Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed.

In 1960 it was “anti-Catholic prejudice.” In 2010 it’s “empirical evidence of improper behavior by the Roman Catholic Church.” And it’s time it stopped. Cold.

If I were a Congressman, I’d introduce a bill yesterday stripping all US operations of the Roman Catholic Church of their tax-exempt status. At the press conference announcing the move I’d also say something along these lines: “I won’t be running for re-election – what could possibly be the point? However, between now and the day I leave office, I’m going to raise hell 24/7/4ever over this issue. I know that I’ll probably never get my bill into a committee hearing, let alone get it out of committee, but if Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens can draw as much attention as they have, I feel certain that I, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, can get booked on every talk show in America. Rest assured, my fellow citizens, this is going to make for some epic television.”

Of course, I’m not Congressional material. If you want to know what Congressional material is, recognize that representatives of a foreign theocracy are inside Congress shaping policy … and not a damned one of the spineless sacred whores on Capitol Hill has uttered a fucking syllable in protest.

Did I miss something?

“America is a Christian nation.” It certainly is. Sort of. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that it’s a white nation, a heterosexual nation, a right-handed nation and a nation with brown hair. That is, “Christian” is the majority position. Boy howdy, is it the majority position, with a majority of the population saying it believes angels and demons are active in the world and 80% saying they believe in miracles. Hell, even our atheists and agnostics sound a little religious. A snapshot of American religious affiliation that I offered up back in 2007 is instructive:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

There’s no denying that we’re a Christian culture – in many ways, that’s a simple math question and it’s about as controversial as noting that whites of European descent are the racial majority. But Christian culture and Christian government aren’t the same thing, and the United States is most emphatically not a Christian state. Not yet, anyway.

Reflecting back on my “if I were a Congressman” fantasy from above, I suppose I’d spend the remainder of my time in office asking the audiences of those TV shows to think about a proposition: to wit, while most Americans are Christian, “Christian” describes a lot of different things and not one unitary thing. Dr. Sid’s “modest proposal” from a couple of months back was more about provoking than persuading, but at its core there’s an important question. If you’re a Christian, you may want to see a more Christian government. But if you’re a Baptist, do you want to see a more Catholic government? If you’re Catholic, how are you going to react when the Texas School Board is co-opted by Mormons and all of a sudden the nation’s textbooks are filled with lessons that transform the hallucinations visions of The Prophets into stone cold fact? If you’re a member of the Foursquare Bible Congregation in Smallpond, Alabama, you probably agree with the Stupakers on abortion, but how do you feel about the idea that your duly elected representatives are keeping counsel with that German eunuch in the pointy hat?

Think about it, Christian supermajority. Think hard.

Crawling Toward a More Rational Future

Evidence suggests that there may be hope in the long run.

From USA Today:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

From FutureMajority:

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) also found that a movement towards claiming no religious affiliation is “a general trend among younger white American.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported “people not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions.”
…
The National Journal profiles a growing faction of non-religious youth – the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Their motto is “Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment.” The SSA’s chapters have grown from 42 in 2003 to 129 this year and they currently have a network of over 14,000 students. Their mission is “to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics.”

From AlterNet:

We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

So perhaps in the 2020s and beyond the Bible-thumping Jesus Jihadi yahoo will be a thing of the past – or at least, his inexplicable influence on the course of government will be. But that’s of little comfort today. Just because the good guys win the war eventually doesn’t mean they don’t lose battles along the way, and lost battles mean casualties, measured in lasting damage to real human lives. Even if it’s just ten years until we’re free of these crusaders, understand that a lot of mischief can be done in a decade. If I might put it in more meaningful terms, remember how long George Bush was in office? Add two years to that.

Not that it will do any good, but your Senators and representatives need to hear from you that it is not acceptable for the Catholic Bishops to be meddling in the people’s business. Separation of church and state. Today.

When Jesus attacks, the proper course of action is to smack him in the nose with a crowbar. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

It was recently suggested that a glossary of terms should be developed.  Unfortunately, many of these terms are subjective and a true glossary would need to be provided by each user of the word.  But the call to duty was raised and i’ve supplemented what i already knew with some quality time at Mid-East Web, the Jewish Virtual Library, and E-Zion.  I purposefully did not visit “anti-Zionist” resources because i don’t really believe that there’s a Zionist in my closet or that a shadowy cabal of powerful, Jewish bankers is plotting the domination/destruction of the planet.  I don’t believe in Leprechauns either.

Originally, the request for a glossary covered all the various modifiers that might be put before the noun “Jew” (which may, in itself, be offensive to some…but i’ve failed to find a connotationless moniker for the situation).  A secular Jew might similar to a Christmas/Easter Christian.  He would be a believer, but would not define himself by his religious belief.  The same definition applies to a “cultural Jew”.  A secular Jew might also be a person of Jewish extraction.  There is debate within the Jewish community as to what it means to be a Jew; many of these labels come from within Judaism rather than without.  But i don’t have the time and you don’t have the patience for the kind of reading necessary to explain all that.

An “observant Jew” is just what it sounds like: someone who observes the calender, dietary restrictions, festivals, etc. of Judaism.  But being an observant Jew falls into a multitude of categories too.  Reform, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, etc.  And none of these variations on a Semitic theme have anything to do with politics.  A secular Jew might well be very conservative, politically, and there’s nothing that says an observant Jew cannot be a flaming liberal Defeatocrat…i know at least one of those.

All of the above exist in a spectrum, and the spectrum is more important than the label.  Just because one is Jewish does not mean that one must hold certain political beliefs.  Labels are useful until they trap us.  For example, most would probably think that the ultra-orthodox Jewish community is very ‘Zionist’; the labels fit together nicely.  But it’s wrong.  The ultra-orthodox community is often the most anti-Zionist section of the Jewish community.

Which brings us to today’s loaded word.  I’ve read a lot on this now, much of it overlapping and in basic agreement, and it’s as confusing as confusing gets.  We’ve reduced the word “Zionist” in a manner similar to our reduction of the word “Communist”  to mean Stalin’s USSR.  There are enough twists, turns, and schisms in the Zionist movement that it would be a good subject for a Russian novel.  You’d need that kind of page count to do it justice.

“Zionism” was coined in 1891 by Nathan Birnbaum, but Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement in 1897.  There is no official Zionist ideology, sorry.  But basically Zionist ideology boils down to the belief that the Jews are a people or a nation like anyone else, and that they have the right, and should, gather together in a national homeland.

The idea of the Jews as distinct people is not entirely religious.  It is also a product of the 19th Century enlightenment, which also gave us the full flowering of nationalism.  European Jews gained their first measure of freedom; some left Judaism, some converted, but there was still a sense that they would be Jews no matter what they did. (Here i call philosophical bullshit.  Of course the first generation would always be Jews, just like first generation immigrants are more old country than new, while their grandchildren are old country in name only.) The idea of a Jewish nation fit nicely with the the ideas of German racists and gave them an excuse to persecute.  But if the Jews were a people, they lacked an actual nation.  Zionism is the ideology to achieve the nation.

The late 1800’s were not a good time to be Jewish in Russia.  Leon Pinsker was originally an assimilationist, at least until the Odessa pogrom of 1871.  He changed his mind and penned Auto-Emancipation.  Pinsker thought that Argentina would make a nice homeland, but his fellow Russians liked the idea of Palestine much better.  The idea at this point was to organize and lobby the great powers to grant the Jews a homeland, a movement that became known as political Zionism.

Herzl was all for political Zionism and he had the power and connections to pursue it.  The first Zionist Congress was willing to settle for Uganda or Cyprus, but the Russian Zionists would have none of it and declined the offer.  Herzl, and other Europeans weren’t actually looking for new digs themselves…they were just trying to be helpful to their “brethren to the East”.  All this was happening at the same time as political philosophy in Russia was tending towards Marxism and revolution, and Zionism was pretty entangled with that process.  (Is this complicated enough for everyone?)

Herzl died about the same time that any hope for political Zionism ended.  At the time, Russian Zionists were mostly members of the SDLP (the party that would later split into Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.  Unfortunately, the antisemitism that would come to characterize Russian Communism  was already evident.  Ber Borochov left the SDLP and founded his own party, Poalei Tziyon, which rested on a synthesis of Marxism and Zionism.  Borochov theorized along Marxist lines but ran into the same problem as other Russians: how do you throw a prolaterian revolution without a proletariat?  Simple, you get a new country and build a proletariat…no revolution needed.

There ended up being multiple forms and groups of socialist Zionists.  Arthur Ruppin (an ethnic Pole born in German territory and trained as an economist) was sent to examine the Palestinian situation in 1907.  His ideas led to the kibbutz, which solved some practical problems of settlement and dovetailed nicely with the socialist ideals of the settlers.  Where the colonial model of the first aliya failed the kibbutz succeeded.  It also made a handy place to hide arms and organize defense force.

Combining the remnants of political Zionism with the practical, settler approach became known as synthetic Zionism; it is generally credited with producing the Balfour Declaration.

Now begins the growth of serious conflict between the Arabs and the Jews of Palestine; WWI; and the British fiddling with their mandate in the post war years.  Mostly it wasn’t pretty and grew ever more violent and unyielding.  Yet another split developed between those who wanted to work with the British and those wanting to fight whoever got in the way.  Enter Ze’ev Vladomir Jabotinsky.  He formulated the idea of a Jewish defense force that would show Arab neighbors that the Jews could not be pushed into the sea.  When the British balked at overseeing such a force, Jabotinsky went ahead with it anyhow.  He also founded the revisionist Zionist movement in 1925 with fellow radicals who disagreed with the socialist Zionists and were bitter over the British subdivision of Palestine.  The main tenent of revisionist Zionism is a claim to both sides of the Jordan river.

The revisionist didn’t gain much power in the official Zionist council.  The labor Zionists under David Ben-Gurien held the real power.  The two groups cooperated at times and fought each other just as often.  Labor basically controlled the Israeli government until after the Six Days war, after which the revisionists were allowed to participate in the government.  The Yom Kippur war broke the hold of Labor over the Israeli government.  It soon found itself in the minority, replaced by militant, religious Zionists and the Likud party, which inherited revisionist Zionism.

At this point, Likud revisionist Zionism basically represents the ideology to the world.  It is through Likud policies – the settlements in particular – that Zionism has taken on its current connotations.  Obviously it is a form of Zionism; just as obviously it is not the only form of Zionism.  Unfortunately it portrays itself as true Zionism, similar to our own politicians making pronouncements about the “real” America.

I hope that i disappointed the black and white crowd, as you suck anyhow and i’m far less worried about Zionists in my closet than i am about you shouting your proclamations far and wide.  And one thing is abundantly clear after this headache inducing experience: the word Zionist is thrown around with far too much abandon by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.  I realize that some of those people will be here any minute to rant from one side or the other; most of them won’t even have read the above.

Fuck it, i’ll light the fuse.  3-2-1…

Though raised Catholic, my father was Jewish (Lithuanian and Romanian). The most WASP-ish Jew you’ll ever meet, though, he imparted none of his ancestral religion to me. My wife, who’s of Scot-Irish descent, likes to joke that she knows more about Judaism than me.

But whenever Israel launches an offensive against Palestine, it brings the Jewish in me to the fore.

Two reasons:

1. With credentials as a Jew, I’m that much less likely to be viewed as an anti-Semite for criticizing Israel. (Though in recent years, because the Jewish lobby and its adherents in the United States have overused it, that charge has lost its power to stigmatize.)

2. As a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with Judaism. I didn’t advertise my Jewish heritage because I thought Jews weren’t cool and, as one, I feared neither would I be. But I was proud of the humanitarian values long demonstrated by American Jews, especially toward those I did think were cool: American blacks.

But so much for humanitarian values when, as it routinely does, Israel injects Exodus with steroids — a HUNDRED eyes for an eye, in the words of Norman Solomon. It’s so, I don’t know, un-Jewish.

The proscription against killing your fellow man is close to, if not at, the core of any religion. Like al-Qaeda and the Taliban beheading people in the name of Islam, wiping out great swaths of Palestinians in the name of the Jewish state hollows out religion. Jews need to stand up to Israel before it renders Judaism a religion in name only.

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here, for your copying-and-pasting convenience, is a transcription of some of what you just heard:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Nigger running for president, you need a first stringer. He’s definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep – or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin – she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda – a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but… I dunno, it’s just kinda… a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash… because we’re not!”

As I always told my writing students: show, don’t tell.

Clearing a Low Bar

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate
Shout loud in the crowd “Watch
them beat us all down.”

At this point, I’m trying to imagine what I can add that isn’t superfluous. That racism still exists, in tragic amounts, isn’t a revelation to anyone with more than six or seven functioning brain cells, although being confronted anew with this kind of evidence is still jarring.

What’s different, though, is what I said back in June.

Make no mistake, in the coming months you’re going to see the ugliest artillery that our nation’s drooling, inbred hatemongers have at their disposal. The looming prospect of a nigra in the White House is going to bring the vermin out of the woodwork, out from under their rocks and out into the light. It’s going to incite the well-heeled country club elite to crank up the meme machine with every sort of subtle, codemongering dogwhistle it can manufacture. The truly ignorant and hateful are going to be liquored up on rhetorical bile of the lowest sort and those who live further up the social ladder are going to be provided with a variety of messages that let them vote white without having to admit to themselves that they’re fundamentally just like the snuff-suckers in the trailer park across the tracks.

This is a good thing. Let me say that again: this is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because we’ll never defeat an enemy that can safely hide from scrutiny. This is a disease that’s only going to be cured with copious amounts of very bright light.

We will not fear your mask. Because what we believe in doesn’t need to hide.

In this election campaign, let’s invite the Klan and its fellow hate groups out into the light. Let’s get their hoods off of them. Let’s show all their videos. Let’s make sure that everybody gets to read their brochures and visit their Web sites. Let’s hand the microphone to their most eloquent speakers and stand aside. Let’s get them front and center and make sure America sees, in all its slack-jawed, toothless glory, precisely what racism looks like.
…
And above all, when we hear racist code masquerading as legitimate, issues-based messaging, let’s not be afraid to say “excuse me, but will you take off your hood?”

It’s decision time, and I’m ready for a referendum on hate. How about you?

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we won’t have triumphed finally and completely over ignorance. Our culture is, at its very core, anti-intellectual and frighteningly tolerant of the willfully stupid. We fetishize shallowness and vote on whether or not we’d like to have a beer with the candidate. We mock “elites,” sort of. We’re too thick to recognize real elitism when we see it, but we can be relentless in our abuse of those born to meager means who, through little but their own intelligence and hard work, rise up to make something of themselves. Our ability for self-deception is unmatched in the entire civilized world.

But an Obama victory (which looks more likely by the day) would nonetheless mark a milestone: we would have arrived at a point where a man of non-white (or half non-white, as the case may be) heritage can be elected to our highest office. As my colleague Whythawk has observed, that actually says something pretty good about America, given how few of our fellow industrialized nations can say the same.

“We suck less,” though, isn’t the sort of shining-city-on-the-hill standard America has traditionally prided itself on setting (even if only rhetorically), and while being the first to clear a very low bar is something to note, it’s not something to get too puffed up over. This is especially true when we have millions of citizens howling for the corpse of Barack Obama. It’s especially true when our media institutions ignore the filthiness happening right before their eyes. It’s especially true when these disgusting public spectacles are funded by a hyper-rich power elite that’s willing to spend whatever it takes to keep us ignorant and at each other’s throats.

As for the premise that McCain is no racist, well … racist is as racist does, don’t you think? He got his back up at the suggestion that he was somehow like George Wallace, but in what conceivable way is that charge less fair and valid than the slanders his campaign has slung in Obama’s direction?

And why should we taken seriously McCain’s late-to-the-dance attempts to rein in the hate that’s been committed in his name? His actions in recent years have made clear that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the White House, Bob Dolizing himself to a degree that Dole himself could hardly have imagined. Tack this way on the advice of advisers, pander to the Right to shore up the base, let Karl Rove bully you out of your VP preference, let slip the dogs of Race War… Why would I or you or any other thinking American regard this as anything besides a tactical maneuver driven by research showing that undecided voters are turned off by it?

None of Us Are Free

In “None of Us Are Free” (written by Barry Mann, Brenda Russell and Cynthia Weil), Solomon Burke sings

None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us is chained.
None of us are free.

Clearly, large portions of America remain chained. Our Cracker Problem persists, and what ought to be most disconcerting is that it not only exists in the heart of Georgia, in Outback Ohio, in pro-America Virginia or in a Republican Women’s club in California. It not only thrives in the minds of elderly whites who preferred Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. It’s not only alive and well in organizations like Stormfront and the League of the South.

No, the problem is that racism, racemongering and race-baiting are alive and well at the very highest, most public levels of our democracy: our presidential election process. And it was put there, on full display, and sanctioned by one of the only two parties that ever really stands a chance in any national election.

On November 4th, let’s hope for an epic thrashing of those who seek to profit by trading in hate and ignorance. Let’s further hope that those who can’t and won’t evolve get the message loud and clear: crawl back underneath your rocks and remain quiet until it’s finally your time to die.

But whatever we do, let’s not confuse winning a battle with winning the war. Our Cracker Problem will be with us for awhile longer, and November 5th will be the beginning, not the end.

And when they come to ethnically cleanse me
Will you speak out? Will you defend me?
Or laugh through a glass
eye as they rape our lives
Trampled underfoot by the Right on the rise…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: Ich Bin Ein Auslander

Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Not that it necessarily took Nostradamus to predict that, of course – as staggering prognostications go this one ranked right up there with “the sun will rise in the East.” Still, the predictability and magnitude of racism in America, the absolute certainty of it, matters.

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate Shout loud in the crowd
“Watch them beat us all down.”
There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

So I collected the bits and pieces of evidence as they began flying across the transom. As Obama’s lead solidified. As McCain became more desperate. As the ignorant and hateful on the Right were whipped into a lynch-ready lather by Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, by the Coulters and Savages and their legions of local market disciples. As they were egged on by the silence of a gutless old man who’d sold what little soul he had to start with; and by the photogenic perkiness of the former beauty queen he chose as his running mate: finally realized, Dan Quayle and Marilyn all rolled into one, witch doctor-approved, and so far to the right politically and theologically that even Pat Robertson has to be thinking “that bitch is crazy.” And of course, by their cynical proxies, who have read enough history to know a thing or two about the value of a good “other” when the scapegoating hour arrives.

Slowly, but all too surely, Cracker America began to realize that its most horrific of spectres is taking corporeal form: the White House is about to become the Black House. One of the greatest truisms of human nature is this: crisis reveals character. Or, in this case, lack of character. If you want to know what people are all about, at their core, back them into a corner. The truth will soon reveal itself, for good or ill.

The Code of Real America

“Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”
See them hunting, creeping, sneaking
Breeding fear and loathing with the lies they’re speaking

I said I had been collecting evidence. Let’s have a look, shall we?

• A Virginia county GOP chair wasn’t content to play the race card – he played the whole race deck:
  

  You need to read this column to believe it. In “humor” he accuses Obama of wanting to paint the White House black, supporting reparations, changing the national anthem to the “black national anthem”, teaching “black liberation theology in all churches”, and replacing the flag with a “star and crescent logo”.

  That he resigned is good, but it hardly excuses anything.

• While we’re talking about Virginia, what do you think Virgil Goode means by “politically correct loans”? Hmmm. Far be it from me to accuse someone of Mr. Goode’s stature of employing code, but as someone on one of my political lists points out, it’s worth noting that if you Google the term, the top result is … illuminating.
• When it comes to deciding whether a particular person is a racist, it’s hard (despite Mr. Bush’s claims of omniscience regarding Harriet Miers) to know his or her heart. Still, we might infer something useful from looking at the company the person in question keeps. With this in mind, Sarah Palin’s political associations should certainly raise a couple questions, don’t you think?
• In our current climate – which I guess we’ll call semi-actualized – it’s no longer acceptable or prudent for a candidate to stand up and shout something as inflammatory as “lynch the nigger!” So when you want people who are open to that message to hear it without you actually saying it, some sleight of tongue is required. At the moment, when we hear the word “terrorist” we tend to think of people who are … how to put this? … not white. We don’t think of Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, for some odd reason, nor do we think of the Irish Republican Army or the fine folks who advocate bombing Planned Parenthood clinics and murdering doctors who perform abortions (although we do get exercised about Bill Ayers, a man nobody cared about until he became a vague acquaintance of Obama’s; dare I suggest that he wasn’t a real terrorist until he was found in the company of negroes?) So when we hear Palin linking “Obama” and “terrorist” the way she’s fond of doing, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear people in the crowd stepping up for their portion of the call-and-response with “terrorist!” and “kill him!” You may argue that there’s nothing racist about this at all, and if it existed in a vacuum, if it were isolated from any larger context, I might have to cede the point that this was simply about a general ignorance of the facts. But there’s a lot of if in that equation, and those showing up to see Palin certainly seem capable of connecting the dots.
  

  At a McCain rally on Monday, television stations caught audio of a crowd member calling Obama a “terrorist,” while Dana Milbank reported that “[o]ne Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.’” Also on Monday, at a Palin rally, one member of the audience yelled, “Kill him!”

  So I don’t see any of us benefiting from playing stupid.

  

• But, you say, it’s not the fault of McCain and Palin that there are a few yahoos in the crowd. True. I’m not responsible for your stupidity. However, I am responsible for my reactions to that stupidity. If you yell “nigger” in a crowded Republican rally and I, the candidate, say nothing, how can I be seen as doing anything but endorsing it? As Solomon Burke sings in “None of Us Are Free,” “if you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right.”
• By the way, I’m having a hard time understanding why the Secret Service isn’t hauling people out of these rallies and charging them with whatever the charge is when you incite/advocate murdering a Senator. Just saying….
• The above assumes, for the sake of argument, that the campaign’s racist tone and tactics aren’t by design. As last week’s Frank Rich column illustrates, though, we can’t possibly assume anything of the sort.
  

  From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

  McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

  No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

  This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

• McCain’s campaign co-chair employed a pretty nifty code-swarm when he worked “guy of the street,” “cocaine” and “Jeremiah Wright” into a conversation with Dennis Miller. “Guy of the street.” Hmmm. Granted, this steps away from all that “elitist” bullshit, which is nice. But if you’re black, your choices are now “uppity” or “street thug”? Lordy, how far our darkies have come from the days of “field negro” vs. “house negro”…
• We haven’t talked about Virginia in a few bullet points, so how about this: Obama = Osama. And again, let’s remember – we’re all smart enough to see the big picture and understand the larger context, especially in light of the fact that we now know this wasn’t a one-off – it’s part of the sewage that campaign workers are being trained to spew.
• By Virginia, of course, we’re referring to real Virginia. You know, Macaca Virginia, which we assume to be part of pro-America America. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
• There’s not only a “real Virginia,” there’s a real America. This FiveThirtyEight analysis takes a good, hard look at Palin’s ideal America (based on her rhetoric and the places she’s chosen to appear lately) and guess what? Real America is significantly whiter than … unreal? … America.
• In Fairfield, Ohio, Halloween is evidently being celebrated by hanging Obama in effigy. If you’re a little confused by the Star of David on his head, join the club. I imagine black and Jew are all pretty much the same thing in some people’s minds.
• By the way, you know that whole “Obama is a Muslim” thing? Read up on the piece of work who fabricated it here. Turns out he don’t like them dirty Jews, neither. And that’s not the half of it.
• You may be thinking – how have I gotten this far without once mentioning FOX “News”? I think this item will reward your patience. Up until now Colin Powell’s negrocity has been tolerated, but yesterday he forgot his place and endorsed Obama. Which means he’s fair game for stuff like this: “Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.” I guess we should be grateful that they stopped at “two-step” (I was expecting “shuffle”) and that they didn’t deliver the story in blackface.
• Lest you think that racism is confined to the South and Midwest, this entry hails from the Great State of California. Where, apparently, them jigaboos loves them some fried chicken and watermelon. Of course, the perpetrator apologized because, you know, she didn’t mean to offend nobody.
• Want more? We got more. Check out the gallery of stupid over at Pam’s House Blend, where you’ll find:
  * More fun in post-racial America
  * John McCain forced to denounce racist, homophobic member of Virginia leadership team
  * Kentucky, I know you can do better than this
  * FL: middle school teacher uses ‘nigger’ to describe Barack Obama
  * Palin praised racist writer who called for RFK’s assassination
  * Values at the Values Voter Summit – Obama as a Muslim Aunt Jemima
  * Westmoreland stands by ‘uppity’ remark about Obama
  * White supremacists: Obama’s boosting our movement
  * John McLaughlin: Obama fits the ‘Oreo’ stereotype
  * Georgia: publication features Obama in crosshairs on cover for article on white supremacist threat
  * Bigot eruption: GOP House member refers to Obama as ‘boy’
  * South Carolina: black reporter attacked by white family (on camera!)

As the song says:

Freedom of expression doesn’t make it alright
Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next: None of Us Are Free

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street.

The project, organized by a veritable “Who’s who” of Jewish liberals, promises to both reframe the debate on the lobbying level and actually push money towards candidates with a more progressive approach to Israeli/Arab politics:

“The genesis of this is really the frustration on the part of a very substantial portion of the American Jewish community that despite the fact that there is broad support for a peace-oriented policy in the Middle East, there doesn’t seem to be the political will to actually carry it out,” Ben-Ami said. “We have not been effective at transmitting the message that there is political support for these positions in the American Jewish community and their allies.”

Another article on J Street from the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman catches a very smart point about the differences between America and Israel on this issue:

An irony of the American-Israeli relationship is that, while J Street’s perspective is controversial in the U.S., it commands a good deal of support in Israel. “We’ve been dealing with this in Israel since the late 80s and the 90s, from [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to the Kadima phenomenon,” said Levy, who negotiated peace accords for multiple left-wing Israeli governments. “If you understand security only as the war on terror and you’re not dealing with the occupation, you’ll never solve the problem. That fundamental change [in perspective] never took place here. We want to be a catalyst in closing that gap.”

This is absolutely correct. Safe from viewing the brutalities of occupation close-up, the armchair generals and quarterbacks of AIPAC and their allies in established media outlets can safely call for the eradication of Arabs as an ethnicity and culture, without even blinking at the irony of this coming from a bunch of those goddamned Jewish New York Liberals ™. As if it wasn’t less than seventy years ago that we were being gassed to death by the millions and buried in ditches by the hundreds.
Don’t forget that many equally insane fundamentalist evangelical Christians have every desire to see a great war begin in the Middle East, as it heralds for them the start of the return of Jesus and the great Armageddon that will send them rising on waves of rapture into Heaven. Think I’m kidding?:

At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.

He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”

Wow, that Hagee sounds like a real nut. Good thing he isn’t in bed with any of the current Presidential candidates.

Seriously, we have let these lunatics dominate the discussion of Israeli/Palestinian affairs for longer than I have been alive, and that has to end. You can’t expect any kind of peace or rapprochment to come from these people–they’re too far gone. It’s time for the debate to be realigned. As Matt Stoller so succinctly put it:

It’s a significant moment for progressive Jews who have previously not had our voices represented in the foreign policy realm, drowned out by right-wingers intent on the most hawkish policies out there. I am pro-Israel, I believe that respect for the Palestinians is the only way to build a sustainable living space for the Israeli populace to live in peace.

In less than two weeks, it will be Yom Hashoah. As we take time to remember those lost to the greatest act of villainy in human memory, I am happy to see many of my fellow Jews taking a step into the future and not letting the dogma of the past dictate their actions. I’ll be doing my part to take those steps with them.

This is actually a boost to remind people that we can produce this kind of journalism at any time. We’re going to have a large enough newsroom to continue to produce this kind of quality journalism.

— Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, winner of six Pulitzer Prizes for 2008; The Post’s front-page story by media critic Howard Kurtz did not mention the paper has endured three rounds of staff cuts since 2003, but the AP’s story did; April 7; emphasis added.

I can only confirm that the route is dynamic.

— Nathan Ballard, a San Francisco city spokesman, as, said The New York Times, “The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China’s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet”; April 9.

For some members of the U.S. Congress to set aside the Olympic spirit and the principle that sports should not be politicized, and even to openly encourage interference with and harm to the San Francisco torch relay, completely lacks basic morals and conscience.

— Chinese Foreign Minister Jing Yu in a rebuke to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for urging peaceful demonstrations against the Olympic torch relay; April 9.

We sincerely regret the inconvenience.

— statement from American Airlines, which has cancelled thousands of flights this week, stranding tens of thousands of passengers, to reinspect aircraft for a problem previously thought corrected; April 10.

I’m quite angry. They should be following the rules,. You don’t try to follow the rules, you follow them. This isn’t golf or horseshoes.

— Brad Weiss, a lawyer whose flight had been canceled by American Airlines, peeved that an earlier inspection of aircraft had deemed them safe to fly; April 10.

Our mechanics felt they had complied but thought they had the ability to take certain latitudes; they did not. In the past they have had certain latitude, and that is no longer the case.

— Daniel Garton, an American Airlines executive vice president, discussing the airline’s inspection policies; April 10.

Nobody at the top ever gets fired.

— Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the aviation subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, suggesting the Federal Aviation Administration’s poor handling of aircraft inspections ought to result in more severe punishments of top officials; April 10.

Our protest is against the problematic order of priorities of the government. First let them find the budget for all the things that the country needs.

— Ron Avni, a leader of a campaign against excessive celebrations on Israel’s 60th anniversary because of apparent deep-seated resentment about the effectiveness of the Israeli government; April 9.

Have we gone mad? Has something gone wrong with our collective mind? The State of Israel is about to mark 60 years of independence in an atmosphere of bitterness, depression and public reluctance ‘to waste the money on celebrations.’

— journalist Sever Plocker, taking the anti-festivity campaigners to task in Yediot Aharonot, the popular Hebrew daily newspaper; April 9.

I say to our brothers and sisters across the continent, don’t wait for dead bodies in the streets of Harare.

— Tendai Biti, secretary general of opposition party Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, in a plea to other African nations after reporting “widespread attacks on its supporters, black youths drove white farmers off their land and election officials were accused of vote tampering and arrested”; April 9.

In that terrible moment, he had two options — to save himself, or to save his friends. For Mike, this was no choice at all. He threw himself onto the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his body.

— President Bush, awarding the Medal of Honor posthumously to the family of a Navy Seal, Petty Officer Second Class Michael A. Monsoor, who threw himself on a grenade in 2006 to save his comrades in Iraq; April 9.

If this is built, it could affect our livelihood; fewer people may want to come here if we can’t offer the peacefulness we have now. The battle has already made it hard to get it out of my mind and meditate properly.

— Bhante Rahula, vice abbot of Bhavana Society Forest Monastery in West Virginia, which is part of a battle in three states between two electric companies on the one hand and thousands of landowners and residents on the other over a $1.1 billion, 260-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that would cut a 200-foot wide swath of forest near the monastery; April 9.

Q: Dana, can I double-check — you are not billing this speech this morning as an address to the nation, right? It’s a statement? …
MS. PERINO: We’re not asking for network time, no, but the President will give his speech at 11:30 a.m. And for those networks who want to cover it, then that will be great — barring any sort of, you know, Hollywood scandal that pops up. (Laughter.) That was not a shot at you all.

— an exchange between a reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing; April 10.

People are saying: ‘Stop it! It’s too much.’ We are a small town in a small country. We didn’t start the war. It was the United States and Great Britain. They must now take the responsibility for the refugees.

— Anders Lago, mayor of Sodertalje, a Swedish city of 83,000 that is home to about 6,000 Iraqi refugees; 40,000 Iraqis have found refuge in Sweden; April 10.

In December of 2007, I signed the United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement Implementation Act to bring economic gains for both of our countries, empower workers, and foster accountability and the rule of law. We seek to build on these successes by working with the Congress to approve the United States-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement and the United States-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement. These and other free trade agreements enhance prosperity in the United States and signal our firm support for those who share our values of freedom and democracy.

— from a statement by President Bush proclaiming “Pan American Day and Pan American Week, 2008″; April 10.

Phil Gramm’s career was as the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has. He’s a sorcerer’s apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system.

— James K. Galbraith, a University of Texas economist, criticizing former senator Phil Gramm, who is one of presidential candidate John McCain’s key economic advisers; April 2.

When the congressman speaks, we listen, and we pretty much do as he says. He is the type of politician that comes around once every 50 years in Washington. He has an incredible presence, and his word means more than anyone’s to us.

— Rich Kasunic, a Pennsylvania state senator, on Rep. John Murtha, who recently endorsed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; March 29.

If you’ve got AIDS, cancer or erectile dysfunction, a group of big advertising networks are going to promise not to remember that you read sites about those topics and remind you (or others using your computer) of your condition with ads for related drugs as you surf the net. But if you have Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure or warts, the ad companies have decided it may well be acceptable to keep track of your interest in medical subjects and fill your browser with ads for helpful products from pharmaceutical companies. Advertising to people who are dead may also be acceptable …

— from a New York Times story by Saul Hansell about “proposed guidelines for [members of the Network Advertising Initiative, a trade association of companies who place ads on the Web] to follow when engaging in behavioral targeting, that is keeping track of what Internet users do in order to show them ads for products in which they may be interested”; April 10.

This information can be quite profound. It can lead to a decision to have your breasts chopped off before you’ve been sick for a day or having your ovaries scooped out before you have children. These are dramatic decisions, but these products are going on the marketplace as though they were underarm deodorant.

— R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, on the emergence of the for-profit, personalized gene-testing industry; March 25.

Striking fear also serves pharmaceutical companies, which want you to worry about diseases, because people who worry are more likely to go to their doctors and ask for drugs than people who don’t. It turns out that much of what we — and our doctors — think we know about many health problems has been shaped by drugmakers and their marketers. Take “condition branding,” one of the most brilliant and widely used marketing techniques for selling drugs. Condition branders use “information” about medical conditions to forge links between disease and treatment in the minds of both patients and doctors. If they have a drug but no condition, they will simply invent a disease. I’ve been reporting this for years.

— medicine and health-care writer Shannon Brownlee in a Washington Post commentary; March 30.

This spring, nearly every top designer has a “Cinderella” slipper, a shoe priced so high that it should come with a handsome prince — or an hour with a male escort, at least. Christian Louboutin’s webbed suede and button sandals sell for $1,345, while Versace offers a $1,400 satin pump festooned with nothing more than a few tassels. Dior’s platform slingback with beaded heel runs $1,030, while Balenciaga’s pink and brown braided gladiator sandal goes for $1,375.

— lede to a Los Angeles Times story by Monica Corcoran about the high cost of fashion pumps; March 30.

photo credits:
Petty Officer Second Class Michael A. Monsoor: U.S. Navy via Associated Press
$1,400 Jimmy Choo pumps: Kirk McKoy, Los Angeles Times

xpost: Scholars & Rogues

For starters, his thoughts on the history and function of civil religion are spot-on, and as I consider how dramatically our culture is changing, they lead me to an obvious conundrum. On the one hand, Americans clearly need something unifying, some organizing social thread running through our increasingly diverse (and diverging) societal fabric. Something that serves as a new civic religion, if I might put it that way. On the other hand, it seems futile, in our fractured culture, to even hope for a cohering principle around which we can all gather. Yeats might observe, were he around today, that the center has not held, and yet no society can hope to survive (let alone thrive) without a center.

It seems obvious that the time when a religious trope could fill the need has passed, a point I think Pastor Dan’s analysis makes clear. Historically civil religion could safely stand on generally shared Christian (or Judeo-Christian) ideologies, iconography and imagery because America was overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian. Now, though, these assumptions are challenged at every turn by growing numbers of non-Abrahamic religious adherents, a swelling Islamic population and an increasingly emboldened community of atheists. When I go to a public event and they begin with a prayer, I assure you, they’re not praying to a god who’s cool with Wiccans. (Note how the image above fails to include a pentacle, for instance.) If you take the holy text of the god being prayed to literally, in fact, the prayer is being offered to a deity who’s on record as saying that Wiccans should be killed on the spot.

So if these other groups seem sensitive, consider:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

As Pastor Dan notes, these dynamics have engendered cynical faith-based power plays by certain of our politicians, and if those on the outside feel a tad paranoid, that’s probably to be expected.

However, even this oversimplifies, because at the same time non-Christians are challenging Christian-based civil expressions, there’s a raging war within Christianity over the soul of the religion. I wish all Christians were like Pastor Dan, but for every one of him there seems to be a dozen Pat Robertsons and maybe even a Fred Phelps or two. So it feels to me (a guy who grew up Southern Baptist in the working-class rural South) that while there have always been significant disagreements from denomination to denomination, our dominant religion is today more fragmented and at odds with itself than I can remember it ever being before.

So let’s acknowledge that whatever center America may have in the future, it’s not likely to be religious in nature. However, at the risk of sounding condescending, I firmly believe that we need a cohering civic “religion” of some sort. Something ennobling, something that calls us to our higher selves, that emphasizes our connection to each other and to our collective identity. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris explains that there’s nothing that can be accomplished through religion that can’t be accomplished without religion, and this is more than true. However, that kind of rationalism can be a hard road for most people. The world is insanely complicated and very few people have the wherwithall to parse even the complexities that lie close to home. We can choose to view people as ignorant sheep, in the manner of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, or we can acknowledge the simple fact that even our most brilliant people are usually overrun when they step too far away from their areas of expertise.

In any case, one need only look at recent elections to see that there’s a powerful need for something to believe in. And my question is whether there’s any possibility of us ever evolving (at least in my lifetime) something to replace the dysfunctional civic religion of our past? Civil religion worked better when our culture was more homogenous, but as I argue in a piece I wrote a few years back for Intelligent Agent, the Modernist monolith has fallen, Postmodernism has destroyed all vestiges of universal meaning, and we’re now edging into the opening act of the Network Age.

For better or worse, contemporary culture is network culture, and it’s important to understand that network culture is by nature distributed culture. Modernism was about centralization, but the Network is decentralized – it is ubiquitous and omnipresent, although no less rigorously structured. Our relationships with institutions were once conducted around the site of the monolith – the bank, the church, the school, the county courthouse, these were all physical places and to transact business with the agency in question, you had to transport yourself to the physical address of the institution. In today’s corporate lingo, we might say that these official relationships were “institution-centric.” Networked, distributed culture, though, is “citizen-centric” (though we’d do more justice to the actual character of the relationship with the term “customer-centric”). The locus of these organizational interactions depends less on the address of the building where the offices are and more on our IP addresses. The institution is everywhere there’s a terminal, a critical distinction in understanding that the Network Age is polylithic in nature. This suggests profound implications for the makeup of organizations, because now you can be an active participant in any number of social activities without having to centralize yourself. A congregation of 1000 people can share a worship service from 1000 separate locations, for example.

Put another way, the symbol of the age of civic religion was the monolith. The symbol of the Postmodern was the bulldozer. And now the large, unified central hub with its equally unitary organizing principles (Lyotard’s “metanarratives“) has been replaced by a distributed network of nodes. Not one large thing, but lots of small ones. Homogeneity replaced by rampant, explosive diversity – of race, of creed, of cultural practice, of religion, of everything.

We need a center, but is a center possible? If not, what is to become of us?

My thanks to Pastor Dan, and my apologies for the scattered nature of my thoughts here. Hopefully I have somehow arrived at a worthy question.

Notice I said “at first glance.” This is the Bush administration. So there’s got to be an agenda, right?

Of course, there is. As usual with these guardians of “the homeland” (is there a term in common usage that makes the gorge rise more than”the homeland”? I mean if they’d chosen something/anything else -say, “the mother ship” – at least we’d get a laugh out of it instead of always feeling that the term sounds discomfortingly jarring in Bush’s “silver-spoon-fed hick boy” Texas accent rather than in a clipped Teutonic one), there’s a “9/11″ connection. A report from the Inspector General’s Office in the Department of Justice (that bastion of civil liberty and freedom in this administration) stated in 2004 that prisons might become recruiting grounds for “militant Islamic and other religious groups.” (Italics mine)

I know I’ve been concerned about Leavenworth and Atlanta becoming madrassas rather about than Gitmo and Abu Ghraib being proven to be American secret prisons practicing torture….

Lucky for us, the DOJ under that patriot Alberto Gonzalez has realized how dangerous books on faith can be. As Bureau of Prisons mouthpiece spokesperson Traci Billingsley notes in her defense of this new policy:

We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts. (Italics mine)

This policy seems incongruent in an administration that’s looking for “faith based” solutions to social problems, doesn’t it. Other people think so, too:

It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism. – Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group.

The lists of acceptable texts, chosen by those “reliable subject experts,” seem inconsistent to the point of quirkiness. There’s lots of C.S. Lewis, no Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr. There’s also no Robert Schuller, a minister one would think that Busheviks would find perfectly acceptable. Then, too, there’s the problem of funding. The removal of “unacceptable” faith books and the replacing of them with “acceptable” ones is, like so many Bushevik “education” mandates, unfunded:

The bureau (of prisons) has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.

Many prison chaplains, tasked with removing the “unacceptable” books, find this new purging policy unnecessary. As they point out, books that espouse extremist ideas or violence are rejected regularly, and all materials that were in prison libraries already had to be approved.

All this suggests the obvious – is there a 1st Amendment issue at stake? Professor Douglas Laycock of the University of Michigan law school believes that there is – mainly because (as usual) the Bush government has overreached:

Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons. But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.

Finally, there’s the nature of the list itself. Although the government hasn’t made the list public, it’s been leaked, and even evangelical scholars are baffled at some of the choices. Timothy Larsen, professor of Christian Thought at the evangelical Wheaton College, thinks the list is skewed:

There are some well-chosen things in here. I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there’s a lot about it that’s weird. The lists show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism, and lack materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

Besides the predictable exclusion of Islamic texts, the list also shows a bias against Catholic and Jewish scholarship. And forget about areas like Wiccan studies.

One can only guess at the why of this latest assault on free speech by the Bush administration. Maybe it’s their foolish and futile attempt to derail the education of an American Osama – or another Malcolm X. Maybe purging prison libraries is a first step toward purging any libraries that receive federal funding of any kind of books that Bush – or those like him – find unacceptable.

As with most every policy of the Busheviks, it’s difficult to tell bad intent from stupidity.