Author: Andrew Sullivan

Pivoting off this thought, a reader proffers another classic Pascal pensee:

A more uplifting Pascal quote:

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, man is still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying  and the advantage that the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of of this."

Or put more simply by Prem Rawat (I'm paraphrasing): "I hear people say 'I am just a speck of dust in this vast universe'…but oh what a speck!"

I can't say either of these quotes gives me total comfort. Ever since I was five, I have been gripped now and then by dread and panic in the face of the certainty of my own death and an unshakable faith that what comes after my life is exactly what came before it — nothing. These episodes usually occur in the early morning as I'm lying in bed, when my mind's defenses are still slumbering. "You will die. YOU". My heart seizes up, and I am sometimes driven to utter an "uggghh" at the thought. The only comfort I have ever found is to have someone I love (a friend, a lover, my sister) sleeping next to me. It is not 100% effective, but I will take it, just as I will take life in all its beauty and horror and hope and dread over non-existence.

The notion that I won't be there to experience my own non-existence provides no comfort. Consciousness is the supreme creation of the universe. I am conscious now, and consciousness rightly rebels at the thought of its own annihilation. The fear of death is rooted in a love of life, a love of consciousness. It's just hard to remember that sometimes.

From Slavoj Žižek's new book:

Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves."…Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood.  She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority — she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked.  Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama's physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears.  Here we have "post-feminist" femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the "first dude" as a phallic toy.  The message is that she "has it all" — and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream…No wonder that the Palin effect is one of false liberation: drill, baby, drill!

Tyler Cowen says this is maybe "what you would get if Andrew Sullivan were a Lacanian and a Hegelian." And while you're at it, don't miss Claire Berlinski's wonderfully frank take on Going Rogue in the American Review. Money quote:

No one wishes to be in the company of snobs, so it is uncomfortable to report the plain truth about Sarah Palin’s autobiography—it is ridiculous and it is awful…

I have no quarrel with the values Palin claims to hold dear. I am all for fiscal conservatism, hawkish defence, free markets, tax cuts and patriotism. God knows I am in favour of God. Nor am I much perturbed by what her critics claim are the book’s many strange factual contradictions and lies. All adults know, after all, that a serious forensic exploration of Palin’s political record would not begin in the ‘autobiography’ section of the bookstore. My objection is otherwise.

The book is artless; it is juvenile; it is dull; it is vulgar; and it is above all phony. It does not seduce; it is not a guilty pleasure; it does not succeed in conveying universal experiences or emotions; it does not elevate. No character in it comes alive. Indeed it is so awful that it is almost impossible to find a single sentence in it that is not awful.

It is only cynical, cowardly politics that prevents so many American conservatives from saying the same thing. And it is only money that persuaded Jonathan Burnham to publish this fictional dreck. And it is only ratings that prompts Roger Ailes to keep this farce alive.

My problem with Palin is no longer Palin; it is the stench of media and political corruption that has enabled this total phony to thrive.

Marc Tracy interviews Peter Beinart:

I really believe that if Israel becomes more and more callous toward the right and dignity of non-Jews, it is naive to believe it will not become more callous to the rights and dignity of certain Jews. I think the two cannot be separated. Whether it’s the rights of gays and lesbians, or the rights of women who want to pray at the Kotel, or soldiers who want to speak out.

When we protect the right of Arab Israelis, we’re also protecting the rights of Jews against the government, and a Haredi population that I think at times is willing to use violence.

A reader writes:

Your reader comments on the spiritual argument about waves and water reminds me of a famous story about Hui Neng, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, when he was a young monk. Hui Neng was an illiterate peasant who had experienced a sudden awakening upon hearing the Lotus Sutra recited aloud, and went to join the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch of Zen. The Patriarch recognized that Hui Neng was in the process of awakening, but rather than openly acknowledge this he assigned him to care for the pigs on the outskirts of the monastery to protect him from the academic and spiritual corruptions of the other monks.

However, one day as Hui Neng was going about his work he heard two monks nearby engaging in a classic argument about spiritual reality. They were watching the large monastery flag waving in the wind, and one monk was arguing that it was the flag that was moving, while the other argued that it was the wind that was moving. These two arguments correspond to classic spiritual viewpoints about the nature of reality, and while listening to the learned monks argue, Hui Neng could not hold back. He interrupted them and told them, "It is neither the flag that moves, nor the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves".

The two monks were silenced, and Hui Neng went about his work tending to the pigs.

That's what they are calling Ilario Pantano. Steinglass summarizes:

[Pantano] a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, told the Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin last week that he had been impelled to run for office by Eric Holder's move to investigate the legality of the CIA's interrogation techniques. "What our men and women were doing in enhanced interrogations was not torture and the prospect of investigations smacked of politics," Mr Pantano said.

What Mr Pantano did while serving as a Marine in Iraq wasn't torture, either. On April 15th, 2004, he unloaded some 50 rounds at point-blank range into two unarmed detainees, stopping in the middle to reload a fresh cartridge, then posted a sign over their bodies reading "No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy", an unofficial slogan of the Marines. The military charged him with premeditated murder and with desecrating the corpses, but dropped the case because the chief witness was considered unreliable.

The Elena Kagan discussion last week has remained in my head, not because the issue is open any more, but because of what it revealed to me about the cocoon I also live in. Like many of us, I inhabit several over-lapping worlds of discourse, friends, family, background, neighborhood, etc. And one of those worlds is the gay one. Being out since my early twenties (a late-comer for today's generation), I've lived very comfortably, joyfully actually, in a gay world – and a straight one – much of my life. In Washington, being able to be part of these two worlds allows me one small but great advantage: I can have as much of a social life as I please without it being largely connected to my work. There are obvious overlaps, of course. You wouldn't believe what you find out on a Thursday night at the Duplex Diner where many plugged-in gay men congregate each week. But there are differences. What is talked about at the Diner stays at the Diner. And I'm a stickler for "off the record" facts in personal and private social settings.

But what's discussed at the Diner cannot help but remain in one's head. So what do you do when you live in both worlds and have a blog that tries to retain a no-bullshit rule of posting? This is a new zone because it has only really existed for a few years, and it is a zone where the conversational honesty of actual discourse interacts with the formal public truths one is ethically required to adhere to, if you're not just to peddle gossip. This was really my problem with the Trig thing.

I was caught between two very powerful impulses: the ethical desire not to say anything untrue or unverifiable and the ethical compulsion I felt to be totally honest with my readers about what I made of the passing scene from day to day. The conflict was so severe in the Palin question I simply decided not to blog for a couple of days while I wrestled with it. I may have been crazy but I wasn't going to bullshit my readers with phony thoughts because they were what I was supposed to think, or should pretend to think because of my reputation. And I could not wait or duck. A columnist can do that; a blogger cannot. To have stopped myself asking of Kagan's orientation would have been, to my mind, something of a rupture of trust between me and Dish readers. It would have erected a barrier between my own thoughts and what I allowed to appear on the blog.

But this where the two worlds collide. What seems like a simple question to me and my friends in a gay setting – "so is she gay?" – has no fraught complications, no element of touching something you never should. And the gay community has been buzzing about this, because it raises so many issues in a culture in transition. But in the straight world, the very asking of the question is deemed a dangerous, invasive, explosive thing. In the straight world, mentioning softball, cigars, and careerism about a single woman is to engage in hideous stereotyping. In the gay world, these stereotypes are totally talked about, cited, joked about and sympathized with. And this makes for a strange eddy as these two cultural forces collide in public discourse. My general position with respect to all this is rather like my mentors at South Park: tell it as you see it. But they have their characters to say what cannot be said. I only have myself.

The straight response in public to this question, in other words, is: "How dare you?"

The gay response in private wherever I have gone is: "Aww, c'mon."

It's between those two worlds that this blog hovers. And sometimes the gulf is simply too wide to handle.

(Cartoon from the wonderful xkcd blog.)

Conor Friedersdorf reports from Greater Phoenix.

Well, it's a free country:

Bristol Palin is hitting the speakers' circuit and will command between $15,000 and $30,000 for each appearance, Palin family attorney Thomas Van Flein said Monday… Bristol Palin, 19, is listed on the speaking group's website as available for conferences, fundraisers, special events and holidays, as well as women's, youth, abstinence and ''pro-life'' programs.

Between $15,000 and $30,000 a pop. Getting knocked up has never been so lucrative. And, according to the Johnston family, it was not an accident:

Levi and Bristol started dating about three years ago. They broke up a few times and there was a lot of jealousy, mostly from Bristol's side, but they always seemed to get back together. Levi was very much in love with Bristol and wanted to, not only marry her, but also start a family. They began actively trying to make a baby way back in late 2007, early 2008.

This was also around the time that Bristol was staying with Sarah's sister Heather Bruce because, according to Mercede, she did not want to leave Levi and move to Juneau with her family. Of course she still saw Levi quite often during this time, and Mercede says that their friends knew that Bristol and Levi were trying to get pregnant and that THIS is why the rumors that Bristol was already pregnant began to circulate in the beginning of 2008. Mercede swears that Bristol was NEVER pregnant before becoming pregnant with Tripp.

An update – via a conference call with Speaker Pelosi. Repealing DADT and passing a federal employment non-discrimination law, both supported by large majorities of Americans, are the issues at hand. Money Pelosi quote:

“I have no intention of losing on either of these.”