slacktivist

Es Tut Mir Leid, Evelyn

There's a flaming red horizon that screams our names ...

"Es Tut Mir Leid," Mark Heard
"Escher's World," Chagall Guevara
"Etcetera Whatever," Over the Rhine
"Eternal Life," Jeff Buckley
"Euphoria," Skatman Meredith
"Eurotrash Girl," Cracker
"Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye," Ella Fitzgerald
"Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye," Annie Lennox
"Evangeline," Matthew Sweet
"Eve of Destruction," The Dickies
"Eve of Destruction/Machines," Charlie McGloughlin
"Evelyn Is Not Real," My Morning Jacket

Charlie's little medley there is from one of my very Favorite Things. Charlie had a weekly show on our college's campus radio station (25 watts, baby, 25 watts of pure AM carrier current mono) called the "Radio Campfire." He'd sit down at a microphone with a guitar and a stack of cheat books and open the phone lines for requests. Charlie'd play whatever he felt like playing until the phone rang, and then he'd play whatever the caller wanted to hear. Even when it didn't quite work -- when he didn't know the song, or when whoever was working the sound board really wasn't up to the task of being recruited to sing backup on "California Dreaming" -- it still had the energy of live, without-a-net radio. But when it did work, nothing was better.

College nostalgia aside, this is something I'd love to hear a professional radio station try. That's probably never going to happen, but it should.

California

"California Court Affirms Right to Gay Marriage"

and also --

"Gay Couples Celebrate California Court Ruling"

Game on.

From that first article:

“In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship,” Chief Justice Ronald M. George wrote of marriage for the majority, “the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”

... “The right to marry,” Chief Justice George wrote, “represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.”

Chief Justice George conceded that “as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman.” But “tradition alone,” the chief justice continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.

... “No religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples,” Chief Justice George wrote, “and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs.”

So a right for me must also be a right for thee. I'm not alone in finding that reasoning difficult to argue with. Lots of people will be upset by this ruling -- or at least they will feign outrage as fundraising fodder -- but you won't hear any of them directly engaging that part of the court's opinion. What you'll hear from the most vocal of these opponents will be, instead: A) contra the last paragraph quoted above, fearmongering claims that your church will be forced to perform same-sex ceremonies or even be forced to hire gay clergy; and B) fearmongering claims that this will mean the End of Marriage and thus the End of Civilization and the End of the World. There's a reason they call it homo-phobia. Those fears are in the former case factually incorrect and in the latter case hysterically unreasonable. But appeals to fear aren't supposed to be based on facts or reason.

We'll also hear a great deal, I suppose, about "activist judges." If the people want rights to apply equally to everybody, this argument goes, then they should pass laws that say so, not simply rely on a constitution that says so. For the judicial activism complaint to be credible, those making it need also to make the case that the activist judges have made a bad decision. A proper interpretation of the state's laws can't be condemned as undemocratic judicial fiat. But don't hold your breath waiting for the anti-judicial activism crowd to make that case.

Apart from the squawking clique of demagogues and those who follow them unquestioningly, there will also be a larger group, comprising millions of Americans even in California, who oppose and lament this decision. They do so based on sincere religious convictions and, to a surprising extent, without the visceral fear and hate that characterizes the demagogues' response. Yet this larger group will also be unable to engage or respond to the core logic of the court's decision. They will also be unable to explain why a legal right should apply to the majority but not to the minority. Instead, they will speak of God and what God has ordained; they will speak of sin; they will cite verses from the Bible. They will, in other words, present a theological argument while side-stepping the legal and constitutional questions.

I disagree with the theological argument presented by these faith-based critics of the equal right to marry, but that's actually a secondary point of disagreement. It seems to me that the more important question has to do with why these friends and brothers and sisters of mine think that such theological arguments can or should be persuasive to those who don't share our religious perspective. I don't think they quite really believe that everyone else can or should be compelled to act in accordance with our particular religious beliefs. I think, rather, that their unexplored assumption is that everyone else can be expected to live as though we all believed the same thing.

That's a peculiar expectation for a "peculiar people."

Manifested

I've now had a chance to read the "Evangelical Manifesto" that we discussed earlier.

It's rather well done and there's much to commend here. The concluding "Invitation to All" is particularly welcome. So too is what is probably the document's strongest contribution and best hope for achieving what it seeks to accomplish, namely its tone, which is reasonable and almost aggressively civil.

I'm also quite pleased to find that this document, endorsed by some notable and influential leaders in American evangelicalism, includes concern for the poor and the powerless as non-negotiable hallmarks of the faith. And I'm even more pleased that it does so without any sense that such commitments must be over-defended as matters of "controversy." Ditto for the manifesto's repeated references to the stewardship of creation and its fleeting, but welcome, endorsement of "a high view of science" and condemnation of the oppression of women.

There are also several points on which I disagree with the writers and several more points I would need to ask them to clarify. Here, for example:

All too often we have tried to be relevant, but instead of creating "new wineskins for the new wine," we have succumbed to the passing fashions of the moment and made noisy attacks on yesterday’s errors, such as modernism, while capitulating tamely to today’s, such as postmodernism.

The writers here seem to be endorsing something other than "modernism" or "postmodernism," but what that might be isn't quite clear. The logical implication would seem to be pre-modernism, but I'm fairly sure that's not what they mean either.

Postmodern there seems to be a bogeyman word meaning, I take it, all the bad things that it might possibly mean and none of the good. (That's a bit odd in a document that otherwise seems to borrow an awful lot from Stanley Hauerwas.)

Elsewhere the document criticizes fundamentalism as "an essentially modern reaction to the modern world." That's astute, but it's difficult to understand such a critique if a discussion of the failures of modernism, i.e., postmodernism, is forbidden as "error." My best guess here is that what the writers are really on about is what they earlier condemn as "an inadequate view of truth." Their dedication to truth is admirable, but it's also troublesome throughout the document due to their own inadequate view of uncertainty.

One gets the sense that one is reading a document written by people who automatically translate "we cannot be certain" into "there is no truth." This makes it difficult for someone like me, who believes the former but not the latter, to engage what they're saying. In any case a bit of humble, postmodern, chastened, glass-darkly epistemology might have helped to rescue the manifesto's discussion of sola scriptura, which seems premised on the idea that certainty is readily and easily available to us humans. (That notion strikes me as, to borrow a phrase, "an essentially modern reaction to the modern world.")

The other bogeyman word here seems to be "secularism." Making this a bogeyman word leads to some serious confusion in the section of the manifesto subtitled, "A civil rather than a sacred or naked public square." What they're advocating here is secularism, but they've decided they can't call it that, so instead we get a page and a half endorsing secularism and the separation of church and state while simultaneously condemning "secularism" and the "strict separation of church and state." It isn't pretty.

The language they are thus forced to rely on comes from the man who led them into this linguistic mess, from Richard John Neuhaus and his book The Naked Public Square. Neuhaus' big idea there was that secularism is, itself, a kind of religion. Thus, for Neuhaus, a non-sectarian government is really sectarian -- it sides with and privileges non-sectarianism as a kind of state religion. The refusal to impose state-sanctioned sectarian prayer on public school students is thus, in this view, an establishment of the "religion" of secularism. And the refusal to accede to a sectarian argument based primarily on the particular tenets of a sect is thus mere bigotry.

That's just a slightly more sophisticated version of the whole "your 'tolerance' is really just intolerance of my intolerance" shtick, the boilerplate nonsense of bigots attempting to pose as victims. Since the writers of the "Evangelical Manifesto" explicitly condemn "posing as victims" for political gain, they might want to rethink relying on Neuhaus here for the framing of this question.

Where the manifesto ends up on the matter is this:

Our commitment is to a civil public square -- a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too.

"A civil public square" providing a "framework of what is agreed to be just and free" to "citizens of all faiths" regardless of sectarian particulars. If I were on the "$25,000 Pyramid" and Betty White said all that to me, I'd be shouting "secularism! ... separation of church and state!"

But here's my biggest problem with the document. "Contrary to widespread misunderstanding today, we Evangelicals should be defined theologically, and not politically, socially or culturally," it says on page 4. "Evangelicalism must be defined theologically and not politically; confessionally and not culturally," it repeats on page 8.

Amen and amen. But then on page 13 it says this:

We call for an expansion of our concern beyond single-issue politics, such as abortion and marriage, and a fuller recognition of the comprehensive causes and concerns of the Gospel, and of all the human issues that must be engaged in public life. Although we cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman ...

The "A-word" is out of the bag, and I don't suppose there's anything I could write here to prevent that from becoming the sole and heated topic in the comment thread below, but my point here is not the substance of the anti-abortion and anti-gay stances that the authors say they "cannot back away from." Nor do I want to get distracted by the question of whether or not "the holiness of marriage as instituted by God" would be an adequate line of argument "within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too."

My point here is the authors' perception, probably correct, that their call to move "beyond single-issue politics" needed to be followed immediately by an emphatic demonstration of their agreement with the majority of Evangelicals on those two issues. This document is not about those two things, but the authors recognize that unless they reaffirm these positions on these two issues, then none of the people they're trying to reach will listen to another word they say.

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not questioning the sincerity of the authors and signatories when they reaffirm these political stances. I am sure they are being perfectly sincere. But what is it that they are doing here with such sincerity? What is the purpose of this ritual reaffirmation?

The authors affirm that they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage in order to demonstrate that they belong, to demonstrate that their voices are legitimate voices in their community, to demonstrate that they are "Evangelicals." And what is the key, the touchstone, the Shibboleth for that demonstration? Two, and only two, political opinions. To be anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality may not be sufficient to demonstrate that one is an Evangelical, but it is necessary -- far more necessary than any given theological or confessional belief.

The manifesto's splendid language about reaching out to "the poor, the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, the socially despised, and being faithful stewards of creation and our fellow-creatures" belongs to a different category. Such opinions are acceptable, perhaps even admirable, but they are not Shibboleths that demonstrate one's valid membership in the community.

Here, then, is the "Evangelical Manifesto." It is an often persuasive and eloquent argument that political and cultural definitions of "Evangelical" are illegitimate. Yet even here -- in the midst of that argument -- the authors cannot avoid bowing to the demands of exactly those political and cultural definitions.

L.B.: Speakerphone

Left Behind, pp. 435-437

In this little section Bruce Barnes and Rayford are playing the Antichrist Game, trying to reconcile what they know about their prime suspect with the many arcane details they've compiled in their check list. Let me briefly try to explain where such details and such check lists come from.

The Bible is full of warnings not to be deceived by false prophets, false teachers or false leaders of any kind, religious or political. Read through the Bible and you will encounter, again and again, various versions of something like this:

Don't be fooled by false leaders. They deceive people with their lies, so watch out to make sure you're not taken in by them.

In many instances, the writer will use a definite generic instead of the plural, so you'll read something like this:

Don't be fooled by the false leader. He deceives people with his lies, so watch out to make sure you're not taken in by him.

Here's the fun part for prophecy enthusiasts: What if that second version doesn't simply replace the plural with the generic? What if, instead, it actually refers to a specific, actual, singular False Leader?

Let the game begin! Get a highlighter and go through the entire Bible, circling every passage that warns against this false leader. (Read carefully -- he goes by many names.) Next, go back through and write down all the descriptions those warnings provide of this false leader/teacher/prophet -- anything that might serve a clue as to this single person's singular identity. And there you have it, your very own Antichrist checklist.

Your final checklist will likely be a bit confusing. Some warnings seem to be describing the False Leader as an Israelite. Other warnings make it clear that he is a gentile. In the first part of Daniel the False Leader sounds like someone very much like Nebuchadnezzar, but in the later chapters of the book he sounds more like someone very much like Antiochus Epiphanes. Later still, John's Apocalypse makes him sound almost like some kind of Roman emperor. This is where the game gets tricky. We seem to be looking for a Jewish gentile who is part Babylonian, part Syrian, part Roman. Trying to reconcile all of those seemingly contradictory descriptions in one single person isn't easy, but that's how the game is played.

(Note: The descriptive details in your check list may seem so irreconcilably disparate or so closely bound to the various biblical authors' distinct contexts that you may even begin to suspect that these details weren't really all intend to prophesy a single, particular False Leader. But that's just crazy talk. Press on -- your speculation about the identity of the Antichrist might end up being wrong, but you won't be any wronger than everyone else who's ever played this game.)

Bruce and Rayford have an advantage over the rest of us when playing the Antichrist Game: They've got a prime suspect carefully tailored by the authors to match every detail of the check list. Yet despite that, they've still got questions, like why is the Antichrist Romanian? This is the question they seek to answer here in Chapter 24:

After the core-group meeting, Rayford Steele talked privately with Bruce Barnes and was updated on the meeting with Buck. "I can't discuss the private matters," Bruce said ...

Bruce and Buck didn't really talk about any "private matters," so I like to think that he's just saying this to give Rayford a hard time. "Hey you know that 30-something guy who's been seeing your freshman daughter? He and I talked yesterday. I can't discuss the private matters -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- but we talked for quite some time."

"I can't discuss the private matters," Bruce said, "but only one thing stands in the way of my being convinced that this Carpathia guy is the Antichrist. I can't make it compute geographically. Almost every end-times writer I respect believes the Antichrist will come out of Western Europe, maybe Greece or Italy or Turkey."

Turkey, traditionally, is not regarded as part of Western Europe, what with it's being in Asia, but if we're going to have any hope of reconciling all of the things in our Antichrist check list then we can't allow ourselves to be constrained by such tired geographic conventions.

Poor Rayford is just trying to keep up. If Bruce says the check list doesn't allow for an Antichristescu, then he'll play along.

Rayford didn't know what to make of that. "You notice Carpathia doesn't look Romanian. Aren't they mostly dark?"

"Yeah. Let me call Mr. Williams. He gave me a number. I wonder how much more he knows about Carpathia." Bruce dialed and put Buck on the speakerphone. "Ray Steele is with me."

"Hey, Captain," Buck said.

Upon reading the word "speakerphone" there I half expected confetti to drop from the ceiling as a Sousa march would begin to play and top-hatted officials would arrive to commemorate this apotheosis of LaHaye & Jenkins' weird fixation with telephony.

"We're just doing some studying here," Bruce said, "and we've hit a snag." He told Buck what they had found and asked for more information.

"Studying" makes it sound like they're translating obscure prophecies from ancient tomes rescued from the library of Alexandria. What they've actually been doing is watching CNN's replay of Nicolae's press conference and comparing his agenda to the Antichrist check list the late Rev. Billings left on his desk before he disapparated. One world government? Check. One world religion? Check. Peace treaty with Israel? Check. Babylonian/Syrian/Roman/Jewish heritage? Hmmm. ...

"Well, he comes from a town, one of the larger university towns, called Cluj, and --"

"Oh, he does? I guess I thought he was from a mountainous region, you know, because of his name."

Following the logic of the dialogue in Left Behind isn't any easier than following the logic of the plot. One bumps into these Python-worthy non-sequiturs at every turn: "Is the town in the mountains?" "No, it's a college town." Huh?

"His name?" Buck repeated, doodling it on his legal pad.

"You know, being named after the Carpathian Mountains and all. Or does that name mean something else over there?"

Buck sat up straight and it hit him! Steve had been trying to tell him he worked for Stonagal and not Carpathia. And of course all the new U.N. delegates would feel beholden to Stonagal because he had introduced them to Carpathia. Maybe Stonagal was the Antichrist! Where had his lineage begun?

The ambiguity of Steve's remark -- "my boss moves mountains" -- sets up what might have been an intriguing mystery. But at this point, 436 pages into a 468-page book, it's a bit late to be introducing a new red herring. The possibility that Stonagal, rather than Carpathia, is our Big Bad is emphatically ruled out a mere 20 pages from now. Jenkins half-heartedly tries over those few pages to milk the question for suspense, but this falls flat since he's already spent so much time establishing that Nicolae is, without a doubt, the Antichrist. Readers thus aren't thinking, "Hey, Buck's right, it could be either one of them," but rather, "Pay attention Buck, you moron, it's Nicolae."

The larger problem with the section I just quoted is that we're in the middle of a Rayford-POV section. The whole point of having Bruce and Buck's conversation on speakerphone was so that Rayford, and the reader, could hear what was being said. Yet we're also somehow able to see what Buck is doodling and to hear his unspoken thoughts. Either Jenkins has completely lost track of which character's perspective he's supposed to be writing or else Rayford has some kind of supernatural mind-reading powers. ... Hey. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's not Carpathia or Stonagal, maybe Rayford is the Antichrist!

"Well," Buck said, trying to concentrate, "maybe he was named after the mountains, but he was born in Cluj and his ancestry, way back, is Roman. That accounts for the blonde hair and blue eyes."

Then again, if this strange-but-apropos Blonde Map of Europe is to be believed, Nicolae's being from Cluj, in northwestern Romania, might also "account" for his hair color.

Bruce thanked him and asked if he would see Buck in church the next day. Rayford thought Buck sounded distracted and noncommittal. "I haven't ruled it out," Buck said.

Following that paragraph is another one of these:

 

 

------------------------------

Indicating a shift back to Buck's perspective for the following section, which begins:

Yes, Buck thought, hanging up. I'll be there all right. He wanted every last bit of input before he went to New York to write a story that could cost him his career and maybe his life. ...

So immediately after reading Rayford's perception of what Buck is thinking we switch perspectives to read what Buck was really thinking and find out that Rayford had it backwards. Again. This was mildly interesting the first time Jenkins did this trick, less so the next four or five times. Here it doesn't work at all because, again, Jenkins got confused and presented Buck's perspective as Rayford's.

If you're a book editor, you should own a copy of Left Behind to take along to your annual performance reviews. Just open to a random page, have your boss read it, and then remind them that this is why you're worth every penny and then some.

Detour to Diamonds

... It's hard not to fall apart

"Detour Thru Your Mind," The B-52s
"Detox Mansion," Warren Zevon
"Devil Inside," INXS
"Diamond Heart," Marissa Nadler
"Diamond Ring," Pedro the Lion
"Diamonds," Christine Havrilla
"Diamonds and Pearls," Prince
"Diamonds in the Sky," Husky Rescue
"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," Paul Simon
"Diamonds/One Way," Larry Norman

Hier stehe ich

Let me clarify that my earlier Protestant protest against the notion that the forgiveness of sins is exclusively available through the mediation of church officials shouldn't in any way be taken as an objection to the practice of priests hearing confession. I love the idea of confession. Whether via the Catholic model or the AA model, confessing to somebody else -- some-body else -- helps us humans accept that we've been heard. Such confessions can also help to free us from the "let's all pretend we're perfect" hypocrisy and the anxiety that fuels it. (David Bazan neatly summed up that anxiety in an album title, When They Really Get to Know You They Will Run.)

I love G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. Father Brown's claim to fame as a detective is that he understands people due to having heard, for years, the confessions of his parishioners. The beautiful thing in these stories is the little priest's generosity of spirit -- the more he comes to know and understand people, the more he loves them.

That's immensely important with regard to the anxiety mentioned above. We humans need to be loved. To be loved without being truly known doesn't count, but we're terrified that being truly known would disqualify us from being loved. That fear can make us hypocrites, turning every Sunday into a kind of awkward first date with God. Such hypocrisy is exhausting and unsatisfying, preventing us from being -- or at least from feeling -- truly known or truly loved either by God or by any of God's human surrogates here on earth.

So I rather like the idea of confession.

I do, of course, disagree -- respectfully but strenuously -- with Roman Catholic doctrine on several points. I couldn't very well be a Protestant or evangelical or Baptist if I didn't. Likewise, an orthodox Catholic will, unsurprisingly, disagree with me. It wouldn't occur to me to regard such disagreement as evidence of "anti-Baptist" or "anti-Protestant" chauvinism on their part. "Non-" =/= "anti-." And so it didn't occur to me either that my comments on feeling really, really non-Catholic during that confirmation homily could or would be interpreted as anti-Catholic.

I can't help but wonder if I stepped in it a bit because, coming from a tradition that accommodates and celebrates dissent, I'm accustomed to discussing such disagreements in a way that sounds hostile to those coming from a tradition that, you know, doesn't. If so, then I've probably just stepped in it again.

In any case, it's Thursday, so please feel free to disagree -- respectfully but strenuously. (Or to disregard this topic altogether and just consider this a Thursday flamewar open thread.)

Bombing the prize

National Public Radio's Morning Edition presented an interesting report today on the U.S. Army's internal debate: "Army Focus on Counterinsurgency Debated Within." NPR's Guy Raz interviewed a series of leading military strategists to provide a useful description of this focus on counterinsurgency:

The counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the use of minimal force, with the intent of winning the hearts and minds of a civilian population. ...

"I would say that Gen. Petraeus' promotion is an affirmation of the fact that the counterinsurgency doctrine he wrote and the counterinsurgency strategy that he implemented in Iraq was successful," says Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the Army's top experts on counterinsurgency doctrine.

... Nagl was based in Anbar province during a 2003-04 tour in Iraq, and he says it was there that he realized the U.S. Army had gotten itself tangled up in an insurgency.

...He began helping write the Army's counterinsurgency handbook, better known as Field Manual 3-24. The manual is like a roadmap for officers: It emphasizes the use of minimal force. The idea in a counterinsurgency campaign, Nagl says, is to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

... Col. Peter Mansoor, a top aide to Gen. Petraeus, also helped write the manual. Mansoor, who spoke from Baghdad, is part of Gen. Petraeus' famed brain trust of advisers, a group of officers and civilians who live and breathe counterinsurgency doctrine. "The people are the prize in a counterinsurgency operation. They are the key terrain, if you will, on which victory or defeat rests."

I appreciate this "the people are the prize" approach. It makes sense to me.

The problem for Mansoor and Nagl, however, is that this report aired on NPR following the morning's main headlines. That included a report, also from Baghdad, on the fighting in that city's largest slum, Sadr City.

That district is sometimes referred to as a "neighborhood," which is misleading. The population of Sadr City is about the same as that of Brooklyn, jammed into an area less than a quarter as large. It's home to 2.5 million people, including thousands of Shiite militiamen from a Shiite faction that U.S. forces have alternated between wooing and trying to crush (at the moment, they're in trying-to-crush mode).

For the last nine days, NPR reported, the U.S. has been hitting Sadr City with airstrikes. "Airstrikes" implies a more targeted, more intentionally discriminate approach than crude carpet bombing, but how precisely discriminate can such strikes really be when directed at a densely populated slum that's home to almost 1 of every 10 Iraqi civilians?

If "the people are the prize," then we're bombing the hell out of the prize. That seems unlikely to be an effective way to win hearts and minds or to drive a wedge between the civilian population and insurgents who live among them.

Imagine if the FBI announced a new strategy to combat the Brighton Beach-based Russian mafia. For the next nine days, they say, Brooklyn will be the focus of military airstrikes. Don't worry about all the innocent New Yorkers, the FBI says, our missiles are really quite precise, the maps and intel guiding them are flawless, and compared to Sadr City, Brooklyn is sparsely populated. The off-chance of a bit of collateral damage couldn't possibly outweigh Brooklynites' gratitude for the attempt to liberate them from the lethal criminals living in their midst. Right?

The U.S. Army's internal "debate" that NPR reports presents two competing philosophies. In old-fashioned, conventional war, the military conducts all-out conflict to destroy an enemy nation. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers. In 21st-century counterinsurgencies, the military conducts wars of liberation to free oppressed people. To that end, it conducts airstrikes against popultion centers.

I suppose what we need to do now is to sit down with the 2.5 million residents of Baghdad's most crowded district and explain to them this important philosophical distinction.

Unconfirmed

I spent Saturday morning at a confirmation ceremony, sadly confirming what I'd read here in comments about "contemporary" worship music in Catholic churches.

The word contemporary is in quotes there because, as with the evangelical species of "contemporary Christian music," the word there doesn't quite mean what it usually means. It shouldn't be hard to be contemporary. One would think that writing music that sounds like it comes from another time and place would require additional effort, but that writing music that comes from one's own time and place ought to be completely natural, yet there's nothing natural-sounding about this awkwardly "contemporary" music.

Watching Philadelphia's bishop/cardinal preside over the ceremony I was reminded of something I once heard an Episcopalian bishop say. What happened at Pentecost, he said, was a miracle and a mystery. The disciples didn't quite know how to describe what they had seen so they described it to St. Luke as something like "tongues of fire" above their heads. Luke wrote that description down and, as a result, the bishop said, "2000 years later I have to wear this funny hat."

I was also reminded of this bit from comedian Ted Alexandro:

Q: Do you renounce Satan and all his works?

A: Well, I can't really say I'm familiar with all his works ...

Anyway, I was feeling warmly ecumenical throughout most of the ceremony, until the cardinal got to the part in his homily where he urged the kids being confirmed to consider a religious vocation. We need priests, he told the children, because we need the forgiveness of sins and "without priests there can be no forgiveness of sins."

That's the sort of thing that makes me want to nail some theses to the door of the church.

* * *

This letter to the editor, which was actually published in the paper, criticizes Rep. Mike Castle for mentioning that the world's oil supply is "finite." The letter writer disagrees, writing: "There is no scientific basis for alleging that Earth has a finite supply of oil."

My point here is not (exclusively) to laugh at the crazy person who thinks that our planet is infinite. That's barking mad, of course (see photo), but I'm not so much interested in the writer's delirium as I am in the fact that such a letter was published.

This raises, for me, two questions that I really don't know the answer to:

1. Before going to work in a newsroom, I had vaguely assumed that the opinion pages operated according to the old saying, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts." Over the past seven years, however, I've seen hundreds of published examples of things that are demonstrably untrue. I'm wondering what, if any, policies or principles guide different newspapers regarding factual errors in letters to the editor and op-ed pieces. I'm not speaking here of matters subject to debate ("Politician X is doing a good job" or "Kids these days!"), but of simple matters of fact. If a letter asserts that Cleveland is the capital of Ohio, or that talc is the hardest mineral according to Moh's scale, do editorial page editors have any rules or even guidelines for dealing with such mistakes and the letters that contain them?

2. I have attended, monitored, reported on and even conducted organizing meetings for activist groups across the political spectrum. All of these groups encourage their members to write letters to the editor and the advice they give for getting such letters published is remarkably similar. That advice always encourages the writers to get their facts straight and to avoid saying anything as full-gonzo nutty as suggesting that the Earth is infinite. Is that advice wrong?

Two scams, both bad

Good piece in Sunday's paper on the PPR -- the poor people's rate, or the premium that poor and working classes are charged over and above what the rich charge one another for the same goods and services.

If that sounds to you like contentious rhetoric that overstates the case, then please read the article: "Lower income can mean higher rates."

Insurers often factor in a driver's occupation and/or education level when setting rates.

The practice is legal in Delaware and all but a handful of other states.

But critics charge there's no valid reason why a lawyer should pay less for insurance than a waitress with the same driving record, and that the practice results in minorities and low-income drivers paying more. And the difference in rates is more than spare change.

A 2007 report by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation found the premiums one company charged Florida drivers varied by as much as 200 percent, depending on a driver's occupation and education level.

The department found that under some plans, drivers "with more professional occupations (doctors, lawyers, architects), and advanced college degrees" received preferred rates while blue-collar workers and those with a high school education paid more.

"It's not obvious to me why a clerk is a worse driver than a CPA," said Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America.

Let me repeat that one line:

A 2007 report by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation found the premiums one company charged Florida drivers varied by as much as 200 percent, depending on a driver's occupation and education level.

The PPR, for auto insurance, can be as high as 200 percent. That's hundreds of dollars. Every year. Hundreds of dollars charged to people who, by definition, do not have hundreds of dollars to spare and charged because they do not have hundreds of dollars to spare.

The game is rigged.

* * *

John McCain seems to have forgotten the First Rule of Holes when it comes to his goofy proposal for a "gas tax holiday."

The Arizona senator's Big Idea is to help Americans at the pump by diverting an additional 18 cents of the price of every gallon of gas to the profits of the oil companies. The effect on what we're all paying to fill our tanks would be negligible -- far less than 18 cents a gallon. But the side effect -- an $8-$10 billion windfall for the oil companies taken directly from funds needed for highways and bridges -- would be six different kinds of bad. That side effect is so vastly disproportionate to the purported aim of this policy that it's difficult not to suspect that this side effect is really the proposal's primary purpose.

You'd think at least one of McCain's advisers would point out that transferring billions of dollars from the public coffers directly into the pockets of ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell seems like a dumb thing to do while running for office. Trying to spin such corporate welfare as help for working families just adds insult to injury.

But McCain is defiantly proud of his hole and he's determined to keep digging. Economists have uniformly panned McCain's proposal. In the words of MIT's Joseph Doyle, economists "are as close to unanimous as it gets in viewing the proposal as a horrible idea.” Undeterred, McCain struck back: "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," McCain said.

What more evidence do you need that this man is simply a carbon copy of George W. Bush? That McCain would stoop this low, cloaking himself in populism while sneering behind his hand that the people are too stupid to realize his shell game won't help them, just his corporate masters, just goes to demonstrate that ...

Wait, what? It was who?

You're kidding.

Well, that's just ... it's ...

Is there a word that conveys both extreme disappointment and outrage? Because that's the word I need here.

L.B.: Geheimkode

Left Behind, pp. 431-435

Buck spent Saturday holed up in the otherwise empty Chicago bureau office, getting a head start on his article on the theory behind the disappearances. His mind continually swirled, forcing him to think about Carpathia and what he would say in that piece about how the man seemed to be a perfect parallel to biblical prophecy. Fortunately, he could wait on writing that until after the big day on Monday.

Reading Left Behind can be a bit like those picture-puzzles from Highlights magazine, the ones where you're supposed to circle everything that's wrong. Let's try that with the paragraph above.

We'll circle "otherwise empty," since Global Weekly's production schedule couldn't possibly allow for everyone to have a 9-to-5, M-F work schedule. (I suppose many of them could have Saturdays off if GW goes to print on Fridays, but that can't be the case since we know the executive editor just spent all of Friday hanging out with Bruce Barnes.) "Getting a head start" gets circled, since The Event is now 12 days past, and Buck's what-happened? follow-up is already hopelessly late. Ditto for "he could wait on writing that." Circling "continually" as unnecessary is probably nit-picking, though there's definitely something off about a sentence in which our hero's own mind forces him to think. I'd also circle "big day" as Buck's chosen term for his meeting the following Monday rather than for the much bigger big day of two Mondays ago that he's supposedly sitting there writing about.

I'm still probably missing something there, but I've covered the page with too much red crayon to find anything more.

It's been an astonishing 14 pages since the last phone call, so you can guess what comes next:

Around lunchtime, Buck reached Steve Plank at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

The conversation that follows is a reprise of the previous phone call between these two (see "Super Powers"). This time, however, they switch to speaking in code halfway through.

First, though, they have to deal with the Hattie Question, and I'm actually going to try to defend this exchange as an almost plausible bit of dialogue:

"I'll be there Monday morning," he said, "but I'm not inviting Hattie Durham."

"Why not? It's a small request, friend-to-friend."

"You to me?"

"Nick to you."

Buck is in an awkward spot here. He can't just tell Steve, "Look, I've changed my mind about helping those two get together because I just found out that he's the spawn of Satan, evil incarnate, the great ten-horned beast of the apocalypse." So instead he just gets snippy and starts acting like it offends his morals to allow two unmarried adults to spend time together with no one there to chaperone except the Security Council and the national press corps.

"So now it's Nick, is it? Well, he and I are not close enough for that familiarity, and I don't provide female companionship even to my friends."

"Not even for me?"

This is good strategy on Steve's part. If your friend becomes inexplicably indignant and starts using words like "familiarity" or "provide female companionship," you could try to point out that no one has suggested anything unseemly or improper, or you could just try to defuse the situation with a joke. Buck's response, however, is not encouraging:

"If I knew you would treat her with respect, Steve, I'd set you up with Hattie."

That "if" there is an unsubtle dig at Steve, who thus reasonably loses his patience with his friend, saying:

"I'll ask her myself, Buck, you prude."

This reading is probably a bit of a stretch. We're probably supposed to view Buck here as legitimately and righteously indignant rather than as flustered into semi-incoherence. The latter would make him more human and thus more appealing, but that's not how the authors tend to think about their heroes.

Either way we read this Buck has managed to tick off his friend, so it takes a bit of chutzpah for him to segue right into asking for a favor. Buck wants another "exclusive" interview with Nicolae:

"You know I'm going to do the complete piece on the guy. He needs this."

"If you watched TV yesterday, you know he doesn't need anything. We need him."

"Do we? Have you run into any schools of thought that link him to end-times events in the Bible?"

Steve Plank did not respond.

How could he respond? That question is almost a perfectly crafted conversation killer. It doesn't allow for a reasonable response.

You can try this yourself sometime. On a train or airplane and don't want to have to make conversation with a chatty seatmate? Just respond to whatever comment they make by asking, "Have you run into any schools of thought that link this to end-times events in the Bible?" Political campaigns are exempt from No-Call-List restrictions, but here is a useful tool for making sure they never phone again. I'd imagine this would also be effective for rebuffing unwanted attention at a bar. (The potential danger to this strategy being the remote but horrifying possibility that someone might respond, "Why, yes! Yes I have run into schools of thought that link this to end-times events in the Bible!" At which point you'd be doubly screwed.)

Steve's silence here, however, is not the shocked and perplexed silence such a question would prompt in real life -- not the semi-panicked pause of a sane person realizing they're dealing with someone in the opposite category. Steve's silence here instead is meant to be ominous and laden with meaning.

"Steve?"

"I'm here."

"Well, have you? Anybody that thinks he might fit the bill for one of the villains of the book of Revelation?"

Steve said nothing.

"Hello, Steve?"

"I'm still here."

"C'mon, old buddy. You're the press secretary. You know all. How's he going to respond if I hit him with that?"

Steve was still silent.

This ominous silence is meant to indicate that Steve knows exactly what Buck is talking about and that he's afraid to answer because Buck's questions are too close to what he knows to be the truth.

So OK then, let's consider how that could be possibly be true.

Buck has spent the better part of the last 72 hours getting a crash course in PMD prophecy theory from Rayford, Chloe and Bruce in turn. They've outlined this interpretation of the book of Revelation and explained to him what they believe it prophesies about a coming Antichrist. Steve hasn't heard any of that, yet here he seems to know everything that Buck does about the end times, the Antichrist and the entire PMD checklist. Where did Steve learn all that?

There seem to be only one place he could have learned it: from Nicolae himself. I'm trying to imagine how that conversation could have gone ...

NC: Welcome, Mr. Plank. Bienvenue. Bienvenido. Wilkomm ...

SP: Just the English is fine here in the office, Mr. Secretary-General.

NC: Please, call me "Nick." Now, your office is down the hall there on the left. Just ask Chaim if you need any supplies. Oh, and there is just one more thing you should know. I am the Antichrist.

SP: I'm sorry, the what?

NC: The Antichrist. The Beast? One of the villains of the book of Revelation? You have not heard of this?

SP: I ... I ... the book of ...?

NC: Ah, I see you will have some catching up to do. Chaim? Please fetch some copies of Tim LaHaye's non-fiction books for our new friend here.

Hmm. My imagined rendition of this conversation hardly seems plausible, but how else could it have gone?

Anyway, back in the novel itself Buck still can't get an answer out of Steve so he tries a slightly different approach:

"Don't do this to me, Steve. I'm not saying that's where I am or that anybody who knows anything or who matters thinks that way. I'm doing the piece on what was behind the disappearances, and you know that takes me into all kinds of religious realms. Nobody anywhere has drawn any parallels here?"

Yes, that's much more tactful. "I'm not saying" your boss is the Great Beast from the Abyss, I'm merely asking how he'd respond if somebody else were to suggest that he is.

This time when Steve said nothing, Buck merely looked at his watch, determined to wait him out. About 20 seconds after a loud silence, Steve spoke softly. "Buck, I have a two-word answer for you. Are you ready?"

"I'm ready."

"Staten Island."

"Are you tellin' me that --?"

"Don't say the name, Buck! You never know who's listening."

"So you're threatening me with --"

"I'm not threatening. I'm warning. Let me say I'm cautioning you."

This is followed by Buck reminding his friend of his reputation as a tough "bird dog" reporter who never backs down from threats or warnings. Steve doesn't contradict him. Nor does he point out that the very example they're discussing -- reporter Eric Miller's suspicious "suicide" leap off the Staten Island Ferry -- is itself one of several stories Buck has helped to bury in just the past week due to his fearful response to threats and warnings.

Here again what is said about a character trumps that character's actual behavior. Thus, for LaHaye & Jenkins, this song --

Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away away.
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat.
Bravest of the braaaave, Sir Robin!

-- should be taken as proof that Brave Sir Robin was, in fact, quite courageous and gallant. This is primarily Very Bad Writing, but I have a theory that it's somehow also related to Very Bad Theology -- specifically to the author's understanding of "faith" as wholly separate from, and irrelevant to, "works."

The dialogue that follows is a delicious font of unintentional humor. Buck attempts to continue questioning Steve by eaking-spay in ode-cay.

Buck began scribbling furiously on a yellow pad. "Fair enough," he said, writing, Carpathia or Stonagal resp. for Eric Miller? "What I want to know is this: If you think I should stay off the ferry, is it because of the guy behind the wheel, or because of the guy who supplies his fuel?"

"The latter," Steve said without hesitation.

Buck circled Stonagal. "Then you don't think the guy behind the wheel is even aware of what the fuel distributor does on his behalf."

"Correct."

"But if he found out about it?"

"He'd deal with it."

"That's what I expect to see soon."

"I can't comment on that."

It's impossible for me to read that without picturing Buck making Dr. Evil air quotes with his fingers when he says things like "fuel distributor." The best part, of course, is that they're worried that Carpathia, Stonagal or Todd-Cothran might be listening in, so they adopt this convoluted way of talking that would only make sense to each other and to Carpathia, Stonagal and Todd-Cothran. Nothing they're saying would be the least bit confusing to any of the people they're trying to conceal their meaning from. This makes as much sense as it would have if the U.S. had replaced our Navajo code-talkers in World War II with people who spoke German.

But while nothing they're saying would confuse the possibly eavesdropping conspirators, it does succeed in confusing Buck.

"Can you tell me who you really work for?"

"I work for who it appears to you I work for."

What in the world did that mean? Carpathia or Stonagal? How could he get Steve to say on a phone from within the Plaza that might be bugged?

"You work for the Romanian businessman?"

"Of course."

Buck nearly kicked himself. That could be either Carpathia or Stonagal. "You do?" he said, hoping for more.

So I pick up the ball, I throw it to first, and who catches it?

"My boss moves mountain, doesn't he?" Steve said.

"He sure does," Buck said, circling Carpathia this time. "You must be pleased with everything going on these days."

"I am."

Buck scribbled, Carpathia. End times. Antichrist? "And you're telling me straight up that the other issue I raised is dangerous but also hogwash."

"Total roll in the muck."

"And I shouldn't even broach the subject with him, in spite of the fact that I'm a writer who covers all the bases and asks the tough questions?"

"If I thought you would consider mentioning it, I could not encourage the interview or the story."

There's the deal: access in exchange for Buck's agreement not to ask certain questions. Buck agrees. He always does. But he's still "a writer who covers all the bases and asks the tough questions." It says so right there in the book, so it must be true.

Creep to Cruel

Hey remember this? I think we were on the letter C ...

Now it's hard to say now if he's only stupid or smart
When he crawled through the door
And poured out more
of his creeping-Jesus heart

"Creep," Radiohead
"Crescent City," Emmylou Harris
"Cricket," Thee Spivies
"Crimes of Paris," Elvis Costello & The Attractions
"Criminal," Fiona Apple
"Criminal World," David Bowie
"Crimson and Clover," Tommy James & The Shondells
"Crimson and Clover," Joan Jett
"Criticism as Inspiration," Pedro the Lion
"Cross That Line," Randy Stonehill
"Crucifixion Cruise," The Hold Steady
"Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World," Johnny Clegg & Savuka

"Cross That Line" is D-grade Randy Stonehill. It's the sort of song that seems like it was written to gain the approval of evangelical youth ministers looking for an unthreatening "CCM" soundtrack for the kids they've been hired to keep safe within the bubble. I can't complain too much about that tactic, since it seems to have worked. Thanks to songs like that one, we kids had permission to listen to his other, better music. I wore out the vinyl on my copy of Uncle Randy's Equator and despite (or because of) the dueling bagpipes and Ethel Merman impressions, I caught a glimpse there of something subversive. In that setting, of course, the threshhold for "subversive" was pretty low, but I'm still grateful. And if boilerplate, disposable CCM tracks like "Cross That Line" somehow helped to allow for that, then I suppose I'm grateful for those songs as well.

Two-for-two

A couple of stories of people getting it right:

1. "Nun offers mercy, but robber gets jail"

Sister Muriel Curran faced the man who shoved her to the ground and ripped away her purse three years ago. She quoted Scripture. She thanked him for the guilty plea that spared her a trial. And she asked a Baltimore County judge not to send him to prison.

"There is possibility and hope -- I believe in it, it's what I'm about -- in rehabilitation and a future," the 78-year-old nun said yesterday, explaining that she has difficulty believing in a penal system that sometimes leaves criminals worse off than before they went to prison. ...

Asked after the hearing what had inspired her unusual approach to the man who left her with broken bones and deep bruises, unable to fully raise one arm and incapable of living on her own any longer, Sister Curran answered simply.

"The Gospel," she said. "You hear that cliche -- 'What would Jesus do?' -- but if you live it, you've got to believe it." ...

Yesterday, on the morning he was scheduled to go to trial, Dodson pleaded guilty to one count of robbery. The decision spared the nun the trip to the witness stand that she said she would have dreaded.

Reading from a card, Sister Curran quoted a letter in the Bible from the Prophet Jeremiah: "For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope."

Turning to face Dodson, she said, "That is my hope for you, Charles. I would like to give that to you."

2. You may have heard about the "virtual slavery" case of the John Nash Pickle company in Tulsa, Okla. Journalist John Bowe tells this story in his book Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. I haven't read his book, but I just listened to a recounting of this story, including interviews with Bowe, on public radio's This American Life. This account, presented by host Ira Glass, also includes interviews with many of the 52 Indian steelworkers exploited by the company as well as with the man who first began to help them -- a lay minister at the local Pentecostal church named Mark Massey.

Once Massey realized how these men were being exploited, he provided a few of the men with housing to get them out of the miserable company barracks and he met with company managers to try to reclaim the mens' passports, which the company had confiscated. Massey quickly found himself in way over his head with little idea of what to do, but he didn't let that stop him. He hired the only lawyer he knew. He moved the rest of the Indian workers into his own house. He organized churches and the local Indian community to provide meals.

Here's what Massey told Ira Glass:

"Our churches have been good to help foreign missions, but when the foreign comes into our own district, our own comfort area, we're not always ready to accept. ... I know we can't help everybody but I think everybody's given a little portion that they can do. And I know we can't turn around and change the world tomorrow, but just what's put in our little field here, our little corner, I feel like we're responsible for, so I felt like that was put in my corner. ..."

The whole This American Life story is about half an hour. It's worth the time. It's not every day that you hear a story that includes among its heroes a lawyer, a Pentecostal minister and a government bureaucracy. Nor is it every day that you get to hear a story with 52 happy endings.