The Dish

An interesting exchange between Peter Steinfels and Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City:

Q. What insights of Niebuhr’s are most pertinent for the nation’s public life today?

A. His sense that elements of self-interest and pride lurk even in the best of human actions. His recognition that a special synergy of selfishness operates in collectivities like nations. His critique of Americans’ belief in their country’s innocence and exceptionalism — the idea that we are a redeemer nation going abroad never to conquer, only to liberate.

Q. You’ve written two critical books on political neoconservatism. Don’t many neoconservatives claim to be Niebuhrians?

A. In various phases of his public career, Niebuhr was a liberal pacifist, a neo-Marxist revolutionary, a Social Democratic realist, a cold war liberal and, at the end, an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He zigged and zagged enough that all sorts of political types claim to be his heirs. Even the neoconservatives can point to a few things…

Asking what Niebuhr would think about this or that is a favorite indoor sport. I cannot flat-out call myself a Christian realist in Niebuhr’s sense. His realism makes it too hard to make a Christian claim at odds with the national interest. Yet for me Niebuhr’s thought is always in the mix. And today I believe he represents a road not taken: a prudent foreign policy chastened by a realistic and religiously grounded understanding of the limits of power.

In Victorian literature, papists were a constant threat:

Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran’s lively study considers a wide range of key authors — including Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers — to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.

The usual minority-phobias.

The senator goes all Kaus-like when the homos are around. Jamie Kirchick is having none of it:

Frankly, I don’t see how someone who is admittedly "not comfortable" around any sort of American – whether they be black, Chinese, poor, or gay – is fit to be president.

Matt Zeitlin is persuasive on this point:

It’s the basis of the liberal society we should try to cultivate in America that someone can be "uncomfortable" with gays in the private sphere, yet in the public sphere, he can advocate policies he knows are fair and promote social and legal equality, because he thinks these values are important. We shouldn’t bash politicians as being not good enough on gay rights if they have common, residual cultural prejudices or even discomfort with gays, yet they still, in their heightened position in the public sphere, advocate on behalf of gays.

Leave Mickey Alone. And who could disagree? Then, alas, we get this lame-ass Democratic talking point:

John Edwards may not be perfect, but let’s not call him a bigot or a dishonest supporter of gay rights, especially when the other party is built on bigotry and disdain for homosexuals.

The rampant homophobia among Christianist Republicans is not a get-off-free card for Democrats. Or did we learn nothing from the Clinton years?

A reader writes:

Again from "Band of Brothers", page 250

"It is worth pausing here to see the Americans as conquerors through the microcosm of # Company. They took what they wanted , but by no means did they rape, loot, pillage, and burn their way through Germany. If they did not respect property rights, in the sense that they commandeered their nightly billets without compensation, at least when they Germans moved back in after they left, the place was more or less intact. Of course there were some rapes, some mistreatment of individuals Germans, and some looting, but it is a simple fact to state that other conquering armies in WWII, perhaps most of all the Russians, but including the Japanese and German, acted differently."

Indoctrinated since birth in the idea that America is different, there aren’t words to express the anguish that I feel that my country now finds itself in the position of saying "But the other guys torturers are much worse than our torturers."

Well they love pop music:

"If you look at 10, 20 years ago, the Middle East was one of those few places where parents and children enjoyed the same music – and today there is that generation gap that is forming for the first time in the Middle East," he says.

One of those who spearheaded this change is the Beiruti singer, Yuri Mrakadi. As an unplugged version of his biggest hit, Arabiyon Arab ("I am an Arab") plays in his snug studio in an old apartment in east Beirut, he recalls how he helped shake things up a few years back. "Because I came up with red glasses and I had bleached hair and I was on guitar and I had like these jeans, I was representing my generation," he says.

A Muslim country where kids bleach their hair is a sign of hope.

I guess it was inevitable.

I didn’t notice either – but it was a global demographic landmark.

Men’s Fitness photo-shops even Andy Roddick’s guns. Their cover-story is on how to get "big arms." Fake ’em, I guess.

France improvises a new immigration policy.