A Bush hit piece aimed at undecided pro-lifers

Here's a piece that deserves a thorough fisking: Why abortion rate is up in Bush years.

This piece is appearing all over the media and the Internet and purports to show why pro-life voters should support abortion extremist John Kerry.

I, Glen, am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, "pro-life" is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world. Gary Krane is an investigative journalist.

Stassen is a longtime proponent of abortion rights within the Southern Baptist denomination. He signed a 1977 document, "A Call to Concern," which called for Southern Baptists to oppose "legal abolition of any and all abortion." He signed onto the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights in the late '70s. At the American Academy of Religion meeting in 2004, he presided over a program on ethics, religion and social services titled "Celebrating the Work of Larry Rasmussen," the same Larry Rasmussen whose book Ethics for a Small Planet was published by The Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health & Ethics and had an introduction written by Rosemary Radford Ruether, a founding director of Catholics for a Free Choice.

"Investigative journalist" Gary Krane is a Democratic operative who went looking for a Flash animator recently. He wrote: "I am an investigative journalist whose team has recently discovered that in contrast to the Clinton years when abortion rates dropped every year almost 2% per year, they have leveled and in some states gone up significantly. This is a bombshell that could decided this election, because about 50% of undecided voters are pro-life! We want to get this bombshell out as fast to as many people as possible, but of course have no funds. Will you help??"

I've got questions about their statistics, but right now I'm just point out that these are not the dispassionate observers that they pretend to be.

We look at the fruits of political policies more than words. We analyzed the data on abortion during the Bush presidency. There is no single source for this information -- federal reports go only to the year 2000, and many states do not report -- but we found enough data to identify trends. Our findings are disturbing.

It's true that the data are sketchy. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, goes only to 2000, as does the information at the Centers for Disease Control, both showing downward trends to 2000.

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4 percent decline during the 1990s. This was a steady decrease averaging 1.7 percent per year. (The data come from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute's studies.)

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

We found four states that have posted three-year statistics: Kentucky's increased by 3.2 percent from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3 percent from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9 percent from 1999 to 2002. Colorado's rates skyrocketed 111 percent. We found 12 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6 percent average increase), and four saw a decrease (4.3 percent average).

I found the site Krane was working from: William Robert Johnston has done fine research into the question. As Stassen and Krane said, most states do not have figures past 2000.

Johnston says, however, "For U.S. states, abortion ratios and percentages are based on abortion figures from different sources with different completeness; the mixed figures are not reliable time series."

Undaunted, the authors continue their political hit:

Under Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

Note the year. If I remember correctly, something important happened in 2001 that affected the U.S. economy quite strongly, and it was not caused by the presidential administration. Nevertheless, the unemployment rate for 2002 ranged from 5.6 to 6.0 percent, lower than in 1990, when the abortion rate was at its historical plateau.

For anyone familiar with why most women have abortions, this is no surprise:

Two-thirds of women who have abortions cite "inability to afford a child" as their primary reason (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). In the Bush presidency, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Herbert Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.

Yes, the unemployment rates increased from their bottom in April of 2000, but they are still in range with the rates of the Clinton administration, and lower than much of that period. Bush is not responsible for a recession that began before he took office, nor for the effects of 9/11.

But we were talking about abortion. Children beyond birth are also expensive; would the authors justify their murder as well?

Half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate. And men who are jobless usually do not marry. In the 16 states, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.

Women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency -- with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million -- abortion increases.

As interesting as these women's reporting is, it has limited pertinence to determining social policy, because there's no way of knowing whether their assessment is correct. Would they have enough money? Would they have enough support? Could they find adoptive parents for their children? They don't know because they didn't try. How much does rationalization enter the picture? How much ignorance?

My wife and I know -- as does my son David -- that doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical insurance, special schooling and parental employment are crucial for a special child. David attended the Kentucky School for the Blind, as well as schools for children with cerebral palsy and other disabilities. He was mainstreamed in public schools as well. We have two other sons and five grandchildren, and we know that every mother, every father and every child needs public and family support.

If public support a la John Kerry is what is required to reduce the abortion rate, let's do a quick and dirty look at that bastion of sophisticated social policy: Canada. Johnston reports a Canadian abortion rate of 24.3 percent in 2000 (so we don't know what the Bush Administration did to the Canadian abortion rate either), compared to--hold your hats--24.4 percent in the United States. There's plenty of reason to implement a Canadian social-welfare system.

What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, insurance, jobs, child care and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need a president who will do something about jobs, health insurance and support for mothers.

It tells me that the authors are a couple of shills for the Democratic party who don't give a rip about the innocent unborn.

The smarmy self-righteousness of the ethics professor takes the cake though: "Congratulate me on not killing my blind son." Congratulations, Prof. Stassen. I wonder how the boy would feel about being used to promote the candidacy of a man who opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion and who has promised his pro-abortion supporters that any judge he appoints will keep the "right" to abortion in place.

Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, Calif. He can be e-mailed at gstassen@fuller.edu.

Krane is an independent investigative journalist in Philadelphia.Readers can write to him at 151 Tulpehocken, Philadelphia, PA 19144 or Coordinator@FairElections.us.

I'm sure the authors would be happy to hear from us. Oh, and Gary is looking for a chick to go canoeing with after the election is over. He's going to need a break.

Symposium

Either of these two reasons would be sufficient to vote for George W. Bush this year. Together they drown out every other pro or con.

The life issues:

Kerry is in favor of abortion without any restriction, including puncturing the baby's head with scissors and sucking the child's brains out.

Bush is opposed to killing for the sake of convenience. He has ended government funding of abortion, signed the partial-birth abortion ban and held the line against government funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

Safety and security:

After 9/11, most of us understand that we have an implacable enemy -- ruthless, brutal and determine -- that wants to destroy our people and our culture. Kerry thinks the best way to fight this enemy is with international summits, waiting for the next attack so that Le Monde will say, "We are all Americans!" and then dispatching Inspector Clouseau to find Osama bin Laden so that Kerry can kill him with his bare hands. Kerry's zigzagging between UN symposia and Rambo rhetoric lurches between useless and delusional.

Reasonable people might disagree with Bush's decision to take the fight against terrorism first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq, but reasonable people haven't come up with an alternative. Bush gives a hopeful, even inspiring, vision of human rights and freedom taking root around the world, beginning with people who have been under some of the most repressive regimes around. Will we win? I don't know, but I know that with Kerry we will certainly lose.

On history and stories

Our priest gave a sermon today about the difficulty of ascribing meaning to specific events in history, whether national or personal, especially events of loss. Why does a child get cancer? Why do terrorists destroy the Twin Towers? Why does America declare war on Iraq? Why (not his example, but I doubt he would disagree with it) do four hurricanes hit Florida within a month?

The answer is in how we tell the story. My friend Barb observes that judgment is the flip side of grace, and that observation is related to the fact that in the Hero's Journey, the archetype at the core of every story, victory lies at the other side of death. I was thinking about the sermon and stories and history in the Liturgy today, when the words popped out at me: "remembering the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven and the second and glorious coming . . . ." That action, remembering those things, is the key to finding God's work in every instance, good or bad.

To say that the way to Resurrection is through the Cross is not to say that the parents of a dead baby deserve their pain, nor is it to say, "Cheer up and get over it. Everything's hunky dory." The cross is the cross, and if the suffering is not real, then it's not suffering. The sufferer stands at his own crossroads--choosing the way of life (which passes through death to life) or the way of death (which passes through denial into bitterness and delusion and comes to a dead-end outside the wall of paradise). And the message, the route of that choice is the story.

The story, however, comes afterward, at the appropriate time. It's a rare parent of a dead child who can see the glimmer of the resurrection in the midst of it, and it's a heartless "comforter" who expects the grief-stricken to do so. In fact, only a person who doesn't want to enter into the suffering--to experience "compassion"--would ask the sufferer to buck up and move on immediately. The Church gives a period of 40 days for the most intense mourning. In fact, the Church gives 40 days for all kinds of transitions--for mourning, for a mother to stay at home with a newborn, for the repentance of Lent, for the preparation of Advent--and 40 days seems to be a number written deep into our being: on a nature show about wolves, scientists observed that a wolf pack mourned about six weeks for one of its beta males who had died.

At some point, the story is written--whether literally written or the oral history of a family ("Your older brother died before you were born, and now he's praying for you") or the private inner story each of us tells ourself each morning on the way about our day ("I survived that trauma, and this is the strength I bring to the world because of it"). Or the opposite: "What I owned was taken from me, and now the universe owes me recompense for my loss."

America's slaves used to draw strength from the story of Moses and the Exodus; they appropriated that story as their own. The story put their suffering in context; it helped preserve the perception of their human dignity (not that the dignity could be lost, but its perception is important); the outcome of the Exodus gave a possible outcome for their slavery; and when a novelist took up their story and put a slave in a Christ-role, Uncle Tom's Cabin helped fire a movement that would lead to their freedom. By putting their story into that context, they were ennobled, and we all are, by the strength, dignity, culture and yet more stories that come out of it.

Hosea lived the story of God's abiding faithfulness, but he lived it and illustrated it through humiliation and suffering. By living the story, he offers another iteration of the story for the next person who finds himself in a similar situation and wonders, "Why does God let this happen to me?" Looking to Hosea doesn't answer the "why?," but it can answer "how?" How can I live with this? How can I find meaning in the midst of it? In fact, that meaning may be exactly the answer to the "why," rather than something along the lines of "because you're such a schlemiel that you deserve it."

We haven't found our story for 9/11 yet. We don't know the end of it--whether a new birth of freedom in the Middle East or the dark night of Sharia imposed throughout the West. We know a few stories--"Let's roll!", the NYFD heroes, private persons who either escaped or died in the attacks. But we haven't finished the big story that will explain it all for our children. Maybe it will take 40 years instead of 40 days. But the answers, when they come, will take the form of a story.

The logic escapes me

A commenter at Observations from an Empty Well has elicited a heavy sigh:

Call me a one issue voter, but I'm going Kerry for the simple reason that he wants to let the Patriot Act expire without renewal.

He is pro abortion, which is abominable, but the judges in this country wouldn't let president Bush ban even the amazingly unholy 'partial birth' abortions, so I see no diference between having the one in office versus having the other on that matter.

The Patriot Act is the scariest thing I've ever encountered. Anyone who will let it die without reviving it has got my support on those grounds alone.

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked repeated attempts to regulate abortion in this country, including Congress' ban on the "amazingly unholy 'partial birth' abortions," the writer is going to vote for the man who has been part of the party obstructing the nomination of U.S. judges in a manner that goes beyond the intent of the Constitution, and for the man who will nominate the next generation of pro-abortion ideologues to the Supreme Court.

All this because the candidate says that he will allow the Patriot Act to lapse (even though he voted for it).

And this great defender of the Constitution (who voted for the Patriot Act before he decided to let it lapse), when challenged by 527 groups working against his candidacy, attempts to use the Federal Communications Commission to shut them up.

But he's going to receive the vote from Alexey, because the Patriot Act is the scariest thing Alexey has ever encountered.

I can't answer for the quality of Alexey's scary encounters, but the Patriot Act doesn't rival the Alien and Sedition Act during the American Revolution; it doesn't meet up with the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, nor is it as extreme as the Japanese internment. It's also not as scary as Sept. 11, 2001.

The Patriot Act allowed the FBI and CIA to talk to each other, to attend public gatherings and read their enemies' web pages, to have the same powers to stop prospective bombers that they currently have to stop drug dealers and money launderers. Of course, ever since they threw Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand into federal prison, the Left has been understandably nervous.

Oh, wait. Michael Moore is still depositing his royalties?

Michael Moore's face is scarier than the Patriot Act.

What would happen if we used the pacifist's methods?

Fr. John McCuen writes:

And yet I can’t help but wonder how the world might have been changed if, after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, we had responded, . . . not striking back by declaring a war in which force meets force; but by saying, in words and deeds, “You cannot defeat us. No matter what you do, you shall not change our way of life. We shall prevail, and you shall not stop us.

Actually, we did that after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. And the U.S.S. Cole. And the bombings in Lebanon and Sudan. And the taking of hostages in Iran. (Well, we tried to do something in Sudan and Iran, but the actions were so ill-planned and half-heartedly launched that they didn't accomplish anything but the deaths of our own people.) We didn't do anything about the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer; and the murderers of the 17 Israeli athletes eventually went free.

I respect pacifism, but pacifists should acknowledge that the methods of pacifism do not necessary lead to victory. More often, they lead to defeat. The pacifist does not sully his hands or his soul fighting the murderer, the rapist, the school bomber or the Nazi. The pacifist leaves Saddam in power and his sons in charge of the Olympic team and the rape rooms. The pacifist understands that suffering can lead to great spiritual depth and so does not try to keep evil from triumphing over the innocent. Or he will try, using words, and if words don't work, he will use more words. And if those don't work, then more words yet. It may not work -- yet more people die -- but the pacifist's conscience and hands are clean.

If sin is evil, if murder destroys the soul of the murderer, then is it any gift to the murderer to be allowed to act unchecked? I know the answer I would give to that question, but I'm not a pacifist.

Bus people 2

The No. 35 Macadam bus stopped outside an elementary school and picked up 27 fourth- and fifth-graders on their way to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. There were parents with them, each with six kids to keep count of, and a teacher in his mid-30s, carrying a clipboard.

They were good kids--they weren't hitting each other or calling each other names or committing destruction. But they were excited, and they raised the bus energy by about 400 percent. Some had never ridden the city bus before. I was near the front, where the girls sat. They all wanted to ride standing up and hanging onto the straps, as they'd seen in the movies, but they weren't quite tall enough for the straps, and so they kept jumping up to touch them. When the bus began to get crowded, a couple of the girls did stand up and found that keeping their feet while the bus was in motion was harder than it looked.

A boy came up from back of the bus after he started to get motion sick. I told him a funny story about a dog, the late Strider, who went to sleep standing up after a hiking trip, and he told me about a dog, which he'd seen on a home-video TV show, that raided the refrigerator. He said his brother had sent in a video to that show, and the show had run it. When I asked what the video was about, he told me he couldn't say. It was a family secret. But his mom was in it, and she had just gotten out of the shower, and her hair was all messed up.

He and his family had taken a Southwest trip recently that seemed to overlap ours a little bit. He asked if I had ever been to Las Vegas. Yes, just recently, I said. Where did you stay? Well, actually the hotel didn't honor our reservation and was going to charge us an extra $50 to stay there, so we didn't stay. The same thing happened to his family, he said (travelers, take note; apparently your Las Vegas reservations are worthless). But they stayed anyway, and he was impressed with the sights.

Anyway, while they were on their trip, he and his mom and dad and brother were waiting for a table in a restaurant; the signal that their table was ready would be a buzzer. My seat companion made up a story for his family about a kid who farted so loud that the people in the next table over thought it was their buzzer. Just as he got to the part of the story where he was going to say the kid farted, the buzzer went off!

They all got off at the first stop downtown, my seat companion calm and cool and slow and the last one off. He went out the back door as the teacher, clipboard in hand and a worried expression on his face, popped back in the front door for one last look over the passengers' faces to see if he'd missed any.

One author's utopia is another author's hell

The "wise" Macintosh in Spider Robinson's The Callahan Touch has a utopian recipe for existential misery, if not species suicide.

I dream of a world where humans have so little fear, so little to fear, that fear loses its obsessive fascination for them, its addictive rush. A world without superstition and ignorance and the ever-present risk of extinction souring and spoiling sleep and making paranoia seem a sensible attitude.

What's wrong with this "ideal society" is the same thing that's wrong with the book: no conflict. The book is one big party, raucous laughter, misunderstandings leading to new friendships, every conflict resolved in the space of a chapter or two. Ho hum.

Human beings with no problems will create problems. If they live in safety, then fear has a greater, not a smaller, fascination for them.

Fear can either sour joy or be the dark backdrop where it shines, depending on the person's means of dealing with it.

Traction is friction. Conflict is character in movement. Argument, practiced honestly, is indispensable to the pursuit of truth.

And paranoia can be a sensible attitude, if they are out to get you.

Don't cry for me, George W.

I've been a fan of Deborah Tannen's for a long time. I've read four or five of her books on communication styles and learned a lot about listening and hearing differences deeper than language.

Maybe she should go back and reread her own 1990 book on men's and women's conversation styles. In that book, she said that neither sex was wrong in its conversation style, just different, and that both needed to try to understand the other, so that better communication would occur.

Well, men's conversation style isn't so good any more:

Perhaps it was not by chance that it was a woman who asked the president, at the town hall debate last Friday, to list three instances in which he had made wrong decisions since taking office. If women react to Mr. Bush's made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured.

Unless, of course, it's Kerry who doesn't apologize. Because when the microphone passed to him during the debate, he didn't ante up with his own regrets and apologies, but continued point out where Bush went wrong.

Which is exactly why men don't apologize anyway, because their opponents use the apology as an admission of weakness. If men's communication styles are different from women's, it might be because their entire way of relating to each other is different. I learmed that from Deborah Tannen.

Another thing Ms. Tannen may have noticed is that there are no metrosexuals among Al-Qaeda (and I have a hunch that even Jacques Chirac is a metrosexual poser, but a sort of French cowboy deep down inside, like De Gaulle). Al-Qaeda are all MEN (not that there's anything wrong with that), who think of themselves as supermen. Our Islamist enemies hate and disrespect women, and they will naturally hate and disrespect any man who communicates like one.

Of course, they already hate everything about the West, and apologies are not likely to get past that. But respect might get them to back down eventually.

We've had an emoting president, with a trembling lip, and "I feel your pain" (when he wasn't feeling something else entirely), and quick on the draw with apologies. He had more fun as president than anyone else in history, and while he was president, we turned our backs on the action-adventure movie unfolding around the globe and focused on our own little chick flick back home--our eight-year Oprah presidency, with its relationships and betrayal and reconciliation. Then the action-adventure came and bit us in the butt.

Thanks. Now I'll take a president with a steely eye, a set jaw and a willingness to accept the judgment of history.

The mind of John Kerry

It's the John Kerry quote all the bloggers are quoting, the gotcha statement that Kerry was so afraid of making:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance," Kerry said. "As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."

The reason it's a "gotcha," though, is that it reveals an attitude toward terrorism that a lot of people find disturbing in someone who wants to be the chief executive. "We have to get back," he says, to where the terrorists were a nuisance. A nuisance. Like when yet another suicide bomber topped the news. Like when yet another hotel was bombed. If it hadn't been for 9/11, would Americans have reacted in the same way to the Madrid train bombing, the Beslan school bombing, the Bali nightclub bombing? I don't know the answer to that, but until you've experienced something, it's hard to enter into it. Before 9/11, it was a nuisance.

The NYT article opens with Kerry leaving the Capitol after the Pentagon was bombed. He related in another context that he and his colleagues spent 40 minutes after the bombings unable to think. I can relate. It was more like a couple of days or weeks for me, but I can relate. Kerry tells the NYT reporter that he hasn't changed as a result of 9/11. The reporter at first thinks Kerry is afraid of being accused of flipflopping, but then he says:

What I came to understand was that, in fact, the attacks really had not changed the way Kerry viewed or talked about terrorism -- which is exactly why he has come across, to some voters, as less of a leader than he could be. He may well have understood the threat from Al Qaeda long before the rest of us. And he may well be right, despite the ridicule from Cheney and others, when he says that a multinational, law-enforcement-like approach can be more effective in fighting terrorists. But his less lofty vision might have seemed more satisfying -- and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign -- in a world where the twin towers still stood.

All that is interesting, why should it take a good reporter to tease it out of him?

When I asked Kerry's campaign advisers about these poll numbers, what I heard from some of them in response was that Kerry's theories on global affairs were just too complex for the electorate and would have been ignored -- or, worse yet, mangled -- by the press. "Yes, he should have laid out this issue and many others in greater detail and with more intellectual creativity, there's no question," one adviser told me. "But it would have had no effect."

This is, of course, a common Democratic refrain: Republicans sound more coherent because they see the world in such a rudimentary way, while Democrats, 10 steps ahead of the rest of the country, wrestle with profound policy issues that don't lend themselves to slogans. By this reasoning, any proposal that can be explained concisely to voters is, by definition, ineffective and lacking in gravitas. Other Kerry aides blame the candidate and his coterie of message makers, most of whom are legendary for their attack ads but less adept at thinking about broad policy arguments. "If you talk about this the right way, then the American people, or most of them, will get it," one of Kerry's informal advisers told me. "But you've got to have guts."

It takes "guts," not only to fight terrorists (and at the debates Kerry sounds like he's planning to go Rambo and hunt them down and kill them with his bare hands) but also to tell the electorate what you've got in mind. He doesn't really trust us to understand what's in our best interest. He has the same view of democracy in the Middle East:

Kerry, too, envisions a freer and more democratic Middle East. But he flatly rejects the premise of viral democracy, particularly when the virus is introduced at gunpoint. "In this administration, the approach is that democracy is the automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the region," he told me. Kerry disagreed. "You can't impose it on people," he said. "You have to bring them to it. You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the process."

What he's not observing is that our guns are not pointed at the electorate in Iraq or Afghanistan, but at the people who would prevent them from voting.

But here's the exchange that reveals the Kerry who could become president:

On an evening in August, just after a campaign swing through the Southwest, Kerry and I met, for the second of three conversations about terrorism and national security, in a hotel room overlooking the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier. A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned.

"Can we get any of my water?" he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didn't like about Evian.

"I hate that stuff," Kerry explained to me. "They pack it full of minerals."

"What kind of water do you drink?" I asked, trying to make conversation.

"Plain old American water," he said.

"You mean tap water?"

"No," Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say I'm out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesn't demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French -- important to stay away from anything even remotely French.

"There are all kinds of waters," he said finally. Pause. "Saratoga Spring." This seemed to have exhausted his list. "Sometimes I drink tap water," he added.

We need someone who can actually answer a question about what sort of water he'll drink, not to mention his philosophy about how the world should be organized.

Where was Kerry this time?

Again with the Zelig Candidate?

During the debate, Kerry said: "I was in Kyoto. I was part of it. I know what happened."

Well, was he? He is saying he was part of the delegation (that's why he knows so much about it), not just that he went on a vacation there around the same time. Is this another Christmas in Cambodia? Another "I was at the signing of the 1991 Iraq peace accords"?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Library people

She comes to the library table, huge in her green coat and overfilled leggings, wheezing like a fireplace bellows, and looks at me uncertainly. I've allowed the book I was looking at to wander outside my territory on the table. I move the book and tell her that no one is sitting there, and she sits across from me and sets down a stack of books on witchcraft, tarot, astrology and palmistry. She is in her late teens to mid-20s, and her hair comes out of her scalp dark blonde, then switches to electric pink, then strawberry, then faded orangy-red where it ends just at her shoulders.

She hunches over Spells for Teenage Witches; the chubby hands that hold the book have dark dimples where the knuckles would be. She looks at the texts with an expression of profound and perplexed concentration, her eyebrows formed into ~'s over her eyes, her mouth hanging open slightly.

The teen witch books show bright-eyed blondes--thin, tan, cheerleader types, the image of the "successful" witch. I wonder what she expects to find in the pages of those books. A job in a house with "PALM READER" in the window? Money and tans and a good figure? A paper for an English class? A glimpse of a world beyond?

She leaves the remainders on the table: Advanced Wiccan Spirituality, Spells for Teenage Witches, Springtime Rituals Love & Celebration, The Forest of Souls.

Of course someone could pity my unrealistic dreams when I walk away from the book I've been looking at: Screenwriting Updated: New (and Conventional) Ways of Writing for the Screen. What does she want, this pitying person could blog. Money, tans and a good figure? A job in a house with "SCREENWRITER" on her calling card? An educational opportunity? A glimpse of her world on a magic screen?

Every shelf here contains worlds and worlds; and every pair of eyes looking at them also.

Just in case she was wondering

She said, "How can Catholics vote for a Protestant against a man who shares their faith, just because [the Protestant] agrees with the church on this one issue."

Her interlocutor nodded and murmured agreement.

"I've always wondered about that," she said. "And how can they support pro-abortion Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

What is the basis for electoral loyalty? Must Catholics vote for Catholics? Baptists for Baptists? Orthodox for Orthodox?

If Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D., Maryland, Orthodox, pro-abortion) is running against Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah, LDS, anti-abortion), am I obliged to vote for Sarbanes?

I don't think so.

This is not about Sarbanes' relation to the Church or his relation to God, about the present state of his soul or his eternal salvation. I'm in no position to judge any of those things, and they make no difference anyway. If St. Basil the Great were running for the Oregon Senate, I'd consider his record and experience against that of his opponent. Sanctity doesn't prove competence--or vice versa.

I've observed that politicians' stated religious affiiliation is frequently an anti-predictor in life issues. Reagan was Presbyterian; Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are Southern Baptist; George W. Bush is Methodist; John Kerry is Catholic. (There are Catholics who are pro-life--Henry Hyde comes to mind--but I don't know of any pro-life Orthodox). If life issues are high on your list of priorities, then you need to look further than denominations.

If she had asked me--and maybe she was wise not to--she would have found that alhough Republicans have a reputation for simplistic black-and-white decisions, in fact, they also weigh priorities with a complicated calculus. A pro-abortion candidate who opposes government payment for abortion is superior to a pro-abortion candidate who has never found an abortion he was willing to oppose. A statement of "personal opposition to" abortion does not trump a signature on a law banning partial-birth abortion.

Some people's view of the "common good" and "economic justice" includes leaving people as much of their money as possible to spend as they deem best.

Some people believe that war can lead to a net reduction in mayhem and murder.

And I may walk to the Communion cup behind Paul Sarbanes, private citizen and Orthodox Christian, and put my mark beside his opponent's name in the voting booth and not consider that I've withheld appropriate loyalty from anyone.

She doesn't read this blog, but just in case someone was wondering.

Bus people 1

He(?) got on the bus downtown, and he wore a uniform for [Acme] Transport with various Kerry-Edwards campaign buttons. His hair was cut in reverse mullet--short around the back and sides but the top pulled into a ponytail that hung down to the nape of his neck.

There was a youthful, immature, even innocent quality about him, so that I would have guessed him to be in his early 20s or even late teens, but his hair was threaded with silver and he was already developing a wattle under his chin. His overall build was feminine -- not Miss America feminine, but dumpy, real-world feminine, with broad hips, small, soft hands and well-tended, squared-off nails, a fleshy face with downturned eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a whispy black mustache. If it hadn't been for that mustache, I'd have pegged him for a lesbian. With the mustache, he left me with the initial question mark uneasily resolved for "he."

He was talking on a cell phone, long pauses punctuated by "Right."

What we get instead of hurricanes

When we were in Louisiana, my daughter said she'd couldn't understand why anyone would live in Florida because of the hurricanes. I said they could be bad, though not usually this bad, but ecverywhere you go has its own share of disasters.

When we got home, Mount St. Helens was in the news.

The first time it blew in living memory was May 18, 1980. I remember the day, because my husband and I were in St. Louis, saying goodbye to friends, with a loaded U-Haul trailer on the back of our 1976 Chevy van. We were moving to Oregon. Gary said, "You're getting fireworks up there."

A couple of days later, May 20 or 21 or so, we were on the high plains of southern Idaho running into a strong headwind that carried a thick pink dust. We had to stop a couple of times to wash off the radiator. I asked the clerk in a gas station if it always blew like that, and she just shrugged.

It was the blast from the volcano.

That first explosion blew the top off one of the most perfectly formed snowcaps of the Cascades. A pristine mountain lake is no more. Millions of board feet of timber were blow down in the blast, and 57 people died, among them the famous Harry Truman (well, not that Harry Truman, not quite that famous), who lived in a cabin on the side of the mountain and refused to leave and at least one photographer shooting the blast when it came his way. The Toutle River has never returned to its pre-volcano condition after the tons of mud and debris went flowing down it.

In July that year, the mountain sent up another plume of dust, and we woke the next morning to what looked like an unseasonable fall of pink snow. The wind had blown the ash our way. It was a quarter-inch thick on the streets, foliage, cars, everything. Whenever the wind blew, it picked up clouds of silicon-based dust. People walked the streets wearing dust masks or bandit-style bandanas for a couple of months.

Mount St. Helens is between Seattle and Portland in a sparsely populated area of Washington.

The thing to know, though, is that Mount St. Helens is not the only volcano in the Cascades. Mount Lassen in northern California is fairly active; Mount Hood, about 60 miles east of Portland, last erupted in 1790, a minute ago in volcano time, and is listed as an active volcano by the U.S. Geological Survey. It's not likely to be as devastating an explosion as St. Helens, though. Mount Rainier last erupted in 1840, and it has a history of mudflows that could be devastating to the Seattle metropolitan area.

I'ver heard that busloads of school kids have been heading out toward Mount St. Helens for volcano observation trips. I appreciate the impetus; it's a stunning sight -- powerful, beautiful and awe-ful, a small hint of planetary processes. But busloads of kids? It's not a tame mountain.

Dinosaurs huddle together as shrews rampage

The people who had the temerity to question Dan Rather's authority are part of a "political jihad," says Tom Brokaw, another anchor at the end of his career.
Rather, Brokaw and Peter Jennings spoke to reporters Saturday about the abysmal lack of respect accorded journalistic royalty in this country.

"I don't think you ever judge a man by only one event in his career," said Jennings, anchor on ABC.

Anyway, this isn't about Rather. "News executives" (I speculate that means legal staff) had told Rather not to say anything about Rathergate while the investigation was under way.

He did, apparently, have permission to whine about his bad treatment, and managed to raise an interesting question:

"If the country is in dire peril, as the president of the United States says it is ... I want to be a patriotic journalist," he said. "You know that the role of the patriotic journalist is to put your fear aside, stand up, look them in the eye, ask the rough questions. But you also know that when you do that, you're going to get hammered.... So what happens is you just say ... maybe tomorrow."

Never mind that if he had actually said "maybe tomorrow" about the fake documents, he wouldn't be in this mess, and never mind that everybody else has to learn that no good deed goes unpunished, that sometimes courage means doing what you believe in in the face of criticism, but focus on the fact that he wants to be a "patriotic journalist."

Patriotism has become the most coveted personal quality of the 2004 election season. Kerry and his advocates earnestly protest that any criticism of their stated policies or voting record is a foul attempt to denigrate their patriotism, and in the same speech will specifically say that their enemies are not patriotic. In a speech calling for more civility in political debate, Teresa Heinz Kerry referred to "un-American traits" at the Democratic convention, though she later declined to explain what she meant by that.

So what is "patriotism"? Is "un-Americanism" its opposite? "Anti-Americanism"? If so, what are they and how do they differ from each other?

Is it a love of the land? If so, what is that? A feeling? Aesthetic enjoyment? Appreciation of the major landmarks?

Is it love of the people? All of them? Even the tiresome ones who are not like us (whoever your "us" happens to be)?

Is there such a thing as a love for the entity as a whole? A willingness to sacrifice to preserve it? What if one person's view of "preservation" seems to fit another's definition of "destruction"?

I've been reading The Kalahari Typing School for Men. At one point, the protagonist thinks about her admirable father, and she speaks with pride about her country, Botswana, about its lack of scandal, its honor, the honesty and uprightness of the people and leadership. I know nothing about Botswana, but her patriotism--for it was certainly that--seemed of an innocent sort, the kind that Americans may have had when teachers told the story about Washington and the cherry tree. But now we know about the Trail of Tears, the scandal of Watergate and the perjury of a sitting president. We know about the Teapot Dome and the continuing criticism of the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Japanese internment, and on and on and on.

There has to be a patriotism that survives disillusionment.

But if anyone is disillusioned, it's someone like Dan Rather. He says he wants to be a "patriotic journalist," but he flings the word around as if it has a meaning. In fact, journalists have been trying to come to terms with the "patriotic" designation for a while, without much success.

Here is a PBS NewsHour discussion of the topic from November 2001, soon after ABC News President David Westin, asked whether he thought the Pentagon was a legitimate military target on Sept. 11, 2001, replied, "I actually don't have an opinion on that, and it's important I not have an opinion on that as I sit here in my capacity right now. As a journalist, I feel strongly that's something that I should not be taking a position on."

Jonah Goldberg compares these conflicted motivations with the World War II reporters.

There were more than 35,000 pictures of FDR taken. Two show him in a wheelchair. Why? Because the press almost unanimously agreed that — despite the huge news value — depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort. The few dissenting photographers from that consensus were routinely blocked or deliberately jostled by the senior photographers so as to shield FDR from embarrassment and the public from its "right to know."

Bob Steele, director of the Poynter Institute's ethics program, wrote a column titled "Patriotism and Journalism" and didn't get any further than more questions:

Must a journalist accept the patriotic absolutism championed by President Theodore Roosevelt? "There can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country," the Rough Rider roared in 1918. "There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else."

Or, can a journalist uphold the passion of patriotism advocated by presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952? "I venture to suggest that patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion," Stevenson offered, "but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime."

A commenter on his site makes a telling observation:

Right after 9/11 I was working at one of the newsrooms that forbade their anchors from wearing red, white, and blue ribbons on air. The news directors' reasoning behind this was it was "taking sides". I found this insane at first, but then thought about it and realized we are totally suppossed to be unbiased and showing American bias counts. How can you trust international coverage of a station that wraps itself in red, white and blue.

I'm not getting any closer to a definition that satisfies my own mind, but here's the Google page if you want to chase the question some more.

If a politician can't define patriotism, he really shouldn't say that other people don't have it. If a professional journalist isn't sure whether he ought not be above all that attachment to any one country, then he shouldn't wrap himself in a flag when someone criticizes his professionalism.

SOURCE: Allah

Quotidian detailia

Today I rode the bus to work for the first time in years.

Before the girls arrived, I worked downtown and couldn't afford the parking. I loved the bus, despite its occasional inconveniences, like being caught seemingly for hours in sweltering heat with windows that didn't open, aside from the occasional loudmouth bore, aside from the occasional obnoxious drunk--or maybe because of them even more than the quiet, thoughtful people reading or listening to music or just looking out the window.

But when you drive from suburb to outer city with plenty of parking and you need to be back when school's out or you need to truck kids off to games or appointments or lessons, the extra hour added to each direction of the commute just doesn't work.

But suddenly they're young adults, with jobs and driver's licenses, and I can leave them to their own devices and ride the bus to work. Even with the extra hour each way--especially with the extra hour--even with the noise and the bores and the walking--especially with the walking.

The downtown is full of energy and life, a statuesque young woman carrying a Gap shopping bag and walking at a quick clip down the sidewalk, a woman in a Fair Isle sweater and turtleneck (on a day in the upper 70s), her brown hair cut into what used to be called a pageboy style, looking wearily into the distance, a man who reminds me of the legendary Father Bliven, a couple of decades younger, reading a book that looks from here like a travel guide (appropriate for Fr. Bliven), on a day that's in the running for Most Beautiful of 2004.

I've got to get myself a bus bag before next week, and then it will be GOOD.

Unrelated observation: A sign at the Greek Festival said, "Do not take alcohol off church property." I also love the Greeks.

Conspiracy theories exposed!

Paranoid conspiracy theories are more prevalent than ever in culture and politics--vast right-wing conspiracies and left-wing fever swamps, billionaires with plans to "RULE THE WORLD" and chillingly suspicious corporations.

Only the initiated few know about the dire strategems, along with a lonely protagonist who accidentally discovers and fights against the overwhelming evil.

These stories--or theories--have in common wide nets of "secret" correspondences (secret in the sense of hidden in plain sight, because the lonely protagonists we find ourselves sitting next to on the airplane are always asking, "Have you ever heard of the Masons?" while the Masons are driving their Winnebagoes around with bumper stickers that say, "2B1 ASK1") and, as Umberto Eco illustrates in Foucault's Pendulum, at the heart of the secret is another secret, which, once it is laid bare, becomes a nothing, laughable. In fact, nothing may be even better than a real secret, because whereas anything can be debunked, nothing can't.

In literature, the lonely protagonist occasionally defeats the conspiracy by exposing it, in which case it's a tepid conspiracy, good for a one-hour TV drama at best. For the blockbuster, the protagonist must win by eluding the evil--as in the Bourne Identity, with the hint that the conspiracy lives to rise another day.

Conspiracies make for high-stakes drama with great potential for action and conflict, but they're an odd social phenomenon, and I wondered where the idea came from, how long it's been around, and why it appeals to us so strongly.

Saturday evening, Carl Olson gave a brief talk about a book he co-authored, The DaVinci Hoax. He told a funny story that captures the "fact" of the book: he has some friends, a couple, who work in a university, one in the theology department, one in art history. The art historian's friends loved The DaVinci Code: Great story, they said, if you ignore the art parts. The theology faculty also loved the book: Great story, if you ignore the theology. But aside from the inaccurate art and wacky theology, aside from the astronomical promotional effort that would have made a bestseller out of the Bunkie, La., phone book, and aside from Dan Brown's mediocre writing, what's not to like?

Anyway, I asked Carl Olson where the conspiracy literature came from, and he said that the "conspiracy" groups came into their own in the Enlightenment--Masons, Illuminati, and so forth--extending up into the 19th century in America with the Transcendental movement, and obviously into the 20th century with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Hal Lindsey believers (not that the Lindseyites are anti-Semitic, only that both they and the anti-Semites are convinced of great conspiracies), and so forth. If anything, it seems, the appeal of conspiracy has become greater in the waning years of the 20th century, and now conspiracy theories have entered the mainstream of Left politics, with Michael Moore, Pres. Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy (scary photo warning), and the Democratic presidential contender.

Foucault's Pendulum posits that the competing conspiracies feed off each other, as their adherents make up lurid tales about the other groups, which connection-hungry individuals, looking for something bigger than themselves, then imitate. These are the people who don't have the psychological makeup to play the lonely protagonist, or they may see themselves as the lonely protagonists who must band together against an evil so great that they need to become part of "Them" to combat it. To what extent was the Nazi movement a matter of Hitler and his followers joining, becoming, "Them," and thus creating the next level of conspiracy mythology with its occult symbols and its aim at world domination?

The leader of the conspiracy in Pendulum is Count St-Germain, a mysterious character, suave, debonaire, rich, and persuasive, who purports to be immortal. (On another sidetrack, Count St-Germain may have been a model for the mysterious villain in Charles Williams' Shadows of Ecstasy, which sheds new light on the book.) The "count" doesn't, however, actually control anything--it takes all his energy to manage the other "diabolicals" (as Eco's protagonists call the conspirators). But for all the talk about managing the inner workings of the world, there was no sense that the diabolicals controlled--or even participated to any great extent--in anything outside their own conspiracies.

Eco's description of the world of the diabolicals fits the world as it actually works much better than the Da Vinci Code, The Book of Q, The Bourne Identity and their ilk. And the obligatory lecture at the center of it, in which a character explains how the world is actually organized, has the virtue of being both beautiful and short, unlike the head-banging tediousness of the "nonfiction" passages at the heart of The Da Vinci Code and The Book of Q.

Foucault's Pendulum turns the conspiracy genre inside out. It's the best and truest thing I've found on the paranoid conspiracy phenomenon and reinforces the "laughably pathetic" aspects of those who trust in the power of conspiracies--for good or ill.

Murder in Greece?

Seraphim Dankaert, a seminarian at Holy Cross Seminary in Boston, says that one of his professors just returned from Greece. Press reports there say that the helicopter crash that killed Patriarch Petros of Alexandria may not have been an accident.

He adds that Vladimir Putin was scheduled to be on the helicopter, but changed his plans so that the patriarch could fly to Mount Athos. Memory eternal.

A lesson in composition

Stanley Fish, dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, takes side-by-side speeches of Kerry and Bush and deduces the following object lesson:

Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.

Candidates aside, he draws useful observations for writers.

And he's a Kerry supporter.

'The way it is today isn't how it was'

If you've got any friends who don't understand the journalistic power of the blogosphere, Joanne Jacobs gives a lively and succinct overview of the Rathergate scandal.

She names the blogs that broke the story (unlike a recent New York Times story that purports to talk about "Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail" and ends up focusing on the lefty bloggers who, at best, had nothing to do with identifying the forgeries), and she does it without a lot of impenetrable jargon.

The Zelig Candidate

He sounds more and more like the chameleon-like title character from Woody Allen's 1983 movie who changes his character to match the people he's with and who manages to get himself photographed with important people and important events in history.

First it was the trip into Cambodia. He couldn't just tell Congress he thought sending secret missions into Cambodia was a bad idea. He had to have it "seared, seared" into his memory that Nixon sent him on a mission that no other swift boat went on when Nixon wasn't even president.

Now Captain's Quarters fact checks a 2001 claim that Kerry was in Iraq for the signing of the 1991 peace accords. Apparently, he did visit Iraq a couple of weeks later with a Congressional delegation, but that wasn't good enough to tell Bill O'Reilly (text of the interview is on the Captain's Quarters blog):

O'REILLY: Yes, that was a classic mistake. But if you arm the Kurds in the north of Iraq, you're going to alienate one of our most valuable --

KERRY: I didn't say necessarily the Kurds. There are other members of the opposition. There are people who are outside the country prepared to go in. There are others inside the country. And I believe -- I mean, I was in Safwan. I went there when the signing of the armistice took place at the end of the war.

And I remember seeing that land, which lent itself in my judgment, considerably to the creation of almost an enclave, which I thought we should have done then. And I think is one way to begin to approach things now, but there are other possibilities. The important thing is that Saddam Hussein and the world knows that we think Saddam Hussein is essentially out of sync with the times. He is and has acted like a terrorist. And he is engaged in activities that are unacceptable.

There's something deeply weird about this guy.

Jayson Blair weighs in on Rathergate

I had occasion to refer to Jayson Blair for a piece of writing for my day job, putting Rathergate in context for (what I consider to be) a left-of-center publication.

Now, however, I've read Blair's comments on the mess, and he contributes some insights to the issue.

He makes an observation similar to what others have, but not quite frequently enough, which is that even if the forged documents had been real, the underlying story, which Rather keeps pointing to, amounts to a big "Who cares?":

You really have to step back and look at this from the outside. No. 1, it was not news that George Bush was wild as a young man. He has pretty much said that himself. No. 2, it was not news that George Bush came from a family that had influence. What would be shocking would be if he did not use that influence. He has three-and-one-half years and two wars as President and if can’t make a judgment on that, as opposed to his personal life three decades ago, then there might as well not be elections.

But teven more to the point is the fact that Blair's inventions added color; Rather's fabrications were the essence of the story:

I have a lot of sympathy for Dan Rather and CBS News with its storied history. Despite the comparisons, I see a lot of differences between my situation and the memo flap with Rather. Obviously, the stakes are much higher in this case. I lifted paragraphs and made up color. It is disconcerting that CBS could – best case scenario – was misled on a non-news story that theoretically would be embarrassing to the President in an election year.

In my situation, I was dealing with a serious undiagnosed mental illness – manic depressive illness – and was suffering from paranoid delusions that were divorced from realty. In my case, what I was trying to do was avoid going very far from home. In Rather’s case, I think what’s really unfortunate is that a guy with a tremendous reputation may have been abused by his source and fallen victim to bad staff work. It’s not implausible because often television anchormen do not do the reporting for the stories they front. And probably no one in the television news business has more responsibilities than Dan Rather as managing editor of CBS News and his responsibilities for “60 Minutes” Junior.

I've heard Blair on the radio before and was impressed at his willingness to take responsibility for himself and his decisions. After reading his response, I'm still impressed:

My first reaction when a friend asked about the Dan Rather memo flap was to ponder whether anyone learned anything from the mess I got myself into. Nobody knows the value of credibility better than I do. I’d give up the book royalties if I could get my credibility and career back.

Blair is out of the news business, but there's every reason to give him a chance to show what he's learned. But if Rather doesn't take a similar fall, then the journalism establishment owes an apology to Jayson Blair.

SOURCE: Allah.

Understanding the faith of Dan Rather

Theology matters. What a person believes about the makeup of the universe will affect how he makes his daily decisions. Geoffrey Hunt at The American Thinker has applied that observation to answer one of the unanswered questions about Rathergate, as well as a number of others floating around it:

Indeed, religious belief transcends human experience. Religious people, reinforced by shared values and faith that cannot be reduced to scientific analysis and analytic propositions, try but usually fail to co-opt language in expressing the inexpressible. The religious notions of the supernatural, for example, have no analog in a mathematical proof. Either you believe or you don't.

If you haven't seen the ideas of Tertullian and Aristotle applied to 2004 politics recently, it's worth a read.

The candidates compare philosophies

People say that there's nothing of substance in the election, that it's all about dirty tricks and 30-year-old biographies. Well, there's that. (I've noticed that the definition of "dirty tricks" depends on which side you're rooting for. But that's not what this is about.)

In the past couple of days, there has been some actual debate about more than the direction of the next four years--about the overall philosophy of government and foreign policy. Bush's speech to the United Nations today and Kerry's speech on foreign policy at New York University yesterday form a sort of first debate, with planned texts instead of extemporaneous reactions--what the candidates want to say, not what they stumble into on the spot. (There's a place for the other kind of debate, too, but this is a good one.)

Kerry says: "Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure."

Bush says: "For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability. Oppression became common, but stability never arrived."

Kerry says: "The President's policy in Iraq precipitated the very problem he said he was trying to prevent. Secretary of State Powell admits that Iraq was not a magnet for international terrorists before the war.  Now it is, and they are operating against our troops."

Bush says: "A democratic Iraq has ruthless enemies, because terrorists know the stakes in that country. They know that a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a decisive blow against their ambitions for that region. So a terrorists group associated with al Qaeda is now one of the main groups killing the innocent in Iraq today -- conducting a campaign of bombings against civilians, and the beheadings of bound men. Coalition forces now serving in Iraq are confronting the terrorists and foreign fighters, so peaceful nations around the world will never have to face them within our own borders."

Kerry says:

We need to turn the page and make a fresh start in Iraq.

First, the President has to get the promised international support so our men and women in uniform don't have to go it alone.  It is late; the President must respond by moving this week to gain and regain international support.

Last spring, after too many months of resistance and delay, the President finally went back to the U.N. which passed Resolution 1546.  It was the right thing to do -- but it was late.

That resolution calls on U.N. members to help in Iraq by providing troops… trainers for Iraq's security forces… a special brigade to protect the U.N. mission… more financial assistance… and real debt relief. 

Three months later, not a single country has answered that call.  And the president acts as if it doesn't matter.

And of the $13 billion previously pledged to Iraq by other countries, only $1.2 billion has been delivered.

Kerry's blast against Bush turns into an indictment of the United Nations. It can pass a resolution, but it can't deliver on action. Bush presented the case in a more hopeful light, maybe because he was talking to the United Nations:

Let history also record that our generation of leaders followed through on these ideals, even in adversity. Let history show that in a decisive decade, members of the United Nations did not grow weary in our duties, or waver in meeting them. I'm confident that this young century will be liberty's century. I believe we will rise to this moment, because I know the character of so many nations and leaders represented here today. And I have faith in the transforming power of freedom.

Kerry says: "[B]illions of people around the world yearning for a better life are open to America's ideals. We must reach them." He never specifies those ideas; he only continues in the next sentence to say, "To win, America must be strong.  And America must be smart." I hope strength and smarts aren't the best America has to offer.

Bush says:

Because we believe in human dignity, peaceful nations must stand for the advance of democracy. No other system of government has done more to protect minorities, to secure the rights of labor, to raise the status of women, or to channel human energy to the pursuits of peace. We've witnessed the rise of democratic governments in predominantly Hindu and Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian cultures. Democratic institutions have taken root in modern societies, and in traditional societies. When it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations. People everywhere are capable of freedom, and worthy of freedom.

Finding the full promise of representative government takes time, as America has found in two centuries of debate and struggle. Nor is there any -- only one form of representative government -- because democracies, by definition, take on the unique character of the peoples that create them. Yet this much we know with certainty: The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls, or martial laws, or secret police. Over time, and across the Earth, freedom will find a way.

James Ridgeway at the Village Voice characterized Bush's speech as "the same old, same old." Even Seraphim Danckaert, an Orthoblogger I respect, sneers that "everything is going just fine in Iraq, and we better be pretty thankful that our Republican president is embarking on a Wilsonian crusade to make the world safe for democracy (Wilson, by the way, is probably my third least-favorite President)." Thus, because Bush has been called "Wilsonian," his vision is suspect. There is, however, a difference between making the world safe for democracy and making it safer through democracy. (Free nations by and large handle conflicts by renaming foods and not buying each other's goods; the bloodiest conflicts of the past 100 years or so have all involved one or more oppressive governments. I could speculate why, but it wouldn't be of much value.)

Kerry says:

The greatest threat we face is the possibility Al Qaeda or other terrorists will get their hands on a nuclear weapon.  

To prevent that from happening, we must call on the totality of America's strength. Strong alliances, to help us stop the world's most lethal weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands. A powerful military, transformed to meet the new threats of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And all of America's power -- our diplomacy, our intelligence system, our economic power, the appeal of our values -- each of which is critical to making America more secure and preventing a new generation of terrorists from emerging.

Bush says:

The Afghan people are showing extraordinary courage under difficult conditions. They're fighting to defend their nation from Taliban holdouts, and helping to strike against the terrorists killers. They're reviving their economy. They've adopted a constitution that protects the rights of all, while honoring their nation's most cherished traditions. More than 10 million Afghan citizens -- over 4 million of them women -- are now registered to vote in next month's presidential election. To any who still would question whether Muslim societies can be democratic societies, the Afghan people are giving their answer.

Call me crazy, call me a dreamer, call me "Wilsonian" if you must, but like Bush, I think even the brown people of the world are capable of livving in freedom. If it must come to a choice between chaos and the stability given by Saddam and his boys, I'll pick chaos. I believe that human beings are fallen, but I also believe that they are capable of governing themselves, even allowing for quirky experiments like Las Vegas, Nev., and Berkeley, Calif.

Back from America

After spending two weeks on a journey from the West to the South and back, I have a few scattered observations about flyover America (in no particular order):

• You often get the sense that it's still the Sixties, driving the remaining stretches of the old Route 66 or driving the mile-long stretch of highway in Utah, stripped down to bare gravel.


• A rerouted highway in a canyon, with weeds growing through cracks in the paving, looks like a remnant of a lost civilization.


• A motel in Wellington, Utah, called the Pillow Talk.


• The person in the party who has the greatest fear of snakes is inevitably the one who will see one.


• A sign-writer in Arches National Park, Utah, manages a Shakespearean flavor in only a few words: "Gather no wood in park."


• A Japanese motor cycle gang in Arches -- riding Harley-Davidsons.


• A car with the Guam license plate wins the prize for the farthest-away-from-home (edging out second-place Hawaii).


• Mesa Verde shows the rise and fall and persistence of civilizations. The woman who sold us hamburgers in the diner could be a descendant of the people who built these majestic housing developments.


• Every road trip has an obligatory side track through country roads. In our case, we missed our turnoff and wandered through 50 miles or more of roads that showed up as light gray lines on our map of New Mexico. After driving a long stretch of gravel leading to the top of a mesa, we found a sign facing the other direction that said: "Warning: 18 miles of unimproved roadway. Impassible in bad weather." Even though the weather was fine, we would probably have turned back if we had seen the sign in time. We did not.


• Somewhere on these back roads of New Mexico is the town of Hassell, marked on the map, consisting of one farmhouse, one building of uncertain use, possibly public, and one cemetery, labeled "Hassell." I amused myself for a while imagining the politics for the mayoral election: Bud Hassell vs. Burt Hassell and a more bitter election than if it were Michael Moore vs. Ann Coulter.


• One homestead consisted of three furbished school buses with curtains in the windows, long ago painted blue and green, arranged in a U shape, with nice Japanese cars parked out front.


• Sudan, Texas, is home of the Hornets and Hornettes, 1A basketball champions.


• I met a woman named Jackal Barnes. I double checked the pronunciation and was told it wasn't a nickname; I'm not sure of the spelling.


• You know you've entered an alternative universe when the barristas at Starbucks have Texas accents.


• Speaking of Starbucks, the folks in the South and Southwest are waiting eagerly for the coffee shop Northwesterners love to hate (I complain about them when I'm in Portland; when I find one in Santa Fe, it's like being at home).


• I don't know if there's any diminution of tourism from France and Germany, due to the current little tiff between the USA and "Old Europe," but German and French accents were the most common in the Grand Canyon.


• The loneliest and most pathetic gambling is what happens at the slots and video poker machines. Poker is a game of interaction, one of the fundamental metaphors of human existence; even blackjack has some skill. But the machine is a whirling, blinking glimpse into the void, and the soul sitting in front of it stares blankly into the abyss. In one small-town casino, there was no live gambling, only banks and banks of the machines. I went into a quick market for a cup of coffee at 7:30 a.m. and found someone playing the machines. Depressing.


• I was a long way away from the hurricanes, in case you're wondering (people keep asking).

LA Times on the bloggers

Ben Wasserstein writes about blogs vs. mainstream media in the LA Times. I expected him to sniff at the bloggers in pajamas, but instead he makes some useful observations about what the mainstream media and the blogosphere can bring to the process of public information.

For a number of reasons, the CBS memos were the blogosphere's perfect target: If any news story was going to be broken by bloggers, it was this. As with the Lott affair, "breaking" this story meant pointing attention to something that aired on television. (Lott's comments were broadcast on C-SPAN.) It was commentary on a news story, not a news story of its own. Leaving the house or making phone calls was not part of getting the scoop.

He is exactly right. What the bloggers do, mostly, is fact-checking and commentary. Bloggers' original reporting, the first draft of history, tends to be ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances--soldiers and civilians in war zones, for example. Otherwise, it's the people with the press passes and the contacts and, frankly, the full-time salary, to dig up the important news for the bloggers to fact-check and comment on. It takes Claudia Rosette to break the Oil for Food scandal; bloggers compile the information in a site for easy reference after the newspapers have lined the bird cage.

At best it can be a partnership. If it has to be adversarial, it may be. The face of the media will change, because pompous, self-aggrandizing bullies like Dan Rather will be untoothed. Real reporters will find the bloggers to be their allies and not their enemies.

What was that story again?

Last night Dan Rather almost cried on TV. I caught the part of his interview where he whined like an accused teen-ager that he didn't mean to publish forged documents, and if they were forged, he'd certainly like to know it (lie--ABC News has found experts that he ignored in chasing the documents story), and besides, he said, the story was true, except for those pesky documents everybody keeps going on about.

What story was that,Dan? From what I've heard (and I confess that I didn't see the original 60 Minues broadcast), the documents were the story. "We've been telling you that Bush was AWOL in the 1970s,that he used his connections to get and stay in the National Guard, that he was a lout and a roust about, and now we've got documents and witnesses to prove it." But the documents are forgeries and the witnesses are deceived, compromised or left out because they weren't on-message, so you're back to your original assertions, made every year or so since you discovered that Texas Gov. George W. Bush wanted to run for national office--and probably before that.

In truth, nobody cares about Bush's Air National Guard record, beyond the factthat he got that "honorable discharge" certificate. He's not claiming that he National Guard experience qualified him to be Commander in Chief ;he's not"reporting for duty" at the national convention; he's not claiming to be a hero; he didn't throw any medals over any fence,and he didn't sell out his fellow soldiers to advance his own political career.

What makes Democratic operatives, such as Rather, so obsessed with Bush's National Guard stint is that they think moderate and conservative voters are stupid. They can't imagine what we think qualifies Bush for office, and all Kerry can imagine is that it must be military experince. In reality, as the elder Bush once said, it's the vision thing.

And so,Dan Rather, with or without forged documents, Bush's National Guard experience is a non-story. There are no National Guard vets out there defending their honor from Bush distortions and slanders, so "rich young man goes into the National Guard and doesn't go to Vietnam" isn't ever going to play against the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. The problem, Dan, is that your man and your party are trying to be something--or several things--they're not.

Then again, so are you.

Character matters more than ever

Returning again to Prof. Jay Rosen of PressThink:

Howard Fineman and Michael Isikoff, also of Newsweek, also of the Gang, try to explain why it's "slime time" again in 2004.

Bush primarily sells himself, rather than his policies (after attacking Kerry in $60 million worth of ads); Kerry defends in kind, turning the Democratic convention into the Biography Channel. Though voters face profound questions, the war on terror has engendered not a high-minded discussion of geopolitics but an obsession--even by American standards--with our would-be commander's character.

Yes, it would be nice to carry on a high-minded discussion of geopolitics. In fact, anyone who's been listening to Bush's speeches over the past three years has been getting a discussion of geopolitics. He believes that the people of the Middle East are capable of democracy, that free people are more likely to be contented and less likely to make war, that the United States may have to exercise its role as world hyperpower without waiting for our erstwhile allies to catch up with the program. Agree or disagree; support or criticize (or both) the execution, but there's the philosophy for all to see.

Kerry, however, instead of answering these philosophical points, can only say, "Anything George Bush has done is wrong," and "I can't tell you what I plan, because that would be tipping my hand."

Rosen writes:

John Kerry, a candidate who is behind, who has never come clearly into focus for most pundits let alone voters, who has been unable to explain his position on the war in Iraq, or define an approach to fighting terror, and who is still sketchily known to the American people... finds that no purpose is served by participating in the most elementary ritual there is in political journalism: answering reporters' questions.

If one candidate has a philosophy about the nature of human governments and where we are in history and the other candidate can only say, "Trust me," then character matters. To Bush, we say, "That's an inspiring vision. Do you believe it yourself? Does it hold water? Does it describe the world as we find it?" To Kerry, we say, "Whom are we trusting? And to do what?" Further, any time you are dealing with unknown future circumstances, more than a plan you need to know a philosphy. More than tactics, we need to know strategy. We're looking at a rough road over the next few years; how do the candidates define themselves and their fellow human beings? With those answers established, by whatever measure we can find, we'll know more about what to expect from their leadership.

If the candidate won't talk about philosophy, we'll have to discern it through the prism of history--which may ultimately be more reliable anyway.

Typewriters, 60 Minutes, and the citizen media

New York University professor Jay Rosen has a post -- and hosts an extensive debate in his comments -- about the CBS documents scandal.

He makes four interesting predictions:

• Dan Rather's staking his authority on the claim -- or staking the claim on his authority -- will raise the issue to the level of "cultural theatre."


• The timing of the documents' release will become part of the issue.


• "Right inside the door of the CBS scandal there is a Dirty Tricks scandal waiting to come to light." Who released the "documents" to CBS? Why now?


• Ordinary citizens "in pajamas" now have the ability to fact check the mainstream media.

I like type, and I've been fascinated at the "History of Typewriting" I've been learning from this. I was a typist in the mid-'70s, later learning word processing, later learning typesetting and now living in a font-intensive world. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've seen how fonts changed over the years. The overlay of the Times New Roman with the "30-year-old memo" persuades me that it's a forgery.

But even more significant than the development of Times New Roman is the development of the citizen media. Dan Rather can say, "You must trust me, because I'm Dan Rather," but people have other alternatives to "Trust [Dan Rather] and Obey." The elitist media say that the citizens have no ethics, no standards and no training, but the situation seems largely to be the opposite. The ethics are the basic ones of honesty and balance, and the standards are the logical fallacies that used to be part of Freshman Composition classes. As for the training, what does Dan Rather know about fonts? About Air National Guard formats? About the history of typewriters and typesetting?

The Internet-based citizen media gives freedom of the press to the one who can't afford one -- and even to people who don't have time to do more than drop a comment into someone else's "press." That's more different than Dan Rather could ever have imagined, and it couldn't have risen up to bite a more appropriate subject.

Dinners, stories and gossip

My uncle was preaching at a tiny church in the town of Eros, La. He's my mother's little brother, and he looks more and more like my grandfather every year.

The church meets in a remodeled house trailer on a lot about a block off the Highway 34, behind the abandoned school. It's an old trailer, and in the bedrooms, Sunday school went on with three children and taped religious music played quietly. After Sunday school, we filled the twelve chairs set out, and the minister's wife, Neva, led the singing.

My mother's cousin Margie was there. We used to visit her and her husband Morton in Baton Rouge, where my parents played Rook with them ("Green, green, a sight to be seen," Moe used to say). One year, they gave me a Christmas present. I slowly tore off the wrapping to find an onion and an old fishing line spool. I guess I must have shown disappointment, because they quickly took it away and gave me something else. What I remember is that just as I had resolved to figure out how to play with the fishing spool and the onion, I lost them, and got something that was no fun to play with at all. I don't remember what it was.

Morton died years ago, and Margie, I hear, travels around the country in an old van, from which she has removed the back seats and has installed a bed. She sleeps in Walmart parking lots. I told her that I had heard about her travels, but she just looked sad and said it was a shame to grow old. It was as odd as the Christmas present, because traveling around the country in the back of a van is one of the youngest things I've heard of in a woman in her late 70s or early 80s.

My cousin Sandra was there, whom I haven't seen since my wedding on Aug. 18, 1973 (all-expense paid trip for two to Eros, La., for the first person who identifies that date from recent news stories). Sandra is a few years younger than I am, the daughter of Uncle Lawrence's twin sister, and with her brother Joe lived with my grandparents when I was a kid. Once I was visiting, and Sandra wanted to show me that she was learning to play the piano. I had actually been taking lessons for several years, but didn't have a real gift for it and was still a plunker. Sandra had started only recently, but was well on her way to being better at it than I was. She got only halfway through the song when my grandmother, whom everybody called Sissy, came in and told her to get up from there, because she couldn't play as well as I could.

That old piano, tinny and missing some keys and out of tune, was the same piano that my mother and sister had learned to play on, both well enough to play hymns for church services. I had a nice new, dry and well-tuned piano at home and never learned to make it sing, the way I took years of French and never had a conversation.

My grandparents lived a half mile up the road from Eros on 90 acres, with a white clapboard house with a front porch running across the width of the house. There was a porch swing, and on summer evenings the family would sit out on the porch, shelling peas or shucking corn and talking.

J.E. Phillips, my grandpa, was over 90 when he died and had served as a justice of the peace in that rural Louisiana parish (county) for more than 60 years. He loved Louis Lamour and TV westerns like Gunsmoke. When I was little and had first moved to Louisiana from Oregon, he used to pull me onto his lap and ask, "Do you like Grandpa?" A Southern grandpa is different from a Northern grandpa, and a grandpa who's a farmer in northern Louisiana is different from a grandpa who is a factory worker with a big garden in Oregon. He talked different, and I remember even at age 5 not knowing yet whether I liked grandpa or not. Finally, several or many visits later, I said, "You'll do in a pinch," and he laughed and laughed. After that, he asked, "Do you like Grandpa?" waiting for the delight of that answer, and I always answered, "You'll do in a pinch," meaning, "Yes, I really do like Grandpa."

The kitchen of that house took up about a quarter of the floor space, and after dinner on Sunday afternoons, people sat around the table telling stories, arguing, pointing at each other. I remember as a kid how the babble of voices would overwhelm me, and yet that's where the family secrets were hinted at and, rarely, told.

I didn't live there, only came back periodically for visits, and living in our small town (as opposed to country) isolation, I learned about family life from Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, which we watched in our living room, just the three of us, without the play by play.

In Eros, we were the family that moved away and got rich, though it didn't seem so back home.

We regathered for Sunday dinner in my uncle's "fine brick home," as my grandpa always characterized new housing construction throughout the parish. Sandra was there, and her two daughters and her husband from California. Sandra has published a book and is working on promotion. And we sat around the table for hours, telling stories and talking about dead relatives. Sandra has done some genealogy, and know about the Cherokee who married Samuel Phillips in the 1800s and became the grandmother of J.E. Phillips.

And just as my mother is out of contact with her sister, Lawrence's twin, Sandra is out of contact with Joe. I don't say they're wrong, but I can't imagine Beaver and Wally ever losing touch with each other.

Sandra turned to me during dinner and asked how we two turned out to be writers in a family where no one else was the least interested in writing. I said we come from a family of story-tellers, and I could have added deep and passionate conflicts.

A return to the 'religion of peace'?

Our Islamic neighbors have taken an important step toward rebuilding relations between their community and the rest of the world. The Free Muslim Coalition against Terrorism has admitted that Islam has a problem.

After September 11, many in the Muslim world chose denial and hallucination rather than face up to the sad fact that Muslims perpetrated the 9-11 terrorist acts and that we have an enormous problem with extremism and support for terrorism.

The people who launched this initiative weren't involved in 9/11, but they have the courage to say that many of their leaders "belong behind bars and not behind a pulpit." They add, "Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against terror, we need to take the lead in this war."

This needed to be said, although Robert Spencer asks the pertinent question, "Why hasn't CAIR been saying this sort of thing for three years now?"

If these people are in the ascendent--and nothing is for certain--then we can work on a civil society of religious freedom.

Travel and eternity

I've been out of circulation for the better part of a week. Although I've seen Kerry supporters (or Bush opposers--I'm not sure which) handing out flyers and raising money in Santa Fe, I don't know whether Kerry or Bush is up in the polls. Although I've seen risen, fallen, risen remnants of Route 66, I don't know the current state of the U.S. economy. Although I've seen standing stones from cities built 1,300 to 700 years ago, I don't know how al-Qaeda is doing in its effort to take down Western civilization.

The ancient cities of Mesa Verde and the ageless and yet changing hills of the Canyonlands and Arches national parks teach about what is fleeting or lasting or eternal.

Losing an election is not the end of civilization. Even losing the war against Islamic fascism isn't the end of the world. They are both more and less. More, because the end is final and requires nothing else of us. Living on requires work and sacrifice, fear and endurance. Less, because every person, group, government or cabal is limited in power, with only so much power as is given from above.

I'm in Louisiana for a few days, where the land writhes with ancient life--my daughter runs past the toads sitting on the sidewalk and won't go past the stinkbug in her path by the swimming pool.

Something profound and real about the lasting things puts into perspective the things that change day by day. The ephemera are important, too, but they're not all, and it's sometimes too easy for me, at least, for forget that.

Hiatus

I may have wiped my hard disk today--taking out calendars, addresses, e-mails, passwords, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, blogs in process, photos, music and more. I am, on the one hand, verklempt.

I am, on the other, philosophical. Maybe it's time for a fundamental re-evaluation.

I'll be out of town for two weeks, and I can't predict when or whether I'll blog.

On the verklempt hand, pen and paper seem much more secure.

On the philosophical hand, a character in my novel loses his computer in chapter 1. I don't think I captured the emotion of it, but perhaps in the revision it will be better.

Signing off for now, with my verklempt hand.

Dads' night at the Republican convention

I guess last night was moms' night, with Laura and the girls, and Arnold who played a mom in a movie once but played to to the moms last night.

But tonight, it was dads all the way, and someone had a lickin' coming, and I'm glad it wasn't me.

Lileks saw it, too, at least in Zell Miller: "The angriest man at hte convention turns out to be a Democrat: who'd have thunk." But Lileks has spent the bulk of his life in the great Prairie North, and I doubt he knows that Southern Dad's-had-just-about-enough-of-this look, and it- won't- do- any- good- to- run,- because- he's- going- out- by- the- woodshed- to- cut- a- switch.

Cheney is your Wyoming rancher dad, who's got some serious life decisions to lay out for you, and you'd better listen up. His self-deprecating jibe at the better hair and sex-appeal of young Johnny Edwards only served to point up the deeper difference between them. You got the sense Edwards was like a young rake wanting to take Lady Liberty out on a date to a dangerous roadhouse.

I'm letting the metaphors run away with me. Both Miller and Cheney had substantial messages, and if you didn't hear it, go to the NPR or C-Span website and hear or read it for yourself.

But I still say it was Dads' night at the convention.