More Polish Than The Poles?

The neocons are hyper-ventilating about a stupid missile shield that few people thought made sense in the first place. They act as if Russia is the Soviet Union and Poland is still being run from Moscow. They completely ignore the fact that this clearly makes Israel safer. In the real world, outside neocon fantasy, actual people have moved on from the 1980s. Ben Smith 373646

Yes: a clear plurality of Poles support being "abandoned" by the US to the claws of the Russian bear. Or, in non neocon-speak: the Poles have long since stopped thinking like the neocons. Almost everybody has. Except the Republican right.

Dear President Bush

Bush-torture-wide

A reader writes:

The only thing missing from your letter to President Bush is the cc to his father. Although the first President Bush kept his distance from the decisions his son, as his own president, was making, there is now time for a father-to-son talk. I find it difficult to believe that the elder Bush is not having much of the same difficulty coming to terms with the torture-and-abuse program instituted under his son's administration.

Another adds:

Conciliatory? Well, I take you at your word, but I have to say my own take on your open letter was quite different.

What I saw was the final summation of a very fine attorney — an attorney for the defense of this nation and our deepest values. It was a summation made not to a jury and a courtroom, but to everyone in the nation, and to history; a summation made in the clear knowledge that no actual indictments will ever be brought against these men in the real world, no verdicts entered, no sentences handed down. It was left to the power of the pen and the pixel to render judgment — which you did, brilliantly. Methodically. Inescapably. If you truly think that was "conciliatory", you need to have your head examined. It was devastating.

You indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced them all in one grand piece. Was it constructive? Oh, yes. Clarity and courage are the sine qua nons of true creativity. And you did something more — you released us. What needed to be said — for all of us — was said. Now we can go on.

So, conciliatory? I know what you mean, and it was an important, even critical component of your approach — but no, I just can't agree. Constructive? Very.

A Poem For Friday


It’s good for the ego, when I call and they come
running, squawking and clucking, because it’s feedtime,
and once again I can’t resist picking up little Lazarus,
an orange-and-white pullet I adore. “Yes, yes, everything will be
okay,” I say to her glaring mongrel face. Come September,
she’ll begin to lay the blue-green eggs I love poached.
God dooms the snake to taste nothing but the dust
and the hen to 4,000 or so ovulations. Poor Lazarus—
last spring an intruder murdered her sisters and left her
garroted in the coop. There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

– Henri Cole, “Hens”.

Green Catholicism

The theocons are obsessed with keeping gays marginalized and making abortion illegal. To listen to them discuss Catholic orthodoxy entirely through this prism is quite a lesson in the total politicization of faith. They say nothing about the Catholic view of healthcare – that it's a human right; nothing about Catholic view of the economy – that unfettered free markets are unjust; nothing about the Catholic position on immigration – that the GOP is wrong; nothing about the Catholic position on torture – that it is an inherent and absolute evil.

They avoid these things because for them, religion is a means to political power. Since the party they support is so strongly opposed to much of what the Catholic church stands for, they remain silent, while castigating those of us who are, in fact, more orthodox as somehow un-Catholic. This is the trick, and the Leaves Vatican hierarchy, just as obsessed with abortion and gays, backs them up.

But not always. Benedict XVI is not an adjunct to GOP power as, say, Richard John Neuhaus was. And so his recent strong statement on environmental issues is ignored. Check it out here. Now, I don't believe in transposing Catholic dogma into political positions; but I do believe a faithful attempt to live according to one's conscience as a Catholic can guide one's approach to issues, an approach that can then be translated into a discourse accessible to all, Catholics, non-Catholics and non-believers alike.

On the environment, the Catholic position is clear. We cannot simply use this planet as a resource without also seeing it as an inheritance. We have no right as human beings to destroy ecological balance in ways that kill off other species, set off climate changes that could truly alter the planet, melt the polar ice-caps, and hurt vast numbers of the poor in the developing world. For Catholics, becoming wealthier is not a reason to ignore this duty.

Now, how we do this is, of course, up for debate. Carbon tax? Cap and trade? These are political questions. But a simple cost-benefit analysis is not the last word for Catholics. And I have to say that the deeper moral commitment to God's creation is not, in my view, optional for a believing Christian. We have all the moral responsibilities of dominion over other species and the natural world. 

I see this is a practical issue – and generally view cap-and-trade with skepticism. I tend to believe that the only real solution will be technological. I'd like a small but gradually increasing carbon tax to help encourage more conservation. But beneath this, it's important to argue that being green is not some secular issue. It is, for some of us, a religious imperative.