Andrew Sullivan

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

It’s a particularly dire moment in the world to take a vacation. But when recently would have been a better one? So I’m sticking to plans and taking a real break from the blog this August. It’s been an exhilarating but utterly draining couple of years and I need a real break from the grid’s persistent pounding to get some balance and perspective and rest. I have a couple of chores to finish – including a transcript of a phone-call debate with Sam Harris over Israel-Palestine which we’ll be posting soon – but thereafter, I won’t be blogging until after the weekend after Labor Day. I hope you’ll indulge me this time away. It’s hard to explain exactly how intensely draining blogging every day for months on end can be. And I’m now 51. Time, I’ve decided, to take a little better care of myself – so I can do this job without the constant tinge of exhaustion and stress.

But happily, the Dish now has a team more than capable of taking over when I’m gone. And this summer break, we’re trying a slightly new formula for guest-blogging and by-lines. All the posts that are products of our relentless aggregation and curation of the best of the web will be by-lined “by Dish Staff”. Only much longer posts will get bylines – and each week, one Dish staffer and one outside guest-writer will be tasked with the bigger, opinion-heavy posts that I usually tackle. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and this is a time when mine don’t matter here. So to kick off, we have Elizabeth Nolan Brown and our own Phoebe Maltz Bovy. Next week Freddie deBoer will be joining us. The week after that Bill McKibben and his wife Sue Halpern will stop by. And our final week will be hosted by Alex Pareene. It’s quite a line-up. So stay tuned as Dish staffers get to opine without my oversight, and as guests get to stir shit up. I’ve no doubt the news will also give the staff a huge amount to work with.

Speaking of whom, I just wanted to thank my editorial colleagues – Chris and Patrick, Jessie, Matt and Chas, Tracy and Jonah, Alice and Phoebe, for creating this concoction with me from scratch every day month after month. They are the backbone of the Dish, the reason it still exists, and a daily inspiration – both as bloggers and as human beings. And also a thanks to you, for subscribing in such numbers, for keeping me on my toes, and for adding so much insight and knowledge and wit and honesty to our rambling conversation. I look back on what we’ve created this past year and a half and am amazed.

Our Iraq coverage over the weekend is here, here, and here.

The most popular post remained The Last And First Temptation Of Israel, followed by Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel.

Many of our recent posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 24 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. A reader writes:

I have finally joined your group of merry subscribers. I have been reading The Dish for a while, and realized that it was past time to put my $19.99 where my intellect was. I learn a great deal from what you and your team write, as well as from the pieces to which you link. The perspicacity of your readers is an additional draw – and the fact that you give them a platform, even when (especially when?) they wholeheartedly disagree with you.

The moral clarity of your voice on Israel and Gaza has been particularly welcome, as well as your thunderous pronouncements on the sins of the Church, like some (bearded!) prophet of old. What I particularly appreciate about The Dish is that it is removed from the Manichean discourse that permeates our political discourse. Do I always agree with you? Nope – where would be the fun in that? But I am always challenged to think. What more could one ask?

I bring the following as a housewarming gift:

Caption from the Paris Review:

If you had asked me two days ago if there existed any Catholic-themed YouTube video stranger than the one where G. K. Chesterton battles a cartoonishly evil Nietzsche, I would have said, “Of course not.” But that was before I saw this group of French feminists in beards paying tribute to Saint Wilgefortis. Wilgefortis is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as “a fabulous female saint … her attributes are listed as “bearded woman; depicted crucified, often shown with a small fiddler at her feet, and with one shoe off.” Considered a “pious fiction”—that is, a sort of unofficial folktale—she enjoyed popularity throughout Europe.

Good luck with The Dish. I look forward to being part of the extended family.

See you in September.

The Empire Is Striking Back

The Obama administration is now facing a real test of its resolve in Iraq. The depressing but utterly predictable resurgence of Sunni Jihadism in a country broken in 2003 and never put back together again by the “surge” has been so successful and the Iraqi government so weak that even Kurdistan is now at risk. The policy now is to do enough – but no more – to keep the Kurds in the game, keep the Yazidis on planet earth and push the Iraqis in Baghdad to get real. I felt queasy when the president announced this intervention and feel queasier two days later. Even though attempted genocide creates a uniquely grave crisis, as soon as the US is committed militarily to an open-ended endeavor in that country, and is in any way dependent on the Iraqis to take the lead, then we are at the mercy of that country’s profound dysfunction once again. It is quicksand. One foot in and you start sinking.

Or you can think of Iraq as perhaps the least reformable of all welfare dependents. Chronically divided, disintegrating yet again at a particularly explosive moment in Middle Eastern madness, it will always seem on the brink of some disaster or other. The temptation to go in again – especially since we gave it tens of thousands of corpses and years of trauma to add to its chaotic polity – is great. And Obama’s signature achievement so far has been his steadiness in resisting that vortex, in defusing Jihadism rather than giving it yet more reason to be inflamed, in being that rare president capable of internalizing what most Americans want – rather than what Sunday talk show blowhards demand.

He still has a chance to do that – but it will be much, much tougher now. Give the hegemonists some blood in the water, and they will soon swarm, demanding more war, and more meddling. You can see that dynamic in the idiotic ravings of John McCain who wants a full-scale war against ISIL – or in the classic scare tactics of Butters, with the inane idea that we have to fight them over there or they will come here. It is madness as strategy – madness that already created catastrophe. But no one responsible for that catastrophe in Washington was ever held accountable – they’re doing their damndest right now to make sure war criminals are white-washed as well – and so their ability to snap back right to 2003 is intact.

And the greatest throwback to 2003 in this respect is Hillary Clinton. So far as one can tell from her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no daylight between her and John McCain or even Benjamin Netanyahu – but a hell of a lot of space between her and Barack Obama. The interview confirms my view that she remains neoconservatism’s best bet to come back with bells on. It appears, for example, that her boomer-era pabulum about foreign policy on the Jon Stewart show – “We need to love America again! – was not an aberration. She actually means it. And once we believe in ourselves again – don’t look at that torture report! – it will be back to the barricades for another American century of American global hegemony. And why not start in Syria and Iraq? I mean: she’s already hepped up about the threat of Jihadism – and what could possibly go wrong this time? If only we believe in America!

You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward. One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.

Just forget that this country destroyed its military deterrence and its moral authority by the war that Clinton favored and has never fully expressed remorse for. Forget the trillions wasted and the tens of thousands of lives lost and the brutal torture we authorized and the hapless occupation that helped galvanize Jhadism, let’s just feel good about ourselves! And do it all again!

And so try and find a real difference between John McCain and Hillary Clinton on these topics. It’s certainly the same “fight them over there so we don’t fight them over here” fear-mongering:

One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States. Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.

Well, actually, their raison d’etre is not to be against the West. Right now and for the foreseeable future, it is about defeating the apostates of Shia Islam and wimpy Sunni Islam. It’s about forcing other Muslims to submit to their medieval authority – with weapons left behind from the last American interventionist project. The West for these Jihadis is a long, long way away. But not for Clinton or for McCain who see every struggle anywhere as involving the US because … America! And that’s when you realize how fresh Obama was and how vital he has been – and how in foreign policy, a Clinton presidency is such a contrast to his.

Among those most eager for a return of the past is, of course, Benjamin Netanyahu. And you see in the interview with Goldberg how closely Clinton’s views mirror his. She hits every single neocon talking point: the Israelis have no responsibility for the killing of hundreds of children because “there’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict … So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.” That’s almost a paraphrase of the Israeli prime minister or Joan Rivers (take your pick of the nuance artists). And Clinton even backs Netanyahu’s recent dismissal of a two-state solution! Yep: she’s not just running to succeed Barack Obama, there are times in the interview when it seems she’s running against him:

“If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over [West Bank] security, because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience.”

Again, you see how fresh Obama was. And what more could the entire neocons wish for? Oh wait: yes! They can also get their most cherished of dreams – a new war on Iran! Listen to Clinton parrot every AIPAC trope:

“I’ve always been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment,” Clinton said. “Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such little enrichment that they could not break out.” When I asked her if the demands of Israel, and of America’s Arab allies, that Iran not be allowed any uranium-enrichment capability whatsoever were militant or unrealistic, she said, “I think it’s important that they stake out that position.”

Clinton’s position is Netanyahu’s. And that’s important to understand. If you want a United States with no daylight between it and any Israeli government, whatever that government may do, vote for Clinton. If you want someone who believes the Libya intervention was the right thing to do, vote for Clinton. If you think America’s problem is not torture or drones or destabilizing occupations or debt but that we don’t tell the world how great we are enough, then vote for Clinton. If you really long for 2003 again, vote for Clinton.

She may be the only option – if the GOP nominates a full-bore pro-torture neocon. But isn’t it amazing that after the catastrophes of the Bush-Cheney era, both parties could effectively be running neocons for the presidency in 2016! Welcome to Washington – where the past is always present, amnesia is a lubricant, and the leading Democrat is running as a neocon. That change you could believe in? Not if Washington has the final say.

How The Dead Live On

Hannah Black talks to historian Thomas Laqueur about his book The Work of the Dead, which describes how the development of the cemetery changed cultural attitudes toward death:

Before the Enlightenment, the only place you could get buried without ignominy was the churchyard. With the development of the cemetery, the dead make new kinds of communities. In churchyards, the graves were all oriented east-west. In the English churchyard, there’s a particular botany: The yew tree is the tree of the churchyard. There’s only one kind of person in the churchyard: a Christian. There’s no private property in the churchyard, everything belongs to the community. Every monument has to have the approval of the parish priest, so you can’t build what you want there. The churchyard is a communal space, and it’s a space that belongs to the parish. Others can come in, but only by paying extra.

The cemetery is a place where (in theory) anyone can buy property, and you can lie next to anyone, and you can be buried in any direction you want to be buried.

You can write anything you want on the tombstone. You can be any religion. If you’re Jewish, some rabbis might not be willing to bury you, but some rabbis would. It’s an open space, and people built according to the sensibilities of the day. Just like you can choose clothes that are slightly retro, the large cemeteries provided big tombs and they provided graves that looked like Egyptian tombs and Roman-style plinths, and you could present yourself in whatever way you wanted. The colonial cemetery in Calcutta looks like an imperial cemetery, it doesn’t look like a churchyard.

In Europe, every nation starts by producing national cemeteries. The first thing the Czechs do is produce a national cemetery. So the dead can produce all kinds of communities.

(Photo of Czech national cemetery at Terezin by Scott Lowe)

Quote For The Day II

“He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoke to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air,” – John Williams, Stoner.

A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn:

This poem by an anonymous author, framed as a riddle as so many early lyrics are, is from Volume One of Poets of the English Language: Langland to Spenser, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson and published in 1950 in The Viking Portable Library.

I persist in thinking the knight has posed four questions.

“The Riddling Knight”:

There were three sisters fair and bright,
Jennifer gentle and rosemaree,
And they three loved one valiant knight.
As the dew flies over the mulberry tree.

The eldest sister let him in,
And barred the door with a silver pin.

The second sister made his bed,
And placed soft pillows under his head.

The youngest sister, fair and bright,
Was resolved for to wed with this valiant knight.

“And if you can answer questions three,
O then, fair maid, I will marry with thee.

“What is louder than an horn,
And what is sharper than a thorn?”

“Thunder is louder than an horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn.”

“What is broader than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?”

“Love is broader than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.”

“And now, fair maid, I will marry with thee.”

(Photo by T. Kiya)

Where Are All The Catholic Marriages? Ctd

A number of readers shared their stories that might help explain the decline of Catholic marriages. One suspects “the rise of interfaith marriages” has played a role:

I’m Catholic, and my wife is Hindu. Since we were both active duty military officers, I had to apply for dispensation for disparity of cult (to marry a non-Christian) from the Archdiocese of the Military. We also had to get permission from the diocese where the wedding was to be held, since the original plan was to have both a Catholic and a Hindu ceremony.

The local diocese flatly refused to grant permission for my father, a Catholic deacon, to perform the ceremony outside of a church. This had nothing to do with Church policy writ large; it was just the local bishop’s personal hangup. Permission for similar situations is granted routinely in our home diocese. Since we were unwilling to relocate the ceremony, we were formally married by the Hindu priest and my father did a short Catholic blessing afterward. My marriage is still valid according to the Church, since I obtained dispensation, but I was unable to have a Catholic wedding without relocating the ceremony.

If this all sounds bitter, it’s not intentional. I think having the ceremony in a neutral setting was the right choice, allowing both families to feel comfortable. Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon story. Since interfaith marriages are on the rise, it’s often easier for the couple to default to the non-Catholic’s tradition for the ceremony, since the Catholic Church requires you to navigate a lot of wickets to deviate from the standard.

Another reader claims that the Church is “completely out of step with the meanings that couples seek to create in their wedding ceremonies, as well as current social trends (e.g., couples living together before marriage)”:

When my wife and I got married in 1991, we chose a younger priest because he was supposedly in tune with young couples who believed in the social justice emphasis of the church. Instead, we got a curmudgeon who was suspicious that we dated for just five months before getting engaged — never mind that we scored in the 95th percentile on the compatibility test he used, and weren’t getting married for a full year after our engagement date. He was obsessed with finding out if we were living together (technically, we were, but we still had separate apartments to keep up appearances — what a waste of money for a young couple). He forced us to go through the full weekend-long pre-cana, where we slept in separate beds (of course) and wwhich was a complete waste of our time. (It also happened to be the first weekend of the Gulf War, and we were told to not worry about the news — the leaders would keep us posted. A bunch of us snuck down at midnight to watch the news.)

We weren’t allowed to use a Peter Gabriel song during the ceremony because it’s not part of the canon. He phoned in a generic homily instead of using anything that he learned about our goals, dreams, and interests over a year of meeting. And so on.

For a young couple who led an Amnesty International chapter and who were (and still are) dedicated to working for social justice, it was the last straw for us. We left the Catholic church after our marriage and have never looked back.

As a sociologist, I know to look for patterns, and yes, this is a data point of one. But I also know from talking to dozens of friends, students, and work colleagues over the years that our experience is not the exception to the rule.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the time that a priest wouldn’t let a bagpiper inside the church during a funeral, which was my dying father-in-law’s last wish. Instead, he had to play outside of the church after the official end of the mass, in a downpour.

Screw those guys.

The View From Your Window

Montreal, Quebec, 2.33 pm

“Metaphor Is Our Only Hope”

Drew Calvert explores the idea of the angelic in Rilke’s poetry:

What kind of metaphor are Rilke’s angels? At first, they sound like a Christian believer’s answer to modernity, and it’s true that Rilke was on a quest for an antidote to his anxious times. He sought out Russian spiritualism, the prophecies of Islam, the legacy of Orpheus, and various modes of aestheticism, but nothing satisfied him completely. … Rilke’s angels aren’t reducible to those flitting through the Christian tradition. In 1921, he wrote in a letter that he was becoming anti-Christian—in fact, he was studying the Koran:

Surely the best alternative was Muhammad, breaking like a river through prehistoric mountains toward the one god with whom one may communicate so magnificently each morning without this telephone we call “Christ” into which people repeatedly call “Hello, who’s there?” although there is no answer.

Are Rilke’s angels Islamic, then? Maybe, but that’s obscuring the point. They seem instead to stand for a higher order of reality, and they offer Rilke a chance to imagine the world from beyond the ranks of humans. W. H. Auden saw this clearly: “While Shakespeare, for example, thought of the non-human world in terms of the human, Rilke thinks of the human in terms of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge).” Language, of course, is a human thing we use to express the more-than-human. Metaphor is our only hope. As Stephen Mitchell puts it, Rilke’s angels are “embodied in the invisible elements of words.”

Face Of The Day

Miho Aikawa photographs the “private dinner moments” of New Yorkers. In an artist’s statement, she explains what the project means to her:

Growing up, both of my parents had fulltime jobs and it was difficult for us to spend time together. They decided that we will try to have dinner together as often as possible to share time among the family. … Having dinner is not just about eating food, and dinner time portrays many aspects of our lives more than lunch or breakfast would, since the term “dinner” refers to the main meal in a day. … My theme is to propose thinking what a dinner should be by objectively seeing different dinner situations. Dinner can be a social activity but for my project I wanted to focus more on private dinner moments which takes place regularly and more often. So I always ask my subject to have dinner in the manner they normally would.

My photo project has a voyeuristic perspective and it’s one of the key elements. Dinner time is usually private and shows a part of the person’s life style. My attempt is to capture such subtle as well as important moments that pass by our daily lives and convey them through the form of photography.

See more pictures from the series here, and check out her other work here.

The Young And The Memory-Less

Annie Sneed highlights the work of neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn that might explain why we can’t remember being babies – “the rapid birth of many new neurons in a young brain blocks access to old memories”:

In a new experiment, the scientists manipulated the rate at which hippocampal neurons grew in young and adult mice. The hippocampus is the region in the brain that records autobiographical events. The young mice with slowed neuron growth had better long-term memory. Conversely, the older mice with increased rates of neuron formation had memory loss.

Based on these results, published in May in the journal Science, Frankland and Josselyn think that rapid neuron growth during early childhood disrupts the brain circuitry that stores old memories, making them inaccessible. Young children also have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, another region of the brain that encodes memories, so infantile amnesia may be a combination of these two factors.

Covering similar ground, Kristin Ohlsen explains why, to form long-term memories, “an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment”:

The raw material of memory – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences – arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, a brain structure named for its supposed resemblance to a sea horse, located under the cerebral cortex. The hippocampus not only bundles multiple input from our senses together into a single new memory, it also links these sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations to similar ones already stored in the brain. But some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

‘So much has to happen biologically to store a memory,’ the psychologist Patricia Bauer of Emory University told me. There’s ‘a race to get it stabilised and consolidated before you forget it. It’s like making Jell-O: you mix the stuff up, you put it in a mould, and you put it in the refrigerator to set, but your mould has a tiny hole in it. You just hope your Jell-O – your memory – gets set before it leaks out through that tiny hole.’