slacktivist

Farewell Sidd Finch

"The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" was one of the greatest April Fools pranks of all time. For that, and for scores of other reasons, this is sad news:

George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose exploits in editing and writing seesawed between belles lettres and the witty accounts he wrote of his various madcap attempts to slip into other people's high-profile careers, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.

Plimpton's writing gave other "ordinary" people a glimpse of what it would be like to be an NFL quarterback, a professional boxer or the member of a world-class symphony orchestra. I only wish he could write about this latest adventure -- a radical new step in "participatory journalism" that would prove even more interesting than Paper Lion.

Say hello to my little friend

Early on in Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, while Al is dissecting the sloppy and inaccurate Bernard Goldberg, there's a strange little aside.

Goldberg cites as an example of media bias, an off-air comment from a CBS producer who called Gary Bauer -- the former head of the Family Research Council and longshot Republican candidate for president -- a "little nut from the Christian group." Here's the aside:

(Full disclosure -- Gary's a friend of mine, is small, a Christian, and not a nut.)

Al Franken is friends with Gary Bauer? It doesn't seem like he's joking, but maybe I'm missing something. Maybe Al's just "kidding on the square."

But later on, Al is talking to President Bush's Bible-study buddy, Commerce Secretary Don Evans. According to Newsweek's Howard Fineman, in the article "Bush and God," Evans and Bush spent a year studying the New Testament book of Acts.

Franken: "So, you know what Acts is about?"

Evans: "No."

That part is hilarious (Jeanne has the full excerpt at Body and Soul), but so is Evans' weird claim that Acts relates "Jesus' Parable of the Talents." Don, buddy, you want parables, read the Gospels. This is the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus only shows up for the first nine verses which -- and this is Franken's point -- it would be hard not to realize if you really spent a year studying the book with your good friend George.

(Full disclosure -- the first eight chapters of Acts were the focus of a Bible Quiz Tournament I competed in during eighth grade at Timothy Christian School. We got our butts kicked by the team from Lancaster Mennonite. I only managed to buzz in first for one answer: "Theophilus.")

Here's Franken:

It was a complete fluke that I had any clue at all about Talents. Last year my son, Joe, had been assigned some New Testament readings in his mostly Jewish private high school and had to write a short paper on, yep, Talents. He couldn't understand it and came to me. I couldn't make any sense of it either, so I called Gary Bauer. That's right. ... As I said, Gary and I are friends. Honestly. It's a long story. But we like each other. And what better guy to explain a parable in Matthew? (Not Acts.) Gary wasn't home, so his wife Carol, who's also a friend (though I think she has some doubts about me), explained Talents.

So they really do seem to be friends. "It's a long story," Franken says. Some day I hope he shares it with the rest of us.

As odd as this is, I find it strangely hopeful.

(NOTE: The link above for Fineman's article takes you to what seems to be the English section of a Danish site about ... something Danish. MSNBC.com's link for the Newsweek story is dead, and this came up on Google. You gotta love the Web.)

Take the bait or take the pledge

"Just watch me." That was how President Bush responded when asked how he planned to spend $170 million in an uncontested primary campaign.

The Bush campaign will likely spend a good chunk of that money attacking his Democratic challengers. He has enough money to attack them all, but that won't be necessary, and it's not how this nasty little game is played.

The key to this low road is to go after the frontrunner(s) -- especially whoever appears like they would be a formidable opponent in the general election. Gov. Gray Davis -- a Democrat -- practically wrote the playbook on this. Davis' most formidable opponent was former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. He ran ads attacking Riordan during the Republican primary, helping marginal (and eminently beatable) candidate Bill Simon to win that contest, and thus helping himself to win the general election.

Davis' hardball (sleazeball) strategy was particularly effective because the California GOP is a notorious bunch of crabs in a bucket. Like Tolkien's trolls in The Hobbit they were all-too-easy to pit against one another. All Gandalf-the-Gray Davis had to do was stick to the shadows and occasionally prod along the infighting, waiting for sunrise.

The Bush campaign has to be hoping that the 10 contenders in the Democratic primary are as big a bunch of suckers as Bill Simon and the California Republican Party. Bush -- or his surrogates -- will likely spend some of that $170 million the way Davis did, with TV and radio ads attacking (for now) Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John Kerry.

The most effective surrogates for the Bush campaign, however, are not conservative advocacy groups, like the despicable Club for Growth. The surrogates Team Bush really covets are those Democratic challengers who are trailing in the polls.

For every dollar spent on attack ads, the Bush campaign will likely spend a dollar on "opposition research," digging up -- or inventing -- the dirt on his least preferred Democratic opponents. The best way to make public whatever his people find/concoct is to leak this to a cooperative Democratic campaign that is willing to work with Bush to tear down the hopefuls ahead of them in the polls.

A key factor in the 2004 election will be how such candidates -- and their supporters -- react when they are given the opportunity to shift the focus of their criticism away from Bush and onto their fellow Democrats. If, like Bill Simon or Tolkien's trolls, they take the bait, they will end up sharing a similar fate -- a mossy relic forever on the political sidelines.

Keep in mind that a sitting president cannot single you out for attack without dragging you up to his level. Whenever the Bush campaign attacks any challenger, it is an opportunity for every challenger to "act presidential" by responding to that attack forcefully.

All of which is why I like the idea of this pledge being promoted at Interesting Times.

"Having George W. Bush as President has been and will continue to be a disaster," the pledge begins, and therefore:

We will not let our partisanship towards any particular candidate for President cause us to lose sight of this basic truth. As such, we pledge ourselves not to become enablers of any campaign designed to divide us in our struggle to remove Bush from power.

A good idea and an important point.

Happy Birthday

On Sept. 26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born.

I know "The Waste Land" is regarded as his masterpiece, but my favorite is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." There's a novel's worth of character and theme packed into those 130+ lines. when I first read this poem in college, I thought it was terrific. Now it seems more terrifying, and more fearfully rich the older I get.

It's fun to imagine which would have bothered Eliot more: That his great plays "Murder in the Cathedral" and "The Cocktail Party" have scarcely ever been produced in the last 30 years? Or that his slightest, most frivolous work was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Weber, of all people, and subsequently played on Broadway for 30 years? (It could be worse -- "Quartos: The Musical!")

Since T.S. Eliot is regarded as one of the foremost writers of the 20th century, and since he was also a Christian, he makes a good candidate for a snarky-but-fun little game I like to call "Torment the Mustard Seed."

The Mustard Seed is a chain of "Christian book stores" in the Philadelphia area. You may not have a Mustard Seed near where you live, but you've likely got something similar, probably called something like "Family Christian Books" or "The Fisherman's Net" or worse. Despite the name "book store," most of the floor space in these shops tends to be taken up with knick-knackery, Precious Moments, greeting cards, WWJD bracelets, fish magnets, etc. Plus a very few books.

"Torment the Mustard Seed" is a very simple game. Pick some great work of Christian literature -- Donne's Holy Sonnets or The Brothers Karamazov, say -- then call up your local Christian book store and ask if they have a copy. Try to seem surprised when they tell you they don't have it -- "This is a Christian book store, isn't it?"

In honor of Eliot's birthday, why not give your local Christian book store a call and ask for a copy of his Christianity and Culture.

The Ditech Factor

I don't like the Ditech Guy.

You probably don't either. Then again, I'm not sure we're supposed to like him. The mortgage lender seems to be taking the annoying-is-better-than-ignored advertising strategy in their omnipresent ads on CNN. (Is this a regional thing, or does everyone have to endure a barrage of Ditech ads whenever watching cable news?) I suppose this strategy works, or else -- like spammers -- they wouldn't do it.

The problem with the Ditech ads isn't only that they're shrill and overbroad, but that they just ... keep ... coming ... at ... you. They're inescapable, but after a half-hour or so of CNN all I want to do is escape them.

All of which gives me hope for the 2004 election.

George W. Bush is raising millions upon millions of dollars for his campaign. He's on his way to surpassing his goal of $170 million just for the primary campaign -- a contest in which he's running unopposed. The conventional wisdom is that more money means more TV spots, and more TV spots means victory at the polls. But George W. Bush has raised so much more money than any previous candidate that I'm not sure the conventional wisdom applies.

How on earth do you spend $170 million? One thing you do is buy ads. Lots and lots and lots of ads.

During 2004, George W. Bush will be just as inescapable a presence on TV as the Ditech Guy. And therein lies his problem.

Sure, $170 million will let the Bush campaign air tons of attack ads -- more than the Democratic candidate will be able to afford to refute. But the sheer volume of ads will itself become a story -- one that creates free media interview opportunities for his opponent.

And no matter how effective Bush's TV ads are, if he runs as many as he can afford, the barrage may -- like the Ditech ads -- end up alienating more people than it attracts. Bush's campaign ads will become the TV equivalent of spam.

Potential conversation from October, 2004:

"Who is that whiny guy in all those ads?"

"The Ditech Guy?"

"No, the other one."

"President Bush?"

"Yeah, him. I hate him."

Krugman and Qoholeth

Brad DeLong posts what he says is his all-time favorite Paul Krugman essay.

In it, Krugman exposes former House Majority Leader Dick Armey as a liar and a fool. You probably already knew both things to be true about Armey, but go read the essay anyway.

Krugman's topic is actually the effect and the policy implications of wealth inequality. What I found most helpful and compelling in the essay is his parable of two different simple societies and the different policies that each should enact to deal with inequality in accord with prudence and justice.

In Ecclesiastes 9:11, the Teacher writes:

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

Any economic theory or public policy that fails to account for this is not merely false and foolish, it is inhuman.

A backwards "K" at the U.N.

After two days of meetings at the United Nations, the Bush administration came away with no new pledges of international troops or funds to assist with the securing and rebuilding of Iraq.

White House officials hastened to say that this wasn't a failure because the administration never actually tried to recruit new aid. "The president did not come here to ask people for troops," one unnamed aide said.

If you don't actually try, the reasoning seems to be, then you can't fail. Bush didn't swing and miss in his meetings with other heads of state, we are told. He just never took the bat off his shoulder.

So he went down looking. That's still an out.

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

Suzanne Fields of The Washington Times wonders why Johnny Cash's deep Christian faith is widely respected, while President Bush's is viewed with suspicion. After all, she says, both "were strongly influenced by the evangelistic preaching of Billy Graham."

That's true. But it's about the only similarity one can draw between the two. George W. Bush views himself as God's hand-picked president -- a cowboy in a white hat. He couldn't be more different from the Man in Black.

Look at one of Cash's biggest hits, "Folsom Prison Blues," in which he identifies with the outcast, the prisoner, the evildoer who "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die." From his cell he hears the train whistle and thinks of the "rich folks eatin' / In a fancy dining car," obliviously passing by in blissful comfort. Which group do you think Bush identifies with?

Johnny Cash took sides. So does George W. Bush. And they chose opposite sides.

Nowhere is this clearer than in "The Man in Black," in which Cash makes more than just a fashion statement:

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.

I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.

I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.

And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin' that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believin' that we all were on their side.

In line after line of that song Cash is taking sides. And in nearly every case, he takes a stand against something that George W. Bush stands for. Yes, as Fields points out, Bush and Cash both speak out for "the words that Jesus said" -- but those words seem to have very different implications for the two men.

If there's one thing President Bush insists upon -- one thing that he wants the world to know about him -- it is that he has a "good heart." (See here for more on Bush's obsession with "good-heartedness.")

Cash never made such a claim. "I keep a close watch on this heart of mine," he sang in "I Walk the Line." He always viewed his own heart with a wary suspicion, serving more often than not as the anti-hero of his own songs. Like many a great bluesman, Cash sang of faithlessness -- but that faithlessness was his own. He was never a victim crying for pity, but a sinner crying out for grace.

Bush declares himself a champion of unquestioned and unquestionable goodness, battling the evildoers. Cash declares himself an evil man, battling to be good. Cash's faith was like that of the man who said to Jesus, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief."

Suzanne Fields wants us to think that George W. Bush is just like Johnny Cash, but the difference between the two is as great as the difference between pride and humility, between white and black.

Friedman, Will and Rumsfeld

Something strange happened last night on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I suspect the work of pranksters who somehow hacked into the system.

At the Times these mischief-makers deleted Tom Friedman's column -- perhaps the next installment of his "because we could" argument for war on Iraq -- replacing it with what appears to be a column by Arianna Huffington.

Over at the Post, meanwhile, the hackers supplanted George Will's next attempt to smear Wesley Clark with an essay that may have been written by Alabama Gov. Bob Riley. Plus they've inserted onto the op-ed page a hilarious parody attributed to "Donald Rumsfeld," in which the supposed Secretary of Defense argues with a straight face that "Today in Iraq we are operating on the same guiding principle that has brought success to our effort in ..." get this "... Afghanistan."

If it turns out that hackers aren't actually responsible for all this, then I find myself in the extraordinary position of wanting to commend both Friedman and Will on the same day.

Friedman "connects the dots" between America's military "war on terror" with our leaders' failure to even try to improve the lives of billions of desperately impoverished people around the world. He points in particular to the breakdown in negotiations at the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun, Mexico.

"I would bet any amount of money," Friedman writes, "that when it came to deciding the Bush team's position at Cancun, no thought was given to its impact on the war on terrorism."

He favorably cites Clyde Prestowitz -- author of Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions -- and even includes an Arianna-ish rant against "a tax break for any American who wants to buy a gas-guzzling Humvee."

Friedman's thesis is bolstered by another article in the Times, by Thom Shanker:

The United States maintained its dominance in the international arms market last year, especially in sales to developing nations, according to a new congressional report.

The United States was the leader in total worldwide sales in 2002, with about $13.3 billion, or 45.5 percent of global conventional weapons deals, a rise from $12.1 billion in 2001.

We're No. 1 with a bullet -- with $13.3 billion worth of bullets, actually. And what better way to ensure international stability than by making sure that every regime with money to spend is armed to the teeth?

Will's column really does read like something by Bob Riley -- a conservative, congenitally anti-tax Republican who's been dope-slapped by reality into arguing for adequate, fair taxation in order to fund basic, necessary services such as education.

Will's instinct, like George W. Bush's, is to embrace tax cuts whenever possible. But, unlike the president, Will recognizes a few values other than tax cuts for the wealthy -- values such as fiscal responsibility, equality of opportunity, access to decent education and security for the elderly. He doesn't seem to realize how New Deal-ish that list sounds.

Because of values such as these, Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn pushed through a tax increase to balance his state's budget and keep the schools open. The Bush/Rove/Norquist wing of Guinn's own Republican Party has responded by trying to organize the governor's recall. This exposes a growing fissure in the GOP -- the split between the "drown it in a bathtub," anti-government tax-cutters and the fiscal conservatives who believe government has at least some legitimate role to play. By defending Guinn, Will is taking sides in this debate, and he's siding with the grown-ups.

Will maintains his trademark pompous sneer, but for all that he comes across sounding rather like one of those Republicans for Howard Dean. No, really. He even closes with this, from Guinn:

"You can't," Guinn insists, "cut your way to prosperity. ... I don't like raising taxes any more than the next person. But I dislike taxes less than I dislike shutting down schools."

Thanks to the Bush administration, this is precisely the choice facing most governors in America today.

As for Rumsfeld, his piece, sadly, is not intended as parody. But it does read that way. He seems to be taking a cue from Winston Churchill, who said he was confident that history would treat him well because, "I intend to write it."

But Churchill had two distinct advantages over Rumsfeld's revisionist attempt at writing history's first draft: 1) Churchill was a talented writer, and 2) he had most of the facts on his side.

Rumsfeld desperately argues that everything in Iraq is going according to plan. Assuming -- against all evidence to the contrary -- that there ever was a plan, it's simply too much to believe that it outlined the shifting, faltering, flip-flopping policies that the administration has embraced over the past five months.

Rummy even includes an audacious attempt to spin America's failing unilateralism into a more enlightened alternative to the neo-colonial nation-building occurring (far more successfully, by any measure) in Kosovo and East Timor. He actually tries to argue that it would be a bad thing if Baghdad came more to resemble the East Timorese capital. Sure, women can't go outside in Baghdad for fear of being raped or killed, but Diu "is now one of the most expensive cities in Asia" where the cost of "local restaurants are out of reach for most Timorese."

Rather than make Baghdad look like these places, he aims to make it look more like Kabul.

President Clinton recently received a hero's welcome during his visit to Kosovo. The Afghan capital remains far too dangerous a place for President Bush to risk a visit, but if he did go there, does Rumsfeld really imagine he would be warmly received as a liberator?

If we take Rumsfeld at his word -- that he has a "plan" to model Iraq on the "successful" nation-building in Afghanistan, what does that mean? Apparently it means he plans to invade some other country next spring to make us forget about Iraq and what a lawless, anarchic failure it has become.

Hide the beer, the pastor's here

"It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; [Islam], not Christianity, is the teetotal religion." -- C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

In this intriguing article in New York magazine, Craig Horowitz explores the strange alliance between pro-Israel Jewish groups and conservative American evangelicals.

Without realizing it, Horowitz relates one howling faux pas from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews:

"More and more Jews see the Evangelical community as a strategic ally for Israel. ... In fact, the Evangelicals may now be seen as even more important allies than the American Jewish community itself. But are Jews willing to have a beer with them? I'm not so sure."

A beer!?! Eckstein has spent more than 20 years working with evangelical Christians in America and he still doesn't realize that evangelicals don't drink beer?

This is a religious subculture that -- despite its claims of a strictly "literal" hermeneutic -- believes that Jesus and his disciples drank non-alcoholic grape juice at the Last Supper. They believe Christ's first miracle was turning water into Welch's at the wedding in Cana.

Drinking beer will get you kicked out of Biola, Bethel, Westmont, Calvin, Liberty and just about any other evangelical institution.

It Horowitz had asked Jerry Falwell, Richard Land, Tim LaHaye or any of the other right-wing evangelicals about sitting down to "have a beer" they would have explained that they can't do that because the Bible teaches them it's a sin.

Horowitz would, one hopes, treat such a claim with a responsible journalist's skepticism, something like: "The reverend explained that he did not drink beer because his interpretation of the Bible teaches it is a sin."

It would be a problem if Horowitz just accepted this teetotalling claim credulously, repeating it without qualification, as in: "The reverend does not drink beer, which is forbidden by the Christian Bible."

I bring this up because Horowitz, like far too many journalists, is just this naive and credulous when relating these evangelicals' bizarre theories about the End of the World. For example:

Many Jews believed that what the Christians really wanted was to convert them. Or to persuade all of them to move to Israel as part of some devious plan to hasten the coming of the end of days as laid out in the New Testament.

Or, even worse:

Evangelicals believe in the end of days as much as they believe in everything else in the Bible. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have written a collection of novels called the “Left Behind” series that use the Bible’s apocalyptic events as their core.

At one point Horowitz even uses the word "biblical" as a synonym for "Manichaen":

George W. Bush ... is a born-again, Scripture-loving Christian who sees the world in stark, almost biblical, terms (“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”).

On what basis is Horowitz deciding that this "stark," dualistic view is "almost biblical"?

The problem with all of this is that Jerry Falwell spouts his theories of "the end of days as laid out in the New Testament" and Horowitz simply passes this on, uncritically, as the literal gospel truth. He accepts -- without a hint of skepticism -- that LaHaye's sensational brand of 19th-century Darbyism is "in the Bible" just because LaHaye claims it is.

Really? Ironsides' charts and Hal Lindsey's apocryphal checklists are in the Bible? Where? To put it in good evangelical language -- show me chapter and verse. (Perhaps it's in the same chapter as the verse that says "Thou shalt not drink Yuengling Lager, for verily it is a frothy and refreshing abomination unto the Lord.")

The only Bible where you'll find LaHaye's weird apocalyptic fantasies is a Scofield Reference -- and that's only in the convoluted and arbitrary footnotes below the text. Nowhere is this vision "laid out in the New Testament." It is the bastard child of "premillennial dispensationalism" -- a tortured and torturous hermeneutic that carves up Scripture like a veg-o-matic and functions as a kind of American evangelical cabala.

"Secrets of Bible prophecy revealed" read the advertisements for the thousands of "prophecy seminars" promoting this nonsense every week across the country. "Secrets ... revealed" -- can you get any more gnostic than that?

We often refer to evangelical Christians as "conservative" -- which accurately reflects their cultural and political views. But there is nothing "conservative" about the obsession with prophecy theories that has twisted so much of the American church.

It would be nice if journalists stopped pretending these people speak for all Christians everywhere.