Month: October 2009

Goshen, Indiana, 3.03 pm

The blood-lust of some Polanski critics is almost as tiring as the absurd antics of his defenders. "He deserves to have his nether regions removed with a rusty scalpel by a drunken, near sighted, baboon" isn't exactly moving the conversation forward. Brendan O’Neill zooms out. He gets much wrong, but maybe there is a small kernel of truth in this:

L’Affaire Polanski has become a Culture War that dare not speak its name, a pale and dishonest imitation of the debates about values and morality that have emerged at various times over the past 50 years. As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of 30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as desperate political observers have instead turned Polanski into either a ventriloquist’s dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of letting off some cheap moral steam.

(Hat tip: VideoSift)

Grayson is refusing to apologize for saying that Republicans want Americans to "die quickly." Eric Trager thinks this is indicative of something larger:

Grayson would hardly be the first politician to recognize that, simply put, there is no such thing as bad publicity.  The problem, however, is that the Age of Hypermedia has magnified the incentives for crude political behavior substantially. Indeed, desperate politicians – particularly those expecting stiff competition in the next election – know that outrageous statements are more likely to get broadcast/blogged/tweeted/posted/forwarded than well-reasoned ones.  They further know that these statements will mostly alienate those who wouldn’t have voted for them anyway, while the die-hards will back them more strongly than ever – and often with cash.  Just ask Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), whose receipts rose substantially after she suggested that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama held “anti-American views”; or Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who reaped $1.8 million in contributions barely a week after he shouted “you lie” at President Obama during a joint-session of Congress.

It's impossible to watch the vast ignorance, hate and extremism in this country right now and not almost despair. At a time of extraordinary challenges, the center is not holding.

Harper Collins' chief marketer, Jonathan Burnham, hired a fanatical homophobe, Lynn Vincent, to write Sarah Palin's book for her. Jonathan Burnham – wait for it – is an openly gay man. Here's Vincent's piece hailing the attempt to reverse marriage rights for gay couples in California. Money quote:

The 14th Amendment equal-protection argument in favor of gay marriage already is trampling First Amendment rights to religious exercise and free speech. In March 2006, for example, the 103-year-old adoption division of Boston Catholic Charities (BCC) decided to close its doors rather than comply with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' requirement that it place children with homosexual couples. Five months later, the group's San Francisco branch followed suit. Both moves were direct outgrowths of the legalization of gay marriage and domestic partnerships in Massachusetts and California.

Politico quotes Burnham's author thus:

"In decades past, men and women routinely brushed off fleeting thoughts of homosexual behavior. Now, though, gay activists have succeeded in planting a seed that says people not only can but should follow such thoughts with exploration and action," Vincent warned last year.

Her former co-author, Robert Stacy McCain, as Dish readers will know, is one of the most hateful homophobes in the blogosphere.

The Palin book, moreover, is clearly being styled as a work of polemic, appealing to the Christianist base, thereby fanning homophobia, and empowering those who would like nothing more than to push gay people back into the closet, out of marriage, out of the military, and out of the workplace. Burnham is now directly party to this effort.

It's not possible to accuse Jonathan Burnham of hypocrisy because that would imply he has any convictions or principles at all. Here, for example, is his quote about a 400-page book written in two months:

“Governor Palin has been unbelievably conscientious and hands-on at every stage, investing herself deeply and passionately in this project…. It’s her words…”

Hey, if it makes a buck, and advances his career, Burnham will do it. As gay people prepare to march for their civil rights, Burnham, one of the more powerful gay men in New York, is preparing to capitalize on their avowed enemies. It's just money, after all. And buzz. Always buzz.

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Because torture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him as an expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terrible power to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolute power of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of those who torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those who are its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also often requires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration of its successes.

Continued here.

TNC asks. I go there:

A reader writes:

There is no denying that religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, has inspired and fostered many wonderful people. I think of Peter, humble and contrite and transformed after his denial; Mary Magdalen, of whom nothing need be said; the fathers of the Egyptian desert and their almost unbearable kindness and gentleness; Francis of Assisi and his Lady Poverty;

Francis de Sales, who found a way to be both a prelate and a saint; and in our own times, Dorothy Day, who practiced a Christianity as radical as Christ's own, while remaining a faithful daughter of the Church. And I say nothing of the countless mute, inglorious saints whom only God knows.

But the Church as an institution is mired in the world to its own great detriment. The worst thing that ever happened to it was Constantine's conversion and its consequent establishment. For the Church itself should have remained a pilgrim. No cathedrals and episcopal palaces. No mitres, croziers, and gorgeous vestments. No princes of the Church. Just plain men and women going out to find and care for lost sheep, the wisest among them showing the way by example and quiet counsel.

It might have gone that way. It could yet. But the need to overawe people and demand obedience from them is powerful and seductive. It is a part of that world that the kingdom of heaven is not of.

A reader writes:

Can we now call torture what it is?  It is not a tactic and it is not a post-conventional moral exception for ticking time-bombs.  Torture is a punishment.  When viewed as such, confessed as such, it loses the tedious layers of rationalization that have characterized both sides of the debate so far.  Torture is not an anxious over-reaction to future threats that haven't materialized.  It has nothing to do with the future; it comes from the past, from a wound we never constituted after 9/11.  Not concern for the future, but still-born rage for a past that can never be undone.  

Torture is revenge.  It is the only expression we have found that goes beyond our fruitless wars, beyond cultural alienation and jingoism.  For torture is an intimate punishment defined by the willful desecration of reason and subjectivity.  This is why so many people cannot bring themselves to utter the word in press or public forums.  Mere death cannot compete with torture for the succor of revenge we seek — we needed to craft a living death.  We needed to make an inhuman aesthetic (Abu Ghraib) to match the spectacle of impotence and vulnerability we suffered on 9/11.  

Any utilitarian argument (e.g. better safe than sorry, ticking time-bomb, ends justify the means, etc.) misses the essential emotions at play.  Indeed, we cling to new iterations of these arguments to hide the raw emotions beneath them.