How the Repugs Plan to win in 2006

Word of an upcoming program on voter suppression on PBS:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/PBS_set_to_ask_if_voting_0830.html

There may be a little life left in PBS ... which is one reason Bush appointed a flack to run it last year. Latest developments in the Ken Tomlinson saga are here.

Katrina stuff

One Year Later: The Real State of New Orleans, a little post at Truthdig. It says:

• Sixty percent of homes still lack electricity.
• Less than half of the city’s pre-storm population of 460,000 has returned.
• Nearly a third of the trash is yet to be picked up

I saw Greg Palast last night on Democracy Now! (Link TV). His persona doesn't appeal to me that much -- but for his politics (swerve left) he would be an excellent anchor person for Fox. He was talking about the contrast between what Bush said the gov't would do and what they've actually done (see above). The claim was made that the refugees are kept in secure trailer parks and journalists are "discouraged" from talking to them by security people who have recently returned from Iraq [I've also heard these charges made somewhere else (NPR?) some time back, I believe]. I find this scenario very believable, since refugees are likely to be anti-Bush and people who aren't card carrying Bush-lovers get arrested if they darken the doors of a Republican campaign event.

But the thing that rang sooo true was Palast's point that New Orleans is becoming a white city now. Much of the industry that employed the poor is gone, he claimed. Poor people whose homes had been in their families for generations (owners, not renters) have not been allowed back. Louisiana, which has been the southern state least likely to be in the Republican column, is becoming less so. And as a conscious motivation for the rebuilding that has not happened, a motivation which would have been in previous administrations simply outrageous, this is very very plausible. Of course, the Bush people would deny such a thing in very heated terms ... but their lips would be moving, and you know how truthy they are when that is happening.

Two books ...

I got these two books on Friday. Both kept me up late. The author of Myth of a Christian Nation is a pastor of an evangelical "mega-church" and when he preached a series of sermons on the title of the book, about 20% of his 5000 members "voted with their feet". But those who remained were grateful to him and the church now is much more heterogeneous racially and economically than it was before (viz., those who left tended to be -- duh -- white, upper class "conservatives"). The church is part of a Baptist denomination that is closer to the Anabaptist, Free church ideals and the author's points of view on issues of church and state reflect that. It was refreshing to me to read someone once again who a) takes the Bible seriously, and b) does not ignore those parts of it that make the evangelical mainstream squirm were they to be read. He says something with which I completely agree (or at least this is what I think I remember him saying), that is that what passes for and uses terminology of evangelical Christianity in the United States today is by and large not Christianity, but a civil religion that has little if any biblical basis, that is not self critical when it comes to the bible, and since it is a civil religion is manipulated easily by the government, the powers of this world. It is this non-Christian religion that permeates our air waves and most of our "evangelical" churches.


The second book, Thy Kingdom Come, I haven't completed yet, but so far I am as excited about it as I was the other. The author has been, among other things, an author for Christianity Today, but he has not allowed himself to be bowled over by the "religious right". Indeed he deliberately calls the "religious right" that rather than the "Christian Right" because, in agreement with the author of the Myth, he sees so much of what passes for evangelical "Christianity" being nothing of the sort. Whereas the Myth book is written in a dialogic or argumentative style -- there are whole paragraphs where the author poses cascading questions to the religious right that can lead the reader to see the inconsistency of that movement with the Bible and the ideals of Jesus -- Thy Kingdom Come seems to be written more from a historical and personal anecdotal point of view. In the first chapter for example the author both tells of his own experiences as a religious correspondent covering the religious right, and gives an enlightening summary of the history of the movement. The "myth" of the founding of the religious right is that it coalesced around Roe v. Wade. This is untrue, the author says, and it is understandable why the leaders of the religious right would not be completely pleased with the truth, which is (documented by the author) that the leaders of the religious right first came together defending the prerogative of Bob Jones University to maintain its segregationist policies (I support today, and I supported it then [decades ago -- I'm an old guy now], the right of Bob Jones U. to pursue this policy, by the way, given its refusal at the time to take federal money. This support was political, however. I think that from a Christian point of view this policy was and is absolutely despicable. Proper Christians should treat the Bob Jones's of this world like Paul said the Corinthians should treat the unrepentant adulterer in their midst -- ban them from the congregation. There should be no question about where the evangelical church stands on issues such as this. Unfortunately there is much question about where the evangelical movement is on this [note G. W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones during his first campaign without hardly a peep from evangelicals] and the evangelical movement is a modern day whore of Babylon). He then shows that abortion only came up as an issue when the religious right leaders had wound down on the Bob Jones issue and were looking for something else to keep their movement going. He has some fascinating early citations from Christianity Today, Bill Graham, and W. A. Criswell, all of whom had very favorable things to say about the Roe V. Wade decision. The point is that these things were said before the religious right and its state handlers managed to make abortion into a political football. My only disappointment was that he doesn't get into the Bible case against the view that the unborn fetus is a full fledged person (yes, this sentence says exactly what I meant it to say), or at least he doesn't do it before page 60 or so which is where I am in the book as I write this.

Attributed to G. K. Chesterton

“My country, right or wrong” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying “My mother, drunk or sober.”

A friend pointed me to some 50+ year-old words of Reinhold Niebuhr ...

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history. We might be driven to hysteria by its inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is “preventive war.” It is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so in the next decade or two.

A democracy can not of course, engage in an explicit preventive war. But military leadership can heighten crises to the point where war becomes unavoidable.

The power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe’s continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe. Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddies every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to form their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. Constant proof is required that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor. Unfortunately the only persuasive proof seems to be the disavowal of precisely those discriminate judgments which are so necessary for an effective conflict with evil, which we are supposed to abhor. There is no simple triumph over this spirit of fear and hatred. It is certainly an achievement beyond the resources of simple idealism. For naïve idealists are always so preoccupied with their own virtues that they have no residual awareness of the common characteristics in all human foibles and frailties and could not bear to be reminded that there is a hidden kinship between the vices of even the most vicious and the virtues of even the most upright.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, p 145 ff.

A couple more on books ...

In addition to some previous aphorisms on books, here are some selections from a recent "Thoughts on the Business of Life" in Forbes:

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is.
--Allan Bloom

Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?
--Karl Kraus

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
--Anthony Burgess
(Ouch!! -- HBF)

On reading while dining out: A book does not make bad jokes, drink too much or eat more than you can afford to pay for.
--Kenneth Turan

On editing: I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
--James Thurber

Vancouver Island, British Columbia denizen