Month: February 2007

From Southern Sudan, human beings for sale:

Did the president ask his dad that? We may never know. But on this Tim Noah and I now have to agree:

Throughout the current administration, I’ve had the experience again and again of learning some new fact that indicated life in the White House was much worse than I’d previously allowed myself to believe.

Napa, California, 1 pm.

A review from the American Journal of Bioethics. If you are still in the denialist camp about authorized torture at Gitmo, you should give it a read.

A reader writes:

I find it difficult to stomach this kind of conservative humbug, that Modernity is anti-spiritual. Western society is the mechanism that allows groups like the Pentacostalists (and cosmos-loving atheists, and Wiccans, Buddhists, et al.) to exist. It is the ground in which they survive. What seems to irritate some conservatives is the fact that they cannot impose their will upon all of society and poison the soil which succors them. If anything, and the USA is the exemplar of this, modern Western society is besotted with spirituality. 

You cannot drive down a street in the greater Los Angeles area, a zone of the country supposedly noted for its secular ways, without encountering churches, synagogues, mosques, reading rooms, meditation centers, Scientology storefronts and other physical manifestations of the "higher" realms. Spiritual desert, bah! It’s an earthly garden of a thousand blooms.

I couldn’t agree more. The notion that freedom and spirituality are incompatible is an old one. It isn’t an American one. The freedom that creates Anna Nicole Smith is the freedom that makes America the most religious and spiritual advanced country on the planet. And the freedom is indivisible.

Doonesbury follows along.

"Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed… Healthy emotions tell every young man and every honourable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal … Away with Jewish brutalisation of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!" – a Nazi magazine in Pomerania in the 1930s. It forms the epigraph for Art Speigelman’s "Maus."

The next generation speaks – in Wyoming.

Once slavery had been abolished in law, it remained in the mind and soul and culture. How to extirpate it? Frederick Douglass got it right, I think:

Slavery, like all other great systems of wrong, founded in the depths of human selfishness, and existing for ages, has not neglected its own conservation … Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions, not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every cross-road. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise — a right and power which will be ever present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.

States’ rights; equal suffrage; and national progress. Not a bad triad.