MDSF

Eno: The True Wheel

2010-12-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

Dan Bodah has been using this as the opening track for his show Airborne Event on WFMU:

I realize the phrase "still sounds fresh" gets overused, but I swear that when I didn't know what this track was I assumed it was Le Tigre.

FBC Jax Watchdog series on FBC Dallas building program

2010-03-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

FBC Jax Watchdog continues his series on the $140 million First Baptist Dallas building program, asking how the decision was made to commit to spend the money. His analysis includes asking how they can justify committing to spend so much money when the church still owes $8-9 million from its last building project.

Did the three step plan work?

1. God spoke to Brunson and gave him the vision;

2. Brunson worked with Doug (whoever Doug is) and the planners;

3. God worked in the hearts of the people to support the vision.

Steps 1 and 2 worked, but I submit step 3 didn't work. The project was sold to the church as a project that would be paid for by pledges made.

But today, FBC Dallas still owes $8.7 million on the Criswell Building. God apparently didn't tell the people at Dallas that this was God's will, else they would have given the money, right? I mean, if this is how God does His work, as Jeffress said, why didn't God complete step 3?

The question of how anyone can be sure they're doing the right thing when taking a step of faith is a difficult one, and to his credit the author generally keeps his rhetorical tone low. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for some of the people who left comments:

Members also know the "lot" of you are the YES MEN who will agree with anything MB wants. No matter, the "lot of you" can pay off the remaining debt - the pews are more empty than filled these days. Pushing MB to go into debt didn't work!

Etc. For the record I don't pretend to have all the facts in hand regarding the Dallas building situation, but I'm quite curious about how this building program plays out. If I attended FBC Dallas I'd be apprehensive about giving a dime if they're still in debt and justifying a huge building project on the basis of vague appeals to "visions" God is supposed to have passed down to "shepherds." I'd be willing to bet that these "visions" aren't also being given to people who can actually co-sign a loan.

Augusten Burroughs: Running with Scissors

2010-03-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

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Augusten Burroughs's 2002 memoir Running with Scissors is one of the most disturbing things I've read in a while. Granted, I don't read a lot of fiction, and I don't generally read just for freak value, but I picked this up at my local library on a whim, and by the time I got to the parts I found really disturbing it was really too late to put it down.

The basic story is this: Burroughs's mother is crazy, and she comes under the influence of a psychiatrist who is also crazy. She leaves him at the age of twelve with the doctor and the doctor's family. Hilarity more or less ensues. Some sexuality and adult situations. Some cruelty to animals.

Much of the stuff that jumps out at the casual reader is barely worth name-checking: the sex, the drugs, the codependent behavior. What's left when I ignore all of this is a story of a child who slips through the cracks, who should have gotten attention from welfare officials, but who was mostly ignored, probably on the strength of the leeway society gave psychiatrists at the time. And I suppose a lot of what happens here happens elsewhere in situations where oversight is inadequate, absent, or wrong-headed: cults, communes, foster homes, etc.

And I think that's all I really have to say about it. It struck me as a story of improperly placed trust, social status, etc. and I'm not really sure what else to say about it.

It's a reasonably good example of how an outrageous story becomes more palatable if presented as nonfiction. The story moves briskly. I don't recommend reading it.

FBC Jax Watchdog series on FBC Dallas building program

2010-03-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

The church watch weblog FBC (for First Baptist Church) Jax (for Jacksonville) Watchdog is doing a series on the building program at First Baptist Church Dallas, home of Robert Jeffress. The first installment is here. For those of you who don't follow the goings-on at other churches, FBC Dallas has embarked on a building program in downtown Dallas, and is asking churchgoers to give $140 million.

chairman Ronnie Floyd is telling us that to fund this GCR the money is in the "pockets and portfolios" of the church members - we see that one of the SBC's most historic churches is asking for its members to not dig into their "pockets and portfolios" to fund more missions, but to give 10% or more of all "personal assets" to build a $140 million dollar campus downtown

This of course gives us one piece of a puzzle that arose when religion reporter Frank Lockwood noted that this breaks down to $40,625 per worshiper: the executive management of FBC Dallas don't think of the rank and file as being you know, ordinary middle-class Americans making four to five hundred thousand dollars a year. They instead see the people in their church as the sort of people who have a spare forty thousand dollars stashed in their retirement funds, or mattresses, or what-have-you.

"meat for lunch for Lent"

2010-03-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

There is so much I do not understand about Catholicism. So much so that when I see a sequence like the following I'm pretty sure I'll never understand what it's like to be Catholic, and I'll double-never-understand what it's like to be ex-Catholic.

Here's Ross Douthat from the Times; I think he's decrying the do-it-yourself of American religiosity, particularly of American mysticism:

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. A would-be mystic can attend a Pentecostal healing service one day and a class on Buddhism the next, dabble in Kabbalah in February and experiment with crystals in March, practice yoga every morning and spend weekends at an Eastern Orthodox retreat center. Sufi prayer techniques, Eucharistic adoration, peyote, tantric sex — name your preferred path to spiritual epiphany, and it’s probably on the table.

I have to admit that I'm so American that I'm genuinely of two minds on this: I love having the freedom to make a mess of my own spiritual practice, but I'm sometimes put off by the messes other people make of their spiritual practices. See e.g. my attempts to make sense of Colin Beavan, the No Impact Man.

But then there's Mary Valle, who I have to thank for mentioning this article:

Ross, do you eat meat for lunch every day otherwise? Really? It’s lunchtime and you’re all “Time for a hamburger! I think I’ll have some chops! Whoa, is that brisket? Garcon! Wheel that meat cart over my way, if you please!”

And I swear I've walked into the middle of a conversation uninvited. In a language I do not speak. Or words to that effect.

Gribbin and Plagemann: The Jupiter Effect

2010-03-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

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John R. Gribbin and Stephen H. Plagemann's 1974 book The Jupiter Effect: The Planets as Triggers of Devastating Earthquakes is believe it or not a book by two scientists (with a foreward by Isaac Asimov, of all people) that predicted a massive California earthquake in the early 1980s. Nowadays it seems like a curosity in a number of ways: it presents data using charts and graphs that were state of the art in 1973 or thereabouts; it talks about massive changes but doesn't mention climate change, global warming, or even peak oil; it even talks about scientific issues without mentioning politics.

It presents a relatively straightforward story: every so often California has a massive earthquake that impacts one end of the San Andreas fault or the other: either San Francisco and the Bay Area up north, or Los Angeles down south. This is because the San Andreas fault is where the North American plate and the Pacific plate meet, and these two plates are slipping past each other at a fixed average rate, but not at a fixed actual rate. This means that every so often there has to be an earthquake to "catch up:" that is, to release energy stored in the fault over time. The authors present what is reasonably well understood about how often this slippage occurs, present current theories about why earthquakes occur when they do, and propose a theory to explain some of the effects not explained by other theories.

They focus on four sometimes overlapping factors: earth tides, earth spin, solar flares, and sunspot cycles. Earth tides are just what they sound like: periodic movement of the earth along the shoreline due to periodic effects. The spin of the earth has some impact on earth tides, and it fluctuates over time, causing the day to get longer or shorter by tiny fractions of a second. Solar flares seem to have some impact on the changes in the rate of the earth's spin, and the occur because of sunspots. Sunspots and solar flares occur regularly enough for radio experts to issue sunspot weather reports with almanac-like accuracy.

And finally, the authors' theory: planetary alignment causes sunspots. They leave it to the reader to track the uneven distribution of planets as a cause all the way back to the San Andreas fault, where they theoretically would have caused a massive California earthquake in March 1982. Fortunately the massive earthquake didn't arrive.

I hesistate to say it's a shame the earthquake didn't arrive. Of course the sort of displacement and disaster the book predicts would have been awful, but the book itself is one of the leanest, most linear and lucid popular science books I've ever read. It also spawned a sequel, The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, but I will probably give that one a miss.

NPR story on 133 C Street SE DC

2010-03-04T20:00:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned the other day, a number of pastors have suggested that the C Street house used by the group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast should not be considered a church for tax purposes. This story surfaced on National Public Radio a couple of weeks ago.

The story repeats the inaccurate characterization of The Family as a fundamentalist group:

The three-story, brick townhouse at 133 C Street SE sits a half-block from the Cannon House Office Building, roughly three blocks from the Capitol — the home-away-from-home for a regular contingent of fundamentalist Christian members of Congress, who can pray in the living room and walk to work.

I have to include that either a) the term "fundamentalist Christian" doesn't mean anything, or b) it is misapplied here. There are four Senators mentioned in the piece: Tom Coburn, Mark Sanford, Chip Pickering, and John Ensign. Of these four, Coburn and Pickering are Baptists, Ensign is Foursquare Gospel, and Sanford is Episcopalian. They may be fundamentalists of some stripe, but they're not fundamentalist Christians; fundamentalism just isn't big enough a tent to accommodate both an Episcopalian and a charismatic.

Atul Gawande: Complications

2010-03-03T21:11:00.000-08:00

Atul Gawande's 2002 book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of fourteen essays, many of them published in other places. Here's a quick rundown:

Education of a Knife: the practical problem of how to educate a future surgeon given that becoming a good surgeon requires literal hands-on experience
The Computer and the Hernia Factory: the value of experience, difficulty of diagnosis, and the value of specialization
When Doctor's Make Mistakes: medical errors and human factor engineering
Nine Thousand Surgeons: Gawande goes to a convention
When Good Doctors Go Bad: the need for and difficulties of self-regulation in the medical community
Full Moon Friday the Thirteenth: superstition among doctors and its basis in fact
The Pain Perplex: pain and the difficulty of treating it
A Queasy Feeling: vomiting, especially hyperemesis, and the difficulty of treating it effectively
Crimson Tide: treatments for debilitating blushing
The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating: a successful gastric bypass operation and the difficulty of overcoming morbid obesity
Final Cut: autopsies and the fact that they're currently way out of style
The Dead Baby Mystery: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and infanticide
Whose Body Is It, Anyway?: the perils of informed consent and patient activism
The Case of the Red Leg: a freak diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis

Despite the thicket of topics and the difficulty (and occasional unpleasantness) of some of the subject matter this was a brisk and engaging read. If I only had time for one essay I'd pick the one on medical mistakes, especially since this is a topic Gawande returns to in his later books. After that I'd probably pick the essays on bad doctors, informed consent, and gastric bypass, in that order.

I could almost have guessed from reading this book, but Gawande is a friend of Malcolm Gladwell, and they share an editor, Henry Finder. So far as I can tell Finder can spin straw into gold.

I've read twenty-two books so far this year and have three or four in progress. This is probably my second-favorite after Stefan Ulstein's 1995 oral history Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism & Grace, of which more later.

Utah State House Bill 12

2010-03-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

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This is as good an article as I think I've ever seen about the difficulties of turning a simple values-driven statement like "abortion is murder" into public policy and enforceable law.

But critics say legislation inspired by an unusual, perhaps even freakish criminal case, could open up a vast frontier around the question of intent and responsibility and give local prosecutors huge new powers to inquire about a woman’s intentions toward her unborn child.
For example, if a pregnant woman gets into a vehicle, goes on a wild ride way over the speed limit without wearing a seatbelt and crashes and the fetus is killed, is she a reckless driver? Or is she a reckless mother-to-be who criminally ignored the safety of her fetus?

For better or worse this is what happens when legislators attempt to make laws to prevent difficult cases. See also Terry Schiavo.

On the other hand, rhetoric suggesting that bills like this reduce women to having the legal standing of household pets, livestock, etc. doesn't help. I guess it does, however, illustrate the difficulty of finding middle ground in the face of "abortion is murder" claims.

John Foxe: Foxe's Christian Martyrs of the World

2010-03-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

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I snagged a copy of Foxe's Christian Martyrs of the World out of the dollar bin at my local Goodwill, and if I had it to over again I think I would have left it.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs was one of the most-read books in English, after the King James Version of the Bible, and it did a lot to frame the way the various heirs of the English Reformation saw themselves. It was Matthew Foxe's lifework, eventually comprising two volumes of more than two thousand pages each. For this reason most people read it in some sort of updated, abridged version. This book is one of those. I wish I'd held out for a better version: partly because this one is such a hash, and partly because this is such an important book I really should have worked harder to do it justice on the first try.

Foxe tells two fairly simple, if gruesome stories:

Historic persecution of the Church in Roman times, up through the conversion of Constantine
Persecution of English Protestants under various Catholic monarchs

Foxe tells these stories together to suggest that the English Reformers were the heirs of true Christianity as opposed to their Catholic enemies, although he never says this explicitly. He just says all these various people were martyrs and leaves it to the reader to understand that they were all martyrs in the same sense. Needless to say this doesn't sit well with his Catholic readers; see e.g. its entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia. He has apparently come back into favor in recent years, primarily because for much of what he covers he's the only historical source.

I came away with from reading this abridgment with a few impressions:

The English Reformation was a brutal business; the history I learned growing up that focused on one monarch displacing another was way too tidy, and the truth on the ground was appalling.
The painful process of making the Bible available to people who were not clergymen had already started before movable type made it relatively easy to print and distribute it. Also, while a rising literacy rate plays an important part in the story, it doesn't play a part in as many martyr stories as I would have expected.
The distinctives worth dying for changed with time; some of the early English Reformers made common cause with the Lutherans, while it's hard to imagine that the latter ones would have.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs played a more important role in how my particular tribe of dissenters saw themselves than I suspected.

This is on the whole not a good abridgment, and I'll need to find a better one, but it was sufficient to give me a taste of what Foxe's original book was like.

floating book prices?

2010-03-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

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There's a fascinating article in the New York Times yesterday breaking down paper book and electronic book prices, suggesting that there's a floor to e-book prices, and it's not $0.00:

On a typical hardcover, the publisher sets a suggested retail price. Let’s say it is $26. The bookseller will generally pay the publisher $13. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about $3.25 to print, store and ship the book, including unsold copies returned to the publisher by booksellers.
For cover design, typesetting and copy-editing, the publisher pays about 80 cents. Marketing costs average around $1 but may go higher or lower depending on the title. Most of these costs will decline on a per-unit basis as a book sells more copies.
Let’s not forget the author, who is generally paid a 15 percent royalty on the hardcover price, which on a $26 book works out to $3.90. ... the publisher is left with $4.05, out of which it must pay overhead for editors, cover art designers, office space and electricity before taking a profit.

And then for electronic books:

on a $12.99 e-book, the publisher takes in $9.09. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents.
The author’s royalty — a subject of fierce debate between literary agents and publishing executives — is calculated among some of the large trade publishers as 25 percent of the gross revenue, while others are calculating it off the consumer price. So on a $12.99 e-book, the royalty could be anywhere from $2.27 to $3.25.
All that leaves the publisher with something ranging from $4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances.

The article goes on to say that while these numbers look transparent, there's no good reason to believe that they are solid, since they come from publishers, etc.

I have to wonder why in an age when food products can carry Guideline Daily Amounts that are easy to read and understand why books a) have fixed prices, and b) aren't broken down graphically to represent the pie slices described above.

Whenever possible I buy books used online, in part because they're cheaper, because I rarely need to read bestsellers that are on the run, so to speak, and because in various online marketplaces book prices float (a little) and I have some idea what I'm paying for: the seller's purchase price, shipping, and profit.

Is there really a good reason why I can't get the same kind of price transparency out of every book I buy? Why should every new book price end in "00" or "99?"

Victor Gold: Invasion of the Party Snatchers

2010-02-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

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Victor Gold is the former press aide to Barry Goldwater, the late Senator from Arizona and 1964 Republican Presidential nominee. And that is just about all you need to know before sitting down to read his 2007 Republican Party exposé Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP. Unfortunately his book doesn't really follow through on its title claim: he basically says Goldwater is the standard by which modern Republicans should be measured, that the Party has lost its way and is doomed unless it repents, etc.

I had forgotten how seriously "Goldwater conservatives" take themselves, how seriously they take Goldwater, and how they consider the 1964 campaign to be the Great Lost Cause of the latter half of the 20th Century. So much so that they consider candidate Lyndon Johnson's Daisy ad to be a crime against humanity akin to Sherman's March to the Sea.

Regardless, this is a light and pretty readable book; compared to the usual inside politics fare: while Gold's frequent attempts to be clever more often come across as bitter, his insight into the differences between the elder and younger Presidents George Bush, the route Dick Cheney took to the office of Vice President, the rehabilitation of Donald Rumsfeld, the disappearance of Secretary Colin Powell, etc. make this well worth reading. And while he doesn't make good on his cover promise to show how "Holy Rollers" ruined the Republican Party, he definitely explains how because Christian Right leaders are willing to settle for symbolic gestures and token amounts of money they get virtually nothing of substance in exchange for their votes. Needless to say as a so-called values voter I wish he would have spent more time talking about this and less about how much he despises Vice President Cheney.

This is still a slim volume at less than 250 pages, and it read like less; I just about read it in one sitting. I wouldn't teach it in a history class, but I'd recommend reading it if it can be had at a good price.

Alan Dershowitz: Blasphemy

2010-02-23T14:57:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

I picked up Alan Dershowitz's 2007 book Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking our Declaration of Independence as part of my continuing interest in the whole "America is a Christian Nation" debate. I'll admit up front I'm not a big fan of Dershowitz: he seems to fall into that broad category of "civil liberties ambulance chasers:" people who grind out a career one book/op ed/talk show appearance at a time, who contribute as much to the fear industry from the Left as people like Richard Land do from the Right, people who tend to be more quotable than they are thoughtful, etc.

On the other hand, like a lot of people who came out of my subculture I think I always took it as read that because the Declaration of Independence referred to "their Creator" and the Old Testament God is the Creator God, that these two were the same somehow, a claim tantamount to claiming that everyone who refers to "God" refers to the same God somehow. And this latter claim in recent days makes about as much sense as believing that everybody understands what I mean when I use the word "I."

Anyway, Dershowitz takes on the apparently common claim on the Christian Right that the Declaration of Independence is a peer to the Constitution in defining the United States as a nation, and furthermore that the Creator God who endows people with unalienable rights in that document is somehow the Christian God, and with some success. He sets about doing this in three steps, with mixed success:

Thomas Jefferson, drafter and primary author of the Declaration of Independence, couldn't have meant the Christian God
Various contemporary Christian Right leaders know they're misrepresenting Jefferson
Jefferson's invocation of natural law, including appeals to this Creator God, is no basis for a system of government.

In the first section Dershowitz works from first-rate sources and makes a pretty strong argument: Jefferson, as a man of the Enlightenment, definitely a Deist and not a Christian the way contemporary values voters think of themselves as Christians: he didn't believe Jesus was divine, he didn't believe in miracles, etc. He more or less believed (as many Muslims do today) that the Apostles in general and Paul in particular had invented the Jesus of Christianity out of thin air. Jefferson was certainly no fan of clergymen, etc. His argument benefits greatly from the many letters Jefferson wrote and the many books written about his opinions.

Unfortunately in the second section Dershowitz makes the same mistake many critics of the Christian Right make: he quotes them as if their comments were meant to be statements of fact, where I'd argue that most of them are using aspirational language, or possibly shibboleths, or cultural signifiers: they're not inviting their audience to judge the truth of what they're saying, but rather to believe what they're saying in the face of the facts (supporting or otherwise) as an act of inclusion or exclusion in a faith community. Instead of "this is true," they mean "everyone in my takes this by faith." This doesn't mean that Dershowitz is wrong, per se, but rather that he's just not working from sources of the same quality when he talks about Christian Right leaders as he does when he talks about Thomas Jefferson. And that's a shame, because it leaves him sounding like he hasn't done his homework.

His closing section is kind of a mess: he essentially argues that Jefferson plays fast and loose with natural law, and more or less making up the justification for the Revolutionary War. I have to wonder why he went to all this trouble, but it's his basis for saying essentially that the Declaration of Independence isn't useful for declaring the United States a "Christian Nation."

In the end this isn't an entirely satisfying book, but it leaves Dershowitz in a peculiar position of claiming that people who make "Christian Nation" claims are engaging in a kind of "civil blasphemy" (his term), setting, in a sense, the American civil religion with its various narratives and theology in opposition to Christianity and its God. I don't know what to make of this; in a sense Dershowitz seems to be saying that Jefferson, as a Deist, had a God, and the Declaration of Independence is a religious document, and it's the Christian Right folks who are the blasphemers. Go figure.

I feel obligated to point out that this book is fairly priced at Amazon.com, with both new and used copies being available for less than fifty cents, plus shipping.

Americans United, Clergy Voice, and that pesky C St house

2010-02-23T12:39:00.001-08:00

A clergy group in Ohio with a background in IRS regulations is asking questions about a certain house on C St in Washington DC:

“As we understand it, C Street Center has no recognized creed or form of worship, no distinct ecclesiastical government, and no formal code of doctrine,” observes the clergy letter. “To the best of our knowledge, it is not led by ordained ministers, and its leadership is not selected based on the completion of any prescribed studies for the preparation of ministers. We are not aware of it holding regular religious services that are open to the public, it has no Sunday schools for religious instruction of the young, and it has no distinct religious history.”
Clergy Voice asserts that the C Street Center is really a boarding house and concludes, “An organization whose chief activity is providing room and board to Members of Congress is not a church.”

I for one wish the folks at the Internal Revenue Service luck in navigating this one; as far as I can tell The Family isn't actually a Christian group, much less a Religious Right group (as AU claims here), but they're engaged in some sort of exercise in American civil religion. I'd hate to be the investigator stuck trying to make the right distinctions here.

Atul Gawande: Complications

2010-02-23T12:06:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

I started reading Atul Gawande's 2002 book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science a couple of days ago, and was surprised last night when I discovered that I'd already read one of the chapters, the one on medical mistakes, human factors engineering, and the grim business of morbidity and mortality conferences. This chapter already appeared in the now-ancient volume The Best American Science Writing 2000, a volume I doubly recommend now, not just because it's got great writing on interesting topics, but also because it's appropriately priced, meaning that you can get it used for four dollars, including postage.

His essay on medical mistakes and how the medical community deals with them made a huge impression on me back in 2001. The story opens with a situation in which he nearly killed an emergency room patient while attempting to intubate her, discusses some of the engineering solutions to mistakes made by anesthetists, and wraps up with a visit to the weekly Morbidity and Mortality Conference (M & M) at his (teaching) hospital, where cases are discussed, blame taken and assigned, and the community creates a safe environment for doctors (and presumably, other staff) to accept the blame for their mistakes, generally without further repercussions.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how churches, networks of churches, and denominations deal with mistakes, malfeasance, and general bad behavior, and I wonder if the M & M approach would be at all helpful. Fortunately for hospitals, doctors rarely intentionally kill patients. Unfortunately for churches, pastors and other leaders sometimes do things either that they know they shouldn't, or believe they're entitled to do anyway. So as much as I'd love to see the sort of blame-taking Gawande describes adapted for church use, I'm not holding my breath.

Larry Tomczak: Clap Your Hands!

2010-02-22T13:31:00.001-08:00

Mary Valle reviews Larry Tomsczak's 1973 autobiography Clap Your Hands! at the KtBlog:

It’s not surprising that later on in life, Larry parted ways with the Magisterium and started his own ministry. Larry’s story makes it clear why Protestantism is truly America’s religion: we don’t want fusty old institutions standing between us and the Lord. We want Jesus, and we want Him now.

and also later:

I could only think that Larry wasn’t going to stay Catholic for long when confronted with the picture of him preaching at Jesus ’73, a midsummer festival in the Pennsylvania countryside. (Note to Hollywood: I would love to write a screenplay about Jesus ’73. Call me!)

There's just not enough attention in the mainstream press (or even among secular or secular-ish weblogs) to this sort of literature at the religious margins. I'm thrilled to see this and want to see more from Mary Valle.

Bill Kinnon's objections to BookSneeze duly noted

2010-02-22T09:26:00.001-08:00

I've just signed up to review a book for BookSneeze. Eventually. Kinnon finds this objectionable and his analysis is here.

I'm just not willing to work for them for free.

For the moment, I am. At least a little bit. We'll see how it goes.

Valerie Tarico parses Mark Driscoll on Haiti relief

2010-02-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

I don't typically read the Huffington Post, but this article showed up in one of my Google Alerts a couple of weeks ago. Valerie Tarico presents herself as a former fundamentalist Christian; I don't know of what stripe or stream, apart from the fact that she attended Wheaton, partly because she considers Mark Driscoll a fundamentalist:

To my dismay, they were once again channeling the compassionate impulse into what is best described as self-promotion: promotion of the church, its pastor, Mark Driscoll, and the viral fundamentalist ideology that both serve.

Driscoll is a lot of things, but he isn't a Fundamentalist. He's Reformed.

That being said, and despite the tone of the article, I have to agree that Tarico is right to be critical of Driscoll:

By filtering and selecting Bible verses, Driscoll makes the case that God never meant for Christians to take care of poor, suffering people but rather poor suffering Christian people (and potential converts). " I challenge all thoughtful, biblically-minded Christians to find a single instance of the New Testament church filling the plates of the 'general population' poor." Cofounder of the site, James MacDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel penned these words: "Children are crouching in shivering fear as people stand stunned and staring in disbelief at the remains of what they once called their home. The world is racing to help these people in unimaginable crisis, but who will help the church?"

When reading this article it's important to remember that Tarico wrote a book (published 2006) about this general topic. And also, that the question of whether the Church should feed the poor is (sadly) a topic about which reasonable people disagree. As best I can tell the whole question comes down to whether one believes Jesus called the poor His brethren in Matthew 25:40, or whether He is referring to His audience as His brethren. Personally I think it says a lot about a person that they'll strain at a comma to avoid feeding the poor.

what does Carl Trueman really know about rape and child abuse?

2010-02-18T11:14:00.000-08:00

I'm a occasional-to-regular Phoenix Preacher reader, and a couple of weeks ago Michael Newnham linked to this post by Carl Trueman, which is a long ramble about how pretty Catholic churches are, how superior Reformed churches are to evangelical churches, etc. and includes this little quote:

And no Protestant should ever try to play holier than thou with a Catholic on the church's record on sexual morality. Even in my limited ecclesiastical experience, I've come across adultery, rape, and child abuse within orthodox Reformed circles, and seen attempts by church leaders to sweep the same under the carpet.

I am accustomed to this sort of rhetoric in evangelical circles: "I have special knowledge, but no, I don't feel obligated to name names or do anything about it; I do, however, feel justified in casting aspersions." I don't know what to do about it generally: it's relatively easy to get people to talk about various horrors if they won't be held accountable for their comments, difficult if they face the possibility of e.g. being sued for slander.

If this were a simple matter of Trueman accusing some unnamed Protestant of adultery I'd be inclined to let him off the hook: without an inconvenient pregnancy there are rarely enough witnesses to adultery to rise to Scriptural standards for accusations, and adultery is legal in the United States. His accusation of cover-up, whatever it is, is an organizational matter for the denomination he doesn't name here, and if Trueman can live with his conscience there's not much I can say or do.

Rape and child abuse are different, however: they're illegal, and in some states people are obligated by law to report them. Fortunately for Trueman he lives in Pennsylvania, and as best I can tell because he doesn't work with children he's not legally obligated to report suspected child abuse to authorities. But I wonder why he doesn't feel a moral obligation to do something if he knows church organizations are covering up past rapes and cases of child abuse. Here are my best guesses given my reading of what he says:

He's lying: he doesn't know of any adultery, rapes, cases of child abuse, or cover-ups.
He's overstating how much he knows, and his inaction is in line with his actual knowledge, and he's making a cheap accusation that fits the flow of his blog post.
He's not lying, but he doesn't think adultery, rape, child abuse, and cover-up of same are serious enough to warrant action.
He's not lying, he understands the seriousness of what he's saying, and he doesn't care enough to do anything.

I'm open to other interpretations here; none of these are flattering to Mr Trueman. I wonder, too, why nobody else is talking about this.

Breakfast with The Family

2010-02-11T13:22:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Here's a quote from Breakfast with The Family at KtBlog:

So when Obama admits that “something’s broken, that those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should,” I completely agree. When he speaks of “division and distrust among our citizens,” I can understand why. When he insists, “neither side has a monopoly on truth,” I think of how The Family stands in tacit disagreement with that sentiment. And when he emphasizes the importance of “stepping out of our comfort zones,” I wonder why he couldn’t have stepped out of his own and refused to participate in the Family’s Breakfast.
It’s not like there weren’t alternatives. The National Prayer Hour founded in part to protest the Family, would have permitted me to hear Obama’s words as he meant them. It’s difficult to take him on face value when, writes Jeff, “the breakfast is regarded by The Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can ‘meet Jesus man to man.’” The only thing holding Obama back is tradition—the event has taken place since 1953—but for a man dedicated to change, that’s no excuse at all.

I'm a little surprised that the author Garrett Baer misses the point about national prayer breakfasts that jumps out to me, but which sneaks into the article in the photo caption "Who are we praying to, again?" As a Christian I am perplexed by the very idea of a "national prayer breakfast" in a country with Constitutional support for separation of Church and State, and tend to think of any such event as an exercise in American civil religion, so the best alternative might be no prayer breakfast at all.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

2010-02-05T14:13:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's 2009 book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America earlier this week, and I've been too busy to write it up. There are really three themes in this book:

The history of positive thinking in America
Positive thinking, management fads, and exploitation
Positive thinking, illness, and positive psychology

Ehrenreich contextualizes positive thinking as a reaction to Calvinism, self-criticism, and neurasthenia, starting with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and New Thought, running through both Mary Baker Eddy and Norman Vincent Peale into the American religious landscape, through the prosperity theology of Kenneth Hagin and Joel Osteen Jr., wrapping up with the now-popular comparison between megachurches and large corporations. I guess she had to go to press before she had a chance to cover Hanna Rosin's article in The Atlantic asking whether and how prosperity theology itself contributed to the current recession.

She blames positive thinking for the rise of irrational professional management, blaming management gurus like Tom Peters for the "management bubble" that led to so much irrational decision-making in the last twenty years, suggesting that the spreading irrational optimism, while it couldn't all be blamed on Peters, could be tracked by following the arc of his career. She includes this quote from Fortune:

If you know one thing about Tom Peters, you know about his first book (In Search of Excellence), and if you know two things, the second is that he hasn't written a book as good as that since, and if you know three things, the third is that some time in the 18 years since that first precious book, he's gone bonkers.

She traces the spread of various kinds of positive thinking for its own sake in corporations: imposed on low-status workers to make them more productive in the face of mounting layoffs and reduced job security, adopted by mid-status workers as a kind of willful self-deception in an attempt to become more successful, and embraced by high-status workers as justification for their escalating salaries and compensation packages, all the while becoming less effective and in some cases outright destructive. Of course Ehrenreich wouldn't be Ehrenreich if she didn't trot out the usual complaints about modern capitalism: too few people own too much, pay discrepancies are too high, etc. This really has nothing to do with the book's supposed thesis: Ehrenreich is really describing several things that happened without demonstrating that one caused the other.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ehrenreich begins the book with a chapter on positive thinking and breast cancer, demonstrating that while resolute positive thinking is part of the breast cancer patient/victim/survivor subculture, there is no clinical evidence that it actually helps. However, when she returns to the question of attitude and illness later in the book, it does appear that a positive outlook can be helpful in avoiding and recovering from other illnesses. She also delves into the phenomenon of positive psychology, the study of happiness as a positive outcome, as described by Martin Seligman and his colleagues, and by turns declares it and him a fraud and a product of a right-wing conspiracy courtesy the Templeton Foundation. Some of the stuff she says about the positive psychology people borders on nitpickery, and I was left wondering if she'd been fair to Seligman and Suzanne Segerstrom, or if perhaps she was treating them with disdain because they're in the social sciences and she has a background in lab sciences (Cellular Biology PhD, Rockefeller University, 1963).

This was a fairly light, quick read at 206 pages, the sort of book I could have easily knocked off on a long plane flight, and that's about what it is: a handful of relatively simple themes, explained briskly, with occasional visits to familiar if occasionally tedious territory. I'd recommend the book for its discussion of positive thinking and prosperity theology: as an evangelical Christian I'm disturbed by the spread of Word-Faith doctrine but I didn't know much about its history. It's not a very good book: Ehrenreich doesn't know enough about some of the things she dislikes and doesn't bother to fill the gaps in her knowledge, so she occasionally takes second-rate explanations as sufficient: she often doesn't distinguish between what something is and what it does, and makes a mess of Calvinism, for example, and probably places too much confidence in D. R. McConnell's book A Different Gospel as a definitive history of the Word-Faith movement. On the other hand, I'm not sure what is an appropriate standard for what is admittedly a popular, not a scholarly, treatment of a topic that can't really be rigorously defined.

I'm increasingly curious about Ehrenreich generally, though, and I will probably have to dig into her backlist. Just because I thought Nickel and Dimed was intellectually dishonest doesn't mean one of her books would make for an adequate way to while away a long plane flight.

KKK prayer breakfast?

2010-02-04T11:59:00.001-08:00

I'm no fan of the National Prayer Breakfast; I think it's a mechanism for co-opting Christians into American civil religion. So I think there are lots of good reasons to avoid it. I'm not entirely sure why someone would need an alternative like the American Prayer Hour, though; the term "American prayer" just kind of gives me the willies.

American Prayer Hours are slated for six cities tomorrow, including Washington, according to this site. Some of the accusations are just nuts, such as author Frank Schaeffer calling the NPB the "KKK prayer breakfast" here on Huffington Post.

I have real sympathies for Frank Schaeffer and appreciate the alternative view of his father he offered in his book Crazy for God, but I have to wonder: if he's willing to use the term "KKK prayer breakfast," what won't he say?

Fundamentalist wolfboys, the Bill of Rights, and you

2010-02-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Alex Rose writes

If freedom from religion strikes you as anti-democratic, ask yourself which is the greater right — that we be allowed to indoctrinate our children with our own belief system, or that children be equipped with the ability to see the world clearly enough to make their own decisions once they are old enough?

and later

What they come away with is a very inconsistent picture of reality, one in which ghosts and miracles exist alongside natural selection and photosynthesis. Maybe some grown-ups can find ways of squaring the circle without any problem, but kids cannot, and the rift creates air bubbles in their understanding of how the world works.

Rose appears to be suggesting some sort of secular test for voting: if you're too religious, you're a threat to democracy, or some such. He casts Fundamentalists (not sure which ones, or how one qualifies) as "wild boy[s] of Averon" who can't be integrated into civil society. Go figure.

Prothero on Salinger

2010-02-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

Still, I will be surprised if anything Salinger has to say in print after death is as eloquent a critique of modern American life as what he has said since he decamped for New Hampshire.

Stephen Prothero, the Religious Literacy guy, writing about J. D. Salinger, Quakerism, and silence as a spiritual and possibly creative practice, at Killing the Buddha.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright-Sided

2010-02-03T07:40:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

Barbara Ehrenreich is something of an institution: she's a social critic, essayist, and author of nearly twenty books. She's probably best known for Nickel and Dimed, in which she took four entry-level/minimum-wage jobs in an attempt to prove that it's impossible to live on minimum wage. She's also what, exactly? A curmudgeon? A pessimist? I'm not sure. She's a Socialist, and unfortunately in what I've read of her writing some sort of magical central planning seems to be the obvious conclusion she leads her reader to.

I got on the wait list for her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America after hearing her speak at the Commonwealth Club of California. It came available over the weekend, and I almost immediately dived in. It's mostly a loosely-connected series of essays on the pitfalls of positive thinking; so far (after five of seven and a half essays) she hasn't gotten around to demonstrating how positive thinking undermines anything. Instead she mostly deals with the obvious implications of believing that you're the master of your own fate given that not everything goes your way.

The opening essay is about her experience with breast cancer, and more or less with the contention that a positive attitude is in any sense helpful when dealing with a potentially life-threatening disease. She first deals with the phenomenon itself: the outfits, the trinkets, the social obligations, etc. associated with breast cancer, and then she delves into the effectiveness of a relentlessly positive attitude on survival rates. Evidently there is none. Ehrenreich doesn't really deal with other related questions: whether a positive attitude makes someone with cancer easier to be around, improves quality of life, etc.

I won't be returning to this essay the next time I post about this book. It doesn't really fit into the sweep of the book, which has more to do with positive thinking in business and religion, and could have been left out without weakening the book.

I'm mostly interested in this book because it deals with an aspect of American evangelicalism I find disturbing: not just the positive thinking angle, but also the blurring of the lines between MBA-style business leadership and executive-pastor-style church leadership. I often fall into the trap of thinking that people who believe and behave even slightly differently than I do aren't "real Christians" and furthermore that the differences are clear to everyone. I'm baffled by the rise and persistence of prosperity theology, the Word of Faith movement, etc. and tend to assume that everyone can tell on its face that it's nonsense. It's helpful to get a perspective from someone who isn't just not in my part of the culture, but who confronts the same questions from an entirely different frame of reference.

Robert Boston: The Most Dangerous Man in America?

2010-02-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

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Robert Boston's 1996 book The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition has the feel of a book written in haste to address an immediate need, and looking back fourteen years I have a hard time imagining what that immediate need was. Boston's stated purpose was this:

This book has been an attempt to explain not only how this deplorable state of affairs came about but why it must not allowed to continue. Robertson's views are extreme, dangerous and, frankly, often bizarre. That such a figure is taken seriously on the political landscape is a tragedy. (p. 239)

The deplorable state of affairs is of course Robertson's influence over national politics circa 1996, with the possibility that a Robertson-approved candidate would among other things stack the Supreme Court with justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and tear down the wall of separation between church and state. For Boston and his organization, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, this scary scenario would include "the group's agenda -- promandatory religion in public schools, provoucher, proreligious majoritarianism, procensorship, antipublic schools, antireproductive freedom."

This is a tough little book, especially for someone who saw these issues from the other side, but who also considered Pat Robertson something of a peripheral figure. I'm accustomed to hearing alarmist rhetoric and unjustified claims regarding religious issues in public schools, funding of religious schools, and abortion, just not from Boston's perspective. To be honest, Boston partly succeeds in making his case that Robertson is "often bizarre;" I can't say he convinced me that Robertson is extreme or necessarily dangerous. This is an unevenly sourced and edited book, and the author lets his adjectives get away from him when his arguments are weak.

I swear this would be a better book if his editor had just cut out the chapters where he overworks terms like "ultraconservative," "extreme," and of course "right-wing."

Here's the outline:

Beginnings: a short biography of Pat Robertson up to about 1988
President Pat?: the story of Robertson's run for the Presidency in 1988
The Two Faces of the Christian Coalition: Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed, the iron fist and velvet glove, or whatever, of the Christian Coalition
The Christian Coalition -- On the Road to Victory?: The inroads the Christian Coalition made in the Republican Party 1988-1996
Pat Robertson's New World Order: a brief dissection of Robertson's book The New World Order
The World According to Pat Robertson: Robertson and the term "Christian Nation," Robertson and world politics, Robertson and other religions
Big Business: how Robertson became a multimillionaire, including his relationships with various Third World dictators
The American Center for Law and Justice: Pat Robertson's Legal "SWAT Team:" Who is Jay Sekulow, and how much does the ACLJ annoy and frighten the ACLU?
Closing Thoughts: Why Americans United cares about the Christian Coalition, and why they think you should too.

Most of this book made no impact on me whatsoever: I still consider Pat Robertson a fringe figure, can't believe anyone takes him seriously, etc. I just don't think Boston makes his case. Because I've heard so much of what he says about the various right-leaning groups, and because he makes his case so poorly, I don't find him convincing. I almost consider Boston and Robertson two peas in a pod: they both tell overstated fear stories, present characterizations as facts, appeal to an idealized future or past, etc. to raise money to combat the fear story and create or defend the idealized past/future. They're both ideological ambulance chasers as far as I'm concerned.They both expect to be taken at their word, or on the basis of too little evidence, typically from too few sources of dubious reputation. If I had a dollar for every time Boston cited his own organization or publication as authoritative I'd have made a tidy sum reading this book.

However, I found two accusations in this book to be damning: that Robertson is anti-Semitic, and that his financial dealings are at best suspect. Let me deal with the second of these first.

Boston accuses Robertson of playing fast and loose with money from the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), in particular selling the Family Channel first to himself and his son and then to an outside investor, pocketing millions of dollars as a result. He accuses him of advertising products on The 700 Club that profited himself personally. He accuses him of dealing with African dictators Mobutu of Zaire, Serrano of Guatemala, and Chiluba of Zambia in a way that is at best suspect. I believe some of what Boston says is overstated, but not by much: Robertson's dealings in Africa via his African Development Company, and later, Freedom Gold, are a matter of public record.

The accusation of Antisemitism bothers me more than these accusations usually do. What Boston is saying here isn't the usual religious disagreement; he cites articles by Michael Lind, Jacob Heilbrunn, and Ephraim Radner tracing sections of Robertson's book The New World Order to primary sources that are definitely anti-Semitic of the old-school Protocols of the Elders of Zion variety. Because I don't trust Boston to source and quote accurately I'm going to have to get a copy of Robertson's book and the articles by Lind, Heilbrunn, and Radner and see what the fuss is about. I suspect, as Boston says, that Robertson worked with a ghost writer, but I have to agree that when he published a ghostwritten book under his name he is responsible for its content, theme, etc.

Much of the rest of the book is nit-picky schoolyard he-said he-said stuff. At best I think Boston is afraid of Robertson and has let it cloud his judgment. I don't think the involvement of Christians, even media figures like Robertson, in the political process is a sign of an impending theocracy, or that any of the actual Constitutional guarantees Boston misrepresents are under any real threat. And frankly I think the intervening fourteen years has proven Robertson and his ilk to be ineffective at turning political victories into policy changes, making Boston's alarmist rhetoric seem a bit dated. He just doesn't seem to have taken the self-interest of the established parties into account.

This book goes on the history of the Christian Right reading list, but it's definitely B-list material. Most of Boston's arguments have been made more cohesive and less alarmist by later authors.

Robert Boston: The Most Dangerous Man in America?

2010-01-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

I've waded into Robert Boston's 1996 book The Most Dangerous Man in America? Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition. Boston is one of the main characters at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and makes a lot of his living out of critiquing and criticizing the Christian Right.

I have to admit that in 1988 I mostly ignored Pat Robertson's run for President. I was in college at the time, and it had already been made clear to me that the sitting Vice President, George H. W. Bush, was God's man for the job. In retrospect I'm not sure why: Bush wasn't really "one of us," as we found out three years later in Wichita; he was "one of them:" the country club Republicans who didn't share our values, except for the ones we'd learned from them.

Pat Robertson, on the other hand, wasn't "one of us" either: he was a Charismatic of sorts, and in 1988 we were still too Fundamentalist to think Charismatics were real Christians like us. Never mind the fact that he was in principle a Baptist. At the time I think we thought he was an ordained minister, and as such already had a calling, and shouldn't have been running for public office. As Boston points out, however, Robertson isn't quite several things: he graduated law school but didn't become a lawyer, and he started a television ministry without being an ordained minister or pastoring a church.

But as Boston also points out, Robertson was sort of a transitional figure between Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, and as such is of historical significance, even if that history isn't very pleasant.

This isn't a great book so far. Boston is honest about where he stands: he thinks Pat Robertson is dangerous, is afraid of him, and wants you to be scared of him too. He tends to cite as sources a lot of articles he wrote or his organization produced, and as such weakens the authority of a lot of his claims; he doesn't apparently speak Christianese, or Evangelicalese, or whatever, so he tends to misunderstand the meaning of certain aspirational "God is on our side" claims. And he misses the point of the ways in which terms like "Christian nation" are used.

Unfortunately people like Boston are the only sources who cover the sordid aspects of modern conservative Christian politics: the campaign finance issues, the credibility issues, the amoral political operatives, the smears, etc. The Christian Right has with rare exception (Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson's Blinded By Might) been unreflective and un-self-critical, always claiming the moral high ground but never quite occupying it. So I'm stuck reading books like Boston's to understand the history of figures like Robertson.

honored and embarrassed

2010-01-26T07:57:00.000-08:00

Ken Eastburn over at Leave the Building: A House Church Blog was kind enough to rate one of my comments as the top comment of 2009. I am of course honored and embarrassed. I hope someday I can say something that's noteworthy without being pithy.

Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English

2010-01-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

I'm about halfway through Patricia T. O'Conner's grammar guide Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English.

This is a neat little book, especially for someone like me who learned English by ear and didn't realize for years that he was speaking a dialect. The author attempts to demonstrate correct English usage, deal with difficult word choices, and clarify rules, all without dealing with technical minutiae, working mostly by example. She's set herself a difficult task, not least because she's working against dictionaries that no longer attempt to describe how English should be used and what words mean, in favor of describing how English is actually used.

This is not really a book to be read; it's a book to be given and consulted, but it rewards the reader anyway. Especially a reader willing to skim.

The author has made some interesting choices, suggesting that some usages while stuffy or formal are not actually wrong.

I'm not going to make too much of this; I grew up thinking that dictionaries should be authoritative/prescriptive rather than descriptive, and like many people from my ideological neck of the woods tended to expect that in the absence of a single shining standard against which everyone should be measured chaos would rule; I can't honestly make the argument that that has happened in English usage, despite recurring dire predictions to the contrary.

Anyway, I have no idea if this book is superior to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves; I'll have to give that one a look as well.

more about Republican Gomorrah

2010-01-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

Here's an excerpt of an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah:

Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.

I hate to disagree with Mr Blumenthal, when he's reporter and I'm just a blogger, but when I hear James Dobson et al talk about "the family," as in "Focus On The Family," I still hear "nuclear family" as in "Ozzie and Harriet" not the very scary political group documented in Jeff Sharlet's book The Family.

This equivocation is really disturbing, in the same way Sharlet's misuse of the term "fundamentalism" is disturbing: there are good reasons to be aware of the existence of The Family and good reasons to be concerned about Dobson's political machinations, and good reasons to be concerned about Christian Dominionism, but it's sloppy at best to mistake one group for another.

I'm doubly disturbed about Sharlet; it's as if he doesn't understand that Christian Fundamentalism is a well-defined social movement with a well-defined history, and it is by definition separatist and therefore not involved in American secular politics. When Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, for example, he left Fundamentalism as a social and religious movement.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part three): terrible times in the last days

2010-01-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

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Last night I wrapped up the second half of Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party.

This was fairly unpleasant reading: Blumenthal talked about the personal lives of various Christian leaders and their children, various Republican men and their sexual behavior, including various illegal activities, the question of whether a man who has sex with other men is a homosexual, etc. Then he devotes an entire section of the book to the significance of Sarah Palin.

This is pretty sordid stuff; I got really tired after a while of Blumenthal's descriptions of pornography, sex acts, etc. I suppose I should have expected this, however, from a book with the word "Gomorrah" in it.

I also got tired of Blumenthal's rhetorical flourishes; he often characterizes a person or organization organization in a way that isn't accurate and typically involves a value judgment or a particular interpretation of history (was Francis Schaeffer really the godfather of Dominonism? Is Youth With A Mission a Dominionist group? etc.) and footnote factual claims on each side of the flourish without doing anything to suggest why his characterization is accurate.

I finally decided that Blumenthal is just a muckraker, and I shouldn't expect anything more from this book. It's not a good book, Blumenthal doesn't apparently understand what he's seeing, he apparently doesn't understand that when James Dobson talks about "The Family" he's talking about an idealized nuclear family and not the group that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast (or just doesn't care), he evidently thinks abortion and pornography are morally neutral or even beneficial, etc. etc.

All that being said, I wish I could find a version of this book that had been fact-checked a bit more carefully, and was written for a centrist rather than a left-leaning audience: he covers a lot of political ground, mentions, contextualizes, and connects a lot of names, and at least mentions every high-profile scandal in the Christian Right (and many in the Republican Party) for the last twenty years. He at least name-checks a lot of the things about the current state of the Christian Right that really bother me, including

The connections between Sarah Palin and Third Wave Pentecostalism
Anything and everything having to do with the Council for National Policy
Purity balls (do these things really exist?)
The continuing unacknowledged influence of Rousas John Rushdoony
The various sexual scandals and the way Christian Right leaders respond to them
The fact that the "movement" has more to do with making Christians into Republicans (and not, say, the other way around)

Unfortunately Blumental makes a mess of this book; I almost wonder if it was intended to inoculate people on the Christian Right against criticism, rather than it's apparent intent to diagnose a real problem on the right.

Blumenthal's basic premise, that the Republican Party is popular with the Christian Right (or perhaps the other way around) because the Christian Right alternately tells fear stories and offers the prospect of a "magic daddy" who can keep everyone safe at the cost of their freedom. This is unfortunately something Blumenthal assumes rather than proves, and it colors his analysis to its detriment. He doesn't compare it to any other fear and magic stories popular in political circles (collective action, labor unions, the New Deal, the Great Society, the free market, etc.) and as I've noted earlier he always seem to be reaching for connections that don't quite make sense.

I'm glad to have this book behind me; I'll probably take a break from religion and politics for a little while before wading back into my history of Fundamentalist Christianity/history of the Religious Right reading list again.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part two)

2010-01-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

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I'm fifteen chapters into Max Blumenthal's book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party and I'm still waiting for the book to gel. Apart from the fact that Blumenthal is a reporter who has dealt with some of the principal players in the book, the fact that he clearly doesn't like Republicans, or Christian political activists, there's not much I can get my hands on.

The current section of the book (chapters 7-15) deal mostly with the impact James Dobson had on national politics during the Clinton and Bush years, with sections devoted to various supporting actors, most of them unsavory characters, including:

Newt Gingrich
Dick Armey
Tom DeLay
Ralph Reed
Jack Abramoff
Ted Bundy
David Berkowitz

I haven't paid much attention to Dobson, and I had no idea he had been part of the media circus surrounding serial killers Bundy and Berkowitz; I was aware that Dobson has made some peculiar calls when choosing candidates to support and candidates to spurn, and that he's not always consistent in the choices he makes.Like Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, etc. before him, Dobson has at times seemed at best naive in his dealings with politicians.

Unfortunately, Blumenthal doesn't really delve into the question that interests me, which is why Dobson believes what he believes and/or apparently makes snap judgments regarding who to support and who to spurn. Instead he wastes pages trying and failing to connect pieces that just don't quite fit together: he tries to suggest that because Dobson associate John Tanner defended Ted Bundy and prosecuted Aileen Wuornos that someone (Dobson? Tanner? The Christian Right?) hates women; he tries and fails to connect Dobson with Jack Abramoff just because they both had political and financial dealings with Ralph Reed.

Blumenthal is right about several things: the Terry Schaivo episode was at best a misguided disaster; Newt Gingrich's rehabilitation is probably a sick joke; the Christian Right's civil rights record is middling to poor. Unfortunately he handles these stories so poorly, so pointillistically, that no real theme ever really emerges. Unless maybe that point is "James Dobson is a bad person," or some such. His recurring references to Erich Fromm's 1941 book Escape from Freedom offer this book its only real theme, but his reading of Fromm is shallow and the Fromm references don't gel either: the things he says about people trading freedom for certainty are not new and not peculiar to the Christian Right; they're a problem on the other side of the aisle as well, and the fact that Blumental ignores this more basic question undermines his application of Fromm.

I didn't know anything about Blumenthal before opening this book, and it wasn't until I reached the point where he mentions having been somewhere on assignment for The Huffington Post that I realized where he's coming from. And I guess that's disappointing: I get the feeling that when Blumenthal makes poor distinctions he's doing it on purpose: instead of looking for a solvable problem he's looking to smear various Christian leaders and make their involvement in the political process suspect, suggesting that because they believe what they believe they shouldn't be involved in opinion-making. This strikes me as an oddly partisan viewpoint, and ultimately unhelpful.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah (part one): march against Bablyon

2010-01-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

Max Blumenthal's 2009 book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party is another one of those "who are these people?" books that attempts to explain who's who and what's what in the Christian Right. It appears to have been written for a TIME Magazine-reading audience, possibly with connections inside the Beltway, since it starts with selections from the TIME list of the 25 most influential Evangelicals and peppers the summary with political reference points: the John Birch Society, the Communist Party, the ACLU, etc.

So far I've just gotten through Part One, for which Blumenthal chooses as an epigram Jeremiah 50:21-22 (march and destroy, etc.). I still have no idea where Blumenthal is going: in the introduction he suggests that he will be explaining the relationship between the Christian Right and the misbehavior of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Larry Craig, etc. and its commitment to authoritarian government, but by the end of Part One he's just given biographical information on a handful of politically influential Christians:

Rousas John Rushdoony
Francis Schaeffer
Howard and Roberta Green Ahmanson
Marvin Olasky
James Dobson
Chuck Colson

And when he makes the turn into Part Two he's still talking about Dobson, connecting Dobson's advocacy of corporal punishment (spanking, plus some sort of trapezius nerve pinch) with his political action against pornography.

I hesitate to say that this is a bad book; Blumenthal is telling a particular story to a particular audience, and it's probably unreasonable to expect him to get details right when he's talking about things that are peripheral to his story or that his audience already believes or doesn't care about: he frames generally accepted terms he doesn't like in scare quotes: e.g. "pro-life," misapplies terms (the Presbyterian Church in America is not ultraconservative; they're a conservative branch of a mainline denomination), gets basic facts wrong (John Wesley wasn't a Calvinist), and tends to quote single sources as authoritative without adequate justification.

I suspect it's fair to say that Blumenthal isn't interested in putting the Christian Right in whatever form into historical perspective; he's looking to sell books to people who already fear and hate the Christian Right. And that's a double shame: first because the rise of the Christian Right is poorly understood by people who disagree with them, and second because Blumenthal's sloppiness and high rhetorical tone doesn't help anyone's understanding.

There are multiple perspectives on the Christian Right as a religious and political movement, and most of the things written about it look at it from one and only one of these perspectives:

A grass-roots political movement
The continuation of some interrupted political story
A foreign imposition of an antidemocratic authoritarian political system
A deviant but uniquely American religious phenomenon
A story of blind faith and political naivete becoming politically savvy
A conspiracy of a cabal of shady characters

Blumenthal seems to be taking the third perspective, putting him in the same category with John Dean and Joe Conason, writing Beltway books for a Beltway audience concerned with Beltway values.

Coakley Brown

2010-01-19T11:35:00.000-08:00

I have mostly ignored this Senate race; I assumed that whatever power kept Ted Kennedy in office for forty-seven years would be sufficient to deliver this seat to whoever the Democrats decided to run. Silly me.

This morning I tuned in to CNN, which took a short break from its round-the-clock Haiti earthquake coverage to say

People in Massachusetts are angry
Martha Coakley apparently called someone named Curt Schilling a "Yankees fan."

Go figure.

538 is all over this; evidently Nate Silver really really wants to see the Democrats keep their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, and hopes that by saying Coakley will lose that he'll rally enough Democrats to the polls to cause her to win. I usually like Silver/538, and really appreciated his coverage of polling results during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Unfortunately I wonder if he's out of his depth here, since there just doesn't seem to be a lot of good polling data regarding the Massachusetts Senate race. Just anger. And baseball.

Haitian death tolls (3)

2010-01-19T08:10:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Haitian earthquake was a week ago, and while secondary effects of the earthquake (civil unrest, impact of breakdown of infrastructure, etc.) are starting to make the news, the death toll numbers are still all over the place:

Haiti death toll: Government says toll could be massive, but firm numbers elusive (Christian Science Monitor)
Haiti appeals for aid; official fears 100,000 dead after earthquake (CNN)

The first article mentions the difficulty of getting accurate counts, and notes that while estimates are 50 000 and 100 000, the confirmed count is "in the hundreds" whatever that means. The second article mentions three estimates: 30 000, 50 000, and 100 000, with the two lower numbers coming from a United Nations official rather than Haitian officials.

The first article includes two examples of death tolls vs. their initial estimates, one from a somewhat similar disaster: the 2003 Bam, Iran earthquake. That earthquake was magnitude 6.6, had initial death toll estimates of 41 000, but was eventually revised down to 26 271 killed, 30 000 injured, 100 000 displaced due to high building collapse rates in the Bam metropolitan area. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was much larger, with something like a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and deaths in 14 countries, but most of the deaths were due to the tsunami, so it's hard to make a fair comparison here.

Haitian death tolls (2)

2010-01-18T08:18:00.000-08:00

It is really difficult to do science in difficult circumstances, and unfortunately the question of how many people, exactly, have died as a result of the 2010 Haitian earthquake is a scientific question. Here are a few links:

The numbers are still kind of round, and vary from 50 000 to 220 000. At the risk of sounding cynical, I am tempted to be skeptical about any numbers coming from official government sources, and would be more inclined to believe numbers coming from a non-governmental organization with the capacity to collect numbers from many areas. The numbers in the article citing the Red Cross are really soft; it says three million affected, tens of thousands dead.

The 200 000 number seems to have come from a comparison to the 2004 South Asian Tsunami, but has otherwise been pulled out of thin air.

Wendell Berry: Life is a Miracle (part two): quotes and conclusions

2010-01-18T07:36:00.000-08:00

Last night I sat up late finishing Wendell Berry's essay Life Is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. I came away with the impression that Mr Berry could have saved many thousands of words by ignoring Edward O. Wilson's book Conscilience altogether and cutting what he (Berry) had to say down to the barest minimum, say a couple thousand words.

If I were to dig through this essay and find those thousand words, this section would probably be among them:

There is no reason, as I hope and believe, that science and religion might not live together in amity and peace, so long as they both acknowledge their real differences and each remain within its own competence. Religion, that is, should not attempt to dispute what science has actually proved; and science should not claim to know what it does not know, it should not confuse theory and knowledge, and it should disavow any claim on what is empirically unknowable.

And when Berry sets out to explain how he would set out to reconstruct the social order to keep science away from religion (and away from art) he starts here:

And how might this come about? Again, I have to say that I don't know. I don't like or trust large, official programs of improvement, and I don't want to appear to be inviting any such thing.

This first quote is close to Berry's main theme: science as we currently understand it is basically soulless, and ruins everything it touches. The second half of this essay Berry devotes to suggesting that science has nothing helpful to say about religion or art, because they are fundamentally about different things, express themselves differently, and value different things. This is at its heart a helpful argument up to a point: we live in a society that claims to value both science and art, but in Berry's mind Wilson and his ilk believe that art is properly within the domain of science, and that left to their own devices they would do something horrible to it. Unfortunately Berry seems to be continually making unfair comparisons: between science (and scientism) at its worst versus an idealized art, and between a future science that is worse and more threatening versus a religion that has been repaired of all its flaws.Frankly this reminds me of the sort of arguments I hear between socialists and capitalists: the socialists want to talk about the excesses and abuses of capitalism as it is vs. the idealistic goals of socialism, while the capitalists want to talk about the theoretical freedoms capitalism offers vs. the excesses of totalitarian states with nominally socialist governments.

I don't know what to make of this: I have to agree with Berry that Something Is Horribly Wrong, and I have to agree with him that simply transferring the power to remake society from one evil system to another won't give us what we all want: a more stable, more diverse, less self-destructive world. Unfortunately I find his arguments appalling: not just wordy and mostly vacuous, but devoid of real remedies.

Berry never makes the argument that what the world needs is better people, so he's left talking about better systems: namely, universities need to be more united and self-critical. Berry suggests that universities have made a deal with the Devil by allowing themselves to fracture into disciplines that never cross-cooperate or cross-communicate, much less cross-criticize. He points out that universities have art critics but no farm critics or industry critics, and suggests that it lacks the latter because corporate and industrial concerns have purchased the silence of the university as a whole. This is an apt observation as far as it goes, but what Berry overlooks is the natural human tendency for university professors to avoid controversy and responsibility. He doesn't ask the question of whether university faculty are corrupt because they are university faculty, or whether they are corrupt because they are university faculty. So while the changes he envisions for society value the individual he never identifies the individual responsibilities to which his systemic reforms devolve.

As an aside, I have to point out that here again Berry is railing against an imaginary university. He chooses Wilson as representative of the evil overreaching scientist, but he never identifies a university that is guilty of the particular sins he lists. As a result he's stuck: either as an authority on universities (which he isn't) or appealing to our prejudices about universities (which may or may not be fair). This would have been a much better book if he'd described the history of the infiltration and downfall of a particular university, complete with names and dates. As it is I'm left wondering if he's even found the right culprit, or if instead the problems he identifies are symptoms of something deeper and more widespread.

Berry is fundamentally grappling with the relationship between the individual and the collective, or more accurately, the individual and the statistical distribution to which it contributes. He asks some worthwhile questions, and I find myself wondering whether he does a better job elsewhere; these are good questions asked poorly and reiterated ad nauseam.

Haitian death tolls

2010-01-15T14:43:00.000-08:00

Here are a few quick links regarding the death toll of the recent earthquake in Haiti:

The first number is a prediction of eventual total deaths; the second is an official estimate from the Red Cross (45-50 000), and the third includes an estimate from unnamed Haitian government officials of about 100 000; the Wikipedia article collects these latter two estimates, and it looks like both of them are current counts, not predictions.

I'm not going to take any cheap shots here; on the other hand, I'd suggest that estimating a large number when communication is poor and data incomplete is really hard.

Wendell Berry: Life is a Miracle (part one) Berry hates Wilson

2010-01-15T08:50:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

For better or worse I've waded into Wendell Berry's slim volume Life Is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Of 150 or so pages, 60 are devoted to a critique of Edward O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

I want very badly to like Berry: he's a Christian (and a Baptist, no less) who is after a fashion an idea leader of sorts. He writes well. People I like read and like him. He's even dealing with a question I really like, regarding the relationship between the individual and scientific knowledge.

Berry's premise is that the scientific community is arrogant: considers everything within its grasp, ignores anything that cannot be easily measured, doesn't have a concept of place, expects too much of its practitioners, expects to be taken at its word despite past shortcomings, etc. Berry's life themes, regarding the value of place and community, give him a framework of sorts for his critique.

Unfortunately Berry is long on rhetoric and short on insight. Sure, there are some real nuggets here, but Wilson mostly pushes his arguments by appealing to abstractions, making emotional appeals to vague concepts, and using "scare quotes." We all understand that there is such a thing as "local culture," for example, but when Berry appeals to this as an absolute and inviolable good I have a hard time following him: surely evil and oppressive practices are as abundant in small communities as they are in large communities. Aren't they? And while I understand the appeal of an heirloom apple tree or the magnificence of the view out Berry's kitchen window, I don't see a fair comparison between that and the global scientific enterprise. I have to agree with Berry's basic fuzzy premise: that the map is not the territory, and people are not just segments of population, and averages are not real things, and life and the data derived from it are not the same thing and shouldn't be treated as interchangeable, but I'm put off by Berry's arguments.

Certainly many evil things have been done in the name of science, engineering, and industry. And certainly it is dangerous to equivocate between brains, minds, and machines. But Berry reads like a Fundamentalist preacher: he doesn't let Wilson speak: he picks individual words and terms that are pages apart and places them side by side; he contextualizes small quotes from Wilson in a narrative of his own and gives the terms his own definition. For example, when Berry quotes "the mind ... is the brain at work" and Berry rephrases this as "mind = brain = machine" (p. 47) I can't believe he's giving Wilson a fair reading, so he can't be giving a fair critique.

Finally, Berry is warning that Wilson's mindset is toxic to all of society, and he's right generally that amoral technocracy is bad for society. However, he doesn't (or hasn't) taken the positive step of suggesting anything that can actually become policy. Locality and community are worthwhile values, but as we in the conservative Christian community are still learning, values are not themselves policies.

Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part four): the disappointing conclusion

2010-01-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

The fourth and final installment of Tony Hillerman's memoir Seldom Disappointed deals primarily with his life as a working writer up to about his seventy-fifth birthday, including a sabbatical at a college in Mexico, the publication of his novels, his misadventures in television and movies, the death of his brother, etc.

Hillerman is disarmingly humble and self-deprecating about his success, making it difficult to be too hard on him: it really seems like after he lived through the Depression and World War II, then got married, adopted several children, and had a successful career before becoming a novelist, that he was genuinely grateful and happy, so the rest of his memoir dealt mostly with explaining a sequence of events: writing and rewriting, finding an agent who understood what he was doing, finding an audience, his generally good relationship with various Indian communities, etc.

There really aren't any deep insights or big controversies in the last quarter of his book. I appreciated his explaining why his books have two heroes (Leaphorn and Chee, rather than Leaphorn or Chee), especially, as he admits, they're hard to tell apart: when he sold the option for his first novel, a clause in the contract guaranteed anyone who bought the option a third time the rights to the Leaphorn character, meaning that Hillerman accidentally found himself partway through his career without ownership of his own character. He mentions more than once that he had to buy Leaphorn back at the cost of $20,000.

His other adventures in Hollywood don't go much better: NBC-TV evidently stiffed him for his expenses after saying they wanted to produce a "desert Hawaii Five-O," but gradually deciding what they really wanted had neither Navajos (per se) nor desert, and they also wanted the hero to have a buxom blond sidekick, meaning they really didn't want anything Hillerman could offer.

That is really the last anecdote of interest; Hillerman more or less looks around at the end and realizes he doesn't have an ending, so he says "well, guess I'll get back to writing" and does. The book ends with a discussion of problems he had to solve in his published novels, a comprehensive bibliography of books he'd written, collected and uncollected stories, books to which he'd contributed, and finally books about him and his work, including several books by crime writer Ken Englade.

This is still a really good memoir: fast-paced, no-nonsense, and very readable. A person could pick worse as a model.

Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part three): Santa Fe and Albuquerque

2010-01-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

Last night I finally got into the section of Tony Hillerman's memoir Seldom Disappointed that drew me to this book in the first place: his move to New Mexico and his gradual transition from ordinary schmo to writer.

In the third quarter of his memoir, Hillerman goes to college and majors in journalism, cycles through several Oklahoma papers before being recruited by the news service United Press. UP sends him off to the Santa Fe bureau, where the stories he dictates over the phone are transcribed directly to teletype for distribution to subscribers. When UP decides to have him split his time between Santa Fe (the capitol city) and Albuquerque (the only metropolitan center of any size) an hour away, Hillerman quits UP and enrolls at the University of New Mexico, where he is immediately drafted as an assistant to the President of the University. His job at UNM is to help the President deal with the press, and, occasionally, the same political figures in Santa Fe Hillerman had just left.

Hillerman's understated style in this section is at its best: he manages to capture the old-boy-network Third-World aspect of New Mexico in the Fifties deftly and economically, and he even captures the magical-realism of the Cricket Coogler murder and its implications without losing his own distinctive reporterly voice.

Hillerman makes the transition from graduate student to UNM faculty and from state politics to university faculty politics, adopts several children, and begins to make the transition from academic to writer; at the end of this section he's beginning to discuss but not actually write the first of his Navajo Country novels and has sketched sections from a couple of others. It's hard to fathom that with a quarter of the book to go he still has forty years to live and more than fifteen books to write.

This is the section of the book that actually seems joyful and amused at how well his life is turning out, and at the risk of falling back on cliche I have to say it's a joy to read. Hillerman's novels sometimes plod and are generally underimagined, and even he understands he's a man of limited talent as a fiction writer (he has trouble with believable villains, struggles with romance, etc.) but as an essayist (The Great Taos Bank Robbery) and a memoirist he's much better, even with his deadpan delivery and lean prose.

If everything goes well I'll wrap this book up tonight; I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it, but not looking forward to being done.

Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part two): World War II

2010-01-12T08:10:00.001-08:00

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

Tony Hillerman wasn't drafted, and in fact because once his older brother was drafted he was the sole remaining son of a widow he was exempt from the draft, but once he failed to make a go of college the first time he essentially volunteered for the infantry. The second quarter of his memoir Seldom Disappointed covers his time in the Army, his convalescence, and his return to civilian life.

Hillerman is the first writer I've read whose account of World War II sounded anything like Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22: reserve troops are sent on fool's errands, replacements are killed minutes after arriving, Army intelligence is almost never right, and officers are generally well-fed and unconcerned with the health and well-being of their men.Most of Hillerman's anecdotes involve marching from one place to another with inappropriate armaments and gear, losing weapons or gear, sloshing through mud, digging foxholes, lying in the mud in foxholes, and getting up the next day to do the same thing in a different direction. He serves out his tour of duty in Europe, skirts the Battle of the Bulge, is awarded the Bronze Star and the Silver Star, steps on a land mine and loses his sight, and is finally sent Stateside at the end of the war for surgery that is abruptly canceled when he is discharged.

On his return Hillerman is impressed with the way a journalist mills segments of his letters to his mother into a passable newspaper article about him and decided to invest his access to education due to the GI Bill to become a journalist, "whatever that was," and a chance encounter with some Navajos in ceremonial dress in the Four Corners area apparently completes the outline of the rest of his life.

I am repeatedly surprised at the balance between the gratitude Hillerman shows for how one accident after another improves his lot in life, and how his primitive Catholicism frames his generally decent behavior day to day, but how these two elements of his outlook never quite coalesce: it's as if God lives somewhere else and Hillerman communicates with Him via a ritual once in a while, while the luck bordering on grace that shapes his life doesn't demand explanation. I sometimes wonder if how much of this missed connection is late artifice by the older Hillerman and how much of it is a fair representation of his state of mind fifty years earlier.

Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part one)

2010-01-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

Tony Hillerman is something of an institution among contemporary Southwestern novelists, and while he was admittedly a writer of limited range, he captures the feel of Navajo country and aspects of the difficulty of living simultaneously in an ancient culture and a modern culture. He's probably best known for his "Leaphorn and Chee" novels, eighteen books centered around two Navajo police investigators. While it isn't fair to say that if you've read one you've read them all, they mostly follow a pattern: one or more murders in Navajo Country, investigation by Leaphorn, Chee, or both, discussion of elements of Navajo culture or religion, and comments on the difficulties of living in Navajo Country. The books follow in sequence, and while there are continuing stories regarding Leaphorn's aging and retirement and Chee's love life and struggle to define himself as either a modern Navajo or a traditional Navajo, the books are not closely linked: while there are characters who recur they can typically be understood in single novels.

In addition to these Hillerman wrote a couple of novels outside the series and several nonfiction books including a memoir, Seldom Disappointed.

While I can usually read a Hillerman novel in two sittings, Seldom Disappointed is a more thoughtful, denser read. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I'll be pleasantly surprised if I finish this book this week.

Hillerman grew up in Catholic in Oklahoma and Indian Territory during the Depression, then fought Germans in World War II in Europe, and I'm just to the point where he has shipped off for Europe. I am beginning to suspect that Hillerman's voice in his nonfiction is freer, smarter, and better than in his novels: his descriptions of frontier education between the wars, of Benedictine missions in Indian country, of what his family's Catholicism meant and implied about them, of realizing that he wasn't college material, of marginal poverty, even of the practice and perception of hitchhiking during World War II are carefully considered and surprisingly economical. His use of digression and foreshadowing is balanced and well-considered. I'm really impressed with this book, and I think it would make for good reading for anyone considering writing a memoir.

Buying In: the ethical conclusion

2010-01-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

Early in Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, author Rob Walker lays out "four and a half" factors that determine the rational (brand- and logo-free) aspects of purchases:

Price
Convenience
Quality
Pleasure
Ethics (that's the "half factor")

In the third section he takes up the ethical side of rational purchasing decisions, and for reasons that aren't entirely clear he narrows this discussion to LOHAS ("lifestyles of health and sustainability"), the DIY/craft movement as a political movement, and finally the question of whether there is a "you are what you buy" analogue to the old maxim "you are what you eat." This last section features an appearance by someone named Rick Warren.

I hate to say it, but while Walker offers a couple of helpful insights, this last section more or less just rolls over and dies. There's probably no such thing as "sustainable consumption," certainly not in a modern city the size of New York City, especially when there are other forces that are more immediate and more tangible and moving in the other direction: struggles against hunger and poverty, the survival of the middle class, immigration, aging of the American workforce, etc. All these things require the expansion of the current economy, and the sustainability narrative isn't a positive, maximizing narrative: it's a negative, minimizing narrative.

Walker edges up to these problems when he notes that, for example, people give themselves a kind of moral or ethical license for wanting to buy greener products, especially if they follow through and spend a little more for a more ethical or cleaner or whatever product: like dieters they tend to allow themselves a counterproductive reward for being good without considering the proportion of the virtue and the reward. So long as this continues to be true, so long as the effects of buying less wasteful or more ethical or whatever products isn't tangible, this will continue to be the case. We're back where we were a couple of books ago with Colin Beavan: Beavan has to believe that giving up real toilet paper helps save imaginary polar bears, so in reality he's left with a spiritual discipline, not an economic or ecological policy. Unfortunately when I hear something like moral panic take hold in someone like Beavan and maybe Walker who think it is really possible to save the world by buying a different brand of t-shirt, or who can't see that Faith Popcorn and Naomi Klein are selling essentially the same product, just with different pitches, I begin to wonder if I'm hearing a story written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (stages of grief) or Friedrich von Hayek (the Road to Serfdom).

In the end Walker achieves a minor victory by mostly debunking the occasionally popular notion that the "consumer is in control" of the marketplace; if he'd stuck to that basic idea in the book and organized its various narrative strands around it this would have been a better book: fundamentally the advertisers are professionals and the consumers are amateurs, and everything else in the story is narrative noise.

I know I run the risk of sounding like I hated this book. I didn't; this is just another step in a complicated process of the mass market understanding itself, for lack of a better term. We tend to see ourselves as free agents and the market as a handful of concrete objects plus a bunch of numbers, and we haven't yet answered the question of whether there is a coherent picture that includes all three.

Buying In, part two

2010-01-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

I'm still reading Rob Walker's book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, and much to my chagrin I only got through another forty pages or so last night.

Walker finally got to the reveal last night: he believes there's nothing special about Red Bull, so all the hype about it (versus other energy drinks) is just that. He says this because it's unique ingredient, supposedly, is taurine, and there's nothing special about taurine. And what's special about Red Bull's marketing? It's unfocused (or defocused) enough for people to project their own meaning onto it.

This, apparently, is the key to the Timberland media strategy too, and how they're able to hold on to their base (blue collar laborers in New England) and reach out to a second demographic group (urban buyers, hip-hop trendies): they admit what Walker calls "projectability," which I suspect means image ambiguity, plus a few cues and clues, not all of which are consistent.

As an aside, I might gently suggest that some of what he's saying regarding projectability could also be said of many religious organizations, but that's another topic for another day.

Walker then tells some anecdotes about BzzAgent and Tremor, organizations that attempt to coordinate and orchestrate word of mouth campaigns; he notes that most of the people who participate in these things do it for the sake of the act itself: they engage in belonging, partly as early adopters and hypesters, but mostly, apparently, for the sense of belonging to something/anything. Walker doesn't delve, because his story isn't about these people, exactly.

Walker revisits some of the Coolhunt territory again, discussing the diffusion of trends through early and late adopter populations. I guess when one stands on Malcolm Gladwell's shoulders it's best to at least namecheck him.

He mentions the strange case of A-Ron, Aaron Bondaroff, a Manhattan scenester who set out to make a living from his lifestyle, and has so far more or less succeeded by promoting clothing among other things, but who mysteriously rejects the "famous for being famous" label; Walker then does the apparently obligatory trudge through sneaker culture and sneakerheads.

Because Walker's story is about the relationship between consumer and brand, and he focuses so tightly on that relationship, he never asks the question I want him to answer: how does all of this work economically? How do the sneaker collectors pay for their dozens to hundreds of pairs of rare Nikes? How do these hypesters and scenesters pay their rent? They can't all just be selling limited-edition Nikes on eBay; the money to buy the sneakers has to some from somewhere. Do they have day jobs? Are they reselling on a secondary market comprised of non-scenesters? Do they all have government grants?

The central message of Buying In seems to be (so far) that to reach postmodern consumers, one has to engage in defocused hype. Or words to that effect.

Sixty pages to go; I may wrap this one up tonight. Watch this space.

Walker's book-related site is Murketing.com.

reading Going Rogue

2009-12-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

Cover of Going Rogue: An American Life

I spent a chunk of the Christmas break reading the Sarah Palin memoir Going Rogue: An American Life.

I don't know what to call this book, exactly. It sort of fits into the shameless political autobiography category, sort of fits into the political tell-all category. I don't read much of either genre: this year I read the Gary Aldrich Clinton-era hit piece Unlimited Access, which fits neatly into the second category, and that's it, so I don't have much to measure it against.

This is an honest-to-goodness four-hundred pager, with lots of self-contained paragraphs that link up to tell the Sarah Palin story, in more or less five acts:

Family history and life before she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska
Time as mayor of Wasilla
Year-plus as Governor of Alaska
McCain-Palin 2008
Life after the campaign and a little future direction

It's a surprisingly dense read: it's written in fairly plain English, but with a fair amount of political jargon and the technical language of running a town or a state: a lot of talk about the nuts and bolts of town council politics and state budget negotiations, not to mention the technical details of running for Vice President of the United States. While a lot of these books get written on the basis of many interviews with the help of a ghostwriter, I got the impression that this was the distillation of a large number of journal entries: the narrative is at times disjointed, and there are lots of little vignettes that really contribute nothing to the overall story. I realize that Governor Palin has a lot to say about a lot of things to several different audiences, but I wondered repeatedly if the book could have done with some editing, perhaps to put the political stuff in political chapters, the family stuff in family chapters, etc.

I don't know if I'm in the target audience for this book; I suspect not. I am inclined to take the implied explanation in the last section of the book: she left the Alaska Governor's office owing a half-million dollars, and the advance for Going Rogue was a relatively painless way to cover those expenses and leave a little nest egg for the Palin family. I got the impression that the book was written as the end of something, rather than a bridge to the next phase of something. Governor Palin definitely sounds done with the whole sordid business by the end of the book.

I found this book painful to read. Palin's tone is earnest and occasionally miffed, and that wears thin pretty quickly, and frankly I didn't (and don't) care about all the scores she needed to settle and records she needed to straighten. The family stuff got old too: I realize that it's very difficult to juggle a career with the demands of being a single mom (Palin's husband works on the North Slope, more than a thousand miles from the Palin home in Wasilla), not to mention the twenty-four-hour-a-day demands of being the Governor of even a state with relatively simple politics like Alaska, but after a while the middle three children sort of blur together (the oldest, Track, is in the military, and the youngest, Trig, has Down Syndrome), and I just didn't care whether somebody was being mean to her kids, etc.

I started reading this book believing that Palin was woefully unqualified to be President of the United States, and the McCain campaign made a snap decision that thrust her into the spotlight. I still believe both of those things, but I'd be less disturbed than I was a year ago if she were appointed to a Cabinet position or were elected to Congress. She espouses a clearly-defined set of values, she's beholden to certain interests, etc. I tend to believe that a President needs to have served in an executive capacity, involved in policy-making, and either started and successfully run a small business or served in the military; preferably both of the latter. Palin is somewhat qualified on the first two counts, and not on either of the latter two counts. If she'd served out her term as Governor of Alaska and been re-elected I'd be more comfortable voting for her as Vice President. I'm not sure what she'd have to do for me to be comfortable voting for her as President. Maybe if she got the Republican nomination and she were running against John Kerry.

I realize that qualifications are sometimes a poor predictor of performance as President: Bill Clinton was poorly qualified, as was George W. Bush, while George Bush had the best resume in Washington, and Richard Nixon and Woodrow Wilson may have been the best-qualified of any candidates in the last century. Good Presidents tend to surround themselves with a mix of political operatives and visionaries, and of course have good luck.

I really didn't get a feel for who would be in a Palin Cabinet. She overplayed her outsider status during the 2008 campaign section of Going Rogue, repeatedly complaining about how she was part of "the B Team" while the campaign was being run by "headquarters." It isn't even clear to me who would be her Karl Rove or her Lee Atwater, much less who would be her Raul Emanuel. If anything, her story lent more credibility to the notion that the 2008 campaign had little or nothing to do with Sarah Palin per se.

I hate to say it, but I can't recommend this book as a stand-alone Sarah Palin biography; I wish someone in the McCain-Palin camp had written a less personal account I could have written first, even if it was a work of hagiography on the order of The Nixon Nobody Knows.

A reading year

2009-12-28T06:50:00.001-08:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Back in 2003 I made a point of tracking every book I read, with a goal of reading fifty books during the calendar year. I finished with something like fifty-five books, and I have the Excel spreadsheet lying around somewhere for that year and the next. It seemed like kind of a silly project, with a bunch of fairly arbitrary limiting choices (What constitutes a book? Does skimming count as reading? What is or isn't cheating? etc.) and when my obligations and interests changed (basically, for a couple of years my job completely swallowed my life, and I wasn't teaching a Bible study any more) I dropped the project.

Then a year ago (to the day) Karl Rove's article Bush Is a Book Lover: a glimpse of what the President has been reading surfaced in the Wall Street Journal, and it just blew my mind. The President, while being the Leader of the Free World, or whatever, had managed during one calendar year to read ninety-five books in his peak year, averaging sixty-two a year over a three-year period. I realized that by making reading a priority I could do something similar. Especially after I had a look at what he read: while it's easy to take cheap shots at him for not reading enough that is critical of his administration, as Richard Cohen did in the Washington Post, and while there's something self-serving about any President reading too much about Abraham Lincoln (because being Lincoln was a life-long project, and one doesn't become Lincoln by reading about him), it was clear that the President not only occasionally read hard books, he occasionally let some of them influence his thinking, rather than just gathering facts to support his already fixed mindset. And while the results may not have been entirely admirable, at least he had the humility to read a book cover to cover.

So this year I set out to read a hundred books. As I mentioned above, it's kind of an arbitrary goal, and I set some arbitrary constraints:

I wanted to average 300 pages per book
Books I began in 2008 didn't count
Children's books didn't count, but so-called young adult books did
Appendices, indexes, acknowledgments, prefaces, end notes, etc. I handled on a case-by-case basis; I generally counted the book as read if I read the main body of the book, but only counted the pages I actually read against the page total
Two-fers, three-fers, etc. counted as separate books if they were originally published separately, so the New Testament and Psalms counts as one book, not twenty-eight, and the Tony Hillerman three-in-one packages would have been three if I'd read any of those
Large documents not actually published as books counted, but they had to be longer than the shortest book on my list. This is kind of a nit-picky constraint, but it's helpful in an age when "published" is in the eye of the beholder.
Re-reads count, but not if they're skimmed.

Along the way I learned a lot about reading, generally. I learned that

Contemporary fiction is easier to read on a page-for-page basis than contemporary nonfiction.
Reading a lot requires planning: you can't read a book if you don't have one handy, and a long-haul flight can sometimes require more than one.
Reading a lot is a discipline, and like most disciplines requires recurring choices: I was on place for 118 books at mid-September, but fell off pace because I didn't stick to my reading.
Television is a great distraction; blogging and blogs are an obstacle.
Some authors stand up well to being read in sequence and close together, some not so much. Big stories stretching across multiple books need this approach, but not every author expects to be read this way. It doesn't make sense to read J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books out of order, for example, and they do reward the reader if read close together. Tom Clancy published his books out of order, both in terms of the chronology in the overall story and in the order in which he wrote them, so a reader has to pick a sequence. And it turns out some of them are better if not read during a prolonged Tom Clancy binge. Tony Hillerman has two main characters, lets them age, and uses the same devices repeatedly; it's better to read his books over a period of several years.

Once I got into the project I learned that there are other people who undertake reading projects on a more or less formal basis, some with Big Year focus and planning, others as more a way of life like big streak runners. Reformed Christian blogger Tim Challies reads and reviews eighty to a hundred books a year, mostly in the nonfiction Religion and Spirituality genre. Nina Sankovich made the New York Times last year for her book a day project: she reads a book every day and posts a review on her blog the next day. Blogger Angie is also doing the book-a-day thing for 2009, but because she lives outside the New York City metropolitan area she didn't merit mention in the Times.

There are even guides and 43 things tasks for this sort of thing, not to mention the somewhat self-serving Big Read project at the National Endowment for the Arts. They all say more or less the same thing: plan your reading, stick to fiction, pace yourself, avail yourself of public (or university) libraries and keep a standby list of short stuff for tough days.

I prefer nonfiction to fiction, and I suspect that imposes a practical limit, either on the length of the books I'll likely read or on the number of books I can read. I suspect I could do a book a day (or half a book a day) if I stuck to Louis L'Amour or Harlequins or some such, but I'd go out of my mind. And unfortunately it can be tougher to skim your way out of difficult nonfiction than boring fiction. There just isn't enough Malcolm Gladwell, Po Bronson, and Michael Lewis in all the world to sustain a book-a-day pace reading nonfiction.

Regardless, this year, with two-plus days to go, I've read 106 books that meet the criteria above, plus another ten that don't count. It's unlikely I'll get to 110 this year. Maybe next year, or when I'm old. I'll spare anyone who has read this far the entire list, but here are some highlights:

All seven Harry Potter books
Fourteen Tony Hillermans (thirteen novels plus The Great Taos Bank Robbery); Hillerman's Navajo Country detective novels are sort of a rite of passage for anyone living in the American Southwest, and I can't believe I put them off this long.
Five Tom Clancys
Four Bob Woodwards
All three Neil Humphreys books about Singapore
Three Haruki Murakami books (Underground, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and After Dark); I'm still easing into Murakami.
The shortest was Henri Nouwen's monograph on icons Behold The Beauty Of The Lord (77 pages)
The longest was J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (870 pages)
The best was probably Kevin Roose's book about his year at Liberty University, The Unlikely Disciple.
Honorable mention to Jeff Sharlet's religious/political expose The Family.
Honorable mention to Alex Kerr's second book about Japan, Dogs and Demons.
Honorable mention to David Foster Wallace's long-form journalism piece McCain's Promise
Honorable mention to Mark Taylor Dalhouse's book about Bob Jones University, An Island in the Lake of Fire
There were several books I'd consider "awful" or worse, but they're not worth dissecting here.
I averaged 88.59 pages per day for finished books, and an average qualifying book had 300.60 pages
At a glance my list looks like it tilts a little toward nonfiction.

I'd love to do this again next year, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in the first half of February, so I should probably be happy if I don't stop reading altogether. And what books I read will probably tilt toward "how to raise a child" and "how to get enough sleep" books. I have a sketch of next year's fiction target list, and right now it includes

The remaining six or seven Tony Hillerman novels
The Left Behind series (all sixteen volumes)
Lots of 20th Century evangelical Christian history and commentary; everybody agrees we're dangerous or worse, but nobody seems to understand the movement or know anyone in it. It's almost like it has come and gone and not found its voice or left a trace.
Half or so of the remaining Bob Woodward books, probably not including the Bush At War books.

I'll be thrilled to get to this point next year with fifty books read, but we'll see. Watch this space.

The Healing of America and its implications

2009-12-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

Cover via Amazon

T. R. Reid, in his book The Healing of America, notes that Americans pay on average substantially more for health care than other industrialized nations, and focuses on the following factors:

Health insurance company profit margins
Health insurance company incentives to cheat
Costs to doctors of dealing with insurance companies
Doctor debt service
Doctors' salaries and expected standards of living
Doctor malpractice insurance

As I've noted elsewhere, in his book he visits doctors in several countries with the same complaint (persistent shoulder pain with limited range of motion), discusses the history of health care funding in each country, describes the general level of health care in each country, and examines at least in passing how each country deals with the problems listed above. These typically include:

Regulatory requirements on health insurance companies
Non-profit health insurance companies
Requirements that health insurance companies cover anyone and everyone, regardless of condition and cannot deny claims
Government funding of higher education including medical school
Health care price controls
Government incentives for preventive care
Government subsidy or funding of malpractice insurance

And while Reid talks a lot about American exceptionalism, holding it up as a straw man, he never deals with (nearly) unique American conditions, namely

The role, effectiveness, and cost of American medical testing
The cost of providing any publicly funded service in a large, sparsely-populated country (the cost of transportation and transportation infrastructure in countries like Australia, Canada, and Russia)
The cost of other American federal government priorities, including foreign aid, military spending, etc.

He deals with the weaknesses of each of the countries he holds up as offering better care than the United States:

France is continually renegotiating and restructuring how it pays for health care
The UK simply doesn't offer some life-saving procedures
Canada offers poor access to specialists
Japan pays for lots of high-quality health care for an aging population by squeezing doctors to the point that a certain amount of unofficial payment in the form of a tip or bribe is customary

And he doesn't project where these different systems will be in ten or twenty years, when undoubtedly one or more will be better off and one or more will be worse off.

Reid presents universal health care as a moral choice and a moral commitment, and once he's done that any further analysis has to be done in terms of values, not data, so when he presents data it's hard to know when he's being fair. He also chooses a mix of metrics for comparing different countries, and a reasonable person might fairly question some of his choices. Certainly infant mortality rate is important, but I have my doubts about any metric that attempts to adjust life expectancy by a quality of life measure, or even life expectancy at sixty: the last of these might be a good way to examine and compare populations, its usefulness as a guideline or a prescriptive measure would be limited.

What I'm saying is this: it would be great to have lots of Americans living to the age of eighty-five or ninety, but I'm not sure it's a proper goal when making health care policy decisions.

Now, finally: what do Reid's metrics suggest about the current health care bill(s)? Reid would probably scream at the prospect of requiring all Americans to buy health insurance without doing something to cap the cost of health insurance (he'd suggest the government take all the profit out of the health insurance industry) and he'd probably suggest that the assumption that the free market will bring down costs a sick joke, since if I understood him correctly most health insurance companies function as local near-monopolies: each, in each of its target markets, has lots of pricing power because it has very little competition. Reid would like the restrictions on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.

And I would guess he'd say what a lot of liberal and progressive pundits have said: this is a lousy start on a good process of increased regulation of the health insurance industry that doesn't do a thing about the health care (providing) industry.

The problem here, of course, is that the Democrats have paid so much for this bill in publicity and political capital that it will likely cost them seats (and power) in the next Congress, so they will be less able to press on to more ambitious goals like price controls and direct public funding of doctors and hospitals. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine the Republicans completely dismantling whatever system results from the current bills.

No Impact Man

2009-12-22T07:36:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Colin Beavan's book No Impact Man still merits a wait list at my local public library, but in the spirit of thrift and conservation I got on the list a couple of months ago and waited my turn.

Beavan came to national attention in 2007 on the strength of a single New York Times article by Penelope Green titled "The Year Without Toilet Paper," and to his credit he' s managed the transition from adequately successful but minor author to blogger, lifestyle experimenter, and finally public figure pretty well.

No Impact Man is Beavan's story of his year-long experiment in personal transformation, devoted to the refinement and reduction of his environmental footprint, including:

Refusing to eat or drink anything in a take-out container
Using a mesh bag instead of either paper or plastic grocery bags
Taking stairs instead of elevators, biking instead of taking public transport or taxis
Eating local food (grown within 250 miles of his Manhattan apartment)
Turning off the electricity in his apartment
Using a solar panel to power his laptop
Composting
Using cloth instead of disposable diapers
Canceling or consolidating trips
Getting involved in local natural resource rehabilitation

He's very committed, involves his wife and toddler daughter, and admits the strain the experiment puts on his marriage. He also discusses the emotional, psychological, and dare I say spiritual foundation of his experiment.

I have to admit that while I found Beavan's experiment interesting, I didn't like him; while he wears his "guilty liberal" credentials on his sleeve, and I appreciated his honesty in that department, I found him self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and on the whole not at all likable.

By and large Beavan doesn't do the math: he often raises questions that have answers if he'd just do the math and doesn't answer them:

Is it possible for New York City to become a sustainable city?
Does it make sense to wash a dish rather than use a disposable alternative?
Which is better (or worse): paper bags or plastic?

He also fails to make helpful distinctions; while he's correct that the no-littering campaigns in the Seventies were funded by industrial concerns and misdirected attention from not creating waste in the first place to disposing of litter, and put the burden on consumers rather than producers, he doesn't distinguish between law-abiding polluters and law-breaking polluters. He never talks about the contributions organized crime has made to pollution in the New York City area, for example. And this is not just a quibble: efforts on the part of individuals are dwarfed by the decisions by corporations and industries, and the vast array of government regulations proposed to fix these problems are useless if the regulations are ineffective.

Beavan also tends to deal in soft generalities: everyone understands that market costs fail to capture ecological externalities, and GDP is a poor measure of aggregate quality of life, but the alternatives he proposes are inadequate. Tax-based approximations to real costs tend to leave a government in possession of a vast pile of money that will need to be reallocated for the benefit of future generations. I have to believe that one of the lessons of Social Security and Indian Trust Management is that the Federal government can't be trusted to manage what is effectively a giant pile of cash. The GDP alternatives Beavan moots (including the Happy Planet Index) are volatile subjective measures that don't actually measure what we'd like them to measure: they don't measure ecological capacity to produce happiness, and happiness itself doesn't really have a cash value. Fundamentally, any fundamental transformation of the way people live has political and economic dimensions, and these don't go away just because real prices are hard to measure and GDP is currently misused and misinterpreted.

Ultimately Beavan is engaged in something like a spiritual exercise, and by discussing his other spiritual practices (meditation, reading various religious texts, etc.) he hints at the fact that he's on some sort of spiritual journal and/or search for meaning through this experiment. Unfortunately his spiritual practice is turned entirely inward: he talks about how his appropriation of elements of various religions fit into his view of himself, help him understand himself, etc. and if anything his preoccupation with himself and his own guilt/satisfaction/whatever undercut the primary message of his experiment: he really is engaging in magical thinking about the connection between the paper plate he doesn't use and a polar bear who may or may not drown, rather than a useful discussion about the meaning of moral commitments and environmental policy. In other words, he doesn't care about the planet or even about his fellow-man; he only wants to feel less guilty or less responsible.

I'm grateful to Beavan for making the connection between his experiment (as a spiritual exercise) and e.g. his reading Buddhist teachers like Pema Chödrön (as a spiritual exercise) or his appropriation of Menominee people as spiritual heroes. When various Christians (and I suppose, various atheists) take exception to environmentalism as a religion they typically cast it in terms appropriate to their model of a religion: Christians see it as idolatry in the form of Gaia worship; atheists undoubtedly see it as latter-day cargo-cult style superstition. But Beavan isn't engaging in religion writ large; he's engaging in spiritual practice writ small.

This narrative is the only thing I can think of that explains how Beavan emerges from his experiment with some new habits and engaged in a new conversation, but he's ultimately unchanged: his false comparison between living in Manhattan and going "back to the land" still makes sense to him; he's ready to jump on a plane and travel to a speaking engagement; he turns back on the electricity rather than moving somewhere with more abundant natural light. He emerges thinking better of himself but not actually a better person.

Summary of T. R. Reid at Commonwealth Club

2009-09-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

T. R. Reid is a journalist and author of The Healing of America; here's a summary of his prepared remarks at Commonwealth Club of California (mp3):

Reid went and visited a bunch of countries and looked at how they fund health care.

Not every modern country uses a socialist scheme: private health care works in other rich democracies.
Not every modern country is single-payer; e.g. Japan has 3000 payers, Germany 220, Switzerland has 70.
Not all developed countries do the same things.

Of 190 countries there are four basic models; they can be broken down by asking who is the provider and who is the payer:

The Beverage model (UK): taxes are high, but they pay half of the what the U.S. does; government owns hospitals, pays doctors, and pays bills. This is real socialized medicine.
The Bismarck model (Germany): premiums are split between employers and employees; private insurance purchased through employer. Private doctors/hospitals/insurance.
National Health Insurance model (Canada): private providers; government pays. Premiums are paid to provincial governments (Reid did not deal with the question of whether people opt out). Model for Johnson/Medicare plan. Popular in newly-rich countries. Reid singled this approach out for criticism because Canada has limited numbers of specialists and advanced equipment; "lots of waiting" for non-emergency care. A gatekeeper system.
Out of pocket model (much of the world). Patient pays at point of service; for some reason Reid spent a lot of time talking about people paying with potatoes.

All four models are in effect in the United States: the military has the Beverage model, the elderly have the NHI model, many employed people have the Bismarck model, and about forty-million Americans pay out of pocket. This differs from much of the rest of the world: most countries have just one model.

Why do most countries have one model? Reid chose to examine Switzerland:

It's simpler and cheaper to administer; Reid says in the U.S. we spend 18-25% of our health care dollars on administrative costs.
They have a strong incentive for preventive health care; cited many anecdotes from the UK.
It is "fairer" to have everyone have the same access to the same health care at the same cost. Reid ended his remarks here by admitting this is a subjective assessment of a moral question and fundamentally reflects a moral value.

During the Q&A Reid said he expects the US to move to a Canadian model.

Ken Fisher's Five Signs of Financial Fraud

2009-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

Image via Wikipedia

Ken Fisher is pushing a book, and put in an appearance at the Commonwealth Club of California recently. His book is about Ponzi schemes generally, and the traits they typically share. Here's his list as best I can summarize it from listening to his appearance at the Commonwealth Club:

Combines custody with decision-making; this means that your shares are held in-house and not with an independent third party.
Numbers too good to be true/fees to low to pay manager/manager making money by "just trading."
Investment strategy opaque, not understandable by laymen, or a trade secret.
Markets things that don't matter but contribute prestige; has flashy hobbies; makes a big deal of associations with politicians or celebrities. Makes a big deal of impressive family history or impressive resume. Implies that he's offering you a special person or specially connected.
Does not answer questions; resistant to due diligence; shuts down/out people who ask questions.

Also, Fisher basically says that there's no difference between a politician and a crook, so beware anyone to takes politicians seriously.

This Little Light

2009-07-12T15:10:00.000-07:00

I've been on unintentional hiatus for more than two months now, but I wanted to do the prairie dog thing for just a moment to mention Christa Brown's new book on abusive ministers:

Eileen Flynn comments on her weblog
Eileen Flynn's column at the Austin American-Statesman about Brown's book

This is Flynn's coverage of Christa Brown's book This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang.

I haven't read this book, but I will probably pick it up when I can find it at a good price and have the time to read it. There really is no dispassionate discussion about abusive preachers, but I'm hoping that Brown takes a more measured tone in her book than she does at her weblog.

See also the promise of a review here and points beyond.

back in the USA

2009-02-20T01:32:00.000-08:00

I am finally back sleeping in my own bed after three weeks away: two weeks in Singapore and most of one in Tokyo. I'm on a tight, somewhat difficult schedule for a project at work, so I will be gophering only occasionally over the next few weeks.

This was a fascinating trip and months from now I will probably still be trying to understand what I saw. Singapore is run by a dictator, but the people seem happy. Tokyo, on the other hand, is in principle a democracy but seems moribund at best, and people spend their entire lives at work but a lot of them just seem to be going through the motions.

I didn't realize it, but Alex Kerr (of Lost Japan fame) resurfaced in 2001 with a book called Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan in which he says essentially that Japan is a mess and getting worse and for deeply-embedded reasons: because their culture is so inward-looking and so much dependent on reaching consensus it's very difficult for them to change course. This manifests in two ways: when they have a good idea they tend to run it into the ground, and when they have a bad idea there's no shifting it.

I really have no idea if he's right or wrong: I read the book somewhat skeptically, suspecting that if he were talking about a culture I am part of I would have been inclined to marginalize a lot of the particulars he cites as being symptoms of a sick society: e.g. some nuclear plant had contamination because it was poorly run, not because Japan has a cover-up culture. And as a foreigner who doesn't speak Japanese I really have no access to information.

Regardless, Dogs and Demons is a fascinating book, and one of the strangest I've ever read. I highly recommend it if you can read it at the right price. Some of what he says hasn't stood the test of time: the economy here in the States is no longer the model of health it was (relative to Japan anyway) in 2001, so some of his comparisons don't have the force they had then. Nevertheless it's still an interesting read.

I also got to change planes in Kuala Lumpur on this trip. I had been somewhat concerned flying a Malaysian airline, and I have to admit the leg from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo was long and not especially pleasant, but on balance it was probably better than flying Delta.

I think Kuala Lumpur is the furthest I've been going west; I'm looking forward to finding an excuse to get back there again, and this time to visit the city itself. Patience patience.

in Singapore

2009-02-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

I've been really busy since the new year, and now I'm in Singapore on business, probably headed to Tokyo late this week or over the weekend.

In the meantime, there's this:

Oh if only life were this simple. Why does this remind me of most of the Laffer Curve pictures I've seen?

Christine Wicker: Not In Kansas Anymore

2008-12-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

Cover of Not in Kansas AnymoreIt's the end of the year, and I'm somewhat inspired to follow the outgoing President's example and make next year a big list of books read, etc. But first:

I picked up Christine Wicker's Not In Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America because it was the only book by Wicker I could find apart from her The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. I was puzzled by her approach in that book (a little hard analysis, a little fudging, then a road trip) and I wanted to see if that's just her style, or if perhaps I was reading her incorrectly.

I think it's her style: Not In Kansas Anymore suffers from the same problem.

I think there's a formula these sort of long-form small stories are supposed to follow: they're part first-person narrative, part received wisdom (historical narrative, expert opinion, what have you), but the two are supposed to be separate: a chapter of first-person narrative, a chapter of perspective, repeat. See for example Bill Bryson's book about the Appalachian Trail, A Walk In the Woods, or Tony Horwitz's Civil War book Confederates In The Attic: Bryson sticks more or less to the chapter-at-a-time formula; Horwitz picks topics per chapter and then breaks up the chapter to add expert opinion.

Wicker doesn't do this, and as a result what could be a fairly interesting story about hoodoo and magical culture in America (for lack of a better term) is a mess: the chapters have cutsie titles that only make sense once the chapter's been read. The story doesn't have an arc, per se. And after a while the vampires mix in with the witches and the hoodoo practitioners and the Otherkind. It's hard to tell who's going through a phase and who's a lifer, who's getting results and who's playing dress-up.

I wish Wicker well with her next book, and I'm grateful for Fall of the Evangelical Nation, which I will eventually write up here. But I have to humbly suggest that Wicker hadn't yet mastered her craft when she wrote this one.

still thinking about the recession, etc.

2008-12-24T03:47:00.000-08:00

Here are two quick recession-related links:

Ten Things You Won't See After The Recession. I guess I should expect a Silicon-Valley-centric view of the recession from PC World, but I'm still disappointed to see supposedly tech-savvy magazines publishing articles that don't offer a single-page view. Boo!
Henry Blodget on why Wall Street still has boom-bust cycles. Anybody who refers to the "current credit bubble" and doesn't mention the aging of Baby Boomers is talking nonsense.

Remember Taiwan?

2008-12-24T03:10:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaI haven't thought about Taiwan in a long time. I used to work for an organization that forbid me from going there, and my current employer doesn't have customers there, so it's unlikely I'll get there any time soon.

My recollection is that Taiwan used to matter to the Unites States. We supported them as a way of keeping indie cred in the United Nations, and to stick our finger in China's eye once in a while. But all of that changed when Nixon went to China, and we broke diplomatic ties in 1979 (Thanks, President Carter). You can still year Radio Taipei broadcast in English on shortwave, but they're mostly just trying to remind us (well, somebody) that they still exist and they're still worried; worried that all the bad things that totally failed to happen when Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997 will still happen to them someday.

In case you're wondering, we're still committed to a One-China Policy, a nuanced position that by turns finesses nation states and nationalities. China (PRC) of course interprets this to mean that we're committed to the notion that Taiwan is a sort of breakaway republic/autonomous region/not-yet-reclaimed overseas territory, and oppose Taiwanese independence (2003, 2008).

Since China became the world's industrial base, and Taiwan quietly became part of their supply chain, and probably vice versa, everyone has more or less assumed that any sort of military incursion is off the table; Thomas Friedman asserts this explicitly in The World Is Flat: countries whose economic interests are aligned rarely attack each other, and Friedman assesses PRC/ROC interdependence as being sufficient to keep Beijing from sending troops to "reclaim" Taiwan.

I hope for the sake of the people of Taiwan that continues to be true during the current economic downturn; if the contraction is severe then not only could the economic ties weaken, but the balance inside China between the economic progressives and the political conservatives could shift to the detriment of Taiwan. Goodwill pandas and domestic flights notwithstanding.

the end of The Religion Report

2008-12-19T07:13:00.001-08:00

ABC Radio National's Religion Report host Stephen Crittenden disappeared from the show/podcast a couple of months ago, and although the quality of the show went down I just figured Crittenden was on vacation or something. Turns out I was wrong.

ABC Radio National announced that it was dropping The Religion Report, Crittenden blasted them on air, and last I heard he had been suspended.

Here are the links:

I for one am going to miss Crittenden; I wish we had someone like him on say National Public Radio here in the States. This is a great loss, unlike (say) Street Stories. I can only assume that The Night Air will vanish this time next year.

Frank Rich: Two cheers for Rod Blagojevich

2008-12-15T12:47:00.001-08:00

There's an interesting article by Frank Rich in the International Herald-Tribune today titled Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich. It's mostly about how depressing the current economic situation is, and how welcome a story we understand is.

I'd have to agree with his point: the Blagojevich story is a distraction, but it's unwelcome, not least because a situation like this, where politicians are suddenly expected to know how to discipline one of their own, and provide future protection against more of the same in the future, while reforming the system that made it possible for him to get within a couple of investigations of selling a Senate seat.

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I have to think that this isn't the only Senate seat to be um nearly sold in the last twenty or so years. Especially when reactions are peppered with remarks that suggest that this is how political business is done in Illinois.

Which suggests to me that we should expect more of the same during the ongoing discussions of economic reform: the business of politicians is to convert money into power and vice versa, and the current economic climate highlights this fact rather than standing in stark contrast to it.

Bleah.

Ex-Gays?

2008-12-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

Richard Land's second radio program, For Faith and Family, recently broadcast a two-part interview with Stanton Jones, co-author with Mark Yarhouse of Ex-Gays? : A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation.

I found the second part (December 5) of the interview fascinating: Jones, who is among other things Provost of Wheaton College (the first part of the interview is devoted mostly to establishing his evangelical and academic bona fides) takes a rather more nuanced tack on the question of homosexuality as a sin/lifestyle/choice/identity/etc. than I expected from a guest on Richard Land's show.

As counterpoint I'd offer This American Life episode 204: 81 Words, a story by the amazing Alix Spiegel's grandfather's role in the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to consider homosexuality no longer a mental illness.

I guess all I'd say about all of this is that it seems really foreign to me as a mathematician/scientist; the whole discussion of homosexuality seems much more like a social construct than a dispassionate discussion of e.g. lab results.

Oh and: I'll predict that Stanton and Yarhouse's book will more or less vanish without a trace.

Update: Google Books has a preview here.

GetReligion: Newsweek vs. subscribers

2008-12-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaI'm not going to keep following the whole Newsweek/gay marriage ruckus: I don't especially like Newsweek and haven't read it in years, and I don't consider either side of the gay marriage debate convincing.

That being said, there's a fascinating article at GetReligion today (Newsweek vs. subscribers) on the apparent sudden dip in base circulation rate at Newsweek. Ouch. It can't all be due to the recession, can it?

Peter Greenberg says

2008-12-10T16:57:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaToday Show travel editor Peter Greenberg says not to look for the Santa Fe River when visiting Santa Fe:

In regards to Santa Fe, Greenberg warns potential tourists who might consider the Santa Fe River as one of this city’s attractions that, “For the past 20 years, the river has been mostly dried up — overgrown with weeds, littered with trash, eroded, blocked by upstream dams that collect water from the mountains. City wells have affected the water table so much that it cannot sustain the river while supplying water to the city of Santa Fe.” The author mentions restoration efforts but says “Bottom line: No water, no fish ... why would you ever go?

I'd have to agree; please don't come to the desert looking for rivers.

Baby Bust: The Demographics of Global Depression

2008-12-10T11:33:00.001-08:00

Image via WikipediaI haven't had time to sort this out, but I found an article that articulates my (wait for it) fears regarding the end of the Baby Boom Bubble and its relationship to the current recession.
And here it is: Baby Bust: The Demographics of Global Depression.

This is not a great article; the "Paleolithic Village" example/image is completely unhelpful. But it touches on several items I haven't really seen discussed in this particular way:

Any economy is finite. I guess this is obvious, but its implications aren't always clear.
One of the implications is that while there's always a shortage of goods (which everyone understands, because this fact is fundamental to the meaning of prices) there are sometimes shortages of consumers.
Another is that there can also be a shortage of savers and investors.
The Baby Boom is in decline, and leaving its prime working years.
This means that apart from the sub-prime-mortgage-driven housing bubble, there's an underlying fundamental shift in the meaning of the single-family home as an investment vehicle.

Now if I could just find someone who would extend this analysis to the New Deal generally.

References to other articles, apparently by the same author, are here.

what we're reading today

2008-12-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaIt's another embarrassment-of-riches day on and off the World Wide Web today:

Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb: The New York Times gives capsule summaries of two upcoming books about nuclear proliferation, suggesting that it occurred via technology transfer rather than by flow of information. In case you're wondering, the nuclear club currently stands at nine, possibly ten, members: the Untied States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and possibly North Korea. Read this article quickly, since the Times hasn't yet caught a clue about how to present its content online. The books are The Nuclear Express, by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, and The Bomb: A New History by Stephen M. Younger.
What's the standard? A pretty good summary of the ongoing Newsweek/gay marriage flap. I guess I'd have to admit at the moment that the so-called Culture War is no longer a matter of one side using unreasonable rhetoric to describe a disagreement, etc.
Rod Dreher takes a break from his vacation to ask why the federal government isn't bailing out the newspaper industry. In addition to taking cheap shots at the Big Three. I have to wonder why Dreher wouldn't see a bailout of e.g. Tribune Co. as a serious compromise of freedom of the press. And I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to wonder in what universe Dreher would be considered conservative.
Baseline Scenario. Someone is eventually going to talk sense about the crisis/recession/etc. Maybe it'll be Boone/Johnson/Kwak.

In other news, I bought a handful of shares of Wal-Mart yesterday. Look for WMT to plummet.

still too soon for the last word on the Obama Administration

2008-12-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

I had the mixed pleasure of hearing most of an hour with Brannon Howse this weekend; he's the host of Worldview Weekend and a rising star on conservative Christian talk radio. He's very good at staying on message; by the time he was done I found myself starting to believe that Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton were all the same person. Or possibly three heads on the same Cerberus. Or part of the same vast left-wing conspiracy. etc.

I thought I had the next four years all figured out: Barack Obama will take office in January, and then, according to Howse, it's a long forced march to a socialist nightmare.

Then I visited Frank Turk's weblog this morning and found this. Evidently not all of America's leftists are (wait for it) tickled pink with Obama's transition team and nascent Cabinet.

There don't seem to be any liberals in Obama's cabinet,” writes John Aravosis, the editor of Americablog.com.

"If you don’t think the labor secretary is on the same level as treasury secretary, that gives me pause,” said Jonathan Tasini, who runs the website workinglife.org.

Juan Cole, who runs a prominent anti-war blog called Informed Comment, said he worries Obama will get bad advice from Clinton on the Middle East, calling her too pro-Israel and “belligerent” toward Iran.

etc.

I for one wish the President-Elect all the luck in the world. And my most cynical self suspects that the ruckus on the right (and left) is just sound and fury: the election's over, so now the partisans, especially the diehard Fear Story people, need to get back to consolidating their readership.

And I hate to say it, but I'm still holding out hope that the new occupant of the White House will turn out to be more conservative than his predecessor.

recession predictions

2008-12-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaFirst of all let's deal with a couple of simple questions: what's a recession and what's a depression?

A recession occurs when business activity declines. A depression occurs when business activity declines a lot.

Here is the first article I've seen that tells me part of what I want to know: it compares the current climate, measured mostly by the unemployment rate, to a handful of other recessions and to the Great Depression. The problem here is that rising unemployment is a consequence of a decline in economic activity, but it isn't a measure of economic activity itself. For that you need to look at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Gross National Product (GNP).

Given that the average length of the ten recessions since World War II has been 10.4 months, with a range of 6 months in the 1980 recession to 16 months in the 1981-82 one, the natural "placeholder" time frame for the end of this recession would appear to be the middle of 2009.
I think that means that the current recession is "long" and "shallow," because it has gone on more than eleven months (longer than average) and the unemployment rate is 6.5%.

I'm still looking for a resource that will identify all the recessions that have occurred since 1933 and describe then in terms of GNP, GDP, and unemployment rates.

This is still a lousy analysis, though, because it just looks at three numbers and it doesn't do anything resembling a principal factor analysis: it doesn't identify and measure the significant proximate causes of these recessions.

Right now I'd have to say that the current problems have been caused by a housing bubble, bad debts, a contraction in available commercial credit, a shortage of household savings, with an undercurrent of maybe a shift in demographics: Baby Boomers are getting older and starting to change their saving and spending habits. Oh and of course the Iraq War.

The Great Depression had widespread bankruptcies, runs on banks, natural disasters, and anarchy. I'm not sure what else. Time to do some reading, I suppose.

There's just no point in talking about a decline in unemployment and an increase in GDP unless and until we can identify the underlying causes of the current contraction.

"Pyrrho" connects current recession and Baby Boomers

2008-12-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaRod Dreher (CrunchyCon) over at BeliefNet promoted a comment to a post. It's commenter Pyrrho offering suggestions on how to "ride out" the current recession:

[4] The economy will be in the doldrums just as some long-term demographic problems take hold. In other words, the older boomers will be reaching retirement age during this period. I think we can anticipate a significant cut in retirement benefits, but they will not be entirely eliminated. Most people in their forties with kids (like thee and me) can probably look forward to working until they no longer can do so, followed by moving in with their adult kids. Not the worst fate in the world, that's for sure.

While I dislike economic commentary that describes trends without numbers (never mind calling the recession "deep:" how is that different from calling it "wide?") I'm glad to see someone beginning to connect the dots between the current recession, inflection points in the path of the Baby Boom generation, and entitlement programs.

one-car family

2008-12-03T08:46:00.001-08:00

Image via WikipediaLocal reporter Stephen Terrell has a good summary of the most recent news on the Rail Runner commuter train connecting Santa Fe with the Albuquerque metro area. The short version is that the first train connecting downtown Santa Fe to Albuquerque will start running in two weeks.

I'd like to point out that the special train containing dignitaries, etc. is wasteful and showy. There's no point in spending taxpayer money to take the outgoing Governor, etc. from Albuquerque to Santa Fe.

I'm concerned that because Governor Bill Richardson is leaving the State to take another position in Washington (he's adding Commerce Secretary to his Washington resume, alongside Congressman, Energy Secretary, and Ambassador to the United Nations) we'll never see stations at Zia and 599, the two stations that would actually help me get to work in the morning. The Rail Runner is not popular outside the part of the state it will serve, and I'm concerned that the new Governor, Diane Denish, won't be able to push through the rest of the funding required to get the project finished, especially if/when there are cost overruns.

Graham Greene: The Quiet American

2008-11-30T09:43:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday I read Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American, his story of a love triangle set in late colonial Vietnam. I'd already seen the movie, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, and I have to admit it's a faithful representation of the story. A few pieces of the story are merged for brevity (a couple of Fowler's trips north become one unbroken story), and some characters are perturbed somewhat (imagine trying to explain without a lot of backstory why a particular ethnic Indian in Vietnam's being from Goa matters), but it is a faithful telling of Greene's story. Unfortunately Fraser is in over his head and the Phuong character is little more than an object in Greene's novel, so only Caine as Fowler is left to make the story happen. I don't especially like Michael Caine, but he does well with a fairly difficult character.

The inner story deals with the love triangle (Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong): Fowler is a British reporter living in Saigon, Pyle is an American, a Harvard grad presented as a soulless dupe who may or may not be working for the OSS in the guise of the American Economic Legation, and Phuong is a Vietnamese national trying to leverage her beauty into a trip out of Vietnam.

The outer story deals with American involvement in the latter days of French Indochina, especially in the attempt to set up a Third Force that is neither the French nor the Communists; in particular on the attempt to strengthen a marginal general apparently involved with the Cao Dai by distributing and setting off first bike bombs and then a car bomb. On balance it's a nasty story tightly told: the current Penguin edition weighs in at some 180 pages.

According to Robert Stone, who wrote the introduction for the Greene Centenary edition, Greene sought to portray Fowler as a tortured soul with a rich inner life, Pyle as a soulless American with no inner life, just objectives, and (I suppose) American involvement in Vietnam in the early to mid Fifties as a byproduct of ascendant American strength as expressed through soulless people working out others' ideas with no sense of history and no grasp of the cultures in which they went about their business.

Stone explicitly excludes Colonel Edward Lansdale from being the real-life Alden Pyle, pointing out that Lansdale had not yet arrived in Vietnam by the time Greene finished The Quiet American. This contradicts the claims Mike Davis and others have made (see e.g. this article from Tom's Dispatch), but doesn't really touch the question of the historicity of The Quiet American, much less the question of who introduced vehicle borne improvised incendiary devices into Vietnam.

After reading this book, though, I can't imagine that there were no VBIEDs in Vietnam during the end of the French occupation; it's hard to imagine that Greene invented the whole thing. I'd just question the accuracy of Greene as a primary historical source. To my eyes this is just sloppy work by Davis and it undermines his book Buda's Wagon but doesn't destroy it.

The basis of Stone's claim comes from Norman Sherry's authorized biography of Greene, which says that Greene finished The Quiet American in 1952, despite the fact that the endnote says it was written in Saigon in 1952-1955; Lansdale came to Vietnam from the Philippines in 1954.

single-issue pro-life voters and their discontents

2008-11-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaI'm glad to see someone else is saying this. I found it here.

And pro-lifers who see the GOP as the only plausible vehicle for their goals have an obligation to look the party's failures squarely in the face and work to fix them, instead of just doubling down on the case for single-issue pro-life voting.

I wonder if Dreher and Douthat speak for people who aren't Orthodox or Catholic. I suspect the Republican Party considers single-issue pro-life voters a captive constituency, and so sees no reason to deliver anything they actually want, but rather to make a token effort once a term or so (see e.g. partial-birth abortion), with the suggestion that they'd really do something if they just had absolute power. Or whatever.

eHarmony, etc.

2008-11-25T08:18:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaI never used eHarmony, even in its heyday, but I did read (one of?) Neil Clark Warren's books, and most of what he had to say was very left-brain and sociology-thinky: pick items from this list that are important to you, now refine it down to an uncomfortably small number of items. Chances are you're compatible with someone who picks the same items.

I hadn't thought about him or it in years, until eHarmony hit the pages of Slice of Laodicea here and here. (Warning: readers not familiar with the author's writing style may have no idea what she's talking about) And then it showed up on the former Ian Shoales's weblog here.

I for one have to wonder what gay users of eHarmony are expecting; Warren's method isn't fundamentally heterosexual, but it isn't necessarily fool-proof. Can they sue if they don't like the matches they get?

And if so, why didn't I think of that?

Never mind that I wouldn't have met my wife on eHarmony; I think both of us were willing to go to our graves single before admitting we trusted a questionairre and an algorithm more than we trusted our friends. But I would have loved to have had a chance to (as they say) monetize my dissatisfaction.

"For these failures we are profoundly sorry."

2008-11-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

As I discovered at Between Two Worlds, Bob Jones University has issued a Statement About Race at Bob Jones University.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

I'm not going to parse this or pick it apart. Good for them. Some of the history is here; for the record, Michael Babcock updated the story of the political tend this case contributed to appearing in books by Ed Dobson/Cal Thomas and Randall Balmer and frankly gives the best summary I've seen.

happy consequences of forced idleness, etc.

2008-11-24T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'm finally back in New Mexico; I'm actually sitting in a shuttle van on the way to Santa Fe. It's good to be back in the States, but mostly because this is where my wife is. Every time I go to Japan the culture shock gradually creeps up on me: the sense of everything being just different enough that I wouldn't be able to function without an expense account and a customer, the sense of being other, perceived as big and dumb and a little dangerous. I get tired of being not just illiterate, but not even close to being functional. But then I come back to the States and see how fat, rude, loud, and unpleasant everyone is. And afraid, of course. And then I don't necessarily want to go back to Japan. I just want to go somewhere sane.

The trip back included one fourteen-hour flight, a ten-hour layover, an overnight stay in a cheap hotel, and now the van ride back to Santa Fe. In order to deal with the plane trips and the time difference I stayed doped up on Dramamine most of the way back, listening to podcasts, dozing, and reading. I just wasn't in any shape to get any work done.

I listened to a couple of old episodes of the Commonwealth Club of California podcast: John Dean pushing a book (Conservatives Without Conscience) where he says Republicans are sociopaths and fascists-in-waiting, one featuring Paul Krugman umming his way through one insult after another, harping on income disparities, insisting that universal health care is possible if we just have the will to redistribute money, and declining to define the middle class. And finally, a panel discussion on the Electoral College, discussing an attempt to get states to allocate their College votes to the winner of the popular vote. As far as I can tell the latter is a thinly-veiled attempt on the part of people in California to make it even more powerful on the national stage.

I read all of Michael Babcock's book Unchristian America yesterday. To his credit Babcock admits that Christians' efforts at seizing political power since about 1976 have been mostly wasted: their top line issues (abortion, prayer in schools, and now gay marriage) get lip service from their candidates during campaigns, but the politicians don't deliver when they get in office. Unfortunately the book is thin on details and kind of wanders between stories about Babcock's life, reassuring anecdotes that everything is going to be all right in the end, and a vague reassertion that abortion is still the most important thing in the world and shouldn't be diluted with other "culture of life" issues like social services, especially for children, examination of capital punishment, or foreign policy issues. In virtually the same breath, however, Babcock asserts that abortion is important because it's a slippery-slope issue: abortion leads in sequence to infanticide, eugenics, and euthanasia, especially for old people. As far as I can tell this last issue is the real taproot of the abortion issue for many evangelicals: they're getting older themselves and concerned that an uncaring state will pull the plug on them as soon as they're unable to make health insurance payments. It's pretty grim stuff, both as a prospect to contemplate and as a way of getting leverage over voters. And as far as I can tell people in my neck of the woods haven't had any new ideas regarding the "culture of life" since Francis Schaeffer teamed up with C. Everett Koop.

Babcock's stated central theme, that America was never a Christian nation, but was founded as a post-Christian Enlightenment experiment, needed to be stated by somebody inside the movement. I just wish Babcock had done more with the rest of the book: I was disappointed that after saying that America isn't a Christian nation, and never was, so appealing to "founding principles" is vacuous, and then pointing out that abortion was a show issue for our movement, at least at the top, rather than a core issue, and then reaffirming his position that abortion is important to our culture, he then didn't attempt to tie the two pieces together: did our leaders sell us out? Who's really to blame: Ronald Reagan and the two Presidents Bush? Movement leaders like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed? And what should we do now? Stop voting Republican?

I read a chunk of Paul Roberts's The End of Oil, but couldn't stick with it. I don't get a sense that anyone knows how to get to a post-petroleum future.

Finally, I read all of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imeperial Life in the Emerald City. It's a story of the first couple of years of the current Iraq War, focused mostly on the process that produced Paul Bremer and some of the decisions he made. I have to wonder what the Bush Administration was thinking: I'd guess it went a little something like this: Dick Cheney saw a way to give Haliburton a huge contract, Bush saw a way to settle an old family score with Saddam Hussein, and believed that the Iraqi people were yearninig for a Western-style democracy, and as a result the Administration engaged in some magical thinking regarding what would happen to Iraq after the liberation. The bottom line was that because of the religious and ethnic tensions in Iraq and the fact that there was no viable opposition there was nobody ready to govern Iraq, so there was nobody to hand the country over to. What's more, there was no plan to keep people employed and no plan to transition from the artificial economy set up by Hussein to something more reasonable. As a result the Bush loyalists who went to run Iraq focused on setting up the experiments they'd do here if they could: flat taxes, free markets, privatization, etc.

I can't imagine for a minute that Chandrasekaran is a neutral observer, but he tells a compelling story replete with details of qualified people passed over because they weren't loyal to Bush personally and/or didn't have their bona fides in order, or because there was a Bush loyalist who was ready to do the job, no matter how unqualified they were.

Frankly this story resonates with me and my experiences inside evangelicalism: the head man tends to value loyalty and predictability above all else, and to trust people who have been "faithful in little" with important positions and responsibilities as they themselves become more successful. They tend to see themselves as God's man, having all the answers, and anyone who agrees with them personally by implication agrees with God.

Which brings me back to John Dean. He essentially claims that the Republican Party is in the shape it's in (or was a year ago when he addressed the Commonwealth Club) because it tends to identify, promote, and reward strong leaders who value loyalty above all else. I need to track down Conservatives Without Conscience, because as far as I can tell the Republican Party and modern American Evangelicalism are so similar and so tightly bound to one another it's hard to imagine they'll ever part.

in Tokyo this week

2008-11-17T23:24:00.000-08:00

Image via WikipediaI'm in Tokyo this week on business, visiting a customer for a project where I have been the slow, under-delivering sandbagger due mostly to commitments to other projects. I hate letting people down, especially when their expectations are reasonable.

I love visiting Japan. I forget between visits how much I love being here.

As a Christian I find that this orderly, clean, relatively crime-free, almost entirely Christian-free nation gives me pause. Especially given the population density, and the tiny spaces individual Japanese people live in. And the expectations society has of the average individual: achievement, conformity, and self-sacrifice.

Frankly any Christian religious professional who goes on about "individualism" and "consumerism" would do well to visit Japan; Japanese people tend to believe in a corporate or communal identity constituted in a federal head that would put a "man of God" and his "sheep" to shame, and apart from their wedding days and Christmas average Japanese people betray no evidence of cultural Christian influences at all.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

MDSF

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