Month: May 2006

Toronto, Canada. Mid-morning. Details of the window-project can be read here.

Amazing reporting from Michael Ware in Iraq embedded with the men of Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. Money quote:

The city remains a stronghold of insurgents loyal to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who U.S. intelligence believes is hiding in an area north of the city. In recent weeks, the soldiers and Marines in Ramadi have come under regular assault, forcing commanders last week to order reinforcements to the besieged city. In the past year, the Army’s 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, the unit the Marines are attached to, has lost 79 men in Ramadi–yet the brigade’s commander, Colonel John Gronski, says, "The level of violence remains about the same."

But these guys fight on. And the war is not yet lost.

(Photo:Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

Stanley Kurtz has a conniption this morning on how the "left" still controls the culture in this country. By "left", he means the "Da Vinci Code." His analysis strikes me as ideological panic and intellectual blindness. There’s a more obvious reason for the popularity of the "The Da Vinci Code" than the alleged non-conspiracy of the left. It’s hack suspense fiction; it’s Agatha Christie fused with dark suspicions of the Catholic church. That kind of dreck sells – and always has done. But there are two other issues. The first is the Catholic church’s sexual abuse crisis. We now know that the Church hierarchy is completely prepared to engage in criminal activity, cover-ups and smears of the victims of abuse. The case of Father Maciel shows how this rotten, immoral policy of self-protection was practised by Pope John Paul II himself – who protected a serial child abuser for internal political reasons. Cynicism about the Vatican hierarchy is therefore no longer cynicism. It’s just realism. We have proof of their iniquity. And so it’s much easier to persuade people that they’re capable of perfidy and lies.

Secondly, the last two decades have seen the unearthing of ancient evidence of real Christian debate and division in the early church. The discovery of the so-called Gnostic Gospels and the more recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas, has helped ordinary Christians see that the doctrinally correct history of the church as an unbroken arc of orthodoxy from St Peter to Benedict is historically false. This doesn’t mean you junk the four Gospels. They remain by far the most authoritative account of Jesus’ life. But once you realize that even those who knew Jesus offered radically different interpretations of what he meant and said, your faith shifts a little. The certainty diminishes. Curiosity grows. And this is a good curiosity. It’s focused on what Jesus meant and might have meant. Suddenly the literal interpretations of an inerrant Scripture – the Christianist version of Christianity – seem a little ridiculous. This curiosity is being fed by serious scholars, theologians and ordinary believers. But hack fiction will undoubtedly feed off it as well. This has nothing to do with "the left," in other words. And it has everything to do with a reawakening of interest in what real Christianity – the teachings of Jesus – might mean. And that’s a positive development.

(Photo: Indra Nilmukharjee/AFP/Getty.)

Here’s the view from a reader of this blog who lives in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in the afternoon. The photo is taken just after a massive hailstorm, which usually presages the spring. Details of the week-long project of reader photography can be read here. A reader comments:

Incidentally, Pietermaritzburg is where a young, UK-trained lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi was thrown off a train for sitting in First Class, where non-whites were not allowed to sit. This is widely considered to be the event that precipitated the political career of arguably the most amazing, significant, and praiseworthy political figure in the world’s history. (I’m admittedly biased, being South Asian.)

An early entry – from Los Angeles, at dawn this morning. Send in digital pics from your own window – to give your fellow readers an idea of where you all live and what you see each day. Details of the idea can be read here. I’ll be posting glimpses of the places where all of you live and/or work all week. You know enough about me. It’s time to find out more about you. Remember to provide the place and time of day.

David Carr sees the Philadelphia Inquirer on the chopping block. Then this:

A yearlong journalism fellowship at Stanford University is supposed to provide a break from the news business, a relaxing time to think big thoughts, recharge your batteries and enjoy diversions like horseback riding on the sunny Palo Alto, Calif., campus.
But this year, not even the blissed-out Stanford fellows could escape the exigencies of the newspaper business. Of the seven fellows who came from American dailies, five worked at papers where buyouts were offered, and one took the offer. The papers of two were sold out from under them.

Just keep the deckchairs in order, will ya?

"Those who hire large numbers of illegal aliens are the 21st-century slave masters. And in my opinion, that’s just as immoral as the 19th-century slave masters we had to fight a civil war to get rid of," – James Sensenbrenner, back in March. (Hat tip: Yglesias.)

A reader writes:

Your desperate desire to slam Dean is disappointing, since I enjoy your writing.  But I guess its understandable – the guy’s basically a living rebuke to you and your conservative beliefs. He shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who will advance equal rights for gays in this country. He shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who can balance budgets – while at the same time providing a statewide health care availability to everyone, rather than your "available if you can pay for it" method. He proves that liberals don’t want to take your guns – and worst of all, he proves that it was the liberals (the non-sellout ones) who were clear thinking on what the Iraq war would be like, as opposed to the sugarplum fairytale fantasies of conservatives.   

Actually, the reason I have come to dislike Dean is because he is an arrogant, devious, self-righteous, and politically maladroit bully. But you were saying …?

It’s a media frenzy now. Money quote:

"Every conversation in Democratic politics right now has the same three sentences," observes a senior party player. "One: ‘She is the presumptive front-runner.’ Two: ‘I don’t much like her, but I don’t want to cross her, for God‚Äôs sake!’ And three: ‘If she‚Äôs our nominee, we‚Äôre going to get killed.’ It’s like some Japanese epic film where everyone sees the disaster coming in the third reel but no one can figure out what to do about it."

I was saying much the same thing in January.

(Photo: Frederick M Brown/Getty.)

One of the strange things about having a blog, especially a one-man outfit like this one, is that, over time, you get to find out more about me, but not much about each other. Yes, you get to read some of the smartest emails on the web, but you don’t get to know who your fellow-readers are, where they live, what they do, what they see as they look out their window each morning. I get a little sense of it from the roughly 500 emails I get a day. But it’s still opaque.

Hence this idea, which may be nuts or inspired. We’ll find out. This week, get out your digital cameras, and take a picture of the view from your window. It can be your living room window, bathroom window, car-window or office view. If you’re serving in the military, or traveling, it can be just the view from where you’re standing or sitting. Email it to me, put "View From My Window" in the contents line, and I’ll post as diverse and as interesting an array of reader photos as I can all week. Just send it via the email option on the right, include the place and the time of day. By place, I mean town, state or county, and country. If you live outside America, I’d love to capture some of the exotic places I often get email from. Special treatment for those of you in the military, wherever you are. No names will be given: this blog’s rule of reader anonymity will remain. And by sending it, you give me the right to publish it. So show me – and every other reader – your world. Don’t pretty it up; just show it as it is – a glimpse through the looking glass of a blog, at the world its readers live in.