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The Paul We’ve Been Waiting For

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/480751046952628227

In a WSJ op-ed late last week, Rand Paul finally showed his cards on Iraq, taking the neocons to task and invoking Reagan to make a case for not taking sides in the Iraq conflict. On Meet The Press yesterday, he defended his position, turning Cheney’s unhinged criticism of Obama back on the former vice president himself:

Money quote:

“I think the same questions could be asked of those who supported the Iraq War,” Paul said. “You know, were they right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass destruction there? That’s what the war was sold on. Was democracy easily achievable? Was the war won in 2005, when many of these people said it was won? They didn’t really, I think, understand the civil war that would break out.”

Matt Welch compares Paul’s positions to those of the Cheneys:

The contrast is striking here not just in policy content but in tone. The Cheneys snarl about “appeasing our enemies,” “abandoning our allies,” and “apologizing for our great nation,” as if it was the 2004 Republican National Convention all over again. Paul, with the exception of one somewhat intemperate paragraph asking “Why should we listen to them again?”, approaches the question with an assumption of personal and national humility, a sense that American knowledge of (and power to shape) fluid events in the Middle East has limitations, as does American appetite for making the kind of commitments that the Cheneys of the world constantly seek … This is a pretty clearly defined fork in the road for GOP foreign policy.

Cheney’s thin retort says a lot in its omissions:

When asked about Paul’s comments, Cheney said his position hasn’t changed: “I was a strong supporter then of going into Iraq, I’m a strong supporter now.” (He was more vague about what exactly the U.S. should be doing in Iraq now, aside from it being the opposite of whatever President Obama is doing.) “If we spend our time debating what happened 11 or 12 years ago, we’re going to miss the threat that is growing and that we do face,” Cheney continued. “Rand Paul, with all due respect, is basically an isolationist. He doesn’t believe we ought to be involved in that part of the world. I think it’s absolutely essential.”

Later, Cheney said he hasn’t decided who he’ll support in 2016, but suggested it won’t be Paul. “Now, Rand Paul and — by my standards, as I look at his — his philosophy, is basically an isolationist,” he said. “That didn’t work in the 1930s, it sure as heck won’t work in the aftermath of 9/11, when 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters came all the way from Afghanistan and killed 3,000 of our citizens.”

Look at the formulae that Cheney recites. He can’t actually address the debate over the Iraq war; he just reiterates his own position then and now. You get the impression he hasn’t actually had a single conversation in person challenging his rigid mindset since the war began. And once again, it’s the One Percent solution. When you posit a threat of apocalyptic devastation far beyond even the horror of 9/11, the cost-benefit analysis will always come down to maximal action everywhere and anywhere. But he hasn’t for a second absorbed that this apocalyptic vision was precisely what was debunked by the Iraq War.

There were no nukes or chemical weapons coming for us. They existed solely in Dick Cheney’s imagination. Thanks to Obama’s deal with Putin, there are also no WMDs left lying around the battlefield for ISIS to pick up and use. The alternative to getting the hell out of a region where we have only sowed chaos and sectarian warfare to no measurable gain is the boogey-man of “isolationism.” You have to conclude that Cheney is intellectually dead. Nothing that happened in the last fourteen years has made even the slightest dent in his terrorized worldview. Sometimes I wonder if Cheney was seriously traumatized by 9/11 in ways even more profound than the rest of us – it occurred on his watch, after all, and he was the recipient of all sorts of terrifying intelligence in the months that followed. But to have reacted by never moving on from his own terror on 9/12 is not a position. It’s a condition.

Meanwhile, Kilgore finds it odd that Paul references Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger:

Cap was less famous for his “doctrine” than for his persistence in securing the highest level of defense spending imaginable. In his endlessly fascinating account of the budget wars of Reagan’s first term, The Triumph of Politics, David Stockman all but calls Weinberger a traitor for his mendacious and successful efforts to trick Ronald Reagan into double-loading defense increases into his seminal 1981 budget proposal. This is one part of the Reagan-Weinberger legacy Paul will probably not want to emulate. And it matters: the most obvious way to convince reflexively belligerent Republicans that he’s kosher despite opposing various past, present and future military engagements would be to insist on arming America to the teeth. But Paul’s government-shrinking visions would make that sort of gambit very difficult. And try as he might, it will be very difficult for Paul to make a credible claim Ronald Reagan stood tall for taming the Pentagon.

The hawks are having a field day, of course. Here’s Rubin:

Understand that he doesn’t merely say we shouldn’t put boots on the ground; he argues that we don’t have an interest in the outcome. He manages to get through an entire op-ed without recognizing that a state dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) would represent a bigger threat to the United States than Afghanistan did pre-9/11. Paul observes that the Iraq war was harder than anticipated but ignores the success of the surge and the peaceful, stable state in which the George W. Bush administration left Iraq. He also borrows President Obama’s false talking point that we couldn’t leave forces there. (Paul incidentally doesn’t understand or is deliberately misleading readers when he says our actions in Syria contribute to the rise of ISIS there; in fact, had we swiftly pushed out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, there would have been no – zero – ISIS fighters there.)

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Dov Zakheim pushes Washington to recognize the Kurdish claim to independence, but he doubts the administration will go for it:

The pro-Western, anti-Islamist Kurds are America’s natural allies. During the nineties, they were the focus of American support while Saddam Hussein was in power. Yet the 450px-Flag_of_Kurdistan.svgadministration remains reluctant to exert itself on their behalf, and, in particular, to help modernize their military equipment.

For their part, however, the Kurds, having seized Kirkuk, their historic capital, are determined both to control that city and their long-term fate. They will press for independence if the sectarian fighting continues to rage south of their border. The Obama administration, which quickly recognized a far less stable South Sudan, should recognize the new Kurdish state. Given its willingness to work even with Iran in order to prop up the central government in Baghdad, however, it is unlikely to do so, prompting Kurdish resentment that will not easily be mollified.

But the case for Kurdistan isn’t as clear-cut as Zakheim wants it to be. The Bloomberg editors make the opposing argument:

U.S. President Barack Obama [last] week explained why keeping Iraq whole and stable is a U.S. national security interest. Kurdistan’s secession would make an extended and destabilizing sectarian war to redraw the borders of the Middle East, from Jordan to Iran, more likely.

So what can officials in Baghdad and Washington do to persuade Kurds to remain part of Iraq?

They might start by noting how difficult it can be for internationally unrecognized states to thrive. Iran and — depending on the response of Turkey’s Kurdish minority — Turkey could turn on a self-proclaimed Kurdish state, making for a tough and lonely existence.

Iraq’s central government, encouraged by the U.S., should also demonstrate that it accepts the new reality that has emerged since the collapse of the army in Mosul. The Kurds will not walk away from oil-rich Kirkuk, and that should be reflected in Iraq’s internal borders. Nor should they be expected to continue to submit to an arrangement for sharing oil revenues, enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, that centralizes all control and payments in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the newly assertive Kurds seem to be doing whatever the heck they want, such as delivering oil to Israel:

In a step that cements the impression of a de facto independent Kurdistan, a million barrels of Kurdish oil were delivered to a client in Israel today, despite threats by Baghdad to sue anyone buying it. The US government, fearing another blow to embattled Baghdad, had also worked to prevent anyone from buying the oil.

Reuters broke the story in a scoop, followed a few hours later by a statement on the Kurdish government website. “We are proud of this milestone achievement, which was accomplished despite almost three weeks of intimidation and baseless interferences from Baghdad against the tanker-ship owners and the related international traders and buyers.”

Josh sounds off on the shipment:

The relationship between the Kurds and Israel is by no means new, though it has never been formal. It also appears that the oil delivered to the Israeli port of Askelon is likely not destined for use locally but rather for storage and eventual shipment elsewhere. For the Israelis, though, it is a key part of a strategy to deepen relations with the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as access new supplies of energy.

For the Kurds of course the implications are potentially profound. The ability to export oil at scale entirely outside the control of the Iraqi central government is a huge step toward de facto independence, whether or not the Kurds took the step of formally severing ties with Iraq.

Previous Dish on the Kurds here, here, here, and here.

(Flag of Kurdistan via Wiki)

Philosophy For The Fun Of It

In an interview about his forthcoming book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Peter Unger sighs over the pretensions his field, arguing that “when you’re doing philosophy, you don’t have a prayer of offering even anything close to a correct or even intelligible answer” to the big questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the like. So why pursue it? He maintains that “for lots of people there’s fun in doing philosophy”:

With a certain proviso, philosophy is an enjoyable form of literature, at least for people of a certain training and temperament.

The proviso is that a fair amount of it contains special symbols instead of words, so that it looks like some sort of scientific thing, almost like an equation. Mathematics, symbolic logic, so on and so forth. So philosophers put that in, and give themselves the impression that they’re doing things ‘ohhh, so scientifically’ that they need the math. All this makes it much less enjoyable to me. I don’t like reading that stuff. But insofar as we can get over all of that useless and pretentious writing, it’s an enjoyable sort of literature, if they take the time to make it reader-friendly.

Take Derek Parfit’s book, Reasons and Persons. It’s in four parts. The first part is not enjoyable to read, because he talks about a lot of theories which he labels with letters. You can’t keep it straight, you need a scorecard next to the page. But the other three parts don’t have that, and they’re tremendously enjoyable to read — at least for some people who have some training in philosophy, and have the temperament for it. It’s wonderful stuff, fascinating stuff.

Reasons and Persons is extremely enjoyable. But does Parfit ever discover anything? No, not at all. Does he ever make credible, interesting new statements about concrete reality? No, not even close. But it’s very enjoyable literature for very many people.

Babysitting On The Border

On Friday, Speaker Boehner called on the president to send the National Guard to the Mexican border. Allahpundit responds:

[Boehner] wants the National Guard there not to intercept illegals coming across but to essentially babysit the younger ones who’ve already made it so that the Border Patrol can go back to intercepting people. Still, though: Sending the Guard to the border is something you’d expect to hear from Steve King circa 2007, not John Boehner circa 2014.

On the same day Boehner released his letter, the White House took action:

Obama administration officials said the government is planning to open new facilities to detain and house the influx of migrants and ease the burden on detention centers in the Rio Grande Valley where horrifying conditions have been reported. Administration officials also said the government would send more immigration judges and lawyers to the region to bolster enforcement and removal proceedings.  “We are surging our resources to increase our capacity to detain,” Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on a conference call, emphasizing the administration’s aim was to make conditions more “humane.”

But can we please retire “surge” once and for all, especially when it comes to immigrant kids? Esther Yu-Hsi Lee downplays Obama’s role in the humanitarian crisis:

In fact, the current process of dealing with unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico was set by the Bush administration, according to Dara Lind at Vox. Under the law, the Border Patrol agency is required to take in these children, screen and vaccinate them, then turn them over to the Department of Health of Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The ORR assigns children to shelters until the agency can identify sponsors and once children are placed with sponsors, their cases work their way through the immigration court.

Dara Lind, who’s been all over the story, notes that “the current system was built for 8,000 kids – not 50,000.” She later details the dearth of detention facilities for families crossing the border:

There’s currently only one immigration detention facility that’s suitable for families: a former nursing home in Burks County, Pennsylvania. DHS announced today that it is “actively working to secure additional space to detain adults with children apprehended crossing the border,” in the words of Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Families who aren’t being physically put in detention are going to be “monitored” using “alternatives to detention,” like ankle bracelets, to make sure that they’re showing up for their court dates.

Lind also describes the alternatives to detaining families:

[Michelle Brané of the Women’s Refugee Commission] says that these alternatives are more humane than detention. They’re also cheaper:

a report from advocacy group Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services found that the government spent $166 per inmate per day on immigration detention, but only $22 per person per day on alternative programs. (And unlike private probation companies, alternatives to detention don’t make up the profit by charging migrants themselves.) But perhaps most importantly for Central American migrant families, alternatives to detention can be successful in getting immigrants to show up to court. ISAP reports that 96 percent of the immigrants it monitors make their court dates.

Why isn’t the government using alternatives to detention? One reason is because the optics of detention are much better for “sending a message” than ankle bracelets or phone calls are. Another is simply that the Department of Homeland still sees alternatives to detention as an experimental program. It hasn’t really implemented any on a broad scale yet. Detention is still the default. But most importantly, it’s easier to process families quickly when they’re held in detention.

Meanwhile, a new NIMBY movement has begun:

The Washington Times is now reporting that, in a blow to the administration, the residents of Lawrenceville, Virginia have successfully rebuffed attempts by HHS to convince the town to house 500 older youths at a recently closed college in their town. Over 1,000 residents voiced their opposition at a town hall meeting. (This comes on the heels of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor and two Democratic senators objecting to plans to house some of the new arrivals of children at an empty office complex in Baltimore.)

Julie Terkewitz provides background on the young people pouring over the US border:

Most of the young migrants in government custody come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Seventy percent are between the ages of 15 and 17. And three-quarters of them are male.

Over the past decade, massive efforts to root out the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico have transformed Central American countries into critical and hotly contested slices of territory for cartels funneling narcotics into the United States. The wave of child and teen émigrés, experts say, is related to the ascension of these gangs, who feed on the money and manpower that youths provide, and pursue them with an almost-religious persistence.

In 2012, the Women’s Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy group, conducted field studies to examine the causes of this unprecedented influx. Of the 151 young immigrants interviewed, nearly 80 percent said that violence was the main reason young people were fleeing their countries. “It’s push factors, not pull factors,” said Jennifer Podkul, a senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The Ever-Expanding ISIS

Adam Chandler tracks their gains this weekend:

As the Associated Press reports, by wresting control of Rutba, ISIS now runs a strip of a major highway, “a key artery for passengers and goods” heading to and from neighboring Jordan. The capture of al-Qaim, as we noted earlier, has already given ISIS control of a vital border crossing post between Iraq and Syria. ISIS also took the towns of Rawah and Anah, which some fear will lead to the capture of Haditha, home to an important dam that, if destroyed, could cause massive flooding and damage the country’s electrical grid.

Juan Cole sees the fall of Qaim as a potentially explosive development:

The first thing that occurred to me on the fall of Qa’im is that Iran no longer has its land bridge to Lebanon. I suppose it could get much of the way there through Kurdish territory, but ISIS could ambush the convoys when they came into Arab Syria. Since Iran has expended a good deal of treasure and blood to keep Bashar al-Assad in power so as to maintain that land bridge, it surely will not easily accept being blocked by ISIS. Without Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions, Lebanon’s Hizbullah would rapidly decline in importance, and south Lebanon would be open again to potential Israeli occupation. I’d say, we can expect a Shiite counter-strike to maintain the truck routes to Damascus.

Mona Mahmood relays an account of life in Mosul under ISIS rule:

People are scared an air strike might be launched by Maliki’s forces against Mosul at any moment.

Most of the people who have enough money are heading towards Kurdistan. The situation is secure and calm inside Mosul. The rebels – some of them are masked, others are not – are guarding all the official buildings, including hospitals and banks. You can see the flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) flying on most of the buildings in Mosul. There is no Iraqi flag at all.

Ba’athists are in charge now of running the city facilities and official institutions like hospitals, directorates and banks. The new mayor, Hafidh al-Jamas, a former military commander in the time of Saddam Hussein, was installed by the Ba’athists and he is doing his best to make life easy for the people in Mosul by providing fuel, food and by keeping prices low as much as possible. A commander was also installed for Mosul who was a former navy commander in the time of Saddam. His name is Khalid al-Jabin. He was in Syria for many years.

People in the city are circulating rumours that we should be careful of smoking in public, wearing jeans or letting women get out without a veil. But the reality is totally different. You can do and wear whatever you want, the rebels are busy now with their liberation of Iraq, and they do not care what people are doing or wearing.

Another dispatch from the occupied city finds the people happy to have Baghdad off their backs, but leery of what their Jihadist rulers have in store for them:

Mosul’s people still seem reluctant to live as they normally do. Everyone is cautious. A group of people I know arranged to meet in the same café they normally do; it was the first time they had all met up since the city was taken over by the extremists. Although everyone likes football, nobody was talking about the World Cup in Brazil. It was clear that everyone had the same thing on their minds: The city, its unpredictable future and how they would find safe places for their families. They all know things cannot remain the same in Mosul after what has happened here and their conversation was carried on in whispers.

“Let’s smoke a shisha [water pipe] because this may be the last time we can,” one of the friends said. He had heard that ISIS would ban shisha smoking and cigarettes as well as many other things.

Reading similar reports, Max Fisher sees a popular support base forming around ISIS:

Mosul residents told the Financial Times that ISIS sacked alcohol shops and tore down a church that was under construction, but that otherwise personal freedoms have been unchanged. Their one complaint was the lack of electricity, which they blamed on the central Iraqi government, and said they were cheering on ISIS to seize a nearby refinery to fix the issue.

The trick that ISIS has pulled off here is seizing Mosul but not ruling it directly. The group appears to have handed authority for the large city over to local, tribal, Sunni armed groups. Those groups share ISIS’s hatred of the Iraqi national government, so they’re happy to help oust the Iraqi army, but unlike ISIS they are not as fixated on imposing extremist Islamism. “There is no ISIS in Mosul,” a 58-year-old Mosul resident told the Financial Times. “The ones controlling city are now the clans. The power is with the tribes.”

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, support for Maliki weakens:

Mr Maliki seems to want to fight Isis without help from the Sunnis, tarring all of them with the same brush of complicity. That there has been some complicity is clear. Some rump Ba’athists and some tribal leaders joined Isis, or at least stepped aside. Sunnis have been provoked but they also have a lot of explaining to do. But this is still a deeply counter-productive approach. The Iraqi prime minister should be seeking to get more Sunni Arabs and Kurds on the government side on the battlefield.

Yet the frigid line up earlier this week when Shia and Sunni political leaders gathered to make a joint call for Iraqi unity told another story. After the photocall, the prime minister and the Sunnis drifted off without a word to each other.

To make matters worse for Maliki, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s leading Shia authority, is calling for a new government:

Although he avoided directly criticising the Iraqi prime minister, Sistani’s call is far short of the resounding support Maliki needs to overcome rising unease at home over his leadership as well as rapidly shrinking international support.

Sistani also renewed a demand he made last week for his followers, who comprise the majority of Iraq’s dominant Shia sect, to fight the jihadist group Isis and its insurgency that continues to ravage north and central Iraq. “They must be fought and expelled from Iraq, [or] everyone will regret it tomorrow, when regret has no meaning,” Sistani’s spokesman announced during Friday prayers in Najaf.

With ISIS bearing down on Baghdad, Martin Chulov observes the rearming of the city and the re-emergence of the notorious Mahdi army:

Up to 20,000 men, many of whom quit jobs last week to join the militia, responded to the call to arms from al-Sadr and [Sistani]. … On Baghdad’s streets, battered pickups shuttled weapons from depots to mosques where the rapid rearming has transformed the already militarised capital into a war zone in waiting. With the mobilisation complete, the now battle-ready militia presented itself to Iraqis once more on Saturday, staging a series of parades in Baghdad and the south that made an emphatic statement of its readiness and intentions.

One of the most feared names in Iraq was back in business, even if it was fighting under a different banner. This time around, the Mahdi army will be called the Peace Brigades, after its leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, decided that a rebranding might shake it free from its infamous past.

But military marches are hardly peace offerings. And the rally through the Sadrist heartland of Sadr City was no different. Columns of fighters carrying rifles, trucks laden with rockets and men in white wearing mock suicide vests were on the move through the former slum-turned-battlefield soon after sunrise in a futile attempt to beat the blazing midsummer heat.

Working On Salvation

Jimmy Carter Helps Habitat For Humanity Build 1000th Home In New Orleans

Reviewing Randall Balmer’s new faith-focused biography of our 39th president, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, John G. Turner places Carter’s work ethic at the center of his distinctive approach to life and politics:

Balmer ends his book with the “impression that Carter was driven—almost obsessed—by a kind of works righteousness.” He observes quite rightly that too many Christians seek “to prove by their good works that they are among the elect.” From his days on his family farm to his years in the Navy to his many years on the campaign trail, Carter was an incessant worker.

Most of the time, his hard work paid off, but Carter’s work ethic could not solve the Iranian hostage crisis, his nation’s economic malaise, or the electoral threat of Ronald Reagan. Balmer observes, however, that after his defeat to Reagan “Carter reaffirmed his commitment to works righteousness as a way to redeem his loss,” and his ceaseless activism and philanthropy bolstered his reputation in the United States and abroad. … He went door to door trying to “share Christ” with strangers. He devoted one week each year to Habitat for Humanity projects. Through the Carter Center, he attempted to eradicate disease, poverty, and dictatorship around the world.

Although he could not redeem his nation from the sins he believed had imprisoned it, Carter was always an ambassador for his Savior in a way that made nearly everyone around him uncomfortable, whether his unmarried staff members when he encouraged them to stop “living in sin” and get married, feminists who bristled at his staunch personal opposition to abortion, or politically conservative evangelicals who just could not believe that a follower of Jesus Christ would affiliate with donkeys instead of elephants. As Balmer laments, by the time of his presidency, Carter was already a rare breed.

Jonathan Yardley, also reviewing Balmer’s book, finds Carter’s approach to religion and politics a cautionary tale:

Religion is a tricky business, never more so than when it gets mixed up with government. Although Balmer pays due respect to the argument that “religion functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power,” that “once a religious group panders after political influence, it loses its prophetic voice,” he does not convince me that Carter, either as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s or as president in the second half of that decade, really “understood that the Christian faith had flourished in the United States precisely because the government had stayed out of the religion business.”

To the contrary, Carter brought religion (religiosity, too) into the national government more directly and intensely than any president before him in the 20th century. He campaigned as a religious man, speaking repeatedly, openly and almost boastfully about his religious convictions, about the centrality of prayer to his daily life, about the joy he took in being “born again.” Balmer sees this as a redemptive response to the cynicism and venality of the Nixon years, and unquestionably there is some truth to that. But Carter made religion a campaign weapon as well as a private belief, which was not appreciably less calculating than Nixon’s disregard for the Constitution and the common decencies.

(Photo: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter works on the 1,000th home to be built by Habitat for Humanity on the Gulf Coast May 21, 2007 in Violet, Louisiana. Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

No God, No Problem?

Peter Watson rejects the view that “there is something missing in our lives” when we try to live without religion. He turns to his own recent book, The Age of Atheists, for examples of those who didn’t get down about the death of God:

I surveyed a raft of playwrights, poets, philosophers, psychologists and novelists who have been active since Nietzsche made his fateful pronouncement, many of whom did and do not share this view that there is something missing in modern life. Some did – Ibsen, Strindberg, Henry James and Carl Gustav Jung would all be cases in point. But far more did not see any reason to mourn the passing of God – George Santayana, Stéphane Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud of course, and, not least, the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic style but they did have something in common. As the art critic Robert Hughes writes in The Shock of the New, “It was a feeling that the life of the city and the village, the cafés and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden – a world or ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, reviewing Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, tells a less happy story:

We are meaning-seeking animals. And if we can no longer believe in God we will find other things to worship.

Eagleton’s book is a brisk, intelligent, and provocative tour of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, understood as a series of chapters in the search for a God-substitute. The Enlightenment found it in reason, the Idealists in the human spirit, the Romantics in nature and culture, the Marxists in revolution, and Nietzsche in the Übermensch. Others chose the nation, the state, art, the sublime, humanity, society, science, the life force, and personal relationships. None of these had entirely happy outcomes, and none was self-sustaining. …

The result is that we are witnesses to the advent of the first genuinely atheist culture in history. The apparent secularism of the 18th to 20th centuries was nothing of the kind. God—absent, hiding, yet underwriting the search for meaning—was in the background all along. In postmodernism, that sense of an absence, or what Eagleton calls “nostalgia for the numinous,” is no longer there. Not only is there no redemption, there is nothing to be redeemed. We are left, Eagleton writes, with “Man the Eternal Consumer.”

Recent Dish on these questions here and here.

A Slip-N-Slide With Siddhartha

dish_suoitiencrocs

It’s not all fun and games at Suoi Tien Cultural Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City, “the world’s first Buddhist waterslide park”:

You would think that a theme park attraction called the Palace of Unicorns would be a charming fantasy world. You’d be wrong. Located within Suoi Tien Cultural Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City, the Palace of Unicorns is a graphic depiction of Buddhist hell. But the sight of torture and violence being inflicted on drug addicts, gamblers, and adulterers is just one small part of Suoi Tien’s diverse and colorful offerings.

Located next to a garbage dump, the amusement park, which opened in 1995, is full of huge sculpted dragons, tortoises, phoenixes, and Buddhas. Employees dressed as golden monkeys scamper around the grounds, tasked with creating mischief.

Suoi Tien is specifically devoted to the Southeast Asian animistic form of Buddhism, so “instead of Mickey and Daffy, Suoi Tien has chosen the Dragon, Unicorn, Tortoise, and Phoenix as its sacred animals.” As for what you’re seeing above?

Perhaps the strangest and most unnerving feature of the enormous park is the crocodile kingdom. A pond with over 1,500 live crocodiles, visitors are invited to feed them with raw meat attached to fishing poles.

The whole thing is quite impressive and constructed on a huge scale. Although, the lax safety controls -acres of wet, slippery concrete, low hanging stalactites in the cavern water slides, and the bay of crocodiles- remind you that you are not in Disneyland anymore.

(Photo by Mike Fernwood)

Suddenly Jewish

In an essay exploring notions of belonging, James Meek recalls how, shortly before her death, his grandmother revealed to the family the long-held “confession, or acknowledgment, that besides being Hungarian, she was Jewish.” Meek reflects on discovering an overlooked heritage later in life:

What I knew of Jews was gleaned – not that I was trying to glean – from news about Israel, from books and films about the Holocaust, from a TV play by Jack Rosenthal set in London called Bar Mitzvah Boy, and from Woody Allen films. I’m not sure I was even conscious in the 1970s that Woody Allen was Jewish. He was a funny American comedian who looked a bit like me. I had no Jewish experience. And then came Granny’s near-death announcement and it turned out me and my sibs had been having one. Not knowing we were having a Jewish experience was our Jewish experience.

Quarter Jewishness might seem a small and meaningless thing, and perhaps should be. It was Jewish enough for the Nazis to designate it as a particular category, ‘crossbreed of the second degree’. Under the terms set by the Wannsee Conference they were to be left more or less alone unless they had a particularly ‘Jewish appearance’ or ‘a political record that shows they feel and behave like a Jew’, in which case they would be exterminated along with the others. Israel, accordingly, under its Law of Return, offers citizenship to those with at least one Jewish grandparent. One day just after the turn of the millennium I was sitting in the canteen of the Knesset interviewing an MP for a newspaper article about proposed modifications to the Law of Return. At some point I mentioned my own grandparentage, which, having conferred Jewishness down the maternal line, made me of the tribe, halachically speaking. Before then the encounter had been rather stiff and remote; afterwards my interlocutor relaxed, smiled, chuckled, and made me understand that as long as his political rivals didn’t meddle with the law, I’d be welcome. It seemed an arbitrary offer to make an atheist who couldn’t say what and when the Jewish feast days were, or speak one word of Hebrew or Yiddish, and who had no intention of becoming Israeli. It was friendly, and gave me a warm buzz, yet it was odd. Like a credit card offer, I’d been pre-approved for membership, using the same criteria with which my forebears had been singled out for execution.

Is The Era Of Evangelicals Over?

Surveying the political landscape, Steven P. Miller finds it “tempting to say yes” to that question. He interprets the Christian Right’s emphasis on religious liberty in the face of defeats on issues like same-sex marriage as evidence they’ve “abandoned the pretense of being a moral majority”:

Social conservatives (evangelical or otherwise) are no longer only battling liberal elites. They are contending with a growing real majority of Americans who either vigorously disagree with them or do not see what the fuss is all about. These Americans have long separated their workplaces from their places of worship. They likewise assume the separation of church and health care (notwithstanding the names of their neighborhood hospitals). Some of them support increased access to contraception precisely because they are uncomfortable with abortion.

Many evangelicals affirm these common-sense approaches, of course. The Christian Right does not represent them; in most cases, it never did. Now, though, evangelical conservatives are having a harder time getting away with claiming to speak for all evangelicals, never mind for Christians as a whole.

We are witnessing the public de-coupling of “evangelical” from “Christian” when it comes to politics. Born-again Christianity is no longer the standard against which religion’s role in public life is measured. This is a pivot from forty years of Carter, Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson, and it seems unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.

This assessment might explain Albert Mohler’s recent statement at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting that America “is embracing a horrifying moral rebellion that is transforming our culture before our very eyes.” Ruth Graham’s unpacks his comment:

To be fair, that’s a line that could have been used at just about time in the SBC’s 169-year history. And “embattled minority” is a treasured pose for many participants in the culture wars, no matter how powerful or popular they happen to be. But the United States really is undergoing a moral revolution on certain sexuality issues the SBC considers crucial: support for gay marriage has grown by almost 20 percentage points since the turn of the millennium, for example. The “transgender tipping point” just made the cover of Time. Conservative Christians will likely discussing these issues for years to come, but it may be only a matter of time before they’re simply talking to themselves.

This is a challenging time for the Southern Baptist Convention. A few weeks ago, the denomination released its annual “church profile” that revealed membership numbers declined for the seventh year in a row. Baptisms, a key measure of health for a denomination whose very name reflects the importance of the practice, declined for the second year in a row, with a quarter of all SBC churches reporting no baptisms at all. Attendance at Sunday services was down, too. The only silver lining was a slight uptick in the number of churches.

Related Dish on conservative churches and secularization here.