precision the otherwise obscure moments where courage, and justice, and temperance, and study are lacking -- and thus, the ennobling role the virtues can play in shaping politics, even where "three men in a room" is the law of the land.

And as far as inspiration goes, that sure beats another tired Obama stump speech. At least, once you learn how to breathe through the fumes.

Oh, Albany! (Part 2)

2008-06-07T10:19:00.000-05:00

This is what I get for making fun of their architecture.

It's actually something my boss and I had been talking about for a while, but I just found out yesterday that he's sending me to Albany on Monday, this time for an entire week. The purpose: my continuing education in the utterly dysfunctional ways of New York government.

It should be useful. Next week's the second-to-last week of the legislative session, so its an especially happening time. Plus, I'll get to spend the week under the tutelage of the universally acknowledged "most feared reporter in Albany," Post state editor Fredric U. Dicker.

Just as long as I can decontaminate my soul when I get back.
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Oh, Albany!

2008-06-02T16:54:00.012-05:00

New York's illustrious state capital gets a bad rap from those city-folk forced to do business in it. It's small, far away, and there's nothing to do, they say. Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Then again, I was only up there for one night.

The occasion was the annual Legislative Correspondents Association Dinner and Show, a black-tie affair where the Albany press corps gets to mock the state's powers that be -- largely to their faces. Let's just say they had a lot of material to work with this year. Video "rebuttals" were provided by Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco and Mayor Bloomberg (here and here, if you're at all curious). Perhaps more on this later.

But back to Albany. I'm something of a democrat when it comes to geography: every location has some hidden charm, whether we're talking about Willets Point or Staten Island. Albany is no exception. It's actually quite a pretty town in many respects. Plus it's right on the Hudson, and the train ride up from the city (a leisurely two-and-a-half hours) is absolutely gorgeous.

The centerpiece of all this is the Capitol building (above), a late-19th centure structure that (you can see) must be delightful to work in.

And then came Nelson Rockefeller. Here's the Capitol again, this time from the side. It's really the kind of building in which you can imagine big, important people like Teddy Roosevelt and Al Smith (for all their faults) doing big, important things:

Now here's what happens when you turn around:

And what on earth is this thing?

Welcome to the Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, home since 1973 to most of the bureaucracies that run New York -- and basically what Epcot Center would look like if DisneyWorld was in hell. Rockefeller, that playboy patron of the "arts," came up with much of the design himself.

When I was in Claremont, I remember several lectures put on by the American-founding types at the Salvatori Center about the role of architecture in expressing and nourishing a nation's values. It's at least interesting to reflect that this may well have been the view from Eliot Spitzer's window.

Mayor Booker at the MI

2008-05-22T23:04:00.002-05:00

There are benefits to being a card-carrying member of the working press. Free intellectual stimulation, for one. All of this is to say, if I haven't said so already, that the Manhattan Institute is a wonderful thing.

And that Cory Booker is an impressive guy. The MI had the young mayor of Newark over this morning for a breakfast lecture, purportedly on his new prison-to-work program, but what ultimately became the general story of the city as he found it two years ago, and what he's been doing since.

The background story is better laid out here, but the cartoon summary is that when New York City had Rudy Giuliani, Newark got stuck with Sharpe James, who Booker finally unseated in 2006. Booker's a democrat, but a young, tough-on-crime, school-vouchers-believing one, for whom the sky's the limit politically if he can actually deliver as promised.

Which would be a very good thing, at least judging from the 45 min I got to hear him talk. He's been compared to Barack Obama (young, black, charismatic, community organizer type), but while there are other things to recommend him over Obama, he's not quite as smooth.

He's even got a bit of that Mike-Bloomberg-post-partisan-problem-solver vibe, which would be annoying -- the one cringe-inducing moment of the breakfast came when, searching briefly for the right turn of phrase, he came up with "inefficiencies of the human spirit" -- if the problems he was facing weren't of such a greater magnitude, and if he didn't have the serious street cred to back it up.

His success, of course, remains to be seen, but all signs still indicate that this guy is for real. It tells you something about a guy when he moves into the housing projects immediately upon being elected to the city council and stays there for 8 years -- camping out on the street, among other things, to protest the lack of police protection.

As mayor, not only has he seriously cut the city's crime rate already, he'll also quite frequently tag along with cops on their nightly patrols, sometimes -- sometimes -- chasing down criminals himself.

I'm not quite sure what to think of that last part. It reminds me a bit of Winston Churchill's stint as home secretary back before WWI, when he once famously insisted on commanding a police confrontation with a group of anarchists holed up inside their London hideout. There's a school of thought that says that the great man didn't exactly help matters with his presence.

Then again, it was all part of the same package: A leader who had a strong enough sense of himself and his purpose to think to do something like that as anything more than a PR stunt.

So yeah, press work has its perks.

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Spring blog-keeping

2008-05-15T16:52:00.005-05:00

Hey folks. My apologies for the long hiatus; I'm back now. It's been a busy and distraction-filled few weeks, with some exciting adventures I hope to catch you all up with eventually.

One of the benefits of being away is that I've had occasion to think a bit about this blog -- what I like, what I don't like, and what I'd like to do more of. Some thoughts:

*Three-week vacations aside, this is my 88th post in just under a year. (Yes, it's been that long.) Considering the shelf-life of most comparable "random musings"-style blogs, that's not half bad. I congratulate myself.

*I said when I started this thing that I hoped it would be a good exercise in disciplining my writing. How disciplined I've been, of course, is open to debate, but I've grown to appreciate blogging as a way to preserve my own voice in the midst of a day job that has me writing in a very different style. That's something I want to keep up. To that end, I'm going to try to cut down on posts like these, which -- while fun -- don't really say anything. Not that I'll leave off-beat subjects completely alone, just that when I have something to say about them, I'll actually take the time to say it.

*I suppose I'd be kidding myself if I thought I could completely avoid blogging about the election in the next few months. Still, it's something I'd like to get away from as much as possible. One of the great failings of this blog, as I see it, has been my lack of effort in giving a good account of my life in the city -- which, if I'm honest with myself, probably speaks to my own lack of serious contemplation on that score. No more. Expect this blog to get somewhat more personal in nature, but always with an eye to presenting useful insights and observations in that context. I promise not to start navel-gazing on you.

*To that end, a couple of ideas I've been kicking around for a while: One is to post more about what I'm reading at the moment, whenever I come across something useful to say. This naturally includes interesting lectures I've been to or movies I've seen (of which there have been several lately). The second is to start a bit of travel journaling. One of my favorite things to do here remains to find some random area of the city I've yet to explore, then take an hour or two just walking around. I'll start bringing a camera, too. Though I suppose I should start with a bit of an ode to my own neighborhood, which I've become quite taken with. Stay tuned.

Adventures in popeaucracy ... or, how I scored those awesome mass tix

2008-04-25T14:33:00.017-05:00

Something I learned last weekend: As far as massive, important bureaucracies go, you can do worse than the Archdiocese of New York.

Pope Benedict's visit was obviously a wonderful, holy thing. But from a logistics standpoint, I'm made to understand from folks on the fringes of the storm, it was also something of a nightmare.

Kinda like you'd expect.

My experience with this was relatively minor. Saturday morning (as I started to describe in the post previous), I was one of a hundred-odd volunteers assisting at the Papal mass for clergy and religious at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Supposedly, our role was to meet the priests as they got off their busses and escort them to the rooms reserved at the Palace Hotel where they could change into their vestments. (No one, obviously, was allowed to get anywhere close to the Cathedral on their own initiative.) Thing was, the clergyfolk knew the drill already, so our job basically became to stand in line along the sidewalk corridor leading to the hotel and greet them as they passed by.
This was actually very cool. For one thing, I had no idea that nuns had so many different kinds of habits. Plus the weather was gorgeous. I was also standing right there as busses and busses of bishops unloaded for their procession, and again as the entire American delegation of cardinals filed out of the hotel.

Then there was lots of free food and plenty of downtime while the mass was going on. Problem was, no one was really around to explain to us where we needed to be next, or when. And we were the least of anyone's problems. There was the bus full of priests that broke down and couldn't get into the cathedral for security reasons until -- somehow this mattered -- the pope was already seated. There was the Secret Service deciding not to let through any more people who had special tickets to stand on the steps of the cathedral. A friend and I finally found a "volunteer coordinator" who had little more idea than we did as to what was next (not much, it turns out), but who told us all kinds of tales of woe from that morning -- most of them involving the Secret Service and the NYPD contradicting each other at every turn.

I found it hard to get frustrated at any of this. I was fine, it was a beautiful day, the pope was there and besides, don't these things tend to happen when four or five all-important institutions get together to coordinate a series of massive, max-security events in the busiest city on earth? Nothing more than a gentle lesson in human folly, poised in poetic contradistinction to the presence of the Vicar of Christ next door.

Or so I thought, until I found out that this very confusion was my chance for a much-coveted ticket to Yankee Stadium.

As it turned out, this volunteer coordinator was also working for the archdiocese on the papal visit, and she shared with us (as a variation on a theme) that there were still loads of tickets to the next day's mass that hadn't been given out. Again, this didn't surprise me greatly, given what I gathered was the intricate politics of distribution (with each parish and diocese just so) and the supposition that at least some people who had reserved tickets wouldn't show up to claim them.

But I didn't expect to be able to walk right into the official archdiocesan papal visit command center and ask for some.

Yet that's precisely what this woman suggested we do. Needless to say, we set out immediately (the offices were ten blocks away), and after a few minutes with a confused security guard, we were welcomed right upstairs.

The woman who greeted us was juggling ten other things -- "The governor's office is on the phone! They want to know about the photographer!" -- but she wasted little time handing us (at my friend's request) two tickets apiece.

Then she took them back. They were handicapped reserved. But out came two pairs of new ones, with the promising label "FIELD CHMP SEC 15, BX 59." Didn't know exactly what "field chmp" meant, but it sure sounded nice.

By now, it was becoming ever more apparent that they still had more tickets than they knew what to do with. So I went for it: "Can I have four?"

Moral of the story? Always ask.

I hesitated for a while to share this too broadly, lest anyone who missed out on tickets trying through the proper channels bemoan (understandably) the unfairness of it all. But as I think back on it (if you'll follow me for a second), that's precisely what made the whole thing kinda special.

There were any number of reasons the powers that be could have cited to turn away two brash young volunteers who showed up the day before the event. There was a system, after all -- as there needed to be, especially for something as big and important as the pope.

But there we were, and so were the tickets -- and as I'm sure the pope reminded us at some point during his visit, if everything were meted out by the standards of exacting justice, we'd all be goners anyway.

Besides, God wouldn't like it as much.

Popemobile!

2008-04-21T17:00:00.009-05:00

I'll tell the story later, but I just so happened to score four utterly amazing last-minute tickets to the pope's big mass at Yankee Stadium yesterday. Right on the first base line. And yes, that shot's with no zoom. I'll post some more pictures later, too, but for now, my colleague Robert George (a much more disciplined blogger than I) has his up. We were sitting in the same section.

I also want to say that I was never prouder to be associated with the New York Post than I was this morning, reading the headlines and captions on the special pope-visit pull-out section. A sampling:

--BEN'S SERMON ON THE MOUND

--Communion crews bring host to most

--PAPA'S MITER FINE ATTIRE (with picture caption: "Infallible taste")

--"It's the pope-arazzi!" (caption for a line of priests in full vestments snapping pictures of Benedict)

--Dam! Beaver dies

And, of course, Sunday's wood: COME TO PAPA

About that speech...

2008-04-19T13:22:00.001-05:00

This is cool. I'm blogging live from outside St. Patrick's Cathedral, where I'm volunteering for the pope's mass for clergy this morning. Our "job" was mostly just to welcome the priests and nuns as they came into the hotel across the street to robe up. As one would expect from an event of this size staged by several of the largest bureaucracies in the world, confusion abounded. Still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing once the mass ends.

But we did get to see the pope. Very briefly. After our "duties" (and breakfast) were over, about 70 of us kind of just filed through these metal detectors separating the hotel from, well, another gate separating us from Madison ave, where his motorcade passed on the way to the cathedral.

Anyway, still thinking about that UN address from yesterday. The tension that jumps right off the page, of course is the vast gulf of seriousness separating Benedict from the body that commands his "deepest respect" or whatever his precise wording was. There's more than a touch of absurdity in delivering a friendly, general-sounding lecture on the importance and foundation of human rights to a body that's elected Iran, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to its Human Rights Council.

And yet. Benedict was never going to give a public tongue-lashing to dictators. That's not his way -- and it probably wouldn't do much good anyway. But there's a few spots in his speech that give the distinct impression that he's up to something just as radical.

I don't know, for example, exactly what he was up to when he said:

"Every state has the primary responsibility to protect its own population from gross and sustained violations of human rights... If states are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the UN Charter and other international instruments."

-- But it's the kind of statement that makes the Bush doctrine seem downright isolationist. And I don't doubt he knows exactly how pathetic the UN has been in this regard for the entirety of its history.

Then he launches on a discourse as to how human rights require a foundation in the natural order of things -- that is, in a full understanding of the human person -- to be effective.

And he has this to say: "When faced with new and insistent challenges, it is a mistake to fall back on a pragmatic approach, limited to determining 'common ground,' minimal in content and weak in its effect."

Say what? Pragmatic, common-ground approaches to human-rights issues is what the UN was DESIGNED for. The soviet bloc and the West were never going to agree even as to what "human rights" consist of -- let alone how to promulgate them. But it was concievably a good thing to have a place for us to talk and vote about stuff before we started firing missiles.

Indeed, as I'm pretty sure I understand from the people who think about these things, the thrust of the post-WWII "human rights" project has remarkably little to do with discerning the true foundations of liberty -- to the extent that it doesn't reject the possibility of such a foundation explicitly. It's much more along the lines of: "What are the bad things that we can all get together and agree (for whatever reason) to call bad?" And the absence of each bad thing gets to be called a "human right."

Benedict would argue -- with ample evidence, if he chose to employ it -- that that approach doesn't quite work.

The question for us: What would the United Nations look like without it?
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Benedict at the UN

2008-04-18T22:45:00.002-05:00

The more I think about it, the more I love the address Pope Benedict gave this morning at the United Nations. More thoughts to come.

Running for bishop, and other perils of modernity

2008-04-16T17:56:00.006-05:00

I'm not always one for browsing the lefty Catholic periodicals, but this piece in Commonweal Magazine caught my attention, especially in light of the Pope's visit.

As I understand it, Fr. Reese is presenting a fairly well-worn argument: The Vatican is too top-down authoritarian; that's not how it always was; and given the post-Vatican II embrace of modernity, the Church should finally adjust its governance to our democratic age.

By, among other things, returning the selection of bishops to a general election of the faithful. I'm hardly of the competence to comment on any of his other proposals, but this one strikes me as a seriously bad idea. And Reese basically makes the argument for me.

As he acknowledges, the centralization of power in the papacy in the first place was in part a response to meddling in Church affairs by secular powers. But then there's this remarkable specimen of comfortable, Western-style obliviousness: "But now that few kings or noblemen are in a position to meddle with the church," he says, "one could argue that such centralization is no longer necessary -- and that it is in fact counterproductive."

No position whatsoever -- as any good Catholic from China to Zimbabwe will gladly tell you.

I'm all for the Church embracing the modern world, but -- and I'm starting to believe that this is the fundamental divide between liberal and conservative Catholics -- there's still a huge open question as to what the modern world we're embracing consists of.

Is it the peaceful, tolerant, democratic world of liberal imagination -- or something a lot more complex? Because if, as both the persistence of tyranny and a strong dose of Christian realism attest, humanity has yet to reach its broad, sunlit uplands, we're going to need a strong and independent Church hierarchy for some time to come.

Contrast Reese's take on the demands modernity places on the Church to Pope Benedict's, from his speech at the White House on Wednesday. There's little doubt he's completely alive to the blessings of the modern world -- as he shows, for one, in his great love for the United States. But he has an equally good idea of what might be coming down the pike.

What's the matter with Obama?

2008-04-15T10:59:00.005-05:00

Or, specifically, this doozy (given at a San Francisco fundraiser, no less):

"[People in economically struggling small-town Pennsylvania] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Rich Lowry's got a good column here, taking what I'd consider the appropriate amount of umbrage. For me, it's not so much that Obama's some kind of closet Marxist (though I'm sure it's still in the water at Columbia and Harvard). It's not even that he's an "elitist" -- at least as the word should be defined. And yes, I know this kind of unthinking condescension should hardly surprise me. Still, what the hell?

Lowry hits it on the head: "Obama prides himself on his civility, but it has to go much deeper than dulcet rhetoric. A fundamental courtesy of political debate is to meet the other side on its own terms. If someone says he cares about gun rights, it’s rude to insist: 'No, you don’t. It’s the minimum wage that you really care about, and you’d know it if you were more self-aware.' "

In other words, what makes this kind of thing so interesting coming from Obama is that it reveals so strikingly the false promises of "hope" and "change" and "unity" so central to his campaign. (Harvey Mansfield, tangentially, has plenty to say about the kind of civility we really need in politics. Hint: It has nothing to do with "disagreeing without being disagreeable.")

Or think of it this way: What kind of hope does Obama really have in America if he thinks Americans' first reaction to economic hardship is to get "bitter"?

I wish this was a joke...

2008-04-11T23:30:00.004-05:00

Ever encountered something so morbidly ironic that you just wanted to find a corner somewhere and cry?

It just so happened this afternoon that my official duties required me to pick through something called Schedule C of the New York City Council's 2008 Adopted Expense Budget. For the layman, that's big stinking piles of municipal pork.

As I understand it, one activates this particular trough (there are others) by getting together with a few other council members and requesting money for a certain city-wide need, which can then get doled out to various favored non-profits.

In any case, I was hardly surprised (this is New York) to discover that one of these items lists Planned Parenthood as the recipient of a cool $50,000. My only question: Did they really need to fund it through the "Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative"?

Yeah.

"This is the Vietnam of newspapers!"

2008-04-10T18:12:00.003-05:00

So, I'm not exactly in the habit of hawking MTV high-school docu-dramas, but this one looks almost promising. Or at least unintentionally hilarious.

Apologies (once again) for the prolonged absence. Feel free to assume that I was off somewhere committing daring and heroic acts in the name of truth and justice. Or something like that.

How cool is this?

2008-03-30T15:14:00.001-05:00

I got a blackberry yesterday. And I'm blogging from it! I feel so hip right now.
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A prayer for Basra

2008-03-30T02:01:00.002-05:00

The Iraqi government launched a major offensive to take back the city from Shia militias last week. It remains to be seen whether they're making any progress -- or what that might look like if it comes. It'd be a huge victory if they could pull it off in the near future; folks down there appear none-too-happy with the status quo, and bringing the port under central gov't control could be very promising in terms of prestige and infrastructure.

And yet. A friend just tipped me off to Anthony Cordesman's latest NY Times column. I know far too little about the war to endorse any particular analysis, but it looks to be a pretty comprehensive (and none-too-uplifting) run-through of all the accompanying political, um, difficulties. Plus, Cordesman's been to Basra recently -- which seems to be a lot more than most folks covering events there can say.

Well, we've been waiting for the next shoe to drop over there. This could -- could -- get a lot worse before it gets better.

Random, belated St. Paddy's Day reflections

2008-03-25T11:47:00.004-05:00

Well it is the biggest mix-up that you have ever seen:
My father, he was Orange, and me mother, she was Green.
--Irish folk song

Sorry this is so late in coming, but hey, if the Catholic Church can change the date of St. Patrick's Day to avoid conflicting with Holy Week, then so can I.

**One of the fascinating things about New York City to me has always been not only how many Irish pubs there are, but how many still seem to be run -- or at least staffed -- by genuine Irish people. I'm fully aware of the extent of the Irish diaspora, but you'd think we would have assimilated by now. Did all these pubs just snatch up the last wave of pre-Celtic Tiger immigrants, or is there something more Disney/Epcot Center-y going on here? Does anybody know?

**Jeremy Grunert of CMC fame, now studying abroad in Belfast, has a fun blog documenting his adventures. Particularly interesting is this post, in which his Catholic Northern Irish roommates tell him the story of the "Troubles" of 1968-98 -- and teach him to stereotype the Orange-folk in the process.

**There were "Troubles," of course, long before the latest (last?) round began in '68, but it took my own visit to London two summers ago for me to realize just how fresh in everyone's memories they still are. I was staying with some Irish priests at the time, and, incidentally, reading Winston Churchill's World War II memoirs for leisure. Churchill relates his frustration, in the early war years, with the stubborn unhelpfulness of the neutral Irish government -- though thanks to the aforementioned diaspora, I was fascinated to learn, he typically went through Roosevelt to get whatever cooperation he could.

And yet, some of the names Churchill was using were unfamiliar to me. So I pulled aside one of the priests and asked in all innocence, "Fr. Martin, who was Eamon De Valera?" Two hours and several pints of cider later, I had my answer.

**It turns out that Churchill was heavily involved in negotiating a settlement for Irish Home Rule before and after WWI, too. In any case, as a Catholic anglophile with joint ancenstry and ecumenical tendencies (i.e., a mutt), I couldn't help but be fascinated with the history (I wound up devoting a good deal of my thesis to Churchill and the Irish question).

One short vignette: Churchill was a negotiator at the 1921 peace conference that laid the foundation for the Irish Free State. Opposite him was Michael Collins, the young and passionate IRA military commander, and soon to be De Valera's bitter enemy in the Irish Civil War. As Churchill tells it, the two of them were one night alone together in Churchill's London apartment, with Collins seething at all manner of past British injustice -- most presently, the 5,000-pound bounty on his head. Churchill responded by fetching a framed reward poster from his own days as an escaped prisoner of war in South Africa. The bounty: 25 pounds.

"He read the paper," Churchill later recounted, "and as he took it in he broke into a hearty laugh. All his irritation vanished. We had a really serviceable conversation, and thereafter…we never to the best of my belief lost the basis of a common understanding."

Lesson: There's nothing like the mutual experience of getting shot at to bring people together.

**Except for maybe a pitcher of cold green beer.

Alleluia!

2008-03-23T01:37:00.001-05:00

He is risen.

Riding Westward

2008-03-21T18:15:00.004-05:00

Okay, I know I should be contemplating weightier things at the moment. Still, my Huskies -- why?!? There goes my bracket, too. Guess I'll just consider this my Good Friday pennance.

UPDATE: In all seriousness, I have had some occasion to reflect today -- and much along the lines of a poem a good friend turned me on to several years ago. It's called "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward" by the English poet John Donne:

"...Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.
Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul's form bends to the East...

"Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?

"...Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and Thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face."

Arthur C. Clarke, R.I.P.

2008-03-19T12:11:00.005-05:00

One of the literary mainstays of my childhood has passed away. John Derbyshire at The Corner has some good reflections. I wasn't what one would really call a sci-fi buff, but there was a time in my life when I simply inhaled Clarke's work.

Folks who know me understand that I'm ideologically about as far from techno-utopianism as they come (I was less so then), but Clarke nonetheless had a flair for technological imagination -- i.e., exploring the effects that new discoveries might have on the fabric of human society -- that was quite enthralling to the curious adolescent mind. Plus, his work was delightfully free of the dour dystopian cynicism that pervaded most of the science fiction I was exposed to.

Then there were Clarke's religious opinions: religion is "a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species," was about as charitable as he got. But even as most of his works set out from that perspective, it always struck me how many of his heroes were deeply religious in the traditional sense -- and how he always tiptoed around the central mysteries of faith. My sense, though it's only a guess, is that he had a begrudging respect for serious religious people whose sense of wonder and mystery were equal to the attitude he took in his contemplation of the future.

In any case, rest in peace.

Claremont prof in Nazi art controversy

2008-03-13T10:50:00.004-05:00

Speaking of news happening: Elise Viebeck, editor extraordinaire of the Claremont Independent, has just broken what looks to be a pretty major story about CMC history professor Jonathan Petropoulos and shady dealings in the world of Nazi-looted art restitution. We'll see how this unfolds.

Counting my blessings

2008-03-12T11:22:00.002-05:00

Hey folks, sorry it's been a while since my last post. I promise I've been doing interesting things in the meantime. Though lest my legthy silence raise undue concern, by "interesting" I mean things such as "taking-a-Saturday-to-explore-Staten-Island interesting" and "losing-your-car-keys-on-a-ski-trip-to-the-Catskills interesting" -- not "$4,300-hookers-in-Washington-hotel-rooms interesting."

But as they say in my business, sometimes news happens.

"In telegraphic idiom"

2008-02-28T18:03:00.003-05:00

I don't have too many stories of the role that the late great William F. Buckley, Jr. played in my life, but I figure I'll add what I can.

Buckley was actually one of the first thinkers I knew -- far before I had any interest in what, exactly, made this thing called "conservatism" so great. I was seven, and my dad, impressed but not overwhelmed with my progress in reading, explained that I'd only know I was really getting smart when I could understand a George Will or Bill Buckley column without a dictionary.

Sad to say, The Hartford Courant didn't syndicate Buckley.

Fast forward. Much has been said in recent days about Buckley's penchant for long, elaborate words -- a penchant that the man who taught me to write, the esteemed Prof. Jack Pitney, most certainly didn't share.

Anyway, the Monday before the 2004 elections, Pitney strides into my "American Presidency" class and writes his prediction on the board:

Kerry wins. 50-49%; 291-247.

That didn't happen, though it seemed entirely possible at the time. (Pitney, incidentally, is also the author of the 1994 tome, "Congress' Permanent Minority? Republicans in the US House." Go figure.)

The day after the election, I'm perusing Buckley's column, which is fittingly enough about mistaken election predictions. He tells of two communiques he received in the leadup to election night:

"The first originated with a professor of government in California who, it was bruited, had always succeeded in predicting the outcome of presidential-year elections. The news was given in telegraphic idiom, no curlicues, embellishments, appoggiaturas: 'President: Kerry wins the popular vote 50-49. Kerry wins electoral vote 291-247. Senate: GOP has net gain of two, for a 53-47 majority. House: GOP has net gain of one, for a 230-205 majority.' That bulletin I disclosed to a few of my closest associates."

In telegraphic idiom, no curlicues, embellishments, appoggiaturas...

Buckley would say that about Pitney. And I smiled, as if the great man had made a joke just for me.

Stuff White People Like

2008-02-22T10:50:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama is promising to move our country "beyond black and white."

This blog shows why that will never happen.

(Hat tip: The Herald)

Barack's Papal Brigade

2008-02-16T16:39:00.013-05:00

Douglas Kmiec, dean of the Catholic University law school and a former Romney adviser, thinks that Barack Obama is a closet Catholic. Or at least that Catholics are closet Obama voters. It's a confused piece on several levels (I'll get to those), but I can't say I haven't been noticing much the same thing.

First, my colleague Robert George notices something particularly "Catholic" in Obama's recent (and worth watching) speech at the Virginia Democrats' Jefferson-Jackson dinner. (My response: Catholics can't preach that well.) Then my friend Paul Snatchko says nice things about the way Obama talks about faith in public discourse. Now Kmiec. That's three times in a week. And that's a pattern.

There are other datapoints as well: Several friends of mine just joined the "we really really wish Barack Obama was pro-life" facebook group. (Sorry, guys.) The wonderful JPII memoirist Peggy Noonan, as I've noted before, seems quite taken with the guy. And is it really a coincidence that the perpetual Obama buzzword "hope" just happens to be the subject of Pope Benedict's latest encyclical? (Move over, Deval Patrick!)

Okay, so what gives?

Kmiec's policy oddities (really: if Mitt Romney had any other anti-war, open-borders, global-warming-worried advisers, he didn't tell us about them) only serve to emphasize his broader point: It's all about the rhetoric.

There's no question that Obama's a brilliant speaker, and Kmiec hints at the interesting point that his community-organizing roots have steeped him in a kind of social-justice rhetoric that's friendly toward religion generally and resonates with Catholics specifically.

Plus, he says, Obama has a kind of Reaganesque optimism too him, the kind that "makes America feel good about itself" -- and the kind that attracted the largely Catholic "Reagan Democrats" in the first place.

And that's where I get off. Kmiec may be right about the short-term politics of it all, and Obama's speeches certainly have an inspiring aura to them -- but it's not Reagan. I don't want to speak beyond my competence on this one, but it strikes me that Reagan's and Obama's optimisms come from two very different places.

Just take a look at what Obama's optimistic about: "Yes, we can"; "We are the change that we seek"; "We can build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth"; (yes, he said that). This is a contingent optimism, a hope in the future success of (Obama-led) collective political action.

That hope may -- may -- be well-founded, and it can still be inspiring; one of the appealing things about Obama's rhetoric is its constant invocation of American history (albeit, mostly the parts where collective political movements for "change" have succeeded).

But as Michelle Obama is quickly proving, that kind of "hope" can have an ugly flipside. "This is the first time in my adult life I've been proud of my country," quoth she.

What?!?

I don't want to take this too far, but I think Mrs. Obama just distilled to its essence exactly what unsettles me about all this "change" stuff in the first place. My question is not so much, "change to what?" -- it's change from what? In other words, what does this cult of "change" ultimately say about the people who cluelessly let things get so bad in the first place?

Again, I'm dealing mostly in tendencies and temptations here, but it strikes me that Obama's brand of "hope" is a very different sort than Reagan's simple trust in the good sense of the American people -- which only needed to be unlocked by the kind of policies he was advocating, not beaten into them by an endless supply of lofty rhetoric.

Think of it another way: For all of Obama's rhetorical brilliance, could you really see him giving Reagan's "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech? Could he speak so naturally of an America that already was and is, of ageless values that have little to do with changing our way of doing politics, as important as that sometimes is?

I haven't seen it.

UPDATE: Okay, looks like Peggy Noonan (author of the above speech, incidentally) isn't quite so enamored with Obama after all. And as one would expect, she makes my point far better than I ever could.

Victorian imperialist anti-utopian love poetry

2008-02-14T11:17:00.003-05:00

Is my favorite kind. Share this one with your sweetheart this Valentine's Day:

An Imperial Rescript
By Rudyard Kipling

Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,
To ease the strong of their burden, to help the weak in their need,
He sent a word to the peoples, who struggle, and pant, and sweat,
That the straw might be counted fairly and the tally of bricks be set.

The Lords of Their Hands assembled; from the East and the West they drew —
Baltimore, Lille, and Essen, Brummagem, Clyde, and Crewe.
And some were black from the furnace, and some were brown from the soil,
And some were blue from the dye-vat; but all were wearied of toil.

And the young King said: — "I have found it, the road to the rest ye seek:
The strong shall wait for the weary, the hale shall halt for the weak;
With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line,
Ye shall march to peace and plenty in the bond of brotherhood — sign!"

The paper lay on the table, the strong heads bowed thereby,
And a wail went up from the peoples: — "Ay, sign — give rest, for we die!"
A hand was stretched to the goose-quill, a fist was cramped to scrawl,
When — the laugh of a blue-eyed maiden ran clear through the council-hall.

And each one heard Her laughing as each one saw Her plain —
Saidie, Mimi, or Olga, Gretchen, or Mary Jane.
And the Spirit of Man that is in Him to the light of the vision woke;
And the men drew back from the paper, as a Yankee delegate spoke: —

"There's a girl in Jersey City who works on the telephone;
We're going to hitch our horses and dig for a house of our own,
With gas and water connections, and steam-heat through to the top;
And, W. Hohenzollern, I guess I shall work till I drop."

And an English delegate thundered: — "The weak an' the lame be blowed!
I've a berth in the Sou'-West workshops, a home in the Wandsworth Road;
And till the 'sociation has footed my buryin' bill,
I work for the kids an' the missus. Pull up? I be damned if I will!"

And over the German benches the bearded whisper ran: —
"Lager, der girls und der dollars, dey makes or dey breaks a man.
If Schmitt haf collared der dollars, he collars der girl deremit;
But if Schmitt bust in der pizness, we collars der girl from Schmitt."

They passed one resolution: — "Your sub-committee believe
You can lighten the curse of Adam when you've lightened the curse of Eve.
But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen,
We will work for ourself and a woman, for ever and ever, amen."

Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser held —
The day that they razored the Grindstone, the day that the Cat was belled,
The day of the Figs from Thistles, the day of the Twisted Sands,
The day that the laugh of a maiden made light of the Lords of Their Hands.

Speaking of Lincoln...

2008-02-12T11:49:00.000-05:00

I've officially lost whatever lingering affection I may have held for Ron Paul. Richard Brookhiser digs up a particularly odious quote from the good doctor in today's Post. Apparently on Meet the Press last year, Paul went off about the "senseless" Civil War that Lincoln raged "just to ... get rid of the original intent of the Republic."

Yeah, like that's all it was good for.

It's not especially surprising he'd say something like that, given the racist newsletters written under his name that came to light last month. To be clear, I still don't think Paul is an actual racist; say what you want about hardcore libertarians, they take ideas like liberty and equality deadly serious -- at least in the abstract.

Paul's problem is instead that he's an ideologue. His singleminded libertarianism gives him such a narrow political and historical radar that he's got no sense of taboo -- no sense that it's not okay to say, "well David Duke and I may disagree on this, this, and this, but here's where we can find common ground." All that matters is finding some way to sell your libertarian ideas.

And so we come to Lincoln, scourge of neo-Confederates for trampling on "states' rights" and "limited government" and all those things that libertarians are supposed to love. And to an ideologue who can't see beyond the contours of today's political debates, that's really all that matters. Halting the spread of slavery? Ancient history -- if not simply a pretext for aggression.

Just to be clear, I have all the respect in the world for my thoughtful libertarian friends, including those who've decided to vote for Paul. But to my way of thinking, one's respect for what Lincoln accomplished is the litmus test seperating those with a genuine and mature love for liberty from the mere small-government fetishists.

Ron Paul fails.

The Tardy Controversialist

2008-02-12T00:41:00.000-05:00

Would make a good title for some high-brow suspense flick, I imagine -- along the lines of "The Constant Gardener" or somesuch thing. But for now, it refers to yours truly, who just got around to seeing two films that were making all sorts of waves several years ago.

Some passing thoughts:

I remember all the buzz and controversy over "V for Vendetta" and its "War on Terror = fascism" message when the movie first came out, but it still surprised me just how beat-you-over-the-head it is. It'd be a much more convincing and thought-provoking piece of art if it didn't feature every single leftist boogeyman at the same time. Enjoyable nonetheless; I find it hard to get worked up over a movie like this on political grounds. When Hollywood stops making movies warning us of creeping right-wing fascism, then I'll start to worry.

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," by contrast, was supposed to be -- in its critics' telling -- all about how brutal and benighted those ancient American civilizations were before the Europeans showed up. To which my response was always, "no doubt." In any case, I recommend it highly. It's very gory, but surprisingly tolerable in that regard (at least to me). It's also very long -- the final chase scene could have used a few fewer bad guys -- but it's so much fun by then that you hardly care.

It's also deeply moving to a level I wouldn't have expected. The basic plot is about this happy mesoamerican tribe that gets captured into slavery -- and human sacrifice -- by the Mayans in the last days of their empire. It's the kind of project that naturally invites charges of "cultural imperialism" (non-European civilizations can't be evil!), but that criticism falls flat. It's the more advanced civilization, after all, that's the brutal one in the story. The captivity scenes are powerful on a simply human level, prompting reflections not so much on the badness of Mayans but on the horrors of which humanity in general is capable. Given Gibson's previous controversial offerings, this was surely his intent.

It's not like we have to be reminded at every juncture that the white man did this stuff too -- I found it hard not to think about the particular sins of which this country has been guilty. Especially as today just happens to be Lincoln's birthday. So if you don't have a handy copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Apocalypto" makes a fine stand-in for anyone who really wants to put some meat on the bones of Lincoln's second inaugural.

Especially this part: "Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

McCain & honor

2008-02-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

Good news for my long-suffering readers: I'm officially giving up following the Republican presidential primary for Lent! ... Starting tomorrow.

But before then, please do check out Yuval Levin's take on John McCain's peculiar brand of "honor politics." It may just be the most insightful thing I've read this season. A sample:

McCain has made the most of his unusual approach to politics throughout his
career, developing his own special brand of honor politics, which in practice is
often a form of anger politics. It makes him terribly prickly and
self-righteous, but also determined and often successful. The substance of his
crusades has turned off a lot of conservatives, and rightly so, but the tone can
be quite effective. And when it is directed to a cause conservatives share —
most notably the war — the Right can take real pleasure in his
passion.

More important, it’s all McCain has got, and he needs to make the most of
it, and not try to pretend he’s something he’s not. To both his credit and his
detriment, McCain just can’t pretend. Rather than attempt a feeble imitation of
Ronald Reagan (the ubiquitous mistake of this campaign) and try to paint the
grand conservative vision of things, McCain needs to train himself at least to
oppose the things conservatives oppose — paternalism that corrupts the roots of
personal initiative and self-reliance, a callous disregard for the lives of the
innocent unborn, hostility to our cultural traditions, cosmopolitanism that sees
nothing special in America — and so to channel his anger in politically (not to
mention substantively) healthy directions. That can be his way of building
bridges, and it can also be an effective way of organizing his campaign’s themes
going forward.

By the by, here's McCain's speech at CPAC yesterday, which I thought was very good.

Saints preserve us!

2008-02-08T10:59:00.000-05:00

No, not literally -- please. An interesting article in the Times today about the patron saint of drug dealers. Good to see that Rome's not biting, at least. Though the Gambinos probably could have used the help.

It's Mac for me

2008-02-05T17:55:00.000-05:00

My friend Robert George explains why he voted -- begrudgingly -- for John McCain this morning. I did, too, though for somewhat different reasons.

In the end, my growing doubts about McCain's unsettling tendency to treat every single political dispute as a matter of deep personal honor -- or about the smallness of his "patriotism v. profit" attack on Romney during the last debate -- didn't quite sway me. Winston Churchill did.

If there's one dominant theme running throughout Churchill's vast historical corpus, it's that prosperous democracies, for all their advantages, are notoriously fickle when it comes to dealing with foreign threats. They can rise to meet them better than anyone once the threat becomes obviously existential, but as soon as it fades, they take their collective eye off the ball -- to the cost of a lot more blood and treasure a few years later.

This is something McCain, with his instinctual value for national honor, understands -- making him a needed candidate for a time when troop deaths in Iraq are down and a dubious National Intelligence Estimate has nudged Iran off the radar screen.

Romney, meanwhile, may be saying all the right things, but his manager's belief in "fixing" "problems" doesn't inspire confidence that he has the judgmental categories to fight a war, with its uncertain constantly changing jumble of human passions.

And while I've got my reasons to trust at least McCain's sincerity on judges and tax cuts, I've seen nothing to indicate that Romney would make the war a priority when push comes to shove. It's not where he's comfortable.

By the by, if there is such a thing as McCain Derangement Syndrome, this piece comes perilously close. McCarthy labels McCain a "multilateralist" for thinking that a president needs to be open to persuading our allies of the rightness of our actions.

Except that McCain's right. One of the great tragedies of 2003 was, in fact, Bush's indulgence of cheap -- though understandable -- anti-Europeanism. Old Europe, ultimately, was never going to come along on Iraq. But how much ill will could Bush have averted by simply going to Europe and reminding Europeans of our common struggles against tyranny? If McCain believes the best for the old Atlantic alliance, good for him; we may need it one day.

It shouldn't even need to be said that he would never bow to their sniping where he sees national security at stake. But a President McCain whose perceived "independence" could actually pull supporters back to our general FP viewpoint remains one of my big hopes -- especially if he picks a running mate who can talk a good game. Though I'm open to being disappointed.

18-1!

2008-02-04T17:12:00.000-05:00

(from The Post)

And that's all I have to say about that.

UPDATE: Our page weighs in on the game.

Shakespeare's Politics, 2008 edition

2008-01-30T18:29:00.001-05:00

"Shakespeare's Politics" was the name of one of my more fascinating college courses -- an independent study with the Ven. Dr. Harry V. Jaffa that combed the deep political wisdom of the Shakespearian cannon. Not that Shakespeare was an explicitly political writer (though there's much interesting in analyzing his plays in light of contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobian politics; we ignored that), but that the insight into the human condition that made his plays so rich can't help but speak volumes about our political nature. Especially (but not exclusively) when he's tackling the great figures of Roman and British history.

And that got me thinking...

It's stuck me for some time that the current presidential race has a certain Shakespearian quality to it; if anything, it certainly has its fair share of potentially tragic heroes. There's McCain's Coriolanus-like "Straight Talk"; his ancient and noble warrior's disdain for the degree of pandering necessary (and appropriately so) in any democratic society. (Full disclosure: This is hyperbole -- I like McCain.)

Fred Thompson: The honorable Brutus-like senator poked and prodded into assuming a higher political role, only to be undone by his lack of ambition.

Ron Paul: Any number of crazy-like-a-fox fools.

Bill Clinton: Ever toeing that fine line between Prince Hal and King Lear.

Barack Obama: Come on, you were thinking the same thing.

But in all seriousness, it remains to be seen: MacDuff? Or Banquo?

As I see it, the only candidate Shakespeare wouldn't have any interest in is Mitt Romney. But I'm open to being proven wrong. Anyone?

NY Post endorses...

2008-01-30T17:01:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama!

No, no one hacked our website; and yes, it's just for the primary.

Woohoo!!!

2008-01-20T23:36:00.000-05:00

Go Big Blue!

Just remember, Patriots fans: Lots of teams would kill to go 18-1.

UPDATE: I guess I just have an eye for obscure historical trivia. Turns out the last 4 NFC Championship games (04/05-07/08) comprise the first four-year stretch in NFC/old-NFL history -- going back to 1933 -- in which eight seperate teams have each played for a championship.

07-08: Giants-Packers
06-07: Bears-Saints
05-06: Seahawks-Panthers
04-05: Eagles-Falcons

See for yourself. Doesn't quite work for the AFC, though: It happened there in 98-99 through 01-02.

UPDATE 2: Okay, as it actually turns out, I'm too clever by half. The real historical occurance is that we've now gone seven years in the NFC with seven different champions:

07-08, Giants; 06-07, Bears; 05-06, Seahawks; 04-05, Eagles; 03-04, Panthers; 02-03, Bucs; 01-02, Rams.

Talk about parity. This has never happened in the history of pro football -- in either league.

Actually, I take that back. It happened once before: last year. Had the Packers won this year, the streak actually would have gone to eight, given that it's the Giants who won it in the 00-01 season. So... doesn't that kinda make the Giants the dynasty of the NFC, if only by default?

Just asking.

Romney in Michigan

2008-01-15T23:08:00.000-05:00

A decisive victory for Mitt tonight -- makes the race a lot more interesting. Here's his speech. It still fascinates me how quickly Romney's transformed himself into the populist anti-Washington crusader. You can almost tell from the speech how new he is to it -- "but hey, it's working, and I kind of like it too." People who know and like Romney say he's got a solid core -- that he really believes what he says, even on the positions he's come to recently. I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'll still have to think this through some more, but I'd say the greater problem with Romney's slickness is that it indicates not a fundamental lack of conviction, but rather a lack of political shame. He repackages himself far too easily -- even if it's the same Mitt inside -- which makes me suspect that he's got a businessman's impatience for the emotional pathos necessary for true statesmanship, especially in a time of war (notice the lack of nearly any reference to terrorism in his speech). Rich Lowry -- presumably a Romney guy himself; his magazine certainly is -- gives evidence (not online) in the latest issue of National Review.

Along those lines, Romney's constant denunciations of "Washington" this and "Washington" rubbed me the wrong way. One wonders whether "Washington" would fare any better at the hands of a 15-part PowerPoint presentation than with some Obama-esqe incantations of "hope" and "unity."

And then there's this line, by far the most awkward of the speech:

"I take my inspiration from Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, who took their inspiration from the American people."

George Herbert Walker Bush? Nothing against the guy, but that's the first time I've heard him mentioned as a source of conservative inspiration. Unless Romney's very obviously trying to leave someone out.

Not that there's anything wrong with criticizing Dubya, either, but it strikes me that there's something deeply unserious about the way Romney does it. Bush isn't optimistic enough? Please.

--------------------------

To be fair, if Romney lacks pathos, McCain's fault probably lies at the other extreme, as John Podhoretz contends:

"Romney may not have won in Michigan so much as McCain lost it. And he lost it because of a characteristic tendency that makes him Romney’s opposite — political rigidity based on a sense of his own personal rectitude. Having said jobs in Michigan were not coming back, he went to Michigan and praised efforts to mandate an increase in fuel-mileage standards, which auto executives claim will raise the price of a car fully $6,000 — a job killer, in other words. And he spoke against drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which is the only realistic way for the United States to increase its own domestic oil supply.

"McCain’s line is that he is a straight talker. But there are moments he seems to make a fetish of his own honesty, and asks others to support him solely because of it."

Hmm... Pathos plus Prudence -- anyone? I'm starting to think that Shakespeare would have a field day with the tragic flaws of the current field.

----------------------

Only caught the final half-hour of the Democratic debate tonight, but was instantly impressed by how boring it seemed. The nice thing about still having a diverse jumbled Republican field is that it leaves room for serious and contentious policy debates -- many of which the current candidates still need to have. Clinton and Obama, by contrast, don't seem to have much more of anything to say. All the policies are on the table, with widespread similarities. All that remains is a contest of likability and tactics (i.e., hope v. experience). And as we're already seeing, that kind of race can get ugly real fast.

Liberal Fascism: the review

2008-01-14T11:45:00.000-05:00

Another year, another byline: The Post's Sunday books section published my review of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" yesterday. As you can tell, I liked the book a lot. Goldberg has a brief and appreciative response on his new book-blog.

As I wrote, my central quibble with the book is in its lack of foreign-policy nuance. An explanation: Goldberg talks a lot about the Progressive echoes of fascist militarism, with various "crises" serving as convenient sparks for charismatic leaders to rally the country to some higher national purpose (and bigger government). But unfortunately missing is any discussion of how aspiring non-fascists should respond to real crises -- moments that may often require bold leadership and/or national unity.

It's a question both deeply philosophical and immediately pressing that Goldberg could have really given some ink to. Goldberg certainly has a sense of the difference between genuine statesmanship and neo-fascist blustering, but he gives precious little account for it.

As I wrote, an unfortunate ommission. Then again, as my brief forrays into professional idea-communication have already taught me, there's never room for everything.

CNN = Math?

2008-01-09T22:27:00.000-05:00

There's an old Onion article from back in 2004, I believe, that "covered" Republican efforts to turn out the vote in black neighborhoods. Teams of GOP operatives would canvas these areas, handing out literature reminding minority voters to turn up at the polls for "Big Wednesday."

If CNN is trying something similar with Times Square tourists (God knows why), they're doing a pretty crappy job of it. I'm just shocked no one's noticed yet.

I took the above photo this morning. It's the CNN news-ticker billboard at the intersection of 47th Street and Broadway in Times Square, which I pass every morning on my way to work. Notice the "countdown to election day on CNN" feature. Now notice the number. You may have realized by now that today is January 9, 2008, which puts 360 days hence somewhere in the neighborhood of January 3, 2009. Which is very much not election day.

And the strange thing is that that ticker, the face of an international media empire at the most traveled intersection on earth, has been consistently wrong for months now, if not longer. Go figure.

Life imitates The Simpsons Movie

2008-01-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

It's Spider-Pig!

(Courtesy: 20th Century Fox)*

*(Someone please tell me if this doesn't cover me as far as the copyright laws go.)

New journalism blog

2008-01-08T18:15:00.000-05:00

My colleague Eric Fettmann, a newspaperman's newspaperman if there ever was one, has an interesting new blog devoted to the journalism history. It looks to be a motley assortment of thoughts and annecdotes culled from his extensive collection of historic newspapers, magazines and journalism memorabilia, with who-knows-what-else to come. Do check it out.

McCain and Obama

2008-01-08T01:03:00.000-05:00

A none-too-daring prediction, and a pre-primary appetizer. Here's a really smart David Brooks piece on the pair. Brooks makes the important point that despite their common appeal to independent voters (and reputations for positiveness and honesty), they're really very different men in the kind of vision they offer -- and not just policy-wise.

My hope for an Obama-McCain general election (though that's still far to early to call; given this primary season, we could just as easily see Edwards-Thompson) would be that this precise dynamic -- similar general appeal, vastly different ideas -- could elevate the debate to a level we've been conditioned not to expect.

Especially on Iraq. If this election is going to be some kind of referendum on where we should go from here (it probably should be, though I'm far from convinced it actually will), what better two candidates than the guy who opposed the war from the beginning, and the guy who supported the surge three years before Bush did? Serious debate between likable guys, all at a distance from the visceral passions conjured by names like Clinton and Bush.

But we'll see. Pronouncements like this one still seem scandalously premature.

Caucus night with the Dems

2008-01-04T17:38:00.000-05:00

One of the nice things about a one-party city like New York is the political class's jolly bipartisanship. Basically, I've learned, because there are so few of us Republicans around, the Democrats see little problem in occasionally letting us crash their social happenings.

So that's where I was for caucus night: the 2nd floor of a crowded midtown Irish pub full of rowdy Democrats.

Some thoughts:

--Very few Biden or Dodd supporters (although I did meet one girl who liked Richardson). Which made a fun game of cheering loudly whenever their vote counts ticked up -- or in Dodd's case, when he got his one. Sad day.

--The Democrats' victory/concession speeches say droves about where they're headed. (Here's Obama, Edwards & Clinton.) Obama's was masterful on so many levels. Uplifting, even as if he was already running in the general (a friend pointed out), yet still with plenty to rally his volunteers into New Hampshire. Contrast that with Clinton, who could only gush about how happy she was that everyone voted for a Democrat. A guy at the party put it well: "Say I'm a volunteer in Iowa, working my ass off for the Clinton campaign. And I get that in return?" I've never been too much a fan of Obama's squishy "hope" message, but it looks a lot better coming against a Clinton campaign that doesn't even want to fight. Also compare Obama's seemless personal touches with Edwards' heavy-handed "example-example-example" of people suffering from evil corporate greed. If I hadn't sworn off predicting anything this election cycle, I'd say Obama wins the nomination.

--Obama and Huckabee. I think it'd make an interesting general election. Obama, the candidate of "hope," and Huckabee, the candidate of "faith." Throw in Ron Paul as a third-party candidate of "love," and you've got all your theological virtues covered. Now pick one.

--Still had a bit of a black eye, which prompted a fun guessing game. When someone asked about it, whose campaign do I say beat me up. Edwards was typically a safe bet.

--A good night for McCain, who I've been known to have leanings toward. But as it's important to recognize, he's not without risks. Rich Lowry sums them up forcefully. And Victor Davis Hanson doesn't care.

N Train, 1; John, 0

2008-01-02T11:22:00.000-05:00

I've been walking around with a black eye for the past few days, which has given me ample time to process what must be one of New York's most important lessons: Subway trains are big and hard -- don't pick fights with them.

Some background:

1. The N/W subway line in Astoria, Queens runs on an elevated track, which means that as I approach my customary stop (30th Ave and 31st St), I can typically see whether a train is coming with just enough lead time to sprint to the station and catch it.

2. I do this is willfull disregard of numerous helpful public service announcements placed around the station, warning that running for a train may result in dire consequences like tripping and falling.

Well, I didn't trip...

The N train did, however, have an unusually large jump on me Sunday afternoon as I was on my way into the city for church. Already late, and mindful of the N's often-spotty weekend service, I broke into a mad dash down the last remaining block to the station and made it to the platform just in time.

Unfortunately, the speed at which I bounded up the stairs greatly widened my turning radius as I attempted to dash through the still-open train doors, causing me to miss the doors entirely and instead bash my face on the side of the car.

That is, I ran face-first at full speed into the side of a motionless train. Which hurt.

I was a cause of general concern as I staggered, bleeding and increasingly dizzy, into the car, which I rode for four more stops before the conductor escorted me off and stayed with me on the platform until the medics came.

As did everyone else. For some reason, my medical "emergency" was grounds enough to clear the entire train and send it away empty. Someone actually announced over the intercom that all Manhattan-bound service was indefinitely suspended (this turned out not to be true). Fortunately, my throbbing headache helped numb the creeping social horror -- and gave me an excuse to keep my head down.

In actuality, though, something about my gaping head wound brought out the best in people. Two seperate people on the train offered me first a wad of paper towels for the bleeding, then a seat. When we all got off, a first-aid practitioner named Walter was there to make sure I didn't die, then ran to get me a bottle of water. The train conducter, meanwhile, regailed me with subway stories that put my adventure in proper perspective.

Good people, New Yorkers. Who says they aren't the salt of the earth?

Chesterton and Dickens

2007-12-24T22:28:00.000-05:00

Wikisource is a wonderful thing. Its better-known cousin may be the more addicting, but any site that gives you nearly the entire completed works of some of the masters of western thought (and then some) is worth perusing every now and then. Even when the one thing you're looking for has been inexplicably deleted, you're bound to run into something else worthwhile.

And so it was today with myself and the delightful G.K. Chesterton, whose "God in the Cave" chapter from The Everlasting Man I thought would make for wonderful Christmas reading. Alas, it was not to be -- but I was happily reminded, given my Yuletide Dickens kick, that Chesterton was something of a Dickens scholar himself.

Here, then, is the ever-so-timely "Dickens and Christmas," celebrating "that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday."

And here, of course, is Chesterton on Scrooge. No question he would have loved the Muppets:

Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

Merry Christmas.

Homeward bound

2007-12-22T07:25:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas everyone!

My deepest apologies for neglecting my blogging duties of late -- it's been a crazy few weeks at work, and I still lack any internet connection at home. When that changes, I'll be much more prolific, I'm sure -- much to the detriment of any social life I may or may not currently enjoy.

In the meantime, praise the Lord for free wifi at the JetBlue terminal at JFK airport, and for the less-than-hellish bus-to-subway-to-airtran commute that allowed me plenty of time to enjoy same. Six months in, I'm really starting to get a knack for this whole getting-around-NYC thing.

Which reminds me: I've been thinking about this blog a bit, and I've realized that what's currently sorely lacking are more stories about the city itself. I've been somewhat embarrassed in this regard by the Great Greg Gallagher, whose musings on his German adventures make for a delightful read. I may not have his eye for the absurd, but at least I've got a lot more material to work with.

But for now, back to the world of letters. I came across a fascinating article by Joseph Bottom (of Weekly Standard/First Things fame) last Christmas, and I've been waiting to blog it ever since.

The subject is that iconic Christmas favorite (certainly mine), Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." Bottom's argument, briefly, is that far too many critics -- and cinematic adaptations -- get the story completely wrong by playing it straight. In other words, by focusing so much on Scrooge's supposed "transformation," they neglect to see that the story is a merry comic farce from the very beginning. Scrooge doesn't so much undergo some dramatic darkness-to-light redemption as simply come into line with the Christmas cheer that pervades the entire tale -- and that he even participates in with his own amusing brand of grumpiness.

My only quibble with the piece is that Bottom completely neglects the one screen version of the story that really does get it. I speak, of course, of "The Muppet Christmas Carol" -- my pick for the best Christmas movie ever made. Who better than the Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat to provide exactly the kind of mirthful narrative voice Bottom longs for? It's damn near perfect, really.

But you're free to disagree. If you hate Christmas.

Guess who's blogging?

2007-12-14T18:55:00.000-05:00

I just happened to stumble upon this treasure trove of wisdom the other day; it's the personal blog of none other than His Excellency, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Okay, the Times helped. Turns out, Ahmadinejad's been blogging for quite some time now, though he's even lazier about it than I am.

What's there, though, is absolutely fascinating. Not that it's all that profound -- or even comically boisterous. It actually has a kind of whimsical sense to it, as if its author sees himself as a sort of deep thinker who only vows Israel's destruction to pay the rent.

The most recent post, for example, is a long series of extracts from a treatise by one of the first leaders of Islam, explaining the duties of a proper Muslim ruler.

He also says he takes 15 minutes a day to actually respond to the comments he gets. Anyone want to take him up on it? I say this partially in jest, of course. But I've gotta think that having an enemy who's so up-front about his aspirations and pretensions is really a great blessing. Not that President Bush (or Lee Bollinger, for that matter) should indulge his b.s., of course, but there must be room somewhere for a kind of kitchen debate on the proper role of reason and religion in politics. Anyone?

Mormons, Part II

2007-12-10T17:48:00.000-05:00

Just watched Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech again. I was significantly more impressed the second time around, mostly because I made peace with the idea that its wooden style and staccato argumentation is just the way Romney talks. And then it didn't seem nearly as awkward.

Actually, it was quite good -- a fitting, if imperfect, response not only to evangelical Iowa voters who may be creeped out by Romney's Mormonism, but also to secular types who are especially wary of someone like Huckabee.

One hears the complaint more and more these days that there's too much religion in politics, a complaint driven not only by genteel horror that someone would act as if their religious beliefs actually influence their lives, but also by reasonable wariness of religion's power, and hence its power to pollute if corrupted. (Religious conservatives should always remember that the first modern mainstream presidential candidate to talk about his faith in the way we've come to expect nowadays was world-class scold Jimmy Carter -- a man I've heard invoked more than once in conversations about Mike Huckabee.)

And yet: It seems only commonsensical that (1) if one's religious convictions were a major part of one's life, one would seek a natural, honest way to talk about them with people who may not share them, and (2) to the extent to which those convictions govern one's actions and values, the voting public has every right to be interested in them.

Come to think of it, I'd be very interested to see whether the members of the NY Times editorial board -- in such top form as they berated the intolerant Iowa evangelical for daring to be curious about Romney's Mormonism -- would be completely neutral to a candidate who professed a religious conviction that, say, the earth is 6,000 years old.

But quite understandably, Romney had neither the time nor the inclination to convince voters that nothing in Mormon doctrine was the slightest bit antagonistic to either good sense or the American political order. A lot of people wanted him to give that speech, but it would have been a fool's errand from the beginning. For one, he'd have had to bring up a lot of the exotic things Mormons actually do believe.

By talking much more generally -- and with evident feeling -- about religion in America, however, he made a very strong argument along these lines: "Trust me." And he promised to return the favor:

"Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it. But I think they underestimate the American people. Americans do not respect believers of convenience."

I would only note that if Romney does lose the nomination, there will be plenty of explanations other than that Americans, in fact, do respect believers of convenience. But I digress.

The Mormon thing -- open thread

2007-12-06T11:32:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to blog for a while now about this painfully awkward question at last week's CNN/YouTube Republican debate, but Mitt Romney's long-debated "Mormon" speech yesterday, I guess, kinda superceeds that at this point.

I'll have a few thoughts later today. For now, here's the speech (and the video). Everyone seems to have something to say about it. So a quick straw poll of my devoted readers: what do you think? Any impressions -- style, political substance, theological substance -- welcome.

And here's Richard John Neuhaus, Rich Lowry, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, E.J. Dionne Jr., Richard Cohen, Jonah Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, the gang at NRO, and the NY Times to help.

Be back later.

Muhammad the Teddy Bear

2007-11-28T17:10:00.000-05:00

Gillian Gibbons must be wondering, "Where's Charles Gordon when I need him?"

Quote of the week (c. 1897)

2007-11-27T18:06:00.000-05:00

A bit of timeless -- and timely -- wisdom, from an old standby:

"We are at present in a transition stage, nor is the manner nor occasion of the end in sight. Still this is no time to despair. I have often noticed in these Afghan valleys, that they seem to be entirely surrounded by the hills, and to have no exit. But as the column has advanced, a gap gradually becomes visible and a pass appears. Sometimes it is steep and difficult, sometimes it is held by the enemy and must be forced, but I have never seen a valley that had not a way out. That way we shall ultimately find, if we march with the firm but prudent step of men who know the dangers; but, conscious of their skill and discipline, do not doubt their ability to deal with them as they shall arise."

So wrote the 23-year-old Winston Churchill at the end of his first book, "The Story of the Malakand Field Force," recounting his adventures subduing a religiously inspired tribal uprising in the Swat and Malakand Valleys on the northwest frontier of British India. You may have heard of these places.

Frankly, the book's pretty hard to read these days without seeing a whole lot of interesting parallels and contrasts -- both sobering and emboldening -- between his situation and ours. At least it good to know that someone's been there before.

Putting "Christ" back in... err, the day after Thanksgiving

2007-11-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

Two things I love about today:

1. Leftovers
2. Guilt-free Christmas boosterism

For as long as I can remember, it's been a standard November ritual to complain about the encroachment of Christmas on Thanksgiving (and even Halloween) -- the grievance being that far too many businesses hang their decorations and launch their holiday advertising far too early, hoping to make that one extra buck off premature Christmas cheer. Like I said, I can't really remember when this wasn't the case, and as one who'd pay good money for extra Christmas cheer, I've never really minded it too much.

However, as proper conservatism obliges me to uphold the standards of an idealized and probably never-existent past, I've always looked forward to today as the day I can finally sing openly all the Christmas carols I've had stuck in my head for the last two weeks. Must keep up appearances, after all.

So have a happy Hanukkah, a far-out Winter Solstice, and/or a joyous and expectant Advent. Just one request, if I could: Mind that you don't judge too harshly those who are only trying to make an honest dollar at a time when people aren't even shopping for themselves. Yes, we all know that Christmas is in some sense "overcommercialized," but isn't there something a bit bah-humbug in whining about it too much? Between the ACLU, the IATSE, and the folks who go apoplectic whenever Target says "Happy Holidays," we already have enough Grinches this time of year.

Richard John Neuhaus, of course (scroll to the bottom), says it far better than I ever could.

And for desert, here's Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart arguing about which of them loves Thanksgiving more.

Yay, science!

2007-11-21T19:23:00.000-05:00

This appears to be nothing short of amazing news: Teams of scientists working independently in Wisconsin and Japan have both discovered a way to make human skin cells act like embryonic stem cells.

In other words, all the adaptability that makes embryonic cells more promising than adult ones for things like tissue regeneration and disease research, without destroying embryos in the process. And cheaper, too!

I'll let the good folks at NRO say what needs to be said regarding the politics and bioethics of it. Certainly, President Bush doesn't come out looking too bad.

I commend the full New York Times piece to your reading -- it's rather long, but it lays out all the details and implications quite well. Also relevant are the (seemingly minor) hurdles still to be overcome, which don't get much ink in the understandably excited conservative press. The relevant part of the story:

"He and Dr. Yamanaka caution, though, that they still must confirm that the reprogrammed human skin cells really are the same as stem cells they get from embryos. And while those studies are under way, Dr. Thomson and others say, it would be premature to abandon research with stem cells taken from human embryos.

"Another caveat is that, so far, scientists use a type of virus, a retrovirus, to insert the genes into the cells’ chromosomes. Retroviruses slip genes into chromosomes at random, sometimes causing mutations that can make normal cells turn into cancers.

"One gene used by the Japanese scientists actually is a cancer gene.

"The cancer risk means that the resulting stem cells would not be suitable for replacement cells or tissues for patients with diseases, like diabetes, in which their own cells die. But they would be ideal for the sort of studies that many researchers say are the real promise of this endeavor — studying the causes and treatments of complex diseases.

"For example, researchers could make stem cells from a person with a disease like Alzheimer’s and turn the stem cells into nerve cells in a petri dish. Then they might learn what goes awry in the brain and how to prevent or treat the disease.

"But even the retrovirus drawback may be temporary, scientists say. Dr. Yamanaka and several other researchers are trying to get the same effect by adding chemicals or using more benign viruses to get the genes into cells. They say they are starting to see success."

Kick ass.

Turkey-pardoning, and other left-wing shenanigans

2007-11-19T17:44:00.000-05:00

I realize I'm jumping the gun a bit. Whatever.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for Aaron Sorkin -- specifically for his Thanksgiving-themed West Wing episodes. Scoff if you must: The show's hopelessly romanticized, Sorkin's a coked-up bleeding-heart liberal, etc, etc. I don't care. "Shibboleth" is one of the most beautiful, clever, heartwarming hours of television you'll ever see.

This comes to mind only because I've had "We Gather Together," the hymn he uses to end the episode, stuck in my head all day. And since there's nothing more annoying than having a song stuck in your head without knowing all the words, I had to look it up:

"We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
he chastens and hastens his will to make known;
the wicked oppressing now cease from distressing:
sing praise to his Name, he forgets not his own.

Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining,
ordaining, maintaining his kingdom divine;
so from the beginning the fight we were winning:
thou, Lord, wast at our side: all glory be thine!

We all do extol thee, thou leader triumphant,
and pray that thou still our defender wilt be.
Let thy congregation escape tribulation:
thy Name be ever praised! O Lord, make us free!"

Here's the tune. A good friend pointed out the strange disconnect between the lighthearted, joyful melody and the gather-together, give-thanks theme on the one hand, and the particularly weighty lyrics -- chastening, tribulation, etc. -- on the other. Worth pondering.

Whoop-ass, prophet-style

2007-11-16T19:01:00.000-05:00

Apropos of nothing in particular, I took a particular liking to the first reading from Wednesday's mass. Figured I'd share it. It's Wisdom 6:1-11:

"Hear, O Kings, and understand;
learn, you magistrates of the earth's expanse!
Hearken, you who are in power over the multitude
and lord it over throngs of peoples!
Because authority was given you by the Lord
and sovereignty by the Most High,
who shall probe your works and scrutinize your counsels.
Because, though you were ministers of his kingdom, you judged not rightly,
and did not keep the law,
nor walk according to the will of God,
Terribly and swiftly shall he come against you,
because judgment is stern for the exalted--
For the lowly may be pardoned out of mercy
but the mighty shall be mightily put to the test.
For the Lord of all shows no partiality,
nor does he fear greatness,
Because he himself made the great as well as the small,
and he provides for all alike;
but for those in power a rigorous scrutiny impends.
To you, therefore, O princes, are my words addressed
that you may learn wisdom and that you may not sin.
For those who keep the holy precepts hallowed shall be found holy,
and those learned in them will have ready a repose.
Desire therefore my words;
long for them and you shall be instructed."

Pretty cool, huh?

Big news on the home front

2007-11-13T13:08:00.000-05:00

Dastardly desert despots, beware: Master at Arms Seaman Sarah Wilson, USN, deploys to the Persian Gulf today. Yes, that's my sister -- and I couldn't be prouder. Any and all thoughts and prayers greatly appreciated. Come to think of it, pray for Ahmadinejad & Co. as well -- that they realize very quickly that my sister is not the kind of sailor they want to mess with.

Popery for the People

2007-11-12T18:25:00.000-05:00

It's official: Pope Benedict XVI will be coming to New York in April. On the itinerary: Addressing the U.N. (4/18), Mass at St. Patrick's (4/19), and an afternoon mass at Yankee Stadium (4/20 -- a Sunday, by the way).

Speaking of Yankee Stadium: It's been noticed that, while Benedict is visiting New York and Washington, he'll be skipping Boston. Some in the press have made the connection to Boston's status as the center of the recent sex-abuse scandals. This may be true, but I'm not convinced. It's been fairly strongly established, consider, that the Boston Red Sox are no longer playing under the Curse of the Bambino. My question: How did they get it lifted -- and is there something the Vatican knows that would make the Pope loathe to say mass at Fenway Park?

One minor disappointment: Benedict won't be saying mass in Central Park, as John Paul II did in 1995. Is Yankee Stadium really that much better of a venue? Or did the Church have to answer to an, um, higher power? Mayor Bloomberg, after all, is especially fond of grass.

Hitting the speaking circuit

2007-11-09T19:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. I could claim busyness, but honestly, it's really just that the right topic hasn't popped into my head at the convenient time for a while. That said, I have had a fun and exciting week -- starting with a trip to Phoenix last weekend for the Collegiate Network's editors' conference. Consider it my first post-college speaking gig. They wanted me there to talk up the Eric Briendell Journalism Award, which I was of course happy to do. The talk went well, and I got to meet lots of interesting people, notably John J. Miller from National Review and Vic Matus from the Weekly Standard.

The theme of my remarks, such as they were, was how the pressures of a big-city newspaper puts the fever pitch of college campus "identity" activism in perspective. Appropriately enough, my next stop was back to my famed alma mater for a wonderfully exhausting day of catching up with old college buddies.

One piece of news to report: CMC is participating in what's called a "Campus Climate Challenge," the idea being to get students to conserve energy. All well and good, of course. But then President Gann had to go put her own spin on things. In her announcement email to students, I hear, she listed exactly two suggestions for how to reduce one's carbon footprint.

1) Turn off the lights when you leave your room.

2) Dry your clothes on a clothesline.

One doubts whether she thought that one out. Or whether the Admissions Office would be completely amenable to wet boxers strung across North Quad as tours pass by.

Happy Reformation Day!

2007-10-31T15:55:00.000-05:00

490 years ago today, a renegade German monk named Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany. One can understand his frustration and admire his zeal without buying all his theological conclusions. One can also mourn the brutal divisions in the Body of Christ this act caused while simultaneously celebrating the constant progress presently being made toward the healing of those divisions.

Anyway, in comemoration of Herr Luther and his, um, chutzpah, here are a pair of reflections on the Reformation by two of the great Christian thinkers of the English language.

The first is G.K. Chesterton's final chapter of his wonderful biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's called "The Sequel to St. Thomas." Note his strong preference for the original.

Quoth he: "Perhaps, after all, it did begin with a quarrel of monks; but the Pope was yet to learn how quarrelsome a monk could be. For there was one particular monk in that Augustinian monastery in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake."

The second is John Wesley, in what is probably the most moving and eloquent plea for ecumenism ever written. (Scroll down to the fourth letter: "To a Roman Catholic.") And to think, it only took the Catholic Church 213 years to respond!

Just noticing...

2007-10-29T11:50:00.000-05:00

A pretty crappy weekend sportswise, for reasons I doubt I need to mention. But here's a bit of silver lining: My UCONN Football Huskies spanked the formerly 2nd-ranked South Florida on Saturday, putting them in serious contention for the Big East title. Already the fastest team to win a bowl game after turning Div. 1-A, they're now the second-fastest to be nationally ranked. 16th in the latest AP poll, to be exact.

And then there's the BCS standings: 13th. That school you may have spotted some six spots lower? USC.

Osama bin Laden, Uomo Fascista

2007-10-24T16:28:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens sounds off in today's (Wednesday's) Post on why "Islamo-Fascism" is an apt and descriptive moniker for fundamentalist Muslim jihadism.

It's a fairly good list of how the jihadism and fascism are bad in similar ways, but he completely misses the strongest case for the term out there. To wit: Osama bin Laden says so.

I refer to OBL's latest audio message to his al Qaeda underlings in Iraq, in which he scolds them for pursuing their own factional interests instead of uniting to chase out the infidels and blasphemers. This, apparently, is his explanation for why al Qaeda is getting it's ass kicked at the moment.

Unity, he says, is the answer: "O people, observe obedience and the group, for it is the rope of Allah to which He ordered us to cling."

And then there's this doozy: "Sticks refuse to break when banded together but if they come apart they break one by one."

It's a telling metaphor. Turns out, a bundle of sticks tied together is an ancient image dating back to Roman times. It's name? The fascis. As in, fascism.

There's no coincidence here. The fascis symbolizes "strength through unity," which is the slogan Benito Mussolini picked up early on to define his new political regime. He even used the fascis on his ministerial flag.

Nor, I would suggest, is bin Laden simply picking up on a helpful but isolated metaphor completely detached from his underlying ideology. Fascism has its intellectual roots, broadly speaking in German philosophical romanticism (Hegel, etc.), which postulated a unity of all things completely freed from the confines of Aristotelian logic. That "Unity" -- also called the "Ideal," the "Oversoul," etc -- was considered synonymous with "God."

The God of Islam, of course, is a much more concrete, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. Kind of. Still, as I argue here (and Pope Benedict argues here), radical Islam retains a fairly troubled relationship with good, old-fashioned philosophical reason of the type that Hegel and his successors passionately reject. And that has troubling implications for the standing of the individual in both cases.

Note that I distinguish here between the jihadist, let's-blow-stuff-up strains of Islam and Islam broadly defined. Whether the clear philosophical problems with the former remain problems with Islam qua Islam, I'll leave up to them to decide.

Some might offer that in either case, the God of Islam isn't nearly as down-to-earth as he should be. But perhaps I digress.

Torre's out, the new CI, and the Times annoys again

2007-10-19T11:43:00.000-05:00

The media here have been gushing for weeks about Joe Torre and what a class act he is, and that's sure to continue now that he's finally officially gone. His class was evident at his press conference today, where he, among other things, explained his decision to turn down a token $5 million, one-year contract. Torre came across as a guy who had done his job, realized the team (the management, at least) wanted to move on, and preferred to cherish the memories rather than go one more round of agonizing uncertainty with the Steinbrenners. He'll be missed.

On the supposed short list to replace Torre, meanwhile, is none other than Don Mattingly, the great baseball hero (along with Nolan Ryan) of my early childhood. I'd love to see it -- if only he wasn't cursed. My colleague Robert George explains.

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In other news, the new issue of the Claremont Independent is out, and full, as usual, of worthwhile reading. In the lead, Elise Viebeck and Ilan Wurman aim their double-barreled shotgun of truth at CMC's Civ 10 program. Particularly interesting -- and outrageous -- is David Daleiden's well-crafted expose of how fresman orientation treated sexuality and mental illness. Utterly classless and disrespectful. Read it -- you'll see. Fellow concerned alumni: The dean of students' phone number is 909-621-8114.

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The New York Times editorial board has a new blog -- and it's a doozy. You'll find the same patent refusal to make an actual argument as on their print-edition page -- only now, they're snippy about it. See here for a good example. Real cute, right? Because as we all know, journalists who oppose the Bush administration get assassinated too.

The News gets the noose

2007-10-15T11:42:00.000-05:00

Much as I hate to credit a rival page, the Daily News' Stanley Crouch today has the best commentary so far on the recent (and unfolding) hate crimes craze at Columbia University. His take: take it easy.

If you haven't heard of the noose found last week on a black professor's door at Columbia, the article might explain why I've been getting some serious deja-vu recently. Not that I'm alleging, as Crouch hints, that anything Kerri-Dunnesque is going on here, but the "I'm being silenced" rhetoric and endless discussion groups naturally bring back strong memories for me.

And then there's this passage (Claremont historians, take note!):

"The reason I am skeptical of the Columbia incident is that when I taught at the Claremont Colleges from 1968 to 1975, it was not unusual for some black students to send racist mail to themselves to manipulate the administration when negotiations about campus racial policies were at a tipping point."

Well. The more things change...

Those classy NY Republicans

2007-10-10T18:06:00.000-05:00

When I was briefly flirting with registering to vote as a Democrat (I didn't, by the way), I mentioned that of the 51 members of New York's City Council, only three were Republicans, and one of them had just been indicted for rape. Well, here's one of the others -- the minority leader, in fact -- reacting to a hapless Norwiegian Ali G wannable. It's worth watching -- as long as there aren't any children in the room.

UPDATE: My colleague Tom Elliott -- who, as you'll see, has some more personal experience with the good councilman -- puts a Churchillian spin on the outburst. I guess I should have thought of that in the first place, but I do appreciate the shout-out.

Blog Post on Strauss

2007-10-09T12:38:00.000-05:00

Leo Strauss, that is -- the Godfather of CMC's Gov Department and political philosopher extraordinaire, whose essay "What is Political Philosophy" I've been perusing to supplement my strange new intellectual diet of gubernatorial scandals and waterfront development.

I make note of this only to direct your attention to some particularly juicy gems of wisdom I found. Among them:

"When [a positivist] says that democracy is a value which is not evidently superior to the opposite value, he does not mean that he is impressed by the alternative which he rejects, or that his heart or his mind is torn between alternatives which in themselves are equally attractive. His "ethical neutrality" is so far from being nihilism or a road to nihilism that it is not more than an alibi for thoughtlessness and vulgarity: by saying that democracy and truth are values, he says in effect that one does not have to think about the reasons why these things are good, and that he may bow as well as anyone else to the values that are adopted and respected by his society. Social science positivism fosters not so much nihilism as conformism and philistinism."

This, for anyone who wonders why Dostoevsky's stark "without God, all is lawful" warning doesn't always seem to compute in our friendly, live-and-let-live Western world. More later.

Friday thoughts

2007-10-05T09:59:00.000-05:00

This is noteworthy: Dan Keating, the last surviving veteran of the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence died on Wednesday. By all appearences, he never really gave up the fight, going so far as to participate in a 1939-1940 IRA bombing campaign of London -- and never accepting old-age benefits from the "illegitimate" Republic of Ireland.

I might update this post with a few more thoughts later. The old "Irish question" was really what got me interested in my senior thesis topic, Churchill & empire, in the first place. It's a fascinating bit of history.

In other news: As I first suspected last Friday, Peggy Noonan has a crush on Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, back in Claremont...

2007-10-01T17:24:00.000-05:00

Big news at my famed Alma Mater: Billionaire alumnus/trustee Robert Day has just given $200 million to CMC for the creation of a Masters of Finance program. Here's the press release. Yes, thats $200 million -- the largest single donation ever to a liberal arts college.

Surprise, surprise, it's controversial -- and to my mind, rightly so. The Claremont Independent's Ilan Wurman reports that the Literature department has sent a strongly worded protest to President Gann, taking issue with the donation's exclusive focus on finance and related fields, like "leadership psychology." To my mind, this is a big concern, given that $200 million amounts to almost half of CMC's total endowment.

Money quote: "If Robert Day cannot be convinced to distribute some of his gift to other areas of the college, we believe it is because you are not showing enough leadership to convince him that it is worthwhile to do so."

I'll remain agnostic about the donation for now, confident that the intrepid (and well-trained) reporters at the CI will soon shed some, uh, Day-light on the controversy. For now, fellow alumni, feel free to sound off.

UPDATE: From President Gann: CMC's Economics Department is now "The Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College."

More Mahmoud

2007-09-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

Not sure what I think of this piece from Peggy Noonan. She remains one of my favorite writers, but I'm always a bit wary when she gets into scoldly/nostalgic mode. Especially when she sounds just like Barack Obama in the process.

She's on to something, however, in scolding Columbia President Lee Bolinger for "introducing" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with an angry condemnation. Not that it wasn't deserved, but it gave A-jad his one legitimate point of the entire circus: "In my country, when you invite someone as a guest, you treat him with respect." A lot of people thought Bollinger redeemed himself by sticking it to A-jad. "He really stood up to the dictator" and all that. I thought the whole thing was unseemly -- if not plain dishonorable.

And William F. Buckley agrees with me. At least he did in 1962, as the folks at NRO's The Corner dug up a few days ago. This is worth reading. Money quote: "Fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to your quarters, merely to spit upon them: and do not ask them to your quarters if you cannot spit upon them."

More broadly: What's with the notion these days that sticking your tongue out at a bad guy constitutes some great act of courage? I got the same kind of feeling a few months ago, when A-jad released those captured British sailors, who went on to sign book deals as soon as they got home. The woman among them bragged about her real snappy comeback when A-jad asked her about her family during his "amnesty" ceremony. Not to minimize their travails, but that aspect was particularly lame.

A theory: Is it a matter of confusing the nature of evil? The belief that genocidal dictators can be embarrassed as if they were run-of-the-mill unscrupulous politicians? Say Bush = Hitler enough, and you'll get some seriously mistaken ideas about who Hitler was.

Zing!

2007-09-27T17:28:00.000-05:00

The opener to this column is the reason George Will remains one of my favorite writers. The rest of the piece ain't bad, either.

My first byline

2007-09-25T09:58:00.000-05:00

I have a short op-ed in today's Post about Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia. My basic thesis is that it was a lot more philosophical and rhetorically clever than he's given credit for -- and still dead wrong. Please forgive my lack of nuance. A millenium of philosophical and theological thinking on two continents is a lot to squeeze into 350 words.

Johann Tetzel rolls in his grave

2007-09-19T16:53:00.000-05:00

Jokes about this story have been flying around the office all day.

For the record: (1) I like trees, and (2) Yes, JP2 has said some wonderful and nuanced things about the Christian duty to care for the environment, an idea I'm completely on board with.

But just for the sake of snarkiness: Who at the Council of Trent would have imagined that 500 years down the road, the Chuch would actually be buying indulgences?

Sola power, anyone?

I was a teenage supply-sider

2007-09-12T17:42:00.000-05:00

Few know this about me now, but during my intellectually formative high-school years, my passion was economics. And not just plain economics, but specifically the supply-side theories of folks like Art Laffer, George Gilder, Jude Wanniski, and Larry Kudlow that formed the intellectual foundation for the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts. For my young and romantic mind, supply-side economics was sexy, sweeping, and (I still believe) fairly commonsensical.

I mention this because Jonathan Chait of The New Republic has a colorful survey of the movement's history in the latest New Republic. It's a shrill hit-piece, but it was still fun to read, given that I actually lived firsthand through some of the intellectual history he's narrating.

The piece itself is unimpressive. Its thesis is that this cabal of "economic crackpots" has hijacked the conservative movement--and American politics in general. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that someone's hijacked the conservative movement (it typically alternates between the neocons and the religious right, though)... I'd have quite a few nickels.

Chait also--while acknowledging that there's a grain of truth to it--wrongly minimizes the applicability of supply-side logic. The plain fact is that taxes affect economic behavior in all sorts of ways, and in that vein, Wanniski's The Way the World Works is a lot more nuanced than he gives it credit for in fleshing those out.

That said, he has some good points when he talks about the, umm... excesses in enthusiasm of the supply side crowd. I was there--and had them myself. In fact, as someone who subscribed to--and loved--The American Spectator when George Gilder ran the show, I can add a few more datapoints of my own.

Like Larry Kudlow's 2001 prediction that the Dow would hit 35,000 by the end of the decade.

Then--to show that the supply-side cabal hasn't completely taken over the conservative movement--there was the scoffing (pre 9/11) editorial about how Bill Kristol and the "national greatness" crowd at The Weekly Standard "would love another war."

Of course, once 9/11 hit, most of the supply-side crowd (with the exception of the oddball Wanniski) was pretty hawkish. Supply-side economics was never just about marginal tax rates, but about the societal and personal virtues cultivated by entrepreneurship and freedom. That a repudiation of all those things would appear in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, then, offered no ideological difficulty. And for folks like Kudlow and especially Michael Novak (both devout Catholics), free market entrepreneurship, done well, can even take on a great religious dignity. (John Paul II, too, has said as much.)

The lesson here for all those (mostly liberal) pundits predicting a crack-up of the conservative coalition, or its hijacking by one faction or another, is that on a fundamental level (and speaking very generally), conservative ideas on social, economic, and foreign policy actually fit together quite well.

Even on matters of war, however, supply-siders' particular and exaggerated ideological optimism was evident. Kudlow (whom I have enormous respect for, by the way) predicted that the Dow would jump 1,000 points the day Baghdad fell. Needless to say, that didn't quite happen.

Chait's other quasi-legitimate point is about deficits. Supply-siders have always been fairly dismissive of big budget deficits, at least on the federal level. The reasoning goes that 1) they won't be as big as predicted anyway, because tax-cut spurred economic growth will bring in more revenue, and 2) even when they're there, their negative effect on the economy isn't that big. This is essentially because tax-cut produced economic growth eats up the inflation deficits are supposed to produce.

This, say supply-siders, is why the huge deficits of the Reagan years were accompanied by an economic boom and low inflation (yes, yes, Volcker helped too)--and why the low deficits of the Carter years coincided with serious stagflation.

One of my favorite Reagan quotes, along these lines, is "I don't worry about the deficit; it's big enough to take care of itself." There's wisdom here. But going forward 20 years, you get Cheney's gloss on the principle: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." And that's a problem, at the very least on a moral level. Because when you have a government that automatically assumes it can spend more money than it takes in... well, you pretty much get Bush's domestic spending.

And that's all I have to say about that. Anyone looking for a more reasonable take on the virtues and follies of supply-siderism should check out Bruce Bartlett, one of the original crew, on why the entire term has overgrown its usefulness.

Green Jihad

2007-09-07T17:26:00.000-05:00

Osama Bin Laden's got a new 'do and a new video, and my good friend Robert A. George has some thoughts about the mess he just stepped into.

I, however, found the following section the most revealing. Quoth Bin Laden:

"In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord."

In other news, Al Gore just started filming his latest documentary: "My Inconvenient Ally."

It also makes you wonder: Just how much could al Qaeda reduce its carbon footprint by, I don't know... not blowing things up?

A Village surprise

2007-09-04T15:09:00.000-05:00

One finds all kinds of wonderful things while wondering around New York. Take the following quote, from a monument in, of all places, Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park:

"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the event is in the hands of God."

That's from George Washington, addressing the Consitutional Convention of which he was just made chairman. What I love about this quote is what one might call its steely hope. Any venture, no matter how well-intentioned, Washington says, may certainly fail, but this is no reason to sacrifice principle to convenience. It is possible to build something both noble and lasting, as the Founders were trying to do, and their hopes are founded upon the kind of people it can rally and inspire.

Or maybe those aren't the right words. I especially love Washington's use of the word "repair," which evokes images of rest or renewal. In other words, the standard Washington wants to raise is not just a cause for which the wise and honest can recognize, fight for, and get worn out, but a cause based on a principle that somehow refreshes the soul.

Worth pondering, for sure.

The Will of God

2007-08-31T19:02:00.000-05:00

Here's Richard John Neuhaus in particularly wise form on the question of discerning God's will for one's life.

His conclusion: You may never know for sure, and that's just fine.

I may have more comment on this later.

The state of the race

2007-08-29T10:45:00.000-05:00

Here's some gripping, fearless commentary that puts the upcoming presidential election in its proper historical perspective. Enjoy.

Sex, Sharia, and Foucault

2007-08-27T10:28:00.000-05:00

David Frum has a fascinating book review at NRO today about deconstructionist philosopher Michael Foucault's (figurative) love affair with Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian Revolution. Apparently Foucault, increasingly discouraged by Marxism's failure to catch on in the West, saw radical Islam as the last best hope of dismantling the old-guard Judeo-Christian/Enlightenment order he detested.

What's more, this book (Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson) asserts, the Revolution's subjugation of women was not incidental to Foucault's admiration.

Frum's money quote:

QUOTE
Indeed, as Afary and Anderson point out, at the moment of his deepest engagement with the Iranian revolution, Foucault was at work upon the books he regarded as his masterwork, his History of Sexuality – a history that treats the emancipation of women in the later Graeco-Roman period as a catastrophe that put an end to the happy classical period when reproductive sex was regarded as an unpleasant duty, with pleasure to be sought between men and boys.

For Foucault, sexual pleasure was intimately bound to rituals of domination and outright acts of brutality. The Judaeo-Christian attempt to separate sex from cruelty was the poisoned apple in his Garden of Eden. He recognized that the Graeco-Roman world had departed forever. But some part of him seems to have hoped that the Islamic revolution might offer a return.
ENDQUOTE

My thought: a lot of slurs and accusations have been leveled against Christianity over the years, but the charge of separating sex from cruelty is one we should be able to own proudly.

There's a deeper point here, too, one that G.K. Chesterton makes at great length in The Everlasting Man. To wit: if one wants to assess the claims of Christianity, one must really look first at what it replaced. Because it has been so dominant for so long, however, its detractors need not even consider how much their worldview is based on assumptions that were once radically and explicitly Christian. That pederasty is wrong, for instance.

And this, I think, has something to do with why many serious Christian philosophers have actually welcomed the deconstructionism and postmodernism of Foucault and his ilk. It's fatal in large doses, but it does serve as a kind of philosophical diharretic, opening up an entire new language with which to express the thrilling claims of Christianity. And by rejecting en masse the traditions of both Christianity and the Enlightenment, it highlights just how much the latter depends on the former, and how lost we are without it.

UPDATE: I havent read it yet, but I hear that Tod Lindberg's The Political Teachings of Jesus is also excellent--and undoubtedly more scholarly than Chesterton--in parsing out the widespread assumptions of our day that come directly from the Gospels.

The Name above [some] names

2007-08-20T17:26:00.000-05:00

I hesitate to attempt any intelligent commentary on this story, if only because I don't want any thoughtful points I make to detract from its all-around creepiness.

So before I go on, please take a moment to read, shudder, and pray for my Church.

Thank you.

Now, can someone please explain to me how Catholics starting to call God "Allah" would do anything to promote religious understanding? True enough, the English word "God," apart from historical context and its distinctive capitalization, doesn't do much to specify Yahweh, the God of Israel, or the Trinity of Christian understanding, and "Al Lah" (The God) is basically its Arabic translation. So it would be only natural that Arabic-speaking (and sure, why not Indonesian) Christians would call God "Allah." (Do they? If I presume wrongly, someone please educate me.)

But I wonder whether Belgium's Islamic community would appreciate the gesture. I'm no expert on Islamic theology when it comes to the name of God, but the only Muslims I've ever discussed the issue with have insisted that the name "Allah" in their understanding refers exclusively to the God of Islam, and any similarity to pre-Islamic Arab words is incidental. (Again, I'd appreciate someone with more knowledge here speaking up.)

In any case, it's highly likely that any such effort would create far more confusion than understanding, and it makes one suspicious that this is simply another example of the term "interreligious understanding" being used as Newspeak for the minimization of crucial differences in belief.

If Bishop Muskens really wants to promote understanding, his energy would be better spent articulating Christian belief, clearly, rationally, and charitably, and expecting the same of other religious leaders.

And speaking of Christian belief, the good Bishop's notion that God doesn't care what he's called is shaky at best. See, for instance, the First Commandment: Thou shalt not take my name in vain. It's true that Christians don't generally call him "Yahweh" (or YHWH) anymore, and that God has many names throughout the Bible, but each one of those many names matters in that it communicates something essential about his character.

Like his revelation to Moses: "I am the God of Abraham, the God if Isaac, the God of Jacob... I AM," which both asserts his transcendent being and defines his identity in specific relationship to the history of Moses' people. Or Jesus' "Abba, Father," a bold assertion of intimacy.

All of which means that while the name "God" is nothing fancy (although, I think, descriptive in its simplicity), why we call him what we do still matters greatly.

And "interreligious understanding" just doesn't cut it.

UPDATE: Robert T. Miller at First Things makes some similar points at greater length.

Humility is harder than that

2007-08-14T10:01:00.000-05:00

Gov. Spitzer delivered a strange speech last week on "The need for both passion and humility in politics."

It's rather long, but you can get a good sense of what he said from the relevant editorials in the NY Post and the Daily News.

Making an ass of myself

2007-08-07T10:44:00.000-05:00

It's time to register to vote -- and that presents me with an unexpected dilemma.

It's no secret that I'm a fairly solid conservative, and nothing about living in New York for the past two months has done anything to change that. Nevertheless, I've received the strong suggestion from several sources recently that I consider registering as a Democrat.

The rationale is that New York City doesn't have much of a Republican Party to speak of. Of the 51 members of the City Council, only three are Republicans. Of those three, two represent Staten Island -- the small, residential, middle-class "forgotten borough" -- and the third was indicted last week on rape charges.

That means that the elections that matter are the Democratic primaries, which often feature mostly reasonable candidates running against demagogues and crazies for the right to rout whoever the Republicans put up in the general election. (Nothing, of course, would necessarily prevent me from voting for that Republican anyway.) Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things fame, for instance, is a Democrat for precisely this reason.

I haven't made any decision yet -- I'd have to weigh this against my desire to vote in the Republican presidential primary, among other things. But go ahead, let the jokes begin.

That said, for anyone who's curious, I figured out all my elected representatives this morning.

U.S. Congress: Democrat Carolyn Maloney, 14th district
N.Y. State Senate: Democrat George Onorato, 12th district
N.Y. State Assembly: Democrat Michael N. Gianaris, 36th district
New York City Council: Democrat Peter F. Vallone, Jr., 22th district

Sigh.

Big News

2007-08-03T11:09:00.000-05:00

As of today, I officially have a full-time job and a kick-ass apartment.

First, the job. I'm staying on at The Post, basically doing the same thing I've been doing, except now I have health benefits and a sweet-sounding title: Associate Editorial Page Editor. Along with that, however, I suppose this is as good a place as any to state for the record that the opinions expressed on this blog are entirely my own. At least the ones that might reflect poorly on the page as a whole.

And now the place--a near-miracle really. Within a period of five hours yesterday evening, I found, visited, and secured a room in an amazing apartment. I'll be moving into a 3-bedroom apartment in the Astoria section of Queens. It's only a 30-minute commute (10 min. walk, 20 min. subway) from Midtown Manhattan, and it's plenty big, with lots of bright windows and access to a roof with a sweet view of the Manhattan skyline. And the roommates seem pretty cool too. I'll post pictures of the view when I can. But for now, here's an article from the indispensable City Journal about Queens in general, which is by all accounts a very nice place.

Weird

2007-08-02T10:42:00.000-05:00

A strange story from The Post's sister paper (tee-hee) today: The piano John Lennon used to compose "Imagine" is making a quiet tour of various American scenes of tragedy. It's been to Virginia Tech, New Orleans, and Waco, among other places. Columbine High School and Ford's Theater have turned it down.

I agree with one New Orleans woman's initial assessment: "creepy."

It's probably obvious, but there's little love lost between me and this song. Honestly, I can't think of any song that would be less comforting to me in a time of tragedy.

On the other hand, I think its send-up in Forrest Gump is absolutely hilarious. In the scene, Forrest is on the Jonny Carson show talking about his Chinese table tennis exploits, alongside guess-who:

Gump: In Communist China, they don't really have a lot of things.

John Lennon: No posessions?

Gump: And nobody goes to church there either.

Lennon: No religion, too?

Carson: Hard to imagine, isn't it?

Lennon: Oh, it's easy if you try.

A brilliant parody: cute, friendly, and absolutely brutal.

Hello out there?

2007-07-29T22:15:00.000-05:00

Here's the deal:

I've been blogging semi-consistently for two months now, and it's time I got a good read on who's actually reading this thing. So here's your job: leave a comment on this post. Just let me know you stopped by--it will give me a better idea of whom, if anyone, I'm writing to.

This is important to me. I started this blog to keep in the practice of writing, to keep my friends informed of my exploits, and also because I thought I might have something interesting to say. So far, it's been a mixed experience. I realized very quickly that I had little interest in maintaining your standard minipundit outlet, consisting of frequent posts of interesting and newsworthy links followed by a paragraph or two of commentary. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not something I'm especially excited about, and I found the prospect of keeping up with the proverbial Joneses tiresome.

Well, it's really been a tiring experience anyway, which is why I haven't posted as often as I would have liked. I'm doing more writing than I expected for The Post, and it takes a lot out of me.

What compounds this even further is that I have very little idea who's out there. I'm in a position where I sometimes feel like I'm just spewing thoughts into cyberspapce with little purpose or method, which is a very unhealthy thing. A writer needs an audience, and he needs to write for that audience, or else his writing is an exercise in narcissism. (Or, if you prefer, "self-liberation," but let's not go there.) And as someone who's so used to parsing his words very carefully, I don't think I like it.

So, since this is your blog (whoever you are), feel free as well to comment on what you've liked or disliked, and what you'd like to see more of. More deep philosophical discussions? Should I bother to finish up my Gatsby or my Peter musings? More New York stories? Spiritual reflections--maybe an occasional brief take on the day's mass readings? Or should I just get my act together and post more frequently on all of the above?

But if that doesn't suit your fancy, don't worry about it. Just tell me who you are, and I'll guess as best I can.

Good news on the home front

2007-07-25T21:38:00.000-05:00

Support for the war in Iraq is going back up, the New York Times reported Wednesday. It's still low -- 42% of Americans now think the initial invasion was a good idea, up from 35% in May, and only 35% think the war is going "very badly," down from 45%. No victory parties yet. Still, if this is a trend -- and it's largely tracking with the facts on the ground -- it might be just enough for us to avoid an ugly surrender before Petraeus has a chance to do his thing.

My hope is that this means the country is climbing away from the second of two sillyheaded extremes we've passed through in the last few years. The first, of course, was Bush's democratic messianism -- "freedom is the desire of every human heart" and all that. Which may be true in some eschatological sense, but neglects the reality St. Paul pointed out 2,000 years ago, and which Bush should have known better -- that we're very very good at not doing that which, on a cosmic level, we probably really want.

Or, as Charles Kesler put it, the problem with neoconservatism is not that it thinks too highly of democracy, but that it doesn't think highly enough of it, minimizing its special genius by underestimating the level of virtue it actually requires of its citizens.

But as we learned that lesson the hard way by watching Iraq fall to pieces, a strange sort of cultural determinism set in. And along with a serious rethink of whether Islam is actually compatible with liberal democracy came the sentiment that, well, Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for a thousand years, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

Which is not quite true either. In the grand debate over whether politics influences culture or culture politics, the truth is a little of both. Certainly cultures can't be changed on the cheap, with a few quick elections and a truckload of Federalist Papers, but over the long term, major shifts can happen as a result of the way institutions are structured. Isn't that why we fight culture wars in the first place?

And it's also why, now that we've given up trying to push a strangely-deformed Iraqi democracy out of the nest and gotten down to the serious business of stopping violence our way, we've seen some significant fruit, and we can hope to see more. Stabilize more and more areas with an active troop presence, and we'll start to see a grassroots civil society emerge, which will do a lot more in the long run than any fragile political compromise we force together at the top.

There's no question that 3 years of American bungling is what got us into this mess, but I think we've finally bungled for long enough that our long-term strategic advantages are starting to emerge and the way forward (assuming we stay in) is becoming clearer. This is what often happens in war. Modern hawks like to compare everything that happens in this war to WWII, because it's recent and convenient. But I think an apter analogy might be Britain's situation during the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars. Basically, Britain suffered from political pettiness and division -- and hence poor military strategy -- far worse than ours as the Revolutionary armies kicked allied ass all over Europe. And then she got her act together. But that's a tangent for another time -- once I brush up on my Churchill.

In any case, our chief long-term strategic advantage -- and it's a huge one -- is that whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy, and despite all the dumb things we've done that Iraqis resent us for, it's becoming increasingly obvious that our aims and our methods are far better than anything else competing for dominance in Iraq. Let's keep working with that.

...

Until Iraq stops being Muslim, we will probably never see a real western-style liberal democracy there. As Richard John Neuhaus points out in his brilliant "America, Islam, and a Somewhat More Peaceful World," our language about "freedom" and such just doesn't jive with Muslim religious sensibilities. But, he continues,

It is more than conceivable that millions of Muslims desire to live under a government that can make a plausible claim to be Islamic and that is respectful of basic human rights... There are Muslim thinkers -- usually and somewhat misleadingly called moderates -- who believe that such a form of government is possible, and we should be listening to them.

In other words, Islam may not know what to do with "liberal democracy," but a Muslim can recognize a good government when he sees one. And if that government happens to keep the peace, uphold equal treatment under the law, and is to some extent determined through elections... is it that much of a stretch that Sunnis and Shiites might decide it's not worth it anymore to keep killing each other?

The caveat, of course, is that I know I'm speaking largely in general principles, and I have little clue whether certain inconvenient facts on the ground bely my musings. Like whether we have anywhere close to enough troops to keep this up. But facts need to be filtered through principles before they become meaningful analysis, and I think the pessimists' larger assumptions are off. And that gives me hope.

And now that I've written something a bit more controversial than "God loves us" or "Riverside Park is pretty," can I please get some comments?

Am I Cursed?

2007-07-23T16:51:00.000-05:00

Something about me just seems to push governors over the edge. Consider my record:

August 2003: Start college in Claremont, CA.
October 2003: Gray Davis recalled.

May 2004: Return home to Connecticut for the summer.
June 2004: John Rowland resigns, sent to prison.

May-June 2006: Spend two weeks at my folks' house in Virginia. There for less than a week when George Allen (a former gov) goes macaca.

And now there's this. Needless to say, it's been a busy day at the office.

Gatsby, part 2

2007-07-05T22:07:00.000-05:00

A quarrelsome comment on one of my earlier posts reminds me that I have yet to complete my thoughts on the great The Great Gatsby, and what on earth it has to do with Harvey Mansfield’s commentary on the role of literature in politics.

Here, by the way, is my first post on the subject.

First, though, to answer my good friend Andy Sinclair, who raises the standard for political science against Mansfield’s harsh assessment of its worthiness. My only reply is that I never meant to denigrate science, as I’m sure Mansfield didn’t as well. Working at a down-to-earth establishment like The Post has given me an even greater appreciation for the social sciences. You’re not going to make any headway in a debate about education or policing policy by constantly returning to first principles. Not only are people understandably suspicious of them, they also often have different ones. This may be unfortunate, but when your neighbors are getting shot, the best way to turn things around isn’t to convince your councilman of the wisdom of the Republic or the Summa.

Of course, that’s really not even the point. The point is that you need science and its method to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. Good social science saved New York.

And I’m sure the same principle applies in the more specific realm of political science. The most charismatic candidate with the best ideas isn’t going anywhere without a grounded campaign apparatus, and even the most seasoned campaign managers rely on the meticulous study of the electoral landscape and the patterns of the past.

So, Andy, I swear on my high school math league trophies that just as you have nothing against literature and philosophy, I have nothing against math and science. If the debate comes down to what needs more emphasis in today's academy or politics, I suppose we'd both be partisans of our respective focuses. Or maybe not. My point (and I think Mansfield's as well) is not so much that there's too much science and not enough literature, but rather that we need to understand their proper relationship, and hope that this may ennoble both.

As Mansfield says, science is very good at telling us the what and the how, but not the who or the why. The problem occurs when science, perhaps absorbed by its method, claims metaphysical significance that it can't support. The most eggregious violator here was Karl Marx, an economist who thought that economics could explain everything. This presumption, of course, led to some very poor economics.

Today, the problem is not so much with scientifically-inspired dogmatic ideology as with scientifically-inspired dogmatic lack of ideology, or dogmatic agnosticism, if you will. Mansfield speaks of science's suspicion of anything that can't be counted, asserting that it's had terrible consequences for American political discourse. I think his diagnosis is spot-on, and I think the last 20 years of New York City politics proves it.

I promise I'll get to Gatsby. But first I need to explain what I mean. Next post.

Two for the Fourth

2007-07-03T20:19:00.000-05:00

Here are two articles I've recently come across that I highly recommend.

"Iraq and the Neoconservatives" is by the brilliant scholar and rumored Presidential dark horse Charles Kesler. It's rather long, but absolutely worth it. It's about the evolution and internal debates within the neoconservative movement and how they're reflected in current thinking about the Iraq war. Prominent is the relationship between politics and culture, and the debate over which influences which.

This one isn't quite as long or as refined, but it says what needs to be said.

Happy Independence Day!

A Greyhound on the Hudson River line

2007-07-01T19:58:00.000-05:00

It's time for another post. I know I've promised a discourse on the philosophical significance of The Great Gatsby, and I also still need to explain how my reflections on the end of John's gospel disprove the Protestant Reformation. But those are fairly weighty subjects, and I appreciate your patience.

For now, it's come to my attention that I haven't blogged at all yet about New York itself--this city that I've already come to love. I've had the opportunity this weekend to see a bit more of it, so this seems as good a time as any. The following observations have no particular unifying theme, and I promise that any prescient nuggets of sociological or philosophical wisdom that may emerge are completely accidental.

Riverside Park: Probably my favorite place in the city. My apartment is on the far west end of Manhattan island (around 63rd street), so I have a very nice view of the Hudson River when I stick my head out my window. I'm a short walk away from Riverside Park (the park along the river, if you haven't figured it out), which is a wonderful place to go for a stroll, especially around sunset. Stroll out on one of the piers, and you have a clean view of the George Washington Bridge to your right and downtown Manhattan to your left. It's just sweet.

Although maybe I misspoke. Riverside Park is best known as the place where all the beautiful liberal yuppies on the Upper West Side go to walk their dogs and push their strollers. It's a wonderful park, to be sure, but it technically only starts north of 72nd street. The area I'm more stricken with is the Hudson River Park, which stretches intermittently along the river from 72nd street down to lower Manhattan. I haven't explored the length of it, but at least the part near my place has a more, well, romantic quality to it. It's still pretty and safe (so far as I can tell), and there's lots of nice places to sit and look at the river, but there's also more of a gothic element. There's the waste treatment facility right next to the old creepy-looking parking garage, the basketball hoops and bike path directly underneath the raised highway, and a decaying wooden half-sunken structure of some sort sticking out into the water. I just wish the benches weren't so new.

Governor's Island: May give Riverside Park a run for its money. I just visited today for the first time. It's a national monument on the site of a former fort, military barracks and arsenal about 800 feet southeast of Manhattan island. It's also the best view you can find of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Brooklyn Heights skyline, the Jersey City skyline, and the Statue of Liberty. And it's completely free, including the ferry to get there.

Currently only the top half of the island is open to the public, but the city recently decided to develop the rest into some kind of recreation area. They've narrowed the proposals down to five, some of which look really weird.

A side note: even though I grew up in Connecticut, today was the first time I'd ever seen the Statue of Liberty. It actually gave me goosebumps. My only previous experience with Lady Liberty had been through movies about turn-of-the-century immigration, notably The Godfather, Part II and An American Tail. There's something both comforting and challenging in realizing that she's still there.

Speaking of which, here's an article by the beautiful Peggy Noonan on her family's immigrant experience. For all her weaknesses in straight punditry--or perhaps because of them--this is the kind of piece that Peggy can write as well as anyone else alive.

And speaking of the lower Manhattan skyline...

I've had a few opportunities to pass by ground zero in my comings and goings around the city. It's a strange place, and I think it would do me good to linger and pray there one of these days. Quite soon after it happened, I filed 9/11 away in my mind as a significant historical event, but it's hard to escape the physical reality of what happened when you're standing right next to a big pit. Hmmm. There used to be two giant towers here.

It's especially good perspective given what's been going on in Britain recently. I may be in the news business, but it's so much more that just news. This is a perspective I've sensed in some of the real New Yorkers I've gotten to know, especially at the Post editorial page, and it says something about journalism as a vocation. Perhaps more on that later.

Also relevant to the physical reality of ground zero is that it's still right in the middle of the downtown financial district, so there's thousands of people passing by every day just in the normal course of their own business. And there's finally construction going on there--and just in time, because downtown is booming and it needs more office space. Which seems appropriate, although I'm not going to pretend I can speak to how until I've lived here a lot longer.

But one final comment on ground zero. So far as I understand it, there's really no good reason why construction of the new tower couldn't have started years ago, and I've heard it suggested that the delays and all the fights about memorials and the new tower's design and such have gradually transformed ground zero from a monument to American heroism and toughness into a monument to American bureaucratic incompetence.

I don't know about that. I'm reminded of one of my many favorite lines from my favorite movie, Casablanca. The evil German Major Strausser and the unscrupulous Vichy French police chief Captain Renault are in Renault's office talking about Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine and the stolen letters of transit they know he has. Renault tells Strausser that Rick is far too clever to let him find the letters. Strausser disagrees: "You give too much credit to this Mousier Blaine. My impression is that he's just another blundering American."

"One musn't underestimate American blundering," Renault coolly replies. "I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918."

Casablanca is a movie about the American doing the right thing--after he's exhausted all the other options. And as frustrating as it may be to the rest of the world (as it has been in the past), there's something fundamental about the American character there. We may try our best to slink into ignobility, but we also refuse to let the sins of our past hold captive our aspirations to goodness and greatness. There's a persistent sense of youthful innocence about America, and that comes, I think, from an understanding of itself that transcends history.

Ground zero is being rebuilt, which is as fitting a monument as any to what happened there. Ten years from now, no one will care whether it was a few years late in coming.

The Gray Lady flashes her colors

2007-06-20T14:18:00.000-05:00

When I was soliciting advice a few weeks ago about my tentative decision to intern for the New York Post this summer, Professor Jack Pitney paid the Post a compliment that, like the best compliments, was meaningful because it was descriptive. Sure, he said, the Post may go for the flashy headline, but it's also "gritty" and "real." This, I'm learning, is what distinguishes it from certain other newspapers, which one can only describe as unreal.

Here's what I mean. I started my internship on Monday, and one of my main tasks for this week has been to read all the big New York newspapers--the Post, the Daily News, the Sun, the Times, and the Wall Street Journal--to get a feel for the style of each and for what's been going on around the city.

One of the big recent stories, I discovered, concerned two separate incidents in which police had detained members of the street gang called the Latin Kings. In the first, a large group of Kings were allegedly being disorderly on their way to a funeral for a slain comrade; in the second, a crowd wearing the Kings' gang colors was arrested at New York's Puerto Rico Day parade. There, the gang had been denied its request to participate, and the police were concerned that they would attempt to crash the party.

Clearly, there are lots of different angles to this story. A few bystander kids at the parade were detained simply because they happened to be wearing the wrong colors, raising the question of how broad police powers to preempt possible threats to public order should be, and to what extent they should employ various sorts of profiling. The Post, for its part, pointed out the disorderly behavior of the kids on the way to the funeral and argued that the various "community leaders" who praised these kids for "standing up for their civil rights" were simply enabling a PR-savvy group of street thugs.

The New York Times, however, determined that the story needed some, uh... broader perspective. Apparently "many New Yorkers" are under the impression that street gangs stopped existing when West Side Story left Broadway. Gang colors, the author helpfully explains, are just like Gucci "horse bits" or children's soccer referees' uniforms in Riverside Park--they help you express your identity.

Or maybe they're just like the uniforms of that other street gang, the NYPD. At least, so says "Almighty Sire," a member of the Kings that this reporter interviews for her story. Sure, she eventually gets around to talking to the police, who present a very different view of what the gangs are and what they do, but nothing in the story indicates that she takes them any more seriously than the Kings themselves.

I guess this reporter would tell you that she was just being "objective." If so, it's a mighty strong indication that "objective journalism" simply doesn't exist, or at least that it shouldn't exist. All journalists should be fair, which often involves admitting that there are things they either don't or can't know. But they should also acknowledge that even when the truth doesn't come down clearly on one side of an issue or the other, it comes down somewhere.

This "he said, she said" blather that passes for journalism at the New York Times, however, isn't fair or good. It may be "objective," but it's also a blatant shirking of a journalist's first responsibility, which is to figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, this reporter lets her own cultural background and biases shine through as if they were completely normal.

Read the two columns linked above, and then tell me what should be New York's "paper of record."

On Loving God

2007-06-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

The 21st chapter of John's gospel might very well be my favorite chapter of the entire Bible. It comes right at the end, and it recounts Jesus' post-resurrection appearance to his disciples, and particularly to Peter, along the Sea of Galilee. It's a deeply moving passage, and there's so much rich and various stuff that can be taken from it. I'm sure entire books could be written based on reflections from this chapter, and I'm sure they have.

But I'm not going to write a book here. (At least that's not my intention--you, reading the final version of this post have a better idea than I do of how long this is actually going to be. For me, promises of brevity tend to come at the beginning of especially long reflections.)

Anyway, one thing in particular has struck me about this passage over the past few days, and that's Peter's peculiar boldness. At this point in John's gospel, Peter has already seen the resurrected Jesus once before. Surely he shared in the joy of the rest of the disciples, but he played no prominent role in that first meeting. Now, as this passage opens, he's gone back to his old pre-Jesus occupation of fishing, and we can be sure that fresh in his mind is his three-time denial of Jesus the previous Friday.

If Peter is feeling ashamed of his denial, Jesus does nothing to ease the burden, at least at first. He calls him by his old name, "Simon, son of John," and he asks three times, "do you love me," mirroring the three times Peter had denied even knowing him. By the third time, John even tells us that Peter felt hurt by the questioning.

And this is where Peter's response is so interesting. He says not just "yes, Lord, I love you," but "you know that I love you."

"Really?" a less friendly Jesus might retort. "The evidence would indicate the contrary. Sure, you were my best friend when I was doing all sorts of miracles and the crowds thought I was great, but when times got rough, when I could have used a friend, you said you didn't even know me. Is that love? What separates you from the rest of the crowd that was praising me one day and demanding my death the next?"

Is this what was running through Peter's mind as Jesus asked him "do you love me?" the third time? Was Jesus just waiting for the right answer, that he clearly didn't? But Peter's third answer, even through all the hurt and the pathos, is even more emphatic: "Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you."

This passage has been on my mind because I've felt a lot like Peter in the past few weeks. It's not that I've denied my Lord recently, at least not directly. But having just graduated last month, and starting work next week (I started this post last week), I am in the middle of a big transition. My familiar roles and relationships and surroundings--the concrete, day-to-day stuff through which I sought to follow and came to know Christ--are gone, and they haven't been replaced by anything comparable yet. And not quite sure what to do with myself, the temptation is to go back to fishing, as it were--to entertain again all the old habits and ambitions and attitudes that defined me before I found my firm identity in Christ.

And this is where Peter's boldness is so striking. I think that in Christian life, the doubt we sometimes struggle with the most is not so much whether God loves us, but whether we love God. It's a dignifying doubt, because it means that we're not satisfied with being passive receptors of God's one-way love, and we realize that that's not what a true loving relationship looks like anyways. But it's also an especially difficult doubt, because like with Peter, an honest look at our lives will turn up mountains of evidence that we don't really love God all that much.

Sure, we can come to an understanding that God forgives us for this or that sin, but what does that look like practically? How do we sort through the ugly stuff our sin reveals to us about who we are?

If this is what Peter is wondering, then Jesus asks the perfect question. It's not, "are you very very sorry for what you've done?" or "do you promise never to do it again?" It's "do you love me?" framed in such a way as to make clear to Peter that his answer means everything.

And Peter says yes. Think about the implications of that for a minute. When we say "God loves me," we see ourselves as fortunate, grateful recipients of an amazing love that we could never merit on our own. This is all both true and wonderful. But it's never quite satisfied me--or at least, I've never felt like I understood the love I was receiving well enough if I just left it at that. But to say as well, "I love God" is another matter entirely. It's a plain and bold assertion of the self to presume that such a statement would even mean anything at all. We not only receive with gratitude but stake our claim as free beings to a part in the eternal plan of our creator.

What I'm missing, then, in thinking of myself as simply receiving from God is that sense of my own self, that what I do matters, and even that it matters eternally. This is also, I think, why I sometimes have such a hard time understanding God's forgiveness. How does one hear "you're forgiven" without hearing also, "it doesn't matter what you did--your actions don't have consequences"?

And so we return to Peter, and realize that while we may be free beings, we're broken ones as well. Peter has the boldness to say "I love you," but he's in no position to back up the claim with evidence of his own. As we've seen, the recent evidence largely points the other way. We may want to stake our claim to a place in God's eternal design, but it's plain that we have no business doing so.

But Peter doesn't just say "I love you" like he's entitled, or like he can back it up. He stakes his case of Jesus' knowledge. "You know everything. You know that I love you." The famously bumbling Peter has a knack for stumbling upon the exact right answer when it really matters, and here, he seems to intuit that despite the great evidence against his love, there is a deeper truth, firm within God's all-encompassing knowledge, that acquits him.

Because the truth is that Peter really does love Jesus. He wouldn't have followed him for three years or jumped out of the boat and swam to shore this last time if that weren't so. God knows this and counts it to our credit, even when we make a weak and poor show of expressing it, and even when we're tempted to doubt it ourselves.

This is not to say that in our love for God we somehow merit his response by our own power. Rather, God's interest is in accepting our weak love because he is the one who planted that love within us. And Peter can be so confident that Jesus knows his love because he recognizes Jesus as the source of that love. It was Jesus who called Peter, Jesus whose spirit inflamed and excited Peter's along the journey, and Jesus who returned to claim and regenerate Peter's love when Peter was tempted to return to his old ways.

There is amazing comfort in this passage, especially in times of spiritual dryness. To borrow from Reagan, it's often the case that in our Christian walks, we don't need to be taught nearly as much as we need to remember. So John 21 is a good passage to reflect on in times of uncertainty or self-doubt, because it reminds us that if we've ever felt God's love in our lives, or if the Gospel has ever excited our minds and our hearts, we can say with a boldness that isn't our own, "you know that I love you."

------------------------------

One final thought. It strikes me that this passage may have some significance, if only as a clarifier, in the theological debates that sprung from the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church has always adhered to the formula that we are saved through a combination of faith in Christ and good works, while Luther raised the banner for "faith alone." The Catholic formulation is founded in scripture--it comes from the injunction in James 2:14: "what good is it, brothers, if you say you have faith but do not have works?", arguing that such a faith is dead. Nevertheless, it can be a fairly misleading way of expressing the Catholic doctrine on justification, leading to the conclusion--played out in Catholic popular piety throughout the ages--that it is the works themselves that justify us before God.

A better and more theologically precise way of expressing Catholic doctrine would be to say that we are saved through faith and love. Of course, the wide majority of Protestants, taking James seriously as well, would say that intellectual assent to the statement "Jesus Christ is God" is not enough for salvation. Someone--the devil falls into this category--could theoretically believe this about Jesus and hate him for it. Loving God is essential for true faith to be present.

The real debate concerns what is called the "process of imputation." Both sides believe that ultimately, we are saved by God's grace. None of us can achieve a saving faith or a saving love by ourselves. The faith we need is itself a gift from God. But what does the process by which God instills in us faith in him and love for him look like? I think I'll leave that as a cliffhanger for now, because I kind of want to go for a walk down by the river, and this post is plenty long as it is. I'll wrap up my thoughts and tie it all back to Peter in my next (?) post.

On Harvey Mansfield and Jay Gatsby

2007-06-10T20:56:00.000-05:00

Last month, Harvey Mansfield, the great Harvard professor and East-Coast Straussian, delivered the 2007 Jefferson Lecture, which is the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities. It's an absolutely brilliant lecture, and you all should read it if you haven't already.

In the lecture, Mansfield argues for a renewed appreciation of importance of the humanities, and literature in particular, for politics. The problem with modern political science, he says, is that it is far too much of a science, with science's inherent distrust of anything that can't be counted or measured. Our modern thinking about politics, therefore, is too focused on "who gets what, when, and how," with the emphasis (mine added) on the process and the quantity of the getting, instead of on the nature of the who.

But "who is man?" is properly the central question at the foundation of politics, and it is a question to which science--including social science--can only present inadequate biologically-based assumptions as answers. Such agnosticism, Mansfield seems to imply, is what leads to the weak pragmatism that informs our debased and entitlement-heavy modern political discourse. He contends further--and more fundamentally--that our natural understanding of ourselves and our self-importance is something far beyond what science alone can tell us. The way he puts it is that we think in proper names, while science wants to reduce everything to common nouns.

And this is where literature comes in. Social science can help us categorize our behaviors, but it cannot adequately explain why we do what we do. Certainly, there may be evolutionary answers to things, but those answers do not take into account our thumos--our unique sense of self-importance, or the way in which our passions, unlike those of all other animals, are channeled by reason into a broader sense of justice.

Anyway, enough about Mansfield. I won't delve into all the wonderful things in his lecture that flow from his premise. I'll only offer, for those of you that read the lecture, that the deep wisdom of what he uncovers about the human condition through his classical/literary approach is a strong testament to the legitimacy and primacy of that approach.

What I find fascinating, rather, is the way he extracts political wisdom from literature that, for all we know, was never explicitly written to convey such and such a point. He's discussing the origins of justice, and boom!, there's Achilles in Homer's Iliad as the perfect example of what he's talking about. It reminds me of the "Shakespeare's Politics" independent study I did with Harry Jaffa several years ago, in which we would just sit in his office for an hour or two a week and talk about the political philosophy themes in Shakespeare's plays. There was so much interesting stuff that Jaffa was able to squeeze out of them that I half believed that Shakespeare had studied under Leo Strauss as well.

It goes without saying, of course, that Shakespeare had never heard of Strauss, who died in 1973. But I would contend that neither Jaffa nor Mansfield is guilty of anti-historical proof-texting, of tenuously imposing their ideas on the greats of the past. Instead, their expositions point to the power of great literature to express something fundamental about the human condition. Shakespeare may not have been a political philosopher, but he was nevertheless brilliant at observing and comprehending how people interact with themselves and each other, and equally brilliant at putting it all in verse. And if I may be so bold, it strikes me that when we as modern men and women relate on a gut level with Hamlet or Homer, we are adding supporting evidence for the hypothesis (I won't quite say we're proving it) that there exists some kind of distinct and timeless human nature.

But I digress. The reason we relate in the first place, as Mansfield says, is that literature, like ourselves and unlike science, uses proper names. We're relating not to man as a species or a sociological grouping, but to Achilles and Hamlet and Gatsby as individual people. And literature, again like ourselves and unlike science, has to take a stand. All good literature (I don't think I'm exaggerating) makes an implicit or explicit statement about some aspect of who we are. The statement may be surrounded by mystery or confusion (or both--Tolstoy comes to mind) but it's out there in the world of the book being lived.

So then. Science, for all the wonderful things it has given us, needs the special perspective found through literature to understand us fully. In my limited travels, I've found it to be a good maxim that you never really understand something until you understand how it understands itself. And when the object of study is ourselves, I would hope--in fact I would assert, and Mansfield would back me up--that our self-understanding has a strong connection to the truth of who we actually are. And this brings me to the specific piece of literature known as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and to a long conversation I've been having with a worthy companion about the nature of self-deception.

But alas, it's already 2 am, and I'm getting up at 7 to bring my car to the mechanic, so Gatsby must wait for another day--sometime soon, I promise. I also promise posts in the near future that aren't quite so long and obtuse.

I leave with only one closing thought. If the social sciences need the help of literature to reach their ends, might we also say the same about philosophy, or even theology. Friedrich Nietzsche (who, lest we forget, was as brilliant as he was nuts) once said that proper philosophy should be sung. One might respond that proper philosophy should be expected to make sense as well, but I wonder whether he wasn't on to something. Oh well. It was a promising thought when I had it, but now I'm too tired to remember where I was going with this. In any case, don't trust a philosopher who can't tell you his favorite novel. And for all my philosopher friends out there--what's yours?

Start spreadin' the news...

2007-06-07T13:58:00.000-05:00

I finally have a start date for my NY Post internship--June 18, and I'm pretty excited. I got my first taste of the city this week when I went up to accept the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in College Journalism. (Eric Breindel, by the way, was editorial page editor of the Post from 1986-1997; my internship comes as part of the award.)

The award ceremony was pretty sweet, and while I don't mean to drop names...well, yes I do. The winner of the corresponding professional award was Max Boot, about whom I've heard great things from my better-read friends. Mark Steyn, last year's winner, was there too, as was John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and several other notable pundits I didn't get to meet. Mayor Bloomberg was there, joking openly about his presidential chances.

There were also the bigwigs at News Corporation, which sponsors the award. Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, was emcee, and Rupert Murdoch made some remarks as well. From right to left, here's Rupert Murdoch, me, and Max Boot. Roger Ailes is on the end, and the woman between Boot and Ailes is Lally Weymouth, senior editor of Newsweek. Cool, huh?

I also got to meet some of the folks from the Post that I'll be working with. (I'm at the editorial page, by the way.) One of them, hearing that I went to Claremont, told me that I won't find anything "esoteric" about the Post. I'm thinking I might enjoy this internship.

By the way, here's the link to the article I won with. I wrote it last summer about homelessness in London, and it ran in the September 2006 Claremont Independent.

Getting started

2007-06-02T14:09:00.000-05:00

So this is my blog. Welcome. My guess is that if you're reading this you already know me to some extent, so I will dispense with introductions. For the uninformed, I just graduated from Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts school outside Los Angeles, with a degree in Government. (That's kind of like a Political Science degree, only better.) I'm moving to Manhattan in a few weeks for a summer internship with the New York Post, and after that, it's anyone's guess.

I decided to start blogging for several reasons. The most immediate reason is that I figured it would be healthy for me to keep writing on a regular basis post-college. Of course, writing regularly is only a healthy exercise if one has something useful to say, and my hope is that I do. What I'll talk about will probably vary widely from post to post; I enjoy discussing just about anything, from good books and current events to theology and the latest episode of The Office. Some of my thoughts may be incomplete, and this may be intentional. I know that very soon I'll start to miss the all the wonderful intellectual banter I've left behind at CMC, so I welcome all comments on my posts, and comments on comments, and so on. Nothing would make me happier than if an actual discussion broke out once in a while. And if you don't feel like making a public comment, I always appreciate emails.

This blog will also be how I keep all of you--whoever you may be--updated on my life. I'm in New York for at least the summer, a location which is sure to produce its share of amusing observations and stories. I'll do my best to keep my posts personal without making them too personal; I will not be pouring my heart out all over the internet, and you will not become my closest personal confidant simply by reading what I've written. Call me old-fashioned if you must. If you really want to see me cry, you can come to my apartment and show me the baseball standings.

The long and short of it is that I'm experimenting here. I don't know yet what this blog will become. I won't be getting private or touchy-feely, but by the nature of the medium I'll be sharing a lot of myself. It's something I'm excited to try, but as a fairly private person, it's not something I'm used to, so I ask for your understanding.

Speaking of personal stuff, it's going to be relevant here that I'm a committed Christian of the Roman Catholic variety. As per my above promise, I won't be using this blog to explore my deepest spiritual struggles, but anything short of that is fair game. From time to time I might post a passage of scripture that I find particularly interesting or meaningful, and you'll probably find that questions about God and the Christian life intersect a lot of my thinking on lots of other topics. We'll see how that plays out once I get writing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my blog. I'll try to post again within the next few days. I just finished reading (and loving) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and it's gotten me thinking about the relationship between literature and philosophy. Stay tuned.