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Friday, April 22, 2005

New Friday feature

I’m putting off my followup post on Sam Harris’s The End of Faith until next week, so that I can inaugurate a new Friday feature:  arbitrary but fun value judgments!

We’ll kick this off with an easy one.  Nick Lowe’s “Cruel to Be Kind” is the most perfect pop song ever written.  Agreed?

I suppose that some of you will want to know the parameters of this here value judgment before chiming in.  Reasonable enough.  First and foremost, this blog does not recognize any firm distinction between “rock” and “pop.” We do not think that the former category is inhabited by edgy artists and assorted Culture Heroes whereas the latter is inhabited by Tommy James and the Shondells.  In fact, our eyes roll back in our heads (yes, we have plural heads) at the mere mention of “rockism.” Still, it remains true that if a song has too much fire and/or grit and/or passion in it, it exceeds the “Cruel to Be Kind” standard in obvious ways.  “Cruel to Be Kind” is airtight: there are no hidden emotional depths, no sudden bursts of instrumental virtuosity, no startling production quirks, no compositional seams.  Just a simple C-E minor-F-G chord progression (up to A minor in the choruses), a preternaturally catchy melody, and a clever little (but not too clever! – this is crucial) rhyme on “bona fide/ coincide” in the first verse (and no, of course Nick doesn’t pronounce it “bona feeday.” That wouldn’t work).

So, for instance, applying these standards to some of the Beatles’ finest, “Nowhere Man” is clearly in this league (and Paul’s bass line is brilliant without being distractingly brilliant), but those mildly supercilious lyrics give it just a hint of Social Content, and you lose points for Social Content.  “And Your Bird Can Sing” would work too, except for its semi-opaque, almost Steely Danian lyrics.  “She Loves You” is just about right.  And “I Should Have Known Better” is nearly indistinguishable from “Cruel to Be Kind,” when you think about it.  C-G7-A minor-F, though what’s that cute E7 doing in the bridge?  That’s extra.

Or, back to the New Wave/ pure pop for now people genre, Elvis Costello’s “Lip Service” is a nearly perfect pop song.  “Lipstick Vogue,” by contrast, is way too intense.  The Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” is a great pop song with a fabulous bridge on “making us part.” But X-Ray Spex’ “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” is way too intense.  Blondie’s “11:59” works, the Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” . . . yep, you got it, too intense (though we’ll take “Pulled Up,” from Talking Heads 77).  The surface of the perfect pop song is clear and untroubled; and below the surface . . . there is no below the surface.  See “no emotional depths,” above.

Other possibilities, from random decades: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “Goin’ to a Go-Go”; the Replacements, “I Will Dare”; Shocking Blue, “Venus”; Londonbeat, “I’ve Been Thinking about You.” Sugar’s “Believe What You’re Saying” and Prince’s “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” are two of my favorite songs in the world – don’t hum them, now, or you won’t be able to stop for hours – but for some reason Bob Mould and Prince decided to write about a painful breakup and a woman who’s been abandoned “with a baby and another one on the way,” respectively.  Songwriters.  Go figure.  See also, under this heading, the Lemonheads’ “It’s a Shame About Ray” and Ted Leo, “Me and Mia.”

As always, suggestions welcome.  Keep ‘em arbitrary – and fun!

Posted by Michael on 04/22 at 09:38 AM
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Thursday, April 21, 2005

Brown’s Birth, and Death

Justice Earl Warren did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Brown v. Board decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Warren wrote the Brown decision, it took the segregation issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Warren and his colleagues invented a right to integration, overturning more than a half-century of established precedent, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Southern voters became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

The fact is, the entire country is trapped.  Earl Warren and his colleagues suppressed that democratic “integration” debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can’t stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Brown v. Board is overturned, politics will never get better.

Hey, can I have David Brooks’ op-ed slot when he goes on vacation?

UPDATE:  Please please give me Brooks’ column for a couple of weeks!  I can churn this stuff out with machinelike efficiency!  Watch:

Justice Earl Warren did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Loving v. Virginia decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Warren wrote the Loving decision, it took the miscegenation issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Warren and his colleagues invented a right to miscegenation that existed nowhere in the Constitution, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Southern voters became understandably alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

The fact is, the entire country is trapped.  Earl Warren and his colleagues suppressed that democratic miscegenation debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can’t stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Loving v. Virginia is overturned, politics will never get better. 

Posted by Michael on 04/21 at 08:04 AM
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Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Department of corrections

Ward Churchill:

“It should be emphasized that I applied the ‘little Eichmanns’ characterization only to those described as ‘technicians.’ Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack.”

Ann Coulter:

John Hawkins:  You’ve caught a lot of heat for a couple of quotes you made. In your column three days after 9/11, you said, “We know who the homicidal maniacs are.They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” You also said in an interview with the New York Observer, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” Do you stand by those quotes or do you think that perhaps you should have phrased them differently?

Ann Coulter:  Ozzy Osbourne has his bats, and I have that darn “convert them to Christianity” quote. (Thank you for giving the full quote. I have the touch, don’t I?) Some may not like what I said, but I’m still waiting to hear a better suggestion.

RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, “after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.”

The symmetry is uncanny, I tell you.

Personally, I think it was brilliant of Time magazine to schedule their paean to Ann Coulter for the week of the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.  It’s just a shame that Ann didn’t take the opportunity afforded by the occasion—to affirm, once more with feeling, that she has no regrets about McVeigh blowing up that nasty government building with its liberal-elite day care center, and that she continues to wish horrible fiery deaths on everyone in the Times building except the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by.

I can’t wait for Time‘s fawning cover story on Churchill!

Posted by Michael on 04/20 at 02:09 PM
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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Ratzinger selected as new pope; promises to end “reign of tolerance”

VATICAN CITY, April 19—Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany Tuesday as the new pope to succeed John Paul II, reaching an early agreement on the second day of voting.

He took the name of Benedict XVI.

A cardinal from Chile, Jorge Medina Estevez, the Senior Cardinal Deacon, made the announcement before thousands of cheering spectators.

The balloting followed a day of stately ritual. Ratzinger delivered a hard-hitting sermon at a pre-conclave Mass attended by the cardinals. A close associate of John Paul and the dean of the College of Cardinals, Ratzinger launched a passionate defense of strict orthodoxy.

“To have a clear faith according to the church’s creed is today often labeled fundamentalism,” he told the cardinals and the congregation packed into St. Peter’s Basilica. “While relativism, letting ourselves be carried away by any wind of doctrine, appears as the only appropriate attitude for the today’s times. A dictatorship of relativism is established that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one’s own ego and one’s own desires as the final measure.”

Ratzinger’s speech expounded one side of an argument that framed the conclave of the College of Cardinals. Opponents say that Ratzinger and other Vatican-based prelates are stifling Catholic debate on religious and ethical subjects.

“Stifling debate is not necessarily a bad thing,” said one source close to the new Pope.  “It invigorated the Church during the Counter-Reformation, and it could really revitalize us now.  Today’s young people, especially, are looking for a Church that will not give in to the dictatorship of relativism, but will remind them, by means of both spiritual and corporeal discipline, that the Holy Father knows best.  We’re expecting a stampede to the youth groups.”

Church historian Thomas A. Becket pointed out that Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict not as a reference to Benedict XV, whose Papal Peace proposal of 1917 sought to end the First World War, but to Benedict XII, the fourteenth-century Pope who, as Bishop Jacques Fournier of Pamiers, “pursued a rigorous witch hunt for heretics, which won him plaudits from the Vatican.”

“We take that as a hopeful sign of a new era of restoration,” said Becket.  “And as a long-overdue warning to today’s witches and heretics that their days in the Church are numbered.  John Paul II was rigorous in matters of doctrine, it’s true, but you’ll notice—if you check the records—that we’ve had remarkably few burnings and excommunications over the past 27 years.  Well, now it’s no more Mr. Nice Supreme Pontiff.  Benedict XVI is in the house, and it’s time for people to wake up and smell the boiling oil.”

Posted by Michael on 04/19 at 11:58 AM
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The end of faith, part one

Last week, in response to the infernal book meme, I mentioned that I had recently finished reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, which I called a “delightful and infuriating book.” Some of you have been curious about this remark, and so, as a public service to all three of you, today I’ll excerpt from the book one of the many passages I admire.

Harris is a scathing critic of Islamic fundamentalism, but unlike many scathing critics of Islamic fundamentalism, he is scathing critic of all forms of religious fundamentalism.  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Eric Rudolph, George W. Bush – this one’s for you:

Out of deference to some rather poorly specified tenets of Christian doctrine (after all, nothing in the Bible suggests that killing human embryos, or even human fetuses, is the equivalent of killing a human being), the U.S. House of Representatives voted effectively to ban embryonic stem-cell research on February 27, 2003.

No rational approach to ethics would have led us to such an impasse. Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.  In neurological terms, we surely visit more suffering upon this earth by killing a fly than by killing a human blastocyst, to say nothing of a human zygote (flies, after all, have 100,000 cells in their brains alone).  Of course, the point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question.  But anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate.  Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth society.  Our discourse on the subject should reflect this.  In this area of public policy alone, the accommodations that we have made to faith will do nothing but enshrine a perfect immensity of human suffering for decades to come.

But the tendrils of unreason creep further.  President Bush recently decided to cut off funding to any overseas family-planning group that provides information on abortion.  According to the New York Times, this “has effectively stopped condom provision to 16 countries and reduced it in 13 others, including some with the world’s highest rates of AIDS infection.” Under the influence of Christian notions of the sinfulness of sex outside of marriage, the U.S. government has required that one-third of its AIDS prevention funds allocated to Africa be squandered on teaching abstinence rather than condom use.  It is no exaggeration to say that millions could die as a direct result of this single efflorescence of religious dogmatism.  As Nicholas Kristof points out, “sex kills, and so does this kind of blushing prudishness.”

And yet, even those who see the problem in all its horror find it impossible to criticize faith itself.  Take Kristof as an example: in the very act of exposing the medievalism that prevails in the U.S. government, and its likely consequences abroad, he goes on to chastise anyone who would demand that the faithful be held fully accountable for their beliefs:

I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything, and I see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismal consequences of this increasing religious influence.  For example, evangelicals’ discomfort with condoms and sex education has led the administration to policies that are likely to lead to more people dying of AIDS at home and abroad, not to mention more pregnancies and abortions.

But liberal critiques sometimes seem not just filled with outrage at evangelical-backed policies, which is fair, but also to have a sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself.  Such mockery of religious faith is inexcusable.  And liberals sometimes show more intellectual curiosity about the religion of Afghanistan than that of Alabama, and more interest in reading the Upanishads than in reading the Book of Revelation.

This is reason in ruins.  Kristof condemns the “dismal consequences” of faith while honoring their cause.  It is true that the rules of civil discourse currently demand that Reason wear a veil whenever she ventures out in public.  But the rules of civil discourse must change.

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering.  Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.).  And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc.).  This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.  It is time we found a more reasonable approach to answering questions of right and wrong.

I don’t love every last word of this – for instance, the “open question” of when we “fully acquire our humanity” is too important to be relegated to an aside, and the implicit link between “full humanity” and “capacity to suffer” involves a form of question-begging.  But I resonate in sympathy to most of these words on the so-called “culture of life,” and you’ve gotta love the righteous rebuke to Kristof at one of his most odiously Kristoffian moments, chastising us liberals for not being more interested in Revelation (and, one presumes, the Left Behind series as well).

I’ll be back tomorrow with a critique of the one aspect of Mr. Harris’s argument that is (strange but true) not secular enough.  In the meantime, I hope I haven’t exceeded the “fair use” of his book here.  So, as they say in U.S. Code Title 17 §107, go and read the whole thing.

Posted by Michael on 04/19 at 07:31 AM
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Monday, April 18, 2005

U.S. eliminates terrorism report

WASHINGTON – The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology used by the National Counterterrorism Center to generate statistics had flaws, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office ordered the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” eliminated weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush’s administration’s frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., reacted angrily.

“This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world,” Waxman said. “It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it – or any of the key data – from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report.”

According to U.S. intelligence officials, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 “significant” terrorist attacks in 2004. That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue but whose first name rhymes with “hondareeza,” confirmed that the publication was eliminated, but said the allegation that it was done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”

“The reason we’re not publishing this report is quite simple,” said the official.  “We think this whole ‘terrorism’ obsession is overblown.  People are getting all bent out of shape about a bunch of scattered attacks here and there, when really, if you think about it, they’re not all that important.  And this administration doesn’t want to scare people needlessly.”

A senior National Security Administration official agreed.  “Terrorism is so 2004,” the official said, “and this administration has moved on.  That’s true even here in the NSA.  Why, right now, we’re compiling an in-depth critical analysis of how the shortfall in the Social Security trust fund in 2042 threatens our national security. That’s what people should really be worried about, if you ask me.”

The State Department publishes “Patterns of Global Terrorism” under a law that requires it to submit to the House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism assessment by April 30 each year.

The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” but that it wouldn’t contain statistical data.

“It will have illustrations, pop-ups, and – for the first time – a special pull-out maze titled ‘Find Our Way Out of Iraq.’ It’ll be fun and educational – fun ‘with a purpose,’ if you will.  It just won’t have all those tedious columns of numbers, that’s all.  We see that as a net gain.”

But, the official noted, the State Department does not oppose the use of statistical data in all circumstances.  “In future years,” the official noted, “we hope to publish a much more comprehensive edition of the report, with data on all the places in the world where terrorist incidents did not happen.  We think that will give Congress and the American people a more upbeat and accurate view of our efforts.”

Even the 2004 statistics didn’t include attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called “a central front in the war on terror.”

“It’s a central front, yes, but not that central,” said the State Department official.

Another G.O.P. lawmaker, this one with very large deltoids, suggested that President Bush was actually fulfilling a campaign promise.  “I came to New York last summer to tell the American people that Bush would terminate terrorism,” the official, who speaks with a pronounced accent, said on condition of anonymity.  “He is doing the next best thing – he is terminating terrorism statistics.  This is the mark of a great leader who does what he thinks is right and stands behind his decisions.  I salute him.”

Posted by Michael on 04/18 at 07:25 AM
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