Caddrick and Chaddsity Smith look on by a small swimming pool in the B.W. Cooper housing projects June 10, 2007 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The project is lacking in recreational areas. Before Hurricane Katrina, B.W. Cooper held about 1,000 families and was the city’s largest housing project, but it is now more than 80 percent empty. By Mario Tama/Getty.
Christian Wiman has written a beautiful essay on skepticism and faith in the American Scholar. Money quote:
There is a passage in the writings of Simone Weil that has long been important to me. In the passage, Weil describes two prisoners who are in solitary confinement next to each other. Between them is a stone wall. Over a period of time — and I think we have to imagine it as a very long time — they find a way to communicate using taps and scratches. The wall is what separates them, but it is also the only means they have of communicating. "It is the same with us and God," she says. "Every separation is a link."
Hat tip: Ross. Clive James writes about Wiman here. This is a simple but lucid evocation of how it feels when grace happens:
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be.
"Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times," – Niccolo Machiavelli. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty.)
I wondered when rural Americans would have serious second thoughts about him. Well, they have now. Heartlanders trusted this president and have sacrificed more of their young to the war he has bungled. Now, it’s payback time:
– A slight majority of rural voters prefers a generic Democratic presidential candidate to a generic Republican candidate.
– War support is declining. Forty-five percent of rural respondents said the country should "stay the course" in Iraq, down from 51 percent in 2004.
– Rural people have a personal connection to the wars. Sixty percent know someone serving in the wars. One quarter say they have a family member serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
– President Bush’s job performance ratings have dropped 10 points (to 44 percent approve) since the 2004 election.
Hat tip: Pollster.com.
Marty Lederman homes in on the critical detail in the al-Marri case: the Bush administration moved him from criminal to military detention solely in order to torture him, it appears. Money quote from the court:
The Government’s treatment of others [in the criminal justice system] renders its decision to halt al-Marri’s criminal prosecution – on the eve of a pre-trial hearing on a suppression motion – puzzling at best. Al-Marri contends that the Government has subjected him to indefinite military detention, rather than see his criminal prosecution to the end, in order to interrogate him without the strictures of criminal process. We trust that this is not so, for such a stratagem would contravene Hamdi’s injunction that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized." 542 U.S. at 521.
We note, however, that not only has the Government offered no other explanation for abandoning al-Marri’s prosecution, it has even propounded an affidavit in support of al-Marri’s continued military detention stating that he "possesses information of high intelligence value." See Rapp Declaration. Moreover, former Attorney General John Ashcroft has explained that the Government decided to declare al-Marri an "enemy combatant" only after he became a "hard case" by "reject[ing] numerous offers to improve his lot by … providing information." John Ashcroft, Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice 168-69 (2006). [My italics].
So it appears they decided to detain him in order to torture him. That’s not constitutional.
Another court defeat for King George.
Like many others, I have mixed feelings about the career and work of Richard Rorty. But two books made a big impact on me trying to figure out the world: "Philosophy and the Mirror Of Nature," and his Oakeshottian essays: "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." He broke out of the stale discourse of analytic philosophy to take readers on a vivid detour through the history of human ideas, beaching us somewhere on the post-modern shore. I share none of his enthusiasm for the collective idea, but his brilliance and his humaneness shone through. John Holbo provides a fitting eulogy here, and the NYT obit is here. Perhaps the best recent profile was in Lingua Franca. Jurgen Habermas remembers him here. Money quote:
One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title ‘Wild Orchids and Trotsky.’ In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he kicked around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of orchids. At the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the start of the vision which accompanied the young Rorty to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky’s dream of justice on earth.
Keep the orchids, dump the Trotsky. Like every other human being dreaming of "justice on earth," Rorty died without its coming to pass. Gitlin bows his head here, and Michael Dorf contrasts Rorty with William James here. A libertarian take can be found here. It’s not a rave, as you might imagine, but I’m grateful that Rorty stumbled across Oakeshott in his final decade. When contrasted with Christianists or the new natural lawyers, postmodern liberals and conservatives have a great deal in common. The Atlantic has an interview here, with Rorty dissing the trend in analyzing human events and society through too biological a lens:
Atlantic Monthly: Over the last four or five years or so, with Wilson’s book, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Robert Wright’s book The Moral Animal, and a whole slew of books on evolutionary psychology, there seems to be a trend toward reducing all human behavior, all human society—in some ways all human knowledge—to a biological basis. Why do you think that is?
Rorty: I wish I knew. It seems to me as desperate as the attempts by Reagan to find out what was going to happen in the Middle East by reading the Book of Revelation. I really don’t understand what the attraction is. It’s as if people thought if they could find a science then they wouldn’t have to think politically anymore. That was one of the attractions of Marxism: if you really understood the basic determinants of everything then somehow your politics would be prescribed for you. But Marx at least had a good cause to take up—namely, the fact that the workers weren’t getting enough money. Pinker and Wilson don’t even have a good cause to take up.
In death, of course, there is much contingency and irony. But, alas, no solidarity. You leave this earth alone.
The two had a meeting yesterday, according to Juan Cole:
The two discussed a wide range of political and religious issues. The meeting was said to be intended by Sistani to "reassure" al-Sadr with regard to Sistani.
Whether this is an ominous sign of Sadr’s rising clout or an encouraging sign of a post-occupation Shiite unity I have no idea.
The ticket may be a long-shot, but the connection between the two has already been established. One element of the coming campaign – and a function of its accelerated national schedule – is that two candidates will have it wrapped up pretty early next year. We will then have an opportunity to watch the candidates staff up over several months, give us a glimpse of their rival cabinets and teams. Jon Rauch explores this in the new Atlantic. A relationship between Obama and Powell would be a perfect blend of old-school Republican realism and diplomacy with a fresh, and internationally powerful new face in the presidency. My sense is that this country desperately wants to unite behind a rational, sane, realist in foreign affairs, who can appeal beyond either party’s base. If we end up in a polarizing Clinton-Giuliani race, then I predict a serious third party candidate. But Obama-Powell as a flavor is so obviously in demand from the American public, and from a world eager to give the U.S. a second chance.
