November 2013 – Page 15

The Liberal Reagan, Ctd

If I had one single reason for supporting Obama in the last election, it was that he and he alone had the strategy and perseverance to end the Cold War with Iran. He hasn’t done that yet – but he has, with remarkable global unity, started down a diplomatic path that could liberate the forces for moderation and democracy in that country, and unwind a dangerous ratchet toward war. That was always his larger promise from the get-go: not just to end the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; not just to end the torture regime that made a war criminal of the president and ruined both our moral authority and the integrity of our intelligence-gathering; but to begin to defuse the deeper forces of polarization and conflict that seemed only likely to intensify after 9/11. I have always seen Obama as the antidote to Bush. This weekend, he fully inhabited the role.

For this blog, the question of Iran has particular resonance. Patrick, Chris and I truly soldered our partnership in the heady days of the Green Revolution, as we became immersed in every tweet, every gesture and every tragedy of that great awakening. I know Dish readers were glued to those events as well – and feel the relief and exhilaration of this partial but still real breakthrough.

Which is why we should make this clear: this blog favors this agreement primarily because of our love of and admiration for the people of Iran. We saw them in June 2009 dare to believe that their long nightmare of isolation, extremism and theocratic rule might end one day. And there are times when commentary on all of this too easily misses their central place in this diplomacy. We are doing this not just because it is in the interests of the United States for there to be peace and non-proliferation in the Middle East; but because it as an act of basic respect toward the people of Iran. They were the ones who risked their lives and fortunes to fight against theocracy in 2009 and they are the ones who recently elected the most moderate leaders allowed. And we owe it to them to reciprocate their courage and perseverance. To be sure, Rouhani is not all of the regime, but he is very much a part of it, and has the sole democratic legitimacy. Not to engage this newly elected leader’s diplomatic outreach would be to turn our back on fledgling democracy in the Middle East – and kindling those democratic forces was and is the best response to the polarization unleashed in the crime of September 11, 2001.

Now consider this: in the past few months, Obama has both begun to remove the threat of WMDs in Syria through diplomacy and found a way to ensure that Iran’s irrevocable nuclear know-how will be verifiably channeled into peaceful, civilian use. These two acts of diplomacy compound one another to make the world a much more peaceful place. Yes, there remains a risk. Of course there does.

But there was also a risk in reaching out to Gorbachev in the 1980s, and yet two Cold Warriors, Reagan and Thatcher, chose to do business with him. And they were right to. As with the Soviets and the arms race, there comes a point when the pain inflicted on the other party by sanctions is so great you have maximal external leverage for reform. Too much and the sanctions would be counter-productive; not enough and we would only have military power as a lever. It takes judgment to know if the time is ripe to take yes for an answer. But, in my view, Reagan was as right to embrace Gorbachev as Obama is to reward Rouhani.

Reagan’s pragmatism and genuine horror of nuclear weapons have not been replicated in today’s Republican right. But those qualities defined him and his legacy just as much as his ideological fervor did. Obama is today acting on exactly those principles – as well as those of president George H W Bush, and Dwight Eisenhower. He is, in other words, the corrective to the second Bush and the neoconservative propensity for both utopianism and war (always a deadly combination). He is, yes, fulfilling his initial promise – to bring about the change we can still believe in and to rekindle the hope that region so desperately needs.

Update from a reader:

Hearing news of the deal with Iran makes me incredibly happy. I am a first-generation Persian and have lived happily in the United States all my life and have never truly understood our country’s issues with Iran. Understandably, there is the tumultuous political history for the past 40 years, but it’s even weirder that it took so long for this deal to come around. My family’s immersion into American life, along with thousands of other Iranians, has left me wondering why Iranians and Americans can get along but Iran and America can’t.

But really the problem was that the two countries just won’t – or at least it used to be that way. And it wasn’t until each leader decided to seize upon the opportunity to talk again. You highlighted the Green Revolution extensively and always showed an enormous amount of respect towards Iranians. You remained skeptical of the mullahs and the Ayatollah while always seeing the best in the people. Not everyone dedicated daily attention to their marches for freedom and the impact of bringing them back into the international community. So it’s with Obama and Rouhani (with the Ayatollah’s backing or permission we don’t know) that finally found a way to make it happen.

I’ve never thought of myself out of place in the US and adore the Stars and Stripes, so I can’t tell you how great it is that my ancestral home and my home are finally moving towards peace.

(Photos: Getty Images)

A Poem For Sunday

“Heroine” by Mary Szybist:

Just before the curtain closes, she turns
toward me, loosening
her gauzy veil & bright hair—

This, she seems to say, this
to create scene, the pure sweep of it,
this to give in, feel the lushness,
this & just a little theatrical lighting
& you, too, can be happy,
she’s sure of it—

It’s as if I cut her heart-whole from the sky,
rag & twist & tongue & the now terrible speed
of her turning

toward me like the spirit
I meant to portray, indefatigable—

see how bravely she turns, how exactly true to the turning,
& in the turning
most herself,
as she arranges herself for the exit

withholding nothing, unraveling
the light in her hair as her face

her bright, unapproachable face
says only that
whatever the next scene is,
she will fill it.

Blessed Beards

Melissa Keating rounds up the “four best beards in the history of Christendom.” One belonged to St. Thomas More:

Henry VIII condemned St. Thomas More to death after he refused to deny papal supremacy. More had been confined in the Tower of London for over a year (hence the beard, and why it’s not pictured). As the executioner lifted his axe, More asked him to wait. The blindfolded saint-to-be carefully laid his beard on the outside of the block, out of the executioner’s path. “This hath not offended the king,” he quipped, thus protecting his beard from the blade.

Then the axe fell.

You read that correctly. His last words before beholding the Beatific Vision were a beard joke. While that might not fit the modern notion of a saint, it completely matches his personality. One biographer wrote, “that innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life, did not forsake him to the last … his death was of a piece with his life.”

Thomas More was my confirmation saint. Now it makes even more sense.

(Image of a not-so-bearded More at the chopping block via Flickr user CircaSassy)

Is Catholic School Just For Rich Kids?

Mike Dwyer fears it’s getting that way:

I attended Catholic schools at the end of a long era of affordability. For decades parochial education was subsidized by a large supply of clergy. When most of your staff has taken a vow of poverty it certainly keeps overhead down. As the number of clergy began to dwindle in size during the 1980s, tuition rates began to creep upwards. For comparison my high school alma mater charged about $150 per year when it opened in 1953. By the time I graduated 40 years later, tuition had risen to about $2,700, Still affordable enough that I could pay it myself with a part-time job bagging groceries at the local supermarket. Today this would be impossible. A full year at the school I attended costs roughly $12,000.

The once erroneous perception that a Catholic education was only for the well-off has now become a reality. What does this mean for a faith with deep roots in the middle class? Whereas parochial schools were the norm for most Catholic children a half-century ago, will there be a day when American Catholics become sharply divided among the haves and have-nots, with a private education being the wedge?

In response, Mike Schilling says he doesn’t expect a Catholic class divide to open up in America anytime soon and suggests there are more interesting questions to ask:

Both of my kids went to Catholic middle and high schools, because they were the best schools we could afford. The middle school was highly subsidized; the high schools were not, but were still half the price of a non-parochial private high school. They got amazing educations, and I don’t regret the expense.

The high schools in particular fostered religious values without being sectarian. The open house at which my son fell in love with his featured students of all denominations explaining why they loved the school, including a Jewish girl whose ambition was to become a cantor. This was great for us, but I’ll ask Mike D.: is that a good thing, or does it mean that the schools aren’t focusing enough on their duty to children who are Catholics?

More context for the debate: the average Catholic schools charged $9,066 in tuition in 2007-08, the most recent year for which statistics are available, while nonsectarian private schools charged $16,247.

Face Of The Day

Photographer Sasha Leahovcenco traveled to Siberia for his project Chukota: A Story From the End of the Earth:

Both trips into the heart of Siberia had two purposes: the first was to give the tribes along the way “warm clothes, shoes, gifts, and simply show them grace and love.” The second was to take professional photographs and print them right there, which usually meant handing people the one and only photo they have ever owned of themselves.

Leahovcenco also created a short film of his experience in Siberia:

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(Photo by Sasha Leahovcenco)

Of Gods, God, And Men

Those following the work of the New Atheists have probably encountered the Richard Dawkins quip, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” Aidan Kimel responds by remarking that “God is not a god,” and turns to this passage from theologian Herbert McCabe’s God Matters to explain what he means – and why he finds that Dawkins statement missing the mark:

God must be incomprehensible to us precisely because he is creator of all that is and, as Aquinas puts it, outside the order of all beings. God therefore cannot be classified as any kind of being. God cannot be compared to or contrasted with other things in respect of what they are like as dogs can be compared and contrasted with cats and both of them with stones or stars. God is not an inhabitant of the universe; he is the reason why there is a universe at all. God is in everything holding it constantly in existence but he is not located anywhere, nor is what it is to be God located anywhere in logical space. When you have finished classifying and counting all the things in the universe you cannot add: ‘And also there is God.’ When you have finished classifying and counting everything in the universe you have finished, period. There is no God in the world.

Kimel’s commentary on the passage – with a surprising twist at the end:

If God is not a being but rather the ultimate source and cause of all that he has freely brought into existence, then he cannot be understood as a god. Deities are but “bits of the universe”; but the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the transcendent creator of the universe. He is the reason why there is a universe, whether it contains gods, fairies, sprites, centaurs or whatnot.

But if God is not a god, then what is he? McCabe is direct: we do not know. We do not know what God is. We cannot provide a definition of his nature. We cannot comprehend his essence. Hence we really do not know what we are talking about when we use the word “God.” All we know is that whatever God is, he is the transcendent Mystery of our existence…. Perhaps now we can understand why Christians were sometimes accused by pagans of being atheists.

Recent Dish on the topic here.

Mental Health Break

A close encounter of the cute kind:

Quote For The Day

“I think serious poems should make something happen that’s not correct or entertaining or clever. I want something that matters to my heart, and I don’t mean ‘Linda left me.’ I don’t want that. I’ll write that poem, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being in danger—as we all are—of dying. How can you spend your life on games or intricately accomplished things? And politics? Politics is fine. There’s a place to care for the injustice of the world, but that’s not what the poem is about. The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in ‘I’m in love’ or ‘my girl cheated on me’—I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We’re the only things—leaving religion out of it—we’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming,” – Jack Gilbert.

A Deal Israel Didn’t Agree To

Netanyahu is furious about the US-Iran deal:

Sheera Frenkel reports on Bibi’s bluster:

“There is no doubt that Netanyahu is a big loser in the Iran deal,” said Gil Hoffman, political editor at the Jerusalem Post. “His whole political career is built on two things: number one is that he persuaded Israelis that only he could protect them from Iran, and number two is his image as someone who could speak to the world in his perfect English in a persuasive way better than any other Israelis. And here he failed.”

What Karl Vick is hearing:

[I]n political circles, the primary reaction to the pact in Israel was alarm, both for the technical realities of the pact, and the political realities that Israel – which did so much to make the Iranian nuclear program a matter of global concern – no longer feels it is driving. “I’m worried twice over,” said Finance Minister Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party emerged as a centrist power in the January elections. “Once from the agreement and its implications and I am also worried because we’ve lost the world’s ear. We have six months, at the end of which we need to be in a situation in which the Americans listen to us the way they used to listen to us in the past.”

John Bolton urges Israel to strike Iran unilaterally:

Undoubtedly, an Israeli strike during the interim deal would be greeted with outrage from all the expected circles. But that same outrage, or more, would also come further down the road. In short, measured against the expected reaction even in friendly capitals, there is never a “good” time for an Israeli strike, only bad and worse times. Accordingly, the Geneva deal does not change Israel’s strategic calculus even slightly, unless the Netanyahu government itself falls prey to the psychological warfare successfully waged so far by the ayatollahs. That we will know only as the days unfold.

Bob Dreyfuss doubts an Israeli strike is in the cards:

Israel’s reaction is, predictably, apoplectic. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economic minister, said, “If five years from now a nuclear suitcase explodes in New York or Madrid, it will be because of the deal that was signed this morning.” But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have trouble playing that card for long, since Israel is drastically isolated from the rest of the world and risks an open break with Washington. Already, some Israel leaders, such as President Shimon Peres and the newly installed leader of the Israeli Labor Party, have issued mild to moderate statement that undermine Netanyahu’s bluster. And, ironically, though, the harsh reaction from Israel will help Rouhani and Zarif sell the deal in Iran, since they can point to Israel’s criticism of the deal as a sign that it was, indeed, a victory for Iran’s “nuclear rights.”

Kerry defends the deal against Israel’s objections:

“I believe that from this day, for the next six months, Israel is in fact safer than it was yesterday because we now have a mechanism by which we are going to expand the amount of time in which they [Tehran] can break out [toward making a nuclear bomb]. We are going to have insights to their programme that we did not have before,” he added.

Paul Woodward argues that Israel would have objected to any deal:

At a time when the diplomatic momentum was clearly not moving in Netanyahu’s favor, one might ask: why did he not back down from his maximalist demand on zero enrichment and find a way of offering qualified support for this emerging nuclear accord? Why hold on to a set of conditions that Iran would find impossible to accept?

The reason is that Netanyahu’s goal has never been for the nuclear issue to be resolved. It’s political value resides wholly in this remaining an unresolved issue and in Israel’s ability to cast Iran as a perpetual threat. For Netanyahu, any deal is a bad deal because absent an Iranian threat, Israel will find itself under increasing pressure to address the Palestinian issue.

A Natural Virgin Birth

A couple of things stand in the way:

First, a mammal’s egg cell usually won’t divide until it receives a signal from the sperm. Second, most mammalian eggs have only half the number of chromosomes necessary for development. If there isn’t any sperm, the embryo will end up with only half the DNA it needs to survive. Both of those barriers could potentially be overcome in the lab or through random mutation, but there is a third obstacle that probably can’t be. Under normal conditions, the DNA in both egg and sperm cells is altered such that some genes will be more active while others are suppressed. When the egg and sperm join to form an embryo, these imprints work in tandem, ensuring that all the necessary proteins are produced in the right amounts. If an egg cell starts reproducing on its own, without the sperm-cell imprint, the offspring won’t survive for very long.

Scientists estimate that imprinting affects about 200 different genes. For parthenogenesis to occur, many of these changes would have to occur through random mutation. “I just think it’s too complex and you’d need too many things to happen accidentally,” says Marisa Bartolomei, a molecular geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. While highly unlikely, it’s still theoretically possible that scientists could one day induce the necessary changes in the lab. “Is there a mutation that could eliminate all imprinting, so we would see that we didn’t need Dad or Mom in order to have normal development?” Bartolomei asks. “This is a question that people have asked a lot, and we don’t know the answer.”

(Image of The Annunciation by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1655-1660, via Wikimedia Commons)