Burns, Burns, Burns

"You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world."

-Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson

Watched the first chapter of the new Ken Burns epic "The War" on PBS last night. While it's true that the USA needs another back-slapping hagiography of the Second World War like I need a massive acne breakout, I was interested enough in seeing how Burns would handle it that I tuned in anyway. To say I'm a huge fan of Baseball, despite it's flaws, is an understatement; watching it again several years ago nearly reignited my interest in the game singlehandedly, though, I admit, much of the credit should probably go to the chilling narration of the late, great John Chancellor, whose voice is inseparable from the film itself.

The chief problem with depictions of World War II in American media is the ease at which they slip in to the comfortable narrative of America as the last beacon of defense against the Nazis and Imperial Japan, swooping in to save the day from the other ineffectual, soft-bellied Allies. Burns has elected to remove the international context almost completely, paring down the scope of the film to war stories from four mid-sized American towns. The results, so far, seem mixed. While this has thankfully much of the grandstanding about the great global Crusade of Freedom, the tales of the hardships of war can ring a little hollow. As the film acknowledges in the first few frames, the United States suffered the fewest combat casualties of any of the major powers in the war, and American civilian casualties were negligible, a far cry from every other theater. It's an odd choice to mention this, as it essentially frames the rest of your movie as an overwrought melodrama, but it reinforces the idea that everything becomes so much more special when it happens to America.

But I was presently surprised to see even a token acknowledgment to the comparatively low number of American casualties in the war, as it's likely as close as you can come to the heresy that the comic-book jingoistic narrative of America as World Superhero is greatly overstated, and that America's work to liberate Western Europe did not subsequently buy us endless moral capital to recklessly throw our weight around the globe on a similar pretext. The Allied landings at Normandy in June 1944 were intended to liberate France, all right, but not from the Nazis. The outcome of the European war was already decided by then; the Red Army was already rolling back the Wehrmacht after gumming up its tracks with millions upon millions of dead Russians.

That's another common flaw with American portrayals of the war; the downplaying of the vastness of the Eastern Front which, for all intents and purposes, was the whole war in Europe, or at least big enough to make the rest of it look like flag football by comparison. There are reasons for this, of course, some more obvious than others. The United States was already effectively an enemy of the Soviet Union, and deemphasizing the Soviets' role was the expected result of the Cold War. But acknowledging it also casts a cloud on the popular illusion of the Second World War as the great clear struggle of Good and Evil; the alliance of convenience with a different evil to combat the one you're both fighting makes things much less wonderfully Tolkienesque.

I hope and suspect that this will be one of Burns' strong points. The United States has cloaked its legacy in World War II in the haughty ideas of freedom and fairness, in which it sent African-Americans to fight prejudice abroad while abetting de facto and de jure discrimination at home, and rounded up west coast Japanese-Americans for fear their inherent Japanese-ness gave them the inclination for treason.

If World War II hadn't happened, it would be necessary for the modern neocons, hawks, and imperialists to invent it. Given how frequently they appeal to it, a vital understanding of the war from a global perspective is necessary for the common citizen. Every petty tyrant who's sitting on some of our oil is the next Hitler, and anyone who doubts the wisdom of unilateral military action to remove him would have twiddled their thumbs during the Holocaust. I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh on the Burns film because it doesn't provide this. If the myth of America as benevolent intercessor has survived Vietnam and Iraq, among numerous others, breaking it isn't something any film can accomplish.

Caliphate rising

I should have used this as a footnote to my earlier post, but I had lost track of the posts I was going to riff from (and I thought the material was located inside posts it wasn't). Anyway.

Slacktivist last week linked to this post from Glenn Greenwald about the amount of sincerity contained in right-wing fears of a rising Caliphate overthrowing Western democracies if we should fail in our goal to out-populate them.

Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States -- the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain -- actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and "our women" will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have -- not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview

Fred responds;

It is astonishing that anyone would think that. So astonishing that my first reaction is to think maybe Greenwald is overstating his case. But then I read the Roger Simon article that prompted Greenwald's post and the frantic recommendation of it by Glenn Reynolds, and then I read as much as I can bear of the Fox/Malkin/Limbaugh strain Greenwald cites and have to admit that he's right -- "This is an actual fear they have."

I hate to look like a fool by disagreeing with people way smarter than me, and Fred's further post gives a compelling explanation for how this could come about, but I'm not sure I fully buy into the idea of this being an "actual fear."

Let's consider what the "War on Terror" is fundamentally designed to do; specifically to pick up in the aftermath of the Cold War as a cash-cow for the military-industrial complex and a grand cosmic conflict fantasy for the protofascist right. Unfortunately the upgrade to "Cold War 2.0," required more careful planning than simply inserting "terrorist" into every sentence where the word "Communist" used to go.

For much of the Cold War, for example, it was at least theoretically possible that the Soviet Union could have infiltrated the American government to the extent of making serious mayhem, though any attempts at a coup would have lacked any popular support to have staying power (and the degree of Soviet espionage has probably been grossly exaggerated.) And they certainly had enough nuclear weaponry to turn the United States into a radioactive crater if the whole government subterfuge didn't work out.

So that fear, at least, wasn't entirely unfounded. It's unknown to me whether there's been any straight-faced attempts at rationally explaining how they imagine such a social transformation might come about. I assume it has something to do with skeered lib'ruls handing over the keys to the Senate to Al Qaeda, though it seems to me the only people living in perpetual terror are paranoid righties.

One of the newest contraptions fresh off the fear factory assembly lines is a theory by a Canadian fellow named Mark Steyn, whose claims of a brown horde seizing control of Europe by out-populating the white defenders of Western Civilization is gaining some traction with the intellectual set. It's mostly racist fearmongering that again provides more of an insight into the accuser than the accused ("We want to take control of the government by outbirthing urban liberals, so why doesn't everybody?"). But even that doesn't explain how the USA is doomed to become an auxiliary member of the Global Caliphate.

Do unto others

Often after I watch a film I poke over to Rotten Tomatoes (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Teh Rupert!) to see what the Important Critics (mainly A.O. Scott and David Edelstein) had to say about it. But occasionally I will find a gem from some lesser-known critic, like this one.

It's too bad that Hollywood, which is always interested in making another anti-American picture, couldn't make a few showing the consequences of Islamic oppression. OFFSIDE isn't much of a movie, but it at least tackles subjects that Western studios avoid lest they upset Islamic fundamentalists.*

That's a fellow named Steve Rhodes, writing about the latest film by Iranian director Jafar Panahi. The "Islamic oppression" on display here is the practice of barring women from attending male sporting events, and the movie tells a fictionalized adventure of several resourceful fans of the Iranian national football team who try to slip through the security net to watch the team clinch a place in the 2006 World Cup.

I am a bit skeptical of the presence of films like this and the 2003 Afghani movie "Osama," both films about Islamic fundamentalists' treatment of women that scratch a certain American itch to feel smugly superior to to backward Orientals. This shouldn't take anything away from the quality of both films; despite my reservations I actually like "Offside" better than Rhodes. Perhaps he resented having to sit and listen to not-English for 90 minutes (which is, admittedly, a problem for this picture if you don't understand the language as it's very dialogue-heavy and some of the more comic touches will be lost to them).**

If you listen to right-wing blather about Teh Mooslim Menace for very long, the appeal to the degradation of women in these societies, such as the given example, will likely be the first, and possibly the only, thing that will be beaten into your head. The image of your sisters and daughters tied down and forced into burkas is regularly evoked as the price you'll have to pay for a lack of vigilance against the Islamunistonazifascist hordes. This is curious in that Western societies are not all that far removed from having similar attitudes, which were generally enforced by the same traditionalist prudes and their intellectual heirs now so outraged about Muslim subjugation of women that it's enough to justify an imperial crusade to liberate them.

This story persists so much because the American right and conservative Christians in particular understand it as a social issue in which they believe they are demonstrably different from the fundamentalist Muslims in the funhouse mirror (and they are even wrong about that, as I'll argue shortly). On most of the other social causes the Christian Right bathes itself in, from homosexuality to abortion, child rearing, pornography, censorship and others, there's hardly any substantive difference. (A cat the unfortunate wingnut Dinesh D'Souza infamously let out of the bag last year.) If you could drag Jerry Falwell and the Ayatollah Khomeini out of Hell long enough to have a conversation--and keep the topic away from religion--they would find a lot to agree upon.

But I don't think the current American rightists deserve even the small amount of credit they believe their self-piously liberal attitude toward women should get them. Even in this case, the difference between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists is one of degree, not of premise; that premise being that women must cover themselves up and keep out of sight so as not to tempt the uncontrollable lust raging in the soul of a man and cause him to stumble out of favor with God. They have already decided it's the women's fault; the rest is just haggling over how much they ought to be punished. (I appeal to my own experience here. Modesty, ladies!)

*Glenn Greenwald had an excellent post yesterday debunking the notion that "speaking against Muslims" somehow sets one up as a unique target for reprisal than remarks about other religions.

**I have the feeling watching a lot of foreign films that the subtitles aren't catching as much of the dialogue as I would like. They are always much cleaner and lacking in inflections than I'm willing to believe. Try watching a film in English and imagine how it might be subtitled (or even put on Spanish subtitles if you like) and see what the difference is between what you hear and what you read. Maybe I'm paranoid about this, though.

Demologos

An entrepreneur in England is recruiting members to buy into a scheme to purchase a lower-league football club and turn it into a fan-run organization.

Once a club is snapped up the members will each receive one vote-carrying share.

"Every decision that is made will be a joint decision and all along the way members will be guided by the respective experts at the club...

"Every decision that is taken, people will be happy with because they'll realise that's what the majority of members want to happen," Brooks said.

Emphasising the members' influence in their club, Brooks noted that fans would have a say in team formations and transfers into and out of the club.

This in turn would help, rather than hinder the coach, he argued.

"We do think he'll have a lot of influence. He will brief the members on suggestions for formations... He will have a very big input in guiding the members towards the team selection.

I found this story through the BTF Newsblog, and the reaction there is quite interesting in its dismissiveness. They seem convinced that, given the chance to make actual important decisions in the running of a sports team, impulsive fans would immediately wreck the team by making rash, emotional decisions about buying and selling players that should be better left to the experts.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. I am something of a democratic absolutists, an, while I don't think people have an inalienable right to democratically operating a sports franchise, I also don't see why it's such a terrible idea given that we ostensibly let them democratically run a government. The ridicule of the former should give us a telling idea about their commitment to the latter. Or perhaps it's that they are fine with the notion of allowing the proles to elect politicians, just not anyone who might make an actual important decision.

For similar reasons, I'm somewhat mystified and worried by the liberal fascination with H.L. Mencken, who famously warned "on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." As disastrous as Genghis Bush's presidency may be, the solution to preventing a repeat performance isn't stripping away the democratic rights of those "plain folks," but educating and persuading them. Unfortunately this is beyond the pale for many urban liberals, who feel their intellectual superiority should grant them more political clout (in a similar way capitalists feel about personal wealth, I suppose).

One by one

The slow die-off of this generation's pantheon of religious right icons continued yesterday as D. James Kennedy followed his colleague Jerry Falwell to the grave. Kennedy was slightly less well-known among mainstream circles, choosing instead to focus his ubiquitous bleating on Christian radio.

Rob Boston of Americans United has a collection of some of Kennedy's greatest hits. Most delightfully, Kennedy had an erstwhile habit of seeing Reds under every rock and bush.

"Just a few years ago, there were as many as ten thousand Communist professors in American universities. The average person never saw any of them, and many would doubt the truth of that statistic. But I can assure you it is true."

"Not all the educators in our public schools and universities are deliberately deceitful, not all of them want to destroy this nation, but many do. The major teachers' unions certainly do."

"Modern secularists and agnostics do not want to admit that the Christian religion is true, because that would mean that they are sinners; and they have no intention of giving up their right to sin."*

It will be interesting to see how the Christian Right, which is largely built around a cult of personality surrounding its leaders, reacts in the wake of the Old Guard fading away (Robertson and Dobson will likely follow within a few years). The younger generation is considered less politically extreme, but there is resistance.

*I'm particularly fond of this trinket, and would like to do a post on this general idea someday.

Balls of fury

Ok, I've been out for awhile again. This means it's time for a US Open tennis post.

Let's start at the top. Roger Federer is, in light of his 2004-06 record, having something of an off year losing a whole six matches so far in 2007. This week he's dropped the first set in both his third and fourth round matches to unseeded players. A chink in the armor? Perhaps, though he did go on to win both of those matches easily, the eventual Federer victory seems less inevitable this week than in recent times.

Part of that doubt arises from the emergence of some better challengers. Though Rafa Nadal is still seeking a breakout performance on a hardcourt major and is fighting two soft knees, he has looked solid and has bought some time by staying out of long grueling matches. The real rising star of the summer has been 20-year old Serb Novak Djokavic, who beat both Federer and Nadal in Montreal last month on his way to firmly establishing himself as the No. 3 player in the world. I thought Djokavic would win the tournament at the start of last week, and I'll stick by that pick, although he's played a lot in the last few weeks and may be starting to wear down. Djokavic should have it fairly easy against Juan Monaco, a nondescript Argentine in the 4th round, while Nadal faces David Ferrer, a good battler who could give him problems if the knees start giving out.

Federer, meanwhile, faces another matchup in the quarterfinals with the perennial Great American Hope, Andy Roddick. From Hell's heart Roddick stabs at Federer, to no avail; nine straight defeats, 13 of 14 overall. Despite that I never feel completely confident of a matchup against Roddick, who is capable of serving well enough to turn the match into, at best, a series of tiebreakers.

One player left to watch in the men's draw is Ernests Gulbis, a 19-year old from the tennis hotbed of Latvia. Gulbis just destroyed No. 8 Tommy Robredo in the third round, and while Robredo would much rather be playing on clay, a demolition of that magnitude is nothing to sneeze at. Gulbis has another very winnable match in the fourth round Tuesday against 31-year old Carlos Moya.

The women's draw has been a tale of two halves heading into the final eight; the top half containing both Williams, top-seed Justine Henin and No. 3 Jelena Jankovic, while the bottom half features the 2004 champ Svetlana Kuzmetsova and three young players looking at the deep end of a major for the first time in their careers. Venus Williams looks to have the edge here, after drubbing my personal choice Ana Ivanovic out in the fourth round Sunday. Filling the "lovable longshot" role is 18-year old Agnes Szavay from Budapest.

This is normally the point at which I rant about television and media coverage of individual sports which grabs at any and all American players and thrusts them into the spotlight at the expense of virtually everyone else in the world with the exception of likes of Federer, Nadal, or Henin. I'm beginning to make my peace with this losing battle, though, with the reflexive compensation of merely rooting for all the Americans to lose out of spite. Less stress that way.

As far as I can tell, this is a worldwide phenomenon. What's different about the United States is that we have enough depth to squeeze everyone else off the page, while most countries would love to have just a single top-10 player in either draw. Across many sports, this has led to the general American attitude that merely winning occasionally isn't enough, the only acceptable outcome is complete hegemony.

The expectation behind this, I suppose, is that I am supposed to cheer for the hometown players in the same way I might cheer for the hometown team. I find both of these assumptions mystifying, actually, but the former especially so. Would I be expected to cheer for white players over black players, or for the Aryans against the Slavs? If not, why should I care about arbitrary national distinctions? I tend to gravitate toward players whom I think would be interesting people to know in real life. Not in a pious, moral adjudicating "role model" sort of way, but I like to see that you have a brain and a heart and you're an honest sportsman who notices and respects the other players. Of course, this is not a perfect system either, as I admittedly don't know anyone beyond on-court demeanor and the press, but it's a far sight better than blind national homerism.

Surfacing

Thankfully, Blogger has a post-searching feature, but that hasn't always been the case with the blogs I've had in the past, so I can't track down the post I made some months ago where I could've sworn I singled out Mike Huckabee as a potential darkhorse candidate in the Republican primaries. If I could find it, I might make myself look rather prophetic, as Huckabee's star is currently soaring after a surprise performance in the Aug. 12 Iowa straw poll.

In "The New Man from Hope" at Street Prophets, uwdonke (take a closer look at that name) has a look at the new hope of the Christian Right. uwdonke quotes Stephen Strang (another name that ought to ring a bell), a Christian publishing mogul who might be the first person on the Huckabee bandwagon.

Wads of cash is exactly what Strang is angling to secure for Huckabee. [Strang] may not have the household name that Dobson does, but through a network of televangelists and mega-church pastors whose teachings are continuously available through churches, conferences, television, radio, and Strang's own magazines and publishing imprints, his views may well trickle down to at least as many people as follow Dobson. What's more, while most of Dobson's followers are white, charismatics are diverse; indeed, the cover story of the issue of Charisma containing Strang's Huckabee endorsement was "The Changing Face of American Christianity: Immigrant Faith."

Huckabee is pretty much a straight-arrow conservative clone of Sam Brownback, with one exception being that Huckabee doesn't seem to tremble at the oncoming Brown Menace. But, in contrast to Brownback, Huckabee has a jovial, easygoing manner, the kind of candidate who passes the "guy-you'd-have-a-beer-with" test the press so eagerly brandished to deliver us George W. Bush.

The other big names have yet to pour in behind Huckabee--he's not yet demonstrated the key atribute they need; the ability to win--but the small fish are starting to flop in, none more interesting and twisted than the case of Dr. Wiley S. Drake, a Southern Baptist preacher in California who used official church letterhead to endorse Huckabee's candidacy. When Americans United for Church and State protested to the IRS, Drake reacted bizarrely with threats of divine retribution.

Instead of responding to Americans United’s concern of illegal activity, Drake issued yesterday afternoon a plea to his supporters to join in “imprecatory prayers” (curses) every morning for Americans United and its staff.

“In light of the recent attack from the ememies (sic) of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer,” Drake said, in an Aug. 14 press statement issued from the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park. “Especially against Americans United for Seperation (sic) of Church and State.”

In a section of his press release called “How To Pray,” Drake includes a long list of biblical citations that call on God to smite enemies. For example, the alleged enemies of God “shall be judged,” “condemned,” and “his days be few….” Additionally, supporters should pray that the enemy’s “children be fatherless, and his wife a widow,” and “his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek bread also out of their desolate places.”

Wiley Drake....FILLED with the love o' Jesus!

Shock therapy

So I happened to check in with the local paper today, which I never read (bad, bad non-participatory me!) and apparently there is going to be some turnover of the syndicated columnists they run. "Hm," I wondered aloud, "what new wingnuts will we be reading in place of the old wingnuts?"

Gone from our Opinion Page will be columns by Cokie and Steve Roberts, Kat Lopez, Nat Hentoff, Among Friends’ Tad Bartimus and the Village Idiot’s Jim Mullen. Replacing them are Amy Goodman, Marianne Means and Charley Reese.

Ohhhh...feeling..a little light-headed...need to sit down...is that *the* Amy Goodman? It is, in fact. Apparently King Features will be running a new syndicated column by the longtime champion of independent media. So she was likely part of a package deal, and perhaps not a direct choice of the awkwardly-abbreviated WTH, whose opinion page is mostly an echo chamber of redundant paleo-cons, "libertarians," and theocrats who love America and Jesus but won't give money to either.

I had an odd thought a few days ago of whether the paper had ever published a socialist writer. It dates to the 19th century, so the chances seem likely there was at least some agitating during the populist era. Still, I wouldn't have imagined I'd have a definitive answer this quickly.

Magneto

This blog is about to jump the shark, in which I will consign myself to the unserious, simple-minded, college-freshman masses of the leftoverse. What does that mean? It means I'm about to quote Noam Chomsky.

Not only are citizens excluded from political power, they are also kept in a state of ignorance as to the true state of public opinion.

Perhaps out of boredom I've suddenly developed a keen interest in the Political Compass, the popular internet tool that purports to test a collection of your political opinions, then plots you on a two-dimensional graph alongside various historical figures. According to the site's FAQ, the test is, by design, quite trickier than it first appears.

Some propositions are extreme, and some are more moderate. That's how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass.

Some of the propositions are intentionally vague. Their purpose is to trigger buzzwords in the mind of the user, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.

At some point, I'd like to go through the test question by question, if for no other reason than to prove to myself I'm not crazy. I've taken the test a couple of times, each time going more slowly than the last, but I consistently flop out between -5 and -6 on both axes (the economic axis being the more fungible of the two for me).

But I'm not going to do that now. Instead, I wanted to take a look at the site's attempted pegging of the 2008 US presidential primary candidates.

Please keep in mind that The Political Compass is a universal tool, reflecting the full spectrum of political thought, and applicable to all democracies. US politics are generally fought within a more confined space. While in mainstream America, Clinton, for example, may be seen as left leaning, in the overall political landscape, she is a moderate conservative. Someone like Kucinich, while seen by his severest opponents as an extreme left winger, would qualify as a typical social democrat in a European context.

Here is the graph:

Obviously, I assume there's a decent amount of guesswork involved here, but this seems basically fair, to my modestly observant eye. Certainly, in the era of neoliberal orthodoxy, no one is going to be taken seriously by either party who posts a negative number on the x-axis. It is a bit more surprising that no one save Kucinich/Gravel score negative on the y-axis. (I'd like to do a more thorough analysis to see how one can get there, since it's the axis I'm far more familiar with.) Not even super-"libertarian" Ron Paul can get there, but perhaps he doesn't hate America enough *wicked grin*.

A great cause of chatter among media watchdogs is why the mainstream press spends so much time focusing on horse-race politics and quarterly fundraising reports in lieu of serious, nuanced policy considerations, and why, for example, it's considered a matter of conventional wisdom that Kucinich is too extreme to get enough popular support to win (which turns nicely into a self-fulfilling feedback loop). The answer is, at least in part, that the public is tilted much further to the lower left than the mainstream press, the Beltway establishment and Wall Street would care to admit, and it's quite important for their self-interest to make sure very few ordinary voting stiffs realize this.

Unfortunately, Political Compass doesn't compile demographic data (and it would be very skewed if they did, I suspect) but I'm quite confident in this proposition. It's rare for me to meet anyone while browsing fairly diverse places with both feet in the upper-right quadrant. I know someone with scores around the (0,0) mark (I've forgotten what to call that, too long since geometry) who presumably sees himself as a mainstream Democrat, if not a moderate, who is, in fact. left of everyone save the nutters who can't possibly get elected. The Kucinich campaign has been touting this poll which, even considering a possibly substantial selection bias, has Dennis the Menace winning in a landslide in a blind test of political opinion.

In our democracy, however, those people don't have enough money to elect their candidate, and, capital being correlated with intellect (I mean, it is, isn't it?), they just can't be trusted to make rash decisions. Napoleon is always right.

The summer of my discontent

I'm hopefully going to be writing a couple of posts about Joe Bageant's new book "Deer Hunting With Jesus," which, as far as I can tell, is a work of staggering genius that has to be read to be believed, an impassioned defense of working-class rural white folks against both the religio-capitalist charlatans who have exploited them like cattle and the urban liberal intellectuals who have dismissed them as unreachable and undesirable gutter refuse.

Bageant, who left the fold of his fundamentalist, blue-collar Virginia town to become one of those dreaded left-wingers, returns to the church where his brother is a fiery preacher who casts demons out of troubled youths.

One September day when I was in the third grade, I got off the school bus and walked up the red-dust powdered lane to my house only to find no one there. The smudgy white front door of the old frame house stood open. My footsteps on the unpainted gray front porch creaked in the fall stillness. With increasing panic, I went through every room and then ran around the outside of the house sobbing; in the grip of the most horrific loneliness and terror. I believed with all my heart that the Rapture had come, and all my family had been taken up to heaven, leaving me alone on Earth to face God's terrible wrath. As it turned out, they were at a neighbor's house not three hundred yards down the road and returned in a few minutes. But it took me hours to calm down. I dreamed about it for years afterward.

Since then I have spoken to others raised in fundamentalist families who had the same experience of coming home and thinking everyone had been "raptured up." The Rapture is very real to those people in whom its glorious and grisly promises have been instilled and cultivated from birth. Even those who escape fundamentalism insist its marks are permanent. WE may no longer believe in being raptured up, but the grim fundamentalist architecture of the soul stands in the background of our days. An apocalyptic starkness remains somewhere inside us; one that tinges all our feelings and thoughts of higher matters. Especially about death, oh beautiful and terrible death, for naked eternity is more real to us than to those born into secular humanism.

I'm a keen observer of many facets of fundamentalist Christianity, but the fascination with eschatology has always held a special place in my heart. The certainty of some Christians that the earth is passing through its final days culminating in global immolation has been with me for as long as I can recall.

This came to a nadir for me ten years ago this summer, when, for whatever reason, I became silently, obsessively neurotic over the notion that Armageddon was imminent, and that I had only two and a half years to live. As Bageant attests, if you have never known anything but fundamentalism, this becomes a very real and frightening thing. For nearly two months, I was desperate to stuff myself with any available distraction, because any time left alone to think ultimately lead to the grim despairing that the world was progressing along an inexorable countdown to destruction. All life was waste.

Worse still, I couldn't find an agreeable way to feel about this. The whole of the earth's population was going to be suddenly killed off, in what was billed by the radio preachers as the Greatest Event in History, and it all seemed so unsatisfactory and arbitrary to me. But not believing was just not an option, after all, the oily apologists had convinced me this was The Truth, and I would have to learn to accept it. And every time one of the much-"prophesied" signs of the End appeared on the news, the nausea started anew.

Of course, this could be chalked up to simple boredom and letting my mind wander. But it was, I think, the first revelation of the depravity that I was unflinchingly believed all around me, though I wasn't at the time ready to face it head on. Whichever of the multisyllabic factions of Last Days prophets one ascribes to, the basic idea behind it is really quite monstrous. I am sure it is believed by many sincere and well-meaning people who have never come to grips with its monstrosity because they assume it to be the Will of God and thus indisputable (a microcosm of their support for American foreign policy in that way, perhaps).

I don't know that it's had that kind of lasting impact on me the way it has for Bageant and others, though it was certainly part of the tunnel that led me out of fundamentalism. And, from time to time, it still occurs to me, particularly when reading slacktivist's series on "Left Behind," how I would react if the end-timers were right all along. Perhaps I can conceive of that possibility better than some because I know the feeling of being resigned to it.

You think I'm crazy?

Well, I'm not paranoid! Here are some gems from the letters section of today's King Kaufman Sports Daily:

Mostly, though, I imagine that baseball will continue to decline as fewer & fewer boys have the time, space, or inclination to play the game.

Generally, in order for something to continue declining, it has to begin declining.

And is anyone really surprised that the man breaking the most famous record in sports (though I'd argue that Ruth's 714 was the real iconic record, the one boomers like me grew up with. Until this recent hoo haw, I wasn't sure what Aaron's exact number was, 750 something) should elicit a lot of negative reaction? He's not some faceless pitcher juicing, he's a superstar who by most accounts just couldn't bear the adulation McGuire/Sosa got during their HR fest. It seems fitting to me that Bonds starting to juice was ultimately an act of supreme petulant ego.

Well, at least he admits it.

Kids today wouldn't get it. The asterisk is there for those of us who do remember when as a society we almost uniformly ridiculed those who cheated by using steroids, associating such cheating with totalitarian regimes who used athletics to "prove" the superiority of their system.

I'm keeping the asterisk next to Bonds's name, to always remember that Hank Aaron was the one who scored the most home runs during the time that America was a Democracy.

*faceplant* Remind me someday to ridicule those people who claim the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" was somehow a microcosm of democratic victory over Communism.

King Kaufmam is one of the most insightful sports commentators around, but even his modified rapture about Barry Bonds breaking the home run record is too much. Bonds' use of steroids attacks one of the most best features about baseball--the integrity and universality of records.

yeeeeeaaarrrghhh....

For all the sanctimonious nonsense going on in that thread, I did think this was a valid point:

This is really a human issue. And a workers' rights issue, in a sense. What if Kaufman worked for a publisher where there was a culture of people working 20 hours per day to produce bigger, better stories, and the management knew some people coped with this demand by using drugs but turned a blind eye? Would his stance on that situation be any less abstract and ambivalent?

511 amd the Memory Hole

Barry Bonds became baseball's all-time home run leader Tuesday night, surpassing Hank Aaron with his 756th career home run off the Washington Nationals' Mike Bascik, whose father twice pitched to Aaron after he had hit the final home run of his career.

The doing may be done, but the long odyssey of the national sports press and assorted others to pour doubt onto the record chase--which began three years ago when it became apparent Bonds was going to reach the all-time mark--is likely just reaching full swing. Bonds, as everyone knows, has long been under suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs, and his connection to the steroid lab BALCO and disgraced trainer Greg Anderson are still under investigation which, we are told repeatedly, is a horrific calamity threatening to rip the very fabric of baseball.

I'm not buying it. These kinds of scandals come along at regular intervals, dutifully accompanied by a chorus of apocalyptic doomsayers predicting the imminent demise of baseball into obscurity. After the 1994 players strike which canceled the World Series for the only time in the past 105 years, we were regularly presented in the press with uncountable number of people who swore up and down they would never attend another baseball game. Apparently, and, if so, not coincidentally, these people have all died off. Major league baseball has set a new attendance record each of the past four years, and two Saturdays ago set a single-day record on a weekend that also included a record crowd for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

So I can say, with some confidence, that baseball has survived the trumped-up "steroid scandal" swimmingly. Steroids are a problem because they are a health hazard, and I am not in favor of unrestricted use as some are. But I also suspect the total effect of steroid use on statistical output in the past 15 years has been less than generally believed, particularly since pitchers have been dosing just as much, if not more, than their hitting counterparts, as we have discovered since baseball's new testing system began in 2005. (Indeed, Clay Hensley, the San Diego pitcher who allowed Bonds' record-tying home run, served a 15-game suspension in 2005 for a "steroid precursor.")

That's a minor inconvenience for the modern sports media, who need to find a way to discredit the modern athlete at any cost. I have little doubt that, even if steroids were not in play, there would be some other narrative put forth to render the new record-holder's mark untidy. Smaller ballparks, juiced balls, pitching talent diluted by expansion, etc.; all excuses which were being used in some quarters during the late '90s before the Godsend of steroids was fully realized. If Alex Rodriguez succeeds in surpassing Bonds' mark, he will likely do so as a full-time designated hitter, which will give the aged sportswriters all the ammunition they need to cast doubt on that accomplishment. Write that down. Come back to me in eight years.

All those points I mentioned in the previous graph are true, at least to some extent. There's no dispute we are living in an era of increased offense. What's absolutely scandalous is that there is nothing at all unnatural about this. Baseball, despite the bloviating of the more pompous purists, ebbs and flows from periods of pitching dominance to periods of hitting dominance. We are actually not living in the most favorable run-scoring environment of all time; that occurred from roughly 1925 to 1940, when Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a season and Hack Wilson drove in 190 runs. Those periods favoring pitchers, however, are usually held up as being somehow more aesthetically pure and innocent. That might have something to do with the last such period coming between 1960 and 1990.

Cy Young racked up 511 wins in an era when pitchers soft-tossed their way to 40 complete games in a season and had little restriction on the ways they could doctor the baseball. Young's record will never be approached before the invention of bionic pitching arms, yet tellingly no one in the sports press has suggested scrubbing pre-1920 pitching marks because of the legal spitter and "dead" balls which were rarely replaced during the game. On the occasion of Tom Glavine's 300th career win on Sunday, we were subjected to the chorus of gloom fretting that modern pitching were too brittle and flimsy to ever reach that modest milestone again.

This is the kind of tyranny we are up against. They are unsatisfied with casting aspersions on records of our generation which were aided by our current environment, they are also unwilling to recognize the occasions in the great and glorious past might have been similarly affected. They are asking us to believe the balderdash that modern players are somehow more morally weak for resorting to steroids, when the only distinguishing factor them and the players of past generation was the absence of that temptation. Anyone who believes otherwise is a doddering fool easily taken.

The modern sports scribe is like a worker gerbil slaving away in the Ministry of Truth, carefully cropping and editing history to flatter themselves and their generation. It is an unfortunate cycle that is passed down from father to son like the game of baseball itself. Luckily, it is also a perpetually losing battle, as current events are reinforcing.

My kingdom, my kingdom for a Bernie

We haven't really checked in Bernie Sanders since last November, but I caught this video of Sanders knocking around White House budget office nominee Jim Nussle knocking around the internets.

Sanders is currently filibustering Nussle's nomination, although Congress has since split for summer recess.

By the way, because I haven't yet mentioned it, note the item on the sidebar which you can read shared items I've tagged from Google Reader. Internet corporate synergy; dehumanizing, but periodically useful.

*Jolt*

Remember when I came back? Yeah, I actually did, but going out of the habit of blogging makes it hard to get back into the right mindset. I haven't disappeared, though. I think July is just a bad month for me, as the longtime reader(s) know.

In the meantime, enjoy this.

Genocide Jesus

The latest from Max Blumenthal, invading the Christians United for Israel conference (which has nothing to do with eschatology or the mass destruction of humanity or anything like that, no sir.)

They hate Harry

The seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series was released amid great pomp and crushing fanfare last weekend. Being the horrible delinquent reader that I am, I haven't read any of them, but I can't help but be tangentially affected by the cultural phenomenon, not least because they have been the target of many fundamentalist Christians over the years, and thus give us an interesting perspective of the fundie mindset.

Blogging at NPR, Tom Regan asks the essential question:

So now I've read all the books and seen all the films made so far. And the best things about these books are what they teach children -- and, it must be said, adults -- about what's important in life: family, loyalty, friendship and love. (This is why I think it's a mistake to ban Potter books for their "magic.") But most of all, it may be about the choices that we make, and how they determine who we really are, despite what we say or think.

I've written before that I believe it is a mistake to characterize the fundamentalist world view as a strict dichotomy between Good and Evil. Regan makes a similar mistake is assuming that, in the fundamentalist mind, the moral worth of someone's actions have anything to do with the actual content of the action. It is not Good vs. Evil, it is Us vs. Them. Fruits such as those Regan lists can only be legitimately achieved by first swearing allegiance to their particular brand of Christianity; any other method must be shady and somehow deceptive. This is most explicitly stated in this clip from Jesus Camp, posted by Orcinus.

This twisted polarization comes, I think, from a logical extension of the Calvinist idea of total depravity, or even the wider notion of "salvation by works," an important cog in the Protestant Reformation. This is the notion that, no matter how much good a person does, it will never be good enough to earn a passage into Heaven; that can only be achieved by acceding to the will of God (which Calvinists will argue up and down does not somehow qualify as a willed action, which I don't find compelling but that's a long subject for another day.)

But the good Calvinists are being deliciously betrayed here by their more zealous brethren, who have gone to the natural conclusion of asserting that therefore any good deed attempted under the auspice of another belief system is hollow and worthless and likely a trick of the Devil.

There is another reason why the fundamentalists have so much antipathy toward Potter, brought up in Orcinus comments by Dread Scott.

Most people have a functioning ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality and see the Potter series as good entertainment. When people are raised to reject rational inquiry as immoral and instead devote themselves to superstition and mythology, works of fiction can be perceived in a way as competing faiths. While most adult fundies aren't going to be waving wands and trying to ride broomsticks, they see the Potter series as a threat to the proper indoctrination of children who might get confused about which fantasies to believe, especially if another is more appealing. Or, at least that seems to be what they fear.

Indeed, if one has much cohabitation with the fundies, their complaints generally will progress along these lines. Fundamentalism is commonly characterized by an absence of real faith, and the adults deeply realize that they are beholden to beliefs that seem fantastical and incredulous. It greatly concerns them, then, that their less well-adapted children will see a competing fantastical, incredulous belief system, even in a book that obviously fiction. And indeed, fundamentalists doubt the very existence of fiction, since they deeply suspect they are following fiction themselves.

Go directly to Hell. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200

Small Town Gay Bar is a documentary which proves the simplicity of a title is sometimes its best value. Not many succinctly-stated titles can stand as so intriguing on their own, and I suspect the road from pitch to title for Malcolm Ingram's film might have been short indeed.

Unfortunately, that doesn't leave much to do for me in the way of plot description, though Ingram mainly uses the establishment in question--located in Shannon, MS, near Tupelo--as a avenue to discuss the trials of being gay in the Bible Belt. That's easy pickings, but the movie reminds us that not everyone wants to leave, and not everyone who wants to leave, can.

It's all tidy and uplifting, until Ingram brings forth the rotting body of the Rev. Fred Phelps, a man whose skin seems to be plastic-wrapped onto his skeleton, which is all covered perpetually by a Kansas State jacket, giving the university publicity they might rather have done without (but then, they did hire Bob Huggins). I'm generally skeptical of anyone who wheels out Phelps as any kind of serious antithesis, but I came out pleasantly surprised--if that's not too obscene--to discover Phelps has a kind of psychopathic clarity.

"It's pure, absolute asinine balderdash to question that God hates people," Phelps says. "He doesn't send their sins to Hell, he sends them to Hell. The judge doesn't send the crime to jail, he sends the criminal."

Phelps' idea of Hell if, of course, one among many, and quite fringe, but I don't think it can be dismissed entirely. If you're going to have a God sending people to Hell, then you have to come up with some justification. A common slogan which has emerged in some conservative church areas in an attempt to seem more humane is "love the sinner, hate the sin." There are situations where this would seem acceptable, correctional rehabilitation for instance, but it is almost universally quoted to pass as a "softer" stance on homosexuality. If you deny the "sin" in your essential nature, are you still the same "sinner?" There seems to be little difference.

Hell exists, we're told, because it must serve as a kind of cosmic justice system. Without it, people would be able to plot uninhibited whatever wickedness they pleased. (It isn't surprising, then, that most of them are the same people who tirelessly dissect the letter of the law, both human and theistic, to see how far they can push the envelope.) But Phelps' analogy comes up short because it isn't severe enough. Hell is immeasurably more corrupt than almost any human legal system, being a gross overreaction to often frivolous "crimes," which can only be bypassed by satisfactorily kissing the judge's ass.

This is, I think, understood by a good number of believers, but they are held firm by the thought of self-preservation. If the great cosmic wizard can send them to Hell, then, by God, they're going to do what they have to do, sense and humanity be damned. Speaking for the rest of us is Huck Finn:

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to Hell" -- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. ... And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Quck hitters

I've obviously missed a bunch of things, but here's a brief attempt at catching up a few things.

The Wimbledon final: This was the first of the four major finals between Federer and Nadal that went the distance and really could have gone either way. It wasn't surprising, really; Nadal is capable of giving Federer trouble off clay, even though he had to play two five-setters against Soderling and Youzhny, hardly world-class players, to get there. I once heard a theory about knuckleball pitchers; that they are virtually as effective against major league hitters as minor leaguers, because hitters don't reach the majors on account of their ability to hit a knuckleball. Likewise, Federer didn't become a galactic marvel because of his play against lefties, so Nadal creates a different set of challenges for him. But he has been in two straight Wimbledon finals, so it's not entirely random. Can he keep it up to give us the rubber match in New York in two months?

David Beckham: I've always wondered what the audience is for those television-tabloid shows hosted by ex-CBS sportscaster Pat O'Brien, I suppose I'm about to find out. I suppose the theory here is that Beckham will raise the profile of US football pulling even more talent into the league, but ask the NASL how that worked out for them. Beckham's celebrity status far outstrips his playing ability at this point in his career and, while he has plenty of gas left for now to be a dominant playmaker in MLS, how much of the interest will be maintained after he inevitably hangs it up in two years? More on this later.

It's the Bible of anti-authoritarian leftists, so you'd think I would have read 1984 at least ten times by now, but I actually hadn't read it at all until last week. Of course, now I have all kinds of things I'd like to say about it, but the problem with 1984 is that there's nothing new and interesting left to say about it. Oh well.

I still want a "Junior Anti-Sex League" t-shirt, though.

Open for business

Please stand by

Hold music

My internet is currently sporadic thanks to a huge thunderstorm that passed here last Wednesday night, so posting will continue to be abbreviated until the situation is resolved, which should be soon.