Month: December 2009

"It is possible that Ayatollah Montazeri will prove to be a more influential figure in death than he was in life," – Gary Sick.

Abbas Milani highlights the fascinating life of Ayatollah Montazeri, the once-close pupil and presumed successor to the revolution's first Supreme Leader, Khomeini:

Tensions between Khomeini and Montazeri began when someone on Montazeri's staff leaked the story of secret deals between Iran and the United States–what turned out to be the Iran-Contra Affair. Khomeini executed the staffer, despite protestations from Montazeri. A few months later, as the nation learned of Khomeini’s ill health, Montazeri learned of mass executions in prisons on the order of Khomeini. Prisoners serving time on earlier charges were to be retried–in procedures often lasting no more than a few minutes–and executed if found to be still opposed to the regime. Instead of keeping a pragmatic silence and awaiting Khomeini’s death, as many of his advisors recommended, Montazeri wrote a harshly worded letter to Khomeini condemning the orders, saying that this is not the kind of revolution they had fought for together. This time, the price for protesting murder and moral perfidy was the direct wrath of Khomeini.

More here. The photo above features (from left to right) Rafsanjani, Khomeini, and Montazeri.

A reader writes:

Long time reader from Rwanda. I noticed you recently linked to an article which stated that Rwanda was contemplating introducing a law to criminalize homosexuality as in neighbouring Uganda. It turns out this is not true. Rwanda's Justice Minister recently announced that the rumours were completely false but, even more suprisingly, he said that sex was a private affair that the government would never interfere with. Amazing huh?

And relieving. And what a thrill those first words still provide: "Long time reader from Rwanda." Ah, the Internets.

Megan worries that we can't afford the health care bill:

We still have a gigantic budget deficit pressing on us from Medicare.  Yes, you say you made serious Medicare cuts.  Then you turned around and spent that money on expanding coverage.  So the Medicare deficit, which will be $100 billion and growing in 2019, will still exist.  There will also be growth in the portion of Medicare that is currently paid for out of general revenue, putting further upward pressure on our deficits.  It's impossible to say exactly how much that $100 billion will be growing every year, but $15-20 billion seems like a reasonable estimate, as least during the senescence of the Baby Boomer.

To channel Colbert. Many readers have written that the notion that the 1990s were not a veiled period of war is factually untrue – as al Qaeda prepared in the first WTC attack, the USS Cole and other outrages. Their point is well taken, except that it does seem, all these years later, that our sudden embrace of the war metaphor (and I include myself) may have been over-reach.

It's worth recalling that the US government had the means, information and warning to prevent 9/11 and failed (forgivably) to envisage an attack of that ambition and drama and vileness. And that the attack contained no actual weapons, apart from our own technology, and amounted to 19 nut-job Jihadists. Yes this was a new and potent threat and it came out of the blue for most of us. But one wonders if we took the bait too quickly, if understandably, and would have been better advised not to have junked the 9/10 mindset entirely.

It's also worth recalling that the main neoconservative concern before 9/11 was China, whence the military threat was supposed to emanate. They were itching for a fight and found the 1990s caesura somewhat disorienting. Another reader writes:

Ironically, it is conservatives, more than anybody else, who should be celebrating the triumph of liberalism. They seem far too committed to waging ideological warfare to have noticed it, but on the large

questions they have won, and rather decisively so.

There are compromises to be made, of course. One could not realistically suggest that the welfare state is going anywhere, but where are the grand ideological projects which attempt to radically reorder or improve the nature of men and societies? Where is the threat of social revolution? The overwhelming majority of the Left now accepts capitalism (!), albeit in a more regulated form, with certain redistributive measures and so on.
 
So yes, it could be said that the raison d'être of Neoconservatism is to fight. More precisely, it is to continue to fight the twentieth century. And who can blame them? They are ideologues, and there was never a better time to be so…

And this is why I find Obama a perfectly acceptable pragmatic trimmer to the center-left. His concessions to the conservative era are profound; but he seeks to move on and forward. Conservatives, sadly, want to go back – to the techniques that Gingrich pioneered and Rove finessed. They don't seem to realize that this is what led them into the incoherent wilderness they now angrily occupy.

The global movement keeps gaining traction. In Latin America, Argentina was among the first countries to legalize civil unions, and now the question of civil marriage is on the table:

On November 13th, 2009, Judge Gabriela Seijas once again put Buenos Aires ahead of its neighbors by ruling that the Argentine government must recognize the marriage of José María Di Bello and Alex Freyre, a same-sex couple. This decision makes Argentina the first Latin American country to attempt to institutionalize same-sex marriage. Despite the temporary block of Di Bello and Freyre’s wedding, ordered by a national judge on December 1st, Argentines will soon be engaged in a battle over the deadlocked debate when the country’s Congress and Supreme Court take up the issue in the coming months.

Uruguay, Ecuador and Colombia also have full civil unions for gay couples (although Ecuador does not permit adoption of children). And yesterday, Mexico City became a jurisdiction which allows full civil marriage rights, only a few days after Washington DC (which, of course, is still constrained by the Defense of Marriage Act). In much of this, Spain was the pioneer – proof that a largely Catholic country can allow for secular equality while guaranteeing freedom of worship and thought for the Catholic hierarchy which vehemently opposes any inclusion or rights for same sex couples.

(Photo: Brazilians Marcelo Sales Leite (L), and his groom Roberto Fraga da Silva, participate in a collective gay marriage ceremony, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on June 13, 2009.)

America's top fake news source reports:

"In accordance with my activist agenda to secularize the nation, this court finds Christmas to be unlawful," Judge Reinhardt said. "The celebration of the birth of the philosopher Jesus—be it in the form of gift-giving, the singing of carols, fanciful decorations, or general good cheer and warm feelings amongst families—is in violation of the First Amendment principles upon which this great nation was founded."

Brent Bozell complained a few years ago that gays are featured in comic strips, or in Bozell's words, that comics have become "a red-light neighborhood where sexually perverted superheroes…[are] packaged to elicit from children fascination and sympathy". John Haffner Jeet Heer responds by posting old homophobic comics:

There are enough of these gay characters that one could easily do an anthology called “The Gay Image In Comics before Stonewall.” The general point to make about these characters is that they are all homophobic stereotypes, although the tone of the representation varies greatly. Sometimes the cartoonists were mildly satirical (as swishy she-men), sometimes melodramatically hostile (as vile seducers of children).

One last point needs to be made: conservatives like Bozell never objected to these gay stereotypes when they flourished in the comics. So what people of this ilk are upset about is not the representation of homosexual per se, but about the fact that gays are increasingly shown in a neutral or favourable light. As long as gays are represented in a homophobic way, Bozell and his political allies would never raise a voice of objection. For the Bozells of the world, it is okay to show gays, as long as you don’t show them as human beings.

(Hat tip: Hit & Run)

Nate Silver puts the spike in context:

The bottom line is that, by the stock market's estimation, the private health care industry appears as though it will benefit if the Senate enacts its plan. But the benefit — about $16 billion in discounted cashflows — is small as compared to the total magnitude of the program, and likely reflects an increase in the size of their customer base rather than any anticipation of higher profit margins.

But the deeper point is: why is so much hostility to the bill wrapped up in the horror that private insurance companies might actually make some money off this? That's what private companies are supposed to do. They're constrained from many of their worst and cruelest tactics in this reform, but remain the primary vehicle for it, as was well advertized from the very beginning. It seems to me that many on the left so loathe these companies they'd rather leave people uninsured than allow the insurance industry to benefit. That strikes me as ideology speaking.

A reader writes:

You gotta check out Robert Earl Keen’s "Merry Christmas from the Family." It’s not so much depressing as a hyper-realistic depiction of what most people’s Christmases are probably like: the anti-Norman Rockwell holiday. Plus I’m willing to lay money that it’s the only Christmas song with the word “tampons” in it.

Another writes:

It's not exactly depressing as it is celebratory of a decidedly different (and distinctly southern, or at least Texan) observance of Christmas. 

Just this past Monday, I was part of a group of musicians that went down to the local homeless shelter to provide a backdrop for a local church's holiday festival.  While I'm probably the least talented musician in the group, for the second year in a row, my stint at the microphone with this four chord two-stepper beat out the intricately finger-picked Joy to the World and an amazingly soulful O Mary Don't You Weep for the loudest and longest applause.  Last year, I was concerned that it would be too southern caucasian for the African-American folks in the audience, but they laughed and clapped as loud as anyone.  This year, I was a bit more concerned about singing about the controversial Mexican boyfriend with a handful of Latinos in the crowd, but two of them specifically came up afterwards and told me they really liked it.

I take no credit for any of this — it's Robert Earl Keen's Christmas masterpiece that carries it.  People not from the South may misunderstand this as a sneering parody, but it's not at all.  It's a song of intense love and acceptance of what is outwardly hilarious dysfunction but is really a picture of adaptation to modernity.