(That's Thursday Flamewar Open Thread, of course.)
So who said the following, and in response to whom?
"It is not probably prudent ... in today's world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country."
So yes, I voted this morning. Had I realized that the past six weeks would be like this I would never have complained so much in the past about our primary being too late to make any difference.
Our polls close at 8 p.m. or, rather, when the last person in line by 8 p.m. finishes voting -- and there will be lines.
I've seen dozens of opinion polls in the past week. Taken together, they point to a single undeniable trend, so let me make a bold prediction: John McCain will win the Republican primary here in Pennsylvania.
You heard it here first.
As far as the Democratic side, the only clear trend the polls seem to agree on is that the candidates' names are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
In any case, starting tomorrow we shouldn't have to put up with another visit from Chris Matthews et. al. any time soon. That's something every Pennsylvanian can agree to celebrate.
Here's one of my favorite scenes from John Ford's film adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Muley and his son confront The Man who has arrived to evict them from their Oklahoma farm. Muley, played by John Qualen (the condemned sad sack fom His Girl Friday), clings to his shotgun:
MULEY: You mean get off my own land?THE MAN: Now don't go blaming me. It ain't my fault.
SON: Whose fault is it?
THE MAN: You know who owns the land -- the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
MULEY: Who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp'ny?
THE MAN: It ain't nobody. It's a company.
SON: They got a pres'dent, ain't they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?
THE MAN: But it ain't his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
SON: All right. Where's the bank?
THE MAN: Tulsa. But what's the use of picking on him? He ain't anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!
MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?
A host of demagogues these days are eager to answer Muley's question. "Want to know who to blame?" they ask, "We'll tell you."
"Shoot the Mexicans," says Lou Dobbs. "Shoot the lazy blacks on welfare," says Grover Norquist. "Shoot the atheists," says James Dobson. "And the gays," adds his chief politico, Tony Perkins. "Shoot the Islamofascists," say Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the rightwing bloggers. "Shoot 'em all," says Fox News.
None of those suggestions, of course, are of any use to Muley or to his contemporary counterparts, because none of those scapegoats are really the source of their problems. But the demagogues don't give a rat's ass about solving Muley's problems. Their only concern is making sure that he keeps his shotgun pointed somewhere else, somewhere that doesn't threaten the status quo.
Such demagogues are con artists. And they're good at it. But recognizing that is where things get tricky and difficult to talk about.
Good con artists are difficult to prosecute. This is true, in part, because getting conned is viewed differently than being the victim of other forms of crime. There's a sense of shame, or at least of embarrassment, on the part of the victims, so they're less likely than other crime victims to report the crimes. Con artists know this, and they exploit it -- sometimes compounding that embarrassment by working a con that relies on the mark's greed or chauvinism or some other trait they are unlikely to be proud of and thus making the victim feel complicit in their own victimhood.
It's never easy to tell someone they're being conned. "You've been hoodwinked. You've been had. You've been took," Malcolm X said. "You've been bamboozled." But nobody wants to hear that, even if it's true. Especially not if it's true. It sounds too much like, "You've been a sucker." Or even, "You've been stupid." It seems to add insult to injury so people reject both the message and the messenger. Even if that means continuing to subject themselves to the ongoing injury of the scam. They are, after all, accustomed to it.
Consider, for example, the state-run lotteries. These "games" (scratch-off cards? What joyous fun!) are exempt from federal truth in advertising laws because they aren't fair games -- the pay-out is woefully disproportionate to the odds. Having to explain that the state-sponsored lottery is a stacked deck and a bad bet would likely result in fewer people "playing" (Wheee!), and thus a reduction in the revenue from these lotteries.
That exemption and the lotteries themselves are con games. Yet no politician is ever going to say that. To say that would cost that politician votes across the board. Those who don't waste their money on the lotteries would realize that such a politician was threatening to cut off a sleazy-but-significant source of state revenue that doesn't cost them a penny. That would mean, for them, either an increase in taxes or a reduction in services -- not a popular message. Those who do "play" the lottery would interpret "You've been hoodwinked" as "You're stupid," and that's not going to win many votes either.
The demagogue/con-men wouldn't be sitting idle, either, if some recklessly principled politician were to take such a stance. They would attack that politician as, of course, an "elitist," portraying her or him as sneering and condescending to the salt-of-the-earth, just folks, red-blooded Americans of the heartland. "You've got a chance to keep your farm, Muley," they would say. "You just need to win the lottery. But those elitists don't want you to have that chance. ..."
That cry of "elitism" always follows any attempt to cast light onto what Rick Perlstein calls "The Big Con." A chorus of such cries greeted Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? That book offers an insightful look at how the scapegoating of "liberal elites" has become an integral aspect of maintaining the Big Con. It was thus bitterly ironic, but not at all surprising, that the scapegoaters seized on its publication as a chance to attack Frank as an "elitist" or "limousine liberal." "You see that, Muley?" the demagogues said. "He thinks there's something wrong with you. We like you just the way you are."
This brings us, of course, to Barack Obama and the ridiculousness of the past week here in the Keystone State. At a fundraiser in California, Obama was asked, in essence, "What's the matter with Pennsylvania?" His answer echoed much of Frank's analysis:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. ...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
That is, among other things, an astute summary of many of the bugbears and distractions the demagogues employ in order to keep the red states red and the shotguns pointed somewhere else.
It was entirely predictable that the demagogues would respond to Obama the same way they responded to Frank. "Elitism!" they cried, tripping over themselves in their best attempts to convey offendedness, desperately trying to brand Obama as a "latte liberal." (The fact that the epithet for a prominent candidate of mixed-race heritage turned out to be "latte" is, of course, a wholly innocent accident of alliteration and it would be wrong to read anything more into that.)
"Then who do we shoot?"
Muley's question is still, more or less, the question asked by every dispossessed, disenfranchised and desperate American family, by everyone whose life seems to be a series of long-odd, low-payout gambles in a rigged game.
We need to be able to talk about this. The Muleys of this world have been ill-served. They've been hoodwinked. They've been had. They've been took. They've been bamboozled. And they will continue to be treated the same way until we find a way to address this honestly.
So we need to be able to talk about this. We need to become the kind of people who are capable of talking about this. If the past week is any indication, we're not there yet.
Here is the passage I was looking for the other day when I instead stumbled onto that bit about cheese sandwiches. This is from Philip Gourevitch's award-winning history and meditation, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.
The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power's greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that [UNAMIR commander Maj. Gen. Romeo] Dallaire's call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call "language" urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration's ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of 270 in Rwanda. ...A week after UNAMIR was slashed, when the ambassadors of Czechoslovakia, New Zealand and Spain, sickened by the barrage of irrefutable evidence of genocide in Rwanda, began pushing for the return of UN troops, the United States demanded control of the mission. But there was no mission to control. The Security Council, where Rwanda conveniently occupied a temporary seat in 1994, could not even bring itself to pass a resolution that contained the word "genocide." In this proud fashion, April gave way to May. As Rwanda's genocidal leaders stepped up efforts for a full national mobilization to extirpate the last surviving Tutsis, the Security Council prepared, on May 13, to vote once again on restoring UNAMIR's strength. Ambassador Albright got the vote postponed by four days. The Security Council then agreed to dispatch 5,500 troops for UNAMIR, only -- at American insistence -- very slowly.
So May became June. By then, a consortium of eight fed-up African nations had proclaimed their readiness to send an intervention force to Rwanda, provided that Washington would send 50 armored personnel carriers. The Clinton administration agreed, but instead of lending the armor ... it decided to lease it to the UN -- where Washington was billions of dollars in arrears on membership dues -- for a price of $15 million, transportation and spare parts included. ...
By early June, the secretary-general of the UN ... had taken to describing the slaughter in Rwanda as "genocide." But the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights still favored the phrase "possible genocide," while the Clinton administration actually forbade unqualified use of the g-word. The official formulation approved by the White House was: "acts of genocide may have occurred." When Christina Shelley, a State Department spokeswoman, tried to defend this semantic squirm at a press briefing on June 10, she was asked how many acts of genocide it takes to make a genocide. She said she wasn't in "a position to answer," adding dimly, "There are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of." ...
Shelley was a bit more to the point when she rejected the denomination of genocide because, she said, "there are obligations which arise in connection with the use of the term." She meant that if it was a genocide, the Convention of 1948 required the contracting parties to act. Washington didn't want to act. So Washington pretended that it wasn't a genocide. Still, assuming that the above exchange took about two minutes, an average of 11 Tutsis were exterminated in Rwanda while it transpired. ...
Clinton's brain trust then produced an inventive new reading of the Genocide Convention. Instead of obliging signatory states to prevent genocide, the White House determined, the Convention merely "enables" such preventive action. This was rubbish, of course, but by neutering the word "genocide," the new spin allowed American officials to use it without anxiety. Meanwhile, the armored personnel carriers for the all-African intervention force sat on a runway in Germany while the UN pleaded for a $5-million reduction of the rental charge. When the White House finally agreed to the discount, transport planes were not available. Desperate to have something to show for the constant American protestations of concern about Rwanda, administration officials took to telling reporters that Washington was contributing to a public-health initiative in Uganda to clean up more than 10,000 Rwandan corpses from the shores of Lake Victoria.
Left Behind, pp. 424-426
As Bruce and Buck go around in circles, spiraling closer to Buck's eventual conversion, I find myself reimagining this scene set in "The Box" from Homicide: Life on the Street, with Andre Braugher in the role of the Rev. Det. Bruce Barnes Pembleton. The authors' notion of evangelism isn't that different from the manipulative mind games employed by Braugher's jesuitical policeman when interrogating suspects. It wouldn't seem out of place if, instead of asking Buck to pray, Bruce slid a yellow legal pad across the table and told him that it was time to make a formal statement.
Alas, the scene as actually written has none of the propulsive urgency of that excellent police drama:
"Nobody can force you or badger you into this, Mr. Williams, but I must also say again that we live in perilous times. We don't know how much pondering time we have.""You sound like Chloe Steele."
"And she sounds like her father," Bruce said, smiling.
"And he, I guess, sounds like you."
I'm not sure if that's supposed to a be little meta-joke there, a winking acknowledgment to the reader that the past 400 pages are filled with repetitious dialogue from often indistinguishable characters.
Bruce's assertion there about "perilous times" in which we can't know "how much ... time we have" is another reminder of how premillennial dispensationalism is shaped by the denial of death. His remark is an accurate statement about the fragile human condition in every place and time. The Bible is filled with such reminders of our mortality. To the PMDs, however, those reminders do not apply to every place and time, they are relegated to this future time period, this other "dispensation." Here in our dispensation, what PMDs call the "Church Age," we can ignore such thoughts of our own finite time by clinging to the hope of, as Irene Steele put it way back on Page 4, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die."
I suppose that's reassuring, provided one doesn't stop to consider that the mortality rate for all humans, RTCs included, is a constant in every time and "dispensation." What mortals these fools be.
"Let me take a different tack," Bruce says:
"I know you're a bright guy, so you might as well have all the information you need before you leave here."Buck breathed easier. He had feared Bruce was about to pop the question, pushing him to pray the prayer both Rayford Steele and Chloe had talked about. He accepted that that would be part of it, that it would signal the transaction and start his relationship with God -- someone he had never before really spoken to.
"Pop the question" is a strange phrase there, though less theologically troubling than the rest of that paragraph. The motif of God as the patient, wooing lover of humanity is a frequent and, to me, favorite biblical image. Betrothal isn't a bad metaphor for the kind of commitment and relationship Buck is considering here. Or, rather, for the kind of commitment and relationship Buck might have been considering were it not for the metaphor that supercedes that one here and throughout Left Behind -- the idea of a "transaction" initiated by "the prayer." Not just prayer, but the prayer -- the right prayer, the Magic Words.
I can't begin to unpack all the many ways that "transaction" is the disturbingly wrong word in the paragraph quoted above, but let's note that this notion of a transaction would seem to imply that Buck would be the one doing the redeeming here. That's not how we Christians usually think of this.
The authors' magic-words notion of prayer also explains what they mean here when Buck says that God is "someone he had never before really spoken to." Prayers not properly formulated and precisely addressed (with the correct ZIP+4) simply don't count. Foxhole-prayers and desperate cries addressed to "if there's anyone out there" don't count. God doesn't listen to things like Renan's agnostic's prayer ("Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul"). Nor does God listen to any supplicant who doesn't pronounce his name precisely right.
Years ago I was arguing with a fundamentalist friend over the meaning of Acts 4:12, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved." This meant, he said, that salvation was impossible unless one spoke that precise name, the name of "Jesus Christ of Nazareth." Teasing him a bit, I reminded him that the book of Acts was written in Greek, and that Peter was most likely speaking in Aramaic, so if salvation required the pronunciation of that precise set of syllables, then saying it in English wouldn't seem to count. This clearly troubled him. I'm fairly sure he went home to look up those magic words in Greek and Aramaic, reciting them again just to be safe.
"I don't mean to be morbid, Mr. Williams, but I have no family responsibilities anymore. I have a core group meeting tomorrow and church Sunday. You're welcome to attend. But I have enough energy to go to midnight if you do."
[Insert gratuitous Ted Haggard joke here.]
Core group meetings (and super-ultra-inner-core group meetings) and church services make up Bruce Barnes' agenda these days now that he has slid into the "senior pastor" role left vacant by the disintegration/rapture of his boss. That raises the question of who now is serving as New Hope Village Church's visitation pastor. That ministry is more important than ever here in the traumatized post-Event world. Every family in the new congregation, every family everywhere, is now struggling to cope with the loss of their children. Others would still be in painful limbo -- their traveling spouses missing for more than a week now, whether raptured or dead in a plane crash no one yet knows. Those people are all going to need the attention of a minister in some form other than prophecy classes and Sunday services. The need and the pain of such people would be the dominant fact facing any church in the days, weeks and months after such an epic tragedy, yet this dynamic is completely absent from the authors' portrayal of the life, schedule and agenda of New Hope church.
We've noted before that the United Nations scenes in LB are completely unrealistic, bungling every aspect and detail of how that institution works and what actually goes on there. The authors' laziness, lack of research and failure of imagination is inexcusable, but their ignorance in that case is at least understandable, since neither of them has any actual experience or familiarity with that institution.
Yet the scenes in this book set in the offices of Global Weekly or New Hope Village Church are also wholly unreal. Such scenes also botch and bungle the details, the rhythm, the culture and the daily life of those institutions. This is confounding. Jerry Jenkins was, for years, the chief editor of a monthly magazine. Tim LaHaye has been, for decades, the pastor of a church. Despite their own histories with such institutions, their portrayal of them still seems as alien, lazy and ignorant as their portrayal of the U.N.
This is baffling. It's like listening to someone describe himself inaccurately while looking into a mirror. (Perhaps that explains it, actually.)
Anyway, I nominate poor, shattered Loretta to fill the now-vacant position of visitation pastor. She's visibly broken and short on answers. That should make her much better at the job than Bruce ever was.
Bruce spent the next several hours giving Buck a crash course in prophecy and the end times. ...
What this means for readers is a summary of the authors' description of the Antichrist, accompanied by a fevered description of Buck's increasing anxiety:
Buck's blood ran cold. He fell silent, no longer peppering Bruce with questions or comments. He scribbled notes as fast as he could. ... His fingers began to shake. ... Buck was overcome. He felt a terrible fear deep in his gut.
I'm starting to worry about his health. Buck's anxiety here stems from the similarities between the Antichrist that Bruce describes and Nicolae Carpathia:
At one point he thought of accusing Bruce of having based everything he was saying on the CNN report he had heard and seen, but even if he had, here it was in black and white in the Bible.
The CNN report is, of course, fictional. So too is this version of the Bible and its purported description of "the Antichrist."
Antichrist stories are, in a sense, a bit like vampire stories. Just as every new storyteller must reinterpret the vampire legends, deciding which parts to keep and which to revise (crosses, garlic, sunlight, mirrors, wood, running water, invitations, etc.), so too every new Antichrist storyteller must do the same -- whether, as here, in fiction or in purportedly non-fiction "prophecy" studies. Both kinds of stories are based on various, sometimes contradictory legends and neither (despite LaHaye's claims) can rely on any actual or canonical account that establishes the "real" characteristics of such monsters.
Because of this, as this series of books progresses, it's interesting to watch the dynamic in this passage reverse itself. Here Bruce and Buck begin to realize that Carpathia's actions closely parallel those supposedly prophesied in the Bible. Such similarities exist, at this point, because the character of Carpathia and his actions are based on those prophecies.
Yet because those prophecies of the Antichrist's actions are also largely a creation of the authors' imagination, the influence and the similarity begins to reverse itself as the Left Behind saga develops. The Antichrist they find "literally" prophesied in the pages of the Bible comes to resemble Nicolae rather than the other way around. They start projecting their own fictional character back into their convoluted prophecy scheme. More on this much later, when we get to some of the sequels (if the Lord tarries and/or we live that long).
I've commented before on the strange way that the authors (and many of their fans) seem to regard these books as evidence that these biblical prophecies are true. That wouldn't be the case even if these books were, as the authors claim, a fictional narrative devised to illustrate the fulfillment of those prophecies.
But that's not really what these books are. They are a fictional narrative concocted by the authors to illustrate the fulfillment of prophecies which were also concocted by the authors. They are two opposing mirrors, with nothing in between.
... I was reminded of a conversation I had with an American military intelligence officer who was having a supper of Jack Daniel's and Coca Cola at a Kigali bar."I heard you're interested in genocide," the American said. "Do you know what genocide is?"
I asked him to tell me.
"A cheese sandwich," he said. "Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich."
I asked him how he figured that.
"What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?" he said. "Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanity. Where's humanity? Who's humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention?"
I said I had.
"That convention," the American at the bar said, "makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich."
From We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch.
I want to link to a couple of items from today's paper, so let me first reassure you that I'm not trying to turn into Will Bunch and don't intend to make a daily dose of local news a regular feature.
Neither of these stories, mind you, is anywhere near as important as this or this or this, but I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can discuss those without sliding into a profanity-filled tirade. I can't yet offer any more helpful comment than to point out that these people are perverse and monstrous and, based on their own words, their own admission, the question is not how long they should be allowed to remain in office but how long they should be forced to rot in jail. These motherless bast...
OK, no. See? Still a bit too sputtery to discuss all of that. Soon, though. For now I'll just stick to a couple quickie notes from today's paper.
- - -
Here's the AP's follow story on the government-sponsored research on using sewage sludge to try to neutralize lead-contaminated soil.
The mix of human and industrial wastes from sewage-treatment plants was spread on the lawns of nine low-income families in Baltimore and a vacant lot next to an elementary school in East St. Louis, Ill., to test whether lead in the soil from chipped paint and car exhausts would bind to it.The research conducted in 2001 and 2002 was funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The idea being tested here might be a good one. The way it is being tested is troublesome for two big reasons, neither of which has anything to do with the ickiness of sludge. The foul smell here comes from something else.
First, and most obviously, this is a test, an experiment. This research was being conducted to find out whether or to what extent, if any, mixing such sludge with contaminated soil might be effective in neutralizing the toxic lead present there. The people conducting this research, in other words, were doing so because they do not yet already know whether or to what extent this might be effective. That's what "research" and "experiment" mean. Yet when they arranged for this research with those nine families in Baltimore and the hundreds of families whose children attend that East St. Louis school, the researchers didn't present the technique as experimental -- they told those families that they already knew that this method would be effective. They didn't already know this. What they told those families was not true.
Second, the researchers also reassured those families, with greater confidence than they could claim, that they were certain the sludge itself posed no additional threat. That was probably true, but not the certainty it was presented to be. Those families had the right to be informed of the distinction between pretty sure and certain.
The research being conducted here was worthwhile, noble even. These families were already living in a toxic environment and the researchers hoped, suspected and believed that they might have a way to help with that. That's what they should have told these families.
The most scandalous thing here has nothing to do with the researchers or with sludge. The deeper scandal is the problem those researchers were trying to address: That it is not unusual in this country for poor, black children to live their lives surrounded by the toxic threat of lead. Researching a potential way to neautralize that toxin is one step up. Conducting that research dishonestly and unethically is two steps back.
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The other piece of news from today's paper isn't really new, just an astonishing bit of local history from 40 years ago -- a look back at former Delaware Gov. Russell W. Peterson's decision to end the military occupation of the City of Wilmington.
This is one of those things that I initially had to read and re-read to convince myself that I'd read it right. The what? In the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago, Delaware's Gov. Charles L. Terry Jr. called in the National Guard to patrol the city. OK, I get that. That happened in a lot of cities in the spring of 1968. But in Wilmington, the National Guard troops stayed for nine and a half months. The troops patrolled the city until Terry was voted out of office.
Peterson, a Republican of the sort that's much harder to find these days, campaigned on the promise that he would end the military occupation of this American city. Peterson's speech, given just before taking office, strikes me as worth quoting today:
What has happened in Wilmington is a warning not only to the citizens of Delaware but to all Americans. The deeply disturbing fact is that many citizens not only favored, but demanded the military patrols.American tradition says, “It can’t happen here.”
Our experience in Delaware tells us that, to an alarming extent, it has happened here. History tells us that when people voluntarily accept military controls, for any reason, they often end up losing their own freedom.
From today's paper: "Bill would restrict voting to property owners."
Last week, [Republican State Rep. Deborah] Hudson introduced House Bill 358, a one-line bill that would restrict voting in school-tax referendums to those who actually pay the tax. Only citizens who live in the district and own property there would be allowed to vote in referendums, though renters and other nonproperty owners living in the district still could vote in school board elections.But by Thursday, Hudson learned that there was a problem with her bill: the Constitution.
Oh, right, the Constitution. Pesky that.
Makes one wonder whether the elementary schools Rep. Hudson attended were adequately funded. Maybe they couldn't afford history or social studies teachers when she was in school. Or math and economics teachers -- since she also seems to think renters don't contribute to paying property taxes.
- - -
"Your friends got brains in their heads," the ridiculous Officer Rivieri says, "they know when to shut their mouths."
Unfortunately for Rivieri, those friends also had a video camera. And a YouTube account. Here's to the Internet for making it slightly more uncomfortable to be a bully with a badge. (via Avram at Making Light)
- - -
Also from today's paper: "Study didn't warn families of sludge risks."
BALTIMORE -- Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning from the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department.
... There is no evidence there was ever any medical follow-up.
... Another study investigating whether sludge might inhibit the "bioavailability" of lead -- the rate it enters the bloodstream and circulates to organs and tissues -- was conducted on a vacant lot in East St. Louis next to an elementary school, all of whose 300 students were black and almost entirely from low-income families.
In a newsletter, the EPA-funded Community Environmental Resource Program assured local residents it was all safe.
"Though the lot will be closed off to the public, if people -- particularly children -- get some of the lead-contaminated dirt in their mouths, the lead will just pass through their bodies and not be absorbed," the newsletter said. "Without this iron-phosphorus mix, lead poisoning would occur."
Soil chemist Murray McBride, director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute, said he doesn't doubt that sludge can bind lead in soil.
But when eaten, "it's not at all clear that the sludge binding the lead will be preserved in the acidity of the stomach," he said. "Actually thinking about a child ingesting this, there's a very good chance that it's not safe."
I suppose it's important to keep in mind the big picture here, remembering all the lives this research might save in the future due to all we're learning about syphilis lead poisoning.
I remember back, waaay back -- had to have been, maybe, January of aught-eight, so we're talking 80, maybe even 90 days ago -- participating in online discussions about the Democratic primaries. This will just sound crazy to you young 'uns, but way back then, you could actually do that online without fisticuffs or weird, out-of-nowhere accusations.
I see some of you looking skeptical, but you kids'll just have to take my word for it. It was another time -- another world. I was there. It might have been a very long time ago, but I remember.
People would ask one another which way they were leaning and then they'd just, you know, talk about it. "I like Bill Richardson," they would say, "but I'm leaning toward John Edwards." Or, "I like John Edwards, but I'm leaning toward Chris Dodd." Or even -- and you kids today will just find this impossible to believe, but I swear it's the truth -- "I can't make up my mind between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I like them both."
And the thing is -- again, I know you won't believe this, but it's true -- the thing is that back then we had conversations like that all the time and I don't remember ever, not even once, hearing any hostility over such expressions of preference or support. If one person liked Candidate A and the other liked Candidate B, this wouldn't be perceived as some kind of attack on Candidate A. If Candidate A gave a good speech you could say, "That was a good speech" without people screaming at you to stop attacking Candidate B.
Some of you kids are looking confused. Let me explain. Back then, back when your parents and your grandparents were several months younger than they are today, we had this idea about primaries as forums in which voters could support rival candidates. The thing that was different, the thing you kids today'll have a hard time understanding, was that even though these candidates were rivals, running against one another, both were still viewed as legitimate.
What? Yes, really. As legitimate. Both the candidates themselves and the fact of their candidacies. It wasn't like today, when the very act of running for office is perceived as an insult to one's rival, when merely being in the race is taken as evidence that one is some kind of fifth-column front for right-wing attacks against ...
Stop shaking your heads. It's true and even though you kids don't like to hear it things were better back then. There were civil debates on the issues that made you proud to be a part of the party ... Stop laughing! It's true, I ...
Oh, just forget it. Kids today.
Check, check ... is this thing on?
OK, then. Comcast seems to have me all set up here in my new digs. They're quite accommodating if you ask politely and say the magic word (not "please" -- "Verizon"). So we now resume our irregularly scheduled blogging.
- - -
Thank you Trevor et. al. for sticking up for Rich Mullins in comments. Mullins did write the unfortunate worship anthem "Awesome God," but he also wrote quite a bit of music that doesn't make me want to run screaming from church.
Mullins died in a car crash in 1997. There's a nice obituary here which gives a bit of background on the man who, when not playing music, taught it to elementary school children in a Navajo reservation in Arizona.
I'm quite fond of his final recording project, The Jesus Record, recorded with the excellent Ragamuffin Band. Had the songs from that album -- songs like "Man of No Reputation" or "Hard to Get" -- become as ubiquitous as "Awesome God," then our megachurches might be very different places.
I actually met Mullins once, in 1994, in a bar in Macomb, Ill. The summer of '94 was a Very Bad Time for me, but my old partner in crime, Dwight Ozard, thought that hanging out with that band of Ragamuffins would do me some good. As usual, he was right. I never met any of them again until a few years ago, when one of the Ragamuffins came to town to sing "Man of No Reputation" at Dwight's funeral.
Anyway, in Mullin's defense, here's his song "Hard to Get."
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Re: Hawker's Christian Music Story -- a post from the archives: "Teetotalist gift shops."
I used to enjoy calling area "Christian Bookstores" to ask for things like Donne's Holy Sonnets or The Brothers Karamazov. It was smart-alecky fun, and the point was a legitimate one, but I quickly realized that the poor souls on the other end of the phone were, themselves, the victims of the very thing I was trying to criticize.
The Christian-brand bookstores and publishing houses could easily follow Barnes & Noble's lead by producing and marketing affordable editions of older classics now in the public domain. My guess is that the reason they haven't done so, at least not on a similar scale, is that they've already calculated the potential sales from the shelf space of such a collection of books and determined that it couldn't compete with the sales they're already getting from the Precious Moments and other Jesus Junk now occupying that space. The flip-side of that blame-the-consumer argument, of course, is to note that they may be getting the chicken-or-egg of it backwards.
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Is it accurate to say that a Navajo reservation is "in" Arizona? I mean, technically (if only technically, since our history with all such treaties is that they're honored only to the point of inconvenience) ... technically it's sovereign territory and thus not really a part of Arizona. I mean, if you want to go there, you have to go to Arizona, but once you're there, you're not really "in" Arizona anymore, right?
So maybe it's accurate to say the Navajo reservation is in Arizona geographically speaking, but not politically speaking? Anyone have any expert insight on this?
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P.S.: I haven't yet figured out how to turn off Typepad's annoying new comments-per-page limit, but I was able to switch it from the extremely irksome 25 to the slightly less irksome 50 setting. Feh. If anyone has a script to work around this new feature, please let me know.
Change is good
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