Month: July 2008

Annandale, Minnesota, 8 am.

Irwin Kula meditates on the changing nature of rituals:

We are living in a moment of profound transition in the way many Americans understand and use religious ritual and practice. Not surprisingly, as with any transition in life whether personal, familial, or social, there are fault lines, divisions and serious misunderstandings that arise between people. Stated very simply; for millions of Americans religious rituals and spiritual practices no longer function as they have for millennia. They are no longer sources of identity or behaviors necessarily connected to a particular tribal or creedal identity nor acts embedded in a coherent or larger theological framework.

For people like Sally Quinn, religious rituals and practices are, with the best of intention, resources that can be used to create personal meaning and connection independent of their metaphysical contexts and belief structures. They are personal tools of meaning that one can choose to use as one feels appropriate to deepen one’s own self awareness and one’s own capacity for compassion and empathy. Obviously, from a traditional perspective this transformation of ritual and practice into a personal resource disconnected from any specific religious authority and any particular historic community is offensive and threatening.

You know you want it:

"It’s really all down to the Israelis. This administration will not attack Iran. This has already been decided. But the president is really preoccupied with the nuclear threat against Israel and I know he doesn’t believe that anything but force will deter Iran… If I were an Israeli I wouldn’t wait," – a Pentagon official to the Sunday Times in London about a military strike on Iran.

Is it possible that things are shifting this quickly? First we find out that Bush may now accelerate troop withdrawals from Iraq:

Although no decision has been made, by the time President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, at least one and as many as 3 of the 15 combat brigades now in Iraq could be withdrawn or at least scheduled for withdrawal, the officials said.

And so Bush’s strategy and Obama’s appear to be converging. Especially when you look at the given reason for Bush’s move:

The desire to move more quickly reflects the view of many in the Pentagon who want to ease the strain on the military but also to free more troops for Afghanistan and potentially other missions…

“We have clearly seen an increase in violence in Afghanistan,” Mr. Gates said at Fort Lewis, discussing the carrier’s redeployment. “At the same time, we’ve seen a reduction in violence and casualties in Iraq. And I think it’s just part of our commitment to ensure that we have the resources available to be successful in Afghanistan over the long haul.”

It was always an Obama meme that we need to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan; now it’s Bush’s and Gates’s. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Maliki’s self-confidence, merited or not, continues to wax:

“We think that by the end of 2008 all the zones in Baghdad should be integrated into the city,” said Ali Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman. “The American soldiers should be based in agreed camps outside the cities and population areas.

“By the end of the year, there will be no green zone,” he added. “The separation by huge walls makes people feel angry.” Dabbagh acknowledged that getting rid of the green zone would be a huge undertaking, given the thousands of American soldiers, private contractors and foreign workers who live inside.

Everyone will try to spin this. But the good news for everyone is surely that we finally have some kind of Iraqi government that feels it has legitimacy and strength and isn’t utterly at the behest of the occupying forces. This is a major achievement, and it would be churlish and wrong to deny the Bush administration credit – at least for the past year or so. At the same time, it confirms everything Obama has said about this conflict from the beginning and much that McCain said over a year ago about the surge.

Isn’t it better to have various politicians vying to take credit for various aspects of a war instead of casting blame?

(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty.)

It would be pretty staggering to elect a president in 2008 who barely knows what the Internet is:

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

Still learning to get online? Is he an alien?

"We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all," – Frank Rich on Jane Mayer’s new book on Cheney’s torture regime.

The Net (Long Island Sound, 1960) by Peter Harris

I saw the black maid park the Cadillac
in the lot of the Indian Harbor Yacht Club.
When she hefted the first huge silver tray
of delicacies for that evening’s soiree
on her boss’s yacht, I offered help.

No, she said, in her starched gray uniform
on orders from her employer. The launch man,
in wrinkled khakis and a black cap with gold
braided on the bill, told her no, she couldn’t
ride the launch. Against Club rules.

But I am just bringing out the food, she said.

Everyone looked at the ground. The launch man
and the maid in their uniforms with strict orders,
me, at twelve, with my marlinspike and stopwatch,
still learning the lines, the tactics of yachting.

I’d never been so close to a black person.
I could see the whites of her eyes flash.
She was caught. He was caught. I
didn’t know that I’d been caught. I couldn’t
feel the hook that pinned my tongue to my cheek.

But stepping aboard the launch, I felt the net,
woven so carefully by so many hands,
the seamless, almost miraculously strong,
transparent canopy that keeps everyone
in Greenwich exquisitely and forever in place.

A 2006 article explores the world of competitive eating:

The eaters rip in, dunking the sandwiches in the water cups and cramming them mouthward with no regard for manners or decorum. As performers, they are very Dizzy Gillespie: dimples blowfished, eyes laser-locked on the chow. “Violent” is a word that comes to mind. “Assault” is another. It’s scary, the suddenness with which the mood of the contest has morphed from chipper to an insectoid creepiness. Rich “The Locust” LeFevre, who looks like somebody’s geeky uncle with his big plastic glasses and gray comb-over, is particularly fearsome. He rotates the sandwiches once they reach his lips, twirls them like they’re corn on the cob, and mashes them inward, toward his pinker parts, the force spraying bits in a scatter pattern around his swampy water cup. A gluttonous metronome, he never alters his food- shoveling rhythm. This is not normal.

Sam Anderson reviews Iain Gately’s book Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol:

Alcoholic tastes, throughout history, are surprisingly diverse. The Greeks drank wine (mixed with water, spices, and honey) constantly, a tradition the Romans inherited and spread to the far corners of their empire. The barbarian tribes that eventually ruined Rome were binge beer drinkers. Huns drank fermented horse milk; Anglo-Saxons drank mead and ale. Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy—although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at which all citizens, including toddlers, were required to drink.

Before Europeans arrived, many Native Americans didn’t even have a word for drunkenness. (The Anglo-Saxon word for “plastered,” if you should ever need it, is beordruncen.) For most of its history, alcohol has been considered as much a food as a recreational beverage. The pyramid builders got a daily ration of one and one-third gallons of beer. In medieval Europe, every child, parent, and grandparent “drank every day, and usually several times each day”; even monks were allowed up to eight pints. While Christianity adopted wine as a central holy symbol, the Koran banned liquor entirely—and yet it was Arab chemists who perfected the science of distillation, which produced a liquid they compared to mascara—in Arabic, al-koh’l. During Prohibition, American moonshine-makers didn’t have time to age their spirits, so they faked the effect by adding dead rats and rotten meat. A single louse from the species that decimated the vineyards of nineteenth-century France could “produce 25.6 billion descendants within eight months.” In sixteenth-century Japan, it was an insult to your host to stay sober, so guests who couldn’t drink would pretend to be drunk and even hungover “by sending thank-you letters deliberately late, written in shaky characters.” Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine trade,” and a group of settlers who came over to join them brought 20,000 gallons of beer and wine but only 3,000 gallons of water.