Accidental Blogger

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  • Sermons in Black and White

    As I indicated in my last post I am worried about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign being derailed by the rhetoric of others close to him.  I believe that Obama, a man of mixed racial heritage from a multi-racial (black, white, Asian) family has the perspective and the attitude to unite Americans, especially the younger generation, along racial and cultural divides. But the latest uproar surrounding his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s sermons is a great weapon in the hands of his detractors which has the potential of drumming up suspicions about Obama in the minds of voters. What was being murmured already on numerous Internet rumor memes and slyly implied by the Clinton camp will now find voice in mainstream media debates; is he a crypto Muslim? a black militant? on the side of our enemies – a Manchurian candidate? can we trust him and his patriotism?

    Is a double standard at play here?  Definitely, say some.  Angry sermons inviting death and destruction on America by white evangelical preachers who rail against its culture of abortion, feminism, homosexuality and the theory of evolution, as also false religions such as Catholicism and Islam are dismissed as the rants of overzealous fundamentalists. Some of these fire breathers are even given a seat at the table of national politics.  Hate mongers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are regarded as elder standard bearers by the mostly white right wing moral brigade. Frank Schaffer, an erstwhile Christian fundamentalist writes that his late father, an angry white preacher was hailed as a hero and invited by several Republican presidents to the White House after denouncing America in words more intemperate than Rev Wright’s. (Shaeffer’s full article with excerpts from his dad’s speeches here)

    When Senator Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father — Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer — denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

    Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father’s footsteps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama’s minister’s shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

    There is or should be a separation of Church and State we are told. The IRS looks askance at religious institutions that indulge in political speech and campaign. Yet, they go on all the time. The faith based social agenda of religious institutions rarely keep a distance from prevailing politics. Religious leaders routinely condemn or bless political leaders for their visions of the world and politicians shamelessly seek endorsements from religious groups. So, it is not the separation of politics and religion or fiery religious speech that are the issue in the case of Obama’s pastor and his church. The bone of contention seems to be whether the faithful and the ruling class agree with one another. Condemning Islam in violent terms does not raise eyebrows but questioning the status quo in racial politics and unjust American foreign policies evokes the specter of treason in the minds of many voters.  Writing in The TPM Cafe M.J. Rosenberg of the Israeli Policy Forum describes the politics of a conservative Jewish congregation where just mentioning the possibility of a middle east peace process angers right wing congregants and the hate speech of ultra hawkish rabbis brings on cheers. We however never hear of that in the media. It is after all business (or politics) as usual in lock step with US policies. Rosenberg also explains why despite his severe disagreements with its politics, he has been for 25 years and continues to be a member of this congregation.

    I’ve been a member of a conservative Jewish congregation for 25 years. I love the rabbi but not his sermons on Israel and the Palestinians. He is a total Israel hawk. To put it mildly, I am not. I am all about the two-state solution (the so-called Clinton plan).

    Even worse, the congregation has become the favorite of Washington’s neocons including the worst warmonger of all: Douglas Feith. The idea of communing with God together with a thug like Feith is sickening to me. Then there is Charles Krauthammer who, in 2001, disrupted Yom Kippur services by bellowing at the rabbi for expressing, in the most general terms, the desire for Middle East peace. The worst moment I’ve ever had at my congregation was when a visiting rabbi from Europe (he comes every year for the High Holy Days) devoted an entire sermon to the value of hate. "To everything there is a season. This is a season for hate." He was talking about the Palestinians. I almost puked.

    And yet I am a member of this congregation and will remain one. Why? As I said, I like the rabbi (the regular one, not the annual visitor) despite disagreeing strongly with many of his views. More important, this is the congregation that my kids grew up in. This is where their Bar Mitzvahs took place. The people there (not the war criminals though) are kind of like family. It’s home. Probably how Obama feels about his church.

    Obama’s faith has been a concern for American voters from day one. Now more scrutiny will be directed towards him and his church;  Obama’s words and thoughts, as well as those of his former pastor will be parsed for the whiff of treachery.  But have the media paid attention to Hillary Clinton’s faith to which she gives credit for providing her with the anchor of moral guidance and strength during turbulent times? What do we know about Hillary’s religious background except that she was raised a Methodist, was active in her church as a youth and continues to seek solace from her spiritual guide in adulthood? Little has been said of the fact that Clinton also belongs to a secretive Bible  study group populated mostly by right wing Republicans whose bipartisan religious politics teach among other things that the political elite is chosen by God to fight spiritual wars and lead the world.

    (more…)

  • Fish(y) Superdelegates (Joe)

    Stanley Fish thinks that there is no ethical concern relating to the superdelegates — they should not stand on principles, because principles are not in play.

    Essentially, Fish’s position is that superdelegates should vote however they want because them’s the rules.  He’s absolutely right to note that "when the group NoSuperDelegates urges the DNC ‘to not seat the
    Super-Delegates . . . and instead nominate the candidate leading in the
    delegate count,’ what it is really urging is the jettisoning of the
    rules because its members fear the outcome that following them might
    produce."

    That said, his position also comes down to the fact that our government is structurally antidemocratic.  This is of course true, but somehow Fish overlooks the fact that this is also bad, and results only from the inherent conservatism of the Founders and the Constitution.  Contrary to what Fish might think, it can "be said that [the superdelegates’] very existence is an affront to the workings of
    democracy," despite "large parts of this democracy work[ing] in just the way the
    superdelegates were intended to." 

    Even if we’re stuck with the dictatorial presidency, the electoral college, and the absurd representation in the U.S. Senate, it does not therefore follow that the Democratic Party should follow suit.  The Democrats should be leaders on this issue and move toward a more democratic system (of course, if they were capable of leading, we wouldn’t have had these last eight years!), although whether they should suddenly consider themselves obligated to do so mid-nomination is a somewhat trickier question.

  • “Brigade de Cuisine” (Dean)

    I approach food writing with caution, if not dread. Too often a writer’s musings about the culinary arts turn out unappetizingly precious or pretentious. Restaurant reviewers have to work hard to avoid saying pretty much the same thing about this week’s carbonnara as they remarked of last week’s polenta. The sappiness and off-putting wordplay can be compounded when foodies get all confessional, presuming the stories of their lives and of their transcendent "passion for food" are necessarily interesting to their readers, but also sufficient to sustain a literary text. I briefly went off on a related tangent in a recent comment here. There’s no need to persist with the complaint, and I’d rather highlight an exception or two to the rule.

    (more…)

  • Caught between a rock (religion) and a hard place (politics)

    Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is in a tailspin. Ever since the fiery anti-white and as some will say, anti-America sermons of his long time pastor Jeremiah Wright were posted on You Tube, non-black voters have begun to look at Obama with some discomfort. Pastor Wright’s angry rhetoric combined with Michelle Obama’s comment earlier, will make some wonder whether Obama himself holds the same grudges against America that the two people he is closest to appear to do. If indeed his campaign is about bringing America together along the various dividing lines, the divisive message of his pastor and spiritual mentor doesn’t help.

    Guilt by association is unfair some will say. But I fear that this controversy may undo the Obama candidacy. After the pastor’s message has sunk in, many voters who are leaning toward him may change their minds – nothing alarms Americans more than black anger.  Also, uncommitted super-delegates who plan to vote for Obama based on popular votes and elected delegates, may choose to use the prerogative of their "better judgement" and cast their votes for Hillary Clinton instead because of fear that Obama will be unelectable in November against war hero John McCain.  Feeling rebuffed by the political establishment, African American voters who have turned out in droves for Obama in the primaries may stay home during the general election. The result will be a bruised and fractured Democratic Party, tilting the election in Senator McCain’s favor … unless of course the Clinton machine again triumphs against all odds in its incessant quest for power.  In either case, the public would much sooner go with a candidate with known negatives than with one whose record is relatively unknown, especially if they suspect his "patriotism." Unless Obama quickly makes a persuasive case that America can trust him and his goodwill toward the country, many of his supporters worry that his candidacy may become severely compromised.

  • Cat Quote

    The scene of this chronicle is the town of Dawson’s Landing, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day’s journey, per steamboat, below St. Louis.

    In 1830 it was a snug collection of modest one- and two- story frame dwellings, whose whitewashed exteriors were almost concealed from sight by climbing tangles of rose vines, honeysuckles, and morning glories. Each of these pretty homes had a garden in front fenced with white palings and opulently stocked with hollyhocks, marigolds, touch-me-nots, prince’s-feathers, and other old-fashioned flowers; while on the windowsills of the houses stood wooden boxes containing moss rose plants and terra-cotta pots in which grew a breed of geranium whose spread of intensely red blossoms accented the prevailing pink tint of the rose-clad house-front like an explosion of flame. When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there– in sunny weather–stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. A home without a cat–and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat– may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

    Mark Twain (from the opening page of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson)

  • A Romantic War

    George W. Bush was recently briefed on the situation in Afghanistan. After being informed of the challenges during a video conference, Bush told soldiers on the Afghan front that he is envious of them!

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq.

    In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops.

    Bush heard tales of all-night tea drinking sessions to coax local residents into cooperating, and of tribesmen crossing mountains to attend government meetings seen as building blocks for the country’s democracy-in-the-making.

    "I must say, I’m a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

    "It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

    When Bush was young and unemployed and there was a war going on, he chose to stay back in Texas. May be Vietnam is not as romantic a place as Afghanistan.

  • A Brave Woman Speaks

    Here. 

  • Hang ’em High In Houston

    Need to burnish the image of a town?  Beautification, public amenities, reasonable cost of living etc. go a long way in keeping residents happy and outsiders impressed.  So do law and order. Being tough on criminals is a selling point for mayors, district attorneys and the local chambers of commerce.  In 1838, Houston, the rag tag "capital" of the newly formed Republic of Texas was struggling to establish a respectable identity. To prove to its many shady and lawless denizens that he meant business, the then Houston Mayor Francis Moore Jr. ordered a pair of  public hangings – the first judicially sanctioned executions in the city. The macabre and melancholy tale involves two young criminals (one a war hero), a pompous mayor, a horse theft, bowie knives and phrenology as a prosecution tool. 

    The history of the young city on its path to mainstream civilization and its first executions are chronicled by Texas historian Stephen L. Hardin in his new book Texian Macabre. 

    Texian_macabreHouston? An image problem? Nothing new there. Back in 1838, when the city amounted to little more than a dozen offal-strewn streets, it had an image problem. Swarms of unemployed young men — "rowdy loafers" in the parlance of the day — made life miserable for respectable folk. They drank, they whored, they fought, they punctuated the night with their raucous clamors. Houston was the capital of the new Republic of Texas, for chrissakes, yet people across the Sabine in the United States might be forgiven for thinking it a den of yahoos.

    The city fathers decided to act. What Houston needed to burnish its reputation as a law-abiding burg was a good hanging. So it happened that on March 28, 1838, in the first judicially sanctioned execution in the city’s history, a Texas Revolutionary War hero named David James Jones and fellow miscreant John Christopher Columbus Quick — convicted murderers both — met their maker in a small grove of trees somewhere in what is now Midtown.

    And thereby hangs the tale Stephen L. Hardin, a history professor at Victoria College, tells in Texian Macabre, an eye-opening and entertaining study of what happens when frontier mores collide with the forces of so-called civilization.

    Texas history buffs will know Hardin as author of Texian Iliad (1994), a well-received account of the military side of the Texas Revolution. An avid re-enactor as well as a scholar, the 55-year-old author is passionate about the period, and for an interview about this new book he brings props. These include a plastic human skull, the relevance of which will emerge shortly. Also a replica of a Bowie knife, "the Saturday-night special of the time."

    Those fearsome blades had only one purpose, to eviscerate another human being, and nearly every man in Houston carried one. It was a Bowie knife that David James Jones plunged into the belly of a New York-born toff named Mandred Wood, earning himself a date with the hangman.

    Hardin builds his book around Jones and the young man’s nemesis, Houston Mayor Francis Moore Jr., a one-armed physician turned newspaper editor turned politician. Moore hailed originally from Salem, Mass., and trailed some of that stiff-necked sanctimony we associate with New England witch hunters. …

    See the review of Hardin’s book in the Houston Chronicle.

  • Updated “Thou Shalt Nots”

    The Vatican has announced some new "sins" to be added to the old sixth century list of pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and sloth.  The additions are more socially responsible compared to the individualistic seven deadly trangressions of yore.  Some are even environmentally friendly; others grapple with new advances in science and medicine.  Whether one agrees with the Catholic doctrine and the revised list or not, it is refreshing to see an ancient religion trying to keep up with the times.

    695pxhieronymus_bosch_the_seven_deaROME, Italy (AP) — A Vatican official has listed drugs, pollution and genetic manipulations as well as social and economic injustices as new areas of sinful behavior.

    Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti said in an interview published on Sunday by the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that known sins increasingly manifest themselves as behavior that damages society as a whole.

    Girotti, who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican body that issues decisions on matters of conscience and grants absolutions told the paper that whilst sin used to concern the individual mostly, today it had a mainly a social resonance, due to the phenomenon of globalization.

    Catholic teaching distinguishes between lesser, so-called venial sins, and mortal sins.

    When asked to list the new areas of sinful behavior, Girotti denounced "certain violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments, genetic manipulations."

    He also mentioned drugs, which weaken the mind and obscure intelligence; pollution; as well as the widening social and economic differences between the rich and the poor that "cause an unbearable social injustice."

  • On The Other Side of Silence: What Happened to the Women?

    India’s bloody partition in 1947 (into India, Pakistan and now Bangladesh) has been recorded in scholarly books. Mostly the emphasis is on history, politics and religious tensions. Eye witness personal accounts of partition victims, especially women, are few and far between. In her book, The Other Side of Silence, Indian author Urvashi Butalia was the first writer to systematically chronicle the fate of thousands of women who were killed or forced to commit suicide by their own families in honor killings so they would not be abducted by the other side. The excellent movie Silent Waters tells the story of a Sikh girl who when faced with the terrifying prospect of forced suicide, chose to escape and survived in the newly created nation of Pakistan as a Muslim. A late day attempt is now under way in India to examine and record the personal stories of the rapidly aging survivors of the Indian partition who are breaking their silence about a horrific past.

    Indias_partitionNEW DELHI — Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.

    At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.

    "None of the women protested, nobody wept," Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. "All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book."

    Although the political history of the 1947 partition has featured prominently in Indian classrooms, personal stories such as Singh’s have gone unrecorded. Hundreds of thousands of Indians have remained trapped in their private pain, many ashamed of the acts they committed, others simply wary of confronting ghosts from so long ago.

    Now, however, the aging survivors of partition are beginning to talk, and historians and psychologists are increasingly acknowledging the need to study the human dimensions of one of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century.

    About 1,300 survivors of partition, including Singh, have been interviewed as part of an ambitious, 10-year research project that examines the experiences of people across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And since late last year, a number of new books, research papers and cultural events have attempted to lift the shroud of silence surrounding partition.

  • Richard Price’s latest (Andrew)

    Lush_life_3
    Apropos of our conversation a few weeks back about hard-boiled fiction, I’m proud to say I have a review of the new Richard Price novel up at the New York Observer.  The novel is definitely worth a read if your tastes run to procedurals — even if the new book is a bit disjointed compared to Freedomland (1998), which so powerfully dramatizes the paranoid and often subterranean racial tensions of the early Clinton years.

  • Reading Level (Sujatha)

    Cross-posted from Fluff-n-Stuff

    ——————————————————————————

    Googling for something else, I found this link which purports to gauge the readability of your blog. It comes with a nifty piece of code that you can use to embed it in your page as well, and I was highly flattered when it tagged my blog as being in the ‘College Post-Grad’ level. What marvels of prose made it adjudge my blog to be worthy of that honor, I wondered. More importantly, was it my deathless prose, or my ease of using French phrases or poetry quotes?
    What was the algorithm behind this rating?

    I started checking out all my favorite blogs and came up with a bunch of mixed results: Some that I rated very highly came up with ‘High School’, while others such as ‘rushlimbaugh.com’, ‘microsoft.com’, ‘google.com’ came up with ‘Genius’. Could this be a sort of negative rating , meaning the higher you score, the more meaningless the result?

    There are, fortunately, more reputable ways to check on the readability index, as this suite of tests provided by Juicystudio. The disclaimer for the interpretation states:

    This service analyses the readability of all rendered content. Unfortunately, this will include navigation items, and other short items of content that do not make up the part of the page that is intended to be the subject of the readability test. These items are likely to skew the results. The difference will be minimal in situations where the copy content is much larger than the navigation items, but documents with little content but lots of navigation items will return results that aren’t correct.

    It’s a relief to know that Rush Limbaugh is less likely to be a genius, and just has a lot of navigation items on his page that have skewed the results.

    Ruchira adds:

    The results are indeed intriguing.  Leiter Reports is predictably "genius."  I thought A.B. would come out at  "college level, undergrad" but was "high school" instead. The kicker is 3 Quarks Daily which is chock-full of art, science and philosophy articles and boasts a stable of authors many of whom are either Ph.Ds or M.Ds, came out at Junior High reading level :-)

    I wonder if the assessment is skewed not just by navigational links but also by the number of images displayed on the blog (Leiter – none,  3 QD – lots), the consideration being : more pictures = easier content.

  • Who should answer the 3am phone call?

    One of the children shown in Hillary Clinton’s 3am phone call campaign ad thinks that it should be Barack Obama.3am_phone_call

  • Waterboarding (Hint: It Is Torture)

    In my comment on Joe’s post below, I expressed some frustration in failing to locate any official international of national document describing methods of interrogation that actually amount to torture. I searched specifically for "waterboarding."  Although the Wikipedia defines it as torture, Attorney General Mukasey evaded giving an answer during his confirmation hearings by claiming he did not have enough information about the exact technique of waterboarding. As I pointed out in my comment, it is clear to me that although many politicians play lip service to banning torture, they want to leave enough loopholes in its definition in case "we" decide to use it under certain circumstances. It was therefore refreshing to find conservative wordsmith and retired commentator William Safire, a supporter of the Iraq War, say unequivocally that waterboarding in fact is torture.  Safire uses the simple rule of deductive logic that if something looks, walks and quacks like a duck, there is little doubt that it is a duck even if the salesman selling you the bird calls it a chicken.

    Waterboarding_5Some locutions begin as bland bureaucratic euphemisms to conceal great crimes. As their meanings become clear, these collocations gain an aura of horror. In the past century, final solution and ethnic cleansing were phrases that sent a chill through our lexicon. In this young century, the word in the news — though not yet in most dictionaries — that causes much wincing during debate is the verbal noun waterboarding.

    If the word torture, rooted in the Latin for “twist,” means anything (and it means “the deliberate infliction of excruciating physical or mental pain to punish or coerce”), then waterboarding is a means of torture. The predecessor terms for its various forms are water torture, water cure and water treatment.

    The early phrase Chinese water torture described a cruel ordeal invented by Asian ancients. The purpose of slowly dripping water on the forehead until each little splash became unbearable was not “to elicit information through harsh interrogation” but to drive the victim mad. That phrase outlived its sadistic practice and is in use today, adopted as a metaphor for “repeated annoyance intended to infuriate.” In a 1991 hostage standoff, President George H. W. Bush decried “the cruel water torture of occasional vague promises.”

    Looks like Poppy Bush didn’t like the technique. However Bush Jr. would like us to believe that waterboarding is benign, effective, mildly uncomfortable and doesn’t amount to "harsh" interrogation; which is why he has vetoed the bill that was designed to ban the method. Other US presidents and armed forces veterans too have stated that waterboarding is a form of torture. Once upon a time Senator John McCain seemed to agree. 

    Senator John McCain — no stranger to both the wrong of painful coercion and the need for antiterror intelligence — strongly denounced the procedure as “exquisite torture.”

    Between that time when he denounced waterboarding and now, what happened to Straight Talker McCain, who voted "no" on the recent senate bill proposing a ban on waterboarding?  The alluring vision of the White House has appeared in the crystal ball, no doubt. Joe asked in his post that if torture is banned in the US, why is there even a need to debate the issue? I pointed out that defining "down" torture is often the devious way a government can continue to use torture and at the same time hypocritically claim to be against it. One way to redefine an age old, tried and tested method of torture is to give it a new name.

    Why did boarding take over from cure, treatment and torture? Darius Rejali, the author of the recent book “Torture and Democracy” and a professor at Reed College, has an answer: “There is a special vocabulary for torture. When people use tortures that are old, they rename them and alter them a wee bit. They invent slightly new words to mask the similarities. This creates an inside club, especially important in work where secrecy matters. Waterboarding is clearly a jailhouse joke. It refers to surfboarding” — a word found as early as 1929 — “they are attaching somebody to a board and helping them surf. Torturers create names that are funny to them.”

    See Safire’s full article in the New York Times here.