Category: Old Dish

I missed the documentary because I already had tickets to see D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello.” But there are some useful links here and here. The Othello, by the way, was marvelous. When you see the play again, you realize just how great Shakespeare’s ambition was. The emotional arc of each character, if followed, forces the audience to endure acute emotional distress and psychological extremity – of a depth and nuance that few contemporary plays or movies even aim at. Just absorbing the play is physically draining, if you can find the acting credible. In this case, the acting was more than credible; it was real. And so the grief you feel lingers in the heart and soul long after you leave the theater. This Michael Kahn production also brought out the extraordinary role of Amelia, Iago’s wife, in ways I hadn’t fully seen before. It was hard to unwind afterwards. So we watched a DVD of “Futurama.” The DP has insisted I watch it – I never really got the show before – and he’s right: it’s really under-estimated. I don’t mean in any profound way. But there are some things so light and yet engaging that they are the only antidote to tragedy. And a perfect thing to watch before you hit the sack.

Arianna recalls hiking with Judy among the aspens of Colorado. The smack-down between these two sex-vixens is among the few redeeming features of the entire affair.

Jonah has some sane words on the two subjects.

A reader asks:

If abortion is “always wrong,” more than that, “morally wrong,” then why make it legal for “pragmatic reasons?” Isn’t this a bit like the argument for torture? Everyone knows that torture is morally wrong, but some want to preserve the option, or give the appearance of preserving the option, for pragmatic reasons? The abortion question is difficult precisely because it is a pragmatic, but immoral, option.

There are a couple of responses to that. The first is that torture is now being committed by members of the government, not by private individuals. Authorizing or demanding that government-paid officials practice abortion is different than merely allowing citizens to perform the practice themselves in the private sphere. That’s why it’s possible to, say, support a policy that bars federally funded abortion, while allowing private individuals to do the same thing. What a government can do must meet a higher standard than the private choices of a private person – because the government represents all the people, not just a few. (That said, torture is just as illegal for private individuals as it is for government employees, so this particular analogy is moot. It would suggest that governments should have lower standards of moral conduct than its own citizens.) The second and stronger response is that the evil of abortion is committed within the confines of a human being’s own body. To deny that someone has a property interest in her own body is to deny the very basis of a liberal political order. It is to make the most fundamental liberty – the right to choose what we do with our own bodies – close to meaningless. Now, of course, it is argued that the fetus or unborn child is also a person. And so two property interests conflict. My pragmatic solution is to allow a woman the legal right to abort her child in the first trimester, where the fetus’s claim to personhood is weakest. That’s the situation in most countries allowed a democratic vote on the question. With torture, no such property interests conflict.

RAPE AND INCEST: Here’s a second email:

We now know that court nominee Harriet Miers backed an amendment in 1989 that sought to ban abortions except those to “prevent the death of the mother.” That precludes rape and incest, two situations that can lead to pregnancy. (It also dismisses other medical events in which pregnancy can severely tax the welfare of a sick woman.) So to answer your question about how someone could consider abortion moral, I’d ask you how you could consider abortion immoral in those situations. Asking someone to carry those fetuses to term against their will is a special private hell that no one should legally be forced to experience. I would argue that it is immoral and that such an event is a stone’s throw away if a Miers Court comes to fruition.

I’ve never understood the moral argument about banning all abortion as the taking of life, while allowing it in cases of rape and incest. I fully understand the psychological and simply humane reasons for allowing someone to abort in those cases. But if your argument is solely about human life, how it is created is irrelevant, compared to the fact that it is created. Miers’ position seems to me more coherent, if insensitive and cruel to a mother in such a circumstance. Equally, if your criterion is that abortion should be legal if it advances the mental health of the matter, I can see the point. But that’s such a nebulous standard it could be and is used to justify any abortion, including the horrifying later-term cases, which are intuitively very hard to distinguish from infanticide. Hence my unsatisfying political compromise for what is still, to my mind, a pretty clear moral issue. At the core of my compromise is an understanding that politics and morality are over-lapping but separate spheres. That distinction between law and morality is at the heart of the liberal project; and attacking it is at the heart of the theo-conservative and hard-left project. In that sense, I am a proud liberal.

The old war-horse of the Tory left has been eliminated from the race for the leadership of the British Conservative party. Now the fun begins, with a new and hopefully more vibrant generation.

“That’s what should make the spectacle of the past week so troubling to the Bush administration. It has depended on orthodoxy within the movement to suppress complaints. But now that discipline has broken down. The conservative movement increasingly resembles a dictator’s palace in the midst of a coup. Comrades have begun turning on one another with incredible fervor, as the widely ridiculed Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt will now surely attest. These days, you never know who will get dragged out and shot next. Since so many nagging complaints have festered for so long, it will surely get even uglier.” – Franklin Foer, at TNR, firewalled off from non-subscribers.

Bush continues to slide in every poll, with a post-Katrina acceleration downwards. Mystery Pollster examines the data.

Well, actually more than that. She would favor amending the federal constitution to ban all abortions, with the exception of the life of the mother. At least that was her position in 1989. That doesn’t mean that she’d vote for repeal of Roe, but it does help clarify things. For me, at least, a willingness to tamper with the Constitution itself to implement social policy is the opposite of any meaningful conservative philosophy. But, hey, that barn is already horse-free. Weirdly, I don’t think it will shore her up among the conservative establishment, who oppose her for her mediocrity, primarily. But it might generate enthusiasm from the religious base, and thereby galvanize the left, which, in turn, may solidify the right. I’m still a wait-and-see-er. The hearings are necessary. But it’s fascinating to see so many fissures on all sides developing.

Last night’s Colbert Report, of course. O’Reilly fileted. My only worry is: how can he keep it up?

“I just need to tell our story since you asked the question “how can abortion not always be wrong?”
My wife and I decided to try for our second baby on December 29, 2002. I happen to remember the date because it was our fifth wedding anniversary. We were amazingly fortunate the first time we wanted to have a baby, as she became pregnant in the second month of trying.
On January 24, 2003, she was diagnosed with lung cancer just three weeks after her 30th birthday. She went for a routine doctor visit and expected to be sent to an allergist because we had just moved into the middle of the East Texas pine forests. Instead, a chest x-ray led to this horrible diagnosis.
In the aftermath of the diagnosis, she did not menstruate. She was always very regular, and we didn’t think much about it until it became six days, then seven, then ten. On the eleventh day she did. To this day, I do not know whether she was pregnant and the stress of the situation caused her to miscarry, or whether the stress just threw off her cycle.
But for a week we sat in a limbo of not knowing, of not knowing what even to hope for. I don’t know what we would have decided to do, whether we would have postponed chemo and radiation long enough for her to have the baby or whether we would have had an abortion. She died on March 28, 2004, and as much as I would love to have another living monument to her life, I know I couldn’t have raised a newborn without her.
We were mere days from having to make a decision about abortion, and I don’t think we would have been wrong in any choice we would have made. I had always been pragmatically pro-choice, but that episode of my life just confirmed to me that just as we didn’t need someone else at our table helping us make this decision, I don’t want to be at someone else’s table either.
So I guess this is a long answer to how abortion can not always be wrong.”