Missing A Department Store Christmas

Paula Marantz Cohen laments a lost culture of shopping:

The waning of department store culture entails a loss of beauty. That bygone experience, no matter its gender oppressiveness or its health hazards, was an esthetic one. Not just the product counted, but the experience of buying it; not just the ends, but the means. Everything contributed — from the color-coordinated restaurants and swankily snooty hair salons to the changing rooms with triptych mirrors and upholstered armchairs. I can still whiff the inimitable mix of cigarette smoke and Chanel #5 that wafted through the aisles, still recall the comforts of fawning saleswomen, still hear the spike heels clicking down the polished aisles and see the long red fingernails tapping on the glass counters. Gone is the sense that going to a department store was a peek into a magical woman’s world.

I really need a Lileks-style illustration for this, don’t I? The essay is a lovely one, marred only by a reflexive blaming of the hippies. I’d say "cigarette smoke and Chanel #5" is a close match in the ugh department for patchouli and B.O.

40 Lashes For A Teddy Bear

The latest Muslim obscenity:

A British schoolteacher has been arrested in Sudan accused of insulting Islam’s Prophet, after she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Colleagues of Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, said she made an "innocent mistake" by letting the six and seven-year-olds choose the name.

Ms Gibbons was arrested after several parents made complaints. The BBC has learned the charge could lead to six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

In Iraq For Good

Clive Crook endorses the "grueling option": "a large continuing military commitment, in support of more modest goals." My own sense is as I wrote here:

The rhetoric ranges from John McCain’s “No Surrender” banner to the “End the War Now” absolutism of much of the Democratic base. Yet the substantive issue is almost comically removed from this hyperventilation. Every potential president, Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world. Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel. We are fighting over something, to be sure. But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground.

The question is: do we want a president slowly withdrawing troops from Iraq to be someone who backed the war in the first place or one who didn’t? If we’re going to have a de facto empire in the Middle East, wouldn’t it be better if it were seen as a reluctant empire, rather than a continuing provocation to Muslims and a recruiting tool for Islamists? There are only three candidates for president who opposed the biggest mistake in American foreign policy since Vietnam when it mattered: Obama, Paul and Kucinich. Only one did so on entirely pragmatic grounds. If we’re stuck in Iraq, wouldn’t it be better to have a president who can legitimately claim he didn’t want to be there in the first place but isn’t reflexively opposed to all use of American power? At least that way, there’s a small chance we can escape before too long, and a smaller chance that the threat of withdrawal might precipitate some kind of functional government coalition in Baghdad.

Powerline Exposed?

Mona at Unqualified Offerings has a cow over this Paul Mirengoff quote:

When I first heard George W. Bush talking about "compassionate conservatism" in 1999, I figured (and certainly hoped) that it was at least 80 percent ad campaign and no more than 20 percent policy guide. Eight years later, it seems to me that, in practice, the Bush administration probably hasn’t strayed too far to the wrong side of that proportion.

I tend to agree with Paul on the former point, but I wish he were more right on the latter. The splurging of tax-payers’ money to make rich brats like Bush feel better about themselves is a defining characteristic of a certain kind of liberalism, not conservatism. And no, it’s not "heroic" to spend other people’s money on your pet bleeding heart projects.

The New Atheist’s Dilemma

A poignant piece by Katha Pollitt with this important point:

There’s no question in my mind that horror at militant Islam and fear of Muslim immigration lie behind at least some of the current vogue for atheism–you don’t make the bestseller list by excoriating the evils of Lutheranism or Buddhism.

…The problem is that the more scorn one feels for religious belief, the less able one is to appreciate "reformed" or "moderate" variants of the faith. After all, pro-gay Episcopalians and liberation theology Catholics still believe in Christ, the afterlife, sin; reformed Jews still find wisdom in the Old Testament. Strictly speaking, an atheist should have no truck with any of it. But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion–which also often means their community, their family, their support system and their identity–you’re not going to have many takers. For every brilliant angry teenager you strengthen in doubt, there’s a mosque- or churchful of people who’ll choose the old-time religion if the only other choice is nothing.

Captain Fogg dissents here, with respect to Europe. I don’t share Katha’s dilemma, because I don’t see religion, as she does, as instrumental to politics or morality. It stands or falls on its attempt to reveal the truth about our lives. But I have to say that the evils of extreme Islam, epitomized but not exhausted by 9/11, reminded me in a way I had almost forgotten of the bloody past of my own faith, Christianity, and the dark, dark side of religious certainty. My own response has not been an embrace of atheism, however, but an attempt to recover the necessity for spiritual humility and political secularism. At the same time.

The Darker Continent

Another big non-surprise: Africa has close to zero Internet culture, as a new UN report chronicles. Money quote:

"For most people even making a telephone call is still a remote possibility in an era when most of the world is now communicating almost instantly across cities, regions and the globe using wireless and satellite technologies to send high-speed electronic messages."

Just don’t tell James Watson, okay?