Month: October 2010

A reader writes:

I am a Deacon in the Catholic Church and in so many ways, like you, I feel the Church has left me.  I continue to hang in there and give witness against the intolerance as often as I can, as I feel that if I leave many others will lose heart and give up all hope.

Sadly, I see the Church leadership turning into Pharisees trying to bind its people via rules and laws. It is the same mindset that has led the Church to attempt to reduce abortions by concentrating on getting Roe vs Wade overturned rather than realizing that the solution does not lie in the legal realm but is a question of  conversion of the heart which is never accomplished by law and is always accomplished by love and mercy.

Another

It's the last two words in your post. The "current hierarchy" is the problem with the Catholic church. I didn't renounce my American citizenship when George W. Bush and Tom Delay pushed every button I had. I continued to believe in the American values that I always cherished. I also began to long for "1.20.09", as the bumper sticker read.

There will be a "1.20.09" for American Catholics. It might be a longer wait, but it will come.

Another:

At the end of the day it boiled down to this for me:  To continue to be actively involved in the Catholic Church at any level seriously compromises my credibility with my kids. As a family, we'd have had nothing to do with any club or organization that was intolerant of gays, who denied women the right to participate and serve in authoritative positions, discouraged the use of contraceptives and the practice of safe sex , all the while knowingly subjecting millions of children to active, known pedophiles and protecting them from legal prosecution.  As a mother, how could I possibly continue to choose this organization as the anchor for my family's spirituality?

"John 6:17" by Stanley Plumly was published in The Atlantic in November 2001:

—The disciples out at sea again.
So many complications in the mission.
Five loaves and two small fishes
to feed the sick Tiberian five thousand,
who want to crown this miracle a king.
But Jesus will not suffer them their vanity
and leaves their lonely company to bread.
He finds another mountain: thus the twelve
abandoned, putting out to sea in the generalized
direction of Capernaum, lost without their master.
A storm blows up, the kind that makes of sailors
disciples of us all. Three, four miles,
twenty-five or thirty furlongs,
rowing in a wind that feels like crime.
They know they should have waited at the shore.
Fear, they know, is their faith tested.
Fear of the figure they now see walking toward them.

Part blasphemy, part rap, part memoir, part hope.

Robert Roper traces Walt Whitman's writings on death to his experience as a nurse in the Civil War:

He was attracted to the dying.  Before he became a nurse in Civil War hospitals, before he sat at the bedside of tens of thousands of wounded or sick soldiers as they passed over, he haunted hospitals and assisted at operations, preparing himself, intentionally it seems, for the war that was to come.  People needed to know what death was, in his era, and Walt also needed to know.  From his researches at New York hospitals came at least one useful answer: Death is not the struggle before the end, the pain and the terror, but rather the deliverance:

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,

For life and joy….

And for love, sweet love…O praise and praise,

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Gregory Levey interviews the former CIA officer who wrote The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. The former officer is being sued by the CIA :

My service included more than fifteen years of continuous and unblemished service in target countries and rogue nations, working on weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. I could see that Americans were at risk because of a lack of financial accountability at the C.I.A. and an unwillingness to assign officers to target countries. Once the C.I.A. became a place to get rich, effective operations ended. Today, more than ninety per cent of C.I.A. employees live and work entirely within the United States, in violation of the C.I.A.’s founding charter. So I wrote the book as a tool in intelligence reform.

Patton Oswalt pens an unusal "It Gets Better" note, aimed at the kids who join the bully's entourage as a way to avoid getting picked on themselves:

And I understand exactly why you’d want to be on the side of the powerful, cruel and, by default, secure. It’s the reason why some poor people get angry about rich people having to pay more taxes. It’s why people join celebrities’ entourages. It’s why two oppressed, disenfranchised groups fight with each other, instead of the powerful entity that’s oppressing and disenfranchising them.

All of that is true. But it doesn’t change the fact that you have power if you choose to take it. …

But you, in the bully’s entourage, can help make it better by taking away part of the bully’s power.

You can take away you.   And if you take the dare, and do it, you’ll be shocked to see how deep it diminishes the weight and scope and space a bully takes up in the world. And when you see that, and experience it, it’ll be your first – and unarguable – taste of how much weight and scope and space you have.

Over at the Smart Set, Jessa Crispin gleans a different message from the series:

What the backlash to the campaign misses is that it’s never a bad thing to create a chorus of voices of how life can be lived on the margins.

Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives a TED talk on what's happening to the balance of power – both between nation-states and within and beyond them:

I already revealed my fave. But this one is a total Dish-pander:

Another classic:

 

I thought George Friedman was pushing the envelope on this meme for Obama's political revival, but then David Broder enters the lunatic circus-ring:

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II.

Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.

There is so much clinically nuts about this, one doesn't know where to start. Friedman, at least, did not pretend that war is like some kind of tax cut or electoral gambit to be toyed with. Then there's the notion that Republicans would in any way support this president for anything (notice their deafening cheers on bombing the living crap out of Afghanistan yet? Or for the remarkably successful and increasingly tough sanctions on Iran?) Blake Hounshell helps out with the economics:

In case it's not obvious, this is crazy for a number of reasons. One is that markets don't like tensions, and certainly not the kind that jack up oil prices. Second, World War II brought the United States out of the Great Depression because it was a massive economic stimulus program that mobilized entire sectors of society. Today's American military has all the tools it needs to fight Iran, and there isn't going to be any sort of buildup. Hasn't Broder been reading his own newspaper? The Pentagon is looking to find billions in cuts as it confronts the coming world of budget austerity.

I'll leave the question of whether Iran is truly "the greatest threat to the world" to others.

Oh, he just got that talking point from Hiatt's Cheneyesque coterie. The only broader point I'd make here is that it is now clear that "the dean of Washington journalism" can write a column that would barely make it past the link-worthiness of some batshit commenter on RedState or the deeper, crazier recesses of the unpaid blogosphere.

The MSM still has many good columnists. But when you really see the man behind the curtain, you begin to realize just how full of crap these Beltway Wizards of Oz can be.