The Table

Liberal Logic

2010-08-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Conservatives like myself are often puzzled when they hear their Liberal friends rail against the manipulative nature of Talk Radio and Fox News while they listen raptly to the latest NPR or CNN broadcast as if the latter two were pure as the driven snow. To help aid us in this confusing paradox, I’ve developed a list of rules that we must understand if we’re ever to fathom the ways of our fellow man (or woman).

A. A boisterous Conservative rally is “angry.”

B. A boisterous Liberal rally is “passionate.”

A. Conservative legislation that doesn’t achieve its goals is proof that it shouldn’t have been the law in the first place.

B. Liberal legislation that doesn’t achieve its goals is proof that the law didn’t go far enough the first time around.

A. Conservative politicians who play the system to stall a vote are “obstructionist.”

B. Liberal politicians who play the system to stall a vote are “principled.”

A. Conservative Presidents who use Executive privileges to enact policy are “setting aside the Constitution.”

B. Liberal Presidents who use Executive privileges to enact policy are “getting things done.”

A. Conservatives who point out the dangers of policy X are “fear mongering.”

B. Liberals who point out the dangers of policy Y are “raising awareness.”

A. Conservative candidates who call attention to their opponents’ foibles and unsavory associates are “distracting from the issues.”

B. Liberal candidates who call attention to their opponents’ foibles and unsavory associates are “demanding accountability.”

A. A Conservative politician whose de-regulation measures foster a dramatic decrease in the unemployment rate is “captive to business interests.”

B. A Liberal politician whose regulation measures foster a dramatic increase in the unemployment rate is “devoted to the common man.”

A. A Conservative President who goes to war with Congressional authorization, a multinational coalition, and tries to get UN approval is “a dangerous unilateralist.”

B. A Liberal President who goes to war without consulting either the Congress or the UN is a “global leader.”

A. Speaking derisively about a Conservative politician is a wonderful example of America’s freedom of speech and anyone who objects needs to get a sense of humor.

B. Speaking derisively about a Liberal politician is a sign of what’s wrong with America’s political discourse and anyone who objects needs to stop being so hateful.

A. An ambiguous statement by a Conservative politician should be assumed to have the most egregious meaning.

B. An ambiguous statement by a Liberal politician should be assumed to have the most innocuous meaning.

A. When Conservatives invoke the Bible to support their cause they are “religious” and are confusing the line between church and state.

B. When Liberals invoke the Bible to support their cause they are “spiritual” and bringing morality into the political realm.

A. Agreeing with a Conservative politician’s actions is to display your inability to think for yourself.

B. Agreeing with a Liberal politician’s actions is to display your ability to think outside the box.

I’m sure that some of my more liberally minded friends (or those who’d prefer to think of themselves as moderate) will object that 1) Conservatives are guilty of the same things and 2) Conservatives are guilty of other things. That is all well and good, and if you feel like coming up with your own list of Conservative failings, that’d be fine by me. There’s plenty of material for you.

But let me ask you, how does the myopia and inconsistency of Conservatives negate in any way the myopia and inconsistency of Liberals? One of my biggest grievances with Liberals is that while they go about making such a big deal about how tolerant and open-minded they are, anyone who spends any time around them will soon discover that they are anything but.

In my own experience I have heard as much (if not more) examples of intolerance of dissent, demeaning of opposition characters, and Lemming-like activity from Liberals than I have from their Conservative neighbors. To this is added their audacity to preen about their unbiased attitudes, respect for others, and independence of thought.

So long as any of us keeps pretending that we are without flaws today and without the potential for flaws tomorrow, then so long will discourse, political or otherwise, be tainted with rancor and self-righteousness.

Doing the Math

2009-06-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps someone else can correct my "math" and I simply haven't seen it correctly, but there have been a couple of rather interesting implications in the news in the past week that have made me wonder. It is not so much the events themselves, though they are compelling enough. It is more what they say about an apparently discredited political philosophy.

It has become axiomatic in popular culture and in the media that if George W Bush had been for a thing it must have been bad. Often following hard upon this point is the corollary that if something is bad that W must have had something to do with it. I'm not planning on arguing here that everything he did was good or that nothing he did was bad. However, we can't very well say that we've thought the matter through if we don't take into account what would otherwise have to be some rather remarkable coincidences recently.

The first is rather subtle. The North Koreans, for reasons that never seem apparent to anyone, occasionally go on saber-rattling fests where they challenge the rest of the world with utter destruction like some odd combination of Dr Evil and Cobra Commander. Its most recent incarnation has involved the threat of launching of a new missile that could possibly reach out as far as the Aloha state. Since they have apparently acquired nuclear weapons, this poses a more serious threat than their past ramblings.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, a local newswoman was interviewed about the attitude of the Hawaiians in the face of the newest danger. She reported that the people weren't particularly worried in part because of the assurances of President Obama about our military capabilities and the increased presence of said military forces. As an example MSNBC showed pictures of one of the United States's giant domed radar ships watching and waiting for any incoming threat.

The other oddity has been splayed all over the news for the past week and more. The Iranians have presented Americans with a gift. A riot in the Middle East where we are not the object of hatred or even have much to do with the argument. Young people who've grown up under a theocratic tyranny are risking (and losing) their lives in a demand for democracy that soon could be more of a revolution than a simple protest.

Here's where I get puzzled. During his administration President Bush (43) was railed at unceasingly for his cowboy, unilateral tactics. Exhibit 'A' was early in his first term when his abrogated the Ballistic Missile treaty with the Russian Federation enabling him to establish at long last a mini-me version of President Reagan's so-called 'Star Wars' defense program. Instead of a massive, space-based missile shield, the United States would now field a few dozen anti-missile missiles in the Pacific and in Europe designed to counter limited threats from 'Rogue Regimes.'

In the same way W was decried for his naive proposal about challenging hostile states by enabling democracy in Iraq. His proposal was that when the populations in neighboring countries saw the Iraqis practicing free elections that this would lead them to wonder why they couldn't have such rights too. Then, with more opportunities for free expression in their own lands, the people would have less need to express themselves violently overseas.

So now, in the past week or so, we have seen Obama tout Bush's missile defense program and the protection Bush claimed it would despite the fact that the Democrats swore it never could, and we've seen a Middle Eastern tyranny be rocked by protests from its people demanding free and fair democracy just as Bush promised and not as the Democrats long denied.

If people want to go on thinking that Bush was the worst President in history, that is fine, but what will they make of this? Bush said he wanted to create a missile shield, and the Left said it would make things worse. Now, we have the protection and the Left thinks its all a great idea. Bush said fostering democracy in Iraq would lead to democracy movements in neighboring, hostile regimes. Now we have a massive democracy movement in neigbhoring, hostile Iran. Am I missing something here? or did maybe, just maybe, W got his math right?

by Timothy Padgett

Reasons and Romance

2008-10-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

A lot of the time when I tell people that I am not among the horde planning on voting for Senator Obama, I am greeted with a quizzical expression. Apparently, the fact that I come across as mildly well-informed and somewhat well-intentioned doesn't equate in their minds with voting for Senator McCain. So as to alleviate some of their disequilibrium, I thought I'd offer some of the reasons I have for my irrational choice.

For one thing, I just don't get it. I'll grant anyone that he's a charming speaker, but if a pleasant persona were the criteria for the Presidency we'd all be voting for Tom Hanks and be done with it. Beyond this, I'm just not seeing what sets him apart from the rest of the gang. His policies, when he isn't off writing yet another autobiography and shows up to vote, are a part of the same Left-wing as a whole gaggle of others. He is a consistent Left-winger who votes with the Left-wing and hangs out with an even more Left-wing. I'm a conservative, ergo, I don't want him for the job.

I can understand the Left in America liking him, considering that he is one of them, but I don't get what the Center sees in this guy. What bothers me about so many of these Centrists is that they don't seem to know what they see in him either. They tell me that he'll bring the change we need to Washington. When I ask them to tell me what part of his record demonstrates that he even can bring about this change or that it is the change we need, they come up short on specifics. Now we can't be too hard on them. It's not their fault that he's done so little.

I'm told they want him in the White House because he understands their values. Really? How do you know that? He says so in his speeches? Call me crazy, but isn't that kind of what politicians are supposed to do? It's not like there's someone out there saying that you should elect him because he doesn't feel your pain. I haven't seen anything in what he's done to support all his pretty rhetoric, and no one who supports him has told me much either.

I'm not quite sure how to handle those whose first justification for supporting my Senator is that anything will be better than what we have now. Am I supposed to take that comment seriously? You think anyone would be better? If so, why don't you vote for me? I'm different! Aside from the fact that I won't be old enough until April, you'd be crazy to vote for someone so unqualified as me for the Presidency no matter how nice a guy you thought I was.

I am amazed about one thing concerning Obama. Apparently, it is impossible to have a valid criticism about him. It seems that anytime anyone brings up a point where he looks bad it turns out that that person is all about destructive politics. What an amazing coincidence! Obama can't be held accountable for going to a racist church for 20 years, but the unsolicited endorsement of an anti-Catholic pastor says something disturbing about McCain. When his supporters say spiteful things about the GOP candidates it's because they are passionate, but when angry words come from the Right, then they are just being hateful.

Now my final excuse for avoiding logic is one that a lot of his conservative supporters seem to want to push to the periphery. They tell me Evangelicals, like myself, need to show our independence as a group from the GOP by voting as a group for the Dems. They tell me that we need to get beyond single-issue voting choice and examine the whole range of issues.

Fair enough on the surface, but tell me this. If a candidate had consistently voted to maintain the privileges of companies willfully responsible for deaths of huge numbers of children, how would this affect your vote? If the police or military were systematically using kids as target practice and seemed to favor doing so with minorities, would you say this was the way to go? Senator Obama has consistently supported such a scheme that has killed not 4,000 or 40,000 but 40,000,000 plus. Is this the change you can believe in? Is this your hope? If this is not a single issue worth making or breaking your support, what would it take?

I don't want him for the job because he is spectacularly unqualified for the position, I don't think his policies are well-founded, and he is promising more than I see he has reason to vouch for. My question for the Centrist is this: What is it in Senator Obama's policies and record (and I mean record, not rhetoric) that distinguishes him from the rest of the crowd? Disagree with me if you want. If you're convinced he's the man for the job, then more power to you. If you agree with his voting record, then you should vote for someone who agrees with you. We ALL want a better world. Who's has the better chance of moving towards that right now?

Finding Yourself at Church

2008-08-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

Like most American church kids, I grew up going to Wednesday night church each week. For much of this time it was all an unmitigated misery as we were compelled to participate in choir activities and then rebuked for not displaying the proper enthusiasm. Granted, there were plenty of us who somehow enjoyed spending the evening singing songs when we could have been playing hide-and-seek or other pleasant diversions, but I just thought those folks were weird.

Needless to say I was greatly pleased when we finally reached the age when we were deemed worthy of activities more interesting than becoming cannon fodder for off-key “show off to your parents” performances. One of the first times where I recall my own individuality being taken into consideration was when they gave us a “Spiritual Gifts” test. For those who don’t know, these tests are basically personality tests that help you figure out what sort of things you are best at or interested in. Armed with this knowledge you can then know how your particular skill set can contribute to the overall community. I can spend my life looking up obscure points of historical interest while my friend Sarah Catherine can continue to enjoying singing as much as she did when we were in choir together twenty-five years ago.

On the one hand, this whole approach makes a whole lot of sense. Taking these sorts of tests helps you distill out from your own desires and the expectations of others what kind of role you can play in the church as you grow up. This is an integral part of the Christian message. Any group of people will have a mix of gifts within it that each will be necessary for healthy growth and life and none of these gifts can be seen as fundamentally greater or lesser than another since they all depend on one another. To put it fancily, what is functionally hierarchical is ontologically egalitarian. (Big words are fun!)

On the other hand, there are some ways in which this focus on an individual’s own interests and practical abilities is open to a peculiarly American form of misunderstanding. We Americans are a very practical people. We are very good at getting things done. It might not be the right thing all the time, but we sure are going to find a way to do it, dammit! Our focus on functionality and the bottom line is one of the key things, for good or ill, that has made us so influential in the world.

In addition to this we are incurable romantics. We believe wholeheartedly that deep down in our hearts we can just know what we need to do. If I have a longing to do this or that, then surely this is what God wants me to do. We have trouble with the idea that it could ever be a good thing to do something as our life’s work that does not resonate with something deep within. Our love for the individual’s quest to find himself in the world leads us to pay attention internal impressions and the practical ability to do given task.

I begin to get antsy when I wonder how consistent our connection between interest/skills and calling is with examples of calling as seen in the Bible. We tend to seek for ourselves and suggest to others that their proper role for God in this life can be found by looking to our practical abilities and within our hearts at what we most enjoy doing. How often in the many biblical accounts of someone being called to an office or even a temporary role is that person’s practical qualifications or even desire to perform the thing in question even mentioned?

The focus in the Bible is much more on the incompetence and unwilling nature of the “hero” than on his ability and eagerness. Even when, with our 20/20 hindsight, we can look back and see how a Moses or a Peter was able to accomplish some great deed for God, is there any mention or real expectation at the time of their calling that they could even do the thing asked of them? Is there any suggestion that an Abraham or an Amos enjoyed the tasks given to them? Or that they had always felt the call towards it? If these things are not the priority in the Bible, then should we really put so much focus on them ourselves?

A Souring Sensation

2008-06-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up in Nashville the people living next to our house were rabid fans of the University of Tennessee. As anyone who’s met a UT fan can assure you, there is something about such fans that can go well beyond mere mania. My neighbors were so incredibly excited about their boys in orange that they have forever turned me against my native state’s most prominent college team. Having their fight song Rocky Top screamed at you is somehow not endearing.

It’s not as though I now intellectually believe that there is something wrong with the Volunteers. They are neither more nor less moral a sports franchise than any of the other “amateur” athletes. But after years of their garish insistence on the superiority of all things that lovely shade of orange I cannot emotionally bring myself to side with them. The obnoxiousness of that advocacy has forever soured UT in my mind.

Years later I encountered another sort of fan. This kind is not nearly so annoying but still manages to turn my allegiance away from the focus of their team-loyalty. It’s like this. Have you ever been watching a game with some friends where you go into it not caring who wins? You could be just as easily persuaded to go along with your friends as to root to the other guy. Yet the more you listen to your buds, the more you want the other guy to win.

I remember one particular time watching a college basketball game. Neither team was “mine” so I was content (at first) at least not to cheer against my friends. Tragically, my resilience was not strong enough to withstand the temptation. By the end of the game I was actively going for the other team. Unlike my UT fanatics these friends weren’t throwing their team colors in my face or even pressuring me to join them.

The problem this time was the unhinged irrationality coming from people who I could otherwise count on for their solid sensibility. Every time a ref would make a call in their favor was “about time!” since it was obviously only their due. Every time that same ref made a call against their team it was just as obviously a bad call flowing from the ref’s bias. My otherwise rational friends were sincerely convinced that the powers that be were actively working to prevent their team from winning.

From my neutral perspective I found this baffling. Despite their insistence to the contrary there simply was no greater amount of calls going against their team than those going for them. I simply could not bring myself to support their guys when they had such ephemeral reasons for doing so. If going for that team left my friends bereft of their faculties I didn’t think that was the course for me.

This sort of counter reaction spills out from sporting events into the real world combat of politics. Jogging through my neighborhood I have repeatedly come across a van that I really wish wasn’t there. Despite being several hundred miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line this vehicle sports a collection of Confederate flags. Whatever positive connotations the Rebel flag might have in some people’s minds there is a far more common negative feeling associated with it thanks to the boys in the KKK. For most Americans this flag is connected with ignorance and hatred.

If this were all the van was emblazoned with then it would simply be a matter of either a racist or someone unaware that everyone around him thinks he is a racist. Unfortunately for my political sympathies, this guy also has bumper stickers supporting the party and some of the particular candidates that I usually go for. I am sorely tempted to scrape off the pro-Republican stickers since I don’t want the people in this largely Hispanic neighborhood to think that to be conservative is to be racist. This guy’s obnoxiousness, just as with the UT fans, would be enough to keep me from voting his way had I not my own reasons for going for the GOP.

This souring sensation also explains part of my opposition to my Senator’s quest for the Presidency. Like with my otherwise reasonable sports fan friends, I am disturbed by the nature of some of my friends support for Obama. It is not so much that they give me reasons for doing so that I then disagree with as much as it is as they offer so little reason for supporting him in the first place.

I have heard all sorts of reasons why he should get the top job, but none of them has any specific substance to them. All I hear are platitudes about how great a communicator he is, or what a great moment it would be to have an African-American in the White House or how we all need to believe in hope. No one goes into any detail about how his words of hope and change are going be translated from rhetoric into reality. No one seems to think its important that they can’t cite anything he has done in the past as proof of what he can and will do in the future.

People talk about how he is not a part of the DC political machine, but they don’t notice that he’s been in thick with the Chicago machine. (I hope I don’t have to explain how Chicago stands in terms of political sanctity.) People talk about how he is above partisan politics and will be his own man, yet they fail to mention that his voting record shows him voting as entirely allied with one party. People say anything will be better than what we have now, but they don’t explain how this golden age is to be achieved.

A friend of mine who was for the Senator long before it was popular to do so was talking to me back at Christmas. With glowing excitement he told me of a mass message he received from the campaign. Obama, his wife, and their children were shown sitting by a warm fire. After a few holiday greetings from the candidate, the two kids then in turn said, “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays.”

My friend was so enthusiastic about the cleverness of the message that for a moment I thought I’d missed something. I thought that surely my friend was not being so carried away by something no more clever than found on a greeting card. But that was it. There was nothing else. Like anyone else infatuated he had seen something amazing in the innocuous.

I can fully understand not wanting to vote for the Republicans. If I thought there was a worthwhile alternative who could actually get elected I just might do the same thing. What I do not understand is the enthusiasm of Obama’s fans. He is indeed charming and great at giving speeches that convey all sorts of happy feelings. He has a knack for getting you to want to please him. However, I’d like more reason to vote for someone to be the most powerful man in the world more substantial than a slightly more sophisticated version of “He’s just so dreamy!”

Love Your Neighbor

2008-05-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

“When I think of a soldier fulfilling his office by punishing the wicked, killing the wicked, and creating so much misery, it seems an un-Christian work completely contrary to Christian love. But when I think how it protects the good and keeps and preserves wife and child, house and farm, property, and honor and peace, then I see how precious and godly this work is.”
– Martin Luther

War causes conflict. While it is obviously true that war itself is conflict, it is ironically true that war, as a concept, causes incredible conflict. Few issues cause people in the church to get more agitated than questions of war and peace. For some, there are few ideas more reprehensible than the suggestion that anyone could knowingly seek another’s death regardless of the circumstances. For others, it is just as disgusting to propose that mortal injustice be allowed to progress unhindered. To the Pacifist a “Just War Theory” makes about as much sense as a “Just Rape Theory.” To his opponent Pacifism is nothing less than complicity with evil through neglect.

While it might be earnestly hoped by all that the subject of war would simply be a matter for historians, violent conflict has a nasty habit of intruding its way into the present. A few minutes in any bookstore will reveal that war has been a part of history as long as histories have been written. A few minutes in a newspaper will likewise inform anyone that battle does not seem to be a passing fad. War is far too common a human practice for the church to maintain some kind of respectful neutrality.

If the church is going to be the church then she must establish her positions based on what God’s word says about this issue. With such a central issues that cuts to the core of justice, humanity, and love we cannot simply rely on our fallen dispositions to tell us where to go. Whatever logical or pragmatic reasons can be marshaled by either side of this debate ultimately account for nothing if the Bible does not speak in accord with that position.

As nice and straight-forward as that might sound, finding what the Bible teaches in this matter is much more complicated. There are people who believe the Bible who are on either side of this issue. There are those for whom Pacifism is the fulfillment of prophecy in the Bible that the lion will lie down with the lamb and Christ's first coming has changed everything. On the opposite end are those who would argue that the Just War perspective takes the Bible seriously since it does not place a false dichotomy between Israel and the church or forget that Christ has not yet returned.

It would be helpful if somewhere in the book of Hezekiah or in III Peter we could find a list of circumstances under which war was allowed or perhaps where it stated in no uncertain terms that war is never allowed. Since there is no such verse we are left to infer from what is said what God would say to his church. While this can seem quite intimidating there is a potential short-cut to the truth. Since Pacifism is necessarily absolutist, any exception to a total prohibition on warfare in the Bible can be its Achilles' Heel. That is to say, one cannot be a half-Pacifist. If it can be shown that the Bible does not condemn war in all situations, then the debate has moved from Pacifism vs. Just War into an in-house debate within Just War Doctrine about whether this or that war is in fact just. Pacifism could fail by a simple process of elimination

Granted, this is a negative argument in that we’re looking for a passage where something does not happen, but the point still stands that if there is any place where the Bible does not prohibit war entirely then Pacifism cannot then be said to be biblical. Putting aside the Old Testament for a moment since many Pacifists would reasonably object that the wars of ancient Israel do not apply to Christianity, are there any places where the New Testament does not condemn war wholeheartedly? Or, are there any places where soldiers or a government’s use of lethal force is not treated as sinful?

In Luke 3 John the Baptist is asked by a series of people how they can properly repent as he is calling them to do. Some average Joe’s are told to practice generosity. Tax collectors are told to stop taking more than they are allowed to collect. Some soldiers also come to the prophet to ask his counsel. If the Pacifist position is correct, then this would be a perfect place for God to speak into the lives of these men (and to us as well) to turn them from their entirely wicked profession. Yet the man whom Jesus said was greater than any other born of women tells them only to stop oppressing people and be content with their pay. This is hardly a solid rebuke of their job choice.

Later on in Acts 10 we find the dramatic first inclusion of Westerners into the church with the conversion a Roman soldier named Cornelius. This man had already been follower of God, but in this passage the Apostle Peter brings the message of Christ. Once again, if the Pacifist position is the biblical view then here was a perfect moment to hear that the arrival of Christ had so transformed the situation that while soldiers were a part of the Old Covenant there was no longer any place for them. Yet Peter says none of these things.

None of these soldiers in the gospel or in Acts are shown as men like the Pharisees who needed to change their hearts or like the tax collectors who needed to change their jobs. Whatever sins they might have been guilty of there is no mention here that what they do for a living is incompatible in and of itself with the biblical message. Prostitutes, idolaters, fornicators and all sorts of other sinners are called upon to repent of their actions. Soldiers are never issued such an order.

Later on in the epistles we find both Peter and Paul addressing the place of the state in human society. In contrast to the Pacifist position, not only do the Apostles not condemn the government for using lethal force, they call such a state the minister of God. In I Peter 3 we are told that as Christians we are to be subject to the state as it is sent by God to punish evil. Peter offers no side-bar to tell us "except when they use force." Likewise in Romans 13 Paul specifically states that part of the government's role in being God’s minister is that it “bears the sword.” You don’t use swords to gently chide someone. Swords kill. If Pacifism is biblical then this passage makes no sense.

I have no illusions that this little essay will spell an end to this question. Christians have been debating Pacifism vs. Just War since the time of the early church so I’m quite sure there is a way of explaining away the lack of comments in the passages mentioned here. However, the question then must be asked as to why such a lack needs to be explained away in the first place. If Pacifism is biblical, then why, among the many times that biblical writers spoke to or about soldiers or a government’s use of lethal force did no one tell them to stop? If war is sinful at all times and there is no place for it in Christ’s kingdom, then why did none of the inspired writers feel it necessary to tell anyone about it?

War is dreadful. There is no question about that. But just as the Fall of Adam has brought in disease, and God has raised up doctors to keep it from running amuck, so has the Fall brought in chaos to human society and God has likewise raised up the state as his minister to prevent our more tragic impulses from running the tables. To stand for justice in the face of wickedness by taking up the sword is not contrary to loving my neighbor but its fulfillment.

Auto-Compassion

2008-05-23T08:55:00.001-07:00

I’m sure you’ve been in this position. It's rush hour or some other heavy time on the road, and you need to cut into traffic. Maybe you’re trying to enter the main flow from a parking lot or it’s that you’re in the north bound lane and you need to cross the SUV infested south bound lane to get to your destination. All you want is for some kind soul to see your predicament and give you the space to get through. Particularly if you are running late already the anxiety of being stuck and the relief at being let through are palpable. When a sympathetic driver finally does slow up to let you through you are able to send a genuinely grateful wave and smile to your savior.

Now let’s spin things around a bit and say that you’re not the one trying to get across traffic but the one in the position to help. You can see the stricken face of your fellow commuter, and you fully understand his plight because it was just yesterday that you were trying to do the very same thing. With mercy on your mind you slow up and let the distraught soul cut through your lane full of the knowledge that a little sacrifice on your part has helped out with another’s day immensely. The wave and smile you get in return is more than enough to drown out the sounds of ungrateful honking from those behind you less interested in compassion. Despite their impatience, you know you’ve done the right thing.

One more time let’s change the perspective. This time you are not the driver in need of help, nor the gracious commuter who gives the help. This time you are the guy stuck in traffic behind this sweet affair who gets the short end of the generosity stick. Just like the person cutting across traffic, you have places to be. Perhaps like the first person you too are running late. While you sympathize with situation you’re not too certain how it is that the one person’s need outweighs your own. Maybe you are one of those who lets out a not so subtle honk of displeasure, and the smug smile on the face of the benefactor does not then raise in you thoughts of mercy or compassion. The plans of yourself and the dozens of others similarly trapped in line are being held up for the convenience of one and the self-satisfaction of another as two or even three lanes of traffic are held up long enough for the single car to make it across.

Like I said, there is not a one among us who hasn’t been in each of these places. Sometimes there is just no way to get where we need to be without doing some serious Frogger reenactments, and sometimes we are the one stuck with the consequences of the Good Samaritans among us. If we are one of these two then we can only play with the hand we are dealt. Our decisions at that point are dependent upon others. However, if we are the second sort of person, then we are deciding for the rest where the line between compassion and functionality should run.

While I applaud the desire to help the person in need, I have to wonder if when we reach out like that who it is that we are thinking of. If our desire is to help others get where they need to go, then how much are we paying attention to those who are impeded by our own good works? By what standard are we deciding that helping the person we can see is worth hurting those we can’t see? Sure, we all feel great when we are able to see that smile of gratitude on the face of those we help, but what about the frustration we cause to those now inconvenienced? Particularly when we feel righteous indignation when we hear the honks of those less merciful and understanding, are we motivated by the pleasure we get from “doing the right thing” or by actually working for the common good? In our driving habits, in our daily lives, and in our political choices, how often is our determination centered not so much upon the actual good accomplished, but upon the short-term feeling of enlightenment and superiority found in the easy good work of being nice rather than the hard choices that often come with doing the real right thing?

Senatorial Choices

2008-03-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

The other day in class one of my professors was talking about the religious consequences of the American Revolution. Like any of the rest of us I knew that when the Founding Fathers established the new government with the US Constitution they made sure that there would be no National Church to which everyone would be compelled to belong. Not only this, but there would be no tax money going support otherwise struggling organizations.

What I hadn’t thought of was how this would encourage all sorts of religious diversity. Think of it like this. When everyone has to go to a particular church, the pastor is going to get paid no matter who shows up so there is little incentive for the leaders of that group to tailor their message or presentation to suit the desires or needs of the people in the pews. However, once the First Amendment was enacted your American Everyman or woman could go to whatever church, synagogue, or matinee movie they felt like. If ministers wanted people to come to their church they would have to be offering something that the people wanted to hear.

Every Sunday my wife and I put this freedom into effect. We get up earlier than we’d otherwise have to so that we can travel the half-hour across Chicago to go to the church of our choice. Now there are a lot of options for us that are a whole lot closer to where we live. We go to all the extra effort because we can find at our church those things that we want to hear. Thanks to the religious freedom enshrined in the Constitution we are able to live according to our own choice.

I say all this because apparently my Senator is not aware that this freedom exists. He seems to be under the impression that you cannot choose where you go to church. Just this morning he gave a beautiful speech in which he responded at length to the many questions arising from the unusual sermons of his former pastor. I truly mean that it was a beautiful speech. The man is a master of his craft. Senator Obama’s craft is, like that of any other politician, is to tap into the emotional undercurrents of his audience and carry them along with the vision he lays out.

Today the vision he hoped to impart was that while his longtime spiritual mentor had indeed said some drastic things, the Senator strongly disapproved. In the midst of some specific criticisms, Senator Obama refused to completely abandon his longtime friend whom he said was “like family.” To illustrate his reasoning he told the audience of his white grandmother. He said he knew she loved him dearly, but at the same time it caused him pain when she occasionally used ethnic slurs or confessed to fearing black men. Just as he could not deny his grandmother simply because she sometimes said regrettable things, he, for the same reason, could not now abandon his pastor.

Now this was powerful rhetoric. The Senator deftly connected with his audience by getting us all to consider how many family members or friends we have that go around saying things that we really wish they hadn’t. Anyone reasonable listening is forced to concede that they wouldn’t kick granny to the curb no matter how loony she might sound sometimes. If we think it’s okay that we continue to associate with those who “transgress” taboos, then we have to grant the same consideration to the candidate.

However, before we all jump on the Obandwagon, let’s think about this a minute. Senator Obama has gotten things a little bit confused. He has confused the nature of his relationship with his grandmother with the one he has with his pastor. His grandmother is his grandmother because she is his mother’s mother. His pastor is his pastor, however, because Senator Obama chose him.

As the candidate suggests we all put up with all sorts of nonsense from those around us. From our families we don’t really have much choice. We don’t get to decide who we spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with. Sometimes we are lucky in this respect and sometimes . . . not so lucky. Yet even in this sacred space there are limits to what we will tolerate. If Cousin Luigi shows up on Turkey Day and starts ranting about how “the Jews” are out to get him most of us are going to be hoping that he doesn’t get invited next year.

The same principle goes for our friends or other social relationships. The only difference is we have a choice when it comes to them. We have an acceptable level of disagreement within which we will tolerate, but beyond which we’ll cut off the relationship. Each person’s line is going to be in a different place, but once it’s crossed we will go our own way. For most people this applies to our use of religious freedom.

Senator Obama has said that Rev. Wright is like family to him. If this were literally the case then his association could be excused. As it is, he has used the same religious freedom that I use each Sunday to go to the church of his choice. If I were to show up one Sunday morning and my pastor were to launch into openly political advocacy, as Rev. Wright has of late, I would seriously question my continuing attendance. If he were to shout to the cheering crowd, calling on God to damn America, as Rev. Wright has done, I would never darken their door again.

Of all the churches among what must be the hundreds available in the Chicagoland area, Obama has chosen one whose beliefs are drastically inconsistent with the vast majority of the American electorate. He says this is not something we need to be concerned about. He wants us to believe that the pastor who ministered to him for a decade or more does not represent his views. He wants us to believe that just as we put up with the unfortunate remarks of our friends and families, he puts up his mentor’s raging against Israel and America for the same reason he continued to love his grandmother. Apparently, he also wants us to believe that his pastor’s desire that “God Damn America!” is an acceptable disagreement. Somehow I am not comforted.

Vote for Hope!!!

2008-03-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

Good Morning,

My name is Joe Bamah, and I’d like to be your airline pilot for this flight. Now I know there are a lot you out there who aren’t too happy with the way previous pilots have been flying us around. I know you’ve been hoping for a new way of flying. I am here because I too believe we can change the very way airline flights are done.

I know there are a lot of cynical people out there who want to scare you by saying that someone with more experience flying planes should be the pilot, but I ask you, what has all their years up there in the cockpit done for them? Has it meant that your plane has arrived on time? There are those out there without hope. They say that my flight simulator “experience” isn’t enough. But has their “experience” given you flights free from turbulence?

I offer you hope for change you can believe in. I haven’t been contaminated by the hours of association with the comforts of the captain’s seat. I haven’t had my hope drained by countless take-offs and landings. I won’t be held captive by their so-called laws of aeronautics. I will fly us through beautiful skies with the smoothness made possible by a complete lack of experience.

Vote for Joe Bamah. I am not a pilot so you can trust me to fly.

Errors of Judgment

2007-09-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago I gave a talk about the dangers of Utopianism. I said that those who have a simplistic view of life’s problems can end up being even more destructive in their attempts to make things better than those who act with malicious intent. ‘The Road to Hell’ and all that. After my talk a friend asked me if I thought that The Anglo-American venture in Iraq should be categorized in the same fashion. At the time I dodged the question by saying that we were too close to the situation to be able so see what the final outcome will be. After all if a few specific battles in 1864 gone differently President Lincoln could have lost the election and history would be dramatically different. In the same way a few things changing in Iraq will greatly affect how future generations view this campaign.

A few weeks ago this same friend asked me the same question and asked if the intervening time had led me to alter my answer. For the most part it remains foolish to forecast what the end result of the war will be. However, we can look to some things that could have done better and could in turn have made our little game of guess-work go more smoothly.

The main criticism that I have had of W, Rumsfeld et al has been that they confused what it would take to defeat Hussein with what it would take to run Iraq. For the first point they were absolutely correct. Despite all the criticism to the contrary before they went in, they managed to take on the largest army in the Arab world, advance 200 miles in 4 days in the face of opposition, and take the enemy capital in three weeks of combat. That campaign, led by Gen. Tommy Franks, was brilliant. I've heard of Iraqis who had only the propaganda to hear of the war who were absolutely shocked that morning in April of 2003 to see American tanks rolling through their streets. They'd only heard about Iraqi victory after Iraqi victory. This campaign cost "only" a few dozen American lives and few Iraqi lives as well. It was a textbook military action.

However, to defeat Hussein's army was only one thing. To rebuild Iraq was another. Whether it was a naiveté about the goodness of your everyday Iraqi or a misplaced insistence not to play the role of the conquering foreigner, The Anglo-American forces failed to exploit their advantage. Instead of maintaining the perception of invincibility created by their charge up the Tigris and Euphrates they soon were perceived as first indifferent and then as impotent in the face of the chaos in the power vacuum. They managed to cause far more damage by playing Mr. Nice Guy than had they been a terror to behold. People are not nice, and it was foolish for them to think that their hatred of Hussein was the same thing as a love for their fellow man.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22349336-2703,00.html

Either of two things could have avoided this situation. The first, and least likely, was that the UN could have organized massive peacekeeping forces. This was unlikely for two reasons. The first is that the UN is perhaps the most useless organization in the world when it comes to conflict resolution. You might think that they would have learned their lesson out of the 90's with the Balkans and Rwanda. UN forces there sat and watched as Serbs and Hutus killed their neighbors. That this hope is a shadow is shown by the UN's paltry response to Darfur in which their peacekeeping force amounts to 26,000 troops that cannot interfere, but can only "observe." However, we never got to see even this pathetic effort. The UN pulled out the first time they got hit. How they expect to resolve conflict if flight is their first response is beyond me.

The other thing that could have helped was the Iraqi Army. Many argued that just as the German Wehrmacht had to be de-Nazified in 1945 so the Iraqi Army needed to be de-Baathified. This makes sense. You can't end a tyrannical regime by keeping the tyrants in power. The question remains is whether the baby went out with the bathwater. After the war in Europe, many who had been not only foot soldiers but also officers ended up in the new West German armed forces. They were able to help build up their country from the chaos their leaders had unleashed. Has our zeal to rid the land of Hussein’s cronies in the Baath Party led us to leave the Iraqi military without teeth.

Without an effective military you don’t have a nation. You have a bunch of people who are little but prey. Until there is an Iraqi Army strong enough on its own to police its own cities and to defend its borders on its own we can’t leave. So long as we are doing this job for them we leave ourselves vulnerable to pressures from other regions of the world. Iraq must stand.

Now many folks have come to just this conclusion and have decided that the best course for America is to cut our losses and get out before more of our blood is spilt. They say we started this mess by going in and the best thing for all concerned is to get out now. Unfortunately this has the same logic as someone kicking a hole in a ship and deciding that going back to his cabin is the best thing to do.

The answer is not go away and pretend it isn’t happening. Many on the Left have let their visceral hatred of the President blind them to the fact they’d be far less comfortable were radical Islam to become the dominant force in the world. Many on the Right have joined in with the short-sighted calculations of those who cannot see beyond next year’s election. The first group pretends that the radicals will sit down quietly and join Greenpeace if we leave, and the second group pretends that preempting our immediate pain will forestall greater pains later on. Both see this deep and global conflict in terms of American political jousting. Do we really think Bin Laden cares which freedom-of-religion and equality-of-gender advocate is in the White House?

This is a war that must be won, and to be won it must be fought. Some of us like to think that fighting is not a nasty, disgusting business. But there simply is no clean war. There is no war where civilians don’t die and soldiers don’t kill. The dangers of Utopianism that were disgusting two years ago stand still. If we withdraw we will be turning millions of souls over to the affections of those who consider broadcasting beheadings of relief workers to be a service to God. What choice do we have? We must, in the words of The Untouchables’ Elliot Ness, never stop fighting till the fight is done. We have to stay there and fight until no one can say that we were driven out. The smallest window otherwise will be a golden ticket inviting attack after attack after attack. God help us.

Bumper Sticker Ideologues

2007-08-11T21:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve often thought that there must be some negative correlation between bumper stickers and intelligence. It seems that the greater the number of bumper stickers to be seen on a car’s back end, the less intelligence can be found thereby expressed. It doesn’t matter which end of the political or cultural spectrum is being advocated, bumper sticker ideologues seem to try to make up for the shallowness of their thought-life by the sheer depth of their plasterings.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not actually against bumper stickers as such. I think it’s great if you want to make a joke on your car or support your Alma mater with some adhesive space. I’m just against trying to make wide ranging statements about life in the world on an 18 by 4 inch billboard while traveling at 70 miles per hour. You simply can’t make an argument like that. It is not so much that I disagree with this or that opinion that you have, but how substantive can you be on an over sized index card?

For instance, take the example of Einstein was a Vegetarian: Think about it. This, I suppose, is designed to connect Einstein’s intelligence with the rather dubious dietary practice of ignoring the fact that we have the same sorts of teeth in our jaws as do our friendly neighborhood carnivores. Aside from the question of what being an expert in Astrophysics has to do with knowing whether Bessie the cow is our friend or our food, you kind of wonder what our vegetarian friends would make of a bumper sticker relating the ardent vegetarianism of someone born just ten years later and from the same neck of the woods as Ole Albert. Hitler Was a Vegetarian: Think About It. That’s right; Ole Adolph was a vegetarian, non-smoker, and non-drinker. I’ll bet Bessie seems a tad tastier now, eh?

Another of my favorites is, You Can’t Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms. This has the advantage of sounding oh-so important without going to the trouble of saying anything at all. Of course you can’t hug a child with nuclear arms! There are plenty of other things in this world that you can’t hug a child with. Buicks for example: They simply are not huggable at all. It’s just that Buicks are not designed to hug children. They are designed to be a way you can spend far too much money on gas. Nuclear arms are likewise not designed to hug children. They are designed to be something so unimaginably awful that no one in his right mind will get up from the negotiating table and risk open war. They are designed to make damned sure that that huggable child can grow up to create inane bumper stickers of her own one day.

Lately I have come across a couple of stickers related to just how God fits in with politics. The first one is fairly innocuous. It simply says, God Bless All Nations – No Exceptions. I’m guessing that this is a response to those who, for some crazy reason, want God to bless America. However, there are others that seem to think that wishing good for one’s own people over and above those who are not is a bad thing. Well, I’m sorry folks. I am more interested in the good of Americans than I am the good of anybody else! I also more interested that my nephew wins his basketball game than I am that your kid does. This doesn't mean I hate your kid. It just means that I love those connected to me more so than I do those who are not. My love for America supersedes my love for some random human just as my love for that same random human overrides my love for a shark who’d like to eat him.

The second one just misses being redundant, but ends up being just plain condescending. It goes something like; God is not a Republican or a Democrat. Yes, thank you very much. I had already gotten the impression that God was around for a little while before Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson started running for office. The thing is, the way I just wrote it isn’t how it shows up on a car near you. What it actually says is;

God is not a Republican or a Democrat.

So what does this sticker actually say? It says that you are really ticked off when you people confuse GOP and GOD. Fair enough. If each party was listed equally then you’d be making a fair statement that we could all get on board with. But it also says that you don’t think that this is a lesson that Democrats need to hear. It says that you are either so naïve or arrogant that you don’t think this is a street that goes both ways. If you don’t think Democrats do this too then just sit and listen to religious liberals opine at a party. They are as disgusting as any Pat Robertson clone ever dreamed of being.

So please, if you want to put something on the back of your car, just make sure it’s short and sweet and preferably tries to be no more serious than the space allows. But if you do want to make a cultural statement, and you actually think the world is more complex than a five word essay, then do me a favor. Do what reasonable people with a need to emote do: make a blog where you can pontificate to your heart’s content. I think we’ll all appreciate your car’s back side more in the end.

The Beauty of Life

2007-06-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

In a book of pictures I once saw a beautifully ugly face. It was of a woman from somewhere in Asia. There was something appealing about this poor woman’s face that was fractured with ancient wrinkles and a magnificent smile. Her face was not one that will ever grace the cover of Madison Avenue’s magazine covers with their perfect beauty, but there was something in that grin that was more flawless than that of some gangly fashion model with air-brushed skin. There was something incredibly beautiful about seeing a smile break out onto someone’s face and seeing them giggle at something even if you have no idea what they are laughing about.

No doubt you’ve seen little moments like that in your daily lives. Last November I was at my wife’s family’s house for Thanksgiving. She has a niece that was just a year old. She is a chubby little thing. The niece that is, not my wife. Little Aurora doesn’t know that much about social interactions just yet. She doesn’t know how to make a clever remark or to tell a joke that will capture everyone’s attention, yet that didn’t stop her from holding everyone’s eye captive for the whole weekend. She brought incredible joy to her audience simply by cackling at simple pleasures like riding “horseback” on her aunt or seeing her uncle make faces at her. There is something so wonderful and right about seeing a child giggle uncontrollably.

Think of all the art museums you’ve been to and the utter awe you feel at those times. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard that if you go to the Sistine Chapel in Rome you have to look at the ground. I’m sure the floor is perfectly nice, but that is not what is meant. What I’ve heard is that the efforts and skill of Michelangelo’s ceiling are just so astounding that it is more than a human mind can handle. Think of that! Something that a human being can make can be so incredible that it can only be taken in by small doses! We’re talking about the artistic equivalent of staring at the Sun!

Have you ever had a moment like that? Have you ever seen a work of art, or maybe read a book, that moves you down to the core of your being? It doesn’t have to be a hoity-toity work like Da Vinci or something found in a museum. Where have you seen human craftsmanship so carefully applied that you just have to stand back in awe?I have an example that you probably won’t think of. I’ve worked in the restaurant business for something like ten years now. The most amazing thing to me about working there has nothing to do with my job at all. I wait tables. That’s really nothing more than sweet-talking people into buying more food than they want to buy. What is amazing to me is watching the cooks work when it is incredibly busy.

The next time you go to a restaurant on a Friday or Saturday night, if the place has an open kitchen where you can see the cooks, go and watch them work while you wait for your table. If it is a good kitchen you will be amazed. I remember when I was working right in front of them how efficient they can be. You’ve got five or six guys running at full speed in very close quarters while carrying around things that are literally flaming hot. They are able to keep track of all these orders and all the minutiae that go into preparing your food. When I see them get into their zone I am astonished that no one gets hurt, no one misses a step, and no one misses an order. It is a work of art.

Not all works of art are found in museums or are the product of any human mind. Some of my favorite sorts of things of beauty are to be found in the natural world. You can see there the immense glories of the stars and the planets. I have always been a bit of a space fiend so I am a little biased, but sometime go someplace far away from the city. Here in town you can see maybe ten stars in the nighttime sky. Go some place far out into the countryside and just look up into the deep, deep blackness. Look at the diamonds of brightest burning stars so far away from our eyes. Look at the Milky Way band itself as it hovers over you and around you. When I see such things I feel so very small and so very fortunate at the same time just to be able to see and enjoy them.

When I was a little boy my family traveled to Switzerland several times. There are few places on our spinning globe so wonderful just to be in than that tiny country. When would arrive my body would still be operating on North American time. While this left me in the uncomfortable position of falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, it did afford me the opportunity of waking up before the sun first peeked out from the night. It was at those times that I saw what to this day is one my fondest memories of stunning beauty.

I would wake up early and go out on one of the many balconies. At first it would be the same twinkling majesty that I mentioned a moment ago. Then ever so gradually the blackness would slip into a pale, pink glow. After a few minutes the rose-tint would bleed into a deeper shade nearly red in its intensity. The coloring would soon drip onto the highest peaks of the mountains around me and would pour down until the heights would be ablaze with light while the valleys remained in darkness. I will never forget those times.

I truly wish that all the scenes of nature that I have seen were so inspiring. But you know as well as I do that ‘Mother Nature’ often acts in a way that is hardly nurturing. I believe it was Woody Allen who said that nature is not ‘mother.’ He said it was a restaurant where everybody eats everybody. We have all seen instances only in these past few years where the gentle hand of nature was one that smothered her children rather than one that lifted us up.

It was two and a half years ago that I was in Chicago with my family for Christmas. I don’t remember if it was late that night or early on the morning of the 26th when the reports started coming in, but I do remember that I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A massive tidal wave had swept through parts of East Asia leaving hundreds dead in its wake. A day or so after that the hundreds had turned into thousands. I couldn’t believe that as many as 7,000 people had died from a natural disaster. Soon that tragic number climbed higher and higher still. People from as far away as Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sumatra lay dead in their homes or lost to the sea forever. It is said that around quarter of a million people lost their lives on that single day. God alone knows how many have died since from water-borne disease and malnutrition. One of the greatest natural disasters in human history had come and gone and there was no one to blame.

Closer to home, this past year’s quiet storm season could easily beguile us into forgetting the devastation we saw in our own backyard just last year. I remember watching the early reports of the incipient hurricane Katrina as she boiled up from the south Atlantic and churned her way across to our shores. With all the wonders of our most magnificent technology there was nothing we could do to stop a major city from being wiped out.

Neither our compassion nor our power could do anything to stop the devastation. We all wanted something or someone to blame. Everyone from local municipal officials to the President of the United States was strung up in the minds of the entire world as we demanded an answer as to why it could have happened. We knew that this sort of thing was not supposed to happen. How can a natural thing be bad?

A few paragraphs back I mentioned how amazing it is to see what can happen when you have a group of skilled human souls. I think it impresses us all to see a master with his craft. But what is our reaction when we see a master at his craft when that craft is destruction? How do we respond when we see great effort and skill poured into something revolting? We’d all be more comfortable thinking that great skill and great intelligence were somehow mutually exclusive to great evil. Tragically, we’d all be fooling ourselves if we thought that this was so. We’ve all seen too much to think that this is so.

Think for a moment of these past 100 years. How much effort was put into butchering millions and millions? We all know of the Nazis and their death camps. We’ve seen enough documentaries to each teach a class on the horrors that went on during those sickening years. At least for me I think that I have seen so many such things that I lose touch with the reality that happened. I forget how very much care was put into making the death machines do their deadly deeds. I forget that they had to arrange train schedules to bring the supplies of gas into the camps. I forget that someone built those morbid showers knowing how impure a purpose they had.

I see the amazing technical ability of the German people put to such a use and something inside me screams that something good has been twisted. I look at those events, as well as the horrifyingly common fellow examples, and I don’t know what to do or to say. Just as there is something wondrous about watching a group of skilled people work towards something beautiful, there is something ugly about seeing that same sort of intelligence warped into an amazing horror.

You can see this same sort of ugliness with the same sort of people that I spoke of so glowingly at the start. I don’t mean the great evil that otherwise beautiful people can create. That is what I was referring to just before. I mean you can see the effect of such ugliness in the lives on the receiving end of such works. Think again of the beauty of seeing a little child at play. There is to me a joy simply in watching little kids play.

Sometimes I think I’d like just going to a playground to take pleasure in the uncomplicated joy of a three year old slipping down a slide. But I don’t go hang out at playgrounds watching little kids. It isn’t because there would be anything wrong with me doing so as such. However, you know as well as I do why I can’t do that. I cannot enjoy the simple pleasures of children at play because there are men who look like me and talk like me who take pleasure in children. They take pleasure in children in a way that makes the most stern of us grow sick as little else can.

Have you ever spoken to someone who was abused as a child? That’s a silly question. Unless you’ve never met more than two people you have met someone who is forever marred. The stats tell us that something like one out of every three girls you meet and one out of every four or five boys has been stained by the most twisted of desires. Speaking to such a one is heartbreaking. You can see their very soul shattered. Women who will never grow to trust a man, while they will always be desperate to do just that. Males who never quite become men, but you cannot call them boys because their innocence was ripped from their spirits long ago.

There is not a one among you who will look at such a situation and say to me, “That’s okay. It’s just a part of life.” Every one of you will have seen in your life someone who will never be okay because of what someone has done to them. You have all seen someone who will never quite recover from that death in the family early in life. You have all watched as someone crumpled under the weight of a sickness that only gets worse.

We all have that one thing that angers us to no end. We might not have seen much grief in our own lives or even in the lives of those we know. But I’d bet that there is something for each of you that makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs that something isn’t right. Something is not the way it is supposed to be! You don’t have to be told by some abstract philosophy or some religious text that for an adult to pour out his sexual desires on a child is wrong. You don’t need me up here to tell you that human ingenuity should be used to help others and not to devise more and creative ways to inflict pain in those around you. You don’t need some intellectual justification to be sick to your stomach when you see body after body after body floating in the waters of New Orleans or Indonesia.

Think of these things. The next time you hear some self-confessed expert tell you that it is arrogant to make moral judgments, think about these things. The next time you hear some egghead tell you that each culture determines its own standards of morality, think about these things. Remember that those folks living up in their ivory towers or their monasteries have isolated themselves by layers of arguments or repeated mantras from the nastiness that we all live in. Remember that there is such a thing as beauty and such a thing as evil and that we cannot ignore the existence of either just because they make us uncomfortable.

Bickering Over the Bomb

2007-03-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

Each year as each August steams its way along we find ourselves treated to yet another round of debate about an event now sixty years past. Along with the more understandable harangues from various voices of our Japanese friends, newspapers and documentaries over here end up re-hashing many of the same arguments about America’s use of Atomic weapons as were brought out during the previous year’s anniversaries. While those attacking the bombs are without a doubt sincere in their hatred of slaughter I have never found most of their arguments convincing.

Arguments against the bomb come down to two basic complaints. The first is that the weapons employed by the United States in August of 1945 were far too vicious and indiscriminate to be considered morally legitimate. The second is that even had this first question not been a factor, Japan was at that point so devastated that the atomic attacks were superfluous to the point of maliciousness.

The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 120,000 people on August 6 and 9 respectively. Pictures and anecdotes from those horrific days can still make one’s stomach turn. Children turned to dust with their sheltering mothers hovering over them like charcoal statues. There can be no denying that the American weapons were both vicious and indiscriminate. These were cities that were attacked and not fleets or fortifications. Even had the target been solely comprised of well-armed warriors, can we really justify such a level of slaughter?

I have always thought that those who object to nuclear weapons because they kill lots of people must not know very much war. They don’t seem to realize just how nasty so-called conventional weapons can be. The immediate historical context of these events puts the lie to such a complaint. In the course of World War Two, somewhere between fifty and seventy-five million people were killed. This means that of this morbid total, over 99% managed to find themselves butchered by “conventional” weapons. Just few short months before Hiroshima up to 130,000 Tokyo residents as well as 100,000 citizens of Dresden, Germany were burned alive by conventional weapons each in a single night.

This scale of death is not the sole property of modern industrialized warfare. On August 2, 216 BC some 50,000 Roman legionnaires were slain by nothing more complex than swords, spears and arrows. Cortez annihilated the Aztec Empire with primitive muskets and cannon. Search through the pages and history and you will find time and again the massive slaughter of both soldier and civilian alike on a scale that will make the stoutest among us queasy from the toll. Humanity had been shredding its own numbers viciously and indiscriminately long before the invention of “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy.” If you are going to protest the human cost of weapons, you need to begin a little farther back on the technological chain.

My question to these earnest protesters is why aren’t you there for these others who have fallen in war? Are those who are killed by atomic weapons somehow more dead than those killed by guns and knives? What is about napalm and high explosives that you find so appealing that you give it a pass for its killing punch? Why don’t you protest the existence of machetes after its prominence in the killing of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994?

The next complaint about the bombs’ use is that of its utter pointlessness. The argument goes that by 1945 Japan was beaten. The combination of British progress through Southeast Asia and American advances across the Pacific Islands left “The Land of the Rising Sun” with no option but surrender. The argument goes on to say that the coming American invasions of the Japanese homeland which was slated for November of 1945 and March of 1946 would not have been as costly as is often advertised.

A corollary of this point focuses on the role of the Soviet Union in this affair. Strange as it may seem in retrospect, while the Russians were deeply involved the war against Germany, they had thus far left Japan to the English-speaking world and the Dutch. This created the odd situation that central members of the Axis and the Allies continued to have full diplomatic relations with one another. Taking advantage of this peculiar situation, Japanese emissaries sought to find a way out of the war by using the USSR as a go-between.

It is further argued that only reason that the US was so determined to use the bomb was as an opening salvo in the imminent Cold War. The reasoning is that as it was clear that the post-war world would be dominated by the Russo-American rivalry and so we were directing the bomb not as a warning to Tokyo to surrender but to Moscow to behave.

Finally it is pointed out that it had already been agreed among the Allies that since Germany was now no longer a threat, the Soviet Union would use its now idle military to neutralize Japanese forces in China. They fulfilled this promise on August 8, 1945 with a massive invasion of Manchuria that crushed the largest segments of the Japanese Army still in the field. Today representatives of the Russian and Japanese militaries are adamant that it was this action, and not the American atomic attacks, which induced Japan to surrender on August 14.

These are serious charges. If the critics are correct then America is guilty of butchering tens of thousands of people for no better reason than a desire to throw her weight around. For the most part the facts cannot be denied. I wonder though whether or not this is the only conclusion possible.

The fact that Japan was already defeated by time we dropped the bomb is a strange argument to make about war in 1945. I am sure that the hundreds of thousands of American, British and Russians who died in Europe in the war’s last months would have been comforted by the fact that Germany was already beaten. The Nazis did not stop fighting their lost war even when the Red Army was swarming all over Berlin and thoughts of victory were supplanted by dreams of a “noble” death. Why do we think that the Japanese would have been any different?

Those who would say so have to argue with two massive battles of that same year. Of the some 22,000 Japanese who had garrisoned Iwo Jima before the American invasion only 212 surrendered. On the American side nearly 7,000 fell trying to take a speck in the ocean only 8 square miles in area. At Okinawa a few months later only 7,400 Japanese out of 130,000 defenders lived to see the end. As at Iwo Jima American losses were high with over 12,000 dead. In this battle, the first on native Japanese soil, approximately a quarter of the civilian population perished as well.

Does this sound like a nation who was prepared to give up? Whatever peace feelers the Japanese might have been sending Russia’s way it was war that they were preparing for. The civilian population was being geared up to oppose the expected American invasion with whatever weapons they could fashion. The military was getting psyched up for a final, noble stand. Their hope was that in the face of the inevitably massive casualties among the American forces should we land in Japan, the American populace would agree to more generous surrender terms.

Anyone who continues to doubt their intentions should consider one fact. On the night before their surrender announcement, military units in Tokyo attempted a coup to force the emperor to keep on fighting to the end. They had heard of his intentions and could not abide the thought of defeat. People at war are often neither logical nor practical. Any American invasion of the Japanese homeland would have been far more devastating than the atomic attacks were.

The Russian factor also fails to convince if for no other reason than such arguments are mutually exclusive. On the one hand we are to believe that the bombings were unnecessary since peace was being sought through the Soviets. Then we are also to believe the bombings were unnecessary because the same Soviets were about to invade China and thereby defeating Japan. Whatever hopes the Japanese may have cherished for peace, the Russians were not at all interested in finding it for them. Someone wiping out your remaining bargaining chips is hardly the person to go to for mediation.

The final complaint, that the United States had the ulterior motive of preemptively facing down the Soviets, simply doesn’t make sense. Let us say that Truman and Churchill were conniving scare the Russians into a more amendable post-war position. After all, we had the bomb and they didn’t. Unfortunately for critics this makes as much sense as saying that police shouldn’t use force to stop one criminal presently wreaking havoc since it can also be used to scare another criminal from starting his mayhem. That America wanted Russia stay in line does not negate the fact that we were already at war with a nation that was still willing and able to continue the fight.

120,000 immediately died in the atomic attacks of August 1945. Even those who survived did so only with intense physical and psychological scars. But these things in themselves cannot make these weapons into a category of obscenity all alone. Over thirty million civilians were killed in the years 1939-45 even without atomic weapons. Those who survived conventional weapons also did so only with deep scars. War is a nasty brutish business without exception. It is not fair to the millions who died in the “normal” ways of war to say that their deaths are somehow less tragic or obscene. They deserve more.

The Humane Society

2007-03-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

When we are born all our actions are passive. We must be fed, clothed, bathed and whatever else by another if these things are to happen at all. Even the few movements we do in fact do are instinctive. When an infant is presented with a breast, he turns to suckle even if it is not his or anyone else’s mother. When his bladder is full, empties it. If he is unhappy or uncomfortable, he cries. All this is done without thought, reflection or intention.

As he gets older he begins to take control of his world. The road to dominion starts with his own body. He learns that his hands are attached and that, to his delight, that he can move them at will. At first these movements are clumsy and often futile. Later on he learns that certain actions affect even those things that are not attached to his person. The bottle can be grasped; the rattle can be shaken and so on.

This goes further when he begins to pull the rug to bring the toy on it within reach. He can make mommy come when he cries or make daddy pick up the toy he has intentionally thrown on the ground. His actions make the world change. Soon language is added to his palette. By manipulating his body in his larynx, he can make his desires known and call attention to interesting things around him.

Throughout childhood this set of actions becomes less instinctual and more intentional. His shuffling steps become running and skipping and dancing. Grunts and cries turn to sentences and to songs. He trains his body to do what he wants even when his desires serve no bodily function.

Life becomes less and less natural. He eats things not as fuel in an indiscriminant fashion, but chooses which foods he wants to satisfy an internal desire. He learns that sometimes the most effective way to accomplish his desire is the indirect route. At first he stamps his foot and screams. Later he quietly pleads and puts his head on mommy’s shoulder. He learns how to seek the two in the bush in spite of having one in the hand by working for what can be rather than being satisfied with what is.

At first he plays with blocks without rhyme or reason. Soon he is building complex castles that he has never seen. First he plays with the dirt and the grass. Then his yard becomes a faraway land with battles and adventures. The more he distances himself mentally from being a cog in nature’s machine, then the more he is able to take from nature what he wants and to cause it to be what desires. Nature slowly becomes his.

As an adult this dominance grows. If he wants to feel alert and sharp, he drinks coffee. If he wants to feel relaxed and mellow, he drinks wine. Even his own state of mind becomes subject to his desires.

This is not his subservience to his own bio-chemical impulses, but an expression of nature and his own body as his possession. He must always obey nature in that he cannot drink a gallon of coffee or wine and still function. Yet it is this very submission to nature’s laws that allows him to make nature submit to him. He must sleep, but he sleeps when he chooses. It isn’t healthy to stand in the rain, but he does so if he chooses.

We all recognize that this self-conquest as maturity, but it is often indistinguishable from stupidity. If a man stands in the cold rain to catch a glimpse of a girl we call him a romantic, a fool, or maybe a pervert. This is exactly where humanity’s supernatural-ness comes to the fore. For people the choice of particular actions has a moral quality corresponding to their context.

If a male animal senses a female in heat then he must obey his instinct. No one thinks a dog is a fool or a pervert when he breaks into a yard to get at a bitch. No one thinks an ape is a fool if he passes on a gourmet meal later so he can have a banana now.

To be human means to cause your instincts to submit to your will and to manipulate nature in the same way. Yet it is for this aspect of our daily lives that the atheist has no answer. For him all is natural. We are not distinct in our desire for music from the animal’s desire for food.

By his reckoning we have no reason to judge a child’s actions as truly less mature. A child obeys his instinct and defiles himself where his sits without thought or care. This is natural. It is unnatural to discipline one’s body. Adults are the ones who are delusional to think there is a value to withholding a desired action.

To kill one’s rival as an animal is not sniffed at by their fellows or by us. To kill one’s rival as a child is prevented only by being weak and small. As an adult human, I am called upon to restrain my passions and instincts. I would be rightly condemned as outside the moral map if I obeyed every physical impulse.

Some might say that the natural attitude is exactly what is needed. They say we ought to get in touch with our inner child and to drop our taboos about sex. To them it is our separation from nature that has caused our misery and nature’s desolation.

But how many of really want to live in a world if we all acted “naturally?” Does the lion care if “no means no,” or if the lioness is not in the mood? Does he treat her as an equal and unique partner in spite of his physical superiority? Does he value the intrinsic value of his rivals’ cubs? No is the answer to all of these. He mates at his convenience. He lies on the grass while the lioness hunts for his food. He kills his rivals’ cubs without care as soon as their father is banished. Is this what we want?

Only humanity can have a humane society. It will not be by getting back to nature that we will achieve a good life. Nature’s society is brutal, selfish, and often cruel. Nature may have no place for hate, but it also has no place for love. It is only by the suspension of our own natural desires and, at times, the violation of natural laws that the concepts of goodness, beauty and love will ever have any meaning. Only by rising above ordinary nature can humanity be what we are naturally intended to be.

Driving Troubles

2007-01-23T19:50:00.000-08:00

Just a few nights ago my wife and I were returning from something or another. On our road home we had an unpleasant experience. As the cars coming from an entrance ramp were merging onto the main road a car in the right lane scooted over suddenly to make room for them. A little abrupt but awfully nice. This was surprising, but not too troubling. I simply moved over into the empty left lane and the scooter scooted back.

When things stabilized again I started to move back into the center lane. My exit was coming up and I anticipated no further difficulties. But as we slipped back into our previous lane we had a most unwelcome greeting from our fellow traveler as the car that had moved around earlier began to blare his horn at us most insistently.

As far as it goes this was excusable. The best I could figure we had each begun to move towards the center lane at the same time. I had not seen him in my mirror since he wasn’t there. This was warrant for a mild outbreak of honking to signal his displeasure at my apparent recklessness. For this fellow, however, mildness was not a virtue.

He began to honk his horn. He did not honk his horn and then go on about his business. He honked his horn and honked his horn and honked his horn. Apparently he was under the impression that we still had not gotten the proper impression of his most noble displeasure because as he continued to honk and honk and honk he felt it necessary to drive all the way up until he was riding up on our bumper.

I tapped my brakes once or twice to “encourage” him to move right along. This worked but only for a time as he came back again to honk up close and personal. I was preparing to continue on past our exit since it seemed this avid driver would likely follow us to continue his disclaimer in person, but this presented the problem of just how far down the road we would find ourselves before cooler heads prevailed.

In the end this gentleman (I am making a biased assumption against my own gender in this case. Idiotic ravings of anger seem to be a specialty of ours.) only stopped his admonition when he got off the interstate himself. Since this was barely beyond where we’d intended to exit ourselves we were at little loss for the whole affair. We got to get our groceries and he got to express himself.

It is this expression that continues to puzzle me. Just what was it that he was accomplishing? Had he simply wanted to politely warn me that I had veered into his lane, then a rather ordinary tapping of the horn would have been sufficient. Had he been somewhat put off by my driving habits and wished to inform me of his angst a few short seconds would have accomplished this accordingly. Had he done this I might have felt properly chastised and been far more careful and respectful of the drivers in my fair city.

But just what was he hoping to accomplish by raging his horn for a full one or two minutes while driving along at 65 miles an hour? He cannot have been thinking that blaring the horn would make me feel bad. We all know what it is like when someone yells at you far beyond the point of reason. Even if we’re being decried for a fair reason we stop listening after the first chapter.

When this guy went from a short bark of anger to an endless diatribe of rage he changed himself from a man speaking his mind to a slave to his own passions. He ceased to be acting with any sort of control of himself. Had he been in control he would have seen that a three second honk would have been far more shaming to me than his two minute ramble.

From that point on he ceased to be speaking to anyone but himself. He wasn’t honking because of what he thought it conveyed to me. He was honking because his rage felt good. It felt good to vent out some of the anger that he felt inside. Doing that does more than simply to vent your anger. It feeds the anger and increases the pleasure that you can take from it. Anger is a powerful and self-sustaining drug that is all too easy to become a willing worshiper of.

How do I know what this guy was feeling? I know for the same reason that anyone else knows about this truly guilty pleasure. When someone does something that annoys us or even genuinely enrages us nothing feels quite so good as to let all that passion slip up from our hearts and onto their waiting heads.

It is the same thing as when we are feeling depressed. When we are feeling emotionally wretched, the logical thing for us to do would be to put on a happy face. We should go find the happiest, sunniest movie we can find to drive our dark spirits from us. After all the whole problem with feeling bad is that it feels bad, right?

As logical as that might well be, it is all too rarely that any of us actually do this. We’d rather sit there in our muck of melancholy and let it dribble all over our minds until we are wallowing in self-pity. Think about it. When you are in a grouchy mood you will bark at anyone or anything that comes across your radar. You feel a sick sense of pleasure because you were able to inflict trauma upon another.

These sorts of reactions to internal malaise should remind us of two facts that we’d all like to pretend are not twisted into our very beings. The first fact is that we aren’t all that reasonable beings. If we were clear-headed then the thing we’d want the most when we’re upset is for someone to come along and help us be cheerful. But how does it really happen in life? When we’re upset there’s nothing that makes us so very livid as someone coming along with a “sunny side of life” attitude. When we’re upset, we want to keep being upset.

Tragically it goes far farther than this. At those times we take pleasure in causing pain in others. If you don’t believe me then ask yourself why you bark at your neighbor or spouse or child when you are angry. Why do you bite the head off of someone who accidentally bumps into you when you’re angry when you wouldn’t when you’re in a good mood? Why do you mindlessly and endlessly honk you’re horn at someone when you’re running late when you don’t if you’ve got plenty of time?

We human beings are not nice people. We can pretend that we are gentle souls, and offer up self-justifications for when we do act out of our grumpiness. We can say that “They deserve to be yelled at!” We try our best to stifle our anger deep inside and end up either a passionless drone or stress-hardened heart. Or we can let our emotions fly which ever way they feel and live as a slave to our hormonal and circumstantial immediacy.

None of these seems a truly human life. To be human is to be more than a mobile emotion projector. There are times in our lives when things will anger us to no end and we cannot deny this. What we can do is to work to modify the manner in which we express this anger. We can work to see that we do not make ourselves the greater fool by exploding at the foolishness of those around us and to work to adjust our own behavior to others so as not to tempt them devolve into lesser versions of themselves.

New Year

2007-01-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

This is a very, very, very short entry. I had another blog, but my teeny brain forgot how to access it and couldn't figure how to fix it. Oh, well. I've just gotten back from my honeymoon. This is a good thing. Mind you, it is not a good thing to be back. It is a good thing to have gone. My wife and I (still a strange concept) spent a week or so in the Pacific Northwest. It is a very happy place. I certainly hope to continue this blog. I also hope that I'll remember the codes. Otherwise I'll end up having dozens of blogs with no connection between them. That is all for now.