Category: The Dish

A clever idea, but it probably wouldn’t work so well in my homeland.

Ben Macintyre writes

In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.

This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?[…]

The plagiarism of words is a familiar crime, but the plagiarising of experience is something more subtle, and far harder to detect. “I never read a book before reviewing it,” declared Sidney Smith. “It prejudices a man so.” There is now an entire literary subculture devoted to the art of not-reading books, but pretending to have done so.

An excerpt from Paul Starobin’s classic Atlantic piece on national anger:

Although public anger tends toward cyclical peaks and troughs, its varieties fall into
well-established taxonomical grooves. There really aren’t any altogether new kinds of anti-establishmentarian anger in America—a country that since its birth has been a congenial breeding ground for this sort of animosity. But even if such anger is a fixed part of America’s genetic code, mutations occur as the various strains adapt to a changing political, social, and cultural environment. A catalogue of the forms of social anger in America circa 2003 reflects the nation’s evolution as the ultimate middle-class society. It turns out that public anger doesn’t dissipate as the average house size (and waistband) expands; it simply fastens onto new targets. Perhaps, as some analysts argue, the anger of an affluent post-industrial society is inevitably rooted more in cultural identity than in economic discontent—but then again, never underestimate the rage of an American who senses a threat to material livelihood.

Los Alamitos, California, 10.47 am.

The fusion of the Clinton campaign with the politics of Karl Rove and Republican neo-McCarthyism intensifies. You just can’t help remembering the following sentence:

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

She has become what she once opposed. And if she wins, it will be a victory for Rove and all he represents.

Ambinder on Obama’s rally in Philadelphia:

An Obama aide sized the crowd at about 40,000. It was probably was a little bit less, but a senior campaign official said it was the biggest the campaign had ever seen.

As usual, about 3,000 guests directly in front of Obama were sent through magnetometers and enclosed by metal barriers. Another 25,000 crowded Independence Park; some even listened from a good three thousand feet away, well behind Independence Hall.

I counted at least a hundred Philadelphia police officers. There were state troops. TSA personnel magging the crowd. A helicopter hovered over the square. The fire department set up a command post with extra medical supplies. It was some way to start Obama’s final Pennsylvania push.

VandeHei, Harris, Stephanopulos and Gibson need to find some more kitchen sinks to throw. Do they have any septic tanks on hand?

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)

Attacks from within families are always more hurtful than those from the outside, and so I cannot pretend that Leon Wieseltier’s latest personal attack on yours truly isn’t painful in the extreme. To be called a "Jew-baiter" in the pages of a magazine I was once proud and honored to edit, and which I love and support, is an extremely wounding blow. It is also untrue and unfair. Here’s why Leon accused me of such a thing. I was outraged last week when Bill Kristol publicly called Obama a liar about his own Christian faith. The reason I was outraged is because accusing someone else’s sincere profession of faith a fraud is about as nasty a tactic as one can imagine, about as brutal an attack on someone’s integrity as can be devised. It will be part of the neocon right’s attack on Obama this summer and fall. Obama’s Christianity – modern, moderate, inclusive, non-fundamentalist, African-American – is terribly threatening to the Republican strategy of defining Christianity as exclusively fundamentalist and heartland, and rallying voters to the polls on those grounds. If the Democrat is obviously a faithful and observant Christian, and not a Christianist, this strategy might come undone, their polarization made less potent, and their cooptation of religion as a political tool less effective. So accusing Obama of being a Marxist, and a liar, and a spiritual fraud, is critical to the success of the strategy. I think this is gutter politics, disrespectful, uncivil and, in Kristol’s case, a function of total cynicism and bad faith.

My phrase "a non-Christian manipulator of Christianity" is an attack on Kristol’s cynicism, not his Jewishness. I agree wholeheartedly with Leon that, "if Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew." It is because he is a cynic about faith, and a ruthless partisan indifferent to the truth when it cannot be harnessed to the wielding of power. My post was a protest against the manipulation of faith for partisan purposes, a theme that readers know I have been concerned with for a long time, and is the core argument of my recent book. It would apply to anyone outside a faith who has decided to use and manipulate another’s faith for his own political purposes. "Non-Christian" would include atheist or Muslim or agnostic or, of course, Jewish. It would apply to my calling a professing Muslim a fraud or a practising Protestant a liar. It seems to me that in these areas of deeply personal conviction, a man’s statement of his own faith – especially when it has been elaborated and explained by Obama in such detail – should be given the benefit of the doubt. And that should be particularly true for those who are not part of the same faith community. When you read the post (which TNR does not link to) this is clear. Here’s the full context:

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That’s where they’ve gone to already. And it’s only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?

If I were "Jew-baiting," what would the "they" in that following sentence refer to: Jews? Please. The phrase is obviously a reference to Republicans, especially the most cynical, Rovian variety, which Kristol epitomizes.

One reader emailed me to say that he thought the phrase could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and, to be honest, it was the first time it occurred to me. All I can say is that is not in any way what I intended, the context makes this obvious, and if someone were to take it that way, I am sincerely, deeply sorry for not being clearer. I find anti-Semitism one of the vilest, ugliest, dumbest pathologies of the human mind and soul, and I don’t think any fair reader of my work over the years could come to any other conclusion. I guess I assume that after years of writing – Leon would call it "typing" – and literally millions of words, readers will know full well where my heart is on this matter. I guess I assume that the editors of The New Republic would know that too.

The origins of Leon’s personal hatred of yours truly are too tedious to recount, but they go back a very long way, and Wieseltier is a connoisseur and cultivator of personal hatred. I do think, however, that when accusing someone of "Jew-baiting," a writer might be a little more careful in his own use of language. I am 44 years old, a former editor of the magazine Wieseltier works for, married, and adult. And yet this is the tone of Leon’s scorn: "Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy."

Little? Boy? African-Americans and gay men have had one thing in common over the decades and centuries. When we are being put in our place by our superiors, we are called "boys." What do you call an openly gay man who actually manages to have a career in mainstream journalism? A boy. Obama is not a boy, and neither am I. And breaking through those barriers is one thing this election has come to be about.

The Supreme Court upheld the use of lethal injection this week, timed nicely with the Pope’s visit. In 1990 Susan Lehman profiled Fred Leuchter, a designer of execution devices:

The Leuchter company’s lethal-injection system, at $30,000, is the cheapest execution system the company sells. (Prices do not include installation.) The Leuchter electrocution system costs $35,000, and a Leuchter gallows would run about $85,000. More and more states are opting for Leuchter’s $100,000 "execution trailer," which comes complete with a lethal-injection machine, a steel holding cell for the inmate, and separate areas for witnesses, chaplain, prison workers, and medical personnel. Leuchter’s gas chambers cost nearly $200,000.

Despite Leuchter’s personal preference, lethal injection is gaining popularity in states that allow capital punishment.

Soon after he had mastered electrocution technology, a northern state, one of the first to switch to lethal injection, called Leuchter for advice. He went back to the library and brushed up on pharmacology and chemistry. From the results of tests done on pigs and rabbits he calculated the dosages of sodium pentothal, potassium chloride, and pancuronium bromide (a synthetic curare) needed for lethal injection of human beings. Then he invented a computer-controlled machine to inject inmates lethally without rupturing their veins or otherwise causing undue discomfort.

Four states have Leuchter-designed lethal-injection machines, though Leuchter has never seen one used. (Indeed, he has never witnessed an execution.) But he is certain that his system will help prison wardens avoid mishaps like the one that occurred in 1988 in Texas, when, during a manual injection procedure, a tube attached to the inmate’s arm burst, causing lethal chemicals to spray across the death chamber toward the assembled witnesses. 

Errol Morris’s film on Leuchter, Dr. Death, is well worth a viewing if you have the time.

An excerpt from John Haught’s God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens:

I must confess that it has been disappointing for me to have witnessed the recent surge of interest in atheism. It’s not that my own livelihood, that of a theologian, is at stake—although the authors in question would fervently wish that it were so. Nor is it that the treatment of religion in these tracts consists mostly of breezy over-generalizations that leave out almost everything that theologians would want to highlight in their own contemporary discussion of God. Rather, the new atheism is simply unchallenging theologically. Its engagement with theology lies at about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.

Clearly the new atheists’ strategy is to suppress in effect any significant theological voices that might wish to join in conversation with them. As a result of this exclusion, the intellectual quality of their atheism is unnecessarily diminished. Their understanding of religious faith remains consistently at the same unscholarly level as the unreflective, superstitious, and literalist religiosity of those they criticize. Even though the new atheists reject the God of creationists, fundamentalists, terrorists, and “intelligent design” (ID) advocates, it is not without interest that they have decided to debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.

This choice of antagonists betrays their unconscious privileging of literalist and conservative versions of religious thought over the more traditionally mainstream types. The new atheists are saying in effect that if God exists at all, we should allow this God’s identity to be determined once and for all by the fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religious traditions. I believe they have chosen this strategy not only to make their job of demolition easier, but also because they have a barely disguised admiration for the simplicity of their opponents’ views of reality.

In preparing treatises on a-theism, one would expect that scholars and journalists would have done some research on theism, just to be sure they know exactly what it is they are rejecting. It is hard to be an informed and consistent atheist without knowing something about theology. And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So the new atheists just know there is something sick and delusional about theology. There is no need to look at it up close. Furthermore, conversation with theologians, most of whom are not biblical literalists, would add a dimension of intricacy to the new atheist literature that would detract from the breeziness that sells books. Ignorance of theology simplifies the new atheists’ attacks on their equally uninformed religious adversaries. It allows their critique to match, point for point, the fundamentalism it is trying to eliminate.

(Hat tip: Bookforum)

Lisa Margonelli writes about needlessly lost energy.