I've been mulling over an iPod post (iPost?) for a while---I'm a dedicated user. In their usual irreverant fashion, the IT industry rag Reg (aka The Register) reports the results of their iPod Health Warning contest, see here.
Being such open-source libertarians themselves, I'm sure they won't sue me for displaying my personal favorite amongst their finalists. This one is in keeping with my preoccupation with millenarian dispensationists, and comes from Euan Lindsay, both very excellent names.
When I arrived in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on Sunday the 8th, the flight attendant on the small Cityhopper jet excitedly pointed out the Queen's airplane, parked next door to our spot on the tarmac. The Maastricht airport is modest. Besides my flight from Amsterdam, the Queen's plane was it---a small commercial jet (like a downsized 737) sitting with no guard or other activity around it.
Once I was off the plane, getting onto the bus to go 100 yards to the "terminal", I noticed a couple of other planes, off in the maintenance area at the far end of the airport. They were somewhat larger---in fact, two 747s, quite recognizably Air Force 1 and its clone.
Then I walked to the parking lot with the cab driver, rather than climbing into the cab in front of the terminal. Then I noticed an unusual number of police in multiple clusters around the place. Then the snipers out toward the edge of the airport, and the police and soldiers at checkpoints, the soldiers in full camo and automatic weaponry every 100 yards along the adjoining highway. From anywhere in town, once I got there, I noticed choppers convoying along the presumably secure routes, ready for any kind of gunship activity called for. The President of the United States was in town.
Turns out the US (that's us) asked the authorities in the Netherlands to close two major highways two weeks in advance of the 17 hour visit. They got two or three hours. Upwards of five thousand police, soldiers, and other security personnel were mobilized. The only cost estimate I've heard or been able to find so far (for the Dutch, or course) was north of 3 million Euros.
Unscientific polling amongst my colleagues during the following week revealed a strong trend in opinion: the level of security for the visit was ridiculous. You need to know how socially sane the Dutch are (despite recent cracks in the rational plaster) to grasp just how ridiculous this looked to them.
The southerners (Maastricht is practically in either Belgium or Germany, down there in that little southern peninsula of the country) don't particularly like the Northern, Protestant Queen---but country-wide, they are way less happy about the war in Iraq. They still appreciate the Allied efforts to rid them of Nazi occupation, which is what the Bushrovers were over there to celebrate.
But I have to tell you, my fellow citizens, that the military full-court press looked like nothing more than another Fascist occupation. I was struck by the surmise, which has since proved to be the case as far as I can google the US press, that domestic audiences have no idea what the President traveling looks like to the rest of the world. He looks like a visiting warlord with his surrounding centurions (even if most of them are rented from the host country).
I wonder if the day will come when he and his chancellery don't care whether this appearance is acceptable or not for domestic consumption. What if---here's an evil fantasy for sure---there was to be some grievous terrorist incident early in November 2008, in which one or both of the candidates were disabled. Somehow I can see a Bushrover interregnum ("just until the country is back in order again---and the Supreme Court can certify that fact") accompanied by such military domestic shock and awe. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, or a hostage to my reading of history, but can anyone doubt the depth of the Bushrovers' contempt for honest, partisan differences of opinion? Or their sublime self-confidence that Their Leader is the Lord's Annointed? Sound familiar on this anniversary of VE Day?
5/24 Update:
I asked some friends in the Netherlands to see if they could find, in the Dutch press, any other estimates of the cost of Bush's visit. One response:
I have no idea what the visit of President Bush did cost us, but today Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands visited Maastricht. She passed our office on her way to the local government. Her chauffeur was driving her in a nice car with a flag on the front. She was wearing a yellow hat and was kindly waving to the people that stood next to the road. She was accompanied by 6 police men on motor bikes and the road was blocked for two minutes.
And guess what, she was not shot, there where no demonstrations and above all. I think I could have paid for the cost of her visit today.
Should I be bothered by the fact that more than two years on, Marines still can't get armor on their vehicles, when so much additional, non-US blood has been spilled?
For a view from Company E, see Michael Moss's article in the NY Times.
The photo is by Capt. Kelly Royer, who "took photos of humvees in which his men died". The opening of Moss's article explains:
On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.
The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.
"The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."
Marines, who have answered the clarion call of our Commander in Chief, are scrounging for scrap metal with which to armor their vehicles while in the war zone.
Certainly there have been a lot more people killed in Iraq who are not US Marines. But the Leader of the Free World is not prosecuting his foreign policy directly on their backs, and praying piously with their families when their dead or shattered bodies are returned home. Can't $80B produce a little armor for these people? Either that, or lets stop the PR charade and put them in tanks. Better yet, lets get them out of there altogether. This fraud has gone on long enough.
In a couple of recent posts (Tweedledee & Tweedledumb 1 & 2) I said that there were some questions that the Bolton nomination (a brand-new one at the time) impose on the left:
One is to ask what it tells us about BushRover-World that this unilateralist extremism is necessary to them. Another is to ask what we need to recognize as resonant and realistic in their analysis. Finally there are an important set of questions for the left. How do we avoid the fruitless converse of W's Manichean exposition? How do we recognize genuine insights and the valuably focused purpose of the current administration (necessary in a dangerous world---nothing new about that state of affairs) while building a public understanding that the implementation (sic) are wrongly or even fraudulently conceived? How do we speak like a Truman (plainly) about something other than fear itself?
Obviously I anticipated a much different nomination hearing than the one that has unfolded. I was thinking that the ugliness Senators would be fighting would be about Policy.
I expected to be able to use the event to pick apart the strands of necessary unilateral self-interest from those of pigheaded self-righteous hardon-ism. Bolton seemed like a pure form, a kind of Platonic Idea of unilateralism, thus a perfect foil for this discussion. This is especially true since I believed that he would not be shy in his manifestation of that Ideal, especially in the face of a 10-8 Republican majority, a majority in the Senate, and full support from the Bushrovers (even Condi).
But what has emerged has been highly instructive without any additional help from me. I think it is a turning point in both constructive and unconstructive ways, viewed from the left.
While Americans believe in an abstract UN, they also are sceptical and individualistic enough (perhaps toxically so) to suspect that the place is rife with corruption and diplomatic pretense. Democratic Senators must have known that complaining about unilateralism would be about as successful for them as it was for Kerry last fall.
So they tried something a lot more subtle (perhaps not knowing how well it might work). The issue they focused on was the apparently overwhelming need Bolton has demonstrated to punish analysts who don't come to his conclusions. The broader, operative linkage of this topic is to the question of why the hell we didn't consider the evidence that no WMDs existed in Iraq before blowing up a lot of stuff and killing a lot of people there. This was brought home by concentrating on the one institution in the government that, small as it is, seems to have raised the appropriate cautionary flags pre-invasion, the State Department's inhouse intelligence bureau, where one of Bolton's victims, Christian Westermann, reported to Carl Ford. (Is there some kind of metaphysical joke to that name, Christian Westermann, in this context?)
This conjunction represents the constructive part of the Democratic counteroffensive. Bushrovers listen to God, so they don't need a second opinion before they get your child maimed or killed in Iraq. Democrats can be pro-intelligence rather than anti-war and break a few Republican-made stereotypes along the way to an effective opposition. This is why the canny Barack Obama conceded much of the validity of Bolton's criticism of the UN, but expressed concern about the manipulation of intelligence.
But then, things went in a truly Nixonesque direction. The amazing similarity in demeanor between Bolton and Attack Dog Bob Haldeman at the Watergate hearings should have made some Republicans (God knows some of them have been around long enough to remember personally) a little more wary of the "personal as political". But if the Bushrovers have proved nothing else, we now know that consistency is the hobgoblin only of the small minds on the Left.
A whole new narrative started to unroll, not just of pressure to submerge non-hard-Right intelligence assessments, but of flaggrant harassment, even, as Barbara Boxer pointed out, in the legal sense. The phrase "serial abuser" started to take on some real weight. His occasional sparring partner Carl Ford, who described himself as "a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a 'huge fan' of Vice President Cheney", described Bolton as "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He's got a bigger
kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy
he's kicking".
Since then, tales of professional abuse of women in his proximity as well as more cases of analyst intimidation have emerged, not to mention an allegation that he had the NSA put names back into some scrubbed transcripts so he could eavesdrop on internal opponents in the bureauocracy. The drip-drip does not bode well in the long term, and culminated yesterday when Sen. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, let the Chairman know that he was not feeling so good about what he was hearing. You could tell that Chairman Lugar was surprised (and perhaps out of his element in these kind of knife fights) because it took a few cycles to sink in that he ought not to proceed with a committee vote---a tie kills the nominee.
When a high profile appointment gets held up for three weeks for more of this kind of investigation, you can kiss it goodbye. That blazing star in the firmament of press secretaries, Scott McClellan, has let us know that the Administration will Stand By Their Man, but you have to wonder how they will feel when they stop posturing and playing to their Right long enough to consider the very real possibility that Bolton has perjured himself before the committee.
So there is a good chance that this nomination, amazingly enough, will sink with all hands, that Mr. Bolton will stop Dr. Bolton from getting the job he seems dearly to desire.
But on what grounds?
It would have been best if the Democrats had succeeded in demonstrating support of a necessary unilateral self-interest while hoisting Bolton on the petard of his all-too-blatant pigheaded self-righteous hardon-ism. In fact, it appears that Bolton (and his handlers) anticipated just this approach, so that he bent over backwards to play the role of someone who genuinely believes that the UN is relevant and that some good can be done there.
The reason I say this would have been best is that from a Policy perspective there is something very important that Bolton has done in the past from which Democrats must learn. The warm fuzzy Love Our Allies that prevades the liberal left has outlived its usefulness by a couple of decades---since the fall of the Berlin Wall, actually. I've been reading about Stanley Baldwin, and I laughed at a much earlier critique from TR---in 1921, Baldwin's cousin Rudyard Kipling showed him a letter from Teddy Roosevelt in which TR referred to the (then newly formed) League of Nations as "the product of men who want everyone to float to heaven on a sloppy sea of universal mush". Regardless of the good a UN could do, we are right to be sceptical of its ability to represent what is needful for us in our current pass. Isolationism is as simple-minded as reflexive multilateralism, and---most importantly---just as useless in protecting us from folks who want to blow us up on the home field. Some kind of hardnosed, engaged pragmatism seems to me the right approach to our allies.
But none of this realism is recoverable by the Dodds, Boxers, Kerrys and Bidens. Now it is the simple fact that Bolton is just a total prick that will sink the nomination. He will not be seen to have the proper "temprament" to function effectively at the UN. His very real pathological behaviors and prevarications will, in a normally appropriate way, prevent his appointment.
But: wouldn't it be the most effective politics to rip him up, then send him to the UN? No one is going to imagine that Democratic (or even popular) pressure will cause a change of course for the Bushrovers (Cheney in particular) from their evangelical brand of unilateral hardon-ism. In some ways this is like the argument against being too hastily successful in removing DeLay---he is such a fantastic posterboy for what is badly wrong with the Republican party. I would argue, however, that a DeLay in the House is far more dangerous than a Bolton in the UN. At the UN, Bolton would be just so useful in helping the Democrats recover the pragmatic unilateralism we need without the lunatic antilateralism of the Bushrovers.
But (alas) now that we have seen what happens to Dr. Bolton when the moon is full, in our Democratic good-heartedness we cannot bear to impose Mr. Bolton on a new crop of otherwise soon-to-be-terrorized lesser bureauocrats in our mission to the UN.
Democracy Arsenal is a relatively new blog which describes itself as "devoted to opinion, commentary and sparring on U.S. foreign policy and global affairs". The commentary I have read so far, from at least two of its five contributors, has the flavor of policy wonkdom (as opposed to academic wonkdom or practical party politics). Suzanne Nossel has a post today that I think illustrates a current but imaginary left-wing dilemma, and how not to address it.
She starts by citing Marty Peretz's identification of, in her words, “a big conundrum facing us foreign policy progressives: namely, how to come to grips with Bush’s successes in promoting democracy in the Middle East”. She disagrees with Peretz that progressives are just churlish, however, because the BushRovers' methods---“the arrogance, the deception, the lack of accountability, the cronyism, the dismissiveness of critics and questioners, the failure to uphold democratic values while purporting to promote democracy, the refusal to admit mistakes -- are flat out wrong”.
In her view, the difficulty for
progressives lies in finding a “boldness, ...[a] willingness to
commit U.S. power and energy in furtherance of important causes, and
...[a] sense of possibility about even the
most intractable region of
the world” that matches Bush’s. We progressives need to figure
out how to recognize “the positive and important results of Bush’s
daring in the Middle East” while we “continue hammering at what’s
wrong with Bush’s approach” (that is, the arrogance, deception,
lack of accountability, cronyism, etc., etc.)
So, for a minute, let's check in on the
successful promotion of democracy in a couple of these places, on “the furtherance of
that important cause”, on “the positive and important results" there (all in Nossel's formulations).
For example, how about a summary of the recent PBS Frontline piece on reporting in Iraq (aired in January). Aside from the fact that the source is a well-known running dog of the fervid liberal left, like all things PBS, it seems to me that the ability of reporters to work in Iraq is some measure of how well the civil process itself might be working (not to mention a test of how difficult it might be for reporters to cover and get the story, thus how well we actually know what's going on).
That night, Burns files a story in which he draws comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. "Vietnam," he wrote, "is rarely mentioned among the troops. It is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost."
Another New York Times reporter, Dexter Filkins, has just returned from two weeks of covering the battle for Fallujah. [...]
Exhausted, Filkins is departing Baghdad for a break -- but he still has to make it to the airport, along a road where there have been 15 suicide bombings in the past month. Filkins is distracted and nervous as his security guard notices a suspicious car on the road, but they make it through safely.
"Just the other day, my colleague went to the airport, and I think he had to drive through one car bombing and then through a gun battle," Filkins says. "It's just such a measure of how troubled this enterprise is. Nineteen months into this thing and we can't really drive to the airport with any kind of assurance. And it's only a couple miles down the road."
Over the way in Afghanistan, things are
also a bit dicey for civil life, let alone democracy. An AP story
from late February this year, by Stephen Graham, leads
Three years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains the world's sixth-least developed country, the United Nations said Monday, warning that a nation that became a haven for international terrorists could fail again unless more is done to improve the lives of its long-suffering citizens. In a wide-ranging report that measures Afghans' personal security, welfare and ability to control their own lives, the world body ranked the country 173rd out of 178 assessed in 2004. The five states that fared worse are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Even though
Afghanistan's economy is booming, growing at least 25 percent annually since then and expected to expand by at least 10 percent a year in the next decade. Some 4 million children have enrolled in school -- more than ever before -- and more than 3 million people forced from their homes have returned, most from Pakistan and Iran.
it should be understood that one of the most important bases for this boom is not likely to enhance democratic civility:
Last week the United Nations announced that the number of farmers growing poppies in Afghanistan has now reached near record levels.
According to the recent Afghanistan Opium Survey produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), land being used for poppy cultivation reached 131,000 hectares in 2004, up 64 per cent from last year, and a dramatic increase from the 8,000 hectares cultivated in 2001. Due to drought and disease, harvesting increased by only an estimated 17 per cent from the 2003 crop that totalled 4,200 tonnes. The report states that poppies are now being planted in all of the country's 32 provinces, and Afghan poppies now provide some 87 per cent of the world's total opium supply. (Peter Willems' story from December, 2004, in Al Ahram Weekly).
So what's the conundrum? The fact is, progressives can stop worrying about it—really, I wish I had to worry. Because this is One---Big---Balagan. Reporters can't get to the airport in Baghdad without severe risk of life and limb. Afghanistan, sans Taliban (at least in Kabul) now produces the basis for almost all the world's heroin supply, with the attendant elevation of the fortunes of warlords there and abroad. Where in this fantastic mess could that democratic progress be lurking?
So, here on the progressive left, let's not worry about the need to give Bush “props for ungluing Arab totalitarianism”. Nossel is correct of progressives that “most of us did not think this could be done, and we certainly had no plan for how to do it in the short-term”. Problem is, neither did the Bush.
And we should not be buying into the BushRovers' pervasive spin that they did, and that somehow there is a general upsurge of “democracy” and “freedom” in the Middle East. What we should be doing is asking why this “upsurge of democracy” crap is being peddled so assiduously by our national media, despite the obvious facts on the ground, including the patent inability of their reporters to work in these places.
I can add that this confusion on Nossel's part seems like a temporary aberration, perhaps evidence (more evidence) of blogging's potential for sloppy thinking. She refers to an article she published a year ago in Foreign Affairs, at the beginning of which she points out that
[a]fter September 11, conservatives adopted the trappings of liberal internationalism, entangling the rhetoric of human rights and democracy in a strategy of aggressive unilateralism. But the militant imperiousness of the Bush administration is fundamentally inconsistent with the ideals they claim to invoke. To reinvent liberal internationalism for the twenty-first century, progressives must wrest it back from Republican policymakers who have misapplied it.
Progressives must therefore advance a foreign policy that renders more effective the fight against terrorism but that also goes well beyond it -- focusing on the smart use of power to promote U.S. interests through a stable grid of allies, institutions, and norms. They must define an agenda that marshals all available sources of power and then apply it in bold yet practical ways to counter threats and capture opportunities. Such an approach would reassure an uneasy American public, unite a fractious government bureaucracy, and rally the world behind U.S. goals.
Suzanne, blog not when thou art weary, neither neglecteth thy earlier, more coherent texts on the topic. The two paragraphs above capture exactly what we need.
I will admit that I was raised in an anti-Catholic household, for all that I lived in a heavily Catholic town and never saw my parents behave in any kind of bigotted way to any individual face-to-face. In my father, the attitude was partly a remnant of anti-Irish UK views inherited perhaps from his Scottish father, even though my father was raised in Australia where tender concern for English sensibility has been dead as doornails since Gallipoli, or further back when the "First Australians" were carried over in HM's prison ships.
But growing up with the British view of world history, even as seen through an Australian prism, predisposes one to a sense of Catholicism as epitomized by the reign of Bloody Mary, or by the 
Inquisition itself. In my childhood historical fantasies, if I was not in the century of my birth, then most likely I could be found fighting the Spaniards.
To a US adolescent in the late 60's, the Catholic church was another and one of the major institutional forms of hypocracy and oppression. Luckily I was moved out of this sort of black-and-white view of things as a college student, when I studied Jung with a theology doctoral candiate at the Harvard Divinity School who was later able to overcome that very significant obstacle and be ordained a Catholic priest. He taught me a lot about the complexity of personal belief in Christ, for a Christian---in some ways I think I came to appreciate the full embodiment of that complexity as it can be seen in Catholic theology, as opposed to the more rationalized versions of Christ and his teachings that have grown out of the various Reformation and Protestant movements of the last four hundred years.
Even so---I'm dismayed by the tsunami of sychophantic drivel that has washed over us as the Schiavo deathwatch has switched seamlessly to the Papal deathwatch, and now the actual death itself. Mark Kleiman, over in his "reality-based community", dares us, despite his generally liberal point of view, to say anything critical about JPII until the grass is green on his grave. I guess I can't work up that level of pious suspension of belief, despite the genuine grief of some Polish friends at his passing.
As a man, there was so much to admire about Karol Wojtyla, but this is also what has always made his extraordinarily rigid interpretation of doctrine so dismaying. Tremendously physical,
courageously opposing two of the great fascisms of our time---Nazis and Soviet imperialists---a multilingual world traveler with special attention for neglected realms of Catholicism in Africa and Asia---he nevertheless continued to enlarge upon the most conservative of the doctrinal streams to have emerged in the Church in the wake of the Reformation.
Spanning several sessions and Popes, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) sought to establish Catholic doctrine in contrast to the emerging tenets of a "reformed" Christian Protestant church, or family tree of Protestant churches. By virtue of its reactionary nature, the Council at most times was among other things a struggle between the Bishop of Rome and the other Bishops, and their representatives, to establish the Catholic Church on a more centralized (Roman) versus a more distributed (Episcopal) basis. This debate is one of the reasons, for example, that Henry VIII could break with the Church at Rome and still consider himself a Catholic.
The ultramontain version of things ("a term used to denote integral and active Catholicism, because it recognizes as its spiritual head the pope") was fixed in cement by the very next Council, the First Vatican Council of 1870. This is the point where the doctrine of Papal Infallibility becomes dogma. Per the Wikipedia:
papal infallibility is the dogma that the Pope, when he solemnly defines a matter of faith and morals ex cathedra (that is, officially and as pastor of the universal Church), is always correct, and thus does not have the possibility of error.
While many catholics apparently haven't heard about or understood the Pope's infallibility
A recent (1989-1992) survey of Catholics aged fifteen to twenty-five from multiple countries (the USA, Austria, Canada, Ecuador, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Peru, Spain and Switzerland), showed that 36.9% accepted the dogma of papal infallibility, 36.9% denied it, and 26.2% said they didn't know. (Source: Report on surveys of the International Marian Research Institute, by Johann G. Roten, S.M.)
it is also true that Papal infallibilty has less scope than non-canon lawyers might suppose:
The only statements of the Pope that are infallible are statements that either reiterate what has always been taught by the Church or are ex cathedra solemn definitions (which can never contradict what has formerly been taught)
Since ex cathedra solemn definitions are very rare, it turns out that infallibility basically inheres in reiterating what has always been taught by the Church.
And here we reach the real glory and damage of the reign of Karol Wojtyla. As Lord Buckley sayeth, in his sermon The Naz, "when He laid it, He laid it!". It is hard to imagine a more activist Pope. The damage is that his doctrinal instincts were so entirely reactionary.
John Paul II was also considered to have halted the progressive efforts of Vatican II, becoming a flagship for the conservative side of the Catholic Church. He continued his staunch opposition of contraceptive methods, abortion and homosexuality.
A controversial point of the John Paul II papacy was his October 1, 1986 letter to all bishops that described homosexuality as a "tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil" and "an objective disorder". His book Memory and Identity claimed that the push for homosexual marriage may be part of a "new ideology of evil ... which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man."
...Regarding abortion, the Pope wrote that: "There is still, however a legal extermination of human beings who have been conceived but not yet born. And this time we are talking about an extermination which has been allowed by nothing less than democratically elected parliaments where one normally hears appeals for the civil progress of society and all humanity."
...The Pope also criticized transsexual and transgender people, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he supervised, banned them from serving in church positions and denied church workers the ability to change records and otherwise accommodate them, as well as considering them to have "mental pathologies".
And while JPII's advocacy for the poor of the world was constant and consistent, he organizationally and doctrinally destroyed the actual adaptation of Catholic teaching to political struggles on their behalf (aka, Liberation Theology---see also Roy Edroso on this topic at alicublog, via Majikthise).
Like much else in the 60's, Vatican II seemed to herald the dawn of a saner and more inclusive exercise of hierarchical power. But we must have been deceiving ourselves on everything from Vatican doctrine to Kennedy's foriegn policy, to see what has grown from these hopeful shoots. Who would not mourn a man like this, who has the grace even to die so publically, over such a long period, with such forebearance? But his papacy has been far too long for the good of many now excluded and anathemized Catholics and perhaps for the Church itself.
Robert Creeley has died. He lived a long life, including three marriages, eight children, over 60 books, and countless lively connections with a wide population of the leading american practitioners of the art. He stretched, stylistically, from Pound and especially Williams, to the Beats and beyond. His sense of poetry as a function of living breath is elemental and beautifully enacted in his work. He 
had a lot to do with the Beats (Ginsberg, Corso, etc.) but although of an age, he always seemed to me even more modern---or in a way, more timeless. His work reminds me more of fragments we know from Sappho, as opposed to, say, the more self-consciously purposeful Howl. It's not that his poems don't reflect an intimate consciouness, but that as work they are also of an almost porcelain completeness.
You can find audio of him reading (which is very interesting in terms of his breathing practice) on the web, for example at this site. One that I hear often in my head is I Know a Man:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
Religious leaders
met on Wednesday in Jerusalem in a united protest against a gay pride
festival planned there in August. From left: Sheik Abed es- Salem
Menasra, deputy mufti of Jerusalem; the Rev. Michel Sabbagh, the Latin
patriarch; the Rev. Aris Shirvanian, the Armenian patriarch; Rabbi
Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi; and Rabbi Yona Metzger, the
Ashkenazi chief rabbi. The man at right was not identified.
Here they are, busy preventing the pollution of Jerusalem. And here's what the various denominations above had to say about the planned gay pride festival this August in the Holy City...
[first from the left, above] Sheik Abed es-Salem Menasra, deputy (Muslim) mufti of Jerusalem: "God destroyed those cities and everyone in them. I'm warning everybody, God will destroy Jerusalem together with the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims."
[fourth from the left, above] Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Sephardic chief rabbi: "They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable. It hurts all religions. We are all against it."
[fifth from the left, above] Rabbi Yona Metzger, Ashkenazi chief rabbi: "Please do not damage the holiness of Jerusalem, preserve its character, preserve its peace...cancel your plans."
[not pictured] Sheik Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi representative: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."
[not pictured] Rabbi Yehuda Levin, of the Rabbinical Alliance of America (claiming to represent more than 1000 American Orthodox rabbis: called the festival "the spiritual rape of the Holy City...This is not the homo land, this is the Holy Land." He's also quoted as saying, "This is not a parade, this is a 10-day radical, militant, anti-family, anti-God celebration of sodomy and pornography. Are we crazy that we need to provoke God again?"
[quotes are from an NYT story by Laurie Goodstein and Greg Myre, an AP dispatch, and an article from Haaretz]
Made in California
What links this post to the previous one about the Middle East roadmap and millenarian dispensationalism is the interesting figure of Pastor Leo Giovinetti. 
Seems the impetus for this highly unusual agreement amongst all the major religions of Jerusalem comes from him and his Mission Valley Christian Fellowship mission. Pastor Leo's ministry has a special relationship with Israel (this is from their website):
Each year a team from Mission Valley Christian Fellowship travels as ambassadors to Israel to share the blessings and hope that come from God. The ambassor group has grown from 20 to 100 travelers and tours the country enjoying the amazing history and fellowship. Mission Valley Christian Fellowship has been blessed with the ability to share financially with this nation in need. Substantial donations have been given to the Ministry of Defense, the Russian Absorption Program of Ariel, and to numerous schools. Most recently, a gift of $100,000 was presented to the Mayor of Jerusalem, to help those who have been directly affected by the campaign of terror.
On their top page, they have a graphic link to a (or perhaps the) gay pride protest site. This site, www.israelblessgod.com, is designed by San Diego Web Concepts, with a number of links at the top back to Pastor Leo stuff. It presents a narrative under the rubric "A Chosen Nation". For example,
I'm not sure if many of you who are Jewish know who you really are and what your Grand heritage is! It began so many years ago and so much has happened since, but if you are curious and you are sensing a call to seek out and know who you really are, please continue to read on and discover the grand pedigree of your family tree.
Is the Modern State of Israel still the same as the original Nation of Israel?
According to the Scriptures, The modern State of Israel is the continuation of all that God began to do. The Scripture foretold of the time when Israel would be scattered throughout the world and of the times when Israel would be re-gathered back into the ancient land of Israel!
Then on to the Abrahamic Covenant:
This Covenant Is So Important that all of the rest of the promises of God are tied into it!
All that God has done throughout history, that which he is doing in our generation, and most importantly, what he is about to do so that we can all finally move onto Heaven is wrapped up in this Covenant!
"what he is about to do so that we can all finally move into Heaven"...this is the critical point where we connect to millenarian dispensation. Although nowhere on the site that I can see is Armaggedon mentioned, if you know your Apocolypse you don't need prompting.
Further evidence of the political orientation of Pastor Leo and his flock is available if you follow the israelblessgod site's "articles" link. At the top you can then go to Benny Elon's Peace Plan site, where the Elon peace plan is outlined. (Benny is in the Sharon Cabinet as Tourism Minister and is head of the Moledet Party.) The main points of this plan are
In a way that is too amazing to really be surprising, Benny introduces his plan by claiming that the current US roadmap to a two-state solution will only lead to war. But how close to war would we be if Israel and the US immediately dissolved the PA, and attempted to collect Palestinian arms, dismantle their camps, and deport their leadership? And that's only covers points one and two of the Elon "peace" plan.
Just as I previously asked whether DeLay might be trying to hasten the day by blocking the Bushrovers' funding request for the PA, I am wondering whether there is not a devious (and well-understood) confluence of agendas between the Dispensationalist Christians and rejectionist Jews in Israel. Fascist movements don't need to be majority movements to be dangerous if they are tightly focused and well funded. We have seen before this the baptismal use of fire as a political organizing principle. I cannot imagine anything good coming from war in the Middle East, but I have to consider that a mixture of American and Israeli fundamentalists seem to believe, even if for differing reasons, that something much better will emerge from that particular fire. I'm certainly not going to be there bowing down in the Final Days---I'll get fried with the rest of the Jews and other infidels---but are we not also running some risk from these people that we'll be fried well before G-d has anything to do with it?
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a piece in Forward, the New York Jewish weekly, about far right obstruction of proposed US funding of the now Abbas-led Palestinian Authority.
Defying the wishes of the Bush administration, Congress approved a foreign-aid package this week forbidding any direct assistance to the Palestinian Authority and, in a rare snub, denying the president the authority to waive restrictions in the interest of national security.
The legislation was approved 388-to-44 in the House of Representatives and is expected to sail through the Senate. The House approved $200 million in aid, to be channeled to nongovernmental projects outside the control of the P.A., as part of an $81 billion in emergency spending bill to help pay the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
...Sources also said that the driving force behind the rejection of direct aid was House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, who at one point threatened to cut all aid to the Palestinian territories out of the bill.
I don't see where this little legislative passage of arms has been much noticed outside the US Jewish press. As it turns out, the waiver authority is thought to be coming out of the bill in House/Senate negotiations, and Bush has other slush funds to go to if he wants to reward the P.A. and Abbas, but its still an interesting wedge on the right. Condi testified in mid February (see the AP story carried in Ha'aretz dated 2/17) in support of the aid payments. Nita Lowey, the Democratic congresswoman from New York's 18th district for almost 20 years (parts of Westchester and Rockland counties for you homies), helped write the aid langauge from her position as ranking minority member of the appropriations subcommittee on foreign affairs. Judging from her website, specifically here, she wants to appear tough on Palestinians while aligning with the Bushrover's roadmap, including Palestinian aid:
Lowey believes strongly that the U.S. must continue to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for their actions. She has secured provisions in the foreign aid bill restricting U.S. funding for the Palestinian Authority, requiring strict oversight of humanitarian assistance provided to the Palestinian people, and condemning the Arab economic boycott of Israel. Lowey also co-authored a provision included in the most recent foreign aid bill specifying that there will be no financial assistance for a future Palestinian state unless and until the conditions included in the President's roadmap are met.
Lowey, according to one source, was point on the intra-House negotiations on aid for the P.A. But at some point, and operative from Aipac was brought in to try to keep DeLay at bay.
Many Jewish lawmakers with an interest in the bill relied on Lowey to handle the negotiations, said a staffer for one Jewish lawmaker who opposed direct aid.
According to well-positioned sources, members of the appropriations subcommittee tapped Esther Kurz, who directs Aipac's legislative department, to broker compromise language that would satisfy DeLay's demands while allowing the administration to have the money. Aipac, up to that point, had only been marginally involved in the Palestinian aid package. Now it was requested to exert its authority on Israel-related issues and to broker compromise language. The assumption, one source said, was that DeLay would be hard pressed to oppose language that the chief pro-Israel lobby has endorsed.
But perhaps Aipac's involvement was not that simply motivated. Aipac has been involved in an FBI/grand jury investigation for some time---seven months ago Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin was accused of passing government documents to two members of the pro-Israel lobbying firm. Laura Rosen has been following this story solidly in warandpiece.com, including her most recent citation of an Ha'aretz article by Nathan Guttman yesterday. According to Guttman,
AIPAC is considered one of the five most powerful lobbies in Washington, alongside giants like the American Association of Retired Persons and the National Rifle Association, whose budgets dwarf AIPAC's.
...Some in D.C. political circles said that AIPAC's main problem now was not the investigation in which it has become embroiled, but rather the political change going on in Israel. "AIPAC is simply lagging behind developments," said a congressional staffer close to the issue. According to the staffer, the fact that most of the AIPAC board is hawkish on the Israel-Palestinian conflict makes it difficult for the lobby to accommodate itself to Israel's new policies.
The issue of AIPAC getting used to the thawing of Israeli-Palestinian relations was put to the test last month during Congressional deliberations on a bill submitted by President George W. Bush to give $200 million in aid to the Palestinians to strengthen reforms and Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas' government. Congress approved the bill in the end, but only after adding some serious strictures.
Who was behind the failure to pass the bill in its original form? Democratic supporters of the legislation said that AIPAC tried to torpedo it and that its lobbyists were behind the restrictions placed on the aid. AIPAC presented a totally different picture, saying that it was House Majority Leader Tom DeLay who had taken a hard-line on the bill, and that AIPAC had saved the day by suggesting compromises which had allowed the bill to pass.
Not even everyone in Congress knows who put the restrictions in the aid bill. After the vote, someone at a meeting of senior congressional staff asked who had been responsible for the limitations. "I don't feel comfortable discussing it here," a staffer from the allocations committee is said to have replied. Others present at the meeting said they thought he did not want to point a figure at AIPAC.
And there is this pair of grafs from a JTA wire story carried in the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California (from the moment in 2002 when he became Speaker):
While some question DeLay's motives, many Jewish leaders have chosen to embrace his support. After his election as House majority leader last week, most pro-Israel activists were celebrating.
"Tom DeLay is a true leader and has a time-tested record of being a dear and valued friend of the pro-Israel community," said Melvin Dow, a fellow Texan and former president and chairman of the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
DeLay's possible motivations are probably more bizzare than Aipac's, if they can be at all seperated. According to Ori Nir's Forward article,
DeLay's success in blocking direct aid has some lawmakers and Jewish communal officials worried about the degree to which the Texas Republican, an evangelical Christian who opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, will go to undercut American and Israeli attempts to achieve a two-state solution.
Non-christians like me who travel in Israel may be surprised to see large tour groups of American Evangelicals at Israeli and Jewish (as opposed to the obvious Christian) sightseeing venues. In fact, there are people called Christian Zionists. See this article of unknown provenance but apparent comprehension, or the Wikipedia entry. In the latter, we read
Christian Zionism is the belief among some denominations of Protestant Christians, mainly in the United States, that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, through the estabishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is in accordance with Biblical prophecy, and is a necessary precondition for the return of Jesus to reign on Earth.
This belief should be distinguished from a general political belief that the Jews have a right to a national homeland in Israel. [...] Indeed since Christian Zionists believe that the Jews must eventually accept Jesus as the Messiah for Biblical prophecy to be fulfilled, some Jews see Christian Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.
...American Christian Zionist theology was developed by the 19th century evangelical Cyrus Scofield (1843-1921), who popularised the doctrine that Jesus could not return to reign on Earth until certain events occurred: The return of the Jews to the Holy Land and particularly to Jerusalem, where they would destroy the Islamic holy places in the city and rebuild the Temple, the battle of Armageddon, in which millions of people would be killed, and the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.
According to Hal Lindsey, a prominent American Christian Zionist, "the valley from Galilee to Eilat (a town in southern Israel) will flow with blood and 144,000 Jews would bow down before Jesus and be saved". According to Lindsey, the rest of the Jews, and presumably all non-Christians, will perish in "the mother of all Holocausts".
Christian Zionism appears to have grown out of the older vein of evangelical eschatology known as premillennial dispensationalism. Premillennialism is the belief, long held as a basic tenet of 
Christianity, that Jesus will return to earth before establishing and reigning over a millenial kingdom. John Nelson Darby, an early proponent, defined periods of historical "dispensation", as milestones along the path that could be understood through the predictive power of scripture.
Again, from the Wikipedia:
Dispensationalism teaches that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will be a physical event, by which a world-wide kingdom will be established in human history, geographically centered in Jerusalem. Many, but not all, dispensationalists teach that the Second Coming will be a two step process. In the first step, Christ returns to resurrect the blessed dead and rapture the living believers from the Earth. After this, a seven year period of tribulation occurs, climaxing in the Battle of Armageddon. In the second step, Christ intervenes at the Battle of Armageddon and establishes his kingdom on earth. As such, dispensationalism is associated with the circulation of end times prophecy, which professes to read omens of the Second Coming in current events.
Can it be that DeLay, and other pro-Israel evangelicals like him, are trying the hasten the day?
There is no question that 9/11 and the subsequent so-called war on terrorism have greatly heighten the sense of apocalypse amongst those leaning that way, and have appeared as a milestone on the way to the End of Days. On that roadmap, the forces of righteousness will destroy the Islamic holy places and establish the Third Temple. This kind of "faith"-based decision making and motivation at the top of our government is not something we can look at any more as aberrant.
In July, 2002, the "D. James Kennedy Center for Christian Statesmanship" (self-described as "a spiritually based outreach to men and
women in positions of influence and authority in our
nation's capital") awarded DeLay its Distinguished Christian Stateman award for 2002. This interesting vignette is part of the news item on its web site.
On the day following the 9/11 attacks on America, Rep. DeLay called his Washington staff together. At this unscheduled meeting, the Texas congressman very deliberately shared the Gospel with his staff. He told them how he knew that he would spend eternity with God in Heaven and how they could know that too. “In light of what happened up this way yesterday, we all need to be sure of that,” he said.
What I can tell is that DeLay is a Baptist. I don't know about his personal orientation to Christian Zionism or premillenarial dispensationism. But his many statements on matters of Christian belief make it clear that he is pretty sure how things should go. Americans United for Seperation of Church and State reports on a DeLay speech from a 300-person "Worldview Weekend" meeting at the First Baptist Church in Pearland, Texas, just before his ascension to the Speaker's chair. In his kickoff, DeLay
noted that he got interested in running for state office in Texas because he was fed up with government interference in his pest extermination business. His wife prodded him to attend a local Republican Party meeting, where someone suggested he run for the legislature.
"It was the first time the Lord talked to me in very meaningful terms," DeLay said. He said he became "obsessed" with running for the office and worked so hard he successfully defeated a Democrat at a time when Republicans were weak in Texas.
DeLay, a Baptist, spent six years in the Texas legislature and ran for Congress successfully in 1984. Despite the divine intervention in his earlier campaigns, DeLay told the crowd that he was still not a committed believer when he went to Washington.
"I was into the other worldview like you wouldn't believe," he said, noting that in the nation's capital he drank too much, stayed out late and ignored his family.
Invited to a Bible study by U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), DeLay soon "found Christ again." [...]
"He [God] has been walking me through an incredible journey, and it all comes down to worldview," DeLay told the crowd. "He is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me."
A Christian as muscular, and a politician as anti-pluralist and anti-democratic as DeLay cannot be a real friend of Israel. There is something behind that agenda. How could a born-again American Christian be more anti-Palestinian than Ariel Sharon, who stood by as his Lebanese Christian allies butchered Muslims in the camps of southern Lebanon during the Israeli invasion twenty years ago? Why would an exterminator from Sugarland, Texas (want to figure out how many Jews live there?) care so much about the same things that the hard-right Gaza and West Bank settlers with the funny clothes and hairdos care about?
I suspect it is a marriage of convenience, a means to an end (in fact, to The End). I suspect that for a number of devout evangelicals in this administration and its legislature, the driving motivation for Middle Eastern policy is their sure knowledge that for those Jews who won't bow down and be saved, its gonna be "the mother of all holocausts".
