Long Pauses

Category: Debris

  • In Lieu of Original Content

    I’ll just quote Charles Pierce:

    As Mo Udall once put it, the people have spoken, goddamn them.

    They showed up. The Republican base, that is. The people who believe that their marriages are threatened by those of gay people, the people who believe there were WMD in Iraq and that Saddam waved a hankie at Mohammed Atta, the people who believe His eye is on every embryo. They all showed up, and there are more of them than there are of us. This was a faith-based electorate and, for whatever reason, their belief was stronger than our reality. This is a country I do not recognize any more.

    The kids didn’t vote. African-American turnout seems to have stayed pretty much the same as it was in 2000, despite all the talk. We lost seats in the Senate and in the House. (Daschle is a pretty momentous beat, despite the fact that he’s not a wartime consigliore and never was.) They elected a polite David Duke in Louisiana, and someone who doesn’t believe gay people should teach school in South Carolina, and a creep in Oklahoma, and somebody who’s fairly obviously drifting into the fog in Kentucky. The pretty clearly indictable DeLay tactics in Texas worked like a charm. These are all victories won on grounds on which we cannot compete. When gay marriage trumps dead soldiers in Iraq, how do you run a race without dissolving into fantasy?

    I don’t know this country’s mind any more, let alone its heart.

  • The Long View

    From Bob Woodward, we’ve learned that President Bush doesn’t give much thought to history — “History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” — but for those of us who do, the San Francisco Chronicle has put together a nice collection of statements from prominent military historians, including G. Kurt Piehler, a member of my dissertation committee.

  • Presidential Referendum

    The Choice 2004, Frontline’s documentary overview of the lives of John Kerry and George W. Bush, foregrounded two key moments from the President’s career, moments that are by now familiar to all who have followed his development. The first was his road to Damascus conversion — the moment when he turned his life over to God and gave up drinking. The second was his father’s primary loss to Pat Robertson in 1988 — the moment when George, Jr. recognized the power of the evangelical vote and thought to himself, “I can do this.” He would become an asset for his father in that regard and would later rely on heavy appeals to the Religious Right in his own successful campaigns against Ann Richards and Al Gore.

    Not surprisingly, President Bush was at his best last night when asked about his faith and family. Ignoring for a moment the relevance of such questions in a supposed domestic policy debate that never addressed the environment, the Patriot Act, or stem cell research, those two questions allowed Bush to put aside policy (which is awfully complicated) to talk instead about feelings and relationships. They allowed him to slip into the comfortable rhetoric of evangelicalism. And Bush, to his credit, hit those softballs out of the park. Bush speaks eloquently — yes, I said it — about his faith because it is clearly important to him and because it has a language all its own. But this leads me to wonder: To whom exactly was he speaking?

    The significance of Bush’s insight in 1988 was that by speaking directly to the Religious Right in a language that they understood — by hitting hard on “moral issues” like abortion, marriage, and public displays of faith; by using the coded language of “stewardship,” “devotion,” and “providence” — he could accomplish three main goals:

    1. Transform a single position (on, say, abortion) into a fixed political identification and, in so doing, make of that position an objective barometer of a candidate’s moral fitness to lead (Clinton’s whoreishness played directly into the Right’s hands in that regard). Abortion, the argument goes, is objectively wrong; therefore candidates who support abortion are objectively unworthy of office.
    2. Solidify the Republican base by offering them a moral imperative to get out and vote. The large (and growing) network of evangelical churches in America, then, becomes a grassroots movement of its own, fostered by everyone from James Dobson and Billy Graham to Tim LaHaye and Thomas Kinkade.
    3. Nail shut the coffin on those strains of New Deal Democratic politics in the South that had been dying slowly since before Carter left office, and, in the process, grab control of the House.

    And so I ask again: To whom was Bush speaking last night? Every poll confirms that Bush and Kerry have solidified their bases. There are many, many Americans who will vote to re-elect President Bush solely because of his pro-life stance or because they see in him a reflection of themselves — someone whose life was radically changed by an encounter with God and who exercises daily the rituals of evangelical life: quiet times, prayers of confession, small group Bible studies. (That, after a decade of steady declines, the number of abortions has, in fact, increased under Bush is a subject for another day.) Bush’s genuine confession of faith last night was, I’m sure, one of the few moments of grace and honesty that many voters (most of whom are understandably cynical and apathetic about politics at large) recognized in an otherwise contentious campaign season.

    And so, for the millions of voters who are comforted by the language of evangelicalism, I’m sure that Bush’s performance last night reinforced all of the values that they had already projected onto him. But what about the rest of us? What about Christians (like me) who are deeply troubled by Bush’s conflation of regressive and immoral tax restructurings and arrogant imperialism with Divine Providence? What about Christians (like me) who also believe in liberal democracy and who see a clear separation between the purposes of the State and the Church? To be frank, we see in President Bush a man of faith who is not competent to lead. We see a man who, even after four years in the White House, has great difficulty articulating even the most fundamental of his policy decisions, even when those policies are valid. We see a man who, like the kings of old, is dangerously close to turning religion into a justification for despotism.

    And what about those undecided voters in the middle who don’t understand the coded messages in Bush’s religious rhetoric, who in fact feel excluded by it? I promise that they saw a very different debate last night. They saw a man who, incapable (and even suspect) of reason, turns instead to fancy and dogma for guidance. Which leads me to believe that this election will, in a very real way, be a referendum on Bush’s 1988 insight. Granted, there are millionaires who like his tax cuts and neocons who like his foreign policy and gun owners who will vote for whomever the NRA endorses, but Bush seems to be putting his fate in the hands of his apostles. And it scares the hell out of me to think that it might work.

  • Party Politics & the Movies

    Yeah, I know that Kerry’s plan for Iraq is only slightly less doomed to failure than Bush’s, and I know that Kerry’s years in the Senate have taught him too much about political compromise, but here, finally, is an honest-to-goodness, no-doubt-about-it reason to get behind the Kerry/Edwards ticket:

    In this very political year, as we approach the November elections, TCM has invited four prominent U.S. Senators to appear in interviews with host Ben Mankiewicz to introduce significant films in their lives. On October 7, John Edwards, Democratic vice presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from North Carolina, will consider Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Edwards chose Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear war because of its message that “putting this kind of power into the hands of human beings – no matter who they are – is an extraordinary thing.”

  • To-Do List

    • Pack for tomorrow’s flight to Boulder (iPod, digital camera, cell phone, laptop, projector, books, and . . . oh yeah, clothes)
    • Come up with something at least mildly interesting to say at the conference
    • Ignore that pretty new copy of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America that is sitting on your desk until after you finish DeLillo’s Americana
    • Write the rest of those f—— TIFF responses
    • Stop putting your dissertation at the bottom of your To-Do list

  • Transition

    Yesterday was my first day as a full-time writer. I spent the morning cleaning my office, stacking books, arranging my desk — you know, preparing. Then I hopped in the car, drove to the doctor’s office, and sat in the waiting room for an hour. On October 1st I will go from having “low copay cheap prescription kickass full-time” health insurance to “grad students aren’t really people please god don’t let me get pneumonia” insurance. I’m scheduling appointments with doctors I’ve never even heard of this month. I even had the “Turn your head and cough — Really? I should be examining them at least once a month?” test.

    After twenty minutes with my kind, obese, narcoleptic doctor — no kidding, he fell asleep once while writing me a prescription — I returned home, ate a quick lunch, and sat down at the computer. Then I checked email, and read a bunch of blogs, and watched a movie. And got my hair cut — you know, preparing.

    But before I got my hair cut, I went to McKay’s, the best used book store in Knoxville, because, like, I had $20 in credit and, I mean, it’s practically right across the street from the hair cut place, so, you know. And so I bought the following:

    • Oswald’s Tale by Norman Mailer ($.50)
    • A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis ($2.00)
    • Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow ($1.50)
    • The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow ($1.50)
    • The Lives of Norman Mailer by Carl Rollyson ($1.50)
    • In America by Susan Sontag ($2.00)
    • Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller ($1.50)
    • Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light by Ivan Klima ($1.50)
    • The sportswriter by Richard Ford ($3.50)
    • The White Album by Joan Didion ($.50)
    • Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby ($1.50)

    Miller, Mailer, Doctorow, and Didion are all central figures in my dissertation. And as we all know, buying books is at least as important as reading them, so I’m half way there, really. And, plus, that Gaddis book will look sweet on my bookshelf. (I’ll put it beside Mason & Dixon on the “thick-ass, postmodern novel I’ll never finish” shelf.)

    So, yeah, I got my haircut, went home, fixed a really disappointing peanut lo mein dish, went for a long run, watched some World Series of Poker on ESPN, and went to bed. Ah, the life of a writer.

    Joking aside, this is a strange period of transition for me, and I’ve decided to extend it to this website as well. The idea behind this site has always been to use it as a venue for processing thoughts, for taking a “long pause” from the white noise of life. In recent months, however, the blog has become content-less — just another string of quotes and links. More noise. I want to get back to writing longer responses to films and novels, and I want to use the blog for ideas and arguments. I’ll be posting less frequently, but hopefully all of the posts will be worth reading, which will be a nice change of pace.

    Oh yeah, and I got all of my first choices for TIFF!

  • Still Big News

    On July 8 I posted a link to what I thought was a pretty big story: America’s decision in April to pull out of Falluja, thus creating a safe haven for terrorist and insurgents. (Follow this link to read the full article.) Yesterday, after weeks of bloody fighting in Najaf, The Times ran another piece on Falluja, and I’m at a lost to explain why it wasn’t front page news. In all of the sound a fury of the Sunday morning spin fests, shouldn’t someone have been talking about this?

    Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert’s edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

    American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts – officials of Saddam Hussein’s army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States – have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.

    UPDATE: Paul Krugman is covering this topic today.

  • Aw, dat’s cute

    Aw, dat’s cute

    A friend asked for a childhood photo, which was enough to send us digging through old albums. Quite a couple, eh?

  • Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes

    If you’ve been around the Long Pauses block a few times, then you may have noticed that my about page, like my career, has been stuck in something of a holding pattern. Three years after launching this site, I’m still a doctoral candidate in English, still hoping someday to finish my dissertation, still paying the bills as an instructional designer. All that’s about to change. Well, some of it, at least.

    On September 7, I’ll be leaving my full time job and taking a ten hour/week graduate assistantship so that I can try being a writer for a while. I’ve decided to call it “being a writer” instead of “working on my dissertation” because I don’t dream of being a dissertator for a living. I want to be a writer, and the next year should prove whether or not I have an aptitude for it. And if I enjoy it. And if this rambling mess of an idea that has plagued me for three years works. Wish me luck.

    In the meantime . . .

    I’m daydreaming about Toronto. Theoretically, I’ll be able to see as many as 30 films between the afternoon of September 11th and the evening of the 17th. Where to start.

  • More Church Stuff

    My recent rambling on “relevance” is far and away the most-read, most-linked-to, most-commented-upon post in Long Pauses history, which is both strange and strangely comforting. The more I search, the more fellow travelers I find. Along those lines, a friend just sent me a link to Charles Moore’s article, “Why I Stopped Going to Church, And Other Acts of Christian Disobedience,” which continues that conversation. Moore’s argument makes me uncomfortable at times. In particular, I think he has too casually ignored the importance of ritual and the sacraments in shaping “Ekklesia”:

    Take away the pulpit and the pews, the audio-visual system, the pastor’s salary, the praise band, the bulletin, the tithes and offerings and Sunday school, and what is left of the modern church? Jesus told his critics that the temple would be destroyed, only to be raised up again. But was he thinking in terms of steeples and stadiums, or of a people in whom the Spirit dwells? If the Spirit gives birth to the church, and if genuine worship is “in spirit and in truth”(John 4:24), then where are the edifices, vestments, rituals, and hymnals on that first Pentecost? We won’t find any. Instead we read about fire, wind, power, food, joy, unanimity and sharing — in short, a communism of love (Acts 2 and 4).

    I understand and appreciate his point here, but surely the “fire, wind, power, [and] food” of Pentecost are something like the “Ideal” that our contemporary rituals hope to signify. As a lover and defender of the arts as a kind of natural theology, I greatly appreciate the real value of ritual. In fact, as it’s now been several weeks since I last attended a Sunday morning service, I find that I’m most craving those rituals — communion, in particular, but also the creeds and doxologies and ceremonies that bind my particular neighborhood church, with its particular congregation and particular values (both spoken and unspoken), to two thousands years of human history.

  • Mr. Bush Comes to Town

    Speaking approximately fifteen miles from my home yesterday, President Bush said:

    Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. . . . We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. . . . I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.

    Then, repeating (again and again) what has apparently become his campaign mantra, he added, “The American People are safer.”

    It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.” I wish someone would ask him what “capability” means, exactly. It seems a fairly significant question.

    It’s also interesting to see how the year-long build-up to war has been reduced by his speech to a choice between trusting Saddam and declaring war on him. Forgotten are the voices of a majority in the United Nations and the millions of protesters, who resisted this false dichotomy. Forgotten are the alternative methods of defending America founded on multilateral diplomacy and the investment of resources in homeland security and the war on Al Qaeda. It’s all just a little bit maddening.

    I didn’t have the energy to comment on the link that I posted on Thursday, but it does seem to me to be a significant (and largely unreported) story. I’ve been critical of the war since late-2002, when it became obvious that Bush would have his “show of force” regardless of what happened at the UN or in Baghdad, but I’ve tried to avoid the pessimism that marks so much of the anti-war crowd. I want Iraq to be a better, more just nation for our intervention there. The fact that Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is now a “safe haven” for those building bombs and blowing up our soldiers and Iraqi civilians seems to call into question Bush’s claim that we are safer for his efforts. Is this his proud legacy?

  • Relevance

    Relevant, the magazine devoted to “God, Life, and Progressive Culture,” is a new voice of American evangelicalism — one that targets college students and young professionals who are turned off by their parents’ brand of stodgy conservatism. “Sight, sound, experience — that’s what my generation is about,” says Cameron Strang, Relevant‘s 28-year-old founder. A quick glance at the Relevant Web presence will give you some sense of what Strang means exactly. Its recent list of “The Top Ten Most Profound Films,” for example, includes such gems as Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and The Count of Monte Cristo. The comments are even more revealing [my italics]:

    thanks for mentioning “high fidelity”, one of my favorites

    I agree with your list for the most part, and I think a lot of them would be on my top ten list.

    I am glad high fidelity made the list its one of my top 5 favorite movies

    Way to be relevant. All good flicks with which everyone is familiar. I think you did a fine job.

    Granted, I’ve cherry-picked comments here, but “relevance,” it seems to me, has become evangelical slang for “familiar comfort.” And, to be blunt, I can’t think of a more damning critique of the church. It’s the type of relevance that leads to books like The Maker’s Diet and Wild at Heart, books that capitalize on “secular” trends (the Atkins craze or Mars/Venus pop philosophy) by refinishing them with a sanctified varnish. I mean, do I need Relevant magazine to tell me The Da Vinci Code “meets all the expectations of a great suspense novel without being formulaic or predictable”? Can’t I learn the same thing from a quick glance at the Best Sellers list?

    So, now in an effort to be a relevant Christian, I’m going to quote from one of Relevant‘s favorite artists, Bono [again, my italics]:

    I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake. If the church doesn’t respond to [the African AIDS crisis], the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains….

    As I’ve mentioned before, the tragedy of Africa is so great as to be incomprehensible to me. I wasn’t able even to finish reading Nicholas Kristof’s recent series of editorials from Sudan. I prefer to ignore completely the millions of dead and dying and, instead, to vent my frustrations at other targets. It’s easier that way. Safer. But over the last year or so I’ve been shamed repeatedly by Bono’s use of the word “relevance” when describing the church in relation to Africa.

    I say all of that to say this: my experience of church for the last few years has been marked by a growing dissatisfaction with its “familiar comforts” — its familiar language, familiar lessons, familiar social interactions, familiar rituals — and I think I’m at something of a crossroads. I wouldn’t call it a crisis of faith, exactly, but something more akin to growing pains. These lines from Thomas Merton have long been a comfort:

    The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.

    I don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be a Merton-like contemplative, but I am suffering the realization that I no longer know what relevance the evangelical church has for me. If I leave, I want it to be a considered decision rather than the slow consequence of atrophy. And, also, my decision must be complemented by the finding of another community of sacred worship, perhaps in a non-evangelical protestant church, perhaps…

  • The Living Room Candidate

    Like David at GreenCine Daily, I’m pretty sure that a significant portion of my immediate future will be spent at the American Museum of the Moving Image’s new Web exhibit, The Living Room Candidate, a collection of presidential campaign commercials extending all the way back to Ike v. Adlai in 1952. Amazing, amazing stuff. It’s embarrassing to admit just how effective those “morning in America” spots really were.

  • Get Mortified

    The most recent episode of This American Life (which is worth listening to in its entirety) ends with an eight-minute reading by Sascha Rothchild. And by “reading” I mean “really funny, really frightening performance of several pages from her teenage diary.” Sascha originally read the piece at Mortified:

    a showcase of people like you sharing their most embarrassing, pathetic and private teenage diary entries, poems, love letters, lyrics and locker notes… in front of total strangers.

    According to their site, a Mortified TV Pilot is in development at Comedy Central. I’d love to see it, especially the Mo Collins bit. Also, be sure to visit their Hall of Lame. The thought of even acknowledging one’s teenage years, let alone airing them in public, is too horrifying to imagine.

  • Pretty close

    What I predicted:

    I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again.

    What he actually said:

    In terms of this administration, we laid out the facts very clearly for the American people.

  • Christian Entertainment

    No, sadly the popularity of Bad Christian Art is not the result of a lack of Good Christian Art. It is a result of the rejection of metaphor.

    That’s two slacktivist links in one week. Time to add him to the daily reads, I guess.

  • Catchin’ Spears

    I’m guessing that it’ll go something like this:

    Press: “Scott, how has the president responded to the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “You will need to ask the president. I don’t pretend to speak for his personal ‘response’ to any event.”

    Press: “Well then let me clarify. Does the president agree with the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “The president has the utmost respect for the members of the 9/11 commission, who have worked tirelessly and with great integrity at a very difficult moment in our country’s history. The commission members are very much on the front line of America’s war on terror.”

    Press: “But does the president agree with their finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda? His recent statements — along with those of the vice president — directly contradict the commission’s findings.”

    McClellan: “I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again. Any other questions?”

  • Cattle Call

    My wife and I spent the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky, where, among other activities, we spent two hours in a long line, in a hot hotel, surrounded by other people who thought that it might be fun to be an extra in the new Cameron Crowe film. We forgot our camera, but this Orlando Bloom fan didn’t. That’s me in the fourth picture — the guy in the striped shirt with his back to the camera. You can also make out just a bit of Joanna’s blond hair in front of me.

    We were told that shooting would begin the second week of July, so we should expect a phone call. Yes, we know we’re dorks.

  • Moral Equivalence

    A nice post yesterday from slacktivist:

    The rationalization of evil in opposition to a greater evil (real or imagined) seems like the only way for many Americans to retain their necessary self-image as “the good guys.” That path is sloped, and the slope is slippery.

    The alternative, I believe, is to remind Americans of, and to recommit America to, an idea of the good that involves more than simply being slightly better than the worst people we can think of.

     

  • Amen, Brother!

    Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the “preaching to the converted” question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms “preaching” and “converted.” It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliche; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies.

    It’s not as if the “converted” are always only Moonies lacking any sort of spiritual liveliness or freedom of thought. Quite the contrary. The converted, the congregation, united by certain beliefs, share amongst themselves bewilderment, despair, hope needing amplification, confusion needing examination and elucidation, and avenues of interesting and productive inquiry. Lockstep congregations are a sure sign of a moribund faith, of the absence of anything Divine. A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants to do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    From 10 Questions for Tony Kushner

  • Friedman on Fresh Air

    In case you missed it yesterday, Terry Gross’s interview with Thomas Friedman is well worth a listen. The first twenty minutes features a discussion of globalization, in general, and outsourcing to India, specifically. In the second half of the show, he explains his nuanced position on Iraq and defends his recent change of heart regarding Bush/Cheney. (He would justifiably object to that characterization.)

  • Is It Just Me?

    From Bush’s commencement address at yesterday’s Air Force Academy graduation:

    Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.

    From a conversation that I overheard at lunch last week:

    Yeah, it’s the biggest one in the world . . . I mean . . . in America. Whatever.

    We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American.

    And please, please tell me that at least some of those newly-commissioned Air Force officers know that the Second World War began before Pearl Harbor. I mean, we can’t expect our President to know such things, but surely the military academies require their graduates to take a history course or two.

    ADDENDUM: A co-worker just pointed out that, while Bush was quick yesterday to quote from Eisenhower (thus aligning himself rhetorically with America’s unprecedented ideological consensus of the 1950s), he carefully avoided these bits:

    “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.” Guildhall Address. London June 12. 1945

    “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” Canadian Club. Ottawa. Canada January 10. 1946

    “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” First Inaugural Address January 20. 1953

    “There is–in world affairs–a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.” State of the Union Address Februarv 2. 1953

    “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” “The Chance for Peace” Address April 16. 1953

    “The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.” Press Conference. Washington. D.C. August 31. 1955

    “The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.” Radio and TV Address September 19. 1956

    “The final battle against intolerance is to be fought–not in the chambers of any legislature–but in the hearts of men.” Campaign Speech. Los Angeles. CA October 19. 1956

    “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” TV Talk with Prime Minister Macmillan August 31. 1959

    “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Farewell Address. Radio and TV January 17. 1961

  • My Famous Wife

    NPR: Visiting Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’

  • Looking Back

    Yesterday, while unboxing another box — it’s a maddening, on-going process — I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. Proud like I’m proud of very few things in my life. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators:

    From Tucker Carlson:

    “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.”

    Mr. Carlson—never really a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy—said he had broken off from the hawkish neoconservatives who flogged the war from the get-go. “I’m getting more paleo every day,” he said, referring to the so-called paleoconservatives.

    From Thomas L. Friedman:

    “Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

    Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong.

    From George Will:

    Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

  • Boxes, Boxes, Boxes

    Every day for the last week, from 9 am until 10 or 11 pm, my wife and I have devoted our every effort to combing through cabinets, closets, drawers, desks, and a ridiculously cluttered basement, deciding (again and again and again) what stays and what goes — which of her parents’ treasures and memories and junkpiles will make the trip to Knoxville, which will be given to grieving relatives, which will be sold, and which, inevitably, will be hauled away to the dump. Childhood crayon drawings. Ceramic doo-dads. Dresses and jackets and hats and shoes and t-shirts and socks and sweaters and coats. Books. Tables. Photographs. Paintings. Chairs (58 at last count). And all of that cookware, china, crystal, and silver.

    The movers loaded up a truck yesterday, and it should arrive in Knoxville on Monday. Our new home will soon be filled with familiar furniture, all of it bittersweet for now. We’re both exhausted.

  • Because You Lied

    Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports — that legendary ‘bad intelligence.’ It was on that basis and that basis alone — the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction — that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade. Now we know better.

    I accept my share of responsibility for the thousands who have since died and are still dying in an elective war that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism but which you and your fellow extremists at the Project for a New American Century had been lusting after since 1992, a war you wanted so badly you lied to Congress and the American people to get it, you dark and terrible man. I was not cynical enough. I know I must make amends for my mistake. But first, come November, the American people must fix another mistake.

    Andrew Christie imagines what he would tell Dick Cheney if he were in Kerry’s shoes. I just wish that Kerry would say something. His “we need a broader international coalition and more troops” line is already wearing thin. With Spain and Honduras pulling out and other leaders feeling growing pressure to follow suit, such a coalition will be damn near impossible. And I doubt that it would make much of a difference in Iraq anyway.

    I’ll be voting the “Anybody but Bush” ticket in November, but I’m still waiting for Kerry to give me a reason to do so enthusiastically.

  • Beautiful

    When I asked my ESL students last night about the great literatures of their native language, one of the Iranians told me about the Arab conquest of Persia. In their effort to erase all evidence of Persian culture, the ancient Arabs outlawed the speaking of Farsi, which, of course, only served to inspire a new generation of writers.

    “Our language was saved by the poets,” he told me.

  • God Save the Queen

    A friend just sent me this link from the National Catholic Reporter. Joan Chittister, like so many of us, watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.” Chittister has made of the hearings an opportunity to reflect on the value of a monarchy in the 21st century, and I love her for it:

    As Americans, we are inclined to be a bit insular. Probably because we live on one of the largest islands in the world. Bounded on the east and the west by oceans and on the north and south by nations far smaller than we, the geography may have affected the boundaries of our minds, as well. We see ourselves as the center of the globe, the biggest, the best, the latest, the smartest, the most advanced, the most powerful, the most right, the paragon of all paragons in all things.

    We forget that unlike cell phones in Europe, which will work anywhere on the globe, ours don’t work outside the United States. We fail to understand that our videos can’t play too many places but on U.S. soil. We don’t even advert to the situation facing other coalition troops in Iraq. “I’ve been in the United States for six weeks,” one Brit told me, “and I have not heard a word on U.S. TV about the British soldiers in Iraq though our boys are being killed there, too, and news about U.S. engagement plays on European television daily.”

    We are a world unto ourselves. We forget, in other words, that rather than purporting to lead the human race in all things good, it may be time to join it. And government accountability may be as good a place as any to start. Most of all, at least in the Condoleezza Rice event, perhaps we have forgotten our P’s and Q’s. Or rather, their P’s and Q’s. “PQ’s” is British shorthand for “Parliamentary Questions.” In England, the Prime Minister himself goes to the House of Commons every Wednesday at noon to answer questions from members of parliament about any facet of government policy.

    More than that, the Leader of the Opposition can question or rebut the Prime Minister’s answers on the spot. No talk of “separation of powers,” no refuge-taking behind the veil of “presidential privilege.”

    Whenever I watch footage of those Wednesday afternoon shouting matches, I imagine an American president in the prime minister’s shoes. To be precise, I imagine George W. Bush in the prime minister’s shoes, but I’m all for bi-partisan bitch-slapping. The impeachment hearings certainly would have been more interesting (and perhaps seeing educated adults arguing breathlessly about the meaning of “is” would have helped reveal how absurd it all was). I disagree with many of Tony Blair’s policy decisions, but I can’t fault his intelligence or his articulateness. He handles his accusers with great aplomb and with nary a stutter or mispronunciation. And the political discourse at large benefits for it. Dubya has given fewer press conferences than any modern president, and I think we all know why. I wonder if any ideas have “popped” into his head since Tuesday night. (By the way, don’t you love the way he phrased that line, ascribing the action verb to the idea rather than to himself, as if it were his job to merely stand there waiting for inspiration? Apparently thinking is just too much work.)

  • Writing in the First Person

    My brain is turning soft. It’s not that I’ve forgotten to update my 2004 film viewing and reading lists; it’s that I have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned my intellectual life. I don’t have the energy for it. Or the time. Or — and this is the big one — the attention span. And it’s starting to wear me down.

    I imagine that, if I were to pick up any book about the mourning process, it would confirm what I strongly suspect: that I’m in some classic first stage (denial, maybe?); that my conscious and subconscious are pitted in a fierce battle for control. As usual, the conscious mind thinks it’s winning — and by all appearances it is doing so — but here’s the thing: I don’t have a short attention span. I’m the guy who starts a book and finishes it the same day. I’m the guy who spends his free time watching ridiculously slow films about Danish farmers and street vendors and agnostic ministers. But I’ve suddenly become the guy who can’t sit still, who can’t even make it through a one-hour TV show, who must be doing at all times. And so something must be wrong.

    Here are some of the ways that I’ve encountered death lately:

    • Last week I listened to “The Few Who Stayed: Defying Genocide in Rwanda” from American Radio Works. Making sense of the murder of 800,000 people in the spring of 1994 is about as easy as trying to understand why news from Sudan is buried in today’s editorial page.
    • My wife, a forensic artist, has begun work on a new case — reconstructing the face of an unidentified man found floating in a nearby river. Because of the case, I often open my email to find emotionally-detached, clinical discussions of the “business” of forensic anthropology — not to mention the requisite photos. My wife’s work, by the way, will be featured in a two-part series by a local TV news crew, who are thrilled to have such a hot exclusive for sweeps. They will, no doubt, describe her as CSI: Knoxville.
    • Names of the Dead. When I scan the daily headlines at the Times, I always take a second or two to read the names and the ages and the hometowns of the American soldiers who have died.
    • And, of course, I think daily of my mother- and father-in-law, who were killed in January, and of my wife, who was made an orphan at too young an age.

    Strangely, the names of the dead in Iraq have the strongest emotional pull on me right now — partly because they remind me of my aunt and uncle who are still mourning their son’s death in Grenada twenty years ago, partly because they remind me of how disastrously misguided America’s foreign policy is right now, and partly because, now that we’re in Iraq, I don’t know how we’ll get out. History is not on our side.

    The tragedy of Africa is too great to even contemplate, so, like most comfortable Americans, I don’t. Even during my weekly ESL class, when I sit across a table from refugees, I distance myself from their past, from what they’ve seen and what I cannot even imagine. Surely things like that don’t really happen. Not in 2004. Not when a Christian nation like America exercises such a powerful influence on the world. I refuse to acknowledge it.

    But I’m refusing to acknowledge a lot these days. I posted this last August for a friend whose father had died unexpectedly. It’s from Anne Lamott’s essay, “Ladders,” from Traveling Mercies.

    Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t work for me, but I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood altering.

    But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

    I hope she’s right.

  • CSS Zen Garden

    With my last reworking of Long Pauses, I attempted to rebuild its architecture from the ground up using CSS. Cross-platform and cross-browser problems stopped me dead, though. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I’d open a page in Netscape or Safari and watch it all blow up.

    CSS Zen Garden is an amazing example of what good CSS-based design can offer. I have a feeling that I’ll be ripping off Springtime sometime soon.