Month: August 2010

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The story about that poor woman who was foolish enough to screw with that cat reminded me of one of my biggest "Everyboy Else is Crazy" things: The way that most people are far more concerned about the welfare of animals than the welfare of children. On the same day this woman shut a cat in a garbage can, how many children were abused in Britain? Why haven't any of those become international news stories? It's not just the presence of video. Here's another example that illustrates the point: My father is a juvenile criminal attorney, and about five years ago, he had a doozy of a case. A 13-year-old from the local Russian immigrant community soaked a cat in gasoline and lit it on fire. Tragic. A horrible thing to do. The result was that someone found the poor animal still alive and took it to a vet. The vet named the cat "Purr-Purr" and kept it alive for THREE WEEKS, performing a series of skin grafts, before the cat finally died. There was local and then national news coverage. My father defended the kid in court. He got literally hundreds of letters from all over the country, many suggesting that the kid be killed – burned to death just as he had done to the cat – or at the very least be locked up in solitary confinement for the rest of his natural life. This Russian kid? He was 13. He'd been horrifically abused at the hands of a series of relatives. His IQ was in the low eighties. He was scared shitless, pissed off at the world, and he made a terrible mistake. But did he deserve to be killed? Was what he did so much more horrible than what was done to him?

By the way, that same week, my Dad had a case where he represented two children who had been removed from their parents' home. The parents were meth addicts, and had been making money by charging people to shoot paintballs and pellet guns at their children while the kids were forced to run back and forth across the living room. The kids were 5 and 3. No news coverage. No angry letters. But if that 5 year old boy grows up to make a horrible mistake and hurt an animal, you can bet their will be.

Animals are just animals. Their suffering is not desirable, but it's also common. And not just at the hands of people, either. Cats play with mice before they kill them. Anything that's alive in the world today is capable of cruelty. It seems to me that some people really, really are invested in believing that animals are not. To me, that's crazy.

Similar sentiments surfaced on the Dish a few weeks ago regarding the shooting of dogs in police raids.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

These posts made me thing of the second track from Neutral Milk Hotel's In an Aeroplane Over the Sea, "The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three." While the rest of the album is more jarring in nature and supposedly written after Jeff Mangum soaked in Anne Frank's diary, the second track starts out with a pretty straightforward "Jesus Christ I Love You." 

From the 33 1/3 book about the album, I guess other people in the (uber hip) Elephant 6 crew at the time were a little taken aback, but Mangum apparently felt strongly about making this religious statement.  For the longest time I thought, probably assuming that one of my favorite singer/songwriters was equally dismissive of religion, that he was being snarky or sarcastic. But the book made it pretty clear he wasn't. While not as widespread throughout his work like THS, The Mountain Goats, or Sufjan, it nearly impossible to ignore the song's message when listening to the album.

Mangum talked about his faith to Pitchfork in 2008:

JM: I can't honestly say that I 100% know what that song means. Do you have a minute? 'Cause this is going to take a little while to really explain this.

Pitchfork: Sure.

JM: For a lot of these songs, I was able to lock myself in a room and allow my mind to completely let out anything it wanted without me worrying too much about what anybody was gonna think. And I think that a song about God was inevitable, because of my upbringing, of the intense experiences I had growing up– going to these crazy Church camps where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely, we talked about…

Pitchfork: And how old were you at the time?

JM: From 11 to 17.

Pitchfork: Where were the camps?

JM: In central Louisiana, out in the boonies.

Pitchfork: Is this the hippie influence on Christianity?

JM: It wasn't even really hippie, it was just weird– where like you could just spill your guts all over the place, people were like laying around or like leaping and freaking out. But it wasn't so much that it was a God trip as much as it was an emotional, human trip. Even if you were an Atheist and your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your Atheist beliefs and there would be debates about it. And being an Atheist was just as beautiful as anything else.

The thing about me singing about Christ; I'm not saying "I love you Christianity." I'm not saying "I love all the fucked-up terrible shit that people have done in the name of God." And I'm not preaching belief in Christ. It's just expression. I'm just expressing something I might not even understand. It's a song of confusion, it's a song of hope, it's a song that says this whole world is a big dream– and who knows what's gonna happen.

We played a show with Vic Chesnutt two weeks ago in Athens and he sat on the stage and played for 30 minutes and didn't stop. And he sang all these songs about how like action and reaction are the closest things to truth in the universe, how he's had all these out-of-body experiences but they weren't supernatural. And I thought it was the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. To me, it's like I'm expressing something that's within me that I can't really explain that really has nothing to do with religion. My love for Christ has more to do with what he said and what he believed in. Then the church put all this fucked-up bullshit around it and made it all this really evil thing at times. If you attach man to anything, he's gonna fuck it up somehow, one way or the other. You think that's too cynical? [laughs]

Pitchfork: No, and we all fuck up. I don't believe in Christ myself, but the sermon on the mount and all the "love your enemy stuff" is an awesome philosophy. And I believe in God, but it's not something I talk about very much. And it's new to me, and it's weird. But I've always found music to be a really spiritual thing. It doesn't matter what kind of music so long as it's really pure, and really good: It's a totally spiritual thing to me.

JM: Right. My only thing with this record is that I feel like the record is very spiritual, but I don't consider it to be religious. And I just hope that when people hear me sing about Christ in the beginning, I hope they understand where I'm coming from in terms of the spiritual aspect of the record can be enjoyed.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Ross Douthat takes on the controversy about how non-Muslim Westerners should relate to spokesmen for a moderate Islam. 

I hold no particular brief for Tariq Ramadan, and his critics have provided ample evidence of his slipperiness over the years. But we have to be able to draw intellectual distinctions on these matters, and if we just lump a figure like Ramadan — or any Muslim leader who has one foot solidly in the Western mainstream but a few toes in more dangerous waters — into the same camp as Islam’s theocrats and jihadists, then we’re placing an impossible burden on Muslim believers, and setting ourselves up for an unwinnable conflict with more or less the entirety of the Muslim world. The Andy McCarthy conceit, which holds that anyone (like Ramadan, and like Rauf) who cites or engages with illiberal interpreters of Islam automatically forfeits the title “moderate,” seems out of touch with the complexities of religious history; moreover, it’s a little like insisting circa 1864 that Pope Pius IX’s critique of religious liberty and church-state separation requires American Catholics to immediately sever all ties to the pope. It’s both dubious in theory and self-defeating in practice.

But making these kind of distinctions doesn’t require us to suspend all judgment where would-be Islamic moderates are concerned. Instead, dialogue needs to coexist with pressure: Figures like Ramadan and now Rauf should be held to a high standard by their non-Muslim interlocutors, and their forays into more dubious territory should be greeted with swift pushback, rather than simply being accepted as a necessary part of the moderate Muslim package.

by Patrick Appel

Frum pinpoints a Romney weakness:

Romney has had many fewer abrupt changes of mind than, say, Newt Gingrich, who (you may recall) used to be an environmentalist, among other things. Yet Newt escapes the flip-flopper charge, because whatever view he is expressing at the moment, he expresses ferociously. There’s an old Hollywood saying, “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Romney’s problem is that he cannot fake sincerity. When he panders, people always suspect he knows better – and they blame him for it.

Hongnong, South Korea, 3 pm

by Conor Friedersdorf

Will Wilkinson writes:

There is no form of libertarianism that simply falls out of our cultural endowment, as American moral culture has never been remotely libertarian. The average Tea Partier is, like the average voter, a collection of reflexes, prejudices, resentments, and demands that add up to no coherent philosophy at all. The heritage of the progressive managerial social insurance state is no less an authentically American one than is the heritage of Jim Crow apartheid, the heritage of utopian collectivist frontier communes, or the heritage of founding-era republican liberty for propertied males. It is the business of conservative elites to fabricate a narrative and ideology of authentic Americanism, and to convince the right-leaning public that this is what their particular concatenation of impulses really comes to, in order to give it some strategically useful partisan shape and motivation. Reasoned public deliberation, passionate rhetorical jousting, and bullshit heritage mongering are all among the selection pressures that shape the course of cultural evolution.

I largely agree with this, but for an important caveat: America's longstanding political institutions, and its Founding values, are political endowments with cultural components. The average voter, while he or she isn't remotely libertarian in moral culture, does subscribe to certain institutionally embedded, culturally influenced beliefs: for example, due to our Constitution, rights like free speech, religious freedom, and the right to bear arms are embraced here relatively more than in other liberal democracies.

In a lot of ways, the impulse to build America's cultural landscape around our Founding values is a healthy project, even though it's a myth that past generations lived in better accordance with those values than we do now.

by Chris Bodenner

With partisans pouncing on the former chairman's record of impeding gay rights (and rightly so), this reader's perspective is crucial to understanding the full scope of this historic moment. He writes:

Like Mehlman, I also came out in my early forties. Although my partner, who came out in his teens, does not understand how it is possible to remain closeted and clueless so long, having folks who everyone thinks they know suddenly come out of the closet is critical.  Having formed opinions about the values and personal character of these late-arriving gays, colleagues who are prejudiced against gay people have a dilemma:  Do they go with their understanding of the individual or do they go with their prejudice? 

In my case, a good number of folks who dismissed or decried the existence of gays as unacceptable discovered they were working with one.  Several were clearly transformed. They went from thinking about how to fix me up with a woman to trying to reconcile their past understanding of gay people.  Mehlman is in a position to knock some folks back in their chairs and rethink their positions on gay people – and their civil rights.

(Photo: Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman listens to U.S. President George W. Bush while he delivers remarks to the RNC Eagles 30th Birthday Celebration October 25, 2005 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. About 260 people attended the fund-raiser which pulled in more than $1 million for the RNC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Exum provides an interesting definition of success:

[W]hile Iraq continues to be wracked by violence and suffers from political instability, U.S. interests have been served in the sense that the conflict in Iraq is now an Iraqi conflict that will be largely settled and fought by Iraqi actors. It's a curious, tragic and selfish definition of victory, I know. But it's victory.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Daniel Larison writes:

…what I find remarkable about this mosque controversy is how blatantly, narrowly political the opposition to this particular construction project has been. It has been an exercise in manipulating public anger and using it for the purpose of waging an ostensibly anti-Islamist political campaign by organizing against harmless Muslims and their organizations. A distinctive American culture isn’t under threat from this mosque, the Cordoba Initiative or Imam Abdul Rauf. Rauf and those like him do represent a threat to lazy conservative anti-jihadism that treats every Muslim to “the right” of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a potential fifth columnist and would-be enforcer of creeping shari’a… 

It isn’t enough if Muslims peacefully practice their religion, reject violence and embrace their new countries, but they must also become pro-government loyalists.

In another post, he says:

These champions give the impression that they are a tiny band of courageous souls resisting the tide of indifference and appeasement that is otherwise taking us all to oblivion, but somehow they wind up critiquing figures such as Ramadan (or Rauf) who pose no conceivable threat to them or to anyone else. The less dangerous the Muslims in question are, the more insidious and subversive they are made out to be.

Obviously, there has been no shortage of self-appointed protectors who want to warn the public about threats from Islamist groups, and for the most part mainstream media outlets have repeated these warnings or served as venues for the issuing of such warnings. The point isn’t that there aren’t threatening, hostile Islamists in the world, but that they are largely so powerless, so irrelevant, and so few in number that it makes no sense that they inspire so much panic and alarm. Scoffing at the alarmists shouldn’t blind anyone to real Islamist threats when they exist. On the contrary, criticizing the people who routinely exaggerate the power of Islamists is an important part of confronting the threats that actually exist. It is also an expression of confidence in “what we stand for” that we don’t believe our way of life can be destroyed by such relatively weak foes.

The staunchest critics of the Cordoba Initiative ought to see that lavishing so much scrutiny on Imam Rauf and his plans for a mosque near Ground Zero is folly in a world where there are plenty of Islamist radicals who openly preach violence, encourage terrorism, and otherwise represent an actually threat to the United States. I've said before that it's perfectly acceptable to scrutinize Imam Rauf's record, and to subject his style of interfaith outreach to praise or criticism.

But if your object is protecting the United States from a security threat, as opposed to constructively engaging the question of how moderates ought to engage Islam as a whole, the decision to focus on Imam Rauf is the kind of judgment call that should basically disqualify you from any position actually responsible for safeguarding American national security.

by Chris Bodenner

In response to the court ruling, Kinsley puts the views of its supporters under the microscope:

Of the tens of thousands of embryos discarded by fertility clinics every year, a few are used for stem cell research. Extracting the stem cells involves destroying the embryos, which would be destroyed anyway. True, the destruction of embryos used for research is purposeful, whereas the destruction of embryos in the everyday work of fertility clinics is incidental. But is that distinction really strong enough to support the difference between cavalier acceptance of tens of thousands of embryo deaths in fertility clinics and a legal ban on using a small fraction of these embryos to help develop ways to save lives? (Conflict-of-interest note: My life included. I have Parkinson’s.)

(Photo: A colony of human embryonic stem Cells is seen on a computer monitor the is hooked up to a microscope at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at University Wisconsin-Madison March 10, 2009 in Madison, Wisconsin. On March 9, 2009 President Barack Obama signed an order reversing the Bush administration's limits on human embryonic stem cell research. By Darren Hauck/Getty Images.)