We’re Looking for a Few Bad Apples

It is far from clear that the Abu Ghaib excesses were exceptions, but the appeal of the “99% of the [cops, prison guards, soldiers, journalists, CEOs, stock brokers, lawyers, doctors, scientists…] are decent people” dodge is apparently irresistible and not just to the defenders of the administration. Nobody wants to suggest that all or most American soldiers are keen to abuse human beings or even that they are willing to go along with such doings, though, truth told, nobody knows how widespread the practices were. The appeal of the exonerating argument doesn’t depend on its factual basis—it usually has none—but in our reluctance to entertain the possibility that the exception may turn out to be, to an uncomfortable degree, the rule. It doesn’t bother me so much that this rhetoric may help malefactors get off the hook, if that’s indeed what’s going on. The trouble with the exception business is that it gives us an excuse for not looking at the rule itself because all the trouble is supposed to arise because of the aberrations of individuals.

Abu Ghraib nestles in the heart of a whole series of concentric circles. It is embedded in a much wider pattern of abusive practices that took place elsewhere in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. It was made possible by a systematic hijacking of the existing military and civilian intelligence systems by ideologists. Legions of administration lawyers and public relations professionals, aided by the usual crew of fellow travelers in the commercial press, worked for a long time to weaken legal barriers against the torture of prisoners by figuring ways around the Geneva conventions. With considerable prescience, if not premeditation, these same people denied the jurisdiction of the World Court over Americans and resurrected the vicious sophistry, originally invented to manage inconvenient Haitians, that we could do whatever we want in Guantanamo because it isn’t our territory. These maneuvers were themselves part of a larger program, the promotion of a theory of American exceptionalism that provided an off-the-rack excuse suitable for any occasion. Since we know a priori that our intentions are benevolent and indeed sanctioned by a patriotic Jesus dedicated to our version of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, we can break any rule with impunity. Why reserve the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical for special occasions?

Rush Limbaugh famously asserted that the Abu Ghraib abuses were little worse than fraternity hazing. That’s absurd, of course, especially since it is likely that the guards murdered some of the prisoners, but it is true that it could have been much worse. My concern is that this episode is merely a segment of a longer trajectory. It belongs to a process of moral coarsening that has been going on for some time and may continue in the future despite brief interruptions. Some time ago, presumably out of fear, we Americans started to get cruel. As part of that process, we not only filled our prisons with millions but we rewarded politicians who made the prisons more terrible—the exception that is Abu Ghraib is arguable far less horrible than the daily routine of Pelican Bay.

Wedding Pictures

Everybody expects governments to lie, especially about military matters in a failing war. You have to wonder, however, whether or not there is a point at which relentless fabrication becomes self-defeating. What we have here is not an instance of rhetorical tactic of casting doubt on the witness’ testimony because he lied about an affair with his uncle’s second wife. The problem is quite real for those of us who, whatever our own propagandistic intentions, also want to know what eigentlich gewesen ist. At this point, nothing the administration says counts as evidence, except, perhaps, evidence of the state of mind of the administration. I haven’t a clue who killed Berg or why. I don’t know to what extent Chalabi and therefore the American government was effectively working for the Iranians all along. I don’t know how much various officers and civilian DOD administrators knew about the specifics of the torture and murder of prisoners. And I certainly do not expect any official investigation to clear things up. Why credit any proceeding controlled by the same military careerists and right wing ideologues who created the problem in the first place? Legalities and procedures only work where people with integrity make them work—in its cruder versions, faith in the rule of law is simply animism—and the one thing we have no reason to have any doubts about is the integrity of Bush, Rumsfeld, and the others.

Somebody Up There Likes Pus

The 14 May issue of SCIENCE summarizes a piece of research recently published in the journal Cell by You et. al. Certain papilloma viruses that maintain a latent infection have developed a protein tether that attaches the viral genome the chromosomes of their hosts so that the virus will be shared out between daughter cells during mitosis. It all sounds very clever, though it is hardly the most elaborate biochemical trick played by parasites, some of whom manipulate the behavior of their hosts or promote their own survival by altering the sex ratios of their host’s offspring. All of which raises a question in my mind.

The Intelligent Design folks claim that certain biological mechanisms are too complex and intricate to have developed by chance. They usually point to such examples as the bacterial flagellum and the vertebrate clotting mechanism as systems that are, in their lingo, irreducibly complex and therefore prima facie evidence of the intervention of something or somebody. If you buy into this logic, however, don’t you have to address the possibility that complex parasitical adaptations are also evidence of design? Furthermore, since the tricks of the parasites appeared very late in the history of life, doesn’t the uncanny biochemical virtuosity of tapeworms and plasmodia strongly suggest that wonders have yet to cease?

Conative Dissonance

Because judgments of probability are made on the basis of prior knowledge, the same piece of information can either confirm or disconfirm a given hypothesis depending on one’s presuppositions. This is not a theoretical possibility. It happens all the time and goes a long way to explaining how contradictory political views can persist in the face of uncontroverted evidence. Different judgments reflect different values, but they are also rooted in contrasting factual beliefs.

The application: right-wingers not only believe that America ought be the unquestioned paramount power in the world; their foreign policy proposals only make sense if we are and will remain vastly more powerful than the other nations for the foreseeable future. Recent events have shown that this notion is at least questionable. In theory, the contrary evidence might change minds; but in practice, believers in American exceptionalism are more likely to explain away failures by recourse to ad hoc supplementary hypotheses. Recall the precedent of 1918. When defeat on the battlefield challenged the presumption of their invincibility, the Germans could have acknowledged that they had been overmatched. Instead, they devised the Stab-in-the-Back story. The analogous salves to pride are currently under construction in the conservative think tanks, and prototypes are tested nightly on Fox News. The narrative about domestic cheese-eating surrender monkeys will make it possible to interpret each new disaster as further proof that we were right all along. After all, it’s obvious that only a womanish failure of nerve and a neurotic obsession with legalistic scruples stands between us and ultimate triumph.

Karma Yoga

The complete collapse of the administration’s credibility has led to a baroque profusion of conspiracy theories, but there is another reason why almost any screwy hypothesis can get traction in these later days. The administration is full of people who love intrigue and skullduggery. The propensity of excitable bloggers to detect plots is matched by the right-wing propensity to hatch them. The ruling Republicans are the same people, after all, who cooked up Watergate and Iran Contra. They like that sort of thing; and, between the Straussian doctrine of premeditated dissimilation and the general glorification of political crime as machismo, they have found a wonderfully elastic excuse to do whatever they want and lie about it with a good conscience. So one shouldn’t be too hard on the conspiracy theorists. Discovering complicated schemes is surely no nuttier than contriving them. There’s more than one way to acquire a tin-foil hat.

Spoilers R Us

I feel somewhat unqualified to review Troy since I’ve actually read Homer. Checking out other reviewers, it was pretty clear that they hadn’t, which probably explains why the movie version of the story didn’t strike them as peculiar. I mean I expected a movie to play with the legend upon which it is built if only because there is too much narrative content for a single movie in the matter of Troy. The Greeks themselves played dozens of variations on the tale, including one version in which the real Helen never went to Troy at all because as Zeus’ daughter she was a little too grand or holy to hook up with a feckless pretty boy like Paris. Myth, as Levi-Strauss correctly understood, lives in ceaseless transformation so there’s no reason to complain if a new rendition is faithful to the original—the Iliad wasn’t the original either. There are, however, versions and versions. To meld a structuralist with a Texas way of putting things, the movie is only a semi-coherent transformation of the epic. Hector has no business stabbing Menelaus to death on the second day of the war. An Agamemnon shaped like Homer Simpson isn’t very Homeric. And allowing Helen and Paris run off to Mount Ida reminds me of the joke about the test audience that liked Titanic but didn’t want the ship to sink at the end.

Sarcasm aside, I was more surprised at what worked than what didn’t. Brad Pitt wasn’t a bad Achilles at all. I wasn’t even put off by his kung fu moves. The war itself was appropriately grim and gory. Allowing for the exigencies of film, the sequence in which King Priam begs Achilles for the body of his slain son actually has some of the pathos of the Homeric account, though its brevity points up how much is lost because of the driving tempo of popular movies. Some of the nonsense in the movie was also memorable in its own way, though the utterly inadequate Helen struck me as an insult to young audiences who are apparently supposed to find an insipidly pretty blond a credible cause of tragedy. On the other hand, I can only salute sublime absurdity of the scene in which Achilles ravishes the virgin priestess of Apollo even though she has a dagger at his throat. Somebody should have let him know that sex is not necessarily safe just because you’re using a Trojan.

Arresting Voltaire

I sympathize with the journalists and politicians who avoid Noam Chomsky. A George Will or Charles Krauthammer arguing with Chomsky could only provide a Nicholas Berg moment if not something far worse like the sadistic fantasy of President Bush suddenly required to substitute for Tony Blair at Question Time. Chomsky made his chops shooting down the likes of B.F. Skinner in a famous series of intellectual duals. There’s an entire book, Challenging Chomsky, dedicated to documenting his spectacular polemical ability on his home turf of theoretical linguistics. Being smart, obviously, is not the same as being right, at least for us empiricists; but in its superlative degree it does make you the scariest gladiator in the arena, especially to mental midgets brandishing tin swords. Respecting or even fearing Chomsky, however, is not the same thing as agreeing with him.

For all of its undeniable strengths, Chomsky’s way of thinking has at least one fatal defect as an instrument for understanding the current situation, a failing it shares with much of the non-Marxist left. It is drastically unhistorical. Chomsky has been elaborating the same indictment of the ruling world system for most of my lifetime as if nothing had changed in the underlying economic, military, and political structure of the world except the names of the members of the board of directors. But things have changed. Bush the Second is not the same as LBJ or even Bush the First. America as the leader of the Cold War coalition is a very different proposition than America as an erratic and lawless hegemon. The nature of the world economy has likewise undergone a huge mutation. A dogmatic analysis that cannot detect these earthquakes does not inspire a great deal of confidence. It also promotes a sort of cosmic Naderism that discourages the compromises and alliances the times require.

Moguls and Cliffs

Time, as the saying goes, was invented to keep everything from happening at once. If so, it has recently been falling down on the job. There are rather too many subplots in this particular movie, which can’t decide whether it is an anthology of short subjects or a sweeping political epic. In the area of economics alone, a great many themes are in play at once, cycles on top of cycles on top of cycles superimposed on trends that slope one way in the medium term and another in the long term. To some extent, surely, this complexity is nothing new. In an important way, however, I think it is. Both critics and boosters of the status quo are talking through their hats. Almost anything could happen in the next couple of years. For example:

On general principles, it’s a good bet that the United States cannot go on running huge trade and budget deficits indefinitely; but it’s also true that the world has already subsidized us for a very long time now—at least since Nixon’s time—and maybe that charity will continue for quite a while longer out of political calculation or sheer inertia. There are reasons, after all, why we’ve been able to live beyond our means for an extended period. To some extent the foreign investment was protection money, an imperial bonus. To some extent it was a premium that reflected the political stability of the United States in a dangerous world. Our artificially high level of consumption has also provided a Keynsian stimulus to a world that suffers from a more or less permanent deficit of effective demand because of great and growing inequality. The same low wages that make Chinese or Indian goods cheap, guarantee that they will have to be sold internationally. Hence America has filled a so-far indispensable role in leading the planet out of a series of recessions. All of these circumstances could change rapidly, however. The Euro could easily replace the dollar. The growth of an internal market in China and other nations could lessen the world’s dependence on the American dumping ground. Inflation in the price of industrial inputs such as oil and metals is already putting pressure on the artificially low prices for commodities that keep our domestic proles in line. A major geopolitical shock could also result in serious inflation: if the paper billionaires suddenly had to spend their money on consumption or real investment or if wealth were somehow to be distributed more evenly, it would become instantly obvious that growth in goods and real services over the last ten years has lagged far behind the production of zeroes on bank statements.

If you are very careful, you can chill water well below the freezing point and it will not turn to ice. Allow a speck of dust to fall in, however, and the whole mass congeals in a moment. I don’t know whether that sort of catastrophic change of state is likely to happen to the economy, obviously; I just don’t think it can be ruled out on the basis of the experience of the last few decades, especially granted the series of unprecedented structural changes that make up the phenomenon somewhat misleadingly called globalism.

The Boil is Ripe

America’s relationship with the rest of the world is problematic for structural reasons that will have to be addressed regardless of who is in charge in Washington next year. Moral considerations aside, we are trying to play a role that is several sizes too big for our actual capabilities. We may be militarily terrible—at least we’re impressed—but the economic primacy that maintains that strength is largely a thing of the past. Having become a global welfare mother, we can’t pay our bills without the continuous charity of other countries. Our hegemony has also lost its rationale. While in the past, we played a positive, indeed indispensable role in first defeating the Axis and then fending off the Soviets, it is no longer obvious who we are protecting from what in a world in which all the large nations (except us) are anything but bellicose. One of these days Germany and Japan are going to get tired of being occupied. One of these days, international capital is going to get tired of pouring money into New York. We would be well advised to prepare for these eventualities, none of which, by the way, have to be catastrophic for us or anybody else.

Nobody can do more to further a constructive accommodation of America to new realities than President Bush whose total and ignominious downfall might serve to drain off some of the hostility towards our country now building to dangerous levels all over the world. Universally hated outside the U.S., Bush can finally do something useful in his life by serving as a scapegoat or Guy Fawkes dummy. As conservatives, of all people, are aware, villains have their uses. Taking a clue from their practice, let us therefore ritually abuse this man, even though he is more contemptible and incompetent than grandly evil and more the symptom than the cause of American decline. And then let us get to work on the real business of the world before everybody else notices that Bush wasn’t the only problem.

Rough Music

Back in the 70s, social psychologists demonstrated that flattery works even on people who know they are being flattered. Which partially explains the effectiveness of right-wing propaganda since, whatever else Limbaugh and Hannity and O’Reilly do, they butter up their listeners to within an inch of their life. Unfortunately, it isn’t just that target demographic who get a non-stop self-esteem message on American media. CNN, CNBC, and the network news also retail an artificially sweetened product, which endlessly reinforces the notion that Americans are better and smarter and more trustworthy than other people. We are a fond people who believe that the hooker really loves us, that we actually deserve a break today…. Well, that’s not so alarming. The Laws of Marketing are, after all, as immutable as the axioms of arithmetic. But even if you choose to luxuriate in a warm tub of purchased praise, it may be advisable to remind yourself from time to time that there is a world outside the bathhouse.

In its modern form, American exceptionalism is a curious concept since our claim on the world’s respect was originally based on a denial of the Old World prerogatives of birth and blood. Whatever else America was, it was the land enlivened by a tremendously good idea that could, in principle though often not in practice, be franchised to anybody who was willing to buy into its premises. By this logic, however, what is special about the country depends upon the determination of its citizens to keep the faith. There is no American race and therefore no reason whatsoever to think that the human beings that inhabit this continent are any less capable of every kind of human folly and crime than the other peoples of the planet from whom, after all, they derive.

On a Desire to Know Basis

I recently read Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos, an ambitious but nontechnical explanation of physical theories about space-time. The book has been extremely well received by serious scientists—I notice that Freeman Dyson also thinks highly of it, though, unlike Greene, he is not a devotee of string theory.

Most popularizations of physics take one of two tacks: they either tell us a series of human interest stories about various scientists, an extension of the what-the-novelist-had–for-lunch approach to a literary interview, or they moralize or mythologize quantum mechanics or relativity as if these alien structures of thought had any relation whatsoever with ancient folk beliefs or playing the stock market. Greene is anything but formal—his analogies often feature characters from television shows—but his informalities are all attempts to convey the content of the subject. Pop science is usually centrifugal and embraces every excuse to avoid the subject. Greene is centripetal. That probably limits his appeal, though in my experience a large part of the market for serious popularizations is made up of scientists and they, presumably, actually want to know something.

I was reminded of Greene’s book the other day by—of all things—a notice of the movie Troy in the New York Times. The reviewer noted that Brad Pitt’s Achilles employed Kung Fu moves on his adversaries, one attempt among many on the part of the director to make the ancient story more meaningful to contemporary audiences. That brought me up short. I usually think that the challenge of approaching old works of art is to register a view of the world fundamentally alien to my own, but perhaps it isn’t really so hard to hear what is different as to want to hear it. One could perfectly well make a Troy movie in which Achilles had naturally had stronger feelings for Patroclus than for Briseis. It would just be a marketing error. Similarly, as Greene’s book demonstrates, it isn’t impossible to convey the concepts of brane theory or cosmic inflation without equations—the physicists who cook up such ideas presumably need to think about them conceptually as well as quantitatively themselves. The supply of readers with the patience and energy to follow a clear exposition is the rate-limiting step.

What Lurks

You occasionally read that the problems of the Catholic Church would be solved if priests could marry, but the underlying pathology is political rather than sexual. From a doctrinal point of view, Catholicism is no crazier than any other religion; but its secretive and authoritarian organization guarantees mischief. That child abuse by priests is what people have decided to get upset now is probably more a function of America’s well-known hysteria about sex than an inevitable consequence of celibacy. Thus, granted the obvious willingness of church authorities to condone and conceal clerical criminality, one can bet that the financial improprieties of the church are at least as widespread as the groping of choirboys. Journalists just aren’t interested enough to battle the political power of the Church to expose unmarketable scandals, at least so long as it pays better to celebrate or at least sentimentalize the decrepit system of superstition.

I draw a partial parallel between the church case and the recent revelation that the United States has been mistreating prisoners in Iraq. Like the Catholic Church, the current regime operates in the deepest secrecy under what it claims to be divine sanction. War can be counted upon to produce horrors under any circumstances, but a war conducted in the dark by people thinking they are doing God’s work will be worse than necessary. Any regime that controls the news as stringently as Bush’s people have effectively guarantees torture and murder will occur because such activity are, as it were, the default behavior of 19-year old farm kids and professional mercenaries. Leaders have an obligation to act in order to prevent what is perfectly predictable under the circumstances. Of course it doesn’t help when a government’s rhetoric endlessly dehumanizes its enemies, suggests that ordinary rules of conduct do not apply to our Chosen nation, and glorifies brutality as “realism.” The priory may be an ideal sanctuary for a pederast, but at least the Church doesn’t actually promote child abuse as a postive virtue.

Tsk, Tsk

Economists smile when people try to understand public finances in terms of the family budget. Running up a huge debt may be inadvisable for a government, but a government cannot go bankrupt so long as the printing presses are working. But the distinction between the public and the private is more widely recognized in matters of money than in matters of policy, even though trying to understand politics in terms of private morality is no less fatuous. Nothing so defines the smallness of the small timers, the commonness of the common man, than thinking of great affairs as the soapbox opera of everyday life writ big. Petit bourgeois moralizing makes bad politics.

An application. In many parts of the United States, the use of lottery money to support public education is defended on the grounds that it only taxes those weak and stupid enough to play. Considered from a policy point of view, however, lotteries are simply regressive taxes that shift the burden of paying for necessary services on the shoulders of those least able to bear it while siphoning off a good cut for the operators of the games, the tax farmers of the new improved ancien regime. One blames a problem on the individual moral failings of the victims and then exacts a public punishment that enriches a small minority. Promoting gambling among the poor is especially cruel because it is precisely the drastic and growing difference between poverty and wealth in this country makes the appeal of long odds and huge payoffs irresistible. As it becomes more and more difficult to live a self-respecting and decent life by hard work and playing by the rules, it actually gets more rational to take wild chances. Besides, it is worth something to be able to identify with the lucky winners even though the chances of actually becoming one are essentially zero.

The Other Primrose Path

One can be corrupted to virtue as well as to vice. An example: the minority of political commentators who oppose the Conservative take over of the United States are often far more scrupulous about the truth than either their ideological opponents or the mainstream press. Joe Conason, Gene Lyons, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah Marshall, and Paul Krugman check facts, worry about being fair to individuals, and admit error. There is no such thing and probably could not be such a thing as a right-wing Bob Somersby. It does not necessarily follow, however, that these individuals are intrinsically more honorable or honest than other writers. Even a born fabulist would find it hard to resist the siren call of integrity in a rhetorical situation where the reduction of discourse to a passionless recital of facts is such an effective tack against one’s enemies.

There’s a converse to this thought: those dedicated to craft are well advised to join the Republican Party. William Safire would only be wasting his very real literary and polemical gifts by going straight; and a similar point could be made, albeit with decreased force, about the merely talented Andy Sullivan or the merely glib Mickey Kaus

Unterwegs zur Portland

I'll be back at the beginning of May.

The Birth of a Nation

Bin Laden has endorsed George Bush for re-election because Bush’s open hostility stokes the radical Islamic cause while a less aggressive, more subtle policy might lull the Arab world into complacency, thus promoting the spread of Western ideas in the region. I suppose most people registered this statement as sarcasm. I take it quite literally. Islamic fundamentalism needs an American sponsor to flourish. Left to themselves, educated Muslims are very unlikely to persist in willfully archaic attitudes. Whatever lip service they might have be willing to pay to their tradition, they also want the economic and personal benefits of the modern world. Indeed, prior to 9/11, the scholarly consensus had it that fundamentalism had reached its maximum influence in the region and could be expected to lose strength and focus as time went on. What the radicals required was an external power that would treat Muslims with general contempt. Bush, famously a uniter, not a divider, was the necessary man. He’s certainly proved himself a nation builder in Iraq where only a bloodthirsty tyrant like Hussein or a hated foreign occupier could make a real country out of the matter and antimatter of Sunnis and Shias. It’s true that he hasn’t yet directed American troops to paint a Crusader Cross on their uniforms, but his endorsement of the Israeli policy of unilateral annexation and high-tech assassination comes pretty close.

French Commonsense

In my last post I mentioned the name of Emmanuel Todd. He’s a French anthropologist and demographer whose book, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, was a best seller in Europe and recently appeared here in translation without eliciting much of a response. To judge from the vehement denunciations of some of the reader reviews at Amazon, he certainly strikes a nerve with right-wingers, who are amazed that anybody can gainsay American righteousness and—more to the point—American might. But Todd, who is neither a leftist nor a retailer of conspiracy theories, hasn’t been much noticed by Bush’s domestic critics except for angry moderates like Michael Lind and me. Todd, however, is not angry. Observing the scene from across the ocean, he is not personally upset about American foreign policy because he believes it will mostly harm us and not the Europeans or Asians.

Todd is no philosopher. He is an observer of big trends such as the rapid spread of literacy and lower birth rates throughout much of the world. In lieu of ideological fine points, he tends to pay attention to coarse facts like the huge American foreign trade deficit and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America and Europe. It says a great deal about the false consciousness of many Americans than such a perspective upsets them so much. I don’t agree with Todd’s particular takes on the renewed importance of Russia, the future of the EU, and the potential dangers of our aggressive foreign policy, but I think his perception of American weakness and vulnerability is essentially indisputable. He also makes a couple of specific points that are well worth considering:

1. Todd buys into a modified version of Fukuyama’s theory of the inevitability of democracy because he believes that general literacy more or less automatically leads to democratic institutions. He does insist that there are very significant differences between democracies, however—it matters that parties alternate dominance in America and the U.K while in Japan the same coalition rules year in, year out. He also accepts Michael Doyle’s claim that war between liberal democracies is impossible. But Todd disputes the notion that the triumph of democracy is the end of history or, for that matter, of the realistic possibility of serious war between developed countries. Nations may tend towards democracy as their citizens learn to read, but there is no guarantee that the process stops with democracy. Indeed, both the United States and Western Europe are currently evolving into a high-tech oligarchies with declining levels of political participation and drastically higher levels of economic inequality. Perhaps Fukuyama will have to indulge us with a sequel: Son of the End of History: the Thousand Year Rule of the Optimates.

2. Many people understand that the huge imbalance of trade between the United States and the rest of the world will eventually be redressed by a lowering in the American standard of living. Todd suggests some ways in which this readjustment could occur sooner rather than later. For example, part of the reason that the rest of the world is willing to finance American power is the dominant role of the dollar. The Euro has already challenged the status of the dollar. If the British do decide to opt for the continent and the still very considerable financial clout of London goes Euro, it’s very easy to imagine a drastic realignment of currency rates.

Cops

We Americans don’t have much of an army. What we do have is an expensive but rather fragile SWAT team. Which is probably a sufficient explanation of our choice of enemies. We noisily engage the small fry while carefully avoiding anybody with real power, a pattern of behavior the French writer Emmanuel Todd calls theatrical micromilitarism. But it would be more accurate to say that we don’t fight wars at all, even miniature ones. We police.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-righteousness to invade other countries and arrest their leaders. The practice presumes that our law has a universal or at least undefined jurisdiction and that we possess a monopoly of force so absolute as to allows us to treat the citizens of Panama or Iraq like the hapless drunks and junkies on Cops. We don’t simply kill our enemies. We infantilize and degrade them. We’re like the LAPD in other ways that are certainly not lost on the rest of the world. For example, we treat Muslims, Hispanics, and Blacks (Iraq, Palestine, Panama, Venezuela, Haiti) with special contempt and yet imagine we aren’t racists because we’re quite willing to treat over class Arabs, Hispanics, and Blacks as equals.

Our highhandedness is cowardly and cruel. Granted the national impotence it conceals, it is also ridiculous.

Relativistic Effects

Huge old institutions distort logic in their vicinity much as massive bodies warp nearby space-time. As the 1919 poem had it, “This much is certain and the rest debate: Light rays near the sun do not go straight.” Similarly, the rules of evidence don’t apply in the normal way when applied near the event horizon of ideologies or religions. How else explain complicated philological arguments summoned up to buttress or dispute the historicity of religious figures who were said to be able to walk on water or rise from the dead? Absent the political and cultural power of Christianity, no rational man would entertain the reality of Christ for a minute anymore than he would suppose that Hercules was once a real baby that strangled snakes in his crib. Truth told, nobody would give much credence to the mere existence of a natural man named Jesus either if it weren’t for the people who make such a fuss about it. If you were snoozing your way through a treatise on Sumerian history, you wouldn’t waste two seconds rejecting the historicity of a name so feebly attested by reliable sources. In the twisted metric of religious polemic, however, the fact that a thesis is not impossible is taken as evidence of its truth. It would hardly surprise anybody, after all, if there turned out to have really been an itinerant preacher named Jesus. But there’s always room for one more obscure Mesopotamian nobleman, too, and that doesn’t make Smargil of Ur a real guy. By the same peculiar rationale, a certain very common kind of rare spirit will triumphantly explain that we can trust the literal truth of Exodus because the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea during a wind storm and not the Red Sea during a special effect. But there is no better evidence for the non miracle than for the miracle, which is to say there is no credible evidence for either.

None of this matters a great deal to the people. Even if there really was a King Arthur, the cultural significance of his story would reside in the grandeur of the fictions that accumulated around some dimly remembered Celt. It’s the mythic figure, not the postulated barbarian that moves us. By the same token, all the detail and pathos of the Christ story belongs to its elaboration—all the good stuff is embroidery on what may already by a fiction. People are obviously genuinely moved by the Passion of Christ movie, but they also get upset about how Scarlet O’Hara treated Rhett Butler. Whether the film offers three or four handkerchiefs worth of catharsis has nothing whatsoever to do with the extent to which it is a true story. It obviously isn’t. But over and beyond the political power of myth, which no one can safely ignore, the halo of goofiness that surrounds religious issues has a definite effect on educated folks who should know better. Besides creating the fly-paper-like presumption that these questions have two sides, the piety, good manners, or mere prudence of the impious makes it hard to figure out how Christianity really did get started.

Lately I’ve been pursuing the implications of a largely uncontroverted philological conclusion, the fact that the letters of Paul were all written before the first gospel and make almost no references to any biographical facts about Christ over and beyond the bare assertion that he was crucified at some indeterminate time in the past. This information is highly relevant to a debate about the veracity of the gospels or rather, would be, if that were still a meaningful argument. What I’m interested in is Paul himself and his utterly Gnostic, indeed docetic, Christology. Apparently, in the history of Christianity, the heresy is older than the orthodoxy.

Thinking Out Loud

Nietzsche made fun of people who strain and struggle to stay 15 minutes ahead of the Zeitgeist. I heard him loud and clear and resolved to do what ever it took to get stretch out my lead to a half hour. In that spirit, may I reiterate my request for a little thinking that looks beyond this election year to a future that won’t be a lot easier without George Bush than with him—and that’s assuming we do get rid of the current gang. In particular:

1. How do we break up the media monopoly or counteract its anti-democratic tendencies? If the journalists could stand by and let a major party run an obvious incompetent on an incoherent platform, they can and surely will do it again.

2. What steps can we take to prepare for the economic shock of increasing oil prices? We probably waited too long to avoid a difficult transition from the SUV era to something more sustainable. Whoever is in the White House is going to have trouble explaining to Americans why gas costs $4 a gallon.

3. How do we address global warming or at least get ready for its consequences?

4. How do we deal with such structural inefficiencies in the American economy as its heavily bureaucratic and wasteful health system?

5. How do we accommodate millions of immigrants in a listless economy?

6. How do we lessen our international obligations to a sustainable level without destabilizing the world?

7. How do we manage the transition from an economy powered by demographic growth to one that depends on technology to grow?

8. How do we reverse the trend towards a society divided into rich and poor or at least ameliorate the degradation of the mass of people?