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08 11 05
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THE MOST IMPORTANT STORY IN THE WORLD LAST SUNDAY | ||||
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Soundclips from ABC radio news last Sunday. Of all the things going on in the world, these were the top items, it seems. The first clip, from 6 PM, starts with administration officials saying the war should not be seen entirely through the prism of combat losses – apparently this qualifies as a remark so new & provocative it must lead the news. One suspects it might have seemed like news because it so flatly contradicts the worldview of those who prepare the newscast, but that’s just speculation. It’s followed with an interview with Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier whose vigil in Crawford has been media catnip. It’s fair and balanced, no? The administration says you shouldn’t view the war through the casualty list, and she says you should: “(Bush) said that everybody deserves to be free, and that’s not good enough. Because he joined the Army to defend America, not to go die in a war of aggression on a foreign soil to make other people rich.” The report ends: “Sheehan wants to talk to Mr. Bush again.” (Mister Bush? Doesn’t he have some other title? Starts with a P?) Next, the seven o’clock report. As is usually the case, the stories are flipped. Having worked at an ABC affiliate for many years, that’s how it works; the second story was usually the first the next hour. Note the differences. No mention of the previous visit: “two high-ranking administration officials met with Sheehan yesterday, but she’s vowing to stay put until the President himself responds.” The missing word here is “again.” As in, “responds again.” You can almost imagine the editor’s pen crossing out that word, but that would be paranoid speculation. No doubt it was cut for time. After all, they had to get to the meat: “More than 30 US service members were killed in Iraq this past week.” Any major offensives under way? Any operations conducted last week that killed some of the bad guys? Never mind. Now, we take you to Pakistan. From the Daily Times. The mom who wants to know why her son died By Khalid Hasan__WASHINGTON: A lone woman who lost her 24-year old son in Iraq and who has been camping out by the roadside in Crawford, Texas, insisting that the President meet her and explain why her son died, has become a rallying point for the growing number of Americans opposed to the war._ The President has not met her and the two senior advisers he sent out to see her, failed to provide her with the answers Cindy Sheehan from California seeks. There you go: the President has not met her. All you need to know. Bastard didn’t even have the decency to send out a slice of plastic turkey. perm link |
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08 10 05
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THEN THEY CAME FOR THE, UH , MORAVIANS, BUT I WAS NOT A MORAVIAN
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We’re often told that Islamic terrorism has an exact mirror in Christian-inspired extremism. Sure, there are thousands of jihadis killing and maiming people of all creeds and colors, but look at Timothy McVeigh! Can’t; he’s compost now. But when he was alive he wasn’t shouldering aside old ladies to make morning Mass; McVeigh was one of those pathetic Aryan pagans who would have beat up Jesus for his dusky hue. What about that abortion bomber guy, Eric Rudolph? Sorry; he calls himself a disciple of Nietzsche. Well, what about the Crusades? And Dresden? Fine. Drop us a line when someone drives a 737 into the Sears Tower on behalf of a bygone Pope and General Eisenhower. It turns out, however, that there are similarities. There is something the Islamic extremists and some Christian groups share: they agree that Israel is the problem. The Presbyterian church - not the members, but the learned elders - has announced it will use the church’s stock holdings to target Israel for being mean to the Palestinians. But they’re not anti-Semites. Heavens, nay. Don’t you dare question their philosemitism! No, they looked at the entire world, including countries that lop off your skull if you convert to Presbyterianism, and what did they chose as the object of their ire? A country the size of a potato chip hanging on the edge of a region noted for despotism and barbarity. By some peculiar coincidence, it just happens to be full of Jews. The right and the left take turns deciding who’s going to be anti-semetic this century. For some time now the hard left in the West has led the charge against the Jews – or, as the sleight-of-hand term has it, the Zionists. The adolescent spirits of the left love nothing more than a revolution, a story of a scrappy underdog rising up against a colonizing power, and the Palestinians, with their romantically-masked fighters and thrilling weapon-brandishing, fit the bill. Plus, there’s something so deliciously naughty and transgressive about calling Jews the new Nazis – if it feels that good, it must be right. Doesn’t matter that one side is a liberal democracy that grants rights to women and non-Jews, and the other side has thugs and assassins for rulers and sends its kids to summer camps where they learn the joys of good ol’ fashioned Jew-killin’; doesn’t matter at all. According to the script of the hard left, Israel was created when some Europeans (hisssss) invaded the sovereign nation of Palestine, even though we all know the Jewish homeland is somewhere outside of Passaic. Then for no reason Israel invaded the West Bank and Gaza – which for some reason had not been set up as New Palestine by the Egyptians and the Jordanians, but never mind – and made everyone stand in line and get frisked. Those who joined the line in ‘67 are just getting through now. Evil Zionists. Don’t tell the Presbyterian council about Tibet or the Sudan. It would absolutely ruin their day. The companies the church wishes to pressure include Caterpillar, which makes bulldozers purchased by the Israelis for the sole purpose of knocking down innocent homes of gentle lamb herders; Motorola, which among other things sells night-vision goggles that give the IDF an unfair advantage over people who want to smuggle in bombs to encourage the social-justice dialogue. The church will probably get around to boycotting Cuisinart, if the imams suggest that Jews use Cuisinart products to grind up Gentile bones for Passover pastries. Of course it’s not true, literally, but in the culture of the occupation and resistance, we must understand these things as potent metaphors. False, yes, but potent! Perhaps they could just boycott Cuisinart’s cookie-sheet division. Next they can sue the company that sells buses to Israely cities. All those tempting targets, packed with innocent people. How could an oppressed person resist killing them all? What sort of civilized nation would tempt them so? Especially because they don’t have helicopters and night-vision goggles and tanks and missiles. Not that they’d use those devices against Israelis. That would risk a boycott from the Presbyterian councils. There are some lines even the most romantic revolutionary dare not cross. |
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08 08 05
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INTELUGENT DESINE, as the critics would call it | ||||
| Listened to a talk radio show on Intelligent Design today – which, for some, is the very definition of hell. (Which does not exist!) (No, it does!) It’s one of those debates ill-suited to the modern media, since the immediate interactivity of blogs and talk radio means that the issues quickly coalesce around the same old sclerotic positions. ID = Creationism, Evolution is Unproved Speculation, The End, Factus Est. On the radio today one fellow insisted that atheistic humanism was the only rational basis for determining morality, the examples of the 20th century notwithstanding; another scoffed at the fossil record, noting that human skeletons were incomplete at best and fabrications at worst, and it was simply preposterous to assume that the universe began as a hot tiny jot. (The host was disinclined to accept the Big Bang model as well as evolution, and conflated both as an example of scientific hubris.) It was ridiculous, said the caller, to think that the entire universe came from one little dense dot. And my immediate thought was, well, unless that was simply the entry point for matter from another dimension. Is that absurd? I don’t know. I like the multiverse model - coincident universes strung together like soap bubbles, with one occasionally leaking into the next. They come, they go, they grow, they contract; they light up, they grow dark. And so on and so on. In principium era verbum: in the beginning was the word. And the word was go. Or Bang. Doesn’t matter; I have never found religion and cosmology to be in conflict, which is why the ID debate is boring. It’s like a debate that seeks to prove whether cats or forklifts exist. Uh - how about both? HERETIC! I have no doubt about evolution – a recent article in the Wall Street Journal detailed a study of some eggs laid down over many tens of thousands of years. Some low-life creature of little significance. The eggs showed how the creatures had adapted to changes in the predator population – growing spikes, losing them, growing them again. The article also pointed out variances within evolutionary biology camps, how they reacted to the data, and pointed out that it’s hardly a monolithic block staffed with unwavering acolytes. Opinions differ. Except, of course, for the idea that evolution occurs, which would seem to be a prerequisite for being an evolutionary biologist. But not one of the scholars asked the why behind the why, and I wouldn’t expect them too. Not their job. Is that the job of high-school teachers? At some point, yes; I think any class could profit from philosophical exploration of the origins of life. And that’s all ID is to me, really: the possibility that the universe as a cause, that it was, for lack of better terms, summoned by volition. I know, I know – analogies are always imperfect, flattering to the believers and annoying to the disputers, but the world is like a newspaper: you either think that someone put it together, or you think that letters were thrown into a building and somehow they all arranged themselves in the form of editorials and recipes. Yes, yes, bad analogy. Although putting a newspaper in the hands of an illiterate tribesman in the Amazon might give him pause; he would have no idea how this was put together, let alone what it was. I just hesitate to say that we have it all figured out, and everything above and around and below is simply clockwork crafted by the hand of chance. I find the heavens, for example, indescribably beautiful – but why? The telescopes peer into the beyond, and the pictures are lush and awesome – am I reacting to some instinctive awe of the skies? Well, early man didn’t see star nurseries in the night sky. There is no cultural bias for finding beauty in a gaseous nebula (unless your culture teaches you to disregard the eyes over the words in the holy books, which is another matter.) All I know is that it is impossible for me to behold the natural world without seeing the hand of God – and that I stop myself there, because everything after that is dogma and schism and debate. The questions get in the way. The questions are natural; the questions are right and necessary, but annoyingly human. Be still, and know that I ROCK! Or so I thought a few nights ago at 3 AM when I couldn’t sleep, and was wondering about things great and small. Before I slept I realized that perhaps my place in the scheme mattered less than the fact that I was part of it, and that was enough. Better to accept the latter than obsess on the former. Of course: tricks and gimmicks and bromides and palliatives ginned up by a brain equipped to rationalize away its own pointless demise. Whatever. All I know is that I do not exactly tremble at the idea that students should set aside a class period to question the origins of the universe. Pens down, notebooks away, drop your cynical carapaces, and ask: this, from what? And why? This, of course, means that I also believe the earth is flat. Lacking the artist’s grasp of the subtleties of the origins of all we behold, I can only agree. Sail to the West at your peril. Postscript: while pausing for a moment to finish a cigar outside I toted up the things that persuade me, daily, of the existence of an animating guide; they are all, of course, subjective, and hence tricks of the old buried god-gland that seeks to find rational reasons for the thunder and the sunrise. I thought of the look in my dog’s eyes, the ecosystem of the lake by my house, the chorus of crickets that replaced the drone of the cicadas at sunset, the spattered stars in the sky, the cells in my body waging war against the invaders that entered the cut on my thumb – and then I thought of a movie that began, and ended, with tiny organisms placed on Earth “by God in his wisdom,” organisms that saved humanity. “War of the Worlds” – blatant ID propaganda! Hey, Spielberg, why not just call it “The Passion of the White Cells” and really go for the Red State demographic? perm link |
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