Reading notes

Wendell writes well and thoughtfully, as usual:

Facing this year’s presidential election, our people are bitterly divided. This division is perhaps as great a threat to our future as is the possibility of a second term for Mr. Bush. And so the paramount question for Sen. Kerry’s campaign is how to oppose Mr. Bush effectively without so exacerbating the country’s political differences as to reduce the possibility of effective government should Sen. Kerry win the election.

One answer, I believe, is to base the campaign solidly and clearly upon our traditional principles of politics and religion. … If the campaign is based soundly enough on principles, then it can be carried out, at least by Democrats, as a reasoned argument, and thus without sensationalizing personal and emotional differences. The further great advantage is that the Bush administration can be shown all too handily to be in violation of many of our country’s traditional political and religious principles. …

Along with all the rest of the world’s people, we have inherited ancient instructions for the stewardship and good husbandry of the earth, with clear warnings, now significantly verified, of the disasters that will (and already do) attend our failure. We have responded by continuing our elaborately rationalized destructions. But bad precedent is no excuse for bad behavior. The Bush attitude toward the natural (God-given) world is sacrilegious and wildly uneconomic.

The human norm, as established by Christ (and others), is love even for enemies, forgiveness, neighborliness, and peace. It is therefore troubling that members of the present administration, while making much of their commitment to Christ, are insisting on the normality of hatred, greed, revenge, and unremitting war. …

However obscured by a history that has fallen short, our religious principles are justice, mercy, peaceableness, and lovingkindness toward fellow humans and the gifts of nature; as our political principles are freedom confirmed in law, honesty, and public accountability. These are not the principles of a party. They are our free inheritance as human beings and as citizens living under the Constitution of the United States.

These observations inspire hope that our “better angels” will ultimately prevail. Yet still I find my heart heavy for those religious folk who continue hellbent in support of the Bush administration whose plans and goals embrace sin as sound policy. What end awaits these ones? Will pleading ignorance justify? In a world of free-flowing information, is ignorance a workable excuse? Maybe their repentance is closer at hand than I realize? Will God forgive as I cannot?

(I remind myself of Lyle Lovett’s humorous-yet-sobering God Will lyric. I really am working on forgiveness, but it’s slow going.)

This is a remarkable story, remarkably told.

Charlotte [NC] — The spectators in the packed courtroom that hot September day in 1997 had come to watch the final act in an extraordinary legal career. But in ways that went unstated, they ended up bearing witness to two painful personal dramas, the lawyer’s and the client’s.

The case of little Bailey Griffin, maimed at birth because an obstetrician waited too long to bring her into the world, was John Edwards’s last as a lawyer, and it crystallized major themes of his life and career.

There was the hell-bent work ethic that propelled him out of working-class beginnings, the natural affinity for the weak against the strong, the transcendent connection with jurors — qualities that later would catapult him from freshman senator to the Democratic vice presidential nomination he is to accept Wednesday night. There also was a record verdict for Bailey, which doctors and insurers — and ultimately President Bush — decried as part of the problem, not a solution, for the health care needs of ordinary Americans. …

Edwards won [the Griffins’] loyalty in the first encounter.

“He was wonderful with Bailey,” Ashea said. “She had trouble breathing, and she always had saliva coming out of her mouth because she couldn’t swallow.” While many people recoiled at Bailey, she said that “he picked her up in his arms, never stood back.” …

Edwards [on Wednesday] is to claim the second-biggest prize in his party. It will mark the culmination of a remarkable journey, from modest beginnings to the top of the legal profession, to the emotional depths and now the political heights. Edwards went to Raleigh on Tuesday before flying to Boston. His last stop was to visit the grave of his son.

Intelligence and passion in service of social justice. Sounds like someone who’s exercising his gifts to the fullest, caring for the least of these, pleasing the one who made him. Who will go for us? “Send me,” says John. Yes.

Melanie highlights a British citizen’s take on U.S. reputation outside its borders. The Guardian UK’s Timothy Ash writes:

[I raise] the larger question of whether the United States’ “soft power”, its power to attract others and to get them to do what it wants because they find it attractive, has been diminished by the way the Bush administration has reacted to the 9/11 attacks. That, in turn, raises the even larger question of who is winning this “war”: al-Qaida or the US? …

The soft power of a country is more difficult to measure than its military or economic power, but one yardstick is what I call the “Statue of Liberty test”. In this test, countries are rated by the number of people outside who want to get into them, divided by the number of people inside who want to get out. … By this rough measure, America still has bags of soft power.

Yet its overall attractiveness surely has been diminished, not just by such bureaucratic procedures, but by Guantánamo, by Iraq, by a certain harsh, militarist, nationalist approach to world affairs, and by a mistaken belief that the “war on terror” can be won mainly, if not solely, by military, intelligence and police means.

If you look at the results of the worldwide survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre, you can see that resentment of America around the world has reached unprecedented levels in the last two years. The Bush administration has imperilled the economic dimension of American power, by running up $500bn trade and budget deficits while increasing military spending to $400bn, and it has largely neglected the third, soft dimension. …

If Osama bin Laden is still in a fit state to make political calculations, he must be backing an election victory for George Bush. The object of the terrorist is often to reveal the “true” repressive character of the state against which the terror is directed, and thus win further support for the terrorists’ cause. … As bin Laden must have hoped, the Bush administration overreacted, and thus provided, in Iraq and Guantánamo, recruiting sergeants for al-Qaida of which Osama could only dream.

So in this looking-glass world of backhanded ironies, Republicans are covertly supporting their most extreme opponent, Ralph Nader, because he will take votes from John Kerry, and al-Qaida terrorists will be backing Bush, because he’s their best recruiter. …

In a recent opinion poll for the Economist, handling the war on terror was one of the few areas in which American voters favoured Bush over Kerry. It seems likely [in the event of another U.S. terrorist attack] there would be a wave of patriotic solidarity with the incumbent. In short, Bush’s election chances may depend on the ruthless ingenuity of al-Qaida, while Kerry’s election chances may depend on the ability of Bush’s department of homeland security to combat it.

But it could also fall the other way, like Spain, wherein most of us soberly choose to rid ourselves of Mr. Bush and his administration’s worldview. After all, he’s made “See? I’ve made America safer” the centerpiece of why we should elect him. Another terrorist strike before the election would vividly illustrate he’s done no such thing. I think “solidarity with the incumbent” in such a case would brand us once and for all, fairly or not, as the most shortsighted, dimwitted, and easily duped people on the face of the earth.

Melanie’s observation based on reader input from around the world is very telling:

The rest of the world is horrified by Bush, and horrified that someplace north of 40% of the American electorate is prepared to support him in the next election. They wonder if there is something wrong with the American character, if we are as greedy, shortsighted, narcissistic and selfish as we appear with the Bushes, Cheneys, Rummys and Ashcrofts at the helm. They always thought we were arrogant, that’s nothing new. But the world put up with that character flaw because they also know that we as people are essentially friendly, if not particularly curious about the rest of the world. That friendly face is gone now, replaced by Bush and Cheney’s opportunistic, warmaking smirk and sneer.

It’s a crisis, yes, and hence an opportunity for change. The evil spell / mass delusion that’s been gripping many of us in the U.S. these last four+ years, causing us to support these Bush guys against our interests and better judgment (and in the case of us Christians, against our bedrock theology), can’t last forever. The return of sensibility or divine intervention or both is inevitable; I pray that it’s soon. In fact, I believe — with caution, trepidation, and the occasional lapse — that it’s happening now.

[via Melanie]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more powerful and succinct opening paragraph:

America’s intelligence system failed to see terrorist threats coming from Al Qaeda that should have been evident before 9/11, and then, after 9/11, saw terrorist threats coming from Iraq that didn’t exist. A system that doesn’t warn of real threats and does warn of unreal ones is a broken system.

And then Robert lays down some serious wisdom:

Terrorism is a tactic. It is not itself our enemy. There is no finite number of terrorists in the world. At any given time, their number depends on how many people are driven by anger and hate to join their ranks. Hence, “smoking out,” imprisoning or killing terrorists, based on information supplied by our intelligence agencies, cannot be the prime means of preventing future terrorist attacks against us. It is more important to deal with the anger and hate.

A war on terror? Crazy it is. It’s like making war on shock & awe, a similarly deranged tactic. Dealing with terror means dealing with the anger and hate that fuel its use as a tactic; dismantling unjust policies that evoke anger and hate directly targets the root of the problem.

This is another way of saying what Jim Wallis has been preaching for some time now:

Poverty is not the only cause of terrorism, but unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we will never win the battle against terrorism.

Back to Mr. Reich, who provides specific ideas on dealing with anger and hate:

This means, among other things, restarting the Middle East peace process rather than, as President Bush has done, run away from it. It requires shoring up the economies of the Middle East, now suffering from dwindling direct investment from abroad because of the violence and uncertainty in the region. And it means strengthening the legitimacy of moderate Muslim leaders, instead of encouraging extremism — as the current administration’s policies have undoubtedly done. …

The United States cannot control or police the world. Instead, we will have to depend on strong treaties and determined alliances to prevent illegal distribution of thousands of nuclear weapons already in existence in Russia, Pakistan, India and other nuclear powers, and of biological or chemical weapons capable of mass destruction. The administration’s “go-it-alone” diplomacy takes us in precisely the wrong direction. That the United States suffers from a failure of intelligence is indisputable. The calamitous state of our spy agencies is only one part of that failure.

The last paragraph’s reference to “police the world” inevitably reminds me of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 observation —

Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of the policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You are too arrogant. If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.’”

Even Sen. Fritz Hollings — with whom I had such disagreement back in 2002 about government-mandated digital-device copy protection (SSSCA renamed CBDTPA) — gets it. Bravo, Senator.

[also archived at Truthout]

I think there’s not a nickel’s worth of difference, in God’s eyes, between our U.S. so-called “Christian” approach to fighting terror and Islamic extremist terrorism in the first place. Who’s done the most killing and destruction by now? Uh, not the terrorists.

Nick goes a long way toward making my case:

[The “Left Behind” series of evangelical thrillers] are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is “Glorious Appearing,” which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes. …

This portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself — and infidels headed for hell.

No, I don’t think the readers of “Glorious Appearing” will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It’s harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now. …

That’s not what America stands for, and I doubt that it’s what God stands for.

Of course it’s not what God stands for, and it’s not by any stretch of interpretation other than outright delusional what Jesus stands for, and I’m guessing neither of these Trinitarian Persons appreciates our saying it is. In addition to our aggressively misrepresenting God’s interests and whatever karmic consequences that piles up, our fighting death and destruction with death and destruction is just stupid; as Jon Stewart put it, “you can’t out-psycho Al Qaeda.” No, a different approach altogether is needed, one like — hold on — Jesus advocates, but which we in our bloodlust disdain and call foolishness.

[also archived at Truthout]

I think this is great. Garrison captures important bits of the realization process that transformed me from a College Republican years ago into a Jesus-lovin’ liberal now:

A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. …

The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances.

This is Democratic bedrock: we don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor’s car won’t start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment.

Thank you, Garrison.