Juicers And The Fans Who Love Them

Over on the Current, I use this rain-soaked Opening Day as an occasion to contemplate why the steroid scandal hasn't prompted large-scale disillusionment among baseball fans.

Lieberman Democrats

Michael Scherer doesn't think much of Joe Lieberman's "I didn't leave the Democrats; the Democrats left me" remarks on "The Week" over the weekend. Here's the quote:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will —and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me.

But as Reihan notes, Lieberman is factually correct: The Democratic Party has shifted leftward over the last decade, on the fronts he mentions as well as others. Moreover, among many of Lieberman's left-liberal foes, this leftward shift is viewed as a great achievement, which suggests that they would be better served treating his comments as a compliment than as a calumny. It's fair to pillory Lieberman for failing to change with the times; it's a little strange to pillory him for merely pointing out that times have changed.

The only truly questionable portion of Lieberman's remarks is his suggestion that the change agents responsible for the Democratic Party's progressive turn represent "a small group on the left of the party." It's too soon to tell if the the new-model Democrats are headed for a long-term majority or just a short-term, post-Bush bounce, and maybe Lieberman's right that the the Dems' leftward shift will eventually drive the party into a political ditch. But given how the landscape looks right now, Lieberman sounds an awful lot like the Rockefeller Republicans of yore, who would complain about how a "small group of extremists" in the conservative movement were hijacking their party and dooming it to defeat, even as those same extremists were leading the GOP to national successes that the Jacob Javitses and Christine Todd Whitmans and Lowell Weickers could only dream about.

There's an important lesson here: Namely, that the American "center" moves around a lot (and varies wildly on an issue-by-issue basis), and thus a party that moves leftward or rightward on the hot-button issues of the day can sometimes find a new center that nobody realized was there. This tends to leave the inhabitants of the old middle - the Rockefeller Republicans in the '70s and '80s, and perhaps the Lieberman Democrats of today - flummoxed and out-of-step, unable to figure out that just because they've always considered themselves "centrists" doesn't mean the American people will always agree with them.

Photo by Flickr user Lieberman_2006 used under a Creative Commons license.

The Mist

I just saw Frank Darabont's latest Stephen King adaptation, about small-town Mainers trapped in a supermarket while a monster-riddled mist - accidentally unleashed when a military experiment opens a portal to a Lovecraftian dimension - rolls over the world. The movie is basically a glorified Twilight Zone episode, but in an era when the horror genre is dominated by torture-porn one-upsmanship, there's something refreshing about a monster movie that traffics in Rod Serling-style social commentary, even if it runs toward heavy-handedness at times. (With the Twilight Zone comparison in mind, I'd be very curious to see Darabont's black-and-white version; if nothing else, the film's low-budget special effects might look a lot cooler than they did in color.)

That said, whether you give the film a thumbs-up or thumbs-down probably depends on what you think of the brutal twist ending, which departs significantly from the King novella. Spoilers follow ...

Continue reading "The Mist" »

Pro-Lifers and '08

I have a Current up about the Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich endorsements of Obama, and what, if anything, they tell us about the fate of the "Catholic vote." But I wanted to make another point on the subject as well. I'm an enormous admirer of Professor Bacevich, but I wish his Obama-endorsing piece hadn't stacked the deck so much; specifically, I wish he'd made a more detailed case for why issues of war and peace ought to outweigh the abortion issue for pro-life voters in '08, rather than claiming, implausibly:

... only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

You hear this sort of thing frequently from pro-lifers who have grown disillusioned with the GOP, and there's some truth to it: A lot of Republican leaders could care less about Roe and would prefer, if anything, to see it upheld, and even if Roe were overturned abortion would remain legal in most of the country. Nonetheless, it remains the case for all the pro-choice sympathies of leading GOPers, the Republican Party nearly succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade fifteen years ago, and would have if one man - Anthony Kennedy - hadn't changed his mind about the issue at the last minute. It also remains the case that the Bush Administration has seemingly brought to Supreme Court within a single vote of undoing what Kennedy wrought in 1992. It further remains the case that while overturning Roe wouldn't magically restore us to some Ozzie-and-Harriet wonderland, returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life. And it further remains the case that to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time. These realities may not require pro-lifers to vote for John McCain, but they deserve more serious consideration that Bacevich affords them.

Obama's Veep

The notion of an Obama-Bloomberg ticket isn't the worst idea in the world, by any means. (At the very least, it makes a heck of a lot more sense than an Obama-Clinton pairing.) But Jim Webb always made more sense, and as the inveterate Webb-booster Noah Millman points out, in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, he makes more sense than ever. After all, what's the obvious cure for having a black-nationalist pastor in your closet? Putting a white-nationalist senator on your ticket!

Reviewing The Trailer

Manohla Dargis attempts a novel gimmick, writing her review of the new blackjack flick 21 based on the trailer, rather than the actual movie.

Oh, wait - sorry, it was Chris Orr whose review did that. Hard to tell the difference ...

The Return of the Seventies (II)

Peter Suderman has kind words for my essay on Hollywood in the shadow of Iraq, but he also writes:

[The piece] gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies ... It’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.

Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View ... sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.

Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.

I largely agree, and tried to suggest as much in the original essay, though Peter may be right that I should have made the point more explicitly. I do think that our neo-Seventies moment has produced movies and (especially) television shows that rival the best work done in that decade - not only highbrow work like The Wire and The Sopranos, Zodiac and No Country For Old Men, but thrillers like the Bourne films (the first two, especially) and B-movies like 28 Days Later. (I think Danny Boyle's zombie film is a vast improvement on the work of George Romero, in fact, though that's a minority opinion.) But it's certainly true that the more explicitly politically-infused material is considerably weaker this time around, often to the point of embarrassment. One problem, as Chris Orr among others has suggested, is the lack of distance on the Iraq War: Films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now came out years after we had departed Vietnam, and as a result they didn't come across as attempts to grab the viewer by the lapels and convince them to END THE WAR NOW!!!!, which was what movies like Lions For Lambs and In the Valley of Elah often seemed intent on doing. The other problem, I think, is the one I tried to get it in my post on Michael Clayton: The best paranoid movies - The Parallax View, say, or The Conversation - wear well precisely because they're willing to "stop just short of realism, to build rotten, conspiracy-ridden worlds that overlap with our own but aren’t necessarily identical to it." Whereas films like Clayton or Syriana or The Constant Gardener are too real-world for their own good, and as a result their byzantine conspiracy theories feel like agitprop rather than art.

National Greatness Liberalism

Via Matt, here's Chris Bowers, complaining about Barack Obama’s too-narrow framing of the benefits of withdrawal from Iraq:

The Iraq war is our major national project right now, equivalent to the Apollo program or the New Deal. Do we want that as our national project? I don't think many Americans would agree. Do we want a series of transactions to specific demographic groups and issues to be our national project? Even if is vastly preferable to making the Iraq war our national project, the truth is that isn't very appealing either. We need a different framing around what we want our national project to be, and we need a Democratic leader who is willing to make that case to the country as a whole.

Tell me that instead of the Iraq war, maintaining a massive global military deployment or doling out a series of narrowly targeted government programs, we are going to do other great things as a nation. Tell me that we are going to have a New Deal for America. Tell me we are going to build a Great Society. Tell me that we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Tell me that we are going to win and end the cold war. Hell, even tell me that we are going to secure freedom around the world, because at least that is a national project that sounds worthwhile. These are the sort of transformative proposals we need from Democrats, and right now we just don't have any. Technocratic, transactional politics just is not as appealing, and ultimately secures a non-ideological mandate and a lack of purpose for the country as a whole. Until we offer just such a sense of purpose, we will never complete the progressive realignment towards which the progressive movement has been building for nearly a decade. Fighting for working families, homeowners, and Social Security recipients, however noble, just doesn't cut it.

One of the bigger internal tensions facing the Democratic Party if and when it assumes real power, I suspect, will be the division between the sort of meliorist liberalism on display in, say, this Democracy symposium (some of whose contents, as Reihan notes, could easily be swiped by a reformist conservatism) and the impatient desire among progressives like Bowers for a vastly more ambitious left-wing politics - a “national-greatness liberalism,” if you will, that harkens back to the salad days of the New Deal and the Great Society. Obama has done a masterful job straddling this divide: His rhetoric of change and transformation has been pitched to Bowers’ frequency, but his paeans to post-partisanship and his specific policy proposals have struck a more cautious, technocratic note. This two-step, though, has made it difficult to tell exactly what sort of President he’d be (a Burkean Democrat? the Reagan of Progressivism?), and it almost guarantees that an Obama Presidency will leave some liberal factions feeling disappointed and betrayed.

My own preference, I should add, is for something closer to the sort of politics that leaves Bowers cold. A “technocratic, transactional” agenda that seeks to head off long-term dangers with policies targeted to key constituencies seems vastly preferable to a crusading, self-aggrandizing spirit that wants a national project, dammit, and doesn’t care what that project is. I’m all for fostering a sense of urgency in our politics: Our book does call for Republicans to “save the American dream,” after all. But that urgency should be directed against real and pressing problems; it shouldn’t be summoned up for the sake of providing “purpose” to American life, or ensuring that the right people get to run the government for the next decade or two.

Moreover, it seems passing strange that someone like Bowers, who seems almost completely agnostic about what, precisely, our “national project” ought to be (another moon landing! another Great Society! securing freedom around the globe!), is nonetheless willing to dismiss out of hand the possibility that America’s current burdens in Iraq shouldn't be lightly set aside.

Great and Glorious Games

Being a typically provincial American, I lack the breadth of experience to adequately address Alex Massie's claim that the glories of baseball are eclipsed by the perfection that is cricket. In defense of my limited horizons, I would only say that Americans’ provincial attitude toward sports has less to do with our philistinism than with our glut of home-grown, big-time sports. The United States has not one but three national games, two of them wildly popular in their collegiate as well as professional varieties, plus a kitchen sink’s worth of popular alternatives to the football-baseball-basketball trifecta, from hockey and horse racing to boxing and tennis; meanwhile, we’re constantly being hectored by internationalist goo-goo types to support our local soccer league as well. And then of course there are the Olympics, when we’re supposed to feign interest in a slew of contests that nobody find remotely interesting if their nation’s honor weren’t at stake.

All of which is to say that while I’d love to immerse myself in cricket – if nothing else, it would enable me to appreciate the greatest sports book ever written – as it stands I can barely keep up with the sports that I followed obsessively as a kid. In high school, I was fanatical about college basketball, baseball, and football; in college, the first of these dropped off my radar screen somewhat (too many teams, not enough time); and now that I’m a half-decade deep in adulthood my football IQ has dropped to a point where I had to turn down a chance to write a piece about about the Patriots this winter – something I would have killed to do years back – because I simply wasn’t following their season closely enough. Maybe once I’m retired I’ll finally have time to learn enough about bowlers and wickets to judge whether Massie’s making sense or full of it, but until then I have to plead ignorance and duck the argument.

Photo by Flickr user Pandiyan used under a Creative Commons license.

Sam Harris and the Prosperity Gospel

You know, I sometimes get the sense that Sam Harris doesn't have a damn clue what he's talking about:

Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.

... The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for Harris to familiarize himself with the literature on the correlations between religious observance and positive personal and financial outcomes, in the nation as a whole but especially in the African-American community; it would apparently be too much, as well, for him to actually read the works of T.D. Jakes before declaring him an "unconscionable predator." There are pure charlatans in the world of the prosperity gospel, but what figures like Jakes (and Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and many many others) represent is something else entirely: They're self-help authors on the one hand and apostles of moralistic therapeutic deism on the other, slapping Christian window dressing on how-to guides for upward mobility and psychological satisfaction. They aren't playing to the follies and fantasies of the poor and desperate; they're responding to the real-world aspirations of the working and the middle classes. They aren't peddling fatalism and false hope; they're offering ambitious Americans advice on how to be prosperous and happy in the workplace and the home, with a little God-talk worked in around the edges.

From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, obviously, this sort of thing is deeply theologically problematical. From the point of view of a hardened materialist like Sam Harris, though, the sort of religion T.D. Jakes is selling is exactly the kind of religion that he ought to like: A faith that's relentlessly focused on success and happiness in this world, rather than on self-abnegation for the sake of the life to come. But to understand that, he'd have to expand his understanding of religious practice beyond the usual run of atheistic cliches and prejudices. Which would obviously be too much to ask.

Lost's Why Problem

Now that I've caught up in my viewing, I'd like to associate myself with Peter Suderman's remark that the most persistently irritating thing about Lost is that "it asks 'why' but answers 'what' and 'how.'" This problem, obviously, is built into the show's architecture, since it's not knowing the "why" that keeps us coming back for more. But it was one thing to consistently withhold the why across the first two seasons, when all the characters were more or less just as in the dark about it as the audience. Now, though, the show has reached a point where certain characters know the why - or at least some of it - and others have good reasons to want to know the why; moreover, the in-the-dark characters often have the means to force the in-the-know characters to explain the why to them. Which means that to keep the audience guessing, the in-the-dark characters have to act ridiculously, implausibly satisfied when the explanations they get stop with the how and the what.

The show is still crackerjack, mind you, but only in those episodes when everybody's too busy doing things to ask questions - as at the end of last season, and the first few episodes of this one. When the pacing slows, as it inevitably must, and the characters have time to sit around and talk things out, things get really irritating really fast. This problem made the middle of last season an enormous drag, and I'm worried it's going to kill the middle of this one too.

Shari'a For Thee ...

Do read Noah Millman, critiquing the defense of Shari'a advanced by his fellow Noah (Feldman, that is) in the Times Magazine.

Yesterday's Issues

Mickey Kaus on Obama:

... it's hard to believe we're about to nominate a Democrat who doesn't acknowledge the lesson of the 1990s--that voters are worried about issues like welfare because they are worried about welfare, not because "welfare" is a surrogate for "lack of national health insurance." Can a Dem who hasn't learned that lesson can be elected in a two-candidate general election? That's no longer unthinkable, but it would require not only that the old Carter-Ford-Reagan-Clinton issues like welfare, crime, etc. recede into the background (replaced by Iraq and the economy). It would also require Republicans who are too stupid to find a way to bring them back into the foreground.

For those Democrats worried about Obama's seemingly old-fashioned liberalism--sorry, progressivism!--the great hope has been that of course he'll pivot and turn toward the reformist, Clintonian center once he's got the nomination in hand. But what if The Pivot never happens (as David Frum, for one, has predicted)? That's a big issue--maybe the big issue--raised by Obama's "race" address. That's a big--maybe main--reason that it's a gaffe. Obama's honesty is bracing. But he honestly doesn't seem to be the sort of neoliberal politician who wins national elections.

Unless that paradigm no longer holds, and the success of neoliberal and neoconservative efforts on welfare and crime - manifest in falling welfare rolls and plunging crime rates - make it possible for a liberal candidate who doesn't really have anything substantive to say about crime and poverty policy to win a national election. Obviously, I'm hoping that Obama says something bolder about welfare than what he's said to date. But at the moment, I think the note he's hitting - acknowledging liberalism's past failures (i.e., his suggestion that welfare policies "for many years may have worsened" the state of the black family) while implicitly consigning those failures to the past - may be sufficient to inoculate him against conservative criticism. Crime and welfare are yesterday's issues, and while they may (and should) matter again some day soon, I can't imagine them playing anything close to the role they played in the 1970s and '80s in this election cycle.

The one place where Obama might be vulnerable to a neocon/neoliberal critique is immigration, and of course the GOP has proven itself utterly incapable of exploiting that issue effectively of late - and even if they could, John McCain isn't the standard-bearer to do it.

Easter

John Henry Newman:

Among the wise men of the heathen ... it was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul ... Accordingly their chief hope in death was the notion they should be rid of their body. Feeling they were sinful, and not knowing how, they laid the charge on their body; and knowing they were badly circumstanced here, they thought death perchance might be a change for the better. Not that they rested on the hope of returning to a God and Father, but they thought to be unshackled from the earth, and able to do what they would. It was consistent with this slighting of their earthly tabernacle, that they burned the dead bodies of their friends, not burying them as we do, but consuming them as a mere worthless case of what had been precious, and was then an incumbrance to the ground ...

Far different is the temper which the glorious light of the Gospel teaches us. Our bodies shall rise again and live for ever; they may not be irreverently handled. How they will rise we know not; but surely if the word of Scripture be true, the body from which the soul has departed shall come to life ... The dust around us will one day become animate. We may ourselves be dead long before, and not see it. We ourselves may elsewhere be buried, and, should it be our exceeding blessedness to rise to life eternal, we may rise in other places, far in the east or west. But, as God's word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect.

Good Friday

From The Everlasting Man:

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry ... But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.

Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.

... And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumor. just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative ...

Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognize the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people!" Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had so been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honored forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.

The Return of the Seventies

Blogging will be light for the duration of the Triduum. If you're starved for reading material, the latest issue of the Atlantic is now online; it's thick with good stuff as usual, and it even includes an essay by yours truly, on pop culture in the shadow of the Iraq War.

And if reading the piece isn't exciting enough, you can watch me talk about it here:

Obama's Speech (III)

I'd like to associate myself with Jay Cost's characteristically thoughtful take on the speech - both his praise for it, and his reservations. Here's the key passage:

My concern with the speech is the following. I am not sure what I think about Obama's claim that he never heard Wright make incendiary comments. I think that hinges on the definition of "incendiary." More importantly, I have always thought this was a moot point. Incendiary comments make for great television - but the bigger concern, especially for somebody as smart as Obama, is the philosophy that undergirds them. Obama clearly understands Wright's philosophy - even if he never heard Wright say what has generated this firestorm. If nothing else, yesterday he contextualized Wright into the broader narrative of the American racial division. He would not have been able to do that so ably if he had only learned about this philosophy last week.

This philosophy is divisive, and Obama was aware of it even if he had not heard its most extreme articulations. At the same time, this philosophy is clearly not the core mission of Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright does not wake up every morning dedicated to dividing people. However, the antipode of this divisiveness is the core mission of Barack Obama. He wakes up every morning dedicated to uniting people. This is why Obama thinks Wright is not just wrong, but "profoundly" wrong. Wright's divisiveness constitutes a grievous mistake on what Obama takes to be the central question of American identity - are we one people or are we not?

Accordingly, this inclines me to ask what Obama did about this profound philosophical error. He has been a parishioner for twenty years, and he has been a strong believer in this philosophy of unity for at least four years, since his keynote address in 2004. I appreciate that he cannot walk away from Trinity because the church speaks to who he is. However, I must ask whether he worked to persuade Wright and the parishioners who applauded so jubilantly at his divisive words that they were wrong on a matter of existential importance. If he did, what was the consequence of those efforts? Did he succeed in bringing about change at Trinity?

... The essential problem of the speech is that it gives no answer to these queries.

Read the whole thing.

Clarke and Minghella, RIP

Over on the Current, Reihan ponders the science-fiction giant's views on religion, and I lavish praise on the late director's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Obama's Speech: The Podcast

In which Matt and I discuss:

Obama and the Right

Andrew argues that the dismissive reactions to Obama's speech from the right are "palpably fueled by fear and racism." That's unfair and unfounded: As I suggested yesterday in detailing my own qualms about the speech, they're palpably fueled by the fact that Obama is a liberal. The conservative idea of a candidate who's "transformational" on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly, and that just isn't what Obama's doing; hence the Right's disappointment, which in many cases is curdling into dismissiveness and outright dislike. Instead, Obama's trying to be a transformational figure on the following two counts: First, as John McWhorter suggests in his response to the speech, he's trying to free African-American politics from the vise grip of grievance and resentment, breaking away not only from the Sharptons and Jacksons but from the NAACP line of Julian Bond and Kweise Mfume as well, and bringing black Americans out of racialism and radicalism and into the liberal mainstream; at the same time, he's trying to bring the country, which has heretofore tilted right, into the center-left mainstream as well. (The latter achievement, obviously, depends on the former, which is why the Wright affair is potentially so damaging: It calls into question his promise as a new kind of a black politician, without which his hope to be a new kind of American politician more or less collapses.)

It's been noted before before, but to understand the Right's mounting disappointment with his candidacy it's worth pointing out again that in his attempt to bring new voters into the Democratic tent, Obama's rightward outreach is primarily stylistic rather than substantive. He's making a bet that the country is already moving left, and that by taking an unusually respectful (by liberal standards) approach to the ideas and grievances that pushed an earlier generation to the right he can win many of them, and their children, back to the liberalism that once dominated American politics. As everyone from Rod Dreher to Mickey Kaus to Steve Sailer have noted, his practical concessions to present-day conservatism are vanishingly small. But he isn't trying to win over the gang at the Corner, or movement conservatives more generally; he's trying to win over those voters (and writers) who sometimes think that conservatives make a lot of sense, but whose ideological commitments are ultimately malleable. So of course if you're an ideological conservative you don't like what you hear from him; he's talking to everybody else, but not to you.

Skynet, Stage One

I'm with Matt; this can only end badly:

David Simon Is Still Talking, Dammit

I was going to say something about David Simon's latest attempt to prove that he doesn't care what the critics thought about the final season of The Wire, not at all, not one little bit, but just for the record he's smarter than all of the self-interested, can't see the forest for the trees, would never have made it back in the old days when true newsmen roamed the earth journalists who got all caught up in boring stuff like "plot" and "characterization" and "dialogue" and just didn't have enough perspective on their business to get how frickin' brilliant his critique of the modern newsroom really was. But Vulture beat me to it.

While I'm on the culture beat, I'd also like to associate myself with Vulture's remarks about the wonderful Judy Greer.

Wright and Left

If you haven't had a bellyful of the Wright debate by now, I recommend Chris Hayes's Nation piece on the subject, and Reihan's response.

Obama's Speech (II)

It had its imperfections, yet for all that I think Charles Murray makes the crucial point: Can you think of a better speech on race in America delivered recently by any politician, black or white? Of course John Derbyshire is right that Obama’s vision of how America ought to transcend our racial divisions is essentially left-wing, with whites and blacks joining hands to raise taxes and government spending, while uniting against their common enemy, the wicked axis of corporations, lobbyists and special interests. But Obama’s candidacy is essentially left-wing; he’s attempting to be a liberal Reagan, not a difference-splitter like Bill Clinton, and I think our political moment is tilting sufficiently leftward that he might just succeed. Certainly, I would have liked to see him talk more than he did about what America has achieved over the past thirty years, rather than pivoting so quickly to how much remains to be done. This speech of all speeches could have done with a little more pure “God bless America” chest-thumping, and a little less of what Andrew Ferguson has memorably described as the Obama style of “optimistic despair," in which "America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind." But this is a conservative's quibble about a liberal politician's address; it's my way of saying "I wish Barack Obama were a little less left-wing," and it doesn't detract from the speech's overall impressiveness.

I do think the problem Jeremiah Wright creates for Obama's campaign remains unresolved, to some extent, since there was nothing Obama could say in a single speech that would undo the perception created by his long affiliation with Wright and his church - the perception that he’s only confronting what’s wrong with Wright’s style of black politics because the media narrative is forcing him too, and that when the spotlight isn’t on him, he’s more interested in fitting in and feeling comfortable than in, well, speaking truth to power. But by using the Wright controversy as an opportunity to play up their candidate's strengths - as an orator, but more importantly as the rare politician who can deliver a thoughtful, nuanced speech and make you feel like he means it - the Obama campaign made some sweet-tasting lemonade out of some awfully sour lemons.

Photo by Flickr user Daniella Zalcman used under a Creative Commons license.

Solidarity

This is also nicely done:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings ... And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

... In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

... Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

He's a smart guy, that Barack Obama. (And you can see why Paul Krugman doesn't much care for him.)

Obama's White Grandmother

When I suggested, tentatively, that Obama should find a way to compare his relationship to Wright to a white American's relationship to a bigoted grandparent, it didn't even occur to me that he could do it this smoothly:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Well played.

Obama's Speech

Barack Obama’s long association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright isn’t significant because it suggests that Obama shares Wright’s more controversial views; I have no doubt that he does not. It’s significant because it undercuts an important aspect of Obama’s promise as a politician: Namely, his potential to break the mold of American politics, by transcending both the recent templates for African-American political activity (grievance-based shakedown politics on the one hand, Afrocentric separatism on the other) and the larger red-blue polarization in the country as a whole. His decades-long embrace of Wright, seemingly untempered by any serious qualms about what his pastor represents politically, suggests that he isn’t willing to confront the rhetoric of division and polarization within his own community, let alone in the country as whole. Which in turn suggests that that far from being the man who will tell us what we need to hear, rather than what we want to hear, he's a go-along-to-get-along figure, a man who accepts The Way Things Are and doesn't rock the boat. In other words, that he's just another politician.

I don't know exactly what he should say in the speech that he's about to give. I think he needs to acknowledge – and acknowledge with specifics, rather than generalities – the ugliness of Wright’s political rhetoric. At the same time, I think he needs to remind his audience that this ugliness - what you might call the paranoid style in African-American politics - exists for a reason: Wright, and millions more like him, grew up in an era when it was hard for blacks to say "God Bless America" full-throatedly, and an era when paranoia about white conduct was only common sense, since the government of the United States was effectively engaged in a vast conspiracy against its black citizens. Then, while nodding to the persistence of racism, he needs to talk at length about how far we've come: He needs to argue that in many respects, Martin Luther King's dream of equality has been fulfilled, so that for a rising generation of African-Americans, America has finally become the promised land that their ancestors dreamed of all through the long dark night of slavery and segregation. And finally, he needs to explain why his generation - a generation that can say "God bless America" wholeheartedly, a generation that rejects and transcends the politics of division and fear and paranoia - nonetheless has an obligation not to cast out men like Jeremiah Wright, men who did a great deal of good in their time, but men who are now simply too old to recognize that America has changed, and too set in their ways to enter the promised land. He needs to reject his minister's politics, in other words, in the name of a new generation of African-Americans, while simultaneously suggesting that the bigotries are not necessarily the only measure of the man, and that the appropriate response to Wright's noxious words isn't outrage but rather the mix of pity and tolerance that a white American might feel toward a racist parent or grandparent, who deserves to be loved and accepted in spite of their retrograde opinions.

Could he actually say all this? Can a half-white, half-Kenyan politician presume to speak for the experience of black America? Can a man who clearly loves his pastor go so far down the road toward attacking him outright? Can a black man persuade white Americans that they should feel toward a ranting black preacher the way they might feel toward their own grandparents? I doubt it. But I'd love to see him try.

Denominations and Double Standards

Here's Matt's take on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

I'm unsure, in general, of what the standards we're supposed to apply to the political views of politicians' favored clergy. I have no idea what the rabbis at Temple Rodef Shalom (where I've gone to synagogue the past few High Holy Days) or at The Village Temple (where I had my bar mitzvah) think about political issues, but I assume I don't agree with them about everything, and certainly it'd be odd to drag up old statements made by any of the relevant rabbis about this or that and then ask me to either endorse the statement or repudiate the entire congregation.

By the same token, we don't assume that a politician who goes to mass wants to ban birth control nor do we ask Catholics who favored preventive war with Iraq to repudiate the Pope in order to prove their hawk bona fides. In short, we generally assume that a politician's stated political views express his or her position on political topics, and that affiliating with a religious congregation does not constitute an endorsement of everything the leaders of that congregation have ever said.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I see this as a basically trumped-up issue.

This is slightly more persuasive than Ezra’s take, but it still seems like somewhat strained analysis. Obviously, nobody's going to expect a High Holy Days Jew or a Christmas-and-Easter Christian to account for their clergyman’s political opinion, since he (or she) isn’t their clergyman in any meaningful sense of the word. As for why we don't see Catholic politicians being called upon to ritually denounce the Pope, one might begin with the fact that the Pope rarely makes political statements that fall wildly outside the mainstream of American politics. John Paul II and Benedict XVI's criticisms of abortion and euthanasia and gay marriage are right-wing by American standards, sure - just as some of their comments on economics are left-wing - but for better or worse (and I think better, obviously) they simply aren't considered beyond the pale in the way that Jeremiah Wright's comments about 9/11 and sundry other topics are. Back when Popes did make statements that fell beyond the pale of American discourse (in the Syllabus of Errors era, for instance) Catholics were frequently called upon to clarify their view of the Holy See's position, and while these calls were often laced with bigotry, they also raised valid questions about Catholicism's consonance with American democracy, questions that it was entirely appropriate for Catholics to answer - just as it's appropriate for Barack Obama to answer questions about his church's view of politics today.

More importantly, though, we don't demand that Catholic politicians answer for every Papal address and encyclical because most people understand that a cradle Catholic’s relationship to the magisterium of the Catholic Church tends to be dramatically different from a convert to Protestant Christianity's relationship to the pastor of the only church he's ever attended. A Catholic's relationship to his local priest is perhaps more comparable, though again the weight that Protestantism - particularly in its evangelical strains - places on individual ministry tends to make a Protestant's choice of minister far more revealing than a Catholic's choice of parish. (Traditionally, Catholics weren't even allowed to parish-shop; where you lived determined where you want to mass.) I would also add that in the course of attending mass at dozens of Catholic parishes over the last decade, I can't say I've heard a single homily remotely like the Wright sermons that are stirring up all the controversy. And if I did attend a Catholic church whose pastor went in for, say, the occasional rant about the Freemasons, I wouldn't be surprised if that fact made waves if I ever ran for office.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose John McCain were a member of Opus Dei. Or to push things a bit further, suppose he attended a schismatic Latin-Mass parish which had, among other things, bestowed an award on a Lefebvrite bishop given to anti-Semitic remarks. Do you think this would earn him media scrutiny, and make a difference in the Presidential race? Do you think it ought to? Your answer, I think, should go a long way toward determining how you think about the case of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

Falwell and Wright

Ezra Klein’s a smart guy, so I’m assuming this is a parody of liberal cluelessness rather than the real thing:

Does anyone believe a long association with Jerry Falwell's church would have done anything but help McCain in the Republican primary, and gotten Democrats tagged as anti-religion when they tried to point out Falwell's nuttiness in the general? It's fine to be a Christian extremist in America. It's fine to believe, and say publicly, that everyone who hasn't accepted Jesus Christ into their heart will roast in eternal hellfire, fine to believe that the homosexuals caused Hurricane Katrina and the feminists contributed to 9/11, fine to believe we must support Israel so the Jews can be largely annihilated in a war that will trigger the End Times, fine to believe we're in a holy battle with the barbaric hordes of Islam, fine to believe that we went to the Middle East to prove "our God is bigger than your God." What you can't believe is that blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country, that they're still face deep institutional discrimination, and that a country where 100 percent of the presidents have been rich white guys is actually run by rich white guys. More to the point, even if you do believe those things, you certainly can't be angry about it!

What horseshit. If John McCain were an evangelical Christian and a longstanding member of Jerry Falwell’s congregation, and if he had written a memoir describing, say, how he was “born again” under Falwell’s influence, he would not be the Republican nominee today. With a great deal of luck, he might – might – have done as well in the primaries as Mike Huckabee did, and of course you may recall that Huck had all kinds of difficulties winning non-evangelical votes, faring particularly poorly among Catholics; you may recall, as well, that the press delighted in lobbing him questions about evolution and wives submitting to their husbands and all the rest of it, without any fear of being tagged as anti-religion. And of course Falwell’s brand of evangelical Christianity is considerably more controversial than Huckabee’s. And considerably more apocalyptic, one might add: Imagine, for instance, how McCain’s support of the surge, and his hawkishness more generally, would have been treated if he attended a church whose pastor's foreign policy views are defined by a belief in the imminence of Armageddon.

As to Ezra's larger point, of course it’s “fine” to be a white Christian extremist in America; it's also fine to be a black Christian extremist like Jeremiah Wright. This is a free country, after all. Nobody in the national media was parsing the Reverend Wright's sermons before the 2008 campaign, and nobody would be parsing them today if he was just one minister among many supporting Barack Obama for President. I have no doubt that many, many Democratic politicians have put in an appearance at churches whose pastors share Wright's outlandish political views without anyone kicking up a fuss, just as Republican politicians have long accepted the support of figures like Falwell without taking too much heat about it. The distinction here, for the umpteenth time, is that Wright isn't just Obama's supporter; he's his pastor, his friend, and his spiritual mentor, which makes him exactly the kind of person whose views ought to be of interest to a public that's considering electing Barack Obama President of the United States. And as to the substance of those views, well, if Ezra really thinks that Wright's sermons have sparked controversy because he broke a taboo against getting angry over the fact that "blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country" and "still face deep institutional discrimination," I would suggest that he take another look at them, paying particular attention to Wright's remarks about 9/11, as well as what appears to be his suggestion that the U.S. government created not only the crack epidemic, but the AIDS epidemic as well.

(It's also worth noting that two of the specific examples of white Christian extremism Ezra nods to - Falwell's 9/11 comments, and General William Boykin's "my God is bigger than your God" remarks - both provoked controversies that ended in public apologies, albeit of the mealy-mouthed, "I'm sorry if you were offended" variety. Whereas I'm not holding my breath waiting for Reverend Jeremiah Wright to "clarify" his remarks.)

It Isn't Brain Surgery (Or Is It?)

I'm sorry if Will Wilkinson took offense at my query about prostitution and incest. I took him to be comparing sex work to carpentry and writing, and it struck me that this analogy suggested a view of sex as a sufficiently banal, devoid-of-moral-content activity - akin to hammering a nail or writing a blog post - as to render any prohibition on the sexual abuse of children somewhat incomprehensible. In his latest post, Will explains that sex work is "emotionally complicated" and "not always pleasant," and therefore is more like surgery, or policing, or hospice care than like basic carpentry or word processing; thus, teaching your child to give a handjob is wrong because it's the equivalent of asking your child to operate on a gunshot wound victim. I appreciate the clarification - not least because this analogy suggests that Will might be amenable to some sort of regulation on sex work. Perhaps we could require would-be hookers to attend accredited academies, as we do with cops and doctors, and streetwalkers could be prosecuted for practicing without a license. (I believe John Derbyshire has suggested something along these lines, and Ezra Klein seems like he'd be amenable, so the proposal would start out with bipartisan support.)

My Country, Right Or Wrong

As defenses of patriotism go, I tend to incline more toward Daniel Larison's rejoinder to George Kateb's essay than toward the response to Kateb offered by Walter Berns. Berns takes the view that "the decisive issue in an appropriate analysis of patriotism" is the sort of government that a patriot is asked to love. But I'm with Larison: It's a mistake to conflate a country and its regime, and a patriot who ceases to love his country because it happens to be governed by a despot is no patriot at all.

This doesn't mean that the patriot has to love the despot, or follow his commands. Love of country does not require absolute obedience to its government (indeed, it often requires the opposite), any more than love of family requires absolute obedience to one's parents, or absolute support for whatever one's children or siblings decide to do with themselves. This is what Chesterton meant with his famous dictum that "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" (Though I would add that if you read them slightly differently - as statements of abiding love in bad times, rather than blanket endorsements of bad conduct - "my country, right or wrong" and "my mother, drunk or sober" are potentially admirable sentiments.) And it's a distinction that's missing from both Kateb's and Berns's essays, both of which seem to assume that the regime is the country, and vice versa, and that to love one is to love the other.

The only complicating factor occurs in a case like the United States, where the character of the regime and the character of the people are bound together so tightly that it's hard to imagine one without the other. The government-country distinction is easier to make in countries where regimes change willy-nilly, and while obviously our regime isn't identical to the one founded in 1789, our democratic temper - both institutional and cultural - has endured through the transition from a decentralized republic to a mass democracy with a sizable administrative state. So whereas France would still be France if the current Republic were dissolved and a monarchy or a dictatorship took its place, there's a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.

They Hold Conventions, Don't They?

Matt, riffing on this Mark Schmitt post about the Clinton camp's ability to get the press to pretend that their candidate still has a chance at the nomination when she almost certainly doesn't:

The strangest thing about the twilight campaign of the past several weeks is that under any other circumstances, it just wouldn't be happening. Or, rather, it would be like the last few races that Mike Huckabee ran -- covered as an amusing sideshow. But because of the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton and their close associates have been the leaders of the Democratic Party for so long at this point, they've been able to take a remarkably slender thread of hope and spin it into a full-fledged horse race. At this point, though, they're perpetrating something of a fraud on their many grassroots supporters who continue to invest money, time, and energy in an already-failed enterprise.

The bottom line, however, is that before the March primaries, Clinton looked doomed unless she could make up major ground in March. With all the March results in, Clinton hasn't made up any ground at all. That means she's doomed. The popular vote victory in the Texas primary is a nice moral victory for Clinton to console herself with, but the overall results just didn't create the kind of delegate count she needed to be viable.

But she isn't viable only if you assume the narrative that the Obama campaign has been pushing, in which the candidate with the most delegates at the end of the primary campaign wins the race regardless of whether he's reached the magic number of 2,025. Now, this narrative has a certain plausibility, but it's by no means the only narrative out there; indeed, if you'd asked me a few months ago what would happen if neither Obama nor Clinton reached 2,025 pledged delegates but both were within hailing distance of that number, I would have said "brokered convention," because that's what used to happen in these kind of circumstances. I'm a little murky on the exact details of the 1976 race (paging Michael Barone ...), but it's my impression that Gerald Ford was ahead in the delegate count going into the Republican convention, and that he had won many more primary votes than Ronald Reagan, who accumulated a lot of his delegates in less-than-democratic caucuses. But Ford wasn't far enough ahead to have clinched the nomination under party rules, and Reagan still made a play for the nomination at the convention, and nearly pulled it off. Which is how the primaries-plus-convention system is designed to work: If you don't accumulate a clear majority, you don't get to win on the first ballot, even if you have more delegates than everyone else. Thus Mike Huckabee's continued candidacy was a sideshow because John McCain was more or less guaranteed a first-ballot victory after Romney dropped out; if McCain's ability to reach the magic number had been in serious doubt after Super Tuesday, there would have been every reason to take Huck seriously, and Romney would have been a fool to quit the race in the first place.

Now obviously the Ford-Reagan race took place in a transitional period from the smoke-filled rooms of yore to the more democratic system of today, and it's entirely possible that if you re-ran the 1976 contest in our era, it would have been a Ford coronation at the convention, rather than a nip-and-tuck battle. But the nominating process still isn't perfectly democratic by any stretch, what with the caucuses in some states and the primaries in others, the arcane delegate-assignment rules, and of course the presence of the superdelegates. And it seems perfectly reasonable for the Clinton campaign to treat the race the way it would have been treated back in the day: As a contest that won't be settled until Denver, regardless of whether Barack Obama has won more votes and delegates than they have.

Photograph Courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

The Democrats And God

Russell Arben Fox, in the course of a characteristically thoughtful post on the book and the issues it raises, wonders why more people aren't discussing and debating Amy Sullivan's The Party Faithful. I suspect that the book would be getting more attention if the Democratic race weren't so dominated by debates over race and gender, which are temporarily swamping even hot-button topics like religion. But if you're looking for a break from the debate over Geraldine Ferraro's racism (or lack thereof), both Amy's book and E.J. Dionne's similarly-themed Souled Out make for thought-provoking reading - as the transcript and clips from this panel discussion (which happens to include yours truly) hopefully suggest.