The Dish

(This post came out of me in a rush, prompted by one particularly depressed afternoon in the office.

I guess one thing I have been forced to learn this past year is a little more equanimity, a deeper understanding that all earthly things decay, and all human institutions flawed and that these facts are only truly depressing if they admit of no possible reform or renewal. And the greatness of the Western system is that it allows enough air for reform and renewal to take hold – as it has, fitfully, in America this past year.

My faith teaches me that solipsistic dismay is a sin, because it does not allow for the possibility of grace, of God's transformation of the world through our souls opening up to his eternal and unconditional love. Reading a lot of Merton this year – that gruff, ornery but profound Trappist – has lifted me up – and taught me more clearly to follow what I constantly preach to others: know hope. – Andrew)

Blogging takes you into the ever instant-present, and the world's rapidly changing scene can prompt shifts in your outlook you never truly expected and don't yet quite understand. I realize that my passionate dismay at the Freeman affair, for example, was surprising to some, and even to me. I'm a passionate believer in Israel's right to exist and care about her security. But the changing world requires adjusting to new realities and past experiences. And sometimes events bring ruptures to the surface that reflect tectonic shifts underneath. And that requires some context. By its nature this post is therefore somewhat solipsistic. Please skip this post if my own internal angst is of understandably minimal interest to you. But I'm a believer in expressing conflicts, not inhibiting them. I don't work on background.

In the last decade, I realize that many of my most cherished institutions have failed – and failed in ways that are not trivial. Perhaps the institution dearest to me, the Catholic church, greeted the emergence of gay people in a way that never truly reflected the compassion of Jesus or the good faith arguments many of us offered as a way forward. This was sad to me, but not life-changing. I know the Holy Spirit takes time, as James Allison reminds us. But then came the sex abuse crisis. Like many others, the truth about the evil in the heart of the church, and the cooptation and enabling of that evil, and the refusal to take real responsibility for the evil, simply left me gasping for air. I realize now that my Catholic identity never recovered, even if my faith endures in a far more modest and difficult way.

Then my adopted country. Again, the frustrations nag, in my case the still-unresolved matter of how an immigrant who became HIV-positive a decade after arriving here can have a secure home and future. I still cannot, although I am hopeful the Obama administration will soon enact what the Congress last year voted for overwhelmingly and the Bush administration intended to change before it ended.  [Update: The ban is formally lifted next January 4]. And the fact that this country also treats my legal civil marriage as if it didn't exist, as if our love and family and commitment were worth nothing, wounds every day.

But again, I understand these things take time. I'm lucky to be here at all and have seen enormous progress in my lifetime. The real sucker-punch to my faith in American government was the embrace of torture against terror suspects. Since it came as part of a response to Islamist evil that I had supported, in a war I had aggressively mongered for, shock was intermixed with guilt, and guilt ceded to a kind of patriotic grief. It is the flipside of love – this kind of grief. It has not abated because there has been no real accounting and no real responsibility taken – just as in the church. The people who really held power, who really should have taken the fall: they are still unrepentant and defiant, even contemptuous of their critics.

The conservative movement is another institution of a sort that has come undone before my eyes. It really was a formative part of my identity as a young man, and yet, for all the reasons I spelled out in my last book, it is not a movement that I feel comfortable in any longer. It actually appalls me daily.

What I could once dismiss as minor flaws – supply-side nuttiness, near-idolatrous American exceptionalism, religious zeal – are now its core, defining features. The way it has responded to the economic crisis – a form of ideological autism – reflects a deep malaise. But, although Obama's pragmatic progressivism has many attractive qualities, I cannot be a liberal. I do not have liberalism's confidence in government activism, I do not share its collectivist instincts, I find its interest groups unappealing. I do not and never will belong. 

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it's a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do? You read me flounder every day; and you can find many less conflicted bloggers to read. Maybe I should take a break and live a less examined life for a while. Or maybe I should do what I am still doing: trying to make sense of where I belong, stay praying in a church that has sealed itself off from modernity, cling to a conservatism that begins to feel like a form of solipsism, hang on in the hope that America can reform itself and repair the world a little. I think, in fact, that this is obviously the right and only serious choice. Life is always a temporary and losing battle, an engagement with the deadliness of doing. It just feels deadlier than usual in these past few years of brutally unsentimental education.

Or maybe I should laugh more.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.

Pat Buchanan wants to deny the Detroit would-be bomber pain medicine for his burns. This clearly violates American domestic law and the Geneva Conventions. But what does Buchanan care about human decency and the rule of law? And, we have been told, the dude with the tighty-whities is talking like a canary. And probably with a very posh British accent.

"Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies. As we speak, there are human beings walking the Earth – perhaps as many as a half dozen of them – with less directorial talent, but they've been safely diverted into other activities," – Mick Lasalle, Hearst Newspapers.

I like this kind of attitude toward trust-fundies with powder shoved down their privates and syringes that don't work:

In fact, there is a growing tinge of mockery of this terrorist for toasting his testicles. This dude who can’t light a fuse is gonna raise the terror threat level to orange? Please. It strikes me as practically British – laughing at the Nazis all the way to the rubble pile in the East End. We’re laughing at Al Qaeda, for the first time, in unison, as a country. Think about that.

Make no mistake – in the Muslim world to which Al Qaeda attempts to speak, this episode is a total humiliation, seen as such, and will hurt Al Qaeda. I can’t think of a more effective way to scupper Al Qaeda recruitment than to turn one of their attacks into a worldwide joke. Yes it will enrage them. Yes, they will try harder to hit us again. But now, we have leadership that can crush them, by turning Al Qaeda’s weaknesses into our strength.

We should remain vigilant; but we should also remain contemptuous. Allowing these rich, theo-fascist losers to wield any fear over us is beneath us.

Manila, Philippines, 12 pm

You usually don't want to mess with Virginia Postrel.

Goldblog:

The real question is: Why is an American diplomat criticizing a foreign ambassador for his choice of speaking engagements in America?

Because she is allowed to answer questions in a press interview and because the ambassador should stay out of domestic American politics and not join in a campaign to torpedo a rival to AIPAC. The way in which Oren acted as a faction leader in American Jewish politics, rather than as a neutral representative of his country, open to all people of good will toward Israel, was obnoxious and undiplomatic. And his position is of far more importance than Rosenthal's.

A classic Palin-style attack in the custody proceedings over Tripp:

Respondent denies that he issued a tweet about using marijuana on October 23, 2009, on a popular social network. He does not have a twitter account on any network and made no such statements about the use of marijuana. The twitter account is a fraud.

He's a nineteen-year-old up against one of the most powerful and easily the most famous celebrity in Alaska. No wonder he wants a little sunlight:

Johnston fought to allow the custody matter to unfold in public, saying in a sworn statement that doing so would help put everyone on best behavior. He noted that Van Flein also represents Sarah Palin.

"I know that public scrutiny will simplify this matter and act as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious, not that Bristol would ever be that way, nor that I would. But her mother is powerful, politically ambitious and has a reputation for being extremely vindictive," Johnston said in his affidavit. "So, I think a public case might go a long way in reducing Sarah Palin's instinct to attack."

Johnston said he didn't want to hurt or embarrass his son — or Bristol. He thinks Sarah Palin, not Bristol, is acting with "sheer malice," Butler wrote in a court filing.

"He feels Sarah Palin, through her lawyer, under the guise of Bristol Palin's name, would run roughshod over his very bones," Butler wrote.

Bristol Palin responded in a sworn statement that Johnston's assertions and fears about vindictiveness and meddling are off base.

"None of this is true; my mother is not involved in this case," except as a grandmother, she said in her statement.