Month: August 2008

I’ve now heard it countless times. McCain has used what appears to be an intensely personal moment in a prison camp as a reason to vote for him in a campaign ad. As he tells it today, it was the pivotal moment in his struggle to survive in the Hanoi Hilton. And yet, in his first thorough account of his time in captivity, in 1973, the story is absent. The story is also hauntingly like that recounted by Solzhenitsen, as told in Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross":

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed.

I have one simple question: when was the first time that McCain told this story?

"One of the great lies about American politics is that Democrats genuinely subscribe to a set of core convictions that make Democrats different from Republicans. And the same thing, of course, applies to the other party. It’s not true.

I happen to define myself as a conservative. Well, what do conservatives say they stand for? Well, conservatives say they stand for balanced budgets. Small government. The so called traditional values. Well, when you look back over the past 30 or so years, since the rise of Ronald Reagan, which we, in many respects, has been a conservative era in American politics, well, did we get small government? Do we get balanced budgets? Do we get serious as opposed to simply rhetorical attention to traditional social values? The answer’s no. Because all of that really has simply been part of a package of tactics that Republicans have employed to get elected and to – and then to stay in office," – Andrew Bacevich.

You can buy his book here. My own defense of a similar kind of conservatism can be bought here.

A bit like me after transcendental meditation:

I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported – which was to say –that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born – even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill, a law already in place in Illinois that insured life saving treatment was given to infants.

So for people to suggest that I and the Illinois medical society, so Illinois doctors were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies commonsense and it defies imagination and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive and it’s an example of the kind of politics that we have to get beyond. It’s one thing for people to disagree with me about the issue of choice, it’s another thing for people to out and out misrepresent my positions repeatedly, even after they know that they’re wrong. And that’s what’s been happening.

Reason takes on ethanol:

Ronald Brownstein wonders if McCain or Obama is more likely to reach across the aisle.

Geoff Manaugh has a charming essay on David Maisel’s new photo book. Mainsel photographed copper cans used to store the unclaimed ashes of patients from a now defunct Oregon psychiatric institution:

In order to deal with the fragility of the objects, and to respect their funerary origins, Maisel set up a temporary photography studio inside the hospital itself. There, he began photographing the canisters one by one. He soon realized that they looked almost earthlike, terrestrial: green and blue coastal forms and island landscapes outlined against a black background. But it was all mineralogy: terrains of rare elements self-reacting in the dark…

Each canister holds the remains of a human being, of course; each canister holds a corpse – reduced to dust, certainly, burnt to handfuls of ash, sharing that cindered condition with much of the star-bleached universe, but still cadaverous, still human. What strange chemistries we see emerging here between man and metal. Because these were people; they had identities and family histories, long before they became nameless patients, encased in metal, catalytic.

It’s the first state to take a stand in resisting the Bush administration’s authorization and enforcement of torture.

A reader writes:

In what alternate universe would we really want a Machiavellian, or even Hobbesian politics compared to one where Rick Warren simply is one (religious) voice among many? I am well aware of Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes, but its worth recalling that Hobbes’ model for political authority was Moses, precisely because he both was political and religious leader, fusing the two together. And Part III of Leviathan is titled "Of a Christian Commonwealth." This is why I thought Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God was so silly — Hobbes was in many ways the political theologian par excellence, not the representative figure of some "great separation" between religious and politics.

You are on firmer ground with Locke, but a number of Locke scholars recognize just how vital God is to his project.

Can we really ground human equality in nature, in the principles we understand through simple reason? (Before you are too quick to answer, read the Essay Concerning Human Understanding alongside the Second Treatise). Maybe not — God ties up a number of loose ends in Locke’s thought (see Jeremy Waldron’s work on this, or the chapter on Locke in Joshua Mitchell’s Not by Reason Alone). He said a few things about Catholics, too, right?

I think it’s more important to cultivate a politic ethic of restraint and humility, even if the person’s voice remains inflected with religion, than to demand a narrow secularism. My concern is not to have a public sphere hermetically sealed off from all foundational reasoning, but to urge generosity, self-criticism, and an understanding of our own fallibility — left and right, secular and religious. That is, I’m not so concerned with limiting what can be said (what counts as legitimate discourse), but urging citizens to say it in a certain way, with a particular sensibility. And I think this approach fits in much better with the trajectory of American history and politics.

An interesting insight:

For better or worse, Obama seems to have chosen to treat this event as sort of an intimate evening with Rick Warren — that just happened to be nationally televised. McCain, by contrast, treated it as a straight campaign event: he had his stump speech talking points ready, and he was eager to cram as many of them into his 50 minutes as possible.

I don’t know if this was a good decision on Obama’s part, but I don’t have any doubt that he’ll choose a much more direct speaking style at his three face-to-face debates with McCain.

Joanne McNeil discusses the global trade in second-hand clothes (according to the NYT as much as 80 percent of American clothes donations are shipped internationally). The short documentary she references can be viewed here.