I was a husky boy. I realized that when they steered Mother to a particular section of blue jeans at Silver’s Mens and Boys Wear where the clothes were labeled “Husky.” They used to have stores like that, with real owners who lived in town, not on Manhattan’s Upper East Side or Bentonville, AR.

Whenever a movie theater (or anything else, but celluloid had a certain combustible je ne sais quoi that memorably forshadowed what awaited movie-goers in the hereafter) burned downtown, Silver’s would have a Fire Sale, though Mother insisted the only smoke damage was from the cigars the owner (I thought his name was Ben, but I think I’ve got the name confused with another haberdasher) smoked in the back room. Continue reading “Dietary Just So Stories” →

James Howard Kunstler at NYCNU

Pro Tip: Read from the bottom up. Continue reading “James Howard Kunstler at NYCNU” →

Fidelity

I attended a Wake Thursday, only we don’t call them that any more.

In the coffin was a 32-year-old man-boy. In line as one approached mother and step-father, were scrapbook pictures of his younger versions, beaming with delight at 4th of July sparklers and other such simple pleasures. He “enjoyed listening to music, watching movies, and sharing his contagious joy. He fought the good fight and is awaiting his crown of glory.” Continue reading “Fidelity” →

Double Standards

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni scores some plausible points against double standards in Sex and the Single Murderess.

But until noon yesterday, I’d not heard of Jodi Arias and had no idea such a person was on trial. I must rummage my memory banks for who Amanda Knox is, and I probably wouldn’t know at all were there not some legal news in there like reversal on appeal.

Yet I have been beating the crap out of Mark Sanford — not because he strayed, and not even because he’s not still hiding in shame, but because his mumbled apologies are excuses in disguise. In my Church, if a man went to confession and said “I committed adultery, but she was my sould-mate,” any Priest worth his salt would say “go away and come back for absolution when you can leave off the part after the comma.” I consider the self-consciously Christian Sanford voters of South Carolina to be enablers, not forgivers.

And Frank Bruni? Does he want us to hold men to a higher standard or women to a lower one?

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Confirmation bias

“Confirmation bias” is putting it gently. A lie is a lie even when the person being lied about is the President of the United States and the truth is ominous.

An old and admirable friend posted on Facebook, but now seems to have taken down, a link and apocalyptic commentary on a story about a supposed effort to make it a court martial offense to share one’s Christian faith in the military.

An individual Orthodox Christian (whose blog, in fairness to him, posts many stories without much filtering) passed on this similar story. Excerpts:

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime–possibly resulting in imprisonment–for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains …

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life …

(Emphasis in original)

I earlier said “This sounds too lurid and absurd to be true, but it’s from several sources. Stay tuned.”

This morning, I saw another item from the Western Center for Journalism, which appears to be, er, more partisan that one might gather from its name:

According to Obama’s advisor on religious tolerance within the U.S. military, Christians sharing their faith, including chaplains, present “… a national security threat. What is happening [aside from sexual assault] is spiritual rape. And what the Pentagon needs is to understand is that it is sedition and treason. It should be punished.” …

And what does the Obama administration do in the face of Muslim war declared against the U.S.?

He threatens to court-martial all U.S. military personnel, including chaplains, if they share their faith ….

What are the facts behind these lurid opinions-masquerading-as-facts? Everyone is citing Breibart:

“Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”
Those words were recently written by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), in a column he wrote for the Huffington Post. Weinstein will be a consultant to the Pentagon to develop new policies on religious tolerance, including a policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.

(Emphasis added) Read the whole Breibart piece; don’t trust me. It’s loaded with lots of inflammatory adjectives, but generally seems to state as fact only that which is fact. “Generally,” though, is important. There is no supporting citation or link for the assertion that the “policies on religious tolerance,” which apparently have not begun to be drafted, will include any “policy for court-martialing military chaplains who share the Christian Gospel during spiritual counseling of American troops.”

So: Weinstein is going to be a Pentagon advisor on new policies on religious tolerance. He’s not the one-and-only Obama advisor.

I’ve heard of Mikey Weinstein. He’s a bat-shit crazy but very loud voice of intolerance, who conflates soldiers’ “solemnly sworn oath to the Constitution” and “follow[ing] the military’s regulations regarding religion” — which he hopes to shape. It’s ominous that the Pentagon feels obliged to include him as a consultant. I’m on record against the Obama administration’s already-execrable record on domestic religious freedom, and this proposed appointment does not bode well.

But we are not yet where the “Christian” liars say we are, and they should be ashamed of themselves. There’s no exemption from the command against false witness for political “war.”

UPDATE: Breibart has a followup story May 1.

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis…”.

Neither Breibart nor Fox News linked to the written statement for anyone who might care to look at the context, but it appears that the Pentagon is alluding to some existing regulation, not to anything concocted in whole or part by Weinstein.

More update (May 6). It looks like thanks are due ADF.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Declaration of Dependence

Holy smokes! I wasn’t going to stop to blog today, the Monday of Holy Week in Orthodoxy, when there will be too little time for professional duties. But this is too good not do share.

Scott Galupon on The Blind Spot of Conservatism, quoting Yuval Levin:

We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.

Galupo, though, thinks there are other false senses of independence, such as

a desire to escape the stifling atmosphere of rural America and discover the wider world; to pursue a life of the mind; to experience, as the British playwright David Hare put it in his screenplay for The Hours, the “violent jolt” of life in the metropolis.

Our culture stokes this desire, and in no small way our economy depends on it. When politicians tirelessly invoke the “American Dream,” when we celebrate social mobility and “churn,” we are encouraging millions of young Rod Drehers to leave their Starhills and become “boomers,” as the poet Wendell Berry (via Wallace Stegner) describes those whose ambition compels them to leave home.

To make the point in the context of our ongoing clash over immigration, do we not at least unwittingly celebrate the dilution of communities when we hold up as heroes those who leave behind their friends and extended families to pursue employment in America? To borrow the simple phraseology of Rod’s mother, a young man who leaves a village in Latin America or South Asia is no longer there.

This is not to dispute Levin’s point about a large and active state “pulverizing” civil society; the phenomenon is real and, as I’ve written before, a purportedly morally neutral state will always and inevitably tip its hand about what it believes to be positive goods.

My point is that big government is not the lone, or lately even the chief, pulverizer of civil society.

(Emphasis added)

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Manufactured Outrage

There is a manufactured outrage circulating at Purdue University.

Perhaps it was an hysterical personality, rather than actual malice, that started it. The words “White Power” were found on a mirror in the Black Cultural Center. This led to major outrage and a march on the Administration building demanding action against racism.

When it turned out that the words on the mirror were left over from a class in which they were written for some didactic purpose, another outrage conveniently appeared. “[P]olice are investigating an incident in which a racial slur was written on one of the posters left behind by the group,” today’s newspaper reports. It’s being treated as a hate crime “since property was altered or destroyed and the conduct was apparently motivated by bias.”

I’d bet a modest amount – say, lunch at a downtown eatery – that if they find who wrote the stick figure, it will prove to have been a person of color, not some cracker.

I’d bet a larger amount that there will be no criminal prosecution because the posters left behind by the demonstrators were abandoned property. You cannot steal (or vandalize) abandoned property, as the publishers of a “conservative” free paper discovered on another campus when “liberal” students methodically appropriated and destroyed every copy of one issue. When they put the free paper in the kiosk, they were abandoning it, so the reasoning went. When the demonstrators left their posters behind, they were abandoning them (and violating an anti-littering part of the student code?).

I would not bet you anything that if a white person is identified as the writer, he (or less likely, she) will not be expelled, though there’s no crime. That’s how hysteria a victimology works.

But I would again bet a modest amount that if the writer is found to be a person of color, he or she will not be expelled for the hoax, even though that, too, should be a serious violation of the student code of conduct.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.