Month: December 2008

Scottsdale, Arizona, 7pm.

It seems an indispensable step toward salvaging anything from Afghanistan. I fear Obama’s attempt to recommit to the war in that godforsaken "country" may be his biggest error in the next four years. Joe Klein explains why to anyone who doesn’t know what a history book is. A telling anecdote about "the daily frustrations of Armour’s job: training Afghan police officers":

Almost all the recruits were illiterate. "They’ve had no experience at learning," Armour said. "You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures — they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh." A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint — possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. "We’re not sure of the motivation," Armour said. "They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the market."

There’s a difference between knowing hope and denying reality.

Staggering when you think about it:

When President Bush took office, the national debt was $5.7 trillion.  Now it is $10.6 trillion — and Congress voted in October to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion, the seventh such hike since President Bush to office and the second since last July.  If, as is quite likely, we reach the new ceiling by January 20, the outgoing President will have managed to amass more debt than all of his predecessors combined.

And you will pay for it – in taxes or inflation and probably both. The amount of damage one man has been able to inflict on this country’s future and the world is truly amazing.

A visitor to New York’s Museum of Modern Art peers through an exhibit. Sent by a reader – the person is his wife.

After my recusal on the matter of cars on today’s Chris Matthews’ show, my personal interest in Mike Kinsley’s proposal is obvious. But the general point remains nonetheless. We desperately need to move toward a lower-carbon economy. The most effective tool we have to goad us into this is the high price of gasoline. Higher gas prices were tough for a while for many people, but they reduced oil consumption, made alternative fuels more viable and helped the planet. Now, alas, the price has plummeted – and all those good green things are vulnerable to collapse. So wasn’t ten months ago the perfect moment to raise the gas tax? If done gradually, we could have essentially moved all that oil money from the pockets of people who hate us to the US Treasury – while avoiding a big price hike. But we did nothing. What could the Treasury do with the money? Obvious:

[G]ive the money back to people by lowering the payroll tax. The payroll tax, or FICA, collects about 15% of your wages or salary — half from you and half from your employer. It is expected to bring in close to a trillion dollars in 2009. Using our windfall from plummeting crude-oil prices alone, we could cut the FICA tax by more than half. Including other forms of energy would bring in even more.

We help the working poor and accelerate energy innovation and encourage employment. Why does this obviously simple and great proposal never get off the ground?

But for Thomas Merton, a chapel beyond any other. From the PBS special airing tonight.

An Iraqi journalist expresses the sentiment of many Iraqis:

Juan Cole explains who the journalist was:

Baghdadiya, based in Cairo, Egypt, supports the Sunni Arab insurgents fighting the US and the al-Maliki government. Al-Zaidi shouted "This is a farewell kiss!" as he launched his size tens, then kept shouting "Dog, dog!" (In Arabic, it would be ibn al-kalb or son of a dog, equivalent to English s.o.b.; for color you can say ‘son of a thousand dogs!’)

Five years ago, the shoes were directed toward statues and images of Saddam. And so "Iraq" moves forward …

My take on the newsmagazine’s cover piece on the religious case for marriage equality is here, if you missed it yesterday.

A reader writes:

You write:

"Civil marriage for all; religious marriage for all who want to supplement it with God’s grace. Why is that so hard for some people of faith to grasp? Why are their marriages defined not by the virtues they sustain but the people they exclude?"

(Emphasis mine.) Because — as you well know — their faiths themselves are defined by the people they exclude: the unbelievers, the unsaved (or let’s be blunt: the "damned"), the always-demonized Other: without that division, that exclusion, their entire theology, indeed their entire worldview, collapses: a theology of inclusion is anathema to them, just as a politics, a sociology or even a science of inclusion (evolution) is anathema.

And why? Because despite their fine words, and their closely-guarded self-images, the actual and real ruling principle of their lives and their theology is fear, not love.

Everything flows from that original orientation, that original choice (because it is, finally, a choice). For them, to be inclusive is to expose themselves to what they fear; and what they fear most is summarized in their mythology of hell and eternal damnation: an eternal torture of body, mind, soul and spirit administered by an angry, vengeful, psychopathic god. It is all pure projection.

And irony of ironies, it is precisely the opposite of the message the Christian Savior tried to bring: that salvation is found only through love, through inclusion, through openness of mind and heart and spirit, through, ultimately, trust — that this world, with all its difficulties and pain and imperfections, built through evolution, and including endless Others, is as it should be, as it was intended to be.

But that leap, from fear to trust, from fear to love, from fear to inclusion, is not an easy one, either for the individual or for a society. No evolutionary leap ever is — and that is precisely what the leap from fear to love is: an evolutionary leap; evolution in action, evolution at the cognitive, emotional and spiritual levels. It’s not easy, and it’s not fast: we’ve been working on this for 2000 years — and longer. Evolution takes its own time, but since this is the evolution of consciousness itself, we do have something to say about it: it’s something we can consciously promote, and consciously accelerate — and it’s something we need to accelerate, and complete: the problems we face in this world, social, political and environmental, will not be solved by a people animated by fear.

We need to make the leap. Which is why gay marriage is important, beyond its importance to the individuals involved: the inclusion of the gay community — the full inclusion — within the human family is a necessary catalyst to this leap, just as the full inclusion of, for instance, the African-American and female communities have been necessary: A house divided against itself cannot stand; neither can it leap. This is where America can, and should, lead by example.

 

There is a radio program I heard yesterday that illustrates this leap from a fear-based to a love-based theology in the most personal terms, while reflecting the social and religious difficulties involved: the story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, "a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he’d worked for over his entire life… Carlton Pearson’s church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn’t have an affair. He didn’t embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell… "

 

And he started believing in inclusion.

 

This program is nearly an hour long, but worth it (Chicago Public Radio’s "This American Life" does a fantastic job). Listen especially to that part of the story, towards the end, when Reverend Pearson, cast out as a heretic by the fundamentalist evangelical community and shunned by all his old friends and colleagues, is invited to a gay church in San Francisco: what happens there moves him to tears as he tells it, and it is moving; it is what real Christianity ought to be.