The Dish

Wal-Mart proves Virginia right. But she almost always is.

A reader writes:

I don’t get this whole "taking a shower with your gay team-mates thing." I am straight.  Straight as an arrow. I like women. I like boobs. I do not find the penis sexy. Very, very straight …

And I check out guys in the shower. I am always curious what other guys look like. I am always comparing and contrasting. Any guy who tells you he does not sneak a peak is full of crap. If you shower in a gym, it does not matter if you are showering with gay guys, straight guys, Chippendale dancers or the Dalai Lama himself … everyone is checking everyone else out.

I’m sure that’s true. As a gay guy who grew up showering among straight guys in school, there was a moment during puberty when it was a little overwhelming. Your hormones are in full throttle and I was a mobile trouser-tent half the time. But I managed to keep it, er, down in the showers. I was probably looking around much less than straight guys because I was scared of getting a woody. Of course there were some guys who turned me on. But the first thing gay guys learn is to overcome that, not to let that stuff come between being mature, adult or committed to the team or whatever. And most straight guys I know can deal with it very easily. It’s the insecure ones who have a problem. And the problem is their insecurity, not anyone’s orientation.

A reader writes:

Your latest response to Sam Harris was right on the money in so many ways – except that it seemed to me that you were reacting against something that Sam actually doesn’t believe and didn’t put forward (at least not nearly to the degree that you took it).

Of course, everyone understands that contingency is inescapable. I just think that Sam never claimed rationalism/science to actually be free of it, merely that they have less than faith-based religious beliefs do. His point on this (by my interpretation) was only that faith-based beliefs cling to contingency whereas science tries to identify and eliminate as much as possible. When he brought up the issue, it was predominantly in the context of this kind of relative sense.

For example, he wrote:

"Your determination to have your emotional and spiritual needs met within the tradition of Catholicism has kept you from discovering that there is a mode of spiritual and ethical inquiry that is not contingent upon culture in the way that all religions are"

and

"Imagine a discourse about ethics and mystical experience that is as contingency-free as the discourse of science already is."

Both of these are comparisons regarding relative levels of contingence, not claims that science is contingency free. I’m afraid you misinterpreted that in an extreme sense that wasn’t intended, then used it as a straw-man.

I should leave this for Sam to unpack if he wishes in his next response, but felt it worthwhile to register the critique here. I won’t add anything now except to say that I certainly didn’t intend to attack a straw-man; and that I don’t believe that the best kind of science is any less contingent than the most admirable expressions of faith.

Grover Norquist does what he can to prevent a sane bipartisan compromise on small business tax cuts.

"We cannot shake ourselves free from the arrogant idea that our own planet, our own race, our own generation, our own corner of the earth is the culmination of the Creator’s work, and in the events which pass through our field of view the final issues of Creation are being fought out.  If we could better preserve our sense of proportion we might recognize the humiliating fact that the events of our day, visible from our point of view, are but an infinitesimal atom in the great whole.  No one to whose mind this truth was present would dream that, from the mere fragment of the vast drama that falls under his view, he can grasp its real meaning, or conjecture the intentions which it is accomplishing," – Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, legendary Tory prime minister, quoted in Andrew Roberts’ new biography.

In Salisbury’s mind, and his was one of the greatest political minds of the nineteenth century, the notion of allying political conservatism with the theological certainty of evangelical fundamentalism would be literally absurd. At a philosophical level, it is literally absurd. Which is why I earnestly think and devoutly hope that this ghastly political contraption devised by Bush and Rove will soon collapse and, with any luck, die.

Some New Yorkers party. Here’s a report from a hip new club in NYC, called Bungalow 8. Money quote:

Next up was a blond woman in her late 30’s. She was wearing a black fedora from the men’s department at Bergdorf Goodman, a black Moschino dress and shoes by Christian Loubouton. I asked her about Iraq.

"A rack? You mean titties? Like a really big rack?"

Iraq.

"Don’t ever waste a moment in life. Fly to the moon and play amongst the stars, be happy, understand how lucky we are — and don’t fight," she said. "I feel personally connected in one way — I’m a mother, and every day in Iraq somebody is losing their child. My little girl will never go to Iraq. I’m sorry, she’ll go to Prada."

Read the whole thing. And be careful not to gag.

A reader comments:

Bungalow 8 has been around for years.  It’s even in a Sex and the City episode. I’m sure it was hardly worth going to when it was ‘hip" and "new"; and now that it’s a hangout for wannabes, I’m sure it’s even less so – if that’s possible.

I’m struck by how many defensive emails I’ve gotten from New Yorkers. Chill. We know you’re not all like that.

It’s Tehran, and an international drama festival. The censors are very very busy, but the young theater-goers keep one step ahead of them:

Finally one of the men says that they are here to experience something new and to see the performances by visiting theater groups from the West. They are curious, another man adds. The Polish production – or was it the French one? – promises to be especially exciting. The actresses wear ankle-length robes, as required under Islamic law, but in the last act the actors apparently pour water over each other and the women’s robes suddenly become skin-tight – revealing the contours of their breasts, legs, stomachs and behinds. You can see everything, the young men say. On an open stage.

Ajjab – unbelievable – one of the men mumbles. The censors are clueless about what’s going on here, says one man. It’s part of the allure. A woman chimes in. She doesn’t like the way the conversation is going. She is tall, has pretty eyes and pale skin, and pulls nervously at her headscarf.

"You can read our most secret thoughts," says one of the men, calling the woman by her first name – "but I beg you, don’t turn us in!" His words are meant to sound funny, flirtatious and ironic, but the tone of his voice betrays a hint of fear and apprehension.

Such fear, such promise.

A brief YouTube of the voice of FDR. Chilling, moving – even now. Maybe especially now.

He picked Boston instead – for the middle finger for Allah.

A reader writes:

Everything you say about being "contingent" rings true in my heart. We are born in a tiny neighborhood of earth, in a brief moment of time. The extent of all that we may become, derives from this origin, over which we have no choice, and from which we cannot escape.

It is the nature of the human psyche to see God behind the workings of the world.  Maybe in the far distant past, people thought God was a wise old man with a long beard, sitting on a Heavenly thrown  in the sky. Gradually, we all came  to realize, this could not be true. But does this mean that God does not exist? Not necessarily. Was this belief in God just a childish wish and imagining? Or might God be a little more complex and subtle? No matter what, my view on God does not come from my free choice, but is colored by all the human interpretations of God that I have encountered, together with my own conscious thinking and wondering, and then analyzed by some mysteriously autonomic analyzing process that operates in my head.

I am aware, where others may not be (perhaps most others) that my total being, personality, and beliefs are merely contingent on virtual "accidents" of the flow of events; and where I may have been on any certain day; and who may have spoken to me; whom I may have listened to; what book, movie, or television show I might have read or watched; if I glanced into the sky and saw a shape in the clouds that cheered me up or made me think of some specific thing…that the world impresses itself upon me, and forms me into all that I become, with only a very little bit of my own destiny and outcome, that I can determine by my own free will or choice.

I do not know much, but I know all of this. It may not be much, in the way of religious belief, but it is a foundation on which all else must rest. To be so sure and satisfied on this modest foundation, after all these years of extreme doubt on everything, is a relief and more than a relief, but satisfying, that I know and believe some things that make sense, and that I can put into words.

The origin of the word "contingent" comes from tangere, Latin, meaning "to touch."

(Photo: A believer reaches out to touch an apparition of the Virgin Mary located on a wall of an underpass April 18, 2005 in Chicago, Illinois. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.)