Category: The Dish

It was a highlight of the Senate Judiciary Hearings on detainee policies last week. Senator Leahy rightly dragged the legal lickspittle Gonzales over the coals. The rage in Leahy’s voice is completely justified: the idea that the U.S. sent a terror suspect to Syria for interrogation, and didn’t expect him to be tortured, is preposterous. Gonzales, Bush and Ashcroft were comfortable with that because they are comfortable with torture. There’s not a freedom Gonzales wouldn’t undermine, not a right he wouldn’t qualify, if his political patrons asked him to. Listen to the section of the hearings related to the rendition of Canadian Maher Arar, a man tortured by a vile regime at the behest of the United States. Listen and get angry again. Anger is necessary. Extreme anger is necessary. Don’t get numb. Get mad.

I mentioned Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man" in the post below. Here it is:

"[The novel] is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative … If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world," – Karen Armstrong, "A Short History of Myth."

My next reply to Sam Harris will appear tomorrow, on my Sabbath.

I was a skeptic at first. We got the 46 inch LCD TV for Christmas but I was utterly indifferent to High Definition. It sounded like a snow-job to me. But Aaron insisted, so we got the new box and set up the new connection. Within seconds, I was hooked. Not since Gillette’s Mach 3 and the iPod have I been as impressed with a new technology. You think it will look better – but not that much better. The best way I can express this is: It is as if they took the lens off the camera.

If you’re into sports, it’s a must (I’m not). My own guilty pleasure is the Discovery Channel, National Geographic television, and other nature shows. I loved them before HDTV; but now they’re astonishing. The clarity that allows you to see nature as if you were there, in your own living room, is a window onto the entire world. I watched a broadcast from the Space Station, to take a simple example. I’ve seen plenty of TV from space before, but always as if through a blizzard or a fuzzy lens. The image always made space seem somewhere else entirely, a different dimension, unlike anything on earth. but HDTV changes all that. To see someone floating without gravity as if they were in front of you creates a whole new perspective on what space travel is actually like. It makes it real – for the first time in human history. If I were NASA, I’d do nothing but get HD images from space to the American public. It would reignite enthusiasm for space exploration.

But my favorite is a Discovery On Demand channel, which has a series called "Sunrise Earth." Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Put down the bong. But you need no bong to be entranced by the simplicity of the series. It takes the highest quality video cameras around the world and captures 50-minute scenes of the dawn in a variety of spots on this water-planet. There is no narration; no music; just natural sounds. Here’s one review:

When seen in vivid, crystal-clear HDTV, the effect is hypnotic. Few viewers will fail to have an impulse to immediately book a flight to join the fun. After watching last night’s program on the Cadillac Mountains at the Acadia National Park in Maine, I quickly checked my work schedule for vacation dates. When seen in high-def, the burnt orange skies lingering over the Maine mountains was enough to make me forget, well, nearly everything.

Again, like Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man," Sunrise Earth lets the high-def pictures do the talking. There is no narrator getting in the way; only an occasional graphic reveals the location and the time of day. It’s a powerful technique. By eliminating the human altogether, Sunrise Earth makes you feel like what you’re seeing could be what you would have seen hundreds of years ago. It’s nature unplugged.

I’ve become obsessed with three so far: the town square in a Cambodian village with a Buddhist temple, as the monks chant in a new day; an Icelandic waterfall; and the foothills of a Turkish mountain range, dotted with Roman ruins. However stressed your day, this devastatingly simple project soothes the soul. It’s a video version of the Dish’s Views From your Window, a reminder that however grim things look, the earth turns, the sun rises, and nature endures.

(Photo: David Conover, series director and photographer, on the River Li.)

Not so much. My bet: he knows things we don’t yet know.

Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 5 pm.

Words to live by:

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’"

It’s H. L. Mencken. My version:

"The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know… The first thing to say is that this philosophy is not warmed-over relativism or nihilism. While the fundamentalist knows the truth, the nihilist believes it is an illusion, that nothing is true, and everything is valid. The conservative differs from both. While not denying that the truth exists, the conservative is content to say merely that his grasp on it is always provisional. He may be wrong. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead. And this, the conservative avers, is what it means to be human."

For a full treatment of the political and theological consequences of this, see "The Conservative Soul."

A debate from 1969, in two parts, with themes directly relevant to today. Below is the first. Here is the link to the second. There used to be television like this; and people used to watch it. Now, at least, it’s online.

"Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, ‘We had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it. We can’t do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley’s a white male Republican governor. And we can’t do a thing to him. So we’re just gonna federalize Louisiana.’" – Former FEMA head Michael Brown, alleging that even Katrina relief was filtered through Karl Rove’s partisan calculus.