The Dish

"If you’re an act, then what am I?" – Stephen Colbert to Bill O’Reilly, last night.

"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you," – Friedrich Nietzsche.

Because you won’t get it anywhere else:

I’ll respond tomorrow, but this reader couldn’t wait:

Harris wrote:

So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves?

Religious books are not "just" books. Rather they are books that try to guide human beings, and their conduct, through the mystery that is human life.  And when I say "mystery" I don’t mean it in the sense of "Wow, that’s cool!"  I mean it in the sense that we don’t know where we came from, or where we are going, or how, on the one hand, we can have a profound sense of self, but, then, on the other hand, must live with the unease that our entire sense of self – without religion – will somehow some day cease to exist.

Religion, and religious books are designed to help us with these problems of human existence.  They are designed to show us – based on very old traditions – about the proper courses of conduct to lead one to the eventual pride in having lived to the full and to the good the one life that one was granted. They make us glad to be alive.

Other books do not help. Even philosophers are of little use for these areas of life, and most will gladly acknowledge it. Perhaps some people don’t need religion. But most of us do, even if our religious devotions are tinged with more or less worldly skepticism.

It is absurd to claim that whoever – one or many – who wrote, among others, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or the Tao te Ching were just regular guys writing regular books.  The only person who can say that is the person who has no sense to appreciate the ecstatic frame of mind that is a core element in the religious life, and which in turn presupposes a voice driving such authors that, in the poor words we humans use, is described a Holy Spirit. And, absolutely, the same applies to the New Testament, which of course was written by real people in real time.

But to say that the New Testament expresses the Holy Spirit is not to be understood either to mean that some kind of vapor descended from on high and penetrated the fingertips of Luke or St Paul. Rather it also means that these are texts that were written by Christians, for communities of Christian believers, and that these communities, over the course of now two millennia, consider them, and their companions, true reflections, in words, of the states of Christian belief and life.

Now, the issue has been phrased as a religious issue but it could also be phrased as an esthetic one.  Artistic experiences, poetry, music, visual arts, will sometimes convey a kind of supernatural and ever-renewing power.  For reasons we cannot put into words, we feel at times – after a Beethoven quartet or a Shakespeare play – that we have been touched by something so special, that it could not be the mere  product of "just some guy." Artists themselves will not infrequently stand in amazement at their own creations. "How did I manage to create something so good?" Here, too, the suspicion arises that the artist is but a medium for something else, indefinable.

I am in sympathy with much of this, but perhaps for the sake of coherence, we shouldn’t ask Sam to address all the readers’ comments as well. I’ll focus tomorrow. Today has been somewhat full.

(Painting: Rembrandt’s "The Evangelist Matthew Inspired by an Angel.")

It turns out they alleviate pain by the same mechanism in the brain – except marijuana does less harm. But it’s pleasurable, so it must be banned.

A reader writes:

Pace your reader, Obama gave an anti-Iraq War speech in the fall of 2002 while still in the Illinois Senate. There’s no way he’s Monday-morning quarterbacking.

Also, my German’s not too good, but I hope he doesn’t exhibit his Weltanschauung. Isn’t that what got Bill Clinton in trouble?

Here’s a tart defense of blurring the lines between fact and fiction in a memoir:

This is the second volume of my unreliable memoirs. For a palpable fantasy, the first volume was well enough received. It purported to be the true story of how the author grew from infancy through adolescence to early manhood, this sequence of amazing biological developments largely taking place in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, Australia. And indeed it was a true story, in the sense that I wasn’t brought up in a Tibetan monastery or a castle on the Danube. The central character was something like my real self. If the characters around him were composites, they were obviously so, and with some justification. The friend who helps you dig tunnels in your back yard is rarely the same friend who ruins your summer by flying a model aeroplane into your mother’s prize trifle, but a book with everybody in it would last as long as life, and never live at all.

I still don’t buy it, actually. It seems to me perfectly possible to write a memoir that does not use composite characters, or change people’s names, without going on for ever. In my own memoir passages in my three books, I make nothing up, create no composite characters and tell the truth as far as I can recall. Yes, it’s subjective – but it’s not a fantasy. I’m somewhat befuddled why this was beyond the talents of the extremely gifted Senator from Illinois. But then I’ve never been angling for a political career.

Historian Alistair Horne talks here about the parallels between France’s doomed counter-insurgency campaign in Algeria and our current morass in Iraq. The most obvious parallel is the way in which the U.S. has copied what Horne calls "the vile hand of torture." Horne’s book on the Algeria debacle, "A Savage War," is currently being read by the president. Horne sent the book to former defense secretary Rumsfeld, with passages on torture underlined. Rumsfeld sent him a "fierce" note back, and then apparently relented and agreed with Horne. Horne’s conclusion from Algeria:

"As far as torture is concerned, the answer must be never, never, never."

Too late, alas. Too late.

From Novak’s column:

"Iraq is a black hole for the Republican Party," a prominent party strategist told me this week. What makes his comments so important is that he is not a maverick Republican in Congress but one of Bush’s principal political advisers.

Here is a fascinating if grim illustration of a punishment used in Auburn State Prison, New York, in 1858. The description reads:

"The convict, More, was a negro. He is certified to have been a man of naturally pleasant temper, but violent when crossed … he was dragged by main force, and after many violent struggles, to the shower-bath; all the water that was in the tank — amounting to from three to five barrels, the quantity is uncertain — was showered upon him in spite of his piteous cries; a few minutes after his release from the bath he fell prostrate, was carried to his cell, and died in five minutes."

This page adds:

The use of the shower-bath as a means of coercing criminals into submission to the orders of prison authorities began to be general about the year 1845.

This is not torture, then, because it isn’t used to extract information, just to crush a human spirit and body. But it is awful nonetheless.

I touched a nerve:

That was a shitty, cheap shot. Obama writes in his intro that he uses composite characters, and then does. An "investigative journalist" investigates and finds a character actually lives up to his description. But others might not because she didn’t investigate them? And readers may not investigate?

This is your "scandal"? This makes him like James Frey who had more holes than cheese? This is a hack job smear, and today you’re a hack enabler.

I didn’t use the word "scandal." When a candidate for the president gets serious, questions like this are raised. His autobiography is a non-non-fiction "memoir," based on his own recollections, not on empirical truth. This new genre of non-non-fiction that isn’t fiction is a strange hybrid that deserves scrutiny, and the book is now likely to get that scrutiny. I understand why a writer cannot recall everything in his past. But I fail to understand why a writer has to change the name of an individual in his past from "Marty Kaufman" to "Gerald Kellman," especially when that person confirms the accounts of verbatim conversations. It suggests that the autobiography was written to create an image not to tell a true story. It’s not fraudulent in the James Frey way. But it is odd. If Obama gets touchy about this, he’s got a lot to learn. Not everyone is a fan either:

Why on earth do you like Obama? Not that there is much to hate about him, but do you truly like him as a presidential candidate?  How is he even remotely qualified?  Aside from his Monday-quarterback judgement of the war in Iraq (as he wasn’t there to make the mistake of voting for it in the Senate in 2002), what can be said for him in exact terms?  He’s a powerful speaker? This is the problem we confronted with Robert Kennedy (or even his older brother – but to a lesser extent).

Has Obama said one word about global strategy that isn’t in reaction to the beliefs of others? Like Kennedy he’s quite skilled at pointing out what is wrong with the world, but that’s only the first step towards solving it, and the rest are all uphill. All I know is what Obama does not like, what he doesn’t believe in. I can’t simply assume that the rest is what he does believe in. Not that I think Obama is another Bush, but let us for just once demand an intellectual showing from our presidential candidates. We have 300,000,000 people in this country. Surely there are men and women better suited for the position of president than the stooges we’ve been offered. Isn’t it about time to change the presidential search paradigm a bit? Isn’t it time that we ask Obama to step up and exhibit his Weltanschauung?  The early allegiance I’m seeing for Obama, Edwards, Giuliani makes me worried that we haven’t learned our lessons. None of them are actually qualified for the Oval Office, so we should really make them earn it!

Agreed. The sole reason I have for liking Obama is his multi-racial, multi-cultural heritage which I think is a great advantage in today’s global climate; and his extremely impressive speeches, particularly on religion and politics. I need to know more. Much more. We all do.