The Dish

Because we desperately need some humor right now.

A reader writes:

John Kerry hits the nail on the head – and a mere day after it occurred to me for the first time how close I came to getting stuck in Iraq myself. Back in 1986 my poor parents worked their butts off to find some way to get me into a decent college. I had decent grades so money was the main problem. 

One of the potential ways around that money problem was – yep – ROTC. As it was, the powers that be wouldn’t let me into ROTC since my eyes weren’t that great, but that turned out to be a huge blessing. Had my parents ended up sticking me into military reserve service to get the funds that would send me to college, I might have ended up in Iraq – in Gulf War I, which started the year after I left college. Whew! A very very close call indeed.

Of course, if anyone dares speak the truth about military service – that many if not most people get into it not as a patriotic enterprise but as a lucrative job or source of job training, they get their heads lopped off by hateful attacks and slander. Some people went to Iraq because they really wanted to fight for our country there. But only some of them. Most just got stuck there. It’s high time people dropped the silly pretense and admitted it.

Andrew – don’t fall for the silly Karl Rove hype machine this time.

I’m not. But there is a real issue here – an ambiguous criticism of the troops – and it wouldn’t be hard to correct it. I intend to focus on the real issue right now: the failed war in Iraq. My reader worries about being sent to Iraq War I. But that war was waged by a competent, decent president, not an incompetent, indecent one. That’s the real issue in this election. And we owe it to the troops not to be distracted from it.

"It’s sad, so sad
It’s a sad, sad situation
And it’s getting more and more absurd."

What Kerry said he must apologize for. Sooner rather than later. He may not have meant it the way it came out. That doesn’t matter. It’s wrong to talk about the military that way – wrong morally, empirically and ethically. And the way he said it can be construed as a patronizing snub to the men and women whose lives are on the line. It’s also dumb politically not to kill this off in one news cycle. Is Kerry not content to lose just one election? Does his enormous ego have to insist on losing two?

(Photo: Charlie Niebergall/AP.)

Bush does the obvious. Kerry gives him the chance. This is politics. Bush has no coherent argument for his party or his record. This is not what this election is or should be about. But Kerry is the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t he? He just rallied the base – the Republican base – more successfully than Karl Rove could. Someone very close to the president once observed that Bush’s signature theme is his luck. Above all, he is lucky in his enemies. And how.

A reader writes:

"When I first found out one of my sons was gay I went immediately to the computer and googled "Catholic" and "homosexuality". It was the first and probably most painful of the paralyzing issues that I felt I needed to tackle in order to arrive at the peaceful acceptance I knew would eventually come. Sadly, I was already reeling from intense anger over the Church’s enormous betrayal of its most vulnerable. The abuse scandal and the horrendous sin of covering it up for decades was for me so painful, so unforgivable, and so destructive that I was unsure I could remain a Catholic even before learning that I was the mother of an "objectively disordered" and "intrinsically evil" son who by loving someone would be committing the unforgivable sin of "deviant love".

I am so glad that you chose to excerpt your answer to CSPAN’s Brian Lamb’s question about remaining in the Catholic Church in spite of its open hostility to Gays and Lesbians. Your dogged commitment to remaining a practicing Catholic at first made me feel so ashamed of my own painful decision to leave the Church. I spent months agonizing and soul searching before deciding that my choice to leave the Church was the right thing for me to do. In spite of the fact that you and I arrived at different decisions, reading your columns and posts helped me to see another side to the story that I was not able to see because of my blinding rage and sorrow. Unfortunately, I just cannot worship in a Church that has deemed one of my children evil, especially when it is coming from a Church that has not only failed to take true responsibility for its own evil. As far as I am concerned, the moral high ground upon which they think they can proclaim gays evil, crumbled decades ago."

One day, the Catholic Church will formally apologize for what it has done to the souls of gay people – and to the children some of its priests have raped and brutalized and traumatized for generations.

(Photo: Gianni Giansanti/Polaris.)

Rick Santorum gets points for honesty. He is opposed to the "pursuit of happiness" proclaimed as one of the three basic principles of the American experiment by the founding fathers. My third chapter, "The Theo-Conservative Project," is a detailed but respectful critique of his book, "It Takes A Family," its confusion about science, and its terrible fear of individual liberty.

You have to wait to the very end of the clip to hear him actually say the words that the "pursuit of happiness harms America." And he tries to portray such a pursuit as somehow an enemy of personal responsibility. But why not both? Isn’t that what true conservatism means? And since when was it the role of government to be the means of imposing values and responsibility? In Santorum, you see how the big government left met the moralizing right and became Bush-Rove conservatism. It’s a vision of America suited for October 31. And it’s time to fight back against it.

Thanks for taking the time to read the whole book. You’re not the first one to say it has the wrong title. Maybe I should have played off Sam Harris’ book and called it "The Beginning of Faith." But when I tried to write about politics in these times, I simply found it impossible not to write about religion. Our foreign policy is shaped by a response to religious Islamic extremism; and our domestic politics, as you so ably demonstrate, has become about the use and abuse of religion for partisan poitical purposes.

I was struck in your book by many things that really are not about politics. Your account of your adolescence is honest, and very funny. Hormones are indeed a laugh riot, and I sometimes wonder whether God gave them to us to ensure that we remember to laugh at ourselves from time to time. But I was particularly struck by what you yourself describe as the moment of your epiphany: your brain tumor, your near-death experience when driving a car and blacking out. You may well have died if your wife had not seized the steering wheel.

So here’s my question: throughout the book, you seem a man able to examine himself, to reconsider roads taken, to evolve and change. You moved from left to right to beyond both. And yet you also suggest that without this encounter with mortality and terror, your epiphany about what you were doing with your life might never have happened. Or at least not happened the way it did.

I had the same experience eleven years ago when I was diagnosed with HIV, when it was a death-sentence. In retrospect, all my writing since has flowed from that moment. It felt as if God were taking me by the lapels and shaking me so hard I couldn’t breathe. (I recount the experience in my previous book, "Love Undetectable." The date inscribed on my prologue to ‘Virtually Normal‘ was also the anniversary of the day I found out I had HIV: June 23, 1993.) I identified with that moment in your book a lot, and wonder how critical you think it was in your evolution toward speaking truth to power?

Or am I being unfair? Was the evolution already in train and this brush with death just a coincidence? Could God work through a brain tumor? Or a virus that is killing countless people, even as I live on?

Or were we just scared into faith?

A good question.

Someone did a Lego version of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller." It’s great. The whole thing can be seen here.

David Kuo and I will be discussing each other’s books and the ideas within them – our agreements and disagreements – over the next few days, on our respective blogs. He started yesterday. He begins:

Dear Andrew,

Would that I knew where to start this discussion/letter/dialogue.

Truth be told when we talked about this idea of a ‘blogalogue’ I hadn’t read all of your book and therefore didn’t understand what a monumental work you had produced. In many ways it is improperly titled. This isn‚Äôt just "The Conservative Soul"; it is really "First Things" (with all appropriate respect to the journal of the same name) because the driving narrative of the book seems to me to be understanding God, prioritizing God, and loving God. Everything else flows from that ‚Äì for well or for ill…

His post continues here on his own blog. I will respond later today to the questions he subsequently raises, and to the remarkable book he has written.